Screenwriting Quote of the Day #88 (Ray Bradbury Pt. 3)

“I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it.”
                               Ray Bradbury
                               On writing Fahrenheit 451 

It would be a fitting end to writing about Ray Bradbury by talking about the remake of Fahrenheit 451. But the only news I know is old news in that Tom Hank pulled out of the project a while back and director Frank Darabont (The Shawshank Redemption) is still trying to get the movie done.

In an interview with MTV Darabont said, “The time has never been better for Fahrenheit 451. I think the message is something we need to hear. Anybody who believes authority should be questioned needs this movie. There’s a reason that novel has been in print for over half a century. It’s one of the most vital antiauthoritarian stories ever written. It also happens to be a really wildly galloping yarn. This would be on the bigger end of the scale for me.”

I hope Darabont gets that film made some day. But since we can’t end there I thought I’d end my posts on Bradbury by talking about the beginning. Bradbury is yet one more writer from the greater Chicago area. He was born in 1920 just a little north of downtown Chicago in Waukegan, Illinois.

Though he spent some of his childhood in Arizona much of his early inspiration came from Waukegan where he lived until his family moved to Los Angeles when he was thirteen. But by that time Bradbury already had a love for books and a strong desire to be a writer. And Bradbury is still alive in L.A. and of this writing is 88 years old. He has a website that is simply www.raybradbury.com which is where I pulled the extended quote of the day from.

“I was fully in love with writing from grade school on and in high school I began to write things about the ravine in my hometown. In FAREWELL SUMMER the ravine is the center of everything; the old people and the young live on opposite sides of this ravine that divides the town. 

Many years since DANDELION WINE began, which was the beginning of the genesis of FAREWELL SUMMER, I had begun to collect essays and short stories about front porches and summer nights and Fourth of Julys and all the celebrations that led me into writing. Looking back I realize that I never had a day when I was depressed or suffered melancholia; the reason being that I discovered that I was alive and loved the gift and wanted to celebrate it in my story. 

At one point Gourmet Magazine offered me a chance to write an article about helping my grandfather make dandelion wine when I was three in our cellar in Waukegan, Illinois. When I went back to visit my home town I wandered into the shop of the town barber, discovering that he had been there since I was a child and he remembered being my grandmother’s boarder and recalled my coming up from the cellar to gather dandelions to make wine with my grandfather.
                                       Ray Bradbury 
                                       In His Words 

 

Related posts — and one of my most popular ones: Screenwriting da Chicago Way

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote of the Day #87 (Ray Bradbury Pt. 2)

Before Ray Bradbury wrote his masterpiece Fahrenheit 451, and before his over 500 other short stories, and before the TV shows and movies based on his writings, he put in his 10,000 hours of learning how to write.

“I wrote at least a thousand words a day every day from the age of twelve on. For years Poe was looking over one shoulder, while Wells, Burroughs, and just about every writer in Astounding and Weird Tales looked over the other.

I loved them, and they smothered me. I hadn’t learned how to look away and in the process look at myself but at what went on behind my face.

It was only when I began to discover the treats and ticks that came with word associations that I began to find some true way through the minefields of imitation. I finally figured out that if you are going to step on a  live mine, make it your own. Be blown up, as it were, by your own delights and despairs.

I began to put down brief notes and descriptions of loves and hates. All during my twentieth and twenty-first years, I circled around summer noons and October nights, sensing that there somewhere in the bright and dark seasons must be something that was really me.

I finally found it one afternoon when I was twenty-two years old. I wrote the title The Lake on the first page of a story that finished itself two hours later. Two hours after that I was sitting at my typewriter out on a porch in the sun, with tears running off the tip of my nose, and the hair on my neck standing up.”
Ray Bradbury
                                                Zen in the Art of Writing 

Bradbury sold The Lake to Weird Tales for $20. And his original voice was off to the races.  Do the math all it took for Ray Bradbury to find his voice was 2 hours of writing —plus the 1,000 words a day for 10 years. 

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote of the Day #86 (Ray Bradbury)

“Zest. Gusto. How rarely one hears these words used. How rarely do we see people living, or for that matter, creating by them. Yet if I were asked to name the most important items in a writer’s make-up, the things that shape his material and rush him along the road to where he we wants to go, I could only warn him to look to his zest, see to his gusto.

