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July 7, 2008

The Joke Thief

When you’re a comedy writer, you can get away with a lot of crap — a structurally unsound story, cardboard-cutout characters, overly expositional dialogue — because the prime goal is: be more funny. Not that I, personally, want my script to suffer from those problems. I just happen to know from experience that plenty of nuts-and-bolts problems disappear if the reader is laughing his or her ass off. When your goal is maximum comedy exploitation, there’s really one ethical code to follow: don’t steal jokes.

This hits on an ethical tricky gray area similar to one I’ve dealt with before: the writing equivalent of, “If a tree falls and no one’s there to hear it, does it make a sound?” Certainly, but if some half-assed screenwriter writes a terrible script that no one above my bottom-feeding level will ever read, is it appropriate to swipe their work, make it kick ass, and try to run with it?

The answer is “no,” and that applies to stealing big things like story and character, and small things like a single, tiny joke.

It’s a slippery slope, though. It’s hard to explain, but when I used to work with a partner, he’d sometimes call me out because I was stealing something — an intonation or inflection, or a rhythm — even if I wasn’t stealing the joke itself. He could hear it in his head, exactly as I wrote it, patterned after some semi-obscure Simpsons line I found hilarious. Objectively, if someone who had no clue who I was took a look at the screenplay, there’s about a 99% chance they wouldn’t recognize it. There’s nothing in the joke that is inherently swiped — the words are different, the goal of the joke is different, the character saying it is completely different. It’s just the way I hear things when I’m writing, and my partner knew all the same references and knew exactly what I was going for, so he’d yea or nay it, depending on the obviousness of the similarities.

I don’t see a problem with taking something esoteric and slippery like that and repurposing it. Maybe that makes me a washed-up hack, but to me it’s like more like an “influence” than an outright theft. For several years, The Simpsons was the funniest thing on TV. Those episodes are so ingrained in me from reruns and DVDs that it’s just become a natural, often unconscious part of my joke factory. I’d never intentionally steal a joke from them; in fact, I’d never even intentionally swipe the various facets within the joke. If I read it later and recognize something, I’ll put it down to the influence the show had on me. If I consciously think, “Man, this is way too similar to a Simpsons joke” (another advantage to having a frightening mental catalogue of episodes sitting in my brain), I won’t use it. Does that make sense or just come across like a weak defense? …Well, fuck off.

Well, defenses aside, there was this one time…

I had to get out of a scene, but it had no ending. The gag goes like this: the protagonist has unofficially joined a cult — all he needs to do is sign his name on the contract. They ply him with a woman, who sexes him up good, then convinces him to sign the contract without reading it. Now, I could have done this any number of ways — or I could have omitted the scene altogether — but it’s a movie about a Satanic cults. If there’s one thing people associate with Satan, it’s convoluted contracts signed in blood. I wanted to keep it, because otherwise I feared someone would ask why I didn’t include something like it…but I couldn’t find my way out of the scene.

Going back to the tree-falling slippery slope, I thought of a joke. It’s a joke I knew wasn’t mine — one that, for some reason, despite the zillions of hours of comedy I’ve viewed, it endured in the back of my mind and, hell, may have been the reason I set up the contract scene the way I did.

See, there was a little show on Fox called Action. Oh, sure, everybody knows about it now — it’s the canceled-before-its-time cult-classic, now available on DVD. But when I wrote this screenplay, all it had was a short run on Fox, a full (13-episode) run on FX, and my vague, glimmering memories. Hell, it’s been so long I might have misremembered the joke, which would have allowed me to avoid the whole ethical quandary.

Anyway, there’s an episode of Action where the writer character gets writer’s block, so his producer sends him over a hooker to get him working again. Also, the writer brings a contract that the writer must sign. So they do their thing, he’s feeling good about himself, she busts out the contract, and he starts looking over it.

“Hey,” he says. “It says this has to be witnessed and signed by a notary public.”

And the hooker seductively says, “I’m a notary.”

That’s a pretty good joke! And I stole it. That was my way out of the scene, and it’s one of the rare cases in my script where swiping somebody else’s joke wholesale managed to work in my script. I’m a big fan of character-based jokes, so much of the time I couldn’t steal a joke if I wanted to (and I don’t want to) because it’d feel out of character. This was different — the protagonist was a very similar character to the writer on Action, the circumstances of the woman providing the sexing-up were identical. It made perfect sense. But it was stolen.

At the time, I didn’t think as much of it. Like I said, nobody had seen the show in years; there was a high probability nobody would remember the show or that particular joke well enough to call me on it. I still didn’t like the idea, but at the time, it seemed like the easiest way to get past this scene and fulfill my deadline.

I had pretty much forgotten about the joke until Preity begged me to read a good script. So I went back through this to polish it up, and there it sat, a pathetic example of plagiarism and broken secret comedy-writing codes. But rereading the scene, I realized there’s a perfect button.

A perfect, original button. I deleted the stolen joke and replaced it with my new ending. Then I sat there wondering why it took me so long to figure it out.

Posted by Stan on July 7, 2008 3:17 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay

July 2, 2008

Pressure

So Preity sent me an e-mail yesterday. I know she had the best of intentions, and really, when it comes down to it, this is good news. Turns out, she was supposed to help in finding four other readers to cover their busy season. Her boss canceled this order when he saw how good and fast I was. Remember how I said writing coverage is an endurance test, and you have to show you can be the fastest? Apparently I was a little too fast.

But, come on. I’m unemployed. What else did I have to distract me?

Therein lies the problem: if the work is going to be this inconsistent, I have to get paid during the off-time somehow. I’m not aware of many jobs, other than shit retail jobs with extremely generous managers, who will let you take three weeks off every three months so you can do another job that, one hopes, will lead to you quitting the current job. I’ve worked a lot of retail jobs, some of them with retail managers, but when it comes to talking about pursuing a career outside the store, many of them flip out.

But that’s not the point: the point is, I don’t want to go back to retail. I want a nice, cushy, semi-permanent job that I can work for a few years until I save up enough to go back to L.A. So now I’m thinking maybe I should just go back to temping and hope the work isn’t quite as intermittent. Frankly, it’s going to lead to some awkward decision-making: I refuse to give up my career because I have to hang on to a permanent, full-time job that looks down on extreme absenteeism, yet at the same time I need money in the long-term, not glory (and some money) in the short-term.

Temp agencies don’t really give a shit; if it doesn’t coincide with an assignment, I’m gold. If it does, they’re usually good about time off as long as you pull your weight when you’re there. It’s truly amazing how much you can get away with at temp agencies if you are the king of soul-crushing office work (P.S.: I am), but I’ve been out of the temping game for awhile. The job market has turned to shit, and it’s a lot harder to even get temp work. Most of them have become external human resources departments, filtering out candidates to place in permanent jobs. The last time I temped — in 2002, back when the job market was…well, it still pretty much sucked, but not nearly to the level it’s sunk now — the best I could do was a three-week assignment here or there. But hey, it’s not like anyone’s jumping to hire me now. I should probably just go for it and hope they come up with something more than nothing.

Either that, or I could tell Preity to tell her boss they should hire more people. But I’m selfish: I want the career-enhancing glory, too.

