You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number two ninety six, except no one's definition of your
life, Define it yourself. Harvey Fierste broadcasting from a dark, windowless room
in Hollywood when we really should be working on that next draft. It's the
Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you
how to make your screenplay bulletproof. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.
Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your
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with guest host Dave Bullis this concluding academic year. July first is the new
academic year. Of course, this is the concluding thirty eighth year. So
I've seen a lot, but I'm recalling years and years ago, and one
of those things I've seen is, oh, about twenty five years ago,
actually probably a little longer than that, the arts at UCLA all across the
campus were reconfigured and the Film School, which was part of the Theater Arts
Department, was turned into a long I was turned into a separate two separate
departments, the Film, TV, Digital Media on one hand, that's my
department and our sister department, the Theater Department, and we aren't together in
the School of Theater, Film and Television. And years ago when we were
still the Theater Department, there was a retreat up to Lake Garrowhead. There's
a very beautiful, upscale, gorgeous conference center up in the mountains, just
about an hour hour and a half from the campus, And the whole subject
that was discussed up there for the weekend was the spelling of the word theater.
There were some people who wanted to change it from the ear to the
r E. It's terribly unimportant, but I am on the side of the
er people. Well though, after two days of robust and vigorous and eager
discussion, it was decided without any equivocation, without any hesitancy to discuss this
further out another retreat, you know, I mean, you know, it's
like it's been said of the universities that university it's just like incorporation, except
that there's no bottom line and there's no calendar. Now both of those things
are completely untrue today. You know, they're universities, especially here in California,
but all across the country are very much in touch with the notion of
the bottom line, as you know, support for public education retreats, and
not only at the university level, but much more grieviously, I think at
the KROE through twelve level and calendar is very much attached to issues and so
on, so fascinating any place to spend a life. That said, there's
no escaping the you know, these bureaucratic issues, they're not you may unique
to public universities or private universities, but all institutions, corporations, nonprofits,
governmental agencies. You know, nothing ever runs real smoothly, and people should
stop explaining it to, you know, and and kind of make do because
what else can you do. So in any event, there I am very
sympathetic with what you're saying. The organizing principle of my life has always been
no meetings. I don't do lunch as much as I can avoid it,
for exily, and yesterday I was at an awards lunch, and how to
be there. I am also the associate dean now of the School of Theater,
Film and Television, and I have to be there for the awards,
the ceremony, you know, they give out scholarships and stuff like that and
celebrate the students. But I'm reminded of a line in one of my favorite
lines in all of movies. In Oliver Stone's Wall Street, there's a line
there's a moment where Gecko you know, Michael Douglas. I'm sure you've seen
that. I expect you've seen the movie. He's on the he's fielding like
eleven phone calls at the same time. At a one point he says,
lunch. You know, clearly somebody's invited him to lunch and it's his lunch,
and he scuses his lunches for whimps and he hangs up, you know,
and I say, lunches for whimps. I believe, you know.
My first obligation to the university, as professor in a research institution like the
University of California, the first the second obligation is teaching. The first obligation
is what they call in the traditional disciplines research, and in the arts they
call it creative activity. But that's the first obligation that I have and I
can't do that, and that all the faculty have. But we can't do
that if we don't have the time to do that. So one does need
to be a warrior for one's writing time, if you follow what I'm saying,
and I'm just responding to get all these meetings. Our previous chair she
had a sign. I loved her because because she had a sign on her
desk, on a little table at her in her office that said, this
meeting is costing, and then there was a blank you know, fill in
the number, you know, next to a dollar sign. So I'm always
sympathetic with what you're talking about. You know, there was a book I
was just reading, Richard. It was called The Power of No, and
basically it's the one word you could use to just sort of the crux of
the book is if you say the word yes, uh, you inherit all
that person's problem. So like if I thank you, Richard, would you
like to go to lunch? And you say yes, Well, well,
you know it's it's funny because the um There's a self help guru who died
I think last years, very well known, Stephen Covey, who wrote a
book that is translated into like one hundred and sixty seven languages, you know,
several of which are not even identifiable. I mean, he sold millions
of millions of copies of this book and it's called something like those Seven Habits
of Highly Effective People or something like that. And in that book he says,
at one point he has a he has something he called six words for
serenity, and he there are own less, do less, say no,
and that's what you're talking about. I have had to learn how to say
no. You know, it's a necessary condition when I'm asked to do things
that I just can't do, rather than sort of play along, go along
and so on. You know, there's all kinds of ways to say.
It's a student. I just got a request, for example for the summer,
a student and you know there. I love. The greatest thing about
UCLA and the greatest thing about teaching is the students, and I love I
love our students. But there is among young people and maybe college students in
particular, maybe especially prestige students in glamour programs like UCLA. I mean it
is the you know, those major film schools like my own, Aluma,
motor USC, like NYU, like like certainly like UCLA. We are the
glamour corner of higher learning. So the people who do get in, it's
very competitive. They maybe you know, they're very gifted and they used to
get getting their own way, and I think maybe they're uniquely entitled. Um,
you know, they have a sense of unique entitlement. So somebody just
announced to me, and this is somebody I really are a fond of and
a very fine writer, or a student in a program that he's decided to
take an independent study with me this summer. I don't get paid for that,
by the way. He will, and of course I have to consent
to it. He can't just announce it, although he felt that he could.
That he's just entitled to it, and he's going to, if he
has his way, you know, meet with me this summer and discuss his
outline for a screenplay after I look it over, and then we'll meet several
times. I'll review the pages and give him notes and so on. I
do that, you know, for eight writers every quarter. We're on the
quarter system at UCLA routinely. But I'm not going to do that this summer.
You know, I'm working on my own stuff. I have all kinds
of things playing. But rather than just saying no, what I told him
was that I wished I could do that, which is only partly true,
and however, that I would not be able to give him and his screenplay
the time and the attention and the consideration that they both merit. So that's
a polite way to say no. We'll be right back after a word from
our sponsor and now back to the show. But you do need to learn
how to say no. And I've also said in Hollywood dealing in the movie
business, you're a hard no. No. This is not for us.
As painful as that is, it's not as painful as what one usually here
is when one submits a project, either to potential representatives or to a production
company, one usually here is is this. You know what I mean.
The silence is deafening. Yeah, very shrill, very shrilled silence. So
I'm sympathetically what you're you're talking about. You do need to I mean,
I consider it actually part of my my pedagog if I could call it that,
my teaching philosophy, is to teach students we are all right, you
know, professional program, a graduate program we offer the master Fine Arts.
I trying to teach them, by example how they need to be warriors for
their own writing time. I once had a definition I used to climb around
about a definition of a writer. A writer is somebody who's always available to
pick up relatives at the airport. And I've preached to writers that if they
when they complain, oh you know, I can't get anything done, then
but the family wants me to do. You know, they think I'm available
to pick up people. I said, well you are available. I mean
you did get pick them up. I didn't you, So why you know,
if you don't get it, they're going to get it. You know.
It's one of my principles, which is if you want to be treated
as a professional writer, you have to treat yourself as a professional. And
the fact is people who are going to pick up relatives at the airport,
but they don't realize is they're actually glad to do that because it allows them
to avoid doing what every writer wants to avoid doing, and that is writing.
And not only that they get to do to feel virtuous about it and
to get the gripe and catch and cart to complain about everybody impinging on the
time, when in fact they're terrified to see a low front of the word
processor, you know, and the relatives coming in from out of town has
given them the excuse not to do that. If you follow me, yeah,
I absolutely follow you. Because there's a book that I read, The
War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. He's a genius. Press Field, He's
just I love that book. Yeah, absolutely, And you know I was
fortunate enough to be able to speak with him briefly, and I told him,
you know, reading that book was an epiphany for me. Oh absolutely,
I just love the book. In fact, I was just quoting on
somebody. I do a lot of consulting off campus. I give notes to
writers who have deals at studios. You know, it's become more and more
routine in Hollywood now, even when you have a deal. Um, you
know, typical writing assignment is what they call and it's whatever is negotiable,
you know, as long as the guild minimums are being observed. Um.
The typical assignment is what they call a draft them a set. A draft
is a draft of a screenplay, and a set usually consists of what somebody
will call a rewrite and somebody else, and then it'll be followed by what
somebody calls a polish. But of course the guy UH do in the polish
and the guy doing the rewrite have different views of you know, what what
it should be, let should be called. But um, often between such
such stages, uh, smart writers will go to somebody like me, a
script doctor, a script consultant, and say, listen, they owe me,
you know, I owe I owe them this draft beforehanded and ask me.
You know, I want you to ask me the hard questions before the
studio asks them, and and and so on. Um. So I was
talking to But I also work with writers who you know, who are independent
and who can afford my very very high fees to give those kinds of notes.
You know, it's easier for a writer who's getting a quarter a fee
from Paramount Pictures to do that than than somebody out of out of their own
pocket. Um. But I do work with writers off campus, as I
say, who can have an If I'm attracted to the script, I think
it's something that I want to, you know, if you feel merits encouragement.
Um. And then of course it costs a lot of money. So
I was working with somebody. I'm working with a particular writer. I was
in the Midwest and she I just sent her back a second raft of notes.
Oh, it's about a fifteen page document going through her script and talking
about it in general, but also going through the pages note you know,
page for page, and and indicating with are in certain issues that are around,
some of them as trivial as typos, and some of them, uh,
you know, fundamental issues about returned story structure and whatever. And she
complained to me that she was really disappointed that there's more work to do,
that she thought she had the whole thing set up, and that she's kind
of sorry that things aren't proceeding, you know, according to schedule, you
know, in the way that she predicted. And I immediately thought of press
Field, who I know what he would say. Stephen would say that her
only amateurs and dilettants think that it goes, you know, in a steady,
predictable, reliable way. That it's not herkey, jerky and frustrating every
inch of the way. You know. Pressfield would say, stop trying to
feel good about it. You know, feel good about having done it,
but don't feel good about doing it. Nobody does, No writer does it.
One of my first principles is all writers hate to write. We love
having written, but actually sitting down and addressing the pages. That's what press
fielicle resistance. There's always resistance sitting there. And I have a lot of
experience as a writer over my years. I've been writing professionally for more than
forty years, but my own experience is leveraged by the experience I've had with
other writers working very very closely, very intimately with writers on campus and off
campus, and so my, you know, I have the experience also of
all of those writers. And that's the way it is for everybody, for
everybody, including the highest handed, you know, highest minded, most successful,
richest petitioners. It's always that way, and people have to, you
know, stop trying to feel good about it. You know. It's like
Steven said one time, he said, uh, you know, if you
can beat resistance inch by inch and you can actually get something made, and
you can actually you know, you sit there and there's a polished manuscript and
he says, congratulations. Now move on to the next one. Exactly.
I quote a student mind. He wrote two scripts in class that became gigantically
successful films. They became franchise as. One as Highlander. Um maybe they
they called it The Highlander. And the other one is Backdraft. I mean
Backdraft became an amusement park ride, you know, I mean, it's gigantic
success. And so here was this twenty six year old writer, multi millionaire.
Already I was reading an interview with him in the press. This is
some years ago, and he was again just like writers complaining, and you
think he'd be jumping for joy and you know, whistling a happy tune.
