Movie Screenwriter Angelo Pizzo

Scene from Rudy, Pizzo second from left

Excerpt from To the Young Writer by Hank Nuwer

     Today, Angelo Pizzo in his early fifties is a successful screenwriter and a filmmaker. In 2000, he signed a deal to write a follow-up to "Goodfellas" from the compelling point of view of a teenager whose father has been exiled to a government witness protection agency in exchange for his testimony against organized crime figures. He also is world-renowned for writing moving screenplays about high school basketball and college football, Hoosiers and Rudy.
     But when Angelo Pizzo was a teenager, he feared that he would never accept responsibility, never have the competency to make a living or be mature enough to have a family and a life. “I thought I was a damaged and wounded person who would never be competent and undamaged,” he said, a few hours before he was to run in a 10K road race. “I felt success would never happen to me. I never believed in myself. I sort of kept going in some weird way, taking one step after the other with this weird blind faith, hoping I would find the answer or the way—not to make a great movie—but just to make a living as a grownup. Each step of the way I started to make discoveries about myself and discoveries about work which opened new possibilities and new doors.”
[Not Letting Distractions Stop Us}
    Pizzo remembers his own painful growing-up years, and as much as anyone he knows how hazing peers, skin eruptions, hormone changes, and seemingly daily crises can strike during one’s adolescent years. “The sense of confusion and self doubt in your adolescent years can be so overwhelming,” said Pizzo. “If there is anything I can share its that—I was there and you get through it. You figure out a way to keep moving. Things change. They never stay the same.
       “Never give other people the power to define you. Don’t give away power to anyone—your teachers, your parents, your friends.”
[Storytelling]
       If there is one key to Pizzo’s success, it is that he learned that the essence of a good story. He creates characters—occasionally flawed people with courage and decency deep down—that confront themselves or the outside world to take a good whack at achieving dreams. He creates obstacles for his characters. His characters face those obstacles and try to find a way to overcome them.
       Thus, the challenge for a fifteen-year-old in “Goodfellas” whose father is on the run is somehow to find normalcy in an abnormal world. The challenge for his basketball coach Norman Day in Hoosiers is how to manage a second chance after losing a previous position because of his character flaws. The challenge for a University of Notre Dame football walk-on named Daniel “Rudy” Ruettiger is to play on the reserve team in obscurity, hoping he will get into a game.
[The Importance of Story]
       The tradition of storytelling goes back to the campfires of aboriginal tribesmen, said Pizzo.  “What I first believe is that the core of any film [and] for any story being told on film is someone sitting down with a blank piece of paper and a pen and working it out. [That means] creating characters, telling a story through film images.
       “When you’re watching a movie, you’re not turning a page, but when you’re writing a screenplay, you have to turn a page,” said Pizzo.  “When you’re reading a good book—whether it be a textbook, comic book or storybook—the most important thing is that you really want to see what happens next. The real skill of a storyteller is to create a kind of motion in a room.
       “If you’re sitting and talking to a person and you’re telling a story, and they’re leaning over and want to hear what’s going to happen next and next, then how you do that is creating interesting characters—one or two that the audience, listener, or reader connects to and relates to. They end up rooting for them, and they want things to happen for them. In the course of the journey of the characters, there are things in the way that they have to work out and get through. They have to solve the problems. They have to overcome emotional roadblocks. These obstacles can be external or they can be internal—though in film they are usually represented by external obstacles. My story telling is done in a rather sweeping, event-focused way looking for significant signposts along the way and getting a feeling how it will build to a climax. I would never start a movie unless I knew I had a great end.”
       Every storyteller learns that characters who refuse to let obstacles stop them are the people whose lives resonate more splendidly on the screen—even if these very obstacles cause much pain to their real-life inspirations. Sometimes it is the captain who runs his boat ashore who best can tell others to watch out for under-water snags. Through the stories onscreen, they learn how to live and become stronger in spite of human realities such as tragic deaths, failed relationships, family conflicts, terrible misunderstandings, catastrophic weather, and other obstacles.
       Every writer in some way uses his life’s experiences to create art, including Pizzo. “Having written 10 scripts, one of the hallmarks of my writing is that I write what I know and where I have experience and knowledge,” said Pizzo.  
