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 1/10th 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
