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Career-Based Rambling Archives

June 6, 2010

Collaborative Effort

Here’s the problem: I’m an impatient, impulsive person. Stories come to me in two different ways: in a slow trickle, or a Niagara Falls-like gush. The slow trickle, for me, isn’t even that slow — a number of disparate ideas will enter my brain over the course of a few months, and I’ll realize these pieces form a single, cohesive story. That’s usually how stories and characters come to me, which is handy because I’ll usually be working on something else, so I’ll be jotting down notes for the next project. Maybe that’s just a short attention span working for me instead of against me.

By necessity, I’ll let that story germinate until it’s ready to be written. I hate writing things like that. Hell, I hate writing anything about my creative process because (a) everyone’s process slightly different, so there’s no real advice or insight there, and (b) every time I write something about “letting a story germinate,” I feel like such a pretentious asshole. At any rate, it’s easy to let the slow trickle story rest, because plowing headlong into a story that’s not fully formed is a recipe for disaster. The gusher is totally different — for me, it’s like trying to capture lightning in a bottle. When an idea comes to me that complete, I have to capitalize on it as quickly as possible before my aforementioned short attention span causes me to lose interest and start working on something else.

I guess you could call this “inspiration.” The story drops in my lap, and I crank out a draft in a week or two (as opposed to the story taking a few months to figure out, then taking another month on a first draft), and believe it or not, these first drafts usually turn out as good as a third or fourth draft of the “slow trickle” stories.

Why does any of this matter, and what does it have to do with my impatience? Let’s set the wayback machine for February. Amelia, one of my pals at Murdstone & Grinby, made a dubious claim: “I’m going to write a romantic comedy.” This claim has a number of problems associated with it: (1) although his favorite movie of 2009 was Easy Virtue (I wish I was kidding, especially now that I’ve seen Easy Virtue), Murdstone has never produced anything even close to a romantic comedy; (2) although she’s sorta funny, Amelia has never written a comedy; (3) maybe I shouldn’t say this, even keeping her real identity a secret, but it’s relevant: Amelia has never been in anything resembling a relationship; and (4) as a result of this lack of experience, Amelia has decided to take the robotic, logical approach to love: it’s the result of a combination of chemicals that fade over time, so why bother giving in to it? I’m not kidding — when Assistant Jim announced he was getting married, she scoffed, “The average relationship only lasts four years. Know why? Because love is just a bunch of chemicals that get people to have sex, and those chemicals wear off after four years.” Which is an awesome theory if not for the fact that an “average” includes relationships that last 80 years and relationships that last three months (I’m going to go ahead and assume it doesn’t include three-day weekend sex romps, which aren’t really relationships — there has to be some mild level of commitment before it fails).

After her proclamation, I said, “That’ll be an interesting change of pace.”

“Stan,” she said, “you’ve written romantic comedies. Would you mind if I ran some ideas by you? I have a few rom-com —” God, do I hate that term — “ideas, so I need some help narrowing them down.”

“Sure,” I said, always willing to help out a writer in need.

She pitched me six ideas. Four of the six were rooted in goofy fantasy — and I’m not talking about “this relationship is far-fetched,” I’m talking about gypsy curses as the inciting incident — which I automatically dismissed because, I dunno, that’s as interesting to me as a judge sentencing a couple to stay married for 30 days. The circumstances that force the relationship to exist are needlessly convoluted and impossible to believe. Maybe that’s a nugget of advice: if you can’t think of a non-supernatural explanation for your couple to be together, maybe you shouldn’t be writing a romantic comedy. As a contrary example, The Purple Rose of Cairo, probably my favorite romantic comedy of all time, hinges on a fantastical turn of the plot. The difference there is that Woody Allen has fun with the fantasy element. Most of these romantic comedies use fantasy to start off their story, but then it doesn’t mean anything to the story itself. With the exception of the inciting incident (and usually some lame machinations in the third act, because the writers finally remember that supernatural element from the beginning), the story is played straight. As opposed to, say, a fictional character taking a real-life woman to a fancy restaurant, then trying to pay with a wad of stage money, then trying to flee in a car that he can’t start because “in the movie, it’s always going.” God, I love that movie.

So the two non-fantastical ideas were okay, I thought. One would have followed a character who uses romance novels to woo women, but when he meets a “tough nut to crack,” he’s forced to befriend a famous romance novelist, whose new book features a similar tough nut. (Originally, I hated this idea, but it occurred to me there’s a lot of comedic potential to the idea of showing a woman’s realistic, terrified reaction when presented with a “romance novel” situation in real life.) The one I told her to go with was, I felt, the one she felt the most passionate about, just based on the way she described it. It’s basically a remake of It Happened One Night featuring a Rolling Stone reporter and an American Idol winner. Through convoluted circumstances, they have to get across the country so he can launch his tour. They hate each other, but they fall in love. It’s not art, but it takes a classic storyline and a simple conflict that allows for characters and a relationship to develop. To quote something I read a few days ago on an old Christopher Lockhart post, “Simple done well is better than complex done poorly.”

Things went awry almost immediately. See, Amelia thought maybe we should base the American Idol character on a modernized take on John Lennon. When she tried to hash out the story with me, it suffered from an extreme lack of conflict, because she refused to portray “John” as having any flaws. I have a lot of theories on how romantic comedies should work, and maybe I’m full of shit, but one of the most important ones is that both characters need to have big flaws that the eventual partner can complement. If he’s portrayed as St. John, the journalist looks like a bitch for hating him. I thought maybe some comedy could be mined from an irrational hatred of a comically nice guy, but that’s really hard to pull off when she’s supposed to be the protagonist.

So she hit on another idea: what if it’s about a journalist and a Ringo-inspired character? Amelia thinks Ringo’s a tool, a hanger-on who just follows his bandmate around without contributing anything to his success. Maybe, she thought, in the context of this script, the journalist could get stuck with the dorky “Ringo” character and not “John” himself.

And that’s when the story dropped in my lap. Yes, she came up with the premise, but the moment she said that, everything clicked into place. It’s like when you get lost, then you finally turn down a street you recognize, and you’re not lost anymore. I knew the exact route to take, but… It wasn’t my story. When she, after discussing the story with me for a couple of days, begged me to punch up the dialogue when she finished the draft, I readily agreed. I wanted to collaborate on this story, because I knew how to make it good. Plus, if she let me develop the story with her, I could push her in the right directions. That’s the thing about punching up dialogue: if the story’s not situationally funny, no amount of amusing dialogue can fix that. She’s not a comedy writer, so she doesn’t know how to structure scenes (or even overall stories) in a comedic way.

I know this makes me sound like an arrogant dick. I don’t think I’m the funniest guy alive, but I’ve been writing comedy almost exclusively for over a decade, and I’m not just writing in a vacuum. Not everything works, but in general, I know how to get laughs, and I know how to structure a story in a way that maximizes comedy. People who haven’t developed these skills just can’t pull it off. I know: I’ve read a lot of comedies by people who gleefully announce they’ve never written one before, and it’s always a disaster, even if they’re funny people who enjoy comedy films. It’d be the equivalent of me deciding I can win the Indy 500 because I’m a good driver. I can drive, but I have no specific training in racing. You can’t win on cursory knowledge and enthusiasm, no matter how good your instincts are. This might sound contrary to my usual “all you need to do to write a good script is to watch a lot of great movies and read a couple of good books on the screenwriting craft” advice. I guess it’s a corollary: you can write a good script based mostly on instinct (but let’s not forget the value of reading a couple of screenwriting books), maybe even a great one, but it takes a lot more skill and experience to master a particular genre. And I say that as someone who hasn’t even come close to mastering a genre.

Hey, earlier I had some kind of point. Ah, yes. I was pushing Amelia in a certain direction because she doesn’t know how to structure comedic scenes or a comedic story, so I wanted to minimize the frustration (for both of us) by having to just rewrite everything the way I wanted it. I was trying to play it subtly, nudging her so she felt like she came up with the ideas on her own and I was just there for moral support. Maybe that’s a dick move, but it felt nicer than just saying, “You need to do this, this, and this, and if you don’t, this script will fail.”

After really getting thorough on the story over the course of a weekend, on Sunday afternoon, she gleefully announced she was off to write. A few hours later, she e-mailed me the first seven pages.

Every single page was backstory. I’m not kidding. Yes, we hashed out the backstory of the characters, but it never occurred to me that she’d open the story six months before it actually begins to set everything up. I read them and said, “Okay, I’m not 100% sure we’re on the same page here, so what I’m going to do is write up an outline of everything we talked about, so we both know exactly what story we’re trying to tell. You go through it and argue with me and make changes or add anything you think I missed.” She said, “Okay.”

It took the rest of the evening, but I had a solid nine-page outline. It explained, in detail, why these scenes needed to be structured in this way, how they develop the story and characters, etc. It reminded me a little of John Hughes’s scriptment for Home Alone, where he spelled everything out in blunt terms to accommodate his eight-year-old star. It felt really condescending, but it seemed clear to me that Amelia was going along with the story I was shepherding without exactly understanding why these choices were being made, and all she wanted to do is write a script about John Lennon, full of heart-shaped doodles and variations of “Amelia Lennon” written in the margins. In my conception of the story, “John” is a MacGuffin who drives certain aspects of the plot but really doesn’t figure much as a character.

She took a look at the outline, said, “Wow, this is great,” then set off to work on more pages. We agreed that she’d write the first draft, and I’d polish it into a funny script. On Monday, she told me she’d have the first act done and e-mail it first thing Tuesday morning. I was pleased, because typically Amelia is an extremely slow writer. I thought maybe the fact that she had a solid outline to work with gave her the confidence to work more quickly than usual. Maybe I should have taken it as a sign when she complained that she “can’t write banter” and that she left several of the opening scenes “blank” for me to fill in with banter.* When the pages finally arrived at around 2 p.m. on Tuesday (maybe that’s “first thing in the morning” in her world?), there were…four of them. I may not be an expert on screenwriting, but I do know that first acts are usually longer than four pages.

This was not because she left everything blank for me to write. It’s because she just wrote two or three early scenes, and that was it. A couple of weeks passed where she just stopped working altogether. She talked a little about it after sending me those four pages, but before long she stopped even doing that. Had the project died before a first draft was finished? I didn’t want to be the sort of dick who browbeats people — I figured, if she wasn’t going to write it, I might as well write it myself rather than force her to do everything exactly the way I wanted anyway.

She had a self-imposed deadline looming: Murdstone takes a pile of scripts with him on plane trips. This is the only time he actually reads scripts himself, but he doesn’t take many plane trips. Cannes was approaching, and Amelia wanted a decent completed draft so she could toss it on his pile. This meant we had to have it done before work ramped up in anticipation of Cannes. She only works on a temporary basis, during “busy” times, so she wanted it done by the time she went back. That didn’t happen, but she didn’t seem particularly concerned, even though she announced to Murdstone the day she came back, “Stan and I are working on a romantic comedy.” To my surprise (and hers, as well), this actually excited Murdstone. He’d read Amelia’s previous script and said something fairly generic like, “The writing is strong, but it’s not my cup of tea.” Apparently he meant that, because the idea of her writing in a more commercial genre thrilled him. He was very excited to read it, and assured her he’d read it on the plane.

This meant we had a new deadline: get it done by the time he leaves. Yet, she wasn’t writing.

“Fuck it,” I said. “I’m already getting distracted with new ideas. I need to get this down on paper. I won’t even tell her about it — I don’t want to steal her thunder. I’ll wait for her to finish her draft, see how well it matches up with mine, make a few changes, and give mine to her as the ‘polished’ draft.” And I started writing. And had a finished draft four days later. Not fantastic, mind you, but a solid start, and certainly better than the combined total of 11 pages Amelia had sent me. Amelia’s actually lucky the volcano fucked everything up temporarily — I did not have nearly as many scripts to read as I usually do this time of year, which sucked for me financially but was great in the sense that I had free time to work on the script.

The week before the deadline, Amelia finally admitted she hadn’t been working on the script because she was depressed. She didn’t tell me what it was about, but I could take a guess (realizing it’s harder to write a romantic comedy without experiencing romance than it is to write a serial killer thriller without having killed a bunch of people, perhaps?). So I took a gamble: presenting my finished draft would either upset her further, or it’d allow her to breathe a huge sigh of relief — again, not a perfect script, but at least there’s something there to work with. I told her about it, and I’m convinced she lied about her reaction. She said it overwhelmed her and surprised her, but she was relieved. She did sound overwhelmed, but she didn’t sound relieved. She sounded a little pissed that I’d stolen her thunder, which was exactly my fear.

