UCLA professor Ackerman presses writers to use own life

Mary Dang
Published: Monday, November 4, 2002

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.