Scriptin' Fancy-Like: Books, courses and other things to lead you astray.

Yesterday, during a short ramble in south Islington, I did something I rarely do and am very skeptical about.

I bought a guide to screenwriting.

This particular guide is Syd Field's "Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (Newly Revised and Updated)". Three factors helped draw me up and over the mental barrier I've erected.

1) I recognized the name and, more importantly, the films of the author (amongst others, Syd Field is responsible for Chinatown).
2) The title is straightforward and to the point. When someone tries to be clever in the title of an instructional work, I get to wondering what shoddy business they are trying to distract me from with humour.
3) This is an updated version of a guidebook which has been reprinted many times over almost thirty years. The book itself, let alone the man, struck me as a bit of an institution.

What sealed the deal was the following short quote which I read on page eight of the introduction.
"This is not a 'how-to' book; I can't teach anybody how to write a screenplay. People teach themselves the craft of screenwriting. All I can do is show them what they have to do to write a successful screenplay. So, I call this a what-to book, meaning if you have an idea for a screenplay, and you don't know what to do or how to do it, I can show you."

I love it. What a great attitude, humble yet instructive. I'm about two chapters in and so far so good, there's a good chance I'll do a tiny review when I finish.

When I was a young'un, I basically decided that I didn't like the idea of Script-Writing books - or anything else that told me how to write. Not so much because I had inflated my ego to the point that I thought I'd perfected writing, but I really hated the idea of their being one way to write anything. In the enhanced mental state that can only come from being a teenager, I decided to more or less reinvent the wheel when it came to writing.

So I wrote.

Then I realized that it might be more expedient if I could learn from the mistakes of others? I found myself utterly repulsed by what I saw on shelves, so I signed up for the beginners scriptwriting course at the CSTC. It was a week long, very intensive course and what I really liked about it was how you were taught more than just the obvious. There were writing exercises, sure, but my teacher focused on teaching about the lifestyle and the business of scriptwriting. This is something I really appreciated because, frankly, I was already studying stories and forms in University. But my picture of how to go about getting a script actually made was woefully inadequate - I more or less imagined that you went to a studio with your script and handed it in, like an essay. Maybe, at some point, a mysterious character called "an Agent" got involved?

Riiiiight.

But the second course I took with the CSTC, one year later, contained a great deal of what I cannot stand in instruction. My teacher fell prey to something which I have always known is a danger when one sets out to teach others how to do something as personally subjective as writing, painting etc. Whether or not he realized it, it was obvious that at some point in his life he had followed this path of deduction.

1. "I want to teach people how to write well"
2. "I think I write well"
3. Conclusion: "I will teach people how to write just like me"
   

Thus style and form get all messed up in the dudes head and this came out in everything he said. Teachers should help people devlop their own style and to take what they find useful from structure(s) - not just try to carbon copy themselves into the presumably tabula rasa student.

What began to tip me off was something which came up at the beginning of the first day. We were each to give a synopsis of the twenty-five page script seed we brought in with us. Eventually it was my turn and I described my story about a detective who has made questionable deals and has to murder his own partner in the first ten minutes of the film (an extension of the first short script of mine that was made for the 2003 Carleton Student Film Festival - Trenchcoats & Corsets. It had some warts, let me tell you, but it was a fun first effort).

For a moment he looked at me, like I'd forgotten to flush the toilet for the thousandth time and he'd just found the evidence. Then he asked me "Oliver, why on Earth would I want to see a movie with an unlikable character?". I took this as a bit of a challenge, alright - fairplay, and started to try and justify why people would want to watch this character. Hey, if somebody wants to bust my balls a bit in trying to get me to further explain an idea of mine...that's cool, I do the same thing to others all the time.

But then he did The Bad Thing. He interrupted me before I'd barely begun speaking and said that he was asking a rhetorical question, that nobody wants to watch a movie with an unlikable main character - that the protagonist has to be someone they'd want to spend time with.

"Uhmmmm....." I said, as I mentally tallied about a dozen different films right off the top of my head which contradicted what he said. Keeping topical, I can honestly say that 300's take on
King Leonidas certainly seemed more intense than someone I'd want to go have a pint with. I can't say as I'd be fussed about hanging out with Hannibal Lector, either. Ah well...

So all I can say for courses is they are a real crapshoot that depends largely on the teacher. When I get my next job sorted I'm going to look into doing a second course with Panico, but this time I'm going to email them and ask for details about the professor so I can at least feel slightly less like I'm taking a gamble with the money I invest.

As for books....I can't say as I'm quite settled on these, having found the odd exception. But I would recommend looking for books written by older writers that have a good, long body of work and who straddle the fine line between speaking in overly esoteric terminology with no practical grounding and the other end of the spectrum, those who seem to think that stories can be explained using a slide ruler and protractor.

After going on about all this, I feel compelled to say "Why yes, I did get a big laugh out of Adaptation".