| CHAIRMAN OF THE UCLA SCREENWRITING PROGRAM |
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MONTHLY SCREENWRITING TIPS - ISSUE #10
Writers crave opportunities to pitch their ideas to producers. Alas, however, if there is no story, no characters worth caring about, no overarching structure, pitching is worse than a waste of time. Without a solid story, you’re merely one more screen talker.
Screenwriters can do what no one else in the business can do: create something from nothing. Producers can’t do it, not directors, not actors or agents. Only writers can write a screenplay, and that’s the only thing we should do. We shouldn’t pitch. Pitching is talking. Our discipline is not called screen talking. In addition to being a writer I am also a trained actor and an experienced public speaker. Over the decades thousands of writers have not merely endured my oral presentations stretching sometimes over two whole days; they have paid oodles of dollars for the privilege. If I can fool writers into tolerating sixteen-hour seminars, surely I could offer a hot two-minute pitch in a producer’s office. But I don’t. Too often the person you’re pitching to is not authorized to green-light a picture. Instead, she has to re-pitch it herself to her boss, and the likelihood is she’ll blow it. There will be a lot of “Oh, I forgot to tell you this part” and “There was something about an aardvark or an armadillo or something. I don’t remember what but, trust me, it was rollickingly funny, insightful, and engaging.” Is that how writers want our material presented? If a writer pitches a notion to a sufficient number of producers, eventually he may meet himself coming around the block. Someone he pitches will say, “Sounds familiar.” That may be due to the fact that someone else the writer pitched mentioned it to yet another someone over lunch at Burrito King, or at a Pilates session, or an A.A. meeting. The shelf life of a pitch is shorter than that of a box of Rice Krispies. Years ago I dreamed up a high concept called Strangers on a Plane with Women. Consider it an homage to the Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train (screenplay by Raymond Chandler, Czensi Ormonde, Whitfield Cook, adapting the Patricia Highsmith novel) in which a tennis champion is approached by a stranger who knows an awful lot about his private life. He understands that the tennis star’s marriage is rocky. He tells the athlete that he is himself is oppressed by his mean-spirited and vindictive father. He proposes the two swap murders.
What spoils murder? Motive. Police solve murders by determining who had a motive to commit the crime. If two motivated culprits swap murders, however, if the stranger kills the tennis star’s wife and the latter kills the former’s father, it ought to be impossible to determine motive because in each instance there was none. Strangers on a Plane with Women updates and modernizes that story, moving from 1950 to the modern day, changing the train to a plane. Likewise, it converts the principal players from men to women. Imagine, say, instead of a male tennis star, a successful corporate lawyer flying cross-country on her way to a litigation settlement conference is approached by a stranger, a young woman, who proposes a parallel scheme? One day years ago I happened to mention this notion to my longtime pal Andrew Bergman who was working on a project at Warner Brothers. Andy said he loved the idea and encouraged me to pitch it to the industry. “Pitch what?” I said. “I have nothing. I have six words. Three of the words are ‘on,’ ‘a,’ and ‘with.’” The next day my phone rang. It was Mark Canton, a former student from UCLA and, at that moment, the head of Warner Brothers. “I hear you have the hottest pitch in town,” Mark told me. “I have nothing,” I said. “All I have is a title.” “You are a screenwriter,” he said. “I am the president of a major Hollywood studio. You will be at my office tomorrow at 3:00.” He hung up the phone. I promptly called my agent de jour Stu Miller who said, “Be sure to register the material with the Guild.” “There is no material. I have six words.” “You can’t go see that goniff (Yiddish for ‘thief’) Canton without registering the material. Before the meeting, sit down and sketch out two or three pages and register it with the Writers Guild.” Reluctantly, I settled myself before my now ancient, analog, sea-green Hermes 3000 heavyweight portable typewriter and cranked out one and a half double-spaced pages vaguely suggesting a handful of notions that hardly added up to a story. I drove to the Guild’s registration office and submitted the material for their files. At the appointed hour I arrived at Mark’s office on the Warner Brothers lot. There was the usual male chitchat: sports, cars, stereo equipment. He toured me around his plush suite, which had its own bathroom. In those days, the depths of Hollywood’s cocaine plague, a bathroom constituted a major bragging point. As the late Julia Phillips wrote in her excruciating Hollywood memoir You’ll Never Eat Lunch in this Town Again, a private bathroom was a must for free-basing, that is, cooking up one’s coke so that, instead of snorting, it could be smoked. Comedy legend Richard Pryor notoriously set himself on fire in this fashion, and was rescued running down the street outside his San Fernando Valley house with his hair ablaze. Mark Canton was no doper and required the bathroom exclusively for its traditional purpose. Still, a private bathroom was a marker for prestige. Only a couple of years earlier this then-arrogant snot-nose brat had sat as a student in my UCLA classroom, and now he ran a major studio from an office with its own toilet. After the obligatory chitchat, Mark asked me to present the pitch. I replied: “Strangers on a Plane with Women.” “That is sensational,” he said. “Let me see the