The Business of Screenwriting: Weather Vanes
“With all these smart folks around, why are there so many weather vanes?”
There are an awful lot of sharp people who work in Hollywood. Studio executives, producers, agents, managers, lots of them from Harvard, Yale, Brown, Columbia, Northwestern, Stanford, USC, UCLA and top MBA programs from around the country.
Which raises the question: With all these smart folks around, why are there so many weather vanes?
As the moniker suggests, a weather vane is an individual whose attitude shifts depending upon which way the prevailing winds blow.
In my experience, there are three types of WV personalities in Hollywood:
- Trendy Weather Vanes: Heavily influenced by what’s perceived as being hot or cold, trying to align oneself with the mood of the marketplace, Zeitgeist-meisters.
- Extreme Weather Vanes: They love something one day, hate it the next, literally flipping positions just… like… that, less about the marketplace mood than their own personality-driven moods.
- Clever Weather Vanes: They never fully commit to something one way or the other, virtual index finger always moist and stuck in the air, testing social media and inter-office political currents, all the while being inordinately cautious in the opinions they express.
For a screenwriter, this state of affairs represents a minefield. You can sit in meetings, lengthy ones drilling down into the minutiae of a project, trying your best to accommodate suggestion after suggestion with seemingly everyone signing off on a take. You go away for two months and write a draft. You turn in the script. Suddenly there are lots of story problems, many if not most of them arising from the very discussions you had.
You press a CWV, they may say something like, “Well, as you recall, I was never totally comfortable with this take. Remember how I said I was somewhat confident it might work, but we just had to see. In fact, I had strong reservations about it, but being a team player, I went along with the others.”
You talk with an EWV, they might admit, “Okay, we gave it a shot and it doesn’t work. Onto the next thing.”
If you’re dealing with a TWV, the issue may be much more prevalent even before you go to draft, knocking out one treatment after another to “make the story better” (i.e., align with what they perceive buyers or consumers to currently be about), changing course significantly from take to take.
Any of these scenarios can be a head-spinning and deeply frustrating experience for a screenwriter where whatever initial inspiration you had for the story can easily get lost in the maze of changes.
Furthermore, whether you’re dealing with a TWV, EWV or CWV, and no matter that the direction of the script was heavily influenced by their opinions, the implication is that the responsibility for what exists on the page lies on the writer’s shoulders, not theirs.
What about that image of a Hollywood power player who goes with their gut, sticks to their guns, lives by the conviction of their unique aesthetic perspective?
There are folks like that. Mixed with actual creative insight, these are the type of allies you hope and pray to find, people who will champion your shared vision, watch your back and help circumnavigate a project through the minefield.
But there are a considerable number of shakers and movers who play a different game, never quite committing themselves to a project until it becomes a hit, then piling on to give the appearance of having been an early supporter.
How do well-educated Ivy League types become prevaricators in chief?
Here is a quote from screenwriter William Goldman that goes a long way to answer things:
“Studio executives are intelligent, brutally overworked men and women who share one thing in common with baseball managers: they wake up every morning of the world with the knowledge that sooner or later they’re going to get fired.”
Fear of losing one’s job can shape a person. It can intensify into an obsession to stay on top of what is going on out there [Trendy Weather Vanes]. It can contribute to wild fluctuations in moods [Extreme Weather Vanes]. It can create the need to become a moving target pulling off the delicate balance of seeming to have opinions, yet difficult to pin down [Crafty Weather Vanes].
Here is a personal example.
We are working on a project at a major studio. In a meeting, an exec presses us to change a key part of our take — I won’t get into the actual specifics, but for our purposes, let’s say it involves turning the Protagonist from a white male heterosexual into a female Eskimo bisexual.
And so, despite our significant reservations, we go away for weeks attempting to work this new take on the character into the story. Frankly, it’s a pain in the ass, but eventually we pull it off and turn in the script.
Cut to our next meeting with the same studio executive where we have this conversation:
“And what’s the deal with changing the Protagonist from a white male heterosexual to a female Eskimo bisexual?”
“Uh, that was your suggestion, remember?”
“No-no, I never suggested anything like that.”
“Yes, you — “
“No, that was my girlfriend.”
[The dull silence of your twitching eyes].
“I was reading your treatment to her in the jacuzzi… we were away at Two Bunch Palms for the weekend… and I remember she said, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be great to make the Protagonist a female Eskimo bisexual? An Eskimo would be cool. Bisexuals are hot’…”
“Your girlfriend?”
“Ex-girlfriend. We broke up the other day. Good thing, coming up with such stupid ideas, right?”
In this case, the exec hit the weather vane trifecta. TWV: Jumping on the girlfriend’s suggestion as possibly tapping into something both cool and hot. EWV: Switching sides from advocate to critic. CWV: Laying off blame onto someone else.
Apart from becoming a raging alcoholic, there are two general ways for a writer to deal with the whole weather vane phenomenon. One is you assume the posture of the Fiery Cocksure Screenwriter. A WV in the face of an FCS can be bowed into compliance with your will, sheer bluster, and presumed understanding of story and its mysterious nuances.
The other option? You guessed it: You become a weather vane, specifically a CWV. In a script notes meeting, you never commit to anything. Rather your stock answers to suggestions are, “Seems like an interesting idea,” “That might work” or “Let me kick that around and see how it plays.”
Never commit. Always leave yourself wiggle room. Maximize your flexibility.
Because if studio executives live with the constant fear of being fired…
Imagine what a writer lives with.
The Business of Screenwriting is a weekly series of Go Into The Story posts based upon my experiences as a complete Hollywood outsider who sold a spec script for a lot of money, parlayed that into a screenwriting career during which time I’ve made some good choices, some okay decisions, and some really stupid ones. Hopefully you’ll be the wiser for what you learn here.
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