Remember the movie The Majestic? The main character is a screenwriter and the studio is butchering his script. It ends up not looking like anything he wrote, except The Concept remains. You can see he's trying to hold back his anger. I saw a recent interview with Quintin Tarrintino where he talked about his reaction when the director of his script, Natural Born Killers, was changing the script. That's when this thing popped in my head today: screenwriters who sell or have their script optioned have the wrong point-of-view. They think it's about their writing. It's not.
When someone reads your script to option it they're interested in The Concept. They're not nit-picking on the dialogue, the action. They're looking at The Concept from a producer's point-of-view on whether the "Idea" is something they want to make. You writing the script is fleshing out The Concept so they can see how it could possibly be played out. The emphasis is on "possible". Chances are that the script will change. Not a little, but a lot. When you write a script to sell or be optioned by a studio or producer you should think of yourself as a "pitch-maker" not a screenwriter. When you take it from that perspective than you won't get angry because someone changed something. Thinking of the script as a "demo" and not as a final means that you have freed yourself from attachment to the script and more interested in just seeing The Concept made into a reality.
If you are interested in making sure the script stays the way it is then make the movie yourself!
These are just my thought, you may totally disagree with me. Go ahead and tell me what you think.
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