Dimitri Devyatkin

I’m an American of Russian ancestry. I grew up in New York City. As a child, I loved drawing and stories. My father was a story teller, who specialized in Ancient Greek mythology and classical stories. My three brothers and I loved his marvelous stories, often told as we walked in the park and in the city streets. I studied violin from an early age, and played in Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center with student orchestras. I studied experimental music composition. At the prestigious Bronx High School of Science, I studied microbiology and calculus, and wrote on the school paper. I went to St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, studied Ancient Greek, philosophy, and literature. My degree is from City College of New York in cinema and Russian language.

Joining the counterculture movement, I lived in San Francisco, played free-style jazz with the great Rahsaan Roland Kirk, and became an early pioneer of video art. In New York, I was the Video Director of the legendary video theatre “The Kitchen,” and a director of the New York Avant Garde Festival, where I “hung out” with John Lennon, and other famous artists.

I was invited to Russia, and studied at VGIK, the Institute of Cinematography in Moscow, in the Director’s faculty. I learned Russian, and became a producer of original documentaries, broadcast worldwide, on America’s ABC, PBS and Arts & Entertainment channels, Channel Four in the UK, French TV, and others. I was producer of six Russian feature films, including the classic comedy “Deribassovskaya Street” directed by Russia’s ‘King of Comedy,’ Leonid Gaidai. I worked for several American television companies, including Metromedia and the ABC TV Network in New York. In the 1990s, I moved to Bonn, Germany, with my family, learned German and traveled widely, to many film festivals. Now we live in Amman, Jordan, where I am a beginner in Arabic language, and travel widely in the Middle East.

I got started in screenwriting as an extension of my experiences in filmmaking. Learning the basic skills of the craft, I immediately felt a culmination of everything I have learned in cinema. My specialization is writing historical dramas, which I call Historical Noir, in homage to the great era of Hollywood noir films of the period 1945-1958, depicting heroes and periods of history in both positive and negative aspects.

I am a storyteller, in the same way primitive people gathered around a camp fire and told stories. The objective is emotional entertainment, with intertwining of vibrant themes and messages. The most important part is choosing a story. The goal is to transport the listener or viewer into another world, to imagine another universe and to envisage living there. I believe in the universality of human nature, and that we all have basic character traits. I am certain that the natural balance of joy, sorrow, fascination, and melancholia have always been a constant. I love the music of the Blues, that expresses common human emotions, love, sadness, and suffering. The main part of the work is to keep your fingers on the keyboard and keep creating these worlds and the characters who live in them.

Working on “Pharaoh” was challenging in that I had to imagine a world 3,000 years ago, people speaking a language I know little about, in an unfamiliar culture and social structure. I was determined to make it feel like a world we can easily imagine, not that much different than any other than our own. I resisted using stiff or unnatural dialog, so the people sound like they are talking as we do today. I adamantly resist the tendency of sensationalizing the theme, in this case of Ancient Egypt. I want to show deep respect for the Ancient Egyptian culture, without trivializing or jazzing up the ancient life. Hollywood tends to bring in known Western characters to make an unfamiliar world seem more accessible, like having Robert Redford and Meryl Street be the stars of “Out of Africa.”

The most important element of a screenplay is the emotional impact. If the audience doesn’t have an emotional connection, there is nothing there. No matter how intense the action, how incisive the dialog, how wise the characters, if the audience doesn’t care about what is happening on screen, it is meaningless.

Hollywood as an institution is dying. The business of filmmaking in Southern California is down by 30%. They are recycling the same themes ad nauseum, part II, part II, etc. with ever bigger budgets and keep out everyone but their own sycophants. The WGA – Writers Guild of America – is more like an old-fashioned exclusive Guild, to keep people out, than it is a union, to open the industry to new talent. The rest of the world is tired of the old formulas. Filmmakers in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the rest of America, crave to experiment with new themes and unfamiliar emotions. We don’t need the same models of entertainment, focusing on good guys vs bad guys, a love interest and a happy ending. Enough already! And the responsibility rests largely with screenwriters who can imagine new ways of creating motion picture entertainment.

I aim for a general audience at all times. I haven’t tried writing different genres much. Tried comedy, but need to work at it more. Mostly, I change locale and setting of my stories.

I love it. It helps me very much. I don’t always make changes after receiving critique, but it is helpful to know how people react. I am mostly concerned that what I write is understandable and holds the readers’ attention. Non-professional feedback tends to be gushing, not technical. Professional feedback sometimes focuses on formula, like following screenwriting school techniques or formulas.

Yes, I have another major project in the works, now for a long time. The tile is “Ferocious,” about America’s greate4st naval hero, John Paul Jones. It is an 8-episode series. Alo in the historical noir genre.

Screenwriting will always be important for cinema. I am not in the least worried about AI replacing writers. Though a computer program can follow a program, it has no soul.

Advice to aspiring screenwriters is simply to write, write, write. Be honest, tell stories from the heart. Don’t try to impress readers with high tech names – like cars, guns, etc. Include humor.