My wife had back surgery last month so it’s temporarily slowed down my blogging and YouTubing output. While helping her on the mend I’ve been listening to every teaching video and interview I can featuring Oscar-winning screenwriter Michael Arndt. On one podcast he dropped a Tarkovsky quote that I had never heard and it instantly went to the top of my list of favorite quotes about art.
“The allotted function of art is not, as is often assumed, to put across ideas, to propagate thoughts, to serve as an example. The aim of art is to prepare a person for death, to plough and harrow his soul, rendering it capable of turning to good.” —Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky BAFTA Film Award, The Sacrifice
Come on—to “plough and harrow” the soul. That‘s great imagery. I’m putting that quote up there with a quote written by Oscar-winning co-writer of Shakespeare in Love :
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you might nudge the world a little or make a poem that children will speak for you when you are dead.” Above quote spoken by the character Henry in The Real Thing: A Play written by playwright/screenwriter Tom Stoppard
Now the Greek dramatists would agree with Tarkovsky and Stoppard. But I am aware that here are plenty of other writers who say the purpose of film is simply to amuse and entertain. No need to argue that here.
But I hope you get the right words in the right order today in whatever you’re writing. May your words plough and harrow the soul, nudge the world a little, and prepare a person for death.
“My father always said to me I would be a late bloomer.” —David Seidler( Oscar acceptance speech after winning for his script The King’s Speech at age 73 )
David Seilder died two weeks ago at age 86. He won a WGA award for a script he wrote with Jacqueline Feather, and an Academy Award for writing The King’s Speech.
Here’s a reprint of a post I wrote about him in 2011:
The next time you hear a writer complain about not getting the break they think they deserve, or how long it’s taking for their script to become a movie, remind them about David Seidler. Seidler’s life story—like The King’s Speech—follows one of the most basic principles of drama; A strong protagonist who is willing to go to the end of the line to get what they want.*
For Seidler all it took was 73 years to reach the top of the mountain. Diablo Cody’s Oscar win in 2009 gave inspiration to many that it was possible to win an Oscar as a rookie writer, and Seidler’s Oscar gives inspiration to many that toward the end of your career you may finally peak in the way you’ve always dreamed.
And it really was a 70 year journey for Seidler. At age 3 he and his parents fled England due to the outbreak of World War II and the impending danger of German troops. Soon after arriving in the United States Seidler began stuttering, which if you’ve seen The King’s Speech is about King George VI’s desire to overcome stuttering as he prepares to give one of the most important speeches before England’s involvement in World War II. Seidler grew up listening to the King’s speeches on the radio and his father would point out to him that the King had overcoming stuttering. And Seidler, like the King, did overcome his speech impediment.
So out of the gate Seidler seemed destined to write this story. Seidler happened to go to high school with Francis Ford Coppola and before you start into the “it’s who you know” thing remember that Seidler has been paying his dues for decades. And it’s not just who you know, it’s what you learn from who you know. (But with that said, having a classmate like Coppola is a nice bonus.) Seidler in an interview on Jeff Goldsmith’s Creative Screenwriting podcast (January 07, 2011) said he picked up some great advice from Coppola:
“I learned a great deal from Francis. He’s a very, very bright filmmaker. One of the things I learned was—know what your ending is. And that’s something that’s really stayed with me. He said he always knows the big scene at the end of the movie he’s going for. It may not be the last scene, but it’s the apex of the action. And then everything is to move towards that scene.”
“Everything is to move towards that scene”—that’s great advice. In the script you’re working on now, does everything move toward that scene?
As Coppola launched his directing career in the ’60s, Seidler’s first job in the entertainment business was less exciting—transcribing Godzilla movies. In 1966-67 he landed his first writing gig on an Australian TV show called Adventures of the Seaspray. I believe after that he turned to a variety of jobs to pay the bills (advertising, Signal Corps, Playwright in Resident in San Franciscio, and political advisor in Fuji).
His next IMDB credit was not until 1981, an episode for the soap opera Another World.
There’s not much there to think that at that point in his career that the 43-year-old Seidler was on the fast track to have a feature made from his work, much less win an Oscar some day. But way back in 1981 is when he actually began working on what would become The King’s Speech. Obviously there were a few twists and turns in the road before it became a movie. And surprisingly, or not, Coppola—Seidler’s old high school classmate— had a small part in getting The King’s Speech script written.
