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BPS 296: How Master Storytellers Keep the Audience Engaged with Richard Walter · Bulletproof Screenwriting™ Podcast

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  You are listening to the IFH podcast Network. For more amazing filmmaking and screenwriting
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  podcasts, just go to IFAH podcast network dot com. Welcome to the Bulletproof
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  Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number two ninety six, except no one's definition of your
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  life, Define it yourself. Harvey Fierste broadcasting from a dark, windowless room
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  in Hollywood when we really should be working on that next draft. It's the
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  Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you
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  how to make your screenplay bulletproof. And here's your host, Alex Ferrari.
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  Welcome, Welcome to another episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast. I am your
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  humble host Alex Ferrari. Now, today's show is sponsored by Bulletproof script Coverage.
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  with guest host Dave Bullis this concluding academic year. July first is the new
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  academic year. Of course, this is the concluding thirty eighth year. So
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  I've seen a lot, but I'm recalling years and years ago, and one
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  of those things I've seen is, oh, about twenty five years ago,
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  actually probably a little longer than that, the arts at UCLA all across the
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  campus were reconfigured and the Film School, which was part of the Theater Arts
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  Department, was turned into a long I was turned into a separate two separate
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  departments, the Film, TV, Digital Media on one hand, that's my
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  department and our sister department, the Theater Department, and we aren't together in
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  the School of Theater, Film and Television. And years ago when we were
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  still the Theater Department, there was a retreat up to Lake Garrowhead. There's
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  a very beautiful, upscale, gorgeous conference center up in the mountains, just
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  about an hour hour and a half from the campus, And the whole subject
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  that was discussed up there for the weekend was the spelling of the word theater.
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  There were some people who wanted to change it from the ear to the
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  r E. It's terribly unimportant, but I am on the side of the
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  er people. Well though, after two days of robust and vigorous and eager
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  discussion, it was decided without any equivocation, without any hesitancy to discuss this
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  further out another retreat, you know, I mean, you know, it's
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  like it's been said of the universities that university it's just like incorporation, except
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  that there's no bottom line and there's no calendar. Now both of those things
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  are completely untrue today. You know, they're universities, especially here in California,
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  but all across the country are very much in touch with the notion of
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  the bottom line, as you know, support for public education retreats, and
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  not only at the university level, but much more grieviously, I think at
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  the KROE through twelve level and calendar is very much attached to issues and so
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  on, so fascinating any place to spend a life. That said, there's
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  no escaping the you know, these bureaucratic issues, they're not you may unique
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  to public universities or private universities, but all institutions, corporations, nonprofits,
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  governmental agencies. You know, nothing ever runs real smoothly, and people should
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  stop explaining it to, you know, and and kind of make do because
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  what else can you do. So in any event, there I am very
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  sympathetic with what you're saying. The organizing principle of my life has always been
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  no meetings. I don't do lunch as much as I can avoid it,
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  for exily, and yesterday I was at an awards lunch, and how to
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  be there. I am also the associate dean now of the School of Theater,
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  Film and Television, and I have to be there for the awards,
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  the ceremony, you know, they give out scholarships and stuff like that and
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  celebrate the students. But I'm reminded of a line in one of my favorite
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  lines in all of movies. In Oliver Stone's Wall Street, there's a line
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  there's a moment where Gecko you know, Michael Douglas. I'm sure you've seen
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  that. I expect you've seen the movie. He's on the he's fielding like
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  eleven phone calls at the same time. At a one point he says,
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  lunch. You know, clearly somebody's invited him to lunch and it's his lunch,
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  and he scuses his lunches for whimps and he hangs up, you know,
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  and I say, lunches for whimps. I believe, you know.
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  My first obligation to the university, as professor in a research institution like the
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  University of California, the first the second obligation is teaching. The first obligation
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  is what they call in the traditional disciplines research, and in the arts they
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  call it creative activity. But that's the first obligation that I have and I
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  can't do that, and that all the faculty have. But we can't do
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  that if we don't have the time to do that. So one does need
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  to be a warrior for one's writing time, if you follow what I'm saying,
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  and I'm just responding to get all these meetings. Our previous chair she
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  had a sign. I loved her because because she had a sign on her
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  desk, on a little table at her in her office that said, this
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  meeting is costing, and then there was a blank you know, fill in
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  the number, you know, next to a dollar sign. So I'm always
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  sympathetic with what you're talking about. You know, there was a book I
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  was just reading, Richard. It was called The Power of No, and
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  basically it's the one word you could use to just sort of the crux of
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  the book is if you say the word yes, uh, you inherit all
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  that person's problem. So like if I thank you, Richard, would you
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  like to go to lunch? And you say yes, Well, well,
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  you know it's it's funny because the um There's a self help guru who died
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  I think last years, very well known, Stephen Covey, who wrote a
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  book that is translated into like one hundred and sixty seven languages, you know,
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  several of which are not even identifiable. I mean, he sold millions
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  of millions of copies of this book and it's called something like those Seven Habits
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  of Highly Effective People or something like that. And in that book he says,
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  at one point he has a he has something he called six words for
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  serenity, and he there are own less, do less, say no,
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  and that's what you're talking about. I have had to learn how to say
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  no. You know, it's a necessary condition when I'm asked to do things
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  that I just can't do, rather than sort of play along, go along
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  and so on. You know, there's all kinds of ways to say.
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  It's a student. I just got a request, for example for the summer,
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  a student and you know there. I love. The greatest thing about
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  UCLA and the greatest thing about teaching is the students, and I love I
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  love our students. But there is among young people and maybe college students in
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  particular, maybe especially prestige students in glamour programs like UCLA. I mean it
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  is the you know, those major film schools like my own, Aluma,
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  motor USC, like NYU, like like certainly like UCLA. We are the
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  glamour corner of higher learning. So the people who do get in, it's
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  very competitive. They maybe you know, they're very gifted and they used to
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  get getting their own way, and I think maybe they're uniquely entitled. Um,
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  you know, they have a sense of unique entitlement. So somebody just
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  announced to me, and this is somebody I really are a fond of and
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  a very fine writer, or a student in a program that he's decided to
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  take an independent study with me this summer. I don't get paid for that,
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  by the way. He will, and of course I have to consent
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  to it. He can't just announce it, although he felt that he could.
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  That he's just entitled to it, and he's going to, if he
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  has his way, you know, meet with me this summer and discuss his
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  outline for a screenplay after I look it over, and then we'll meet several
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  times. I'll review the pages and give him notes and so on. I
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  do that, you know, for eight writers every quarter. We're on the
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  quarter system at UCLA routinely. But I'm not going to do that this summer.
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  You know, I'm working on my own stuff. I have all kinds
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  of things playing. But rather than just saying no, what I told him
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  was that I wished I could do that, which is only partly true,
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  and however, that I would not be able to give him and his screenplay
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  the time and the attention and the consideration that they both merit. So that's
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  a polite way to say no. We'll be right back after a word from
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  our sponsor and now back to the show. But you do need to learn
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  how to say no. And I've also said in Hollywood dealing in the movie
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  business, you're a hard no. No. This is not for us.
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  As painful as that is, it's not as painful as what one usually here
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  is when one submits a project, either to potential representatives or to a production
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  company, one usually here is is this. You know what I mean.
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  The silence is deafening. Yeah, very shrill, very shrilled silence. So
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  I'm sympathetically what you're you're talking about. You do need to I mean,
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  I consider it actually part of my my pedagog if I could call it that,
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  my teaching philosophy, is to teach students we are all right, you
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  know, professional program, a graduate program we offer the master Fine Arts.
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  I trying to teach them, by example how they need to be warriors for
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  their own writing time. I once had a definition I used to climb around
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  about a definition of a writer. A writer is somebody who's always available to
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  pick up relatives at the airport. And I've preached to writers that if they
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  when they complain, oh you know, I can't get anything done, then
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  but the family wants me to do. You know, they think I'm available
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  to pick up people. I said, well you are available. I mean
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  you did get pick them up. I didn't you, So why you know,
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  if you don't get it, they're going to get it. You know.
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  It's one of my principles, which is if you want to be treated
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  as a professional writer, you have to treat yourself as a professional. And
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  the fact is people who are going to pick up relatives at the airport,
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  but they don't realize is they're actually glad to do that because it allows them
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  to avoid doing what every writer wants to avoid doing, and that is writing.
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  And not only that they get to do to feel virtuous about it and
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  to get the gripe and catch and cart to complain about everybody impinging on the
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  time, when in fact they're terrified to see a low front of the word
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  processor, you know, and the relatives coming in from out of town has
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  given them the excuse not to do that. If you follow me, yeah,
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  I absolutely follow you. Because there's a book that I read, The
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  War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. He's a genius. Press Field, He's
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  just I love that book. Yeah, absolutely, And you know I was
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  fortunate enough to be able to speak with him briefly, and I told him,
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  you know, reading that book was an epiphany for me. Oh absolutely,
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  I just love the book. In fact, I was just quoting on
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  somebody. I do a lot of consulting off campus. I give notes to
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  writers who have deals at studios. You know, it's become more and more
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  routine in Hollywood now, even when you have a deal. Um, you
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  know, typical writing assignment is what they call and it's whatever is negotiable,
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  you know, as long as the guild minimums are being observed. Um.
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  The typical assignment is what they call a draft them a set. A draft
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  is a draft of a screenplay, and a set usually consists of what somebody
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  will call a rewrite and somebody else, and then it'll be followed by what
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  somebody calls a polish. But of course the guy UH do in the polish
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  and the guy doing the rewrite have different views of you know, what what
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  it should be, let should be called. But um, often between such
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  such stages, uh, smart writers will go to somebody like me, a
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  script doctor, a script consultant, and say, listen, they owe me,
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  you know, I owe I owe them this draft beforehanded and ask me.
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  You know, I want you to ask me the hard questions before the
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  studio asks them, and and and so on. Um. So I was
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  talking to But I also work with writers who you know, who are independent
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  and who can afford my very very high fees to give those kinds of notes.
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  You know, it's easier for a writer who's getting a quarter a fee
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  from Paramount Pictures to do that than than somebody out of out of their own
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  pocket. Um. But I do work with writers off campus, as I
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  say, who can have an If I'm attracted to the script, I think
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  it's something that I want to, you know, if you feel merits encouragement.
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  Um. And then of course it costs a lot of money. So
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  I was working with somebody. I'm working with a particular writer. I was
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  in the Midwest and she I just sent her back a second raft of notes.
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  Oh, it's about a fifteen page document going through her script and talking
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  about it in general, but also going through the pages note you know,
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  page for page, and and indicating with are in certain issues that are around,
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  some of them as trivial as typos, and some of them, uh,
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  you know, fundamental issues about returned story structure and whatever. And she
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  complained to me that she was really disappointed that there's more work to do,
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  that she thought she had the whole thing set up, and that she's kind
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  of sorry that things aren't proceeding, you know, according to schedule, you
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  know, in the way that she predicted. And I immediately thought of press
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  Field, who I know what he would say. Stephen would say that her
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  only amateurs and dilettants think that it goes, you know, in a steady,
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  predictable, reliable way. That it's not herkey, jerky and frustrating every
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  inch of the way. You know. Pressfield would say, stop trying to
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  feel good about it. You know, feel good about having done it,
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  but don't feel good about doing it. Nobody does, No writer does it.
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  One of my first principles is all writers hate to write. We love
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  having written, but actually sitting down and addressing the pages. That's what press
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  fielicle resistance. There's always resistance sitting there. And I have a lot of
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  experience as a writer over my years. I've been writing professionally for more than
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  forty years, but my own experience is leveraged by the experience I've had with
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  other writers working very very closely, very intimately with writers on campus and off
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  campus, and so my, you know, I have the experience also of
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  all of those writers. And that's the way it is for everybody, for
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  everybody, including the highest handed, you know, highest minded, most successful,
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  richest petitioners. It's always that way, and people have to, you
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  know, stop trying to feel good about it. You know. It's like
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  Steven said one time, he said, uh, you know, if you
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  can beat resistance inch by inch and you can actually get something made, and
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  you can actually you know, you sit there and there's a polished manuscript and
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  he says, congratulations. Now move on to the next one. Exactly.
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  I quote a student mind. He wrote two scripts in class that became gigantically
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  successful films. They became franchise as. One as Highlander. Um maybe they
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  they called it The Highlander. And the other one is Backdraft. I mean
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  Backdraft became an amusement park ride, you know, I mean, it's gigantic
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  success. And so here was this twenty six year old writer, multi millionaire.
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  Already I was reading an interview with him in the press. This is
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  some years ago, and he was again just like writers complaining, and you
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  think he'd be jumping for joy and you know, whistling a happy tune.
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  No, he was talking about how they had betrayed him at Fox, how
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  they had dissed him at NBC, and burned him at Warner Brothers, and
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  lied to him at Paramount, and on and on, you know, all
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  of these dramas and the you know, acts of these crimes that have been
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  visited upon him. This poor, poor guy, this poor multimillionaire, twenty
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  six year old screenwriter. And then he pauses in the interview, and I
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  swear if you held the interview this is a press, you know, a
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  print piece, If you held the news page close to your face, you
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  could have felt the waft of his sigh. If you know what I'm saying,
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  He felt a breeze on his cheek. It was that palpable in the
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  context of what he was saying. Was quoting me. He was saying,
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  Ah, but I can just hear. After he's griping and complaining, he
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  says, ah, but I can just hear my professor, Richard Walter of
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  muc LA say mcgreg Don't you know it's the privilege in Hollywood, even merely
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  to be mistreated this way again? What Hollywood will do to you. The
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  worst thing Hollywood will do. He is not mistreat you, but you ignore
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  you. I have an experience I met with, Rest his soul, Julius
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  Epstein. He's He and his brother and another writer wrote Casablanca and among many
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  other things that Julius was involved in. He lived, he was working well
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  into his eighties. He passed a few years ago. Now, rest his
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  soul. He Uh. When I first time I met him, I said,
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  Oh, mister Repstein, I'm so excited to meet you. The only
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  you know, all I hope all of all I or any of my film
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  phony balance. All we hope for is his want in our lives. We
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  should touch something as you did with Casablanca. That's timeless, that's eternal,
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  that is going to you know, touch the hearts and minds of generations.
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  Oh, something like that. Yeah, I wouldn't be nice. Iff I
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  could report to you that, he said, Oh, thanks very much,
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  kind of you to say so. I mean, that would be courtesy one
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  oh one. You know. Uh, he's a writer. You gotta understand.
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  He grew up in Brooklyn, but he spent seventy years in la but
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  he never lost the Brooklyn rawle that he had. We'll be right back after
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  a word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. And his
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  reply to me was casablancish Messiblanca. They fucked that up. You know the
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  part where Florde Raine says such and such a day. But oh no,
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  they want with my brother of Philip. I mean, we had a thing
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  with it. And here he is complaining, you know, more than a
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  half century later, like sixty seventy years later, about how they messed up
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  his movie, what movie Casablanca? And all I could think is, by
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  god, I wish somebody would mess up my movie like they messed up Casablanca.
