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The Adventure Begins
The means by which enterprising individuals claw and scratch—or sometimes merely stumble—into the world of screenwriting are myriad. Many gain a foothold in other aspects of professional writing, or in different parts of the entertainment industry, before deciding to craft narratives for feature films. Others commence their professional lives without any plans to enter show business. Richard Rush wanted to be an astronaut. Antwone Fisher served eleven years in the U.S. Navy. Ari B. Rubin fancied a career in politics, though being the son of Oscar-winning screenwriter Bruce Joel Rubin made him a prime candidate for entering the family trade.
The reasons why people pursue screenwriting are equally varied. John Carpenter learned that writing scripts could advance his directing career. Naomi Foner seized movies as a platform for conveying political messages. Mike Binder simply wanted to broaden his reach as an entertainer, following years in the smoky nightclubs of the stand-up comedy circuit. Every intrepid soul who aspires to write movies embarks on a unique path for a unique reason. The commonality that joins them is the power of the form they employ.
To the untrained eye, a screenplay is a perplexing document. Presented in a rigid format of page-wide screen directions and thin strips of dialogue, feature-film scripts are littered with numbers and abbreviations and jargon that make them virtually incomprehensible to those not involved with film production. A screenplay is not a genuine literary document, for the author’s ultimate goal is not seeing readers engage the words as they’re written; the author’s ultimate goal is seeing the words transformed into moving pictures. And yet a screenplay is very much a genuine literary document, for it represents a writer’s expression of a narrative.
That dichotomy underlies much of the screenwriting experience. Accordingly, it seems fitting to precede a discussion of how screenwriters began their professional lives with remarks that attempt to explain exactly what these artists spend their professional lives doing.
Words and Pictures
STEVEN E. de SOUZA: Alfred Hitchcock said it best. He said, “A lot of writers think they’re filling a page with words, but they’re filling a screen with images.”
WILLIAM GOLDMAN: Screenplays are structure, and that’s all they are. The quality of writing—which is crucial in almost every other form of literature—is not what makes a screenplay work. Structure isn’t anything else but telling the story, starting as late as possible, starting each scene as late as possible. You don’t wanna begin with “Once upon a time,” because the audience gets antsy.
RON SHELTON: Screenwriting is rigorously disciplined, in the sense that movies are two hours long, give or take. Well, that’s like telling the painter how big your canvas is every time. But in that two hours, you can tell a wonderful little story or you can tell a huge, gigantic epic.
MARK D. ROSENTHAL: The word screenwriting is a kenning, which means it’s a composite of two nouns. This is my literary background. Everybody stays focused on the screen part, because it’s Hollywood and it’s fun and it’s money and it’s fame. The writing part, no one talks about.
The most difficult thing a screenwriter does, which is the most difficult thing in moviemaking, is to make a precise, detailed decision. It’s easy to say, “Let’s have an exciting chase along the beach here, where he finds out that his partner is gonna betray him.” The person who says that thinks, “Oh, I’m a genius. I just came up with a scene.” That’s not hard. Anybody can do that after a while of watching movies.
The precise second-to-second detail of that scene—what each character is doing, feeling, and saying—is really hard, because it forces the mind to get as particular as mathematics. It’s the only reason moviemakers use screenwriters. Otherwise, why pay us this money? It’s too hard to try to come up with all those details while you’re making the movie. You have to have them laid out first.
DOUG ATCHISON: Screenwriting is a very difficult thing to master. It requires both halves of your brain. You need that artistic, impulsive, creative aspect—and you also need that objective part as well, because a screenplay is precise. It’s not like a novel. You write it over a long period of time, but you experience it in a finite period of time. And you have to find within that very precise structure ways to access very imprecise feelings and emotions and motivations.
JOE FORTE: A novelist can go inside the brain of a character and tell you what they’re thinking. The Great Gatsby is a great novel, but it’s never worked as a movie because the escalation and the forward movement of the novel is the narrator changing and perceiving the characters differently. You can’t do that in a screenplay. You have very few tools, and you have to learn how to use those tools well.
JOHN D. BRANCATO: A screenplay is a blueprint. It’s not that much fun to read. I’m not worried about the fact that it’s not in itself valuable. It’s okay to be a means of bringing something alive onscreen. I mean, the more I think back on some images that were just crazy crap in my own head, and are now up there in films that I’ve written—that’s pretty amazing. It’s like having some projector from your brain.
