Bill's BBC Writer's Room Interview

From Literally Over A Dozen Years Ago!



The Interview

Years ago when I was in London to teach my big 2 day class and attend the Raindance Film Festival, I did a million interviews in two days. I was on morning radio (breakfast chat) and afternoon radio. I did all kinds of radio in between. Every newspaper interviewed me. I did a couple of strange shows at the BBC where I was in a studio talking to someone who was on the other side of the country... and it was broadcast live. I did one great show - kind of a zany drive show, hosted by a couple of writers who wanted to know every story I would never tell in print... and I told a couple.

And BBC's Writer's Room wanted to interview me. After racing all over town in a million taxi cabs, they called and rescheduled... for the morning at some hotel. I don't do mornings. And I still had jet lag. I get to the hotel - barely awake, and they seat me on the lobby steps and begin asking questions... as hotel guests come down the stairs. Every minute we had to stop for guests! I finish this lengthy interview, and have no idea how it turned out. They run it, and post it on their website:

One of the focuses on this interview is Writing For Production - being aware of schedule and budget and all of the other elements that you will need to know if you also plan on making your own film. Or just selling it to a low budget production company.

Interviews

Along with interviews from Paul Greengrass and David Benioff and many other folks you have heard of, and I kind of forget about it. Until a website regular discovered it, and e-mailed me a version and put a copy up on YouTube. I decided to add titles and put it up on My YouTube... and here it is.

As I said, I talk a lot about writing for a budget, which I don't think Greengrass or Benioff cover in their interviews. This is the kind of information that is important when you are breaking in, because you probably won't be writing a big blockbuster like THE DARK KNIGHT or IRON MAN... you may be writing a Made For TV movie or an Indie film or a low budget action or horror flick or even making your own movie, where budget matters.

Thanks to the Raindance Film Festival for setting all of these interviews up for me!

- Bill

Hey, this is topical...

NEW: WRITE IT: FILM IT!

Making Your Own Movie?
Writing An Indie Film?
Writing A Low Budget Genre Script To Sell?
Writing A Made For TV Holiday Movie?

You will be writing for BUDGET. On a standard spec screenplay, you don’t have to think about budget, but these types of screenplays writing with budget in mind is critical!

If you are making your own movie, budget, is even more important - and you need to think about budget *before* you write your screenplay... or you will end up with a script that you can’t afford to make (or is a struggle to make). Everyone is making their own films these days, and even if you have done it before there are lots of great techniques in this book to get more money on screen - for less money! You can make a film that looks like it cost millions for pocket change.

SALE: $7.99!

The rest of that entry from 12 years ago...

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

Yesterday’s Dinner: Fresh tomato beef at City Wok in Studio City.

Movies:
MOVIES: CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR - So I drove down to Long Beach to hang out with my friends Melanie and Yamo and grabs some dinner and see a movie. As dinner winds down, Mel pulls out a list of all the movies playing at the 95-plex next to the restaurant, and I look over the list and have seen many of the films and Mel or Yamo have seen others... and we narrow it down to a handful, of which CHARLIE WILSON’S WAR is the best as far as time goes... so that’s what we see.

Okay, you have an all-star cast, and Mike Nichols directing, and Aaron Sorkin writing, so you can’t end up with a bad movie.

Tom Hanks plays this charmingly sleazy congressman, Charlie Wilson, who is sitting in a Vegas hot tub with a couple of strippers and a Playboy centerfold when he sees Dan Rather on TV wearing a turban. A turban! He wants to know what that’s all about. Discovers that the Russians have invaded Afghanistan, and the Afghans are fighting back... but they need weapons. And Charlie sees a way to make his mark.

He teams up with a grumbling CIA agent named Gust, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, and a wealthy right wing Texan played by Julia Roberts. Since Roberts just popped twins and is getting older, her character *must* wear a bikini in one scene.

This movie is all over the place - and nowhere at the same time. Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts seem to be in some over the top farce, Hoffman manages to play his character with a foot in reality... yet still be at home in the farce scenes. But the danged thing just isn’t funny. You get all the funny lines in the trailer - both of them. It’s kind of breezy for the most part, and the people are fun to watch... but they left the jokes out. And the thing about this true story is that it’s wacky. It plays as farce better than it plays as reality. Oh, then they throw in a real horror of war scene with *children missing limbs* in an Afghan refugee camp. Nothing farcical about that! The TONE is all over the place, and the film never seems to decide if it’s a comedy or a drama or a farce or a... heck, it could be anything. But ends up kind of being nothing. Light but not funny.

