posted October 04, 2004 02:27 PM            

A dramatic weekend with screenwriting instructor Robert McKee

By Todd Leopold
CNN

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- Robert McKee paced. Robert McKee cajoled. Robert McKee dismissed. Robert McKee joked. Robert McKee harangued. Robert McKee pontificated. Robert McKee philosophized.

Robert McKee would make a dandy character in a movie.

Of course, Robert McKee has already been a character in a movie -- "Adaptation," in which Brian Cox portrayed the screenwriting coach.

But "Adaptation" featured a "McKee" -- a sharp-tongued, gruff adversary to the Charlie Kaufman character -- who represented only a fragment of the real thing. The living, breathing McKee can be sharp-tongued and gruff, but he's also thoughtful and funny as he guides students through his Robert McKee Story Seminar.

The seminar was in Atlanta last weekend, and about 150 would-be, sometime or professional writers gathered in a large hotel auditorium for the three-day class. Many had traveled from all over the Southeast. It was a relatively young crowd -- most people seemed under 40 -- and men outnumbered women by about 2-to-1.

We would sit there for almost 12 hours each day, from 9 a.m. to 8:30 p.m., and listen to a man Vanity Fair recently called "Hollywood's most sought-after screenwriting instructor."
'I will not patronize you'

McKee walked in unobtrusively, just past 9 a.m. Friday.

The instructor -- who looks more like "Barney Miller's" James Gregory or "The West Wing's" John Spencer than Cox -- laid down the law immediately: The schedule would be "arduous," he said, with three 15-minute breaks and a one-hour lunch break over the course of each daily session. No questions from the audience during class, only at breaks. A cell phone ring or computer ding would be a $10 fine from the offending party, payable immediately.

"I will not be interrupted," he said. As if on cue, a cell phone went off. McKee was not happy.

He was also not happy with the state of screenwriting -- or fiction writing in general. "It's a worldwide, cross-media crisis," he said. He went off on politically correct language, sloppy structure, shallow characters and lazy work habits (and, over the course of the weekend, President Bush, the British Empire, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, "American self-deception," car pools, Wonder bread and the lack of meaning in modern life).

"I will not patronize you by telling you that writing isn't the hardest godd--n thing on Earth," he said. "You're in over your heads."

He was intimidating, infuriating and impatient, particularly when his probing style elicited dull stares. (He referred to one of those occasions as a "Socratic nightmare.")

But he also had a tremendous sense of timing -- riffing with George Carlin-esque ease -- and a golden sense of humor. He sat, paced, walked on his stage, occasionally sketching his point on an overhead-projector transparency (an overhead projector!) and exhorted us to dig deep within ourselves and the characters and stories we would create, to find the truth of our tales and our people.

I loved it.
A fight for love and glory

Because at the heart of McKee's writing philosophy -- what I gathered, anyway -- is humanity. That's refreshing in a world of video-game movies and paint-by-numbers spectacle.

McKee's lectures combined dramaturgy, philosophy, emphasis on classical roots and writing nuts and bolts, some of which is (I hope) likely familiar to any college sophomore. He offered step-by-step advice about constructing a script from the inside out and the outside in, advice that's rigorous and helpful, but not necessarily -- and he'd likely be the first to admit it -- groundbreaking: Do research. Plan your story and characters in detail. Write dialogue last. Rewrite and rewrite again.

But what made it fresh -- what made it inspiring -- was the way it was woven together, a Robert McKee Theory of Story.

McKee was half Howard Beale, profanely railing against the decline of civilization, but he was also half cockeyed optimist, convinced that a good story can make a difference and resonate in the hearts and souls of human beings.

The class concluded with a six-hour analysis of "Casablanca." Humphrey Bogart's Rick Blaine, McKee pointed out, begins the movie at a low ebb, long since abandoned by Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa Lund, grimly adrift in the chaotic North African seaport. By the film's end, he's rediscovered "love and glory" (as mentioned in "As Time Goes By") and is re-energized.

"Casablanca," a beloved film for more than 60 years, still rings true. It's a story about faith in human beings, and McKee knows its power.

