How to Write a Screenplay, Screenwriters Speak
Theme is a strong tool that can power your writing. Identifying your Personal Thematic, is a concept I first learned from producer and screenwriter Meg LeFauve, and story consultant, Laurie Hutzler that can impact your entire writing process.
Themes add meaning and resonance to your story. That which moves you has the power to move others.
Writing a piece that speaks to your Personal Thematic is motivating and energizing. It gets you excited and keeps you going – even when the going gets tough – long into the tedium of rewrites. It brings focus to the story that enables you to make choices faster and more effectively. And it powers your work because it taps into core concepts and beliefs that you desperately want to express – to share with the world.
That is how important Personal Thematic is to elevating your writing.
Screenwriters Speak on Themes
Over the course of my career as a film industry exec, and as a producer, it has been a great privilege to work with truly talented writers. What I have learned has been invaluable.
I wanted to bring this kind of knowledge to the students in my online seminar, Screenwriting Elevated. So I started featuring a Surprise Guest Speaker each month. I choose a writer whose work they class has read as part of the monthly assigned scripts. I might show a clip or read a scene from their work. And, admittedly, I like the added reveal of the students not knowing who the speaker will be!
Some are easy asks for me. Some are my Screenwriting Fangrrl idols, and just “the ask” made my heart pound a bit. All are incredibly articulate and very generous with their time, eager to answer any and all questions.
After the introduction, I ask just one question to get the ball rolling:
What themes – a character type, a dilemma, or a conflict, an idea – do you find yourself drawn to, again and again, in your work?
Of course, this goes straight for what fascinates me the most about the creative process.
I love hearing their answers! And I think you will too.
This show I’m working on right now that is my first foray into TV and streamers – I reached a point where I said, ‘I’ve got to do something that is just mine.” I literally took a year and half off during Covid, and worked on this on spec. I can think about this project, and I think it probably would echo in a lot of the other things that I’ve written as well.
What makes a human, human? What makes a human being a human? What are the aspects of us that are the best of us and worst of us? Is being human doing something noble in the face of danger? Or is part of humanity betraying supposedly everything you believe in to achieve some kind of goal?
These types of conflicts, these moral or ethical issues that exist in yourself, in each person, those are themes that intrigue me.
Issues of integrity. What is heroism? What is admirable in people?
There’s a western that I love, an early Sam Peckinpah western, Ride The High Country, that featured two aging actors, Joel McCrae and Randolph Scott, at the end of their careers, who had both been in a lot of westerns. They’re playing these older gunmen. In some ways it’s like the Unforgiven of its’ time. The Joel McCrae character has a line about the type of life that he’s lived, “I just need to enter my house justified.”
To me, it’s those kinds of issues: What is the code that you live by? How do you treat people? These are things that are important to me as a person too, but I like to explore those issues in stories.
Even in terms of someone trying to do the honorable thing, but also I’m totally fascinated by people who the exact opposite and who are capable of doing awful things for their own pleasure or greed.
That human dichotomy, that’s the stuff that fascinates me.
Mark Protosevich: The Cell, I Am Legend, Thor, Oldboy, Sugar
There’s something about humanity and human behavior – why people act the way they do, and feel the way they do – that always intrigues me. For Fisher King, it was the 80s. I thought it was a really ugly decade. A decade of great narcissism and cynicism. And I saw this out there and so I decided to write something about that. About a character that was narcissistic and then, by the end of the story, committed a selfless act.
The Fisher King, The Bridges of Madison County, Beloved
The other day, I was coming up with a plot, and I suddenly thought, this is exactly the same basic structure as eight other things I’ve written! The idea of an innocent person caught between other extreme factions. I would say that that’s a biggie. It’s totally unconscious, but I find that person likeable.
Also the idea of people being able to communicate or connect with people despite whatever is separating them. That is sort of our main job as writers – is to find something that you can connect with in every single character. I think that makes for better writing.
I am particularly not in a genre. I tend to think that’s because whatever I see, I want to do. If I go into a plumbing supply store, I want to build something. So if I see a comedy, I want to do a comedy. If I see a thriller, I want to do a thriller. Partly because my model was William Goldman. When I was growing up he was really cool. And he would say, “Ok, I’m doing a western. Now I’m doing a political thriller. Now I’m doing The Right Stuff.” Now a war movie.” He was always changing genres. And I thought, that sounds like so much fun!
