Who Are You People?

I don't have much in the way of screenwriting advice. It's like telling someone how to make love. It's more useful (and more fun) to figure it out on your own. But I do have one tip that I feel qualified to give:

Never throw anything away.

Keep every idea you come up with, every scene you jot down, every line of dialogue. And, for heaven's sake, don't ever throw away an entire script or story. This is not a repudiation of the "kill your darlings" maxim. I'm not talking about cherishing every crap thing you scribble down while dropping acid. I'm just saying, tuck it away somewhere. Just in case. Because you never know.

Shortly after I moved to LA, I was doing some housekeeping and came across an old floppy disk. I didn't recognize the file that was on it, and I wasn't able to open it, since it was written using an antiquated word processing program I no longer had. So, I pitched it into the trash can.

But it didn't stay there long. Curiosity had gotten the better of me. I dug it out and, through trial and error, was able to convert the file to plain text.

Turns out, it was a rough draft of a screenplay I'd written six years earlier. It was maybe the third or fourth feature length script I'd attempted, but I had such a low opinion of it at the time that I abandoned it.

I started to read it right there on the screen, in plain text, all of the formatting stripped away, with action running into dialogue -- and I couldn't tear myself away.

I had put the story so completely out of my mind that it was like reading someone else's work. In fact, as I became increasingly invested in the story and the characters, I realized that I didn't know how it ended -- or even if I'd ever written an ending.

Fortunately, I did. And that ending brought me to tears.

The story was about a precocious and vexing 16-year-old girl who is sent by her beleagured mother to spend the summer with her grandparents in a sleepy beach town. She's so irritated at this punishment that she declares to all interested parties that she intends to commit suicide before the summer is out. And as she goes on to wreak havoc in their lives, her grandparents can't decide whether to fear that her threat is serious or pray that it is. Not exactly high-concept, I know. But it's a nifty story, alternately hilarious and moving.

The script was rough and needed some polishing, but the spine was in place, and the characters were vivid. To a screenwriter always in search of a new idea, this was better than finding a sack of money in the gutter. I'd essentially come into possession of a free script.

I cleaned it up and showed it to my agent, and he agreed with my assessment: this was a keeper.

The script rapidly eclipsed my more recent work to become my calling card piece. The small scale and macabre nature of the story made it a tough film to get off the ground, but a number of proven producers and name directors tried. It became the first screenplay to earn me money, in the form of an option to an independent producer who went on to hire me to write a couple assignments for him. At one point, an icon of the tweener set was even attached to star.

And, as of this writing, the script is setup with a production company and a director who are proceeding with plans to produce it on a low budget next summer. If things go as planned, it will be my first screenplay to go into production.

And for a few moments, seven years ago, the only existing copy was sitting in the trash can.

I don't throw anything out anymore. In this age of affordable hard drives and CD burners, you simply have no excuse for it. In fact, when I start on a revision of anything -- no matter how minor the changes -- I save it to a new file first so I won't destroy any previous version. I might end up with forty or fifty different versions of a screenplay, most of which I will never look at again. Who cares? It costs nothing. And every now again you might just realize you overlooked a gem.

Posted by Michael Gilvary at 3:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Right before I left for Los Angeles, I took a quick trip to Europe with my folks. I brought a bottle of bordeaux back from Paris. It was to be my celebratory wine, only to be opened when I had my Big Break in the film business -- however long that took.

Moving to Los Angeles wasn't just a change of locale, it was a change of mindset. I made a pact with myself. I had become a skilled editor with a couple successful tv docs under my belt. But I decided not to seek work as an editor in LA. Editing would pay well, but it would also take too much time and energy. And, in the end, I didn't want to be an editor.

I came out here to write screenplays. So, I decided to only take jobs that would bring me closer to that goal.

I ended up working as a script reader, writing coverage of screenplays and novels for a number of production companies around town. It was thankless, low-paying work that offered little in the way of industry exposure or contacts or experience.

But it did give me the opportunity to read about a thousand screenplays over the course of a few years -- most of them lousy. It taught me a lot about what makes scripts work, and what makes them fail. I applied those lessons to my own writing, the pace of which increased dramatically after the move west.

