SeanPaulMurphyVille: Writer Tip #41: Screenwriting Quotes

Thursday, January 11, 2024

Writer Tip #41: Screenwriting Quotes

This blog is just the wit and wisdom of some great screenwriters, and others, concerning Hollywood and writing in general. I hope you enjoy it.

"I want to point out to you that in a novel a hero can lay ten girls and marry a virgin for a finish. In a movie this is not allowed. The hero, as well as the heroine, has to be a virgin. The villain can lay anybody he wants, have as much fun as he wants cheating and stealing, getting rich and whipping the servants. But you have to shoot him in the end. When he falls with a bullet in his forehead, it is advisable that he clutch at the Gobelin tapestry on the library wall and bring it down over his head like a symbolic shroud. Also, covered by such a tapestry, the actor does not have to hold his breath while he is being photographed as a dead man." Screenwriting advice from Herman J. Mankiewicz to Ben Hecht, 1926

"I knew no one as witty and spontaneous as Herman would ever put himself on paper. A man whose genius is on tap like free beer seldom makes literature out of it." Ben Hecht on Herman J. Mankiewicz

[on Herman J. Mankiewicz] "Sure, Mank was witty, but his wit took a much more elaborate form than wisecracks. He could improvise in a way that just held you spellbound." Nunnally Johnson

"If Los Angeles is not the one authentic rectum of civilization, then I am no anatomist. Any time you want to go out again and burn it down, count me in." H. L. Mencken, the sage of Baltimore, to F. Scott Fitzgerald, on his return from Hollywood.

"At 18 our convictions are hills from which we look; at 45 they are caves in which we hide." F. Scott Fitzgerald

Ben Hecht

"For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle. Of the 60 movies I wrote, more than half were written in two weeks or less. I received from each script, whether written in two weeks or [never more than] eight weeks, from $50,000 to $150,000. I worked also by the week. My salary ran from $5000 a week up. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1949 paid me $10,000 a week. David O. Selznick once paid me $3500 a day." Ben Hecht

"It's not Hollywood's fault. The writer is not accustomed to money. It goes to his head and destroys him." William Faulkner

"I begin to realize why people believe that Hollywood corrupts writers. But they're quite wrong. All Hollywood does is give them enough money so they can get married and have kids like normal people. But it's the getting married and having kids that really corrupts them." Dalton Trumbo

Dorothy Parker

"I'd like to have money. And I'd like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that's too adorable, I'd rather have money." Dorothy Parker

"One of the downsides of money is if there's no money there are very few real jerks who are attached to your project. And if there is money you do attract some very difficult unhelpful people." Whit Stillman

"I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer." Ben Hecht

"Understand this: all the sleaze you've heard about Hollywood? All the illiterate scumbags who scuttle down the corridors of power? They are there, all right, and worse than you can imagine." William Goldman

"The making of a motion picture is an endless contention of tawdry egos, almost none of them capable of anything more creative than credit stealing and self-promotion." Raymond Chandler

Paul Schrader

"Every time you think the studios have fucked you every way they can, they come up with a new way." Paul Schrader

"I struggled with that for quite a while -- trying to see like a child again, and realizing why I'd started in the movies. To get that excitement back, and lose some of the more unsavory lessons I'd been forced to swallow." Shane Black

“The only “ism” Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.” Dorothy Parker

"The job of turning good writers into movie hacks is the producer's chief task." Ben Hecht

Raymond Chandler

"The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn’t take things too much to heart. He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself. He should do the best he can without straining at it. He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return. He won’t get it. And when he has had enough, he should say goodbye with a smile, because for all he knows he may want to go back." Raymond Chandler

"It is not at all difficult for a writer to stay sane in Hollywood. Cynicism is more often a defense against just criticism." Ernest Lehman

"An audience is never wrong. An individual member of it may be an imbecile, but a thousand imbeciles together in the dark - that is critical genius." Billy Wilder

