You’re not a writer until you finish something

He got in on a script with a terrible title

Roth grew up in Bedford-Stuyvesant. His grandfather had come from Russia, spoke almost exclusively Yiddish, and loved the movies.

“He’d take me, we’d go two, three times a week to the Brooklyn Paramount Theater. And that was home to me. I always felt like coming home every time I was part of thinking about movies.”

In 1970 he entered the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Award at UCLA and won it. The script was about Jerry Rubin being driven across the country in a car with two FBI agents and a murderer, because the authorities were afraid to put him on a plane.

“It had the worst title in the history of screenplays. It was called The Harmonica Patriot.”

It never got made, but it got him an agent — on his terms.

“I said, I’ll sign with you if you can get me a job.”

The job was a small film shot in Israel that “was only released here for about seven minutes.” Then a director named Stuart Rosenberg, who had made Cool Hand Luke, took him on. Roth was nineteen when Rosenberg sent him to Louisiana to rewrite The Drowning Pool.

“I walked on the set in a place called Lafayette and Paul Newman said, ‘Our savior’s here.'”

The first lesson was about who wins

Rosenberg also gave him the lesson that shaped everything after. Roth had written a scene for The Onion Field that he thought was the greatest scene ever written. Rosenberg said he didn’t get it and didn’t like it. They argued for two weeks.

“He said, ‘You can leave it in the script. I’m not going to shoot it.’ And that was the end of that.”

Roth’s conclusion wasn’t bitterness. It was strategy.

“The biggest boon to my career was being able to get married to some of the greatest directors who ever lived. Because if I could get a director who would respond to the material — and I’m not saying this is easy, it’s almost near impossible, still is — but that got the movies made.”

He doesn’t outline

Asked about his process, Roth was blunt.

“Don’t outline. I know the first scene and the last scene. That’s it.”

He’ll work two or three scenes ahead once he’s underway, but no further. He puts enormous weight on the opening.

“I think you all should spend as much time on the first scene as you do almost the whole screenplay, if you can get that right.”

And on the ending: of roughly forty produced films, he says, the ending was changed exactly once — on Munich.

He has never had writer’s block, and offers a trick for when a scene stalls.

“I change the weather. If it’s not working, I make it rain or something. All of a sudden you have a different look at the whole thing, and you have a different perspective.”

The other habit is about how you stop, not how you start.

“Before I’m done for the day, I make sure that the scene I’m writing I feel really good about. So I don’t have to the next day start getting into some weird writer’s block thing.”

His model for the writing life is John Cheever, who commuted into Manhattan, took the elevator to a basement, folded his trousers neatly, and wrote in his underwear in the boiler room until noon.

“He saw it as a job. And I see it as a job.”

I’ve never had writer’s block. If it’s not working, I change the weather.

Eric Roth speaking on stage at State of the Story, Los Angeles

Screenplays are “a bastardized art form”

Roth has read almost no screenplays and doesn’t much enjoy the ones he does.

“It’s a bastardized art form. It’s all dots and dashes. You don’t have to finish the page. You’re not a novelist. You’re not a playwright.”

He describes himself instead as “a frustrated novelist who’s never written a novel,” and he writes dense prose in his scripts — 180 pages once, closer to 128 now. Most directors have let him.

“The only one who doesn’t like it, who takes it all out, was David Fincher. And we’ve done three movies together, so we’re still successful.”

The notes he gives other writers never change.

“It’s screenwriting 101. Please don’t have people talking about what they both know. Please get rid of all the expository stuff. Stuart said the worst line of dialogue was, ‘Good morning, Mr. Water Commissioner.'”

What he wants instead is subtext.

“You don’t write about what’s going on. You try a metaphor, or a story someone’s telling that underlines what’s happening.”

On receiving notes, he was less diplomatic.

“I demanded right away. I said, look, you want me to read these? Put ’em in bullet points. I don’t need to have you make your bones on my work.”

Adaptation is mostly about knowing what to throw away

Roth is best known for adaptations, and his method is unglamorous: read the book, underline what should be dramatized, discover you’ve underlined the whole book. He admits to having written a couple of films from books he never finished, using readers to summarize the chapters — a practice he explicitly does not recommend.

He also has a theory about which books make good films.

“There’s two tropes. Bad books make good movies, and bad plays make great movies. A lot of the books are just junk. The Horse Whisperer, Forrest Gump itself — I didn’t think it was one of your finest hours in literature.”

On The Horse Whisperer he fought Robert Redford over invented material and lost most of it, but won one scene he still loves: Redford’s character simply sitting and waiting for a runaway horse to come back, for what felt like ten minutes of screen time.

