What I Wish I'd Heard at Graduation: Take Any Writing Job (And Two Rulebook Casefiles)

 Gillian Flynn doesn’t have an MFA. From a profile in Elle:

• Knowing she wanted to be a writer but too practical—self-effacing, as well—to apply to an MFA program, the de rigueur move for an East or West Coaster with similar preoccupations, she applied to journalism school instead. Claiming novelist as your ambition sounded, in her words, "Mmm, yeah, a little…lofty." She thought she'd become a crime reporter, combine her love of words with her love of sex and death. Only, as it turned out, she had, of all things, a squeamish side, which effectively put the kibosh on a career covering the mean streets. So after graduating from Northwestern, she moved to New York and took a job with Entertainment Weekly. At EW she could be up to her eyeballs in kiss kiss bang bang, but kiss kiss bang bang at a remove, safely confined to the screen, dissipating once the credits rolled and the lights came up. She stayed on staff for 10 years, writing about movies and TV.

If you imagine yourself as a great novelist, then writing reviews for Entertainment Weekly (not even the New Yorker!) might seem like too much of a comedown, but for Flynn, it was the apprenticeship she needed. What’s a huge part of writing reviews? Coining unique adjectives and similes! You don’t want to say, “I liked it because it was good.” You want to say what it was like.

Every writing job gets you writing, and the more manipulation of words you do, the more facility you’ll have.  If you must get a graduate degree, do what Flynn did and get a journalism degree.  Unlike MFAs, journalists learn to write on deadline, listen to real speech, and crystalize it into just the most interesting bits.

This leads us to two Rulebook Casefiles: Give Every Hero a Part of Yourself and Tap Into Real Life National Pain.

Of course, the problem with the advice I’m giving you is that these jobs are now much fewer and farther between than they used to be. But of course that change is a big part of this novel. Flynn has gifted her backstory to her character Nick, and by doing so, she’s tapped into a real source of national pain: the death of a huge sector of the economy due to the rise of the online space, culminating in a total wipeout with the 2008 crash.

Indeed, I learned a lot about writing by writing reviews but I was part of the problem: I gave away my reviews for free on this blog. I would have loved to have made the jump to writing paid reviews, but nobody was hiring because the magazines were failing because they couldn’t compete with free content like mine!

Flynn knew her pain was real, and widely shared, and that she could bestow it upon her character to make him real, and more meaningful. Giving your own life away is the greatest gift you can give your characters (And then, once you gift them your real past, you craft a present that is more interesting than your actual present. You don’t want to get too realistic.)

What I Wish I'd Heard at Graduation: Only Scumbags Make You Think All Your Dreams Are Coming True

Harvey Weinstein’s sexual abuses were reserved for women, but he was emotionally and physically abusive to both men and women. In the Washington Post article, “Law and Order” vet Warren Leight says, “He’s very seductive at the start. You think he understands you and your destiny is about to change.” Soon Leight is complaining to Weinstein of his mistreatment, so Weinstein replies, “Right now this feels like getting f---ed up the ass without Vaseline, but in 10 years, it’s going to seem like the best sex of your life.”

This reminds me of two of my old posts: In this one, I warned that if they talk about doing a lot of projects together, they’re probably about to screw you. They want something from you, and they don’t want to pay you that much to get it, and they want to be able to treat you like shit the whole time. The best way to do that is to make you think that you’ll be messing up a great thing if you rock the boat.  An honest producer will say, “Let’s see how this one goes.”

It also reminds me of this post, in which I talk about how California hasn’t changed since the days of “The Grapes of Wrath.” Once again you have an industry that wants to drive down the wages and bargaining power of its workers, so it tells the rest of the country how wonderful it would be to work there. When people flock there, however, they’re met with armed guards at the border, forcing them to beg to get in. The industry gets what it wants: A desperate workforce that will put up with any kind of treatment without saying a word.

Weinstein got away with it for a long time, and others are still getting away with it. I think the best solution is a transformation of the guilds: The abused actresses should have been able to rely on SAG to back them up, and writers should feel that they can rely on the WGA. Predatory producers need to be heeled.

What I Wish I'd Heard at Graduation (aka How to Get Ahead): The Archive

This is another one that’s somewhat painful to archive. I wrote this when I was a cocky 30-something in the first blush of career success. There’s a lot of stuff here that I’m no longer sure I really believe, now that I'm a more grizzled 40-something. Nevertheless a lot of this is pretty good, so I’ll let you pick through it and evaluate it with your own bullshit-meter.

• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 1: Don’t Confuse Your Goals With Your Strategies
• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 2: Stockpile Your Work Until Everyone Is Telling You That You’re Ready
• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 3: They Can’t Buy You, They Can Only Buy Your Material
• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 4: Favors Are Serious Business
• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 5: Be Necessary
• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 6: Only Worry About the Quality of Your Own Work
• What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 7: Be Ridiculously Professional
• What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 8: Your Best Connections Are Outside Your Profession
• What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 9: You Can't Pay Your Dues Until After You’ve “Made It”
• What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 10: Stay Out of Fantasy Camp
• What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 11: The Better You Get, the Less Intuitive the Work Is
• What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Finale: Knowledge Shrinks, Experience Grows
• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Addendum: Would You Hire You?
• What I Wish I'd Heard at Graduation, Addendum: Underpromise and Overdeliver
• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Addendum: Be Amazed By Success
• What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Addendum: Every Celebrity Has the Same Personality
• What I Wish I’d Heard at Graduation, Two Final Caveats
• What I Wish I’d Heard at Graduation, Addendum: You Sometime Have to Work on Projects You Hate (And it Might Be “Your” Project)
• What I Wish I'd Heard at Graduation, Addendum: Don't Blow It

Rulebook Casefile: Jennifer Kent vs. the Naysayers

For the upcoming pieces on The Babadook, I’ll be relying heavily on the great interviews that Jennifer Kent has done to promote this movie, because she talks about herself and her art more perceptively and more honestly than just about any of the other writer/directors whose work we’ve looked at.