No, he was talking about how they had betrayed him at Fox, how
they had dissed him at NBC, and burned him at Warner Brothers, and
lied to him at Paramount, and on and on, you know, all
of these dramas and the you know, acts of these crimes that have been
visited upon him. This poor, poor guy, this poor multimillionaire, twenty
six year old screenwriter. And then he pauses in the interview, and I
swear if you held the interview this is a press, you know, a
print piece, If you held the news page close to your face, you
could have felt the waft of his sigh. If you know what I'm saying,
He felt a breeze on his cheek. It was that palpable in the
context of what he was saying. Was quoting me. He was saying,
Ah, but I can just hear. After he's griping and complaining, he
says, ah, but I can just hear my professor, Richard Walter of
muc LA say mcgreg Don't you know it's the privilege in Hollywood, even merely
to be mistreated this way again? What Hollywood will do to you. The
worst thing Hollywood will do. He is not mistreat you, but you ignore
you. I have an experience I met with, Rest his soul, Julius
Epstein. He's He and his brother and another writer wrote Casablanca and among many
other things that Julius was involved in. He lived, he was working well
into his eighties. He passed a few years ago. Now, rest his
soul. He Uh. When I first time I met him, I said,
Oh, mister Repstein, I'm so excited to meet you. The only
you know, all I hope all of all I or any of my film
phony balance. All we hope for is his want in our lives. We
should touch something as you did with Casablanca. That's timeless, that's eternal,
that is going to you know, touch the hearts and minds of generations.
Oh, something like that. Yeah, I wouldn't be nice. Iff I
could report to you that, he said, Oh, thanks very much,
kind of you to say so. I mean, that would be courtesy one
oh one. You know. Uh, he's a writer. You gotta understand.
He grew up in Brooklyn, but he spent seventy years in la but
he never lost the Brooklyn rawle that he had. We'll be right back after
a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And his
reply to me was casablancish Messiblanca. They fucked that up. You know the
part where Florde Raine says such and such a day. But oh no,
they want with my brother of Philip. I mean, we had a thing
with it. And here he is complaining, you know, more than a
half century later, like sixty seventy years later, about how they messed up
his movie, what movie Casablanca? And all I could think is, by
god, I wish somebody would mess up my movie like they messed up Casablanca.
So you know, again, only amateurs and dilettants think you just settled
in eagerly in front of the word processor, and you know, you take
a deep breath and you kind of just get into your creative zone and it
just kind of flues out of your magically. You know. Just ain't that
way? Ain't that way? And the other thing is people are never you
can't get no satisfaction, if I may quote, they're rolling stones. It's
never as good as people think that it should as the writer herself or himself
thinks it ought to be it's always better in the mind. You know,
when it's not an actual, tangible hold in your hand, it's always more
perfect than when it's a real thing. You know. So there is a
quality of frustration and disappointment that walks hand in hand with creativity, and professionals
know that they accept that, they tolerant, that they endure it. They
don't like it, and amateurs deny it. You know, it's amazing that
the screen wode of Casablanca actually, you know, had of problems with it
because you know, that's the movie that's the go to movie that you know,
almost every screenwriting professor I've ever had, or you know book I've ever
you know read, that's one of the two movies that they you as a
paradigm for this is this is what a great movie or I'm sorry, this
is what an excellent movie is. You know, yes, well, it's
what a great screenplay is. And it is a great moment, and it's
beautifully active and beautifully directed. Um, I quite agree with you. And
yet the actual writer of that, you know, thinks it's as so.
So. But then there is also a trend kind of that I've detected among
writers where if you talk to a really successful writer and you ask, and
what's the favorite thing that you wrote? They're going to pick their most obscure,
least successful project, you know, um, almost to make up for
the disappointment that they experienced when it was was released. As I say,
one praise for disappointment when something because you let them be disappointed if something isn't
released, you know what I mean. So again I tell my writers,
and I tell my colleagues around the table from the timement UCLA on the faculty,
that fantasy is for your screen play, for your life reality. So
you know, as we we talked about you know, just you know about
writing and you know some disappointments you know in your classes. What I wanted
to ask, you know, it was when whenever a student comes to you,
you know, how do you know what's a good concept and what's not?
Well, you don't. You don't. You never know what's a good
concept. You never I'm going to tell you two concepts right now that are
the stupidest um concepts for movies. You will never hear a stupider comment concept
for a movie than uh than either of these. Ready, um, I
mean, let me let me, let me uh before I say that,
let me let me mention Blake Snyder and save the cat. He argues that,
um, if you're a writer and you have a concept, you should
run that concept past some some other people. He actually says you should stop
people in the street, and especially young people, and telling hey, can
I talk to you for a minute. I'm a writer and I have a
notion for a i'd you know, for a screenplay of a concept, and
I'm wondering I'd love to, you know, talk you through it for a
minute or two and see what you think of it, whether you think I'm
like you know, it'll be a mistake to move forward or resist the worthy.
And imagine you were walking down the street and somebody comes up to you
and wants to run a concept past you, and you and you're generous enough,
maybe most people probably would say, well, oh all right, all
right, you know, let's do it. Because and you did that,
and the guy gave you the following concept to you ready, I'm ready.
Um. A man stutters, but he has to give a speech, so
he hires a speech therapist and they work on the speech, and then he
gives the speech. What if somebody's what if you said to like, well,
I gotta tell you honestly, you know, you seem like a really
good guy. And but you know that sounds just oh let's I mean,
who could possibly care about way you just described what if events? Said?
He will, all, well, you know, thanks, just the same.
But respectfully, let me tell you that I happen to think this this.
When it's all done, it's going to win the screenplay, you know,
best screenplay, Oscar and best movie. You'd figure crank up the lithium
on this guy's trip. It's madness, you know. And yet I don't
have to tell you what movie that is, I'm sure. Or how about
this? Somebody comes up and says, I want to do I have an
idea for a cable series. I think it's going to be sixty two hours.
It's going to run for you five seasons or six seasons, going to
be sixty two hours of programming. And here's the idea, A here's the
concept. A high school chemistry teacher gets a cancer diagnosis, and he say
he decides, in order to provide for his family, to partner with a
former incorrigible student and go into the meth trade to manufacture and cell methodphetamine.
One of these, well, I had a day and that's that's certinly much
of a concept that would one of these all. I think it's going to
turn into sixty two hours of unparalleled genius. I don't mind telling you I
am one of those people who regards Breaking Bad as one of the greatest achievements
in the history of civilization. In fact, last Saturday I was at Just
a week ago today, I was at pitch Fest in Burbank, big screenwriting
festival have every year, and I've actually met Toms Now's and Peter Gould,
who are the forces behind Better called Saul, which of course grew out of
Breaking Bad, and I just trembled to meet them. You know, I
have to shake the hand that wrote those all of those uh beautiful Breaking Bad
episodes. They were prominent writers, producers and occasionally I think directed some of
the Breaking Bad episodes. So it's not about ideas, it's not about concepts.
It's about story. The story is all. It's about stories everything,
and that's what we preach at UCLA. And you know, if the proof
is into tasting, we've we've you know, there's a lot of evidence that
we're we're not wrong about that. Yeah, I you know, I saw
some of the accomplishments you know, uh they some of your students have done,
uh, and that that is just phenomenal. And you know that's why,
you know, you're the guy that I wanted to talk to. You
were, you know, when I was in the early stage of this podcast,
you were one of the of the people that I actually marked down to
talk to. And I'm so happy that we actually got to talk. Now.
Uh, well, you go too, and I'm flattered by what you're
saying. I thank you kindly. Oh, completely my pleasure. And you
know, just you know, to to to continue talking about your class.
You know you mentioned before an outline. So do you have your students actually
you know, sort of uh flesh flush out their stories through an outline?
And how and if so, how detailed do they have to deal with that
outline? Well, the first answer is yes, I do have them do
an outline, but I also tell them to throw away the outline once I
get started writing. It's not terribly detailed. When we have our each quarter,
we have three ten week quarters at UCLA, where most institutions have two
semesters, you know, fifteen week semesters, and at the beginning I work
each quarter. I've taught the course now over one hundred times with students,
eight students around the table writing a feature length screenplay, and each one has
to we meet once a week for three hours, the whole group of Oh.
I do meet with them multiple times during the quarter, independently, individually,
you know, tutorially, one on one where we review the pages together.
You know, I read their pages. Having read the pages, I
meet and give them my notes I have. Everybody has to bring the second
week of that class. They have to bring in a maximum two page kind
of a beat sheet, sort of a scene list. It's not really an
outline, but it's a sort of a document that helps the writer have a
general direction that the script is going. But then I tell everybody to stay
open to the surprises. The last thing you want to do is drag something
back to, you know, an earlier notion that you had if it's working
better in a new fashion. You know, I never knew a writer who
wasn't surprised by lines of dialogue that our characters spoke. You don't seem to
invent by themselves, you know, by twists and turns, in the story
that they didn't they weren't even aware of even though they are creating the whole
thing. There is a kind of a magic to it. I had Neil
Simon come to class to talk about comedy. We'll be right back after a
word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Imagine being in
a writing class and having you know, Neil Simon comedy. It's like being
in seminary and you know, it was announcing at two o'clock in room nine,
the Lord will be doing a Q and A, you know. And
I asked mister Simon, I said, do you laugh at your own jokes?
And he said, sure, I do the first time I hear them.
And I think that's a great line. It's as if his jokes are
not made up by him, but but told to him by the characters that
he creates. I don't know any writer who hasn't had that experience. So
yes, I do think you have to have an outline, but I think
you have to then sort of throw away the outline and expect the script to
unfold in a way that will surprise not only people who read it but the
person who wrote it. Yeah, you know, very true and there was
a book and I can't remember the name it off top of my head.
I think it may be the Artists Way. But the author of that book
Julia Cameron, Yes, I yes. And one of the methods that she
describes in that book was basically, you know, just sort of starting and
just going and don't worry about, you know, having a plan, you
know, meaning like you know what a detailed outline means. Well, there's
something there's something to be said for that. El doctor Rao, who's not
a screenwriter to my knowledge, but a very very successful novelist who's some substantial
number of his novels have been made into movies. He's probably best known for
Ragtime. Um. He says driving he compares writing to driving at night.
You can only see as far as the headlights reveal. But that's long enough,
that's far enough to drive, you know, the whole journey. He
also describes Ragtime. How he came up with Ragtime, which is that he
was in his He lived in New Rochelle. I think he still does New
roche which is in Westchester County. It's a suburb of New York City,
and he lives in a home kind of a early twenty century home, and
he was just stuck. He was in his writing room and he just didn't
know what to write about. And he was in deep, deep dark depression
and despair the way writers get. And he finally just wandered around his study
and could think of nothing to write about. Say, he put his head
against the wall. He started to like bang his head literally bang his head
against the wall, and finally he decided, well, the hell of it,
He's just going to write about the wall. And he thought about the
wall that he was, you know, pushing his forehead up against, and
when it went up, and when the house was built, and that happened
to be around, you know, in the period that Ragtime is built,
and what was going on in New Rochelle at that time, and there was
a parade and this one fraternal order of something or other. And suddenly,
out of out of banging his head against the wall and writing about the wall,
comes Ragtime, which is a gigantic number one you New York Times bestseller,
uh and a sensationally successful film directed by Millish Foreman. Uh. And
all of this came about by, you know, banging his head against the
wall. Um so so uh. Again, the you you were asking about
oh, yes, about getting started. There's a writer. Do you know
the name Anne LaMotte, Yeah, an Annie Lamotch. He's best known.