pages.” “There are no pages. What I just told you, that’s it. That’s all there is.” “Don’t shit a shitter,” Mark said. “Yesterday I instructed you to meet with me. What would a screenwriter have done under such circumstances? You called your agent to brag that you had just gotten a call from the head of Warner Brothers. Who is your agent? Isn’t it Stu Miller? What would Stu Miller have said to you? He would have said, ‘You can’t meet with that goniff Canton without registering the pages.’” He pointed to an Italian leather briefcase I had bought in Rome while writing a picture there the previous summer. Stupidly, I had brought the bag with me, and in it, of course, was a copy of the pages I had registered at the Guild not an hour earlier. The pages seemed almost to levitate from the hand-tooled bag. I passed them across the desk to Mark. He said he would read them over the weekend. “Over the weekend? You can go right now into your private bathroom and while you’re taking a leak read the pages twice. You can hold your ding-dong in one hand and the pages in the other, and before you shake off the last drop you can commit the pitch to memory.” He laughed and chased me from the office. I didn’t doubt that what he would actually do was send the page and a half to the story department and have the pitch ‘covered.’ That is, a reader for the studio would review the pages and summarize them. It struck me that the ‘summary’ of the page-and-a-half would run five pages. Needless to say, a new millennium has arrived plus another decade, and I have yet to hear Word One from Mark Canton or anybody else regarding Strangers on a Plane with Women.
Behind the Screen: Getting to Know Lew Hunter Lew Hunter has maintained one foot in the classroom at the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television for over half a century – starting in the late 1950s as a student with classmates like Francis Ford Coppola, before becoming a professor in the late 1970s and co-head of the program in 1988. His students include David Koepp (Spider-Man, Panic Room, Ghost Town, Angels & Demons), Pamela Gray (Conviction, A Walk on the Moon) and Dan Pyne (Fracture, The Sum of All Fears), among many of the top television and film writers of the last 30 years. In 1998, nine of the ten top-grossing films were written by graduates of UCLA's screenwriting MFA program. Lew retired in 2002 and currently resides in Superior , Nebraska. In classic Lew fashion, even in retirement he continues to catch the dreams of tomorrow’s screenwriters and supports their aspirations by returning to UCLA every winter quarter to teach his famed “434” writing workshop, as well as lecturing internationally and throughout the US. He conducts quarterly screenwriting colonies in Nebraska, which offer hand-picked writers the opportunity to learn from a screenwriting master and develop their scripts in a two-week intensive workshop. The book Lew Hunter’s Screenwriting 434 remains a bestseller to this day. He’s currently penning a new resource for screenwriters. The title is "Naked Screenwriting: 24 Oscar Winning Screenwriters Bare Their Art, Craft, Secrets and Souls" which will be available in 2012, God and procrastination willing. Get inspired to catch your screenwriting dream by discovering how this legend realized his: Q: What led you to Hollywood to pursue a career in entertainment? Lew: This is the type of question that people usually expect to hear answered with a response like “I grew up loving movies.” Truth be told, the only movies I was allowed to watch growing up were MGM and Paramount musicals. My mother, a graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music, had two requests that my father, a farmer from Nebraska, agreed to upon their engagement – one, she was to have an indoor toilet; and two, she wouldn’t have to raise chickens. When my father agreed to both, they married and lived in Nebraska, where I was born and raised. My mother put her artistic aspirations in me, and from the time I was four years old, she dressed me up in costumes for holidays like Easter and the Fourth of July, and I sang and performed at all of the local women’s clubs. So, I got my start in entertainment very early on. My major when I entered Nebraska Wesleyan University was business administration – which, to this day, is the major for people who don’t know what they want to do when they grow up. The theater department head, Doc Miller, heard about some of the mischievous drama I had caused by pulling practical jokes on campus, one with a women’s sorority – and thought my skills for entertaining and mixing up trouble could be put to better use on stage. She assigned me the role of a tobacco spitting preacher in the play Sun-Up. By the fourth night that the play was performed, I had mastered not only the skill of spitting the tobacco over 20 feet across the stage, but in also getting a good laugh from the audience. Getting that laugh – that love – from the audience was very empowering and inspired me to pursue theater as a major. From performing I moved behind the scenes when I worked my way into a production position at a TV station in Lincoln, Nebraska and then pursued a masters degree in theater from Northwestern University. I graduated in 1956 and knew I wanted to go to New York or Los Angeles. I asked 32 people in Chicago, where I was working, and 32 people said “don’t go to Hollywood.” The thirty-third person, my personnel director, said “If you want to go badly enough, go.” I took the advice of the thirty-third person, and much like a scene out of The Grapes of Wrath, my wife and I headed to Hollywood with a mattress and other belongings strapped to the roof of our car. We camped out along the way. My education on how the entertainment capital of the world worked started before I had my first interview. I applied for a utilities account