Screenwriting, by Lew Hunter
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by matthew hansen
SUPERIOR — He sits cross-legged in the center of a living room in the center of a town just 40 miles from the center of the country.
He sits in the center of 16 students, their undisputed Aristotle. They're waiting wordlessly to be convinced they can do this. They can write movies.
The 69-year-old wears a purple T-shirt barely covering his belly. A red scar runs down his surgically repaired knee. Blue footies keep his feet warm — no shoes in Aristotle's house.
When he leaves, he will leave in the longest, greenest car you've ever seen.
But don't get blinded by all the color. Lew Hunter — small-town Cornhusker, Hollywood power broker, transatlantic screenwriting guru — does have a little old-fashioned Greek wisdom to share.
He can teach them how to write the great American movie. He can help them believe they're authentic American screenwriters. He can help them invade the most American of cities.
He can show them how to live the great American life. His life.
But first, a Rodney Dangerfield joke.
Can 16 minds groan silently, in unison?
The Omaha rock guitarist, the L.A. accountant, the Big Springs music and band teacher, the Canadian wanderer, the Superior High School student, the Boston novelist and all the rest aren't here for punch lines.
In most cases, they've forked over $2,500 to drain wisdom from a man who worked for Walt Disney, knew Michael Eisner before he was Michael Eisner, hung with Francis Ford Coppola and then started the most prestigious graduate screenwriting program in the world.
They've flown from both coasts to the "Victorian Capital of Nebraska," a town with 2,397 citizens and, on this Saturday afternoon in late June, exactly two cars, both pick-ups, on Main Street.
They're not here for the nightlife. They're here for a two-week crash course taught by the author of "Lew Hunter's Screenwriting 434," one of the industry's most respected textbooks.
Their goal is simple: Come to where the dirt is fertile, turn a seed of an idea into a 120-page screenplay, sell the germinated idea to a Hollywood studio, watch it blossom on big screens all over the world — and then have it blow all the way back here to Superior's one-screen Crest Movie Theater.
The goal is also complicated, nuanced, more universal than Universal.
Something about writing your dream and then living it, day jobs and long odds be damned. Something about what the owner of this three-story Victorian mansion can give them.
Time's wasting, Lew. Back to the point!
Wait. Rodney Dangerfield is the point.
"Moses comes down from the mountain," Hunter says. "There's Act 1, the beginning."
"He says I have good news and bad news. There's Act 2, the complication.
"The good news is I got him down to 10. The bad news is adultery is still in. And there's Act 3, the resolution."
Campfire stories, Hamlet, Budweiser commercials, JFK's speeches, Rodney Dangerfield jokes and all the movies we love have one thing in common, something Aristotle pointed out to his students as they sat around him more than a thousand years ago.
They have a beginning. They have a middle. They have an end.
"I don't know of anything good that doesn't," Hunter says.
"Really, it's the only rule."
Act 1 — The Hook
Fourteen hours later, that one rule has multiplied. Procreated. There's been some sort of rule explosion.
It's Monday morning, the first real day of the two-week seminar. The students have gathered on the first floor of Hunter's Victorian home, sitting on chairs, the floor and something Hunter calls his Mormon Tabernacle couch ("because the entire choir could make love on it.")
They stare bleary-eyed at the maze of arrows and lines on the dry-erase board in front of them. "How do we do that?" one student whispers to another.
Linda Voorhees, Hunter's teaching sidekick, is used to explaining what she calls a paradigm and others call a blueprint for screenwriting success.
She signed up for Hunter's University of California at Los Angeles screenwriting class more than two decades ago and, like countless others, she never really left.
Voorhees has been a UCLA professor for 13 years. She's written for countless TV movies and "Lion King 2."
Her most recent script is about a larger-than-life professor who talks frustrated writers down from ledges and nudges them toward greatness an anecdote at a time.
"In the first draft, Lew could fly."
Her mentor is right, Voorhees explains. Movies only have one rule: Aristotle's beginning, middle and end. But there are plenty of other rules that can be broken only after they're learned.
For starters, a screenplay needs one hero and one villain.
The hero needs flaws and a buddy, someone to talk about those flaws with. (Think Joe Pesci in "Goodfellas," and "Raging Bull.")
The villain can be bigger, tougher, smarter or sexier than the hero, but he or she still must be a villain, someone trying to keep the hero from success. (Think Joe Pesci in "Home Alone," and "Home Alone 2.")
Act 1, which the class will focus on first, serves as an introduction. We meet the characters and start to identify with the hero as his or her journey begins
.
That journey better be interesting.
"Make the stakes high," Voorhees says. "Think life and death. Think sex and death. Just think death.
"And then make me believe it."
The key is Page 17.
On Page 17 of "Gremlins," the father gives the son a furry little creature and three rules to care for it.
The rest of the movie is the son breaking those rules and paying the price.
On Page 17 of "E.T.," the boy and the alien first appear together on screen. The rest of the movie is about the boy helping the alien go home.
