Shortly after I ranted about people having no faith in the Hitman movie, I came across the Hitman script…
Upon reading this script, I recalled a seminar I attended for the producer Steven Haft. He said, basically, that a studio can say yes to only one script per month. [Re: a Terry Gilliam panel I went to - "Hollywood's job is to say no to people all day."]
And they only read your script if you’ve followed every protocol down to the letter – font, size, margin, spacing, placement, treatment, comes with a cookie, and the script is over and under the required page count. (Too short and it’s no good, too long and you can’t sell it to many theater screens.)
Say you got the script to look and feel like everyone else’s, now it has to be ‘good.’ And ‘good’ is subjective, so what I mean by ‘good’ is marketable.
Now that it’s marketable, you’re fighting against the other scripts that hit the same office. If this cubicle jockey is in the mood to read yours, you stand a fighting 2% chance.
Say he reads it and likes it, he now wants you to revise it. But not just you, 5 other people. Once all 6 of you have revised it, it gets graded again.
Say it passes, excellent. You’re in the running for a greenlighted screenwriting credit!
Say a producer says “ok, we’ll make it,” now you’ve got a credit! Now, depending on how many awards you’ve gotten in the past (and I am not making this up), it determines how much money you get.
I won a student filmmaker award for the Vermilion Chicken, which I posted a few days ago, so I’d make a bit more than a lesser nobody. However, that award is a Kodak Student Filmmakers Award and not a festival award, which would yield more. The more cred your award and pull can flaunt, the more dollar bills you get for your script. I’d make about $1000 for my script if it got through all of those phases and the script supervisors? More because the studio hired them. Now you get the picture on why your script wasn’t read and you’re stuck in LA as a waitress, driving in the middle lane of traffic so your perfect cheekbones can be seen.
What does all this have to do with the Hitman script?
Simple. Skip Woods, the douchebag who brought us Swordfish, wrote the script and he has more pull than most. That being the case, his goddawful script beat out all the prospected-hundreds of others, some of which were probably by people who actually played a game in the series.
Without spoiling anything because I don’t want to be sued, I’ll just say that I am greatly disappointed in this sty reaking of boiled ass, this 127-page piece of drek, this impure tome. The characters who aren’t Agent 47 are unlikable, the characters who ARE Agent 47 aren’t accurately portrayed. The setting and pacing and order of the scenes are a garbled mess. If I had to compare the plot to anything it would be to a set of unhappy children, playing with micro machines, behind a blurry time-stained window somewhere their parents can’t get to. In other words, I don’t know why I pained myself to last all 127 pages because I knew it was all going to suck 10 pages in.
Well, maybe I shouldn’t hate on Skip Woods so much. I mean, he only directed the first movie he wrote and produced which implies that he was once like you and I – trying to get out there, make a movie, make a name for himself. He did that in ‘98 and got the award he needed to have more pull, then I guess kept trying until Swordfish was picked up in ‘01… but that still doesn’t excuse anything. The only thing I liked about the script was the bondage, but you don’t need a lot of that to make me happy. Maybe Xavier Gens has a plan to rescue the movie since one of the scenes in the trailer (the only one I wanted to see, ironically enough) isn’t even in the damn script, but I doubt it. I mean, the religious nonsense that soaks the trailer with pretty piety also is not in the script. Either someone is to blame or Hollywood just doesn’t work… oh wait.
Hey, guys, on a related note, I agree with the philosophy that pirates can help bring justice to the gross sales of a movie. And by that, I don’t mean pirates helped Sicko make more money (which I believe it did), I mean if we stop paying to see our favorite games turn into what THIS is going to be, they might stop ruining things at such an alarming rate or at least hire better people for the job. And, you know, even if they don’t… at least they didn’t get your $11.
