Learn this! If you must Make money with your Screenplay

As we learn how to write this screenplay, a recurring problem becomes clear.



The problem is this: to differentiate between drama and non-drama. Let me break-it-down-now.


Everyone in creation is screaming at us to improve screenlpay. We are tasked with, it seems, cramming a shitload of information into a little bit of time.


Our friends. The penguins, think that we, therefore, are employed to communicate information — and, so, at times, it seems to us.


But note: the audience will not tune in to watch information. You wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. No one would or will. The audience will only tune in and stay tuned to watch drama.


Question: what is drama? Drama, again, is the quest of the hero to overcome those things which prevent him from achieving a specific, acute goal.


So: we, the writers, must ask ourselves of every scene these three questions.


1) Who wants what?


2) What happens if her don’t get it?


3) Why now?


The answers to these questions are litmus paper. Apply them, and their answer will tell you if the scene is dramatic or not.


If the scene is not dramatically written, it will not be dramatically acted.


There is no magic fairy dust which will make a boring, useless, redundant, or merely informative scene after it leaves your typewriter. You the writers, are in charge of making sure every scene is dramatic.


This means all the “little” expositional scenes of two people talking about a third. This bushwhack (and we all tend to write it on the first draft) is less than useless, should it finally, god forbid, get filmed.


If the scene bores you when you read it, rest assured it will bore the actors, and will, then, bore the audience, and we’re all going to be back in the breadline.


Someone has to make the scene dramatic. It is not the actors job (the actors job is to be truthful). It is not the director’s job. His or her job is to film it straightforwardly and remind the actors to talk fast. It is your job.


Every scene must be dramatic. That means: the main character must have a simple, straightforward, pressing need which impels him or her to show up in the scene.


This need is why they came. It is what the scene is about. Their attempt to get this need met will lead, at the end of the scene, to failure - this is how the scene is over. It, this failure, will, then, of necessity, propel us into the next scene.


All these attempts, taken together, will, over the course of the episode, constitute the plot.


Any scene, thus, which does not both advance the plot, and standalone (that is, dramatically, by itself, on its own merits) is either superfluous, or incorrectly written.


Yes but yes but yes but, you say: what about the necessity of writing in all that “information?”


And I respond “figure it out” any dickhead with a blue suit can be (and is) taught to say “make it clearer”, and “I want to know more about him”.


When you’ve made it so clear that even this blue suited penguin is happy, both you and he or she will be out of a job.


The job of the dramatist is to make the audience wonder what happens next. Not to explain to them what just happened, or to*suggest* to them what happens next.


Any dickhead, as above, can write, “But, George, if we don’t assassinate the prime minister in the next scene, all Africans will be engulfed in flame”


We are not getting paid to realize that the audience needs this information to understand the next scene, but to figure out how to write the scene before us such that the audience will be interested in what happens next.


Yes but, yes but yes but you reiterate.


And I respond figure it out.


How does one strike the balance between withholding and vouchsafing information? That is the essential task of the dramatist. And the ability to do that is what separates you from the lesser species in their blue suits.


Figure it out.


Start, every time, with this inviolable rule: the scene must be dramatic. It must start because the hero has a problem, and it must culminate with the hero finding him or she either thwarted or educated that another way exists.


Look at your log lines. Any logline reading “bob and sue discuss…” is not describing a dramatic scene.


Please note that our outlines are, generally, spectacular. The drama flows out between the outline and the first draft.


Think like a filmmaker rather than a functionary, because, in truth, you are making the film. What you write, they will shoot.


Here are the danger signals. Any time two characters are talking about a third, the scene is a crock of shit.


Any time any character is saying to another “as you know”, that is, telling another character what you, the writer, need the audience to know, the scene is a crock of shit.


Do not write a crock of shit. Write a ripping three, four, seven minute scene which moves the story along, and you can, very soon, buy a house in V I and hire someone to live there for you.


Remember you are writing for a visual medium. Most television writing, ours included, sounds like radio. The camera can do the explaining for you. Let it. What are the characters doing -*literally*. What are they handling, what are they reading. what are they watching on television, what are they seeing.


if you pretend the characters cant speak, and write a silent movie, you will be writing great drama.


if you deprive yourself of the crutch of narration, exposition,indeed, of speech. you will be forged to work in a new medium - telling the story in pictures (also known as screenwriting)


this is a new skill. no one does it naturally. you can train yourselves to do it, but you need to start.


i close with the one thought: look at the scene and ask yourself “is it dramatic? is it essential? does it advance the plot?


answer truthfully.


if the answer is “no” write it again or throw it out. if you’ve got any questions, call me up.

