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Personal Scriptwriting: The Edge

William Goldman, in his amusing book about screenwriting, Adventures in the Screen Trade, advises that new screenwriters realize that an excellent screenplay is a well-structured screenplay, but no one knows what constitutes a successful screenplay.¹ An entire world of difference exists between these two desirable adjectives—excellent and successful. Many elements beyond your control determine whether your screenplay is excellent and successful. Agents, producers, directors, and, above all, actors, influence the outcome of your screenplay.

If Goldman’s proscription is dire, it certainly isn’t overly dramatic. Screen-writing is not akin to a lottery, but time is pushing it in that direction. As successful screenwriters are paid more and more for their screenplays, the risk factor in production suggests an increasingly conservative attitude toward screenplays and screenwriters. Film is already (given its economic structure) the most conservative of the arts! Does this mean that the screenwriter must study and write for the market? Only partially. The search by studios for the successful screenplay is more urgent than ever. Therefore, screenwriters, more than ever before, will have to strive to differentiate themselves from the rest of the marketplace.

All producers expect well-structured screenplays. As a writer, you can’t avoid structure. But because producers read with an eye on emulating the latest great success at the box office, you have to capture their interest by writing something different. In the end, the only source of inspiration is those screenplays that are different. This is the reason for the meteoric rise of Spike Lee and John Patrick Shanley. As a writer, you have a choice—to imitate, as do so many others in the marketplace, or to innovate. We suggest that you innovate. If you do, you’ll have a better opportunity to obtain excellence and success. This means that you have to move your screenplay beyond structure. It also means that you take on a more personal form of storytelling.

In this chapter, we reiterate screen story conventions and how to write against those conventions. We look at form, character, language, and tone, and highlight narrative strategies that yield fresh options. We also highlight how the other arts provide sources of options to strengthen your screen story. We want to stress that there is no strictly technical solution to writing a successful screenplay. Screenplays are a mix of technical form, good story, characters by whom you are fascinated, and a deep interest on your part in inviting the audience to stay with your characters for 2 hours. During these 2 hours, you want the audience to feel pain and pleasure, and at the end of the experience, you want them to leave stimulated or exhausted. You want the audience to think and to feel, and, in doing so, to feel a level of satisfaction for having spent 2 hours with your story.

If this stimulation is missing, you have failed. If it is present, you have worked a small miracle, given the distractions of modern life. You will have convinced, hopefully, a large paying group to suspend their sense of the present and enter the world you’ve created. After 2 hours of escape into your world, they’ve been entertained, stimulated, and may leave not quite the same as when they entered. This change may last 20 seconds or 20 years. This is the extent of your influence.

Your Story

Whatever the source for your screen story, whatever your motivation for writing the story, it has to reach an audience, or it remains incomplete. Unlike a novel, which can be published modestly, or a play, which can be produced locally, a film requires an infrastructure for production, distribution, and exhibition. Consequently, the economics of production preclude the vast majority of screenplays from being produced. With producers, distributors, and exhibitors all eyeing audiences to determine what will sell, screenwriters are constantly pressed to do this as well. The results are screenplays that are strongly influenced by current issues, be they social, political, or economic. Almost any personality or event that has significantly captured the public’s interest, even for an instant, merits screen consideration.

Your story, however, doesn’t have to be a direct rendering of such an event. The perspective you choose, along with everything else, is up to you. This is where your individuality can yield an interesting angle. This is where you begin to apply the range of narrative strategies that best suit your story. This is where your life experience helps you coax an unusual perspective from your story.

This individualism explains the powerful moral fervor of the scripts of Paul Schrader. Whether the subject is Jesus Christ (The Last Temptation of Christ), a high-priced male prostitute (American Gigolo), or pornography (Hardcore), Schrader’s perspective makes his screenplays intense, probing, and unpredictable. He’s made the subject his own. However we feel about his treatment of the subject, the films differ dramatically from other screenplays about similar subject matter.

Turning to another writer, Blake Edwards, who grew up in Hollywood, we notice that whatever the subject matter or genre, Edwards’s screenplays are, first and foremost, entertaining. His desire to entertain rather than to risk offending blunts the intensity of his subject matter—for example, his films about sexual identity (Victor/Victoria) and middle-age crises (10)—but the subject matter is as serious as is that of Schrader’s scripts. Edwards, above all, wants to entertain, so he uses the situation comedy, rather than the melodrama, to provide entertainment values that are much stronger than are those in a Schrader screenplay.