Posted by Stan on July 2, 2008 11:13 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling

July 9, 2008

Overkill: My First Bit of Coverage

In honor of that reader job, I’m going to share something with you that I didn’t even think still existed. Here’s the backstory:

In 2001 or 2002 (or maybe earlier, but I didn’t pay much attention until 2002), Francis Ford Coppola’s American Zoetrope Studios launched an interactive component of their website. A social networking site in pre-social networking days, it allowed writers — and later all manner of other film-industry wannabe-creative-types — share their work in an honest, encouraging, semi-anonymous forum. It surged in popularity because of a (most likely bullshit) carrot dangled at the end: legend started to spread that Coppola himself was known, on occasion, to download the most popular scripts on the site and take a look at them. I believe Pumpkin was a Zoetrope.com find, and how you feel about that movie might gauge how you feel about the whole project.

It shared the same problem as a lot of screenwriting contests; I would say it was worse because it didn’t cost anything to submit a script, but at the same time you didn’t “win” anything for writing a good script, so maybe it broke even. Point is, people will pick up Story or Screenplay or just write a script on a whim and send it to a contest. I don’t want to denigrate those people, because I’ve long been of the opinion that the only formal training needed to write a good script (or make a good film, for that matter) is to watch a shitload of movies. But watching a shitload of movies and/or reading a book on screenwriting doesn’t guarantee the screenplay won’t be a piece of shit.

I can’t tell you how many “amateur” screenplays have loglines like this: “A waitress/single mother struggles against adversity in the small town where she grew up. Based on a true story.” This was especially true when I browsed the material available on Zoetrope.com. While it follows a basic “beginning-writer” tenet — “write what you know” — and could make for a good movie (last year’s Waitress was pretty great), it also ignores another basic “beginning-writer” tenet: the things that happen to you in your day-to-day life are not necessarily the stuff of great drama. Never say never, but I know my day-to-day is boring as shit, so when I write I take the emotional truth of what is happening or has happened to me in reality and apply it to something that is 100% fictitious.

There’s also the Hemingway-Cézanne philosophy: if you have something that’s real and true but isn’t quite dramatic, change it until it is. So many beginners fall into a pattern of writing “what they know” while neglecting basic principles of drama because, in their reality, “it didn’t happen that way.” So, to go back to the waitress/Waitress example: the arc of that story is centered around the effects of a pregnancy on an unhappy marriage. Meanwhile, your “based on a true story” waitress has crafted a supremely uninteresting story in which she leaves her husband around the time her kid is six. What’s more dramatic — leaving your husband because you don’t want him to destroy the life of your newborn baby, or leaving him because, eh, you just got kinda tired? You try to explain this to the writer, and they come back at you with, “But that’s not how it happened!” Who cares?

So I signed up to Zoetrope.com for the same reason anyone else did: for the chance to have my work glanced at by the man who directed The Godfather and The Conversation. But the way it worked back then — I don’t believe it works that way now — was pretty convoluted. You had to read four or five screenplays before you could submit one of your own, and the rumors floating around misc.writing.screenplays and various messageboards were that the scripts they’d send you to start out scraped the bottom of the barrel. You couldn’t just rush in and have the pick of their litter, choosing only their top-rated scripts; instead, the site provided a “random” selection of scripts with either low or no ratings.

I ended up reading one and thinking, “If everything I read on this site is this bad, I’m wasting my time.” Nowadays, I’d think, “If everything I read on this site is this bad, then my crap is sure to rise to the top in no time!” And yet, I’m still not exactly racing to Zoetrope.com. I just happened to think, after getting this reader job, about that first unproduced script I tore into. I logged in on a lark, fully expecting that my e-mail address or password would be wrong; once I logged in, I also fully expected that such an old, old, old coverage submission would have been deleted on the server.

I’m kinda glad I was wrong on both accounts. I enjoy keeping copies of everything, and it always disappoints when I’ve lost something. Plenty of old blog posts from a past life vanished in a bitter, seething rage — and I have no backups. Not that I’d necessarily restore them, but it’s nice to have the option.

In particular, though, I like having this coverage around because I can look back with amusement on my rookie mistakes. So here it is, my first-ever coverage attempt. For some reason, I can’t find when I submitted it. I seem to remember writing it up over a three-day weekend, most likely Memorial Day, but the response the writer sent me (which I recall he sent rather quickly) is dated 6/30/02. It’s really long:

Your screenplay shows a lot of promise, but it is also has many problems that should be addressed.

Right off the bat you have some glaring formatting errors. Among the most prevalent:

• You’re capitalizing arbitrarily. Stop that. In proper spec format, you only capitalize the name of a character the first time s/he is introduced. Otherwise, just write everything like standard prose. A few years ago, the rule in spec format was to capitalize sound effects only. It was never a style thing applied randomly to whatever nouns and verbs seemed important; it was so the sound effects pop out in the script so the sound editor or foley artist could just skim. It’s not done anymore. I’m not sure why specifically; it’s just the way things are.
• When you write a sentence in the action, don’t start a new line for the next sentence. Again, standard prose. The action should form a paragraph, not a stanza.

These next few may seem minor, but all formatting stuff is very important. If you submit this to studios or an agent and want it to be sold, nobody’s going to get past page three with the mistakes you’ve made. If it’s properly format on the surface, they’ll at least keep reading. Even if it’s a bad script, they’ll keep going until at least the end of the first act. Anyway, here goes:

• You’re introducing your protagonist, the guy we follow through the whole film and are rooting for. So why do you introduce him as “YOUNG MAN” and then reveal his name in the dialogue? If you’re trying to be clever, you’re not. If he’s an unimportant character, it would be all right, but he’s your main character. Introduce him with dignity in the action. “CHRISTIAN DOYLE, good-looking, about thirty, writes at his computer.”
• Drop the “we see” stuff. All of it. Anything that remotely resembles second person or implying what the shot should be. There are better ways to do it, and “we see” second-person mumbo jumbo absolutely SCREAMS amateur. E.g., your line on page 2, “We see a HEATER VENT exuding SMOKE into his room,” should read something like this, “Smoke drifts into his room through a heating vent.” The reason I tell you to avoid things like that is because the director decides what we see, not the writer, and directors turn into pissy babies when the writer tries to tell the director what to see. There are much more subtle and effective ways of telling the director what to see without flat out saying “we see.” Use your skills as a writer.
• The “[listening]” stuff every time he’s on the phone looks bad. Ignore the fact that they should be parentheses instead of brackets, they’re improperly used. You know he’s on the phone, you know he’ll be listening. Ellipses (“…”) cover that fine and take up much less space. Screenplays are all about maximizing your limited page count, and about 700 “[listening]“‘s on page 3 will turn a script reader off faster than Ted Koppel in lingerie.
• Your left and right margins both appear to be formatted at 1.5” for action. It should be 1”. Again, it looks like you’re tightening things because you don’t have enough written to reach the desired length.
• Unless you’re using pronouns, try to refer to characters by their name. I.e., “Christian studies Marina” instead of “Christian studies the young woman.” That kind of stuff is for novels, not screenplays.
• Page numbers should be justified right, 0.5” from the top, and should read: “#.” without the quotes. There is no page number on the first page.
• There should be one blank line after slugs.
• If you have a line of dialogue that slips on to the next page, there are some rules. If it is one line, just push the whole thing (character name included) down to the next page. If it is more than one line, cut it off at the end of a sentence, insert a new line below, centered, that simply says “(MORE)” and start the next page with the character slug followed by “(CONT’D.)” and then finish the dialogue off. If it a sentence that is more than one line that goes onto the next page, again, drop the whole thing down to the next page.
• This one’s even worse. The proper formatting for cars, believe it or not, is something to the effect of “INT./EXT. CHRISTIAN’S CAR (TRAVELING)” The (TRAVELING) parenthetical changes from person to person it’s a matter of preference. The supposed standard is TRAVELING, but just as acceptable is MOVING or DRIVING. And if it’s not traveling, moving, or driving, it’s PARKED. If it starts out parked and starts traveling (or vice-versa), notate it in the action, but you don’t need to make a whole new slug to indicate that.
• Your first page is your title page, and your screenplay starts on page 2. Not so. Your title page should be a separate entity, and your screenplay should start on page one. It also shouldn’t start halfway down the page with another title. FADE IN should be the very first thing we see on the very first line of page one.
• Typical phone conversation etiquette is confusing until you get the hang of it. Again, don’t be too specific with who’s onscreen and who’s offscreen when you write; that’s the director’s responsibility. The easiest way to do this is to type a slug that goes something like “INTERCUT: MARINA’S UNIT / CHRIS’S UNIT” and lose the offscreen indications. Then any action you write for Chris or Marina, it is assumed that it is in the respective unit.
• You don’t always have to have a time frame in the sluglines. Usually, it’s pretty self-explanatory. Unless it’s a completely new scene, you don’t need them. You don’t need all the “MOMENTS LATER” and “SAME TIME” and “A LITTLE LATER” stuff unless you really think it’s unclear. I personally think it’s less clear with those than without.

