According to Variety
KK has done whole films without a script, why you gotta be so demanding? hahahahaha
Oh, I dunno, call me old-fashioned, call me old-timey, antediluvian even, I just like stories to be about something. It's just my way.
I find myself up against the logic wall when these conversations come up because the recent trash being produced was, point of fact, because of this exact issue. ( With the clear exception of series where the director has been the writer from day one) No script was presented and the entire creative writing process was handed to directors to make up on the fly. Trek, Star Wars, Lost (ABC) were all being created as a single person creative suite. No writers, or ones that didn't act like it, they acted as directors while writing and correcting ON SET, LIVE. But when I point out that directors don't write scripts unless it is their own story(written BEFORE the directing part started), several people will chime in with how perfectly normal it is and how I really shouldn't have noticed an issue that doesn't exist. But all this picking up of franchises, with known canon, and saying that the director gets to write the new dialogue and usually on the fly? But yet people defend this like it is totally normal. Anyone who has spent even a semester in film school knows that isn't true. Directors don't write, they direct vs writers writing. It seems so obvious in the names of the jobs..... but here we are. I think the best part is, the ones known to do this are the same ones who have destroyed entire franchises. So, I concede that if you wish to destroy decades of valuable good will in epic franchises , then yes, it is a perfectly normal path. But I will also concede that many series shows are totally written by the director, including jokes, and are smash hits.Oh, I dunno, call me old-fashioned, call me old-timey, antediluvian even, I just like stories to be about something. It's just my way.
This is true. I worked for a producer, Michael Preger, when he was in development for Village of the Damned for Universal, and we went through numerous drafts--and writers--long before John Carpenter got attached (after I left). I did see one or more David Himmelstein drafts, as well as other writers. Every time a draft came in, I had to break it down, cook up a shooting schedule that made sense on paper, and run a budget, all so Mike could compare his numbers to what Jim Jacks at Universal was giving him. This went on for years. We were also doing the same in parallel for Day of the Triffids, which never got made.
TFA famously was in development for over a year with just concept artists doing random art with little direction. That's what led to such crazy rumors in the early days. It's also what gave direction to Michael Arndt, who never managed to bring the script into focus before Abrams came in and nuked most everything.
STOP BEING LOGICAL! And the studios wonder why none of their movies are profitable...
I know, right? And we're not even finding out the true budgets of these disasters. I wouldn't be surprised if Snow White ran up $400M by the time the reshoots and CGI revisions were done, and that's not even considering the marketing budget.
Disney is a publicly traded corporation. Their stock is trading at less than 50% of its value five years ago. They can't afford to be fire hosing money out the door on "brand maintenance." Their movies have to make a profit.
That's not the way modern Hollywood works.Oh, I dunno, call me old-fashioned, call me old-timey, antediluvian even, I just like stories to be about something. It's just my way.
