Screenwriting 101

A chat with two screenwriters

By Terence Loose

TIM ALBAUGH

Tim Albaugh photo by Ben Dixon, The Eytchison Group

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ach year over 35,000 screenplays are registered with the Writers Guild of America, of which 300 are made by studios. Better odds can be found in a crooked casino.

But that doesn’t stop a dedicated group of screenwriter hopefuls from assembling in a sparse UCI classroom every Thursday from 7 to 10 p.m. They deconstruct great movies, they critique each other’s scripts – harshly – and share bits of industry gossip. But mostly, they listen to the 39-year-young Steven Spielberg-looking guy seated at a small fold-out table in front of the chalkboard. This is Laguna Beach’s Tim Albaugh, one of the most respected instructors in UCI Extension’s screenwriters program, who also teaches at UCLA’s professional screenwriting program.

Albaugh doesn’t need to teach, though. He’s one of the chosen few who makes his living as a screenwriter, mostly through rewrite assignments. He’s also one of the lucky winners who have a feature film credit, 1997’s Do Me A Favor. With it comes cache, at least among struggling hopefuls. But Albaugh would be the first to tell you, Hollywood is not all glamour and good times. We asked Albaugh about his craft, his students and the frustrations of success.

Why teach at UCI? It’s not the money.

It’s definitely not the money. It’s fun to be in a room with people who aren’t cynical about the industry. And inevitably, helping people deal with the problems in their stories helps me work out my own.

Is the screenplay art or craft?

It’s a craft more than an art. The art is visual metaphors, plots. But there are very specific rules that you can’t break, at least with the studio system. Exciting incidents happening in the first 10 minutes. Having a dilemma point. A hard act point at 30 minutes. Audiences have come to expect these things. Once the writer can accept and work within those rules it opens up a lot of options.

What’s the most common misconception first-time students have?

People can be in too big a hurry. They’ll start a class in August and think, “Okay, by Christmas I’ll be a millionaire.” Then, around the fifth week half the class drops because they realize it’s actually a lot of work.

And the most common mistake?

They write a movie like a novel. But a director prefers a sparse script so he has something to work with. You do want some color to engage the reader, but it’s a fine line and probably no great mystery that many great novelists – Hemmingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald – failed miserably at screenwriting.

It’s the reason I became a screenwriter. Instead of having to find some great way to describe a sunset, I just write the sun sets.

How did you get your start?

While majoring in English at San Francisco State, I managed a law firm that did a lot of limited partnerships for schlocky sexy horror movies – picture hot tubs of Long Beach. They’d make them for a hundred grand and make loads of profit through video. For the hell of it I took a screenplay class, wrote a script and won a competition in which Richard Walters [Chair of UCLA’s screenwriting MFA program] was one of the judges. He suggested I apply to the MFA program.

And from there?

I wasted three years writing movies I thought would change the world. I didn’t get my first real break until Don Simpson [Top Gun producer] died and his assistant started his own company and optioned my script, Do Me a Favor. A lot of A-list actresses liked that script and hired me. When they were committing to a movie, they’d have me do a rewrite for them. I was known as the dark, edgy, 40-year-old woman guy. Thankfully, Do Me A Favor got made and I got better jobs.

What happens when you do sell a script in Hollywood?

The first thing that happens is you go to a meeting with 15 people: the director, the producer, the studio exec, and all their people. They all have an opinion on how to fix your script. So, if it’s your first time you’re going to be shell-shocked because you’re thinking “If they love it, why are they telling me to change everything?”

Sounds bad.

It’s horrible. It’s like starting completely over. First thing you have to do is find that assistant guy who’s trying to work his way up the ladder. They say the most, so find that person and shut him down. It gives you some leverage. But mostly you have to say “That’s a great idea” and then from your car you call your agent and tell him what a bunch of whacks they are.

The weirdness of it is that half the people who are in that meeting won’t be in the next meeting because they lost their jobs or moved on. So you start all over again.