The key point here is that these two screenwriters are serious, but their priorities and approaches differ from one another. Both are successful, individualistic screenwriters. The best approach to your story is the approach that respects your individuality and seeks to differentiate your story from those about the same subject.

Approaches to Structure

The respect paid to structure in contemporary produced screenplays grows every day. Respectfully, structure has become Hollywood’s eleventh commandment. Challenge to the structural model has been tempting only to those who are established in the industry. No studio is going to tell Woody Allen or Spike Lee that it will not finance his next film. Allen’s and Lee’s patterns of experimentation mark the route of Fellini and Bergman. Having reached their audience, all of these writer-directors want to experiment. The result is that they often challenge our notions of structure and allude to what structure can be.

We are not suggesting that you should rail and rebel against Syd Field or Bob McKee. But, we are saying that audiences today are very media-wise and they tire of repetition. You can help your career and foster your creativity by varying your structural approach. Structural options begin to develop once you have a main character, a premise, and the nature of the story (i.e., the genre). Immediately, you face two issues: at what point will your audience enter the story and, if you sense a possible ending, what is the end point or climax?

Whether you opt for a three-act structure depends on how open ended you want your story to be. If you see a story with a resolution, a three-act structure is called for. However, if you don’t find a resolution necessary or interesting, you may opt for a two-act structure. If you do, realize that this choice has implications for every other element in your screenplay. To make a two-act screenplay work, you need gripping characters whom we won’t mind spending time with. Since there is less action, particularly rising action, in the two-act approach, your audience will demand more from your dialogue as well as from your characters. The conflict that doesn’t happen visually must be manifested in the language.

The decrease in action also has implications for the number of plot points and the number of plot-oriented devices you employ (i.e., reversals and surprise). Because the amount of plot is lessened in the two-act approach, there will be less need for reversals and surprises. The audience’s involvement will come from their involvement with your characters, not from their involvement with your plot.

If you do choose the three-act structure, there remain many structural options available to you. Rather than writing within the context of genre, you can challenge or alter a primary genre motif. One example is Raising Arizona, by the Coen brothers. The main character (Nicolas Cage) isn’t driven by material success like the classic gangster is. He is a man who is driven by his love for his wife. She wants a baby, so he steals a baby for her. His sweetness is an element that is foreign to the main character in the gangster genre, whose transgressions are carried out to get ahead materially in society. Yet Raising Arizona remains, at least partially, a gangster film.

Another option available to the writer is to mix genres. This approach is rapidly becoming an industry standard. The mix of the science fiction and gangster genres is the most popular. But the most unusual of combinations have proved successful. Certainly, audiences have found mixed-genre films to be an appealing novelty. The issue for you, whether you alter a motif or mix genres, is whether it improves your story. This is a critical question. If you alter a motif or mix genres for novelty’s sake, the benefit to your story remains superficial. If, on the other hand, the mix helps reach another level of meaning that makes your story more credible and revealing, then the structural shift has served you well.

The protagonist–antagonist mix is a power struggle of considerable force in the melodrama. Kramer vs. Kramer is an example in which both protagonist and antagonist are members of the same family—husband and wife. This same approach is taken in Music Box, but this film has a twist. In Music Box, daughter–father are protagonist–antagonist, but the daughter doesn’t know it. In fact, for the majority of the screen story, she is her father’s lawyer. Only at the end of Act Three does she face the truth about her father and his Nazi past. This twist of bringing protagonist and antagonist close together within the melodrama lends a force to the story that would not be present if this choice hadn’t been employed by a screenwriter such as Joe Eszterhas. It also helps create the background story of the film. The key is that the motif shift brings us into the story in a deeper way than if the same story were presented with the daughter, father, and the father’s lawyer. In Music Box, the motif shift adds an additional layer of meaning to the melodrama.