You might be wondering why I did this — why I wrote the draft, why I presented it to her, etc. Much as I’d love to keep rambling about “lightning in a bottle,” I had an ulterior motive. If nothing was riding on this script, I would have just written my draft to get it out of my system and then put it aside. We had a tenuous deadline that could either mean nothing or everything: Murdstone would read it, love it, and want to buy it, or he’d read it, love it, and work his ass off to help us get an agent, and suddenly we’d be stuck as writing partners working on romantic comedies. I could think of worse fates, but I’m guessing Amelia couldn’t. Nevertheless, this is what she wanted: a commercial script that would impress Murdstone enough to stick his neck out for us. I can’t wait for life to happen. I need to make shit happen, and this was an opportunity. If Amelia was going to spend five years writing this script, like she spent five years writing her last script, I was not interested in hitching my wagon to that horse. I’d rather her be a little pissed but realize how much I saved her ass than just not do anything and hope she pulled a script out of her ass before the deadline.

Amelia read the script, said she had to excuse herself from the office several times because it made her laugh so hard, and although she had “a few” notes, she thought it was a solid draft and would spend the rest of the week “editing,” at which point we’d argue it all out and come up with a compromise-based draft to submit to Murdstone. Then, Murdstone announced — surprisingly apologetically — that, because of the volcano, work was mounting, and he’d have to finish it on the plane instead of his usual routine of reading scripts. I did not witness this, but Amelia described him as sounding genuinely upset, which is really surprising if you know him (P.S.: he’s a dick). She runs the office while everyone else is off in France, so he told her to leave a copy on his desk the Friday before he comes back, and he’ll read it. The following day, he told her to schedule a meeting for one week after his return, so we can have a meeting about the script.

“What the hell is going on?” I thought, shocked at how seriously he was taking Amelia. I read her script: it’s good, but it’s not that good.

Because of the delay in the deadline, Amelia naturally delayed her “editing.” I was sort of dreading it. I don’t mind getting notes and then taking them back and incorporating the ones I like but throwing away the ones I don’t. This was different — I’d be expected to incorporate all of her ideas, and although I hadn’t heard any of them, she did tell me one frightening thing: she wanted to trim out the dialogue to keep it under 100 pages. The draft was a solid (maybe a little bloated) 118 pages, but here’s the thing: it’s a screwball comedy. I know that film is a visual medium — and don’t worry, I put in a lot of broad physical schtick and visual puns — but screwball comedies live and die on their dialogue. In a screwball comedy, the characters’ personalities are defined as much through what they say (and how they say it) as what they do. I knew there was material to trim and revise — I’d already been regretting a couple of choices I’d made, and simply cutting them would have freed up at least five pages — but I really couldn’t see us getting it down to 100 pages without turning the characters into what I rather harshly described as “exposition-dispensing robots rather than human beings having conversations.” Half the character and comedy was rooted in the dialogue, so chopping things or rewriting them to rob them of all personality or rhythm would pretty much ruin the script.

And that’s when Amelia launched into the “general” notes. This was just last week. Because there was so much, she decided to separate the “general” notes from the nitpicky notes. About 90% of the general notes were “Add, add, add.” The other 10% were “change.” What the hell was she planning on cutting, if she wanted to take a 118-page script and add at least 10 pages to it?

As a last-ditch effort, I spent Thursday revising the script based on those notes. To be fair, I did like many of her suggestions — but some I hated, and hated them even more when her only defense for them was, “All romantic comedies have [insert irritatingly cliché-based scene].” So I took our conversation on Instant Messenger, streamlined the notes, and ordered them based on priority — stuff that was essential to the script, down to stuff that I both hated and deemed unnecessary. I also trimmed out as much unnecessary dialogue as I could find, and attempted a variation on cheating the margin by rewriting certain lines of dialogue and action to keep them from carrying over to the next line. The end result was a stronger 113-page script. I also wrote a long e-mail defending my decisions to not incorporate some of the ideas. She accused me of being angry about things collapsing with Dentist Chick (short version: she had a boyfriend, but was still more than willing to go out with me — I’ve been down that road many times, so it’s time to break that fucking pattern) rather than simply not liking the goddamn ideas. Man, is that annoying.

I also included a passionate defense of the dialogue, but it didn’t move her. On Friday, after I stalled her for days with (legitimate but solvable) cell phone problems, I’d been backed into a corner. I already regret that decision. If we’d done it earlier, we wouldn’t have come up on the deadline, but look: she has this obsession with doing notes over the phone, which makes zero sense to me in an age of e-mail and IM. We’re writing shit down, so I see no purpose in describing over the phone what needs to be changed or cut, when it could just be written into an IM window and pasted into the script. I’ve tried to convince her of this in the past, but she insists on doing things over the phone. So, because I kept putting it off, we ended up staying up until 4 a.m. working on the changes.

I don’t want to say she tricked me, but initially her dialogue cuts didn’t seem too bad. Better than that, she’d come up with a few additional ideas that I really thought were great. It put me in a better mood, and I was happy to keep working — so happy, I didn’t realize she was slowly stripping the edginess and satire out of the script.

See, I have this thing… Why bother writing a fucking story if you’re not going to say anything more interesting than, “Aww, these two people fell in love”? I thought American Idol was the perfect metaphor to make a rather harsh (and, let’s be honest, fairly unoriginal) statement about pop music. Maybe I’m a dick, but I don’t care if she wanted it to be about American Idol discovering a latter-day John Lennon — I see that show as a shortcut. Ambitious, hard-working musicians don’t need a karaoke contest to find success. (And if you’re thinking it’s hypocritical to go for screenwriting contests while saying American Idol is a waste of space — in the first place, I’m not a big fan of contests, but even if I were, you have to contribute something resembling a personal artistic statement to screenwriting contests. Even if you’re just writing some hackneyed shit to make money, a part of you believes in the story, even if all you believe is “it’s commercial.” What do American Idol contestants contribute, creatively? Other than a hard-luck story that’s largely made up by the producers, they just do bland renditions of other people’s songs, “owning” it by adding a bunch of shitty Mariah Carey vocal runs. Is it any surprise that they’re beloved when doing karaoke but fall flat on their asses when singing awful songs written by even worse record producers?) Wow, I hope you enjoyed that mini-rant, because I just lost my train of thought. Yeah, so the script ultimately turns into an indictment of big media conglomerates owning both news and entertainment outlets. The line blurs, so the main character (who is shown as passionate about music and disdainful of the American Idol/pop music assembly line) thinks she’s going to submit this tough exposé about what a sham it all is, when she learns her magazine is owned by the same media conglomerate that owns our American Idol surrogate. She has a choice: resign, or keep going with an article that humiliates the man she’s fallen in love with. Guess which one she chooses?

More than anything else, her character arc hinges on that scene. To some extent, so does the plot. It’s the moment where this hard-nosed career woman realizes everything she’s been working for is a lie, and the choice she makes shows how far she’s come. Her job no longer matters to her — he matters. Yes, it’s trite. Yes, it’s pat. But to quote Amelia, “All romantic comedies are trite and pat.” At least there’s some grim corporate satire, which I have decided is commercially viable in our current state of economic disarray.

“We don’t need that scene,” Amelia said. “It’s long and it doesn’t really accomplish that much. Besides, she goes and meets the love interest and explains every single thing that happens in the scene.”

My take: “I’d rather go back and work on making her dialogue with the love interest less redundant.” There’s a little rule of screenwriting called “show, don’t tell.” What she wanted to do was write a brief scene leading up to the main event, then cut to her explaining what happened to the love interest. No main event. I get the idea, and I’ve seen that sort of thing in movies, but all it says to me is “tell, tell, tell.” She’s explaining what she’s going to do, then she’s explaining what she did. Isn’t it more interesting and dramatic to see her doing it? It’s a long scene because it’s basically the moment the narrative and character arcs collide. She’s tested with a decision that will show the audience whether or not this experience, or her feelings, has changed her in any way, and — yes! It did! Huzzah, she can be taught! So why excise it?

I sat there, in dead silence, for about 10 minutes, contemplating, rereading that scene, reconsidering everything we’d changed and everything we had yet to change, realizing it was 3 a.m. and my fight was gone. All her dialogue edits had dulled the edges. The satirical content had turned into a basic Scooby Doo-esque “overhear shady producers laughing as the plot the demise of their latest Idol. The Big Scene no longer fit, and we didn’t have the time to work on it until it did fit. Besides that, I liked too many of the other changes to say, “Let’s go back and reinsert all the hostile, satirical humor to justify this scene.” So, ultimately, Amelia was right, but she was the architect of her own righteousness. I felt duped, but it’s my own fault. I could have argued more about keeping the dialogue. Part of the problem is with me: I just wanted to get it over with. Part of the problem is with her: I sort of hate to admit it, but she’s a captivating speaker who’s incredibly self-assured despite not really knowing what she’s talking about. The sort of person who can lead 10,000 men into battle without having a plan, so they end up resembling an electric football set. (Yes, I’m that old, or maybe just that poor. Also, I have The Simpsons to remind me of my horrible childhood toys.)

I did go on record as saying I hated this change, and the first thing we’d need to address in the rewrite is making it a dramatic confrontation instead of a series of bland “tell, don’t show” scenes. But we we were gaining daylight (by the time I went to bed, I was annoyed because the rising sun was creeping through the sides of my window shade), so we didn’t have the time to argue about it or rewrite it as something retarded. It was bad writing, but for the moment, it was easier just to cut it.

I still hate the change, but I have to admit, the script turned out better than I expected. It’s not what I’d call good. If they started shooting the script we submitted tomorrow, I’d toss around phrases like “mildly amusing” and “relentlessly mediocre” while hoping the actors’ chemistry redeems what doesn’t work on the page. Again, I fall back on my general philosophy that a script should be required to say something about the human condition or the state of society. If you don’t think a romantic comedy can sustain such high ideals, let me point you back to The Purple Rose of Cairo, or Defending Your Life or The Hammer**. I got depressed over the weekend and watched a bunch of movies I love. Those were three of them, and in all cases, I just kept thinking, “This is what our script needs to be.” But the more depressing thought is: That’s what it was, until that Friday night note session. (Not that I’m comparing the quality — just the fact that it conforms to the romantic comedy genre while attempting to say something insightful about the state of things.)

As I view it, our collaboration is over. I don’t hold out much hope that Murdstone will like the script. Maybe this is crazy — after all, he did love Easy Virtue — but I’d like to think he has slightly higher standards. He won’t buy the script, he won’t help us in any way, so to that end, what’s the point of continuing to work on the script? At the end of the day, Amelia and I wanted to tell two completely different stories. It frustrates me because, I realized, she never read that nine-page outline I sent her six weeks ago. It’s not just that she had problems with what’s on the page — it’s that she didn’t seem to know why it was on the page, which is all explained in the outline.

Look, I’d love nothing more than to fall on my sword and say, “Yes, I wrote a script in four days, and it sucked. It didn’t make any sense, so it needed all the changes Amelia suggested and I was crazy to think my version could work.” However, I sent it to two readers who have never led me astray, and they had some good notes but deemed it pretty solid. So I get confused and annoyed when the end result is a worse product. I understand that this is a business that’s interested in making money. I just don’t understand why peddling a shitty product is the only way to make money. And when Murdstone says, “Nobody will want to see this crappy script” while suggesting a number of changes that previously existed in the script, maybe I’ll be proved right. Or maybe not, if his chief complaint is that it’s still too cynical.

Update: I wrote this post over two weeks ago, but I wasn’t sure about posting it. As of Thursday, the verdict is in: Amelia texted me that Murdstone read the script. However, while she’s convinced herself that both he and Assistant Jim loved it, everything she told me is contradictory: he found it “impressive” and “very well put together,” but he won’t reach out to any agents he knows to help us get it read. He considers the storyline — which, I’ll remind you, combines the frequently abused It Happened One Night storyline and a satire-free homage to American Idol, the most popular television show in the fucking world — “of limited appeal and not terribly commercial,” but in the same breath he says the script is “ready to be shopped around.”

There are ways to interpret the seeming contradictions in a positive way. For instance, maybe what he meant about it not being commercial yet ready to be shopped around is that it’d be good as a writing sample, but it’ll never get made). The positive takes are optimistic at best. I know everyone in Hollywood is a pussy and afraid to admit anything is good (yet, ironically, they’re all pretty okay with turning horrible scripts into worse movies), but people don’t say, “Wow! Impressive! Anyone would want to snatch this up… Except me and everyone I’m on good terms with, so you’re on your own.” I really think he was just trying to politely (and, let’s face it, generically) compliment the script while shoving a little bit of realism down Amelia’s throat. Message received on my end, but as I said, she’s convinced he loved it.

