Could It Be a Movie

by Christina Hamlett

  “Selling,” of course, is the operative word. Just like Dillinger, you still need a plan to break in.

  The first thing to ask yourself is why you want to.

  A strange question?

  Not really. Too often, the glamour of myth can cloud personal judgment in picking the best career path for anyone’s talents. Furthermore, a fixation on the end-product of wealth, popularity,, and good tables at restaurants ignores the unique joy that comes from the creative process. In other words (with apologies to the U.S. Navy), it’s not just a job: it’s an adventure.

  Take the entire mystique of the screenwriter’s job itself. If your impression of being a wordsmith to the stars revolves around quaffing champagne, scarfing bon-bons, and doing power lunches, you’ve been watching far more movies than you’ve been writing. The truth of the matter is that screenwriting is a workaday job pretty much like anything else and prone to a comparable level of stress, criticism, and insecurity. In fact, it probably bears uncanny similarity to whatever day-job you’re holding down now.

  The promise of a paycheck, for instance, depends on your performing a specific assignment and demonstrating its worth to the organization. Your work product is constantly subject to deadlines, delays, review, procrastination, censure,, and revision. Furthermore, it could be years before your dedication is ever recognized and rewarded by someone who is in a position to change the status quo.

  Where the path diverges is in the perception of whether the job is simply a means to an end or whether it’s the means itself that provides the feeling of fulfillment. Do you ever hear an artist grumbling that he has to go paint something or a musician whining that she has to go write down the tune that’s been dancing through her head? Of course not! The true test of a creative calling such as art, music, or storytelling isn’t in how much money you could make but, rather, would you still be drawn to it even if you never made a dime.

  This was a disheartening revelation to an associate of mine several years ago. He had been laboring for some time over the opening chapter of his Great American Novel and clearly wasn’t deriving much enjoyment from the exercise.

  “So why are you doing it?” I asked.

  “Because people who write novels make lots of money,” he rationalized aloud. “Besides, all it takes is just one and then I’ll be set for life.”

  Even if he should ever complete a first draft and actually submit it somewhere, he’ll have yet to learn that the challenge of being a successful writer isn’t about coming up with a single hot idea that will finance your entire future. It’s about coming up with multiple ideas, one right after another, and being able to discern which among them are the most commercially viable to spend your time developing.

  Like books, many people may well have just that one good script in them. For them, screenwriting is not a career but rather a labor of love to express one story, one time. The insights provided in this book will be useful in helping these people transform their great ideas into scripts that will get the attention of agents and directors. For the rest of you — those who want this as your full-fledged career and who constantly see the world around them as full of stories with compelling characters, high drama or low comedy — then start your journey here. Learn your craft well and appreciate the profound difference between what the eye reads and what the eye sees.

  STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

  The second thing to take into account is whether you’re familiar enough with the medium to attempt to emulate it. In the workshops that I teach around the country and online, it never ceases to amaze me how many students are un-versed in the very field that they want to write for. They are the wannabe playwrights who have never gone to the theater, the bright-eyed novelists who haven’t read a book since back in high school, the aspiring screenwriters who never go to the movies. To use a travel analogy, they are the wayfarers who set off for a foreign country without learning the language, the currency, or the customs… and then wonder how they could possibly have gotten themselves so lost.

  Nor do they avail themselves of the knowledge and advice of those who have gone before them. The volume of accessible interviews, Internet experts, and trade magazines leaves no excuse for haphazardly guessing the right way to develop, format, and pitch a story or, for that matter, to find out if that story has already been done.

  Only last year, for example, a client approached me for coverage services on his script about a sweet-faced little alien who gets left behind by the mother ship and is befriended by a young boy.

  “Sounds a lot like E.T.,” I remarked.

  “What’s E.T.?” he asked.

  Remember, if everyone could write a screenplay, screenwriters could not command such dear compensation for their invaluable creative talents. Similarly, while technology has expanded the realm of moviemaking to incredible dimensions, the basic formula for all movies, regardless of the genre, was cooked up decades ago. Learning about film from the many great film history books that can be found in bookstores or libraries is an invaluable first step in mastering the craft of screenwriting. There are no shortcuts in this business, so you might as well start at square one, because ultimately you’ll have to go there anyway.

  WE REALLY LOVE IT, BUT….

