7
The Rules of the Game
If it seems unfair that writers must run the gauntlet of the development process only to discover that even more compromises loom when powerful collaborators become involved, then the fact that other challenges still await must seem patently cruel. But that’s the lot of the screenwriter in contemporary Hollywood: The obsessive focus on fast returns at the box office means that writers are expected to deliver blueprints for consumer products, rather than personal artistic statements.
It was not always so. For a glorious moment in the late sixties and early seventies, individualistic storytellers seized power in Hollywood by putting their collective finger on the pulse of the burgeoning youth audience. Almost as soon as that heyday for offbeat screenplays began, however, it ended when studio executives saw the unprecedented box-office returns of effects-driven blockbusters such as Jaws (1975) and Star Wars (1977). As Paul Mazursky and others who flourished in the “New Hollywood” era note, the period during which studios bank-rolled personal films was as fleeting as it was precious. The result is the current stark climate, in which corporations scrutinize potential movie productions as closely—and as coldly—as any other items on their balance sheets. These financial pressures lead to an anxious existence for writers who, as Mark D. Rosenthal colorfully remarks, feel like prey trying to avoid the clutches of ravenous predators.
Adding to the insecurity is this unpleasant fact: Writers who complain too noisily about their status in the creative process quickly find themselves shut out of the process altogether, because they gain reputations for being difficult. The concept that a screenwriter might know best how to tell a film’s story simply doesn’t have any credibility in Hollywood.
If there’s hope in this bleak litany of professional realities, it is the knowledge that pragmatic screenwriters have opportunities to protect their work and to ensure continued employment—if they’re willing to compromise. That compromise may take the form of providing gratis labor, parsing unclear instructions in order to identify what powerful colleagues truly want, or even sacrificing beloved story elements for the greater goal of seeing a movie brought to life.
Yesterday’s Gone
MICHAEL JANUARY: Hollywood lives and dies on something that seems new and original, but is very much like something that made money before. If you, as a writer, can figure out how to make that formula work, then you can become quite wealthy.
JAMES L. WHITE: The studios are not very receptive to original thought. Everyone likes to say they are, but then they find sixty zillion reasons why there’s no audience for this and there’s no audience for that, and they keep making the same thing over and over again.
ARI B. RUBIN: I remember when I started out, one of the first questions I asked in every single meeting was: “Do you want original ideas?” They all said no. Every single one of them said, “It’s hard to get an original idea produced. If you have a book you love, let us know. If you have a magazine article, we’ll option it and you can do it.” The money people wanna see something tangible from the get-go.
JOHN AUGUST: You tend to have a lot of ideas you would like to see made into movies, yet the reality is that most things that actually become movies aren’t brand-new ideas that I sit down at the computer and write. If I want to have movies in theaters, it behooves me to actually write the kind of movies that are gonna get made. At this point in time, the movies that get made are based on some preexisting piece of intellectual property.
JONATHAN LEMKIN: Things are really brand-identified right now, and if I could pitch Wheaties: The Movie tomorrow, I’d have a better chance of selling it than I would with an original idea. “There’s already a cereal box, guys!” It’s a very strange time.
RICHARD RUSH: A corporate style of conducting business has been imposed upon the movie industry, which used to leave room for the disruptions of talent. It is stunning to see how cleverly everything has been assigned a number value, and any idea is immediately dissected into numbers representing the stars, the subject matter, the possible disposition of it in various media, countries, ancillaries—and it’s all a stunning amount of bullshit, because it totally neglects whether it’s going to be done well or not.
JOHN CARPENTER: The movie business has evolved from this industry that used to be run by the owners—people like Jack Warner and L. B. Mayer and these guys, back in the golden age. The studios were factory situations, and everything was controlled. Things began to break loose in the sixties and seventies, and more freedom was given to the director. This coincided with a lot of style changes—lighter cameras, you could go on exteriors, and so forth. Nowadays, giant conglomerates own the studios, and movies are just a part of this big company.
John Carpenter
PAUL SCHRADER: There was a crisis of confidence, right around the late sixties. The big studio films had started flopping—Paint Your Wagon; Hello, Dolly!—and the indie films had started making money—Five Easy Pieces, The Last Picture Show, Easy Rider. The studios were in very bad trouble. This was the time in which Paramount was actually sold, and they were gonna fold up the lot; 20th Century–Fox sold off most of its lot. There was a real sense of insecurity in the executive suites as to what people wanted to see, particularly what young people wanted to see. So you could actually go into those offices and say to them, like Coppola did, “Today is your lucky day—I have come to tell you what people want to see,” and they would actually believe you.
