CS Weekly Archive > Happenings > 07/28/06

Writing is Rewriting:
The Writers Guild Foundation
Annual Craft Day -- Rewriting

By james fogelson

At the Writers Guild Foundation's Annual Craft Day, an audience of working and aspiring writers gathered to hear panel discussions on the topic of rewriting. Did the event spark creativity—was it more than just a refuge from the heat?

"Only good can come from this."
—Robin Schiff, during the "What Now?" panel.

I spent a day inside the air-conditioned confines of the Writers Guild headquarters. As temperatures outside raged into the triple digits, inside the WGA quotable advice boiled up from panels and ideas bounced off the walls.

On Saturday, July 22, the Writers Guild Foundation hosted their annual craft day, a full slate of panel discussions called "Welcome to Rewriting! or Dying is Easy…Rewriting is Hard" at the Writers Guild of America, west headquarters in Los Angeles. Featuring over a dozen prominent writers from film and television, along with a handful of executives and agents, the event drew 130 writers who paid up to $150 to garner some pearls of wisdom about the rewriting process.

First up was the full-group panel entitled "What's Wrong with This Picture?" named after a lecture that husband-and-wife writers Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune) and Robin Swicord (Memoirs of a Geisha) have been delivering at the Austin Film Festival for a few years. Moderated by newly elected WGF President Chris Brancato (The X-Files, Boomtown), the panel included writers Kazan, Swicord, and Ron Bass (Rain Man, My Best Friend's Wedding) along with producer Marianne Moloney (Out of the Ashes) and agent Bob Hohman (Aline Brosh McKenna, Neil Jiminez) of the L.A.-based Hohman Maybank Lieb literary agency.

The Swicord/Kazan lecture must be a doozy. They tried to distill it down to 20 minutes at the WGF event, but it's easy to see how their presentation could expand to fill a whole day. Swicord and Kazan have a checklist of rules that writers should examine after they've finished a draft to make sure that the draft is all that it can be before it goes out into the world. (They use this same checklist on their own scripts.) The bullet points:

Just be competent—Proofread your script for typos, misspelled words, widows and orphans, etc.
Don't just be competent—Competence is not enough. Be compelling. Make your screenplay distinctive.
What's the subtext?—There has to be a mythic level driving the action, a wanting and a need underlying the action. Infuse every moment in every scene with intention. Swicord and Kazan believe that there's a mythic story that underlies every good screenplay. Kazan's Frances, for example, is the story of a woman who dared to speak the truth and was punished for her actions. He said that he could measure every scene of that screenplay against the mythic story that underlies it.
Construct your story from the inside—From your character's point of view.
Don't make things up—Your story has to be grounded in its own internal logic—inserting twists and turns that don't come out of character or the situation, that are simply writer's devices, will unhinge your work.

Kazan said that he knows what is wrong with every screenplay before he ever reads it, so he has put together a list of those potential problems:

Passive protagonist—The protagonist doesn't drive the action.
There's no discernible myth
The movie is overstuffed
The movie is understuffed
The first narrative event happens too late
There's a feeling of the inevitable—Stories have to be surprising as you move forward, inevitable as you look back.
There's no real central character
The central character is not compelling
Failure to tell what's important—Every moment, every event has the same weight.
Unfair burdens are placed on dialogue—Avoid exposition that is all based in dialogue. Don't force characters to tell each other things that each already knows just so that the audience will be clued in.

Kazan and Swicord emphasized the value of having a few trusted, astute readers. Swicord stated that "if you hear a note twice, there's something wrong with your screenplay."

When the discussion shifted to Bass, the Oscar-winning former lawyer showed himself to be an able contrarian. Bass maintains a paid team of development people who give him feedback on his screenwriting, yet insists that he trusts his own opinion above all others. For Bass, the biggest asset a screenwriter has is his confidence and judgment. He encouraged writers to listen to their own voices after exposing themselves to "all proper considerations."

Agent Bob Hohman encouraged writers to live in Los Angeles—he only represents writers who live in the L.A. area—if they want to be seriously considered for assignments, pitches, and professional writing work. Hohman believes that finding astute readers is much easier in the City of Angels. Interestingly, unlike some agents, Hohman doesn't give creative notes to his clients on their scripts; though he reads every draft, he feels that he's a great audience, but not a great source of writing solutions.

After a brief coffee break, the event broke up into four separate workshops and case studies. Participants had a choice of attending "Story and Plot" with Swicord and the writing team of Miles Millar and Al Gough (Smallville), moderated by Hohman; "Characters" with Marc Norman (Shakespeare in Love co-written with Tom Stoppard), Jane Anderson (The Positively True Adventures of the Alleged Texas Cheerleader-Murdering Mom) and John Sacret Young (China Beach, Testament), moderated by Georgia Jeffries (Sisters); "Building a Scene" with Winnie Holzman (My So-Called Life, the Broadway musical Wicked), Andrew Marlowe (Air Force One), and Kazan, moderated by John Furia, Jr. (TV's Kung Fu); or "Dealing with Notes" with Jack Epps, Jr. (Top Gun, The Secret of My Success, both co-written with Cash) and Michael Goldenberg (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix), moderated by Marianne Moloney. After an hour-and-a-half of discussion, the event broke for a free-for-all lunch of Subway sandwiches and greasy chips, just like real writers.

