What It's Like to Flop ⇒

· Joanthan Poritsky

Screenwriter Sean Hood on Quora, answering the question “What’s it like to have your film flop at the box office? Don’t they know how bad it is before it comes out?”:

Unfortunately, the work I do as a script doctor is hard to defend if the movie flops. I know that those who have read my Conan shooting script agree that much of the work I did on story and character never made it to screen. I myself know that given the difficulties of rewriting a script in the middle of production, I made vast improvements on the draft that came before me. But its still much like doing great work on a losing campaign. All anyone in the general public knows, all anyone in the industry remembers, is the flop. A loss is a loss.

It’s a long answer to a complicated question, but every word is worth reading. Hollywood is very good at ruining solid scripts, but the real value in Hood’s answer comes at the end, when he talks about what his next move is. Just great.

(via Deadline.)