"Page 17 is what the movie is all about," Voorhees says. "The audience settles back and says, ‘OK, Now we know where we're going.'"
Daniel Wyatt is a little fuzzy on Page 17. He's a little fuzzy on what should happen on every page.
Wyatt is sure of one thing, though — he's found his calling.
The 21-year-old stands smoking on the Hunter's front porch explaining what brought him here (a back story, in screenwriting parlance).
The Omaha North graduate backpacked through Europe after high school. He took classes at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He helped run a family business in Phoenix.
He moved to New York on a whim, looking to resolve a variation of screenwriting's basic question: What's this story about?
He found movies.
Wyatt started small, working on the crew of an independent film shooting in the Berkshires.
He ran errands. He worked punishing 17-hour days. He loved every second.
"The one thing that bothered me, though," he says, stubbing out his cigarette, "the scripts were always crappy."
It's a line that will be uttered here again and again. It's a belief the whole country sometimes seems to share, especially when they're exiting a theater having just seen "Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde" (or "Home Alone 2," or "Caddyshack 2," or "Blair Witch II.")
At some point, screenwriting replaced prose and poetry as the United States' preferred form of communication.
For some reason, half the country thinks they can do it better.
Hunter has gotten scripts from actors, producers, people on the street. He's gotten them at cocktail parties and mailed to his house.
Once a screenplay slid under a bathroom stall, catching him, quite literally, with his pants down.
"There's just a sexiness to movies," Voorhees says. "Do you want to read what you wrote in a C-SPAN bunker somewhere? Or do you want to be on set with Cameron Diaz?"
Hunter began to write because "90 percent of the stuff I read was shit."
The Guide Rock native started as a page at NBC after graduating from Nebraska Wesleyan and getting a master's degree from Northwestern at age 19.
By 1969, and the age of 34, he had risen to a producer at Disney, then CBS.
He had a good job, a nice house, a family.
He didn't need to write.
He took the year off and wrote six screenplays anyway. One, "If Tomorrow Comes," a Japanese-American Romeo and Juliet story told during the period after Pearl Harbor, became a movie after Aaron Spelling read the script on his lunch break.
Hunter ended up writing and producing mostly TV movies and served as an executive for all of the Big Three networks.
In 1979, he joined the UCLA screenwriting school faculty. There, he turned himself into one of the school's most popular professors.
Nearly 1,500 people showed up at his retirement party in 1999 to celebrate a man whose personality is as varied as his career.
Hunter seems to cry at least once a day, usually at the mention of an old script or old friend, or an old friend who wrote an old script. He attends church every Sunday. He pines for movies that change the world.
He's also well-versed in the wants and needs of Hollywood.
"You'd say I want to do a nice character study, and he'd say, ‘Perfect. Put blind lesbians on roller skates,'" former student Diane Salzberg says.
He's Santa Claus, if Santa gave encouragement as presents and knew Ray Bradbury. Or maybe he's Buddha, if Buddha cursed.
Or maybe he's just Lew Hunter.
"He really is larger than life," Voorhees said.
Asked to explain his life, Hunter says: "Somebody once said life is something that happens when you're making other plans.
"I never planned any of this. It just happened."
After encouragement from Hunter, Daniel Wyatt thinks it can happen for him as well.
He's taken some writing classes at a New York state college. He's written his first screenplay, a 17-page short drawing from his experiences as an Omaha teenager.
And now he's back in Nebraska, starting his first full-length script.
It's set in Cuba. It's about love triumphing over money, over everything.
"I want to direct someday, something unique," he says. "Something that's mine. Something that's good."
Act 2 — The Plot Thickens
The hero has to fail. This is the first rule of Act 2.
There are others: Around Page 60, or midpoint, the hero must seize control of his or her destiny.
It's time to stop reacting and start acting. It's time for Dirty Harry's steely resolve and some driving theme music. It also never hurts to blow things up along the way.
All this action builds toward a crescendo, a final showdown between hero and villain, at the end of Act 2. Voorhees prefers the students use fists over knives in that climactic scene, and knives over guns.
You can use words, too, but forget about the phone. In movies, unlike real life, the biggest moments always occur with hero and villain face to face.
"It's conflict, conflict, conflict," Hunter says one day as his group meets around the dining room table. He's pounding the table for emphasis. "Nobody wants to see the village of the happy people."
Diane Salzberg knows this. She knows all this.
She graduated first in her 1,000-student San Fernando Valley high school class and then breezed through Stanford, UCLA's graduate screenwriting program and Hunter's first-ever "Screenwriting 434" class in 1979.
"She's a star," Hunter says.
She isn't here for knowledge. She's here, she tells the class, because she needs to leach from their joy, their enthusiasm. She's here because Hunter told her to come to Superior and let him and wife Pamela shower love upon her.
"I tend to get jaded, because you know where I live? I live in Hollywood."
After graduation, Salzberg worked as a temporary secretary at movie studios.