You have your list of favorite writers; I have mine. Dickens, Twain, Wolfe, Peacock, Shaw, Moliere, Jonson, Wycherley, Sam Johnson. Poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, Pope. Painters; El Greco, Tintoretto. Musicians: Mozart, Haydn, Ravel, Johann Strauss (!). Think of all these names and you think of big or little, but nonetheless important, zest, appetites, hungers. Think of Shakespeare and Melville and you think of thunder, lightning, wind.”
Ray Bradbury
Zen in the Art of Writing 

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James T. Kirk, Iowa & the Future

“Every town has festivals of some kind, not too many of them deal with something happening over 200 years from now.”
                                                            Phil Richman
                                                            Riverside, Iowa resident  

 

I didn’t know until yesterday that the future of not only the United States, or even the entire Earth, but the whole safety of the Universe is in the hands of a man born in Riverside, Iowa –Captain James T. Kirk (and his crew, of course.)

Forget that the recent J.J. Abrams version of Star Trek has Kirk being born in space and raised in Iowa. That’s all fiction. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry in his book The Making of Star Trek acknowledged that James Tiberius Kirk was in fact born in Iowa. Serious scholars(okay, a few people) have agreed on Riverside, Iowa as the place Kirk will be born in the future.

They even have a rock in Riverside saying so, which, of course, settles the matter.

Riverside is an actual town in Iowa about 20 miles south of Iowa City or about an hour and a half from where I type this in Cedar Falls. It’s just off 218 which is known as the Avenue of the Saints because the highway basically connects St. Louis, MO and St. Saul, MN.

There is a staggering amount of creative literary activity from that stretch of land (which includes The Iowa Writer’s Workshop, Grant Wood and Mark Twain) so it’s safe to say that there is something mystical about this region and it’s not really a surprise that the future captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise is from a small town in Iowa.

If you’re a Star Trek fan you have a good reason to go to Riverside, Iowa next month for the 2009 TREKFEST June 26-29,2009. Walter Koening (Checkov), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) and Geroege Takei (Sulu) are scheduled to be there. And the Grand Marshal this year will be Steve Miller who in 1984 first encouraged Riverside to declare it was where Captain Kirk had been born. City council later wrote Roddenberry asking for permission to make that a declaration and he agreed.

Last night I did go to see the new Star Trek movie and there are a couple scenes in Iowa. Iowa is a happening place in the future. Not that it’s not now, of course.

“Live long and prosper.”

 

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote of the Day #85 (Michael Schiffer)

“If you take the occasional seminar and come away with one great tip you didn’t know before, that’s a good thing. But I’ve come to believe you only learn on your own by doing it, by trying to tell stories that work. When you write 14-20 screenplays, you begin to internalize a sense of timing and movement of the story, structure, and dialogue. It’s not somebody else’s rules that matter, it’s your own. If you do it by trial and error from the inside out, your work will find its own unique storytelling voice.”
Michael Schiffer
screenwriter, Crimson Tide, Lean on Me
Quoted in The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters
by Karl Iglesias
page 32

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote of the Day #84 (Lt. Colonel Jack Lewis)

“I’ve been told that I’m not smart enough to realize I can’t tilt windmills and win, but tenacity has a life and a way all its own, I’ve found. If one approach to a problem doesn’t work, figure out how to go around it”
Jack Lewis

Since today is Memorial Day I wanted to find a quote from a screenwriter with a military background and landed on Lt. Colonel Jack Lewis, USMCR (Ret) in part because he just happens to be a honored veteran and was born right here in Iowa.

Before he joined the Marines and served in World War II Lewis was a writer, selling his first short story when he was 14 years-old for five dollars. He has gone on to write an estimated 6,000 magazine articles and work on more than ten films as a screenwriter.

He was born in 1924 and joined the Marines at age 18. According to Wikipedia after the War he earned a degree in Jouralism  from the University of Iowa and later returned to active duty during the Korean War where he earned a Bronze Star as Combat Correspondent and Photographer.

In addition to writing screenplays (A Yank in Viet Nam), he wrote the novel Tell it to the Marines, and his memoirs on Hollywood, White Horse, Black Hat —A Quarter Century on Hollywood’s Poverty Row. In total, he’s had more than 30 books published including Mojave. Lewis is still writing (under the name C. Jack Lewis) and living in a beach house in Hawaii. Just this month (May 09) at age 84 he had an article in Leatherneck (Magazine of the Marines.)

