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"Your
Assignment, Should You Choose to Accept It..." Perhaps
the most common question I have heard from readers in the two months I have been
writing this column is, “How do I get the job?” Ah
yes, the most important question a screenwriter-- be they a wannabe or a
grizzled veteran-- can ask. Interestingly,
the answer has little to do with writing talent. Yes, somewhere along the line, that person sitting on the
other side of the desk or across the restaurant table from you had to see
something written by you that struck a chord with them, that made them think you
might be The One. So ability, if not talent, got you through the door. At
this point, your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to convince that
person that you are safe, i.e., that it is safe to do business with you, that he
is not putting his job at risk by hiring you.
This is why people who have already done something generally find it
somewhat easier to get the next job, though that is not necessarily a given. Shortly after I accidentally fell into the movie business, I found that my job increasingly seemed to involve hanging out with that guy in the leather flying jacket at the end of the bar. Sean was a character with a capital “C.” The first time I sat with him through a meeting with one of the investors in his movie, he began telling the investor the most fantastic story I had ever heard, about being a mercenary pilot in “The International Squadron” during the Korean War, and of flying as a jet-propelled “Flying Tiger” for Chiang Kai-shek’s air force in the later 1950s. Fortunately,
my experience in politics had taught me not to interrupt the boss when doing
business, or I might have interjected “That’s the most incredible bunch of
baloney I’ve ever heard!” In
addition to being a screenwriter, I have been a lifelong student of aviation
history, and I knew for a definite fact that absolutely nothing he was telling
the investor had the slightest connection to the truth. But
the investor-- who had been somewhat reluctant to invest in an “airplane
movie” at the outset-- became more and more enthusiastic as Sean waxed
eloquent with his fantastic tale. There
was enough real knowledge of airplanes and pilots, and obvious knowledge of the
mythology of fighter pilots, that he sounded like a man who really knew what he
was talking about. After a few
drinks over the course of an hour, the investor was aboard the project. At that point I hadn’t spent a minute with Sean actually working on the movie-- not that I knew a thing about what that meant-- but a few weeks later we were on location at the California City Airport up in the Mojave Desert, where I got to see him stage one of the most amazing stunts I ever saw in twenty years in the movie business and double that watching amazing stunts in movies. It involved him flying a Stearman biplane upside down at a height of something less than 30 feet above the runway, while two cars drove up opposing ramps, sailed through the air above him, and landed on the opposite ramp. The
FAA, after several months of negotiations, had approved this as a one-time-only
event. It worked perfectly; those of you old enough might remember having seen
this later broadcast on the old TV show “That’s Amazing!”
I remember standing around Sean, the Director of Photography and the FAA
Safety Inspector, and hearing the inspector say “...this would never have been
approved if it was anyone else.” And
that’s the moment I “got it.” Sean
had reassured the investor with the tall tales of aviation derring-do that he
was the guy the man could trust with his money. He could never have explained to
the man what he was going to do with the money, at least not in a way that would
have reassured the investor that the money was safe. A
few years later, I was “discovered” as a screenwriter for a screenplay
titled “In The Year of the Monkey,” a Vietnam war story that for about a
year gave Oliver Stone, who was still trying to launch “Platoon,” weekly
nightmares as it wended its own way through the development process. At one point, the well-known science-fiction writer Joe
Haldeman read it and asked me why we had never met, since he had served in the
infantry division in which the story was set at the time the events therein were
supposed to have happened. We became good friends when I told him I hadn’t
been in the Army, that I had done my research, and that all the “amazing
events” in the story were from my memories of stories about “magic
minutes” told me over the years by vets during my time in the veteran’s
anti-war movement. When
I would meet with various development people and studio executives over the
years with that script, they assumed it was autobiographical, and I did nothing
to disabuse them of such an assumption, though I also never did anything to
actively promote it. On the basis
of my alleged “first-hand knowledge,” I got hired to write action scripts,
because these people felt safe having them written by someone who “knew”
what he was talking about. The two
things I really did know about were the absolute blood-curdling fear at the
