What I've Learned So Far From This Blog

So here we are, folks, my final post before my hiatus.  Everyone who comes to this address in the next few months is going to see this post, so I didn’t want to end on the merciless pieces I’ve been doing recently.  The most obvious thing to do is to simply repeat the piece that best sums up all the others, The Ultimate Story Checklist, but a link will do.  Please go there if you want a systematic study of how you can use this blog to improve your story. 

But one thing about the checklist is that it’s very exhaustive, so not all those ideas are ones I can claim.  And so, for this “see you later” piece, I wanted to take a moment to review twenty ideas that were generated by this blog that I hadn’t heard anywhere before.  I could just make this a list of links, but I’d rather try to re-state each one in a self-contained way, as succinctly as possible:

1. Nobody can become a hero by doing what anybody would do.  A hero should have special skills, and be surrounded by people who lack his/her heroic attributes. 
2. It’s not very helpful to think about an “inciting incident.”  It’s more helpful to think about a longstanding problem leading the hero to pursue an intimidating opportunity which leads to an unforeseen conflict.
3. Story comes from a volatile reaction between character and situation, in which each transforms the other. 
4. A hero needn’t be smart, but must be resourceful.  (Even fools can resourcefully go after what they want, which is why it’s impossible to make anything foolproof.)  This is because audiences find it painful to care for characters that don’t care about themselves.
5. A character’s “metaphor family” is the aspect of his/her background (usually his/her home region, job or developmental state) that determines his/her slang, exclamations, and points of comparison.
6. A character’s voice breaks down into three components: metaphor family, default personality trait, and default argument strategy.  You don’t need to know everything about a character, you just have to know these three things.   
7. The best scenes consist of two characters trying to trick and trap each other, resulting in at least one of them doing something they didn’t intend to do when the scene began. There’s nothing immoral about engaging in this behavior.
8. In the best scenes, there is literal give and take (an object is exchanged, representing larger values), and literal push and pull (characters touch each other at least once, and often only once, to symbolize the completion of the goal).
9. Sometimes, rather than have an ensemble of fully-rounded three dimensional characters, it’s better to have an ensemble of exaggerated, polarized characters.  One is better at recreating actual interpersonal conflicts, but the other is equally legitimate because it dramatizes our own internal debates.   
10. The second quarter of a story is usually about tackling the problem the easy way, and ends in a disaster.
11. The third quarter of a story is usually about trying again the hard way, and ends in a spiritual crisis.
12. A hero should start out with a false statement of philosophy, which is only replaced by a true statement of philosophy as a result of the spiritual crisis.  
13. The best way to make a hero compelling is to make him/her misunderstood.   
14. The theme of a story should never be stated in terms of “good vs. bad”, which is a no-brainer, but rather in terms of “good vs. good” or “bad vs. bad”
15. Stories thrive on unique, never-before-seen relationships, moreso than never-before-seen characters.
16. An obstacle is something that makes a task hard to do, but a conflict is something that makes a task hard to want to do. 
17. Stories that are considered to be literature tend to be primarily about unintended consequences, while stories that are considered to be entertainment are almost always about intended consequences. 
18. Withhold exposition until both the character and the audience are demanding to know it.
19. Problems should be visually apparent, so that the characters don’t have discuss the mechanics of the plot.
20. You shouldn’t have to disable the hero’s cell phone, because your hero should be the only one who can solve the problem.  

That’s it, folks!  I hope to see you all in three months!

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...  

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 6: Only Worry About the Quality of Your Own Work

In any situation, there’s always going to be someone doing a better job than everybody else.  You should be that person.  But you need to accept the fact that, even if you are the best, you will not advance right away. Four things will happen first:

1. Other people will pocket the extra value that your work creates, for a while, without giving you any extra credit. That’s fine.
2. They might even steal credit for your work, for a while. That’s fine.
3. They will also try to get you to do their work, without credit. That’s inevitable, so do it if you can. 
4. People who are embarrassed by your work will order you to water your quality down.  That’s not fine.  Humbly defer their requests. 

Do you have a bad boss?  Good for you! That’s a great opportunity.  Take your boss’s job.  Of course, in the mean time, you’ll have to work extra hard to please a dud, but that’s okay, because you’re also showing your boss’s boss that you deserve your boss’s job. 

But what if your boss’s boss doesn’t notice for a long time?  And what if your infuriating boss just takes credit for your output?  That’s fine.  Let him.  Don’t worry about working without recognition, because it’s impossible: someone is always noticing.  Even if it’s just your fellow co-workers.  Even if it’s just the customers. 