Throughout the weekend, the instructor signed copies of his book, "Story." "Write the truth," McKee inscribed, over and over.

posted December 07, 2004 01:18 PM            

From idea to action with 'Movie Plot Generator'

By Todd Leopold
CNN

(CNN) -- You've heard them all before: The cop who doesn't play by the rules. The holy fool who challenges the beliefs of the country club set. The small-town girl with big-time dreams who invades Poland with a wisecracking robot.

That last one doesn't sound familiar?

If so, that's because you'll only find it in "The Official Movie Plot Generator," a book made up of 90 page tabs -- each containing a standard-issue protagonist, plot and twist -- that can be combined in thousands of combinations.

For example, flip the tabs and you might get "Adolf Hitler/Hits the karaoke circuit/Deep in the Compton ghetto." Or, "A hockey mask-wearing psychopath/Helps children learn to read/In a rousing adaptation of the Broadway musical."

Authors Jason and Justin Heimberg -- actual Hollywood screenwriters -- were inspired to create the book after one too many meetings with actual Hollywood producers. They'd arrive to pitch some of their ideas, be turned down, and then have the producer muse on one of his or her own pet concepts.

"We kept hearing them say they'd want something original, but then they'd have these clichéd elements," says Justin.

"They'd tell us that they had the greatest idea, but then it would be the same old derivative idea," adds Jason.

The light bulb went on and the two, close enough to finish each other's sentences, decided to put together a book. They perused issues of TV Guide and thought of the standard plots of various genres -- the rogue cop action movie, the time-traveling scientist film, the historical epic -- and wrote them all down, separating them into hero/situation/place or theme.

Then, in a bid for more control than they usually get over their screenplays, they decided to publish it themselves.

"The publishing business isn't as bad as the movies -- publishers usually don't bring in someone to rewrite your book -- but you still don't have control over design and marketing," says Justin, who has had a hand in writing humor books. "So we decided to do it all on our own."

That included finding a printer and distributor, while arranging for most of the sales on their own (through Amazon.com, Barnesandnoble.com, some gift stores and their own Web site, www.movieplotgenerator.com).

"We wanted to be noble and help the struggling Chinese economy," says Jason.

More seriously, he adds, "It's kind of fun, though daunting. But this is all ours." (Indeed, during the interview Justin was at the Heimberg parents' home in Rockville, Maryland, awaiting the delivery of 3,000 new copies. The brothers Heimberg have already printed 10,000 and sold most of them at $15.95 a pop.)

The two hope that "The Official Movie Plot Generator" becomes a nice business in its own right, but in the meantime they're making a full-time living as screenwriters. Currently, they have seven ideas in development purgatory, according to Justin, and they're doing the screenplay for "Kingpin 2," a sequel to the Farrelly brothers' 1996 film.

And if they're feeling a little creatively dry, they can always turn the pages of their book. After all, they've actually heard some of the more outlandish possibilities, such as one in which a cop becomes a nanny, or another about a bumbling nerd who teams up with an orangutan.

Which is why the book is also a fine gift for producers who think they have the perfect film in their heads. Indeed, some have even pitched ideas that exist in the book.

posted December 15, 2004 09:29 AM            

Globe-nominated screenwriter Charlie Kaufman digs deep

By Todd Leopold
CNN

(CNN) -- Somehow, Charlie Kaufman has picked up this reputation as the Thomas Pynchon of screenwriters: a reclusive man who spins loopy, cerebral tales of fame, love and identity, such as "Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation" and last spring's "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind."

Never mind that, though he considers himself a private person, he's willing to do press to promote his films. Never mind that he's been photographed occasionally -- and recently, too, so there's no need to rely on an old high school yearbook photo or something.

And never mind that most people would have a hard time picking any screenwriter out of a lineup. Kaufman, whether it's because of his erudite scripts, soft-spoken demeanor or reticence to explain his work, has an image of a movie mystery man.

After all, a guy who comes up with the idea of a tunnel into John Malkovich's head or writes himself and a twin alter ego into a screenplay allegedly based on a book about flower smugglers, must be some kind of eccentric, right?

Uh, no.

"I'm kind of selective [about doing interviews], and it's not my favorite thing to do, but whenever movies come out, I promote them. So I don't know," he says. "Maybe people need an angle or something."