After I groused with a lot of (justified, I think) pessimism, she IM’ed me today saying, “Just re-read our script. I’m pretty damn proud of it.” More pessimism: I tried to re-read the script earlier this week and got so angry at the first three pages that I had to stop. Yes, I agreed to the cuts she wanted. It’s my fault for trying to compromise. I know this. But the fact remains: even the cuts I deemed “not so bad” really kill the flow. I want the characters — even the minor ones, who only appear very briefly in the script — to breathe a little and feel as much like real people as a character who’s only in four scenes can. Is that so wrong? And all of that is gone. It’s exactly what I said I didn’t want to happen: they’ve turned into exposition-spewing robots instead of humans having conversations. Worse than that, Amelia added a joke that is sort of funny — but at the expense of our protagonist’s intelligence. It’s exactly what I frequently rail against when I examine comedy scripts: no internal logic.

I know it’s my fault for giving up and not arguing with the appropriate level of passion and gusto. I can’t say I’m proud of the script we submitted. I wish I could.

*Maybe I’m alone, but I’ve never been able to write a script this way. I think — but I can’t really remember, so I can’t dig up any evidence to back myself up — some people say it’s okay to skip past a difficult-to-write scene and continue with the story. Maybe it’s okay for one scene, but look at it this way: if the scene isn’t easy to write, that probably means it’s important. If it’s important, doesn’t it seem like a bad idea to gloss over something that sets up the scenes you’re skipping to? I don’t know about you, but when I write an outline — even this solid, nine-page outline — I end up deviating from it.

I know I’ll sound like Captain Pretentious here, but when my characters actually start interacting at a human level (rather than the general overview of an outline), things change. My conception of them and their interactions change, and that, in turn, changes the story. Maybe in small, subtle ways — or maybe I have to stop and completely change the outline. If you skip over a scene and come back to it later, you’re stuck. You can’t let the characters surprise you in the scene, because it’s gone from a pivotal scene to something to bridge the gap between Scenes A-D and Scenes F-L. If you follow the natural pull of the characters, you’ll just have to rewrite Scenes F-L, anyway — or you’ll end up with a dull Scene E. [Back]

**This is a great romantic comedy from 2008 starring former Loveline host and current podcast kingpin Adam Carolla. It’s mistakenly marketed as a sports movie, I assume to bring in Carolla’s Man Show audience. It operates on both levels, but it has a lot more in common with Annie Hall than Rocky, and I mean that in a good way. More people should see this movie. [Back]

Posted by Stan on June 6, 2010 10:17 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

December 5, 2009

Suspicious Script

Last week, I read a script that made me a tad uncomfortable. It attempted, very ineptly, to capitalize on the recent-but-not-as-recent-as-the-writer-thinks poker craze. I don’t claim to be a cigar-chomping cardsharp, but I know this: a 52-card deck does not contain any “1” cards. That’s more than the writer of this script, who explains that an “Ace is the best card you can get. Then it’s King, Queen, Jack, Ten, Nine, Eight…down to One, usually.” Usually.

Several things got my gears going as I read this script. First: I received it the day before Thanksgiving. Usually, the Murdstone & Grinby Company is shuttered for the whole holiday week (plus the Monday after), so getting a script during an unofficial coverage dead zone concerned me. Also irritated me, because while the extra cash is nice, it’s still the day before Thanksgiving, and I’m fucking lazy.

Second: something about it felt off, in an indefinable way. Sure, it had the same very definable problems from which other scripts suffer (notably one-dimensional characters and a nonsensical third act), but something about the diction didn’t feel right. It felt less like a dramatic work than a loudmouth guy at the end of the bar saying, “Hey, buddy. Yeah, you — you know what’d be a good idea for a movie?” before elucidating a ramshackle stream-of-consciousness narrative that felt more like a working-class fever dream than a piece of writing. I don’t just mean it had a conversational style. The only thing separating it from the guy at the end of the bar was a lot of “No, no — just hear me out” asides. ‘Twas a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Emphasis on the “idiot” part.

I read through the script, then went back over it to craft yet another tedious synopsis and felt repulsed all over again. It felt more like the shit I used to read for The Manager than anything I’ve read for Murdstone, and I’ve read a lot of crap. The fact that it sold and was most likely a go picture (as are the bulk of the scripts I read) alarmed me.

I couldn’t help thinking, though. I know it’s a problem, and I’m working through it with a certified mental health professional. Last time a script really bugged me, I discovered a few months later that it was not, in fact, a go picture; rather, Murdstone wanted to produce it and kept taking meetings with the writer (who also wanted to direct), much to the consternation of Amelia. She found him as annoying as a person as I did as a writer. Once she read the script (which I politely and secretly e-mailed to her), we both agreed we’d hitched our sails on a sinking ship and had either bite down on cyanide capsules or find a rescue boat before they went ahead with this steaming pile. (Semi-amusing postscript: during my crisis regarding this script, Amelia told me for the first time that Murdstone & Grinby paid me for my coverage, then turned around and hired one of their other readers to manufacture a more enthusiastic response instead of crapping all over it.)

So what if this arbitrary script and its arbitrary timing occurred because Murdstone & Grinby had wild hairs up their ass about this poker script? They needed to know before the holiday whether or not this would be the perfect project to set up after their shitty sci-fi project.

Then, my pondering got even weirder. See, Jim (my boss at the company) had given his notice, effective sometime before Christmas. He had no savings or other job prospects, but he’s decided he wants to chillax and focus more on his writing. I’ve heard tale of everyone from assistants to CEOs submitting their own scripts to readers under assumed names — in this case, a script that contained the default Final Draft title page, with none of the information filled out — so they can get honest feedback. Then, they fire the reader if he or she shits all over it.

Amelia had quite a strong opinion about Jim’s writing ability, so I considered the possibility that he had written this script himself (most likely in crayon, with a typist entering it into Final Draft) and submitted it to me because he trusted my cantankerous opinion. In my mind, it made a small amount of sense. If nothing else, it explained the slipshod “first draft by an utter novice” vibe of the piece.

Before writing the notes, I called her for a consult: did she know if they wanted to produce a poker-themed movie, and/or had Jim dropped any hints that he was hard at work on a horrible poker-themed project?

Holy fuck was she pissed. I inadvertently walked into a steaming pile of my own. See, she has a strong opinion about Jim’s writing talent, but apparently in the past few weeks, Jim has developed a strong opinion about hers. She recently finished a script, one of those “pet projects” that she’d spent so much time developing, she’d been hyping it since the day she started at Murdstone. She finally finished it, then polished it into a “Draft 1.5”-type thing, then sent it out to people she trusted — among them, myself and Jim.

I read it, but I had a pretty good idea of what to expect: a typical, problematic first draft with a lot of good ideas buried underneath crap. Jim had never read any of Amelia’s previous work, nor had he listened to her wax on about craft or cinema history or any of the other crap I have. He got nothing but the hype, for five years, and much like Tucker Max fans, he found himself disappointed by the end result.

Hasn’t every writer had at least one experience like this? You meet somebody who’s so articulate, so bright, and so capable, you automatically assume they have the talent to back it up. Then you read something less-than-stellar, and you can’t help it if your respect for them diminishes. I know I’ve had a few of these moments, and it gets easier as you realize how easy it is for smart, knowledgeable people to pump out crap in the early stages. Most people do. When it blindsides you, and maybe especially when someone has spent five years hyping the project, during which time she would have presumably worked all the shitty drafts out of her system, I can understand why Jim would react the way he did.

So how did he react? Well, at work he froze her out completely, ignoring her as much as humanly possible for a week, blocking her from Instant Messenger at home, and apparently not sending her this poker shit. See, part of the reason the “vacation” timing puzzled me is because it’s pretty common for Murdstone to get scripts during time off — but they almost always go to Amelia, whose turnaround is slower than, say, me.

Amelia quickly assuaged my fears about the development possibilities of the script, and especially about the possibility of Jim writing this script (“No way in hell has he ever finished a script!”), but she derailed the conversation by focusing on her fear that she’s being phased out of the company. It may not have anything to do with the reaction of her screenplay, she posited. Murdstone is in trouble, and despite having more seniority than someone like me, she also has less value. Not to me, but to the people at the company, who take her for granted.

I happen to think she’s overreacting, but who knows? With Jim leaving, they’ve brought in a replacement Amelia fears may hate her. Getting squeezed out may have more to do with this than the company’s alleged economic woes. If she gets canned, I lose my inside wo(man), which means I’ll never see it coming if I’m next. The only solution, to quote Roseanne, is to suck up at the speed of light.

This, I can do.

Anticlimactic postscript: I sent the coverage, received no enraged complaints or firings, got more scripts on Monday, got the check yesterday, deposited it today. Good times.

Posted by Stan on December 5, 2009 5:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

June 5, 2009

Line-Jumping

The past month should have been agonizing, but frankly, both of my shitty jobs kept me too busy for me to stay in suspense about my imminent career launch. Also, I made a conscious effort not to think of it, on account of knowing (a) I did not submit my absolute best work, and (b) I could generously estimate the chances of success at one in a million. At the end of the day, I have no qualifications other than scripts, and scripts aren’t enough.

Mitch Michaels called last night. Sounding thoroughly nonplussed, he said, “There’s a lot to like, but it’s just too fucking dark.” I can’t say it surprised me, considering he had the exact same reaction to the feature script based on this character. I’ve always had a particular fondness for entertainment that seamlessly combines raucous comedy with brutal drama, and I thought maybe a fringe cable outlet would be more willing to embrace this than the Big Four. Of course, maybe they would, but I’ll never know because the production company rejected it without anyone at the channel knowing of its existence.

Mitch brought up other factors. He didn’t have any hard numbers — why bother, since he was rejecting me — but just from reading it, he decided it’d cost too much. He’s probably not wrong, but remember I didn’t write this with a budget in mind. Hell, I didn’t write it with an audience in mind, other than myself. These scripts were really… I don’t even know what they were anymore. If I really doubted their commercial prospects, I would have continued writing them as publicly accessible blog posts instead of private teleplays. I could call them an exercise or a pipe dream, but if I look a little deeper, I can’t deny it: I hoped that, someday, I’d gain enough respect/clout to make my depraved vision of rock-star decadence a reality.

At best, I can say now’s not the time. I have no clout or respect — hell, I couldn’t even get Mitch to say this stuff was good enough for him to consider me for the staff of whatever show he does try to get on the air. He’s just given me the world’s softest “no,” three times in a row. I guess it’s time to take the hint. Especially when he pointed out a few easy-to-remedy problems but made no suggestion that we take time to develop the material into something this channel would buy.

There is one plus side, though. It’s partly the reason for this post (the other part is to update you on the tragic conclusion to last month’s misguided optimism). I think people — both in and out of the business — spend far too much time terrifying newbies into thinking one false move will get them blacklisted for all eternity. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve read panic-stricken accounts of meeting executives and blowing their One Big Shot. Hell, I even wrote one.

I won’t say it’s not true that you can screw yourself, quite easily, with false moves and misguided statements. I know the movie business is built on passive-aggressive behavior, but I sincerely believe two things: (1) if my writing really sucked, Mitch would have told me not to send him anything else, and (2) if he was too much of a puss to do that, he would have simply stopped e-mailing me. People have done both to me, so the fact that he kept coming back, and that he’s welcomed me to continue coming back (even after I practically begged him for a job and he turned me down)… It’s gotta mean something.

At the very least, it means you can send something that isn’t your best work, or isn’t a person’s cup of tea, and the world won’t crumble around you if they reject it. Like anything else, it’s a business of relationships. Mitch and I, despite a shaky past, have developed a good relationship, so I could probably fling shit at him until the day I die, and he’ll always read it. Maybe I’m off-base, but I really think that’s what it’s all about.

(Trivia: Mitch Michaels — not his real name — knows all about the blog. Even more mysteriously, he’s known about it since I worked for him in 2005, when I stupidly accessed it from a company computer. I don’t think he — or anyone else who has stumbled across this dung pile — would consider himself an “avid reader,” but I honestly think keeping this blog has a little something to do with his willingness to talk to me after a three-year communication lapse. He can feel free to correct me if I’m wrong in the comments. Ironically, I’ve spent years trying to keep this blog as secret as possible for fear of offending and alienating people I know in the real world. Despite this suspiciously positive result, this blog will remain as secret as possible.)

Posted by Stan on June 5, 2009 5:56 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

December 29, 2008

Screwing the Pooch

Amelia called to warn me that work was about to dry up. It’s like having an inside man at a company I already work for, but it’s helpful. She told me nobody at the company would tell me when scripts dried up, and she was right, but at least I had some warning. I mean, I knew it wouldn’t last forever, but they don’t even soften the blow by easing off. It went from a steady three scripts a day to a steady zero scripts a day.

Amelia mentioned that, because of the dealings Murdstone & Grinby has with other companies, they may help me find freelance work elsewhere when our work slows down. It sounded great to me, so I told her I’d ask as soon as they stopped sending scripts.

“Hang on,” she said. “That might not be such a good idea.”

Zuh?

She gave me more warnings: if Murdstone & Grinby like me — and they do — they won’t want to lose me. If I asked for help, she said, Jim Taggart (the Director of Development, a.k.a. my boss) would be cordial and understanding and promptly do nothing, because they don’t want to lose me. She added, “They’ll probably just come back at you with the excuse that if you’re reading scripts for, say, Endeavor, and they get an Endeavor script they want you to read, that’s a conflict of interest.”