Of course, if you’ve been outperforming your boss for a year, and there’s been no reward, it might be time for a new job, but guess what?  You’ll be in a great position to get one.  You’ll find that there are a lot of people around you who will give you a recommendation. Ask those admiring co-workers if they know anybody else looking for a person in your position who’s looking to advance.  Or ask those customers who liked you if they know of any other opportunities. 

The point is: don’t do what I did, over and over again, in these situations.  Don’t say to yourself, “This supervisor is terrible, and nobody seems to care, so why do a good job?  I might as well slack off.”  That’s the best way to ensure one of two things: either you’ll have to work for that same bad boss forever, or you’ll leave and be unable to get another job because no one from your old job will recommend you. Work experience that doesn’t include a recommendation is a liability, not an asset.

This is the hardest thing in the world to do: Only worry about the quality of your own contribution.  It’s so easy to think: “My good work will be wasted if everybody else around me is doing bad work, so why not redirect my energies to pointing out that their work needs to be better?”  No.  Nobody wants to hear your criticism. Be aware of who around you is doing good work and bad work, but don’t point it out to anybody. If you make a stink, you’ll just stink up the place. 

Quality is a beacon, even if that beacon is temporarily covered in mud. If no one around you is doing good work, then don’t compare yourself to them.  Compare yourself to the people you’d rather be working with and try to meet their level of quality, even if no one around you seems to appreciate that.  

Here’s the good news, If you have a bad boss, that boss will probably be fired soon, and another boss will come in who might appreciate you.  Never assume that the bad situation is going to continue.  Things change all the time.  You may be unappreciated today, but if a shake-up happened tomorrow, would you rise to the top?  Why not?   Worry about that instead of plotting a coup.  You don’t need to plot a coup.  Shake-ups happen.  Everything will be different in a year, especially in this economy. 

So how do you shine brighter than your co-workers?  We’ll get to that tomorrow…

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 5: Be Necessary

Yesterday, we talked about the importance of doing a lot of amazing favors, but I cautioned that nobody will owe you anything in return.  This was one of the hardest things for me to learn: nobody really owes anybody anything.  It doesn’t matter what you think they owe you, and it doesn’t even matter how much they actually want you.  The only thing that matters is how much they need you.

Just because you have a great resume, or “paid your dues”, or you’ve been best friends with the boss since childhood, or even if they promised you a job, they don’t owe you anything. Even people who owe you money don’t really owe you that money, unless you made them sign a legally-enforceable paper contract and you kept a copy with their signature on it.  Even then… not really. People who don’t really need to pay you anything aren’t ever going to pay you anything.

Even when someone truly wants to hire you, they often can’t. It’s not their money.  (Even if it seems like their money, it’s not.  Everybody has backers that they are responsible to, even if their name is on the door.)  The only reason that anybody will ever hire you is because you have demonstrated to them that you have something they absolutely need.

No one is going to pay you any of their money.  Instead, they are going to pay you a share of the money that you help them accumulate. And that’s perfectly fair.  It took me a long time to figure out that this is the whole idea behind employment.  The only reason to hire somebody is if they’re going to bring more money in the door each month than they take out of the door at the end of the month.

Trust me: every month that you work, keep a ledger in your head of every dollar that you bring in the door and every dollar in your paycheck.  If the first number is smaller than the second, your days are numbered.  If you want to stay employed, don’t just be nice, don’t just be friendly, don’t just be skillful, don’t just be useful. None of those are going to keep you employed.  Be necessary.  

If you are necessary, they will have to keep you on, at least for a while, even if they despise you.  If you are necessary and a friendly, professional person, then you’re really set, and your whole life will become a lot happier.  We’ll talk about how to do that tomorrow... 

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 4: Favors Are Serious Business

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Filmmaking, like any other career in the arts, requires you to do a lot of favors, but you have to do so with your eyes wide open.  You have to be okay with the fact that most favors disappear into the ether, never to be seen again.  That’s okay.  The purpose of doing favors is not to get someone to say “this person did something for me, so now I owe them an opportunity in return.”  Few people will have that response. 

Realistically, you’re hoping that, at some point in the future, they will say, “Shit, my plans fell through, I’m in a bad jam, and I need to call in someone who I can depend on to do an amazing job at the last minute for almost nothing. Who have I been able to depend on in the past?”  That day may never come, but if it does, you want to be on their list of dependable people.  You get on that list by doing amazing favors.

This brings us to the horrifying truth about favors: If you agree to do a favor, even if it’s a huge, unreasonable, last-minute favor for the biggest screw-up in town, you have to do amazing work, better than if you were getting paid. 