Mechanics:

Page 2: In the opening, you call Sleepy Hollow Manor a “SUBURBAN APARTMENT COMPLEX,” and go on to reveal a sign calling it “SLEEPY HOLLOW MANOR.” Vice-versa. The slug should say “SLEEPY HOLLOW MANOR,” and you should describe what it is in the action and talk about the sign if you’d like.

Page 35: “The magnetism between them is palpable.” This should be revealed through characterization and dialogue, and by this point it should be obvious (and frankly, it is). You don’t need to write it. It insults the intelligence of whomever is reading it. “Even though it is night, he appears to blush in the porch light.” I wasn’t aware people stopped blushing in the night. Sarcasm aside, this is so unnecessarily wordy it makes me want to cry.

Page 35: “Chris blushes.” That’s all you need. Or if you want to get fancy, you can keep the porch light bit…but lose the first clause, because although I know what you mean, it doesn’t make sense as written and it’s not necessary to keep it.

Page 37: “In the background, SCREW, a big nasty guy, appears in his dirty underwear.” I wanted to point this out because it’s kind of tricky, but “in the background” is kind of like “we see” in the sense that it implies what the shot is. It should be worded more like “Behind Deek, a big, nasty guy named SCREW, approaches wearing nothing but stained underwear.” That way there’s no shot implication. If the director wanted to — and I have no idea why he would, but at least he has the choice — he could dolly behind Screw as he walks to the door.

Page 37/38: “Shithead” and “asshole” are usually compound words, and “I dono” is usually “I dunno.” It’s not going to make or break you, and I know it’s slang, but sloppy spelling and grammar is not your friend.

Page 38: “Chris looks to see him.” Awkward! “Chris looks at him.”

Page 40: “Chris looks as if he does not know what to say next.” Again, awkward (and this is the last time I’ll point it out). “Chris does not know what to say.” Much better.

Page 65: “You just keep my rent free, as usual…” I’d take out the “as usual.” It makes the statement redundant.

Overall:

I’m getting nit-picky, and I didn’t include this stuff in the formatting because technically there is no format for it so it’s subject to debate, but here’s how I would handle the computer stuff (example from page 24): “Chris sits down and awakens his computer from sleep mode [much quicker than stopping the action to wait around for a computer’s boot cycle]. He opens his present story in the writing program and begins to type: ‘As if expecting to be attacked by the intruder…’” Etc. Do you see how much more concise it is? You don’t bog down basic stuff that most people — especially script readers — are knowledgeable about, like opening MS Word and typing, in your script. It works for a short story, where you want to be as descriptive as possible, but for a screenplay, it’s all unnecessary fat that can and should be trimmed. You also want to avoid stuff like “the monitor shows” (p. 36), which is the computer equivalent of “we see.”

You use an excessive amount of adverbs, especially introductory adverb clauses. Maybe it’s a stylistic thing, maybe not, but it gets really wordy and much of it can be worded better. It’s your call whether or not to change that, but it doesn’t flow when you read it, which may be a problem in getting readers to take it seriously.

You often imply the attitude or expression of characters, usually Chris, in the action just prior to a line, like “He lights up” (pg. 34) or “A sarcastic grin creeps across Chris’s face” (pg. 37). This is a bad idea unless it’s absolutely necessary, and even if it was you’d put it in a parenthetical under the character name like “(sarcastically)” instead of wasting a whole three lines and a hell of a lot of words for an action that isn’t really necessary. For many of these, the tone of the line is pretty obvious, and actors really, really dislike it — even moreso than directors — when you’re telling them how to interpret things. The same thing goes for putting in beats. Sadly, it’s up to the actor and director to figure that stuff out, not the writer. I recommend you go back through and make changes as you deem it necessary.

Plot/Characters/Theme:

Chris/Bill doesn’t write suspense. He writes his life (or, rather, what he wants his life to be like), and there’s nothing really suspenseful about it. That’s my main problem with this script. A suspenseful screenplay builds from the first shot until you reach the turning point for act III that sets everything in motion and eventually releases the tension. You almost do that, but don’t quite make it. Let’s examine why.

Your characters are flat-out stereotypes. The closest character to three dimensions is Marina, but you ruin her by making her a mechanic of the plot instead of the other way around. Plot is not the most important element in a good script; it’s all about the characters, and when you have good, fleshy characters, they drive the plot. The plot shouldn’t drive the characters. Marina starts out as an intelligent woman with a good job and an equally good head on her shoulders, descends into idiocy with her baffling trust of the very obviously evil (to anyone of her initial intelligence, anyway…) Malcolm Griddle, and then her getting raped and just sort of letting it go like it’s no big deal, not telling anyone, not telling the police. I know that in reality many women don’t talk about it, even to the police, because they are ashamed, but we never get a clear indication that this is why in Marina’s case. She just comes off like an idiot.

Christian is the typical writer who has a hard time with romance because he has a hard time dealing with people. The Grissards are the typical spry elderly couple whose sole purpose is to point out very specifically to the audience what all of Chris’s problems are and why Chris and Marina should be together. The entire dinner scene you wrote bothers me because all they do is sit there and beat the audience over the head with the fact that they should be together, which we all know from page 5 on. You don’t develop characters into flesh-and-blood creations, which I think is why they never leave the stereotype stage; you waste all that time beating us over the head with obvious stuff.

Now that I’m thinking about it, Malcolm Griddle is not a stereotypical character. He starts out as the stereotypically evil landlord, but when the rape happens and then he tries to kill Chris, he crosses a line into unnecessarily psychotic. I really have a big problem with rape and attempted murder when there’s really no clear motive. And, incidentally, evil and/or psychoses do not qualify as clear motives. Why does he rape her? Sure, he was attracted to her and wanted to have sex, but I’m attracted to and want to have sex with a wide variety of people, but I don’t just do it, against their will. Nobody does it just for the hell of it. We need a reason. Same thing with the attempted murder. Nobody in the world is that evil. Some come close, but they’re mostly psychotic. Malcolm seems pretty psychotic to me, but he’s still portrayed as a guy who’s completely of sound mind — he’s just gone beyond the rational realms of evil.

