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    Get Your Hero Up a Tree: How to Write a Movie (That Doesn't Stink)
    Get Your Hero Up a Tree: How to Write a Movie (That Doesn't Stink)
    Get Your Hero Up a Tree: How to Write a Movie (That Doesn't Stink)
    Ebook114 pages1 hour

    Get Your Hero Up a Tree: How to Write a Movie (That Doesn't Stink)

    By Mark Achtenberg

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    About this ebook

    Created for the college classroom, and intended for aspiring screenwriters, Mark Achtenberg’s Get Your Hero Up a Tree: How to Write a Movie (That Doesn’t Stink) is a surprisingly refreshing and entertaining how-to book that tackles the medium of film. A long-time educator and respected expert in the field, Achtenberg approaches his t

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRunAmok Books
    Release dateJan 1, 2018
    ISBN9781641365666

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      Book preview

      Get Your Hero Up a Tree - Mark Achtenberg

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      Praise for Get Your Hero Up a Tree

      Mark Achtenberg’s book is a common sense, accessible approach to screenwriting, aimed at students and young writers. Written by a writer and teacher who is also an excellent picture editor, the book is filled with practical insights and approaches, based on examples of real films that students will know. It gives the writer a number of choices and the reasons behind them to consider in her or his own original work and does so in a way that encourages the writer to stay true to the passion of the idea and discourages a formulaic ‘one way’ approach.

      – Lawrence Mirkin, producer on Fraggle Rock and the Jim Henson Hour –

      "How to write with moving pictures has often been shrouded in a fog of conflicting advice. Get Your Hero Up A Tree looks clearly through to the heart of what is necessary. Follow Mark’s advice and never get lost. It makes a fuck of a lot more sense than anything Robert McKee ever

      blabbered on about."

      – Robert Mills, writer, director, founder of Radical Sheep Productions –

      This guy has been working in the biz for 20 years and he’s passing on a lot of hard-won wisdom in this book. Whether you buy this book to help you achieve your screenwriting ambitions or to increase your understanding of how films work, you’ll find it an enjoyable and invaluable read. 

      – Henry Brock, author of Vicious Dogs –

      GET YOUR HERO UP A TREE: HOW TO WRITE A MOVIE

      (THAT DOESN’T STINK)

      by

      Mark Achtenberg

      ISBN: 978-1-64136-566-6

      Run Amok Books, 2018

      First Edition

      Introduction

      As a teenager I became obsessed with photography. I discovered my father's old manual Pentax camera and learned photography the old-fashioned way. I was also obsessed with movies, watching everything I could get my hands on from the local, but limited, Blockbuster Video. One day I had exhausted the catalogue of new movies and I was lamenting the lack of good movies to watch. My mom said I should rent The Godfather. My initial response was typical of a young person—why would I watch an old movie? My mom persisted (apparently, my grandfather walked out of the movie during the horse head scene) and I eventually caved in and rented the movie. It put the zap on my brain. From there I went down the rabbit hole of classic films.

      A few years later I started my degree in literature and, at some point, saw Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It and the zap was on again. Reading about the film, I was inspired by Lee’s conviction that anyone should be able to make a movie, not just the Hollywood studios. He was way ahead of his time. Unlike the cliché when people say "I knew I wanted to be a filmmaker when I saw Star Wars," it didn't occur to me until She's Gotta Have It. Where this all leads to is my passions colliding—my love of photography and my love of literature. They marry together powerfully into that other medium which I love so much—the movies.

      Film is alchemy. A movie is a collision of many arts. This includes photography, sound, music, architecture, fashion, arts & crafts and makeup. Add the element of performance, and you have the ingredients for making a movie. Edit together this symphony of the arts and you can create a film. Yet, all of this starts on the blank screen or a blank piece of paper. This book intends to expand the writer's view of the medium itself. It is meant to make the reader think beyond the page and consider how a film works. Anyone who has made a movie knows that it doesn't end with the script. It is a fluid process—one that allows the filmmaker to react and change the final product to what he or she wanted, versus

      allowing it to be what it eventually arrives at. Things you think will work die, and things you think weren't working great end up soaring. Alchemy.

      In the end, this book is meant to provoke thought about what it means to be a writer of moving pictures. Film is an entirely different beast than other artistic mediums, and thus one that needs specific, and special, consideration. So let us consider them— movies, and the writers who write them. Read on.

      Empathy

      Empathy. This is one of the greatest concepts that any storyteller understands and is the essence of motion pictures. Master this concept and you will succeed as a writer and as a filmmaker. Film works best when it works in emotion and empathy. When someone says that they go to the movies to escape, they are saying that they want to experience something. They want to experience joy and laughter (comedy), fear (horror), joy and sadness (drama), excitement (action adventure) and anxiety (mystery/thriller). There is not a better artistic medium that captures these emotions and it is the reason we love movies. This is something the screenwriter needs to understand. The combining of pictures and sound is powerful. It can be extremely moving and extremely visceral. What you need to do as a screenwriter is to aspire to those extremes. Understand the medium and wield it.

      Know the Medium – Tame the Beast

      The movie is never as good as the book. This is the conventional wisdom of most audiences that enjoy both movies and books. These audiences are almost always disappointed in the film adaptation, which leads the screenwriter to ask, Why is the movie never as good as the book? The answer to this question reveals a lot about the differences between novels (and short stories) and film scripts. It is also an excellent place to start when thinking about writing a movie. Before we get into this, it is important to note that there are always exceptions to the rules. And I will repeat this phrase many times over the course of this book. There are always exceptions. Is the book always better than the movie? No. Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler improved James M. Cain’s Double Indemnity. Cain had written the novel under pressure to deliver and didn’t quite solve some issues with his plotting. Cain himself admitted that Wilder and Chandler had come up with great solutions to the problems he was having with the novel. There are also many who would say that Francis Ford Coppola and Mario Puzo improved what Puzo himself had written in the novel The Godfather. Again, there are always exceptions to the rule.

      So what are the differences between writing a novel and writing a feature film? Why is the movie never as good as the novel? I like to think that writing for film is like putting on a pair of handcuffs. When you write for the movies you are handicapped by not having the ability to tell the audience what your characters think or feel. You have to show this. You cannot delve into the backstory of your characters. This is a form of digression and film hates digression. You need to be moving forward in your story or you are dead in the water. In film writing, we have dialogue, action, and editing. This is how we tell the story. What is your character doing? What are we learning from the dialogue? You cannot tell the audience what they are thinking unless you employ a voice-over. You cannot tell the audience exactly what they are feeling. You cannot break the scene to tell the audience that the feeling the character is having reminds them of how their father treated them as a kid. You could use a voice-over, or write a soliloquy or monologue, but these are not techniques that audiences expect in modern film. Woody Allen might break the scene and talk to the camera in Annie Hall , but this is one of those rare exceptions. Voice-over is the most used technique, but it has been derided over the years as being lazy writing. Voice-over was also a staple of old Hollywood, including the highly stylized track in Wilder and Chandler’s classic Double Indemnity. In the modern day, film dislikes digression and voice-over is a last resort for a poorly written script. I will put the technique of voice-over off until later.

      As an example of how a film is not like a novel or short story, we can look at Edgar Allen Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado. Poe is particularly interesting, as there have been many films made based on his writings and most have failed. Why? Most writers want to capture his macabre and psychological horror and translate it to film. This is aided by the fact that Poe’s stories are in the public domain and free for any budding filmmaker to use. Poe was one of the first writers of genre, and his texts have inspired many writers and readers of horror and mystery. Why have so many

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