On Theater and Film (Part Two)
(Continued from Part One)
So I was doing pretty well in the theater world. My plays were being produced across the country and abroad, and my pieces were being published in various anthologies. I thought I was developing a fairly good grasp of long-form storytelling. So I started adapting my own work for film.
This is where the difference between the mediums of film and theater began to hit me — my early film adaptations of my work were still very play-like. Too much dialogue, not enough movement from scene to scene. I was screenwriting as a playwright, and none of it was working.
So I went back to basics and studied film like I had studied theater years before. I picked up and read as many screenplays as I possibly could, taking them apart and seeing how they worked. Watching movies and reading screenplays are two completely different things; if you want to get good at any sort of writing, you need to be a voracious reader first. Trying to get good at screenwriting by analyzing finished movies is like trying to learn how to draft architectural blueprints by looking at finished houses. It is best to study how blueprints are drawn instead.
I essentially followed the same path I did when I began playwriting: I studied, I wrote short pieces (some of which were made into short films), I eventually started writing full length scripts. And like I did with playwriting, I submitted my work to as many contests and writing development programs as I could. And like I did with playwriting, I eventually started getting hits.
It all involved a lot of small, incremental moves forward. I think that this is how it will continue to go in the future — you make these moves forward and you learn from each one. You win the smaller contests first, then you build on those laurels and keep on going until you win the big prizes. Continuous improvement.
Eventually the theater work began to support the film work, and vice-versa. This is a people business, and if you have a good track record as a playwright, people can trust that you are capable of disseminating notes and executing rewrites on time on a film project. That is, they know that they can trust you (and pay you!) to work on a movie with discipline and execute an assignment. A prolific writer in one medium is easier to depend on in another; not every writer is a playwright or a novelist or a screenwriter, but every playwright, novelist, or screenwriter is a writer — and focusing on the craft and discipline of writing is what allows you to move between mediums and excel at several of them at once.
So eventually I was being selected for writing development programs and winning awards for both theater and film. Both mediums were beginning to feed my edification of writing in general: Theater taught me how to craft characters and dialogue, how to build real conflict and relationships. Film taught me how to think visually, use brevity (i.e., move things along quickly and don’t waste the audience’s time), and be cinematic in terms of scope and transformations. Nowadays they feed each other — people tell me that my plays feel cinematic, and that my film work has tightly drawn and detailed characters.
It is the best of both worlds now. As we all know, there is very little money in theater — so film provides a means for me to make a good living. But theater provides a continual education in the way people live and work; it gives me access to actors, directors, and organizations that are dedicated to the purity of storytelling. And you know that their dedication is pure because of the fact that there is very little money in it. So in terms of storytelling, it can take more risks and dig for gold in unsafe places.
Thankfully, big things in both mediums are on the horizon. But I’m always interested in and working on the Next Next Thing. “What is the next thing after this next thing?”
It’s television. Or whatever medium TV evolves into in the 21st century world of Apple Tablets. TV is another writers’ medium — essentially, it is playwriting in groups at high speeds with lots of money attached and lots of compromises too. But it’s definitely in a resurgence and is facing a new frontier of possibilities.
But as I think back now — especially at the end of such a terrific, transformative year — I realize that all of it comes down to the indivisible, incredible act of storytelling: How we devise it, how we revise it, and how we perform it. People will always need storytellers, and it is such an amazing honor to be allowed to be one.
Notes From the Holidays
It was a nice holiday week. Every time I go back home to the Bay Area I forget how dark it is there at night — or I fail to recall how fluorescent LA’s night sky is. The Bay Area is also a lot more granola — the spirit of Jerry Garcia is still hanging around toking fatty bowls, and there are many random middle-aged beardos who will come up to you and talk to you about the rain, movies, and their Volvos.
Sometimes it’s easy for me to forget that I grew up there. I’m such an LA creature now. I love driving; I love how we live among the ruins of art deco, golden-aged Hollywood. I have big sunglasses and bling in my grill. This is my town, and I don’t think I could ever leave it — especially now that it has its hooks in me.
