First Time Director. Gil Bettman

the face of the planet for all of the key parts in his film; then, when he goes into production, he can rest assured that, no matter how budgetarily compromised his film is, no matter what disasters strike during filming, he can still make a great film. If he has a great script and a great cast, all he has to do is to get them to say the lines in the script while the camera is rolling. That's it.

A Few Examples from the World According to Bob

      I developed two feature scripts with Zemeckis for studio movies that I was to direct. Neither project ever got made, but going through script development with a master like Zemeckis was enlightening. Bob used to say, “The script is never finished.” He meant that only perfection is good enough, so you have to keep on rewriting and improving the script until it is too late — because you just finished filming the scene. On every film Zemeckis has made, even after the studio had approved the script and it was being prepared for production, Bob continued to work with the writer. This may seem obsessive to some, but Zemeckis looks on it as the most productive use of preproduction.

      He knows that nothing done during the preproduction process will have as great an effect on the quality of the finished product as the script. During the preproduction for a huge scene like the one in Forrest Gump at the anti-war rally in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where Forrest reunites with Jennie after a separation of many years, Zemeckis understood that everything which takes so much time and money to prepare — securing the location, hiring the hundreds of extras who will make up the crowd, working with the effects artists to prepare the CGI graphics that will add tens of thousands of additional people to the crowd, renting all the period costumes, renting all the additional camera and lighting equipment, transporting all the men and material to the location, catering, and the like — would make the movie a little bit better. But none would contribute one tenth as much to the overall quality of the film as the script and the cast. What makes the scene in front of the Lincoln Memorial moving and great is the way it was written and the way that Tom Hanks and Robin Wright played it.

      You should not begin to shoot a film without the right cast. Ironically, the most concrete proof of this axiom is a Zemeckis film which made that very mistake. The film, Back to the Future, put Zemeckis over the top and made him a director of note. What most people don't know about this film is that Bob first cast Eric Stoltz over Michael J. Fox as the main character, Marty McFly. In retrospect, this seems surprising. In the years that have passed since Back to the Future came out, Eric Stoltz has gone on to deliver many fine performances, almost always playing a mercurial, quirky, slightly oddball type, and Michael J. Fox has built a successful career (cut tragically short by his illness) with the help of some respectable actor chops, but relying mostly on that which God gave him: earnest likeability, pluck, puckish charm, and deft comic timing. Twenty-five years later it's obvious — Eric Stoltz is an excellent actor, but Michael J. Fox is the definition of Marty McFly.

      Back in 1984, when Zemeckis went into production on Back to the Future, Stoltz and Fox were young actors, just starting out and largely unknown. Bob shot for three weeks with Stoltz before he realized he had made a crucial mistake. Eric was a good actor, but he could never do justice to the role of Marty McFly. Because Spielberg was the executive producer, and the film was being made at Universal — where Spielberg was, de facto, the most powerful man on the lot — Zemeckis was allowed to shut down the production for several weeks, recast Marty, and finish the picture with Michael J. Fox in the lead. And the rest is history. We now can see clearly that without the perfect actor in the role of Marty — Michael J. Fox — the film would have never achieved greatness. It would have a good film. The script was great. Christopher Lloyd was perfectly cast as Doc Brown. The rest of the cast was solid down to the bit parts. But with Eric Stoltz playing Marty McFly? No one can say for sure, but it seems highly likely Back to the Future would not have been the film that launched a franchise.

Perfecting Your Script - Getting the Audience into the Movie

      A first time director is wasting valuable time and energy during preproduction if he concerns himself with questions such as how many days, if any, he will get to have a steadicam. Instead, he should focus on what will yield the greatest results: perfecting the script and securing a dream cast. How does he go about doing this? It is incredibly difficult. If it were simple or easy, great first films would be a dime a dozen, instead of one in a hundred.

      All first time directors, before they undertake their big breakthrough gig, should have spent a reasonable amount of time trying to understand and incorporate the wisdom of one of the great screenwriting gurus. Zemeckis swears by Lajos Egri. According to Bob, everything you need to know about screenwriting is in Egri's book, The Rules of Dramatic Writing. I personally found the approach of Frank Daniel, who ruled the USC School of Cinema when Zemeckis was a student there, to be the most enlightening. His teachings are memorialized in a book written by two of his disciples, David Howard and Edward Mabley, called The Tools of Screenwriting. Many of my colleagues at the School of Film and Television at Chapman University think the best book on screenwriting is Chris Vogler's The Writer's Journey. You are well advised to read and take to heart the teachings of one of these books (or one of comparable greatness) before you direct your breakthrough film. Your understanding of what a director must do to make his breakthrough film great will be seriously compromised if you do not.

      That said, I personally think the easiest way to get a handle on how to perfect your script is to understand exactly how an imperfect script ruins the experience of watching a film. As mentioned earlier, I am adamantly convinced that people go to the movies because they want to be transported in space and time into the action of the film. They want to identify with the main character and live in his skin for the two hours they are in the theater. Again, the extent to which the film allows them to do this is the extent to which the film succeeds. This explains why different films have different audiences. Generally speaking, those under 30 get off on spending two hours being Batman or Spider-Man, while those over 30 prefer being transported in space and time to somewhere like Jane Austen's England, or present-day America courtesy of the Coen Brothers, where they witness a series of events which provides some insight into our current collective consciousness. In a movie made from a script that is flawed, the transportational effect will be weak, even for its target audience — perhaps so weak as to be nonexistent — or it will be intermittent. In either case, the audience's appreciation of the film will be diminished.

      There are a number of reasons why the transportational effect of the script might be weak. Usually it is because the script fails to give the audience the basic information they need to enter the action of the film. The audience must know who the main character of the film is. They must know what the main character wants, and they must want him to get it. Often this essential component of a good script is referred to as the protagonist and objective. The audience has to know who the protagonist is and what his objective is. Sometimes the main character or the protagonist is embodied in two characters. The protagonist of The Godfather could accurately be said to be the joint character of Vito and Michael Corleone. The godfather of the Corleone family is the main character, and throughout the film this role is passed from the father, Vito, to his heir, Michael. In the case of an ensemble film, like Diner or American Graffiti, there is no single protagonist. It is easiest to think of ensemble films as being a number of shorter films woven into one longer film. Each shorter film has its individual protagonist. This is whom the audience identifies with and enters the action through, each time the film shifts to the story centered on that particular protagonist.

      If somebody is going to put up the money to have a first time director direct a script, hopefully they know enough about filmmaking to have made sure that the script has a clear protagonist and objective. Where most scripts are flawed and could be improved is in the extent to which the audience wants the protagonist to realize his objective. Do they really care? If I have heard Zemeckis ask me once, I have heard him ask me a thousand times, “Who cares, Gil? Who really cares?” This is the acid test. This is the hard question every first time director should ask himself when he starts the preproduction on his breakthrough film. Will your audience have an intense desire to see your hero succeed? The more the audience cares, the more fully they enter the action of the film.

      So when he reads the