“But wait,” I retorted, “couldn’t they just send those scripts to someone else — like you?”

“Yeah, but they’d forget and —”

“Trust me,” I said, “I wouldn’t forget. Couldn’t I just reply to them that it’s a script from a place I’m working for, so they should send it elsewhere?”

“Well, yeah,” Amelia said, “but it’s just an excuse they’ll be using.”

“But if they give me an excuse and I tell the same things I just told you, wouldn’t they be a little more understanding?”

Amelia sighed. “I think maybe I should talk to Jim for you.” Initially it sounded like she was changing the subject, but it occurred to me that she was not-so-subtly suggesting that me talking to Jim myself would end badly. I mean, I guess it makes sense: if they want to make up excuses but I have an answer to all of them, it’s just going to piss them off. They want me to swallow the shit and slink away. Amelia was a little more tactful than that, mentioning that she’s worked with them longer and more closely. She felt if she broached the subject — not asking directly but just feeling out how they feel about it — she’d come across as someone concerned about a friend rather than someone trolling for information or asking on my behalf.

The following afternoon, I got an e-mail from Jim. The first paragraph thanked me for my hard work. The second paragraph said that Amelia mentioned I had some scripts she thought he should look at, and he’d be more than happy to once things settled down. Everything was going according to —

Wait — what?!

I called Amelia and asked what the hell happened. She told me that, when it came time to talk to Jim, it occurred to her that the business all but shuts down during the holidays, so Murdstone and/or Grinby could troll around for people to hire me and it wouldn’t amount to anything. She told me I should wait until the post-holiday flurry dies down and then ask. I started to wonder why any of this strategizing mattered when she insisted they wouldn’t even help me.

That was neither here nor there. Where did this script thing come from?

“I’m trying to help,” Amelia said. “I was straight-up honest with him. I said you have a great sense of characters, dialogue, and comedy, but you write horrible, tedious second acts.”

“Gee, thanks,” I said.

“It’s true,” she grumbled.

I don’t know that it is true — she read what many others regard as my best script and hated what she felt was a “pointless diversion,” even though in my mind it’s essential to the protagonist’s development from stunted manchild to adult. It works for others as well as it does for me, but I don’t dismiss her point. It makes sense, but the only ways I can think of to “fix” it are really contrived and hacky, and since nine out of ten readers agree it works, I just left it alone. I do love how, in her eyes, my entire body of work suffers from second-act problems when she only griped about it in the one script. Although I guess she griped about the whole story in another script, so that’s two bad apples. Anyway…

“So based on that rousing recommendation, Jim sent me an e-mail saying he wants to read ‘some of my scripts,’” I said.

“Are you shitting me?”

“…no?”

“What a fucking asshole,” she snapped. “I talked you up for at least 20 minutes, and he acted like he could give a fuck. And then, as soon as I leave, he turns around and e-mails you.”

“Yeah, so… What the hell did you think I should send him?” I mean, she hated one of my scripts and has been a bit more critical of the others than anyone who’s read them. I like that — maybe the others who read them are lobbing softballs, or maybe she just has a different point of view. Either way, I haven’t had someone as tough on my work since Callie, and I’ve always held the opinion that that’s the way to make someone a better writer. But it left me wondering what, exactly, she thought the company would like.

“Send them your most commercial script,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be good. They hate good. It just has to make money. I know Jim says to send him more than one, but it’ll take him forever to read one. It’ll take him even longer to read more than one, and he’ll just feel guilty about it and resent you.”

What? This is one of those things I’ll never understand about the industry. I know nobody has any respect for writers — especially writers with no credits — but why ask someone for something and then not read it? Is this some sort of perverse power trip, or has it become so ingrained in the industry that I should just roll with it? I mean, when I send them coverage, they don’t wait six months to read it — they read it as soon as they get it. Because it’s time-sensitive. Well, what if I’ve written the glossiest, most commercially appealing piece of shit on the planet? What if they sit on the script for so long that, before they know it, a bidding war has broken out to get this script, and they could have had it for a rock-bottom price? I know I’m not a great writer, but they don’t know that. They think I’m a great reader, which theoretically translates to great writer. It’s not like I’m some asshole off the street. I do related work for them, and they claim to love it. So why do I have to wait? And why does Jim get to resent me because he feels guilty for not doing something he should have done instead of just doing it?!

None of this matters much. I just think it’s retarded. I know it’ll take forever to read my script, and I don’t care. I thought about the right script to send, and seeing their track record with action (including one action-comedy), I elected to send my action-comedy script. It may not be my most commercially viable, but it seems more up their alley. I don’t know what I expect, though. Not to get it sold or even optioned. Maybe they’ll respect me 5% more. I don’t know.

I have this lingering fear — the reason I felt so apprehensive when I received Jim’s e-mail — that he’ll read the script and decide it’s so terrible, they should question my skills as a reader. In their mind, I’ll be the guy who can build a compelling case about anything but is so clueless about all the important elements of a screenplay, who cares how compelling my case is? I’m just full of shit.

I’m sure it won’t go down that badly, but I’m not exactly pressuring Jim to give it a read.

Posted by Stan on December 29, 2008 2:29 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

August 4, 2008

Pitched

Last week, Amelia sent me a series of e-mails that went from interesting to scary faster than anything I’ve experienced recently. If you’ll remember, I’ve known her for awhile — so long, in fact, that she was a main character in this story before we were what you’d call friends, and definitely before she received an officially sanctioned Stan Has Issues™ fake name — instead, she got the less impressive Stan Has Issues™ generic description. Observant readers will also note that yes, we know each other personally, although obviously we haven’t seen each other personally in a few years. In fact, the bulk of our contact has been through e-mail, for no other reason than its convenience. We exchanged phone numbers while I was in L.A., we exchanged phone numbers once again when we reconnected after I’d left, and we exchanged phone numbers a third time that I don’t remember. So the phone never seemed like a scary thing…

…until now.

In general, I’m not a big phone-talker. I end up talking on the phone a lot, for long periods of time, by virtue of the fact that I’ve befriended people who ramble as endlessly and incoherently as I do, and by virtue of the fact that most of those people have either moved out-of-state or are just as lazy as I am when it comes to making a 20- or 60-minute drive, and by virtue of the fact that they’re too lazy/incompetent to just type it up in an e-mail (and are too lazy to read it when I do that). I guess what I’m saying is, it’s a double-edged sword. I don’t have any problem with the phone, but if given the choice I’d rather talk in person or write an e-mail.

This has worked pretty well with Amelia, the only person with whom I’m currently on speaking terms who enjoys my long, tedious e-mails. She sends equally long e-mails with the added challenge of never, ever using paragraphs to separate her ideas. It’s not hard to read, but it makes it very difficult to reply. I always feel like I miss something as I scan the original while writing a response.

E-mail became a problem last week, because she had a pitch meeting with Murdstone & Grinby coming up on Friday that she was ready to shit her pants about. For some reason — I don’t know if I should feel good about this or not — she believes I’m really smart, so she wanted to bounce some ideas off me and get some feedback. She asked me to play “studio exec” and try to assess not if the ideas were good so much as whether or not they’d make money. I flashed on William Goldman’s classic “Nobody knows anything” bit and thought, Hey, I am nobody! So I agreed to her little game, with some mild reservations because I feared her ideas would disappoint in some way — whether they seemed commercial or not — and it would diminish my respect for her.

She wrote back, asking if I wanted to do this through e-mail or over the phone, but something about the way she phrased it made me think the phone made her a little uncomfortable. Even though I’m lazy and just wanted her to type up all the ideas so I could think about them — I hate being put on the spot, especially if the ideas are terrible — I decided to keep the ball in her court. She wrote again, saying the phone would be easier because her fingers would explode before she could finish typing the thousands of ideas rattling around in her brain. But, she added, she “didn’t know if our relationship was ready for that step.”

I honestly still can’t tell whether or not she was being sarcastic. My immediate thought was, “But I’ve talked to you in person dozens of times,” followed immediately by, “What relationship? Are we dating and I just didn’t know?” I did the long-distance relationship thing before, but at that time I seemed to have a clearer idea of where things were headed. This came so far out of left field, it seemed to come out of right field (in actuality, it was so far left it had traveled the entire circumference of the planet).

So I tried to play it cool by completely ignoring the bit about the “relationship,” smoothly saying, “The phone’s fine with me,” and giving her my number for the fourth time in our relationship.

After some more awkward exchanges about when the best time for this conversation would be, I played the waiting game. Normally, waiting for a phone call would have made me more annoyed than nervous, but she tossed out the “R” word, so suddenly it felt like a first date — an excruciating, long-distance audition for some kind of future dating in the event that I move back to L.A. I sat in silence and tried to get into a relatively zen state so the stress didn’t cave in my skull, and when she called, I felt a strong urge to just not answer and make up some elaborate, far-fetched excuse as to why I had to miss her call and never, ever call her back.

Instead, I picked it up…

After an initial “I haven’t actually heard your voice in three years” moment of unease, we slipped back into our old routine. It’s amazing to think we even had an old routine, but I had forgotten how easy she is to listen to. You heard me right: she’s one of those people who can just talk, and I’ll just sit there listening and not giving a shit that I haven’t said anything for an hour. Compare that to Lucy, who frustrates me when she won’t give me a word in edgewise after five minutes. It’s just a difference in personality or articulation or something.

We didn’t have a one-sided conversation, though. We could have with no problem, but she forced me into an active role — she pitched these ideas and wanted to know how I felt. Her ideas… I don’t know if I want to say “to my surprise,” because I didn’t expect badness and I wanted them to be good, but I do tend to plan for the worst. Anyway, most of her ideas were…really fucking good. Commercial but not retarded, dense but cinematic, and a few of them really brought out some passion in her. In defense of my fawning all over her, while many of her ideas impressed me, some of them were kinda “meh” and one of them was a total dog (although she even admitted that).

Meanwhile, if this was some kind of dry-run phone-date, I flopped big-time. I had a hard time forming any kind of cogent argument for or against these ideas — I tried my best to stammer through my vague notions. Without having any clue what she intended to pitch, I couldn’t do any preliminary research. I just had to go with my gut, which said, “Awesome,” but chose not to elaborate.

The downside is, neither of us have a clue how her pitches went. I can’t/don’t want to go into details on all that, but she described the Murdstone meeting and one casual pitch session with an assistant she knows, and in both cases, things seem a little strange.

Posted by Stan on August 4, 2008 5:33 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

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? [Back]

Posted by Stan on July 30, 2008 11:51 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

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  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

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  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

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 mysterious club — 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 deviant lawyers. If there’s one thing people associate with lawyers, 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 Amelia 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 re-reading 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  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

July 2, 2008

Pressure

So Amelia 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. Edward Murdstone 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 six weeks off during each quarter 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 Amelia to tell Murdstone 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  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 30, 2008

Screwed

Remember the co-op? Remember how I described it as part-sales-pitch, part-new-age-feel-goodery? I had an uneasy feeling about it from, let’s say, day three. Basically, after Big-Shot Producer’s initial pitch — which made it sound pretty good — he began ladling on the creepy gravy until I felt very uncomfortable about the whole prospect. I wanted to know what happened to the mild but very much existent promises that some crazy group of foreign investors would read Dying Proof and have a response in three weeks or less. I wanted to know what happened to the co-op concept of getting 20-30 (maybe even up to 50) individual pieces of feedback on my script.

Instead, what little information I did receive — which reached a standstill by mid-April — consisted of nothing but impersonal marketing-speak. Gone was the producer who encouraged me despite his reservations about my pitch-black sense of humor. In his place stood a pod person. I didn’t like where this was headed.

Now, it’s not unusual for a screenwriter — especially one near the bottom of the food chain — to be ignored by Big-Shot Producers for months at a time. I believe the reading turnaround for successful screenwriters is about eight weeks, so my having to wait six months, while frustrating, isn’t unusual. I continued my usual pattern of calling and/or e-mailing at least once a week, but I continued to get stonewalled; again, frustrating, but you sort of get used to it. On the one hand, there’s the principle that I should wait for them to call me; on the other, I’m nobody. I have to remind them that I exist.

Finally, last week, I received an e-mail from the Big-Shot Producer. He apologized all over himself and made two excuses: (1) server crash on the co-op’s files, (2) he’s busy producing movies. That old chestnut! I didn’t really believe him about the server crash, but I suppose it’s meaningful that he’d go out of his way to lie to me. Then again, considering what happened, I suppose it’s not that meaningful.

