Screenwriting Rock Star

How does one become a screenwriting rock star?

Well, you only have to do two things:

1) Write a screenplay that becomes a movie starring Tom Cruise.

2) Date Jennifer Aniston.

But here’s the tricky part, you have to do them both at the same time. Yeah, I know that last stipulation is a killer for most of you. (And really makes it tough for female writers.) As far as I know there is only one person who fits the above qualifications.

Justin Theroux. Screenwriting Rock Star.

How does one go from zero to a rock star? I’m not 100% sure, but I think it has something to do with not exactly starting with zero.

Let me unpack Theroux’s journey. Hang with me, it’s quite a trip.

First the name Theroux is not foreign in the world of American literature and movies. Paul Theroux has written more than 45 books (novels, shorts stories, non-fiction travel) and a few have been made into films, the most well-known being The Mosquito Coast (1986) which starred Harrison Ford. One of Paul’s sons, Louis Theroux is a journalist turned documentary filmmaker, and another son Marcel Theroux is a British writer with four published novels. So we can agree that Paul has quite a literary family, correct?

Paul Theroux is Justin Theroux’s uncle. According to a 2001 Washington Times article, Justin’s mother was a writer for the Washington Post. In another older article Justin called his father  a good painter turned wealthy corporate lawyer in Washington D.C..  His parents divorced when he was young and he’s described his childhood as “relatively normal middle class,” with no thoughts of being a writer. At the age of 14 Justin began attending a boarding school in Massachusetts. He also started acting and discovered punk music around that time. He would go on to graduate from Bennington College in Vermont where he studied visual art and drama.

“I’m pretty easy to please artistically. I can be inspired by a rusty length of chain, or a car battery if it’s the right color.”
Justin Theroux

After Bennington he entered the British America Drama Academy where he performed Shakespeare.  He moved to New York and made a living painting everything from t-shirts to billboards. He also got involved with the Roundabout Theatre and Actor’s Playhouse and this is where things really get interesting. He performed in the revival of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. For what it’s worth, I happened to catch that show in New York. It was only a six week run because many of the cast were working in Hollywood and could only take a pay cut for so long. (Eric Stoltz said in an interview he made $1,000. a week doing the play. He told the New York Times, “Doing something like this is more enriching than doing a film. Ideally, we’d be getting $20 million to do Chekhov and people in silly movies would be getting B scale.”)

It was February of 1997 and Three Sisters was the first show I ever saw on Broadway. (It was also my first trip to NYC—one glorious weekend.) I went to see Three Sisters because it was Chekhov and the cast included Stoltz, Jeanne Tripplehorn, Lili Taylor, Amy Irving, Jerry Stiller and David Strahairn. It also included actors who would become quite famous later; Billy Crudup, Calista Flockhart, and Paul Giamatti. So Justin earned his way on the stage with some talented actors. But it was his friendship with Tripplehorn that would lead him to eventually gaining a writing credit on Rock of Ages.

Tripplehorn was dating Ben Stiller and introduced Justin to Ben beginning a long friendship. And while Justin’s had a long run as an actor (including a part in Stiller’s Zoolander) his first credit as a writer was on Tropic Thunder which Stiller directed. And, of course, that movie had a memorable character named Les Grossman played by Tom Cruise. He then earned a writing credit on Iron Man 2, and today he’ll watch a film he wrote (credited with Chris D’Arienzo and Allen Loeb) fill theaters—all with Jennifer Aniston by his side.

“The media’s always talking about overnight success. There’s no such thing. My friend Calista Flockhart [the star of tv's Ally McBeal] is a good example. She’s been doing plays for years—11 or 12 years. Nothing overnight success about her.”
Justin Theroux
2001 Interview with Sibella Giorello

Sure Justin Theroux probably had a little more coin and connections in his family than the average person, but you’ve got to think there’s a little more than average literary talent in those family genes. And there’s also the training and time to factor into the equation. From acting as a teenager, through college plays, performing Shakespeare in London, and Chekhov on Broadway, to acting in films and Tv shows—there’s more than 25 years of dramatic work that prepared Justin Theroux for this day.

He put in his 10,000 hours (of drama) before becoming a screenwriting rock star.

