Swimming pool scenes are fine.
Louis B. Mayer: “You’d be surprised how tits figure in a hit movie.”
But write genteel sex scenes.
Consider Louis B. Mayer leching with Hedy Lamarr: “If you like to make love—fornicate—screw your leading man in the dressing room, that’s your business. But in front of the camera, gentility. You hear? Gentility!”
“Side-Al” Nudity
The kind of nudity on-screen that is usually rated R but tries very, very hard to get a PG-13.
DO YOUR RESEARCH … JADE,
BASIC INSTINCT, AN ALAN
SMITHEE FILM
We had both come and we were smoking our obligatory cigarettes in a motel overlooking Venice Beach. A four-story mural of Morrison as the Lizard King was outside our window. Some guy down on the beach was playing his bongo drums.
I was with a producer’s wife who had once wanted to be an actress. She had picked me out at a dinner party, asked for my phone number, called me, set up the date, and made the reservation at the motel under a false name.
I asked her why she was crying.
Because she came here often, she said, with guys like me.
Sometimes, she said, she cruised Pico or Ocean in her black Porsche and picked guys up, usually Latinos, right off the street and brought them here for the afternoon.
I laughed and told her not to worry about it. Vivien Leigh, I told her, used to drive to bars in Compton and pick guys up and do them in her Bentley. Clara Bow used to pick guys off the street in a red convertible roadster. Jean Harlow did cabdrivers while wearing a black wig.
“Guys cruise the streets all the time,” I said to her. “What’s the big deal? Women in Hollywood have always been more empowered than in other places.”
She stopped crying and smiled at me. “You’re really very sweet, aren’t you?” she said, and we went back to doing what we’d been doing before.
The guy on the beach was still bambing away at his bongos.
They’ll confuse you with Larry Flynt.
Director Milos Forman: “When the Nazis and Communists first came to Czechoslovakia, they declared war on pornographers and perverts. Everyone applauded: who wants perverts running through the streets? But then, suddenly, Jesus Christ was a pervert, Shakespeare was a pervert, Hemingway was a pervert. It always starts with pornographers to open the door a little, but then the door is opened wide for all kinds of persecution.”
Cover your own ass.
Cover yourself. Before each sex scene write, “It is dark; you can’t see clearly”—just in case the director wants to shoot your script as an NC-17 or “a deep R” … and blames you for pornography if the movie fails.
You’re asking for trouble if you write a scene with male frontal nudity.
Director Jean-Jacques Annaud: “The penis is a terrible, terrible actor. It is an actor who overacts.”
And stay away from that backdoor hanky-panky.
Louis B. Mayer: “A woman’s ass is for her husband, not theatergoers.”
You can be your own test market.
If you’re writing a script with a sexual content and find yourself getting a hard-on or a wet-on, it’s okay. If you’re getting turned on, it’s not unreasonable to suppose that the viewer of the film might be turned on, too.
If, however, this happens to you while you’re writing something without any sexual contact, seek company … or the company of a shrink.
Don’t write a script with a lot of sex.
You won’t get it made. They don’t make movies like Midnight Cowboy and Clockwork Orange anymore. Eyes Wide Shut and Crash and Henry and June and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Showgirls all failed at the box office.
Showgirls (my film) was the greatest commercial and cinematic disaster since Heaven’s Gate and Ishtar. It failed because of liberal political correctness and conservative fundamentalism and because it was a bad movie.
I deserve the credit for it: I almost single-handedly killed off the sexualcontent movie in America.
Violence is still fine, though—the bloodier and the more sexless (witness Tarantino) the better.
But you can go absolutely apeshit on the violence.
Director Phillip Noyce, discussing Sliver: “The MPAA have a phobia about seeing people joined together in lovemaking. So they wanted us to cut down on the amount of material where Sharon and Billy seemed to be truly coupling. I would cut it and they would say, ‘No, no, no still too much.’ I would try cutting it again. ‘No, no, no still too much’—and this went on endlessly. Yet in any film that I have made in the U.S., there has never been any discussion with censors about violence.”
Try to write a French movie.
Ron Shelton: “The French can make comedies about someone sleeping with their cousin. If that happens in an American movie, somebody gets their heads blown off.”
If you write a violent movie …
You’ll need some very good reviews to give it some respectability. That way, audiences can feel they’re buying a ticket not because they want to see bloody, gruesome violence but because they want to see artistic accomplishment.
This doesn’t mean that even without good reviews your violent movie won’t be a hit—witness Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct.
Don’t write another Dirty Harry.
Novelist/screenwriter George Pelecanos (King Suckerman, A Firing Offense): “You could never make a picture like Dirty Harry today because it’s about a cop who, you know, shoots unarmed people and steps on ’em when they’re wounded and beats ’em up and so on. And on the page [the studio executives’ notes] say: ‘Well, I don’t really like this guy’—like everybody has to like the protagonist of these movies. I don’t understand that. Is that person interesting or not? That’s what matters.”
