On Screenwriting or the Lack Thereof

Written by: Amir Ovadia Steklov - all rights resaved

Disclaimer: I use an LLM to help with proofreading, not with ideas and reasonings.

Through the years of making films and trying to expand my range and network, I came across an interesting phenomenon that keeps bothering me to this day.

In this essay, I’d like to discuss this phenomenon, share my view on it, and at the end, offer some ideas on how we can continue to tell our stories despite the barriers it puts in front of us.

Writing is the core of every film, or so I was led to believe while growing up in the 90s and 2000s. Before falling in love with cinema, my dream was to be a novelist. I wrote my first manuscript at the age of 17 and outlined my second novel at 19. Neither of these has been published, nor do I wish to publish them today.

I’m now 38 years old and have made a bunch of short films and documentaries, still dreaming of making a full-length fiction film one day. Perhaps it’s an early midlife crisis creeping in, but I feel like this dream is becoming more and more untamable.

In the last few months, I was watching the old TV shows Twin Peaks and Sex and the City with my partner. Many times, both of us agreed that a lot of what we saw was a product of its time and that “you can’t write like that today.” This got me thinking: what has changed, and why isn’t screenwriting what it used to be?

Besides focusing on the obvious politically correct and risk-averse studios in the US that influence the global film industry, I’d like to highlight a different aspect of the film business that suppresses good writing.

Every single time I talked with a producer about a film project I wanted to develop and mentioned or even shared a first draft of a screenplay (usually ~90 pages), I received the same answer: “No.”

Whether it was by not replying, saying they're not the right producer for the project, or frankly admitting, “I don’t read screenplays.”

If you want to make a full-length fiction film in Europe nowadays, there’s a definite path:

1. Get a producer

2. Join a reputable film development lab or fellowship to earn industry points

3. Get as many letters of intent (LOIs) as possible from distributors and sales agents

4. Write proposals to European film funds and investors

   
   

In this path, having an already written screenplay can sabotage the effort of reaching the final goal:

1. Producers won’t read a screenplay due to lack of time and the legal implications of potential copyright violations

2. Many reputable script labs require not having a first draft, as they want to support and influence the story from the very beginning

3. A well-developed screenplay could potentially make distributors hesitate to write an LOI, as it’s always possible to find something not PC or something that may upset someone in a script with strong conflicts and complex characters

4. Many film funds and investors are very specific about the kinds of films they want to support. In most cases, a finished screenplay will not tick all the boxes of a given fund. It’s not unheard of for screenplays to be modified and altered to please a certain film fund or investor. As Gaspar Noé said in a 2010 interview for the Sarajevo Talent Campus: “Scripts are not made to become movies, scripts are made to get finance.”

   
   

In this early development process, the screenwriting is being pushed to the end, and in many cases, it’s an afterthought or worse, a tired document that came into the world after being over processed and stripped of the original spark, idea, and passion of the writer.

The writer, in almost every one of those cases, is also the director, taking the ideal of the auteur filmmaker as a high value for creative quality. But in my view, many directors are not qualified as writers. Many of them are not interested in the art of writing. They mostly wrote short films and stories throughout their career, but not many full-length films or novels, let alone read many full-length screenplays before attempting to write their own.

This is not a criticism of those filmmakers. Everyone has their unique interests and passions. And in an industry that naturally promotes individuals who do not write, or do not start their creative process with writing, it’s no wonder that when the time to write a screenplay arrives, those filmmakers struggle to come up with a mature, fully developed script.

And if some of the budget is already secured, it’s no surprise that these amateurish, tired screenplays end up in production.

If movies are not being sold based on screenplays, how are they being evaluated by funds and investors?

The short answer is: loglines, mood boards, and comparables. These are easy to consume and process in a mass-production system where one needs to evaluate at least 10 films every single day.

The longer answer has more to do with the reputation of the director and producer and their network, but that’s a topic for another essay.

When I watch the shortlisted films at the European Film Academy, I keep a Google Sheet document where I give a score to each of the following aspects of every film: Screenplay, Directing, Acting (F), Acting (M), Camera, Editing, Sound, Music. The sum of these determines the final score I give the film.

In most films I evaluate as a jury member, the screenplay score is the lowest. The other creative aspects of the film are usually very high and professional, but it’s rare to watch a film where the screenplay shines. From my experience, a film with a good screenplay has a greater chance of getting a high final rank on my lists.

When I read short screenplays for the Shore Scripts Film Fund, I come across many scripts that could be expanded to a feature film. In this particular competition, they’re not utilizing the short form to its full potential. I find many talented screenwriters eager to write long-form but believe no one will read their feature script, so they turn it into a short proof of concept. I’ve done it myself a few times and have much to say about this process and its shortcomings. That topic, too, goes beyond the scope of this essay.

As I look back on my work and creative process, I find it frustrating that I can’t kick off a new film project by writing the screenplay first. I’m trying to adjust my creative process to fit the mechanism of the European film industry, but it doesn’t come naturally to me. I know I’m not the only one. I’ve met many writers who expressed a similar situation, where they invested many hours into writing that no one cared to read.

As someone who cares deeply about cinema and its future, it saddens me to see how much this medium has distanced itself from the art of writing. I ask myself how I, and others who share a similar creative process, can make our films. The obvious answer: cinematic adaptations.

I first encountered this idea at OutFest in Los Angeles in 2022, where I was invited to screen my short film Bi The Way. There, I heard for the first time that if you want to make a film, first write it as a novel or graphic novel. Once it’s published, it’s much easier to sell it to investors.

For three years, I’ve been processing this idea before writing this essay. At first, I thought it was ridiculous to invest so much time and money into making a different product out of my stories. But as I enter my midlife crisis, I look forward and can’t see any other path to telling my stories. I love reading novels. I read about 20 a year on average. My teenage dream was to be a novelist, so why am I so protective of my dream of being a film director? What reason do I have not to write my stories as novels first?

After all, writing is limitless, very cheap to produce, and can be sold based on its quality. I want to believe that as we grow alongside AI models that replicate human writing, the future of the art of writing will become more and more relevant. As Philip K. Dick always returned to the biggest question of our time: “What makes us human?”

Our society is going to get tired of bad writing and bad films. People are already voting with their feet, by not buying tickets, unsubscribing from streaming platforms, and rejecting anything that smells artificially made.

The resurgence of low-key online videos that feel raw, unprocessed, and awkwardly human is a sign of the lack of authenticity in traditional media.

Just as the camera killed the realistic painting industry of the 19th century and “liberated” painting into an emotionally expressive form of art, AI may transition writing, and its consumption, into a more deeply human experience.

Bad writing is the reason most movies fail to connect with us, and AI will only make it worse.

The future is in good, original, authentic, human writing.