Screenwriting contests
What are your thoughts on screenplay writing contests? There are hundreds of them to choose from, and most of them charge around $50 to enter. Is this truly a viable way for an unknown writer to get discovered? Or is it a waste of money?
–Tim Wilson
The two screenwriting awards I know best are the Nicholl Fellowship and the Sundance Screenwriters Lab, both of which have a history of being a tremendous boon to a young writer. The benefit is not just being selected, but in the follow-up and guidance these programs provide. If you have a great script that feels right for these competitions - and by that I mean it’s not an obviously commercial action thriller or such - these might be places to consider.
Beyond these two, it gets murkier, and harder to separate the good competitions from the bad. In general, I’d say the ones associated with festivals are a little more reputable, and might be worth the entry fee. Just make sure it’s a real festival that’s run for a least three years.
I’m more suspicious of unafilliated competitions, because it’s never clear what their real motivation is. Some are run by upstart management companies who are trolling for young writers. Others are just in it for the cash. And even if it is an honest competition, having won a contest no one’s heard of isn’t going to help you in your career.
Robert Mckee
Have you taken Robert McKee’s screenwriting class? And if so, what did you learn from it? –Bill
To read his brochure, you’d think that everyone in Hollywood has taken McKee’s course, but the truth is, I don’t know anyone who has.
Whenever I hear his name brought up, it makes these tiny hairs rise on the back of my neck, because it usually means the speaker is going to cite some piece of screenwriting gospel, or use a clever word like "counter-theme."
I’ve never met McKee and have nothing against him, but to read his bio it’s clear that he’s not a very successful screenwriter and never really was. That’s not to say he can’t be a great teacher, just as many great film critics are not filmmakers, nor do I think that there’s anything wrong with a screenwriting class per se, especially if it helps you get off your ass and write. But I would rather have dental surgery than go through a structural analysis of CHINATOWN.
The downfall of these classes and books (Syd Field’s is the best known), is that the guru comes up with a theory about why scripts are good or bad, then manipulates the examples to prove his or her point. I remember one professor in graduate school who when confronted with counter-examples, would label some of the greatest movies ever made "failed films," simply because they didn’t fit her framework.
Overall, it’s worth reading a few books and taking a few classes to get a handle on how Hollywood talks about scripts and movies. Internalize what makes sense to you and chuck the rest. Kevin’s question goes right to the point: You’ll learn the most by reading a lot of screenplays, good and bad, and learning how they work.
The truth is, there’s no magic formula for writing a great script. (Or for that matter, a commercial one.) Anyone who tries to convince you that theirs is the One True Way is deluding themselves and you.
Avoiding cliches
When you are writing a screenplay, how do you manage to focus on originality and avoid a multitude of clichés just slipping into the story some how?
–Christian
In the writer’s ongoing battle against clichés, he finds two basic enemies: verbal clichés ("as easy as taking candy from a baby"), and story clichés (the explosive with a count-down LED timer).
Eliminating the first kind is simply a matter of recognizing them and finding something better to replace them. I work incredibly hard on the narrative description in my scripts, tweaking it at least as much as the dialogue. With vigilance, the night never has to be "as black as coal" or "as cold as a witch’s tit."
The story clichés are harder to deal with, because certain genres carry them along like parasites. Action movies sometimes have the ticking time bomb, or mismatched partners, or heroes who somehow avoid being hit when a hundred bullets are flying their direction.
The key — and this starts in the conception phase of the script — is recognizing the inherent clichés in a genre, and figuring out how you’re going to handle them. SCREAM did a masterful job pointing out, subverting, and ultimately fulfilling teen-slasher clichés.
Sometimes, the best way to avoid story clichés is to look at the reality behind every character, every setting, every decision made in your story. Is Carla Ann really "a hooker with a heart of gold?" On closer inspection, she might be a nervous, self-deprecating dreamer.
Does the police station need a squad room full of desks and detectives milling about? Maybe your scene could take place in a courtyard, or by the photocopier, or in the cafeteria.
Clichés are shortcuts. The more you avoid taking them, the more interesting the places you’ll end up.
Past mistakes
Now that you look back on your career, what was the single biggest mistake or wrong assumption you made early on that someone else could learn from?
–Damion
From the moment I got to Los Angeles, I felt I didn’t deserve to be here. I was never a classic movie buff; I didn’t have a favorite director; my Honda was rusting out, but not in a glamorous, beauty-in-poverty way.
