On Theater and Film (Part One)

December 24th, 2009Blog0 comments

I thought it would be interesting to write a post on finding my way into screenwriting from theater. So here it is:

There are a lot of differences between playwriting and screenwriting. One is a medium of dialogue; the other is a visual medium. One is a writers’ medium; the other is a directors’ medium. In one medium the audience’s seats have cup holders and in the other they do not — although it would be pretty fantastic to check out a Hamlet while sippin on a Big Gulp.

I’ve always loved both playwriting and screenwriting. I love storytelling (as you can see from the header on this website), and there are some stories that can only reach their fullest potential in one medium or the other. Truly visual stories — aliens, robots, spaceships, explosions — must be done as screenplays. Stories about the spoken word, about intense and complex emotional interplay and the naked truth of someone standing alone on a stage addressing an audience: Those have to be plays. Of course there are glorious exceptions — i.e., a play with aliens, robots, spaceships, explosions sounds fuckin’ awesome — but visual=movies, dialogue=plays is a good rule of thumb.

Plus you have to consider the marketplaces for both mediums. Film is a medium for the masses — the prohibitive cost of making a film tends to narrow the scope in terms of which scripts actually get made. Typically, of course, the more accessible the story and the wider the potential audience, the better. Now, it’s perfectly fine to write a film for a niche audience — though whether it ever gets made becomes a question… Again there are some glorious exceptions — i.e. David Lynch’s filmography.

Now theater is a medium for a smaller, more mature audience. It’s for people who are looking for that naked truth of an actor on a stage — there’s a personableness and intimacy that the camera can’t provide. There is plenty of room for spectacle and fierce awesomeness onstage, but while the cinema is about broadcasting a recording to the masses, theater is about seeing someone tell a story live in a series of precious, fleeting, and irreproducible moments.

So both of them are great, and when I got into writing I wanted to do both.

I started with writing plays because it was much easier to get things produced. In fact, I could produce them myself. I started in college, writing short plays with a certain UCLA theater group. This taught me the basics of storytelling mechanics in a safe environment. We were a bunch of kids trying on different masks and having fun. We were also blessed because we were able to get our own work in front of real audiences — this showed me what was working and what wasn’t, and it helped build my confidence. Confidence is extremely important to the writer. Without it, he or she can second-guess him/herself into paralysis.

I read a lot, studied a lot. My major wasn’t playwriting, but I read a ton of plays anyway. I took them apart, saw how they worked. Saw how to develop a character, saw how writers accomplished things in their stories. Actually, I read a lot of everything — and I still do. I wrote a lot — wrote more short pieces at first, but eventually I started tackling longer pieces.

Looking back I realize now that theater taught me a lot of things: How to work with other people as a team; how to receive notes (my favorite response is either “I’ll keep that in mind” or a variant thereof — but this is a whole other post by itself) and execute rewrites. It taught me discipline and how to work under a deadline and how to be good in a room. By that I mean that now I have the confidence and — I can’t name any other word for it right now, so I’ll call it the verve — to walk into a meeting in any room in this town or on the other coast, hang out, have fun, talk about the work, laugh, and connect with people. Theater taught me how to put in the work and how to believe in it.

But I think that the single most important thing that theater taught me is how to be theatrical: To be able to perform in front of an audience, to discover the details of a story and to hit them hard and make them read. It taught me how to be that person alone on a stage in front of a whole bunch of people, storytelling — because that is the essence of storytelling, of the pitch. And in the film industry and in almost every other industry in America, pitching is everything.

So once I got good at writing for theater, I jumped into writing for film.

(To be continued in Part Two — but until then, here is a video of a pit bull being harassed by a cat on a Roomba.)