Postcard #31 (Shingle Creek)

Several years ago I added the section of postcards to this blog as a shorthand way of keeping this blog rolling when things get super jammed. And they mix it up a little, but sometimes I find that even in a simple photo I can find a tie in to one of the themes of this blog.

Today’s theme I’m tapping into is source. Go back on any writer you admire and see if you can find a source of their inspiration. Often there are a mix of sources that made them become a writer such as the hometown they were raised in (as in Rod Serling’s case), but sometimes it’s singular—perhaps an event, a situation or a teacher.

Today’s photo is just a simple unretouched iPhone photo I took at sunrise Wednesday morning on the last day of a four day shoot I did at the Rosen Shingle Creek in Orlando, Florida. Shingle Creek is believed to be the northern most waterway of the Everglades. It’s hard to believe that though I was raised in Central Florida I had never heard of Shingle Creek until this shoot popped up. It’s also hard to believe this creek—this swamp area— is just about a mile away from International Drive—which is one of the most touristy areas of the country—if not the world.

Related Post: Rod Serling’s Binghamton Roots

Scott W. Smith 

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“Big” Emotions

“Big is one of those rare films that will tickle the funny bone and touch the heart.”
Movie critic Peter Travers (then with People magazine)

“(As a screenwriter) I’m in that emotional place where there is room for idealism. In Big (1988) and Dave (1993) there is a similar question being asked: Is innocence redemptive? And I want people to come away with renewed optimism.”
Four-time Oscar nominated producer/screenwriter Gary Ross (Seabiscuit)
1993 LA Times article 

The following exchange between screenwriters Anne Spielberg and Gary Ross can be seen on the second disc of the expanded edition of Big. The 1988 film brought the screenwriters an Oscar nomination, as well as landing Tom Hanks his first Academy Award nomination.

Gary: If there was a punch line on top of the situation where you could feel the writer—we’d yank it out.  If you were organically laughing at the situation, then than was great, that’s where the comedy should come from. If we went through pages and pages (in reading the script for Big) when you weren’t laughing, that was okay.

Anne: And that’s what gave the poignancy to it—that you’re always on that edge of being a kid on his own, and he can’t go home again. There’s always that little moment of sadness just right around the corner.

Gary: And under a lot of the movie there is a lot of sadness. A loss of childhood is a wonderful and sad thing, and I think we respected both of those emotions. And I think one of the things we did that was good was when the story wasn’t funny to us, but was true to the story—that was okay.

An interesting sidenote to the casting of big; Tom Hanks originally turned now the role in Big, and Anne and Gary (and director Penny Marshall) were working with Robert De Niro to play the role of the boy who wakes up a man. Imagine how different that film would be.

And way back in 1959 a Twilight Zone episode written by Rod Serling called Walking Distance first aired. It’s the story of an ad man who mysteriously returns to his childhood town—and nothing has changed. Rod said it was one of his most personal episodes and the theme of returning to one’s youth was never far from his thoughts. You can read that script at rodserling.com. The small boy in the clip below from that episode was played by Ron Howard.

(Yes, Hollywood is one big family–Ron’s dad, Rance Howard, is an actor, Anne’s brother is Steven, and Gary’s dad, Arthur A. Ross, was a screenwriter —deal with it. Write a script as good as Big and you’ll be in the family as well. One more reason Diablo Cody should be your screenwriting hero—a total Hollywood outsider…until she had a hit film and won a Oscar.)

I think the Big commentary by Anne and Gary is the single best commentary I’ve ever heard on a movie from the perspective of a screenwriter, because it is the only one I know that has the original recordings of the creative process as they developed the story right out of the gate.

Related posts:

It Takes Guts to be a Screenwriter (Gary Ross quote)

Rod Serling’s Binghamton Roots

Writing “Seabiscuit”

The Juno—Iowa Connection

Scott W. Smith

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Aaron Sorkin on Theme, Intention & Obstacles

One of the great things about listening and reading about writers talking about the writing process is you see how everyone’s approach is different. Some write in the morning, some at night, some write quickly in bursts and others methodically take their time. Rod Serling (The Twilight Zone) was very successful writing from theme, but fellow Syracuse University grad Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network, A Few Good Men) has a little different perspective on theme:

“When you’re talking about things like theme you have to be really careful because that’s not what’s going to make the car go. Okay? It’s what’s going to be what makes the car be good and give you a good ride. But that’s not what’s going to make the car go—at least not for me. You know, everybody writes different. But for me I have to stick—really closely, like it’s a life raft— to intention and obstacles. Just the basics of somebody wants something, something is standing in their way of getting it. Make sure you have that cemented in place. Themes will then become apparent to you and you can hang a lantern on the ones you like. Bring them into relief, you can get rid of the ones that aren’t doing you any good and you can paint the car and make it look really nice. But the car isn’t going to turn over unless you see to the basics of drama, and drama is intention and obstacles, somebody wants something, something is standing in their way of getting it.”
Aaron Sorkin
Creative Screenwriting podcast interview by Jeff Goldsmith
December 24, 2010

Related Post: Screenwriting Via Index Cards (Touches on the writing process of Aaron Sorkin.)

