Adventures in the Screen Trade (13 page)

So you see, I am neither an absolute beginner, nor totally naive about the business aspects of screenwriting. Since I am without an agent, however, I do have a lot of questions about how to proceed from here. If you could spare an hour or so to talk to me, I would appreciate it. I promise not to ask for introductions to anybody or beg you to read my work.

There may be no great profit in such a meeting for you, but perhaps it would not be entirely disagreeable. I am not a fool nor (despite the evidence at hand) am I by nature a forward person. The tradition of older writers advising younger is both long and honourable, and I hope you will consider my request in that light.

I don't know what you think, but there was no way I couldn't meet with that kid. I had no way of knowing if he was telling the truth or not, he might have been a hustler from Sandusky. But the idea of assuming that studio executives would know the subject matter of Troilus was terribly appealing.

For whatever reason, the letter worked. We met, I answered questions for an hour, I don't think I did him any good, but he got what he wanted from me.

Obviously, I'm not an agent. But that kind of letter-thoughtful, serious, I think talented-might have triggered something positive in an agent as well. They do, after all, need clients to survive. It also might not have worked. If not, don't hate them. Theirs is not an easy life.

Just a couple of reasons to indicate what I mean. I was calling 2ig once not long ago, and it was late and I was hitching about something, probably the standard screenwriter's whine: "They don't appreciate me." Whatever. In the middle of my spiel, I could sense his tone changing and just like that I had a thought. And I stopped talking. He asked me why and I told him: "I just realized something: Nobody ever calls you with good news."

And that, I suspect, is true. Clients just don't phone in or write and say thank you. Rather, they think, "That lazy son of a bitch, having lunch when I call, why isn't he out getting me a job, hell, he Cakes ten percent, why doesn't he do something." So there is that, the lack of gratitude that goes with the job. And there is something else, a truth they must live with every day of their lives. Clients leave them.

Every agent knows that every client wilt, at some point, become dissatisfied. One top Hollywood agent I talked to almost never mentions a client's name without preceding it with an expletive. Most aren't that open. But the reality is a constant they must endure.

I was at a gathering once where a star was chatting socially with an agent not his own. And the star was being funny and charming and we all listened and laughed and then the star began to tell a story that had happened to him that day, on a taxi ride in from the airport, and- -and the agent said, quietly but with amazement, "You mean they didn't send a limo?"

The star shrugged and said he didn't want one and went on with his taxi ride material. But I was watching and I saw the look that passed ever so briefly when the agent cut in with the limo line.

It did not surprise me when I learned, shortly afterward, that the star had changed agencies. ...

Bread

Anywhere from $11,110 to maybe a million.

Meetings

Whoever invented the meeting must have had Hollywood in mind. I think they should consider giving Oscars for meetings: Best Meeting of the Year, Best Supporting Meeting, Best Meeting Based on Material from Another Meeting.

One studio, and this is typical, recently announced that they had one hundred and eighty-three projects in development. Do you know what that figure represents to people in the business? Heaven.

Look at it logically. Of those one hundred and eighty-three projects, maybe ten, at the outside, will ever happen. And only one person at that studio has the final "go" decision. Well, what are all the other executives supposed to do with their time? How can they justify their salaries? And how can producers Fill their days? Meetings are everyone's salvation.

I suspect that those one hundred and eighty-three projects represent-at the very least-well over a thousand meetings.

Studios rarely initiate projects anymore. So let's say you're a producer and you think the time is ripe for making The Little Engine That Could.

So you take a meeting with your agent. The agent says, "Well, animation is awfully expensive nowadays, can you do it live-action? I hear Eastwood is a train freak, he might be great for the engineer." The next thing then is to set up getting an option on the rights.

Now, once you've got the rights, you take a meeting with a studio executive. Could be lunch at the Polo Lounge, could be over breakfast coffee. You kibitz awhile about the Rams or the Lakers, and then you lay it on him: The Little Engine That Could.