If we look at Errol Morris’s mixed-genre film The Thin Blue Line, the use of the dramatic form of the police story together with the investigative documentary makes the film both realistic and stylized. The artifice of the drama makes the viewer ask the question: Am I being manipulated or did this really happen? The viewer is invited to consider who is manipulating whom. Consequently, The Thin Blue Line, in using a mixed-genre approach to structure, makes the central theme of the documentary come alive for the viewer. Who are we to believe? Randall, his accuser, the police, or the filmmakers?

Remember: the strength of challenging a motif or a mixed-genre approach lies in what the narrative strategy adds to your story. Does it make the story deeper? Does the approach give us new insights about your main character? Does the approach help sidestep audience expectations? If it does, you are on your way to writing a unique screen story.

Approaches to Character

Perhaps the most important decision you make about your screenplay is the identity of your main character. You must then ask yourself why you have chosen this person to tell your story. The appropriateness and flexibility of your main character can’t be overestimated. Not only does the audience enter the story through that character, they also relate to the story to the degree in which they become involved (positively or negatively) with that character.

Your decision about character has many implications about the nature of the other characters, as well as the degree of plot in your story. The specificity of your character—the socio-economical, regional, cultural, political, and psychological qualities of that character—affects the nature of the dialogue.

Real Drama and Unreal Life

At the baseline, your character has to convince us of her credibility. This doesn’t necessarily mean you need to take a slice-of-life approach to the nature of the character. Indeed, too literal a view of realism yields an unrealistic character in dramatic terms. To put it simply, drama and real life are distant cousins; they are not synonymous. Drama is, in a sense, compressed real life complete with coincidence. Real life might be dramatic, but more likely the dramatic incidents are stretched out over a long length of time.

Screenwriters have to use compression, coincidence, and conflict in order to create dramatic situations. Dramatic situations are the meat and potatoes of audience expectations. We experience the long stretches of filler in our lives. We won’t pay to see more of the same thing; we want drama. So your characters have to be credible. In order to be credible to the audience, they have to get involved in events and with other characters far beyond what might be called credible. This contradiction is willingly overcome if you fascinate us and convince us to suspend our sense of realism in order to enter into, with your character, the screen story.

The Role of Dilemma

When George (Bob Hoskins), the main character in Neil Jordan and David Leland’s Mona Lisa, returns from 7 years in prison, he finds that his wife has thrown him out and his mobster boss, for whom he suffered imprisonment, is no longer interested in employing him. George’s dilemma is that he is free, but he feels betrayed by his two principal sources of support— his wife and his boss. How George deals with this dilemma is the subject of the balance of the film. The fact that George is both violent and tender adds dimension to this gangster film centered in London.

The dilemma serves to very quickly bring us into the story and to see George as disadvantaged. In spite of his being a gangster, his callous rejection by his wife and the corporate style of gangster life seem to justify George’s outbursts. He yearns for life as it was. The dilemma helps us identify with George. Once this identification has taken place, we are ready to follow George through the story, hoping that he will be able to resolve his problem. Whether the dilemma is coincidental, as it is in Dalton Trumbo’s Lonely are the Brave, or logical, as in Mona Lisa, the role of the dilemma is to bring us into the story quickly and to get us to identify with the main character.

The Role of Charisma

As we have mentioned earlier in the book, whether one describes the main character as appealing or charming, main characters need charisma. The sense of energy that the character displays may develop out of a sense of commitment or out of an intensity that may be sexual, aggressive, or both. It is valuable to the writer when the main character isn’t likable, but the character does have to attract the viewer; he has to be charismatic.

While dilemma gets us involved with your character, charisma keeps us involved. In William Inge’s Splendor in the Grass, the main character’s intensity is sexual. In John Steinbeck’s Viva Zapata!, the character’s intensity is political. In Elia Kazan’s America, America, the character’s intensity is born out of a will to survive. In each case, the main character has an honesty as well as an intensity that shows the character’s vulnerability. The result is that we remain involved with each of these characters throughout the screen story.

The Tradition of Non-Conformity

In America, non-conformity as a philosophy of life has always had appeal. This is not lost on screenwriters. Often, they will position the main character in such a way that he appears to be a non-conformist. Whether we view the country singer, portrayed by Robert Duvall in Horton Foote’s Tender Mercies, as a stranger to the community or as a man with an unconventional vocation, he doesn’t quite fit into the community. He is an outsider. So, too, are Pelle, in Billie August’s Pelle the Conqueror, and Pike Bishop, in Walon Green’s The Wild Bunch .