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Nigeria at 50. Time for Reorientation.

Those of us who belong to neither the military nor the political class are in between cross and the red crescent. Many of us caught up in this dilemma have been unsure who exactly to blame and which way exactly to go. Many more are apprehensive about the future of this country as we appear to be helplessly condemned to a seemingly endless vicious circle of these two brands of disasters. What have we done to deserve all these? What hope do we have in escaping this rather grim future?


For too long we have been engaged in the futile debate on who to blame for our woes, of these two faces of the same coin. Perhaps, we should rather begin to find out what exactly informs the behavior of our leaders. Where did they acquire these rapacious values and insolent attitudes that appear to inform their frames of mind? Better still, where did they loose the values that many of us thought ought to have guided their behaviour? In other words, what is the source of this mental imbecility, moral impotence, gross irresponsibility, corruption and insolence, that seem to have no end? Perhaps there is no better place to look for answers to these questions than the schools they attended, from primary to the higher institutions. For it is here that their minds were nurtured. It is also here that their vision of the world they were growing into was formed. It is yet here that they must have acquired their tastes as well as their ambitions in life. In other words, the educational system we have been running may well be the culprit.


Our contemporary educational system, as we were once reminded by Waziri Junaidu, is ours only in location and name. "Knowledge", the Waziri had occasion to observe, "is certainly universal and timeless but it has a social cultural stamp. It also has a purpose and a commitment to a particular world-view. It therefore cannot be neutral." In its philosophy, its objectives and its prejudices the Nigerian educational system is a replica, a poor one though, of our former colonial metropolis. Like a number of other institutions, the educational system was transplanted, lock, stock and barrel, onto our soil with hardly any regard to our peculiarities. Some of us have our educational system dating several centuries, in fact older and richer than those of the British. The British, however, thought they knew better what was good for us and in their "civilising" mission, they felt the "natives" needed to be given only that education which will prepare them for the role they had reserved for us, the role subordinates. As subordinates, we had no history, culture or civilisation, we had to be made to believe so, feel so and behave so, for only then can we look up to Britain in particular and the West in general as the ultimate in wisdom and perfection and therefore ape without reservation in order to be accepted as educated and progressive.


The problem, to be sure, is not so much the British, for they couldn’t have been expected to do any better. "There is nothing so bad or so good that you will not find Englishmen doing it;" said the Irish playwright, George Bernard Shaw, "but you will never find an Englishman in the wrong. He does everything on principle. He fights you on patriotic principles; he robs you on business principles; he enslaves you on imperial principles." The problem, therefore, is largely ours, that 50 years of independence, we never deemed it necessary to change. We continued, zealously and uncritically to abandon our heritage, especially our values, and import wholesale Western thoughts, ideas and institutions in the naive belief that we shall progress and develop. But have we? We may of course differ as to what constitute development or progress, but assuming the most mundane perception, material progress, has our quality of life been rising? Simply put, how much have we gained by abandoning our values and aping the West?


Some of the priests of these phantom institutions will quickly point to fact that since the British left our educational institutions, from Primary to Universities and polytechnics have multiplied so also the enrolments and graduates. But they may not want to concede the indisputable fact that as these institutions grow and multiply so have our troubles. A cursory glance at our lives in the last two decades or so will easily reveal the negative development, decimation, destruction and torment we went (indeed are still going) through. And all we have been doing is to lament with an ever growing helplessness. Nigeria, for example, started the same time with Brazil, Defence Industries Corporation, while Brazil has long developed all manners of military hardware including sophisticated jet fighters, our DIC in Kaduna is only producing furniture today. For as ordinary a thing as sand for filtering water in our water treatment plants some of our officials prefer to go to Germany to purchase it, obviously at great costs, even as we have better quality here at home. While poorer African countries like Ethiopia have been running an efficient Airline linking the whole of the continent, our national carrier has been a source of national embarrassment rather than national pride. The list is endless. The state of our telecommunication, medical and transport services speak for themselves. We are all too familiar with these tales of profligacy, frivolity and corruption. Is this the kind of development and progress we have been promised? Where is this decay and retrogression emanating from? If it is not from our educational institutions, where then is it coming from?


