I didn’t care if I was glamorizing smoking or causing young people to start smoking.
Then I got throat cancer. I consider my cancer my personal punishment for glamorizing smoking on-screen.
Don’t bring the same karma upon yourself that I brought upon myself.
Let’s repeat that.
Kirk Douglas: “Hollywood started me smoking, literally putting a cigarette in my hand. Who knows how many moviegoers have started smoking because of what they have seen on the screen? Too many movies glorify young people smoking. It doesn’t have to be this way.”
Conflict means spinal fusion.
The most important component of the spine of your script is conflict, and the dramatic tension that flows from it.
Without the introduction of conflict, you can’t hold your audience; they’ll get restless and leave what you’ve put your heart and soul into, going for the urinal or the candy counter instead.
Conflict doesn’t have to be physical, of course; it can be cerebral, understated, and subtle. But it has to be there.
You can combine conflict with attraction and create a spicy and often sexy stew that will both hold and amuse your audience. I did that in Betrayed, Jagged Edge, and Basic Instinct. There was conflict between Tom Berenger and Debra Winger, between Jeff Bridges and Glenn Close and between Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone. But, as in real life, the conflict led to attraction, or attraction was part of the conflict.
The most hard-hitting of all conflicts is when the heart is in conflict with itself, when the heart is torn. In Betrayed, Debra falls in love with Tom even as she knows that he is a neo-Nazi murderer. When she kills him, she blasts away a part of her own heart. In Jagged Edge, Glenn falls in love with Jeff, saves him through her own skills and strength gained in prison, and then discovers that he is a murderer and that he’s been using her all along. And in Music Box, we see the deadliest conflict of the heart: A woman who adores her immigrant father winds up protecting her son from being poisoned by her father’s cruelty and racism.
When my friend Richard Marquand was shooting Hearts of Fire, he called me from the set one day to tell me that Bob Dylan and Rupert Everett, who played rockers vying for the same young woman, were getting along so well as actors that it was impossible to bring out the underlying conflict their characters were supposed to have between them on-screen.
Richard said, “I’ve decided just to let their characters be friends.”
I said, “You can’t do that. If there’s no conflict between them, there’s no triangle. If there’s no triangle, the movie isn’t about anything.”
“I’m not disagreeing with you,” Richard said. “But there’s nothing I can do about it. Bob and Rupert like hanging out, and every time Rupert looks at Bob, Rupert says, Bob makes him laugh. And neither of them really want Fiona. Rupert, as you know, is gay, and Bob says he doesn’t want to kiss Fiona.”
I said, “He won’t kiss Fiona? Why the hell not?” I’d had a long afternoon in New York getting to know Fiona—we’d begun with two bottles of Cristal at Tavern on the Green—and I thought her eminently kissable.
“I’m not certain,” Richard said. “I think it has something to do with his newfound Christianity. He says he doesn’t want to be seen kissing anyone on the big screen.”
I realized we had a love triangle where the two guys didn’t want the girl for different reasons and liked each other more than they liked the girl.
I feared the movie was dead. And it was. When it was released after Richard’s death, there was no underlying tension to it, no conflict—just an actor and two tired rockers making tired, friendly, “Have a nice day” faces at everybody.
Categorical Imperative
The underlying thrust of your script—the motivation that gives it power, that makes your hero go the extra mile to achieve what he wants.
Tone is everything.
The tone of your script is even more important than the structure of it. It is the key to your script’s success. If your tone is off, the movie will not work.
No matter how good the structure is and no matter how sharp the dialogue, your script is hostage to its tone.
In my experience, hitting exactly the right tone comes with rewriting and polishing. It is like selecting the right volume on a stereo or like the volume of an actor’s performance: If it’s even slightly off, it’s all over.
A Built-in Spine
What the movie is about—the drama at its core.
Slug it out with your second act.
The second act is the most difficult to write because the first and third acts have built-in, surefire dramatic potential.
But in the second, you have to move your story and your characters along as speedily as possible.
The director of Jagged Edge (Richard Marquand) and I kept taking the film out to preview audiences and getting dismal responses. But when we cut eight minutes from the film’s second act, audiences erupted at the end of the movie with applause.
Adrenalizer Scene
If things are slowing down, you inject one of these into the spine of the script.
Don’t worry about first- or second-act curtains.
You don’t need them. Just follow a general three-act format, but you don’t have to pay off each act by giving it an ending. Your need is for one ending and one ending only—at the end of the film (the end of the third act).
Does Your Story Hang?
Does your story climax? Is it well-structured?
Don’t be afraid of ambiguity.
The ambiguous ending of Bridge on the River Kwai was thanks to producer Sam Spiegel, who believed “that the audience should make their own choice.”
Producer David Selznick believed in ambiguous endings, too: “Let the audience write their own ending.”
Ambiguity can make you a lot of money, too.
Surveys after the success of Basic Instinct showed that many people were going back to see the movie twice, or even three times, because they were involved in arguments with others about who the killer was.
