Creative Conflict

I listened to Margaret Heffernan's TED lecture, "Dare to Disagree" today. It starts with an anecdote about Alice Stewart, a scientist who was able to prove that it's not a good idea to X-ray pregnant mothers because she had a great collaborator. He was her statistician, and his job, as he saw it, was to prove her wrong. Only by mining the data sixteen ways from Sunday, trying to dredge up any way to show that X-raying pregnant mothers was not correlated with childhood cancer, could they prove that it is correlated.

In a writing partnership, you want a certain amount of creative conflict. If you agree with each other all the time, who needs two of you? You need to be willing to criticize and shoot down each other's ideas. To say, in Denis McGrath's old catchphrase, "Here's why I hate that."

This is hard to learn. (Unless you are from New York, in which case you have to learn when to shut up). In companies, most people often feel they can't voice their concerns. The whistleblower is the odd man out. Or look at American politics, where almost no current politician dares criticize the country's utterly insane drugs policy.

In a creative partnership, you want different points of view to clash.

On CHARLIE JADE, Sean Carley, aside from being a very fine writer, was the guy in the writing room who would call shenanigans on Denis and me when we came up with something he didn't believe.

After all, if someone in the room doesn't believe it, what are the odds that the audience will?

What makes creative conflict useful is restraint. You have to agree on the underlying premise. I've got notes back on my writing where the analyst did not buy into the basic premise of the material. That kind of note is not constructive. (It may be accurate, just not constructive.)

You also have to agree on what you're critiquing. If you're working on our premise, you critique your premise. If you're working on your outline, you critique the beats, and maybe you critique the premise if the beats cannot be made to work. If you're working on pages, you should no longer be critiquing the premise. A creative partner who keeps going back to the drawing board will hold you back. This is particularly true on a TV show, where you just don't have time. But at a certain point you just have to have faith that your premise will hold up.

It's crucial because about 40% into anything, you'll probably start to question whether the idea has any merit. You'll also question whether you're capable of writing it. Or writing anything. You will possibly get the idea that you have lost any talent you had, if indeed you ever really had any. That's why I call 40% in "The Sucky Point."

In the WaPo, Emily Matcher makes the claim that overentitled millenials can help, since they expect everyone to listen to their thoughts.

Criticism is essential to making anything good. But just like heat applied to steel in the forge, what makes it productive is focusing it on the right part of the material at the right time.

If You're Bored, They Are

Just working on a horror feature script, and I'm really getting antsy for something horrible to happen. Too much of this drama stuff. The drama stuff is important to the story, but c'mon, already.

Trust your feelings. If you're bored, the audience will be. If you're impatient, the audience will be. And if you're jumping up and down, with luck, your audience will be, too.

Eddie

Here's the trailer from EDDIE: THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL, a fine black comedy I story edited. It's about a has-been artist, Lars, who starts taking care of a deaf-mute with a habit of killing and eating small animals while sleepwalking. Strangely, Lars finds himself inspired to paint for the first time in years.

So Lars pushes Eddie to go further.

It's pretty twisted. Sort of ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL with, you know, cannibalism.

It's fun working on a piece like this. Your job as story editor is sometimes to reassure the filmmaker that his most demented instincts are right on -- you're the voice going, "Yes, that is seriously effed up. Now go for it." Because no one wants a cannibalistic art satire that pulls its punches.

Lisa and I got a similar note a few months back on our dark drama ALICE FOUND ALIVE. It was a few too many things at once, and a wise producer suggested we carve it down to its freshest and scariest impulses. Once you cross certain lines, you can't look back.

Eddie is premiering at the Tribeca Film Festival. Here's an early review.

The Obligatory Scene

I started rewatching BAND OF BROTHERS because I've been rereading Churchill's history of World War II. ("History will not be kind to Neville Chamberlain," Churchill said. "I know, for I shall write the history.")

Just watched episode 3, "Carentan." And there's a particularly brilliant scene that sums up all the carnage that Easy Company has been through.

(Spoilers, obviously, though just regarding the scene.)

