Screen Writing 101 with Hollywood Screenwriter Bob Saenz

What makes a screenplay work?

How does a writer break into the competitive world of screenwriting?

At the Southern California Christian Writers Conference, Bob Saenz, veteran screenwriter, actor, and story consultant, sat down with me to unpack exactly that. He shared how he transitioned from acting to writing and how faith informs his professional choices in secular Hollywood.

Whether you’re a novelist curious about writing for film or an aspiring screenwriter looking for your next step, Bob’s experience will offer you insider insight and some good-humored reality checks about what it takes to succeed in the industry.

What makes a screenplay different from a novel?

Bob: In a novel, you can write people’s thoughts and intentions and describe things in great detail. A screenplay is just whatever you can see or hear on a screen presented in the most efficient way possible. You let all the other people who work on films do everything else. They design costumes, decide what the scenery looks like, what the background looks like, do casting, and determine what the characters look like.

As a screenwriter, you just tell a story in sights and sounds, and the other people color in the rest of it.

Thomas: The Hunger Games did that well. In the films, you see what’s going on, and you see the truth. But in the books, you’re inside the head of Katniss Everdeen, a young woman with serious PTSD after the first book. She’s slowly going crazy, and her view of the world becomes less and less reliable as the series progresses. It’s fascinating literature and really great writing, but it is impossible to do in a film. And they didn’t try, which I thought was wise.

Bob: The man who originally did the first one was an amazing writer named Gary Ross. He also did Pleasantville and Seabiscuit. When he got that book, the first thing he did was open it up and say, “Okay, I’ve got to deconstruct this entire story and make it into something it’s not,” which means using a different point of view. In books, you can set up a POV and stick with it. In a movie, the point of view is the audience. When you write a screenplay, you don’t really have a point of view.

Thomas: And almost without exception, you have to be telling the truth. That whole descent-into-madness type of movie is hard to do. Hallucinations are risky. It can be done.

Bob: Well, you don’t always have to tell the truth. You can misdirect people. Great twist endings work because you leave clues but misdirect the audience. You don’t always have to tell the truth.

Thomas: You don’t have to tell the whole truth.

Bob: It just has to look like the truth.

Thomas: The audience has to trust that what they’re seeing on the screen isn’t going to end with someone waking up with a gasp and discovering it was all a dream.

How did you get started in screenwriting?

Bob: I started as an actor. I began acting seriously as a teenager and performed professionally on stage until I was about 22. Then I met my soon-to-be wife and realized I couldn’t make a living as an actor, so I stopped.

Thomas: But you were in Jurassic Park before the end?

Bob: No. Around 40, I started acting again. I went to my wife and said, “I think I’m going to act again.” When I picked her up off the floor, she said, “You’ve done really well. Let’s give it a couple of years.” And it’s worked out fantastically. I got my Screen Actors Guild card right away with a movie called Angels in the Outfield. I had one line: “Try throwing it over the plate.” Then, I ended up as a regular recurring character for six seasons on a TV series called Nash Bridges with Don Johnson and Cheech Marin. They’re both fantastic people. I was on that show for six years.

Bob: During that time, I started reading scripts and thought, “I could do this.” And I found out I could do it better than I could act. I’m holding my fingers about two inches apart right now, and between those fingers is my acting range. If you get me right in there, I can knock it out of the park. But I’m not a great actor. Still, there are a lot of directors who will call me if they can fit me into that two-inch range. I still act a couple of times a year.

Thomas: So you have your SAG card, you still do some acting, but your primary bread and butter is writing?

Bob: I did a lot of screen acting before my writing career took off. I’ve been in dozens of movies, including Jurassic Park. I die spectacularly in Jurassic Park 2.

How can someone break into screenwriting?

Thomas: One advantage actors have when getting into screenwriting is that they interact with screenplays more often. Many people have never even seen a screenplay. They don’t know what one looks like, and it’s hard to break in.

Bob: Well, thank goodness for the internet. You can go online and find all kinds of screenplays to read. If you want to become a screenwriter, read as many scripts as you can. Search for your favorite movies and look for their screenplays. You’ll find them. They’re out there. Read them and see how efficient they are.

Bob: There’s also a great book by David Trottier, who wrote The Screenwriter’s Bible, and it’s the best book you could possibly read about formatting a screenplay.

Thomas: Better than Save the Cat?

Bob: Save the Cat is a formula book that doesn’t work. Use Save the Cat to prop open a door. If there were a formula for writing a successful screenplay, you’d think the guy who wrote the book would have successful screenplays. He didn’t. Plus, formulas stifle creativity. Writing within a box means you’re focused on how you’re writing something instead of what you’re writing. And there’s a huge difference. There’s no formula for success in screenwriting. What makes you successful is writing something wholly original that’s yours and yours alone.

How do you approach adapting a novel to a screenplay?

Thomas: You’ve had a lot of your screenplays made into Hallmark movies and feature films.

Bob: I’m sitting on 15 produced films right now.

Thomas: What’s your approach to writing a screenplay? If someone gives you a book and asks you to adapt it, what’s the first thing you do after reading it?

