Confessions of a Script Doctor: How to Turn Your Life Experiences into Books, Plays, Screenplays

By Jack Fitzgerald

More than likely, you have always wanted to write a book, screenplay, or stage play. Now you can and base it on your personal life experiences. Let this handbook be your guide into the writing world as a hobby or profession.

You will find in this book a large number of writing secretes, tips, advice, and pitfalls. The material is not complicated, theoretical, or analytical. It is presented in an easy-to-grasp format. As you go through the pages, you will feel like you are having a cup of coffee with your own private mentor. This is a fun book, and the subject matter is humorously presented.

You will be shown how to take the various events of your life and develop them into a writing project. In addition, essentials such as grammar, punctuation, and good writing skills are painlessly presented.

We have all had interesting experiences in our lives. You can now join countless others who have used their backgrounds as the basis of a book, screenplay, or stage play.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 22, 2019
• ISBN: 9781532072345

Jack Fitzgerald

Jack Fitzgerald has worked as a journalist and political columnist with the St. John’s Daily News; a reporter and public affairs writer with CJON and VOCM news; and as the editor of The Newfoundland Herald and Newfoundland Chronicle. He lives in St. John’s.

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Copyright © 2019 Jack Fitzgerald.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-5320-7233-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5320-7234-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019903635

iUniverse rev. date:   04/19/2019

Dedicate

d to:

Ernest Plank

Ronald McCoy

Denis Rosenberg

For their help and friendship

and

Dan Felix, who was present at the birth of each chapter in this book.

Contents

Prologue

Part I: Personal Experiences

In these chapters, you will find some of the adventures I have experienced in my life. I am a firm believer in writing about what you know and that means recalling various episodes in your life. I have used most of these adventures in this section in my books, plays and screenplays. You can do the same with your own experiences. These events of mine are presented here as an inspiration for you to do the same. Look back over your shoulder and see what incidents in your life you can commit to your creativity.

1   Foreign Intrigue

2   Film Noir

3   Serendipity: A Fortunate Happenstance

4   In Memory of …

5   Film Festivals

6   Hollywood Hair Dos and Don’ts

7   Lucy

8   Morgue Studios

9   Bits and Pieces

10   Yes Sir!

11   Walpurgis Nights

12   Friends

13   Mississippi Spanish

14   Okie Nights

15   Change Ahead

16   Change: Don’t Fight It

17   Tales From the Script

18   Paris is a Movie

19   Robot Writing

20   Films vs. Movies

21   The Oscars

22   The Golden Globe Awards

23   Accents

24   Writing 101

Part II: Creative Features

In this section, you will find over 50 ingredients for writing. Some you’ve heard of and some probably are new to you. This section does not give you formatting or typography information. Here you have the actual components you need to carry your creativity forward and make it interesting, colorful and enjoyable.

25   Electronic Emotions

26   Satire & Irony

27   Stroking and Cold Pickles

28   Creativity

29   Why Write?

30   Ideas

31   The Idea Machine

32   The Writing Hat Trick

33   Small Talk

34   Style and Voice

35   Stage Plays vs. Screenplays

36   Writing Q & As

37   The Name Game

38   Politics in the Movies

39   Accidents

40   Crossroads

41   Movie Philosophy

42   Synchronicity

43   Goals

44   Dreams

45   Just Write!

46   MacGuffins

47   Anatomy of a Book

48   Anatomy of a Film

49   Good Storytelling

50   Good and Bad Movies

51   Sequels

52   Deus Ex Machina

53   Beginnings

54   Plot

55   Conflict

56   Dialogue

57   Endings

58   Your Life as a Movie

59   What if?

60   Overcoming Writer’s Block

61   Teddy Bear Questions

62   Tijuana Lady Goes Hollywood

63   Language in Sunday Clothes

64   Gobbledygook!

65   Communication Tips

66   The Fog Index

67   Questions on the Fog Index

68   Speaking & Writing for Success

69   Our Wonderful English Language

70   Editing and Grammar

71   Humor

Part III: Marketing Mayhem

Here is where the rubber meets the road—Money. One reason you go into writing is that you hope to make some income from it. In this section you will find a heavy dose of reality and a very light dose of pie in the sky. This book does not coddle its readers into thinking the writing profession is an easy one—no matter how long you have been at it. You must become a realist instead of a cockeyed optimist. You must realize that many people view you in your beginning years as a cash cow. Contests, workshops, access, editing and you name it cost money. This section tells it like it is. Even so, if you do experience any of these bad adventures, they will just give you something else to write about in a book, a stage play or a screenplay.

