With the help of the writer conferences I teach at and this blog,I have a habit of picking up new author penpals at a regular clip; my newest pal is Shelly Frome who is a retired college professor from back east. He is just launching his newest book on screen writing and sent me (prepub) the Introduction for the ShootingShrink blog.

The Art and Craft of Screenwriting.  North Carolina & London:   McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009 by Shelly Frome.  Advance copies available at Amazon.

            Dateline Hollywood:  First impressions.

Among the magazines and newspapers that line Al’s open-air newsstand on fashionable Beverly Drive, arguably the most prominent are preoccupied with the entertainment industry along with screenwriting ploys to breach the barriers.

            A featured article in one issue of Los Angeles declares that L.A. is the mecca of movies and television, “the two most powerful cultural forces of the last hundred years.”  It also underscores the city’s preference for pop culture over high culture.  For those who are adept at networking and trying to get an edge, there are the trades like Variety and The Hollywood Reporter.   Here you will find the daily changing currents: which company is buying what kind of scripts and who brokered the deal, the movements of various development execs and story editors, a list of films that are going into production.  For the seasoned veteran, these are clues to current trendy material.  

For the hopefuls that are not in this league, Fade In magazine is available, touting yet another annual Hollywood Pitch Festival where, for the price of $400 dollars, starry-eyed screenwriters from all over the country are given a chance to be one of the first in line outside the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel (not far from Al’s newsstand) to give  a seven minute pitch of a sure-fire “high concept.”  Those on the receiving end of each face-to-face encounter are Hollywood buyers and brokers, scouts from top talent agencies like Endeavor or management firms, studios and production companies.  Aspirants who arrive later than 6:30 a.m. may find themselves pitching to lesser lights:  younger agents and junior executives from second-tier outfits who, as a rule, don’t accept unsolicited ideas or scripts.  Though only a small percentage of those who have spent hours rehearsing their notions are deemed worthy of follow-up, everyone in line appears optimistic.

            For those looking for strategies beyond a one-shot “pitchfest,” Script offers industry news, articles by and about screenwriters who have found commercial success, all manner of ads and services to enhance a novice’s chances, and so forth.  First and foremost, the reader can find out “who sold what to whom.”  For instance, two first-time writers (one the son of a well-known TV actor) who met at a screenwriting class at USC may have sold a spec script (spec for speculation) to a production company about a bookstore clerk who discovers a museum devoted to his life.  Warner Bros. may have acquired a comedy pitch to be written by an actor-writer attached to a current Warner Bros. movie.  Columbia Pictures may have obtained a pitch from a woman about a bounty hunter hired to track and bring back his ex-wife, to be developed by a seasoned writer.   A leading first article may advise the reader to take advantage of the summer months in L.A. when top executives have left town and the chances of a meeting with an assistant development executive or story editor are better.  Said assistant might welcome a peek at a spec script during this time when the “tracking board” indicates the stream of available material has slowed to a crawl.  The article may also reveal that pitching a “writer-proof” book adaptation is a safer bet than an idea or a spec script.

            In case the reader isn’t ready for any of this, ads offer coverage (a grading system of potential “must-see movies”) and a draft-by-draft evaluation to perfect the marketability.

There are also ads for primers; classes (especially at UCLA film school); consultations, weekend seminars and books by gurus who have jumpstarted the careers of screenwriters whose names are legend.   One such text offers the credo that all notable screen stories are power struggles.  The source is a theatergoer who wrote a book in the 1940s insisting that plays should be a contest between a protagonist and antagonist who won’t quit until the struggle is played out.  The authors of the text add that the struggle nowadays has greater rooting interest if the protagonist starts out to be a bit weaker.

Interestingly enough, at the time this primer was published, reviews of an action franchise attributed its success to the fact that it dealt with a struggle over identity (Who am I?), morality (What did I do?), and remorse and redemption (How can I make up for the terrible things I’ve done?).  Moreover, in the L.A. Times the appeal of yet another slacker film was attributed to the fact that the leading character would have been happy to remain shiftless were it not for some unforeseen dilemma.

What to make of all this?  So far screenwriting seems to consist of hawking a product using some kind of inconsistent recipe.

Back to another book ad.  “The most sought-after screenwriting teacher in the world” apparently has no patience for any story headed in a single direction and opts instead for twists and turns at every interval. 

            Another variance.  Arguably the most well-known author of screenwriting bibles and short seminars, Robert McKee (another guru with his roots in the theater), takes up an entire page with his ad in Script.  In his popular book he claims that through the efforts of a driven hero or heroine, the resolution of a story proves the writer’s message.  He numbers among his students writers like Eric Roth and cites Roth’s Academy Award-winning script Forrest Gump (1994) and Oscar nominations for The Insider (1999) and Munich (2005).  However,  you’d be hard pressed to find a self-generating protagonists in any of Roth’s storylines as a way of proving a point.  Forrest Gump, for example, is a guileless young man who is sidetracked in search of his sweetheart by cartoon-like happenstance and key events in history over which he has no control.  In a later work, Roth’s The Good Shepard (2006) flits back and forth in time over a span of three decades revolving around a character who is painfully introverted and manipulated until he reaches a high position in counterintelligence.  And all along he’s simply a company man.

            Speaking of company men, in Tony Gilroy’s acclaimed script for Michael Clayton (2007), the title character has to be dragged into the action and shaken before he finally takes over almost ¾ into the narrative.

