The Benefits of Using Friends Versus Actors in the Initial Table Reading of Your Script

“I didn’t know I knew how to make a movie until I was doing it.”
—Celine Song
The Hollywood Reporter

Before Celine Song’s Oscar nomination for her Past Lives screenplay, she’s had an interesting journey. Born in South Korea, raised in Canada, and got her MFA in playwriting from Columbia University in New York City. She then spent a decade doing off-Broadway plays including Endlings which unfortunately debuted with New York Theater Workshop in March 2020 just days before New York theaters began shutting down because of the pandemic. But as the saying goes, every ending is a new start.

Here’s a quote from Song that mixes her background in theater and filmmaking that I hope you find helpful. Especially if you live in an area where there are not a lot trained actors.

”Theater is just all table reads. Theater is just reading after reading. And I actually have trouble seeing what I have written, either a play or a screenplay, unless I’ve heard it out loud in a little room full of my friends. . . . How good the performance is in the reading is not helpful. In fact, I really don’t personally ever invite actors to the reading of my first draft. Because actors can make the script sound a lot better than it is. And we love actors and reply on them so much, but I think sometimes what happens is the actors are also auditioning for the role when they’re reading it, and that’s undo pressure on the script. So I think the performance part of it is not necessarily valuable for a script, because what you need from that reading is objectivity. What you need from that reading is the way that story and the writing itself is hitting the first very small audience. I usually invite fellow writers or people who are not in the industry, but are able to read on site. . . . You just want to see the way the script is hitting them live, because that’s where you’re going to learn if the script is working.”
—Oscar nominated writer/director Celine Song (Past Lives)
Scriptnotes podcast (#630) interview with John August

Here‘s the trailer to Past Lives which Song received a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination (and the film also earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination).

Related article: What Is a Table Read?

Scott W. Smith is the author of Screenwriting with Brass Knuckles and runs the Filmmaking With Brass Knuckles YouTube channel.

Read Full Post »

Death of a Salesman in Iran

“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.”
Mad Men creator & 9-time Primetime Emmy winner Matthew Weiner

“Arthur Miller’s Death Of A Salesman was like a mirror to the story I had written.”
Asgahar Farhadi on The Salesman
Empire Q&A

Iranian filmmaker Asgahar Farhadi wrote and directed The Salesman which is up for an Oscar tonight. (The film under its original tile, Forushande, won Best Screenplay at the Cannes Film Festival last year. A film he wrote and directed (A Speparation) won an Best Foreign Language Oscar Film back in 2012. Also in 2012, he was named on the Time 100:The List by Time magazine.

In an interview with the Film Experience he talks about his starting point as a screenwriter:

Q. When you’re first starting a screenplay,  do you start with character studies, or a germ of a story and extrapolate from there?

Ashar Faradi: It never begins with a character. It never begins with a theme or the plot. I never start by saying ‘There’s this important thing I want to say and so know I have to look for a story for it!’  For me it always starts with a spark that leads to a succcinct story. For instance in A Separation the image I began with was a man bathing his elderly father. Little by little I expanded it and it became a story. And the story dictated to me how the characters would be. I am never able to have a character before the story because it’s the turbulent circumstances of these stories that reveal the characters. Once I’ve written ten pages of the story I reread it and I ask myself “What is this story talking about?” Prior to that I don’t really know what the subject or theme are.  For instance with The Salesman, once I’d written I realized the story was about humiliation and privacy. In the continuation of my writing I strive to create a harmony within the themes.

P.S. I’ve said this year that I’d like to do more posts about screenwriting/filmmaking outside the United States so if you have some suggests send them my way. Ideally, they’d be films where there is a decent about written about the filmmakers. I love Q&As.

Related Post:
Arthur Miller on Writing
Volcanic Emotions & Arthur Miller
Screenwriting Quote #175 Arthur Miller
What Would Miller Do?

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Born to write ‘Hidden Figures’…and working hard for the opportunity

“We were actually writing the screenplay at the same time as Margot [Lee Shetterly], the author, was writing the book – all we had was the book proposal. A few years ago, the producers were looking for a writer, and they read my script on Agatha Christie, actually, and they sent me the book proposal – having no idea that I had grown up near Cape Canaveral in Florida, that my grandmother had worked at NASA, and that my grandfather and I had worked at NASA.