Interest in 'real relationships'
Kaufman's own angle is to look at a subject in ways that most people have never pondered -- in movies, at least.

In the case of "Eternal Sunshine" -- recently nominated for four Golden Globes, including a nod for Kaufman's screenplay -- he wanted to write a movie about relationships that was neither a clichéd romance nor a gritty descent into hell.

"My intent was to address thornier questions," he says in a phone interview from New York. "I was only interested in doing it if it was about real relationships" -- the kind with good times and bad times, and a lot of time in which the relationship just is.

In the movie, a sad sack named Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) wants to have the memories of his last relationship, with the artsy Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet), removed from his brain, as she has already done. He goes to a Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), creator of a process to eradicate unpleasant remembrances (Joel: "Is there any risk of brain damage?" Dr. Mierzwiak: "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage"), and begins the procedure.

But things are not so simple as that, either in the plot or the telling. The film doubles back on itself, showing scenes from different perspectives and through different degrees of Joel's forgetfulness. Characters literally lose their faces; places where Joel and Clementine once met, such as a bookstore, evaporate into nothingness as they're removed from Joel's consciousness.

And then Joel decides that, maybe, he doesn't want to forget Clementine after all, which leads to even more complications and comedy.

Kaufman did "a fair amount" of research on memory to write the script, he says, and seized upon the link between memory and emotion.

"I wanted to approximate the images of memory," he says. "And one of the things that struck me was that the things that made memories memorable, and vital, are the emotion attached to them. And so that's the way the memory-erasing technique works -- [draining the emotions] is what they prey upon, and how the memories fade."

'It's a struggle'
Though "Eternal Sunshine," now out on DVD, did only mild business at the box office, it's obviously struck a nerve with viewers: It currently ranks in the all-time top 50 on the Internet Movie Database. Kaufman shrugs off the ranking -- "movies that came out recently always rank very high" -- but he's pleased with the response.

"It's really kind of great to hear what people say," he says. "We weren't trying for that [reaction]. We were just trying to make a movie about relationships. ...

"There are such false ideas in Hollywood movies. They have nothing to do with reality," he adds. Relationships in most movies, he observes, tend to show a couple overcoming an obstacle or two and then living happily ever after. "In this movie, you see a relationship over time. You're seeing what happens to everybody in a relationship -- it's a struggle."

And struggle, the 46-year-old Kaufman suggests, doesn't always result in happiness.

Take his own life: He wanted to be a writer for years but worked other jobs, including one as a ticket seller for the Metropolitan Opera and another at a stock photo agency.

"I really didn't want to go to Los Angeles. And I gave up and I moved to the Midwest, and I was going to go back to school and then I didn't go back to school," he says. "But then I turned 30, and I thought, 'I have to do something now.' I didn't want to be answering phones for the rest of my life. ... [I had to give it] one last shot."

He managed to land a job writing for the Chris Elliott sitcom "Get a Life" -- which has led, eventually, to his current position -- but he hasn't forgotten what might have been. Even "Being John Malkovich," which made his name, was on the verge of not happening, he says.

posted July 12, 2005 11:05 AM            

'The Golden West': Access Hollywood
By SAM TANENHAUS

This superb collection of Daniel Fuchs's fiction and essays about Hollywood, spanning half a century, records the vagaries of the film industry from the perspective of a screenwriter who toiled for the great studios in their heyday and was on the premises during their decline. Fuchs brought to this subject the watchfulness of a born novelist whose so-called Williamsburg Trilogy, about Brooklyn tenement life, remains a highlight of 1930's fiction -- a marvel of detached sympathy and supple naturalism, all the more remarkable for having been written by an immigrant son when he was in his 20's and on breaks from his day job as a public-school teacher in Brighton Beach. When MGM dangled a 13-week contract in 1937, he took the bait and journeyed west, but kept an eye fastened on the literary world back home.

So it appears, at any rate, from the earliest essays in ''The Golden West.'' Dating from his first months in Los Angeles, they suggest he couldn't wait to get out of there. ''Dream City, or the Drugged Lake,'' opens with Fuchs disconsolately trying to salvage some pages of schlock and concludes with him ''studying the calendar I had on my desk, jumping the weeks to the time my contract would end.''