And the executive, no fool, says. "Look, we're not into animation, go see Disney." And you say, "Who's talking animation, I'm talking adventure, suspense, a picture for everyone. And Eastwood might be available-I mean, everybody knows what a train nut he is."

Now you wait while the executive has a meeting with a fellow executive. And they spitball awhile, first trying to figure out what they can get for Richard Pryor. That out of the way, the first executive says: "Eastwood in a train picture, we know how loony he is over trains." The second executive says, "God knows Silver Streak took in a ton. And so did Von Ryan's Express." And the first executive says, "On the money, only I think The Little Engine That Could will be bigger than both," and then, before his peer can bring up animation, he adds "Done live-action, adventure, the whole ball of wax." And the second executive thinks before saying, "Well, God knows it's a classic, I wonder what sales might say."

Now the executives set up a meeting with the top salespeople and they kick it around. "Sure, Eastwood loves trains and Eastwood in action is money in the bank, but this is kind of a kids' picture, would the two audiences conflict?" "What if they didn't conflict, what if they combined?-What if they turned out to be Star Wars plus Every Which Way but Loose?'

The salespeople ask for a little while to run a couple of surveys, check sales and title familiarity, etc.

The salespeople work their magic and eventually they might decide it was worth a shot. So they meet again with the executives and give their findings, and finally the first executive will have a second meeting with the producer, at which they discuss the parameters of the development deal. Including how much they'll pay for the writer of the first-draft screenplay. Which is where we come in.

What this chapter is really about is this: behavior in meetings. There are really two kinds of meetings involved here: (1) the audition meeting, when they're thinking of hiring you, and (2) the creative meeting, when the script is done and everybody wants changes.

(1) THE AUDITION MEETING

The proper note to strike in the audition meeting is a mixture of shy, self-deprecating intelligence and wild, barely controllable enthusiasm. This combo is not something the majority of us were born with. It's not easy to come by, especially if you're young or starting out or, most importantly, if you need the job. If you do, if you actually need it, that fact must go with you to your grave, because they sense things Out There and they will never hire you if you arc desperate. Because they then know you don't care about their project; you would take anything they offered.

You walk into the executive's office with your producer leading the way. Introductions follow. Then the standard circling chitchat: "Been here long?" "Actually, I was born in Westwood." "A native? Are they legal?" Chuckle chuckle chuckle.

During this sizing-up time, the executive is trying to answer one question: "Who is this asshole?" He knows you're not Mario Puzo because Puzo wouldn't be there talking about taking twenty-five thou for an iffy project like this. The executive undoubtedly has read something of yours-a treatment, a story maybe, an earlier unmade screenplay. And he's talked with the producer who has probably glanced at the same material. But are you the one?

That's what they're trying to ascertain. Screenwriting is not something at which you necessarily improve: You may be as good as you're going to get your second or third time out. Are you the one?

Are you the man in all the world most liable to bring to life this combination of a child's fantasy and a Clint Eastwood bang-bang picture? Because if you are, and you write a screen-play that captures the star, then the producer gets rich and the executive gets a big boost up on his career.

It may seem casual, but there's more riding on this meeting than you ought to think about.

Eventually, after five minutes are fifty, there will be a pause, and the executive will then ask it: "What do you think of the material?"

Do not say "I think it's my favorite book and will make the greatest movie since The Battleship Potemkin."

Something like this is much better: "Well, of course as you know I'm kind of new at this, I'll probably never know as much as you guys, but of course I've read the book and I wrote my senior thesis on Movement in Contemporary Juvenile Fiction, and this will probably sound stupid, but when the train gets the toys across the mountain, I cried-1 don't mean buckets, but there were tears. I guess probably as literature it isn't Alice m Wonderland, and this isn't to knock Alice, but, well, it never moved me." Are you the one? You won't know till your phone rings. . . .