“So I got it, and called the producer ‘Please, I have to be a part of this, I was born to write’, or something equally cheesy, and the producer probably rolled her eyes and thought ‘Oh, those Hollywood writers will say anything.’ But when I told her my background – that I’d studied math a lot in college and so on – that was it, I was hired. ”
Oscar nominated screenwriter Allison Schroeder (Hidden Figures)  
Alex Moreland Interview

Note: Schroeder did her undergraduate work in economics at Stanford and earned an MFA in film at USC. Check out Juggling paid work and spec scripts at JohnAugust.com to read a first hand account of what Schroeder’s life was like just a few years ago—“Before my big break, I worked, and worked hard as a PA, an assistant, and writer-for-free.”

P.S. Schroeder graduated from Melbourne High School, here on the Space Coast of Florida, in 1997 and said in a Florida Today interview,  “Mrs. Steady was my English teacher. She was always an extreme advocate for my writing. She really pushed me to go out and see the world. She urged me at 18, it’s OK, fly across the country. Go experience something new and have an adventure. It was one of the best decisions I ever made.”

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

The Diablo Cody—Damien Chazelle Connection

‘Whiplash’ is astounding. Believe the hype. My heart was still pounding 10 minutes after the credits rolled.”
Diablo Cody
November 26, 2014 Tweet by @diablocody

Damien Chazelle has a few things in common with Diabo Cody. Both are screenwriter/directors, both have cool names with the initials D.C., and both were 29-years-old when they received their first Oscar nominations for solo credited screenplays with single world titles. (She for Juno and he for Whiplash).

A film critic after interviewing Cody said she was ‘wicked smart,” and Chazelle graduated from Harvard (and his father—a Yale graduate— is a professor a Princeton). We’ll know in a couple of weeks if Chazelle walks away with an Oscar like Cody did seven years ago.

But there is one more similarity that I’d like to point out—they both had a long creative history before their breakthrough Hollywood success. Cody said she’d written everyday (short stories, poems, etc.) since she was 12-years-old, and Chazelle had even an earlier start by making films when he was elementary school age.

“I always wanted to make movies. Basically, there’s nothing else I ever wanted to do. So it just became a matter early on of figuring out how I was gonna do that. You and I were talking last night about some of my early masterpieces with my dad’s shitty camcorder, just making little movies with friends in my house…. I was too young to know how to actually operate the camera, so I would just stage stuff and have my dad shoot it. My dad got sick of that really quickly. He never really liked it to begin with, and he started messing up the shots and at a certain point I realized, as a lot of actors actually often do, that I’d be better off getting behind the camera. So, I was in fourth or fifth grade when I started actually getting behind the camera.”
Damien Chazelle
Issue Magazine interview with Whiplash actor Miles Teller

P.S. While in college Chazelle spent two years making his first feature film Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench.

Related posts:
Beatles, Cody, King & 10,000 Hours
Screenwriter’s Work Ethic
Stephen J. Cannell’s Work Ethic
Screenwriting Quote #87 (Ray Bradbury)
Bob DeRosa’s ‘Shortcuts’
Differentiate Yourself

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Off-Screen Quote #28 (Robin Williams)

“In Hollywood people are nice to you just in the first week after the [Academy Award] ceremony. Then they are like, ‘Oh, you just won an Oscar, right?’ Three weeks after the big party people are already thinking about the next year’s Oscars. Life goes on. Winning an Oscar is an honor, but, between you and me, it does not makes things easier.”
Oscar-winner Robin Williams (Good Will Hunting)
1998 Interview in Veja magazine with Ruben Edwald Filho via Forbes

Related Post:
The Breaking of Peter Bogdanovich —”Orson [Welles] had this line: ‘The terrible thing about LA is that you sit down when you’re 25 and when you stand up you’re 62.’ He was not wrong.” Director Peter Bogdanovich (The Last Picture Show)

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

The End of the Rope Club (Oscars ’14)

“I would never write about someone who was not at the end of his rope.”
Stanley Elkin

I’ve always been fond of the above quote by Elkin and I thought I’d add some movies that I know are not only about characters at the end of their ropes, but movies that as of last night are movies connected with at least one Oscar win :

12 Years a Slave 

Dallas Buyers Club 

Blue Jasmine   

Gravity

Her

Congrats to all of the winners at last night’s Academy Awards.

