Screenwriting Partners: Yes or No?

You’ve heard — it’s been said — many times that film is a collaborative art form. We in the business like to illustrate this concept by talking about working “off” our co-creators. For example, a director should and will meet for months with the Director of Photography (DP) to plan shots or will sit in the editing suite with the editor when a project is in post (post-production) or an actor in a scene will work with her scene partners — whatever they are bringing to the shot — to create a jointly-developed reality.

Another way of understanding the collaboration required to make a film is to sit through the very end of a movie and watch the credits roll, see the hundreds of people without whom the film would not have come to the screen.

Given that the writer, too, hands off her work to the director and producer, why don’t more writers work collaboratively inside the screenwriting process itself?  Should writing be an exception to working off a co-creator? Should writers sit alone in their garrets (coffee shops) and draw lonely inspiration from the Muse?

A lot of screenwriters think so. But many, many more work with writing partners.  These partnerships can range from consulting another writer for fresh eyes once the first draft is done to sitting next to a co-writer daily for months and months cranking out every line of dialog, every slug line, together.

Where do I fall on this co-writing spectrum? Probably because I’m an actor and as such, hardly ever work without a raft of scene partners and a director, not to mention taking direction from the cinematographer and hitting marks made for me by the AC, or the gaffer or maybe because I don’t believe in the theory of divine inspiration of genius, or possibly because there really are no new stories — just new ways of telling them — I like to work hand in hand with a co-writer when developing a screenplay.

In later columns I will share stories of the writing partners I’ve had over the years and how each of these collaborations was different from every other one.