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  So you know, again, only amateurs and dilettants think you just settled
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  in eagerly in front of the word processor, and you know, you take
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  a deep breath and you kind of just get into your creative zone and it
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  just kind of flues out of your magically. You know. Just ain't that
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  way? Ain't that way? And the other thing is people are never you
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  can't get no satisfaction, if I may quote, they're rolling stones. It's
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  never as good as people think that it should as the writer herself or himself
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  thinks it ought to be it's always better in the mind. You know,
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  when it's not an actual, tangible hold in your hand, it's always more
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  perfect than when it's a real thing. You know. So there is a
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  quality of frustration and disappointment that walks hand in hand with creativity, and professionals
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  know that they accept that, they tolerant, that they endure it. They
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  don't like it, and amateurs deny it. You know, it's amazing that
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  the screen wode of Casablanca actually, you know, had of problems with it
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  because you know, that's the movie that's the go to movie that you know,
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  almost every screenwriting professor I've ever had, or you know book I've ever
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  you know read, that's one of the two movies that they you as a
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  paradigm for this is this is what a great movie or I'm sorry, this
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  is what an excellent movie is. You know, yes, well, it's
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  what a great screenplay is. And it is a great moment, and it's
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  beautifully active and beautifully directed. Um, I quite agree with you. And
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  yet the actual writer of that, you know, thinks it's as so.
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  So. But then there is also a trend kind of that I've detected among
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  writers where if you talk to a really successful writer and you ask, and
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  what's the favorite thing that you wrote? They're going to pick their most obscure,
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  least successful project, you know, um, almost to make up for
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  the disappointment that they experienced when it was was released. As I say,
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  one praise for disappointment when something because you let them be disappointed if something isn't
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  released, you know what I mean. So again I tell my writers,
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  and I tell my colleagues around the table from the timement UCLA on the faculty,
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  that fantasy is for your screen play, for your life reality. So
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  you know, as we we talked about you know, just you know about
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  writing and you know some disappointments you know in your classes. What I wanted
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  to ask, you know, it was when whenever a student comes to you,
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  you know, how do you know what's a good concept and what's not?
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  Well, you don't. You don't. You never know what's a good
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  concept. You never I'm going to tell you two concepts right now that are
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  the stupidest um concepts for movies. You will never hear a stupider comment concept
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  for a movie than uh than either of these. Ready, um, I
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  mean, let me let me, let me uh before I say that,
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  let me let me mention Blake Snyder and save the cat. He argues that,
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  um, if you're a writer and you have a concept, you should
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  run that concept past some some other people. He actually says you should stop
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  people in the street, and especially young people, and telling hey, can
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  I talk to you for a minute. I'm a writer and I have a
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  notion for a i'd you know, for a screenplay of a concept, and
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  I'm wondering I'd love to, you know, talk you through it for a
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  minute or two and see what you think of it, whether you think I'm
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  like you know, it'll be a mistake to move forward or resist the worthy.
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  And imagine you were walking down the street and somebody comes up to you
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  and wants to run a concept past you, and you and you're generous enough,
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  maybe most people probably would say, well, oh all right, all
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  right, you know, let's do it. Because and you did that,
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  and the guy gave you the following concept to you ready, I'm ready.
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  Um. A man stutters, but he has to give a speech, so
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  he hires a speech therapist and they work on the speech, and then he
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  gives the speech. What if somebody's what if you said to like, well,
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  I gotta tell you honestly, you know, you seem like a really
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  good guy. And but you know that sounds just oh let's I mean,
• 24:56
  who could possibly care about way you just described what if events? Said?
• 25:00
  He will, all, well, you know, thanks, just the same.
• 25:03
  But respectfully, let me tell you that I happen to think this this.
• 25:06
  When it's all done, it's going to win the screenplay, you know,
• 25:08
  best screenplay, Oscar and best movie. You'd figure crank up the lithium
• 25:15
  on this guy's trip. It's madness, you know. And yet I don't
• 25:19
  have to tell you what movie that is, I'm sure. Or how about
• 25:22
  this? Somebody comes up and says, I want to do I have an
• 25:26
  idea for a cable series. I think it's going to be sixty two hours.
• 25:30
  It's going to run for you five seasons or six seasons, going to
• 25:34
  be sixty two hours of programming. And here's the idea, A here's the
• 25:37
  concept. A high school chemistry teacher gets a cancer diagnosis, and he say
• 25:48
  he decides, in order to provide for his family, to partner with a
• 25:52
  former incorrigible student and go into the meth trade to manufacture and cell methodphetamine.
• 26:03
  One of these, well, I had a day and that's that's certinly much
• 26:07
  of a concept that would one of these all. I think it's going to
• 26:08
  turn into sixty two hours of unparalleled genius. I don't mind telling you I
• 26:14
  am one of those people who regards Breaking Bad as one of the greatest achievements
• 26:18
  in the history of civilization. In fact, last Saturday I was at Just
• 26:22
  a week ago today, I was at pitch Fest in Burbank, big screenwriting
• 26:26
  festival have every year, and I've actually met Toms Now's and Peter Gould,
• 26:32
  who are the forces behind Better called Saul, which of course grew out of
• 26:37
  Breaking Bad, and I just trembled to meet them. You know, I
• 26:41
  have to shake the hand that wrote those all of those uh beautiful Breaking Bad
• 26:48
  episodes. They were prominent writers, producers and occasionally I think directed some of
• 26:52
  the Breaking Bad episodes. So it's not about ideas, it's not about concepts.
• 26:56
  It's about story. The story is all. It's about stories everything,
• 27:03
  and that's what we preach at UCLA. And you know, if the proof
• 27:07
  is into tasting, we've we've you know, there's a lot of evidence that
• 27:11
  we're we're not wrong about that. Yeah, I you know, I saw
• 27:15
  some of the accomplishments you know, uh they some of your students have done,
• 27:21
  uh, and that that is just phenomenal. And you know that's why,
• 27:23
  you know, you're the guy that I wanted to talk to. You
• 27:26
  were, you know, when I was in the early stage of this podcast,
• 27:29
  you were one of the of the people that I actually marked down to
• 27:32
  talk to. And I'm so happy that we actually got to talk. Now.
• 27:34
  Uh, well, you go too, and I'm flattered by what you're
• 27:37
  saying. I thank you kindly. Oh, completely my pleasure. And you
• 27:41
  know, just you know, to to to continue talking about your class.
• 27:44
  You know you mentioned before an outline. So do you have your students actually
• 27:48
  you know, sort of uh flesh flush out their stories through an outline?
• 27:52
  And how and if so, how detailed do they have to deal with that
• 27:56
  outline? Well, the first answer is yes, I do have them do
• 27:59
  an outline, but I also tell them to throw away the outline once I
• 28:02
  get started writing. It's not terribly detailed. When we have our each quarter,
• 28:10
  we have three ten week quarters at UCLA, where most institutions have two
• 28:15
  semesters, you know, fifteen week semesters, and at the beginning I work
• 28:19
  each quarter. I've taught the course now over one hundred times with students,
• 28:26
  eight students around the table writing a feature length screenplay, and each one has
• 28:33
  to we meet once a week for three hours, the whole group of Oh.
• 28:34
  I do meet with them multiple times during the quarter, independently, individually,
• 28:41
  you know, tutorially, one on one where we review the pages together.
• 28:45
  You know, I read their pages. Having read the pages, I
• 28:48
  meet and give them my notes I have. Everybody has to bring the second
• 28:55
  week of that class. They have to bring in a maximum two page kind
• 28:57
  of a beat sheet, sort of a scene list. It's not really an
• 29:00
  outline, but it's a sort of a document that helps the writer have a
• 29:08
  general direction that the script is going. But then I tell everybody to stay
• 29:12
  open to the surprises. The last thing you want to do is drag something
• 29:18
  back to, you know, an earlier notion that you had if it's working
• 29:23
  better in a new fashion. You know, I never knew a writer who
• 29:29
  wasn't surprised by lines of dialogue that our characters spoke. You don't seem to
• 29:34
  invent by themselves, you know, by twists and turns, in the story
• 29:40
  that they didn't they weren't even aware of even though they are creating the whole
• 29:42
  thing. There is a kind of a magic to it. I had Neil
• 29:49
  Simon come to class to talk about comedy. We'll be right back after a
• 29:56
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Imagine being in
• 30:06
  a writing class and having you know, Neil Simon comedy. It's like being
• 30:11
  in seminary and you know, it was announcing at two o'clock in room nine,
• 30:15
  the Lord will be doing a Q and A, you know. And
• 30:19
  I asked mister Simon, I said, do you laugh at your own jokes?
• 30:26
  And he said, sure, I do the first time I hear them.
• 30:30
  And I think that's a great line. It's as if his jokes are
• 30:33
  not made up by him, but but told to him by the characters that
• 30:34
  he creates. I don't know any writer who hasn't had that experience. So
• 30:40
  yes, I do think you have to have an outline, but I think
• 30:42
  you have to then sort of throw away the outline and expect the script to
• 30:48
  unfold in a way that will surprise not only people who read it but the
• 30:52
  person who wrote it. Yeah, you know, very true and there was
• 30:56
  a book and I can't remember the name it off top of my head.
• 30:59
  I think it may be the Artists Way. But the author of that book
• 31:03
  Julia Cameron, Yes, I yes. And one of the methods that she
• 31:07
  describes in that book was basically, you know, just sort of starting and
• 31:11
  just going and don't worry about, you know, having a plan, you
• 31:15
  know, meaning like you know what a detailed outline means. Well, there's
• 31:18
  something there's something to be said for that. El doctor Rao, who's not
• 31:22
  a screenwriter to my knowledge, but a very very successful novelist who's some substantial
• 31:27
  number of his novels have been made into movies. He's probably best known for
• 31:30
  Ragtime. Um. He says driving he compares writing to driving at night.
• 31:40
  You can only see as far as the headlights reveal. But that's long enough,
• 31:45
  that's far enough to drive, you know, the whole journey. He
• 31:49
  also describes Ragtime. How he came up with Ragtime, which is that he
• 31:56
  was in his He lived in New Rochelle. I think he still does New
• 31:59
  roche which is in Westchester County. It's a suburb of New York City,
• 32:04
  and he lives in a home kind of a early twenty century home, and
• 32:13
  he was just stuck. He was in his writing room and he just didn't
• 32:15
  know what to write about. And he was in deep, deep dark depression
• 32:19
  and despair the way writers get. And he finally just wandered around his study
• 32:27
  and could think of nothing to write about. Say, he put his head
• 32:30
  against the wall. He started to like bang his head literally bang his head
• 32:35
  against the wall, and finally he decided, well, the hell of it,
• 32:37
  He's just going to write about the wall. And he thought about the
• 32:40
  wall that he was, you know, pushing his forehead up against, and
• 32:45
  when it went up, and when the house was built, and that happened
• 32:47
  to be around, you know, in the period that Ragtime is built,
• 32:51
  and what was going on in New Rochelle at that time, and there was
• 32:52
  a parade and this one fraternal order of something or other. And suddenly,
• 32:58
  out of out of banging his head against the wall and writing about the wall,
• 33:00
  comes Ragtime, which is a gigantic number one you New York Times bestseller,
• 33:07
  uh and a sensationally successful film directed by Millish Foreman. Uh. And
• 33:10
  all of this came about by, you know, banging his head against the
• 33:14
  wall. Um so so uh. Again, the you you were asking about
• 33:20
  oh, yes, about getting started. There's a writer. Do you know
• 33:22
  the name Anne LaMotte, Yeah, an Annie Lamotch. He's best known.
• 33:27
  She's a wonderful novelist, but she's probably best known for the books she's written
• 33:30
  about writing. The best known is called Bird by Bird and she Annie preaches
• 33:37
  that every writer should allow themselves what she calls a shitty first draft. You
• 33:45
  got to get it down on the page and stop, you know, being
• 33:49
  disappointed that it's not genius yet. Um. There's another book I think is
• 33:54
  very interesting. It wasn't written about writing the about the thirty years ago there
• 34:00
  was a best seller by a writer named Mark McCormick. Mark McCormick actually was
• 34:07
  a sports He invented modern day sports management. He really started in golf and
• 34:14
  he's the guy who got multimillion dollar contracts for ball players and really went along
• 34:20
  way towards getting rights for ball players at they you know, used to not
• 34:24
  have. I remember, almost a half a century ago, I was working
• 34:28
  on a Jerry Lewis picture. I was the dialogue director on a Jerry Lewis
• 34:31
  picture of Warner Brothers, and on the Jerry liked to slum with ball players,
• 34:36
  and so he had the star of the Dodgers at that time, Willie
• 34:38
  Davis, on the movie. And Willie was a hold out that winter.
• 34:45
  You know, it was pre free agency. I don't know what he could
• 34:49
  do is refuse to play. So he had held out for his contraent farmany.
• 34:52
  Driving over the studio one day we was shooting in December. In January,
• 34:55
  you know, offseason for baseball, I heard on the radio that Willie
• 34:59
  had signed his contract. Who I asked him? When I got to the
• 35:01
  studio, I had no right to ask whom I asked him? How much?
• 35:05
  What do you think he got for the nineteen seventy season. He was
• 35:08
  twenty nine years old, he had hit almost four hundred the previous season.
• 35:14
  He was in his prime. He's one of the best players in baseball.
• 35:15
  What do you think was his salary for the nineteen seventy season? Take a
• 35:21
  guess. I'm going to take a guess at thirty thousand for the year.
• 35:27
  That's a really good guess. It was not as bad as that. It
• 35:30
  was actually fifty thousand. People who guess, oh, you know, quarter
• 35:34
  of a million, a half a million, you know, million dollars and
• 35:36
  so on. Why don't I mention this I had to do with Oh yeah,
• 35:38
  Mark McCormick writing about sports management. He wrote a book called He went
• 35:43
  to the Harvard Business School and he wrote a book called What they Don't teach
• 35:47
  You in the Harvard Business School. And I was kind of a street savvy,
• 35:51
  you know, wisdom for MBA's and CEOs you know, and CFOs and
• 35:58
  CEOs and see and whatever, um, you know, major executives. And
• 36:04
  we were saying, one of his rules is, um, it's quite wonderful,
• 36:09
  uh, I believe, and it works very well for people in the
• 36:14
  arts and including writers. And here it is, don't let excellence stand in
• 36:19
  the way of good. You got something that sort of works, go with
• 36:23
  it, you know, at least for the time being, and then you'll
• 36:27
  come back and rewrite UM. But I think that's what slows people down sometimes
• 36:32
  they and stops them cold, you know, is it's not excellent every inch
• 36:37
  of the way as they go, it's merely good. And I'm saying,
• 36:43
  if you can be merely good, give thanks to God and move on.
• 36:50
  You know, you mentioned bird by Bird that it's funny you mentioned that because
• 36:53
  I was actually talking to people about you know, books on writing and you
• 36:58
  and I and you know, usually the book we just talked about writing as
• 37:00
  a whole. The number one book I always hear about is Stephen King's on
• 37:02
  writing. That is my favorite book by Stephen. It's a brilliant book.
• 37:07
  And by the way, you'll recall what he has to say about ideas.
