In this case, it also comes with a twinge of sadness.
After 88 columns, Scriptland is moving off the Times stage. It's been massively satisfying to have so many people read and respond to the column (special mention goes to writer-director Scott Coffey for early on bemoaning the "turgid snark" of my prose).
But more importantly, readers seemed to rediscover the obvious: that the lives, work and minds of this town's writers are endlessly rich and insightful.
If there's a legacy here, I hope it's theirs -- that they receive due respect for being the miraculous cultivators not just of their own imaginations, but of ours as well.
Over the last 21 months, I've had the good fortune to speak with a lot of smart, savvy people in the TV and film world -- agents, managers, producers, executives and, especially, screenwriters.
Many shared hard-won wisdom about a profession that can often be more frustrating than fulfilling.
One of these was Oscar winner Christopher McQuarrie ("The Usual Suspects"), a real student of the game who once offhandedly provided the most succinct explanation for the gummed-up, 10th-circle-of-hell runaround of the film business that I've ever heard. Here it is, for your morbid pleasure:
"Scripts don't get movies made, directors do," McQuarrie e-mailed. "(You can argue that actors do, but the first question the actor asks is 'who is directing?') The list of directors that supply the necessary confidence is exceedingly small. So even if directors were choosing projects based solely on the quality of the writing (which is not always the case, obviously) a writer's chances are slim.
"Next, is your spec script based on a bestseller, a comic book, a graphic novel? Is an actor attached? What makes it worth investing tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars? If your answer is story, you should be writing books.
"So what about the scripts written for a studio? The purpose of studio development is getting the script to a place where it is suitable to attract a director from the aforementioned short list. The common belief is that directors will only read a script once and will be less likely to accept a script some other director has passed on. Thus, no one wants to show the script to a director until it's ready to make. And, as we've established, a script isn't ready to make until a director says it is.
"Welcome to turnaround."
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A ban on ...
