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.