Jessica Alba steps in it

I’m sure you’ve heard about this recent quote from actress Jessica Alba:

Good actors, never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.

Then screenwriter John August responded on his blog [excerpt]:

Oh, Jessica. Where to start?

Scripts aren’t just the dialogue. Screenplays reflect the entire movie in written form, including those moments when you don’t speak. Do you know the real reason we hold table readings in pre-production? So the actors will read the entire script at least once.

Following your logic, you’ve never been in a movie with both good actors and amazing writing. That may be true, but it might hurt the feelings of David Wain, Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller.

You’re saying your co-stars who delivered their lines as written are not “good actors.” Awkward.

You’re setting dangerous expectations. So if an aspiring actor wishes to be “good,” she should say whatever she wants to say? That’s pretty terrible advice.

Then TV writer Ken Levine weighed in with this post on his blog [excerpt]:

I would love to see Jessica Alba join the improv workshop I attend. She might find that creating a character, moving a story forward, and holding her own with other gifted actors without a script requires more than nice breasts.

In the theater, actors must perform the script verbatim. But this doesn’t apply to Jessica Alaba since I can’t imagine her ever doing theater… except maybe a one-woman show as the Statue of Liberty.

By the way, I always find it curious that actors will claim, “I can’t say this” but in a play where they’re legally not allowed to change anything they somehow manage to deliver the lines as written.

In sitcoms, especially multi-camera sitcoms, it is imperative the actors don’t stray from the script because, among other reasons, cameras move on line cues. A hint to the studio audience that an actor is ad libbing is when three cameras crash into each other.

I wish those actors who dismiss scripts, like Jessica, could sit in a writers’ room. They’d be amazed at how much thought and time and effort goes into crafting each line. Debates over whether a certain word in a set-up needs to be in the middle or the end of the line. Long discussions on ways to make the lines sound more natural. The Jessicas would be surprised by how concerned we are with making the dialogue easy for actors to perform. If something is a tongue-twister or clunky we change it so they don’t have to struggle with it. On MASH, before we sent a script down to the stage, we read it aloud ourselves and tweaked any lines we felt the actors might stumble over. You’re welcome, Jessica.

All I have to add is this, a video produced during the 2008 WGA strike imagining a world where actors were faced with no script:

The only thing to do at this point is clear: Jessica has to present the Oscar to the winning screenwriters at this year’s Academy Awards. And she can read the words on the teleprompter provided to her by some hard-working TV writers.

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