Lessons From Losers

I just read Good Scripts Bad Scripts by Thomas Pope. (The market for screenwriting books is bigger than the market for screenplays.)

Most such books aren't too helpful. Once you get beyond nuts and bolts, how much can you learn? What good is knowing the formula for a screenplay when it's how you fill in the formula that counts. Will learning the formula for a fugue allow you to compose beautiful music? To make it worse, I find a lot of Pope's analysis weak.

Still, I admire what the book is trying to do. Most show how others have succeeded. This one spends as much time dissecting failures as successes. I've always found you can learn as much from bad movies as good ones, maybe more. In general, books that attempt to show you how to succeed in any field have this problem--rules that work for some don't necessarily work for everyone.

(Another problem--Pope's politics also occasionally intrude. He says of Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire Of The Vanities "it's a fierce denunciation of the crass materialism and 'me first, last and always' philosophy of the Reagan years." Wolfe is actually a fairly conservative guy who likes Reagan, and his book attempts to be a panoramic view of life in 1980s New York, satirizing quite a bit more than just the Wall Street lifestyle. And when discussing the movie Havana, Pope writes "While Batista was a monstrous villain, the dictatorship Castro created to supplant it was not that much of an improvement." You don't have to support Batista to believe Castro was worse.)