• 37:10
  He launched his whole career with Carrie. That was his big success, his
• 37:17
  breakthrough. And by the way, you may remember from the book that he'd
• 37:22
  gotten some distance into it and then he'd despaired of it, and he threw
• 37:25
  it away and Tabitha, his wife, Tabitha King, found it in the
• 37:30
  garbage and took it out and read it, said what's this? And she
• 37:36
  said, what's this? I found on the bub and she said, ah,
• 37:37
  it's just now we're gonna have them in the band name. She said,
• 37:38
  what do you mean? It's great, you should keeping. That's how
• 37:43
  Carrie came about. But do you remember how it started. Stephen was living
• 37:49
  in Maine, where he still lives, and he was a high school teacher,
• 37:52
  and he always wondered what he knew what the boys room and the boys
• 37:57
  lockers looked like. But he was what the girls bathrooms and the girls lockers
• 38:02
  looked like so one day when the uh after school hours, when when school
• 38:09
  was closed, but some of the teachers were still there and the lockers in
• 38:13
  the bathrooms were deserted, he went into the women's you know, the girls
• 38:17
  bathroom and the girls lockers, and he discovered, guess what, that just
• 38:22
  exactly like the boys lockers, except for two differences. One is that in
• 38:25
  the showers, the boys lockers had um gang showers, you know, just
• 38:31
  a great big room with novels, you know, on the wall, and
• 38:37
  the girls had curtains. They had, you know, modesty curtains. They
• 38:40
  were they were tracks on the on the ceiling of the shower room and that
• 38:47
  provided for curtains so that they had, you know, a more modest experience
• 38:52
  when they showered. The other difference was that in the girls um locker rooms
• 38:59
  and bathrooms there were these little vending machines, if you know what I mean.
• 39:04
  And look at Carrie. It's all about this girl who comes into menstruation
• 39:09
  and doesn't know what it is, is mocked and ridiculed by the other girls
• 39:15
  who see her in the shower, and they can see blood running under the
• 39:19
  curtain. If you still have a movie for you remembered, or if you
• 39:20
  read the book, just looking in the locker room leads to a thing which
• 39:23
  he sold back then, forty years ago for four hundred thousand dollars, adjusted
• 39:30
  for inflation, would be about three million dollars today. And it all came
• 39:35
  about from curtains and tampons. Amazing, amazing. Yeah, I remember the
• 39:42
  opening to that movie, and it did heavily involve that. And you know,
• 39:45
  and you know, even the remake, which I remember pieces of I
• 39:50
  don't remember as much as the original, but you know that had I think
• 39:53
  that's a similar a similar beginning. We'll be right back after a w from
• 40:00
  our sponsor, and now back to the show, so open. Yeah,
• 40:07
  well, I don't see the remake, but I remember says he's basic in
• 40:10
  the beginning. She's in a very being of the hour. She's you know
• 40:14
  the movie. She's in the shower at school, and there are other girls
• 40:19
  in the showers, and suddenly blood is running, and she clearly does not
• 40:22
  know what this is about. He's never been taught by her parents or anybody
• 40:27
  else about menstruation, and she thinks there's something horribly wrong with her that you
• 40:30
  know she's evil and and and then the other girls see the blood and they
• 40:36
  see that she's upset about it, and you know, there's this terrible bullying
• 40:39
  uh attitude that emerges among adolescents, men and women, and they start to
• 40:46
  attack her. And so I mean, that's what drives the whole movie in
• 40:51
  this movie about revenge, isn't it? And she ultimately, you know,
• 40:54
  avenges them at the end of the movie. But it all derives from that
• 41:00
  very very simple premise. And if you describe that to somebody superficially, they
• 41:05
  would think it's pretty hopeless. So again, I think that one of the
• 41:07
  biggest mistakes that writers make is to assign too much value, too much credit
• 41:15
  to the idea. I like to tell writers when you have a great idea,
• 41:21
  if you have a really great idea for a movie, that's all you
• 41:24
  got. I mean, what remains after that? You know, the incidents,
• 41:31
  the anecdotes, the events, the characters, the dialogues that describe I
• 41:36
  mean, everything remains after that, The idea is really rather useless. What
• 41:42
  has value is the story. And think about it. You can tell the
• 41:45
  idea for a movie in a you know, a minute is about forty seconds
• 41:50
  more than you need to tell an idea, But to tell the story it
• 41:53
  takes you, you know, as long as the movie. For example,
• 41:57
  I was talking. I was saying to somebody the other day what I had
• 41:59
  just said to you a little while ago about talking about the King's speech.
• 42:01
  I was describing, as I did to you, man man stutters, he
• 42:07
  has to give a speech. He how's a speech therapist and gives a speech.
• 42:10
  So somebody said, yeah, well you left out that the man who
• 42:14
  stutters is the King of England. And then it's the nineteen thirties and war
• 42:19
  clouds are gathering in, you know, on the continent, and that he's
• 42:22
  having a romance with Wallace Simpson, a you know, an American commoner,
• 42:29
  and so on and so well, that's the story. That isn't that the
• 42:34
  story. That's not the idea any longer. It's the story, and that's
• 42:37
  where the value is. Yeah, you know, somebody once told me that,
• 42:42
  uh, you know, ideas are diame a dozen, but at that
• 42:45
  at that point, you're over paying for the idea. It's yeah, well
• 42:50
  I'll tell you something. I have a sideline I have, you know,
• 42:53
  I am. If you ask me what I do, I would say I'm
• 42:58
  a writer, if I you know, if I were in the yellow time
• 43:00
  to respond, you know. But the truth is, I also am an
• 43:05
  educator, pretty well known educator. But that's not the end of it,
• 43:09
  that's just the beginning. But I'm also a consultant, and I consult in
• 43:13
  um. You know, I'm a public speaker and I'm a media commentator.
• 43:19
  I do a lot of appearances on talk shows, television, radio, and
• 43:25
  as a consultant, I do two kinds of consulting. One is I've already
• 43:30
  told you about where I work with writers. I consult with writers as a
• 43:32
  script doctor. I give them support in working out there their scripts. And
• 43:39
  the other kind of consulting that I do is in the court. I am
• 43:45
  a court authorized expert in intellectual property law, particularly copyright of fringement, in
• 43:51
  plagiarism, who wrote the movie? And I have testified. I've been an
• 43:55
  expert witness in oh between thirty and forty court cases over the years where there's
• 44:02
  litigation over you know, who wrote the movie. Somebody thinks the movie was
• 44:06
  stolen from them, And over the years I've on occasion been retained as a
• 44:12
  witness by plaintiffs but also by defendants. I was a witness, for example,
• 44:15
  in the very legendary case at Paramount involving Art Buckwald, the famous humorist,
• 44:23
  and the Paramount the producer of the movie Coming to America and Edy movie
• 44:29
  Eddie Murphy movie and Edny movie Murphy, where buck Walt suit claiming they'd stolen
• 44:37
  it from him and so on. I testified that the you know, they
• 44:40
  didn't steal it from him, that it was a different movie. But I
• 44:45
  only mentioned it because it is the miss appropriation of value regarding ideas that has,
• 44:52
  if I could put it this way, put off a danch on my
• 44:54
  children's teeth and paid for their fancy yess nose bleed costly private school education.
• 45:05
  My wife and I looked, my kids have grown up now, God blessing.
• 45:07
  But we used to joke that we saved up enough money to send the
• 45:10
  kids to college, but we spent it all in high school. You know.
• 45:14
  Um. And what I mean by all of that is people attach too
• 45:19
  much value to the idea They had an idea for a movie, They see
• 45:24
  another movie that has a similar idea, and they think it must have been
• 45:28
  stolen from them, when they don't get that it's just an idea. Ideas
• 45:36
  are unprotectable. It's the expression of the idea over the length and breadth of
• 45:39
  a narrative, where the where the value is. You know, you have
• 45:44
  to show what the courts call substantial and ideally strikingly similar um examples from one
• 45:52
  to the other, you know, not just that the boy and a girl
• 45:54
  fall in love, they break up, and then they get back together again.
• 45:58
  You know. So this the understanding of ideas, has put a lot
• 46:00
  of money in my pocket. You know. It's it's you know, funny
• 46:05
  you mentioned that because about May, two summers ago, I actually met a
• 46:09
  professor who teaches at Yale and he actually also does you know, uh does
• 46:16
  copyright and things like that. And he was actually involved in the Avatar case
• 46:21
  because some some writers came and said James Cameron stole their idea for Avatar,
• 46:24
  and they wanted to you know, they wanted a you know, a couple
• 46:27
  of millions actually you know, one of a couple of million dollars. But
• 46:30
  uh, and he was involved in that whole litigation. Interesting, I don't
• 46:34
  mind bragging that. It's a student of ours. And named Leita kinda gritas
• 46:39
  very successful writer. She wrote much of Avatar, Jim gives her credit not
• 46:46
  as writer, but she does have a producer credit and it's her own card.
• 46:51
  Her name stands all alone on the screen. But the fact of the
• 46:55
  matter is she really wrote a lot of that movie. She's not suing a
• 46:59
  complaining, you understand. She idolizes Jim Cameron, and I think he's I
• 47:02
  know him too. He's been very good to us and our students in our
• 47:06
  program um and uh, you know, Leda was paid millions of millions of
• 47:13
  dollars for her work on Avatar, and she's she's not not complaining. But
• 47:17
  yeah, I believe that any any big movie. You know, a lot
• 47:22
  of people know about the the buck Wald case. It was covered, you
• 47:28
  know, the Coming to America case that I mentioned earlier. It was covered
• 47:31
  Gavel to Gavel. It was held live Gavel to Gavel on the trial on
• 47:36
  on CNN. I remember, And a lot of people don't know that that
• 47:42
  particular litigation was one among seven or eight cases where people had claimed, you
• 47:46
  know, other people had claimed they'd written the movie, you know, independently.
• 47:52
  There's an expression that every hum success has many parents, but there is
• 48:00
  an orphan. In other words, if a movie makes no money. Nobody
• 48:04
  hears about it, no one will sue. But if you have a great,
• 48:06
  big hit like Avatar, there's going to be bunches of lawsuits. I
• 48:08
  know that my old classmate, George Lucas from USC film school, we were
• 48:15
  film school students together all those years ago. Um, you know, there
• 48:17
  have been multiple suits. Star Wars was sold from him, you know,
• 48:22
  from them. I I remember that he went up to Canada to um.
• 48:27
  It would have been easier for him to just settle, which is what they
• 48:30
  usually do. But he's a very funky, feisty guy, George, and
• 48:35
  nobody's going to say that. You know, he's not going to going to
• 48:37
  consent to anybody. Uh, you know, he's never going to agree that
• 48:43
  anything that he ever ripped anybody off. Um. And so he actually went
• 48:46
  to the trial and somebody had uh claimed that he the plaintiff, had had
• 48:53
  invented the Wookie and George had stolen that from him. You know. So
• 49:00
  you know it's like when my son was little, if he couldn't find his
• 49:01
  baseball, maybe he'd say, who stole my glove? You know, it
• 49:05
  couldn't be that he misplaced it, you know. You know what I'm saying.
• 49:07
  So people always think that there's something similar. It must have been stole
• 49:10
  one from from them. Uh. Occasionally it happens, but it's most exceptional.
• 49:16
  And when you mistake the exception for the rule, you fall on your
• 49:19
  face every time. Very true. Uh, you know. And and the
• 49:23
  more I hear about, you know, cases like that, you know,
• 49:27
  Richard, And the more I hear that it is either you know, a
• 49:30
  hey, you know what, two people, you know, great minds think
• 49:31
  alike, as they say, so, you know, it is possible if
• 49:34
  you know two people that live in you know, maybe the opposite ends of
• 49:37
  the earth came up with a similar idea, you know, I mean,
• 49:42
  I mean, you know, you and I could go to the video store.
• 49:44
  You know, well, if their video stores are still around, you
• 49:45
  and I could go to Netflix and we could see there are There's all there's
• 49:49
  a plenor of movies that maybe share maybe the same scene, or maybe share
• 49:53
  like the same you know, plot points, or maybe share the same you
• 49:57
  know, character character at your view something. We'll be right back after a
• 50:02
  word from our sponsor, and now back to the show. You know,
• 50:10
  it's similar on those lines again. The only thing I totally I totally receive
• 50:16
  many movies of the same theme Jaws, I happen to know and now I'm
• 50:22
  blanket. Carl Botley who who wrote Jaws. Um, of course he was
• 50:27
  adapting to Peter Benchley book. Um was was telling me that the uh,
• 50:34
  you know, he had conversations with Bentley. Um. Jaws is based on
• 50:39
  a play by the great Norwegian player at Enrick Gibson Um. And the play
• 50:47
  is called an Enemy of the People. It's a very well known, you
• 50:51
  know, sort of a classic play. I guess it's a one hundred and
• 50:53
  fifty years old or something. Um. And it's said in a healthy sort
• 51:00
  health spa that's famous for its waters, that there are healing waters. People
• 51:06
  come from, you know, a thousand miles you know, to have their
• 51:10
  their maladies healed in the waters, the magical waters of this particular health spa.
• 51:17
  And the protagonist in the movie is um doctor Stockman. He's the medical
• 51:24
  director of the baths. Now this doesn't sound at all like Jaws, but
• 51:28
  consider this. At the beginning of the movie, he discovers, the doctor
• 51:31
  does that the waters are actually polluted and that they're making people ill. And
• 51:37
  this is a really important discovery when he announces it, he thinks people will
• 51:43
  honor him because he's saving a lot of people, a lot of illness and
• 51:47
  even death, you know, because they'll they out of that bad water.
• 51:51
  And it will also get the resort to do whatever needs to do, if
• 51:54
  it can be done to you know, repair that right. So that doesn't
• 51:59
  soundly like jos and yet it is because the reaction of the health spat and
• 52:05
  the community around it that lives off the income brought in from tourists coming into
• 52:10
  the guests at the spa, they instead of honoring him, they they you
• 52:16
  know, degrade him. They deride him, and they declare him an enemy
• 52:20
  of the people. And that's exactly the deal with Richard dreyfus In as the
• 52:25
  sheriff in Jaws and John's if you remember that day he realizes it's the start
• 52:30
  of the season, it's a beach town, and suddenly there's a dangerous shock
• 52:36
  and if word gets out that there's all of that danger and people aren't supposed
• 52:40
  to use the beach, well they're not gonna do a beach vacation at least
• 52:44
  not there, you know. So instead of honoring him for making this really
• 52:47
  important life saving discovery. They degrade him, they humiliate him, they scorn
• 52:53
  him, they mock him, they love him. And so the theme is
• 52:59
  history hates a truth teller, something like that. And that's the same theme
• 53:04
  for Jaws and for the Enemy of the People, even though they so,
• 53:09
  what's the difference between them. The difference is the story totally different story,
• 53:15
  the setting, the dialogue, the characters, everything is different, though they
• 53:19
  have the same theme. Quite quite true. So you're going to see movies
• 53:23
  that have similar themes. But you can't protect a theme. All you can
• 53:27
  protect as a story, and it has to be substantive. This happens,
• 53:30
  that happens, this happens, that happens, The same stuff happens in both.