What's brilliant about it is that it doesn't come during any of the battles. It's not a moment after the battle, surveying all the men lying on the field. You expect that after a battle scene. No, it comes when Easy is back in England after being pulled off the line in Normandy. They're going back to the war, so Sgt. Malarkey goes up to pick up his laundry.

He pays the woman -- he doesn't know what to make of English money, so she just picks the coins out of his hand. And he's about to leave, when she asks if he knows a certain Lieutenant, who hasn't come by to pick up his laundry. And we can see from Sgt. Malarkey's face why the Lieutenant hasn't come by. But he pays for the laundry. And then the wash woman asks about a few more soldiers from Easy who haven't been in to pick up their laundry. And she calls off their names. And of course she's naming the dead. And there are a lot of them.

It hits you harder because you're not expecting it. You don't expect to meet death when you're safely picking up your laundry.

I've heard the phrase "the obligatory scene" a few times. It's the scene that goes with the territory. The scene that the audience knows it has to see or they won't have a complete experience. As a writer, you try to figure out how to write that scene so that it's fresh and convincing and surprising, not merely obligatory.

The all-time most amazing obligatory scene I've ever seen, I think, is in ROME. It comes after Caesar's murder. Marc Antony has to give a speech, you see.

The problem is, he's going to give a speech that another writer has written rather memorably. "Friends, Romans, countrymen," it begins. "Lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him."

How do you rewrite Shakespeare?

You don't, of course. And what the screenwriter of that episode chose to do, instead, was to have a fellow come into a bar and tell everyone about Antony's speech. Of course he doesn't remember the words. He barely heard them. He talks about how Antony came out with Caesar's bloody toga, and kissed it, and how he played the crowd.

The writing fills in around the famous speech. It's like jazz: you don't hit the beat, you hit around the beat, trusting the audience knows where the beat is.

The audience of BAND OF BROTHERS knows where the beat is. It knows where the dead are. They're lying in the hedgerows of Normandy. So you don't talk about death there. You talk about fear, and fearlessness, and fatigue, and stupid mistakes, and cowardice, and hysterical blindness. You talk about everything except death.

And then after the beat, you play that note -- afterwards, you have your obligatory scene.

Billy Wilder's Notes for Writers

1. The audience is fickle.
   
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
   
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
   
4. Know where you’re going.
   
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
   
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
   
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
   
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
   
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
   
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then -
    
11. - that’s it. Don’t hang around.

Via The Uncool

Opaque Characters

We're continuing to enjoy THE GOOD WIFE. I continue to marvel at the opaque quality of Alicia Florrick. Most TV shows go to great lengths to show us the inner life of the main character. She has someone she tells her inner feelings to, whether it's a best friend, a lover, a dog, or the audience via voice over. Not Alicia Florrick. She keeps it mostly bottled up. We can guess at her feelings, but we can't know which way she'll jump or even how she feels about people. How does she feel about Will now? About Peter? About Kalinda? We can only watch from the outside.

Come to think of it, Kalinda's another character who never lets the audience in. And, to some extent, Will.

Obviously, that works, or people wouldn't be watching the show. I would imagine that the audience enjoys trying to figure these people out. After all, in real life we rarely know for sure what the other people in our life are thinking.

It's a risky way to write, of course. And you'll get a lot of flak from readers who feel that your writing is murky. They'll complain that they need to know more. They don't actually need to know more, of course. They just want to know more. And you don't necessarily have to give it to them -- sometimes the sizzle is better than the steak.

Magic Hat vs. Midi-chlorians

I was talking with a videogame producer I'm working with about our story, and we wound up talking about the mechanics of why the main character has her special power, on which the game is based. We talked backstory and we talked mythology. Ultimately my feeling was that she gets her special power from a Magic Hat.

A Magic Hat is a special power that you don't explain. Because the explanation wouldn't actually resolve anything. The point of magic is that it's magic. You can create a mythology behind a magic hat, if that's what your audience is into (e.g. the One Ring, Excalibur). But it's still a magic hat.

