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Excerpts:

What’s the worst note you ever received on one of your screenplays?

C. Shyer: We were asked to make Judy Benjamin — the Jewish American Princess in Private Benjamin — from Texas instead of Philadelphia.

D. Wallace: I honestly can’t remember a worst note. I mean I’ve had some critiques that haven’t set well with me, but something that stood out as being absolutely horrible...I don’t remember ever receiving one of those. I’ve been heartbroken when told a story isn’t really working, but usually there’s some thought there that is constructive and generally inspires me to get back into the work and do a better job. Everything can be improved, and you should be open to doing that. But then again, your critics aren’t always right either. It’s good to develop a built-in stink detector and arm yourself with it. That takes time to perfect, but ultimately, it’s your best aid in evaluating what you’ve created.

Can you discuss the relationship between screenwriter and producer; when do fight and when do you give in?

G. McBride: I come from the world of advertising, which was a great place to learn that nothing is created in a vacuum. There are always going to be other people’s opinions. And many of those people are more powerful than you are and they will get their way — with or without you. Thus, I make sure to keep the discussion flowing at all times. If I don’t agree with a note I will fight it, by explaining why my way makes sense for the project. Usually the producer will listen and then agree to “try it.” But this can also be Hollywood-speak for, “I’ll just get the writer we hire after you’re gone to do it my way, anyway.”

C. Moss: You have to learn how to pick your battles carefully. Give up the small stuff in exchange for the stuff you’re most passionate about.

Does the writer need to be thinking about budget and/or marketplace when writing a spec script?

J. Fasano: This is tough. You can think about market so much you fool yourself into thinking you have a slam dunk on premise when the script is too weak to sell. Ultimately, I think the writer should sit down and write whatever the hell he wants. Look at it this way, if you write something you’ve tailored to what you think is the market and it doesn’t sell, you feel like you wasted a half a year. But if you wrote a great script on what you wanted, and no one bought it, at least you’re proud of it — and maybe you can sell it later, or adapt it for television, or even make it yourself on DV or something.
As for budgets, I directed my first 35mm feature film on a $52,000 budget, and have written projects that cost almost one hundred million. The cost of the movie is the level of elements. First find a really great story you want to tell. Tell it right and you will get something out of it.

C. Shyer: Short answer: Yes.

Have you ever written with a partner? What are the advantages or disadvantages to writing solo?

D. Goyer: I have only written with a partner once. It didn’t turn out particularly well. I like writing alone. I think it’s an individual decision. Some people work well with others, batting ideas back and forth, etc. But I have developed a very individual style of working that wouldn’t mesh, I’m sure. I have a kind of shorthand when I am researching, beating out a story, and so on.

C. Shyer: I’ve always written with a partner — too lonely without one.

Do you prefer to write on spec or on assignment? Why?

L. Karaszewski: Right now, we’re writing our first spec since Ed Wood. We’ve been very blessed in that we’ve been able to have a career that includes a large number of eccentric choices that, fortunately for us, got made through the studio system. Sometimes you have to do something for yourself, and that’s where the spec script comes in. You can do it exactly the way you want to with no interference. We haven’t felt that we sold our souls because we’re writing crazy movies like The People vs. Larry Flynt. It’s interesting writing on spec again. It’s nice to have no one to please except yourself. The problem is that most people who write specs are trying to make some big sale and they end up compromising. We write a spec to clear our heads. Ed Wood came about because we were trapped in crappy kiddie comedy-land. The Problem Child films were very successful but they were a style of filmmaking that we were not that interested in continuing.  But when we went in and pitched more serious projects, people would laugh at us saying, “You’re the guys who wrote Problem Child!” We were told we weren’t good enough to write our own ideas. That kind of thing freaked me out. So in a sense, we wrote Ed Wood as a spec in order to do something that we weren’t being allowed to do in the studio system. That film made our name as writers.

