CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 4/18/08

Analyze This:
Tom Stempel's Understanding Screenwriting

By jason davis

Frequent CS Weekly contributor Tom Stempel takes on the good, the not-so-good, and the bad in his new book on the craft of screenwriting.

When he's not teaching courses in screenwriting at Los Angeles City College or contributing book reviews to CS Weekly, Tom Stempel is writing books like the newly released Understanding Screenwriting: Learning from Good, Not-Quite-So-Good, and Bad Screenplays, in which he picks apart several recent films (and a few noteworthy classics) to come to grips with what makes a screenplay, great, not so great, or just plain awful.

How did you become interested in writing about movies?
I've always been interested in movies. I studied playwriting while I was in college and then went to graduate school at UCLA to study screenwriting. When I was at UCLA, I got involved in a project called The Oral History of the Motion Pictures, which was run by a guy named Howard Suber. I ended up doing a long, long history interview with Nunnally Johnson, the great screenwriter of The Grapes of Wrath, The Dirty Dozen, and Three Faces of Eve. That turned my interest to the history of screenwriting, because no one else was doing that. People literally looked at you funny when you said you were writing about screenwriting back in the '60s and early '70s. My PhD doctoral dissertation was a biography of Nunnally Johnson, which was eventually published as a book. It was turned down by over 30 publishers, most of them twice, before it was eventually published. People could not conceive of a biography of a screenwriter that wasn't a collection of interesting, funny jokes. This was a biography that took a screenwriter seriously and was eventually published in 1980 and got some very good reviews. That whetted my interest, and since there were not a lot of people writing about screenwriting, I decided to keep up on that.

So you were doing Creative Screenwriting-style writing decades before there was a Creative Screenwriting Magazine?
Yes. When Creative Screenwriting started in 1994, I subscribed and got the first issue of it. At the bottom of one page, there was a little box saying we're interested in people to join the editorial board. I laughed out loud, because I'd had so many projects turned down by editorial boards. I thought the idea of me on an editorial board is like giving Billy the Kid a badge and saying, "Clean up the town." I sent in my application and resume and [founding publisher] Erik Bauer said sure. The original incarnation of Creative Screenwriting was more of an academic journal than it is now. They needed an editorial board to read through the stuff that was submitted. I, and Malvin Wald, and the other people on the board sorted through the stuff. We did that and it helped build up the journal. I loved the opportunity to encourage young people writing about screenwriting.

Why did you write Understanding Screenwriting?
In 1982, I did a screenwriting textbook called Screenwriting. To fill it out to "feature length," so to speak, I had a selection of notes on scripts. The categories there were some great ones, flawed gems, and disasters to learn from. They were short takes. Several people at the time said, "Tom, you could do a whole book of this stuff." I said, "Yeah. Okay. Maybe." I put it away because at that time I'd already started working on Framework: The History of Screenwriting in the American Film, which came out in '88. I didn't think about it again until about three or four years ago. Erik came up with the idea of doing a series of books under the Creative Screenwriting umbrella. He had that idea for about a minute and a half, decided it wasn't going to work out. But in the meantime, he asked the writers if anyone had an idea for a book. Suddenly, the light bulb went on over my head. That thing everybody said 20-something years ago…I could do that. Even though Erik ended up not doing that series of books, I went ahead. This was a chance to write about screenplays in some depth. That was how it came about.

How did you arrive at the "good, not-so-good, bad" format for this book?
It came over from the last one. I liked the idea of dealing not only with the good ones. There was one publisher that turned down the book—"Why are you dealing with not-so-good and bad screenplays?" I said, for the reason that business schools study the Edsel and New Coke —you find out what's going wrong. For writers, to be able to look at their own scripts and say, "What am I doing wrong here?" is enormously valuable.

What was the criterion by which you selected the films to talk about?
Everyone asks, "Why did you pick those films?" Of the six people who read the first couple of drafts, there's been absolutely no agreement on what should be in the book and what should not be in the book. I picked the films primarily because I thought there was something interesting for me to say about them and there was something for somebody reading the book to learn from these movies. Keep in mind, there are two elements to this book. One is what I have to say about the scripts, which I hope is interesting and amusing. The other thing is to teach people how to look at movies and how to learn about screenwriting from looking at movies.