for our new rental property, and when asked what my profession was, I replied “producer”. In the job section of my file, they translated that to “unemployed”. Q: How did you start your writing career? Lew: Like so many other writers whose fervent desire when they come to Hollywood is to make it as a writer, I started out in the mailroom. Before I left for Hollywood, I had written letters to 96 people asking them to meet with me. Fifteen replied; and five agreed to meet with me. Three weeks into my new life in Hollywood, with a masters from Northwestern University, no viable writing gigs on the horizon and “unemployed” still listed on my utilities application form, I was starting to think the move was a failure. But one of the five people who agreed to meet with me was producer Ed Cashman. “Listen,” he said, “It’s no shame to be on the paid staff at the networks, and a good way to get in the door.” I found an entry level job at NBC, where everyone I worked with in the mailroom also had masters’ degrees, and one had a doctorate. After several weeks I jumped up from mailroom to music clearance. Around the same time I also heard about the NBC David Sarnoff Fellowship, which would allow me to learn about film. I applied for, and got the fellowship and decided to go to UCLA, which I knew had a wonderful film school. Of course, all the classes were conducted on campus in Westwood, but the experience was like taking a trip around the world for its diverse collection of intellectual and stimulating young people – students in the program were from all over the US, as well from such faraway places as Siberia and Greece. While studying at UCLA, I continued to work 20 hours a week at NBC and was offered a higher paying position at ABC. Unlike Nebraska, where dedication to a company may attain you the CEO position if you stuck at it long enough, I learned quickly that Hollywood doesn’t reward you for loyalty. If anything, getting hired at ABC would only help grease the wheels for NBC to bring me back at a higher position. My then boss, the head of programming, gave me that advice – along with another piece that served me well for the rest of my career – and that was to live at my same level, and not go blowing money as soon as I got a pay bump. I took his advice to heart – I maintained my residence for almost 40 years at the same house in Burbank where I raised my family and also later hosted the famed monthly “Writers Bloc” UCLA writers’ parties. My career advanced and I went into programming for shows like Peyton Place, Bewitched and The Addams Family. I was responsible in total for six of the 12 series on the air for 20th Century Fox. I was telling writers how to write but I wasn’t yet a writer for the networks. But I knew I wanted to write – and had actually been doing so, in the closet for about ten years. Over the course of working in a position at Disney for a three year period, I had read over 2,000 scripts. And, 90 percent of them were shit, for lack of a better word. And, I thought the scripts I was writing could at least be at the top 10 percent of that shit. So – that’s what I did – with my spouse’s blessing to quit my salaried day job, enough unemployment insurance and savings in the bank to get me through a year – I became a writer. Q: What is your favorite movie of all time and why? I have two favorite movies: Casablanca and Citizen Kane. How else could I possibly respond? I have to pay homage to Orson Welles not only for giving us Citizen Kane, but also for his dedication to UCLA. Fellow professor Howard Suber and I, among many others, worshipped Orson. We idolized him almost to an unhealthy degree – he was a seminal point for all of us. So, imagine our elation when we got him to do some teaching at UCLA. When he died on October 10, 1985, we learned he was actually slumped over his typewriter working on a syllabus for a UCLA class. My other favorite film, Casablanca, has perfect structure as I see it. Everything in Casablanca has a direct relationship to what the movie is about. Everything is there for a specific reason relating to intelligence, creativity and emotion. There is nothing extraneous in that movie. I show Casablanca in my screenwriting colony classes; and regardless of the hundreds of times I’ve seen it – I always cry at the same three or four different places every time. Q: What advice would you give to new writers who have the dream of making it big in Hollywood? Lew: Read Dorothea Brande’s “Becoming a Writer.” It was published in 1935 but is a timeless resource for writers. Also, take the advice that was given to me by John Steinbeck while I was a young student at Northwestern. I approached him on campus after one of his lectures and asked: “What can I do to become a wonderful screenwriter?” He twisted his forefinger and thumb over his goatee, scrunched up his eyes and he said it, “Write.” Then he turned and walked away. I’ve since determined it was the best advice I could’ve been given, in addition to another one-word directive: “Finish.” I’d also give new as well as experienced writers the proverbial reminder that ‘less is more’ – especially in terms of the dialogue and characters you put into your screenplays. And, lastly, keep the burn that you have at the start of a new screenplay and at the hope of a dream being realized going for the long haul. People don’t fail in this business – they quit. You may think there are a million external factors that will determine your success – from the studios liking your script to what the next hot trend may be. Those are excuses. Procrastinations. The only shot you have at making your dream come true is within yourself. Amen and druce (Gallic for 'so be it').
Catch Richard If You Can! Up and coming workshops and seminars: May 18, 2011 – Scripped.com Teleseminar
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