What you definitely don't need is a pseudo-scientific explanation of your magic hat. The classic example is from the Star Wars universe:

Midi-chlorians were intelligent microscopic life forms that lived symbiotically inside the cells of all living things. When present in sufficient numbers, they could allow their symbiont to detect the pervasive energy field known as the Force. Midi-chlorian counts were linked to potential in the Force, ranging from normal Human levels of 2,500 per cell to the much higher levels of Jedi. The highest known midi-chlorian count belonged to the Jedi Anakin Skywalker (over 20,000 per cell), who was believed to have been conceived by the midi-chlorians.

Of course that doesn't explain how midi-chlorians convey power in the Force, so you're just kicking the can down the road.

A synopsis is not a synopsis

From time to time, funding programs (Canada) and producers (the US) will ask you for a synopsis.

A synopsis is "An outline of the plot of a play, film, or book," right? It recounts what happens.

Technically, yeah. A secret that took me years to find out is: when they ask for a synopsis, always send a pitch.

When you turn in a synopsis, you want the reader to get excited about your project. Your goal is to get them to read your script if they haven't. If they have, and they're going through a big pile of synopses, your goal is to remind them of why your script is the best one, and possibly even get them to think your script is more exciting than they did when they read it.

A good pitch recounts your plot, yes. But more importantly, it hypes the elements of your story. It sells what your main character wants, why he or she can't get it, and why we care. It is long on the jeopardy, the stakes, the obstacles, the antagonist, and the personality of the main character. It is short on details. It contains details, yes, but primarily details that are revelatory of character, or clever, or funny, or thrilling, or fresh.

Generally, the best way to write a pitch is to do it off the top of your head, as if you were writing a letter to a friend in the business, or a friendly producer. You will often reduce the amount of cutting back and forth between storylines that you do in the script. Sometimes you have to double back to mention something that wasn't worth mentioning earlier. You have no obligation to match the pitch story to the actual plot. Who cares if it doesn't match exactly? They'll only find out when they read the script, and that's all you wanted them to do in the first place.

The worst way to write a synopsis for submission is to go through the script and write down what happens. That's how you get "an outline of the plot." You'll wind up with a series of events that lack a strong through line.

It is very, very hard to read a real synopsis. They tend to lack nuance, gusto, and fun. A pitch should be fun to read. It should make us see the movie.

In fact, as you write a pitch, you'll often feel inclined to change your story. Go for it. Changes you make when you're selling your concept are often changes in the direction of a stronger story.

Of course, a beat sheet that you write for yourself is another beast entirely. Then you do want to go into detail about what happens. But a beat sheet doesn't have to communicate the story; it's just a reminder of what your story is.

Accomplishments vs. Relationships

Lindsay Doran featured in a Times article about what makes movies successful:

“Audiences don’t care about an accomplishment unless it’s shared with someone else. What makes an audience happy is not the moment of victory but the moment afterwards when the winners shares that victory with someone they love.” So she mentally rewound the concluding scenes of these “accomplishment” films. Ms. Grey leaps into the arms of Patrick Swayze at the end of “Dirty Dancing,” and after that she reconciles with her father. Jaden Smith performs that impossible kick at the end of “The Karate Kid,” but afterward makes peace with his opponent and shares the moment with his mother and trainer. Colin Firth conquers his stammer at the end of “The King’s Speech,” and then shares his victory with his wife, daughters and the crowds cheering outside the palace. The film closes with a title card that reads that the king and his speech therapist remained friends for the rest of their lives.

Discuss.

Failures & Mistakes

Seth Godin:

A failure is a project that doesn't work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn't move you directly closer to your goal.

A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth avoiding.

We need a lot more failures, I think. Failures that don't kill us make us bolder, and teach us one more way that won't work, while opening the door to things that might.

School confuses us, so do bosses and families. Go ahead, fail. Try to avoid mistakes, though.

A mistake is when, really, you know better, and do it that way anyway.

One of the most valuable lessons I learned from my creative writing professor, the poet Kenneth Koch, was that there's no downside to writing a lot. You don't have a limited number of words that you can write in your life.