This sardonic exercise, published in Cinema Arts magazine, might well have escaped the attention of his studio paymasters. But the even more biting ''Hollywood Diary'' appeared in The New Yorker for all the world to see. Ten days into his first job, Fuchs languishes in an oversize, empty office, ''waiting for some producer on the lot to call me up and put me to work on a script.'' His earnestness amuses his fellow hacks, who teasingly call him ''scab'' but genially sweep him along to the studio commissary, where the pecking order is as rigid as in a high school cafeteria. Fuchs and the other small fry, all in the $100-$500 a week bracket, eat at one table. ''The intermediates ($500-$750) eat privately or off the lot,'' Fuchs reports. ''The big shots eat at the executives' table along with topflight stars and producers. They shoot craps with their meals.''

By Depression standards, all these salaries were enviably high -- some absurdly so -- as Fuchs, whose teaching job had paid $6 a day, knew very well. ''The check comes every week, doesn't it?'' his agent reminds him when Fuchs frets about the assignments not sent his way. But the cash nexus only reinforces his feeling of servitude. At last put to work on a vehicle for the actress Francine Waldron, he feverishly extrudes 40 pages in a week's time. The effort is a waste, since, it emerges, Waldron ''has no commitments on this lot.'' Three weeks later Fuchs comes to work and finds another man, as eager as he'd once been, perched in his chair. ''While I cleaned up my desk, he had the embarrassed tact to leave me alone.''

In addition to the familiar theme of the defenseless literary man ground down by a mercenary system, Fuchs apprehends something deeper: the entire ''dream factory'' is fueled by free-floating anxiety, owing to an obvious but troubling truth. Mass entertainment, if it's any good, can't be mass-produced, but instead must be improvised anew each time, just like art -- because it is art. Every film poses a unique struggle and leaves the men at the top groping through the fog just as clumsily as nobodies like Fuchs. ''Everyone here is scared silly all the time,'' a character remarks in the short story ''Florida,'' published under a different title in Collier's in 1939. ''The stars, the writers, the producers, even the big bosses -- they're all afraid they'll wake up one morning and find out they've lost their magic touch with the public.''

Fuchs, for his part, found his touch and stayed in Los Angeles until his death in 1993 (at age 84). Though by no means the first or last gifted writer to trade print for celluloid (a more recent example is John Sayles), Fuchs did so at a time when the cultural status of the novel was very high, and when he seemed destined to master the form. It is difficult to imagine other ambitious Jewish-American novelists of his generation -- for example, Bernard Malamud and Saul Bellow, his juniors by five and six years -- sitting still for lectures from Samuel Goldwyn or composing dialogue for Ronald Reagan. But Fuchs was just enough older to feel hemmed in by Depression exigencies and to fear lifelong entrapment in the immigrant ghetto. Not in a physical sense. He had installed his young family in a farmhouse in Pennsylvania. The danger he faced was that he'd run out of things to say. He'd worked many variations on his Brooklyn material, and it was already growing stale. Before the Hollywood contract, he'd abandoned a fourth novel, splintering it into short stories and sketches snatched up by glossy magazines for good fees. But even the best of these writings, ''vaudeville-virtuoso mimicries and performed entertainments,'' in his cool judgment, skated on the edge of ethnic minstrelsy. Hollywood offered a chance to broaden his reach and perhaps coin new idioms. Thus did Fuchs's journey parallel that of the moguls, the Mayers, Goldwyns and Cohns, fellow Jews he admired for taking it upon themselves -- ''as a public responsibility,'' no less -- to ''help create the national myths.''

Fuchs established himself, however, not in the ''tasteful'' family fare prized by Mayer, for one, but in the gritty urban genres later hailed as the true glory of Hollywood's golden age. Fuchs's script for the taut and sexy crime noir ''Criss Cross'' (1949) was durable enough to inspire Steven Soderbergh's remake, ''The Underneath,'' in 1995. The psychodrama ''Panic in the Streets'' (1950) was an early success for its director, Elia Kazan. ''Love Me or Leave Me,'' a biopic about the torch singer Ruth Etting, won Fuchs an Oscar for original story in 1955, thanks to a bravura performance by James Cagney -- who, in the role of a gimpy Chicago hoodlum, brilliantly captured the comic ferocity that laces through Fuchs's best writing.

