"The basic element of a story that many, many stories are missing right from the beginning is that something causes something else," said Becker. "If you don’t have that cause and effect, you don’t really have a story. I’m constantly seeing things like ‘Kids get in a car and drive across the country and have adventures along the way.’ That is not a story."

With the current buzz about Michigan filmmaking, Becker has been contacted by several prospective filmmakers in search of a director. The first thing he asks is to see the script, and many of the people who contact him either have no script at all or a script that looks more like a rough draft than an actual working script that is ready to be made into a feature film.

"I think there is this assumption out there that I have heard a thousand times — that it will be really good once we shoot it," said Becker. "As my good friend Bruce Campbell said, if you have script problems and you have not fixed them before you start to shoot, your script problems are now 40 feet tall."

Becker politely suggests to people seeking his services with no script in hand (or a very flimsy excuse for one) that what they need is a writer, not a director, at that stage of the game.

"People seem to have this notion that ‘I have to get shooting! I don’t have time to write the script!’ You don’t put in the time on that script, you don’t have a movie," said Becker. "Everyone wants to get right to the shooting because locking yourself in a room and writing is not all that glamorous. It’s hard."






It took Becker a long time to learn how to make a good, low-budget feature film. There was plenty of trial and error, a process most filmmakers must go through before they begin to hit their stride.

"It’s like, if you are a photographer, it seems like a certain amount of film has to go through your camera before you get the hang of it," said Becker. "It’s the same with writing a script. My first four scripts just did not function at all. It wasn’t until my fifth script — "Thou Shalt not Kill … Except" — that I came up with a good idea: the Marines versus the Manson Family. It was ‘something leads to something else’ — cause and effect."

But it wasn’t until Becker’s 10th script — for "Cycles," a story about World War II veterans who become a motorcycle gang and get into a confrontation in Texas — that he really felt like he was able to develop a story with conflicted characters. Instead of the "good guys, bad guys" approach of "Thou Shalt Not Kill … Except," the script for "Cycles" featured characters who were neither completely good or completely bad. Just as in life, he left plenty of gray areas in his story.

"In my first draft of the script, the motorcycle guys were good guys, and the people in the Texas town were bad guys," said Becker. "Then I realized that guys with white hats and black hats is just not very interesting. I rewrote it several times, making the good guys not so good and the bad guys not so bad. Then I thought I had something pretty good, because everyone was in the gray area."

Becker sold his script for "Cycles," but it was never made into a movie.
 
He made his first movie when he was only 13. The script is something you might expect from an adolescent boy: Boy makes dates with seven girls for seven different nights of the week, and they all call him back to reschedule for the same night.

"We shot it in Super 8, and then I had a guy with a tape recorder getting the sound," said Becker. "After we shot the movie we tried to figure out how to sync those two things, and of course you can’t."

Another of Becker’s lessons in filmmaking: Try to head off technical problems before they start. For his next film, a project for his junior-high history class studying ancient Greece, Becker put his own spin on Oedipus Rex. This time, to avoid the sound/picture sync problem, he shot it like a silent movie, writing scene titles on blackboards and then filming them. Only one problem: The titles weren’t in focus.

"My neighbor Jane Gordon made baklava and got an A, and I made a motion picture and got a C," said Becker. "My movies kept going wrong at the beginning. I kept running into huge technical problems. But I think that every young filmmaker ran into those things. Thank God they went to 16 millimeter!"

Becker’s formative years were the 1970s, and while many great films were made at that time, for him the ’40s and ’50s were the best years for movies. "From Here to Eternity," "On the Waterfront" and "Casablanca" are among his favorites. So obsessed was he with "Casablanca" that he recorded the sound from the movie on a cassette tape and took it too school, where he listened to it discreetly with an earpiece during math class.

"At that time we got at least one good movie coming out every week, and once a month you got a great movie," said Becker. "Back then the tough thing was narrowing the Oscar field down to five great films out of those 12 great movies. Now I think you struggle to get five. ‘Frost/Nixon’? ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ with eight Oscars?"

With "The Complete Guide to Low-Budget Feature Filmmaking," Becker is trying to help aspiring filmmakers avoid the mistakes he made along the way. And he is sending the message loud and clear that you must respect the story. What every filmmaker needs, he believes, is patience — patience to work at crafting a good script, and patience to not start shooting until everything else is in place.

