SCREENWRITING 101 ACCORDING TO WEISBECKER

 

(written at Big Turkeys in early 2002)

 

There actually are differences – if not fundamental ones — between writing for movies and all other types of writing.

 One of these differences, probably the difference, is this: In movie writing, Endings are everything.  

I know, endings are important in all types of writing, in all types of storytelling: novels, plays, jokes, poems. Hey: even music, which is another type of storytelling. (I’m not talking about the lyrics, but the music itself. Whether or not you understand German, if you can listen to Beethoven’s 9^th without being moved emotionally, check yourself for a pulse. Yes, old Ludwig Van was telling a story by stringing together all those notes.) 

 

Try this, and edge your way down with the little arrow so you come upon the last line suddenly (don’t worry, it’s not long):

 

                                    Whenever Richard Cory went to town

                                    We people on the pavement looked at him:

                                    He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

                                    Clean favored, and imperially slim.

 

                                    And he was always quietly arrayed,

                                    And he was always human when he talked;

                                    But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

                                    “Good Morning,” and he glittered when he walked.

 

                                    And he was rich – yes richer than a king –

                                    And admirably schooled in every grace:

                                    In fine, we thought he was everything

                                    To make us wish we were in his place.

 

                                    So on we worked, and waited for the light,

                                    And went without meat, and cursed the bread;

                                    And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

                                    Went home and put a bullet through his head.

 

I remember “Richard Cory” from high school, maybe you do too. When I came upon it again recently in William Goldman’s Which Lie Did I Tell?, the ending came rushing back to me before I finished the first stanza, after 30 something years. (I highly recommend the above book, by the way; and also Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade. My “Endings are Everything” phrase came from the latter book.)

 

Certainly, even in poems, Endings can be Everything.

 

Endings are Everything was why adapting Zero was not only tough but scary. But, again, I’m getting ahead of myself. (Actually, I’m laying in a half-assed setup, which is generally what I’m doing when I get ahead of myself… By the way: screenplays can be viewed as a string of setups and payoffs, with the Ending being the ultimate… but damn, there I go again.)

 

Why Endings are Everything has to do with an aspect of screenwriting that appeals to me, and why I do it (aside from the money), in spite of how unsatisfying it can be in about a million other ways. That aspect is this:

 

Screenwriting – good screenwriting — is the purest form of written storytelling. (Purer than novel writing, say.)

Why is this?

 

Screen time is so precious.

 Which means, one more time: Endings are everything. 

Are you following me? Probably not. That’s okay. Bear with me. I’ll eventually circle back (loop back!) to In Search of Captain Zero, the assertion that it has no screen story.

 

Wait. What do I mean by “pure” storytelling? And what about that “Screen time is so precious”?

 

The two concepts actually are different ways of referring to the same… thing.

 Still don’t get it? Okay, let me put it in a way you can understand: In screenwriting you can’t fuck around.  You can’t go off on flighty little bullshit side trips. You can’t disguise poor storytelling with flowery prose.  Or, for that matter, with great dialog: DIALOG DOESN’T MEAN SHIT.  You gotta show, not tell. You gotta make every scene advance the story.  

Wait, back up. What was that? A couple lines ago, the thing in super bold caps? Dialog doesn’t mean shit? What am I, nuts? Dialog is what screenwriters write, right? Wrong.

 Take this one to the bank and leave it there in an interest bearing account: Dialog is the least important aspect of a screenplay. Tied for last place with neatness and punctuation.  

Don’t believe me? Spend 20 years writing screenplays, some of them bad ones that you eventually learned from, then come back and we’ll talk.

 

Whoa. This is starting to sound like a rant. I’m going surfing, calm down. Talk to you later.

 

#

 

Head high Southern Hemi groundswell. Tide got a bit too low while I was out there. Banged my knee on a rock on the inside. Limping a little. Still, a good session.

 

#

 

I’ve reread what I’ve written so far. There’s a lot more stuff I could put in bold, principles or rules or whatever about screenwriting. Not gonna do that. Those of you who are serious about learning the craft of screenwriting – or any kind of storytelling – go get a book called Story by Robert McKee. Get it, read it, study it, you’ll kiss my ass later. (I don’t agree with everything McKee asserts, only 97.5%.)

 

#

 

By the way: I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from folks asking to be considered for jobs on the movie. (Another way of hexing me.) Actors, technicians, etc. My message to all of you:

 

Have you heard the one about the Polish actress who tried to get a part in a movie by boffing the writer?

