Life: The Other Kind of Research

“I'm trying to take culture and put it onstage, demonstrate it is capable of sustaining you. There is no idea that can't be contained by life: Asian life, European life, certainly black life. My plays are about love, honor, duty, betrayal—things humans have written about since the beginning of time.”—August Wilson

August Wilson was fond of saying that he didn’t do research. When I asked him about it, he said, “I figure if they had horse-drawn milk wagons when I was coming up in the ’50s then they had them in the ’20s.”

The truth is August researched all the time. He read a lot for one. But he also spent a ton of time with people, all kinds of people. People fascinated him. And he wasn’t quick to judge them—he was far more interested in what made them tick. He wanted to know why people did what they did. Or how people got to be who they were.

If you are a storyteller then your job is to observe and report on human behavior—the world is your classroom. You have to be a keen observer of human behavior. And the great thing about humans is that they are everywhere. It is safe assume that you see and interact with a human being almost everyday.

No matter what you are telling stories about at its core will be human emotions and motivations. You can get many details wrong, but if your characters don’t behave as people do in real life all the other research in the world will not help you. You have to learn how to “see” people.

I would say that “seeing” is at least as important as “doing” when it come to art. Art is about both how you see and what you see. When someone does something you would never do or can’t understand ask yourself why. You have to do this with clarity and without judgment. This is the hardest part of observation—to do it without judgment.

Why is it important not to judge your characters? Because characters who are judged by the storyteller tend to be caricatures rather than characters—cut-outs rather than real people. Over the years I have met many writers who are quick to judgment, but few who strive for understanding. And good story writing is honest. Sometimes painfully so.

The best place to look is inside yourself. But not at the parts of you that you think are great. No, you must find those things about yourself that you’d rather not look at. The things you keep in the dark. That’s where you mine the real dramatic gold. That’s where the humanity is.

Look at others, look at yourself—find the humanity in both. That’s how you write something that matters.

Too much of a good thing: The pitfalls of research

"If your work shows, you're in trouble." --Chuck Jones

I was once writing a script on a particular topic, and as part of my research I was reading the "For Dummies"book on this subject. Someone saw me reading this book and scoffed. I took that to mean that I should have been reading a more "serious" book on the subject. Why? To avoid embarrassment? I wasn't trying to impress anyone--I was trying to learn enough about my subject to write about it.

Don't fall into the trap of trying to impress others with your research. This can rear its ugly head in the writing itself. You want to show off all of the work you did. But this only takes focus away from your story and characters and puts the focus on the writer. This kind of storytelling pulls people out of the story rather than sucking them in.

The more people are emotionally invested in your story the more effective it will be. Don't show your work.

Another trap of research is procrastination. Writers love to procrastinate. If procrastination were an Olympic event writers would win the gold every time. Research is perfect for writers because we can fool ourselves into thinking that we are working. We can research a subject for years and make ourselves believe that we are working. Now, some subjects really do take years to research. They really do. So how do you know when you are done?

The trick I use is that when I start to feel like I have read most of the things more than once. In other words, when information is repeated by several sources, I quit my research.

Another thing that can happen is that research sparks other ideas. You may start off with one idea and upon researching the subject you discover other things you could tell stories about. Now you can't decide what to do. This is just another form of procrastination.

What you do is make a decision. You can always tell those other stories. Just pick one and tell it. There will more than likely be one that pulls you more than the others. You may be afraid of this idea because it may be more challenging, but that's exactly why you should choose it.

Okay, time for me to get back to work. When I want to procrastinate I write a blog post.

This Is Not a Pipe: The Value of Research

Before I start I want to thank all of you who have promoted my new book on your blogs. And also thank you all very much who have bought the book. I am grateful that you think I may have something worthwhile to say to you.

The response has been great. It just got a really great review on MicroFilmmaker.

And now back to our regularly scheduled program…


A playwright once told me that I should write a book about how to research for writing stories. Until she said this I had no idea that I was any good at it. But I have noticed that people will often comment on a feeling of authenticity in my work and if that is true at all it is due to research.

I divide research into two areas – “soft research” and “hard research.” Hard research is what most of us do. This is research for factual data – things like when was the Spanish American War and why was it fought. Or finding out how tall George Washington was. Or who is buried in Grant’s Tomb.

These are just hard facts easily looked up in a book or on the Internet. But there is another kind of research that I find even more valuable – this is soft research.

Back when I was a teenager trying to learn my trade I read an interview with Lawrence Kasdan just after Raiders of the Lost Ark came out. I was obsessed with Raiders and Kasdan. And because he had written the screenplays for both Raiders and The Empire Strikes back I wanted to read anything he had to say. I would follow his advice to the letter.

Well, in this interview he said that one of the things he did when doing research for Raiders was read books and see movies that came out the year that Raiders took place. That made sense to me. This is why there is an authentic voice to the piece. It feels very much like something from the 1930s.

Kasdan’s approach is a perfect example of soft research. This kind of information goes beyond facts. It gets to the feeling of things – the intangible. And these things can make their way into your story or art or whatever in ways you could never predict.



When you are engaged in soft research you should do so without a goal. You should just be open to taking in information. Take everything in.

When the guys at Pixar were making Finding Nemo they got certified to scuba dive. This gave them the experience they needed to make their film feel like it was taking place in an actual environment.

I was once working with animation students on a project that took place in the woods. I could not convince them to go spend time in the woods to soak up the environment. They thought looking at pictures of trees on the Internet was the same thing as going into woods and looking at real trees. It isn’t.

There are things those students could have learned in the woods that they never could learn. Bruce Lee said, “If you want to learn to swim, jump into the water. On dry land no frame of mind is ever going to help you.”

As much as possible you want to “get in the water.” Soft research puts you in the water. When you are immersed in the world, you want to recreate you will have a much easier time doing so.

If I am writing a piece that takes place in the past I will see films, read books, listen to music, watch television shows, listen to radio shows, watch talk shows and look at art made at the time. I find that comic strips are good because what people laugh at tells you a lot about what they were feeling at the time. They really tell you about what people were serious about.

Hard research is the key to making your work accurate, but soft research is the key to making you work feel accurate.

Of course you could just wait for the movie...

Thanks, everyone, for visiting this blog. I’m still getting used to the idea that people care what I have to say. Some people hate what I say while others find it useful, but it’s just a strange feeling to have people care one way or the other. Sometimes the only way that I can muster up the courage to write this blog is to pretend to myself that no one reads it.

I didn’t even want to start this blog. Truth is a friend of mine thought I should have one and created this blog and told me to fill it in. I figured I might as well. That’s pretty much the way I started teaching too. I needed the money and someone thought I’d be good at it. Turns out I am pretty good at it. Who knew?

