He comes back with the script, and it's racist like a 1940's Newspaper.
To this day, I get rewrite offers where they say: 'We feel this script needs work with character, dialogue, plot and tone,' and when you ask what's left, they say: 'Well, the typing is very good.'
I do finish reading a script and say, Why are they making it and what are they talking about? I like to try and be responsible in my choices in that way.
And I don't think I'm giving away any secrets here, but there are a lot of terrible scripts in this town.
When an actor asks you to read his script, your heart sinks. The number of scripts I've been given by actors that are so unbelievably terrible!
It fills me with dismay sometimes when you look at the scripts that do come to you that are primarily focused on violence. There are so many other things to play around with.
We all, as actors, have to fight these battles, where it's like, 'OK, that's a little far-fetched.'
Some TV shows are like really good novels in that there are enough episodes that you start to have your own feelings about how the characters should act. When the scriptwriters go slightly wrong, when they make the character make a left turn that he or she wouldn't do, you know enough about the characters to say, "No, that's not what she would do there. That's wrong." You can actually argue with a TV show in a way that you can't do as much with movie - you inhabit a TV show in the way you inhabit a novel.
Most scripts are bad. I read a lot of them.
Most actors really love it, that's what they want to do. They burn to do it. And so they'll read a script and think, that's an interesting part. And because they love acting, that blinds them to the fact that the rest of it is pretentious nonsense, which it very often is.
You would not believe some of the scripts I have seen. I have read something like 160 that I've rejected, and I keep them all, for posterity.
So often, I read scripts and am like, 'This would never happen in real life. It's not trying to be funny. It's trying to be serious.'
One job I did turn down was 'How I Met Your Mother.' My character was 'creepy gay guy.' That was the character. The script said, 'Creepy gay guy gets in elevator every day with Jason Segel character and he's just being creepy.'
The bane of every TV writer's existence is the likability note.
On every film, there are producers all over the place, and everyone's got to have an opinion. I think the screenplay is a beautiful form with great potential, but the environment around it is awful for a writer.
