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Shane Nickerson — the man who brought us the immortal hawesome – often disturbs me with his posts, both at his own site and at Metroblogging Los Angeles. In a good way. In a way which forces me to look inward, to think, to assess, to pursue. I don’t often like what I see when I look inward, but the experience is nearly always cathartic in some way, thought-provoking.

He just posted a piece called “still” which painfully reminded me of my own stalled, nearly-forgotten screenwriting career, and my sense of loss at slowly losing the hope which had once nourished me so powerfully, hope of attaining goals that now seem dim and senseless. What I once thought of as optimism I have begun to feel is absurdity, foolhardiness.

From where I sit, I gaze out on the Los Angeles sky, overcast but impotent, a cloud cover without the energy and life-bringing qualities of rain, but more than capable of robbing us of light, the sun, the energy of scope and color.

And underneath that same sky reside tens of thousands of screenwriters. Some of them have made hundreds of thousands of dollars from their written words, others are starving. Many are worse writers than I, many more are far greater. Such is Los Angeles.

On days like this, when the clouds wrap you in an unwelcome insularity, I feel like anything which I had thought made me original, or my work worthwhile, has vanished like mist, a spectre of falsely confident assumption. It’s been done a million times before. It’s been done better a million times before. Why bother?

This inescapable sense of purposelessness robs me of the energy I need to press on, to prove that my work really has value, to imbue it with value.

In the last year I’ve found more and more reasons to let my writing go. I’ve got this remodeling project to take care of, I’ve got my web design work to do, writing is a long shot, you’re better off taking your chances on the lottery, no agents want you, Los Angeles is overcrowded with screenwriters and their toilet paper-grade scripts as it is, fuck off. As a result, my output has trickled to a minimum. I averaged five pages a day in January. In April, I didn’t write a single page. The less I wrote, the harder it became to write more, and like a vicious cycle the wheels of the machine ground to a halt. Now, I look at my unfinished scripts and I’m paralyzed with a sense of inability, incapable of continuing on with them. So I turn away, without writing a word.

But this is all in my mind. This is all self-inflicted doubt, self-produced negativity. Can we blame anyone for our lack of initiative but ourselves? I can bitch and gripe about how shitty the last five years have been, my crappy health problems, financial hardship, family stresses. But there’s always time to write, always. Bitching and griping aside, who is to blame but myself for not seizing upon that time that is always there and producing?

And then something happens. The hopelessness courses through me, settles, and then I sit back and I analyze it. And I find, to my surprise, that melded with that hopelessness, like the polarity of a yin-yang symbol, lies hope. The two are one, shadow images of themselves, like those half-black, half-white guys in that episode of Star Trek, each despising the other, unable to see the mirror image of themselves. I realize that the emotions inside me which produce hopelessness are the same emotions which can produce hope; they’re consuming the same energy, energy which, if I had the balls to grab it, I could harness for positive use rather than negative.

All I have to do is fire up Final Draft, pick up the proverbial pen. And write. Is that really so hard? And can I not trust to my instincts and my craft to guide me later, to edit and revise if what I write now is not up to caliber? Should I allow the lack-of-self-worth paralysis to rob me of my chance of even trying to write somethig worthwhile, something good? Of persisting in chasing those dreams which of late seem more and more unreachable?

The truth of the matter is that I know I’m capable of writing good stuff. It’s just that, like the cloud cover over the city, self-doubt covers that confidence, obscures it from conscious view. If the cloud cover lingers too long, I begin to forget about that confidence.

I let that cloud cover drown April under a downpour of self-doubt. Time to let the sun shine on May, and make something of it.

Time to fire up Final Draft again. I’ve got dreams to chase.

I was browsing the Star Wars page at the IMDb and was surprised to discover that only George Lucas is credited as the writer of the film. He’s the only official writer, but the IMDb is supposed to be about more than official credits.

Now, it’s an open secret that Lucas’ friends, Willard Huyck & Gloria Katz, punched up the dialogue for the revised fourth draft of Star Wars, and in the process lent the movie some of its famous banter, particularly that between Han Solo and Princess Leia.

Remember the following exchange?

LEIA
Listen, I don’t know who you are, or where you came from, but from now on you do as I tell you.

HAN
Listen, your holiness … let’s get something straight! I take orders from one person … me.

LEIA
It’s a wonder you’re still alive.

Those three lines were written (or rather, rewritten) by husband-and-wife team Huyck & Katz (sounds like a 1930s comic strip). Much of the wisecracking in the script which has earned comparisons with Howard Hawks and his ilk is directly attributable to Huyck & Katz, and I think the movie would be the lesser without their contribution.

Yet it’s rarely discussed or commented on, which I find a shame. By WGA (Writer’s Guild of America, the screenwriter’s union) rules, you have to rewrite at least 50-percent of a screenplay in order to earn film credit. It is not at all uncommon for many more writers to have their fingerprints on a produced script than those which appear in the credits. Still, given Star Wars‘ immense legacy and enduring popularity, I would have expected more references to these contributions, which are, to my eyes, extremely valuable.

Lucas has often stated that he does not think he’s a good writer, that the process does not come easily to him. He is, I think, a magnificent plotter, and even the largely-disappointing prequel trilogy is, if nothing else, deeply-layered in its plotting and thematic development, even if much of that is lost onscreen. But, to be blunt, he’s not a magician at conjuring fabulous dialogue. So it was with tremendous foresight, I think, that he called on his USC friends to do what essentially amounted to a production rewrite, giving zip to a number of scenes that are quoted every day by a bazillion Star Wars fans.

Though not credited for their work on Star Wars, Huyck & Katz do appear in the credits on American Graffiti, sharing them with their director. Things kind of go down hill after that. They wrote what is generally considered the worst Indiana Jones film (Temple of Doom), the dreadful Radioland Murders, and reached their creative nadir with the execrable Howard the Duck (which Huyck also directed), often cited as one of the worst movies ever made.

But it’s not these blemishes for which I happen to remember them. It’s for those little moments of zip in Star Wars, those little moments of banter and repartee, moments so glaringly absent from the prequel trilogy. And at those moments, I always give a little nod to the Huyck-Katz writing duo. Credit where credit’s due, IMDb be damned.

Technorati Tags: Star Wars, movies, films, screenwriting, Willard Huyck, Gloria Katz, George Lucas