TALES FROM THE SCRIPT
Directed by Peter Hanson
Produced by Hanson & Paul Robert Herman
Written by Hanson & Paul Robert Herman, based on an idea by Herman
Released by First Run Features
USA. 105 min. Not Rated   
 

The television series Action was a short-lived comedy on Fox in the late 1990s, and it’s very likely that by now it has slipped out of all public consciousness, with the exception of a few archivists and television buffs. The show starred Jay Mohr as a narcissistic film producer, an archetype somewhat along the lines of Garry Shandling’s Larry Sanders, but cartoonish and callous. As a satire of Hollywood, Action was fairly spot on. Money and power were the ultimate goals, and filmmaking simply a method for attaining those things.

One of the running gags of Action had to do with how Mohr’s producer kept abusing and humiliating a screenwriter, forcing him to drastically change the script on a whim. While the show may have been broad in its parody, the treatment of the writer isn’t far from the truth, and as the new documentary Tales from the Script neatly illustrates, being among the most powerless players in show business is fraught with anxiety, doubt, and rejection.

It’s obviously not all awful or no one would be in the profession, but Tales does an excellent job of dispelling any kind of romanticism that might hover around the notion of screenwriting. At a major studio, for every script that’s produced, there are hundreds rattling around that never will, and for every script a screenwriter sees produced, there are likely five or 10 or 20 sitting in a drawer somewhere. Once one realizes the sheer numbers and amount of work that go into this line of work, the scales drop from the eyes.

Like Action, Tales shows that Hollywood is first and foremost a business, and only secondly about making films. Writer and director Peter Hyams sums it up fantastically, “If I want to write, I sit down at the keyboard and write. If I want to draw, I take a No. 2 soft pencil and a blank piece of paper, and I draw. If I want to make a film, I’m asking somebody for money. The only reason why they’re gonna give me money is they think they’re gonna make more money back than they gave me. If they didn’t think they were gonna make more money back than they gave me, they’d be idiots to give me the money.”

Tales then is surely a niche project. As engaging as it is, how much it holds for those outside the industry is doubtful. Action failed because it was an insular show that demonstrated how awful Hollywood can be, and while Tales is certainly not that pessimistic—most of the writers interviewed are still fairly positive about their experiences despite what they have to put up with—the picture of Hollywood that results is rather bleak. Tales demonstrates just how difficult it is to make a movie and why films that might have a great script, director, and cast often turn out so awful—there are so many competing demands pushing and pulling the film in every direction that it can’t ever satisfy them all. Films often try to serve a hundred masters, all with different, contradictory needs which cannot be mutually fulfilled, and in trying to fulfill them, they’re torn to pieces. Well, at least there’s the writer to blame. Andrew Beckerman
March 12, 2010