Worst

A Cautionary Tale?

This is not a political allegory.

Photo by Toni Pomar on Unsplash

Back in the last century when the world did not seem as awful and people read things printed on paper instead of just sending PDFs, someone I worked with at a fledgling movie studio (that was being deluged with horrible material because no one in the industry took us seriously) decided to spend a weekend writing the worst possible screenplay.

He wrote quickly and came up with something he described as truly wretched that would appeal to no one.

Now, understand, he was a smart guy and a fairly good writer. And his stated goal was to write the worst piece of dreck anyone had ever seen.

This guy was knowledgeable, so the script was properly formatted and proofread.

I never read it, but people I worked with did. And they unanimously agreed it was awful.

So… job well done?

My coworker managed to get the script to an assistant at a management company, who didn’t read it, but recommended it to his boss because he and my coworker went to college together.

The management company sent the script to 12 people at 12 different companies. No one liked it. (But of course, everyone was reluctant to be too honest or too negative, so the rejections were all wrapped in meaningless small bits of praise.)

My coworker was heartbroken. He’d somehow convinced himself that this script was going to sell and make him millions.

A few weeks later, he told me in passing how much what happened upset him. I reminded him that he’d written the script in one single weekend with the singular goal of creating the worst thing possible.

He pretended not to understand what I was saying.

Perhaps somewhere in that weekend he fell in love with the idea of what he was writing and moved away from the goal of creating the worst piece of dreck ever. Perhaps he was mad that anyone remembered what he had said. Or perhaps he convinced himself that worse movies had been made (and worse scripts were submitted to us every day) so by creating something marginally better than the worst piece of shit ever he deserved praise.

I’m not sure. We were never that close and he left his job and the industry soon after.

I heard that he moved to North Carolina and was working in real estate.

I can’t quite recall what he looked like and it’s been enough years that he undoubtedly looks totally different now. Still, I think of him whenever I see a movie or TV show that is awesome in its sheer tone-deaf wrongheadedness. But I’m reasonably sure that the writers of whatever waste of time I watched did not originally intend to create something horrible that would appeal to no one.

If there’s a moral, I suppose this is it: Be careful what your original intentions are when you create something… because those intentions can be hard to overcome and just might come back to haunt you.