YOUNGtoFilmmakers

LE T TERS

Howard Suber

CREAT IV ITY & GETT ING YOUR F ILMS MADE

M I C H A E L W I E S E P R O D U C T I O N S

Con† ent s

Dedication . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .vContents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .viiAcknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ixForeword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiIntroduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiiiBecoming a Filmmaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xivBecoming a Professional Filmmaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .xviiThe Contents of This Book . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xixThe Letters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Fate vs. Destiny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5It’s Who You Know . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9“Born Creative”? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11The Principal Principle of Creativity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13Inspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17Originality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20Ideas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 24Pitching . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 26What’s It About? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 29If The Screenplay Is So Important, How Come Screenwriters

Are So Often Treated Like Shit? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31Emotional Storyboards . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35Write What You Know? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 37Creating Recognizable Characters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41Developing Your Writing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43The Audience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45What Audiences Want . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47Strategy and Artistic Freedom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 49Logistics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 51Prioritizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53Hollywood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 57What Movie Are You Living Now? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 59Decisions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61

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Active vs. Effective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64Negotiating . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66Aggression . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68Motivations vs. Goals . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 71Rules vs. Principles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73What’s Most Important? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75Treatments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77Readers and Coverage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79Development . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82Options . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87Marketplace Value of First Time Screenplays . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91Writers vs. Producers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94Producers vs. Everyone Else . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97Conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 100Partnerships . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103Mentors and Models . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107Sharing Your Passion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .110How Much Does A Film Cost? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112What Happened To The Studios? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .114The Golden Age of Independent Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 117Making an Independent Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 120Agents . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123Managers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 126Hip-Pocketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 128Getting Started as a Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .131Getting Started as a Producer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134Doing Things for The Good of the Film . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136Exhibition and Distribution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139Marketing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 142Minorities and Women in the Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144Ageism and Youthism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 147Copy and Other Rights . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 150Life Rights and Roman à Clef . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160Being Screwed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164Other Opportunities . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .167The End of the Industry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169What Determines Success? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171Why Try? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175

Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185About the Author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .191

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In† ro∂uct ion

Becoming a Filmmaker

During the course of having lunch with a friend who had recently been the C.E.O. of a major studio, I lamented all the creative people on planet Earth who might be just as talented as the people currently working in the industry and how they would never get a chance to make their films. He fixed my eyes and said: “Howard, I think all the really talented people are making films.”

His response reflected what I already knew about his Darwinian worldview. I thought of arguing the point but decided it would be fruitless, because you cannot prove a nega-tive. That exchange echoed in my head for years, and in some way provided the genesis for this book.

Is it true that those who “make it” are the most talented people practicing the art of film and therefore deserve to succeed? Or do other factors play an equally important role?

A loaded question. Of course luck and other factors outside one’s own control have a lot to do with who “makes it” and who doesn’t. Yet I also believe that knowing the realities of how films come to be made also plays a large role in determining who succeeds. Or maybe I should put it the other way around: igno-rance of those realities plays a large role in determining who will not succeed.

What realities? At the top of the list is this: whether you are a writer, director, producer or other creative person, to a very large extent you do not make a film, you have to get the film made.

You may call yourself a filmmaker, but no matter how great your creative abilities or how strong the force of your will and willingness of other people to let you exert it, you cannot make a feature film that large numbers of people want to see by your-self. You need dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of others to

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work with you. You need large sums of money to make a film, and whether you make Hollywood features or small budget independent films, almost invariably it is far greater than you can personally afford. You need distribution to get your film seen by enough people to pay back the costs. You need marketing funds that often equal or exceed the cost of making the film. And you need large numbers of people to see your film, ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions.

Whatever your creative role you do not make a film; you make a contribution to a film. Without the contributions of others, the film won’t come into existence and won’t reach an audience.

When I say it’s not enough to know how to make a film, you need to know how to get a film made, I mean to emphasize, as I do throughout the letters in this book, that others are as respon-sible for your film as you are. I’m not just calling for humility, I’m asking you to learn and understand what all those people you have to work with contribute to the process of film.

When I was a young film professor, I thought I could tell who among my students would “make it.” As the decades passed and I watched what actually happened to the constant passing parade of students, I gained more humility. People I thought surely had “the right stuff” often disappeared without a trace, while people I scarcely noticed while they were students went on to fame and glory. It took years to conclude that I’m not prescient. Today, I believe that no one can tell at an early stage whether someone will be successful in film, television, and related media.

Doctors, lawyers, physicists, and other professionals are not “born”; they go through many stages of testing and examina-tions. If they pass the boards, bar, doctoral exams, or other screening devices set up by their own disciplines (which are often licensed by the state) they are allowed to practice.

