Good Readers…

En route to the Philippines, I leave you with some thoughts about the business of screenwriting from some Hollywood writers who have paid dues much longer than I. I don’t claim to have but a glimmer of first-hand experience here, but I will add this profound, cosmococcic statement:

The biz kinda…sucks.

You will be eaten alive if you don’t concern yourself with the biz. The journey from idea to finished spec script, lengthy and hellish as it may be, is 1/10^th the journey. The rest is the gentle art of making it. The biz, Good Reader—neglect it at your peril.

Talk to you all soon, from the other side of the world.

PP

“I never had an original idea in Hollywood. Well, I did, but no one ever liked them. . . . To make myself feel better, I repeated my mantra over and over, The check is good. The check is good. It’s the mantra of all L.A. screenwriters — once they find out that after years of hard pitching, writing, rewriting, and silly story meetings, there is no movie, no audience, no satisfaction — or that there is a movie but it has little in common with the script they wrote.”

– William Missouri Downs

“How deeply do I let business considerations affect choices that might otherwise be more or less esthetic? . . . Do I choose the upbeat rather than the downer ending because I know it will score better at the preview? Can the idea be sold in a single sentence? Can it compete with space aliens and tornadoes and missions impossible?”– Edward Zwick

“Sometimes I hear that some studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it.”– Mike Leigh

“You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people. What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big broad joke, a high concept. Everything is tested. The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer’s confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent.”– James L. Brooks

“ . . the movie business flattens everything in its wake like an ancient dead tree falling from an immense height into a particularly soft spot of moist, dumb green grass. . . . I suppose the only things that have ever seemed to hold my interest in life are the stories we tell one another, the things overheard and unsaid, the choices people make, their desires and fears and dreams. But it’s very difficult to pursue that interest in the movies of today, perhaps to pursue that interest in the America of today. Because in the America of today, the sole arbiter of nearly every kind of art (or even entertainment) is not what it provides but only what it makes.”– John Malkovich

“[My  screenplays are not dark. Dark is a code word in Hollywood for uncommercial. I've always been interested in people, perfectly intelligent people, who seem to have some sort of grasp on life but go around acting in a self-defeating way because they are expressing some neurosis -- either sexual or spiritual. The guy who saves a President's plane from terrorists isn't terribly interesting to an artist. . . . The goal of any artist -- somebody else said this, but I'll take credit for it -- is to attempt to sell out but fail. By that yardstick, I've done pretty well. Though at some point the product becomes unworth your time and effort. [Martin] Scorsese and I went through this with BRINGING OUT THE DEAD. At the last minute, we received notes from the producer trying to simplify the main character’s struggle to more of a problem-solution situation. But life tends to give us dilemmas, which are never really solved. Marty and I wrote the producer back, saying that, true or not, you see character as an instrument of elucidation, whereas we see character as an instrument of mystery.”– Paul Schrader

“Being a good filmmaker does not mean you know how to sell your idea. But to succeed, that’s exactly what you’re going to have to do, over and over.”–Joe Pichirallo

“The usual wages of screenwriting in Hollywood are money and oblivion .”–Aljean Harmetz

“Nobody goes to Hollywood to sell their soul. The truth is, people give it up for free.”–Emma-Kate Croghan

Screen Direction and Dialogue. Less the slugline, that is all there is to a screenplay. While it might be argued that dialogue is far more important, the ability to write clean, crisp screen direction is essential.

What is the best way to go about it? Recall the earlier definition: Screen direction is what the camera sees—with attitude. There are two parts to this, let’s examine them both:

What the camera sees … The easier part, one would think, is to write in a clean and basic style only what the audience sees. Sadly, there is nothing easy about this.

How much do you describe? What if you leave something important out?  You read so many scripts that include massive detail, including camera direction. If there’s no one correct model, how the hell do you write it so your script stands out?

Make the script a good read.

