THE BIG PICTURE: Come on, writers, script your future

Hollywood is a town awash in hyphenates. TV is loaded with writer-producers. The movie biz is full of writer-directors. There's even a legion of actor-filmmakers like Clint Eastwood and George Clooney. But as the writers strike enters its third week, I think the future belongs to a tantalizing new hyphenate: the writer-entrepreneur.

Visiting a UCLA film class the other night, I was asked to name the most influential filmmakers of our era. The choices were pretty obvious: Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, John Lasseter, George Lucas. . . . As the names spilled out, I realized they all have something in common. They're filmmaker-entrepreneurs, artists-turned-businessmen who helped start their own companies to further their work, became financially independent and created a world that operates under a radically different set of rules from the vacuous studio assembly lines. It's telling that the current strike is about new media yet both sides seem to be following old-school models.

Writers Guild members, listen up. There is a lesson here. Just ask Tony Gilroy, the writer-director of "Michael Clayton," a nervy thriller that's won critical raves this fall. Gilroy had a script that was dead in the water until a total outsider -- a Boston real estate developer named Steve Samuels -- said if Gilroy could get a star and stick to a budget, he'd bankroll the film.

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--Patrick Goldstein

Comments

[Alexander Chow-Stuart]

Love the writer-entrepreneur tag. I was always a huge fan of Francis Ford Coppola when he was pioneering running his own studio and creating electronic filmmaking - using videos of rehearsals to create electronic storyboards - way ahead of anyone else.

And I remember a quote from Clint Eastwood, years ago, that all he needed for a company was "a phone jack up my ass" (this was in the days before cell phones).

Now we have the technology and the outlet (the web, while it's still relatively unregulated - something we should fight hard to preserve). As ever, it just takes ideas to make things happen - and that's what we're striking to protect: the core longterm value of our ideas.