I don’t believe anyone is “born” to become a filmmaker, nor do I think filmmaking will or should ever be licensed by the state. Considering how cheap and widely available the tech-nology is, anybody can make a film. This is a blessing as well as

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a curse, because there’s no way to know until after a film has been made and shown to others whether the filmmaker has even the most basic competence, let alone artistic ability. Even if the artistic ability is in full display, there is little assurance that the individual will become a professional filmmaker, which I define as someone who makes a career and a living from the process of filmmaking.

The film industry, or perhaps the press that covers the industry, has always mythologized early success – the person apparently “born” to make films. Orson Welles made Citizen Kane (1941) at the age of 25. In the long run his early success was as much a curse as a blessing, since forever afterwards there were people who said he never lived up to his early promise.

Precocity is something journalists love to write about simply because it is a rare phenomenon, and therefore always “news.” Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers: The Story of Success, summarizes research that shows it takes about 10,000 hours of hard, intensive work – approximately a decade – for anyone to produce work that experts in the field will regard as substantive.

When we’re young, of course, we don’t want to hear this. Ten years? An inconceivable and intolerable amount of time. People who want to become professional filmmakers sometimes find it difficult to believe that the process is not all that different from becoming a doctor, lawyer, physicist, or other kind of highly skilled professional: it requires a huge amount of effort and commitment.

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Becoming a Professional Filmmaker

Professionals in all fields have a way of looking at the world, a set of values and procedures that tells them what they need to pay attention to and what they can ignore, those things that are either relevant or irrelevant to their goal and method of work. So, too, do filmmakers.

“Anyone can make a movie,” is true in the same sense that anyone can play baseball or write a sonnet, but few become a Babe Ruth or a William Shakespeare. Becoming a professional requires not only a higher degree of skill than most people obtain; it also requires a mindset about the profession that is quite different from that of the weekend golfer, open mike comedian, or summer filmmaker.

Many books try to help you appreciate and understand how films work. (I’ve written one myself, The Power of Film.) A slew of others tell you how to write screenplays or master the tech-nical aspects of filmmaking. This book is not about these things. It is about the process of becoming a professional filmmaker.

Professional filmmaking involves (1) the creative process, and (2) the process that makes creation possible. Novelists, painters, or poets can wake up every morning, immediately begin creating and continue doing so all day long. If they have the inner resources and will, they can do this every day of their lives. They don’t need anybody else’s permission or support to begin working, and they can complete their creative works all by themselves.

Professional filmmakers are not so fortunate. While screen-writers can write “on spec” to their heart’s content (although few do, and even fewer do so for very long), directors, actors, producers, cinematographers, editors, etc. can’t begin to work until all of the many elements required to complete the film have

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been provided, especially, the large sums of money and large numbers of people who are required to make a feature film. As a result, most filmmakers spend only a fraction of their lives actu-ally creating films and spend far more time trying to get their films made.

This book is based on the idea that the combination of creativity and an understanding of the realities of how films get made are what makes one a professional filmmaker.

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The Contents of this Book

For more than 20 years at UCLA’s film school, I taught the history and analysis of film. Then I became head of UCLA’s Film and Television Producers Program, where I have taught for the last 26 years. During my days as head of the program, I recruited heads of studios, agencies, distribution companies, lawyers, and other industry pros to teach Producers Program courses. I worked closely with several of them and team-taught for two decades with two prominent executives. So, my own teaching career has been split between analyzing great films and dealing with the realities of the film and television businesses that produced them.

In 1996, when UCLA started providing free email service to students, I became the first faculty member to require all my students to be accessible by email, and I’ve urged students to communicate with me through email exchanges ever since. Many have done so, not only while they were students but for years afterwards. This book consists of a carefully chosen portion of the more than 5,000 exchanges I’ve had with screen-writers, directors, producers, animators and scholars who were once my students. Certain kinds of questions or problems come up with each generation, and I have used some of the most common ones as the basis for the exchanges that follow.

I have deleted all information that was either personal or related to the specific situation that caused the writers to contact me. For fun, I have given each writer the name of a central char-acter in a classic film. I have attached an appendix at the end of the book containing the character I was thinking of at the moment I assigned that name during the editing of this book, but my whimsical substation of names is like a word associa-tion test. There may or may not be some logical connection,

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but one should not make too much of any instance. In editing the exchanges, I have often combined what were originally several different exchanges on the same general topic into one longer response.

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† heLETTERS

Howard,You talk a lot about the importance of strategic thinking. How in God’s creation can I control my future or my career? I don’t control squat! Things just happen to me and I react — that’s it.

Dear Rick,You express a common feeling and attitude. There are two primary forces in our lives, one of which I call “Fate” and other I call “Destiny.” While some dictionaries treat them as synonyms, we use the terms differently in our lives. If someone is killed in an accident, we refer to it as a “fatal accident,” not a “destined accident.” In American history, the famous phrase, “Manifest Destiny,” was used to justify the country’s expansion from the Atlantic to the Pacific oceans. No one called it “Mani-fest Fate.”

