Bad writing for film and television really irks me because of how avoidable it is. I’m not talking about mediocre or lackluster writing, but the actual bad writing.
TV shows and movies are tremendously expensive to make. Every part of it costs a fortune except for one: the writing. Even if a studio or production company was paying for a whole team of writers to work full time it’s still only a fraction of the cost of paying film crews, actors, editors, and VFX artists.
Given the relatively lower expense, relative lack of time constraints, and enormous importance of the script to the overall quality of the product it absolutely boggles my mind that production companies consistently fuck up the writing process.
It’s like reading a news article and seeing horribly constructed sentences and typos. Like, this is your main job! I know there are a lot of English majors out there who would love to find work.
At least for some of those there’s an excuse of needing to get the news out ASAP, but there’s no reason an in depth piece or an online article that’s been up for a few days should be butchered.
Really though writing should be the least important part of a journalists job, digging through stories and finding the truth or understanding the complex strands of the story should be and that often involves going back and editing, restructuring, reediting, reworking and adding to it over and over again.
It gets really hard to see your writing with fresh eyes once you’ve got it so perfectly constructed in your head, it’s super easy to miss awkward mistakes that have crept in - this is why editors were a thing but newspapers rarely bother anymore or the editor is too focused on political and social acceptable to notice grammar or word choice errors
I’ve been building a list called “The Micro or Low Budget Sci-fi” https://letterboxd.com/mattcoady/list/the-micro-or-low-budget-sci-fi/
Basically movies that cost almost nothing to make and use great writing to build up the world. Our minds are really good and fleshing out the rest as long as their given good writing as a foundation. Productions could save a lot of money with good writing. It blows my mind you could sink $200 million dollars into a project and not have an absolutely flawless script.
Hey, thanks for sharing!
It’s completely beyond me why scripts get rushed out the door before they’re at the very least solid. Sure, a production company might make their money just a little bit sooner but they run a massive risk of losing all of their money making a movie that completely bombs.
It’s impossible for every script to be a masterwork, but holy crap it seems like an audience wanting a competent script is too much to ask. It’s not like there’s a shortage of aspiring writers that can take a crack at a script until it’s at least passable.
Ever heard of Time Lapse from 2014? It involves a camera that takes pictures 24 hours into the future.
That is such a good movie.
Well maybe right. What draws a general audience? A flashy trailer of the sun exploding or someone talking about their family issues?
Why not both?
I never said they’re mutually exclusive. There’s tons of big budget explosion movies that have great scripts. Dark Knight, Casino Royale, Matrix, The Bourne movies, Heat. The best movies have legs and continue to sell for years after release, exploding sun only gets you a good opening weekend.
It’s crazy cause if you hear writers in tv talk about it, they’ll get contracted like a month or two before they have to finish the first batch of scripts. Writing in Hollywood is as much about learning quick writing shortcuts/tropes to move the plot along to get the product out on time as it is being able to develop a plot.
That’s what sticks in my craw. If I’m a studio exec who’s going to invest potentially hundreds of millions of dollars it’s beyond stupid to jeopardize that to get a payout a little faster.
It just seems stupid to put a time crunch on the most important phase of your investment. I don’t see how taking a greater risk of a project being a flop is worth getting the script a few weeks sooner.
I think a lot is because Hollywood became a Henry Ford production process, one part feeds into the next so they’d have empty studios and workers idle if the next idea isn’t ready to go.
Also it literally doesn’t matter, this marvel film has literally the same plot and jokes as the last one? That’s ok we cooked up a drama where we pretend villainous gamers are against it to get people talking about it, we seeded stories into the media we own about it and forced our celebrities to pretend to love it…
They can make the absolute worst shit and as long as they link it to something vaguely related to some culturally significant thing it’ll be huge, even more so if they can link it to a social divide or political division they have no intention of ever actually caring about.
Childhood toy + social flag = money, it works for comic books ‘i had a the flash t-shirt when I was six I have to like these new films’, it worked with Barbie ‘this proconsumerism corporate tat which was heavily criticised by notable feminists has made a film attempting to shoehorn social progress back into a corporate friendly sales generating mush, they say the baddies don’t like it so I have to go see it!’, and it works with endless sequels ‘this franchise now makes zero sense, has the most painfully predictable plots, has gone so far off the rails jumping sharks that literally nothing makes sense and there are zero stakes to any of it which totally ruins everything that made the first one good…’ and you can’t even tell what I’m talking about with that because it’s everything (i was thinking john wick btw)
Make something actually good and no one will care unless the media circus tells them to, that’s how you get s flop. Make something even slightly changing intellectually or from a certain point of view and instantly most your audience is gone or angry, but be like Barbie and put sparkle on social concepts 90% of the world has agreed on for decades while actively avoiding anything more contentious then you don’t need to worry about alienating the audience or going over their heads.
