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In a previous blog entry, "The Endless Rewrite", I related how my writing partner--the estimable--indeed inestimable--Julie Gray, proprietor of thescriptdepartment.com--and I saw our project brought out of the grave with the fresh interest of a producer in Hollywood. I thought I'd update this, as time has passed since then.

Hollywood time, in any event: a wholly unknown property of physics to those of us born and raised on the East Coast, where, especially in my native New York, everything has to happen a minute ago. This producer, whose name I can't divulge, just as I can't say anything more precise about the script because all is in play at the moment (and, yes, that's another rule in this business), is a notably picky man. He has produced major motion pictures and has passed on projects that have gone on to gross many millions of dollars. So when this Man of Mystery takes a script out, studios pay attention.

Anyway, he and his story editor gave us notes. "Notes" in the movie business are very different from the gentle suggestions offered by book editors, which are typically couched in terms of negotiation and afterthought ("I felt--I don't know if you'll entirely agree--that the protagonist's behavior on page 345 was a little out of character. If you don't agree, then that's fine, but if you'd be willing at least to think about it I might not press you to change the other little item we discussed on page 20"): what we're talking about in the screenwriting business are mandates. You either change them or you get out of this business.

His suggestions were actually excellent. This script, which Julie and I have lived with for so long that we could work on this in our bi-coastal sleep, was always strong, with a solid structure and story. But these notes helped point us towards strengthening the arc of our main character and thus changing the script, not radically, but emotionally. Audiences will connect with this far more easily than they would have before. It's become, in fact, studio-ready.

Hardcore prosewriters and poets will look upon this with disdain: writing on demand to please someone else...? Puleeze...

That's the big difference. Screenwriting is as much a craft as furniture-making, architecture and knitting. What you are creating will be bought and owned by someone else who can do with it as he or she pleases. (Which is why so many movies are rewritten so often that in the end they barely resemble the original conception.) These are "products" meant to make money. But...there is nothing wrong in making money off one's writing. Richard Price, who has written both screenplays and TV scripts (most recently episodes of the great "The Wire"), speaks of screenwriting as a way to finance his much less profitable work as a novelist.

As I'm sure Price does, I write my novels for myself, first and foremost; I write the kind of books I'd buy and read. Of course I want them to be entertaining, but I also want them to be thought-provoking and even challenging. They express something of who I am, and as such they are my art as well as my craft. But we can also write movies that we'd like to see. And so when shaping our script, when trying to please this development executive or that producer, my partner and I always have in mind the core questions: are our characters being true to themselves? Do they grow in some way throughout this 103-minute story? Is what we're telling based on a simple, unbreakable truth about how we live our lives? All questions a novelist might ask himself. So in a sense we straddle those two worlds of being artists and craftspeople. We think like artists, and write like craftsmen.

Novel-writing may be my first love, but screenwriting has its immense pleasures for me that draw me back to it time and again: the challenge of telling a compelling story in a limited amount of pages in a visually thrilling way and with dialogue that snaps and crackles off the page. But there is also this, that comes from being an American. It dawned on me some years ago that in a way the history of 20th century America is reflected in its movies. Cinema is so much a part of our culture, that when we look back over its short, century-long history, and view those landmark films with the truly great stars of their time, we can't help but be aware that, though movie-making is all about illusion and make-believe, it's also about dreaming and stepping out of ourselves and our daily lives. In the last Great Depression, cinemas were packed with people who'd spent their precious nickels to watch Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance their way through yet another cruise or cocktail party. Audiences, for the most part, would never be doing that, ever; but it never hurt to think about it. 

In some quarters it's chic to downplay film (and there are enough stinkers released to make one despair at times), but watch a Preston Sturges classic, or Katherine Hepburn in "The Philadelphia Story"; "Casablanca" or "The Godfather". All of these, and hundreds more, really do tell us something about who we are at a particular place in our history. And for those few hours we can forget what keeps us awake at night or has us pacing the floor as we try to figure out how we'll make it through another day.

Sure, it's a business, but when it turns out something great, it touches that which we call art. Julie and I, then, are at the 11th hour of our project. This week or next it'll go out, and we've been in this business long enough to know that just as something may happen with it, it may also simply fail. But we'll write another script and another, and one day that first screenplay we wrote together will be picked up by someone who'll say, "You know, I've been looking for a great story for two actresses..."