What he offered, in the e-mail, is what he perceived as an olive branch. Not that he needed one — this was just more sales pitch. See, before communication dropped off between us completely, this co-op sounded less like a free exchange of ideas among working professionals and more like a scam, under the guise of a distance-learning class, designed to screw novice writers out of money they likely don’t have, guaranteeing some sort of foolproof method to succeed as a screenwriter. It only lacked two components: a fee, and a money-back guarantee. So I just kept waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And so it did. Big-Shot Producer offered, as a “gift,” to send me “a few assignments” from the co-op. I had no clue what he meant about assignments — I’d read the marketing-speak he’d sent and spent far too much time trying to parse it for any sign of humanity or hostile intent, so I got that it was supposed to be like a “class,” but I thought the “class” was: “Read other people’s shitty scripts, cover them, and receive periodic inspirational e-mails.”

Yet, referring to them as “assignments” — not scripts or coverage or anything — confused me. Was this more semantic mumbo-jumbo, or did he really believe giving me homework assignments was a gift?

With reservations, I told him to send the assignments. My curiosity had gotten the better of me. Besides, I have the craftiest known safety net to avoid getting bilked out of money: I don’t have any. So the joke’s on him!

He did send me an assignment, which was long and tedious and involved reading an inspirational speech (good guess!) and answering a variety of lit 101 questions about how it applies to my “career,” followed by a request to sum up my autobiography in between five and 10 pages. The fuck?

Oh, he also included the long-promised, never-delivered coverage on Dying Proof. Remember that whole “20 or 30 (maybe up to 50!)” thing? I got one person’s coverage, and not to sound too harsh, but it wasn’t exactly constructive. The reader clearly didn’t like the script, which I guess is helpful in itself, but everything the reader wrote in response felt like they’d read McKee’s Story for the first time ever just before reading my script, and because it’s not a textbook example of his methodology, it’s the worst thing ever.

I hope that doesn’t come across as defensive. I don’t think Dying Proof is a great script, and in fact Amelia read it and also disliked it quite severely. I was pretty frustrated with her take, but receiving the coverage from this other person crystallized the difference: Amelia gave me valuable, valid feedback. She may have said a few things I disagreed with in terms of the storyline and structure, but she did give me a couple of ideas that are worth their weight in gold — in fact, I’m planning a rewrite based solely on those few suggestions, because they’ll make Dying Proof that much better.

However, it didn’t come across like the co-op reader, who seemed to hate the genre more than the story or characters, had anything constructive to say. What I wanted was basic, basic, basic “I learned this in fifth grade” argumentative structuring: topic sentence tells what’s wrong, rest of the paragraph explains why they feel that way. Even if they don’t give notes on how to improve it, which I usually do, explaining why they disliked something helps me figure out how to fix it on my own. Knowing only what without the why doesn’t help anything.

So yeah, I’m planning another draft of Dying Proof, but I had hoped I’d have a wide range of feedback to look at, so I could gauge how a wide cross-section of people feel about the story. Instead, I get some useless advice from one anonymous person.

What else did Big-Shot Producer include in the e-mail? Oh right, a brochure for the co-op, which is so professional it only contains one egregious misspelling in the first sentence (“amateur” is spelled “armature”…yeah, I wish I could make up something like that). I paged through the brochure to understand what I was truly in for, and then I hit the pricetag: $4500 for the basic course, $6500 for the advanced course, $15,000 for the “professional” course. Bear in mind these prices are only for the first four weeks. I half-expected a “…plus 99¢ for each additional minute” disclaimer at the bottom of the page.

Granted, Big-Shot Producer has not, as of yet, hit me up for money, but I know it’s only a matter of time. He’s giving me the “free” assignments not as a “gift,” but in the same way a new drug dealer always gives his prospective client an initial free hit. If Marked for Death is accurate at all, taking one puff of marijuana will lead teens to immediately try crack. The free assignment is designed to get me hooked on the crack of the paid course.

Even if I could afford it: look, I’m both dumb and gullible, but I had one lesson drilled into my head repeatedly by everyone I’ve ever met associated with the film industry: do not give anyone money. People asking for money for anything — especially something as tenuous as a “surefire” way to make a living as a screenwriter — are full of shit unless they’re booking the Whisky, in which case they just need you to sell some tickets, come onnnnn. Just don’t do it, contrary to the teachings of Nike.

I’m honestly pretty insulted. Not so much by the wasted time, the endless aggravation, and the general obnoxiousness of stringing me along for a few years only to offer me up as a ritual sacrifice for his own, private moneymaking enterprise — no, what really gets my goat is that he clearly thinks I’m dumb enough to fall for this. I have another friend who has done rewrite work — unpaid, but still — for Big-Shot Producer. He’s never heard of the co-op, of “assignments,” of anything.

Amelia suggested I string Big-Shot Producer along, doing the assignments until he starts asking me for money, then give him my tale of woe and beg him to give me a job. I don’t know. It seems like a lot of effort for, potentially, nothing in return.

Posted by Stan on June 30, 2008 10:34 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 27, 2008

My Knowledge of Reading

Yeah, so I got the reader job.

I sent Amelia the coverage samples, hoping the ones I’d chosen weren’t too long or too short. And yet, despite my desire for brevity, I couldn’t resist sending the epic. It’s long, but it’s the best example I have of rolling up my sleeves and digging deeper, which I’ve been asked to do on several occasions. It has a plot so convoluted, it requires both a long synopsis and a long analysis, so you can get into the nitty-gritty and explore just why it doesn’t work — even the writing problems are convoluted.

Besides that, everyone seems to have different coverage policies. The last two places I read for wanted longer analyses than synopses, yet I’ve also done work for companies that seem to want longer synopses with a brief, “three biggest problems”-type analysis. I guess this is fair, because I’ve read plenty of scripts where if they fixed the biggest problems, everything else would fall into place. So in the three samples I sent, I tried to get the wide range: biggest problems, digging deeper, and one that’s kind of in the middle. I didn’t know if Amelia wanted three so she could choose what she, having worked at Murdstone & Grinby for a year, thought they’d prefer. If she showed them all three, I wanted to show what little range one can show in analytical writing.

I have no clue how the bosses felt about them. Instead of telling me, she sent me the shooting draft of an upcoming remake of a once-iconic (if not what you might call good) movie to give them a coverage sample. I figured they’d do something like this, but I wasn’t sure. Because they don’t just want competence — who knows how many months I slaved writing the samples I sent? — they want speed. So they send the script, I tear right into it, synopsize it, and analyze it. I try to do this in under two hours, but almost always it ends up being around two and a half. Synopses are deceptively tricky — if I didn’t have to write one, I could definitely cover any 100-page script in less than two hours.

Time is not always of the essence, but when you’re effectively “auditioning” for the job, you want to show you can do it if they need you to. Probably the funniest part about the experience is that I didn’t get Amelia’s e-mail with the script until about 90 minutes after she sent it, and they still raved about the incredible turnaround time.

But raving is one thing. Paying is another. Amelia e-mailed the next day, saying, “They loved your coverage! You’re hired! But here’s the thing…” There’s always a thing, isn’t there?

See, when she e-mailed, she told me they were hiring readers because they needed readers. But they don’t need readers — they want a reader, but the load won’t be heavy until later in the year. Basically, this will be a nice supplemental income, but it’s not exactly solving my financial woes. I received an official e-mail from Jim, the person who is now technically my boss, telling me that if they get anything in the interim, they’d send it over to me, but who knows what that means?

I had really hoped I could get a decent volume — something like three scripts a day — and just turn that into a full-time thing. Instead, I’ll be lucky if I get one a week. Things will be different in August, but it’s not August.

In the meantime, I’d been scheming to parlay this work into something akin to what my pseudo-Net-nerd hero, Darwin Mayflower, used to do — write longer, movie-review-style analyses and convince some crazy film website to pay me for the trouble. I don’t know if I’m allowed to do that or not, but if I’m careful enough, the shroud of anonymity afforded by the Internet might help me pull a fast one, making double the money for half the work.

But alas, if I’m not getting scripts, I can’t do shit about shit.

Posted by Stan on June 27, 2008 3:20 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Reader

Ugh… Well, I hope it works out, but I haven’t heard anything all weekend. Amelia e-mailed me on Friday to tell me Murdstone & Grinby is looking for paid readers — decent money for the scripts, but no details on volume or whether or not this will come close to being permanent. She just wanted me to send her some coverage samples to give to her boss, Jim; I did, and I’m hoping for the best. Also, of course, preparing for the worst.

Posted by Stan on June 23, 2008 1:19 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

June 11, 2008

Write What You Have

Now, look, I know I’m pretty hard on Stupid Blogger, because, well…I think it’s pretty clear. Maybe I’ve only devoted one officially sanctioned Stan Has Issues™ post to her, but I still read her blog daily and mock her to pretty much anyone who will listen. I won’t start some kind of blog jihad because that’d make me look publicly crazy. I’m really only prepared to look crazy in private, where my friends can assemble behind my book and discuss how worried they are about me and my obsession with people I find intellectually inferior.

But she wrote something recently that, while comically moronic, gives me a good subject to broach from a screenwriting standpoint.

It goes like this: she’s written a short film she intends to shoot herself. She intended this all along, but suddenly she finds herself going haywire because one particular shot — difficult to just go off and get, because she lives in Los Angeles and this involves snow and evergreen-covered mountains — seems impossible to achieve, yet for reasons unknown but apparently very important to her, the shot cannot be changed or altered in any significant way.

So, you know, I’m not really a qualified expert on anything, but I did cut my professional teeth writing short scripts with the intention of shooting them. I don’t know where I picked up this advice, so I can’t attribute it to anyone (for the sake of argument, let’s say I just figured it out on my own — therefore, I get all the credit), but I started thinking of it like this: “write what you have.” A little play on the old “write what you know” philosophy; I have complicated feelings about that particular sentiment, but now is not the time.

“Write what you have” is pretty simple: what or who do you have access to and/or what can you find easily and inexpensively? If, for instance, you need a sleepy, snow-covered village in the Pacific Northwest, planning to shoot it in L.A. in July is not writing what you have. Maybe it works for that particular story, but the point of writing what you have is to take stock of everything you have and conceive a story utilizing everything to its fullest.

Every short script I’ve ever written, if it has a scene that takes place in a house, I picture the layout as my house. The decor changes, the people living in it change, but the physical floor-plan is always identical. Because I know I can get it. If somebody wants to donate a cooler looking space — or a different looking space, just for the sake of variety — it’s easy enough to revise, but if you look at all my old short scripts, I guarantee every single house will have the same layout details.

If you’re working in film and don’t know any actors whatsoever, you’re doing something wrong. So I’m taking it for granted that you, budding filmmaker, know some actors. How many? What can they do? Play to their strengths or play to their desires — if, for instance, he’s been cast as Biff Loman in 30 different productions of Death of a Salesman and he’s sick of the role, no matter how well he plays it, you don’t want to cast him as a seething cauldron of filial angst. If he loves embodying that type of role, go for it. He’ll give it his all.

Try to accommodate yourself so you aren’t wasting shitloads of money on things that aren’t feasible. Although I didn’t write it with the intention of ever shooting it, I developed a pretty strong desire to shoot “Bessie,” but I’m not made of money. How am I going to afford to rent a soundstage to build a barn replica with a retractable floor that hides a Saturday Night Fever-style light-up floor? The Vietnam sequences are almost plausible with the aid of a good Army surplus store, but how am I supposed to direct the actions of a cow? Even if animal trainers worked cows (I’m not sure if they do or not), again, it’s more money shit.

So it gives you two easy options: either rewrite the script or don’t shoot it. It’s easy as that. A third, less-easy option is to find a way. A friend suggested going down to Southern Indiana, which has many haunted forests that have an eerily similar feel to Southeast Asian canopy jungle (I’m not even joking — it’s more like Vietnam than it is like Colorado). I could contact a few open-minded farmers who might help wrangle the cow. I mean, half the joke is the cow just stands there like a lump. I’m pretty sure you don’t need a trainer to coach a cow to act inert. Bottom line: I could try to make it happen. I didn’t have the ambition for all that, though, but it is possible.

At the time I shot my masterpiece “The Love Switch,” I had fairly limited resources. Most everyone I knew was out of town for the summer, so I relied on an actor/friend, a classmate, and my dad. I was the one-man crew, and that was that. It turned out much better than I expected considering it cost a grand total of $50 (for the two blow-up dolls). I originally had a much more ambitious idea for the story — primarily revolving around the protagonist attempting to “get off” with a blow-up doll before a big date, but getting his dick stuck in the doll for some reason — but I didn’t have the time, money, or resources to pull off my original ideas, so I abandoned them in favor of what I could accomplish, and I think it’s a better film for it. Maybe you’ll disagree, but fuck off.

That’s all there is to it — take stock of what you have, what you can get (either with ease or difficulty), and figure out what you’re willing to do and spend to make the dream happen. Maybe Stupid Blogger will get her snow-covered shot. Maybe she’ll wait until February to truly finish the film, if it’s that important to her. For my money, that’s the most plausible action; the comments left on that post from industry folk were fucking retarded, ridiculous and convoluted and more expensive than simply waiting.

