The idea I’m borrowing is basically “the assistant works for the evil boss” and I don’t plan on using the same character names. I also intend on adding more characters and plots. But…and a big but, is I want to keep the title of the book as the title of the show. Seeing as nothing is really the same, I’m confused if I need to ask permission.

– Quentin
Essex, Iowa

There’s no gray area here. You are flat-out stealing, and brazenly at that. Stop.

You have a few options at this point. First and least defensibly, you can change so many of the details (and the title!) that the story feels like it’s “in the vein of” but not actually based on the book in question. National Treasure isn’t based on Dan Brown’s books, but it’s comfortably and legally within the same microgenre. It’s not the same story, but it’s the same kind of story.

In your case, there’s endless precedent for evil bosses. Do you own version. Don’t crib anything from the book at all.

A second choice is to actually get the rights. This feels like a longshot — why would a somewhat-successful author give an unproduced writer the right to adapt his book for TV? But it sometimes happens. I’ve written about how to do it.

A third choice is to simply acknowledge on the title page, “Based on the novel Title by This Author.” This doesn’t give you the right to make this pilot. You couldn’t sell it. You couldn’t produce it. But you could feel reasonably secure that no one would come after you, the same way legions of Buffy fan-fic writers don’t worry about Joss Whedon sending cease-and-desist orders. Particularly in television, there’s industry precedent for scripts that are simply writing samples. That’s what you’d have.

MakingOf has an interview up with me in which I talk a bit about my writing process, the challenge of adaptations, and why one’s career is often as much about the scripts you didn’t write.

Take it, Matt.

The Writers Guild Foundation hosted and coordinated the ticketed event, which was ably moderated by Paul Attanasio.

Working first as assistants for Sam Raimi on his Xena and Hercules series, the then twenty-three year old Orci and Kurtzman broke in early but struggled to get past the stigma of the fantasy genre until they met J.J. Abrams. Abrams appreciated their ability to give “A treatment to B material” and brought them onto Alias. The success of that relationship lead to work on Abrams’s Mission Impossible 3, Fringe (which they co-created), and Star Trek.

Collaborations with Michael Bay include The Island, Transformers and its upcoming sequel. They produced Eagle Eye (with Steven Spielberg) and the Sandra Bullock/Ryan Reynolds comedy The Proposal.

The ninety-minute talk to a theater nearly full of writers and a sprinkling of suits, notably Stacey Snider and her posse from Dreamworks, covered collaboration, craft and the creative process.

The partners also defined a new-to-me screenwriting term: the structurefuck.

But most in attendance were there to ask (and gush) about the duo’s latest hit, which elicited some story lessons worth sharing.

Nero

Nero’s storyline in Star Trek was much longer in both the script and the shoot. Much was left on the edit room floor. Nero was tortured by Klingons, had to wait out twenty-five years somewhere and spit out bitter monologues, etc. All but one shot was cut from the final version. They found in post that anytime they took the story away from the heroes it sagged. Nero served only as a force to bring everyone together. The more screentime spent away from Kirk and Spock, the more defocused the movie became so they reeled him in significantly in post.

Lesson: Sequels are for villains; origin stories are for heroes. Heroes determine structure. In further support, Alex Kurtzman offered the example of Iron Man, which he said was all about Robert Downey Jr. and the suit he forges. As for what Jeff Bridges was up to? No idea. Didn’t matter. Good as he may be on screen, we’re really just waiting to see Downey in the suit again. (Not much Vader in Star Wars Episode IV compared to The Empire Strikes Back come to think of it.)

Kirk n’ Spock

Kurtzman and Orci researched heavily, studying partnerships – Lennon and McCartney, Billy Wilder and I.A. Diamond, for example — to explore why the core relationship of Kirk and Spock worked so well creatively for the series. Like Lennon and McCartney, both Spock and Kirk lose a parent. It’s something fundamental and shared that allows for a connection even with the contention and heated power struggle. Halfway through writing the first draft, Kurtzman and Orci discovered their own relationship as friends and writing partners had infused itself into the Kirk and Spock dynamic.

Destroying Vulcan

The writers felt they had to tie in the current climate and break from the past in a visually and emotionally dramatic way. Destroying Vulcan felt to Orci like seeing 9/11 and the Holocaust all at once. While that was said in jest, I think, the sentiment and desire to break this movie out from the era of the series was genuine. Something radical needed to happen.

