Write Screenplays That Sell

"I’m not crazy about the title, and I expect Hal agrees at least somewhat with me about that. He was pressured by the publishers. It’s a real dime store title. It’s a brilliant book and he’s a brilliant educator. Hal’s been here at UCLA… I don’t know. Whenever I say two or three years it turns out to be 25. So Hal’s been here a quarter of a century and has had a great presence here. He’s our screenwriting co-chair. What he says is that it’s all about story. We’re an old-fashioned programme here and we’re about the primacy of story. People don’t go and see a movie because of the actors or the director. There are no directors that haven’t had their share of turkeys. The audience is smart and they have ways of finding the good stories. Shakespeare is not a little-known writer found in some archive by a group of academics – these plays were massive blockbusters in their day. Why? Because the plays are about violence, perversion, sex and tawdry, vulgar, ugly stuff. Oedipus? Well, you know what Oedipus does. Medea kills her kids. Macbeth murders Duncan in his sleep because he wants to be king. Richard III kills his own nephews. The body count at the end of Hamlet is nine bodies on stage in the final scene. Nobody wants to see ‘The Village of the Happy Nice People’. I mean, there’s a place for that, but not in art. Yes. What I preach in my new book is that the movie theatre is a safe place to live out the brutal aspects of our character. We are violent. History is – God forgive us all – a catalogue of horror and violence. I have, as I do every morning, a copy of the New York Times and a copy of the LA Times in front of me. It’s a bloodbath! I do a lot of commenting in the media and my detractors (it thrills me that I’m prominent enough to have detractors!) say that a retro-hippy university professor like me should be railing against Hollywood, but that in fact I’m a company man, an apologist for Hollywood. But I really believe that film violence does no harm. As Aristotle says of Purgation, the theatre helps people by providing a safe place to experience the lethal aspects of our condition and to expend that energy in a harmless way. In fact, since television and film have become more explicit and violent in the past 30 years there has been a serious decline in crime. In fact, crime is plunging. That’s because of foolhardy drug laws. You could put all the cartels out of business by decriminalising drugs. A medical condition – drug addiction – should be treated medically. Imagine the damage you could do to the Taliban by decriminalising opium. It would rob them of their financial resource."