moment when you know someone you have never met is trying to kill you, and the total joy Winston Churchill described as “the
experience of being shot at to no effect.” However,
what I’ve just described is only half of what you need to do in that room in
order to walk out the door with a solid agreement for employment. You’ve
convinced this person that you know how to put words on the page so they make
sense, and you’ve told them a story-- or let them tell themselves a story you
went along with-- that convinced them in some way that you have a clue what
you’re talking about. Now
you need to convince them that they can stand to meet with you several times
over the coming year or so in that small room. My old mentor, the late Wendell Mayes, gave me my clue of how to do that. As he pointed out, people in Hollywood love to talk, and their favorite topic is themselves (this is a fact I am certain will never change). As he explained it to me, one needed to walk into that office as an observer of what was there. While going through the pleasantries of wanting coffee or something else, he would look around the room until he saw something that “rang my bell” as he put it. Drink in hand, he would look over at the object and ask a question about it. “People always put themselves in their offices, and the things they have in there say something about them,” as he explained it. “Let them tell you why it’s there and they’ll think you’re one of the best people they ever met.” Of
course, it really helps if the McGuffin is something that really interests you,
too, because then you can become a pair of enthusiasts on the topic, whatever it
is, and you’ll find you’ve spent 30 minutes of your 20 minute meeting on
this; when they say “Where’s the time gone?
Quick, tell me your idea,” you have Made It. They want to hear your take on the project, and they think
they want to work with you. As
Wendell explained it to me, “Getting a job as a writer has nothing to do with
writing.” If
you’re like me and every other writer I know, your deep dark little secret is
the fact that you’re something of a social klutz. Hey, it goes with the territory!
It’s how you became “an observer of life,” a job no one volunteers
for when they could be “a participant in life.” In my own case, I have
discovered in recent years that I have Asperger’s Syndrome (something I wish I
could have known long, long ago), which means the wiring of my brain doesn’t
include an innate ability to read social situations.
Even without knowing the “why” of my inabilities, armed with
Wendell’s advice I found that I could “write a script” of how to do what
he told me to do. Most of the time
it worked, and with practice, I even got to the point where I felt “normal”
doing it. You’ll
notice, I hope, that neither Sean nor I ever told anyone we could do something
we couldn’t. In Hollywood,
you’re free to reinvent yourself, and you can tell them anything, but be sure
not to lie about what’s important. What’s
important is one thing and one thing only: that you can do the job. “Failure
to deliver” is the one crime in Hollywood for which they will take you out and
hang you from the nearest lamppost, and leave the body to rot on the rope.
Sean knew he could do the stunt; I knew I could write the script.
We both delivered. Always. There is one warning to this advice about reinventing yourself: be careful about putting yourself in a position where your actual past can catch up with you. A recent president of the Writers Guild of America had to resign with a cloud over his reputation when it was discovered that his tale of military exploits and achievement, which had gotten him The Job many times, turned out not to be quite as he had led people to believe. Had
he been willing to be merely a well-regarded and financially successful
screenwriter, he’d never have had a problem, even if it had come out.
The knowledge would have been private, and everyone he did business with
would have given him a pass with the knowledge they’d done something similar
themselves. But he wanted Public Recognition--
and Hollywood doesn’t like being made to publicly acknowledge they’ve
been lied to en masse. How do you get the job? Tell them anything, but never promise more than you are absolutely certain you can deliver. Thomas McKelvey Cleaver has been (and still is) a freelance journalist; he
was a staff writer and editor at several publications prior to accidentally
becoming a screenwriter 20 years ago. In addition to writing 15 produced
movies, he has been a development executive in independent film, and a story
editor and supervising producer for three cable TV series. His credits
include the cult horror hit "The Terror Within" (though his only
connection with "TW II" is a credit "based on characters created
by..." which he was forced to take). He is currently in development
on a World War II script optioned by Greenwich Films, and has recently completed
an adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper's "The Deerslayer." Reach
Thomas at tom@absolutewrite.com. Click here for more columns by Thomas McKelvey Cleaver |
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