It’s my instinct to go to different genres and yet, I find the same themes in all the different genres.
Fracture, Mad Money, Disfigured
I recently heard playwright, screenwriter and director John Patrick Shanley, interviewed by journalist Katherine Brodsky and had the opportunity to ask him my favorite question about themes. His answer was immediate and succinct:
Characters who won’t give up, who are going to find a way.
Moonstruck, Joe Versus the Volcano, Doubt
When you get a chance to do what you love to do as a writer, especially in screenwriting, where you can come up with any story and write it – obviously the business is changing – but when I broke in in 1983, it was wide open. You really could dream up a story and write anything you were passionate about. That’s how I approached it.
When you do that, you tend to draw from ‘what made you.’ Whether it’s things you were drawn to as a child – what molded you. Things you watched as a child, what stories you read at a young age, what you did with your free time.
All of those things combined, at least for me, to create a theme that I find runs through a lot of my work, which is man or woman’s place in nature, or man or woman against nature. Mainly it’s our relationship with nature. I’ve always explored that theme. It’s apparent in Last of The Dogmen. It’s apparent in Gorillas in the Mist.
I grew up camping and loving the outdoors and spending a lot of time outdoors. I love wilderness. I love wild places. I love the idea that there are places in the United States where you can still hear a wild wolf howl, or where grizzly bears roam.
This informed a lot of what I chose to write early in my career, and what I ended up writing later in my career. It still runs through my work today.
Forty years later, I’m still writing about the same themes. Because they’re important to me. And because they’re relevant to the world we’re living in today. Our relationship with nature. You can connect that to climate change. You can connect that to indigenous people that are disappearing, languages that are disappearing. What’s our relationship to that?
That’s essentially what turns me on thematically in storytelling.
Gorillas in the Mist, Last of The Dogmen, Hunchback of Notre Dame, Tarzan, Atlantis: The Lost Empire, Brother Bear
Breaking & Entering
A few weeks ago, I was working at my “Saturday coffee shop,” musing over what my next article should be, when a woman from across the patio got up and made a beeline in my direction. I could tell she wanted to ask me something. As she got closer, I was astonished to realize that I recognized her.
She wanted to take my picture to send to a former intern who looked remarkably like me. Turns out, I also look remarkably like me, a former intern of hers from a bajillion and a half years ago. We were surprised and delighted to reconnect. I blurted out that horrid, disingenuous, cliché – “You haven’t changed a bit!” – because it was true.
D. Diane Miller was likely the second person I ever worked for in my Hollywood career. Neither of us can recall how we met, but reconnecting this way seemed serendipitous to us both.
As I chatted with Diane, I suddenly realized what I wanted to write about – mentorship. And the bosses and mentors who impacted my career and my life.
That’s why I’m always adding new mentorship packages for the writers I work with as a consultant, so they can benefit from this crucial ingredient to success. You can read about them here.
It takes both talent and serendipity to break into the industry. And by that I mean the combination of preparation, relationships and lucky timing, mentorship is the surest way to gain those ingredients and to advance once you’ve gotten a foot in the door.
The best part of mentorship is that at some point you’ll be able to give someone else a hand up.
Toe to Toe
As I think back on my time with Diane, I’m struck with two things. First, even though I was truly just a kid, and an intern, she treated me with respect, included me in meetings, and handed off tasks, never doubting I would accomplish them.
Decades ago, Diane constantly worked with male business partners and in all-male settings. Never, ever, did she seem to be on anything less than an equal footing. When I asked her about this recently, Diane said that in many ways she considered women superior to men, and was reaching down to lift them up to her level!
How to Take A Meeting
Her business partner at the time, a male producer, took me to my first ever, real film industry meeting. He had been in the business for ages, and knew exactly how it worked. It was a Meetings 101 primer – the kind that you aren’t offered in any Ivory Tower.
I soaked it in. I watched him start with what seemed like casual, small talk and then deftly transition to the project that was the purpose of the meeting. So smooth. Wow. That’s how it’s done.
