What Is A Screenwriter?

When you look at life, you realize that a certain amount of discipline, a certain amount of punishment, a certain amount of agony is bred into life.  But when you have your allegiance to a species or a culture and it comes up against the bumpers on the track and it’s slowing down and starting to lose its sense of direction, as writers you’re entitled to do something about it.

You’re entitled to disturb what is laughingly called Self-determination, and that in essence is more or less what I envision a screenwriter is doing: getting the wheels turning, getting the show on the road and keeping a culture from falling on its face.

I would say he was somebody who brought light and humanity to Man and his sciences because Man neglected to bring humanity in when he brought in science.

There's nothing at all wrong with physics, chemistry or mathematics, electronics or anything else, until some little slap-happy guy who doesn't even know he has a next-door neighbor decides that the machine is far more important than men.

And when he decides that, the Screenwriter, of course, has a perfect right to shoot him.

A Screenwriter is a troubleshooter.  Suddenly, life's going along, your hero is doing all right and suddenly the gates sort of drop across his track and they just can't get out of that much trouble.  Well, nobody in the past could get a person out of that much trouble.  Here's a fellow, he's going along all right, the baby is born, and his wife has, all of a sudden, dizzy notions that she ought to kill the child.  He's in too much trouble.  His life for the next thirty or fifty years is going to be a burden to him.

Well, a Screenwriter can very well do something about that.  But that isn't all.  What about the fellow who just thought it was wonderful to go around and have big adventures and, all of a sudden, found himself falling into the traps of criminality?  Nobody would let him have any adventure.  And he found out he couldn't have any adventure and he finally sunk down to the level of being a criminal.

What right does this society have to keep men in cages?  Well, I'll tell you what right it has.  None!  A Screenwriter can do something about that, very definitely.

He's a troubleshooter for the individual, for children, the family and the political and economic group.  He knows what life is about; he knows whether it's on its rails or it's off the rails.  He knows whether a corporation is failing or not failing, simply by estimating its level on a Scale.  How simple.  What's the state of internal communications of a corporation?  Well, if you just look at that, "What's the state of your interoffice communications around here, boss?"

"What interoffice communications?"

You say, "Well, I'll give this company about six months".  That's about it.  It'll drag along that way.  Here will be a lot of guys out of work suddenly.  Here's management not taking its responsibility like it should.  That's the economic group.

And what about a political group?  Well, there isn't too much you can do about political groups because they come and they go.  But, there is one thing about the world today which is intensely interesting, is that there are two parasitic groups in the world today which are at war with each other and which are causing more commotion—everybody is so flabbergasted, they don't quite know what's happening.  And one of them is a dictatorship, the other is capitalism.

A “dictatorship" is a military aristocracy which depends upon the worker, and "capitalism" is a money aristocracy which depends upon the worker and the guy who is going along is the manager.  The manager, the worker and the people who service the managers and workers—that's the society.  Those are three groups.

Everything just goes along fine.  There's the manager—the entrepreneur, the fellow who manages things, the foreman.  And then there's the fellow who's really got his hands on the tools and who's building things.  And then there's that vast class of tradesmen and wives and movie theater owners and all these other people that service the worker.  He won't get anyplace servicing managers, there aren't enough of them.

So you have these three operating groups and they're just going along splendidly until a military aristocracy comes in and says at the point of a pistol, “We are now going to sit down and you're going to feed us, on account of we can shoot and it's in the law that we can shoot and you can't”.

And the other one is the fellow who says, “I control all the buying power of the entire community, therefore you are all slaves”.

Those are two political groups today that aren't letting us do too well on the world at large.  Our income taxes today are directly attributable between these two parasitic forces, capitalism and a dictatorship.

The Screenwriter can remedy and rectify conditions unfavorable to the survival of desirable life forms and conditions unfavorable to the survival of desirable life forms.  He has to make up his mind what's a desirable life form.  Well, he always has things that he's siding with.  Right now, you're siding with Man, therefore flies aren't desirable.

