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March General Meeting
Screenwriter Edward Khmara
by J'Amy Pacheco
(March 2002) |
Let's get one thing out of the way: Edward Khmara's script, Ladyhawke, was not based on a legend.
Instead, Khmara related at the Network's March 9 meeting, the story was inspired by his late-night ramblings on the streets of Paris during the 1970s.
"Being an insomniac, I walked around at night," he recalled. "I loved to walk around the old parts of the city, where there are old churches, and gargoyles looking down at you. I could just envision what medieval life must have been like. The story started to concoct itself in my head."
Khmara envisioned a story starting with the main character being thrown out of a Paris inn and meeting a knight who would accompany the main character on a quest.
"The knight had this hawk on his shoulder," he said. "I could never understand that. I knew the knight had to have the hawk on his shoulder, but I could never figure out what that meant."
Two years passed, and the story went no further. Khmara returned to the United States, and kept thinking about it. One day it hit him: the quest would be one in which the knight has to find woman he loves, and the hawk is that woman.
"It just wrote itself from then on," Khmara recalled. "But that was three or four years. It was just images, and bits and pieces.
"If you're willing to live with those images and bits and pieces, and not give up on them, they might someday reveal themselves to you and be one of the best things you wrote," he suggested. "Because you didn't try to put it together by reading books and figuring out where the pieces go. You just let some internal process take over and create it."
Khmara, whose film credits include Enemy Mine and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story, made the jump to television with 1998's Merlin, following it with the television movie, Submerged. He also teaches screenwriting at UCLA Extension.
Ladyhawke was his first script sale. Before it occurred, he attended film school.
"In film school, people treated talent like it was this flower; if you blow on it the wrong way, it will just wilt and die," he said. "People were so anxious to encourage talent and not dampen talent that they never really told you much except 'Gee, this is nice.' There were some great teachers, but some were just too gentle."
After earning his Masters in film, Khmara started "writing one screenplay after another, trying to get an agent."
"It's at that point that I learned the truth of William Goldman's saying, 'Nobody knows anything,'" he said.
Presented with the script for Ladyhawke, Khmara's agent advised him that she couldn't sell it except, perhaps to "the people who make Godzilla." Khmara entered the script in a contest, became a finalist, which ultimately led to Ladyhawke being optioned by Warner Bros. But Khmara had little to do with its getting made.
"When you're a new guy or gal, and you sell something, they don't know you and can't wait to get rid of you," he observed.
With the Ladyhawke sale under his belt, Khmara started going to meetings, trying to get development deals, and doing "whatever you have to do to make a couple of bucks."
"After you sell something, for a moment it's a big deal and you're hot and everybody wants you," he said. He next was hired to write Enemy Mine, which, like Ladyhawke, was released in 1985. Enemy Mine bombed.
"So that was the end of the heat," he said.
Khmara said he worked on a lot of projects; most of which never got made.
"Sometimes, those things hang around for a long time," he reflected. "There's stuff I wrote for studios back the early 80s, and people still say, 'Where is that script? We want to do it.'"
But because so much money accumulates against an unmade studio project, Khmara said it becomes cost-prohibitive to get it back.
"It sounds kind of harsh, but if you have a project that you really, really love, don't pitch it and then sell it," he advised. "If you pitch it to somebody who will buy the pitch and then hire you to write it - you lose your stuff. Unless they make it, it's absolutely gone, lost; you can never get it back. You can never do anything with it.
"It's much better to write it on spec," he continued. "If you sell it and it never gets made, you at least you'll have a big chunk of money to console yourself with."
Khmara likely needed some consolation of his own after writing Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story.
The project was initially pitched to him as an "Asian Raging Bull." A devoted researcher, Khmara traveled to Hong Kong, where he met with Lee's family and former colleagues.
"At the end of that research time, I felt I really knew the guy," he said. "He was very intense, driven, somewhat petulant, physically a genius, and I tried to portray that character."
Khmara explained that Lee, who had a life in America, was "torn" between wanting to be an American and "a world that sort of called to him from his origins in China" and which ultimately called him to his death.
Khmara created a complex character that reflected a world in which "America was always the hope, and China was always the fulfillment." The Bruce Lee character was "not the smiling sunshine boy" ultimately depicted in the film.
"They told me, 'This is much too tough a character, much too tough a story. We can't do a story about this obsessive guy. We need a nicer guy.'"
Eventually, it was decided that the story would include a theme of white prejudice against the Chinese, and Director Rob Cohen decided to rewrite the script himself. Although he used the structure Khmara created, the characters were "somewhat different."
The assignment to write Merlin came about in what Khmara described as a "strange way."
"My agent called one day said, 'Do you like the story of Merlin?'" Khmara recalled. "I said, 'I don't know much about it.' And he said, 'I just made a deal for you to do Merlin.' I said, 'Great.'"