“What?? Why is that?? They’re not even paying me!  Can’t I just phone it in?  At least I showed up!”  Don’t believe it.  No matter much they beg and plead and promise you that they just need a quickie job or a warm body, you still have to say no if you can’t do an amazing job for them.

Agreeing to do a favor, any favor, is a dangerous opportunity.  If you do a half-ass favor for someone, even if they promised you that you wouldn’t have to work hard, they will resent it, and they will bad-mouth you.  Even worse, other people working on the project won’t know that they’re getting paid and you’re not.  All they’ll know is that you did a half-ass job, and they don’t ever want to work with you again. 

So you have to be willing to say no to a favor.  The truth is that, if you do say no, no matter how hurt they pretend to be, they’ll just shrug and call somebody else and give that person the same song and dance they gave you.  It won’t really hurt their feelings. 

It’s vital to do as many favors as possible, but only agree to contribute if you’re prepared to act as if you’re the highest paid person on that project.  After all, this is your chance to audition for everybody involved in this project, all at once.  That’s why you do a favor, not because anybody will owe you anything in return.  In fact, in screenwriting as in life, nobody ever really owes anybody anything.  More on that tomorrow…

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 3: They Can’t Buy You, They Can Only Buy Your Material

Connections are great.  Impressing people at parties is great.  Being the most well-liked writer in town is great.  All of these things open doors.  But the whole point of all of this, the whole point of “getting in the door,” is to get them to ask that one magical question: “What else ya got?”  If you say “Nothing yet”, then all that work you did was for nothing. 

A shoe-gazer with a great script will always be worth more than the nicest guy in town with a so-so script.  Stop schmoozing, go home, write. 

If you’re waiting until you get signed to start writing seriously, you’ll never make it.  Reps don’t sign you in order to make you money.  They sign you in order to intercept some of the money that’s about to hit you.  

You can’t fall into the trap of asking, “Why isn’t my agent talking me up so that I get more writing assignments?”  That’s not your agent’s job, and it would be impossible anyway.  Your agent’s mouth can’t sell you, only your material can sell you.  Your agent’s only job is to get your best material to people who will love it, so that they will either buy it or meet with you about writing something else.   

Another reason that you need a lot of good material before getting signed is because it’s a lot harder to write afterward. This is true for a few reasons:

1. Your new rep will probably send you out right away on some meetings, and some of those people you meet with will want to come up with free ten-page pitches for their own projects, so you’ll be busy with that.  (P.S., That free work usually goes nowhere.  Consider it hazing.)
2. It becomes much harder to hear your own voice after you’ve been signed.  You’ll be hit with so many derisive “everybody knows” screenwriting “truisms” that you’ll start to doubt everything you think you know. 
3. Even if your rep manages to sell your sample, then it probably won’t make you much money, because you’re not a name yet.  Once that’s sold, you make your real money on your second sale. 

The good news is that you can stop beating yourself up about not having any representation.  You’re in the prime of your career right now: the period where, without encumbrances, you can write spec after spec.  Those specs are not just your ticket towards getting signed, they’re going to be your ticket long after as well. 

In the meantime, you need to help out your peers, which we’ll get to tomorrow...

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 2: Stockpile Your Work Until Everyone Is Telling You That You’re Ready

A lot of aspiring screenwriters keep churning out self-indulgent scripts, thinking that their goal is to find one “enlightened” executive who sees the value in their material, hands them a golden ticket, and stove-pipes them to the top of the profession.  No.  That executive doesn’t exist.  He died forty years ago. 

What if you did actually find that lone powerful decision-maker who liked your stuff, even though no one else did?  All he could do is say, “Okay!  I love this!  Now I’ll put you in a room with ten of my colleagues and you’ll have to sell it to all of them.  And by the way, if nine of them love it, and one hates it?  It’s dead.”  

There is only one way to get ahead in the world of screenwriting: popular acclaim.  Write a script that everybody loves. 

(“Popular acclaim” is not the same thing as “broad appeal,” but your level of talent does have to match the difficulty level of your screenplay.  If it’s about a leprosy epidemic in an old folks’ home, you’re going to have a harder time getting everybody to love it, obviously.  But if you’re amazing enough to pull that off, then go for it.  If you write a truly great script on that topic, people might say, “this isn’t my thing”, then they’ll follow that up with “but the writing is brilliant and we have to hire this writer for something.”)

This is why you need to wait before you send out your material, rather than pouncing on every opportunity early on.  If a powerful person asks to read a sample of your writing, that’s a dangerous opportunity. 

