2014 Screenwriters Roundtable (Part 9): Chris Borrelli, Brian Duffield, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, Greg Russo
A special treat this week and next as I will be posting excerpts from an extensive screenwriter’s roundtable I did in December 2014 with a group of talented Hollywood screenwriters: Chris Borrelli, Brian Duffield, F. Scott Frazier, Chris McCoy, Justin Rhodes, and Greg Russo. How good are they? Between them, they have sold more than a dozen spec scripts and have multiple original screenplays on the Black List.
This is the fourth GITS screenwriters roundtable with this group of writers, the first three of which you can read here, here and here. This has become something of an annual event as it’s a great way to take the pulse of what’s happening in the screenwriting universe, track the careers of these talented writers, and benefit from the many insights into the craft they share.
Here is Part 9:
Scott Myers: This leads into this next area that I wanted to talk about, which is about the supposed screenwriting “rules,” and that Screenwriting 101 stuff you were talking about.
Avoid using voice over narration or flashbacks, you can’t include unfilmables, all scenes in the script must be something a moviegoer can see, and there’s no commenting on the moment, and so forth.
What is your general overall take on these supposed “rules”?
Brian: I think they are all bullshit.
Scott Myers: Is that a general consensus?
Greg: Yeah.
Chris Borrelli: I could speak for myself, but it helped me years ago, when I finally read one of those books. It was before I could write. My little theory on this is, people take it like a Bible, take it word for word. Think about any kind of art, think about painting or sculpture, if I had to explain it on one page, if I could do it, if I had to explain it in two minutes to someone, or 30 seconds, on one page, I’d have all these rules.
But, if someone was actually a painter, since they can actually do it, they can go against those rules, they can paint the chapel lying on their back if they want. It doesn’t have to be serious Bible that we study.
It’s good guidelines, and then, you know when to break them. But we sometimes do it, like the execs who take it word for word, because they want to be safe, to feel as safe as possible, and sometimes, as I said before, the tail’s wagging the dog.
Greg: I don’t think anybody really cares about that stuff. Look, you deliver on the big stuff, have your structure down and your characters defined, write the hell out of that story. I couldn’t imagine a studio exec saying, “Hey man, you know that line of action? I can’t film that. You need to take that out.”
Brian: I have had that happen.
Chris Borrelli: I could introduce you to few people.
Chris McCoy: If you’re following a book that wants you to paint by numbers, and everyone else is following that book, all those resulting scripts are going to feel like they were painted by numbers. It’s good to be comfortable with structure, but the script will feel more interesting to readers when you start trusting yourself to paint outside the box. It’s like, nobody wants to look at a thousand architectural drawings that are exactly the same.
Brian: Any of the “rules,” I can show you a script that completely nukes that. I’m good friends with Eddie O’Keefe, and one of my big things, as I was starting out, was never writing flowery prose, keeping it as far away from a novel as possible. Eddie and Chris’s scripts are so… every paragraph is gorgeous and it’s very colorful, it’s exact opposite of everything I wanted to do, or at least, was taught to do.
And it was so much better than anything I’ve done and it suits the stories they are telling so well. You feel like you are watching that movie, in the exact tone the writer wants you to watch. As long as it’s not boring, it works.
Scott Myers: Frazier, didn’t you post something on Dan Gilroy’s script Nightcrawler?
Brian: That script’s so good, too.
Scott Frazier: That’s more of a format than anything. Structurally, that script is goddamn tight, as far as the “beats of it.” But, the way it’s written, it’s written like a crazy person wrote the script. The film is saying, the protagonist is a crazy person. It feels like a racecar going down the page. It’s crazy.
For me, structurally, following the rules, the one rule I will literally get anxious about is, having the act breaks and the big moments be in the right places.
It’s really not even, “Oh, it has to be on page 30. That point has to be on 60.” It’s almost this innate sense that I have, that I’m like, “Oh my God, the first act is too long.” Just knowing that there’s not enough before the midpoint turn. That innate sense of, “There’s something wrong with it,” and just going off that gut feeling.