That changed in the early eighties, when Barry Diller came from ABC over to Paramount, and he brought in Frank Mancuso and the whole concept of market research—because the studio executives hated the idea that they had to take the word of artists about what was gonna make money.
Market research used to be a building way on the other side of the lot. When Diller came in, it was right next to his office. Virtually everything went through market research, and that was a great relief to the studio executives, because now they had a system whereby they could tell what people actually wanted to see. But once you introduce the concept of market research, then you start down a road where the filmmakers are moved out of the executive suites, and bit by bit the money managers are moved in. Now the big film conglomerates are run by people who know the money game, but not the filmmaking game.
PAUL MAZURSKY: The seventies were paradise. There was great respect for the auteur, and especially for the director who wrote his own scripts, or cowrote them. They weren’t bringing me material. I brought my material to them. In the seventies you were answering to one or two people at a studio. Nowadays it’s corporate, so you don’t know quite what you’re going up against.
The nature of the movie business has changed in some very powerful ways. Number one, when Jaws came along, wide distribution became more and more the thing, which led to what I call “opening big on Friday.” And if you write a script that they don’t think will open big on a Friday, you’re doomed to more difficulty. They don’t care how good it is, and they used to care.
Paul Mazursky
In the seventies, they all wanted Oscar nominations, so many good movies were made. They weren’t thinking about releasing it in three thousand theaters. When they were reading a script, they could say, “Well, if this doesn’t cost too much money, if it’s really cheap—this guy might be talented, there might be something here. Let’s take a shot.” And they would open it in maybe fifty or a hundred theaters in the country, see how it did. If it did okay, it would go a little broader, might even get up to five hundred. And if it only cost $2 million, they might end up making their money back and be satisfied.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN: With Butch Cassidy, George Roy Hill was a powerful director, and Paul Newman was the biggest star in the world. I think the movie cost $4.8 million. If you were gonna make Butch Cassidy today with Will Smith, let’s say, and a name director, you’re talking $150 million, and that’s if you’re lucky. That’s one of the biggest changes screenwriters have to deal with—everything is so fucking expensive, and it’s only gonna get more so.
I was talking to a superpower producer recently, and some studio head just said to him, “We’ll make movies for under $20 million or over $75 million. We don’t want anything in between.” That logic is this: “Under $20 million” means an art film, and they might make money off of an art film, and “over $75 million” means special effects. Well, it’s ridiculous to assume that you can’t make a movie for $35 million that’s a huge hit.
DANIEL PYNE: One of the sad things that’s happening in film and television is that this is our mythmaking structure. Culture tends to need myths, and it tends to need storytelling. And I think sometimes we shortchange ourselves by making the kinds of movies that we sometimes make that have no real cultural context except to make money or sell theme-park rides.
STEVEN E. de SOUZA: We’ve sort of moved into a post-content era now, if you’re talking about a studio tent-pole project. And if you’re interested in story and human emotion, I would not recommend chasing those kinds of movies. I go to meetings and they’re already talking about the sequel. I go to meetings where they’re talking about the power of this scene where your leading lady says, “They killed my best friend! They betrayed me! They’ll pay!” and they go, “We really think this best friend is an appealing character, and the actor we’re thinking of getting is looking for a franchise. Do we have to kill that person? Could that person just be injured?” Well, that’s sort of like a different thing. When Scarlett O’Hara says, “I swear to God, I’ll never be hungry again,” you don’t ask if she could say, “I swear to God, I’ll never miss lunch!”
KRISS TURNER: You’ve got Pirates of the Caribbean 8, probably, on the way, and I understand it. Spider-Man 14. I get it. They’re gonna keep comin’, comin’, comin’…. But I’ve gotta believe in original ideas, because those are what I write.
NAOMI FONER: I do a lot of independent, smaller-budgeted films, and I do those movies that the studios make that are character-based, and I’ve started to bring things to them to remind them of the movies they used to make. Ordinary People wouldn’t get made anymore—it would be a Lifetime Television movie. It’s not the kind of thing that studios are doing. Those are the kinds of things that I started my career doing, and those are the kinds of things that I think people are still hungry for. This is what we have to convince the studios to make.
