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February General Meeting
Larry Gross
by David Wolfson
(February 2002) |
The screenwriter faces a myriad of dilemmas and paradoxes. February guest speaker Larry Gross focused on some of them, beginning with the nature of screenwriting, itself.
It doesn't take a great writer, he told a mostly-captivated audience, to write a great screenplay. Some average writers have written great screenplays, and some great literary writers have written poor screenplays.
"I've had this disabling and confusing uncertainty all my life about whether I was a writer that was a writer or a writer who wanted to be a screenwriter or really a filmmaker masquerading as a screenwriter," he said. "I do believe that there isn't necessarily one way that's the right way.
"I don't believe anybody's ever been harmed in their screenwriting by being a good literary writer -- although I've read scripts by excellent literary writers where their misplaced faith in their literary skills allowed them to not perform the essential screenwriting functions properly, so they wrote a surprisingly mediocre screenplay," he added. "But that's not intrinsic to why the script is bad."
One of those functions is writing for an audience, an idea he said that is easily misapplied.
"Audiences to a writer are sort of like money to all of us," he stated. "You either have too much or too little, you never have the right amount of money. Audiences are the same way. You're either too conscious of them or you're not conscious of them enough. You never find exactly, in my opinion, the absolutely right relationship to an audience. The whole notion of defining what an audience or a perspective audience means to you as you write is, to me, one of the trickiest and most elusive questions that a writer faces."
"When do you let your sense of what the audience is doing with your text invade your sense of what to do next?" he asked. "It's a really big question, it's an ongoing question, and you always have to be aware that you could be handling it wrong." Gross said he erred toward the side of being too little interested in an audience, mainly because he never thought in terms of someone reading his script.
"My own personal conviction is that everything good proceeds from the moment you turn your back on an audience, and yet if you turn your back on an audience too much you have nothing," he said. "But everything proceeds from the perspective that this is what everybody's expecting, this is what everybody wants, but I'm going to do it differently."
He cited two major rule-breakers. In Bull Durham, the audience is led to believe the story is about three characters, including Tim Robbins' Nuke, but Nuke departs well before the story ends. The writer didn't care if the audience was interested in Robbins, yet the writer's skill had made them interested. In The Godfather, Al Pacino does not become a central character until one hour into the story.
"Most people will tell you, and they're not wrong, that if you take an hour to let the audience know who your central character is, you are screwed," Gross said, adding that the writers did not arrogantly ignore the audience, but decided to take a risk.
In addition to screenwriting, Gross is a prolific writer of film commentary with a vast knowledge of cinema and literature. He came to his love of film as storytelling at age eight, after he was blown away by Citizen Kane.
"I was 14 years old the year the two biggest commercial films in Hollywood were The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde," he recalled. "Can you conceive of what a delusion that produced in me about what a career would be like in Hollywood? You're gonna get all the money in the world to be as utterly subversive and transgressive as you can possibly imagine being. Get out to Hollywood immediately, pal. It's Utopia. I was completely misled."
The idea of scriptwriting came later. He began with film criticism in college, and there he hooked up with a writing partner -- someone who disagreed with most of his criticism -- for several years. His interest in writing a script then was solely to make a film.
A rewrite (Captured, read by producer Joel Silver) and a personal relationship with director Walter Hill (they'd double dated) led to his working with Hill on 48 Hours. Hill, he said, was not only a writer and veteran director, but also a remarkable human being, and he had a great experience on that film. He said all who came in contact with Hill agree about him as a person. Not so with other directors.
"Nothing is ultimately more decisive in a writer's career in Hollywood than what director ends up directing your film," he said. "The best one to have is a director who can write." A director who writes, Gross advised, has a more realistic sense of what a writer can do.
"He will have had the essential pain and pleasure of having written," he explained. "Non-writing directors go through a process where they first fantasize about you as being better than you are and then turn on you for not being better than you are. They idealize you, and then they degrade you." If a writer has four great ideas for a character, a non-writing director thinks the writer can produce 40.
While there are exceptions, he said the very thing a non-writing director loves about a script is the thing that secretly fills him with fear and loathing.
"They think you know something they don't, and that's the biggest challenge to their authority," he said.
