"We write because we can't help ourselves; writing keeps us from killing ourselves and others."
--Richard Krevolin, Screenwriting from the Soul
Every year over 3,000 scripts are entered in competition for several Nicholl Screenwriting Fellowships, one of the top prizes for new writers.
Screenwriting is probably the most competitive form of writing there is in today's marketplace. One hundred thousand scripts or more get written each year, but at best only a few hundred movies are made.
This is why it's been said that selling a screenplay is about as likely as winning the lottery (interesting statistic). But there's an essential difference.
A great deal more than luck is involved in selling a screenplay. To be sure, a little good fortune - like being in the right place at the right time with the right script - never hurt anyone. But when you write a screenplay, you are engaged in an act of imagination and craft over which you have total control.
It is only in marketing a screenplay, not in writing it, that Lady Luck may come into play. But what you write, what you bring into the marketplace, is completely up to you - and it is here that one writer can gain significant advantages over another in this highly competitive arena.
This is not to say that success is automatic once you learn the craft of screenwriting. But without learning the craft, you are at a significant disadvantage.
A common cry among producers today concerns how many poorly crafted screenplays there are in the marketplace. By mastering the craft of screenwriting, you join an elite group of writers - and hugely increase your chances of commercial success.
This course is not in competition with any of the methods above. Rather, it is supportive of them, a foundation from which you can expand your studies in new directions.
At the same time, everything is here that you need to know to get started. Learning craft is about learning a process. Among the skills you will learn here are how to:
Look at it this way: screenwriting is the only narrative form of writing in which "success" is measured by putting a product "into development" in order to change it. (Reminds me of a joke.) When you write a poem or short story or novel, you send it out and hopefully it gets published. There may be revisions before this happens but typically these are not major. (Screenwriting also is the only form of writing in which "writing for art's sake" makes no sense: see Writing: Art v. Commerce).
Not so in screenwriting. You send out a script and a producer buys an option on it. Before he takes it out to find a deal, however, he puts his own stamp on the script, which means the screenwriter rewrites according to the taste and dictates of someone else. A star reads the script and likes it, getting attached to the project. Now there are rewrites made to satisfy the star. A director comes on board, and now the director is boss and changes are made under his watchful and necessarily approving eye. All along the process, the screenwriter is rewriting in order to satisfy other people. S/He is -- unlike the playwright or novelist or poet -- powerless even though s/he initially creates the story. (Reminds me of a joke.)
Richard Price (The Color of Money) puts in bluntly in American Screenwriters:
"I'm just saying how things are. But creatively it's a bunch of shit because you put everything you have into the first draft. The rest is chipping away at what you did to make it look like everything else that's ever been done, so they can feel comfortable enough to put their millions of dollars behind it. So after you finish your first draft, you say goodbye, you kiss it, you wrap it in its bundle, and you just watch it get changed. And if you want to get it done and you want your name on it, you have to do the hacking. But you never care about it as much after the first draft." [REF]
Price usually writes after selling an idea, so his first draft is the last one he gets to do alone. As a beginning writer, you are going to be writing many drafts before you even enter the marketplace. But once you do get interest in your script, the story no longer is yours alone, and this is the situation on which Price is commenting (speaking, of course, as a novelist used to more control over his material).
The collaborative nature of screenwriting was the basis of an article in the Sunday NY Times (4/1/01) called "Writing for a Business Where No One Reads," written by David Thomson, a book author who sometimes writes for the screen. He emphasizes the differences between screenwriting and "real writing":
"Yet screenwriting isn't actually writing -- that needs to be said and allowed to sink in. Writing cannot exist without reading, and in the movies, the only things that are read are contracts, credits and subtitles."
"'Real' writers," he points out, "never trade away the privileges of copyright, of owning their work." But screenwriters did just this, in something that resembles a Faustian pact, a pact with the devil:
"But they have made a bargain for success. Ultimately, the American picture depends on being a hit. The Writer's Guild...has to face that fact. Screenwriters can't write for the sake of words and reading. They are clever typists in a business that likes to regard all its necessary workers as properties. So nearly every screenwriter dies crushed -- with a well-fed, well-maintained corpse surrounding a large soggy heart still yearning for novels, plays, poetry and respect."
Harsh words, perhaps, but words that tell an important truth. The essential point for the beginner to understand is that a screenplay is not a literary document. It is a blueprint for a movie, an invitation into a collaboration in which the screenwriter, who is the originator of the process, ends up being one of its least powerful members. This is the present reality.
Producers get writers to change scripts in many ways. Screenwriter Steve Rivele (Ali, Nixon) put it this way (New York Times Magazine, 11/03/02):
"There are basically four ways producers get you to change something. The first is that they just won't turn it in to the studio. Of course, they never say it like that. They'll say, 'We just want it to be as good as possible when we turn it in.' But they mean that they won't turn it in without the changes, and because you get paid for delivering a final draft, you won't be paid until you make the changes. The second is they fire you. The third is they overwhelm you with such breathtakingly stupid suggestions that you begin to doubt your own judgment. You think, God, is it possible I'm the one not getting this? ... Finally, when they find out that you've fallen in love with the story, they can endlessly manipulate you. They know you think it's important that this actually get seen by the public. Then you're dead."
About the screenwriter v. the director.
You can master the craft of screenwriting. This is something that is learnable. And only when you have mastered it will your creativity and imagination have a language with which to tell your own unique film stories in powerful and moving ways.
For even though successful movies have much in common, they also express the individuality of the unique artist. You have film stories to tell that no one else can tell for you. My purpose here is to help you tell them in the most dramatic and successful way possible.
(See Cyber Film School column, "Is Screenwriting Right For You?")
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