Why movies should not be written by committee (Or: Why I hated Yesterday )
By: Thom Leaman
Tags: Movies, Yesterday Movie, Uk Film Industry, Film Reviews, Love Actually

OK so this not exactly the quickest film review off the mark but I’m on a plane and when travelling on a plane as most of us know when it comes to on flight entertainment you tend to defer to the less challenging content and those films and shows that you passed on by at release perhaps because it was not something you’d want to risk spending money on. A long transatlantic flight gives you the chance to swim in the seas of the less aesthetic and more anodyne. So it was I found myself on my flight from Dublin to Dulles watching Danny Boyle’s recent hit Yesterday. And so it is having watched the thing that I now feel compelled to vent my spleen regarding a film that came out several months past.

Yesterday, in case you do not know, tells the tale of a world in which the music of The Beatles is stricken from everyone’s memory — everyone except one young musician — Jack Malik — who tours the world with Ed Sheeran in tow belting out Beatles numbers to anyone who cares to listen, which of course is much of the known world.

Now I’m not much of a Beatles fan. Often you utter those words and people just assume you are trying to be deliberately contrary and controversial. But it’s the truth. Of course they were good songwriters and they were certainly prolific — if Yesterday does nothing else (and I will attempt to show in the words that follow that indeed it does do nothing else) as Jack is remembering song after song you cannot help but marvel at just how many Beatles songs are engrained in our cultural make up. The simple truth as far as I’m concerned is that when it comes to musical habit there have just always been plenty of other bands I would rather listen too. I don’t hate The Beatles, I just don’t care that much about them.

All that said, I have no cross to bear with the band or their music. I sat through the whole movie so I can’t dislike them that much. But I did dislike the movie Yesterday. Boy did I dislike that movie. My distaste had little to do with The Beatles and everything to do with bad decisions and movie math gone wrong. And this, dear reader, is what I’d like to spew forth on.

You can picture the scene. A bunch of film execs sitting in Working Titles’ board room in Soho Square. They are discussing their latest production slate and one chirpy exec pipes up ‘We have the music of The Beatles, Danny Boyle directing, Richard Curtis writing the screenplay, Ed fucking Sheeran guest starring, Working Title producing. How can could this not work?!’ Indeed from a marketing perspective those are some pretty solid gold hooks. But there lies the problem — if you produce a film solely to look good on the sales sheet but then get the work experience guy to write the thing you are in for a problem. A whole heap of problems.

But the work experience guy didn’t write Yesterday. Richard Curtis did. Richard bleeding Curtis! Richard Curtis who gave us ‘Blackadder’. Hell, Richard Curtis who gave us Love fucking Actually. Love Actually — by the way — is a film with many, many, many faults, but I would have it streamed directly into my eyeballs on repeat sooner than having to watch Yesterday even one more time. So how did he get it so wrong here? Well the proof evidently is in the pudding. This is not a badly written film. It is a film barely written at all. There is zero craft to it — zero diligence. It reads like a drunken first draft. I’d be hugely surprised if it wasn’t. I’d be worried in fact if it wasn’t. If what we saw there is the result of the usual multiple revisions and drafts, then the state of British film production is worse than I feared.

Instead I’d suspect the terrible writing and the plot holes you could fly a star destroyer through are the result of some great hubris on the part of the producers and those film execs. When you have all those elements altogether in one movie, who cares if the film makes no sense whatsoever. Really the writing is just a prop to keep all those other marketable elements in play right? I suspect Curtis turned in his vomit draft to the producers and they rolled camera on it there and then without a second thought.

It should come as no surprise that a film so evidently written by a committee can get things so wrong. I have been around the film industry long enough to know that those production meetings are mostly populated by older white men of a certain social class. But really the sheer ignorance on display in Yesterday is astonishing. The film’s big denouement sees Jack get his own back on the greedy record label execs by putting his music out for free on the internet! Shock horror! Really though, are the Yesterday writing committee actually so out of touch with modern reality that they understand this today be a cataclysmic event? Or in their imagined alternate movie timeline do Spotify et al also not exist and they just neglected to include that plot point?

This is just one of many such transgressions but so indicative of everything that’s wrong with the film industry and the over reliance on existing IP and unwillingness to encourage fresh ideas.

But hell if you can’t beat them, join them right? Working Title, if you’re listening I have an idea for a meta sequel to Yesterday. It stars me and I wake up in an alternate timeline where the film Yesterday doesn’t exist. Now that I’d pay to watch.