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Sceenwriting software now knows how to coach

By Neal Koch
NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE, HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA
Sunday, Mar 02, 2003, Page 12

Roger Schulman, who wrote ``Shrek,'' sits with one of his dogs in Beverly Hills earlier this month. Schulman uses two screenwriting programs, Power Structure and Microsoft Word with Scriptwright. PHOTO: NY TIMES

Roger SH Schulman recalls being in the control room of a Hollywood sound studio as John Goodman, the actor, recorded the voice of Baloo the bear in The Jungle Book 2. As Goodman's voice resonated over a telephone line from a studio in New Orleans, a Disney executive turned to Schulman, one of the film's writers, to request additional dialogue for a roughhousing scene. But with the executive, Goodman, a dialogue director, engineers and others waiting in two studios, Schulman drew a blank. "My brain just froze," he said.

Trying to appear calm, Schulman quickly resorted to his black IBM ThinkPad 240 notebook computer. He punched "boxing" into a word- and concept-association brainstorming program called IdeaFisher, going through the response "fighting/fighting sports" until he got to "sticks and stones will break my bones."

"Stick and move!" he exclaimed, remembering it as a common boxing instruction. Goodman recorded it within a few minutes of the request to Schulman.

Get with the program * Final Draft: The most widely used program, by most accounts, especially in television. Often chosen to avoid problems in converting files from other formats. Has templates for many television shows. Tech support by phone costs US$2.50 a minute, with 20 free minutes in the first month. E-mail support is free. Price: US$199.95. Information: www.finaldraft.com * Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000: "Movie Magic Screenwriting does virtually everything better than Final Draft," Robert J. Elisberg, a computer columnist, screenwriter and publicist, writes in a review on the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences Web site. Price: US$249. * Scriptwright: One of several template add-ons for Microsoft Word, providing more word-processing features than are available with more streamlined scriptwriting programs. Created by Guy Gallo, a screenwriter (Under the Volcano) and film instructor at Columbia University who provides prompt, free tech support by e-mail, according to Schulman. Price: US$129.95. Information: www.indelibleink.com * Scriptware: Once the most popular, credited with innovations now widely adopted; has fallen from favor because the current version is several years old, though update patches are available online. The maker, Cinnovation, says it is geared for users who are not especially computer literate. Price: list US$299.95; sale US$199.95. Information: www.scriptware.com * Ideafisher: Conceived 25 years ago to aid creative brainstorming based on the way the mind makes creative associations. Although IdeaFisher still has an early Windows interface, by most accounts it remains unique. Aimed at pastors, corporate executives, designers and others. Price: US$69.95 to US$528. Information: www.ideafisher.com * Inspiration: Idea graphing and outlining. Aimed at students, it has gained a following among screenwriters. Price: US$69. Information: www.inspiration.com or (800) 877-4292. * Power Structure: Designed to aid story and character development and structuring. More for the professional with developed storytelling skills. Price: list US$269; sale US$179. Information: www.write-brain.com

"As far as anybody knew from the outside," Schulman said of that moment two years ago, "they had asked me a question and I gave them an answer."

In an industry where creative types can still cling to tradition, Schulman, who shared an Oscar nomination a year ago for Shrek, appears to be a maverick among professional writers.

A handful of Hollywood writers still put pencil to legal pads, including David E. Kelley (The Practice) and Bill Lawrence (Scrubs). Tom Fontana (Oz) has three Emmys but no computer. Most professional screenwriters bristle at any suggestion that their talents can be enhanced by computers, beyond their use for typing and formatting scripts.

But Schulman suggests that there are times when resorting to software like IdeaFisher, "this helpful little guy who has a million ideas and suggestions," can be a bit like having another writer in the room.

If so, when credits roll at the end of a film, how much applause belongs to the human writers and how much to their gizmos? Can software help turn you into a high-octane Hollywood honcho? Can stardom be bought in a box?

"It made me a better writer," said Kevin Falls, an executive producer of The West Wing, in a reference to script formatting software, which he credits with freeing him to focus more on story structure and content.

At the same time, Falls and his colleagues are quick to note the limits of such digital assistance.

"It doesn't write any dialogue," John Wells, past president of the Writers Guild of America, West, and an executive producer of ER, said of the formatting software. "All it does is keep you from looking like a jerk."

