Will anything come of this?

[cmmora]

http://www.deadline.com/2010/06/june-gloom-the-week-that-the-studios-sought-out-the-agents/

[frontburner]

Nikki said it. Must be true!

[carcar]

I'm actually a little suspicious it was more about how do we make this Hollywood futures trading thing work, so we can make money even if a movie tanks, than how do we make better movies.

But maybe I'm just cynical.:cool:

[Wordsmithteer]

The issue here isn't only buying original material. It's keeping original material original during the development process. Yes, Nottingham had some issues story wise and they could have been fixed. Instead they turned it into Robin Hood a story we have seen many times before and had nothing new to offer.

Studios need to start respecting the writer and what they bring to the table. A writer doesn't tell the actor how to act or the director how to direct. No one should be telling the writer how to write a good story.

It doesn't appear that Clint Eastwood goes through a long development process once he finds a script he likes. He finds script he likes, he shoots script. And Clint has been consistent in that the films he directs are considered generally good. Why isn't anyone following Clint's example?

[frontburner]

In all seriousness.

There's a front page story in the LA Times today about Pixar and how even they have succumbed to the business of putting out unoriginal material (out of their next four movies three of them are sequels... and they just came out with Toy Story 3. As a comparison - in the last 15 years they've only put out one sequel). If Pixar - one of the last beacons of originality - has reached this tipping point, I think something will need to happen if we want to save movies.

[Donreel]

... Instead they turned it into Robin Hood a story we have seen many times before and had nothing new to offer....

Except they actually didn't do the Robin Hood story everyone knows--they just deceptively promoted and advertised it that way, but ended up doing a very different story, one that might even be called "original". But it was a mess.

[Ravenlocks]

The issue here isn't only buying original material. It's keeping original material original during the development process. Yes, Nottingham had some issues story wise and they could have been fixed. Instead they turned it into Robin Hood a story we have seen many times before and had nothing new to offer.

Studios need to start respecting the writer and what they bring to the table. A writer doesn't tell the actor how to act or the director how to direct. No one should be telling the writer how to write a good story.

It doesn't appear that Clint Eastwood goes through a long development process once he finds a script he likes. He finds script he likes, he shoots script. And Clint has been consistent in that the films he directs are considered generally good. Why isn't anyone following Clint's example?
Amen. In Bill Martell's blog post about Robin Hood, he suggested an intriguing idea: lock the script. A script could be unlocked for an awesome idea that would improve the story, but otherwise, it stays locked and nobody gets to change it. No more messing with good scripts until you end up with just an unoriginal mess.

I have great respect for Eastwood's moviemaking style.