Truby expresses his respect for Avatar:

In all the visual splendor of James Cameron’s Avatar, it’s easy to overlook the script. In fact, the Avatar screenplay has come in for the same abuse Cameron’s Titanic script earned. You’ve heard the complaints: the story is a Pocahontas rip-off. The bad guys are just evil villains. The dialogue is stilted. In short, great visuals, bad screenwriting. The critics aren’t so much wrong as irrelevant.

He goes on to explain how the film is a combo of the “eco-myth” and the “disaster” genre and how Cameron is a “brilliant writer of pop culture.” Expect to see several new specs that purport the love of trees and all things nature within the next year.

One of my all-time favorite storytellers interviewed fifteen years later:

I just tried to write honestly, and I tried to make this little world fun to look at, so people would take the time to read it. That was the full extent of my concern. You mix a bunch of ingredients, and once in a great while, chemistry happens. I can’t explain why the strip caught on the way it did, and I don’t think I could ever duplicate it. A lot of things have to go right all at once.

Two months later and the dogpile continues:

A script in active development is not a blueprint for a movie, it is an archeological footprint of the development process itself. It reflects a writers reaction to producers, her input from her agent but not her manager, his notes that get the lead actor attached, the draft that costs $30 million more than any studio would spend, the version that attracts foreign sales agents. A draft is just a draft, a living creature caught in a freeze frame. Every time we send one out we think of a million things that could be different. They aren’t meant to tell the story the way a movie is meant to tell a story. Not even close.

For the record, I like ScriptShadow for no other reason than it constantly amazes me what people consider to be “good” screenplays.