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Battlefield Earth Screenwriter Accepts Razzie
An anonymous reader writes "The New York Post has a story about J.D. Shapiro, and his gracious acceptance of a Razzie award for writing Battlefield Earth. He first offers an apology to anyone who has seen it, then he offers a funny, outsider's perspective of dealing with Scientologists, and the subsequent mangling of his script for what was once allegedly referred to by John Travolta as 'The Schindler's List of Sci-Fi.'"
If you replace Schindler's List with Killer Tomatoes and SciFi with Propaganda Movies, we can talk.
Oh, it works just fine. It's just the wrong Schindler and the wrong List. We're talking Dave Schindler and his List of 100 Best Ever Fart Jokes.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
If we believe his story, then the original screenplay was nothing at all like the finished product. The Scientologists asked him to totally rewrite it, he refused, they fired him and got someone else to rewrite it. So at that point it became a choice between taking his name off the credits or getting paid. I'm honestly not sure what I would have done in that situation.
Are you kidding man? He got to TAKE money AWAY from Scientology!!! How many get that opportunity? Falling on his sword was a no brainer.
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... my VCR spit out the tape about 5 minutes in, thus saving me from ever seeing any substantial part of the movie and wanting to claw my own eyes out. That VCR no longer works at all, but I keep him around, just to stop by and say "Thanks" every once in a while.