Academy Series

Had my first Academy Series class tonight. We watched Gladiator, then had a Q&A with the guy who wrote it. Gladiator actually seemed a lot better than I remembered. My impressions watching it the first time were that it started out great, but that the final act dragged, and the final battle was anti-climactic. When I watched it on DVD, I found myself fast-forwarding through the dialogue to the action scenes. But watching it tonight, the pacing and balance really seemed fine. Maybe I’m just more accepting now, faced with the prospect of actually writing my own play and screenplay.

The Q&A was awesome. The writer was brutally candid about his experiences, and listening to him talk sure made working in Hollywood sound like hell. He freqently referred to studio execs as “fucking idiots,” and talked about one meeting where an exec asked him, “Could you rewrite it so that Russell Crowe’s character isn’t a gladiator?” He said that in his original script, Maximus returns to his family at the end, but the studio insisted that they be dead and out of the way right from the start, so the director introduced the afterlife concept as a way to preserve that part of the story. The writer was proud that the film portrayed a pagan hero and a pagan afterlife, something that would’ve never been permitted during the Roman epic films of 1950s. He talked about how the idea of Maximus rubbing sand on his palms before each battle came simply from a need to show externally Maximus’s decision to fight and live on after he’s first captured and made a slave. He said that everyone thought Gladiator would flop and ruin Russell Crowe’s career, and that Russell Crowe was furious with them the whole shoot for involving him in this harebrained project, but that that anger came across well on screen.

He also talked about some of his other films, namely Amistad and King Arthur. He said that his Amistad script had survived pretty much unscathed, except that the black slave was supposed to be the hero, and they’d made the white lawyer the hero instead, which he thought was a terrible mistake. He said that King Arthur was the worst experience of his life, because the original script had been brilliant, and they’d turned it into a ridiculous medieval Top Gun.

The funniest moment was when the professor who teaches a class on writing treatments asked him if he’d written a treatment for Gladiator, and he said, “Nah, I never do any of that shit.” He said that if a treatment is really required, he’ll write a first draft and then compress that into a treatment. When asked how he got his foot in the door in Hollywood, his answer started out like, “Well, I was banging this girl at Fox, and she put my script in the filing cabinet where a big-name actor saw it.” I guess that’s good to know.