Take my advice, young filmmakers: write what you have, then what you know, then what you really wish you could do if a million dollars and professional crew dropped in your lap for your 30-minute short.

Posted by Stan on June 11, 2008 1:13 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 26, 2008

Learning to Be a Writer

In the fall of 1997, I joined a creative writing club that I didn’t really want to join at the insistence of a teacher I spent far too much time trying to please. The English Department had given this teacher, Mr. Hart, the opportunity to take over their barely existent creative writing department, which consisted of one class and an after-school club. I didn’t want to join because I figured it’d be made up of a bunch of weirdos. I wasn’t wrong, although it turned out they were exactly the type of weirdos I wanted to hang around with.

By the spring of 1998, we had turned into the dorkiest group of friends imaginable. It was the first time anyone my age had ever read (or heard read) my stuff, and they were pretty encouraging. The only big problem: I’d been under the impression what I was writing was pretty serious and dramatic. It surprised me to learn they all thought it was hilarious and ironic. It’s just one of those things, I guess. This isn’t bragging because I honestly hate it and would change it if I could, but the only time I’m able to not be funny is when I’m trying to be funny, at which point I spew forth jokes so lame Fozzie Bear would grimace in disgust.

I rationalized that I have a skill most people don’t — and if they do, it’s not so effortless — but that didn’t make me feel as good as you might think. It did reach a point where I found myself able to merge legitimate, dramatic emotion with my comedic weirdness, but that’s the closest I’ve come to straight, unfunny work.

But in this story, the “funny” takes on some importance, so keep it in mind.

One morning in early March, Hart mentioned he’d been approached by a teacher who coordinated the annual Earth Day Jam, which is about as lame as it sounds. This teacher was kind of a touchy-feely hippie kinda guy who wanted every single club or activity in the school to be represented, if possible. To that end, he wondered if maybe the creative writing club would like to put together something for the Jam.

“What?” I asked. “Like a reading or something?”

“Well…” Mr. Hart said, taking that hushed, confidential tone that made idiots like me feel like we had a “friendly” rapport rather than just the normal student-teacher relationship. “Phoebe and I came up with this idea, and we’d like you to write it.”

Phoebe was another member of the club, someone I’d both befriend and developed a moderate crush on. In retrospect, I have no clue if she was involved in this or not. I know that he knew I had a crush on her (it was pretty obvious), so he might have figured I’d join up with anything that had Phoebe’s name attached to it. He wasn’t wrong.

The idea went like this: a group of stoners use Earth Day as an excuse to get high, but they discover the true meaning of Earth Day. It was edutainment: it teaches you while you learn. Hart wanted some kind of sketch-comedy from this premise, and it sounded like an idea I could work with.

Things went wrong almost immediately. Although I didn’t get a negative vibe from it at the start, I got annoyed with Mr. Hart’s insistence that this was my project, even though it wasn’t my idea and he’d impede what little I contributed. Sure, I wrote the script, but when I tried to cast it, Hart didn’t seem to care about anything…until I started bringing in my actor friends. He jumped in to tell me that I had to cast it using members of the writing club, none of whom had any acting experience. I forced a compromise because the script had two male parts, and the only other male in the club refused to participate, so I had to get one of my actor friends to do it.

He, in turn, palmed the script off on another friend, who was funny enough and nice enough, but it sort of blurred the line between truth and fiction because, basically, he didn’t have to act to play the part of lazy burnout. During our minimal rehearsal time, he start ad-libbing. A lot. And it was funny, so I went with it. I had some minor concerns that his ad-libs might cross a line between “good-natured pothead satire” and “saying things that a person can’t get up on a high school stage and say without getting suspended.” When I mentioned this to Mr. Hart, who insisted on being there for all rehearsals (despite the fact that this was my baby and he was just there to “observe”), he just shrugged and said, “Well, it’s not my sketch.”

Worst of all, saddled with non-actors for key roles, Phoebe opted to play the person who teaches them the meaning of Earth Day. The second half of the sketch turned into a direct spoof of A Charlie Brown Christmas, and Phoebe was Linus — with dimmed lights and everything, she steps up to explain the true meaning of Earth Day. The only problem: she wasn’t an actor, and our performance wasn’t going to be miked. My solution was to grab one of the mics for another performance and have her use that, but Phoebe and her friends all insisted that she “can be loud.”

Then, the day arrived. Here’s something you have to know about Earth Day and the Earth Day Jam: every single stoner at our school really did use this day, and this event, as an excuse to get high. As I recall, this was the year our school experimented with “modular scheduling” (an absolute disaster), which made the Earth Day Jam extra-long and may have accounted for why the coordinating teacher was hard up for acts. I remember it running during lunch periods for most years, but that year it ran all day. With the modular scheduling, students had open blocks at any time of the day. Since attendance was nearly impossible to enforce (the modules made hall passes irrelevant), stoners just holed up in the tiny theatre. The audience was more like a shitty concert than a shitty school event, with a thick haze of smoke drifting toward the ceiling at all times, the acrid sweetness of marijuana in the air. You’d think somebody would smell that and start tossing people out, but in my four years, it was the same thing every year and nobody seemed to give a shit that kids were smoking both cigarettes and joints during the festivities.

I’m writing this a decade later, knowing the hoary aftermath and just basically knowing the stupidity of everything leading to the Earth Day Jam performance. You have to understand the utter cluelessness I felt leading up to it. I had my reservations, but I had no clue it would turn into the disaster that it did. The worst part about it is, I realized how bad it’d be within the first 15 seconds of the sketch.

Because I found it funny at the time (and still find it funny) to portray and character on drugs as some kind of Maynard G. Krebs-style Beatnik, the sketch opened with a Dylan-mocking folk song. I remember nothing about it except that it ended with the line, “So let’s all get stoned!”

The entire theatre erupted in enthusiastic applause that lasted for what felt like five minutes (it was probably about 15 seconds, all told). I looked up from my guitar, trying to peer past the lights into the shadowy sea of faces, but I didn’t need to see the faces of the applauders to realize what would happen next. All the stoners looked to my ad-libbing friend, who stole the show. Phoebe went up to deliver her soliloquy, but she refused to take the provided mic. My sister and a couple of other friends, up in the lighting booth, later told me they couldn’t hear a word she said from the back of the house. I’m pretty sure they would have had the same complaint if she’d been in the front row. Phoebe is a quiet, mousy person who apparently thinks she’s louder than she is.

So the end result: kids lured in by the hilarity of drug-based humor, without grasping the underlying point because they couldn’t hear it.

The real lessons came from the aftermath. A week later, another teacher took me aside after class and explained to me that, during the most recent faculty meeting, the teacher gossip-mill was abuzz with the news that I’m a giant pothead. I was a dorky sophomore who, at that time, hadn’t felt anything better than a contact high. I didn’t drink, didn’t smoke, didn’t use drugs, yet they were branding me a Lot Troll* without basis. Okay, maybe the sketch served as basis enough, but what the fuck?

So I went to Mr. Hart and told him I’d heard a rumor that teachers are saying I’m a burnout because of that sketch. He shrugged and unconvincingly said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

And suddenly, the body language and evasiveness of the past month made total sense: he rammed this idea down my throat, but then he either had second thoughts or always knew that this would be something to distance himself from, and if he received any negative criticism about the sketch, he’d blame the writer.

Yes, this was the first moment in my life that I felt like a real, professional writer.

I didn’t have many options, so I did the best thing I could think of: I wrote a two-page letter discussing my intentions for the sketch, the flaws in the casting/rehearsal/performance process, and the gross misinterpretation both of what I’d written and the misperception of myself and my character. I attached a full copy of the sketch (pre-ad-libs) and made copies for every teacher in the school.

Not many people remarked on it. Mr. Hart was pissed off. Another teacher in the English Department seemed genuinely concerned until I explained to him that I didn’t want to go through two full years of new teachers with them all thinking I’m a burnout and treating me accordingly. I had a bad enough time with that in junior high — I didn’t want the trend to continue.

More impressively, two teachers to whom I’d been fairly indifferent (and who were equally indifferent toward me) thanked me for the explanation and honesty and kinda acted guilty for either believing or spreading the rumors.

So I learned another lesson from the experience: words have power, both good and bad.

*As in “smoking lot.” [Back]

Posted by Stan on May 26, 2008 11:03 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 23, 2008

Inside Jokes for Outside Viewers

Have you ever watched a movie that just sucks a painful amount of ass, but it seems like the cast (and probably crew) had a whole lot of fun making it? If the movie’s mediocre enough, the high spirits of the cast can make it approach good. The recent Jeff Bridges vehicle The Amateurs has a shitload of flaws, and at the end of the day it’s a pretty terrible movie, but they’re all having such a visible amount of fun with each other and with the material (which isn’t even very good) that you want to like it.

Sometimes, though, a movie is so, so tragically awful that nothing can save them. In the case of comedies, I think a lot of this has to do with the inside-joke factor. Inside jokes can be problematic for material that’s intended for release to the public; you aren’t making a movie and writing a book for the benefit of yourself and your friends. While they might laugh hysterically at your joke — in part because they know you, in part because you’re making reference to something only you and a small group of friends truly understand — an independent judge might greet your hilarity with a stony, possibly angry face.

I recently had to review a no-budget indie called The Windy City Incident. I say “had,” even though I volunteered for the assignment, because when the DVD arrived, I felt completely duped. The distributor must have a fantastic marketing department, because they made the movie sound like a scream, a little diamond in the rough, rough world of shitty direct-to-video indies. I’ve never seen a worse, more ineptly made movie. Ever. Labored gags that aren’t funny to start, then repeat far beyond the patience of any sane person. Then you flip on the audio commentary and hear the writers/directors giggling at the hijinks. Until I listened to the commentary, I sincerely believed these two men made this movie solely to get emaciated young actors to strip and simulate sex acts while they filmed, but no, they seemed to sincerely think they were making a compelling, hilarious movie.

The problem, it turns out, is that the movie is wall-to-wall inside jokes. Some people have good enough comic instincts to understand the difference between a joke that’s as close to universally funny as a single joke can get and a joke that’s only funny to you and your best friend. If you aren’t sure, it’s easy enough to vet the quality by springing them on unsuspecting people unfamiliar with the outside joke, or to attempt stand-up comedy and understand the sound of 100-200 people not laughing.* But somebody just saying, “Hey, I’m gonna make a movie that’s nothing but a series of consecutive inside jokes” — that’s an idea so terrible I only attempted it once, and I never finished it.

Bottom line: if you want to write a comedy, make sure people you don’t know think it’s funny. If you’re taking a class or part of a writing group that doesn’t consist primarily of friends, force someone new to read your work. Try to find the person least like you, and don’t accuse them of “not getting it” if they don’t find it funny. If they don’t offer, ask them for an explanation of why the jokes didn’t click with them. Even better, find someone who isn’t even a writer — a peripheral friend of your second cousin or something — and tell them it doesn’t matter if they don’t know shit about structure or movies. You just want to know if it makes them laugh.

The hardest part in writing a comedy is making it funny, and in order to do that you have to not only understand your audience, you need to understand your audience doesn’t consist solely of your 12 closest friends.

*I paraphrased/stole that from one of the few truly funny and insightful moments of Aaron Sorkin’s dreadful flop, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. [Back]

Posted by Stan on May 23, 2008 4:14 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 21, 2008

It Was Symbolism; He Was Mad!

The more I read shitty scripts, the more it occurs to me that many screenwriters haven’t mastered intermediate elements of storytelling. They often have the basics — tedious goals, bland conflict, dunderheaded protagonist “growth,” revealing every single detail using expository dialogue rather than visual clues — but it creates a hollow reading experience that will translate to a hollow viewing experience. Say what you will about Steven Spielberg — and I’ll say many great things unless you try to talk to me about any of his recent work — fun “popcorn” flicks haven’t been the same since he stopped making them. You could say, “Well, he’s not really a writer,” but the man’s PRODUCED BY stamp is almost as firm as his DIRECTED BY stamp. You can watch The Goonies, Back to the Future, Gremlins, Poltergeist — even later stuff like Men in Black — and see the Spielbergosity of them. I mean, Gremlins and Poltergeist are pretty fucked up, the kind of thing you’d think he’d maybe get stuck with and then limit his involvement to “big name that gets the greenlight,” but no — they’re as full of Spielberg spirit as Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark.

Spielberg knows how to tell a story. He understands audience expectations and knows how to push them, sometimes defy them, but not go so far that the audience will rebel. His early movies show that he realizes kids aren’t fucking retards, that “family” movie means more than “kiddie horseshit,” but more than that, they show he understands character, tone, and subtle symbolism — three things these newer scripts lack. The first two, they trade worn-out stereotypes and ape the tonal beats of similar, successful movies; they very rarely have a bit of the latter.

