Life & Wisdom Quote by Nicholas Meyer

Meyer’s line has the bite of an industry veteran who’s watched too many “sure things” evaporate between a pitch meeting and a greenlight. By calling a screenplay a “blueprint,” he strips it of literary romance and reassigns it to labor: functional, collaborative, and fundamentally contingent. A novel can be read in solitude and stay itself; a screenplay exists to be transformed, misread, revised by committee, and ultimately overwritten by reality - budget, casting, locations, studio politics, the weather, an actor’s face doing something the writer never imagined.

The kicker is the quiet cruelty in “most likely never be built.” That phrase doesn’t just acknowledge high failure rates; it reframes the screenwriter’s job as creating persuasive potential rather than delivering a finished artifact. The screenplay becomes a speculative object, closer to a proposal than a product, designed to mobilize other people’s money and attention. That’s the subtext: screenwriting isn’t only art, it’s also lobbying.

Context matters here because Meyer comes from the world of adaptations and franchise filmmaking, where authorship is always distributed and permanence is a myth. The line draws a boundary against the fetishization of the script as “cinema on the page.” He’s not saying screenplays can’t be beautifully written; he’s saying their beauty is secondary to their usefulness. A blueprint can be elegant, even visionary, and still end up in a drawer. That’s not failure so much as the medium’s default condition.