And for some reason people just won’t stop watching it, they won’t watch indy stuff made with passion or small budget things no matter how good they are because they HAVE to see the big releases, like you’ll lose touch with society and be unable to make friends if you don’t force yourself to endure at least a dozen painfully dull industry movies a year.
i wouldn’t be surprised if a big part of it is that the higher ups don’t know much about what good writing actually is, or they’re too focused on ratings and they don’t dare deviate from “what works”. it also wouldn’t surprise me if writers weren’t allowed to make “major” changes to scripts after seeing how the writing looks after scenes have been recorded, because it might be “too expensive to change”.
My pet theory is that this is because of the assembly line way of thinking of studios. Script -> Casting -> Shooting -> VFX -> Editing -> Profit.
It takes time to develop a good idea and script. If you force a writer to adhere to a strict schedule you’ll get a rush job and bad writing. As long as money keeps flowing in, their assembly line theory is validated.
Because writing doesn’t really work like that, the reason we get bland writing is because they keep adding extra chefs.
Thay get these professional writers that learned formula in school and apply it to sections of someone else’s work and wonder why the result is an ugly tapestry of formulaic rubbish.
All the things people love are written by people with passion for the project, then they get a budget increase and professional industry writers get brought in and it’s all shitty generic snappy dialog and dramatic posing that feels uncomfortable and awkward in the scene.
Yeah but taking advantage of that would require executive ghouls to be capable of appreciating art or even be willing to read drafts.
Maybe it’s studio meddling or director indecision? Lots of changes at the last minute make the writers fly by the seat of their pants?
I’m sure there’s plenty of those making a mess of things, but taking time in the writing process, getting input from relevant parties, and doing as much preparation as possible cuts out a myriad of problems.
Studio got a product placement deal? Great, let’s integrate that into the story long before filming even begins so it feels natural.
Director doesn’t know if he wants plot point A to happen or not? Good thing he heard about that while the movie was just a script instead of having him decide with dozens of people on set.
I’m sure there are uncontrollable, unforeseeable problems that will come up in any production. There is no reason to exacerbate those by being willfully unprepared. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure but it seems like film studios reliably hamper the “prevention” part to shave a few weeks off on prep time and end up losing more time or huge piles of money because of it.
That’s why the Lord of the Rings movies are so good. They had almost as much time in pre-production as they did during filming.
I’m still salty about League of Extraordinary Gentleman. Literary Avengers is such an awesome concept, but what we got was so fucking bad Connery walked away from acting forever.
But it did give us one of the most beautiful movie cars ever which, you know, is nice.
Read the comic. It does so much better with the concept. Goddammit, can we get at least one good Alan Moore adaptation?! Look at the mans run of Swamp Thing! It’d do well as an animated movie, at the very least!
Just like Sandman, it could only be good if the man himself was at the helm, but he hates comics now.
I really don’t think we can and I’m fed up of them trying, why don’t they let old things be old and comics be comics?
You want to make a good film in the twenty twenties then write a film to be a film in the twenty twenties.
You didn’t like the watchmen tv show?
TV show with really interesting premise that is well written, well acted, with great sets:
Streaming service cancels it after the first season and doesn’t renew it.
RIP ‘Night Sky’ with JK Simmons. What could have been.
I was just thinking about that show last night and wondering if/when season 2 was coming out, as it had good reviews, great cast, a good plot, and the dialogue was pretty good too.
Went to the Wikipedia page and found out Amazon cancelled it two months after it’s debut. Two months! They didn’t even give it a chance.
I watched with my SO and googled it right after we finished it to see when Season 2 was coming, thinking it would be a joke “haha only 2 years to wait for the next season” and it had already been cancelled. Rough.
I was enjoying the heck out of The Peripheral. RIP.
Well that really sucks. I don’t even have a guess to what’s going on with that ending.
RIP Carnival Row. I thought it was a pretty damn good show, with excellent actors and good character building.
It hasn’t been “officially” cancelled, but it may as well be at this point.
This first Suicide Squad was hot garbage, the second was awesome.
Will Smith’s compulsive need to never be the bad guy didn’t help.
The second one should have just been called something else.
Every DC fan I knew had such a bad taste in their mouth for that Will Smith Suicide Squad.
That’s the beauty of the Suicide Squad, they die or escape or there are other teams, so they can wipe out the whole cast without hesitation because it fits into the plot constraints.