S. Susco: Both. I usually have three projects going at the same time: a “food on the plate” assignment; a project I’m trying to set up; and a spec. Working on multiple projects at the same time keeps any one of them from getting old.

How did you get your first paying gig?

J. Fasano: I was painting the one-sheets — movie posters — for a low budget film company in Manhattan called Reeltime. They were making a sorority slasher film called Blood Sisters and the script was just awful — they had the guys from the mental institution with butterfly nets, for Christ’s sake! I said I could re-write the script for them because I had studied writing and film in college, and so I did a pass — uncredited, welcome to the world of the screenwriter — and they shot the film. Another producer, Jack Bravman, heard about what I did for Reeltime and asked me to write and direct the film Zombie Nightmare in Montreal for $5,000. I did, and ended up without either a writer or a director credit for the sake of the Canadian tax shelter. Do I see a pattern developing here? Anyway, the film ended up starring a young Tia Carrere and an old Adam West and was subsequently on Mystery Science Theatre 2000 where I was glad my credit was only “assistant director.”

D. Wallace: My first paying gig was while I was still in film school at UCLA. A fellow student, who already owned his own commercial production company, wanted to make a film about the experiences of a young immigrant woman he knew. He paid me five hundred dollars to do a story treatment for him. That was the first money I got for writing, and that just sort of fell into my lap.
My first industry gig came from my work finding its way into the hands of a TV producer. My first agent — who really wasn’t that great an agent, but did get one of my early screenplays optioned — used that script to get me the work. Though I was still a non-union writer at the time, he parlayed my writing sample into a submission at Laurel Entertainment, who were producing Monsters and Tales From the Darkside. They loved the writing and the subject matter, and ultimately gave me the gig.

How many scripts did you write before you got paid?

D. Drake: Actually I was very lucky. I managed to sell my second screenplay and — miracle of miracles — it got made. But you have to bear in mind that before I finally got up my nerve to try to face the blank page, I had spent many grueling years in development, and had probably read hundreds of scripts.

R. Fox: I had been writing scripts since I was fifteen, five or six in all, including two three-act plays. Some time around my twenty-first birthday, I was working as a messenger for Embassy Pictures. I delivered a script to Arnold Schulman — one of Hollywood’s true legends and a great, great writer, and he asked what I was working on. I told him, and he offered to read it. The next morning he called me and said, “Be at my house right after work for rewrites. If this thing doesn’t sell, I’ll turn in my Guild card.” I showed up after work and watched him dictate Chorus Line dialogue in his robe as a hot secretary typed it all down scene by scene — this was the life! He ordered in enough Chinese food for 200 people and we got to work. Six weeks later he showed my script to his agent who said, “I’ll have you fifty grand and an office on a lot within a month.” A month later, Arnold left the agency and that agent stopped calling me back. He never did get me the fifty grand or the office, and that script never saw the light of day, though I had spent the money in my head ten times over. It took writing four more screenplays over the next two years before I optioned my very first script — for exactly $10,000 plus ten more for the rewrite. And I was thrilled to get it...though I am still waiting for Arnold’s Guild card.

Which books on writing do you find most helpful?

C. Moss: Not to sound clich8Ed, but Robert McKee’s Story helped me. Also A Writer’s Journey. Both books were able to breakdown the screen writing process in ways that I could understand because I’m really not all that bright.

G. McBride: Screenwriting 434 by Lew Hunter. The Screenwriter’s Bible by Dave Trottier. And any screenplay you can get your hands on. Read! Read! Read!

Talk about your daily writing schedule.