FRANK DARABONT: Done well, screenwriting is real writing. Yes, there is hack work, but the same is true of novels. There’s a lot of crap on the bookshelves, and very few novels that will transport you and uplift you or illuminate some truth of the human condition. The notion that somehow writing novels is real writing and writing screenplays isn’t is horseshit—usually shoveled by somebody who couldn’t write a movie that would move people if you held a gun to their head and said, “Show me what great screenwriting is.”
Frank Darabont
GERALD DiPEGO: If you go to a store and buy a play by Tennessee Williams or someone, you can come home and read it and have a real experience with it. You haven’t seen the play, but you’ve read it. Well, the same thing should be true of a good screenplay. You bring it home, sit in your chair, and you should have an experience with it, because the writer has created a play.
JOSH FRIEDMAN: A screenplay is a piece of writing, and the best of them are great pieces of writing. But they will be interpreted, and if you’re a good screenwriter, you take that into account.
The Path to Hollywood
PAUL MAZURSKY: I started as an actor. I was in Stanley Kubrick’s first picture, Fear and Desire. I was in Blackboard Jungle. Then I moved out to California. I was in the Second City comedy revue. That led to me writing for Danny Kaye’s television show for four years. That was the first steady job I’d had in show business. While working for Danny Kaye, I wrote the pilot for The Monkees with Larry Tucker, and wrote a script with Larry called H-Bomb Beach Party, which was optioned but never made. Came close. The Danny Kaye Show ended, we got an office on Sunset Boulevard, and Larry and I wrote I Love You, Alice B. Toklas! My agent got it to Peter Sellers, who read it and said he wanted to do it. That was an amazing foot in the door of writing for movies.
RICHARD RUSH: I was at UCLA as an astronomy and physics major, hoping to be the first man on the moon. After the first year, I realized the math was killing me, so I switched my major to theater, and it was the first semester of the movie department at UCLA. It was fortuitous in that sense. The idea was to become a director, and writing was the intrinsic part of it. That’s how I started.
LARRY COHEN: I started writing movies when I was a kid. I was probably only nine years old. I was writing my own comic books, and they were basically storyboards for movies. I didn’t deal with superheroes; I dealt more with dramatic stories. I was doing the same thing then that I’m doing now, to tell you the truth. When I sit down at the table and start writing, I feel like I’m back in my room as a kid.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN: I had written a novel called No Way to Treat a Lady, which was very short. So to make it longer, I made a lot of chapters—there were, like, sixty chapters in a 150-page book. Some chapters were one word long, some chapters were all of a sentence. The actor Cliff Robertson got ahold of it and thought I had written a screen treatment. He asked me to do a movie for him, which I did, and then he fired me from it immediately and won the Oscar for it. So he was not dumb. But it was all by mistake.
DAVID S. WARD: At UCLA, the films I was making just got longer and longer, and as the films got longer, the scripts got longer. My thesis film was supposed to be a thirty-, thirty-five-minute film. It felt like a feature idea, so I just let it go to feature length and actually wound up writing my first feature script. It was a film called Steelyard Blues, which I was fortunate enough to get made a year after I graduated from UCLA.
PAUL SCHRADER: I was a protégé of Pauline Kael, and I thought I would become a film critic. I had gone to UCLA, but I had gotten an MA in film studies, not an MFA in filmmaking. I also did coverage for Columbia Pictures. Coverage is just writing a synopsis of a book or a screenplay. I’d gotten fired because I was too snide in my coverage, but I knew what scripts were, so that really helped. And then, you know, I hit a rough patch in my life, and I had to turn to fiction—to fantasy—to sort of exorcise these things that were eating me up. Out of that came Taxi Driver, and then I went on and wrote other scripts.
JOHN CARPENTER: I made a movie in the seventies called Dark Star, which I hoped would get me directing jobs. It didn’t get me any directing jobs. It did get me an agent, who told me the way to get into the movie business is to write your way in. So I just started writing screenplays—outlines, treatments, screenplays.
STEVEN E. de SOUZA: Well, if you dispense with about seven or eight years of freelance writing, and working in local television, and collecting maybe 150 rejection slips from magazines—if you skip all that, I’m an overnight success, in that within five days of arriving in Hollywood, I had an overall deal as a writer at Universal Pictures.
When I decided I had to get out of local television, I said, “I’ll give myself three months to be successful in Hollywood.” I knew enough to bring writing samples that were screenplays. I came out to California, and I had an aunt and uncle out here with a sofa bed. My aunt’s best friend was Merv Griffin’s secretary, but she says, “Well, gee, all we do here at Merv Griffin Productions is the game shows. We have the talk show, but Merv just makes up whatever he says. Wait a minute—there was a lawyer who worked for Merv, and I heard he became an agent.”