I learned right then and there how the industry takes a meeting and how a skilled producer operates. They start the ball rolling, tee it up for the writer, hand it off and then step back. And that’s how I’ve handled it for the rest of my career. In countless pitches to studios with a great idea and a writer in tow – whether they were a newbie of an Academy Award© nominated professional – I knew what my job was.
In the room, I learned that once my “active” work was done, the single most important thing I could do as a producer once the pitch began was shut up and observe. I sit the writer directly across from the most important person in the room, and I sit off at an angle where I can watch not the writer, but the decision-maker, observing their expressions and their body language.
Where did we hook them? When were they confused? When were they utterly engaged? All this feedback based on reactions would go back to the writer later so we could make the pitch better.
Mentorship Takeaways
- Never lose sight of your value. See yourself on equal footing with your peers.
- Watching how it’s done in the real world surpasses even the best how-to books.
Never Let Them See You Sweat
My first real industry job was as an assistant at a boutique literary agency. There is no better place to learn how the business works than an agency. Infinitely harder than working for two independent producers, but a priceless education, and I was eager to get schooled.
I worked for the two youngest, i.e. lowest level agents: A man who worked in feature and a woman who worked in TV. As the lowest on the totem pole they had to do more – read more, submit more, network more. They were trying to break new writers, prove themselves, and handle added responsibilities for the agency of covering studio open assignments and network staffing.
2 bosses + several incompetent assistants who proceeded me + young agents working 10 X harder than the partners = 60-hour work-weeks yields BIG learning curve.
To top it off, my two bosses had offices on different floors! I was literally running. My agents were sending out up to a dozen submissions a day. This is back in the olden days of scripts on paper, sent via delivery service, each with a perfect cover letter attached. I worked hard as hell, and I handled it. Except for getting a complaint from the bookkeeper that I was rushing around the script library/Xerox room/kitchen and looked stressed. Seriously?
So I trained myself to speed walk and whistle while I worked. OK, I can’t whistle a tune to save my life, but I hummed, and I smiled. No way was I going to be accused of not being able to handle the pressure.
My male boss, Gary Pearl, early in his career then but now a highly successful manager- producer, is the person truly responsible for getting me into the business. Except for a handful of quirks which I readily adapted to – may of which I picked up and still use – I knew exactly what he expected of me, and I could deliver.
Breaking into The Industry
In case I haven’t harped on the importance of having relationships to get into the industry as well as to advance, here’s the scoop:
My younger brother Neil, went to Tulane University where he helped reinvigorate a chapter of the Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity, or Sammy as it is called. After Neil graduated, he was offered a job as a national field rep for the fraternity. Pretty awesome job. He traveled the country helping new chapters spring up, as well as visiting existing ones where the brothers attempt to throw the best party you’ve ever seen while he tried to get then “scared straight” on alcohol, hazing and safe sex. Perhaps I’ve made it sound a bit too glamorous, but that’s the gist of it.
Through Sammy, Neil get to know the chapter advisor of the UCLA house, an alum, which is Gary. Who meets met I puts me up for a job as assistant to the partners, which I don’t get, coming in second place to a guy with a law degree. The next opening is for a new assistant he’s sharing with another agent. And this time I get the job.
Mentorship Learning Curve
While I freaked out that I lacked the agent sensibility, Gary taught me that if I wanted to be a development executive and a producer, I needed to focus on learning what my taste was. When I knew what types of stories I was attracted to, then I was ready to find a job with a producer who shared my taste.
Mentorship Opportunities
Gary gave me the opportunity to do some development work, helping a green writer who had interest on a script and was stuck in rewrite hell with a development exec who he wanted desperately to please but was confusing him. Here’s where I learned how to talk with writers in the way that will bring out the best in their work, different for each individual. And, because of the development exec and his notes, I saw what happens when you fail to tell a writer what it good, what is working and why. It can disappear. And the script doesn’t get stronger in the next pass. This was one of my early experiences in working closely with a writer and supporting them through the writing process. Invaluable!
Mentorship Takeaways
- Relationships, relationships, relationships.
- It’s not just who you know, it’s who you know knows!
- Nervous or not, put on a brave face, get in there and push to excel.
- Learn your taste in material, it’s invaluable.
Looking for Mentorship?
My Screenwriting Elevated Seminar includes 3 1/2 hours of one-on-one time! Read more here. Flyer here.