 

#

 

 As I say, I’ve gotten a lot of emails in support of the book and the coming movie; folks beseeching me to stick to the book, don’t change anything, don’t Hollywood-it-up, etc. Lots of ‘em over the past year. Thank you. But only one message out of the multitudes really resonated with insight.

 

A guy who said, “There’s no movie there.”

 

Remember that, because the guy was both right and wrong.

 

#

 

Where was I? Right. The Zero screenplay, how the book has no story, how screenwriting is the purest form of storytelling, screen time is so precious, ENDINGS ARE EVERY- THING. That stuff.

 One of the above bold little nuggets of fucking wisdom says this: You gotta show, not tell.  Although this is true in any sort of storytelling, with screenwriting – with movies – it’s not only true, but TRUE.  Where does the word “movie” come from, its derivation? Moving pictures. Pictures that move. Doesn’t say anything about “words.” In fact, of course, the first movies were wordless, not even any dialog cards. They had to show everything with images, tell their story with pictures. That’s still the way to tell a movie story. 

When I said DIALOG DOESN’T MEAN SHIT I was admittedly overstating (just a little) to make a point. It does mean shit, but only a turd’s worth. What I really mean is that dialog is the weakest way of advancing a story. (And remember that every scene must advance the story.) Voice over narration is even weaker. You can use it for other things, but not to advance the story.

 

(Back in another life when I lived in Hollywood, people would give me screenplays to read. Here’s how I would decide which ones were not worth a look: I’d thumb through them and the ones that had lots and lots of dialog – especially lots of long speeches – were tossed.)

 

Moving pictures. Tell your story with pictures whenever you can. I’ll give you an example.

 

Let’s say I want to make the point that the origin of waves, of ocean groundswell waves, is the sun’s energy. The sun’s energy comes down and stirs the atmosphere, which makes wind, which makes waves. Okay. One way I could do it would be to have two surfers watching waves roll in and one says to the other: “Hey, dude, did you know that…” etc.

 

On the other hand, here’s how the Zero screenplay starts (I was referring to the very first draft, back in 2001, when I wrote this essay):

 BLACKNESS, THE VOID… 

A tiny, far distant pinprick of light appears then instantaneously bursts and expands, filling the void with a fantastic explosion of swirling energy… pulling back from the depths of this magical light…

     

…to a segment of a mammoth, firey ball … it’s a section of the rim of our sun…

 

….a solar flare erupts, piercing the void……we follow the red/yellow/ magenta pulsating vanguard of the solar eruption as it instantly leaves the sun far behind… expanding until to a shimmering curtain of energy, bound at great speed for the beautiful blue-green ball far ahead… earth… and a sound rising, almost like a musical note… a strange, beautiful, unearthly sound… maybe it’s the singing of the spheres…

… in a few seconds the journey is done and the light curtain benignly envelopes our planet… a nearly instantaneous passage through the upper atmosphere, a glimpse of continents below…

 

…our journey and that beautiful sound end as a calm sea absorbs the magic curtain of light and…

 

In flash of swirling, absorbed energy, a storm builds: a product of the sun’s energy. (Days compressed into seconds via surreal time lapse and dissolves)…

 

Waves exit the storm system, calming themselves, organizing, beginning their travels…

 

Somewhere, sometime, in some ocean, a groundswell is born…

 

Isolating one individual wave, we follow its journey… time and distance behind it, our wave peels along a pristine shore… a perfect wave.

 The wave image changes in quality, becomes grainy, less real… it is now a movie image within our movie, a sequence from The Endless Summer… 

“Long Island, New York, Summer of 1965”

 

Okay. That’s how the flick starts. We will now introduce our two main guys – the characters loosely based on myself and Christopher, both age 17 – at a drive-in, watching The Endless Summer from the back fence. (It’s dusk and those red/yellow/magenta sun colors light up the sky behind the drive-in screen.) They are narrating along with Bruce Brown, by rote; they’ve seen The Endless Summer 20 times. Also: they both have the same tattoo on the back of their right hands. A sunburst tattoo.

 

While the other kids make out, goof off, our guys make a pact to dedicate their lives to surfing. They will live the life portrayed up on the drive-in screen. They will roam the world in search of waves. Of the perfect wave.

 

Okay. What have we got here? What’s accomplished?

