In movement class, you had to lie on the floor and get your alignment in to pass the class.
BETH HENLEYBut here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
More Beth Henley Quotes
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That’s what I like about [smoking] . . . taking a drag off of death, Mmm! Gives me a sense of controlling my own destiny. What power! What exhilaration! Want a drag?
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The impetus behind going to graduate school was a year after graduating from college spent in Dallas working at the dog food factory and Bank America and not having met success in my chosen field, which at that point was being an actress.
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And all writing is creating or spinning dreams for other people so they won’t have to bother doing it themselves.
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What I loved about the acting class was that you got to think all day long about a person that wasn’t you, and figure out why they were sad and what they wanted, what they dreamed.
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Plays are so much more special if they’ve never ever had a production, but I think you can really work on a play and make it better with each production.
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The most glorious thing about working in the collaborative art is when you have somebody like Susan Kingsley or Kathy Bates who are better than your play.
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I was just restless with being in school; so I went out to Los Angeles.
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I love to work, although sometimes I can spend whole days doing nothing more than picking the lint off the carpet and talking to my mother on the phone.
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It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.
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But when I got to SMU and decided to take a playwriting class, I said this isn’t a bad idea. IfI write characters, they could be as dumb as me, and I don’t have to be very smart.
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I tried to start a theatre in LA and failed miserably, but I was probably not meant to raise money.
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The next thing I wrote was in a writing class at night school. It was about a poor woman who worked at a dime store and who was all alone for Christmas in Laurel, Mississippi.
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That was always my inclination, to start on a new play before the other one gets done, because at least you’ll have something to go back to if that play gets trashed.
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It’s really interesting that whenever you do something that is so out of character, like having an emotional outburst, that you don’t get in trouble.
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But here’s the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.
BETH HENLEY