Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Hollywood is famous for burning talent, and screenwriters have always been ready to jump into the flames. Countless scripts, often as good as the ones film studios have lavished millions upon, lay moldering, each coffee-stained manuscript a record of someone’s fierce ambition and deepest hope. Perhaps in reaction to such an unfathomable waste, screenwriters become very knowing. They believe that without a penetrating sense of how the movie business operates, the quality of their scripts will matter little. Their belief is that if they know enough, they will create an edge for themselves that will transcend the eccentric nature of the business.

You can see them all over town, from club-hopping tyros in black to graying mock-professors with weary eyes, making hard practical plans in the belief that the deployment of tactical skill is one part of the equation they can control. They share a single urgent need: to avoid the slag heap of the unproduced. It’s little wonder that a thriving industry of instructional books and lessons has grown up. Supplicants gather in airport hotels to listen to gurus tell them how to do it: “Unlock Your Inner Screenplay!” or “Secrets of Tantric Script Writing.” Manuals filled with charts and diagrams promote various methods, some making the job more mysterious than it already is and others all but promising to make it no harder than filling out a complicated form at the DMV. The books and theories come at you like late-night TV commercials for strange kitchen utensils. Some of it is charlatanism. And some of it is useful.

All this would have seemed unlikely a few generations back. Jack Warner caught the prevailing attitude when, with his customary delicacy, he called screenwriters “schmucks with Underwoods.” When films were silent, someone--perhaps with an early Underwood--cooked up a scenario and wrote the intertitles, usually along the lines of “Came the dawn.” The director ran the show.

The director’s authority was ratified in the 1950s, when a few overheated French critics associated with Cahiers du Cinema attributed authorial powers to a few Hollywood directors, an idea that has come down to us as the auteur theory. This seemed plausible applied to, say, Alfred Hitchcock or John Ford, directors with rich personal styles. But soon enough, any director who used similar camera angles from picture to picture qualified. Style became content and any schmuck with a viewfinder was an auteur. It was an easy hook for anyone writing about movies.

Everybody knows movies aren’t made like novels or poems, but what is also true, and what drives screenwriters mad, is that many pictures, certainly the best ones, are indeed attributable to their directors. On a movie set, which can never be a democracy, someone has to be the boss. Still, movies do not spring fully formed from a director’s brow. Every situation is different--which creates a dilemma entirely too complex for the necessary simplifications of journalism. So the auteur theory, with its mix of accuracy and convenience, caught on and has never let go. A few directors have final cut, which gives them some artistic autonomy, though not as much as the phrase implies. No writer has final draft.

Despite this dispiriting situation, young people want to be screenwriters in the way they want to be rock stars or earlier generations wanted to be novelists. They seem to be everywhere, from Xerox shops to studio lots, with their scripts tucked under their arms, ready to tilt at Hollywood’s windmills. John Gregory Dunne once wrote, “Wanting to be a screenwriter is like wanting to be a co-pilot.” So why do so many endure the humiliation and hardship? Some believe that screenwriting will lead to a chance to be a director, which they think of as hitting life’s lucky number. For others, perhaps even most, it’s simpler than that: The money can be sensational.

William Goldman has been writing film scripts for 35 years. He’s been on top, or not far from it, for much of that time. His most memorable scripts are “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” (1969) and “All the President’s Men” (1976). His work in recent years hasn’t been quite so vivid, though he still gets scripts produced and is in demand as a script doctor. He’s become a sort of world citizen of the cinema, sitting on festival juries and writing tart magazine articles.

His “Which Lie Did I Tell?” follows “Adventures in the Screen Trade” (1982), the book that gave us the memorable apercu about Hollywood: “Nobody knows anything.” The new volume is a similar mix of memoir and instruction. Goldman walks through his movies telling war stories, sometimes to his benefit but also reporting his mistakes. He enjoys contradicting himself and drawing rules that are only casually enforced. “There are no rules to screenwriting, as we all know, but one of them is this: you must never ever open your first draft screenplay with a courtroom scene.” He explains that it’s OK to open a movie that way, but by then you’ve sold the script. He rages about sequels, calling them “whores’ movies”--in a book that is itself a sequel.

The summary of his thought this time, not quite as pithy as “Nobody knows anything”: “There are really two kinds of flicks . . . generic Hollywood movies, and what we now call independent films. Hollywood films . . . want to tell us truths we already know or a falsehood we want to believe. Hollywood films reinforce, reassure. Independent films . . . want to tell us things we don’t want to know. Independent films unsettle.”

As he did in the first book, Goldman includes a script of his own that doesn’t quite come off. He asks six screenwriters what they make of it. As the Writers Guild--8,400 members, 8,400 opinions--often demonstrates, there’s little agreement. All the comments are plausible, and each seems right until you read the next. Unproduced scripts will do that. They seem to cry out: Help me, change me, improve me, kick me around.

Goldman writes in a conversational voice, throwing in the occasional “Duh,” as if he were writing dialogue for the teenage farces that have all but supplanted his own style, a potent and unsentimental mix of irony and action. He has an anti-Los Angeles bias that feels tired. He refers to L.A. as “Out There.” It put me in mind of the era when New Yorkers talked about “going out to the coast.” Still, this is a leisurely and perceptive look at movies and scripts and how they happen from a master of the trade.

*

Millard Kaufman is a name known in Hollywood if not to the general public. His most memorable film is the western “Bad Day at Black Rock” (1954). I don’t know if he monkeys around with scripts any more--he’s in his 80s--but he turns up on Writers Guild committees, and if anyone can be said to have seen it all, it’s probably Kaufman. Like Goldman’s books, “Plots and Characters” is part memoir and part instruction. Old decisions are chewed over until precepts and a way of working emerges. Kaufman is at his best when he walks us through several approaches to a key scene in “Bad Day at Black Rock,” showing how, in small increments, the scene got better until it was finally right.

Kaufman’s book has an unexpected density, chiefly the result of the quotations and references he brings to bear on his argument. Sometimes it can get a little out of hand. On one not untypical page, he mentions Hemingway, Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Shakespeare, Anatole France and Johannes Kepler. Happily, he’s also an unstoppable raconteur. Some of his tales and jokes have been around, but at one point he interrupts a discussion of dramatic structure to recall Joe Pasternak, an MGM producer who was Hungarian and not always at home in English. Talking about Mario Lanza in “The Great Caruso,” Pasternak said, “The first time you see him, he’s wearing blue gungadins,” thereby conflating Rudyard Kipling and denim trousers. And, after a long day, Pasternak announced, “I’m tired of all this rigamajew.”

In a chapter on character, Kaufman observes that Aristotle’s flawed hero “has been supplanted by the multitude of villains hellbent on liquidating him.” What Kaufman’s getting at is that the classical approach to drama, practiced since Aeschylus, has now been abandoned for movies that are little more than cartoons. This situation gives rise to an amusing taxonomy of villains from early westerns: the brain heavy, who’s Mr. Big or the smart guy; the dog heavy, who’s the enforcer, the killer; and the cad heavy, who’s more weak than evil.

Kaufman breaks down dramatic form using “The Fugitive” (1993) as a model, walking through it showing how the various elements are put together. He does it astutely, revealing the script’s inner workings, its DNA. The trouble with an exercise of this sort is that it feels after the fact. It’s unlikely that when Kaufman wrote his own movies, he thought much about “rising action” or the “precipitate train of events.” Surely it’s the result of his having read other scripts and thought and read widely before setting to work. Now, looking back, Kaufman can codify what he did and report it in theoretical terms. What he has to say is never less than interesting, but it’s a relief whenever he acknowledges that sometimes a writer just has to start writing.

“Fitzgerald Did It” by novelist Meg Wolitzer is a guide for experienced writers who want to attempt a screenplay. F. Scott Fitzgerald was famously unhappy and unfulfilled in Hollywood. He came here to write himself out of debt. He wound up with one shared credit (“Three Comrades”) and eventually found a use for the movie business as a subject for his Pat Hobby stories and “The Last Tycoon,” the novel he was writing when he dropped dead at 44. The idea of using Fitzgerald’s experiences in Hollywood as a model is the sort of notion that belongs to the world of book proposals rather than in an assessment of what a novelist or playwright needs to get going in Hollywood. That’s not to say that Wolitzer’s book is without value. She’s an experienced writing teacher and her own novels have a lovely human quality about them. She includes a treatment for a romantic comedy of her own that succeeds because it raises the only question that counts in a romance: What keeps the lovers apart?

And yet I kept hoping for a more daring and less conventional story, something that astonishes even as it holds to Goldman’s point about studio movies reinforcing prevailing attitudes. Wolitzer says, tongue in cheek, that there are two kinds of characters: “moose heads” and “bookshelves.” She means big personalities and more recessive ones. It’s a movie gloss on E.M. Forster’s famous point in “Aspects of the Novel” about round characters and flat characters. The round are fully developed, and one of the ways we measure them is by their flat compatriots.

Wolitzer writes in a relaxed voice, and when she’s not skating on the thin ice of her overall idea, she’s instructive, which takes us to a knotty question. Is it possible to write effectively about something one has not accomplished? Aristotle was a thinker and not a playwright. Wolitzer has, apparently, written and sold a number of scripts. None of them so far as I know has been tested in production. Goldman addresses this problem in a discussion of his movie “The Ghost and the Darkness” (1996) that he feels was harmed by the casting of Michael Douglas and Val Kilmer. “If they had been in ‘Butch Cassidy,’ instead of Redford and Newman, you would not remotely be listening to anything I might have to say about Hollywood.” It’s a business of hits, and no one fully trusts counsel from anyone but winners. Theoreticians who stand outside the fray get a free ride, but a screenwriter--novelist or not--without a record of production is what most screenwriters are trying not to be.

These three books offer solid advice, but with Goldman and Kaufman, I sensed the occasional crawling doubt about the very idea of such a venture. These books, and others as well, frequently say the same things about film scripts:

* On structure: All agree about the value of the three-act form as a baseline for structuring a script. Kaufman reminds us that it amounts to: “Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy gets girl.” He credits George M. Cohan with: Get the hero up a tree, throw some rocks at him and then get him down again. Goldman is all for the three-act form when it’s useful and not when it’s not. “A lot of mine seem to have five acts. . . . ‘Butch’ is really two acts.” Wolitzer supports the theory, giving each act a general name and page length: One is the setup, two the conflict and three the resolution. She suggests a major plot point leading up to Page 30 and again leading up to Page 90. This comes out less doctrinaire than it might seem. It’s similar to the theories of Robert McKee, who gives popular workshops in script writing, and to Syd Field, whose “Screenplay” (1979) was the first of these books to find a large audience.

* On story: Goldman says, “After writing movies for thirty-five years, I am more convinced than ever it’s only about story.” This is in line with Aristotle, who held that what we think of as story, or action, or plot is the soul of drama. Kaufman emphasizes that the classical view is that action and character are ordained by the gods. The modern notion is best formulated as “action is character,” an Aristotelian remark usually attributed to Scott Fitzgerald. The terms themselves are treacherous. Plot? Story? Forster, again, has a wonderfully concise definition: “ ‘The king died, and then the queen died’ is a story. ‘The king died and then the queen died of grief’ is a plot.”

* On dialogue: In an interview in a recent issue of Written By, the Writers Guild magazine, Anthony Minghella remarked, “Good film writers are making . . . films. . . . They’re writing scenes that may have only visual information.” Actors are often encouraged to improvise. So dialogue is more important in a script that is for sale than one somebody else is trying to shoot. And yet, many of everyone’s favorite movies sparkle because of their dialogue. The screwball comedies of the 1930s are made of language. In our own era, the best films of, say, Woody Allen or James Brooks are memorable for characters who are defined by what they say.

There are exceptions, but in production, written dialogue is regularly seen as merely a starting point. The situation is often at its goofiest in action movies set in the present. Characters constantly run over to the latest victim, bloody on the ground, and ask, “Are you all right?” The actors are trying to fill the moment and make their character more sensitive or caring. I doubt much of it comes from the script. Screenwriters, who work hard at their dialogue, don’t like to think about this dreary truth. It’s the part of screenwriting least attended to in these books.

* On theme: Kaufman writes, “Theme is hardly paramount to writing a screenplay,” which may seem cynical, though it’s a paradox that’s true of most dramatic writing. You explore a situation or a character and soon enough--if you have a pulse--you see the theme. Confusion about theme is often the source of trouble in studio notes or meetings. Producers and executives sit around yelling ideas. If everyone isn’t in agreement on the theme, it will be destructive.

There’s a good discussion of the issue in John Gardner’s “The Art of Fiction” (1983). He explains that theme can’t be imposed but rather is evoked, saying it “is initially an intuitive but finally an intellectual act on the part of the writer.” You don’t start with a formulation of a theme, but you soon come to see what it is, and from that point the story gets easier to tell.

* On rules: All script writing seems to rely on a handful of well-turned rules of procedure. Goldman is consistently amusing here and almost embarrassed to slip in a few: “Enter Late,” which means to begin each scene as deep into the action as possible. You’ll get the idea if you think of all the tired well-made plays that began with servants bustling about announcing that the master would be home soon and there was trouble ahead. In a modern film, all that dust is blown away, and the master is already home with a troubled look on his face. Wolitzer, quoting the novelist and screenwriter Richard Price, says, “Screenplays are about giving a story momentum.” A writer I know insists that the first two lines of almost any scene can be cut and momentum will be increased. As Goldman puts it, “Things should hook into each other. One thought moving forward while . . . referring back.” When this sort of gambit works, it makes stories that Goldman finds “both inevitable and surprising,” which is similar to Henry James’ famous formulation: “recognition and surprise.” Both are trying to achieve authenticity of feeling: James was doing it through language; Goldman, a man of his own time, through action.

*

Can anyone learn to write a screenplay from reading books? Each of these writers hedges a bit: They’ve written books on the subject; of course they believe in the possibility. They also recognize that if a person doesn’t have talent for the form, it won’t matter how many books he reads. It’s like trying to build an airplane from a kit. You might get the engine to turn over, but I’ll be damned if I’d go up in it.

Instruction in something as unruly as script writing is bound to run up against what Yeats called “asking the will to do the work of the imagination.” Scripts written in an over-determined way, with mandated plot turns, usually show the author’s sweaty hand. The result, as in many of the movies advertised in this newspaper, is industrial with the soul of toothpaste.

“Screenwriters,” by Helena Lumme and Mika Manninen, is a coffee table book of photographs that have been exhibited around the world. I first saw them in a show at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills. The original prints are now in the Writers Guild collection. Some of the pictures are staged and theatrical, while others document private or pensive moods. They’re all carefully printed and quite vivid. The book is full of pleasant surprises, though when in the introduction the authors say of their subjects, “They . . . spread the American way of thinking,” you can’t help but wonder if they’re talking about the same disparate group of rogues and poets depicted in their own pages.

I particularly liked the portrait of Julius Epstein (“Casablanca”) laughing, with his patented eyebrows rolling out like antennae, as if he were remembering gags of the past. The picture of Bo Goldman (“Melvin and Howard”) with the head of a Roman emperor, standing deep in sand waiting for whatever will come, his mind on higher things, establishes a visual metaphor for a screenwriter’s difficulties. And there’s a rich photo of Goldman himself, looking like an aging matinee idol. Ruth Prawer Jhabvala (“Remains of the Day”) has a gentle skepticism in her eyes, though with her European and Indian background and her many adaptations of English novels, I’m not sure that she spends much time spreading the American way of thinking.

Some of the writers comment on their work. Jane Anderson, who wrote the sublime “Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom,” compares script writing to bearing and rearing a child until “a bunch of people walk into your house and say, ‘OK, we’re going to raise him now.’ And they take your kid away, change his name, give him a buzz cut and send him to military school.”

In “Why We Write” by Lorian Tamara Elbert, the 25 screenwriters depicted are mostly in the middle of their careers. A few of them were unknown to me, though most are names familiar to other screenwriters. The pictures were shot in available light in comfortable circumstances and have a frank and direct feel to them, though as Times film critic Kenneth Turan notes in his introduction, many of the writers look worried. The title “Why We Write” seems a wee overblown and all but begs for a wisenheimer reply. These men and women may on occasion be suffering artists or pamphleteers at the barricades, but their day jobs are in a venal business.

Some of their statements are wry and self-deprecating. Michael Ferris, talking about “The Net,” recounts that he and John Brancato had an assignment to write a moody paranoid thriller. Their ending was “replaced by one in which Sandra Bullock knocks the bad guy off a catwalk with a fire extinguisher. Thus the words ‘Sandra Bullock’ and ‘darkly ambiguous’ are unlikely ever to occupy the same sentence again.”

There’s a resonant photograph of Michael Grais (“Poltergeist”) in which he looks something like the cartoonist R. Crumb. Grais tells of his own life of drugs, world travel and near lunacy. It’s a richer tale than any of his movies and serves to point up the ambiguous role that screenwriters play. Most of them are whip-smart and some are indeed underappreciated artists, but many are journeymen, turning out anonymous screenplays. Just how they might enrich those dreary scripts by drawing on their own emotions and experiences has been a screenwriter’s problem at least since the days of Jack Warner.

John Briley, who wrote “Gandhi,” catches a sad truth, and he can have the last word: “The wonder is that good films ever get made at all. . . . When that does happen . . . it can be traced to one strong creative person big enough to defy the system. It may be a star, it may be a director, it may even be a producer, but it is never a writer.”