S. Susco: On a good day: up at 6:00 A.M., coffee by 6:07, ten pages by 1:00. Work on the novel, or a short story, for another hour. Life outside the house the rest of the day.
On a typical day: up at 6:00 A.M., coffee by 6:07. Responding to email and surfing the ‘net until 8:00. Gawking at the clock in disbelief until 8:02. Taking a much-needed break by 8:20. Going for a jog and watching a movie until noon. Thinking about lunch until 1:00. Getting lunch. Home by 2:30. Answering phone calls until 3:30. Putting on headphones and deciding to write straight through 5:30. Phone starts ringing off the hook at 3:45. On phone until 5:20. Taking a soak in the hot tub until 5:50. Turning off the phone to get some work done. Cell phone starts ringing. Phone calls until 7:00. Wonder what happened to the sun. Get out of the house. Back at 10:00. Pour a scotch, write until 11:30. Fall asleep.

C. Shyer: Every day, very disciplined. It’s a job, mostly torture. Dorothy Parker had it right when she said, “I hate writing. I love having written.”

What preparation do you go through before beginning a screenplay?

D. Wallace: First comes the idea. I usually jot it down as a note to myself, then let it germinate in my head for a while. Time passes and accompanying ideas join the original. At that point, I begin to map out the story into a rough synopsis. Once I’ve got a general idea of where it’s going, I try to plug what I’ve got into some facsimile of the three-act structure. I also look at mythic structure to see how well my story falls into that order. Once that part is established, I plug in the characters, plot points, the themes, and as many visual treats as I can come up with. The rest I leave to discovery during the writing process.

J. Fasano: I think. A lot. I read up on the subject I’m going to write about, and then I make notes, rough outlines, until I reach the point where I think I know what the film is going to be from beginning to end. That outline might be thirty pages long. I try to put every scene into it, even though there will be room for discovery. Then, only when I’m seeing scenes from the film in my sleep, do I sit down and write the script. By that point I’m just taking dictation from God and my own brain.

Do you write with specific actors in mind?

L. Karaszewski: We think about a number of people who would be very good for it, but it’s usually not very specific. When you’re dealing with true stories, you tend to think of the real people. Our first script was written with two actors in mind. In the first draft we actually named the characters Albert Brooks and Morris Day.

A. Schulman: No, absolutely never, because I don’t know who they’re going to turn out to be. Even if an actor is already attached, I think it makes for a worse script because unconsciously, even though I try not to, part of my brain is recycling things I’ve seen the actor do before. That makes for lousy writing, as far as I’m concerned.

How do you create characters?

R. Fox: The best characters, I think, are “captured” more than they are created. You observe real people in real situations, maybe combine them with other people you’ve observed, and then you can add in reasons they behave a certain way. Usually, the closer you stick to truth, the better chance you have of people saying, “Hey, I’ve been there.”

D. Drake: Once I have a sense of what the story is, and thus a vague notion of who these people, to some extent, have to be, then I think mainly in terms of dialogue. The things they say seem to tell me who they are. But you have to try to orchestrate them as best you can, and you can’t just let ‘em ramble for the sake of rambling — unless, of course, you’re Quentin Tarantino.

What preparation do you go through before beginning a screenplay?

C. Moss: Lots of oiling up. Actually, we develop a detailed beat sheet/outline and then we’re off and running.

G. McBride: It varies. But usually I think about it for weeks, even before beginning the notes or outlining process. Then one day, I start. A deadline always helps the start date. For specs, I try to create my own deadlines. I find the first thirty pages the most difficult to get through. There’s something about knowing you need to fill 90-100 blank pages that can be kind of intimidating. Of course, working from an outline helps. But when you’ve created full and interesting characters, they can sometimes take you on a course you didn’t originally set out for. Starting is easily the most difficult part of this job. But it’s the biggest and most necessary step. That’s for sure.

How do you come up with ideas?

C. Shyer: I have no idea how that process works. Thank God.

D. Goyer: Hmmm. God knows. Sometimes they come from my dreams. I got the job for Dark City, in part, because I had had a series of recurring nightmares as a child that corresponded with some of the imagery Alex Proyas was interested in exploring through his film. I am also a voracious reader. Frankly, I read more than I see films.