All language subtitles for MasterClass David Mamet Teaches Dramatic Writing_Full2

A B C A always B C closing. Always be

closing.

I don't understand what anything means.

You want to learn the first rule you'd

know if you ever spent a day in your

life.

What do you want me to do?

Teach me. I want you to teach me.

What do you mean? Can I talk to him

about this?

Yeah.

Are you just talking about this or were

we just talking about it?

Yeah, we're just speaking about it.

Speaking about an idea.

What I hope I'm doing, and here's where

your English papers got a point, is I'm

responding to the will of the people.

You laughing now.

No, there are people out there. People

who came here to know something they

didn't know. Who came here to be helped.

I've been in this business 15 years.

What's your name?

[ __ ] you. That's my name. I think you're

angry.

Oh, have I got your attention now?

Good.

They say when the student is prepared

that the teacher appears. So, the same

is true of most of the lessons you're

going to learn uh in any I don't know if

any art, but certainly in any craft.

When you're ready to learn it, you will.

if you want to and if you need to and if

and and and if you don't want to and you

don't need to, you ain't ready yet or

maybe maybe you don't want to. I always

say, you know, the arts is my experience

is like running away to the circus. You

know, if you got something to fall back

on, the circus don't need you. The

circus don't want you. You got to run

away say, "Okay,

I'll leave, but you're going to have to

kill me."

And what that's one of the great things

I found in our in this wonderful bis

show business and also in the movies is

is the kid who shows up and says what

can I do and you say nothing get out of

here right the kid keeps coming back a

week later you say for Christ sake

you're going to get me a cup of coffee

and get out of here right by the end of

the third week you're saying where's

that kid right and at the end of the

movie you're saying kid what do you want

to do next it's it's magnificent but I

always thought that being a writer is a

lot like being a beaver

that beavers

their teeth itch, right? And so that's

why they cut down trees,

right?

Because that's the only thing that stops

their their teeth from driving them

crazy. And so I think that I'm kind of

like, it's not the teeth, it's my

consciousness. But it's the same thing.

How can I get it to shut up for a while?

Give it a different give it a problem

that it likes, right? And so once in a

while the problem that likes is

unpleasant.

But what else am I going to do? Well,

I'm not going to play golf.

I think I'm going to talk about kind of

a unified field theory of aesthetics.

And if anyone's still listening after

that, um, you're probably even more

caffeinated than I am. Um, so I've

always been fascinated by the idea that

there's exists a unified field theory of

where we can regularize the way we

perceive with the way that we write and

write because we understand the way the

human beings perceive

and to apply and this theory I try to

apply to

the uh the performing arts. How do human

beings perceive A plus B therefore C? we

perceive in terms of cause and and

effect. That's our survival mechanism.

Therefore, any performing art has to

take into account the way we perceive

cause and effect. The best way that this

describe the how this operates in drama

is a plot. A plot is an exercise in

cause and effect. So, that's what I'm

going to be talking about. That's the

way a plot works. That's the way a scene

works. That's the way a movie script

works. That's the way I talk to actors

in terms of what does the character

want? Why does he want it? What happens

if he doesn't get it? Why now? Those are

the questions I ask of everything.

Over the years, I taught in a lot of

different venues. I founded a couple of

acting schools with my friend William H.

Macy. One of them is is still operating

in New York. It's part of the Atlantic

Theater Company. I taught at all these

hot shot universities uh as an

instructor, guest lecture, blah blah

blah. I taught private classes. And

there was one group that was the only

group I met that was significantly more

intelligent in the universities was the

kids at MIT because they were they

knew how to be analytical

and they were it was kind of like a po

what they used to call like po uh poetry

for physicists. So I was talking to them

about my theories and they were used to

being analytical saying okay let me test

that out. Let me see if it jives with my

experience. Let me see if I can practice

it. If so, it's probably true. So, the

guys at MIT, the guys and the girls at

MIT didn't have any didn't have any

preconceptions about drama. They were

simply physicists. So, it was easy for

them to say, "I get it. This guy's

propounding a theory. Let me see if it

makes sense." And so, I hope that's what

you guys and girls would do, too. Say,

"Okay, he's propounding various

theories. Let me see if I follow them.

Let me see if they jive with my

experience. And if I practice them, let

me see if they work. They say if you

want to really learn something, teach

it. So I I love teaching. I'm a

Sagittarius. All Sagittariuses are

teachers. I was born on November 30th,

same day as Winston Churchill and Mark

Twain, who are two of my idols. And one

day before Woody Ellen, who's who's the

third, and that's why I'm glad to be

here.

teaching a class this way was really

interesting for me. I don't know if you

walk away with anything other than

thinking, oh, you know, he's moderately

charming. You know, that might inspire

me uh to look at his works or it might

inspire me, you know, if that buffoon is

going to waste my time for 6 hours. Let

me see if I can do better. So I I would

hope that you guys would would be

encouraged to say if this class clown

can do so well, you know, and get

through life on just a shoe shine and

smile for 50 years, hell, I'll try it,

too.

I'm David Mamemoth and this is my master

class.

The purpose of drama, that's a really

really good question. That's a really

good question. Uh there's an old Je I'm

Jewish. My people have only been Jewish

about 5,000 6,000 years. So we're kind

of getting used to it. So there's an old

there's an old joke about there's a

international flight and this terrorist

breaks in with the submachine gun. He

says, "Okay, who's a Jew?" And a little

old little guy at the back says, "That's

a really interesting question." So

that's kind of how I feel about about

drama. I think the purpose of drama uh

is to define the clan.

And the reason I think this is I've been

watching a lot of football games lately.

And also my Chicago Cubs finally won

after 108 years in the best ball game

anyone's ever seen. And I realized that

what the sports rooting does is it

defines the clan. Not just Green Bay

versus Atlanta, but football fans. You

know, the the fan the fans get together

and they get to scream at the referee.

you know, you you evil swine, you are

you blind, blah, blah, blah. But the the

United

rules because if there weren't any

rules, the guy would just come out with

brass knuckles and bang and get the ball

over the So, the United which unites the

clan is the rules. Drama has rules.

We're given a premise. The hero wants

something to find the cause of the

plague on thieves or to free the Jews or

to uh establish civil rights or to fly

the Atlantic. We get it. We're going to

follow his or her um journey until the

end. And the end is going to be

surprising and inevitable. Just like in

a great football game, it's surpris you

know the the perfect game is the last

game in a World Series. It comes down to

the final three seconds, right? and then

they have to they have to call it off

because the the the uh because the

field's no good or Green Bay's playing

and the guy kicks the final field goal,

they have to call it back because it was

a timeout. That's the perfect that that

our consciousness is freed, right? We're

relieved of the burden of our

consciousness. So, one way we've always

done this is through getting into

trouble. That's what human beings do.

with sex and drugs, booze,

sports, and drama. So, here's what

happens. At the end of the day, what do

we we human beings do? We gather around

the campfire, right? That's what human

beings always do. The other day, today,

the campfire is called a computer or a

television, whatever. We may not sit in

the same place, but watching the young

people today, while they're watching,

they're all talking to each other around

the campfire. Did you see that? Drama

goes back to the beginning of

civilization around the campfire where

the tribe comes together and they say,

"My god, did you see what blah blah did

with that mountain lion today?" And the

other guy says, "I'll tell you one

better than that.

When when I was young," and they we tell

stories that unite the tribe. We

reinforce our our our tribal um unity.

We say, "This is how we do things here."

And we we establish this by telling

jokes. We establish it by telling

stories. We establish it through

religion, religious observance. And it's

all the same thing. It's saying we're

going to put aside the burden of our

consciousness

for a while and sit around the campfire

and tell stories and then we can go to

bed.

Everything in our life is drama, right?

A neurosis is to is a false uh

relationship of cause and effect. Right?

I'm standing at the uh I'm standing at

the corner and I look over and this is

attractive young person over there and

she looks away and decides to cross the

street the other way. Obviously, she was

offended by me, right? That's how we we

we we structure everything into cause

and effect. Well, see, it may not they

may not be related at all, but we

structure everything into in our lives

into cause and effect. And it takes a

great deal of thought to be able to

unravel the un the unhealthy

relationships, right? And to understand

what the truth is, right? So that so

drama at the end of the day is just a

way of discharging any leftover uh

energy that same leftover energy of

trying to establish cause and effect.

And the we reason it establishes it is

at the end of the drama we realize we're

wrong.

Right. Because we say, "Yeah, the bear

this. Yeah, the bear that. Yeah, the

bear that. Tell me grandpa. Tell me

grandpa." And then at the end of the

day, yes, I realized it wasn't a bear at

all. Right. That's how when and when we

tell stories to each other all day long,

we're dramatizing it. We're always

altering it for an effect. You say, "I

waited for that dang bus 42 minutes."

Well, it felt like 42 minutes, right? It

might have been 2 minutes, right? You

know how many times I I I I crapped out

of Las Vegas? 16 time. We we

unconsciously

alter

what may or may not be real events to

increase their their dramatic potential.

And we tell stories that have a

punchline that's surprising. That's all

drama is. And then aunt Shirley turns

out, guess what? She left everything to

her dog. Wa.

It's the same thing as saying and then

Edipus found out he was the cause of the

plague on thieves. Wa, you know,

everybody slaps their knees. I don't

know about that. Here's one thing that

we all dramatize. It's called the

weather, right? The weather happens

every day. It's the weather. But yet, we

all dramatize. Did you see what that

rain was like today? And on the morning

when I got to be in this studio at 9:30,

why of this? It's just the weather,

right? There's no connection between the

weather and my need to be at the studio.

But we dramatize everything. Of course

we do.

What is not the purpose of drama is to

make people better, to give them ideas,

right? To teach, to reform,

uh to espouse good causes. This is not

the purpose of drama, right? You any

more than it's the purpose of a joke,

right? You know, for example, my

favorite one my favorite joke two two my

favorite jokes. What did Washington say

to his men before crossing Delaware? Get

in a boat.

Right. What did Kuster say when he saw

the Indians coming? Here come the

Indians. Right? That's a great Those are

great jokes, right? They're surprising

and yet inevitable. You go, "Yeah, okay.

I I get it." You don't want to say,

"What did Washington say before crossing

to Delaware? get in the boat because if

you don't we will not be able to cross

the Delaware. Okay. So that's taking a

joke and turning it into an object

lesson or a cautionary tale. So it's not

the purpose of drama to be cautionary

tales. Anybody's got kids, you know,

kids love stories, right? And the

weirder the better. And when you can uh

as as I think a lot of people do,

suspend

your own rational process and just start

making up a story out of thin air, the

kid loves it because that's his or her

special time to be like two little

furbies communicating with their

parents, right? Talking about the nature

of the world. You're sharing something

that's not rational. The bad use of that

time is to say, you know, I want to tell

you a story about a little rabbit who

didn't do his homework.

Right? So that's not the that's not the

purpose of a bedtime story. And drama is

just a form of bedtime story. That's all

it is.

There were some people

who were doing a show on Broadway and at

the end of the show there was somebody

in the audience who was a politician who

the people in the in the cast didn't

like and they stopped the show the

curtain call and started addressing that

person. This is a irrespective of the

worth of the show they were putting on.

This is a profound misunderstanding of

the responsibility of the artist because

the people who come to the theater don't

come to be taught. They come to be

entertained. Period. If you're not

entertaining them, you're not doing your

job. Because the those people on

Broadway nor I nor knows better than the

audience whom they should vote for.

Right? When you pay that money, you're

there to be entertained. So

that's that's the purpose of drama. It

is to entertain. That's enough. I mean,

Lord have mercy. I mean, if you can

entertain somebody and take away from

them the burden of their consciousness

for half hour comedy or two-hour movie

or hour and a half play, you've done a

fantastic amount. I mean, they say, uh,

who rises refreshed from his prayers,

his prayers have been answered.

So, it's not our purpose to teach

because I don't know anything better

than anyone else who they should vote

for. It's like, think about this. You go

to the dentist. Okay? So, what the

dentist is going to do is they're going

to give you some sort of a numbing

uh novacane or g whatever the hell

they're going to give you. Right? So,

now you've given yourself up to that

dentist. You say, "I trust you that

you're not going to rape me, rob me, or

beat me or kill me while I have less

than my complete faculties." So for the

dentist to say, "Yes, you know, while

you have I have you here, although you

only came for dentistry, I'd like to

tell you about an investment opportunity

I have or I'd like to lect you about

politics. I'd like to give you my views

on feminism." That's not what you you

wouldn't have got into that chair unless

you trusted that the dentist was only

going to do what he or she said they

were going to do. It's so nice being

back on a movie set. I spent many

decades on a movie set on the other side

of the camera. And one of the things I

remembered which is uh

this as we know it's a very very tight

cultural community and the nobody tells

you the laws but you got to figure them

out right. You got to show up, shut up,

do your job. And one of the wonderful

things is never ever ever do somebody

else's job. Doesn't matter if you it

doesn't matter if they're driving off

the cliff. Doesn't matter. Doesn't make

any difference. You do your job. That's

enough for you. So that's what I think

about uh drama. My job is to entertain.

Somebody else's job can can be to put on

a political uh uh a political show and

it should be advertised as such,

right? Or else you're tricking people.

For example, if you listen to AM radio,

the they're selling a lot. I like AM

radio because they're selling snake oil.

Everything they sell on AM radio is a

bunch of snake oil. consolidate your

debt. We'll get you out of your condo.

We'll take 10 inches off your waist. Uh

uh we'll uh teach you how to flip

houses. There'll It's snake oil, right?

So, hell, I bought a lot of snake oil my

time, right? So, one of the things that

they do is they'll say blah blah blah

with five snake oil um commercials. Now,

we'll go back to uh uh whatever the

Douggee Burn and the Douggee Burn Show.

Hi, this is Douggee Burn and I know that

a lot of people are concerned about the

economy. Well, what I do is I invest in

gold. So, you're saying, "Wait a second.

Wait a second. I signed on to listen to

the 10 minutes of commercials about

snake oil. I switched gears. I'm going

to go back. I'm going to suspend my

disbelief. I'm listening to you to be

entertained. And you're going to you're

going to misuse that license which I

gave you to sell me gold?" Uh-uh. No.

You know, you just you you just lost my

respect. You took advantage of me.

Drama is also just a form of myth. Myth

is a poetic statement of an unverifiable

reality.

Right? Myth is not false. It's just

unverifiable.

Right?

For example, Jesus Christ died for our

sins. It's not false. If you're a

Christian, that's the essence of your

life. You just can't point to it on a

sheet of paper and say, "See here." But

it's nonetheless true for that. So myth

again is a statement of truth which is

not verifiable.

And so is drama. Drama involves us in

the quest of a human being to achieve

something.

uh whether it's um um Willie Lman or

whether it's Dr. king or whether it's

Jesus or whether it's Moses

they all become myths and the fact that

some of them actually happen to have

lived nonetheless they become a myth we

see yes I understand how at every step

this human being was trying to achieve

something and they underwent um traumas

I could not even begin to imagine and

they doubt and they doubted themselves

and they all wanted to quit every human

every hero every heroine wants to quit

every hero and heroine wants to give it

up and say had enough. I'm not equal to

the task. Right? But nonetheless, they

found strength somewhere and they

achieved a result which elevated them to

to the status of a god or killed them.

I've been writing drama for about 50

years. The more the more you look at it,

the more complex you understand the

human being is, including ourselves. one

of the so one way that we try to we have

to organize the world that's the

difference between human beings and

animals is we have the capacity to use

reason to organize the world we say if A

and A happened and B happened perhaps

there's a relationship between them

which would enable me to reason oh yes C

I shouldn't sit on a hot stove again or

I think it's obviously say in 1902 it's

obviously impossible for human beings to

fly because they're heavier than air.

Human beings will never fly. But wait a

second, birds can fly and birds are

heavier than air. Therefore, my reason

tells me I can figure out as a human

being how to get people to fly, right?

So, this is what separates us from the

animals, right? We have the capacity to

reason. We aren't just working on

instinct. But reason's insufficient

because reason always has the capacity

to lead us down the wrong path. We

become arrogant. We say I I'm

reasonable, right? I'm I married the

wrong man. I married the wrong woman.

Oh, because I'm reasonable. It's their

fault. I voted for a politician. The

politician didn't keep his or her

promises. Oh, yeah. Well, no politician

keeps his or her promises. Why? They're

politicians. So, we reason ourselves. It

makes sense to go fight World War I.

We'll draw a line from uh Belgium

straight down south and we'll line up

the two most advanced civilizations in

the world across from each other and

from 1914 to 1918 they'll kill each

other. That seems reasonable.

A reason is flawed. So the purpose of

drama is not to investigate reason. It's

to free us from reason. And all drama is

basically the same as a joke.

The joke frees us from reason because we

take a reasonable proposition we're

trying to find the end to and the joke

tells us no, you're looking in the wrong

place. Why does a chicken cross the

road? I don't know. To get to the other

side. Ah, so all drama is basically why

does the chicken cross the road? It's

leading us, as Aristotle tells us, to a

conclusion which is both surprising

and inevitable. we realize, oh my god, I

my my my mind doesn't work. I mean,

which of us didn't say, oh my god, I

can't believe I did, said, bought, sold

that. Am I insane? And the answer is

yes. Right? That that's part of the

nature of human consciousness is we

believe what we think and we believe

what we're told. And one way to get the

group together is through prejudice. We

can you can almost always coalesce a

group through prejudice saying you know

what let's hate those bad people over

there. The problem is not human nature.

The problem is not my consciousness.

It's those bad black, white, Christian,

Jewish, German, blah blah. Those people

left, right. It's those bad people over

there. That's why I feel so upset.

So our that's one way we can deal with

our consciousness, but it's a it's a

sorted way. There's a better way which

is through drama which is basically a

stepchild of religion.

We're basically nuts. Human beings are

we're we're basically insane. I mean

it's it's a and I'm talking about, you

know, not not you of course but

certainly me and everybody else I ever

met, right? We kind of stumble around

blindly with these ideas and we that we

think we believe in and we say, "Oh, I

don't believe in God." And then we go

and create our own religions or we say,

"I don't believe in love." And then we

go out and treat people unlovingly. And

we very seldom um put our beliefs and

our actions into the same box.

That that's just human nature because

you you because we're nuts. And I I I

wouldn't say that we're sinful. I would

just say that we're missing a

connection. This is an ancient idea,

right? It goes back uh in fact, you

know, Freud denied it, but he was a

fairly serious Jew. And the Jewish idea

is called the yetzahara, which means the

evil impulse. There's another he called

it um um aeros andos, right? The life

impulse and the death impulse. But

there's a thing called the yetzah which

in Jewish tradition is that evil side of

our it's our consciousness. It wants to

kill us. It wants to lead us astray.

Wants to call lies truth and truth lies.

It says you know you can go out and

cheat on your wife. You of course we

know it's against the law. But in this

case who would blame you know or you can

cheat on your taxes or blah blah blah or

you know it's not a good idea to call

your that son of a gun your neighbor an

xyz. you know that's not a good idea but

the way he looked at you today right so

all day long there's this other side of

our nature called the yetzahara the dark

side or the sitra a right that's we got

to we got to figure out how to deal with

it and one way we can deal with it is

religion and another way we can deal

with it is is drama right the problem is

using the mind to cure the mind and it's

really really difficult and The term

that Freud used was psychoanalysis,

which doesn't which is um uh psycho is

is the soul, right? He's really talking

about the soul. He's trying to find out

what is the soul, right? So, you're not

going to find the soul through reason

because you can't point to it. So,

people say, "Oh, the soul doesn't exist.

I can't point to it." Right? Well, you

can't point to patriotism. You can't

point to love. You can't point to

justice. These are ideals, right? You

can point to some examples but you can't

point to the thing. So we know that the

soul exists, right? So the question is

ho how how do we ex how do we examine

our soul? How do we get closer to God?

How do we get closer to the truth? And

one way is is through drama is by being

relieved of the burden of our

consciousness. Why did the chicken cross

the road to get to the other side?

Your job is to tell a story. The story

has a hero and he or she wants one

thing. And the story begins

when something precipitates the event.

Aunt Martha dies and the first nephew or

niece who can get to her house gets a

million dollars. The story didn't exist

before that. Now it does exist. Okay.

The story ends when the we either find

out that Aunt Martha left you the money,

right? Or find out why she didn't.

Everything has got everything in the

story has got to be a progression from

the telegram and I have to get to Aunt

Martha's will to the reading of the

will. Anything which is not on that

line, throw it away.

And what happens when you get yourself

into a situation you can't think your

way out of? That's great. Cuz if you

can't think your way out of it, the

audience can't either. So that's the

point. You got to say, "Hold on. It's

not time for me to sit down and drive

myself crazy trying to figure out how to

get out of Buffalo."

Aristotle wrote a little pamphlet on

playwriting called poetics. And he said,

"It comes down to some very simple

rules." He says, "It's the hero journey

from A to B. The hero has to be

transformed from a beggar to a king,

from a king to a beggar. It has to

happen in the least possible number of

steps. It has to happen in one place

over 48 hours. And at the end, we have

to undergo recognition.

We have to undergo a shock and awe. We

have to undergo fear and pity. Fear and

pity. Pity because we see the poor

schmo. My god, he's just like me. and

fear or awe because my say oh my I

didn't see that coming how is it

possible that I just like the hero who

represents me on stage didn't see that

coming we have to undergo and so that's

what we have to undergo what the hero

has to undergo is two things called

recognition and reversal of the

situation in one moment bam Aristotle

become he realized he'd been sleeping

with his mom he killed his dad he puts

his eyes out he goes from being the most

powerful man in the world to being a

blind beggar

So he under goes reversal of the

situation and he under goes recognition.

He has to undergo he has to say oh my

god

what have I done and that's the

punchline of the tragedy. So that's

basically Aristotle's poetics in in in

30 seconds.

Every plane needs to have a beginning

middle and an end. So, Jean Lucada said,

"Yes, every movie needs to have a

beginning, middle, and end, but not

necessarily in that order." And that's

why French movies are so effing boring,

right? Because it says fi at the end,

right? Which is French for You can go

home now, right? So, a play needs to

have a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Just like a joke has to have a

beginning, a middle, and an end. So, you

got to start at the beginning, go on

till you get to the end, and then stop.

Okay? So, every story is the hero

journey. and we're the hero. There's

Moses, right? He's the king. He's he's

the uh uh prince of Egypt. He's like

unto Pharaoh. And he says, I He says, "I

I I I I can't take it anymore. I saw

this Jewish guy getting beat up, this

slave." I said to him, "Do you like

being a slave?" And he wouldn't. So, I

killed this. He said, "Yes, I do. I

killed this the slave master. So, I went

off to the uh to the wilderness. I got

to figure this thing out. I don't like

being king of I'm a Jew and I'm almost

Pharaoh. I don't like it. I got to

figure out who the hell I am. Goes off

to the wilderness. There's a burning

bush. Okay, so now the story starts. The

burning bush says, "Guess, guess who I

am, right? I got something I want you to

do." So what does Moses say? He says,

"Now is not good for me." He says,

"Saving the Jewish people and listening

to a burning bush. That's great. Why

don't you take my brother Aaron? He

speaks I have a speech impediment."

Well, my brother Aaron, he's smarter

than I am. Why don't you pick him? God

says, "No, actually I want to pick you."

So the story doesn't begin until the

burning bush speaks to Moses. Moses

doesn't want to go. The whole story of

the five books of Moses is him having

difficulty with these idiot people, my

own people, the Jews, who are trying at

every stage to go back to slavery. Moses

keeps wanting to give up. He says, "God,

start again, right? Or give me one more

chance or

I don't know what to do. I'm lost. I was

up there on the mountain getting the

word of God. I came down 30 minutes late

and they're worshiping a golden calf.

It's the same people we took out of

Egypt two weeks ago when you parted the

Red Sea. They're worshiping golden calf.

I can't take it anymore. God says, "No,

you're not done yet. I'll tell you

when." So, the story of the five books

of Moses, the hero journey, which is the

paradigmatic

story of all drama, because we're always

the hero, ends. Moses is just about to

get into the promised land, right? We're

just about to get to this wonderful

ending with the fuzzy little bunnies and

the sheep and all that, right? And all

the hummus, unfortunately. Okay. And God

says, "Nope." He says,

"Oh, you're going to die here." Moses,

well, you know, you remember from

before, you know, I'm the guy at Burning

Bush. We had such a good time. We had

all those adventures. I worked real

hard. God says, "Yeah, you're done."

[ __ ] And that's the end of the story.

It's surprising and inevitable. And it's

the hero it's the hero journey.

So that's what that's what all drama is.

It's the hero journey.

And if it's not the hero journey, it

might be advertising or it might be

politics or it might be hack work, you

know. And so what the artist has to, at

least I do, has to fight with all all

the time is nope, do better.

Nope, just do better.

I know you don't want just like Moses

because the the artist is the hero just

as the hero is the hero just as the art

the audience is the hero. The lights go

out they become that hero trying to

figure out how's he going to get out of

this how's he going to get out of that.

I think a dramatist at least I is one

who's not inspired by solutions but one

inspired by situations

right because the solution is I know

you know I know what I'll do I'll just

um

I'll realize that I am the cause of the

plague on thieves so what Aristotle says

is the hero can't just get the idea

something has to happen from outside

that inspires the hero in a way that he

or she didn't realize before. He said,

"Cuz if they could realize it before,

why now?" So if you look at most dramas,

most modern dramas, especially movies,

the hero just gets the idea, right? They

they discover it's all within themselves

that they knew, they know a league of

their own or blah blah blah, whatever

the hell or school of rock. They

suddenly become inspired. But the

question is why?

What inspired them?

And the answer is

the writer had to think a little bit

harder,

right? Because if you knew the answer

before you started out, I swear to you,

the audience knew it too. So the only

way to get their attention to play along

is to you have to go through the process

and you have to find out the answer to

the question that you didn't know when

you started. And that involves,

as Hemingway said, writing is easy. All

you got to do is sit down at the

typewriter and bleed.

So when you're writing, when I'm

writing, there's two things you're going

through and you better be going through

one of them. One of them is this will

kill him and the other is this will kill

me.

Aristotle says that the that there have

to be the unities of time, place, and

action. The hero has to be only doing

one thing. If he's doing anything other

than that one thing, uh-uh, you're

breaking the rules. It has to take place

in one place and it has to take place

over 48 hours. So, you can screw around

with a little bit, but I always thought,

okay,

there's a pencil, right? That's all I

need is a pencil. A piece of paper would

come in handy, and I'm going to write

some dialogue

that

through the dialogue expresses the

journey of of a hero toward a goal. and

it's going to take place in one place

and I can do it on a bare stage with two

chairs and that's all I need. So it

takes so it's marvelous. It's like

anybody ever went camping, you know, if

like camping you say, "Well, I got a

knife and I got some matches. Okay, I'm

going to I can live in the woods for 10

for 10 days." It's marvelous. It's

that's the most primal thing in the

world because it takes me back to the

campfire and it takes the audience back

to the campfire. Yeah. Say, "Yeah, tell

me a story. I don't need a moving set.

If you're a dramatist, you have to be

simple in your storytelling so the

audience can follow it. They have to

know what story they're following so

that they can be misled. You see,

because what we do when we listen to a

story is we jump ahead. We say, "Oh,

yeah, I see what he's going to do." Or,

"Oh, no, I don't know what they're going

to do. Let me try to figure it out." And

then the next step is surprising and

inevitable. Each scene is a simple

attempt to solve the problem. The scene

fails. It has to or we wouldn't go on to

the next scene. The next scene is more

information which helps us solve the

problem, but we get in more trouble. The

third scene is even more information. We

get even deeper. Now, now we're into the

second act. The second act, they say

it's hard to remember that you set out

to drain the swamp when you're up to

your ass and alligators. The second act,

you don't even remember why you were

born. So every the the the difficulty in

writing any drama, especially a tragedy,

is what is second act problems because

the hero is stuck there and they don't

even know why they're there. Nothing has

worked. Every all of their good ideas

have have fallen by the wayside and the

hero has to has to struggle with simply

coming back to a sense of self or a

sense of purpose in a world doesn't make

any sense until at the end of the second

act, the quest is

clarified. and enabling the hero to go

on to the third act.

