conspicuous by his absence in this thread is @Donald_Petersen
so, go ahead. lay it on us.
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The wife and I were just talking about this. One time she was taking class with Spike Lee, who handed out his latest script. They all sat down and read it and all of the grad film students didn’t know how to say that it wasn’t quite there, that it wasn’t going to do very well. It was 25th Hour, which did very well.
Another time she was reading scripts for a company and loved this Charlie Kaufman script, thought it was going to be amazing. Eventually it gets handed off to Michel Gondry who does okay with it, but the final result is missing a few things, it didn’t do very well.
The point was that scripts, while important, aren’t the whole thing. Casting, directing, production design, acting, editing, all that stuff comes into play a lot more than any producer is willing to admit. So at this point, when they still have all the money and can say yes or no of course they’re going to try and push any influence they can, because they are useless dolts who have no idea what they’re up to after it starts shooting.
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Really needs a benny russell gif.
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After my first year in the line of work I’m in, I learned that executives (really, anyone with power of authority) are not necessarily where they are for positive reasons.
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A good book on this sort of topic is sadly out of print “A Martian Wouldn’t Say that”
https://www.amazon.com/gp/search?index=books&linkCode=qs&keywords=9780967606156
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This was common practice in the old UK motor industry where every boss was (in his own mind) a super-competent designer draughtsman. Harry Weslake told me that the reason that the original Triumph Bonneville had such major engine problems was that, the bottom end having been correctly designed, Ernest Turner walked in and shaved off some metal “in order to reduce weight” (and make the casting a little cheaper). There are many other instances. To a certain extent it’s an attempt to recapture lost youth and to demonstrate that they can still do it.
Once someone does an MBA you know that they regard becoming a manager as more important than their technical competence. The wise then manage. The foolish try to do both.
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Well, honestly, the last feature I worked on was Encino Man, so I’m hardly the guy to ask. That said, I am currently sitting in my office, thumbs atwiddle, awaiting studio notes on a TV pilot. I’ve heard some real dumb ones in the past, but most of them that I’ve been privy to are not all that shabby.
One of the funnier/most appalling instances took place last year. A character mentioned that they’d have to be “the dumbest publisher since Gutenberg put ink to paper” if they didn’t include some particular juicy tidbit in a book they were publishing. Someone in S&P flagged that line and emailed the question, “can you please let us know what this is referring to?”
We kind of ignored it, thinking they had to be kidding, but the next day they emailed again: “if this comment is referring to a specific incident, can you please let us know what it is?”
Thirty-five people were cc’d. One of us had a heart and gently emailed back, “I think they’re just referring to Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press.”
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I feel like this might be stating the obvious but this is a massive improvement on “slowly overcome a postapocalyptic warlord of the season”
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Ha, I was just thinking, “Isn’t that actually a show?!”
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Achingly slowly
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Those who can, do. Those who can’t, manage.
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Ftfy.
“Nice screenplay you’ve got there… shame if someone’d push for a re-write, wouldn’t it?”
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The way I understand it:
It’s very possible to turn a great script into a pile of crap film, but it’s impossible to make a great film out of a crappy script.
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Yes and no. So much goes into the casting, camera, and editing. You can edit around bad performances and bad script. James Cameron has basically made a career out of it. Avatar is a terrible, terrible script with a bajillion plot holes and is nothing we haven’t seen before from a ton of other movies but it went on to be a nominee for best picture and won 3 Oscars.
The Blind Side, The Help, Crash, these are all terrible scripts with Oscars.
So great things can certainly come from terrible scripts. Most of the time we’re lucky and they end up like Battlefield Earth, but even in the right hands that could have been a contender. 
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Dilbert Principle in action?
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While true, the problem is that conclusion leads to a greenlight & release date based on a treatment, or just a comic book. This is often a recipe for disaster. Pixar famously goes against this culture by not greenlighting till they have a viable script. Their track record speaks for itself.
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During my years with my first employer, reading “Dilbert” was like reading the company ‘diary’. The break room running joke then was that “Dilbert” was being fed stories and situations from one or more of our employees. The common response when seeing another “Dilbert” cartoon was, “Ohhh, yeeessss!!”
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Absolutely not. I’m saying “the perfect script isn’t the whole thing,” not “you don’t need a complete script.”
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