Dialogue
Many writers I know have led unique, interesting and challenging lives. We all had some contributing event or events that helped us open the door to our own creativity a little wider. For some of us, it was all relatively mundane, and positive — parents, teachers, siblings, friends telling us that they thought what we wrote worth reading. We’re blessed with the open mind it takes to believe what we see in ourselves and hear from others. We have the nerve to throw our words in front of whoever will read, whenever they’ll read them. We’re able to take some constructive criticism, and some cheap shots, too (though never lightly).
Some writers I know have also faced tragedy — and been driven further out into the hinterlands of their own personal pain, to come back with a tale to tell. They’ve lost what no one should, overcome, learned to live with, suffered through the kinds of things…well, the kinds of things other people only read about.
Most writers I know are relatively free to write; though maybe not as often as they’d like, or as continuously. They maintain the schedule they set for themselves, around their day job or as their one and only occupation. They each impose their own form of self-discipline, strict or slack, and their work is usually either in circulation to print publishers or posted on the web by choice, or both.
But few writers I know could bring themselves to surrender the stories they tell, the worlds they construct, the characters they birth to uncaring strangers, ceding nearly all control of how their imagination is packaged and presented to the world.
I recently watched a documentary titled Tales from the Script. I found it remarkable in many ways, and it made me feel by turns very lucky and very, very weak-natured, really kind of a wuss. Imagining myself a soldier in battle, strong of heart, noble of deed, I find I’m far, far back from the actual trenches. While the real fighters are over the horizon somewhere, bleeding for their art, slugging away at producers, directors and actors, eating shit by the barge-load, I’m back here where it’s safe, playing literary pattycake.
I hear the roar of the fight, I see the reflected flashes of glory, and I know — I’m no warrior.
It’ll be awhile before I feel like whining publicly again about how difficult it is to write. The thought of what it would take to commit to the monumental task of writing a screenplay makes me feel slightly, sickeningly lightheaded, as if the sheltered universe I inhabit is slightly canted. Since nothing I’ve written contains anything close to the plot, action, dialogue and characters that a successful screenplay must, I’ll likely never know for sure how much harder writing a screenplay would be than writing a novel, and I’m okay with that.
Dennis Palumbo, who wrote a lot of 70’s sitcom scripts and the screenplay for My Favorite Year, half-jokingly describes screenwriters as “egomaniacs with low self-esteem.” I don’t know about that — after watching this documentary, they seem like superheroes to me. You get the impression that for screenwriters, the next screenplay is a complete rewind, as if the one you just finished agonizing over never happened. They’re like gamblers, going all-in on a bluff. There is no next hand — it’s a new game, and the player now sitting across from you has a whole different set of tells than the one who was there before. Talk about reinventing the wheel…that’s exactly what the great ones do.
So many screenwriters are double/triple/quadruple threats; screenwriter-actor-producer-directors. It’s easy to see why — because actors, producers and directors who aren’t screenwriters are massive pains in the screenwriter’s ass and can, in fact, become the enemy in short order. A screenwriter has to become all of them, to avoid having to deal with any of them.
Take Shane Black, who struggled as an actor before writing the first Lethal Weapon script, talking about his next project with the same reserve and this-could-all-end-tomorrow caution that he probably felt in 1987, when he was 26, and Lethal Weapon got made.
As you scan his credits, you’ll see Shane Black picking up hyphenates like the steel stars in a game of jacks. He wrote and produced The Last Boy Scout. He wrote and directed Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, and is writer, and director, of the third chapter in the Iron Man franchise. He is careful to be complimentary and supportive of the business as a whole and his role in it. That’s the word — careful. In all things. He has “New Guard” stamped all over him…a businessman, with a hefty dose of creativity mixed in. And good for him.
Not at all like the competitive, brawling writer-stereotype that kicked off screenwriting when Hollywood was young.
David Niven writes in his excellent retrospective of Hollywood in the days of L.B. Mayer and Samuel Goldwyn, Bring On the Empty Horses: “For some incredible reason, the writers were treated like second-class citizens by the studios. Wilson Mizner said that working for Warner Brothers was like fucking a porcupine — it’s a hundred pricks against one.” But literary writers of the day flocked to California none the less, because there was money there, even if there was no there, there, as Gertrude Stein famously said. Somerset Maugham, Robert Sherwood, Sinclair Lewis, Lillian Hellman, Robert Benchley, Evelyn Waugh, Donald Ogden Stewart, F. Scott Fitzgerald…they all came, and if they didn’t conquer, they partied like the rock stars they’d never know, made a buck or two and went back to the Algonquin with more stories to tell.
Screenwriters aren’t made quite that way anymore, but they’re still a different breed.
