I came to teaching largely by accident. I had a masters in screenwriting but had veered off into the high output, low return arena of free-lance journalism.

There I was, laboring away at championing small, but heartfelt independent films in obscure trade publications and the occasional consumer rag, when, one day, an old graduate school chum called to ask if I wanted to take over his screenwriting class at the School of Visual Arts.

We had studied screenwriting together at Columbia University when the Film Division was co-chaired by Milos Forman and Frank Daniel, both Czech ex-pats. Milos was only on campus occasionally, leaving the running of the department to Frank, a former film producer in then-Czechoslovakia who had studied with Eisenstein and Pudovkin at the state film school in Moscow.

Frank immigrated to this country in 1969 and soon became a highly influential teacher of screenwriting, counting among his students the likes of Ivan Passer, David Lynch and Terence Malick. Also at Columbia, extending the East European influence, was Yugoslav director Dusan Makavejev teaching directing, Stefan Scharff, from Poland, teaching film studies, and numerous other Slavs among the staff and students. In addition, Columbia gave me the opportunity to study acting and directing with Brad Dourif, and film history with Andrew Sarris.

I decided to take my friend’s offer, and began my first class by giving the students a brief lecture on the fundamentals of three-act structure. That was easy – I just told them what I had been taught. But at a certain point, I had to stop bouncing in front of the blackboard and settle down to listen to their assignments. And respond. That was the scary part.

Then it happened. The first student read a short scene, and – immediately – I knew what to say. What’s more, I saw the student’s eyes widen as his mind expanded to see how a good idea can be made better. I was in my element.

Before long I was firmly entrenched in what I call “the circuit” in New York, doing adjunct work at The New School and Film/Video Arts, as well as SVA, and eventually getting an Assistant Professorship at New Jersey City University. But my second big moment came when I decided to take my first shot at teaching Script Analysis, a lecture class I had taken at Columbia analyzing classic films for their screenplay structure that was a central part of the screenwriting program.

Until then, I had always taught intimate writing workshops, sitting in a circle and knowing everyone’s name. I had never done straight lecturing, up in front of the students, exposed and presuming to know something they needed to learn. I did many hours of preparation, just to make sure I knew at least a few things worth telling them. But, nonetheless, I was so nervous the night before, I barely slept. I could only hope I would get through the next day without humiliating myself.

Then, when I arrived for my Saturday morning class at The New School, it happened again. Despite my anxiety and fatigue, I knew just what to say. I started analyzing The African Queen on video, scene by scene, pointing out all the cool things going on under the surface, and suddenly realized an exhilerated energy had kicked in. I was saying things I hadn’t thought of ahead of time. I was making jokes the students actually laughed at. I was getting to show them why I love the medium so much. And I was having more fun than I’d had in years.

Back at Columbia, Script Analysis had been Frank Daniel’s signature class, a five-hour marathon in which he would first screen a film, and then lecture on its structure, characters and scene construction over two class sessions. Being the pre-video era, we would re-view sequences using an “analyzer,” a big, unwieldy 16mm projector that ran like a truck, going into low-gear, as if chugging up a hill, to project in slow motion, or being slammed into a sprocket-mangling reverse to view a segment a second time. When Frank ordered the teaching assistant to stop the projector so he could talk about a scene, it would throw a lead screen in front of the bulb so as not to burn up the film, leaving only a washed out suggestion of the image on screen. Needless to say, the underlying tension of worrying that the film might just burn up anyway was a bit distracting.

By the time I got around to teaching Script Analysis, not only did I have videotape, for zipping along in fast forward and rewind, but I also had a remote, which was like a magic wand. Stop! Go! Back! Forward! Then came DVD for jumping all the way to the end and, on second thought, going back to view a small moment at the beginning, then picking up again with the ending. When it became possible to watch a DVD on my laptop computer, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. I’ve done many a class preparation sitting in a café with earbuds, watching a scene, typing some notes, watching another, typing some more, watching, typing, watching, typing, all in two little windows on my screen. These days, there’s really no excuse for not doing this kind of close analysis of films.

