Inspired by mrongey's thread.
http://www.absolutewrite.com/forums/showthread.php?t=65538
Here's an interview with Zach Helm in
Vanity Fair (March 2006) where he discusses what lead to his determination to never suck up to the Hollywood system again at the expense of his craft. And so he wrote a Screenwriter's Manifesto.
http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2006/03/windolf200603?
Meanwhile, I am trying to find the COMPLETE manifesto itself online and haven't been able to do so (yet). Here's an incomplete piece of it that a blogger managed to piece together (probably by reading this same
Vanity Fair article) back in April of 2006.
http://lightthroughcelluloid.blogspot.com/2006/04/incomplete-zach-helm-manifesto.html
If anyone has the complete manifesto, can you post it?
Thanks!
Personally, having read the partial "manifesto" -- I think it's a bunch of baloney.
To say that he won't allow financial need to determine his career choices -- well gee, ain't that sweet. Right up until the rent comes due.
Financial need always -- unless you happen to have the last name Hilton or have a trust fund -- determines your career choices. In this business no different from any other.
Ultimately, you don't get to choose whether a spec script of yours gets bought or not. That's not a choice that you get to make. And you have to be exceptionally high in the game before people simply come along and offer you work -- simply say -- here is the script, come and write it for us, as you choose.
It just doesn't work that way. Producers give you the opportunity to pitch on projects -- and you have to go in and "sell" your approach, if you choose to. Then they get to decide whether they want you. But say no often enough, they'll simply stop coming back.
You don't get to just pick what you want to write. They pick you to pitch to them.
As to the "highest bidder" -- in this business there are only two things -- there's money and there's talk. In the end, even such things as "creative control" don't really mean anything, because if they don't like what you're doing, they'll take away your creative control and tell you to go sue -- so it still comes down to money.
The reason directors have a lot of creative control and screenwriters have virtually none is because replacing a director in the middle of a shoot costs producers a tremendous amount of money. On the other hand, replacing a writer costs almost nothing.
It costs almost nothing for the producers who seem like total jerks and it costs almost nothing for the producers who seem really passionate about your work and really committed to your being creatively involved, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah --
And so it doesn't make any difference. It's all just talk. Unless there's some really substantial *money* connected to all of that talk about how much they deeply respect the writer, etc., etc., etc., -- it doesn't mean anything, and the longer you work in the business, the more you come to understand that those opening words you hear when you get on the phone with an exec, "I'm a huge fan of your work," -- are fundamentally the equivalent of, "Hi, how are you."
They don't mean anything.
As far as foregoing money in order to retain involvement in the development process -- that is "creative control" -- producers just love to hear that. The reason they love it is because it means that you're going to give up something in exchange for nothing. That's because money is something, while creative control, as far as a writer is concerned -- contractually mandated creative control -- creative involvment -- simply doesn't exist in this business.
And as far as not doing rewrites of other people's work -- I worked in development for years, in TV and movies and would see scripts come in, stuff that we'd paid for. And the reality is, we'd work with writers who you could rely on and who delivered quality work -- and we also worked with writers who, frankly, just plain took the money and ran.
And there were cases where we had a commitment to shoot. The movie was going to get made -- and the writer had delivered a draft that was, maybe thirty percent shootable, and we'd be giving him fifteen, twenty pages of notes to try to get this thing where we needed it to be -- and each draft would come back -- thirty-five percent shootable. Thirty-seven percent shootable. And meanwhile, we're going into pre-production on this thing. And finally, we just said, if we gave this guy two years, maybe we'd squeeze a decent script out of him -- but we've got three weeks.
So we brought in another writer -- he got the script within eighty-five percent, and then the director and I sat in a room for two days and got it the rest of the way.
So in a world where every writer is great -- then sure, you don't need to have scripts re-written by others. But that isn't this world.
NMS
