“Unlike many of you, I don’t consider myself an artist,” said Ira Deutchman, the keynote speaker opening Script Sessions. “I’m going to get a bit controversial. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with working with formulas, it’s what you do with them that counts.” Deutchman, the founder and president of an independent film production company called Redeemable Features, was appearing at a three-day screenwriting workshop put on by CineStory–a screenwriters’ conservatory–and Columbia College. He once ran a film society at Northwestern, and now teaches at Columbia University on the side. He bashed the latest batch of independent films at the Sundance festival for their absurdly antiaudience posture. “Look at the career of someone like Jean-Luc Godard. He spent his life deconstructing the pantheon and he never broke through to an audience. He grew tiresome.”
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Script Sessions drew over a hundred aspiring screenwriters who are on a tireless quest for formulas to Hollywood success. In the clubby environs of the Union League, where 39 brands of cigars are sold from under a glass counter in the lobby, Script Sessions set up shop on the eighth floor. Registration tables carried flyers touting the latest software from FictionMaster and Dramatica (“At the click of a button see which classic stories share the same structural elements as your story”). Collaborator’s Version III Plus includes a “Conflict Thesaurus” and “Conflict Arena.” There are also reference books for injecting realism: Deadly Doses: A Writer’s Guide to Poisons; Cause of Death: A Writer’s Guide to Death, Murder & Forensic Medicine; and Malicious Intent: A Writer’s Guide to How Murderers, Robbers, Rapists and Other Criminals Think.
The oddest choice was a double bill from Ken Kokin, the coproducer of The Usual Suspects. He juxtaposed a scene from Fritz Lang’s child-murder thriller M with a Nazi rally scene from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will that ended with a close-up of a monumental swastika. The applause afterward was notably muted. “My thing as an artist is to be very aware of your world and what’s going on,” he explained.