You seek your destiny; you succumb to your fate. Fate is the force that lies beyond individual will and control; it pushes you

Fa† e vs.

Des† iny

3

from behind. Destiny is the attracting force in front of you that acts like a magnet and that you choose to acquire.

Your looks, weight, height, race, gender, and usually your social class, religion, and education are part of your fate because you had little or nothing to do with them. They were given to you in large part by genetics or by the circumstances into which you were born. No one is born a writer, director, or a producer; you become one.

Luck, by definition, is synonymous with fate because it is a force outside you, something you do not control. We should never underestimate the power of luck in life; but then neither should we underestimate the power of will, determination, and long, hard work.

Fate — where you came from — may determine how you got to where you are, but Destiny determines where you will go. People need to seize their destiny.

For many creative people, the closest they can get to a strategy can be summed up by the famous line from the film Field of Dreams (1989): “If you build it, they will come.” It’s such a famous line because it conveys what many young film-makers wish were true: that huge numbers of people will somehow spontaneously recognize how wondrous a thing you’ve created and will bestow upon you the adulation, respect, and wealth you crave.

The plain truth is, though, that “If you build it, they will come,” is really about wish fulfillment, not strategy. Yes, many things “just happen,” but creative success is seldom one of them.

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Howard,I’m working for a guy who put a copy of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War on my desk last week. He told me to read it. “It’s the Bible,” he said, and walked away without explaining why. He’s my boss, so I have to read it. Is it really and truly the bible of the film industry?

Dear Willard,Some people think so. I trace this phenomenon back to Mike Ovitz, who, in the last few decades of the 20th Century, was frequently referred to in print and throughout the film and tele-vision industry as “The Most Powerful Man in Hollywood.” CAA, which he helped start, was also often referred to as “The Most Powerful Company in Hollywood.” Ovitz required his employees to read Sun Tzu’s three thousand year old text, so maybe your boss once worked for him. Unquestionably, The Art of War provided Ovitz and CAA at the time with its model of the world.

War

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Ovitz made a bad career move and accepted the position of president at Disney. The problem was that Disney already had a boss, his old friend Michael Eisner, the C.E.O. who’d given him the job. Perhaps predictably, it wasn’t very long before Eisner forced Ovitz out. After a couple of years, Ovitz’s name disap-peared from the pages of Variety and The New York Times, and few people knew or cared what he was doing.

Did Eisner stab his friend in the back and take his power away from him? Not necessarily, although Ovitz said so in the inevi-table lawsuit. As we see in Citizen Kane (1941), The Godfather: Part II (1974), Oedipus Rex, Macbeth, King Lear, and in many of the world’s most memorable stories, the fall of powerful people often comes, not at the hands of others, but because of what the individual did to himself.

There have always been people in the film industry and everywhere else who take war as their strategic model. This is not surprising. If you compile a list of books with the word “strategy” in the title, 90% of them will be about war or busi-ness, where the idea is so well entrenched that the best way for you to prosper is if your competition is diminished or defeated.

War may be an appropriate model for an agent, lawyer, or studio head, because all of them are engaged in a “zero-sum game,” which means that one side tries to capture everything it considers valuable and leaves the other side with nothing. The logic of war is very simple: In order for you to succeed, others must fail.

But I question whether warfare is an appropriate — by which I mean useful — strategic model for creative people. In war, you kill your enemies or render them impotent. How can a creative person accomplish this goal? Who would the enemy be? Certainly not, in any direct sense, other artists. Do creative people ever have the power to convince potential buyers to pick their screenplay, hire them as a director or actor or give them money to make their film by weakening or defeating other creative people?

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The real enemy of creative people is indifference. Creative people compete with other creative people for attention. If you are a creator, you want people to pay attention to you rather than to someone else. No manual on war is going to be of much use to you in accomplishing that goal.

Three prime tools of warfare are lies, deception, and betrayal. You try never to let others see why or what you are really trying to accomplish. War justifies betrayal as a necessary act of self-survival. When people who use war as their model are caught in their lies, deceptions and betrayals, their consciences are clear. They will tell you, like Marlon Brando’s character, Terry Malloy, does in On the Waterfront (1954):

“You want to know my philosophy? Do it to them before they do it to you.”

If you plan a career in filmmaking, you can’t say you won’t deal with people like that — you need to be able to deal with them. But this does not mean their behavior is a model for how you should act. Thinking like a filmmaker, which is to say thinking strategically, requires that you get out of your own head and into the heads of others long enough to figure out how they see the world and how you fit into it — or don’t.

