President of Troma Entertainment and director of Toxic Avenger Lloyd Kaufman distills the collected wisdom of the screenplay writing world into one short article.

Article first published: Winter 2003

So you’ve sold your mom’s soiled panties on eBay and have raised enough cash to shoot your opus. Now all you need to do is slap it onto some paper and thrust it into the hands of the people you’re going to be working with. Many screenwriting instruction books will spend a lot of time telling you how to format a script. They’ll tell you an improperly formatted script with misspelled words and improper grammar will never get your script past stage one in Hollywood. But you’re not in Hollywood, so you don’t need to worrry aboout the misteaks what y7ou made. Hand write your script on a cocktail napkin with crayons if you have to. Just get the damn thing written and make sure it’s got a beginning, a middle and an end.

In a ‘typical’ Hollywood screenplay one page equals one minute of film, thereby making the ideal screenplay 90 to 120 pages long. This is only a rule of thumb, however, as a single line in a Troma script which says “the hard-boiled lesbians with rivers of passion flowing between their legs make sweet sapphic love” may take up to 32 minutes to portray faithfully on screen.

Another ‘rule of screenwriting’ is ‘to thine own self be true’ (coined by popular screenwriter William Shakespeare in his seminal work 101 Surefire Screenplay Ideas), or in the simplified parlance of modern scriptwriting guides: ‘write what you know’. This may not just be the greatest advice a struggling screenwriter can receive, it may be the best advice anybody doing anything can receive. You may be asking yourself, “if this is true, Lloyd Kaufman, what the hell do you know about hard-boiled lesbians with rivers of passion flowing between their legs or the true effects of defenestrating yourself into a barrel of Toxic waste?” Well, what I didn’t know about lesbians and hideously deformed creatures of superhuman size and strength I made up for with my excellent knowledge of being an unloved 98-pound loser who couldn’t get laid to save his life and still lived at home with his mom. The best movies ever made – fantastic and violent and sexy or not – are loved because of their pathos. Great stories come from great characters and great characters are familiar to the viewer in some way. Your screenplay can be as fantastic and ‘out there’ as you want it to be. But relate parts of it to your own obsessions and interests. Every movie I’ve made, no matter how bizarre or outlandish it gets, has been centred on issues and themes that are of real importance to me. Always base at least some of your story on something that you can relate to – the script I’m currently working on is about zombie chickens with a human hero who has a tiny, tiny penis.

Maybe you’ve got a good concept and want somebody else to sweat over things like formatting and having to type every single letter in the damn thing. No problem – ‘real’ screenwriters are often willing to work for nothing or close to nothing in exchange for a credit on a real, completed movie. I haven’t actually put a piece of paper in a typewriter since… well, since you wrote scripts on a typewriter. I got Trent Haaga, co-screenwriter of Citizen Toxie, to do about ten drafts of the script for a mere $750.00. While this amount may seem exorbitant by some low budget standards, I got a feature film script for .002 per cent of the film’s budget! In other words, as vital as it is, your screenplay can be one of the least expensive components of your film.

It’s possible you may feel a twinge of guilt over exploiting someone’s talent and reducing him or her to a state of indentured servitude. You shouldn’t. While you can’t offer cold hard cash, you’re giving them a tangible, finished film for which they will have a valuable screen credit and, if they promise to share their flabby, pale writer’s body, maybe even their name on the poster. And if the writer’s talented, she may be able to parlay her time in the trenches into honest-to-god jobs that actually pay paper money. James Gunn wrote Tromeo & Juliet and within two years made the logical progression from writing one of the most obscene films ever made to writing the script for the live action adaptation of the beloved children’s cartoon Scooby-Doo.

Budget smudget

Should you let the budget dictate the grandiosity of the screenplay that you write? Common knowledge says that if you’ve got a five-dollar budget, you shouldn’t attempt to recreate the Roman coliseum games in all their splendour and glory. But common knowledge is for assholes. I say that if that’s the story you really want to make, a box of assorted animal crackers can be bought for $0.98, monofilament can be pilfered from your dad’s fishing kit, and those little green army men can be easily turned into gladiators with the aid of a handy disposable lighter.

Many screenwriting books will refer to the screenplay as ‘a set-in-stone blueprint for your film’. Adhering to this definition is one of the biggest mistakes first-time filmmakers make. They think that if something’s in the script, they have to shoot it, even if it sucks. In reality, the script should be a mere flowchart of your film, one of the most flexible aspects of the entire production. The script isn’t finished until you are literally unable to make any more changes – that’s when you’ve struck your composite print. If you find a new location, your script should be able to accommodate it. If an actor you’ve hired really sucks, you can change their lines or eliminate the character altogether. If another actor breaks her leg in the middle of production, you should be able to work it into the story (“what happened to your leg?” “I broke it on the way over here”). If you hire Robert Downey Jr as a well respected and level-headed lawyer, make him a well respected druggie lawyer rather than firing him when he gets caught sucking dick for rock. Even after you’ve finished principal photography, keep writing. Lines can be added or changed throughout the editing stage. Don’t worry about syncing the dialogue, toss them in whenever the actor turns their face away from the camera. Keep a microphone handy while you’re mixing the sound so you can record whenever inspiration hits you. The script should be a living, breathing thing that you can slowly choke the life out of throughout every stage of the filmmaking process.

Treating the script like an amorphous blob of Silly Putty will drive some of your cast and crew insane at first. As a director, you will have to reassure them that you’re not going to go to Movie Jail if you change dialogue between two takes of the exact same shot. This technique is particularly frustrating to assistant directors, whose job it is to try to keep everything organised, under control and running on schedule. In 1995, after 25 years of filmmaking, I finally figured out a way round this problem when I made James Gunn assistant director on Tromeo & Juliet. I perfected the process a few years later on Citizen Toxie, when I made my main writer, Trent Haaga, assistant director and featured actor. This triple duty required him to craft dialogue and run the set while dressed in a diaper and baby bonnet with a pacifier hanging around his neck, getting rid of any last illusion of dignity or respect the other cast and crewmembers may have had for him. The system worked quite well and Trent appears to have made a complete recovery.

Lloyd Kaufman Lloyd Kaufman has written, produced and/or directed more than 25 films, including Toxic Avenger, Terror Firmer and Tromeo and Juliet. He is president of Troma Entertainment, the oldest and, arguably, the longest-running truly independent film studio in history. This article is extracted from his book Make Your Own Damn Movie! www.stmartins.com