When I was invited to join the faculty of the UCLA film school it was technically the late '70s. Spiritually, however, it was still the '60s, with its hippie-dippy disregard for accomplishment and achievement.
The third worst act a writer could commit was to actually sell a screenplay. That was mere commerce, down-and-dirty profit-crazed capitalism. The second worst act was to have that script actually produced as a film. That constituted copping to the system, becoming a drone in the dreadful, oppressive "establishment."
Worst of all, of course, was to sell a movie that was produced and then, heaven forbid, to have it become a huge hit. Audience are morons, many of my colleagues opined. The more popular a film, the less its value. Conversely, if a film was a rancid little tone poem with nifty, scratchy, shaky, chattering camera movements, that was true Art.
Francis Ford Coppola, a UCLA film student a few years ahead of my time in Westwood, was held in low regard for having released as his thesis film an actual feature-length movie ("You're a Big Boy Now"), which was produced by a major Hollywood studio, distributed to theaters and screened for paying audiences.
At UCLA we long ago came to reject that notion. As I argue relentlessly in my lectures and seminars and workshops, not to mention (full disclosure: shameless self-promotion ahead) my new book "Essentials of Screenwriting," we hold that audiences are not stupid but smart. They have a way of finding the good stuff.
I'm not saying that any popular film is worthy and any unpopular film is not. The fact is, however, that since the inception of dramatic art, close to 3,000 years ago, the truly brilliant works, i.e., the classics, have been not only artistically lauded but also commercially successful during their authors' lifetimes.
People who know me even just a little quickly figure out that I come on like an over-ripened, over-mellowed, burnt-out, old retro hippie, when in fact I am to my core a desperately, wretchedly middle-class kid. I'm still married to the first woman I ever married (as of this writing 43 years and counting -- is that freaky or what?); we have 2.2 children, or whatever the national average happens to be. I love America and on national holidays fly the flag at our home. I believe in God. I believe that middle-class bourgeois values are, frankly, the hope of the world.
I tend to scorn self-help gurus, whom I listen to nonetheless, mainly to steal their material. Occasionally, however, there is timeless wisdom to be had even there. Something said by Deepak Chopra has always stayed with me. Chopra asserts that to attach to a particular action a particular expectation is a recipe for frustration and failure. The key to serenity and success, he avers, is to stay open to the surprises.
This applies directly to success and failure in screenwriting. To attach to the act of writing a screenplay the expectation that it will sell is a self-defeating prophecy. A
