Thanks, Bruce

Many years ago I took a screenwriting class as part of my graduate degree in creative writing. It was okay. At that time I didn't really get the whole screenwriting thing. Not sure why. Maybe the story I was working on was meh. Either way, I learned the basics, then mostly forgot everything and went back to working on that novel.

A couple of years went by, and although I'd manage to plunk out several short stories, even get one published, I hadn't gotten very far on that novel.

And I never would.

That Christmas, my then-boyfriend and I both unwittingly gave each other the same present, which made for a goofy Christmas morning. It was a copy of Bruce Campbell's first book, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor. I don't know if he ever read his copy, but I flew through mine. It was the beginning of a long love for Hollywood autobiographies.

The book, if you've never read it, was basically the story of how Bruce Campbell came to have a career in this business, so it goes all the way from Sam Raimi and Evil Dead to life as Billy Zane's audition nemesis and trying to eek out a living on B movie salaries. This was before Burn Notice.

It was the Evil Dead thing that got me. They wanted to make a movie, so they did. Sam Raimi got a bunch of his friends together and they put together a story. Then they made it. It wasn't easy of course - I'm glossing over all the hard parts, but it boiled down to the idea that if you want to make a movie you make a movie.

This had never occurred to me before. You can just go write screenplays and then people make them into movies? This is a thing?

I guess it had never occurred to me before, even during my screenwriting class or all the years I'd been writing stories and watching movies. I was floored by the idea that anyone can write a movie.

First I did what every idiot like me does: I emailed Bruce Campbell and said "How do I start writing screenplays?" Thankfully, he ignored my email.

I bought a couple of format books and started reading websites. I reread the Syd Field book I'd bought for that screenwriting class, as well as the script we were required to purchase - Dead Man Walking.

Then I sat down to write. The novel I'd been working on? In a year I'd written eight pages. That day I took the same idea and I wrote TWENTY pages in the screenplay format I cranked out through Word.

I was home.

I never tried to write a novel again.