The corrolary is that you shouldn't be afraid to try and fail. Just make sure you learn from the things you tried that failed. I can't remember which scientist was known for his cheery response to experiments with negative results: "Well, now we know that doesn't work!" Every failure gets you closer to success, assuming you don't repeat it.

Second Draft Advice?

Q. A friend and I are on page 93 of our first draft of a screen play about [snip]. We need advice on draft 2. The books we have read thus far have led us nearly to the end of draft 1. Does your book tell where to go after the first draft?

No book can give you specific advice about draft 2, because draft 2 depends entirely on draft 1. If the story is solid, you might work on fleshing out the characters. If it's too long, you're looking to cut. If it has unnecessary scenes, you're looking to cut. If the third act doesn't hold up, you're thinking about a new third act.

Generally there are two questions to ask yourself before going onto the second draft:

a. How well did the first draft deliver the goods on the pitch? Did you create the character you pitched? is the antagonist as scary as your hook suggested? Did you hold true to your story, or did your script go off the rails and become about something else?

b. How well did the pitch work? You might find that your stakes, which sounded good at the pitch stage, aren't convincing. You might need to raise the stakes. The main character might be less compelling than you'd hoped. What would make him or her more compelling?

You may also find on reading your script that your initial story wasn't as strong as you'd hoped. Somewhere in the first draft, you might have found a way to twist the story so it's better. The job of your second draft might be to fulfill the promise of your revised story. This is often hard to do, since one tends to cling to good scenes that don't belong in the new version. But if you endure a little carnage, you'll have a better script.

Ultimately, the question you ask about a first draft is: is this the best movie I can write in this territory? Or can I make it better, either by refining the characters, scenes and dialog, cutting junk, streamlining and punching up; or by revising the story foundation and rebuilding the whole structure?

You ask these same questions, in fact, in every subsequent draft. Creatively (as opposed to financially) there is no such thing as a second draft. Every draft is a first draft, until you shoot it. Because if there's a way to make the script better, you should make it better, no matter whether you're improving your first draft or the project is something you've been working on for years.

Shifting Space

One of the things directors have to watch is the topography of a set. Often you don't have the budget to build an entire set; but you have to film it so that the viewer has a clear sense of what's where.

This article makes the case that Stanley Kubrick did the opposite in THE SHINING: he changed the set, presumably to subtly disorient the viewer.

It's an interesting technique. It leverages the way our brains tend to elide the editing. Even a scene of two people talking is actually multiple conversations shot from different angles and edited together. We generally remember the conversation but not the cuts. We assume that the hotel wouldn't change because we assume what we're seeing is really a hotel and not a series of hotel sets that may or may not join up. So how can we reconcile things when bits of the hotel change? We can't, and that's sort of subliminally alarming.

We've all seen this done explicitly, when the hero comes back to the place he saw the crime and there's no house there, or the house is abandoned and not the new house he was in, etc. This is the first time I've seen a convincing case of someone doing it without drawing attention to it.

How can you apply this technique to writing? You'd probably have to make clear to the reader what you're doing; otherwise the film crew would assume you were just sloppy.

UPDATE: John August says this is "the genius fallacy." It may be. But even Kubrick didn't do it intentionally, you can.

Playboy

A Friend of the Blog was kind enough to send me the PLAYBOY pilot by Chad Hodge. The series is Imagine/Fox TV's/NBC's answer to MAD MEN, complete with cigarettes and sexism.

Interesting to note that Hodge breaks three important "rules":

a. He casts the show. Characters are introduced with movie actors in mind, actors who will obviously not be cast in the show, but are there just for type, e.g. "a ditzy Amanda Seyfried."

b. He puts music in the show. We've got a character singing "Chicago," and we've got Ike and Tina Turner singing some of their hits.

c. In the Act Five act out, he explains, in the action, who someone important really was.

(a) is generally deprecated as a crutch. If you say "Amanda Seyfried," then you aren't forced to write a character with her brand of slightly disturbing vulnerability. Also, you aren't going to get Amanda Seyfried.

(b) is generally a no-no because everyone may not have the same reaction to a given song. And the music can't really "play" on the page the way it does on the screen. And what if you can't get the rights?

