Ask Swerdlow

Screenwriting questions answered here

We are all familiar with houses/apartments. Our own, other people's, the place we grew up, our friends’ houses etc. We’ve been in all sorts of dwellings of all kinds and styles throughout our lives, and though we have spent a lot of time under various roofs, very few of us wake-up one day, and say, "you know what, I think I can build one of these."  

Now, we all have seen a lot of movies as well, again all kinds of styles and genres from Marvel blockbusters to Louis Malle. But unlike building a house, a lot of people do wake-up one day and say, "I think I can write one of those."  Well, I'm here to say, “Why not? Go on and give it a shot!”

I’ve been a working screenwriter for thirty-five years. I wrote the movie Cool Runnings, but also was a writer on Little Giants, Snow Dogs and more recently The Grinch and Puss in Boots the Last Wish. I was recently working on the new Shrek movie and wrote the original draft of a prequel for Donkey. I had a TV show on the air in 2000 called Brutally Normal. Then there’s the forty scripts that didn’t get made or I don’t have credit on, and the endless drafts and notes from producers, the director or the studio.

I never intended to be a screenwriter. I started out as a poet. Then I was an actor. When I was twenty-five, I wrote a play, and the director, Michael Goldberg, helped me turn it from a bunch of entertaining dialogue into actual theater. We became writing partners, and went on to have a lot of success together.  Michael never wrote a line of dialogue or description, but he had a genius for story, and for understanding the piece as a whole. This might seem simple, but it's not. You need to be open to the impulses of the characters and the spontaneous living truth of things, but you can't let that take you away from the story you are telling. In fact, it has to take you toward it. 

This may sound a little abstract but hopefully I can make it less so. That's why I'm going to try out a Substack where I answer questions about screenwriting that people have. I know there are a lot of writers on Substack and I'm sure screenwriting is of interest to many of them and to non-writing movie lovers as well.  I don't really believe this stuff can be taught, but I can show you how I think about things, and what has come to matter to me and not matter to me over the years.

I'll take questions on your work, my work or movies you like or don't like and are curious about. Just type them into the comments section and I’ll answer a few. I envision it more as a Q&A than a class, but let's see where it goes, and if there’s any interest.

Below is one of my favorite scenes I’ve written. It’s from Cool Runnings and maybe some of you will know it. There’s a lot of reasons I like it, and if you want to know what they are, ask me. One of them is the performances by the actors, especially Malik Yoba as Yul.