RON SHELTON: I wrote Bad Boys II. That did $500 million. I think I know how to deal with that marketplace, but it isn’t what I would like to do with my daily life. The need for tent poles kind of lowers the bar to where an international common denominator is the goal of the screenplay, and that just doesn’t interest me. But moving over to indies, as I have in the last five years, you run into the issue that independent films are driven by foreign money. Well, none my sports movies works in the foreign market. So that’s the juggling act. You know, the business changes. The goalposts move all the time. You can complain about it, or you can try to kick it through the moving goalpost. That’s what I do.
Here Come the Writer-Eating Crocodiles
BRUCE JOEL RUBIN: A brief story, just so you understand how Hollywood works. When I had written Ghost, I walked out of the commissary with a number of executives, and they turned to me as we were walking, and they said, “Bruce, we just want you to know that Ghost is the best script we have ever read.” And I just…I couldn’t quite believe it, but I just thought, “Oh my God, this is extraordinary.” I felt so wonderful, and I sort of floated away. About a week later, I was walking out of the commissary behind those same executives, who were walking with another writer. I was listening to them, and they said to the writer, “We just want you to know that your script is the best script we have ever read.” And then I got it. I got how the town works, on some level.
NAOMI FONER: I wrote a screenplay called Triangle, which I had written for Barbra Streisand about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire, and they hired Jane Fonda to play the other part. She wanted to get rid of me. I didn’t yet have enough experience to know that when somebody comes on a picture, they want to bring in their people because they know that if they don’t bring in their people, they’re in some jeopardy of not being important enough in the process. You know, it gives them power. I was devastated, because I had written a really good script—one that had attracted Jane Fonda, one that Barbra Streisand was happy with. These were a couple of women who I had held in great esteem—who I had hoped would be mentors of some sort or another—but who turned out to be giant pains in the ass when actually encountered in life.
MARK D. ROSENTHAL: Once you’re hired for a job, there’s a very high anxiety level, which just stays in the background—it’s sort of like a white noise of “What’s gonna happen to me on this little adventure? Am I gonna make it down the river? When are the giant falls with the writer-eating crocodiles in ’em gonna come? Are they gonna come way down the river? Are they gonna come right away, which they do sometimes?” You know, you turn in a first draft and good-bye. Or maybe you’re gonna sail way down the river and get it close to production, and then something bad is gonna happen. Or in the rare case, you’re gonna make it all the way through. I once had a studio executive say to me, when we were replaced, “What are you carping about? Nobody goes the distance anymore.” As if that was okay.
JOSE RIVERA: Earlier in my career, I was still learning my craft as a writer, and I would think, “I’m not getting these jobs because I’m not yet a good enough writer to get the jobs.” Now I don’t feel that. Now I feel like I really know my craft, and now if I get rejected, I take it far more personally and think, “Oh my God, these people are idiots. They just don’t know what they’re doing. They don’t know a good thing when they see it.” It’s much harder to be turned down these days, because I feel that I’m giving it everything I have, and the marketplace has proven that I can perform. When something gets turned down, I feel there’s something really wrong here.
RICHARD RUSH: Frequently, I find that if I’ve written a project, what is going to be attacked is my favorite scene, whatever it happens to be. The one that I know is truly interesting and right, and the reason that I made this piece and the reason it works, is the one that will come under attack, because everybody wants to get in on the glory of what’s good about it. They want to change it, and therefore be part owner. I think that’s the secret, unconscious motivation that drives it—otherwise the coincidence is too great.
JOHN CARPENTER: Everybody wants to be creative. Everybody. They’re trying to influence the movie so they can be proud of it. So you just see how bad the suggestion is and see if you can live with it. If it’s not too terrible, you try to accommodate them. If it’s the worst thing in the world and it destroys your idea, then you have to stand up and say, “I can’t do that. That’s just gonna ruin this.”
GERALD DiPEGO: I’ve always stayed with my films. Even when they’ve replaced me, they’ve asked me to come back. So when I go into the theater or to the premiere and see the movie, it’s not a surprise. I know what the damage is if there’s damage, and I know where the thrills are if the thrills are still in there. But it’s very hard to be calm about it, because the story is such a personal thing, and you dreamed it up. As people say, it’s kind of your child that you’re sending out into the world.
I’m sort of toward the end of my career, and that’s one of the things I’m so glad to leave behind. I mean, I have a small movie that I’ve written, and if it’s my last one, that’s fine. I’m in business with a man, and we’re going to hopefully raise the money and do the film, and I’m looking forward to that. But I’m also picking up my novel career again and writing short stories and so on.
