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Screenwriters – make a short film this summer

May 23, 09 //
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Have you sent your scripts off to the Nicholl Fellowships for the year? Are you working on your next feature project? Are you trying to learn how the business works from the outside?

If you answered yes to any of the questions above, you’re probably still in learning mode. Most screenwriting bloggers recommend moving to LA if you’re serious about a career so that you can immerse yourself in the industry and make connections. Some will heed that advice and others won’t, but either way it’s a long, hard road to get a feature script that you’ve written filmed and distributed. The odds are pretty much against you. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try. But it does mean that you should be doing everything you can to learn about filmmaking.

Ultimately, the best way for a writer to learn is to simply write and rewrite scripts. Words and story are your tools, and you have to know how to handle them better than anyone else on a project. But another way to to learn is to make a short film. Like writing, it can be done anywhere. If you do it yourself, it’ll cost you a couple thousand bucks, and it might not turn out very well, but it will provide an education.

I’m working on my first short film now, and it’s an education. I’ve got one feature script in development, and I’ve written several full-length scripts that have fared well, but a short film is another matter altogether. Our project is already up to a cast of 15 plus extras, and a crew of at least 10 (if we can find enough volunteers). You look at a script differently when you’re trying to meet a budget. Or when you have to rewrite to adapt to a location that is different from what you originally envisioned. You learn about things like gaff tape (and what it’s for), camera dollies, cranes, and how catering, snacks and coffee are at least as important as what camera you use.

This isn’t something you can do on your own as a screenwriter. But if you’re outside LA, you’d be surprised how easy it is to get the interest of volunteers. You’ll need experienced partners. And it’ll take months of your free time. But you’ll learn a few things about filmmaking and you’ll be able to talk intelligently about the myriad of issues that producers have to deal with, from working with a budget to casting to managing a large crew. And when you’re asked to rewrite to address any of these issues, you’ll do so with complete understanding and empathy.

I’ll blog this summer about the progress of our little project. Of course we’re entering with the typical hubristic notion of showing in film festivals, winning all sorts of awards and sending it off to Sundance. But even if it sucks, I’ve already learned a bunch about filmmaking that I didn’t know after years of writing and revising.

Hiking with kids

April 6, 09 //
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The hearth killed more poets than alcohol, according to William B. Yeats. But like Jim Harrison, I prefer intense domesticity. Or maybe that’s just what I say because that’s what I have and I’m of no mind to change it.

It's hard to gain the solitude necessary for writerly artistic meditation when you have a five-year-old in tow, but if you follow these steps, you'll neverless have a pleasant hike in the woods

It's hard to gain the solitude necessary for writerly artistic meditation when you have a five-year-old in tow, but if you follow these steps, you'll never less have a pleasant hike in the woods

I fully believe that any writer has to master the skill of capturing a sense of place in his or her work. I was earnest when I recently wrote that one way to develop this sense of place was to sit on a stump for four hours in the remote forest of your choice. That’s, of course, more easily done in rural Missouri or Oregon, the locales I’ve most recently called home.

Stumps are easy for me to come by, especially in Oregon where there’s a vista of stumps around just about any bend. This state has a reputation for being green and sustainable, but there are also a whole hell of a lot of clearcuts with nary a huggable tree in sight.  So I’ve got plenty of stumps nearby. It’s the isolation and the four hours that are hard to find these days.

Like many people, I’ve got a kid. And despite being a big-time-famous writer (sic!) on nights and weekends, I’ve also got a full-time, mortgage-paying job. And a wife whom I hope stays sane. So, unlike that diminutive and celibate little bachelor Henry David Thoreau, I rarely have four hours to sit on a stump and develop my sense of place. I try to sneak away for a weekend backpack, or sometimes I send my wife and kid to the in-laws in Phoenix so I can wallow in solitude and hiking blisters, but still, I need little woody quick-fixes.

I had one such forest jaunt this morning. But I had to bring my daughter along because it my turn. We hiked 3 miles through an Oregon Coast Range forest. I found a nice stump and we sat there for twenty minutes drinking coffee (me) and eating animal crackers (kiddo). I think that writers as a type need to hike in wild (or mostly wild) places for a variety of reasons. It’s best if you can do it alone, but if you can’t, here are a few tips if you must bring a small child along. I’ve developed these tactics over the past few years with my own kid (currently 5-ish), but I assume they work with a range of ages and even multiple children.