But the Bay Area has many charms. The air is fresher because the landscape is greener, and the people are more relaxed. There are far more Santa Claus lookalikes in the Bay. Also dim sum in SF Chinatown on Christmas day is always great — that’s one of our family traditions. Plus Mom took the dog to see Santa:
Bosco told Santa that he wanted the evil power of 10,000 souls for Christmas; Santa let him know that he could only have things that elves can make. So then Bosco asked for 7.62mm ammo for his AK-47, and a license to murder whomever he likes. We printed up a fake license that the dog seemed pretty happy with — after all, the Scarecrow felt smarter after the Wizard gave him that fake diploma.
So I’m back in LA now. I’m looking forward to the new year. I’m not so much a fan of New Year’s Eve — I’m not a drinker or a partyer, really. I’m more of a New Year’s Day man. I always start the new year with a long run, a big breakfast, and then spend the day doing work. I always see January 1st as a template for every day for the rest of the new year.
This is my favorite time of the year: Winter. In the coldest, darkest part of the year, there is renewal.
On Theater and Film (Part One)
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.)
The Aim of This Game Seems to Be Death
Hey, now that The Wire is over for me, here is my new favorite teevee show: Meet The Natives.
I initially avoided this series thinking that it was a 21st century version of aboriginals attempting to return a coke bottle. But it’s far from that — the show is about five guys from a vastly different culture visiting our own. And it provides tremendous perspective and some very interesting commentary on our culture.
For example, they travel to New York City to stay in a SoHo loft with a tribe of WASPs (the show’s nomenclature, not mine!) headed by a lady named Bunny. They also brand cattle in Montana, experience snow for the first time, and witness the consumption of processed food.
But it is their commentary on American life that is really entertaining and insightful:
While watching football on TV…
THE CHIEF: Do they often hurt themselves?
AMERICAN HOST: Oh yes, there’s lots of injuries.
THE CHIEF: The aim of this game seems to be death.
These guys also have really great attitudes. They want to try everything and do everything. Of course, I feel like if I were in a similar situation I’d want to do the same sorts of things. If I were on their island I’d want to swim all day, skin pigs, eat grubs, farm yams, wear a penis sheath, etc..
Our Travel Channel version of the show was actually spawned by a BBC version (with a different group of guys from Tanna) that is viewable on YouTube in full here. Free, fun entertainment!
Plus one of the five guys is called “The Happy Man”. His job in the village is to make people happy. I hope that this can be my job someday as well.
Also: HP Computers Don’t Care About Black People.
Update: I had dinner with Rick and Angel, the friends that introduced me to Meet the Natives. I told Rick that he is our Happy Man. I think he does this job very well for us!
Three Day Weekends
Oh man, when I was a kid there was nothing better than coming home from school and knowing that you had a three day weekend ahead of you. I’d have an extra day to drink chocolatey Quik and watch Transformers and play Rescue Raiders and Infocom games on my Apple ][e. It was FREEDOM in all caps. They say that youth is wasted on the young, but back then I still felt that time was precious. And having a three day weekend to do whatever — to just play — was the best.
I still feel that sorta exhilaration today when I’ve got a big fat break ahead of me with nothing to do but write. Holy crap, that’s the best. I can sit for hours with my notebook and work stuff out, plug things into the computer, punch in pages, spend the whole day plowing through whatever I’m reading for research or enjoyment.
And that’s the best part of my Christmas/Hannukah/Kwanzaa holiday — lots of days of freedom to get things done.
Like this guy, I now have a stack of scripts to read for work and a stack of scripts to read for friends/acquaintances. Fortunately I’m still at an early phase in my career so I still have time to read plenty of both. And I love to read, so it’s like getting a steady stream of candy for free.
What I love — LOVE LOVE LOVE — is to pick up a friend’s script and read it to find out that it’s really good. I really, really like reading good stuff. Good stuff teaches me things, it shows me what’s possible, it stretches my imagination. It lets me spend time in worlds that I would never even have imagined. I spend a lot of time and money seeking out good books to read. There are often a lot of false starts and disappointments, and it’s hard to find the stuff out there that really knocks your socks off.
The other thing I love about reading a friend’s good script is that I can then call them up and say, “Hey friend, I read your script and I really liked it! What are you doing with it? Do you have any questions for me? What else have you got???” The very last question is the most important, because if I have read one good thing from a person, chances are that they have more good stuff to show me. I’m hooked.
