Pictured left to right: Scott Frank, Richard LaGravanese, Phil Robinson, Lawrence Kasdan, and Ted Griffin.
Hey all, J.C. here. This is the first in a series of articles covering the 2010 Nashville Screenwriters Conference.
I was lucky enough to cover the event and throughout the event I noticed a few things. One major observation is that a lot of the aspiring screenwriters had the exact same questions for the panelists. So, throughout these blogs I will try to answer some of those questions in hopes that the writers will not be asked the same five f*****g questions over and over next year.
Seriously, it was amazing how when each panel opened up to Q&A people would ask the same questions as they did to the panel before. Most were common sense questions that I still wonder why someone who REALLY wants to be a writer would even ask but who am I to say what makes a good question?
The first panel I will be discussing was called “War Stories” that Scott Frank hosted with guests Lawrence Kasdan, Richard LaGravenese, Phil Robinson, and Ted Griffin. Frank later said that the panel should have been called, “The Sum of All Fears.” The panel opened with Scott letting each of the other writers describe how they got their start in the business. These guys were obviously friends and there was a lot of joking around going on during the panel that just would not transfer well to a blog so I will just try to get to the informational stuff for you guys.
Ted Griffin was sleeping at a dry cleaners where he worked at during the day when he got his break. He had a friend who had an office down the hall from Neil Tolkin and shopped his script around for six months eventually landing him an agent.
Lawrence Kasdan and his brother were both huge film buffs and after his brother came back from Harvard he explained the filmmaking process to Lawrence and after he saw Lawrence of Arabia he decided he wanted to be involved in the business. He worked in advertising for five years while writing and then, out of nowhere, his scripts started to sell. Steven Spielberg bought Continental Divide and that is how he eventually got the Raiders of the Lost Ark job.
An interesting story he told was that Spielberg told him George Lucas was going to offer him More American Graffiti but Spielberg insisted that he turn it down and two weeks later he was sitting with Spielberg and Lucas working on the story for Raiders, which is now available in a transcript on numerous sites [including this one]. And yes, Kasdan let the entire audience know that. Kasdan would later explain how when he turned in the draft for Raiders, Lucas threw it on his desk and asked him to lunch and then over lunch asked him to write [Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back]. Kasdan mentioned to him that he hadn’t even read Raiders to which Lucas replied, “I’ll read it tonight, if I don’t like it I’ll pull the offer.” Lucas then told Kasdan, “You know… Darth Vader is Luke Skywalker’s dad.” To which Kasdan replied, “No s**t!” Kasdan then went on to write Empire in a mere six weeks!
Phil Robinson discussed the difference between working with a director that keeps you on throughout the filmmaking process and one that doesn’t. During All of Me, Carl Reiner kept him on the set everyday and took him into casting, location scouting, etc. At the same time he still had to re-write Rhinestone for another director, except that Sylvester Stallone had changed all of his lines already and Robinson was instructed not to change any of them. It was during this time that he decided he wanted to be a director.
When it came to talking about relationships, in terms of working with people you already know, Richard LaGravenese said that he learned early on it was a director’s medium. As a writer you fight for what you want, but you have to learn to give the director what they want, and at the same time try to keep in some of the things you want as well. If, as a writer you want power, then you should write for television. In film, the only power you might have is in picking what director you want to work with and whom you give your script to.
Scott Frank said a producer once told him that even if you force a director to do something, they wouldn’t understand. Even if you held a gun to their head they will do it horribly and it won’t work.
An audience member asked how serious anyone in Hollywood would take a query letter. Kasdan responded, “Not at all.” Ted Griffin added that everyone in Hollywood wants to read something that is really terrific because it’s like finding a pot of gold and on the other hand to get a query letter is just kind of scary. He said that sending a script is better because more people will pass it along. An audience member let him know that most places will not accept any unsolicited mail and he was quick to take back everything he said.
One of the most asked questions was, “Do I need to live in L.A. to get noticed?” Ted Griffin thinks you really need to live in LA. He got his break because his friend knew a guy and that would have never happened if he did not live there.
One attendee asked the panel how they deal with writer’s block. Phil Robinson believes that writer’s block is a severe psychological disorder; that most writers don’t get writers block, they just get hung up on one thing. He said he has problems and the way he gets through them is by telling himself that no one will ever see this draft, so he just throws stuff down on the page so that he can work on it later. Kasdan added that the problems as a writer are the same everyday: you ask yourself constantly how you did it again and no matter what, you run into roadblocks. Robinson thinks that if you don’t have these small bumps along the way, then you aren’t doing your job because writing isn’t easy. He said he has numerous people come up to him, hand him a script, and say, “This script wrote itself.” To which he always replies, “Well, then, it can read itself.”
The closing of this panel was the best of any panel of the weekend and it also deals with a lot of the questions that were asked at the Conference: should I be a trendy writer and try to write for what is selling in the marketplace? And also: should I follow an exact formula from McKee or anyone else selling writing books?
After Scott Frank told a great story about a pitch that went wrong, he explained how some writers are great pitchers and some are horrible at pitching. He said that he thinks there is too much focus on the pitching and the query letters and that people are trying to teach you how to do everything but write: “The business is writing but now there is a business of people trying to teach how you to write and it’s all b******t. The best thing you can do is write. Just sit and write and make the mistakes that these people are telling you that they’ve made, it’s hard, it’s not supposed to be easy.
“If it’s easy, I promise you you’re writing s**t. There are days where it may really flow and there are days where you may just have ideas that are really far and between. They are like balls of dough that you then roll out and you hope that has that dough is getting thinner and thinner that another ball of dough will appear and you can roll out that one. It’s very hard, but the only thing you can do is struggle through it.
“And the truth is, most of the time, the most brilliant things in your script are the happy accidents. The things you never planned on, something that just popped out of someone’s mouth while you were writing and just not thinking about it or following some template that Syd Field told you, not trying to organize it in the way McKee told you to, just some thing that happened and the best movies are built on those happy accidents not how I got an agent, should I live here, should I live there.
“Write the script, build it, and they will come.“
All photos courtesy of Kelly J Parsons Photography: kellyjparsons.com
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