It’s interesting to look at her statements about the development of the movie, because they exemplify one of the dangers I singled out in two posts a long time ago. On the one hand she talks a lot about protecting and purifying her individual vision:

• Of producer Kristina Ceyton: “She’s really protected this film. It’s been able to stay pure from the get-go because of her.”
• Of mentor Lars Von Trier: “The biggest thing I learned from him was courage. He’s stubborn, and he does what he wants. I needed to see those things up close.”
• Of her script development lab: “They are an extraordinary bunch of people because they really wanted to find out what your vision was first, and then they helped you develop the film and got on board script advisors that were suited to the vision that you had, and that for me has given this a strong base.”
• About the ending: “We had many people fight the ending. I had to really defend that ending.”

This sort of talk is catnip to both fans and potential creators. Fans love it because it convinces them that they’re not watching some work-shopped product, but rather an unadulterated vision that flowed right from God’s brain into their eyes. Aspiring creators love this talk even more because it feeds our suspicion that we don’t need notes after all: Don’t adulterate our vision, man!

But rather than get seduced, it’s always important to keep your head on your shoulders. Wait just a second, what’s that other thing she mentioned in passing in one of those interviews?

• I had been working on a number of film scripts, and they were just too out-there. Screen Australia supported me up to a point, but they thought these scripts were too ambitious financially. So I realized I needed to look at an idea that was contained and more intimate.

So she did listen to the naysayers, up until a point. At what point do you say, “Okay, this is it, all of these notes have been great, but at this point I have to declare it done and start defending what I have”? Kent picked just the right moment. She let herself be talked out of all of those too-out-there scripts and found something instead that was contained and intimate, but then, once she was fairly certain that she had finally nailed it, she started digging in her heels and fighting for her vision.

The problem of course is that most aspiring writers start fighting too soon. We fight to defend the “purity” of those too-out-there ideas, because we think that that’s what writers do. We pay attention to those first four quotes from Kent, and skip right over that last one. Knowing when to take your stand is one of the hardest calls in life.

Best of 2013 #1, Part 1: The Most Remarkable Thing About American Hustle

There hasn’t been a lot of love for this movie in the comments, so I suspect that I’ll get some blowback on this one, but what can I say, I loved it! At the end of the week, we’ll get to what I loved about the finished movie, but first let’s devote most of this week to the most remarkable thing about this movie: how much better it was that the repugnant spec script that it was based on.

In my “How to Give a Note” series, I mentioned that Hollywood went absolutely crazy for a certain type of script for a while, marked by the following qualities:

• Omnipresent misanthropy.
• Squishy, bizarre violence.
• Fanatical levels of profanity, in both word and deed, preferably including an unproducible title (in this case “American Bullshit”) which makes the script-reader feel like an outlaw just for recommending it.
• Most importantly, it doesn’t once ask the reader to care. The characters are all strutting roosters who cockfight each other until one comes out on top.

It’s not hard to figure out why these scripts became so popular, when you consider the economics of the script-reading profession. It’s one thing to ask somebody to care when they’re sitting in a darkened theatre, with heartfelt performances, sumptuous cinematography and sweeping music, but when the poor script-readers are quickly flipping through a pile of paper, then the last thing they want to read is some ham-handed attempt to suck into moments of vulnerability, or earnestness, or, worst of all, poignancy, sitting there naked on the page, unenhanced by any of those things.

Readers would be embarrassed to have to tell their bosses, “You should buy this because it touched something inside me.” Instead, they want to say, “Finally, boss, we got a script without any of those old clichés!” They want wall-to-wall “Holy Crap!” moments. They want “too-cool-for-school”.

So “American Bullshit” hit the market, and made the Black List (an annual list of which scripts the readers liked the most in the previous year), and sold for big bucks, and started to attract some attention from stars…but then something amazing happened. David O. Russell, one of our very-best writer-directors, got hold of it, saw some slight merit buried deep beneath all that attitude, and totally rewrote it from the ground up, reconceiving every scene and writing entirely new dialogue. The result was American Hustle, which became, against all odds, the best movie of a very good year.

So now we arrive at the great irony: For all the reasons I listed above, I don’t think Russell’s American Hustle screenplay would have ever sold as a spec script. The only way to get movies like this into the pipeline is to start with the script-reader-friendly version, then bring in a writer-director with enough talent, vision and clout to transform it into something heartfelt and meaningful.

“American Bullshit” exemplifies the current screenplay market: showing why these scripts are so bad and also why they sell, so I think it might be interesting to take a closer look at it for the next three days, until we finally arrive at American Hustle and how it turned this lump of lead into gold…

Storyteller's Rulebook #190: Limit Yourself

PIXAR had a problem. They had pioneered the idea of computer animation and made some very appealing short films featuring a jumping desk lamp, so they were eager to move into features ...but their technology seemed to have huge limitations.  

There was a reason that they had been anthropomorphizing lamps: they just couldn’t get the hang of creating hair or warm-looking skin, which seemed to mean that they would never be able to feature human characters.

They parleyed their short Tin Toy into a first feature called Toy Story. While that was in production, they sat down for a now-legendary lunch in where they tried to figure out the future of the company: they couldn’t make movies about toys forever, but how many movies they could make about heroes without hair or warm skin?

In addition to more Toy movies, they wound up brainstorming a list of five more ideas, all of which eventually got made:

• Ants: A Bug’s Life 
• Monsters: Monsters Inc. (They didn’t know at the time that by the time they got to this movie, they would finally master hair, and be eager to show it off) 
• Fish: Finding Nemo 
• Cars: Cars 
• Robots: WALL-E

Once they had their list, they realized that had a really hard job ahead of them. The problem was that all of these potential heroes would be hard for audiences to identify with…in large part because they lacked hair and warm skin!