I get to that guy when he’s literally moving into his desk at an agency. He said, “Do you have writing samples that are screenplays?” I said, “Yes, I do.” Forty-eight hours later, he called me up and said, “I love your stuff. If you don’t mind, I’m gonna give your scripts to another client of mine.” This is, like, the fourth day I’m in Los Angeles.
He calls back and says, “Go see these guys Harve Bennett and Allan Balter. They’re producers at Universal.” I go there, and I’m in this meeting, and they’re talking about my stuff, and it’s very encouraging. Then they say, “Go see Claire. She’ll give you your parking information.” So I go, “Uh, well, I’ve got my thing right here—you can stamp me here.” And they go, “Ha, ha, ha.” I didn’t realize that I’d already been hired. Monday morning, I go to work on The Six Million Dollar Man.
Steven E. de Souza
RON SHELTON: I came from a family of storytellers—you know, people who stood around the kitchen and took two hours to tell the story of a five-minute trip to the grocery store. I grew up not being able to go to movies—kind of the rigorous Baptist background: no movies, no alcohol, no cards. So, of course, I became a heavily drinking film director.
When I played baseball, I went to movies every day. My film school education was going to the theater every day at one o’clock for year after year. I just started writing out of the blue. I just started writing some not very good screenplays, but I was smart enough to throw ’em away when I was done. And over a several-year period of writing and throwing away and writing and throwing away, I started to figure out what this screenwriting thing was all about.
NAOMI FONER: I was a producer in public television. I worked for years at the Children’s Television Workshop—I was part of the team that developed The Electric Company. As a producer, I worked with a bunch of different screenwriters, and the whole time I thought, “Well, I’d like to write,” but I was afraid I would fail.
A friend of mine who was running a program on PBS, which was like the precursor of American Playhouse, offered me the opportunity to actually write one. I was pregnant with my daughter, and I was thinking about how my life was gonna change, and I decided I would try. I wrote it, and they produced it, and all of a sudden I had an agent and I was a writer.
I got into screenwriting out of an interest in politics. I had this underlying agitprop idea, which is that you reach more people with an idea that’s buried in storytelling—if you made people feel something, maybe they’d think about it. I thought we lived in a country where a lot of things needed changing.
ROBERT MARK KAMEN: I had just finished my PhD in American studies. I spent a year doing fieldwork in Afghanistan, and it really affected me on a core level. I came back and wrote a novel about it. A cousin of mine knew a film director. The director read the novel and gave me three screenplays to read, so I figured out the form and turned the novel into a screenplay. Through the same director, I met Richard Dreyfuss, who had just won the Oscar for The Goodbye Girl. He could get anything done, and what he wanted done was my screenplay. It didn’t matter that the lead character was twenty-one and Richard was thirty-two. He got Warner Bros. to buy the screenplay for $135,000. I was making $6,200 a year as a lecturer at the time, so I never bothered to go to my next lecture class.
NORA EPHRON: At a certain point in my career as a journalist, I was approached by a couple of producers who offered me money to write screenplays. The money was modest by today’s standards, but it was way more than I earned as a journalist, and it was something new, something different. So I tried it, and then other people offered me work. I had small children, and it made more sense to stay home and not run around reporting on stories. Then I was divorced with small children, and I needed the money. Finally, one of my scripts was made into a movie, and the director was kind enough to let me be involved in the process. It was way more interesting than journalism.
MARK D. ROSENTHAL: I was finishing a doctorate in Chaucer, but I knew I wanted to be around the movies. I finished school in Northern California, checked out of my apartment, packed my records in the car, and drove to L.A. I had heard that you could get paid for reading scripts, and I called up a new studio called Orion. Luckily, it was lunchtime, and the secretarial staff was gone—because if I had called and said, “I’m interested in a reader job,” they would have said, “We’ll put your name on the list.” The story editor picked up, and she laughed out loud when I told her I just finished a doctorate in Chaucer. She said, “You sound really unusual. Come on in.”
She gave me a stack of scripts, and I proceeded to evaluate them like I was doing a paper for my doctorate—you know, I was using Latinisms and talking about the character development. I gave my evaluations back to her, and she said, “What, are you crazy? Just tell me if they’re gonna make money or not.” She gave me a second chance, and within about six months, I became an official reader at Orion. After that, it dawned on me that I could write as poorly as the people whose scripts I was reading.