I started with the films I had seen Frank lecture on at Columbia, but soon began adding a few new films each term. This led to noticing structural patterns I had not been taught in school. After several years, during which I prepared in-depth lectures on about 20 classic films, I became increasingly curious about the historical precedents for these structures and decided to go back to school at New York University to study the history and theory of drama from the Greeks to the 20th century.

Using the script analysis techniques I had developed in my classes, one of the first papers I wrote was a comparative study of three plays based on the Hippolytus and Phaedra myth, starting with Euripides’s Hippolytus, then Seneca’s Phaedra and, finally, Racine’s Phedre. I also analyzed the structure of Shakespeare’s Othello in relation to the medieval morality play, looking at Desdemona as the “Good Angel” and Iago as the “Bad Angel,” battling for the soul of Othello’s “Everyman.” Reading August Strindberg’s Miss Julie gave me the idea to do a comparative study with the Lina Wertmueller film Swept Away since they are both about a master/servant power switch, but for very different thematic purposes. All of these studies can be found on this website under “The Art.”

One of my overriding goals in going back to school was to find out where this three-act structure business comes from. I soon learned that it is a surprisingly new form. The Roman theorist Horace in the first century had interpreted Aristotle’s Poetics as dictating a five-act structure, which dominated drama until well into the 19th century. I saw the first hints of a three-act form when I studied the late-18^th century innovation in popular theater called Melodrama. Then I learned that melodrama led to another popular form called the Well-Made Play, which is much maligned among dramatic literature scholars but was fascinating to me as a precedent for the early silent films a century later. I also discovered something that drama scholars are reluctant to admit – that Henrik Ibsen studied the Well-Made Play form in depth, and utilized many of its dramatic principles in his history-making A Doll’s House.

But my most enduring memory from those two years is being deep in the stacks of NYU’s Bobst Library, sprawled on the floor, volumes piled on either side of me, searching for that turning point in history when classical five-act dramatic structure was finally abandoned in favor of the three-act form we take for granted today. I did eventually find it, in an early 20^th century playwriting manual by William Archer, the man credited with introducing Ibsen to the English speaking world.

This tells me that dramatic structure is an evolving form. It took about 1900 years for the three-act model to gain precedence. So it is inevitable that new forms will emerge to supplant it. Meanwhile, I will continue to pursue my deeply felt passion for the objective study of screenwriting as it is manifested in the time-tested work of others.

Teaching
Lucasfilm Animation, Singapore
Lucasfilm, Ltd., San Francisco, CA
Pixar Animation Studios, Emeryville, CA
Film Arts Foundation, San Francisco, CA
The New School, New York, NY
New Jersey City University, Jersey City, NJ
School of Visual Arts, New York, NY
Film/Video Arts, New York, NY

Consulting
Pixar Animation Studios
Independent Television Service
Squaw Valley Community of Writers, Screenwriting Workshop
Film Arts Foundation, Robin Eickman Screenwriting Award
New York Foundation for the Arts, Artists New Works Program
National Endowment for the Arts, Media Arts Program
P.O.V., The American Documentary

Panels
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Seventh Art Film Series
Goethe Institute
The Film Workshop At Prague
New York Women In Film & Television
Bay Area Women in Film & Television

Juries
Marin Arts Council, Screenwriting Grants Program
San Francisco International Film Festival, Golden Gate Awards
Mendocino Film Festival, Narrative Features Category
Film Arts Festival, Narrative Features Category

Journalist
Premiere
The Village Voice
Ms.
Sight and Sound
Screen International
Release Print
Filmmaker
The Independent
The Off-Hollywood Report (Editor, 1988-1990)

Education
San Francisco Art Institute, Bachelor of Fine Arts, Film
Columbia University, Master of Fine Arts, Screenwriting
New York University, History and Theory of Drama