It’s hard for me to love what I do, and then make peace with a film that makes you wince and cringe—maybe every twenty minutes, or maybe just twice during the movie if you’re lucky. There’s always a little cringe factor involved.
DAVID S. WARD: Sometimes you’ll write a script and it’ll be made into a movie, and you’ll feel like the movie is really a pale imitation of the potential that the script had. Other times you feel like the movie not only did the script justice, but it may have improved it. Both of those things are possible. It’s not always that the screenwriter winds up feeling like their work has been somehow diminished. There are times when it does, and it’s a terrible feeling because everyone works hard and wants the film to be good.
WILLIAM GOLDMAN: Nobody sets out to fuck up your movie. It’s not like the director or the stars wake up in the morning and say, “Let me screw up this scene. How can I really cause Bill Goldman pain?” It’s just that they’re terrified. I wrote a line once that caught on out there in Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” And they don’t. If we knew what we were doing, every movie would be wonderful. If actors knew what they were doing, every performance would be just swell. It’s a crapshoot. It just is. There’s no answer. I wish there were.
ANDREW W. MARLOWE: I think the hardest situation is when you have a director who gets skittish a few weeks or a few months before shooting. Everybody’s loved the script up to that point, but just for insurance, let’s bring on a big name, or somebody who’s good with this dialogue. They come in and they do work, and the work probably doesn’t make the script any better; it’s probably a lateral change. That’s when it’s difficult, because it’s not really rewriting to make the project better—it’s rewriting to assuage somebody’s ego. More often than not, you’ll end up with a project that has competing points of view.
ZAK PENN: Particularly on the big blockbuster movies, where you’re coming in as a rewriter, I go through that same period of feeling like “This movie’s gonna be great, and I have all these ideas, and this is how it’s gonna be different from everything else.” And then you start to realize: “This isn’t my movie.” Even if I don’t get fired—which probably is gonna happen no matter how good a job I do, because it’s the nature of the beast—it’s really the director’s movie, and the actors’ movie, and a bunch of other people’s movie. And so at a certain point as a screenwriter, you have to say, “The purity of vision that I’m looking for isn’t gonna happen, so what is worth my investment here? How passionate can I be?”
BRUCE JOEL RUBIN: Writers don’t own the very product that makes this whole business flourish—and that’s not right. It’s not fair. It’s never been fair, and every writer knows it. There’s a kind of underlying anger in every writer in Hollywood at how misused we all are by the business. It is really cruel on some levels that writers have so little participation in the work they create. You know, to be a writer and to have to fight to go to the premiere of your movie, or to be allowed on the set where they’re shooting your movie—it’s not right.
MARK O’KEEFE: This was at the Bruce Almighty premiere. It was my first movie. There was some sort of VIP area with the actors, and I’m like, “Oh, let’s go in there and say hi to everybody.”
STEVE KOREN: The security guard wouldn’t let us in. He didn’t know who we were. I got mad. I’m like, “You have a job tonight because we had an idea once!”
MARK O’KEEFE: Steve’s freaking out. I’m getting a little testy.
STEVE KOREN: I’m like, “Come on! We wrote this movie! Please.”
MARK O’KEEFE: And then Stacey Snider comes out, and she’s like, “Oh, let them in.” So we go in there.
STEVE KOREN: She was very nice to let us in.
MARK O’KEEFE: Yeah, and we’re like, “We’re here! We did it!” It was very emotional being denied access to…
STEVE KOREN:…to your own movie.
MARK O’KEEFE: Yeah, this is our own premiere. And so Jim Carrey’s in there with his daughter and her friends. There’s a few other people—I think Will Ferrell was there. But it’s very empty. And the only other person in there was some woman. We go up to her, and I’m like, “What involvement did you have with this?” And she’s like, “I trained the dog.”
STEVE KOREN: The urinating dog in the movie.
MARK O’KEEFE: Yeah. And she says, “So what did you guys do?” I say, “We’re the writers.” And she says, “Oh, wow. It’s so cool they invited you to this.”
Mark O’Keefe and Steve Koren
Your Reputation Precedes You
MICHAEL JANUARY: If you do things that get you a certain reputation, when you come up in a meeting or a discussion, you can get shut off very quickly. If you have a reputation for being difficult, if you have a reputation for threatening to sue people, if you have a reputation for not being able to deliver, then when there’s a discussion around a table, someone will say, “I heard this,” or “I heard that,” and they’ll go on to the next choice. You will disappear from the conversation, sometimes with an expletive.
