Writing Worth Reading
Last updated 12 pm GMT
Writing Worth Reading
I should make a full disclosure here and say that two of these books were written by close friends of mine: Hal Ackerman and Lew Hunter. Lew was my long-term partner at UCLA and we’ve been in the business together for 30 years. He’s now an emeritus professor living in Nebraska but he comes back to Westwood every winter to teach a 434. That’s the Film, Television and Digital Media catalogue number and the name of our meat-and-potatoes, bread-and-butter course. I’m into high-cholesterol metaphors. Our students take the course several times during their tenure in our Screenwriting MFA program at UCLA.
It’s a feature-length film workshop and everyone writes a feature-length film. Some students will enrol in the course eight or nine times. Anyway, Lew knows better than to spend the winter in Nebraska and he’s a legendary screenwriting teacher – many of the great writers have been through this course.
I love Lew, but that shouldn’t be held against him. You know, most people can’t take his class because you have to be a matriculated UCLA student, but you don’t need to take the class! You can read the book!
What does he say in it?
Well, there are two big pieces of advice. Writers write. Don’t wait for inspiration. Everyone who writes is a writer. Think of yourself as a writer. And less is more. We preach this with religious fervour. Economy, efficiency, integration. A screenplay is an elaborate list of sights and sounds whose purpose is moving the story forward.
Is the advice in Ackerman’s book different? Write Screenplays That Sell: The Ackerman Way.
I’m not crazy about the title, and I expect Hal agrees at least somewhat with me about that. He was pressured by the publishers. It’s a real dime store title. It’s a brilliant book and he’s a brilliant educator. Hal’s been here at UCLA... I don’t know. Whenever I say two or three years it turns out to be 25. So Hal’s been here a quarter of a century and has had a great presence here. He’s our screenwriting co-chair. What he says is that it’s all about story. We’re an old-fashioned programme here and we’re about the primacy of story.
People don’t go and see a movie because of the actors or the director. There are no directors that haven’t had their share of turkeys. The audience is smart and they have ways of finding the good stories. Shakespeare is not a little-known writer found in some archive by a group of academics – these plays were massive blockbusters in their day. Why? Because the plays are about violence, perversion, sex and tawdry, vulgar, ugly stuff. Oedipus? Well, you know what Oedipus does. Medea kills her kids. Macbeth murders Duncan in his sleep because he wants to be king. Richard III kills his own nephews. The body count at the end of Hamlet is nine bodies on stage in the final scene. Nobody wants to see ‘The Village of the Happy Nice People’. I mean, there’s a place for that, but not in art.
So art is where we act out our fantasies?
Yes. What I preach in my new book is that the movie theatre is a safe place to live out the brutal aspects of our character. We are violent. History is – God forgive us all – a catalogue of horror and violence. I have, as I do every morning, a copy of the New York Times and a copy of the LA Times in front of me. It’s a bloodbath! I do a lot of commenting in the media and my detractors (it thrills me that I’m prominent enough to have detractors!) say that a retro-hippy university professor like me should be railing against Hollywood, but that in fact I’m a company man, an apologist for Hollywood. But I really believe that film violence does no harm. As Aristotle says of Purgation, the theatre helps people by providing a safe place to experience the lethal aspects of our condition and to expend that energy in a harmless way. In fact, since television and film have become more explicit and violent in the past 30 years there has been a serious decline in crime. In fact, crime is plunging.
But the prison population isn’t.
That’s because of foolhardy drug laws. You could put all the cartels out of business by decriminalising drugs. A medical condition – drug addiction – should be treated medically. Imagine the damage you could do to the Taliban by decriminalising opium. It would rob them of their financial resource.
Tell me about Aristotle.
Aristotle’s Poetics is the user’s guide to dramatic narrative and dramatic structure. It’s just a ragged little pamphlet really.
With a reputation as the godfather of screenwriting, UCLA’s Professor Richard Walter has mentored many of Hollywood’s most successful screenwriters. Walter is a member of the Writers Guild of America and is a writer of substantial professional experience throughout the media. He is the author of Escape From Film School and Screenwriting: The Art, Craft and Business of Film and Television Writing. He has written numerous feature assignments for the major studios and has sold material to all three networks. His latest book, Essentials of Screenwriting, is available from the end of June. Walter lectures on screenwriting throughout the world. He says Aristotle’s guidelines should be followed, not interpreted.
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