“I had written Tucker for Francis and was just naive enough to think that that meant it would get made immediately and change my life forever. It took ten years to get made and it didn’t change my life that much. And I also thought that meant I could write anything I wanted in Hollywood. And you’re all wise enough to know that’s not true, but I did.” —David Seidler
And that’s when he began to work on The King’s Speech. But unlike Tucker:The Man and His Dreams_it would not take 10 years to bring The King’s Speech to the screen, or 20 years, but almost 30 years. As Paul Harvey used to say, “You think about that.”
* A strong protagonist who is willing to go to the end of the line to get what they want. Other films in this year’s Oscars that fit that description include, Black Swan, 127 Hours, The Fighter, and True Grit. All which also build to a dramatic ending.
In under 5-minutes I solved the age old question, “Can Screenwriting Be Taught?” (At least I tried to.) If you’re somewhere between elementary school age and in a retirement home and ever wanted to write a screenplay there are worst places to start than the video I produced below.
Emmy and BAFTA winner and Oscar-nominated producer, director, writer Edward Zwick has a book out titled Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Forty Years in Hollywood. I bought the audio book yesterday and will pull some quotes from it in the coming weeks. But Zwick has had an amazing career starting out writing prestige television (Thirtysomething) back in the ’80s before anyone was talking about ”prestige television.”
Then he went on to make prestige movies (Glory, Shakespeare in Love, The Last Samurai) working with many prestige actors including Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, and Denzel Washington. And he’s learned from many of the most talented people Aaron Spelling, Woody Allen and Sydney Pollack in the entertainment business.
In a podcast interview with Marc Maron, Zwick said as he was defending a plot of a script he was working on Sydney Pollack told him ”Plot is the meat that the burglars throw to the dogs when they climb over the walls to get to the jewels—which are the characters.” In other words, the plot serves the characters. It doesn’t matter how cool the plot is if the characters aren’t strong.
That reminds of the this Stephen King quote:
“Plot is, I think, the good writer’s last resort and the dullard’s first choice. The story which results from it is apt to feel artificial and labored. I lean more heavily on intuition, and have been able to do that because my books tend to be based on situation rather than story . . . . I want to put a group of characters (perhaps a pair; perhaps even just one) in some sort of predicament and then watch them try to work free.” —Stephen King On Writing, A Memory of Craft (2000 version), page 164
As I type this, I see that the post What Christopher Nolan Did When He Couldn’t Get Into Film School is the top read post of the day so far. That made me look back to see what other quotes from him that might be buried in past posts and I found this one from 2012 (and I embedded a few of his inspirations):
“I had a couple of big influences. When I was 16 I read a Graham Swift novel, Waterland, that did incredible things with parallel timelines, and told a story in different dimensions that was extremely coherent. Around the same time, I remember Alan Parker’s The Wallon television, which does a very similar thing purely with imagery, using memories and dreams crossing over to other dreams and so forth. Nicolas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth and Performance were also influential. Those stuck in my head, as did a lot of crime fiction—James Ellroy, Jim Thompson—and film noirs like Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past, which was just staggering. Then, somehow, I got hold of a script to Pulp Fiction before the film came out and was fascinated with what Tarantino had done.” Writer/Director Christopher Nolan (Oppenheimer, The Dark Night Rises, Dunkirk) DGA Quartlerly article The Traditionalist by Jeffrey Ressner
Last night the University of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark set the all-time scoring record for NCAA Division I women’s basketball. She finished the night with 49 points in the victory over Michigan. That gave her a total of 3,569 over her career. She has a chance over the last four games of regular season to surpass a record Pete Maravich’s achieved 54-years ago. His 3,667 points still stands as the Division I record for men and women. (A remarkable accomplishment considering he only played three seasons of varsity ball instead of three.)
The odds are that she’ll break Maravich’s record this month. Congrats on an amazing feat.
Des Moines-born Clark was only six years old when I started this little Screenwriting from Iowa …and Other Unlikely Places. I lived in Iowa at the time and saw it as a place that has historically served as fertile ground for some incredible success on a national level. In sports that includes two-time NFL MVP and Super XXXIV MVP Kurt Warner (University of North Iowa), Master’s Tournament golf champion Zack Johnson (Drake University), Brock Purdy (Iowa State) who started at QB for the San Francisco 49ers in the Super Bowl this month, and legendary Olympic gold medal wrestler and 15 NCAA Division I national champion coach Dan Gable (Iowa).
The list of film and TV celebrities with Iowa roots goes back to John Wayne, Donna Reed, Johnny Carson, Jean Seberg, and Tennessee Williams (Mississippi-born Williams actually got his nickname Tennessee while a student at the University of Iowa). But a major inspiration for starting this blog was screenwriter Diablo Cody who graduated from the University of Iowa in 2000, on her way to winning an Oscar for her 2007 movie Juno. Also in 2007, screenwriters Scott Beck and Bryan Woods graduated from the University of Iowa on the road to their breakout film A Quiet Place.