A few years ago some of my students and a few friends told me that I should write a book. I had never written a book and didn’t think I could do it. Anyway, in 2003 I wrote one. People liked it, but no one wanted to publish it until now. You can read about that here: http://thesunbreak.com/2010/03/01/brian-mcdonalds-invisible-ink-guide-to-story-hits-print

The book is titled Invisible Ink, just like this blog. In fact, the name of the blog comes from the book. If you have liked this blog, the book takes the same ideas and expresses them in more detail. Thanks to all of you for reading the blog all these years, and I hope you will find the book helpful.

Here are some of the people who did me a huge favor and read the book in manuscript form before there was any publisher in sight. I am eternally grateful to them. They all did this because they believed in me and my book. They did this out of the goodness of their hearts to help me get this thing published:


“Writing stories is hard. They are stubborn by nature. No matter how many times you master one, the next story is obligated to conceal its faults with an entirely new disguise. Your only recourse is to keep writing, while concurrently increasing your understanding of this deceivingly simple, yet highly complex, organism we call story. Brian McDonald’s insightful book does just that. Somehow, Brian has found yet another fresh and objective way to analyze how great stories function, and emboldens you to face the challenge of scaling whatever story mountain looms before you. If I manage to reach the summit of my next story it will be in no small part due to having read Invisible Ink.”
—Andrew Stanton (cowriter Toy Story, Toy Story 2, A Bug’s Life, Monsters, Inc., and cowriter/director Finding Nemo and WALL-E)


“Invisible Ink is a powerful tool for anyone who wants to become a better screenwriter. With elegance and precision, Brian McDonald uses his deep understanding of story and character to pass on essential truths about dramatic writing. Ignore him at your peril.”
—Jim Taylor (Academy Award™- winning screenwriter of Sideways and Election)


“Brian McDonald’s Invisible Ink is a wise, fresh, and highly entertaining book on the art of storytelling. I read it hungrily in one sitting, delighted by his careful and illuminating analysis of my favorite films, novels, television shows, and even comics. A multitalented creator, McDonald never errs in his critical judgments or the very practical principles he provides for creating well-made stories. I recommend this fine handbook on craft to any writer, apprentice or professional, working in any genre or form.”
—Dr. Charles Johnson (National Book Award-winning author of Middle Passage)


“If you want to write scripts, listen to Brian. The guy knows what he’s talking about. A very well-thought-out, easy-to-follow guide to the thing all we writers love to pretend we don’t slavishly follow—story structure.”
—Paul Feig (creator of NBC’s Freaks and Geeks)


Invisible Ink is an uncommonly good guidebook that reveals the unseen workings within great movies, TV, and literature. Brian McDonald, the author of the guidebook, is like a modern day magician who understands the enchantment that lives within a good story, and fortunately for us, he is ready to share his many secrets.
—Joel Hodgson (creator of Mystery Science Theater 3000 and Cinematic Titanic)


“Don’t tell anyone, but the secret to exceptional story crafting is written in Invisible Ink. I advise you read it, memorize it, and then eat the pages one at a time and digest it thoroughly, so that it stays with you. Besides, you can’t afford for this book to fall into the hands of your competitors. Brian’s powerful concept of armature as understructure will change the way you look at movies and writing forever.”
—Pat Hazell (producer/playwright/ former writer for NBC’s Seinfeld)


“Invisible Ink fell into my hands at just the right time—as I was banging my head against the wall trying to structure a screenplay that had too much going on in it. The book’s thoughtful exploration of what makes movies work helped me see my core story clearly, and throw away a third of my material—which I now understand will not be missed. I have a stronger, more focused script thanks to a process inspired by this book.”
—George Wing (screenwriter of 50 First Dates)


I would like to thank these guys for their early support.

As for the followers of the blog I hope that the book does not disappoint.

Thanks,

-- Brian

How to be Original

"All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply tell the truth (without caring twopence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it." --  C.S. LEWIS

One of the problems I run into a lot when teaching story structure is the question of originality. People want to know how they will ever be original if they follow the time-honored principles of structure.

When people say these things, I know that they are far more interested in the glory and praise of creativity rather than the roll-up-your-sleeves work of it. They are imagining themselves on the red carpet, before the fawning fans and critics. And all before bothering to learn their craft. The aspiration to be good takes a back seat to being praised as a genius and living a Warhol-like existence. And this is of course your reward for doing something new and different. Or so many think.

I have written stories that people told me were "original." I can assure you that was not my goal at all. I just wanted to do good work, following the lead of those who came before me. If Chaplin or Hitchcock or Wilder--or Jim Henson or Bruce Lee or Chuck Jones or John Ford or any number of masters--says to do it, then that's what I will do.

My goal is always to be as good as I can be. I want to communicate clearly with my audience, engage them and touch them in some way. I have no problem using tools that have worked since time immemorial. In all of my reading I have found that the masters were all trying to do the same thing--to do the best they could. Being good is hard enough without trying to be unprecedented.

You've probably heard lots of talk about how much Avatar is like Dances with Wolves. Yes, it has similarities. But there is not one story anywhere that cannot be traced, in part, to an earlier source.

The infant Moses was set adrift so that his life would be spared and he was adopted and raised by strangers and become a hero. Same as Superman. Zorro and Batman are the same--both are rich men who fight crime in costumes. No matter what you try to do, someone has always done a version of it. Trust me.

There really is nothing new under the sun. Things may look different to the untrained eye, but humanity only has so many emotions and so many concerns. We need food, shelter, and love. We all must live under some form of government. We must all fight our internal demons.

There are no new problems, only the same old problems dressed differently. Take the story of John Henry. Here is an American myth about a man who races against a steam-powered hammer to dig a tunnel through a mountain.

This story comes from the fear people had--in the late 1800s--that they would be replaced by machines.

Human beings have had a strange relationship with machines ever since we started to use them. We build them to make our lives easier, but then we worry that they will replace us. The Terminator taps into the very same fear. It's just dressed up in new clothes.


Everything is a Remix Part 1 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.

Here's the key to being original--be good and be true to yourself. Originality is often tied to the idea of style. Will Eisner said that style is what happens as a result of how one solves problems. Style is not something you have to force or invent--it comes out of you because you yourself are unique.



It's amazing what happens when you rid yourself of the burden of being original. You can breathe easier and get down the business of doing good work.

If you do this and you do work that matters to you, and if you say the things that matter to you sometimes you will hit on a new way to combine old ideas. But only in a way that serves your point--only as a result of how you solve problems. Originality is not the goal--it is the product of doing great work.

