Thursday, January 10, 2013

Hollywood's Writer Overkill

According to Hollywood, a good majority of the world’s population are writers.

I was reading through some of the descriptions on Redbox while trying to find a good movie.

Ruby Sparks:
“Calvin is a young novelist who achieved phenomenal success early in his career … “

Leave:
“Henry Harper is a successful novelist who has it all.”

The Paperboy:
"Miami Times reporter Ward Jansen returns to his sleepy hometown of Lately, Florida, where a decades-old façade of Southern gentility strains against the sweeping social changes of the 1960s."

There are a lot of movies about writers that have been made, but it seems like there's a lot more of them the last few days. If it's not a movie about a secret agent, it's a movie about a writer.

There's that old saying, advising people to 'write about what they know.' I get that. It makes sense. It's hard to write a novel or movie script about something you don't have any experience with.

Is it too much to ask for a little originality though?

I'd just like to know that there's more people in the world than writers and their families.

If you go down the aisle at Wal-Mart or Target you'll notice a lot of movies about television, news, writing, and Hollywood. I'm assuming that's because there are so many writers in Hollywood.

Like I said earlier, it makes sense.

To those writers, though, I make this request: branch out a little. Next time you write a script and plan to make it about some kind of writer, give your character a different profession.

I'll take an alien pig farmer over another writer.