The punks are also stereotypically evil. Just because they play loud music and dress funny doesn’t mean they’re evil. They can be juvenile delinquents who are always trying to mess with Chris, but should they really be homicidal rapists? It’d be much more interesting if you had someone like Lyle, the seemingly pleasant gay neighbor, be the evil guy. It may not be politically correct and you may pick up flak from GLAAD over it, but at least it’d be a little be less stereotypical. As they are, the punks and Lyle are both stereotypes. Lyle is actually a stereotype of an irony, where he’s this effeminate guy, but he kicks ass when he wants to. It’s like, “Oh, I just thought he was a femme, but he’s really strong!” It’s the same way to go against the grain that has been done 1000 other times, and so it’s become a stereotype in and of itself.

Jilly is an interesting character who goes nowhere. Way too young for Chris but still in love with him (or so she thinks, anyway). But then she, like Marina, becomes a plot device used only to show how Chris can kick some ass when he gets fed up enough. Chris is not Billy Jack; none of that is necessary, and Jilly’s character becomes too simplified.

Finally, the plot starts out interesting and rapidly becomes disastrous. This is a romantic comedy that descends into unncessary violence and sexual assault. Why can’t it stay a romantic comedy? Why can’t you spend more time fleshing out the romance and less time bitching about Malcolm Griddle? As it stands, the romance between Chris and Marina doesn’t do a whole lot for me. They have some things in common, they go and have chocolate together in a very cutesy way, and then the plot starts grinding and the characters become mindless and the romance dissolves.

This movie should be about the romance. The way I would do it is this: he meets her, learns that she works for a publishing house, and immediately starts hustling for contacts (it’s what a serious writer would do, and it would immediately turn her off and create some actual conflict). Of course she doesn’t like him, but he becomes very vocal at tenant meetings about how awful Griddle is and how they need to get rid of him, and she becomes attracted to that side of him and agrees to join in the cause. She begins to fall in love with him, but he’s so interested in getting rid of Griddle — and not by killing him, either — that he hardly notices, even though if he was paying any attention he’d realize he felt the same way. Of course, you don’t have to do this — or anything else I suggest — but when I downloaded this screenplay, that’s more along the lines of what I thought I would be reading. This is just food for thought. The only thing I’d strongly recommend paying attention to are the formatting errors.

The other problem I have with your script is that I cannot find a theme in your script. Next to character, your theme is the most important thing in your screenplay. If you don’t have a theme tying your story together, there really is no point. The point of every scene is to punctuate the theme, and the conclusion is essentially a statement — subtly or overtly — of the theme.

In a way, yours is about how art imitates life, or vice-versa, but it’s really more confusing than anything else because it turns out at the end that Chris is not really Chris and that all of this was a novel he has written. The twist itself was not confusing, but to me it seemed like the point of that twist was that he could not work up the courage to ask Marina out until he wrote about his romance in the book, but since there is very little romance, it reinforces my humble opinion that the bulk of the story should be the romance, and the less Griddle and the punks are involved the better. You have to decide if you want this to be a romantic comedy or an action movie and write it accordingly. I personally think the romance is better than the action, but you decide which you would rather do for yourself.

Inconsistencies and Contradictions:

There are a lot of them. I’ve already mentioned a couple — like Malcolm Griddle being evil, but there being no clear motivation for his evil — but there are more.

For starters, Malcolm’s reasons for burning down the apartment in the first place were confusing? Was he trying to collect insurance money? Why? He’s a slumlord who owns buildings all over town.

Here’s what slumlords do: they prey on the ignorance (and sometimes a lingual barrier), charge as much rent as they want, take advantage of tenants, basically do everything Malcolm Griddle. Except they don’t burn down their buildings. They let their buildings get run down, bilk people for years, pay off the local beat cops, and when the city finally condemns the building, they have it torn down (or maybe then they burn it down for the insurance money) and sell the land, usually for far more than it’s worth. Then they use that money to buy a new building, usually a cheaper building, and they keep the profits and let this new building run down.

So what’s the point of having Griddle burn down his building? Is he just doing it to try to throw out the Grissards? If so, why didn’t he have the fire started in or around the general vicinity of the Grissards’ unit? Even if the fire was stopped as quickly as it was, chances are enough of their unit would be damaged, so he’d have just cause to kick them out and arguably could blame them for starting the fire. He’d also have no responsibility in housing them while the damage is repaired, whereas if he needed to throw them out of the unit so he could knock down walls and inspect the inner structure of the building, he would be legally obligated to put them up in a hotel or in one of his other buildings until they are done inspecting and the walls are replaced.

Going along with that, I’m fuzzy on whether or not this place is rent controlled. You say he keeps kicking out the old people so he can raise the rent, but then you say at another point that Griddle arbitrarily raises the rent anyway, so it wouldn’t matter if he kicked them out or not, as clearly the rent control is not effective.

Furthermore, when you rent an apartment, you almost always sign a lease that outlines the rental agreemnt for both tenant and landlord, and nothing can legally contradict the lease unless the tenant breaks the lease or the landlord has just cause for throwing the tenant out. You can’t raise the rent arbitrarily, or even raise the rent in a rent-controlled environment, until the leasing period is over. Otherwise, the tenants have legal recourses to take, and somebody as smart as Christian or the Grissards surely would have taken them already. These tenants are not ignorant; these plot devices would work better if they were.

My final issue involving the rent and the tenancy is that Chris complains about Griddle raising the rent all the time and how he’s charging way too much, but when Marina asks him why he doesn’t move, he explains that he can’t find an equivalent or better apartment for the price. Why the hell not? If Griddle’s rent increases are so unfair, he’d be able to find a better apartment for the price or an equal apartment at a lower price, if not in a town where buildings are owned by Griddle, at least somewhere else. It doesn’t make sense.

Chris is a writer. Marina works in publishing. Nobody ever mentions or even implies that Chris has a day job, so he must be at least marginally successful in writing. Why is it, then, that Marina has never heard of him? She is, or at least she starts out as, an intelligent woman working in the world of publishing. She’d probably be well-read. She’d probably have at least heard of Christian Doyle, even if she had never read anything he had written. Why doesn’t she have a clue who he is? If he is a struggling writer with a day job, why doesn’t he cozy up to her initially for contacts? That’s what I’d do if I was in the same position and happened to have a friend/publishing contact living in the same building.

When Lyle and Marina show up to the hospital with Chris, the clerk won’t admit him until he shows proof of insurance. Later, when he leaves, the first thing she asks for his payment. I know all ER’s work differently, but the most common practice I’ve seen is that they treat you first — especially under extreme emergency circumstances like Chris’s — and they don’t worry about payment until later. Ordinarily, they send the proper forms to your insurance company for billing, or if emergency visits are not covered (they aren’t on my insurance), they send a bill to your home address. On my few trips to emergency rooms, I’ve never been required to pay immediately after services were rendered, and especially not before.

Chris is injected with enough heroin to kill two people. So why is he released from the hospital, it seems, three hours later? I mean, isn’t that a big deal? Wouldn’t they at least keep him overnight for observation? There is no real indication of the passage of time, but it all seems to happen very quickly, and Chris seems to get out of the hospital almost immediately after he wakes up. Even if by some strange miracle they did decide to release him, wouldn’t he be suffering fiercely from physical and mental withdrawal symptoms? Even people who shoot up once, with a normal amount of heroin, crave it for weeks, months, until they can get another fix. I don’t see why Chris would be any different.