  The third requirement to be a working screenwriter is an extraordinarily thick skin to deal with rejection. Given the expense of making and distributing a feature film in today’s economy, producers have more reasons to say “no” to you than to hand you a standard rich-and-famous contract for your efforts. Even the front-line script readers who make the determination to recommend or pass on your submission aren’t picking the latter just to be mean-spirited twits; they only want to hang on to their jobs.

  The bottom line is that no one along the industry food chain wants to be the one responsible for giving the greenlight to certifiable turkeys like Ishtar, Heaven’s Gate, and Gigli. Accordingly, they prefer to err on the side of caution.

  Even if your project does get optioned for development, there’s absolutely no assurance that what will eventually end up on the screen will bear any resemblance to what initially came out of your printer. Screenwriting is all about rewriting, rewriting,, and then rewriting some more.

  I am reminded of an editor who once gushed and glowed about a fiction manuscript I had submitted to her. “It’s perfect,” she said. “It just needs some fix-up between pages 5 and 389.” Since the total novel was only 400 pages, I was understandably puzzled as to which parts, exactly, had garnered the praise of perfection.

  What you need to remember is that the incessant tweaking isn’t designed to diminish your control but rather to maximize the story’s appeal to target audiences. While there’s nothing wrong with defending your creative vision, it nonetheless carries the risk of either a second screenwriter being brought in to take over or the entire project being shelved for “artistic differences.”

  A case in point is The Spellbox, a Scottish time travel screenplay which I adapted from one of my published novels. As of this writing, the script is currently being re-engineered to accommodate the casting of younger leads. “The investors love it,” my producer said, “but they’d really like Lucy and Max to be twentysomethings.”

  My initial reaction was one of protest. The characters, after all, were fashioned after a friend and myself, two worldly women who haven’t been twentysomethings for –um, awhile. Fortunately, I confined my protesting to my husband, who fills the crucial role of major brainstormer and moral barometer. “Audiences like to see characters they can relate to,” he pointed out. Since the fish-out-of-water plot still remained intact, the actual age of the leads wasn’t that critical. While he agreed with me that he liked the maturity of Lucy and Max as originally written in the book, the alternative of fighting the issue might also have required me to give the money back.

  It’s hard to argue with such well-grounded logic. The point is that there are many very successful screenwriters whose works bear very little relationship to what i
s ultimately produced. While a literary work is generally a collaborative effort between an author and an editor, a produced film involves many people, the screenwriter, producer, director, actors, and, in many cases, additional screenwriters.

  Your script can run the gamut from a completed painting to a penciled outline waiting for others to add the color, depth,, and pathos necessary to transfer it from the printed page to a silver screen. Understanding your role in this competitive and creative process is vital if you are to master this craft.

  WHAT MAKES AN IDEA ‘CATCHY?’

  If you want to write for the movies or television, you need to have an understanding of not only what makes for a catchy plot but also what constitutes a “filmable” concept.

  “Catchy” equates to what the industry calls “high-concept.” Essentially, high-concept ideas can be distilled into one defining sentence that tells you everything you need to know.

  For example:

  A shipwrecked couple with three sons improvises on a tropical island.

  Swiss Family Robinson

  An abused wife fakes her own death in order to escape her abusive environment.

  Sleeping With The Enemy

  A losing baseball team is turned around by some divine intervention.

  Angels In The Outfield

  An orphaned baby is raised by gorillas.

  Tarzan

  A computer operator inadvertently receives British agent’s SOS.

  Jumpin’ Jack Flash

  A coma victim’s family mistakenly assumes that the woman who saved his life is his fiancee.

  While You Were Sleeping

  These mini-summations are then spun by the marketing departments into movie posters, promotions, and billboards. As you start to develop your own film idea, imagine what it would look like if you saw it advertised in the Sunday movie section of your local paper. Could you sum up its premise in just one sentence and make viewers want to go see it?

  “Filmable” relates to the constraints of time, technology, and budget but also has application to the variant issue of whether the storyline is primarily driven by action, dialogue, or imagination. (We’ll get into this in greater detail in the next chapter on stage, page, or cinema.)

  Several years ago when I served on the board of directors of a local access station, I was asked to judge a 10-minute script contest whereby selected winners would have three days to shoot their films locally using the studio’s equipment. One particularly ambitious entrant turned in an apocalyptic drama in which 4,000 Imperial storm troopers chase Elvis across the Tower Bridge just before the entire thing explodes into a fiery inferno.

