One of the nicest things about film scriptwriting is that it offers not just a living, but a way of life which allows you to make full use of your potential.
In addition, if you’re cut out for it, it can prove a tremendous lot of fun.
Next question: What do you need to become a film scriptwriter?
Seven things:
1. The kind of rhinoceros hide and iron backbone that won’t take “no” for an answer.
2. The ability to become excited about any subject on ten minutes’ notice—or no notice at all.
3. Resilience on a level that enables you to take the worst punch in the teeth or knife in the back where your ego is concerned and still come up affable and smiling.
4. Conscience of a brand that keeps you dedicated to making the best of a bad job, even when your every atom churns with resentment/disappointment.
5. An understanding of how to make the most of your creative talent.
6. A decision as to the area in which you wish to work.
7. A knowledge of the scriptwriter’s ground rules and technical devices.
Does this mean that if you have these attributes, success is automatically assured you?
Oh, come, now! Becoming a film scriptwriter is one thing; becoming a successful film scriptwriter, a rather different matter.
You see, in this life there’s an element known as competition. Certain things loom as desirable—things like high pay, congenial work, ego satisfaction. In consequence, more people want them than can get them.
Result: survival of the fittest … an unhappy state, for many, in view of the fact that “fittest” may, upon occasion, mean anything from pure genius to possession of an uncle with an inside track. But that’s the way of the world, as they say, and the ability to face it and fight it is part of the stubbornness and resilience on which we focused in points 1 and 3 above.
On the other hand, breaks alone can carry you only so far, especially where scriptwriting is concerned. How much success you achieve in the long haul will depend pretty much on your own ability as a writer … your ability, plus the seven points listed above, that is.
So, what about those points? Let’s consider them one at a time.
1. The kind of rhinoceros hide and iron backbone that won’t take “no” for an answer.
If your father is a major movie star, a top director, a seven-figure investor in a film company or a company that buys films, it’s quite possible your desire to become a scriptwriter will win a reasonably warm reception. Agents will agree to read your efforts. Producers will chat with you over drinks. A director may even go so far as to take you under his wing; hire you for some minor job so you can observe the process and problems of film making at first hand.
You understand, they still won’t buy your scripts or hire you as a writer; not unless said scripts are in and of themselves of top quality, fully up to the level of the competition. Film production is far too expensive a proposition for it to be otherwise. But, you will have a built-in “in”—a breach of sorts in the towering walls which otherwise seem to surround the motion picture market.
Most of us, for better or worse, have no such entrée. In consequence, we have no choice but to storm the barricades on our own.
There are easier tasks, believe me. For one thing, scripts submitted by mail ordinarily come back unopened. (I’ll explain why in Chapter 16.)
So, you have to shoot angles, start on a different level. Maybe that means doing films on your own, in Super 8 or whatever, in hopes someone will recognize your talent. Or taking film courses in schools that bring in people from the industry to lecture. Or scraping acquaintances with studio personnel, on the theory that sooner or later you’ll meet someone with the authority to buy scripts. Or taking jobs as page boy or typist or sweeper, in order to scrape up such acquaintances.
I wish I could pretend that any or all of these approaches held your answer. Unfortunately, they don’t. Scriptwriting is a rough field to crack, and for every writer working, there are a dozen struggling to survive with part-time jobs outside the field.
What it comes down to is that if you learn the ropes, and if you persevere, and if you have the writing skill, then maybe—just “maybe,” mind you—you’ll eventually make the grade.
This doesn’t discourage you? Good! Because if you can be discouraged, you’re better off not to start. Only if the writing of film scripts enthralls you to the point that you can’t be stopped do you have any business in this field.
2. The ability to become excited about any subject on ten minutes’ notice—or no notice at all.
A friend of mine, half of a husband/wife team long prominent in the ranks of TV and film writers, once told me, “One thing I know. In this business, can you do it in a hurry counts for a lot more than can you do it good.” Then he added, “You can’t imagine how many jobs we’ve cinched because we could leave a conference, bounce ideas off each other for five minutes in the reception room, and then walk back in with a fresh angle.”
