Some of Our Favorite Screenplays Since the Last Writers' Strike
Plus: the best of what's new to streaming this month!
Earlier this week, the Writers Guild of America officially voted to go on strike after failing to negotiate a new contract with Hollywood’s major studios. (For a detailed explainer on why the writers are striking, check out this article.) The last writers’ strike lasted from November 5, 2007, to February 12, 2008, and you only need to look at the poor 2008 James Bond film Quantum of Solace to see how essential these writers are to movies and TV.
As a small tribute to screenwriters, we have written about a couple of our favorite screenplays since the last writers’ strike ended about 15 years ago. Also below, a list of the best of what’s new to streaming this month!
Drew recommends…
Margin Call
How do you make a movie set at an investment bank interesting and watchable? You place the action over a 24-hour period just as the financial crisis of 2007-08 is about to change the world. And you have the talent to write a killer script and the good fortune to draw a brilliant cast to the material. That’s 2011’s Margin Call, one of the more underappreciated films of the 21st century.
More entertaining finance movies have come out in the last decade (The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short), but none have felt so (depressingly) real and grounded. Writer-director J.C. Chandor’s feature debut is about a large Wall Street investment bank and its employees that suddenly realize the entire system is about to come crashing down. Margin Call is a talky drama that’s paced like a thriller with a looming sense of real-life horror as it becomes clear most of the higher-ups are only concerned about the interests of the firm and not their part in a worldwide fiscal catastrophe.
Chandor packs the screenplay with Wall Street jargon that effectively drops us into a domain that most of us likely have little familiarity with, but we don’t need to understand everything these characters are saying to grasp the dire situation and the emotional stakes. These are characters that are written so distinct and lived-in on the page that Margin Call would’ve been a very solid movie even without an A-list cast to bring it to life on screen.
Speaking of the cast, Paul Bettany gives one of his best performances, Jeremy Irons crushes every single second of screen time, and Simon Baker had me wondering why the guy from The Mentalist didn’t have a better film career. Margin Call also features Stanley Tucci (terrific, as always), Kevin Spacey (obviously his presence hasn’t aged well, but he’s very good in the part), Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore, and Penn Badgley as that one coworker who’s obsessed with how much money everyone makes.
The flipside of having a stacked cast of actors is that if you don’t have a compelling and worthwhile screenplay, you don’t have much at the end of the day. Chandor’s Margin Call is such an impressive debut film, because the writing is so sharp, propulsive, and intelligent that you’d assume a veteran screenwriter had to be behind it.
Streaming on Showtime
Billy recommends…
Spotlight
There are so many different scripts I wanted to go with. A fast-talking genre movie that fits perfectly into all my interests like Moneyball. Try to get cute and go on a rant I don’t fully believe about how The King’s Speech gets too much hate. Or how Mud is the best coming-of-age movie of the 21st century.
But then I really wanted to find a movie that feels impossible without a great script. Spotlight is the quintessential example for me since 2007. There is the obvious parallel of a writer for movies romanticizing the work of journalists and the painstaking process that goes into both professions. Exemplifying passion for their own craft while showing admiration for the craft of these journalists.
The roles of these two professions, while linked, are not the same. Journalists, or the ideal purpose of this profession, is to seek truth and reveal that to the masses. Screenwriters for the pictures have to find the emotion of their own story and manipulate that to an audience so that the most authentic emotion possible is revealed. This is at least how I, neither a journalist nor screenwriter, sees both these professions.
Spotlight is about The Boston Globe unveiling that the Catholic Church in Boston covered up how hundreds of priests were sexually abusing children. The writers Josh Singer and Tom McCarthy (also the director) not only beautifully showcase the importance of the press revealing corruption, but shrink the emotion of that massive revelation from The Boston Globe to a local perspective. That perspective can be attached to many demographics. The one that I identify with the most is how truth can existentially change how you view something that once felt so safe.
This is a complex emotion that is not often explored in film. Processing shocking news while wanting to hold on to your old reality is a truth that everyone has felt in some way. Spotlight taps into that convincingly and gently while encapsulating it in an entertaining legal drama. This story is traumatic and the willingness to explore people's faith hits close to home. Despite all that, this is a movie I love coming back to because of how gentle it is.
Streaming on HBO Max
New To Streaming In May 2023
Netflix
American Gangster
Austin Powers
Black Hawk Down
The Cable Guy
Captain Phillips
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Dawn of the Dead
Léon: The Professional
Paranormal Activity
Pitch Perfect
This Is the End
Amazon Prime Video
A Beautiful Mind
Babe
Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure
Bridget Jones’s Baby
Dallas Buyers Club
Darkest Hour
Fatal Attraction
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
I Am Not Your Negro
Mamma Mia!
Moonrise Kingdom
Shutter Island
Space Jam
Thelma & Louise
True Grit
AIR (May 12)
She Said (May 19)
Hulu
Atonement
Beetlejuice
Bottle Rocket
Boogie Nights
Crazy Stupid Love
Horrible Bosses
The Hunger Games
The Mask
Speed
Twilight
HBO and HBO Max
American Honey
Eat Pray Love
Mid90s
Paper Moon
Parasite
Some Like It Hot
Step Brothers
The Conjuring (May 8)
Men in Black (May 16)
The LEGO Batman Movie (May 19)
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (May 19)
Links
There’s only one link that matters this week. Dune: Part Two is coming.