Tom Benedek on prep-writing
A note from screenwriter and educator Tom Benedek (Cocoon, Free Willy) about the importance of prep-writing:
My Prep course at Screenwritingmasterclass.com starts May 30. I love it. Alfred Hitchcock believed that screenplays were all prep. The draft itself was only a transcription of a lot of thought and preparation which became the finished film. Our Prep class gets you to the heart of your new script project before you start the first draft. With weekly teleconferences, posted lectures and on-going forum discussions, I will guide you through the hard work you need to do so you are fully equipped when you start writing pages, venturing out into that wonderful creative wilderness of the first draft. The great thing about Prep is that it asks all the fundamental questions through writing exercises which are pleasurable. Sure, all writing includes some tough work. Still, creative writing is an adventure — brainstorming, plotting story shifts, fathoming the emotional depths of your characters. We all start writing well-equipped with script elements in some areas. Then, we have to fill in the blanks as we go along. Prep enables us to fill in so many of the blanks before writing script pages that the journey of writing the first draft can be much more creatively satisfying.
Tom isn’t kidding about Hitchcock. Here’s a quote from screenwriter Ernest Lehman who wrote the screenplay for North by Northwest, talking about the movie’s famous cornfield chase scene:
“Hitch and I acted out the entire crop-dusting sequence in his living room. Then I incorporated every move into the script, and that was the way he shot it.
Storyboarding is really an illustrator’s work for the director. A motion picture illustrator puts pictures on paper and puts them on boards. In story-boarding a script for a Hitchcock film, the illustrator is told what pictures to put on the boards by the script, which has benefited from my conferences with the director. Of course, I participate in what is going to appear on that storyboard, because even without the storyboard the script describes exactly what is going to be on the screen. Hitch would have it no other way. The script even describes the size of the shot, whether it’s a medium or a tight close-up, whether the camera pulls back and pans to the right as the character walks toward the door, whether it tilts slightly down and shoots through the open doorway, getting the helicopter as the lights go on outside. That’s why Hitch says it’s a bore for him to get the picture on the screen, because it has all been done already in his office.”
The fact is most professional screenwriters and all TV writers work out their stories in prep. It is perhaps the single most important part of the writing process and certainly where most of the substantive work is done. In Prep: From Concept to Outline, you use 6 weekly lectures and writing assignments to nail down your story, enabling you to type FADE IN with confidence. Moreover your learn a step-by-step process you can use on all future writing projects
Tom starts teaching this round of the Prep class on Monday, May 30. For more information, go here.
Some background on Tom’s career:
Tom Benedek has written screenplays for Robert Zemeckis, Lawerence Kasdan, Lili Fini Zanuck and Richard Zanuck, David Brown, Ron Howard, Martin Scorsese, Sydney Pollack, Richard Rush, Harold Ramis, Lauren Schuler Donner and Richard Donner, Ray Stark, Brian Grazer, Working Title, Jersey Title, Jersey Film, Chris Blackwell and many others. He wrote the screenplay for Cocoon, Free Willy and other films.
He is a member of the Writers’ Guild of America, West and the Writers’ Branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He teaches screenwriting at the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts and at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor where he is a James Gindin Visiting Artist. Tom is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where he received a Bachelor’s Degree with Individual Concentration in Film.
He studied at L’Institut de Formation Cinematographique in Paris and is a graduate of the Director’s Program at the American Film Institute.