Blame the Screenwriter: Freedomland, Eight Below, Date Movie
By Burbanked on Feb 17, 2006 in Blame the Screenwriter, Movies, Screenwriting | 1,417 views |
So here it is Friday, and you’re contemplating which movie coming out this weekend really deserves your money to help boost its opening-week grosses. And, because you’re such a savvy moviegoer, what crucial element do you need to factor in while you make your decision? The movie’s stars? Director? The overblown marketing campaign?
Silly reader! Of course the correct answer is The Screenwriter! The quality of your moviegoing experience depends, of course, on how well the story is crafted, the delicate layers of character work the screenwriter has built, the clever but packed-with-subtext dialogue. So let’s take a look at the track records of this weekend’s opening movies’ screenwriters…
Movie title: Freedomland
Screenwriter: Richard Price
Track record: Sea of Love, Mad Dog and Glory, Kiss of Death
Uh-Oh: Shaft
Blame the writer? Price is fairly solid with thrillers. With his pedigree, we’re willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.
Movie title: Eight Below
Screenwriter: David DiGilio
Track record: several credits as “producer” and “production manager”
Uh-Oh: several credits as “producer” and “production manager”
Blame the writer? Hard to say. Remake of a 1983 Japanese movie as Disney triumph-and-survive story about explorers and sled dogs….what? Sorry, we dozed off a bit there.
Movie title: Date Movie
Screenwriter: Jason Friedberg, Aaron Seltzer
Track record: Spy Hard, Scary Movie 1-3
Uh-Oh: There’s probably no adaptation of Tolstoy in their futures.
Blame the writer? Not really. These guys are aiming pretty low.
So who do you blame? Probably Richard Price’s Freedomland. Take a chance that the guy who created the great “Meet the Yankees” sting in Sea of Love still has some cinematic tricks up his sleeve.
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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