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Inside
the Cover Book Reviews Ask
the Pros: Screenwriting Ask
the Pros: Screenwriting is not your typical screenwriting book. Edited by
Howard Meibach (of Hollywoodlitsales.com fame) and writer-director Paul Duran,
this book does not attempt to teach you how to write a screenplay – at all.
The book is exactly what the subtitle says it is: 101 Questions Answered by
Industry Professionals. Now,
I have to admit that when I first sat down to read it, I did not think I was
going to like this book or find much value in its approach to screenwriting
“education.” A big fat frequently-asked questions (FAQ) list, in book form,
for screenwriters? Containing such hoary gems as, “what makes a screenplay
great?” (that was the first question of the first chapter). As a well-read
wannabe, I prepared for the worst; I expected to find all the same questions and
answers that I’d already read and heard in various forums, and in a thousand
different ways, from every screenwriting seminar, how-to book, and advice
columnist on the web. So
you can imagine my surprise when I started liking the book – and my total
shock when I realized that I was actually learning from it. Based
on the “Ask a Hollywood Pro” forum from hollywoodlitsales.com, the premise
of the book is deceptively prosaic: Gather a long and impressive list of working
Hollywood professionals – writers, directors, producers, agents, studio
executives, etc. – and get them to answer, in detail, the most common
questions that screenwriters always ask about writing, selling, making movies,
and breaking into the business. Arrange the answers according to question topic
and the profession of the answerers, pepper the pages with sidebars to give
extra details and relevant definitions, and voilŕ, you have Ask the Pros:
Screenwriting. But
the real value, I discovered, comes not from the individual answers but from the
collection itself – from seeing how each answer compares, side-by-side, with
answers by similar professionals responding to the same questions. Look, we’ve
all heard stories about the capricious nature of Hollywood, about the
Politburo-like mindless conformity that supposedly permeates the corridors of
power and leads executives to march in lock-step, regularly rejecting
mega-blockbuster scripts like, say, My Big Fat Greek Wedding (“You’ve got to
be kidding, right? There’s just no Greek demographic.”). Intellectually, we
know that’s not the whole story – we know that good scripts rise or fall for
a lot of reasons, and that somewhere on the other side of that monolithic Wall
there are individual human beings with differing tastes, opinions and abilities.
Well,
Ask the Pros: Screenwriting puts that diversity of opinion in stark black
and white, right on the page for all to see. Sometimes the effect is comical:
for example, one of the questions the producer-experts answered was, “How much
does [script] coverage affect your [development] decisions?” One producer
said, “coverage is very important”; a second one’s answer started off,
“coverage is a waste of time”; and a third one said, in essence, “It
depends.” Other contrasts weren’t so dramatic, but everywhere I looked, I
detected subtle shades of difference in approach, attitude, and expectation. I
suddenly realized – hey, these guys are professionals, and even they don’t
agree on the best recipe for wannabe success. This
was the first, best lesson I learned from reading this book: When it comes to an
artistic, creative endeavor such as making movies or writing screenplays, there
is always more than one right answer. The
second best thing about Ask the Pros is its sidebar blurbs. I especially
like the “Buzz Word” definitions, which explain various
“Hollywood-speak” words in ordinary English. These are terms that most of us
in “flyover country” (everything between NY and L.A.) don’t use in
day-to-day life, but that regularly appear in industry magazines such as
Variety. For instance, did you know that “tyro” means first timer? (As in:
“Tyro scribe Jim Jones just sold his spec script ‘Drinking Kool-Aid’ to
DreamWorks for an undisclosed six-figure sum”). Or that Praisery is another
word for public relations firm? And if you ever see a film directed by Alan
Smithee, you’ll know (after reading Ask the Pros) that this is a Director’s
Guild-allowed pseudonym, and it is probably being used because the real director
didn’t want his or her name associated with what he considered to be a
train-wreck of a picture. Ask
the Pros also includes a CD-ROM with a demo copy of the latest version of
Final Draft script formatting software. If you’re serious about your wannabe
status, and if you want to have any real hope of ever tasting success on the
other side of that Wall, then you absolutely must invest the money to buy a
scriptwriting software package. I don’t care, save your dimes for a year if
you need to, cause this type of software gives you 50 spoons’ worth of
traction when you’re digging for that next killer script. Final Draft is one
of two packages recognized and used throughout the industry (the other one is
Movie Magic Screenwriter). The demo CD enclosed with this book has a
full-featured copy of Final Draft that you can take for a time-limited test
drive. If you like it, you can activate the full copy simply by purchasing and
entering a valid serial number. Bottom line – Ask the Pros: Screenwriting is useful for getting inside the heads of the many Hollywood professionals interviewed. Although the book won’t help you with the mechanics of writing a script, it will give you a clearer picture of how the whole Hollywood success thing works (or doesn’t). It also helps prepare you for what you’ll encounter once you type “The End” and want to scope out which section of the Wall you’ll slam yourself into first. It’s a first-rate spoon, this one: I give it an A. Now go, young wannabe tyros – dig and be happy. Patrick
Beltran is a screenwriter, independent producer, and freelance writer who works
as an IT professional during the day to pay the bills. He lives in Virginia with
his wife and three daughters. |
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