Ask Dr. Hollywood #1

As you can probably gather, I'm an aspiring scriptwriter. I love to write, love it, from thinking something up to writing the last line, it's the best feeling in the world. I've written one full-length script, one episodic drama, and have several other works in progress. What I need help on is how to get started. Should I find an agent first? If so, where should I start? Who would be a good judge of what I've written? Anything you have to offer would be greatly appreciated.

J.C.

J.C.,
Basically you're fucked. There's no way in. Forget it. Welcome to the wonderful world of Catch 22, where you can't get an agent without credits, you can't get credits without a job, and you can't get a job without an agent. All you can do is exploit whatever meager contacts you have to the fullest and don't stop until someone notices you. Whatever it takes. Make the news. Write a best selling book, but then you'll need a LITERARY agent, who won't be interested unless you have credits, etc. If you love writing, who says it has to be screenplays? Van Gogh painted more than flowers. Write journalism, write for Madison Avenue, write press releases. A newspaper once assigned me to interview an actor. During the interview, the actor actually asked me if I had a script for him. You never know where that break is going to come from.

Hi,
I'm a sixteen year old trying to build a portfolio of videos that I can show to film schools and such. The one problem I have whenever finding a new idea is that my brain goes into a complete dead lock. Mainly because there are so many ideas out there and so many variations of them. I feel I can never be original. Do you have any methods for thinking up an idea that I would really like as well as it being original? Thanks.
-Mike

Dear Mike,
Just a short peek at my site should indicate that ideas ain't my problem. I got a million of them and so do most people in Hollywood. Fuck ideas. Ideas are a dime a dozen. Everybody's got 'em and no one wants 'em. What's important, my dear friend, is execution. What you, and only you, can do with an idea. It doesn't matter what the idea is or whether it's good or bad. If you've got what it takes to be a wordsmith, a practitioner of sentences, not to mention paragraphs, you should be able to take anything you think up yourself, or anything that anyone gives you, and make it more than readable.

Maybe it's just my background as a journalist talking, but I pride myself on my ability to take any lame ass assignment from a hack editor and turn it into gold. That's what writing's all about. Stop worrying about whether your ideas are any good. Take it from me. They're not. It's the way you write them that makes them special. A narcotics officer trying to bust a drug dealer isn't a particularly good or original idea but take a look at what Robert Towne did with it in Tequila Sunrise. Brilliant, not because of the idea, but because of what he did with it. "What is it, Nick, do you need some chapstick or something, because your lips keep getting stuck to your teeth, or is that your idea of a smile?" would be a great line of dialogue in ANY movie.

Here's an idea. Take the stupidest idea you've got and just write it, or make a video of it. File it under "Stupid ideas." Then take some of your best ideas and file them under "Good ideas." Then take someone else's idea and do something with it. They'll never notice. The best of those, develop further. Keep going until your files are full. Practice. Develop your skills, because whatever you're doing now, your next one's going to be better because you just learned from experience. You're young. You still don't know what you're best at, so do everything. Though it's easy to get pigeonholed, people who hire artists generally like artists who can do anything.

Dear Dr. Hollywood,
I am interested in making my own films. I am looking for effective ways to write. How much stage direction is it a good idea to give in a script?
Gary

Gary,
There are two kinds of scripts, the selling script and the shooting script. The selling script tells the story to everyone pre-production, hoping to get you INTO pre-production. Once you're actually making a movie, you use a shooting script which tells all the people involved precisely what they're going to need for each shot. In many cases, there's not much difference, but sometimes the differences are enormous, especially when the selling script is written by a director who intends on directing the script.

I often show people my copies of Stanley Kubrick's script for Full Metal Jacket, and Hal Ashby's script for Vital Parts. Both directors knew that they were going to be on the set directing the movie, so they left everything out of their script that they knew they would be telling the crew members personally. If you know you're going to be telling the actor to perform a certain way, why tell the producers and the cinematographer and everyone else who is going to be reading the script? It's between you and the actor, so you leave it out of the script. Same thing with camera moves. You're going to be working out the camera moves with the cameraman. Why tell the composer? Same thing with sound cues and edit cues. Kubrick and Ashby's scripts don't contain ONE SINGLE stage direction. They are frustrating reads because you haven't a clue what Kubrick and Ashby actually intended on doing with the script. Everything that will eventually make the film a Kubrick or Ashby film is very deliberately left out of the script, like it's no one's business HOW they've going to make it work. The reader simply has to trust that Kubrick and Ashby know what they're doing.

You cannot afford to do this unless you are Stanley Kubrick or Hal Ashby, or unless you actually have the money in place to make your movie without interference. If neither of these circumstances fit your bill, then what you are writing is a selling script, a script that quickly and succinctly describes a dynamite movie with a minimum of flourishes, a script that isn't full of itself but simply tells a story that hopefully others will want to hear.

What's the ratio of dialogue to action? The answer is more visual than anything else. Readers are in a hurry. They like to see space broken up into nice digestible chunks, just like your cat. Throw in a giant blocky paragraph that fills half a page and no one will read it. They'll just skip ahead to the next piece of dialogue. Sure, there are times when a whole page is just dialogue, and there are times when a whole page is just action, but you space it out. If a building explodes, give a whole line to
"Ker-blloooooooooooeeeeyyyyyyyyyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!"

Hi Dr. Hollywood,
I have gotten some positive attention from a coming-of-age comedy feature I wrote, but no sale yet. I am concerned with a note I received from a low-budget producer who told me that the dialogue needed to be punched-up. I asked what he thought it needed, and he said, "a lot more profanity." He told me "real" teenagers cursed a blue streak, and mine were too mild. He added that you couldn't make a teenage movie without the f-word or the s-word. I promise you these kids don't spend the movie in prayer, but I haven't found the need to use those words so far. Although if it meant a sale, I would probably fill the air with profanity, but do I need to?
Thanks,
Ray

Ray,
There's no such thing as the final version of a script. The final version of the script is the movie. Before any of a script is committed to celluloid, it will be constantly fine tuned down to the last minute. Maybe when writers used Royals, when every word they wrote was committed to paper as they wrote it, there was a reason to believe in their work as a final product, to be just flung into the maw of production. But now, in the land of search-and-replace, major re-writes can take seconds.

You got a shithead producer who wants to liven up the goddam second act with some fuckin' profanity? What's your fuckin' problem? Shouldn't take more than an hour. Give it to him. He'll fuckin' sell it or he won't. If he does, you got a fuckin' movie. If he doesn't, you didn't fuckin' DELETE the first version, did you? You may end up with five versions of your script, one full of fucks and damns, one with a totally extraneous lesbian love scene, one in outer space, one at the bottom of the ocean, and one with a whole new part for the producer's girlfriend. Whatever it takes, man, whatever it takes.