So was it worth doing? Was there any point in making movies about such unlikely subjects? Yes, but they’d have to make up for the inherent liabilities with extra assets: they would have to create heroes that were extra-lovable, extra-compelling, extra-human.

Faced with such a daunting task, they had to admit something that no one else in town was willing to say out loud: the Hollywood way of crafting stories was broken.

In the heyday of the studio system, as historian Thomas Schatz famously described in his book “The Genius of the System”, the studios managed to closely manage their artists in a way that unleashed creativity instead of stifling it. During the system’s peak, from the mid-‘30s to the mid-‘40s, they somehow created something unprecedented and never again replicated: quality and quality control at the same time.

PIXAR realized that, if they were going to create five very expensive movies about five different types of hard-to-like creatures, they were going to have bring back that studio spirit. This meant that they had to bring back the idea of the “story department”. Egos had to go out the window, replaced with rigorous group critiques. Everything was constantly second-guessed by their “braintrust” and whole movies were sometimes sent back to the digital-drawing-board.

The results, as you probably know, were stunning. They were creating characters that were so lovable, even people who disliked computer animation were flocking to the theater every year. More than any other studio name in town, “PIXAR” came to mean quality.

And then a funny thing happened: they ran out of limitations. Now that they can tell any type of story, the PIXAR name has started diminish in the public’s eyes. They aren’t bending over backwards to make us fall in love anymore, because they seem to feel like their new human characters should be inherently likable.

But no character is inherently likeable. Even if you’re making a live-action movie, your character are just cold constructs until you hook them up to a lightning bolt and jolt them to life. Every character starts off as a bug, a fish, a car, a robot… they only have as much life as you give them. I wish that every studio would take PIXAR’s lead and bring back story departments, but unfortunately, it seems PIXAR is joining their competitors instead of beating them.

Meanwhile, if you don’t run a studio, what lesson can be learned from this? Limit yourself. Put yourself in a box and try to figure out how to do great work inside of it. Can you write a great thriller set entirely in two apartments, like Bound? Can you make people cheer for a love affair between a teenage boy and an eighty-year-old woman, like Harold and Maude? Can you make an entire super-hero movie out of found footage, like Chronicle? Can you write a silent movie, like The Artist?

Hold your own feet over the fire. Create a situation where you find yourself saying “This will only work if I do everything right.” Because guess what? That’s always true.

What I Wish I'd Heard at Graduation, Addendum: Don't Blow It

To paraphrase Rick’s description of Renault in Casablanca, filmmaking is like any other job, only moreso.  Did you choose this job because you don’t want to have a boss?  Well I have bad news for you, you won’t have one boss, you’ll have dozens, and many of them will be ten times as arrogant, exploitative and contemptuous as the worst boss you’ve ever had.

Above all else, beware of this: Hollywood producers, agents, stars, directors, etc., are some of the most thin-skinned people in the world.  On those lucky occasions that one of them offers you an opportunity, it’s ridiculously easy to blow it.  They have a lot of unspoken rules, and it’s not hard to break one, which will be the last you ever hear from them. The sense of entitlement these people have is overwhelming.

Remember, these people are constantly pestered by job-hopefuls who have memorized everything about them and are desperate to be part of their world.  On one level they find these people really annoying and try to avoid them, but on the other hand, they also come to take them for granted…they have unconsciously concluded that there must be a good reason why all these people are obsessed with them.

Inevitably, they internalize the assumption that everybody out there on the street knows everything about them, including their tastes and preferences, their contact info, where they hang out, etc, which helps explain why power-people are so bizarrely uncommunicative.  It takes a Herculean effort to get them to confirm the day, date, time, place and address of a meet-up.  If they mention the name of a restaurant to meet, you’re just supposed to know where that is, and if there’s more than one location, you’re supposed to be able to guess which one they prefer.  If you don’t, you’ll have to badger their assistant to get that information, and the assistant will be even more contemptuous.  They know everything about their boss, so why don’t you??

And by the way, the super-hip places they want to meet invariably have no street signs whatsoever—restaurants without signs, private clubs without signs, even hotels without signs.  They don’t even notice that these elite places are designed to be completely invisible from the street and it would never occur them that this might not be the best place to meet someone for the first time.  You’ve been there before, right?  Everybody goes there.

Most of all, these people assume that everybody will be agog when hearing their voice on the phone.  They’ve gotten so used to hushed awe that anything else seems downright contemptuous.  The last three people they spoke to were in awe of them, so who the hell are you to act differently?

The trick is to always be deferential, but never dazzled.  Profoundly respect their power and their peculiarities, but don’t surrender your self-respect. Yes, you should be grateful these power-people are giving you some of their genuinely valuable time, but keep looking for the opportunity to quietly prove you’re good enough to be there.  The trick is to prove your excellence in a way that doesn’t even remotely smell like insolence.

What I Wish I’d Heard at Graduation, Addendum: You Sometime Have to Work on Projects You Hate (And it Might Be “Your” Project)

In the comments on this post, we debated about whether it ever makes sense to work on projects you hate.  Ultimately, I would say that my answer is a sad yes, in some bad situations.

No, you probably should knock yourself out trying to get hired for an opening writing assignment you hate, for several reasons:

• It’ll be hard to crack the story if you don’t have a healthy respect for it.
• You’ll be unlikely to get the job because they’ll detect your lack of enthusiasm.
• You don’t want to be miserable while you’re writing it, because you’ll get bogged down over and over.

But you do have to at least be able to write projects you hate.  Why?  Because of this very unfortunate fact: in the years between the sale and the finished movie, every script you sell will at some point become a project you hate, even if only for a while.