 

1.      The sun opening tells us something that would be certain death if done in dialog between the two surfers. It tells us that surfing is… cosmic. (There are no scenes in my screenplay wherein surfers talk pithy about wave riding. This was a rule I started with. Here’s some real wisdom: You must make the reader/audience do the work in conveying insight. If you make them figure stuff out, they will love you. If you tell them stuff in dialog, no room is left for them to do the work. Remember this one: “A picture is worth a thousand words”? Let me add this to that, regarding screenwriting: “And a thousand words’ll put you to sleep.”)

 

2.      The sun opening is also a setup, although you don’t know it yet. It sets up the sun motif that reoccurs throughout the screenplay. (Yes, the tattoos are part of this. The tattoos are also an important story device; the sun opening justifies this device. It hides the fact that it’s a device.) A motif is a set of images that have symbolic value. I’ll not go further into this, because with symbolism you have to keep your trap shut. If you’re consciously aware of it, it’s ruined, becomes pretense. You want the audience/reader to figure it out, but only on a subconscious level. (Having said that: think about all the stuff the sun means. Light as opposed to darkness, warmth as opposed to cold, enlightenment as opposed to ignorance, and maybe good as opposed to bad, or even Evil. And in this story, a related issue: waves as opposed to no waves. And wherever that perfect wave is, our local star, the sun, created it.)

 

3.      The sun opening is also a setup for visuals to come, wherein we descend from on-high to establish place, where we are on the planet. This device also gives a sense of the… cosmic… our place in the grand scheme. Hey: humans are small. In every sense of the word.

 

4.      The sun opening is – should be – beautiful, visually. This amounts to a promise to the audience that the movie itself will be beautiful, and visual. We better not renege on this promise.

 

5.      In summation: The sun opening sets up the world of the story. In an interesting, indirect (in other words, in subtext), visual way.

 

6.      One more thing about these opening images, any opening images: it’s really cool if you can reprise them during the Ending (which I do in the Zero screenplay). Except that during the Ending there will be way more meaning to them, because of all the stuff that happened in the story. The audience/reader will be subconsciously telling itself: “Wow, now I really get it.” (This also helps give the story unity, which the human mind loves. Unity is largely a function of what I started to say before… the story being a string of setups and payoffs.)

 

7.      The drive-in stuff. The memorized narration of The Endless Summer tells us that our two guys have already found their passion in life at a young age. Wave riding. (The “Long Island, New York, Summer of 1965” – words, which you know I hate – is probably not necessary. The old cars and dress of the other kids will tell us when we are, if not where.)

 

8.      The fact that they are on the back fence while the other kids goof it up in their cars also separates them from their peers.

 

9.      It’s obvious they are best friends. Given the matching tattoos, they are maybe a secret society… of two. (Which was sort of what surfing was back then, a secret society.)

 

10.  The pact they make to live the life sets up everything that happens afterwards. This is important because the next scene is in the present of 1996 and we need a sense of what happened in the 30 intervening years.

 

Okay.

 

All this stuff is conveyed on the first page of the screenplay. And largely without dialog, without words. (I don’t really count the rote narration as dialog.)

 

Let’s bring back one of those bold deals:

 Screen time is so precious. This is what makes screenwriting “pure”. Pure here means laden with meaning.   

So whaddya think? Good way to start this movie? I think so, but you’re the better judge. Let me put it this way: Aside from all the setups and symbolism and all that crap, do you want to know what happens next? If yes, then the opening succeeds, at least temporarily.

 

Why do I italicize what happens next? Because that’s the ball game in screenwriting, in any kind of writing. You have to make the reader care what happens next (screenplays are actually written to be read, with the goal of the Studio Head whipping out his checkbook). And you have to sustain that through the whole thing, 120 pages or whatever. How do you do that? Well, you gotta know a few things about the craft of screen- writing, but the real answer is this: Fuck if I know. It’s what separates art from craft.

 

It’s so beautiful when it works.

 

Hold it. Wait a minute. Did you notice anything about the above opening?

 

It isn’t in the book.

 

Oh. On page 37 there’s one sentence about the sun’s energy creating waves, but it comes in the context of Mike Stewart’s story. A digression – amazing though it is — that couldn’t possibly make it into the movie.

 

And the first mention of The Endless Summer comes on page 9. And guess what? Christopher and I hadn’t even met when I saw the movie.

 

Are you starting to get the idea?

 

Are you people sure you want me to stick to the book? Not change stuff?

 

Are you starting to trust me?

 If so: Trust me when I say (via William Goldman) Endings Are Everything.  

Yes, we’re back to that.

 Your ending is the ultimate payoff. The whole screenplay, the movie, has one function. The whole nine yards of it is a mega-setup to Make the ending great. 

