It’s like the Wizard of Oz. We’re looking for a wizard, seeking a heart, a brain, courage, and the wizard says you already have these things. All you need to do is use them. When you believe in your great indomitable self, then all things are possible.

—Marva Collins

I really got the most kick out of making my clients’ lives a little better, by going the extra mile for them.

She took a hard, clear look at her identity and redefined what success meant.

The successful person makes a habit of doing what the failing person doesn’t like to do.

—Thomas Edison

We keep bumping up against seemingly different concepts of identity. As you read the story of Syd Field, you might see it the way Syd tells it—that he progressed through a sequence of extreme identity makeovers. Or you might conclude that the emergence of his true identity just took a little while. See what you think.

Profile in Success: Syd Field

Syd Field is acclaimed as the “guru of all screenwriters” by CNN and “the most sought-after screenwriting teacher in the world” by the Hollywood Reporter. The internationally celebrated author of eight books on screenwriting, his book Screenplay is considered “the Bible” of the film industry, published in some 28 languages and used in more than 450 major colleges and universities around the country. He has conducted screenwriting workshops all over the world and has been a special script consultant to the governments of Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Germany, Israel, Mexico, and more. He has been commissioned to conduct special executive workshops by the Disney Studios, 20th Century Fox, Universal Studios, the Nike Corporation, and others. Field was inducted into the prestigious Final Draft Hall of Fame in 2006 and is currently on faculty in the celebrated Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. Much of Hollywood uses his screenplay paradigm, or rebels against it, so Syd has made his mark. Still, he has learned that even though he has a firm handle on his own identity, he has to stay light on his feet and be able to reinvent himself. Here is his story, in his own words.

When I was growing up, I had to cope with having an older brother—four years older, to be exact—who was the apple of my parents’ eye. They named my father’s furniture company, Morton’s Furniture, after him. He was always such a “good” boy that he never did anything wrong in their eyes and was held up to me as a shining example of how I was supposed to be. I rebelled and decided that if he was the “good one,” I was going to get even by being the “bad one” and getting in trouble a lot of the time.

This was just my stubbornness at work. So growing up, I, along with all my friends, were more into rebellion than anything else. In high school, we were the guys endlessly in some kind of trouble. We were also the star athletes on the track team, so we got away with it most of the time. My family still remembers what a concern I became to my mother after my father died when I was 12. She feared that I wasn’t going to make it in life because I was always getting into trouble and I showed no apparent aptitude for anything other than athletics. By the time we graduated high school, Jimmy Dean was a rising star. My friend Frank met Dean by accident, and Jimmy started hanging out with us as we strolled down Hollywood Boulevard looking for trouble—and find it we would. We got in a lot of fights and ended up in juvenile hall. We were everything being a rebel was about.

Jimmy Dean somehow found in us a freedom and another way to look at his life. Instead of living the structured life of an actor, for him it became the unstructured life of freedom, of which acting was a part. About a year after Jimmy made Rebel Without a Cause, we realized that our group of guys were the “bad guys” model for the movie. So we started to play that role full on. And then my mother died. My aunt accused me of murdering my mother. She didn’t really mean it. She was sick with loss and grief. Of course, it took years for me to understand that she didn’t mean it. But when my mother died on my birthday, I started to turn my personality around. Out of choice, I didn’t continue as the overt, getting-in-trouble, loud-mouthed attention getter. I became the quiet and introverted one. I said, “I’m not going to be an athlete. I’m not going to run track anymore.” (I was a member of the track team at USC the year we became national champions.)

Instead, I went to U.C. Berkeley and morphed from being a loudmouth attention getter to a quiet, introverted person who focused on being “good.” I attempted to fulfill the promise I had made my mother just before she died, that I was at heart a good boy. This meant I would become a professional person: doctor, lawyer, Indian chief—whatever she wanted, that’s what I was going to be.

At Berkeley, I was drifting, not knowing where I was going and still searching for what I wanted. I started acting and had good success. Then I met my mentor, Jean Renoir, the French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer, and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than 40 films, from the silent era through the end of the 1960s. As an author, he wrote the definitive biography of his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and as a man, he changed the direction of my life. Renoir said to me, “The future is film—don’t waste your time with English literature, don’t waste your time trying to be a professional person, the future is film!” He wrote me a letter saying to the UCLA film department, “Let this kid in.”

