Are You a Professional?

Do you have an amateur’s point of view or a professional’s? One way to tell: “How do you react to notes?”

A TV producer-director friend, who’s directed hundreds and hundreds of hours of television, comes across a lot of writers. A lot of beginning writers. A lot of intermediate writers. A lot of professionals. He recently told me he no longer reads scripts by non-pros. “If they’re not professional, all they want is praise.” He stopped wasting his time.

There’s always that straw that knocks the camel into the dung heap. For my buddy, this was it…

“I read the script by this guy. It was terrible. But it had a good idea. So when I met with him, I told him he had to throw the whole thing out and start over, but the core idea was worth the effort. He said, ‘Yeah, I know that. But would you show it to your agent?’ I told him again that it was not good, needed total rewriting, and wasn’t ready. He said, ‘I know, I know. But would you show it to your agent?’ I told him a third time and he asked me to show it to my agent.”

As the British would say, that tore it. End of that particular wannabe’s relationship with someone who could help him.

If all you want is praise, go hang out with your grandparents. If you want to get into the movie and television business, get ready for notes. All you’re ever going to get is notes. Criticism piled on more criticism with spicy criticism sauce poured on top. Plus… the lack of praise makes you feel bad. Get over it. I did.

All I ever want anyone to say about my writing is, “I weep at your genius.” I’m still waiting.

John Lloyd Miller, who’s a helluva filmmaker, says this and I agree, “Every note is an opportunity for you to improve your work.” You need to buy into that mantra, wholeheartedly. When someone takes time to give you notes, take the time to actually listen, nod attentively and appreciatively, write down every single painful thing they say, and pay for the lunch.

If you don’t want notes, can’t welcome notes, can’t smile when you get punched in the gut, find something other than writing to occupy your time because you don’t want to be a writer.

Not a better one anyway. Certainly not a professional.

If You Can Keep Your Head When All About You…

Kipling was one hell of a writer, not a filmmaker. As you so well know, writing is a solitary event. A novelist may deal with an editor or publisher, but, unless you need a new typewriter ribbon or more ink for your pen, you don’t rub up against many people.

Filmmaking is not like that. You’re in the soup with a lot of other people. Your agent, producer, director, sound person, DP, actors, caterer, editor, colorist, sales rep… are your collaborators. They have your best interest at heart. Listen to them even if, from time to time you must ignore Kipling and his legendary poem, “If.”

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46473/if—

In the film department I run, I see this a bunch: despite the best and repeated advice of their crew and teacher, filmmakers at times insist on doing it “their way” and fly the entire operation into the ground.

This is a thin line to walk and I get the degree of difficulty in successfully negotiating the “But they just don’t understand what I’m trying to do!” aspect of filmmaking.

Your crew is your first audience. There’s no way they can see inside your head to understand what you planned and hope for, but they can see the script, they can see the dailies, and they can see the rough cut. They can see your mistakes and if you absolutely won’t be swayed from the gleaming railroad tracks running oh-so-straight across the desert toward distant Paradise, there’s a chance those tracks will drop your train into a deep canyon.

Talking to someone who won’t listen is as rewarding as talking to a wall. At some point your crew may give up trying to give you advice.

When I was in film school, we were required to crew on a 480 (15 minute thesis film) before we were allowed to direct one. The semester before I directed, I was a cinematographer. Together, all the crews watched all the dailies for all the films. All the teachers were in the theater and gave notes as we watched each crew’s footage or cuts and the directors’ reasons for and defense of their choices.

One film was about a Sikh’s decision to cut his hair. The director had a scene where the man is in his bathroom and his girlfriend is waiting in the hall. He takes off his turban and his long hair comes down past his shoulders. He takes one hair between two fingers and pulls it down in front of his face. Holding nail scissors, he looks at the solitary hair and his face in the mirror and… cuts the hair. Nothing happens. Lightning does not strike him and, using the scissors, he hacks at all of his hair, chopping, chopping, chopping.

The scissors were too small to do the job right and the lame attempt to cut all that hair looked ridiculous. Everybody told the director that he had absolute gold if he went from the shot of the one hair being cut, to the hero’s tense wait for lighting to strike, to the girlfriend waiting in the hall, and to the man coming out of the bathroom with short hair. We all felt that, if he showed the character taking the scissors to the rest of his hair, it would be a disastrous mistake. He disagreed. He stuck to his artistic guns and did it precisely like he had always wanted. In the final film, the scene didn’t work. By then, of course, it was too late.

