Screenplay: From The Inside

SCREENPLAY – FROM THE INSIDE

Edward Di Lorenzo

Copyright © 2012 by Edward Di Lorenzo

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Introduction

You know in your heart that you can write better than what is out there -- and you can. All you need is a little help from someone who has been where you want to go.

Today is your lucky day. There is only one way to write a screenplay -Story, structure and believability are the three cornerstones to any form of fiction writing. Without them I don't know what you have except that you don't have a film or a novel or a play or a short story or a poem. Too many films today have forgotten this. They give you razzle-dazzle special effects, ad nauseam, graphic violence until you want to vomit, and as much sex and nudity as they can show without calling it pornography. They blow you away with sight and sound and totally disregard substance. It's like the ancient Chinese meal adage – twenty minutes later you're hungry again.

You'll hear in some screenwriting class or read in some screenwriting book that character is the only element that matters, that if you stay with your main character, he'll write the script for you. I wouldn't want to be hanging by my thumbs until that happened. You'll also hear or read the mandate – make your story character driven, not plot driven. Of course, no one is going to show you what that means or how to achieve it or tell you that there has never been a story written in any form anywhere, anytime, that wasn't plot driven. If the writer doesn't know the beginning, middle and end of his story then what the hell is he writing?

He's writing a French film.

Bad news, good news. I am not going to make you a professional screenwriter. No one can do that. I am going to give you everything you need to make yourself the writer you want to be. Deal?

For you who have a trunk full of what you call screenplays that you can't even give away let alone sell I will show you how to turn lead into pure gold. And for you who have a closet full of unfinished masterpieces that will otherwise remain unfinished, I will show you how to get to THE END.

One thing I know that has been causing you to turn off your computer is that you believe the screenplay is a three-act structure. Or let's say, you never had any reason to believe otherwise, as if life itself were a three-act structure and only divine intervention could deem it something else-- dare I say it? – like a four-act structure?

The good news is that the screenplay or any other story has always been a four-act structure, not three.

Take the playwright. He always wrote in three acts but he knew that in the middle of act two something specific had to happen that jumped the story to another level or the rest of the play would not work. Truth is, he was always writing in four acts but didn't want to get into any debate about it, so he kept his mouth shut and went about his business of writing successful plays in three acts.

You can check out the long list of excellent films and you will see the four-act structure. If you don't see it, more than likely the film is a turkey, and it's only your opinion that places it on any hit list. Put it this way – you've been watching movies since you could walk. Instinctively, you know that around the middle of the film, the sixty minute mark or so, you can leave your seat and go to the bathroom, have a cigarette, make a phone call, buy more candy and popcorn, and when you return to your seat, lean over and whisper to your partner, What did I miss?

That's right. You know the answer – nothing, nada, niente, zilch. Within seconds you‘re back in the movie that proves you missed nothing. Now why is that? Even the critics will give this recommendation – See this film. Terrific beginning, bit slow in the middle but stay with it because the third act is dynamite. They are recommending an incomplete movie and like computerized robots we buy into it without getting our money's worth.

The second act blues is the curse of the three-act structure. Be of good cheer. By the end of this book you will no longer be crying the blues but you'll be dancing on the ceiling.

Before I go on I've got to put something important to you up front. If your main objective is fame and fortune then stop reading right now and return this book and get your money back. I've got nothing against fame and fortune nor do I believe an artist has to starve and struggle in order to create art. That's bullshit. Picasso proved it by leaving ten million dollars when he left town.

The drive to succeed has to come from that special place inside you, not from some fantasy of fame and fortune that is completely outside yourself and over which you have absolutely no control. The fantasy can cause you to sell yourself short, for the line between compromise and surrender is so thin that you will not be aware of it until you have lost the only thing in life that truly matters: yourself. Without you, you're just spitting in the wind.

If you are truly serious about becoming a writer, the following should help point the way.

What is a pure artist?

Any ideas? See what you can come up with. I usually got a blank look whenever I asked my students the question. It's as if I had just asked them to decipher the Rosetta Stone. It's okay. I didn't expect them to have the answer. If they did they wouldn't need to be in my class.

Take this artist in his studio. He's standing there sipping dry white wine and smoking a Gitane filter cigarette and staring at a blank canvas resting on an easel. He's been doing this for hours, formulating a painting in his mind and heart. Sipping, smoking, formulating. Finally, after God knows how long, could be days, he puts down the glass of wine, crushes out the Gitane and picks up his brush and palette and strides over to the blank canvas and begins to paint. One hour, two hours, three, four, five – no food, no water, no cigarettes, no wine, no sleep, no bathroom. The studio could burn down around him and he wouldn't notice. All that matters, all that exists, all that is real is what he's putting down on that canvas.

