GROUNDED IN REALITY

'Believability.'

Perry Bunt pronounced the word slowly and solemnly, hoping this would help it sink into the skulls of his screenwriting students.

'Without believability, you have no hope of involving the audience in your story.'

The students in his 10 a.m. class stared back blankly at Perry, their minds occupied, no doubt, with how to argue the believability of a dog with extrasensory powers or a flying baby. On the one hand, Perry couldn't help but admire the courage of their convictions. Once he too had possessed this kind of confidence.

Not so long ago, Perry Bunt had been known as one of the premiere Idea Men in the entertainment business. It seemed like everything he set his eyes on gave him an idea for a movie. One day he picked up his phone and thought, 'What if I could call anyone on this – even dead people?' and in a flash, the entire story unfolded before his eyes (Guy gets mysterious call on his dead wife's phone telling him who killed her). Later that week, he optioned 'Dead Call Zone' to a major studio.

There were days when Perry's mind was so full of stories that there wasn't room for anything else. The problems began when he sat down to write them. For while Perry possessed a keen sense of what made a story interesting ('the hook' in the parlance of the movie industry), he was mediocre when it came to actually putting words onto a page ('the writing' in the parlance of the movie industry). Staring at his computer screen, Perry had a terrible realisation: dreaming up a story had almost nothing to do with writing it. Dream-ing was inspiring and fun; writing was gruelling and difficult. While dreaming required little follow- through, writing demanded almost nothing but. Perry, it turned out, had very little follow-through.

The executives he worked for were even worse. Jittery at the thought they'd spent hundreds of thousands of dollars in vain, they'd tell Perry they absolutely loved what he'd written and then proceed to pepper him with haphazard notes – 'Consider changing the boy to a dog'; 'Let's talk about changing the dog to a cat'; 'We all agree that the cat isn't working and that a boy would raise the emotional stakes' – the movie-industry equivalent of the panicked screaming you might hear in a burning airplane plummeting towards the ground. When confronted with these contradictory ideas, Perry would further torture his mauled script and then, eventually, give up and chase the next Big Idea. It wasn't that he was a bad writer; if he'd been forced to work exclusively on one of his many stories, a good script would have no doubt resulted. But he was always tempted away by the next script, convinced that this would be the one that would prove irresistible to filmmakers and audiences. Ideas, like relationships, are always more exciting when they are new.

'You get six, sometimes seven scripts before they find you out,' his first agent had warned him. Sure enough, after Perry sold his seventh script – and that script, like all the others he'd written, was never made into a movie – his career began a long ride downward. It took a while for him to realise what was happening. The true Hollywood ending is no ending at all; there is no fade to black, no elegiac music, no credits. There is only a phone that doesn't ring. Perry learned that no news wasn't good news, but was instead bad news taking its time. He had once dreaded the phone calls – the phoney banter, the ubiquitous schmoozing, the mendacious puffery – but now he missed them. He wouldn't mind if someone called and lied to him, as long as they called.

For a while, Perry still found work in the entertainment business. On Hey, Hey Fiancée, a television show featuring newly engaged couples on a tropical island, he was tasked with devising ways of breaking up the affianced. Sickened by the experience, he quit after two episodes and vowed never to work in the so-called reality TV genre again. Had there ever been a more egregious misnomer than 'reality TV'? In what kind of reality do people routinely become craven animals on display?

His principles came at a high cost: after Hey, Hey Fiancée, he could find employment only on a children's show about a talking wombat, which was soon replaced by a cartoon featuring hyper-aggressive koala bears. After scripting an industrial for a juicer, Perry hit the end of the line: teaching.

It was a shock from which he had yet to recover. 'Bunt's a Hit' proclaimed a Variety headline that Perry still carried in his wallet. Yellowed and torn, it was a small signifier of his denial that this same Bunt was now teaching eight classes a week of Beginning Screenwriting at the Encino Commun-ity College, where he made it a personal mission to break young writers of the delusions he saw as his undoing.

'Ideas are a dime a dozen,' he told his 10 a.m. class. Perry surveyed the students, holding his smallish frame as erect as possible to emphasise his seriousness. Though he had once been considered handsome, with delicate features framed by dark curly hair, that was when a Bush was President, and it wasn't the one who stayed in Iraq. Now in the last gasp of his thirties, balding and a little thick around the middle, Perry's features appeared misplaced on a head that seemed too big for them. 'It's all about follow-through. It's all about execution. It's all about grounding your scripts in reality.'

The impetus for his well-worn lecture on believability was a scene written by a large goateed boy–man named Brent Laskey, one of the students Perry referred to as the Fauxrantinos. Perry's least favourite filmmaker was Quentin Tarantino, not because of his movies per se, but because every time he made a movie, a thousand Brent Laskeys bought screenwriting software, convinced that writing a film consisted of nothing more complicated than thinking up new ways for people to die.

Brent's screenplay was about a med-school student who pays his tuition by moonlighting as a hitman for the Mob, then discovers a cure for cancer. It was among the class's more plausible scripts. In the scene up for discussion, the hitman is attempting to assassinate a Colombian drug kingpin. When his sniper rifle jams, he steals a helicopter, flies it upside down, and improbably decapitates the kingpin and his bodyguards.

'Without plausibility, you have no credibility,' Perry said, winding up his all-too-familiar rant. 'And when you lose credibility, you lose your audience. Any questions?' The students' expressions remained resolutely blank, as if their disinterest was all that kept their bodies propped upright. Perry was about to return to the open script on his desk when a hand shot up in the back of the class. Perry was pleased to see that it belonged to an attractive young woman in a blue jacket. This woman's name was Amanda Mundo.

Perry's students generally fell into two categories that he labelled 'the geniuses' and 'the nut-jobs'. The geniuses were laconic, arrogant young men and women who dreamed, like Perry, of being successful writers. This class was a tedious necessity for them, a stepping stone to surpassing their poorly dressed, caffeinated instructor and being recognised for the geniuses they were. When Perry praised, they listened attentively; when he criticised, their eyes glazed over as they travelled in their minds to the ceremonies where they would gratefully gather their Oscars, pausing long enough...