And so they did. I went to UCLA for a year. I was there with Ray Manzarek and Jim Morrison. They were punk rockers at the time, and they created a garage band called the Doors. We all made films together and hung out together, and then they went into music, and my uncle got me a job as a gofer in the film business. I worked in shipping at Wolper, a studio praised for Roots, Willy Wonka, and Thorn Birds. First and foremost, Wolper was a documentary film producer. This was really the period that defined my life, because it gave me a direction. In retrospect, that’s when I found out I had choices to make in my life. Film was a big arena. If I wanted to be in film, what did I want to do in film? And the answer was, well, go into production in some way. But serendipitous circumstances drove me to look for a writer’s job. Because I was the only one at Wolper who really figured out how the library worked, I volunteered to do research.

When I was at Wolper doing research for five years, I was still a young kid, and I learned that I could find stuff. That was my gift—I could find stuff. I found the actual Bay of Pigs footage that was shot on the boat as they were going to invade Cuba. I found Grace Kelly’s first modeling spread, shot when she was 17 years old in high school. I found the first film Marilyn Monroe ever made—a Union 76 commercial. She went by her maiden name of Norma Jean Baker at that time.

I was learning that I could find things if I set my mind to it. I became aware that, with this change in mental strategy and energy, I could put that energy out into the world and opportunities would start to find me. I could then make different choices about who I wanted to be as a person and what I wanted to do. I remember the “aha!” moment when I recognized that I could make the choice to be a success or a nonsuccess. That literally changed my life. In that moment, I realized that I could choose the life I wanted.

This was also when I had the opportunity to write my first book and to start teaching. This was back in the ’70s. These were times of great exploration and great experimentation. I was fortunate to be within the crucible of that change in the film industry. We were all setting out along this unknown path of experimentation in making television the way we wanted to see television. You can’t do that now, of course—but that’s how we started, going around to show what could be done and creating what we called entertainment documentaries, the forerunner of shows like Law and Order.

When I started out teaching, I was terrible. I was the worst you can imagine, because I had this position that, if I’m hired to be the teacher and you guys are the students, I have to know something that you don’t. It made me just the worst teacher. Students were leaving in droves every night. I could figure out it wasn’t working; so, I thought, “Why don’t I be a student and they be the teacher?” I opened up class to answer questions from the students. I answered from my own experience as a reader, a writer, and now a teacher. I began to realize that everybody has the same questions regarding how to write a screenplay.

How do you tell your story? How do you structure a story? How do you create the characters, write more effective dialogue, and shape strong and complex characters? This became the structure for the book. I read a lot of screenplays along the way—at least 10,000 to 15,000, and probably 20,000 by now. I’ve sold screenplays, had a few produced, and had quite a few optioned. As I’m looking back, I see that there were certain signposts that directed me as I was moving along this path. I didn’t even know that teaching was one of them until I found out that I could take questions from people and not be an ass in front of the class or assume I knew something they didn’t know. I went back to writing and finally sat down to pull chapter outlines together for a book. I wrote an introduction and then two chapters, and got it sold within two weeks. I’ve been writing and teaching all over the world ever since.

Now the whole business of film is being reinvented. The power of the big studios and the mainstream media is vanishing, just like the world changed in the music industry. All of us in the business have to reinvent our identities and roles in the business of film and television.

What’s interesting to me is the growth I’m going through right now. At this moment in time, and after all these years, I’m still not clear about understanding who I am in terms of identity, because I’m changing now with the current of the times, reinventing my identity as I am carried along by the current. Identity to me is a conscious thing, and any conscious thing lives and grows and changes and adapts to the times. If you don’t adapt, it’s over. You see that all the time. People who can’t adapt get locked in nonsuccess until they perish.

People who cannot adapt to the present time is what Sam Peckinpah, one of my mentors, used to write about. He believed that there were unchanged men in changing times, so he made The Wild Bunch, in which you have four outlaws who are out of time. In a similar vein, you have Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The characters go to Bolivia because they can’t adapt to the times of the railroad, to the telephone, to the check; they’re out of business because all they know how to do is rob banks. In The Wild Bunch, it’s the same way—all they know how to do is rob banks. Their trade, their identity, is of a bank robber. However, at that time, in 1907, things had changed, and they didn’t know how to adapt to the change. So this idea about unchanged men in changing times is really important, and that’s exactly what I’m beginning to understand.

I either have to adapt or it’s over. Period.