BYOB Archive for March, 2009
Watchmen BYOB In The Non-IO Era
Our very own Comedian has been thrown out of the window for 48 hours for verbally napalming the blog and attempting to rape reasonable discourse.
Hopefully, a huge opening weekend for Watchmen will calm him down, as he has, at times been a valued commenter to this blog. In the meantime, feel free to throw ideas around in a civil way for a while…
BYOB – Monday 030209
Weirdest thing I heard this morning from a fairly big producer:
“There are no scripts! There’s just nothing! All the scripts that are out there are crap, directors are packing it in for ’09 or attaching themselves to a couple of long shots being packaged for Cannes, but there are just no completed scripts out there! The distributors are going to start hurting for product as the studios are getting gunshy about even greenlighting programmers.”
Personally, as someone who works as a screenwriter, I am finding this to be oddly true. Long-dead mid-level projects are coming off shelves, getting dusted off and offers are being made to talent on movies that weren’t good enough to be going forward a few years back. I’ve been shocked to hear some of the stuff that’s got money on it now.
And I’m not talking about a resurrection of the spec market, but of producers who have been running around with a script and a couple of loose B-level attachments suddenly being treated better than bigger ones with, say, some valuable piece of underlying material and an A-list director – but no completed draft.
It’s like what you hear about “new pilot season” – completed pilot scripts have been given more weight than high-level writers/showrunners with high concept pitches.
And they say no one reads in L.A….
Posted by: SJRubinstein at March 2, 2009 12:56 PM