Look at it this way: Did you ever walk out of a movie and say to your companion, “What a great movie. The ending wasn’t much, but the movie was great.”? Not only have you never said that, but I’d bet that in the whole history of movies, no one has ever said that. On the other hand, you might say that about a novel. I have. As I say, screenwriting is… different.

 

Now we’re finally back to my assertion that In Search of Captain Zero, the book, supplies me with no story. (Why it seems to work as a book is another subject entirely.) Why is that?

 

You should have guessed already, but just in case:

 It has no Ending. 

Therefore, if you accept all I’ve said about Endings, it has no story. No Ending, No Story.

 

But wait. Why do I say that? The book has no ending? Most of you were moved by the book’s ending.

 When I say No Ending, I mean No Movie Ending. 

Why is this?

 Because, in the book, the crux of the Ending takes place in my head.  

Although there is a lot of stuff (mostly in-my-head stuff) going on in Part IV (or at least I like to think so), the crux of the ending is on page 312: “Who am I to judge Christopher?”

 

How do you put that in a movie?… “Voice over narration”? Is that your answer?…

 

If you were here right now I’d strangle you.

 

If you have the time and patience, re-read Part IV. Or just take my word for this:

 NOTHING HAPPENS.  

When I say NOTHING HAPPENS I mean nothing you could put on the screen.

 

There’s not even any surfing. Christopher and I take a couple walks, have dinner a couple times and that’s that.

 

And you don’t want me to change stuff?

 

Whaddya, nuts?

 

Which somehow brings us back to the guy who emailed me and said, “There’s no movie there.”

 

I said he was both right and wrong.

 

Sounds like he was right, right? No ending, no story, no movie. Ipso fucking A facto.

 

Remember my moronic claim, right up top at the outset: I’ve kicked ass with the screenplay. (Truth is, I did not kick ass, not with that draft.)

 

If that’s true, then there is a movie there.

 

But where? I mean how did I do that, kick ass?

 I reinvented the story. 

I changed not just a few things – which tons of you beseeched me not to do – but a lot of things. Hey, I fucked around so much that I changed the main character’s name from mine to “Alex.” (“Al,” which I’m sometimes called – I hate it — plus “ex”. Ain’t I clever?) Wouldn’t have been honest to name the main character after myself.

 

Here’s an example of how different the screen story is: Alex doesn’t bring his dog with him. (I can hear the yelps of consternation even as I write this.)

 

HEY! What about the book?

 

It’s still there, thematically. In fact it’s there in spades, thematically. And that’s the ball game in adapting.

 Here’s a good question: If there’s no movie story in the book as written, Why did someone cough up a bunch of money to buy the rights and for me to write the screenplay? Because: For one thing, the guy who wrote the check, the Studio Head, hadn’t read the book. 

He had read the coverage. Coverage is the report a reader punches out, after having read the book. Here’s what the studio head said to me in that meeting a year ago, after blithely stating that he hadn’t read the book: “I love the idea of it.”

 

In fact (you may remember this from my message of a year ago), he loved the idea so much that he pointed at Sean Penn and said, “I want to make this movie so much that I don’t even care if he’s in it.”

 

I loved that.

 

So the studio head whipped out his checkbook and paid me a bunch of money… for an idea.

 

What was the idea?

 

“A guy goes searching through Central America for a long lost friend. Set in the world of surfing.”

 The book supplied me with no story. It supplied me with a premise.  

The story, well, that was my problem.

 

So I got back on the plane, got the hell out of Hollywood – a place and state of mind that make me very nervous – came back down here to my end-of-the-road little niche and…

 

What did I have to do? What was my job? What were they paying me for?

 

Goddamn it, if you don’t know by now, I’m just spinning my wheels here, wasting my time and your time…

 

Come on!

 I HAD TO FIND THE ENDING! 

One more thing about Endings. Remember when I said you have to keep the reader caring about what happens next for the whole screenplay, 120 pages or whatever? Okay. After all those pages, after the movie, after the Ending, they suddenly and completely don’t care what happens next (they may think they do, but they don’t) because there is nothing left to happen. The ending has settled everything.  

 

You know how hard that is?

 

(You want an example of a great ending? American Beauty. Notice how everything – the main story line plus a bunch of subplots – was settled in just a few minutes of screen time (and real time too) and all in one geographical place. It was not only great, but elegant. For once I agreed with the Academy about Best Screenplay.