Bob: I read the book once. Then I read it a second time with a red and green pen. The red pen is for everything I’m going to throw out. The green pen is for things I’m going to change. I look at the thoughts and intentions in the book that don’t translate to film and think, “How can I manifest these into action?” What can I have the characters do to show the same ideas? I also look for characters I can get rid of, which ones I need to keep, and whether I can combine two characters into one to save money on casting.

Thomas: As novelists, we take for granted that we have the luxury of writing people’s thoughts. I remember reading about the author of Ender’s Game. The author sold the movie rights right away because the book was so successful. It checks all the boxes for a good sci-fi film, but it isn’t a good movie.

It took a long time for it to get made into a film because the whole book takes place in Ender’s head. Interestingly, the screenplay he developed turned into an audio drama that was excellent, but it wasn’t the same script that became the movie with Harrison Ford.

Both versions had to bring in a friend for Ender to talk to, just so those internal thoughts could be expressed onscreen.

Bob: After the red and green pen step, I start writing. I keep the book open right next to me, and I write notes. Sometimes, I’ll go sit in my backyard to get out of my office and write longhand on a yellow legal pad. I’ll only write out maybe the first fifth of the book, and then I’ll go write the adaptation for that first fifth to see how it plays. I do it in segments, so I’m not writing all my notes at once. By day 40, I don’t remember what my notes from day one meant.

If you do it in segments, you’re fresher with your notes and better off. Then, when it’s all done, you go through and edit it all. That’s when you look for redundancies or plot holes that might have been in the book but won’t work for a film audience.

Can you just sell the script and move on?

Thomas: When you’re done editing it, can you just make a phone call, sell it to somebody, and move on to the next one?

Bob: No. Here’s how adaptations work. A producer will take a bestselling book that has sold at least 100,000 copies. Nobody wants to make a movie out of a book with fewer than 100,000 copies sold. You’re better off just writing a screenplay based on it and trying to sell that. When you say, “I have a book,” the first thing a producer asks is, “How many copies did it sell?”

Thomas: Part of what they’re buying is that audience and fan base.

Bob: Exactly. They’re buying an audience that’s already there.

Thomas: It’s important to honor that audience by handing the adaptation to someone who’s a fan of the original book. That audience doesn’t want their story “fixed.” They think it’s good the way it is.

Bob: That’s true, and it’s mind-boggling when you see some of the adaptations out there. A Wrinkle in Time was one of my kids’ favorite books, one I loved reading to them. We went to see the movie, and we walked out of it. I just don’t understand. If you buy a screenplay based on a book, why do that to it? As someone who gets paid to adapt books, it still boggles my mind.

What makes for a faithful adaptation?

Thomas: The secret to Marvel’s success is that Kevin Feige, the producer of the Marvel films, is arguably one of the biggest fans of Marvel comics. He’s not trying to fix Spider-Man; he already loves Spider-Man.

The same thing happened with The Lord of the Rings. The people who made those movies were true fans. They were faithful to the spirit of the story. They didn’t get everything right, like cutting Tom Bombadil or changing Faramir’s character, but they made their case to the fans for why they did it.

Bob: The Fellowship of the Ring was as brilliantly adapted from book to screenplay as anything I’ve ever seen.

Thomas: It was excellent, but it wouldn’t have been that good if the people adapting it didn’t already love the source material. They wanted to be true to it, which is why they tried so hard.

Bob: As the screenwriter, you’re given instructions about the tone and direction they want. Once a book is optioned by a producer, it becomes a work-for-hire job. Producers go to agents and say, “We bought this book. Who’s a good writer for this project?” Or they go back to writers they’ve worked with before. I’ve gotten a lot of my work-for-hire jobs from producers I’ve worked with previously.

Bob: I’m doing one now for Lifetime. With those jobs, you pitch yourself: “What can I bring to this that the 15 other writers can’t?” You have to choose a point of view that hopefully matches the producer’s vision. For this Lifetime movie, it came down to me and another writer. The network chose me because they knew me. That made the difference.

How do you build relationships in the industry?

Thomas: What advice do you have for someone who doesn’t have those relationships? Do we have to move to L.A.? How do you make those connections?

Bob: No, I don’t live in L.A. I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I was told when I started writing that you can’t be a screenwriter unless you live in L.A., and I said, “Why not?” God has been fantastic.

Thomas: There’s this thing called the internet. You can email your manuscript.

Bob: Exactly. You can write at home and travel to L.A. for meetings. I’ve never missed a meeting in L.A. if I had at least a day’s notice. In fact, now that producers know I live up north, they’ll say, “We’re going to have a meeting,” and then follow up with, “Actually, you don’t have to come. We know what you look like. Let’s do a conference call.”

A few weeks ago, for our meeting, we were all in our cars during the call.

How does being a Christian affect your screenwriting?

Thomas: How does being a Christian affect your screenwriting?

Bob: It affects my whole life. Let’s be clear, though. I work in secular Hollywood, and I write secular scripts. I can’t be light because if I am, I don’t work. But I can be salt. I’ve turned down jobs because they weren’t something I could write.