She's a wonderful novelist, but she's probably best known for the books she's written
about writing. The best known is called Bird by Bird and she Annie preaches
that every writer should allow themselves what she calls a shitty first draft. You
got to get it down on the page and stop, you know, being
disappointed that it's not genius yet. Um. There's another book I think is
very interesting. It wasn't written about writing the about the thirty years ago there
was a best seller by a writer named Mark McCormick. Mark McCormick actually was
a sports He invented modern day sports management. He really started in golf and
he's the guy who got multimillion dollar contracts for ball players and really went along
way towards getting rights for ball players at they you know, used to not
have. I remember, almost a half a century ago, I was working
on a Jerry Lewis picture. I was the dialogue director on a Jerry Lewis
picture of Warner Brothers, and on the Jerry liked to slum with ball players,
and so he had the star of the Dodgers at that time, Willie
Davis, on the movie. And Willie was a hold out that winter.
You know, it was pre free agency. I don't know what he could
do is refuse to play. So he had held out for his contraent farmany.
Driving over the studio one day we was shooting in December. In January,
you know, offseason for baseball, I heard on the radio that Willie
had signed his contract. Who I asked him? When I got to the
studio, I had no right to ask whom I asked him? How much?
What do you think he got for the nineteen seventy season. He was
twenty nine years old, he had hit almost four hundred the previous season.
He was in his prime. He's one of the best players in baseball.
What do you think was his salary for the nineteen seventy season? Take a
guess. I'm going to take a guess at thirty thousand for the year.
That's a really good guess. It was not as bad as that. It
was actually fifty thousand. People who guess, oh, you know, quarter
of a million, a half a million, you know, million dollars and
so on. Why don't I mention this I had to do with Oh yeah,
Mark McCormick writing about sports management. He wrote a book called He went
to the Harvard Business School and he wrote a book called What they Don't teach
You in the Harvard Business School. And I was kind of a street savvy,
you know, wisdom for MBA's and CEOs you know, and CFOs and
CEOs and see and whatever, um, you know, major executives. And
we were saying, one of his rules is, um, it's quite wonderful,
uh, I believe, and it works very well for people in the
arts and including writers. And here it is, don't let excellence stand in
the way of good. You got something that sort of works, go with
it, you know, at least for the time being, and then you'll
come back and rewrite UM. But I think that's what slows people down sometimes
they and stops them cold, you know, is it's not excellent every inch
of the way as they go, it's merely good. And I'm saying,
if you can be merely good, give thanks to God and move on.
You know, you mentioned bird by Bird that it's funny you mentioned that because
I was actually talking to people about you know, books on writing and you
and I and you know, usually the book we just talked about writing as
a whole. The number one book I always hear about is Stephen King's on
writing. That is my favorite book by Stephen. It's a brilliant book.
And by the way, you'll recall what he has to say about ideas.
He launched his whole career with Carrie. That was his big success, his
breakthrough. And by the way, you may remember from the book that he'd
gotten some distance into it and then he'd despaired of it, and he threw
it away and Tabitha, his wife, Tabitha King, found it in the
garbage and took it out and read it, said what's this? And she
said, what's this? I found on the bub and she said, ah,
it's just now we're gonna have them in the band name. She said,
what do you mean? It's great, you should keeping. That's how
Carrie came about. But do you remember how it started. Stephen was living
in Maine, where he still lives, and he was a high school teacher,
and he always wondered what he knew what the boys room and the boys
lockers looked like. But he was what the girls bathrooms and the girls lockers
looked like so one day when the uh after school hours, when when school
was closed, but some of the teachers were still there and the lockers in
the bathrooms were deserted, he went into the women's you know, the girls
bathroom and the girls lockers, and he discovered, guess what, that just
exactly like the boys lockers, except for two differences. One is that in
the showers, the boys lockers had um gang showers, you know, just
a great big room with novels, you know, on the wall, and
the girls had curtains. They had, you know, modesty curtains. They
were they were tracks on the on the ceiling of the shower room and that
provided for curtains so that they had, you know, a more modest experience
when they showered. The other difference was that in the girls um locker rooms
and bathrooms there were these little vending machines, if you know what I mean.
And look at Carrie. It's all about this girl who comes into menstruation
and doesn't know what it is, is mocked and ridiculed by the other girls
who see her in the shower, and they can see blood running under the
curtain. If you still have a movie for you remembered, or if you
read the book, just looking in the locker room leads to a thing which
he sold back then, forty years ago for four hundred thousand dollars, adjusted
for inflation, would be about three million dollars today. And it all came
about from curtains and tampons. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, I remember the
opening to that movie, and it did heavily involve that. And you know,
and you know, even the remake, which I remember pieces of I
don't remember as much as the original, but you know that had I think
that's a similar a similar beginning. We'll be right back after a w from
our sponsor, and now back to the show, so open. Yeah,
well, I don't see the remake, but I remember says he's basic in
the beginning. She's in a very being of the hour. She's you know
the movie. She's in the shower at school, and there are other girls
in the showers, and suddenly blood is running, and she clearly does not
know what this is about. He's never been taught by her parents or anybody
else about menstruation, and she thinks there's something horribly wrong with her that you
know she's evil and and and then the other girls see the blood and they
see that she's upset about it, and you know, there's this terrible bullying
uh attitude that emerges among adolescents, men and women, and they start to
attack her. And so I mean, that's what drives the whole movie in
this movie about revenge, isn't it? And she ultimately, you know,
avenges them at the end of the movie. But it all derives from that
very very simple premise. And if you describe that to somebody superficially, they
would think it's pretty hopeless. So again, I think that one of the
biggest mistakes that writers make is to assign too much value, too much credit
to the idea. I like to tell writers when you have a great idea,
if you have a really great idea for a movie, that's all you
got. I mean, what remains after that? You know, the incidents,
the anecdotes, the events, the characters, the dialogues that describe I
mean, everything remains after that, The idea is really rather useless. What
has value is the story. And think about it. You can tell the
idea for a movie in a you know, a minute is about forty seconds
more than you need to tell an idea, But to tell the story it
takes you, you know, as long as the movie. For example,
I was talking. I was saying to somebody the other day what I had
just said to you a little while ago about talking about the King's speech.
I was describing, as I did to you, man man stutters, he
has to give a speech. He how's a speech therapist and gives a speech.
So somebody said, yeah, well you left out that the man who
stutters is the King of England. And then it's the nineteen thirties and war
clouds are gathering in, you know, on the continent, and that he's
having a romance with Wallace Simpson, a you know, an American commoner,
and so on and so well, that's the story. That isn't that the
story. That's not the idea any longer. It's the story, and that's
where the value is. Yeah, you know, somebody once told me that,
uh, you know, ideas are diame a dozen, but at that
at that point, you're over paying for the idea. It's yeah, well
I'll tell you something. I have a sideline I have, you know,
I am. If you ask me what I do, I would say I'm
a writer, if I you know, if I were in the yellow time
to respond, you know. But the truth is, I also am an
educator, pretty well known educator. But that's not the end of it,
that's just the beginning. But I'm also a consultant, and I consult in
um. You know, I'm a public speaker and I'm a media commentator.
I do a lot of appearances on talk shows, television, radio, and
as a consultant, I do two kinds of consulting. One is I've already
told you about where I work with writers. I consult with writers as a
script doctor. I give them support in working out there their scripts. And
the other kind of consulting that I do is in the court. I am
a court authorized expert in intellectual property law, particularly copyright of fringement, in
plagiarism, who wrote the movie? And I have testified. I've been an
expert witness in oh between thirty and forty court cases over the years where there's
litigation over you know, who wrote the movie. Somebody thinks the movie was
stolen from them, And over the years I've on occasion been retained as a
witness by plaintiffs but also by defendants. I was a witness, for example,
in the very legendary case at Paramount involving Art Buckwald, the famous humorist,
and the Paramount the producer of the movie Coming to America and Edy movie
Eddie Murphy movie and Edny movie Murphy, where buck Walt suit claiming they'd stolen
it from him and so on. I testified that the you know, they
didn't steal it from him, that it was a different movie. But I
only mentioned it because it is the miss appropriation of value regarding ideas that has,
if I could put it this way, put off a danch on my
children's teeth and paid for their fancy yess nose bleed costly private school education.
My wife and I looked, my kids have grown up now, God blessing.
But we used to joke that we saved up enough money to send the
kids to college, but we spent it all in high school. You know.
Um. And what I mean by all of that is people attach too
much value to the idea They had an idea for a movie, They see
another movie that has a similar idea, and they think it must have been
stolen from them, when they don't get that it's just an idea. Ideas
are unprotectable. It's the expression of the idea over the length and breadth of
a narrative, where the where the value is. You know, you have
to show what the courts call substantial and ideally strikingly similar um examples from one
to the other, you know, not just that the boy and a girl
fall in love, they break up, and then they get back together again.
You know. So this the understanding of ideas, has put a lot
of money in my pocket. You know. It's it's you know, funny
you mentioned that because about May, two summers ago, I actually met a
professor who teaches at Yale and he actually also does you know, uh does
copyright and things like that. And he was actually involved in the Avatar case
because some some writers came and said James Cameron stole their idea for Avatar,
and they wanted to you know, they wanted a you know, a couple
of millions actually you know, one of a couple of million dollars. But
uh, and he was involved in that whole litigation. Interesting, I don't
mind bragging that. It's a student of ours. And named Leita kinda gritas
very successful writer. She wrote much of Avatar, Jim gives her credit not
as writer, but she does have a producer credit and it's her own card.
Her name stands all alone on the screen. But the fact of the
matter is she really wrote a lot of that movie. She's not suing a
complaining, you understand. She idolizes Jim Cameron, and I think he's I
know him too. He's been very good to us and our students in our
program um and uh, you know, Leda was paid millions of millions of
dollars for her work on Avatar, and she's she's not not complaining. But
yeah, I believe that any any big movie. You know, a lot
of people know about the the buck Wald case. It was covered, you
know, the Coming to America case that I mentioned earlier. It was covered
Gavel to Gavel. It was held live Gavel to Gavel on the trial on
on CNN. I remember, And a lot of people don't know that that
particular litigation was one among seven or eight cases where people had claimed, you
know, other people had claimed they'd written the movie, you know, independently.
There's an expression that every hum success has many parents, but there is
an orphan. In other words, if a movie makes no money. Nobody
hears about it, no one will sue. But if you have a great,
big hit like Avatar, there's going to be bunches of lawsuits. I
know that my old classmate, George Lucas from USC film school, we were
film school students together all those years ago. Um, you know, there
have been multiple suits. Star Wars was sold from him, you know,
from them. I I remember that he went up to Canada to um.
It would have been easier for him to just settle, which is what they
usually do. But he's a very funky, feisty guy, George, and
nobody's going to say that. You know, he's not going to going to
consent to anybody. Uh, you know, he's never going to agree that
anything that he ever ripped anybody off. Um. And so he actually went
to the trial and somebody had uh claimed that he the plaintiff, had had
invented the Wookie and George had stolen that from him. You know. So
you know it's like when my son was little, if he couldn't find his
baseball, maybe he'd say, who stole my glove? You know, it
couldn't be that he misplaced it, you know. You know what I'm saying.
So people always think that there's something similar. It must have been stole
one from from them. Uh. Occasionally it happens, but it's most exceptional.
And when you mistake the exception for the rule, you fall on your
face every time. Very true. Uh, you know. And and the
more I hear about, you know, cases like that, you know,
Richard, And the more I hear that it is either you know, a
hey, you know what, two people, you know, great minds think
alike, as they say, so, you know, it is possible if
you know two people that live in you know, maybe the opposite ends of
the earth came up with a similar idea, you know, I mean,
I mean, you know, you and I could go to the video store.