In getting caught up to Theroux’s recent success, it would be easy for someone to say, “Well, yeah, his uncle is a famous writer,” or “If I had a rich dad….” Which is why I wanted to show the bigger picture. All of this reminds me of a discussion that happened in an acting class I had in L.A. when I was 21 and everyone was talking about Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez getting roles because their dad was Martin Sheen. Visiting casting director Tony Shepherd said, “There are a lot of things that will get your through the door, but you have to stay in the room with your own talent.”

P.S. So does the East-coast raised Theroux have any wisdom for screenwriters living outside L.A.?
“Someone said, ‘Never fly yourself to L.A.  Always let someone else fly you there. ‘ I actually took that advice, and I was in New York a long time. But I ended up having my first ticket bought for me to Los Angeles.”
Justin Theroux
Screenwriting U Interview with Jenna Milly

In otherwords, earn your way to Hollywood. And you might find this helpful from the same interview.

“I think the ability to throw out your own material is really important. Because everyone has an opinion on what you’re going to write. From the studios, to the actors, to the directors, whatever. So you get your sandcastles kicked over a lot, you know? So if you’re going to get your feelings hurt then you should be writing novels—and even then you’ll have an editor who’s going to knock you around. I’m a believer that the more sandcastles you build the better the sandcastles you’ll eventually build.”
Justin Theroux

May we all build better sandcastles.

Update: Before there was Rock of Ages the movie there was Rock of Ages the musical written by Chris D’Arienzo. He graduated from Paw Paw High School about 15 miles from downtown Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’ll see what I can uncover and write about him next week. What’s funny is just a month ago I wrote a post called Kalamafrickin’zoo’s Talent Pool and didn’t have D’Arienzo on that list.

Related Posts:
The Secret to Being a Successful Screenwriter (Seriously)

Thanks for the Plug TomCruise.com (My respone to post on TomCruise.com called Guide for Aspiring Screenwriters Part 1: Story Matters Most When Writing a Screenplay! )

Scott W. Smith

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First Class Film Directors

This morning the Directors Guild of America (DGA) in Los Angeles will have a special dedication of the Great Film Directors First-Class Forever stamps honoring John Ford, Frank Capra, Billy Wilder, and John Houston. And while the selection of directors is no surprise, you might be amazed to learn the artwork was created right here in little ole Cedar Falls, Iowa by artist Gary Kelley.

Kelley’s studio is just two blocks from mine and he’s been a creative lifeline to me ever since I moved from Florida to Iowa in 2003. And I was actually able to be on the ground floor of watching him sketch the initial drawings of the directors. I remember discussing various scenes from the movies represented as he searched for iconic images that would feature each director’s work. Of course, there were copyright and estate issues to consider and the final decisions are the above scenes from The Searchers (Ford), The Maltese Falcon (Huston), It Happened One Night (Capra), and Some Like it Hot (Wilder).

Kelley told me the only real glitch in the project was he originally painted the boat from Huston’s The African Queen, which was rejected because of rights. He felt the boat worked better not only because it was a horizontal image, but because it’s a more recognizable icon. The final artwork was done with pastel on paper and each image is approximately 8” X10″.

I asked Kelley if he had a favorite movie from the stamps and he said, “The Searchers, I saw that with my dad, and it was in Technicolor—that was pretty cool stuff.  But I also remember getting pretty excited when Marilyn Monroe came on the screen in Some Like it Hot.”

So today,  DGA President Taylor Hackford, AFI President Emeritus Jean Picker Firstenberg, film critic Richard Schickel, Anjelica Houston, Allegra Houston, Frank Capra III and representatives from the U.S. Postal Service will be on hand to honor these four great directors.

One person who won’t be there is the artist Gary Kelley. I asked him why he wasn’t going and he said, “My invitation must have gotten lost in cyberspace.” Now you know that painters and screenwriters have something in common.

You can buy the stamps at your local post office or at USPS online.

P.S. Kelley, a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa, is perhaps best known for his large murals found in Barnes & Nobel Bookstores across the country. He is also one of the most medaled artists in the Society of Illustrators. Gary and I had a meeting yesterday with artistic director/conductor Jason Weinberger for a multi-media project we will all be doing with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony in 2013, much like the Kelley’s Blues concert that we did back in 2010.