I have been able to affect changes in scripts that I thought were particularly bad, not by saying, “This is wrong,” but by writing something better. I’ve only been able to do that because God opened those doors for me. When God opens a door, you’re smart if you walk through it.

Thomas: There’s an old saying that it’s better to light a candle than to curse the darkness. It’s a lot easier to curse the darkness and a lot harder to be in the room as one of the decision-makers influencing things. It’s really easy to complain about bad decisions from “those people in the room.”

Bob: They still make bad decisions, and they also make very good ones. It’s like any other industry. People say, “Well, it’s Hollywood. It’s a special industry.” I used to work in the furniture manufacturing industry, and there isn’t a whole lot of difference. It’s still business. Whether you’re an artist or writer, remember that at the end of the day, this is business. If you keep that in mind, you’ll be a lot happier because you won’t expect non-businesslike outcomes.

Is Hollywood as magical as people think?

Thomas: And that takes away some of the magic. A lot of people are very intimidated by “Hollywood,” but there’s nothing magical about Hollywood or the people who work there.

Bob: I’ve developed long-standing friendships with people like Jeff from Marvel. We’ve been friends for 20 years. He’s a special guy who works in this industry, and I’m proud to call him a friend. There are others like that, too. But nobody’s superhuman. No actor is superhuman.

At the end of the day, you’re dealing with people. They all have their own agendas and egos; some you have to massage, and some you scream about in the other room. But 99% of the decisions being made are business decisions. They might be bad business decisions, but they’re still business.

Why are blockbuster films getting cleaner?

Thomas: The amount of adult content is decreasing because studios want their films to play well in the Middle East, China, and India, where the box office matters. It’s a business decision not to alienate those audiences.

Bob: Yes. But it also means that sometimes the more fun or edgy stuff gets removed because someone in China won’t like it. That can frustrate a screenwriter, too.

Thomas: Yeah, I can imagine. You’re like, “Hey, I liked that scene. How dare the Chinese government censor me?” But then you remember that the Chinese government is putting $10 million into this film.”

Bob: The people with the gold make the rules. China is also making a lot of their own films. Some of them are quite good. You have to pick and choose, but some of their movies are genuinely good.

Thomas: Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is one of my favorite movies of all time.

How can someone become a better screenwriter?

Thomas: What advice do you have for someone who wants to become a better screenwriter?

Bob: Just do it. Read as many scripts as you possibly can. Read scripts from good and bad movies. Study what they did right and wrong. Watch the movie and see how it differs from the book. What worked in the script that they should have kept? What worked better in the movie than in the script?

Look at how the scripts are written. Notice how simple they are. If you read the Marvel scripts, there’s a massive amount of white space. They’re so simply written because the writers trust those 2,500 other people (whose names you see in the credits) to do their jobs and make the film look good.

As a novelist, you might describe a character’s entire office, including what’s on the shelves and what kind of leather is on the chairs. Those details show his personality. In a screenplay, you write: “Interior Office. A typical advertising agency office.” That’s it. Then, you trust the set designers, prop masters, and others to research the character and decide what belongs in that office. Your job is to tell a compelling story that allows the reader to see the film in their head.

The more minutiae you include, the less room you give the reader to use their imagination. The more you let them fill in the blanks themselves, the more likely you are to capture their attention.

How is filmmaking like a factory?

Thomas: This is where moviemaking and the furniture business are similar. In many ways, making a movie is like working in a factory. In a factory, someone might varnish wood all day, every day. In Hollywood, there are people whose entire job is to turn human beings into aliens using makeup. That’s all they do, and they’re really good at it.

Bob: They’re very good at it. I once did a BBC show called The Seven Modern Wonders of the World, and one episode was about the Transcontinental Railroad. It focused on the robber barons, including Crocker, Stanford, and those guys in San Francisco. I played Leland Stanford, who definitely doesn’t look like me.

After I got the part, they told me not to shave and to show up five hours before the shoot. I sat in the makeup chair, and the woman doing my makeup said, in a lovely British accent, “I just got off of Harry Potter.” I said, “Oh, how fun!” Then she transformed my face with a prosthetic nose, beard, and everything. It took her about five hours every day we shot the film. It was so much fun. I even fell asleep in the chair.

Taking it off was painful, though. They’re peeling stuff off your skin, but it was such a fascinating process to go through myself.

What final advice do you have for aspiring screenwriters?

Thomas: What resources or activities would you recommend?

Bob: There are screenwriting groups in most towns. You’d be surprised how many active screenwriting groups are out there. If you’re interested, get involved.

Download screenplays and read them.

Start by coming up with a great idea for a movie and write it. It won’t be good at first. It takes about eight screenplays to really find your voice. You might find it sooner if you’ve got natural ability and you’ve been gifted by God, but even then, it takes time.

Then, look at how other people do it. Get on the internet, go to YouTube, and watch screenwriting classes. Some people love outlining, and some don’t. Try everything and see what works for you. Every approach you try teaches you something, and you’ll start developing your own method and your own voice. Producers are looking for a unique voice.