Once I had a couple of screenplays I was proud of, I called up my old friend, the agent. I'd kept in touch with him over the years, sending him new screenplays as I wrote them. He had been increasingly impressed each time, but remained unconvinced that I would be a worthwhile client.

I told him that I was in LA now, and that I was very serious about this whole writing thing. He agreed to read my latest script, and that one sealed the deal. I had an agent. It only took me 4 years of persistent phone calls (and a lot of writing).

I considered opening the wine, but decided against it. Landing an agent, while promising, doesn't really qualify as a Big Break. A lot of writers find an agent, but never make a sale.

No, the bottle should remain corked until I made my first script sale.

That came when an independent producer optioned one of my screenplays. But an option isn't really a sale, it's more of a rental. And the money, which was nice, was only a few thousand dollars. Not exactly hitting it big.

I decided not to open the bottle yet. It should be saved for a Really Big Break.

The same producer hired me to write a few screeenplays for him. That was a significant development -- somebody was paying me to write. But the upfront money was small, and those projects were being developed outside the studio system, which meant the chance of the films actually being made was minute.

The bottle remained corked.

Then I optioned a screenplay to Miramax, and that was exciting. The money was much better. I readied my corkscrew. But then I discovered that this option was not going to qualify me for membership in the Writers Guild of America. And that was important to me.

I put the corkscrew away.

In just a few years in LA, I'd started earning money as a screenwriter. Given the number of people who walk around this town with a script under their arm, that's not something to sneeze at. But I wasn't making enough to earn a living at it. I was still covering scripts for rent money.

And I was starting to learn that, on this career path, you have to be ready for all the close calls -- the producers who fall in love with your script, but then aren't able to get the studio to write a check, the people who swear they can get your film made if only you do a free revision for them, the star's brother's kid's nanny who promises she can put your script in the star's hands. You make a thousand excited phone calls to your parents back home -- "Great news! Rachel Leigh Cook's agent loves the script and is giving it to her this weekend!" -- only to have the rug pulled out from under you. Or worse -- the interest simply fades away over the course of many months. You never get an answer from Rachel Leigh Cook. At least not while people still know who Rachel Leigh Cook is.

I stopped breaking out the corkscrew after a while. I wanted to wait for The Really Big Break, the one that would change my life, the one that would transform me from a wannabe in a rented house to a respected pro with a villa in the hills.

Then I reached a real milestone: I landed an assignment rewriting a sci-fi action script for Paramount -- a project being produced by Gale Anne Hurd, one of my great Hollywood heroes. It was real money, and it got me a guild card, at long last. Better yet, it allowed me to quit working as a reader.

Nevertheless, it didn't even occur to me to open the bottle. I'd become too jaded about it. I was a professional screenwriter, after all this time, but it didn't feel at all permanent. Like it could all evaporate overnight.

I decided that The Really Big Break, if it existed at all, wouldn't come until one of my screenplays was actually produced. It's amazing how far you can get in this business without actually getting a film made. And none of my films were getting made.

In fact, none have been made yet. I've worked on several assignments and have optioned or sold several of my screenplays. A couple of them are tantalizingly close to production, but I've been at this too long to take anything for granted.

The bottle of bordeaux remains corked, tucked away in a cabinet. My wife reminds me about it every once in a while. It might be vinegar by now. It probably wasn't any good to begin with. But, as my father said to me a while back, "The big day will come and you'll open that bottle, and it'll taste like shit, but you'll drink it anyway and you'll love it."

Posted by Michael Gilvary at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

"Backstory" is a term used to describe everything that has happened to characters before the movie begins. When Indiana Jones walks into Marion Ravenwood's bar, she slugs him because he broke her heart years before. We don't know the details of that heartbreak, because we never got to see it. It's part of Indy's backstory. And this is mine:

In 1977, my parents dragged me to see a film called Star Wars, and movies became my religion.