There is only one you. Originality rises from that. Now that you understand all you need to about that. Worry about being good, and let originality take care of itself.

The Rabbit Doesn't Always Win

Last weekend I guest lectured for some friends who co-teach a screenwriting class and something came up that I see happen a lot. As I taught/spoke, I could see people were working very hard to “get it.” They felt like they had to understand what I was talking about right then and there.

One of the things that teaching has done for me is make me a better student, because I see where others get blocked and know to look out for those things in myself. Our system of education reinforces the idea that if you get things quickly you are a better learner than those who don’t. This makes us afraid to struggle with a concept. We are afraid of the headache that comes from wrestling with an idea. If it doesn’t come quickly we blame ourselves--and sometimes the teacher. But sometimes we just need more time with an idea.

I’m not sure if I should say this, but the truth is the students who “get it” quickly usually don’t “get it” very well at all. This is not a sprint, it’s a marathon.

When people think they understand a new concept right away, they stop looking at it--they never get past the most superficial understanding of it. But anything worth learning is multi-layered. Often these are things that seem, on their surface, to be very simple, even simplistic. I promise you that it is these simple ideas that yield the most knowledge. Like a Zen parable these simple ideas can be pondered for years and can lead to profound understandings.

But if you think you “got it,” you will never look any deeper. Sometimes, people cut me off when I am talking to let me know that they “get it” and I can move on. Later these people struggle the most.

I sometimes hand out a list of films for people to watch, and almost always someone tells me that they don’t need to see the films on the list because they have seen them before. My class is all about teaching students to look at things differently--to see differently. I often show film clips from movies they are intimately familiar with, and like a magic trick I reveal to them aspects of the film that they had never noticed before. Not unimportant minutia, but things of substance that they wonder how they ever missed. I sometimes see people’s mouths drop at the revelations. It is these same people, however, who will say of my viewing list that they do not need to see the films.

The people who struggle are trying to see all aspects of the new idea. They are working harder and get more out of it in the end.

I remind students and former students of this all the time--always be a student. Once you think you “get it” you stop learning. So, even when it has been months or years since you’ve had a big epiphany, if you keep looking profound things will reveal themselves to you. It may take a while, but like I said, this is a marathon.

If none of this makes sense to you, just think about it for a while--you’ll get it.

Here There Be Monsters

One of the most common things I hear from people who object to learning, or having others learn, story structure is that the writing becomes stiff and mechanical. They are right. I will not argue with them about that.

This argument, however, is made primarily by those who have a hard time understanding and applying story structure and it is convenient to say that it makes their work mechanical.

Yet, this is true of the process of learning anything. Most people who learn to play the piano start with the simple tune "Chopsticks" and move on to something like "Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star." When they are first learning these songs, they do not produce anything that sound very much like music. It's more like a series of unrelated notes. But sure enough, after much practice, the notes begin to sound more and more like an actual song. And some of these people go on to play, or create, great music.

Why would this be any different from learning to structure a story? It isn't. When one is learning story structure, one's writing goes from clumsy and clunky to effortless-seeming. There is still effort, but those early lessons have moved into the subconscious. You learn these things so deeply after years of practice that you take for granted that you know them.

I remember trying to learn the guitar years ago. I remember how hard it was to make my fingers do the right things. And I had to think so hard about where to place my fingers. It was not fun and it was not music. But people who stick with it learn so well where their fingers go that it recedes to the back of their minds.

This is where you want to get with writing and constructing stories. You have to be prepared to be bad. I tell my students that they have to love this enough to be bad at it.

And that is why I can't play a musical instrument. I did not love it enough to be bad at it. I didn't like that the guitar made my fingers hurt, or that what I was playing sounded like mistakes. I wanted to make music, but I wasn't willing to do the work it takes to make music.

I'm reminded of an early art teacher for the late great animation director Chuck Jones, who was fond of telling his students that they all had 100,000 bad drawings inside them and the sooner they got them out the better.

If you have acquired any kind of mastery of some skill, chances are you did not start off great. You may have, if you were, lucky had a natural talent for this thing. But talent only takes you so far and soon enough you hit the edge of your natural abilities. I have seen many, many people stop at that edge afraid to go over. This is like an old-fashioned sailor's map which read of unknown areas,"Here there be monsters." It's the edge of the world.

But if you sail beyond that edge there is a new world. This is where you learn to appreciate the challenges that come with an opportunity to learn and to grow.

Don't be afraid to be bad at this for a while. Don't be afraid to sail off the earth you know. There are no monsters here.

Movies I Like: It's a Wonderful Life

There are some films we have that are respected and less loved, and some that are beloved and less respected. Citizen Kane, for instance, is respected but not beloved like The Wizard of Oz. A few (very few) are both loved and respected—Casablanca is a prime example.
As a rule, films that make us think are respected while those that make us feel are beloved. Film scholars and critics mostly keep the respected films alive. But those films that are beloved are kept alive by the public — a public that cares little about the use of a deep-focus technique or reflections in windows. A public that has never heard the term mise-en-scene.

I have great respect for films and filmmakers who make us feel or, god forbid, entertain. Critics would have us believe that this is an easy task, and not a very noble one. As a society, we tend to regard emotions as secondary to intellect.

Scholars and critics dismiss those films that move us in favor of those that bore and confuse us. They would have us believe that any hack can make their point clearly and move people in the process—but that it that takes a real genius to make us scratch our heads and wonder what we’ve just seen.
My argument is that any child could make something that is difficult to understand, but it takes someone with a full command of craft to communicate effectively and move people.

One of my all-time favorite films is one of these films that is beloved rather than respected: It’s a Wonderful Life. This is an amazing piece of filmmaking, as good as anyone has ever produced. Do not hold it against it that people actually watch and enjoy this film.

What’s so great about It’s a Wonderful Life? Everything. The script is amazing. And although director Frank Capra is known for sappy films, the film also delves into some dark places that most modern films seldom go.


The story is amazingly focused. When it starts there are voices praying for George Bailey (Jimmy Stewart). Someone says that he needs help and mentions that he never thinks of himself. This is the heart of the film.

In the film George Bailey is, from the time he is a boy, a person who dreams of traveling the world, but every time he is about to leave his sleepy town something comes up to stop him. The truth is he is not stuck, he chooses to stay. Why? Because as one of the first sentences in the film states—he never think about himself.

Selflessness has been the mark of a hero as long as human beings have told stories. It is this selflessness that keeps George Bailey in this town. It is also George’s selflessness that makes him a person liked by everyone in town. (Watch the film carefully and see just how many times George could leave his sleepy town if he just thought of himself before others.)

