As a screenwriter, William Goldman is famous for a string of classics including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man, and The Princess Bride. As a guru to budding screenwriters, he is famous for countless books and essays on the subject, but his most-quoted maxim in Hollywood is “Nobody Knows Anything”. This refers to the truth that you can never predict a hit or flop with 100% certainty; sometimes, you can structure your script properly, have dazzling stars and a big budget, and audiences will still boot you out the saloon door. Even he wasn’t immune.
William Goldman falls prey to his own maxim; and also lions
Screenwriters (myself included, I confess), have cited this in refutation of revision notes that we don’t want to execute. And I do think there is some wisdom in erring on the side of the storyteller’s impulse rather than trying to focus group your way into the largest audience possible. That is a very big, ongoing, vital conversation…and is not the subject of this blog post.
While I was at the Phoenix Film Festival, I spoke on a panel about screenwriting and a budding screenwriter asked me about the creative impulse behind “The Retriever”. I said, with total honesty, that my two organizing principles were 1) I wanted to show off my producing partner Barney Crow’s acting ability as a thank-you for everything he did to bring my first short film to life; and 2) I had no money. This is not the answer you usually get, but it was an honest one – I came up with an idea based on what I had.
I have taught many screenwriters by now, and if there’s a common mindset I would love to undo with a magic wand, it’s the idea that you are learning how to write Your Script. The One That Will Make You Rich. Why screenwriters ready to cite Goldman’s First Rule to studio executives can still cling to the idea that they just need to learn how to format their One Great Idea and they’ll definitely get those Harry Potter dollars is baffling, but human. Nobody Knows Anything cuts both ways.
You can’t control outcomes in this business, you can only control your own process. Which means that if you take this at all seriously, you have to think well beyond one script. Imagine if your plan to make it as a football player was to train really hard to run only one specific pass route, then hang around a stadium in the hopes that the Super Bowl will happen there, AND that a team will offer you a chance to catch the winning touchdown because they just happen to want to run that one play. You’d say that’s an absurd plan, because even if you get really good at running that route, your scenario depends on the occurrence of so many incredibly unlikely things that aren’t in your power to manifest. And screenwriting is like that. Don’t learn how to just write one script. Instead, make yourself a screenwriter, ready to apply your skills to diverse situations and staying in the game by constantly keeping your skills in practice.
The best way to make yourself useful (read: hire-able) as a screenwriter is to show that you can use the tools of storytelling to solve problems. The illustration I come back to constantly is in the legendary Raiders story conference transcripts that show George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Lawrence Kasdan beating out the original Indiana Jones movie. The key element that Kasdan, as the screenwriter, provides, is his sense for the progression of drama and cause-and-effect; and his desire for simplicity and efficiency. His screenwriting talents help create essential elements like the Staff Headpiece which motivates Indy to seek out Marion and, due to a clever reversal, subsequently puts the Nazis at the wrong dig site while Indy and his team discover the tomb.
Solving problems in your own work is one thing, and no doubt beneficial time and time again. Now that I am making my own short films, however, I’ve become a born-again advocate for practical training. Naturally, if you are excited about some big, studio-sized idea, write it down. But while you are waiting to receive the Standard Rich and Famous Contract a la The Muppet Movie, go ahead and write something to make right now.
Does this mean you have to become a director? Not necessarily – find someone who wants to do that if you prefer. When people talk about networking, introverted writers can have nightmares about lunches and parties with agents and executives. And if you’re lucky you will have to do some of that, someday. But if you’re just forging partnerships with other creative people in the course of bringing work to life, that is a form of networking too, and one that can be of immense benefit to the peer group you start to build. And it’s a lot more fun, in my experience.
But what thing should you make? What camera should you use? Should you use SAG actors or non-SAG? Should you submit to festivals or start a YouTube channel? How much should you spend?
I cannot answer these questions for you. But I can tell you how you should go about asking them; and that brings us back to Mr. Goldman, and this deeply funny and eminently-sensible scene from The Princess Bride:
“What are our assets?” Tattoo that question somewhere.
The first things you make are likely to resemble those heroes’ rescue plan – a tiny group of people with a little hope and not enough time. That’s good! K.I.S.S.: Keep it Simple, Shortfilmmaker! Start thinking about interesting locations you can access for free – get beyond Someone’s Apartment. The submission queues of film festivals are littered with Someone’s Apartment short films. Who are the actors you know? If you don’t know actors, do you know musicians? Stand-up comics? Who are the personalities you know that you could point a camera at? What could you, the well-rounded screenwriter, come up with for them to do?
Is someone you know junking a car? Would they let you wreck it instead? Does someone have a wheelchair they’re not using for a few hours? Congratulations – you’ve got the makings of a DIY camera dolly! Start looking around with this mentality and you might surprise yourself with what your assets really are.
It’s okay if the thing you make is not great. It’s okay if it’s terrible. Just make it. Make it, watch it, congratulate each other, then start asking – what would we need to make this better? Your experience will automatically make the next thing better, but maybe you also identified some key piece of equipment that would up the polish of your little filmmaking unit. “The Retriever” was shot without permits in a park outside of LA County because I couldn’t afford permits, but if I had it to do again I definitely would have found a few extra dollars to rent a shoulder rig for my cinematographer to make the camerawork a little steadier.
The great thing is, though, I gained assets just by getting out there and making things. More people became interested in helping out, lending resources, even investing a bit of much-needed cash. I’m still extremely limited in the scope of the stories I can tell but I’ve also grown my capability to make good work within those confines. I now have viable feature-length projects that could be made from the talent and resources I have access to; all they are missing is the budget. It gives one a lot of confidence to be able to show that to a potential investor.
I still have my “big” studio-style scripts that I put time into in case they ever come sniffing around; but I’m in such better shape for having chosen this self-starting outlet. And every time I start now, that’s the first question I ask.
“What are our assets?”
The more good work you can produce in response to situations like this, the more you develop your all-around muscles. A lot of paydays happen in Hollywood because somewhere, a producer suddenly has an urgent need to solve a problem. You want to be the one they think of. My gig last year writing the upcoming anime pilot Children of Ether didn’t happen because I had any experience writing English-language anime on an incredibly-short deadline. Who knows if there are even any names on that list? But a producer on the project knew and trusted me because I’d delivered for him in the past, and I solved their problem by coming in and executing the script on their deadline.
On “The Retriever”, I challenged myself to see if, as a writer, I could take a guy, a smart phone, and a shovel, and make that interesting and entertaining for five minutes; because that’s what I knew I could get my hands on and what my still-underdeveloped directing chops could handle. Now that it has concluded a festival run that succeeded wildly beyond my hopes, I can share it with you so you can see what a half-dozen friends and I were able to do in an unsecured public park in a half-day for a total budget of about $700.
Enjoy, then go figure out what your assets are and get to work!
The Retriever from Nicholas Thurkettle on Vimeo.