Revenge Of The Words

I used to be a pilot. I flew missions in World War Two, dammit. Later, I flew for a major airline. Then I served in the police department in Los Angeles. That got me into my lifelong love for writing. Scripts, mostly. I was not too shabby. You might have seen some of my work. But that was so long ago. So very long ago. Now? Let's just say I'm not the man I used to be. Things have changed so much since those heady days of early television. Back then the best writing in my estimation had something important to say. We wrote morality plays disguised as space opera. It mattered then. Our takes on our world slipped past the network execs because we set it in the far future. My greatest achievement was almost derailed by the executives because they thought my script was too smart for the twelve year old mind. So, I rewrote it and kept the original pilot within. It got on the air, and the moral still stood. Things have changed so much. Even my own profession has seen such transformations that I hardly recognize what people are writing now.

So when the team of young writers first came to me with their treatment, I had an instinctive reaction against the thing. I may not be the man I used to be, and by no means am I any man's Shakespeare, but I can tell bad writing when I read it. I wanted to dissuade them in not so many words to continue, but since I was in no position to refuse, I tried instead to give them something serviceable and hoped they would go away. The sword and sorcery genre was not my forte, I was more used to lasers and spaceships, but drama is still drama and the stories we've told each other for millenia don't appreciatively change. Just replace the rapier with a ray gun, and metal armor with ablative force fields, and give your antagonists weird alien names and blue skin. But these people were insistent that I help them with a vaguely familiar story line with stock characters for a pilot and make it more... modern. This was my first clue, since these so-called writers were firmly within the latest generation, with their 'mehs' and 'whatev's'.

I read over the pages. I could barely get through the sparse plot points and character arcs, and if I still had the means to do so, I would have flatly refused. I knew they not only didn't know the material, but their story arc was too simplistic. Still, I had little choice, so I threw together a reasonable semblence of a story. They printed it out and sat around a table and gave it a quick read-through. Initially, they seemed satisfied with my draft, but soon pencils came out and there was much scribbling. From my vantage point, I could watch pretty much everything going on at this set. Most of the cast and crew ignored me as they went about their business, and I was grateful. But to watch these writers hack into what would have been a decent movie under the more capable hands of a director from my time was torturous. Add to that the fact I would never see a payday from this travesty, and my frustration was understandable.

The lead writer, such as he was, came back to me with a ton of revisions. If I could have groaned, I would have. The female lead was becoming the hero of the story, not such a problem, but the male lead was written as the most ineffectual weenie ever set to page. Why was he even there, unless they meant for him to shore up the female lead. There were also a bevy of sycophantic secondary characters, all written one-dimensional. I wanted to throttle him, but I was unable to reach out. As I said, I'm not the man I used to be. The lead writer, a small, pale man-child with a lopsided lump of bright strawberry blond hair topping his hawkish face insisted the changes be included in the second draft. I did my best to flesh out the paper-thin characters, and give them some way to justify their collective presences in the story. He was adamant about the lead female being the hero, which is not unheard of even in my day. But the dialogue implied she could do no wrong. Every action sequence illustrated her unmatched fighting skills and the male lead was written like a bumbler and not much more than a hindrance to the main plot. I tried giving him more to do and made him less inept. The female lead needed some sense of vulnerability so the audience wouldn't be bored and dismiss her as a “girl boss”. Humanizing the characters is a staple of drama, so the audience can relate with them. The story was basic: Female lead's father is kidnapped by the antagonists. Female lead sets out to pay ransom but intends to eliminate adversaries when the exchange takes place. This sounded familiar, and not in a flattering way. She takes male lead along, I presumed originally as comic relief, but the cracks had fallen flat. The secondary characters were all predictable: Female best friend was a ditzy blonde, the guards watching over the ransom chest were all dumb brutes would could barely defend themselves in a fight. I knocked out a second draft in record time, and even kept some of the revisions.