What’s the best way to break in?

Probably to win a contest. Hollywood [agents and producers] are like sharks after chum at big contests.

How do you fight the feeling that you’re readying chum for the sharks?

[Laughter] It’s hard. But its one of the reasons I like to teach, because I’ve been on the other side so I understand what they’re going through. And the beauty of it is that you never know. I’ve had students who were not the world’s best writers but have sold scripts. In fact, my students have sold over $3 million worth of scripts [including UCLA students]. But it’s extremely difficult and I remind them of that.

So, is the cliché of the writer getting no respect in Hollywood true?

Definitely. Most directors look at screenwriters as hacks. They believe if they just had the time to sit down and type they could write a great screenplay. In fact, Dennis Palumbo [the writer of My Favorite Year] got so fed up with it he became a therapist for writers.

Steve Bagatourian

Steve Bagatourian photo by Tara Little

This young screenwriter’s success story is as good – and as twist-filled – as most movies produced by Hollywood.

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creenwriter Steve Bagatourian is the kind of overnight success story every aspiring screenwriter (a.k.a.: anyone with a laptop) hates. His first produced script, cowritten with writer-director Aric Avelino, stars Forest Whitaker, Marcia Gay Harden and Donald Sutherland. The movie, American Gun, an uncompromising look at the affect of guns in modern American culture, is due out in 2006, but already getting that most coveted of Hollywood cache: “buzz.”

But as with everything else in Hollywood, things are never what they seem. Not the least of which is Bagatourian’s “instant success.” Though only 27, Bagatourian feels like a veteran of the Hollywood game, and he has good reason: His road to success has been rockier than Stallone’s career.

A comic artist since his preteens, Bagatourian started writing screenplays at the age of 18, believing his strong visual and storytelling skills would make a good fit for the medium. So, after spending days in Barnes and Noble reading “how to” books, he wrote Crackhouse Tango, what he calls “the most god-awful script you could imagine.”

Wisely, he signed up for a UCI Extension class taught by screenwriter Tim Albaugh (Do Me A Favor) and started fresh. Albaugh became Bagatourian’s biggest fan, not to mention influence. “Tim took me under his wing, he really responded to my writing and gave unlimited support,” says Bagatourian. At age 21, Bagatourian entered and won a major Chicago screenplay contest called Cinestory. They flew him to Chicago for a big awards party, he was accosted by agents and, best of all, John Cusack’s company optioned his script – a violent story of a teenage gangster called Weasel – for $10,000. Soon, he was hanging out with Cusack’s crew, watching Lakers games, eating pizza, and developing Weasel.

And it only got better.

The John Cusack option sparked interest from Hollywood and Weasel ended up on the desk of Allen Gasmer, head of William Morris’ literary agency. Bagatourian remembers his first meeting with the super agent: “He said, ‘You’ve really got something here, kid. I don’t know what you’ve got, I know I can’t sell it, but it’s really good.’ He told me if I could write something half as good as Weasel with commercial potential he’d sign me.” So Bagatourian went back to class with Albaugh and developed a dark comedy script called Gangsterama – The Godfather in high school – and landed representation. “At that point Tim and my classmates were freaking out,” says Bagatourian. “Gasmer is huge. He sells million dollar scripts every week.”

Unfortunately, Gangsterama would not be one of them. It would instead prove to be the first in a series of mistimed incidents in Bagatourian’s career, which seemed destined to become a bad Hollywood cautionary tale.

It started with Gangsterama, which was shopped around the same week that HBO’s The Sopranos premiered and Analyze This was number one at the box office. “I thought, ‘Great, synergy, mob comedies are hot,’” says Bagatourian. What he found, however, was, yes, mob comedies were hot – the previous year, when the studios stockpiled them. Now, they were looking for the next big thing. “That’s the hardest part of being a screenwriter,” says Bagatourian. “You spend a year on something and then in one afternoon, its fate is decided.”