Unfortunately this tends to be a rare situation — I mostly read peoples’ work, assemble a list of notes and ship them back to the writer. Most things need work, and it’s up to the scriptwriter to process them and make changes as he/she sees fit. And I’m always down to read second, third, fourth drafts, but the question remains: Will these scripts get better? I don’t know. It’s not really up to me.
But as a reader, it’s discovering the really good scripts that really makes me happy.
So what are the scripts that really do it for me?
It’s simple:
Which way do you go?
How To Be Nice
How to be nice: Watch this documentary called Overnight (Extra: Roger Ebert review here), and do the exact opposite of what the dude in it does.
Don’t come to meetings hung over and brag about it. Don’t talk about yourself and how awesome you are. Instead talk about your friends and how awesome they are. Don’t disrespect Jon Bon Jovi. Don’t fire your managers and tell them that you’re never giving them any pay even though they’ve worked on your behalf for over a year. Don’t tell your band mates that you’re keeping all of their pay — and even though you say that they deserve it, don’t tell them that you’re still not going to give it to them. Don’t wear a baseball cap everywhere with the title of your movie on it.
And don’t wear overalls — ever.
I’m now watching the final season of The Wire with anticipation and dread. Anticipation for everything I’m seeing and how it’s being wrapped up, and dread in that it will soon be over.
I was going to post my list of my five favorite characters, but making such a list proved to be impossible — I love so many of them. I even tried making a top ten list, but then there wouldn’t be room for Bunk, Ziggy’s Duck, etc.. Yes, Ziggy’s Duck is one of my favorite characters. He knows what he loves.
So okay — if I had to pick, I would say that Omar is my favorite character. This guy makes me want to switch careers and rob drug dealers for a living.
Actually, maybe Bubbles is my favorite character. To tell you the truth, I can’t choose between them. I think they should get their own show where they solve mysteries or live with an alien in the suburbs.
I love this show to death. It’s definitely in my top three along with The Sopranos and MST3k.
I wish I could combine them all into one show and watch it forever. Tony Soprano, Tom Servo, and Bunk on a satellite making fun of bad movies.
One Wild Year
2009 has been a heck of a year. I began the year as the schlub I had always been, drinking way too many Diet Cokes and yukking it up to Keyboard Cat videos. I ended the year as a member of New Dramatists, got a playwriting commission from one major regional theater and had a play premiere at another; I won a big award, found myself with a lawyer, new agents, and a producing parter. I’m now a professional screenwriter as well as a professional playwright.
So how did this happen?
Thinking back, what I did was this: I wrote stuff.
I wrote a lot of stuff. Over the last few years I’ve written five feature screenplays, six full length plays, two TV specs, numerous short plays, short films, short stories. And it’s not like a piece of work is done once it’s written — there are innumerable rewrites. Cycles and cycles of iteration on everything as notes come back on a script or a play is prepared for production.
Every day I write — it would be impossible to get anything done if I didn’t. Like an insane sports fan, no matter what I’m doing I’m thinking about my sport. I think about writing while I’m washing dishes. Throughout the day I’m logging everything that happens, taking notes, jotting things down to plug into the computer.
I heard an anecdote once about how someone asked Conan O’Brien how he broke into writing. “I wrote a lot of stuff,” he said. It really is just that simple. Of course, you still have to go out there and sell this stuff (submit it to contests, get people to read it, get it produced), and it helps quite a bit if your work is good. And getting good at selling is a whole other extremely useful skill. But the key is to always be generating new work.
That’s the power of the writer — he or she makes something out of nothing. You’re like cold fusion — a power source that gives and gives, seemingly by magic alone.
So a friend of mine recently said, “Hey Mike, all you have to do now is to just keep doing what you’re already doing. Just keep on writing.” That’s exactly it — keep on riding this thing, keep drinking Diet Cokes and watching Keyboard Cat videos. Keep turning out work, dreams. People always need stories and dreams.
My Work in Print
Year Zero
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.com
Cowboy Versus Samurai
Available from Samuel French and Amazon.comFor a complete list of books containing my work, please click here.