JOHN D. BRANCATO: Being really pissy about things doesn’t help. One of the great blow-up stories happened with a close friend of mine. He’s in a development meeting, and somebody’s saying, “We want this character to have more of a Judd Nelson feel—you know, from Taxi.” My friend turned to the executive and said, “That’s Judd Hirsch, you fucking moron.” That wasn’t really good for his career, but the story was told repeatedly, and I think people love him all the more because of it.
PAUL SCHRADER: I have a very troubled and problematic reputation. I’m known as somebody who will cause you trouble. I’m not that good at taking orders. I’m not that good at, you know, shufflin’ my feet. I have friends who are. I was just talking to Richard Price, who worked on American Gangster, and he was talking to me about the hard time Denzel Washington gave him. I thought to myself, “My God, I would have walked out of the room if someone had said to me the things that Denzel was saying to Richard.” But he didn’t walk out of the room, and he pulls down bigger numbers.
JOSE RIVERA: If you’re starting to feel like you’re hot shit and you don’t need to play fair with others, I think that can really hurt you—feeling that you can be a one-man band, that you don’t have to listen anymore. You know, the root of the word hubris means that you stop listening. I think that’s the biggest danger you can get into—when you think you’ve got all the answers, or you’ve got all the experience in the world.
MICHAEL WOLK: I think there are ways that you can handle your career to cultivate relationships with the people that have the power to make your movie. And I think I did everything I could absolutely wrong. I was about the work, I was about the script, I was about transmitting my vision—but I wasn’t so much about schmoozing and hanging out. One factor was that I was a New Yorker. I couldn’t wait to get on the plane back to New York.
There’s a line from the marvelous light comedy Mourning Becomes Electra: “Rottenness is born of sunshine.” That was kinda my feeling about L.A., and so when I would go out there, I would stay there until I started to rot, and then I would come back to New York, which was usually no more than ten days. So the idea that I would cultivate relationships with the Hollywood community was kinda…I was thinkin’ they would reach out to me ’cause I was an artiste. But they stopped reaching out for some reason.
I think it’s very, very important to cultivate real personal relationships, because those are the things that really count when people are starting to put projects together. Who do they like? Who do they wanna work with? Who do they wanna hang with? You know, that’s very important. Even if they don’t get you what you want right away, just keep workin’ the rooms, and keep in touch with people. And if they ever do somethin’ good for you, let ’em know that you’re really very grateful.
DAVID S. WARD: Hollywood’s a small town. People pretty much know what goes on. It’s very hard to keep a secret. Most people know what movies really cost, as opposed to what people are saying they cost. How does this affect screenwriters? Well, you can get a fairly good reputation as a screenwriter without really having a lot of credits, because people may have read work you’ve done that was actually very good work—it just didn’t happen to get made.
There’s all kinds of reasons why scripts don’t get made. They may be too expensive for what people think the commercial return could be. They could have gotten caught in a change of management at the studio, where somebody else comes in and doesn’t wanna have anything to do with the slate that was developed before.
But because the script may have circulated, a lot of agents around town may have read it, a lot of executives and studios around town may have read it, and a lot of financing entities. And they may have liked it. They may have thought, “I’d like to work with this writer sometime.” Maybe that script doesn’t get made, but that script will get you work doing something else.
Taking One for the Team
FRANK DARABONT: Look at the credits on the end of any given movie. Even a simple film that was shot in six weeks, like The Mist, has hundreds of people bringing their contributions to the table. That the initial vision on the screenplay page remains intact by the time it hits the screen is miraculous considering how many fingerprints get on it along the way—even when those fingerprints are well-meaning fingerprints. So when you see something intact, you really have to take pleasure in it, if you’re the guy who put the words on the page in the first place. It’s a very bizarre process, what we do. So when you see a great movie…man, I find it very inspiring to see somebody’s work that really speaks to me. To see those components having all sailed in the same direction and landed safely, instead of hitting the rocks, is fantastic. I love that part of what we do.
