Monday, June 11, 2018

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Q: what were your best and worst screenwriting experiences?

How about a tie between two experiences in each category?

BEST. My agent telling me SAD LAUGHTER was the best screenplay he ever read. Felt really good hearing that, even though he couldn't sell it. Mirrors what happened with DEAD POETS SOCIETY, the agent saying something I often quoted to my students: "This is the best thing you've ever written. I don't think I can sell it." Which was true for seven years, until Robin Williams saw the script. Then it was in production in less than a year. That's how things happen in Hollywood.

Next, my experience working with familiar actors to direct and film THE FAREWELL WAKE, improvised from my scene by scene story line. With zero budget. Honestly. Well, I did buy coffee and drinks for the cast more than once. An underground (illegal) adventure in filmmaking that was fun and also changed my attitude about the process, realizing that the director is, in fact, more important than the writer, even though the writer starts the process. The director does all the thinking on one's feet at the moment, which is much of filmmaking.

WORST. Getting a call from a producer with an option saying, It's a done deal, papers being signed the next day, check will be in the mail. Then to learn the entire deal fell through at the last minute because the inexperienced producer/director, in her naive excitement, gave the investors too much information, bragging that Jennifer O'Neill was attached to play the lead, an investor pointing out that her recent MOW work bombed, everybody gets scared and bails ... and no check got in the mail.

Next, as a writer for hire, depositing a five grand check, as I did before, and covering a lot of bills, only to learn the check bounced, and my payments, because one of the producers skipped town with the prodco money. A mess.


Wednesday, May 2, 2018

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Q: Kind of a picky question. One space after periods in screenwriting, or two?

I'm not sure it makes a difference. I always did one. I did one because two is the standard in prose and I did everything I could to make my writing unlike standard prose, i.e. lots of sentence fragments, unusual exclamation points, aggressive points of view, etc. I wanted to break the reader's reading habits.

Friday, April 13, 2018

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Hanging in

Let me tell you about a remarkable student I had. She is the Godmother of Perseverance. Maybe she will inspire you to keep at it, despite the difficulty.

She never should have been in my screenwriting class. She wanted to be a sitcom writer. TV writing is very different from film. But at the time, the university offered no TV class. I was it. I told her the limitations of what I could do for her but surely I could teach her story structure, which all writing uses. So she enrolled.

I didn't think she was a very good writer. But she was serious. Also, she was older. Maybe in her 50s. A woman without great talent in her 50s in Hollywood TVland. Fat chance. But she stayed and did all the work.

Midway through the class, I learned she was homeless. Living in her car. Wow. I admired her character, if not her writing, but in fact she was getting better.

Near the end of the class, hearing me talk about the advantages of being in Southern Cal, she told me, I can be homeless in LA as easily as homeless in Portland. I am going there. Can I take a collection in class for gas money? I let her.

In the end, she earned a B. She said goodbye and headed off, I assumed.

Maybe six months later I got an email from her. She was in LA. Actually in was harder to be homeless, the cops were meaner. But she had a routine, and she was visiting agents and prodcos on a daily basis, had found a gold mine for making pocket change, all was well.

A few months later, another email. SHE HAD A JOB! An agency had hired her as a secretary. She said they hired her so she would stop pestering them! A few months later, a promotion: she had such a good personality, they were letting her rep the company at film festivals. She was meeting people. A few were reading her scripts.

Some time later, an update. She had an apartment and another promotion. Better, SHE HAD AN AGENT who liked her work. He thought he could place her at a sitcom.

I haven't heard from her since ... that was about five years ago ... but I like to think that's because she's too busy in her sitcom career. This lady defines perseverance!


Thursday, April 12, 2018

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Q: Considering the odds of getting anything produced, how would you describe the rewards of screenwriting? Do you get satisfaction from writing a great scene, even if very few people will ever read it, and it will never be filmed?

Great question.

