Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1543164
20 C I N E M O N T A G E U N I O N M A D E By Kevin McMahon G rowing up in New Jersey in the 1 9 50 s a n d ' 6 0 s, I wa s a l ways a movie and TV addict. I taught my- self to read before starting kindergarten so I could decipher the TV listings in the lo- cal paper and catch my favorite shows like "Crusader Rabbit." My older siblings hated that kid stuff and would never tell me when my shows were on, so I had to find out for myself. I came to love reading for its own sake — all those adventures of the mind. I'd check books out of the library and de- vour my older sister's trashy novels after she was done with them. Dad had bought a lifetime subscription to "Reader's Digest" during the Depression, and I consumed every issue when it arrived each month. I was voracious. It was off to boarding school in my teens, a whole new world for me. I acted in Shake- speare plays, and first-rate English teachers sharpened my critical writing skills. Just locking antlers in dorm bs sessions with other students who were a lot quicker than I was honed those skills to a finer edge. My first summer job at Random House in Man- hattan came with an employee discount, which I used to buy their doorstop-sized dictionary. I haunted bookstores, amassing a collection of paperbacks, and I always kept one stuck in my hip pocket to beguile idle moments. For college, I ended up at California Institute of the Arts in the School of Critical Studies before being admitted to the film school. A horde of transplanted New York- ers was on the scene that first semester in Burbank, a madcap Bohemian interlude before an earthquake demolished the place. CalArts relocated to its permanent campus in Valencia where, amidst the sagebrush, subdivisions, and cowboy bars, we learned how to use 16mm Eclairs, Nagras, and WHAT A STORY ONE CAREER, FROM 'CRUSADER RABBIT' TO 'THE ILIAD' Moviolas, crewed each other's films, and hit Hollywood just as the demise of the studio system was nearly complete. Jobs were scarce, but I got hired as a publicist at Billy Jack Enterprises in Culver City. (My time there could be the subject of a whole separate essay.) Fired after a year, I did some freelancing, then landed my first gig as a story analyst at First Artists. The story editor liked my work, but by this point, I'd soured on the whole "breaking into the movies" thing, so I lit out for a commercial fishing job in Alaska, then moved to San Francisco and worked construction for the next decade. Lured back to LA in 1984, I banged out a goofy screenplay on my crappy portable typewriter about a moribund dancing school. A friend showed it to his real estate partner, who showed it to his partner, and the next thing I knew, I had a producer, an agent, and a development deal at Tristar. It all happened so fast; I didn't realize how much I didn't know about the development process and bungled the rewrites. But I was already getting more assignments off my first draft and kept up the imposture for a few more years, writing unproduced scripts. By this time married with a family, I needed steady work and a dependable health plan. I called in a favor and secured a full-time reader position at Warner Bros. Fortunately, I passed muster with my new boss, story editor Teresa Wayne, who was the best in the business. By this time, I was sufficiently equipped to do the job; nobody knows how to pick apart the fault lines of a screenplay better than a failed screenwriter who's already done everything wrong him- self. I'd taken Robert McKee's seminar on story structure, which initially just made my writing worse but gave me a valuable template for understanding why it was worse. I also built a small library of books on writing for stage and screen, everything from Aristotle to Lajos Egri to Walter Kerr's "How Not To Write A Play," which, believe me, was incredibly helpful. So I was well prepared for tasks such as analyzing the '60s bubble gum cards that were the un- derlying material for Tim Burton's "Mars Attacks!" (Plus, I'd collected the entire set as a kid.) That's the thing about this racket — you never know what odd bit of experience will come in handy. My prep school classics diploma proved not entirely useless for covering the "Aeneid" and "Iliad" (for what became the movie "Troy"). By the time I retired as a senior story analyst (I assumed the title just meant Old Reader), I'd covered thousands of submissions, most of them, well, not good. But the ones that were good hit the trifecta: They made me care about what happened, they were tight and solidly constructed, and the payoff justified the buildup. They delivered what my old drinking buddy, Sam Fuller, defined as the essential thing: "In a word: Emotion!" If you can fake that, you've got it made. ■ Kevin McMahon put in his time as a journalist, publicist, Moviola repairman, screenwriter, and development executive before retiring as a senior story analyst at WB Pictures. He's reachable at: kmcmahon50@gmail.com. Kevin McMahon.