A new Hollywood status role: prompt doctor

Bear with me for a little thought experiment.

When a script in Hollywood appears to be lacking something crucial and the existing writers have exhausted all their creative solutions, the producer or director will sometimes bring in a “script doctor.”

The script doctor is a writer who parachutes in and, based on their expert knowledge of story, actors, movies, and how directors and producers think, quickly identifies the problem and rewrites the script to make the movie sing. This is an extremely valuable skill. Producers and studios may have already invested tens of millions of dollars in the picture and know that hundreds of millions more depend on turning the movie from drek into gold. Furthermore, the script doctor has to work in a hurry, under pressure, in an ego-rich and fraught environment. Because the stars and director are not available for very long, the fix needs to be ready quickly.

According to a profile in The New Yorker, script doctor Scott Frank, who doctored scripts including “Saving Private Ryan,” “Night at the Museum,” “The Ring,” “Gravity,” and some X-men movies, pulled down $300,000 for script doctoring. Some of those were great movies. I’m sure he was worth it.

What happens when AI writes the scripts?

So much of Hollywood’s output is now formulaic. Watching some of today’s predictable movies, especially action thrillers, you’d be forgiven if you thought, “Jeeze, a machine could have written this.”

Unsurprisingly, the studios have noticed. Writers are already testing AI writing tools. There are unwritten rules about scripts, for example, how frequently characters need to interact, the Hero’s Journey, and the “First Act, Second Act, Third Act” rhythm of the action. AI tools will soon be able to find and fix problems associated with those common challenges (if they’re not already).

And we all know how much of what we see on screen is generated in a computer anyway. CGI (computer-generated imagery) is de rigueur, especially in action movies. For a fascinating exercise in what this can do in the hands of an expert, I strongly recommend that you spend a couple hours with “Flow,” the movie that just won the Oscar for best animated feature, now showing on Netflix. It’s an utterly unique and compelling story of a cat, a dog, a lemur, a capybara, and other animals (none of them talk, they interact and move very much like real animals) in a flooded world with no humans visible. “Flow” was created entirely with the computer animation tool Blender, and it’s absolutely stunning, charming, and amazing.

Is it too much of a stretch to imagine that a high proportion of what you see in the next generation of movies will be conceived, scripted, and rendered by AI? Right now one of my kids is watching all the “John Wick” movies, which are stylized exercises in acrobatics and violence with the thinnest plots imaginable, a genre known as “gun fu.” With enough computer power and provided that Keanu Reeves gave permission to use his image, I’m certain an AI could generate the next movie in the series.

Of course, the problem with this vision is that AI will be best at creating pictures that replicate the familiar formulas. If you’re watching the thirty-fourth movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe on the couch with the kids and the dog, I suppose that’s good enough.

But eventually, people will get bored with computer-generated scripts and imagery. Originality stands out and captures our attention. That originality is not going to come from a machine.

It’s going to come from an expert in story, dialogue, possibility, Hollywood, and AI tools. Somebody who knows what to tell a machine to make it spit out something different from everything that’s come before — something that fits the description of the art form “movie” but breaks the rules in an unexpected way.

That’s a prompt doctor. Armed with the right computer tools — tools he or she knows better than anyone else — a prompt doctor might turn a formulaic story into a novel and diverting spectacle in a single day.

What would that be worth?

I’m betting a lot more than $300,000 a week.

That may never happen. Hey, as I said at the start, bear with me for little thought experiment.

But wouldn’t that be an amazing job?