I loved this, but the book was like, 1000 times better.In a bold move today, the Hollywood Screenwriters Coalition issued a manifesto to all the major Hollywood demanding that they start squashing the physical publications of the stories that they option for adaptation to film.

The request is born out of apparent frustration of the constant comparisons of a screenplay to the literary work that it was adapted from. "We at the HSC are completely and utterly fed up with the phrase, "It was ok, but it wasn't nearly as good as the book." It's hurtful and demoralizing to our hard-working membership to hear this over and over again. It's time for the studios to step up and do something about it."

Not everyone knows that studios are often bidding and securing the rights to a book before it is ever published, but it's true- publishers give them advanced looks to lock in those lucrative deals. The HSC is asking that they not only lock in those deals, but actually *prevent* the publication of the book. That way, the screenwriters will be authors of the only published version of the work.

"We're not trying to put these writers out of a job," an HSC spokesman said. "There's quite a bit of work required for them before the manuscript will get optioned, and then, once the movie is written, we anticipate that they'll be the logical choice to convert that screenplay into a final novelization."

The HSC acknowledges that this idea is likely to be controversial amongst publishers and authors, but is quick to point out that without Hollywood knocking down their doors for lucrative film ideas, most of them would be "penniless art-school d-bags with worthless creative writing degrees that ghost write and copy edit JCPenny catalogs for a living and read heart-breaking poetry at open mike nights to a handful of junkies and drunks."

Screenplay photo by CC license from lonely sandwich on Flickr