I think, that structure is important because movies are an exercise in structure. They’re 90 minutes to two hours. Things, generally, have to fall on the same place for majority of movies. Innately knowing that, and being able to feel that, and sense that… I think, it was Roger Ebert, he had a great quote one time about that, “Bad movies don’t feel like real‑life, but even worse, they don’t feel like movies.”
Chris McCoy: Even though you’re trying to get down to an economy of language with a script while trying to tell a story, if you’ve read enough scripts, if you’ve written enough scripts, hopefully you’ll have where the structural sign posts should be built into your DNA somewhere, and you can just rely on your instincts.
One thing that people need to think about though, is that ultimately these scripts have to get actors attached. So when you’re introducing characters, do it in a cool way. You can sometimes be a little more flowery or little more in‑depth when it comes to describing your heroes, because those descriptions will be the first thing actors will be seeing when they get the script.
Scott Frazier: Yeah, and if we could stop describing every female lead as “beautiful” as the first adjective that describes her, that would be awesome.
Justin: Talking about the rules and everything, what’s weird is, is in an actual draft pages, nobody seems to care. No one ever talks all that much about structure or… I even know a script this year that didn’t even have slug lines in it.
In treatments or outlines, if people flip through it and Act One has more words than Act Two, people freak out. It has to look like it’s going to have these 30 minutes per act structure. Even if one beat is going be a 20‑page scene, and you write, “They fight. It’s a huge epic Lord of the Rings fight,” because you said that in 10 words, they’re going to freak out, and think that’s a 30-second scene.
There’s this weird, whole structural thing. Everyone seems very rigid Syd Field, Robert McKee, in the treatment phase. That all goes away in the pages, always, in my experience.
Brian: I think sometimes execs seem to forget that you’ve written scripts before. They actually think, “Oh no, they’re going to hand in a 60 page script.!” There’s a huge disconnect sometimes. The fact is that we are all professionals, and we have never handed in something 30 pages short.
But, I’ve noticed that too, with treatments, where people get really twitchy about every detail not being there. It’s like, “He’s not going to put it in!”
Justin: What’s weird is, when you do a pitch, you spend most of your time on the set-up and first act. If you deliver on that in the treatment, they say, “I know about the beginning of the movie, because the writing of it informs some of the rest of it.” Sometimes, the story beats are actually more important than the content in treatments.
But, that’s the place where everybody gets very, “I’ve read screenwriting books, and this is how it must be.” Maybe in the script two characters fall in love. They say, “it doesn’t seem like they fall in love. I don’t believe it,” and you’re like, “Yeah, you should. It says that they fall in love. That’s what’s going to happen. I’m going to write that later.”
Scott Frazier: Yeah. It almost seems like when you turn in a treatment or outline, they expect to go on the same emotional journey that they will for the completed movie. I guess because it almost looks like a novel, they want it to have that same kind of emotional journey. If the script is like an architectural blueprint, the treatment is like a paperclip. I don’t even know what the treatment is in that metaphor.
Brian: It’s like if the back cover of the DVD was 30 pages long. I beg to not do outlines anymore. I just found that it’s excruciating, because it’s not a script. I’m like, “I could’ve written this script in half of this time.” People want more because they get uneasy. I’m actively trying to avoid treatments. I’ll be fighting that my entire life.
Greg: I hate these words, but it starts like this, “I know it’s just a treatment, but…”
Scott Frazier: You just made me nauseous.
Brian: Yeah. I’m agitated, right now. I want to shower.
Justin: I met this writer‑producer one time. One of my favorite meetings was, we had a treatment. Somebody goes, “This character feels thin,” and he goes, “It’s a treatment. Shut up.”
[laughter]
Justin: I can’t say that, but he could. It was great.
For Part 1 of the Roundtable conversation, go here.
Part 2, here.
Part 3, here.
Part 4, here.
Part 5, here.
Part 6, here.
Part 7, here.
Part 8, here.
On Twitter:
Brian Duffield: @BrianDuffield
F. Scott Frazier: @ScreenWritten
Chris McCoy: @thatthere
Justin Rhodes: @twopointfour
Many thanks to Wendy Cohen for logistical help with the roundtable.
Tomorrow: Part 10 of this exclusive screenwriter’s roundtable.
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