Warfare seeks to have power over other people. For creative people, however, the most important power is the power of your work.

Howard,Come on, now! As I see it, everybody in this business is trying to get as much power as they possibly can.

Dear Michael,Of course everybody wants power. What happens in our lives depends on power — our own or somebody else’s. Many creative people cringe at this thought, perhaps because they have an

W a r

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attitude towards power that Victorians had towards sex; everyone knows it exists and plays a crucial role in human behavior, but nice people aren’t concerned about such things, and they certainly don’t talk about it.

Power isn’t merely something the strong exert over the weak. Power has two components: the ability to produce change or to prevent it.

By definition, creative people want to produce change. They want people to pay attention to them, to recognize, pay, and occasionally applaud them. There are always forces at work that can prevent change, though. Some of these forces come from opposition, but for creative people there is a more powerful force they must surmount.

Newton’s First Law of Motion says that things will remain at rest or continue moving in the same direction as they were going unless acted upon by an outside force. We call this inertia, and it applies not only to the physical world but also to human behavior. The greatest challenge to creative people is not that other people will attack them, and it’s certainly not that they will attempt to destroy them. It’s that other people will be obliv-ious or indifferent to them.

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Howard,I think I have a really cool strategy to get my film made, which is the reason I take a mountain of horse dung from my boss, day in, day out. To be honest, working for this powerful whack job has given me the idea that one of these days, I’ll take on some of his power. Don’t worry, I’m not going to turn into another paranoid tyrant. In his insane way, my boss has been a good teacher, and, as everyone knows, it’s a business of who you know.

Dear Bud,Where in life isn’t that true? If your tooth hurts and you need a dentist, you can search the Internet and randomly pick a stranger whose web page design you like, or you can ask your friends whether they know of a good dentist. Of course who you know is important.

What’s even more important, however, is that it’s not really who you know; it’s who knows you. You may work for many of

I† ’s Who You

Know

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the most powerful people in town, go to endless Hollywood parties, make “friends” with industry insiders, go to endless public appearances by influential people and introduce yourself to them afterwards, but it would be naïve think you “know” them.

Maybe you’ll get to “know” your boss, but will he jeopar-dize his career, his ability to buy that new Bentley, his daughter’s junior year in Paris, his second wife’s rehab and his professional reputation just because he “knows” you?

Working for him may enable you to meet other important people. On the basis of that connection, you may get a fifteen-minute meeting with big shots, but do you honestly think they’re going to make your film because they “know” you? Doubtful. They’re going to base their decisions on whether they think your project will enable them to continue their own careers.

It might be more productive if people spent less time getting to “know” people and more time producing work that makes people eager to know them.

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Howard,I keep hearing that you can’t teach someone to be a writer or an artist. What do you think? Are you born creative or can you learn it?

Dear Vicki,This question has perplexed people for about 2,500 years. Are people who win Olympic medals “born athletes”? Any coach would tell you that you need to have to be born with certain physical characteristics (long distance runners or basketball players, for example). But those same coaches will tell you that it’s what you do with what you’re given that makes a difference.

Many people, especially when they’re young, approach creation as something that will either come to them in a moment of inspiration or through an instruction manual. They want the learning curve to be quick and preferably easy. But, for most people most of the time, creativity frequently comes after

“Born Crea† ive”?

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the expenditure of a great deal of perspiration, but it seldom precedes it.

We might distinguish between craftsmanship and creativity. A craftsman works on something such as a piece of furniture, knowing in advance what it is he or she is creating. An artist often doesn’t know in advance exactly what the object will turn out to be until he or she has finished working on it. Most screenplays are examples of craftsmanship, especially those that are based on familiar stories or some other pre-existing template. Only a percentage of them display artistry.

While I agree with those who say you cannot be taught to be creative, I think you can be taught to release and enhance the creative potential you already have. That doesn’t make me a great fan of “how-to” books, however. How-to manuals invariably deal with how-it’s-been-done. And, while yielding to no one in my belief that history is important, creativity comes from adding something that hasn’t been done before. There is no instruction manual that can lead you to create something new.

L e t t e r s t o Y o u n g F i L m m a k e r s • s u b e r

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Howard,You once mentioned that you used to teach a seminar in creativity. I’m interested in the creative process, but when I look up the subject on Amazon, I’m bewildered by the hundreds of titles and don’t know where to begin. Is there a book or an idea that you think is central?

Dear Michael,There are tons of books that try to tell others how they can become more creative, which is similar to telling people how to be funny. There are others that observe how people have been creative and others that try to figure out what has been the basis of creativity. Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation, a very long, dense book I read almost fifty years ago, is in the latter category. While it’s been criticized for being reductionist, especially by people who have another theory to offer, I’ve probably cited it more often than any other book I’ve read.

The Principal

Principle of Crea† ivi† y

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