She read scripts for producers, certain she could write better screenplays than the ones she was reading.
She even served as a casting assistant on George Lucas' memorable bomb, "Howard the Duck."
"They called me the dwarf wrangler. It was my job to find little people for the movie."
Dozens of little people, many ups and downs and a long illness later, Salzberg got her big break.
She had teamed with college buddy and working screenwriter David Titcher to write a script they sold to MGM.
The pair built their comedy on the fact Snow White, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty are all married to a young stud with the same name.
So what would happen if Prince Charming was a polygamist?
We'll probably never find out. We'll never find out because, once you sell a script, it isn't yours anymore.
"We went into a meeting and they said, ‘He can't be married to all three.'
"And we're just shocked, because that's the whole movie."
Now the script — her script — sits in turnaround, Hollywood terminology for "this will probably never get made," Salzberg says.
"They raped it."
Even the beginners here talk with some bitterness about trash that made it to the big screen, and undiscovered gold that Hollywood refuses to mine.
It's a modern-day Greek tragedy, with Spielberg as Zeus.
"At some point some 20-year-old college kid like me reads your script," says David Radcliffe, an Omaha native, University of Southern California student and intern for Jersey Films. "If they're not hooked in the first nine pages, you're done. You go to the bottom of the pile.
Part of the frustration stems from the lack of control.
Part of it stems from screenwriting's Powerball-like odds.
Case in point: Hunter estimates he read 3,000 scripts at UCLA. Seven of those scripts — just less than one quarter of one percent — got made into movies.
And there's ample frustration for screenwriters who hit the jackpot.
It's an addiction, hanging out on the set, eating free food, chatting up Cameron Diaz, being somebody.
The low is going home.
"Then you're just another lonely writer in a room with the cursor blinking. And you have to try to do it all over again," Voorhees says.
Salzberg thinks she's ready to face the cursor again.
She says she isn't jealous of Titcher, who recently wrote the script for "Around the World in 80 Days."
She's writing a steamy erotic thriller. She's trying to channel Hunter's energy.
"I don't know how realistic all this is," she says. "I don't know if everybody here should drop everything and move out to Hollywood.
"Of course, I'd be jealous if they made it."
Act 3 — They Save the World
There isn't much to a movie's final act.
It should end organically. Don't tack an artsy ending onto a shoot-em-up, and don't try to put a smiley face on something sad.
If Jon Bokenkamp had his way, he'd change the ending of "Taking Lives."
The screenwriter is calling from California, where he's working on his latest script.
The Kearney native has spent most of the summer with his wife and newborn on Johnson Lake, a strange place to find a screenwriter whose next two scripts are supposed to star Diane Lane and Julia Roberts.
His last, "Taking Lives," starred Angelina Jolie. The movie made $34 million.
"I remember the first thing I wrote, and I'm driving up to the lot going in for my notes thinking, ‘This is hilarious,'" he says. "They're paying me to write something."
Bokenkamp graduated from Kearney High School in 1991 and headed to California, where he attended USC.
He didn't know anyone. He didn't really have a plan of attack.
"I'm not exactly Shakespeare, either," he says.
But he had an idea, a thriller he started working on during an independent study class at the University of Nebraska at Kearney.
He wrote by day and parked cars and worked at a spaghetti restaurant by night.
One night he stopped at a gas station after work and bumped into a nice woman whose car had Nebraska license plates.
Pamela Hunter took him home to meet her husband, even though he was wearing his spaghetti-stained work clothes and even though it was midnight.
"I really bought into Lew's philosophy about things. You come up with a good script, you pour your heart into it, it doesn't sell and you say, ‘Well, what's the next one?'"
So Bokenkamp kept writing, right on through the high of selling the first script and the low of the resulting forgettable movie, "Bad Seed."
He wrote through the high of being hired by Julia Roberts' agent and the low of the studio meddling with "Taking Lives."
He wrote some on "Blair Witch II."
He doesn't try to get caught up in what happens to his scripts. Instead, he gets caught up in the scripts themselves.
"When it's on the page, it can be 100 percent dead right. It can be perfect."
It seems so simple. Lew Hunter thinks it is.
He's boiled it down to a two-word credo, a declarative sentence he ends nearly every conversation, e-mail and lecture with.
It's his only real rule, a rule that trumps even Aristotle's beginning, middle and end.
It's easily ignored amid his blue-and-yellow Hawaiian shirts and all the talk of paradigms and genres, opening box-office numbers and paychecks.
It's easily missed when you focus on goal No. 1 — money, fame, success — and easily understood when you get the second goal, the one about telling a story, your story.
It's Hunter's Page 17, his conflict and his resolution. It's the seminar's main idea. It's Aristotle's — and this story's — beginning, middle and end.
"Write on," Lew Hunter says as his students stand up from the dining room table, readying themselves to work on their scripts. "Write on."
Reach Matthew Hansen at 473-7245 or mhansen@journalstar.com.
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