By this point, any film buff can step in and offer countless other examples of why McKee’s popular formula often just doesn’t work.  In the best-loved Casablanca (1942), our disenchanted hero spends much of the time brooding, reminiscing and being acted upon.  Not until the trio of screenwriters writers came up with a last-minute solution did the storyline resolve.  In Psycho (1960), the heroine is eliminated early on.  In writer/director Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura (1960), the heroine disappears, jaded members of her party begin to search for her, but the camera soon looks for other points of interest like the stark setting of the Mediterranean island and the playful rhythms of light and dark.  Giving the characters a second chance and then another, the camera seems to find the overpowering flow of time and space much more interesting.  The same sort of thing happens in Antonioni’s The Passenger (1975).  The lead character (Hollywood’s own Jack Nicholson) attempts to find excitement as an investigative journalist, gives that up to be a passenger in someone else’s life (taking over a dead man’s identity as a gun runner) and still can’t hold the camera’s attention as it moves out the window, into a North African landscape and the greater drama of the world outside.

True, with Antonioni, we’re dealing with the sensibilities of a European.  But when you keep in mind that film is a collaborative venture, the great influence of Antonioni on the work of Oscar-winner Martin Scorsese, not to mention some of writer/director Woody Allen’s movies, and the fact that Michael Curtiz, the director of Casablanca was from Budapest, Britain’s Alfred Hitchcock certainly had an affect on the narrative of Psycho--when you consider the background and sensibilities of many a Hollywood writer and writer/director—not to mention the opportunities outside of Hollywood, large and small, across the pond and all points of the compass--it’s impossible to  confine the process to products and recipes.

On the surface, of course, it’s easy to imagine putting all this aside for the lure of the quick fix in pursuit of insider status, a great deal of money and a brush with celebrity.  There have been all those exposes.  The source?  Certainly Hollywood itself.

For a start, there is Michael Tolkin’s book which he transformed into a shooting script of the same name, The Player (1992).  At the outset, as a gaggle of writers jockey for position at a Hollywood studio, pitching notions like “Out of Africa meets Pretty Woman,” the more wily of the bunch works after hours in tandem with a tracker.  At a posh Bel Air hotel by the pool, the tracker catches a studio exec alone and distracted.  Seizing the moment, he moves in, claiming that he and his partner have exclusive meetings at Paramount and Universal “first thing.  Meaning, if you pass this up, you’ll lose it.”  The writer/player goes into gear and acts out a movie trailer, framing key shots with his fingers.   Pressing the issue, the tracker cuts in with, “No one yet has heard this, we should make a deal now.”  For a clincher, the writer adds, “No stars, no happy ending.  That’s the reality. And, I tell you, there’s not a dry eye in the house.”  In this take on the industry, the writer’s notion about a heroine who dies in the gas chamber is green-lit and a lucrative deal is struck.  The upshot, however, turns out to be the inclusion of box-office stars and a new ending:  the heroine is saved at the last second.  But still the writer and tracker win.  As a counterpoint, a maverick writer (a poor man’s Antonioni perhaps) refuses to play the game and looses his life at the hands of the studio exec who gets off scot-free.

And there is the prototype of the screenwriter-as-opportunist in Billy Wilder’s 1950s classic Sunset Boulevard.   Here Joe Gillis’s last-ditch pitch has been flatly turned down by a studio exec.  Distraught and penniless, willing to do anything to keep from slinking back to his small-town Ohio newspaper, he agrees to turn a hopeless silent screenplay into a talkie.  But little writing takes place.  Gillis is only buying a little time, playing both ends against the middle.  The “hook”:  unknown to Gillis, his employer is not only a forgotten, deluded film queen, she’s also deranged.  In this earlier model, a former insider overplays his hand and loses both the game and his life.

There have been countless other examples in films and on TV of scripts tucked into slim envelopes passed on to stars, agents and moguls.  These surreptitious hand-offs, usually during lunch at a Beverly Hills watering hole, only add to the belief that trying to out-guess the market, hawking material and scrambling for an edge simply comes with the territory.  Even companies distributing software-for-screenwriters have entered the fray promising the latest insider tips if you hurry and buy the product now.

But for those still caught up in the hype that screenwriting is solely a crafty trade, Charlie Kaufman and his late brother Donald devised Adaptation (2002):   a movie-in-a-movie dovetailing into a character’s mind.  And, ironically, the cover of the DVD is featured in McKee’s full-page magazine spread.  In this tale, the introverted Charlie Kaufman struggles to be true to a rambling non-fiction book about orchids.  But his cynical agent wants the adaptation “fast and sweet.”  Buying into “the system,” extroverted twin brother Donald and a complete amateur,  bypasses Charlie’s concerns about integrity, buys McKee’s book and attends his workshop in New York. After learning that Donald has landed a major deal in no time flat, Charlie also enrolls in a second McKee weekend seminar. When McKee denigrates Charlie’s belief in allowing the story to unfold organically, a crestfallen Charlie gives in.  The movie in his mind transforms into the movie, replete with sex, drugs, a wild chase after a rare and priceless ghost orchard in the alligator-infested swamps of the Everglades and the death of an obsessed orchard poacher and brother Donald.  As a bonus, Charlie loses his brother but, by following McKee’s “classic” and timeless formula and ditching his integrity, he gets the girl and makes good in Hollywood. 

In short, we need to put the satires aside, dig beneath the surface and search beyond the ads, primers and first impressions to discover the true scope and realities of the screenwriter’s trade.                       -Shelly