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Ten for 10.10.10

Now that it’s almost been three years since I started the Screenwriting from Iowa blog and have written over 700 posts, I thought October 10, 2010 (10/10/10) was a fitting day to pick a mix of ten of my favorite, most viewed, and  most helpful posts that you may have missed depending when you started reading this blog or how often you check your RSS feed.

One word of warning is the first year of posts were generally longer than they are today. It was not uncommon that they weighed in between 1,000 & 2,000 words. I’ve added a quote to give you a feel of each post and hope you can take the time to read one or two links. Thanks to everyone for frequenting this blog. Watching the numbers increase really does help keep me plugging away daily. (Hope to get it in book ready shape by the end of the year.)

1) Where Do Ideas Come From? (A+B=C)
“The way to have a great idea is to have lots of ideas.”
Linus Pauling

2) Can Screenwriting Be Taught?
“I wrote screenplays as a way to get into production. I wrote six or seven before I sold one.”
Lawrence Kasden
screenwriter, Raiders of the Lost Ark

3) Everything I Learned in Film School (tip #1)
“If real estate’s mantra is location, location, location, then for screenwriters it’s conflict, conflict, conflict.”

4) Starting Your Screenplay (tip #6)
“Who is your hero, what does he want, and what stands in his way?”
Paddy Chayefsky, Three-time Oscar-winning screenwriter

5) Screenwriting & Structure (tip #5)
“Structure is the most important element in the screenplay. It is the force that holds everything together.”
Syd Field

6) Screenwriting & the Little Fat Girl in Ohio

“One day some little fat girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart.”
Francis Ford Coppola

7) Rod Serling’s Ohio Epiphany
“I don’t think that calling something commercial makes it stink.”
Rod Serling

8) The Serious Side of “Gilligan’s Island”
“(Gilligan’s Island) is about, people learning to live together.”

9) Re-Writing Screenwriter John August
“If you write a script anywhere and send it to an agent in Chicago or Detroit or Cleveland or wherever…and if that agent sends it to an agent in Hollywood who loves it…you can sell your script.”
Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas

10) How Much Do Screenwriters Make?
“Most screenwriters are unemployed, chronically unemployed.”
Screenwriter Tom Lazarus (Stigmata)

10a—bonus) Juno Has Another Baby (Emmy)
“Don’t ever agonize about the hordes of other writers who are ostensibly your competition.  No one else is capable of doing what you do.”
Oscar-winning screenwriter Diablo Cody (Juno)

Scott W. Smith

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Serling Vs. Coppola

I don’t know the context in which Francis Ford Coppola said the below quote, but it offers a contrast to the post where I mentioned that Rod Serling said that be began writing with a theme in mind.

“Sometimes you never really quite understand what the movie’s about until you go into a matinée screening at the Oriental Theater on a Thursday afternoon.”
Francis Ford Coppola
As quoted in Lew Hunter’s Screenwriting 434

Coppola has had an amazing career, but I can’t help but wonder if not quite understanding what kind of movie you’re making is part of the hit and misses he’s had in his career. And perhaps why people are little confused by some of his films. But keep in mind that even the ambiguous Apocalypse Now, Coppola was nominated for an Oscar for his script.

It also seems to me from Coppola’s interviews and film commentaries that it is clear that on his three Oscar-winning scripts (Patton, The Godfather, The Godfather II) that he was aware of themes of the movies he was writing.

Scott W. Smith

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Rod Serling’s Ohio Epiphany

“I don’t think that calling something commercial makes it stink.”
Rod Serling

“A legend doesn’t die, just because the man dies.”
The Twilight Zone episode A Game of Pool

Rod Serling was born in Syracuse, New York and joined the U.S. Army the day after he graduated from Binghamton Central High School where he had worked on the school newspaper. During World War II he fought in the Philippines where he routinely saw the casualties of war that would shape his life and writing. He was injured himself , received the Purple Heart, and was discharged in 1946.

