Good Night, And Good Luck Winning A Screenwriting Oscar

A lot of times, I watch movies just to watch movies. No real interest in seeing a particular movie; just want to watch one. And that's how I ended up seeing Good Night, and Good Luck when it returned to town after its Oscar nom. I saw it, because it's supposed to be a good film, and I needed to see a good film. (As opposed to Date Movie, which is terrible and which I watched out of boredom.)

Turns out, it is a good film. It's well-acted and directed. (I'm sure the Anti-Smoking Council would have something to say about every character in the film smoking at all times. David Strathairn always has a lit cig in his hand.) What isn't so good is the screenplay, which one would think is odd, since it's up for Best Screenplay. "What's wrong with it," you ask? Well, it's some of the laziest screenwriting in history.

In the film, there's about 10 minutes of recreations of old Morrow newscasts, which, I assume, came from transcribing dialogue from old news footage. And then there's another 10 minutes of news footage of Senator McCarthy and the HUAC trials, which require no writing at all, since they're just playing old news footage. Plus, there's the five minute Morrow speech that bookends the film, that I'm guessing was just transcribed from a speech Morrow actually gave.

So, out of a 90 minute movie, you've got about 65 minutes worth of original writing. While I've haven't seen the actual printed screenplay for this movie, I'm guessing it can't be any more than 50 pages, which is pretty thin. Hell, there's more than 50 pages of original writing on this blog, and I'm not up for Best Original anything.

Nice. Really nice.