Before Sunshine and Star Wars (Michael Arndt’s Breakthrough)

(Opening scene of the Little Miss Sunshine script (PDF dated 10.9.03) written by Michael Arndt.)

“I didn’t really expect that the script [Little Miss Sunshine] was going anywhere. I mean, I was hoping to get an agent out of it but I didn’t bother to register it just because I didn’t think anyone was going to see it. And then I had a friend of mine who was represented by the Endeavor Agency [now WME] and that was sort of my one hope. She read it and liked it and said, ‘Can I give this to my agent?’ so I said, ‘Yes, please do.’ And like six weeks went by and I thought no one had read it and it had falling through the cracks. And I was really unhappy because I’d spent a whole year writing it and I thought I’d have to go back and get a day job again. It was a Saturday afternoon and I got a message on my machine saying, ‘We read your script, we really liked it.’ And I called them on Monday morning and basically they said, ‘We think we can do something with this.’ And I still have those agents today. They basically saved my life. I said it at the Writer’s Guild Awards, the thing that’s standing between me being up here and me being in my basement was this agent who read my script.”
Screenwriter Michael Arndt  (Little Miss Sunshine, Toy Story 3)
2007 talk at Cody Books (at the 33:31 mark of the FORA.tv video)

This single post/Arndt excerpt—sums up everything I’ve been writing about on this blog for the past five years. Here’s a sweeping overview of Michael Arndt’s career path:

—Graduated from NYU Film School
—Read 1,000 scripts as a script reader of which only “three or four” were turned into good films
—Wrote 10 scripts before breakthrough where he sold one
—Wrote first draft of Little Miss Sunshine in three days, but took a year—full time— to do rewrites
—Was fired off Little Miss Sunshine project—then rehired a few weeks later
—Won an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine
—Wrote Toy Story 3, Hunger Games: Chasing Fire, and most recently hired to write Star Wars Episode VII

P.S. To register your film script—which is a good idea— contact the WGA East  or the WGA West.

P.P.S. I finally set up a Facebook page under “Screenwriting from Iowa & Other Unlikely Places” so you can track me down there where I’ll link to posts from the past you may not have read as well as share links from other blogs and websites. (If you decide to “like” make sure it says “Screenwriting from Iowa & Other Unlikely Places.”)

Related Posts:
Screenwriting the Pixar Way (Part 2)
Insanely Great Endings
How to Become a Successful Screenwriter (Tip #41)
Beatles, Cody, King & 10,000 Hours 

 

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

The Serious Side of “Gilligan’s Island”

“Everybody agreed (Gilligan’s Island) was a terrible show and it’s still running every night everywhere.”
Sherwood Schwartz
Creator, Gilligan’s Island

“I wanted to do a show about democracy, in its basic form. Seven people who have to learn to live together. I couldn’t do that with a job because you can get fired. Where could I put people where they could not get away from each other? That’s what started that show. The only place I could think of was an island, a deserted island, where a group of people were for some reason stranded there.”
Shewood Schwartz

Sherwood Schwartz is not as common a name as Gilligan, the Skipper, or Ginger, but he did create one of the most loved, ridiculed and longest running shows on television—Gilligan’s Island. He also created The Brady Bunch. I just came across an interview Schwartz did with L.Wayne Hicks at TV Party.com that provides some interesting insights into Schwartz’s career.

Schwartz graduated from NYU with the goal of going to med school.  But in the 30s in New York being Jewish was a hindrance. He was advised to change his last name to Black and put down on his application that he was a Unitarian. That concept didn’t sit to well with Schwartz;

“I said, ‘Look, I’m Jewish. I’m not ashamed of that. My name is Schwartz and I’m not ashamed of that. I’m not going to be changing anything to get into medical school.’ So as a result I didn’t get into medical school.”