JOHN AUGUST: I think what newer screenwriters fail to understand is that about 50 percent of the job is how well you write. The other 50 percent of the job is how well you can understand what the people making the movie—that includes the producers, the studio, and, most importantly, the director—need in order to make the movie. I think one of the reasons why I’m able to keep working with some of the same filmmakers again and again is I can sort of intuit what it is they really need. Sometimes they don’t have the vocabulary or the specific answer to explain what it is that’s not quite working, but you’re listening very carefully and figuring out what they need. There’s a social aspect to screenwriting that’s very different from being a novelist or almost any other kind of writer.
DAVID HAYTER: It’s my job to be positive. There are some times when I’m going into a meeting that I know is gonna be miserable, but to a certain extent it’s my job to go in and power through it—to keep it afloat, you know? Even if you have to force your enthusiasm going in, it’s contagious, and it will pick you up, and it will pick up the people you’re meeting with. Studio executives with stone faces will suddenly start being drawn in by your energy and by your enthusiasm. It’ll make your life easier, and it’ll make the movie better in the long run.
JOE FORTE: As a writer, the only power you have is persuasion. That’s it. You can stamp up and down and you can scream, and eventually people are not gonna want to be around you. And so you try to stay as close to the process as you can, because that’s your only ability to influence it—to be in the room and try to persuade people. People want to change scenes or dialogue. You work with that. But the thing that I try to influence is the theme, that emotional through-line. That’s what the movie’s about.
If you don’t know what it’s about, for you, then you can’t influence anybody, and your arguments don’t make sense. They won’t track. But if you can always return to that through-line, that’s what the theme is there for. It orients everything. It’s the registration mark that goes through your movie. And if you can bring people back to that, that’s why you try to stay involved as much as you can—or are allowed to be. Then, you know, the chips fall where they may. Because it’s such an expensive business, it’s collaborative.
ADAM RIFKIN: A movie that costs $70 million, $80 million, $100 million just to make is gonna cost another $100 million just to promote. That’s a $200 million risk. So of course everybody’s nervous. Everybody’s gonna second-guess everything, and everybody is gonna run around like chickens with their heads cut off, panicking.
But you have to be professional. You have to be easy to work with. Because let’s say that you’re working on a project that you know is going south. You can rant, you can scream, you can be difficult in the room—and then you can be guaranteed that you will never work at that studio again. But if you are working on a project that’s going south and you do the best job you can, they’re gonna remember that you worked hard, that you are creative, that you’re easy to work with. And when something else comes up, they’re gonna think of you for another project.
If you’re difficult, believe me, they’re gonna remember you—they’re gonna remember not to hire you. I know a lot of writers who do this, and get themselves systematically banned from studio after studio after studio. It’s not worth it. It’s one movie. If you’re a writer worth his salt, you’ve got a stockpile of scripts. You’ve got a hundred books that you think would make great movies too. You want to be involved in as many projects as possible, because it’s a numbers game. Of the thirty movies you get a chance to develop, maybe two of them get made. You know what I mean? You want to keep working.
Adam Rifkin
DAVID S. WARD: I think the most difficult behavior is to be defensive about your work—to simply say, “No, I’m not gonna change it. You’re stupid. Your ideas are stupid.” Word gets around that you’re difficult to deal with, that you’re not professional, that you’re not a team player. That can really hurt your career, because it’s just a fact of life in the movies that changes are made to scripts. Nobody ever turns in a script and they just go and shoot it.
LINDA VOORHEES: When you’re on an assignment, you are contracted to do three rewrites and a polish. So the first draft that you turn in to a producer is their first draft, but you have rewritten it between six and twelve times. So you’ve already done six to twelve rewrites, and you’re calling it “Draft One.”
Then you sit in a meeting and they do notes on their “Draft One,” and you go back and you rewrite for the “Draft Two” that you’re gonna turn in to them per the contract. To get to that draft, you again rewrite between six and twelve times. Then you do another set of notes.
The third time, you rewrite again, and hopefully it’s in pretty good shape, so you’re only gonna rewrite between three and six times. Then you want the green light. If you don’t get the green light, then you give them their polish. If you do get the green light, then you do the polish with a director. So either way you’re gonna do the polish, and that polish is a true draft. It’s never a real “polish.”
So you’re doing a lot of freebies along the way, and the reason you’re doing the freebies is because you have pride as a writer, because you want to turn in your best writing, because you want to work again, and because you want that paycheck again. The other thing is, quite frankly, they let you know that you can be replaced. You want sole writing credit if possible, so you hang on to it with everything you have by doing those various iterations as you’re calling it “Draft One,” “Draft Two,” “Draft Three.” By the time you get to the polish, you’ve rewritten easily twenty times or more.