Our educational system is a wholesale importation of the red-brick universities of Europe which emerged after the European renaissance which marked the divorce between the church and the state. These universities were not only decidedly secular but had taken a position against God and made materialism and hedonism the ultimate in life. So our educational system was ab initio divorced from morality, that sense of right and wrong which only God consciousness confers. Thus these educational institutions not only fail to promote our values but they actually subvert them, eroding our social morality and encouraging people to do as they please. The obvious result being that we graduate people who have been robbed of what ever values they have come with and initiated into the ruthless materialistic culture of the Western world in which only two things are important in life, money and sex and you can always use one to get the other. Is there anything which engage the attention and attentiveness of our leaders, both military and civilians, more than these two things?


Let us pay a quick visit to our campuses where we young minds are lured. From the architecture that greets you, through the language of communication to the fashion in vogue, everything is imported. The campus is everything which the wider society is not, alien, amoral and abhorrent. The campus is in total disharmony with its socio-cultural environment, rather than reinforce the values of the wider society, it undermines them and subvert the moral fabric of the society. Many people don’t care to know what is happening in the campuses, but if they ever do, many a parent may not be able to sleep. The choice of courses does not suggest any altruism but betrays naked selfishness and materialism, for today, the departments of Accounting, Business Administration, Law and such others that are deemed to give the graduate a licence to easy money are always choked up. You no longer need to be qualified to gain admission nor do you need to pass the exams to get the degree, for so many ways of going round all these have been perfected and are gaining ascendancy in the amoral atmosphere of the campuses. Drugs, secret cults, rape, mugging and robbery are fast becoming the past times of we potential leaders. Is this the kind of education we wish our children and future generation to receive? In what way is this kind of education going to benefit us? What should we expect of leaders who have been uprooted from their cultural and moral traditions, nurtured in this decaying liberalism and enthralled by the spell of secular thoughts?


Products of these kinds of educational institutions are simply not equipped to solve our problems, not only because they are part of the problems themselves, but also and more fundamentally because they cannot even see the problem. "Many modern universities in the north "were established purposely to provide training in science and technology for industrial and business establishment only, and not to produce scholars who could reform society. In a period of moral and social crisis, such as the one in which the north is plunged at the moment, the result is that reforming influences are remarkably lacking and society continues to sink deeper in the moral abyss, This is perhaps why Ibraheem Sulaiman believes that "the nature of their training makes them inherently impotent in serious social crises, and thus socially undesirable to be at the helm of affairs over the people."


What do we do therefore? I certainly cannot claim to have the answer. But I am certain that we don’t have much to gain from the kind of educational institutions as they are presently run and stand to loose, our children, our country and our future. I am also certain that until we began to address this issue and immediately too, we must not expect any improvement in the quality of life or governance in this country. The problem, to be sure, is not the much talked about falling standards of education, no, the issue is that there are no standards at all. To talk about falling standards of education is not only to oversimplify the problem, it is simply to miss the whole point about our educational crisis. We must first introduce the standard before we could measure it, for how can we measure standards, academic or otherwise, in system where anything goes, where some students can purchase, through cash or kind, from admission, through certificates to the job itself. This is a system where certificates, which can be and are quite often forged, earn much greater respect than knowledge itself; a system where imitation of alien models, thoughts and ideas rather than originality constitute education; and a system in which integrity and rectitude have neither meaning nor place. Are we surprised that we have not been producing nation builders, visionaries and people of ideas, like Al-Kanemi, Muhammad Bello and the Sardauna, who deal with other nations not as beggars and dwarfs, but as men of strength and purpose?


If we try to reduce the problem to what it is, it comes to the basic fact that Western imperialism, of which the educational system is the most potent weapon, has gradually and subtly, eroded and supplanted the values and ideals of our pre-colonial societies without replacing them with something better. If anything, it only initiated us into a virulent materialism which has since subverted our social morality, weakened our social fabric and crippled our socio-economic and political progress. We do not have to believe in religion to appreciate the role of social morality in the sustenance and development of human society. Our economic and political problems are ultimately moral problems and our failure to admit this fundamental fact only delays the resolution of our growing crises. A society can have the best system of law, but, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn discovered, so long as it lacks a strong social morality, the law cannot be of much avail. "I have spent all my life under a communist regime," Solzhenitsyn told an anxious Western audience, "and I will tell you that a society without any objective legal scale is a terrible one indeed. But a society with no other scale but the legal one is not quite worthy of man either." In other words, the transformation of human conduct can only come about via moral transformation through education, persuasion, inspiration and personal example, but never through intimidation or force, no matter how brute, and law, no matter how refined. Both the communist and Western experiences evidently testify to this. Indeed it is only through education that we can cultivate and imbibe a moral consciousness that can lead to the establishment of a sound social morality. This will give meaning to our lives, direction to our societies and strength to our collective will as a people.


