Sad to hear last week’s news of the death of Sidney Lumet. It’s a testament to the man that I asked my 19 year-olds at Columbia to name some Lumet movies. They were able to name a half-dozen or so. Network, of course. The Pacino movies: Dog Day Afternoon and Serpico. 12 Angry Men too. Not a one of them, though, had seen The Pawnbroker or Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Or two of my absolute favorites: Fail Safe and Family Business.

To a 19 year-old film school student, talking about the Golden Age of Television is about as interesting as talking about the Golden Age of spin telephones. Live 1960 broadcasts of Playhouse 90 or Kraft Theater just don’t seem relevant. Yet this is where Lumet broke in, with such TV hours as The Alcoa Hour or United States Steel Hour. This is also where men like John Frankenheimer, and Rod Serling, and Paddy Chayefski started. All the King’s Men, The Iceman Cometh, Long Day’s Journey… represent an incredible cultural heritage that Lumet helped pass down to us.

The man was also a teacher and would give tremendous advice about the craft of filmmaking.

I only have one personal story concerning Lumet. It was ’97 and I was working as a dice dealer in Aurora, Illinois. Jane Doe was in the works. The producers decided in their infinite wisdom to hire me as director (possibly because my fee would be exact $0). I had zero–repeat ZERO–experience as a film director. Not just that, I had stepped onto zero–repeat ZERO–film sets in my life. When I asked the producers why they had confidence in me they said:

“You know the world, you lived it! You’re the man!”

When I again expressed my concern about directing, I heard:

“Here’s a book. Everything you need to know is inside.”

“But I don’t know how to talk to the camera guy!“

“It’s ok, it’s in the book.“

“But I don’t know how to talk to the actors!“

“Paul…it’s…in…the…book.“

The book was Sidney Lumet’s Making Movies. Did reading it make Jane Doe a masterpiece? Ah, no. He was Lumet, not Christ. But the book got me by, gave me an instant foundation of the role of director in the film-making process. It helped make an Aurora, Illinois craps dealer into a quasi-competent director–quite the feat indeed.

Sidney–you’ll be remembered 200 years from now.

You are missed today.

So, you’re ready to roll. You’ve got the story outlined. You’ve worked the characters, got basic bios on your Protagonist, Antagonist, and key secondary characters. Worked up a basic backstory and fgured out how each sounds, what their day to day world is, how they interact, setting up A to Z character arcs along your structural outline. This leaves you only thing to do…

Write the damn thing! Want to write good dialogue? Give yourself a chance. This means not writing at 11pm after a 12-hour workday. It means not writing an hour on Saturday on the back porch before the kid’s soccer game. Is this script a priority or not? I know I know, you want it to be a priority, but life intrudes. The inconsequential matters of making money, taking care of a family, etc. I hear ya…but you’ve got to find a  flow. Great dialogue will never happen if you don’t give yourself a chance. Write with energy.

Kill the Perfectionist in you. Remember the Salieri scene in Amadeus, looking at Mozart’s manuscript pages, and not a single change. The music written from God’s own hand. Guess what—you ain’t Mozart! Want to know how to not write great dialogue? Try to make it perfect the first time. Novice writers make the mistake of rewriting the first 30 pages over and over, going for perfection. Don’t do it. Rough draft dialogue, even in a fully outlined script, will probably be little more than placeholder dialogue. Don’t sweat it. You need to push out with the rough draft, get it on paper, and then rewrite. Can’t write a joke for your scene? Don’t stop, even if you have to write: INSERT HILARIOUS JOKE HERE. Kill the perfectionist in you.

Never trust the first solution. You’re in the shower when you hear it: The dialogue for the scene you’ve been struggling with—and primo dialogue! You drop the Shay Butter soap and run out to write it down. Great stuff, right?! Maybe, maybe not. If I were you, I would never trust the first solution, the first choice. Sure, write it down, but be distrustful. Maybe it’s the exact dialogue I want, but I’m not settling for it. Why? Recall Robert McKee in his book Story: The first thing off the top of the screenwriter’s head: Cliché.

Plausibility: What would I do? One of your characters says something—do you buy it? Will an audience buy it? One way you can know if a situation is truthful: Become the character. What would you do if you were facing the same choice as your character? How would you react? Is it plausible? Inhabit the skin of your characters. If it’s truthful to you, there’s a decent chance it will ring truthful for a reader, or an audience.

10-5-2-0: Finding the visual solution: You’ve got 10 lines of dialogue in a scene–see if you can write it with five lines. If you’ve got five lines, try to do it in two. If you’ve got two, can it be done without a single line of dialogue? Always look for the visual solution.

