Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1530856
38 C I N E M O N T A G E F E A T U R E had guessed," he conceded. AI isn't the only concern to come out of Silicon Valley, as Hollywood's new tech overlords have changed the entire way that the business is valued, and thus, run. These days, studios are hungry for pack- ages that come with creative attachments already in place. "Even producers with deals, they'll have something great, and our execs will say, 'Come back to us when you have the pack- age,'" said Rodriquez. "And that affects the work we're doing. We still do the tried-and-true analysis if a studio is looking for something with a clean slate and no attachments, but if you do have those attachments, and you've got a TV director who hasn't done a feature before, and two actors who aren't A-list, now you're thinking about the package a bit more, whereas before, it was just based on the script. "Instead of saying, 'We have over 100 years that serve as proof of concept that what we do works,' we've adopted Silicon Valley's 'move fast and break things' phi- losophy, and we've let them break a lot of things," said Rodriquez. Blyskal noted that in moving from a theatrical studio to Netflix, he's respon- sible for fewer rounds of story notes. The development window for Netflix movies is shorter because they head into production much faster than theatrical features at legacy studios. At Netflix, he's also able to consider more niche material. "If you're working in film, you have to think about global audiences if you want to make a huge amount of money in theaters. But now, things can be much more niche, because if you're working for a streamer, they can program for anybody — you just need to bring us something with a particular audience in mind." Blyskal also noted how, oddly enough, the greater the number of targeted audiences, the broader the range of voices and subject matter. Meanwhile, Truong said that working for Sony is unique in as it's the only legacy s t u d i o w i t h o u t a d e d i c a te d s t re a m e r, which means it can sell content to the highest bidder. " We a l w a y s h a v e a n e y e t o w a r d s , 'Could this go to another streamer?'" she explained. "I think our boats have gotten harder to steer, the bigger they've gotten," said Ro- driquez, referring to the streaming services that studios have felt forced to launch in order to compete with Netflix. "I remember being at Sony during the hack, and the studio was really struggling after [former studio chief ] Amy [Pascal] left. But look at them now — they're not saddled with a streamer and they get to do distribution deals with Netflix, so they're more nimble, and they've got enough ex- isting properties that things are going to be okay." Speaking of existing properties, one t h i n g m a n y i n d u s t r y o b s e r v e r s h a v e wondered about is why studios don't do anything with the mountains of scripts for which they've already paid millions of dollars. If a script was good enough to have drawn Tom Cruise's interest in 2004, but it never got made, why couldn't that same script draw Ryan Gosling's attention now? "Sometimes you have genius execs who do [look] back," said Blyskal, but it can be difficult with limited time and resources and Hollywood's age-old obsession with what's "new." Story analysts typically read and write coverage for one script per day, though they may read a second script and then start the next day by writing the coverage. Nat- urally, there are "the ones that got away" — scripts that, despite strong recommen- dations, never got made, or wound up being made elsewhere. "I loved one called 'The Offing' that had Helena Bonham Carter attached and was about a very unique friendship between her character and a teenage boy." Of the recent scripts that Truong has read and loved, Megan Park's "My Old Ass" stands out. "It's been a while since I've read a script like that, so I'm happy it's being released." One of the old scripts Rodriquez advo- cated for was Noga Pnueli's "High Society," which was voted to the 2020 Black List. The script follows a progressive woman stuck in a small conservative Texas town where she begins micro-dosing everyone with mari- juana to make them all get along. "There was a remake of 'The Thin Man' that Billy Ray wrote about the case where Nick and Nora Charles first met. Who knows what happened to it? But I loved that one, and a Frank Darabont script called 'Stitch in Time,' which was a fish-out-of-water story set in contemporary times." Sklar offered advice to young writers, "Write what you love." "I don't believe in following trends," she said, "so don't chase the market. It's never a great idea. We're just looking for great stories in which we have some emotional investment, and we're looking for origi- nality. One of the reasons 'Barbie' was so successful was that it had a point of view," said Sklar, who predicts that comedies will soon make a comeback, though she admits it's among the hardest genres to do well. She also revealed her pet peeve: when writers describe a character by referring to an actor, like "Think Jeff Goldblum," or "Imagine Ryan Reynolds, but younger." "That's lazy writing," she said. Blyskal's advice for young writers was simple: "Read more screenplays," adding "We can tell when the writer hasn't because the formatting is off." ■ Jeff Sneider is a veteran entertainment reporter who writes the newsletter The InSneider.