(c) is generally considered cheating. Sure, you can write "she realizes it was Ziggy all along" in the blacks, but how does anyone act that? You can act emotion, but how do you act information? A more accurate description of what's going on her face would be "as she realizes something shocking" or "putting two and two together, with horror."

So does that mean the rules are off? Well, "There are no rules, but you break them at your peril." Chad Hodge obviously believes he can get away with them. Can you, if you're not a showrunner working with Brian Grazer? I don't know.

I think it does mean, though, follow the rules until you need to break them. Hodge did not want to put the realization at the end of Act 5 in the dialog, because the character would never, conceivably, say it to anyone. And, arguably, if the scene is shot properly, the information will get through to the audience.

It also means that, hell, if you can get away with it, go for it. J. J. Abrams doses his scripts heavily with f-bombs, obviously feeling it pumps up the energy. If that's "you," maybe try it, and see if you get away with it.

The show, interesting, is quite daring for prime time. It's period. It's serial. It shows us another world. It has a style. It's intelligent. No one solves crimes. I can imagine watching this. I am very far from being "the audience," but NBC is apparently hoping that intelligent scripted drama will pull it out of the rut it has dug itself into through cost-cutting and reality series.

Likable v. Interesting

On a certain script, I've been getting some feedback that amounts to two characters not being perceived as likable or worthy people. I've had various proposals on how to make these characters seem more likable or more worthy people.

While that note can be valid, often it is misleading. We don't have to like your main character and we definitely don't have to like your secondary characters. You have to make your characters people we find compelling. We have to root for them to succeed or fail, but rooting for them to fail is just as strong as rooting for them to succeed.

For example, we have a lot of sympathy for the Frankenstein creature, but we don't want him to survive -- he murdered a little girl! In Oliver Stone's NIXON, we don't want Tricky Dick to get away with it. But we find him a compelling, fascinating character -- a sort of monster himself.

Lisa and I were just watching Charlie Kaufman's BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. (And if ever the possessory credit should belong to the writer and not the director, this would be it.) John Cusack's character is not likable. He's a whiny loser of a puppeteer. Then he goes on to do things that make us hate him. Yet he carries the film. We care what happens to him ... and his punishment is very satisfactory, thank you.

In this particular screenplay, I couldn't give the main character more likability because of what he does. He has a profession we all despise and fear. And in the movie he does a very bad thing, and then covers it up. That's nothing I could change -- it's in the bones of the screenplay. Having him be nicer to his daughter or to "save the cat" would just piss the audience off -- they'd feel I was trying to weasel out of the character's essential badness.

I think I've cracked how to fix this particular screenplay. If I'm right, the answer isn't to make the main character more likable nor his girlfriend more worthy. Instead I'm making the girlfriend much more clearly crazy -- clarifying just where her insanity lies -- and showing more clearly how the main character is failing to understand her craziness. The solution is in making their flaws clearer and stronger, rather than giving them virtues they do not deserve.

When someone says your character isn't likable enough, the answer may not be in making the character more likable. There is something missing, but it may not be something you can solve by having the character take care of his aged grandmother. The solution is in making them more interesting. Make them more compelling, stranger, more distinct, more flawed, more human. Make them more someone we can't take our eyes off.

When someone asks you to make a character more likable, make them more interesting.

When do you Flash Back?

I was going through a script full of flashbacks the other day. The flashbacks seemed unmotivated to me. The scenes themselves were important to the story, but I didn't know why we were flashing back at that point.

I think the best rule is: Use a flashback when the audience has just asked the question that the flashback answers. Which means, of course, that you provoke the audience to ask the question, and then you provide the flashback that answers it.

This is actually a pretty good rule for any sort of cutting away from what the hero is doing right now, whether it's to the past or the future or to another character. When I'm telling a well-crafted screen story to my stepson, I find that he often asks a question just before I come to the part that answers that question. That's good story telling. Let the audience ask the question, and then answer it for them. When the audience asks the question, they pull themselves into the story.

By contrast, just pushing information at the audience tends to push the audience out of the story.

