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RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK'S LAWRENCE KASDAN VS. THE FORTRESS OF HOLLYWOOD by Tom McCurrie
At the latest edition of the Spring Storytellers series, sponsored by the Writers Guild Foundation, Lawrence Kasdan ("Raiders of the Lost Ark", "The Empire Strikes Back") came off as the nicest writer-director on the planet. He also came off as the shrewdest, giving out some of the best advice I've ever heard on the art, and business, of screenwriting.
Kasdan quotes producer-director Tony Bill on breaking into show business: "[In] Hollywood, you have to fight to get into the war." Kasdan: "[Hollywood] is a fortress and they're trying to keep you out, basically because...why do you want more people in there competing for those jobs. So the gates are closed, the walls are manned and they're trying to throw hot oil on you. And you're trying to get in there somehow, maybe a secret tunnel or bashing down the front gate, who knows? But the hardest part of the career, and it's tough to sustain a career for a long time...the hardest part is getting in, because you not only have to do something that lets you get over the wall, under the wall or around the wall, but you have to keep at it when everyone's saying you're crazy. And when you are sure you're crazy. And when you just haven't had any encouragement...[And] tomorrow I gotta go back to my job and I don't like my job...and it can go on for years, and you know it's funny when you talk about it this way but it's not funny when you wake up and you know you're going to [a job you hate]."
For Kasdan, this job was advertising, where he worked for five years after graduating from the University of Michigan: "And I hated it...it just wasn't what I wanted to do. And what it was for me, it was an acid flashback to elementary school which I hated, where you're just watching the clock all the time...and they're mad at you if you're not excited about it. So it's hell." The true test is "to have the stamina to stick with it, to keep writing, which is hard enough when you're being paid for it -- it's almost impossible when you're not."
And Kasdan wasn't getting paid for years: "I couldn't sell anything, I couldn't get an agent, all of a sudden then I got an agent and he couldn't sell anything. And he actually tried to fire me." But before Kasdan fell back down "that slippery slope" to non-repped oblivion, "all of a sudden I sold two like that, two originals, 'The Bodyguard' (1992) and 'Continental Divide' (1981). Instantly, a week later, I got a call to come meet Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. So my first job in the business really was writing 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' (1981)."
Now with some money in his pocket, Kasdan quit the ad agency gig and set to work writing "Raiders". After six months, he handed in the finished product, and Lucas immediately offered him the job of writing "The Empire Strikes Back" (1980). Kasdan was happy but stunned: "I said [to Lucas] don't you want to read 'Raiders' before you offer me this job?" According to Kasdan, Lucas responded: "Well, I'll read it tonight -- if I hate it I'm gonna call you up tomorrow and take back this offer." Needless to say, Kasdan didn't get that call.
Compared to "Raiders", "Empire" was a breeze to Kasdan: "The hard part was writing 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' from nothing. Here in 'Empire' [Lucas] had a story already (including the revelation that Vader was Luke's father)...and it didn't even have to end, it didn't even have to tie up in the end! It was irresistible and we did it really fast." Kasdan: "It's only when you have to write the ending that you get in trouble, because everyone's always disappointed in the ending. And in fact, on 'Return of the Jedi' (1983) [which Kasdan also wrote], everybody was disappointed in the ending -- I mean, they're gonna get together again, get more medals, whaaaat?" As Kasdan explains, "[Because] everything's still in the works and you don't know how it's going to work out...the second act of any three-act structure [or the Second Film in any Three-Film Trilogy] is always the fun part, so when I was offered that job [on 'Empire'], I was like, yeah, bring it on and [Lucas] was going to do a lot of the work!"
But the man behind "Raiders" and "Empire" still doesn't find writing easy: "For me it's a struggle every day to sit down and do it." Of course, if writing is a struggle, not writing is a misery, giving Kasdan two states of mind: "You're either writing or you're feeling bad."