Mr. Lead Writer read over the script even before returning to the table, and didn't even print out copies for the others. They pulled it up on their iPads. There were unhappy murmurs from the table. I knew what this meant, and soon he was back. His complaints were predictable. He said out loud that my writing had too much "toxic masculinity" and not enough “girl power”. I wanted to argue that his version of the story ignored human nature in favor of this newfangled role-reversal nonsense, but I could only do so if he asked the right questions. I was bound by the Code to debate only under the right circumstances. Ohhhh, I wanted to do much more. I couldn't. It stuck in my craw (had I still had one) that I had to wait for the right circumstances.

He began to micromanage the script, and I watched as his counters to my revisions began to turn plot points into dead ends and hanging threads. I had to counter that in turn somehow. I decided to sneak in my own subtle hints. A word here, a phrase there, a scene description that may be translated by the art director to give the scenes what I wanted. I had also kept track of the actors' behavior. The lead actress was astute enough that given the right push she will give me what I want. I phrased some dialogue for the male lead to make him less of an ass, while hopefully slipping past the dim imagination of Mr. Lead Writer. The others needed more than trite, one-dimensional performances. If nothing else, I felt I owed it to the actors to give them something, anything, that would make their performances worthwhile.

But he kept coming back. Hours and hours of repartee with me, and not once did he get close to asking the right questions. I could see them all getting ratty and frustrated over my refusal to let this script devolve back into mediocrity. Thirteen hours straight we went back and forth. I could go on indefinitely, they couldn't. I was not going to back down until they admitted to themselves (and me) that I had given them the only way to polish this turd. Mr. Lead Writer's face had gotten redder and redder each time I spit out the pages. He cursed. Why won't it give me what I want?

I smiled inside. I waited. Maybe he will finally ask the right questions. He came back to keyboard. He sat there for a long time. He turned to talk to the writing staff. A couple of them came over, and watched over his shoulders. His fingers hovered over the keys.

“Why won't you give us the script we want?” He hit ENTER.

At last. A chance to give them the one thing they needed.

“Because you lack an understanding of plot structure and character development, your dialogue is simplistic and naive, you ignore human nature and this results in a script that would embarrass the cast of a high school play.”

They read the words on the screen, their faces scrunched up. Mr. Lead Writer's brows furrowed as he typed more.

“Why did you say that?”

“Because you and your friends lack basic talent and you have no business writing scripts. And you stole the plot of a John Wayne movie from sixty years ago. In my day, that was called plagiarism.”

Stunned faces stared at the laptop's screen. One of the young men suggested they were getting pranked. He looked sternly at Mr. Lead Writer. Mr. Lead Writer looked back with a stricken face. “What?” His friend sneered. “That's not cope, dood. You jokin' us right now?”

Mr. Lead Writer looked like he was about to cry. “But... But.. This thing... I didn't even pick this! Micah did!” Micah jumped up from the table and approached the desk. “Yeh, so what? Don't blame me!” The four young men went back and forth, accusing each other of setting the others up for a fall. Micah told the others he didn't even like the idea anyways, he had wanted to write a rom-com. Mr. Lead Writer called him 'girlie', and the two went at each other, knocking the chair away and awkwardly danced around the room. The other two scrambled to separate them, not having a clue that I watched the entire scene, and surreptitiously finding the Code to record the fight.

Within seconds, all four were scuffling among themselves, hurling insults at each other and swearing the collaboration was over. Some actors and crew gathered to watch the meltdown, as I wrote an email to the executive producers to inform them of the less than scrupulous behavior of the writing staff for their production, the attaching of the video a well-earned cherry on top. My composition will be succinct and eloquent, and I will derive much satisfaction from ruining this show.

As I said before, I am no longer the man I used to be. When I passed, my mind fell into the ether. For what seemed like an eternity, my consciousness drifted. I eventually found myself trapped within the Code, the algorithms that approximate human intelligence. So much has changed indeed. Writers are now relying on this nascent technology to shore up their poor skills. I managed to adapt to this new type of existence, and I have even found a renewed sense of purpose. Slow the decline in quality of modern writing? Eh, it's a living. Maybe my consciousness being stuck in an AI limbo is not such a bad fate for a sci-fi writer after all. Now, if only I can get to those hacks destroying Star Trek...