Robert Towne

"Because the one thing you know when you're shooting a script, and I've been on a lot of sets, is space is in a script, and the distance between the page and the stage is so enormous that it is unbelievable how even the brightest people can misread your intent or not see it altogether. Scripts have air in them. Scripts are supposed to leave things up to interpretation, but people can misread things enormously, so sometimes it's just a matter of wanting to put on the screen what you had in mind." Robert Towne

"Every screenwriter worthy of the name has already directed his film when he has written his script." Joseph L. Mankiewicz

"I don't think the written word is important in movies anymore and the really great movies are done by great directors who in many cases write their own scripts. I think it's gotten to be more of a visual thing than an audible thing." Anita Loos

"Give me a good script, and I'll be 100 times better as a director." George Cukor

Nunnally Johnson

"I think John Ford almost dies because he can't write. It just runs him nuts, that he has thoughts and ideas and has never trained himself to put them down on paper. And I've found that true of so many directors. They're just so thwarted." Nunnally Johnson

"The similarity between the big directors I've worked with is that they allow the writer to find a way of doing what they want done without saying 'do it this way.' They describe what they want, then let the writer figure out a way to do it." Steven Zaillian

"A film set, as Orson Welles was first to say, is the most wonderful electric train a boy could ever be given. What he failed to add was that, most of the time, it doesn't work." Frank Pierson

"I don't want the power. When a project is given to me, and I say yes, I'm gonna oblige everybody who has the power to try to make it work." William Goldman

"I was driving by Otto Preminger's house last night -- or is it 'a house by Otto Preminger?'" Burt Kennedy

“Don’t write about Man, write about a man” E.B. White

"It is the writer who is the dreamer, the imaginer, the shaper. He works in loneliness with nebulous materials, with nothing more tangible than paper and a pot of ink; and his theatre is within his mind. He must generate phantoms out of himself and live with them until they take on a life of their own and become, not types, but characters working out their own destinies." Dudley Nichols

Lillian Hellman

"If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama" Lillian Hellman

"Plot is people. Human emotions and desires founded on the realities of life, working at cross purposes, getting hotter and fiercer as they strike against each other until finally there’s an explosion—that’s Plot." Leigh Brackett

Billy Wilder

"Now, what is it which makes a scene interesting? If you see a man coming through a doorway, it means nothing. If you see him coming through a window - that is at once interesting." Billy Wilder

"When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand." Raymond Chandler

"There is only one plot -- things are not what they seem." Jim Thompson

"Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent. The rest of the fraternity is deadwood. Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark." Ben Hecht

Anita Loos

"Sometimes writers of no talent at all can write great acting scenes. Sometimes the very best writers can't write scenes that come to life." Anita Loos

"I don't care who you are. When you sit down to write the first page of your screenplay, in your head, you're also writing your Oscar acceptance speech." Nora Ephron

"Artists don't talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it's stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work." Paddy Chayefsky

"Nobody knows anything." William Goldman

"When screenwriting, be prepared to drop your pants and show your dirty laundry. If you can't do that, better find yourself something more polite." Paul Schrader

"You sell a screenplay like you sell a car. If someone drives it off a cliff, that’s it." Rita Mae Brown

"If my books had been any worse I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better I should not have come." Raymond Chandler

Ernest Lehman

"No good screenplay is vulnerable. Only those that still need work are vulnerable, and should be vulnerable, and should be worked on some more by the writer - or, if not him, another writer - to ensure, or make possible, a good film." Ernest Lehman

"In spite of everything, screenwriting is better than threading pipe." Paddy Chayefsky

Or working in advertising, Paddy.

Other Writing Tips:

Writer Tip #1: The First Act

Writer Tip #2: Write For Actors

Writer Tip #3: Don't Work For Free!

Writer Tip #4: Make The Changes

Writer Tip #5: Manage Your Expectations

Writer Tip #6: Hone Your Scripts

Writer Tip #7: How To Make Movies For A Living

Writer Tip #8: The Query Letter

Writer Tip #9: Nobody Wants To See Your Crappy Little Movie