In the autumn and winter of 1999, I had the privilege of
attending Syd Field’s private screenwriting class at his home. Like many young screenwriters, I was
greatly influenced by his books during my early attempts at the profession, so
this was an honor and a great opportunity to hone the craft with one of the
master gurus. Each session
consisted of about six writers sitting around Syd’s dining room table, reviewing
the pages written the previous week.
All the other writers who attended were of my parents’ age or
older. I was the kid.
After reading his books, I wasn’t sure what to expect from
his personality. From his writing
I gleaned that he knew the mechanisms behind excellent script structure
possibly better than anyone, and he was always able to walk the reader through
each part, step by step. And that
was how his books had helped me.
They take a potentially overwhelming project and divide it into smaller
and smaller parts, and then show how each part affects another. His Workbook had been indispensable for
my previous screenplay, so I reread that book again before attending his class.
The man whose work had influenced entertainment industry
development departments for decades and now greeted his students with snacks
and bottled water in his home every week was not a Hollywood guy, not a Type A,
not a producer, not a snake oil salesman.
Syd was soft-spoken and very calm, a generous and sweet man.
In his personal life he loved to meditate and was, at the time, studying
Hindu and Buddhist texts.
I had thought the whole class would be about structure, but
instead we focused on characters and the human element behind each
creation. But the true lesson I
took from his class was a lot larger than anything to do with screenwriting.
The script I was working on was about a crappy schlock
journalist who took a last-chance assignment to uncover the truth behind a
well-known messianic cult figure.
The assignment starts to awry right from the start when he discovers his
ex-girlfriend love-of-his-life is now the messiah’s lover. I was 21 years old at the time, the age
wherein one clearly knows everything about the world and humans and God. So my script was going to be a serious
exposé, not on the messiah figure but on the miserable failure that was my main
character. And I struggled with
the damn thing immediately.
Syd had me take a step back and spend a week doing writing exercises
from the point of view of my main character and his ex-girlfriend. It was a way to find their voices and
personalities, and thus find out why they do things. I had trouble cracking this part as well. After a couple of false starts, I
started writing about the terrible sex lives these two people had together and
separately; the terrible stuff in the sack that screwed them up in their future
relationships. I thought it was
sad and revealing, and I tried to make it a little witty, because bad sex is
funny in hindsight.
I was nervous about reading it out loud to complete
strangers and Syd Field. So
I chose to go last in the class with my pages. When it was my turn, I decided to boldly dive in and not
apologize for something I was already kind of regretting. At first I heard some titters from
the audience, then some chuckles, and then by the end I had to keep pausing
because the laughter had risen to a roar.
My arms were buzzing with goosebumps. I had never attempted anything comical
before; all of my writing had been young-man’s self-serious DRAMA. This project was going to be another
heart-wrenching deconstruction of male delusion. But because I could not figure out how to express this in
melodramatic format, I took a look at my characters’ sources of failure and
mixed it in some dick jokes. And it worked.
Syd said to me, “Why try to keep forcing your story into a
mold and tone that don’t fit? Your
characters’ voices clearly work the way you just wrote them. The soul of comedy is failure and
disappointment. It’s okay to make
people laugh, you don’t have to be serious all the time.” I went home that night and saw my previous
three screenplays in an entirely new light: how self-important, serious, and
tragic I had tried to be. I had
always liked making girls smile, why not broaden my scope? That’s of course the young man’s
response. The real lesson was I
had to learn how to laugh at myself, at my failures and disappointments. Sitting around moping about them and
then weaving those feelings into screenplays was only going to perpetuate my
problems.
Did that messiah script succeed? In the sense that I learned something about myself,
yes. Or at least that seed was
planted. The lesson is something
I’m still learning today. One
doesn’t usually find that level of personal clarity in a screenwriting
class. But this wasn’t a normal
class and Syd wasn’t a normal guy.
We all wrestled with the characters in our stories for that handful of
months. Structure-Structure-Structure
wasn’t the value. The person, the
voice, and the Why were what mattered.
And the kid in the class learned to not take himself so seriously.
Syd Field passed from this world yesterday. His family, his wife, Aviva, and his friends were
there by his side. Though I can’t
say I knew him very well personally, I do know how he approached life
spiritually. So I’m certain he saw
this end as but another beginning.
Thank you, Syd. May peace
be upon you.