So drama is an exercise in failure and

it's also an exercise in lies because

all drama is based on lies.

I was learning n I was learning aerial

navigation from a great great teacher

and he and I was floundering and he said

okay I'm going to make it simple for you

got a map United States. He he said here

we are in Los Angeles and got a ruler.

Where do you want to go? I said I want

to go to Las Vegas. He said, "Okay,

there's a dot Los Angeles. There's a dot

at Los Las Las Vegas.

Take a ruler and draw a line between Las

the two dots." I did. He said, "Okay,

start at this dot, go till you get to

that dot and land."

So, that's the rule. That's the rule of

of dramatic writing. You start at this

dot, you go to that dot, and you stop.

You told me you were going to that dot.

Go there. You're going to encounter

stuff along the way. The stuff that you

encounter along the way will be

determined by your imagination. You'll

say, "Oh my god, what if this? What if

that? What if that?" But you have to be

unafraid to be challenged.

The rules to me are very very simple.

It's uh

I I wrote a I was very involved in

martial arts for a while and I wrote a a

martial arts movie that I also directed

called Red Belt. And this woman comes

and she's been um physically abused and

she comes to this great teacher of

martial arts and he says, "Uh, okay." He

says, "Come on to the mat." So he comes

on to the mat

and he says, "Okay." He says, "I want to

stand sideways to you." But he said,

"I'm not going to touch you. I'm not

going to touch you. I'm going to stand

about three inches apart." He says,

"Now, if I stood sideways to you and you

grabbed me," he said, "Could he he said,

"Could I strike you?"

She says, "No, I don't think so." He

says, "Okay." He says, "I want you to

stand 20 ft away from me." So, she says,

"20 ft away." So, he says, "Oh, 20 ft

away." He said, "Could I strike you?"

She says, "No." He He says, "Well, walk

forward. Get to the point where you

think I could strike you." So, she comes

forward till she's about 4t away. He

said, "Could I strike you there?" She

says, "Yeah." He says, "Don't stand

there.

If you want to come back for a second

lesson, give me a call. Right?

So, that's what I feel. The rules are

are pretty darn simple, right? There

aren't that many of them. They're pretty

darn simple. Tell the story. Start at

the beginning. Go on until you get to

the end. Don't stop. Be interesting.

Make sure that everything is on the

line. You know, if you want to go from

New York City

to Baltimore, it doesn't matter if

there's something interesting

in Boston. That's not where you told me

you wanted to go. So, there's something

that happens when you're making a movie

that I call location sickness.

So, location sickness is I'm making a a

shoot shooting a scene at a girl school.

The girls come out, blah blah blah,

whatever. The bus comes, but the bus is

late. So, the girls, they're going to

practice cheerleading on on on the

sidewalk because they're going to the

cor the um competition while Okay, that

that's our setup. So, we go there and

the location people say, "Okay, here's

our girls. It's great. Oh my god, look

over there. There's a shoe store that

was built in 1940 in the shape of a

sneaker.

That's magnificent.

We got to figure out some way

to put that sneaker in in the in the

story because it would be a shame. It's

free, right? So, it's the free stuff

that kills you. That's called location

sickness,

right? Doesn't matter that it's a looks

like a sneaker. That's not the story

that you were telling me. You got to

throw it away. So, all of the

interesting stuff, the rule is take all

like Hemingway said, write the best

story you can and throw out all the good

lines.

So that's how you make a movie. You got

to throw anything that's not the plot,

throw it away.

So one of the rules is if you, and this

is especially true of um screenwriting,

and it's harder to learn with

screenwriting than it is in playwriting,

because in playwriting, you write the

play, you put it on with the audience.

You get it right. They just because when

the lights go down, you got their

attention. It's yours to lose, right?

When you lose it, you don't get it back.

Okay? So, you see that with an audience,

you feel it. It's harder when you're

working without an audience in in a um

in a uh in a television show or or a

film, but uh you can learn in the to a

certain extent in the editing room. And

the f one of the the great rules if you

think that possibly maybe you might

sometime cut

right now throw it away throw it away

because there my great friend and

teacher Barbara Tulliver has cut my

films for 354 years says uh there's

there's there's no rules but there's

only one law and the law is don't be

boring

throw it away. And so Barbara's cut 12

or so features of mine and a million

hours of TV and everything and learned

so much from her. And every project she

calls up in the middle and says, "You're

going to kill me." I said, "Why?" She

says, "I got to tell you something." I

say, "What?" She says, "You know scene

12?" I said, "Yeah, scene 12, my

favorite scene." Da da da da da. She

says, "Yeah, I cut it out. The film's a

thousand% better for it." time after

time. And of course, she's right because

the audience don't care. It's my

favorite scene. It gets in the way of

the progression. Throw it away.

And so, Czechov said the same thing uh

as quoted by Constantine Stannislovski

where they're working on this play, the

three sisters.

And Czechov uh somebody says, one of the

characters, Guy says, "How's your wife?"

And the guy says, "Oh, my wife, I'll

tell you how my wife is. My wife is like

the spring. Sometimes it is gorgeous and

full of sunshine and new birth and

sometimes it is just like continuation

of winter and full of frost. She's like

us and the scene goes on forever and

it's weep weep weep beautiful. So the do

the stage in the play and check off

telegrams and he says you know the thing

where the guy says how's your wife that

long three pages just have the other guy

say a wife is a wife.

So that to me is a genius lesson in

play. Wife is a wife, you know, cut. If

you think you should cut, cut. Get out

of there. The audience beat you there.

Anyway,

there was a guy called Howard Lindsay

and he had a partner called Russell

Krauss and there Lindsay and Krauss were

playwriting team and they wrote the uh

some of the great um um dramas and

comedies of the 30s, 40s and 50s. very

phenomenally successful arsenic and olay

state of the union life with father etc

etc on and on and on and he wrote a

little pamphlet I think you can guys can

probably find it online of some tips

which I find very helpful so these are

not philosophy just tips one of them is

save your be biggest laugh for the end

of the second act I said okay I get it

second one I found very helpful is at

the beginning of the I don't know if

people write three-act plays anymore

I've written bungee and uh at the

beginning of the second act, remind the

audience who they love and who they

hate.

I thought that's very helpful. And the

other one I found really provocative is

stop giving your best lines to the

secondary characters

cuz I I sure do it right. I don't know

why. I think it might be envy. I said,

"Well, oh, hero hero, you get to do the

whole thing. You know, you get to free

the Jewish people or to walk." But the

secondary charact they're the

interesting ones, right? So, I got to

force myself to take my best lines from

the secondary characters and give them

to the uh give them to the hero. And

there's a several more more tips, but

you you learn you got to learn it

through doing it. And as they they say,

you know, the easily shamed will not

learn. You got to put up with a lot of

shame. So the unfortunately there is no

list of rules other than those of

Aristotle that will help a dramatist and

those are only going to help if you

assiduously do them. I I studied uh

Brazilian jiu-jitsu for many years and

uh it's a fascinating um study and it

becomes clear that if you could

perfectly master the first five things

they show you

in the first month perfectly, no one

could defeat you.

So it's like that with playwriting,

right? If you could perfectly master

those the the the unities of Aristotle,

you can write. It ain't going to be

pretty and you're going to get beat up

sometime, but but uh no one can defeat

you.

I always used to tell my kids and they'd

say, "Dad, where do you get your ideas?"

I say, "Well, there's this little

Mexican guy in Inino, okay? He drives in

on the weekend. and he sells them off

the back of his truck. So, we all have

ideas all the time. I mean, our mind, as

I believe Swinburn said, is a raging

fire. We have all these ideas all the

time. What if that person turned around

and said, "I love you." What if we got a

thing in the mail saying it's not your

real father? What about if I found a

wallet with a billion dollar? That's how

we go through life all day, right? We're

fantasizing. I mean, that's kind of a

shame that people are on these the the

little machines everybody uses all the

time just because they spend less time

fantasizing. You know, it it it

fantasizes for you.

At the beginning of my life, I say I was

I was um

uh living rather interesting uh

existence in Chicago and earning my

living doing various things and playing

a lot of poker and hanging out with a

bunch of thieves and uh I was also

working in a prison for a couple of days

a week, two prisons and I was fascinated

by everything that I saw. So I wrote

about it and the the menu in which I was

writing at that point was kind of the

the the

underbelly of the uh a big city which I

was in involved in. That's what that's

what I was doing when I was 20 and 30.

Later on my life I was doing different

things and I got interested in in

different subjects and I wrote about

them. I think there was a famous story

about Stannisloski. Someone said some

woman was preparing a part and she said

should I use my own life experiences? He

said what choice do you have?

So I mean my own life experiences are

somewhat similar to everybody else's and

sufficiently different that they at

least interest me. The question is is

what is what choice do you have? I'm not

trying to make a point. I'm just trying

to get the voices in my head to shut up.

American Buffalo. I was um

playing a p used to play a lot of poker.

This is in the days when nobody played

poker. They started again I think in the

80s but in those days the poker was just

played in home games and in illegal

games and a lot of them were run by the

mob especially in New York and in

Chicago a lot of the illegal games were

kind of a a crossbreed between an

illegal game and a home game. And I used

to play in this one game that was all

thieves and they played poker all day

cuz you know I didn't go to work till

the sun went down. So I hung out with

them and I was very inspired by them.

And one one of the kids said something

once about there was the son of the one

of the owners said if I didn't know

better I would think that you guys was

cheating me. And I thought oh that's

interesting. That's very very

provocative because he is is both

accusing them and not accusing them. he

can't figure it out in his own mind. So

I started writing about about those guys

at that poker game.

The inspiration for sexual perversity in

Chicago was that that process which back

in the stone age we used to call

courting. And I I'm sure it's called

something else now. It's probably the

same nature. But uh but I had an

interesting experience there. It was a

play about um really a play about

misogyny. I mean which one would one

would have thought it was fairly clear

from the title that perverse

perverseness is acting contrary to one's

best interest but some goodwilled people

in the press got the idea that because

it was a play about misogyny that I was

somehow a misogynist and to this day

people come up and say well why don't

you like women I'm rather fond of women

a they're human beings and b I like

women and b why don't you write for

women and in truth I probably written as

many parts for women as I have for men

but that became part of a uh um

um a meme or an idea.

Oolana was um is another tragedy. These

two people, a young woman, female

student and an older male professor who

really have a lot to offer to each other

and end up ruining each other's lives.

And um somebody was uh a friend of mine

was been a professor somewhere and said,

"Oh my god, he'd just been accused of

sexual harassment by not by the young

woman, but by the uh young woman's

adviser that the young woman had been

telling a story and the adviser said,

"Oh, you know, you you're a victim of

sexual harassment that this guy did

something or said something blah blah

blah, sexual harassment." And the woman

said, "No, no, no. Absolutely not.

you've misinterpreted me. And so they

started an action against the professor,

the adviser did on the part of the

college. And so the woman went to her

parents

and the parents came in and said, "No,

no, no. You have to call this off. You

know, you've misinterpreted or even if

you haven't, it's certainly our we don't

want to prosecute this thing." So this

guy came close to having his life

ruined. And this was 30 years ago. 30

years 25 years ago. So this was in the

heyday of that uh that phenomenon. And I

was kind of I was shocked. So I wrote

this play Ooliano. We did it off

Broadway, ran for a year and a half and

it drove people crazy.

People talk about themes and I'm very

fortunate. I, you know, as I say, I

never opened a school book and I went to

this hippie- dippy college who didn't

have any classes. So I I never got much

of an education other than, you know,

washing windows and driving a cabin, all

that stuff I was privileged to do. So I

never learned about themes. I'm not

quite sure what I know what themes are.

I know English departments care about

themes. So it's possible to look at my

work, I guess, anybody's work and infer

a theme, but it's not something which

concerns me. I'm interested in telling a

story.

I mean to to me it's personally it's as

pointless about talk as talking about

the theme of a joke

right there to make you laugh. Drama is

there to keep you interested for an hour

and a half.

I mean nobody ever left a great play

humming the theme.

I always knew that a good writer threw

out what a bad writer kept. That

occurred to me after years the opposite

was also true that a good writer kept

what a bad writer threw out.

Right? The stuff that someone would say,

"No, that doesn't seem to make sense."

Well, I say, "Well, hell, work it

through. See where see where that's

going to lead you." Cuz writing a drama

is just like analyzing a dream. You're

kind of doing it backwards. You're

making up the dream instead of analyzing

it. But when you analyze a dream, you

might say, "Well, there I was. I was in

bed with my dad and a dog was uh eating

my leg and it was raining outside and

there was something about a parakeet and

then I was getting shot and I was going

to have to stand trial blah blah blah.

So what Freud would say is and what I

would say is what's the out what what

doesn't belong the little parakeet. So

that's where you got to put your

attention. We know the rest of the

stuff, right? Your mind is a bundle of

snakes. All of your ideas are wretched.

Your thoughts are loathsome, right?

You're you're you're a sinful human

being. You're no damned good. What was

the parakeet doing there? So, if you

start analyzing the dream, start writing

about the parakeet, something will

happen that you did not expect. The

truth's going to be where you didn't

expect it and you're going to have to

get it and muck around and find it. So,

I was just up in Vermont. I this old

farmhouse I lived in for many, many

years. And I had an old Civil War safe,

a key turn safe, and I'd put some

valuable papers into the safe a long,

long, long time ago.

And I hadn't been up in the house in

years. And I went to clean out the safe.

And I took the key and I took off the

strike plate of the uh the lock, right?

The thing that the bolt goes into the

strike plate. I to unscrewed it, drilled

a hole, and inserted the key in, and

then put in some packing material and

put the strike plate back. I thought,

"That's fine. No one will ever know it's

there except me." So, I go back. I take

off the strike plate. There's no key.

I That's ridiculous. So, there has to be

the key there. I remember blah blah blah

blah blah blah blah. Aha. I say, "I've

been robbed." I said, "Wait a second.

How would anybody know there was a key

there?" And also the safe has a trick

mechanism. This puzzle mechanism where

you insert the key, but you don't turn

the key, you turn the knob. You have to

turn the knob halfway. It's a really

wonderful old mechanism. I got to get

those papers. I can't leave those

papers. I got to get them out. So I call

up this locksmith comes over 30 miles

and he says, "Uh, I tell him the story."

And I said, "You're going to have to

pick the lock." And he looks at the

safe. He says, he says, "I can't pick

this lock." He said, "We could take this

safe, which weighs 500 lb, somehow get

it on the truck, take it and you know,

in effect crack the safe." But he said,

"I'll tell you something." He said, "The

key is in his room." I said, "What do

you mean?" He said, "You haven't been."

He said, "I've been doing this for all

my life. You haven't been robbed. You

put the key someplace and you've

forgotten it. Keys in this room."

I said, "That's the silliest thing I've

ever heard." I said, "I didn't say it. I

thought that." I said, "Well, thank you,

sir." He leaves. I'm tearing apart the

room, throwing stuff out, throwing stuff

out, throwing stuff out. I come this

little box of an old metal from the

Chicago World's Fair. It's just a box. I

start to throw it out and it rattles. I

take off the the padding and there's the

key to the safe.

So, I start screaming, you know, with

wonder and and and delight and

gratitude, right? It's well, you didn't

expect it, but this guy knew it, right?

He knew it was going to be in in in he

knew it was in the room,

right? So that's what I would say to the

writers. It's it's there somewhere. You

got to look for it, right? And you got

to trust that it's there even when you

don't believe it's there. Cuz it is

there.

Here's the thing. Stacy Schiff is a

great historian. She just wrote a book

about the witches in in Salem, right?

Marvelous book. And if you look at it,

they were the Salem right over here was

involved in a mass hysteria for about a

year and a half. And you could say, "No,

I'm not a witch. I'm not No, I'm not a

witch." But what you couldn't say, and

you might be able to get off. You

probably wouldn't, but you might be able

to get off by saying, "I can prove to

you that I'm not a witch." I don't know

how you prove a negative conosition.

You can't logically, but you might be

able to get off. The one thing that

would get you killed is saying there are

no witches.

Right?

So the one thing the un the the

unpalatable truth

is there's no such thing as character.

Just doesn't exist. Where is it? Where

is it? Here. Go through the thing. I'm

going to shake out. All there is is the

things that people say. Why do they say

them? In order to get something from

each other. Guy A wants to get something

from girl B. Girl B wants to get

something from guy A. That's why they

talk. The rhythm of their speech is a

certain kind of poetry which structured

so that each one of them if each one of

them is pursuing a specific goal, you

might even call it a play.

But there is no backstory because they

don't. We imagine them. And here's a

perfect example.

We listen to the radio, right? And

sometimes you ever many of us had the

experience of thinking, "Oh my gosh,

when we meet a radio personality, I

didn't think she looked like that.

That's not what I thought she looked

like." Right? Because it's never what we

thought she or he looked like because we

didn't think they looked like anything.

We It's a f We thought we thought they

looked like something, but we didn't. We

never had a picture in our head. And

here's another example. Anybody have

voices inside their head? I certainly

do. You know, I almost shut up. Most of

us do. We have this voice. It's not

quite our voice, but it's a voice. What

does that person look like?

It's not us. It's it's something, right?

We think we almost know what they look

like, but they don't have a physical

being.

And if we saw the physical being, say,

"No, no, no. That's not him."

Similarly, these lines on the page

create the illusion that there is

something behind them and that we can

grasp it. We can write it. We can

understand that he's the kind of a guy

who but it doesn't exist. It just it's a

it's a what what's what we're creating

is an illusion. And there's another way

that we can understand this. Bruno wrote

a wonderful book called the uses of

enchantment about fairy tales. And he

said the fairy tales work because

one of the reasons they work is because

we don't characterize

the hero and the heroine. You say

a a beautiful young woman rode into town

on a horse, right? We don't say a

beautiful young black woman because if

you're not black it ain't you. You don't

say a beautiful white young white woman

because if you're not white it ain't

you. You say a beautiful young woman. I

get it. If you're a woman it's you.

Right? We don't say the tall, handsome

blonde prince. If I'm that handsome,

tall, and blonde, that cuts me out. You

just say the prince. That's all we know.

What's his position in the lineup? He's

the prince. We get it, right? He's a

salesman. We get it. That's all we need

to know. That's all we do know. And

that's all we can know. So, think about

this. Here's another another example

about character. Say you're at a party,

okay? And there's some guy over there

and he's kind of talking. Hi, how are

you? looked like a complete schmuck,

okay? And he's badly dressed and da da

da. You hardly pay any attention to him.

And someone says, "Oh, we're talking to

Joe over there. You know, you know, he

know he owns Silicon Valley. He's worth

$47 billion." Now all of a sudden, oh my

god, that's all we need to know. He's a

a billionaire. Now all of a sudden, we

invest him with all of these

characteristics.

A billionaire is no different than a

salesman. That's all we need to know.

Anything else has to be a lie because we

we didn't discover it.

Question is what is character? And

Aristotle says character is just

habitual action. There is no more to a

character other than what we see them

do. That's it. You can't characterize

them saying she's the kind of woman who

in this situ who cares, right? Also,

it's a lie. We know it's a lie because

if anyone ever you meet someone at the

party says let me tell you a few things

about myself. Whatever comes next is

going to be a lie because who who go

they don't know anything about

themselves right? They might have a

fiction but they're speaking in order to

um manipulate us whether they know it or

not. They're speaking in order to

manipulate us to to

sidestep our process of observation

because all that we know about a

person's character in real life is what

they do. And I was working with while a

guy in Delta Force who'd been instructed

there for years. And he said that they

always said that it took 90 hours at a

minimum for people to figure out who was

who and just to begin to see who did

what to who when and whom you could

trust and so forth. Similarly on a set

you walk onto a set by the third or

fourth day people generally know who

everybody is and they know their

character. This person can absolutely be

counted upon. this person can ab it's

got to be watched right this person will

do more than I ever thought possible and

you begin to know these people's

characters through what you see them do

and nobody says effing thing you watch

them just like they're watching you and

so that bond that happens on a set

happens from watching habitual action in

this circumstances that's what a person

will habitually do that's character and

so Aristotle says that's all a character

is on stage there's Nothing. What else

would it be? It's what they do.

We came to watch what that character

does will determine what their character

is.

Stannislovski is something great. He

said, "The most interesting thing in the

world is a guy trying to get a knot out

of his shoelace."

So that's what you're watching in

Glengary Glenn Ross. Another another

name for that is he got an objective. He

wants something so bad

that there's nothing in the world he

won't do.

You know, and I always say the perfect

example of a kid who doesn't want to go

to bed and a young man who wants to have

sex. There's nothing they won't do,

right? There's no lie that they won't

tell. There's no strategy that they

won't end. There's nothing they won't

try. They'll never give up. They'll

pretend to surren.

And they'll never ever ever stop. Right?

The characters are what they do. Nobody

sat down and said, "Oh, I'm going to be

the this. I'm going to be the that. Oh,

look, uh, there's the there's the

corrector of mistakes. There's the

martinette." Right? It hap. So, we all

know what characters are. The problem

writing drama is when we sit down to

write, we kind of forget it. It's just

like politicians. You talk to

politicians, right? They're all what

they are, right? None of them are very

damn good. They're all a bunch of lying

[ __ ] We know that. But in person,

some of them are kind of interesting. if

once in a while they let down their

guard because they're crooks, right? And

crooks are interesting people and they

have great stories that they tell and

they love to tell stories to each other

and my god, what happened in that

election? Wibbity bobby boo. Interesting

people, but they put on their politician

hat and all of a sudden they forget a

that they're people and b that they're

talking to people and they start

speaking like a politician in this

cadence. we must and we shall and the

American people this and my who cares,

you know, it's recognizable as political

talk, but they forgot that they're just

people and they're just talking to

people.

So, we're just we're just all stuck in

the elevator here. At some point,

somebody in the elevator say, "Well,

what are you going to be here for?"

Like, I don't know, it's going to be an

hour. They said it's going to be an hour

anyway. You know, this reminds me of the

time. And that person will start telling

a story which is all that I've been

doing

in my life and all I've been doing up

here and you can do it too.

Actors used to talk a lot about when I

went to other people's rehearsals where

such a character would have gone to

school, right? Or what was their

favorite kind of car or blah blah blah

blah. It's a good It's a wonderful tool

because it keeps them from rehearsing

because what does rehearsing mean? You

if you want to be good, how do you start

out by being bad, right? If you if if

you were good at the beginning, you

wouldn't have to rehearse. So the

actors, like any other human being, want

to put off the pain of being bad. So the

way they put it off is by talking

garbage to each other, sitting around

used to be smoking cigarettes, right now

it's like drinking kelp or whatever the

hell they do. and then four weeks later

saying, "Oh my god, let's learn the

lines and get up there and stumble

around." I mean, everybody has his or

her own way and probably they're as

self-delusive as I am. I mean, cuz they

don't know what the hell they're doing

and I don't know what the hell I'm

doing. So, we're making up a story to

explain ourselves to you what we

couldn't explain otherwise. It's like an

actor, you know, you see all the time

the actors say, you know, I played a

waitress and I went and worked in a

greasy spoon for 6 weeks. That may mean

that she maybe read the script, right?

You don't pay actors to do research and

they don't have to do research. They

have to show up and act. If they can act

and you give them a waitress outfit and

they got a good scene, why would they

have to dish hash for 6 weeks? It's it's

beside the point. It's not going to

influence the the uh the performance.

So for me anyway to sit down and say

what kind of shoes he wore, it might be

a good way to pass the time so that I

don't have to actually write the silly

thing.

I just cleaned up this house in Vermont

I've been living at for 40 years off and

on. It's old farmhouse. And I look at

the changes that I went through and the

stuff that I accumulated and the things

that I said and did. And there's an

incredible mixture of grief at the

passage of time which seems to pass,

right? And gratitude that I got to do

all the stuff that I used to do and

regret of the stuff that I did badly or

didn't didn't do. It's kind of it was

overwhelming. So it's not that I needed

to change, I did change, right? Just

like you and I do during the day or over

the course of a life. Okay? So it's not

that you have to make the character

change. That's that's manipulative. So

to manipulate the character is an

attempt to manipulate the audience. So I

say I would never manipulate the

audience.

I mean I learned a lot from the

audience. I like the audience. I love

working with the audience. They pay my

rent. I'm not going to manipulate them.

Plot is all that there is.

And that's all that there is. And

as I say, the perfect example is

the the joke, right? There's nothing in

the joke that does not tend toward the

punchline. Anything in the joke that

does not tend toward the punchline kills

the joke. And if you talk to comedy

writers in LA, what they have a saying

among themselves, what do you do all

week? Well, I'm I'm in there shaving

syllables,

right? They're taking out extra

syllables so we could I wanted to tell a

joke, but all the jokes I know are

filthy. So, I got to think if I think if

I can come up with a joke that's e

either clean enough to tell to the

camera without breaking the camera or

insufficiently Jewish so that it might

uh uh uh resound to a uh uh the benefit

of a a wider audience. Tick- tock, tick-

tock, tick tock. This is this is me

thinking

a guy is marooned on a desert island

with let us say Jessica Chastain. Okay?

And they're there for months and months.

a guy named Jessica Chastain. They

become very good friends. They know

they're going to be there for years.

They become intimate, right? After a

while, he gets up one morning. He says,

"Uh, Jessica,

would you do me a favor?" He said, "Uh,

would you put on my clothes?"

So, she says, "Okay." He says, he said,

"I'm going to take a little bit of burnt

cork from the the fire and kind of

stipple in a beard on you. Would you do

that?" She says, "Yeah, sure." He said,

"You mind walking down the beach with

me?" He says, "So they're walking down

the beach and he says at one point

they're walking, he says, "Uh, I'm

sleeping with Jessica Chastain."

So

everything in the joke tends toward the

punchline, right? It's a guy. That's all

we have to know, right? It doesn't a

banker, a football player, a movie. It

doesn't make any difference. A desert

island. We get it. It's a desert island.

Right. They're there for a long time. We

get it. We can put in as an amateur was

he he bl he he brings her a rose and she

who cares? We're all Everything tends

toward the punchline. Just that's what a

plot is. If it doesn't tend toward the

punchline, take it out.

There are a lot of um plays that have a

title of a present participle being,

going, achieving, feeling, blah blah

blah. Present participle is an ongoing

action, right? Something that makes a

terrible play, right? It's a except for

being there. It's a dead giveaway that

you you're looking at something where

the a writer hasn't quite thought

enough. A play has to have a

precipitating event before which the

play didn't exist.

And the prec precipitating event has to

inspire the hero on a goal, a journey

that has a specific end at the end of

which the question which is raised at

the beginning is answered either in the

positive or the negative. A sristotle

says edypus says I want to find out the

cause of the plague on thieves. He's

becomes king. He wants to that's the

precipitating event. I want to find out

the cause of the plague on thieves. At

the end he finds out he's the cause the

play's over. Right? We've stated a

proposition and we've solved it.

Anything which is not on that line

has to be thrown out.

The second act problem is we talked

about the swamp and the alligators,

right? It's hard to drain the swamp when

you're up to your tushy and alligators.

