Learning the Trade

One piece of advice I constantly hear for aspiring writers is to watch as many movies as you can. Being sick and laid up in bed yesterday, I took that advice and browsed my MoD channels. The only one I was interested in seeing was "4: Rise of the Silver Surfer," not that I'm a Fantastic Four fan, but rather because a friend of mine loves his Silver Surfer comic collection. So, I said, "Let's see what $130 million buys these days."

Five minutes later I was asleep. Literally. So, late last night, riding a second wind, I started it up again and this time I made it all the way through, but I can't say I'm happy about it. We're talking one hundred and thirty million dollars spent to make two hours of entertainment and this was the result? One of the cardinal rules of screenwriting is to stick to the story. Anything that doesn't advance the plot doesn't need to be there. These guys are pros, they should know this. While I applaud the special effects, particularly the Silver Surfer himself, the story just didn't play out very well for me. I don't know how closely it resembled the comic, but to me, the whole Reed and Sue wedding storyline was extraneous. The pre-wedding dialogue, the bachelor party, wedding #1 and the wedding at the end served no purpose here.

As the credits began to roll, the only word to come from my lips was 'ridiculous.' Okay, so maybe a 39 year old isn't the target audience, but that's no excuse to put out a mediocre film. Did the producers really think it was good? If so, that explains why so many films these days are less than remarkable. Of course, I'm sure they weren't looking for a Best Picture Oscar. Oscar films are made for Oscars, not audiences. In the past several years, the nominees have largely been films I hadn't seen and had no desire to see.

Being a writer-in-the-making, I knew better than to blame the writers for the final cut of Silver Surfer, but thought I'd check their creds just the same. The writers, Don Payne, Mark Frost and John Turman, I'm sure are all lovely people and there's no way to tell who contributed what to the story. Maybe Don turned in the draft, then Mark and John were brought in to polish. Maybe John wrote the Silver Surfer parts, Don - the lame wedding parts, and Mark only provided the idea that Torch be able to swap powers with the others. Who knows? Doesn't matter, really. Odds are, they submitted something perfectly viable and worthy of a big budget, only to have the bosses pull out the good parts and replace them with filler. Good work.

As I said, though, giving the writers the benefit of the doubt, I thought I'd see what else they'd done to garner themselves such a juicy assignment. Well, Don Payne's writing credits include "My Super Ex-Girlfriend" and... and... that's all. That's it? One writing credit and you get to write on a $130M picture? How about Mark Frost? He wrote the first "Fantastic Four" and "The Greatest Game Ever Played." He's written some other stuff and has non-writing credits on stuff I've heard of, but is that a strong enough track record? I'm not sure I agree. John Turman, currently has a Sci Fi Channel original movie in development, a remake of the 1967 James Darren series, "The Time Tunnel," one of my faves. His only other credit? "Hulk." That crappy, unwatchable Ang Lee trainwreck. Like I said, these are probably good people, but were they the right people for the job?

If the producers cared about the quality of this film, why wouldn't they have assigned it to the best people available? People well-established in the genre. Three people who maybe have more than 3 superhero movie credits...combined. I'd like to be proud to see my name in the credits one day. I hope these guys were proud to see theirs.