Instead Schwartz moved to California to earn a master’s degree in biological sciences. So how did he go from that to Gilligan’s Island? After he got his master’s he still couldn’t get into med school. He had a brother who was a head writer for Bob Hope’s radio show and wrote some sample jokes and ended up getting hired for a five year period until he was drafted.

His time in the military would be a fruitful time creatively as he got to work on the Armed Forces Radio Service shows with, “about everybody you ever heard of, and probably some people you never heard of but who were famous stars at that time. Because the Army had access to all stars and they all did it for nothing, so you’d do shows with anybody and everybody.”

When he got out of the service he wanted to get away from variety shows and move toward situational comedy and wrote for the radio programs Ozzie and Harriet and I Married Joan. But then he wanted his own show and created Gilligan’s Island which was rejected time after time. He said his book, Inside Gilligans’s Island, is about the struggle to get Gilligan’s Island on the air. But remember, like any good protagonist, Sherwood was used to dealing with adversity.

In the TV Party interview Schwartz was asked; What kept you going? Why didn’t you just give up?

“I thought I had a great idea. And it’s still a great idea. It’s people. Here’s a serious show. It’s serious in that Arabs and Jews have to learn to live together for they’re stuck together. North Koreans and South Koreans, they have to learn. If you don’t learn, you’ll all die. So there’s this philosophic basis — this is not an afterthought, this is in the show. When the show first came on the air I got with regularity bachelor’s degree, master’s degree thesis from people in the theatrical area explaining what’s the basis for Gilligan’s Island. Like I didn’t know. It was carefully thought out, these seven people. That took me like a year to figure out who should be on the island. And it was all with a view towards the respect that people have to learn for each other because nobody is the same as anybody else. When would a billionaire sit down and have lunch with Gilligan, except if he had to? The same is true of a movie star and a professor. There’s miles between them, but when they’re stuck in the same place they have to learn to live together. That’s what the show is about, people learning to live together.”
Sherwood Schwartz

So in the case of Gilligan’s Island,  I’m going to put Schwartz down for writing from theme. (As opposed to starting with an interesting cast of characters or a shipwreck. His beginning place was a show about democracy, and how seven people “learn to live together.”)

Schwartz won an Emmy for Outstanding Writing Achievement in Comedy as one of the writers on The Red Skelton Hour. Born in 1916, he’s still alive and getting fan mail. The Archive of American Television has a video interview they did with Schwartz in 1997. Schwartz has said that if he was making Gilligan’s Island today he would have a multi-ethnic cast.

P.S. And in case you haven’t heard, there is a Gilligan’s Island script in the works being written by Brad Copeland (Arrested Development, Wild Hogs). You can find many humorous casting suggestions at various websites. One report had Schwartz pulling for Michael Cera (Juno) as Gilligan and Beyonce as Ginger.

Related posts:
How to Create a TV Cult Classic
The Weather Started Getting Rough…

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Screenwriting Quote #128 (Eric Guggenheim)

That’s it, Eric Guggenheim is the final straw. Is it me or are screenwriter’s names getting longer? Today I’m officially change one of the categories on this blog from “Screenwriting Quote of the Day” to simply “Screenwriting Quote #___.” The last writer I quoted was Mark D. Rosenthal and the post heading just looked too long.

So let it be said, so let it be done.

Wonder what took me so long to edit that down. It’s not like I’m paid by the word like my first writing gig at the Sanford Herald. I think it was 10 cents a word. But, heck, I was nineteen and thrilled to being paid anything to write. (Wish I was making 10 cents a word to write this blog.)

Anyway, back to Eric Guggenheim. Guggenheim sold his first script at age 23 just after he graduated from NYU before going on to write the script for Miracle (on the 1980 US Hockey team).  In an interview he did with Debra Eckerling he was asked, “What separates a good sports movie from a bad one?”

Guggenhiem: If all you have is that big game, you’re lost. The film has to be about something else. Take Seabiscuit for example. It’s a story about loss and healing that just happens to be set against the backdrop of horseracing. Jeff Bridges’ character lost his son, Tobey Maguire’s character lost his family. Chris Cooper’s character lost his way of life. Working with the horse and each other helped to ease those losses.