So the second act is you know where

you're going and then all of a sudden

you get lost. You say like um

uh what you call it Dante says walking

in in the middle of my life. I found

myself lost in the middle of a dark wood

because I I' I'd lost track of the

direct path. So that's what happens in

the middle of your life. That's called a

midlife crisis. So you get old enough

you realize it's an ongoing thing. It's

called life, right? So we're constantly

saying, "Wait a second. I knew what I

was going to do, right? I wanted to have

a girlfriend, have a wife, have a

boyfriend, have kids, get married, blah

blah blah." Now wait a second. All the

kids grew up and the dog died.

Now what? I've forgotten what I was

about what I set out to do. I'm

complete. Lord help me. I'm lost. And

there's a very good book of funny little

sayings written on this. It's called the

Psalms, right? So if you read the

Psalms, you know there's written by King

David. And there this guy who just says,

"Lord, help me. I'm I'm lost. I need

some help here right now. I don't know

anything. I don't know why I'm here.

I've forgotten what I was supposed to

do. I forgotten why I took those oaths.

I don't trust I don't trust anything in

the world. I got nothing left but you.

There's an interesting phenomenon

of it has to do with confession and uh

the uh I'm a Jew and the Jews confess uh

well, you know, you should talk to God

every day. It's a good idea, right? It's

good to know somebody's listening, you

know, especially if you got kids. But,

uh, there's a Yam Kapor is the Jewish

day of atonement and confession. And

you, uh, do this service several times,

and about 5/8s of the way through the

service comes a confession. You stop

everything. You get to the point of the

confession. I confess all my sins before

God. I I let them out. Curiously, in

every movie,

not so much in plays, in every movies,

about 5/8 of the way or 3/4 of the way

through, there's a confessional.

And the confessional usually takes the

point takes the form of the death of my

kitten.

Right?

Two, three, threequarters of the way

through, somebody's saying, in fact, I

don't know why I'm telling you all this,

right? When I was young, I had a kitten

or my mother never really loved me. It's

a confessional. And sometimes the

confessional takes the form of a

montage. Curiously, rather than saying

being a verbal confession, I'm going to

throw a bunch of images up on the

screen, which more or less reflect what

I think is more or less the state of the

hero at this because I don't know how to

go on. You can't go on to the end. You

can't go on to the end of the yam kipur

service until you've divested yourself

by means of confession. So the second

act ends just as does the yum kipur

service and just as it does in the death

of my kitten speech. The second act of

the play ends with a certain

confessional. And the confession is Lord

help me. I've I've lost my faith. I

don't know what in the world I'm doing.

And only at that point when the 12step

program they call it hitting bottom only

until and the thing is about hitting

bottom those of us who have the

privilege if you wonder whether you've

hit bottom or not you haven't right but

when you have right you don't got to

wonder about it and so at that point you

have the capacity only then to face the

third act to be reinvigorated for the

struggle because now for the first time

you understand the struggle

and that's that's the second act is lost

in a swamp. The second act ends with a

confessional and then the hero the

heroine is energized or inspired to

continue the continue the quest. And

also you see it in all religious

stories, right? It's Jesus and

Gethsemane, right? Or it's Moses

pleading throughout the five books of

Moses, I can't do it anymore. I can't I

just can't go on. You got to give me an

out. And every hero journey contains

this confession. And there's a very good

book on the subject all you guys would

get a kick out of. It's called the hero

with a thousand faces and it's by Joseph

Campbell and it's a study of world myth

of the hero myth uh Moses Jesus uh

Buddha Superman uh that he says every

hero myth every hero myth heroine myth

is the same myth goes through the same

stories because that's how we perceive

the hero myth right that the hero myth

doesn't exist as a creation it it it ex

it exists as an expression of our

understanding of life.

There's an old theatrical phrase which

is that anybody can write a good first

act which of course I think it's it's it

there's some truth in it because you're

setting up an interesting problem,

right? The question is how you figure

your way out of it. There was a very

good movie. I don't mean to malign the

work of of my colleagues. I'm not going

to malign. I'm just going to comment on

it because because and it was called

Arrival and it was about these aliens

who come they want to communicate with

us. Great story, great a couple of great

actors and so these guys they want to

communicate with the aliens who of

course are octopuses, right? So the

aliens are these octopuses. Great story,

great setup but the question is how they

communicate with the octopuses

and they gloss over it. They say, "Oh,

Amy Adams somehow made a graph and she

saw the blah blah blah and that's how

she learned to commun to speak octopus."

And so then the problem is that China

somehow those bad bad Chinese

want to blow up the octopuses because

they distrust their motives. So the

problem is to get some I don't I can't

remember what the problem was. The

reason I can't remember was that they

skipped over the real problem to my

mind. I mean, it was a good movie. I

enjoyed every minute of it. But I I go

back and my great friend Shell

Silverstein was a

wrote children's books and country

songs, was a genius cartoonist, and we

used to call each other up and fix

jokes. We say, "I heard this joke. It

almost works. What's what's wrong with

it?" Because we've shared the idea that

the joke exists in some ethereal

existence, whether or not we tell it,

whether or not we hear it, that it's our

responsibility to fix it.

And so I'm looking at this movie and

thinking, okay, why why can I not

remember what the real problem was at

the end? Because it's not the real

problem. What is the real problem?

It's how to speak octopus. That's the

real problem, right? Because and I

think, well, if I were going to re It's

always easier to rewrite somebody else's

movie, but I'm thinking if I'm writing

that movie, I'm going to come up against

that problem. I'm going to have to stop.

I'm going to say, "Wait a second. I

don't know the answer. Right. So, the

first act is I got to get onto the ship

and I establish a relationship. I figure

out they're not going to kill me. Now,

they're doing something that might be

speech. So, what's the second act? I'm

lost.

They're trying to tell me something.

They came here from the planet Mugaban,

right? I know they're trying to tell me

something because not trying to kill me.

They're making these symbols. I don't

know how to talk to them. So, that's the

problem of the second act. It's the

problem that's so insurmountable that

the dramatist doesn't know how to fix

it. So the dramatist is going to have to

sit down and think and think and think.

So what happens curiously is then the

dramatist is in the same position as Amy

Adams.

She doesn't know and he doesn't know and

the audience doesn't know. So this so

the surprising solution which thus into

the third act won't come until that

problem is solved. However much you'd

want to have a different problem, that's

the problem you've got. As a lot of us

say, you know, the troubles which are

true to life, you know, Lord, you know,

any any test you want except this,

right? Just not not this anything else,

just not this one. But that's of course

always the test that we get. So these

guys write a great first act. The

octopuses show up. We get we get onto

their ship. They're making these

symbols. They're trying to tell us

something. The second act, I don't know

what they're trying to say. So, you can

go, now I can speak octopus, or you can

face it head on, but that's going to be

icky. It ain't going to be fun.

This is something that really can't be

taught, but must be learned. And so,

what I'd like to encourage uh the the

viewers and listeners to do is teach

yourself. You have to teach yourself.

There's nobody who can teach you. And if

there's anything that I could do to

teach you, it's not in what I'm going to

say, but what what I wrote. Because when

you get to the point where you can look

at something and say, "Oh, I get it. I

see what he or she is doing here. I

understand." Then you're on the track of

learning to write a plot. You have to

learn how to write a plot for every new

play

because you have to figure out what the

play's about, why it starts where it

starts, where why it finishes where it

finishes. And you might be wrong. You

might write the whole thing through and

say, "Wait a second. This is not what

this play is about. Let me start again."

But I I was talking to a woodworker once

about some staircase he was going to

rebuild. And it was very very complex

and very complex uh curves and recurves.

And I said, "How do you do that?" And he

said, "Well, when I can draw it, I can

build it." So when you can write the

plot on 15 lines on one sheet of paper,

you could then you can write the movie

or the play.

Sometimes you don't know what the story

is. You know, sometimes you you write

scenes and write scenes and write scenes

and you say, "Oh, I get it. If A, B, and

C and I got these scenes, maybe there's

a story involved." Like everybody when

they start off, if they find out they

can write, they're going to write a

bunch of episodic plays which are

basically an epic, right? Oh, the couple

doesn't get along in scene one. know

they don't get along in scene two or

they kind of get along in scene three

bib. We've all written those plays but I

had a very uh wonderful experience. I

wrote a play when I was very young

called American Buffalo and we did it in

Chicago at uh the Goodman Theater and

the St. Nicholas Theater with Billy Macy

and we moved it off off off off off

Broadway to New York and this is a

wonderful director called Ulu Grossbard

who was a stage director and a film

director and he came and saw it and I

thought man this this plays cast

pajamas. Nobody ever wrote a play that

good and he said find the plot. He said

if you find the plot I'll put it on

Broadway. So I thought find the plot

man. I'm so good I don't need a plot.

Right. But then the next this then then

the next stage is to say, "Well, okay, I

better find the plot. I better

understand how to write a plot." And

writing a plot's one of the hardest

things I've ever learned how to do. It's

just hard cuz it's like

it's like playing with with with with

some unclean substance. And and it is

because the unclean substance is your

own consciousness. You say, "I've

created these marvelous characters. I'll

listen to them all day." Well, yeah, I

will cuz I wrote them, but the audience

won't. So, can you learn Can one learn

how to write a plot? Yes. And you have

to learn it again every play because

every play the plot is different. It's

hiding, right? If it were clear to

writing a play with, you know, if you

can write I mean, I can write an hour's

worth of dialogue in 26 minutes. That's

no, that's that's just a gift. Some

people can do it, some people can't. You

don't need to do it to write a play, but

I can. But to to craft a plot is actual

work and uh

it feels dreadful except when you you

finish you can be proud of yourself.

Can I say something about my outfit

because I love this outfit. I showed up

this morning in my usual street clothes

with I wife beater t-shirt. Okay. Cut

off jeans. All I've worn for 70 years,

flip flops and a motorcycle jacket. And

I thought that would be cool to let you

into how I actually look is also I take

off the motorcycle. My I'm covered in

tats. And my left arm is uh Admiral Dwey

at the Battle of Manila 1895. And my

right arm, and I think I'm the only guy

who has this, you tell me, is the final

scene from Kramer versus Kramer. And

then on my chest, I got the first

chapter of 50 Shades of Gray, but it's

reversed. So when the I can read it when

I'm shaving and on my back is Good Night

Moon. So when you I go to the gym, I do

a lot of weightlifting, a lot, you know,

I can bench press 8,000 pounds and I get

all sweaty and the people in the gym,

they can read Good Night Moon while

they're while they're they're working

out. So this outfit, it's it's wicked

cool. I'm dressed up like a professor.

You see, I got the prop and everything.

But I realized you you can't wear it on

the street because if you do, a bunch of

people are going to descend on you and

try to sell you a Volvo.

And there's nothing wrong with the

Volvo, by the way. The only thing wrong

with them is they never wear out. They

got the original Volvo were pulled by

horses. The horses died, so those guys

are immobile. Everything after that is

still on the streets. It's a great car.

It's the national car of either Sweden

or Denmark.

and uh their their national uh pastime

of course as we know is suicide is

jumping off of cliffs like lemmings. So

how how wrong can they be? Having issued

that disclaimer, I just like to say how

glad I am to be back with you today. I

want to talk about plot and and we we'll

talk about a couple of um plays of mine

and how I structure a plot and I like to

use a a board like this. when I I got

I'm always surrounded by a bunch of

corkboards or so in my offices that I

can either put up a sheet of butcher

paper or else index cards always say

scene one blah blah scene two blah blah

scene three so I can look and see if the

progression makes sense cuz sometimes it

it's much easier to see if the

progression makes sense and to see if

the scenes make sense because you get

involved in the scenes and the scenes

might be wonderful and you work so hard

and they say such cool stuff you have to

reduce the scene

to an incident,

I get out of the stuck elevator

and put that, at least I do, on the

board. And when the when the the

progression makes sense, then the play

makes sense. I'd also like to say about

plotting that we all know about

plotting. We all do it naturally.

Plotting to get Sally and Suzie

together,

plotting uh to get Aunt Mabel to leave

me the silverware. plotting to get my

bad coworker kicked off. Uh plotting a a

surprise party. It's all plotting. We

say, "Okay, I know where I want to get.

What do I have to do in order to get

there?" So, it's something that we all

do naturally. And unfortunately, and

what I'm told is called everyday life.

It has a bad association with, oh, he's

just plotting. But that's exactly what

you're doing when you're making up a

play. You you're following a plot in

order to to get the silverware. That's

all

the guy taught me aerial navigation. He

said let's let's pretend for example in

fact let's not pretend let's actually do

we draw a map. Map looks like this.

So, as you see, this is a map of United

States of America. It's a heck of a

country. I love it here. My grandparents

came here.

Um,

and the guy said about aerial

navigation. He said, "Here's what it

comes down to." This is true for sea

navigation, too. Say you're over here.

Where are we? In in New York City,

right? Where do you want to go? That's

the first question. Where do I want to

go? You will remember Alice and the C

the caterpillar. Uh Alice is at a

crossroads. There's this big caterpillar

sitting on a mushroom. She says, "Uh,

please sir, which road should I take?"

He says, "Where do you want to go?" She

says, "I don't know." He says, "It

doesn't matter what road you take." So,

for the purposes of navigation, it does

matter what road you take. So, here's

Los Angeles, California here, right?

which is the cultural capital of Los

Angeles County and here we have New

York. So what we want to do is we want

to draw a line connecting

the two cities.

So we want to go if we follow the line

theoretically

will take us to Los Angeles. That's all

we got to know to start off with. This

is called a rum line. R U R H U MB from

um

um naval navigation.

The direct line from one place to the

other. But of course there's going to be

difficulties. Perhaps you can't go

direct. Perhaps for example

there are ice storms over here, right?

Perhaps, for example,

there are runway closures and you're

flying. There are runway closures at

your fuel stop over here.

Perhaps, for example, you're going to be

out of fuel when you get over to here,

and you ain't going to get enough fuel.

You don't have enough fuel left to get

over the mountains. So, what do you have

to do?

You're still going from point A to point

B. New York City, the Bronx is up, the

batteries down. Los Angeles, the

cultural capital of Los Angeles County,

you're still going from A to B, but

perhaps the most direct route is not a

straight line because perhaps you have

to de detour around the thunderstorms.

Perhaps you can't stop for fuel here, so

you have to stop for fuel here. Perhaps

you don't have enough fuel to make it

over the mountains or the winds are

adverse so you have to come down here to

get to Los Angeles. So each of these

stops is an incident which could be

likened to an incident in a play.

Aristotle tells us that a play is

nothing other than the structure of the

incidents. That's all that a play is.

What happened? I got into the play. I

had to deviate here. That's an incident.

I ran out of fuel here. I had to go up

here. That's an incident. I couldn't get

over the mountains here. I had to

deviate there. That's an incident. A

scene is the unit which contains one

incident which informs the journey. One

incident. If it doesn't contain an

incident that informs the journey, it's

it's not a scene. It doesn't belong in

the play. It doesn't matter what happens

between here and here.

If it's not an incident

now, could we have an incident between

here and the thunderstorms? Sure. What

about if the engine quit? That's an

incident, right? So, because the instant

the engine quit, we didn't end up here.

We ended up here. Now, we couldn't get

the engine fixed. So, what do we have to

do? We had to rent a car.

Okay? So, that's an incident. A engine

quits incident. Bent the car incident.

Now, you notice you don't got to you

don't got to think very hard about

remembering these things. You don't have

to go, "Yeah, what happened then?" or

"What do I do next?" Because you always

have in mind the progress from A to B.

You get it? You're always trying to get

to B. That's all you're trying to do.

Now, Stannislovski, you remember, was a

uh a Russian director and um writer and

teacher and theoretist. And he said he

was on the Great Vulgar River,

uh which runs through Russia, uh a bunch

of commies, you know, what are you going

to do? runs down through Russia, great

vulgar river, and there's the the vulga

boatman, the steamer captain has to

navigate constantly over here to get out

of the shores, over there to getting

into the calm water, over here to take

advantage of the current. And

Stannosloski says, "This river is so

long, you're constantly capable of

navigating it. How do you remember all

those things?"

Captain says, "I don't remember. I stick

to the channel.

I stick to the channel." The channel is

marked.

The channel is I got to go from A to B.

I stick to that channel. If something

happens in the midst of that, I deviate

so that I can come back to the channel.

The deviations are called incidents. The

incidents are called scenes. And the

totality of the scenes leads us from

point A to point B. Now, this is very

very important when you're making a

movie.

For example, you've structured the the

incidents in the film. You get onto the

set and you say, "Okay, I know exactly

what I'm doing today. Today is the scene

when we rent the car." Good. You get to

the car place and guess what? The car

didn't show up. The prop car didn't show

up. You got to get the film in the can

today, right? You have no option. The

the actors are on a tight schedule. They

got a heart out. You got to see shoot

the scene where they got to get into the

car, but there's no car. So, what do you

do? Aha. You stick to the channel. You

say, "Wait a second. I can't get the

car." So, I'm in exactly the same

position today as the director that the

hero is in. All I got to remember is

what's the channel? The channel is I got

to get to Los Angeles. I had this whole

scene about a car, but the car didn't

show up. What am I going what am I going

to do is the same thing as what is the

hero going to do? That's the progress of

the hero. It's the progress of the

director. It's the progress of the actor

and the progress of the writer. What do

I got to do to get from A to B? Well,

okay, let's think.

I don't have to be frightened because I

know where the channel is. Maybe the guy

gets a horse. Does anybody have a horse?

Oh, okay. Maybe in order to get the

horse, I got to walk over these over

these mountains. Maybe in order to get

to the horse, I got to go onto this land

over here, which is marked no

trespassing.

Maybe when I get onto the the uh the no

trespassing line, a guy comes out with a

gun. Maybe the guy comes out with the

gun and says, "Wait a second. I'm going

to make you marry my daughter." I go,

"Whoa, whoa, whoa, ho, ho. Hold on a

second. You got the wrong guy." So, you

see, the difficulties are what creates

the journey. The difference between a

vacation and an adventure is on an

adventure you always wish you were at

home. Okay? So the interesting journey

is not a vacation. Oh, let's have

something h let's have something

moderately interesting happen here. We

have a talk while we're in the plane

about our childhoods. We'll have

something moderously moderately

interesting happen there. Oh, look,

there are water fowl flying from point A

to point B. Aren't they interesting? No,

we don't care about moderately

interesting. All we care about is the is

the channel. All we care about is the

journey. And the difficulties of the

hero are the same thing as the

difficulties of the writer. Think about

it. You're writing this movie. It's a

road movie, right? You're writing this

play and you say, "Okay, he rents a car,

but the car ain't there or the car the

car place is closed. The car rental is

closed. Why is the car rental closed?

Let's think about it. Ah, I get it. The

car rental is closed because it's Martin

Luther King Day, right? Okay. So, why

does that occur to me? Because that

might go back and inform why we're going

on the journey in the first place. Think

about it. I have to give a speech on

Martin Luther King Day in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is two days away. I have one

day to go there and rest up. I've been

asked I've been uh to give a speech at

my high school on Martin Luther King

Day. Now I get here on Saturday, the guy

said I'm gone, right? I'm closed for the

whole weekend. I'm gone. So that the

what seems to be a

random difficulty relates directly back

to the purpose of the journey. It's no

longer random. So what happens if you

let your imagination work? those things

which appear to be random can be

connected back so they don't come out of

nowhere. So the audience is saying,

"Yeah, okay. The the car wasn't there."

Ha ha ha. Oh, but I get it. Of course,

it's a holiday, right? Or maybe the

reason I can't drive across the country

is uh the reason I maybe I can't fly

across the country because there's an

ice storm. So, I got to drive across the

country. My car breaks down. And the

reason that the the the garage is closed

is his car broke down. So the it's

possible to to structure a a drama so

that the supposed um uh arbitrary

incidents are related back to the first

cause. Okay.

So what do I got to do? What's my

objective? That's the Aristotle says

that's the only thing hap that matters.

What is the objective of the hero to get

from point A to point B?

The scenes are the are the incidents and

each incident builds up into a threeact

structure. Okay. So the first act

structure is get there. The first act

structure is here's where my ideas run

out. This is act one, right? I get all

of these great ideas. They get me to

here and now the ideas run out. The

second act is wait a second. As we spoke

about, I believe earlier, I can't

remember that I'm supposed to drain the

swamp, but I'm up to my tush and

alligators. What happens is, think about

it. I I steal a car. I say I can't help

it. It's not Martin Luther King Day.

It's my my great aunt is dying and she's

going to leave $10 million to the first

person who gets to LA. I got to get to

LA. I've rented the car here. The car

breaks down over here. I have to steal a

car. I leave him I leave the guy a note

saying I'm the guy that stole your car.

Blah blah blah. And I get arrested by

the cops. Now I get thrown in jail.

Okay. So now my now now my problem. It's

still all part of getting to LA, but

it's a different understanding of the

problem.

And so the great Hudy Led Better is

known as Leed Belly was one of our great

American poets, a

a singer and a songwriter. And he said,

he said, "Here's how you write a blues."

He said, "It's all about a knife." He

said, "You've got this knife and you're

using it to cut bread because you need

to go to work. Why do you need to go to

work? You need your strength because

tonight you're going to be partying with

your girlfriend. So you need your

strength for work so that you're going

to be partying with your girlfriend

tonight. So you use the knife to cut the

cut the bread. Verse one. Verse two

or act two.

You come home from work, you take a

shower, take a bath, using a knife to

shave with so you can be pretty with

your girlfriend.

You get to your girlfriend's house.

She's in bed with another guy. You use

the knife to cut her lying heart out.

that Hudy led better. It's a genius

understanding of drama. The threeact

structures, it's the same knife, but the

knife has a completely different uh um

completely different weight in each of

the three acts. So here my my objective

to travel gets thwarted. Here I'm thrown

in jail.

So now perhaps the the the sheriff says,

"Okay, I'll let you out of jail. I

understand you're a writer. I'll let you

out of jail if you write my kids

get into college essay.

I say, "Okay, what's what's the essay

on?" He says, "It's on pre-Colombian

pottery. Do you know anything about

pre-Colombian pottery?"

I say, "Do I I do I know anything about

pre-colian pottery?" "Yeah, it's my

hobby." Okay. So, he says, "Okay, good.

Write the essay. We'll let you out of

jail." So, now I got to write an essay

on pre-colian pottery.

I don't know anything about

pre-Colombian pottery.

How can I find out about pre-colian

pottery in order to get out of jail?

Well, I have to go to the library. Why

can't I go to the library? Because

there's an ice storm and and they've

closed down the library.

What do I have to do? I have to break

into the library to find a book on

pre-colian pottery so that I can get out

of jail so that I can get to my aunt's

uh uh house so that she don't give away

the uh the $10 million to my lying

cheating sister.

The audience will follow you because

it's they understand the process. They

understand that it's all part of getting

to LA. These aren't random incidents.

Most road trip movies are random

incidents about people who find out

things about themselves and about each

other, right? It's an easy movie to to

to to make and it's not a hard movie to

watch, but big deal because if you can

take one incident and put it here and

the other in put it there, if the

structure is not absolutely linked, the

audience won't follow it.

Because what's see what's happened is

we've involved the audience in our

journey. They said, 'Oh my gosh, I see

how we got out of here. We rented a car.

I see how we got out of here. We rented

a horse. I see how we got out of here.

We stole a car. How's he going to get

into the library? They have all Now

they're thinking ahead.

They're anticipating, which is what you

need the audience to do. That's what

drama is. Just like around the campfire,

you say, "And then we saw the bear, but

then guess what?" The audience go,

"Yeah, what? What?" So that your

audience around the campfire is saying,

"Oh my gosh, how are we going to get out

of here?" So what do they know about the

hero? They know his or her character.

Why? Because character is nothing other

than habitual action. Remember we were

talking about that. That's all a

character is. The guy or the gal over

here didn't say, "Let me tell you a

little bit about myself." Right? They

got in an airplane. The airplane ran out

of gas. They stole a car. The car ran

out of gas. uh uh they broke into the

they got thrown in jail. They made a

deal to write the essay. That's all we

know about them. That's all there is. If

you take a script and shake it upside

down, there's not a character that's

going to fall out of it,

right? There's nothing in there. It's

just words and actions. The words that

the guy woman says and the actions that

they do. Okay. So, now we're we we got

to we got to drain the we're up to our

ass in alligators and we forget we got

to drain the swamp. We got to find out

about pre-Colombian pottery. Okay, so

we're finding out pre-Colombian pottery

in act two and act two ends with a

revelation of some sort. For example,

act when we start getting into the

library, we start going into pre-colian

pottery. We're studying pre-colian

pottery. We're looking through a book

and it mentions something about

my aunt mentioned something about she

was going to leave all of her money to

the uh the society for the prevention of

of something or other. Right? That's who

she's going to leave her money to if I

don't get there. So I find out something

here in act two about these guys, these

swine from the prevention of blah blah

blah.

And I find out that something that

informs the end of the journey. I find

out, wait a second,

they aren't going to hold this will in

LA at all

from I I look through the minutes of

this meeting and I looked them up in

those those computers and I found out

Society for the Prevention of Blahla,

they don't even meet in LA anymore. I've

been given wrong information. Where do

they meet?

Well, they meet up obviously. you know,

they meet here in Seattle. So now I have

this whole plan which I've worked out to

get me to LA, but I learned something in

act two seemingly by accident which says

it's not LA at all. Aha, I have to get

myself up to Seattle. So the journey is

the same. The point of the journey is

the same to get the money. We find out

at the end of act two, the money ain't

even in LA, right? The money's up in

Seattle.

So, it's the it's the three uses of the

knife. Act one, cut the bread.

It's a rational journey. I'm going to

LA. What could happen to me? I cut the

cut the bread to make myself a sandwich

so I can have

a strength to do my work. Act two, I'm

stuck.

I'm I'm using the It's the same knife

here. I'm using it to shave, but here

I'm stuck. I have to use my tool, my my

uh intellect in order to write the

pre-Colombian pottery thing in order to

get out of jail, in order to get to LA.

And I find something here, the nagging

little friend, which as we know from the

greatest work of drama of all time, of

course, Dumbo, is the little is the

little mouse with a magic feather. And

the little mouse with a magic feather,

in this case it's a librarian, we'll

call her Beth, is pointing out to us,

wait a second, pre-Colombian poverty,

blah blah blah, uh, the Society for the

Prevention of Blah blah blah, aren't

they the ones who,

and it's always with our little friends,

what do we try to do with our little

friends, the helper? We try to scrape

them off our shoe. We say, "Okay, leave

me alone. Leave me alone. I'm studying

pre-Colombian pottery." and they're

trying and finally we listen to that

little nagging message which sends us

off to

Seattle so we can get the money

sticking to the channel. It's all the

same action,

right?

The nature of it changes from one act to

the other. Every act is made up of

scenes and every scene is an incident.

An incident is an incident may be

defined as a happenstance which if you

removed it

the journey wouldn't make sense

right if you could put in something that

you can take out for example here he

discovers that I don't know what the

heck here in the middle act he discovers

that this town was also an ancient Inca

site doesn't make any difference take it

out

if we leave out the incident of the

sheriff doesn't make sense

So we always know what to put in and

what to take out. Does each does each

scene does each incident advance or

impede the journey of the hero? Does it

affect the journey of the hero? If it

doesn't, take it out.

Just as if I'm going across the country,

doesn't make any difference if I go

through the Grand Canyon and I say, "Oh

my goodness, that's the biggest canyon

in the world. It's it truly is Grand.

I'm going to stop and look at it."

doesn't make any difference. The Grand

Canyon is not on it's not on your map,

right? It's not on your journey, so you

don't have to worry about it. Uh, so

that's how you write a play.

