Confessions of a Technophobe, New Series 2
In my last blog, I wrote about publishing my trilogy of novels. This time I’d like to write about the joys and frustrations of selling a movie screenplay. With a novel, the author works with the publishing team to provide the best edited version of one’s story. If you sell a screenplay to a production company, you have no further say in how it’s going to be made, unless you are actually part of the producing entity.
In complete ignorance in the early 1960s, I wrote my first screenplay based on the life of a remarkable German military man, Colonel, later General von Lettow-Vorbeck. I was writing commercials for Killarney Studios in Johannesburg, the oldest and largest film company in South Africa at the time. One of the studio executives felt that the story would be well received by one or more of the major studios in the U.S.
I read everything I could on the subject of the position of Tanganyika (now Tanzania) in World War I. I soon discovered that von Lettow-Vorbeck was a military genius, albeit an unorthodox one. I’ve written about him in earlier blogs but some of it deserves to be repeated. He had 3,000 German troops and 15,000 Askaris (African troops). He was opposed by somewhere between a quarter and half a million British troops and was never captured or defeated. In fact, he only laid down his arms two weeks after Armistice was declared. I called my screenplay “The Bicycle General” because of his habit of riding through the bush on a bicycle to visit his various outposts.
When the first British troops arrived, they moored their troopships a short way off the beach outside Dar es Salaam, the capital. As the troops waded ashore, a small team of German snipers fired, not at the Brits but into the trees lining the beach. This disturbed thousands of wild bees who attacked the advancing British troops, driving them all back to their ships!
Later, as the Germans proved to be remarkably elusive, some British scouts stumbled on von Lettow-Vorbeck’s camp. They rushed back to the British HQ and spoke to the commanding officer, General Wapshare (yes, that was his real name) to tell him that if the British forces moved quickly, they could capture the Germans. The good general raised his brandy glass and replied, “Sorry chaps, got a game of polo this afternoon. It’ll have to wait for tomorrow.” By then, of course, the Germans were long gone.
The British troops, mostly based in India, were so incompetent that in desperation the authorities appointed a South African, Jan Smuts, to command the troops. Smuts had been an outstanding Boer commandant during the Anglo-Boer war. He was later to become Prime Minister of South Africa twice as well as to serve in Winston Churchill’s war cabinet in WWII. A remarkable man but, unlike conditions in South Africa where battles were fought on mostly open plains and mountain ranges, East Africa is a place with largely dense jungle. Smuts nearly caught the wily German a few times but he was unfamiliar with the terrain and could not operate as he did in the Boer war, with skilled marksmen on horseback creating the beginning of the first-ever guerrilla warfare.
Nevertheless, Smuts and the Colonel developed a great mutual respect for each other. A dinner in Paris in 1922 commemorated the East Africa Campaign for both sides, with von Lettow-Vorbeck and Smuts as guests of honor. They became close friends. During World War II, von Lettow-Vorbeck was stridently anti-Hitler and anti- Nazis. Because of his fame as a war hero, he was not executed but put under house arrest for the duration of the war.
One day I spoke to a German friend in Johannesburg, Graf Heinrich von Pfeil, and asked if he knew about von Lettow-Vorbeck. To my amazement, Heinrich replied that the General was in fact his uncle. I got some great inside information about the man from him.
When the screenplay was written, the Killarney Studio executive, who had previously worked for 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles, sent it through to them. They replied that they liked the screenplay but did not think that a film about a German hero would work for the U.S. public, bearing in mind it was at that time only about seventeen years since World War II.
I felt it to be very small-minded of them. Subsequent attempts to get the picture financed and produced are ongoing. The anti-German bias has now disappeared, but the logistics of the story and its large budget have been stumbling blocks. Nevertheless, I still believe it would make a fine movie.
Today the most common way of getting a screenplay to a production company is by having an agent to represent you. The problem with that is the ultra-critical attitude of the agents who dare not send anything substandard to their clients such as the production houses or A-list actors.
As William Goldman, the writer of such classics as “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” has often said, no matter how well known you are, you’re still only as good as your last screenplay.
Another thing that producers usually look for is some proof of copyright. The last thing they want is to get excited about a screenplay and then find that it is owned by someone else other the person who claimed to be the author. Therefore, the best way to avoid this is to register the screenplay with the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., USA. This copyrights the work for every country in the world.
