AUGUST 1997:

THOSE DARN STUDIO EXECS

In looking over this web page recently it seemed to me I'd been overusing a term and singling out a specific group of people to take all the blame for the state of movies nowadays. The term is 'Studio Executive'. Now, like any blanket statement regarding any group of people, for me to tar everyone working within the studio system as some sort of creatively vapid algae-eater more focused on the bottom line than the quality of the pictures they're turning out is ridiculous. I know that there are many passionate, intelligent, creative people working within each studio... just as I know there are sleazy, money-skimming wankers making independent films. I've made the mistake of criticizing a group of people, when what I should have been criticizing is an attitude.

It's easy when working in Hollywood to lose sight of why you wanted to be there in the first place. When I started writing I was thrilled by every script - hell, every idea or joke in the script - thinking that one day it'd be up there on the silver screen. I remember one incident in particular. When working on the first draft of NIGHTLIFE (which would become ONCE BITTEN), my partner Jeff and I were sitting in a park. After coming up with a joke we thought particularly funny, we looked at the people around us and had the same thought: One day these people may see this joke in our movie and never know they were there when it was conceived. Now, in a way that's a pretty arrogant thought, but that's the kind of excitement we felt when working on scripts. What we were writing was special, it was important, and it was going to get made. Cut to fifteen years later, and writing's become more technical and less passionate. It's a job now. These days I find myself thinking more about getting a script sold so I can get a paycheck than whether or not it's actually going to be made into a movie. And I fucking hate that.

Yes, studios put out a lot of stinky goop... but every once
in a while they'll take a risk and turn out something pretty dang cool.

So I battle every day to rediscover the passion I had when I started writing. And you know what? Most days - especially when the ideas are flowing and everything's falling into place so smoothly I start to think I may just finish this script by the deadline after all - that passion returns. Maybe I have to look a little harder to find it, and maybe it takes a little longer to dredge it up, but it does return. But it's that crappy attitude that what I'm doing is a job, with all my focus on the end result of a paycheck, that I think screws up many people in this business. Not only writers, but directors, producers, production designers, cinematographers... and studio executives. It screws us up because we're all susceptible to it. We're human, we need to make a living, we want to keep our jobs, it's understandable. But when that's all we think about our product suffers, because it takes something special to turn out good movies. It takes passion and artistry and striving and - sometimes - failing. It takes a fearlessness which allows us to aim high, to push ourselves to achieve more than we believe we're capable of. But more and more it seems we all get too concerned about the bottom line.

I'm not only talking about the financial bottom line, but the creative one as well. Creating solely to make money is not creating. It's hacking. A hack isn't someone who has no talent, a hack is someone who creates not for the joy or the triumph, but for the financial reward. We all become hacks when we forget why we wanted to be in the movie business. I know - I've forgotten on occasion and hacked out scripts (luckily I have a great agent who doesn't let me get away with it for very long). I've focused on that bottom line, put a bag over the scripts head and pounded out 120 pages. But the scripts - and the experience - have never been as good as when I'm striving for something more than a quick buck. And it's exactly that bottom line mentality I decry when I use the term 'Studio Executive'.

Another good thing about studios? They can pay to put
a real ass-kicking cast together every once in a while.
Plus the craft services is way better. Way. Really. I'm not rationalizing!

Here's the deal. I'm gonna try not to use that term anymore. It's prejudicial, it's inaccurate - and worst of all it's lazy writing. But should I slip, you now know that 'Studio Executive' is code for 'commerce over all, especially art'. And you should know that studio execs aren't the only ones who can fall victim to this attitude - we all can. Hell, we all do at some point or another. I mean, my partner and I wrote an 'Ernest' movie, fer chrissakes. If that isn't 'commerce over art' I don't know what is.

(Just a sidebar - that joke we wrote in the park? It's one of the few that made it all the way from the first draft of the script to the final cut of the film. Of course it was changed by the director to make it offensive to gays, which got me - not Jeff, the bastard, me! - written up in THE CELLULOID CLOSET. With a photo from the film and everything! So what we wrote did have an impact... just not quite the one we'd envisioned.)

Air Bud can't jump anymore - but he sure can roll over! Give him a push to return to the SPEW archives!

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