Meanwhile, Fuchs discovered a new literary topic, Babylon's slow decline in the 50's under the pressure of the new mass medium, television. Picking up the threads of his Brooklyn novels, and their themes of resignation, despair and survival, he became an acute chronicler of the Jewish-American film shtetl, populated by small-time dreamers and operators who clung desperately to the privileged lives they had created on California's gilt-edged frontier. The most haunting, and fully realized, of these tales is ''The Golden West,'' first published in The New Yorker in 1954. ''For many of us who used to work at the studios, the pleasant, oversized checks that came every Thursday have stopped,'' Fuchs says in the voice of his alter ego, a screenwriter. ''The blow fell softly, mainly because when the crisis developed we couldn't believe or didn't want to believe that it was upon us.'' He provides a case study of some families and friends, all on the fringes of the movie business, who convene for Sunday dinner in Beverly Hills. None will own that times are bad. They obey instead the showbiz code of chronic denial and its corollary of chronic optimism. One good break, one hot deal, will put them back on top. This delusion is nourished by the splendors of the landscape, the lush flora and tireless sunshine, and also by the tangible advance, or encroachment, of new wealth. ''On the hillside below, bulldozers had scooped out level sites,'' Fuchs writes. ''Homes now lay before us in descending tiers.'' The party goes on. The wives swan past the oleanders in their summer dresses; the husbands, in evening jackets, smoke and talk shop. But the tight little nucleus has been shaken. Its egomaniacal star, a boy-wonder producer, has sunk a small fortune in a doomed project, dragging down with him a business partner who has invested his wife's dwindling inheritance. Only one of the crowd is thriving, the producer's brother-in-law, an accountant, untouched by ''creative'' pretensions, who has craftily purchased a string of movie theaters in the sticks, ''far from the cities, from the television stations'' where he screens budget Westerns and ''sex-and-sands with Yvonne De Carlo'' and spikes concession sales by filtering popcorn aromas into the auditoriums. ''Awed by this whole circle of movie people'' he has married into, he is keeping them afloat, which only increases their disdain. As evening falls and candles flicker, tensions erupt and the guests tear into one another. They rehearse longstanding grievances and flourish evidence of sad-sack adultery, all of it masking the deeper truth that only the C.P.A. acknowledges: ''The industry was dead. It was all over -- the years of picture-making, the work, the rush, the all-night sessions at the studio, the whole wonderful excitement and rapture.''

This is not the romantic Hollywood of ''The Last Tycoon'' or the surreal one of ''The Day of the Locust.'' But it feels more concretely lived than either. ''Fuchs's demonstration . . . of so much vitality, subtlety, clairvoyance and edginess in the short-story form made him something of a legend in Eastern literary circles,'' John Updike, for many years now Fuchs's most articulate champion, recalls in his elegant introduction. ''How could the writer of such fiction be content with the drudgery, the compromises, the abasement of screenwriting?''

How indeed? The question was repeatedly thrust at Fuchs, who became the object of continual speculation in the literary world he left behind. This wasn't surprising. His choices -- film over fiction, Los Angeles over New York, commercial success over cultural prestige -- struck directly at the prideful either/or of East Coast littérateurs who in turn branded him a failure, one of ''those poets and annalists of the 30's who did not survive their age, succumbing to death or Hollywood or a sheer exhaustion of spirit and subject,'' as one premature obituarist, Leslie Fiedler, wrote in 1957, when Fuchs was still in his 40's. (Then again, the script he'd written for ''Jeanne Eagels,'' which opened around the time Fiedler's comments were published, was probably his worst.) Fuchs feigned indifference to this sniping, but it plainly smarted. When the novelist Mordecai Richler chided him for boasting, in print, about his screenwriting wages, Fuchs retorted, ''I never made a great deal of money in the movies; sixty thousand a year was about the best I could do, if Richler doesn't mind my saying so.''