My own experience in the fact-film field echoes that in spades. I have, on numerous occasions, discovered on entering a meeting that someone had billed me as being wild to do a script on quail-hunting, or the acidizing of oil wells, or promotion of a backwoods women’s college. Once, even, my phone rang and when I answered I found I was talking to a psychiatrist who wanted a film scripted from a citation in a medical text. On another occasion, a feature producer thrust an abstract painting at me and was shocked when my interpretation of it as a springboard to a film didn’t match his.
The point? You’d better be fast on your feet, Jack, and this is no field for negative thinkers.
3. Resilience on a level that enables you to take the worst punch in the teeth or knife in the back where your ego is concerned and still come up affable and smiling.
This is the morning after a week in which you’ve worked your heart out to build a really spectacular angle for the bright new producer of a science fiction film. He listens while you try to sell it … then informs you he isn’t interested in “hack work” or “linear thinking” and exercises his right to cut you off the job.
The technical consultant on an industrial relations film accuses you of being a “racist bastard” because you’ve differentiated two characters in your script by labeling one a Serbian, the other an Italian.
The star of a feature finds your very presence so distasteful that she demands the director bar you from the set. Her stand-in tips you off that the real issue is that Star thinks you’ve given a bit player better lines than hers in a 30-second exchange.
Yes, you do need resilience!
4. Conscience of a brand that keeps you dedicated to making the best of a bad job, even while your every atom churns with resentment/disappointment.
The film is on deer hunting. A conservation man insists that you include a shot of a knife ripping open a doe shot out of season … hands lifting out a dead fawn’s blood-dripping fetus. You point out it’s going to make half the viewers sick, but you get nowhere.
A film on mental retardation for a national agency. A petty bureaucrat, afraid of repercussions, wants to carve the guts out of it for fear of offending one state’s medical association.
A feature with a hideously weak director. The male lead continually bollixes plot lines. When you protest, the actor retorts, “George S. Kaufman never made me memorize my sides. Why should you?”
In each of these instances, you have a decision to make. Since you’re not in charge, you can’t control the situation. So, will you slack off and say, “The hell with it,” or will you go on sweating, trying to make the film as good as you can, within the limits of your predicament?
If your answer is, “The hell with it”—please quit before you start. This business has enough eight-balls already. Which is not to say you may not withdraw or demand that your name be taken from the credits, upon occasion. The man I’m objecting to is the one who stays on the job but quits trying.
5. An understanding of how to make the most of your creative powers.
It goes without saying that a film scriptwriter must above all be creative. Creativity is one of the major—if not the major—tools in his craft-kit.
Some people, obviously, are more creative than others.
It’s also a fact, however, that most of us can become infinitely more creative than we are, if we learn how to make the most of our abilities.
The creative person, you see, is one somehow conditioned to make multiple responses to single stimuli. That is, he tends to have a variety of reactions to whatever he perceives. Most often, he’s not even conscious that he does this. But—spontaneously, habitually—it’s become an integral part of his overall pattern of behavior to operate in this manner.
Thus, consider a candlestick. The non-creative among us see it for what it is and nothing more—as some sort of holder with a socket for a candle.
The creative person, on the other hand, looks beyond this obvious function to see the candlestick’s further potentials, based on its size, shape, material, components, relationship to the room and its furnishings, and so on. So if I ask him to devise ten ways to murder someone with a candlestick, odds are that sooner or later he’ll come up with something fresh and original, simply because he’s formed the habit of envisioning more than one possibility per situation.