I was asked over and over again about the ending of the movie by people who recognized me.
“Catherine did it, right?”
Or: “She didn’t really kill anybody, did she?”
My answer to every one was this: “Go back and see the movie again. Pay close attention; there’s a clue near the end that will answer everything for you. If you still don’t get it, see it again.”
Needless to say, I had significant “points” in the movie. And made more money every time someone bought a ticket.
But if you want to sell your script, an ambiguous ending can be risky.
Michael Douglas had a full-rupture hissy fit over the ending of Basic Instinct. He wanted to blow Sharon Stone away at the end. He said the film “lacked redemption” and would fail at the box office.
The studio didn’t like the script’s ambiguous ending, either, and the only reason it stood is because the director, Paul Verhoeven, wouldn’t allow the film to be focus-grouped. The focus group would certainly have voted down the ambiguous ending.
If you’re writing a mystery, let it be a mystery to you, too.
I think the true test of a successful mystery, one that will fool audiences, is to be able to switch the last scene and still have the movie make complete sense.
Take the last scene of Basic Instinct. It would have made sense if Nick had killed Catherine, and it would have made sense if Catherine had killed Nick. But the ambiguous ending—the ice pick under the bed—was the most surprising.
The same thing is true with Jagged Edge. It would have made sense if the tennis pro had been revealed as the killer at the end instead of Jeff Bridges, but it wouldn’t have been as daring. Partly because Jeff Bridges was the perfect casting for a killer—until Jagged Edge, he had always played some variation of the homespun, down-to-earth good ole boy.
It’s okay to leave audiences confused at the end of your movie if you’re writing a mystery.
If they’re somewhat confused, they’ll talk about your movie with others—and they’ll argue about what happened at the end.
In the case of Basic Instinct, they argued about what the ice pick under that bed meant. Did it mean that she’d kill Michael? Or did it mean that she wouldn’t use that ice pick on him because she loved him.
With Jagged Edge, as Siskel and Ebert discovered, people weren’t sure who that was on the floor when the mask came off. Was it the tennis pro (played by actor Marshall Colt), or was it Jeff Bridges? So a lot of people went back to see it again—and the movie made a lot of money.
If you leave them confused, though, make sure they like the movie. Because if they don’t like it, they’ll never go back to see it again and they’ll trash it to their friends.
My feeling is that people like to be fooled by a mystery’s ending—to be taken in some direction they never expected—but a lot of studio executives would disagree with me. Their feeling is that a movie (even a tough mystery) needs a soothing last scene, one that will make people leave the theater happy—the classic television ending.
I point to box office. Jagged Edge and Basic Instinct both had surprise endings that faked audiences out. Both were huge hits.
Spell it all out in your script.
Leave as little as possible for the director to screw up. View what you’re writing not as a blueprint for a film, but as literature. Lie to yourself—tell yourself that not only may millions of people see your movie but millions may read this script that you’re writing.
So it has to be … perfect!
You can subvert your future director with beats and adverbs.
When you write a scene, control how the scene is paced by indicating “beats”—screen moments. If you indicate in the script when a character is to deliver a line of dialogue (after two beats, say) and then the actor is exposed to your description in the script, he will be influenced by your vision (no matter what the director tells him).
And if you describe how your character is to say a line (sweetly, with an edge, with a grin, etc.) and the actor reads your description, it will affect his performance.
Through the course of fifteen films, I had only one director who caught on to my game and stripped the script of beats and adverbs before he gave it to actors: Costa-Gavras.
“Why?” Costa said. A long beat … and then (sweetly): “Because I am the director and not you, okay?”
Use your iron.
Screenwriter/director Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights): “Screenwriting is like ironing. You move forward a little bit and go back and smooth things out.”
Try not to masturbate too much while you’re writing your script.
In a survey done a decade ago, it was determined that writers masturbate more than people in any other profession.
If you do, you’ll go blind and grow hair on your palms and …
You will take that creative edge that should be going into your script and put it into your hand, so to speak.
HOW TO DEAL WITH WRITER’S BLOCK … THE LAMBORGHINI SOLUTION
If you live in L.A.—which I told you not to—go over to Budget in Beverly Hills and rent a Lamborghini for the weekend. Drive it out to Joshua Tree National Monument and then back. Tell yourself that if you finish your script and it’s a hit movie, you’ll be able to buy yourself one of these babies.
You’ll finish the script (I promise).
More is more.
On the first draft of an original screenplay, don’t make it too tight and lean. Don’t worry if it’s around 140 pages; producers and studio people have a theory that anything can be cut down. But if it comes in at around one hundred pages, many of them will ask, “Where’s the beef?”
Screenwriter Michael Tolkin (The Player): “The director is someone who can take all the intentions and make sense of them for the reality of a production. All scripts are too long, all written scenes are too long, all dialogue is too wordy; this is the inevitable dividend of being written in a room, usually alone.”
If you write a script that’s too long.
