Hollywood Tales
“Alex Jacob’s script of Point Blank (1967) was a revelation. He was a friend (wonderful guy, looked like a pirate, funny and crazy). This revelation came about despite a character flaw of mine. I have always had difficulty being complimentary to people whose work I admire, when face-to-face with them. This is not the norm in Hollywood where effusiveneess is generally a given. Anyway, a mutual friend told Alex how much I admired Point Blank and John Boorman. Alex then very graciously gave me a copy of the script. This was about the time he was doing The Seven-Ups (1973).
“Anyway, by now I’d been making a living as a screenwriter for maybe two or three years and had gotten to the point where I was dissatisfied with the standard form scripts were written in — they just all seemed to be a kind of subliterary blueprint for shooting a picture and generally had no personal voice. Mine were tighter and terser than the average, but I was still working with the industry template and not too happy about it. Alex’s script just knocked me out (not easy to do); it was both playable and literary. Written in a whole different way than standard format (laconic, elliptical, suggestive rather than explicit, bold in the implied editorial style), I thought Alex’s script was a perfect compliment to the material, hard, tough, and smart — my absolute ideals then. So much of the writing that was generally praised inside the business seemed to me soft and vastly overrated — vastly oversentimental. Then and now, I haven’t changed my opinions about that. But I have changed them about the presentational style.
“Anyway I resolved to try to go in that direction (that Alex had shown), and I worked out my own approach in the next few years. I tried to write in an extremely spare, almost haiku style, both stage directions and dialogue. Some of it was a bit pretentious — but at other times I thought it worked pretty well. I now realize a lot of this was being a young guy who wanted to throw rocks at windows.”
— Walter Hill
UPDATE: I ran a series of posts covering the rather odd confluence of Walter Hill and the Pixar movie Wall-E. In this post Wall-E screenwriter and co-director Andrew Stanton gives props to Dan O’Bannon for the “haiku style” of writing in Alien. But as I point out, the style — not necessarily the content — is more reflective of Walter Hill’s approach to scene description. Then this post about scene description as poetry. Then another comparison of writing styles between Hill and O’Bannon here.
To be clear: O’Bannon, who received writing credit on Alien, while Hill did not, generated most (per the WGA credit formula) of the actual content in the shooting script for the movie. My point is strictly about scene description style. The minimalist approach is Hill’s approach.