“Two of my characters in my mystery series are probably somewhat autobiographical.  Charlie Cougar is a Mescalero Apache who has been a stuntman, a drunk and a rodeo rider.  I’m a quarter Mescalero and I’ve been all of those things.  Sam Light is a newspaper man who has been a Marine, a reporter, a drunk, an editor and a hobo.  I’ve been all of those things, too.  But at least, I’m writing about things of which I have a basic knowledge!”
Jack Lewis

Update: From the odd connection section I found out that when Lewis and his parents moved from Florida from Iowa when he was two, he lived in Winter Park. Winter Park, Florida is where I lived for 13 years before moving to Iowa. (Still checking to find out where he spent time in Iowa beside college in Iowa City.)

Update June 10: Found out today that Jack died on May 24 of this year. Just one day before I posted this article. I also found out from someone who worked with Jack for many years that Jack spent much of his youth in North English, Iowa which is a small town southeast of Iowa City. Here’s Jack’s obituary from the L.A. Times.

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote of the Day #83 (Stephen Susco)

“(USC Film School) made me realize that this wasn’t something I could take lightly; if I was serious about it, I’d have to get my butt in gear.”
Stephen Susco
screenwriter, The Grudge, Red

Years ago I heard it said that there were plenty of screenwriters in L.A. who had never had a movie produced but were living in homes with swimming pools and driving nice cars. Meaning that even though a screenwriter hadn’t been produced he or she could still earn a decent living. I’m sure today that is still true (though perhaps to a lesser extent).

Up until yesterday the record number that I had ever heard about of feature scripts written by a screenwriter before they were produced was 18 by Geoff Rodkey who finally broke through with Daddy Day Care. Then I heard the Creative Screenwriting’s podcast where Jeff Goldsmith mentioned that Stephen Susco wrote 25 movies before he had his first one produced (The Grudge).

The Grudge was produced by Sam Reimi and starred Sarah Michelle Gellar and had an $100 million domestic gross at the box office. An interesting side note is The Grudge is based on the Japanese film Ju-On: The Grudge written and directed by Takashi Shimizu though that version only made $3 million worldwide.

Perhaps the most amazing thing about Susco is not that he wrote 25 screenplays before being produced but that he wrote 25 screenplays in less than a decade. He wrote his first feature screenplay in ’96, graduated from USC film school in ’99 and The Grudge was released in ’04. But he had also been writing since he was a kid growing up in Pennsylvania far from the film industry. He also had made some short films including one that won an award in California which helped open the door at USC.

So Susco wrote his pages and paid his dues. Susco’s directorial debut Red premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival.

Everybody’s got their own crazy story about how they got started, and for me, I had written a lot by that point. Also, when I got to USC, I got a really good recommendation from someone. What the school’s going to be able to do for you is somewhat limited, so you should try to get an internship at the studios and you can learn a lot, so I ended up getting an internship at Warner Brothers at a production company over there.

My job was basically to get coffee and water for people in the morning and alphabetize the script library . . . but I read all of them, and listened to people talking on the phone and started to figure out how the business actually worked, things you couldn’t really get in school. I kept writing and second semester I switched and interned at Silver Pictures: Joel Silver’s company, which was good for me cause I grew up on those films; I loved his films. And it was also a totally different kind of shop.

The first place I worked was sort of a smaller company, Paul Weinstein’s company, and they did a lot of sort of independent films and going over to Joel Silver, it was suddenly you’re in a middle of an episode of Entourage but there was a guy who worked there who had aspirations to be a producer also, and he had found out that I had written a couple of scripts and he said you know I have this project that needs re-writes, and I have this director involved. Can’t pay you, but if you’re interested that’d be great. I ended up re-writing their script for them, and that’s the script that ended up at New Line cinema a number months later and led me to get my first gig. It was kind of a circuitousness path- I didn’t have an agent at the time.
Stephen Susco
Interview at filmmaker.com

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting Quote of the Day #82 (Blake Snyder)

Blake Snyder, screenwriter and author of the popular screenwriting book Save the Cat, was recently Interviewed by Demetria Dixon and this was one of her questions followed by Blake’s answer:

You’ve talked about the “touched by the divine” moment . Would you expand on that?

Blake: I think we write stories and listen to stories looking for the “touched by the divine” moment. All stories are about transformation, and that change comes with a crushing truth about ourselves. That “all is lost” beat forces us to look at the “shard of glass” that’s been buried deep in us, and that this story pulls out and forces us to look at, but then what? Is there nowhere else to turn when human solution falls short? However we “dig, deep down” to find the next step in our evolution, we must! And whether it’s a “happy ending” or a “sad ending” we like stories about enlightenment, that moment where we get it, and either use what we’ve learned to win, or find a moment before we die that tells us we are not alone in the universe, we are part of it. The ironic thing about all this is: you find these moments in the Oscar winning dramas, as well as silly rom-coms[romantic comedies], and high concept poster movies! A good story must address this no matter what type of film… it’s why we tell stories and need to hear them.