Forrest Gump was an accident, and he knows it

Roth is clear-eyed about the film that won him the Oscar.

“It doesn’t have the kind of classical dramatic structure — state the problem, complicate the problem, and either solve or don’t solve the problem. That’s all screenwriting is. It’s Shakespeare, same structure. And Forrest Gump didn’t have that.”

The feather came from theme, not story.

“I just felt, how do we show whether it’s destiny or by accident? I’m more interested in the theme than I am — not uninterested about the story, but what it’s about eventually is, to me, what’s important.”

He advises writers to ask a question a director once asked him about a stage adaptation of High Noon.

“Why this play, why now? It’s a perfect question. Obviously you want to pay the rent. But if you have a little latitude, decide why you’re doing it.”

The first draft was considerably stranger than the film. Jenny wore angel wings until they disappeared. Lieutenant Dan had a black cloud permanently over his head. Robert Zemeckis said it was too much.

“I think he was right.”

One scene was cut: Forrest and Jenny hear a commotion, run toward what he assumes is a party, and arrive at the Selma bridge. “We just couldn’t do it. And I’m so glad they didn’t.”

Quentin Tarantino once told him, “Tell me this isn’t the most ironic mainstream movie ever made.”

And there was a sequel. Roth wrote it and turned it in on the morning of September 11th, 2001. Forrest sleeps in the back of a Bronco that turns out to be O.J. Simpson’s. He becomes a ballroom dancer and tours with Princess Diana. He falls in love with a schoolteacher in Oklahoma, sits on a bench waiting to take her to lunch, and the building behind him explodes.

“That was the big thing that came toward the end. Nobody wants to do it. I understand it.”

What directors taught him

On Michael Mann, and The Insider: Roth had written Al Pacino a monologue running a page and a half.

“He called me that morning and said, ‘I could do it with one look.’ Michael said, ‘I’ll shoot it both ways.’ In the movie, it’s one look.”

Mann also let him open Ali with twelve minutes and no dialogue, carried by a Sam Cooke song, and shot a Malcolm X speech entirely over Ali’s hands being taped.

“You could show how drama can happen without watching everybody in close-up.”

On Martin Scorsese, and Killers of the Flower Moon: Roth wrote thirty or forty drafts across the better part of a decade, and is candid that the film he wanted isn’t quite the film that exists. His Tom White was a genuinely good man, and that part shrank as Leonardo DiCaprio moved to a different role.

“If I had my druthers, I would rather we had the other movie. But that doesn’t mean the movie Marty made wasn’t really something special. It was a lesson, though. You can’t capitulate on many things. I don’t have that power.”

The radio-drama ending, he points out, wasn’t invention. It happened.

On John Frankenheimer, who directed The Good Shepherd before his death: “I don’t think he ever asked me to change a word.”

The ones that got away

Michael Douglas asked Roth to write One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He was busy, and his agent told him they’d never make it. He was brought back late enough to write the fishing boat scene.

He wrote The Hatfields and the McCoys for Brad Pitt; Kevin Costner did it on television first. He wrote a Rendezvous with Rama adaptation for Denis Villeneuve, who is “busy with doing twelve Dunes.” Fincher had wanted to make it, somehow, “in the dark.”

And he wrote a film called Us, for Jane Fonda as an archaeologist and Robert Redford as a priest who has lost his faith, to be directed by Sydney Pollack. They were two months from shooting when Pollack called him in.

“He says, ‘I’m going to have to disappoint you.’ I said, why? He says, they found something I really want to do.”

It was Tootsie.

The advice

Roth spent much of the session resisting the idea that he has any, on the grounds that his career has been too lucky to generalize from. Pushed, he gave the only rule he’ll defend.

“You have to finish what you start. I don’t think you’re a writer until you finish something. You can find seven million reasons not to finish it.”

Then he did the arithmetic.

“Three pages a day — and I’ll even give you the weekends. That’s fifteen pages a week. So in how many months, you have a screenplay. Three months. That’s it. Period. And if it doesn’t work, put it in a drawer and go do it again.”

He was insistent that nobody should try to write like him.

“Don’t imitate anybody else. Don’t look to my career as anything more than, I’m just good at what I do. There’s always going to be somebody better than you. That’s why a lot of people all of a sudden stop painting.”

And on making a living while you wait:

“There’s nothing to stop you except for getting paid, which is rough. But if you’re not getting paid, then go be a barista or whatever it is. And keep writing. And keep writing. Keep writing.”

He gave the last word to the job itself.

“The great writers say they’re always trying to put the right word in front of the other one. And that’s hard to do.”