Related Posts:

John Ford’s Secret Formula?
Filmmaking Quote #27 (Frank Capra)
Screenwriitng Quote of the Day #38 (John Houston)
Billy Wilder on Writing

Scott W. Smith

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The Writer from Oklahoma (Tracy Letts)

“Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County is what [Eugene] O’Neil would be writing in 2007.”
Jeremy McCarther
New York magazine

“Killer Joe has a strong moral code, bent as it is.”
Screenwriter/Playwright Tracey Letts (on a character he created)

A couple of years ago I drove to Chicago just to see a play Tracy Letts had written. It’s a five-hour drive from Cedar Falls, Iowa to downtown Chicago, but that’s how bad I wanted to see the play August: Osage County. It wasn’t as if I had discovered a hidden jewel, by that time the Letts had already won the Pulitzer Prize and August:Osage County had won the Tony Award for best play.

Though Letts isn’t the most widely known writers outside of theatrical circles, I think that will change this year when they begin to shoot the film version August: Osage Country starring Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts. And also the release this year of the film Killer Joe starring Matthew McConaughey. (The film was actually completed last year but has wrestled with an NC-17 rating. It now has a release date of July 27, 2012)

Letts’s journey is an interesting one and fits in well with what this blog is all about. He was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1964 and raised in Durant, Oklahoma where he graduated from high school. After a short stint in Dallas doing the actor/waiter thing he moved to Chicago where he got plugged into the Steppenwolf Theatre Company for more than a decade.

Chicago is where his plays August: Osage County and Killer Joe premiered. The first work of Letts’s to be produced as a movie was the 2006 film Bug, for which Letts wrote the screenplay based on his 1996 play. There is definitely a regional flavor to Letts’s work. Both August: Osage County and Bug are set in Oklahoma and his play The Man from Nebraska is about, well, a man from Lincoln, Nebraska.

There is also a flavor of the classic playwrights Eugene O’Neil and Tennessee Williams in his work. Houses full of dysfunctional people fighting moral, spiritual and personal battles—as well as a few drugs and alcohol issues. Here’s how Letts unpacks some origins of the gritty movie that’s advertised on the Killer Joe website as, “A totally twisted deep-fried Texas redneck trailer park murder story.”

“I lived in Dallas for a couple of years in the mid ’80s, Dallas cops were in the news round then, busting heads. I had a tough time in Dallas, that hard-scrabble existence, it can be a really hard city for the have-nots. I lived in a trailer myself when I was a kid, for a while, and I was familiar with certain aspects of the lifestyle. The original story this was based on was about a Florida family, but I found it transposed to Dallas quite easily. I’m a big fan of Jim Thompson, the great alcoholic crime writer from Oklahoma, he wrote ‘The Grifters’ and ‘The Killer Inside Me,’ he was some of the inspiration of this. It seemed to fit with Dallas well, they behaved in a way that I thought people from Dallas could recognize. I think it helps that Matthew’s from Texas, and brings a real authenticity to this.”
Tracy Letts
Indiewire interview with Oliver Lyttelton

P.S. Just found this link to a Steppenwolf article where Letts writes about his inspiration for writing August: Osage County. Which happens to involve “reviewing the biographies of the actors who comprise Steppenwolf, I was struck by the nearly common denominator: place of birth.  From Lincoln, Illinois to Council Bluff, Iowa, from Mankato, Minnesota to my hometown of Tulsa, Oklahoma, the majority of ensemble members are small-town Midwestern people.”

Scott W. Smith

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Spotlight on OKC

Well I never been to heaven
But I’ve been to Oklahoma
Well they tell me I was born there
Never Been to Spain, hit song performed by Three Dog Night
Lyrics by Hoyt Axton

“I call it a little small city that’s booming.”
Rod Meyer
Owner of Deep Fork Grill restaurant in Oklahoma City

Tonight the spotlight shines on Oklahoma City. The Oklahoma City Thunder play their first NBA championship game ever when they host the Miami Heat. And while the pressure is perhaps most on LeBron James, the spotlight is definitely on the city of Oklahoma City like never before in recent history.

I know I don’t follow sports like I used to, but I honestly didn’t know that Oklahoma City had an NBA team until I did a video shoot there last year.  While Oklahoma has never had a MLB or NFL franchise, the Thunder (who transplanted from Seattle) have been in Oklahoma since 2008. And that nickname “OKC”? I don’t recall ever hearing that until the Thunder’s impressive playoff run as they took down the Dallas Mavericks, the LA Lakers and then the San Antonio Spurs. Now, OKC is the new LOL.

