McBride Writing in Pictures

Screenwriting Made (Mostly) Painless
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-27438-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

Unlike most how-to books on screenwriting, Writing in Pictures is highly practical, offering a realistic guide to the screenwriting profession, as well as concrete practical guidance in the steps professional writers take to write a screenplay that comes from the heart instead of the pocketbook. The readeris taken through the nitty-gritty process of conceiving, outlining, constructing, and writing a screenplay in the professional format, with clear and concise examples offered for every step in writing a short dramatic film. Writing in Pictures offers straight talk, no mumbo-jumbo or gimmicks, just a methodical, step-by-step process that walks the reader through the different stages of writing a screenplay -- from idea to outline to character biography to treatment to step outline to finished screenplay. Using well-known films and screenplays, both contemporary and classic, to illustrate its lessons, Writing in Pictures also offers comments from famous screenwriters past and present and insightful stories (often colorful and funny) that illuminate aspects of the craft.

Joseph McBride is a film historian and associate professor in the Cinema department at San Francisco State University. His many books include Searching for JohnFord, Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, Steven Spielberg: A Biography, Hawks on Hawks, Whatever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career, as well as the critical studies John Ford (1974, with Michael Wilmington) and Orson Welles.

Autoren/Hrsg.

McBride, Joseph

Leseproben

1

So Why Write Screenplays?

My screenwriter friend Sam Hamm, whose credits include Batman, Batman Returns, and the brilliantly acerbic political satire “Homecoming,” often visits my classes to share his wisdom. He starts by telling the students, “If you can do anything else, do it.” Sam is right. Trying to earn a living as a screenwriter, or as a writer of any kind, often resembles the Myth of Sisyphus.

If you want to be a doctor, you go to medical school. You take a series of clearly defined courses, get the required practical experience, and emerge as an M.D. The odds are strong that you will find a well-paying job with a hospital or an HMO. But in the field of screenwriting, there is no such thing as a training course that will guarantee you a well-paying job, or any other kind of job, no matter how qualified you may think you are. The odds against breaking into the field are long, and even if you do, it’s hard to make a living as a screenwriter; about half of the members of the Writers Guild of America can’t find work in any given year. So if you can make a living as a computer specialist or an accountant or a firefighter, the wiser course is to enter one of those saner professions.

Even if you manage to get a script before the cameras, the trouble is just beginning, because it’s rare for a screenplay to survive production unscathed, without endless revisions by other writers (or anyone else on the set). And even if a miracle occurs and your script emerges from this process as a successful movie (artistically, commercially, or both), that’s no guarantee you will sustain a career. A flop or two, and you may find yourself back on the unemployment line. Just about everyone in the business goes through fallow periods; managing to survive them and carve out a long career takes tremendous stamina and ingenuity, and it usually doesn’t get much easier.

You can write screenplays as a means to an end, a way to move up the ladder to becoming a director. Many students admit that getting a ticket to direct is the reason they want to learn screenwriting, for being a director is generally considered a more glamorous job than being a screenwriter. Screenwriters are the Rodney Dangerfields of the film business. Directors get more respect, more publicity, more money, more of almost everything. They sometimes get their name above the title and claim that the film is “A film by Joe Doakes,” much to the displeasure of the Writers Guild. But as most people in the film business know, deep down, but hate to acknowledge, the writer is the single indispensable person in the making of a film. Until the script is written, nothing can happen in front of the camera, and if the script is no good, the film doesn’t have a chance of success. That fact should give great power to the writer, but it doesn’t work that way. Writers are viewed as interchangeable and expendable. The industry lives in active denial of the central importance of the writer, because recognizing it would dangerously expose the insecurity of everyone else who depends on the writer’s work.

Another reason writing is held in such low repute in Hollywood is that it seems that everyone who lives there wants to be a writer or describes himself or herself as a writer. People joke about how the guy bagging groceries at the local Ralphs always has a script in his back pocket to sell you, but the joke often turns out to be true. So when you tell someone in Hollywood that you’re a writer, you are often met with a sneer of contempt. And in the film business, unfortunately, everyone seems to think he or she can write, so the profession is undervalued. It’s not bad enough that the director and actors feel capable of improving a script. Even the star’s boyfriend or girlfriend believes he or she can take a whack at the script and make it better. Few people would have the chutzpah to tell the cinematographer how to adjust the camera or set the lights, but just about everyone on the set has an opinion on how to fix the script.