• 53:36
  And then you're starting to get onto a you know, an enterprise that
• 53:42
  is protectable. It's just a very, very crazy arena. The truth of
• 53:52
  the matter is studios, producers, production companies, networks, cable companies,
• 53:58
  they have no elfish interest in stealing material. They don't want to risk the
• 54:05
  tens of millions of dollars that it takes to put together a series or a
• 54:08
  movie. Indeed, Avadar half a billion dollars. Nobody's going to make that
• 54:17
  kind of an investment and try to cut somebody out of one tenth of one
• 54:22
  percent of that, which would be you know, hundreds and hundreds of thousands
• 54:24
  of dollars or even millions of dollars for the script, and put the whole
• 54:30
  rest of the project into jeopardy just trying to shave off a point or even
• 54:34
  two from the budget by stealing the script. You follow what I'm saying,
• 54:38
  Oh, yeah, it just don't you know, there's a not a lawyer,
• 54:43
  though I've spent a lot of time around lawyers doing this kind of kind
• 54:47
  of working. There's a there's a Latin phrase I forget what it is,
• 54:52
  or something like que bone. Oh you know who benefits from this? If
• 54:57
  you look at a legal case and you want to who's in, you know,
• 55:00
  you suddenly discover for somebody dies and you suddenly discover that they had a
• 55:05
  huge insurance policy and it all goes to this particular beneficiary. Well, that
• 55:08
  beneficiary had a substantial steak and a great reward in this person dying. Maybe
• 55:15
  maybe she or he killed him, right, Um, so, uh,
• 55:21
  movie companies have a steak in not stealing material. Nobody benefits by that,
• 55:29
  and indeed they suffered greatly. So I think it does happen, but I
• 55:32
  believe it's vastly, vastly exaggerated. You know, you mentioned, you know,
• 55:38
  your classmate was George Lucas. Did you have any other, you know,
• 55:43
  interesting stories or any other funny stories about you and George? Well,
• 55:46
  you know, I am the uncredited writer of the first two drafts of American
• 55:51
  Graffiti. Um, there's there's no controversy about it. George doesn't tell it
• 55:55
  any differently. Um, there's nothing unusual in Hollywood about a substantial number of
• 56:04
  writers being paid for their services on a particular picture, not all of them
• 56:08
  getting credit. Credit as a a judgment that is rendered by the writers Guild.
• 56:15
  So I, yeah, I worked. I knew George pretty well.
• 56:19
  We weren't very close friends in film school, but we knew each other when
• 56:23
  we were at parties together, we were in classes together. I was in
• 56:27
  awe of his achievements as a film student, as we all are back then
• 56:30
  at USC. His legendary student film THHX one eight four EB, which became
• 56:38
  a feature length film, ultimately not as good as the shorter version, but
• 56:44
  it was his first movie. It was done at Warner Brothers with Francis Ford
• 56:46
  Coppola producing. I was, you know, in awe of his talent as
• 56:55
  a graphic artist as a filmmaker when I was in school. When we worked
• 57:00
  together on Graffiti, I didn't really work closely with him. He had he
• 57:07
  was out of the country, actually had the long version of fex we called
• 57:12
  it sex THHXUM. He was bringing that to Can the festival. I was
• 57:19
  traveling with his then wife Marcia. They were backpacking around Europe and they were
• 57:22
  going to end up at can and they needed a draft of Graffiti in a
• 57:28
  hurry, and I was asked to write it in a couple of weeks,
• 57:31
  which I did on that first draft, and it did not He was not
• 57:37
  pleased with it. For he complimented it for it and he has over the
• 57:42
  years complimented for its professionalism and all of that. M but he was bothered
• 57:47
  by two aspects of it. One was the sex in it. You know,
• 57:51
  I saw it as a tale of um, you know, adolescence,
• 57:55
  kinding of age and all of that, and that's the time of sexual awakening.
• 57:59
  And you know, you look at George's films that kind of like clinical
• 58:02
  uh surrand wrapped as far as sexuality is concerned, the sort of isn't any
• 58:07
  you know, um the U and I'm a sexual pervert, not really as
• 58:14
  kidding, but but I think that, you know, in my own I've
• 58:16
  written at length about adolescent My first novel was a coming of age in New
• 58:22
  York City, and there's a lot of you know, sexuality and its young
• 58:27
  people, um, flirting and and and more. And George didn't like that.
• 58:31
  He's kind of uptight about those sorts of things. And the other thing
• 58:35
  you didn't like was that it wasn't close enough his own experience, you know,
• 58:37
  growing up in Modesto. Hey, I'm you know, I'm a New
• 58:40
  York kid. I grew up in the Queens and went to school with high
• 58:44
  school in Manhattan, you know, and I didn't know anything about cars and
• 58:46
  stuff like that. Um. So we never really worked together on and except
• 58:51
  after the first draft. There was a two draft deal we did. We
• 58:54
  didn't meet at my house, and then we met. I remember we had
• 58:59
  another meeting at a restaurant in Hollywood, and we spoke at length on the
• 59:04
  phone after the you know, during the process of writing the second draft and
• 59:08
  and so on. I was well paid for the work that I did,
• 59:12
  and I'm not complaining. Um, you know again, the credit decision is
• 59:17
  something that is rendered by the writer's guild and the so it's really their judgment,
• 59:25
  not the studio's judgment, not George's judgment, and so on. He's
• 59:31
  a powerhouse. You know, he's a kind of a rough, nerdy,
• 59:37
  scratchy voice little guy. But I mean, he suggests the greatest genius I've
• 59:42
  ever known. I mean the impact of that his work has had across I
• 59:46
  mean, who on the world, you know, who around the world doesn't
• 59:50
  know some aspect of the of the Star Wars franchise hasn't been touched by some
• 59:54
  aspect of it, right, I mean, you know, don't you think
• 59:57
  it's realistic to suggest that billions of people of heard of it? At least
• 1:00:01
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back to
• 1:00:08
  the show. Who do you know in all of human history who touched so
• 1:00:15
  many people, got into the consciousness and the awareness of so many people all
• 1:00:19
  around across the globe in so little time as George did. I also believe
• 1:00:25
  that the influence that he's had the influence of Star Wars. I'm not really
• 1:00:30
  crazy about the movies John Neelius our film school. Look alum, you know,
• 1:00:36
  a fellow alumnus, alumnus you know, calls them pap. I watch
• 1:00:44
  all of them. I've seen the first one, which is I guess the
• 1:00:46
  fourth one by a certain measurement, part of the second one, and so
• 1:00:50
  on. But the lesson that they put out there, I think is a
• 1:00:54
  really really affirmative, healing, positive message across the world, a very Judeo
• 1:01:04
  Christian message, which is that the power of love is greater than the power
• 1:01:07
  of hate, the power of God is stronger than the power of Satan,
• 1:01:13
  the power of construction is bigger than the power of destruction. I mean,
• 1:01:19
  you know, you have a fairy tale and said again again going back to
• 1:01:22
  the ideas we were talking before, what's the idea behind Star Wars. I'll
• 1:01:24
  tell you what it is, and you already know what it is. It's
• 1:01:30
  a fairy tale in space. The bad guys abduct the princess, and you
• 1:01:35
  know, the good guys rescue her. That's Star Wars, isn't it.
• 1:01:39
  Yeah? You know? So what makes Star Wars especial in the answer is
• 1:01:43
  the frame by frame, moment by moment, seeing by seeing action in it
• 1:01:49
  and the dialogue that the characters speaking and so on. So, you know,
• 1:01:54
  George is a very um uh, you know, he's not a very
• 1:02:00
  available kind of a guy. I don't think a lot of it. People
• 1:02:02
  would describe him as warm and cuddly. But when I worked with him,
• 1:02:13
  both on campus and off campus, that was certainly a professional arrangement and agreement.
• 1:02:19
  And you know, whatever disagreements that that we had were you know,
• 1:02:22
  we're experience were not unusual among artists working on a movie together. Yeah,
• 1:02:31
  it's very understandable. And I was actually his house guest. I remember my
• 1:02:36
  wife and I in the August of nineteen sixty nine. He had already left
• 1:02:40
  LA he was living up in Marine And I love to say that Mike class
• 1:02:46
  at USC we were the first to move on. You know, when we
• 1:02:50
  came to film school, there was no tradition of moving from film school into
• 1:02:53
  the professional community. In fact, I have an article right and it's just
• 1:02:57
  come out like yesterday, the day before, in the current issue, the
• 1:03:02
  most recent issue which has just come out, excuse me, of written by
• 1:03:07
  which is the Writer's Guild monthly journal, and it's called Film School Haven or
• 1:03:13
  Hoax. And I'm arguing that you know in it. I'm arguing, of
• 1:03:17
  of course I have a vested interest in it, but I still believe it's
• 1:03:21
  observably, verifiably empirically true. The film School's not a hoax, you know,
• 1:03:25
  but very very helpful in um in getting you know, people into the
• 1:03:30
  movie business. I cite in the article eleven eleven titles of movies written I'm
• 1:03:38
  sorry, directed or produced and or produced by Steven Spielberg that were written by
• 1:03:44
  at least in part by UCLA trained writers who have the on screen credits for
• 1:03:49
  those movies. Eleven of them Jurassic Park one to three, Indiana Jones two
• 1:03:53
  and three. That's five right there, the terminal Munich, Lincoln, War
• 1:04:01
  of the World's Eagle Eye. Eagle Eye was produced by Stephen Travis Wright was
• 1:04:08
  the writer our student a few years ago when am I leaving out oh the
• 1:04:12
  TV series Amazing Stories, our students in the last six or seven years of
• 1:04:18
  at five, just in the last six or seven years, five Academy Award
• 1:04:25
  Best Screenplay nominations and have won three Oscars for Best Screenplay in the last so
• 1:04:31
  script between now and then now being today and then being the time now almost
• 1:04:38
  half century ago that I was going to film school in classes with George Lucas.
• 1:04:41
  The big difference is that film school has gone from being a dead end
• 1:04:45
  professionally to being the single most advantageous way to enter the film industry. So
• 1:04:56
  I like to say that our class at USC we were the first one to
• 1:05:00
  go on to own Hollywood, except for George of Olsen Marine County. So
• 1:05:04
  in any event, my wife and I in nineteen sixty nine, in August,
• 1:05:09
  we took a motor trip, just a vacation, a holiday up the
• 1:05:13
  West coast, and we drove all the way up ultimately to the Oregon border,
• 1:05:17
  the California Oregon border, the Umpquad Dunes. There are some beautiful sand
• 1:05:25
  dunes along the northern California southern Oregon coast, just EXCLUSI we camped along Barnson,
• 1:05:31
  But on the way we stopped at San Francisco, and I remember I
• 1:05:33
  had we had brunch one Sunday morning in Saucelito with some old film schools pals,
• 1:05:44
  including George and Marsha. Also John Nellius, if you know that name,
• 1:05:48
  I referred to him earlier. John, you know, invented Schwarzenegger.
• 1:05:55
  You know he did Conan and bunches of other movies. He wrote, John
• 1:05:58
  probably best known for his script of Apocalypse. Apocalypse Now. So it was
• 1:06:04
  my wife and I and George and Marshall Amelius. Also Caleb Deschanelle, who's
• 1:06:09
  probably famous now being the father of very famous actress daughters. But the Caleb
• 1:06:15
  is of course himself a multi nominated cinematography he's one of the most respected,
• 1:06:21
  the most successful cameraman in the history of the industry. And there were some
• 1:06:28
  other people. There was Walter Murch who's very famous. Walter actually won two
• 1:06:31
  Oscars for sound design and something else in the same years Officer when he got
• 1:06:39
  to come up twice to the stage to pick up his oscars, he was
• 1:06:43
  there with his wife, Aggie, a British woman. And then was also
• 1:06:47
  Caleb, as I mentioned in a producer now a well known producer, David
• 1:06:53
  Lester, who producer all Around Shelton's film you know, Bull Durham, and
• 1:06:59
  on and on and on. And I remember Marcia invited us to to be
• 1:07:04
  there their house guests, and we said, well, we're we're moving on
• 1:07:10
  up the coast tonight, you know, I mean, right after this meal,
• 1:07:12
  we're driving north. She said but on the way down, if you
• 1:07:15
  want to stay with us, feel free. So we did. We were
• 1:07:17
  actual the house guests overnight when he was living in Mill Valley in um Marin.
• 1:07:25
  It was before his gigantic success with Live Graffiti. Graffiti wouldn't come out
• 1:07:29
  yet for about three years. I think it was in seventy two seventy one
• 1:07:32
  or seventy two seventy three. It came out. It was released in seventy
• 1:07:38
  three. Um, so we were all, you know, film school pals.
• 1:07:43
  When I look back, you know, at the time, we weren't
• 1:07:45
  really aware of it. You got to look back to see it to talk
• 1:07:49
  about right place, right time. You know, I had come out.
• 1:07:51
  I thought to California for three weeks from New York and at the last moment
• 1:07:58
  I just fell into film school that I see kind of a whim and you
• 1:08:02
  know, somebody turned around. It was ten years later, you know,
• 1:08:08
  I had never really planned to settle in California, much less to become a
• 1:08:15
  screenwriter, A much much much less to be a a your professor, you
• 1:08:19
  know, and legal expert and so on. If there's a great example of
• 1:08:25
  staying open to the surprises in a life narrative, I think you know.
• 1:08:29
  I'm always song writers, in your dramatic narrative, in your life narrative,
• 1:08:32
  to stay open to the surprises that all of the people I know who are
• 1:08:36
  enjoying what they're doing, are also surprised by what they're doing. They're not
• 1:08:42
  doing what they planned to do. People who do what they planned to do
• 1:08:47
  are people. I know a lot of such people, and they offer the
• 1:08:50
  most what doctors. I grew up in New York City and the big thing
• 1:08:53
  to be was a doctor. So I know a lot of medical professionals,
• 1:08:58
  and they have very successful they're you know, they're well paid and so one,
• 1:09:01
  but not all of Some of them are very happy, but not all
• 1:09:03
  of them. Many of them are unhappy. This one wishes he was an
• 1:09:08
  oceanographer. That one wishes he was an anthropologist, and all of them seems
• 1:09:14
  to wish they were also screenwriters. Sometimes it seems like um. And the
• 1:09:18
  point is that you know there's a Chinese curse me or dreams come true curse.
• 1:09:27
  It's a little scary when when you accomplish what you said out to accomplish
• 1:09:30
  and and it doesn't really feel right. I have a friend who's just retired
• 1:09:32
  from medicine. He's done very very well. He's respected um, he's made
• 1:09:38
  a good living, but he's always been lukewarm at best about about his career,
• 1:09:44
  never really enjoyed it. On the other hand, I know another doctor,
• 1:09:47
  a friend of mine who went to film who went to medical school.
• 1:09:53
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor and now back the show,
• 1:10:01
  but just didn't like practicing medicine. What he liked was computers, and
• 1:10:06
  very early in the computer revolution he got into the uh, the writing of
• 1:10:14
  software for computerizing pathology laps. He was a pathologist whose specialty was pathology,
• 1:10:21
  and that branched on out out to general medical medical record keeping in general.
• 1:10:29
  They were computerizing all of that. You know, previously a doctor would see
• 1:10:31
  a symptom and would sort of think about it. Now you can, you
• 1:10:34
  know, really search the databases. And this is a result of not just
• 1:10:39
  inconvenience, but in the savings of countless lives if you think about it.
• 1:10:44
  UM. So, my friend is um. We were visiting with him.
