Tales from the Script

The documentary listens to the people who write scripts in Hollywood. William Goldman, Paul Schrader, John Carpenter, Frank Darabont and Shane Black are among those speaking. What they describe is the work itself: where the idea came from, how a script gets changed once it is sold, whose name stays on the credits, how a writer gets taken off a job. Nobody talks romantically. What the film is about is that in this industry a screenplay counts as raw material and the writer is the easiest person to replace. Peter Hanson directs; a hundred and five minutes, with more than forty screenwriters speaking. It covers not only the work that succeeded but the projects that went nowhere for years. A book of the same name came out alongside it, collecting the interviews.