Warning - Long-ass post
Many, many apologies for length. Feel free to skim, ignore at will but I sincerely hope the rest of the regulars at this particular AW outpost will contribute here even if only briefly. We can answer newbie questions about page counts and dos and don'ts until the end of time but we hardly ever talk about the good stuff that brought us here and I, for one, would really like to hear your stories. Thanks to PD, Livin and ice.
So. The reason I started this thread was because I read an interview with a filmmaker who was sourcing his major influences and it seemed, like every other person on the planet, this guy's seminal movie "wow" moment was Star Wars (yes, the shot with the ship coming over the camera right at the beginning.) This was troubling to me because this was not a seminal moment for me. I was probably in my mid-teens before I saw Star Wars and even then it was buried on a satellite classic channel. So it got me thinking, what was it that shaped me?
The first film I can ever remember seeing is Jaws. It was in Saudi Arabia, where I lived for a brief time when I was about 3-5. I know I didn't watch the whole thing but I clearly remember the "show me the way to go home" scene in all its vivid detail.
And remembering that, I kept getting flashes of watching Jaws throughout my life. Watching it with my mum at eight, badgering her about Quint's death (is it now? when is it?) I remember watching it when it was finally syndicated on Sky Movies and shown ad nauseum - also the time of my first VHS, long-play, pan and scanned, mono copy of my very own.
And finally I remember buying it on DVD in 2000 from a Toys R Us in Orlando, Florida - which also opened my eyes to the wonderful world of widescreen - who knew my VHS copy of Jaws was only half a movie?!
I think Jaws is probably in my top five "most watched" films in that I've lost track of how many times I've seen it. These days I'm not a Jaws nerd - I don't fare very well on the "Get out of the water trivia game" found on the DVD bonus features but I feel like that film is a part of me in that... John Williams' entire score is on a hard disk in my head. I intuitively feel each and every cut as and when it's about to happen.
Sometimes I put on stupid little scenes like the ferry scene where Brody crosses the bay with the mayor to intercept the swimming boy scouts, purely to marvel at how it's shot in one take with a locked off camera that somehow still manages to go from a wide to a medium to a close up through the choreography of the actors alone and I watch it and think, "Was it difficult to think up that or does it come easily for someone like Spielberg?" There isn't a frame in Jaws that I don't adore. There isn't a piece of information via the dialogue, editing, pace, whatever, that I feel I'm not receptive to. I feel like it's *my* film.
So there's Jaws. But Jaws wasn't released when I was a kid. It had been out forever and I was playing catch-up. But there was a seminal film during my early teens that absolutely shaped me as a screenwriter. And I didn't even get to see it in the cinema.
At the time I had gone with my brother to see Costner's 'Robin Hood; Prince of Thieves,' a little tame by today's standards but a pretty damn good example for me of that pure joyous, cinematic entertainment I'd always loved. But the experience of watching the film was slightly off-set by a trailer for Terminator 2 that was shown before Robin Hood started which, for the rest of the film, I just couldn't get out of my head. It was action-packed and full of wonderful, weird imagery - I mean, what the hell was that silver, metal dude anyway?
Alas, the film was a certificate 15 and I was 12. Fortunately, by the time it was released on tape, it had lost none of its impact. I remember those days very clearly. We live in a small town and at the time, for a film like Terminator 2, there would have been maybe fifteen copies in the whole town. I remember it being talked about in class, "Did you see this film? Oh man, you have GOT to see this film." It was actually about the same time that Pulp Fiction was released which had a similar stirring effect on the classroom.
Quick aside - film certifications meant nothing to my parents for reasons I haven't yet bothered to ask them. I grew up on Freddy and Jason, Hammer Horror, Paul Verhoven, John McClane, Dirty Harry, Sergio Leonne and I'm happy to say that I am (so far) not royally fucked up by seeing Kenny pounded into strawberry jam by ED-209 or Dustin Hoffman having his teeth ripped out in Marathon Man so renting Pulp Fiction or Terminator 2 and sharing it with the kiddies wasn't a big deal for the folks.
Anyway, it took a while before we were able to get our hands on a copy of Terminator 2 but finally, it came and yes, it was just about the most exciting thing I'd ever seen. Here was a world that was full and rich and unrelenting. I'd seen the original Terminator but kind of put in the same drawer as the Friday the 13th films - at that age I wasn't old enough to appreciate the sophistication of sentient technology running amok.
T2 stayed with me for a long, long time. I knew it had stirred something creative in me but I had no idea what it was at the time. About the same time, a series of books started circulating at school under the banner of "Point Horror." These were teenage stories about serial killers and ghosts called very lame things like “The Cheerleader” and “Hit & Run,” that were really just about offing hapless teenagers and something you could quietly read in a double history. I read a couple and thought they were OK but the rest of the class just couldn't get enough of them. I didn't understand why they were wasting their time on this trash while T2 was doing the rounds.
