Ho hum.
Ben remarked,
They were all practically just part of the background. It was a crew of whiny and undisciplined 15 year olds.
I can't speak to the movies, but it seems to me that describes the personnel complement of most script committees nowadays. At least in terms of what I've been seeing on TV of late.
References to pot smoking deleted from the following dialog in the storyboard room...
"OK, so then what?"
"Ooo, ooo, I've got it. So then he leaps across the gap to the other building but the bad guy tries it and doesn't make it and starts to fall the fifteen stories to the pavement below."
"That's good, that's good...."
Long pause while the collective imagination mulls it over.
"OK, so then what?"
"Ooo, ooo, so then the hero is concerned that his falling body will hurt people in the street below, so he uses his superpower of having a tractor beam in his left pinky to pull the bad guy back up and captures him and takes him to jail."
"Oooo, yeah, yeah, I can see the visual now. Waves of power coming out of his left pinky."
"Oooo, oooo, yeah, and loud humming, too."
"Yeah, that's the ticket. And his saving the bad guy symbolizes the goodness of his nature."
Long pause while the typist types all this out.
"Hey, wait a minute. Where'd this tractor beam superpower come from? We never scripted that before...?"
"Nah, that's OK. The audience will never catch on to that."
"Yeah, right, they never caught on to how he got back to the city on a submarine in the fourth spinoff."
"OK, so then what?
"Hey, wait a minute. What if we have the bad guy splat on the pavement with his guts spraying out and bones 'n stuff sticking out of his remains?"
"Oooo, ooo, yeah. That'll get us the PG rating. Guaranteed draw!"
"And zoom in on his wide open bloody dead eyeballs!"
"But then we can't use the tractor beam in his left pinky!"
"What if the hero's tractor beam misses the bad guy on the way down?"
"Yeah, good, good."
"OK, so then what?"
And so on.
And of course, nobody ever thinks of the tensile strength required in the good guy's left pinky tractor beam.
Terry jumps on his tricked out motorcycle which never appeared anywhere else in the plot and roars off to safety, 230RN.