Cheat on the margins. Extend and lengthen the margins on your page. Chances are good that the person timing your script (a minute a page is the rule) won’t notice what you’ve done.
The downside is what happened to me on Betrayed. My script was about thirteen pages too long, but it read great. I didn’t want to ruin how it read by cutting it down. So I extended the margins on both sides and at the bottom, too.
Halfway through the shoot, I got a call from the producer, Irwin Winkler, telling me that half the script had been shot and that at this rate it would be a three-hour movie.
I had to fly to the Betrayed set in Canada and cut my script—cut from the parts that had not yet been shot.
Cutting that way, I’m sure, threw the whole movie out of whack. It’s not impossible that extending my margins ruined the fundamental structure of the movie.
But, as I said, the script read beautifully. It was passed around town and admired, and when the movie failed, there were those who said they’re read the script and it was brilliant and that obviously Costa-Gavras, the director, had ruined it.
Tighten your script as much as you can.
Poor you. As studio head Arthur Krim said, “There’s always going to be another turn of the screwdriver.”
If your script reads beautifully, rewrite it.
A good script is about character and action, not language. If the language is literary and gets in the way of dialogue and action, it should be a short story or a novella, not a screenplay. In a script, the simpler the better.
It’s okay to repeat yourself in a script.
An old studio rule: Never use anything once that you can use twice.
Pick your characters’ names for how they sound.
For Basic Instinct, I named my burned-out, streetwise homicide detective Nick Curran because I thought the name made the character sound cool and tough. Catherine Tramell, I thought, sounded classy and vaguely threatening.
Sharon Shone thought I’d named her after a tramell, “a death shroud in Scottish mythology,” and complimented me for my subtlety. I shouldn’t have corrected her, but, being Hungarian, I couldn’t help myself. She didn’t believe that I’d named her after Alan Tramell of the Detroit Tigers, one of my favorite baseball players.
The truth is that I’ve named a lot of my characters after ballplayers; I keep the Baseball Encyclopedia near my desk.
I also tend to use first names that are classic and old-timey; I think there are way too many Brets and Austins and Dylans (even Jaggers) on the big screen. A Jack, I think, is ageless; a Dylan, I fear, might be out of style in a few years, replaced by an Eminem or an Usher.
Don’t name your characters for personal reasons; it never works out well.
I gave a villain in F.I.S.T. the first and last names of an editor I had clashed with at the Cleveland Plain Dealer in my reporting days: Tom Vail.
I gloried in the notion that this person who had fired me from the paper would recognize himself on the big screen as a bad guy.
At the time, I didn’t know that studios vet with a research firm all the names in scripts they are filming.
In this case, the firm’s report came back with this notation: “Tom Vail was once Mr. Eszterhas’s editor at the Cleveland Plain Dealer and fired him.”
Don’t ever name a character after the man or woman you love.
I learned the lesson painfully: Nomi Malone of Showgirls was named after my beloved wife’s childhood nickname, Nomi—the name I called her in intimate moments.
Not anymore. Not after a stark-naked Elizabeth Berkley came up to her on the set and said, “Hi Nomi, I’m Nomi.” Not after Showgirls turned into one of the great bombs of film history.
Some names can get you big laughs.
Every time this TV newsman introduced himself in Jagged Edge, we got big laughs from preview audiences. We couldn’t figure it out until I changed the guy’s name.
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His new name was Tom—no laughs. His old name was Dick—big laughs. A producer friend told me that the name Peter on-screen always gets the same reaction.
Sometimes you can have a little fun with your names.
New York Times film critic Janet Maslin was always more than a little hard on my movies, once even calling me “the Andrew Dice Clay of screenwriters.”
When I wrote An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, I created a fictional character named Janet Maslin, a critic and desperate wannabe screen-writer who hated the work of the fictional character Joe Eszterhas.
The studio’s lawyers made me change the name of the fictional character Janet Maslin, first to Sheila Maslin and then to Sheila Kaslin.
I made sure, though, that the director, Arthur Hiller, cast an aesthetically challenged woman as the fictional Sheila Kaslin.
You can get a LITTLE cute naming your characters.
In the movie Sliver, one of the characters is talking on the phone to her agent. She says, “You’re a sleazeball, Michael. You’re a bully. You’re two-faced, Michael. You’re a sad excuse, Michael, for a human being.”
You’ll notice the constant reiteration of the name Michael.
I had very publicly fired my agent, Michael Ovitz, four years earlier.
HOW TO DEAL WITH WRITER’S BLOCK … THE VIAGRA
SOLUTION
A screenwriter I absolutely, categorically won’t name told me this story. He was blocked writing a script and he took Viagra. He figured if Viagra helped one thing, it might help another. He was still blocked, though, after he took the Viagra.
But now he was blocked and had a big hard-on. He called his girlfriend and said he was on his way over to see her. They got into an argument when he got there and he stormed out and went home, where he sat down and tried to write. He was still blocked.
The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood Page 17