Asked about the WGA's struggle to require the presence of the writer on the set, Gross said it would help little.
"You either have a good relationship with the director or you don't," he said. "A writer shouldn't be telling a director what to do. When a writer gives a movie to a director, they must believe that the director has the right to screw this movie up their own way. If they don't believe that, they shouldn't bloody sell their work.
"Should a director be open for a Socratic, lively conversation about 'why'd you do that?'" he asked. "Yes, but they then should be prepared to say 'if you don't like it, f--- you!'"
Another ongoing dilemma is career choices. While his career has included many genres, including comedies, westerns and the story of David for Turner Broadcasting, Gross has been asked many times to do 48 Hours again. He could have benefited financially but not emotionally. He opted not to repeat, a choice he sometimes regrets. Overall, though, he said if you produce an inferior product too many times, it will come to hurt you. He knew that 48 Hours was a unique experience because it was such a low budget that the studio pretty much ignored them, leaving Hill to create a quality movie.
His recent work has been more independent, perhaps not by choice, but he said he'd written a number of indie scripts while doing studio work, and that now the cable and indie markets are more open to them. He added that the studios are doing projects he wouldn't be hired to do, such as animated films or action/effects movies. Technology, he said, is the main form of creativity now.
Gross said the studio process has changed so much since he came to Hollywood, that if he had it to do over, he might have chosen to stay in commentary or some other area rather than become a screenwriter.
In the 1970's, Walter Hill, Paul Schrader, John Milius and a number of others all developed careers by writing successful, commercial studio pictures and then directing the movie they wanted to direct, often less commercial or atypical for a studio. That path no longer exists, Gross lamented. He said Curtis Hanson is the only recent example, but he was 53, while the others were around 30, and Hanson had to write a lot of junk studio scripts in the interim. Most writers who recently tried to take that path were forced to make a genre movie like the ones they'd written. When it flopped, they were not allowed to direct again.
"This was a road that was absolutely open," he said about the path he took, "but the road started to disintegrate around me as my career was evolving, and I didn't see it until it until it was already disintegrated. It's not that the films are worse, it's not that they're better, it's that the path doesn't exist in the film world."
He did, however, take a turn at directing, both in film, a low budget film which he says was a good learning experience, and in television, which he enjoyed and learned from. While network television doesn't hold his interest, he said some of the cable projects are better than many feature films.
While many writers say the path to good writing is to write, Gross, who clutched a book throughout the session, urges writers to read.
"Studying literature is a real help to people more than studying films," he said.
When it was suggested that his first commercial success, 48 Hours, was a trendsetter for cop buddy movies, Gross gave assurances the film was highly derivative (a 40-year tradition dating to Howard Hawks), and suggested the male bonding action plot goes back five centuries to Cervantes' Don Quixote. He added that a lot of storytelling since then, including a high percentage of movies, owes something to that story.
He cited a poignant scene from Pscyho, the often overlooked sandwich scene, a four-minute dramatic playlet in which Norman Bates converses with the woman he, or his mother, will soon kill. He offered that despite Hitchcock's apparent focus on editing and visuals, he is the greatest screenwriter of all time.
"There's not a single false word in the scene," he pointed out. "It plays at about four levels of the structure and meaning of the movie." It's basically Chekhov, Gross explained. It's also where the movie goes from language to image.
"And none of it is conventional-it comes out of left field," he said.
Oddly, though, literary writers not only falter with an ignorance of screenplay structure, but they often dumb down their writing to make it 'Hollywood.'
"What it boils down to is, if you don't love films, you're not going to apply your literary gift in an interesting way," he stated. He also suggested that literary writing is now heavily influenced by film.
"There's a whole strain of avant-garde writing in 20th Century fiction that is always already influenced by film," he said. "Arguably, Faulkner's' early fiction is more cinematic than any movie that has ever been made in the 20th Century. The Sound and the Fury is the idea for an utterly cinematic movie, the language of which has never actually been equaled by cinema." Gross noted that the opening pages of that novel contain the most incredible montage that's ever been written.
"This is the prototype of a cinema that hasn't been written yet," he said.
David Wolfson is a writer who would think Larry Gross has forgotten more than most of us know, except that Larry doesn't seem to have forgotten anything.
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