The obvious genius

One of the most tired tropes in movies and TV is this idea of the genius whose talent in a particular field is instantly obvious to any other practitioner in the field who sees an example of the genius's work. This conceit occurs frequently with writers. In the case of The Words (2012), the genius is a novelist played by two different actors (Ben Barnes in youth, Jeremy Irons in old age), yet for some reason he doesn't get a name.

Some time after World War II, the young man moved to France, took up a job writing for an English language publication for "expats," and married a French waitress. After the tragic loss of their baby, the young man was inspired to write a brilliant novel, but the novel was misplaced on a train and lost for many years.

Until it is discovered by Rory Jansen (Bradley Cooper), a mediocre writer who has gotten enough rejection letters to fill up a binder and is marking time as a low-ranking employee at a publishing company. Rory is so impressed by the typewritten novel that he is compelled to type it on his computer verbatim. His wife Dora (Zoe Saldana) convinces him to show it to someone at his workplace. Rory does, leading to inevitable success.

And an inevitable confrontation with the true author, who claims to want neither byline nor payment. Rory comes clean to his publisher, who is understandably angry. After some convincing from the publisher and from the true author, Rory decides to continue the charade, and the secret of the true authorship of The Window Tears dies with the author.

Here I have presented the story of the movie in a straight line. But the way the story is presented in the movie, you'd be forgiven for initially thinking that Rory might actually be a very good writer who just hasn't caught the break he so desperately needs.

That's because in real life, the work of a genius is not immediately obvious to everyone. Try googling "rejection letters to famous authors." You probably won't even have to type the whole thing. Animal Farm by George Orwell and Moby Dick by Herman Melville are but two bestsellers to have gotten rejection letters your search will turn up. And a book we're led to believe was a source of inspiration for The Window Tears, The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway, was deemed "tedious and offensive" by Peacock & Peacock in 1925.

So it's not just amazing that the misplaced novel was found by a novelist, it's also amazing that a novel which was so spontaneously written was also immediately recognized as a work of genius by the very first publisher it was shown to. Genius or hack, any novelist who makes any effort to get published will get rejection letters. Only in the movies will the publishers who pass on brilliant first time authors feel like idiots. In real life, publishers of print books have become very risk-averse, something this movie's screenwriters should have known back in the 1990s when they started working on this story.

A couple of things they're probably not gonna teach you in screenwriting class

"Those who can, do; those who can't, teach." Nowhere has that aphorism been truer than when it comes to screenwriting. My young cousin Jim took a screenwriting class with Joel Silvers at Wayne State University, and told me that Silvers is the worst washed up has-been to ever teach screenwriting (though I doubt he would have gotten a much better instructor if he hadn't gone out of state).

From what Jimmy has told me, Silvers is quite awful. But if you go to almost any university that has screenwriting courses, you will find that the screenwriting instructor is a hack more interested in telling stories from his long-gone glory days than in critiquing the dozens and dozens of pages he's made you write for nothing.

Anyone who seriously wants to be a screenwriter needs to know these two things:

• A successful screenplay has more than one author. A hack teaching screenwriting will put a lot of pressure on you to write an excellent screenplay. Not by offering insightful critique, mind you, but simply by repeatedly saying worthless things like "It has to be good!" The hack won't explicitly say so, but he might occasionally make the very subtle acknowledgement that most of Hollywood's most successful screenplays have at least two credited authors and who knows how many uncredited. It's true that most Oscar-winning screenplays have only one credited author (usually a famous director, like Spike Jonze, Quentin Tarantino or Woody Allen), and it's also true that some of the worst movies have had as many as five credited screenwriters. But in general, if your screenplay gets made into a movie and you're not the director, your screenplay's gonna get rewritten by someone else. Plus the director may cut out some scenes and let the actors ad-lib.
• Not everyone watching a movie is a completely ignorant moron. The hack screenwriting instructor will pressure you to do lots and lots of research but he will also pressure you to not actually use it in your screenplay. For example, the student might be expected to read an entire book about whist (it's a card game, more like bridge than like poker, from what I understand) and write a complete set of biographies for every single character in the screenplay before the next time the class meets. But then, when the student screenwriter writes a whist scene with authentic, believable whist play, the hack teacher tells the student to change it to something more dramatic, and to sacrifice the whist authenticity, because "no one watching this movie knows anything about whist." But this is a false dilemma. High drama does not rule out authenticity, and authenticity doesn't rule out high drama. The director doesn't need to show every hand being played. But there will be someone watching who does know about whist, even if just enough to notice if something is not quite right about the game. If the movie gets the whist wrong, that might make someone not want to watch the rest of the movie. Of course some of these things cross over into the job of the continuity staff. If the screenwriter can make things easier for the continuity staff, he should.