I’ve said on The Movie Blog for a long time, that we, as movie going fans, give far too much credit to how much actors factor into how good or bad a movie is. Don’t misunderstand me, actors are important… but FAR MORE IMPORTANT are the director… and the writers.
Actors don’t come up with the story, or the words that they say. That’s the job of the writers. For any movie to stand a chance of being decent, it MUST start with a strong screenplay. And personally, this is where I feel most movies fail.
So here is a question I have. If a great screenplay is the building block for any movie to have a chance at being good… why give 20x more money to the actors, than the people who… you know… actually write the movie?
This is an idea we talked about on yesterdays Audio Edition. Here’s what I would like to suggest:
Instead of giving an actor $15 million dollars in a film, get an actor that will take $3 million (oh how on earth will they survive???). Then, take 10 million, get the 10 best writers available, give them the idea for the movie you want and give them each a million dollars to just take 6 months and each write their own screenplay for that movie idea.
At the end of that process, take the best one, and give that writer the job and to use other ideas from the other scripts to incorporate into their screenplay if they feel it will improve it.
The end result is that you get much better films built on much better screenplays and more money going towards the writers who actually craft these films before the director gets to run with it. It’s a Win/Win//Win situation… except for the uber rich actors who have to take a pay cut… which is fine by me.