If you’re lucky enough to be in preproduction with a director, you can do another six drafts.
BRUCE JOEL RUBIN: I worked on The Last Mimzy for eight years, so you have no idea how many drafts were done. I mean, beyond understanding. And in the last year toward production, more drafts than I had done in the seven years before. It was exhausting and difficult. I was removed from the project. I was brought back to the project. In the last months of it, I was told to cut the script from 120 pages to, like, 95. The people who were putting the money into the project wanted a shorter movie.
So I cut it, and we got it down to a very skeletal length, and then we had the cast reading just before we started shooting. Everybody sat around the table and read the script, and my heart just sunk. I said, “This is the outline of the movie. This is not the movie. It’s not there.” I didn’t know what to do, but I knew that they had planned every day’s shooting—there was a schedule, and they weren’t going to change any of that. But within that schedule, I could look at every scene and I could give it a little bit more tissue, a little more fat, a little more heart—whatever was required to make it richer. And so I went home that night to the hotel. I worked all night, and I rewrote the movie. I gave it more life.
Working on Mimzy was a great experience for me, because I finally understood how much you can cut away, and then how much you have to add back to make sure it’s alive. It was one of the great lessons because I didn’t know you could pare away that much and still have it work. That was really astounding. One thinks that all of one’s words and all of one’s scenes and all of one’s dialogue is precious, and has to be there to make this thing work. That proved not to be the case.
Bob Shaye, who directed the film and produced it, knew this. He kept saying, “Cut more, cut more.” And I kept thinking, “It’s gonna die, it’s gonna die.” Not only did it not die, it found a kind of musculature that was very powerful. I did need to come back in at the end and add the little bit of flavoring, but it finally all worked. I really loved that I could learn so much about movies, even at this late stage of having written a fair number.
JANE ANDERSON: I wrote a spec script called Cop Gives Waitress $2 Million Tip. It later was turned into a film that they renamed It Could Happen to You. I went around pitching the idea to various studios before I wrote it. The idea I pitched was a cop can’t pay his tip at a diner, and he tells the waitress, “I’ll split my lottery ticket with you.” He wins, they split the ticket, the cop and the waitress fall in love, and the cop’s wife is so furious about this that she sues them for everything they have—takes all their money away.
Originally, I said, “The cop and the waitress realize that even though they lost $10 million, they found love, and that’s where their true happiness was.” I remember the executive at this one studio looked at me and said, “They don’t get the money?” I said no. “You mean they walk away poor? Can’t they have some of the money?”
I knew that, as is, the idea wouldn’t sell, because these executives felt that in order for the film to be satisfying, the characters had to have money. So I thought to myself, “How can I have the cop and the waitress have money in the end, yet still relate what I want to say—which is that generosity of heart is what counts in this life?” I gave it a different ending, which was: The cop and waitress lose all their money to the greedy wife who sues ’em for everything they have, and then every New Yorker who fell in love with the cop and waitress’s story hears that they’re penniless, and every New Yorker gives them a dollar. They end up with $10 million again.
In that way, I was able to hold on to the integrity of my story and yet please a studio—thus the film got made.
The Screenwriting Guru’s Perspective: Richard Walter
Richard Walter
Carving a path through the Hollywood jungle is so challenging that writers often enlist the guidance of so-called screenwriting gurus. These charismatic personalities of varying professional experience present seminars; offer one-on-one counseling, often for substantial fees; and appear at conventions such as the annual Screenwriting Expo. One of the most respected veterans of this circuit is Richard Walter, co-chair of UCLA’s screenwriting program. Walter is the author of several books, including The Whole Picture: Strategies for Screenwriting Success in the New Hollywood (1997), and a popular commentator on entertainment industry topics.
It Pays to Embrace Spontaneity
I came to California about forty years ago, fell into film school at USC. That was the turning point for me: Irwin R. Blacker’s class. He’s long gone now, God rest his soul, but he was the teacher of many, many famous writers, including the likes of George Lucas, John Milius, John Carpenter. In his class, I wrote my first screenplay. I never would show that script today. It looks like what it is, a first effort. But it had some spark, it had some style, and it got me a lot of work. It won me a career, such as it is.
