Write, write, write

The title line was a comment I recently came across … and I couldn’t disagree more. A-list writers deliver, they know the craft. Of course their first drafts are not the finished products - but they will, at the very least, already be well crafted. An A-list writer does not deliver “crappy” anything – he’d be off that list in a heartbeat.

Guess who's on top - yep, Salieri.

Remember Amadeus, Milos Forman's 1984 film about Mozart? Just as there is a huge difference between a novice musician and Salieri, there’s another leap from Salieri to Mozart. Antonio Salieri was an accomplished composer. He didn’t have Mozart’s genius – but he was a hardworking craftsman. And that is exactly what most professional screenwriters are – Salieri. They know the craft, they live the craft, they understand the craft. They know what works and they know what doesn’t and they deliver good work from the get-go to the shooting script.

See? I wrote “good work” – not “brilliant work”. There will be strokes of brilliance along the way - and there will be the rare Mozart among screenwriters. But most professional writers – all the way to A-list levels - will be Salieri (with an occasional lucky measure of Mozart thrown into the mix). Beginning writers often seem to forget that screenwriting is a collaborative craft. Trust me on this – the producer will want to work with a reliable Salieri, rather than a capricious Mozart.

The Salieri-type writers deliver on time and deliver well crafted. And, together with the various partners (producers, director, actors, etc.), the Mozart-ian flashes of brilliance will flow into the collaboration that’ll end with the creation of a great film. So, to come back to the title’s claim  – do A-list writers deliver crappy first drafts? Hell no.