For the unfamiliar, a
"reveal" in screenwriting parlance is the
placement of key, revelatory information
in a story. Most times,
the last reveal is the most important revelation of all.
FADE IN:
INT. BACKSTAGE
CLEVELAND PAY PHONE - NIGHT
A wild Cleveland crowd in the building. The cities
on this tour are getting bigger, and so are the
audiences. And there is a whiff of business now
too. Men in satin tour jackets
and some Disc-
jockey types cruise the backstage. A Hysterical
Fan is led screaming to the nearby medic room. Few
even react - it’s Cleveland - as the shot finds
William, tired and
yawning, on the backstage pay
phone. He is absolutely ready for the worst.
WILLIAM
Hi Mom. I’m
in Cleveland.
He listens stoically. Larry and Ed watch nearby.
INTERCUT:
INT. LIVING ROOM--NIGHT
Mom sits in silence.
WILLIAM
(cont’d)
(rehearsed)
I’m fine!
I’m fine! I’m flying back
on Monday
Morning. I’ll only miss
one test. I’ll
make it up.
Russell listens in, holding his guitar, laughing.
RUSSELL
Tell her
you’re a slave to the groove
- you can’t
help it!
WILLIAM
(covers
phone)
No.
Russell grabs the phone, talks to the silent mother
on the other end.
RUSSELL
Hi Mom!
It’s Russell Hammond, I play
guitar in
Stillwater! It’s my fault.
How does it
feel to be the mother of
the future
of rock journalism?
(beat)
Hello?
Silence. Penny passes and stands near William,
smoothing her pass. They watch a new pack of grou-
pies prowl the road-crew. They are more glam, more
trashy and less selective. They
glare insolently
at Penny Lane. This is the future.
RUSSELL
(cont’d)
You’ve got
a great kid--nothing to
worry about!
We’re taking care of
him! And
you should come to a show
sometime!
Join the Circus!
ELAINE
Listen to
me. Your charm does not
work on me.
I’m onto you. Of course
you like
him.
RUSSELL
Yes.
ELAINE
He worships
you people and that’s fine
with you,
as long as he helps make you
rich.
RUSSELL
(a
nerve is struck)
Rich? I
don’t think so -
ELAINE
Listen to
me. He’s a smart, good-
hearted, 15
year-old kid, with infinite
potential.
Russell looks over at the kid, eyes narrowing as
he processes the truth. He’s 15?
ELAINE
(cont’d)
This is not
some apron-wearing mother
you’re
talking to. I know about your
Valhalla of
Decadence, and I shouldn’t
have let him
go. He is not ready for
your world
of compromised values, and
diminished
brain cells that you throw
away like
confetti. Am I speaking
clearly to
you?
RUSSELL
Yes, ma’am.
ELAINE
If you
break his spirit, harm him in
anyway,
keep him from his chosen
profession--which
is law, something
you may not
value but I do--you will
meet the
voice on the other end of
this
telephone. And it will not be
pretty. Do
we understand each other?
RUSSELL
Yes... yes...
ELAINE
(always
the teacher)
I didn’t
ask for this role, but I’ll
play
it. Now go do your best. "Be
bold and
mighty forces will come to
your
aid!" Goethe said that. It’s
not too
late for you to be a person of
substance.
Get my son home safely,
I’m glad we
spoke.
She hangs up. Russell hangs up, oddly affected and
shook up.
WILLIAM
Some people
get her. Some don’t.
Russell is still recovering. William feels embar-
rassed by
his mother, once again.
--ALMOST FAMOUS, written and
directed by Cameron Crowe.
I recently spent some time
re-formatting my file copy of Cameron Crowe’s great screenplay for his film,
ALMOST FAMOUS. I had acquired the copy from the web as a text file (meaning
that it was not in accurate screenplay format, and possibly originally a
scanned version with OCR errors where the software mistook characters here and
there along the way). I was going through the script fixing what I knew to be
scan errors, and re-formatting the text on the page, eventually saving it as a
new, correctly formatted PDF file.