Why does Spock get the girl?

It was a visual way to show Spock’s choice: his human/mother’s side had won out over his Vulcan side. It compressed Spock’s arc and made the writers love Uhura more for making the unexpected choice while messing with audience expectations.

Finally, for those interested in process, it took five months to break the story and two-and-a-half more for them to write it.

Advice for the aspiring

Mop floors, do anything you can to get inside and “reveal a surprise.” At age 23, the partners fetched coffee for the producers of Xena and Hercules. They wrote a spec episode and had it ready when the time was right. Wasn’t quite good enough but they were given an episode to play with and when the showrunner left, they were given the helm. They were twenty-four.

Kurtzman noted that P.T. Anderson was a PA smoking outside a set and started chatting with Philip Baker Hall. They hit it off, which lead to Hard Eight. In short, move to Hollywood, look for your moment and be ready when luck strikes.

Once you’re working, see studios as clients not villains out to ruin your art. Learn to love the process of rewriting. Be married to the sprit of words but not the words themselves. Often the studios have forced them to get beyond the “kernel” of the story in the first draft to explore new avenues and ultimately improve the story. (Notably, there were no horror exec stories typical of writers’ panels.)

How does their partnership work?

They’d met in high school but it wasn’t until after college when they began editing each other’s love letters that their partnership began. Neither had any idea how to write, but they were able to expose embarrassing parts of themselves without worrying about being judged or “thrown in a locker.” Each has their strength – Kurtzman at creating moments and Orci on the macro story elements.

They’ve been writing partners for 17 years. They credit that success to treating their relationship with the care of a marriage and applying some of the same addages: Don’t go to bed angry. Make sure one side doesn’t feel like they’re doing all the heavy lifting. Respect strengths and weaknesses.

UPDATE

To structurefuck is to disrupt a linear narrative by playing a scene twice in order to achieve a surprise reveal upon second viewing of that scene. The idea being to plant information in the audience’s heads early, when they’re likely to accept it as truth. When the scene plays again later, you alter (or “fuck with”) the perception of fact and force the audience to reevaluate the story by ripping off a mask or showing that the gun shot a blank or that the heroine actually dodged the bullet and didn’t fall to her death but was hanging naked by a bed sheet caught on a piece of glass.

I’m largely on board with most of their recommendations, particularly the idea that there are no paradoxes. I’m not talking scientifically here — I honestly have no idea how to crunch the numbers to prove this point. But in terms of fiction, and screenwriting in particular, I’d argue you need to actively crush any talk of paradoxes or impossible conundrums. They will grind your story to a halt.

I did a little work on Minority Report, a Scott Frank adaptation of a Philip K. Dick story which is enjoyable for its combined Frank-Dickness. Minority Report doesn’t deal with time travel, but rather its pushy cousin called precognition — knowledge of the future. In the story, police use precognition to stop murders before they happen.

But! But! How do you know the murders were going to happen? You changed things. So for every crime, you would need to prove that the soon-to-be-killers were absolutely, unquestionably going to do it. Which seems impossible.

I argued that you couldn’t just answer those questions when they came up. You had to take away that whole class of questions, early and forcefully.

Here’s the scene I wrote:

(In the final movie, it’s Tom Cruise’s character (Anderton) rather than Jad who provides the explanation. And that’s an understandable change: you want your hero to feel in command of the facts.)

In any script, look for scenes in which characters answer questions, and try to find ways to take the questions away. Often, that means backing up five or ten pages, well before the audience has started to formulate their concerns, and finding a way to visualize (or better yet, physicalize) the problem.

The first Jurassic Park does this well, with the animated science lesson setting the ground rules and chopping down poles upon which red flags might fly. Likewise, the first acts of most horror movies are largely devoted to creating situations in which the characters can’t simply escape or call for help. The more artfully it’s done, the less you notice the setup.

Nor can comedies waste time addressing audience concerns. Groundhog Day churns through a number of possible solutions to Bill Murray’s dilemma in a montage that makes you feel certain that he’s tried everything, whether you’ve thought of it or not.

Don’t answer questions. Get rid of them before they’re asked.

UPDATE: The weird thing about running this blog for 5+ years is that I sometimes forget which questions I’ve answered, and which anecdotes I’ve given. I wrote this post an hour ago, but it covers a lot of the same ground as last year’s longer and better essay on How to Explain Quantum Mechanics. Credit for consistency, I guess.