Simon Kinberg has seemingly spent his whole career living the dream.  He sold his film school thesis screenplay Mr. and Mrs. Smith to Hollywood, then made millions rewriting other people’s projects while his own script attracted every big name in town.  (For a long time, it was supposed to star Will Smith and Nicole Kidman!)

Even more impressive, by the time the finished movie came out, he was still the only listed screenwriter, which is almost unheard of.  Now, in point of fact, he had been fired several times, and other writers had re-written it a dozen different ways, but each time the studio changed their minds and reverted back to his latest version.

As hard as that was to take, it was even worse when he didn’t get fired, because each new director demanded he re-write his script to fit their vision, even when he wildly disagreed with their take.

One of the most acclaimed directors in town decided that the story should be a metaphor for domestic violence, and the spies should keep sending each other to the emergency room where they could make mirthless jokes about how the other ran into a doorknob.  It turned Kinberg’s stomach to write these scenes, but he did it anyway, because, by this point, he knew that this director would inevitably pass and he would soon be working for someone else, and he just wanted to stay attached until that happened.  In the end, he was glad he did.

This is a job.  Like any other job, you do better work when you believe in what you do, but you can’t demand the right to be gung ho about every assignment every day.  Sometimes, you just have to keep your head down, do it their way, and trust that, somehow, everything will work out alright.

(...But whatever you do, don’t say, “Okay then, I’ll write it in a way that shows them how bad their idea is.”  Inevitably, one of two things will happen:

• They’ll instantly detect that you tanked it, then fire and bad-mouth you.
• Or, even worse, they’ll love your purposely-bad version, and you’ll be stuck with it.

Instead, you really have to try your best to make their bad idea work.  Ironically, if they can tell that you really tried, they’ll be far more like to admit that their version just doesn't work.)

Storyteller's Rulebook #187: Own It (But Don’t Let It Own You)

We finally got around to watching Whale Rider the other day, which was great, and one thought I had while watching it was how much the New Zealand filmmaker Niki Caro and novelist Witi Ihimaera owned the material.  They were telling their land’s story, one that no outsider had.  The emotions were universal, but, to a non-Maori audience, all of the details were wonderfully exotic and unique.  There is real power in that authenticity.

I made a fundamental mistake when pitching my Alan Turing script around town.  They would all ask me how I found this story and I gave the wrong answer: “I randomly ran across it in a book, liked it, read a bunch more books, and decided to write it.”  They would look a little uncomfortable and ask me what my connection to the material was, and I would blithely blabber, “Funny you should ask: absolutely none!  He’s a gay British mathematician, and I’m not any of those things!”  I didn’t realize that I was killing my sale.

Instead, when you’re pitching, you need to play up your authenticity, establish your connection to the material.   Even if you don’t “own” any source material involved, you have to own it.  Be necessary.  Prove that you’re the one writer who is perfect for this material.  Assure them that, if they had been the one to have this idea, and they could have hired any writer in the world to write it, you’re the writer they would have hired. 

After all, as soon as they buy it from you, it is their idea, in every sense of the word, and you’re their employee.  You don’t want them to suddenly wonder, “Why did I hire this guy?”

But be aware that there’s a tipping point at which your connection to the material stops being an asset and starts being a liability.  It’s one thing to say, “I’m the perfect guy to write this, because I’m a gay British mathematician myself” (in fact, Turing’s most in-depth biographer was all three), but the fear is that you’ll then say, “And I’m gonna tell the real story, instead of all that phony Hollywood crap!”  Suddenly, all of the enthusiasm will drain out of producers’ faces. 

You have to own it without letting it own you.  You have to have a deep reservoir of unique real-world knowledge, but then you have use it or discard it as necessary in the service of a great story.  

Look at “The Americans”: creator Joe Weisberg sold that show based on his own experience as a CIA officer, and indeed the show offers many real-world aspects of spy work that you rarely see onscreen, such as the recruiting and handling of long-term assets, but it also exaggerates and re-writes the facts at will. The details are authentic, but the story is pure fiction. 

In this excellent AV Club interview, Weisberg makes it clear that the spy stuff was always restricted to being a metaphor for the family stuff, and never the other way around.  He uses all of his spy knowledge, but he doesn’t let it take over the show. In the end, he’s not even writing about spies, he’s just using his authentic tradecraft knowledge as a source of unique details to enrich a universal story of family strife. 

What I Wish I’d Heard at Graduation, Two Final Caveats

Caveat #1: If They Talk About Doing a Lot of Projects Together, They’re Probably About to Screw You

Here’s one I had to figure out  through bad experiences.  When you first start getting work, you’re probably going to be working for the bottom-feeders.  At first you’re going to say to yourself, “Gee, I’m so lucky to get this job!  Why on earth did they take a chance on a hayseed like me?”  Then you find out the answer…

All producers hate paying writers, but the bottom-feeders really hate it.  They hire beginners for two reasons: so that they can offer rock-bottom rates, and so that they can get out of actually paying those rates.  This can range from asking for extra free drafts to flat out refusing to pay you the money you’re owed.

How can you avoid these situations?  You can’t, altogether, but you can look out for some warning signs, and here’s the biggest one: they start talking about all the projects that you two are going to do together.

To a beginner, this sounds great!  “Wow, I’ve just lined up my next five jobs, before I’ve even finished my first one!  I have employment for life!  We’re going to be the next Schrader and Scorsese!  The next Kaufman and Jonze!”

But a veteran would never fall for it, because they would know that most projects end sadly: either the project dies, or the writer gets replaced, or both…and that’s fine.  That’s the nature of the business, especially at that level.  So no, you’re not going to make a bunch of projects together, because this project is almost certainly going to disappoint both of you in the end.

So why do they tell you that?  Because they’re already figuring out how they’re going to screw you over, and they’re trying to keep your eye off the ball.  When they say, “We’re going to make a lot of projects together,” the implied corollary is, “So don’t blow it by demanding your money for this one.”  If they try to sell you that line, just politely respond with, “Let’s wait to see how this one turns out.” Then watch your wallet.