You, in turn, can through practice train yourself to apply this same principle to every phase of your writing. If a character seems trite and obvious, make a list of half a dozen ways you might increase his individuality via unique goals, background, attitudes, appearance, mannerisms, speech, or what have you. Look at Tootsie, with the hero in drag, or the characterization of Sherlock Holmes as a boy in Young Sherlock Holmes. Continental Divide features an outdoor heroine who dominates woods and mountains, while the man, at home on city streets, is unable to take care of himself in the wilds. Ruthless People sees Bette Middler, a kidnap victim, terrorizing her captors. Does a dialogue passage sound dull? Try different lines—a dozen of them! Let the little old lady carry a switchblade in her reticule, or the preacher’s wife sleep around. How about a monster of a man who faints at the sight of blood? The bathing beauty who’s scared of water? The tycoon who can’t read? (Pardon me—better skip that last one; Somerset Maugham built a classic short story around it!)
Similarly, your film’s key statement may be dull or it may be spritely (or provocative, or profound, or what have you). Your own taste and judgment will be the deciding factor. Given “What about Susie Schnick-elfritz’s party?” as a central question, you may come up with answers ranging from “Seven close friends attended” to “Any birthday can be a disaster, if Susie bakes the cake!”
But remember, it takes practice to change habit patterns. Get in the swing of creative thinking before crucial need for it arises. To that end, look for faces in clouds. Compare people with animals as to manners or appearance. Devise outrageously appropriate replies to propriety’s questions—even if you don’t have the nerve to voice them. Leave a movie two-thirds through the picture, set up five possible endings of your own, and then go back for the next performance and see if the scriptwriter resolved the situation as cleverly.
Do keep the fitness of things in mind, however. That is, be sure your characters—whether people, products, or principles—stay in character. Don’t throw your picture out of kilter with shock for shock’s sake. You’ll still have plenty of room to move around, once you learn to devise a variety of fresh handlings—via lists—for every mundane circumstance.
6. A decision as to the area in which you wish to work.
Film production today is a fantastically big field—and all of it needs competent scriptwriters. But you’re the one who has to decide which road you want to take.
Thus, there are art films, business films, documentary films, educational films, entertainment films, experimental films, government films, industrial films, medical films, promotional films, religious films, sales films, scientific films, slide films, travel films, and a host of others. Each area offers strengths and weaknesses, advantages and opportunities and headaches.
You need to find out about these various specialties: the demands they make, the rewards they offer. Here, we can strike little more than a glancing blow at an issue that warrants all sorts of study.
Where you’re concerned, the important thing is not to fall prey to snap judgments, slap-dash decisions. Above all, recognize that Hollywood represents only the tip of the film world’s iceberg. Other types of scriptwriting may, for you, prove far more congenial.
7. A knowledge of the scriptwriter’s ground rules and technical devices.
By and large, all films fall into one of two categories: fact films, designed primarily to inform; and feature films, whose main purpose is to entertain. And while the degree of overlap between these two fields is great, the differences between them are sufficiently marked as to warrant giving each separate treatment.
Such being the case, I’ve divided this book into three major segments.
Part 1 concerns how to script fact films.
Part 2 deals with the writing of feature film scripts.
Part 3 is devoted to what I hope are practical suggestions on how to survive and prosper as a writer—especially during that crucial period when you’re trying to break in; interviews with people in the script-buying end of the business; and examples of film script form and technique, drawn from the scripts of produced films and here presented in their typescript versions, complete with detailed comments.
I recommend that you begin your study by scanning the book in its entirety, in order to get an idea of each chapter’s contents. Particularly, do not slight the fact film chapters because your main interest lies in features, or vice versa. Otherwise, you’ll miss many things you’ll need to know.
Bear in mind, too, that I, like any writer, have my own notions as to how my subject matter should be presented. Thus, the traditional approach to scriptwriting tends to act as if all scripts follow a rigid, neatly ordered pattern of development: outline, treatment, screenplay, shooting script. While in general I agree, I also see the picture as a good deal more flexible—even fluid—and so treat it in these pages.
And that’s enough and too much of preliminaries. Now, let’s get going … with a step-by-step look at how to organize a fact film.