  1. Bring a day pack with a smallish blanket, a nature guide, water, coffee, healthy and not-so-healthy snacks, a magnifying glass, layers of clothes for all parties concerned and a camera.
  2. Start your hike by going uphill. If you live in a mountainous area, look for a loop hike with a gradual uphill gradient, with the second half of the hike all downhill to your car. If you live in washboard topography (like Missouri), stick to the flats.
  3. When they start complaining, take a snack break. Even if you’re less than an hour into your hike, stop anyway. Spread out the blanket and have a picnic. It’s okay to have multiple picnics.
  4. Make your second picnic stop before they start complaining for the second time. This will surprise them and they will inexplicably begin to trust you and believe that you are not going to march them to death.
  5. Engage on several collection games during the hike. It can be wildflowers (to be pressed in the nature guide) in season, heart-shaped rocks, slugs, photos, animal tracks, leaves, whatever you can think of. You’ll wind up with a pocket full of stuff that you will have to bring home, but it’s far better than incessant whining.
  6. The magnifying glass makes collection games more interesting. Binoculars can also work. Allowing your kid to take photos can also get them engaged in the hike. Sometimes they can look for limbs or clouds of an interesting shape.
  7. Set ground rules for piggyback rides before you start. I give my daughter 1 free piggyback ride to use when she chooses.  She usually blows this one early in the hike and then soon starts whining that she wished she would have saved it for a steeper stretch of the hike. I’ll usually give her another free shoulder ride later on in the hike. If you’re following the other steps, she’ll forget and probably won’t use it for the rest of the hike.
  8. Don’t read the warning signs about bears and mountain lions out loud to your kid. You’re the one who has to be wary, not her. No need to make her more scared of the woods than she needs to be. You, of course, should be vigilant.

If you follow these techniques, you’ll soon learn that your little anti-hiker who whines and cries when you tell her it’s time for a forest walk might even begin to ask you when you’re planning to go again.

Of course, these techniques aren’t limited to writer-types.

Story within a story

March 28, 09 //
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My daughter was watching a show on PBS about a dog who travels through time. It worked on multiple timelines with several threads weaving the overall narrative.  A pretty complex structure for a kid’s show, or so I thought. I paused by the television on my way to the kitchen for an espresso and she looked up at me and explained, “this story is happening inside another story.”

It was then that I realized how natural is the narrative concept of story within a story. My daughter, barely five, is hardly thrown by a complex narrative.

Story within a story, as a device, is as old as storytelling itself. Take The Arabian Nights and Sheherazade’s desperate bid to prolong her life serving as a framework for a string of tales. Take Guillermo Arriaga’s multi-threaded storytelling in Amores Perros and Babel. Take the picaresque collection of tales in Big Fish, each exaggerated story serving the greater narrative about a complex father-son dynamic. Or consider the simple story within a story told by Tom Hanks in Charlie Wilson’s War that amounted to the finest moment in that film: he tells the story of how he became involved in politics as a young boy, ending the tale with, “And that’s the day I fell in love with America.”

The technique is used so often in film and fiction that it’s hardly original or distinctive. It can be done well, as in Joseph Conrad’s Youth, which is a story within a story delivered around pints of beer by a sailor in a pub. Or it can be as clumsy and hamfisted as the oft-maligned flashback. But a flashback is just another form of story within a story, an if you do it well, nobody will complain.

Way back in grad school, I was taught that story within a story was a useful technique that could help you advance a narrative. The instructors in Columbia College Chicago’s fiction program used an exercise called the “steeple chase.” Basically, you’d take a short story or novel excerpt and put it through the ringer, telling parts in first person, parts in second, switching narrators and tense, or telling part of it as a letter or newspaper article. We were also required to tell part of the narrative as a story within a story. Often it served the purpose of unsticking a stuck narrative. So if you’ve got a novel or script that you can’t seem to bear to finish, try having a character tell a story within a story, or launch into some tangent, and see what effect it has on the narrative…it might just set things into motion again.

Whatever the case, it’s a natural device in storytelling…so inherent to the art that it’s simple for even a five year old to grasp.

Using Reversal?

March 17, 09 //
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I’m still thinking about last week’s excellent New Yorker article on screenwriter/directory Tony Gilroy. What sticks in my mind is the notion of “the reversal.”  According to the article, this is a well-used film convention. I’ve never heard the term, but then I didn’t go to film school and I’ve never read any books on the story side of screenwriting. Maybe it’s not news to most other folks.

The core of “Duplicity” is the screenwriting trope known as the reversal. Gilroy told me, “A reversal is just anything that’s a surprise. It’s a way of keeping the audience interested.”

An example:

In “Good Will Hunting,” when Matt Damon, mopping the floor at a university, comes upon a complicated math problem on a blackboard and solves it, the audience suddenly realizes that he is not an ordinary janitor—that’s a reversal, too.

I think it’s a useful concept. I’ve been struggling through the opening page of a script. The rest is finished, almost ready to send out for casting, but something is still needed in the opening scene.  I’ve been through at least twenty drafts.

The latest draft, also the strongest, has a pair of reversals in the first two pages. I don’t know if that’s what makes it better than previous versions. It certainly has to help. Reversals seem to function in the same way as contrast in graphic design, creating a tension that keeps viewers engaged.

When to start

January 19, 09 //
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So I’m reading a book on economics and the fall of the Soviet Union last week and one line suddenly jumps out at me. In moments I’m recalling Boris Yeltsin standing on the tank talking about democracy. I still remember the feeling vividly. I’d been thinking of my childhood years in West Berlin and what it felt like after the Wall came down and how there was this limitless possibility and hope, and also a little sadness over the fact that I couldn’t be there. It was similar to the feelings surrounding tomorrow’s inauguration.

