a long entry in which i come to no conclusions.
And so tonight I am pleased to announce that the Justice Department has entered into an agreement with the Microsoft Corporation. Microsoft has agreed to provide every newborn with a laptop, provided that the parents sign a legally binding agreement that their child will for the rest of its life use only Microsoft Internet Explorer.
What did scientists at Stanford University report after studying data collected from their dish antenna, and why is NASA so interested?
(Don't send me your answers. This is just a little way to expand your horizons. Honest.)
Note: I've already moved the Forums to their new home: http://www.spies.com/cgi-bin/ubb/Ultimate.cgi Everything should be the same -- just mark down the new URL.
That is all.
I heard about an article in the new New Yorker about Ron Bass, so I decided to pick it up and take a look. I don't usually read The New Yorker, even in the doctor's office, because I have usually found it a)boring, b)pretentious, and c)poorly laid out. I realize I lose more intellectual credits with this admission, but there you have it.
Anyhow, I bought the magazine and read the article and I'm still pondering.
Ron Bass is arguably the most successful screenwriter in Hollywood. Hell, for the past few years it's appeared he's the only screenwriter in Hollywood. And there's a reason for that, a reason the article goes into with some depth: Bass has a team of six writers who work for him and help him plot out his screenplays. There is a little intimation in the story of what I've heard said outright on countless occasions here in La-La Land: the reason Ron Bass is writing so many screenplays is because he's getting a lot of help writing them.
Writers using other writers' to ghost their material is nothing new. The article mentions a few other screenwriters who've done it -- Ben Hecht, Philip Yordan -- and I've heard on the QT that a few high-powered screenwriters these days do it. I know of a prominent screenwriter who wrote a script for a director, and as part of the deal the director was going to put his name on it as writer so that he could have writing credits. The money was good, the deal was made, the WGA was not informed. I don't know for sure -- Julia Phillips certainly gives one pause in You'll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again -- but is it likely that Steven Spielberg actually wrote Close Encounters? No, and no one cares.
And there are tons of novelists: Lawrence Sanders evidently didn't write several of his novels, Dick Francis's wife wrote his, and VC Andrews (if she ever existed) has been dead for about twenty years. Pooks told me about at least one major romance author who bought romance novels to submit as her own, simply because the writer couldn't keep up with the demand for "product." Most celebrity authors don't write their novels -- I hope this doesn't come as a big shock, but William Shatner did not sit down at his computer and pound out the TekWar novels. (Ceej informs me the author was actually Ron Goulart.) I know of a major seller of legal thrillers -- no, not JG -- who has not written word one. I've had someone tell me that Stephen King isn't purely responsible for the prodigious output under his name. I have to say I find this one more difficult to believe, because no one has to publish as much as King does, and his voice is so clear in his writing I find it tough to believe that's someone else, but I could be wrong.
But back to Ron Bass -- I've come to the same conclusion the writer of the article has come to: I don't actually believe Ron Bass is signing his name to 120 pages someone else wrote, front to back. I believe he is actually writing the scripts (he uses "No.2 Sundance pencils, made by Blackfoot Indians" -- this is the kind of New Yorker pretentious nonsense I'm talking about) from "Fade in" to "Fade Out."
But he is doing so with a ton of input from a team of writers, making his writing process sound more like the lead writer on a sitcom working with a table of writers. Team Bass comes up with the structure, the characters, snippets of dialogue. This is way beyond the feedback you might get in a writer's group.
In fact, they give so much input it sounds like collaboration, with Bass being the lead collaborator. But only one name appears on the front page, making it seem that Ron Bass is one amazingly prolific writer. (The members of Team Bass are, by the way, paid accordingly -- I remember hearing somewhere that they each earn six figures per year working for Bass.) For such a reportedly together writer, he seems remarkably clueless about the process:
If someone says, 'Then this gay guy comes out and makes this really swishy, biting comment' -- that's assigning me to do all the work. I mean, any idea what that comment might be?
Well, no shit, Ron -- you're supposed to do the work. That's why your name is on the front page. That's why your name is on the check. You get to figure out who this gay guy character is, you get to figure out why he says what he says, and you get to figure out what the comment is supposed to be. That's what writing's all about.
Now, one of the things that comes through loud and clear in the article is that Hollywood does not care. Ron Bass could be lifting up other people's work off the slushpile and submitting it as his own for all they care. What's more important to Hollywood is that the work is good -- I don't care for much of Mr. Bass's output, but clearly a lot of people do; the article calls him "The Two-Billion-Dollar Man."
