Screenhead

Yesterday, Variety reported that 20th Century Fox, the butt of many a Simpsons joke, are on the verge of making a landmark deal with a collective of screenwriters. This collective will not only be paid their usual rates, but also act as producers on their respective projects, and thus be in a position to protect their work from being rewritten without their permission. So much for David Mamet’s “film-making is a collaborative process: now bend over”.

The only requirement is that Fox want each member of the group to generate at least one spec script within four years. Considering these people’s jobs are to write, that doesn’t sound like a very demanding arrangement. It is almost unprecidented that a major Hollywood studio would make such a deal. Variety rightly speculate that this is an attempt to befriend a few established writers in order to stockpile plenty of scripts before the possible writers’ strike takes action.

While this deal is great news for the writing community, for it indeed places more creative control in the hands of the writer, the person whose original vision drives the project, my only concern is the members of this writing collective. The only one with any real writing talent is Michael Arndt, who penned Little Miss Sunshine. The rest of the group contains the likes of John August, who wrote Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Simon Kinberg who scripted Mr and Mrs Smith, the Wibberleys who wrote the two National Treasure films, and Craig Mazin who wrote the classic Scary Movie 3 and 4. One can only wonder that if it were truly original and creative scripts Fox wanted, would this be the right group for the job?

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