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Norman the Conqueror
by Bonita M. Alford
(June 1999) |
On June 12th, Academy Award winner Marc Norman was our guest at Universal, which, coincidentally, is where his illustrious screenwriting career began. Contemplating his future after receiving a Master's degree in English from UC Berkeley, Norman surmised "I always kind of liked movies." He moved back to Los Angeles and filled out employment applications at all the studios. Under desired position he earnestly put "producer."
"It sounds funny," Norman begins. "It sounds like I was being really ironic. No. I was stupid. I didn't know what else to put." After being repeatedly told "we'll call you when there are openings," he was offered the chance to participate in Universal's "executive training program"--delivering the mail.
In order to get out of the mailroom, he had to corner producers on the lot to ask for a job. One of the first jobs he landed was to write treatments for Leonard Stern of Get Smart fame. After a few years, Norman decided to take time off to write a feature. That script, which eventually became one of the first movies for television, landed him an agent and more assignments rewriting episodic television.
In a strategy he would often return to, after a few years, Norman quit to write the equivalent of a "suicide note"--a screenplay that would either take Hollywood by storm or be the swan song of his writing career. Luckily that script was Oklahoma Crude -- which sold for a lot of money and he quickly became a "flavor of the month."
After spending several years as a "development writer,"i.e., taking writing assignments on projects that would never see the light of day, Norman was at another crossroads in his career. Per Norman, "I had to reinvent myself. What it really meant was thinking consciously about how I did my work instead of expecting it to happen in sort of a magical fashion. Writing is a performance. Often writers are forced to apply their skills and talents to crummy ideas. So how do you get to the position of working on good stuff?" His answer was to focus more on the process of screenwriting, acknowledging that "there's such a thing as craft as well as inspiration."
"There is a certain amount of writing that can be taught. I don't think anybody can teach you how to be inspired or creative. I think people can teach you certain basic rules. I think writing courses are good for that: To learn certain kinds of basic concepts. Then you have to put it aside because if all you learn are those things, then you're no better than anybody else who's taken the class. What's going to make you better than anybody else is what you bring to it."
His new attitude began paying off when Norman noticed an improvement in his work. "When I was young, I would say I wanted to be a screenwriter more than I wanted to write. As I got older, I began to get more and more interested in the writing." He compared his improvement as a screenwriter to that of a long distance runner training to be slightly faster today than he was the day before.
His children proved to be a bountiful source of inspiration. His twin sons figured out at an early age, "If dad works, we eat." It was one of Norman's sons who suggested doing a script about a young William Shakespeare. That suggestion was the beginning of a ten-year journey that culminated in the widely acclaimed film Shakespeare in Love.
Shakespeare in Love was yet another "suicide note." Norman hit upon the notion of portraying Shakespeare as a frustrated screenwriter, based loosely upon his own life experience. "People are not born geniuses. People develop into geniuses. There had to be a point in Shakespeare's life where he was just a guy trying to get a job, a guy trying to figure out who he was. There had to be a point where Shakespeare was in development hell."
Norman researched Shakespeare and Elizabethan theater at UCLA. In many ways, the world of Elizabethan theater was a precursor to modern day Hollywood. This was the second part of Norman's three-prong attack for Shakespeare in Love.
The final piece of the puzzle came from imagining that Shakespeare's love life was the inspiration for Romeo and Juliet. "Up to Romeo and Juliet, he is a promising playwright. He's written some good plays, not great plays. In Romeo and Juliet, he does something radical. Why did he finally break through? What happened to him in his personal life? And I came up with the third leg of my idea which is a real conservative tried and true Hollywood idea. He met a girl."
The project was almost made in 1992 with Julia Roberts as Viola, the part eventually portrayed by Gwyneth Paltrow. However, in a scenario eerily similar to the script's search for an actor to play Romeo, production was shut down when the role of William Shakespeare couldn't be cast. Per Norman "It's a demanding role. Guy's gotta be good looking, able to do comedy and able to do elevated text." The project went into turnaround for five years until Miramax committed to making it.
The moral of this story: never give up. "That's one of the few things I've been able to figure out about this business. I've never given up even when everything said I should. Is that glorious insight or is that stupidity? I don't know. I do know that in the face of a lot of evidence that I was not cut out for this work or I was never going to achieve what I wanted to achieve, I stayed."
When asked if he follows a particular formula when writing a screenplay, Norman responded: "There are craft issues. And if you do this work enough you learn them. Their little rules. And you play with them at your peril. For example, if you don't have your hero up and running and doing something compelling by page 10, the guy reading your script is going to put it down and read somebody else's. The rules are really story telling rules. I tend to always use a three-act structure. A first act that kind of states a problem, a second act which states the opposition to that problem, a third act that states the resolution of the conflict between the two."
He writes 9 - 5. He begins by writing notes, bits of dialogue, description, costume ideas. He tries to keep an open mind and delays making any major decisions as long as possible. Marc continues this process for a month or two until he can't stand it anymore, and then he starts writing a draft.
His parting advice: "Go out and buy a car. Bet on yourself. Find reasons to keep yourself going. There's no one way to do it."
Bonita M. Alford earned $55 as a screenwriter last year and hopes to at least double that figure in 1999.
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