Raping someone is a big deal. A huge deal. Nobody ever in the history of cinema has treated rape lightly. And yet Griddle rapes Marina, and very little is made of it. There’s an implied internal conflict with Marina, who obviously does not want to tell anybody, but nothing ever comes of it. I know in many cases the woman feels ashamed and doesn’t want to tell anybody, least of all the police. It especially makes sense in Marina’s case after all the warnings about trusting Griddle, and she’s trusting enough to just let him into the apartment just after getting out of the shower. More should be made of this internal conflict, or she should tell somebody right away. Call the police. Tell Chris. Scream bloody murder until somebody else dashes into the apartment and saves her from actual full-fledged rape. She starts out smart and somewhat tough and dissolves into an idiot as soon as she starts trusting Griddle’s words over everybody else’s. A woman like that would realize that all of them can’t be wrong, and she’d notice how evil or at least how suspicious Griddle acts.

That’s about all I have to say. I appreciate the opportunity of reading it, and I really do think you have a good start here. Good luck to you in the future!

Okay, class. In this example, what did I do wrong?

A couple of things I’ll defend. The bit about standard prose and not breaking for every sentence or two — that is something where the norm changed a few years ago, but at the time I wrote this, it was still conventional wisdom to keep action blocks as actual blocks of action, with paragraph separations. Now, there’s this goofy “paragraphs can be no longer than four lines, even if it’s not the true end of the paragraph” rule. I guess it’s easier on the lazy eyes of readers, but I think it’s bullshit.

I’ll also defend the chastisements for “we see” and introducing the main character in a goofy, mysterious (and pointless) way. Now, there are plenty of established writers or writer/directors who use this method. I know, for instance, that the Coens used this in Fargo. Ignoring the fact that only a complete idiot would rip apart the Coens for taking a novelistic approach in their screenplay, it just doesn’t make sense to use this approach very often. The Coens don’t always do this; it works in the Fargo screenplay because they’re establishing in the writing what they expect an audience member to feel: confusion. Who are these characters? What’s the relationship? This guy’s writing what basically amounts to a romantic comedy: why the mystery?

However, looking at my work with the old critical eye — I go into way too much detail on each point. I make the point, then give him an example, which in retrospect makes me feel like I’m dumbing it down. Granted, when I read the screenplay, I remember feeling like it was so stupid and poorly written, maybe the writer wouldn’t understand if I just made the points. Still, it’s excessive.

Most of the rest of the formatting stuff — including what I’ve already mentioned — I’d never put into “professional” coverage. Even back then I knew better. The point of Zoetrope.com was for fellow newbie writers to band together. I was just trying to help, because conventional wisdom is that if you’re a newbie and it’s clear from your writing that your a newbie (because of glaring formatting issues), they’ll toss your script aside.

I can’t think of anything more ridiculous than pointing out formatting and mechanics problems in professional coverage. Look at every single one of those paragraphs. I’m basically telling this guy, “You don’t know how to write. Here’s how you should write it.” As a writer, it’s sometimes hard enough to hear that from somebody who’s only making big, vague plot and character suggestions — it’s excruciating to have someone send you a list, with page numbers, of every misspelling, grammatical error, or poor slug choice. I mean, Page 65: “You just keep my rent free, as usual…” I’d take out the “as usual.” It makes the statement redundant. Am I kidding? It’s so nitpicky and ridiculous that I can’t even use the “I was just trying to help another newbie” excuse.

Bar none the worst thing about this coverage: I made it way, way, way too personal. Every problem that I have: “here’s how I’d do it,” “here’s my biggest problem.” Every time I mention choices he makes, I refer to “you.” “Your characters are flat-out stereotypes.” Without the emotional distance of third-person and modifiers like “perhaps,” “maybe,” or phrasing statements as questions, to me it comes across as very harsh. Maybe I’m crazy, but I see a world of difference between, “The characters are flat-out stereotypes” and “Your characters are flat-out stereotypes.” Asking questions, on the other hand, tricks the writer into thinking you’re just spitballing ideas rather than attacking his work.

Aside from that, I stand by the meat of most of the commentary. The inconsistencies/contradictions thing goes on way too long — it makes the mountains of Indiana seem nonspecific — and some of the points aren’t as valid as I thought they were at the time.

My favorite part is this, though: If he is a struggling writer with a day job, why doesn’t he cozy up to her initially for contacts? That’s what I’d do if I was in the same position and happened to have a friend/publishing contact living in the same building. I might as well say, “I’m a horrible person. Why isn’t your character?” Though it starts out valid — the relationships between these characters, and their related occupations, are flawed — it ends up not being constructive at all, because I’m projecting my own personality onto this writer’s fictional character and screenplay.

To sum up:

• Keep it brief and to the point (do the opposite of this blog).
• Whenever possible, use question phrasing (“What if Christian was an astronaut instead of a writer?”) instead of declarative statements.
• If questions don’t work, keep it as impersonal as possible — use third-person and back up your point with reasoning that’s as objective as possible.
• Professional or not, don’t waste time chastising the writer for sloppy formatting or mechanical problems unless they specifically ask for this (that has happened to me once or twice — it’s hard to proofread your own work).
• Keep the analysis brief and focused on the big issues. Don’t go on and on (and on and on and on) with nitpicks and inconsistencies; take it as a given that fixing the “big” problems will also fix all the small problems. This may not be true, but it won’t matter until you see a later draft — if you see one.

But, you know, you might have to nitpick sometimes. Take another look at the mountains of Indiana. I didn’t dive into this earlier because the coverage above lacks a synopsis, but the synopsis is an important part of coverage.

Keep it within the specified length (if they ask for a four-page synopsis, don’t give them one page or seven pages), but within that length make sure you hit on details that will become necessary for the analysis. If you have some leeway with the company and need more room for details, take it — my synopsis is about double the length he wanted, but I’d been reading for him for awhile and felt it necessary to bombard him with details because I nitpicked in the analysis. I don’t recommend doing that, but sometimes it’s necessary — sometimes a story makes so little sense, it’s all just little problems building to one huge problem. You can’t attack it any other way.

If you need to go that route, still don’t make it as long as this. The mountains of Indiana, tour de force that it is, still amounted to about three pages using the company’s coverage template, for both synopsis and notes. The monstrosity pasted above, with no synopsis, clocks in at almost 10 full pages using the same template. Yeah. Excessive.

Posted by Stan on July 9, 2008 3:22 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay

July 11, 2008

What’s Wrong with Being Sexy?

For the moment, I’ve abandoned Rolling in It: The Movie. It’s still there, waiting to be completed, but a new idea has hit me. Idea-wise, I work in two different ways: either I have a vague notion that I have to pound and force into something resembling a story, or I have a swarm of vague notions that all amount to a story that’s, basically, fully fleshed out. That is rarer for me, but in the cases that it has, the scripts have required the fewest number of rewrites. They just kinda pull together—no story problems, no character problems, just a lot of minor nudges.

This new idea is a swarmer.

At first, it concerned me a bit. I’m rarely known for political correctness, but at the end of the day, I want to be fair to people. If I’m going to hate them all equally, it’s hard for me to go ahead with a misogynistic, LaBute-like pile of garbage. In this case, it’s not even terribly misogynistic; it’s just a bit sexist. It doesn’t try to be, though. I don’t want to divulge its secrets because, frankly, I feel like it’s a pretty fresh take on the dying romantic-comedy genre, but I will say this: it plays with a lot of ideas involving manhood and womanhood.

Part of me thinks that, as a man, I’ll be labeled as hostile or sexist for going with this. The underlying theme, though, is that the clinical, psychological dispositions of “male” and “female” behavior are bullshit. So now I’m in trouble for being anti-intellectual, but the point is: people are people. If you want to trace back everything they do to primal urges, that’s fine; if you want to say, “Because this is how the majority of men and women behaved in a clinical study, then all men and women behave this way.” I just happen to think that’s what we in the artistic community call “a huge load.”