Perhaps I’m the last person in America to learn these things, but I think this championship (win or lose) will do to Oklahoma what happened to my hometown Orlando in 1995 when Shaq lead the Magic to their first (and only) NBA championship series.

Orlando had long been in the shadow of not only bigger cities like Atlanta and Miami, but also Tampa and Jacksonville (which both had NFL teams). Orlando had Disney World, which was great, but it had long sought an identity beyond the Magic Kingdom. I grew up in the Orlando area and was there in ’95, and I really believe being in the NBA Finals changed how people perceived Orlando. Less jokes about retirees and banter about humidity. Shaq gave Orlando a facelift. (Of course, he fled after that, and that’s a different story altogether.) Orlando was no longer fantasyland—just a place you flew into— but a real city.

Oklahoma City’s perception to outsiders has long been tied to oil and cowboys, and while a large city, it has never gotten the attention of Dallas or Denver.  But that’s all going to change tonight. (Don’t underestimate the cultural identity a champion team like the Dallas Cowboys or the Denver Broncos brings to a city.) Win or lose, national TV exposure is only going to enhance the revitalization Oklahoma City has been going through for years.

“This incredible group of young men has unified this city and state like never before.”
Oklahoma City Thunder Chairman Clay Bennett after the team defeated San Antonio last week

Tonight Oklahoma City moves out of the cable spotlight into ABC primetime. And tonight someone in Los Angeles will be flipping through the stations and see the score of the Miami—Oklahoma City game and will think, “Huh, I didn’t know Oklahoma City had an NBA team.” And then he’ll be exposed to a vibrant downtown full of construction, people partying in Bricktown, and all the things I saw and photographed when I was there last year field  producing and shooting several Google micro documentaries on behalf of Magnet Media and their Get Your Business Online campaign.

The Oklahoma City Thunder are young and hungry so I wouldn’t bet against them. Of course, I wouldn’t bet against LeBron and the Miami Heat. Good thing I’m not a betting man. But it should be an interesting series. At least the aerial shots will be a refreshing change for the first time in years.

P.S. Hoyt Axton (1938-1999), who wrote the hit song Never Been to Spain (and Joy to the World), actually was born in Duncan, Oklahoma and inducted into the Oklahoma Music Hall of of Fame in 2007. And he also was occasionally an actor and had a roles in the 1990 Frank Darabont directed TV film Buried Alive, the Francis Ford Coppola directed Black Stallone, and was Randall in Gremlins. And his songs where featured on soundtracks for many films including Forrest Gump, Roger & Me, The Big Chill, Thank You for Smoking, Tropic Thunder, Four Christmases, and the under appreciated Heart Like a Wheel.

Talent comes from unlikely places like Duncan, Oklahoma (2012 census population 23,432). Man this is turning into a long P.S., but I can’t stop. Actor/Director Ron Howard was also born in Duncan. But here’s the real mind blower, Duncan is also the birthplace of the Halliburton Corporation where Erle P. Halliburton founded the New Method Oil Well Cementing Company in 1919. Today the Houston based company employs 60,000 people in more than 70 countries. (And, of course, has had its share of press coverage in the past decade.)

Related posts:

Stranger than Fiction—Oklahoma
Screenwriting Quote #8 (S.E. Hinton)

Scott W. Smith

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Postcard #17 (Lake Pepin)

“Lake Pepin ought to be visited by every poet and painter in the land.”
William Cullen Bryant

Last week I spent a couple of days on the Wisconsin side of Lake Pepin, mostly in the villages of Stockholm (founded by immigrants from Karlskoga, Sweden) and Pepin. It’s an area I try to get to at least once a year. It’s especially pretty in the Fall, but this time of the year is nice too and good for sailing. Lake Pepin is actually part of the Mississippi River and I believe the largest lake on the grand river.

The drive along the Wisconsin section of the Great River Road from Maiden Rock south along Lake Pepin is often highly rated on great roads in America to drive. In fact, a recent article in the Huffington Post had the road where I took the above picture voted as the “the most beautiful road trip route”— beating out the Hana Highway in Hawaii, Big Sir in California and the US Route 1 (A1A) in the Florida Keys.