Do you know of any? It seems everyone I see only accepts ‘original’ material.

– Matisse

Two reasons:

1. Apples to Apples. With an adapted screenplay, it’s not altogether obvious what awesomeness came from the screenwriter, and what came from the underlying material.

2. Legal Awkwardness. Let’s say a screenwriting competition gives first place to an adaptation of the third book of the Twilight series. Do you think Stephanie Meyer (or her business people) would be delighted?

One exception to all of this: television. Writing spec episodes of current television series is an accepted industry practice, and several competitions feature this, including Austin.

To answer your first four questions: there’s no release date, no cast, no locations, no nothing. I’m writing a script which could become a movie if everything lines up correctly. So here’s hoping. It’s a terrific project that I’m excited to be writing.

(Mild spoiler warnings throughout.)

Heroes are more important than villains

Iron Man spent 85% of its storytelling energy on Tony Stark. It had the requisite set pieces, all of which were well-staged, but for an action movie it didn’t really break new ground. Where it succeeded was in creating a funny, flawed hero who propelled the story by his own ambitions. He wasn’t just responding to outside threats.

Did the villain get short-changed? Yes — to the degree that his motivations didn’t really make sense. Did it matter? Not much. In order to better establish the villain, we would have needed to spend more time away from Stark, which would have been counter-productive.

The lesson: There’s no equal-time rule for antagonists.

Leo ex machina

Price Caspian featured a terrific and surprising defeat at the movie’s mid-point, which gave me hope that the movie would transcend its kid-lit roots. But when another lengthy battle sequence¹ also ended on the south side of success, my worst fears were confirmed: the fricken lion suddenly showed up to save them. And teach them humility. Or something.

Yes, I know: it’s a Christian parable. But that doesn’t make it any less maddening. If it weren’t based on a famous book, no screenwriter would ever get away with that ending.

The lesson: Let your heroes succeed or fail on their own merits.²

Why is he doing that?

I don’t want to pile on the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull hate-parade. But beyond the tonal issues, I was often at a loss to say why Indy was doing what he was doing. Is he trying to take the crystal skull to the cave, or keep it out of the cave? Does he think Mac is a traitor, an ally, or not really care one way or the other? (Sadly, I think the last option is probably correct.)

It’s this kind of granular motivation I’ve written about before. It’s not psychoanalysis. It’s making sure the audience understands what’s happening in any given moment, so they can anticipate what might happen next. Without this ability to anticipate, the audience is just flung around helplessly, wondering why the great Indiana Jones is just standing there watching special effects.

The lesson: Every scene, every moment, ask the question: What is my hero doing, and why? If it’s not obvious, stop and rethink it.

1. I call shenanigans on that PG rating. It may be the most violent “family” movie ever.
2. And without interference by supernatural beings who could have shown up in the first reel, sparing a few hundred lives. Thanks.

I got 38.

Some disclaimers are in order. First, the list includes only fiction. If it included non-fiction, I’d score much higher. I only counted books I actually read — seeing the movie doesn’t count. The list makes some questionable choices (The Lord of the Rings trilogy counts as one book, while Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass is two), and some notable exceptions (Dune, anything by Faulkner¹). But there were enough titles that I recognized and hadn’t read to make me feel a bit ashamed.

The list comes from 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, a title that mixes death, forced labor and literature in a way that’s not particularly appealing. But I’m sure the editor explains his biases somewhere in the book.

By all means, share your score and criticisms in comments.

(Original link via Jason Kottke.)

1. I mistyped Faulkner’s name when doing a search. Unfortunately, I’d already credited myself for The Sound and the Fury.

Trivia: If you’re watching The Nines, that’s Rawson’s house which gets burned down at the start of the movie. And if you’re watching The Nines on DVD (ahem), the short film God was shot at my apartment off of Melrose, which Rawson later took over.

I probably need to start paying my location scouts more.

If a friend or co-worker tells you an anecdote, or describes a character eccentricity of one of her relatives, and you use it in a screenplay are there any legal ramifications? I have no intention of using the name of the friend’s relative (I don’t know it), but the story and the relative are so funny and eccentric, respectively, that a very amusing character could be made from them. Do I need to get my friend’s permission to use this information?