Next semester, when it was my turn to direct, I told my editor that if everyone told me I was doing something wrong, to make sure I listened.

If you’re making a film based on events that happened to them, you are constantly in danger of falling out of the life boat into heavy seas. Creating narrative based on personal history clouds the mind. It takes experience to understand how that, just because something was dramatic when it happened to you, it may not succeed dramatically when it gets to the screen. Be aware: real-life-into-drama can be quicksand.

My 480 was about a girlfriend I’d had in Paris. And a woman I’d dated in Los Angeles. And a French friend I yearned for but who had no romantic interest in me. Claude Lelouch was my favorite director and I wrapped these three stories around each other to tell my story like Lelouch.

It didn’t work. The only one who could follow the complex story structure was me… but I loved it. It was exactly what I’d written and shot. Everything I’d hoped for.

Late in the semester, when we were about to lock picture, my crew and editor said I needed to strongly consider cutting the thread about unrequited love. Nearly one third of the film.

The three part intercutting structure was vitally important. Losing the “friend in Paris” scenes would wreck what I’d been writing, planning and working on for a year. I really, really, really didn’t want to let go of my initial idea.

Luckily, I remembered the previous semester’s director and The Advice Not Taken. As wrenching as the decision was to go against my instincts, I decided that, because everyone was telling me I was wrong, I’d better listen. I told the editor to cut the character. Away she went.

Suddenly the film made perfect sense, worked nicely, and did well for me.

Decades later, I cannot remember anything about that missing story thread except the super cool modern house in the Hollywood Hills we shot in. It’s as if that character’s story never existed. I’d been wrong when everyone around me was right. My team helped me save my film.

If you’re making a film or writing something and everybody’s telling you you’re wrong, there’s a slim chance they could be wrong and holding on to your original plan might be the correct decision. Most likely though, they’re right and you’re not.

When that many people tell you you’ve made a mistake, listen very, very, very carefully.

When you’ve shown your film to an audience or given your writing to an agent, it’s out of your hands and there’s nothing you can do to bring it back. As Ken Robinson, my teacher at USC, told us, “You don’t get to stand next to the screen and explain it.”

I dedicated both my books to the man who gave me that piece of wisdom.

And now, I give it to you.

Kitchen Timer Method

A good way to make yourself write. Don Roos, the clever mind behind The Opposite of Sex and Web Therapy, gave me this.

“KITCHEN TIMER”

The principle of Kitchen Timer is that every writer deserves a definite and do-able way of being and feeling successful every day.

To do this, we learn to judge ourselves on behavior rather than content. (We leave content to our unconscious; experience will teach us to trust that.) We set up a goal for ourselves as writers which is easy, measurable, free of anxiety, and fail-proof, because everyone can sit, and an hour will always pass.

Here’s how it works:

1. Buy a kitchen timer, one that goes to 60 minutes.

2. We decide on Monday how many hours of writing we will do Tuesday. When in doubt or under pressure or self-attack, we choose fewer hours rather than more. A good, strong beginning is one hour a day.

3. The Kitchen Timer Hour:
No phones. No listening to the machine to see who it is. We turn ringers off if possible. It is our life; we are entitled to one hour without interruption, particularly from loved ones. We ask for their support. “I was on an hour” is something they learn to understand. But they will not respect it unless we do first.
No music with words, unless it’s a language we don’t understand.
No internet, absolutely.
No reading.
No “desk re-design/landscaping”, no pencil-sharpening.

4. Immediately upon beginning the hour, we open two documents: our journal, and the project we are working on. If we don’t have a project we’re actively working on, we just open our journal.

5. An hour consists of TIME SPENT keeping our writing appointment. We don’t have to write at all, if we are happy to stare at the screen. Nor do we have to write a single word on our current project; we may spend the entire hour writing in our journal. Anything we write in our journal is fine; ideas for future projects, complaints about loved ones, even “I hate writing” typed four hundred times.

When we wish or if we wish, we pop over to the current project document and write for as long as we like. When we get tired or want a break, we pop back to the journal.

