What a predictable list! Casablanca best screenplay of all time – didn't they make that up as they went along? Annie Hall in the top ten – don't they know it was salvaged in the editing?

Reading it, I assumed it was just American films, but no, La Grande Illusion and 8 1/2 (!!) sneak in there in the 80s, just to prove how cosmopolitan our WGA members really are.

Terrible list, though easily summed up by the fact that no less than two of the quotes (from PREMIERE's version) in the list (JAWS and MIDNIGHT COWBOY) were ad-libs, and the inclusion of STAR WARS. Good God.

Where is there a "Good" list? I'd like to find one. Did the WGA really picked these?

I think the PGA could pick better!

Lists are just there to start arguments and stoke publicity, really, though it would be nice if they had some substance to them. I actually confess to liking Premiere's new 100 Greatest Performances list. While it's certainly missing some great ones , it's hard to argue against most (most!) of them. Worth a look anyway. But these are kind of... eh.

cp

looking at this more closely now, as staid or predictable as some of these choices certainly are, there are quite a few that are hard to argue with. Some of my favorites made the list, including a few recent scripts like Eternal Sunshine and Groundhog Day. The problem with the list is how American it is. At first I thought it was like the AFI's list of 100 best American ______. But it's not, so it seems pretty Ameri-centric. Still, I'd love to know specifically which films people would see on it, and remove from it...

cp

Same old same old. With a few minor additions this list could've been compiled twenty-five years ago.

Star Wars. Someone voted for Star Wars. Because the screenplay is the reason we all loved Star Wars when we were five years old. As a matter of fact, when I was five years old, I had my mom read the Star Wars screenplay to me before bed.

No Boogie Nights? No Todd Solondz?

Casablanca. This list is for senior citizens. And in fifty years someone is going to try and convince me that The English Patient is the Most Important Film in the History of Mankind. I'll be in the waiting room of my doctor's office and the old man sitting next to me will say I think Magnolia stole all of it's ideas from Crash and not the other way around and I'll say I heard that too and then they'll call my name and it will be time for my prostate cancer chemotherapy.

Hollywood needs an enema. Citizen Kane is lodged in it's upper duendum, or whatever it is that they call that thing.

No Bergman, either, which seems a pretty glaring omission.

No Peter Weir. No Breaking Away by Steve Tesich, one of my own personal favorites and an Oscar winner. 1979 might be too new for this list.

I just noticed Star Wars after you pointed it out; my consciousness couldn't understand what it was seeing the first time I saw it sitting there.

German cinema seems underrepresented, too - what do you think David?

I'm not sure I'd put Todd Solondz on this list but Boogie Nights could've made it (though I find the third act of that script a little unwieldy).

C

Yes, the Germans are underrepresented, but so is the rest of Europe - with the exceptions, as Tom Charity points out, of one French and one Italian screenplay. All of Asia is shut out.

The inclusion of 8 1/2 and La Grande Illusion looks stranger and stranger as you realize they might have tacked onto the title of their list "... in English" and have done with it.

Except that there are so few English screenwriters represented. Sure, there's Stoppard (Shakespeare in Love), but no Pinter, no Christopher Hampton...

Weed out the few who are mentioned and you have a list of top American screenplays on which to base a real argument.