There's a huge difference between the story in your head pre-formed and the actual work of getting it down onto paper or in a digital file. That's the premise this screwball comedy with Audrey Hepburn and William Holden is based on.
Holden is a screenwriter down to the wire with only days to turn in a full 138-page script he hasn't even started writing other than seeing a vague outline of a story in his head called The Girl Who Stole the Eiffel Tower. Audrey Hepburn is his typist who is both bewildered and entranced by the way Holden approaches his craft (or avoids the business end of it in particular). As Holden creates the story, and then re-creates it over and over, the scene plays out as described featuring Tony Curtis as the foil boyfriend for Hepburn's leading lady. As the story grows and changes, the romance blossoms (because this is old-school Hollywood after all). And there's your plot.
But you know from my reviews, that's not what I looking into here.
So, just what does Paris When It Sizzles actually have to say about writing via this zany rom-com from the bygone days of Hollywood's classic flicks?
I think the movie lays out it premise clearly in the scene where Holden and Hepburn meet. After a little bit of flirty wit between the two, she asked point-blank where is the script she is supposed to type for him. He immediately grabs a stack of blank paper and proceeds to place plain, white sheets all over the flat, one at a time, as he describes scene after scene: opening scene, a girl in black on the Eiffel Tower, the girl and the man meet, they fall in love, then BAM!, tension when an obstacle occurs, the girl leaves, the whole romance shifts to the other foot, a cat drenched in the rain, and then the studio-rent-paying, popcorn selling kiss before the movies fades out.
While the sudden kiss leaves Hepburn fluttering, she's not fooled by his act of literary bravado. Instead, she gathers her wits, and basically says, "So you haven't actually written any of it?"
To which, Holden describes his normal process of drinking and partying and gambling 98 percent of his contracted time away and then banging out a script in the last few days, one that he's ultimately unhappy with, but lets the paycheck soothe his unsatisfied writer's conscience.
This is where the relationship between the two really shines. The imagined stories tell the real plot of a budding romance, hidden between spies, vampires, the Old West, almost anything the viewer could imagine. This is where the hard work of writing the script is done, one idea after another, editing and re-editing, throwing ideas away and replacing them with other (sometimes better, sometimes not) ideas. And this is the "moral" for us as writers when we watch this fun little flick -- ideas are gold, but getting them out, that's where the story actually happens. The hard work, the writing things down, the knocking around of ideas (sometimes even off another person), that stuff is platinum to an idea's gold.
Even for lazy writers who waste 98 percent of their schedule. (Maybe especially so.)
