Adem at 2011-08-20 21:04:29:

I've admired Brad Bird since I first saw The Iron Giant. If you haven't seen it, do!

"BB: One of things that people get wrong is they toss off too many witty comments"

Though I'm still a zygote screenwriter I struggle with this. I don't want to direct the actors, but I don't want to plug in dialog just for the sake of getting the point across either.
Sequences without dialog start to look like a novel and everything I hear says to keep the reader plugging along quickly as possible.
I should probably look over the GItS FAQs again, there's probably something on this...

Scott at 2011-08-20 23:18:39:

@Adam: I love The Iron Giant. One of the worst marketing campaigns in history. A hidden gem.

Your comments remind of a story about Hollywood's first great producer Irving Thalberg. He had much antipathy toward writers. Visiting a group of them under contract to MGM at the time, he declared [paraphrase]: "I don't what the big deal is with you writers. All you do is put one word in front of the other." To which a writer replied, "Yes, but the trick is knowing which words."

And there's the rub: Movie studios would love to remove writers from the process. But any time they make a move in that direction, they are reminded of the primacy of story, and the necessity of having writers circumnavigating the mysterious, roiling waters that produce great stories.