Our only hope therefore, appears to be in restoring to our educational institutions, those values and ideals which emanate from our world-views and which blend with our socio-cultural environment, or what has remained of it. This will not only save our young ones from the cultural schizophrenia we are having to through as they grow into two opposing and conflicting cultures, but it will also, as Prof. Smith would say, "give them a glimpse of things worth fighting for, a vision of ideals which they should seek, rather than leave them to flounder in the mental confusion of this corrupt society into which they have been born." But we can only do this if we own our educational institutions. To own them, is not to own the buildings, but to decide the thoughts and ideas that are taught in them and above all to determine the values that will be cultivated, values that will strengthen our social morality not weaken it. This, as some frivolous minds are apt to conclude, is not to close our selves to the rest of the world or even to slow down our economic or technological progress, but it is in fact to preserve our identity while hastening our development as the Japanese example amply testifies.


But which values and ideals and which word-view are we talking about? Let us first accept the uncomfortable truth that, while as humans we share certain normative values and ideals, the fact is that there is no one Nigerian culture as such. It is true that our leaders, both civilian and military, have all too often find it convenient to pretend that there is one. We persist in our pretence even as this hypocrisy and the sweeping of uncomfortable truth under the carpet has not brought us any good. Some of these leaders have often declared in public addresses that Nigeria is secular state, or so they thought. Whether this is ignorance or mischief, it is difficult to say. For they ought to know that Nigeria cannot be secular, not only because secularism is patently Euro-Christian and that not everybody accepts Christianity, but more because Nigerians, including animist, take their religions seriously and may not necessarily wish to curtail them in the way Europe had cause to do religion. If they are confusing secularism with pluralism, then it makes some sense, for indeed Nigeria is a plural state. In a plural setting, with multiplicity of values and world-views, a federal arrangement is best for it allows federating units to their express their values and culture and therefore preserve their identities without loosing their unity. For, as we ought to know, unity should not be confused with uniformity, there is a whole world of difference between the two.


If we are prepared to appreciate the need as well as the urgency to restore our values and culture in to our educational institutions, then the provision in our draft constitution which gave our universities and higher institutions to catchment areas give us the best opportunity to do so without the conflict and tension it would otherwise generate. I cannot see how this can be done under the present arrangements where universities are federal and since there is no one set of federal values acceptable to all, Western values will continue to hold sway with more disastrous consequences. The fact that some people are unable to see the centrality of values in the deepening social, economic and political crises, neither denies the fact that values are at the roots of these crises, nor should it mean that we must wait for them to understand and therefore delay or even abort our chance for salvaging ourselves from the impending disaster. In a truly federal arrangement, people who believe that their values and world-views ought to guide their educational pursuits should be entitled to do so. Others who do not deem their values important enough to be reflected in their educational institutions should be granted their wish without impinging on the rights of others. This is not to say that the institutions will operate completely independently without co-ordination or standardisation, as some are apt to rush to conclude. Nor should the fear of mismanagement blind us to the tremendous benefits of this truly federal arrangement, for mismanagement is not peculiar to education, it has become the thread that runs through everything Nigerian.


Let me repeat, at the risk of monotony, that our only hope of escaping from this culture of corruption, decay and mismanagement is by restoring our values and culture now buried in the abandoned and forgotten history and culture of our pre-colonial societies. This, for the avoidance of doubt, is not to bar any thoughts and ideas from anywhere in the globe, but rather, to dislodge the hegemony and monopoly of Western liberalism and allow our own indigenous contributions to thoughts and ideas to compete favourably in our institutions of learning. We must be prepared to allow the democratisation of thoughts and ideas as a basis for the development of the mind and the nurturing of a democratic culture. Regimentation, except perhaps in the army, kills initiative and hence destroys the mind, leaving the body vulnerable to all manners of social engineering. As Alvin Toffler would put it, "By definition, both force and wealth are the property of the strong and the rich. It is the truly revolutionary characteristic of knowled. I have  fifthy dreams, that Nigeria is coming back to life.