"The writers who make it big are never daunted by the odds."
--William Froug, Screenwriting Tricks of the Trade
For example, I am a playwright who also writes screenplays. I define myself this way largely to keep sane: the screenwriting business would drive me nuts if my major ego and financial energy were devoted to it.
Additionally, I grew up in Los Angeles, receiving my BA at UCLA, and no longer choose to live there. I realize that this is a serious professional disadvantage in screenwriting and therefore adjust my goals accordingly.
I am an artist (and artists have few homes in Hollywood) and a literary craftsman (and screenwrights get little respect down where movies are made). Rather than deal with these issues, I don't put them in the center of my world.
I am primarily a playwright, not a screenwright. This distinction lets me sleep well at night.
At the same time, however, I love the screenplay form so much and love movies so much that I am always working on a new screenplay.
Do you want to be a screenwriter? Make sure you understand what you are getting into. Richard Price puts it this way in American Screenwriters:
"Understand the nature of the screenwriter, that he serves people. You're a service craft. If you want to feel good about yourself, consider yourself a craftsman. The most important thing in getting a job is not how well you write - because if they don't know you, they won't ask for you. For them to want you, you have to go in there with a great story." [REF]
As we've seen before, "the idea is king" and success begins with a great story concept.
How you answer this question determines how you go about building your screenwriting career. And there are other questions you must answer:
You need to give serious thought to these questions. You need to define your world as a screenwriter, a screenwright, in as much detail as you can.
Whatever screenwriting world you enter, you're going to have to face some unpleasant facts. For example, you often will be faced with putting a script into what is called "development hell," a collaborative process from which it may never emerge. Consider this observation from FrameWork, a history of screenwriting:
"In the eighties, the process of development became so complex that writers spent most of their time either taking meetings to pitch an idea or script or doing rewrites on their own or someone else's script. By the mideighties, the major companies combined were investing between thirty and fifty million dollars a year in the development process. Most of the scripts in development were not made." [REF]
Indeed, 9 out of 10 were not made.
A screenwriter must also learn how to hustle. Again, from FrameWork: "Screenwriters have always had to hustle, but the more the process of screenwriting moves away from the family feeling of silent films or the organized procedures of the studio system, the more the screenwriters have had to learn how the manipulate the system, or, increasingly, the systems of filmmaking."
Screenwriting, in whatever world, is not "a writer's paradise," certainly not as we would define "writer" in the context of the novelist or poet, an artist with control and responsibility over rhetoric. Writers are closer to hired hands in the world of film and the closer your own world moves to the Hollywood mainstream, the more this is true.
Cyber Film School column, Citizen Screenwriter.
For example, if you want screenwriting to be your life, if you want to work within the studio system and get assignments, then (as you'll see below) you need to be where the action is, in Los Angeles. You need to figure out how to get there, if you're not there already, and how to survive once you are there.
Another writer, who is primarily a novelist and wants to write screenplays on the side, has no reason to move to L.A. and so does not have to figure out how to get there and survive.
These two writers would prioritize their energies in different ways because the former has a lot of "non-screenwriting craft" issues to deal with, while the latter can simply concentrate on learning how to craft a good screenplay. If the former has a degree in accounting, for example, and a present job as an accountant, finding an accounting job in Los Angeles might be a high priority because that would be a natural way to move where the studio action is. Once there, the person can concentrate on changing careers.
Every case is going to be different - and only you can define your world and figure out the best way to reach your goals.
However, there is one area that often gets neglected but which all screenwriters, no matter how they define their world, should concentrate on: creating your movie concepts.
Concepts are king. And good concepts are maddeningly difficult to create! Once a good concept is heard - an estranged father cross-dresses as a nanny in order to visit his children - it rings immediately true, and we think, Why didn't I think of that? But coming up with these "natural" concepts is much harder than beginners think.
So I urge you to pay more attention to the very beginning of the writing process - the movie concept. Once you've learned the craft, it's tempting to jump in and exercise it with the first "good story" idea you get. But "good" isn't enough.