It’s an area of wineries, art galleries and good food. Pepin & Stockholm are also home to the Flyway Film Festival.  Last Thursday I had a casual lunch meeting with Flyway founder Rick Vaicius and got an update on how the festival has grown over the years and plans they have to continue to grow. Submissions are open to this year’s festival which takes place October 18—21, 2012. One of the most unusual things about Flyway is they do not charge a fee to enter. As a screenwriter and/or filmmaker if you feel pickpocketed every time you turn around on your creative journey, you know how refreshing that is.

As writers in Hollywood continue to wonder if the career of being a screenwriter is coming to an end, let me assure you that there are creative seeds popping up all over the world—in unlikey places like Pepin (probably even in Karlskoga, Sweden)— that will bear fruit for years to come.

P.S. Across the Mississippi River from Pepin is Wabasha, Minnesota which you may remember as the setting for the Jack Lemmon/Walter Matthau movie Grumpy Old Men. Check out my post Before Juno There Were Grumpy Old Men to read about “Grumpy” screenwriter Mark Steven Johnson who is from nearby Hastings and Winona.

Related Post:

Little House in the Big Woods
The Next Sundance
Screenwriting from Wisconsin

Scott W. Smith

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Little House in the Big Woods

“In April of 1932, an unlikely literary débutante published her first book…Little House in the Big Woods, was the first volume of an American family saga that has since sold about sixty million copies in thirty-three languages
Judieth Thurman
The New Yorker article Wilder Women 

From Shaft to Little House on the Prairie—that’s how we roll here at Screenwriting from Iowa.

In yesterday’s post I mentioned how Shaft screenwriter Ernest Tidyman didn’t start writing screenplays until he was past the age of forty. Laura Ingalls Wilder actually didn’t start writing novels until she was in her 60s. And though she is most known for the book Little House on the Prairie, her start can be found in the little house in the big woods—in more ways than one.

Little House on the Prairie (which inspired the popular TV show of the same name) was actually her seventh novel, her first being Little House in the Big Woods. And like Little House on the Prairie it was based on her own childhood growing up in the Midwest.

Wilder was actually born in a little house in the big woods. Yesterday I visited the replica cabin that stands about seven miles outside Pepin, Wisconsin where Wilder was born in 1867. Even if you’ve never read Wilder’s books there are a few things you can learn from her as a writer.

The majority of writers do not become household names. So for a female writer born more than a hundred years ago to have enduring success is an accomplishment all by itself. So if you’re a writing in an unlikely place, here’s some inspiration for you.

The little house that I took the above picture of is smaller than some bedrooms I’ve been in. It’s in an area that today, while beautiful, is still a rather remote spot in the United States. As of the 2010 Census, the population of the village of Pepin was 837. Minneapolis is an hour and a half drive today, but was a world away back in Wilder’s day.

Wilder did not have the benefit of a college education, and did all of her writing by hand. (So if you’re looking for excuses that are holding you back by from writing anywhere in the world, Wilder is not a good role model.) Born in a very small house in a remote area far from any big cities, no college education, and no computer or the latest software, and no connections to Hollywood.

Yet here we are almost 150 years after her birth talking about her.

But the best part is that Wilder didn’t starting writing novels until she was in her sixties. And she only did so for the always great reason—she needed the money. She was actually a popular writer of articles and essays for the Missouri Ruralist and had a comfortable life with her farmer husband until the Stock Market Crash of 1928 when she and her family lost all of their investments.

In 1930 she began writing a story on her childhood, and in 1932 Little House in the Big Woods was published. As she continued to write and publish books her financial concerns went away. Though most of her windfall came after she had been married for 50 years. It takes a little time sometimes. She died on her family farm in Mansfield, Missouri in 1957 at the age of 90.

There is some debate on just how much editing Laura Ingalls’ daughter did on her books. Rose Wilder Lane was her oldest daughter and had her own first book published  in 1915, the biography The Story of Art Smith. She is the one who typed Laura Ingalls books and is a said to have been a well paid writer & ghostwriter in her own right in the 1920s. Rose also had publishing connections and is the one who not only inspired her mother, but is believed to helped in collaboration of the Little House stories by aissisting with dramatic pacing and literary structure.

P.S. Is there an Iowa connection here? Of course. Laura lived for a brief time in her childhood in Burr Oak, Iowa, and that is where she learned to read. And many of Rose’s personal papers are held in the Rose Wilder Lane Collection at the Herbert Hoover Library in West Branch, Iowa. (Which, for what it’s worth, is just over 10 miles from where screenwriter Diablo Cody went to college in Iowa City. Call it The Wilder Women Club.)