Now, you may want to learn screenwriting to help you become a better cinematographer or producer or actor. That’s all to the good; everyone who works in film should know from personal experience how scripts are written. A producer who has tried her hand at writing scripts will be better able to work with writers in improving the structure and style of a screenplay. An actor who has written scripts might write a good part for himself (as Sylvester Stallone famously did with Rocky, propelling himself from bit player to star), and an actor who knows how to write will be better able to sharpen or improvise dialogue and to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the scripts he is offered. A cinematographer, whose job is to tell a story with images, can benefit greatly from knowing how to conceive those images and put them into words. But choosing whether you want to be a writer or a director, or both, or whether you want to practice another filmmaking craft, is a process of learning to know yourself, your strengths, your limitations, and what gives you the most creative satisfaction. If being a screenwriter brings less recognition and offers less social activity than the life of a director, it also allows you more time to think on your own and practice your craft in blessed solitude, in complete control of the characters and story, just like a novelist or playwright—at least until you turn over your script to be filmed.

Woody Allen, one of the great writer-directors, admitted in 2009 after making the splendid romantic comedy Vicky Cristina Barcelona,

I almost always feel disappointed when I see my movies. When you’re conceiving them at home, it’s only happening in your mind and everything’s fabulous. Then you find out that Javier and Penelope are not available, you’re not gonna be able to get Buckingham Palace and the cameraman doesn’t quite get the lighting exactly as you want. By the time the thing is over, between your own mistakes and the compromises and the money that you don’t have to reshoot scenes, you never think, “This is amazing.” Instead it’s: “Oh, God, if I take it back into the editing room, cut this, put this over here and add some music, I think I can save it.” You start out convinced you’re gonna make The Bicycle Thieves and, by the time you’re in the editing room, you’re just fighting for survival. You’ve given up all your aspirations, greatness is out the window, you just don’t want to embarrass yourself and for it to be coherent.

And so there are those few (I am tempted to write “those unhappy few”) who just want to be screenwriters. That is a condition more to be admired than pitied. But if you take your writing seriously, you should take the craft of screenwriting seriously. Don’t treat it merely as a means to an end, whether the end is status, money, fame, or anything else. Show the craft the respect it deserves. If you don’t, you will be demeaning yourself by looking down on what you are doing. You should be doing it out of love for the craft and a passion to create. Only that kind of engagement and dedication will enable you to overcome all the obstacles you will face and give you a shot at a satisfying career as a screenwriter.

Once in a while someone comes along and tells the truth about how hard it is to succeed in Hollywood. George Lucas issued such a warning in 2009. Discussing the tumultuous changes that have occurred in the film industry in his lifetime, Lucas gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times recalling how it was in the 1980s when students considered film school and the film industry a path to riches: “I told the students then and I tell them now, if you are here to make money, you’re in the wrong place. This is the place you don’t want to go make money. Very few people are successful at it. You better love making movies because if you don’t you will live a very miserable life. It’s definitely a hard physical and mental process that you go through.”

That’s the same message I always give to aspiring screenwriters. I warn them about the dangers they will face so that, if they choose to plunge into the shark tank anyway, they will do so with their eyes wide open. And I do so to make sure that, before making the decision to enter this daunting profession, they ask themselves, “Do I want it badly enough, and why?”

After the old studio system collapsed in the 1960s, a new generation of writers and directors started coming into the business—the “movie brats” or “film generation,” who included Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Paul Schrader, and many others. It soon became clear that more young writers wanted to write the Great American Screenplay than wanted to write the Great American Novel; someone of the caliber of Robert Towne, if he had come of age in an earlier generation, would have written Chinatown as a novel rather than a film, but Towne brought a masterful level of novelistic density and sophistication to the form of the original screenplay. In earlier generations, most films were based on books or plays, and original screenplays, especially ones written on “spec” (speculation), were much harder to sell. For an all-too-brief time in the 1960s and 1970s, that started to change, and movies were the better for it.

There still is a market for original screenplays today, as...