• 1:10:49
  He lives in Seattle. Uh. We were visiting with him and his wife
• 1:10:56
  hold dear old pounds of laws some months ago and his house is on Lake
• 1:11:00
  Washington. There's a duck behind it, and on one side is his power
• 1:11:04
  boat, and on the other side of his sailboat across the lake, and
• 1:11:10
  a little to the south is the Bill Gates Compound. I mean, this
• 1:11:15
  guy has done real well, my friend, and he loves his work.
• 1:11:17
  And he didn't jettison his medical education. He very much exploited in and that's
• 1:11:24
  not a dirty word. It just needs to make the most of it.
• 1:11:26
  He integrated into his career, his very successful career, a career that he
• 1:11:30
  loves that he just enjoys enormously. My point is he's not doing what he
• 1:11:38
  expected to do and he's loving it. And that's what I'm The point that
• 1:11:45
  I'm making is that it's possible to overplan, kind of outsmart yourself in life
• 1:11:51
  and else. He mentioned Richard, you know sometimes wants to be a screenwriter.
• 1:11:55
  You know, it's kind of like everyone. I think it was Joe
• 1:11:59
  Esterhouse, the screenwriter of Basic Instinct. One said, uh, you know,
• 1:12:02
  it used to be everyone wants to write the great American novel. Now
• 1:12:05
  it's the great American screenplay. M Yeah, No, Joe is a friend
• 1:12:11
  of mine. I know him well over a number of number of years,
• 1:12:15
  and I'm aware aware that he said that. It seems to be true.
• 1:12:18
  Um, it seems to be true. People people want to uh, you
• 1:12:25
  know, there are more people who years ago would have been writing novels than
• 1:12:28
  are running screenplays. I do both. I've just finished a novel, and
• 1:12:32
  I've had modest success in both areas. And it's interesting. The guy was
• 1:12:39
  just lecturing on this, this is my subject. A week ago at the
• 1:12:42
  bitch Fest, we were talking about how it's funny. Let me put it
• 1:12:47
  this way. There's a there's a political figure you've heard of, Governor Christie
• 1:12:54
  from New Jersey. He's running for president, and he was I saw him
• 1:13:00
  sometime last week. Earlier in the week. He was bitterly denying that he
• 1:13:06
  was what somebody had accused him of. Somebody that accused him and called him
• 1:13:10
  and characterized him as a particular word, a very very evil word, the
• 1:13:14
  most evil word I think you can uh, you know, used to characterize
• 1:13:17
  a political figure that these days in this country. Can you guess what the
• 1:13:21
  word was, I'll tell you. Somebody called him a moderate. They said
• 1:13:27
  that he was moderate. Imagine that used to be like a compliment, you
• 1:13:33
  know, Um, he was denying these are moderate. Now, why do
• 1:13:38
  I bother you about that? Because there's a word in Hollywood that Hollywood seems
• 1:13:42
  to have come to hate. Are you ready? Original? They don't want
• 1:13:47
  to do anything original. In fact, the disappointing release of tomorrow Land is
• 1:13:54
  that what it's called? Yeah tomorrow Yeah with Clooney? What kind of disappointed?
• 1:14:00
  They say that they're not going to do any more original movies, you
• 1:14:02
  know, because if Tomorrowland as a original movie, they only want to do
• 1:14:04
  tenfowls remakes, reboots, prequels and sequels, adaptations of material from other media.
• 1:14:15
  They don't want to do original screenplays. And I think that's a real
• 1:14:18
  pity, because you know, what they're trying to do is play it safe,
• 1:14:25
  and playing it safe is the most hazardous course you can follow in an
• 1:14:29
  art. You have to take the risks, you have to embrace the risks,
• 1:14:33
  invites, elicit and courage the risks, it seems to me. And
• 1:14:43
  nevertheless, it as if you're a writer and you have an original screenplay,
• 1:14:45
  what are you gonna do with that? Nobody's making original screenplays, or certainly
• 1:14:47
  these studios are not. They are not buying spec scripts and turning em into
• 1:14:53
  movies. They're developing projects inside. I had a writer who wants to he's
• 1:14:57
  a huge fan of Batman, and he wanted the Batman franchise, and he
• 1:15:00
  wanted to pay me a substantial sum to give them notes on a Batman script.
• 1:15:04
  Day right, I said, but you can't do anything with a script
• 1:15:10
  Warner Brothers on the right to you know, Batman, because he said,
• 1:15:15
  well, I'll show what the Warner Brothers. But Warner Brothers isn't going to
• 1:15:18
  look at a Batman's script. They're not going to buy a speculated uh Matman
• 1:15:24
  script. They're going to develop it with writers they know who work with producers.
• 1:15:28
  They know. Those writers may very well be former students of mind mind
• 1:15:30
  you, and I'm happy to brag about that. But they are not going
• 1:15:34
  to do this guy's script. Not only are they gonna make it, they're
• 1:15:36
  not even gonna read it. And they're gonna make a point not to read
• 1:15:40
  it for reasons. To go back to what we were talking about earlier,
• 1:15:43
  having to do with litigation. If it's Batman, it's certainly going to be
• 1:15:45
  similar. It's going to have certain similarities to the Matman franchise. Don't you
• 1:15:51
  think and then they'll be they'll be their lawyers that Warner Brothers will be telling
• 1:15:55
  you you mustn't look at this and you must notify you must send this back
• 1:15:59
  to him and tell And we haven't looked at it. We don't accept that
• 1:16:00
  I'm still of material. And so because he's gonna claim when the new Batman
• 1:16:03
  cames up that we that we really used it and we didn't, um you
• 1:16:09
  know, uh, we just we stole it from um so. Uh So
• 1:16:15
  we're talking about originality. So how do you get around that as a writer?
• 1:16:19
  Uh? And the answer is, and I've had modest success with this
• 1:16:23
  repeatedly in my career. I don't consider myself to be any kind of superstar.
• 1:16:29
  But the the Wall Street journeal calls me, they what did they say
• 1:16:34
  about me? They said, Oh, I am a writer of substantial professional
• 1:16:39
  experience. You know, there's no literary laundry I haven't taken in. I've
• 1:16:44
  written feature assignments, feature length movie assignments for all of the studios, almost
• 1:16:49
  every studio, and I've stolen material to all three major broadcast networks. And
• 1:16:57
  I have had almost half a dozen books published by by all of them,
• 1:17:00
  by major new York publishers. I've had best sellers in mom fiction, my
• 1:17:06
  screenwriting books, in print, you know, over thirty years. My last
• 1:17:13
  novel made the Times List best seller lists only for a week and only at
• 1:17:18
  number thirteen. But think you know the Times List. It's not a not
• 1:17:21
  a small thing. And the reason I mentioned it to you is that my
• 1:17:28
  very first novel I had written as a screenplay and I just couldn't. It's
• 1:17:35
  been said Hollywood is the one place on earth where you could die of encouragement.
• 1:17:41
  I had so much encouragement over that script when I never had was a
• 1:17:45
  nickel for it. And finally there was a strike and you couldn't market to
• 1:17:49
  Hollywood anyway, And so naively I turned it into I used it as an
• 1:17:53
  outline for a novel and wrote a novel. I was naive about how cruel
• 1:17:57
  the fiction market is, especially the first market, and that knife day served
• 1:18:01
  me very well because I sold this thing right away. And you know,
• 1:18:05
  had I been more stavvy about the business, maybe I wouldn't have, you
• 1:18:10
  know, uh, invested the time and effort it would take to turn them
• 1:18:13
  into a novel, knowing how grimm the chances were. So you understand how
• 1:18:15
  ignorance is your friend, knife day is your palm. Now, as soon
• 1:18:24
  as it was sold as a novel, it was sold as a movie.
• 1:18:29
  A Warner Brothers, a studio that had turned it down when it was a
• 1:18:31
  screenplay, bought the same screenplay as soon as it had been published as a
• 1:18:34
  novel because it was no longer original. It was now an adaptation. It
• 1:18:39
  had been tested in another market. The executives if every every day in Hollywood
• 1:18:45
  that an executive doesn't have to make a decision about anything, as a victory
• 1:18:49
  for her. She hasn't put her neck out, she hasn't risked. And
• 1:18:54
  he said, you know, if you don't do anything, you'll never do
• 1:18:56
  anything wrong. Right. So, and every movie that does get made starts
• 1:19:01
  with the anticipation by the executives who are responsible for spending the money to produce
• 1:19:05
  it. It starts with their expectation that it will fail. And they're trying
• 1:19:13
  to figure out how to explain away the anticipated failure of the movie. I
• 1:19:15
  don't see how that can do anything other than to suppress creativity and imagination and
• 1:19:21
  so on. But you understand how somebody could say, if the movie comes
• 1:19:26
  out and it bombs, for example Bonfire the Vanities, which was produced by
• 1:19:32
  a friend of mine and a colleague of mine. He's also a professor at
• 1:19:35
  UCLA. Peter Goomer very successful producer. He was the head of Warner Brothers.
• 1:19:39
  He was at a Columbia. He's produced a lot of major, major
• 1:19:42
  movies. Well, one of the movies that he produced, it was a
• 1:19:45
  terrible mom there's even a book written about about it was Bonfire the Vanities.
• 1:19:53
  And when people say to him, Peter, how could you invest so much
• 1:19:58
  money in this turkey. We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:20:06
  and now back to the show, he can. I mean, you
• 1:20:11
  must be some lousy executive. We should get rid of you. He has
• 1:20:14
  a defense. Then the defense is wait a minute. This was a best
• 1:20:17
  selling novel by Tom Wolfe. I also had Bruce Willis and Tom Hanks in
• 1:20:25
  the movie. The screenplay was adapted by Michael Christopher, a very very distinguished,
• 1:20:32
  respected writer. The director was Brian the Pond. It's not mind fault.
• 1:20:35
  It's not my fault. You understand what I'm saying? So suddenly because
• 1:20:40
  with my own novel when it was sold as a movie, the producer who
• 1:20:44
  bought it could say if anybody asked him, how I think you'd buy this,
• 1:20:47
  he could say, what don't mean? Mortar Books published this? You
• 1:20:49
  know, major publisher New York published this. So I'm not the only one
• 1:20:54
  crazy enough to think that there's merit in this. So I've been recommending to
• 1:20:57
  writers that they contemplate they write a screenplay, but instead of showing the screenplay,
• 1:21:03
  write an original screenplay. Certainly you don't want to do an adaptation of
• 1:21:11
  material that you don't own. I mean, they're like dragons. What are
• 1:21:17
  you gonna do with something if you don't have the underlying rights. So what
• 1:21:23
  I'm recommending is they write an original screenplay, but then instead of marketing the
• 1:21:29
  screenplay at first, they use it as an elaborate outline for their novel and
• 1:21:32
  write it as a novel, and then try to sell the work as a
• 1:21:36
  novel, and once it's sold as a novel, they can get action as
• 1:21:43
  a screenplay. I've done that multiple times now, and right now I'm working
• 1:21:45
  on I've just finished a novel that's based on a screenplay. I wrote the
• 1:21:48
  screenlay last summer and now I'm finished the draft as a novel. It's just
• 1:21:54
  the draft, I still have to do a bunch of work on it.
• 1:21:57
  But once you've got the screenplay, most of the heavy list lifting has been
• 1:22:00
  done. I regard, just like we were talking earlier about the most valuable
• 1:22:04
  part of the equation is the story. Once you've got the story or worked
• 1:22:09
  out, you've got the characters, the dialogue. I mean, most of
• 1:22:13
  that's there in the screenplay, isn't it. To turn that into a novel
• 1:22:15
  is relatively easy? Underscore relative there's um, you know, relatively there's not
• 1:22:21
  a you know, no writing is easy. But for me, the hardest
• 1:22:27
  part of writing is the heavy lifting is in devising creating the plot, because
• 1:22:31
  the plot, the story really involves everybody else. The story is character,
• 1:22:38
  The story is dialogue, story is description, it's everything. I mean,
• 1:22:41
  who's the richest character? I mean, imagine somebody said, well we're in
• 1:22:45
  a minute, richie, what about character? Isn't that important? But who's
• 1:22:48
  the greatest character in all of English language grammatic literature? Isn't it a Hamlet?
• 1:22:55
  Certainly Hamlet would be a good candidate, don't you think? So?
• 1:23:02
  What's the description? Have you ever read Hamlet? Do you remember the playwrights
• 1:23:08
  description of Hamlet here it is, it's three words prints of Denmark. That's
• 1:23:14
  it. There's nothing about melancholy. So where does this Hamlet come from?
• 1:23:19
  And the answer is from the story, the stuff he does and the stuff
• 1:23:23
  he says inside the context of the story. So it's really really all about
• 1:23:29
  all about story. So once the story has worked out, you have the
• 1:23:34
  opportunity to retell that story as a novel. And it's just easier to write
• 1:23:40
  a novel. It's easier because you're not stuck with discitan sound like you are
• 1:23:44
  in a movie. You're not. You know. We mentioned George Cluney a
• 1:23:49
  moment ago. I read a screenplay called The American. I didn't see the
• 1:23:54
  movie. It's a dreadful screenplay. Cluney was in it. I think the
• 1:23:59
  only reason George was in it because it was shot here where he lives in
• 1:24:01
  northern Italy, and I lives Lake Como at the edge of the Swiss border
• 1:24:06
  up there, and they was shot it up there. So I think that's
• 1:24:10
  the only reason I can imagine to George would have been, you know,
• 1:24:13
  had anything to do with this movie, would be because it was convenient was
• 1:24:17
  in the neighborhood, so so it's begen any that there's a scene in the
• 1:24:20
  movie where the main character is sitting is at a cafe ordering a bottle of
• 1:24:29
  wine. He's with a girl, and the waiter comes up and offers him,
• 1:24:31
  you know, taste of the wine, and he samples the wine.
• 1:24:33
  And it actually says in the script that he takes a sip of the wine.
• 1:24:38
  It takes slightly flinty, with notes of chestnuts and cinnamon. Wait a
• 1:24:45
  minute, well, how does the well, how does anybody knows sitting in
• 1:24:48
  a movie theater watching them on screen with what's something tastes like? You follow
• 1:24:53
  what I'm saying? Yeah, I knew exactly what you mean. This guy,
• 1:24:57
  this writer doesn't understand the most fundamental aspect of screen running, which is
• 1:25:01
  you stuck with sitan sound. It's just sitan sound. Um. And it's
• 1:25:06
  easier to write a novel because you're not stuck with You can say with somebody
• 1:25:11
  remembers what they think, how they feel. You know. The the greatest
• 1:25:16
  um compliment that's ever been paid me is that final draft. The software.
• 1:25:23
  I'm sure you know of it, the screenwriting software has actually created. I
• 1:25:28
  don't know if it's available yet. We are creating they are creating for me
• 1:25:33
  in consultation with me, that Richard Walter template. You know, like if
• 1:25:36
  you want to write a H, if you want to write a Simpson's script,
• 1:25:45
  for example, you can you can punch up Simpsons. You know,
• 1:25:48
  there's a pull down window in Final Draft and you can go to Simpsons and
• 1:25:54
  you click that and it will immediately give you the formatting for that H.
• 1:25:59
  You know, the simpson likes, but the Simpsons uses. And I don't
• 1:26:02
  mind telling you that my colleague of mine has won several Emmys for all the
• 1:26:08
  Simpsons and a bunch of us students have written for the Simpsons, and oh
• 1:26:12
  one of them. This makes me sad because he died young in his forties.
