The Collaborative Art of Filmmaking

From Script to Screen

Linda Seger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351207058
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

The Collaborative Art of Filmmaking: From Script to Screen explores what goes into the making of Hollywood's greatest motion pictures. Join veteran script consultant Linda Seger as she examines contemporary and classic screenplays on their perilous journey from script to screen. This fully revised and updated edition includes interviews with over 80 well-known artists in their fields including writers, producers, directors, actors, editors, composers, and production designers. Their discussions about the art and craft of filmmaking – including how and why they make their decisions – provides filmmaking and screenwriting students and professionals with the ultimate guide to creating the best possible "blueprint" for a film and to also fully understand the artistic and technical decisions being made by all those involved in the process.

1
Doing the write thing

In the Beginning

It begins with – nothing. Writing is a monastic existence. The writer sits alone with a blank page or an empty computer screen, waiting. Then there’s a spark. A half-formed thought. The snippet of a story. A character begins to take form. There’s an idea that feels important to the writer – something about human nature or the human condition or issues or feelings. But, at the beginning, it’s all half-baked. The writer is at sea. In a fog.

Writers often say that stories push at them. Characters demand that they be given life. Ideas insist on being explored. At the beginning, there is only one person interested. If, after countless months and years, the script takes form and finds a home someplace – it will be the guide for everything that follows. It creates footprints in the dark that will lead the way from beginning to end.

Screenwriting is one of the few art forms that is not complete when it’s finished. Novels take the form of a book. The painting is completed and put on the wall. The architect’s building is built and the ribbon is cut. But the screenplay is just the beginning of the art form. It’s not complete until hundreds of artists put their stamp on it, translating and interpreting it, and bringing it to life. Everyone will push at it and pull at it and try to find every nuance and every color and every emotional shade. If it’s a great screenplay, everyone who comes to the screenplay will find something that the writer didn’t even know was there. It’s as if the writer’s unconscious is layered into that story. Each artist who follows will work on a different layer until it all comes together in a stratum of meaning.

Going It Alone

The universal problem most writers encounter is the struggle with the creative process. Things don’t flow easily. Writers live in terror that nothing will come at all!

Academy Award-winning and Emmy Award-winning screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (Social Network, Molly’s Game, West Wing) admits,

I love writing but hate starting. The page is awfully white, and it says, “You may have fooled some of the people some of the time, but those days are over, giftless. I’m not your agent, and I’m not you mommy; I’m a white piece of paper. You wanna dance with me?” and I really, really don’t. I’ll go peaceable-like.¹

In fact, it gets so bad for even the best of writers that “writer’s block” haunts them day after day, and night after night. Sorkin reveals,

Most nights I go to bed having written nothing and not knowing what I’m going to do tomorrow morning . . . It takes me months and months of doing what to the untrained eye might look a lot like lying on the couch and watching ESPN.²

It’s not only the necessity of putting something on the empty page, it’s all the twists and turns and detours that seem to take the writer nowhere. Screenwriter Tom Schulman, who wrote the Academy Award winning script, Dead Poets Society, began his script with a threadbare premise, a few personal experiences about great teachers he had, and a desire to write something about pursuing your dream no matter what.

I was frustrated with trying to write scripts I had no real emotional connection with. I was writing action pictures, horror films, Kentucky Fried Movie-type comedies. Things I had very little aptitude for – they simply weren’t special enough. They were like other movies I had seen versus something I really believed in. I never thought of Dead Poets as a commercial script. I figured it wouldn’t sell, but as I got into it, I thought it felt awfully good.

When Schulman finished the first draft of the script, he was one of 25,000 writers who annually register their projects at the Writer’s Guild. When he started trying to sell the script, he was told by one producer that the only way to make this script less commercial was to call it “Dead Poets Society in Winter.” Instead, it was wildly popular, became a huge money maker and people all over the world said it changed their lives and many changed their careers as a result of the call to “Carpe Diem – Seize the day!” By the time it was all over, Schulman was living the dream of every screenwriter: He was standing on the stage accepting his Best Screenplay Oscar.

Footprints in the Dark

Unless writers are fortunate enough to win one of two Academy Awards for Best Screenplay – either Original Screenplay or Best Adapted Screenplay – no one outside the industry will ever have the faintest idea who they are. Paid far less than the star or director, their names will appear “up there” for all of a second or so. And then they will be gone.

You have heard of Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep. But unless you are a writer, chances are you are unfamiliar with names like William Kelley, Frank Pierson, Alvin Sargent, Aaron Sorkin, Robin Swicord, or any of the other top screenwriters whose words and ideas, characters and conflicts have produced so many of Hollywood’s classic films.

The best screenwriters may labor in anonymity, but what they leave behind is a future all their own, the “footprints in the dark” that will illuminate the way for all who follow.

In order for writers to function creatively under these conditions, a certain mindset is required, a firm belief that what you are doing can make a difference.