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriter Ernest R. Tidyman

“He was a complex man who was full of rage and civility, but he also played violin beautifully.”
Chris Clark, fourth wife and widow of screenwriter Ernest R. Tidyman
(Clark also co-wrote the script for Lady Sings the Blues.)

“Words are a licensed weapon and I never pull them out on people who aren’t good adversaries.”
Ernest R. Tidyman

This is how organic writing the blog is; yesterday in a fleeting moment I thought of a scene from High Plaines Drifter. Then I realized I had no idea who wrote that memorable Clint Eastwood film. Checked IMDB and the name Ernest R. Tidyman came up. What an interesting person. In fact, he was an Oscar-winning screenwriter.

Tidyman didn’t become a screenwriter until he was over 40 years old. He was born (1928) and raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Dropped out of school at age 13, began working as a reporter at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland as a teenager, and eventually worked for The New York Times.

“He was a legendary drinker and gambler. Legendary too, because he’d been fired from the newspaper for stealing a wrist watch from a jewelry store where he’d gone to cover a hold-up.”
Joe Eszterhas
(Also a former journalist with The Plain Dealer turned screenwriter)

So how did Tidyman end up a Hollywood screenwriter? He wrote a pulp fiction novel that became according to Michael A. Gonzales, “one of the most popular Black detectives in crime fiction”—he wrote Shaft. Then he wrote the screenplay (credited with John D.F. Black) for Shaft (1971).

Yes—”Hotter than Bond, Cooler than Bullitt”—as the movie poster proclaimed. Yes, a white guy from Cleveland wrote the classic black New York City detective John Shaft—played by Richard Roundtree in the movie. The film that was at the center of the blaxploitation film movement.

“The idea came out of my awareness of both social and literary situations in a changing city. There are winners, survivors and losers in the New York scheme of things. It was time for a black winner, whether he was a private detective or an obstetrician.”
Ernest R. Tidyman

In the article Shafted: On Ernest R. Tidyman and the Making of Shaft, Gonzales mentions that Tidyman was not happy with the film because his character had become politicized. Tidyman went on to write six more Shaft novels. And while the movie was remade in 2000 starring Samuel Jackson as Shaft, the books by Tidyman have been unpublished for years.

Now about that Oscar.

The year 1971 was a big year for Tidyman as his follow-up script for Shaft was The French Connection based on the novel by Robin Moore. The film won a total of five Oscars including best picture, best actor (Gene Hackman), best director (William Friedkin), along with Tidyman’s script.

Tidyman continued to write book, films, and Tv shows until he died in 1984 at age 56. But to place a cap on Tidyman’s career I’d like to mention one last project of his, Guyana Tragedy; The Story of Jim Jones (1980). That is one gripping TV movie, and I’ve never forgotten Powers Booth’s Emmy-winning portrayal of cult leader Jim Jones. Tidyman is single credited on the script based on a book by Charles A. Krause.

Ernest R. Tidyman may not be the most recognized (even remembered) screenwriter in screenwriting circles, but to have written Shaft, The French Connection and High Plaines Drifter (films all released in a just two year window) was one heck of an accomplishment.

P.S. Just found this link to the 44th  Academy Awards in 1972 where Tidyman’s Oscar is handed to him by Tennessee Williams. A mountaintop experience for sure.

Scott W. Smith

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Name that Character? (Tip #59)

“What’s in a name?”
Romeo & Juliet/Shakespeare

“Life ain’t easy for a boy named Sue…”
A Boy Named Sue/Written by Shel Silverstein & make popular by Johnny Cash

To paraphrase the Clint Eastwood character Dirty Harry, “A screenwriter’s gotta know his limitations.”

And one of those limitations is how many characters you can really follow in a screenplay. We’ve all read screenplays where you have to flip back and forth in the script trying to keep track of characters. One antagonist and one protagonist is pretty easy for anyone to follow. Add two or three sub characters and you’ve got a full house.

I’m not talking about people in your story, just the ones you’ve focused on. The ones you’ve circled saying, “pay attention to these people.” Juno—watch her. And it’s hard not to—not just because it’s Ellen Page in the movie version, but because in the script (as well as the movie) Juno is in EVERY SINGLE SCENE. If Juno didn’t have a name that would be odd. But how does a character earn a name in your script? Because by naming a character you are saying, “This person is important in this story.”

