What does it mean to write, for a screenwriter, or any manner of digital era scribe? “I chase the cursor… and I’m going to catch it one day.” Thus saith Virgil Williams at Saturday afternoon’s ever-popular SBIFF writer’s panel at the Lobero, to laughter of recognition in the house.
Williams chased his personal cursor beautifully in his adapted screenplay for Mudbound. The stage was full of other writers who soared in the past year: Adrian Molina (Coco), Edgar Wright (Baby Driver), Michael H. Weber (The Disaster Artist), Emily V. Gordon (The Big Sick), Liz Hannah (The Post), and Vanessa Taylor (The Shape of Water, with Guillermo del Toro). Anne Thompson, of Variety, was the afternoon’s moderator, before a full house (this is Southern California, after all, a landscape crawling with real, active, and aspiring and wannabe screenwriters — present company included).
That palpable scent of movie biz desire and ambition found a resonance in the case of the Golden Globe-anointed film The Disaster Artist, about the maker of the infamously inferior cult film The Room — “the Citizen Kane of bad movies,” quipped screenwriter Weber. While clarifying that the film is less specifically focused on that underground classic than to create a “movie about dreamers,” he went on to describe the surreal circumstances of dealing with The Room’s self-styled auteur, Tommy Wiseau. Wiseau negotiated his own contract, demanding that he appear in The Disaster Artist and had the right to make notes on the screenplay, although Weber said he primarily “used the opportunity of script notes so he could air grievances” with producers, and Hollywood at large.