Caveat #2: Beware of Buyer’s Remorse:

When you sign with a representative, or when you get hired to write a script, you’re over the moon: “They like me!  They really like me!  All that suffering, all those years of hard work have finally paid off.  Now the pressure’s off! Now they finally trust me”

But of course this isn’t true.  First of all, the pressure has just ratcheted way up: Before you were unemployed, but now you’ve got a boss.  And even though you’re not being well paid yet, you’re now taking up the time of people who could be meeting with millionaires instead, so you have to act like you’re in that class.

But it’s worse than that.  Your reps may have liked you before they signed you, or that studio may have liked your script and/or pitch before they bought it, but as soon as you signed on the dotted line, they regretted it.  Everybody loves the thrill of the hunt.  They saw that someone else desired you, and they felt that their attractiveness was threatened, so they pounced upon you with a better offer, and they bagged you: success!

But now they’re stuck with you, and they can’t remember why they wanted you in the first place.  In the harsh light of day, you’re just not as attractive as you were at closing time.

The only solution is to re-sell yourself.  Show them something they haven’t seen before. Everything you brought to the table before you signed on the dotted line is going to seem old and dead to them now.  Hit them with some new ideas. Re-invigorate their interest before they decide to shelve you in favor of their next conquest.

Okay, folks, enough negativity!  This is gonna be the year of Matt!  Happy helpful hints resume tomorrow!

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Addendum: Every Celebrity Has the Same Personality

Sing it along with me: “You can spend all your time making money, or you can spend all your money making time.”  When we listen to the song, we all know which choice that the Eagles are endorsing, don’t we?  They’re the sort of guys who don’t believe in working all the time, and they’re looking for fans who feel the same way. Fans like you!

But it took me years to figure out that the Eagles were, in fact, spending all their time making money, and there’s nothing wrong with that.  Their marketers may want us to picture them sitting around their porch, picking guitars and smoking blunts while they perform, but in fact each one of them got up early that morning, left their loved ones at home, showed up to work on time and spent the whole day in a windowless studio, performing that song over and over while perfecting every note.

Every famous person brands him or herself a different way.  Michael Douglas and Michael Buble present the image of being trim, neat, and professional, while Matthew McConaughey and Snoop Dogg create the image of not giving a damn.  But don’t buy it.  Every famous person has the same personality: Type A.  They are hard-charging, ultra-professional, ultra-ambitious, ultra-level-headed.  It can be hard to believe that Edward Herrmann and Russell Brand are basically the same guy, but believe me, they are.

Any time you’ve ever listened to a song, or watched a movie, or read a book about the need to stop working all the time and start smelling the roses, then you’re enjoying the labor of someone who stopped smelling the roses and started working all the time.  They’re not selling you that message because they themselves live that way, they’re selling it because they know that you wish you could live that way, and you’ll pay good money to be told that it’s possible.

I cannot recommend enough the Cracked article 6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You A Better Person about the importance of becoming a productive person, even if (and especially if) you’re progressive-minded.  It’s written in the same vein as this series, but it’s more succinct and better written.  It gets pretty rough, but I’ve found that most people who read it nevertheless find it uplifting.

Creative people have a lot more competition and a lot longer odds than non-creative people, so we have to work twice as hard and be twice as professional as they are.  There were hundreds of thousands of country-folk bands touring America in the ‘70s, but the Eagles worked their asses off to get to the top of that pile.  

Let me be clear: I’m not accusing anybody of hypocrisy.  There’s nothing immoral or unethical about praising or portraying a lifestyle that you yourself can’t follow.  It’s perfectly legitimate to encourage your audience to take it easy, but you should know that if you take your own advice, no one will ever hear that message.

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Addendum: Be Amazed By Success

When I was young and silly, if I met a screenwriter who only had one credit for one bad movie ten years ago, then that writer was just a joke to me.  After all, I was about to be a huge success, and I couldn’t risk my rising cred by hanging out with people whose work I couldn’t respect. 

This attitude can be seen in the criticism meted out to storytelling guru Blake Snyder: “This guy’s biggest credit is Stop or My Mom Will Shoot! Why are we listening to a thing he says?”

This is a lousy attitude for so many reasons...

• Writers have zero decision power over which jobs they get.  There are Oscar-nominated writers out there trying like hell to get every job they can possibly pitch for, no matter what they think of the source material or subject matter. 
• The credited writer has very little influence on the quality of the final film.  Every choice the writer makes gets second-guessed on the fly by the producers, the director, the stars, the editor, and the distributor by the time the movie is done.  
• In fact, writers can’t even control the quality of their own writing on the page.  If the producer tells you to write it badly, then you write it badly, or you’re fired. 
• The vast majority of screenwriters, even the ones who make a good living at screenwriting, get few if any onscreen credits on theatrically-released feature films.  If you get a credit, even if the final film sucked, then you’re probably doing something very right. 

Most often, the writer in question wrote a brilliant spec back in the day, and then a producer bought it, and pretended he was going to make it soon, but asked the screenwriter to re-write one of the producer’s pet projects in the meantime.  Alas, the producer then buried the brilliant spec, because all he actually cared about was the pet project, which was always destined to be a horrible movie, no matter who wrote it.

Now don’t get me wrong: maybe the writer you’ve just met really is just some talentless boob who got steampiped through the system because his uncle was the studio head.  But it’s pretty obvious who those guys are.  If, on the other hand, you find yourself saying “Gee, this guy seems smart, so why do his movies suck so bad?”, then give him the benefit of the doubt.   In this unforgiving business, it’s good to keep in mind that success is a pretty amazing thing.

