We all know Fifty Shades of Grey is a disaster. The books were terrible, the movie was even worse (if that’s even possible), and if that wasn’t clear before, it will be now: turns out Kelly Marcel, the screenwriter who worked on the movie, won’t even watch the finished product because it’s just that awful. Marcel hated the experience of working on it so much, that’s why EL James handed the job over to her husband for the sequel.
Here’s what Marcel had to say to Bret Easton Ellis on his podcast this week (via US Weekly):
“I very much wanted to do something different with the screenplay, and when I spoke to the studio and the producers and made that quite clear, they were very enthusiastic about that and kind of loved the things I wanted to do,” she explained. “When I delivered that script was when I realized that all of them saying, ‘Yeah, absolutely this is what we want,’ and, ‘You can write anything you like and get crazy and artistic with it’ — that was utter, utter bulls–t.”
“My heart really was broken by that process, I really mean it,” Marcel continued. “I don’t see it out of any kind of bitterness or anger or anything like that. I just don’t feel like I can watch it without feeling some pain about how different it is to what I initially wrote.”
Why am I not surprised? The fact that Fifty Shades is even a thing is sad enough on its own, but to know that they couldn’t even try to put lipstick on a pig, so to speak, with a good script is even more pathetic.