Afterwards he attended Anitoch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio where he got involved in theater and writing radio dramas. He received his BA degree in 1950 and moved to Cincinnati to work in advertising writing for radio and television. In less than ten years he created his signature show, The Twilight Zone.

In 1959 Rod Serling was interviewed on TV by Mike Wallace and told about how in 1951, at a diner in Cincinnati, he decided to leave the security of his advertising job in Ohio to write freelance for television programs.

“The immediate motive at the time, the prodding thing that pushed me in to it, was that I had been writing at the time for a Cincinnati television station as a staff writer—which is a particularly dreamless occupation, composed of doing commercials. Even making up testimonial letters. As I recall there was a liquid drug on the market at the time that could cure everything from arthritis to a fractured pelvis and I actually had to write testimonial letters, and on that particular day I’d just had it. And though I had been freelancing concurrent with the staff job, the best year I’d ever had (freelance-wise)  I think we netted $700 which is hardly even grocery money, and that one night we just decided to sink or swim and go into it.”
Rod Serling

Serling swam. He would have been 27-28 years old at the time and six months after that decision he moved to Connecticut and then New York. Serling kept building his career in TV and one of the first programs to show his genius was Requiem for a Heavyweight for the Playhouse 90 TV series in 1956.  But his greatest success came when he launched the The Twilight Zone on CBS on October 2, 1959.

Despite its enduring popularity, The Twilight Zone didn’t draw large audiences, nor was it a financial success for CBS when it first aired. The show was cancelled in 1964. Serling whose normal workload was 12-14 hour a days, seven days a week was burned out on TV. He wrote well more than half of the 156 episodes, and grew tired of having to fight the corporate sponsors and the censorship imposed on him.

Not thinking The Twilight Zone would have much of a future he sold his rights to the show for $500,000. which would have cost him and his estate tens of millions of dollars. He turned to teaching in his later years and died at the young age of 50.

P.S. A couple of days ago I said that at one time Johnny Depp, Tom Cruise and George Clooney all lived in Kentucky at the same time. Well, just over the Ohio River at one time Rod Serling and Steven Spielberg would have lived in Ohio at the same time. In fact, I’m not sure how long Spielberg lived in Ohio, but he was born in Cincinnati in 1946 so he could have even been in the same city—heck, at the same diner—as Serling when he had his epiphany. Maybe not a big deal, unless you believe in another dimension, a dimension of both shadow and substance, a dimension only found…in The Twilight Zone.

Scott W. Smith

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Writers: Don’t Skip Jury Duty

“Most people , I believe, initially shun jury duty. The summons always seems to come at the least opportune time, and one might go kicking and screaming.”
David Mamet
Introduction, Twelve Angry Men, Penguin Books

Some writers begin with character, some with a situation, some from theme, but today we’ll look at a writer who once started with setting. A setting most try to avoid—the courtroom.

The first time I stepped foot in a courtroom I was 18 years old and fighting a traffic ticket. It was intimidating, and stimulating to the senses. And it was made all the sweeter in I presented my case, showed some photographs, and won. I was relieved and the police officer even gave me a pat on the back when it was over. That was a good day and left a positive impression of the legal process. My next time in court was a wake-up call.

I was a 22-year-old film school student when I was given a ticket in North Hollywood for what I believed was a mistake of perception on the police officer’s part. I took pictures once again and was confident that the judge would understand the situation and rule in my favor. And he might have, except I didn’t factor in one thing—that the police officer would lie. I was stunned. The judge believed his story, I lost, and the cop called me a punk as we walked out of the building. My hands shook as I drove back to my apartment in Burbank, constantly looking in my rearview mirror.

After that day I started to listen to those who complained of police improprieties. Yes, Virginia, there really are good cops and bad cops. (And  good doctors, bad doctors, good money managers, bad money managers…) Sooner or later you realize we all live outside the garden. Once your eyes are opened, it doesn’t take much to realize the depth of depravity in the world.

But fortunately we live in a country where in general the law and the courts seek the truth. The water may get a little muddy, and it may not always be found, but truth and justice are the goal. And that leads us to Reginald Rose and what led him to write the classic story 12 Angry Men as a successful teleplay (for which Rose won an Emmy), play, and Oscar-nominated screenplay and movie. (In 2005 , the play also won an Tony for “Best Revival of a Play.”)

Rose began writing plays as a teenager and sold his first teleplay when he was 30. Four years later he wrote 12 Angry Men as a one hour teleplay for Studio One and its popularity grew into the play and the 1957 film starring Henry Fonda directed by Sidney Lumet. (A great study for independent filmmakers because the bulk of the movie takes place in one room.) In 1997, another TV version was made starring George C. Scott, Jack Lemmon and Edward James Olmos and would win a collection of Emmy, DGA, SAG, and Golden Globe awards.