I know there is one screenwriting book that says it’s insensitive to call a character “Cop #1″ or “Skinny Teacher,” but you’re not writing a politically correct handbook—you’re writing a screenplay. Be insensitive, be rootless—be like Dirty Harry—and kill off names that are just cluttering the minds of readers.

And just how many is too many names to have in a screenplay? That’s tip #59.

“A reader can absorb about eight names. After that, they’re drowning.”
William M. Akers
Your screenplay Sucks! 
Page 163

And if you want to see how this plays out in real life, here’s the following Twitter exchange that Scott Myers posted a couple of weeks ago between Hollywood script readers:

@amandapendo [Amanda Pendolino]: romcoms are a treat.. it’s easier to remember a 2-person story 

@BittrScrptReadr [The Bitter Script Reader]:  yeah, faced w/a rom-com or a sci-fi epic, I go rom-com every time

@nate_winslow [Nate Winslow]: Contained thrillers, also a breeze in that regard. One location to remember.

@GoIntoTheStory [Scott Myers]: See, right there is what I’m talking about. Prefer rom-coms bec it’s a 2-person story. Easier.

Check out the whole exchange at GITS:The Twitter Conversations—Script Readers (Part 1) & (Part 2)

And speaking of Clint Eastwood, one of the great scenes around a character’s name is in High Plaines Drifter (written by Ernest Tidyman) when he’s asked, “Say, what did you say your name was again?” Eastwood just squints in the way that only Eastwood can (at least that’s how I remember it) and says, “I didn’t.”

P.S. And to be perfectly honest, I didn’t have much of a theory for naming characters until last year when Adam Levenberg read a script of mine and called me out for given a name to a very minor character (who was only in one scene) and then not giving a name to another character who needed one. To read more about what Levenberg found wrong with my script read the post Script Consultant Adam Levenberg.

Related Post: Meet Your First Audience (Tip# 36) —Post on Hollywood script readers.

Scott W. Smith

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The Outsider Advantage

“The fact is, when I wrote Juno—and I think this is part of its charm and appeal—I didn’t know how to write a movie.”
Diablo Cody

If you took all the books on screenwriting and all the blogs on screenwriting—even those from produced screenwriters— and mashed them together you’d get some great lessons and great insights, but you wouldn’t find many great films that they actually wrote.  In fact,  if you take William Goldman’s Adventures in the Screentrade off the table—you wouldn’t even find many good films that they wrote.

It’s not that all those people don’t know what they’re talking about—it’s just there is an obvious disconnect between knowing what makes a script great and writing a great script.

But if you hit the rewind button and go back to Minneapolis circa 2004 and asked a young Diablo Cody what made a great script I’m sure she’d have a opinion or two, but it was something she’d never tried to do. And if she was totally honest her answer would have probably been something like, “I don’t really know.” Keep in mind that Cody went from having never written a screenplay to being an Oscar-winning screenwriter in five years. How is that possible? She took full advantage of being an outsider.

“I had gone to the bookstore, and while I hadn’t bought any books on how to write a screenplay, I’d bought a couple of scripts so I could see how the formatting works. I just needed to know how a Hollywood screenplay looked on the page, which was something I was totally unfamiliar with. I had American Beauty and Ghost World, and interestingly enough, the producers of Ghost World wound up producing Juno. My now-ex-husband convinced me to use our last $200 to buy Final Draft, so I just sat down and started writing a movie. It’s that simple.”
Diablo Cody
2008 Writer’s Digest Interview with Chad Gervich

Simple like Sylvester Stallone writing Rocky, simple like Ben Affleck & Matt Damon writing Good Will Hunting, simple like Frank Darabont writing The Shawshank Redemption. And the reason it was simple (in the way Cody uses the word) was because they were outsiders. They may of had some connections in the film industry, but they were all screenwriting outsiders. All writing scripts on spec. I imagine their expectations where low. Part of the genius of all of those writers was they were in their 20s and early 30s and didn’t fully understand what they were doing. They simply captured the magic.