You know, well, if their video stores are still around, you
and I could go to Netflix and we could see there are There's all there's
a plenor of movies that maybe share maybe the same scene, or maybe share
like the same you know, plot points, or maybe share the same you
know, character character at your view something. We'll be right back after a
word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. You know,
it's similar on those lines again. The only thing I totally I totally receive
many movies of the same theme Jaws, I happen to know and now I'm
blanket. Carl Botley who who wrote Jaws. Um, of course he was
adapting to Peter Benchley book. Um was was telling me that the uh,
you know, he had conversations with Bentley. Um. Jaws is based on
a play by the great Norwegian player at Enrick Gibson Um. And the play
is called an Enemy of the People. It's a very well known, you
know, sort of a classic play. I guess it's a one hundred and
fifty years old or something. Um. And it's said in a healthy sort
health spa that's famous for its waters, that there are healing waters. People
come from, you know, a thousand miles you know, to have their
their maladies healed in the waters, the magical waters of this particular health spa.
And the protagonist in the movie is um doctor Stockman. He's the medical
director of the baths. Now this doesn't sound at all like Jaws, but
consider this. At the beginning of the movie, he discovers, the doctor
does that the waters are actually polluted and that they're making people ill. And
this is a really important discovery when he announces it, he thinks people will
honor him because he's saving a lot of people, a lot of illness and
even death, you know, because they'll they out of that bad water.
And it will also get the resort to do whatever needs to do, if
it can be done to you know, repair that right. So that doesn't
soundly like jos and yet it is because the reaction of the health spat and
the community around it that lives off the income brought in from tourists coming into
the guests at the spa, they instead of honoring him, they they you
know, degrade him. They deride him, and they declare him an enemy
of the people. And that's exactly the deal with Richard dreyfus In as the
sheriff in Jaws and John's if you remember that day he realizes it's the start
of the season, it's a beach town, and suddenly there's a dangerous shock
and if word gets out that there's all of that danger and people aren't supposed
to use the beach, well they're not gonna do a beach vacation at least
not there, you know. So instead of honoring him for making this really
important life saving discovery. They degrade him, they humiliate him, they scorn
him, they mock him, they love him. And so the theme is
history hates a truth teller, something like that. And that's the same theme
for Jaws and for the Enemy of the People, even though they so,
what's the difference between them. The difference is the story totally different story,
the setting, the dialogue, the characters, everything is different, though they
have the same theme. Quite quite true. So you're going to see movies
that have similar themes. But you can't protect a theme. All you can
protect as a story, and it has to be substantive. This happens,
that happens, this happens, that happens, The same stuff happens in both.
And then you're starting to get onto a you know, an enterprise that
is protectable. It's just a very, very crazy arena. The truth of
the matter is studios, producers, production companies, networks, cable companies,
they have no elfish interest in stealing material. They don't want to risk the
tens of millions of dollars that it takes to put together a series or a
movie. Indeed, Avadar half a billion dollars. Nobody's going to make that
kind of an investment and try to cut somebody out of one tenth of one
percent of that, which would be you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands
of dollars or even millions of dollars for the script, and put the whole
rest of the project into jeopardy just trying to shave off a point or even
two from the budget by stealing the script. You follow what I'm saying,
Oh, yeah, it just don't you know, there's a not a lawyer,
though I've spent a lot of time around lawyers doing this kind of kind
of working. There's a there's a Latin phrase I forget what it is,
or something like que bone. Oh you know who benefits from this? If
you look at a legal case and you want to who's in, you know,
you suddenly discover for somebody dies and you suddenly discover that they had a
huge insurance policy and it all goes to this particular beneficiary. Well, that
beneficiary had a substantial steak and a great reward in this person dying. Maybe
maybe she or he killed him, right, Um, so, uh,
movie companies have a steak in not stealing material. Nobody benefits by that,
and indeed they suffered greatly. So I think it does happen, but I
believe it's vastly, vastly exaggerated. You know, you mentioned, you know,
your classmate was George Lucas. Did you have any other, you know,
interesting stories or any other funny stories about you and George? Well,
you know, I am the uncredited writer of the first two drafts of American
Graffiti. Um, there's there's no controversy about it. George doesn't tell it
any differently. Um, there's nothing unusual in Hollywood about a substantial number of
writers being paid for their services on a particular picture, not all of them
getting credit. Credit as a a judgment that is rendered by the writers Guild.
So I, yeah, I worked. I knew George pretty well.
We weren't very close friends in film school, but we knew each other when
we were at parties together, we were in classes together. I was in
awe of his achievements as a film student, as we all are back then
at USC. His legendary student film THHX one eight four EB, which became
a feature length film, ultimately not as good as the shorter version, but
it was his first movie. It was done at Warner Brothers with Francis Ford
Coppola producing. I was, you know, in awe of his talent as
a graphic artist as a filmmaker when I was in school. When we worked
together on Graffiti, I didn't really work closely with him. He had he
was out of the country, actually had the long version of fex we called
it sex THHXUM. He was bringing that to Can the festival. I was
traveling with his then wife Marcia. They were backpacking around Europe and they were
going to end up at can and they needed a draft of Graffiti in a
hurry, and I was asked to write it in a couple of weeks,
which I did on that first draft, and it did not He was not
pleased with it. For he complimented it for it and he has over the
years complimented for its professionalism and all of that. M but he was bothered
by two aspects of it. One was the sex in it. You know,
I saw it as a tale of um, you know, adolescence,
kinding of age and all of that, and that's the time of sexual awakening.
And you know, you look at George's films that kind of like clinical
uh surrand wrapped as far as sexuality is concerned, the sort of isn't any
you know, um the U and I'm a sexual pervert, not really as
kidding, but but I think that, you know, in my own I've
written at length about adolescent My first novel was a coming of age in New
York City, and there's a lot of you know, sexuality and its young
people, um, flirting and and and more. And George didn't like that.
He's kind of uptight about those sorts of things. And the other thing
you didn't like was that it wasn't close enough his own experience, you know,
growing up in Modesto. Hey, I'm you know, I'm a New
York kid. I grew up in the Queens and went to school with high
school in Manhattan, you know, and I didn't know anything about cars and
stuff like that. Um. So we never really worked together on and except
after the first draft. There was a two draft deal we did. We
didn't meet at my house, and then we met. I remember we had
another meeting at a restaurant in Hollywood, and we spoke at length on the
phone after the you know, during the process of writing the second draft and
and so on. I was well paid for the work that I did,
and I'm not complaining. Um, you know again, the credit decision is
something that is rendered by the writer's guild and the so it's really their judgment,
not the studio's judgment, not George's judgment, and so on. He's
a powerhouse. You know, he's a kind of a rough, nerdy,
scratchy voice little guy. But I mean, he suggests the greatest genius I've
ever known. I mean the impact of that his work has had across I
mean, who on the world, you know, who around the world doesn't
know some aspect of the of the Star Wars franchise hasn't been touched by some
aspect of it, right, I mean, you know, don't you think
it's realistic to suggest that billions of people of heard of it? At least
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
the show. Who do you know in all of human history who touched so
many people, got into the consciousness and the awareness of so many people all
around across the globe in so little time as George did. I also believe
that the influence that he's had the influence of Star Wars. I'm not really
crazy about the movies John Neelius our film school. Look alum, you know,
a fellow alumnus, alumnus you know, calls them pap. I watch
all of them. I've seen the first one, which is I guess the
fourth one by a certain measurement, part of the second one, and so
on. But the lesson that they put out there, I think is a
really really affirmative, healing, positive message across the world, a very Judeo
Christian message, which is that the power of love is greater than the power
of hate, the power of God is stronger than the power of Satan,
the power of construction is bigger than the power of destruction. I mean,
you know, you have a fairy tale and said again again going back to
the ideas we were talking before, what's the idea behind Star Wars. I'll
tell you what it is, and you already know what it is. It's
a fairy tale in space. The bad guys abduct the princess, and you
know, the good guys rescue her. That's Star Wars, isn't it.
Yeah? You know? So what makes Star Wars especial in the answer is
the frame by frame, moment by moment, seeing by seeing action in it
and the dialogue that the characters speaking and so on. So, you know,
George is a very um uh, you know, he's not a very
available kind of a guy. I don't think a lot of it. People
would describe him as warm and cuddly. But when I worked with him,
both on campus and off campus, that was certainly a professional arrangement and agreement.
And you know, whatever disagreements that that we had were you know,
we're experience were not unusual among artists working on a movie together. Yeah,
it's very understandable. And I was actually his house guest. I remember my
wife and I in the August of nineteen sixty nine. He had already left
LA he was living up in Marine And I love to say that Mike class
at USC we were the first to move on. You know, when we
came to film school, there was no tradition of moving from film school into
the professional community. In fact, I have an article right and it's just
come out like yesterday, the day before, in the current issue, the
most recent issue which has just come out, excuse me, of written by
which is the Writer's Guild monthly journal, and it's called Film School Haven or
Hoax. And I'm arguing that you know in it. I'm arguing, of
of course I have a vested interest in it, but I still believe it's
observably, verifiably empirically true. The film School's not a hoax, you know,
but very very helpful in um in getting you know, people into the
movie business. I cite in the article eleven eleven titles of movies written I'm
sorry, directed or produced and or produced by Steven Spielberg that were written by
at least in part by UCLA trained writers who have the on screen credits for
those movies. Eleven of them Jurassic Park one to three, Indiana Jones two
and three. That's five right there, the terminal Munich, Lincoln, War
of the World's Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye was produced by Stephen Travis Wright was
the writer our student a few years ago when am I leaving out oh the
TV series Amazing Stories, our students in the last six or seven years of
at five, just in the last six or seven years, five Academy Award
Best Screenplay nominations and have won three Oscars for Best Screenplay in the last so
script between now and then now being today and then being the time now almost
half century ago that I was going to film school in classes with George Lucas.
The big difference is that film school has gone from being a dead end
professionally to being the single most advantageous way to enter the film industry. So
I like to say that our class at USC we were the first one to
go on to own Hollywood, except for George of Olsen Marine County. So
in any event, my wife and I in nineteen sixty nine, in August,
we took a motor trip, just a vacation, a holiday up the
West coast, and we drove all the way up ultimately to the Oregon border,
the California Oregon border, the Umpquad Dunes. There are some beautiful sand
dunes along the northern California southern Oregon coast, just EXCLUSI we camped along Barnson,
But on the way we stopped at San Francisco, and I remember I
had we had brunch one Sunday morning in Saucelito with some old film schools pals,
including George and Marsha. Also John Nellius, if you know that name,
I referred to him earlier. John, you know, invented Schwarzenegger.
You know he did Conan and bunches of other movies. He wrote, John
probably best known for his script of Apocalypse. Apocalypse Now. So it was
my wife and I and George and Marshall Amelius. Also Caleb Deschanelle, who's
probably famous now being the father of very famous actress daughters. But the Caleb
is of course himself a multi nominated cinematography he's one of the most respected,
the most successful cameraman in the history of the industry. And there were some
other people. There was Walter Murch who's very famous. Walter actually won two
Oscars for sound design and something else in the same years Officer when he got
to come up twice to the stage to pick up his oscars, he was
there with his wife, Aggie, a British woman. And then was also
Caleb, as I mentioned in a producer now a well known producer, David
Lester, who producer all Around Shelton's film you know, Bull Durham, and
on and on and on. And I remember Marcia invited us to to be
there their house guests, and we said, well, we're we're moving on
up the coast tonight, you know, I mean, right after this meal,
we're driving north. She said but on the way down, if you
want to stay with us, feel free. So we did. We were
actual the house guests overnight when he was living in Mill Valley in um Marin.
