Second Annual Nashville Screenwriters Conference
Participants include Randall Wallace, Anne Rapp, Lewis Colick, and others
May 19-21 at the Hermitage Hotel
$225 registration; call (888) 680-4491 for information
One of Hollywood’s hottest screenwriters will have a homecoming of sorts this weekend when he participates in the Second Annual Nashville Screenwriters Conference. Randall Wallace, who penned the script for Braveheart, began his writing career nearly three decades ago as a Music Row tunesmith. After graduating from Duke University with a major in religion, the Jackson, Tenn., native came to Nashville in 1972 to work as a staff writer for Tree International, where he remained for three years.
Although he amassed about 200 songs while at Tree, his songwriting career never really took off. ”I just really wasn’t writing the kind of songs that the business was doing,“ says Wallace, who was initially lured here by the music of Kris Kristofferson. ”I felt I was in a different place musically than the industry was. I was sort of more where country music is now than where it was then.“
After several frustrating years, Wallace moved to Los Angeles and worked for a year as a United Artists song plugger before he began writing scripts. Ironically, one of his big screenwriting breaks came through songwriting. While exercising in a gym one day, he overheard two men swapping stories about Elvis Presley. Wallace told them that his father saw Elvis perform at supermarket openings in Memphis, and before he knew it, the struggling scriptwriter was deep in conversation with Mike Post, one of television’s most successful music composers.
”We got to be buddies,“ Wallace says. ”He found out that I was a writer. But I never pitched Mike songs.“ Instead, Post took one of Wallace’s screenplays to a TV producer, who gave Wallace his first screenwriting gig, the TV movie Portrait of a Disco Roller Skater. ”It was the most horrific thing anyone can do,“ he remembers. ”They used the hook that I used to write music, so I could write about music. It was an incredibly stupid job. After that, I thought, ‘Get me out of that. I’ll never do this again.’ “
For several years, Wallace gave up on television writing, but eventually he decided to give it another chance. He scripted an episode for the TV show Hunter in the mid-’80s and wound up spending another four years writing for television, co-creating the network series Broken Badges and Sonny Spoon.
From there, he moved into film screenplays, scoring big with the screenplay for Braveheart, for which he won the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1995. He also received Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations for Best Original Screenplay. Three years later, he served as director, screenwriter, and producer of The Man in the Iron Mask. Filming is under way now for the Wallace-penned Pearl Harbor, which has a budget of $135 million—the most expensive budget ever approved in Hollywood.
Although it has been years since Wallace seriously pursued songwriting, he recognizes parallels between the two disciplines. ”I think the basic internal skills are the same for screenwriting as they are for songwriting,“ he says. ”You have to wrestle with the internal spiritual questions of, ‘Do I have something to say? How do I make a story completely personal and at the same time universal?’
”Nashville has this terrific and unique school of thinking. It’s a very Southern, concrete, human way. In a song, you don’t talk about vague generalities, you talk about the real stuff of life.... I think in great measure that I am the writer I am because I spent time in Nashville under that view. As in songwriting in general, you want to be able to say in a concise way something that is both down-to-earth and poetic, something that is honest and emotional.“
While he can’t teach a neophyte how to come up with great lines—be it in a song or a film—Wallace hopes to advise conference participants about the process of writing. ”When I’m there, I like to make myself available as much as I can to give people what I didn’t have myself, which is an experienced voice. You can [tell] a person how much effort is required,“ he says. ”But I don’t know that you can teach them until they experience it themselves.“
Wallace says he has been approached by both new and experienced screenwriters who are despairing because they’re on their fourth draft and feel like they’re not getting anywhere. ”I’ll say, ‘I wrote 12 drafts of Braveheart before I turned it into anyone as a first draft.’ I’ll say, ‘How easy do you think this process is or ought to be?’ You are asking to have a great deal of money invested in your work and have it shown to millions around the world, so you want it to be your very best work.
”Like with songwriting, a lot of people—particularly amateurs—believe it’s pure inspiration. But songwriters know they’ve worked a lot of years and written a whole lot of bad songs to be able to handle a great inspiration when it comes. Maybe it’s true they wrote a song in five minutes, but it took them years to get there.“
Aspiring writers tend to focus on all the wrong things, Wallace argues. ”The most common questions are, ‘How can I get my screenplay read? How can I get an agent?’ The first question ought to be, ‘How can I become a better writer?’ Amateurs tend to believe they’ve already written something great, but in fact, what they’ve written in almost every case needs work and they don’t know how to improve it.“
Newcomers to the business frequently ask Wallace to read their screenplays, and he almost always declines. ”I don’t want to read other people’s screenplays,“ he says. ”I write my own. If all I did the rest of my life was produce and direct my own movies, I would run out of life before I would run out of movies. I want those writers to develop themselves, to learn to do things their own way.“
Wallace has written about 50 screenplays for movies or TV, about half of which have made it to production. ”You can imagine how I feel when someone who has written half a screenplay wants me to read it,“ he says. ”A lot of people want to find a shortcut, when they should really be focusing on how to write something. I truly believe if you have got a great script, you will find a way to get someone to recognize that. I also know that we tend to think we’ve written something great, when we need to think the best thing we’ve got is what we’re going to write next. We should always look toward what we’re becoming, look toward the future.“
