Screenwriting 101: Dale Launer

“Over the next six or seven years I honed my writing skills to a point where I actually sold a screenplay: Ruthless People. It was made and became a bona fide box-office hit, and it got pretty good reviews.

The reviews would often mention a scene or a moment or a situation that I’d written, and then proceed to give the director credit for it. Huh? It was at that point when I became a confirmed fallen Auteurist. What do they think a writer does on a film? What do they think the director is doing?

Then I’d meet people outside the movie biz who’d ask me what I do. I’d tell them I write movies, that I wrote Ruthless People, to which they’d usually respond, ‘That Danny DeVito, he’s so funny.’ Or ‘Bette Midler — she’s hilarious.’

Later in the conversation, the outsider would always ask, ‘When you say you wrote the screenplay, just what exactly does that mean?’ To which I would say, ‘I came up with the idea, wrote the entire story including creating all the characters, every scene, one scene after the other, what happens in the scene, where they take place, what time of day, all the action, and everything all the characters said.’ And they would be silent for a brief second, and then they’d respond with ‘Really?’

People may see a movie with a certain movie star, but only if the story sounds like a good vehicle for that star’s charms. Put an action star in a romantic comedy and people stay away. Clearly people are heavily influenced by the story, and who writes it is (apparently) irrelevant.

So who does the movie belong to? In my opinion, as long as movies have stories, as long as they are based in fiction, they are filmed stories. The medium is film, but it’s still fiction, it’s still a story.

Take away the story, and you have no movie.”

 — Dale Launer (Ruthless People, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, My Cousin Vinny)

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