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INDEPENDENCE DAY'S DEAN DEVLIN GIVES US THE REAL DEAL AT SCREENWRITING EXPO 3
By Tom McCurrie
Last month in Los Angeles, a truly cool event was held at the Convention Center: Screenwriting Expo 3. Think of it as a convention for screenwriters, without all the goofy fez hats and funky secret handshakes. The Expo had it all: seminars on Comedy Writing, panels with agents and managers, even pitch meetings with production executives. Over three days, it was Nirvana for writers of all ages (and genres).
The best thing about the Expo was the number and quality of guest speakers: screenwriting guru Robert McKee, writer William Goldman, writer-producer Ron Shusett, producer David Foster, writers Ted Elliott & Terry Rossio to name just a few. It's not often you get the truth about the joys -- and horrors -- of the biz from people who've been slugging it out in the trenches, and these guys told it like it is, unvarnished, without the benefit of PR flacks and their rose-colored glasses.
One of the most unvarnished was writer-producer Dean Devlin (INDEPENDENCE DAY, CELLULAR and, most recently, TNT's THE LIBRARIAN). Like most "overnight successes," Devlin took over a decade to get his big break. He toiled in a film rental house, became Al Pacino's chauffeur, and then turned to acting, essaying supporting roles in shows like LA LAW and movies like REAL GENIUS. Still, his career was stalled by the time he was cast in the made-in-Germany sci-fi flick MOON 44 (1990). Devlin: "It was the worst script I had ever read...but I desperately needed the money. I hadn't worked in a long time." Nevertheless, this bad movie turned out to be a godsend, since it hooked Devlin up with the director of MOON 44, his future partner Roland Emmerich. Emmerich knew how to use a camera, but when it came to the script, his limited English gave the dialogue a case of the Tin Ear. Devlin asked to rewrite his lines and Emmerich said OK. Devlin: "[Then Emmerich] came to me a couple of days later and said, look, I have a big problem. All the other actors are really mad because you have all the best lines in the picture. So would you mind rewriting their dialogue as well?" Devlin was "happy to," and was equally happy to help Emmerich rewrite the movie when it needed reshoots. Devlin: "So when [Emmerich] got his first big Hollywood movie [UNIVERSAL SOLDIER], he asked me to write it." A phenomenally successful collaboration was born.
Almost immediately, Devlin found himself becoming a hyphenate. "UNIVERSAL SOLDIER was the first film that was made that I was the writer on for Roland. And I found myself doing a lot of producing on the film as well...at [Emmerich's] request." Now Devlin knew that "in movies, [the screenwriter is] very important until you hand in your script, then they just don't want to ever see you again...So if you want to have any protection at all as a writer in movies, you have to be a producer [as well]." Devlin then laid it on the line: "After [UNIVERSAL SOLDIER] I told Roland I wouldn't write for him again unless I was producer, and that just became the rule. So for the next ten years, he directed, I produced and we wrote it together."
Of course, Devlin had the writing bug long before he met Emmerich, attending screenwriting classes at Sherman Oaks Experimental College, and getting tips from his screenwriting dad, Don Devlin. Still, as far as learning the craft went, Devlin explains, "...mostly, it just came from doing it. You can read a lot about structure, and I have, and I think [that's] good...I think mythology is great to study, in relationship to your work especially...but none of that beats writing. You just gotta keep doing it. At least in my particular writing career, I kept thinking things were on the page that weren't. I would write a scene, and to me it was a very dramatic scene, and I could see how. Other people read it -- it's nothing. And I realized a lot was happening in my head that I wasn't getting on the page. The more you write, the more you find ways to get it out of your head and onto the page." Devlin also likes table readings with the actors. "As soon as you hear it out loud, first of all, you start to realize how much you overwrite. How much you don't need to write." In the end, Devlin admits, "For me, it was twelve scripts before I had one that was even worth reading."