72   Access: Success is Who You Know

73   Help!

74   The Dream Sellers

75   Screenwriting Gurus

76   Screenwriting Gurus

77   Marketing

78   Ersatz Marketing

79   The Dreaded Query Letter

Epilogue

Prologue

Roger Should Have Said Yes

My career as a writer, like so many others, began in Paris, France. Since the 1920s, countless authors have elected this city as the residence of the writing muse. Some names that come to mind are Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and that other Fitzgerald, F. Scott.

Over the years many writers have launched their careers in Paris. This inspiring city continues up to this day to attract writing hopefuls. Most end up at Shakespeare & Company, the vintage English-language bookstore across the street from Notre Dame Cathedral. Would-be authors hangout there because of the place’s reputation for being hospitable to budding writers. If you go there, you will see what I mean.

My going to Paris and my life there were accidental. Very little of my life has been the result of planning. I am living proof that a lot of the time we humans let fate make our decisions for us.

Before I go any further, I should state that my mother, if she had her way, would have had me working at the local post office in the small Mississippi town where I grew up. She was impressed by their pension plan. She said all my flitting around would never amount to much. I, of course, thought otherwise or this book (plus six others) would never have been written.

So, let’s talk about how fate snatched me from the jaws of the Post Office in Okolona, Mississippi, and sent me to Paris, France.

After I graduated from high school, I went to Mexico and studied Spanish at the University of Mexico. Later I got a Master’s Degree from Middlebury College in Vermont. Then I began teaching.

I was an instructor of Spanish at New York State University in Plattsburg, New York. The climate in that city near the Canadian border was well known for its frigid and dreary winters. What was I doing in such a place? The local joke was that summer fell on a Thursday this year.

In order to escape Plattsburg’s bad weather, I volunteered to serve as director of our junior year abroad program in Guadalajara, Mexico. The weather there was beautiful, warm and inviting so I was told.

The year in Mexico went by much too fast and before I knew it, I was facing anther frigid winter in Plattsburg. I knew one thing. I did not want to face another winter in Plattsburg.

At that time, I was reading George Orwell’s Down And Out in London and Paris. It gave me an idea. I could ask for a sabbatical of a semester off to study French in Paris toward my PhD foreign-language requirement.

That is exactly what I did. I figured I’d just as soon be down and out in Paris as I would be in all that Plattsburg snow.

Before I knew it, I was living in an attic room of a building on the Rue Cambon near the Ritz Hotel and Coco Chanel’s house of fashion. Outside the world was very chic but in my dingy attic quarters, I was experiencing exactly what Orwell had written about in his book. For me, it was all a big adventure in which I was letting fate have its way with me. I was in Paris. Let life happen.

The semester flew by because I was like a tourist on an extended vacation. The time was looming closer and closer to when I would have to return to Plattsburg. I was between two worlds. I really had no choice except to return to my Popsicle existence in Plattsburg.

Fate stepped in at that moment and decided to change the direction of my life. An American girl named Eileen lived in a cubbyhole next to me in the attic. One day she received an urgent call from her mother in Baltimore, Maryland. Her father had a stroke and she had to return home immediately.

Eileen supported herself in Paris by teaching English at a small, private language school. She proposed for me to cover her classes until she returned from Baltimore. I quickly had to choose between frigid security in Plattsburg and exciting insecurity in Paris. I took a deep breath, bit my tongue, and quickly chose Paris.

Eileen was gone two months and when she returned, the director of the school offered me a full-time job.

Fate had seen to it that Plattsburg was no longer in my life. The problem now was so what? I stayed awake nights trying to come up with answers for some very important questions. What future was there for me in Paris? What could I do that would match that good Post Office pension my mother had in mind? One thing was apparent though. I was not starving but at the same time I was barely making ends meet.

One day when I was out walking on break from my classes, fate stepped in and changed the course of my destiny.

I passed a small café-théâtre and noticed a group of English-speaking people waiting in a line outside. My curiosity got the best of me and I wandered over to ask what was going on. A young lady with a crisp British accent holding a clipboard told me they were auditioning for a play to be performed in English there at the café. She asked me if I wanted to try out. Being that I didn’t have my next class until two hours later, I thought I’d give it a shot.

I joined the waiting line and finally read. Afterwards, the lady with the clipboard told me to wait around for a bit. She finally called me back into the theater where she told me the name of the play. It was a three-character, one-act play called The Silly Show. An Australian actress who thought there might be money to be had in presenting English theater in Paris was producing it. I was offered the male role. Without thinking much, I accepted and thought I’d let fate have its way with me.

We rehearsed the play for three weeks. The hardest chore for me was having to affect a stiff British accent. The lady with the clipboard was my tutor and before long I sounded just like her.

Finally, we opened and presented the play for five performances. The drama critic from the International Herald Tribune newspaper attended and gave us a tepid review. We had pretty good audiences in the tiny theater but definitely not enough to warrant the Australian lady to continuing subsidizing such a project.

