The sexist joke read: “Once upon a time there was an actress so stupid that she slept with the screenwriter.” Today we could coin: “Once upon a time there was an actor who thought he was so smart that he crossed out part of his script before studying it.” At a meeting of some of the architects of Red Queen With the audience, Hovik Keuchkerian spoke vehemently about his approach to a script. “In a script there is a role, there is no character,” she stated. “You give me a script to start with and the first thing I do is remove all the stage directions. Because it conditions me, no tone, no shit (…)”. She continued with an example: “’Michael enters the bar sad and meets Amaia Muruzábal.’ And why the hell does he come in sad? Then I cross out. ‘Michael enters the bar.’ Because I don’t know what happens in that bar. I will know as he works.”
It’s easy to refute Hovik: you don’t know what happens in that bar, but the screenwriter who wrote the script does. And apparently, he knows something else that you don’t know and perhaps you would benefit from understanding: the stage directions are as much a script as the lines of dialogue. And of course they condition you, they are there, among other reasons, for that.
The anecdote reflects the disposition of some actors who, by dint of embodying characters, believe that they have the ability to make decisions regarding everything that surrounds them. My character wouldn’t talk like that, my character wouldn’t dress like that, my character wouldn’t have those cushions. But you do have, excuse me, the guts to go and make amends with the people whose job it is to decide how your character speaks, how he dresses, and how he decorates his house.
This power that certain actors have is the result, first of all, of a system that allows them to disparage the work of others on which their own is based. Anyone who has worked on a film set knows that to the tasks of their job they have to add that of pleasing them – and some take the arm when you shake their hand – something that never happens the other way around.
The actress with the stale joke was a wrong stereotype, but the joker got something right: despite building the cornerstone of any series, a scriptwriter has very little power. Crossing out lines by system is not doing your job better, it is throwing theirs overboard.
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