That's why Devlin tells new writers to beware: "One of the problems that happens is, it's so hard to write a script...to get 120 pages of anything done. But what happens very often is that beginning writers sometimes get married to that script, they want it to be made so desperately that they don't move on to the next one." So Devlin's chief exhortation to writers is, "...just keep writing, that is, get better at it."
(And speaking as a producer, Devlin also warns, "Don't write jokes in the description, just don't do it. The jokes are not in the movie, they just annoy the people who read the script. And your friends read it and they think it's really funny. But we know that joke won't be in the movie and it makes us mad...I used to do that a lot in my scripts.")
For a writer of one of the biggest blockbusters of all time (ID4 made $817 million world-wide), Devlin is surprisingly self-effacing. "I'm not a great writer. But I'm pretty darn good with structure...and I understand how to make my writing work on camera. I'm not a great writer. I actually prefer, especially in this stage of my career, to work with more talented writers. But the first time I wrote a script that felt like a movie was INDEPENDENCE DAY. STARGATE had a lot that was cool about it, and so did UNIVERSAL SOLDIER for that matter, but so much of the writing happened during the process [of making the movie], rather than the screenplay." For instance, in UNIVERSAL SOLDIER, Devlin had to radically trim the dialogue because Jean-Claude Van Damme's Belgian accent couldn't handle too many words at once! Devlin: "I think my early screenplays, the writing happened on the set and then in the reshooting, because my early films did a lot of reshooting, a lot of reshaping after the test screening."
Though Devlin's experience as an actor helped him as a producer (i.e. working with actors on the set, etc.), it turned out to be a problem as a writer. "I would very often write a line of dialogue, and [as an actor] I knew how to say that line, and to me it would be a funny line of dialogue. What I didn't realize is that if you just read it on the page and you delivered it any way other than the way that it was in my head, it wasn't funny. And I still have this problem today." Devlin loves the new writing programs that read dialogue back to you in a monotone; that way he can tell if the line is funny because of the way it's written or the way it's delivered. In the monotone, the dialogue "has a whole other meaning when you read it like that."
This doesn't mean Devlin forces the actors to stick to his scripts word for word. Devlin: "On INDEPENDENCE DAY, we, especially with Will Smith, and especially with Jeff Goldblum and Judd Hirsch, we said, don't even memorize the lines. We'll know the lines, so we'll know when there's information that's missing. But you gotta just have fun; you gotta just let it go. In fact, there's a couple scenes where the first half of the scene is what was written, and that was the end of the scene, and then they kept going, and then the second half was better than the first half. So very often, we only used the second half, or both halves are in the picture. Like the scene in the car, where the father [Judd Hirsch] is getting mad at [Jeff Goldblum] for driving fast to try to get to Washington, and he ends up saying this line, slow down, what do you think, Washington's not going to be there when we get there? And then there was like this pause, Ohmigod, it might not be! That was totally Improv-ed. Judd Hirsch realized what he was saying and it became a very honest and real moment." Devlin continues: "I'm a big fan of improvisation as long as it works within the context of your structure." And Improv is not for every movie. "THE PATRIOT didn't really lend itself to improvisation because the language was so specific and stiff and the structure was so tight. It was the first time I ever worked in a five-act structure, so it was a little bit confining that way."
Now writing with a collaborator is a much different process than writing solo, especially if that collaborator is the hard-charging Roland Emmerich (they wrote STARGATE, INDEPENDENCE DAY and GODZILLA together). Devlin: "So for Roland, if we're gonna write a script, we're gonna write it in four weeks. Now that doesn't mean a couple hours a day for four weeks...that means twenty-four hours a day we're writing till we drop dead and have a screenplay. So for all you who are writers, you know that your house is never as clean as when you try to write, because you always try to find an excuse not to write." But as Devlin explains, it's hard to find that excuse "...when you got a German in your face going ARRRRGGGH!"