Personally, for me the primary rewards of screenwriting were financial. I came to the form late, after fiction and theater. I came during a seller's marketplace. I found it relatively easy to sell an option on a screenplay, and I sold options that went nowhere through most of the 1980s and early 90s. During that time I made far more money on screenplays not being produced than on stage plays that were produced and winning awards. As a playwright, I thought this really sucked but I had no problem taking the money.

But today the seller's market is long gone. 5 grand on an option to a nobody is a thing of the past.



But I grew to love the screenplay form for itself over time. In no form is story structure more visible and more important. I found you could use what screenwriting taught about story structure in fiction and other forms of writing as well. I also found that screenwriting was the easiest form of writing to teach because it had more "left brain" material, like story structure, and format rules, and depended less on intangible values as most other writing forms do. Also, I was a mathematician before I was a writer and story structure plugged into some of the same skills I needed in math.

In fact, at Portland State University, fiction teachers sent students having a hard time with storytelling to my class in screenwriting. Fiction writers generally hate screenwriting because "good writing" really isn't the point. Great language skills are not necessary to be a good screenwriter. Great STORY STRUCTURE skills are necessary, which is a very different matter.

I think it is a kind of tragedy that so many screenplay stories fall into the black hole of neglect if they don't become films, a fate for the great majority. This is why I've suggested a reworking of screenplays for a new audience. I've written about this here (see Stories in Overdrive).

But if I were starting out today, I definitely would make my own films from my own screenplays. To be a screenwriter alone is the steepest mountain to climb in the writing world. Digital tech makes filmmaking doable for any of us. I shot a no budget feature on a minicam with actor friends. It ain't great but it ain't bad either. (see THE FAREWELL WAKE here).

Good writing is always fulfilling, no matter the form. But writers need validation. We need to know we're not crazy thinking we wrote something that is hot shit, or at least worthy. That can be hard in all forms as well. Screenwriter Paul Shraeder (sp?)  said the only reason to be an artist is that you're not capable of being anything else. I believe it. The writing life is so hard, so demanding on the psyche and one's time, can be so alienating to other people, there are a zillion reasons not to do it or to approach it as a hobby. But if you can't not do it, well, you're left with doing it. You do it, finally, because you love it, because doing it is who you are.

I had a topsy turvy writing career in a variety of forms, but I wouldn't trade it for anything. And in the end, screenwriting was the most FUN to write. Even after the marketplace changed and options
became harder, I kept writing screenplays.

Hope this gets at your question.

Saturday, March 24, 2018

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Q: Any recommendations for scripts with distinct or otherwise well-written action scenes?

This is a very general question. But it does give me an excuse to talk about genre.

Action scripts are obviously very popular, but for the beginner there's a hurdle other genres don't present. Filming action is complicated and expensive. Since many action films are mainstream blockbusters with huge budgets, the writers are usually assigned seasoned pro's. I think this is perhaps the hardest genre for a beginner to break into.

What then are the best genres for beginners? One gets a sense of this by reading the weekly newsletter published by Ink Tip, where producers seek specific genre scripts. A recent issue, for example, listed producers looking for:

a character-driven crime drama
a thriller
a micro budget horror
a revenge thriller
children's animated
a comedy
a film noir
a story about golf
a story about a Buddhist monk

What most of these searches have in common are lower budgets and often a request for few locations (sometimes called "contained story").

In general, I would say lower budget thrillers, mysteries, dramas, comedies and fantasies give a beginner a better shot to break in than an action script. I am talking about submitting to producers here, not to contests. I think contests are a good vehicle for the well written action film.

Hope this helps. I confess, the question is so general, I wasn't sure how to respond.

Friday, March 16, 2018

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Manners

One thing that strikes me as both a screenwriter and a playwright: and, yes, generalizations are dangerous but this really has been something I've noticed throughout my career: People in theater have better manners than people in film.

