Gallo’s cinematic success feeds his teaching

Imagine being responsible for turning your favorite novels into movies on the silver screen.

Guy Gallo, longtime professor of screenwriting for the Columbia graduate film program, has worked to draw several fields of writing together. Before launching his career in adapting fiction for film, he was a playwright, and since then, he has also written several original screenplays.

Gallo became interested in film while at the Yale School of Drama as a teacher’s assistant for Annette Insdorf, Columbia’s director of undergraduate film studies. However, he describes the events that led to becoming a screenwriter as “serendipitous.” His first film, “Under the Volcano” (based on a novel by Malcolm Lowry) was produced by chance when he mentioned his draft of it to a producer working with “The Maltese Falcon” director John Huston.

Gallo’s second project was an adaptation of Mark Twain’s “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” For this adaptation, he had wanted to change the ending “in order to continue the trajectory Twain had established in the first two-thirds of the book.” The changes were approved by several literary scholars, but the producer got cold feet and decided against it. “That was a lesson that they can do that,” he said.

Gallo felt thankful for his successful initiation into the industry. After these two projects, he worked on more adaptations, and he had become known for them. That “is basically how Hollywood often works,” he said. “You get known for one thing and that’s what they want you to do.” But after a string of unproduced adaptations, he decided to take a break from film. He wanted to work on novels and plays as well as continue his work as an adjunct professor at Columbia.

Since then, Gallo has taught screenwriting, and now teaches a second-year graduate screenwriting workshop, which is a year-long course that has students workshop one feature-length screenplay throughout the year. He also taught a course in adapting fiction for film, which included writing both strict and loose adaptations of a short story. Gallo enjoyed teaching the course this past summer and found it to be successful enough with graduates and undergraduates. He hopes to be able to teach the course again next fall.

Gallo’s recent works as a writer include a play, a screenplay, and a book about narrative film writing titled “Hearing Voices.” The book relates to his work as a professor, including what he has learned about dramatic structure, and “various tricks and techniques for facing the blank page and getting your character’s voice to resonate,” he said.

“Trying to draw a strict connection between my work in the industry and my work in the school is a little bit tenuous,” Gallo said. “My experiences I brought to the students were sometimes more anecdotes about how to deal with the industry than they were my way of writing a screenplay, because every writer is different and my job as a teacher is not to get them to write the way I write.”

Professors in Film explores Columbia professors who also work in the film industry.