Finally, it's finished.

He steps back, looks at the painting. It's a bloody masterpiece! He knows it, his God knows it. For about twenty seconds he's walking among the clouds with the rest of the immortals.

Okay, nice work. Now what? He takes the masterpiece off the easel, goes to the raging fireplace and calmly places the masterpiece into the fire. He doesn't even bother to watch it go up in flames. He puts another blank canvas on the easel, pours another glass of dry white wine and lights another Gitane. He sips and smokes and stares at the blank canvas.

That's a pure artist. He's also a little crazy.

If that scene didn't remove a millstone from around your neck, then you missed the point and if you missed the point then maybe you should think about finding something else to do with your life because you're living a fantasy not a dream.

Any fool knows that a fantasy will kill you but a dream will set you free. (And you always thought it was the Truth)

In case you're wondering, true art is organized chaos –Van Gogh, Pollack, Picasso, Monet …… Logic and reason can a only take you to the door, only imagination and courage can bring you inside the creative mind to that magical world where you stand alone so that everything there belongs only to you. To use only logic and reason in the attempt to create anything brings only a sterile and antiseptic result that is no more art than pigs can fly.

Back to three acts vs four acts – all the screenwriting books (most written by someone who never made a living writing screenplays) admit that act two is split into 2a and 2b and that something has to happen at the end of 2a that does … what? They never really answer the what. They might say something has to happen to change the direction of the story or something has to happen to the hero to do God knows what or to take the hero to God knows where. They don't give a definitive answer that you can understand so that you can improve your screenplay.

Instead, you continue to run out of gas at around page sixty so that all you can do is repeat yourself – another sex scene or another murder or another car chase or another funny shtick to fool the audience into believing the story is moving right along when actually it's hit a wall. So that when your partner tells you that you missed nothing while you were gone it's because there was nothing to miss, nothing happened to progress the story! Before your seat is warm again you're back in the story as if you had never left.

Don't panic. I will show you exactly what must happen around page sixty to prevent your story from repeating itself and become boring. The cure for the second act blues is so simple that you'll be compelled to say, Why didn't I think of that? As it is with the jazz musician who has to know form in order to improvise (riff) on it, the story writer has to know structure in order to reshape it or twist it or turn it or reverse it or rearrange its parts and still maintain its wholeness.

Another plus for structure is that once you nail it, you can do whatever you want with it and it will never let you down.

I used to tease my class by putting the knock on Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Finally, a student asked if I had seen the film?

Of course I hadn't seen the film. I saw the previews too many times and I had never heard such lousy dialogue that put me off seeing the film. The whole class jumped on me, How can you put down a film you haven't seen? etc. Okay, okay, I fought back. Bring in a copy and we'll all watch it together.

And we did. When the lights came up the class turned to me, I did a B movie dramatic pause, That was a terrific film, I said, and meant it. The class was delighted. Then another student did a typical Graduate Film School know-it-all announcement. See, Tarantino broke all the structure rules and still made a hell of a film. The class agreed with him.

Naturally I wasn't about to let that go by. Time out, guys, I countered. I've got news for you. Pulp Fiction is one of the most structured films you'll ever see. Tarantino is no film dummy. He knows movies. All he did was move one sequence out of linear time and created the illusion that you were seeing something new and different. Point is – if Tarantino didn't know structure, he couldn't have pulled it off. More than likely, he wouldn't have even thought of it.

Same with the films Two For The Road, Momento, All That Jazz, and an army of other films that may look different but all of them are driven by the same engine -- Structure!

If you're trying to come up with something that has never been done before – forget it. An original story? – it doesn't exist. There are only seven major plots and only thirty-six variations on them. What are they? Go to the library and look it up. I'm not going to do all the work for you. Actually, it's another self-test. If you do the library thing, that's one thing; if not, that's something else.

There is only one thing in storyland that's original –and that is YOU. It's how you take one of the seven major plots or one of the thirty-six variations and do it your way. The way you do it makes it original. Of course if you are film illiterate, and sadly, most film school students are, what you think is an original twist on a plot has probably been done a hundred times already and when the reaction to your original version is, Hell, I've seen that in at least ten movies, you're going to feel like a damn fool and so you should.

I find it inexcusable for someone to want to be in the film business that has not seen at least the hundred great films. It's like someone wanting to be a writer and doesn't read or be an artist and never steps into a museum to study the great paintings. Who's kidding whom, here?

What else is this book going to do for you, the writer, that all the screenwriting books have not done? – absolutely nothing. Unless you fill in the blank pages with all the guidelines I'm going to give you and all the inside stuff never before seen by human eyes, you'll still be putting the square peg in the round hole.

