The standards for what makes a great story can rely on many
elements. For some, good writing has to succeed in drawing the
audience into another world.
For Harold Ackerman, there’s no better world to write
about than the real one. As a professor of screenwriting at UCLA
for more than 16 years, Ackerman emphasizes the importance on
drawing from one’s own experiences in order to write. His
method seems to be working since five of his students have
successfully turned their scripts into films and won many
prestigious awards and honors from the Goldwyn, Nicholl and Nissan
competitions.
Upon coming to UCLA in 1978 to substitute for a teacher on
sabbatical, Ackerman used what he knew as a struggling screenwriter
to encourage his students to glean from their own lives. Originally
a New York native who wrote plays and musicals, Ackerman moved to
Hollywood in 1971, steadily selling some scripts while working as a
photographer on the side.
His latest literary effort is a new play called “Blue
Sunday: Love in the Times of Prostate Cancer,” which deals
with his cancer treatment in the middle of a budding new
relationship. Diagnosed with prostate cancer in November of 1999,
Ackerman began to write about his whole treatment process.
Some of his students, such as Pamela Gray (“A Walk on the
Moon”) and Allison Anders (“Gas Food Lodging”),
have achieved success in the screenwriting profession. For
Ackerman, who saw Anders become a presenter for this year’s
Goldwyn Awards after winning first place in 1989 under his
tutelage, the feat signified how much influence his teaching
has.
“It just gave me a good feeling to know that you might
have helped to make (someone else’s life or career) more than
it could have been otherwise,” Ackerman said.
Ackerman’s teaching style is very lax. In believing that
life experiences shape writing, he is not really teaching but
actually reinforcing the individual voices of his students when
they’re writing.
“What I try to do is give them confidence and faith in
their own voice because that’s all they’re ever going
to have in their lives,” Ackerman said.
Using the metaphor of the “writer’s gym,”
Ackerman presses the importance of hours of writing and sharpening
one’s senses to find inspiration. For example, Ackerman finds
eavesdropping on real-life conversations an effective way to gain a
sense of reality, especially in the way people interact. As a
writer, there is no shame in hiding behind the bathroom stalls or
laying on a couch at IKEA.
“It is amazing what you can hear if you can make yourself
attentive to it, catching people at unguarded moments, the bits of
dialogue that you’ll hear, the way people talk with each
other, the way a life is revealed in just a couple of lines back
and forth,” Ackerman said.
As a teacher and a screenwriter, Ackerman himself, as well as
his approach to how he writes, has been changed by the students at
UCLA. Teaching about writing has given Ackerman a keener
sensibility for how he writes.
“Being a teacher makes me focus on the things that I
consider to be important as a writer,” he said. “So
when I do my own writing I hear my own teaching voice in my mind
thinking “˜OK, if they read what I’m writing would they
say I’m hypocritical to my own teaching or I’m doing
what I am saying?’ So it keeps me honest.”
Writing and teaching is a reciprocal joy for Ackerman. He
relates to the sense of students’ accomplishments as
equivalent in some ways to how he feels when he finishes his own
piece of work.
“There’s absolutely nothing that makes me happier
than when the story just takes me away and I find that I put the
pencil down and I’m just in the story. It’s a gorgeous,
wonderful feeling,” Ackerman said.