Don't get it right, get it written

Some advice for aspiring screenwriters:

The secret of screenwriting success is simply this: Don't get it right, get it written.  – Art Arthur

So many people drop out after a few classes. Most people never finish a screenplay. I impress on my students to finish in the time allotted. There are a lot of perfectionists out there who kinda circle around and around and research and read books and study—and they never really finish screenplays. What I took away from my teachers was they made me finish scripts.  – Kris Young, UCLA

Butch Cassidy

I don’t know what it means, a perfect story. I think you just wanna basically try to figure out the story, and stay in the story as long as you can and as closely as you can, and end it. I think when you start telling yourself, “I wanna write a perfect thing,” all you’re gonna do is castrate yourself, and get into deeper and deeper trouble. It’s hard to do anyway. It’s no fun going into your pit every day and trying to figure out how to get two or three or five pages. Some days you don’t do anything. Then if you have two crappy days in a row, you’re really in deep shit. You just wanna get it done, and you pray someone will like it.   – William Goldman

Toy Story 3

The first draft is nothing more than a starting point, so be wrong as fast as you can.  – Andrew Stanton

Actually finishing it is what I’m gonna put in as step one. You may laugh at this, but it’s true. I have so many friends who have written two-thirds of a screenplay, and then re-written it for about three years. Finishing a screenplay is first of all truly difficult, and secondly really liberating. Even if it’s not perfect, even if you know you’re gonna have to go back into it, type to the end. You have to have a little closure.   – Joss Whedon

Once you start writing your screenplay, the most important advice I can possibly give you is to keep going. Do not go back and make revisions under any circumstances. Once started, press on like there's a pack of wolves nipping at your ass.  – William Froug

First posted:  11 October 2011

Tales from the Script

Book

Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories, by Peter Hanson and Paul Herman.

DVD

Here's a collection of interviews – in book form and on DVD – with a bunch of real screenwriters, including William Goldman, Shane Black, Frank Darabont, Paul Schrader, Nora Ephron, John August, John Carpenter, Paul Mazursky, Ron Shelton, Robert Mark Kamen, Antwone Fisher, David S. Ward, Steven E. de Souza, and others. (If you don't recognise all those names, you haven't been doing your homework as a screenwriter.) 

The book is great, the DVD is better. Partly for the joy of seeing the writers and hearing them speak, but also because of all the Extras on the disc. Worth it for the Advice for New Screenwriters section alone.

Here is a video clip which provides a taste of what's on the DVD.

First posted:10 October 2011

You're not interesting enough...

On September 30, Charlie Kaufman – Being John Malkovich,  Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Synecdoche, New York – was one of the speakers at the 2011 BAFTA Screenwriters' Lecture Series. His comments have been reported in a number of places, including The Guardian.

One of the many quotable lines from the session addresses a fear which afflicts some aspiring screenwriters: You're not interesting enough to be writing movies.

My first writing job was on a TV show called Get a Life. The show was mostly in the voice of its creators, Chris Elliott and Adam Resnick, who'd worked on the David Letterman Show. Adam's scripts were the best thing about Get a Life – and we all tried to write in Adam's voice. That was the job. 

I was frustrated with the results, but it occurred to me that there was no solution as long as my job was trying to imitate someone else's voice. The obvious solution was to find a situation where I was doing me, not someone else. The major obstacle to this is your deeply seated belief that "you" is not interesting.      –– Charlie Kaufman

If Charlie Kaufman wrestled with the fear of being uninteresting, there's hope for the rest of us. 

First posted:  8 October 2011

Advice from Joe Eszterhas

Devil's Guide

One of the most successful spec screenwriters in Hollywood in the 1980s and '90s was Joe Eszterhas. His films included F.I.S.T., Flashdance, Music Box, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, and Telling Lies in America.

A lot of people don't like him for his lifestyle, his drug use, his arrogance, or his choice of stories to tell. I'm not here to defend him over any of those things, just to say: If you want to see how to write a great script that sells, read one by Joe. You can find a copy of the script for Basic Instinct here. 

Basic Instinct

In 2006 he published The Devil's Guide to Hollywood, a mix of reminiscences and Hollywood trivia in the guise of a handbook for wannabe screenwriters. (It's an eye-opener; well worth reading.)

In the following video, recorded at a public reading of that book in 2006, Joe talks about his research and how he went about writing some of his scripts, including Basic Instinct.
 

First posted: 4 October 2011

"The script will write itself."

Freaks

I finally got to see the classic Tod Browning movie, Freaks (1932) the other night. It's an amazing film, and well worth the effort needed to track it down. Sadly, it pretty much ended Browning's career, but that's often the way with art. The better your work, the less it's appreciated. Until you're dead, of course. Just ask Vincent Van Gogh.

The Player

Having seen Freaks, I immediately followed up by rewatching the movie which first piqued my interest, Robert Altman's The Player (1992). Lyle Lovett gives a memorable rendering of, "One of us, one of us..." [Few things irritate my wife as much as the sound of me imitating Lovett around the house. I should probably stop doing that...]  If you haven't seen The Player, it's a Hollywood insider movie, like All About Eve, Celebrity, For Your Consideration, Get Shorty, The Muse, State and Main, The Stunt Man, Sunset Blvd., The Last Shot, Tropic Thunder, or What Just Happened?  And probably the best of those.

I first saw The Player at the movies in 1992, and have watched it lots of times since on VHS and DVD. It has three scenes which stand out for me. First is the opening – a continuous tracking shot, just under ten minutes long. Yes, a single shot sets up the entire movie, shows us all the key studio characters in their native habitat, and introduces the problems in Tim Robbins life. 

Russian Ark

Ten minutes isn't the record for a tracking shot. Russian Ark (2002), set in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, is a single shot, 99 minute, guided tour of Russian history and art, possibly wrapped in a mystery. Hard to be sure when you don't speak Russian. Anyway, it took over 4,000 people to put this film together. The Winter Palace was closed for one day only, and they had to get it all in that time. Three ruined takes, then a successful fourth attempt, and now we have an extraordinary movie. Lush, magnificent, unique, gorgeous. Well worth seeing.  

A scene from Russian Ark - Catherine the Great takes morning tea in the small parlour

The second scene in The Player which stands out for me is the one where the newly-arrived, young, hotshot, studio executive is explaining his scheme to save the studio money – he'd stop paying writers and take stories direct from newspaper headlines (a technique pioneered by Warner Bros. in the 1920s). There's a brief interchange between Larry, the hotshot, and Marty, a studio accountant, who has to pluck a headline from the paper.

                  MARTY

       How about, “Mudslide Kills 60 in 

       Slums of Chile”?

                  LARRY

       That’s good. Triumph Over Tragedy. 

       Sounds like a John Boorman picture. 

       You slap a happy ending on it, the 

       script will write itself.

 

I'd pay a lot of money to watch a script "write itself." Yet the glib attitude behind that line can be encountered today in many places outside Hollywood.

The third memorable scene, one which greatly surprised me this time round, is one of the moments in the opening reel where Tim Robbins is dealing with yet another threatening postcard. This time he shoves the Humphrey Bogart card in his desk drawer, which is left open long enough for us to see a stack of other threatening postcards and... wait for it... a screenwriting advice book!  I must have blinked and missed it all those other times.

And what was the well-dressed studio executive supposedly reading twenty years ago?  Look closely.

First posted: 2 October 2011