Those doors don’t open very often, and memories are long.  If you send them a piece of material that they hate, they will shut the door, remember your name, and warn others against you.  Don’t just send them a piece of writing that you think is good, send them something that everybody thinks is good.  If you don’t have a piece of material like that, don’t send them anything.

Let’s say that you just finished your first screenplay, and your uncle mentions that his stepson is Martin Scorsese’s assistant.  What should you do about this?  Nothing!  It’s your first screenplay! If this really is an opportunity, don’t blow it.  This is only an “opportunity” if you happen to have something that everybody is telling you that Scorsese would buy. 

Would you try to sell the first painting you did in kindergarten to a museum?  Would you try to sell the first poem you wrote when you were sixteen to “The New Yorker”?  Everybody knows that one painting doesn’t make you “a painter.”  Everybody knows that one poem doesn’t make you “a poet.” Likewise, one screenplay doesn’t make you “a screenwriter.” 

A capital-s Screenwriter is someone who has started to really master the format.  How will you know when you’re ready?  When people you trust are insisting that you send your stuff out.  Tomorrow we’ll talk about what you can do in the meantime…

What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation, Part 1: Don’t Confuse Your Goals With Your Strategies

Before I go on summer hiatus, here’s a round-up of some advice I really wish I’d gotten for a career in the arts…  

You probably think that employees should be allowed to criticize their boss’s decisions without fear of being fired, right?  And I agree with you: that should be possible.  But you can’t say, “Therefore I will criticize my boss’s decisions without fear of being fired.” 

In college, we frequently advised each other to “be the change you want to see in the world,” and sometimes, if you’re really brave, you can pull that off and make the world a better place.  But if you follow that advice at the wrong time, it can be a recipe for disaster.  The more I live, the more I realize that the way to achieve a better world is not to pretend a better world already exists.  Just because, for instance, you think we should get money out of politics, doesn’t mean that you should refuse to help the politicians you support raise any money. 

Before I become a screenwriter, I was a union organizer and I still think that the best way, in the long term, for any employee to get ahead, is to form a bond of solidarity with his/her fellow workers and raise up everybody’s standards and working conditions at the same time.  But in this series, unfortunately, I’m going to give a lot of advice that directly contradicts that. 

For instance, I’m going to recommend that you do a lot of free work, despite the fact that I believe free work is basically a form of scabbing, and it devalues not only your own work but the work of all of your fellow writers.  I wish I could tell you that now is the perfect time for the unemployed to stand together, refuse to be exploited, and demand a fair deal for all, but that only works when you’ve got some leverage.

The dream, of course, is that, once you do have some power, you’ll use it to make things less exploitative for the next generation, though it rarely works that way, since people usually delight in passing along the indignities that they had thrust upon themselves.  But there’s reason to think that that chain of reprisals is finally about to break…

More and more, top screenwriters are being re-subjected to the same exploitation that they thought they had left behind years ago.  Hopefully, they will soon be pushed to the place where they feel they have to use their leverage to rectify the situation for everybody. In the meantime…

The trick is to embrace humility without surrendering your dignity.  In this series, we’ll look at ways to do that.  We’ll start with asking the toughest, most humbling question of all: When are you ready to go for it? 

Warning: Upcoming Summer Hiatus

So folks, have you noticed that the advice has been getting a bit more hard-edged on this blog recently?  That’s because I’m sick and tired of my stalled-out career and I need to make some changes. Unfortunately, part of this drive involves taking the summer off from this blog, starting in two weeks. 

I started this blog two and a half years ago because I had hit a ceiling in the quality of my specs and I wanted to figure out what I was doing wrong.  The good news is that I learned more than I ever thought possible.  I feel like this blog has turned me (and hopefully even one or two of you) into a spec-script-super-genius.  The bad news is that I haven’t actually written any new specs in the last two years. 

This happens frequently to writers at the beginning of their career.  You’re taking a lot of meetings and people are (vaguely) promising you a lot of money to write up their ideas, so you re-configure your brain to be write their way, not your way.  Unfortunately, you gradually realize that 90% of the hype you’re hearing is bogus, and most of these producers never actually pay you anything.  You find yourself writing endless free re-writes “on spec” for people who aren’t releasing any movies.

So then you have to get back to writing original screenplays, which is hard, because there are suddenly no deadlines, no notes to address, and no hype to pump you up.  But that’s what I’m going to try to do. 

