Call Western Union - A letter to writers...
By Anthony Lanza, Editor & Program Director of The Writers' Retreat

Editor's note: Here's not just advice about screenplays; this is the reality of screenplays.

Dear Fellow Writers,

I see increasingly more screenplays that display a fundamental misconception of a screenplay’s purpose. This mostly stems from the silly stuff being written about screenwriting, particularly in the trades. We tend to forget that these mags are little more than glorified small town newspapers, a mutual admiration society. Everyone gets their turn to shine and are often attributed with wildly exaggerated insight and sensibility.

So I figure it’s time for a reality injection.

I’m getting a relentless deluge of agenda-driven (read: unsaleable) screenplays. Not that an agenda is necessarily bad, but it’s seldom entertaining. If you want to wax philosophical, write a book. Or at least don’t smother entertainment value with a “message.”

Our first job is to entertain. If we don’t entertain, people will never hear our message anyway… because our script will never get produced. And rightfully so. Samuel Goldwyn said it best: “If you wanna send a message, call Western Union.”

If you really must send a message, couch it in subtext rather than banging it on our collective head.

ILLUSIONS OF GRANDEUR
In the interests of self-disclosure, I love movies and I love writing screenplays. I even manage – every now and then - to cobble something together that makes a few bucks. But does a screenplay, even one that earns a sizeable chunk, qualify as art? Does writing the thing make one an artiste? The answer to both is a resounding No!

Now, why do I belabor such a self-evident point? Because it seems the point is less evident to those few thousand souls (actually engaged in this sort of work) inhabiting that small company town called “Hollywood.”

And why, you may ask, does it matter?

It wouldn’t actually, if they didn’t write about it. Or, better said, write about it with the (ostensible) purpose of “helping” aspiring screenwriters. That they actually believe their own press clippings is understandable, but their inability to distinguish fact from fiction can screw us up.

So when you read stuff like, “…propelled the story to a much deeper emotional level…” or “… sea of surrealism…” or “…dramatically valid but superfluous…”, recognize it for what it is: self-congratulatory posturing. Such pseudo-literary babble might be useful for something (like, to impress naïve fans… or, maybe, to wow the wannabe starlet that just hit town), but don’t try to integrate these mutterings into your screenplay. They might be applicable to art, but no matter how great a screenplay, art it ain’t.

[That’s not to say a great movie can’t rise to the level of art (at least in the same haphazard sense of a Jackson Pollock painting). But – discounting the proponents of the auteur school of thought - it’s collaborative art. And you gotta wonder, if enough monkeys had a typewriter…?]

If you want to make art, write novels and short stories and poems. Or songs. You know, things with intrinsic value. Screenplays have the intrinsic value of a rudder - not worth a crap unless attached to a boat.

If you’re protesting, convinced you really should be writing art, you’ve already ingested too much artsy-fartsy advice. To make the point, consider this: Any “insider” account of working in Hollywood is replete with stories about readers taking home a dozen – or more – screenplays to “cover” over the weekend. If they’re not hooked within ten pages (the dreaded “ten-page rule”), your script gets a pass. The suits that write the checks read only the “coverage.”

Now, nobody would suggest reading a dozen novels over the weekend. And no matter the medium, if you’re mining for art you dig deeper than ten pages. And if you’re looking to buy art, you don’t rely on some underling’s opinion. So if you’re writing art, you’re writing to the wrong crowd. They want short, sweet and simple. And with lots of white space.

We are writing for (ultimately) “The Industry” – an industry that refers to our scripts as “properties” and to movies as “products”; it refers to crew and talent as “below-the-line” or “above-the-line.” This is not slang; these are terms of contract, universally recognized as carrying legal import. They are terms not of art, but of finance. And finance is The Industy’s overriding consideration.

So what are screenplays, if not art? They are, mostly, just fun to write. And, if we get very lucky, they command an obscene amount of money for relatively little effort… certainly less effort than writing a novel.

At Screenwriting Expo 3 (a couple months back) William Goldman (Harper, Sundance Kid, Misery and others) summed up his four decades of screenwriting wisdom: “Screenplays are structure and movies are story, and that’s it.” Stick with Goldman’s philosophy and you won’t go far wrong.

Signed,
Anthony Lanza,
Editor & Program Director, The Writers' Retreat
(819) 876-2065
info@writersretreat.com
www.writersretreat.com

The Writers' Retreat, 15 Canusa Street, Stanstead (Québec), Canada;
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ISSN 1710-6788
Published by: be smith designs
Copyright © 2005 Anthony Lanza