We're going to talk about dramatic

structure now is applied to one of my

plays. And this might be I have to ask

your patience cuz I mean they pay me to

write them, but they don't pay me to

read them. So, I wrote this play a long

time ago, so I'll see if I can remember

it. I'll do my best. It's a play uh it's

called American Buffalo. So, American

Buffalo was done on Broadway. First, we

did it in Chicago, then we did off off

Broadway, then we did it on Broadway

with Robert Duval and Kenny McMillan,

John Savage. It was a great production.

And um the opening night party was at

Sard's restaurant, which was then a

theatrical tradition. It may still be.

Sardis used to be a speak easy in the

20s and then was taken over and run as a

wonderful restaurant and it was the

theatrical restaurant still may be. So

the tradition was all the backers of the

play and the friends came to Sardis for

the opening night and so um my dad and

my stepmother are there from Chicago. My

dad was a a labor lawyer and a

depression baby and

in the army in World War II and an

immigrant kid. Very tough tough guy.

Wonderful guy. And we're sitting around

and the reviews of this play come in. No

one's ever heard of me. They don't know

who the hell I am. Reviews come in. One,

there about six papers and the New York

Post and the New York Daily News and the

uh uh uh Brooklyn whatever the hell and

the New York Legend blah blah blah.

They're all genius reviews and

everyone's very morose. And my dad says,

"These are great reviews. Why is

everybody so morose?" So the producer

says, "They aren't morose. They're just

anxious." And he says, "Why are you

anxious? these reviews are great. They

said, "We're waiting for the New York

Times review." So he says, "Well, wait a

second. These reviews are great. What

difference does the New York Times

make?" So the producer said, "Well, it

makes all the difference in the world.

The play will stand or fall based

on the New York Times review." So my dad

thinks for a second. He says, "Wait a

second." He says, "The guy who writes

this review at the New York Times, how

much money you think he makes?" So Bruce

says, "Well, he probably makes like

$35,000 a year a while ago." My dad

said, "Well, what and what did this

plate cost to mount?"

And the guy says, "Well, I think it cost

about $700,000."

My dad says, "Are you crazy?"

So that that was the Chicago answer,

right? And I've I've uh often had time

to think about it and admire his admire

his wisdom

because uh there are there are very few

things in his life uh that aren't rigged

and I'm thankful for both of them. So

American Buffalo played by is about a

bunch of guys in a junk shop and it's a

tragedy.

That means people have more or less good

intentions and they end up ruining each

other in a way that they could not

foresee. But that at the end of the play

is revealed as inevitable

and at the same time surprising.

So we start off the play over here and

there's these guys in a junk shop,

right? There's this guy Donnie Dubro.

He's the um the protagonist

of the play and his mentor. He's a

mentor to a young kid named um Bobby

who's in effect his son. It's his

adopted son or his boyfriend. We don't

know who it is. It's the most

significant person in his life. And he

is the protector of this young young

boy. And um the boy has failed. They're

they're all thieves. And the boy has

failed in one of his tasks. The boy was

supposed to watch this mark who they

were going to rob. And the boy has

failed in one of these tasks. And so at

the beginning of the play, the the

protagonist Donnie is uh lambasting the

boy. He's trying to teach the boy how to

behave like a man. He's trying to teach

the boy the code of their life. It

happens to be thievery, but it could be

doesn't make any difference, you know.

And if you look at it, this is a very

very common um scene

and one of the great exemplars of it is

the scene between Pelonius and Leertes.

Pelonius and his son Leertes where the

kid is leaving the house and Pelonius is

trying to say just uh neither neither a

borrower nor a lender be for loan both

loses both itself and friend. Costly thy

habit as the purse may bear, but rich

not showy. And he's giving the he's

saying to this kid the last few things

before the kid goes off into the world.

And I think he's usually played Ponius

as a clown. But anyone who ever had kids

who goes went off into the world know

that speech. And the speech is I've

screwed everything up. I've been a

terrible parent to you. Lord knows I've

tried, but Lord also knows I failed.

Perhaps I didn't try hard enough. There

are a few things I would like you to

know before you go off. is so important.

Please, please listen to me. Every

parent knows andor has made this speech.

So, while he's teaching the kid, it

turns out that the kid was supposed to

watch the uh the mark, the supposed

victim of a robbery. They're going to

take rob a guy's coin collection. So,

who comes into the equation here is uh

the third party, the antagonist,

a guy named Teach. And Teach is a thief.

And uh teach figures out that Don is

engaged in a robbery. And the way he

figures this out is Don is talking

around the robbery. He's talking in code

to the kid saying, you know, when we do

the thing blah blah blah, we do the

thing bibbidity bobby boo. And so the

the kid gets sent out to get some coffee

and teach says, "Okay, I've got it

figured out. New scene.

What's going on? Are you and the kid

planning something?" So Donnie says,

"No, no, no. It's just don't worry about

it." Blah, blah, blah. And so Teach

talks him around. Says, "Wait a second.

Wait a second. Don't we have a

relationship independent of what you

think you owe the kid? He's just a kid.

Aren't we thieves together? Haven't we

done a lot of stuff together? Tell me

what the deal is."

So Donnie gets talked around and he

tells him what the deal is. And so Teach

deals himself into the robbery.

Now Teach is involved in the robbery and

they start planning the robbery and

Teach uh gets caught up to speed and now

Bobby who's been sent out for coffee

comes back with the coffee and so the

new incident is Teach says

I'm going to get rid of the kid. We

don't need the kid. Donnie says we don't

need this kid.

The kid the kid is uh he's not up to the

job.

And so this plays in the same way that

um Athell gets played upon by Iago. This

plays upon Donniey's concerns, right?

You might say it's it's the second

aspect of the psychology of the of the

father. This kid ain't ready to go into

the world. He doesn't know all the stuff

that I've told him. He he doesn't he

doesn't have the uh uh the s doesn't

have the understanding to go into the

world. Teach plays upon that, right?

He's the he's the yetah. He's the bad

influence, the bad part of the self, the

bad part of the protagonist, and says,

"The kid's not ready to go. Let's get

rid of the kid.

Let's deal the kid out of the robbery."

And he talks Donnie around and

humiliates the kid. And Donnie, instead

of standing up for the kid

to stop the humiliation or out of his

own weakness, says to the kid, "You know

what, kid? you're not going to do the

robbery.

I'm going to deal you out. We'll give

you 10 bucks. Get the hell out of here.

We're not going to do the robbery. And

so the kid is heartbroken and the kid

doesn't understand. And Donnie says,

"That's it. You're out." So that's the

end of that.

His anxiety has been curiously played

upon by the protagonist. Now the kid's

out. So now the kid's out and we come to

the to the end of the scene here, which

we're coming to the end of the act.

where there's another guy called

Fletcher who's been setting up the

robbery. He's the out offstage

character. And now with the final

incident is in the first act is Teach

comes around and says, "Let's get rid of

Fletcher too, right? There'll be more

for you, there'll be more for me,

there'll be less for we don't need

Fletcher because the whole thing's set

up. We're going to deal him out." So

Donniey's manhood kicks in. He says,

"No, no." He said, "That would be

treason. We can't deal Fletcher out.

Fletcher is in, the kids out. Get out of

here. Go take a nap.

So that's the end of that act.

Okay. So now we come back to that that.

So where where are we at the end of the

first act? We tried to teach the kid a

lesson and the lesson was you're not

equal to it. I'll I I'll stand up for

you being humiliated. I won't sell the

other guy out, but you're out. We come

back to act two and everything is now a

who. Fletcher can't be found. They can't

find out where Fletcher is. They don't

know where he is. Now, Teach,

who's the the uh the antagonist, says,

"This doesn't feel right that Fletcher's

not here. He's supposed to be here. I

think he's selling us out. In fact, I

think maybe he and the kid are selling

us out. There should be nobody left here

but you and me." He's uh he's um

capitalizing on the credul of Donnie and

saying, "Let's get rid of Fletcher."

Now, you see, let's go do the robbery

right now.

Then the kid comes in and the kid has a

report about what happened to Fletcher

and he says, "Fletcher's in the

hospital. Fletcher got mugged by some

thugs and Fletcher's in the hospital. I

don't I know I'm not in the um the

robbery. I just came back to tell you. I

wanted you wanted you to know I'm still

on your side. So that's this incident

here. And now Teach says, "Wait a

second. Wait a second. How do you know

all this stuff,

Bobby? How do you know all this stuff?"

And he convinces Donnie Dubro that the

kid is in league with Fletcher

and that they're all selling the robbery

out and they're and the kid is the cause

of the whole thing.

And he tries to extort a confession.

Teach tries to extort a confession from

the kid here. Tries to extort a

confession from the kid. And the kid

won't confess. He's got nothing to

confess. So eventually teach starts

beating the kid to death to extort a

confession because teach says, "Wait a

second, Don. The cops may be coming in.

We don't know what's going to be h

what's happening. Nothing makes any

sense. The only way this all makes sense

is that the kid has sold us out. So,

we've gone down the line of tragedy from

Donnie trying to teach the kid how to be

a man to Donnie being talked into. Yes,

he's not a man. I knew that back here.

He's a kid. Not only is a kid, he's a

traitor. And the only way to teach him

is to beat him. And they're beating the

kid to death. When what comes out is

what the kid has been doing throughout

has been trying to make up for his lack

in scene one. Miss Lackam in scene one

he was supposed to be following the mark

and because they wanted to steal a rare

coin from the mark and all throughout

he's been trying to help his father

who's Donnie and so what he does he

takes the money that's been given him

and he buys a rare coin to plate his

father and he says that he found found

the coin they know that that's a lie and

so that's why they start beating him

teach says that's a lie you didn't buy

you didn't find that coin you bought

that coin or you robbed you robbed the

joint. So the the the kid's attempt to

be a man to to uh fulfill his father's

um best wishes

is interpreted by the father as an act

of treason and they start beating the

kid to death until the kid fin the kid

says here's what I did. I missed the guy

over here but I bought a coin in order

to retain your love in order to prove my

manhood. And now they got to take the

kid to the hospital because he's dying.

And and uh Teach throws a fit and he

wrecks the junk store. And then we're

left with the Donnie and and and the kid

who's beaten something to death. And

Donnie underos reversal of the

situation. He goes from being the mentor

to being a a monster and recognition. He

re realizes that he's been behaving like

a monster and he's come close to killing

what

the most important thing in his life,

his beloved son.

And so the the hero underos recognition

of the situation and reversal of the

situation. And that's how we know the

play was over.

And it all stems from the original um

the original premise which is I have to

teach my son how to be a man cuz he just

got something wrong and ends with the

best way to teach him is to kill him.

And uh that's American Buffalo. I mean,

it looks like a bunch of badly drawn

dolphins or something, but uh

that's the that's that play.

The play, what starts the play? The play

starts because a guy comes in to the

junk shop. It all takes place in a junk

shop.

takes a coin and offers 10 bucks for

this Buffalo nickel and leaves. And

Donnie Dubro says, "You know what? I

didn't like that guy's attitude. He was

a rich guy. He lives around the corner

with his girlfriend. I seen him. If he

offered me 10 bucks for that, I bet he's

got a lot more money than that. I don't

like his attitude. I want to rob him."

and he puts his son or his his mentee

Bobby out to keep an eye on the guy to

see when the guy's going away because

they're going to rob the coin

collection. That was the precipitating

event. Before the guy came into the

store, nothing was happening.

Before the ant died, there was no reason

to go to Los Angeles.

As we move along,

the coin collection becomes the reason

that the a that the antagonist to teach

says you got to get rid of the kid. It's

much much too valuable a a project. It's

not a teaching opportunity. The kid's

not your science project. You got to get

rid of the kid. We have to get those

coins. The only thing that matters is

those coins. So, it begins to wean the

protagonist Donnie away from the

original objective. And and at the end

of act two, they've gotten rid of the

kid. The best way we can teach this kid,

says teach, is to not let him come in on

the coins because the important lesson

is don't screw up. If you're going to be

on the wrong side of the tracks, you

can't screw up. He says, Donnie, you

remember the kid screwed up on day one.

That's why we got to play in the first

place. We aren't going to let him screw

up again because Donnie, you're

interested in being the the excellent

man. The excellent man doesn't let

sympathy

get the better of reason. Kick the kid

out. Kids kicked out. Act three, they're

looking for the coin collection. And

Teach wants to kick out Fletcher because

he wants all the coins for himself. The

kid comes in and he says, uh, and the

kid gets accused of

being in league with Fletcher and trying

to take Donnie off. And the kid comes in

and he says, "Look what I got. I got

something for you. I have this valuable

nickel.

Takes us right back to the beginning of

the play. He says, "Let me back in on

this on the on the job because look what

I was capable of doing. I got this

valuable nickel for you." So now teach

and Donnie teach convinces Donnie says,

"Wait a second. This kid's an idiot.

Remember that you told me it on day one.

What? How does he get a valuable

nickel?" And so he says to the kid,

"Well, how'd you get the nickel, Bob?"

up. So, you know, I talked to this guy.

I met this guy around. He can't account

for his actions. So, because he c

because the kid cannot account for his

actions. He's accused and convicted of

treason

and he's beaten almost to death and it

comes out the way he got the nickel was

when Bob Don gave him some money up

here, he went out and bought it to make

up for his supposed sin of missing the

guy in the first place. So the nickel is

be from the kid's point of view is an

article of redemption. It's a relic. And

from Donniey's point of view, it's proof

of treason.

So we come full circle from the the the

first guy comes into the nickel. We

follow the nickel throughout the course

and it has three meanings.

And uh there you go.

Structure is very important. I mean, I

think a lot about structure and I think

a lot about our greatest western

philosopher and I think a lot of you

guys have already beaten me to the punch

when I say of course it was Daffy Duck

because Daffy Duck asked the essential

question of philosophy which is FA

what's going on here anyway.

So the question of structure is what's

going on here anyways. So why does the

structure exist? Why do we have scenes

which are approximately 7 minutes long,

scenes structured into acts which are

approximately a half an hour long and

the act structured into a play which is

approximately an hour and a half long.

And the answer goes back to the campfire

because it's built into the uh we're

hardwired human beings that every seven

minutes approximately every seven

minutes we stop and we take a little

look around

cuz that's what that's goes back to the

caveman days. And if you think about it,

that's the length of a comedy skit and

it's also the length of the time between

commercials on a television show, right?

It's not an accident. They've written

the scene unconsciously nonetheless

because that's the amount of time we

need for that before we start to look

around. Every 20 minutes, which is

approximately three of those 7 minutes

of um intervals, we take a longer look

around and conversation stops. In fact,

our friends, the French, you remember

them, right? They gave us Alan Delone,

Bridget Bardeau, and they they gave

Paris to the Germans a couple of times.

I think they got it back, but it's all

part of the European Union. So, what who

am I to judge? Okay. In any case, they

say an right 20 minutes after the hour,

they say an angel passes. And if you

think about it, you you watch it, you'll

see in your daily lives. At 20 minutes

after the hour and 20 minutes before the

hour, there's a longer pause in the

conversation. Why? Why do the pause

pauses occur there? Because most things

start in the hour. Most events, dinners,

dates, blah blah, most of them start in

the hour. So 20 minutes after that,

there's a pause and people and the

conversation just dies. And the same

thing is true 20 minutes later, it's 20

minutes to the hour. The conversation

just dies.

So this is the hard wiring of the human

being around the campfire. Every seven

minutes, you want to look a little bit

around and keep talking. Every 20

minutes or so, you want to take a little

bit longer pause.

And when you go to the theater, you'll

see this happen because most theater uh

the curtain is if it's called for 8,

it'll go open at 8:07. And at 8:07, you

can set your stopwatch by it. The

audience stops talking. They just

naturally quiet down at 8:07. If the

play doesn't start, they'll start

talking again. But it's it's hardwired

into the human experience. So the seven

minute scene, three of them um more or

less make an act. and three acts more or

less make a whole play. That's the

traditional three-act structure. Some of

my plays are written in a long oneact

structure and some of them are written

in two act structure. And the reason for

that is I I think just because I mean I

don't know any better. That's just how

it occurred to me. That's just how it

occurred to me at the time.

People sell Michelangelo statue of

David, right? Pretty cute. And they say,

"My god, how did you do that?" and he

said, 'I just looked at this block of

marble and I cut away everything that

wasn't

David.' And so I grew up like everyone

else listening to that, thinking, "My

god, that's brilliant." until I realized

what he was really saying was buzz off.

I was working in a real estate office in

Chicago uh in what was called a boiler

room. For those of you who never had the

experience, a boiler room, you're

subject to it, but most of you haven't

done it. Somebody calls up and says,

"Hi, uh, Miss Sanchez. This is uh, uh,

Oscar Lavine. I'm with uh, Rex

carpeting. We're having a special offer

on carpeting this thing, and I got your

name from and you give this pitch in

order to set up what's called a sit.

You're trying to get I think that

they're now automated, most of them, but

in the in the old days, they were real

life people. I was one of them trying I

tried to sell land over the telephone. I

sold carpets over the telephone. what

they call cold calling, which is they

give you a phone book and they say,

"Here,

these are not leads. Nobody's qualified

them. They're just people. See what you

can do." And it's it's it's it's real

hard work. And and I found it very

grueling because uh a I'm lazy and b you

have a conscience. So I'm working in

this office and I'm listening to these

guys and I'm out at we all went to the

Chinese restaurant every night and I'm

listening to guys in the next booth

talking about something or other and all

these guys I mean it was fraudulent land

sales I mean it was 6 to5 in a pickum

whether it was actually a crime or not

but these guys were all genius salesman

stroke crooks stroke confidence men and

I'm listening into the next booth and

I'm thinking wow that's really cool that

I can just overhear a little bit of this

conversation next booth. I don't quite

know what they're talking about, but

they're so intent I'm going to listen

harder. I think we've all had this

experience, right? So, this should teach

you if nothing else does.

Don't write exposition and don't write

narration because you want to start the

story as the Roman said in the middle.

Say, "Well, what's what the hell's going

on?" No, just as you do when you come to

the bar and there's a thing on the

television, you say, "Give me a glass of

water, you know, or you know, a uh what

do you call whistle pig straight white

whiskey for choice and you're watching

and you see two people talking in the

show and you you understand what's going

on.

You don't need someone to you don't need

you don't need the first reel." So,

there's ancient theatrical wisdom which

is how do you make any movie better?

Burn the first reel. Take the first 10

minutes of any movie, throw it away,

and you'll see this. Check it out. Try

it. Watch a movie and see 10 minutes in,

12 minutes in. Say, "Well, hell, why

don't you start here?" I didn't need all

this. Well, back when we were young. And

the reason I'm telling you this, and

Jim, you know, you are the head of this

hospital. You don't need it. Start in

the middle. How do we know you can start

in the middle? Well, you know it cuz

when you come to the bar, and you know

it cuz when you sit at the Chinese

restaurant, you're listening to the next

booth. you want to find out what's going

on.

So I thought I started writing this

scene. What about if this great salesman

is trying to sell land to somebody who

doesn't care? And the salesman starts

off in scene one with this long rambling

monologue doesn't seem to make much

sense until he brings it down at the end

and he says this what I what I'm doing

is I'm talking about investing in land

and he's talking to the guy like this

guy is his best buddy in the world and

the punchline is hi my name is Ricky

Roma what's yours and we say oh my god

this guy's the best salesman in the

world he just had me the audience

listening to him for 38 minutes talk

about this obstruuse land values and

depreciation and this and that. I I'm

gone. So what happens is Ricky Roma, one

of the heroes of the gang drama, is the

in the same position as the writer. I

say, man, okay, I'm going to I'm going

to catch you by the hair. I'm going to

make you listen. Watch this. You just

got all this information. Why? Because

Ricky, not because I, the the

playwright, wanted to give it to you,

the audience, because Ricky Roma, the

hero, wanted to give it to this guy he's

trying to take it advantage of. How

about that? Ain't that cute?

Difference between tragedy and and

drama. Well, we talked about tragedy.

Tragedy is is the the quest of the hero

for one specific goal. Such quest re

resulting at the end of his at the end

of the journey in reversal of situation

and recognition such that it awakens in

the audience fear. Oh my god, I'm just

like that and pity. Oh, the poor son of

a gun.

Tragedy has to be strictly structured so

that we only have incidents. Incidents

are also called scenes. Each incident

has to be an essential step in

achieving the goal. Now, here's a here's

a really uh handy dandy little giant

test for you. The incidents can be

understood as

let's say you got to go to get your we

talked about you got to go to get your

wife's or your your aunt's what do you

call it the legacy or your your wife's

mittens whatever the hell it is. How are

you going to get there? Well, you got to

get to the elevator, right? The elev you

got to get the cab. You got to get to

security. You got to get through

security. You got to get from security

onto the plane. Each of those is an

incident. You cannot take one away.

You can't say I'll I won't do the cab.

Each is an essential incident to get you

on the plane. You you you want to add

another incident of you discover a cure

for cancer. That's fine, but it's not a

part of the story that you were telling

me. So those are the incidents. So a

tragedy is is strictly structured

progression of incidents. The reason it

has to be that as we spoke of is so the

audience can follow it. Napoleon said

you got to keep your plans very very

simple so that your enemy can follow

them. Kind of a brilliant thing to say.

Okay. So you got to keep your plans very

very simple so that they aren't the

enemy that your friends the audience can

follow them so they can think ahead. And

the perfect example of course is the

other greatest stoical philosophical

philosophy which is the philosophy of

wishing things to occur as they do and

only wishing for those things we can

award ourselves for example honor not

wishing for those things we cannot award

ourselves for example fame. And the

greatest so uh uh soal philosophy of all

time was of course the roadrunner who

reduced all philosophy to those two

magical words beep beep. So wy coyote

he's always trying again. He's always

trying again. Every everything

he's when he fails he tries again. His

one goal in life is to catch the road

runner. Nothing will force him to give

up this. So Wally Coyote is the tragic

hero and the roadrunner could be

considered as fate or you know as a

silly prairie chicken. I mean you know

you take your choice. So that's tragedy.

So drama has to deal with drama does not

result in reversal of the situation and

recognition.

Things are changed somewhat and we're

given a slice of life. certain things

happen and we live we we leave not full

of fear and pity but saying isn't life

just like that by this definition

a death of a salesman is not a tragedy

it's a drama

oh my sons another Arthur Miller play

great play is a tragedy okay so Glengary

Glenn Ross is a kind of a new 20th

century form called the gang drama

As we see in the tragedy, everything is

an aspect of the hero, right? Donnie

Dubro is the protagonist. The antagonist

teach is his yet harah, his dark side of

Thanootos, as Freud would say. And the

other side that he's taking care of is

is been split off from the hero is is

the son is the the part which deserves

compassion. In a gang drama, rather than

having one protagonist, you have many.

And gang dramas usually deal with

professions.

Almost all drama, in fact, I think all

drama on television is gang drama. It's

cops or it's lawyers or it's crooks or

it's medical people. You those are all

gang dramas. And it started in the 20th

century I believe with uh Elmer Rice

wrote a play called Street Scene and

Sydney Kingsley who's a wonderful

dramatist. He wrote Check out these

plays. They're great. They made great

movies too. Men in White the the the

quintessential doctor drama and

Detective Story the quintessential

detective drama. Claire Booth Loose

wrote The Women. Her gang was women uh

stuck in a um hotel in Reno, Nevada,

awaiting their divorce. These are all

gang dramas.

And Glen Gary Glenn Ross is a gang drama

about men in a real estate office

selling fraudulent land uh in Chicago.

And uh

that's what that is.

So Glen Gary Glenn Ross is a uh an

exercise to me in in uh character like

just as we're speaking about one gets to

know people from knowing their character

through watching what they do. We

determine what their character is. Are

they good? Are they bad? Are they

reliable? We determine this also when

listening somebody tell a joke. They

tell a joke and the joke is good. They

tell the next joke. However bizarre the

joke is, we'll listen along because we

know their character. We know they're

going to get to a punchline. So, we'll

play along. We're going to give them the

benefit of the doubt. The same thing is

true when the audience is watching a

play. If they know that eventually

you're going to get to a punchline,

they'll play along. They'll say, "Wait a

second. Okay, I don't quite understand,

but I know I'm in good hands. I know

he's taken me somewhere, so I'll listen.

So, in Glengary, Glenn Rosson, the first

scene is uh these two guys in a booth

talking about leads. Who the hell knows

what leads are? The audience doesn't

know what leads are, but the guys know.

One guy wants something called leads.

The other guy doesn't want to get them

give him the leads. Little by little, we

begin to understand through their

dialogue that leads are

indications of who who might be a good

prospect to be sold this stuff. What is

this stuff? It's land. We we we don't

start off by narrating what's going to

happen. We start off in the middle of

two guys talking about something we

don't understand. But the one guy is so

intent uh Lavine on getting these leads

getting these leads getting this leads

that we'll go along with him. We'll go

along and at the end we found out what

the deal is. We've because we not

because we were told not because

somebody spoonfed it to us with a

shovel. And if you notice, most most

dramas have these days and all the

action movies have a big computer room

scene where people are always talking

about, "Oh my god, we got a bad reading

on the ADS SP2."

You don't mean the automatic sync credit

P.2, do you? Right. Who cares? If I got

a bad reading on the machine, get on

with it. We don't need to give the

machine a name and then explain what the

name means because whom for whom are we

explaining it for the purpose of the

audience? They don't care. They want to

know what's happening. They don't care

about the we'll assume that the machine

can do anything because that's what

computers do in a in in in a movie. They

do anything. So, uh, computers in a

movie are the same are the equivalent of

cigarettes in the theater in the old in

the old days. You could block anything.

You could blocking is getting pre people

from one part of the stage to the other.

It's very important to move people

around the stage because if you guys are

the audience, I may be talking to

somebody whose back is to you, but at

some point that she's going to be want

to be talking to me. So, at some point,

I got to move so that she can be talking

to you. Get it? We can't move the camera

on the stage. You're set. In the old

days, you could always block, you could

move anybody by having them go get a

cigarette.

So, I would go over here to get the

cigarette and the woman over there would

come down and start talking to me. You

could see her face.

So, the the computer is the if you if

you don't know how to move the thing

forward in a movie, you can always go to

the computer because the computer will

say tickity, tickity, tickity. Oh, look

what the computer's saying. Here's the

piece of information we didn't know.

Find me where this person is right now.

Tickity, tickity, tickity talk. Oh,

boom, boom, boom. Google Earth says that

he's over there in the thing. Oh,

tickity, tickity.

You just took the movie out of it. and

Chuck Jones, who was the great director

of the um uh Warner Brothers cartoons,

all the great Warner Brothers cartoons,

Ad Daffy and Marvin the Martian and Bugs

Bunny and the Roadrunner. He said, "You

can't have a a character who can do

everything.

If the character character can do

everything, the audience loses interest,

right? Superman has to have kryptonite

or he doesn't exist. Because if Superman

can do anything, who cares? We we we We

can't identify with somebody who can do

anything. Okay. So, uh narration. So,

what can you what can you do without

narration? If you say I'm going to going

to have one piece of narration in this

movie, in this play, you can tax

yourself to be sufficiently interesting

that the audience will play along with

you. But you also have to be

sufficiently honorable that you're not

going to disappoint them by by leaving

them saying, "What what the hell's going

on?" So the first scene is these two

guys talking about leads, talking about

leads, talking about leads. We

understand that the leads are so

important in the first scene that the

first scene is between a guy called

Lavine and a guy called Williamson. We

understand that the leads are so

important that there's uh Lavine and

Williamson that

Lavine bribes Williamson. He says, "I'll

give you I'll give you a bunch of money

to give me the leads." And Williamson's

okay, but you got to pay me right now.

Lavine doesn't have the money. So, we

left Lavine is in a quandry. What do we

know? He wants the leads. That's all we

know in scene one. He's got to get the

leads. Why? His daughter's sick. Okay,

give me a break. Scene two,

the same booth. Two more salesmen. Now,

these salesmen are called Moss and Ear

now. And they're they're bitching.