Now when he begins a new script, Kasdan builds from the characters up: "I'm interested in characters first and then hopefully they create fields of force that attract story, you know, and interactions with other characters and suddenly a story starts to develop around the people that you're interested in and to some extent the ideas that those people embody." An example of this embodying is in Kasdan's "Grand Canyon" (1991) when Kevin Kline teaches his son to drive, literally handing over control of the car and hoping he doesn't crash: "It's a perfect metaphor in my mind for letting [children] go out into a dangerous world where bad things can happen in a second." But you have to watch out for the "Cringables", moments where characters stop speaking like characters and more like ideas, where characters spew philosophy instead of dialogue that feels natural and unforced (Kasdan admits "The Big Chill" [1983] has a few of these Cringables, "where [characters] had to come out and say explicitly what I would rather they embody.").
Interestingly, for a guy who came up with those juicy lines in "Body Heat" (1981), Kasdan puts more importance on description than dialogue. Kasdan: "I think that's the most misunderstood thing about screenwriting -- it's mainly about action, and not so much about the dialogue. When people try to describe who a screenwriter is, they always go to his dialogue, but it's writing those things that matter [dialogue or not]." For the funeral sequence in "The Big Chill", Kasdan and Barbara Benedek wrote specifically "how each of those people would greet Glenn Close as they come out of the church, who rides together and where do they sit and what is it they want during that ride. [The sequence] has as much to do with the embraces, and body language and the expression on their face when they look at their friends [as it does with their dialogue]."
But here comes Kasdan's best advice, and that's why I'm going to quote it as he said it, in the Mother of All Paragraphs. It has to do with the perils of repetition, the danger of overwriting and the supposedly inviolate one-page-per-minute-of-screen-time equation, which Kasdan thinks is utter "baloney": "The truth is, if you write a 120 page script and shoot it, it'll probably run about 245 minutes long when you put it together. If you were really hoping to have a two hour rough cut, you should probably write about a ninety page script. The thing is everything takes forever and everything is too much and you've done everything twice when you can do it once -- the hardest thing, I say it's a continuing dilemma for me, is to recognize when you've done it and can move on. And so often, the one look from an actor replaces a three-page scene -- they look up in a certain way and you don't need a whole scene that says they were surprised...But we always write them because when we write them we're trying to create a whole universe -- I do it all the time. But the truth is you should write the shortest possible script. Now remember the script is not so much...the finished movie, the final cut or the first cut or anything but a script. At this point, it's doing only one job: it's trying to convince somebody to give you the money [to option, purchase or fund your directorial ambitions]. That's it, that is the only thing it's doing. If that script indulges itself in any way, there's an extra paragraph about the sunset, or the oppressiveness of city life, you can figure that whoever's reading it has stopped at that point, [since] they have a whole stack of scripts to read and they don't want to mess around with yours. So anything that can keep them going to the end of your script, that's the triumph, and if the script happens to be 100 pages long
-- now you're never going to get a note saying, 'The script was too short.' That'll never happen. [Getting someone] to actually read your script, that's the struggle. And when they read it they have to be so excited by it, energized by it, that they say, 'Ah, I can see a movie here.' And everything that doesn't work toward that end should go...You don't believe it, but [the script] always gets better when you cut out everything that you don't absolutely need."
And for all you writers and filmmakers out there trying to break into the biz, Kasdan offers these parting words: "Wake up every morning saying, what I'm trying to do is impossible. No one's going to want me to do this. Everybody is going to be against me. But I'm going to do it anyway." That's the only way you'll be able to breach Fortress Hollywood.
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to
gillis662000@yahoo.com.
(Note: For all those who missed my past reviews, they're now archived on
Hollywoodlitsales.com. Just click the link on the main page and it'll
take you to the Inner Sanctum. Love 'em or Hate 'em at your leisure!)
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked
as a development executive and a story analyst. He is currently a
screenwriter living in Los Angeles.
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