Avoid direct responses. “Who won the Super Bowl?” “The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl.” “They beat the Bears, didn’t they?” “They beat the Bears, yes.” “You being a Bear fan, guess it kinda sucks being you.” Pulls out a gun, shoots him. “Not as much as being you.”

Beware exposition: “Hi Phil! How about this weather, huh?” “Snow… Reminds me of when we were rolling through Baghdad…” Followed by a five-minute monologue on the Iraq War. “What’s your problem, Mary?” “My problem? I’m glad you asked…” Followed by a three-minute monologue about problems with her husband. On and on like this. Five full pages of expositional blather that crushes subtext. Don’t do it.

Write it, Read it: Many times after reading student material they seem amazed: “I can’t believe it took that long!” What I can’t believe is that they never took the time to read it when they created it. Read it as you write it, every page of it. How it looks on the page isn’t the same as how the thing will read. These are words that will come from an actor’s mouth. What’s it sound like?

Subtext: Slow Train Coming: Think of dialogue as railroad tracks. Two rails: One, the said. One, the unsaid. Subtext is saying it without saying it. Confused? I’m talking about the intention behind the scene. When you write in every thought in a character’s mind, you kill subtext.

Example: Lost In Translation. For me, one of the best directors for subtext is Sophia Coppola. Here’s a scene on an elevator with Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson. It’s 3 a.m., they’re drunk. He desperately wants to sleep with her, she’s not so sure:

Or, of course, the ending, where you never do hear what he whispers to her. Great choice, even in Italian!

You don’t have to say everything in dialogue. Actors fill in the emotional gaps between words. Next movie you look at, start looking at the subtext—the meaning, the emotion between the words.

Study the Masters: The Three Davids: Simon, Chase, Milch The case could be made that the “three Davids” made HBO. The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood—are there three better TV shows in the history of television? David Chase defined the sound of modern gangsters with Tony Soprano and his New Jersey crew. David Milch, flat-out genius. He writes laid out on his side, dictating to a typist through a TV screen with a roomful of writers behind him, reworking even line of dialogue in Deadwood like some megalomaniacal Shakespeare (check the box set to watch him in action, pretty amazing).

Or, with The Wire, the devastating authenticity of the dialogue. The series praised for its uncompromising, documentary-style look at the social woes of modern-day Baltimore. Why does it feel so truthful? How do they do it? David Simon (and some incredible co-writers, Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, among others) in five years created literally hundreds of characters; worked out character arcs, plot twists for entire seasons in advance, but the dialogue! We’re at home with detectives laying out one of their own on an Irish barroom pool table. We’re at home with the intricacies of City Hall, following a corrupt Mayor on his way out, and an ambitious State Senator on his way to being Governor. We’ve get a season with Polish dock workers; get a season set in the Baltimore school system; we see life on the drug-infested streets of West Baltimore. And the characters—Jimmy McNulty, Stringer Bell, Avon Barksdale, Marlo Stanfield and Omar Little—all with utterly believable, utterly authentic voices.

Isn’t it depressing, to think how far away you are as a writer from these guys? But what to do about it?  You can’t go wrong studying The Davids. Their history, how did they come up with the ideas, how did the dialogue develop. Like the poet said: Writing is “war all the time.” Don’t give up.

Write a million words: I didn’t invent this one, but it’s true. How do you find your voice? Outwork the other 70,000+ people who registered scripts with the Writer’s Guild last year. Not to discourage you, but lots of folks are writing the Great American Screenplay. Maybe it’s my circle, but I know very few people writing novels. On the other hand everybody—and I do mean everybody—has a screenplay. How can you stand out? Make your dialogue sing. And how exactly do you do that? Hopefully you found some ideas here in the last couple weeks. It might just come down to this:

Work your craft.

As a playwright, I used to hate readings. I’d put in months of work, and then have actors read my stuff in front of an “objective” audience. When the lights came up, the criticism began. I was expected to go back to the drawing board, spend another two months with no pay to fix what these folks—who had spent a grand total of two hours in my world—thought was wrong. It suuuucked!

In retrospect, this was exactly the wrong attitude. Good Reader, if you break out in a rash when asked to rewrite your screenplay, you might want to stop writing screenplays. This isn’t the game for you. There’s no avoiding rewriting. The tough love comes with actually believing that rewriting is necessary and beneficial.