And it’s hard to shake the real-life punchline: the Afghans we armed to fight the Russians became the Taliban. Those guys we were showing as heroes in RAMBO 3 and that James Bond movie became the guys who took down the Twin Towers. That’s not in the movie, but maybe it should have been. Maybe they should have left out the maimed kids and made the film into a laugh out loud comedy... with the shocker end. People would have loved it... then hated it. But they would have *felt something*. Instead we get an all star, beautifully made, kind of ho-hum film.

- Bill

Tofu Steak Tartar

Flashback To July 2007...

A RANT

I was going to do an entry about standing in line at the DMV, but what the hell could I say about that experience that would be original?

Then, Lindsay Lohan was arrested this morning for drunk driving again... and I was shocked. Didn’t she just get out of rehab about a week ago? How could she possible be driving drunk already? She had on some sort of ankle alcohol monitor - she displayed it for the paparazzi before entering some night club. How could she drink with that thing on?

In Hollywood, everyone goes into rehab. It’s almost a Get Out Of Jail Free Card - if you go on the Tonight Show and admit you screwed up but are getting help, and with the help of your family and your sudden interest in religion, you will get through it. You spend some time in rehab, and by the time you get out everyone has forgotten that you plowed into a family with your SUV, killing a few people. But a year after you get out of rehab... you do something stupid again, are arrested, and go back to rehab. The Promises rehab facility seems to have a revolving door - the same celebs keep checking in, cleaning up, being released... then checking in again.

Lindsay Lohan was hanging out in bars and clubs *before* she was 21 - I thought that was illegal. Plenty of kids have fake IDs, but we *know* how old Lohan is. So how did she get in...

And after she was released from rehab, and turned herself in to the police for her last drunken vehicular incident, and was released on bond, what does she do?

Go clubbing!

Everybody knows that the best place to go if you have a drug and alcohol abuse problem is a crowded nightclub filled with people drinking and doing coke in the bathroom.

The problem isn’t just drug and alcohol abuse, it’s the choice of lifestyle. Why would you continue the very behavior that got you into trouble in the first place - ankle bracelet or not? The *purpose* of a bar is to serve alcohol. So what the hell are you doing there if you aren’t supposed to drink?

In this grand and glorious country of ours, most people do not go out clubbing every night. They do not spend every waking hour going from one drinking establishment to the next. They have *lives*.

In my previous post I mentioned that when I was in my 20s I could drink and then function the next day... but I didn’t spend every night drinking! I had a full time job at Safeway Grocery working the swing shift (3-Midnight) and was also a full time student at Diablo Valley Community College (recently in the news due to a sex-for-grades scandal), plus I was writing scripts and making short films. Yes, every once in a while Larry, Juan, the crew and I would have a beer in the store parking lot after our shift was over and try to throw paper bags over the letters that spelled SAFEWAY on the awning over the doors... and sometimes on our weekends we’d meet in a bar somewhere and have a couple of beers... but our lives did not revolve around going from club to club drinking. We had lives! I was writing scripts and making movies and going to the movies and reading books. Larry was scuba diving and trying to sleep with every female over the age of 16 who came into the store. Juan had a bunch of kids at home and was constantly taking family camping trips. We all had better things to do than club hop. Like... laundry.

The problem with all of these folks that keep getting busted for drunk driving and going to rehab, only to be busted a couple of weeks after they are released: they need to change their *lifestyle*. If you want to remain sober, don’t hang out in places that exist to serve you drinks. Find some hobby, some purpose in your life, other than going clubbing.

McVEGGIE AND FRIES

In London, every McDonalds and Burger King has an extensive menu of veggie burger items. These burgers look and taste like beef - you wouldn’t know the difference if they didn’t tell you it was 100% vegetable - great for vegetarians! Over there they seem to have a high percentage of the population that have gone vegetarian, and the fast food chains are targeting them.

I have eaten many veggie burgers - not because I’m a vegetarian, but because I’m a fat guy with high cholesterol who loves hamburgers. I’m a meat eater, and I want to eat something that tastes like meat... but won’t send me to an early grave (well, *earlier* grave - I still eat too much bad food).