Related posts:
’12 Years a Slave’
The 20 Year Journey of Craig Borten—Dallas Buyers Club
Screenwriter Melisa Wallack —Dallas Buyers Club
Unconscious Writing (Tip #82) —Blue Jasmine
Picking Movie Titles —Gravity
Back to the Future with ‘Her’

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Traumas, Survival, Oscars & the Super Bowl

“Anxiety, nightmares and a nervous breakdown, there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming.”
Jasmine (Cate Blachett) in Blue Jasmine
Written by Woody Allen
Nominated for 3 Oscars

“The art of survival is a story that never ends. ”
Irving Rosenfeld (Christian Bale) in American Hustle
Written by Eric Warren Singer, David O. Russell
Nominated for 10 Oscars

“I don’t want to survive. I want to live.”
Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in 12 Years a Slave
Written by John Ridley
Nominated for 9 Oscars

I was looking for an Oscar-nominated song this year to add an exclamation to the above quotes and decided to settle for a now formerly nominated Oscar song. The song Alone But Not Alone was disqualified a couple of days ago by the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Science—but if you read related backlash articles in the LA Times, Deadline, and The Hollywood Reporter  on the song’s historic rejection you’ll know it’s a survivor.

The indie film hasn’t even been released and the song seems to have a life of its own. The producers of the Alone Yet Not Alone movie have to look at the controversy and be thinking—like Bill Murray in Scrooged— “You can’t buy this kind of publicity!”

The perfect Hollywood ending would be during the Super Bowl half-time show tomorrow that Bruno Mars and the Red Hot Chili Peppers were joined by quadriplegic Joni Eareckson Tada (carried on stage, of course, by Tim Tebow) as they all sing Alone But Not Alone. The crowd joins in like a version of We Are the World. Cut to close up of Payton Manning crying just before completing his own personal neck injury comeback by winning the game’s MVP. Followed by world peace.

P.S. Gravity, Captain Philips, and Dallas Buyers Club add at least 22 more survival-related movies to this year’s Oscar nominations.

Update: 2/1/14: “I owe quite a debt to Capt. Richard Phillips, who survived something I know would have killed me.” Screenwriter Billy Ray accepting the WGA award for writing Captain Philips.

Related posts:

What’s at Stake? (Tip #9)
Goal. Stake. Urgency. (Tip #60)
“Unbroken” One great true story of survival that will be released as a movie this year.

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

David O. Russell on Characters & Theme

“I always look for amazing characters who I find are fascinating, charming, flawed, romantic and in trouble. Those are the key elements I look for. And they have to have a very specific world they’re in, as in The Fighter and Silver Linings Playbook. They’re a sort of community and they’re having to reinvent themselves. So they’re in trouble of some kind, but their world also has some enchantment in it that they love. There’s love and passion and compassion in it. And then there must be a sizable theme, and in [American Hustle] it’s not just about conning people, but reinvention.
Oscar-winning writer/director David O. Russell
Post magazine Interview with Iain Blair/ January 2014

P.S. American Hustle tied Gravity for the most Oscar nominations (10) and shows the important of execution. I can’t imagine too many screenwriters pitching a film based on the ’70s scandal Abscam getting a request for the script. Now, David O. Russell wanting to do a film on Abscam—that’s an easier sell.  By the way, Oscar-nominated Best Picture Nebraska, would be a hard pitch as well. No matter how you dressed it up it’s still a story about a son who drives his elderly dad from Montana to Omaha. But say that Oscar-winner Alexander Payne wants to make that film and it’s an easier sell to investors and audiences.  Execution trumps concept in those cases. Though it still took Nebraska 10 years to get made after Bob Nelson’s script was first optioned. Here’s how that script got early traction:

“I was working at a Seattle show called The Eyes of Nye. Producer Julie Thompson came up. I had written a screenplay to try and get a TV job. Julie got the script to Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger, who have a company called Bona Fide Productions.  They decided to send it to Alexander [Payne], not with the intention to direct it but just to produce it and raise money. I was very fortunate, very lucky, and it doesn’t happen a lot. The one take-away is that even though I was in Seattle, I was still working in the business.”
Oscar-nominated screenwriter Bob Nelson
Indiewire Interview with Meredith Alloway

Especially if you live outside of LA you have to be creative in finding find alternative ways of getting people excited about your screenplay. And while not the norm, Nelson—and Diablo Cody— show that you can not only capture the magic while living in Seattle or Minnespolis, but that it can even lead to an Oscar trip.  In fact, there are film people living in LA that say you have to live in LA to be taken seriously yet will never see the critical success of Nelson or Cody.

