Education

What’s the first movie where the writing really made an impression on you?

–Kate

I remember watching WAR OF THE ROSES on videotape with my brother, and liking
it so much that I immediately rewound it and started watching it again. I wrote
down the dialogue for the first few scenes,
and suddenly realized that somebody really had to write this all first — the
actors weren’t just making their
lines up. There was an invisible plan behind the movie I was watching.

That seems strange to me now, because at the time I’d read plays and even
acted in a few. But plays are basically just dialogue, while a movie script
had to show what was happening even when no characters were talking. I wouldn’t
read an actual movie script until a few years later, but it didn’t stop me
from transcribing an entire episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation." (Incidentally,
transcribing a show is a great exercise to get comfortable with standard formatting
and writing scene description, since the big work — structure, character,
dialogue and plot — are already handled for you.)

When someone says about a movie that "the writing was really impressive," I
always wonder if that means that some other aspect of the movie wasn’t very
good, such as the acting or the directing, which let you notice the words.
In my experience, if everything in is working at top form, you’re not even
aware the movie is written. It seems to simply exist.

It’s only as you stop to think back about what you saw that you recognize
how good the writing must have been. Experience has shown that you can make
a bad movie from a great script, but you can’t make a great movie from a bad
script.

I’m considering getting a journalism
degree as a base point for a screenwriting career. I noticed you did the same
thing. Do you have any regrets about getting your bachelor’s in journalism,
or was is the best option available to a future screenwriter?

–Larissa Barlow

As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, I think journalism is a good bachelor’s
degree choice, particularly if film studies aren’t available. Journalism teaches
efficient, structured writing, and good work habits. But it’s by no means the
only undergraduate major that helps.

An English degree is a great and obvious choice, particularly one that combines
literature and composition. Depending on the specific program, a major in communications
could be good, if it had a strong focus on writing. But any field in the humanities
would really work. A quick survey of my writer friends reveals political science
majors, religion majors, art history majors, and probably a dozen other specialities
I don’t even know.

More than anything, I’d advise majoring in something that really interests
you. While you may aspire to a screenwriting career now, who knows what the
future will bring? A physics degree is no obstacle if you decide to apply to
graduate-level film school. In fact, it would probably be intriguing enough
to an admissions panel that they’d be eager to meet you.

I’m a teenager. How young were
you when you knew you wanted to become a writer?

–Ruhalia Knight

I probably knew I wanted to be a writer when I was seven years old. My mom
had a manual typewriter, and I spent the better part of a week trying to type
a story about a boy who lived on Mars. I only made it about 12 lines. The story
kept changing because I often hit the wrong keys, and would have to stop and
think about what words I could make with the letter I had mis-typed.

It wasn’t until college that I started to think about writing for movies.
In the era before the internet — and internet-based advice columns — I read
what I could find in bookstores, starting with Steven Soderbergh’s screenplay
for SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE. I remember being fascinated by how simple movie
scripts were. It seemed easy, or at least a lot easier than any other form
of writing.

I was wrong, but I was hooked. I learned everything else about screenwriting
after I moved to Los Angeles in 1992. I was 22.