That is a requirement for selling scripts, though. And as Oscar night rivets ever more attention, it seems that more and more people dream of becoming screenwriters. Jesse Douma, an owner of the Writers Store in Los Angeles, which specializes in screenwriting how-to books and software, said that sales had picked up noticeably over the last two years. He estimates that 80 percent of the buyers are amateurs.

Some attribute the increased interest in screenwriting aids to the availability of increasingly cheaper and fuller-featured digital video cameras and video-editing software. Others see larger cultural trends.

"In the postwar generation, writers aspired to write the great American novel," said Mark Lee, an author and journalist. "These days, my friends want to write the great American screenplay."

It is also hard to beat Hollywood's pay.

Whatever the reasons, in a market where studio executives seriously consider only the tiniest fraction of scripts, aspiring screenwriters are increasingly hunting for an edge.

The software that helps Schulman seek an edge is used mainly in the study of his ranch home in Beverly Hills, high above the Sunset Strip, as he gazes across his swimming pool to a vista of mountains and valley.

A Brooklyn native, Schulman worked as a stand-up comedian and as an editor at Business Week before moving to Hollywood. Recently he has worked on several Disney films and on Looney Tunes: Back in Action, a Warner Brothers film scheduled for a Thanksgiving release. Over the course of these projects and his work on The Jungle Book 2, which opened this month, his mix of software tools has evolved, and so have their functions.

He starts a story with Inspiration, a program for creating graphical flow charts. He chooses symbols of various colors, sizes and shapes into which he types his ideas. A mouse click turns the charts into an outline in rich text format, which can be imported into most word processors.

To get to know his characters and structure his script, he uses Power Structure, essentially a series of forms that prod him to think through every aspect of his story, including his protagonist's childhood dreams, successes and failures. He chooses plot points, defines each scene's conflicts, identifies points of view and sets the story's inevitable ticking clock -- the march toward an event before which the protagonist must make a fateful decision.

At the bottom of his screen, Power Structure graphically displays the tension level over the course of the film. Schulman rates the tension level of each scene himself.

"It's not a cookbook," he said. But consulting these outlines and graphs as he writes keeps him focused on a single, tightly drawn story. "I can make sure I'm not straying into some other movie," he said.

To write in standard script format, he prefers ScriptWright, a template add-on for Microsoft Word. That gives him a more full-featured word processor than those found in most script formatting programs.

He is willing to forgo a feature of Final Draft and Movie Magic Screenwriter 2000, the two leading formatting programs, that generates male and female voices to read scripts aloud. The voices, mechanical and halting, more readily suggest actors rejected for the part of R2D2 than Goodman in The Jungle Book 2.

Moreover, writers who already live for old-style distractions and interruptions may not need new ones.

"Writing is all about trying to overcome procrastination," Larry Gelbart said from his home in the California desert, where he retreats to work half of each week and is writing a sequel to "The Candidate." "I don't like people talking when I'm working."

Schulman said that if he had a writing partner he would probably use a feature in both programs that allows online collaboration by real-time typing in a chat box (Movie Magic Screenwriter also provides voice). But he would ignore their links to online script registration services. He said his lawyer had advised him that minor copyright fees would bring him greater legal protection.

Still, he gleefully demonstrated perhaps his favorite feature, which allows something that he says writers avoid discussing: "cheating," or imperceptibly reducing font sizes and line spacing to bring scripts within assigned page counts. Screenwriter's tool bar has an icon labeled "Cheat." ScriptWright calls it "Fudge." "It knows what you're really after," Schulman said with a laugh.

The latest innovations are not limited to formatting, though. Programs now also tell writers how to write, or do it for them to varying degrees.

Perhaps the biggest-selling "story development" software, Dramatica, allows users to create story outlines drawing on such examples as "Hamlet," by answering 250 questions with no more than their shift, tab, enter and space-bar keys. Based on those responses and a storytelling theory developed by two University of Southern California film school graduates, the program can warn you when it finds your choices faulty. The appeal is spreading: Even Power Structure, meant as an outlining aid, has boxes with pull-down lists that allow writers to classify characters and scenes according to Joseph Campbell's mythic storytelling stages and archetypes, although it offers no opinions of their work.

Professional screenwriters who are asked about such software can turn somber, shifting in their seats as they reply that they have never heard of it, and then quickly disparage the judgment of the novices they say must be the ones using it.
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