What’s that mean? It means you want the reader to read it relentlessly. You want the reader to read it fast, to be a page turner; a teaser, a heartbreaker, or a laugh a minute.  It means—for screen direction—you want the script to read vertically, to give white space, to not have more than five lines in any paragraph. You want to pick strong, active verbs; ditch all weak adverbs and adjectives (Walks slowly? Anyone can write that!) You want to avoid all unnecessary detail. You want to never write character thoughts or write “in the head.” You want to get in late, get out early. Accomplish what the scene needs to accomplish, and get out.

But will that be enough to make you stand out? No.

You need to take it further. And here’s where the “with attitude” part enters.

With screen direction, the key is POV.

You need to inject your personality, your voice, your POV, into screen direction.  How do you do that with the strict “show only what the camera sees” rule? The answer is: You don’t.

Tell the story straight-forward where you can; give us poetry and POV when you have to. Do it when you want to blow the reader away, in key moments and scenes. I don’t need devastating description when the protagonist walks into a Starbucks for a latte.  I might need it, though, when the protagonist’s mother dies.

Not sure what I mean by POV? Let’s look at some examples. The first, from Backdraft:

Beautiful. We are put, literally, into the character’s mind. “I never forget a face, kid…” is the character talking to the fire in screen direction. This is exactly what you want for your script—screen direction as extension of dialogue. “Something flesh-colored. Shit. It’s a body.” Right into Brian’s head. Exactly.

The best example of POV I’ve ever seen comes from—can you believe it?—a Rom Com. My Best Friend’s Wedding. A stylistic tour-de-force that, from page 1, puts you into a scary place–right into Julia Roberts character’s head:

Two levels at work here. Sure, we get the basics. Who’s in the shot and what’s happening. She’s forging a letter, praying she doesn’t get caught. But look at how we’re getting the information. Pure POV. The reader experiences every second—in screen direction—through her eyes.

This is writing no longer concerned about just craft. This is beyond craft.

This is where the art in screenwriting is found.

“I don’t write screenplay character biographies beforehand. I usually go in knowing some sequences: this is where I want to start, this is where I want to end.”– John Sayles

“Character arcs always seem to be a big issue with film studio executives . . . so the inevitable questions were posed: What was her emotional journey? How does she change? Is she a rich little snob who learns to embrace the less fortunate when she becomes penniless or is she a racist who becomes more liberal when she . . . yawn yawn.”–Elizabeth Chandler

One of the highest compliments any writer can hear is: “Your movie brought back memories of my brother.  He died last year….” Or, “Your movie meant so much to me. My mother was the same way…”

Strike a chord with people. Write something that resonates. Synthesize the personal into something that resonates as universal. Do this and you have found—as the Bard once said—the crux of the biscuit.

But how do you write characters that resonate, that will mean something to the audience?

Consider this: In all moviedom, there are only three types of character models:

1)    Characters that exist in the real world.

2)   Characters that are wholly invented.

3)   Characters that are a combination of 1 or 2.

As the writer, you are God.

You decide every breath every character in your movie will take. Characters based strictly on people you know in the real world can sometimes turn sentimental, can lose perspective. Then again, if you base them entirely on fiction, they may be stiff, lack real-life passion, dialogue, or humor.

My choice is Column 3. The Frankenstein monster of part creation, part real.

Often times what happens in real life cannot be believed, let alone invented. Ever see anyone eat baby back ribs like Uncle Rocky? How about your pal Mickey who works graveyard shift at the porno bookstore and feeds you dialogue no human being has ever uttered before.

Grab a pen, write down every word Mickey says because…

It’s Life: Use it all.

Sunday afternoon on line at Target. 2 A.M. Saturday on the Chicago Transit Authority Blue Line. You hear someone say something and it’s good. Grab a pen, get it down on paper. Assuming it’s not a passage from a published novel, if you hear it and get it down, you just wrote it.

Someone at the Post Office looks exactly like the antagonist you imagined in your story? Grab a pen; write down every detail of his look; the way he moves, even what he says. Stranger than fiction, you usually cannot beat what the real world offers.