IFP's Script to Screen Conference - Conversation with James Schamus - March 7, 2009

IFP’s Script to Screen Conference

Conversation with Keynote James Schamus – CEO, Focus Features
March 7, 2009
New York, NY

(Scott Macaulay & James Schamus. Photo by Brian Geldin.)

Focus Features CEO James Schamus makes his second appearance here at The Film Panel Notetaker (his first being at the Woodstock Film Festival last fall) with my notes taken in a packed hall at the New York Film Academy Saturday morning during IFP's Script to Screen Conference, which was created to help aspiring and working screenwriters explore new opportunities. Filmmaker Magazine Editor-in-Chief Scott Macaulay moderated Saturday’s conversation with Schamus. The discussion moved a bit beyond the script writing process, so here I will focus (bah dump bump) on the elements of the conversation that may be most helpful for the screenwriters reading this blog.

Macaulay’s first question was, how do you know what a screenplay is, to which Schamus replied, “It’s completely a business plan…American screenplays are essentially 124 pages begging for money…The scripts are moving into predetermined generic modules…On the other side, the fantasy side, there is the writer/director mode…all of us live somewhere between the two ends of that spectrum…On that spectrum, you are doing something that serves as an object…The problem of getting too far on the (writer/director side) of the spectrum…a screenplay in the production context is 123 pages of advice and if the advice is a little hazy or if someone stops taking the advice…once you stop taking your own advice, everybody stops, too…The key to making a movie well…is that everybody on the set is making the same movie.”

To elaborate on the writer/director paradigm, Macaulay noticed that fewer directors seem to be going down this path. Macaulay asked Schamus if he’s noticed this, too, and if so, why does he think so? Using Ang Lee as an example, Shamus said, “Ang was never a writer/director. He was always a filmmaker. That definition seemed in and of itself sort of liberating a couple of years ago, became actually quite constraining…That said, writer/directors are still clearly the DNA that will never rinse down American independent cinema…You can be a non-writer/director and still be an auteur…(that) came out of (France’s) Cahier du Cinema writers who were not writing about themselves…they weren’t filmmakers yet. They were writing about filmmakers who had household name recognition…What they were doing was using auteur theories to excavate the idea of the director as the central signator…inside the Hollywood system and use that wedge open a completely different appreciation of cinema.”

With Focus’s upcoming release of Cary Fukunaga’s Sin Nombre, Macaulay asked Schamus how Focus got involved with working with a first-time feature filmmaker. Schamus said, “We continue to adapt our business to audiences. In this case…an audience that’s open to a first-time filmmaker…To me what’s exciting about Sin Nombre besides how masterful and amazing the movie is…how do we create a Latino audience in the United States? We saw his short, which he was developing at the Sundance Lab [More about screenwriting labs, contests & worshops in a near future post here]…We’re really an internationally oriented company…80% of my day is spent on movies that are circulating across the globe.”

And what about Schamus as a screenwriter himself, mostly working on adaptations with Lee, Macaulay asked. “With Ang, it’s literally whatever I can find that will scare the shit out of him,” Schamus revealed. “I actually really like Hollywood movies. I like the system. It’s an incredibly interesting cultural machine.”

Opening the conversation to the audience, one person asked the perennial question, how does one submit a project to the company? Schamus recognized that the answer is a “Catch 22” saying “you need representation…If I accepted an unsolicited manuscript; my own lawyers will now sue me.” Later someone asked if it’s best to come to Focus with the complete package of a producer, director and a star, to which Schamus replied, it varies. “It usually means someone we believe internationally, in a territory other than the United States, somebody who has a bit of a profile that we can leverage.” And for people looking to work as spec script writers, Schamus said, “Spec scripts are for people who want jobs. That genre only functions in the Hollywood context …There’s no spec feature market (for example) for European art films…It’s basically the Energizer Bunny approach.” And finally, does age bias really exists for screenwriters? “For whatever reason, there is a bias against older writers, except there are a handful of A-listers. Part of it is, if you actually establish yourself as a writer-for-hire let’s say by your 30s, that business is fairly lucrative…and then, after 10 years…that’s it.”

Woodstock Film Festival - Conversation with James Schamus - Oct. 4, 2008

2008 Woodstock Film Festival
Conversation with Honorary Trailblazer James Schamus
Saturday, October 4, 2008

Ang Lee and James Schamus at Woodstock Film Festival Awards Ceremony. Photo by Brian Geldin.

