Before I post up the THR Roundtable on writers, a quick reminder about how the Best Screenplay nominations are kind of a joke. What appears on the screen and what appeared in the original screenplay are often very, very different. First off, film is a collaborative effort and things always change throughout shooting. In fact, there have been iconic moments in film were actually improvised and had nothing to do with the screenwriter. Unless people actually read the screenplays themselves, you can't really know what the best screenplay was. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if a few terrible movies actually found their original screenplays getting nominated because they were great ideas that fell apart during production.

But perhaps the best example of this is Michael Mann's "Heat", a film that people love and that includes a memorable scene with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino facing off over a cup of coffee. It was a scene that film critics and fans went gaga over.

Some pretty strong, natural writing in that scene, no?
The thing is (as Lee Goldberg pointed out years ago) the writing in that scene wasn't considered all that great when Michael Mann first shot pretty much the exact same scene six years earlier for a straight-to-TV movie "LA Takedown". I'm not sure too many people would laud the writing in this scene.

Now don't get me wrong, I think the screenplay is the backbone of any good movie and that people should treat screenplays with far more respect than they do but I also can't support the idea that The Best Screenplay can be gauged by what ends up in the screen. The top screenwriters do usually pen stuff that is just too good to change or do a better job of arguing for their decisions rather than an actors or producers ideas but that's rewarding a different skill IMO.

Enough of my rant, here's the video of the full hour of the THR Roundtable with some potentially Oscar nominated writers of 2011.

Oh, and if you were wondering why everyone laughed so much at Aaron Sorkin saying that he loved the Writer's Guild and thought the union was great, it's because he pretty much savaged the union while the last year's Roundtable and did so while sitting next to the head of WGA, John Wells. Here's the clip.