years from now you'll be standing around a posh cocktail party congratulating yourself on how you spent an entire weekend locked in a room with an asshole, an opinionated arrogant asshole, for your art.
so.  what is the substance of writing? nothing as trivial as words is at the heart of this great art, my friends.
literary talent is not enough. first, last, and always, the imperative is to tell a story.
twenty three hundred years ago, aristotle said, when storytelling goes bad in a society, the result is decadence. well, just look around you.
 and god help you if you use voice- over in your work, my friends.
god fucking help you! it's flaccid, sloppy writing. any idiot can write voice-over narration to explain the thoughts of a character. you must present the internal conflicts of your character in image, in symbol. film is a medium of movement and image.
you want your writing to be original. you want to have an original voice like neil simon or nora ephron. well, let me tell you something, my friends. the key to originality is not eccentricity.
long speechs are antithetical to the nature of cinema. the greeks called it stykomythia -- the rapid exchange of ideas. a long speech in a script, say a page long, requires that the camera hold on the actor's face for a minute. look at the second hand on your watch as it makes one complete rotation around the clock face and you'll get an idea of how intolerable that would be for an audience. the ontology of the screen is that it's always now and it's always action and it's always vivid. life is rarely vivid. and that's an important point. we are not recreating life on the screen. writers are not tape recorders. have you ever eavesdropped on people talking in a coffee shop? then you know how dull and tedious real conversation is. real people are not interesting. there's not a person in this world -- and i include myself in this -- who would be interesting enough to take as is and put in a movie as a character.
someone asked me recently, bob, do you think michelle pfeiffer is pretty.
anyone else?
the real world? the real fucking world? first of all, if you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, you'll bore your audience to tears. secondly: nothing happens in the real world? are you out of your fucking mind? people are murdered every day! there's genocide and war and corruption! every fucking day somewhere in the world somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! every fucking day someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! people find love! people lose it, for christ's sake! a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! someone goes hungry! somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! if you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know much about life! and why the fuck are you taking up my precious two hours with your movie? i don't have any use for it! i don't have any bloody use for it!
yes?
i need more.
oh, right, okay. nice to see you.
i make it a rule not to give private tutorials to my seminar students. it wouldn't be fair to the others.
i could use a drink, my friend.
then what happens?
i see. that's not a movie. you must go back and put in the drama.
ah, the everpresent deadline. yes, i was doing a kojak once and.  it was hell.
you've taken my course before?
twin screenwriters. julius and philip epstein,who wrote casablanca were twins.
the finest screenplay ever written.