You can, especially in TV, cut to the B-story just to trim the A story -- it's always easier to jump from one time to another time when you jump to another story in the middle. But if you can relate the B story to what's happening in the A story, that's usually stronger.

James Manos at Banff, Part Three

(Continuing my notes from the James Manos master class at the Banff Worldwide Television Festival...)

Manos stressed that he never writes with an actor in mind. “I can’t write with Bobby DeNiro in mind. I know the person, but it’s an amorphous vision.”

That makes sense to me. Producers sometimes ask me if I have cast in mind. I find it a bit dangerous to write for a star. If you’re writing for Jack Nicholson, for example, who invests so much personality in his delivery, you might tend to underwrite the lines. Underwriting the lines is exactly what you want to do if you actually have Jack Nicholson, or Clint Eastwood, or even Dennis Leary. But if you’re trying to create a character in the reader’s mind, you have to write dialog that is as distinctive as possible — not just only lines that that character would say, but lines that only that character would say.

If you get to write for a star, of course, it’s a joy. When I wrote lines for Colm Feore for BON COP / BAD COP, I knew what he’d be able to do with them.

Manos’s first choice for DEXTER, in fact, was Greg Kinnear; he thought Michael Hall was too nice a guy to play a cold serial killer.

(Actors run into this all the time. Even though we all know they’re actors and that they play characters, we sometimes assume they’re best basically playing themselves. Some actors can only play themselves, more or less. But I know one actress who was rejected because “we’re looking for a blonde.” And a francophone casting director told Lisa a funny story about a francophone actor whom she refused to ever cast in English projects because he was so Québecois. The guy had to call back pretending to be an American actor who’d just moved to Montreal; only at the end of the phone call did he admit he was the guy she knew.)

Manos stressed how important it is for actors to have solid theatrical craft. He basically feels you shouldn’t show up in Hollywood until you’ve spent years in New York doing theater. (Theater in LA tends to be second rate because the actors are only doing it in order to be seen by casting directors, and they quit the shows as soon as they get a gig.) “Michael Hall was singing cabaret in New York when we cast him.”

Manos doesn’t read spec episodic scripts. He’s only interested in reading “a script that shows your voice ... that shows your anger. Be committed to what the story is. You can tell when a writer doesn’t really care. Is this really what happened to you? Is this what your really felt? You can tell when someone’s really lived through it.”

He also finds that a major flaw in scripts he reads is “geography. ... I’m reading a script and I’m thinking, where am I? A moment ago I was in an alley. Make sure the reader sees what you see. You are writing pictures. Stop, now and then, and look at the imaginary screen. Where is he? Where is she? It’s a lost art. If a character shows up in the middle of the scene and he wasn’t there before, I stop reading, because I know the writer isn’t really seeing the scene.”

In the ‘whatever works for you’ department, Manos doesn’t like outlines. “Outlines are deadly for me. I know the beginning, middle and end, but then I like to write. Too many drafts and pieces get overdeveloped. I’m also not a fan of telling people what I’m working on. I do believe the more you talk about something the less chance it’s going to get done. You lose the inspiration to finish the piece. I think writing a very specific outline is killing yourself.”

(Yeah, that’s a direct contradiction to my “pitch your project over and over” advice. And if pitching your project makes it lose its juice for you, don’t do it. On the other hand, having read literally thousands of scripts, I would say that 90% to 95% of them would have benefited from being pitched at least a few times out loud.)

“And executives make you stick to the outline. You become a slave to your own outline. Let me find my way through it. I knew where I’ll end up.”

Manos agrees with Hemingway: don’t end your day’s work by finishing a scene. If you know how the scene will end, leave it for the next morning. That way you’ll start the day finishing something and feel good and have momentum, instead of starting with a problem you don’t know how to solve.

Manos does another thing I don’t do and don’t recommend. He starts every day rereading from page one, and rewriting and polishing anything he doesn’t like.

Personally, I don’t reread anything while I’m writing it. I find it slows me down. The only time I’ll look at something from a previous day is if I need to put in a setup for a payoff I just invented.