 

Give you another example of a great ending. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Which was by William Goldman, who came up with Endings Are Everything. This is an even better example. Why? Because until the Ending, this Oscar winning screenplay wasn’t all that great. It was cutesy and rambling and a bit predictable. Remember that scene where Sundance holds a gun on Etta and “makes her” disrobe? I don’t know about you, but I saw the fact that they were already lovers coming a mile away.

 

But the sonofabitch sure pulled it out with that Ending. The two guys all shot up and bleeding and obviously dying and what are they doing? Arguing about where they’re going next. Like to tear your heart out. Without that scene, without that Ending, the screenplay/movie wouldn’t have even been all that good, let alone great, which it was.)

 Back to me finding the Ending to In Search of Captain Zero: 

Here’s something I said before and have since beaten you over the head with:

 

Your ending is the ultimate payoff. The whole screenplay, the movie, has one function. The whole nine yards of it is a mega-setup to Make the ending great. (Am I over-simplifying? What about character? you might ask. Well, goddamn right your characters better be good. But all that good character stuff is part and parcel of the setup for the Ending: the Ending can’t be great unless the characters are great. Hey, I’m not writing a book here. As I say, you want a book, go get McKee’s.)

 

If this is true, and it is, how could I start the screenplay, how could I write anything, if I didn’t know the ending? (Think back to “Richard Cory,” above, a rare example of an Ending being Everything in a poem. You know the author knew that ending before he wrote the first stanza.)

 

Well, of course, I couldn’t write anything until I knew the Ending. (McKee says never start the screenplay until you know the Ending. You’re supposed to diddle around with notes and outlines. I disagree with him on that one. In fact: HUYA!)

 

But… I did. I dove into the screenplay. Out of desperation.

 Remember when I said this: Which was why adapting Zero was not only tough but scary. 

Why scary?

 

Listen to this: I’ve been working on this goddamn thing since last July, and guess when I found the ending…

 

…about two weeks ago.

 

I was on page 112 two weeks ago and I still didn’t know how the thing was going to end.

 

You have any idea how scared I was?

 

And I couldn’t tell anybody. Who was I gonna tell? The producers, that crew? Phones in the homes and offices of replacement writers would have been ringing off the hook. My surfbuddies down here? “Yeah, dude, but we got a swell on the way,” would have been the best I could’ve hoped for in terms of sympathy. The only type that would understand would have been another screenwriter and I don’t know any other screenwriters. And anyway, admitting to another screenwriter that I was on page 112 and still didn’t have my ending would have been like… what?

 

I would have gotten a “I’m so sorry…” plus the look you might be subjected to after spilling the beans about your inoperable brain tumor. Yes, exactly like that…

 See: By page 112… well, 112 pages of stuff had happened. All kinds of subplots and supporting characters and intrigues had been laid in, both in the backstory and in Alex’s journey south, and… I didn’t know what the fuck they meant. 

If I didn’t know what the fuck everything meant, how was I going to write an Ending that would settle everything?

 

Here’s what happened next (if you don’t care what happens next then I’ve failed as per the above piece of wisdom and I’m looking like a real fool):

 

I took a beach walk with my dogs in order to calm my panic and – I can picture exactly where I was, which was right next to this huge piece of flotsam that’s been on the beach for about a month – the ending popped into my head. I mean boom! and it was all there. (This was the same part of the same beach where I would later talk to the producer by phone and she said all that “it’s brilliant” stuff.)

 

And everything, all the stuff I’d written, all those 112 pages, now made sense. (Yeah, I had to go back and diddle with things – in other words, rewrite some — but it was basically all there.)

 

It was perfect.

 

It moved me.

 

(I sure hope you agree when you read the damn thing… I’m not such a jerk that I don’t realize that I have to let you read the screenplay. Otherwise, I’m like the coward yelling through the fence that I’m gonna beat you up, knowing I won’t have to. Yeah, I’ll post it as soon as… problem is I have to get permission from the producers and Studio… I will do my best.)

 

Anyway, I sat down on the piece of flotsam and almost wept. Like if the doctor said he was mistaken about the inoperable tumor…

 

Another thing: When you read the ending, you won’t have seen it coming, but then you’ll say, “It had to end that way, it was inevitable… so what was the deal with Weisbecker not seeing it for a year and struggling so fearfully?”

 

At least I hope you’ll say that.

 

SCREENWRITING 101 ACCORDING TO WEISBECKER

ALL SUMMED UP

 

You didn’t see it coming.

 It was inevitable. It moved you. 

You want to write a screenplay? Fine, just make sure these three things are there at the end.

 Or you could write Police Academy XIV.