Since I’ll go on record as Seabiscuit being my favorite movie of the last decade (and most watched), I never get tired of talking about that movie. (And am always surprised by how many people haven’t seen the film.) Sports film, horseracing, big Hollywood film—I get why some people would not be attracted to the film, but if you haven’t seen it give it a try. It really is a well-crafted film that is enjoyable to watch on many levels.

Is your favorite sports film about more than the big game? I know Rocky & Hoosiers are both about broken characters looking for redemption.

And by the way, Debra Eckeling writes for Storylink and has the website Write On Online (which is full of Q&A with writers). And you can follow her on Twitter @writeononline.

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Director Kate Whoriskey

Until last Saturday afternoon I was unfamiliar with the name Kate Whoriskey. By the time the afternoon turned to evening I was sure that everyone would eventually become familiar with the name Kate Whoriskey. Whoriskey directed Lynn Nottage’s  Pulitzer Prize-winning play Ruined which just finished its run in New York. She’s been called “one of the most admired directors in the American theatre today.”

Whoriskey comes with solid credentials with an ungraduate degree from NYU and an MFA from the American Repertory Theater at Harvard (A.R.T.). After graduating from A.R.T. in 1998 she soon directed Ibsen’s The Master Builder. She’s directed plays in in Louisville, Utah, Alaska, Chicago as well as various theaters in California and New York. 

She recently has been appointed as the artistic director of the Intiman Theater in Seattle beginning in 2011. She has said that one of the reason to move from New York to Seattle is to escape commercial pressures of the New York theater scene as well as for more aesthetic freedom. (Maybe I should start another blog—”Playwriting from Iowa…or wherever you live outside New York.”

Whorisky’s role was not simply directing Ruined but helping Nottage in her research including traveling with her to Uganda to interview women who had been raped and abused in the Congo. It was an experience that had a profound effect on Whoriskey and she later told NPR:

“They were all beautifully dressed, these 15 women, so colorful and beautiful. And then we heard these stories. And the stories were devastating, and to hear them back to back. … I didn’t actually recognize that rape had such physical consequences. I always thought of the psychological, but not the physical consequences. It was hard to hear, over and over, how ruined these woman’s bodies were.” 
                                 
To watch a short video with Kate Whoriskey and Lynn Nottage visit Charlie Rose “A conversation about the play Ruined.“

 

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Screenwriting Quote of the Day #101 (Joel Hopkins)

This week I watch Last Chance Harvey on DVD and really enjoyed it and wondered who wrote the script that attracted the acting talents of Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson. Turns out it was Joel Hopkins who also directed the film.

Though I know little of his life story, what I do know shows the difficulties of this business. Hopkins was born in London in 1970 and attended NYU where his student film Jorge won NYU’s Wasserman Award which provided him with funds to make his first feature film in 2001, Jump Tomorrow. In 2002 he was named the Most Promising Newcomer by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

So just a few years ago Hopkins was an award winning filmmaker from NYU with a feature film that was well received at the Sundance Film Festival. Many filmmakers would sell their souls to be in that position. So why did it take Hopkins another seven years before he released another film?

“Quite often the second one is sometimes harder than the first…For whatever reason, I’d been attached to films that haven’t happened, as a director. I’ve had scripts I’ve written that have almost happened, but you make your first feature and you just assume the next one will be easier, but it’s kind of not, unless you have an absolute blow-out success and someone will write a check for pretty much whatever you want to do. And it’s not the case. You kind of have to start from scratch really.”
                                        Joel Hopkins
                                       ComingSoon.net interview with Edward Douglas 

 

Last Chance Harvey is not a great film, but it is well written and has some wonderful moments in it and it gives two fine actors a chance to do something you don’t see enough of these days—a chance to act. I hope it’s not another seven years before Hopkins makes another film.

Read Full Post »