Manos’s technique results in fairly polished first drafts. Mine results in very fast first drafts that I can start tinkering with. For inexperienced writers, rewriting from page one is dangerous, I think. I think it’s really important to finish things before you start criticizing them. Reading your first draft can be demoralizing. But also, endlessly polishing your first draft can feel more rewarding than writing new pages; but it doesn’t get you to the end.

Manos doesn’t write on index cards. He hangs butcher paper on all his walls, and then writes on his walls. “Until you actually see the whole movie, you can’t write it. I write down character stuff, scenes, all around the office in different color inks. You wouldn’t be able to read it, but I can. When I can see the entire movie on the wall, I can write it.”

Manos says “You can learn more watching a bad movie than a good one. You can watch THE GODFATHER for two hours and never know what happened to you. But a bad movie, you’ll watch and think, don’t do that, that didn’t work, I could fix that...”

Crafty Sheldon Turner Interview

THE DIALOGUE SERIES is a series of DVD interviews of famous screenwriters, focusing on their craft, instead of the usual war stories, hosted by New Line Cinema's former president, Mike de Luca. I checked out his interview with Sheldon Turner, recently nominated for the Oscar for UP IN THE AIR. Among the tidbits:

Sheldon Turner writes out every scene in prose before writing it in script format; that gives him a better feel for what's happening the scene.

He wrote a dozen screenplays before he sent any of them out.

He thinks you should never write more than two lines of action before skipping a line. Otherwise the eye just blips over the rest of the text.

He says directors often tell him they knew by page 12 they were going to do a project.

He finds that successful stars know how the audience wants to see them; if you can write to that, you're ahead of the game. In other words they generally do not want to play against type.

(I like to make a distinction between actors and stars. Actors play roles; stars play themselves in roles. Alec Guinness disappears into his roles. Marlon Brando could play a street thug or an upper class South African lawyer convincingly. Robert Redford plays Robert Redford really well. That said, even the greatest actors have their limitations. Robert De Niro can't play comedy. Dustin Hoffman can't play a leading man. And you generally play Robert De Niro to play threatening and Dustin Hoffman to play nervous.)

The Dialogue Series guys are offering you guys a 15% discount -- just use the discount code CRAFTY15.

THE DIALOGUE is a DVD series of 70-90 minute discussions in which more than two dozen top screenwriters share their work habits, methods and inspirations, secrets of the trade, business advice, and eye-opening stories from life in the trenches of the film industry. Each writer discusses his or her filmography in great detail and breaks down the mechanics of one favorite scene from their produced work.

Interview subjects include Oscar winners and industry veterans like Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), Callie Khouri (Thelma and Louise), Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show, Donnie Brasco), Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich), Peter & Bobby Farrelly (There's Something About Mary, Stuck on You) and David S. Goyer (Dark City, Blade, Batman Begins). The series is hosted by Michael De Luca, film fanatic and former President of Production at New Line Cinema. In a climate where "industry" talk shows are mostly fluff pieces, Mike De Luca's probing and savvy style elevates this series to a true exploration of the craft and its masters.

Craft Lectures

The WGA is hosting a series of writing craft lectures.

Writers taking part will include John August (Big Fish, Go), Robert Eisele (The Great Debaters), Diane English(Murphy Brown; The Women), Bruce Evans & Raynold Gideon (Stand by Me, Mr. Brooks), Michael Brandt & Derek Haas (3:10 To Yuma, Wanted), Jon Lucas & Scott Moore (Four Christmases; The Hangover), Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life, Wicked), Jack Epps, Jr. (Top Gun; Dick Tracy), Nick Kazan (Reversal of Fortune; Fallen), Jim Kouf (Rush Hour; National Treasure) Nicholas Meyer (Star Trek, The Human Stain, Elegy), Melissa Rosenberg (Dexter, Twilight), Thomas Rickman (Coal Miners Daughter, Tuesdays with Morrie), Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost; The Time Traveler’s Wife), Margaret Nagle (Warm Springs; Side Order of Life), Robin Swicord(Little Women; The Jane Austen Book Club), Robert Nelson Jacobs (Chocolat; Waterhorse: Legend of the Deep) and more. Check here regularly for updates.