The villain, Potter, thinks only of himself and he is hated by the townspeople—and the audience. Villains have been selfish as long as there have been stories.

There is even a great scene where George is tempted to cross over to “the dark side.” He is offered everything he wants and all he has to do is think about himself for once in his life. All he has to do is be a little selfish and he can have everything he wants.  But George, good to his core, rejects this deal with the devil.

This story is all at once mythical and human. We understand George Bailey’s frustration at not getting the things he wants in life because we all feel this frustration. He wants a better house, a better car; he wants to travel the world. But when he is given the chance to have these things, he turns them down each and every time because that is the nature of heroism—selflessness. We wonder if we could be as strong—we hope that we could be.


Not only is the story worth telling, but also it is well told. The filmmaking is as good as anyone’s. People don’t pay much attention to Carpra’s incredible filmmaking, but this is because they are sucked into the film emotionally.

Watch the scene where George decides to let his brother take a great job rather than stay stuck in their little town. The scene is all played on Jimmy Stewart’s face. You see his whole world crumble. Not many directors would have allowed that huge event to happen in such a small way.


This film as worthy of study as anything made by John Ford, Orson Wells, Akira Kurosawa, or anyone else. Making people feel is not a lesser form of art than making people think, and communicating clearly is not more easily done than confusing them.

Over the generations since its release It’s a Wonderful Life has become a beloved family classic. But it should also be respected as a stunning piece of craftsmanship and art.

One-trick Pony

"Overall theme leads to character and then on to plot" -- Rod Serling





There are two things that inexperienced screenwriters talk about ceaselessly--dialogue and the twist ending. The twist ending is the Holy Grail for the new or inexperienced writer.

Younger writers think a twist is the end-all be-all is because it is writing that can be seen, writing that can be noticed. Young writers don't speak of brilliantly constructed scenes that are seamlessly woven into the theme. Nor do they notice the work that well-constructed dialogue can do other than being clever. They don't comment on how well a piece of exposition was hidden in natural-sounding dialogue. Or just how efficiently an aspect of character was revealed through dialogue. No, they only see the obviously witty, smart or funny dialogue that may or may not serve any purpose beyond being attention-getting.

But it is the twist ending that almost all amateurs recognize as "good writing." I went through this phase myself as a teenager in the '70s and '80s. The twist ending was the first thing I learned to write fairly well. It was like a magic trick. And it did get me attention.

Rod Serling, the creator of The Twilight Zone, was my first big writing influence. He is in essence my artistic father--and he was the undisputed king of the twist ending. I studied his work and learned.

What did I learn? That the best episodes of his show (most, but not all, written by him) all had a point that the ending helped to prove. The twist was not random--it did come out of nowhere. It was integral to the telling of the story. The twist was really nothing more than an exclamation point at the end of the story.

Most inexperienced writers think they can just tack a twist ending on to a story. Not so. The ending must be a payoff to a set-up, and is strongest when it does more than just surprise. Think of it like this--someone can leap out from around a corner and scare you because they have surprised you. This works, but it is a cheap way to get a reaction.

Now imagine someone tells you a joke. A joke is a story with a surprise ending, but the surprise is not cheap because everything has been set up for the punch line. Everything leading to the punch line supports that punch line.

I’m one of the few people who hasn’t liked any of M. Night Shayamalan’s films--this includes the beloved The Sixth Sense (no letters, please). I told people at the time that film came out that he would never make a film that people liked as much.

How did I know that? Because his ending didn’t matter. Yes, Bruce Willis was dead the whole time and it was a surprise for most, but it didn’t really matter. The story itself would be more or less the same without it. It proved nothing. I knew then that M. Night Shayamalan was no Rod Serling. Not even close.

Let’s look at the original Planet of the Apes movie written by Rod Serling and Michael Wilson--probably one of the best-loved twist endings in film history. In a nutshell: An astronaut crash lands on an unknown planet populated by intelligent talking apes and brutish human beings. He escapes the apes only to find of that he is not on a faraway planet, but Earth.



But here’s the deal--at the opening of the film the astronaut, who thinks he is returning to his home planet after being away for hundreds of years, wonders if humanity is just as self-destructive as they were when he left. When he lands on the “foreign” planet the apes see him as an evil presence. They see him as destructive and brutish just like the other humans on the planet. The astronaut is forced to defend humanity. He is even put on trial simply for being human.

When he escapes the apes he finds the Statue of Liberty buried in the sand, apparently in the aftermath of a nuclear war.

This ending shocked audiences, because they did not see it coming. But it was the answer to the first question asked by the film--Are human beings still self-destructive creatures? The statue answered that question. It becomes a cautionary tale, warning us of our animal nature.

This is the way Rod Serling wrote--with a point. M. Night Shayamalan does not and that’s what I saw when I saw The Sixth Sense. He only writes for the twist and the concept. But neither the concept nor the endings are in service of a bigger idea. Until he figures this out it is unlikely that he will repeat the success of The Sixth Sense.



Everything you do when writing a story should be in service to that story. Know what you are trying to say and say it. Say it in the most engaging and entertaining way you can, but don’t write an entire story just because you think you have a great twist. If you do you are likely to become a one-trick pony.

Yet another movie I like—The Apartment

"The best director is the one you don't see." -- Billy Wilder

Someone asked me today why I like older movies better than new ones. This is not an easy question to answer to everyone’s satisfaction, but I will give it a try. They’re better.

This is not to say that all old films are great, but they are better on the whole. The level of storycraft in the older films is higher. It just is and as further proof I give you another example of a film I like—The Apartment.

Anyone who talks to me for about 30 seconds finds out that Billy Wilder is my favorite filmmaker. He understood how to tell a story as well as anyone in cinema ever has.

What makes him so good? No fat. Everything matters. He writes with the steady hand of a master surgeon. He is always advancing, plot, character, or theme. Sometimes all three.

He once boasted that there was never a phony shot in any of his movies. What he meant is that he never put his camera anywhere where it didn’t help to tell the story. He was not a show-off—he was a craftsman and a storyteller.

Just as with his camera shot choices he also never had a phony scene, sequence, character, or line. Everything matters. Every choice is made in the service of the story. No fat. Nothing phony.

So many modern-day filmmakers are trying so hard to be noticed. The shots are there to be noticed. The characters are there to be noticed. The editing is there to be noticed. It all has the effect of pulling us out if the story rather than pulling us in. All phony. All fat.



