>>>There again, there have been many movies that the critics hated yet the public has liked. Almost to a man, critics panned "John Carter", yet almost every person who went see the movie and wrote on-line about it had almost the same thing to say: "We don't know what movie the critics saw, but it wasn't the one we saw".
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>>I'm no high-falutin' cinephile either, but I'm probably a bit more critical of sci-fi movies. Fantasy in general annoys me unless extremely well written and/or performed, by that measure "John Carter" sucked big-time.
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>>"Prometheus" is another massive disappointment, plot holes you could drive a planet through:
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>>"Hey, the air in this alien installation is breathable! I'm taking off my helmet?" What could possibly go wrong?
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>>"Aww, let's make friends with the alien wormy things swimming in the muck!" What could possibly go wrong?
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>As a hardcore SF fan I find myself more and more reading, and less and less watching. Writers don't have to suck up to any target demographics, lawyers, and purse string pullers. They can write whatever they want, without giving much of a thought to how'd it look on the screen. If it gets to the screen, it won't be possible to recognize it anywhere. Any civilization encountered will have just one village of two dozen people, ruled by a council of elders, whose chief has a @!%$! daughter. Any battle will be fought in the same forest or the same valley somewhere in Nevada/Arizona. All the ships will have military command with system of ranks derived from the UK naval code, with officers having something called commission, whatever that is. And there won't be any seat belts on the bridge. Airbags will have been banned too.
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>So good writers don't even bother to thing about _screen.ability, they write what can't possibly be filmed. And I enjoy that much more.

For several years I hung out in a screenwriters forum on the old CompuServe. There were a number of writers with produced movie credits, along with lots of wannabes. One of the produced ones was John Hill, who did some touch-up work on "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and had solo credit for "Quigley Down Under." He won an Emmy for a well respected TV show ("L.A. Law"?) which he claimed he kept in a closet. (I never believed that. "Have you seen my Emmy trophy? Here's my Emmy, right here on the mantel)".

He was tremendously encouraging but also threw a wet blanket on the unrealistic. He said if you're 40 or older here and don't have any produced credits, write a book instead. You don't have to worry about how much it would cost to shoot. You don't have to worry about about target demos. Write a page a day -- one page a day -- and a year later you've got a book.

I have lost touch with John but think he teaches writing at UNLV. Now that would be a heck of a writing teacher.