Schlock on Trial

Anschutz’s Witness Accuses Clive Cussler of Bad Writing

By Jenny Shank, 4-16-07

Since February, Denver businessman Phil Anschutz and Arizona-based writer Clive Cussler have been battling in court over the fate of the screen adaptation of Cussler’s 1992 Dirk Pitt adventure novel, Sahara, which was made into a box-office bomb of a movie in 2005 by Anschutz’s Crusader Entertainment.  (EW.com offers an informative timeline here.) Cussler filed a lawsuit over the fiasco, and Crusader Entertainment countersued.  Tom McGhee of the Denver Post wrote about the lawsuits here--basically, each side says the other is to blame for the financial failure of the film.  Last week, there was a development in the trial that should be of interest to writers: Screenwriting teacher Robert McKee (who played himself in a cameo as a screenwriting teacher in Adaptation) appeared as an expert witness for Crusader Entertainment and vilified Cussler for bad writing.  Glenn F. Bunting of the L.A. Times quotes McKee as saying: “I mean, I cannot overstate how terrible the writing is.  It is flawed in every way writing can be flawed.”

Cussler didn’t respond to this assertion, but his lawyer did:

“Attorney Bertram Fields said McKee’s verbal attacks were ‘totally irrelevant’ to the case. ‘He is a very good actor and he uses colorful language,’ Fields said. ‘I think he was all wet.’

Notice that Fields didn’t make any claims for the timeless literary qualities of Cussler’s fiction.  Those of us who didn’t lose money on the development of Sahara can sit back and enjoy the rest of McKee’s reflections on Cussler’s writing:

“The writing is very bad. How bad? I have thought of phrases like ’seriously flawed’ [or] ‘fatally flawed.’ But it is beyond all of that, because when something is flawed there is an implication that something else about it is good… On average, there is something unbelievable happening every two minutes.”

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