When Bad Things Happen to Good Writers

Wavers, we are lucky indeed to hear from one of the writers of SHARK SWARM. The Wave-inatrix actually has been a casualty of the development process and I've seen it happen to other writers as well. And yet I still wrote a rather snarky bad review of the finished work and for that I apologize for impugning the writers in a rather cavalier manner. So the Wave-iantrix humbly offers my apologies, a cupcake and excerpts of the email I received from the writer in which he explains what went so very wrong and why. Listen and learn.

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Hi Julie,I’m one of the writers of SHARK SWARM.

SHARK SWARM was an assignment project that I and my writing partner took over a year and a half ago. It was to be a four-hour miniseries with a fairly large budget, and it was scheduled to air on a network other than Hallmark, thus ensuring that we could include a good bit of violent content -- after all, it was a killer shark movie – who would ever expect it to end up on Hallmark, right? My partner and I worked night and day for two months, finally turning in a 240-page draft. In the end, we were very happy with it. Our script was a satirical marriage between a Peyton Place-esque small town story and 70s-style “nature run amok” movies. We wrote a series of interconnected three-dimensional characters with motivations and conflicts that were more than just surface traits (a la simple stubbornness), we poked merciless fun at corporate greed as well as blind activism, we wrote huge setpieces that would put the cost somewhere in the 30 million dollar range – pretty high for a miniseries.Then, production began. Actors and crew were hired, executives got involved, and filming commenced. We were involved in the early going during pre-production and helped to smooth out a few things, but as the film rolled, our job was done. A week into it, the budget was lowered considerably, the network deal changed, and Hallmark became the destination. An hour was hacked out of the script by the production crew. Certain big-name actors who’ve been working for years decided to change every single line of their dialogue. Other actors changed their characters entirely. Connective scenes were deleted by the producers, while scenes that we hadn’t written were added. Characters were dropped, subplots disappeared, setpieces were rewritten by producers to make them smaller, logic be damned.

The entire film was restructured in editing, meticulously researched scientific scenes (I visited marine biologists in Monterey and Santa Cruz) were dropped, reshoots were done to change character motivations and plot points, the climax was dropped in favor of a completely retooled and simplified scene that we never would have written. The final cut was a drastically different film than the one we wrote. While maybe fifty percent of our scenes made it in, they were reshaped entirely and often filled with dialogue we didn’t write. Here are a few examples. That toxic dumping thing? Not ours. Our script dealt with offshore drilling that inadvertently uncovered a mineral sheaf with electromagnetic qualities that affected local sharks and sent them into a perpetual feeding frenzy. Those pulse guns? In our draft, they were minor ultrasonic caving devices that were only used in two scenes, not supersecret military weapons. That shark cage sequence? Utterly different in our draft. And that only scratches the surface. Even worse, the final cut, which is twenty-five minutes longer and actually features a few scenes that we ended up liking, was butchered further for the Hallmark showing. So even LESS of our work made it through.

Anyone who goes through the production process knows that it’s often a wonder that ANY script survives remotely intact. Ours was one of the casualties, and the producers themselves know it. That’s the nature of the beast. At the same time, it provided a stepping stone that got us plenty of other work and allowed us a greater deal of control in the process. Since writing SHARK SWARM, we’ve written two television films (one for Spike and one for Lifetime). We’re currently working on a miniseries for one of the Big 3 networks and a feature film for one of the best actors in the business. We’ve got a career now.SHARK SWARM was our first produced credit, and we’re still quite proud of our script, despite its vast difference from the finished product.

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And that, Wavers, is a great response. My worry, Shark Swim writers - is that aspiring writers will view this type of finished product and think that it's then okay to write scripts with gaps of logic, etc., not being aware that in actuality, the script was probably quite good and that the production may not be a representation of what is on the page.

I must say, I thought Assante's dialogue was really good - did that stay intact? He was smarmy and insincere but quite articulate and the interspersed speeches about "neighbors" and "solidarity" were fantastic. So again, cupcakes for the Shark Swim writes for taking a moment to add to the conversation and my apologies for being snarky about something that must have been a frustrating experience.

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