Be a lifetime (film, television and media) learner.

If you’re struggling with an element, scene, sequence or act of a movie or show you’re writing, stop.  Quit writing briefly and look back a few years or decades to previous material.

Scorsese, Coppola, and other great filmmakers never stop learning.  Watch the DVD or BluRay extras for any of their films where they share their studies with the disc viewing audience.

Got a problem with a part of your story?  You abhor taking the simple way out using voice over or character dialogue.  Take in a Buster Keaton film from the 1930s.  I recommend The General, or Steamboat Bill Jr.  Familiarize yourself with the ways and means of the masters of the silent era.  Buster Keaton, Charles Chaplin, and others handled key components of their visual narratives before and during the advent of sound in motion pictures expertly.  Learn from the early greats.

Maybe you have problem with “on the nose” or unreal dialogue.  Watch a film, such as Alexander Payne’s Sideways (2004) where characters say one thing and generally act out the opposite.  Download a screenplay written by Nora Ephron, Diablo Cody, Callie Khoury, Susannah Grant, Diana Ossana, Alan Ball or Paul Haggis to name a few.  Read such a screenplay; study it. Notice techniques, styles, and methods.  What do these writer’s characters say with their mouths?  What do they mean in their hearts?  Learn from the greats you know and don’t yet know but have heard of.

Ok your problem is writing a genre piece.  Maybe you didn’t want to end up there but nevertheless there you are.  Now you’re falling into all the associated pitfalls and clichés of that genre.  It’s a mess and you’re ready to give up.  Don’t.  Look for films that have busted, redefined, remade, or just bettered their respective genre.  Take Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), science fiction thriller right?  How about futuristic film noir?  Or Christopher Nolan’s Inception, its surely a sci-fi thriller too.  Right?  Or is it a heist movie?  Find and watch movies that stretch your idea of a given genre.  How did they do it?  Did they embrace cliché?  Did they redefine recognized characteristics?  How did they accomplish that?  Challenge yourself to research and study your genre or an unrelated one.  Either way, apply what you’ve learned to your work.

Set your writing woes aside. Read and watch.  With your lessons learned, inform your writing and eradicate your problems.  If writing is rewriting, then learning is relearning.  Become a student of film again, or do so for the first time.

Best regards,

Jack Lucido, M.F.A.

Associate Professor of Communication

Undergraduate Film Studies Director

MFA Screenwriting Track Coordinator

Western State Colorado University

                              A FEW THOUGHTS ON SCREENWRITING

I can’t speak for Mayank, but personally I got into screenwriting for the parties. So far though, I haven’t been invited to any. Well, maybe a few.

Dinah Shore invited me over for a movie screening at her house once and it turned out she needed me to run the projector. Well, not exactly, but I did rethread the film for her. I worked on Dinah’s TV show in my youth, and not too many years later I was walking along Broad Beach in Malibu and I went right past her without recognizing her. She yelled out to me, “Bob, Bob, it’s me, Dinah.” Rather embarrassing for me, and possibly for her. I’m so bad at recognizing people, the same thing happened with Pierce Brosnan, not once but twice. And I’d spent a week with him on the set of a “Remington Steele” I’d written a few weeks earlier. It also once happened with model-turned-actress Jennifer O’Neill WHILE she was starring in a TV series I was producing!

I’d like to say I didn’t recognize any of them because I was so busy writing a script in my head. But actually, it’s a physiological condition. All these years I thought I was just bad at recognizing people and remembering names. Then I saw a piece on it on “60 Minutes” and it turns out there are people who don’t recognize their own spouse if he or she changes their hairstyle or glasses frames. I suspect there’s a movie lurking somewhere in that bit of information. But I may not remember it long enough to write it.

Mayank has written that movies are about structure. And I concur. In fact, I used to try to show my undergrad students how important structure is to screenwriting by playing a little trick on them. I’d say, “OK, get out of piece of paper and a pen, or open your computer, get ready, now…write something wonderful.” They’d sit there with empty faces and empty sheets of paper. I’d leave that way for a good 15 second before I said, “OK, that’s almost impossible. But now, instead, write a limerick.”

That completely changed the situation. Those students who understood the structure of a limerick could write one, often a good one, in a couple of minutes. I stopped doing this exercise, however, because I found a good many of my 18-21 year-old college students had no idea what the structure of a limerick was. And having to explain and demonstrate it to them took much of the fun out of it for me.

But the point remains the same. Structure is not the enemy of creativity, it is the cradle of it. I have a few writer-friends who poo-poo structure. Who think that Blake Snyder and the others who write books on screenwriting structure are selling a formula that leads to crappy, boring, predictable scripts. I agree that it does, but only in the case of crappy, boring, predictable writers.

I began to notice the structure of movies long before anyone, let alone Blake Snyder, had written a book on it. And I learned my first lesson from Alfred Hitchcock. I’d be at a theater watching an Alfred Hitchcock movie and something would happen. I’d feel it in my bones. A shot of adrenaline would course through my system. I’d look at my watch. And lo and behold, it was ALWAYS exactly 30 minutes from when the movie had begun.

Once I was sensitized to it, I’d experience it in other directors’ films. And lo and behold, it was always 30 minutes in. Something had changed. I’d experienced some sort of, you should pardon the expression, climax. In a completely non-sexual sense. Years later I would learn, that’s called the turning point of Act One.

Every movie has that. And like it or not, it happens 30 minutes in whether the writer, the director and the editor of the film are consciously aware of it or not. Whether they set out to do it or not. It’s in their bones just like it’s in mine. And yours. Try it when you go to the movies. Or watch a DVD. You have to do it with a feature film, and it can’t be interrupted by commercials. I bet it’ll happen for you too.

And it’ll be an emotional, physical lesson in movie structure.

-          Bob Shayne