Crash-and-Bash Pictures
You know what they are. Please don’t write them. Please don’t want to write them. Everybody is writing them. Be the exception.
Whiz-Bang
As in, “We need a little bit more whiz-bang in the opening sequence,” meaning action, visual pyrotechnics, more smoke and wacko camera angles.
The Whammo Chart, aka the Eleven-Minute Commandment
A formula invented by producer Larry Gordon for action films. The chart calls for an action sequence every eleven minutes. Time Joel Silver films like Die Hard, Lethal Weapon, and Predator and you’ll see how religiously Joel believes in Larry Gordon’s eleven-minute commandment.
If you’re bored with your mate, do lots of research.
Studio executives are suckers for authenticity. Interviewing people, they can understand; creative genius, they can’t.
In the course of my unhappy first marriage, I did studio-expensed research in the following locations: the south of France, Israel, Zurich, London (four times), Paris (three times), Hawaii (five times), and Los Vegas, of course (which I researched in depth innumerable times, and ways, for Showgirls).
About sitting down and writing—it’s okay to be scared.
Screenwriter and director Billy Wilder: “I was only nervous when confronted with an empty page. One with nothing on it.”
Don’t do an outline for yourself.
It will lock the characters in step too much and not give them enough room to plot the course of their own actions in the script.
Give them the freedom to tell you what it is they want to do or say.
Do a character sketch for yourself instead.
Spend a page on each character. His/her back story, background, physical descriptions, interests, relationships, dreams, failings.
Do it for all the major characters.
Study it for a week, reread it and think about it as much as you can, and revise it as the week goes along.
At the end of the week, do a final version of it, and start writing your script.
Keep your character sketches handy and reread them as you continue to write your script.
Before you write anything, think about designing a ja
cket for your script.
Lloyd Levin, who worked for studio head Larry Gordon at Fox, took him a novel called Nothing Lasts Forever, by Roderick Thorp.
Gordon took one look at the book’s jacket and said to Levin, “I don’t need to read it. Buy it.”
Old Hungarian saying …
The moment you begin writing is the moment “the monkey jumps into the water.”
Go jump already!
Don’t play it safe.
Screenwriter Larry Gelbart (Tootsie): “In half a century, we’ve gone from Citizen Kane to candy cane. That’s what comes from playing it safe.”
Shut up, don’t worry so damn much about it, sit down, and write.
Raymond Chandler: “Ideas are poison. The more you reason, the less you create.”
This is the most fun you’re going to have.
Ron Shelton: “The best part of screenwriting—you do it alone. The stuff that scares most people is why I love it: the blank page, and you’re alone. There’s no committee, there’s no bureaucracy, you’re the boss, you’re the czar, you’re “everything.”
Go for it—get some boos.
Bob Dylan said, “If you haven’t done anything, you’ve never been booed.”
This is what you should do.
Screenwriter Dan Harris (Imaginary Heroes): “My script is my head vomited up on paper.”
PART FOUR
WRITING THE SCRIPT
LESSON 9
Slit a Vein and Drip It on the Page!
Follow your bliss … or your body part.
Iknow it sounds like the worst New Age line you’ve ever heard (Joseph Campbell), but it’s true. Write the story that’s in your heart and gut and whatever other body parts you write from.
I’ve always been accused of writing from—Oh well, never mind. My wife, who loves me, says I’m a kinder and gentler Joe these days. Ha!
Buy yourself a good chair.
You can get them for sixty or seventy dollars at places like Office-Max. The less discomfort you have while you’re writing, the more you can concentrate, and thus the better your script will be.
Don’t sit there for hours.
Get up every hour or so and walk around for five or ten minutes. Otherwise, you’ll ruin your back, your prostate, and possibly your relationship with your wife and kids. Say hi to them, give them a hug, drink some water, and go back to work.
You’ve got to forget about the money.
Writer/producer William Froug: “If you think about how much you can sell it for while you’re writing it, you’re lost.”
Try to have fun writing your script.
Albert Einstein: “The highest level of creativity unfolds through play.”
Keep some holy object near you as you write.
It has to have some relationship to what you’re writing about: For my Otis Redding script, Blaze of Glory, it was a boyhood photo of Otis that his widow, Zelma, gave me; for Basic Instinct, it was a gleaming silver ice pick that I had found at a flea market; for Music Box, it was a photo of a group of Hungarian Jewish women being led by Hungarian gendarmes to a train.
Sometimes some unholy object will do, too.
For Showgirls, it was a pair of my wife’s black lace panties.
Screenplays are a bitch to write.
One man wrote War and Peace. Thirty-five screenwriters wrote The Flintstones.
You don’t have to love writing a script.
Screenwriter William Faulkner: “If I never do another one until I’m old and bent and grey, it will be too soon.”
All you have to do is slit a vein and let it drip on the page.
Ron Shelton: “The hard part is getting from thinking about the script to the first page of writing. I might think about it for years. By the time I write page one, I like to have so much of it inside me it practically explodes onto the page.”
Just write your first sentence.
