My first reporting job was for the Village Voice in the mid- to late-nineties back when it was owned, quietly, by the Hartz Mountain Group (after Rupert Murdoch, before Arizona). By then it had already been a few decades since that paper had seen its heights, but I’d held faith. The idea of the Voice, even at that late date, was that it still stood up for the hidden parts of the city, for all those sidelined subcultures no one else covered, and as one of the new I was blessed with a mad jumble of beats — video game writers, arm-wrestling tourneys, the Internet. The stories had nothing to do with each other except for the fact no one else wanted them. I saw that newsrooms were much like plots of divided land: prime, bountiful tracts staked by the first regime; parched, lime-stoned fields seeded by the callow new. And so I tended my fringe soil.
After a few years I had lucked into a few leads on a story about how Asian gangsters were running gambling and prostitution parlors in Manhattan and Jersey, prize information. The Voice‘s main mob reporter then, Bill Bastone (who later went on to found The Smoking Gun), encouraged me to go after the story. He even graciously offered a few sources. He was part of that Voice tradition where fellow reporters helped one another whenever asked.
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Slowly, I gathered. I interviewed. I mined the background. Eventually, I cut a small story into the paper, a concession; I hadn’t nailed down that sweeping, epic feature I had first imagined. (Don’t we always imagine that first?)
How To Accidentally Transition Into Film: Write About It
Around the same time, I had separately been working on a story about independent filmmakers, one of those knowing, think-pieces typical of the Voice then. My lead subject was Michael Kang, writer and director of Sundance film The Motel. During the interview he happened to ask what else I was writing, and I mentioned the Asian gangster story. He then suggested the obvious thing brewing between all the spaces in our conversation.
There was hemming and hawing, the usual deflections — from me. But then I could see in the reams of research that I had gathered — all of which touched but never completely confirmed certain New Gotham truths — the outlines of a movie, that necessary narrative waiting to get out. So I said yes, and I learned to drum in Final Draft. After a while Mike and I had 110 pages of scene and dialogue, and we made the rounds. Money was found. Production happened. The film, called West 32nd, premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this year, and I was lit with pride. Through it all I learned to speak in “blue page” and “white page,” in “pre-pro” and “post” — the filmmaker’s cant that marks the mouths of insiders (even if it turns out to be for just the one time).
The Great American Novel, It Ain’t
But there is a frustrating certainty to screenwriting: A screenplay isn’t really a writer’s form. There is suspense in structure, yes. There is realism in dialogue, yes. But not much else. The writer writes for the director, the producers, even the actors before he writes for himself. All of the players need clarity first, and while that is certainly a reporter’s rifle, unlike a news story, a script’s brutal efficiency doesn’t allow for any literary pause. There’s no room to order language into careful or commanding prose, into that unique rhythm and hiccup of words that define what a writer does.
Don’t think so? Think of your three favorite movies not written by the director. Do you know who wrote them? Let’s try another: Which is your favorite Martin Scorsese picture? Who wrote it?
| The director chooses which notes to perform, and a good director can turn a meager script into a masterpiece; the reverse is also true. |
This has nothing to do with any faulty justice on the part of Hollywood, though that machine definitively deserves final fault for many, many crimes of trade. The reason for that gap in cinema memory is that screenwriters are not responsible for what anyone ultimately likes (or dislikes) about a film. I’m not trying to pass the buck, as, indeed, frightfully inept writers fill the ranks, and poor scripts are plenty, enough to glut the Hollywood air.
But as with any craft, it’s all about execution — and a script is the opposite. It is a proposition, a string of intentions, of word and action, of story and character, even of stunts and special effects. The director chooses which notes to perform, and a good director can turn a meager script into a masterpiece; the reverse is also true.
So what then, the writer’s role?
Details, Details, Details
Journalists hold an edge here. Details. Hollywood, and by that metonym I refer to all filmmakers (studio or independent), is starved for detail — it’s the one thing studios are forced to pay for and what the writer owns. My pile of reporter’s notepads served the script in succinct measures.
First, like any well-devised feature article, a script needs a nut, that sleek widget that explains the need for the story at all, and one of the more interesting facts to this clan of mobsters was that they operated completely differently from the Italian mafia (a well-trod path on screen) — they were either more extreme or exactly reversed in their perceptions and procedures to the Italianate brand. And it was this variance that propelled our script’s sense of urgency. From there we crafted character, my interviews providing some dialogue verbatim.