It is useful to the writer to create an additional layer of conflict when the main character’s position is that of a non-conformist. Nola, in Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, and Bree Daniels, in Andy and David Lewis’s Klute, both pursue non-conformist behavior. The non-conformist main character has a natural appeal in a country where non-conformity, or individualism, has a historical backdrop. The fact that American culture has always embraced the non-conformist does much to explain the popularity of the anti-hero—the cowboy and the gangster. The usefulness of non-conformity in behavior and appearance is dramatic and appealing. Indeed, the writing tradition suggests that the use of a non-conformist as your main character enhances his appeal.

Character Versus Plot

An issue you will continually face has to do with the primacy of character over plot or plot over character—the foreground–background dilemma. As we mentioned, stories are enhanced by having both foreground and background. However, particular stories and genres need more of one than the other. Adventure films, farce, satire, and musicals do not need complex characters, but they do need elaborate plots. Other genres, such as the melodrama and film noir, depend on the complexity of the characters. Consequently, the screen time spent with characterization rather than with plot in melodrama and film noir is much greater.

When the background story takes precedence over the foreground story, such as in Sam Shepard’s Fool for Love, character becomes everything, and the plot—the foreground story—withers in importance. In the extreme case of background story primacy, such as in John Patrick Shanley’s Moonstruck, the plot can be described in two lines. In these cases, where the background story is prevalent, the nature of the character, the role of charisma, and the role of dilemma become even more important. The consequence is a reliance on character.

Implied in the reliance on character is the increased reliance on dialogue. Your dialogue in background stories has to be exceptionally charged and appealing to compensate for the simpler plot. The audience’s need for stimulation is no less in the strong background screen story than it is in the foreground screen story. You should keep in mind the tradeoff between plot and character. What does your story need? Does it need more of one than the other?

Character Types

There are particular character types that may be useful as you consider the nature of your main character.

The Marginal Character

As mentioned earlier, audiences find the outsider appealing as a main character. The sense of mystery and surprise this character brings to your story is useful. But marginality only works when it interacts with the larger society or with mainstream ideas. If Nola in She’s Gotta Have It didn’t flirt with the idea of a life with one of her three men, there would be no personal conflict and, consequently, no story. Likewise, Mozart may be a musical genius in Peter Shaffer’s Amadeus, but his manners and behavior are far below the expectations of the Viennese court in which he seeks fame and fortune. He is an outsider looking to breach the social order, and his failure leads to his death.

Whether your main characters are prostitutes, pimps, or princes, the marginalized position in which they find themselves comes alive when you create dramatic situations in which margin and center clash in terms of characters.

The Mad Character

An extreme example of a marginal character is a mad character. Whether madness is the subject matter of the story, as in Ken Loach’s Family Life, or the posture taken by the character to meet the world, as in Julius Epstein’s Reuben, Reuben, the mad character places the viewer in a challenging position. The mad character is not charismatic; in fact, he is the opposite. This character pushes us away to reflect on his plight and the reasons for it.

Often, the writer will use the mad character to comment on significant relationships or on society. Robert Klane uses mad behavior and mad characters to comment on society. His screenplays for Where’s Poppa? and Weekend at Bernie’s use humor to make the mad behavior more palatable. Essentially, the behavior of the mad character remains irrational. However, the fact that he experiences humiliation causes us to feel sympathy for him. The benefit of using a mad character is the distance between the character and the audience. This distance allows the viewer to reflect upon events. In this sense, the mad character is useful in the same way the ironic character is useful.

One last point: Because of the extreme behavior of the mad character, the writer has a volatile unpredictability that can be useful to rouse the feelings of the viewers beyond the usual experience. Bo Goldman uses this powerful quality in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Shoot the Moon .

The Victim

In many ways, the mad character is the ultimate victim. But many other screen stories present the main character as a victim without the overlay of madness. The screwball comedy, film noir, the horror film, the satire, the melodrama, the war film, and the situation comedy can all present the main character as a victim. Who can forget Felix in Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple? The benefit of using this position for the main character is the inherent conflict of the position. If the character is being exploited by a situation or a person, we can readily hope he will not only survive, but will also overcome his dilemma. It’s the old story of rooting for the underdog.