As John Calley, the head of Sony Studios puts it in the article
(Bass is) responsible for quality control and management, and that's what we're buying. If a director is really his cameraman and his editor, if they're the only reason he's great -- well, who cares? As long as the movies work out.
Certainly the audience doesn't care. How many screenwriters can you name? (Beyond William Goldman.) Are you aware of any screenwriters' styles? This year has been odd in that the writers of American Beauty and Being John Malkovich have received so much attention...and I'm still sure most people who loved those movies cannot name either writer.
And the public is quite well aware of the chew-them-up,-spit-them-out methods of the Hollywood script writing machine -- everybody knows that whatever names appear on the movie screen, there were any number of other ones who worked on it. So if Ron Bass is the front man for a whole team of writers, isn't he just circumventing the process a little?
In fact, I think the only people who do care about what Ron Bass is doing are other writers. Because he's hurting us. If Ron Bass & Co. are writing seven movies a year, other writers are not getting work. Different voices are not being heard. It's screenplay-as-product, not screenplay-as-story. What single writer can compete with a factory? Are studios going to go to someone who might turn in something quirky and original but a month late, or someone who's going to turn in a serviceable screenplay on time?
Maybe this is one of those situations where "If everybody knows about it, it's going to change." Perhaps if everyone thinks, "Oh, screenplay groupthink is the way to go," then it's time for quirky, original voices that are not easy to duplicate. I doubt it though. As Bass says,
We're in a collaborative medium, and the screenwriter's job is to find the change that everyone can agree on. You want your original vision? Go home and write down your thoughts and publish them as a novel, or just look at the pages on weekends and feel good about yourself.
He's not wrong about that. That's the thing I keep thinking about -- writing movies is not like writing a novel, and no screenplay gets through Hollywood without hitting a few committees. Isn't it better to go through your own committee first?
So, is the answer to work the same way? I mean, if I were a major screenwriter, wouldn't it behoove me to compete with Bass this way? Set up my own little group to help me put together the structure, the characters, the dialogue? It would be awfully tempting, methinks. Get a whole bunch of talented people to help me churn it out. I'm quite sure that there are plenty of writers out there who will take a bird in the hand (a guaranteed job paying a decent salary) to two in the bush (the insecurity of trying to make sales as a spec writer). And who knows -- maybe Bass does give Team Bass a leg up in Hollywood should they strike out on their own. A win-win, right?
The whole setup still annoys me.
I know several pro writers who it annoys quite a bit as well. One friend of mine describes him as "soulless," which the article appears to say as well. In fact, the article is not flattering to Bass as a person at all. Not only does he come off as a pretty noncreative automaton, working 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, but also desperate to be loved and approved of. For a guy who's this successful, it's made out to be just a little pathetic.
Maybe I'm overreacting. Feel free to try to straighten me out.
I read somewhere today that the ridiculously awful (and quickly dead) movie Supernova cost $100m. to make. This is the kind of thing makes me crazed. At no point did someone say, "By the way, we're pissing this money away?" That's five $20m. movies. Was Supernova really a better bet?
No, I don't much care that Al Gore inhaled, fairly frequently it seems. Actually, I take that back -- I don't care because at the moment I don't know his policy on the War On Some Drugs: if he's hardline, than I have zero time for him. That's what annoys me about Dubya -- I don't much care if he used cocaine in the 70s or 80s, but the fact that he's so hardline now on people who don't exactly have his access to lawyers really pisses me off.
I don't think much of narcotics, whether the legal kind or not, and I've never understood the appeal of pot. As far as I can tell you, it makes you stupid and I know I'm not the only person it made depressed and paranoid. But, you know, if you really enjoy it and you don't do anything like operate heavy machinery or operate on someone... you know, the same rules as for alcohol.
The sooner this country wakes up and realizes the WOSD is a war on the Bill of Rights and an easy way to dispense with little things like due process, the better off we'll all be. It's not about the drugs; it probably never was.
The answer to yesterday's question: The UN's Security Council unanimously named Hans Blix, former head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, to be the chief inspector of a new disarmament commission for Iraq. The last UN weapons inspectors left Iraq in Dec. 1998, just before the US started (yet another round of) bombing.
Anyone who's followed the career of the rather wily Mr. Hussein (or simply watched "The Survival of Saddam," the most recent Frontline) knows that the UN ain't going to get anywhere near Saddam's weapons programs. But it's nice to know they're still trying.
And by the way...if PBS doesn't do it, no one's going to.
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Copyright 2000 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com