Wilder had a highly successful screenwriter career where he honed his storycraft before becoming a director. The story was always paramount with him. I tell my students that you are not the master of your story, but a slave to it. You must do what it needs, not what you want.

On the surface The Apartment is about a man who lets the higher-ups in his office use his apartment to have adulterous affairs, and how he falls in love with one of the women. But there is a deeper story about two people who learn to value themselves enough to stop prostituting themselves.

It is a marvel of construction and the more you learn about story construction, the more you will marvel.

The film is a film made by a man at the top of his craft. In the 100-plus years that people have been making movies few have made one as good as The Apartment.

Do yourself a favor and see this film.

By the way, here are some screenwriting tips from Billy Wilder* himself:
1. The audience is fickle.
2. Grab ‘em by the throat and never let ‘em go.
3. Develop a clean line of action for your leading character.
4. Know where you’re going.
5. The more subtle and elegant you are in hiding your plot points, the better you are as a writer.
6. If you have a problem with the third act, the real problem is in the first act.
7. A tip from Lubitsch: Let the audience add up two plus two. They’ll love you forever.
8. In doing voice-overs, be careful not to describe what the audience already sees. Add to what they’re seeing.
9. The event that occurs at the second act curtain triggers the end of the movie.
10. The third act must build, build, build in tempo and action until the last event, and then—that’s it. Don’t hang around.
* Via Conversations with Wilder by Cameron Crowe

My bad play and what it taught me

“Never bore people.”--Billy Wilder

When I was in the 8th grade I was a big Star Trek fan. At that time there was no movie and no Next Generation–just the original Trek in reruns, and the cartoon series that got me hooked in the first place.

Anyway, the show was, and continues to be, a big influence on my writing.

Back then I was in a drama class and we had to write a short play and perform it for parents.
I decided to write a Star Trek episode. I had so much fun writing the episode: Here I was, able to put words in the mouths of characters I loved so much. The script just spilled out of me, it was so easy to write. And like I said, it was fun, really fun, to do.

I turned in my script and parts were assigned to my fellow thespians. I, of course, played the captain, which was also fun. We rehearsed it. It was even more fun to see the thing come to life.

So the big night came when it was time to put on the show for the parents. We had our lines memorized and our cool, retro-1960s costumes on as we waited in the wings to go out there and share all this fun with the people in the audience.

It was time. The curtain rose and we started to put on what I thought was the best episode of Start Trek ever.  We were putting our all into it. And, yes, we were having lots of fun. How could you not have fun playing Kirk–out there on the stage “Kirking” it up.


Then it happened–I looked out in the crowd and saw someone’s dad nodding off. He was trying to stay awake, but it was a Herculean task for the poor man. His head would fall slowly until his chin was on his chest, and then he would jerk it up again with his wide open. But in a few moments his head would fall again.

All I could think is, “How can he be bored?” The show had been so much fun to write and perform, how could it not be just as much fun to watch?

I learned a very important lesson that night–just because it was fun for you to create doesn’t mean that it will be fun for your audience to watch.  I was lucky to learn this lesson young. Some people never learn it. They get so caught up in their creative world that the audience is an afterthought. They may also have a tendency to blame the audience in a very sour grapes way. They say things like, “They're not smart enough to get it,” or “I’m ahead of my time.”

This thinking does nothing to help you master your craft. It is not selling out to attempt to communicate with your audience. It has become an artistic crime to strive to communicate clearly with all of one’s audience. People will say that it is pandering. They will say that it is appealing to the lowest common denominator. They tend to think that a boring, confusing movie is better than one where the audience is moved and engaged emotionally. For them, it is the highest form of art to have people scratching their heads when they walk away.

I have never understood why people think it takes great craftsmanship to confuse and/or bore the audience. If this is the case, I mastered script writing my first time out. If that dad in the audience is any indication, I was an 8th grade genius.

The truth is that it is very hard to make yourself understood. I was at a book reading at a bookstore a while ago, and someone asked the author why she didn’t write more books. She said, “It takes a long time to write something that is easy to read."

Every time I sit down to write something I think of that dad jerking his head up as he fought off sleep. It keeps me honest. It keeps me from being self-indulgent. It keeps the audience in my head. I try to view the piece through their eyes instead of just my own.

I’m not saying that I never bored anybody, I’m just saying I try hard not to.
All writers should be so lucky as to stand before an audience and bore them to sleep with their precious words. It was painful and embarrassing, but I sure am glad it happened.

Another Movie I Like: 12 Angry Men

“I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.”--ROD SERLING, Los Angeles Times, 1967

I had a student once who would always ask me what films I liked. He was confused as to why I almost never liked anything new. I did what I always do and I talked about craft and the lack of craft of those writers and director making films today.

So the student asked me to name films that I liked and why I think they were so much better. I listed a few and asked him if he had ever seen 12 Angry Men. He hadn’t. I told him that is was well-written and well-directed, entertaining, engaging and smart. It is a combination that is almost never seen any more. I said to this student, “I just want to go to the theater and see 12 Angry Men.”

I meant of course that I want to see its equivalent a movie that is both meaningful and entertaining. Both emotional and important.

This student, unlike most, took it upon himself to watch 12 Angry Men and the next time I saw him he said, “I just want to go to the theater and see 12 Angry Men.”

This, like Paper Moon, is one of those films that I wished I’d made. One of these days if I study really hard maybe I can write something as well as Reginald Rose wrote this piece.

I’ve said it before but those guys knew what they were doing back then. They felt both a social responsibility to tell stories that were relevant as well as feeling a responsibility to engage an audience.

My pet theory, which I cannot back up in any way, is that the writers who fought in World War II felt a real responsibility to their friends who had died on the field. They saw just how inhumane human beings could be to one another and they wanted to remind us to be as good as we could be. To be as fair and compassionate as we could be.

It is all over my hero Rod Serling’s work.

But at the same time they strove to teach, not preach. Drama is a way of getting an intellectual idea across on an emotional level.

12 Angry Men is a story that says that each of our voices matters--that because of our personalities and experiences we can all bring something to the table. It is a story that says we all have value.



It also shows how our prejudices can blind us and how foolish it is to stick to them despite all evidence to the contrary.

12 Angry Men is a masterpiece, plan and simple. It is a lean drama stripped to its essence, all the fat trimmed off.

Do yourself a favor and look past your own prejudices of style, or what you think of black and white film, or old acting styles and see what’s underneath all of that. Treat yourself to the rare experience of both feeling and thinking as you watch a film.

See 12 Angry Men.

