The First Time I Got Paid For It: Writers' Tales From The Hollywood Trenches - Softcover

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Peter Lefcourt is a screenwriter and the author of numerous novels including The Woody and The Dreyfus Affair. He lives in Los Angeles. Laura J. Shapiro is a writer and producer living in Santa Monica. Laura J. Shapiro is a writer and producer living in Santa Monica.

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Excerpt

Alan Alda

I was writing my first episode of Mash in a hotel room withFrench furniture from the Wilshire Boulevard period, and I noticedI had begun dancing around the room.

    I was in the hotel because the architect who was doing renovationson our house had promised me the work would be finishedby the time I came back to town for the second season ofMash, whose first season had paid for the house in the first place.

    Renovations, like rewrites, take longer than expected, and Ihad made things worse by insisting that the house look like theplan we had agreed on before I left town. "I don't want that bigexcrescence in my living room," I had said, using the biggestword I could think of for a modernist hump on the wall the architectwas proposing. Sure enough, when I got back to L.A., thehouse wasn't finished, but there was the hump, big as life, andjust as excrescent. I took a sledgehammer to it and knocked it offthe wall. This made my point, but set back construction anotherthree weeks.

    So, here I was, working on my first serious try at a televisionscript in the cool, contemplative solitude that can only be foundin a cheesy, fake-elegant hotel. More and more, I found myselftaking a sledgehammer to my own scenes and dialogue, and aftera while I was dancing.

    I was dancing because, after hours of rewriting a scene, I hadfinally solved it and had crashed through to something I knewwould work. "I can do it ...! I can do it!" I chanted, dancing andjumping for joy until the thought intruded that there were anotherfew dozen problems to solve before I'd be finished.

    This was the first time since I had decided I wanted to be awriter at the age of eight that I was actually working on somethingthat might be seen by millions of people. Every little writingvictory was therefore charged with emotion.

    I've thought, since then, how lucky I was that my first scriptwas one in which so many problems had already been solved forme. The show had been on the air for a year: I wasn't creatingcharacters from scratch; I wasn't imagining a whole new world.

    As an actor, I had already researched the time and place. I'dread that the Korean winters were bitter and, in a series of two-handedscenes, I let a humble pair of longjohns go from one shiveringbody to another through a string of deals, love offerings andextortions. It was, of course, similar to a device used by Schnitzlerin the film La Ronde, so even some of the plot was borrowed.

    In this way, I was able to concentrate on the pleasures of puttingwords together, discovering the voices of the characters,tracking the subsurface tectonics of their emotions. This mademy victory dances a whole lot easier to come by than I realized atthe time. Even after I had written a number of episodes and wasexploring new paths, I was still making use of the work of peoplewho had first explored the territory.

    It was something of a shock when I began working on thefirst feature-length script I'd try after writing for Mash. Since itwould be three times longer than an episode, I assumed it wouldbe about three times harder. Imagine my surprise when it turnedout to be about 27 times harder.

    Suddenly, I had to create, through research and imagination,a new world, populated by characters I had to build from theirheads to their toes. I had to find out how they would act on oneanother in a way that would plunge them into Act Two and letthem climb out through Act Three. I was all by myself on a hugeconstruction site.

    Hemingway said that writing is architecture, not interior decoration.I was learning that, even with all the rewriting, it wasn'trenovations, either.

    Now I was taking a sledgehammer to the foundation itself, redesigningit time after time, from scratch.

    After all that, when I would finally crash through to somethingthat worked, I would feel—and every writer must feelsomething like this—a thrill, a rush of joy, a desire to dancearound the room.

    I still feel it. And, once in a while, I still dance.

* * *

Alan Alda has written five screenplays: The Seduction of Joe Tynan,Four Seasons, Sweet Liberty, A New Life, and Betsy's Wedding. He wroteeighteen episodes of Mash, one of which, Inga, won him an Emmy for writing.

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Excerpted from The First Time I Got Paid for It...by Peter Lefcourt Copyright © 2002 by Peter Lefcourt. Excerpted by permission.
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