Hampton Fancher - The Wall Will Tell You: The Forensics of Screenwriting

Also by Hampton Fancher

Books:

The Shape of the Final Dog and Other Stories

Screenplays:

Blade Runner

The Mighty Quinn

The Minus Man

Blade Runner 2049

The Wall Will Tell You

Copyright Hampton Fancher 2019

All rights reserved

First Melville House Printing: March 2019

Melville House Publishing

46 John Street

Brooklyn, NY 11201

and

Suite 2000

16/18 Woodford Rd.

London E7 0HA

mhpbooks.com

@melvillehouse

ISBN: 978-1-61219-761-6

ISBN: 978-1-61219-762-3 (eBook)

eBook design adapted from printed book design by Marina Drukman

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Fancher, Hampton, author.

Title: The wall will tell you : the forensics of screenwriting / HamptonFancher.

Description: Brooklyn : Melville House, 2019.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018049340 (print) | LCCN 2019003415 (ebook) | ISBN9781612197623 (reflowable) | ISBN 9781612197616 (pbk.) | ISBN9781612197623 (ebk.)

Subjects: LCSH: Motion picture authorship--Handbooks, manuals, etc. | Motionpicture plays--Technique.

Classification: LCC PN1996 (ebook) | LCC PN1996 .F36 2019 (print) | DDC808.2/3--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018049340

Ebook ISBN9781612197623

v5.4

a

for Micheal Glass

Hampton Fancher is one of my favorite humans, an exception to the rule of whats possible in the art of living a life, an exception that makes you want to live a little bigger and a little harder. Hes a teenage Flamenco runaway child star sidekick cowboy beatnik arm-candy countercultural Zelig patchouli-drenched shy handsome provocateur of a man, which isnt to mention: film director, documentary subject, screenwriter of Blade Runners, and author of a collection of remarkable short fiction, as well as author of moments in the lives of his friends they can only recall with dazed wonder. Im not going to be able to tell you all I want to tell you about Hampton Fancher, about what it is to know him and care for him and be drawn into his universe, but thats okay, because we have this here book to consider instead. It is tempting to call The Wall Will Tell You a sequence of zen koans in the guise of a writers guide, and it is that, but it is also something like a little brick hurled at the reader by the Ignatz Mouse part of Hampton. It is meant to lodge at an odd angle in your psyche and go on throbbing there, reminding you that the greatest cause in life is that of remaining delighted and remaining surprised, and putting that delight and surprise into whatever you do, and to offer it forth into the commons of the human. Ive learned a lot from Hampton over the years, and most of all when what he had to teach me came in the form of a baffled admission that he had no fucking idea what to do from one moment to the next except live, write, exist, and love. I think its all here for you now, if you want to take it.

Jonathan Lethem

START

A screenplay is the bones of a poem and the poem is a movie and the movie is a dream.

Writing is improvising, is getting inside other minds, other voices. Practice listening, imitate other voices. Listen to people talk, watch people listen. Inhabit their feelings, take note of strangers and people you disdain. It will open the ear to your heart, your imagination, empower you with other voices. Writing is acting.

A character concerns us because of what she does, what she says and that she says it in situations the outcomes of which are uncertain. Most importantly it be a story that you, you the writer, really like.

Dont just point to the thing in the window; go into the store.

Take us somewhere. Dangle a promise. A question to be resolved. An impending event. Incidents, yes, but no incidentals.

A decisive event. Try beginning with one. One that leads to an unexpected challenge to the protagonist. Sudden change. Something that can go either way, will concern us, make us care about what might happen next. Hang us from the cliff, but for that to be a dramatic option there must be circumstances that support it. Your job is to invent a destiny for these characters.

Cause and consequence. Without the former you cant have the latter.

If theres nothing at stake youre dead. Uncertainties are good for narrative. The trouble their motives get them into, or unexpectedly shit happens out of nowhere. Watch some Preston Sturges. Open it up. Flail or bask in the divide between appealing and appalling. Squeeze it, widen it.

Disruption. Something that feels irreparable. The damage done. A circumstance your character is trapped in, is partly to blame for, then has to do what she has to do to overcome it. All of us have done it. Maybe not big things, but little ones are good. These are stories that can come to you lying on your back.

Have your characters live in chance. Living in the unknown means they have to take chances.

Its what might be under the rug thats compelling, but thats only if the rug is too. Oceanic, sweeping. Raft of the Medusa. Thomas Hart Benton meets Salvador Dal. Think about it. Do it.

Locate the potential for tension. Where does it reside? The trouble youre in if you cant really find it is exactly where the process of trying to discover it begins. The characters have to be persuasive. But they wont be if the problems that challenge them are not. Persuasion has to take on life.

Construct truth through lying, make things up. Be free to lie, love to lie, exercise it. It aint logic, its instinct. Monkey around.

Identify/recognize the problems, the solutions. I mean in the narrative, see if you have any: its a groping process, little certainty in itchance and inspiration. It starts with dissatisfaction, with squintingtrying to reach things out of reachon tiptoes, jump and grab, then write it clear and concise.

A weed in a windless place dying for a breeze. Write a dialogue between that weed and the sky and make that weed smart enough to connive a reluctant sky into whipping up a wind and the sky is no pushover.

Whats usually needed in screenplaying is the directitude of a journalist. And the opposite of course, a dreamer too.

INK and BLOOD

Wonder is the first of all passions. It has no opposite.

Ren Descartes

If youre not in love with words why are you writing? Wondrous, the books that explore the words, words that lead to ideas and ideas to expression. It is to your benefit to read a thousand books in your lifetime, and to get there you need to always be reading. Imagination is a greedy little pig that needs to be hand-fed. Several times a day. Fatten the pig.

If youre not in love with the construction of words, trying to be a writer is as futile as trying to find water in a desert. By memorizing great writingthe lines, the speeches, the dialogues of the poets and dramatistsyoull be keeping inside you the best company, the highest teaching. It will restore your heart, reward your mind, and provide immediate inspiration. Through recitation you can prime your faculties to write dramas whereveron the subway, in the car, on the street, in the dentists chair. If there is any substitute for love, its memory. To memorize, then, is to restore intimacy. Joseph Brodsky wrote that.