Are you one of those commuters with that unwritten serial-killer script rattling around your brain? Or that romantic comedy that’d be just perfect for Julia Roberts?
If so, Dan Decker hopes you’ll see his sign hanging from a brick building near the Brown Line’s Irving Park stop.
It reads, in bold black letters on a white banner: “Movie writing classes,” followed by a phone number.
This year, Decker celebrates the 10th birthday of the Screenwriters Group, his school and workshop for aspiring movie scribes. Decker’s classes, laying out his own principles for character-driven script construction, are attended by mostly middle-age students, some serious writers, others purely interested in story craft. Some just need a creative outlet, which makes Decker a dream merchant of sorts.
“A lot of people have said that, that we make people’s dreams come true,” Decker says. “People have different motivations for coming into this school, some that have nothing to do with selling a script. We give people a way to pursue their dreams. We provide a path, a means, a door.”
Winner of a screenwriting award from the American Film Institute in 1988, the former director of industrial films for United Airlines has since authored “Anatomy of a Screenplay,” a self-published book of screenwriting philosophy as well as nuts-and-bolts advice.
Despite having sold options on “about 15” of his own screenplays, Decker says, none of them has been produced.
To add perspective, of the 60,000 scripts registered with the Writers Guild of America each year, only 200 are made into Hollywood movies, according to the WGA. The group has no way of tracking independent films and scripts, and Decker says WGA numbers also don’t include television movies, which could raise the total to 500 movies produced annually.
These odds don’t daunt the 53-year-old Logan Square native and teacher who has just signed a lease on a second Chicago location, opposite Millennium Park, and has opened a satellite group in Los Angeles.
That group’s program was attended by Karen Barna, now a writer for the WB melodrama “The Mountain.” Two other former Chicago students, Delvin Molden and Michael Gilio, went on to separately turn their screenplays into low-budget indie features, “Love Relations” and “Kwik Stop,” both most recently seen on the Starz! cable channel.
Of his own movie track record, Decker simply says, “I’m a teacher,” and points out that author Syd Field, whose book “Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting” launched the how-to-write-a-movie-script industry in the 1970s, doesn’t have any screenwriter credits.
Even reigning “how-to” screen guru Robert McKee, who was portrayed in the Spike Jonze movie “Adaptation” and counts Oscar-winning director Peter Jackson among his students, doesn’t have a theatrical movie credit, Decker says.
Fair enough. But how does Decker defend himself against the old adage that those who do, do and those who can’t, teach?
“People in Chicago accept that a school is a school. Just because a person gets a movie produced doesn’t mean they know how to teach you how to write a screenplay. We have a system that will take your idea and turn it into a pitchable screenplay,” Decker says, walking to his red brick offices in Lakeview.
“I would have responded to that question much differently 10 years ago, but 10 years ago, I didn’t have a book out. I didn’t have a successful school. In the beginning, the classes were smaller, it was a lot more abstract. It was people who wanted to learn the craft and didn’t care about anything else. Now, we have success stories and a track record.”
Visual maps
On a recent Wednesday night, Decker stood in front of a dry-erase board covered in what looked like quantum physics equations. They’re not. What Decker lays out for his ProTrack 2 class — a 16-month, $7,950 course — are diagrams, visual maps meant to dissect and reassemble his students’ story concepts. First-time screenwriters are encouraged to take ProTrack 1 (six months and $2,750) to develop basic screenwriting skills.
“I don’t want you to go for flash and dazzle and get all writerly on the page,” Decker tells his five-student workshop. “I want sparse, flinty, frosty pages.”
Among Decker’s favorite scripts are “Groundhog Day,” “Don Juan DeMarco” and “Casablanca,” which he cites so often as one of the best scripts ever written that students bring him “Casablanca” memorabilia for his office.
On the walls around the Big Room, as he calls it — a reception and classroom area leading to the three other classrooms and four offices– are movie posters from “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers,” “Miller’s Crossing” and the Ben Kingsley noir thriller “Sexy Beast.”
