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Fancy
a career in the exciting and profitable world of screenwriting?
Then get to the back of the queue alongside Leanne Smith, who's got
more than an Ultimo to get off her tits.
Picture the scene - you're walking down the street when you're suddenly
seized with a bolt of searing pain in the chest. You think - maybe I
shouldn't have wolfed that kebab so fast - then blam! Next thing you
know you're being hurled in a gurney, ER-style, to be told, don't
panic, your cardiac arrest's about to be sorted by the house plumber,
just as soon as he pulls his arm out of the S-bend.
It's a well-known fact that anybody can be a screenwriter. Go ask the
Script Factory, who seem to think the nation's screen scribblers are
fighting off offers, so much so that they're on the look-out for
underemployed playwrights and novelists for their Writer's Circle
scheme. Noble as their initiative appears, I ask myself - what does
this say about all those screenwriters already out there trying to
scratch a few quid? Most of us wannabes are hardly in it for the
cashola, at least not by the time we get ripped off by producers, our
rights grabbed by public bean-counters and sundry TV Tarts and if we're
really lucky, mugged by our agents to boot.
Unless you're Harold Pinter, (who can pick and choose his gigs) to
claim a novelist or playwright can automatically write a decent film
script is wishful thinking. Transferring skills is all very well, but
schemes like this show a woeful but all-too-typical up yours for the
craft of writing for the screen. Welcome to UK film, Britain's biggest
not-for-profit business where with enough 'training', anybody with two
fingers can toss off a great script.
To be sure, the road to Hollywood has long been littered with the
corpses of literary hacks lured by filthy lucre, but that's Hollywood.
Back in Blighty, where the notion of cinematic writing is an alien
concept (oh, is it not a tad short on dialogue?) you're lucky to get
your bus fare home and a cheese sandwich - and that's after turning in
a free draft.
And there's the rub-a-dub. Cash-starved UK producers constantly bemoan
the fact there's no scripts out there worth wiping their arse on.
Trouble is, they can't get their mitts on the Lottery dev pot unless
they produce the goods, which means some hapless, unwaged screenwriter
has to give it away. And if the script's rubbish to start with, it's
only bound to get worse by the time a coven of so-called development
execs get their claws into it, an ordeal on a par with a bikini wax and
surely an eye-opener for pampered playwrights unused to having their
work ritually shredded.
We all know the story of Robert Riskin, a Hollywood hack who once threw
120 blank pages on Frank Capra's desk, declaring, try giving that the
Capra touch. And he was on the pay roll, which is more than you can say
for the average UK scribbler. Personally I wouldn't dream of having my
fillings done by a plasterer or my hair dyed by a car mechanic.
Scriptwriting's a hard enough game without the open season, thank you.
Gosh, I'm beginning to sound like a writer. Maybe I should write a
book...
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