I can never get enough of behind-the-scenes film blogs. There’s certainly a delight to be found in reading movie reviews, fanboy rants and all of the latest Hollywood news, but when it comes to the nuts-and-bolts of filmmaking, from the people who are down in the thick of it, I eat it up like a big old bowl of hot, fake-buttery popcorn.
It’s probably because there’s a part of me that still misses working in Hollywood and being in the middle of it. Driving past two blocks of production vehicles teeming with activity; bumping into well-known actors and actresses around the studio lot; chatting up writers and directors while they’re waiting for meetings with importanter people. As a young man struggling to make it in showbiz, I had more than a few of those The Player moments where my friends and I would all question whether or not we had other things to talk about outside of the movie industry - and not a single one of us could come up with anything.
So when I see an excellent article such as this one by John August about the sudden death of his Shazam superhero screenplay, I get all giddy and giggly in a way that I’m slightly ashamed to admit to you.
I’ve noted it in the past, but it’s worth repeating that August is always very open and generous with information and insight from deep behind the curtain of movie industry screenwriting. His site is a must-read for screenplay junkies and students everywhere, and his account of writing Shazam only to see it devolve, deteriorate and die through the studio development system is a wonderfully instructional tale about how Hollywood movies get made - or don’t.
In about mid-story, August relates how the enthusiasm for his latest draft changed once Warner Bros. took over the project from New Line:
When we turned the new draft in to the studio, we got a reaction that made me wonder if anyone at Warners had actually read previous drafts or the associated notes. The studio felt the movie played too young. They wanted edgier. They wanted Billy to be older. They wanted Black Adam to appear much earlier….I expressed my frustration that I’d wasted months of my time and a considerable amount of the studio’s money on things that should have been discussed at the outset. I asked for a meeting with the executive in charge. He and I had one phone call, then I got a new set of notes that didn’t gibe with what we had discussed.
August admits that he got paid pretty well for his work, and that the project’s death allows him to move on to other assignments. His vast experience with the development process allows him a high degree of acceptance of the myriad possible outcomes.
Way, way down at the other end of the acceptance scale, we find our favorite Hollywood Juicer Michael Taylor in an impassioned yet well-reasoned rant against Screen Actors Guild president Alan Rosenberg (among others). Taylor’s concerns - to put it inappropriately mildly - are that Rosenberg appears bound and determined to drive Hollywood into another strike season in 2009, at a time when the town’s sizable below-the-line working class faces catastrophic financial consequences if movie production shuts down again:
The writers and directors already fought this battle. Whether they won or not is for history to decide, but we who work on the crews took a bath on the deal. Three months of lost work might not mean much to Martin Sheen out there on the beach, but it made the difference between a decent year and just barely breaking even. Thanks to the WGA strike, none of us who work below-the-line has much of a financial reserve heading into the new television season, which means we’re all counting on 2009 being a good year. That won’t happen if the SAG membership follows Alan Rosenberg off the cliff and into the abyss of professional suicide.
Is Los Angeles filled with vapid starlets, psychotic leading men, megalomaniacal producers and clubloads of narcotic-sniffing oddballs? Well sure it is, but it’s also home to many very creative, very heartfelt people who go about their showbiz jobs each day, lifting heavy loads in the service of our entertainment. Our cube prisons here in Corporate America may feel drab and mundane as compared to the bright wattage of movie stars and make-believe. But truly anyone who works for a check at the whimsical mercy of circumstance, society, and our power-gifted fellow humans can recognize the common fears and insecurities of an uncertain future.
Movie celebrities have always been the stuff of public fascination, dating far, far back into Tinseltown’s turbulent history in the near-constant scandals, divorces and sexual peccadillos that have run the gamut from harmless to deviant.
From Star Trek to Get Smart; from The Day the Earth Stood Still to Friday the 13th; from planned remakes of everything from The Karate Kid to Arthur to Romancing the Stone to A Nightmare on Elm Street, this past year has seen the completion or the launching of movie remakes at previously unimagined levels. It’s as if all of the trained monkeys of the Hollywood development scene suddenly and collectively gave up on new material, packed away their spec tracking lists, and are now only seeking pre-existing material.
So here I am celebrating Burbanked’s third birthday and it occurs to me that my chances of getting an actual present for this occasion are mighty slim. Seriously, no one I know truly celebrates blog-birthdays outside of their own sites and each time I bring it up with friends and family I just get a collective rolling of the eyeballs.
Three years. That’s actually a longer commitment than I’ve given some jobs I’ve had, so I hope you’ll allow me a small amount of pride to slip through here.
My blog-love affair with cartoonist Doug Savage’s terrific daily Savage Chickens (
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because clearly Cage has decided to become action/thriller cinema’s first Polish great-grandma. (
Well, that’s too bad. Back a year or so ago when I heard that they’d be making a movie out of Judi and Ron Barrett’s terrific kids’ book Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I hoped maybe it’d be made live-action. Handled well, the idea of seeing an actual town where it rained hotdogs and baked beans in an open-roof restaurant, as well as the bit where sanitation trucks clean up all the leftover rain/snow/food and feed it to the pets would be, I thought, a bundle of CG-imbued cinema fun. 
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