And he remedies and rectifies conditions favorable to the survival of undesirable life forms and favorable to the survival of undesirable life forms.  I tell you if you had mosquitoes all over the place here or had them all over Jersey, it'd be a pretty good project to go out some Sunday with some kerosene cans and throw some kerosene on those ponds and, boy, the mosquito population would suddenly take a nosedive.  That's well within your purview, because it's part of the contest of Man and life against the environment of the universe.  And some forms of life have taken it into their minds that they must be the only thing that eats.  And when you get a form of life which takes that into its mind that it's the only thing that's going to eat and it's not going to let anything else eat, anywhere—that's bad, that's real bad.  What's bad and what's good?  Well, that happens to be bad.

When the capitalist says, “I am the only one that can have two Lexus” shoot him.  If a guy running a machine press down there is producing good stuff and so forth, let him have a Lexus, too.  What's the matter with that?  Nothing.  Not a thing.

But it wouldn't be a distinguishing badge that somebody could wear as he drove down the street.

Understand, I'm not beating the drum for either of these two insanities, I'm just trying to talk about something that's pretty good sense.  And neither one of these are good sense, I assure you.  I know both of them.  They're just not good sense.

Now, a Screenwriter is a counselor for problems of culture.  Isn't that a nice broad statement?  Well, the funny part of culture is, culture consists of the productivity, the art forms.  Here's where you would enter that immediately.  You might know of starlet who was doing just fair.  A little too self-conscious.  You go to a show, you see this little girl, she looks like she'd do all right, but she just isn't up there anyplace, You got to have enough brass to go back of the scenes and pull her up the scale and make an actress out of her.  You're helping culture when you're doing that.

You would be amazed today, for instance, that there are forms of culture out across the world which are astonishing in their beauty, which still survive over many centuries, and so on.  Somebody’s helping them along.  And they're really all that's left of an entire flourishing race—these forms of art are still there and practically nothing else is.  If you want to deal with survival in the raw, deal with art forms.

Another thing a Screenwriter could be is a counselor for those responsible for the conduct and planning of political and economic groups.  You know, there's an awful lot people around that are carrying a terrific weight on their backs.  They just don't think there’s anything at all that could possibly help them out.

Somebody said one time, "The world is carried on the backs of a few desperate men".  That’s very probably true.  If you find any of these desperate men, why, give them just a little more back.

A Screenwriter would be a teacher of doctrines useful in the tasks of survival, things like the basic drives of existence.

The doctrines all by themselves have a potency up on the screen which you shouldn't neglect.  Somebody comes in and sits down, you talk to them for a little while and they go away.  They think they know what Screenwriting is.  No, they don't know what it is.  It's a codification of an understanding of existence which is assimilable by Man.

A Screenwriter would be a social catalyst dedicated to the mission of raising the standards of happiness of Man and bringing him to recognize his brotherhood with the universe.

A Screenwriter would be a leader in Man's conquest of his environment and that's about the summation that I would care to make of it.

That's a lot of things.  It's very easy to be or do many of those things.

Let's look at the drives of life and we find out that as soon as a character is much more willing to be the himself, the more willing he gets interested in kids, he gets interested in groups, so on.  And the truth of the matter is that this universe is a tremendously interesting place.  A character has to talk about it being a mean place once in a while, simply because nobody will agree with him about anything else.

You are capable of making a universe of your own, certainly.  That's Screenwriting, that's something that's a little bit out of our range of understanding when we're dealing with this universe alone.  We needn't worry about that.  Because you'll find that you probably (and probably the majority of your characters) will come upscale in terms of motion alone—up to the point where your audience is no longer able to stay disinterested.  It's a tremendously interesting universe.