It was before his gigantic success with Live Graffiti. Graffiti wouldn't come out
yet for about three years. I think it was in seventy two seventy one
or seventy two seventy three. It came out. It was released in seventy
three. Um, so we were all, you know, film school pals.
When I look back, you know, at the time, we weren't
really aware of it. You got to look back to see it to talk
about right place, right time. You know, I had come out.
I thought to California for three weeks from New York and at the last moment
I just fell into film school that I see kind of a whim and you
know, somebody turned around. It was ten years later, you know,
I had never really planned to settle in California, much less to become a
screenwriter, A much much much less to be a a your professor, you
know, and legal expert and so on. If there's a great example of
staying open to the surprises in a life narrative, I think you know.
I'm always song writers, in your dramatic narrative, in your life narrative,
to stay open to the surprises that all of the people I know who are
enjoying what they're doing, are also surprised by what they're doing. They're not
doing what they planned to do. People who do what they planned to do
are people. I know a lot of such people, and they offer the
most what doctors. I grew up in New York City and the big thing
to be was a doctor. So I know a lot of medical professionals,
and they have very successful they're you know, they're well paid and so one,
but not all of Some of them are very happy, but not all
of them. Many of them are unhappy. This one wishes he was an
oceanographer. That one wishes he was an anthropologist, and all of them seems
to wish they were also screenwriters. Sometimes it seems like um. And the
point is that you know there's a Chinese curse me or dreams come true curse.
It's a little scary when when you accomplish what you said out to accomplish
and and it doesn't really feel right. I have a friend who's just retired
from medicine. He's done very very well. He's respected um, he's made
a good living, but he's always been lukewarm at best about about his career,
never really enjoyed it. On the other hand, I know another doctor,
a friend of mine who went to film who went to medical school.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back the show,
but just didn't like practicing medicine. What he liked was computers, and
very early in the computer revolution he got into the uh, the writing of
software for computerizing pathology laps. He was a pathologist whose specialty was pathology,
and that branched on out out to general medical medical record keeping in general.
They were computerizing all of that. You know, previously a doctor would see
a symptom and would sort of think about it. Now you can, you
know, really search the databases. And this is a result of not just
inconvenience, but in the savings of countless lives if you think about it.
UM. So, my friend is um. We were visiting with him.
He lives in Seattle. Uh. We were visiting with him and his wife
hold dear old pounds of laws some months ago and his house is on Lake
Washington. There's a duck behind it, and on one side is his power
boat, and on the other side of his sailboat across the lake, and
a little to the south is the Bill Gates Compound. I mean, this
guy has done real well, my friend, and he loves his work.
And he didn't jettison his medical education. He very much exploited in and that's
not a dirty word. It just needs to make the most of it.
He integrated into his career, his very successful career, a career that he
loves that he just enjoys enormously. My point is he's not doing what he
expected to do and he's loving it. And that's what I'm The point that
I'm making is that it's possible to overplan, kind of outsmart yourself in life
and else. He mentioned Richard, you know sometimes wants to be a screenwriter.
You know, it's kind of like everyone. I think it was Joe
Esterhouse, the screenwriter of Basic Instinct. One said, uh, you know,
it used to be everyone wants to write the great American novel. Now
it's the great American screenplay. M Yeah, No, Joe is a friend
of mine. I know him well over a number of number of years,
and I'm aware aware that he said that. It seems to be true.
Um, it seems to be true. People people want to uh, you
know, there are more people who years ago would have been writing novels than
are running screenplays. I do both. I've just finished a novel, and
I've had modest success in both areas. And it's interesting. The guy was
just lecturing on this, this is my subject. A week ago at the
bitch Fest, we were talking about how it's funny. Let me put it
this way. There's a there's a political figure you've heard of, Governor Christie
from New Jersey. He's running for president, and he was I saw him
sometime last week. Earlier in the week. He was bitterly denying that he
was what somebody had accused him of. Somebody that accused him and called him
and characterized him as a particular word, a very very evil word, the
most evil word I think you can uh, you know, used to characterize
a political figure that these days in this country. Can you guess what the
word was, I'll tell you. Somebody called him a moderate. They said
that he was moderate. Imagine that used to be like a compliment, you
know, Um, he was denying these are moderate. Now, why do
I bother you about that? Because there's a word in Hollywood that Hollywood seems
to have come to hate. Are you ready? Original? They don't want
to do anything original. In fact, the disappointing release of tomorrow Land is
that what it's called? Yeah tomorrow Yeah with Clooney? What kind of disappointed?
They say that they're not going to do any more original movies, you
know, because if Tomorrowland as a original movie, they only want to do
tenfowls remakes, reboots, prequels and sequels, adaptations of material from other media.
They don't want to do original screenplays. And I think that's a real
pity, because you know, what they're trying to do is play it safe,
and playing it safe is the most hazardous course you can follow in an
art. You have to take the risks, you have to embrace the risks,
invites, elicit and courage the risks, it seems to me. And
nevertheless, it as if you're a writer and you have an original screenplay,
what are you gonna do with that? Nobody's making original screenplays, or certainly
these studios are not. They are not buying spec scripts and turning em into
movies. They're developing projects inside. I had a writer who wants to he's
a huge fan of Batman, and he wanted the Batman franchise, and he
wanted to pay me a substantial sum to give them notes on a Batman script.
Day right, I said, but you can't do anything with a script
Warner Brothers on the right to you know, Batman, because he said,
well, I'll show what the Warner Brothers. But Warner Brothers isn't going to
look at a Batman's script. They're not going to buy a speculated uh Matman
script. They're going to develop it with writers they know who work with producers.
They know. Those writers may very well be former students of mind mind
you, and I'm happy to brag about that. But they are not going
to do this guy's script. Not only are they gonna make it, they're
not even gonna read it. And they're gonna make a point not to read
it for reasons. To go back to what we were talking about earlier,
having to do with litigation. If it's Batman, it's certainly going to be
similar. It's going to have certain similarities to the Matman franchise. Don't you
think and then they'll be they'll be their lawyers that Warner Brothers will be telling
you you mustn't look at this and you must notify you must send this back
to him and tell And we haven't looked at it. We don't accept that
I'm still of material. And so because he's gonna claim when the new Batman
cames up that we that we really used it and we didn't, um you
know, uh, we just we stole it from um so. Uh So
we're talking about originality. So how do you get around that as a writer?
Uh? And the answer is, and I've had modest success with this
repeatedly in my career. I don't consider myself to be any kind of superstar.
But the the Wall Street journeal calls me, they what did they say
about me? They said, Oh, I am a writer of substantial professional
experience. You know, there's no literary laundry I haven't taken in. I've
written feature assignments, feature length movie assignments for all of the studios, almost
every studio, and I've stolen material to all three major broadcast networks. And
I have had almost half a dozen books published by by all of them,
by major new York publishers. I've had best sellers in mom fiction, my
screenwriting books, in print, you know, over thirty years. My last
novel made the Times List best seller lists only for a week and only at
number thirteen. But think you know the Times List. It's not a not
a small thing. And the reason I mentioned it to you is that my
very first novel I had written as a screenplay and I just couldn't. It's
been said Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.
I had so much encouragement over that script when I never had was a
nickel for it. And finally there was a strike and you couldn't market to
Hollywood anyway, And so naively I turned it into I used it as an
outline for a novel and wrote a novel. I was naive about how cruel
the fiction market is, especially the first market, and that knife day served
me very well because I sold this thing right away. And you know,
had I been more stavvy about the business, maybe I wouldn't have, you
know, uh, invested the time and effort it would take to turn them
into a novel, knowing how grimm the chances were. So you understand how
ignorance is your friend, knife day is your palm. Now, as soon
as it was sold as a novel, it was sold as a movie.
A Warner Brothers, a studio that had turned it down when it was a
screenplay, bought the same screenplay as soon as it had been published as a
novel because it was no longer original. It was now an adaptation. It
had been tested in another market. The executives if every every day in Hollywood
that an executive doesn't have to make a decision about anything, as a victory
for her. She hasn't put her neck out, she hasn't risked. And
he said, you know, if you don't do anything, you'll never do
anything wrong. Right. So, and every movie that does get made starts
with the anticipation by the executives who are responsible for spending the money to produce
it. It starts with their expectation that it will fail. And they're trying
to figure out how to explain away the anticipated failure of the movie. I
don't see how that can do anything other than to suppress creativity and imagination and
so on. But you understand how somebody could say, if the movie comes
out and it bombs, for example Bonfire the Vanities, which was produced by
a friend of mine and a colleague of mine. He's also a professor at
UCLA. Peter Goomer very successful producer. He was the head of Warner Brothers.
He was at a Columbia. He's produced a lot of major, major
movies. Well, one of the movies that he produced, it was a
terrible mom there's even a book written about about it was Bonfire the Vanities.
And when people say to him, Peter, how could you invest so much
money in this turkey. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show, he can. I mean, you
must be some lousy executive. We should get rid of you. He has
a defense. Then the defense is wait a minute. This was a best
selling novel by Tom Wolfe. I also had Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks in
the movie. The screenplay was adapted by Michael Christopher, a very very distinguished,
respected writer. The director was Brian the Pond. It's not mind fault.
It's not my fault. You understand what I'm saying? So suddenly because
with my own novel when it was sold as a movie, the producer who
bought it could say if anybody asked him, how I think you'd buy this,
he could say, what don't mean? Mortar Books published this? You
know, major publisher New York published this. So I'm not the only one
crazy enough to think that there's merit in this. So I've been recommending to
writers that they contemplate they write a screenplay, but instead of showing the screenplay,
write an original screenplay. Certainly you don't want to do an adaptation of
material that you don't own. I mean, they're like dragons. What are
you gonna do with something if you don't have the underlying rights. So what
I'm recommending is they write an original screenplay, but then instead of marketing the
screenplay at first, they use it as an elaborate outline for their novel and
write it as a novel, and then try to sell the work as a
novel, and once it's sold as a novel, they can get action as
a screenplay. I've done that multiple times now, and right now I'm working
on I've just finished a novel that's based on a screenplay. I wrote the
screenlay last summer and now I'm finished the draft as a novel. It's just
the draft, I still have to do a bunch of work on it.
But once you've got the screenplay, most of the heavy list lifting has been
done. I regard, just like we were talking earlier about the most valuable
part of the equation is the story. Once you've got the story or worked
out, you've got the characters, the dialogue. I mean, most of
that's there in the screenplay, isn't it. To turn that into a novel
is relatively easy? Underscore relative there's um, you know, relatively there's not
a you know, no writing is easy. But for me, the hardest
part of writing is the heavy lifting is in devising creating the plot, because
the plot, the story really involves everybody else. The story is character,
The story is dialogue, story is description, it's everything. I mean,
who's the richest character? I mean, imagine somebody said, well we're in
a minute, richie, what about character? Isn't that important? But who's
the greatest character in all of English language grammatic literature? Isn't it a Hamlet?
Certainly Hamlet would be a good candidate, don't you think? So?
What's the description? Have you ever read Hamlet? Do you remember the playwrights
description of Hamlet here it is, it's three words prints of Denmark. That's
it. There's nothing about melancholy. So where does this Hamlet come from?