[When Life Imitates Art]
       Pizzo lives in Ojai, California, close enough to Hollywood to attend film studio meetings. A family man, he no longer cowers when crisis occurs, welcoming such events as potential story fodder and a way that his own character can be more fully realized and formed.
       “Whenever I face rough times in my work or my personal life I know that those things are ways in which I am going to grow and change,” confided Pizzo. You don’t grow and change in good times—I don’t think anybody does. I personally need to have crisis in order to move to the next place creatively and personally. In my teens and my twenties, I thought (a crisis) was the end of the world.  Now I can put these things in context.”
 [Creating Fascinating Settings]
     A story must be universal while taking place in a regional setting of interest to viewers.  Pizzo’s job, therefore, involves knowing the environment in which his characters live, thus giving his audience clues to their values and morals.
       “I am commenting on the way people relate to each other, the way they relate to their family, community, and environment,” said Pizzo, who cautions that he never lets pure ideas or moralizing get in the way of his basic story. “In telling my stories, I obviously deal with my own concerns and the things that interest me, but I also know that I am a conduit for the rest of our culture and society. But all those things I don’t think about when I write. What I think about is what is a good idea for a story and the best way to convey that story with a simple idea in mind.”
       While there are some stories so universal that it matters not if you set them in New York, Minneapolis or Phoenix, most tales are all the better when audiences can respond to the spirit of a setting. For Angelo Pizzo, Hoosiers and Rudy benefited from their location in small Hoosier towns.
       “I really felt the place, Indiana, was really as important as the Norman Dale character,” said Pizzo, chewing on a bagel. To make the reader feel transported into the frantic, frenetic world of Friday night high school basketball, Pizzo made every detail authentic about small-town Hoosier life. He knew “how they walked and talked and how they sat in barber shops.”
       When writing his first draft, Pizzo allows himself to write long. In fact, he writes scenes that will never make the final draft to see how characters will do in a scene that happens offstage, because there is always the possibility that they will say or do something surprising that he’ll keep. Even if the scene doesn’t get used, it helps the writer to know his setting and his characters better.  In Hoosiers, a fall harvest was not in the final cut, but contributed to the authenticity Pizzo wanted.
       Throughout the writing of a screenplay or any other writing product, the writer must always contemplate what is essential? To illustrate what is important, the writer might keep one scene to represent four other scenes
        “What is the apotheosis—the quintessence and pithiness of one scene that suggests all those other scenes?” said Pizzo.  “I think your first draft in some ways is a big concrete stone you’ve created, and then you go back and start carving and chipping until you get the sculpture that you want.”  
[Putting Your Inward Vision on the Screen]
       As a storyteller, Pizzo has to find a way to tell a story that reflects what he himself has learned about life and the way human beings like himself get through such obstacles as their own physical or mental limitations, foolish errors, vices and character flaws.       The job of screenwriter then is to find the universal message so that every person in every theater audience says, This is how the story appeals to me or applies to me. Pizzo sees the obvious rendered unobvious, and that same miracle of insight then gets transmitted in a theater one viewer at a time.
       Thus, the job of every screenwriter is to create pleasant surprise and astonishment in an audience. But this must always be natural and believable in terms of the story, setting and characters that appear on the big screen.
       “The films that disappoint you are the films in which you think you know what is going to happen next—and you’re right,” said Pizzo. “The films that excite you are films that you think you know what’s going to happen next and it almost does—or it does but it does in such a startlingly unique and original way that its more of a thrill than if it’s a complete surprise and goes the other way.”
            Pizzo asserts that the great filmmakers like John Ford who made western classics, such as Stagecoach with John Wayne, found ways to take tired old formulas and render them original and thrilling.  They started with certain forms and conventions and twisted those until it seemed that they had created a very different genre. “When you watch a John Ford western, it’s as if you are seeing a western for the first time. Everything seems fresh and new and alive and real and you the viewer can connect to it,” said Pizzo.
[How a Plot Thickens]
       One tip Pizzo offers screenwriters is to twist a plot a little, avoiding the novice writer’s tendency to fool a viewing audience so completely with some development onscreen that it comes off as false, unbelievable, or farfetched.
        “Take something and turn it just a little bit to move the way a story is told maybe three degrees,” said Pizzo. “Sometimes that is the most compelling way to tell a story in a really interesting way.”