Movies I like

"I know a woman who looks like a bullfrog but that don't mean she's the damn thing's mother." -- Moses Pray (Paper Moon)

Anyone who speaks to me for more than five minutes knows that I think that this time we are living in is the worst time in the history of American film. In fact, I did write about it in two other posts. So if you’d like more details you should look at those.

I will say that I am not alone in my assessment: legendary screenwriter William Goldman says the very same thing. And so does filmmaker Alexander Payne. In fact, Payne dates the demise of American film around the same time I do—around 1982.
This does not mean that there have not been good films since 1982, but it was the last great film year:

• E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial
• Tootsie
• The Verdict
• Gandhi

These films were all released in 1982. If just two films of that quality came out this year I’d be amazed. These movies were all huge hits and all very different—there was also more diversity of subject matter back then.

Anyway, whenever I get on my soapbox about this someone always asks me what films I like. I answer with a few names of classic films and they will (always!) interrupt and say, “Yeah, but what have you liked lately?” The answer is not much. Some years it’s nothing. There was a level of story craftsmanship in older films that is almost nonexistent today—outside of Pixar.

But because people always want to know what I like and why I like it I’ve decided to recommend a film every now and then.

Some of you who read this blog are younger and have a problem with older films. The acting styles are different, the color may appear strange or, god forbid, is nonexistent. The music cues may seem over the top by today’s standards. The special effects may be corny because your eye is used to CGI.

I’m going to ask you to try to look beyond all of that to see the craft underneath. I want you to see the craft that transcends style and taste. I want you to see the quantifiable quality of these films.

I will start with a film I wish I had made—Paper Moon.

Released in 1973 and directed by Peter Bogdanovich, this film is one of my all-time favorites. Nothing like it is made today. It was written by Alvin Sargent, who wrote Spider-Man 2. And actress Tatum O'Neal became the youngest person ever to win an Oscar. She still is. When you see the film you’ll know why.

What does the film do well? Everything. The big question is what makes a father: biology, or loving and taking responsibility for a child? You will see that right away the question of parentage comes up in the very first scene and it never stops. The film never forgets what it’s about. Listen to see how often it comes up blatantly or in more subtle ways, like how alike the “father” and child are. Also look for great visual storytelling. See how much is told with pictures and not words—first class screenwriting.

In this film you care about the characters and what happens to them. Films today don’t make you feel as much as they make you think. We seem to have made a collective decision that thinking is better than feeling. But sometimes the emotion of a situation is the truth of a situation.

Nowadays when I ask people if they liked a current film they say, “Yeah? It was good? I liked it.” They are tentative when they speak. The film may have made them think, but they felt nothing. They are afraid that they may say the wrong thing and say they liked a film that is not “smart” enough.

When Paper Moon came out people liked it. Period. And they weren’t afraid to say it. They said, “It’s great, you should see it!”—the same way they were later with Jaws and The Godfather.

Unlike many, many films today Paper Moon does not rely on a gimmick that pulls you out of the film. You will not have to have read the book. You will not have to have to go to a website to find information on something you didn’t understand. You will not have to know that there is a special shot in the film that no one had ever done before. You will simply have a great time and you will be moved.

Today, they may make hits, but they almost never make classics.

Enjoy Paper Moon.

Two Questions That Drive Me Crazy

First some backstory:

When I was a kid there were no VCRs. Only rich people had them; they were still rare for the rest of us. I desperately wanted to see my favorite television shows over and over again, but there was no way to do it. So I used a cassette recorder to record the shows’ audio. I would listen to them in bed when I was supposed to be asleep. This was during the ages of ten, eleven and twelve.

I was a kid obsessed with movies and television and how stories were put together. I needed to know what made a story work. After listening to my recordings of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, and reruns of The Twilight Zone and others, I began to see patterns. I didn’t yet know the terms for three-act structure and had never heard of Aristotle, but I knew that the first part of a story was a set-up for what was going to come later. And that there needed to be some kind of conclusion where it all paid off.

When I was a little older I found out where I could get screenplays. I got them and read them until I could see the patterns there as well. By the time I started to read books on screenwriting they were just confirming, and putting labels on, things I had already observed on my own.

Later, when there were VCRs, I watched movies and studied them over and over again so that I would understand the visual language of film. I checked out a 16mm projector from the public library along with old silent movies, and projected them from my room onto the side of a white house next door.

I made my first film when I was ten; I met a kid who had a Super 8 camera. All I remember thinking at the time was, “Finally, I’m getting to make a film!” This was something I had wanted to do since I was five, and found out you could do such a thing.

When I was thirteen I saw that there was a listing for motion pictures in my local phone book so I started calling people and asking questions. That got me my first after-school job as an assistant animation camera operator for a man named Bruce Walters, who taught me things I use to this day.

Why this trip down memory lane? Because I have two pet peeves.

I am often asked by beginners which screenwriting software I use. All I can think is that this is the last thing they need to worry about. They never ask if they have the skill or talent to write a screenplay. Writing screenplays is a lot of work and the more you understand how to do it the harder it gets.

But software is always the first question people ask nowadays. They will not put in the time and effort to hone their craft, but they will plop down a couple hundred bucks on a program that makes their jumble of ideas look like a screenplay.

Sure, every now and then an ex-stripper decides to write a movie and hits the big time. But more often then not I’m guessing that someone starts off wanting to be a screenwriter and ends up a stripper–not the other way around. This is a tough business and it helps to study the craft.

The other question has to do with passion.

I often find myself speaking or teaching a class where I tell people that if they want to write screenplays they should read screenplays. I am surprised how few people bother to read things written in the form they profess they want to work in. So I say, “Read screenplays.” The response that always comes back, “Where do you get screenplays?”

I got my hands screenplays in the ‘70s and early ‘80s when they were much harder, not to say impossible, to find. Back then not everyone wanted to write movies, so not many people sold screenplays. Now you can get them everywhere.

“Where do we get screenplays?” may sound like an innocent question, but what it really says that the person is unwilling to put any effort into learning their craft. Not even the effort it takes to type “screenplay” into a search engine. C’mon, people.

I once asked a group if they would like to sell a script for a million dollars. They did. “Well,” I told them, “if you want to sell something for a million dollars you have to do a million dollars worth of work.”

No program will help you write better and a “good idea” is not just proper formatting away from being a hit screenplay. If you want to write screenplays you have to read screenplays. If you feel you have nothing to learn, then you have no idea how much you really don’t know. (If you feel you just have a few things to learn, you also have no idea how much you need to learn.)

But when you sit down to write a screenplay and are gripped with fear and insecurity, when you feel you know nothing, when you know what you don’t know, and you can see there is a mountain you must climb ahead of you—then you are on your way to becoming a screenwriter.

