Part 67
How did I learn how to write feature screenplays? Living in South Africa in the 1970s, apart from books on the subject, there was virtually no one in the country who I could look to as a successful international screenwriter.
There was a political decision by the Apartheid regime to not allow television broadcasts until 1976 for fear that the disadvantaged black majority might begin to understand just how much they were missing in their lives compared to more democratic nations.
As a result, both black and white South Africans were deprived of the mixed pleasures of TV. The Afrikaans community took the initiative and started making movies which were aimed primarily at “platteland” (country) audiences, who were starved for entertainment. Although these movies were extremely popular with local audiences, they were not exactly Oscar material. They were primarily love stories and rarely dealt with more serious subjects. I didn’t feel that I could learn much from the screenplays they were working from.
The one film that did emerge from South Africa to huge international acclaim was “The Gods Must Be Crazy.” It was made by an eccentric man, Jamie Uys, who walked around barefooted, wearing khaki shorts and a T-shirt most of the time. He controlled virtually everything himself: writing, directing, editing and producing. Only he could make head or tail of his screenplays.
The picture had a wonderfully funny story about a bushman walking in the Kalahari desert when the pilot of a light aircraft throws a Coke bottle out of his plane, which lands on the bushman’s head. The bushman sees it as a sign from God and makes it his mission to throw the bottle off the edge of the world! The story is actually enhanced by the curious, rather antiquated style employed by Uys as a filmmaker. The picture for a few years was the largest-grossing foreign (non-American) movie in the world. Too obscure an example to follow.
To begin with, I simply wrote by trial and error and made plenty of mistakes: far too much dialogue, lengthy and often unnecessary scenes, and so on. Eventually, I realized that the only way in which I could hope to break into the international level of screenwriting was to get to the United States and visit Hollywood. I recognized that many movies made in Britain and Europe were more intelligent and more character-driven than the fast-paced and exciting style of the American movies. However, I also observed factually that movies made in the USA were more widely distributed and made more money than their British and European counterparts. I also believed that if one had any kind of message to impart in a story, it made sense to try to reach the widest possible audience. Only too often, movies with important messages and themes fail to entertain as well, thus reaching mostly the converted to that idea, in small art houses.
I’ve never claimed to be a purist as a writer, attempting to emulate people like James Joyce, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. I simply wanted to communicate as clearly as possible any story idea, which may or may not contain an underlying message. Therefore, I saw Hollywood as the place where I should learn my screenwriting trade.
I paid a couple of visits to Los Angeles before meeting the kind of people who I believed would be helpful in my quest for knowledge. One of them was an interesting character whom I shall call Barney. He had left his family’s successful businesses in Chicago and came to live in Hollywood determined to learn about the entire movie industry. Over a period of two or three years, he obtained an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of all aspects of the business. When I met him, he was looking for screenplays that he could present, as a producer, to various financing sources and obtain funding for the production of a picture.
I showed him two or three of my screenplays written without knowledge of the basic structure of a successful work. He enjoyed the stories but correctly felt that I could have written them better. He introduced me to the material written by Bob McKee which explained the basic format of a three-act structure for any screenplay as well as emphasis on brevity of dialogue, reminding the reader that film is essentially a visual medium, and that the more said visually and the less said verbally, the better the final product will be.
I returned to South Africa armed with this priceless information and set about rewriting my screenplays within the basic formats laid out by McKee. It is also a truism that once you fully understand a rule, you can then effectively break that rule on occasion. However, you must understand how the rule works first. Today, there is a question as to whether the three-act rule still applies but, in my view, I think it is a very useful guideline.
What is the three-act rule? Basically, the screenplay should be broken into three parts. Act 1 starts with an inciting incident – something which engages the audience immediately and gets them to wonder what is going on. Then after plus or minus 25 minutes, Act 1 should have a climax, which basically poses the question of the protagonist “What in the hell should I do now?”
Act 2, over about 40 minutes, may have a number of smaller climaxes as the protagonist finds out what he/she should do, rising to another major climax where the protagonist understands what has happened and what needs to be done, even though it may be seemingly impossible. Act 3, over 25 to 30 minutes, is the resolution of the problem, with the ending of the picture having the biggest climax of all, when all is revealed and resolved.
This and other knowledge made a fundamental difference to my writing. Now the next problem was to get someone to read my screenplays who might finance the picture. Out of the blue, I got a call from Barney saying that he was speaking with some other producers who were interested in a screenplay of mine called “Warhead.” Could I get back to LA and do some further rewrites? He added that it was necessary for me to work with an experienced writer to achieve the result that enabled the picture to go into production.
Hugely excited, but particularly broke at the time, I persuaded my very long-suffering wife that it was worthwhile taking out an extra mortgage on the house. This could be my entry into the magical world of Hollywood!
Arriving back in LA, I was invited to stay at Barney’s house and met the writer who was going to guide me through the maze of writing a successful screenplay. It took me exactly three days to discover that I actually knew more about screenwriting than he did. He was nice guy but, apart from selling a story for a short film, it did not match up with my fifteen screenplays and two TV series that I had already written back home prior to learning the basics from Bob McKee.
The next shock was when Barney finally admitted that the only thing the producers liked about my “Warhead” screenplay was the title. He proceeded to outline the kind of story that he and the producers had discussed. It was a total rewrite, and, by the way, I would only get paid if they agreed to buy the final product. Welcome to Hollywood, I thought grimly, but I hadn’t come all that way to go home with my tail between my legs.
I told David I would write it on two conditions. Firstly, I would write it alone and secondly, I write best when travelling around. The second point was a white lie. I just wanted to get away from LA and visit my cousin in Vancouver, Canada, which I did. I also spent a pleasant day and night in Ashland, Oregon, visiting a South African friend of ours who had settled there.
My original “Warhead” story was about a nuclear warhead sent into orbit by the US during the time of the Cold War, which had lost its position in space and had crashed into the Namib desert with both Americans and Russians racing to retrieve it. The new story was about a crazed African dictator in a remote African Republic who obtains two nuclear warheads and tries to hold the world to ransom, while the major nations of the world agree to send their best teams to retrieve the warheads. US Navy SEALs, British SAS, Russian Spestnaz, Israeli Mossad and even the South African Special Forces, form an unlikely alliance with very interesting results.
I didn’t mind the new story, although I still liked the old one. I wrote about a third of the screenplay on my journey, which Barney enthused over and then I returned to Johannesburg to complete it. The saga continued for some months. I was told that the producers loved it but had now put their money into another movie and that they would get back to me. They never did.
The moral of the story is that despite all the let downs and untruths, it did start me on the path to becoming a pretty good screenwriter, with five feature movies made from my screenplays and seven television drama series.
In a similar fashion, Peter Warren had to delve in between the existing false data about computing and numerous shenanigans before he uncovered the basic workable truth upon which ExoTech has been developed. Creativity is all very well, but the other essential ingredients are persistence and self-belief!
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.