In light of the recent copyright hoopla, I’d like to preface this article by stating this: the article that you’re about to read is why I do what I do; it’s the reason this website exists. My intention isn’t to violate anyone’s rights, it’s to simply educate myself and others. Without this site, and the many, many people that utilize it, I would never have stumbled across the Hard Times screenplay. A script that I can say has single-handedly and radically altered my approach to screenwriting as much as Alexander Jacobs’ Point Blank altered Walter Hill’s. I can only hope that you are — or soon will be — as fascinated and enamored with his style as I am. As you’re about to read, it is, indeed, a revelation. Enjoy.

In my screenplay studies, I’ve noticed that, in regard to overall style, there are usually three different types of writers. Let’s take a closer look as I break them down for you:

EPIC: These are the writers who fill their scripts with so much description and detail that it’s wall-to-wall black on the page. Blocks of text so long you feel like you’re reading a novel rather than what’s supposed to be a screenplay. These writers detail for us the petals of a flower, the pollen on its surface, the minute size of it, how the pollen feels knowing it’s so small, and how it wants to be a towering mighty oak tree, but it’s really just this small, infinitesimal, microscopic bit of pollen with a dream, but maybe someday… someday… All this before we even get to FADE IN! And it becomes such a chore to turn a single page of their 220-pager that it’s like taking out the garbage, or mowing the lawn, or watching Reflections of Evil.

MODERATE: These are your writers who know and abide by the rules. Their flower is a flower and if it’s important they’ll let you know because they write by the book: they dot their i’s and cross their t’s, no more than four lines per action block, with a nice balance between action and dialogue. Their 110-120 page script looks pretty vertical and it’s a pleasant read.

LEAN: Zen masters. F**k the flower. Short. Sparse. Terse. Haiku-like. Details? Just enough; move on. 100 pages, maybe.

There are those who linger and frolic about in the middle ground between two of the three styles, but given the current industry standards regarding formatting, etc., most writers are MODERATEs. Full on EPICs and LEANs are rare, but they do exist. I should make it known now that, all jokes aside, I don’t personally have a problem with any one type of screenwriter. If your scripts are well-written and engaging reads, then I’ll read them, but here’s my two cents: do not be an EPIC writer if you can absolutely help it because if you’re an EPIC writer, then, inevitably, a lot will be lost from script to screen because there’s just so much that has been written that can’t be shown visually. How do I know? Look at the scripts for Cleopatra or Doctor Zhivago and you may start to get an idea of what I’m talking about here.

If you’re a MODERATE writer, then some of what you write will be lost and there may be some additions too, but, for the most part, the majority of what you write will make it to the screen.

If you’re a LEAN writer, well, then, everything you write is making it to the screen, and then some, because you’ve engineered your script in such a way that almost nothing can be taken from it.

Again, lest it be thought otherwise, I am not damning any of these types. If that’s your style, whichever style it may be, and that’s how you choose to write, then write. My goal here isn’t to detract or discourage anyone from writing. I’m simply getting to the point that your style — in a sense — could be determined by how much of your vision you’re willing to surrender to compromise on your story’s journey from script to screen.

My other point, and on a personal level, is that as a screenwriter I much prefer being a LEAN. Part of this is from my own experiences and the learning process I’ve gone through writing and directing my own small projects and realizing that if I write too detailed, like an EPIC, then ultimately I’ll be disappointed with the end result because of the inherent compromises involved, whatever those compromises may be, from minute details to locations to specific dialogue. In short: the less I write, the less that is compromised.

Also, I like short, choppy sentences. I want energy in my words. I want rhythm. I want to surprise and engage the reader. In the words of the late Mystery Man: the less you write, the more they’ll read. And that’s the point: to make people read your script. And in this age of ADHD and thirty-second attention spans, I want my scripts to be a quick read. Maybe so much so, they read it twice. If I’m lucky.

So, obviously, by choosing the zen-like approach to my own screenwriting, it wasn’t long until I found Walter Hill. Considered by many to be the granddaddy pioneer of modern haiku-like screenwriting prose. And, my god, the scripts that he’s written in that style are an absolute revelation in regard to how absolutely, minimally lean a screenplay can actually be.

The Point Blank Effect

Several websites around the web have linked to and shown excerpts from this Film International article entitled Walter Hill: Last Man Standing and, without hesitation, I’m going to join that long list because the wisdom in these words begs to be shared yet again.

Film International: How did you teach yourself screenwriting?