JOHN D. BRANCATO: I tried to be a cartoonist. That didn’t go well. The first job I got out of college was in journalism, writing for a newspaper in Long Island. Then I came to California, just because I wanted to get three thousand miles away from my family, and I wound up taking a job with Larry Flynt at Hustler. Interesting job. Luckily, it didn’t last all that long. While I was there, I was approached to collaborate on a screenplay for a horror film. I hadn’t ever intended to write screenplays. I read as many as I could, and I thought, “This is a form I can handle.” It wasn’t writer-ly with a capital W. It was more a matter of visual imagery. I could think like a cartoonist. I felt like, “Oh, this is what I should do with the rest of my life.”
MIKE BINDER: I did quite a few years as a stand-up comic, and a bunch of things went wrong. I was cast as part of Saturday Night Live and then fired. I did pilots. I thought, “I gotta learn how to make the pie instead of being served a piece of the pie.” The people that I really admired were Woody Allen and Mel Brooks and Albert Brooks. So I just started studying screenwriting, studying movies, and I said, “Okay, that’s what I wanna do.”
JANE ANDERSON: I started out as an actor, and I found that writing was so much more appropriate to my metabolism. As an actor, I could never cry on cue. I didn’t have the emotional dexterity that really good actors have. I also was limited by my physicality, because back then I looked about sixteen even when I was hitting thirty. I could never play really interesting roles, and I started to discover that as a writer, I could be anything. I could be male or female, I could be of any class, any ethnicity.
I got a small role on The Facts of Life. They had just fired a bunch of writers, and they were looking for new writers—women in particular. I don’t know where I got the nerve, but I said to the producers, “I wanna work on your show as a writer.” They said, “Give us a spec script.” I wrote a spec script, gave it to them, and they hired me.
FRANK DARABONT: Even when I was in junior high school, I was writing screenplays. You know, I’d write a Star Trek episode even though Star Trek was no longer on the air. Once I graduated high school, I started applying enormous amounts of time to getting a screenwriting career going. That became a very, very focused effort in my early twenties, during which time I was set dressing, which is nailing sets together, bringing the furniture in, putting the stuff on the walls that the director has chosen. I was not making much money doing it, but it kept the rent paid, and when the job was over, I would have enough saved up to sit at home for a month and just write. I treated writing like a full-time job. I would sit at home until the bank account bottomed out, and then I’d call my friend Greg, who was an art director—and these days, my production designer—and I’d say, “Get me on the next gig, dude!”
Nine years after graduating high school, I started making a living as a screenwriter, and I haven’t looked back—but that nine years involved a lot of sittin’ in the chair and trying to figure out how to become a professional-level screen storyteller.
BILLY RAY: When I got out of college, I was a gofer for two TV-movie producers named Jim Green and Alan Epstein. I would read everything that came into the office and write at night. I decided to write a novel, and that took about a year. I couldn’t get the novel published, and then I wrote another one. That took another year, and I couldn’t get that published either. Then I wrote my first script, which took quite a while—couldn’t get that sold. And then I rewrote it and finally got it sold, I think for $5,000. It wasn’t enough even to quit, but it was enough to make me feel like I was a writer. Then I sold my first pitch, and that was enough money that I could quit my job and actually just write full-time.
GUINEVERE TURNER: I just wanted to make a movie about lesbians, so my girlfriend and I decided we were going to make a movie about lesbians. We wrote a script, which was Go Fish. It was far more widely successful than we had ever anticipated, and hence life went into screenwriting.
JOE STILLMAN: I got an opportunity to write copy for a movie trailer company because I had been a messenger for a trailer cutter. That led to me becoming a freelance copywriter in movie advertising, and that eventually led to me writing promos for Nickelodeon and other cable networks. During this very long period, I was also writing screenplays, imagining that each one I finished would be the one that would get me the call from Steven Spielberg and change my life into something golden and wonderful. Of course, that didn’t happen. Writing promos for Nickelodeon eventually led to writing shows for Nickelodeon and working on Beavis and Butt-Head. That got Mike Judge to decide to give me a shot at the Beavis and Butt-Head movie.
JOHN AUGUST: I grew up in Boulder, Colorado, not really knowing much about the film industry or even knowing that there was a job like screenwriting. I was always a writer, but it wasn’t until some time in high school that I first realized that there was actually a script behind a movie that you saw. I went through school, and it wasn’t until about midway through getting my journalism degree that I realized I actually wanted to do movies. I applied to a summer film program at Stanford—very hands on, cutting 16 mm. I loved that. I applied to the USC film school, and I ended up coming out here.
