July 2006 Archives
July 23, 2006
Why Isn’t Anyone Interested?
Went around to music stores with fliers advertising a revolutionary idea: a metal band that doubles as a barbershop quartet. Not something really weird like a hybrid metal-quartet. That’s just retarded. I’m saying, one night we play a balls-to-the-wall metal show at some depressing dive on the southwest side, then the next night we play a completely separate barbershop gig at a 4H club or old-folks’ home or something? Can you imagine how awesome it would be to find three other people with that level of versatility? We’d be unstoppable!
Sadly, I don’t think I’ll find anybody who’s interested. Except maybe my sister, but you can’t have girls in a barbershop quartet! All the songs are loaded with hilariously outdated sexism.
Posted by Stan on July 23, 2006 2:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Random Musings
July 17, 2006
Pepper
Growing up, I spent a whole lot of time at my grandmother’s house. With both my parents working much of the time (at one point, my dad was working three jobs and my mom was working another), and my sister and I getting in trouble all the time, my mom decided to nip that shit in the bud by sending us to our grandmother’s house. My grandma had two dogs: Maggie, a black half-poodle, half-puli; and Pepper, a gray miniature schnauzer. I hated Maggie because when I was six years old, she bit my finger for no particular reason. But I loved Pepper. I’ll spend my entire life trying to reach a point where I can have my own dog, just so I can get another gray miniature schnauzer and hope that he’s half as awesome as Pepper.
Pepper and I were inseparable for a few years, but then my dad got a better job, so he could quit all three of his and my mom could quit hers and be a stay-at-home mom. We didn’t need to go to my grandmother’s as often (not every day, anyway), so I didn’t see Pepper as often. A few years later, he started getting decrepit. He went blind and started to go deaf. He never went nuts or anything like the yappy dog from next door (which finally died, thank God), but it was pretty sad to see him always walking into walls or getting into wacky trouble because he couldn’t hear the call to “take a break” (which became his command to take a fucking hike when he got annoying).
His death was pretty tragic for me, even though we only shared a close bond for maybe six months. But I still kind of miss him every once in awhile, which brings me to the ultra-depressing dream I had last night. I think it may have been prompted by Oy’s mournful behavior in The Dark Tower, because I’ve never really had such a vivid and depressing dream about a dog before. I think it was Pepper in dog-heaven — which looks suspiciously like the long, dark-wood, dimly lit, L-shaped hallway in my grandmother’s house — mourning the death of my grandmother. For some reason I was there, too (is this a sign of my fate?), trying to comfort his sadness, but he refused to eat, refused to play, wouldn’t let me pet him. He just slept all the time and eventually withered and died.
I awoke disturbed, but I didn’t think much of it until I tried to explain it to my sister. I realized my eyes were rimmed with tears and that this dream had had a more profound effect on me than I had originally known. I guess it just saddened and disturbed me that I was so thoroughly unable to comfort the depressed dog in his time of need. I think that reflects on my hilarious lack of sensitivity in my waking life. But as I look back on a life of cruelty and insensitivity, I do realize that I feel the most regret for a household pet in a dream that never happened and never will. Take that, people I’ve wronged!
Posted by Stan on July 17, 2006 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Family: The Horror…
July 16, 2006
The Manager
A few weeks ago, a good friend of mine — also a struggling, depressed screenwriter in Chicago — announced that he had taken an unpaid “e-internship” reading scripts for a manager in Los Angeles. He told me it was great: dude e-mails him scripts, he reads them and e-mails back coverage. He could do it all while working a full-time job in Chicago. At the end of the summer, he gets a good reference and/or a letter of recommendation, plus he gets all that experience, and maybe a guy who will look at his scripts. I thought it sounded nice, but maybe not the thing for me…
…until he gave me the icing on the cake: “So I’ve been doing this for a couple of weeks, and the guy offered me a paid position this fall.” Paid position, eh? He told me, “This guy seems desperate for readers — I sent him my resume, not even expecting to hear back, and he responded in a few hours with a message that said, ‘Welcome aboard’ and a screenplay attached.” He gave me the contact info, and I sent my resume. Just as he said, that night, the guy e-mailed me a script.