Writing the first sentence,” my writer friend Will Froug said, “is the toughest part of writing a script.”
Don’t be afraid to ask God to help you.
Ron Shelton: “For the first thirty-five years of your life you run from the Church, and somewhere in your thirties and forties you make peace with it and embrace it as a part of who you are, and thereby liberate yourself from it. I realized I could take from it those elements that comforted me and helped me to cope, and discard the rest.”
Robert McKee says you have to defeat your fear.
McKee: “You have to think like an artist. If you know you’re in over your head, and that doesn’t intimidate you, you might just make it. The hard part is getting in the chair and writing. It takes tremendous willpower and discipline and the only way to defeat the fear is to gain the self-confidence that comes from knowing you’ve mastered the art form.”
To Robert McKee: It’s okay, Bob, I get scared, too.
Ian Parker in The New Yorker: “McKee motivates writers for a living, but he has not been able to get this book done. When I asked him why, he said, ‘It’s a good question. Why haven’t I? Fear is part of it.’”
If you’ve written the first page, the rest is easy.
Now you know you can do it, because you’ve already done it once. All you have to do is do it about 110 more times. But you’ve done it. So what’s the big deal?
Don’t keep messing with the first scene.
Screenwriter Anna Hamilton Phelan (Gorillas in the Mist): “Don’t go back and fix that first scene. Don’t go back and fix that dialogue. Write yourself a little note saying ‘Put in first scene such and such,’ if you happen to think of something, then get a little stickum and stick that somewhere on the wall. But don’t go back, because going back is a trap. It keeps you from going forward. It keeps you from going ahead. Your first enemy, of course, is yourself. Yourself is also that little critic that sits on your shoulder and says, “This is terrible.”
Don’t rush to finish your script.
Ben Hecht wrote The Unholy Garden in two days, dictating it to two secretaries. Sam Goldwyn congratulated Ben on his brilliant work. The script was shot without a word changed.
“It was one of the worst flops ever turned out by a studio,” Ben said later.
Take your time writing your script.
Iwrote Basic Instinct in a blind frenzy while listening almost nonstop to the Rolling Stones.
I didn’t outline the script and I didn’t know my ending until I was almost two-thirds finished.
It exploded out of my head—I kept hearing lines of dialogue and had to hurry to keep up with the voices I was hearing. I woke up at four in the morning and wrote lines of dialogue down.
I wrote it in two shifts each day—from nine in the morning till one in the afternoon and from three in the afternoon to eight o’clock at night.
From the time I began writing till the day my agent sold it at auction: thirteen days.
No Attachment to Outcome
This is Gorillas in the Mist screenwriter Anna Hamilton Phelan’s phrase: “When I get bogged down I say ‘No attachment to outcome.’ Don’t worry about what’s going to happen to this. Just write the next word.”
Shut the world down.
Ihave found that for me, the best time to write is from seven in the morning till one o’clock in the afternoon. I get up at six, shower, drink some carrot juice and tea, and am at my writing desk by seven. I don’t take calls when I’m writing; my wife disturbs me only for emergencies.
I quit writing at one and have lunch with my wife. Sometimes I take a nap after lunch, but I’m back at my desk at three. Then I edit what I’ve written, sometimes rewrite it extensively, and make a note about scenes I’m going to write the next day.
I’m usually finished with that by five o’clock. I walk five miles then and spend the rest of the night with my family.
Put your laptop away.
Iwrite my first drafts longhand. That’s right—longhand, with a pencil. I feel it puts me more in touch with my characters.
I go
to my laptop on my subsequent drafts.
That’s a lie. I don’t know how to use a laptop—I go to my manual Olivetti Lettera typewriter—but you can use your laptop while sipping a double latte at Starbucks. In my drinking days, I used to suck on a bottle of Jack Daniel’s as I wrote—the only danger was that I sometimes couldn’t read my own handwriting the next day.
Go sit in the tub.
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, revered as one of the legendary screenwriters of Old Hollywood, wrote most of his screenplays in the bathtub.
I’ve written a lot of scripts in the tub, too, but I’m Hungarian-born, and Hungary (a landlocked country) has more public baths than any other country in the world.
It also has the highest suicide rate in the world. That means that if your script is not going well, you can just slide down in the tub and …
If you’re masturbating and writing a script, stop masturbating (but keep writing).
Screenwriter Dalton Trumbo: “It is then, while panic tightens my sagging throat, that I whisper to myself: It’s true, after all. It does make you crazy. It does cause the brain to soften. Why, oh why did I like it so much? Why didn’t I stop while I was still ahead of the game? Was it only one time too many that caused this rush of premature senility? Or a dozen times? Or a thousand? Ah, well—little good to know it now: the harm’s done, the jig’s up, you’re thoroughly addled, better you’d been born with handless stumps.”
Write six pages of script a day.
Stick to this schedule no matter what. You’ll have a finished first draft in roughly twenty days.
Then go back and edit what you’ve written. Spend no more than five days on this edit.
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 15