Film critic Karen Durbin sat down with Focus Features CEO James Schamus Saturday during the Woodstock Film Festival for a conversation with distributor and often producer/screenwriter of Ang Lee’s films (Crouching, Tiger, Hidden Dragon, The Hulk, Lust, Caution) about his career and what he’s currently up to as he would later that evening be bestowed and Honorary Trailblazer award. Below are some highlights of that discussion.

Durbin: What’s the first movie you ever saw at a theater?

Schamus: It’s so hard because for a lot of us for a certain age, I started film going at theaters under conditions that were quite different than now…back then the theaters didn’t list the starting times of movies…There was a very profound shift in distribution and exhibition practices that came in the wake in particular of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho from Universal who insisted the starting times be published so that people would not be admitted into the theater after the start. It was a publicity stunt. It was something that would change the whole nature of film going, because up until that time, it was also a coincidence the rise in television as a competitor…the movie theater used to have an open door…It’s impossible to have a first movie, because it was more about the experience of being at the theater…It’s really hard. I have so many memories…Like Sarah Palin, I actually dodged the question.

Durbin: I read that at the age of 10, you wanted to be an architect and at the age of 18 you wanted to be an academic in literature. When did you see the light?

Schamus: At the age I’m at now…I still want to be an academic. I did get my doctorate two years ago in English at Berkley…I was hired as a film historian 19 years ago at Columbia and that’s where I still teach…My undergraduate lecture this semester is Introduction to Classical Film Theory.

Durbin: How did you start producing?

Schamus: I was in Berkley and went back to New York for a while. It was at that moment in time when what we called an independent film…the late 80s…when a lot of them were picking up cameras and started making feature length narrative films in a context that was outside of the studio system…It was the work of avant-garde filmmakers, but they were studio filmmakers…Pulling together all these different strands both financing, exhibition and the critical community…it was all happening in the 1980s with Jim Jarmusch and Spike Lee and moved into…Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon.

Durbin: What was your very first movie?

Schamus: Because I had absolutely no skills and I was surrounded by people who were all genius artists, the one thing I could do was say, ‘hey, does anyone need help raising money?’…There were certain limited partnership models and there were also pre-sales, particularly European television that they don’t have any more…you could patch together that, and believe it or not, there were grants. Then finally in the States, there were certain people who weren’t necessarily invested in independent cinema in the beginning, but who opened the door to stabilize and adjudicate at least some of us…for example American Playhouse on PBS…Lastly of course was the rise of video, which people remember when VHS tape came, it was the end of the film industry. Jack Valenti said this is going to kill the studio system…What happened was the first company that ever got capitalized to make and distribute movies for that market was a company called Vestron.

Durbin: What about Good Machine? When did you form that with Ted Hope?

Schamus: It was a great time, because Ted Hope actually knew how to make movies. What the idea was…we’re just here to help get the movie made…We really didn’t care if we were the producers, executive producers, the financiers, the salesman, the line producer, production manager…whatever it took, however we fit into the puzzle, we would just drop our piece in there and make sure the film got made.

Durbin: When did you start writing?

Schamus: I got to New York…and took an internship…I was the oldest living production assistant. I was in grad school…I was 27…It was a lesson in humiliation.

Durbin: When did you hook up with Ang Lee? Is Taking Woodstock a comedy?

Schamus: It still is. We’re shooting our 11th movie right now…Taking Woodstock…we’ve made six suicidingly depressing movies in a row. I realized, this is the longest mid-life crisis in the history of cinema…I don’t think anyone here was laughing too hard at Lust, Caution…I wouldn’t mind if somebody called it (Taking Woodstock) a comedy. It’s like our earlier funnier movies like The Wedding Banquet…they’re not knock it down funny movies. They’re funny because people are funny…(Taking Woodstock) is story based on a memoir…This is very difficult for me to say, but the way we got the material for the movie was that Elliot Tiber who wrote the memoir was in San Francisco. Ang and I were out there promoting Lust, Caution…(Elliot) gave Ang the book…that’s difficult for me to admit...because you get sued every time you read something that hasn’t gone through the agency, but that’s how it happened.

Durbin: What’s the story of Taking Woodstock?