When I interned last summer, I had the joy/torture of reading scripts that were mostly “production-ready,” or close to it. Some of them were pretty good; most of them weren’t, but they had certain elements that distinguished them — usually professional dialogue and tight structure. “Professional,” of course, doesn’t mean “well-written” — definitely readable, natural, but still usually on-the-nose or plot-centric instead of character-centric. And some people like William Goldman, and probably these latter-day “script gurus” like Syd Field and Robert McKee insist that structure is the most important thing to a screenplay. I agree with that, but the key that many of these writers seemed to forget was that structure isn’t the only important thing. A series of meaningless plot points don’t make a good screenplay.
But alas, now that I’m on the other end of the spectrum — unpolished newbies looking for a shot — I’ve read some real crap. Unprofessional, not entertaining, no dramatic structure, no characters, some of the worst dialogue I’ve ever read, and sadly, many of these scripts won or received “honorable mention” in UCLA’s recent screenwriting contest. I’ve read many of the scripts on that list, and I thought one of them was very good; the rest are awful.
This has a two-pronged effect on me: on the one hand, it builds my confidence. I know I’m better than stuff that’s won a reasonably prestigious contest. On the other hand, it really depresses me that I haven’t yet “made it.” Yeah, I know, time, hard work, perserverance, et cetera, but it’s tragic to me that agents and managers are spraying their shorts over the UCLA winners, and the scripts are terrible. I have no idea how these people won, but I’d pay money to read some of the screenplays that ended up on the reject pile.
So I thought it was a good thing when this manager called me about 10 days ago, ostensibly to shoot the shit, then said, “You’re a writer, right?”
“Yup,” I said.
“Well, you do great analysis, so I’d really like to take a look at something you’ve written,” he said.
“Sure,” I said, thinking this was my chance: if this guy was seriously considering such rotten material, what I had would blow his mind.
“Yeah, so, just send me something in the next couple of days and I’ll look at it this weekend,” the manager said.
I agreed…but I didn’t trust him. Googling him and his company hadn’t really turned up anything, which made me a tiny bit suspicious — I knew, if nothing else, that he’d never gotten anything sold. I’d also noticed some weirdness in the e-mails he’d sent me that, combined with the phone conversations I’d had with him, led me to concoct and elaborate and (I now know) erroneous theory:
I originally thought he had a huge network of unpaid interns, all across the country, reading scripts for him. After a couple of weeks, he’d ask to see their material, then farm it out to other writers. Essentially, he played a numbers game: if he sent it to 10 interns and got 10 positive responses, he’d maybe send it to 10 more and say what kind of response he got, but more likely he’d just read the script himself and make a judgment. I thought two things when I realized this: shady, and…well, clever. But it explained the anonymity, his apparent animosity with interns knowing each other, strangley blind-carbon-copying what I assume is a whole mailing list but trying to make it seem like a “personalized” e-mail, et cetera.
I had one of my good friends in Los Angeles do some detective work for me. She has access to sites like IMDb Pro and Filmtracker, which I do not, and she’d be able to find out his contacts. She e-mailed me back and said he’s listed in the Hollywood Creative Directory and on Filmtracker, which could either be a sign that he’s legit or a sign that he has a lot of money to burn. (This led me to think that, in the grand scheme of things, if he wanted to do something like steal good scripts from people, it’d be much cheaper to get listed in legitimate places than to buy the screenplays.) She also uncovered some stuff that made me believe he was, quite simply, insane.
Strike one: a lot of bizarre, inflammatory (literally, what people on Usenet call “flaming”) posts regarding some hip-hop television show he supposedly produced (Filmtracker doesn’t show him as having any credits). The initial post would be hyping up the show; this would be followed by several posts mocking him or the show; and finally, he’d strike back with bizarre, obscenity-laced rants.
Strike two: he spent a lot of time planning, with a guy on a random fan forum, treatments and screenplays for a trilogy of live-action movies based on a semi-obscure comic book, which he claimed he’d pitch to a major studio. This was in October of last year. He personally posted several times in the thread, vacillating between stuff like “I’m a wannabe, too,” and “We pitch to the studio next week.” From there, I simply wasn’t sure of his credentials. Most people with the connections and access to pitch a big-budget franchise idea they don’t even own to a major studio don’t call themselves “wannabes.”
I didn’t know what to make of any of these forum posts. In both cases, one side showed an overall ignorance/naïvete that I don’t think would be acceptable as far as representation goes, while the other side showed an intense passion for the stuff he wants to do. I could think of worse qualities in a manager than passion for my work.
