I've had my profound differences about writing and writers with Mr. Ritchie, but I agree wholeheartedly with his comment here. There is no defense for either writing movies or narratives compared to other forms of writing. If you like writing slogans for an advertising agency, cool. Poetry, cool. Requests for refunds from Pepperidge Farm, great. Each form has its pleasures and headaches, but the more you try in any field the greater the craft teaches you about its secrets. My trip through Hollywood has been punctuated frequently with exclamations from the powers that be about how everybody writes screenplays but very few screenplays are movies. I'm sure the editors in Midtown would say the same thing about the manuscripts coming from erstwhile novelists; where is an actual book, or the kind of writing which can be shaped into a book?
How many novelists or screenwriters can write a play? "Angels in America" is a staggering achievement, in my eyes, partly because I cannot conceive how beautifully precise all of its moving parts are. As a movie, as well. It's a clinic on writing starkly but casting huge shadows of nuance and subtlety. But could "Angels in America" be a novel? How is it possible that a writer like Kushner cannot handle the long-form? He has no novel in him?
Most of the posters here know I loathe the query-and-pray submission process, particularly for screenplays, but I like to think I encourage everyone I meet to write. Period. Letters to Mom, if need be. Because the act of writing is a sharpening of the imagination as much as the act of watching TV is a dulling of the senses. We can play, or we can sit on our asses and be fans. Why not play, if we have the discipline for the attempt? Writing is a profound interaction with the mind, and even the amateur writer who hopes nothing for his scribblings can draw inspiration and power from his creations.
But I have to agree with the opening post that screenplay writers can hide a lot of weaknesses in a 125-page two-brad properly-spaced "script." The ease of creating a 124-page screenplay attracts a lot of writers who wouldn't dare attempt iambic pentameter or a novella of 40,000 words. That's why, partly, there are so many (millions!) of junk scripts in Lalaland. What script would the half-dozen posters in this thread agree to as a "great" script? Would we go all the way back to a turgid silliness like "Casablanca" for all of us to be in agreement? But "Casablanca" was submitted to 150 readers and production companies 15 years ago, and something like 140 of them turned it down as worthless, many with scathing notes. Only four or five of the readers recognised the script as "Casablanca."
It's a trip to have your dialog quoted in reviews, line by line, as being brilliant dialog, for sure. I wonder, though, if David Mamet and Neil Labute and John Sayles do not beat themselves up for trying something "harder." I say these three names because I personally know in the case of two that the movies are not scratching adequately the literature itch. And it is always lovely to talk to successful movie writers about novel-writing and have them instantly dismiss themselves as being incapable of writing a novel, or of lacking the talent or passion required.
And I wonder what most writers would think a better strategy: cutting your teeth on screenplays as an approach to writing novels, or struggling with novels in order to produce screenplays in the future with relative ease? Wouldn't most writers want to attempt both?
Once again, I must absolutely disagree.
First, the above seems to suggest that it is "easy" to write a screenplay because a screenplay is only around 120 pages, while it is hard to write a novel because, well -- a novel is a lot longer.
One might as well say that it is easier to write a short story than it is to write a novel.
It is not, in any way easier to write a short story than it is to write a novel, unless you're measuring "easiness" as if writing were a day job that pays by the hour and an easy job is one that takes twenty hours and a hard job is one that takes four or five hundred.
I am reminded of a famous artist who became embroiled in a lawsuit over the sale of a painting of his and was on the stand and the lawyer for the opposing party asked him how long it had taken him to paint the painting in question and he replied, "A lifetime."
To write any work of excellence, whether it is a novel, a short story, or a novel, embodies the work of a lifetime, both writing and living.
On the other hand, as someone who once worked as a reader at an agency, reading both scripts and novels, I can tell you with absolute authority, that you don't need a hundred and twenty pages to hide the junk, or a thousand and twenty.
It's right there on page one.
Why write a screenplay?
Why write a play? I don't remember reading any great novels by Harold Pinter or Ionesco. Or reading any plays by Dickens.
So what? Why should they choose to write in some other medium?
Some do. Some don't. To argue about whether a particular playwright or screenwriter is "up to it" is to impose a completely artificial hierarchy upon the whole business, with "novel-writing" at the top.
It implies that, well of course, any novel writer could knock off ten or twenty first-rate screenplays in an afternoon because, after all, they're just shit but for a screenwriter to tackle a novel -- that would be a real challenge because a novel, you know, that's like real writing.
Well, Stephen King has written some very good novels. He's also written adaptations of his own novels as screenplays and he's written original screenplays. But his screenplays have never been anywhere close to the quality of his novels. It is by no stretch of the imagination "easy" for King to write a good screenplay. In fact, he's never written a screenplay anywhere close to the quality of his best prose work.
There's a reason why the Kubrick version of the Shining (*not* based on a screenplay by King) is an excellent movie while the TV version, based on King's own screenplay, is very weak, even though extremely faithful to the book.
It is because the screenplay is so faithful that it doesn't work nearly so well.
A screenwriter, though writing in prose is writing for a visual medium, just as a playwright, though writing in prose, is writing for a performance medium.
It is no easier for a first class novelist to make the transition to writing *first class* screenplays than it would be for a first class screenwriter or playwright to make the leap to writing *first class* novels.
It's very common, when a novelist has his book bought for adaptation, that he wants to write the screenplay, and producers will very often give the novelist what's known as a "first pass" -- they'll pay him to write a draft. But in virtually every case, that's just figured in as part of the cost of acquiring the rights, because it is almost always unshootable junk.
Theses guys, for the most part, just have absolutely no clue how to write a screenplay.
And by the way, the reason there are so many "junk" scripts in the world is the same reason that there are so many junk novels in the world -- because there are countless junk writers in the world, writing both.
NMS