Decker, though physically imposing, is the opposite of the archetypal nail-spitting script doctor. Decker’s message can be harsh — even scary, but he delivers it in the even-toned voice of clergy inside the confessional.
His advice, sharpened to well-honed mantras, includes: “Write simple stories, complex characters,” “Your delete key will set you free” and “Just be brilliant.”
Decker classes are intense, often three class hours a week with outside peer edits and frequent deadlines. Classes at the Screenwriters Group, Decker says, are not for the weekend movie lover.
“We’re for the serious person. I’m going to move in with you for two years. I’m going to sit on your head while you type. I’m going to slap your wrists when you make a mistake,” he says lovingly. “I’m going to get you guys sold if I have to break both your arms.”
This ProTrack 2 class (four women and a man, with two men absent) has spent the past few months poring over one another’s scripts. Many of them, metaphorically, have had Decker on their heads for almost two years.
Now in ProTrack 2, Laura Heine, a 33-year-old former high school English teacher, has two completed scripts to her name, a short film screenplay and a commission (acquired through the group) to write an independent feature for a filmmaker in Columbus, Ohio.
Heine makes the three-hour round-trip drive from Geneva once a week to attend the crunch sessions.
“It’s just amazing to me what I’ve been able to accomplish in a year with their help,” she says. “I didn’t realize how demanding it would be. We have a lot of responsibility and tight deadlines, which is really good. It’s definitely not a hobby, it’s the pursuit of a career.”
Members of the Screenwriters Group, taught by Decker and 12 instructors (all former students) in Chicago and Los Angeles, are about evenly male and female, equally city dwellers and suburbanites, almost all middle-age and middle class. They come from all walks of life, including “lawyers and cops and maids,” Decker says. Heine heard about the courses from her dental hygienist, also a student.
“Our organization is for people who need a creative outlet in their life. And I can tell you, the demographic is 30 to 50 at our school. We get no young people. Young people think they already know everything. We do no marketing around college at all. They are off our radar. What we get in our classrooms are people who read a lot, the NPR listeners . . . ,” he says.” “It’s not at all what you’d think. It’s not young people dressed in black, looking for more corners to huddle in.”
Journey to `The Mountain’
Thirtysomething Barna’s seven-year creative odyssey led her from writing screenplays on her own to Decker’s courses to a Warner Bros. writing program and, eventually, to “The Mountain.”
“I started writing scripts and wanting to be creating movies . . . I bought the [special screenwriting computer software] and just started writing. What I ended up with was a lousy execution of a good idea,” she says.
When she met Decker at the Screenwriters Expo in Los Angeles three years ago, Barna says, “Everyone there had a course centered on their philosophies of screenwriting, but very few of them had a concrete system of putting them into practice. The moment I heard Dan speaking, I knew he had a method of teaching these philosophies, these rules.”
Not everyone in the industry is a fan of screenwriting courses and “how-to” books.
“I find that people who are trained in that particular way create scripts that are cosmetically more polished. They are turned out in a way that is, on the surface, more professional. But often in no way, shape or form is the content more interesting or filmmable,” says Mark Urman, former Lions Gate president and head of U.S. theatrical distribution for ThinkFilm.
“Going to a couple of good movies should be enough, and if it isn’t, the sources of inspiration are numerous, if not infinite,” he says. “I’m not saying that nobody who does [takes a course] won’t generate a good and worthy script, but it’s no guarantee that the process will be better than somebody who wrote a script in the attic with their typewriter and never paid a dime.”
Barna counters: “It’s just like trying to learn anything. You get out of it what you put into it.”
“There is a terrible tendency among young screenwriters to think that they don’t need classes, and that’s the worst mistake you can make,” she says.
“Everybody in the business has taken classes at one point or the other. I’m still learning. It’s an incredibly amazing process.”