Held Tuesdays at the WGF/WGA offices - 7000 W 3rd St, LA 90048
7:30 pm to about 9:00 pm.

Via Go Into the Story.

Describe Me a River

How descriptive would you/should you/ do you have to be when describing a setting? The first scene of my script takes place in a Morgue. I have a 10-lined paragraph describing the room (autopsy table/sink/bio-hazard boxes, etc) that seems a bit long, but it does describe the room. The character in the scene isn't using anything in the room. And really only spends about a page in this room before leaving.

Ack!

My rule of thumb is: describe only what we need to know for the story or to set the scene. "A squalid morgue with one flickering flourescent." "A brightly-lit, state-of-the-art morgue." "Your basic down home back-country morgue. A variety of stuffed animals suggests it doubles as a taxidermist's workshop."

The production designer and set decorator will do the rest.

Thing is, we've seen dozens of morgues on TV, and we can fill them in with scales, steel gurneys, etc., for ourselves. Give us more details if it's something we can't fill in for ourselves -- a geomancer's workshop, for example. But even there, give us just enough to set the scene. One or two striking details are worth more than ten lines of description.

Sway

Ori and Rom Brafman's SWAY: THE IRRESISTABLE PULL OF IRRATIONAL BEHAVIOR is a smart little think book about the many ways in which people stick to an idea after the evidence has turned against it. For example, it's very hard for people to accept a loss now in order to avoid a bigger loss later. (See Vietnam War. See also first impressions.)

The book quotes an interesting study in which men told they were talking to a pretty woman on the phone thought she was also funnier, more sociable, warmer, etc. (They had been given fake photos, half of pretty women, half of plain women.) That's not surprising, but then, when other men listened only to the woman's responses after the first men's voices were edited out, without any indication whether she was pretty or not, the second group of men found the "pretty" women to be funnier, more sociable, warmer etc. In other words, if men think you're pretty you start acting pretty.

I read these books for fun, but I can always winkle out a nugget of screenwriting advice. The Brafmans tell a story about Intel in the '80s, when it was starting to lose money in its core business of computer memory chips.

Grove related, "I was in my office with Intel's chairman and CEO, Gordon Moore... Our mood was downbeat. ... Then I turned back to Gordon and asked, 'If we got kicked out and the board brought in a new CEO, what do you think he would do?" Gordon answered without hesitation. "He would get us out of memories." I stared at him, numb, then said, "Whey shouldn't you and I walk out the door, come back, and do it ourselves?"

One of the hardest things to do for a writer is abandon the creative path he's been pursuing when he gets a great but radical note. It means accepting a loss now (you have to junk parts of the script, or even the whole script) in order to head off a bigger loss later (the script doesn't get bought). Any time I get a great note, there's a part of me that thinks, "Damn you! You couldn't have just suggested I tweak the dialog?"

Part of the skills you learn as a writer (or any other creative thinker) are mental. You train yourself to accept radical notes. You train yourself to seek them out. Otherwise you're just polishing a rotten piece of wood.

It's useful to ask, "If I were just arriving on the scene and were given the choice to either jump into this project as it stands now or pass on it, would I jump in?" If the answer is no, then chances are we've been swayed by the hidden force of commitment.

I repeatedly took Richard Marks's editing class at UCLA. He had an amazing ability to look at a film and not remember any of the times he'd seen it before. So he could be confused who the characters were, if the current version had failed to set them up properly. Likewise, one of the skills you want to develop is the ability to read your own script as if you've never seen it before, tracking what the audience knows, what they're thinking, what they're rooting for, what they're scared of. Not knowing where it's going.

That's why it's sometimes good to let a project lay fallow. I'm currently rewriting a pair of screenplays that I hadn't touched in a year. It's amazing how much clearer their flaws become. But if you don't have the perspective of time, someone else's feedback can draw your attention to those flaws. That's why it's so important to listen to all criticisms. Your readers have the perspective you have usually lost.