ENGLISH 365:WRITING THE SCREENPLAY FALL 2008 If you would create something, you must be something. Goethe Be brave enough to live life creatively. The creative is the place where no one else has ever been. You have to leave the city of your comfort and go into the wilderness of your intuition. You can’t get there by bus, only by hard work and risk and by not quite knowing what you’re doing. What you’ll discover will be wonderful. What you’ll discover is yourself. Alan Alda, advice to his daughter We tell ourselves stories in order to live. Joan Didion We do not write in order to be understood, we write in order to understand. Cecil Day-Lewis It is a surprising and memorable, as well as a valuable experience, to be lost in the woods at any time. Henry David Thoreau It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts. John Wooden Today’s would-be writers rush to the typewriter without first learning their craft. Robert McKee Read, read, read. Read everything--trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter, who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it is good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out the window. William Faulkner An aspect of the business of playwriting that I’m very passionate about is craft. The word is playwright, W-R-I-G-H-T. . . maker of. I know that in the vocabulary of the arts are terms like “inspiration” and “the Muse,” but I am very nervous about all that. I mean, a play is a made thing, and the crafting aspect of it is something that gives me infinite joy. Athol Fugard When forced to work within a strict framework the imagination is taxed to its utmost–-and will produce its richest ideas. Given total freedom the work is likely to sprawl. T. S. Eliot Writing a script is like removing layers of paint off a wall in an old house–-you keep uncovering things that couldn’t be seen until you removed the layer on top. It’s a constant uncovering and revealing process. And with every layer uncovered, your dramatic premise has to be looked at anew. Buzz McLaughlin The first draft of anything is shit. Ernest Hemingway

Character is the essential foundation of your screenplay. It is the heart and soul and nervous system of your story. Before you put a word on paper, you must know your character. Syd Field There is one basic dramatic circumstance: Somebody wants something badly and is having difficulty getting it. David Howard Without conflict there is no drama. Without need, there is no character. Without character, there is no action. Syd Field A script’s success can often be measured by how well and how quickly it captures and maintains an audience’s attention. Mark Axelrod Movies to me are about wanting something, a character wanting something that you as the audience desperately want him to have. You, the writer, keep him from getting it for as long as possible, and then, through whatever effort he makes, he gets it. Bruce Joel Rubin The film experience is like a seamless dream. David Howard Drama is life with the dull parts left out. Alfred Hitchcock My task . . . is to make you hear, to make you feel--and, above all, to make you see. Joseph Conrad Never fear [the audience] nor despise it. Coax it, charm it, interest it, stimulate it, shock it now and then if you must, make it laugh, make it cry, but above all. . .never, never, bore the living hell out of it. Noel Coward Information gleaned indirectly by an audience is far more effective. Important information should always be conveyed at least twice. Alan Ayckbourn You can take a movie, for example, like Angels with Dirty Faces, where James Cagney is a child and says to his pal Pat O’Brien, ‘What do you hear, what do you say?’—cocky kid—and then as a young rough on the way up when things are going great for him, he says, “What do you hear, what do you say?’ Then when he is about to be executed in the electric chair and Pat O’Brien is there to hear his confession, he says, “What do you hear, what do you say?’ and the simple repetition of the last line of dialogue in three different places with the same characters brings home the dramatically changed circumstances much more than any extensive diatribe would. Robert Towne The screenplay is only secondarily a written thing; it is an elaborate notation, or, put another way, a kind of codified visualization. Larry McMurtry

Screenplays are structure. William Goldman You shouldn’t begin writing a script if you haven’t mastered the craft of writing a scene. And you can’t write a scene without knowing something about how actors work and what the writer has to supply so that they can do that work. Jeffrey Smart For script analysis, action is a very particular entity. Action occurs when something happens that makes or permits something else to happen. Action is two “something happens,’ one leading to the other. David Ball Things on stage should be as complicated and as simple as in life. People dine, just dine, while their happiness is made and their lives are smashed. If in Act I you have a pistol hanging on the wall, then it must fire in the last act. Anton Chekhov The conflict in a stageplay comes out in dialogue. That’s the strength of the stageplay form. A novel may focus on the thoughts and feelings of each character. That’s the strength of the novel-–inner conflict. However, a screenplay will focus on the visual and emotional aspects of a scene–-on the action–-because movies are primarily visual. David Trottier Give me the same thing, only different. Sam Goldwyn The weakest possible excuse to include anything in a story is: “But it actually happened.” Everything happens; everything imaginable happens. Indeed, the unimaginable happens. But story is not life in actuality. Mere occurrences bring us nowhere near the truth. What happens is fact, not truth. Truth is what we think about what happens. Robert McKee You have to know everything about structure in order to move beyond it. It isn’t possible to reinvent the process without knowing it in detail. Jeff Rush and Ken Dancyger No matter how rudimentary or primitive or unlikely, if an idea comes to me, I keep it in a notebook. Horton Foote Man is but a network of relationships and these alone matter to him. Antoine de Saint Exupery Do not remove a fly from your friend’s forehead with a hatchet. Chinese proverb The secret of life is enjoying the passage of time. James Taylor

A pro is someone who can do great work when he doesn’t feel like it. Alistair Cook Close the door. Unplug the phone. Cheat, lie, disappoint your pals, if necessary, but get your work done. Garrison Keilor