There is only one way to scale this mountain — study your craft. Be a ravenous consumer of information. You can start right now by typing “screenplays” into Google.

And please never ask me those questions again.

The Perfect Solution

I would like to take back the word “perfectionist.” Let’s start by assuming that perfection is something we can actually attain. For instance, some people say that people there is no such thing as a perfect circle, but, for all practical purposes, there is. Let’s call this perfect. Near perfect is perfect.

Why am I defining perfection? Because I have seen many screenwriters and others use unattainable perfection as a false goal that allows them to procrastinate. How many of you have been working on “that project” for years? Chances are you are afraid to move forward because when the project is done it will not be “perfect.”

Ultimately you’re afraid of judgment—your own or someone else’s. Someone may see your mistakes and you will be confronted with your shortcomings. As long as the project exists only in your head, it is an uncompromised ideal.

Perfection is a way not to finish. It is a way not to make decisions, because you might make the wrong decision. It is a way not to be judged. But being judged is a part of being an artist. If you are unwilling to take this risk, you are not an artist.

If you do the best job you possibly can, then by definition you can do no better. This is when you stop, because this is as close as any of us get to perfection.

I have a friend, Pat Hazell, who is a writer. He talks about it like this. He says that people will start a script, and maybe get ten pages in before they go back to perfect those pages, then back again to perfect those pages. And as he puts it, “They think they’re writing.”

This quest for the unattainable creates the illusion of progression without the results. In his novel The Plague, Albert Camus created a would-be novelist, Joseph Grand, who ceaselessly revised his first sentence, never getting beyond it.





The thing to remember is that all artists share this fear that they will produce crap that everyone hates. Usually, only the worst artists do not have this fear.

Years ago I was at Comic-con in San Diego with my friend Brian O’Connell. Brian is an illustrator and director over at Lucasfilm working on the Star Wars’ Clone Wars television show. But at the time he was just a guy trying to break into comics who was being passed over by no-nothing comic book editors who could not see his talent.

One person who could see his talent was comic artist Mike Mignola. Mike saw Brian’s work and was so impressed that he showed us some pages for his new comic book called Hellboy, which no one had heard of yet. Mike had not even finished the first book. Brian and I were blown away. These were truly beautiful pages.

Brian thought he’d make a joke and said with a straight face, “You need to work on your proportions.”
Mike got a sheepish look on his face and said, “Yeah, I know.” Brian had to explain that he was just joking and that the pages were amazing.

Even Mike Mignola, who is very, very good, has his doubts about his work. But this doubt does not stop him from creating. Don’t let it stop you. Understand that the imperfect work you produce is far better than the perfect work that lives only in your head. Sit down and get it done.

If you work hard the next thing will be better and the next thing will be better still. Which is perfect.

Our Very Own Library of Alexandria

The Library of Alexandria was the largest library in the ancient world. The aim of this ancient Egyptian library was to collect the world’s knowledge. It was said that when foreign ships came into port that their books, and all written material was confiscated, copied, and returned to its owners.

The library was tragically destroyed in a fire. Scholars still lament the loss of this vast repository of knowledge. What would we know if we had this ancient information at our fingertips?

I am old enough to remember the advent of the VCR. The idea that you could tape a show and watch it later or keep it forever was amazing. But even more amazing was the idea that you could watch whatever movie you wanted when you wanted. For a boy like me, who had wanted since the age of five to be a filmmaker, this was not a mere piece of technology, but a gift from the gods.

When Orson Welles wanted to learn how to make films, he screened John Ford’s film Stage Coach over and over again. Before the VCR this required a film print and projector. For most people this was cost prohibitive. Other students of film would have to sit through multiple screenings of a movie in order to study it. And in those days when a film left the theater that was it. There was no cable. There was no VCR, DVD, or Blu-ray. When a film was gone, it was gone. If you were lucky, you might see it on TV. But even then it would be cut up to make it family-friendly and to allow for commercials.

But with the VCR, any young student of film could do just what Orson Wells did. I dreamed how the VCR would advance the craft of filmmaking, because now we all had the history of film at our disposal.

Think of it: the history of film is just over a hundred years old and much of the best work by the best filmmakers in history is available to us. This is our library of Alexandria.

Our teachers can be Eisenstein, Griffith, Chaplin, Keaton, Capra, Ford, Kurasawa, Hawks, Welles, Lean, Wilder, Hitchcock, Wellman, Wyler, Houston, Stevens, Lumet, Ritt, Cukor, Kazan, Bergman, Pollack, Peckinpah, Donen, Logan, Rydell, Le Roy, Forman, Preminger, Penn, Milestone, Minnelli, Kramer, Wise, Lang, Ashby, Zinnemann, Hiller, Vidor, Milestone, Lubitsch and countless more.

Yet I am constantly amazed, talking to younger film students, to find that they have seen almost no classic cinema. They are put off by black-and-white photography or some other superficial quality of older films. Are you going to let something so small stop you from learning from the best? People who study physics still study Newton and Einstein. They understand and respect what those who came before have something to teach them.


Historic 2018Blockbuster2019 Store Offers Glimpse Of How Movies Were Rented In The Past

The Library of Alexandria still has something to teach us: we cannot take for granted the vast store of knowledge we have at our disposal. As filmmakers, why not take the opportunity to learn from those who came before us? It is the best way to go further than they did.

Bad Shark, Good Movie

Back in the days before CGI, my roommate was a special effects makeup artist. At that time I had a few friends in this field. There was an ongoing argument that I would have with my creature-making friends about Yoda and E.T., back when both of these characters were make of rubber. They were really just suffocated puppets.

My roommate’s view was that both E.T. and Yoda were poorly sculpted. It bothered him that Yoda looked like puppet. Now, he may have been correct. But it doesn’t matter.

Jaws was released in 1975 and the shark looked like a big rubber piece of crap. This did not prevent the film from becoming the first summer blockbuster, one of the highest-grossing films of all time, and a bona fide classic.

How did this happen? Spielberg and editor Dede Allen kept the shark off-camera as much as possible (partly because the thing didn’t work). This allowed the audience to use their imaginations. Not a bad strategy.

They also told a good story and created characters that we cared about. This is a novel idea in today’s Hollywood, but it used to be standard practice. Creating compelling characters and putting them in a story for an audience to be invested in produces the illusion of life better than any computer imagery ever could.

Yes, the audience could see that Yoda was a puppet, but they were so interested in this unusual character that they allowed themselves to be “fooled” into believing he was a living, breathing being.