JUSTIN ZACKHAM: I went to the University of Vermont and managed to fail out twice my first year, which is a feat. When they told me they weren’t going to have me back the second time, I went and worked on a three-hundred-foot-tall ship based in Grenada, in the Caribbean. I was the only white member of an all-black crew (this screenplay’s written, of course), and they beat the crap out of me, threw me overboard in the middle of the ocean. Twice. One guy tried to stab me. I made it through the whole thing, and I was planning on living down there. You’re in the Caribbean, on a ship, hot chicks, swap out every week—not too shabby.
I broke my leg at sea one day—got hit by this metal pipe that shattered my ankle. We had just left port, so I was at sea for a week and they had no good drugs. My job was to wake up in the morning, go sit at the bar, drink as much as I possibly could all day long to numb the pain. I was really entertaining that week.
I had to come back to the States to have my ankle operated on. While I was recovering, my dad had an angioplasty. This was back when there was only one guy in the country doing it, in San Francisco. I went out there with him, and I could only visit him for an hour in the evening. I was twenty-one years old in San Francisco, by myself, straight. There was very little to do.
I just started seeing movies. I remember the first day I saw The Godfather: Part III, Goodfellas, and a Zhang Yimou film called Ju Dou, which is still one of my favorite movies. I just did it because I was bored, and I started seeing the craft behind this stuff. I went to a bookstore and I bought this little book called Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices, and that was it. From that point on, I bored everyone to tears talking about film.
ANTWONE FISHER: I used to be homeless when I was a teenager, because I didn’t have any family. I had heard no all my life, and that I would never be able to accomplish this or that. After being in the navy for eleven years, there were a lot of things that I accomplished that previously I thought I could not.
I was a security guard on the Sony Pictures Entertainment lot. I was using Sony Pictures as a way station before I found a better job. I found my family and I wanted to go and meet them, but I hadn’t been at the job long enough to acquire any leave. So I told my boss why I wanted to go, and once I told him a little bit of my story, he said, “Go ahead.” When I came back, a lot of people wanted to hear my story, and they said that it would make for a good movie.
I insisted on writing it. Being in the navy made me understand that if I put effort toward something, at least I could find out whether I could do it or not. I owed it to myself to try. I got myself some legal pads and I wrote it out by hand. The funny thing is that at that time, all the guards at Sony had been to film school. I was the only one who didn’t have any aspirations toward filmmaking.
Antwone Fisher
ARI B. RUBIN: I wrote my first mini-screenplay when I was thirteen, and my first full screenplay when I was fifteen. I always had in the back of my mind that I would do it on the side—it was a hobby. I went to NYU, dropped out after a year and a half, and ended up going to a liberal arts program at Wesleyan. I was pursuing politics, very much going in that direction. I came out to L.A., still kind of writing on the side, and then the Iraq war happened.
That prompted me, in a very short period of time—about eleven days—to write a script about a secretary of state who realizes that his government is pursuing a war for reasons other than they were ostensibly proclaiming. I was applying to law school at that point, and I got so invested in writing the screenplay that I literally missed the day that I was supposed to take the LSATs.
That script sold about three weeks later, and that was that.
The Courage of the Young
LARRY COHEN: You don’t need much confidence when you’re a kid, because you have nothing to lose. It’s not like you have any kind of established position to maintain; you’re nobody. I never assumed there would be any obstacles whatsoever when I started out. I knew it was inevitable I would succeed, because I couldn’t do anything else. When you have no other talents but one, you must succeed at that one talent.
JOHN CARPENTER: Anyone who writes or directs or acts or does anything creative—you’re completely naïve. You don’t know what to expect, and I think that’s probably best. Because if you knew what was gonna come, you wouldn’t do it.
DAVID HAYTER: I was as naïve as Han Solo heading into the asteroid field when C–3PO starts telling him what the odds of survival are, and he says, “Never tell me the odds.” It wasn’t that I didn’t understand that those were the odds. I just felt that I could overcome them. You come to town and you don’t really know how the town works, and you don’t even really know what you’re doing, in a sense. All you have is your belief in yourself and your energy and your enthusiasm.
NORA EPHRON: I knew when I was very young that in addition to my parents’ success as screenwriters, they had lots of disappointments—plays that were never produced, movies that had flopped. In fact, when I was about ten or eleven, I read one of their unproduced plays and was so outraged it had never appeared on Broadway that I sent it to a famous Broadway producer. My parents were beyond embarrassed.
