The Trouble Was Never the Idea

Somewhere in Los Angeles sits a warehouse of screenplays that will never be filmed. Every studio keeps one, literally or otherwise—a graveyard of optioned premises, abandoned sequels, and high-concept pitches that expired quietly in development. The warehouse is a figure of speech, but only just: since 2005 the industry has compiled the Black List, an annual register of the screenplays its own executives most admire and have nonetheless declined to make—more than a thousand titles to date. The supply of ideas in Hollywood has never been the constraint. The supply of films worth watching has. Anyone who has waded through a publisher's slush pile, sat on a grants committee, or emptied a corporate suggestion box knows the same truth in different dress: the world has always been awash in ideas, almost none of them any good, and telling the difference has always been the entire game.I raise the point because an argument has lately become fashionable, and it is half right in a way more…