Indiana Jones, Captain James T. Kirk and other movie heroes may have to use more ad-libbed wisecracks next year. By 2009, they could be positively tongue-tied if a strike by Hollywood writers drags on for months.
Unlike television, which felt an immediate impact as some programs shut down when writers halted work last month, big-screen movies have a longer lead time and can ride out the strike with scripts already in hand, at least for now.
Talks between the Writers Guild (WGA) and the Alliance of Motion Picture and Television Producers broke down bitterly last week, diminishing any hope that a quick resolution would limit the impact on movie production to small ripples.
PHOTO: AP
Shooting on a few big films - among them Johnny Depp's drama Shantaram and Tom Hanks and Ron Howard's Angels & Demons, a prequel to The Da Vinci Code - has been postponed, with studio executives deciding it was wiser to wait than risk a script impasse without a writer on set to polish up a scene.
Other films due out in 2008 have mostly moved ahead as planned, with producers taking extra pains as the strike deadline approached to have screenplays as close to letter-perfect as possible so filming could proceed in the writer's absence.
"I just thank God that I'm not involved with anything in production, because it would be agony to have to stand there and know you could fix something and not fix it," said Akiva Goldsman, who wrote The Da Vinci Code and Angels & Demons screenplays and won an Academy Award for the script of Howard's A Beautiful Mind. "But that's what a lot of my brothers and sisters are doing right now. That's tough, because you spend years getting to a movie, and it's like, melodramatically, it's like watching someone you love wander out into traffic." The key issue for writers, who say they have been shortchanged on DVD revenues, is compensation for programming on the Internet and other new distribution forms. If the strike lingers as long as the one in 1988, when writers walked off the job for five months, it could cause chaos for filming schedules, desperately needed reshoots for scenes that do not work and planning for films further down the road.
"For 2008, the studios are all fine. If anything, they've had too much product in release, so even if they're down a few projects as 2008 unfolds, they'll give themselves a little more breathing room at the box office," said Anne Thompson, deputy editor of Hollywood trade paper Variety. "It's 2009 that starts becoming the issue, especially big tentpole projects." Studios might be left dusting off scripts that have languished on the shelves for years to keep the production pipeline flowing, and the quality of the finished product would inevitably suffer.
"I would expect that as last time, you will see some forgettable movies coming to theaters," said Kim Masters, an entertainment correspondent for National Public Radio. "I can't see how studio executives can feel really comfortable going forward with a script where rewrites may be needed, as they so often are." Steven Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, reuniting him with Harrison Ford and producer George Lucas for next summer's blockbuster sequel, has finished shooting, so presumably it will not be affected.
Yet even filmmakers of Spielberg and Lucas' caliber may want the luxury of last-minute reshoots to improve something that does not work in the editing room. If they needed to bring the cast back to reshoot something, they would be stuck with the words in the screenplay or letting the actors improvise.
In normal times, writers work with actors, directors and others to continually tweak dialogue and action.
"You want the original writer doing that," said Barry Josephson, producer of the current hit Enchanted. "That voice is what compelled you to move forward with the project, that voice is what brought the director to the movie and the stars. So you want that writer." Ad-libbing on set is common in Hollywood, particularly in comedy.
But directors, especially those who are Writers Guild members, have to be very careful to avoid any coaching of actors that could be characterized as writing.
Hundreds of screenwriters, including directors such as Judd Apatow (Knocked Up) and Bill Condon (Dreamgirls), have attached their names to a pledge on the Writers Guild Web site in which they vow to not write a single word "until all writers get a fair and reasonable deal." The second name on that alphabetical list is J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and the director of the new Star Trek flick, with a fresh cast playing Kirk, Spock and the other characters from the original 1960s sci-fi series.
Due out on Christmas Day, the Trek film began shooting in November and continues through March, without the on-set assistance of screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci.
Abrams is no slouch at writing himself, yet his hands are tied if he runs across something that sounded good on the page but not in front of the camera.
"J.J. Abrams, how does he not write?" Masters said. "I don't understand how a WGA writer can turn off the writing part of his brain. You've got people wedged between not wanting to have their work turn out bad and not wanting to undermine their cause." Abrams' film is vital for Paramount Pictures, which is trying to revive the sci-fi franchise after 2002's Star Trek: Nemesis flopped and the last TV spinoff, Enterprise, suffered early cancellation.
The picket line Monday outside Paramount took on a "Trek" theme, with guild members wearing T-shirts quoting a line from Spock: "Logic clearly dictates that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few." One strike member carried a sign reading, "Beam us down some justice." "This is really corporate greed vs the creative people," George Takei, who played helmsman Sulu in the original Star Trek, said outside the Paramount gates. "The story originates in the minds of the writers." Screenwriters Orci and Kurtzman have visited the Star Trek set a couple of times "as fans, but we're useless," Orci said outside Paramount on Monday.
"We haven't touched a line," Kurtzman said, "and we won't." Angels & Demons writer Goldsman said he was on set every day for his latest film, the Will Smith sci-fi tale I Am Legend, which opens today in Taiwan. As a plague survivor who might be the last man on Earth, Smith says little, and the scant dialogue in the film was carefully honed as shooting progressed, Goldsman said.
Work on I Am Legend might have been halted if the strike had hit during filming, Smith said.
"For a movie this size, we'd probably most likely just shut down and wait it out," Smith said. "You don't want to be in the US$100 million movie range and not have every opportunity to get it right."
May 11 to May 18 The original Taichung Railway Station was long thought to have been completely razed. Opening on May 15, 1905, the one-story wooden structure soon outgrew its purpose and was replaced in 1917 by a grandiose, Western-style station. During construction on the third-generation station in 2017, workers discovered the service pit for the original station’s locomotive depot. A year later, a small wooden building on site was determined by historians to be the first stationmaster’s office, built around 1908. With these findings, the Taichung Railway Station Cultural Park now boasts that it has
Wooden houses wedged between concrete, crumbling brick facades with roofs gaping to the sky, and tiled art deco buildings down narrow alleyways: Taichung Central District’s (中區) aging architecture reveals both the allure and reality of the old downtown. From Indigenous settlement to capital under Qing Dynasty rule through to Japanese colonization, Taichung’s Central District holds a long and layered history. The bygone beauty of its streets once earned it the nickname “Little Kyoto.” Since the late eighties, however, the shifting of economic and government centers westward signaled a gradual decline in the area’s evolving fortunes. With the regeneration of the once
The latest Formosa poll released at the end of last month shows confidence in President William Lai (賴清德) plunged 8.1 percent, while satisfaction with the Lai administration fared worse with a drop of 8.5 percent. Those lacking confidence in Lai jumped by 6 percent and dissatisfaction in his administration spiked up 6.7 percent. Confidence in Lai is still strong at 48.6 percent, compared to 43 percent lacking confidence — but this is his worst result overall since he took office. For the first time, dissatisfaction with his administration surpassed satisfaction, 47.3 to 47.1 percent. Though statistically a tie, for most
In February of this year the Taipei Times reported on the visit of Lienchiang County Commissioner Wang Chung-ming (王忠銘) of the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and a delegation to a lantern festival in Fuzhou’s Mawei District in Fujian Province. “Today, Mawei and Matsu jointly marked the lantern festival,” Wang was quoted as saying, adding that both sides “being of one people,” is a cause for joy. Wang was passing around a common claim of officials of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the PRC’s allies and supporters in Taiwan — KMT and the Taiwan People’s Party — and elsewhere: Taiwan and
RSS