The Screenplay Is The Coin Of The Realm
Last week I met with the producer who turned me into a feature film writer.
Now she’s even more successful than she was the day she “discovered” me. You would know the recent critical and commercial hits she also discovered when they were just scripts in her email inbox. She said:
The screenplay is the coin of the realm.
Couple nights ago I had dinner with a bunch of tech people. Our conversation turned — or maybe I turned it — to if or when artificial intelligences would take all our jobs. I pointed out that I had long thought that my job was safe, because the differentiating quality between good screenplays and great ones is humanity. And the more deftly and inexorably you wield that humanity — toward an ending that feels like a swift blowing out of a candle — - the better.
I never thought an AI could do what I do until very recently. Now I think even sooner than we think, AI’s will be writing mainstream movies along with performing almost every other human job.
To be fair, most mainstream Hollywood movies have been written by robots for years.
But I do believe the powers that be will quickly assess how much writer-productivity they can gain out of a good AI who has been fed the WGA’s top 100 best screenplays (how do you like THAT “dramatic irony” you greedy union!) — and even though the resulting movie won’t feel as alive as say, one of my movies, it will still likely feel fresher than the paste that results from the studio mill where they mash up 15 writers’ work and souls into dust, prop up a puppet director who is a stand-in for the studio and compile it all in post via commands from an overhead loudspeaker in the bay that feeds directly from one of those $10,000 conference call systems on the middle of an empty studio conference room that has itself grown sentient.
At least with the AI they’re likely to stick with the vision of one AI and not switch AI’s over and over again, though that remains to be seen.
At dinner with the tech people I said that I’m particularly interested in this subject — and I’m talking about it on my podcast Threat Surface — because I feel like finding the inflection point of what makes our work human reveals what makes us necessary.
The screenplay is the coin of the realm.
Right now, screenplays are the most important element in making a movie. Without a great script, you’ve got nothing. And if you try to make a movie on a mediocre script — well, you can do a lot with cast and direction, but that’s a big hill to climb.
The town obsessively hunts the great scripts, but the town treats the scripts’ parents like AI’s. Interchangeable. Disposable. Inhuman.
Script is code to make a movie and script is code to make AI.
I can tell you the code for how to save your shitty mediocre script from turning into an even shittier robot movie: go with the human.
Blow out the candle.