E.T. was another example of a puppet (albeit a sophisticated puppet) that people believed was a creature with feelings, dreams and motivations. When I saw the film in 1982 I don’t remember a single person in the audience saying that the puppet was poorly sculpted. People cried when E.T. “died” and cheered when he was revived.

With all due respect to Carlo Rambaldi who built E.T., the first step in making E.T. live was writing the script. Melissa Mathison made the alien come alive on the page. She constructed a story that made us sympathize with a fictional alien when he was left behind on a planet not his own. Her words made us both happy and sad when E.T. went back home.

Today we could arguably make a “better looking” E.T., but would he would not be any more believable. In recent years we have spent a lot of effort trying to make creatures look more real. Maybe they do. But they don’t feel more real. No one cries when they die.

Our job as storytellers is to make characters as real as possible, so that people can suspend disbelief. Our job is to make it so bits of rubber or bits of digital information can live in the minds of the audience. When I was a kid there were few television stars as big as Ms. Piggy and Kermit the Frog. By no standards do these characters look realistic. They do, however, live as far as the audience is concerned.

For thousands of years people have imbued puppets with emotion and feeling. The puppets can be crude or sophisticated, it makes little difference. If the story is relevant and well-told, people will believe even a sock puppet can talk.

My hope is that Hollywood will once again concentrate on story and storytelling, instead of empty spectacle, because this is not what pulls us into the film experience. No, it is character and story that does that. If they get that right we will fear a rubber shark, cry for a dead alien, even worry about a digital fish lost in the big ocean.



No matter how much better technology gets, it will not improve on good story-craft. Make your characters live on the page and they will live on the screen.

The Best Writing Advice I Ever Got

One thousand years ago, when I was a teenager, I went a sci-fi convention in Seattle. This was probably 1978 or ’79. In those days these kinds of conventions were only attended by hardcore geeks (called nerds in those days) who were on the fringe on society. Big movie stars did not go to these events. The biggest star at this convention was the actor who played Boomer on the original Battlestar Galactica.

In attendance were a smattering of comic book creators. And it was while sitting in on a panel with these creators that I heard the best piece of writing advice I have ever heard to this day.

I can’t remember who the writer was, though it may have been Steve Englehart, who I met at that convention and still talk to from time to time.

Whoever it was listened to a story pitch from the crowd and gave back this golden nugget, “If you have a Batman story and you can turn it into a Superman story, it isn’t a very good Batman story”.

That was it, that was the advice. I use this advice whenever I write.

Some of you will think this is nothing special. Too simplistic. But the mistake of not making a story character specific is one of the most common mistakes that I see writers make. It may be simple advice, but few people know it or use it.

First you must understand that all plot and character are linked. They are one and the same – one does not exist without the other. “Character driven” is how people describe a story that has no plot, but is just an observation of people behaving. There is a reason that this type of story reaches a small audience and is boring to most people. Nothing happens.

On the other end of the spectrum is the story that uses characters that are simply buffeted around by the story. Things happen to them – character and plot are not really intertwined. These stories may excite people, but have little or no emotional impact on us.

It is the combination of plot and character that makes a story sing. You cannot remove Hamlet from Hamlet and replace him with King Lear. Those characters and plots are unified into a single entity.

In Finding Nemo, Marlin is an over protective father who is afraid of the big bad ocean. What happens? His overprotective nature pushes his son to take risks he might not otherwise take, resulting in him being taken away. This means Marlin must face his fear and search the ocean looking for his lost boy.

See how the character is interlocked with the story? They are not separate things.

Characters create plot through their actions or lack thereof. And these actions are driven by the hopes, fears, strengths, weaknesses, desires, loves, hates or insecurities of these characters. It is how these characters confront or avoid these things that creates drama in your stories.

In the film The Wizard of Oz, Dorothy is not simply a girl who is taken to a faraway land by a twister. No, she is a girl who dreams of life away from her farm. She wants to be somewhere far away. It is this Dorothy who is swept away by the tornado, only to find that she wants nothing more than to go home.

Here again, story and character are linked.

Ask yourself when you write, “Why this character for this story?” Make sure one cannot exist with the other. Can you plug in any generic character to your story? Character and plot are respectively the body and soul of stories – the yin and yang. Make sure you don’t have a Batman story that can just as easily be a Superman story.

If you follow this piece of advice, the quality of your work will be consistent and appeal to more people.

Water Shortage

Several years ago I wrote a script that had as one of its elements an army of ghosts. Everyone who read the screenplay swore it would sell for big money, and that it was the best screenplay I had written up to that point. I was really proud of this script myself; I felt that I had nailed this story and its treatment.

But when I showed the screenplay to my agent at the time, he looked as if he had smelled some sour milk. His comment was, "Dead people walking around – that's like Scooby-Doo. Don't they have dead people walking around?" He looked at me like I was a moron.

I was stunned. This was a fairly serious script; the ghosts were treated as a real threat. There was nothing there remotely like Scooby-Doo. (The cartoon, I mean. This was before the live action movie.)

But let me put this in context for you: this was years before Sixth Sense, and Hollywood hadn't yet rediscovered the power of the supernatural.

For a while, I was baffled as to why my screenplay made my agent think of a cartoon show. Then it hit me – he had no better reference for dead people walking around.

That's when I realized that imagination is like a reservoir: you can take out only what you have put in.


Everything is a Remix Part 2 from Kirby Ferguson on Vimeo.


I grew up reading comics, watching the Twilight Zone, Star Trek and The Outer Limits. I had also had books full of art by fantasy artists like Frank Frazetta. My mind was full of fantastic images and stories. This was the reservoir from which I drew. It was all of these things I took in that allowed me to create my own stories with their own realities.

My agent had a much more limited palette, so for him dead people equaled Scooby-Doo. He had no other reference point.

I tell you this story because I have a hard time getting some of my students to watch older films or films outside a particular genre. But these things are ways of filling one's reservoir. It will give you more colors to paint with, so to speak, and demonstrate that there can be many different treatments for the same idea.

Look at Batman. There is the 1960s camp version. There is Tim Burton's version from the '80s, which was inspired by Frank Miller's treatment of the character in The Dark Knight comic book. And there is the current film treatment by Christopher Nolan, which, I'm sure owes much to the Frank Miller/David Mazzucchelli take on the character in their comic book mini-series Batman Year One. That book treated the character in a more realistic fashion than others had.




My point is that there are an infinite number of possibilities when it comes to how a story, or character can be imagined. But your ideas are limited to your life experiences and the books, movies, television show, music and other art that you take in. So do what you can to experience more because, again, your imagination is a reservoir. The more you put in, the more you can take out later on.