The point is, when disgust or fatigue with the current project arises, we don’t take a break by getting up from our desk. We take a break by returning to the comforting arms of our journal, until that in turn bores us. Then we are ready to write on our project again, and so on. We use our boredom in this way.

IT IS ALWAYS OKAY TO WRITE EXCLUSIVELY IN OUR JOURNAL. In practice it will rarely occur that we spend the full hour in our journal, but it’s fine, good, and right that we do when we feel like it. It is just as good a writing day as one spent entirely in our current project.

6. It is infinitely better to write fewer hours every day, than many hours one day and none the next. If we have a crowded weekend, we choose a half-hour as our time, put in that time, and go on with our day. We are always trying to minimize our resistance, and beginning an hour on Monday after two days off is a challenge.

7. When the hour is up, we stop, even if we’re in the middle of a sentence. If we have scheduled another hour, we give ourselves a break before beginning again — to read, eat, go on errands. We are not trying to create a cocoon we must stay in between hours; the “I’m sorry I can’t see anyone or leave my house, I’m on a deadline” method. Rather, inside the hour is the inviolate time.

8. If we fail to make our hours for the day, we have probably scheduled too many. Four hours a day is an enormous amount of time spent in this manner, for example. If on Wednesday we planned to write three hours and didn’t make it, we subtract the time we didn’t write from our schedule for the next day. If we fail to make a one-hour commitment, we make a one-hour or a half-hour appointment for the next day. WE REALIZE WE CANNOT MAKE UP HOURS, and that continuing to fail to meet our commitment will result in the extinguishing of our voice.

9. When we have fulfilled our commitment, we make sure we credit ourselves for doing so. We have satisfied our obligation to ourselves, and the rest of the day is ours to do with as we wish.

10. A word about content: This may seem to be all about form, but the knowledge that we have satisfied our commitment to ourselves, the freedom from anxiety and resistance, and the stilling of that hectoring voice inside of us which used to yell at us that we weren’t writing enough — all this opens us up creatively. When we stop whipping ourselves, our voices rise up inside.

Good luck!

In Praise of Typewriters

I recently paid one of the few IBM trained typewriter repair people in my lovely hometown $125 to bring my slightly gummy Correcting Selectric II (the Mt. Olympus of typing devices) back into smooth running order. It was worth it.

For one thing, writing thank you notes is a pleasure because I can bang them out on the noisy typewriter and it makes me feel like I’m doing something. I can’t know how it feels to receive such a thank you, but perhaps a bit different from an email that took all of 11 seconds to write and send. Plus, I have fancypants engraved stationery I love using.

Though I have no problem with writer’s block, a lot of people do. It can be crippling. It can wreck your life.

If you read Your Screenplay Sucks!, and you should have… at least three times… you will be familiar with my IBM Correcting Selectric II. The typewriter gets a mention because of the importance of spell check. As I grew up writing on that typewriter, I got really good at proofreading because, once you pulled the paper out of the typewriter, there was no way to correct the mistake and you had to go back and retype the whole damn page.

I can imagine droves of Millennials reading that sentence and committing suicide.

Such is one benefit of a typewriter.

Another benefit a typewriter taught me, which is also wired into my DNA, is that you can’t go back. March forward or die. The typewriter sits there waiting patiently, motor humming like a throaty purring cat… There’s nothing for you to do but ponder the page and think about what you’re going to do next. Because of my typewriter’s inability to go backwards, to allow me to fix anything at the top of the page or the page before or 20 pages before, the typewriter taught me to keep writing.

This simple idea is lost on people who began their writing efforts with the computer. The wonderfulness of a computer makes it possible for you to go back and rewrite something… as soon as you write it! This is hooded Death staring you down, eyes burning red, whispering for you to fail.

If you don’t have Samson’s iron will, going back is a death sentence to your ability to write.

Stopping kills the mindset needed to get into a character or a creative space that allows you to tell a story, relentlessly living in that creative “zone.” If anything dislodges you from the zone, you are lost. At least temporarily. Some people: permanently. “Dislodge” is perhaps the wrong word. That suggests that a granite foundation exists to creative work and you are simply knocked off it.

The word “dislodge” should be replaced with “brushed” or “flicked.” The slightest distraction can flick you out the headspace, that precious zone you endeavor to stay in so you can write. Once you are out of it, it can be extraordinarily difficult to get back in.