Related posts:
Broken Wings and Silver Linings
Screenwriting Quote #177 (David O. Russell)
Screenwriting from Nebraska
The 20 Year Journey of Craig Borten The Dallas Buyers Club took two decades to make it to theaters,  but joins American Hustle and Nebraska in the Oscar race for Best Picture.
Writing from Theme (tip#20)
Jailbait, Rejection & Screenwriter Mark Boal’s Start Another Oscar-winning screenwriter (The Hurt Locker) who was living outside of LA when his journalist writing opened doors.
Screenwriting Quote #145 (Mike Rich) Rich (The Rookie) launched his screenwriting from Portland by being awarded a Nicholl Fellowship.

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Picking Movie Titles

“My top ten tips for tilting your film. 1. The shorter the better…”
Chris Jones (Co-author of The Guerilla Filmmakers Handbook)
Top Ten Tips For tilting Your Movie

“A good title should be like a good metaphor: It should intrigue without being too baffling or two obvious.”
Novelist/essayist Walker Percy (The Moviegoer)

There’s no “rule” that says movie titles have to be short, but it’s a pretty good proven principle to follow.

I noticed this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees followed a trend I began to see clearly back in 1998 with the release of AFI’s 100 Years…100 Movies list. The vast majority of great movies titles are three words or less.

The original AFI list sits right about 75% with titles with three words or less. (Citizen Kane, Casablanca, and The Godfather set the tone right out of the gate.) Best Picture nominees this year have only one of the nine pictures with more than three words in it. And 66% have two or less words including four with only a single word; Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena.

Historically, going all the way back to very first Academy Award ceremony (1929), more than 60% Best Picture winners have titles with three words or less, but ever since Rocky won Best Picture in 1977, only three winners (out of 37) had titles of more than three words.  (And each of those three was a novel first.)

That’s a pretty good case for picking short titles. One reason is it’s easier to recommend  Gladiator or Platoon than it is The Bridge on the River Kwai or All Quiet on the Western Front. Hitchcock’s best films had short titles including Vertigo, Psycho, and Notorious. Even a list of breakthrough indie films (filmmakers who seek to be unconventional from the Hollywood norm) has its share of short titles: Memento, Clerks, Reservoir Dogs, Before Sunset, El Mariachi, Slacker, Metropolitan, Rushmore.

Shakespeare at his best? Hamlet, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, Henry V, and Macbeth. 

Woody Allen’s most referenced films these days? Annie Hall, Manhattan, Crimes and Misdemeanors,  Midnight in Paris, and Blue Jasmine. 

Chapin? City Lights, Modern Times, The Great Dictator, and The Gold Rush.

And if I haven’t made the case for picking a short title clear enough consider Pixar’s titles; Toy Story, Cars, Up, Wall-E, The Incredibles, Finding Nemo, Ratatouille, A Bug’s Life, Brave, Monsters, Inc., and Trains. In fact, Pixar has never had a feature film title with more than three words.

That doesn’t mean bland and slightly long title (Ferris Bueller’s Day Off)—or even a bland short title (The Shawshank Redemption)— can’t find an audience. Or that Up in the Air isn’t the perfect metaphor for George Clooney’s character. (A character whose only real purpose appears to be collecting frequent flyer miles—everything else is up in the air.) Or even that it’s unheard of to have a very long title like The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension. (Although, when that last film came out in 1984 I remember people referred to it as Buckaroo Banzai.)

The point is short titles rule. Why fight an uphill battle?

Movie titles are important. How do you pick a good one?

Some writers talk about starting with a title and going from there, and others talk about struggling to land on a title even after they’ve finished their book or screenplay.

But the most common titles seem to focus a main character or being, place or thing, or an event. Of the non-sequel films (or non-comic based films) at the top of the all-time box office include Avatar, Titanic, Skyfall, and Jurassic Park. (And audiences tend to abbreviate sequels/comic-based movies around the water cooler calling them Batman, Star Wars, Pirates, Spider-Man, Twilight, Iron Man and Harry Potter.)

CHARACTER(S) OR BEING:
Citizen Kane
Lincoln
E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
King Kong
Rocky
Alien
Erin Brockovich
Patton
Forrest Gump
Spartacus
Bonnie and Clyde
The Godfather
Tootsie
Norma Rae
Jaws
Psycho
Raging Bull
Bridesmaids
The Artist
Annie Hall

A PLACE OR THING:
Titanic
The African Queen
Bridge on the River Kwai
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
On the Waterfront
Chinatown
Sunset Blvd.
The Bridges of Madison County
Pearl Harbor
The Maltese Falcon
The Apartment
Casablanca
Fargo
Oklahoma
Wall St.
Philadelphia

AN EVENT:
12 Years a Slave
High Noon
Apocalypse Now
Star Wars
3:10 to Yuma
Flight
2001: A Space Odyssey
This is 40
Saving Private Ryan
Bringing Up Baby
Sophie’s Choice
Mutiny on the Bounty
Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

(Or a person, place, & event: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.)