All that was left was plot, and one of the biggest challenges to screenwriting is plot mechanics. Why does B happen after A, or how can I get B to happen after A? Knowing, for instance, how law enforcement actually works, or being aware of the dynamics of a particular cipher (such as an illicit subculture) can tighten those strings of causality.
And yet, more detail was sought on set. Perhaps my enduring worth during the filming of West 32nd was defined by the fact that I was one of the few who had seen this Asian Mafioso act up close, and I was nervously pecked by actors looking for specific ticks; by the costume designer who wanted to know what these characters wear; by the location scout who wanted the actual addresses of the places I had reported from; by the director who wanted to recreate the look of a seemingly simple room and the action of a minor character (“___standing on the table naked, she bent over and drank a mug of beer stuck to the table…”).
The Conventioneers
But while weaving details into a script can create the ring of truth, kowtowing to convention can also further the feeling of familiarity — anything that strays from the standard will not translate. In other words, don’t do the Quentin Tarantino thing — unless you know you’re going to direct it. Is it any surprise that all those post-modern films that cloyingly maintain the beats of literature are written and directed by the same person? Charlie Kaufman, the inevitable asterisk, has nonetheless preserved his writer hallmark not by over-conceptualizing his stories as many might think, but by putting himself in them.
By contrast, one of the today’s most successful screenwriters, Spielberg workhorse David Koepp (Jurassic Park, Spider-Man, upcoming Indiana Jones 4), is not a known quantity outside the machine. That you may never have heard his name might have to do with the fact that he’s very good at his job — his writing is tight, invisible.
Indeed, journalists hardened by that noble newsroom regulation, Economy of Words, might think that screenwriting is not so different after all. Even David Foster Wallace would have to bare his nape in grudging veneration at the Temple of Word Thrift, but that’s not the case. A screenplay is a more stripped down device, and I don’t think any journalist or writer would hold faith in a church that makes writing so modular, that corners writing into such a consensus trade as the movie business demands.
It requires that you subsume your writing to the story, to the forever formula.
The Method
The books on screen-craft are legion and while they have all promised that hokey sense of fulfillment that comes with a polished product, they have also promised the following: You will have written no more than 110 pages and no fewer than 90; you will have written a plot turn on page 27; you will not have written a single scene that goes beyond four pages, ideally two or three; you will not have written dialogue that could otherwise be explained by SCENE ACTION (instead of saying “Yes,” he nods); and the list of dictums goes on. Taken in sum they form this curious mathematical tedium:
HIT MOVIE FUNCTION = SUM [Scene Pages 1-2 (nemesis + action)] + [Scene Pages 3-4 (main character + problem (as-defined-by-nemesis))] + … + [Scene (main character + love interest + flirting/promise-of-consummation)] + … + [Scene Page 27 (main character (setback/friend killed/etc.))] + … + [Scene Page 60 (main character + love interest + conflict/remorse)] + … + [Scene Pages 90-94 (main character + nemesis + showdown/denouement)] + … + [END Scene Pages 95-99 (main character + love interest + resolution/catharsis)]
Don’t laugh, as it actually works. It is exactly this kind of creaky, workaday craftsmanship that defines today’s brand of filmmaking, and as the above formula illustrates, a screenplay in the end is nothing more than a neurotic hem-haw, a ream waiting for cut-up, and if you want your script taken seriously, it, and you, must accord.
In total: Formula, then detail, no aims at literature.
Perhaps the cynical timbre of my recount betrays a certain perverted sense of gratitude on my part, but, in truth, I would not diminish my time in moviedom for anything. I am, in fact, hoping for more, because after it all, screenwriting does fulfill. It is a shared fulfillment. There is some definite magic to seeing your words resolved in the mouths of actors who can somehow make it sound so much better than you once imagined or even intended. And as the movie pushes along and the director finds clever new ways to edit the reel into ever-tighter structures, and the music and special effects are added, and that impossible alloy of remoteness and intimacy forms around every frame, you begin to see something much larger than whatever was first on the page. You see a movie.
Edmund Lee is at work on his first novel. He awaits impending distribution of West 32nd so all his friends who missed it at festival can stop pestering him. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and daughter.
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