Jeff at 2010-06-11 13:29:02:

Minor lesson: spend your 10 bucks this weekend on a good import beer or on multiple rounds of skeeball at your local amusement park or, hell, dole it out to the less fortunate, someone on the street with a tin cup and shmata... ANYwhere but on a screening of The A-Team.

Major lesson: Hollywood has, does, and always will hate writers. We're such prickly ninnies... us and our annoying persistence on character, plot, dramatic structure.... we're like gnats!

I'm not one who hinges their weekend reading the box office grosses... a quick glance Monday morning over coffee, at best. But after reading that, I shall be rapt, hand cupped over ear, listening for the sonic-boom thud of The A-Team flopping majestically.

I'm hoping for something so disastrous it'll make Heaven's Gate seem like a mega-blockbuster.

Vindictive bastard, ain't I?

Mike at 2010-06-11 14:13:20:

Heck, Karate Kid '10 is at least a COPY of a movie that followed form and structure and hit all its character-development beats. I expect KK10 to obliterate The A-Team at the box office. And I say that despite knowing that I am only going to see the latter in theatres, owing to the fact that I must pay my penis tax.

I love it when a plan comes together.

Frank at 2010-06-11 14:17:50:

Arndt's observations are inspiring. "They realize how hard it is to come up with a great screenplay." I've got four years in on a script, and it's finally good. Not good enough, but good. It'll be a long hike to great, but I'm on the road, getting closer every writing session.

Tom at 2010-06-11 14:20:51:

I've always thought the Pixar model could not help but be successful - no matter the genre. As long as your crew of critics knows story, knows the genre and agrees to let the writer be the writer, how could you not come away with a great story?

What Fox did was essentially assign the script to one writer/team as a NEW project each year for ten years. What Pixar did was assign one script to one writer and then gave him ten script consultants who were experts in the genre for three years.

This all comes back to collaboration. Good collaboration is when you can rely on those around you, you become a team, your thought processes are similar, when you’re criticized it’s the project that is criticized, not you and then the team is there to back you up and provide support as you adjust to the critique with the changes you have to make. A good team can become closer than a family. It takes work to ensure jealousy doesn’t raise its ugly head and that egos stay reigned in, but when a team like this works, it works like a finely tuned engine and can crank out hit after hit with different writers for each hit.

It’s actually ironic that the very process that creates real-life A Teams (one of the three teams in a Special Forces unit) was so completely missed when writing the script.