I still didn’t trust him, though. My friend’s bottom line was, “Don’t give him any money. Ever.” This is obvious, of course, but — not to sound too arrogant — to me, handing over my screenplays all willy-nilly is pretty much like handing him money. I happen to think, based on my own opinion and the opinions of several I trust, that I have a good store of material built up. I can’t just hand it out to any asshole who calls himself a manager. Sure, I’m desperate for steady employment in a field I care about, and I’m desperate for anything like a foot in the door, but I’m not desperate enough to be an idiot.
I had a plan. I have a friend in a band who’s an entertainment attorney; in exchange for miniscule updates to her band’s site, she’s offered me free legal help/advice for life. I’d ask the manager for a release form. If he gave me a hassle on that, I’d know he was shady and refuse to send him anything. If he didn’t, I’d send it to my lawyer. She’d look it over, tell me whether or not it was acceptable, and either I’d sign it if it was or she’d rewrite it if it wasn’t.
You might be wondering, “Gee, Stan, why are you so obsessed with a release form? Surely you had your screenplays copyrighted and registered with the Writer’s Guild of America…” I did the latter, because it’s easier and cheaper: just e-mail them a PDF and PayPal $25, and you’re registered for five years. For reasons I can’t figure out, I’ve been told that WGA registration is “meaningless,” and copyrighting is the only thing that affords real protection. But I…hadn’t done that, because it costs almost twice as much and you have to go to the effort of printing a hard copy and mailing it. Damn my laziness!
But that’s only part of the story — even if I sent out the copyright stuff before I sent this guy the scripts (and I sent them out last weekend), there’s another layer to the horror of intellectual property law. Because there are so many derivative movies being made all the time, I have the burden of proving not only that I wrote a similar screenplay (because that’s old news) but that I had a business relationship with this person and that he did, in fact, read my screenplay prior to selling his own similar screenplay or making his similar movie. That’s where the release form comes in handy.
Of course, it’d be nice and fun if you could go on down to the Library of Congress, pull out my screenplay, and say, “Ha-HA! This is exactly the same.” But it won’t be, because if he’s smart enough to have a system to steal screenplays, he’s not going to be dumb enough to start sending around my script, verbatim, with his name on it. Even if he does, it’ll go so far through the development wringer that it’ll come out unrecognizable. Chances are I’ll never even know about the theft until it either sells or goes into production, and it’ll be far beyond what my script looks like.
Some might wonder, if the burden of proof is a direct result of every movie in Hollywood having similar ideas behind them, can’t you still shop around your original script around? They always say, ideas aren’t copyrightable — it’s all in the execution. Well, it’s probable that I could. In fact, it’s probable that if a movie that started out as my stolen screenplay is successful, that’ll be better for me in the long run, because it’ll be easier to sell something that’s already succeeded. If it fails, though, I’m screwed.
Besides, what if they change it just enough for me to theoretically not have any “actionable” claims, but enough that I could never sell the screenplay? Intellectual property law is a nightmare, so I’d rather not have to get embroiled in anything crazy. As such, I’d like to be safe and smart.
So I asked the manager for a release form, and he wrote me back, “No release form is unnecessary.” I still haven’t figured out if this is a typo or some kind of shrewd, crafty response to confuse me. If it’s the latter, it sure worked; on top of this puzzling statement, he reaffirmed (for the third or fourth time in two days) how much he looked forward to reading my scripts this weekend. What is the fucking rush? I’ve always learned that in business, if the other guy is trying to put a clock on things, run away.
I wrote back and insisted he send me a release form. I actually figured he wouldn’t, and then I could cop out and refuse to send anything. Sadly, he called my bluff. Ironically, his release form made me trust him even less. Of the six terms listed, three of them were clauses that essentially said, “I hereby give you the right to steal the ideas presented in my screenplay and will be entitled to no compensation or legal action if you steal them.” I didn’t even need a lawyer to go over this — it was pure bullshit.
I was at a crossroads. I wanted to have it both ways: not send him my scripts, but still read for him. This was mostly motivated by my desire to get steady employment as a reader in the fall. He can be as shady as he wants with other people, so long as they’re sending him scripts for me to read on a full-time, paid basis. (At the time, I was way ahead of myself; he hadn’t even offered me a job. He has since then.) But I also saw it as a good opportunity to continue feeling him out, to try and figure out if he’s a total fraud who wants to steal scripts, or just a newbie manager who really is passionate and wants to do well but just…isn’t so competent. Maybe from inexperience, maybe from ignorance — who knows? I certainly didn’t.
