Now that I’m back home from a week long trek to DC and LA, I’ve finally got time to post my notes from the recent Beyond Words event at the WGA Theater in Beverly Hills. Moderated by writer-director Judd Apatow, the five panelists were all nominated for screenwriting awards this year: Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire), Dustin Lance Black (Milk), Tom McCarthy (The Visitor), Jonah Nolan (The Dark Knight), and Eric Roth (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

* Apatow began the evening by trying his best to get Eric Roth to drop some gossip about what it was like to go to school (UCLA) with Jim Morrison (they were friends). Roth did his best to avoid revealing much about their relationship, only admitting that they had, indeed, smoked pot together and Morrison was a pretty good poet, although “not as good as he [Morrison] thought.”

* Beaufoy talked about the challenges of adapting the book “Q & A,” comprised of 12 short stories, into the screenplay for Slumdog Millionaire. An early decision Beaufoy made was to keep the game show framework, but he wanted to make the story about more than just getting rich, so he traveled to India to find “something more.” What he discovered is that Bollywood movies are pretty “straight ahead love stories,” so he decided to make Slumdog about love. He also said that writing the script was far different than anything he’d written before because he found that “subtext is irrelevant in Mumbai.” What Beaufoy experienced there — the extremes of beauty and ugliness, wealth and poverty — contributed to what he called a more “melodramatic” approach to writing the story which he felt fit the movie culturally.

* McCarthy said that he’d pretty much always been involved in writing, stretching back to his days doing improv. Re The Visitor, he started with the actor Richard Jenkins in mind for the lead character, but it took a year or so to discover the rest of the story. Apatow, who had a great time needling McCarthy all evening, asked McCarthy about working on the acclaimed HBO series “The Wire.” McCarthy said that it was a “humbling experience” being around all the great writers on the series, a number of whom are novelists like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane. McCarthy also jokingly asked the audience if they thought Richard Jenkins’ performance was better in The Visitor — or Step Brothers.

* Jonah Nolan said that he and his brother Chris, co-writer and director of The Dark Knight, have an “antagonistic relationship,” but then rephrased that to say that basically what he meant was he and his brother come at story from two very different perspectives — and that’s a good thing in Jonah’s opinion because they do a thorough job vetting stuff before it “hits the page.”

* Lance Black said he was inspired to write Milk because Harvey Milk had essentially proven that “you could be gay and do something with your life.” He met Cleve Jones (played by actor Emile Hirsch in the movie), a longtime associate of Milk, and spent a lot of time with Jones, learning everything he could about Milk. Black said he did a ton of research — reading through all of Jones’ clippings and articles, meeting a whole host of people who had been associated with Milk. From 2004 to 2007, Black and Jones “tried to work it out” [an approach to the script], which Black finally did. When he was finished, Jones said he wanted to give the script to “a friend.” Black feared that Jones was talking about some fringe filmmaker or worse, however Jones’ friend turned out to be director Gus Van Zandt — who loved the script. The project came together very quickly after Van Zandt got on board.

* In a typically comic transition from Apatow, Judd then turned to Roth and said, “Eric, you wrote Airport ’79. Tell us about that experience.” The subject turned to if Roth found it daunting to adapt The Curious Case of Benjamin Button from a short story written by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Roth admitted that at first, he was a bit nervous, but then discovered that Fitzgerald hadn’t really been all that enamored of the story — he’d written it when he needed cash and dashed it off for what Roth said was a thousand dollars — so then Roth decided “I didn’t care” about Fitzgerald’s involvement and Roth went off to write however he wanted. Re director David Fincher, Roth said, “He’s the wisest undereducated man I’ve ever met,” that he was “fearless and a pain in the ass… asks ridiculously good questions, hard questions,” questions generally summed up with, “Why did you write this?”

* When McCarthy talked about the necessity of a filmmaker being excited about the story they’re working on, Apatow asked him what the budget was on The Visitor (hardly anything at all). Then Apatown turned to Nolan and asked him what The Dark Knight’s budget was, leading to the comment, “Let’s pull out our budget dicks.”

* Black admitted that one of the most difficult aspects of writing Milk was deciding what not to tell, what incidents not to include.

* Nolan said that writing The Dark Knight had been an interesting experience because, as a writer, he tends to jump around from scene to scene, but because Warner Bros. wanted the movie’s opening robbery sequence available to screen 6 months in advance of the movie’s release, he had to start the scripting process on P. 1 — a first for him.

* Black, who writes for the HBO TV series Big Love, said that one of the best things about writing TV is that “you learn length… this is how much scene I can bite off” for these many pages.

* When asked about how he managed to find the emotional core of the Joker’s character, Nolan told a funny story about how he got stuck in a Jet Blue flight on the tarmac for several hours, and was forced to watch 4 episodes of the MTV series “My Super Sweet 16″ — and “that’s how I found the violence” for the Joker.

* Beaufoy: “We just never thought Americans would take the movie (Slumdog) to heart.”
Apatow: “Because we’re assholes?”

* Nolan was asked if he had thought about Heath Ledger when he was writing the Joker. Nolan said “I find it distracting to think about an actor” for any role, “I can’t do that.” He recounted how he was never on the set of The Dark Knight, but pestered one of the movie’s producers, curious to see what Ledger had done with the role because “I heard the Joker’s voice in my head.” Of Ledger’s performance, Nolan said, “He knocked it out of the park.”

* Roth responded to a question about if it was difficult to deal with a story being changed from the screenplay during production by saying he had learned early on during the making of The Onion Field that the director is “always going to win the argument.” Despite that fact, Roth said that he is “a fighter,” that he sees it as part of his job to “challenge their [director's] ideas.”

* As noted previously, Nolan advised writers in the audience to ignore the adage, “Write what you know” and “write what you want.”

* Apatow ended the evening with this summary: “Most of the writing in this town [Hollywood] is terrible.” He encouraged audience members to “stick to it and don’t give up, be the hardest workers.” His final point: “There’s not a brilliant screenwriter alive who won’t get discovered — at least if they leave the house.”

As noted here about the WGA Awards, Black won Best Original Screenplay (Milk) and Beaufoy won Best Adapted Screenplay (Slumdog).