CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 1/30/08

It Starts With the Script:
The Santa Barbara International Film Festival

By amy dawes

Creative Screenwriting editor Amy Dawes reports in from the Santa Barbara International Film Festival's "It Starts With the Script" Panel.

It was his original research that really made the character of the late Harvey Milk come alive in the screenplay that landed Oscar nominations for him and actor Sean Penn, writer Dustin Lance Black said Saturday during the annual screenplay panel at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival.

Black joined fellow Oscar-nominated scribes Andrew Stanton (Wall-E), and Tom McCarthy (The Visitor) on the afternoon panel in front of a packed house at the Lobero Theater, along with actor Robert Knott—who co-wrote the Western Appaloosa with writer-director and star Ed Harris—and moderator Anne Thompson of Variety.

Titled "It Starts With The Script," the panel has traditionally been a centerpiece of the festival, occurring just days after days after Oscar nominations are announced and appealing to the sizeable screenwriting community in the seaside resort town, located an hour north of Los Angeles, as well as to pros who drive up from the filmmaking mecca.

But it has to be said that the once-remarkable event has lost momentum the past two editions. Last year, it was cancelled entirely, due to various illnesses and schedule conflicts, and this year it was half its usual size. At its peak, the panel boasted eight or more of the 10 writers in a given year's Oscar nominee circle. Still, smaller is sometimes better, as it gives each panelist a chance to open up, and the insights and bon mots this year were abundant.

Black, 29, said he initially got hooked on Milk's story after seeing Robert Epstein's documentary The Times of Harvey Milk while attending film school at UCLA. But it was his 2004 meeting with Cleve Jones, the activist portrayed in the movie by Emile Hirsch, and subsequently with Anne Kronenberg, a lesbian organizer who was also part of Milk's circle, that proved essential to the story he would tell. "My biggest inspiration was the word-of-mouth stories they told me that made Harvey's character more personal, more interesting and controversial," Black said. "They told me he was a failure as a businessman, and that he screwed up every relationship he ever had. I had always seen him as a hero, but the more I talked to people who knew him, the more human he became." Black, a writer-producer on HBO's Big Love, said he is currently working on another project with Milk director Gus Van Sant—this one is a an adaptation of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, literary journalist Tom Wolfe's 1968 book about the LSD-fueled adventures of Ken Kesey and the followers he called the Merry Pranksters. The project involves "a lot of fun research," Black said with a laugh, though he declined to specify whether the research was journalistic or recreational.

Stanton, whose animated fable WALL-E was one of last year's best-reviewed movies, said that the creative process at Pixar involves a mix of "complete creative freedom" and "brutal honesty."

"People at Pixar are relentless about story," he said. "It's all about the writing, and developing the heart of those characters. We're going for an intimacy, so that you believe every minute of a character's world."

Once an idea is green-lit, a writer might go off to work on his own for six months at a time with no interference, said Stanton, but then comes the day when the company's creative team convenes to dissect and criticize the work in progress. "It's a safe but very blunt discussion," said Stanton. "It's the hardest day to face, but the constructive criticism is like gold. I hate it and love it at the same time, and I don't know how to make a movie any other way."

Tom McCarthy, writer-director of critically loved indie films The Station Agent and The Visitor, said his method is different. "I'm intensely private," he said. "I work alone in my basement. My dog is my head of production." McCarthy recently came out of seclusion to spend months at Pixar working on Up, the upcoming animated adventure directed by Pete Docter, and described the experience as "fascinating but brutal."

Despite the splendid final outcome, McCarthy said his first drafts tend to be rough. "They're flawed, but it's a matter of seeing what's powerful in there that's worth saving."

While writing The Visitor, he said, he sought honest feedback from his agents by having an early draft circulated in the agency with a pseudonym on it. The coverage by one reader was so harsh, but so "honest and good," he said, that he went in to thank her for it. She was mortified and apologized, but he took her to lunch and says he found her analysis helpful. Besides its screenplay nod, The Visitor also brought an Oscar nomination to its lead actor, Richard Jenkins.

Knott, who debuts as a produced screenwriter with Appaloosa, said it was the lousy scripts he received as an actor that motivated him to write. "When I didn't get a role, I'd think, 'I'm glad I didn't!' and throw the script in the trash," he declared. An Oklahoma native and third-generation actor, he said he came to realize that "I had a voice, and I had something to say." He teamed up with Harris, who he'd met doing theater, to adapt the Robert P. Parker novel about a pair of gunslingers for hire (Harris and Viggo Mortenson) and the woman (Rene Zellweger) who comes between them. He said he and Harris have plans to collaborate on two additional projects based on novels by Parker. His writing method, he said candidly, involves "a lot of drinking and working at 3 in the morning," plus perseverance. "I just try to stay in it," he said, "and let the characters tell me where to go."

All the writers emphasized developing character and emotion as the central aspect of their work. On WALL-E, said Stanton, even the title was changed to bring the focus onto the character (it was originally called Trash Planet). "I had this idea, of 'what if mankind left the planet, and forgot to turn the last robot off, and that little robot just did its job forever, for no reason.' The loneliness and futility of that was so clear—you could feel it, and it became the bedrock of the story."

Stanton opined that "emotional reality is everything," and that "plot is really just a device to find out who your characters are."

Black concurred that "character is absolutely first. I knew the story of Harvey Milk," he said, "but it was a matter of figuring out who those (real-life) people were at that time in their lives, and what was going to make us fall in love with them."

Stanton, who also wrote Pixar's Finding Nemo, Toy Story, and Toy Story 2, said he's completed a second draft of his forthcoming adaptation of the Edgar Rice Burroughs novel John Carter of Mars, which he's making for Disney.

Amy Dawes is a freelance journalist and the former editor of Creative Screenwriting Magazine. Santa Barbara is her favorite California city.



Santa Barbara International Film Festival courtesy Rebecca Sapp

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