So to me, it’s not anti-intellectual; it looks at psychological precepts — limitations, really — on the understanding of male and female behavior and saying, “Yeah, maybe we need to dig deeper to get at some real truths.” And it’s not sexist — you have a guy being assigned labels because of the way he acts, but in the end he learns to embrace that kernel of individuality instead of rejecting it and trying to change.

But that’s just me. I’m a little concerned about what people who aren’t me will think.

And, okay, you caught me: it’s called Tranny Surprise and the title does not refer to transmissions.

Posted by Stan on July 11, 2008 11:14 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling, Creative Works!

July 14, 2008

Defeating Childhood

As a lad, my favorite series of video games was Capcom’s Mega Man. I didn’t much get into the SNES X series, but those original games — I don’t know, maybe it was my childhood love of robots and futuristic sci-fi, but for games with such simplistic stories, they opened a world of imagination that you don’t always get with modern, “realistic” games.

I couldn’t tell you if it was the announcement of a new Mega Man 9 in the classic, 8-bit style that did it, or just happening to coincidentally find a YouTube instructional video at around the same time, but I fixed my old, worn-out NES. It didn’t take quite as much effort as I thought; just a lot of screwing and unscrewing. Probably the hardest part was leaving a certain level of looseness to the screws; strangely, the spring that keeps the cartridge-holder depressed will fail to work if all the screws are hand-tightened to their tightest.

Once it worked again, the first game I popped in was Mega Man 2 — still, for me, the series’ peak. The game features some of the greatest music ever created (not just in video games!); stages, weapons, and bosses that are clever but not “we’re running out of ideas” silly (Top Man?!); and overall, it feels like the perfect length. The stages are a little longer than the first game, and they’re more challenging but not in the punishing way that is still the first Mega Man’s trademark. Unlike later games, the stages don’t go on so long that they wear out their welcome. Later games may have had better graphics or neat new moves (the slide!), but nothing ever topped Mega Man 2.

I played through Mega Man 2 in one sitting, on difficult. I felt cocky — as a kid, it was hard enough to beat it on normal. Beating it on difficult felt like a bad-ass revolution. I moved on to 3, which is tougher and harder, but it just loses a little something. The best thing about it, for me, are the memories I have of my sister and I spending hours — weeks, really — trying to get ahead, poring over strategy guides and Nintendo Power tips. My sister and I never got along well, but Nintendo — one-player Nintendo — was a different story. We were completely cooperative, each willing to give up the controller if a certain section of game required the playing strengths of the other, but for selfish ends: we both wanted to get to Dr. Wily and see the end of the game.

But there’s a secret shame: I’ve never beaten the first Mega Man. As a kid, it was fucking impossible. I’m not kidding; the only game I ever played for the NES that gave me more trouble was Metroid, a game I still can’t beat (though I can get way farther nowadays than I ever could at the tender age of nine). But, you know what? I never even owned the original NES Metroid until long after the system was past its prime. Some might remember an unusual time when the Super Nintendo eclipsed the NES in popularity; despite Nintendo’s insistence that they’d keep developing equally for the NES, it quickly became clear that their buyers didn’t want that. New games for the NES dwindled, but apparently Nintendo still wanted to push some hardware. I distinctly remember them repackaging well-known classics — like Metroid — so I got a brand-new, unused copy in, like, 1993 or ‘94 (probably the latter, since that’s when Super Metroid came out).

Point being, Metroid doesn’t hold any kind of “recaptured youth” element to me. Sure, I played it at friends’ houses and witnessed the awe-inspiring, Custer’s Revenge-like magnificence of the Justin Bailey code — but I didn’t sit there for hours trying to figure out how to beat it. Mega Man, on the other hand… It only became more infuriating when I’d beat Mega Man 2, 3, 4, 5, etc., then still go back to the first and not be able to make it to the boss on the easiest stages.

Now I’m older, wiser, and about 1% more patient — I figured, with a functional Nintendo, I could crack it.

I figured wrong. The game is a fucking nightmare.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration. In addition to being older and wiser, I’m also lazier. I set some ground rules for myself: no winning in ways that I wouldn’t have known about when I was a kid. For instance, I don’t remember the correct boss order. I could spend ages figuring it out through trial and error, but what would I have done at age eight? Talked to a friend who beat it and find out from them, or borrow a strategy guide. I don’t feel like it’s cheating Googling a walkthrough to find a good order, though I wouldn’t allow myself to look at anything other than the order (even though if I had had a strategy guide, I would have had complete maps of every stage and details on how to beat each enemy and boss).

That said, the stages are pretty easy — much easier than I remembered. I had a lot of trouble with Ice Man (that second set of randomly appearing blocks has a really hard pattern), but once I got it, it was a snap. Of course the bosses are easier; with the correct order, you kill most of them in two or three hits. So that’s all good, right?

Wrong. Remember how you’d have a good buzz going, playing some awesome game, and you’d get farther than you’d ever gotten before —

— and it’d freeze up? Yeah, that hasn’t changed. In fact, considering my console is over 20 years old (nothing on this blog has ever made me feel older than that statement, but there it is), it’s probably worse than it used to be. Without the password system implemented in the second game, you have to start all over, every single time. It’s all well and good, except if it’s going to freeze up every time, you’re screwed.

It doesn’t freeze up every time, but predicting it is an act of futility. I’ve gotten to Dr. Wily’s castle several times, but that rascally motherfucker has a torture chamber that would make Macaulay Culkin look saintly. When I finally get to that stupid rock monster, he kills me, and I’m always on my last life by that time. So then I finally found out the yellow devil/select trick to beat him — but ever since then, some kind of disaster has struck before I’ve gotten to Wily’s castle. It freezes, I get some kind of absurd RF interference from a nearby parked taxi (that really happened; my NES is kickin’ it so old-school that it’s still connected using the original RF/coax box), somebody calls and I pause the game then have to do something more productive than playing a video game…it’s a cruel mistress.

But I will not rest until I’ve beaten Mega Man, and when I do, I will feel truly unstoppable.

Posted by Stan on July 14, 2008 5:07 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Stories of Hilarity and Humiliation

July 16, 2008

Getting Shit On

For nearly a year now, I’ve been writing a weekly column about television. Similar to Zap2It’s TV Gal, but way less retarded, it’s basically an uncompromising look at the TV shows I waste my time watching. It’s not a big thing; mostly, it exists to lend enough legitimacy to myself to apply for the TCA, get in, get invited to the upfronts, then hobnob until I can get a good job and shake off the dust of this shitty review website. It’s a sound plan.

Now, I’ve mentioned this site and the occasional run-insI’ve had with the site founder, but man did he rile me up last week — and he tried again this week.

USA Network’s publicist sent me some screeners to promote the upcoming seasons of Burn Notice, Monk and Psych. Now, I’ve asked him specifically — multiple times — that anything coming his way that involves television, he can forward to me and I’ll take it. I don’t care if I’ve never seen the show before or if I’ve watched it since episode one. I’ll take a look at it and use it, in some way, in the column.

He hasn’t listened to that. At all. So I have to fight to get these screeners. It’s a little frustrating. On top of that, he doesn’t strictly want me to use these TV reviews with the column; look, at the end of the day, I’ve been doing the column for nearly a year, and he couldn’t give two shits about it. For months, he only provided one link to it, and that link directed everyone to my very first column, way back in September. I asked him repeatedly to point the links to an index page with a list of columns; he never, ever did it. I solved that problem by using the file the link did point to as the index.