Seek out good council. Develop an “inner circle” of people you trust; find a writer’s group; seek out professional critique if necessary. Filter the comments; see what makes sense and what doesn’t. Then write the second draft. Then start your second screenplay. And your third. And your fourth. Control what you can control. Outwork everybody. Write a story that is important to you, to which the powers-that-be can’t say no. Make your dialogue so authentic that an audience recognizes it as compelling and true.

Write a million words.

I recently gave a lecture on dialogue at Chicago Screenwriter’s Network. Since 1995, CSN has provided an excellent resource for local screenwriters. Featured speakers have included Harold Ramis, Linda Seger, and Tim Kazurinski. Many thanks to Bethany Lape for having me, and for the work the good folks at CSN do in serving the Chicago screenwriting community.

Here are some thoughts on dialogue from the lecture…

Years ago, a connection in law enforcement gave me a wiretap transcript between The Ex-Governor of Illinois, Rod Blagojevich and the future Mayor of Chicago, Rahm Emanuel. If you want a taste of Chicago’s political corruption, have a read… I’ll wait.

What do you hear?  F-bombs dropping as from two scotch-rocks Mamet salesmen. But what else? Did you hear the repetition, the rhythms, interruptions in that dialogue? How about the power dynamic? Pay-to-play politics, Chicago-style. This is verbal warfare. Both guys have agendas, they come in with wants and needs. Blago trying to, essentially, extort money for the Senate seat. Trying to say that without saying it. Rahm takes the call out of courtesy but wants nothing to do with the Governor. Each tries to control the call. Thus, is born conflict. Or, Orson Wells once said: Everyone has their reasons. Understanding who and what drives a scene—and the dialogue within the scene—will go a long way toward making your movie ring true.

Can you “teach funny”? Can writing dialogue, comedic or dramatic, be “learned”? Second City—the Chicago comedy institution—might have a thing or two to say on this subject. Tens of thousands have gone through their schooling. From John Belushi to Stephen Colbert, their  success stories are too numerous to mention. So the answer would be yes, right?

It’s not an irrelevant question to ask: If tens of thousands of people went through Second City improvisational teaching, and hundreds now make their living at it: What about the thousands who aren’t making a living at it? They got the same training as the success stories, sooooo….? Not to get into the whole nature/nurture debate… I think we could agree that the theory of comedy can be taught; you can learn improvisation games, read endless books and become better by working the craft of comedy writing, but…how do I teach you, exactly, to write funny dialogue?

I sat in on a Comedy Guru’s traveling seminar a few months back. Among other lessons, he pointed out that comedy isn’t always Jack Black flailing arms and squealing as he chokes on a chocolate éclair. It’s the fact that his date doesn’t notice he’s in the process of croaking. In other words, her reaction. He then showed clips from Abbot and Costello to a David Cross skit that emphasized his point—yes, the laugh was in the reaction. Fine, got it, now what? He set up a writing exercise with a similar premise and had students write a 10-line scene. The seminar-folk wrote them and proceeded to read them. It’s being charitable to say they weren’t successful. Interestingly, he had given them the theory of it but, in the end: They still had to sit down and write the freakin’ scene! Alone!

If I can teach you to write comedy then I can teach you to write drama, the question is: Why do some people walk into the room Day 1 being able to write killer dialogue. Others give 1000%, work at it, work at it, and it never happens for them. Why?

If the craft of dialogue writing can be taught, what are some of things I’d recommend?  How about starting with these:

Charlie Kaufman has two ears. So do Quentin Tarantino, Shane Black, Paul Haggis, and Diablo Cody—two ears. Here’s the good news: So do you. Writing dialogue is about hearing it. Write the scene. Now, read it. Does it sound natural? How can you tell? What I’m about to tell you is painful, but… You need to listen to people. On the subway, on the line at Target. What you’ll hear is that screenplay dialogue isn’t a regurgitation of real life speech. It’s a stylized recreation. Movie dialogue isn’t perfectly formed Noun/Verb sentences: It’s repetition, lost thoughts, rhythms, pacing, stuttering, political outlook, educational background, tension and release, subtext.

Good dialogue is imperfection. It works to fill the gap between character action and inner thought. It provides information that, for some reason, cannot find a visual solution. Dialogue serves story and character. Why are you in the scene? Can you say it without saying it—i.e.: find the visual solution. No? Fine, say it in dialogue. But find subtext. Don’t verbalize everything. Let the actor fill in the emotional gaps between words. Start by writing it, and then speak it back to yourself. Hear the words. Do you buy it? A cop talking about the trajectory of a bullet. An astronaut talking about a propulsion system. Not convincing? Write it again. Get specific. Write the same passage 10 times until it sounds passable. Then write it an 11th until it’s more than passable. Hear it.

