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Tales from the Script
As its cheeky title suggests, Tales from the Script is less a definitive chronicle of Hollywood screenwriting than a mélange of insider gossip, one-liners, and wry anecdotes that detail the sporadic highs and frequent lows of life as a scriptwriter in the modern studio system.
Filmmaker Peter Hanson interviewed dozens of contemporary screenwriters, eliciting both their personal experiences and more generalized thoughts on the role of the writer within the industry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they tend to view their profession as both essential and terminally undervalued. Describing the Hollywood power structure as a totem pole, Ghost writer Bruce Joel Rubin dryly notes that the writer occupies the space that’s shoved into the ground to keep the whole thing upright.
Such observations rarely come across as self-pitying. Indeed, it’s striking how candid the writers can be in acknowledging their vocation’s compromises and limitations. Many well-trodden tales of professional struggle fill the film’s running time: the years languishing in obscurity; the multiple rejections; the constant second-guessing and financial scrimping. Yet success brings its own array of issues, with even the most bankable of writers susceptible to studio-sanctioned re-writes, directorial revisions, and stars who alter lines of dialogue simply because they feel their character “wouldn’t say that.” Artistry, in other words, often takes a backseat to ego and commerce.
The constancy of these issues may have something to do with Hanson’s choice of subjects, the vast majority of whom have made their careers in mainstream American cinema. If you accept the inherent limitations of this approach, however, Tales from the Script offers the modest but not insignificant pleasure of listening to funny, articulate people sound off about their professional dreams and insecurities. And as with any talking-heads documentary, you end up anticipating the return of some individuals more than others. William Goldman, Oscar-winning writer of such films as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, offers profanity-sprinkled advice about the nature of screenwriting (it’s more about the sturdiness of the structure than the elegance of the prose); while Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader reflects on how he and frequent collaborator Martin Scorsese connected over similar relationships to their divergent religious and ethnic backgrounds. Go Fish writer Guinevere Turner, meanwhile, serves up some bracing stories from the studio trenches: most memorably, the gleefully masochistic tale of how her original script for the schlocky horror bomb BloodRayne got ground up in production by uber-hack Uwe Boll. Attending the film’s premiere, she recalled howling with laughter at her screenplay’s trash-tastic on-screen translation.
"Hanson keeps the focus almost entirely on the interviewees. It’s a shrewd move, given how little else he offers in terms of historical context or aesthetic variety. There’s an amateur-hour quality to much of the filmmaking here, from questionably-lit interviews to visual inserts that make thudding attempts to “complement” what a writer is discussing at a given moment. At one point, Mona Lisa Smile scribe Mark Rosenthal describes the precision that a screenwriter must bring to every scene he or she writes, even something as ostensibly straightforward as a chase scene on a beach. To visually accentuate this point, Hanson then fades to a shot of . . . a beach. (How enlightening!) Then again, perhaps it’s oddly appropriate that a film about screenwriting should come swathed with such iffy stylistic choices. With little else to draw our attention, the word—and the put-upon pros who supply it—reigns supreme.
Matt Connolly
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