But they were contract writers at Fox, and what they wrote was almost always produced, immediately. When I started as a screenwriter and wrote six or seven scripts that weren’t made, I couldn’t help thinking about how much easier it had been in my parents’ day to get a movie made. And, of course, I thought, “I will never get a movie made, ever.”
MICK GARRIS: The first screenplay you write is rarely going to be sold and made into a movie, but it might be a good sample to get you hired to write something else. I probably wrote a dozen scripts before I ever got paid to do one.
STEPHEN SUSCO: I’ve had three movies made to date: The Grudge in 2004, The Grudge 2 in 2006, and Red in 2008. That’s three scripts. I’ve written thirty-eight screenplays. The Grudge was my first film. It was my twenty-fifth screenplay.
ARI B. RUBIN: Because I had watched my father go through it, I think I was actually better suited to deal with a lot of the challenges than many of the people who come out here. On the upside, I had my father to watch. On the downside, my father was not the best model. He made a lot of mistakes, and I emulated a lot of those mistakes in the early part of my career. So on a scale of one to ten, I would say I was probably a five in terms of naïveté. But I definitely knew it was going to be hard.
BRUCE JOEL RUBIN: I wrote a movie called Quasar, with my friend David Beinstock, and somehow we got Ingo Preminger—right when he was producing the movie M*A*S*H—to love the script. I was in my twenties, and I thought, “It’s happening just like I dreamt it.” And then, for reasons that are hard to explain—the Hollywood reasons—the movie didn’t get made, and that was that. The door just shut.
It took me years to write another movie, and that became Brainstorm, which took almost ten years to get made. I thought, “I’ve arrived, I’m a Hollywood person.” The film didn’t make money, and nobody would take my phone calls.
I was still living in the Midwest, and I thought, “My God, what does it take to arrive in Hollywood?” I was sending scripts off, and nothing was coming back. My wife looked at me, and she knew how hungry I was for this. She went to the head of the department where she was teaching in Illinois, and she said, “We’re moving to California.” She had all this faith that it was going to work. I had nothing but fear.
I was in my forties. We had two kids and enough money to live in L.A. for maybe a couple of months. We just took off. And the career started to happen. A seed falls in the right soil, and it grows.
Without my knowing it, a script that I had written called Jacob’s Ladder had been in an article about the best unproduced screenplays in Hollywood. Because of that article, people all over town had read it. I arrived in Hollywood as a known entity, which was shocking. I would go into meetings, and they would say, “You wrote Jacob’s Ladder? We love Jacob’s Ladder.”
You can’t cut yourself out of the game. If you really want this, fight for it. That’s a dangerous thing to say to some people, because it doesn’t always work, obviously.
It’s huge, taking a leap of faith. I have done it about four times in my life, where I’ve given up things and just said, “Go, see what happens.” It has worked every time. If you believe in yourself that much, that alone generates things. But if you have a leap of faith that is underpowered—where you’re questioning it as you leap—you don’t get to the other side. You can’t leap without complete and absolute willingness to die for what you want.
Bruce Joel Rubin
ADAM RIFKIN: You’re a boxer. Your job is to get punched in the face and to keep swinging. It’s easy for anybody to say, “I wrote five scripts. None of them sold. I gave it my best shot. I’m moving back to Chicago.” You can’t do that. If you want a career in Hollywood, you can’t fail. You can quit, which most people do when they don’t achieve success as quickly as they’d like, but you can’t fail. There are as many opportunities as you can create for yourself. You can write a script a day, every day, for your whole life, if you’re that motivated.
JOSE RIVERA: I do some teaching every once in a while, and I always tell my students, “Don’t have a backup plan.” As a younger person, I intentionally never developed another skill that I could fall back on, because I didn’t want to fall back on anything. I said, “I’ve gotta succeed at this, if it takes thirty years.” Luckily, it happened sooner than that. But I was prepared from a young age to stick with it for the long haul.
MIKE BINDER: I painted myself in a corner. There was nothin’ else that I was gonna do in my life. I had no other skill set. I started very young. It was my dream, and I proclaimed it, and I went after it. I jumped in the water. I don’t know what I would have done if I had failed. I was poor for many, many years, and I got used to that.
JAMES L. WHITE: The long drought till you get to be a real screenwriter—the years of not having money, and people going, “So you’re a writer, and what else do you do? How do you pay your bills?” That’s a reality. I think you need to be prepared for that.
