Work In Progress

This book, by Syd Field, is very nearly a waste of money. I guess that if you've never read anything about screenwriting it might be more helpful, but after Goldman's books and How Not to Write a Screenplay, there was very little that was new. An awful lot of it was things like how one develops characters and story ideas. I can't imagine a person starting to write without being able to do that on their own — what else could drive a person to write than coming up with stories and wanting to tell them? Of course there are things to know about creating characters, but I didn't feel that they were covered (e.g. be careful of making the star ever feel small).

Worse, the book is horribly dated. It's new chapter covering computer software mostly talks about how abandoning a typewriter for a computer may be terrifying but can be worth it. Screenplays and hollywood seem to have a lot of conventions, and these conventions seem to be shifting and changing. How fast I don't know, but a book which covers what they were like in the late 1970s isn't reassuring.

It does have a few interesting insights on writing, though. While largely covered in other books (and I suspect most people's experiences, to a degree), his description of how "everyone is a writer" (i.e. when you tell them your story, they'll tell you how you should write it) was interesting.

I don't recommend buying it, but it might be worth skimming if you can get it for free (e.g. at a library).

How Not to Write a Screenplay: 101 Common Mistakes Most Screenwriters Make is an interesting book and a pretty quick read. It's very entertainingly written, and makes a lot of sense. Unlike William Goldman's books (Adventures in the Screen Trade and Which Lie Did I tell?), I don't think that it would be interesting except for those with an interest in screenwriting.

For those, like me, who have an interest in screenwriting but are just starting, I heartily recommend it.

Incidentally, one of the things it mentions but doesn't really harp on is how much of a group endeavor a movie is. In the section where he recommends against including camera directions, aside from them being distracting, he points out that the director and cinematographer are going to ignore them anyway. Goldman mentioned that too.

Essentially, once a screenplay gets accepted and people start signing on, they're all going to want to have creative influence on the story, and so far it seems to be recommended to make sure to give leeway for that in places where it doesn't matter so that people are less likely to screw around with the parts that do matter. There's probably something to that, of course, but I wonder if it might not be better to try to avoid getting so emotionally attached to someone as one's own that won't be one's own. Of course you have to at least like a story to write it, and it probably really helps to love it, but that also seems counter-productive to one's health. I imagine that it's kind of like children. If you don't approach them with a pretty healthy dose of realizing that they're not going to turn out like you expect, you're not likely to be a good parent and you're just going to suffer.

How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, by Roger Corman, is an interesting look at low budget film making.

If you find many of Corman's films interesting, it's worth a read, because he talks about a lot of them (I suspect that many of them are pretty interchangeable).

One of the things that I never realized about Corman films is how fast they're made. Very often the scripts didn't exist until Corman saw a set that he wanted to use (because it was available cheaply) and would have a story which uses the set written in a week or two. It explains why so many of his films are so bad in so many ways.

That being said, having seen a fair number of Roger Corman films, it is surprising how many of them have at least a few good ideas or a few bits of quality in them. Overall I found the book somewhat interesting and don't regret the money I paid for it or the time I spent reading it.

William Goldman's sequel to Adventures in the Screen Trade, Which Lie Did I Tell? was a really interesting book and an enjoyable read, more so than the first one. There are two main reasons for this.

The first is that being 26, I hadn't seen many of the movies discussed in the first book, and so the references were more abstract. This effect will obviously vary with the age of the reader, but I suspect that the audience for people considering a career in the screen trade is not that old, simply because few people take up new careers in their 40s and 50s (I find it very reassuring that some people do, and many of the ones who do do so quite successfully).

The other, more significant reason, is that Goldman matured. When he wrote Adventures, he was 52, whereas Which Lie was written when Goldman was 69. It's generally been my experience that people in their sixties tend to be either a lot more crotchety, or a lot more mellow, than themselves in their 40s and 50s. Part of it may be simply getting tired, but I think much more it's that after 40 years of working and worrying, people have seen enough of the world to realize that they don't need to worry nearly as much as they thought that they did when they were younger. Whatever the reason, Goldman does seem much more at peace with hollywood when he started. (I don't mean to give the impression that he praises it; he still observes many of the idiocies and ego-driven problems which go on in hollywood, but he has more of a sense of humor about it.)

In any event, I recommend Which Lie Did I Tell? even more strongly than I did Adventures in the Screen Trade. It's a great complement to the first book — I bought them at the same time and read them together, and I think that I did the right thing. The second doesn't require the first to have been read, but I think that you get more out of them together.

Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman, is a fascinating look at what being a mainstream hollywood screenwriter is about. I must confess that while I consider myself to have finished it, I've probably only read about 2/3 of it. Written in an extremely personal, conversational style, the portions of it which recount Goldman's experiences are extremely interesting and education, but like C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letter, it's difficult reading. (For those who haven't read that great work of Lewis's, the words are easy, but the emotions are tiring.)

If you're interested at all in mainstream screen writing, or in how the plots of mainstream hollywood movies are made, I heartily recommend it. The plots of mainstream movies are created with a process that only starts with the screenwriter, and Goldman covers this in great depth. Like most human activities, film making is really an ad-hoc affair; a large number of people scramble to get it done and fulfill their own goals as well as they can, and the dynamics of this are varied but Goldman makes them seem understandable.

I was drawn to the book by my interest in screenwriting (I haven't done any yet, but I am quite interested in it) and am quite glad that I bought the book.