So why does the blog have to go on summer hiatus?  Part of the problem is that this blog has just been too damn fulfilling.  I wake up with the urge to write blog posts, not screenplays.  After all, I get to publish everyday, get responses everyday, and track each post’s popularity online.  Screenwriting just can’t compete with that sort of instant gratification.  It’s going to be painful to deny myself that joy for three months.  But I have to do it in order to refocus my energies where they need to be. 

Of course, I can’t help but think of Diane leaving Sam at the altar on “Cheers” and promising, “I’ll be back in six months” only to stay away for six years. So the real question is: Am I really coming back in September?

The answer is: Yeah, probably.  At this point, I basically generate one Storyteller’s Rulebook post for every page of actual screenwriting I complete, and that’s great, because it helps me codify what I’m learning.  I don’t think that’ll change, so I expect to be stockpiling new rules all summer, until I get to roll them out in September.  I’m also only an eighth of the way through “What Could’ve Won”, and I’d love to finish that.  The bigger question is: Will any of you guys come back?  Obviously, my circulation will take a huge hit, and I may have to rebuild from scratch.  We’ll see…

So why am I announcing this now if it’s not beginning yet?  Because it leads into the last epic, 12-part series before the summer vacation called “What I Wish I'd Heard At Graduation,” featuring the sort of hard-nosed advice I really wish I’d gotten when I needed it, about screenwriting or just about life. That begins tomorrow…

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1937

The Year: 1937 

What the Nominees Were: The Awful Truth, Captains Courageous, Dead End, The Good Earth, In Old Chicago, The Life of Emile Zola, Lost Horizon, One Hundred Men and a Girl, Stage Door, A Star is Born 

Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Make Way for Tomorrow, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves 

What Did Win: The Life of Emile Zola

How It’s Aged: It’s okay, but pretty stodgy and sterile.  A fast-forward through the greatest hits of Zola’s life, without anything making much of an impact.  Silly wigs abound. 

What Should’ve Won: The Awful Truth

How Hard Was the Decision: McCarey won best director for this but he complained in his speech that he won for the wrong movie, since he was far more proud of Make Way for Tomorrow, his heartbreaking portrait of life without Social Security, in which an aging couple loses their home and have to throw themselves on the mercy of their adult children. It would have been a deserving winner, but sorry, Leo, it just can’t compete with this.   

Director: Leo McCarey

Writer: Vina Delmar, based on the play by Arthur Richman

Stars: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy, Asta

The Story: Society bon vivant Grant comes back from a fake vacation (presumably he was away on a tryst) to find that his witty wife Dunne might have strayed too, so they agree to get a divorce, but they share custody of the dog, which gives him lots of opportunities to sabotage her rebound fling with buffoonish oil tycoon Ralph Bellamy. When will those crazy kids get back together?

Any Nominations or Wins: In addition to picture and director, there were nominations for Grant, Dunne, Delmar and editor Al Clark.

Why It Didn’t Win: It almost did, obviously—the director winner usually wins picture too, but somehow the vote got split and the weaker movie won, due to the Academy’s perpetual prejudice against comedies (and an understandable soft spot for movies like Zola that denounce anti-Semitism). 

Why It Should Have Won:

1. This was the moment that Grant truly became Grant: he achieves a level of effervescent wit that had never been seen onscreen before, and yet every line is laced with bittersweet regret for the failed relationship.  The greatest tribute to Grant’s acting ability is that everybody thought he was just being himself. 
2. Bizarrely, you often read in write-ups of the movie that Grant’s character was falsely accused of infidelity, and indeed they never say otherwise, but come on! This shows the true power of the Hays production code: It allowed the movies to cover up wickedness with a wink, and it also allowed tender-hearted viewers to ignore the wink if they chose to. 
3. In my write-up of another 1937 classic, I mentioned that Betsy always knows when there was a woman writer, because male writers don’t give women characters their own sense of humor.  And indeed, the witty pen of Vina Delmar gives this movie its spark, making this the most equally-matched of all screwballs, and therefore the liveliest. 
4. From this point on, screwball would be almost synonymous with the “comedy of remarriage.”  Grant tries to sabotage Dunne’s new relationship over and over, until the moment he could deliver the coup de grace but doesn’t, and of course that’s the moment he wins her back. 
5. It’s amazing the number of people that one meets from Oklahoma City.  Believe me, I know, because every time I meet one, I must suppress the urge to mention Grant’s cheerful mockery of Bellamy’s home town: “Oklahoma City!  Every since I was a small boy, that name has been filled with magic for me.  And if it should get dull, you can always go over to Tulsa for the weekend!”

How Available Is It?: Alas, Netflix’s DVD is barebones.

Ah, 1937: Listen to Me, You Idiot!