The French people who ran the café-théâtre were very sad to see her go back to Australia. They had never sold so much wine, beer and peanuts.

The night of our last performance, the young man who managed the theater asked me if I wanted to put on a play at their café-théâtre. I of course said yes before even thinking. After all, I did have a one-act play available. I had written it while living in Plattsburg.

Before I knew it, I was in production of my one-act play Killing Time. This overly dramatic and turgid two-character piece concerned an elderly lady who lived a lonely life. She was waiting around for death as she felt she had nothing for which to live. A young lady who feels the same way enters her world. They end up saving one another.

I am of the opinion that most beginning writers are prone to writing ponderous material in their first efforts. They believe, as I did at the time, that such is the most direct route to hooking up with the writing muse.

My play didn’t seem destined to sell much wine and beer. The café-théâtre people had long faces as they watched the two actresses rehearse their somber lines.

The night before Killing Time was to open, the actress playing the old lady did not show up for dress rehearsal. We called her landlady who said Doris got a call hiring her to do her one-woman show Paris is a Lady in London. She had left early that morning. We were devastated. How could she do such a thing?

Cathy, the actress playing the young lady, was extremely upset and wanted to know what I intended to do. I told her I would start crying if I thought that would help.

My crew consisted of Abbey, the crisp young Brit with the clipboard. She said she would put on the old-lady wig and read the role. We tried that but it just didn’t work.

Cathy’s husband Steve spoke up. He reminded us he had been to every rehearsal and was quite familiar with the play and its blocking. He stated he would be glad to put on the wig and play the old lady in drag. He figured it would at least get us through opening night. I accepted his proposal. I told everybody that I needed to go home for a couple of hours to revise the play to fit its new set of circumstances. I told them I would meet them back at the café at 10 p. m.

I quickly returned to my cubbyhole. While riding home on the Metro, I came up with an idea. Why not change my play from high melodrama to a camp drag melodrama? I’d throw in a few jokes, some innuendos and a couple of songs. Steve was studying music in Paris for his PhD so this was no challenge for him. Once I got home, I already had the new structure in my mind. I only had to write it down and get back to the theater.

We opened next evening to a full house and subsequently great reviews. Where we were supposed to run for only a week, we ended up with a six-week run. The café people were more than delighted. We even got a great review in the International Herald Tribune.

The last week of our run, the producer of one of the top café-théâtres in Paris caught me after a performance of Killing Time and asked me if I had a play for him. He said a theater group had cancelled on him and he was desperate for a replacement production. The problem was that the production had to be ready to open in just two weeks. How could I say yes? I didn’t even have a play. Even so I surprised myself by saying yes and agreeing to his impossible set of circumstances.

The next day when I woke up, I was in a panic about what I had promised that theater owner: Two weeks to come up with a play, cast it, rehearse it and open it in a top theater. I decided it was impossible. I’d just have to go and level with the guy.

In order to district myself, I quickly checked out my mail that had just arrived. In a colorful envelope was my Aunt Elsie’s yearly Christmas newsletter. In it she told in glowing terms all the fantastic things she, her husband, and their two children had done during the year. The rest of our family knew she was gilding the lily and always wondered what the real truth was.

I scanned over the newsletter quickly and then went on to my other mail. All of a sudden, I had a thought. There was my play. It would be called News from Elsie and would be a living newsletter. I wasn’t sure about using my aunt’s name though. She might not like it so I chose Freida, the name of a Canadian friend of mine. So, the name would be News from Freida. I would write a sketch for each month. Freida would deliver a commentary on the glowing activities of her family to the audience for each month. Then the four actors would show you via a sketch what really took place.

Before the day was over, I had written January and February and placed a casting notice in the International Herald Tribune. In two days, I had my cast and we were on our way. I wrote a month as we rehearsed the previous month. We just barely made the opening date. The production was a huge success. In fact, two companies of the play were running at the same time in Paris.

After several years in Paris, I was offered the opportunity to go to Hollywood to work on a screenplay. My muse in Paris had treated me well.

The opportunity to go to Hollywood was somewhat overwhelming because up until this point in my writing career, everything had been a stage play, with zero points in the screenplay department.

There I was leaving the world of the stage for the electronic walking and talking universe of film. Would I successfully be able to make the transition? I had no idea. I knew I would simply give it my best and hope all somehow would work out.

Before leaving Paris, I visited Smith’s English Book Store where I managed to lay my hands on several paperbacks covering screenwriting techniques. I kept them well out of view in case someone discovered that I was a complete novice when it came to this special world of dreams called the scenario.