There are stories where the character is being victimized by himself. The main character in Roger Simon and Paul Mazursky’s Enemies: A Love Story needn’t go on acting like the victim, but a mixture of living in the past and fearing the present maintains his position as a victim. As long as you can avoid a position in which the character accepts being a victim, the main character as victim is useful to you. Just as the marginal character needs the center to rail against, the victim needs to struggle against the oppressor. As long as the character struggles, we hope for the best and fear for the worst, a useful position for the writer to have us in.

The Hero

The natural position for the main character is the hero. This is probably the easiest character with which to work. The hero is attractive, has charisma, and, by virtue of the dilemma in which you place him, his struggle can be easily presented as heroic. We are not suggesting that this is the position most useful for your screenplay. Rather, we are suggesting that the presentation of the main character as a hero needn’t be like James Bond or Josie Wales. It does mean that the behavior of Rory, in Inside Moves, in his decision to make something of his life rather than remain a victim, is heroic. Rory is a hero in spite of his passivity. Regina’s decision to go against her mother in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes also makes Regina a hero.

In order to make the main character, even a passive character, a hero, you need a plot that suggests the many barriers to heroic action. You also need an antagonist who is so formidable that the behavior of a Rory or a Regina will seem heroic. Heroic action does not need superhuman effort. From a writer’s perspective, this option only needs proper positioning of the character and plotting of the story. The main character as a hero probably offers you the strongest formula for identification, but to be credible, it challenges you to create a story that, on a personal level, seems like the climb up Mt. Everest; it’s tough, but worth a try.

Your Attitude Toward Character

Your attitude toward the character is the most important decision you’ll make in your screenplay. You don’t have to love your character, but you should be fascinated by him—so fascinated that exploring the facets of that person is very real for you. If the character grips you, your audience should follow readily.

A variety of positions can help you set up your character so that conflict flows more readily. The marginal character and the mad character are positioned to fight the values of the center, the society. This struggle brings us into their stories. The victim and the hero are more readily viewed as characters with whom we can easily identify. Again, the situation in which they find themselves is a conflict; therefore, we can enter their story quickly. This is where tone becomes very important when articulating your relationship (and ours) with the main character. Will it be a tone in accord with genre expectations or will you deploy an ironic tone?

Seduction and Scriptwriting

It is not enough to make us care about your character. It is not enough that you grip us with your character. If your screenplay is to succeed, we have to experience all the ups and downs with your main character. To be more specific, we suggest that most successful screenplays tend to acknowledge a special relationship between you, the writer, and the viewer. We intentionally call this relationship between writer and audience seduction and scriptwriting. The hyperbolic term seduction is used to focus your attention on the devices you use to involve us in your screen story. To capture our attention, we suggest that you involve us in an intense relationship with your main character, and that in the course of the screen story, we in the audience have to live through an emotional relationship with that screen story. The relationship needs many of the satisfactions of intense personal relationships. We need to love and hate and to resolve the state of the relationship. Our contention is that without this level of intensity, structure, plotting, character, and elegant language will not be enough to link us to the screen story.

To illustrate what we mean, we will look at five screen stories dealing with the same story. Essentially we want to illustrate why Wyatt Earp, the Lawrence Kasdan and Dan Gordon version of the Wyatt Earp story, failed. We contend that it failed because it did not establish a deep relationship with the main character, Wyatt Earp. By looking at four other versions, we will show how important it is for the writer to create and maintain an intense relationship between us and the main character.

The four other versions of the Wyatt Earp story are Tombstone, written by Kevin Jarre; Hour of the Gun, written by Edward Anhalt; The Gunfight at the OK Corral, written by Leon Uris; and My Darling Clementine, written by Samuel G. Engel. These and Wyatt Earp share the following elements:

1. Wyatt Earp is the central character.
2. He is the sheriff of Tombstone, Arizona.
3. He was formerly the sheriff of Dodge City, Kansas, where he earned a reputation as a lawman.
4. He worked closely with his brothers, Virgil and Morgan, as both sheriff and deputy.
5. He struck up a friendship with Doc Holliday, a gunfighter who was a gambler and former dentist in the East.
6. Tombstone is a tough frontier town. The cowboys, including the Clantons, the McLowerys, Curly Bill, and Johnny Ringo, were the dominant outlaw force in the territory.
7. The famous gunfight at the OK Corral is fought in Tombstone. The Earps and Doc Holliday fought against the Clantons and the McLowerys.
8. As a consequence of the gunfight, Morgan Earp is assassinated.
9. Wyatt Earp wreaks revenge on the cowboys by destroying those who stood against him, and Doc Holliday continues to help.
10. Wyatt Earp, although he believes in his family, is a man with rough edges. He functions well as a lawman because he is as ruthless as the cowboys.
11. All of the Earp stories focus on the 1880 period when he is sheriff of Tombstone.

