read such nonsense. And any actor who’s not on his first gig and who has never before held a real-life-by-God-script in his trembling hand is going to black out all those ‘instructions’ in his copy.”
“He was attracted to the kind of simplicity that could happen at any moment when there was conflict and contact between people,” noted his son, Stirling Linh , who is also a writer. “One thing he would coach me on is how to make a scene between two people talking or arguing even better, and that was to bring in an unexpected third element, which could be something as simple as a janitor dropping a mop and one of the participants in the conversation stopping the conversation and walking over and picking up the mop for the janitor. He was detail oriented in that those little things mattered to him. Signature aspects of his writing are its leanness and its simplicity. He felt the same way about filmmaking. He was always saying that if the camera isn’t from someone’s perspective then it shouldn’t be there. And the John Locke novels were sort of the Bourne before Bourne, that sort of thinking man’s mercenary.” [301]
Though he lived well into the computer age, Silliphant refused to use one. “I tried, really gave it my best shot, but it never connected for me,” he insisted. “I felt too much separation between me and the [computer] screen; somehow the words up there lacked immediacy. I could not relate to them.” His weapon of choice was not exactly a steam-powered Royal manual model, though. “I find that I am faster on the IBM Wheelwriter than any computer instructor I’ve ever known is on the computer. Believe it or not, I’ve held contests with the doubters and every time creamed them. Also, the painful process of retyping, as opposed to the instantaneous capability of the computer to change and revise, makes me deal with what I’ve written in a constantly intimate sense, so that, by the time I’m through with a script, every page has been revised, polished and rewritten a dozen or more times. If I were to make this process computer-easy, I would divorce myself from the hard work of facing up to every word as though for the first time.”
His writing method was similarly precise: “I type on plain white paper with three holes punched into the left side of the sheet so I can place the finished pages into a loose-leaf notebook and move them around if I decide to change my continuity or if I want to replace the scenes already written. Also, I never write a script in continuity. I always write my favorite scene first. I always ask myself, ‘What is the single most important, most moving, most dramatic scene in the film, the single scene people will still be talking about a week later?’ I write that scene first, no matter where it might play in the finished script. And I put it into the notebook. Then I write my next-most-favorite scene and put it into what may end up being its appropriate position. And so on and so on until I have to start connecting those fragments. The last thing I write are these connections and I spend hours thinking of them in terms of images and locations.”
“Stirling was a brilliant writer who could turn a blank page into fantastic material by just dropping that paper in the typewriter (no computer in those days),” said Charles W. “Chuck” Fries, for whom he and Bert Leonard had developed Route 66 at CBS. [302]
“Once he started his work day, he never left the office,” his son recalled. “We barely saw him unless he had to go pee or make coffee. I don’t know if he took lunches, which is funny, because he was such a big food person. I’d do my homework in his office, on the carpet. He was totally in another world and didn’t even notice my presence. I was also not making any noise.” In addition to wearing the green eyeshade, he would act out the scenes at his desk, gyrating, bouncing, and rocking back and forth at the keyboard, sometimes speaking his
“He was attracted to the kind of simplicity that could happen at any moment when there was conflict and contact between people,” noted his son, Stirling Linh , who is also a writer. “One thing he would coach me on is how to make a scene between two people talking or arguing even better, and that was to bring in an unexpected third element, which could be something as simple as a janitor dropping a mop and one of the participants in the conversation stopping the conversation and walking over and picking up the mop for the janitor. He was detail oriented in that those little things mattered to him. Signature aspects of his writing are its leanness and its simplicity. He felt the same way about filmmaking. He was always saying that if the camera isn’t from someone’s perspective then it shouldn’t be there. And the John Locke novels were sort of the Bourne before Bourne, that sort of thinking man’s mercenary.” [301]
Though he lived well into the computer age, Silliphant refused to use one. “I tried, really gave it my best shot, but it never connected for me,” he insisted. “I felt too much separation between me and the [computer] screen; somehow the words up there lacked immediacy. I could not relate to them.” His weapon of choice was not exactly a steam-powered Royal manual model, though. “I find that I am faster on the IBM Wheelwriter than any computer instructor I’ve ever known is on the computer. Believe it or not, I’ve held contests with the doubters and every time creamed them. Also, the painful process of retyping, as opposed to the instantaneous capability of the computer to change and revise, makes me deal with what I’ve written in a constantly intimate sense, so that, by the time I’m through with a script, every page has been revised, polished and rewritten a dozen or more times. If I were to make this process computer-easy, I would divorce myself from the hard work of facing up to every word as though for the first time.”
His writing method was similarly precise: “I type on plain white paper with three holes punched into the left side of the sheet so I can place the finished pages into a loose-leaf notebook and move them around if I decide to change my continuity or if I want to replace the scenes already written. Also, I never write a script in continuity. I always write my favorite scene first. I always ask myself, ‘What is the single most important, most moving, most dramatic scene in the film, the single scene people will still be talking about a week later?’ I write that scene first, no matter where it might play in the finished script. And I put it into the notebook. Then I write my next-most-favorite scene and put it into what may end up being its appropriate position. And so on and so on until I have to start connecting those fragments. The last thing I write are these connections and I spend hours thinking of them in terms of images and locations.”
“Stirling was a brilliant writer who could turn a blank page into fantastic material by just dropping that paper in the typewriter (no computer in those days),” said Charles W. “Chuck” Fries, for whom he and Bert Leonard had developed Route 66 at CBS. [302]
“Once he started his work day, he never left the office,” his son recalled. “We barely saw him unless he had to go pee or make coffee. I don’t know if he took lunches, which is funny, because he was such a big food person. I’d do my homework in his office, on the carpet. He was totally in another world and didn’t even notice my presence. I was also not making any noise.” In addition to wearing the green eyeshade, he would act out the scenes at his desk, gyrating, bouncing, and rocking back and forth at the keyboard, sometimes speaking his
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