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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Feb 16, 2018 12:04:55 GMT
Untrue. Hitchcock, Godard, Ford, Bresson, Fellini, Dreyer, Kurosawa, Welles, Hawks and plenty of other great directors have turned shit-scripts into masterpieces. Hitchcock even said he specifically chose Psycho to show how you could take the worst source material and make a great film. Hawks told Hemingway he could make a good film of his worst book (To Have and Have Not), and he did. Even if you just take something like Star Wars; just reading it on the page it's the stuff of 1000 B-Sci-Fi films, and that's ALL it would've been without Lucas's directorial vision. That's not really what I'm arguing. For example, the script for Psycho wasn't bad at all even if the story was terrible. Granted, a director who doesn't care that much about a story can minimize a bad story or make us forget it, if the story is the movie they are going to have a more difficult time of it. The script for Psycho is bad b-movie horror fair. Hand it to an average director and it easily could've been terrible (and by script I just mean the plot and dialogue; not Hitchcock's detailed shot-by-shot screenplay). A story is never a movie; indeed, that's kinda my point. Stories are just a kind of a skeleton upon which the flesh and features of the narrative and audio-visual experience is crafted, and I'd say that any director thinking they can make a great/good film just because they've got a good script is sorely mistaken. To address your edit: Star Wars has some laughably bad dialogue. Now we chalk it up to its cheesy charm, but on the page it reads terribly. There's a reason most everyone involved didn't take it seriously and thought the production was a disaster. Read that script along with any number of bad sci-fi scripts without knowing what kind of films they were made into and you'd never peg SW as being remotely exceptional. |
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Post by CoolJGS☺ on Feb 16, 2018 12:09:51 GMT
That's not really what I'm arguing. For example, the script for Psycho wasn't bad at all even if the story was terrible. Granted, a director who doesn't care that much about a story can minimize a bad story or make us forget it, if the story is the movie they are going to have a more difficult time of it. The script for Psycho is bad b-movie horror fair. Hand it to an average director and it easily could've been terrible (and by script I just mean the plot and dialogue; not Hitchcock's detailed shot-by-shot screenplay). A story is never a movie; indeed, that's kinda my point. Stories are just a kind of a skeleton upon which the flesh and features of the narrative and audio-visual experience is crafted, and I'd say that any director thinking they can make a great/good film just because they've got a good script is sorely mistaken. I'm not sure why you think I am disparaging directors, so I'll try to figure it out. If you are saying that a good director can do anything with a terrible script - I would disagree. If you are saying that some scripts are horrible but we don;t know it because a good director, unlike eastwood, would figure out how to make it work - I disagree. If you are saying that B-movie scripts make for good movies under good directors - I would agree since they are so basic as to be manipulated however way the director wants. I do not think a biopic fits in those scenarios and many of them suck because the script is bad and the director has a difficult time working with it such as something like Steve Jobs. |
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Post by Eva Yojimbo on Feb 16, 2018 12:30:15 GMT
The script for Psycho is bad b-movie horror fair. Hand it to an average director and it easily could've been terrible (and by script I just mean the plot and dialogue; not Hitchcock's detailed shot-by-shot screenplay). A story is never a movie; indeed, that's kinda my point. Stories are just a kind of a skeleton upon which the flesh and features of the narrative and audio-visual experience is crafted, and I'd say that any director thinking they can make a great/good film just because they've got a good script is sorely mistaken. I'm not sure why you think I am disparaging directors, so I'll try to figure it out. 1. If you are saying that a good director can do anything with a terrible script - I would disagree. 2. If you are saying that some scripts are horrible but we don;t know it because a good director, unlike eastwood, would figure out how to make it work - I disagree. 3. If you are saying that B-movie scripts make for good movies under good directors - I would agree since they are so basic as to be manipulated however way the director wants. 4. I do not think a biopic fits in those scenarios and many of them suck because the script is bad and the director has a difficult time working with it such as something like Steve Jobs. 1. I wouldn't say "do anything," but they are capable of making great films with them; history has proven that. 2. Not saying that, though some people might not notice a bad script if they liked the film. 3. B-movie scripts tend to be terrible scripts. I don't know what makes them any more basic and manipulatable than any others. 4. Some great biographical films based on less-than-good scripts: Ivan the Terrible, Alexander Nevsky, Andrei Rublev, The Puppetmaster, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, Ed Wood, Ludwig... Steve Jobs failed more because of how the writing and directing clashed than because either were individually bad. |
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