[OrigamiSensei]

Eh. My grammar nittishness aside, whether a screenplay is good or not has everything to do with things like plot and a good ear for dialogue and darned little to do with an occasional grammatical error. It would be silly to judge someone's ability as a screenwriter based on some random post in an internet forum. I simply couldn't resist and didn't mean to hijack.

aside: On the subject of good screenplays I think dialogue is a particularly hard thing to deal with. How does one write plausible dialogue in an artful fashion without it seeming artful? It doesn't work to make the dialogue too realistic, or else it's boring and sounds silly. On the other hand overly precious dialogue is just as bad. A particular movie I remember having the problem of over-realistic dialogue was a forgotten movie "Frankie and Johnny" (with Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer if I recall correctly). I remember feeling that the screenwriter had actually perfectly captured the way these people would really talk but in doing so rendered it virtually unwatchable. So many long pauses, "uhs", and other hitches in the timing made it grating to the ear. Certain writers like Sorkin and Mamet have mastered writing dialogue that you know is artful when you're watching it, but not so artful or precious that it wrecks the scene. Unfortunately in today's movies high concept often replaces the interaction of the characters. /aside

back on track: All of which has pretty much zero to do with a writer's strike. On that subject it's no surprise that the studios don't want to pay on new media even though fairness demands that they should be doing so. On the other hand having a father who was a union worker who went through several strikes and seeing the results of many other strikes my belief is that the overall cost of striking to the worker almost always outweighs the benefit of the eventual negotiated settlement. It's also going to affect a lot of other people in the industry who stand to gain nothing from the writer's settlement and have everything to lose by shows not being in production. The networks will simply put on some other schlock and continue to profit and I have no doubt the movie studios will find a way to make their money as well.