• 1:26:15
  A wonderful writer and a wonderful got very successful um in um, not
• 1:26:23
  just in TV but also in features. He wrote four he wrote the super
• 1:26:28
  Girl. Very very fine writer. Um he uh. He was a the
• 1:26:36
  the Oh producer what are they quotem co exacutive producer of the Simpsons and a
• 1:26:42
  writer for the Simpsons. So Final Draft has a Simpsons template. They now
• 1:26:46
  have a Richard Walter template. If you if you punch up me, you'll
• 1:26:51
  get um format that conforms to my particular desires. For example, I don't
• 1:26:57
  when if you write x E x T for exterior, you know, it's
• 1:27:03
  like extra ort. I was taught that you don't put and I preach it,
• 1:27:08
  you should not put a period after that. And in final draft,
• 1:27:13
  if you go to the Richard Walter template, it'll get rid of the theeriod
• 1:27:15
  that comes after ext that. Somebody might say, Gee, that seems like
• 1:27:17
  a pretty petty point, but actually I think it's the most important, the
• 1:27:21
  most profound point in all of creative expressions. And the point is simply this.
• 1:27:26
  There shouldn't be anything in the script that doesn't serve the script. That
• 1:27:30
  is to say, it doesn't move the story forward. And if you learn,
• 1:27:33
  if you get into the kind of mindset that leaves out even the period
• 1:27:36
  after exterior, then you'll leave out lines of dialogue that you don't need.
• 1:27:40
  You'll leave that whole characters you don't lead, you leave that whole scenes that
• 1:27:44
  you don't need, if you follow what I'm what I'm saying so in anyway,
• 1:27:48
  the only reason I'm telling about this is that in the Richard Walter template
• 1:27:54
  for final draft, they are now having we're tweaking it and in the wide
• 1:27:58
  margin description, if a word realizes, feels, remembers, thinks, appears,
• 1:28:04
  it's going to get highlighted a little zig zaggy line underneath if some attention
• 1:28:10
  will be called to it, to ask the writer, do you really want
• 1:28:13
  to say this? Is this something that the audience can see or hear?
• 1:28:17
  Because if it's an internal, interior mental thing, it has no place in
• 1:28:21
  a movie. But in a novel, I mean everything in it that's interior.
• 1:28:26
  A mental movie has to come out of sight and sound. You know,
• 1:28:29
  the Marilyn's eyes widen in what can only be the realization that Harry left
• 1:28:35
  the gun in the nightstand at the motel. You understand what I'm saying.
• 1:28:39
  It's going to be told from a visual standpoint. Answering the question, never
• 1:28:44
  mind the reader of the ink on the page. I want to know how
• 1:28:47
  the viewer in the movie theater watching it on the screen is going to know
• 1:28:51
  this information. And but in a novel you can just spill it out.
• 1:28:57
  And you can also write in the past tense or in the future tense.
• 1:29:00
  I wrote a novel, and it's said in the past, in the president
• 1:29:03
  of the future, and in the past. I tell it in the past,
• 1:29:08
  and in the future. I tell it in the future tense, and
• 1:29:11
  in the present. I tell it in the in the present tense. She
• 1:29:15
  goes to the door, she opens it, he stands there. You know
• 1:29:16
  what I'm saying. So, um, you don't have to worry about that.
• 1:29:20
  In a novel, you can you can do anything you want. Also,
• 1:29:25
  novels are longer, and it's easier to write longer then shorter. Not
• 1:29:30
  everybody gets that. There's a It's like it's easier to ride a bike fast
• 1:29:34
  and slow. You know what I'm saying. It's very true. You're absolutely
• 1:29:40
  right. The there's a letter from Hemingway. There's a very famous letter from
• 1:29:45
  Ernest Hemingway. He was in Cuba, I think he was working on The
• 1:29:50
  Old Man in the Sea, and he wrote a letter to his um legendary
• 1:29:56
  editor, Maxwell Perkins. Will be right back after a word from our sponsor,
• 1:30:04
  and now back to the show. It was nine pages long, on
• 1:30:10
  and on and on and on and on about this and that and the other
• 1:30:12
  thing in aspects of the script of the Manuscript of Thanks script for Old Man
• 1:30:16
  of the Sea, and this and that and the other thing. Finally,
• 1:30:18
  halfway down the middle of page nine, he says, well, that's about
• 1:30:23
  it for now. Max, He says, please forgive me for writing such
• 1:30:26
  a long letter. I didn't have the time to write a short one.
• 1:30:30
  It takes longer to be quick and to the point and to call and select
• 1:30:35
  and do the things that artists have to do. So I think there's really
• 1:30:40
  something to be said for writers taking another tack, trying their script out as
• 1:30:47
  a novel, trying to get some traction there, and if they do,
• 1:30:51
  suddenly it becomes viable as a movie project because it's no longer original. They've
• 1:30:58
  taken the quote curse quote off of it, um by removing its originality and
• 1:31:04
  making an aupdation. So you know, there's some thoughts. There's some thoughts.
• 1:31:10
  You know. It's funny you mentioned Richard, because I'm actually a Final
• 1:31:15
  Draft not only affiliate, but I also am part of their uh their program
• 1:31:18
  where we like beta testing. I'm sorry whose program I missed? Oh,
• 1:31:23
  I'm sorry. I'm actually a part of Final drafts uh Final Draft. Yeah,
• 1:31:27
  not only their affiliate program, but also they're beta testing, so like
• 1:31:30
  I get the new stuff before anybody else, you know, and get feedback.
• 1:31:33
  Um, I haven't got a chance to actually check that template out but
• 1:31:36
  one, but I'm gonna keep my eye out because yeah, you know,
• 1:31:40
  I've been working with Alejandro Seri, who's one of their guys, a great
• 1:31:44
  guy, And I don't know if it's available or not yet. I think
• 1:31:46
  it's it's an you know, like, UM you can sort of upload it
• 1:31:50
  if depending what you know, what version you have and so on. Yeah,
• 1:31:55
  and uh, because right now, the latest thing that I've been beta
• 1:31:59
  testing is, uh, they have a new app out for the iPhone and
• 1:32:04
  that's what I've been beta testing a lot of just you know, giving them
• 1:32:08
  feedback and you know, hey, I like to see this feature, I
• 1:32:10
  wouldn't like to see this feature, you know, stuff like that. And
• 1:32:13
  I'm going to keep an eye for that template and I want to actually because
• 1:32:15
  if it's it's available, I will definitely upload that. Well, thank you,
• 1:32:20
  I'm honored that you would. It's it's not radically a different UM,
• 1:32:25
  but I am a big believer in the less is more, No continued,
• 1:32:30
  absolutely nothing. I've argued for years and years and years that if you UM
• 1:32:39
  can embrace this very very fundamental precept, which is what we were just saying
• 1:32:44
  earlier, then it's just site and sound. And if you can add to
• 1:32:48
  that just one thing, and that is that every site and every sound must
• 1:32:51
  move the story forward. I'm palpable way, some identifiable way. That doesn't
• 1:32:58
  matter what you're right, doesn't matter what this so called genre is. It
• 1:33:01
  doesn't matter what happens. People will be drawn to it. You can even
• 1:33:04
  have nothing happen. And if somehow nothing happening can move the story forward,
• 1:33:13
  people will pay very very rapt attention to nothing happening. And I'll give you
• 1:33:16
  an example of that in a student of Mine. God blessing Me blurbs my
• 1:33:23
  book very prominently. Alexander Payne in one of his best movies, I think
• 1:33:31
  about Schmidt, starring Jack Nicholson. I think it's Nicholson's best work. The
• 1:33:36
  movie opens with Jack just sitting alone. He's an insurance salesman. It's just
• 1:33:40
  clearly his last moment, literally his last minute on the job before he retires,
• 1:33:45
  and he just sits at the desk and absolutely nothing happens. But the
• 1:33:48
  camera kind of wanders around the room and you can see the only motion in
• 1:33:51
  the room is the sweep second hand of the wall clock and it's ticking off
• 1:33:59
  the second. It's like forty seconds before five o'clock, and when it hits
• 1:34:01
  five, he gets up and he leaves. You know, that's the scene.
• 1:34:05
  But it tells you so much about that man and how punctual he is,
• 1:34:11
  and how afraid he is, and how this he is, and how
• 1:34:13
  that he is and so on, that you get it. You get really
• 1:34:15
  really drawn into that. So that's why my template, if you can get
• 1:34:19
  into it, if you can find it, you'll see that it really preaches
• 1:34:23
  minimalism, that you should keep everything off the page that you can keep off
• 1:34:28
  the page. You know, if you look at my books, you see
• 1:34:30
  the front page of a screenplay. I have a model of a front play
• 1:34:34
  of a screenline that I have a model of what not to do. And
• 1:34:38
  the model of the what you should do is just the title of the script,
• 1:34:42
  the name of the writer. It shouldn't stay written by or even merely
• 1:34:47
  by, much less an original screenplay written by In case you think you're worried
• 1:34:53
  somebody might think it's a chicken salmath sand which you're a bowling ball or something.
• 1:34:59
  Well, what if it just says by, written written by? What
• 1:35:01
  does that tell you it tells you nothing. If it simply says bottom Dollar.
• 1:35:09
  Um, you know Sam Smith, people are gonna figure this script is
• 1:35:13
  called bottom Dollar and this guy, Sam Smith, probably wrote it, you
• 1:35:16
  know. And then on the only other thing you should have on that page
• 1:35:19
  is a phone number and an email address. Um, you know, contact
• 1:35:25
  infoe. Now, if you have an agent, she's going to be sending
• 1:35:28
  out on her own. You know, she's not gonna want potential buyers to
• 1:35:33
  contact the clients. She's going to want them to contact her. And by
• 1:35:36
  the way, the author should not want to be contacted directly. Be suspicious
• 1:35:40
  of anybody contacts it directly. If you have a representative, if they are
• 1:35:43
  legitimate, if the producer leg legitimate, they should be willing to and be
• 1:35:47
  eager to call the producer, you know what I'm saying. So so it's
• 1:35:53
  different if the thing is sold. But if it's a speculative Scriptum, if
• 1:35:58
  you just have the name of the script of title, the script in the
• 1:36:01
  name of the writer, and as I say, a phone number, one
• 1:36:04
  phone number, only one phone number. I have a bunch of phone numbers.
• 1:36:09
  I have my UCLA number, I have my home number, I have
• 1:36:12
  a cell number, I have his best number in my home office. They
• 1:36:15
  don't want all of that. They don't want my mother's number, they don't
• 1:36:17
  want my lawyers. I know, just one number and one email. Is
• 1:36:24
  this so that you can be found if people are interested? And as I
• 1:36:28
  say, if it even simply says by somebody who puts that on the script
• 1:36:32
  on the front page doesn't get it. That right on the cover of the
• 1:36:36
  script is information that serves no purpose at all. What is the likelihood that
• 1:36:43
  somebody's going to miss that? But get character and story and dialogue and all
• 1:36:47
  of the sophisticated and heady and provocative precepts and principles that apply to the autona
• 1:36:57
  craft in the business of screenwriting. You know, it's you know, not
• 1:37:01
  encouraging. So again that's what you'll see is very very minimal. Anything that
• 1:37:09
  can be lost, you should lose. And if you're in doubt about something,
• 1:37:12
  you sort of feel well, maybe you need this. Maybe then you
• 1:37:15
  lose it. If you're in doubt, throw it out. Just have stuff
• 1:37:18
  that absolutely must be there. And it's so easy to figure out what must
• 1:37:24
  be there. You just ask yourself, what if it weren't there, does
• 1:37:30
  it still make sense? If it makes sense. Without it being that,
• 1:37:35
  then it wasn't needed. If the whole thing falls apart without you know,
• 1:37:41
  when it's not that, then it was needed. You follow what I'm saying.
• 1:37:45
  It's like there's a there's a joke. A guy goes into a library
• 1:37:50
  and he steps up to the desk and he says, to the library and
• 1:37:54
  I'll have a hot dog and a coke and French frize please, And the
• 1:38:00
  librarian syste him, sir, this is a library. He says, Oh,
• 1:38:06
  I'm sorry, I'll have a him. I'll have a hot dog.
• 1:38:11
  Uncle. You know, whisper? Is it? You get the joke?
• 1:38:13
  It's like you're not supposed to talk loud in the library. He thinks that
• 1:38:16
  she's reprimanding him just talking through loudly, rather than for ordering food at a
• 1:38:20
  library desk. You follow the joke, Yeah, absolutely so. The reason
• 1:38:26
  I tell you that joke is you can imagine if that were a screenplay,
• 1:38:29
  a portion of a screenplay. You absolutely have to have the parent edical direction
• 1:38:33
  and whispers sir, this is a library. Carry whispering, and then the
• 1:38:41
  line again, you with me if if if you don't have it, the
• 1:38:46
  person's going isn't going to whisper and the whole joke is lost. So you
• 1:38:50
  needed the parents edicle. But that's the exception. One of my great battles
• 1:38:57
  is against parent edicles. Um, it's a sure sign of amateurism where there
• 1:39:02
  are a lot of parents edicals, Riley Roley angrily smiling. You know,
• 1:39:11
  sadly Shakespeare got through thirty six or thirty seven plays not a single parents edical,
• 1:39:18
  you know, Hamlet, Melancholleague never So you want the least, and
• 1:39:26
  you can figure out what the least is by asking yourself, what if this
• 1:39:29
  weren't here, does it still make sense? Then we didn't need it.
• 1:39:34
  So that answers the question that every artist is confronted with, which is what
• 1:39:38
  needs to be in the work and what doesn't and why doesn't everybody do that?
• 1:39:44
  And the answer is it takes time to do that match what people won't
• 1:39:47
  give it. They just won't give it the time that it takes. You
• 1:39:53
  know. One of my one of my mentors, Bill Boyle, he actually
• 1:39:57
  wrote a book called The Visual Mindscape of the screen Play. We'll be right
• 1:40:01
  back after a word from our sponsor and now back to the show, and
• 1:40:11
  he goes into that in depth that you have to take out anything that is
• 1:40:15
  not you know, it's always about what's on the screen, all the good
• 1:40:20
  and it always and he's that way, uh, because he says he always
• 1:40:26
  would see people hanging in screenplays and they would say things that like, you
• 1:40:30
  know what someone is thinking in a screenplay? And he's like, how can
• 1:40:32
  we show that stuff exactly exactly? You know, Evelyn remembers that the she
• 1:40:41
  left the car idling, Well, what does that look like on the screen?
• 1:40:45
  Somebody remembering something? You know? And how are you gonna know?
• 1:40:48
  Uh, let's say the actor looks up remembering and acting for dummies, if
• 1:40:54
  there is such a thing, and is able to put on the remembering face.
• 1:40:57
  If there is a thing, do we know what they remember it?
• 1:41:01
  You know? Again, it's so simple. It's it's really very simple,
• 1:41:08
  very simple to know what to do to succeed. Why doesn't everybody to see
• 1:41:11
  because it's hard to do it. It's easy to know what you do.
• 1:41:15
  It's like I don't know exactly what to do to hit a home run.