It annoyed me so much that I decided to write my own entries in the Point Horror series. I wrote three 'books,' hand-written on A4 paper, folded in half and stapled (meaning you had to guess the page count and write to fit that accordingly) and passed them around class. I even had a manager who would write the blurb on the back and Crayola a bit of nasty artwork for the front cover. I wrote the schlockiest, blandest, most trashy crap I could come up with, full of gore and murder and the kids ate it up with a spoon - I was a writer. But despite my creative urges being somewhat fulfilled by writing this nonsense, it didn't feel like it was enough. It didn’t feel Important because although I saw the images in my head, words on the page just didn't feel like enough. I wanted others to SEE it.
About a week later, I got a book that changed everything. I'd seen it in a newsagent which sold graphic novels and those plastic Halcyon models of the drop ship and the APC from the
Aliens film. I didn't know what the book was except that it had the T2 poster on the cover and anything involving T2, I had to have. It was there when I came home from school one day and opening it up, I found it to be
this - the illustrated screenplay.
Essentially, it's the shooting script on one side of the page with five or six still frame photos on the other side, corresponding to those words. I had no idea then what a script was but it didn't take long for me to figure it out and when I did, it was a pretty stunning moment. I simply couldn't believe that all of that fantastic imagery and excitement could come from words on a page. And the beautiful thing was, because of Cameron's informal writing style, it was very easy to see that what was on film was what he had been thinking about when he wrote the script.
That was it! That was the thing that had been missing all of my life. Here I was thinking that somehow films just... happened but no - someone came up with the idea and they wrote it down and it became something bigger and more exciting. I can say with hand on heart, that book is almost entirely responsible for directing me towards screenwriting. I still have it today and it's battered and torn and more than a little well-thumbed.
So T2 goes on the list as well.
My third choice goes to world of James Bond. I can't talk about Bond films in the same way as Jaws and T2 because they just aren't those kind of films but I have to include them on the list because they've been there since I knew what a television was and they're still with me now. I think they taught me about heroes and villains and the idea that action needs to be paced - action/drama/action/drama. I grew up with Roger Moore's efforts but certainly not exclusively and, again, they're films that I must have seen dozens of times individually.
If you’re interested in my two cents, I think
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service is the best of the lot and I can honestly say I’m probably the only person in the world who doesn’t have a favourite Bond. They’re all Bond to me. I saw The Living Daylights at the cinema (a film I was actually old enough to see) and that introduction teaser in Gibraltar just had me from the opening gun barrel. As soon as Timothy Dalton turned around for his close-up he just *was* Bond. And I’d take a million Living Daylights over one Die Another Day.
Finally, I can't complete this list without including two entries from the TV world. The first would be The West Wing - a show I didn't see until many years after it was first broadcast. It was something I'd heard a lot about but didn't have the time to get into (plus the box set was damn expensive.) I was in my very early twenties by this point and firmly down the road of screenwriting with a view to possibly getting into TV writing eventually. At some point, the DVD went on sale and I bit the bullet.
Watching the pilot episode was a unique experience. I didn't understand a word of it - it may as well have been in Korean for all the plot I got out of it but there was a magical element to it that took hold of me. There was a rhythm and music to the dialogue that meant you didn't really have to know what the characters were talking about because it was just such a pleasure to listen to.
The second episode was better but still not quite there for me (I caught words like
veto and
caucus but was still a little lost.) Then came the third episode,
A Proportional Response, which was easily one of the most amazing 40-odd minutes of television I'd ever seen. Ever. And sometimes I worry because I don't know if I'm going to have experiences like that again; where I'm so completely consumed by the story and in stunned and terrified awe of the sheer talent that’s somehow managed to come together to create it. Those moments don't seem to happen as much anymore.
Anyway, the subsequent seasons taught me an awful lot about character and dialogue and were instrumental in honing those skills in my own writing. Yeah, it dipped when Sorkin left but I think by then his influence had been so established that they were able to ride that wave until the end.
And finally, I choose
24. And I don't quite know what to say about the show except that when I have it in my life, everything feels OK. This is a show that's so extraordinarily crafted in every way that it makes me sort of shake my head in stunned silence.
It's a show that utterly consumes me when I'm into it. When I watch it on DVD, I positively devour the episodes in marathon sessions where day and night fuse into one maddening blur and there’s always time for just one more, just one more. But it's a show that taught me and continues to teach me in a very heightened way about structure and plot and about engineering and maintaining engagement levels. It's hard enough to keep an audience hooked over two hours but over 24 episodes? Sheesh. It's not everyone’s cup of tea but you should try living in the UK, enduring poorly made cop dramas and slice of life soaps. By comparison, 24 is like lining up Louis Armstrong with the Spice Girls and saying, “Take your pick.”
So those are my five. Honourable mentions for TV shows go to
The Wire, The Simpsons, Frasier and The Sopranos. Honourable mentions for films go to Quentin Tarantino, Disney and Spielberg's other films -
Raiders of the Lost Ark was sooooo close to being on the list.
There were other influences on me for sure. I had a wonderful lecturer at university who honed my writing in a more specific way regarding structure and pacing. He also wrote me a letter of recommendation that got me my first agent but by this point I was already very rooted in the world of screenwriting - way, way beyond the point of no return where success was, and still is, the only option.
Enough. Your turn.
