1/12/24
Newsletter #546
The Crack of Dawn
My old friend Steve and I had a rousing, provocative, intelligent, occasionally aggravating, discussion about politics and art last night for two hours. I don’t get much of that anymore. Aside from simply being opinionated, Steve enjoys playing Devil’s Advocate, pushing back against some of my most strongly held beliefs just to see where and how far I’ll go defending them. When I arrive at a pointless state of anger because I can’t convey the strength and weight and sincerity of my theory, he easily just moves the conversation on to something else. But it’s good to have my beliefs questioned now and then just to see if I still believe them.
As I’ve no doubt mentioned, I started my website, Beckerfilms.com, in 1998, with the lofty, altruistic goal of imparting some of my hard-earned knowledge regarding screenwriting to young, aspiring screenwriters. I wrote five essays, entitled, The Need for Structure, Parts 1-5, and posted them. I answered thousands of questions over the years. Tens of thousands. And nobody ever wanted to join my conversation; they only wanted to dispute me. People were predominately looking for a fight as to why they personally didn’t need any prior wisdom or even education to achieve screenwriting greatness, because they had to be free.
My mind drifts back to arriving in Hollywood at the age of 17. I procured an apartment for $65 a month across the street from Paramount Pictures, bought two reams of erasable typing paper, rolled a sheet of paper into my electric typewriter, and thought, “Now I’m a writer in Hollywood. As such, and I am now going to write all over those thousand pages of paper, and maybe something great lurks within these pages.” No, it didn’t. I did end up with an 18-page script for a Super-8 movie that I made, called The Final Round (1977), but it certainly wasn’t great, or even all that good. But I did make it.
What that thousand-pages of paper really started me on was a quest for the components, the building blocks, the elements of stories, followed by their construction. And as I kept writing screenplays, I realized that scripts generally have 50-100 scenes, most of which are 3-pages or shorter, and these are the basic building blocks of screenplays – scenes. I’ve come to learn from both watching and making movies, if you have enough good scenes, you’ll have something approximating a good movie. So, how do you stack those blocks? Using three acts is simply a way to hold them, and breaking things up into smaller units is a good idea. You can spend 35-45 minutes setting things up, as do most movies, or you can get to your point within ten minutes, as does The Bridge on the River Kwai, when Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guiness) says of the Japanese prison commander, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), “This, uh, Colonel Saito of yours, he seems like a reasonable fellow.” William Holden breaks out laughing. “Reasonable. That’s a new one.”
I’m off on a tangent. When I came to understand more and more about story construction, like themes and subtext, it only became a deeper subject. I think about it all the time.
Anyway, I thought that I was being of service to my community, helping the young, but I found out that I’m really an oppressor, and part of the patriarchy, out to enforce the old, outmoded “rules” of “structure,” but I’m so square that I don’t even understand that you can’t use words like “rules” and “structure” anymore. Or as Steve kept reminding me last night, regarding art, “You can’t use words like ‘must’ or ‘should.’” Though it was never said, the idea as I comprehend it, though Steve was certain that I don’t understand, is that all art has now transmogrified into a bigger, greater, form, free from all prior constraints. Because art is freedom.
But that is nothing more than a commonly held bit of nonsense by those who do not create art. Art is not about freedom; art is about limitation, which is the opposite of freedom. And it doesn’t matter if you make chairs, paint pictures, or write scripts.
I attempted to paraphrase this last night, but finally didn’t even try and let it go. I said, “Here’s a quote from Willa Cather.” Steve said, “Mediocre, early 20th century writer.” I was offended for her and said, “That’s why she won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922,” then he shat upon the Pulitzers, which is fine with me. I haven’t been able to finish a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel in decades, although I used to collect them.
So here is Ms. Willa Cather’s quote:
“Every artist knows that there is no such thing as ‘freedom’ in art. The first thing an artist does when he begins a new work is lay down the barriers and limitations; he decides upon a certain composition, a certain key, a certain relation of creatures and objects to each other. He is never free, and the more splendid his imagination, the more intense his feeling, the farther he goes from general truth and general emotion.”
The false argument is that art, having shed its prior constraints, has now moved up to a better, higher, freer place. Except that the movies all suck. I’m not making that up. And it’s based on that same combative attitude I first ran into in 1998 with the Q&A on my website. Succinctly put, it’s “I’m a rebel and I reject all past forms, but I’m too lazy to come up with new ones, and I don’t even know how to fake it.”
Therefore, I believe that what Steve was pushing and defending is spurious, although he may have just been doing it for his own rhetorical amusement. In any case, it was fun.
Good day.
Thank you for your constancy.
I've read your website since 1999 (including all of your essays, screenplays, unpublished novels, and published books), and your "Need for Structure" essays are vital and should be collected into a textbook to supplant Syd Field manuals. Talent and technique are nice if you can get them, but nothing works without craft and revision (which are the hard parts, and therefore rejected by most people). It seems like that should be obvious to any writer, but alas. I look forward to continue reading your thoughts for the 25th year....