My former partner Dennis Palumbo writes about how a writer should deal with getting "notes" on his or her script. Folks who give notes should read this especially. Some of them can be very callous and insensitive to the time and emotion that the writer has in the work being critiqued.
As I think back over times when I've had real problems with notes, they fall into three categories. One is when you get multiple notes. The network wants your script to have more action and the producer wants less and the star wants something else. It is sometimes easier to deal with one set of notes from an idiot than three from smart people.
The second category is with notes that are mainly to assert power; where the note-giver is trying to interfere so he or she can say, "I fixed it and made it work" or the note-giver is just trying to prove he or she has the power to make the writers jump. I worked on a special one time where one of the stars wanted all his lines rewritten. He had no specific complaints about any of them. It was just to remind everyone that he was a star. He made a lot of gratuitous, pointless demands of everyone just to demonstrate that they had to obey.
When one of the other stars saw that the first star had been able to order a whole new set of lines, guess what the second guy wanted — and again, he had no particular complaints about what he already had. (He had previously had his agent raise hell because his dressing room was about three square feet smaller than the other star's. It was also much nicer and more conveniently located but that didn't count. Size matters.)
So the other writers and I wound up rewriting both stars' dialogue. What neither one realized, of course, is that what they got the second time around was for the most part, our second choices, written in a few hours. What they'd rejected out of hand was our first choices, written over a few weeks. Fortunately, some lines from the first set miraculously reappeared during the last rehearsals.
Finally, we have the third category: Notes that are given out of panic. These are notes that are given with no real thought of improving the script, just about pleasing one person.
About twenty years ago, I was hired by a very Nervous Producer to write an outline for a proposed animated feature. He had been charged with developing this outline and getting it to the point where he could hand it in to His Boss. His Boss would then decide if the project went on to the next step or if they would drop it and just write off as a loss what they had invested in outlines by folks like me.
I was not the first to tackle this particular project and they already had spent a lot of cash on outlines that the Nervous Producer didn't think were solid enough to present to His Boss. The Nervous Producer had convinced himself that he would be fired and his career in Hollywood would be over and he would lose his home and his family would no longer love him (etc.) if His Boss didn't love what he turned in.
He was hiring writer after writer to rewrite the outline. I was at least the fourth, maybe the fifth or sixth. This was his way of delaying that possible, dreaded moment when His Boss read and didn't love what had been developed. But of course, the more writers he hired, the more of the studio's money he spent so the loss if the project was abandoned became greater and greater…which, natch, made him more nervous.
The notes I got from him were never about making the story better or laying the structure for the best possible movie. They were more like…
- "My Boss said yesterday that he really liked this scene in another script where the characters went fly-fishing. You have to add a scene into your outline where the characters go fly-fishing."
- "Someone told me My Boss was saying he thought there was going to be a resurgence of movies about the Old West. Can we switch this thing around and set it in the Old West?"
- "My Boss mentioned in a meeting that he wanted to find something so the studio could work with Cher. Could we change the character of Harold to a woman so Cher could play that part?"
- "My Boss went to see Forrest Gump and loved it. I want to insert a character or change one to be more like Forrest Gump."
Needless to say, the story in question had no reason for anyone to go fly-fishing, could not have occurred in the Old West, Harold had to be male, there was no place for Forrest Gump, etc. I also recall him noting that His Boss wore a lot of plaid and asking me to specify in the outline that the hero dressed in plaid. I asked, "Do you want me to put him in a kilt?"
I rewrote the outline and then rewrote the rewrites to the point where I finally had to say to the Nervous Producer, "I've done more revisions on this than my contract called for. This is the Sixth Draft. If you want more, you're going to have to pay me more."
This horrified him. He couldn't pay me any more, he said. But if the outline wasn't still in active development, he had no choice but to turn it in. And then…and then…what if His Boss didn't love it? He asked me, "What do you think I should do?" I told him to hand in the Second Draft, which was much better than those that followed, but he didn't like that idea.
I went home and never heard from him again. A few weeks later, Hollywood Reporter announced that he was leaving the studio to spend more time with his family and pursue new projects. That, of course, is code for "Got fired." As far as I know, he never worked in the industry again.
Six months later, his replacement called me in to discuss a different project. When I inquired about the first one, she checked the files and found out that her predecessor had never handed anything in; not my outline, not the outlines by all who had gone before me. "I think that's why they got rid of him," she said. "He never finished developing anything."
That annoyed me a bit. If he wasn't going to hand anything in, he could have just not handed in my First Draft and saved us both a lot of time.