I hadn’t seen the picture in quite a
long time, and so was reading along, remembering the film on the screen, and
realizing, once again, how great it is. It paralleled in time, my own late
adolescence and early adulthood. I lived those times. And, later, for a few
short years, I worked in the concert business. I knew how mind-blowingly crazy
the business was, and so, how accurate Cameron Crowe’s autobiographical script
was. I remember...
...Ted Nugent’s security guy, Lurch,
all 6’9” of him, tossing fans off the stage one hot night in Green Bay, WI,
when, by the end, the place was so humid it was raining indoors.
...holding an elephant’s leash
outside a theater in Milwaukee, waiting to go onstage for the Blackstone Magic
Show, one foggy Saturday night when Kareem Abdul Jabbar walked up on one of his
famous after-game strolls, looked at me and the elephant, and said, “Now I’ve
seen everything!” “Me, too,” I replied.
...securing a stairwell for Ray
Davies and the Kinks so that they could get their picture taken with Star
Trek’s Mr. Spock before he went onstage and introduced them and then went
across the street to do his own one-man show about Vincent Van Gogh’s brother,
THEO.
...body-guarding Meatloaf all alone
after a show at the theater’s loading dock while he came down from the night,
waiting for his limo, a pick-up truck.
...chasing down the same
fence-jumping fan three times off a hill teeming with 22,000 rockers at an outdoor
Blue Oyster Cult show, eventually showing him where to sneak in without me
catching him so I could get my wind back, and then patrolling the fence-line in
the dark, past the men’s and women’s bathrooms. Hearing some laughter, I turned
around to find before me 20 or more ladies, squatted down, peeing outside
because the line was too long.
...holding the hotel door for
Liberace and Scott Thorson, each dressed in complementary synthetic pastel
hounds-tooth leisure suits, before Liberace died and it all went south for Mr.
Thorson.
...body-guarding Michael Jackson one
night in Chicago while my security brothers kept returning backstage to wipe
the wads of fan-spittle out of their hair.
...using a golf cart, one hot summer
night, to chase down gate-crashers on the 9-hole course behind Alpine Valley
during an Aerosmith show.
...standing at concert gates, both
indoors and out, as legions of groupies tried every trick from offering money
to room keys to underwear, to be allowed in and party with everyone from Eddie
Money to Tom Jones.
...watching after Black Sabbath’s
opening acts (and no, it wasn’t Cameron Crowe’s Stillwater, it was both Foghat
and Long John Baldry) as, for over an hour, roadies stacked speaker after
speaker in columns on each side of the stage before Ozzy and Sabbath came out
and blew the roof off the place.
...waiting outside an elevator door
with my boss, a 5’4” lady with more guts than me, as a knife-wielding nut was
about to emerge, sent that way by others working the show. The doors opened,
the lady leaped on him like a pit bull, and two of us went for the knife.
After every show, I took my fabric
stick-on backstage pass off my jeans--Cameron got that right, too--and stuck it
on an old bookcase I had. By the end, I had more than 60 of them, entirely
covering the thing.
It was quite a ride. And my hearing
has never been the same.
But editing my file of ALMOST FAMOUS
reminded me how great a writer Cameron Crowe is. And that excerpt above is an
example. The characters jump off the page, fully-formed. The dialogue can only
be spoken by those people, in that moment. And reading the script, rather than
just watching the film, is a lesson in how powerful and precise the material
can (and should) be before the camera and the actors deliver it to its
audience.
As a writer who believes that
reading scripts is the single best way to learn screenwriting, I found myself
acquiring them here and there, now and again, over the years, until I realized
I had so many that I had better get them organized so that I could find one if
and when I wanted or needed it.
Since most of them were acquired on
the web, I decided to create a database from which I could store the necessary
facts, and from which I could access the files themselves. I built a
spreadsheet with the rows representing each file, and the columns providing the
key data points: title, page count, version date (if any), release date (if any
- otherwise “none” or “in development”), author(s), and source of the story (if
any), among others. The release dates became hyperlinks to the IMDb web pages
for the titles so that I could get more information on a title if needed. The
titles themselves became hyperlinks to the actual digital files, so that I
could open one instantly, if desired, in one click of the mouse. In a few
cases, I had as many as 6 version drafts of a given title. At this writing, the
file count is almost 1,800 (update - 3-11-2016, almost 12,000).
