How They Write A Script: Anna Hamilton Phelan

“It’s the character that usually grabs me. My downfall always is the plot. That’s the hardest part for me, plot.”

Anna Hamilton Phelan has been a working screenwriter since 1985 with numerous writing credits including Mask (1985), Gorillas in the Mist: The Dian Fossey Story (1988), and Girl, Interrupted (1999). These excerpts are taken from a wonderful book called “The New Screenwriter Looks at the New Screenwriter,” by William Froug, who among other accomplishments founded UCLA’s Film and Television Writing Program.

ON HOW SHE BECAME INVOLVED WRITING ‘GORILLAS IN THE MIST’

“When Dian Fossey was still living, they (Universal Studios) had bought that book from her and offered the project to me. I read the book. It was mostly Dian’s research with the gorillas. Chapter after chapter on gorilla dung and things; there was no story. So I said, ‘Thank you very much, but no thank you.’ Subsequently, about a year after that, Fossey was murdered. And then I thought, ‘Well, what is this about? What is this? Now there was something more going on here than just a woman going up there and researching.’

“So I started asking around and made some phone calls, and someone told me in New York that they knew a saleswoman at Bergdorf Goodman who knew Dian Fossey and who twice a year sent evening gowns to Dian Fossey’s research camp. And I thought, ‘This is very interesting that this woman, who’s up there mucking around in the mud with the gorillas, orders these fancy ballgowns.’

“So after snooping around a little bit more and finding out this was a very interesting woman, aside from her involvement with the gorillas, I thought, ‘There may be something to this. This is something I’m interested in.”’So I called Universal and said, ‘Remember that book you offered me, that project? I’m interested now.’”

ON EXPOSITION

“It’s a difficult thing to do, an expository kind of writing — you want to stay away from getting all that information out in dialogue. And if you can find some creative ways to do it, where people see it rather than hear it, that always seems to feel better.”

ON 3-ACT STRUCTURE

“I structure my screenplays in three acts… I think for me it’s from coming out of the theater and writing in acts. I wrote plays before I wrote screenplays. I try to find a dramatic event to bring in around page twenty, twenty-five — twenty minutes into the movie — that hooks into the action and swings it around.”

ON YOUR FAMILY AS POSSIBLE STORY IDEAS

“I think for new writers, if you can’t think of anything to write about, just look in your family. Just think about Uncle Harry, because it’s pretty amazing what’s happening right near you. You can fictionalize so that nobody gets upset or, if you want to, you can do what I do — get the rights. You don’t have to pay a fortune. I paid Rusty (subject of the movie Mask) a hundred dollars. You get those rights and write about somebody in your home town. Fascinating stories are happening right next door to you. You don’t need to write, you know, John Rambo. Right down the street there’s that old woman who lives in that house and nobody ever sees her. She’s back in there. I would just love to know what’s going on.”

ON CHARACTERS AND PLOT

“I have, actually, in both… Mask and Gorillas. I did start from character in those. It’s the character that usually grabs me. My downfall always is the plot. That’s the hardest part for me, plot. I can steal Alvin Sargent’s great line. Alvin Sargent said, and this is the same way I feel, when he dies and is buried, he’s going to have written on his tombstone, ‘Finally, a plot.’”

ON HOW SHE PREPS A SCRIPT

“I used to use index cards, but now I buy a roll of butcher paper, like a scroll. And I write the story out on that. I’ll have a scroll twenty, thirty, forty feet long. And I just wind it around my walls so, as I look up, I can really see the whole movie that way, the whole screenplay. I used this method when I pitched this story about a man named Johnny Spain, the Black Panther, which I knew was a difficult subject. I thought I’ve got to have all the advantages I can have, so I thought maybe I could use visual aids. I took this long scroll as a visual aid. I had the whole story mapped out on it, and I unscrolled it down this long conference table. One of the scenes is the Watts riot that this little boy named John Spain happens to witness. So I drew in the flames; it was almost like third grade. But it did seem to work, because they were able to see my screenplay.”

ON “KEEP GOING”

“If I could say anything… it is to keep going. Don’t go back and fix that first scene. Don’t go back and fix that dialogue. Write yourself a little note saying, ‘Put in first scene such-and-such,’ if you happen to think of something, then get a little stickum and stick that somewhere on the wall. But don’t go back, because going back is a trap. It keeps you from going forward. It keeps you from going ahead. Your first enemy, of course, is yourself. Yourself is also that little critic that sits on your shoulder that says, ‘This is terrible’… You have to wipe him off your shoulders and keep going. He’s the one who says, ‘Go back. Go back’… You must get it down on paper…. you must sit down and write with no attachment to outcome. Try to distance yourself from what’s going to happen to this… No attachment to outcome. I don’t know where I ever heard it, but I put it on a little piece of paper, and I had it framed. I have it right in front of me. When I get bogged down I say, ‘No attachment to outcome. don’t worry about what’s going to happen to this. Just write the next word.’”

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