I worked for all the studios, writing assignments. I was at, like, the top of the second tier. I’m the original writer of the earliest couple of drafts of American Graffiti. That led to a great deal of work for the studios writing coming-of-age stories. Mostly they were not made, but I was well paid for them. It’s frustrating, but a lot less frustrating than starving to death. I wasn’t naïve at all. I was absolutely savvy that there’s no way you could get into the movie business—it just can’t be done. I always tell writers to expect the worst in life and in Hollywood. This way you can guarantee that your surprises will be exclusively of the pleasant variety.
What I really think pays off is stumbling around blindly and stupidly, and grabbing on to that which you really like. That’s true in your life narrative, and it’s also useful in your screen narrative. You have a clear goal, where the story is going to go, and then the story runs away from you. I never knew a writer who wasn’t surprised by dialogue that a character spoke by circumstance. That’s where the real fun is. That’s where the spontaneity and the naturalism are. That’s what audiences respond to, and the biggest mistake you can make is try to hold to some preordained plan that you intellectualized at some time in the past.
When Colin Higgins was a student here—before Silver Streak, before Foul Play, before his great successes—he y entered the Goldwyn competition hoping to win first prize. First prize in that era was $4,500. And in that day, you could actually live pretty comfortably in Los Angeles for a year on $4,500. That was his dream, to win $4,500 so he wouldn’t have to have a day job. But alas he only won second prize, which was $2,500. And so that meant he had to supplement his income with a day job.
He went to work for a swimming pool cleaning company. And the very first pool that he’s cleaning is in the flats of Beverly Hills—great big, fancy house. As he’s vacuuming the pool, sitting under a beach umbrella at the pool is a guy who clearly owns this house and he’s reading a screenplay. They get to chatting, and Colin tells him about this script that won the Goldwyn prize. And this producer agrees to read it, and ends up producing it. It’s Harold and Maude. So you just have to stay open to the surprises. You have to be in the stream of things.
The Privilege of Suffering
So many people come between you and the ultimate work. It’s true they may mess it up, but there’s every chance they’ll make it even better than you imagined it could be. That’s what’s unique about film—the opportunity to belong to the family of artists and craftspeople. If you can’t stand what goes on in Hollywood, then write novels. But if you’re working in film, you have to not merely tolerate or even accept this collaborative nature, but you have to rejoice in that.
The important thing is to stay open to everything, no matter how ridiculous it sounds, because there may be something useful lost in there. Sometimes it takes some time to really get it. But the important thing is to stay open. If all you do is glean a small percentage of useful stuff, then it was worthwhile.
Everything means no except yes. That means 99.999 percent of what you hear is no. There are two calls that every writer should want to hear. The first is a producer wanting to know who is your agent. That’s a good call. The best call is from some anonymous person at an accounting department for a movie studio that just wants to know your social security number. That means they’re cutting you a check.
Don’t be such a crybaby. Expect it all to go to hell. Right now, as we’re sitting here, David Mamet is teaching a workshop in another building. David Mamet is a gigantically successful screenwriter and playwright. But he’s a bitter, dark soul who carps about how he’s been betrayed by this, that, and the other—how tortured the business is, and what idiots the producers are. David Mamet is this way! So that never goes away. You have to accept that or you must do something else.
It’s a privilege to be permitted to suffer in this business.
They have this ceramics program here at UCLA. In the beginning, each student creates some kind of an object, preparing the clay and sculpting it and glazing it and baking it in the kiln and so on. Then they analyze them all at the end of the quarter. And then the last thing they do is they line up and throw them against the wall and smash them to bits. The professor is trying to get them to understand that it’s just clay. There’s more.
Screenwriting is not about the sale. It really is about the process. I’m a hard-boiled New Yorker. I can just imagine my friends back East saying, “Richie, you’ve been baking your brains in the sun too long out there in California if you’re talking about ‘the process.’” But it’s true. It really is about getting into the process, and not becoming goal-oriented. Writers get paid for what other people get scolded for: day-dreaming. We’re supposed to wander. You know, Faulkner supposedly divorced his first wife because she didn’t understand that when he appeared to be gazing idly out the window, he was really hard at work.
What could be greater than just spinning your tales, telling lies, making up stories, and having people actually pay you money for it? Feed your family, pay for your kid’s fancy private-school tuition, simply because you told some crazy story that you made up?
There is something so unique about the human condition that has to do with creativity. You know, beavers don’t do it, termites don’t do it—not plankton, not krill. Humans do this, and if you don’t do this you are not entirely fulfilling your purpose as a human being.