What movies did you initially consider including and why were they cut from the final draft?
There are a number of outtakes that will be on the DVD (laughs). At one point, I was going to do a comparison between the original version of The Italian Job and the remake, because that's an example of a remake that is much better than the original. I just ended up not doing it. I originally had a chapter—that I never got around to writing—called "Where Have All the Women Gone?" It was a look at films by macho directors like Scorsese, De Palma, and Stone, in which I point out that the women characters are really underwritten. I ended up not doing that because there are so many other opportunities in the scripts I did write about to include those observations. The other chapter that got dropped as we were condensing the book was called "A Dozen Bad Screenplays and One Punch Line." In it, I did short takes on a dozen bad screenplays and the punch line was that I hadn't seen any of the movies. The idea was that you can learn about screenwriting not only by seeing the movies, but by reading the reviews, reading material about them, and so on. There were some people who read the book and thought that's cute. The people who hated that chapter, I mean really hated it, felt it was just a trick and it was a cheat and all of that so when I had to cut down to a publishable length, I cut that chapter all together.

In the introduction, you say you'd rather be a teacher than a guru—
I hate the idea of being a guru. It's their vision, their philosophy, their structures…all of that. I would prefer to teach people and let them figure out how to do it on their own and not be dependant on mechanical formulas. In the book, I slap Syd Field's formula upside the head a couple of times. His emphasis on structure is very good, but in the original, he makes it rather mechanical. Like I say, you see certain films and you know they have been cut to fill the Syd Field mold. That's the reasons I included the little short take on Bon Voyage—it doesn't.

At the outset, you say that the book is primarily focused on films since 1982, but Lawrence of Arabia and Rear Window are two of the first films you review, and they come up repeatedly in the later sections. Do you see them as yardsticks to judge other films?
Both of them have been very heavily borrowed from. I knew with all those historical films in the Lawrence-wannabe chapter that I could refer back to what Lawrence did well and what these are doing well or not. Since I dealt with classic screenplays earlier, I wanted to deal with more up-to-date stuff, the kind of stuff that gets made now.

How is this book reflective of how you teach your classes at Los Angeles City College?
It reflects it very much, because several of the good films I've done in my screenwriting class. I tend to go through them in segments on DVD, 15 minutes at a time. Every two or three weeks, we'll see another segment. In my class this semester, I'm doing Rear Window. It's the same interactive kind of thing. We look at the scene and say, "Is this working? Is this not working?" The book is designed to be informal in that kind of way, the way that I do the teaching.

Who do you see as the target audience for this book?
Originally, since I conceived it with Erik's idea of a Creative Screenwriting book, it was focused on screenwriters and would-be screenwriters. When I got into it, I discovered that if you're writing about the way things work or don't work, you also end up having to talk about actors and directors and art directors and CGI people and all of that. It really expanded as I was writing it to make comments about what they do and don't do. It's not just for would-be screenwriters and screenwriters, it's for would-be and actual actors, directors, and so on. I was surprised in some ways that there ended up being so much about what the actors bring to the scripts. Liam Neeson could bring a lot to the role of Kinsey because it's there in the script. But as [Qui-Gon Jinn] in Star Wars Episode I, there's not a lot he can bring to that because there's not a lot there in the script. I always get on my students—I tell them if they're writing a screenplay, they're writing for performance. The actors have got to be able to do this, to say this, to play this in some kind of way. You've got to give the actors something to do. Beginning writers tend to write long speeches expounding their philosophy. From an acting point of view, what can you do with that? One of the points I make in the book is that screenwriting is organic. It's not mechanical. For every rule you can think of, there's at least one spectacular exception to that. A rule I'm sure most screenwriting books give you is don't start out with a long monologue. Yeah, okay. Go look at The Godfather. Bonasera's speech to Don Corleone—that is one of the great openings in the history of movies.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

Tom Stempel courtesy Alix Parson
The Italian Job (2003) courtesy Paramount Home Entertainment

Kinsey courtesy 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment

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