Sunday morning, I hit on a good excuse. I told him I was blowing off e-mails and being evasive about sending him stuff because I thought the scripts needed minor polishing, but it turned into major revisions, and I didn’t feel comfortable sending him anything that was less than perfect. He accepted that but maintained he was eager to read them “soon.” Since then, he’s kinda gotten off my back. I’ve also had more time to seek out information about him.
I still don’t know whether or not he’s a fraud, but I looked up many of the titles and authors on the screenplays I’ve written and have discovered that a number of these scripts — while terrible — are written by actual, professional writers in other areas (mostly comics). So he has clients. He’s also “opened up” a little more in the e-mails he’s sent me, and I’ve been swapping info with my e-intern friend. From that, I’ve deduced that he does know what he’s talking about regarding these scripts. Or, at least, he and I are on a similar wavelength as far as what we think is good or bad. I was worried that, even if he had the production company and studio contacts he claimed, he might fuck himself by sending over a lot of inferior scripts. So far, the only one he’s suggested sending out has been the only one I thought was exceptional. That’s a good sign.
In my Googling, I found a list of companies he supposedly has contacts with. Over the next week or two, I intend to call most (or all) of them trying to dig up information on him — have they heard of him, his company, the writers he represents, and what do they think of him/them? If I get a lot of positive responses in the first few, I probably won’t go down the whole list. So we’ll see. Like my e-intern pal says, either we’re getting in on the ground floor of something great, or this guy will fold like a cheap card-table and we’ll be cut loose.
But at least we’ll have the experience.
Posted by Stan on July 16, 2006 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Career-Based Rambling, The Manager Chronicles
July 14, 2006
The Dark Tower
Finished the Dark Tower this afternoon. Good Lord. The ending — I’m talking the last two or three pages — almost redeemed at least this last book from being a total failure, but the more I think of it, the more I just feel horribly cheated by Stephen King.
Yeah, yeah, I know the whole Comic Book Guy routine — he doesn’t owe me anything, but I read the first three books in 1994, and they’re nothing short of astonishing. I’d rate the second one as probably the best thing he’s ever written, and the first and third rank up there. I had to wait a few years for the fourth book, which was terrible and a big disappointment — which only made the (all told) decade I waited for him to finally finish the story more unbearable. “He has to redeem himself for this crap heap of a book…right? Right?!”
Wrong, motherfuckers. I’d rather be sentenced to an eternity spent reading that fourth book over and over again than ever touch books five, six, and seven again.
Full disclosure: I actually really, really liked the sixth book. It really geared me up for what I assumed would be a kick-ass ending. It was short and sweet (for a Stephen King book — dude doesn’t shut up!), and very focused and lean because most of the legwork to set up the plots and subplots had been established in the previous BORING AS SHIT installment. However, in hindsight of what all those storylines became in the seventh book, I’ll gladly lump Song of Susannah together with Wolves of the Calla and The Dark Tower as the three worst books he’s ever written. No, maybe Black House is still worse. Tough call.
WARNING
There may be some spoilers ahead, but I’ll try to dance around the big events because I’m not convinced anyone cares enough for me to tag every spoiler (and I’m not convinced any of these will be spoilers if you’re DT fan, even if you haven’t finished the books). Also, I think this should serve as a warning if anyone is a fan — you should willingly let me spoil it, because my vague synopses and criticisms couldn’t possibly be worse than the books themselves.So the main thing I really hated about these last three books were the meaningless entrances and exits of characters from King’s other books. It was kind of cute/creepy when the gunslinger and his ka-tet stumbled into the universe of The Stand. It was less cute and not at all creepy when other random characters started popping in.
I’ve been outspoken for a long time about my disgust over King intentionally writing novels and short stories whose soul purpose of existence is to bridge the “real” world with the universe/story he created in DT. Aside from a trip to Iowa where I had so little to do I kept picking up Stephen King paperbacks Lucy had lying around her apartment and reading out of sheer boredom, I haven’t tried to read a “new” Stephen King novel or short story since Black House. Before that, it was Insomnia. These two rank among the worst books he’s written, and — not coincidentally — they both exist almost exclusively to tie two of his earlier works to the DT world (The Talisman and It, respectively).