Walter Hill: The usual story – read a lot of scripts, saw every possible movie. Wrote a lot at night. My big problem was finishing – I must’ve written twenty-five first acts – abandon and move on, abandon and move on. This went on about three years. Funny thing, once I was able to finish a script, I was able to make a living at it right away.

Film International: I don’t mean the format so much, I mean the essence of it, as well as the kind of style you preferred. Were you influenced by specific scripts?

Walter Hill: Alex Jacobs’ script of Point Blank (1967) was a revelation. He was a friend (wonderful guy, looked like a pirate, funny and crazy). This revelation came about despite a character flaw of mine. I have always had difficulty being complimentary to people whose work I admire, when face-to-face with them. This is not the norm in Hollywood, where effusiveness is generally a given. Anyway, a mutual friend told Alex how much I admired Point Blank and John Boorman. Alex then very graciously gave me a copy of the script. This was about the time he was doing The Seven-Ups (1973).

Anyway, by now I’d been making a living as a screenwriter for maybe two or three years, and had gotten to the point where I was dissatisfied with the standard form scripts were written in – they just all seemed to be a kind of sub-literary blueprint for shooting a picture, and generally had no personal voice.

Now, he touches on two very good points in that single paragraph. Two points that any aspiring writer should make serious note of.

The first: writing style. He mentions a “standard form.” Does your script look like everyone else’s? Obviously, you don’t want to stray too far from the accepted and conventional screenwriting form, but that doesn’t mean that your script has to be homogenized. You can use the form, but your writing style can — and should be — yours and yours alone.

The second: personal voice. For my thoughts on that, check out the introduction to Writer’s Style.

He goes on:

Walter Hill: Mine were tighter and terser than the average, but I was still working within the industry template and not too happy about it. Alex’s script just knocked me out (not easy to do); it was both playable and literary. Written in a whole different way than the standard format (laconic, elliptical, suggestive rather than explicit, bold in the implied editorial style), I thought Alex’s script was a perfect compliment to the material, hard, tough and smart – my absolute ideals then. So much of the writing that was generally praised inside the business seemed to me soft and vastly overstated – vastly over-sentimental. Then and now. I haven’t changed my opinions about that. But I have changed them about the presentational style.

Anyway, I immediately resolved to try to go in that direction (that Alex had shown), and I worked out my own approach in the next few years. I tried to write in an extremely spare, almost Haiku style. Both stage directions and dialogue. Some of it was a bit pretentious – but at other times I thought it worked pretty well. I now realize a lot this was being a young guy who wanted to throw rocks at windows.

So, reading Point Blank was the artistic turning point for him. If you’re a regular visitor to this site and/or you follow us on Twitter, then you know how much I long to read Jacobs’ draft of Point Blank. I freely admit my desire to do so is solely based on this Film International article, but more than that, that screenplay had such a profound revelatory impact on Hill that it changed his entire writing style forever.

If you take a moment to think about that – how reading one script can alter a writer’s entire process – then I think it’s easy to see how that screenplay has quickly achieved an almost mythic status in my eyes. What words are on those pages, and in what form, that they so thoroughly resonated with and radically revolutionized the very way in which Walter Hill wrote? I want to read it! But, in the same breath, do I really want to read it?

He also makes another very good point: he “resolved to try to go in that direction” and he worked out his “own approach.” This is important because, although imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, simply aping a writer’s style won’t get your far.

Anyone remember the gluttony of pop-culture-spouting Tarantino-like writers after the success of Pulp Fiction? Or, more recently, the slew of people attempting to mimic the sharp wit and crunchy dialogue of Diablo Cody?

The lesson here:
DO be inspired.
DO NOT ape and imitate.

The Implementation of Inspiration

Film International: What scripts did you write in that particular style?

Walter Hill: Hard Times (1975) was the first, and I think maybe the best. Alien (1979) – the first draft, then when David and I rewrote it, we left it in that style. The Driver (1978), which I think was the purist script that I ever wrote, and The Warriors (1979). The clean narrative drive of the material and the splash-panel approach to the characters perfectly fit the design I was trying to make work. Of course all this depends on the nature of the material; I don’t think the style would’ve worked at all had I been writing romantic comedies.

Don’t misunderstand his last sentence. What he’s suggesting is that the extreme style that he was utilizing for those specific scripts maybe/possibly/probably wouldn’t translate well to a genre such as romantic comedy, but that’s not to say that a LEAN-like prose wouldn’t work, period, never, at all, because it very well could.