What I Wish I'd Heard at Graduation, Addendum: Underpromise and Overdeliver

Every relationship in Hollywood begins when someone says, “Wow, this kid’s the real deal” and ends when that changes to, “Nope, just another windbag.”  Your job is to keep that window open as long as possible.

The secret is to underpromise and overdeliver.  This is common general advice, and it’s always harder than it sounds, but in Hollywood it’s especially difficult, because the pressure to overpromise is overwhelming.  It’s a town run on hot air.

Writers hate to sit around writing, which is way too boring.  We’d rather be out partying, which we refer to as “networking”.  The problem is that, when you’re out “networking”, people are constantly asking you, “What are you working on?”  The honest answer is, “Nothing, obviously, or else I’d be home writing instead of at this party,” but, rather than admit to that, you start boasting about all your “irons in the fire”: the project you’re “setting up” at one company, and the one that’s “under consideration” at another…

In a great, long-out-of-print memoir called “A Friend in the Business”, Robert Masello tells about moving to L.A. to make it in TV and running into a friend who had already been out there for a few years.  He was happily surprised to discover that his friend was doing great: “I’m selling projects all over town!”  Only after Masello himself had gotten a staff job (on a horror show called “Poltergeist: The Legacy”) did he realize what his friend had meant: Everybody is selling all over town, but very few have sold anything.  His friend was overpromising and under-delivering.

The problem gets even worse once you actually are selling.  Now you’re surrounded by people who are over-promising to you: telling you that they’re going to make you rich and they’re over-the-moon excited about your current draft.  It’s only natural to believe them and then pass on that excitement to others.  You relate their enthusiasm to your friends, family, colleagues, reps, other clients, etc.  Then it proves to be yet more hot air.

There are two great reasons not to give in to exaggeration.  The first, obviously, is that it makes you seem like a dupe and/or liar.  But the second is even more insidious: The more puffery engage in, the more inflated you feel, but actual writing produces the opposite feeling: it’s very, very deflating. 

What’s on the page will never match your how great it was in your imagination, and that’s painful, but it’s even worse if you’ve already boasted to everyone about what you were going to accomplish.  To cheer yourself back up, you’ll want to stop writing and go to another party, beginning the cycle anew…

The key to lasting personal and professional satisfaction is to quit the puffery cold turkey.  The only feelings of satisfaction for a writer should come after you write something good or after you sell something.  The writing itself should be unsatisfactory, as you painfully force yourself to get better and better, and the meetings should be even more unsatisfactory, since all that puffery should make you wary and weary. 

The next time you’re at a party and someone asks you what you’re working on, bite your tongue and simply say, “Nothing worth talking about yet”, then excuse yourself from the party to go home and write.

(…But wait, you may say, why are you taking that guy’s advice?  He was just a writer on “Poltergeist: The Legacy”!  More on that next time…)

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Addendum: Would You Hire You?

True story: After a few failed attempts at post-college dating, I had reached the point where I’d pretty much given up. I decided that I would just wait until some girl came along, took pity on my aimless 20-something life, and saved me from myself. Amazingly, this didn’t work.

Then, one day, something occurred to me.  I asked myself: “Hey, Matt, would you date you?” Could I look at myself and say, “Hey, what a catch! He’s living the kind of life I’d love to lead! We’d have so much fun together!” I had to admit that, if I met myself on a blind date, I’d run away.

So I quit my pizza delivery job for a somewhat-interesting desk job, traded in my junker for the cheapest new car they sold, and started going out on the weekends, doing the sort of thing I would be doing if I had a girlfriend. One month later, I met Betsy. If she had met me a month earlier, would she have liked what she saw? We’ll never know.

It works the same way with writing.  I keep having to remind myself that I can sit around hating on others for getting the interviews or assistant gigs or staff gigs that I wanted, but I should never stop asking myself, “Would I hire me? Am I what a showrunner is looking for? Am I a catch?” And if not, why not?  Because there’s a lot of things I can’t control, but I can always be upping my game. 

The wonderful thing about writing is that, unlike dating, anybody can do it at anytime. You don’t need permission to write the great American story. In fact, even if somebody wanted to stop you, they couldn’t. Writers write. It’s free, fun, and you can do it all day long.

If you want to be hired to write an episode of a TV show every month, here’s one good way to prepare: write an episode of a TV show every month. Yes, it sucks that you have to do it for free for the time being, and it would be nice to work in an the industry that had an outreach program and paid for on-the-job training, but we’re masochists, and we’ve chosen an industry that only needs 0.001% of applicants, so they don’t feel any incentive to do that.

The best way to get a writing gig is the best way to get a date: Act like you already have one.

What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Finale: Knowledge Shrinks, Experience Grows

So things are looking bleak for our heroes…  They have been lied to from all sides, fed false dreams and get-rich-quick schemes… They have discovered that the touchy-feely artsy-fartsy profession they thought they were entering is actually a hyper-professional, mercilessly exploitative, brutally competitive visit to the thunderdome!

Can it get any worse?  Well, here’s another seemingly terrible thing you realize after graduation… Every profession is changing very fast these days, but none faster than filmmaking. 

When people advise you to get a liberal arts education as opposed to learning specific job skills, one reason they often give is that you’ll end up getting a job that didn’t exist when you started school, but now we’ve escalated beyond that.  My first real desk job, after a few years delivering pizzas, was one that didn’t exist when I graduated college: digital video editor.  And I know a lot of people with that same experience.

If you’re foolish enough to go to film school, they’re going to teach you all about the profession…or at least how the profession was when your teachers were actually in it.  Not only is that knowledge already out of date, but even the most current information will change by the time you’re ready to earn a paycheck. 

Everything you learn, and yes, that includes every rule on this blog, has a short shelf life.  If you think of your education as progress toward the goal of total knowledge, then I’ve got terrible news for you: you’re moving backwards down that path, not forwards.  Knowledge shrinks faster than it can ever grow, because every year there’s going to be more and more new things you can’t keep up with. 

