I adore HBO’s limited series Chernobyl and its associated podcast of the same name with the writer and show runner Craig Mazin explores the crafting of the show and where it deviates from the historical record. That podcast led me to Mazin’s other Podcast Scriptnotes where he co-hosts where fellow screen scribe John August about screen writing and things interesting to screenwriters.
There had been a time in my life where I really wanted to be a screenwriter and director. Movies are a passion of mine and I adore all the aspect of cinema. This weekend I will spend 13 hours watching a marathon of SF themed horror film as part of a local cinema group’s annual celebration. My novel coming out in March 2020 Vulcan’s Forge is not only a celebration of film noir in prose but stuffed to its hairline with references to some of my favorite films. However, listening to Scriptnotes I think I have learned that being a professional screenwriter may not have been for me.
Where there are lots of books about how to write screenplays and what the form of the material is like there are few recourses that can give you a real look at what the life of a screenwriter is really like, Scriptnotes is one of those rare resources. In addition to excellent advise on character, conflict, and constructing scenes, John and Craig climb down into the muddy trenches of dealing with contracts, producers, the Guild, studios, and set realistic expectations for aspiring talent just what the business is going to expect of them. What dismayed me was the amount of work a professional screenwriter does that is being a ‘gun for hire.’ How often a person will work on projects that they did not start, did not conceive, and are expected to create and polish into gem stones as glittering as their own projects. Certainly spec scripts, that is a project that was written without a contract and without the writer being hired to writer it, get produced but more often these scripts are used to open doors and gain employment as those hired guns and the films those scripts were written for never come into existence.
That has to be heartbreaking.
As a novelist I write a manuscript with every expectation that it will be a novel. For my preferences the ideal outcome is a traditionally published novel where a publisher pays me an advance and I get the benefit of their entire production, advertising, and distribution enterprise but if need be in this digital age I can publish the book myself. I do not need to produce well-polished dreams that are likely to be discarded so I can chase work on material I did not create.
Perhaps one of my novels will eventually be sold and made into a film and then I may writer the screenplay. I think I have a real talent for that form, but as a career, I think that screenwriter would have been a poor fit.
