Helping Evolve The Script
an interview with screenwriter Bo Goldman
Bo Goldman is an Oscar-winning screenwriter ('One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest', 'Melvin and Howard' and a nomination for 'Scent of a Woman'.). At the time of our interview he was working on 'City Hall'. He talked with the Newsletter about a writer's relationship with editors.
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"If you think of the making of a film in three parts-pre-production, production and post, part 1 rarely sees part 3 and part 3 rarely sees part 1. I work far more closely [with the editor] than a lot of writers do. Directors and editors have usually been very good to me in that way.
"We're redoing some of the ending on 'City Hall' and I'm involved in that. I'm working hand in glove with Bob Jones who is the editor - I come in and he shows me the footage and I'm trying to write stuff in and around it. So the process is very close.
"I work very hard on the ADR - there's so much you can do with sound. For instance, there were some moments of confusion in 'City Hall' and we were able to clarify them with ADR - with a little voiceover - and it just feathers right in.
"I had a musical on Broadway when I was 26 - it was an adaptation of 'Pride and Prejudice'. I mention this only because I think that lyric writing was very good training for writing screenplays - because you can't waste a lot of words, even though I concentrate a great deal, in the movies I write, on language. I think there's a very powerful rhythm that exists in any film and either you have an ear for that or you don't - it's a musical thing. Editors combine a sense of rhythm with manual dexterity. I think it's like conducting. Music is tremendously important. There's music in everything that exists to do with film. You don't hear it sometimes - there's music in a performance. I mean Al Pacino - he's like a whole string section when he's working.
"I love music. I love the job Tom Newman did on 'Scent of a Woman'. Jack Nitzche's score for 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest' is really a genius piece of work - that horrible Musak Nurse Ratched puts on - he wrote all that. It sounds hypnotic, soporific, and makes robots out of the guys. I believe that the spirit of a movie, the sense of it, the subtext of a movie is endemic, it's there, and music will help bring it out, like editing will bring it out. Chiselling away to create the work of art.
"There was an enormous tug both editorially and script-wise in 'Scent of a Woman'. The studio was always hammering at us to try to cut the movie because it was two hours and twenty-five minutes and, just practically speaking, that meant one less show a day. One less show a day meant I don't know how many millions of dollars less in the grosses worldwide.
"Ultimately, the film was never cut down beyond that because it was a richer film at the longer length. Every scene as it's written has a meaning to the whole.
"I don't write in the reaction shots, that would be ludicrous, right? But I do benefit by them. I would say the most important reaction shot that I've ever 'written' in my life (but I never put it in the script) was the reverse on Chris O'Donnell when Al Pacino is doing the tango in 'Scent of a Woman', This young man is just beaming, he looks absolutely beautiful, you sense his love for the colonel at this moment, and of course I didn't write a word. It was the selection of a shot by Michael Tronick in concert with Marty Brest, the director. So, in a sense, the editorial department is helping me with the script. Helping the script evolve."
"I worked with Richard Marks on 'Dick Tracy'. I noticed that he had a cardinal rule which I think was quite wonderful. We had a director who wanted all of our time but even when we were really under the gun Richie put his foot down, 'I don't work Sundays', he said. I thought that was wonderful."
"I know someone like Bob Jones keeps the script handy and refers to it. In 'Scent of a Woman' Billy Steinkamp, Michael Tronick and Harvey Rosenstock were very aware of story, story all the time. They may not be looking at any pages but they're respectful of the script. Same thing with Richard Chew, Lynzee Klingman and Shelley Kahn on 'Cuckoo's Nest'. Working on the narrative all the time, making the story. Some of the scenes that flow the best, they can just fly in rehearsal, they get shot and they're zilch. And the editor doesn't take any great glee in that - they want to make it work, and more often than not they find a way to make it work.
"But sometimes you have to watch cutting because I've had occasion when certain elements of a film were not working. Say there's some subplot and it's 'Oh, let's throw out the love story.' With the dispensing of that story the main story can get undercut because that's been feeding it. But the editor will not accept that sometimes. They'll only see what's expedient. They'll say 'Well we don't need this anymore.' Well maybe not, but sometimes it's going to affect the overall. Great editors can say, like in 'Scent of a Woman', 'Well, I can lose it but it's going to hurt this', so they'll give the director the choice. They understand, like a great diagnostician in medicine - this is the problem, this is how we can treat it, but you're going to have side effects. They'll see the whole picture. That's the artist, as opposed to the practitioner of editing, because they see right away what the spine of something is and what's extra. Others won't offer the complete diagnosis, they just want to do the surgery."
Asked if he felt editing had ever ruined his work Bo said, "I've never seen it ruin it. I've seen it improve - I think it improved it in 'Scent of a Woman', it improved it in 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest'. In every case I think it's improved it if the movie's worked. I love editors and I think they're great allies."
"I think they're dangerous things. People publish themselves too easily with a computer. They're constantly talking in their head about what they've just written instead of sitting down and just doing it. I think the same thing's true with the Avid. I think that it's double edged. It gives you too many choices. In the proliferation of choices the work gets polluted. Going in the cutting room you don't hear the sound of a Moviola anymore - not even the whirr of a Steenbeck. You hear nothing. Just screens blinking at you, you might as well be in NASA.
"In the old days, I remember coming in late at night and the director says, let's take a look at this scene. It's 11 o'clock at night, you come in and there's somebody bent over a Steenbeck, you know, trying this - no good, goes over to the rewinds, something gets cut, comes back - there's something about that process - there's a sense of craft to it, you know. I'm sure the Avid has its place, but I think that time is well spent when the editor is by himself or herself with their own artistic consciousness. Any good work - writing, editing - is a hand-made process."
Reprinted from
The Motion Picture Editors Guild Newsletter
Vol. 16, No. 5 - Sept/Oct 1995
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