– Derek

Legally, no. Ethically, yes. Particularly if said friend is a writer who might be planning to use it herself. I borrowed an anecdote from a screenwriter friend in Go: the moment when Simon accidentally sets the hotel room on fire. I changed pretty much everything about it, but I checked with him first to make sure he wasn’t planning on using it.

I’m writing a scene between a Chinese immigrant woman and a man from Mexico. Both characters speak in broken English, and I’m wondering how to correctly write broken English with a Chinese accent and speaking pattern, as well as how to do it for other languages. Do you just write the dialogue in “good English” and then somehow note that the character has a thick Chinese accent? How would you tackle this challenge and could you an some example or two?

– Jules Hoffman

No time for examples in a Short Answer Sprint. But when writing non-standard English, you walk a fine line between “giving the flavor” and “annoying the reader.” So here’s the simple advice:

1. Use the speaker’s words
2. Use the speaker’s grammatical structure
3. Don’t try to duplicate the exact speech pattern on paper

If you have more than two apostrophes in a line of dialogue, you’re probably overdoing it.

I’ve been building a bit of a gut. Too many years of balancing a day job with writing time and squeezing in food when I could led to some really bad eating habits. One of the perks, though, was that I became a “Shit Camel.” I could go for a week without taking a dump. Sure, it was a massive, hour-long endeavor that afforded plenty of reading time whenever I did take a crap, but it left the flow of work or writing largely undisturbed.

Now that I’m eating better and trying to work this fat off, I find that I’m visiting the john much more often and depositing much less when I leave. I hate that. This has been especially annoying in the past few days since I blocked them off for writing time only.

All this is to ask, what do you eat as a writer? Are you hunched in front of your Mac for hours on end like a crazy Korean gamer, with Red Bulls and candy wrappers scattered everywhere? Or do you have some kind of healthy eating regimen that keeps you energized? Just curious, because distractions of any kind really destroy my momentum.

РRen̩ Garcia

Writing is sedentary, and sedentary people tend to get fat. But most screenwriters — even the fat ones — defecate more than once a week. Yikes.

In terms of health, I eat pretty sensibly. If you’re trying to lose weight, South Beach is actually very easy and sane. Excercise-wise, I lift three times a week. (A lot of writers go to my gym, for reasons unclear.) I do less cardio than I should, but I’m walking 4+ miles per day picketing, so that kind of makes up for it.

I am a beginning screenwriter and I am very intimidated by plot design. I love reading good screenplays because the plots seem like clever puzzles where each piece fits snugly but unexpectedly into a grand scheme. When I try to construct plots on my own, however, I feel they seem contrived and unrealistic. It seems like a very intellectual process to me, even though the ultimate goal is an emotional one. Do you have any advice for someone struggling with this? I’ve read about three books on screenwriting, and they make plot structure seem so basic, but it doesn’t feel that way when you’re creating from scratch. Any helpful words from you will probably do a lot for me.

– Jim

Screenwriting books make everything seem so tidy, when actual screenwriting is gory and difficult. Plot and structure are really just the answer to a single question: what happens when?

Look at your story from your main characters’ perspectives. What are they trying to do at each moment in the script? What do they know, and what do they learn?

Then look at it from the audience’s perspective. What do they know, and what do they expect will happen next?

A good plot keeps surprising both the main characters and your audience. Probably the reason your plots feel contrived is that you’re trying to drag your characters through some pre-determined series of structural benchmarks, rather than focusing on what’s interesting and surprising right now in this scene.

I read in your comments, some time ago, that you had a mix tape you listened when you wrote for “Go” to help you get in the right mood. Did any of that music find its way into the movie? If so, how did that happen? ex. did you suggest it to the music director? If not, why not? Wasn’t it a key factor in setting tone for you?

– Dan

None of those songs made it in the movie — and that’s fine. A playlist is a great way to help capture a certain tone while you’re writing, particularly when you need to get back into a mood. But it’s really just for your own preparation. Screenwriting is a lot like acting in that way, incidentally. Actors often have touchstones to help them get back into a role. Music is a great one.

Are you inspired to help new writers because you had the good fortune of a mentor when you were starting your career, or do you do it because you had to figure it out on your own?

– Annabel

I didn’t have a mentor, at least not for any significant period of time. I started this site because I remembered what it was like having 1,000 questions about screenwriting, and no good place to ask them.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one, but do you think the stop of “Ops” was related to the imminence of the somewhat similar secret-adventures-’round-the-world “The Unit”?