That is, when you communicate with someone in theater, say you enter a script in a contest, or write an artistic director, they reply with a normal, courteous, decent response. In contrast, when you write someone in film, you usually get no response at all. Okay, the film industry is bigger and they are too busy to respond personally. Maybe. But I also think that money corrupts and consequently there are more wheeler-dealers and downright shady sorts in the outer ranks of the film industry, where beginners are likely to get their feet wet.

Actually I can say the same thing regarding U.S. theater companies v. European ones. Europe has better manners than the U.S. I wrote a European theater director recently about hyperdrama and she was "honored" to hear from me. I about fell out of my chair. I can't imagine an American director telling me that.

Not that any of this matters much. But I definitely have noticed the difference. 

Sunday, February 25, 2018

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Q: Are there any writing tools you recommend? They all do formatting. Any with bells and whistles that are worth investing in?

I love this question, and the answer is YES.

You have to remember I'm an old man, so when I started writing screenplays there was only ONE -format program, an MS-DOS program called Movie Master. They blew it, going from King of the Mountain to a peasant with the appearance of Windows and Mac systems. They didn't see the revolution coming, as few of us did at the time. (Bill Gates once said, Why should a computer need more than 64K memory? Ha ha ha!)

I never used Final Draft at first, I think because it started as a Mac program and I was PC. I did get involved with Final Draft late in my career when a VP there tried to get the company to embed my electronic screenwriting program into theirs. He tried very hard for several years but couldn't bring his bosses around. Too bad, would have been great for my pocketbook. I ended up cutting a deal with a rival on the edge but by then I was ready to retire and not interested in upgrading it with new movie analyses.

The program I used through most of my career, which I absolutely loved, was called Sophocles. It went out of business under mysterious circumstances. There's a whodunit for someone! Anyway, what I liked about it was the ability to generate reports. (I think FD does this, too.). The report that I found essential was this:

A scene breakdown, giving length of scene in quarter pages, speaking parts, and non speaking parts.
When I finished a draft, the first thing I did was generate this report. Then, with a red pen (being a professor ha ha), I circled EVERY SCENE OVER ONE PAGE LONG. That may strike some of you as extreme but I am a true believer in the economy of the screenplay narrative form. I then circled the name of the protagonist wherever s/he appeared and checked how many consecutive pages, through the script, where there was no protagonist. I wanted no more than five pages without him.

The one plus page scenes I ruthlessly double checked. I wanted no more than six or eight  scenes in the script over a page. I identified the issues from all this and rewrote accordingly.

Another program I found useful while planning a story is STORYSPACE, a program I used regularly for hypertext. I used it to develop the story in little boxes down and across the screen, and there are less expensive programs, index card programs, that will do this but I already had this one for other uses, in hypertext.

Sophocles reports and Storyspace "pictures" of story flow I used regularly through most of the years of my career. The former is especially important, I think, to double check story economy and focus.

Saturday, February 10, 2018

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Q: I'm used to the convention that character introductions are the one place you're allowed to cheat a little by including details that the movie audience won't see. But I was criticized by some fellow writers for going too far by introducing the main character's best friend as "the only classmate to attend his mom's funeral." What's your take? My script had already explained that the mom was dead, so this wasn't new information. The main complaint for my critics was that I described an actual event that wouldn't be included in any scenes. I quite liked the description though. I felt that it gave me a lot more mileage than just "this is the main character's best and only friend."

This is a really good question that raises an important issue about the "rules" of screenwriting.

Let me say from the start that I like your description and I would justify it this way: it is an important clue to your most important collaborator, THE ACTOR, about a relationship, and it is an ECONOMICAL way to make the point.

Additionally, no one will reject your script because you write this. If you went overboard, if you did it with great verbosity, they might, but you can get away with lots of things the books warn you against if you do it economically. The books make the field sound more fascist than it is.

When I was a reader, I would have been delighted to read this because it breaks the mold of drab, beige screenwriting, which is what seems to result from following rules too closely. Look, if you follow all the rules and are BORING, you're not helping your story.

