John August

QandA

Getting stuck in a genre

Genres, QandA

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.

More LA relocating

Film Industry, QandA

How important is it to be in Los Angeles to truly make it
as a successful screenwriter? Is it possible to make it outside the City of
Angels, or should
one realistically think about relocating?

–T. Sexton

You don’t need to live in Los Angeles to write a screenplay, although the reverse
sometimes seems true. Everyone in L.A. eventually writes one, though usually
they shouldn’t.

Writers move to Hollywood for the same reason long-distance runners move to
high-altitude. By making things more difficult for yourself, you hopefully
improve. And let’s face it, there’s something romantic about being a struggling
screenwriter in the big city, living from ramen noodle to ramen noodle, doing
your laundry with other aspiring filmmakers, complaining about Jerry Bruckheimer
movies while finishing your spec script about terrorists.

After a year or two the romance fades, and if you haven’t had any success,
you become bitter. That’s not to say you wouldn’t have become bitter wherever
you came from, but in L.A., it’s more expensive. (On the plus side, the weather’s
better.)

Do you need to move to L.A. to become successful? Probably. While there are
major screenwriters who don’t live here, most of them did at some point in
their careers. Part of the job of a beginning screenwriter is to take 1000
meetings with 1000 young development executives, listening to them spout on
about their pet projects which will never get made, and that means living in
town.

Should you, T. Sexton, move to Los Angeles? Only if you’re really serious
about making it as a writer. Just as nine out of ten actors who move here don’t
succeed, probably a greater proportion of writers strike out. The difference
is, actors have to go out and audition, while writers can fail in private.

But some writers, including many of my best friends, do succeed. And truth
be told, it can be a great job. Don’t let the fear of failure keep you from
trying. Pack up the U-Haul if that’s your goal. Just make sure you have a script
or two finished first.

Writing is hard

Psych 101, QandA, Writing Process

questionmarkI’ve been busy
writing a script, and I have the whole idea mapped out in my head. But for
some reason, my writing doesn’t seem to flow. I struggle to get from one point
to the next. Is this normal? If I go back through the script
again after I’ve jotted down my rough dialogue, will it flow then? Do you do
a quick rough draft before you get into the real writing?

–Bob

answer iconWell, are you a good writer? I ask because it sounds like this is your first
screenplay, and there’s every chance you’re a terrible writer. It’s my experience
that most people in Los Angeles feel like they could write a good movie. The
reason why most of them aren’t successful screenwriters is that they’re really
aren’t good writers.

It’s easy to see how they get mislead: If you read a script, you’d think any
monkey could do it. Most monkeys can’t.

I’m not picking on you, honestly. I hope you’re a terrific writer who’s just
realizing how incredibly difficult screenwriting can be. It’s great when the
writing flows, but most of the time, it doesn’t. You work your ass off to get
to the end of a sentence, then start another. You end up deleting scenes that
took you four hours to write, then rewriting entire scripts based on problems
you should have spotted before you even started writing.

It’s not grueling, back-breaking labor like building a road, but it is labor.
It’s exhausting. And while Final Draft might make formatting your script easier,
it’s still just as hard to write.

Often, when I approach a scene, I will do a quick rough draft, by which I
mean all of a scene’s crucial dialogue lines scribbled on the back of an envelope.
It’s mostly just to get the shape of the scene, but it is "real" writing
just as much as the endless tweaking that will inevitably be entailed.

Above all this, I would stress: Don’t wait for flow. It might come; it might
not. But it’s your job to keep writing anyway.

Action writing

QandA, Words on the page

Say you were writing the script to an action flick–LETHAL
WEAPON, for instance. When you get to the part where Mel Gibson and Gary Busey
are trouncing
each
other at the end of the movie, do you write a blow-by-blow account of the fight
in the stage directions, or do you just write "Gibson and Busey trounce
each other for a while, and Mel wins," and let the director/choreographer
worry about the details?
I’ve always wondered about that concerning the action
scenes in movies, like fights and gun battles and car chases and such.

–Roger

There’s a common misconception that a screenwriter only writes the dialogue,
while the director handles the rest. Being a guy who writes a lot of action
sequences, I can say definitively that’s not the case — at least not in the
21st century.

Supposedly, when the screenplay for GONE WITH THE WIND got to the climactic
fire scene, it stated only this: “Atlanta burns.” Just two words,
but in the movie the sequence took several minutes.

In modern screenplays, at least those that make it into production, the action
written on the page pretty closely matches the action on-screen. A fight sequence
will almost never be written blow-for-blow, but will at the minimum give
a sense of the action, the stakes and the most important moments within the
battle. If you don’t believe me, flip through the script to THE MATRIX, which
you can find in most bookstores. The Wachowski brothers don’t label each punch
and kick, but reading the script, you get a very good idea what the fight sequences
will look like.

The same holds true with almost any action sequence you can think of. In GO,
I spend half a page describing the chase down the alley in Vegas, in which
the Riviera gets stuck sideways. Everyone reading the script — producers,
the director, studio executives — could see exactly how funny the moment would
be, which is how such an expensive and time-consuming stunt stayed in the budget.
Otherwise, it would have been the first thing cut.

The danger with properly-described action sequences is that if they’re not
written very deftly, they can slow down the read immensely. That’s why I spend
at least as much time working on these moments as the dialogue scenes. They’re
much less glamorous, and honestly, more difficult to write. But the ability
to write interesting and economical scene description is what distinguishes
the screenwriter from the playwright.

That, and the weird “gh” in the name. If a playwright writes for
plays, shouldn’t a screenwright write for screens?