– Matt Waggoner

The Unit is a lot like Ops — but done as a CBS show. I don’t mean that as a slam. They figured out how to take a potentially risky premise and turn it into something embraceable by a mass audience. What’s funny is that we met with Scott Foley for Ops (at Susina, the coffee shop featured in The Nines). He read the script and really liked it. We liked him, and would have cast him in a second. He’s an undervalued actor, and a nice guy.

But no, I don’t think The Unit derailed Ops. Our project hung around longer than it should have largely based on my name and the quality of the writing. It really wasn’t a Fox-appropriate show, and it’s for the best we never shot the pilot. (The two Ops scripts are in Downloads section if you want to read them.)

I’m in early discussions with a producer about writing a biopic. One thing that has come up in these discussions is the producer’s insistence that the movie adhere to a traditional three act structure and not be ‘episodic’ – and I agree with him in principle (I’m frequently dissatisfied by biopics for this very reason), but I also feel that the complicating factor in this case is that lives simply don’t unfold in three acts – they are, by their very nature, episodic. I was curious as to how you might approach this kind of assignment in terms of finding a three-act story within an episodic sequence of ‘true’ events.

– M

History is history. Movies are stories, and good stories have forward momentum. Your challenge is finding the thread(s) that keep the main character working towards a goal, with obstacles, setbacks, and moments of success. And that may not be possible. There are many remarkable people whose lives are surprisingly resistant to dramatic staging. There hasn’t been a great biopic of Lincoln, Da Vinci, or Einstein. Amadeus succeeds because they elevated a fairly minor character in his life (Salieri) and told a largely fictionalized story through his eyes.

Don’t try to tell the story of a great person’s life. Tell a great story using the details of a person’s life.

This may be kind of a loaded question, but have you ever read Stephen King’s Dark Tower books? They’ve just been finished, thirty-some years after the first book was started, and are so old fashioned and evocative of Rod Serling — like some weird combination of The Lord of the Rings, Sergeo Leonne’s Spaghetti Westerns and The Twilight Zone — that a movie adaptation has to happen eventually. The fan base is much too huge. Could you ever see yourself considering adapting this?

– J.R. Flynn

This is an example of how long questions sit in the box sometimes. JJ Abrams is now adapting it.

But to answer your question: sure. I could see myself doing it. But JJ Abrams or not, I try not to dwell on the projects I’m not writing, because that can drive one mad with frustration. As busy as I am (when not on strike), barely a week goes by that I don’t see a project announced in Variety which causes that spike of envy. If that ever goes away, I’ll probably quit.

In the re-design of the site, I inadvertently got rid of the “Ask a Question” link. Until I find a good home for it, you can ask a question here.

Now I know stealing ideas rarely happens and there isn’t anything I can do to protect my rights on a story in the public domain, but if a producer I query decides to adapt the same novel I have, without using my script, well then my script is pretty much dead in the water, right?

Basically I was curious to find out if you think I should stop worrying and pitch these adaptation, or should I focus on pitching the other two scripts I’ve written (which are based on true stories I control the rights to) and then pull out my adaptations once I forge a working relationship with a producer?

– Rob
Ohio

Would it suck if a producer, upon reading your query letter (or hearing your pitch), decided to go off and use the same public domain material as the basis for a different writer’s script? Yes.

Is it likely? Not really.

Let’s say you wrote an adaptation of some lesser-known Christopher Marlowe work. Say, “Dido, Queen of Carthage.” The producer is unlikely to know anything about the story, so if your pitch (or query) is interesting enough that he wants to know more, he’ll read your script. At that point, you’ve succeeded in getting a producer to read your material, and that’s the whole point of pitches and queries at this stage in your career.

Sure, you hope he loves it and wants to produce it. But that’s all dependent on his reaction to your writing. If he likes your writing, and he likes the idea, you’re golden. If he doesn’t like your writing, his loss.¹

Either way, I think it’s unlikely that your script would suddenly kindle an interest in a long-ignored literary property. I’m sure there are cases where that’s happened, but it feels like the exception, rather than the rule. So if the best script you have available is an adaptation of a public domain piece, by all means show it around.

1. As a reminder, I assume that everyone writing in with a question is a fantastic screenwriter. This is an absurd postulate, but lets me sleep better at night.