I don’t know. If it’s done well and with a decent enough director and a cast that knows what they’re doing, it would probably be shit-ass awesome (which is different from being good mind you).
Executives were worried that Jeff Foxworthy would be too southern to appeal to a national audience so they moved his sitcom locale to Indiana.
Similarly the John Larroquette Show took place in a Subway station at night. Executives thought that made the show too “dark.”
The writers made one simple change to the scripts.
Instead of writing “Int. - Station - Night”
They wrote “Int. - Station - Day”
Dunno if it’s the same album, but he also talks about the executive complaints he would get when he was writing sketches for a TV Show: “Yeah, we like the Hitler sketch, but does he have to be anti-Semitic? And can some of the Klan members be black? We might get letters…”
Wasn’t it a bus station? I remember it was called “Crossroads”.
Anyway, the thread topic reminds me of a cartoon I saw once, not especially well drawn, about a movie pitch that was constantly being tweaked. I think it pitch started out about being a low-key story about a man and his dog and the executives’ musical response was always:
We love it!
We simply adore it!
…something something something…
But we need a little change
Just a very minor change
A change that’s very small
Not a big change at all
The changes were absurd, like replacing the dog with a horse, and the man with a Xena-like female warrior, etc. The writer would retool and repitch the idea as requested, to get the same response and a new flurry of of preposterous changes, rinse, repeat, with the final iteration being the executives wanting to make a “minor change” to turn the story into one of a man and his dog.
I can remember the music, but unfortunately “we love it!” is too generic a phrase for a google search.
They could have spun it off as a comedy, where at the last minute a Biblical scholar, a Temple harlot, a money changer and his wife, and Ruth rush aboard to join Noah and his little buddy. Then they run aground on an uncharted desert isle. Hilarity ensues.
A cyborg dog? A cyborg dog? With Reese? Did they pay any attention to the premise? Gads, that is utterly stooopid. Did they not grasp that the cyborgs were the bad guys? That all computers are out to kill humans? Yeah, I know they upended that for T2, by reprogramming the cyborg, but for T1 that simply would not have worked, it would have ruined the whole concept. T2 only worked because it had T1 to draw upon. Without the evil cyborg in T1, the “good” cyborg in T2 would have just been silly.
Gilligan’s Island?
[Damn you, Voyager!]
My favorite was reading about the movie Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters from one of the screen writers. He had this long convoluted tale of going to the studio with a success record and a blank check to make a project, picking the title, working on the script, getting booted off the script, the script being reworked by two other teams, then getting pulled back onto the project to finish the script. And suddenly facing a nearly identical plotline movie being made simultaneously, and having to do weird things with the aliens to make them different - the whole alien space ship thing. Plus, my all time favorite comment, where he was trying to follow Heinlein and have the female character actually be important and smart and do things, and being told by the studio exec that “women aren’t like that in these kind of movies” - and that was a female exec.
Why is it that studio execs seem to know so little about screenwriting?
I’m surprised no one has mentioned For Your Consideration, which illustrates quite effectively and humorously how a screenplay can “evolve” from one concept to a totally opposite one due to outside influences. Excellently acted by Eugene Levy, Parker Posey, Catherine O’Hara, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, and other well-known actors of the improv influence. Put it on your Must See List.
Not surprising at all, the most vocal critics of strong female characters are often women. Roddenberry had a story about how he changed the female XO in the original Trek pilot into Spock due to very negative response from women in the test screenings.
…do you have any other examples?..or just that one… from 50 years ago.
Sorry, word from marketing is that dinosaur action figures outsell sea creatures two to one. Maybe we could swap out the angels for sharktapusses, though.
I haven’t heard that one, so it might be from another album or show.
Spock was in the pilot – and, IIRC, Roddenberry was told to lose either the female XO or the pointy-eared devil guy, his choice.
I have this book, too, and agree that it’s hilarious. My favorite was the executive who commented, “It is too gruesome and unsympathetic to have Martin murdered while hooked up to life-support systems. Wait until he recovers, then kill him.”
He returned the favor when I was working with him at Red Storm Entertainment. He decided that the Coolest Thing Evah would be a special ability that would let a player eavesdrop on other player’s private conversations in an online game we were working on. The fact that every designer on the team agreed this was a Bad Idea both from a gameplay perspective (the game depended on secret negotiations) and a community perspective (lots of conversations were personal exchanges between friends) was completely ignored. Tom wanted it, so we put it in.
And can Noah please say the phrase “Damn you Sharktopus!”?
The latest Ellison product is a little book called bugf#ck which has quotes, etc. from him.
It’s not really worth the $10, imo. And the # in the spelling is the real title on the cover.