What I mean when I write “subtle symbolism” is the kind of symbol that isn’t a symbol for the sake of symbolism — something that coheres with the story, characters, or setting without overwhelming them, pointing and saying, “SYMBOLISM!!!!” Here’s an example of the most egregious example of “symbol for the sake of symbolism” in the history of cinema: at the end of Jane Campion’s overrated shitstorm The Piano, Holly Hunter’s character (Ada?) wants her piano tossed overboard. When Harvey Keitel does it, she intentionally sticks her foot in the ropes and drops into the water with it, but then she decides to live and severs the connection with the piano and is “reborn” as she is pulled back into the boat. It’s the kind of dunderheaded, ham-fisted symbolism I can’t stand — the kind of thing that allows “art films” to break into the mainstream because idiots who watch it think it’s really deep and smart, when in fact it’s simple-minded and obvious. And this is coming from a guy who doesn’t particularly like symbol-heavy, nonsensical “art films.” I’d rather have them be batshit insane in a fascinating way than obvious and heavy-handed.

Although Spielberg’s symbolism has gotten a little more heavy-handed and, well…pointless over the years (the Blue Fairy in A.I.? the sex scene in Munich?), many of his earlier films feature the perfect kinds of symbols: first, their meanings are open to interpretation; second, you can watch the movies as pure entertainment, without consciously grasping the layering of symbols. For an example of both: E.T., on the surface, looks like the simple story of a stranded alien trying to get back home. Symbolically, there’s some deep shit happening: you have E.T. de-fracturing the broken home, turning Michael from asshole brother to sworn protector, even making Elliott himself into a father figure for the lost, confused alien. As for the “subtle” symbolism, think about the scene where Elliott flips out and releases all the frogs. Depending on how you interpret it, he’s either embracing a nonconformist, hippie spirit or just turning into your ordinary joe who will stand up for things he believes in, even if he gets in trouble. In the straight narrative, it’s merely “Elliott’s deep, psychic connection to E.T. causes him to flip out and spare the frogs.”

Symbolism and subtext like this form literature. Good writers — and good filmmakers — have the ability to utilize this without seeming to. Sometimes it goes too far into obvious territory. For instance, it’s clear very early in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom that Indy is the father figure to Short Round, and he goes too far when Short Round declares, “I love you!” to help break the goofy trance. I will admit, it’s still kind of a powerful moment, but it turns something that’s all about symbol and subtext and turns it into…well, text. But when it’s done well, this kind of thing will wash over a viewer (or a reader) and they’ll love the story even if they can’t pinpoint why. They’ll withstand the test of time because they’re about something universal and human, not about Richard Dreyfus building a giant Devil’s Tower in his living room.

I’ve started to call this “symbolic duct-taping,” a phrase that hasn’t exactly caught on. In my novel, Cedar Point, as relationships decay, there’s a recurring joke starting with one character who has the physical strength to tear a motel room door off its hinges. The main character keeps taping it back to the door frame, only to have it knocked down by another character who’s enraged with him. Even when I started writing it, I didn’t intend for the duct-taping to mean anything, but it occurred to me that it means everything: they knock down the door (representing the damage to the relationship!) and the main character is forced to fix it, and although it’s not the same having a door duct-taped to the frame rather than screwed to its hinges, it’s still basically a functional door (i.e., the relationships are never back to 100%, but there’s been enough repair for them to be functional).

For me, the accidental symbolism and subtext is the best kind, but it’s a pain in the ass. If you don’t recognize that it’s there, it’ll end up muddled and not meaning anything. If you do recognize it, you run the risk of overplaying your hand and turning it into a piano tied to your protagonist’s ankle.

Posted by Stan on May 21, 2008 9:07 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 16, 2008

Make It Good

Awhile back, I read an article that discussed loudness in music (specifically, the abuse of compression and limiting to make music — or, more noticeably, television commercials — appear louder). I am too lazy to dig it up, so I’m going to paraphrase one of the quotes from an engineer or producer or somebody, who said something like, “Making a song sound louder makes it seem more powerful. Music, in general, is getting louder, and we can turn back now.”

My immediate thought: why the fuck not? Isn’t it fair to say that if the music itself is good, listeners aren’t necessarily going to give a shit about it creating the illusion of extra loudness? Am I going to like “The Sweet Escape” more than 4 Non Blondes’ “What’s Up?” because one is recent and much, much, much more compressed and “loud”-sounding, even though the two songs were played on a daily basis on the stupid radio station I used to have to listen to? One of those songs is qualitatively better — click the link and take a guess which one. If you guessed “the louder one,” you didn’t click the link.

Loudness doesn’t matter. It’s not a fluke when certain indie acts whose albums are recorded in somebody’s parents’ basement eclipse some overproduced (and over-compressed) pop shit. Besides which, some would argue (and I’d agree) that bringing back the mystical idea of dynamics into music makes things more interesting. I know they can create the illusion of dynamic shifts while compressing sounds into oblivion, but it’s an illusion, just like the theory that songs being louder will make them better. Or that I’ll pay attention to a TV commercial because it’s 10 times louder than the show itself. (That one backfires big-time — nothing makes me hit MUTE faster than an obscenely loud commercial.)

The misguided notion of tossing all the wrong eggs into the basket can also apply to movies. There’s a “bigger is better” mentality that’s become increasingly counterproductive. On the plus side, box-office receipts are starting to reflect a rebellion among moviegoers who seem to realize that if one gag worked in the first Meet the Parents movie, repeating it isn’t quite going to work in all the sequels and knockoffs. Throwing enormous budgets at a movie won’t ensure quality (look at the Pirates of the Caribbean movies). For every movie hyped as the “most expensive movie ever made,” which barely means anything anymore, more of them are Waterworlds than Titanics.*

I watched a crime drama yesterday that couldn’t have been made for more than $5000. That’s not a misprint. It’s rough around the edges, clearly shot on DV (not even HD), but it’s professional enough and has the only three things it needs: decent acting, a good (enough) story, and squib effects that aren’t laughable. It’s not exactly The Godfather, but then, it’s not American Gangster**, either. I’m not saying it’s perfect. Like many of these low-budget movies, the leads are pretty solid, but nearly every supporting role is stilted and amateurish. To paraphrase Mike Nelson, “Thanks, director’s college buddies who brought their own suits to the shoot.” It also tried a little too hard for a crazy twist ending that kinda starts up too soon and doesn’t make enough sense to bother. It felt like there were some scenes deleted, but with an 81-minute movie, I can’t imagine the harm in putting them back.

But the bulk of its story — and its main character, who has to own the movie and does a pretty good job with a difficult role — is solid and depressing. And, actually, the budget restrictions give the movie a slight charm in some ways; it’s a gangster movie that was shot in rural Virginia, with a cast of almost entirely native accents. Believe it or not, hearing that Virginia drawl enhances the movie, differentiating it from gritty, urban crime films. I’m sure if the writer/director had a budget, it would have been set deep in the heart of a city, but having it set elsewhere makes it feel fresh instead of derivative.

The movie got distribution — the only reason I saw it is because the distributor sent me a review screener — which is a minor miracle, considering it has nothing associated with the post-Pulp Fiction Studio-Co-Opted-Independent New Wave, which requires at least one D-list sitcom or teen-soap star trying to avoid getting pigeonholed. This movie has nothing but a good story, told better than you might expect considering the opening shots look like something you might find in a porno movie.

People like movies for all sorts of different reasons, but I hear “I didn’t like the story” or “I couldn’t relate to the characters” more often than I hear “the action sucked” (which I do hear) or complaints about special effects. Even then, it depends on the mood. It’s like with music: sometimes, you want something that’ll speak to you on an emotional level; other times, you want some candy-coated bullshit. But in both movies and music, it seems like you get much, much, much more of the latter than the former. That can’t be healthy, can it?

*So people let me off the hook: I’m not saying Titanic is a good movie. James Cameron does some things well in the movie, but he does many, many, many things badly. Speaking purely in terms of big-studio “throw more money at the problem” mentalities — Titanic was expensive and it made a shitload of money and it won a shitload of awards. That’s all a studio wants, and they can even do without the money. [Back]
**Spoiler alert: it sucked. [Back]

Posted by Stan on May 16, 2008 6:11 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 5, 2008

Killing Your Darlings

I don’t know why, but for the past few days I’ve found myself obsessing over ideas that don’t work. But not the normal “wow, this scene sucks” or “this plot point doesn’t work at all” kind of idea — ideas that work on their own, but for various external reasons fail.

I’ll give an example: in the novel I’m writing, I always thought it’d be funny to incorporate a scene that essentially spoofs the scene in Sling Blade where Karl goes to visit his father (played by Robert Duvall), who’s a barely coherent, almost immobile drunk living in squalor. It would have also spoofed a scene in the VH1 movie about Meat Loaf, where he goes to visit his unsupportive father (early in the movie, Meat Loaf leaves home because his dad comes after him with a butcher knife) and discovers a Meat Loaf shrine. Because I leave no rural social issue unmocked, the joke mainly revolved around the father (of German-farmer heritage) having a shrine to the Nazi Party rather than a shrine to his son.

I’ll tell you why I cut it (ignoring the fact that it’s not terribly funny): it has nothing to do with anything. It has no bearing on the story, doesn’t fundamentally change the character or his conflict with his mother (he blames her for the father’s death, making the big reveal that he’s still alive only function to shift his anger from the death to the hiding) — it’s what I like to call a Family Guy spoof: it’s random, it’s kind of funny, but it means absolutely nothing aside from, “Hey, look! They referenced that movie!”

If I’m going to do a spoof, I much prefer the idea of spoofing something that has bearing on either the story or the characters. When I mentioned spoofing Saving Private Ryan’s opening, it served essentially the same function as the original movie: illustrating the chaos and futility of war while introducing its characters through their actions in this particular situation. I’ve always found that to be the key to high-quality spoofing — make it about something, not just a show-offy example of all the obscure movies you’ve seen.

Here’s another example that has nothing to do with spoofing, because I’m sure you’re as tired of that word as I am by now. In high school, one of my friends and I came up with an idea, based on a true anecdote. It’s so incredibly dumb, in retrospect, but the problem that I’m struggling with is that the idea refuses to go away. Plenty of ideas, if I don’t write them down, disappear completely. This one’s almost a decade old, but it’s still there, sometimes trying to dominate my thoughts.

The true anecdote it’s based on goes like this: we were at a restaurant in Traverse City, Michigan. The day before, we had gone to a department store right across the street from this restaurant called Stages-Milliken. I honestly can’t remember why we did this. I think because we didn’t realize Traverse City is right on the edge of a giant lake and we didn’t pack swim clothes. I know we were buying clothes, but the point is the name of the store: Stages-Milliken. At the restaurant, I dropped my fork, and some random waiter — not ours — who happened to walk by picked it up. I said, “Thanks,” and everyone at the table heard him respond, “Thank you very much, Dr. Milliken.” Maybe he said something else, but I swear to you, this is what our ears all heard. “Thank you very much, Dr. Milliken.”

Within an hour, we had the basic idea of a screenplay with this weird moment as its inciting incident, where for some reason two teenagers are mistaken for mad scientist Dr. Milliken and his lowly assistant, Stages, and end up embroiled in what’s basically a Bond movie, except they’re confused for the evil geniuses bent on world domination. Meanwhile, the actual Milliken and Stages infiltrate the group of teenagers and try to manipulate them into world domination via road trip.

You can see why the idea fails. Austin Powers has been done. The “Hank Scorpio” episode of The Simpsons has already been done. The basic idea of Milliken was Professor Farnsworth from Futurama, and Stages was Kif. Why either would be mistaken for teenagers was a plot hole that I’m not sure we ever solved. The closest thing to a fresh spin on anything is the idea of two middle-aged or elderly men posing as teenagers (picture Mr. Burns dressed like Jimbo in “Who Shot Mr. Burns, Part 1”) and trying to convince them to take over the world. But face it: that’s retarded.

Why can’t I let this idea go? I have no clue, but that’s why I have the fake band blog. I intentionally had Traverse City as a tour destination for them so I can finally write this stupid idea and make it go away. And that is, in many ways, the function of that blog. I can take all the flotsam and jetsam of weirdness floating through my brain and get rid of it, opening it up for clear, focused writing.

I can’t speak to everybody’s writing process, but doing that is the only thing that works for me. I don’t think anything I’ve written on the other blog is genius or poetry. It’s just an accumulation of weird things that make me laugh, either affectionately (like the history of Guns N’ Roses) or derisively (like O.J. Simpson’s If I Did It…). So if you’re a writer struggling to focus, feeling the constant temptation to add weird inside jokes nobody but you will understand, do the reading world a favor: start a fake blog that nobody but you will ever read, and concentrate on making the rest of your stuff tighter. Unless you aren’t looking to sell out and enjoy the good life of the mainstream. In that case, by all means continue to write your stories about masturbating on subway platforms and submit them to various “edgy” publishers who claim to have more interest in HARDCORE than profit, then accuse them of going corporate when they reject you. It’s fun!