Your hero gets into motion.  He gets into action.  He can remember times when he was a Kid, when life just looked too doggoned deliciously beautiful to be left alone.  So he could feel like that again if he worked at it.  And what do you think will happen to him when he finds life is just too good to be left alone?  He'll start living it.  Wherever he suddenly moved into that phase and stayed there, he'll hit it a few times and then miss it.  A little more writing and you'll start to hit it more constantly and away you'll go.

It's not near as hard to write a number of people at the same time.  That's a fact.  You can write a lot of people much easier than one character.  That's why I say groups are very good.  Yet, one might very well find, for years to come, a great deal of interest and satisfaction in writing characters.  That's all very well, too.  But remember there's a lot of other things that you can do.  And if you start concentrating all the time upon the unable and the sick, you really won't be in there pitching hard for the culture at large.

You should be pitching an optimum solution and that's not working continually in favor only of those who are incapable.

The society is running because of capable people.  There's a lot of things that can be done for it.

It depends to a large degree upon initiative and imagination, but you have the tools with which to bring yourself to a level of such initiative and imagination if you do not have it already.  Therefore life at large is actually waiting for you with open arms.

And who will thank you?  You will thank yourselves: That's the only person that can thank you.

So, on the uses and future of Screenwriting, one can look at an entire universe, but the writer looks at a universe not of speculation but of action.  You don't have to think twice or give notice to people who are thinking about it.  People who are thinking about it are not dangerous.  They don't handle guns, knives, they don't run fast.  Most of the time they don't even talk bitingly.  You could sit and think about it for fifty years and neither you nor anything else would be any better for it.

So when I talk about Screenwriting and its uses, please don't think about it—just do it.

Now, what do you mean by action?  Action is just motion.  Any motion is better than no motion.

When I was a young writer they used to tell me, "Never under any circumstances write action for the sake of action.  Never".  They taught the artist to work with restraint.  The one thing art isn't, is restrained.  It is directed motion, which means a certain amount of discipline has to go into any motion an artist makes.  But is that restraint?

What is, then, the optimum use of what you know?  One of it is teaching it so that others can know.  But how would you teach it?  By going over it little by little?  No, you could best teach it by example.  You can give the rudiments, the integrative data which suddenly sparks another mind.  But it would be unfair of you if you did not give him, as well, the techniques which, having moved him into thinking, would not again move him out.  You see?  Action.

The difference between a young man and an old man is an old man knows he can be hurt and the young man doesn't care.  And the difference between a young girl and an older woman is essentially the same thing.  When it comes to esoteric matters on the part of a young man or the young woman of beauty and so on, do you realize that animation always arrives at the finish line, while beauty is thinking about it?  I have been at embassy balls and dinners, time after time, to find the belle of the ball a young girl?  Oh no, the young girls were over there against the walls hoping somebody would ask them to dance.  Some old gal who really had a beautiful line, she understood and knew life.  And all the desirable young men weren't over there by the wall.  There was beauty and here was charm.

What is charm?  Charm is the ability to reach out, be and admire.  Your personal appearance, outside of the fact that the society objects to a dirty shirt, doesn't mean very much when it comes to charm.  Anything you build up on charm in way of a mock-up is that much more gratifying, of course.  But you practically with an idea, with knowing what you are doing, with certainty, with poise, with the ability to laugh or the ability to be dignified, each in its place, you to go out into this society ... You don't know it sitting here.  It's fantastic that people don't know this, but life out there is so far gone.

You just start walking through it and it just goes apart like grass.  There's nothing-nothing interrupting your line of motion.  Nothing.  It's fabulous.  But life today has no great resistance in this society.  Its pioneer period is at end.  The vitality of the country is very definitely on the wane.  There's no opposition.

I found out that whenever I trained a writer well.  When he walked out into the society, there was a spreading pool of light going from him.  In other words, more and more people knew what they were doing.

And so we have a possibility by, you might say, super-training some of those already trained, to bring about this condition in several parts of the country or the world.

What I am going toward is better dissemination of information and better writers—that even might mean fewer writers.