       Another bit of advice Pizzo offers is that young storytellers ought to pay attention to the way their listeners receive the stories about their own lives that they tell. If a listener doesn’t seem to respond to a story one way, rearrange it some or cut and add certain details.
       “I believe the nature of storytelling is constantly evolving,” said Pizzo. “I will tell a story once and I will subsequently register how people respond to various points in it along the way.  By the time I’ve worked it out I’ve probably changed, misrepresented and exaggerated what actually happened to make the story more compelling and more interesting, because that is sort of my nature. I went to Europe for the first time at 16, and I was all alone for two months. Some amazing things happened to me. I know I was prone to exaggeration when I came back and started telling these stories to make them seem more dramatic and more compelling. Over the years, these stories got cranked up, and now I’m not even sure what happened.”
       Non-fiction writers are duty-bound to put down the truth on paper, but screenwriters, novelists and short story writers have a duty to tell higher truths about the human condition by manipulating for artistic effect a fictional story based on a true story..
       “Say I’m doing a story about a guy who wants to play football for Notre Dame,” muses Pizzo. “He is small and gets bad grades and so forth. Then I will start elaborating on it.  I‘ll start telling more about him and testing the various ways I can tell that story. By the time I sit down and begin writing the screenplay, I will have told people a 10- minute version of it in which I think I know what is to be the flow and the sweep and the general kind of movement that the story is going to take dramatically. I know what the obstacles will be and how those obstacles are going to be resolved. To a large part, I’m test marketing. I’m looking at how the audience—through the person I’m telling the story to—responds to the material.
[Making the Story New]
            Pizzo says the writer should imagine packing a suitcase and going on a long train trip. Even though the traveler knows he will see lakes and mountains that millions before him have seen, every traveler will tell stories that are different from those of previous travelers.
       “You have some idea of what the destination is, and you have some sense of what the terrain is, but when you get on the train, it’s as if you’re seeing it for the first time,” said Pizzo.  “If you the viewer know you’re going to see a movie about a basketball team that is trying to win the state championship, that is not only my idea but my problem to overcome. That is, how to make, what is in many ways a clichéd story, seem fresh.”
[Getting Started]
       Millions of people want to write. Since Pizzo failed to pen his first produced screenplay until he was thirty-one, he has sympathy for strugglers.
       “Writing is very difficult. It’s very hard to look at that blank piece of paper,” said Pizzo. “Someone once said, `Writing is easy – you just sit at the typewriter and wait for blood droplets to form on your forehead.’  I think there is some truth to that.”
       But to the minority that actually wrest their stories out of their head and get them on paper, something magical happens, said Pizzo. “When you sit down and create these characters, they take on a life of their own,” said Pizzo.
       Essentially, there are two kinds of writers. One is the person who writes a basic whirlwind outline for a sense of direction, or has merely the germ of a plot. The other is the writer who writes an extensive, detailed outline to use it like a compass and map, knowing he’ll never leave port or arrive at a destination without this navigating tool.
Pizzo is the former kind of writer, never painting himself into a screenwriting corner by slapping down too many paintbrush strokes ahead of time.
“I don’t believe in outlining,” said Pizzo. “I don’t think you know your characters well enough that you can say, `0n page 85 of the screenplay, these two characters are going to have an emotional moment or an emotional scene.” Why? Because you haven’t developed and grown with those characters or helped them find their voices.  Their `voices’, the magical thing I’m referring to, is when they take on a life of their own, and they start doing things you never expected them to do. Their presence becomes so dynamic and powerful that you have to deal with them.”
        In the screenplay for Hoosiers, for example, the character of Shooter (played by actor Dennis Hopper) character was someone, when Pizzo originally conceived him, who was going to have little if any dialog. Shooter originally was a device to highlight his son, a star player on the Hickory team, and to illustrate the boy’s character by how he responded to his dad.  Originally, Shooter was just going to be always drunk and off to the side instead of taking center stage. In the first scene Pizzo wrote, Shooter, the character, showed up drunk at a game, and the screenwriter expected the townspeople to pull him off. Instead, the character of Coach Dale was so overpowering that he became the main person who went on the floor to help Shooter off.
       “Once Norman did I knew he was going to have to deal with Shooter,” said Pizzo. “Once I created that relationship, it suggested a whole different avenue, emotion, and path for that character. Shooter became richer and more interesting. He became an essential part of the Hoosiers troupe instead of a fleeting backdrop.