Here's a zinger for you. Talent does not make you successful! Everyone in the film business is talented so you're not unique. There are people in the film business with ant-hill talent and Mt. Everest success. There are people in the film business who have so much talent that it'll make you cry, yet they can't get arrested.

If talent does not make you successful, then what does? It's all the other things. Can you do the other things? If you can, you can't miss. If you can't, then what? Don't throw your laptop out the window. The other things are in this book. You are already doing some of them or else you wouldn't have bought this book in the first place.

I make some writing points by telling war stories based on my experiences in the trenches of movie making and working with good and bad actors and good and bad directors. Speaking of directors, don't be taken in by the graduate film school myth that the director walks on water, that it's his vision (how I hate that word) that matters, the writer merely provides the blueprint. The truth is revealed in the screenwriter's contribution to the film making process.

The screenwriter is the only creator in the making of a film. Everyone else is an interpreter. How well they interpret what the writer has put down on the blank page is their creativity. I'll say it in a nicer way – without the screenwriter, every major studio would be a parking lot and Beverly Hills would be a low rent district.

I love film directors – the good ones. Most directors today couldn't direct their way to the men's room and most of them don't know how to talk to actors because they know nothing about the actor's process, how the actor acts without making it feel like he's acting.

If you want to be a screenwriter or film director then get yourself on the stage as an actor, even if it's only in an acting class where you do scenes every week. Watch Inside The Actor's Studio, and listen to professional actors talk about acting, and read every biography on the first class actors and directors and writers from Spencer Tracy to Montgomery Clift to Marlon Brando to Paul Newman to Russell Crowe, Robert DeNero, Al Pacino to Tom Hanks and Jack Nicholson, from D.W. Griffith to John Ford to Elia Kazan to Akiro Kurosawa, from Preston Sturges to Dalton Trumbo to Paddy Chayefesky to Robert Bolt to Tennesee Williams, from David Lean, Ridley Scott, Coppala and Speilberg to Anton Chekov to Eugene O'Neill to Ibsen to William Shakespeare and everyone else in between.

It was always upsetting when my students had absolutely no idea who most of those artists were. That's worse than a painter who never heard of Vincent Van Gogh. Don't laugh. There was a young major league baseball player who had never heard of Mickey Mantle.

I'm going to refer to a particular film and a particular scene or sequence in that film and you're going to have to rent it and watch it, even if you've seen it before, in order for the point I'm making to make any sense to you. For example – watch the beginning of Three Days Of The Condor up to the moment when Robert Redford leaves the telephone receiver hanging off the hook at an outside public telephone booth before walking away.

We all know how important it is to THINK like a writer but what is even more important is to FEEL like a writer. This book will SHOW you how to do both.

What else is in this book that makes it different and more helpful than you could ever imagine? Yes, I cover the usual chapter headings – Building A Character, Structure, Dialogue, Scene, Sequence, Counterpoint Stories, (Never heard of that one, did you?), and the rest, but in more helpful way.

Everything I give you comes from my years of doing it myself, my blood, sweat and tears, nothing from a text book or from someone else's experience or opinion. I call it the way I see it. Agree or disagree, I'm not going to change my mind; I hope to change yours.

There is no one ANSWER to all your problems, writing-wise and otherwise, unless it is carved inside the Holy Grail and since no one has yet to discover The Silver Chalice, we are still sentenced to plodding our way through a sea of ignorance.

However, there is a QUESTION that could give you the one answer you are looking for to not only solve all you problems, writing-wise and otherwise, but to put your life on the path it was meant to follow.

You will find The Magic Question at the end of this book.

You only need to have four things in order to make it in the film business – a sense of humor, insatiable curiosity, ruthless dedication and the guts to do the things that have nothing to do with writing, but without them even the writing is an illusion. The biggest handicap for all of us today is that the world has locked itself into an age of mediocrity where art has become so mediocre that mediocrity has become art.

All I want you to do is strive for excellence. There is no way you can do it unless you know what excellence is? It sure isn't ninety-nine percent of what's out there now.

What is it? Do you know?

I do.

************

WHAT''S YOUR STORY?

Idea vs Story

Curiosity is the way of life. Take nothing

for granted but question everything

even that which you believe was written

by the hand of God for it is not enough

that we cannot fly as it is to discover how

the sparrow is able to do so.

––Leonardo DaVinci

In ancient times groups of men would go around from tribe to tribe earning their bed and board by telling stories. They were the first professional storytellers. You can bet the family cat that these storytellers knew what a story was or else they might end up being the evening meal. They knew how to play on the emotions of their listeners, how to hook them immediately, how to take them on an exciting journey, the highs, the lows, the twists, the turns, the surprises, how to give them a hero and characters that they could identify with, how to keep their undivided attention the whole time, no commercial breaks, no dead spots to bore them or put them to sleep. They knew that a story, any story, had to have certain elements or else it wasn't a story. They had to know what they were doing as storytellers, their very lives depended on it. I've got this gut feeling that these gifted storytellers used a four act structure to tell their stories.

