SUCH SWEET FOLLY
The standard screenplay-vetting system works perfectly ... if you want bad films, says David Mamet.
Here’s how things got that way. The entry-level position at motion picture studios is script-reader. Young folks fresh from the rigors of the academy are permitted to beg for a job summarizing screenplays. These summaries will be employed by their betters in deliberations.
These higher-ups rarely (some, indeed, breathe the word "never") read the actual screenplay; thus the summaries, called "coverage," become the coin-of-the-realm.
Now, as anyone newly enrolled in a totalitarian regime, these neophytes get the two options pretty quickly: conform or die. Conformity, in this case, involves figuring out what the studios would like (money) and giving them the illusion that the dedicated employee, through strict adherence to the mechanical weeding process, can provide it. The script-reader adopts the notion that inspiration, idiosyncrasy and depth are all very well in their place, but that their place has yet to be discovered, and that he would rather die than deviate from received wisdom. The young script-reader self-corrupts in the heartbeat it takes to assess the alternatives and vote with the pocketbook.
The mere act of envisioning "the public" (that is: "that undifferentiated mass dumber than I") consigns the script-reader to life on the industrial model. He or she is no longer an individual, but a field boss, a servant of "industry," and, as the industry in question deals with myth, an adjunct of oppression. Deprived of the joys of whimsy, contemplation and creation, they are left with prerogative. So script coverage is brutal, and dismissive.
Why would this canny employee vote for the extraordinary? The industrial model demands conformity, and the job of the script-reader is not to discover the financially and, perhaps, morally questionable "new," but to excel in what for want of a better word one must call hypocrisy.
Oh, boo hoo.
Opposed, we find the scriptwriter.
A statistician friend told me she had determined this: that the odds of one winning the lottery are so small, it does not significantly lower the odds not to have bought a ticket. "What?" you ask, as did I, and she responded: one might, with equal chance of success, hope to find the winning lottery ticket on the sidewalk, and save the dollar purchase price.
The lottery numbers grow. As they grow, they attract new players, further swelling the payoff. But the numbers of new players grow exponentially faster than the payoff, thus the chance of winning recedes as fast as the prize itself grows more attractive.
Similarly, as the gross of blockbuster movies swells, the quality falls. The viewers see this trash and, correctly, exclaim: "Well, hell, I could do that..." They then write a screenplay. These screenplays are, in effect, tickets to the lottery. Their perusal costs the studio nothing at all – they have been written for free, by the deluded.
The late share price delusion, the "new Economy," has taken its place with the South Sea Bubble and the Dutch Tulip Mania. These short-lived and second-class frenzies are as nothing compared to the long-lived, indeed, unkillable fantasy that each and every person born can rise to prominence and wealth in showbusiness.
This sweet folly is a capitalist’s erotic dream. In general, the theoretical limit to which wages can be reduced is that at which starvation transforms worker competition to revolution. (In plain English, the boss usually has to pay the workers something.) In showbusiness, however, the bitten will not only work for nothing, they will fight for the chance to do so.
Back at the ranch, the corrupted youth, the script-readers, sit at what I will imagine as their high Victorian desks, and paw through the incoming screenplays, nuzzling the Earth for truffles for their masters. Yes, their muzzles are tied, but some day, some day, they, these readers, may be elevated to the rank of executive – indeed, to the very pinnacle of studio head, where they will have the power not only to discard, but to endorse. They will there be showered with perquisites, first and not least among them that they will never again have to read another screenplay.
What, however, of the professional screenwriter? This person, cursed with actual dramatic sense and credentials, is, similarly, self-caught in an evil net. He differs from the amateur in that he is actually getting paid for the work. This puts hummus on the table, but places him at a distinct disadvantage in the lottery of production.
There are two counts against him. First, the work – if it contains inspiration, glee, sorrow; if it is complex, actually provocative or disturbing – is not easily condensable to those three paragraphs allowed the script-reader. Second, the fact of his actually getting paid enrages those involved in the studio system. Is it not monstrous, they wonder, that one should actually pay for that which 90 percent of all human life would do for free? The two burdens of the actual writer, his inspiration and his bill, conjoin synergistically to end in tragedy.
Most writing assignments begin with the plea, "Fireman, fireman, save my child," and end, "Where is that half-eaten chicken I believe I left in the icebox yesterday?"
For the studios, in fine irony, consider the writer a thief.
My friend Art suggests that every studio executive should be forced to write, direct and produce a five-minute film and submit it to a jury of his peers. Others have wistfully opined that they be chained in a large ship and set adrift, forced to subsist on carbohydrates and tap water. Yes, these solutions are fanciful, but, in the great words of Theodore Herzl: "If you will it, it is no dream."
© David Mamet 2003. This article first appeared in The Guardian and is reprinted with permission of the Wylie Agency.
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