These are the story elements of all five screen versions. Each of them works with the historical record, some more literally than others. The two versions that attempt the greatest verisimilitude—Anhalt’s Hour of the Gun and Kasdan and Gordon’s Wyatt Earp —are the weakest screenplays.

The Anhalt version opens with the actual gunfight at the OK Corral and focuses on its aftermath. It’s not quite docudrama, but the historical events are the focus of this version. The Gordon–Kasdan version covers 40 years in Earp’s life, beginning with him as an adolescent and ending with him in middle age. The events of the OK Corral gunfight occur shortly after the midpoint, although the preparations for the fight open the film. The goal here seems to be to look at Earp the man while dismantling Earp the legend. The three other versions each take a particular dramatic approach to the story.

In typical John Ford fashion, Samuel G. Engel’s script, My Darling Clementine, approaches the story as a struggle of two families, the Earps and the Clantons. The Earps represent family values—loyalty, responsibility, and morality—while the Clantons, although loyal to one another, are cattle thieves and murderers who kill James Earp at the beginning of the story. The gunfight at the OK Corral becomes the ritual that purges Tombstone of its immoral element and establishes the primacy of the Earp family values as American, as a source of strength of the individual, Wyatt Earp.

Leon Uris’s Gunfight at the OK Corral, as with My Darling Clementine, takes place principally in Tombstone. This version focuses on the evolution of the friendship of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Although Holliday is important in all of the versions, no single version focuses on him as much. Indeed, the friendship supersedes the antagonists whether they are the Clantons, Curly Bill, or Johnny Ringo. Friendship and personal sacrifice are all that count in this version.

Kevin Jarre’s Tombstone focuses on Wyatt Earp as a man with material ambitions for himself and his family. Those ambitions take him to Tombstone and away from the law. However, in Tombstone, the power of the cowboys is such that they stand in the way of his material climb. He takes up the law to protect what he views as his material well being. The cowboys are so relentless and vengeful that all who stand in their way become their targets; they force the confrontation with the Earps. (In this version, Wyatt is deputized by Virgil in order to fight as a lawman at the OK Corral.) Doc Holliday, Wyatt’s friend, fights as well. Only the assassination of Morgan forces Wyatt to eliminate the cowboys. He uses all means, and his ruthlessness is necessary for his survival. In the end, he has lost the very thing he came to Tombstone for: prosperity.

In the most successful versions— My Darling Clementine and Tombstone —there is a natural progression in our relationship with the main character. Each film begins with a clear articulation of the goal of the main character—prosperity for the family. In My Darling Clementine, prosperity involves a cattle drive. In Tombstone, it involves buying into a gambling emporium/saloon. In each version, a bully taunts the ordinary citizenry of Tombstone. And in each case, the objectionable person is easily overcome by Earp. The consequence is that Earp is a highly desirable person for the position of sheriff. In My Darling Clementine, he accepts; in Tombstone, he does not. In each film, we see Earp struggle to maintain his position in Tombstone as either lawman or businessman. And in each case, a clear antagonist emerges to position himself against Earp. In both films, that character is Ike Clanton (although Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo are more prominent co-antagonists in Tombstone). Our point here is that the clarity, persistence, and cruelty of the antagonist(s) in My Darling Clementine and Tombstone draw us closer to the main character, Wyatt Earp.

Another dimension of our relationship with Wyatt Earp is to see his vulnerability in a love relationship. In My Darling Clementine, it is Earp’s unrequited love for Clementine that makes him seem vulnerable. In Tombstone, it is his attraction to Josie, the actress, that makes him vulnerable. Since Earp has an ongoing relationship with the prostitute Mattie, he doesn’t take up a simultaneous relationship with Josie. He is loyal—and, consequently, lonely. Therefore, in both of these versions, Earp seems a man incapable of finding love. The loss enables his sense of responsibility to his family and to Mattie.