They're fetching about the leads.

They're talking about how terrible it

is. They have this contest on that if

they don't get sales, they're going to

get fired, but they can't get the leads

because an edict has come down from

Williamson that the good leads only go

to the uh great salesman because they

can't waste the leads. So, at the end of

the scene, Moss says to Aaron, "Now, you

know what? There's an easier way out of

this. Let's just steal the leads."

Moss says, "What?" He says, "Yeah, we'll

steal the leads. The leads are the most

important thing which you, the audience,

remember from scene one. Everybody wants

the leads. We can't earn the leads.

Lavine's trying to bribe the leads.

Let's steal them. We'll break into the

office. We wreck the joint up and we'll

go across the street to Jerry Graph.

There's a different organization. We'll

have the leads and it'll give us

$10,000. Moss says, "I'm not going to do

it." Aron says, "Yes, you are." Well,

Moss says, "No, I'm not cuz I'm not a

thief."

Aron says, "No, I'm not. I'm not a

thief." And Moss says, "I don't care

whether you're a thief or not. I need

the leads. I need the money. I'm going

to rob the joint. If you don't do it,

I'm going to do it and tell me you tell

them you help me. So, tell me if you're

in or out. So, that's the end of that's

the end of scene two.

Now, we go to scene three and there's a

guy, we don't know who he is, in a

Chinese restaurant talking to a guy in

the next booth. And this guy is saying

he's saying talking about train

compartments and sex and life and

philosophy. We don't know what the hell

he's talking about. We don't know why

he's talking to this guy, but we're

willing to listen.

Because we're intrigued,

not because we've been informed, but

because we've been intrigued.

Narration is informing people. Nobody

cares. They'll accept it. Yeah, I get

it. Most almost all politics is

narration. Let me tell you a few things

about myself. Let me tell you what I'm

going to do. Let me tell you what the

other thing. And if you notice,

politicians point their finger a lot.

Both both sides open. They're saying,

"In effect, those guys over there,

they're the bad guys. We're the good

guys. Let me tell you about." So if you

say, "Wait a second. Let's look at the

guy. Let's look at the woman's record."

The pol what's the politician going to

say? That's cheating. Don't look at my

record. Don't look at my marital

infidelities. Don't look at the stuff

that I've robbed. Don't look at the

stuff that I've said. No, no, no. Listen

to my narration because I'm telling you

a story. you know, you can believe in

this fairy tale. If you cut out the

narration, it's easier to see what's

going on.

A A and B are all the same. So now we

got a guy over here. He's talking about

he's talking about philosophy. He's

talking about life. He's talking about

courage. And the guy over here is

listening. We don't even know who the

hell this guy is. At the end of this

long monologue, this guy over here says,

"My hi, my name's Ricky Roma." All of a

sudden, we go, "My god, this guy's been

talking to a total stranger. Right.

Great piece of getting lucky on my part.

I mean, if you put, "Hi, my name is

Ricky Roma." There's no reason it can't

come at the beginning of the scene,

except it's not interesting. Where's the

fun in that? The fun is my god, he's

talking about the most intimate things

in life to a guy. I didn't even know

what the hell the guy's name is. And

then Ricky Roma says, "Oh, Ricky Roma."

They say, "We've been talking about

Ricky Roma in scene one and scene two.

Who is he? He's the chief salesman. He's

the observed of all observer. He's the

greatest salesman in the world. He's the

guy who gets the good leads. And Ricky,

now we see who Ricky Roman is. My god, I

understand why he's a great salesman. He

had me listening to nothing. And he

says, "Listen, I want to show you

something. This is a piece of land." We

say, "Oh my god, we just saw this guy

sell a piece of worthless property." And

that's the end of act one. We've

introduced all of the characters. Act

two, we bring them all together and we

start off with Aaronau here in

Williamson. All the office has been

wrecked. So we see the result of all of

this talk here is there somebody who's

robbed the office. They've wrecked the

office. Who who robbed it? Obviously

Moss and Arinau because they were

talking about it. And now Williamson's

got to make sense of this. The cops are

here. And act two becomes who robbed the

office and the chaos that is brought

about by the fact that we had started

the sales contest. Everyone had their

job put on the line.

And as as the act progresses,

people start cross-connecting with each

other. Ri Ricky Roma comes to the

defense of Shelley Lavine over there,

who was a great salesman. And because

Lavine comes in, he says, "I finally

closed the sale. I closed this great

sale with these great leads. You told me

you wouldn't give me the leads without

selling without selling them to me. I

didn't have enough money. I went out and

closed these crappy leads. The hell with

all of you." And Williamson then says,

"You know what? I gave you a bad lead.

The guy's insane." He said, "You closed

nothing. You're no goddamn good." And

then it comes out that everyone gets

interrogated by the cops. Link, who's

the uh this guy Link over here? Roma

sold a bunch of land to Link. And Link

comes in to say, "I want to call the

deal off cuz my wife says it's a bad

deal." And Ricky Roma's got to hold him

in. He's got to cement the deal. Not

only because in the in the in the face

of the wife, but in the face of the the

whole thing's been uh robbed.

Everything's shambles. So Rick, we get

to see Ricky Roma as the great salesman

cementing

uh Link in the in the face of chaos. And

it comes out that of course the office

was not robbed by Moss and Areronau at

all. It was robbed by Shelley Lavine

because that's the only way that he

could um uh make money. And because he

made the money from selling the leads,

he took one of the bad leads and had

enough confidence to close that. and he

finds out that he's been completely

duped and he ends up going to jail. And

the punchline of the this the gang uh

drama is uh Aaron says, "Oh god, I hate

this job." So that's a gang drama about

guys in the in the in the uh in the real

estate profession.

Three scenes in a Chinese restaurant

and a second act which ties them all

together. And we end we say, "Oh my god,

life was just like that. What an

interesting trip I just had into the

world of real estate. Just like we do in

the cops shows or the medical shows or

the special ops shows or the fire shows,

we get to get to go backstage. Everybody

loves to go backstage.

You have to write dialogue in a rhythmic

way because human speech is rhythmic.

And if you listen to people having a

conversation, what they're doing is

they're creating a rhythmic poetry.

They're filling in the pauses and

capping each other's speech and so forth

in a way which is rhythmic. And uh

Shakespeare was who was our um I think

somebody said English is the only

language which our our prime writer is a

dramatist. So it's Shakespeare and the

greatest poet of the English language

and he wrote an iamic pentameter because

that's the the rhythm of everyday

English speech. WC Handy also wrote

anamic pentameter because that's the

rhythm of of everyday English speech.

I hate to see the evening sun go down is

amic pentameter. Oh what a rogue and

peasant slave am I isamic pentameter.

I'll see you Sunday if it doesn't rain.

That's amamic pentameter. It's the

rhythm of of natural uh English speech

and Shakespeare raised it to the

greatest of art forms. I mean I talking

my friend a rabbi Rabbi Finley and he

says when he sees sees a couple and he

says okay tell me what the problem is.

He says he can almost tune it out. He

can tell just by the rhythm

what's what they're saying to each

other. Right? And we can too because if

you think about it, you see a couple,

two businessmen, two business women, a

couple blah blah blah cross the

restaurant, you can't hear what they're

saying, but you know what they're

talking about, right? Because you can

tell from the rhythm, how they cap each

other, how they come on top of each

other, how they cut each other off. And

so if you can write that

such that if you can write it, the

actors know it and they love it because

it's natural because they don't have to

fight against the current of a clunky

line. So the the lines come out of their

their mouths naturally and uh they're

grateful for it and so I'm I'm grateful

to them.

But the old joke is one guy says to

another why does a Jew always answer a

question with a question. The answer is

well what what should a Jew answer a

question with? The the question is why

do people speak in real life? They speak

to get something from each other. It

might seem like they speak to express

themselves. But as I understand that

that's not true. They only express

themselves to get something from one

another. It might be something

legitimate, right? Right? Or it might be

something illegitimate but they only

speak to get something.

So similarly on stage they only speak to

get something. So the question is what

does each person want? Then we know why

they're speaking. Then we know what they

want to say. For example

um what what go one person might say to

another what what floor do you want? Or

they might say I want to go to bed with

you until the cows come home. And the

two things might mean exactly the same

thing, right? But there's a way to say

it,

right? So the qu So what the person's

saying is not I need to know what floor

you're going to, right? Or what floor

you want. What floor do you want might

mean I seen you before and there's

something about you I don't like. You

don't know what it means, right? But

they don't speak to get or to give

information. They speak to get a result.

bad dialogue. Well, if it doesn't if it

what's bad dialogue if don't if it don't

work right. If the if the if the point

has already been been made or if the po

the person is not speaking to get

something from the other person bad

dialogue if in addition it can be

beautiful and rhythmic if it can be

interesting

and who knows where the uh where it

comes from. I wrote this novel I just

finished I think I told called Chicago

novel of prohibition and this this guy

is talking to this old uh uh madam who's

uh who he who who's kind of his uh

preceptor right his philosophical

preceptor and they've just killed his

girlfriend

and he says uh I got to take revenge he

says cuz I got to do it but I can't do

it now because I know the proverb

revenge is a dish best eaten coal

And she says, "Honey,

revenge is like lobster. It's good hot

or cold."

And I and I don't know where the hell

that line came down, but I just wrote it

down. I started screaming with laughter,

you know? So, it's not it's not like I

invented it. It's like, you know, I I

discovered it. So, that's that's the

thrill of writing dialogue. And I' I

guess I've written some bad dialogue.

The trick is to go through and take it

out.

The other thing about dialogue is some

people have that gift, some people

don't. But do you need to be able to

write dialogue in order to write a play?

The answer is no. How do we know? Cuz we

do plays in translation. You know, most

people in America don't speak Russian,

yet we understand Czechov. We appreciate

Czechov's plays. How do we know you

don't have to do dialogue? We watch

movies with subtitles,

right? or we watch movies that have been

dubbed. So if one can write dialogue,

that's a plus, but you don't need it to

hold the audience's attention. You watch

Green Bay, right? I could study for a

trillion trillion years. I wouldn't be

able to to to handle the ball like Aaron

Rogers. You know, to a certain extent,

everybody can learn a little bit of

passing a football, but to a certain

extent, you have to have a gift. Right?

Now, can you get by without the gift?

Yeah. Are you going to be the

quarterback for Green Bay? Probably not.

You know, you got to take the hand you

were dealt. Like there's a famous, he

was a Russian theater director and and

he kind of discovered Czechov and he

worked in Moscow, founded the Moscow Art

Theater about 1895, I think. And some

kid and he invented this thing called

the Stannislovski system. I have no idea

what the hell he's talking about, but I

he might have. And some kid comes to him

and says, "Constantine Stannislovski."

He says, "I lack the gifts of so and so

over there. What am I going to do? I

don't have those particular gifts."

And Stannoski said, "Well," he said,

"Okay." He says, "Have you got a you got

a girlfriend?" Guy said, "Yes, I do." He

said, "Okay, you've got a girlfriend

now." He says, "Do you have a male

friend who's richer andor better looking

than you are?" The guy said, "Yeah, I

think so." He said, 'Well, then

obviously you should

he should be going out with your

girlfriend. So, what's the point? The

kid has a right to his girlfriend. He's

got a right to his life, whatever his

talents are. And that's what I would say

to the writers. Write it down. See what

you come up with. Are you going to hate

it? Yeah. Are you sometimes going to

love it? And yeah. And then are you

going to hate yourself for feeling uh uh

um so self-confident and doubt yourself?

Yeah. Welcome to my world.

play is

essentially a poem. It's a it's a poem

written for two voices or three voices

or four voices. So the lines have to be

rhythmic and beautiful if you can

because they aren't about conveying

information.

For example,

sh uh uh Churchill says, "We will fight

them on the beaches. We will fight them

in the in the fields. We will fight them

on the landing fields. We will never

surrender."

Uh and he could have just said

we're going to fight.

But he his speech created

an idea in the in the minds of its

hearers. The poetry of of Churchill

which comes right out of his love of

Shakespeare and of the King James Bible.

Those are the same cadences

in encouraged the British people who

were they were beaten in in 1939. There

was no way that they could have defeated

the Nazis. There was no way except

Churchill said we're going to win. We

will never ever surrender. And he said

it may be our fate to drown in a welter

of our own blood and that's preferable

to living under the Nazis. And he wasn't

talking to the Nazis. He was talking to

the his fellow Brits who said, "Yes,

that's true. We are like that."

But they weren't like that until

Churchill said it. Then they realized

they were like that. So that's the power

of poetry.

Dr. King's a perfect example. I have a

dream. The speech changed America,

right? He was speaking prophecy. He was

speaking poetry. And he could have

spoken like a politician. Nobody listens

to politicians because every it might be

true, but it's all dril.

Right. But when you put it in poetry

which has an element of prophecy in it,

it has the the capacity to move souls.

Some people have a gift to write poetry

and and others don't. And great poetry

has the capacity to move and it works

itself into the mind. Like if you read

Shakespeare, you're going to remember a

lot of Shakespeare. Even if it's only a

phrase, you remember a lot of them. You

read Roger Kipling, you know, or you

read um uh say for example uh Ceridge or

Keith Shell or those guys, you remember

it. The glossy magazines today

publishing dril they call poetry. You

can't remember one. If I said to you,

okay, I'll give you a billion dollars if

you can quote me that poem tomorrow. You

couldn't remember it. You know, the

poetry is the stuff that you want to

want to shout back and forth to each

other across the hall.

There are certain cultures that I've

encountered

that communicate um

by telling stories or by telling jokes

or by one of them is the Jewish culture.

We communicate between, you know, by

telling stories, by telling jokes. And,

you know, we we grew up in a in a in a

mixed neighborhood, an African-American

and a Jewish and and we all used to play

the dozens on each other, right, on just

on Stony Island Avenue. And we and

status was awarded for the ability to be

witty, to be funny, and to be trenchant,

right? As it is in the Italian

community, as it is in the in the in the

law enforcement community. You know, if

you can tell a good story, if you can

come up with a good line, you get a lot

of status. There was a guy called Bo

Brummel, and he was a a dandy in the

reign of, I think, George III in

England, and he was everybody didn't

mean money, but he was famous cuz he was

so witty. I mean, he came to a club one

day and somebody said, "Mr. Bruml, you

seem to be limping. What's uh what's the

matter?" He said, "I've hurt I've hurt

my right leg and it's my favorite leg.

So all of a sudden everybody in in

London is just say yeah like they're

giving the son of a [ __ ] a nooiegie.

You know get over it you son of a [ __ ]

Yeah do that thing about the you know.

So we grew up with the ability to tell

stories and to and to tell jokes was

very highly praised. Also you know I

think we were fairly common um uh middle

class uh 1950 Jewish uh neurotic family

and we drove each other crazy. So the

ability to um inflict damage

neurotically on your dearest and most

beloved uh family members was highly

praised.

You know, oh yeah wouldn't cut it, you

know. And so the Jews have always um

loved language. I mean, there's never

been an illiterate Jew. And you go back

and you read the uh the Torah in the

original, it's it's very very piffy. I

mean it's like street corner language.

You know we we get used to interpreting

the Bible as in most of western culture

in in English in the King James version

which is all full of privies and

wherefors and that stuff but the but the

original language is very very punchy.

Some people can write dialogue and some

people can't. I think most people can

because it's just gossip.

You know you make that up all day long.

He said, she said what happens is

something kicks in and all something

artificial kicks in between what we do

naturally and our ability to do it when

we say it's art. And I think that thing

which kicks in is called education

which is the worst thing to happen since

kale.

But there are a lot of people who do it

who do it naturally.

they as I we're talking about cultures

that prize the ability to um speak

poetically

and it it's uh and you know one of them

is African-American culture is Jewish

culture another is um or the Irish and

storytelling and the you know and the

Italians and street c and there was a

guy there was a guy called Louis Eito

Louito was a cop in New York and he

wrote a book called mafia cop

because his family would all mafia had

all all been members of and I think

eventually killed by the I think the

Gambino family. And Lou says, "No, I'm

going to go straight. I'm going to be a

straightup cop." And he goes into and he

wrote a book called Mafia Cop about his

experiences as a straightup

police officer.

And he was eventually uh convicted of

while being a police officer of

committing 70 murders for the Gambino

family. And he went to prison. He's in

prison. I was in prison forever, right?

And I used to hang out with him because

he was a good friend before he was

convicted. He was a good friend of

Bumbum Mancini, Ray Boom Boom Mancini,

champion of the world. And uh Boom Boom

knew everybody. And we have this

lunchon club in Santa Monica, the place

we go called a joint. Everybody goes

there every day for lunch. There's a lot

of cops and a lot of jiu-jitsu fighters

and pilots and bouncers and stuntmen.

It's really great. And so, um, one time

Lou is over there and he starts talking

about his, um, some stakeout he'd been

on. He says he comes in from a stakeout

and he says, "I look like I stink

because I do stink. I've been sitting in

a car for 5 days." And there's a

beautiful mafia kid, a connected kid

there. And the kid is all tugged out

with the $10,000 suit. He's got gold all

over and his nails are done and he's

gorgeous. He looks like a movie star.

And they've been asking him for

information. And the kid's not giving up

information.

So Lou says, "So I say to the guys say,

"Excuse me a second,

would you leave the room?" They leave

the room and he says, "Kid, you got a

lot of good looks and you got a lot of

information."

And one of those two [ __ ] is

staying in this room.

Like

that's the best thing I ever heard

anybody say, you know? And of course the

the cops they they they prize verbal

acuity. They love to tell stories, you

know, to put in as is uh

put it the best way possible. So a lot

of us have that ability and some of us

don't. Like I'm always struck at people

who don't know how to tell a joke. It's

always I always think well anybody can

tell a joke. Well, how can you tell a

joke that badly? And but some people

don't hear it. Most people do. You know,

my sainted grandmother spoke very very

uh broken English and very accented

English. She didn't understand English

very well. I just loved listening to

her. I remember there's a couple of

stories I've told about I think before

is my dad would speak to her and say,

"Ma, you know, we're going to move you

into this other apartment, but in the

interim I want you to stay here. In the

interim, I think bibity bobby boo." So

she says, "Buddy, when you say the

interim, do you mean the vestibule?"

So that that was my grandmother

one time he's saying ma he said I see

you've been doing this and that blah

blah blah in lie of that I'd rather you

do this in lie of that I'd rather you do

this so she said buddy who is this Lou

so she was she was in she was in the old

old country Yiddishama and one of the

first plays I ever wrote was about these

two old Jewish um uh DPS displaced

persons

uh sitting on a bench in Lincoln Park in

Chicago called the duck variations and

they're two old Jewish guys talking

about ducks for and I was very

influenced of course not only by uh my

grandparent I mean everybody I knew

their grandparents came from the old

country was nobody in my neighborhood

whose grandparents didn't grow up

speaking Russian and Yiddish so I was

exposed to that and I just read read a

book by Aaron Copeland

uh great composer and theoretician

teacher of music and I think it was

called theme variations I think it was

called and I thought well wouldn't that

be cool to write a series of variations

but instead of writing it musically to

write it dramatically so these two guys

do in effect I think there are 14

variations on a theme of talking about

ducks

so that was that was that idea two old

guys sitting on a park bench

I love to read. If I'm not writing, I'm

I'm usually reading. And it's like

having a different language. You see, if

you got another language, you got

another soul, right? You also get a

chance in reading to see how other

people observe human interactions. I

read the, you know, some great genius

writers say, "Man, that's great." And as

I said before, not that I want to be

just like him or her, but I now I see

what people that it's cap I'm capable of

ascribing to that sort of uh uh

concision or or poetry if you will. And

uh most of the writers I read, it's not

so much the dialogue that I appreciate,

although I'll mention three of them. One

of them is uh George V. Higgins who was

a assistant district attorney in Boston

for many years and wrote about 30 novels

about Boston the the the interaction

between the criminal world and the legal

world in Boston. He was a genius. Uh

another one was Patrick O'Brien who

wrote 22 C novels taking place during

the Napoleonic wars and he just died

about 15 years ago in his 90s. And the

third was John Licare who had of course

been a spy and wrote about the secret

world and their dialogue is is just

spectacular.

And we mentioned Hemingway and I'm sure

I'll think of a whole whole bunch more.

Uh well another one is Don Powell who

wrote in the 40s and 50s in New York

City. Nobody reads her much anymore.

Great great writer. There's a piece that

Hemingway wrote in a a book called

Islands in the Stream. And it takes

place in uh there's this painter, a

famous painter who's the hero. And

writers always love to pick painters for

their heroes cuz they think, "Oh my god,

you know, I'm being a writer. I loathe

every second of it except the time that

that I don't. And then I loathe myself

for being proud of myself." But

painters, man, they got it easy. They

just sit down and blah blah blah. They

paint a little bit of this, but they

must have it really easy. So writers

love having having painter heroes. So

this painter hero and who's divorced

from a movie star and he hasn't seen the

woman movie star in years and years and

years and it's during World War II and

our painter hero is living in Cuba and

uh the movie star shows up, the woman

movie star, and they have a bunch of

drinks and they take a walk on the beach

and they have a son who's in the Air

Force. They take a walk and out of

nowhere he says, "Uh, it's the boy."

Yeah. Isn't it? She says, "Yeah." He

says, "Uh, he's dead, isn't he?" She

says, "Sure."

It's a genius.

Drama has nothing to do with

information. Drama is storytelling

that's that that that assembles the

clan. Information is is um

information is the compiling of facts

which may or may not be useful and also

which may or may not be true. So I don't

why would I want to give people

information? It's all we do all day is

we get information. Almost all of it's a

lie and even the true stuff we don't act

upon. Right? It's other people's job is

to give people information. Right? or in

the case of newspapers, misinformation.

My job is to tell them a story. Period.

It's not my job to be informative. My

job to be interesting. I got a special

way of being interesting that pays my

rent. It's called uh uh writing drama.

I'm I'm just a class clown. Uh uh

writing drama.

That that that's what I do for a living.

He used to say in the old days in this

movie business you meet a writer you say

what do you do he'd say I write gags and

titles because that goes back to the

silent era they made up gags and they

wrote the titles in silent film we've

all seen a silent film so the writing of

gags uh is is magnificent because if you

look at Buster Keaton's films for

example he's structuring this wonderful

progression which is like a joke the end

of which the gag is surprising and

inevitable. So even in the early talkie

days the hip writers would say what are

you doing say I write gags and titles

and I'm going to pick up the phrase from

from the old days. The other thing about

titles which is interesting to me in

black and white films is they're none of

them are necessary.

If you take everyone out of every black

and white film changes nothing.

But the tradition of writing titles

exists today in the unfortunate

tradition of conveying information. CBS

used to drive me [ __ ] crazy. I mean,

it shows they'd say, "Okay, uh the scene

takes place in the Senate uh Senate uh

offices." I say, "Okay." They say, "Oh,

got to have an establishing shot of

Washington."

I say, "Well, where else would the

Senate offices be?" "No, we got to have

an establishing shot."

I say, "Put it put an establishing."

Okay. Put an establishing shot. I look

at it on TV and there's establishing

shot and superimposed of the capital

building. Superimposed as what?

Washington DC. What? Who? Who? Who is

this for the benefit of,

right? A, it matters that it's in a room

with a bunch of fat white guys who look

like senators. We'll assume it's the

Senate, right? B, where would the Senate

be even? not in Washington DC. Is there

going to help anybody understand the

scene? Right. Right. They're fat

corporate types. And see, so I did my

first movie, House of Games, and uh we

shot it in Seattle and the guys who re

who uh

released it, a guy, think a guy called

Orion, guy called Bill Bernstein, and he

says, "You have to have an establishing

shot." I say, "Why?" He says, "How will

people know it's Seattle?" I said, "It's

not important that Seattle. It's a

city." He says, "No, no, no, no, no. You

have to have an establishing shot."

I said, "Oh, [ __ ] Okay." So, I go to,

you know, my favorite department, the

toy department. I say to props, "Okay,

we have have to have an establishing

shot of Seattle. Here's what we need. We

need a ter

of Seattle, right? A big fat poster

Seattle skyline. And then we need a

mirror. Okay? And then we need like a

little wooden tugboat with a string.

Okay. And we're gonna pull the tugboat

across, right? Like that. And then we

need a a watering can

making it rain. And so we shoot the shot

and the tugboat's coming along. And the

watering can I say, "You got to get the

watering can in the shot." So they bring

the watering can in the shot and they

pull the tugboat. So we sent it to send

it to uh Orion said, "There's your as

your establishing shot.

What you want to do is take off, you

want to take off the um the excess

flesh. Friend of mine when she was

young, she danced for the Elvin a

company and she came and said two

things. She said what Elvin wanted to do

is two things. He said first he said

take off the tights. He said I want to

see what your legs actually look like.

And he said the second here's the

audition. Walk across the room. He said

I'll figure it out. I thought oh good.

Those two good things. So, you got to

take out the excess flesh. You got to

make sure you don't cut too deeply,

though. And that's why you have to work

for the audience. Are they keeping up?

Good. And you haven't cut too deeply.

Are they going to sleep? Bad. Then you

haven't cut deeply enough. If they get

it, you don't want to say it twice. The

test is how little one can put up. Like

the world's great great juggling Michael

Motion and he used to work with Big

Apple Circ. He worked all over. I I

don't know what he's doing these days,

but one point he said, "Okay, you know,

I can juggle 14 balls. I'm just going to

juggle one ball." And he did a routine

with of just juggling one ball. Most

beautiful thing anybody ever saw,

you know, or like, you know, Misha

Bishnikov, right? You watch him dancing

like he doesn't have the athleticism

that he that he had when he was young.

Who does? But you just walk and walk

watch them walk across the street and

and just turn uh across the stage and

turn direction and it's the most

beautiful beautiful thing you ever saw.

What can you do without? That's the

question, not what can you put in.

I did a movie called Spartan and it's uh

with Billy Macy and Val Kilmer and uh

and um

Kristen Bell and it's pretty good movie

and there's no narration in it.

Somebody's been kidnapped. You don't

know who she is. Somebody's sent to find

her. You don't know who who he is. You

don't quite And Macy paid me the highest

compliment. He said, "You know, there's

not one second of narration in that

whole damned movie." I Well, that's a

great that's a great compliment, right?

because anybody can write narrations.

It's why anybody can write television

because it's all basically narration.

And one of the um hallmarks of soap

opera, which most television drama is,

is two people talking about something

that happened offstage. They don't want

anything from each other. They're

saying, "Did you see that Dr. Jim, whose

sister is an albino? Do you know that he

didn't get arrested for the blah blah

blah, but he got arrested for the da da

da?" No, no, no. I can't talk about that

now because nurse Tweeie over there as

you know. So

that's the death of drama. And I tried

to tell writers that when I was working

on a television show that phrase as you

know cuz who who we talking to?

There's a time and a place for

everything, you know, except cilantro.

And we mentioned kale, right?

And um somebody asked Woody Allen, they

said, "Woody, if you had your life to

live over again, what would you do

differently?" He said, "I do everything

exactly the same, but I wouldn't see the

ice capes."

I thought that was one of the hippest

things anybody ever said. So narration,

I don't know. I What does it add? You

know, I fly across the country and I

watch them watch movies, but I always

watch them with the sound off because we

were talking about the woman who said

Elvin Haley said, "No, you know, you

know, you got let's see what you like.

Let's see if you got muscles or not.

Take it tight." So, watch the movie with

the sound off. See, does it make sense,

right? They're all pretty wretched, but

some of them aren't, but you got to

watch it with the sound off and see if

it makes sense.

