Hollywood Tales

“The screenplay is the most fragile art form there is, the one with the most perilous journey from cocoon to butterfly. A novelist, a singer, a sculptor — they can just do it and it’s done. I know that’s a mighty simplification, but when a screenwriter ‘does it,’ it’s not done — it’s just begun. No one has to go through an uglier, middleman-packed, Chinese telephone torture than a screenwriter does — producers, directors, investors, studio executives, opinionated craft-services people…I have never written a bad ending, yet everyone of my films has one.”

 — screenwriter Daniel Waters (from “Why We Write,” Silman-James Press, 1999)

Comment Archive