Hamlet with Lions, or How to Write a Screenplay

How to Write a Screenplay or Tell a Better Story

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Victor Pineiro has not written an Oscar-winning screenplay, a summer blockbuster or the Great American Novel, but he does have a few things to say on "How to Write a Screenplay." Most of it is distilled knowledge from several sources (screenwriting books from Robert McKee and Syd Field, Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces), but he does supplement it with the experience of having written and produced the documentary Second Skin, which showed at SXSW, and was also a finalist at the Sundance Film Lab.

Pineiro understands the importance of having an idea--that it should be awesome and high concept--but that that idea must be supported by a solid story and plot. You know your idea is solid when you can boil it down to a single sentence, the log line: "A weatherman finds himself living the same day over and over again." (He doesn't include the "why", i.e. "until he realizes his need for true love." Or whatever Groundhog Day was about. More on that later.)

Pineiro also finds the "X meets Y" one sentence description useful. I liked "Pocahontas in Space" and "Hamlet with Lions." It also helps that there is a hero going after his needs and wants. Using Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's weatherman wants a future (tomorrow) but needs to appreciate the present (today).

 But most of all, I love that his last slide is this:

Which is one of my most favorite movies as a kid.

Page to screen

Maud Newton of the IFC admits that "adapting fiction for the screen has always been a tricky endeavor." Hollywood wants the glitter of literature and transform it into box office gold, but there are missteps all the way. Newton says: "For every "Apocalypse Now," "The Big Sleep" or "Rebecca," there are scores of butchered classics and box office duds." She cites the recent foray of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera" to the big screen. But even Javier Bardem's energy can't save it. Instead, Newton points us to another film that has Bardem in it--"No Country For Old Men," a Cormac McCarthy novel which the Coen brothers adapted for the screen. So an actor, no matter how great and gifted, can't make the jump from page to screen work. The material may be a literary classic, but it's not an assurance it'll be great movie material. Newton thinks that "No Country for Old Men" worked well for the screen because it's probably not as lush as the Marquez novel. McCarthy's prose was "so stripped-down novelistically, it tended to read like stage directions."

So if you follow that line of thought, the sort of prose that will also work for the screen is something that is stripped down and with room enough for improvisation and development. A short story really is a good candidate, and surely editor Stephanie Harrison will agree. She put together the book Adaptations, which contains 35 short stories which were the basis for Hollywood movies. The book is divided into sections, with parts for independent movies and comic books and the "difficult" ones to adapt, like Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers." All the writers who tried to adapt Hemingway for the movies said one thing: The guy writes on water. Lots of style, but all the action is suggested. But your mind is working overtime to fill in what was left unsaid. And that is where you put in all those other scenes not in the story.

Mostly Nothing Happens

"But mostly nothing happens, except in the sense that novelists and short-story writers understand. For them moving a character from not knowing that he’s unhappy to sort of acknowledging it qualifies as a pretty momentous event."

This comes from a New York Times article about the film "Smart People," which is about a depressed professor of literature who has an affair with a former student (played by Sarah Jessica Parker) and lives with his precocious daughter (played by Ellen Page of 'Juno' fame), a good for nothing brother. It was written by Mark Jude Poirier, a fiction writer who now has to reluctantly call himself a "professional screenwriter."

I haven't really seen the movie. Just found the review because I clicked the links related to the reviews of the Sex and the City movie. Apparently, the "depressed academic" is a character that has surfaced in American film in the last few years, with the bar set high by Michael Douglas' portrayal of Gordon Tripp in Wonder Boys and Jeff Daniels in The Squid and the Whale. I saw both of these films and they both happen to feature frustrated academics-slash-writers. If these are the models, then maybe Smart People isn't too far off.

But what really got my attention is Poirier's shift from fiction writing to screenwriting, where generally, things have to happen. The article says that Hollywood had always wooed the big name literary writers--Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Truman Capote--but all these writers just go away puzzled. Hollywood asks them to write stories where a lot of things happen. But what about the epiphany? Epiphanies can be so subtle, if you wink you'll miss it. Poirier is from this school of writing: the only visible change is that the main character now recognizes that he *is* depressed, but acknowledging it doesn't make it any easier. No big transformations, no miracle happy endings.

What the article also makes known is that there really aren't too many fiction writers who can hack the writing of screenplays. Oh there's Larry McMurtry (whose script to Brokeback Mountain I have yet to finish reading), but there's just so few of them. Playwrights have a better batting average. So if the fictionists are having a hard time transitioning to the big screen, what about the reverse: do screenwriters make for successful fiction writers?