So the question is if I'm using in

effect marital aids to make the thing

work such as montage such as narration

there may be something wrong with my mar

you know if the magic has gone to that

extent out of the marriage maybe I

should have fixed it on day one so when

we talking about airplanes

you want to fix a problem on the ground

right you don't want to fix it in the

air you can fix it on the ground if you

can fix it in the script

fix it then don't shoot something you

don't intend to keep. Right? Don't write

something you don't intend to shoot.

Keep it simple, stupid. Fix your

problems. Now, cuz they're just going to

they're just going to burgeon.

My son and I uh we like to read

magazines at night and he likes um

gaming, you know, being 18-year-old. So,

we read a lot of gaming magazines, and

gaming magazines are interesting to me

because unlike, for some reason, unlike

most um hobbyist magazines, they're

dreadfully written. I I love hobbyist

magazine as somebody who just loves what

they're doing. Doesn't matter model

airplanes or model model boats or tulip

culture or poodle grooming. I just love

the fact that they're so interested. But

these magazines are really dreadfully

written. at least the ones that he gets.

So maybe some aren't. And so they say

things like the reason for this fact is

because of the prevailing fact that

prior to this happening and I say

rewrite that and he says okay when

I say yeah that's right okay she's got a

great sense cut. What do you actually

mean to say? There's an old phrase that

says if you

if you can't express your thoughts

clearly your thoughts are muddied. So

cut cut. As I used to say, shoot for

show, cut for dough.

If you have to narrate it, the audience

might understand, but they'll no longer

care.

You want them to care,

right? If you have to narrate,

a plane goes down in the middle of the

ocean. On this plane is Jessica

Chastain. She is also there's one other

survivor and they they are no ability to

communicate with the outside world. In

fact, the plane has been blown off

course. So no one will ever know

what island they are on. Thus they real

Okay. All you got to say is this guy's

on a desert island with Jessica

Chastain. That's that's where the the

story starts there. the the the what do

you call the backstory or the prequel is

narration. Nobody cares. You come why do

you know you're watching the movies on

TV going to the other room to get a beer

right? You come back 15 minutes later

you haven't missed anything right if it

were holding your attention you wouldn't

go get the beer would you? No.

So what I said to these writers as

working on a television show is your

living and my living depends on your

ability and my ability to get the

audience to come back after the

commercial, right? Just like you rush

back, you know, when the commercials are

wonderful commercials are over for Geico

insurance, but they're going to start,

you know, Green Bay is has got the the

ball on the three yard line. You're not

going to say, "Well, I'll catch up with

it later.

How do you not fall into the trap of

exposition? There's only one way in the

world, and that's you have to stage your

plays in front of a paying audience,

right? You stage them in front of mom

and dad. They're going to say they loved

it. You'll say, "Well, you'd say that

anyway, wouldn't you?" And they say,

"Yeah." So, you say, "Mom and dad, how

can I believe you?" The answer is, "You

can't. You can't believe mom and dad."

You can't believe anybody at the school

cuz why? Cuz they want to keep you in

school, right? If you're more talented

than they can possibly imagine, they're

going to give you a failing grade,

right? If you're middle of the road, uh,

and they want to keep you in school,

they'll they'll they'll praise your work

to the sky. In a school, they're going

to assign you actors so you don't have

to engage actors through the worth of

your of your writing. You got to go out

and and and and get the stuffing kicked

out of you. That's the only way you can

learn. The only, you know, how you learn

to def defend yourself in a in a in a in

in boxing is by sparring with someone

getting hurt. You say, "Oh, I get it. I

get it. I got hurt. I better defend

myself." Right? Learn to land an

airplane. You better learn how to land

the airplane or you're going to die.

It's that simple. So, if if your

self-esteem or your livelihood

depends on learning these lessons,

you'll learn them or you'll you'll quit.

And it's not for the the faint of heart.

So there's no way in which these lessons

are going to become clear to you guys

who are starting writing because you

can't know. And for the largest extent I

can't know. I write something I think

it's perfect. I put it in a rehearsal

hall. I see oh my god it's overwritten.

I rewrite it. I say it's perfect. I put

it in front of the audience. I say no I

just made a dreadful dreadful error.

Right? So what I can do that you can't

do a lot of you can absolutely write is

I know how to cut. Right? Because as

painful as it is to cut, it's more

painful to be shamed by the audience

going to sleep. I believe it was the

great Billy Wilder who said, "When the

lights go down, you've got their

attention. You've got their attention."

And friends I know who went to Ranger

School say, "When you go to Ranger

School, the first thing they say is,

"Okay, welcome to Ranger School. You are

now an Army Ranger. You have three

months to see if you can keep that

status." When the lights go down, you

got their attention. Can you keep it?

How do you know if you're going to keep

it or not? Well, if you have intuition,

that's good. And then you got to test it

to find out where you're wrong.

The scene has to contain a

uh an attempt of the hero to achieve a

goal. That's it. That goal has to be

part of an a

rockhard structure of a journey from A

to B. Right? For example, we talked

about getting to the airport, right? The

scene could be I'm I I need the elevator

to get downstairs, but the elevator is

broken. Oh my god, what am I going to

do? I can't get to the elevator without

getting downstairs. Right? So, this is

an essential scene. The beginning of the

scene is the elevator don't work right.

I got to get downstairs. How am I going

to do it?

That's every scene. Well, I better take

the stairs. Oh my god, there's a fire on

the stairs. Maybe I got to go up to the

roof and jump over. Maybe I got to get a

helicopter, but I got to get out of the

building. There's three questions. Who

wants what from who? What happens if

they don't get it? Why now? You got to

be able to answer those three simple

questions about any scene, about any

play. who wants what from whom? What

happens if they don't get it and why?

Now, for example, when going across

country, if

if you don't get to Los Angeles, your

dog, they're going to shoot your dog.

You're going to exercise a certain

amount of energy in getting to Los

Angeles. If you don't get to Los

Angeles, they're going to shoot your

wife. You're going to exercise different

kind of energy. So what happens if they

don't get it informs the urgency of the

of the is the urgency of the scene?

Is the scene essential?

Not is it lovely, but is it essential?

Cuz if it's not essential, throw it out.

And if you look at movies, there's

usually a part, and it's usually the

woman's part. Yeah. That's usually the

woman's part where at some point about

2/ird of the way through she's speaking

very impassionately about what X means

to her, whatever X is. And you're

looking at it and it's always overacted

and you're thinking

that's the audition scene. Of course,

that's the audition scene. They gave her

the part because she did the audition

scene in such a way that was so

predictable that we understood

that it was the obligatory scene. It was

the essence

of the But you don't want one scene to

be the essence of of the movie. You want

the movie to be the essence of the

movie. The question is if you took See,

here's the thing. The question is if you

took it out, not would you miss it, but

if you took it out, would the audience

miss it? That's the only question. cuz

of course you're going to miss it cuz

you wrote it. The question is the

audience goes, "Wait a second. Wait a

second. Wait a second. I understand the

trains on fire, right? And I understand

that we're being bombed by Soviet Russia

and I understand that the child's dying

of leukemia and we have to get to the

next station before Bibbidity Babidity

Boob. But where's the scene where she

talks about her kitten?"

I miss that scene. The audience, just

like the audience does not know what's

behind the camera, the audience doesn't

know what you took out. All they know is

what they're looking at. You got to

learn from the audience. You can't learn

playwriting except from the audience.

You can't learn bull writing except by

getting on the bull. The problem is that

the difficulty is it's going to cost you

something. You got to to pay the price

of putting up with their verdict,

right? Because the verdict is uh you

can't um you can't there is no higher

court. You can't say wait a second

audience do you know how hard I worked?

They don't care. The scene that you

worked for 12 years on and the scene

that you dashed off on the way to the

theater. They don't care. It's none of

their business. Nor should it be. They

just they're saying, "Okay, did you did

you did you do what I expected? Did you

do less? Did you do more?"

An obligatory scene is a scene that

doesn't belong. That it's the like my

good friend Barbara Toiver, my cutter

for many years and colleague, always

takes out the obligatory scene, which is

always my favorite scene. It's the most

heartfelt scene. It's the most moving

scene, you know. And she says, "It's

ruining the movie. It's cutting the

movie." I say, I say, "You I thought you

were my friend and you've betrayed me by

taking up my my baby, my puppy, my

firstborn, my beloved son, Jacob, you

know, and uh or Isaac rather." and she

said, "Yeah, let me explain to you why

everything has happened so far is the

obligatory scene. Let me think of some

examples. I'm sure there are a lot of

examples in in most movies have them.

They have at least several of them where

people stop and they explain to each

other why they have to save the world or

why it's necessary to get this dying

child to the hospital, you know, or or

we get it. If the child's dying, we're

going to assume that that's why you have

to get it to the hospital or how much

they how much they love the old couple

how much they love each other and how

much they've learned from there. All

these buddy movies that one sees about

um how much people have learned from

each other over the years and how

they've finally come to realize that

they need each other. After all, those

movies are all they are is the

obligatory scene. Who cares? Nobody

cares, right? the people who are making

it don't care. Yeah. So, in the mo movie

Munich, right, there's the Munich.

There's a wonderful No, I can't even use

that word. And one of the most

horrifying things I've ever seen is a

documentary docu magnificent documentary

called One Day in September. And it's

about the Munich massacre where the PLO

came in into the Olympic Village in 1972

and kidnapped and murdered uh 11 Israeli

athletes. And it's a spectacular

documentary. It's narrated by Michael

Douglas. And there's one shot from the

news footage of the time where

the screen is taken up by a barricade

and the building is barricaded and

there's all these shooters up here and

all these shooters down over there and

they can see the the masked terrorists

inside, you know, with masks over their

face holding guns. And then the camera

pans over to the right and you see that

just on the other side of this wall is

the Olympic village and they're playing

pingpong and volleyball in the Olympic

village.

So rather than the Germans, God bless

them, saying, "Excuse me, the Olympics

are now over and going in and killing

the the uh the kidnappers."

They said, "No, no, it's more important

for the Olympics to continue." And PS,

we aren't going to kill the kidnappers

because we're afraid of reprisals. So,

we'll let the kidnappers uh uh kill the

Jews, which they did. And so, uh

Spielberg, I believe, made a movie about

it. And I think Tony Tony Kushner wrote

the script. And at one point, one of the

guys from the Mossad, which is the

Israeli foreign for foreign intelligence

operations,

finds himself in a building with a

Palestinian who was on the on the other

side and they meet on the staircase and

they have a talk.

That's an obligatory scene,

right?

It's it's useless and it's not the story

that he said he was going to tell. It's

a story, but it's not that story.

If a scene bores you as you're writing,

it's going to write bore the actors when

they're acting it, and it's going to

bore the audience when they're looking

at it. So, everybody's going to try to

take up the slack. The actors are going

to try to do more, which is the last

thing that you you want them to do. The

directors going to try to do more with

the actors, which is the last thing you

want to do. that the scene designer is

going to try to do something

interesting. Big deal. Stannislovski

said, "Any director who does something

interesting with the text doesn't

understand the text." It's like the old

pilots uh adage, if there's any doubt,

there's no doubt.

Or if there's any doubt that you can

make it from point A to point B with the

gas in the plane, there's no doubt. Stay

on the ground. If you think it's

failing, it is failing probably. Try it

out on the audience. They're you're no

different than they are. If you're

bored, they're they're bored. If you

say, "Okay, I gotta get this thing in

here." They're going to reject it cuz

the audience know less than the kid at

bedtime doesn't like cautionary tales,

right? They don't like being force-fed

stuff that's good for them.

I just went up to this house from

Vermont that I've been living for more

than 40 years and many kids and dogs and

marriages and uh outdoor excursions and

collecting this and that and collect

it and I thought my god there's there's

no way I there's no way to do this. I

don't, you know, it was the Aian

stables. I don't even know where to

start. So, the answer was there's no

good place to start. You just jump in

and muck in like the rest of us. And

there was a um talking about poetry.

There was a um a couple of books written

about something called the Jailhouse

Toast. And I don't know if anybody knows

the Jailhouse Toast anymore. The

Jailhouse Toast were and areal

tradition

uh epic poems. I mean the the the uh the

equivalent of the Iliad and the Odyssey

and they came out of the jail house

basically black jailhouse in the south

and became current throughout the jail

system and I encountered them with some

ex-convicts in I used to hang out with

in Chicago in the 60s and one of them

was called um the stagal toast and went

on forever and people would add you know

just like cadence in the military they

would add to it they would embellish it

they would throw in the verses one was

called The stagly went uh um talked

about your gamblers. You ought to see my

Richard Lee shot $10,000 and he come out

on a three. When you lose your money,

learn to lose. And the stackly was this

bad man, a black man, a bad man. And it

went on forever and people would

embellish it. And another one was called

the signifying monkey way down in the

jungle with what he I can't see

signifying monkey uh climbed up a tree.

And that would go on forever and people

would add to it. And one was called the

Titanic. uh the Titanic toast, which was

a toast about the Titanic went down in

1912 and about this guy who was um a

black um stoer and he got on the Titanic

as a Stoker and he's talking a lot about

Jack Johnson who was the champion of the

world but they wouldn't let him on the

Titanic because he was African-American

and it saved his life because the

Titanic went down and so Stacle has to

save the captain's life and the captain

is saying uh uh check that the Stoker I

forgotten his name has got to save the

captain's life and he says oh my god my

daughter, what will the answer be? And

the guy says, "Get your ass in the water

and swim like me." So, a guy came out of

Harvard University

in the 70s and he wrote a history of

jailhouse toasts with a great title, get

your ass in the water and swim like me.

So, that's that's my advice to you guys.

I don't have a secret that I'd like to

share with you about my process because

I know what my process is. And if I did,

I wouldn't tell you for fear of God

forbid offending it. But if you like,

I'll make up something. You know how

Hemingway always wrote standing up.

You've heard that. Everyone's heard

that, right? Well, I write sitting down.

You got to sit down at the damn desk and

as Hemingway said, sit down with the

typewriter and bleed. throw away all the

distractions and write something. If you

can write it better, write it better. If

you think it's perfect, put it on and

learn from the audience, rewrite it, and

write another one. I mean, who who where

else you going to learn how to write? I

used to spent many, many decades in this

little cabin in Vermont with no um

heated by wood, with no electricity, and

an oil lamp and a candle and I had

nothing to do except read, write, and

take a nap. So eventually, you know, at

the end of the day, at some point, maybe

you come up with a new idea. You say,

"Well, it's 4:00. I got 20 more minutes

of light left, but thank God I'm done

for the day." Oh, what about if? So, you

got to have leisure in order to write.

You have to have a lack of um

distractions.

And I was very fortunate to have that

for a number of years before the

computer age when I just wrote with a

pencil, pen, and wrote with a

typewriter. There weren't any

distractions. So I had to amuse myself.

So amuse myself by writing.

I tried writing on a computer once. I

don't like it because um there's

something about the the sound and the

rhythm and the tactile feel because when

you you're writing, you know, what are

you doing? I mean there's basically

nothing there except your own diseased

consciousness. So you want to So I

anyway become very very attached to the

very very few artifacts

that are around me like an old

typewriter or an old pen and also that's

how I make my living. So you ever been

lost in the woods? You know the things

that helped you get out whether you know

it's a firearm or a knife or a compass

you know you're going to you're going to

treasure them. They have a a real

meaning for you. I mean obviously I'm

going to uh praise those things which I

found good

uh and uh suggest that they were

universal good. They perhaps they aren't

the universal good. Perhaps they're just

good for me. But what was good for me

was a beautiful fountain pen and uh some

nice paper and a typewriter and doing a

million drafts and having the drafts all

in front of me. So, I never learned to

use a computer. And I understand that

people could do use computers now fairly

exclusively, but I wouldn't want to do

that. A because I'm lazy. I don't want

to learn the new thing. And B because I

I have an affinity for the things that I

that I know and love. And so, I'm going

to um universalize that and saying, "Oh,

that's the only way to write. I I don't

I don't know that it's the only way to

write. It's the only way to write for

me.

A play's got to be crafted. I mean, you

can start with a a precipitating event.

You can start with a line of dialogue,

but what you want to be is inspired. Cuz

if if it's not fun for you, it's not

going to be fun for the audience. If you

know at the beginning, you're in a lot

of trouble.

It's like saying, "I know the perfect

girl. I'll know her when I see her."

Because look here. Here's what she's

going to be like, right? Bity bobby boo.

Uh-uh.

Right. If you say, "Yes, I have this

feeling about this person over there,

but obviously it's not on it's not as

part of my plan, so I can't pay

attention to that." You're in a lot of

trouble. It's the same thing. If you

start out and you know what that drama

is kabing, when you sit down,

you're not delving into your unconscious

mind. And the so the audience will not

participate with their unconscious mind.

They will participate with their

conscious mind. Oh yes, I see. And Frank

shouldn't have been pursued by the

Nazis. H thank you. I really Right. But

so what? Right. None of them are going

to go, "Ooh,

whatever you do first, you're going to

have to do the other thing." Right? If

you write the scenes, you're eventually

going to have to do the structure and

they're going to inform each other and

you'll reform your diagnosis. You write

the structure first, eventually you're

going to have to do the scenes and

they'll reform each other and you'll and

the best thing is when you come to the

end of the process, you say, "My god, I

was I was wrong all around." That's not

what this play is about. Oh my god. And

you get a little bit of inspiration and

because you get stuck with it,

theoretically the audience can go

through the same thing. They're not

going to go through anything you haven't

gone through. The tough part in dramatic

writing for me is at some point you got

to say, "Okay, I'm done screwing around,

right? I got three hours worth of the

most beautiful scenes anybody ever

wrote. I'm going to have to sit down and

wade through them and throw them out and

structure them into something that I

don't want. I I I there's nothing in the

world I would rather do less, but I'm

going to do it because I'm tired of

these damned notes." If you go out to

uh where my archive is in Texas, I mean,

they have hundreds of pages of notes on

on movies. I just I can't figure it out.

I can't figure it out. I can't figure it

out until some point I say, "Oh my god,

duh."

And that's why the audience will go

through the process because I went

through it.

Davy Crockett once, somebody's once

said, "Dave Crockett, were you ever

lost?" He says, "I was never lost, but I

was once a might bewildered for three

weeks." So, I don't know if I experience

writer's block, but I experience, you

know, sometimes I I get stuck. So, what

I'll do, I'll take a nap or I'll write

something else or I'll force myself. So,

it's very hard to know if the correct

answer any any given day is go back for

God's sake and pick up where you left

off and figure it out or the correct

answer is take the day off and, you

know, go take a walk. It's hard to know.

I work on I work on one thing until I

get bored or get blocked and then I go

home and complain and then I come back

the next day and work on it again. And

my wife always says she knows when

something's going great when Monday and

Wednesday I'm saying it's the best thing

ever written and Tuesday and Thursday

are saying I'm going to kill myself. I'm

a no good hack.

There's an old joke about the they used

to have the writer rooms at the studios,

right? Where they put the writers in

these rooms, they're kind of prisons and

they put 10 of them there and they and

they used to have studio spies and the

spy when they he came around and he

reported to his boss. He says, "I stood

outside the writing room and there was

one guy in there. He wasn't writing for

three whole minutes. As far as I know,

writing is is mainly thinking. It's

thinking and worrying and writing and

thinking and worrying and taking a nap

and and trying to jump out the window

and eventually something gets done.

You're not quite sure how. I try not to

write on the on the weekends, but other

than that, I just write every day. And I

used to work in this cabin very much

like this in Vermont. And one day, I got

up and I I try to get there 9:30, 10

o'clock in the morning. and I got my

little mug of tea and my daughter who's

now 33 was 10 and she said, "Dad, where

you going?" I said, "Well, I'm going off

to write." She said, "Nighty night."

Cuz a lot of my writing those days and

this consistent taking a nap cuz

sometimes you just get burnt out.

Well, eventually you have to end up with

an outline uh for a play eventually and

especially for a movie. So, I don't know

if I mentioned before, but what I try to

do is take an unformed idea and write

scenes and notes and blah blah blah till

I can get the outline down to uh 15

lines on one page. And that's going to

be the movie. And so what I do when I've

directed the movie, I've written and

directed a movie, I've gotten the

script, but I've rewritten the script

and I've reduced the script to a series

of sequences that I can remember. And

I've reduced the sequences to the

scenes, and I've reduced the scenes to

the shot list. so that I know every shot

in the movie before I step set foot onto

the the the set. And when I set foot

onto the set, of course, I never look at

the notes. Why? Because I know them.

Because if I don't know them when I

stand up on the set, I' I've done

something wrong. Now, I may, and many

times will uh uh come off the shot list.

But if I don't got the shot and get a

better idea, or somebody might say,

"What about this?" But if I don't got

the shot list, if I don't have that

outline, what am I shooting when I get

onto the set? I I I was talking to some

exe executive from a studio and I he

said I said, "How you doing?" He said,

"I've got this big movie coming out.

It's $150 million movie coming out on

Friday. I'm concerned about it." I said,

"Well, why are you concerned about it?"

He said, "Well, the ending doesn't

work." And I thought, "Well, why didn't

you fix it? If you know if the ending

doesn't work, who's going to sprinkle

fairy dust on your movie? If the outline

doesn't work, the movie's not going to

work. And so that's there's this thing

called the pitch process, right? Where

you come in and you talk to some

executive for 10 minutes or 5 minutes

and the executive says, "Tell me the

movie." You're pitching the movie to

them, right? If you can't pitch the

movie in 3 minutes and keep their

attention, not only aren't they going to

make the movie, you aren't going to make

the movie because you don't know what

the movie is. You got to be able to tell

it in those three minutes. You got to be

able to tell it in those 15 lines. And

one of the great lessons I learned in

movie making came from a um a continuity

supervisor and she was working on doing

the the day out of days of the board or

whatever the hell it was. What you do is

you put down uh scene one uh or or day

one. Scene one, uh Alice finds her dogs

missing. Scene two, she tries to contact

the veterinarian to get the chip number.

Scene three, the veterinarian, she finds

the veterinarian's dead. Scene four,

blah blah blah. So that each scene is a

subtle reminder, a a succinct reminder

rather, to everybody. What's scene four

again? Oh yeah, scene four is she can't

find her collages. I get it. That's the

scene we're doing. So the continuity

supervisor was looking at the board and

she said, "Wait a second. We got two

scenes here that sound kind of like

they're the same scene." And so I looked

at it and I thought, "Well, that's

wisdom. If two scenes on the board sound

like they're the same scene, obviously I

don't need both of them. I might not

even need either one of them.

Something's out of whack. I'm going to

fix it on the outline so I don't so I

don't have to fix it on the set. So I

don't end up having to fix it in the

editing room. So I don't end up with an

unreleasable movie because I somehow

thought someone was going to sprinkle

the fairy dust on it. There isn't any

fairy dust. It's just a story. If you

can't tell it to the next guy, you can't

make a movie out of it.

Writing dramatically is rewriting. You

have to rewrite all the time. Rewrite

all the time. Rewrite all the time. I

made a lot of movies as both as a

director and as a screenwriter. And they

say you make a movie three times. You

make it when you write it, you make it

when you shoot it, and you make it when

you cut it. And so I write a script and

I go work for very hard on a script.

It's like a because that's what I do for

a living and b because I find it

fascinating. And I take the script in

front of the camera, say, "This is the

best script anybody ever made. This is

going to be the best movie. I have

nothing wrong with the script. It's

perfect." And you start filming, you

say, "This is a croc of dre. What what

have I done? Oh my god, I better I

better try again. And you shoot it and

you say, "This is the best movie anybody

ever made. It's perfect." You get into

the editing room and all anybody ever

says in the editing room is, "Get me out

of here. I am the dumbest son of a gun

that ever lived. What have I done? Oh my

god." And then again, you know, you

preview the things. Okay, it's perfect.

And you go through the process again.

Writing is rewriting because it's

getting rid of your bad ideas because

there's something that lives outside of

your head that's trying to tell you

something. If you say, "Okay, I want to

make a I want to write a story about a

guy

who becomes king of thieves."

There's something that's beyond your

consciousness that does that says,

"Okay, listen to me." Right? listen to

me

because I don't want you to write a

cautionary tale. I don't want you to

write the stuff that we can figure out

daytoday. Right? Like Freud said,

there's such a thing called psychic

economy. He says he says you're going to

have very serious problems in your life,

right? One of them is do I hire Sally or

do I hire Rebecca? Right? But you're not

going to dream about it, right? Cuz your

your dream time is precious. You're only

going to dream about the stuff that you

can't solve rationally.

So drama is dream time. You don't want

to write a drama about oh my god deaf

deaf people are people too. Oh my god.

Thank you. Thank you dramatist. You want

to write a drama about the stuff that

you that you can't figure that doesn't

quite have a rational solution and

that's driving you nuts.

That's that's the correct use of drama.

You know, I was talking to a friend of

mine was a spent decades as an ER doctor

and she said, we're talking about

something. She said, "It's very simple.

They come in. If it's X, they're going

to die. If it's Y, they'll probably make

it into the O, right? If if if I can get

them to the O, I've done my job. I have

five things I got to ask. What's their

temperature? What's their what's their

pulse? What are their vital signs?"

Bibbidity bobby boo. Right? That's how

the ER doctor looks at the person who

comes in off the car crash, right? You

or I are going to look at the person and

say, "Oh my god, look at the this. Look

at the that. Doctor, doctor, doctor, I

have to tell you they're on this

medicine." Doctor says, "Shut up and go

away. I got a list of things I got to

do." That will get me there faster than

yours. Then I understand that you're

involved, but I got to be um clinical.

And so that's what you got to be when

you're looking at your own work. You got

to be clinical. And the one thing that I

love to do, love it, is to cut,

right? Because that's that's to me the

utmost generosity, right? It's saying,

"Yep, this is a scene. It's better to

scene anybody ever wrote. Oh, it don't

work." Boom. So, somebody else might

say, "Yes, but I say, uh-uh." My biggest

fear in life is that the audience is

going to beat me to the punchline.

You got to write it down. You write it

down. There's is there is there magic

involved? Probably. But the all you guys

out there, write it down. There's no way

that you can um subvert the process.

There are many ways you can try. One is

to stay in school. One is to get better

um more or trickier software. Another

one is, as I've done for my whole life,

write lots and lots of outlines. But

finally, they say in the screenplay, the

hardest two word words to write are fade

in. At some point, you're going to say,

"Okay, it's going to be bad." You got to

stand being bad. If you want to be a

writer,

because if you don't, you're never going

to write anything good.

a wonderful man named Anthony Trrollop

who wrote 47 novels uh in the late

Victorian period from 1860 to 1880

1890 47 novels and his day job was

running the British post office and so

he paid a guy to come in and wake him up

every morning make him get out of bed at

5:00 in the morning because at 8:00 he

had to run the post office and he would

sit down every morning at 5:00 and he

would write 2500 words and he'd up and

if he wrote 20 if he wrote 1,500 words

and that finished the novel, he'd write

another thousand words of the beginning

of the next novel. And that was his his

his uh that's what he did. Everybody has

their own ways and it doesn't make any

difference. I used to beat myself up

constantly because I said, "Oh, Dave,

you don't have any discipline." I I

know, Dave, you don't have any

discipline because everybody told you

you don't have any discipline. You

stupid son of a gun. You know, sometimes

you go to work and you just stare at the

thing. Sometimes you walk around.

Sometimes you take a nap. You don't have

any discipline. So discipline was a a

rod used to beat dreamy kids or back in

the day and it may still be.