Devlin goes on: "We also had a very unique partnership in that Roland is enormously visual. That is his genius as a director, the ability to visualize and come up with images you haven't seen before. So we would sit at this long table, and I would sit at one side with a laptop writing the scene, he would sit on the other side drawing the scene and storyboarding it. And then at the end, he would hand me his storyboard and I would hand him the script. And if I saw something he drew I didn't write, then I'd go and change it and...vice-versa, and we'd critique each other. And we were very brutal on each other, by the way; these were not pleasant experiences...but our rule was, nothing went in the pages [until] we both agreed. We didn't just kind of compromise and say, oh, alright, if you think so. We'd have to both be totally convinced. And it was great - we got a lot done in a short period of time. And the experience of doing all those drawings gave us an added value because he was directing and I was producing, which is we had the movie completely storyboarded by the time the script was finished. So we knew how many digital effects shots [we needed], how we were going to do those digital effects shots, so when we would go to the studio with the script, we had a script, we had a budget, we had a marketing campaign...the whole other package to bring in than just a part of the development system."
Since ending his partnership with Emmerich and striking out on his own at Electric Entertainment, Devlin hasn't reached the heights of his earlier successes, producing modest performers like EIGHT LEGGED FREAKS (2002) and CELLULAR (2004). As Devlin himself admits, "I had had a couple of bad experiences making films here in town." In fact, one of the reasons he did THE LIBRARIAN for TNT was that it was a more enjoyable process working with the cable network than with the studios (fewer execs interfere), even though it meant a much lower budget. This TNT experience "reenergized [his] love for filmmaking, [and his] desire to stay in this business..."
Still, Devlin doesn't hold back about the often brutal world of showbiz: "This is an awful business. There's only one reason to be in this business -- you can't not be in this business. It's like a disease. If you're doing it because you wanna get rich, you're crazy. Look at the percentages, so few people get rich. If you're doing it because you want to be famous or you want people to love you, you're just going to be in for hell. You gotta do it because something about a dark theatre and strangers being in that room laughing and sharing that experience is addictive to you. That's the only real reason at the end of the day. So I always try to discourage everyone, and if they end up doing it anyway then they should."
And if you do end up doing it anyway, Devlin has some important advice for writers: "Underlying material helps a lot. Every studio in town right now has a policy that you should know about, which is they will not make a movie that costs more than $40 million unless it's based on a bestselling novel, a sequel to a movie that was a hit, a television series or a very successful video game. If it's not one of those things, they're not spending that kind of money. I've had three different studio executives say to me that they would not buy INDEPENDENCE DAY today because it wasn't based on something else."
This doesn't mean the studios are looking for a particular genre. Devlin: "I think it makes no difference. I think what matters is how good the script is. If the script rocks, they really don't care who wrote it. They just care about the material. So I would say choose what you want to write based on what you love...If you're a person who really won't go see an action picture, don't go write one. Write what you are willing to stand in line for 45 minutes to see. If you're willing to tolerate an incredibly obnoxious crowd on a Friday night to go see a picture, you're doing it because you really wanna see something. And you got that passion, that's the kind of movie I think you should write, because you'll write it well, it'll come from a real place inside of you, and then there's a chance, and it's only a small chance, but then there's a chance that that passion can become infectious [with an audience]."
But before you get to that point, you have to be hungry enough to get that first break. Devlin: "There's an expression in football that goes, the man in motion attracts the luck. I think you have to be proactive in your career...and then luck will come to you. It's not going to come to you just sitting in your apartment waiting for it." So whether it's screenplay contests, pitch sessions or networking opportunities like Screenwriting Expo 3, just do it!
Responses, comments and general two-cents worth can be E-mailed to gillis662000@yahoo.com.
(Note: For all those who missed my past reviews, they're archived on Hollywoodlitsales.com. Just click the link on the main page and it'll take you to the Inner Sanctum. Love them or Hate them at your leisure!)
A graduate of USC's School of Cinema-Television, Tom McCurrie has worked as a development executive and a story analyst. He is a screenwriter living in Los Angeles and is currently writing a novel about Spaghetti Westerns.
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