And what was the impetus for the story that would go on to win so many awards and be performed so much? A court case where Reginald Rose was part of the jury.

”It was such an impressive, solemn setting in a great big wood-paneled courtroom, with a silver-haired judge. It knocked me out. I was overwhelmed. I was on a jury for a manslaughter case, and we got into this terrific, furious, eight-hour argument in the jury room. I was writing one-hour dramas for ‘Studio One’ then and I thought, wow, what a setting for a drama.”
Reginald Rose
1997 interview with The Daily News.

I don’t know if Rose looked at his jury duty as a pain or a civic duty but I do know that it was that it resulted in a story that was the pinnacle of his career. And since today is Memorial Day let me say that since Rose was a veteran I’d like to think that he, to borrow Mamet’s phrase, saw himself an “essential component of American Democracy.”

Rose enlisted in the Army in 1942 after Pearl Harbor and served in the Philippines and Japan as a First Lieutenant until 1946.

He was nominated for a total of six Emmys winning three and belongs to mentioned with his TV contemporaries Paddy Chayefsky and Rod Serling.

So the next time you get that dreaded jury duty request, remember Reginald Rose and 12 Angry Men.

Twelve Angry Men (Play published by Penguin Books with David Mamet intro)

12 Angry Men (50th Anniversary DVD starring Henry Fonda)

Twelve Angry Men (L.A. Theatre Works CD)

Twelve Angry Men (DVD of original 1954 Studio One production)

Scott W. Smith

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Writing “Seabiscuit”

“The future has arrived!”
Charles Howard (Jeff Bridges)
Seabiscuit

“But I’m not; I’m not obsolete!”
The Obsolete Man written by Rod Serling
The Twlight Zone

Thinking about my recent posts that touched on the theme of the Old West changing, represented in Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid (1970) as well as The Grey Fox (1982), made me think about another movie that begins in those years of transition—Seabiscuit (2003).

Back in 1996 magazine journalist Laura Hillenbrand stumbled upon an article that would change her life.

“That day I found just a tidbit of information, a few passages about how Charles Howard was a modern automobile man and Tom Smith was a plains cowboy. Something about that tugged at me, and I kept turning it over in my head. I thought it was fascinating that a man who would find his true greatness by teaming up with a frontier horseman who had been rendered obsolete by the automobile. I started poking around in more documents and doing a few interviews, and a spectacular story tumbled out of the research.”
Laura Hillenbrand

Her research became an article, then a best-selling book, and then a wonderful film based on Seabiscuit and the people that were touched by that horse. One of the side benefits of research is what you can stumble upon along the road you thought you were headed down. Serendipity happens in writing, in traveling, and in life.

Speaking of life, the movie was produced and released in wake of the September 11, 2001. A film about struggle was timely then, and it’s timely in 2010. A public speaker once told me that if you talk about pain and suffering, you will always have an audience. This is how the book starts:

“In the winter of 1937, America was in the seventh year of the most catastrophic decade in its history. The economy had come crashing down, and millions upon millions of people had been torn loose from their jobs, their savings, their homes.”

It was the task of screenwriter and director Gary Ross to take Hillenbrand’s research and best-selling book and somehow tell the story in two hours.

“Seabiscuit is about these broken characters coming together, how they helped heal one another. It’s about people redeeming each other, getting past their own barriers and isolation to live again, and to re-engage in life. That’s what I found so amazing about it, was the struggles these three guys had out of despair. As the country was engaging in a similar struggle. That’s what really drew me to it.”
Gary Ross
DVD Talk Interview

Themes about hardship and the hope for change and transformation will never go out of style. Perhaps that is not only the history of American cinema, but of the history of civilization.

Related Posts: Seabiscuit Revisited in 2008
Writing Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote of the Day #32 (Mad Men)

Though I do appreciate great TV programs like The Twlight Zone, Northern Exposure, Sienfeld, and LOST I’ve never been a big TV watcher. And since I don’t get HBO, CNN, or AMC unless I’m at a hotel, I’m sure I miss some good stuff. But there are only so many hours in a day. 

But just like in the fifties when writers like Paddy Chayefsky, Horton Foote, and Rod Serling helped made for a TV a golden era, but many believe this is a new golden era for television as its attracting some of the best dramatic writers with David E. Kelley, Alan Ball and Aaron Sorkin leading the way. (Certainly if you are looking for a large audience TV is the way to go.)