The Extended Cut version of the first movie is actually an okay time. It boggles the mind anyone would think it’s a good idea to pull every bit of backstory and subplot and give us the mess of a theatrical version we got.
This was Once Upon A Time on ABC. Could’ve been a really good show, but it was basically fanfiction written by a middle schooler.
How many times can you use amnesia in a show with seven seasons? How many times can you reveal that Character A is secretly related to Character B? How many times can someone get killed but then miraculously get better? How many times can you introduce absolutely world-breaking plot devices, only to forget about them immediately?
The answer for all of the above, for Once Upon a Time, is THERE’S NO FUCKING UPPER LIMIT.
It did have this absolutely fantastic exchange though…
Grumpy: We’re all going to go hang out with Happy.
Snow White: Didn’t he get turned into a tree?
Grumpy: Yeah, but we fixed that months ago! We do things when you’re not around!
…for which I’ll almost forgive all the rest.
‘Fables’ was a comic book that was the first to use the idea of characters from fairy tales living in the modern era. When people realized that everything was already public domaine we got two shows, neither as good as the comic.
Wolf among Us was great though
Two shows?
After seeing all the weird ads in malls and on random food, I decided to read the wiki about this show. Sounds like a really really good premise!
But the moment I watched a random trailer… Yikes. Bad execution.
It was created by some of the same people who made Lost. Both shows relied heavily on flashbacks to make the shows seem more planned out. Both relied on inconsistent mythologies to fake worldbuilding.
Witcher :(
And I’m not talking about the casting or other stuff. Just the general writing and conversion from books to screen sucked ass
It was like a teenager wrote the dialogue.
Recently this was Hazbin Hotel for me. Thought I would give it a shot but it’s written like a kid’s show instead of an edgy adult comedy about demons.
How is it compared to Helluva Boss?
Much less clever and subtle. I would call that a pretty low bar, honestly. Helluva Boss also has a lot of poorly-written content IMO, but in Hazbin it’s nonstop bad writing until there’s a small glimpse of something competent. I would recommend Helluva Boss to anyone who likes shitposts and sitcoms, but I wouldn’t recommend Hazbin to anyone right now.
Damn, had high hopes, too bad.
Aw man, I was hoping it’d be better. I will still see and hope for the best.
I liked the hazbin hotel pilot, but very much felt how you do about the helluva boss pilot. I thought hazbin was fun and quirky and I liked it a fair bit, helluva boss cranked up the edginess and immaturity but didn’t bring anything else that made up for it. Maybe the actual series is better Idk
The Dark Tower movie adaptation, I am a huge fan of the books and I was so looking forward to a 3 movie arc. Turned out 🤮
The movie “In Time” and the movie “Upside Down (2012)” are both great examples
Yeah in time showed great promise but the execution was crap Maybe they’ll do it as a series
If you like the concept of Upside Down, you might be interested in the anime movie Patema Inverted. It has the same premise and came out around the same time.
Spelling error in a meme poking fun at bad writing. Hilarious.
rong righting
What are your opinions on The Magicians?
The show where they have to sex each other in super sexy horny sex to cast some spell. Yeah sex magic wooo!! And what does the spell do? It just creates a column of light that some guy can use as a beacon to navigate.
My eyes rolled so hard I saw the back of my own skull.
I did not like the constant tonal shifts between silly magic frat boys and depressing magical apocalypse.
Never watched enough to get a feel. I could not stand the whiney main character kid. He was like nails on a chalk board annoying…
Haha, have you read the books? It is a million times worse / more pretentious. The show was camp, which was at least kinda fun. Definitely an improvement anyway
I haven’t watched all of them but the animated Suicide Squad movies have been pretty good.
But I’ve heard the follow-up to Suicide Squad, “Birds of Prey (and some clown woman)” had great writing, so… does that even out?
And you would know, Margot Robbie! Good work!
Thank you!
Also, that’s esteemed Academy Award nominated character actress Margot Robbie to you!
I haven’t seen Birds of Prey, but “The Suicide Squad” (not to be confused with “Suicide Squad”, which I also didn’t watch) was very good.
Edit I may be stupid,
Indeed, that movie is also pretty good.
Ironic grammatical error
Darling in the franxx, I was really interested in the world building and was on the minority of people that liked the episodes that had no mecha fights and they were just exploring the current city and how weird it was.
But trigger couldn’t contain themselves and had to do their asspulls and sudden massive power escalation that worked on Gurren Lagann because it wasn’t a grounded take on post-apocalyptic future with a few mechas that defend humanity!
