KPLU Local News
(2010-04-18)
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Students at The Film School in Seattle.
Bellamy Pailthorp photo.
Growing a Grunge Scene for Movies
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| John Jacobsen (r), co-founder and President of The Film School, discusses a script with students in the spring 2010 intensive. |
"We'd been getting scripts for years from people who wanted to make movies. And we had to, well, suffer through those scripts, because they're just young."
There was so much potential - but at that time, the discussion in Seattle was all about how to lure in more movie crews from out of town. Jacobsen says he and Hollywood actor Tom Skerritt would get together and vent.
"And one of us finally said, let's stop doing that, why don't we learn how to make better movies here. And we'll create our own indie scene, sort of like the grunge scene if you will."
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| Students at The Film School recite poetry in Stewart Stern's class, "The Personal Connection." Seattle, spring 2010 intensive. |
They contacted others who had already been teaching in Seattle - screenwriter Stewart Stern, writer/director Rick Stevenson and impresario Warren Etheredge. The five of them shared a conviction: that the basis of any high quality film is a really great screenplay.
"And we created this school that just focuses only on story, and it turns out to be the only film school in the world that only focuses on story - everybody else has cameras."
The Intensive: Find Your Story and Hone Your Craft
For six years now, they've been running 3-week intensives, twice a year - where students of all ages spend twelve hours a day, six days a week, thinking about nothing but great stories: their structure, their characters and the words on the page that create them.
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| Screenwriter Stewart Stern teaching his class, "The Personal Connection," at The Film School in Seattle, Spring 2010. |
Stern is unabashedly old-school. He's amazed at what technology has done to his industry.
"Writers have it so easy now. They have their audience at their fingertips, without any right to do it. It's like somebody being allowed to build a bridge and not knowing the first thing about how."
He teaches appreciation for language by leading the class in a series of poetry readings. They chant in unison from a selection of works by Rudyard Kipling, Vachel Lindsay and Robert Frost.
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| Screenwriter Stewart Stern takes questions from KPLU News reporter Bellamy Pailthorp. (Photo by Lucy Hart.) |
Stern says reciting poetry gives writers muscle memory for great language, with rhythm and cadence. And it teaches them the importance of strong metaphors and double meanings. But more than all of that, he says his course, called "The Personal Connection," is about giving his students the courage to delve into their deepest selves and uncover what really moves them - and to write about that.
"You know, what do you value most? What would you least give up? What would you run back into a burning building to take out if you had a choice of only two things?"
That focus has been helpful to a growing community of alumni. More than 250 have been through the program so far.
"I was really smitten with Stewart Stern. He's such a magnetic man" says Lisa Halpern. "And his stories are so - from the heart."
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| Lisa Halpern and Winda Benedetti, screenwriting partners who met during the inaugural session of The Film School in March 2004. |
"So they're just saying, wait - before you rush into shooting something, take a minute, take a year, take six months. Take whatever time it needs, to know what your craft is and to craft something that you'll be glad you shot. And that people will want to see."
Thumb Wars and Rewrites
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| A thumb war ensues as Benedetti and Halpern prepare Benedetti's screenplay Sundownfor a staged reading at ACT Theatre in Seattle. |
"It's so much more fun to write with somebody - so much more fun," says Winda Benedetti, another member of The Film School's inaugural class. Halpern emphatically agrees.
Sitting at Halpern's kitchen table, the two cuddle up like school girls, holding hands, fingers hooked. They joke that they settle any writing disputes with thumb wrestling, which they demonstrate. Benedetti wins.
They're working on her screenplay Sundown, which she co-wrote with her dad. It's based on an idea from another Film School classmate: a mash-up of two genres - the zombie movie and the western. Even though the premise is bizarre, Benedetti says it has a structure, characters and focus on human dilemmas that were all very much influenced by her teachers at The Film School.
"Whether you're, you know, telling a story about zombies or you're telling a romantic comedy, there has to be that nugget of human truth. And Stewart just wants you to be able to find that human truth in yourself and if you can find it there, then you can tell it in your stories."
Her zombie-western mash-up was a finalist in a recent state screenwriting contest. She says it's still a work in progress, though - so she's excited it's next up in a series of readings of alumni-written scripts that The Film School is putting on at ACT Theater. She says hearing professional actors doing all the parts in a staged reading, with her buddy Lisa directing, will be immensely valuable.
"Because you spend so much time hearing your screenplay and your words and your dialogue in your head You give it to these actors and they just bring it to life."
Benedetti says the reading will be fun - but it will also show her what's working and what's not. It's not quite that million-dollar deal many screenwriters dream about, but she says it will give her a new list of rewrites. She'll be more prepared if Hollywood comes calling.
A Nest for New Talent
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| Bert & Bertie of Bertiefilms, participants from the UK in The Film School's Spring 2010 Intensive. |
Bertie Films' second short, The Taxidermist won awards last year at festivals in Palm Springs and Rhode Island. Their first film, Phobias, visited 30 festivals worldwide and can be downloaded on iTunes. But prior to visiting The Film School, that success came without any formal training in how to make movies.
Bert says she finished the course feeling relieved and validated. "Aside from the obligatory mirror shot" she says they didn't find many embarrassing moments or typical flaws in their works so far. And they now understand better why certain scenes they'd struggled with weren't working. They have new tools to fix them.
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Would they set them in Seattle? Maybe.
"The kind of films we make don't tend to be set anywhere - but there's a kind of stylistic quality we have in our heads," Bertie explains. "And we walk around Seattle and we're like, 'Oh my God, that's the perfect house! ...and that's the perfect house!' And you just don't have that in the UK, or not where we're from."
She says the connections they've made are compelling.
"We'd really like to make the leap to the states at some point with our filmmaking. And we think that this is really nice place to do it."