When you write on a computer and misspell a word, a wiggly red line appears under it. POW! Out of the creative headspace. Now you correct that word. Then, all of a sudden, you look at the top of the page and see something else that isn’t exactly perfect. So you correct it in an endeavor to make it perfect. But it’s not perfect. So now you’re depressed because you can’t achieve perfection and you try to correct it again. Then you think of something two pages back that might need a little more thought. Due to the nature of the computer, you slide up a page or two and start to work on that piece of junk you wrote. Forget whatever the hell it was you were trying to write when you misspelled the original word. Now, instead of swimming forward in your wonderful writing zone, you are thrashing in an acid filled morass of depressing quicksand that will peel off your skin and leave you reduced to a sobbing carcass.

Very hard to get writing done when you are a sobbing carcass.

The main cause of writer’s block is fear. Generally, this fear is “fear it won’t be perfect.”

No worries as long as you don’t try to make it perfect in the first draft. If you know you’re going to fix it later, it’s all right if it’s not perfect now. Sometime in the future you can make it as close to perfect as possible. Not now. Not while you’re staring at that word with the red line under it telling you you’re stupid and talentless. And maybe ugly.

Enter the old fashioned typewriter.

If you write on a typewriter, you can’t go back and fix what you wrote. You have to keep moving forward and the pages will pile up and the first draft will be all right, but not perfect, but who cares? It will exist. You will get work done. Keep moving. Fix it later.

If you find yourself always going back and rewriting while you are in the process of doing your first draft, seriously consider a typewriter. It may help a lot.

My suggestion: an IBM correcting Selectric II, for around $300. Or the IBM Wheelwriter. They still make ribbons for them. Buy from a typewriter repair person or a store. Take out the correcting tape and you can’t fix anything!

Or, visit swintec.com.  They still make new ones!

If you want a manual typewriter, get one. Tom Hanks likes ’em. They are more expensive cause they’re cooler. And, wonderfully, since they don’t have any correcting feature at all, with a manual, there’s no way to go back. None.

With a typewriter, you can only go forward. For someone with a crippling need to perfect their first draft, a typewriter seems a Godsend. For one thing, it’s faster than writing with pen and paper. The idea that, for someone with horrible writer’s block, being unable to go backwards seems an exhilarating and liberating experience.

Because few people writing today have written on a typewriter, the idea of constant forward motion and staying in the writing zone has been lost. I hope not forever.

You gotta want it. A lotty lot.

Figuring out a way to wrench out time to write, especially after working all the livelong day at your horridly painful job, is excruciatingly difficult. Especially if you’ve never had any real success writing. You have to maneuver forward as best you can, trying to convince yourself that this is a good idea. Brutally difficult at best, writing is physically debilitating, emotionally draining, and a big fat waste of time… at worst.

However, I do not believe in the worst. Especially the “waste of time” part. You’re always learning, always improving. If only by dull banging-your-head-against-the-wall repetition, you get better. It’s never a waste of time.

Writing is so vague and semi-invisible, it’s hard to make yourself do it when all you have is the little voice inside telling you you should do it. Doing battle against naysayers, like a spouse, or friends or false friends, or the evil little voice inside that soothes, “this is never going to work. Why don’t you just go to bed at a normal time?” Defeating the voices around you and defeating the one inside yourself is, in a lot of ways, more difficult than writing. When you have so many other forces tugging at you, just sitting down to write can be the hardest thing.

Well, solving the puzzle that is the incredible mess you made of the project you’re working on is more difficult than sitting down to write. Hell, all of it’s difficult.

However! When it is moving forward, nicely, at a good clip, and you feel like you’re not the biggest idiot in the world, writing feels pretty good. That’s the best you can hope for — to feel pretty good a reasonable percentage of the time.

Get in a writing group. Find like-minded people. Get some encouragement. Try to get far away from people who make you feel bad about yourself for doing what you’re doing.

To rip a “writing hour” a day out of your 24 hour day is critical, and savagely difficult. Two hours a day would be a miracle.

