Foreword

Whenever I am asked what advice I might offer to young people who want to break into film, I always say that there are already far too many people in film and what we really need are more people in health care.

Nevertheless, each year there are those who, armed with a combination of courage, ignorance and hope (which is a form of both ignorance and courage) reject medical school, trade their LSAT manuals in for a screenwriting program and a coffee pot, and confront the blank page.

"Here comes another one," giggle the Muses, as they watch the poor fellow pore through his dog-eared Syd Field or Robert McKee in hopes of writing the next Casablanca or The Lady Eve. "Six weeks max," they say, "before he starts talking to himself. Eight and they'll pick him up naked in a bus station outside Cleveland, muttering about character arcs, climaxes, and whammeys."

Yes, it's a terrible business, this intersection of art and commerce and science and opinion and intuition and rules and contempt for rules; a business in which, to quote the poet, the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity. And yet, despite the crater-sized pitfalls, there is something undeniably exhilarating about writing for the movies.

I don't refer to the delicious possibility of bankrupting a global corporation or the ability to make hard-bitten men weep (the exhibitors) or even the chance to move an audience in one direction or another. For me, the mysterious appeal has always been that it all starts from some low-voltage electrical activity in the recesses of somebody's brain, something you dream up inside your head.

It's an enormously powerful feeling, not to be underestimated: the seductive, infantile omnipotence with which someone alone in a room, though he appears to be staring off into the middle distance, is in fact inventing people, starting a war, perhaps, or if it's been an especially rotten day, destroying an entire planet. In what other line of work can a person make a beautiful girl fall in love with, say, a giant ant? Or bring to the masses a detailed description of interplanetary travel, right down to the non-gravity suction-toilet?

As your psychoanalyst will confirm, this is not an insignificant capacity, this omnipotent control over an entire universe. It is, in fact, what separates us from the animals: the animal understands one act: survival. The human understands three, with a climax occurring somewhere around page 90.

When it all works, it can be satisfying, therapeutic, and financially rewarding. When it doesn't, and the infant who a moment ago controlled the world suddenly finds the world spinning out of control, it can be terrifying.

This is, perhaps, one of the reasons we collaborate. Larry Gelbart, in a slightly different context, described collaboration as "consorting with the enemy." In the current context, however, the description would be: "two people fighting the common enemy."

The enemy has many names. One is loneliness. In my romantic period, when I lived alone and worked at night, I believed the best work in any field was accomplished by people working alone at night: Mozart. Goya. Tolstoy. Jack the Ripper. Experience has made me wiser, and I can now admit that sometimes two people working alone can be better than one. Especially if it's the right two people.

There are as many reasons for writing teams as there are teams (actually twice as many reasons, if you think about it). Loneliness I have mentioned. The bringing to bear of different sensibilities and experiences to a subject is another. The sobering effect of someone who can expose your dementia to the light of reason so it will shrivel and evaporate like Dracula in the sun. The usefulness of conversation as a tool for exploring and developing ideas is yet another.

When I first started writing, alone in my room at night, I would type out imaginary exchanges with myself, having schizophrenically invented a doppelganger/collaborator with whom I could argue about ideas in dialogue form. One night, and I am not making this up, I typed out, "I'm hungry." On the next line I typed, "OK, how about Chinese?" On the next line I typed, "I'm sick of Chinese, how about a pizza?" On the next line I typed, "you are going crazy," at which point I went for a walk around the block.

Every writer harbors two personalities: the infant who generates the raw material and the editor who evaluates it. Both are crucial to the process and each is inescapably at war with the other. A balance must be struck, an internal negotiation which often has as much to do with blood sugar, hormone levels and one's personal life as with wisdom, logic, and experience. If the infant gains too much control, you get a 300-page screenplay with too many speaking parts, giant ants, and no architecture. If the editor gets the upper hand, you wind up with twenty-five aborted starts and the conviction that you are in fact the fraud you always suspected, that all the good ideas have been taken, that you have less talent than that pigeon staring at you from the window sill, and that your mother was right.

So the presence of another person functions as a stabilizer, like the two-man launch rule for ICBMs. The chances that two people will lose their mind at exactly the same time are exponentially smaller.

In a world fueled mostly by animal ego and self-interest it's encouraging to know that two personalities can accommodate each other to achieve a result. The whole can be — and often is — greater than the sum of its parts. This speaks well not only of the medium, but gives one hope for the very future of the civilization. Read and enjoy.


Marshall Brickman
Award-Winning Writer/Director