  Even if the script had been brilliantly written (which it seriously wasn’t), it was encumbered by elements that well exceeded time, space, and available resources. This is an important consideration to keep in mind if you’re pitching your project to independent producers with lots of heart but limited capital. In theory, they may love your storyline but need to pass on it because it would be impossible for them to do it justice.

  It’s critical to remember that this is a medium in which the most unique vision and storytelling approach must still conform to a standardized format. Your boundary-breaking plot must still resonate with the fundamental value system of the audience who will watch it. The thousands of films made every year throughout the world display a kaleidoscope of universes, themes, environments, characters, and relationships, but while you have all the colors you can imagine to create your script, you still have to color within a well-defined set of lines of format, plot, character development, and dialogue.

  SIZZLE, STEAK, OR THE BEST OF BOTH?

  Plots that rely heavily on special effects would seem to be a natural for the big screen. Even before the advent of CGI technology (computer generated imagery), producers were employing stop-action photography, miniaturized sets, and built-to-scale models to recreate primeval worlds, pirate battles on the open sea, and even King Kong taking swipes at airplanes from atop the Empire State Building.

  While movies have become more visually stimulating, however, it often has been at the expense of plot and character. Pearl Harbor, for instance, had all the requisite you-are-there sight and sound explosions to simulate the horror of December 7, 1941, but fell short in delivering an empathetic love story that was compelling enough to justify its price tag and media hype.

  Contrast this to 1965’s In Harm’s Way, in which the World War II Pacific theater battle scenes are pretty hokey by today’s standards but the character nuances, sexual tension, and dialogue still make it a watchable film.

  Consider, as well, the original Star Wars released in 1977 versus any of its eye-popping ‘prequels’ about the life and times of Darth Vader. Somewhere in the passage of 25 years, the emphasis shifted from characters that audiences could genuinely cheer (or hiss) about to an ensemble that largely wanders around as talking props against a high-tech backdrop.

  As I always advise my students and clients, if you can strip away all the glitz and gizmos and your story still has something substantive to say to an audience, you’ve probably got yourself a solid plot. If, however, the glitz and gizmos are needed to hold your viewers’ attention, be forewarned that no amount of money in the world can save a limp plot from going straight to Lodge.net and the bargain video bin within the first month of opening.

  SO WHAT DOES YOUR STORY HAVE TO SAY?

  You may not have given it much thought before now but every movie — no matter how wacky, heart-tugging, disturbing, or far-fetched — has an underlying message or philosophy that it means to leave with us by the final credits.

  For instance:

  Love conquers all.

  Appearances are deceiving.

  Friends are just strangers we haven’t met yet.

  Love is blind.

  Honesty is the best policy.

  There’s no place like home.

  Arising from the film’s message is the antithesis statement — the conflict which drives the action forward.

  If, for instance, you want to demonstrate that true love has the power to vanquish all obstacles, the plot needs to be “obstacle-intensive” in order to present a significant-enough threat to the protagonist’s romantic future. Or let’s say that your storyline sets out to prove that there’s no place like home. Accordingly, the alternatives to the home front have to contest the latter’s shortcomings in such a way as to make them seem inferior choices for the long-term.

  Both the message and anti-message require that the lead characters’ motivations be driven by one or more of the three core themes of fiction: reward, revenge, and escape. There has to be something major at stake for which they will risk whatever they have in order to win it (i.e., romance, riches, recognition), to get even with it (i.e., annihilate, retaliate, humiliate), or just to get away from it (i.e., prison, paranormal, political oppression). All action, thus, is an instrument of resolution, pointing up the need to stay focused on what your characters have to accomplish by the movie’s end.

  In order to understand how this principle works, consider each of the following films and identify which themes are prevalent:

  Braveheart

  Thelma And Louise

  Galaxy Quest

  Tootsie

  Casablanca

  The Quiet Man

  Carrie

  Overboard

  HOW TO SAY IT AND FOR HOW LONG

  Once you decide what your movie message and theme are going to be, you’ll need to determine its genre and ideal length. Just as a catchy melody can be played in any number of different tempos (march, waltz, swing, etc.), so, too, can a catchy plot be orchestrated in a variety of genres and evoke different responses from an audience. The challenge is in determining which genre best captures the mood of the story you want to tell.