“I still have vivid recollections of putting in day after day of trying a case in front of a jury, which is one of the most exhausting activities I know about, dashing up to the law library after court had adjourned to spend three or four hours looking up law points with which I could trap my adversary the next day, then going home, grabbing a glass of milk with an egg in it, dashing upstairs to my study, ripping the cover off my typewriter, noticing it was 11:30 p.m. and settling down with grim determination to get a plot for a story. Along about 3:00 in the morning I would have completed my daily stint of a 4,000-word minimum and would crawl into bed.”

Erle Stanley Gardner (whose Perry Mason novels have sold 300 million copies)

You’ve got to be like Erle Stanley Gardner. You have to really, really want it.

Wanting it “a lot” is not going to be enough. To make screenwriting or any other artistic medium actually happen, you have to want it like a drowning man clawing for the surface so he can get a lungful of oxygen and not die.

Is anything about writing easy? The Little Voice in Your Head…

I have a tiny little voice in the back of my head. Sadly, it does not give me football scores before the games. It does warn me when there is something wrong with my writing.

But, it is SO quiet. So distant. So almost not there…

I ignore it a lot.

Can’t do that. Not ever, because it’s always, always, always right.

Generally, what happens is… it says, so softly as to be inaudible, “This isn’t working.” And, generally, I drown it out with, “It’ll be fine.” You think by now, I’d have learned. When the tiny voice tells you something isn’t working, and you think it will be fine anyway, most likely you are wrong. But it may take draft after draft after draft before you realize that the thing is NEVER going to work, and you’re going to have to buckle down and do the work and fix it.

As long as you do the work before you hand in your writing, you’ll be fine.

This thing I’m working on, has two scenes in a bath house. As I write this down, it seems so obvious, but I can tell you, it wasn’t. The little voice would tickle me and say, “One of those scenes is kinda like the other one.” And I would tamp the voice down… which is VERY EASY TO DO, as I weigh a lot and the voice is thin as smoke. Finally, after getting notes from a friend, I saw that the two scenes were basically saying the same thing, so I combined them into one. Saved some pages. Saved some dead weight. Saved some useless repetition. And finally shut the voice up.

The instant I made the change, I knew the scene worked. At last I felt better.

Disregard the Little Voice at your peril. Find a way to listen. Which is a lot more difficult than you may think.

Panic Dialogue Edit

I may have mentioned that the editing room is where hope dies. A line I heard from writer Alec Berg. Yepper, it’s twue, it’s twue, it’s really twue. When you get to that nicely air conditioned room, you’ve shot the material and you’ve either got it or you don’t. All your great dreams for this script are now a reality. Sometimes a cold brutal reality. It’s never as good as you’d hoped… But, take heart… it’s never as bad as you fear.

And, in that editing room, there is nothing more horrible than facing your own mediocrity and the panic over trimming dialogue. When your movie is staring you down with the twin double-barrels of boredom aimed at your face, you will cut every speech, every line, all the way down to every unneeded breath between lines… Flop sweat is a great way to induce you to trim dialogue. When you are terrified blind, the unneeded dialogue leaps off the screen and tries to strangle you, muttering, “Why didn’t you cut me before?”

It doesn’t have to be that way. Cue FLASHBACK MUSIC…

Try to work yourself into the Panic Dialogue Edit mode during the script stage. Cut dialogue NOW! You can save yourself a ton of grief in the editing room if you put on your emerald green panic glasses NOW and cut all that dialogue that you’re going to cut later NOW.

If you are scared, it’s easy to trim dialogue. So, imagine you are awash in fear and panic and hack away — before you shoot, before you edit. If dialogue CAN go, it goes. It’s simple.

Here’s one example. A nebbishy college professor welcomes two burglars into his home. This was Draft B.

***
Ron pours a second drink, smiling the whole time.

RON
I’m Ron, by the way. Welcome to my humble home. Excuse the mess, okay? Relax, relax. How has your day been?

He hands the brandy to Spike.

RON
It’s top drawer brandy. Why skimp, I always say. Can’t have a drink with a fellow I can’t see. Why don’t you get those masks off and we’ll knock the chill right off.

He drinks.

RON
Down the hatch!

***

By Draft H, it got shorter.

***

Ron pours a second drink, smiling the whole time.

RON
I’m Ron, by the way. Relax, relax.

He hands the Scotch to Spike. Spike takes it, but handles it like a live grenade.