Hey, man, whacha do last nite?

Flicks, man. Outa sight!

Yeah? What was the story?

Bout dis guy kills deez broads. Musta been ten a dem. I mean, man, he kills dem good. Cuts der troats, rips out der guts, chops 'em up. It was awesome.

Cool. So tell me da story.

I'm tellin' ya. Dis guys kills deez broads. Slasher Sam, heavy dude, man. Ya shoulda seen it.

The story, Joey, the story.

Fuck da story, man. Dis guy kills deez broads. What else is der t'know?

How's that for progress or is it regression?

Substitute killin' broads with crashing cars or killin' guys and you have the entire story to many movies in theatres today. The only unreal thing about the dialogue exchange is that any friend of Joey's wouldn't know a story if it bit him in the ass.

Okay, so I'm pushing the point a bit. Then again, maybe I haven't pushed it far enough or hard enough. Think about it.

How many movies have you seen that by the time you got back to your car or to the bus stop or subway, you've already forgotten it except for the excessive violence and vulgarity? What you saw was not a story on film. It had no beginning, middle or end, no characters who had anything going for them that even resembled a believable person, nothing that was redeeming, nothing that made you think or care and certainly nothing that gave you hope that maybe the world wasn't such a cesspool after all. Even the popcorn was stale and the Pepsi was flat. Truly a night to remember.

Why does Hollywood keep making no-brainer movies?

To pour salt on the wound, when I was teaching at Boston University Graduate Film School I was privileged to have Julius Epstein visit my class for a Q & A session with my students. In case you have that blank who the hell is Julius Epstein? look on your face, Mr. Epstein and his brother, Philip, and Howard Koch, wrote Casablanca.

Anyway, one of the students finally asked Mr. Epstein, Why are movies so bad today? Everyone stopped breathing. Here's this eighty something year old man sitting there, his mind still sharp, looking through coke bottle eyeglasses at all the young eager innocent faces, their eyes overflowing with the Hollywood fantasy, and after a very dramatic pregnant pause, Mr. Epstein pointed his arthritic finger at the class and as he spoke, his finger passed over each student like the sword of Constantine.

You are the reason, he said. When I drive by Westwood Village and see you people lined up around the block to see that garbage, then you have no one to blame but yourselves.

Mr. Epstein went on to give the class a few facts of the movie business. It's a business whose business is to make money not films. If all the 18-25 years olds, the major portion of the movie going public, refused to pay to see these no-brainer films, then Hollywood would stop making them.

It's that simple Of course, saying it's simple, isn't saying it's easy.

Now, what about your story?

For openers, you don't have a story.

What you have is an idea, maybe. How do I know? Simple. You've already told me so. If you're sitting there wondering how you're going to fill 120 blank pages with your wonderful story, then you don't have a story. If you're wondering how you're going to fit your wonderful story in only 120 pages, then you might have a story.

I'll let one of my students clear the air for you with his wonderful story about a young guy who was trying to find himself. That's fine, I said. What else? What do you mean, what else? That's it. It's a story about a young guy trying to find himself. Really? In other words, your story goes something like this ---

Young Joey wakes up, goes into the bathroom, doesn't like what he sees in the mirror and says -- Man, I got to find myself. He walks into the kitchen where his mother takes one look at him and says – Joey, what's wrong? You look terrible. Don't ask, mom. I'm tryin' to find myself. He gets on the school bus and the driver says -- Joey, you look like shit. You got a hangover or somethin'? Don't bug me, Al. I'm tryin' to find myself. Outside school, his pals are hanging out when Joey gets off the bus and joins them. They all agree that Joey looks like something the cat refused to drag in. Hey, guys, lay off. I'm tryin' to find myself, I'm tryin' to find myself. In class, Joey sits there until the teacher notices. Joey, what are you doing staring out the window like you're expecting the Second Coming? Chill out, Teach, get off my case. I'm tryin' to find myself.

Don't laugh. There was a very successful film with just that idea – The Graduate and it made a Dustin Hoffman's career. So what's your initial objective? Simple, again.

Turn your idea into a story.

Okay, here's how you're going to do it. Forget everything you think you know about writing a screenplay. Empty your creative mind as if absolutely nothing had ever entered there before.

Then, first things first.

One night in class a student asked me an embarrassing question, embarrassing because I should have known the answer to How do you define a story? but I didn't. I had never really thought about it except in the stock definition – a story has to have a beginning, middle and end, which could mean almost anything. I was about to hyperventilate and make a complete fool of myself when I had a vision of an old Greek friend who once told me before he took one drink