On the one hand, this is terrible news!  All that education was for naught!  All the know-how and savvy that you had planned to flaunt at job interviews becomes a liability, not an asset, once you realize that it’s all out of date…

…But this is all okay, because while time can render your knowledge obsolete, it can’t take your experience away, and that’s what you’re really selling. You don’t want to brag about what systems you’ve worked with or how much education you have, you want to say to employers, “Hire me because I’ve adapted before and I’ll adapt again, the next time everything changes.” Nothing beats that argument.

Once you realize this, your whole perspective changes for the better.  Suddenly you realize that every mistake you made, every dead end you followed, every boss you pissed off …these are your assets.  There are no real career missteps, because it all gets added to your store of experience, so it all makes you more valuable.  

Okay, folks, that’s it: Twelve rough life-lessons from me to you, in hopes that you’ll avoid some of my mistakes.  So do I leave you on this harrowing note?  Of course not!  Tomorrow, I’ll put up my final post before hiatus: a list of my twenty favorite things I discovered through this blog…

What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 11: The Better You Get, the Less Intuitive the Work Is

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When I got started as a video editor, I had to painstakingly log every scene, sort them into hundreds of carefully-described bins, and slowly discover which clips worked together through trial and error. 

Then as I got better, I started to develop a “sixth sense”.  As I previewed the raw footage, I was able to spot which clips would be the most useful.  I quickly discarded all the footage I wasn’t going to use without logging it.  As I edited, I started making fewer “rough cuts” because I knew instinctively where to cut into a clip and where to cut back out. 

I got paid by the job, not by the hour, so one benefit of this was that I was able to do more work and make more money. “Finally,” I thought, “this is what real professional editing is like.”

But I was wrong.  When I started hanging out with real feature editors, I was shocked to see how they worked.  I visited the editor of Todd Solondz’s movie “Happiness” and I saw that she (or an assistant, when she had one) had not only logged each clip with exhaustive detail, but she had gone much further…

She had painstakingly subdivided each clip into each sentence of dialogue, and then created a separate sequence for every sentence in the movie, demonstrating how it sounded from every possible angle.  She explained that this was standard, because you never knew when the director was going to say “I’m sure there was a better take of that line, let me hear them all.”

Intuition, as it turns out, follows a bell curve.  You start off with little, develop a lot of it as you become a cocky young turk, and then you abandon it again as you become a master.  The better you get, the less intuitive your job is, and the more drudgework you do. 

This turns out to be equally true of screenwriting as well, for several reasons:

1. As with video editors, once you’re getting paid real money, you have to be able to show your work, to prove that you made the best choices.
2. You also have to be able to reverse engineer every decision you make, to undo it and redo in 10 slightly different ways. 
3. But even if you’re just writing for yourself, you find that the more you know, the less you trust yourself.  You’ve had too many scripts go wrong because you coasted on intuition until you crashed.  You force yourself to slow down and work more methodically, so that you can backtrace your steps at any times.

So was all that experience for nothing, given that you end up working just as menially at the top as you did at the bottom?  Is there any hope for your heroes?  Yes, there is.  Tomorrow we will find a ray of hope in our grand finale…

What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 10: Stay Out of Fantasy Camp

The most reliable way for an aspiring screenwriter to secure representation is to win a contest, and that’s what I did.  I wrote a bio-pic of Alan Turing (who broke the Nazi codes during World War 2 and helped invent the computer) which won a Sloan award and a Columbia award. 

Based on that script and a lower-budget thriller script, I got managers, who circulated the Turing script to a few small companies.  As it turned out, it got me a lot of meetings, and it’s still getting me work as a writing sample, but it never sold.  My reps weren’t that surprised, since they said the subject matter was a hard sell.  Maybe it would have sold a few years ago, but there weren’t a lot of spec sales anymore because money was tight…

So imagine how it felt when I read one day that a studio had just paid a cool million dollars for an Alan Turing biopic from a first-time screenwriter…who wasn’t me.  I can’t help but think of that as the million dollars that I didn’t make. 

Of course, that screenplay might be a lot better than mine (I can’t bring myself to read it) but as soon as it sold, I knew what I’d really done wrong… I chose to live in fantasy camp. 

There are several biographies of Turing, but only one that really goes in depth.  I knew that I should attempt to option that book, but I never did.  Instead, two producers optioned it and hired another first-time writer to tackle it.  Obviously, if I had already been attached, these producers would have had to come to me with their proposal, and if they liked my script enough to back it, we would have been in business…

I complained in my “What’s the Matter With Hollywood” pieces about Hollywood’s insistence on owning a property, but I never took that lesson to heart.  If you bring them a bio-pic that you just sniffed out of the air, then they’ll be suspicious… if this story is just lying around, how come nobody’s used it before?  But if you bring it to them as something that you’ve locked up…and you can sell them the exclusive rights to, then that will seem like something of value. 

So why did I never attempt to option the in-depth biography, which was long out-of-print, and quite possibly not under option when I first wrote my script?  Because I was still living in fantasy camp.  I convinced myself that I didn’t really need to secure the rights, because I had drawn on five or six books, so I could claim that I had used less than 51% of any one book. 

But honestly, I was afraid that I’d track down the author and find out that somebody did have the rights.  I was so enamored of the potential value of this subject that I was terrified to discover the actual value.  If they said “Someone else owns the rights, so cease and desist” then even though I still might have been legally able to pursue a competing project, I would have been too bummed. 

And besides, what if I had been unable to afford the option?  When every script is just fantasy camp, then it seems silly to lay out any money.  Don’t screenwriters create value out of thin air?  Why pay for that? 

I’ll tell you why: One Million Dollars…that I didn’t make because I was more interested in the fantasy of writing a screenplay than I was in treating this like a business.

