Nikki Finke with a must-read story:

I can report exclusively that the Writers Guild recently decided the credits on The A-Team, the movie based on the ’80s TV show and opening this weekend. There were 11 screenwriters who worked on the film — 5 single writers and 3 teams of two: Kevin Broadbin, Bruce Feirstein, Jayson Rothwell, Laurence M. Konner and Mark Rosenthal, Michael Brandt and Derek Haas, Skip Woods, Joe Carnahan & Brian Bloom, Mathew Carnahan. And that’s with the interruption of the writers strike. The final credit now reads: “Written by Joe Carnahan & Brian Bloom and Skip Woods. Created by Frank Lupo & Stephen J. Cannell.” In other words, 11 writers, and in the end, the director and his partner get first position credit. The WGA has a history of idiotic credits decisions. But the story behind these 11 writers that interests me most is how Alex Young lost control of The A-Team.

The pic comes out Friday following almost 10 years in development, millions of dollars in script costs, all for a movie version of a forgotten TV show that 20th Century Fox already is predicting to reporters may not gross more in its opening weekend than the recent 4th installment of the Die Hard franchise. Not since examples like Sister Act and Armegeddon and G.I. Joe have so many screenwriters labored so much to produce so little. (This is not about whether the movie’s any good. It’s about yet another unoriginal movie idea emanating from Hollywood and how it was developed.) So I chuckled when I read a trade review today that started out: “Beginning with the sound era, studios and films producers have longed for a way to eliminate the screenwriter from the filmmaking process. By and large, writers are prickly personalities who absorb too much time, demand too much credit and need to be kept clear of the set, where they might interfere with the director, who is, after all, the real auteur of the film. With The A-Team, a Fox film derived from a 1980s TV series, this dream now is a reality. The film seems nearly writer-free. Absolutely no time gets wasted on story, character development or logic.”

Let’s unpack that last comment from the trade review (Kirk Honeycutt of The Hollywood Reporter): Leave a movie entirely up to studio execs and a director, watering down any coherent vision deriving from one or perhaps two sets of writers, and you get a movie where “absolutely no time gets wasted on story, character development or logic.”

Okay, let’s play a round of “Compare and Contrast.” Here’s how Honeycutt’s review of The A-Team ends:

All the actors can do amid the explosions and stunts is to develop a comic banter among themselves that isn’t about anything other than how unconcerned everyone is over these supposedly life-and-death situations. Because for all the firepower in any sequence, none of the heroes gets more than a bump on the head or clothes that need cleaning.

Yes, a writer would only gum things up with suspense and character.

Now here’s a taste of what movie reviewer Todd McCarthy says about Toy Story 3:

The main reason Pixar has established itself as the best film company in the world is that its top priority is story, story, story. No matter how dazzling the technique (the 3D is perfectly judged here), how funny the gags or how sly the characterizations, the narrative superstructure is as sound as the engineering for the Eiffel Tower or a 747, the plot as satisfyingly consummated as in a novel by Dickens or Hammett. There are visible formulae at work here, to be sure, especially with the emotional injections administered at the beginning and end, but they convey honest and valid sentiments lying at the heart of the attachments of characters that now have long histories, both with each other and the audience.

20th Century Fox ran through 11 writers / sets of writers with the three credited writers ending up including the director and one of the actors.

Pixar found one writer (Michael Arndt) whose voice they resonated with – even before his first movie (Little Miss Sunshine) had been released – and stuck with him throughout the entire story-crafting process.

If you knew nothing else about either movie, that one fact alone reveals almost everything you need to know about which approach is serious about crafting a great story.

As screenwriter Michael Arndt said about his experience with Pixar:

“People say that writing is re-writing,” he [Arndt] continues, “but that leaves out a crucial part of the equation: the feedback you get prior to your re-write. Pixar stories work because of the robustness of the story feedback system.” Arndt points to statements made by several key Pixar staffers who admit that, at some point in the process, every single film Pixar made was once the worst thing one might ever see. “It’s only by making the movie as a ‘reel’ seven or eight times, and failing repeatedly, and by applying the smartest and most ruthless criticism you can to the story over and over again, that the stories are able to take shape and come out feeling coherent and complete,” he says.

Arndt’s observations on his time at Pixar only confirm what many film pundits and fans have long suspected: Pixar’s films are such rousing successes because of the attention each individual at the studio dedicates to the screenplays. “Andrew Stanton’s rule of thumb is that it takes 10 man-years of labor to make a good screenplay,” Arndt explains. “Either two writers working five years or 10 guys working one year. For Toy Story 3, it was even more than that — probably the equivalent of 10 people working two or three years.”

“To me, this is what separates Pixar from almost everyone else,” Arndt concludes. “They realize how hard it is to come up with a great screenplay.”

I’m sure there’s a lesson here somewhere…