Not enough attention is given to something I think is very important in screenwriting: WRITE WITH AN ATTITUDE. Let some of your individuality and personality come out in your writing style, always with great economy, always with brevity, but man, it can get boring to read a stack of scripts written in "legal beige prose" that follows the rules. Give yourself some wiggle room.

The danger is going too far because screenwriting is ECONOMICAL above all else, the most economic and minimalist storytelling form we have. But you can wiggle within those requirements, you can reveal personality and individuality and attitude, and you can make your writing more interesting without being more wordy.

I like the description. The actor will like it, too.

p.s. Here is a description of Annie in Bull Durham, which follows the "notes for the actor" strategy: "Words flow from her Southern lips with ease, but her view of the world crosses Southern, National and International borders. She's cosmic."

Friday, February 9, 2018

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Q: What do you think of writers groups?

This is a tricky question. A writers group can be helpful or an unpleasant distraction, depending on the group. In my experience, the helpful one is rare, which is why I recommend an alternative below.

A writers group operates with the social and political dynamic of any other group, so that very often certain individuals emerge who like to control things. This is not helpful. Moreover, in my experience, a number of writers inflate their own work and egos by putting down others.

You need to find others to offer genuine CONSTRUCTIVE criticism. Sometimes you find them in a group. If possible, I recommend you form your own group of readers/audience whose opinions you can trust to be fair and honest, who hopefully have done work you respect. Colleagues. Over the years, I found half a dozen such folks, who then gave me early feedback on all my work.

I never found a group that reached this standard, which is why I gave up on groups fairly early in my career, in order to put together my own team.

Join a few and see how they work for you. 

Friday, February 2, 2018

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Keeping the faith

Writers, for the most part, get bad news. They are like baseball players, where success one third of the time is considered outstanding.

The thing writers must do is keep the work available. For screenwriters, that has become much easier with online marketing sites like Ink Tip, where for a nominal fee ($15/mo. now) a screenwriter can have his script available to producers looking for material. And they have a track record that is impressive. I have used them in the past, with minor success, and so have my students. In fact, I resurrected a thirty year old script and posted it this week, a story that has become topical today, that was "far out" in the 1980s. Passive marketing.

The thing is, if a script or story or any piece of writing is in a drawer or on your computer, and that's it, nothing will happen. Guaranteed. But make it available, and now and again a surprising moment of interest can happen.

My most extreme example of this is an essay I wrote for a class as a graduate student. A very far out opinion about teaching writing. The professor, who disagreed with it, nonetheless thought my ideas were worth considering, and he instigated its publication in a reputable journal (this is back in the days when a university was actually a university). A firestorm resulted, putting the essay down. But twenty years later this happened:
"One of the Composition-specific articles in this genre of radical sixties pedagogy, one which I have never been able to forget since the day I first read it in the dimly-lit stacks of my university's library, was written in 1967 by a young graduate teaching assistant at the University of Oregon, Charles Deemer. His article, "English Composition as a Happening," did what many of these articles did, but did it in a formally compelling way (the article is a collage of brief sound-bite snippets, alternating between Deemer's own poetic reflections-as-manifesto and quotations from Sontag, McLuhan, Dewey, Goodman, and others), and Deemer's ideas seemed to catalyze my own discontent with what passed for Composition during the 1980s." 
Geoffrey Sirc went on to write a book based on my ideas, renewing the debate, and more successfully than I had. The point is, for more than TWENTY YEARS this essay was on library shelves, gathering dust I assume, and then BAM! suddenly the ideas in it came alive again. This is how writing works.

If you still believe in a piece of work, position it so it can be discovered. Don't give up on it. The example above is just one of half a dozen surprises of discovery in my career. None would have happened if the work had not been available. With the Internet, exposure is easier than ever (also hugely over-crowded). Take advantage of it.