And the answer is from the story, the stuff he does and the stuff
he says inside the context of the story. So it's really really all about
all about story. So once the story has worked out, you have the
opportunity to retell that story as a novel. And it's just easier to write
a novel. It's easier because you're not stuck with discitan sound like you are
in a movie. You're not. You know. We mentioned George Cluney a
moment ago. I read a screenplay called The American. I didn't see the
movie. It's a dreadful screenplay. Cluney was in it. I think the
only reason George was in it because it was shot here where he lives in
northern Italy, and I lives Lake Como at the edge of the Swiss border
up there, and they was shot it up there. So I think that's
the only reason I can imagine to George would have been, you know,
had anything to do with this movie, would be because it was convenient was
in the neighborhood, so so it's begen any that there's a scene in the
movie where the main character is sitting is at a cafe ordering a bottle of
wine. He's with a girl, and the waiter comes up and offers him,
you know, taste of the wine, and he samples the wine.
And it actually says in the script that he takes a sip of the wine.
It takes slightly flinty, with notes of chestnuts and cinnamon. Wait a
minute, well, how does the well, how does anybody knows sitting in
a movie theater watching them on screen with what's something tastes like? You follow
what I'm saying? Yeah, I knew exactly what you mean. This guy,
this writer doesn't understand the most fundamental aspect of screen running, which is
you stuck with sitan sound. It's just sitan sound. Um. And it's
easier to write a novel because you're not stuck with You can say with somebody
remembers what they think, how they feel. You know. The the greatest
um compliment that's ever been paid me is that final draft. The software.
I'm sure you know of it, the screenwriting software has actually created. I
don't know if it's available yet. We are creating they are creating for me
in consultation with me, that Richard Walter template. You know, like if
you want to write a H, if you want to write a Simpson's script,
for example, you can you can punch up Simpsons. You know,
there's a pull down window in Final Draft and you can go to Simpsons and
you click that and it will immediately give you the formatting for that H.
You know, the simpson likes, but the Simpsons uses. And I don't
mind telling you that my colleague of mine has won several Emmys for all the
Simpsons and a bunch of us students have written for the Simpsons, and oh
one of them. This makes me sad because he died young in his forties.
A wonderful writer and a wonderful got very successful um in um, not
just in TV but also in features. He wrote four he wrote the super
Girl. Very very fine writer. Um he uh. He was a the
the Oh producer what are they quotem co exacutive producer of the Simpsons and a
writer for the Simpsons. So Final Draft has a Simpsons template. They now
have a Richard Walter template. If you if you punch up me, you'll
get um format that conforms to my particular desires. For example, I don't
when if you write x E x T for exterior, you know, it's
like extra ort. I was taught that you don't put and I preach it,
you should not put a period after that. And in final draft,
if you go to the Richard Walter template, it'll get rid of the theeriod
that comes after ext that. Somebody might say, Gee, that seems like
a pretty petty point, but actually I think it's the most important, the
most profound point in all of creative expressions. And the point is simply this.
There shouldn't be anything in the script that doesn't serve the script. That
is to say, it doesn't move the story forward. And if you learn,
if you get into the kind of mindset that leaves out even the period
after exterior, then you'll leave out lines of dialogue that you don't need.
You'll leave that whole characters you don't lead, you leave that whole scenes that
you don't need, if you follow what I'm what I'm saying so in anyway,
the only reason I'm telling about this is that in the Richard Walter template
for final draft, they are now having we're tweaking it and in the wide
margin description, if a word realizes, feels, remembers, thinks, appears,
it's going to get highlighted a little zig zaggy line underneath if some attention
will be called to it, to ask the writer, do you really want
to say this? Is this something that the audience can see or hear?
Because if it's an internal, interior mental thing, it has no place in
a movie. But in a novel, I mean everything in it that's interior.
A mental movie has to come out of sight and sound. You know,
the Marilyn's eyes widen in what can only be the realization that Harry left
the gun in the nightstand at the motel. You understand what I'm saying.
It's going to be told from a visual standpoint. Answering the question, never
mind the reader of the ink on the page. I want to know how
the viewer in the movie theater watching it on the screen is going to know
this information. And but in a novel you can just spill it out.
And you can also write in the past tense or in the future tense.
I wrote a novel, and it's said in the past, in the president
of the future, and in the past. I tell it in the past,
and in the future. I tell it in the future tense, and
in the present. I tell it in the in the present tense. She
goes to the door, she opens it, he stands there. You know
what I'm saying. So, um, you don't have to worry about that.
In a novel, you can you can do anything you want. Also,
novels are longer, and it's easier to write longer then shorter. Not
everybody gets that. There's a It's like it's easier to ride a bike fast
and slow. You know what I'm saying. It's very true. You're absolutely
right. The there's a letter from Hemingway. There's a very famous letter from
Ernest Hemingway. He was in Cuba, I think he was working on The
Old Man in the Sea, and he wrote a letter to his um legendary
editor, Maxwell Perkins. Will be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show. It was nine pages long, on
and on and on and on and on about this and that and the other
thing in aspects of the script of the Manuscript of Thanks script for Old Man
of the Sea, and this and that and the other thing. Finally,
halfway down the middle of page nine, he says, well, that's about
it for now. Max, He says, please forgive me for writing such
a long letter. I didn't have the time to write a short one.
It takes longer to be quick and to the point and to call and select
and do the things that artists have to do. So I think there's really
something to be said for writers taking another tack, trying their script out as
a novel, trying to get some traction there, and if they do,
suddenly it becomes viable as a movie project because it's no longer original. They've
taken the quote curse quote off of it, um by removing its originality and
making an aupdation. So you know, there's some thoughts. There's some thoughts.
You know. It's funny you mentioned Richard, because I'm actually a Final
Draft not only affiliate, but I also am part of their uh their program
where we like beta testing. I'm sorry whose program I missed? Oh,
I'm sorry. I'm actually a part of Final drafts uh Final Draft. Yeah,
not only their affiliate program, but also they're beta testing, so like
I get the new stuff before anybody else, you know, and get feedback.
Um, I haven't got a chance to actually check that template out but
one, but I'm gonna keep my eye out because yeah, you know,
I've been working with Alejandro Seri, who's one of their guys, a great
guy, And I don't know if it's available or not yet. I think
it's it's an you know, like, UM you can sort of upload it
if depending what you know, what version you have and so on. Yeah,
and uh, because right now, the latest thing that I've been beta
testing is, uh, they have a new app out for the iPhone and
that's what I've been beta testing a lot of just you know, giving them
feedback and you know, hey, I like to see this feature, I
wouldn't like to see this feature, you know, stuff like that. And
I'm going to keep an eye for that template and I want to actually because
if it's it's available, I will definitely upload that. Well, thank you,
I'm honored that you would. It's it's not radically a different UM,
but I am a big believer in the less is more, No continued,
absolutely nothing. I've argued for years and years and years that if you UM
can embrace this very very fundamental precept, which is what we were just saying
earlier, then it's just site and sound. And if you can add to
that just one thing, and that is that every site and every sound must
move the story forward. I'm palpable way, some identifiable way. That doesn't
matter what you're right, doesn't matter what this so called genre is. It
doesn't matter what happens. People will be drawn to it. You can even
have nothing happen. And if somehow nothing happening can move the story forward,
people will pay very very rapt attention to nothing happening. And I'll give you
an example of that in a student of Mine. God blessing Me blurbs my
book very prominently. Alexander Payne in one of his best movies, I think
about Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson. I think it's Nicholson's best work. The
movie opens with Jack just sitting alone. He's an insurance salesman. It's just
clearly his last moment, literally his last minute on the job before he retires,
and he just sits at the desk and absolutely nothing happens. But the
camera kind of wanders around the room and you can see the only motion in
the room is the sweep second hand of the wall clock and it's ticking off
the second. It's like forty seconds before five o'clock, and when it hits
five, he gets up and he leaves. You know, that's the scene.
But it tells you so much about that man and how punctual he is,
and how afraid he is, and how this he is, and how
that he is and so on, that you get it. You get really
really drawn into that. So that's why my template, if you can get
into it, if you can find it, you'll see that it really preaches
minimalism, that you should keep everything off the page that you can keep off
the page. You know, if you look at my books, you see
the front page of a screenplay. I have a model of a front play
of a screenline that I have a model of what not to do. And
the model of the what you should do is just the title of the script,
the name of the writer. It shouldn't stay written by or even merely
by, much less an original screenplay written by In case you think you're worried
somebody might think it's a chicken salmath sand which you're a bowling ball or something.
Well, what if it just says by, written written by? What
does that tell you it tells you nothing. If it simply says bottom Dollar.
Um, you know Sam Smith, people are gonna figure this script is
called bottom Dollar and this guy, Sam Smith, probably wrote it, you
know. And then on the only other thing you should have on that page
is a phone number and an email address. Um, you know, contact
infoe. Now, if you have an agent, she's going to be sending
out on her own. You know, she's not gonna want potential buyers to
contact the clients. She's going to want them to contact her. And by
the way, the author should not want to be contacted directly. Be suspicious
of anybody contacts it directly. If you have a representative, if they are
legitimate, if the producer leg legitimate, they should be willing to and be
eager to call the producer, you know what I'm saying. So so it's
different if the thing is sold. But if it's a speculative Scriptum, if
you just have the name of the script of title, the script in the
name of the writer, and as I say, a phone number, one
phone number, only one phone number. I have a bunch of phone numbers.
I have my UCLA number, I have my home number, I have
a cell number, I have his best number in my home office. They
don't want all of that. They don't want my mother's number, they don't
want my lawyers. I know, just one number and one email. Is
this so that you can be found if people are interested? And as I
say, if it even simply says by somebody who puts that on the script
on the front page doesn't get it. That right on the cover of the
script is information that serves no purpose at all. What is the likelihood that
somebody's going to miss that? But get character and story and dialogue and all
of the sophisticated and heady and provocative precepts and principles that apply to the autona
craft in the business of screenwriting. You know, it's you know, not
encouraging. So again that's what you'll see is very very minimal. Anything that
can be lost, you should lose. And if you're in doubt about something,
you sort of feel well, maybe you need this. Maybe then you
lose it. If you're in doubt, throw it out. Just have stuff
that absolutely must be there. And it's so easy to figure out what must
be there. You just ask yourself, what if it weren't there, does
it still make sense? If it makes sense. Without it being that,
then it wasn't needed. If the whole thing falls apart without you know,
when it's not that, then it was needed. You follow what I'm saying.
It's like there's a there's a joke. A guy goes into a library
and he steps up to the desk and he says, to the library and
I'll have a hot dog and a coke and French frize please, And the
librarian syste him, sir, this is a library. He says, Oh,
I'm sorry, I'll have a him. I'll have a hot dog.
Uncle. You know, whisper? Is it? You get the joke?
It's like you're not supposed to talk loud in the library. He thinks that
she's reprimanding him just talking through loudly, rather than for ordering food at a
library desk. You follow the joke, Yeah, absolutely so. The reason
I tell you that joke is you can imagine if that were a screenplay,
a portion of a screenplay. You absolutely have to have the parent edical direction
and whispers sir, this is a library. Carry whispering, and then the
line again, you with me if if if you don't have it, the
person's going isn't going to whisper and the whole joke is lost. So you
needed the parents edicle. But that's the exception. One of my great battles
is against parent edicles. Um, it's a sure sign of amateurism where there
are a lot of parents edicals, Riley Roley angrily smiling. You know,
sadly Shakespeare got through thirty six or thirty seven plays not a single parents edical,
you know, Hamlet, Melancholleague never So you want the least, and
you can figure out what the least is by asking yourself, what if this
weren't here, does it still make sense? Then we didn't need it.