So, just because you’re writing a romantic comedy, that doesn’t mean that you have to alter your writing style to say a MODERATE, or just because you’re writing a historical biography means that you need to adopt an EPIC style.

Your style will work in any genre because, as he mentions, it’s all about how you approach the material.

Hard Times

So, exactly how lean of a style are we talking here? Let’s take a look at the first page of Hard Times and you can judge for yourself.

So, pretty lean, right? But not lean enough for some of you? Don’t worry, it gets leaner… and meaner.

Hard Times was released in 1975. The scripts clocks in at 101 pages, but when you subtract the title page and the quote pages that separate the story into parts, you’re looking at 97 pages.

97 pages, even by today’s standards, is pretty light, but to help illustrate just how light the script was in 1975, take a look at the Academy Award-winning scripts of that year: Dog Day Afternoon and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. They clock in at a whopping 140 and 127 pages, respectively. And when you glance through Dog Day Afternoon, you can very quickly discern why it’s 140 pages: long novel-esque action blocks; the mark of an EPIC.

Granted, to compare Dog Day Afternoon and Hard Times as films is a no-brainer. Dog Day is, hands down, the better film in my own opinion, for many reasons that I don’t need to illustrate. But, based solely on the style of the scripts, my money is on Hard Times all the way. Just take a look at the first fight scene:

Chills, man. Chills. That’s what happened as I read this script. How unbelievably lean is that? Can you get leaner? Are you beginning to see just how much you DON’T need to show in your script? Sure, you may be telling your story with a lot of action, which is good, that’s very good, but just how many lines are in your action blocks?

Don’t answer because it doesn’t matter… Walter Hill just kicked your ass one word at a time. I love it.

The Driver

Three years later, in 1978, Walter Hill wrote and directed his next picture: The Driver, which he described above as the “purist script” he ever wrote. Now, what we find here is a revision of his lean style, so it appears that he was still finding and refining his approach. With Hard Times, he separated each line into its own double-spaced action, making the script very open and airy on the page, but with The Driver he formed his action into single-spaced, stanza-like blocks. With the script weighing in at roughly 115 pages, I’m guessing this was borne out of necessity. To separate the lines the way he did in Hard Times would surely have doubled the page count here, if not tripled. But this script is no less tight or terse. Let’s look at the first page (Note: the Scrippets plugin doesn’t like the single-spaced action blocks, so I’ve had to provide screenshots of the pages):

A little more on the first page than Hard Times, right? But it’s a quick read, and that’s what’s important. What I love about this style is he’s giving you the necessary info and quickly moving you down the page, not back and forth across it. This helps give the impression that you’re reading the script faster, turning the page faster, not bogging your reader down in minutiae.

And since this script is called The Driver, we’ve gotta have chase scenes, right? What’s different about how he’s written his chase scenes here, than say Bullitt or a similar film, is his lack of INT and EXT shots. Bullitt carefully walks you through every shot of its famous chase scene [which starts on page 76 of the available script] and, I’ll admit, after a couple pages it gets tedious to continually read from which perspective the action is taking place, when it should all be very seamless. We’re in a chase scene for crying out loud! It should be fast, fast, fast!

Whereas, here, Walter Hill simply leads you through the action with a scene heading of THE POKER CHASE and allows you, the reader, to discover and decide in what sequence the shots should be. Why is this so important? Simple. He’s writing, not directing. Not directly directing, anyway. But if you take note of the way in which he’s chosen to word his action, you’ll find he’s subversively directing: the perspective isn’t blatantly stated, but casually implied. Sneaky, smart, effective.

Although they read fast, the only problem I see with his chase scenes in this script (and this is simply personal preference) is I would have moved the geography of the chase — lines like “long straight” and “four way junction” — from action lines to shots or simple scene headings. Much like he does throughout the rest of the script. That way, it’s still not cluttering the page with INT and EXT shots, but further breaking the action into parts to make it a quicker, faster, easier read.

Alien and The Warriors

The following year saw the release of two Hill films and the final two scripts that he mentions in the above interview: Alien and The Warriors. Here, we can see that he finally cemented his approach to this lyrical haiku-like style by using the single-spaced, stanza-like blocks of action.

What’s interesting regarding his and Giler’s Alien script is in their rewrite. Their original draft seems pretty lean on the page:

But with their rewrite, they opted for a more atmospheric and moody opening, void of the crew, that draws us further into the workings and details of this physical space, while paring the overall length of the action lines further than before.

