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By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

Posted Friday, March 17th, 2006 - Comments Off on Nicole Holofcener's shitty first drafts
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Nicole Holofcener's shitty first drafts

In the Reporter, Martin Grove asks Friends with Money‘s Nicole Holofcener about her writing habits. “”I’ve got a Mac and I write on Final Draft. I set my nice office up. I’ve got a view of my garden. My dog sits there. And, of course, I can’t work in there. I don’t know if you’re the same way. If I’m in my office, I’ll pay bills or fall asleep. So I prop myself up in a coffee shop generally with my laptop. Sometimes I’ll spend 10 or 15 minutes making notes about where the characters are and where they came from in terms of the scenes that I’ve already written and I’ll just start typing. I really encourage myself to be as stupid and bad as I can be. I really try to let myself be dumb about it because if I don’t I’ll be paralyzed. I even titled my folder ‘Shitty First Drafts,’ which I got from Anne Lamott. She wrote this terrific book called ‘Bird by Bird’ and it has helped me a lot over the years. It’s a book about how to write. She’s so funny and so brilliant… She might have had a chapter called ‘Shitty First Drafts’ and if you don’t let yourself write one you can’t write. I mean, that’s the way I am. fwm 8704587.jpg And often the stuff that comes from the place that lets yourself play is the best stuff—not what comes from your head or an outline. That’s why I don’t use an outline—because it kills the spontaneity, it kills the life for me. And since my scripts are not plot-driven—but don’t tell anybody because I know no one really knows that!—I don’t need it. I think if I was writing a plot-driven script, I would absolutely need an outline and index cards. I used to waste a lot of time with index cards. They’re a really good thing if you don’t want to write and you just want to screw around. ‘Oh, I think I’m going to spend the day doing my cards.’ You know, you write these beautiful cards and they’re up on the wall and then you never look at them again. At least for me… I do the opposite of everything I was taught in film school [at Columbia University]. It’s funny. I guess teachers are so afraid they’re going to get this mess of 300 pages handed to them if they don’t do that [about using index cards to organize screenwriting].”

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

So I decided on three writers that I might be able to option their material and get some producer, or myself as producer, and then get some writer to do a screenplay on it, and maybe make a movie.

And so the three projects were “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep,” “Naked Lunch” and a collection of Bukowski. Which, in 1975, forget it — I mean, that was nuts. Hollywood would not touch any of that, but I was looking for something commercial, and I thought that all of these things were coming.

There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

“That was the most disappointing thing to me in how this thing was played. Is that I’m on the phone with you now, after all that’s been said, and the fundamental distinction between what James is dealing with in these other cases is not actually brought to the fore. The fundamental difference is that James Franco didn’t seek to use his position to have sex with anyone. There’s not a case of that. He wasn’t using his position or status to try to solicit a sexual favor from anyone. If he had — if that were what the accusation involved — the show would not have gone on. We would have folded up shop and we would have not completed the show. Because then it would have been the same as Harvey Weinstein, or Les Moonves, or any of these cases that are fundamental to this new paradigm. Did you not notice that? Why did you not notice that? Is that not something notable to say, journalistically? Because nobody could find the voice to say it. I’m not just being rhetorical. Why is it that you and the other critics, none of you could find the voice to say, “You know, it’s not this, it’s that”? Because — let me go on and speak further to this. If you go back to the L.A. Times piece, that’s what it lacked. That’s what they were not able to deliver. The one example in the five that involved an issue of a sexual act was between James and a woman he was dating, who he was not working with. There was no professional dynamic in any capacity.

~ David Simon