Your screenplay sucks. William M. Akers can help.
by Joan Brasher
photo by Steve Green
It’s not that William M. Akers thinks your screenplay is terrible. Well, actually, he does – but don’t hold that against him.
It’s just that in his nearly 15 years of teaching screenwriting at Vanderbilt and his 20-plus years of writing scripts, pitching them to Hollywood gatekeepers and facing his fair share of rejection, he’s picked up a thing or two. The good news is he has written a book that details all he’s learned, and he’s more than happy to share that knowledge with you.
Your Screenplay Sucks! 100 Ways To Make It Great is a rapid-fire read packed with insider tips, brutally honest observations and acerbic asides. It outlines the most common mistakes made by screenwriters and offers suggestions for crafting an engaging script that film executives won’t toss onto the slush pile.
Akers, a senior lecturer in the theatre department, knows of what he speaks. He earned his undergraduate degree at Vanderbilt and his master’s degree at the University of Southern California film school. A fixture in the Nashville film community, he may best be known for writing the cult comedy Ernest Rides Again, but has had two other screenplays made into movies and has served as a writer on the network television series Strange Luck, Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman and Eerie, Indiana. Two of his screenplays are currently under option, with production on one slated to begin in fall 2009.
Your Screenplay Sucks! was inspired by the students in his Vanderbilt screenwriting class.
“Everybody was making the same mistakes,” Akers said. “I thought, why don’t I give them a checklist, so that when we sit down to talk about their script, we can talk about something more interesting than ‘Don’t have rhyming character names.’”
Rhyming or similar character names is just one of Akers’ pet peeves.
“Punctuation, spelling, grammar – these are the kinds of basic things that people should get right. I heard one agent say, ‘I read to the first typo.’ People are horrified by that, but it’s true.”
Other transgressions include poorly executed dialogue, underdeveloped characters, scenes that do not advance the plot and unoriginal story ideas.
“Producers – or the assistants who read for them – are looking for an excuse to stop reading by page 10,” he said. “Don’t give it to them.”
Screenwriting is a tough business – Akers makes no bones about that. But he doesn’t let the near impossibility of getting a screenplay read by a Hollywood muckety-muck – much less made into a movie – dull his enthusiasm for the craft, as evidenced by his book’s hyperbolic section titles:
“You’ve picked the wrong main character!”
“Your bad guy isn’t great!”
“You haven’t ripped out the first 20 pages!”
“You have not shouted at every scene ‘How can I jack up the conflict?’”
Writing Your Screenplay Sucks! came about in true Hollywood fashion: being in the right place at the right time.
“I was at a writers’ conference and met Blake Snyder, author of Save the Cat, a book about screenwriting that I adored,” Akers said. “We got to be buddies and I started telling him my ideas. He said he would tell his publisher about me. If I had not met him, I probably would not have been able to sell the book.”
Beyond reading his book, Akers suggests that budding screenwriters watch lots of movies – he sees two to four a week – and read voraciously.
“To improve, you’ve got to read everything – scripts, short stories, novels,” he said. “Go to www.script-o-rama.com and download screenplays. And you can’t just read Charlie Kaufman. You need to know who I.A.L. Diamond is, and Preston Sturges. Read everything from The Godfather and Rocky to The Shop Around the Corner.”
Screenwriting, like any other endeavor, must be rooted in one’s passion. If you’re not willing to put in the work, it might not be for you, Akers said.
“Writing and filmmaking was something that I found I could immerse myself in. I could sit all day long and do it. But if sitting in a chair all day and writing and getting rejected on a fairly regular basis does not sound like fun to you, you may need to go into a different line of work.”
Akers hopes his students, and anyone who reads his book, see it as more than just a handbook on how to make it in the screenwriting game.
“It would be easier to learn to levitate than get a screenplay made into a movie,” Akers admitted. “But my students learn a lot more than how to write a screenplay. I teach them to behave in a professional manner and deliver something that is done to the absolute best of their ability.
“One of my former students now works for Yahoo. He said his presentations blow his colleagues’ out of the water, all because of what he learned from my class. No matter what your line of work, if you can communicate, keep people’s attention and tell a great story, you’re going to succeed.”
Excerpt
Your Screenplay Sucks! 100 Ways To Make It Great
by William M. Akers
Chapter 1
You have not written something you care about!
Write about something that fascinates you; that boils your blood; that gets you out of bed in the middle of the night; that you argue about at cocktail parties; that might cost you an old friend.
“Write a screenplay that will change your life. If you don’t sell it, at least you will have changed your life.”
– John Truby
Take a cue from Mr. Truby, one of Hollywood’s legendary screenwriting teachers. Are you writing about something that is of deep interest to you and therefore might be of deep interest to other people? Though it may be buried 17 layers below the surface, are you writing a story that is “about something?”
Writing is not for wimps. It takes colossal mental and spiritual energy. It’s hard work. Do it long enough, you’ll have hemorrhoids and a bad back. If you’re only trying to make money, you’ll never survive the bone-grinding difficulty of the process, so for God’s sake, have something to say.
Why do you want to write? Why are you passionate? What matters to you? What can you write, that you care about, that people will be interested in reading, that you know about? What story do you have the right to tell, more than any other writer out there?
If you’re just writing a surfer horror movie because the last seven surfer horror movies made a mint, you’re in it for the wrong reasons and the reader will smell it like gangrene.
You can write the goofiest movie in the world, and if there is something in there that’s got its hooks in your guts, you’ve got a chance at writing something wonderful.
© 2008 William M. Akers
Published by Michael Wiese Productions
To listen to a podcast interview with Will Akers, visit here.
Posted 04/01/09