In Britain, there is the viewpoint that a written work is automatically copyrighted. I imagine this is because that today’s screenplays are virtually all written on laptops and the time of writing is dated; it constitutes proof that the author wrote it on such and such date. Anyone trying to copy it or steal it would have to prove that they had the story before that date, which is impossible.
Agents and producers often ask for the Form PA number which provides copyright protection for works of the Performing Arts intended to be performed for an audience, which is the receipt from the Library of Congress acknowledging that they have registered your screenplay.
I recently had to register a TV series with the Library. It had been about five years since I last registered anything with them. I was horrified to find how they have now made the whole process so complicated that I had to enlist my daughter Xanthe’s help in ploughing through the morass of the application form.
Previously it was very straightforward. Is this perhaps symptomatic of how bureaucracy is imposing controls over everything we do?
I doubt whether many of you are about to write a screenplay, but I thought you may be interested in some of the complexities attached to getting a screenplay to a producer, agent or even a movie star. Even when you’ve performed miracles along the way and gotten the screenplay to the person you have been trying to reach, you will often find that it has now been turned over to a screenplay reader for analysis. To be fair, hundreds of screenplays are submitted all the time so that there has to be a process of sorting the wheat from the chaff. The bottom line is that, if you want to write a screenplay and eventually see it produced, you have to have enormous persistence. Don’t be surprised if the screenplay reader is critical of your work. Readers are largely failed writers themselves and are therefore biased against most works. Avoid them if you can.
All forms of writing have their complexities but once you have either a manuscript of a novel or a screenplay, just know that the battle has only just begun. So many writers write the final word of their work, heave a huge sigh of relief and relax thinking their job is done. No, it’s only just started – and getting the work to the point where it will be published or produced on screen is far more arduous and less enjoyable than the writing of it. It’s tough but it’s not going to happen on its own unless you are fortunate enough to acquire an agent.
Bookshelves and drawers are littered with unpublished novels and screenplays. Some of them may be very good indeed but if you don’t have the determination and persistence to follow through and get your work to the right outlet, you’ll have dust accumulating on your works and a sad feeling of “if only …”
Having said all that, I’ve been writing now for over fifty years and wouldn’t change it for a seven-figure salary in a large corporation or run a hamburger stand. Writing is a bit like eating peanuts. The more you eat, the more you want to eat! When I started writing I had good ideas, but my writing skills were very ordinary. That was resolved by simply writing and writing and writing until the words started to flow.
The early days were tough but then I found myself actually starting to look forward to putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboards. Today, I get withdrawal symptoms if I don’t write anything for a couple of days.
As an aside, at school I really hated poetry. My teachers were constantly telling me what poems were exceptional, and what poets I should read. Tennyson, Yeats, Lord Byron and so on were dumped on us. They were undoubtedly great poets – but having to learn a couple of verses by heart and spout them out in front of the class was not my idea of fun. Only in later years did I discover more modern poets like Dylan Thomas or John Betjeman who found a very different way of expressing themselves. By then, to my own surprise, I was already experimenting with some poems.
I’ll never forget the expression on the face of a fellow rugby player who saw me writing in a notebook just before an important match. He asked what I was writing and when I showed him a poem, he shook his head in disbelief. For him rugby players played rugby and poets, well, they hid in attics and starved away.
He couldn’t conceive of a person who lived a so-called normal life and played a rough sport like rugby, who could also write poetry. I thank goodness that I was able to bridge the gap with a foot in both worlds – a boot on the one and a sandal on the other!
An ExoTech Ltd shareholder, Chris is currently authoring two of the four books to be published the day ExoBrain launches and has helped to create ExoBrain’s introductory video to the Confidential Technical Briefing. Chris has spent his working life in the film and television industry, starting with BBC Television in London, then ATV in Birmingham becoming, at the time, the youngest Studio Manager in Britain.
Later, in South Africa, he wrote and directed film and TV commercials, having four South African entries at the Cannes Advertising Festival. After a number of years of writing and directing or producing documentaries (eight international awards) and corporate videos, he concentrated on writing feature film screenplays (five screened) and television series (seven screened). He has a novel, ”Pursuit of Treachery,” with a literary agent and is currently obtaining finance for an action adventure feature film he has written and is co-producing. He is a published poet and has given many readings.