As an American screenwriter living in the UK, the most common question I get asked is: “Why are the bad guys in American films always British?”

Simply put, to an American, British accents sound smart and sophisticated. You want your villain to be smart and sophisticated, because that makes it all the harder for the hero to triumph. And giving him an English accent is a fast and easy way to do that.

My British friends never believe me, but that’s about 90% of the reason.

What’s the other 10%?

Part of it is, the actors cast for villains are often really good character actors. And the English system seems to produce a lot of really good character actors.

Another part is that you want your villain to be some kind of “other,” so he seems exotic and unpredictable. But you can’t cast him as a member of some group that Americans have historically oppressed, because then you either imply that his group is inherently evil (which will anger the liberals) or that his group has been wronged so badly, they deserve to take revenge (which will anger the conservatives.)

And for practical reasons, you have to cast an actor who speaks English at or near the level of a native speakers. And you can’t make him Australian because we Americans think all Australians are good-natured beer drinkers who just want to throw a shrimp on the barbie. You can’t make him Canadian, because we think of Canadians the same way we think of Australians, only colder and more polite. So, basically, that leaves you with a villain who is from either the UK or Singapore–and there just aren’t that many Singaporean character actors floating around Hollywood.

As I like to remind Lauren, there are certain advantages to being married to a full-time writer. She never has to be the one to stay at home and wait for a delivery, and most nights, I’ve got dinner waiting for her when she steps through the door.

But there are certain disadvantages as well. One of them, no doubt, is that sometimes your husband calls you at 5PM on a Wednesday to tell you he’s just walked out of the first free movie screening of his afternoon, and he’s on his way to his second.

Anyway, For Your Consideration season has swung into gear. Before taking this afternoon off, I had already seen Marie Antionette, followed by a Q&A with Sophia Coppola; and World Trade Center, followed by a Q&A with Oliver Stone and Will Jimeno (one of the real-life officers whose story the film is based on.) Today, I added Keane and The Black Dahlia to that tally. Tomorrow, it’s Stranger Than Fiction, followed by a Q&A with Will Ferrell, Dustin Hoffman, Emma Thompson, and the film’s writer, Zach Helm.

I’ve already read the script for Stranger Than Fiction–it’s being passed around from writer to writer, because it’s just that damn good. I’m hoping the film will live up to it.

When I got my Master’s from USC, the digital revolution hadn’t quite kicked in. But now that it has, I usually tell people not to bother with film school. DVGuru offers 10 reasons why–8 of them very good. I disagree with #8 (“You can’t teach art. Can you?”) and #10 (“You either have it or you don’t.”)

I believe that everybody has an intrinsic maximum potential in any field–artistic or otherwise–and that education is the way to maximize that potential. But I agree with DVGuru that, nowadays, the best way to educate yourself is to beg, borrow, or buy a DV camera and a computer, and start shooting and editing movies. And that goes for writers who just want to write–even if you ultimately want somebody else to direct your work, you ought to direct a few of your own short scripts, just for the learning experience.

It’s been a little while since I wrote about screenplay theory…

Over at The Artful Writer, Craig Mazin has posted an interesting bit of theory on the relationship between theme and plot structure.

Craig sees theme as:

A proposed argument, e.g. “There’s no place like home,” “It is better to love and lose than never to have loved at all,” “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In this sense, “theme” could actually be referred to as “The Answer.”

Like most mainstream American screenwriters, Craig’s definition of “theme” coincides with the one that Lajos Egri laid down in The Art of Dramatic Writing. (Egri calls it “premise,” but “theme” seems a more common way of describing it.) I don’t know if Craig has read Egri, but certainly many writers have. When I was at USC grad school, I was advised that Egri was the granddaddy of script theorists.

What’s interesting to me is that, as a viewer of film, I’ve always gotten the impression that European films (and, perhaps, American indie films) define theme differently. In the American mainstream, theme is a sentence. In Europe, it seems to be a phrase, or even a noun. “There’s no place like home” is an American-style theme. A European-style one might be “the human longing for home,” or even simply “home.”

As I said, this was my impression for a long time as a viewer. It was confirmed recently when I sat down with one of my favorite European directors for a script I’m writing for him. He decided early on that the theme of the book I’m adapting is “escape.” An American director might have looked at the same book and concluded the theme was, say, “You cannot escape your nature.”

(As with any blanket Americans-are-like-this-but-Europeans-are-like-that statement, I’m generalizing greatly, and there are numerous exceptions. Indeed, Egri himself–the found of the theme-as-sentence school–was Hungarian-born. )

Done well, there’s nothing wrong with either approach. It’s only when it’s done badly that the differences really start to emerge. I find badly written American film to be too pat and too obvious.I find badly written European film to be maddeningly unclear or evasive. I enjoy the best-written films of all sorts… But because I personally prefer films that err on the side of ambiguity, I like the European approach a bit more. Obviously, it’s a matter of taste.

An actual, untouched scan from the TV listings in last week’s Time Out: London:

When my friends Rob and Sheryl went to the Emmys in 2004 and 2005, I posted their star-studded backstage roundups here at Yankee Fog. But their 2006 writeup is so Emmytastic, it requires its very own website. Go there, and be shocked by the decadent tales of backstage Hollywood, where the water flows like champagne and the martinis cost eleven bucks.