DEAD POETS SOCIETY: Screenwriter Thomas Schulman

Article by Steve Biodrowski

The roots of this film were in acting school. I wanted to write something about the experiences I had with a teacher named Harold Klerman, who was this grand old man of Broadway. They brought him in to criticize the work, and after five minutes of that he would stand on stage and talk for two hours about the theatre and life and what we were doing on Earth. We were just so full of inspiration that all of us would go out and talk about changing the world. It became clear that wasn’t do-able, but I thought about writing about acting school.

Fairly quickly I realized it was a little too ‘Hollywood.’ The character of Neil, the boy who wants to become an actor, is a vestige of that concept. I wrote the teacher first, all the inspiring parts. It was a little bit like psychoanalysis; I didn’t understand what I was writing about as I wrote it: this creative force versus repression. I thought of putting it in a military school. I had gone to not a boarding school but a day school that wanted to be a boarding school but couldn’t pull it off.

When I first gave the script to my agent, he said, ‘I think it’s the best thing you’ve written. But if you want to get it made, you need to get another agent. No one’s going to make this movie, but if you want to try, go out and look.’ I gave it to five other agents; all except one passed. I went to see one agent who had his shoes off and his feet up on the desk. He said, ‘I’ve read the first half of this and it’s really good; it’s cast-able, and I think we can get this made.’ I spent a month in terror, thinking he would read the second half and fire me as his client.

After a year, he had taken it to all the studios, including Disney, who wanted to change all the students into dancers and call it ‘Sultans of Strut’—a FAME kind of thing. They wouldn’t even give it to Jeffrey Katzenberg. I also met with a couple producers who said they just wanted to meet me and ask why I’d wasted my time writing a script that no one would make. Even the title, DEAD POETS SOCIETY, they said had the three worst words you could put in a title.

Finally, a producer called and said, ‘I read this about a year and a half ago, and I haven’t been able to forget it. So I’d like to option it for very little money and try to get it made.’ SECOND SIGHT [another Schulman script] sold one afternoon, and my agent called and said, ‘I think Disney is going to buy DEAD POETS, probably tomorrow.’ They called me at midnight to say they wanted it. That late hour shows how little they were offering. That’s not a good thing—it means it was the last thing they did that day.

Then it went through two directors. The first production, they shot a day and then burned the set! That was very discouraging—it really felt like this movie would never get made. I wrote it in ’85, sold it in ’87, and the sets were burned in ’88. Then it was made later in ’88, with Peter Weir directing.

Peter Weir had done YEAR OF LIVING DANGEROUSLY and WITNESS. When I finished the script, I had just seen WITNESS, and I thought, ‘If I can just get this guy, he could make it happen!’ Peter, when we first met, said, ‘I’m surprised you’re not directing.’ I said, ‘I’m just happy it’s getting produced!’ He said, ‘You must have the ambition to do that. I want you on the set, so feel free to use that as a way to learn how to do it.’ The first or second day, I said, ‘You should try it this way.’ He said, ‘Well, go try it.’ I said, ‘You mean, talk to the actors?’ He said, ‘Yes!’ So I walked out there and talked to them. When I came back, I said, ‘What if it doesn’t work?’ He said, ‘I’ll fix it.’ You couldn’t have a more generous, amazing partner in making something like this. It was my second produced film, so I didn’t realize how wonderful it was.

Lots of people came and read, and I would think, ‘My script is terrible.’ Then someone would come along make it come alive, and inevitably that was the person who was cast. Peter Weir would send me the audition tapes and say, ‘I don’t want to say who my favorite is. Tell me yours.’ I would tell him, and they would always be the same one.

Robin Williams was sort of slavishly reciting the lines. The first day terrified me; I was on set, watching it sound very wooden. Robin went away for two and a half weeks to do a play on Broadway. When he came back, Peter made him improvise a scene not in the script, where he’s teaching the class about Shakespeare. From that moment on, Robin got it, and the script came alive. He improvised things like ringing the bell [“Thanks for playing,” he tells students who give the wrong answer].

The biggest change in the script came before we shot. In the first draft, the teacher has Hodgkins disease. The kids come to class one day and he’s not there. He’s in the hospital; he’s not dying, but his life is going to be abbreviated by this disease. It explains his ‘seize the day’ approach to life. Peter Weir thought we didn’t need it, and I finally agreed. When we met Robin Williams, I hoped he would want to keep the scene. But when Peter told him, ‘Robin, we’re taking out the scene that shows you with Hodgkins Disease,’ he said, ‘Oh, good idea!’ I said, ‘Peter, how are we going to explain why this guy is this way?’ He said, ‘You don’t have to explain it.’ Nothing else changed; we just took out those three pages and nothing else. I guess it was an easy lift because I had planned out the whole script before I wrote it, and when I got to that page, I thought it needed something else, so I threw in the disease. Peter was right: if it had been in there, it would have been a film about a dying teacher. It was also not the same at the ending, when the students stand up for him: it’s easy to stand up for someone who’s dying, but you take that out, and they’re standing up for what he’s taught them.

We were worried about the suicide scene. Peter mentioned that, according to Ingmar Bergman, the only thing you should never do is have your lead character commit suicide. But it was such an integral part of the movie that you couldn’t change it. I think it was dealt with as tastefully as possible. I love the way Peter shot it. Because of the Ingmar Bergman quote, I didn’t want to think of Neil [Robert Sean Leonard] as the main character. I think Todd [Ethan Hawk] is the main character; he’s the one who grows and changes. It was a hard character to write, because he’s so shy and withdrawn.

There was pressure to change the title. Disney even had a contest in the marketing department where they made everyone turn in forty different suggestions, and then sent this sheaf of titles to the production unit. They insisted on calling the movie ‘Keating’s Way’ [after the name of the Robin Williams character]. We would send them memos regarding ‘Dead Poet’s Society,’ and we would get memos back from them regarding ‘Keating’s Way.’ Finally, Peter put his foot down and said, ‘It’s DEAD POET’S SOCIETY.’ He had wavered once: when we started the movie, he went into a video store; the guy behind the cash register recognized his name from his credit card and said, ‘Oh, Peter Weir, what are you doing?’ Peter said, ‘A movie with Robin Williams called DEAD POET’S SOCIETY.’ The guy said, ‘Oh, not a funny Robin Williams movie, huh?’ It made Peter think, ‘It’s not a comedy, but…’ So for a while he wavered, and Disney jumped in. They could have easily changed the title, but I never told them—all they had to do was change the name of the club, and that would have been the title of the movie. They never made that connection.

With this movie, I always felt like people were going to walk out at any second. With comedy, you hear the audience laughing and feel like they’re going to stay, but with drama, it’s torture.

Disney thought they would try to make a TV series around the Keating character. I have no idea what the character would do next, but there was pressure to do a sequel. I never took the time to think about what would happen to him next. There was a time when they really wanted a sequel, and I was afraid they would somehow make one.

I always hear people say you should ‘write what you know,’ and I’m not even sure I know what that means. Someone did a study on pottery for a new book that’s coming out. They asked one group to make one pot each—they best they could possibly make. They asked another group to make as many pots as they could. They had judges come in, and invariably all the best pots came from the group that made the most pots. I think I’ve found that just writing, a lot, doing it every day, without trying to make it too precious, without feeling like that is the best thing I’ve ever done—just writing is the best way of doing it well. People who write twelve hours a day turn out to be really good writers, so write a lot.

Copyright 2002 Steve Biodrowski