Lucy, Schroeder & Robin Hood Explain the Movie Business.

IF YOU'RE LIKE me, you probably greeted the new Robin Hood movie with a bit of mystification.  Especially when the reviews came in.  If you were going to tell such a well-trod & explored story (a couple of movies & TV series just in the last few years!) how could you not make sure you were bringing something new and different to it?

Well it's simple. As Bill Martell explains, you start with new and different -- in this case, a nifty script called NOTTINGHAM, and then you systematically murder it.  Until it is dead, dead, dead, well and truly dead.

So, Ridley Scott wanted to change the NOTTINGHAM script which featured period forensics to a script about archers and archery...

Then he came up with a brilliant idea! What if the Sheriff Of Nottingham and Robin Hood were the *same person*! Kind of like FIGHT CLUB. He’d be chasing himself for the whole damned movie! And there were some drafts of the screenplay written like that, until someone (maybe Helgeland) must have hinted that it might be a little silly.

And draft after draft, they script changed - evolved - twisted - becoming something completely different. The way the most expensive meal you have ever eaten turns into something else when it goes through the digestive process.

The full blow by blow is painful & illuminating.

Of course, this kind of collaboration doesn't just happen with Directors.  Sometimes it's with Producers too.  Most writers have these stories floating around.  And most of those stories can be very adequately explained by this simple interaction between Lucy & Schroeder from A Charlie Brown Christmas: