The Devil’s Guide To Hollywood (35 page)

If you’re bored with your mate, do lots of research
.

S
tudio executives are suckers for authenticity. Interviewing people, they can understand; creative genius, they can’t.

In the course of my unhappy first marriage, I did studio-expensed research in the following locations: the south of France, Israel, Zurich, London (four times), Paris (three times), Hawaii (five times), and Los Vegas, of course (which I researched
in depth
innumerable times, and ways, for
Showgirls
).

About sitting down and writing—it’s okay to be scared
.

S
creenwriter and director Billy Wilder: “I was only nervous when confronted with an empty page. One with nothing on it.”

Don’t do an outline for yourself
.

I
t will lock the characters in step too much and not give them enough room to plot the course of their own actions in the script.

Give them the freedom to tell you what it is they want to do or say.

Do a character sketch for yourself instead
.

S
pend a page on each character. His/her back story, background, physical descriptions, interests, relationships, dreams, failings.

Do it for all the major characters.

Study it for a week, reread it and think about it as much as you can, and revise it as the week goes along.

At the end of the week, do a final version of it, and start writing your script.

Keep your character sketches handy and reread them as you continue to write your script.

Before you write anything, think about designing a jacket for your script
.

L
loyd Levin, who worked for studio head Larry Gordon at Fox, took him a novel called
Nothing Lasts Forever
, by Roderick Thorp.

Gordon took one look at the book’s jacket and said to Levin, “I don’t need to read it. Buy it.”

Old Hungarian saying
…

T
he moment you begin writing is the moment “the monkey jumps into the water.”

Go jump already!

Don’t play it safe
.

S
creenwriter Larry Gelbart (
Tootsie
): “In half a century, we’ve gone from
Citizen Kane
to candy cane. That’s what comes from playing it safe.”

Shut up, don’t worry so damn much about it, sit down, and write
.

R
aymond Chandler: “Ideas are poison. The more you reason, the less you create.”

This is the most fun you’re going to have
.

R
on Shelton: “The best part of screenwriting—you do it alone. The stuff that scares most people is why I love it: the blank page, and you’re alone. There’s no committee, there’s no bureaucracy, you’re the boss, you’re the czar, you’re “
everything
.”

Go for it—get some boos
.

B
ob Dylan said, “If you haven’t done anything, you’ve never been booed.”

This is what you should do
.

S
creenwriter Dan Harris (
Imaginary Heroes
): “My script is my head vomited up on paper.”

PART FOUR

W
RITING THE
S
CRIPT

LESSON 9

Slit a Vein and Drip It on the Page!

Follow your bliss … or your body part
.

I
know it sounds like the worst New Age line you’ve ever heard (Joseph Campbell), but it’s true. Write the story that’s in your heart and gut and whatever other body parts you write from.

I’ve always been accused of writing from—Oh well, never mind. My wife, who loves me, says I’m a kinder and gentler Joe these days.
Ha!

Buy yourself a good chair
.

Y
ou can get them for sixty or seventy dollars at places like Office-Max. The less discomfort you have while you’re writing, the more you can concentrate, and thus the better your script will be.

Don’t sit there for hours
.

G
et up every hour or so and walk around for five or ten minutes. Otherwise, you’ll ruin your back, your prostate, and possibly your relationship with your wife and kids. Say hi to them, give them a hug, drink some water, and go back to work.

You’ve got to forget about the money
.

W
riter/producer William Froug: “If you think about how much you can sell it for while you’re writing it, you’re lost.”

Try to have fun writing your script
.

A
lbert Einstein: “The highest level of creativity unfolds through play.”

Keep some holy object near you as you write
.

I
t has to have some relationship to what you’re writing about: For my Otis Redding script,
Blaze of Glory
, it was a boyhood photo of Otis that his widow, Zelma, gave me; for
Basic Instinct
, it was a gleaming silver ice pick that I had found at a flea market; for
Music Box
, it was a photo of a group of Hungarian Jewish women being led by Hungarian gendarmes to a train.

Sometimes some unholy object will do, too
.

F
or
Showgirls
, it was a pair of my wife’s black lace panties.

Screenplays are a bitch to write
.

O
ne man wrote
War and Peace
. Thirty-five screenwriters wrote
The Flintstones
.

You don’t have to love writing a script
.

S
creenwriter William Faulkner: “If I never do another one until I’m old and bent and grey, it will be too soon.”

All you have to do is slit a vein and let it drip on the page
.

R
on Shelton: “The hard part is getting from thinking about the script to the first page of writing. I might think about it for years. By the time I write page one, I like to have so much of it inside me it practically explodes onto the page.”

Just write your first sentence
.

W
riting the first sentence,” my writer friend Will Froug said, “is the toughest part of writing a script.”

Don’t be afraid to ask God to help you
.

R
on Shelton: “For the first thirty-five years of your life you run from the Church, and somewhere in your thirties and forties you make peace with it and embrace it as a part of who you are, and thereby liberate yourself from it. I realized I could take from it those elements that comforted me and helped me to cope, and discard the rest.”

Robert McKee says you have to defeat your fear
.

M
cKee: “You have to think like an artist. If you know you’re in over your head, and that doesn’t intimidate you, you might just make it. The hard part is getting in the chair and writing. It takes tremendous willpower and discipline and the only way to defeat the fear is to gain the self-confidence that comes from knowing you’ve mastered the art form.”

To Robert McKee: It’s okay, Bob, I get scared, too
.

I
an Parker in
The New Yorker:
“McKee motivates writers for a living, but he has not been able to get this book done. When I asked him why, he said, ‘It’s a good question. Why haven’t I? Fear is part of it.’”

If you’ve written the first page, the rest is easy
.

N
ow you know you can do it, because you’ve already done it once. All you have to do is do it about 110 more times.
But you’ve done it
. So what’s the big deal?

Don’t keep messing with the first scene
.

S
creenwriter Anna Hamilton Phelan (
Gorillas in the Mist
): “Don’t go back and fix that first scene. Don’t go back and fix that dialogue. Write yourself a little note saying ‘Put in first scene such and such,’ if you happen to think of something, then get a little stickum and stick that somewhere on the wall. But don’t go back, because going back is a trap. It keeps you from going forward. It keeps you from going ahead. Your first enemy, of course, is yourself. Yourself is also that little critic that sits on your shoulder and says, “
This is terrible
.”