It’s an interesting look at the process of rewriting, but, also, how we can take what we’ve already written and simplify it further and, at the same time, make it better. I mean, compare how fast your eyes move down this page as compared to the above page. And you’re getting more info from the rewritten page, too!

The Corroboration of Alteration

As I’ve stated, I find it amazing how much of an effect Point Blank had on Walter Hill as a writer. The fact that this entire style you’ve seen was borne out of the reading of a single screenplay boggles the mind. But seeing is believing, and the best example I can use to illustrate the enormity of this impact is with Hill’s scripts for The Getaway.

The first and better-known version of the film directed by Sam Peckinpah and starring Steve McQueen and Ali McGraw was released in 1972 and was only Hill’s second screenwriting credit. What you see here is a more traditional, MODERATE approach to the writing:

The second and less-known version of the film came twenty-one years later, in 1993, when Hill decided to revisit the film, which was then directed by Roger Donaldson and starred Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger. Here his haiku-like style is firmly in place and should, by now, be instantly recognizable.

The same writer. Two very different styles. Fascinating.

Medium Determines Method?

It’s a style that makes absolute sense when paired with certain projects. In 1992, he and Giler wrote what was going to be an American remake of John Woo’s Hong Kong action-thriller The Killer, which was to also be directed by Hill. Again, when you think about the style of the writing and the nature of the material, it seems a perfect marriage. Sadly, the script remains unproduced, but it’s still a great read.

And, naturally, his drafts of Alien³ are written in the same style.

But, earlier in the above interview, Walter Hill states:

So much of the writing that was generally praised inside the business seemed to me soft and vastly overstated – vastly over-sentimental. Then and now. I haven’t changed my opinions about that. But I have changed them about the presentational style.

And he stays true to that regarding several of his scripts. Southern Comfort, 48 Hrs., Streets of Fire, and Red Heat — all written during the 80s and the height of his career — appear more MODERATE in style. It’s also worth mentioning that all of these scripts were collaborations with various co-writers, so if the presentational style was altered because of that, I’m unsure, but certainly that aspect of the process had to have an impact.

In the mid-nineties, Hill wrote and directed two films, Wild Bill and Last Man Standing, which take a surprising turn in regard to their writing style: massive blocks of text on the page; much, much more EPIC than anything he had written before. Longer blocks of action than even his scripts from the early 70s, pre-Point Blank.

I can understand the heavy-handed and EPIC, biographic nature of retelling the story of Wild Bill Hickok, but when you consider Last Man Standing (a remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo) in which the very premise of the story — a drifting gunslinger-for-hire finds himself in the middle of an ongoing war between the Irish and Italian mafia in a Prohibition era ghost town — almost screams to be written in that LEAN, terse, haiku-like prose. Yet, it isn’t. I’m sure you can imagine my disappointment when I cracked open the script and found novel-like paragraphs from the outset. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still an engaging read, just not what I was hoping for.

So, why the sudden change-up in his writing style? Especially at this point in his career? Was it due to the time period in which the scripts were written? The intended audience? The nature of the material? He just felt like writing them that way? I guess only Walter Hill really knows… and I’d love to be able to ask him.

Conclusion

It’s been interesting to dissect the evolution of Hill’s screenwriting process and how vastly different his approach has been from script to script. As I’ve mentioned, I’m most taken with his LEAN style. I love it. Hard Times has been the revelation and game-changer for me and definitely opened my eyes to the possibilities and true value of “less is more” on the page. Much like Hill did after reading Point Blank, I’ve already resolved to go in that LEAN direction and find my own approach.

So, if you’re looking to read just one of the scripts I’ve made mention of here, please make it Hard Times. While I don’t think the story itself may be for everyone, the many lessons that can be gleaned from its use of style should be invaluable to any screenwriter. If I were to make my own list of scripts that aspiring screenwriters should read, it would most definitely sit very proudly in the esteemed first slot.

So, fellow screenwriters, what is your writing style? Are you an EPIC having problems getting people to read your 220-pager? Maybe you should rethink your approach and, just for the hell of it, try rewriting it as a LEAN. Who knows, you may surprise yourself and that next reader… who buys it.

And, finally… if anyone has a copy of Alexander Jacob’s Point Blank, I think you’ve figured out by now why I’d be more than happy to take it off your hands.

Related Posts:

• UPDATED: In search of POINT BLANK by Alexander Jacobs, Pt. 1