• 1:41:19
  I'm sitting here about two months from Dodger Stadium, and I know exactly what
• 1:41:26
  you have to do. You have to get to bat around in the right
• 1:41:28
  place at the right time. The difference between me and uh, you know,
• 1:41:31
  Babe Ruth is that he could do it. He didn't merely know how
• 1:41:35
  to do it, but actually could do it. I know how to do
• 1:41:39
  but I can't do it. I don't have an equipment to do it.
• 1:41:42
  So it's really you know that, that's really all there is to it.
• 1:41:48
  And again the reason people don't do it is they in too much of a
• 1:41:54
  hurry, had to right to just tell me it's already, this is already
• 1:41:59
  a third draft. Well, come on, David Kepp, I bet you
• 1:42:02
  know the name. Koepp, a former student of mine, a writer director.
• 1:42:08
  He wrote you know, the Mission Impossible, Jurassic Park one and two.
• 1:42:15
  Right now he's writing the second chapter of the Ron Howard of the Da
• 1:42:23
  Vinci Code. I mean, he's a gigantic successful writer, also a very
• 1:42:27
  very sweet man. He says the secret of his success is seventeen drafts.
• 1:42:30
  He knows he can get through seventeen drafts. He says that day seventeen drafts
• 1:42:35
  to hear somebody complaining to me about their third draft, you know, and
• 1:42:40
  they don't like hearing me telling them you're just getting started. You know,
• 1:42:45
  you gotta if you could get one more draft out of this, then you'll
• 1:42:46
  only mean about thirteen more after that, you know, and that stops a
• 1:42:50
  lot of people. They just don't have the what some people call those zits
• 1:42:59
  fleisch uh, you know, the ability to sit there, um the flesh
• 1:43:05
  tolering, just sitting there reworking it, reworking it, reworking it. You
• 1:43:11
  know, in my own experience, you know, Richard, I wrote a
• 1:43:15
  It was a comedy horror movie and it was about at a at a summer
• 1:43:17
  camp. And summer camp, uh, it's a made up summer camp.
• 1:43:23
  I had h and um the the I'm about seven or eight drafts in now,
• 1:43:31
  and some people feel that these drafts. Some people have said, who
• 1:43:34
  write it? They said, listen, these drafts are better. Sum are
• 1:43:38
  saying you're starting to get maybe a little too far away from the original concept.
• 1:43:43
  And you know, and now, you know, I sort of judge
• 1:43:45
  for myself. I sort of have to say, you know what, who's
• 1:43:47
  writing a situation? Well? You know, and I sort of go back
• 1:43:50
  and and there was at one point, I'm gonna be honest, Richard,
• 1:43:54
  I was so burned out from rewriting this thing. I was like, I
• 1:43:58
  was fearing opening up final draft and looking at this thing again. M well,
• 1:44:02
  that's every writer has that experience. It's actually a good time, but
• 1:44:06
  do go on. And at that point I actually h you know, I
• 1:44:12
  printed it out. And one of my favorite thing to do is actually just
• 1:44:15
  print it out and I make marks with just a pen, you know,
• 1:44:16
  sort of I cut myself off from all technology, just me and a you
• 1:44:20
  know, a ninety year excellent, excellent thing to do. I also think
• 1:44:29
  it really makes a lot of sense to write something else, put it aside,
• 1:44:31
  work on something else, and then you'll be able to come back to
• 1:44:35
  it with fresh eyes. You know. Over the last number of years,
• 1:44:41
  I've become a fanatic crossword puzzle guy. I do the New York Times Sunday
• 1:44:45
  Crossword Puzzle every Sunday. And one thing that I learned doing crossword puzzles is
• 1:44:50
  you you know, you go through, you get what you can get,
• 1:44:54
  and then there's stuff you just can't get. And funne you're just reading all
• 1:44:57
  the clues and you fill them maybe a little less than half the thing,
• 1:45:00
  and you just you can't get another freaking thing. You just can't and you
• 1:45:05
  feel defeated and stupid, and so you put it aside, just go up
• 1:45:09
  and do something else. Come back to it later. You sit down and
• 1:45:11
  suddenly wham wham wam, wham wam. This thing, gap thing, this
• 1:45:14
  thing, it all leaps, you know, into relief that you can right
• 1:45:18
  in and almost run your hand over and feel it like a freeze on a
• 1:45:23
  temple, you know, a carved marble freeze. And it teaches me that
• 1:45:30
  just like the body gets tired, the muscles get tired, the mind gets
• 1:45:33
  tired. And when you rest as the muscles and they recover, so also
• 1:45:38
  can you rest the mind and it recovers. And you look away from something,
• 1:45:42
  you look at something too careful, you really can't see it. You
• 1:45:45
  kind of look away, and then you look back and there it suddenly is.
• 1:45:47
  I'm reminded of when I was an undergraduate student in Binghamton, New York,
• 1:45:51
  as a you know, history major in college. Binghamton is in Broom
• 1:45:59
  County, New York, and I remember going through some original letters that had
• 1:46:03
  to do with Broom County history, and they've been written in like the early
• 1:46:08
  eighteen hundreds, and there was a you know, they were concluded in some
• 1:46:12
  state archives from kind of the archive or something like that. They were contained
• 1:46:15
  there, they were housed there, and they're written in this ancient kind of
• 1:46:21
  script, you know, handwriting, and sometimes I just can't read what it
• 1:46:26
  says. I remember my teacher telling me, you're looking at it too hard,
• 1:46:30
  look away from it, and then kind of sneak up on it and
• 1:46:33
  suddenly, how suddenly in context it all leaps out. You know. So
• 1:46:38
  if you take time away from you, you really stuck in your script.
• 1:46:41
  You don't let your eighth draft. And when I say you, I mean
• 1:46:44
  any writer. What about put it aside for a while and work on something
• 1:46:48
  else and then come back to it. And as far as you're getting too
• 1:46:51
  far away from your original concept, maybe there's something better than your original concept.
• 1:46:56
  Maybe you've taken it through a place that's even better for it to be.
• 1:47:00
  One more thing on this subject. And it goes back to David Tepp
• 1:47:03
  in the seventeen draft. He says, very often the latest drafts mimical the
• 1:47:09
  earliest draft. You sort of get back to the beginning of it, and
• 1:47:13
  you get back to that context, that original concept that you had, and
• 1:47:19
  that might seem like a ferocious waste of time, But it wasn't you needed
• 1:47:24
  to go through all of that to see that this is the way it really
• 1:47:27
  ought to be. I was talking to writer only the other week, a
• 1:47:30
  few weeks ago. Who was I ran it. I haven't seen him in
• 1:47:32
  a long time, A guy I know pretty well, but I don't seem
• 1:47:34
  a long time an now he says, well, much better now, I
• 1:47:36
  said, what do you mean? He said, Well, I was stuck
• 1:47:40
  for ten months this year. I was struggling with this script, and I
• 1:47:45
  just pumpfort and hesitated and stumbled and just couldn't make any pregrets with it at
• 1:47:50
  all, and it haunted me and it tortured me. And then finally two
• 1:47:56
  weeks ago, I just settled in and said, screw this, I'm going
• 1:48:00
  to do this. And I remember right through it and I got it then,
• 1:48:02
  you know, and nailed it and it's just great, um, you
• 1:48:08
  know. And and that's why I'm upset. I said, I don't understand.
• 1:48:11
  Why, Why why is that a setting? It sounds like like a
• 1:48:15
  nice thing. He said, Well, I struggled with this thing, but
• 1:48:17
  the nine or ten months, why don't I just do this ten months ago?
• 1:48:21
  You know? And I wouldn't have had all of the darkness and all
• 1:48:25
  of the pain that I had. And I said to him, you couldn't
• 1:48:28
  have done this ten months ago. You needed to struggle and suffer and have
• 1:48:31
  all of this pain and live all of this life of the last nine or
• 1:48:35
  ten months to become the person that you are that could have you know,
• 1:48:39
  who's also the person that could finish this script? You know, write this
• 1:48:42
  script. So that's where it goes. You know, nothing new about writers
• 1:48:47
  beating up on themselves. So I mean what I ended up doing was I
• 1:48:53
  ended up Actually I did work on something else. I just at that point
• 1:48:57
  I said, you know what, I think I should just take a break
• 1:48:59
  from this. And I'm thinking about coming back to it very soon. And
• 1:49:02
  because it's been about probably a month or may month, ahm, and I
• 1:49:06
  think now it's probably better you can come around full circle now and uh and
• 1:49:11
  just again start draft nine and see where that takes me. Look, my
• 1:49:15
  first novel was I told you about it earlier. I had written it as
• 1:49:21
  a screenplay and couldn't get any action. I wrote as a novel and this
• 1:49:25
  order as a screenplay. Um years later, I um, and by the
• 1:49:33
  way, it got me a lot of work. You know. It was
• 1:49:35
  an adolescent coming of age story. Um, and uh, given that in
• 1:49:43
  my draft of Merdan Graffiti, which is, uh, you know, an
• 1:49:45
  adolestent loss of innocence rite of passage. We'll be right back after a word
• 1:49:50
  from our sponsor, and now back to the show. Coming to a story.
• 1:50:00
  I was able to get a lot of work. I was kind of
• 1:50:00
  a go to guy for adolescent kinding of age stories, lots of innocence stories
• 1:50:05
  in Hollywood. Um that novel. After I saw and It's a kind of
• 1:50:12
  a I grew up in New York City and I sang duop in the streets
• 1:50:16
  with friends of mine and so and so. It's about this duop group that
• 1:50:19
  never really succeeds, but they learned that if you sing in harmony, you'll
• 1:50:23
  live in harmony, you know. And after I saw it, I started
• 1:50:28
  thinking about it as a stage play. Um, you know, as a
• 1:50:31
  musical, but I needed a songwriter. And then after I saw Jersey Boys,
• 1:50:38
  I was seeing it several times on Broadway, I realized, no,
• 1:50:42
  it could be a jukebox musical and so uh, I rewrote it as I
• 1:50:47
  adapted it for the musical theater using existing tunes, you know, just like
• 1:50:51
  the Carold King Show and the Motown musical Um you know, and Jersey Boys,
• 1:50:59
  you know, are just examples. There are a lot of them now
• 1:51:01
  that I'm not using original music, but that's why they called jukebox musicals,
• 1:51:05
  because they use existing tunes. I suddenly realized I could do it as a
• 1:51:10
  jukebox musical, so I rewrote it as a jukebox musical. Two years ago,
• 1:51:14
  it was workshop that UCLA. There was a humble read through sing through
• 1:51:24
  directed by one of the professors in the musical theater program in our sister department
• 1:51:29
  theater, and it was the most satisfying, fulfilling creative experience I've ever had
• 1:51:35
  in my career, This humble little read through. Now there's a somebody eagerly
• 1:51:41
  showing the play around, trying to get a production for it. Probably nothing
• 1:51:47
  will come of it, but but my you know, the craziest things have
• 1:51:50
  happened. But the point is, and the reason I bother you with it
• 1:51:54
  telling you about it, is, Look how long I've there even business with
• 1:51:56
  this thing. It goes back over forty years, you know, between the
• 1:52:01
  time that I first started outlining what became the screenplay which ultimately became the novel.
• 1:52:08
  And so on. My most recent novel, which which I bragged to
• 1:52:12
  you, made the Times List. I also wrote originally as a screenplay,
• 1:52:17
  and I'm talking about over thirty years ago, probably thirty one of thirty two
• 1:52:25
  years ago. I wrote it as a screenplay. It was optioned and dropped,
• 1:52:30
  an optioned and dropped. I made some money on it. It was
• 1:52:31
  optioned by, you know, an Oscar winning multi Oscar winning independent company of
• 1:52:39
  air prestigious companies. I made some money on it, but I never got
• 1:52:41
  anywhere with it. It never got produced. So eventually a student of mine
• 1:52:48
  at UCLA I was talking about the project. He said he'd love to read
• 1:52:54
  it. So it convinced me to let him read it. And he came
• 1:52:56
  to me and he said, you should use this as an outline for a
• 1:52:59
  novel, a comic novel. So I did, and when that was done,
• 1:53:08
  I showed it around to the publishing business and I couldn't get any interest
• 1:53:11
  in it at all. All I had with it was frustration and heartache and
• 1:53:15
  as I say disappointment then, I mean I'd made some money on it,
• 1:53:21
  you know, in the early days when it was a film script and I
• 1:53:24
  got those options, but generally it had been a pretty big disappointment. Then
• 1:53:28
  I met an editor, and I'm sorry, I met a very powerful agent.
• 1:53:30
  I have been so privileged in my life to do the things that I've
• 1:53:34
  done. One of them is for five summers, I would take the whole
• 1:53:39
  family to Maui for the writer's conference late in the summer. And if it
• 1:53:43
  had been in a Motel six, that'd be okay, it's Maui. But
• 1:53:45
  it wasn't in the motel six. It was in the ground while I lay
• 1:53:47
  a five diamond luxury spa hotel resort, you know, just an incredible place.
• 1:53:54
  And there I would meet all of these heavyweights from both literature and film.
• 1:54:00
  We mentioned Stephen King earlier. Stephen was there, you know. I
• 1:54:03
  mean they had world class writers, both in the movie business and in the
• 1:54:11
  literature business. And I remember I met an agent there and she said to
• 1:54:15
  me, a very powerful New York agent, and she agreed to I pitched
• 1:54:21
  the project to her and she agreed to read it on the mainland when she
• 1:54:25
  got back to the mainland. So I sent it to her in New York
• 1:54:28
  and she called me up and she said, and this is like twenty This
• 1:54:31
  is twenty years after I had first written, and about fifteen years ago.
• 1:54:39
  If you're with me, she said, I have to tell you. I
• 1:54:45
  read your Tepe script and I think it's great, and I want to represent
• 1:54:48
  it, and i'll represent it exactly as it is if you want me to,
• 1:54:53
  I'll send it out exactly as you've written it. However, I have
• 1:54:56
  an editor here in the office that I work with, and I think you
• 1:55:00
  should get notes from Miriam. And if you don't like the notes, you
• 1:55:08
  know, then the hell of it offen. You know, from away,
• 1:55:11
  I'll show the book as this. But I have to tell you, Richard,
• 1:55:13
  she said to me that when my office worked with Miriam, I show
• 1:55:18
  this stuff right away. Now I charge thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars
• 1:55:23
  for notes, and they're not charging me a nickel for this. You understand
• 1:55:27
  now. I wanted to say to them, please, I'm not interested in
• 1:55:30
  rewrite. I had nothing but grief from this project, and I'm depressed and
• 1:55:35
  lost at the moment, this moment in my life, and I hardly feel
• 1:55:40
  like going into some old, you know thing that's been nothing but discipline all
• 1:55:43
  the way. And you've already said you show it as so just show it
• 1:55:45
  as it is. I didn't say this, mind you, David, I
• 1:55:48
  just was This was my thinking, you understand. So I said to myself,
• 1:55:55
  don't tell her how much you hate the notes until you see the notes.
