![]() Even at the highest levels, the job can make you feel stunted and contingent. You can’t make a Hollywood movie without a script, yet a screenwriter, unlike a novelist or a poet, must eventually hand off his precious creation to a whole team of people, and the first thing they want to do is change it. Scripts, he says, are “more of an exact science.” Frank has written fiction, and finds it easier. The tools of the novelist are mostly off-limits: no extensive character description, no metaphors. Screenplays “are this unique, weird thing,” Frank says-more disciplined than playwriting, and with a much faster tempo. And, as Frank points out, the bad ones are “just as hard to write as the good ones.” A formatted screenplay page equates to about a minute of screen time, so each scene needs the abbreviated clarity of a haiku. It’s one thing to write a movie it’s another to get it made, and another altogether for it to be any good. “ millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots,” he wrote, adding, “ don’t let this get around.” Countless books and seminars and podcasts offer advice to aspiring screenwriters, as if any idiot could do it. In 1925, Herman Mankiewicz (“Citizen Kane”) sent a telegram to his friend Ben Hecht, the playwright, trying to lure him from New York to Los Angeles. Screenwriting looks as if it should be easy, but it isn’t. “Long ride to Florida.” And the credits roll. ![]() “Maybe she thought we’d have a lot to talk about,” Clooney murmurs. A shot of Lopez, her face giving nothing away. Hejira mentions that he was supposed to leave for Florida the previous night, but for some reason “the lady marshal” wanted him to ride with Foley. F oley ( interested now): And how long was it before they caught up with you? H ejira: That time? F oley: There were others. F oley: You busted out? H ejira: I prefer to call it an exodus from an undesirable place. F oley: Meaning? H ejira: Meaning time came, I left. F oley: You were at Leavenworth, huh? H ejira: For a time. F oley: The flight? H ejira: The brothers in Leavenworth gave me the name. ![]() His name is Hejira.į oley: Hejira? What kinda name is that? H ejira: The Hejira was the flight of Mohammed from Mecca in 622. Then a new piece is suddenly added to the chessboard. She can at least escort him back to the penitentiary in Florida. Clooney is shackled in the back of a prison van, with Lopez sitting up front. Frank needed a tiny dose of hope: nothing cheesy, but something in keeping with Leonard’s playfully sardonic tone. But the movie version couldn’t end with Clooney returning to prison and Lopez just going home. The book culminates in a mansion outside Detroit the federal marshal Karen Sisco (Jennifer Lopez, in the film) shoots the escaped bank robber she loves, Jack Foley (George Clooney), in the leg, then arrests him. In the mid-nineties, he was adapting “Out of Sight,” a novel by Elmore Leonard. ![]() Instead, he became one of Hollywood’s most prolific and successful screenwriters.įrank tends to obsess about the beginning of any story: how can he introduce a character with a few deft strokes so that the audience is immediately invested in what happens to her? He has devoted entire months just to cracking an opening scene. He never learned how to fly a plane himself. Scott was a sensitive child with a vigorous imagination, and these impromptu exercises in flight instruction were slightly traumatic. Barry was a Pan Am pilot, and he believed that in some lines of work, as Scott later put it, “fear is your friend.” Upon reaching an altitude of two miles, Barry would say, “Scott, if I had a heart attack right now and you had to land the plane, where would you land?” Scott would scan the horizon for a break in the trees, his heart pounding to the rhythm of the ticking clock Barry had imposed: The plane is going down. This was the mid-nineteen-seventies, in Los Gatos, California. When Scott Frank was a child, his father, Barry, bought a small Cessna airplane, and on weekends the two of them would fly.
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