And, at least as of this writing, none of those writers have ever been able to capture the magic on that same level they did on their first films. And one of the major reasons for that I believe is they went from being out outsiders to being an insiders. Surrounded by expectations and experts full of advice on the right way to do things. (The same could be said of Orson Welles, who directed Citizen Kane at 26 years old.)

In Jonah Lehrer’s great book Imagine, How Creativity Works, he dedicates a whole chapter to The Outsider. And he gives several compelling examples of the outsider advantage of being an outsider and coming up with various breakthroughs and accomplishments.

“The world is full of natural outsiders, except we don’t call them outsiders; we refer to them as young people. The virtue of youth, after all, is that young people don’t know enough to be insiders, cynical with expertise. While such ignorance has all sorts of obvious drawbacks, it also comes with creative advantages, which is why so many fields, from physics to punk rock, have been defined by their most immature members. The young know less, which is why they often invent more.”
Jonah Lehrer
Imagine: How Creativity Works
page 123

The good news if you’re not in your twenties, if you are cynical with expertise, and if you are an insider—there is still hope. Because as Lehrer points out that, “Creativity isn’t a phase of life—it’s a state of mind.”

“The outsider problem affects everyone. Although we live in a world that worships insiders, it turns out that gaining such expertise takes a toll on creativity. To struggle at anything is to become too familiar with it, memorizing details and internalizing flaws. It doesn’t matter whether you’re designing a city park or a shoot-’em-up video game, whether you’re choreographing a ballet or a business conference: you must constantly try to forget what you already know.”
Jonah Lehrer
Imagine: How Creativity Works
page 132

Related posts:
Beatles, Cody, King & 10,000 Hours
The Advantage of Being from ________
Writing “Rocky”
Writing “Good Will Hunting”
Finding Your Voice
The Juno—Iowa Connection (Going back to 2008 when I originally caught this wave.)

Related post: One Benefit of Being Outside Hollywood

Scott W. Smith

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Postcard #16 (Louisville, Kentucky)

Jason Weinberger is the music director/conductor and artistic director of the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Symphony Orchestra (WCFSO) here in Iowa. We’ve worked on a couple of multimedia projects together and when he heard I was going to be shooting a project in Louisville a couple of weeks ago he gave me a short list of restaurants to try and visit. Jason’s a native of Los Angeles and was educated at both Yale and the Peabody Conservatory, on top of having a regular presence in Kentucky as the resident conductor of the Louisville Orchestra—so all that to say that I trust his recommendations.

I wasn’t able to hit all the places on his list, but enough to give me a fine taste of Louisville. Everything from Chicken & Waffles at The Silver Dollar,  Oyster Fritters in Champagne Batter at the Blind Pig, sweet plantains at the Havana Rumba, and Scrambled Eggs with Gruyère Cheese at the Blue Dog Bakery & Cafe—all in the same general area of Butchertown/Clifton/Frankfort Ave.

But the most surreal stop was downtown at Proof on Main which is connected to the 21 c Museum Hotel. I didn’t stay, eat or have a drink there, I just wandered around amazed to find something I didn’t expect to see in Kentucky—including their iconic Red Penguins. The Red Penguin sculptures are mascots or ambassadors to the hotel and were created by Italian artist Omar Rond and can be found throughout the boutique hotel.

P.S. Jonah Lehrer points out in his book Imagine: How Creativity Works, when you wander off the farm (metaphorically speaking) you begin to see something as simple as a field of corn differently:

“Instead of standing on a farm, you’re now in a crowded city street dense with taxis and pedestrians. The plant will no longer be a plant; instead, your vast neural network will pump out all sorts of associations. You’ll think about high-fructose corn syrup, obesity, and the Farm Bill; you’ll contemplate ethanol and Iowa caucuses, those corn mazes for kids at state fairs, and the deliciousness of succotash made with bacon and lima beams. the noun is now a web of tangents, a vast loon of connections.

And this is why travel is so helpful: When you escape from the place you spend most of your time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas previously suppressed. You start thinking about obscure possibilities—corn can fuel cars!—that never would have occurred to you if you’d stayed back on the farm.” 

I love Lehrer’s book and listened to the book on CD for the second time on this most recent trip and last week purchased the book for a third dose. Tomorrow I’ll actually connect—via Lehrer’s outsider theory—how Diablo Cody could write the Juno script in Minneapolis and walk away with an Oscar. (And touch on why it’s hard to be an insider and still be innovative.)

Scott W. Smith

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