[originally published 03/06/02 at Disposable Lit]
Bill Martell has written many movies that are crappy. But he hasn't written crappy movies.
If there's one thing I've heard over and over from screenwriters, from Bill (with his resume of direct-to-video and made-for-cable features) to Terry Rossio (co-writer ofShrek, The Mask of Zorro, The Road to El Dorado, and others), it's this: You can't fault the screenwriter for what you see on screen. If you haven't read the script, you can't blame the script.
Which is why I can tell you that the credited writer behind such non-notables asInvisible Mom, Victim of Desire, and Cyberzone has written an absolutely kick-ass book on writing action movies.
Now, here's the other thing I need to tell you. I've got a degree in English Lit. Which means I spent four years (five, actually) doing nothing but reading and then writing about what I read. And yet not one bit of that work got me one step closer to being able to tell a story effectively — and despite what academia likes to say, story-telling is the absolute sine qua non of all literature in every country.
I learned an awful lot about literature in that five years. I learned more about storytelling in the 240 pages of Bill's book.
Let's face it — there's a certain creative spark to a real storyteller. No book or course or seminar or software's ever going to be able to change that. And no book can ever instill the drive to tell the story, to get the damned thing down on paper so that others can actually get told. But if you've got the spark, and you've got the drive, Bill's collection of tricks, twists, and tools will help you get it done right.
We're not talking about the overly-formal structural "rules" propagated by Syd Field that have taken over Hollywood in the last thirty years: Act One must end on this page, there must be these certain plot permutations on these pages, etc. (Field, by the way, never sold a script in his life.) We're talking understandings of what makes for dramatic viewing — "dramatic" in the sense that there's character-based urgency to the proceedings, and "viewing" in the sense that you've got to show people something on the screen; it's a visual medium, after all.
Here's an idea of what I'm talking about. Bill will tell you, over and over again, that his definition of a story is when the protagonist has to overcome an inner conflict in order to deal with the outer conflict. Sounds almost cookie-cutterish, right?
Great. Now go back and think of any compelling story you've ever encountered in any medium.
Fits, doesn't it?
It's that kind of analysis, of figuring out what makes the best movies work, that Bill has filled the book with. He's not working from some Platonic ideal of story and then coming up with nebulous rules on what makes a story "great"; he's worked from the best movies, the movies that haven't lost their power to be compelling and exciting and memorable, and said, "What do they have in common? What makes them tick? What's the underlying principle, and how can you use it?" And once he's pointed it out for you, like a hidden picture, you can't stop seeing it, and you wonder how you never noticed it before. (If I had some spare change, I'd get copies of the book into the hands of both Ripley Highsmith and John Glen, writer and director respectively of the recently-reviewed dud The Point Men. I always would have thought the movie missed the mark by a good country mile, but having freshly read Bill's book, I could pinpoint exactly what it was they kept doing wrong!)
He's got the street cred to back it, too. He's got seventeen produced films to his credit, plus several others that have sold and never gotten produced. As he'll boldly proclaim, he doesn't have the connections in Hollywood to have gotten those sales by schmoozing; he's never even used an agent. The only thing that sells his work is what's on the page, and it's been enough that producers have chosen to make his words into movies seventeen times is a damned fine endorsement. (And then it turns out that the producers don't themselves understand what it was that made the script work in the first place, and muck it up before it gets to the screen. I've heard some of Bill's war stories…)
My only regret is that it's so thick with information, with ways to look at your idea or draft and identify its weak spots, that it's too much to absorb fully in one reading. Bill's prose is like his scripts: spare and to the point, and each page is packed with fluff-free information. Which means that I'm just going to have to make a convenient spot for my copy on my computer desk, ready to review frequently until I've internalized the whole damned thing.
I can't recommend this book highly enough.