Be tough on yourself and don't settle for just any "good" concept. Keep struggling and don't start writing until you've found that "great" concept. Of course, one person's "great" is another person's "not so great" - you can't escape the subjectivity at work here.
At the same time, you need to move beyond writing stories that only you are interested in. Writer Kurt Wimmer puts it this way (quoted in Big Deal):
"Most first-time, second-time, third-time and tenth-time writers have difficulty suppressing themselves and their screenplays and the stories they find interesting, as oppossed to the stories they think are interesting and they think the entire moviegoing public -- and therefore the studios -- would be interested in." [ REF]
You'll know when a concept rings "true and great" with you, the way the concept for Mrs. Doubtfire rings true and great with me (others may not be impressed by it). Hopefully, your taste will be in sync with the tastes of the power brokers in Hollywood.
Or at least with one of them. More about timing.
Continue the notebook or file in which you write movie
concepts (notes and loglines). Review these periodically and see which
still resonate with you. If you don't like them any more, discard them.
Try to find those concepts that ring "true and great" with you over a period
of time. These are the scripts to start working on.
You can look for concepts even as you're working on a script - and should be! In fact, I think you always should be writing down new ideas and concepts for future scripts. The working screenwright is always busy at:
The working screenwright is always writing:
"Well, I used to be an engineer, and the equation seems very simple to me," notes Todd W. Langen, who wrote Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. "If you write you have a chance. If you don't write, you have zero chance. So, if you want to succeed, you're going to have to write. And that's what keeps you going." [REF]
Look around you. Who is walking around with a digital camera, making a movie? Maybe they need help. The more you know about how movies are made, the better your screenwriting will be for it.
Film schools especially offer opportunities. Not all budding filmmakers write their own scripts. Maybe they need a short script written for a school project. Maybe you are the person to write it.
This is what happened to me in March, 2002, with a film student from NYU. Read the story.
You don't have to move to L.A. if:
But if you want to be a working screenwriter in the heart of the system, you'd better prepare to move to Los Angeles. You have two strikes against you if you don't.
The better news is that you don't have to do this right away. You need to learn the craft first at any rate, and you can do this as well in one place as another.
When you consistently get producer-interest in your screenwriting is when you'd better start dealing with the handwriting on the wall. Living in L.A. is what most screenwriters have to do. I've had agents who were very much behind my work - until they learned that I would not relocate back to Los Angeles. That's just the way it is.
However, there is some dissenting opinion on this issue, which may give distant screenwriters hope. According to Thom Taylor in Big Deal, there are emerging advantages for living and working out of the mainstream: "Modern technology has allowed writers to remain in their indigenous environments. And because Hollywood loves what's unattainable, being further from the center of heat can add to a screenwriter's fire." [REF]
So define your goals and do what you have to do.
Becoming a successful screenwriter is not easy, and success sometimes makes writers scarred and bitter (even if wealthy). Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost) offers this advice (from American Screenwriters):
"I feel very badly for people who get bitter and sour out here. It's so sad to watch it happen to sweet and juicy people. But it does. That's the sad part of Hollywood. It eats people up. And unless you can eat it up, you're going to have a problem. There's no guarantee on which way it's going to work. But if you can have something in life that's more important to you than writing movies, chances are you'll survive this better than if movies are your only source of nurturing." [REF]
All the screenwriters before you have taken it. And not just screenwriters, but writers period. Writing is a long and honorable profession. Be proud and write what you can be proud of.
In January, 2003, I started on online weblog, "a blog," in which I share the adventure of my own writer's journey. I'm going to share here the entries of this blog to date. (The blog can be found at cdeemer.blogspot.com.)
Maybe I'll start where I began: I love screenwriting, and I hate screenwriting. I also have a dream.
My dream is that digital movies are going to be produced that will never see theatrical release. Instead they will be distributed from the World Wide Web, where customers will download them directly to their home entertainment screens.
In other words, digital filmmakers will have the option of becoming their own distributors by creating a website.
If this happens, an extraordinary amount of independent artistic energy will be released. If this happens, I hope to be a part of it.