I poured over the how to books and soon noticed that about the only thing I was really going to get from them was the nuts and bolts of the physicality of a screenplay: How the manuscript was formatted, how long a scene should be and how long the scenario itself should be. I noticed screenplays, like stage plays, also were written with divisions into three acts: Act I, Act II and Act III techniques, even though they were not as obvious as in stage plays.

I realized that a lot of the information in those books went far too deeply into analyzing famous films and what had made them so successful. Those chapters were like trying to analyze a slot machine. Why did one pay off and another one didn’t?

After about two weeks of going through those books, I realized that plot, character and dialogue were the very basis of any screenplay and you had to get down all your information in about 120 pages max. Via my plays and having the opportunity of working with a live audience, I pretty much had acquired the essentials of writing dialogue and developing interesting characters.

Very soon after I arrived in Los Angeles, I began working on the screenplay that I had been hired to translate.

During my spare time, I began writing a screenplay of my own that I called The Devil Sent You To El Paso. It was 123 pages long and I enjoyed the writing exercise it afforded me.

Everything seemed to be going along beautifully–that is, UNTIL one day out of the blue the Peruvian director informed me that he had had some very serious financial reversals and that he was going to have to abandon the project.

I had my first Hollywood jolt. Things like this can happen there on the spin of a dime. One day you’re up and the next you’re down. So, there I was, off the gravy train in one swift kick of the pants.

I licked my wounds and, as quickly as I could, tried to assess where I was in life. It meant that I needed a job, any job. I ended up teaching English at a Korean private school in Los Angeles while trying to see if I could gain some measure of employment as a writer. I did everything I could to try to get some interest in my spec scrip, The Devil Sent You To El Paso. No matter how hard I tried, I could not collar any green-light person with enough clout to get it to first base.

At a free film conference in Beverly Hills, I did manage to get in a few words to a top female mogul at a major studio. I quickly pitched her the gist of my Devil screenplay. She listened politely and accepted my resume.

Much to my surprise, a few days later I received a call from her office asking me to drop off a copy of my Devil script. I have never accomplished any feat as fast as I did in getting her office a copy of my script. I did not see her but left it with her secretary. About three weeks later, I got a call to go to her studio and talk with a young man in their story department whom I shall call Roger. I got to the studio and was so full of apprehension that I almost broke out in shingles.

I finally found Roger, who called his particular piece of heaven a small cubicle in a large room of many cubicles. He welcomed me with a big smile, had me sit and proceeded to tell me how much he liked my screenplay. My heart was beating so loudly I could hear it in my ears. Then just when I thought Roger was going to lift me out of that Korean school into a new life, he said with a great smile, "Jack, in spite of my loving The Devil Sent You To E Paso, I’m going to have to pass. But you’re a splendid writer. Be sure to drop off your next script for us to examine. Really, I’d love to read anything you write."

What did I do? I went home and began immediately writing a new script. This one was called Pasadena. I dropped it off at the studio for Roger. He replied about a month later to come and meet with him. Much to my surprise, he was no longer in a cubicle. He was in a small office. When we talked, he was friendly as a pup and repeated almost to the word what he had told me on my first visit, right down to the part where he asked me to drop off my next fantastic script.

Foolish me. What did I do? I went home and began writing Bad Trip, which I dutifully took to the studio a couple of months later. When I next found Roger, he was in a nice office and had a secretary. He looked as successful as I looked unsuccessful. He again repeated his spiel to me.

Yes, I went home and wrote yet another screenplay, Cleo de Janeiro. I really thought he would go for this one. When I went out to the studio yet again for another Roger meting, much to my surprise I found Roger in a very spiffy office with a very personable assistant. In fact, I had to go through two gatekeepers to get to him and his fancy digs. Both Roger and his assistant couldn’t have been nicer to me.

Almost by rote, he began repeating his usual monologue to me of how fabulous a writer I was, etc. etc. I finally stopped him midway in his recitation and asked him how was it I got poorer each time I came out to see him and he got richer. He smiled at me as though I had not a scintilla of a brain and said proudly, I always say no.

I replied, Excuse me?

He replied as though he were talking to an orangutan and said, I never say yes to anything. That way I never can be at fault for costing the studio money. They think I am doing a bang-up job. I could have socked him but I took my manuscript and left.

A couple of years later I noticed in the trades (Variety and Hollywood Reporter) that Roger was now one of the big wigs at the studio, vice president or something other. A few more years pass and one day I read where Roger was head of one of the studios. So, is that how one gains success in Hollywood? Could be. It just means that breaking into writing is not for the faint of heart. For sure, it’s an adventurous life!

Thankfully I managed to find an agent who secured work for me as a script doctor. That is how I spent my Hollywood years up to my retirement, working mainly on other people’s projects. I did well in that area over the years and certainly learned the ins and outs of Hollywood, many of which I have passed along to