What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 9: You Can't Pay Your Dues Until After You’ve “Made It”

For years, I mistakenly thought I was paying my dues: I wrote a lot of screenplays, first ones that were terrible and later ones that were better, and I did odd jobs for big-time screenwriters, like organizing an Emmy winner’s library, and editing banquet-dinner videos for an Academy Award nominee...  But then I realized that actual dues-paying has nothing to do with learning your craft or impressing potential employers.

Aspiring screenwriters often think: “I’ll write a dozen screenplays, on my own, behind closed doors, then, one lucky day, my talent will be spotted by someone on the ‘inside’, who will read my work and love it.  Some calls will be made, and by the end of the day, I will suddenly have an agent, a studio contract, and a check for a million dollars.  Then I’ll decide whether or not I ever want to work again.” 

We somehow think that the day we make our first sale is the day our dues paying ends.  This is utterly backwards.  “Paying dues” actually refers to doing excellent work in your chosen profession that pleases your boss but does not please yourself.  Doing paid work of the kind you want to do, but working on projects you don’t really believe in.

Writers are constantly fed fairy-tale stories of writers like Quentin Tarantino, J.K. Rowling, Stephanie Meyer, Diablo Cody, etc., who supposedly hit it out of the park their first time at bat.  Those stories may or may not be lies, but they are certainly not typical.  Note that you get far fewer profiles or writers like Suzanne Collins, who published a lot of semi-successful books before she finally hit it big with “The Hunger Games”.  Stories like hers, while far more common, don’t sound like fairy tales, so they don’t get repeated.

Most screenwriters have to pay their dues for years after they start making money, but before they can do the personally-fulfilling work they were born to do. Matthew Weiner was a staff writer on “Becker”!  Charlie Kaufman was a staff writer on “Ned and Stacey”! And they didn’t contemptuously dash off a few scripts that were far beneath their skill level.  They worked hard.  That’s real dues paying.  And it starts after you’ve supposedly “made it.”

Wow!  Things look bleak for our heroes!  Will it get any worse before it gets better?  Find out tomorrow?

What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 8: Your Best Connections Are Outside Your Profession

If you’re a would-be filmmaker, then you’re probably not going to impress any pros with your knowledge or talents, no matter how good you are. Many of them are burn-out-cases with no interest in the next generation, but even the nicer ones have a healthy wariness of the endless numbers of hungry up-and-comers. 

Yes, you should selflessly do lots of amazing favors for people above you on the ladder, but understand that many of them will simply consider that to be your obligation.  (In fact, they feel that they’re doing you a favor by letting you do them a favor.)  And yes, you should also selflessly help people below you on the ladder, but beware that they may only resent you more as a result. 

Movies and moviemaking have lost their magic for most filmmakers.  Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone, amateur or pro, how much movies mean to you, because they’ll just roll their eyes.  It’s like someone at a lawnmower company making a speech about genuinely loving lawnmowers.  Nobody is going to believe it.

But… as soon as you step outside the world of movie making, most people you meet, even highly-paid professionals, will find your status as a filmmaker to be enchanting.  Even then, they may still be slightly wary—after all, anyone can claim to be a filmmaker, but if you’ve got a degree, or a credit, or a prize, or anything that makes you seem legit, then that’s all they’ll need to be dazzled by you. 

I put in a lot of time assisting professional editors, but I got my first paid solo editing job because I was the only editor that this client had ever met.  Likewise, I apprenticed to a lot of screenwriters, but I got my first paid gig because I was the only screenwriter who the author of the novel knew personally.

And it works the other way too: the more time you spend developing interests outside the world of film, the more interesting you become to filmmakers, who, after all, are tired of talking about movies.  Whether at a party or a pitch meeting, they’d much rather hear that you spent the weekend at a glass-blowing retreat than a Robert McKee seminar. 

So when I got those jobs, had I finally “made it”?  Let’s get to that next time…

What I Wish I’d Heard At Graduation, Part 7: Be Ridiculously Professional

Screenwriting is a business of razor-thin margins.  For every job opening there are tens of thousands of potential applicants.  It’s really hard to become a better writer overnight, but it’s much easier to will yourself to be (here’s that dreaded phrase:) detail-oriented. 

Producers, like any other employer, would rather hire someone with moderate talent and lots of professionalism than someone with lots of talent and no professionalism. A screenplay with great dialogue and a lot of typos turns them off more than a screenplay with so-so dialogue and not a single typo.

Why?  Because talent actually can, eventually, be taught, but it’s almost impossible to beat professionalism into someone’s head if they don’t want to learn it. They can teach you how to write dialogue, but they can’t teach you seriousness or respect.

Turn in drafts on time, even if you suspect that they’re not going to bother to read them for weeks. Be early for every meeting, even if you know that they’ll show up twenty minutes late. If they disrespect you, show them up by being twice as respectful to them.  Be a pro, and you’ll move to the top of your bracket, whatever bracket you’re in.

Go above and beyond: Reggie Bythwood told me this story about getting hired on “New York Undercover”. Bythwood had been a writer for the sitcom “A Different World” and he was explicitly hired to add jokes to the show, but he quickly realized that there was a problem: creator Dick Wolf tended to put all the experts on policework he interviewed onto his “Law and Order” staff and fill the “NYU” staff with hip-dialogue guys, so there was a lack of expertise on the nuts and bolts of the world of the show. 

Bythwood decided that he would study up on all the procedural stuff, so that he could be the go-to guy when the other writers had questions about that.  Soon enough, everybody loved him. That’s real professionalism.  Do everything you’ve been hired to do, and then go past it to do whatever needs to be done, even if it’s not one of the strengths you were supposed to bring to this job.  

Okay, okay, you say, you promise to be good, but what good will it do you if you can’t get hired anywhere?  Guess what, tomorrow I’ll finally tell you the number one shortcut to getting your dream job...