Going to the Movies by Syd Field

Author:Syd Field [Field, Syd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-56957-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2001-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

“Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…. And one fine morning—So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back, ceaselessly into the past.”

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

The Great Gatsby

During the two and a half years I was head of the Story Department at Cinemobile, I read more than two thousand screen-and more than a hundred and fifty novels while searching for material to submit to our financial partners. Of those two-thousand-plus scripts, I found only forty to submit. Why so few? Most of the scripts were simply not good enough in terms of story or idea. Sometimes the ideas were good, but their execution was terrible—too talky, too wordy, too explanatory, with one-dimensional characters and contrived, predictable story lines. I learned that a good idea is not a good idea unless it’s executed properly.

As a reader, I was there to do a job, to “find material,” and I wanted to approach the task from the writer’s point of view. I felt that if I wanted to improve my own skills as a screenwriter, I needed to find out what made a good screenplay—what makes it tick, what holds it together, how the story unfolds from beginning to end. After many years of writing and learning about the craft, I was now learning it through the reading of screenplays. And while I thought it would be an easy job, I learned I had to wade through a lot of terrible stuff, all those poorly written scripts, to get to “the good stuff.”

One reason it was difficult to find good scripts to submit to Fouad was that Cine Artists was a new company and agents and producers were somewhat reluctant to submit their top material. They didn’t know whether we were serious players or not. So we would get material which had been submitted and rejected all over town, and I learned very quickly that these recycled scripts were a real hard sell. That, clearly, was not the way to go. Especially if I wanted to keep my job.

In truth, the majority of screenplays submitted to Cine Artists were badly written. Not only were they poorly conceived and executed, most of them were imitations of movies that had already been made. Since I was the one who was evaluating the material, I had to make some clear and sharp distinctions about the screenplays I read. The scripts I submitted to Fouad and Eddie had to be good scripts, significant in some way or another, and they had to be of a good enough quality that I could stand behind my selection. Otherwise, I’d be out of there very quickly.

So I created an intention for myself: I would be as honest as I could in my evaluations, I would not submit anything I did not believe in and I would take full responsibility for what I submitted. I felt that if I could follow those guidelines, I would be okay.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.