Ben wrote: ↑January 31st, 2021, 6:26 am
EricJ wrote: ↑January 31st, 2021, 3:59 am
It's a bad sign when the audience begins to know a screenwriter by name...
There are plenty of "star" screenwriters. Netflix just made a movie about one of them.
The rules are different for studio-era ones--
Nowadays, there's a
difference between knowing that Ernest Lehmann wrote a script, and noticing that Michael Bay wrote one.
Ben wrote: ↑January 31st, 2021, 6:26 am
EricJ wrote: ↑January 31st, 2021, 3:59 am
Would Joe Eszterhas have become a legend on "Showgirls" alone, if "Jade" hadn't opened the same month?
Jagged Edge and, especially Basic Instinct had already made him an infamous name.
Yes--After Edge and Instinct, execs thought Eszterhas was the greatest
psychological-thriller writer in the world, and everyone wanted him to write scripts for them. (Prompting the great Bidding War that helped kill off screenwriters in 00's-10's Hollywood.)
Just like Disney was so impressed with Woolverton after their "Oscar nominated" Beauty & Beast, they wanted her to write all their scripts for them, not even suspecting what they were about to let out of its cage.
This is why it's not a good idea to hire writers based on
one script.