Finally, there are the concepts of family and friendship. Earp works closely with his brothers, and in both versions he is strongly supported by an alter ego, the educated, articulate killer Doc Holliday. In My Darling Clementine, Doc dies in the gunfight. In Tombstone, Doc fights on with Earp against the cowboys after the famous gunfight. In the latter version, Earp is present at the sanitarium when Holliday is near death. Although much is made of family, it is the friendship and its dignity that emotionalizes both My Darling Clementine and T ombstone (as it did in The Gunfight at the OK Corral); the two men are opposites, but friendship remains important to both. Their mutual commitment in the midst of a hostile environment, Tombstone, makes them both appealing. Their relationship humanizes and serves to ennoble the notion of friendship and, in this case, its object, Wyatt Earp.

Returning for the moment to the concept of family, this issue is much more powerful in My Darling Clementine, where it is two families, the Earps and the Clantons, who sum up the struggle of good against evil in Tombstone. Consequently, family is very important in My Darling Clementine and it serves to root and ennoble the Wyatt Earp character.

We turn now to the flaws in the Gordon–Kasdan version, which essentially come down to our lack of involvement with the main character. This version fails for the reasons that the Jarre and Engel versions succeed.

The Latest Version: Lawrence Kasdan’s Wyatt Earp

First let’s look at the issue of the main character’s goal. In the Engel and Jarre versions, we learn the goal of the main character right away. This is not the case in the Gordon–Kasdan version, where we first see the young Earp trying to run off to war. For the first hour of the film, we understand him as a character struggling between what he wants to do and what his father wants him to do. He experiences disappointments and tragedy (the loss of his first wife), but we never do know what his goal is. We have to assume that he is a character without a clear goal, an ambivalent character rather than a character who wants material success for his family, as the Earp character does at the outset of My Darling Clementine and Tombstone .

A second problem in the Gordon–Kasdan script is that there is no clear antagonist. The Clantons, the McLowerys, Curly Bill, and Johnny Ringo are present in Tombstone, but we never understand the antipathy of the Earps toward them, nor do we understand what they are fighting about. It is as if Gordon and Kasdan are so concerned with debunking the myth of Earp that they make him his own antagonist. The consequence is that we do not understand Earp in his struggle. We watch as observers on the sidelines rather than as participants in Earp’s struggle.

And what of Wyatt Earp the lover-in-waiting of My Darling Clementine and Tombstone? This is not the Earp we meet in the Gordon–Kasdan version. Instead, we find a man who never recovers from the loss of his first wife—he takes up with a prostitute, Mattie, and simultaneously begins to sleep with the actress, Josie. Instead of Earp the vulnerable male, here we have Earp the selfish male. Instead of caring, he seems cruel. Instead of vulnerable, he is cold and calculating. This is not a character we want to be involved with.

Turning to the issues of family and friendship, we find a similar Earp. In the Gordon–Kasdan version, as in the others, Wyatt does work with his brothers. However, the brothers’ wives constantly complain that Wyatt runs their lives and eventually ruins them. In this version, Wyatt Earp is in a constant power struggle for control of his family. This is hardly the ideal Earp family portrayed in Engel’s My Darling Clementine. As with Wyatt the unrequited lover, here Wyatt the family man is unattractive.

This leaves only the issue of Earp’s friendship with Doc Holliday as a source of audience empathy for Earp. There is friendship here, but it’s a case of too little too late. Earp seems so impervious to feeling that the empathetic Holliday appears marginal and pathetic. Given Holliday’s fragility, the friendship says more about the Holliday character. Consequently, it does not help our relationship with the Earp character as it does in the more successful versions.

At all levels, the Gordon–Kasdan version of the Wyatt Earp character deflects us from an active involvement and empathy with the character. Without that intense relationship with Earp, the screen story fails. Indeed, in any screen story, if the writer does not seek and cultivate a special relationship between the main character and the audience, the story will fail. To succeed, the audience needs that special relationship; writers can cultivate that relationship by understanding the dramatic means to achieve it.

