A few years ago, when I began to reacquaint myself with the study of the screenplay, I was surprised to see the name of Lajos Egri being associated with screenwriting manual writers and film studies programs located primarily on the West Coast of the United States.\u00a0 I noted that he was particularly highly regarded at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.\u00a0 This both puzzled and surprised me because Egri, the author of a very old book on playwriting, was rarely ever mentioned on the East Coast of the United States; furthermore, I considered his work extremely dated when I first read it\u00a0decades ago.\u00a0 This prompted me to re-examine this very interesting man and his work.\u00a0 I now share this re-examination with you.<\/p>\n
Lajos Egri was born in Hungary in 1888.\u00a0\u00a0 He immigrated to the United States when he was eighteen years old and earned a livelihood working in the New York City garment industry.\u00a0 He is purported to have written his first play when he was ten years old.\u00a0 In New York he also wrote plays, but was not a well-known playwright.\u00a0 In 1942 Egri published a manual on play writing entitled How to Write a Play<\/em>.\u00a0 <\/b>This manual was revised and republished in 1946 under the title The Art of Dramatic Writing<\/b><\/em>, which was, as far as I can discern, revised at least once more. At some point, I am not sure when, Egri opened a school for writing in a small office in midtown Manhattan (New York).<\/p>\n We do not know much about this school of Egri\u2019s. I was only able to find two pertinent references to it: one is an article in the New York Times (1961), and the other is a reference by one of his students\u2014a very young Woody Allen. The New York Times article describes how one of his students, a sixty-three year-old grandmother, had her first play produced on Off-Broadway; it received mixed reviews and ran for only a few weeks. (By the way, sixty-three years was considered old in those days.)\u00a0 \u00a0\u00a0Allen, while generally praising Egri, described the other half dozen or so students in his class as \u201creal losers–some fat house wife, a salesman.\u00a0 There was no one in the class under forty-five years of age and nobody knew what they were doing\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n Sometime in the early 1960\u2019s Egri moved to Los Angeles, where he continued to offer writing classes (in his home) until his death in 1967.\u00a0 The edition of his book that I own states that Egri \u201cnow resides in Los Angeles, California, where he is teaching and working with members of the film industry.\u201d\u00a0 However, I was not able to substantiate that he had any impact on Hollywood during the few years that he lived in Los Angeles.<\/p>\n By now I am sure that some of you suspect that I am sitting behind my computer screen, smirking at this obscure, humble immigrant: this tailor by trade who eked out a meager living by mentoring would-be playwrights with precious little talent and less chance of success. \u00a0After all, he wasn\u2019t a graduate of the Yale School of Drama. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Totally Wrong!<\/i> \u00a0\u00a0Lajos Egri was a man I could admire.\u00a0 He was absolutely brilliant!<\/p>\n Every hundred or so years–if we are so fortunate–a person comes along who can see things that no one else can see.\u00a0 A person who sees order where others can only discern chaos.\u00a0 A person who perceives simple, but profound truths where others can only perceive confusion.\u00a0 A person who is able to see the forest despite the trees.\u00a0 Lajos Egri was such a person.<\/i><\/p>\n What Egri did was to set out to uncover the secrets of successful play writing.\u00a0 His methodology was straight forward: he saw every play possible (from the classics to the Broadway fare of his day) and he read all the major books on playwriting that were in print at the time.\u00a0 Then, he formulated his discoveries in a very simple and direct way.\u00a0 His major discovery was that although the authors of most books on playwriting used different terminology and proposed differing theories, they were essentially saying the same thing: which is that all plays must possess what Egri termed a premise<\/i>.\u00a0 Whether they talked about a \u201ctheme,\u201d \u201cthesis,\u201d \u201croot idea,\u201d \u201cgoal,\u201d \u201caim,\u201d \u201cdriving force\u201d etc, they were really talking about a \u201cpremise.\u201d\u00a0 And whether this was true or not, that is, that other authors writing on dramatic art actually meant the same thing, is unimportant.\u00a0 What is important is that Egri believed<\/i> that it was true.<\/p>\n To understand Egri one has to understand Henrik Ibsen, a\u00a0Nineteenth Century Norwegian playwright who was a major influence on him.\u00a0 Ibsen, in the late Nineteenth century, introduced a type play that served as a major model for succeeding playwrights for the next sevent-five years: plays which took place in a realistic milieu and employed idiomatic dialogue\u2014but more importantly, plays that prove and\/or demonstrate a socially-significant premise.\u00a0 In his The Art of Dramatic Writing<\/i>, Egri uses Ibsen\u2019s A Doll\u2019s House<\/i> as his main teaching example and thoroughly analyzes the play.\u00a0 The major tenet that Egri derives from Ibsen is that all plays must have a well-formulated premise.\u00a0\u00a0 For Egri, the \u201cpremise\u201d was \u201ca tyrant\u201d that demanded that the playwright go in only one direction: its absolute proof.\u00a0\u00a0 The approach that Egri recommends for writing a play is to start with a well-formulated premise and then select the characters that will prove it.\u00a0 For example, according to this methodology, if your premise was \u201cPoverty breeds crime,\u201d and your protagonist is a young man who grows up in poverty and then becomes a criminal, the young man cannot have a brother who becomes a priest, because that would undermine the premise.\u00a0 Nor can he have friends who are the sons of rich men, but turn to crime for the thrill of it.<\/p>\n Egri gives a very interesting but bizarre example of this \u201ctyranny\u201d of the premise.\u00a0 He presents the premise that if a girl cannot find any other means of support, she will turn to prostitution.