Craft & Career Newsletter - Issue 13: From A-List Screenwriting

Warning: SPOILERS BELOW for The Kids are All Right.

I am not going to scrutinize this movie to death like I sometimes do. In fact, I'll leave out enough of the details so that it will only make sense if you've actually seen the film.

Notice all the hippie references and peace signs. The movie definitely has the idea of "freedom" on its mind. Look at how the characters are set up - the Annette Bening character says "no" to nearly everything, while the Mark Ruffalo character says "yes." The Julianne Moore character rebels against the "no" by moving toward the "yes," but then has to learn a tidy lesson that "yes" isn't always the answer, that life is more complicated than that.

The daughter, played by Mia Waskowska (check out her stint on In Treatment...she gave one of the best child performances ever) whose growth anchors the movie, also has to wrestle with when to say "yes" and when to say "no." She has to figure out when "yes" means freedom, and when "yes" only means regression and empty, and possibly harmful, rebellion.

I like the choice that the writer/director/actor made in not judging Ruffalo's character at the beginning. He is really a guy who is open to anything and just going with the flow. I started wondering if the film and the director were going to have the insight to face the fact that eventually this character was going to have to create some conflict that was earned, i.e., the world of the story would have to come along and show that he wasn't perfect. Sure, enough it did. He makes his mistake with the Julianne Moore character and possibly the bigger mistake of saying "yes" for a bit longer than she does.

Okay, that's cool. He's not perfect. He made a mistake. But when the family finds out, their reactions are all a bit too similar. The son blows him off. The Annette Bening character calls him an interloper, which from her perspective, is true. To her, he is unwanted, a selfish intruder. The thematic stickiness escalates when the daughter also blows him off. Unlike the others, she leaves the door open a sliver by saying that she might see him again, but her final words are too judgmental and too much like her perfectionist mother: she tells him he could have done better.

If it's a coming-of-age story and you want the daughter to learn the lesson that life is complicated, then you really want to explore the idea that freedom is learning the balance between "yes" and "no," and that sometimes you have to say "no" to things that seem easy and feel good. But that also means that sometimes you have to say "yes" to things that seem messy or ugly. Here's the problem. His mistake, as it affected the family, wasn't any worse than the mistake made by the other mother, Julianne Moore. But instead of introducing us and the daughter to a new idea/synthesis that it would be okay to find some way to accept love from this imperfect source, the film embraced the tidier notion of casting him out and "protecting" the family by saying an unequivocal "NO."

Essentially, the film doesn't give its characters (and the emerging themes) their due. Somewhere along the way....in the writing, the casting, the directing or acting, the Ruffallo character, the biological father, besides being impulsive and selfish and a little bit lost, also became honest, caring, interested, giving, and protective. A more mature idea of freedom would allow us and the daughter to embrace him at least a teeny bit. If the daughter had told him that he could have been "better" and yet was definitely willing to see him at some point, it would have solved it for me. If she had pulled his hat out of her stuff at school, that would given me a sense that she had learned something meaningful. The nice thing about the hat was that it was linked to protecting her (from the sun). Heck, even if she had bought sunscreen or said hi to a guy on a motorcycle, that would have at least been a gesture that she's outgrown her mother, that adulthood and freedom (checkout the big hippie poster in her dorm hallway) means a complex understanding of things, and that she would be able to embrace (say "yes" to) imperfection in her life.

Speaking of life... let's go from REEL LIFE back to ...

REAL LIFE

In the above discussion of The Kids are All Right and in discussing Dead Poet's Society and The Hurt Locker, I have discussed what Mckee calls the "Negation of the Negation." I have playfully called it the "F-d up Permutation." It's the place where two seemingly contradictory ideas in a script collide and mesh in such a way that an action which seems to so clearly be A and not B is actually B and not A. To understand this in movies is craft. To understand it in life is, I guess, wisdom.

The twenty-twoish-year-old woman I interviewed for the director's assistant position was living in Michigan after having graduated a year or so ago with a degree in journalism. She had decided that she was going to pursue being a writer, producer or director...she hadn't settled on one yet. I told her that this would be a good opportunity to learn about these crafts. In lieu of a few hundred dollars a week, I offered consultation on her screenplay, a seat in my screenwriting class, and the opportunity to be present during rehearsals (even those where we would rewrite on the spot), private meetings with the producer, AD, DP, and every other department head. And she would be allowed to watch 90% of the movie being shot from ten feet away. I figured if she really wanted to ponder being a director, she should find out what the role entails.

She "stuck to her guns" and said that she had to get paid $10 per hour. I could literally hear her parents' voices in her head saying things like "You stick up for yourself" or "You don't let them take advantage of you." She then went on to brag about how she has been able to make a living (by living at home) over the past year or so by finding paying PA jobs and Assistant to the Production Coordinator jobs here and there that paid a few hundred dollars per week.