(2)THE CREATIVE MEETING

There is one crucial rule that must be followed in alt creative meetings: Never speak first. At least at the start, your job is to shut up.

This transcendental truth came to me early on in my movie work and quite by accident. I was involved with a film that was, I thought, set. The studio had said "Go," preproduction was well under way. I was feeling pretty chipper because everything had gone as well as it could-a few skirmishes' an occasional outbreak of hostility, but bloodshed had been kept to a mini- mum.

And I get a call from the producer, saying, "Look, I'm in town. I'm free Saturday, save all day, we've got some things to talk about." Save all day?

That was the phrase that echoed as I marched down to the Sherry for the meeting. I went to his suite, we ordered coffee, and I tried very hard not to let him know how nervous I was: I thought the script was okay and had no idea what he wanted or how in the world (or if) I could fix it.

Because of his "Save all day" warning, I bought a notebook. (Never enter a creative meeting without a notebook.) And I opened it and took out a pen and got ready to face the firing squad. I said, though I didn't know .it, the magic words. "Tell me everything you have in mind," I said, and I took the top off the pen and prepared to write.

I didn't know it then, either, but the meeting was over. Because suddenly, he was unarmed and I had this weapon with dread stopping power: my notebook. I was going to take down everything. All his wisdom. Record it then and there. And, like most producers and executives, he had nothing specific to say. They are generally not equipped to deal with the intricacies of a script--any more than I could deal with the problems they face.

What he offered was something like this: "I think we have to watch out in case there are any sags," he said. I repeated "Watch sags" and wrote the words. "Gotta keep the pace up." "Pace mustn't flag," I said, and wrote that down. "And our main guy has gotta always be sympathetic." "Sympathy for hero."

By then our coffee had arrived, we poured and sipped and then we were into bullshitting about this and that. I was gone in half an hour.

I have followed this procedure in every creative meeting since. If you begin, they can counterpunch. Try never to give them the chance. Allan Burns, a writer friend, recently emerged from a creative meeting in which the studio head had only this comment to make: "The script's got to be twenty-five percent funnier."

A few weeks later, the giiy asked after the rewrites. Allan, who co-created The Mary Tyler Moore Show and can be funnier than most people, replied, "Well, I'm only eighteen percent funnier so far, which means I've got to be thirty-one percent funnier the rest of the way."

And the studio head didn't know it was a joke: What he said was, after some thought, "Sounds about right."

Usually, before you have a creative meeting, you are stroked. Quite rightly, I think, since most of us are so insecure. It's counterproductive from the producer's point of view to say over the phone. "Get out here, this script sucks." Because when the face-to-face confrontation begins, guns have already been fired across the water.

I recently submitted a script to a producer who read it and called me and said, "It's everything I hoped it would be, why don't you come on out here and we'll talk about details."

I flew to California, met with him, we ordered coffee, I got out my notebook, readied my pen, and said, "Tell me everything you want to say."

Did he ever. He told me "I think the script is downbeat and depressing and I hate: the main character and it's all got to be done over completely."

I remembered those words very clearly-no need to write them down. But unpleasant as that meeting may have been, note two things: Nothing specific was mentioned, and nothing fatal was done to the structure. The rewrite I did required a lot of brute work, but that's the nature of the beast, we expect that. Since the structure could stay, my job became one of making the new script the same only different.

Most people in the business, being nonwriters, haven't the least notion about what's hard.

A friend of mine is struggling now with an adaptation of a novel in which he was instructed to keep everything just the way it was, except for one small change-make the main character, who is sixty-six in the book, forty years old. (Perfectly logical from a producer's point of view; not only logical but sound business practice. There are no bankable stars, who are sixty-six; there are a bunch who can play forty.)

A change like that is agony. Because you can't really keep anything in the book. The problems and tensions of the novel shift epically when you lop a quarter century from the hero's age. The guy doing this job lives across town from me.