Screen savers

When I try to visualize a screenwriter, I usually get a mental picture of Dixon Steele, the tortured script hack played by Humphrey Bogart in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place: smoking, drinking, full of rage and self-loathing. Or else there’s William Holden as Joe Gillis, the cynical, bottom-feeding screenwriter in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard. Needless to say, it seems like a pretty miserable profession to get into.

But of course, we now have more modern examples to cheer us up: Quentin Tarantino, who happily (and now regularly) taps out his patented dialogue-loaded homages to film. For him, it’s just about getting his characters together somewhere and “starting them talking.” (Recently, I’ve come to the opinion that Tarantino is like the Torrents of filmmaking: he takes bits of pieces of films you vaguely remember and assembles them into new works of art, like Django Unchained. He’s “Quentin Torrentino,” if you will.) Or there’s Christopher and Jonathan Nolan, who devise sharp, smart scripts as a team though they grew up continents apart (a product of divorced parents, Christopher lived in England while Jonathan was raised in Chicago, à la The Parent Trap).

It turns out screenwriters are just humans, running the gamut from tortured souls to workaday troopers who are committed to the page. Script Tease, a series of interviews with top screenwriters assembled by Hollywood Reporter profiler Dylan Callaghan, gets points for including both types. You get to hear from both Darren Aranofsky and Rob Zombie; both Aaron Sorkin and, er, Emilio Estavez.

This is useful because it tells a lot about how differently people work. Some, like Diablo Cody, claim they thrive on dysfunction and chaos. Others show up in front of the computer the same time every day.

Callaghan is a probing interviewer. He speaks the lingo of both Seth Rogen and Elmore Leonard, so his candid questions elicit honest answers. When he asks Sofia Coppola how she approached casting Somewhere, she says, “I always find it helpful when I’m writing to picture an actor.” (So she pictured Stephen Dorff??) We learn the Golden Rule that Rogen and his writing partner Evan Goldberg have embraced: “Bounce sh*t off people.” Things may not be as funny alone as they are with a group. (They use watching The Simpsons alone as opposed to with others as a barometer: “When I watch it with friends, I laugh my a** off; when I watch it alone, I might laugh three or four times.”)

And he does a good job of prying info out of the famously reticent Coen brothers. Who knew Joel and Ethan had a long bout of writer’s block while scripting Fargo? (“We were literally stuck in the script for six months at the line ‘FADE IN: SHEP’S APARTMENT — Carl is humping the escort.’”) Their solution? Start working on something else. “Eventually we managed to come back and write beyond that line.”

Everyone likes a comeback story. Shane Black penned some witty scripts for the Lethal Weapon series, then flopped badly with Last Action Hero and The Long Kiss Goodnight. He made waves again with the entertainingly postmodern Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, then wrote and directed Iron-Man 3 for his buddy Robert Downey Jr. His trick? Keep every scrap of dialogue you ever wrote down and throw it in a shoebox; later, you can raid it for ideas.

In truth, Script Tease is a treasure trove of insights as well as good advice. It helps to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth. And the tally is pretty impressive: Gus Van Sant, Nicholas Sparks, Richard Linklater, Emma Thompson, Sylvester Stallone, Steve Kloves, Vince Gilligan (whose idea for Breaking Bad actually arrived “like the proverbial lightning strike” because he and a friend were broke and joked they could make more money setting up a crystal meth lab in an RV and selling it cross-country).

Some, like Gilligan, are humble about success. “With Breaking Bad, it’s like I pulled the lever on the slot machine and it came up cherries; if it was something I did, I don’t know if I could repeat it.” Others, like Juno writer Cody, seem very defensive about it. When Callaghan notes that critics say her characters all talk alike, she cracks, “Yeah, that’s why I won an Oscar, because I write bad dialogue.”

I still have a mental image of screenwriters locked away in dark motel rooms, typing away as the LA sunshine beats down outside the curtains. In fact, Stallone says that’s how he managed to finish Rocky: he literally painted his windows black to shut out the world outside his apartment. It worked; he had a script in three weeks.

No less successful, if perhaps a bit more businesslike, are writers like Kloves, who penned all the Harry Potter movies (“I see movies in terms of rhythm more than structure; like music, going from one scene to another”) as well as the more adult-oriented Wonder Boys, for which he won an Oscar. Then there are the writing teams — Glee and Nip/Tuck scripters Ian Brennan and Chad Falchuk; or Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot, who claim their cookie-cutter scripts for The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise are “a lot more complex than they seem.” (Could’ve fooled me. I once watched a Pirates movie on a plane without headphones, and found I could follow the story 100 percent without hearing a single word of dialogue. It was so broad, they were practically miming the script. So who needs writers?)

A lot of good scriptwriters, it turns out, emerge because they didn’t feel they had much of a voice growing up. Aaron Sorkin, who won an Oscar for The Social Network, claims he grew up in a crowded home where his voice was easily drowned out. (“Anyone who used one word when they could have used 10 wasn’t trying.”) So, like a lot of writers, he made the people on the page do his talking for him: “I tend to write people who are smarter than I am, smoother than I am, and, in most tangible ways, better than I am,” he admits. Perhaps, in this way, screenwriters get to savor that famous “second act” in life.