So add Caitlin Clark to the latest breakout success from that someone unlikely place tucked away in flyover country.
“I didn’t know I knew how to make a movie until I was doing it.” —Celine Song The Hollywood Reporter
Before Celine Song’s Oscar nomination for her Past Lives screenplay, she’s had an interesting journey. Born in South Korea, raised in Canada, and got her MFA in playwriting from Columbia University in New York City. She then spent a decade doing off-Broadway plays including Endlings which unfortunately debuted with New York Theater Workshop in March 2020 just days before New York theaters began shutting down because of the pandemic. But as the saying goes, every ending is a new start.
Here’s a quote from Song that mixes her background in theater and filmmaking that I hope you find helpful. Especially if you live in an area where there are not a lot trained actors.
”Theater is just all table reads. Theater is just reading after reading. And I actually have trouble seeing what I have written, either a playor a screenplay, unless I’ve heard it out loud in a little room full of my friends. . . . How good the performance is in the reading is not helpful. In fact, I really don’t personally ever invite actors to the reading of my first draft. Because actors can make the script sound a lot better than it is. And we love actors and reply on them so much, but I think sometimes what happens is the actors are also auditioning for the role when they’re reading it, and that’s undo pressure on the script. So I think the performance part of it is not necessarily valuable for a script, because what you need from that reading is objectivity. What you need from that reading is the way that story and the writing itself is hitting the first very small audience. I usually invite fellow writers or people who are not in the industry, but are able to read on site. . . . You just want to see the way the script is hitting them live, because that’s where you’re going to learn if the script is working.” —Oscar nominated writer/director Celine Song (Past Lives) Scriptnotes podcast (#630) interview with John August
Here‘s the trailer to Past Lives which Song received a Best Original Screenplay Oscar nomination (and the film also earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination).
“Most of what I know about writing I learned from Allan [Gurganus], and it is a testament to my great good luck (heart-stopping, in retrospect, such dumb luck) that it was his classroom I turned up in when I first started to write stories. . . . I needed someone to tell me how to go forward. The course that Allan set me on was the one that guided my life ever since. It was the course of hard work. . . . Ninety percent of what I know about fiction writing I learned that year. Write it out. Tell the truth. Stack up the pages. Learn to write by writing. . . . What began as something like a dream will in fact stay a dream forever unless you have the tools and the discipline to bring it out. Think of the diamonds, or, for that matter, the ever-practical coal that must be chipped out of the mine. Had I wound up with a different sort of teacher, one who suggested we keep an ear cocked for the muse instead of hoisting a pick, I don’t think I would have gotten very far.” —Ann Patchett ”The Getaway Car” (in The Story of a Happy Marriage)
Here’s my fourth video for the Filmmaking with Brass Knuckles YouTube channels. I’ve read that most YouTubers quit before they upload 10 videos. I think the reason is simply it takes a lot of time to write, produce, shoot, edit, etc. original videos. Even a little 4-minute video like this one.
But I have to say there is free flowing creativity to creating these that is really fun. So many little discoveries along the way that make it personally rewarding. I hope you check it out and that it inspires you to write like Jerry Seinfeld. (Even if results will vary.)
One of my favorite discoveries in recent years was learning that the inspiration behind Mickey Mouse was Charlie Chaplin. I wrote this post about it in 2020.
“We wanted something appealing, and we thought of a tiny bit of a mouse that would have something of the wistfulness of Chaplin—a little fellow trying to do the best he could.” —Walt Disney
It’s a great example of how creativity is a mix of influences—even if you have the genius of Walt Disney.
Then in doing research for my next YouTube video I just learned the inspiration behind the TV show Seinfeld.
The Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld created show that TV Guide named as the greatest television show of all time has its roots in a 1950s TV show you may have never seen—or even heard of.
”I patterned my show after [The Abbott and Costello Show]…We had the street like they had the street. We had the apartment like they had the apartment. Two guys who were just trying to figure it out—me and George. That was the genesis of [Seinfeld]. George’s middle name is Lou after Lou Costello. Abbott and Costello is a pure comedic show. There’s no story arc where anybody learns anything—and that’s where that whole thing came from. It’s a show by two stand-up comics who only care about the laugh. All great comedy is—even if you go back to Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream, everyone is self-motivated, self-interested. That’s how you build comedy.” —Jerry Seinfeld Howard Stern interview
Screenwriting from Iowa 