Khmara's next television project was an adaptation of a book about the rescue of a sunken submarine's crew. Although his initial proposal of the story was rejected as not having enough female appeal, another producer succeeded in pitching it to NBC.
During a combination summer job-vacation at a mule packing station in the Sierras, Khmara received a call asking if he could deliver a script in six weeks. He said yes, then rushed home to write. The script was approved, and Khmara was given eight days to do a substantial rewrite. After working 24-hour days, he delivered what he felt was "the true story of a great American hero."
Another writer was brought in, and Khmara expressed frustration with the resulting changes.
In Khmara's version, the hero accomplishes a seemingly impossible feat: he pilots a diving bell he's invented to the sunken submarine and attaches it, not knowing if the sub is flooded and he will be killed, or if any of the crew have even survived.
"He's not sure of anything, he opens the thing and finds himself looking into the face of the caption and the men who thought they were going to die," Khmara reflected. "And he says, 'Permission to come aboard?' And they say, 'Permission granted.' To me, that's an emotional scene. The emotion is in what isn't said."
But in the movie, Khmara said, the interaction was changed. The question became, "What kept you so long?" and the answer was, "Traffic."
"To me, that's utterly idiotic," Khmara said. "But that's what they want to do these days. It seems like people have a hard time accepting that there can be real emotion in a scene."
While working on another television project, Khmara said he was stunned to hear that the executive he dealt with read only dialogue. The executive's assistant advised him to put important story points in dialogue - and to put really important points in bold-face type.
"So then you find yourself writing kind of like for radio - 'Oh, look there, they're running across the field heading toward that shed!'" he quipped. "And you think, somebody's going to make a decision about a movie, if it's going to be produced, and they read only the dialogue? And only the part that's in bold?
"To me, that's absolute idiocy," he added. "The dialogue is only text. There's no subtext."
Khmara cited the submarine rescue, and the "Permission to come aboard?" line as an example.
"This man has devoted his life to this moment, and the fact that he's still keeping up this kind of formal Navy protocol and these men who thought they would never be rescued are still Navy men - to me that adds the emotion to it," he explained. "A joke is stupid. Yet if you just read the dialogue, you don't get it."
Movies, he pointed out, started out silent, and are considered a "visual medium."
"If you're only reading dialogue, then you're reading everything but the visual medium," he pointed out.
Khmara is now working on a Western - something he said he has always wanted to do. He hopes to produce the project himself.
"It's different than when I was a kid," he reflected. "There are a lot of outlets for movies. You see cable, direct-to-video, and soon enough, there will be Internet outlets. All of these opportunities people have now to do something meaningful didn't exist before. I think it will be fun to take some of these opportunities and do your own movies, even if they're just done on digital video on your credit cards."
Khmara said he is ready to "make the movies I want to make," admitting that he is not sure where to find the money, or how to market his completed work.
"But I'm going to learn all those things," he said. "I'm taking a class in independent production. I'm going to try to immerse myself in that world."
To emerging writers, Khmara offered this advice: "find a premise we care about."
Many beginning writers start with "some intense personal experience they feel is meaningful," he said. But many lack the skill to create an engaging story around that experience, refuse to deter from the reality of their own experience -- and end up with a story containing no real quest; with nothing important at stake.
"There are people who are so skillful with characters that if somebody's eyeglass lens pops out, you just have to know how that ends," he said. "Very few of us can do it. With all the years of experience I have, I can't do it. I've met very few people who can. So find a premise that works."
"Train yourself," he added. "Take a chance on doing something different. Find that premise that's going to hook me."
He also advised new writers to avoid falling "into that whole Hollywood trap."
Khmara recalled an aspiring writer who rose from delivering scripts to writing the adaptation for Harry Potter. When Khmara last saw him, he was still living in a small apartment and driving his old pickup truck - despite having written several successful films.
"He wasn't working on assignments," Khmara explained. "He was taking only work he wanted to do, working on spec. He didn't run his credit card up to the limit, didn't buy the hottest Mercedes going. His career and what he wanted to do with his writing was more important to him than looking cool. He's had a great career, and I don't know anybody that deserves it more."
Writers should also be prepared to give up their words when they make a sale, he cautioned.
"When people buy a spec script, they buy an idea," he pointed out. "When I sell, nobody is going to say, 'Edward Khmara has written this script, let's make it.' They can't justify that."
Instead, million-dollar writers will be asked for their take on the project.
"So if I sit and ponder every tiny detail, like where I put the commas, it doesn't make a difference," he said. "It's got to hook people, make them read to the end, make them want to know what happens, and it's got to make them feel that there's a great story there.
"You have to accept that they're going to rewrite you from page one," he added. "I no longer torture myself."
J'Amy Pacheco is the editor of a law-oriented newspaper, and writes a syndicated humor column. She is the editor of the Scriptwriters Network newsletter.
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