Charlie Kaufman

I adore Charlie Kaufman. BEING JOHN MALCOVICH, ADAPTATION and ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS MIND are beautifully written scripts and marvelous movies. CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND is a pretty good movie developed from an outstanding screenplay. And HUMAN NATURE is... interesting.

Kaufman's new film is a movie I can't see soon enough. And to tide me over, The Onion A/V Club has just posted a great interview with the new director. Check it all out here.

Writing to shoot

Below is a revision to a post I made a couple of years ago. It was part of a series of posts I had written collectively called, The VertiBlog Film School. VertiBlog was, you see, the name of my old blog. I had subsequently taken all of these posts and turned them into a manuscript that I still one day hope to publish. You know... like in a book.

Click here to check out the original series of posts.

THE SCRIPT

Writing to shoot requires a certain pragmatism toward your script. Don't write in stunts. Don't cast children. No animals. No pyrotechnics. No car chases. Don't have dozens of extras. Don't have 12 principal speaking roles. Don't write long passages of dialogue that amateur actors will mess up take after take. Don't have a dozen key locations that are miles and miles apart from each other. Don't write 'walk and talks', which are a nightmare with continuity and retakes... for long dialogue scenes, keep people stationary. Keep it contemporary, set it today, not in 1970 or 1885.

What to do: Keep it simple: a small cast of characters. Few locations. Try to write a lot of scenes to take place outdoors. Outdoors, you don't have to light -- huge timesaver. However, outdoors you have to battle the sounds of the outdoors, so keep it far from the street, and not next to a construction site.

Also, you should take advantage of locations. You know somewhere cool. That old derelict train trestle back behind your uncle's property, overgrown and rusted, but an incredibly interesting looking structure. Or the cool empty silo that your friend's cousin knows about.

That place by the river.

The movie theater where your buddy works.

Rack your memory, and ask your friends and family if they know any unique, super cool locations. I guarantee you they will. And exploit them. Let them inspire you.

The scene you were going to shoot in your mom's kitchen is going to be a hell of a lot more interesting at the old abandoned amusement park way up near Mount Tom.

I'm worked on a feature, DEAD DUDES, written and directed by my friend, Karl. Karl decided he wanted to make a zombie film. He loves zombies. The budget is probably around $750.

Karl wrote his script with the intent to shoot it. He wrote it with few characters, few locations, and cleverly had the whole film take place in a day (certainly helped with wardrobe and makeup continuity). That was all smart.

He did another smart thing. All of his characters, with only one exception, are between 19-25 years old. Why was that smart? Because he was able to hire students. The other role? He wrote it with his college professor in mind.

Then Karl did yet another smart thing. He decided he wanted to write about something.

The script's plot is about a couple of guys trying to avoid zombies while they're trying to avoid the mob. Simple. And if that was all that the movie was about, it could very easily fail; let's be honest, for $750 you're not gonna have much in the way of zombie action +/or that many cool mob shootouts.

Karl's idea was to use the zombie story to look at the values we hold dear in society today. What's important to us? And if faced with a zombie onslaught, would it still be important? Would we try to protect only ourselves, or would we choose to help others. Are a bunch of mindless zombies only interested in eating your brains that much different from a bunch of people only interested in saving themselves?

These are pretty good ideas. And they will separate his zombie movie from the countless other zombie movies out there that are about, well... zombies.

© 2008 by Marty Langford

Sole authorship

The concept of a single driving creative force behind a movie seems an odd notion. What clearer example is there of a collaborative art that film? We all get that films require a small army of above and below the line talent (even if the proprietary "A Film By" credit that some directors get suggest otherwise).

And as much as we, as screenwriters, like to believe that the buck absolutely begins with us. The 'us' we're referring to (except in the case of writing partners), is actually the 'me', isn't it?

Former agent Nancy Nigrosh has written an interesting essay regarding the idea that multiple writers are needed to create a producable screenplay.

Like us, she asks, 'why exactly does this notion exist?'

Click her to read her insightful reasons.

Do you need Final Draft?

There is, I suppose, a larger question that I could ask. That being, 'do you need ANY kind of scriptwriting software?'

The answer to that one is 'yes'.

I didn't ask it because, quite frankly, if you're into scriptwriting enough to be seeking out information on a site like this, then you probably already know the importance of a well-formatted screenplay, and you already know the difficulty in creating one without any formatting software.

My first several screenplays were written in Microsoft Word, without templates and without macros (truth be told, my first three screenplays were written on a Brother word processor). I was vaguely aware that there were scriptwriting programs out there, but I never saw the need to adopt them. I mean, you only really need four tab settings, right? You have your left margin and then it's just a tab for your character name, another for parentheticals, a third for dialogue and a fourth for transitions. Who needs to spend $250? I was able to write quite efficiently during those several poor to mediocre scripts.

After a while, I graduated to macro-enabled Word programs. There's a couple of good ones out there, but I primarily used Simply Screenplay (you can it, as well as many other useful freeware downloads here). It was free and it took care of many of the formatting problems I ran into with simply Word (pagination for one, which was a biggie!).

For my last few screenplays, I made the jump to Final Draft. And quite frankly, if you take yourself at all seriously as a screenwriter, then you should, too. There have been several times when a producer has asked me for an .fdr file and if I had to explain that I had written the script as a Word document, then my credibility would have suffered.

There are a few other industry standard programs out there, among them Movie Magic and Dramatica. But Final Draft is absolutely the preferred app.

At least by me.

Do as Mamet says...

In Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman memorably writes "nobody knows anything". And generally speaking, he has a point. Everybody claims to have the answer, and really... none of us really know a damn thing.

Except David Mamet.

But rather than present us with an answer, Mamet poses three questions. In his book, BAMBI VS. GODZILLA, Mamet sagely states that every screenwriter, in every screenplay, needs to answer these three questions.

-WHO WANTS WHAT FROM WHOM?
-WHAT HAPPENS IF THEY DON'T GET IT
-WHY NOW?

Tacked directly in front of my computer, I'm looking at it right now, is a piece of paper with these questions written upon it.

I read them every day.

AFI's BASICS OF SCREENWRITING

The AFI is the American Film Institute, and as they say on the front page of their website, they are "a national institute providing leadership in screen education and the recognition and celebration of excellence in the art of film, television and digital media."

They're not quite a college or university, but act as a educational environment for filmmakers. And they know quite a bit about screenwriting.

Fathom.com has published some of the AFI's screenwriting material on their site and it's well worth your time. It's good reading. And good learning.

Click here to visit the AFI's screenwriting seminar on "The Basics of Screenwriting".

Stephen J. Cannell

Say what you will about Cannell, yeah... he's the guy who wrote The A-Team and Silk Stalkings... but he's also the guy who wrote The Rockford Files and Wiseguy. The guy's a prolific, successful scriptwriter and he's more that qualified to host a seminar on screenwriting.

And lucky for us, the folks over at writerswrite.com have transcribed and posted many of the materials Cannell used in his lecture. There's lots of good stuff in here, and I recommend you put it on your reading list.