The movie studios have, whether because they ran like factories in the days of the old studio system, or because they bought into the auteur theory after that, generally been contemptuous at best of screenwriters, who are frequently rewritten, fired, rehired and fired again. Writers are, perhaps today more than ever (where a big blockbuster movie like “Wonder Woman” will hire multiple writers to work on drafts simultaneously and then combine them) seen as disposable and replaceable.
Studio notes might be just as common in the days of network TV, but the writers are at least firmly in charge, given power, creative control and respect in the best scenarios (or at least more of it than in the movie world). Furthermore, filmmakers and screenwriters want to tell stories, first and foremost, and studios have increasingly been shying away from making anything that you can’t make an interlocking franchise out of. “Mr. Robot,” among multiple others, actually started work as a feature script before creator Sam Esmail refashioned it as a series, and Amazon’s upcoming Guillermo del Toro-directed pilot “Carnival Row” was in development a decade ago as a movie, just two examples of studios letting talented folks slip away from them and into television.
So who could blame a writer from pushing into the television world, when studios increasingly say that they don’t make the kinds of movies that many people grew up loving? And yet when even a franchise-packed summer like this one fails to connect, Hollywood whimpers about competition from television, when they haven’t even tried to put up a fight, and have conceded the ground that they’re losing.
Adult dramas, romantic comedies or thrillers don’t make money anymore, we’re told, but if millions are constantly glued to their shows on ABC or HBO or Netflix or Amazon or wherever, who’s to say that a romantic thriller written and produced by Shonda Rhimes, or a romantic comedy from “Catastrophe” creator Sharon Horgan, or a big broad family comedy from “Black-ish” creative Kenya Barris, or an original family adventure from “Gravity Falls” mastermind Alex Hirsch, can’t connect with an audience?
And we don’t mean hiring these people to work on the latest Marvel movie, or bringing them in to polish a project just before production. We mean involving them from day one and giving them the kind of trust and autonomy that they’ve become used to in TV. Let them bring the same kind of focus on story and character that they’ve honed on small-screen projects. Let them thrive in the way that people like Wright, Lord, Miller, Apatow, Feig, Whedon and Abrams were able to do on the big-screen in recent years.
Some of the smarter producers and executives out there get it. Pixar’s story-above-and-beyond-anything-else approach owes as much to TV writer’s rooms as anything else (and John Lasseter has exported it to parent Disney with great success). At their best, Marvel have learned a lot from a showrunner-led approach while still letting writers and directors do their thing (at their worst, though, you get the “Ant-Man” debacle). “The Lego Movie” franchise has imported higher-ups from “Community” and “BoJack Horseman” for future installments, while “Pacific Rim 2” will be directed by Steven S. DeKnight, a former Joss Whedon collaborator who was showrunner on “Spartacus” and “Daredevil.”
Now, of course there will be TV writers who love TV over film, and have no ambition to move across the proverbial aisle. And it would be disingenuous to say that the movie studios are ignoring this new breed of talent: Some, like Hawley, have projects developing, and we’re sure plenty of others have taken meetings or have stuff in development that hasn’t been revealed yet.
But it’s more about the general attitude, a squandering and a dismissing of talent, while technically gifted but storytelling-bereft filmmakers like Michael Bay or Zack Snyder are given carte blanche. It’s an assumption that a screenplay is a blueprint to be discarded at will rather than the foundations on which everything else is built. And don’t mistake it for a push against the auteur. It’s more of a reminder that auteurs can come from many different places, and sometimes aren’t even necessarily directors.
That no one’s really talking about most of the summer movies, while conversation online has been dominated by “Game Of Thrones” and “Stranger Things,” and “Mr. Robot” and “UnREAL,” is a reminder that the movie studios risk losing the interest of an entire generation of talented writers and directors, and potentially beyond that — “Game Of Thrones” is doing for an age-group what “Star Wars” or “The Matrix” did for ones before. And it’s going to take a real, concerted effort to get them back.