Trying to see if there was a better fit for her, we offered her the role of "Assistant to the Producer," with one of the perks being that she could sit with the producer at the end of shoot and review the hundred-page application for the Michigan Film Incentive. If you were going to go make a 50k feature in MI as part of your rite-of-passage, this insight would have been worth more than 20k since the MI incentive kicks back more than 40% of the money you spend there. She said no to that also.

Is it possible that I was wrong about this young lady and that maybe she was getting exactly what she needed from sporadic, poorly-paid assistant positions? Maybe she was discovering her love for film and she was going to have an epiphany in a few months that she needed to go to grad school or get a part time job that would allow her to write twenty hours a week. Maybe. Maybe not. A little context: a week later, as I knew we would, we found forty "kids"' who were willing to give us a month of their time for credit and experience. So why did we buy this woman lunch and keep talking to her? Why am I spending six hours typing this story for you? I guess it's a symptom of being a champion. There is a dark side sometimes to seeing someone's gifts when you also have to see them wasted.

See, in some version of this story I am an evil old man manipulating this poor little girl into working for free but this is where the "F-d up Permutation" plays out. My spending an extra ten minutes to convince her to take the non-paying job wasn't manipulation and "taking advantage." It was ironically, taking care of her and helping her career in a way her parents never could.

Spending sixteen hours a day on a production as a PA spread out over years of intermittent work is probably the least productive way to "get into the industry," especially if you want to aim for an above-the-line title. If you want to be a producer, become an assistant to a producer - even if it's without pay - but make sure you get access to what's going on. If you want to be a director, get in line. And then figure out what you don't know and get in the other line: to making movies, going to film school, or learning the related trades like working with actors, development, editing, cinematography or, ugh, producing.

On the feature film March that I directed, one of my students wanted to be a DP, so I let him be 1st or 2nd AC for the entire shoot. He worked tirelessly for fifteen hours a day that summer, was never late and never complained. His payment was two meals a day plus craft service. He told me after the shoot that he realized that he hated the camera department and that he decided to go to grad school to be a producer. Do you know how much that information was worth to him? A lot more than $400 a week for three weeks. One of the interns on last month's shoot actually saw how much went in to directing and decided that he wasn't cut out to be a director.

This woman was a possible foil character for me and my life story, whose function was to show me the importance of some of the choices I have made in my life, the times I have said "yes." I think there is a career lesson in this for all of us about when to say "yes" and when to say "no." Sometimes getting paid isn't really getting paid and sometimes you even have to pay yourself.

CHEAP FAST GOOD

There is a rule about productivity that has been applied to filmmaking - the idea that out of Cheap, Fast, and Good, you can only get two out of three. You can rush it and it will be bad or expensive. You can save money and it will be bad or a drawn-out process. Or if you need it to be good, you have to pay with either cash or time. Well, I made a low budget movie this summer that was done pretty quickly. We shot one hundred and twenty pages in three weeks. I think it's pretty damn good. But it was a low budget movie and my salary was, well, nominal. So does that mean the equation broke down?

No. Here's why.

It's been ten years since I've had a chance to direct a movie. Was I going to look back at this experience and whine, "There wasn't enough time, if only I had more preparation, if only the budget were bigger, if only I had a storyboard artist..." No! Screw that! How would that help ANYONE? Although my fifty cents per hour salary has already been eaten up in travel and prep, I was paid an additional $15,000 to make this movie.

Who paid me? Me.

I took three months off to work on rewrites with the writer. I spent a month more on pre-production than anyone else other than the producer. I turned down work and literally had to return money to clients to focus on the movie. I cleared five-six months of my life to prepare the way I wanted to, so in essence, I sacrificed half a year of work and PAID MYSELF.

The working writers with whom you're competing make $100 to $10,000 per hour to write scripts on assignment. They have a team of really smart people whose careers are on the line giving them notes and feedback. If the film gets made, maybe they have A-list actors poring over every line and making the characters stronger and the dialogue better. Hey, I have even heard there are a few directors that can help the evolution of a script.

This is meant to inspire you, not discourage you. What is it about your script or the writing process that you value enough to put aside a weekend for? A week? A month? Part of your summer?

Are you okay with just wanting to have some fun, meet some people and use your creativity? That's cool. That's part of why I like to teach. Is it about the money? If so, consider changing the line of writing. Ever consider writing ransom notes? But seriously, how do you keep your interest alive for five -to ten years until it's likely that the money side MIGHT pay off?

Figure out the real core values for you in your screenwriting or filmmaking goals. Is it to tell your story? To make a million people laugh? To make a better movie than the one you saw at the Cineplex this weekend? Here's one of mine: I want to show the world something that only I can show them.

These sorts of values can sustain you for the years of perseverance that this business requires. Dig deep to find what's important to you. Find the values that allow you to put the time and effort in to take your script or movie all of the way. Are there things in your life that don't serve these values? Are you asking the hard "Negation of the Negation Career" questions to make sure that the things you think are helping aren't actually hurting you? I will pose some questions for you to ponder on the A-List Blog this week and feel free to pose some of your own too.

And when you are in service of the things you value, don't be afraid to say "yes" to yourself. Or to paying yourself. You're worth it.