Schamus: Elliot at the time was a schnook. It’s ’69. He was living in Greenwich Village where he’s an interior designer for the mafia at night clubs. Not getting paid. Completely broke. Gay. He has these insane tyrannical Russian Jewish parents who operate a kind of Jewish Bates Motel in a shitty Catskill dump called Bethel…Now it’s really nice. The bank is about to foreclose on (the motel)…which he’s not that sad about…Up in Bethel, he’s the president of the chamber of commerce…One day he hears the radio and it’s news that the town of Wallkill has pulled the permit on this hidden music festival. He goes, maybe I can have it my barn or the motel and he calls up Michael Lang…three weeks later, a half million people show up and his life is completely transformed and the motel is saved. This character has little as possible to do to making Woodstock happen, on the other hand, if he hadn’t picked up the phone, it wouldn’t have happened. We can’t tell the story of Woodstock. It’s too big…there’s too many perspectives on it…it is one of the great stories of American culture.

Woodstock Film Festival 2008 Award Winners

I just returned home from the Woodstock Film Festival, where I had a really great time. I will be posting more of my notes from the panel discussions and Q&As I attended in the days to come. In the mean time, below is the announcement of the winners of the festival that were presented in a ceremony last night that I attended along with Blind Spot director Adolfo Doring and producer Amanda Zackem. (I posted notes from their Q&A earlier). The highlights of the evening had to be Ang Lee’s presenting the Honorary Trailblazer Award to James Schamus (see brief video clip below) and Kevin Smith’s hilarious acceptance speech (parental guidance suggested) for his Honorary Maverick Award.

Ang Lee presents James Schamus with Honorary Trailblazer Award. Video by Brian Geldin.

(Woodstock, NY)—October 4th, 2007—The 2008 Woodstock Film Festival's Maverick Awards ceremony was held Saturday night, Oct. 4th, with director Sean Baker’s PRINCE OF BROADWAY taking Best Feature Narrative and director Jeremiah Zagar’s IN A DREAM winning for Best Feature Documentary. More than 300 indie film movers and shakers attended the gala event, held at Backstage Productions in Kingston, NY just outside the Woodstock arts colony.

Best Feature Narrative PRINCE OF BROADWAY is the story of Lucky and Levon, two men whose lives converge in the underbelly of New York’s wholesale fashion district. Set in the shadow of the Flatiron building and soaked in the colorful bustle of Broadway, the film is as much a brutal drama as it is a tender comedy. Shot in a fast-paced guerilla style that is akin to the hustler lifestyle, the film reveals the lives of immigrants in America seeking the ideals of family of love, while creating their own knock-off of the American Dream. (WFF East Coast Premiere).

Best Feature Documentary, IN A DREAM, quickly turns from a character study to an incredible personal, powerful and stirring drama. It is an unparalleled visceral and emotional experience. Shot over the course of several years, Zagar’s film is the kind of brutally honest and often beautiful look at the tumultuous time in his parent’s marriage that only a son could have captured.

The Diane Seligman Award for BEST SHORT NARRATIVE went to GLORY AT SEA, directed by Benh Zeitlin.

The Diane Seligman Award for BEST STUDENT SHORT FILM went to SIKUMI (On the Ice), directed by Andrew Okpeaha Maclean.

The Diane Seligman Award for BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY went to PICKIN’ AND TRIMMIN’, directed by Matt Morris.

The Maverick Award for BEST ANIMATED FILM went to BERNI’S DOLL, directed by Yann J (Jouette).

The Haskell Wexler Award for BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY went to AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD, directed by Dan Stone and shot by Daniel Fernandez, Tim Gorski, Simeon Houtman, James Joyner, Jonathan Kane, Mathieu Mauvernay, and John “Rip” Odebralski.

The James Lyons Award for BEST EDITING of a FEATURE DOCUMENTARY went to IN A DREAM, Keiko Deguchi and Jeremiah Zagar, Editors.
The James Lyons Award for BEST EDITING of a FEATURE NARRATIVE went to WERE THE WORLD MINE, Jennifer Lilly, Editor.

THE HONORARY LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD was presented to cinematographer Haskell Wexler, by writer/director/actor John Sayles, producer Maggie Renzi, and actor David Strathairn (award previously announced).

THE HONORARY MAVERICK AWARD was presented to director/screenwriter/actor/editor/comic book writer, Kevin Smith, by producer John Sloss (award previously announced).

THE HONORARY TRAILBLAZER AWARD was presented to James Shamus, CEO of Focus Features and award winning writer/producer, by director Ang Lee and actor Melissa Lee (award previously announced).