[Godfather80]

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is it really THAT hard to write a decent action movie script?

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yes, it is.

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I strongly disagree.

Seriously, most of the action movies make horrible mistakes. Resident evil for instance. They go in with a million and one high tech guns that are useless. Then at the end they are killing beasts with revolvers? It's like they are intentionally messing things up.

Stick to what made the comic book or the video game great and don't concentrate on holleywood effects and big bangs.

It's not that hard to make a decent movie with a decent plot especially when somebody already did almost all of the work for you.

Hollywood = stupid.

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Sorry, Wacki, but your avatar is indeed descriptive of you in regards to this topic. You really have no clue what you're talking about.

If you think it's easy, go to Hollywood and let them all know your brilliant plan - I'm sure they'll throw money at you and hail you as the second coming of Orson Wells.

It's incredibly difficult to write a very good genre screenplay. There are an inordinate number of pitfalls awaiting one who attempts to do so:

Most of the conventions of the genre are well know to the point of cliche; stick too closely to them and you're being derivative, break the rules and you're no longer writing the genre you're being paid to. It's a very, very fine line.

The audience these days is more sophisticated, aware and involved in the movie-making process than ever before. You can't slip a sub-par plot twist or charactization past them (for the most part).

Every story has been told. Think back when Die Hard came out and the next fifteen years of action movies were, "Die Hard on a bus," or "Die Hard on a boat." There really is nothing new in the genre to be told - only in HOW a story is told. And that takes incredible skills by everyone working on the film, not just the writer.

A good film is ridiculously hard to make. A bad film is ridiculously hard to make. When you do happen to run across a good one, count yourself lucky, because all that means is the stars were aligned for this particular project.

Again, if you think it's not difficult, I challenge you to write a great action script. I have an agent and a manager and I'd love to find a project from an unknown to give to them.

So...put your money where you mouth is, and then maybe you'll be able to not so resemble your avatar.

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While I agree that a good film is hard to make, I am consistantly amazed at the amount of money that is thrown at poor scripts. Good ideas and the ability to write them down cost next to nothing. I fear that what must happen is that most scripts start out reasonably intelligent with something compelling about them, but then get hacked up and boiled down to their lowest common denominator in the film-making process.

So, no I don't think it is that hard to make an action movie that "you" would like if you had total control. But, since you have to worry about what several million people would like (or not like), things get very complicated very quickly.

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You're right with your last thought...but I find interesting the part I put in bold...you don't make a movie to please yourself, or for your own, private pleasures. The very demands of the medium make it an art for the mass audience - and that's something I have no problem with.

Yes, budgets have gotten so large and bean counters have gotten so prevelant in the actual creation of Hollywood films these days, that a writer or director's original vision is often watered-down and/or corrupted in the pursuit of a huge opening weekend. This emphasis on making "franchises" instead of original films is what helped push me out of Los Angeles to begin with.

But these days, if you want to make a personal film, you can - you just can't spend so much money on it. But in the end, after so much sweat and labor, even the most obscure filmmaker wants his work to be seen by as many people as possible. That's the whole point of the excercise, isn't it?

If you want to write something for yourself, make a great action script that you can put in a drawer somewhere so it won't be corrupted by the inevitable changes and compromises a 7 or 8 figure movie demands, go ahead - but I don't think you'll find it very satisfying.

If you do, they have a word for that kind of writing:

a diary.

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And this is the difficulty of movie-making in general: really [censored] movies make lots of money on a regular basis.

Didn't PT Barnum say that "nobody ever lost money underestimating the intelligence of the American public"?

It is amusing to me that those who hold the purse strings at the studio greenlighted (greenlit?) this project and will continue to do the same for others like it.