In this message, I asked folks to send in questions for me to answer on this here blog. Here's one from Ira W., who read the question I answered here yesterday…
Thank you for telling us how the staff at DC wanted to get Jack Kirby to draw more like other artists and less like Jack Kirby. I find it amazing but I guess I shouldn't. That kind of thing seems to happen a lot on creative enterprises. My question is why you think this happens. Why do people want to change others' work?
Well, let's be honest: There are times when someone's work isn't very good and it does need to be changed. I've rewritten other writers and other writers have rewritten me and there have even been times when we've rewritten together in the same room. One should not get into a collaborative art form if one is adverse to collaborating.
But what you're talking about mainly are changes that seem arbitrary or gratuitous. In comics, I once heard someone praise an editor by saying, "He isn't the kind of guy who has to change things just to prove he's making a contribution." That is a very good trait because there are guys in charge and gals in charge who do that; who demand or make alterations in the works of others because they're afraid they won't get enough credit if they don't put some fingerprints on it and then it's successful. (By the way and to forestall questions about who the editor was that was said about, it was Archie Goodwin.)
It's kind of a win/win situation for those who'd tamper with your work: If the project is successful and acclaimed, they can take some bows for it and try to steer folks into thinking it was the editorial guidance and alterations that made it fly. If the project flops…oh, of course that's the fault of the guy they rewrote, only they maybe don't mention that they did that. Or it's "I tried but even I couldn't save the disaster he handed in."
But it isn't always Office Politics at work. Sometimes, it's a matter of nerves. A lot of folks can't grasp the concept that if you keep fussing with something and making changes, you are not necessarily making it better. I once had some dealings with a movie studio exec — a guy with the power to green-light projects and to decide which screenplays would get made. Each of those decisions was him deciding his company would spend X million bucks and the "X" was usually not a single digit.
Obviously, if you guess wrong on enough of those decisions, you get fired and your career and huge salary go away so he was scared to be wrong. One way he dealt with that fear was to have scripts rewritten and rewritten and rewritten. He probably had a lot of perfectly-fine scripts rewritten and perhaps ruined as he postponed the moment when he might have to say, "Yes, let's spend 50 million making this one." He was eventually sacked, not so much because he was green-lighting the wrong projects but because he wasn't green-lighting enough projects, period.
This is just something you have to deal with as a writer. Some of the producers and editors you work with are great and wise and sane and when they change things or ask you to change things, they're quite often right. And with some, the impetus to tamper comes from the wrong place.
Many years ago, I worked on a TV series which had a lot of producers listed in its credits — executive producers, supervising producers, senior producers, etc. I think there were eight of them but I only ever saw two of them make actual, real contributions. One of the other six did absolutely nothing. He was secure enough in his position (I guess) that he didn't feel the need to do what the rest of them did. Each of them would pop in once a week for five minutes and Save the Show.
That was the term we in the trenches had for what they did: Saving the Show. It meant that they would stop by and make a contribution just for the sake of being able to say they made a contribution. Some of these contributions were meaningless…like saying "We need to have the dark blue curtain off to stage right instead of the turquoise one" or "Make sure the camera gets a good two-shot of those actors in the scene they have together." Sometimes though, they were big changes that made a lot of work for others and/or harmed the program.
Either way, the changes ordered had this in common: They were done in the spirit of "Thank God I caught this in time or it would have been a disaster."
One time, I came back from a long lunch and asked one of the other writers what, if anything, had transpired in my absence. He said, "Well, Harry came by and he Saved the Show. Then Lyle came by and he Saved the Show. Then Phyllis came by and she really Saved the Show. Then Joey came by he really and truly Saved the Show. Oh — and there was some guy from the network who popped in and she Saved the Show…twice."
Nothing any of them demanded fixed anything or made anything better. The alterations didn't matter except that they allowed the Show-Savers to say they'd Saved the Show. The two producers who were hands-on and fully involved did make changes and decisions that made things better but others gave notes because they could. Once in a while, we could just ignore their Show-Saving advice and they never seemed to notice. I'm not sure any of them were even interested in watching the show. They just wanted to Save It.