The best revenge, he knew, was writing well. He completed one extended work of Hollywood fiction -- the novella ''West of the Rockies,'' published in 1971, but set in the 50's, the decade he understood best. As always with Fuchs, the mise-en-scène is stimulating. An aging star on the rebound from a disastrous marriage to a British playboy has fled the set of her latest movie and is AWOL in a Palm Springs resort. She's also begun a halfhearted affair with a public relations factotum, who is sent out to retrieve her and save the film. The narrative idles, stops and starts, slips into reverse as Fuchs supplies too much back story. But the portrait of the actress is mesmerizing: her appetites, her ambition, her compromises, her courage, her ''flamboyant, unsparing tenacity.'' Fuchs, who wrote scripts for Ginger Rogers, Kim Novak and Doris Day, had witnessed firsthand the heat radiated by movie goddesses, and he drew on this knowledge to give contour to his own creation, Adele Hogue. ''She held her shoulders straight, carrying her body with that clear-striding, forthright sexual quality they had and which they knew they had,'' he writes. ''It was the way they were put together; it was the bones in them. It was a readiness or acquiescence to use the body for all the pleasure it could give, a readiness they picked up from their mothers, in the Hollywood malt shops, out of the air.'' Even with her career on the skids and her looks fading, Hogue can summon up force, but only toward destructive ends: shutting down the film, panicking the backers, unhinging the studio bosses. It will ruin her too, but she's beyond caring. ''There's always something inside of you, watching you -- you know perfectly well you're being impossible and making outrageous demands,'' she explains. ''But you don't stop. You just go right ahead. You do it.''

''The Golden West'' opens and closes with two reminiscences of Hollywood's peak years written a quarter-century apart, though both came after the republication of Fuchs's early novels in 1961 had brought him a cult following. Each is wonderfully anecdotal and abounds in glamorous names, and each gives a delicious account of Fuchs's ill-starred collaboration with William Faulkner. Together they also argue, with only a hint of defensiveness, that writing for the movies was an experience richer than Fuchs's first anxious dispatches conveyed. ''I found the life in the studios most agreeable,'' he recalled in 1989. ''You're not closed up in a room by yourself. You're always with people, and there are advantages in working company hours.'' Those people included ''photographers, set designers, editors,'' who ''worked with the assiduity and worry of artists.'' The collaboration was bent, in its intensity, toward untangling a single knot: ''What makes a story good? How do we manage it? What is the secret elixir that we must look for, the thing that gives a story life?'' These pressing questions called forth the ''reckless expenditure of energy and clamor'' that made Hollywood, for all its excess, a place of unremitting labor.

''Generations to come, looking back over the years, are bound to find that the best, most solid creative effort of our decades was spent in the movies, and it's time someone came clean and said so,'' Fuchs asserted in 1962. This was not special pleading; he appears to have thrown his lot in with Hollywood even before it beckoned him. His first novel, ''Summer in Williamsburg,'' published in 1934, teems with references to movie houses and transfixing film stars. One thwarted character longs ''to get out, to live freely and luxuriously as they did in the movies, and he was old enough to know that only money could deliver him.'' The formulation applied equally to Fuchs, who in the same novel declares, ''Poetry and heroism did not exist, but the movies did.'' Though a talented writer, he was foremost an immigrant son, his face pressed against the dingy pane of the grand American storefront, whose many wares, however meretricious, seemed bathed in a cinematic glow. Its source was Hollywood. And as long as the Southern California sun kept pouring down, making everything sparkle, Fuchs saw no reason to leave.

Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review.

posted August 08, 2005 04:56 PM            

Article: "Hollywood Doesn't Need Great Writers"

posted August 23, 2005 05:17 PM            

Over 90 pages and under 120-125 pages and you might get read. Too many scripts are being sent to us that aren't in that range, and that's not good since it's a sure sign of a new writer. We realize that many of you are new writers, but don't let Hollywood know that. When agents or producers get a script, they assume it's from a professional writer, not a first-timer. They've only got time to deal with pros, so do everything you can to ensure your script appears professionally written.

Most often scripts from new writers come in too long rather than too short since new writers tend to overwrite. There's too much description, too much dialogue, too many scenes that don't serve a purpose, etc. If you have a script on the long side, go over it scene by scene and ask yourself, why is this here? Is it serving a distinct purpose? If it's not, cut it. Cutting scenes this way is how you'll make the most dramatic dent in the page count. Sure, you can also cut unnecessary dialogue, but if that's all you do, you won't get the page count down that much.