The violations and indignities that the written word suffers in Hollywood are many and sundry, but screenwriters get their say in Tales from the Script, a highly interesting documentary built around wide-ranging conversations with almost four dozen big screen storytellers, from John Carpenter and Frank Darabont to Bruce Joel Rubin and William Goldman. Eschewing voiceover narration or some artificially manufactured chronological narrative structure, the movie instead more or less embraces chaos theory that conventional mainstream narrative storytelling rejects, thematically grouping its anecdotal insights in ultra-loose fashion with title cards.
Yes, Tales from the Script is exclusively a talking-head affair, which lends it the feel of a cultured curio — a selling point, to be sure, for cineastes, but something of a hurdle for general audiences. (There’s also a hefty companion book to the film, underscoring a certain academic worth.) A lot of the observations herein are pointed but somewhat generic. Steven de Souza (above) amusingly and perceptively notes that there are people in the room during a story meeting who basically make their day, work-wise, by offering comment on your script, so such an environment encourages even dumb, from-the-hip remarks over more thoughtful silence.
Some stories, however, are pure, unadulterated gold, like Guinevere Turner hilariously recounting her work experience with director Uwe Boll on BloodRayne, Darabont talking about being offered a $30 million budget for shooting The Mist with a different ending, and Rubin ruefully recalling a Disney executive taking him to lunch and surreptitiously picking his brain for ideas for Armageddon by just letting Rubin talk about his work on Deep Impact. Director Peter Hanson and co-producer/co-writer Paul Robert Herman are also smart enough to include in the mix a number of writers laboring chiefly in the straight-to-video realm, which helps keep Tales from the Script grounded in reality. Too much focus on only pie-in-the-sky top-shelf Hollywood product would make the risk-reward somehow seem more palatable, or like less of a long-shot. While it could use a bit more insights from independent writer-director-producers, as is the movie comes across as an accurate, unblinking and certainly engaging look at the balancing act between art and commerce that is screenwriting, and moviemaking in general.
Housed in a regular plastic Amaray case, Tales from the Script comes to DVD presented in anamorphic widescreen, with an English language stereo audio mix. Bonus features are ample, kick-started by 46 minutes of additional interview footage that is, unsurprisingly, entertaining as all get-out. Billy Ray (Shattered Glass, Breach) shares his own metaphor of Hollywood’s fickle embrace, relating an anecdote about Christmas gifts spread out over a couple years. Ron Shelton compares a script to sheet music, but says that it unfortunately only gets played once; he then goes on to talk about Bull Durham being written in a single draft, with his film’s opening two-page monologue dictated into a microcassette recorder while driving the back roads of North Carolina. Other writers, too, weigh in on the delicate balance between money, hack-itude and narrative ownership. The aforementioned Rubin asserts that a writer is always the birth parent to a film, while a director is an interpreter, akin to a conductor. Shooter screenwriter Jonathan Lemkin, meanwhile, says he consciously alternates between being “an artist and a whore, because if I was just the former I’d be broke and if I was just the latter I’d be sad.”
In addition to a clutch of preview trailers for more First Run Features home video releases, other supplemental features include 12 minutes of peer genuflection at the altar of William Goldman (Darabont compares him to the funny-without-knowing-it uncle who has all the best stories), and nine minutes of advice for beginning screenwriters, most of which underscores the occupational frequency of rejection, and the necessary psychological fortitude one must have to continually endure it. To purchase the DVD via Amazon, click here. B (Movie) A (Disc)