Writer Unboxed

You’ll have to excuse me, but I haven’t been writing very much since Transformers was released on DVD. I saw it twice in the theater, and have watched at least once a day since I bought my copy.

Ahhh … now we find out who actually reads this blog.

I simplify the reaction possibilities considerably by assuming this, but I’d still bet big bucks on the supposition: at least half of you just groaned, slapped your foreheads, rolled your eyes, or displayed any of a number of physical actions meant to convey disapproval.

Oh, my GOD, Dave. You call yourself a writer? That movie is junk. Those movies are junk. All summer movies are junk.

They are, aren’t they? Even better, they’re LOUD junk. I mean that in every possible sense of the word. They’re Dolby Digital 5.1 loud. They have loud production values, loaded up with sweet special effects. The actors are loud. The story is like being in the center of the funnel when the tornado passes over your head. That’s over 240 decibels, if you want to know. 140 decibels is pain. Now you know that whether you wanted to or not. I am a veritable fountain of utterly worthless knowledge.

Summer movies are loud junk, and I love them. I also love loud winter horror flicks, which are generally half as good and twice as predictable.

Still loud, though. Yep. You betcha.

I do not like quiet art movies. I sobbed with boredom during The English Patient. The Piano made me want to hurt someone, and not in a good way (if you’re looking for a movie that makes you want to hurt someone in a good way, see 300).

I like music and movies the same way – cranked up, blowing my hair back, and annoying virtually everyone around me.

So. How many of you out there have thought about writing screenplays? You know who are. 110 pages, six weeks and you’re done, huge paycheck, name on the big screen.

Next question: how many of you think of screenplays as an art form? Valid as Wolfe, literary as Updike, social and meaningful and incisive as Raymond Carver?

I’ve read many screenplays that are written well enough to stand on their own – Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, for instance, or anything by William Goldman.

Story is story, in any form.

Fortunately, I have never published anything other than genre. It really doesn’t damage my reputation to admit to a passion for barn-door-broad melodrama. I’m already slumming, so what’s the difference?

Is screenwriting, then, slumming at its lowest? I suppose the only thing on a lower rung might be comics. Biff! Boom! Pow!

But those waters are very muddy indeed. 300 is based on a graphic novel (i.e. comic book) written by a guy named Frank Miller, who also wrote the script for a film based on his original graphic novel series, Sin City, which is sort of like noir detective Phillip Marlowe doing a bunch of acid with Space Ghost creator Alex Toth. It’s dark, damaged and very sad, but so beautiful, too.

Miller is a very talented writer who cut his teeth on issues of Daredevil comics before inventing his own surreal, Chandleresque landscape. His writing shimmers with black energy, much of it captured alive in 300.

I’ve written short fiction, novels, poetry, lyrics, music and screenplays. My attempts to bring those forms to a wider audience have met with wildly varying degrees of success. I suppose I’m better known for the short stories (where I’m known at all), should that be your particular yardstick for meaningful accomplishment.

I have yet to write a screenplay I think is worth shopping, but I have had more fun writing screenplays in the past three years than anything else. I’ve written military thrillers (20 years in the Air Force, most of it guarding nukes, is great research), monsters, science fiction, straight drama. I started writing them because I just wanted to do something that could be finished sometime this year, got hooked on it, and kept going because it was so much fun.

Then I learned about the paycheck.

As a film writer, you’re protected by a union. It’s called the Writer’s Guild of America. If you’re a member of the WGA, they make sure you get paid a certain amount. There’s a contract that guarantees it.

If you sell a screenplay for a feature-length film with a budget of over $2.5 million, you’re guaranteed to be paid at least $58,411.00.

As a novelist, your first novel might garner you a $12,000 advance. Which of course means you won’t be paid anything more until the book actually earns more than $12,000. Which it probably won’t.

As a short story writer, you will still be cashiering at Walmart. I don’t even have to tell you that, do I?

While I admit to being gleefully lowbrow, I am not so unprincipled that I would continue to write screenplays just because the money’s good. If you look at the numbers of screenwriters registered with the WGA versus actual working writers, the money isn’t good at all, because only about 5% of them are employed. I would love to actually sell a screenplay (the convoluted mess that can follow that sale is a subject for another post), but in the meantime, I’m making big budget summer movies in my head, and they’re fun. Big fun. And I don’t mind saying that I think I write better monster movies than many I have seen in theaters.

I repeat: I would not return the check uncashed. But I write them because I love them, love movies, have a long-standing love affair with films and filmmaking (my first major in college was film).

Love: first and foremost. Anything else is a waste of material.

Is it art? Ultimately, that’s for somebody else to decide. I don’t think of anything I do as “art” in the stuffy, snobby, stuck-up stickybeak sense of the word. I’m not a gallery owner from New York. I’m a horror hack. If genre fiction is the bad side of town, horror is the ghetto. That’s where I live and breathe.

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