Walking Through

Screenwriters' Masterclass (Book #13) doesn't tell you how to write a screenplay, how to chop the story into three acts, or how to sell your spec script to Hollywood. There are many books which do that out in the market. They cost a lot and after reading a couple of these, they all begin to sound the same. But in the end, you throw out the books and whatever they're saying out the window.

What those guides don't tell you is how the writer actually grapples with the ideas in his head, that how stories are conceived and written is different for each story and for each writer. How in the end, no matter how much you study dramatic structure and you can quote fifty different definitions of what a plot point is, In the end, it's still you and the computer (or the pen and paper, whatever) and how your gut feel guides you in telling the story.

What Kevin Conroy Scott did was he put together nineteen screenwriters and asked them to talk about their movies. The lineup of writers and movies is more contemporary than classical, art house/indie favorites are pitted against genre/pop. Think Amores Perros/Requiem for a Dream vs Out of Sight/Die Another Day. The European sensibility is represented by Francois Ozon (Under the Sand) and Lukas Moodyson (Together); the Latin Americans are accounted for. It's through that out of nineteen writers, only one woman made the cut (Lisa Chodolenko/High Art) and there are no Asians.

But when it comes to the writing, everyone is united by the process. Conroy Scott's favorite question seems to be, "Can you walk me through your writing process?" There's someone who favors typing out his script, others insist on a 5-page quota for the day and spend the rest of the day doing other things. Paul Laverty insists on doing research and living with his intended subjects. He hung out a lot with the Mexicans and Guatemalans who cleaned houses in LA and whose stories eventually became the seed for "Bread and Roses."

The actual writing may take six months to six years. What's also remarkable was that at one point almost all the writers hit a phase where they sit up, stop and ask themselves, "What the hell am I doing?" That's when Scott pops his next favorite question, "What do you do with self-doubt?" This is apparently inevitable. You try to ignore it, you forge on and write and hopefully a solution presents itself later on.

Scott's film school education manifests itself when he starts quoting a lot of theory and Ingmar Bergman and follows that up with "So do you agree with that?" At one point, Scott quoted Bergman as saying that Lukas Moodyson is "a young master" of Swedish cinema. I suppose whenever people think of Swedish cinema, Bergman is the first thing that comes to mind. But Moodyson probably surprised Scott by saying that Bergman never really became popular in Sweden. While the National Film Institute of Sweden sends Bergman all the movies made that year for him to screen in his private home theater, the young Swedes just make their movies and pretty much shrug their shoulders to Bergman's pronouncements.

Most of the writers view themselves as "accidents." When asked whether literature or the arts played a huge role in their childhoods, most would say, yes, the family encouraged them. Or that there were lots of books in the house. Or you get someone like Moodyson who just wanted to listen to loud music and didn't like reading. His view of writing is that he's pretty much like a human Ouija board. The story is out there, he's just the medium.

Then you get a lawyer like Paul Laverty, who was supposed to become a priest but quit when he saw the cute Italian girls in Rome. Then he got sent to Nicaragua and saw what was happening. He wrote something about that experience, and when the film was finished, he brought the film reels back to the village which inspired the story. Laverty emphasizes a grassroots approach to filmmaking. He does say that "you can't copy a screenplay from life. But in many ways we've touched their experience and we've gained a great deal of insight from their lives through them. So it's a matter of respect, and in a strange sort of way it's a way of thanking and recognizing that they are the authors of the piece."

I liked the emphasis that writers placed on research--unless you are Moodyson. But also, the book gives you a great rare glimpse into how writers basically squirm around until the story's out there. Then you're free until the hell that is revision begins. More revisions if the film is connected with major stars and big studios.

This is a great book if you want more than just a guide on how to write a script. Most of the writers interviewed didn't even know what a script looked like. They got hold of the legendary Syd Field book, read sample scripts, then chucked everything out the window and wrote.

Also, this was a great buy for me. I've been eyeing this book for such a long time in Powerbooks but it was just so expensive. The acid-free paper edition retails for PhP1,300+. My copy was originally going for P995 but I got it on sale and only paid for PhP199. Not bad, not bad at all.

Screenwriters' Masterclass: Screenwriters Talk About Their Greatest Movies. Edited by Kevin Conroy Scott. Faber and Faber, 2005.