And then of course it all went to hell shortly thereafter. I hope Mr. Obama’s quiet revolution fares better than Yeltsin’s.

In any case, within minutes I saw an entire script unfolding before me. Ideas are cheap. Any writer probably gets a dozen every day. But a few really have that spark, that sense that they could become a real story. But once you get an idea with the appropriate fire, the question becomes, “when do I start?”

There are no formulas, rules or truths, and any self-proclaimed guru who tries to sell you one is full of shit. Only the formatting guidelines of a script are set in stone, and beyond 12-point Courier and the appropriate margins, anything goes. Sure the three act structure can work, though it doesn’t have to. If there is a gun in the first act, you’d better use it by the third…unless you can make it work otherwise.

And then there’s the question of research. A lot of writers immerse themselves in the world they’re about to be writing in for a long period of time before they get started. It’s probably a good practice, but I can’t work that way. For me, too much research tends to shape the story and take it off course into the weeds of detail, especially in a period piece. So when I get an idea for a script and I don’t have an ongoing project, I’ll wait as long as I can, which usually means a week or two. And then it will either fade or I just have to jump in and race through the first draft in a few weeks.

I don’t slow down for research on that first draft. What I can’t find out in short magazine articles and Wikipedia will have to wait. I’ll save the heavy research, that involving travel or books over 500 pages, for somewhere between the first and second drafts. Often I’ll find that some of the assumptions I made in the first draft hold true. Other instances will have me rewriting to correct some factual errors.

I’m not a big fan of advance research, but that’s just me. Maybe you’re the sort who needs an idea to gestate for a period of time before getting to work. I know some writers who wait years. There are no rules, though. Beware of people who try to tell you that there are.

Collaboration

December 7, 08 //
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As of a few hours ago I received my first remuneration as a screenwriter. It consisted of a plane ticket, a motel room and a very nice meal (and a few beers) at a seafood restaurant in Santa Monica. Of course tomorrow we’ve got a full day of combing through one of my scripts line-by-line in an effort to turn it into something that this particular production company will want to option and hopefully produce. Then Monday morning I’ll head back to the real world with a dozen pages of notes and yet another draft to write while waking obscenely early in the morning before I go to work.

But in the process, I’ve learned something about folks in the film industry. First, they are business people who deal with a bottom line and the uncertainty of a market just like any of us who work professional jobs. Next, they have very clear creative aspirations which they struggle to exercise by risking their livelihoods on a very fickle and challenging industry. Finally, and probably most important, they value collaboration.

As a writer-type, I’ve heard all manner of horror stories about Los Angeles. The most common comment I get from people when they learn that I’ve won some contests and had meetings in LA about scripts I’ve written is: “Aren’t you afraid someone is going to steal your ideas?” Sometimes I hear, “You mean you just send your script to strangers?” People tend to get defensive right away. The truth is, screenwriters don’t get paid for ideas. Nobody gets paid for ideas. If that were the case, we’d all be rich. Writers get paid to write, and write well…and often they don’t get paid that much to do it. If they get paid anything.  And writing well is hard to do. If you and another writer arrive at the same idea, and you write a bad script and she writes a good one…then she deserves the payday, not you.  If you have a brilliant idea but write a bad script…sorry.  Nobody’s ever going to pay you anything for it.

But idea theft isn’t the only thing I’ve been warned about. Other knowing writers have referred to Hollywood as a “meatgrinder” or a “bloodbath.” I suppose bad things can happen to sensitive creatives in the glare of Tinsletown lights. But what I’ve learned about people in the film industry in my experience here is that they’re no more or less ruthless or conniving than your garden variety corporate lackey or your average middle manager in higher education. They’re ordinary working stiffs trading their time in hopes of making something useful for society while also paying the mortgage. The only difference is that when they’re successful, what they make can inspire or enthrall millions of people in darkened theaters all over the world.

And most importantly for writers, if you want to fit in here, you have to be willing to collaborate. Nobody can make a film on his own, least of all a writer. Sure there are the Auteurs, but then most of them have a trust fund or a boatload of luck. You need smart business people, a visionary director, talented actors (and a casting director to match) a matchless DP, etc, etc, etc. It’s all about collaboration. If you’re not willing to collaborate, you don’t belong here. If you’re an artiste (with a long ‘e’), this is probably not for you. If you’re so terrified that some producer is going to insist you insert a wolfman and a car chase into your artfully written script that you’ll bristle at any and all suggestions for changes or revisions, then this is probably not for you. If you’re desperate to quit your day job, screenwriting is not going to allow you to make that happen. You probably won’t get rich. You probably won’t become famous. You probably won’t even get a WGA card. But, if you can write, and if you’re willing to be the consummate collaborator, then maybe, just maybe, you’ll have a shot at getting a plane ticket and a motel room and a decent seafood dinner. And with a little luck, maybe you’ll have a rare chance to see something you wrote (and rewrote and rewrote based on round after round of worthy and legitimate feedback) have a shot of making it onto the screen.

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