2/18/23
Newsletter #251
The Crack of Dawn
Writing is by far the most difficult aspect of filmmaking. There’s an old adage from theater that completely applies to movies: if it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage. You can have all the money in the world, the best cast, and the most talented crew, but if your script’s no good your film won’t be any good, either. As the great sage, Bruce Campbell, once said, “If you have script problems, don’t fix them, and shoot anyway; your script problems are now forty feet tall.”
What’s fascinating to me is that most folks running around calling themselves writers these days, particularly screenwriters, don’t even know what a story is. A story is a three part construct: something causes something else. In other words, all stories are examples of “cause and effect.” If something does not cause something else, you’re not telling a story.
If you don’t know your ending when you start writing, you haven’t got a clue why you’re writing anything. In a good story, everything is leading to the ending. If you don’t know your ending, but still sit down everyday and add a page to your script or book in the belief that you’re actually writing a script or book, you’re doomed. Author John Irving (The World According to Garp) writes the last chapter first, then starts at the beginning and leads everything to that chapter. And when this is done properly, it’s incredibly satisfying. If it’s not done properly, at the end of act one, about thirty minutes into a movie, your butt starts to hurt. Harry Cohn, head of Columbia Pictures, put it this way, “If the picture’s any good, I know it in my tuchus. If my tuchus starts to burn, it’s a bad movie.”
OK. Here’s the problem. Many folks who want to be in the arts – as opposed to every other thing you could possibly do – are searching for their “freedom.” Art somehow equals freedom. If I have escaped the confines and prison of business, and taken the giant plunge in “Art,” I can now be as free as a bird in flight, sailing effortlessly on a warm summer breeze. Wait, there I am, seated at an easel on the shore of the Mediterranean, a warm breeze in my face, painting an abstract blue sea, with little swaths of black for the birds. Weee . . . Art is fun. Better than work.
Except that art, good art, is entirely based on limitation, which is the opposite of freedom. And the more limitations an artist can impose on themselves, the greater the possibility of creating something good, let alone great. Minimally, one should at least try to be somewhat unique. I don’t know much, but I’m pretty sure that if everybody is doing it, it’s not a good idea.
Let’s use music as an example. The process begins with: I want to create music. That’s terrific: what kind of music? Jazz, rock, country-western, polka, you choose. But the second you do, you’ve restricted yourself from all the others. If you choose “pop song,” you’re not writing a symphony or an opera, or anything else but a pop song. Now, what key is it in? Whatever you choose, you’ve limited yourself from all the others. Now, what’s it about? I’m in love and I can’t stop singing, or my heart’s broken and I can’t stop crying. Whatever it is, it’s not the other one. If you can limit yourself down to exactly what you mean, that’s the best you can do. If you can go off in any direction you want any time you want, so what? So can everybody.
I’ve found that in writing stories, the greatest limitations you can impose on yourself are not only knowing where the story is going, but having a point. Why did we go here? And the most difficult limitation I’ve confronted is thematically binding all of the characters together with variations of the same issue. Movies can’t do it anymore. The only place I see it is in series TV when suddenly, magically, that specific episode has a theme. A random episode of Sex and the City comes to mind. The theme is “balls,” and it’s primarily about women. Do they have “balls,” and what does that mean anyway? One character is forthright, another is unassuming, and another is confused. Also, Cynthia Nixon’s boyfriend develops testicular cancer. The writers were joyously all over their theme. Why? Because they actually had one.
If you’re a rebel searching for your freedom, don’t become an artist. Art is not about freedom; it’s about creating limitations, and the finer the limitations, the better the art.
A new day dawns.
The Crack of Dawn
I keep wanting to write about Stravinsky, every time I hear him. One of my oldest LPs is Le Sacre du Primtemps, from about 1950, and as thick as LPs ever got. I stole it from my father.
You are so right. One of my favorite quotes from Igor Stravinsky: “The more art is controlled, limited, worked over, the more it is free.” And I don't know if it's apocryphal, but Orson Welles is credited with saying "The enemy of art is the absence of limitations." Between the three of you I should think the idea has merit!