McTiernan Pleads Out in Pellicano Case

The Pellicano case just keeps getting more interesting! John McTiernan has pled out, agreeing to plead guilty and, more importantly, help out the FBI in their investigation of Pellicano in exchange for a lighter sentence (one would presume). This is pretty amazing, that McTiernan would just flat-out admit that he hired Pellicano to explicitly do illegal things. And now he's going to talk to the FBI about everything he knows, which presumably is substantial since otherwise why would the FBI have bothered to strike a plea? McTiernan undoubtedly heard some things about Pellicano that factored into his decision to hire Pellicano, and who told him what may turn out to be pretty big. Or it could be that Pellicano himself told McTiernan some things in confidence about other illegal activities he was involved in. In either case, it really opens a can of worms now. This is how Watergate got started, seemingly a very small case, until more and more people got sucked in and more and more people started naming names.

Why Writers Aren't Respected in Hollywood

The Writer's Guild of America has released their list of the 101 Best Screenplays of all time. The best screenplay as chosen by screenwriters themselves? Casablanca. That's right, a screenplay that was notorious for being written on the fly, by a bunch of different writers who hodge-podged it together, where nobody knew the ending until the day it was filmed ... That screenplay is the best screenplay of all time. And writers wonder why they get no respect in the industry. They don't even respect themselves!

On their website, the WGA writes: "the greatest films of all time have one thing in common: each began as the vision of writer. Long before the parts were cast and the cameras rolled, a writer gazed upon a blank page and set in motion a classic story." So let me get this straight. Screenplays are important because they begin as the vision of a writer ... but the greatest screenplay ever written wasn't the vision of any writer, but instead was whatever one of three or four different writers happened to think would be best on any particular given day just before that particular scene was shot? This is completely idiotic! The screenplay for Casablanca had so little "vision" that nobody knew if it would end happy or sad, if Bogey and Bergman would end up toegether or not! Isn't that critical to the entire "vision" of the story and the characters in them??

By choosing Casablanca as the greatest screenplay of all time, the WGA has in effect legitimized the fact that the director is the most important person behind the making of a film, and that the writer's job is to do whatever the directory wants, whenever he/she wants. The writer's "vision" is unimportant, it's the director's "vision" that matters. Congratulations, WGA, I hope your members are thrilled the next time a director hogs the "written by" credit on a film or during the next round of contract negotiations when the producers refuse to give you any additional residuals. You've just given them all the justification they need to disrespect you even more than they already do.

Hollywood's Own Watergate?

This Pellicano case just keeps dragging more and more people into it, doesn't it? It's starting to paint a very bad picture of Hollywood insider politics. When directors are getting wiretaps on producers and agents are wiretapping their clients, it just starts to seem like a madhouse. The latest to get sucked in is director John McTiernan, who helmed several really big action films of the past two decades, including Die Hard and Predator. The idea that he hired Pellicano for wiretapping purposes is just mind-blowing to me. This could be Hollywood's version of Watergate, where one little crime starts to draw in more and more people, until it reached all the way to the President. Just crazy.