But it wasn't until the next year, when I dragged them to see Ralph Bakshi's animated adaptation of Lord of the Rings, that I had my epiphany. As Gandalf tumbled into the abyss with the Balrog, a thought popped into my 9-year-old brain:

"These movies don't just appear out of nowhere. People make them... Maybe I could be one of those people."

From that moment on, my future was decided. The rest of my childhood was spent making super 8 movies and waiting to grow up so I could go to film school. Had anyone told me how hard it would be to break into the film business, I would've become an architect, like my dad.

Okay, that's not entirely accurate. Everybody told me how hard it would be, but I didn't believe them. And, anyway, they had no fucking idea how hard it would be. They were off by several orders of magnitude.

In retrospect, I'm very glad I didn't listen to them.

I got a film degree from Emerson College and entertained fantasies of becoming the next Spielberg. I hadn't taken into account the roughly 7 million other kids out there for whom Star Wars had become a religion, who made super 8 films, who dreamed of going to film school and becoming the next Speilberg.

I spent several years bouncing from one dead-end job to the next, doing my best to find film-related work on the east coast. I was a production assistant on a couple of features. I wrote some infomercials. Served as production manager on a low-budget film. Then I taught myself how to use the new digital editing systems that were just coming out and went to work cutting cable TV documentaries.

But all the while, I was writing screenplays. I'd get up at 5 AM so I could put in a couple hours of writing before I went to my day job and my brain turned to Cool Whip. I wrote half a dozen screenplays this way. They were unfilmable, but had occasional moments of inspiration.

One of them made it to the quarterfinals of the Nicholl Fellowships. That earned me a phone call from a well known Hollywood agent. He asked to read the script. I sent it to him. He thought it showed promise, but wasn't impressed enough to sign me. However, he encouraged me to send him any new scripts that I wrote.

This is just the kind of nibble that can keep a young screenwriter going for, literally, years.

I kept writing scripts. I kept sending them to the agent, and to other agents and producers. And I kept every rejection letter. But nothing was happening. I started to suspect that nothing would happen with the screenwriting unless I moved to Hollywood.

My editing career was going well. I was living in beautiful Vermont, earning a respectable salary and, for the first time in my life, I had health insurance. But I wasn't dreaming of 401k's, watching Gandalf tumble into that abyss.

So, I quit the job, climbed into my third-hand Cherokee with my neurotic Dalmation and drove 3000 miles to Los Angeles...

Posted by Michael Gilvary at 11:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

In the excellent film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Richard Dreyfuss' character, Roy Neary, has visions implanted in his mind by alien visitors. These visions drive him toward Devil's Tower, where he is intercepted and interrogated by members of a mysterious scientific team portrayed by Francois Truffaut and Bob Balaban -- Why has he come here? What does he hope to find? But Neary doesn't know, and he can only respond with a frantic question of his own:

"Who are you people?"

He never does get an answer.

Neary's plight perfectly mirrors that of the screenwriter -- driven by inexplicable urges to tell stories for a living, but challenged every step of the way by the demons and imps (and occasional angels) who serve as gatekeepers in the Inferno of the Hollywood system.

Who are you people, indeed?

This website is intended to provide some insight into that struggle, into the life of that screenwriter -- of this screenwriter.

It won't be as funny as Josh Friedman's blog. Not for lack of trying, and not because I don't love you. But let's be realistic.

It won't be as informative as Craig Mazin's site. Craig just has more to offer in the way of knowledge and experience -- and a stronger desire to actually teach you something useful.

I doubt it will be as earnest or interesting as John August's site.

And it definitely will not be as revelatory as Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio's long-running Wordplay website -- absolutely the best online resource for aspiring screenwriters.

There are other differences between me and those guys -- like the fact that their careers are wildly successful and mine can be charitably described as "cute." But, we're talking websites here, not careers.

And my website aims to be little more than a window into the world of an intrepid, working screenwriter as he hacks his way through the bush of modern day Hollywood, trusty Powerbook slung over his shoulder, on a quixotic quest to put his stories up on the big screen, demons and imps be damned. Battles will be won and lost. Lessons will be learned. Tears will be shed. Popcorn will be eaten.

Care to tag along?

Posted by Michael Gilvary at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)