33 replies to this topic

[plankattack]

From what I've read on the web and around here, I take the position that P&W are pretty much the in-house staff who bang out a first draft or develop some storylines. No doubt then when MW talks about "everyone sitting down in January" that means P&W, Babs and himself for sure, with maybe someone else invited (like the TND writers' weekend) and maybe now DC (who Sight and Sound magazine claim has far more input in the creative process than any actor before him) the recipient of frequent updates.

We've all taken shots at P&W but as someone who likes TWINE alot, I tend to want to give them a bit more of a chance. We all know that film scripts are the result of many hands and many layers, and I don't doubt that P&W are responsible for the first coat of paint. And with the exception of DAD, they haven't done the worst job. We attribute a lot of what we don't like to them, but they might be carrying the can for too many of the re-writers (or in the case of QoS, director and star).

For example, Haggis has been attributed with polishing up the dialogue in CR, but surely P&W should get the nod for adapting a 50-year-old novel without losing too much of what made the source material great. And if they were responsible for the first hour, they created something which at least fitted with what came from the novel. When you hear that Haggis had the idea of "Bond's child", then I'm glad it's a collaborative process where things get improved, by subtraction as well as addition.

[zencat]

I really want to lay my hands on the P&W drafts of CR and QOS (if they even did a full draft of QOS - might have just been a treatment). Without these, I just don't know how to judge P&W's post DAD work.

[Eurospy]

It's unfair to judge any writers who are not allowed a couple of re-writings of their own work.

I suspect that Haggis had the easy part, since he worked from something where most of the hard work had already been done. And Haggis contributions are not in dialogue only (maybe it was even less than one immediately assumes), but seem to lean more towards structure and action sequences.

[Safari Suit]

The idea that everything bad in CR or QOS is Purvis and Wade's fault because they wrote TWINE and DAD is absurd. One script by a pair of writers will not necessarily be of the same quality of their other scripts. Are the essays you write at University the same quality as the essays you write at middle school? No. People improve.