Per the NY Times Arts Beat blog:
Once Robert De Niro gave his career-spanning collection of papers and artifacts to posterity, it was only a matter of time before the filmmaker Paul Schrader, his screenwriter on “Raging Bull” and “Taxi Driver,” got into the ring, too.
On Monday, it was announced that Mr. Schrader, whose films include “American Gigolo” and “Light Sleeper,” had given his own stockpile of screenplays, correspondence and production materials to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, where Mr. De Niro’s collection already resides.
Mr. Schrader said in a telephone interview on Monday that his donations to the center were a result of Mr. De Niro’s persuading, starting with the actor’s “Taxi Driver” costume (which came from Mr. Schrader’s personal wardrobe).
“Bobby gave all of his stuff to the Ransom Center,” Mr. Schrader said, “and said it would be good if all the wardrobe could be in the same place. Would I give them the ‘Taxi Driver’ stuff?” He added: “Then they said, ‘Can we have the rest of your stuff?’ So, why not? Sure.”
That’s cool, but check this out:
Among the unique memorabilia that Mr. Schrader is donating, including books, press clippings and an annotated copy of his screenplay for “The Last Temptation of Christ,” is his heavily marked-up outline for “Raging Bull” (a detail of which appears above), for which he shared writing credit with Mardik Martin.
“It’s part of the oral tradition,” Mr. Schrader said of his process. “Rather than writing my way through an outline, I tell my way through, and then each time I tell it, I re-outline it.”
As the “Raging Bull” outline shows, Mr. Schrader had the thrust of each scene, as well as key lines of dialogue (“If you win, you win. If you lose, you still win.”) already worked out before he sat down to write. (Alas, we couldn’t tell from this image how much of Jake La Motta’s helpful description of how to cook a steak had been composed at this stage.)
Mr. Schrader also gave an estimated page length for each scene as well as a final count and a running tally of total pages, which he said was crucial for pacing.
“It’s very important to calibrate these events and when they’re happening,” he said. “Somebody says, ‘I don’t know why this scene doesn’t work,’ and you say to them: ‘It’s very simple. It should have happened 10 pages earlier. Then it would have worked.’”
Which is exactly how Schrader said he approached writing here:
“I know exactly where I’m going beforehand. I know to the half page if I’m on or off target. I draw up charts before I do a script. I endlessly chart and re-chart a movie. Before I sit down to write, I have all the scenes listed, what happens in each scene, how many pages I anticipate each scene will take. I have a running log on the film. I can look down and see what happens by page thirty, what happens by page forty, fifty, sixty and so forth. I have the whole thing timed out to a hundred and five, a hundred and ten pages. You may go two, three pages ahead or behind, you may add or drop dialogue or scenes; but if you’re two pages ahead or behind, you have to work that into the timing. Especially if you get five pages ahead, or, worse, five pages behind, then something you had planned to work on page forty may not work the same way on page forty-five.”
So for all you writers who spend enormous amounts of time on your outlines, I believe you’ve found your patron saint: Paul Schrader.
The news release re Schrader’s donation is here. The collection also houses material from screenwriters Ernest Lehman and Jay Presson Allen.