Frank Pierson is the man who won the Academy Award for Dog Day Afternoon and was nominated for Cool Hand Luke and Cat Ballou. He explains that the idiosyncratic nature of the screenplay all but guarantees writer anonymity as it makes its way from script to screen:

A screenplay is a very strange form of creative writing. Structured like a play, flowing like music, consisting of 120 pages or so of dialogue and a few sparse stage directions that will act as the creative impetus for everything that is to come.

And stay tuned, there’s a lot more to come. Since the making of a studio film is a collaborative art, whatever immortality screenwriters achieve comes not from name recognition but from the work they leave behind. Pierson explains:

The fact is that a successful film, one that works on the level it was conceived and finds an audience, carries one’s feelings and ideas about the life we share to literally hundreds of millions of people all over this fragile planet. I hope for some kind of future for the human race, and I’d like to illuminate that in some way.

William Kelley, who won the Academy Award for Witness, clarifies that the need to express oneself has to be guarded and nurtured.

The writer is given a little bit of madness and we must take very good care of it, preserve it, and let the world think that we’re nuts. And we are, to the degree that we’re willing to isolate ourselves for weeks at a time and not go anywhere.

Out of the writer’s isolation come ideas, and for Kelley, an accountability to the audience, the “final collaborators” who will eventually watch the film.

We are allied in a specific time with an audience of contemporaries, and we owe them the best of our talent that we can give them.

Like many creative endeavors, a script begins in darkness. But the writer must light a candle to show the way for all who will follow. It begins with an idea, a creative spark. But where does that spark come from?

The Process/ The What If . . .

Part of a writer’s job is to find the idea that will speak to millions. Generally, this begins with a “what if”.

What if an out-of-work actor disguises himself as a woman to get an acting part? (Tootsie) What if a very simple person of little consequence fell in love with a fish? Whether that leads to The Little Mermaid, or Splash, or the Shape of Water, the creative mind begins to work out the consequences of that question. What if somebody were lost in space – all alone? This could lead to Gravity The Martian, Interstellar, or Lost in Space.

It is not just the idea that has to be found. It is the unique execution of the idea that will determine whether it’s a great script or not.

Guillermo Del Toro is both a writer and director known for his horror and fantasy films such as Pan’s Labyrinth and Shape of Water. He recognizes that the execution of the idea has to do with the artist’s voice. Part of the writer’s job is finding the voice that makes that particular story their own. He says,

In order to have a voice, you have to reach inside you and be completely yourself; but, to paraphrase Stephen King, "all the songs have been sung" It helps if you're aware of all the singers that came before you so you can be rooted in tradition and then push it to a new place. That's the only thing we can offer: a new voice in a really, really old tale. We are in the business of reproducing reality from nothing. We are the biggest liars in the world, seeking truth.³

That original voice can come from personal experience or it can come from a great deal of research. It is often said that writers need to write about what they know. It certainly can make the research easier. But great scripts are explorations more than a writing down of what the writer already knows. The writer finds a way into the material. If they’re good writers, they’ll take their work seriously, and write their work with depth and meaning and reveal something to themselves, and to millions, which expands the way we look at life.

Larry Gelbart has been successful as a screenwriter (Oscar-nominated for Tootsie), a TV writer (M*A*S*H) and a playwright (City of Angels, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum). He says,

Ideas come from within and without. They spring from your own observations or your need to say something, not necessarily a message, but the need to tell a story. It’s partly a need to communicate something about the human condition, to communicate to people who might have the same experiences, feel the same emotions, be influenced and impacted by the same stories.

It’s not the size of the idea, but the temperature of it, he explains. Ideally, it’s something you shouldn’t merely want to do, but something you absolutely have to do.

The process may begin with many ideas that must be winnowed down to one story, or a small spark that lights a fire that spreads rapidly and eventually takes over. For writer-director Lawrence Kasdan, his ideas tend to be very personal. I work out of my own interests, enthusiasm, obsessions, and neuroses. The man responsible for Body Heat, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Solo: A Star Wars Story admits that for him, even one movie idea is hard to come by:

I don’t have a lot of ideas floating around. I wish I did. I tend to have a few things that interest me, and one tends to bubble up to the surface more strongly than the others and demand my attention. Then, I start to let my mind play with that. Of course, once you start writing, almost anything else seems more appealing, but I don’t desert what I’m working on, for the most part.

Alvin Sargent has had one of the most exemplary screenwriting careers in the history of filmmaking. Now in his 90s, his work began to be produced in the 1960s. He won Academy Awards for Julia and Ordinary People. His latest works were Spider-Man 2 (2004), Spider-Man 3 (2007), and The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) with co-writers James Vanderbilt and Steve Kloves. Alvin and I started e-mailing each other around 2015, after I heard he liked my books and then agreed to endorse one of them. We met in Los Angeles for breakfast and the moment I saw him, I said to myself, “This is the most adorable man I’ve ever met!” Now he calls me his “good pal.” We talked for three hours at that first breakfast and then met again at my next L.A. visit, and talked three more hours. I wanted to go up to Seattle where he’s now living and spend some time with him talking about writing for this book, but he said he wasn’t up to it at his age. But he emailed me some of his thoughts.

Take the chance, because “caution is a thief.” Remember that. Nothing ...