If I were a vegetarian I would never eat a veggie burger.... I’d just eat vegetables. There’s an intent thing involved. Making vegetables taste and look like meat is the first step to eating a real hamburger. As the vegetarian played by the great Gerritt Graham says to his supposedly vegan girlfriend in the movie HOME MOVIES: “First beef, and now this!” If you are a vegetarian, and your intentions are to only eat vegetables, then eat the friggin vegetables!

Personally, I’m against vegetarians for reasons spelled out by, I think, Sam Kinison: As humans, we need to maintain our place at the top of the food chain. So many people are becoming vegetarians that we are losing our place at the top of the food chain, and in the future Chuck Heston and his space ship crew will be captured by COWS! Cows! Cows that have evolved because we don't eat them anymore! And they will bring Heston to Daly City to be punished in front of the cow ruler... an evil Cow Queen who lives in... The Cow Palace! The only way to stop this is to keep eating those damned dirty cows....

I WANT TO BE A SCREENWRITER

When I should be writing, I’m often visiting screenwriting messageboards answering people’s questions. The ones that always confuse me are “I want to be a screenwriter, but I don’t really like writing” or “I can’t write” or “I want to be a screenwriter, but I need someone to help me come up with a story, or a character, or a scene idea, or a line of dialogue, or...” I don’t know how to answer these - because they are asking me to do their work for them. To do the creative part of writing. Um, if someone comes up with the story and all of the characters and scenes and dialogue for your script, doesn’t that make you just a *typist*? If someone else is doing the creative part, what is left?

Hey, we all get stuck and need someone to kick-start our imagination every once in a while, I’m talking about those people who want someone else to do their thinking for them - the writing for them. Look, if you want to be a screenwriting, you are going to write screenplays.

And screenwriting is work.

Lots of boring work.

Work that isn’t glamorous or exciting... and most of the time no one in the world will ever see your work.

If you are only after the glamor of screenwriting (whatever that is) and you don’t want to do the difficult, boring writing work part... well, you will never be a screenwriter and will never experience the glamor of premier screenings where the audience of celebs and stars applauds every single name in the opening titles... except yours (they never met you, they *did* meet the craft services person who supplied donuts on set every day). Or that guy gesturing for you to get off the red carpet and find another way into the theater. Or... well, there really is no glamor in a screenwriter’s life. There’s lots of boring work...

Or, maybe lots of exciting work. Depends on what you want in your life.

If you want to stay sober, change your lifestyle so you are not going to places where they serve drinks every night. If you want to be a writer, don’t hang out with people who just talk about writing and don’t *be* someone who just talks about writing - instead... Write!

If you really want to write screenplays, write some screenplays!

- Bill


Also from 2007...

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
Yesterday’s Lunch: Maple Oatmeal.
DVD: Another DVD I bought on my birthday was KELLY'S HEROES / DIRTY DOZEN double DVD. Kind of a Donald Sutherland & Telly Savalas double bill. I watched both, and realized that DIRTY DOZEN was the model for the movie S.W.A.T. - check it out! My friend Larry, who played the uptight Police Chief guy - same character as Robert Ryan in DD! Sam Jackson is Lee Marvin's character! The whole thing plays out pretty much the same in both movies - even though it isn't obvious. Both films have tough guys who don't deal well with authority given the task of getting a bunch of anti-authority individuals to work as a team... and the Authority guy hoping they screw up and trying to screw them up... only to be outsmarted by the end and look like the silly suit that he is... then the team has a mission that tests all that has come before.
KELLY'S HEROES is a text book example of putting two opposite characters together to create drama and conflict (and comedy) within the team. Donald Sutherland plays a hippy tank commander in WW2 (???) who ends up in scene after scene with tough guy Clint Eastwood. All you have to do is put those two guys next to each other and you have a scene! But the script has them constantly butting heads (and personalities) because they have to work together. This film was obviously the model for THREE KINGS - guys who start out pulling a robbery during war, but end up doing the right thing. In KH it's more *accidental* than in 3K, but the results are the same. Both are fun films - the kind of big team war flick they really don't make anymore.
Pages: None on the new spec, but I designed the labels for the Naked Class CDs and even ran some... plus I'm working on the bonus CD.