I had been hearing so many good things about the show Mad Men that I rented the first season DVD last week and watched the pilot.  I guess the fact that it’s won three Golden Globes and six Emmys, including an Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series finally got my attention. But I’m kind of jaded on TV from watching too many hours of characters sit around and spill out exposition. Most of the time I’d rather watch a classic movie one more time.

All that to say I was blown away by Mad Men. At least that first script by Matthew Weiner is brilliant. The lighting and sets were beautiful and the talented crew of actors were believable–which is not easy since the first program takes place at a New York City ad agency in 1960. There are layers of depth and subtext in the writing that is hard to find anywhere today.

“Advertising is based on one thing…happiness. And do you know what happiness is? Happiness is the smell of a new car. It’s freedom from fear. It’s a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you’re doing…it’s okay.  You are okay.”

                                     Mad Men
                                     Season 1/ Program 1
                                     Don Draper ( Jon Hamm) pitching a cigarette company

So I wanted to find out a little about Weiner and discovered that he worked on The Spranos. He wrote the script for Mad Men seven years before it was finally produced and even with his cnnection to HBO could not get them to commit.  Weiner has said to many reporters that part of his inspiration for the series was based on the movies The Apartment and  and How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying. And there is also where key piece to Weiner’s mindset. 

“There’s no one working in television or theater today who’s not influenced by… the fountainhead of this whole thing, which is Death of a Salesman. That’s it. And you never have to see it, just read the play and you’re like ‘This is it. This is everything. This is the truth about human behavior.’ And it’s earlier than the show but it’s everything that I am interested in. And anybody who I know that I admire, and all the people I admire were influenced by it. Paddy Cheyefsky and Rod Serling – they’re all part of that.”
                                                   Matt Weiner
                                                   Mad Men Q&A Kathy Lyford
                                                   Variety

The show is a look back to how we got where we are as a culture, while at the same time probing who we are as human beings today.  That’s hard to capture on the page in the first place , much less find a studio that will produce it and convince an audience to watch. Weiner is a great example of someone with vision, talent and persistence who shows you how an 18 year journey can lead to overnight success.
  

Scott W. Smith

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President Obama, The Man & Iowa Seeds

Let’s put political views and rhetoric aside for the day and just step back and look at this moment.

Just a few minutes ago Barack Obama became the first African-America president in the history of the United States. 

To put this in perspective when Obama was born in 1961 the Voters Rights Acts that allowed blacks to vote was still four years away from being signed by President Johnson. And when Obama stood before that sea of people in Washington D.C. today he stood on the shoulders of those who went before him. There was Jesse Owens who was shunned by Hitler, there was Jackie Robinson who was shunned by a chunk of the nation, and there was Martin Luther King Jr who was stunned by a bullet.

If we just look at the last 47 years from a racial perspective since Obama’s birth the change while not necessarily swift has been sweeping in scope. Sure there are struggles. There always will be because we are human. But this day is a symbolic mark for the United States.

As far as Screenwriting from Iowa? How about screenwriting and Iowa? Two things come to mind. 

Screenwriting: At least in fiction, the first black American president (as far as I know) actually happened back in 1964 in the novel The Man by Irving Wallace which became a film in 1972  starring James Earl Jones as President of the United States with the screenplay written by Rod Serling. The pen has always had power to lead the way which is why Plato wrote a few thousand years ago that poets should be banned as a danger to society.

Iowa: I ended up seeing 12 presidential candidates in this last election and the first one I saw speak was Obama in Oelwein (pop. 6,692), Iowa in the summer of ’07. That’s where I took the above photo. I ended up being hired to videotape him in Waterloo, Iowa and happened to be at the Iowa State Fair when we crossed paths once again. I was always interested to watch the people and how they responded to him. But even as his momentum grew it was still a surprise that he won the Iowa caucus.

And the chances are good that without that win in Iowa Obama wouldn’t have been sworn in as President in Washington today. Depending on your political view you can credit or blame Iowa. 

“What you started here in Iowa has swept the nation.” Barack Obama 

“I don’t think we’ll ever quite capture the feeling of that night in Iowa when we won. This is hallowed ground for us.” David Axerod
(Huh, this is Field of Dreams territory and sometimes confused with heaven. ) 

Just one more example of big things having their seeds planted in small places. And let’s all hope that Obama does a great job as President.

And lastly, I’m not a 100% sure but I think those large lights you saw in the wide shot as Obama spoke at the inauguration were Musco lights that are made here in Iowa. They are also not strangers to film shoots where large areas need lit with portable lights.

 

Words & Photo Copyright 2009 Scott W. Smith

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