Teaching

I'm considering teaching screenwriting again on line. I've done it before as you can see above and have enjoyed it teaching UCLA in Los Angeles. Also, I have a book on screenwriting which you can learn page by page. You can also see the book.

The sheet above is hard to put on due to the real size, sorry to do it too small.

Here's a page or so of what I wrote.

1-Liner response

First of all, I have to say the some of the ideas presented this class are some of the most interesting and challenging ideas I’ve seen for a long time. I am anxiously looking forward to their development.

 What you strive for in this business, is to come up with something recognizable, yet fresh and different. There are only a handful of stories in this world, constantly retold. What makes a tired story fresh – that’s hard to say but easy to see afterwards. What made The Graduate different from all the college teen movies before it, what made the Godfather different from the Cagney/Edward G. Robinson movies, what made The Unforgiven different from True Grit.

 The studios want something they recognize, thus the genres… a suspense thriller will always get attention, it gets an audience. Basic Instinct was no different than tons of “noir” stories, but they pushed up the sex and cast it with Douglas and Stone and it worked. This is what you have to do and it isn’t necessarily a compromise either. This goes for art movies as well, Merchant & Ivory created a demand for British period pieces, but mostly because they cast and made them well, with great scripts that related to today.

 One of the problems I see so much today are writers who are reasonably good, but who write clichés. They lack originality. Some of these writers sell their work, but it’s because they have connections and/or are in the “club”. I can almost sell an action adventure story without even thinking about what I’m writing, I can send you a script I wrote for a director friend that literally has no idea, just a series of clichéd scenes, and the damn thing is going into production, albeit for a low budget of $500,000.

 But I wrote it in 2 weeks, start to finish, almost as a joke. But I have those connections and they know what they’ll get in a Makichuk script is something that they can cast and film and will have reasonably interesting characters.  And someone watching it can say, “I can write something as good as that”, and they can. But they won’t be able to sell it without connections and a reputation. 

But I “earned” that position by writing some really good scripts, most of which still haven’t been made and may never be made, so it’s really a two-edged sword, I can write things that can sell, but still have problems making my best scripts.

But I’m not alone in that, everyone in this town has trouble trying to make what they want, with the exception of a few at the top, and even they have problems with projects close to their heart. Robert Duval had to finance The Apostle with his own money. I had a meeting at Dustin Hoffman’s company last year where they talked about a project Hoffman wanted to make for very little money but no studio in town would do it.

I am making my comments available to all of you at the same time, and would like you to read all of the comments rather than just your own (naturally I’m assuming you’ll do it anyways).  As I mentioned, some of you have far more experience in screenwriting than others, but I can balance my comments to all of you at whatever level you’re at.

 And remember that the choice is yours, these are only my comments. I want you to take into consideration all that the others have mentioned in the forums and make your own decisions.  And remember, you can talk about the ideas with me, but you need to start working on the one-page outline this week.

So that's a little bit of on-line teaching.

Might send you a few more bits and piece