KRISS TURNER: If you have children, or you’ve got this overhead that you’ve gotta handle, then that limits you. But if you’re twenty, then that’s not a big deal ’cause you’re crashin’ with your friends and eatin’ Top Ramen. But you’ve got to make some financial choices. Can you sacrifice a lifestyle for the dream?
JOSH FRIEDMAN: I remember some quote I saw about being a professional gambler: “It’s a hard way to make an easy living.” I think screenwriting is kinda the same thing. It’s a lot of fun, and it’s the hardest thing you’ll ever do.
RICHARD RUSH: There is a natural, physical resistance in the universe toward finishing “it,” whatever “it” happens to be. It’s always a mountain slightly higher than you could have imagined, and it takes a little more strength than you thought you possibly had. But the trick is finishing “it” no matter what they’re throwing at you.
PAUL SCHRADER: Occasionally people ask me about whether they should get involved in screenwriting or filmmaking. I usually say, “If you can find any happiness or satisfaction in another field of endeavor, you should do so, because the real reason to get involved in the arts is because you have no choice—you have issues that you need to address through fantasy and fiction.” That said, there is also a very commercial incentive for being in the arts, but I’ve never really given that too much thought, because that was never my intent. I got involved as a form of self-therapy, and I stay in it that way.
DANIEL PYNE: You don’t wanna take this up as an avocation unless it’s something that you would do for free. There are so many variables, not just skill and talent and perseverance. There’s also luck. In the book Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby talks about how in English football, there are no undiscovered strikers—there are no great defenders who no one knows about—whereas there are probably great writers who never get movies made. I know people who have worked really hard at it, who are good writers, who haven’t been that successful. That’s the luck factor.
Peter Hyams
PETER HYAMS: I began writing at a very young and precocious age, including a lot of bullshit lowercase poetry. You know, “i seek/in my life/frailty,” that kinda thing, which at the High School of Music & Art could get you laid. My aspirations were to be a documentary filmmaker, because I thought that was the best combination of writing and imagery and relevance.
I was with CBS for seven years, and made a lot of documentary stuff. I ultimately found myself more interested in writing a sentence that I thought was effective or clever than something that was giving information. So I decided I wanted to go into feature film.
I was twenty-six, and I had two kids. I came home and said to my wife, “I quit my job and I’m gonna make feature films.” My wife, who was a history teacher, said, “Are we gonna struggle?” I said, “I would expect so.” She said, “Okay. I’ll make up a struggling list.”
I shouldn’t be given credit for being bold. I was stupid. I had no idea how difficult it was. I thought all you had to do was write a script, and somebody would buy it.
I wrote a script, and Paramount bought it.
It got sent to the right people, because somebody I knew since I was a kid wound up in charge of Paramount. So when I wrote it, he said, “Send it to me.” I sent it to him, and he said, “I wanna make it.”
I am a complete anomaly. I didn’t have years of sending stuff out and having it all come back from studios or agents. It’s just stupid, blind luck.
The Educator’s Perspective: Kris Young
Kris Young
The personal interaction inherent to the collegiate experience helps many beginning screenwriters discover whether they’re truly suited to a career in show business, and Kris Young has seen that experience from several different perspectives. As an undergraduate film student at USC, he learned from noted instructor Irwin R. Blacker. Then he worked as a screenwriter for several years before earning his MFA at UCLA, where he studied with screenwriting guru Lew Hunter. Today, Young teaches at UCLA, and he co-chairs the Writers Guild of America’s Asian-American Writers Committee.
Lessons in Learning
Now that I’m a teacher, I realize everybody comes to film school because they have a big dream of going through school, learning how to write a great screenplay, selling the big script, and launching their career.
I wanted to be a Playboy photographer. My parents said, “It’s better to go to college—why don’t you go to film school, because that’s kinda like photography, isn’t it?” That’s how I wound up in film school. At USC, I made a film called Blazing Fists, a martial-arts comedy. It was the most popular film of the whole season, but the teachers hated it because it was this fusion of Bruce Lee and Blazing Saddles. The teachers would not allow me to go on as a director. That’s when I started thinking about going into writing.
Irwin Blacker was great. Up until I had his class, I think the longest paper I’d ever written was five to ten pages. And then he stood up there and said, “You must write a fifty-page treatment.” I said, “There’s no way.” And then I just did it, because you were forced to—he was kind of a scary older guy in a suit—and he gave me an A-plus. I had no idea that was gonna happen, and then I realized: Maybe I can be a writer.