So that answers the question that every artist is confronted with, which is what
needs to be in the work and what doesn't and why doesn't everybody do that?
And the answer is it takes time to do that match what people won't
give it. They just won't give it the time that it takes. You
know. One of my one of my mentors, Bill Boyle, he actually
wrote a book called The Visual Mindscape of the screen Play. We'll be right
back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show, and
he goes into that in depth that you have to take out anything that is
not you know, it's always about what's on the screen, all the good
and it always and he's that way, uh, because he says he always
would see people hanging in screenplays and they would say things that like, you
know what someone is thinking in a screenplay? And he's like, how can
we show that stuff exactly exactly? You know, Evelyn remembers that the she
left the car idling, Well, what does that look like on the screen?
Somebody remembering something? You know? And how are you gonna know?
Uh, let's say the actor looks up remembering and acting for dummies, if
there is such a thing, and is able to put on the remembering face.
If there is a thing, do we know what they remember it?
You know? Again, it's so simple. It's it's really very simple,
very simple to know what to do to succeed. Why doesn't everybody to see
because it's hard to do it. It's easy to know what you do.
It's like I don't know exactly what to do to hit a home run.
I'm sitting here about two months from Dodger Stadium, and I know exactly what
you have to do. You have to get to bat around in the right
place at the right time. The difference between me and uh, you know,
Babe Ruth is that he could do it. He didn't merely know how
to do it, but actually could do it. I know how to do
but I can't do it. I don't have an equipment to do it.
So it's really you know that, that's really all there is to it.
And again the reason people don't do it is they in too much of a
hurry, had to right to just tell me it's already, this is already
a third draft. Well, come on, David Kepp, I bet you
know the name. Koepp, a former student of mine, a writer director.
He wrote you know, the Mission Impossible, Jurassic Park one and two.
Right now he's writing the second chapter of the Ron Howard of the Da
Vinci Code. I mean, he's a gigantic successful writer, also a very
very sweet man. He says the secret of his success is seventeen drafts.
He knows he can get through seventeen drafts. He says that day seventeen drafts
to hear somebody complaining to me about their third draft, you know, and
they don't like hearing me telling them you're just getting started. You know,
you gotta if you could get one more draft out of this, then you'll
only mean about thirteen more after that, you know, and that stops a
lot of people. They just don't have the what some people call those zits
fleisch uh, you know, the ability to sit there, um the flesh
tolering, just sitting there reworking it, reworking it, reworking it. You
know, in my own experience, you know, Richard, I wrote a
It was a comedy horror movie and it was about at a at a summer
camp. And summer camp, uh, it's a made up summer camp.
I had h and um the the I'm about seven or eight drafts in now,
and some people feel that these drafts. Some people have said, who
write it? They said, listen, these drafts are better. Sum are
saying you're starting to get maybe a little too far away from the original concept.
And you know, and now, you know, I sort of judge
for myself. I sort of have to say, you know what, who's
writing a situation? Well? You know, and I sort of go back
and and there was at one point, I'm gonna be honest, Richard,
I was so burned out from rewriting this thing. I was like, I
was fearing opening up final draft and looking at this thing again. M well,
that's every writer has that experience. It's actually a good time, but
do go on. And at that point I actually h you know, I
printed it out. And one of my favorite thing to do is actually just
print it out and I make marks with just a pen, you know,
sort of I cut myself off from all technology, just me and a you
know, a ninety year excellent, excellent thing to do. I also think
it really makes a lot of sense to write something else, put it aside,
work on something else, and then you'll be able to come back to
it with fresh eyes. You know. Over the last number of years,
I've become a fanatic crossword puzzle guy. I do the New York Times Sunday
Crossword Puzzle every Sunday. And one thing that I learned doing crossword puzzles is
you you know, you go through, you get what you can get,
and then there's stuff you just can't get. And funne you're just reading all
the clues and you fill them maybe a little less than half the thing,
and you just you can't get another freaking thing. You just can't and you
feel defeated and stupid, and so you put it aside, just go up
and do something else. Come back to it later. You sit down and
suddenly wham wham wam, wham wam. This thing, gap thing, this
thing, it all leaps, you know, into relief that you can right
in and almost run your hand over and feel it like a freeze on a
temple, you know, a carved marble freeze. And it teaches me that
just like the body gets tired, the muscles get tired, the mind gets
tired. And when you rest as the muscles and they recover, so also
can you rest the mind and it recovers. And you look away from something,
you look at something too careful, you really can't see it. You
kind of look away, and then you look back and there it suddenly is.
I'm reminded of when I was an undergraduate student in Binghamton, New York,
as a you know, history major in college. Binghamton is in Broom
County, New York, and I remember going through some original letters that had
to do with Broom County history, and they've been written in like the early
eighteen hundreds, and there was a you know, they were concluded in some
state archives from kind of the archive or something like that. They were contained
there, they were housed there, and they're written in this ancient kind of
script, you know, handwriting, and sometimes I just can't read what it
says. I remember my teacher telling me, you're looking at it too hard,
look away from it, and then kind of sneak up on it and
suddenly, how suddenly in context it all leaps out. You know. So
if you take time away from you, you really stuck in your script.
You don't let your eighth draft. And when I say you, I mean
any writer. What about put it aside for a while and work on something
else and then come back to it. And as far as you're getting too
far away from your original concept, maybe there's something better than your original concept.
Maybe you've taken it through a place that's even better for it to be.
One more thing on this subject. And it goes back to David Tepp
in the seventeen draft. He says, very often the latest drafts mimical the
earliest draft. You sort of get back to the beginning of it, and
you get back to that context, that original concept that you had, and
that might seem like a ferocious waste of time, But it wasn't you needed
to go through all of that to see that this is the way it really
ought to be. I was talking to writer only the other week, a
few weeks ago. Who was I ran it. I haven't seen him in
a long time, A guy I know pretty well, but I don't seem
a long time an now he says, well, much better now, I
said, what do you mean? He said, Well, I was stuck
for ten months this year. I was struggling with this script, and I
just pumpfort and hesitated and stumbled and just couldn't make any pregrets with it at
all, and it haunted me and it tortured me. And then finally two
weeks ago, I just settled in and said, screw this, I'm going
to do this. And I remember right through it and I got it then,
you know, and nailed it and it's just great, um, you
know. And and that's why I'm upset. I said, I don't understand.
Why, Why why is that a setting? It sounds like like a
nice thing. He said, Well, I struggled with this thing, but
the nine or ten months, why don't I just do this ten months ago?
You know? And I wouldn't have had all of the darkness and all
of the pain that I had. And I said to him, you couldn't
have done this ten months ago. You needed to struggle and suffer and have
all of this pain and live all of this life of the last nine or
ten months to become the person that you are that could have you know,
who's also the person that could finish this script? You know, write this
script. So that's where it goes. You know, nothing new about writers
beating up on themselves. So I mean what I ended up doing was I
ended up Actually I did work on something else. I just at that point
I said, you know what, I think I should just take a break
from this. And I'm thinking about coming back to it very soon. And
because it's been about probably a month or may month, ahm, and I
think now it's probably better you can come around full circle now and uh and
just again start draft nine and see where that takes me. Look, my
first novel was I told you about it earlier. I had written it as
a screenplay and couldn't get any action. I wrote as a novel and this
order as a screenplay. Um years later, I um, and by the
way, it got me a lot of work. You know. It was
an adolescent coming of age story. Um, and uh, given that in
my draft of Merdan Graffiti, which is, uh, you know, an
adolestent loss of innocence rite of passage. We'll be right back after a word
from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Coming to a story.
I was able to get a lot of work. I was kind of
a go to guy for adolescent kinding of age stories, lots of innocence stories
in Hollywood. Um that novel. After I saw and It's a kind of
a I grew up in New York City and I sang duop in the streets
with friends of mine and so and so. It's about this duop group that
never really succeeds, but they learned that if you sing in harmony, you'll
live in harmony, you know. And after I saw it, I started
thinking about it as a stage play. Um, you know, as a
musical, but I needed a songwriter. And then after I saw Jersey Boys,
I was seeing it several times on Broadway, I realized, no,
it could be a jukebox musical and so uh, I rewrote it as I
adapted it for the musical theater using existing tunes, you know, just like
the Carold King Show and the Motown musical Um you know, and Jersey Boys,
you know, are just examples. There are a lot of them now
that I'm not using original music, but that's why they called jukebox musicals,
because they use existing tunes. I suddenly realized I could do it as a
jukebox musical, so I rewrote it as a jukebox musical. Two years ago,
it was workshop that UCLA. There was a humble read through sing through
directed by one of the professors in the musical theater program in our sister department
theater, and it was the most satisfying, fulfilling creative experience I've ever had
in my career, This humble little read through. Now there's a somebody eagerly
showing the play around, trying to get a production for it. Probably nothing
will come of it, but but my you know, the craziest things have
happened. But the point is, and the reason I bother you with it
telling you about it, is, Look how long I've there even business with
this thing. It goes back over forty years, you know, between the
time that I first started outlining what became the screenplay which ultimately became the novel.
And so on. My most recent novel, which which I bragged to
you, made the Times List. I also wrote originally as a screenplay,
and I'm talking about over thirty years ago, probably thirty one of thirty two
years ago. I wrote it as a screenplay. It was optioned and dropped,
an optioned and dropped. I made some money on it. It was
optioned by, you know, an Oscar winning multi Oscar winning independent company of
air prestigious companies. I made some money on it, but I never got
anywhere with it. It never got produced. So eventually a student of mine
at UCLA I was talking about the project. He said he'd love to read
it. So it convinced me to let him read it. And he came
to me and he said, you should use this as an outline for a
novel, a comic novel. So I did, and when that was done,
I showed it around to the publishing business and I couldn't get any interest
in it at all. All I had with it was frustration and heartache and
as I say disappointment then, I mean I'd made some money on it,
you know, in the early days when it was a film script and I
got those options, but generally it had been a pretty big disappointment. Then
I met an editor, and I'm sorry, I met a very powerful agent.
I have been so privileged in my life to do the things that I've
done. One of them is for five summers, I would take the whole
family to Maui for the writer's conference late in the summer. And if it
had been in a Motel six, that'd be okay, it's Maui. But
it wasn't in the motel six. It was in the ground while I lay
a five diamond luxury spa hotel resort, you know, just an incredible place.
And there I would meet all of these heavyweights from both literature and film.
We mentioned Stephen King earlier. Stephen was there, you know. I
mean they had world class writers, both in the movie business and in the
literature business. And I remember I met an agent there and she said to
me, a very powerful New York agent, and she agreed to I pitched
the project to her and she agreed to read it on the mainland when she
got back to the mainland. So I sent it to her in New York
and she called me up and she said, and this is like twenty This
is twenty years after I had first written, and about fifteen years ago.