RON
20 year old Scotch. Even on a professor’s salary, why skimp?

***

You may sneer at my Draft B, there from the comfort of your own living room. You may say to yourself, “That Akers guy, what does he know, the schmuck? I’ll never write that much crappy dialogue. I don’t have to pay attention to what he’s suggesting.”

AT YOUR PERIL, foolish one. At your peril.

All I have to say is “Panic now.” Because if you get to an editing room with your film (or you send it to an agent who passes!), you’ll wish you had heeded my simple little lesson.

If there is ANY way you can cut it, it’s history.

Just When Everything Seems Hunky Dory, Sandra Bullock…

If you’ve read my book, which you should do on a monthly basis, you know the K.H. Rule of Drama. If you have not read my book, pond scum that you are, here is the Rule: “Just when everything seems hunky dory, everything is so… not.”

What that obscure little law of drama means is that, when something fantastic happens for your character, the NEXT THING that happens, is horrible. Right after little Julie reads Pat The Bunny by herself the first time, she runs outside to tell her grandmother and falls down a well.

Right when, in the horror movie, the couple has hot sex (is there any other kind?), the Hooded Claw kills both of them. Or the one who was a virgin, anyway.

But you say, “That’s a silly thing.” “Stuff like that happens zero in real life.”

I would disagree.

Just ask Sandra Bullock. Win an Oscar… (Everything is hunky dory). Find out that husband has been banging a tattooed horrorshow… (Everything is so… not.)

Whoops. Real life imitates art!

Kill The Cat! Kill It Fast and Rough!

In Save The Cat, Blake Snyder’s amazing book, he talks about giving the character a scene where he, figuratively, climbs up a tree and saves a cat. We will then like that guy for the rest of the movie. Good call. Clint Eastwood does it in HIGH PLAINS DRIFTER.

Now, the opposite can also be true. Perhaps a Kill The Cat moment will find its way into what you are writing.

In the superb Robert Altman film THE LONG GOODBYE, Mark Rydell plays the bad guy. Rydell didn’t really like the way the script handled his character and he asked Altman if he could take a crack at a rewrite. Altman, the King of Listening To Any Idea, said sure.

In an interview, Rydell said, “So Larry Tucker and I decided to make him this Jewish gangster who was insanely brutal, completely capable of any kind of brutality, yet at the same time deeply religious, offended that he wasn’t in shul, where he should have been on this night. At the same time, the challenge was to make it funny. Make it not only cruel and horrendous, but charming and funny.”

Well, I don’t see the funny part. But boy, he does kill that cat. The bad guy is firmly established. And you are SCARED TO DEATH of him for the rest of the film.

In the scene, Elliott Gould owes Rydell money. It’s the first scene in the clip. I saw it in a theater twenty years ago and have never, ever forgotten. It’s one of the best-written character moments ever, and my favorite Kill The Cat moment in the movies.

Caveat: As Rydell promises, it’s brutal.

Don’t Write For Anybody But Yourself!!!

If he writes, he does it for himself!

Ever.

It’s a waste of emotion and time and can flip you into a cesspool or worse, a quicksand snakepit, should such a thing exist.

I have a friend who wrote AN ENTIRE BOOK so she could hand it to her father and he’d be proud of her and he’d hug her and tell her how wonderful it was that she’d done this fantastic thing and she’d cry and it’d be amaaaaazing. She got her book published and the great day came and she handed the book to her father and the fucker he didn’t even open it to see what she’d inscribed. He tossed it on the counter and said, “Maybe I’ll get around to reading it.” Shot down and shredded, she collapsed into therapy for half a decade. She’d spent every single day of the entire two years it took to write it, hoping for his approval and didn’t get it. Ewwwww.

Pattie Boyd wrote a book about her life with George Harrison and Eric Clapton (he famously wrote “Layla” and “Wonderful Tonight” about her… probably paying her zilch for being his muse…) and Clapton NEVER called her or sent a congratulatory note or anything. Nothing. Zero. When she was interviewed and asked what Clapton said about the book, she covered what had to have been a shattering hurt by saying he must be terribly busy…

As Sgt. Rock would say: “ARGGGGGHHHH!”

Write for yourself. Please yourself. If you write for someone else’s approval, what happens if you don’t get it?