How to Make Your Script Your Own

If the narrative strategy you’ve employed takes advantage of your character choice and your structural choice surprises and delights the viewer, all that remains to making the script your own is to infuse the script with details that mean something to you and with language that allows your emotions to speak. This may sound optimistic, but it isn’t.

What we are saying is that having a good feeling for the structural choice and character type that best suits your story isn’t quite enough to make it unique. You have to be willing to invest more feeling in the story. This effort is akin to the mechanical adjustment you can make to alter a character who is a stereotype. Move away from the idealistic professor who is curious about everything to the idealistic professor who follows up his curiosity with action and you’ve got Indiana Jones. But it isn’t until Jeffrey Boam begins to probe the conflicting relationship between Jones and his father that we begin to understand Jones’s quick frustration and misunderstanding in his relationships. This move humanizes Jones and makes the third film in the series, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, seem fresher. Jones is now far from stereotype. This is the sort of creative metamorphosis that makes the story seem new and appealing. This is the path Alvin Sargent follows in Julia, and Sam Shepard and Wim Wenders follow in Paris, Texas. It’s the path Julius Epstein has followed from Casablanca to Reuben, Reuben .

Screenwriting and the Other Arts

Screenwriters are storytellers who write stories for film. Some make a great deal of money but get very little respect from their peers. Most make very little money and get very little respect from their peers. It has always been perplexing, but that’s the way it is. Nevertheless, writing talents such as Clifford Odets, Sam Raphaelson, Preston Sturges, and Harold Pinter have been attracted to the form. The works of Billy Wilder, Joseph Mankiewicz, and Ben Hecht remain vital and artful, especially from today’s vantage point.

Just as other industries compartmentalize function, so, too, do the arts. A screenwriter is no longer a writer from a community of storytellers. She is a screenwriter. However, it is important that the screenwriter reconsider her links with other communicative and popular arts. We have much to learn from playwrights, novelists, and journalists, just as they have something to learn from us. Whether their interests are social action or a good laugh, they share our interest in capturing our audience. They, and screenwriters, live in a world of ideas.

Screenwriters can strengthen their foreground stories by telling them clearly and quickly, as do journalists, who have to maintain reader interest to the end of the story: at any point, a reader can set aside a newspaper. Likewise, screenwriters can learn much from the strength the playwright brings to the background story. Character and language are all that the playwright employs to keep his audience. Consequently, these elements have to be amusing, stimulating, and must compensate for the relative loss in action the stage suffers relative to film. Screenwriters can also benefit from the use of stronger background stories. Screenwriters can be emboldened by the structural experiments of writers such as Ann Beattie (Picturing Will) and Don DeLillo (Libra). These structural experiments add layers of meaning to the content of the work, just as the structural experiments of screenwriters such as Stanley Kubrick and Spike Lee add meaning to their work.

Screenwriters and the Market

In Broadcast News, James Brooks begins the film with three small vignettes about the three characters of the story as adolescents. After this prologue, the film shifts to the time period of the film, some 15 years later. Brooks’s point is that characters come from somewhere and go somewhere. They have regional, cultural, sexual, and behavioral differences. The same can be said for writers. Unfortunately, if you were to watch all of the films released in any 3-month period, you’d hardly know it. You’d think all screenwriters grew up a 10-minute drive from Universal Studios, were all the same sex, and were born minutes apart.

Our point, here, is that you are the only you there is, and your script will be better if it reflects your individuality rather than what you think is selling today. This isn’t a particularly radical thought. If you look at cinema-tographers and directors, notice how many come from Australia, England, The Netherlands, and Germany. Hollywood has always sought out talent wherever it was available. The only thing American writers have going for them is their ease at writing colloquial English. This will change as English becomes more and more widespread and will end the American writers’ monopoly on screenwriting—unless, of course, we start writing better scripts.

Ann Beattie, Richard Ford, Bharati Mukherjee, and Margaret Atwood are all exceptional world-class novelists. Playwrights such as Sam Shepard and Neil Simon have also made their mark around the world. Will the art of screenwriting follow suit? It will when screenwriters tell stronger, more personal stories. To compete in the fickle entertainment market, screenwriters have to be as innovative as are novelists and playwrights.

We hope you will be.

We know you can be.