Wednesday, May 19, 2010
Film How Bad Movies Get Made: Robin Hood from Script to Screen
Posted by Mark Asch on Wed, May 19, 2010 at 12:42 PM
- Cary Elwes takes aim at each of Robin Hood's screenwriters.
Vulture's Claude Brodesser-Akner has an in-depth report on how, exactly, that "thorough development process" went.
Short version: risk-averse studio groupthink and the "I love that—now change it" mentality of a series of producers and agents and directors and suits who don't have any ideas except how to make somebody else's idea better.
It is, one suspects, a fairly typical story, although it turns out that The L and film critic Benjamin Strong may owe something of an apology to credited screenwriter Brian Helgeland for evaluating his work as "atrocious" and cliche-ridden. Inasmuch, that is, as Helgeland was apparently hired to rewrite somebody else's rewrite of his own rewrite of the original script, and then saw Tom Stoppard hired to provide some on-set dialogue polishing.
Apportioning credit and blame in a big-budget studio development is a fool's game, but I think we can say with a fair degree of certainty that "I awoke this morning with a tumescent glow" was all Stoppard.
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