A 12.17 Wall Street Journal article by screenwriter Derek Haas (co-writer with Michael Brandt of 2 Fast 2 Furious, Wanted, 3:10 to Yuma) offers a rare look into the soul and the mindset of a successful Hollywood hack.

I don’t know Haas and therefore have nothing against him personally. The piece makes him sound like a nice enough guy. But Wanted was torture, and it wasn’t all the fault of Timur Bekmambetov — the script surely pointed the way. The shootout at the end of 3:10 to Yuma was ludicrous, and so was the bit when Russell Crowe whistles and the horse gallops after the train. I tried watching 2 Fast 2 Furious on DVD once, and I only got to the 25-minute mark.

The only passage in Haas’s article that I wholeheartedly agree with: “Readers will love you if you layer in theme, subtext and symbolism, but they’ll never forgive you if you bore them.”

Sample passage #1: “As a novelist and screenwriter, I’m sometimes asked to speak to a class of film or literature students at a university. Inevitably, a 22-year-old hipster with designer-chic black glasses and a permanent pout will raise his hand and ask, ‘What does it feel like to sell out?’ I smile. I tell the students, ‘Sell out? Are you kidding me? I sold in!'”

Sample passage #2: “From an early age, I knew that I wanted to write popular thrillers, but when I got to graduate school, I sensed an upturned nose and a haughty eye directed toward the fiction and films that I loved. I was taught over and over, ‘Write what you know.’

“‘Write what you know’ works if your father runs covert ops for the CIA. ‘Write what you know’ works if your mother infiltrated the mob. But when you grow up in the suburbs, you don’t have that sort of material to draw on.

“When I graduated, I had an epiphany. Forget ‘Write what you know.’ Instead, write what you think is cool.”

Wells interjection: “Write what you think is cool” is something you weave into a script or a story after you’ve decided to write something interesting, compelling, urgent or heartfelt. “Write what you think is cool” means that after you’ve got something solid you need to give it a good topspin and some nice pizazzy elements so people won’t be bored. But to start with “write what you think is cool” means you’ll end up with something like Wanted or something that will play well at ComicCon but die out in the real world.

Back to Haas: “What did I think was cool? A dark character, surrounded by a colorful cast, with the entire world turned against him. And then turn him loose and watch him wreak havoc. As soon as I embraced this popcorn side of myself, my work vastly improved.”

Actually, this last sentence I agree with also. To write well you have to accept who you are and what your influences have been and what really moves you and then work with that, which means forget trying to satisfy some arcane aesthetic requirement left over from a college writing class.

If an alternate version of Michael Mann‘s The Insider had been made with different actors (but ones just as good as those who acted in the 1999 version, and if it was directed by Mann and written by Eric Roth) and released in 2011, it would win the Best Picture Oscar…hands down. 2011 has been a good-but-not-great year, and I don’t think there’s any question that Mann’s film would sweep aside The Artist, The Help and War Horse like so much seaweed.

Especially if it had a distributor smart enough to throghly explain to everyone that The Insider is not about the evils of tobacco and tobacco-company executives (which Jason Reitman still believed two years ago) but about corporate interests smothering the integrity of corporate-owned journalistic organs like 60 Minutes.

I explained it all in a January 2010 post, but I happened to watch The Insider earlier today on DVD and it hit me all over again how good it was.

The Insider was nominated for Best Picture but lost to American Beauty.

I’d forgotten that The Green Mile and The Cider House Rules were actually nominated for Best Picture that year. The Green Mile! The death row electric-chair movie with Tom Hanks and the cute mouse! What were Academy members thinking?

Put it this way: If you think a 2011 version of The Insider still would have theoretically lost to The Artist or The Help or War Horse, what pre-2011 film could come along and kick the asses of these three in this year’s Best Picture race? if it hadn’t been released before, I mean, and had magically arrived fresh this year?

In 2000 The Insider was nominated for seven Academy Awards — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing and Best Sound…but not Chris Pummer for Best Supporting Actor despite his having won awards for hsi Miek Wallace performance from the Boston Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and the National Society of Film Critics.

Absurdist, steroid-injected action thrillers like Mission: Impossible 4 — Ghost Protocol are over. They’re obviously thriving commercially as we speak, but they have nowhere to go except in the use of more powerful steroids and more CG ridiculum, and that’s a dead end. There’s only one kind of thriller that can work these days — i.e., the human-scale, back-to-basics-and-believability model found in Steven Soderbergh‘s Haywire and Nicholas Winding Refn‘s Drive.

Action nerds born in the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s will disagree, of course, but they’re running around with a kind of ComicCon myopia, which amounts to a kind of poison in their veins. They sincerely believe that action films aren’t worthy of consideration or patronage unless the thrills and spills in a just-opened film vigorously competes with (or more preferably tops) the last flamboyantly unrealistic action film. It has to dismiss if not piss on physical law and be emphatically cartoony and hard-drivey to a fare-thee-well. There is no way out of this morass.

So the nihilistic strain in this Brad Bird-Tom Cruise film can’t be ignored or waved away. And yet (a) I loved the boxy IMAX footage, particularly in the early stages, (b) the sequence with Cruise climbing up the glass exterior of that Dubai skyscraper is highly exciting, despite intense and relentless efforts to convince the audience that what you’re seeing is ludicrous; (c) the older Cruise gets (he’s nearly 50), the more interesting his face becomes, especially due to the fact that his nose has gotten bigger and beakier; and (d) Jeremy Renner gives the best performance.

If I was a Republican, being on the cover of Success would fill me with satisfaction. Ditto my latest film, Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows, being projected to earn $42 million and change by Sunday night [3,703 situations = an average of $11,450].

And I could roll with it badly trailing” the opening-weekend tally of the original (i.e.,$62.3 million). Ir’ll do well enough to justify a third installment, and then the Holmes franchise can diversify (TV series, video game, clothing line) and my portfolio will continue to expand with all kinds of investment and stock options.

“Robert Downey Jr. is currently carrying two movie franchises — the Marvel Iron Man proto-Avengers thing for Paramount and the brawling steampunk Sherlock Holmes series for Warner Brothers — so it is perhaps understandable that he is showing a touch of fatigue,” writes N.Y. Times critic A.O Scott.

“In the new Holmes adventure, A Game of Shadows, his imperiousness is hard to distinguish from boredom, and he seems to be in a hurry to spit out his lines, take his lumps, throw his punches and collect his paycheck.”