Lights, Camera–Novels

Many, many, many moons ago, I tried my hand at writing scripts.  At the time, I lived in Los Angeles, so I was right at screenplay ground zero.  My father suggested it because it paid well, and other forms of writing didn’t.  So I wrote scripts like crazy–all humorous.  My first ones were on a typewriter, and then I graduated to a Commodore 64.  My horror was running out of disk space on a save, so the computer merrily aborted the save along with all my changes.

I remember driving to an agent’s office on Moorpark over the weekend and dropping my script in the mail slot (it wasn’t like there was a lot of information on the do’s and do not’s available at the time!).  I also met David Angell, who was then writing for Cheers.  It was a friend of a friend meeting, and my impression was that he was only doing this because the friend asked him to and wasn’t particularly interested.  It was quite shocking to learn that he had died in one of the plane crashes on September 11.  I also ended up with an indirect contact with Walter Brough, a writer from Mission: Impossible.  He didn’t do a personal meeting, but did send me a card of encouragement.  I also heard a horror story about a 17-year old boy who wrote a script for the Six Million Dollar Man, got it accepted, and by the time it was filmed, it didn’t resemble the original script that was bought.

I wrote about 20 or 30 screenplays over a very short period of time and burned myself out.  Over time, I came to realize that scripts weren’t what I really wanted to write.  It was fiction, and novels.

And the two forms of writing are quite different.  Aside from typing dialogue in a specific format (they have software now to duplicate the format; I did it by hand), there are different needs that a movie has.  But there are some similarities, too.

The Washington Post has an article in today’s paper called Words, Camera, Action! on the screenwriter’s role in movies.  This caught my eye:

Even the tiniest visual details in a film — choices viewers might assume a director or editor made — were written in the screenplay. The pink underwear Scarlett Johansson wore in the opening shot of “Lost in Translation”? Specified in the script. The hamburger phone in Juno’s retro-tastic bedroom? Written into the script. The cut from a lit match to a sunrise in “Lawrence of Arabia”? Credited to editor Anne Coates, but originally written by screenwriter Robert Bolt.

I actually did think things like that were decisions made by the director.  When I was reading everything about screenplays–which wasn’t much–the only information I had was David Gerrold’s The Trouble With Tribbles, a book on the writing of the Star Trek episode.  In it, he describes a fight scene in one sentence: All Hell breaks loose.

Whereas, in the article:

Such detail is especially important in scripts for action movies, which at their worst will simply say, “Two men shoot at each other on a deserted street,” and leave it at that. The result is often something as generic and unspecific as the writing.

Movies obviously have the added visual impact of the details–I still remember Whoopi Goldberg’s giant toothbrush in Jumping Jack Flash.  But there are also books where the details add a new level that makes the story special.  The first two I can think of offhand are the early Sue Grafton books and the early Laurell K. Hamilton books.  Also Louise Marley’s Sing the Light series.  With Sue Grafton and Laurell K. Hamilton, the details often had a bit of punch to them, and often humor.  With Louise Marley’s, it added texture to the story.

What books have had stand out details for you?