Can you really teach screenwriting? Don't writers have to learn it by themselves?
Over three decades teaching the art, craft, and business of screenwriting I frequently hear these questions. The subtext is, of course, that college and university programs such as the one I've chaired at UCLA now for thirty years are scams. They are sorry testimony to the decline of ethics in higher learning. Screenwriting courses draw students--read 'customers'. It only tells you, critics complain, that universities have become retail enterprises, K-Marts for the intellect. Screenwriting is hot this week, so it is offered in abundance. Not much different from I-pods and grapefruit.
Likewise books treating the subject (I'm guilty of having written two myself). You can no more easily learn screenwriting from a book than you can learn how to swim by reading the Red Cross swimming and water safety instruction manual.
Also independent seminars, including the several I have offered all across the country and the world.
Why in the world is screenwriting the one art form that is learned wholly by the artists themselves? Does anyone expect a violinist to walk into a closet with a fiddle and come out able to play? Does anybody expect a composer to hide out in the woods somewhere and emerge a master of musical composition? Even Mozart had a teacher.
The proof is in the tasting. Anybody who accuses me of bragging tells you the truth, and we have much to brag about in Westwood. UCLA-trained screenwriters rule. Both of Steven Spielberg's pictures in the past year had on-screen credits for writers who studied at UCLA. Indeed, approximately eight of Spielberg's films have been scribed by former Bruins, including all the Jurassic Park pictures, Terminal, and more. The current screenwriting Oscar holder, Alexander Payne, studied screenwriting at UCLA.
And this is not the tip but the tip of the tip of the iceberg.
Can't we at least agree that we are not causing these writers any harm?
I'm often asked: what's our secret? It's no secret. We provide a safe place where writers can feel safe to reach and stretch and take risks, and occasionally to fall on their faces and pick themselves up again in a supportive, encouraging, nurturing environment. We essentially embrace two fundamental principles.
We have one rule: don't be boring. Anyone who's tried it knows it's no easy feat to avoid being boring over the couple of hours a typical movie plays. Indeed, anybody who's been to even just a handful of movies knows how true that is.
Then we have to three subsidiary principles.
First, try to reach as many people as you can. Movies are for audiences. Poets and painters need only a handful, maybe even just a single patron, but public and popualr expression is for the public and the populace. It doesn't have to be a blockbuster success on the order of Titanic (though no sin if it is) but it has to reach more than merely the immediate friends and family of the artist who wrote the movie. Self stimualation has its place in our lives, but art is about stimulating others. From time to time meeting writers to review my notes they will say, regarding a lackluster section, "I felt it intensely when I wrote it." Nothing wrong with that, of course, but the challenge is to make ME feel it. And by 'me' I mean, of course, the audience. If you don't care about reaching audiences--or, worse, if you have contempt for audiences--you should work in a medium that is not audience-oriented, like, say, sculpture or painting. Otherwise you are fulfilling a self-defeating prophesy.
If you want to be treated as a professional, you've got to treat YOURSELF as a professional.
Having discussed professionalism, let me now flip the coin to the other side and assert our second Westwood principle: you've got to forget about audience altogether and write what you personally care about. Is that a contradiction? Hey, contradiction is perpetually present in worthy creative expression.
How will an audience care about a story if the writers themselves don't care? The challenge is to cram emotion and excitment and passion into the tale that resonates with the viewer, even if the situation is odd or peculiar or offbeat. Who would care about a dyspeptic, filthy, homeless con man like Ratso in Midnight Cowboy? Who would care about a half-wit Texas dishwasher such as Joe Buck in the same film? Answer: everybody. Hasn't everybody at one time or another struggled with hardship, felt isolated and alone and lost? Hasn't everybody battled to connect with another human being in a meaningful and even a--dare I say it?--loving way? Even though Ratso's and Joe's lives are so foreign to our own, there is something in their humanity that immediately reminds us of ourselves.
The key to success among UCLA screenwriters and others: First, write your own personal story. Second, jam it every inch of the way with passion, heartache, conflict, confrontation. Third, see to it that every single line of dialogue and every bit of action palpably, measurably, identifiably moves the story forward and expans the audience's appreciation of the characters.
Even if you don't sell the script--and you very well might--you might win representation. You'll expand your reputation and your inventory--sometimes scripts sell years and decades after they are written. Most importantly, for the experience, the sheer drill, you'll be a stronger writer.
And that is the whole picture.