In my prior life as a script reader, I certainly read a lot of bad scripts, but at times, an even more common occurrence was a script that seemed to do a great many things right, but somehow fell just short of being something you wanted to champion as a movie. As draining as the terrible scripts were, there’s something pure about clear-cut bad. It takes little effort to explain why they’re unfit.
The
real challenges were the scripts that had kind of a decent premise,
kind of an okay twist or two, and a lead character who wasn’t bad so
much as he or she was just… there. The raw materials are there for what
COULD be a script. They just happen to be assembled in the least
compelling way possible. It’s competent enough that it feels close to
being a movie, but it’s raw enough that you won’t want to put your job
on the line to tell someone else to read it. Scripts like this often got
the “Consider with Reservations” ranking. If you’ve worked in
Hollywood, you’ve probably read a number of scripts like this. If you’re
not in the biz, it’s hard to find a good analogy to explain these
scripts that need more time to bake.
Then,
after a trip to Netflix one recent afternoon, I realized there’s an
easy series of examples I can point to. In their library at any given
time, you’ll stumble across a ton of recent films you’ve never heard of
that star former mega-stars like Nicolas Cage, Bruce Willis, John
Cusack, and Pierce Brosnan.
The
men who headlined some of the biggest films of the eighties and
nineties now film entire movies that no one knows exists until they show
up under the heading “Because you liked Con Air.” Just going back five years, here are the films of just ONE of those aforementioned actors: Stolen,
The Croods, The Frozen Ground, Joe, Rage, Outcast, Left Behind, Dying
of the Light, The Runner, Pay the Ghost, The Trust, Snowden, The USS
Indianapolis, Dog Eat Dog, Army of One, Arsenal, and Vengeance: A Love Story. That’s SEVENTEEN films! How far into that list were you before you were sure I was talking about Nicolas Cage?
Read the rest of Consider With Reservations: The Stars of Quantity Over Quality Cinema over at Film School Rejects