I don't think the powers that be want it to happen because I think they know more than they let on, and one of the things they know is that the movie audience is smarter than they give it credit for being. People want good stories about real people.
More about the digital revolution.
I think the powers that be are afraid of the kind of level playing field that could result if distribution of movies happened via the Web, by-passing the usual channels entirely. (Note) I think great untapped audiences, who are starving for quality film entertainment, will be reached for the first time. Independent filmmakers and writers whose material would never reach a mass audience nonetheless could reach their audience and make an honest living from it.
To look at but one example, consider the audience of retired people. Lots of time on their hands. But they don't like to go out much because it's become so dangerous. Movies like Cocoon and Driving Miss Daisy are perfect for this audience - but how many of these even get made? Then how much time passes before the movies get shown on TV so the audience can watch them safely at home?
Digital movies delivered weekly (or even more frequently!) to home entertainment screens from the net would serve this audience perfectly. So we need 50 or 100 or 200 movies made every year for the senior citizen market. Now that's an effort I could get behind.
Late in 2001, the PBS show "Frontline" focused on how Hollywood has changed in recent years, mostly in ways not encouraging to writers and others who favor non-formulaic storytelling. The good news, however, was about the possibilities of the digital revolution and its effects on the film industry, including screenwriters. See a transcript of this show, which was called "The Monster That Ate Hollywood".
I think this is a great dream. It - and the joy I feel in the present tense of screenwriting, when the magic of a story consumes me - is what keeps me going.
Find something that keeps you going.
There are other reasons to be optimistic about the future of screenwriting. For example, Jon Glickman thinks the future bodes well for screenwriters (quoted in Big Deal):
"Writers are probably the most safe going into the next world because stories are always going to stay the same. You're always going to need to have a good story....Whoever produces it may be different, the companies may change. But you're always going to need stories, and story construction has been the same since 600 B.C., or whenever. I don't see that aspect of the business changing. There's not going to be some new storytelling, so I think writers are the one constant." [REF]
At the 1999 WGA awards, Taxi Driver writer Paul Schrader accepted his first ever screenwriting award and made these remarks:
"Sooner or later, the kind of work I do will be acknowledged. It's nice to have it happen while you're still alive. But when you do this sort of thing, you have to believe in history and you have to believe in the ancestry of art. You have to believe that you're filing things in the archives. Maybe they will be appreciated in your lifetime and maybe they won't. It doesn't really matter."
Another award recipient at this ceremony, Frank Pierson, lamented the present state of the industry:
"I'm really disturbed about two things today. One is that among the big audience pictures, which are being financed by the major studios, the range of subject matter is so narrow and is aimed at a particularly small and not especially demanding audience. That's an impoverishment of our intellectual and cultural life that I really, truly regret."The other thing, which I see with the people that I am teaching, is a matching impoverishment of the language of film that we share with an audience--a language we can use to push the envelope and expand an audience's ideas and feelings about what they are seeing. Lamentably, that envelope has gotten very thin and shredded.
"Kids coming along tend to assume that they can automatically, intuitively write, direct and act, without ever having taken the steps to learn the language and the craft of those professions. For most of my students now, film history began with Steven Spielberg. Ironically, Steven himself was brought up studying the films of people who had a very broad literary and liberal arts background--a real true understanding of the culture in which all this fits. And that's all missing now, or at least it tends to be skimmed over.
"So the only thing we can do is just beat the hell out of these kids and say, 'Listen, the films you're making are shit, and the stories you're telling are not worth hearing. They do not advance us at all in our knowledge of the human condition. Now, let's go back and talk about why they're that way and how we can make them better.'"
Are screenplays literature? Do they strive to such a high standard? Mostly, in the history of film, they have been entertainment first and foremost. But there have been serious films, too, that aspire to many of the same narrative goals as literature. (See my Cyber Film School column, Are Screenplays Literature?).
You, the future generation of screenwriters, will determine what films become. I hope you have high standards. I hope you tell stories about real people, stories that matter.
I wish you well on your journey.
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