Scriptwriting has little to do 5 with writing

STRICTLY PERSONAL

—

vt

IN MY spare time, fama
student of film. I hadn’t
wanted it to be that way.

1 had wanted to be able to write

one searing, epoch-shaping script
every year or so, make millions,

and spend the rest of my time doing

wonderfully idle things like sailing

and writing, maybe tippling a pint

“here and there as [ visited old bud-

; dies in various places around the |
/ world.

‘A few years back, I put in my
“dues at the Canadian Centre for.
Advanced Film Studies, where |
spent nine months learning the
mechanics of movie-writing.

Prior to that, I wrote a dozen
Beachcomber scripts. Don't knock
it. That stuff qualified as legitimate
national televised drama, and
helped to get me into film school. ©

More usefully, off and on, I’ve
spent at least six months of my life
locked up alone in motels or cabins
in places ranging from Auckland to
South Pender, hammering away at
movie or television scripts.

That’s the good time. The actual
‘. writing, Just you and the action in -
~ your head. The pictures and conver-
sations that race by. The wit. The -
Tage. The pain. The ecstasy.

You capture as much as you can
of it, and try to tack it down on the
. keyboard, bind it for all eternity in
hard copy.

+ ‘It looks easy. It ain’t.

I abide by ‘the oft-expressed
movie community adage that
scriptwriting is the most difficult
literary art form. Like poetry, it

~demands many levels of meanings;
like novels, it calls for dozens of
simultaneous story lines.

But mainly it is a medium that

. plays upon emotions.
The great script is a mechanism
for emotional manipulation. If you
\ hear a memorable line in it, it is
- probably because somebody
screwed up and let something slip
through thal wasn’t supposed to be
there.

If viewers started thinking in the
middle of a movie, what a disaster!
That would shatter the hypnotic
spell that is supposedly being cast.

Everything in the movie should
be herding the viewer down the
chute to a precisely planned emo-
tional moment at the end. That’s
what the art is all about.

At least, that’s the theory.

Knowing this, of course, isn’t
cnough in itself.

Still, it helped. Even if I never
quite hit the million-dollar pot of
gold — the big Hollywood block-
buster script — { did make more
money out of scriptwriting, easily,
than from ail 10 of my books put
together.

And, put it this way: except fora
12-minute film school Nick and the
Beachcomber stuff, nota scene
from any of those scripts that made
me so much money saw the light of
the big screen,

in other words, I got paid to
write stuff that never got produced,

And this is the living, burting
development hell, as it is known, of
movie-writing, Ninety-nine per cent
of the stuff never gets distribution.

And yet a writer has died a thou-
sand deaths cach time ta come up
with 120-odd pages of modern ihe-
atrical instructions.

It isa highly technical design
system, the working script. Iwas
described to me best as being like
the blueprint for a 747, There are
fundamental, immutable dynamics
that cannot be ignored.

In the interests of maximum
profit everything must follow the
proven formula. Unless you do,
nobody puts up the money.

A movie is too expensive an
underlaking for the artists to begin
to finance by themselves. Thus, the
big players are the investors, who
ultimately control the choice of
product. ;

66 That's why we see
so many stupid movies
ww. Why the messages
are so gutless, 99

That’s why we see so many stu-
pid movies. That’s why the mes-
Sages are so gutless, Thal’s why the
cliches. That’s why the stereotypes.
That’s why the shallowness. That's
why the predictability.

Everybody knows, in their:
bones, that somewhere between 15 ;
and 20 minutes into every flick, the
first Plot Point will occur, launch-
ing us into The Journey, which will
carry us off to the end of Act Two,
and depending on whether it ends
on an up or down note, Act Three
will end on the opposite note
because that’s the way the formula
goes. :

Why? Nobody knows, but it
works best that way in terms of box
office. And that’s that. Don’t mess
with it.

In the real world of scriptwrit-

“ij

ing, even though everybody says
all starts with the seript,” you
quickly learn that the writer is the
low soul on the totem.

In television, you have a story
editor poking about with your cre-
ation, with a producer looming in
the background, ready for fresh
meddling once the editor has
exhausted his or her talent for irk-
some interference,

They pay you in instalments so
that if they want a rewrite you have
to deliver, or no cheque.

In movies, impossible as it may
seem, it is even worse, You may be
spared the ignominiousness of
being tumpered with by a story edi-
tor, but you have to deal with a pro-
ducer, director and executive pro-
ducer, and all their assistants, us
well, sometimes, as an entire “cre-
ative department,” plus, let's face

‘the truth, the opinions of every girl-

friend, wife and drinking buddy of
the producer, director, executive
producer, their assistants, ctc.

And that’s long before you get
to the stage of the actors and their
agents sticking their two-bits worth
in.

: A “consensual art form,” they
“call it. Yikes!
They can call i: what they want,
‘one thing | know: it sure as devel-
opment hell is no place for a writer.
Whatever scriptwriting may be, it
ain’t writing. Not by the time
they’re all through with it.

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