Guys like David S. Ward (The Sting, The Milagro Beanfield War, Sleepless in Seattle) and William Goldman (Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Heat, All the President’s Men and — for this alone he should be bronzed — The Princess Bride, among many others) are slightly less circumspect in Tales from the Script than their younger counterparts.
William Goldman, as far as I and many others are concerned, could spend the rest of his life walking around as an enormous ego on two feet. He’s earned it. In Tales from the Script, his desire to tell others how to succeed in his world seems tepid; not because he’s mean-spirited or speaking from on high. He’s preoccupied. You get the feeling that he just wants to get back to his keyboard, and doesn’t really have a lot of enthusiasm for telling his own story — he has too many other tales waiting to be told.
There are a lot of through-the-looking-glass experiences in a screenwriter’s world. Antwone Fisher offers a great example, when he talks about having to pitch a story to Sidney Poitier — “all 16 feet of him” — and becoming so tongue-tied that Mr. Poitier finally had to ask him if he was unwell. Steven E. de Souza, the man behind 48 Hrs, Die Hard, Ricochet, and Jumpin’ Jack Flash, says “the most important thing in a screenwriter’s arsenal is this: Wear flat shoes. You never want to be taller than whoever the producer is.” According to Mark O’keefe (a former writer for David Letterman and Bill Maher as well as screenplays for various movies starring Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, and Steve Carell), “a movie set is like the military, and as a writer you really have no place in the chain of command. So when you show up, you know, you’re sort of like this weird creature…”
There’s another subsection of screenwriting that I have to say intrigues the hell out of me — script doctoring. Judd Apatow, Joss Whedon, Quentin Tarentino, William Goldman (him again), Aaron Sorkin…all those guys have had a hand in some of the best movies made in the last three decades, as has Carrie Fisher — she’s rewritten a ton of feminine dialogue, when the original screenwriter missed the mark. A lot of their work is uncredited as far as moviegoers are concerned, but thanks to IMDb, their days under the radar are ending. And the important thing is that Hollywood knows them, and the projects they’ve helped save, and that’s really what matters if you have a normal fondness for, say, recurring paychecks.
One theme running through the entire documentary is this: if you want to be a screenwriter, be prepared to see your story sent through every available option on the most elaborate Cuisinart imaginable. Be prepared to be barred from movie sets, ignored and/or insulted by producers and directors and actors and investors and executives and anyone else attached to a movie production. Be prepared to see the eventual film that was supposed to bring your vision to life, and be very prepared to recognize approximately one micron of it as what you intended when you sat down and typed the first line.
The great Ron Shelton (Under Fire, Bull Durham) on the movie The Great White Hype: “I tried to get my name taken off it because the film they made was not the script I wrote. I find it a horrible movie.” He’s in excellent company — one of the funniest scenes in Tales from the Script is the spectacularly talented Guin Turner (Chasing Amy, Dogma, American Psycho) relating her experience after writing the screenplay for what became the atrocious movie BloodRayne: “I would say that about 20% of what I wrote is on the screen. The producer called me, when the movie was just being finished, and he said, ‘Don’t be alarmed, Guin. Uwe (Boll, the director) changed a lot of the script….and then he let the actors take a crack at it.’”
She was the only one at the premier who laughed out loud while watching the movie. Could you possibly hang on to your sense of humor during something like that? I’m not sure I could, and I’m almost certain Uwe Boll would now bear a most unfortunate scar.
Tales from the Script left me with the distinct impression that once you’ve written a screenplay and actually sold it, you’ll be forever shopping your next screenplay. It appears to be an incurable addiction. As if going back to writing mere books is a complete impossibility, like living a monastic and robed life, where you don’t get to show off the muscle you’ve worked so hard to build.
It’s an entirely different perspective on writing, eye-opening to say the least, and I recommend it to anyone who aspires to write in any form. Not to get too precious, but I think the ability to write is a muscle, and the more you stretch it the more it supports you. It’s why I urge one and all to get out of your comfort zone to some degree…write as much dialogue as you can, for instance — whether you publish it or not. It’s one of the hardest things to tackle, and screenwriters are better at it than anyone. In television, Justified and The Good Wife are contemporary examples of outstanding scripts, and from years past, Hill Street Blues, The West Wing and Firefly come to mind as monuments to sharp dialogue. There are just too many movies to name — but I love the ones you think are just going to be shoot ‘em ups, or farcical, or typical in some other way, that end up being something else altogether, all because of the writing.
Tales from the Script could send you off on a whole new path: whether it be the one leading towards that shimmering western horizon, or the one going hastily in the other direction, towards the world where words stay on the page.
Where it’s safe. Care to play some pattycake?