To add insult to injury, none of this means anything. None of the random DT references and character “cameos” in other books, none of the references to his other novels within the DT — none of it amounts to jack shit in the long run. These characters, who have been gracelessly inserted into the Dark Tower story, serve three functions:
- “Oh isn’t that cute — it’s that guy from that short story about the kid who meets the guy everyone thinks he’s crazy”-type recognition factor. (I list this first because, I hate to say it, but I really think this is the only reason King did this — about as close to written masturbation as you can get without a mild hallucinogen.)
- To run into the gunslinger and the ka-tet, vomit out as much expositional dialogue as possible in a short amount of time, maybe involve themselves in a plot point or two, then either die or disappear into the sunset.
- To keep the story moving. At this point in the story, at the places these folks visit on the last few legs of their journey, they wouldn’t discover any of the information they get without help from these other characters.
Sure, King could have put them in other places. Like, say, instead of dominating the whole of Wolves of the Calla with an extraordinarily bland rip-off of The Magnificent Seven — well, I don’t know where he could have set it, but he spends so much goddamn time on that stupid storyline, he could have just as easily removed the entire thing and had a book-length number of pages to come up with something without inserting characters from other books.
The worst affront? Inserting himself into the story. Sure, it’s occasionally amusing that even in the fictional world, everybody either thinks he’s a hack writer or incredibly lazy (or both), but — WHY THE FUCK DID HE WRITE HIMSELF INTO THE STORY? What does it add, other than convolution? In the end, it adds nothing.
And that’s the biggest disappointment: the conclusions of every single character’s stories, the conclusion of the overall plot itself, and the very last pages of the book render the entire seven-volume book pointless. Every death — meaningless. All seven books, the epic quest, the drawing of the three from our world, the plot developments, character developments — meaningless. The villains, whom he spends the cours of three entire books developing and who are both killed in about 30 seconds. The Tower itself — meaningless. Right, right, it’s a metaphor, but I ain’t talking in metaphors, I’m talking in fucking endings, I’m talking about making an investment in seven books and, at this point, 12 years (for some who were with it from the beginning, more than 20), for a book that amounts to nothing.
I’m not even necessarily talking about the very, very, very last-three-pages end, either. I’m talking about the last, oh, 100-150 pages, where everything really comes to a boil. Every single thing that happens is just, for lack of a better word, lame.
It’s incredibly disappointing that King himself spent over 30 years on this project, and aside from forming the ka-tet and continuing the quest for the Tower, the overarching “save the universe” plot itself didn’t really kick in until the fifth book. It’s just horribly disappointing that King decided to go with these storylines — writing himself into it, bringing back characters, the stupid “we must get back to America-side and form a corporation” bullshit, Susannah’s pregnancy. I was even willing to put up with that “who’s really the father and what kind of freak am I carrying?” pregnancy, the most operatic of all soap opera plotlines, if it had led to something remotely interesting. In the end, it didn’t.
After creating such a rich universe, such great characters, and hinting at interesting storyline possibilities, it’s tragic and disappointing that these three books are the final product.
It’s funny — a few pages before the epilogue, King has this pretentious and obnoxious rant about how he’s fine ending it where it is (where there hasn’t even been an actual fucking ending) and remembering these characters without knowing what happens to the gunslinger inside the Tower. It’s irritating because he implies we’re assholes for wanting an ending with real finality after investing time and energy in over a half-dozen books that span two decades, thousands of pages long.
Me? I really, really wish I could travel back in time (even mentally, to attempt to erase these books from my head) and remember the characters on Blaine the Mono, in the middle of a riddling contest with an insane, sentient train, unsure of where they’d stop (if they stopped or survived), their fates uncertain. Sure, you knew they’d survive — but what would happen once the monorail stopped? The hints of storylines and possibilities all spread out before you, allowing you to just pluck at random and come up with any story you want, sharing your own imagination with the imagination that created this world in the first place.
So yes, I’d recommend people read the first three books: The Gunslinger, The Drawing of the Three, and The Wastelands. And sit back, contemplative but pleased, in love with these characters and this world, trying to guess what could happen next. Because guess what — anything, and I mean anything that your imagination comes up with will be at least one million times better than anything that happens in Wizard & Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah, and The Dark Tower.
Fuckin’ Stephen King, man.
Posted by Stan on July 14, 2006 11:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | Reviews