Be a sponge. More good news: You’re on a subway, two people are talking and it’s…amazing. I mean genius. It’s ridiculous, demented, and sooo out there you could never have dreamed it up. Time to go into sponge mode. Drop everything and get the conversation down on paper. Can it be used for your screenplay? Unless they’re speaking a passage of an unpublished magnum opus, the words they just spoke—you just wrote them. Why do you own them? Because you recognized their genius, their divine absurdity. Truth is stranger than fiction. Write believable dialogue by tapping into real life conversations. Check out these OVERHEARD DIALOGUE examples. Could you have written these from scratch?

What, exactly, are you trying to say? I once went to a lecture by Judith Malina, co-founder of the Living Theater. You might know her as Grandmama in the original The Adams Family movie. She told us that, when beginning a project, she always asks herself: What is it I’m trying to say? Pretty basic thought, huh? How many of you do it though? Every scene you write, every line of dialogue, should move to say what you’re trying to say. If it’s a revenge tale, every Act 1 scene should set up the revenge, every Act 3 scene pays it off. Dialogue advances character or plot or it has no reason for being. But it should also have a thematic basis. Figure out what you need to say in the scene, say it, and get out.

The essence of you: What’s important? You, as God of the Realm, have a responsibility: A little piece of you should be in every character. How will that filter into dialogue? If what you write rings true to you, you stand a decent chance that the words will resonate with your audience. Example: If you had an abortion, and were writing a script where a character had to undergo a similar abortion experience, some piece of you would be in that scene. You could write it not just with authenticity but with an emotional POV that would strike a chord with audience members. Does the writer have to first-hand experience everything their characters do? Absolutely not. But you must come at dialogue with an understanding of what’s true to you. Get those feelings into dialogue and the story will ring true.

Research: Public Domain and the gathering of bullets: I wrote a 1921 stage adaptation of Ben Hecht’s A Thousand And One Afternoons In Chicago. The play was based on a book compilation of Hecht columns for the Chicago Daily News. Early on it occurred to me that the publisher had only used about a hundred of the 300+ articles Hecht wrote. So I wondered: What about the rest of the columns? This sent me hunting in the microfilm room at Harold Washington library Contrary to popular notion, there are some things that can’t be found in a Google search. Yes, I spent months hunch-backed over the broken down and antiquated microfilm machines at Harold Washington, but there was an upside. The 1921 Chicago Daily News material circa 1921 was public domain. Meaning I could use it—dialogue, scene ideas, characters—at no cost. Should anyone ask, of course I would attribute it to Hecht (as I do here)…but if it’s public domain, if you dig it out, you can adapt it.

Sure, I could have tried to create—from scratch—a scene with a 1921 Flapper-girl in the Green Mill nightclub. Or I could go to the pages of the Chicago Daily News, pull a story about the Green Mill with dialogue from the patrons who were in the club that night, and excerpt it for a scene I need. Out of dry and dusty microfilm Limbo springs forth “fresh” dialogue, and probably 10X better than anything I could have dreamed up.

The writer needs authenticity—the appearance of being an expert in matters in which he is not an expert. It’s not required but wouldn’t hurt the authenticity of your words if—before you write that spec Chicago Code episode–you actually ride with a Chicago cop for a day or two, or interview a Chicago cop for their POV. Research is critical for dialogue.

Example: You’re trying to write a scene  with a cop talking about the trajectory of a .9mm bullet. You haven’t a clue about that subject. So, what to do?  One word: Google. Google is a force of nature (a damn good spell-checker too!). It’s also a great way to add details about whatever subject you need. You can’t copyright single words. If you can’t ride with actual cops and ask them, ask Google. Root them specific wording, slap it into your writing for authenticity. And speaking of thievery…

Steal Well. “Bad artists copy, great artists steal.” –Picasso. It was one thing for a specific shade of red Picasso saw in someone else’s picture to turn up in his own paintings, but… I’m not actually advocating plagiarism, riiiiiight? As with everything else in life, it depends on interpretation. For instance, Tarantino. One of the great writer/directors of our time! How can people talk shit about him?! Tarantino a thief?! It’s nuts…

Or is it?

There is thievery and there is re-interpretation. One doesn’t have to be a plagiarist to steal well. Using someone’s concept but bending it for your own purposes, changing it enough to make it your own—that’s been done, and some of the culprits are American Film Institute Hall-Of-Famers, believe it. Steal well, but carefully, O ye hearts of larceny! And remember: You didn’t hear it from me!