A few years back I started to notice
that the web sources of screenplays were starting to dry up. The studios
decided to go after the websites that offered scripts for free. A few
collectors also had huge databases with titles from which others in-the-know
could download. They are my unsung heroes. They put themselves on the line for
the rest of us, and they are paying for it. One notorious case had lawyers from
a pair of studios confronting a single mother with a lawsuit that would have
put her away for years had it gone the way they were threatening. Eventually
she survived it.
But this had the predictable effect.
The era of freely available film and television scripts is slowly ending. Today
there are fewer and fewer sources of film and television scripts available on
the web. And many of them are posted as text on web pages, rather than
downloadable PDFs, causing them to be out-of-format when one tries to move the
material from the web page to a file on one’s PC. The only real answer was to
go through each script acquired this way and put it into correct format before
converting it to PDF, something I have been doing with the out-of-format copies
I have, for quite a while.
I am glad that I got them when I
did, as I now have copies of scripts that can be found nowhere else. I have
both film and television scripts, the oldest from 1903, and the newest a few
months old, most produced and released, but also scores of titles still in
development or even on the market. I do not sell script files from my
collection. I can’t risk having
a lawyer threaten me with a lawsuit and prison time for merely giving someone a
digital copy of a script produced as many as 80 or even 100+ years ago.
I am astonished, though, that the
studios feel it necessary to prevent an interested fan or collector from owning
a copy of, for example, CASABLANCA, because they--the studios--haven’t been paid
for it, or because they might want to charge for it at some point in the
indefinite future. Why is my early draft of CITIZEN KANE (written exclusively
by Herman Mankiewicz when it was still titled, AMERICAN, and before Orson
Welles made changes) deemed a threat to some studio somewhere? Who would want
to produce that 73 year old document as a film today? What about newer ones? Is
AVATAR threatened by international script pirates who might make a killing
selling copies in China? Or will a rogue producer in Kazakhstan make a Kazakh
version of AVATAR with the “bootleg” copy of the screenplay? Can no one see how
absurd this is? If someone printed up my entire collection and left them in a
bin at Wal-Mart, selling for $5 apiece, how many do you think would sell? How
many would be taken if they were free? Do the masses even know movies are
written?
The next time a studio takes some
single mother from Long Island to court for offering collectors, students, and friends 4,000 scripts for
download, why doesn’t the judge ask the studio why it doesn’t digitize its
library, and, following the music business’s example, sell its E-scripts, itself or through online retailers, for download
for a modest fee, perhaps $3.99, or even less? With--dare I say it--royalties to the writers and their assigns. Nahhhh, they're just the writers. Studios should put up or shut
up: market them themselves or let it go. Show me how they are materially injured by 2,000 film-buffs across the world possessing a digital copy of the script for THE MALTESE FALCON. Or even last season's blockbuster.
These scripts, once produced as
films, are in many cases, while of little-to-no intrinsic market value, no less
important than those songs sold for download; probably more so. Once the films
are released, they are our heritage, part of world culture’s literature, its intellectual property, not just a
studio’s. Indeed, by film and television scripts being made accessible, they
are the basis for how such literature can
and must evolve. The writers of these same studios’ movies, in years to
come, need access to these works in order to become better screenwriters and so
produce more and better product for those same studios! So who is really being
harmed by easy access to produced film and television scripts? How many
millions of dollars might be lost by allowing produced films’ scripts to be
owned by the public? A better question might be: how many billions of dollars might be gained? #
FADE OUT
Lee A. Matthias
Quotes of the Post:
"Be bold and mighty forces will come to your aid!"
--Goethe
"The next time a studio takes some
single mother from Long Island to court for offering collectors, students, and friends 4,000 scripts for
download, why doesn’t the judge ask the studio why it doesn’t digitize its
library, and, following the music business’s example, sell its E-scripts, itself or through online retailers, for download
for a modest fee, perhaps $3.99, or even less?"
"These scripts, once produced as
films, are in many cases, while of little-to-no intrinsic market value, no less
important than those songs sold for download; probably more so. Once the films
are released, they are our heritage, part of world culture’s literature, its intellectual property, not just a
studio’s."