I was a working professional when I went to UCLA, so I’d kinda been through it all when I went to school the second time. Lew Hunter was my main mentor. Lew expects your highest work. He’s very firm with “You’re gonna have a script done in nine weeks,” and you just do it. I think in his class, a lot of people would say that they did some of their best work.
With every teacher I’ve had, I just said, “I’m gonna do everything they tell me to do.” So no matter who they were, I walked out of their class with a finished screenplay. By experience, you find out which teachers you like better. I just took them almost randomly, and then the ones that worked, I took again—like Lew, who I took many times.
The goal of the undergrad program is essentially to give students enough training to continue until they either quit or succeed. In the undergrad program, a lot of them are total beginners, where they’ve not even written a screenplay before. The difference in the master’s program is the people are usually more mature, or they came out of undergrad programs, so they’ve written more scripts. They’re the cream of the crop from everywhere else. But the goal is the same—to equip people to become professionals.
A master’s might give you a leg up on some people, in the sense that maybe people will look at that and go, “If he went through the UCLA MFA screenwriting program, he’s probably not an idiot.” But ultimately, you’re judged by your work.
Put Up or Shut Up
You can watch a film just for fun, and then you can watch it again and start breaking it down with the timer on your DVD player to see what kind of things happen at certain times and to look for patterns. You can get a simple book, like one of those Syd Field books, and see if things are actually falling on these different structural places. But it’s a dangerous thing too, because I find that a lot of people wrote great screenplays without having to know all these structural paradigms, so you want to balance that with still enjoying film and writing from your heart.
I have my students read a screenplay a week—hopefully great ones. And I think that’s where you learn. There’s rhythm; there’s the way things look on a page. Not just formatting, but things that can’t really be explained in a book. So many people seem to need focus and discipline. The “voice” part of screenwriting can’t be taught, but I think school can shave maybe a couple of years off somebody’s eventual career—the typical mistakes that you’d have to learn by the school of hard knocks.
There’s something they talk about in the orientation for screenwriting school, and I think it’s very important. You will find out in a year or two if it’s for you or not—I guess in the same way that Michael Jordan played baseball versus basket-ball. You know—no harm, no foul. At least you can move on with your life. But if you find out that something is ignited in you, and it’s a passion that cannot ever be quenched, then that’s a great thing.
I think a lot of people hold on to this dream, even if they’re never gonna write a script, because it’s a great dream to hold on to—that someday you might write an Academy Award–winning screenplay. Going to film school, it’s a put up or shut up kind of a deal.
Teaching newcomers to screenwriting, I try not to dwell too much on the negative aspects. I guess it’s like telling new soldiers, “You’re all gonna get killed.” It’s a lesson you learn for yourself when you’ve been in it long enough. So many people drop out after a few classes. Most people never finish a screenplay. So I don’t like to tell them horror stories up front.
I impress on my students to finish in the time allotted. There are a lot of perfectionists out there who kinda circle 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.
Kung Fu Screenwriting
You need to learn that it’s more about the journey than the destination. This is something that I teach in my lecture “Kung Fu Screenwriting,” which is based on some Bruce Lee philosophy—there’s a difference between doing and being. When you venture forth to do screenwriting, like many people do, then the moment you stop, you’re not a screenwriter. But if you move toward the idea of being a writer, then it never leaves you. And I think that’s a higher thing to aspire to—to be a writer. You keep writing not necessarily to sell a script or to get a movie made, but because that is who you are.
I look for people who are already self-motivated. People who already have a high level of interest in the subject—they’re really not gonna do anything else. They’re writing before school begins, they’re gonna keep writing when school stops. It’s not something they do, but it’s something they are. Be a writer as opposed to someone who does writing.
I had never really applied for a job as a screenwriting teacher. I knew a teacher here. She had to go on vacation, and she said, “You wanna sub for me for a semester?” I was very fearful. I had thought about teaching in the sense that if I ever did it at UCLA, I’d wanna come in with an Academy Award, or some big film that could front for me, because I was very insecure about it: Why would they listen to me?
I really enjoy teaching. It’s something that I’m passionate about, and it’s something that comes naturally. It’s kinda like I don’t have to do it—I just am that, you know? I have a lot of fun with it. I mean, the hardest part is reading all those scripts, though. I’ve gotta admit that.
Some of my students are just starting to get some recognition. I feel an extreme sense of pride in the people I’ve helped—I don’t even wanna say taught. I tell students I’m more of a personal trainer. I’m just telling them, “Do more of this, do more of that.” You know, “Gimme ten more.”