From Script to Screen
07 Apr 09
The RTS Futures event From Script to Screen discovered the ins and outs of getting scripts off the page and onto the small screen.
Tony Jordan the Eastenders, Hustle and Life on Mars writer and The Street writer Alice Nutter, were probed by The Guardian's TV Critic Gareth McLean, finding out their thoughts on the different routes into screenwriting, how to get projects away, and how to create an award-winning TV show.
Advice on Writing
Luck, talent or hard work?
Tony Jordan: “There is an element of luck: if the right person at the right time reads your script and it’s the kind of thing they’re looking for, ‘Whoopee’.”
Alice Nutter: ‘You’re not likely [to succeed] sending in unsolicited stuff … I booked myself into a course with a radio producer and that got me a radio play. If you spend a week with somebody and they realise you can write and you’ve got ideas, then they’re more likely to work with you. I then booked myself on to Jimmy McGovern’s course and I got an episode of The Street from that. When I did the course I worked like a maniac.”
TJ: “I passionately believe that talent will out because they aren’t enough good writers in this country for it not to come to fruition at some time."
AN: “You need to work four times as hard as everybody else.”
Collaboration or going it alone?
AN: “It’s a really collaborative process. I sit at home, sweat and work really hard, but I’m absolutely dependent on the quality of the people around me, partly for pushing me but partly for pointing out what’s wrong with it. You see one person’s name on a script and really there’s about four that have been involved in shaping it … In the end what’s important is whether the script is any good … If you’re clinging to your first draft and you’re not willing to change it, unless you’re an absolute genius [it won’t be any good].”
TJ: “I surround myself with people whose judgment I trust. They tell me when it’s **** and when I need to work harder they push me. But as writers I think it’s really important we hold on to our own voice … It is a collaborative process with a script editor, producer, director and the other writers on the team, and they all have a valuable input. But at the end of the day it has to be your voice.”
The only advice that matters
TJ: ‘All my advice as a writer comes out of one book: William Goldman’s ‘Adventures in the Screen Trade’. He wrote All the President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. He said, ‘Writing is easy — all you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until your forehead bleeds.’ Only a man who writes would understand that. But the most important advice, and [Goldman says] it on every single page, is, ‘Remember; nobody knows anything’ … That means you should be free to be as original as you want, to have your own voice, to be brave, to be extraordinary.”
