The LA Times: February 20, 2011
The five films competing for original screenplay all had long, difficult paths to the big screen.
Original Screenplays, once the staple of Hollywood's verdant creativity, are in danger of going the way of the Dodo
David Seidler first sparked to the idea of writing a movie about the life of King George VI in 1980. A stutterer himself, he found the real-life narrative of the English monarch’s struggles to overcome a debilitating stammer moving and profoundly relatable, but Seidler understood that it wasn’t going to be easy to see his script turned into a feature film.
First, he had to wait for the Queen Mum to die; he had asked the royal matriarch for her blessing to tell her husband’s story, and she had requested that he wait until after her passing, since the memories of that time were still too painful. And then, the 73-year-old Seidler explains, there was another, possibly even more significant hurdle: “It was the subject matter.
“If I had gone into any executive office in Hollywood to pitch a story about a dead king who stutters, I would have been out of there in 30 seconds,” he said. “They would have thought I was out of my mind.”
Seidler has a point. For years now, the notoriously risk-averse Hollywood studios have been spending their money on the safest bets possible, big-budget projects and potential franchise properties that usually are based on a book, a video game, a toy or even an amusement park ride. It’s a trend that shows no signs of abatement, with Universal working to bring Stretch Armstrong to the screen, while Paramount develops a Magic 8 Ball movie among many other projects that have been co-opted from the toy aisle.
“We used to make toys based on our movies, and now we are making movies based on toys,” said Nina Jacobson, former head of production at Disney who’s now an independent producer. “We used to be the generators of intellectual property, not just recyclers of it.”
It’s a fact that’s helped drive many of the industry’s most highly acclaimed screenwriters — people such as Steven Zaillian (“Schindler’s List”) and Akiva Goldsman (“A Beautiful Mind”) — to devote more of their time to plum writing assignments such as Zaillian’s current work on “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” and Goldsman’s adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Dark Tower,” rather than develop their own ideas.
And it paints a grim picture for many screenwriters hoping to tell original tales…
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