Up in the Air falls into that minority category of a title that’s a little more obtuse, in line with The Last Picture Show, A Streetcar Named Desire, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, Silence of the Lambs, or Gone with the Wind. (Again all were books or plays first which tend to favor a more intellectual audience, and gives them the advantage of a built-in audience when the movies hit theaters.) If you go with a metaphor, it doesn’t hurt if the title is a common phrase like “up in the air.” Even still, I heard people called Up in the Air,  “The new George Clooney movie.” (More words than the actual title but easier to explain to a friend when picking a movie.)

What are some of your favorite titles (even if they aren’t one of your favorite films)? What are some of your favorite bad titles?

Some of my favorite titles are the lesser remembered movies Them! (1954) and  Zulu (1964).  And I like titles such as Psycho, Black Hawk Down, Meet the Parents, Witness, The Hunt for Red October, Collateral and The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly because they all have built-in conflict, mystery and intrigue. They hit you at a gut level.

When I think of bad movie titles it tends to be because I think the movies are bad. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that many of the movies listed at The 100 Worst Movie Title are longish; The Assassination of Jesse James by Coward Robert Ford, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen.

I should add in closing that just because you have a short title doesn’t guarantee success as Ishtar and Gigli prove. But even in an internet driven age where viral reviews may trump movie titles, short titles still seem to work best because word counts are as important as ever.

P.S.  One blogger wrote a post called Top 10 Worst Movie Titles Ever and put Surf Nazis Must Die at #10. That film was written and directed by Peter George who I happened to go to film school with. (I was always a little upset I didn’t get a small role in the film.) If anyone knows where Mr. George is these days tell him I want my watch back. The one that I left at his Hollywood apartment after I crashed on his sofa one night back in the day.

P.P.S. My own longest and worst title for a script I’ve written—When the Cold Winds Blows. More novel-friendly, but I should really be forced to write an apology letter to James Taylor for sampling the lyrics from his classic Fire and Rain. And in case you think I’m kidding—here’s the tattered title page from over a decade ago.

Updated from the post: Movie Titles (tip #32) published in 2010.

Related posts:
Screenwriting the Pixar Way (part 2)
Irony in Movies (Tip #79)
Average Length of Movie Scenes (#21)
Choosing a Title for Your Script  “A good title could get your script moved up from the bottom of the stack of to-read scripts to the top — and change your life.”—Terry Rossio (Pirates of the Caribbean, Shrek)

Related links from others:

Choosing a Great Title “Will the title look good on a poster and will it intrigue passersby?”—Julie Gray
Screenplay Tip #6: Title  “Sometimes dramas will have a lengthy title like Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, but this seems less now and I certainly can’t remember the last time I saw such a long title for a drama in the spec pile.”—Lucy V. Hay
Reader mail—titles “You know what does stick with me? The clever titles, the unique ones.”—The Bitter Script Reader
The Ultimate Guild To Screenwriting Titles

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »

Stories That Will Always Sell (Tip #89)

“The Twilight Zone was in peril of not being renewed, season after season. It was not a hit, rating-wise; succès d’estime, yes but not the sort of series anyone could have predicted would be running thirty years later. [Rod] Serling’s skill as a writer has a lot to do with that…also his compassion for the human race as he saw it around him, from day to day. His optimism about the human condition led to stories that made one feel good about the race and its chances for emotional triumph. That, well told, will always sell.”
Producer Buck Houghton (The Twilight Zone)
What a Producer Does (First published in 1991)

P.S. Look at this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominations and look back on past Oscar-winning Best Pictures and see how many end showing an “emotional triumph.” Not all, but it’s an interesting gauge. And even in death there can be an emotional triumph—Gladiator, Titanic, Braveheart.

Bonus:
“The Twilight Zone at its best is better than anything else I’ve ever seen on television…Walking Distance is maybe the show’s best episode.”
Producer/Writer/director J.J. Abrams (LOST)
Time/ Top 10 Twilight Zone Episodes

https://vimeo.com/39915949

Related Posts:
The Twilight Zone Secrets
Rod Serling’s Binghamton Roots
Rod Serling’s Ohio Epiphany
40 Days of Emotions

Scott W. Smith

Read Full Post »