Truth be told...

I was recently on one of the screenwriting bulletin boards (ugh) and I saw where somebody had posted a question about honesty when it comes to critiquing the work of a friend or associate. In other words, if you read a friend's script, and the script sucks, do you tell this friend what you really think, or do you keep it to yourself? Well, I usually get paid to give my opinions of scripts, so I tend to be brutally honest. After all, telling some lousy writer, “Oh, your script is really good!” ain’t gonna do him much good. (Sadly, based on past experience, actually telling him what’s wrong with his script ain’t gonna do him much good, either.) If I'm doing the critique for a friend, I'll still be honest, but I'll do it with a smile. But anyway, this honesty question got me to thinking about a meeting I had with a producer a few years ago. Nice guy; I liked him. Anyway, he had produced a handful of movies, one of which had recently been released to DVD. In fact, I saw this particular movie about a month before the meeting. It was a truly awful, awful movie. I mean, I don't mind a movie with some flaws, a few bad lines of dialogue, some not-so-great camera work...but this was baaaaad. So anyway, this producer asked me if I had seen his flick. I said, "Yeah, actually, I just saw it a few weeks ago." He asked, "So what did you think of it?" I sort of shrugged and told him, "I can’t say I cared for it much." He looked at me for a moment, and I thought maybe he’d be a little ticked off, but then he said, "Yeah, it wasn't very good, was it?"