But I realized well there's another

meaning of discipline which is I have

the discipline to look at something

truthfully and say I can do better or to

look at something that I don't want to

do cuz it's hard and say no you have the

discipline to stick with it until you're

done cuz when you put your name on it

that's your name on it that's your name

at the top of the paper you know

so that's a different kind of discipline

and um the great Leo Tol story talks

about this in the Anakarana where

Karenan has this son called Sergey and

Sergey is a dreamer

and Karen the kind of martinet father is

saying no no no I'm trying to talk to

you about the difference between an

adjective and an adverb can't you get

into your head the difference between an

adjective and an adverb it's so simple

and he gets into the kid's head told the

kid's looking out the window and he's

looking at a butterfly and he's thinking

about wind currents and he's thinking

about what causes the wind and the

rotation of the earth and the kid is

trying so hard

to bring his attention back so as not to

disappoint or not not to be ungrateful

to his father but he's dreaming and uh

you know that's what I done all my life

and a lot a lot of people I think we all

do to a certain extent and difference in

me is I wrote it on.

There's not a lot that we can learn as

humans, right? Because we're stupid. We

really are. And Bill, myself more more

than anyone else. Billy Wilder was a

great great uh wasn't a better director

and there wasn't a better screenwriter.

And he said

the audience, he said, individually

they're idiots.

Collectively they're a genius. And

that's been my experience. Individually

they like like me

are idiots, right? But collectively you

cannot fool them. And I've done my stuff

in every medium that I know of all

around the world. I've never met a dumb

audience. Never. because they cuz they

they they the lights go out and the

button gets pushed. Okay, tell me a

story, right? And if you're interesting

interesting them, they'll follow along.

And if it's funny, they'll laugh. And if

it's not funny, they won't,

right? And if it's and if if it's

stunning, they'll gasp. And I mean,

that's you you know, you can extort a um

standing ovation out of any audience in

the world. You can extort it, right? But

you can't extort a laugh out of them and

you can't extort a gasp out of them.

They did that. Boy, you've done

something.

I learned something really important

years and years ago. I think we're on in

the same studio where I shot um Sydney

Lamett shot the movie The Verdict of

Paul Newman and uh and I and Sydney

asked me to write a couple other movies

for him and one of them was the

autobiography of Malcolm X. That that

script never got made. Eventually Spike

Lee made his version, but I really loved

um uh doing research and one of the

research that I did was reading from the

Quran in English. I got a big kick out

of it. And one thing that the Quran says

is the prophet Muhammad says he says I'm

I'm leaving now.

But I'm going to leave you two teachers.

There's a speaking teacher and a silent

teacher. The speaking teacher is this

book, the Quran, and the silent teacher

is death.

I thought, well, okay, you know, and

then I started thinking about drama. I

thought, how do you teach people about

drama? And there's only two two things

that can teach the people about drama.

There's the silent teacher and the

speaking teacher. And the speaking

teacher is the audience. You cannot

learn how to write drama without writing

plays, putting it on in front of an

audience, and getting humiliated.

Nothing makes any sense until you do

that. Until you've used your

consciousness and you said, "This is

this will kill them. This is the best

thing anybody ever wrote. It's going to

grab them by the throat and they won't

be able to look up." and then you watch

the audience go to sleep and you're

humiliated. You found you were an error,

you have to try again. And if you're

easily shamed, you're not going to

learn. So that's the um the speaking

teacher, the audience. You cannot learn

to write drama without an audience. And

the silent teacher is the empty page.

You got to look at that empty page and

say, "Man, somebody's trying to tell me

something.

I got to start to listen." Because the

process to me, and I think the process

to most artists doesn't feel like

creation so much as it feels like

discovery, there's something there. If I

start with this premise, there's

something there. Something's trying to

tell me something and it wants to get

onto that page.

And it's kind of like saying, well, they

say, well, oh, can things exist

non-verbbally? Can is that possible? Of

course they can. because we've all had

the experience of saying I I almost know

what the word is but I don't quite right

I almost can express this it exists

outside of your mind right and trying to

be become a re a receptacle for that is

the to me is the um uh the silent uh the

silent teacher

there's an old Jewish proverb that says

says flattery

is theft.

So you say, "Oh, that's interesting.

Flattery is theft." They say, "Yeah,

flattery is theft. To flatter someone is

to try to steal from them a little bit

of their capacity to make an independent

judgment."

So they teach the Orthodox, don't talk

about people, don't flatter them. Okay?

So flattering the audience by appealing

to their whatever their political biases

is theft.

You know, one can do it, but uh as

Richard Nixon said, I could do it, but

it would be wrong, right? That as I

think I said previously, they're pretty

smart. There's they're smarter than you

are. They're smarter than one is.

They're going to beat you to the

punchline if you let them. And um what

they did is they paid you the compliment

of coming to see your play or movie and

throwing a couple bucks in the kitty.

So, you can repay that compliment

saying, "Okay, I'm going to show you a

good time. If it's a comedy, you're

going to laugh. And if it's a tragedy,

you're going to cry. You know, if if if

I sell myself short and sell them short,

they might go along with it for for

reasons of political reasons, or they

might go along with because, well, I I

paid my money. I'm going to give it a

standing ovation. I'm going to make sure

I got my money's worth. But, uh, where's

the sport in that?

Suspending disbelief is you sit down.

Like somebody said, there's only one

difference between a fairy tale and a

war story. A fairy tale starts once upon

a time and a war story starts this is no

[ __ ] right? It's the same thing. It's

all a fairy tale, right? Because we

dramatize even if a quote actually

happened, we don't remember it

correctly. So, we dramatize it for our

own benefit or we dramatize it for

dramatic effect. Like just like saying

the bus was 1 hour and 12 minutes late.

Well, maybe it was eight minutes later,

right? It felt like 1 hour, 12 minutes,

everyone's going, "Uhhuh." They're

listening to the story around around the

campfire. They they they are not going

to judge. When you listen to the story

around the campfire or when we gossip,

gossip is just creating dialogue. Millie

says to him blah blah blah and Bob said,

"Bibby bobby boo." Millie comes back and

she says, "Blah blah blah." When you're

gossiping like that, that's as good as

dialogue as anybody else can write,

right? because you're doing it for

unconsciously for the dramatic effect of

narrating not what happened but the

essence of what happened for the benefit

of benefit of the listener. So gossip is

is is dramatizing uh for your for your

audience and the audience goes along

when you gossip the person suspends

disbelief. They say, "Okay, this is not

a question of is it true or is it false?

I'm going to put it into a third

category." Right? I'm listening to

gossip. What's more enjoyable? Nothing.

In fact, I'm going to add to the

dialogue. Merely says blah blah and Bob

says blah blah. You say, "Uh-huh." And

what did what did Sammy say? Right? So,

if you listen if you were to record a

gossip session, the the rhythms would be

magnificent. They'd be perfect. Right?

People are doing it unconsciously just

like the guy in Tartu who was told he

spoke pros his whole life, right? And he

was thrilled to find out that he spoke

pros.

So the the person listening to a war

story, to a fairy tale, to a myth, to

gossip, suspends their disbelief. They

which means they stop asking if it's

true or not. It's it's it's true gossip,

right? And so the play can be in that

category. It can be in the category of

true gossip. I get to watch somebody

else's life, right? To see if a

dramatization of it makes sense. I'm not

going to say, "Wait a second. Hold on.

Wait.

Elephants can't fly.

Excuse me. I love this movie." Dumbo.

Great. Love the movie. But elephants

can't actually fly. You know that. I can

prove it already. Right. You suspend

your disbelief.

The audience's journey and the hero's

journey and the writer's journey are all

the same. It's the same thing. They've

elected for one uh evening to have me be

their dosent as you will leading them

through the dark wood by telling them a

story which they understand correctly as

being about themselves. And how do I

know it's about themselves? It's about

me, right? You know, it's and it I think

it was um

I can't remember who it might have been

St. Paul. St. Paul I think said what I

am for you frightens me and what I am

with you comforts me as for you I am a

preacher but with you I am a Christian

right so for the audience for them I am

this writer right but with them I'm just

a human being who likes stories so

that's a great comfort

the the the rabbis say guy comes to the

rabbi says if there's only going to obey

one rule in my life what would that rule

be rabbi says don't lie

pretty good rule hard but it's pretty

real cuz a if you don't lie b you're not

going to do anything you got to lie

about. So I always thought that my

responsibility as a writer and a

director is don't lie that there is

something called the truth which is

exists somewhere in an ideal form

outside of myself and if I really pay

attention I might have access to some of

it and sometimes I don't know the truth

but if I try to find out the truth I'm

doing my job and so if I'm writing a

play it might take me 10 minutes to find

out the truth or it might take me 20

years. But if I say, "No, no, no. This

is not quite true. I can get by with it.

I can cheat with it. The audience might

even buy it. Might even be successful. I

don't know. If it's not quite true, then

I'm not doing my job. So, it's a it's

it's important to me that to tell the

truth. So, in order to tell the truth,

you got to figure out what the truth is.

And that sometimes that's a very

unpleasant process.

Curiously,

the theater is the place we go to hear

the truth.

And the theater in this is like the

religious setting. And I'll prove it to

you.

How many people come late to a movie?

Nobody comes late to a movie. Everybody

gets to the movie early. How many people

come late to church in synagogue?

Everyone. Everyone in the world has the

same experience of for God's sake, we're

late with blah blah blah. Don't change

your shoes. Did you lose your keys? Get

the car. I'll get the kids. We're going

to church. We're going to school. We're

late. Don't we're late. Everybody comes

late. Everybody also comes late to the

theater.

My god, we got tickets to do. We're

late. Blah blah blah. We get But nobody

comes late to the movies. Why? Because

the movies don't challenge them. The

church, the synagogue, and the theater

challenges them so deeply because

there's a human need to hear the truth

challenges so deeply. They have to

retain some measure of autonomy. Right?

I'm not going to say I'm anxious about

the word of God or I'm anxious about the

play. They say, "No, no, I'm anxious

about the time." So, it's a it's a dead,

you know, Freud said psychoanalysis is

the art of the obvious.

It's hard to face the truth, isn't it?

Uh I've been fortunate to be very

friendly with and u study with a a

great rabbi in Santa Monica named Morai

Finley. And um he was telling a story

one day about counseling.

And um he said, "This woman comes and

says, "Rabbi,

my mother has forgotten my birthday for

the fourth time in a row. She calls me

like one day or two days later." She

said, "I was so busy." She says, she

never sends a present. Or she says

she'll write a letter a month later

saying, you know, I I thought I'd send

you a present, but I missed the birthday

and blah blah blah. And she doesn't

return my calls and blah blah blah. And

the rabbi says, "Your mother doesn't

like you."

So, you know, may be comfortable not but

that's the truth. I mean, so that's the

different from the psychoanalytic

paradigm where you could sit there and

say, well, when you were young, blah,

blah, blah. He says, okay, your mother

doesn't like you. That's the truth. Now,

the question is what do you now you got

the truth. Can you take the truth what

do you want to do with it? Up to you.

All drama is about something which is

hidden. Like in the story I was telling

about the rabbi which is hidden is the

woman is spending all of her time

repressing the fact that her mother

likes doesn't like her. So the idea is

you search for the truth. The truth will

set you free. And it may be pretty or it

may be ugly, but it's the truth. How do

we know that? Because we have the

capacity to commune with

the preverbal with the ethereal love,

justice, truth, and beauty. They're out

there. We can feel them,

right? But we have to devote ourselves

to feeling them and train ourselves to

overcome the dictates of our reason. I

said, 'W wait a second. Are you telling

me that you're going to spend every

Sunday morning

going to church and singing these songs

about some guy who died 2,000 years ago

and may not even live? Does that make

sense?

Well, yeah, it makes sense. It's called

religion. It just makes a different kind

of sense.

You know, you think about kids, right?

What are kids best at in the world?

Right? Lying, right? No kid has ever

told the truth to their parents about

anything, right? We remember that when

we remember we were kids. Okay? So, as

Rabbi Finley teaches,

you can take a superior position. You

say, "No, no, no. You did not do two

hours of homework. I know that because I

had a clock and a nanny cam in your room

and you did six minutes of homework."

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And wagged

your finger at the kid, saying, "It's

not true." Or you could suspend your

disbelief and say, "I get it. The kid

didn't want to do homework. He's trying

to protect his individuality. He doesn't

want to be criticized. So he says, "I

did two hours of homework." I get it.

Okay. I'll I'll parent the kid's soul.

And um also I learned something else

from um Rabbi Finley. I'm very very

lucky to have my second great teacher.

My first was Rabbi Larry Kushner. He was

talking about lying and he said he said

what's a lie? He said imagine you went

to the doctors and you had a procedure

done that was none of anybody's business

and somebody said to you oh where were

you yesterday I didn't see you at the

club and you said you know I just

decided to take a walk. He said that's

not a lie. He said there are untruths

which are not lies. He said what's a

lie? A lie is an untruth that's told to

injure someone. I thought that oh that's

pretty damn good. We have a right to

privacy. We have a right to embellish,

right? As long as we're not injuring

someone. And in a gossip situation, we

know that we aren't injuring someone,

right? We're just gossiping.

Similarly, in a theatrical situation, we

can say things that if they're

internally consistent might be pleasing,

but they aren't a lie. Although, in one

sense, they aren't true.

Speed Plaza is a comedy, right? So,

these two guys think they know how to

get rich, right? By capitalizing on um

capitalizing on uh an an adventicious

event in show business. They got this

into this. See, that's the thing about

Hollywood, right? It's a dreadful,

dreadful, dreadful place to live, right?

Unless you're unless you're like dead or

something. Because the lie in Hollywood

is Hollywood functions like Las Vegas.

You're just this far from getting vastly

wealthy. My god. You could walk into the

supermarket and see blah blah. And

they'd say, "Oh, what a nice pair of

glasses." And you'd say, "Yes." You'd

start talking and then you would be the

producer on the new movie. Just like Las

Vegas. The reason people go to Las Vegas

and get broke is it's almost true.

If if nobody ever won in Las Vegas,

nobody would go to Las Vegas. The fact

that somebody might win in Las Vegas

means everybody goes to Las Vegas. The

fact that somebody might get lucky in in

Los Angeles means everybody goes to Los

Angeles and and they waste their lives.

So, it's hard to get rid of that

addiction because if you like being

inert,

you can live with that addiction

forever. That's the lie, right? There's

just enough truth in it that you can

fool yourself into saying, "Well, then

that that makes sense. What what the the

old joke is, what what and leave show

business, right?"

In American Buffalo, the lie is

introduced by the character the

antagonist of. So everything that

happens in a dream, of course, are all

aspects of our own consciousness. What

else would they be, right? the the

little dog fluff and the mountain and

the stream. They're all aspects of our

own consciousness symbolized and we're

free to interpret the symbols however we

want. So that the the so that all as

everybody in the drama is aspects of one

character, right? The character split

used to be that the drama was just one

person on stage in a chorus and this guy

called the thespus I think introduced

the the duteragonist, right? the second

player. You have the antagonist, the guy

who's uh uh uh acts against the

protagonist. So the protagonist in the

play is Donnie Dubro in American

Buffalo. The antagonist is this

character called Teach. And his lie is

nobody can lead you to the truth but me.

Everybody else is trying to uh take

advantage of you. You aren't getting

what you deserve. the the young fellow

who you've befriended as your proteéé,

he's turned on you. And he speaks so

convincingly that he leads the the the

protagonist down the road almost to

murdering the guy who's in effect his

son.

Well, Ooliana was a play I wrote about

25 years ago and I would always have um

fascinated by a piece in the Hamlet

where Hamlet uh hires these Sperling

players and he says to his sidekick

Horatio, he says, "I want you to stage a

play something like the murder of

Gonzago with his wife kills a husband

and marries the uncle much like my uh

mother and so forth." Uh and he says, "I

have been to I've heard that guilty

creatures sitting at a play

may by the cunning of the set of scene

be so moved as to confess their own

malifactions."

And I'm think, well, that's cute, but

certainly not true. You know, you can't

get somebody, however guilty or however

upset at a play to start confessing

their own malfactions. Okay,

Shakespeare, you know, you wrote a lot

of good stuff. will give you a pass. So

then I write this play called Oana which

was about at the beginning of this whole

nonsense about political correctness and

incipient fascism and the end of free

speech and all that other good stuff.

And I put it off Broadway. We did it

first in Cambridge Mass and then we were

off Broadway and it's about this young

woman student and uh her professor

and she's all confessed. She's confused

and she doesn't know why she got such a

bad grade. And he says, "Well, okay, let

me help you. Let me devote myself to

you." Blah, blah, blah. I'll talk you

through the thing. You know what? The

grade doesn't count. I'll just give you

an A. She says, "But I don't understand.

Is the I don't understand then. I'm the

first in my family ever came to to

college, so I don't understand how this

works, and I work like mad to get here.

You can just assign me a grade?" He

says, "Yes, that's right." He says,

"Education is nonsense." He says, "We

give you a lot of books and we say read

them. You say you've read them. I say

you're lying. We're going to give you a

test. We're going to find out you lied.

And when you we find out you lied,

you'll be disgraced and your life will

be ruined." He says, "That's the

educational process." She says, "But

then I then I'm really confused." She

says, "Why

are you involved in it?" And he says,

"Because I love teaching." She says,

"No." She says, "I'm lost. I'm I'm

really really lost." things begin to

escalate. And he says, "Listen, you got

stuff stuck into your head early on

about what the educational process." He

says, "I'll give you an example." He

says, "When I was a kid, I heard that

poor people make love more frequently

than rich people, but they take less of

their clothes off."

He says, "Is that true?" He says, "I

don't know." He says, "Is the person who

said it, do they know if it's true?" I

don't know. It's stuck in my head. Why?

I don't know, but there it is. He says,

I don't have time to go through and rip

out all this stuff, but it's operating

against me. It's it's clogging up my

head. You have a prejudice about

education. It should be XYZ. That got

stuck in there. So, they go on blah blah

blah blah blah.

She gets radicalized because the

president, the the the guy won't help

her. And so, she seeks out F, which

happens at college. You know, I went to

a a feral hippie dippy sippy in college,

right? Sex and drugs and radicalization.

You know, there I am playing poker and

listening to the Beatles and the the

weathermen over there staging guns to

blow up the building on 11th Street. I

didn't know who they were. Yeah. And

they my my roommates, they went

underground for 30 years, right? Because

from having dealt with kids in this age

range, 17 to 22, that's the door is

closing. There's a good reason that

healthy societies take these kids and

put them in the military, right? Because

they need a lot of discipline, right?

They don't need a lot of exuberance.

They got that. They don't need a lot of

inspiration. They got that. They need

someone to say, "For this amount of

time, do this. Don't do that. Shut up."

Right? So the Mormons, whom I love,

right, for many reasons, one of which is

they're the smartest people in the world

because they say to these kids, you

know, why don't you go to like Bolivia

for a couple of years and convert

people, right? So whether or not they're

converting people, I hope hope they are,

they're getting the kids out of the

house and they're saying, I can't be

your parents anymore, which is a great

thing. And in ancient Rome, they used to

have the tradition of guest parentage

where they would take a young I don't

know if they were boys and girls,

certainly boys at the age of like eight

and they would swap kids.

So I'm going to raise your kid. You

raise mine. And we've all had this

experience. You say, "I don't

understand. I can't do anything with my

son. Uncle Timmy comes in and they're

they're the best buds and he's behaving

like an a because right because the kid

doesn't have to rebel against uncle

Timmy. So you take kids in the age range

17 to 22, now we're sticking them in

college where they learn to, you know,

march around with signs and and and and

burn and burn effiges and so forth.

That's all that's all good fun, but what

about preparing for the wider world?

It's not going to prepare them for the

wilder. They could do it on the

weekends. If you do it all the time,

you're going to be very very confused.

So what happens to kids who are very

very confused? They have the capacity to

become radicalized because they just

like gangs, right? Gangs are an attempt

of young people with unsufficient

structure to find structure. It's it's

perfect. It's perfectly logical. Of

course, they need structure.

It may the result may be unfortunate,

but the the urge is is absolutely

logical. So, young kids at college,

they form gangs, right? And one of the

gangs, young kids can get radicalized to

any any cause, right or left, American,

anti-American, Islamic, Zionist, anti-

they can get radicalized. He said, "I'm

going to put all my energy cuz I finally

found the truth." I didn't know what the

truth was cuz I'm confused. I didn't go

into the military where they said the

truth is make your bed or you're going

to the brrig. That's the truth. The rest

of it you can figure out on your own.

They got nobody to tell them make your

bed. You know, so what are they they're

going to say? I want the truth. Someone

says, "Here's the truth. The educational

system is misogynistic and uh it's male

oriented and you've just been taken

advantage of." This is what the pro the

young girl goes out off stage. She gets

radicalized. So, of course, she's going

to listen to to the person who says, "I

have the truth and I will protect you."

So, the college is not protecting her.

Her parents aren't protecting her. The

group was protecting her. She says,

"Yeah." So, she the group tells her,

"Wait a second. that guy put his arm

around you and he talked to you about

people taking off their clothes and

making love. Oh my god, you've just been

raped.

So the girl, wait a second. He said,

nope. Under the college code of sexual

ethic, that constitutes rape. Let's ruin

the professor's life. So the girl comes

back to the professor in act two and act

three and eventually they end up almost

killing each other. It's a dreadful,

dreadful situation.

And it so raised the audience to a fever

pitch that they would scream at the

stage every night. They'd scream at the

stage. They they wouldn't do it on

purpose. They just find themselves

scream. Every night there would be

fights within the audience at the end of

the thing, a man and a woman, and they

wouldn't always take the same side. How

can you say that? How can you say that?

Pointing finger, marriages, breaking up.

It was great. And then the woman who my

wife Rebecca Pigeon played the young

girl and William H. Macy played the man.

And the woman who replaced Rebecca, I

don't know if I mentioned it, was my

good friend Mary McCann. Did it for a

year and she once got actually punched

coming out of the uh dressing room by an

audience member. People were screaming

and because um it drove them nuts. the

fact that and I thought it was

marvelous. You know, the fact that I

could uh look at an impossible problem

and say, "Well, okay, you know, let's

take it up to 11 now.

Let's see where that goes. Ain't that

fun?"

I wrote a play called Race. And Race was

a play was on Broadway. It was Carrie

Washington, David Allen Greer, Richard

Thomas, and James Speder. And it was

about Another very very very provocative

case that I mean you know things get I

mean the question is who who become the

writers the people who are affronted by

something in youth or who don't

understand so a lot of writing

especially my writing is an attempt to

understand to work something out in a

way that it can be understood because a

lot of human equations don't come out

even on a on a day-to-day scale but

perhaps they can be understood

poetically they can be understood

mythologically So our country's been

fighting about race now, right, for for

you know 230 years and there all of

these cases coming up pro and con. I say

well gosh it would be a terrible

terrible idea to write a play about s

such a provocative um uh topic. Here I

go. And so I wrote it. So the the the

play is there these two lawyers, black

guy and a white guy. The white guy is

James Spade, a black guy's David Alen

Greer. And they have another associated

young woman lawyer, Carrie Washington.

and they take on a new client who's a

white guy, Richard Thomas, who's accused

of raping a black woman. So the question

is whether or not they're going to take

on his case. He's a billionaire. And so

I wrote this long expository scene, oh,

you know, when he comes in this, when he

comes in that, it says in the paper this

blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah

blah. And then there's a speech at the

end where the the the the

African-American lawyer played by David

Alen Greer says, "Okay, wait a And he

says, "You want me to tell you about

black? You want to tell me, Mr. White

man, about black black people? I'll help

you." Dr. King was a saint. He was

killed by a jealous husband. Malcolm X

became

uh saintly when he embraced nonviolence.

Prior to that, he was misguided. Um,

you never actually [ __ ] a black girl,

but one sat next to you in science class

and she was really kind of shy. And the

other guy says, "Wait a second." The

white guy says, "I would never say any

of that stuff." So the black guy says,

"You're goddamn right you wouldn't. Cuz

you know what a white guy can say to a

black guy about race? Nothing. You're

goddamn right. Nothing." He says, he

says, "You white people think," he says,

"Let me put you out of your misery. You

white people think that black people

hate you. You're right. We absolutely

do." He says, "I don't want you coming

in with your white [ __ ] and your

rich [ __ ] about how you were

wronged." So the white guy says, "I I'm"

She made a false accusation. So the

black guy says, "Well, which of us is

which of us is is immune?" So the So the

white guy says, "Uh, she she said she

loved me." And the black guy says,

"Well, I guess she changed her mind cuz

it says here you say she says you raped

her." So I'm talking I'm looking at this

is 35 minutes into the play. I'm

thinking, man, if you don't start the

play with this speech, you're stupid and

I think you are. Right? So all of a

sudden we rip the band-aid off the

subject of race where this black guy

says, "I don't care if you don't never

like it. This is the truth. You want to

talk or not?" So the whole beginning of

the play becomes these this this black

and white couple saying to the white

rich guy, "You want to talk or not?"

Right? You want to tell the truth or

not? I don't give a [ __ ] Right? But

you're paying us uh to defend you.

And he said, "I don't even want the

case, but you're paying us to defend

you. I'm going to tell you the truth."

And so that was a it was I thought it

was just electrifying. and the audience,

God bless them, they they loved it. I

was I was It was thrilling.

I've thought a lot about acting for 50

years. I was 50 years ago as a student

at the Neighborhood Playhouse School of

the New York. And our my teachers a man

named Sanford Meisner among others who

was co-evil with Lee Strawber. They both

came out of the group theater and Lee

Strawber invented this idea called the

method. And uh Sandy Meisner invented

this thing that came to be called the

Meisner technique. And before you went

to the neighborhood players, they gave

you a list of about 50 books that were

all about technique. And they were by

Stannislovski and Neorovich Stanchenko

and all the Russians and uh um all all

the um Michael Redgrave mask and face

and uh Shalyapian talking about singing

and they they came from a very very

Jewish tradition right because the group

theater was very Jewish tradition. Lee

Strawberg and um Sandy Meiser was the

tradition of study that the that the

truth can be found in um

intellectualizing

and so they invented the these

techniques and I looked there as I was

an acting student. I didn't understand

them. I understood the beauty of trying

to to find a technique for acting, but I

didn't I didn't understand how that

other than as an article of faith

translated into acting that I liked. And

so I started thinking about it. And so I

founded a theater company. I think I

founded my first theater company. It was

maybe 21 years old. And I said, "Wait a

second. Let's start at the beginning.

What's an actor actually doing?"

And this puts me in mind of um

uh combat handgun shooting. So the

combat handgun shooting, you know,

following it as we all do over the

course of decades, you know, back in the

50s, the the guys at that point, they

were all guys. The cops were taught

stick one hand in your pocket and we're

going to practice on a bullseye, stand

at 90 degrees to the topic and at to the

target and blah blah blah. Later on,

some theorists said, "No, no, that's not

what you want to do. What you want to do

is you want to use both hands,

right? You want to thrust the gun out,

right? And hold kind of they call an

isosles stance, right? One hand is going

to pistol pistol hand's going to thrust

out. The other hand is going to pull

back and you want to take a sight

picture so that you have three things in

a line. The back sight, the front sight,

and the target. Your your mind can't

hold the the eye can't hold that much

focal length. So, what are you going to

focus on?

focus on the front sight and you let the

back sight go fuzzy and you let the

target go fuzzy and you it's a great way

to shoot targets. But then somebody came

along and said, "Wait a second, that's

really great for shooting targets, but

when someone's shooting back at you,

there's nobody in the world who's not

going to grab the gun from the holster,

stick it out over there. The your vision

narrows to the size of a pin and they're

going to and and they're going to slap

the trigger."

So current thinking was let's see what

people do naturally and train them to do

that because there's no way they're not

going to do it. So let's capitalize on

that. So similarly in acting training we

have all these techniques which they're

great techniques but they don't work

under the great stress

of I want to be good and there's an

audience. So my question was what does

work?

