Jessica Alba is pretty. Like many actors and actresses, her attractiveness has helped propel her stardom, but her pleasing physical features have brought with it a definite downside: People assume she’s dumb. When the most memorable moment in your film career, arguably, is asemi-raunchy dance in “Sin City,” it’s hard to combat that perception, but Alba sure didn’t help herself with a somewhat-innocuous comment she made recently that has every screenwriter in town gunning for her.
Elle will be featuring Alba on their December cover, and they teased the feature on their website, including a few choice quotes from her interview to go along with a photo slideshow. In one of those quotes, she says, “Good actors, never use the script unless it’s amazing writing. All the good actors I’ve worked with, they all say whatever they want to say.” Forgetting for a second the weird punctuation in that first sentence — is she instructing the shadowy legion of “good actors” not to use the script? — there’s no context to know what inspired these thoughts. But that hasn’t stopped several prominent writers from making their unhappiness known.
The most reasonable of these responses was from John August, who has collaborated with director Tim Burton and wrote the “Charlie’s Angels” movies. Acknowledging that the quote may not have come out the way Alba intended, August used her comments for a good-old-fashioned teachable moment about the importance of the screenplay to the overall film. (For example: “Scripts aren’t just the dialogue.”) But while his response was at least polite, it’s funny how other writers, in defending their craft, enjoyed taking potshots at Alba — specifically the fact that because she’s attractive, she must be an idiot.
“I would love to see Jessica Alba join the improv workshop I attend,” wrote veteran TV writer Ken Levine. “She might find that creating a character, moving a story forward, and holding her own with other gifted actors without a script requires more than nice $#@!.” Following along in that line of thinking, married writers Michael Seitzman and Ellen Rapoport decided to mock her alleged stupidity by juxtaposing random quotes from Alba’s interviews and tweets with classic lines from famous movies. The name of the article? “Jessica Alba: From the Mouths of Boobs.”
It’s no surprise why screenwriters would be offended: Theirs is a profession that’s not much understood or respected by even those in the business, and having someone high-profile like Alba dis them sure doesn’t help the cause. But it’s worth noting that these writers’ way of hitting back is to say, essentially, “You’re pretty, you don’t know anything, shut up.” (Even in August’s response, he includes a bit of advice for Alba that she befriend screenwriters because “We are pushovers for attractive people who pay attention to us.”)
Listen, Alba’s comment, if it is exactly what she meant, is really just silly. She makes disposable movies that aren’t exactly known for their scintillating writing — it’s no great cinematic crime if all the actors in her films “say whatever they want to say.” But to go after her for being pretty is just petty. And for all the attention this one quote has stirred up, it’s amazing that nobody seems to have bothered to click on the next picture in the Elle slideshow, where she talks about being away from her two-year-old daughter to return to acting. “The time I’m not spending with my kid has to be worth it,” she said, “so when I sat down with my agents after I was ready to go back to work, I told them: It’s all about the directors.” Oh boy, writers just love hearing things like that.
by: Tim Grierson
