Modern screenwriting is in a crisis.
From Hollywood to the peanut gallery, nobody is happy about the most important part of the storytelling business: the storytelling. Just as we are beset by soulless franchise installments, faithless adaptations, and remakes that nobody asked for, we are awash in some of the lowest-quality writing in the history of moving pictures.
“Craft in writing has often been replaced by pure arrogance,” says David Zucker, whose directing credits include Airplane!, Top Secret!, and the first two Naked Gun installments. Part of the problem is the “increased corporate control of Hollywood,” he tells me, unlike the days when “real creatives such as executives Michael Eisner and Barry Diller, and brilliant creatives like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg,” ran the show. There are still pockets of creatives, Zucker adds, “but mostly the business has been taken over by mediocre little people.”
We live in the era of endless spin-offs, reboots, pre-boots, sequels, prequels, and “other derivative trash,” as Zucker puts it. “In fact, the most recent Naked Gun was very similar to an AI version.”
The failure of the Star Wars sequels is owed not only to lazy writing but to no writing at all. Disney relaunched the franchise without first plotting a narrative course.
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