Worse than that, I’ve written at least quite a few reviews, separate from my column, but in order to help him, I’ve put them into his cruddy HTML templates myself, uploaded them, then e-mailed the links, asking him to make sure to put them on the main pages. He hasn’t done this since September of last year, and I’ve written at least a half-dozen reviews since then (in fact, one of the people from a distributor recently came to me wondering where my review was; I pointed her to the review, and though she was effusive, it really pissed me off because the review was more than a month old). And it’s for this reason, and this reason alone, that I posted my Juno rant on this blog instead of his site. I wouldn’t be ashamed to put my name of it, I wouldn’t be ashamed to unleash the hate on a semi-legitimate site, especially one that has a monthly column called The Rant. But fuck it. Even if he put up a proper link to it, I’m just starting to get disillusioned by the shoddiness and the total disinterest the webmaster takes in his own site. There are certain things I get out of the site that compel me to continue doing work for it, but I’m not going to donate any unsolicited material to him. I know now that his acceptance of it means very little; he’ll post pretty much everything without question.

I needed to go into some of that background so what happened last week is perfectly clear. Per usual, I posted my weekly column — this one a special edition on Burn Notice — on Sunday, like I usually do. (Okay, on Monday but backdated to Sunday — deal with it.) To find it, all you have to do is click the link to the column, click the link on the index page that takes you to the newest one, and you’re there.

So I was a little surprised when The Webmaster e-mailed me on Tuesday evening. He was forwarding me a promotional e-mail from the publicist regarding Burn Notice, along with a sternly worded note basically telling me, “You haven’t done this, so do it ASAP.” He CC’ed it to two people from the publicity firm.

Now, I know why he did this. He wants to create the illusion that he’s a stern taskmaster, fully in charge of the site and deserving to wear the EDITOR-IN-CHIEF propellor-beanie. Although I don’t believe he had to word it quite as strongly as he did, especially since I had already written and posted it, I tried not to take offense. I wrote him back, telling him I’d done it and posted it as part of the column.

Here’s the part that pissed me off: on the rare occasions that this has happened, first of all, he hasn’t CC’ed others; secondly, I usually just send him the link and he says, “Great, thanks!” and forwards it to whoever’s asking about it. This time, he replied — again, CC’ing them, even though I hadn’t done a “reply all” — with a snippy, “We do main-page links for things like this.” Just like he does main-page links for the seven reviews I’ve written since September, right?

I wrote him back saying, “Fine, just add a direct link to the column review,” also adding that I intended to do the same thing with the following week’s reviews of Monk and Psych. (And by the way, he never added a main-page link to the review.) So what happened, a week later, when the USA publicity people sent another e-mail about the upcoming premieres of Monk and Psych? Sends me a CC’ed e-mail “reminding” me to let him know when I’ve posted the new column. The new column that I had already posted. And, again, no main-page link to it.

For me, it comes down to basic etiquette. I don’t mind people treating me like shit if I’ve done something wrong, and I fully admit that it was wrong to merely post a review of something as part of a column without telling anybody (but I felt justified because this was the only way anyone would see the review). Where my problem lies is in the lack of follow-through. The Webmaster wasn’t bitching me out because he was truly angry or annoyed; he was bitching me out so he looked good in front of those USA Network people. But what looks better? Publicly bitching at some dude they’ve never heard of because of a review he has already written, or privately saying, “Hey, did you do this?” and then just sending them back a link, and making sure to post a link from the main page.

I know I should just let shit like this roll of my back, but it bugs me, and this is my outlet for shit that bugs me. Deal with it.

Posted by Stan on July 16, 2008 5:09 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Job Shit

July 18, 2008

Flattery Will Get You Nowhere

My friend Mark usually writes horror/suspense stories. I could never write shit like that, but he does it really well. When he sends me short stories, they remind me of Night Shift-era Stephen King (and if you know King’s work, that’s pretty much the sweet spot for him in terms of quality short stories); when he sends me screenplays, they remind me of a slightly-less-schlocky Brian De Palma. The only exception to this is when he sends me comedies. He’s a really funny guy, but somehow it just doesn’t end up on the page. It’s like what happens when I try to write suspense.

Maybe it’s just a different method to the madness or something. It’s a comedy, so he’s trying to be funny, as opposed to his suspense/horror stuff, almost all of which is thoroughly entertaining and funny without feeling so…derivative. Because, to me, it looks like he just has his set of favorite comedies and is content to imitate them.

The first one sent me was a Clerks knockoff that, at least, tries to define itself by taking place in a totally different workplace environment. Unfortunately, it’s the exact same conflict (20-somethings struggling to cope with their directionless lives and learning something about themselves over the course of one crazy day; he even includes an equally unnecessary “main character gets shot” ending) and the same basic “more obscenities and pop-culture references = more funny” formula that has made Kevin Smith rich.

The second one is Office Space with a lot of tired political satire instead of sharp corporate satire. He grew up as a liberal in a rural, conservative area, and in many cases his writing seems to work out the issues he has with the ignorance and foolishness that causes the agro-poor to support the men who made them poor. It’s a fair point, but there’s always a Michael Moore-esque “preaching to the choir” mentality about it; no ignorant farmboys would go to see this movie. Only yuppie liberals who spend their weekends at the “arts cinema” would seek it out, and they’d laugh knowingly and wonder why these rednecks don’t adjust their attitudes.

When he works in a medium (gory horror) that his chosen demographic might actually watch, and the satire is a little more subtle, it’s much more effective.

So it surprised me when he sent me the first few chapters in a novel he’s started work on. I figured it’d be a long-form horror novel that I could really sink my teeth into.

It was not.

In fact, in many ways it reminded me of Juno, which is a fate worse than death. I can understand it, though; he cited Juno as one of his favorite movies of last year, and I can see Diablo Cody’s awful, blunt satire appealing to him. That’s the main problem: in the five chapters he sent, every single person is a cardboard cartoon character. The big TEEN PREGNANT-style “tackling taboo issues” portion involves a suicide-bombing at a high school, but there’s nothing close to fully realized characters and 3D shading on anybody.

On the one hand, I can see it not mattering; one of the things I like to do is portray these grossly over-the-top caricatures, then slowly ladle on the shading until they go from hilarious to tragic. So I only have 25 pages, most of which consists solely of character introductions. We learn of their ridiculousness and, one hopes, will soon learn harder truths about them.

The thing that bugs me is that he told me specifically that he was inspired by the style of my novel, Cedar Point, which he read throughout the process and gave me dynamite feedback to help with the rewrite. And I can see it, but I don’t like what I see.

In character and plot (what little there is so far), I see the repugnant stylings of Ms. Cody, but in terms of sentence-by-sentence joke-building, I see…a poor-man’s me. It’s like looking in a horrible funhouse mirror, but it makes me wonder: is this a distorted picture of what my writing looks like, or am I really bad? Is he a poor-man’s me, or has he done a spot-on job of aping my poor-man’s Raymond Chandler-cum-Woody Allen style?

It’s making me question everything: was I hard on his comedies in the past because they remind me of myself? I don’t dare ask questions that compare myself to Diablo Cody, because much as I want to say something like, “Maybe my unnatural hate of Juno comes from a secret belief that Cody’s manipulation of the system to produce an offbeat, Midwestern brand of comedy to the mainstream has ruined my chances to do the same thing,” really, at the end of the day, the movie just fucking sucks. The offbeat, Midwestern brand of comedy doesn’t involve quite so much rhyming.

I don’t know what else to say. On one hand, I’m flattered that he thinks enough of me to try to imitate my style; on the other, I can’t be objective enough about my style to know whether his imitation is so accurate I should be flattered, or so grotesque I should distance myself from him. I’ve never had to deal with something like this before. I want to be proud, but I’m mostly just embarrassed.

