The Writers Guild’s ‘Greatest Screenplays’ list shows the low standards of Hollywood’s reigning groupthink.
As if keyboard jockeys in the media haven’t caused enough problems already, last week’s announcement by the Writers Guild of America saluting the “101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (* so far)” tells us American filmmaking is in deep trouble. The list, determined by a poll of the Hollywood-industry union, declares their standards as practiced by the long-vaunted purveyors of articulacy and wit. The WGA’s picks reveal the profession’s shaky politics and elusive values.
The top ten is more insipid than impressive, more repetitive than awe-inspiring: Get Out (2017), Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004), The Social Network (2010), Parasite (2019), No Country for Old Men (2007), Moonlight (2016), There Will Be Blood (2007), Inglourious Basterds (2009), Almost Famous (2000), and Memento (2000).
If they seem unique, look closer. Race, sex, violence, and power thematics indicate a preference for hot-button issues and a trendy obsession with topical social concerns. Only Eternal Sunshine and No Country are half good. Hollywood ‘s New Profundity prioritizes commercialism and groupthink; it’s not necessarily complexity or insight.
Such writers’-union vanity calls to mind what one of its most famous late members, the storied Billy Wilder, said about those Communist screenwriters who opposed a congressional investigation and were labeled “The Unfriendly Ten.” Wilder quipped, “Only three were talented, the rest were just unfriendly.”
The listed films might well seem unfriendly, or downright impertinent outside of today’s woke legions. That the Guild cites 101 titles is laughably arbitrary for a century that isn’t even halfway through.
A critic is not intimidated by such a list; it proves the kind of uniformity that should be resisted, though it has made this century’s Hollywood output tiresome and predictable. Each of these films is snarky and cynical, representing the show-offy scribes’ desperate attempt to appear smart. The list emphasizes snappy dialogue, rather than expressive plot design or image-driven narratives. Incapable of ingenuity, today’s screenwriters praise themselves for being agents of change.
Changing the canon — establishing a taste for cynicism — seems to be the WGA’s aim. These films influence the copycat policies of HBO and Netflix. That “Writers Room” legend, in which the enviable workings of showbiz elites impress laymen, is really just another version of the junior-high cool kids’ commissary.
Fact is, millennial society is so inundated with nonstop content that not even great films stay in cultural circulation. There’s no Godfather, Sounder, or Chinatown among these 101 titles. Where’s Munich? Where’s the cultural development evident in such trailblazing screenplays as the small-town confessions of George Washington, My Winnipeg, or Next Day Air? The celebrity exposé of Infamous and Bellocchio’s Vincere? The political-moral scrutiny of Villeneuve’s Incendies, Makhmalbaf’s The President? The social satire of Mom and Dad and Straight Up, or the sensual and moral scrutiny of DePalma’s Femme Fatale? Each of these films (each boasts a great script) is superior to the WGA’s mundane honor roll.
When the WGA list includes Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Rings (No. 76), you know the ability to discern and all other standards are lost to mere favoritism. Spike Lee comes in at No. 90, with BlacKkKlansman, no matter that the infuriating Red Hook Summer is probably his most original concept. David O. Russell sneaks in with Silver Linings Playbook (No. 101) but not American Hustle, his best-yet film.
Viewed objectively, the list catalogues contemporary trends as though prescribing great achievement. This public confession of the industry’s tenets is the Guild’s way of congratulating moviegoers who already know the films mentioned, then suggesting them as models of the industry’s production.
The WGA’s self-promotion is based on the fallacy that every good movie owes its creative success to a wordsmith. Tell that to Griffith, Sternberg, Eisenstein, Hitchcock, Welles, Godard, or Spielberg.