• 1:55:58
  In other words, wait for the note and then tell them that,
• 1:56:01
  yeah, you know, you really appreciate Miriam doing what she did, but
• 1:56:05
  no, you want to stick with what you had. In the hell with
• 1:56:08
  us, you don't have to do any more work, right And by the
• 1:56:13
  way, who the fuck is this Miriam? Some twenty three year old who
• 1:56:17
  just got out of you know, creative writing major from Suave Moore or Bryn
• 1:56:20
  Moore or one of them. More's you know, don't they know who I
• 1:56:25
  am? And you know that kind of insulated view of self that a writer
• 1:56:30
  can get and become his own worst enemy. Of course, I said,
• 1:56:33
  none of that. Well, that was my thinking. So finally the notes
• 1:56:36
  come from Miriam. By the way, it's Miriam Godrich. She's now a
• 1:56:43
  partner in the agency. It's this god its now U. And I read
• 1:56:48
  Miriam's notes and you know what, David, the notes My heart sinks like
• 1:56:51
  a stoneman. I Reading's notes because they have such good notes, and I
• 1:56:57
  know I'm looking at my worst enemy. And when I brush my teeth,
• 1:57:00
  when I shave, if you follow me, if I don't get my button,
• 1:57:03
  a chair, my hands on the keys, and find the old files
• 1:57:06
  and get get back into it right. So I certainly didn't want to do
• 1:57:11
  that, but I did. And by the way, the moment I started,
• 1:57:15
  I've written two three sentences. I suddenly was born again. The fog
• 1:57:19
  lifted, the depression was gone. I was sealed by the wonderful nurturing choices
• 1:57:27
  that flow through the system when you when you you know, get involved in
• 1:57:31
  creative expression. And it took me a couple of months, uh you know,
• 1:57:35
  to get the they script attended to in the way that had been recommended.
• 1:57:41
  And then I got back to the agency and bingo, they sold it
• 1:57:44
  right away. As I've told you, it made the Times List best seller.
• 1:57:48
  You know, it's a Times best seller, and there was a lot
• 1:57:54
  of movie action around it, but nothing ever came of it as a movie.
• 1:57:59
  Now all that ever comes of it as it was a best selling novel.
• 1:58:01
  That's not a bad thing, isn't. But guess what, I'm going
• 1:58:05
  to London. I'm going to be at the London Screenwriters Festival in October and
• 1:58:12
  a British producer called me. He said that he's actually American producer, but
• 1:58:16
  he's British base, he's London base, and he said he has This was
• 1:58:24
  a few years ago. This is three or four years ago. He'd come
• 1:58:27
  upon the novel and he thought it'd make a great movie, and he wanted
• 1:58:30
  to option the rights to it. Well, nothing ever came of that,
• 1:58:33
  more frustration and disappointment. Now suddenly he calls me, just coincidentally, I'm
• 1:58:39
  going to be in London in the fall, and he says, guess when
• 1:58:42
  he made a movie with a He produced a movie that was directed by a
• 1:58:48
  new director, a short film, and on the strength of that short film,
• 1:58:55
  that director has been signed by a very very prominent agency and they have
• 1:58:59
  asked him to bring projects to them that he would like to do. So
• 1:59:04
  he asked this producer, and producer called me and said, is your novel
• 1:59:09
  still available? And it is so right now as we're talking. It's being
• 1:59:13
  shown not by me, but by an artist who's been signed by a major
• 1:59:18
  agency who have asked him to show them stuff that he wants to do.
• 1:59:24
  Do you understand how much better that is for the material to be exposed to
• 1:59:27
  them that way than for me, the author to call their attention to it.
• 1:59:30
  You follow what I'm saying, Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. And
• 1:59:33
  on top of that, it's conceivable that they will be showing it the producers
• 1:59:41
  and production companies. I who would rather be represented, if anything comes with
• 1:59:46
  it, by a lawyer rather than an agent. But if they want to
• 1:59:49
  go out with this thing, and they approached me and they want to want
• 1:59:53
  me to let them represent them on it, I'll do that in a heartbeat.
• 1:59:58
  We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
• 2:00:04
  to the show. It's better for me to have them motivated, you know,
• 2:00:10
  extra motivated. Follow my reasoning there, If they can represent me as
• 2:00:15
  well as the director, they're going to be that much more motivated to sell
• 2:00:18
  the thing. So but likely there's nothing that will come of it. But
• 2:00:23
  here we are. We're talking in two thousand and fifteen, midway through the
• 2:00:27
  year just about, and I'm still in business on this thing that I started
• 2:00:30
  writing in like nineteen eighty. So you see what a mistake it is for
• 2:00:35
  writers to do what they often do, which is a writer script that doesn't
• 2:00:39
  sell, that's the end of that. They think it was a fature mistake.
• 2:00:43
  Mistake, mistake, mistake, mistake. Yeah, and you know that
• 2:00:46
  that's you know, very true. I have a friend of mine also who
• 2:00:51
  he's you know, in his forties or fifties, but he wrote a screenplay,
• 2:00:56
  you know, in his twenties and then suddenly you know, that's becoming
• 2:00:58
  a light again and you know, you know again, like you were saying,
• 2:01:01
  you know, it's it's amazing how these things getting new life. You
• 2:01:05
  know, years they God Webb people's you know, he won the Oscar for
• 2:01:10
  Unforgiven. It was also best Best Movie that year. Clint hung onto that
• 2:01:15
  script for twenty years. And Clint made another movie that was very successful,
• 2:01:18
  didn't win the Oscar, but it was very successful about the the Secret Service
• 2:01:24
  guy takes the bullet for the President in the Line of Fire. And that's
• 2:01:28
  another script that was hanging around for fifteen sixty years. The writer and that
• 2:01:30
  script was packing his trunk of his car and getting ready to you know,
• 2:01:34
  go back and defeat with his tail between his legs back to New Hampshire.
• 2:01:40
  When the film rings a small pass so Clint's company and you know, they
• 2:01:45
  want to know that, they want him to know that they wanted to come
• 2:01:46
  in for some meetings about brushing up the script. They now have a schedule.
• 2:01:50
  They're going to go ahead and you know, produce it for eighty eight
• 2:01:54
  million dollars something like that. You just never know. People don't understand that
• 2:01:59
  when a screw it doesn't sell, it's not the end. If it's the
• 2:02:01
  beginning, that script might sell eventually. But even if it doesn't, it's
• 2:02:08
  a sample of your craft. It could lead to representation, It could lead
• 2:02:13
  to a development deal on another notion that you have in mind. It could
• 2:02:17
  lead to a rewrite assignment. I've seen all of these things happen. They've
• 2:02:25
  happened to me, they've happened to writers that I know, And that is
• 2:02:30
  why it is a terrible self defeating mistake to imagine that a script that doesn't
• 2:02:39
  sell that's the end of it. It's a failure. The very first script
• 2:02:42
  I ever wrote, I wrote in a class at USC It was in the
• 2:02:45
  legendary The instructor was the legendary Irwin ar Blacker, who was George's teacher and
• 2:02:53
  John Melius's teacher, and on and on. That script never sold, but
• 2:03:01
  I got top flight representation as a result of it. I got a UM
• 2:03:08
  onto staff at Universal. And here I was a young kid. I wasn't
• 2:03:12
  you know. I was in my twenties, and I had an office at
• 2:03:15
  Universal with my name on the door, a parking place next to Paul Newman's
• 2:03:17
  parking place. I noticed, UM a ridiculously generous salary, at least it
• 2:03:25
  seemed that way at the time. Actually, adjusted for inflation, was pretty
• 2:03:29
  generous. UM. And it all came to that from a script that hasn't
• 2:03:32
  sold, you know, to this day. So to consider that script to
• 2:03:35
  be a failure is lacy, Yeah, and very various business. The business
• 2:03:43
  is hard enough on writers. Writers don't need to be hard on themselves,
• 2:03:46
  is the point that I'm making. Yeah, And that that's an excellent point,
• 2:03:49
  and that that sort of leads me into, you know, my one
• 2:03:53
  of my last questions. I know we've been talking about two hours. I
• 2:03:56
  know I've been taken up a lot of you delighted, is that we don't
• 2:03:58
  want to make sure we do cover I do talk a little bit about the
• 2:04:00
  uh the summer session, that class that I offer. So go ahead and
• 2:04:04
  ask me a question and then I'll talk a little bit about that. That's
• 2:04:06
  actually the question I was going to ask you was, you know, I
• 2:04:09
  know you have a you know, upcoming summer session, and this is the
• 2:04:12
  only time of the year where non UCLA students can sign up, and I
• 2:04:16
  wondered if you could just you know, talk a little bit about the class
• 2:04:18
  and you know, for anyone listening who's you know, interested in signing up.
• 2:04:23
  Well, the first thing I'll say is just that the housekeeping. If
• 2:04:26
  you want to find out official information about it, you can do that by
• 2:04:30
  simply going to my website Richard Walter dot com. There is no asse at
• 2:04:34
  the end of my name Richard Walter dot com. And I think the very
• 2:04:38
  first thing on the site is a link that will take you to the UCLA
• 2:04:42
  site that describes enrollment procedures and tells me a little bit of class. It
• 2:04:45
  also tells me something wrong about this class, which is that there are certain
• 2:04:50
  prerequisites for the summer session. All prerequisites are waived and the class is open
• 2:04:58
  to the classes is actually designed for the summer session. I've put it for
• 2:05:00
  thirty over thirty years now. It meets starting on June twenty second, Monday,
• 2:05:06
  June twenty second, Monday afternoon and for the next five that is a
• 2:05:12
  total of six Monday afternoon sessions. It's not a electric course, it's hands
• 2:05:16
  on writing course where you get the main activity of the class is the in
• 2:05:24
  class examination of in progress scripts being written by students in the class, So
• 2:05:28
  you get not only the support of the teacher and the teaching assistants, but
• 2:05:33
  also your fellow writers around the table. I'm one thing that has touched me
• 2:05:39
  very deeply all these years US is how generous everyone is, All the writers
• 2:05:43
  are with everybody else, how much support that the writers give each other.
• 2:05:46
  I feel like I've learned much more than I've ever taught, you know,
• 2:05:50
  being at UCLA, and my students are my teachers. So you get all
• 2:05:55
  of that alive. It's not online, it's alive in a classroom, and
• 2:06:00
  it is a rare course in that Uh, it's very difficult to get into
• 2:06:05
  it, even if you're registered matriculated UCLA student. It's very hard to get
• 2:06:10
  into an advanced film class with senior faculty like me. So this is an
• 2:06:16
  opportunity to do that, not only for UCLA students, but even for students
• 2:06:19
  who are not enrolled at UCLA, and by the way, everybody gets eight
• 2:06:24
  credits for it. Those credits are useful at anybody you know, for anybody
• 2:06:29
  at any University California campus. But also they're transferable, depending upon the attitude
• 2:06:34
  of the institution, they're transferable to other institutions. Though I would say most
• 2:06:41
  people taking the class really aren't interested in the credits. They're interested in getting
• 2:06:44
  the attention and consideration that you know, our regular students get when they write
• 2:06:48
  their their screenplays. So it's a really upbeat six weeks together. And uh,
• 2:06:59
  it's limited enrollment. It's almost sold out, but there is still some
• 2:07:03
  room for some people. I want you to know that I don't get paid
• 2:07:06
  per student. I don't get paid on a per student fee. Rather I
• 2:07:11
  get a flat fee. And the only thason I tell you that is that
• 2:07:13
  I'm not trying to self at grand bys here. I'm not against self promotion
• 2:07:16
  and I'm not against making money, but I'm not I don't get any extra
• 2:07:20
  money if you know, extra students enroll or anything like. I just want
• 2:07:26
  anything like that. I just want your readers and listeners, the people that
• 2:07:32
  you reach, I want them to know that this is a rare opportunity.
• 2:07:35
  It's not that widely known. It is available to them, and we crank
• 2:07:42
  up two weeks from Monday. It's not too late to register. People commute.
• 2:07:47
  By the way, It's obviously most convenient for people in the southern California
• 2:07:51
  region, but there are people who commute from all across the country. I
• 2:07:55
  had somebody last summer commuting from Illinois. The previous summer, I had a
• 2:08:01
  couple I were, a doctor and his wife coming commuting every Monday. They
• 2:08:07
  would fly in to La from El Paso and take the class and then fly
• 2:08:13
  back, you know, either late that night or the following morning. Um,
• 2:08:16
  that's how motivated people out to take the class. And I would commend
• 2:08:20
  it to you know, a lot of the people that you reach and uh,
• 2:08:26
  you know, I've actually I've known people who've actually taken the course.
• 2:08:28
  Uh. And you know, I'll probably I'll mention their names when we get
• 2:08:31
  off Richard, because you probably know you probably remember a few of them.
• 2:08:35
  And they spoke very very highly of the course. Oh thank you, and
• 2:08:39
  uh, you know, uh, and again, I mean to work with
• 2:08:43
  someone who's actually been in the fields, been in the trenches. It's just
• 2:08:46
  you know it's unbelievable. Um and you know I again, I will link
• 2:08:50
  to your your upcoming class in the show notes. You know and everyone.
• 2:08:54
  I also recommended to check out Richard's book Essentials of Screenwriting. I have a
• 2:08:58
  copy behind me where che you can't say it, but it's on the massive
• 2:09:01
  bookshelf behind me. But Richard, you know I've taken up so much of
• 2:09:07
  your time today, I want to say thank you very much. Like Flick,
• 2:09:09
  I enjoy channing. I really truly did, David. Oh, and
• 2:09:13
  I would love to have you back on if you ever wanted to. Absolutely
• 2:09:16
  you know how to reach carefully. She kind of handles my calendar and I'd
• 2:09:20
  love to come back. Be a pleasure to do that. Excellent because there's
• 2:09:24
  a ton of questions that we've never got a chance that I never got a
• 2:09:26
  chance to ask you because I mean there's so many and there's so many things
• 2:09:30
  we could talk about. Well, one thing I've learned about the questions and
• 2:09:33
  answers, and that is really good. Answers just lead lead to more questions,
• 2:09:37
  you know, so, and there's nothing wrong with that. That is
• 2:09:39
  the nature of learning. Absolutely, you know, everyone, you could check
• 2:09:43
  Richard at Richard Walter dot com and yes it's rich exactly right. And Richard,
• 2:09:48
  I want to say one more time, thank you again for coming on
• 2:09:50
  and I will thanks for having me. David, thank you. Oh it's
• 2:09:54
  my pleasure. I'm so afford to chatting with you again. We will do
• 2:09:56
  it for sure. Amazing Again everyone, thanks again for listening, and Richard,
• 2:10:01
  I wish you would have a great day and you know, best of
• 2:10:03
  luck with all your projects. Back to you, and thank you so kindly.
• 2:10:07
  Thank you here now bye bye, bye bye. I want to thank
• 2:10:11
  Dave so much for doing such a great job on this episode. If you
• 2:10:15
  want to get links to anything we spoke about in this episode, head over
• 2:10:18
  to the show notes at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv forward slash two ninety six,
• 2:10:22
  and if you haven't already, please please please head over to Screenwriting podcast dot
• 2:10:26
  com, subscribe and leave a good review for the show, or subscribe and
• 2:10:31
  leave a review for the show. Wherever you are listening to this podcast,
• 2:10:37
  It truly truly helps us out a lot in getting this information out to more
• 2:10:41
  and more screenwriters, creatives and filmmakers. Thank you again so much for listening.
• 2:10:45
  As always, keep on writing, no matter what I'll talk to you
• 2:10:48
  soon. Thanks for listening to the Bulletproof Screenwriting podcasts at Bulletproof Screenwriting dot tv.