I felt like a fraud, an imposter. Worse, I was taking up a slot that some genuinely deserving person should have gotten. Working in Hollywood was never my childhood dream. It was almost a flip-of-the-coin decision. For all I knew, the next Spielberg was stuck flipping burgers in Wichita because I had taken the last available opening.
Honestly, I felt this way for about three years. I kept waiting to get found out and sent back to the Midwest.
Thinking this way was easily the biggest mistake I made. When you don’t think you deserve to be in the room, no one else will, either.
But the truth, which took me an embarrassingly long time to realize, is that all of the smart, confident people I was meeting really didn’t know any more than I did. Okay, I had never seen Terrence Malick’s BADLANDS. But I had seen every episode of "Bewitched," and that was just as valid.
And I could write better than most of them. That seems like an egotistical statement, but considering I was marking myself lower in every other category, that lone bright spot was a beacon of hope.
It’s hard to synthesize this advice without making sound like insipid pabulum, "just believe in yourself." Perhaps it’s best expressed in the negative: "you’re no stupider than everyone around you."
Getting stuck in a genre
How important is it for a writer trying to break into the business to pick one genre and stick to it? You’ve had a lot of success writing all sorts of different stories, but isn’t that unusual? Isn’t it better to become a "brand name," so to speak? I imagine the suits saying, "Let’s get that new guy who wrote that great heist script to rewrite our Die Hard on a Carnival Cruise project."
–FALZONE
It’s true that some writers prefer to write in certain genres, and others seem to have the choice made for them. Early on, I got pigeon-holed as a family film guy, because the first two movies I was paid to write were kiddie lit adaptations.
I have nothing against the family film genre — in fact, I think it’s one of the most difficult genres to write well — but I didn’t want to spend the rest of my career charting the inner turmoil of ten-year olds. My script for GO was, on some levels, a calculated move to get producers and executives in Hollywood to notice me as a more versatile, and hireable, writer.
So should your second script, or your third script, be the same genre as your first? Only if that’s what you most want to write.
Writing a script is a huge commitment of time and brain-space, so you better be sure any project you’re working on is really going to hold your attention draft after draft. If, after finishing one broad comedy, you have a great idea for another, don’t immediately kill it because you should "really" be working on a thriller.
The right genre is the one that will actually get you to fire up your word processor, rather than surf the internet.
Writing for VFX
The visual effects in CHARLIE’S ANGELS are dazzling. Did you write this into the script, or was it the work of the director? Could you please advise on how to write those slow motion shots?
–Lawrence
The writer’s job is to communicate whatever is seen or heard on screen, and that includes effects. The best way to do this is usually to visualize the scene in your head, and do the best job you can describing it efficiently and compellingly. Obviously, the director, along with the cinematographer and visual effects supervisor, are going to have the final say about what the effects look like. But until these people come along, the writer is all those jobs, so you need to do what you can. Regarding slow motion, we’ll start with a lesson in cinematography. To achieve slow-motion, the camera runs at a speed faster than the usual 24 frames per second, often at an even increment like 48 or 96 frames per second. Then, when the film is played back at normal speed (24 fps), the action appears to be slowed down. More than that: it often has a somewhat dreamy, sexy quality that makes car crashes and pretty-girls-getting-out-of-pools extra appealing. In order to achieve this effect in a screenplay, I add extra vowels and consonants to words. So instead of writing:
The Thug fires four rounds at Maxwell. I write:
Thheee Thhhuugg ffiirrees fooouurr rrrounds attt Maxxxxwweelllll. I’m kidding. Please don’t do this. Instead, at the start of a scene that really, really needs to be slow-motion to make sense, I’ll add the phrase, "in SLOW-MOTION," to one of the action sentences. So the sentence might read, "In SLOW-MOTION, the Thug fires off four rounds at Maxwell, whose fingers just reach the button in time." In the CHARLIE’S ANGELS: FULL THROTTLE, I wrote:
Handing off an UNCONSCIOUS MAN to PARAMEDICS, firefighter Alex pulls off her helmet to set loose a slow-motion cascade of black hair. That time I didn’t capitalize "slow-motion," because there were already a lot of words in all-caps. And I’ve been known to write, "in super bad-ass slow-motion" if that’s really the feeling I’m going for.
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