"There is a guy who has come to my web site for years, and he has made a bunch of movies, and none of them are very good," said Becker. "We were discussing one of his films, and I was pointing out where it was lacking. And he told me he didn’t have time to finish the script, because he had to get shooting. Why? It’s not like you have a release date when it’s due to be distributed to theaters across the nation. What do you mean you don’t have time? You’ve got nothing but time."

Becker advises first-time filmmakers to stick to the basic rules of scriptwriting and filming. He doesn’t dispute the fact that many a successful film has been made by breaking the rules, but he believes that before you break the rules, you have to know them thoroughly.

"If you are smart enough, and you can come up with your own better rules as opposed to having no rules, then you can break the rules," said Becker. "A good example of that is ‘Groundhog Day.’ The story is told in, like, 100 acts as opposed to the traditional three-act story. But the people who made that movie really knew what they were doing. There were Eugene O’Neill plays that were nine acts, so if you are really good you can break the rules."

Although Becker states clearly on his web site that he does not read and critique scripts, he recently consented to read a script submitted by one of his fans.

"I have all of these essays on my web site about story structure, and he sends me a script with no structure," said Becker. "Twenty-five pages in, you don’t even know who the lead character is. I told him he had not followed any of the rules of structure, and his response was, ‘I’m a rebel.‘ No, you are just a bad writer. You cannot go beyond the form until you have mastered the form. And that is the key thing that has been lost somewhere along the line. "

Becker encourages those trying to grind out a script to do whatever they need to do to stimulate the creative process. For him, that means working out and drinking a lot of very strong coffee. He also tells writers not to get stressed if they go through a period when ideas don’t seem to be flowing from the brain to the page. Eventually, if you are patient, they will.

"I hear from a lot of young wannabe writers that they hate writing," said Becker. "Well, if you hate it, if you hate the process, don’t do it. I love the process. I love it, and when you are really cooking, it’s great — even if you just get it down and change it the next day. The hard part is when you are between scripts coming up with the next one. People think they have writer’s block, but that is just part of the process. You’ve emptied the whole glass out, and now you have to fill it again. I’ve written 35 scripts so I know another one is going to come."

Try not to make things too complicated, Becker says. Some of the best films have featured interesting characters but a very simple story.

"You don’t need a lot of motivation for a plot. I love Charles Bukowski, and in the movie ‘Factotum,’ the Bukowski character, Henry Chinaski, gets a job driving a truck. And halfway through his shift, he goes into a bar and gets drunk and leaves the truck and gets fired. He spends the rest of the movie trying to get that half-day’s pay. That is the whole plot of the movie, and I thought it was pretty good."

Despite not liking most of — OK, any of — Steven Spielberg’s movies, and despite the fact that what he considers the worst movie of 2007 ("No Country for Old Men") won the Best Picture award, Becker does believe that, after a downturn in the ’80s and early ’90s, films are getting better.

"As much bitching as I have done, I do think movies are getting better," said Becker. "‘Charlie Wilson’s War,’ ‘Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,’ ‘Doubt’ — there are some good films getting made. Independents got terrible for a while, and now a lot of them are really good. I think there is hope."

The new push by Governor Jennifer Granholm to make Michigan a moviemaking hotbed also gives Becker hope. He says that not only will the influx of filmmakers give the state’s economy a much-needed boost, Michigan is also a great place to make a film. Michigan, he says, is much more geared to the low-budget filmmaker than is the West Coast.

"I made two feature films in Los Angeles, and two here in Michigan," Becker said. "In L.A. you get anywhere near an establishment with your camera, and the owner is going to come out and say he wants $10,000 for his place to be in your shot, and that he has had 75 movies shot there already. In Michigan people think filmmaking is cool. When we made ‘Lunatics’ here in Pontiac 10 years ago, the people of the city could not have been nicer. Anything we wanted, they gave it to us."

Becker has shot movies in Bulgaria, California and Michigan, and filmed the episodes of "Xena: Warrior Princess" that he directed in New Zealand, which he says was much like Michigan in that everyone was very friendly and accommodating.

"L.A. is so not geared for low-budget movies because of the taxes, the cost of living, the attitude of the people — everything," said Becker. "People are nicer here, and everyone is not so cutthroat. It’s a good place to make a low-budget film."

Susan Smiley is an award winning sports reporter, poet and short story author.

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