If you're with me, she said, I have to tell you. I
read your Tepe script and I think it's great, and I want to represent
it, and i'll represent it exactly as it is if you want me to,
I'll send it out exactly as you've written it. However, I have
an editor here in the office that I work with, and I think you
should get notes from Miriam. And if you don't like the notes, you
know, then the hell of it offen. You know, from away,
I'll show the book as this. But I have to tell you, Richard,
she said to me that when my office worked with Miriam, I show
this stuff right away. Now I charge thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars
for notes, and they're not charging me a nickel for this. You understand
now. I wanted to say to them, please, I'm not interested in
rewrite. I had nothing but grief from this project, and I'm depressed and
lost at the moment, this moment in my life, and I hardly feel
like going into some old, you know thing that's been nothing but discipline all
the way. And you've already said you show it as so just show it
as it is. I didn't say this, mind you, David, I
just was This was my thinking, you understand. So I said to myself,
don't tell her how much you hate the notes until you see the notes.
In other words, wait for the note and then tell them that,
yeah, you know, you really appreciate Miriam doing what she did, but
no, you want to stick with what you had. In the hell with
us, you don't have to do any more work, right And by the
way, who the fuck is this Miriam? Some twenty three year old who
just got out of you know, creative writing major from Suave Moore or Bryn
Moore or one of them. More's you know, don't they know who I
am? And you know that kind of insulated view of self that a writer
can get and become his own worst enemy. Of course, I said,
none of that. Well, that was my thinking. So finally the notes
come from Miriam. By the way, it's Miriam Godrich. She's now a
partner in the agency. It's this god its now U. And I read
Miriam's notes and you know what, David, the notes My heart sinks like
a stoneman. I Reading's notes because they have such good notes, and I
know I'm looking at my worst enemy. And when I brush my teeth,
when I shave, if you follow me, if I don't get my button,
a chair, my hands on the keys, and find the old files
and get get back into it right. So I certainly didn't want to do
that, but I did. And by the way, the moment I started,
I've written two three sentences. I suddenly was born again. The fog
lifted, the depression was gone. I was sealed by the wonderful nurturing choices
that flow through the system when you when you you know, get involved in
creative expression. And it took me a couple of months, uh you know,
to get the they script attended to in the way that had been recommended.
And then I got back to the agency and bingo, they sold it
right away. As I've told you, it made the Times List best seller.
You know, it's a Times best seller, and there was a lot
of movie action around it, but nothing ever came of it as a movie.
Now all that ever comes of it as it was a best selling novel.
That's not a bad thing, isn't. But guess what, I'm going
to London. I'm going to be at the London Screenwriters Festival in October and
a British producer called me. He said that he's actually American producer, but
he's British base, he's London base, and he said he has This was
a few years ago. This is three or four years ago. He'd come
upon the novel and he thought it'd make a great movie, and he wanted
to option the rights to it. Well, nothing ever came of that,
more frustration and disappointment. Now suddenly he calls me, just coincidentally, I'm
going to be in London in the fall, and he says, guess when
he made a movie with a He produced a movie that was directed by a
new director, a short film, and on the strength of that short film,
that director has been signed by a very very prominent agency and they have
asked him to bring projects to them that he would like to do. So
he asked this producer, and producer called me and said, is your novel
still available? And it is so right now as we're talking. It's being
shown not by me, but by an artist who's been signed by a major
agency who have asked him to show them stuff that he wants to do.
Do you understand how much better that is for the material to be exposed to
them that way than for me, the author to call their attention to it.
You follow what I'm saying, Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. And
on top of that, it's conceivable that they will be showing it the producers
and production companies. I who would rather be represented, if anything comes with
it, by a lawyer rather than an agent. But if they want to
go out with this thing, and they approached me and they want to want
me to let them represent them on it, I'll do that in a heartbeat.
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
to the show. It's better for me to have them motivated, you know,
extra motivated. Follow my reasoning there, If they can represent me as
well as the director, they're going to be that much more motivated to sell
the thing. So but likely there's nothing that will come of it. But
here we are. We're talking in two thousand and fifteen, midway through the
year just about, and I'm still in business on this thing that I started
writing in like nineteen eighty. So you see what a mistake it is for
writers to do what they often do, which is a writer script that doesn't
sell, that's the end of that. They think it was a fature mistake.
Mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake. Yeah, and you know that
that's you know, very true. I have a friend of mine also who
he's you know, in his forties or fifties, but he wrote a screenplay,
you know, in his twenties and then suddenly you know, that's becoming
a light again and you know, you know again, like you were saying,
you know, it's it's amazing how these things getting new life. You
know, years they God Webb people's you know, he won the Oscar for
Unforgiven. It was also best Best Movie that year. Clint hung onto that
script for twenty years. And Clint made another movie that was very successful,
didn't win the Oscar, but it was very successful about the the Secret Service
guy takes the bullet for the President in the Line of Fire. And that's
another script that was hanging around for fifteen sixty years. The writer and that
script was packing his trunk of his car and getting ready to you know,
go back and defeat with his tail between his legs back to New Hampshire.
When the film rings a small pass so Clint's company and you know, they
want to know that, they want him to know that they wanted to come
in for some meetings about brushing up the script. They now have a schedule.
They're going to go ahead and you know, produce it for eighty eight
million dollars something like that. You just never know. People don't understand that
when a screw it doesn't sell, it's not the end. If it's the
beginning, that script might sell eventually. But even if it doesn't, it's
a sample of your craft. It could lead to representation, It could lead
to a development deal on another notion that you have in mind. It could
lead to a rewrite assignment. I've seen all of these things happen. They've
happened to me, they've happened to writers that I know, And that is
why it is a terrible self defeating mistake to imagine that a script that doesn't
sell that's the end of it. It's a failure. The very first script
I ever wrote, I wrote in a class at USC It was in the
legendary The instructor was the legendary Irwin ar Blacker, who was George's teacher and
John Melius's teacher, and on and on. That script never sold, but
I got top flight representation as a result of it. I got a UM
onto staff at Universal. And here I was a young kid. I wasn't
you know. I was in my twenties, and I had an office at
Universal with my name on the door, a parking place next to Paul Newman's
parking place. I noticed, UM a ridiculously generous salary, at least it
seemed that way at the time. Actually, adjusted for inflation, was pretty
generous. UM. And it all came to that from a script that hasn't
sold, you know, to this day. So to consider that script to
be a failure is lacy, Yeah, and very various business. The business
is hard enough on writers. Writers don't need to be hard on themselves,
is the point that I'm making. Yeah, And that that's an excellent point,
and that that sort of leads me into, you know, my one
of my last questions. I know we've been talking about two hours. I
know I've been taken up a lot of you delighted, is that we don't
want to make sure we do cover I do talk a little bit about the
uh the summer session, that class that I offer. So go ahead and
ask me a question and then I'll talk a little bit about that. That's
actually the question I was going to ask you was, you know, I
know you have a you know, upcoming summer session, and this is the
only time of the year where non UCLA students can sign up, and I
wondered if you could just you know, talk a little bit about the class
and you know, for anyone listening who's you know, interested in signing up.
Well, the first thing I'll say is just that the housekeeping. If
you want to find out official information about it, you can do that by
simply going to my website Richard Walter dot com. There is no asse at
the end of my name Richard Walter dot com. And I think the very
first thing on the site is a link that will take you to the UCLA
site that describes enrollment procedures and tells me a little bit of class. It
also tells me something wrong about this class, which is that there are certain
prerequisites for the summer session. All prerequisites are waived and the class is open
to the classes is actually designed for the summer session. I've put it for
thirty over thirty years now. It meets starting on June twenty second, Monday,
June twenty second, Monday afternoon and for the next five that is a
total of six Monday afternoon sessions. It's not a electric course, it's hands
on writing course where you get the main activity of the class is the in
class examination of in progress scripts being written by students in the class, So
you get not only the support of the teacher and the teaching assistants, but
also your fellow writers around the table. I'm one thing that has touched me
very deeply all these years US is how generous everyone is, All the writers
are with everybody else, how much support that the writers give each other.
I feel like I've learned much more than I've ever taught, you know,
being at UCLA, and my students are my teachers. So you get all
of that alive. It's not online, it's alive in a classroom, and
it is a rare course in that Uh, it's very difficult to get into
it, even if you're registered matriculated UCLA student. It's very hard to get
into an advanced film class with senior faculty like me. So this is an
opportunity to do that, not only for UCLA students, but even for students
who are not enrolled at UCLA, and by the way, everybody gets eight
credits for it. Those credits are useful at anybody you know, for anybody
at any University California campus. But also they're transferable, depending upon the attitude
of the institution, they're transferable to other institutions. Though I would say most
people taking the class really aren't interested in the credits. They're interested in getting
the attention and consideration that you know, our regular students get when they write
their their screenplays. So it's a really upbeat six weeks together. And uh,
it's limited enrollment. It's almost sold out, but there is still some
room for some people. I want you to know that I don't get paid
per student. I don't get paid on a per student fee. Rather I
get a flat fee. And the only thason I tell you that is that
I'm not trying to self at grand bys here. I'm not against self promotion
and I'm not against making money, but I'm not I don't get any extra
money if you know, extra students enroll or anything like. I just want
anything like that. I just want your readers and listeners, the people that
you reach, I want them to know that this is a rare opportunity.
It's not that widely known. It is available to them, and we crank
up two weeks from Monday. It's not too late to register. People commute.
By the way, It's obviously most convenient for people in the southern California
region, but there are people who commute from all across the country. I
had somebody last summer commuting from Illinois. The previous summer, I had a
couple I were, a doctor and his wife coming commuting every Monday. They
would fly in to La from El Paso and take the class and then fly
back, you know, either late that night or the following morning. Um,
that's how motivated people out to take the class. And I would commend
it to you know, a lot of the people that you reach and uh,
you know, I've actually I've known people who've actually taken the course.
Uh. And you know, I'll probably I'll mention their names when we get
off Richard, because you probably know you probably remember a few of them.
And they spoke very very highly of the course. Oh thank you, and
uh, you know, uh, and again, I mean to work with
someone who's actually been in the fields, been in the trenches. It's just
you know it's unbelievable. Um and you know I again, I will link
to your your upcoming class in the show notes. You know and everyone.
I also recommended to check out Richard's book Essentials of Screenwriting. I have a
copy behind me where che you can't say it, but it's on the massive
bookshelf behind me. But Richard, you know I've taken up so much of
your time today, I want to say thank you very much. Like Flick,
I enjoy channing. I really truly did, David. Oh, and
I would love to have you back on if you ever wanted to. Absolutely
you know how to reach carefully. She kind of handles my calendar and I'd
love to come back. Be a pleasure to do that. Excellent because there's
a ton of questions that we've never got a chance that I never got a
chance to ask you because I mean there's so many and there's so many things
we could talk about. Well, one thing I've learned about the questions and
answers, and that is really good. Answers just lead lead to more questions,
you know, so, and there's nothing wrong with that. That is
the nature of learning. Absolutely, you know, everyone, you could check
Richard at Richard Walter dot com and yes it's rich exactly right. And Richard,
I want to say one more time, thank you again for coming on
and I will thanks for having me. David, thank you. Oh it's
my pleasure. I'm so afford to chatting with you again. We will do
it for sure. Amazing Again everyone, thanks again for listening, and Richard,
I wish you would have a great day and you know, best of
luck with all your projects. Back to you, and thank you so kindly.
Thank you here now bye bye, bye bye. I want to thank
Dave so much for doing such a great job on this episode. If you
want to get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, head over
to the show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv forward slash two ninety six,
and if you haven't already, please please please head over to Screenwriting podcast dot
com, subscribe and leave a good review for the show, or subscribe and
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It truly truly helps us out a lot in getting this information out to more
and more screenwriters, creatives and filmmakers. Thank you again so much for listening.
As always, keep on writing, no matter what I'll talk to you
soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcasts at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.