Where the Scripts Are

Ladd blames the movie industry’s sagging box office on a dearth of good screenplays.

I would suggest that the problem has more to do with a surfeit of bad buyers, who fall into the following categories:

* The studio executives who hide their inability to evaluate scripts by letting readers do their jobs for them. Unfortunately, because of incompetence or envy, these overworked employees frequently prevent the best material from being read at a higher level.

* The producers who (a) think that packaging a director and star is more important than a well-constructed, fleshed-out story, or (b) believe that a screenplay has to read like a comic strip to be commercial--a fallacy responsible for more lousy films than a legion of hack writers.

Until self-serving rationalizations such as Ladd’s are abandoned and qualified people replace the inept, box-office figures will continue to wither.

DAVID EVANS

Sepulveda