Memo to Women Screenwriters: Man Up!
April 14, 2014 In Indiewire By nancynigrosh

Memo to Women Screenwriters: Man Up!

Why do so few scripts written by women receive high ratings on The Black List? This is mainly a problem for feature scripts, but highlighted television pilots also project a dim ratio.

As a service, The Black List has consistently been ahead of the curve but presently, it’s right in sync with 2013’s bleaker-than-usual, dismal “celluloid ceiling” report. Is the shrinking percentage of women screenwriters now seen as just business as usual, a reflection of our societal malaise? Or are women screenwriters actually doing something to fuel the inequity?

I doubt an old school research tool like listing all writers by their first initial would change the numbers much. It’s the genre-skirting “logline” that gives the women away, demonstrating what separates the girls from the boys. These self-congratulatory summaries border on dimorphism which, in the animal kingdom, distinguishes between male and female appearance.

An illuminated “premise,” on the other hand, has to work to gain advocacy with lasered, clear-cut genre as its engine. Agents prefer the term “premise.” A solid premise indicates something durable that actually has a shot at getting across the Hollywood player minefield, while a weak one won’t make it through the many hoops it takes to get all the way to the bank.

The Bechdel Test launched 1,000 righteous infographics illustrating the tried-and-true — and sometimes false — business model of male-centric “programmers,” clearly labeling blame on male decision-makers. What if those charts and graphs were interpreted another way? What if they were seen simply as stats for a losing team? If that were so, why wouldn’t that team re-think its overall strategy? Instead of a self-pitying document, why not make the annual Celluloid Ceiling report an occasion for a call to arms?READ MORE

How Screenwriter Terry Southern Prepared Me for a Career in Hollywood
February 6, 2014 In Indiewire By nancynigrosh

How Screenwriter Terry Southern Prepared Me for a Career in Hollywood

Some people debate the value of film school. I’m not one of them.

Terry Southern’s NYU master screenwriting class was held on Tuesday nights at Remington’s Bar, a basement dive on Waverly Place. Trudging through the ice-hardened sidewalk, I noticed his beat up Ford Mustang with the broken canvas top barely covering up the snow from the storm night before. I always wondered how he’d made it back to Connecticut in that thing.

Terry was one of a kind, a truly badass screenwriter. Even in the revolutionary times of the 1960’s and ‘70’s, the author of the geared to shock novel, Candy, also wrote screenplays for Dr. Strangelove, Easy Rider, Barbarella, and many other films that scored bull’s-eyes at shaking up the status quo.

I nodded to my classmates, who each nursed a coke or a beer at the counter. In turns, we sauntered over to Terry’s table, where he presided in kingly fashion, and gave insights into the magic of professional filmmaking. There were six of us, so we got roughly half an hour each. By ten o’clock, Terry was in a world of his own, yet still adept at letting us in on Stanley Kubrick insider stories and cool anecdotes about the scenes behind the scenes of Easy Rider.READ MORE

Memo to Screenwriters #3: Being Solely Identified by Your Scripts Leads to Permanent Identity Crisis
September 12, 2013 In Indiewire By nancynigrosh

Memo to Screenwriters #3: Being Solely Identified by Your Scripts Leads to Permanent Identity Crisis

Like so many others, Elmore Leonard, god bless him, praised writers for their “perseverance to just sit there alone and grind it out.” Of course writers might think he was only referring to writing, especially when coupled with his memetic 10th rule: “if it looks like writing, re-write it.” Taking this credo too literally is certain to drive writers even further into the ivory tower of the introvert. Justified, indeed.

Elmore Leonard’s fans don’t have to have read his work extensively or at all, to uh, “know” him. He presents himself as a look-us-in-the-eye type, not some remote artist alone in a tower being celebrated from afar. In other words, Leonard exists to us as a man, not solely as a writer. His appeal extends beyond what’s on the page — the other half of the career equation. Even an opposite icon like J.D. Salinger’s controlled seclusion and rejection of immortal author conventions are just as famous as the characters he created. We know what these writers look like. We can even imagine what their opinions on various topics might be. Even though they are no longer alive and writing, they still speak through the media in identities separate and apart from their work.

I was recently asked about the difference between a screenwriter’s identity and a screenwriter’s voice. Simply put, in a screenplay it’s the “voice” collected into pages that’s put up for sale. If the writer’s persona has been left behind embedded in the pages, versus used portably as a sustainable tool the writer can re-use, then the writer has to start from scratch with every screenplay to gain back any kind of self referral as an artist. Imagine if the DIY self-published authors of today followed the technique traditionally used by screenwriters to simply type their name under the title as reference to authorship with no personal outreach to their readers.READ MORE

Memo to Screenwriters #2: Like E.L. James, You Can Change the Game
July 16, 2013 In Indiewire By nancynigrosh

Memo to Screenwriters #2: Like E.L. James, You Can Change the Game

In the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan emphasized the value of message and the medium the message uses over its creator. This idea flies in the face of the modern era’s printed book as the ultimate expression of the writer, who toiled in glorified isolation as the big publishing house distributed it magically across the universe. McLuhan went on to predict a wireless world, where all messages are accessed instantly to and from a collective brain–what we now call mobile media.

Ever since authors shed the fantasy of a big publishing house model, many midlist and novice writers have opted to write speculative books delivered to reading tablets–print on demand–once they realized that they had the distinct advantage of having a product they solely owned that could be bought directly online. Now writers manage not only all creative decisions but also their own metadata, including ISBN number and price.

The most successful among them, “Fifty Shades of Grey” author E.L. James, strategized with aggressive genre mastery. She identified and directly engaged with present and future readers in social media hangouts. She insured that the upload to Amazon, iBookstore, Barnes & Noble, Kobo and Sony Reader could truly pay off. Big publishing houses had long overlooked such popular fiction genres as romance and science fiction. Now big houses along with the public (and movie studios), scout for bestselling indie authors.

Which prompts the question: what can screenwriters learn from this?READ MORE