Posted by Stan on July 18, 2008 9:08 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Creative Works!, Friends: Can’t Live with ‘Em

July 28, 2008

Beat Mega Man

I would love to say I skipped a week of blogging because my quest to beat Mega Man had so consumed me that I sat in an obsessive daze, eyes glued to my old TV, as I endlessly and repetitively reset and played over and over and over until I crushed Dr. Wily like so many ants…

…in reality, I just beat it about five minutes ago, on a single playthrough (and a shitload of continues). The problems I had with the occasional, old-school NES freezing or the “didn’t quite blow on the cartridge hard enough” artifacting didn’t affect me this time, so I just kept going until I won, and let me tell you: Wily’s castle is fucking impossible, infinitely more difficult than the big man himself.

In fact, the reason/excuse for my absence goes a little something like this: I have a novel, and I want to be done with it. I want to be done with it so I can get the ball rolling on that fake publishing company idea and iron out all the difficulties. Look at the date on that post — it’s been over a year since I came up with the idea, and all this time I’m mainly dragging my feet because the fucking thing isn’t done. So now that things with The Big-Shot Producer have basically broken down, what am I left with? An inconsistent reader job, a drawer full scripts ranging from half- to whole-assed, and a novel that I poured — and continue to pour — far too much effort into, to make it the best thing it can possibly be.

It occurred to me that I’m past the halfway point on revising and editing the novel. It’s in better shape than I thought (there’s one major section that I will rewrite from scratch, but otherwise it’s all just nipping and tucking and proofreading), so I just wanted to keep going on it as much as possible. But something else — even stranger and, perhaps, even better — happened, something that’s never happened to me before with my own writing. Look, I wrote this novel from about November 2006 to January of 2007, and since then I’ve convinced myself I’ve been “rewriting,” even though I didn’t even look at it again until August of 2007, and then I got about a third of the way through before I got busy with work and screenplays and bullshit bullshit bullshit. So I put it aside again and picked it up in February of this year, started from the beginning, didn’t get much farther before The Big-Shot Producer came calling again, and I distracted myself with screenplays.

So I’m back on the novel, and it’s been so long since I’ve read anything beyond the first third that something miraculous and a little terrifying happened: I started to get really into the story. That’s not me trying to sound arrogant — believe me, I’m as surprised as anybody — but it shows me that I’ve written exactly the kind of novel that I like reading. Whether or not I’m the only one remains to be seen, but at the very least I can feel confident that I’ve written the very best novel I can.

I don’t know if the ruse will work or what will happen once I finish. I’m just glad it’s working.

Posted by Stan on July 28, 2008 11:51 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Random Musings

July 30, 2008

The Poochie Problem

Here’s something I can’t stand: watching a movie or television show where it occurs to you that the writers have become so enamored of a certain character, all supporting characters exist to do nothing more than talk about that character. They don’t appear to have lives of their own — from a dramatic perspective, they have no goals, no nuances, no arcs. In every scene, they offer either a plot point that will affect the central character or lines of dialogue that allow for the central character’s development. Or, even worse, they populate scenes that exist to do nothing more than talk about the main character.

I call this The Poochie Problem, for one of Homer Simpson’s suggestions for Poochie the Rockin’ Dog, the new character he voiced on The Itchy & Scratchy Show: “Whenever Poochie is not on screen, all the other characters should be asking, ‘Where’s Poochie?’” It tends to happen more frequently in television — the medium of wheel-spinning — but it also happens in plenty of movies, especially action movies and shitty comedies.

Remember how excited I got when I solved the story problems in this script? I didn’t say it at the time — partly because I couldn’t put my finger on it but mainly because I hadn’t yet come up with a cutesy name for it — but it suffers from the Poochie Problem big-time. Look at that story — it gives is three or four different characters who have nothing to do but service the guy the screenwriter obviously wanted to be the Fonzie-esque breakout character. Even worse, the protagonist exists only to talk about how hot he is for the love interest (and also to suffer through humiliating slapstick gags) and the love interest doesn’t even get that much development. It’s no surprise that my main suggestion was to give these people subplots. Make them matter to the story, or else why put them in the story?

It’s an easy trap to fall into, because oftentimes it seems like a good idea. In an action movie, for instance, there’s nearly always a scene where the villains find out just who they’re up against. This is information that’s vital to the story and the hero’s depth, but it’s also information that a hero — in the modest, taciturn tradition Americans love — would never say about himself. One of the very few ways to get this out is to have the villains learn about it. Yet, this is not just vital to us — it’s vital to those characters. You’re a villain, and you have a big chunky meathead on your submarine, blowing shit up at random and killing your men — villains in movies are often crazy, but thinking they wouldn’t want to find out who the person is and discover everything about them takes them to a level of insanity not seen since Eric Bogosian’s demented computer genius in Under Siege 2: Dark Territory — and even he wanted to know everything he could about Casey Ryback.

There are plenty of reasons to have characters talk about other characters, but there is absolutely no reason to have them do nothing else. If that statement featured too many negatives, let me put it another way: don’t not do what Donny Don’t does. Think about it this way (and bear in mind I’m not being original here, but I can’t remember which if the zillions of books on drama it comes from): every person is the hero of his or her own life. The same principle applies to movies. Every single character — from the hero to the villain to the tacked-on love interest to the bland car-rental agent who has one line on page 17 — believes they’re the hero. The villain fights just as hard to come out on top, but it’s all a matter of perspective. Taking over a Navy nuclear sub to blow up a nearby island is bad. Trying to stop the foolish American government from waging an unnecessary war is good. What if the only way to do that is to nuke an island?

Theoretically, an ethical dilemma like this is the stuff of great drama; in movies, shit blowin’ up real good is the stuff of great drama, but the dilemma still needs to be there. If you can’t come up with a better reason than, “Um… ‘Cause the hero’s gotta fight someone,” congratulations! You have failed.

I think every screenwriter stumbles on this problem at some point, or maybe it only happens to really hacky people like me. I wrote a script once where two supporting characters turned out to be romantically linked for no other reason than to throw the main character into an effeminate tizzy. It was planned from the outline stage, but it really had no reason for being: neither of these characters seemed like they’d ever get involved, and neither had any rationale (up to and including “love”) for getting together. It was just a giant monkey wrench thrown in front of the main character’s kneecaps.

When I revised it, knowing full well that this problem marred an otherwise decent story, I realized what I had to do: make these characters despicable. Okay, that might sound a little extreme; I merely rewrote the woman as a power-addicted she-beast* and rewrote the man as a serial womanizer with some deadly plans in store for her. Yes, I admit it: I have issues with manipulation, but it’s not just limited to women. It just makes more story sense, in this example, for the woman to be the thinks-she’s-manipulating-when-really-she’s-being-manipulated character rather than the man. I do not hate women! Stay in school!

So there you go: an easy problem to fall into, but one with an equally easy solution. Just realize that every time you put a person into the script, they’re as real as anyone you might pass on a busy street. Their lives might mean nothing to you, but they all have their own shit going on, and knowing all that shit helps you create unique situations instead of clichés.

*Please do not misconstrue this as misogyny. Remember the part where each character is the hero of his or her own story? Her goals just happen to be unfortunate, petty, and power-obsessed, which leads to some wacky irony when she goes from the controller to the controlled. Man, I am not digging myself out of the misogyny hole, am I?

Posted by Stan on July 30, 2008 11:51 AM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)  | Career-Based Rambling, How Not to Write a Screenplay