Still, because so many producers and studio executives loved that script, Bagatourian got called in for meetings all over town and, a zillion pitches later, he landed the writing assignment for Beetlejuice II. He figured he had arrived, and could finally pay his phone bill.

“My agent told me the paperwork would take a month, then I could get to work,” he says. “So the waiting began.”

And the waiting continued.

About five weeks out, Bagatourian got nervous and called his agent. “He asked if I was sitting down,” Bagatourian says.

Then he got really nervous.

“He told me the executive that hired me just quit Warner Bros. and the new guy didn’t want to make Beetlejuice II. Since they never got to my contract, I got nothing,” says Bagatourian.

He was disappointed, but his rewriting on Weasel kept him going. “I had held back for the contest but Cusack wanted to get more edgy, so the new draft was more violent and raw, a real Tim Burton/Stanley Kubrick Clockwork Orange-style world with an operatic opening and young gangs overrunning towns with guns and drugs.” But – and here comes the timing disaster hat trick – “I turned the new script in the weekend of the Columbine High School shooting,” says Bagatourian with a grim smile. “I get a frantic message from Cusack’s people on Sunday morning. They can’t make Weasel, they’ve got to take the violence out. But the violence was the story, so we came to a stalemate.” Like its protagonist, Weasel was dead.

For the next two years Bagatourian went on over a hundred pitch meetings, without any luck. “It was really frustrating,” he says, “because on one hand these execs were intrigued by a 22-year-old wunderkind writer, but on the other, they were hesitant to risk their careers by giving me a $30 million movie to write.”

Finally, Bagatourian went back to the one thing he knew he could control: “I just wrote for a few years,” he says. At first, he tried to write commercial stuff, but that was more self-defeating than the pitch meetings, so he decided to separate himself from the “industry” mentality. He didn’t try to sell anything; he didn’t play the game. He just wrote the stories he felt passionate about.

It was then that he collaborated with Avelino, his closest and oldest friend, and a graduate of Loyola Marymount Film School film school. Avelino felt the same way Bagatourian did about storytelling and Hollywood. “He didn’t want to spend two years of his life working on some dopey comedy or some lame genre picture, like a heist movie,” says Bagatourian. “We both wanted to tell a story that had the potential to change the way people look at our world.” So, the pair decided to focus on how the proliferation of guns in America dramatically influences every day life.

They knew that had been done not only in drama, but in documentary form, so their challenge was to find a fresh and provocative perspective from which to tell their story. Ironically, the Columbine tragedy that had shot down Bagatourian’s first script inspired this one. Harden plays a single mother of a teen whose younger brother shot and killed a number of school kids. She still lives in the same small town, and the son must attend the same school. Other characters include an ace student in trouble for taking a gun to school (Forest Whitaker is the principal). “What if he’s a good kid, but because of socioeconomic forces he has to carry a gun?” says Bagatourian. “What if he doesn’t really want a gun, dreads the idea of ever using it, but needs it just to survive his walk home? It’s not as simple as ‘All kids with guns are bad.’”

These were the morally gray issues that haunted Avelino and Bagatourian, and resulted in a movie that’s as powerful as its subject matter. “It’s not an easy movie to watch,” says Albaugh, who, with his partner Sean Sorensen, is producing Bagatourin’s Weasel through their company, Popular Films. “But [American Gun] is totally involving and something Steve should be very proud of.”

While American Gun is small by Hollywood standards – the entire film’s budget is less than Brad Pitt’s weekly rate – its market value for a “new” writer is priceless. The fact that some of the industry’s most respected actors signed on because of the material, rather than a paycheck, speaks volumes. It also has garnered Bagatourian another writing gig and the promise of a career in arguably the planet’s most competitive business.

The full force of the experience didn’t hit Bagatourian until principle shooting, however, this past summer. “I remember being on the set one day, watching Donald Sutherland in a scene, and it hit me,” he says. “Donald Sutherland was actually saying lines that I wrote.”

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