Our Hollywood Columnist
Nicholas
Thurkettle: Musings from Hollywood
Column #1:
10 Rules of
Screenwriting
In February of 2004 I walked into the
I was going to tear a chunk off my student loans
with this
check; my car payments, too. I was going to buy new clothing, a new
computer,
new furniture for my new apartment, very very nice presents for my
family. I
was going to take a road trip, open a savings account, allow the
remnants of
that check to dribble into my life for months and years to come,
letting me be
just a bit nicer to myself. Order that second drink. Get the in-flight
movie.
While talking with a “financial planner” at that bank about account options and interest rates and tax brackets – the bank had officially closed for the afternoon but they made no move to push me towards the door, they offered me candy – they did a little financial survey to give me a handy overview of the shape I was in pre-windfall. I didn’t need their “portfolio” to know it was a disaster, but it did feature one of the greatest sentences I’d ever seen, the sort of whimsical marriage of the dry and impossible that can only come from computer-generated forms. It read:
"Based on your
current debts and assumed interest rates, you should be debt-free in
the year
5402 if you add no additional debt and continue your current payment
plan."
I later crunched the numbers and learned this delightful fiscal death sentence was the result of an input error on the part of my “financial planner”. Then again, we live in a world where a Japanese brokerage giant can have a quarter billion dollars vaporized in a software glitch. As the prophets say – shit happens.
The point is – this was a very special check, and even if it had been for less it would have still been worth memorializing, because it was the first check I ever earned for screenwriting.
Hollywood
Screenwriting Rule #1: Nothing is
real in
***
I had graduated
I’d arrived with little defined sense of what to
do with my
life, I’d evolved by graduation into a writer who wanted to make films
and
plays. After graduation I moved to
The goal of the first draft of any script is to
prove you
can finish a first draft, and the goal of the first screenplay is to
prove you
can get from “FADE IN” to “FADE OUT” at all. Of course I didn’t know
that at
the time – I read those pages (a plotless and navel-gazing trifle
called Quality Entertainment) and saw
brilliance, fortune and glory. These rushes are as necessary to the
writer as
the inevitable hungover return to reality.
And that was the beginning of five years in the trenches of the Hollywood Development Executive – the shadowy people who judge the scripts, take the lunch meetings and act as gatekeepers deployed against the rabble. No one executive’s definition of their job ever matched another’s, myself included.
It took that whole first year and then some just to make enough money to keep a roof over my head. I remember volunteering to drive a director of photography out to our movie’s location in the desert, because it meant free food. I stuffed myself at the catering wagon then, wearing a long coat with deep pockets, proceeded to appropriate cereal boxes, fruit and granola bars from the craft services table.
When my first real payroll check finally came through I hadn’t eaten for 24 hours. I speed-walked ¾ of a mile to the accountant’s office rather than let the postal service have it, then walked back to my bank, deposited it, and went to Subway for the best foot-long sandwich of my life.
I could gas on forever about that gig, but
suffice it to say
I never earned what I was worth for a single day, I worked an average
of 50+
hours a week and read over 1,000 screenplays as well as novels, graphic
novels,
stage plays, script treatments, and so on and so on and so on.
And when I could keep my brain working long
enough I wrote.
***
Screenwriting, as I may describe in some detail
some other
time, is very very very very very hard to be good at. That’s worth
re-iterating:
You could say the same thing about oncology or
falconry and
no one would question the statement, but for some cultural reason we
have
lowered expectations for this particular craft. To see a movie is to
think you,
if you put your mind to it, could do better, and when you say “they should have done this!”, or
“You know what would have been really
cool…?”, you’re saying you could do better than that screenwriter.
Many
arrive in
Corollary to
I turned 23. 24. 25. Screenplay #3 had a winning premise but got tangled up in its own rules and stopped being entertaining. Screenplay #4 was kind of a lark – I dashed off the 86-page first draft in a weekend. As a result it’s impeachably sloppy but not without a certain urgency. It might even be something half-decent one of these days if I ever get around to cleaning it up.
And then there’s Screenplay #5. Queen
Lara. I even remember the moment I got the idea, I was
descending the sidewalk outside my building – the high-rise
No matter how many stories I’ve cooked up I still find miraculous that moment when something really starts stitching itself together. It’s like you’re staring through a microscope at all these little wiggling things that have suddenly combined, watching your brain turn impulses into a story almost without conscious help.
But there it was, on the sidewalk, in the space
of five
footsteps I went from a “Hey, what if…?”
to a “Here’s the movie…”. I got in my
car, a hand-me-down Mustang with a busted window, bad brakes, no A.C.,
loose
convertible top and quirky transmission, and on the drive over rolled
this story
around in my brain, trying to give it nourishment.
In my boss’s kitchen, as we uncorked wine and laid out cheeses and pasta salads and chicken wings in plastic tubs from Pavilions I pitched him the story. He liked it, and asked “so who do you think should write it?”
