It's Only Temporary: The Good News and the Bad News of Being Alive by Evan Handler
Authors: Evan Handler
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one of the facets of my personality that’s stood in the way of my enjoying greater success. It’s possible Tim didn’t know what he wanted on any particular day, either. Maybe his personal assistant was like TiVo. The more she was exposed to his preferences, the more accurate became her future predictions. A nifty feature.
By relieving himself of the duties most people have to slog through before even beginning their day’s work, he’d freed himself up to be able to concentrate on whatever he chose. He used his time to read and educate himself in regard to filmmaking principles and theories. Of course, few things are more tedious, or perhaps even dangerous, than a person who’s come to view himself as an expert solely from theoretical readings. But I put my misgivings aside, since the Hamptons were a nice place to be during the summer. Plus, I learned his assistant was to be briefed about my own culinary preferences.
“What do you like to have for breakfast?” I was asked. “I’ll have Kristin fill the refrigerator in the guest house for you.”
My first draft of the screenplay was a bloated overweight mess. It came in at 175 pages. For those of you not familiar with modern screenplays, that’s somewhere between 55 and 80 pages too long. Still, I wasn’t concerned. There were portions I was immensely proud of, and the length was, at least in part, in acquiescence to Tim’s doctrine of doing no work before we sat down together. I felt that arriving with what was clearly a rough first draft would go as far as necessary toward reassuring him that the script was very much a work in progress. I expected he’d be able to see that there was plenty of room for shaping it together, and that there would be abundant opportunities for him to put as much of an imprint on it as he might feel necessary.
Our first day of work together consisted of my old friend Tim reading my 175-page screenplay to me out loud. Himself. Playing all the parts. Badly. I was flabbergasted. Besides being flabbergasted, I was appalled. It’s not that one individual reading a screenplay a cappella is unheard of. I’d witnessed such readings in writers’ groups. I’d also read about it being done by renowned filmmakers with recalcitrant screenwriters in a few books. The same books, apparently, my friend Tim had been reading in preparation for our work together. What disturbed me was the presumption that he had gained a level of expertise qualifying him to play the role of teacher to my student. Tim’s awkward recitation was followed by his setting the script aside, pulling out a set of three-by-five inch index cards – a common screenwriting tool used in the first steps of designing a screenplay from scratch that I’d used and dispensed with weeks earlier –and announcing that we were now going to begin all over again. Together. Page one. Go.
Really. Just like that. Tim wanted to preapprove not only what scenes were going to be written and in which order they’d occur, but every single word that would be said within them. He also wanted to predetermine the precise length each scene would run
,
down to an eighth of a page, before a single word of dialogue was written. Before writing a single word of Scene one, he wanted me to declare the precise length I’d give to Scene seventy-six. I tried to find a way to play along and make it work, but my patience ran out within a matter of minutes.
“Look,” I said. “I can’t tell you how long each scene is going to be before I start to write any of them. That’s not going to work.” I told him I wasn’t comfortable writing as a team, or even writing in his presence. I told him that I understood the structural requirements of a screenplay, and understood how to outline one. I even added that I was happy to outline the script, in a more general way, with him. But the precise details of each scene would depend on what inspired me as I wrote, and what proved to work best as I progressed.
By relieving himself of the duties most people have to slog through before even beginning their day’s work, he’d freed himself up to be able to concentrate on whatever he chose. He used his time to read and educate himself in regard to filmmaking principles and theories. Of course, few things are more tedious, or perhaps even dangerous, than a person who’s come to view himself as an expert solely from theoretical readings. But I put my misgivings aside, since the Hamptons were a nice place to be during the summer. Plus, I learned his assistant was to be briefed about my own culinary preferences.
“What do you like to have for breakfast?” I was asked. “I’ll have Kristin fill the refrigerator in the guest house for you.”
My first draft of the screenplay was a bloated overweight mess. It came in at 175 pages. For those of you not familiar with modern screenplays, that’s somewhere between 55 and 80 pages too long. Still, I wasn’t concerned. There were portions I was immensely proud of, and the length was, at least in part, in acquiescence to Tim’s doctrine of doing no work before we sat down together. I felt that arriving with what was clearly a rough first draft would go as far as necessary toward reassuring him that the script was very much a work in progress. I expected he’d be able to see that there was plenty of room for shaping it together, and that there would be abundant opportunities for him to put as much of an imprint on it as he might feel necessary.
Our first day of work together consisted of my old friend Tim reading my 175-page screenplay to me out loud. Himself. Playing all the parts. Badly. I was flabbergasted. Besides being flabbergasted, I was appalled. It’s not that one individual reading a screenplay a cappella is unheard of. I’d witnessed such readings in writers’ groups. I’d also read about it being done by renowned filmmakers with recalcitrant screenwriters in a few books. The same books, apparently, my friend Tim had been reading in preparation for our work together. What disturbed me was the presumption that he had gained a level of expertise qualifying him to play the role of teacher to my student. Tim’s awkward recitation was followed by his setting the script aside, pulling out a set of three-by-five inch index cards – a common screenwriting tool used in the first steps of designing a screenplay from scratch that I’d used and dispensed with weeks earlier –and announcing that we were now going to begin all over again. Together. Page one. Go.
Really. Just like that. Tim wanted to preapprove not only what scenes were going to be written and in which order they’d occur, but every single word that would be said within them. He also wanted to predetermine the precise length each scene would run
,
down to an eighth of a page, before a single word of dialogue was written. Before writing a single word of Scene one, he wanted me to declare the precise length I’d give to Scene seventy-six. I tried to find a way to play along and make it work, but my patience ran out within a matter of minutes.
“Look,” I said. “I can’t tell you how long each scene is going to be before I start to write any of them. That’s not going to work.” I told him I wasn’t comfortable writing as a team, or even writing in his presence. I told him that I understood the structural requirements of a screenplay, and understood how to outline one. I even added that I was happy to outline the script, in a more general way, with him. But the precise details of each scene would depend on what inspired me as I wrote, and what proved to work best as I progressed.
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