Scott W. Smith

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Screenwriting from Space (Star Trek)

No one would confuse me with a Trekkie. In fact, I’ve never seen a Star Trek movie. And chances are good that whenever the TV show was on when I was a kid that I was outside playing ball. But when a movie has an opening weekend of $75 million and has made over $200 million worldwide since its release two weeks ago you kinda take notice. Thought I find out about the writers and discovered the team of Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman. 

It turns out that they have been writing together since just after graduating from high school. And they are red hot Hollywood writers with writing credits on Transformers, Mission: Impossible III, and many episodes of the TV program Alias. Just in their mid-30s now it’s safe to assume that you’ll be seeing their name on the big screen for perhaps as long as screen are still big.

So how do these two writers work together? I found a Q&A that Alex Billington did with them online at Firstshowing.net :

 

Alex: Tying back to the beginning, how do you step into the process of collaborating? What I mean is, does one of you write the dialogue, the other write the story, or is there an equal share between what is contributed to the script from both of you? Does one of you finish the first draft and the next take a look at it? How do you work together? How does your chemistry work between you two when working on a script?

Orci: Altogether different, but Alex and I right now are talking to you from across the table that we’ve been sitting at for the last five years. We sit across from each other, each with our own computer and our scripts are our conversations. We contribute equally, to figuring out what the story is and then actually writing down what is said and how the scenes are blocked, etc.

Kurtzman: It goes back all the way to the way we started writing together, which was pre-internet when we were at college. Bob and I would get on the phone and we would put the phone between our ear and our shoulders for like six hours and just write line for line together, staring at screens half way across the country from each other. That sort of conversation just became what we knew. We didn’t really know any other way. It wasn’t like “All right. You take this scene and that scene and then we’ll divide it up and we’ll come back together.” It was just kind of a conversational line-for-line development that continues to be the way we write now.

 

Related Post: James T. Kirk, Iowa and the Future

 

Scott W. Smith

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Idols, Iowa and Entertainment Tonight

While Josh looks in this photo like an American Idol contestant I don’t even know if he can sing. He’s been helping me out at River Run Productions the last couple months doing freelance editing. He’s a student at UNI here in Cedar Falls but heads out to L.A. today to work as an intern for Entertainment Tonight over the summer.

So next week when those of you in Southern California see him driving to or from CBS studios in his Mini Cooper you’ll think he’s just an another L.A. hipster, but it’s really another talented kid from Iowa finding his way to California to work in the biz.

So how does a kid from Iowa end up working on the set of Entertainment Tonight? In part because of another kid from Iowa has paved the way. ET co-anchor  Mark Steines was born and raised in Dubuque, Iowa and attended UNI on a football scholarship and earned a B.A. in radio & TV. He got his start in broadcasting here at KWWL before eventually joining ET in 1995. So he’s opened the door for others to follow in his tracks. 

And speaking of American Idol, I finally sat down last night and watched  my first (almost) entire program of the popular show. I jumped on the bandwagon just in time. It didn’t feel like 2009, but more like 1979 as they featured a who’s who of people I listened to in high school back in the day; Rod Stewart, KISS, Lionel Richie, Queen, Carlos Santana  and even a cameo with Steve Martin on the banjo. 

My favorite quote of the night was when runner-up 27-year old Adam Lambert said he had been working on his singing dream since he was 10. That’s a 17 year journey. I imagine that winner Kris Allen’s story is probably the same. There probably won’t be too many screenwriting blogs talking about American Idol, but I’d like to point out, that like top screenwriters there’s a lot of talent and hard work to make it to that level. Congrats to both Adam and Kris. 

I enjoyed the commercial during American Idol with Iowa-native Ashton Kutcher promoting the Nikon D90. That’s the camera I’m shooting with these days including the above photo. (Along with a couple SB-800s flashes for those of you technically minded.)

And I might as well send out congrats to another Iowa native (and Olympic goldmedist) Shawn Johnson who won the Dancing with the Stars competition on Tuesday night. And I really should mention that The Official Shawn Johnson Website is powered by my buddies at Spin-U-Tech who I share office space with right here in beautiful downtown Cedar Falls, Iowa.

So you see, Iowans are not really out of the entertainment loop. And as I like to say about Iowa itself — “It’s conveniently located between New York and L.A.”

 

photo & text copyright 2009 Scott W. Smith

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