And my answer was

uh back to the days of hiking, don't put

it in your pack if you don't want to

carry it.

If you pick it up, you're going to carry

it. So all these ideas of in this moment

I A and in that moment I be and my

character is the kind of person who when

you take that on stage, you all you're

left with is wait a minute. Wait a

minute. Am I going to hit this moment?

uh uh correctly. I'm going to hit that

moment correctly. So, what that does is

it makes you self-conscious. The desire

to be perfect

makes you self-conscious, which is to

say sterile. So, you say, "Okay, how can

we make actors other than

self-conscious?"

Well, Stannislovski says, "Don't tell

them to do anything more complex than go

over there and open the window." Because

that's something you can do. If I say to

you, go over there and open the window,

okay? or move your chair back 6 in. You

can do that, right? If I say to you,

remember the time when your little dog

died, you can kind of pretend to do it

cuz what's going to happen when I give

you a instruction

is self-consciousness because you're

going to be saying, "Wait a second. Am I

really thinking about the dog the time

my dog died? Am I doing it enough?" Blah

blah blah. So, what does it does do? It

closes you in rather than opens you out.

So what you want to say to the actor is

don't do anything which is not

physically capable of being done which

is not something like what the author

intended which is not fun because if

it's not fun

why would you do it you know if acting

is not fun why would you do it it's not

an exercise in getting the moments right

who cares I mean there are some

musicians who give such oomph to every

passage they just want to shoot yourself

you know and that became like the style

of singing starting after Barbara

Stryson, you had to sing each note as if

the fate of the universe depended on it,

right? But you go back and listen to,

for example, for Billy Holiday, who

knows what she's doing, but it's not

much in every bit of its genius. You

know, you don't have to save the

universe, just sing the stupid song. So,

the actor has to do something which is

something like what the playright

intended, capable of being done and fun.

Get the other guy's attention. Hey, hey,

I can do that. Get the other guy's

attention. Hey, I can do that. Change

the other guy's mind. Well, I'm I'm not

quite sure that's physically capable of

being done.

Most people, casting directors and and

directors in general

tend to believe that they have an image

in their head of what the character

would be. And so they see a bunch of

people that say, "No, no, no, no, no,

no, no, no, no." But what they don't re

realize is they don't have an image in

their head of what the charact they

think they do. It's like the the radio

personality. So what they end up doing

is discarding the unusual and ending up

with a run-of-the-mill oh this looks

just like the woman who played the

lawyer on the other show. And Sydney Lum

hated was a great director and hated the

casting process because it's terrible

thing for the actors to go through and

he loved actors as do I. And he said,

"Okay, the first person in the door who

can play the part gets the part." I

don't know that that's any less cruel or

more cruel. I don't know that that's any

more cruel than the other way. Cuz the

real question in casting is not can they

act the part. The question is can they

act?

If somebody can act right and and

they're, you know, they're you don't

want to cast a young woman to play an

old man. Someone can act and they're

more or less in the ballpark. Now I've

narrowed down the field. I don't care if

they can act the part. Most people come

to an audition and co come up with their

own idea of how the part should be acted

and the casting agent or the director

don't know what the hell they're doing

and say no that's not it right it's it's

it's heartbreaking because they don't

they don't tell the actor what they're

looking for in terms that the actor can

appreciate which is only an action

that's all an actor can do only an

action so if you tell the actor any

actions find out can they do it or not

so since the the directors most of them

and casting directors most of them don't

understand acting by just saying no, you

know, she was a little bit loud or I

really didn't like the way he moved his

head and etc.

There's craft and then there's art.

And uh art is

in the Jewish tradition, prophecy is not

the ability to foretell the future, but

pro a prophet is one who has a direct

connection to God or to something

spiritual. So you would say that a Bach

was a prophet, right? Bach was certainly

a prophet. Or if you look back at the

there's a woman called Jean Eagles who

was an America American stage actress.

She's great great stage actress in the

20s and she did one or two movies. One

of them is called Valletter. It was

later made with Betty Davis was very

good. But if you look at the earlier

thing with Gene Eagles, you're looking

at a force of nature that has never been

seen before. You say, "Oh my god, what

is that?" And Stannisloski talks about

two actresses playing the same part. One

was El was uh Sarah Burnernhard who was

famed for her quote technique and the

other was Eleanor Redusa who reduced

people to to a state of raw

spirituality. And nobody knew how she

did it. and she didn't know how she did

it. And he looked at him playing the

same part and saw Dooa looked like a

genius until you checked that that uh

Baron Hart looked like a genius till he

saw Elanor Aduza and someone came up to

Dooa afterward at the stage door and he

was transfixed and said, "Who are you?"

And she said, "I am nobody."

So there are those actors who are

prophets who something flows through

them and it's not of their own

construction and they didn't work it up

in the mirror but it comes from

somewhere and Stannisloki says there's

three kinds of actors. He says there's

the one who says I get it. This is how

you portray grief. I've seen other

actors do it. This is how you portray

joy. I've seen other actors do it. I can

do that. And he says then there's

another type which says no no no. I'm

going to figure it out for myself. I'm

going to figure the moments out in

myself and I'm going to say this is what

this moment means to me. That's what

this moment means to me. And he said the

third actors who don't do either of

those things, they go on stage and they

say the words and they're gifted with

prophecy and things come out of them

that they didn't put in and that's art.

And that's worth anything in the world

when you see that on stage.

There's certain techniques which

unfortunately actors um don't learn

which are the only techniques that can

be learned and must be learned. I I my

wife Rebecca Pigeon did a lot of work

with her on stage and in film and so

forth. And she went to the Royal Academy

of Dramatic Art uh Rada. And I said,

"What were the acting classes like?" She

said, "We didn't have acting classes." I

said, "What? Rada doesn't have acting

classes." No. She said, "We had

directors come in and direct us in

scenes and we'd learn whatever we could

or from not, but nobody approached

acting in a technical manner. What they

did do is teach you to speak and teach

you to stand still and teach you to face

out and teach you the other the other

skills, the the important skills. Show

up early, be kind, let everybody do

their job and you do yours." And those

are those are the great skills. And if

you start with show up early, know your

lines, stand still. As Jimmy Kagny used

to say, what's acting? Hit your mark,

look the other guy in the eye, and tell

the truth.

So if you can do that, that's the that's

the path to good acting. And if you do

that and you have inspiration, that's

the path to something which which

approaches prophecy.

actors. Unfortunately,

they have to be biddable because it's

part of

their job to be both biddable because

you're directing them and gracious. And

they're generally very, very gracious

people. you know, an actor or anybody in

show business, not gracious, is is an

anomaly and it's it's such an anomaly

that when we see it, it becomes the a

gossip forever. Oh my god, I can't

believe what this guy did on the set.

Actors need to be biddable. But um the

other thing actors I talk to actors

about, they say, "Wait a second. We want

sometimes like in a class or something,

they say, "I I need to discuss this um

the script."

And I say, "Well, okay. Well, did you

understand it when you read it? They

said, "Well, yeah." I said, "Okay, well,

let's go do it." It's a recognition

scene. Off you go.

It's It's really not that difficult. And

that's what makes it so hard, right?

Stand still, speak up, say the words,

and if you do, and pick up your cues,

something will happen to you that you

did not foresee.

And if you don't, nothing will happen to

you that you did not foresee. And if you

couldn't for if you could foresee it,

the audience could too.

Our pel William Shakespeare right said

the world's a stage and all the men and

women merely players and they have their

entrance exits and their entrances and

each man in his time plays many parts.

And so of course it's appropriate to act

in certain ways in certain circumstances

and inappropriate in other circumstances

and we all we all know that and so we

gauge our behavior to the to the

circumstances but that acting on stage

is a little is a little bit different.

Acting on stage is um in its perfect

form is it has to be an attempt to get

something from the other person but it

cannot be an attempt to get something

from the audience. even understanding

we have to say you're over there I'm

going to do my job which is getting

something from him and I trust and it

will be proved to be true that you will

give me your attention and so people uh

currently a lot of them misunderstand

the purpose of the the the curtain call

purpose of the curtain call is to thank

the audience that's why traditionally

the actors at the end bowed they said

thank you for your attention it is not

to receive receive praise from the

audience but to thank them.

Um

that's what Puck says, right?

If we shadows have offended, think but

this and all of us mended that you have

but slumbered here while these visions

did appear and our weakened feeble

theme no more yielding than a dream.

Gentles do not reprehend. If we if you

will pardon, we will mend. Give us your

hands if we be friends and Robin shall

restore amends.

And then the the actor would bow saying

thank you for your attention.

Well, the relationship with the actors,

I mean, you know, Shakespeare said,

"You're better to have a bad epipath

than their ill report during your life."

They are the abstract and brief

chronicles of our time.

And indeed they are, you know, the the

Marlon Brando playing the godfather of

Steve McQueen in the Great Escape or

one could go on and on. I I'm um um

limiting myself just because I don't

want to talk about people to make

invidious comparisons with people who

are now people who are now working or if

you look at the um

ma lawy for example

they they they inform the way we think

about life. say, "Oh, yes, I understand.

That's what courage is. That's what

grace is." Look at Carrie Grant, that's

what graciousness is. You know, you look

at Betty Davis, that's what intensity

is. You know, honor, you look at James

Earl doing um the Great White Hope, you

say, "Oh my god, you know, where' that

where in the world did that come from?

Who who is that man?" They are the ab as

Shakespeare says, they're the abstract

and brief chronicles of our time.

There's a famous story that uh

Shakespeare uh had his own company right

the king's men and the globe theater

company and his best actor was a guy

called Richard Burbage and he when

Shakespeare wrote the King Lear he gave

it to him and he said well Dick I

finally written one you can't play

so I've been blessed in my life with

working with the the best actors in the

world and uh the point is not writing

for them but knowing that if I if I

write it that uh they'll they'll inhabit

it, right? That one doesn't have to that

that their talent isn't being able to

being able to do not one thing. So, one

doesn't have to write for them, one has

to write and then they'll play it.

There's a great um exemplar that all of

you guys out there should really check

out and is an unknown genius of the

American theater. Her name was Ruth

Draper and Ruth Draper uh worked in the

I guess in the late 20s and throughout

the 1950s

and she was a monologist. She would go

all alone onto the stage and she would

do monologues and the monologues would

be at a garden party or in the middle of

a snowstorm in Fargo, South Dakota or

the the Italian lesson or an Irish

immigrant arrives at Ellis Island and

she would just do one part of the

conversation but for and you can get

she's recorded and she would she would

do these monologues such that she

created a whole world around her the the

marvelous whole world around her. And um

she was a wealthy woman and she was over

in England and she became uh Bernard

Shaw and Null Coward came to her parties

and she'd do these party turns and they

said, "Oh my gosh, you know, this is

genius. You should go do them on stage."

And so she did. And it was she's one of

the great American playwrs, although

she's not recognized as such and one of

the great performers of all time. And

one of the the um

routines she did was called Three Women

and Mrs. Clifford. And it's these uh and

she plays the three women. Each one

takes about a half an hour. The first

one is Mr. Clifford's secretary talking

about what what uh the wife and the son

and blah blah and the and the friend

from France. And the second one is Mr.

Clifford's wife and they obviously have

a very very difficult marriage and the

wife is talking about the same thing

from her own point of view. And then the

third one is his mistress with whom he's

perfectly happy and they're talking

about the same thing from the same point

of view. It's one of the great pieces of

dramatic writing. And where does it come

from? It not not only did the content

not exist, the form didn't exist until

Ruth Draper stood up at a party and and

started making up these silly little

characters.

You know, it's like again uh as Pelonius

says to a field you love is affections

do not that way tend. And so I wanted to

say something to all you guys listening

about that is that a lot of people are

drawn into movie making and drawn into

the theater for because of one thing

they want to do. That might be being a

director of photography. It might be

being an actor. It might be being an ad.

It might and you might find there

something else

that you want to find. Maybe you're not

so good at that, but you're very good at

something else. And that's where all of

the the writers used to come from and

still did in my day. They came from guys

who got in as an actor. Okay,

Shakespeare was an actor. And they said,

"Wait a second. Let me try this other

thing." And we know this works when we

put on the office party. Okay. So, we

put on the office party and Sally says,

"We're going to have an office party

here. We're going to put on a skit about

the mail room." And one person says,

"Oh, good, good, good. I got a great

idea for costumes." And one person says,

"Oh, can I write it?" And the other guy

says, "Oh, I'm going to I'm going to

play Bertha." Right.

This this is such a cliche of American

life. Judy Garland and Nick Mickey

Rooney saying, "We'll put it on in the

garage." But that's all a theater is.

It's a bunch of people say, "We'll put

it on in the garage. My uncle's got a

top hat. Ooh ooh ooh. Can I Can I sing a

song?"

You're not going to find that in school.

Not going to find it at any school. But

you're going to find it in the garage.

Got a job at Ford designing automobiles.

Well, what's that person going to get a

job doing? They'll say, "Oh, good.

You're going to work on the tail light,

right? So, you're going to work on the

tail light for 10 years and maybe you

work on the on the back bumper and blah

blah blah. It's very seldom that you're

going to actually get a job designing a

whole car. On the other hand, there were

these things in LA in Los Angeles,

mainly in Los Angeles, there may still

be called chop shops, which were not the

chop shops of today where they took

stolen cars, but where kids would get

together and they'd create a new car out

of nothing, right? They create the hot

rod buggies. They create it. And the

people from Detroit started coming to

these chop shops and saying, "Wow,

that's what we should be doing." So

these kids were making the cars right

there that Detroit was beating a path to

their door and saying, "We want to make

that. We want to make that car." So it's

the same in the theater. You know,

rather than going through all of these

schools and blahy blahy blah, make your

own car, put on your own play in the

garage, and maybe the world will will

beat the path to your door. And if it

doesn't, you had fun anyway.

It's a schizophrenic profession being a

dramatist because you have to be several

people and yourself and the audience,

and you have to like doing it even when

you're miserable. I was shooting a uh

movie for HBO, the Phil Spectre story

with Helen Marin and Alpuccino. And we

were out here in some place, Long Island

like 3 4 years ago was the world's worst

hail storm

and we were shooting outside of course

and we had you know 500 extras of course

and we're shooting outside starts the

hail. So, we're all under the underhang,

the whole crew, right? And there's 80

people and just little underhang all

hang together and everybody's run for

cover. And the hail is literally eating

cars. It's the worst hail. I mean, this

hail the size of of of freaking golf

balls. It's eating the cars and the

temperature drops down and it's 20° and

we're all shivering and it's pissing

down rain. We all looked at each other

and thought, "Ain't this great?

who who would want to be any place else.

You know, you pity the people who

weren't there. So that's, you know, it's

when it's good, it's great, and when

it's terrible, it's not so bad.

You know, the best thing you can say to

someone who wants to go into show

business, you know what it is?

Don't do it.

You know why? Because if they listen,

they don't belong in show business. I

think most people drop out of show

business in my experience because they

can't stand the uncertainty

because it's a life of self-direction

and you have to learn how to do it by on

your own. No one there's no one going to

be your mentor in show business though a

lot of people claim to. But I think that

show business is just like raising

children in that you get everything

wrong. There's nothing that you get

right.

you you're strict when you should be

lenient, lenient when you should be

strict, and you're hanging over them

when you should leave them alone, and

you're absent when they need you.

Nonetheless, they grow up. So, that's

what I think. But, um, everybody's got

to figure it out for him or herself.

There's there's what I I guess the

question is what I'd like people to take

away from listening to me and thank you

for your your patience for telling all

these fairly disjointed stories. I think

the answer is I'm not any less confused

than you are. I'm not any less I'm not

any less uncertain about my work or my

worth than you are. I just got in the

habit of doing it and and and you can

too.

The conscious mind is has to do what it

did before. That's what the conscious

mind does. that the mind, as our good

friend William James told us, is a

basically a lump of mud. And we have

these electrical impulses which can be

likened to a drop of water. And you put

the first drop of water on the top of

the lump of mud, it's going to run down

some way or other, but the second drop

is going to run down where the first

drop ran down. And the the the rivullet

is going to keep getting deeper and

deeper. And these electric impulses

form our consciousness.

To what extent this is the mind and what

extent it's the brain, I don't know. But

it's an interesting way of thinking

about it. So how that's the conscious

mind. How do you use the conscious mind

to subvert the workings of the conscious

mind? Well, psychoanalysis try doesn't

work very well. There's meditation

that's good, right? There's varieties of

religious experience as William James

told us and

there's dedication. So if you dedicate

yourself, no different than the

ballerina or no different than the

quarterback or the tight end, dedicate

yourself to the discipline of your

craft, eventually eventually you will be

rewarded with something which is not

from your conscious mind.

You know, it's an odd life and it takes

a lot of um the ability to put up with

uncertainty and many many people would

rather put up with lethargy and would

rather put up with

failure rather than put up with

uncertainty. It drives some people nuts.

What do I do today?

How how do I start? How do I blah blah

blah? And a lot of you guys are asking

that question. How do I start? The

answer is figure it out. Figure it out.

You know, don't forget that you're human

beings, right? When you got something

that you really, really want to do,

anyone, you'll figure it out. I well I

like writing you know and it's been

working out pretty well so far kind of

horror I like writing I do as I do it

for money and if you if you got trouble

being motivated do something else you

don't got to be a writer maybe you're

not cut out to be a writer

find out you're entitled to find out

people there all these novels written of

used to be written for 100 years of a

young person who said I'm going to go to

Paris to paint and I'm just going to

give it two years and If at the end of

those two years, well, you're already

done, right? Like somebody who's got

something to fall back on will fall back

on it. Of course, they will. You know,

it's like saying about young kids living

together, they say they're they're

living together. They're practicing

being married. Well, they aren't.

They're practicing being not married,

right? Cuz you're living with somebody

and someone knows you, oh, she burned a

toast. I thought she was love my life,

but she burned a toast. Obviously, she's

not the one. Thank you, honey. And so

they get we get involved in serial

monogamies which is a practice for not

make being married and being married is

okay we took an oath we're going to work

it out you know so usually one person

and it's always that usually one person

is always the wife saying don't you dare

walk out that door you know we're going

to stay right here until we work it out.

It's just like with writing right if you

took that oath say I'm a I'm a writer

I'm going to work it out. You stay in

that chair till you work it out.

I did a few things with the great Jack

Lemon

and we were talking one day about

growing up. He grew up in he went to

Harvard. He grew up in Cambridge and his

dad was a baker and he said he said,

"You know, my dad always said when I get

up in the morning and there's no romance

in a loaf of bread, I'm going to quit."

I thought that was kind of cute. But I

always feel that about um I've been

working in on stages all my I was a kid

actor in Chicago. I've been doing this

uh for over 60 years and I never come

onto the sta uh onto a sound stage or

the backstage. I'm sure you guys all

feel the same without a feeling of being

privileged and without a feeling of

being grateful to be able to come in

through the stage door, be able to come

in through the set door. And I always I

think that most people who nearly all

but certainly most people in our racket

feel the same. It's a it's a wonderful

place and we're given a great um uh gift

and a great responsibility which is to

tell stories as honestly as we can and

experience things in the in the process

that are uh that are that are beautiful.

I have self as a writer all the time.

You know they say woe be to you when all

men praise you. You know, if you're

praising yourself all the time, you're

you're definitely doing something wrong.

So, as I said earlier, I go back and

forth between this is the greatest thing

anybody ever wrote and why was I born?

I'm I'm a complete fraud. You go back

and forth and back and forth and you and

you work it out because um if you're

making it up off the top of your head,

it's not going to cost you anything.

Just like a performance you work up in

the mirror, that's not going to cost you

anything, you know? But it's very grand,

but it ain't art.

Art is going to cost you something.

That's going to cost you something you

weren't prepared to pay, which is the

definition of what cost is. You know,

obviously there's something of the of

the destructive nature in the artist,

right? Duh. You got to not care if

school keeps cuz you grow up and people

says, you know, nobody if you're a smart

alec, a wise ass like I was. And in

addition to being a nerd dwell,

threeletter man, people say, you know,

nobody nobody likes a smart alec. They

always I don't know many of you guys and

women out there have probably heard

that. It's not true. It's just not true.

Also, I didn't care if a I knew it was

not true cuz that was my place in the u

in the in in in the in the roster,

right? Was being the no good smart alec.

And people seemed to laugh at my jokes.

So [ __ ] that I was I kept telling them.

If you want to write for a living,

what's stopping you? nothing

because because think about it, you

know, if you want to say I want to write

for a living but I want to make a lot of

money at it. Well, you're not entering

that race. It may happen or it may not

happen but you're entering a different

race. And this is a very concept goes

back to stoal philosophy where someone

says uh you know I I work so hard I want

to be famous and um Epictitus I believe

says you did not enter that race. That's

a different race. If you want to enter

the race to be a writer and to learn to

write, do that. You know, whether you're

going to be famous or not famous or make

money or not make money at it, you

didn't that's a different race.

So there there was a terrible idea that

came around in the the turbulent 1960s

that one can you can have it all, right?

I mean, it started with women. Women can

have it all, then everybody can have.

Why can't everybody have it all? Well,

nobody can have it all, you know, but

you might be able to have one thing

if it's like they say that which you

that which you desire more than anything

else in the world. Perhaps that you may

have.

You should avoid inaction.

I remember I was a kid in New York. I

was in New York and I was making I can't

even remember what I was doing. sleep my

friend Johnny Cass's couch and

doing something. I don't remember what

he was doing for money. And I one year I

made like $4,000 and I spent 1,500 bucks

of it on Xeroxing.

So you can't afford in action. Can't

afford waiting for the phone to ring.

You got to be writing all the time,

acting all the time. So I tell my kids

in the business, you got to do two

things every day. You got to do one

thing for your art every day, and you

got to do one thing for your business

every day. Just one thing, that's all.

Write a letter, make a phone call, make

a connection for your business, get new

cards printed up. Think it's your

business. Nobody's going to help you but

you. And do one thing for your art every

day. Write a scene. If you're the

actress, take a yoga class,

take a singing class, read a play. Kind

of liken it to woodworking. You know,

you can make a model of a ship. You can

make a real ship. You can make a

cabinet. If you like woodworking, you

like working with wood, you like the

challenge of the different of the

different forms. I like the challenge of

the different forms. Also, it keeps me

busy, you know, sometime. And it's it I

I kind of feel like I got a push cart,

you know. I have had through my life

zero capacity to be bored. I can't stand

it. It drives me insane. As a result, I

ended up as a nerd do in show business.

I also missed out on a lot of things

where a little bit of discipline would

have took me a long way. But we all, you

know, we all get to lead his or her own

life, each of us. And, you know, we're

we're dealt a hand and as they say, uh,

the good life is not in getting a good

hand, but in playing a bad hand. Well,

the people watching this paid me a great

compliment to turn it in that the that

I'm not giving you any advice I don't

give myself. I'm not giving you any

advice I don't give my kids who are

writers.

What I'm telling you is the way I live

my life. Other people might certainly

are going to live their lives

differently and so are you guys watching

because you have to come to it on your

own. It occurred to me there's a a verse

in u in Proverbs which is pretty wise

stuff in the Bible. It says the stone

that the builders rejected has become

the cornerstone.

And this verse came home to me very

strongly once. I lived for many many

years up in very rural Vermont. And I

was making a laying a stone wall, just a

laid stone wall. And what happens when

you live in a laid stone wall is you

there's some stones which just won't

fit, right? You want a stone to to fit

in a certain way, certain way. You say,

"Oh, I get it. This will fit here with

that. I get it. That will fit here with

this. Oh, there's a stone over there

that I remember." But there's one stone

that looks fascinating, but it's never

going to fit any place. It's just got

the wrong angles and it's just wrong and

it nags you and at some point you're

going to get to some point in the wall

where that's the only stone that'll fit.

So the stone that the builders reject

rejected has become the cornerstone, the

most important stone. So artists are in

effect the stone that the builders

rejected.

So if you look at um Winston Churchill,

right, he was out of office. He was

disgraced from World War I. Everybody

thought he was an old buffoon. He was

just good for one thing, which was

saving Western civilization.

Or uh Ulissiz Srant was last in his

class at West Point. He was a drunkard.

He was indigent. When they found him at

the beginning of the Civil War, he was

selling firewood and starving to death.

After the Civil War, he was a dreadful,

drunken president. The only thing he was

good at was at winning the Civil War.

He's just good at that one thing.

So I'm a guy who got very very very very

lucky and I grew up in Chicago in a time

when people who became the people around

me were creating their own theaters and

garages you know William Hy and Lorie

Metaf and John Malovich and John Cusack

Annie Cusack and Joan Cusack and Joey

Montenia William Peterson Dennis Frons

these people were Andre Deields these

people were all creating little garage

theaters and I walked into the middle of

it and I said, "Well, didn't I get

lucky?" And I started writing plays

and I never and I never stopped

and you can do it too or if you want to

try, you can certainly try to do it too.

What's stopping you? That's the

question. And that's the question of

stoal philosophy. Stoa is Greek for

porch. And the Stoics were the guys who

sat out on the porch. So when you say

the Stoics it sounds like a very heavy

term but it means the porch guys. So the

porch guys used to say only like only

aspire to the things you can award

yourself.

Honor, honesty, patience, perseverance.

You can award those to yourself. Only

hate the things that you can avoid.

Dishonesty, sloth,

uh uh intemperance. Don't desire

something you can't award yourself fame

and don't hate those things that that

you can't a that you can't avoid uh

dishonesty in others

and the they said here's here's the best

test for you and I had this used to have

an engraved on every time I had a

wristwatch I got a new wristwatch I

haven't had an engraved the phrase is

what hinders you so that's what I'd like

to you guys take away what hinders you

what's stopping you you say I wish blah

blah blah I wish. So any phrase that

starts with I wish is a proclamation of

something you're not going to do.

So rather than I wish, if there's

something you want, say I will or I

intend to or I'm going to and do it.

What's the worst thing that's going to

happen to you? You're going to fail. So

what? There's a wonderful book by a guy

called Benjamin Caps and he wrote

Western books. And he wrote one book

about a true story about a woman who was

a member of the Crow Nation. I believe

she'd been kidnapped and was raised as a

crow. She wasn't really a crow. She was

Shashonyi or something like that. She

was raised as a crow. And she became the

chief of the tribe. And the tribe had

never ever ever had a chief who was a

woman before. But she through her

excellence became chief of the tribe and

someone came to her when she was um

uh putting herself forward in council

and someone said you know you're going

to get into a lot of trouble and she

said what's wrong with trouble?

So I thought that was a pretty great um

pretty great phrase. And the last thing

I'd like to leave all you with and thank

you for your attention is a story from a

book by a guy called Alfred Bester who

is a British um science fiction writer

and he wrote a book night mid-50s called

the demolished man and it's uh in the

future and it's there are mind readers.

It's been discovered that some people

can actually read minds for real and

also they've discovered this time warp

so that people can travel over millions

of light years to a different galaxy.

But there's only one way to communicate

with them and that's through the mind

readers. So the mind readaders are very

very

prized and by the civilization they love

they love their mind readers just in the

same way we might love our artists or

our sports figures. They loved the mind

readaders. Everyone wants everyone

thinks they're going to be a mind

readader. And so the mind readaders set

up a school and they say, "Okay, the

school will be open

Monday, Wednesday, Friday. We'll take

applicants all morning Monday,

Wednesday, Friday. Line up and start

filling out your form. You'll be taken

through the line and it's going to be a

dayong process."

So the mind the mind readers are looking

down at all these people filling out

forms waiting to be to be tested. And

the mind readers are thinking if you can

hear me I want you to leave the line

and go over to your left and there's a

door there and the door is marked no

admittance

and I want you to go through that door.

Thank you.