This triggered a long but polite tug-of-war. He
thought this
idea was too good to risk on an unproven writer (me). As an
executive/junior
producer I could see his point-of-view. There was certainly upside to
laying it
off on an established writer we knew, coordinating a fat studio sale
and going
home with a co-producer credit, some green and possibly a shared story
card.
But being an executive/budding producer was not why I was dealing with
Los
Angeles, living in that cheap apartment in the Valley where there was a
perpetual brown stripe of smog in the air like someone had rubbed a
great turd
across the sky, squeezing through 50+ minutes of traffic to go 12 miles
each
morning and evening, passing up expensive nights out, living away from
my dearest
friends in other cities.
He’d dangle hot writers’ names in front of my
face. I’d
clutch the idea to my bosom and tease patience out him – just
let me write the treatment, show you what I want to do. I put
the treatment in the corner of his desk, knowing it would be lost in
the piles
of scripts he took home each weekend on a small luggage handtruck. Once
he’d
read the treatment – I’ve already got a
few pages of the script, and the town’s shutting down for the holidays
anyway,
why don’t I spend the break writing the first act so you can see how
I’d do it?
In the winter I gave him 25 pages. Before he could read them I was at 55. And after he read them, he ended his campaign and I finished the first draft.
I did a thorough re-write on that, scalpeled out
29 pages
and wrote 30 new ones. I look now at the difference between those two
drafts
and consider myself blessed, because the first draft was about making a
first
draft. The re-write made it into a screenplay.
Seven agents looked at Queen
Lara – six my boss recommended and one I knew. His six all passed –
two
didn’t even return his calls. One just said “I can’t get
Hilary Duff to play this part, so it’s not going to get
made”. All agreed it was “too dark”.
Mine loved it. Said she could sell it. Wanted to
sell it. I
learned all this on my cell phone, jammed on the freeway as I crossed
town for
a screenwriting class I teach each fall. I suddenly felt a surge of
credibility
– three years and nine months after coming to
I did another polish. We waited for the right time. I went on Jeopardy! and came in second. I worked on Full-length Stage Play #2. Watched the financial waters rise. I was in another crumbling relationship (as a profession we are known for them).
The script went out on a Tuesday afternoon in November. My agent lined up 27 copies of the script and called 27 companies whose checks were known to clear. I agonized, tried to focus on my work. In my web journal that day I wrote: “A pessimist could define a screenwriting career, really any career, like this - the progression of opportunities to fail with greater and greater degrees of visibility and humiliation. Every step you take up is just another one you could go tumbling down like the priest at the end of The Exorcist.”
Three times a day my agent sent me an updated list of the companies that had the script – who had read it and how they had responded. New companies appeared on the list thanks to “tracking boards”. Development executives develop little networks, often on the internet, to keep track of what projects are circulating and what action, if any, they’re generating. One company, an independent film financier called Room 9 Entertainment, had read the premise of my script, liked what they’d seen, and asked to be included. My agent checked them out, deemed them legit, and sent a copy.
As the days progressed it was clear they liked it. They really liked it. The bigger companies, the studios, were passing. Too dark. Too indie. Too small. Tough genre. Hilary Duff won’t play this part. But I was labeled someone with a “voice”. People wanted to meet me. This happens – when people like your script you’re the toast of the town for about 15 days. They’re fun days, you can bask in the afterglow of them for months.
A few companies were championing it. Some wanted “territories” – i.e. the exclusive right to bring it to a major studio through their producing deal. This is a positive development. Still, we’d reached the weekend, which can be a huge momentum killer. One of the goals of the wide script submission is to whip up hysteria and bad judgment so a company will spend lots of money to tie up the script lest someone else do the same. Ideally, you end up with more than one of these 8-and-900 pound gorillas escalating bids against each other. It was decreasingly likely I’d hit this jackpot.
But Room 9 really liked it.
The call came late Monday afternoon. My agent asked if I was sitting down. She gave me the numbers, said Room 9 had pushed for an option (a low-cost temporary retention of the script) but she’d convinced them an outright purchase was necessary.
Hollywood
Screenwriting Rule #8: People with
money in
I had sold a screenplay.
From that meeting I went to Room 9, met the guys who were changing my life. On the way out of the meeting my cell phone hummed and my agent told me she’d negotiated my fee up a nudge, and that in her opinion we’d taken it as far as it could go. I agreed to the terms and swung into her neighborhood for lunch.
She walked me around her agency offices – the conquering hero. Every agent there gave me their power handshake. We went to a Beverly Hills Chinese restaurant – full of tanned seventy-year-olds with enormous hats on their enormous hair. She opened a little notepad and said “congratulations. You’ve got a writing career – what do you want to do with it?” I spilled dreams and ambitions – what I wanted to be doing five years hence. Pitched her every story I’d written and yet wanted to write. When our fortune cookies arrived, hers read: “You see treasures where others see only the ordinary.” Mine read: “You will live a prosperous life.”
I’ve still got that fortune in my wallet.
***
Since then I’ve written Screenplays #6 and #7. #6 is
ambitious, expensive and ready to shop, we’ll see what
Whatever else it does, this town sells you on the merits of
happy endings.
***