\u00a0 The protagonist he chooses to prove this premise is named Irene, an attractive young woman who lives in a small town and comes from a good family.\u00a0 She goes to New York to become a dancer, fails at that and then sinks into prostitution.\u00a0 But we know that not every girl who comes to New York and fails to succeed\u00a0as a performer\u00a0(or some similar endeavor) becomes a prostitute\u2014or at least we would like to believe so. There must be something else she could do?\u00a0 Egri\u2019s answer is that in order to prove your premise you must choose a girl who under these circumstances does just that\u2014becomes a prostitute.\u00a0 Furthermore, Egri urges that you, the playwright, must make Irene try every conceivable way to avoid prostitution.\u00a0 But, according to Egri, she must fail! <\/i>Otherwise you will not be able to prove your premise.\u00a0 In fact, he goes so far as to say, \u201cIf, for any reason, we feel that prostitution wasn\u2019t the only way out for Irene, you have failed as a craftsman and as a dramatist<\/i>.\u201d\u00a0 (Italics by Egri.) \u00a0\u00a0To be fair, it must be understood that Egri is not saying that any<\/i> girl would do this, only a girl with\u00a0 Irene\u2019s ( mostly selfish and vain) character traits.<\/p>\n The premise, as Egri defines it, is also a capsule summary of the plot.\u00a0 But it was not in plotting where Egri excelled the most: it was in his treatment of character<\/i>.\u00a0 On this subject Egri broke with Aristotle, who decreed that character was secondary to plot.\u00a0 \u00a0What is more important, Egri asks:\u00a0 plot or character?\u00a0 That is a pointless question, Egri would answer, because plot emanates from character.\u00a0 If you have chosen your characters well, and fully understand them, then they have no choice but to take the path that you have destined for them\u2014the path that proves your premise<\/em>.\u00a0 On the subject of character, Egri acknowledges that \u00a0the great Russian playwright Chekhov \u201chas no story to tell, no situation to speak of, but his plays are popular and will be so in time to come, because he permits his characters to reveal themselves and the time in which they lived.\u201d\u00a0 Regrettably, Egri never fully explains how the success of Chekhov\u2019s essentially \u201cpremise-less\u201d plays relates to his own seemingly contradictory theories.<\/p>\n One area in which Egri particularly excelled\u2014and in which other manual writers usually completely ignore\u2014was in his analyses of why certain \u201cbad\u201d plays succeed at the box office.\u00a0 And in this vein, his analysis of Tobacco Road<\/i>, a play about an impoverished dysfunctional family in the American Deep South during the 1930\u2019s\u00a0is particularly insightful.\u00a0 \u201cThe play has characters, but no growth,\u201d he\u00a0points out.\u00a0 But these were not ordinary characters.\u00a0 These were characters that you could smell.<\/i>\u00a0 \u201cTheir sexual depravity, their animal existence, capture the imagination,\u201d Egri astutely observes:\u201dThe most poverty-stricken New York audience feels that its fate is incomparably better. . . . The audience, mesmerized, flocked to see these animals who somehow resembled human beings.\u201d\u00a0 But Egri\u2019s penetrating analysis didn\u2019t stop there.\u00a0 He notes that Jeeter Lester, the central character, is \u201ca weak-kneed man, without the strength to live or die successfully.\u00a0 Poverty stares him in the face, his wife and children starve,\u201d yet he does nothing. \u201dIs he a weak or a strong character?\u201d Egri asks.\u00a0 \u201cTo our way of thinking he is one of the strongest characters we have seen in the theater in a long time,\u201d he answers. \u201cLester stubbornly maintains his status quo<\/i>, or seems<\/i> to maintain it, against the changes of time\u2026.in his weakness he is exceptionally strong, and condemns himself and his class to slow death rather than change.\u201d<\/p>\n Egri had some very sage advice for the aspiring writer:\u00a0 \u201cIf you are interested not in writing good plays, but in making money quickly, there\u2019s no hope for you,\u201d he warned. \u201cNot only won\u2019t you write a good play; you won\u2019t make any money. . . . . write something you really believe in,\u201d he advised.\u00a0 And lastly, \u201cDon\u2019t write for the producers or for the public.\u00a0 Write for yourself<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n Egri was indeed brilliant, and I have incorporated certain of his concepts, particularly those dealing with character, in my own work.\u00a0 His conceptualization of premise<\/i> has been embraced by both critics and industry professionals alike.\u00a0 Yet Egri is dated, terribly dated.\u00a0 \u00a0Plays and screenplays with Egri-styled premises are rare today.\u00a0 Audiences are too sophisticated; they have seen it all.\u00a0 There is little you can prove to them that they don\u2019t already know.\u00a0 And they don\u2019t like to be preached<\/i> to.\u00a0 As a further illustration of this, Ibsen (who Egri greatly admired) is rarely performed today, while Chekhov is continually revived.<\/p>\n If you write like Egri would have you write, your work may very well be criticized as being didactic and contrived, with wooden characters as well.\u00a0 On the other hand, If you write like Chekhov, critics might very well say that your work is unfocused and diffuse. \u00a0The creative processes of both approaches are different, although one is not necessarily better than the other.<\/p>\n Every writer\u2014novelist, playwright and screenwriter alike\u2014should read Egri, if for no other reason than to be able to defend their work should it be criticized for not adhering to his dogma.\u00a0 As to why Egri is so widely embraced on the West Coast of the United States, I think it has more to do with the fact that for a long time his\u00a0manual on playwriting was the only one to be found in bookstores, not because he had lived and worked in Los Angeles for the last few years of his life.<\/p>\n Lajos Egri: a very wise \u00a0man–and a name you should know<\/i>!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A few years ago, when I began to reacquaint myself with the study of the screenplay, I was surprised to see the name of Lajos Egri being associated with screenwriting manual writers and film studies programs located primarily on the … Continue reading