I decided to check out "Dealing with Notes," where veteran screenwriter Epps talked about his experience on such films as Top Gun and Dick Tracy, and emphasized the value of building consensus during the notes process. For Epps, the task is finding the core of the movie and staying true to that core. He likes to boil his film down to a few simple core statements and to keep relating back to those statements as he moves forward in the process.

Goldenberg talked about his experience adapting next summer's Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix from J.K. Rowling's novel. Agreeing that it's important to make sure that everybody wants to make the same movie, Goldenberg feels that the screenwriter is the ultimate defender of the work, but that there are multiple solutions to every issue. It's the screenwriter's job to distill the notes and find solutions that address their core.

Epps encouraged writers to view the director as their creative partner who can bring out the best in the material. A director and a strong producer can be a writer's best defense against the barrage of notes that can erupt in a studio setting. Epps stated that "it's a collaborative business and you have to collaborate. You have to be a diplomat."

After lunch, there was another round of breakout panels. Writers picked from "Raising the Dramatic Stakes" with Michael Colleary (Face/Off with co-writer Mike Werb), Jessica Bendinger (Bring It On), and Marlowe, moderated by Norman; "Dialogue and Subtext" with Holzman, Anderson, and Sacret Young, moderated by Robin Schiff (Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion); a free-ranging discussion with Eric Roth (Munich), moderated by Furia; or "Stage Directions, Narrative and the Big Print" with Epps, Goldenberg, and Showtime exec Joan Boorstein, moderated by Jeffries.

I chose "Dialogue and Subtext," which turned out to be a delightful, lively discussion with moderator Schiff calling on her background as an ex-Groundling to keep things moving.

The panel focused more on subtext than on dialogue, and the topic was more of a taking-off point than an anchor for discussion. Anderson and Holzman, with their extensive theater experience, spoke to the differences between a playwright's necessary reliance on dialogue and a screenwriter's dependence upon description to carry subtext. Anderson emphasized the importance of tone, and of establishing your script in the opening three pages to let the reader know what kind of movie you're writing. As a technique, Anderson says that she uses more parenthetical directions and more extensive description in the opening of a script to point the reader in the right direction; she reduces these as she gets deeper into the script, trusting the established tone to carry the reader through.

The panelists all spoke about relating their writing of subtext to the process of acting. They felt that it was important to understand how actors play subtext, and to give them direction in the text that helped get the subtext across and that the most effective direction is to describe evocative action.

Holzman said that for her, writing dialogue is all about editing. She boils down long speeches in her writing with interior cuts, believing that shorter is almost always better. The panelists all agreed that the best dialogue writing is not naturalistic, but that it captures the flavor and essence of real speech in an artistic way. Anderson repeated the quote that "Screenwriting is haiku," and encouraged writers to treat themselves kindly, "as kindly as you would treat a young student."

After another break, the entire group gathered together again for a panel entitled "What Now?" Sacret Young moderated a panel made up of Joan Boorstein, Colleary, Schiff, and Holzman, and UTA agents Marc Korman and Julien Thuan (whose clients include such as Chris Brancato and Drew Goddard) to try to answer the question "When is a script ready to go out into the world?"

The entire panel agreed that, in a business of first impressions, there's no excuse for typos, spelling errors, and formatting goofs. When a script comes up in the pile with sloppy mistakes, readers are likely to discard it without giving it a second (or even first) look. Colleary suggested that a script is ready to go out when you acknowledge that your screenplay will never be finished in your hands. It's ready to be shared with others after you've proofread, corrected, and cleaned up the script. And, he noted, when you send that script out, always keep in mind that it is going to come back with notes.

Showtime's Boorstein and UTA's Korman engaged in some discussion about the television business, and the purpose of TV spec scripts. While TV specs serve to show a writer's ability to write for established characters and situations, nowadays writers have to work even harder to make their scripts stand out from the pile. And while spec pilots are another way of showing off a writer's skills (in concert with spec episodes), always remember that series TV is a business of pitches rather than specs. While there are exceptions to every rule, you should think of spec pilots as calling cards rather than scripts that might sell.

The panel concluded on a series of positive notes, encouraging writers to find their trusted readers, to let themselves be inspired, and to "make friends with your frustration." Step back, take some time away from your writing, and according to Sacret Young, "you may be your own best reader."

The day was capped off by a wine and cheese reception in the WGF's Shavelson-Webb Library where several lucky writers won raffle prizes, including Final Draft software and dinner at Chipotle, all while mingling with other writers and many of the panelists.

In a business that is so rife with negativity, the Annual Craft Day at the WGF was a relentlessly upbeat affair. Working writers talking about writing, attempting to inspire the next generation of writers to focus on their craft and build their confidence for the tough journey ahead. Even the agents were focused on the bright side. UTA's Korman said "Good clients and good ideas make good agents. Good writing wins out."

If "Dying is Easy" and rewriting is hard, at least the view from the top of the ladder still makes the climb seem possible.

Jason Fogelson is a freelance writer. He served as Literary Manager/Director of Play Development at the Public Theater in New York under Joseph Papp, and as a lit agent for the Gersh Agency and the William Morris Agency. He's currently developing several feature film and documentary projects as a producer, writer, and director. You can read Jason's car reviews at About.com and his weblog at suvs.about.com.

Wonder Boys courtesy Paramount Home Video

The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio courtesy DreamWorks Home Video

Finding Forrester courtesy Sony Pictures Home Entertainment

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