Posted by Stan on May 5, 2008 4:11 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 30, 2008

Getting Burned Out on a Character

In mentioning the notecard theory the other day, I started rambling about a novel I’m in the process of revising and editing. It’s in pretty good shape in a general sense — nothing huge to rewrite — but it had enough flaws that I needed to get organized on it.

I neglected to mention that, until a day or two before that post, the novel had been sitting, lifeless, while I distracted myself with easier (and potentially more lucrative) screenplays about people beating up Nigerian 419 scammers. I spent much of last summer revising it, then I decided, “I need to get on that novel again” and put it up in the little status sidebar, thinking if I let all my shame hang out, I might do something about it.

Well, I am doing something about it, but not because of its shameful flaccidity as it flaps in the wind. I just got burned out on this particular set of characters.

These particular characters have been with me since around 2001. I don’t want this to sound like a pretentious artist thing, like these characters have invaded my soul and I love them like I would my own children, because it’s really not. The progression of the characters is very practical: first, I invented them to exist in a feature film I planned to shoot with a tiny, tiny crew and my friends as actors. When that failed, I…took the route of lying my ass off.

I took a 100-level screenwriting class that was divided into three related parts: documentary, narrative, and experimental. The syllabus was set up as a domino effect: you get a subject for your documentary, you write a narrative film based on the documentary, then you write an experimental film based on the narrative. Tasked with interviewing somebody both real and interesting, and being both unable and unwilling to complete that task, I elected to “interview” somebody interesting…but not real.

This is actually when I knew he had potential. I made up a person. He does not exist. He never has, he never will. Yet, when I pitched this “person” as the documentary subject — people were amused by this eccentric rocker they’d never heard of. They were amused when I brought in an interview that read like an episode of Space Ghost: Coast to Coast. And they laughed out loud when I brought in a 15-page script about this fictional character and his friends.

After dabbling with an unsuccessful attempt at a website (what I know refer to as a “dry run”) dealing with the characters and their band, I let it rest for a few years…

…until I went to L.A. and was forced, as part of the class I took out there, to bring in three fully formed ideas. I figured, since I had a clear idea of the characters and a short-script draft, it couldn’t hurt to scrawl down that idea as one of the three, even though I had a ringer that I thought would wow the prof so much that he’d support and encourage that one.

He didn’t. In fact, his reasoning was that my eyes supposedly “lit up” when talking about the washed-up rocker idea. Huh. Maybe it is a pretentious artist thing.

A few months after writing this script, I decided maybe it was time to attempt to take my career seriously. Maybe I could latch on to the viral marketing bandwagon and make a second attempt at a website. The hope was to get it to a point of “Internet sensation” — cult popularity that would give me enough traction to tell production companies, “Hey, look, this script has potential!”

Despite the 10,000 friends the fake band has on MySpace (nearly 50 of which aren’t spambots), it’s not something I’d call an “Internet sensation.” Half of the people who have paid attention seem to think it’s legitimate, and the other half don’t quite seem to understand the joke. Mostly, though, people don’t pay attention. I’ve accepted that, in the hopes that maybe someday some person who’s just as warped as me will stumble across the sites* and get hooked. It costs me nothing but time, and for awhile it was an amusing diversion…

…until, like I said, I got burned out. I planned an entire story arc on the blog, but I wrote one or two entries before I just, simply, got too bored to continue. Not because I hated the story or the characters. I’d just written so much about these people, it started to feel repetitive. How many times can he get conned out of his money? How many times is his wife going to leave him? How many times will the band quit? What started as running jokes stopped being funny.

What do you do when this happens? How do you get the mojo back, especially when you have to do something major like, um, finish rewriting a novel? I could have always just ditched the blog for awhile — nobody but me reads it, anyway — and pick up again. In fact, that’s pretty much what I did. I’m in the process of catching up, which is why my blogging here has been a little erratic lately. (If you look on the band’s blog, all the posts from the past six weeks — around 25 — have been written by me over the past couple of days.)

First, I tried to pick it up again with a new character — one who has yet to be introduced, but she will parody my arch-nemesis Diablo Cody and become incorporated in the next major story arc, which parodies this guy. The operative word here is “parody.” That helped a little bit, but it didn’t give me the desired level of enthusiasm.

In my earlier post, I write, “I picked up on one moment in a related story that made me rethink the characters’ backstory.” This sentence pretty much inspired today’s entire post, and what I refer to very vaguely there is the exact thing that inspired me to continue working on these characters.

I went back through some old stuff and stumbled across possibly the stupidest thing I’ve ever written, a structural and stylistic parody of O.J. Simpson’s classic “fictional” tell-all If I Did It… The concept fits perfectly with the established backstory, but because I went through O.J.’s book sentence by sentence and grafted Girth’s life onto it, I had to create some strange backstory surprises. re-reading it, I discovered one of the surprises, and it gave me a whole different outlook on his career. In fact, reading one small paragraph of this goofy thing fixed every problem with the “flashback chapter” in my novel, and the alteration of the backstory made him more interesting to me.

The advice you can draw from this is — well, if you’re anything like me, you’ll end up forgetting small but vital chunks of what you’ve written if it’s more than a year old. No matter how bored you are with a character or a story, go back over the material until you find something new and surprising. It doesn’t have to be literally on the page, as it was in this case; I’ve had similar moments of clarity just by looking at individual scenes with fresh eyes. You’ll see something new and different that will invigorate the writing. It’s how Dying Proof went from a love story to a story about sibling rivals (Freud would love it!).

*Yes, plural — part of the fun of viral marketing is trying to assert your artificial reality on the real world. So far, this has caused me to accumulate over 20 MySpace accounts and create five different websites. [Back]

Posted by Stan on April 30, 2008 4:24 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 26, 2008

Notecard Theory

So for all you non-writers, there’s this theory floating around — mainly but not exclusively in screenwriting circles — that notecards will magically help to improve structure. There are about 90,000 different methods of doing this, but the most useful one I’ve heard works like this: for every given scene, you write down a general description of what happens in the scene, followed by (a) how it fits into the overall story, (b) the characters involved in the scene, (d) their conflicts within the scene, (e) how these conflicts are resolved, and (f) how this scene reenforces the theme. In theory, you should have all the answers and a fully-loaded 3x5 notecard, or you should cut the scene. (Or rewrite it until you can provide all the notecard information.)

Most of the time when I hear the notecard theory, it doesn’t work like that. It’s a much more useless structural idea: you map out the scenes with notecards so that you can shuffle them around. I’ve read lengthy, possibly apocryphal stories (all of them coming from unsold spec writers) explaining how notecards saved their script. One part of the story doesn’t work, so they shuffle one scene from the first act to the third act, and — boom! Citizen Kane 2: Razing Kane. Am I an anomaly for never really having problems with an overarching structure or misplaced scenes?

To paraphrase William Goldman, once you find the spine of the story, you can fuck up just about everything else and still have people thinking there’s something in the screenplay worth saving. This is what I’ll politely call The Mountains of Indiana Syndrome — one of the many reasons I find that writer so frustrating is that his stories are structurally sound; it’s everything else that’s the problem. I have a pretty harsh reason for not buying into the validity of these “repositioning one scene saved my script” legends: if you put an act-three scene in act one, chances are you have bigger problems — problems that a notecard can’t solve. That is the “tough-love” approach from a guy who believes, more than anything else, that story is structure.

Of course, the “story is structure” mantra applies more to dramatic writing than, say, a novel. Novels have quite a bit of structural freedom, and you can throw pretty much anything at it and still come out a winner. Or, at least, you can if you can write well. Probably the best recent example I can think of here is Stephen King. Why are so many Stephen King movies terrible, when you feel like his books are ready-made for film adaptations? Critics might tell you it’s because he’s just plain not as good as everyone wants to believe, but if you’ve ever actually read one of his novels, you might notice that they’re very loose and rambling. He describes everything in vivid but plainspoken detail, making you feel like you can see everything. He often does this without resorting to hoity-toity poetic imagery that turns a lot of “mainstream” readers off of “literature,” but…he also has a tendency to go way over-the-top with descriptions. A description of an ashtray will start off with a paragraph about the ashtray, then deviate into a 30-page meditation on one character’s lifelong love of smoking, its effects on his wife and children, and the grim specter of his cancer-killed father looming over every cigarette he smokes. (Also, he repeats details all the time: in any given book, there’s about a 99% chance a smoker will strike matches on a thumb hardened and yellowed by nicotine staining.) He basically writes fictional versions of this blog.

That’s a problem: how the fuck do you adapt that? Unless the novel is called John Q. Smoker Gets Ironic Lung Cancer, there’s a high probability that it will be adapted as follows: JOHN Q. SMOKING-ISN’T-CENTRAL-TO-THE-PLOT, skinny mid-30s, takes one last drag on a used-up cigarette, then stubs it out. Maybe there’ll be later references to the character smoking, but we don’t need the case history.

Knowing what to cut is one of the general struggles of adapting, but it’s even worse with somebody like King, where everything feels cinematic but only about 10% of what he writes has anything to do with the dramatic “movie story” he’s telling. So people either complain that an adaptation sucked because they cut out all the good parts, or they complain because they tried to cram in everything and very little of it made sense. Or, like my complaint with Kubrick’s The Shining: completely missing the point. This is a book about a man dealing with alcoholism. The only way King could make this point less subtle is if he’d titled it Jack Torrance Is a Drunk, and It’s Not as Fun as It Sounds. I don’t know what the fuck Kubrick was going for, other than a shoddy horror movie or some kind of meditation on insanity. (For the Kubrick defenders: use, I know Torrance is portrayed as a drunk in the movie, but it’s downplayed to such a degree that it’s irrelevant. Also, you can’t defend against the fact that Jack Nicholson — who’s usually great — plays Torrance as insane from the first second he appears on screen. Where’s the gradual descent into madness?) For my money, the best book-to-screen adaptations must retain the spirit and theme of the source material. It’d be nice if they kept the characters and the overall storyline, but they can hack it to pieces as long as it has the same underlying purpose.

What I’m getting at, at long last, is this: my novel, Cedar Point, is about as good as it’s going to get, with a few exceptions:

• One of the later chapters deals exclusively with two minor characters. Although these characters are central to the plot, this chapter is not. It’s universally reviled by everyone who’s read it — not so much because of what happens, but because of when it happens. I admit, I tried something a little different. At the end of the day, this is a straightforward story I could have just as easily written as a screenplay, but I threw in a few novelistic flourishes every now and again. The one in the next bulletpoint, which worried me much more, got a warm reception, but I guess that’s the difference between giving readers a cliffhanger at the beginning instead of the end. When you’re on page 300, leaving them hanging, then spending 30 pages with different characters before getting back to the main story, does not make them happy. Good to know.

  On the plus side, nobody hated the chapter — the suggestion from every single person was to merely take the events condensed in this chapter and sprinkle them throughout.

• It’s a whole different ballgame when you’re on page 50 and you take a 100-page diversion from the main story. This surprised me, because it’s 100% backstory — taking the three main characters on a journey from 1991 until 2005 (“present day” for the story) to show not only how they’ve changed — which they already know from the first 50 pages — but why they’ve changed. Everyone loved this little trip along the scenic route, but that didn’t mean they had no criticism. I got two main points from everybody’s feedback: first, I have to incorporate a fourth character into the backstory chapter; second, certain backstory elements didn’t work for them. More to the point, it’s implied that the story might take a totally different direction (not my intention, but this is what the readers picked up on), and when it doesn’t, it got a little confusing.
• This is related to the flashback chapter: while some parts of the backstory need work to clarify the actual story, the main complaint from me is that much of the backstory isn’t funny enough or interesting enough to sustain readers’ attention. This was actually backed up by one reader, who suggested I established certain characters and situations and didn’t take full advantage of them. I’m trying not to be too coy, but I’m also trying not to give everything away. Sorry if this all sounds really bland and stupid.

  The bottom line is, I picked up on one moment in a related story that made me rethink the characters’ backstory. Fortunately, these new thoughts only affect the main story in the sense that they make it even more tragic. I won’t have to take a backhoe to the whole thing just to change out one little tiny piece.

If you were paying attention during that little list, something might have occurred to you. If it didn’t, I’ll bluntly state it now: I am going to start using notecards. OH I WENT THERE.

My feeling is, notecards aren’t really as effective for something structure-dependent like a play of any kind. Maybe they help some people, and that’s fine. I’ve never felt the need to use them and have never had any complaints about structure.

A novel is different. It’s a bit more unwieldy: more scenes, for one thing, and in those scenes many things can happen that don’t happen in a screenplay — internal thoughts, repeated descriptions (in a screenplay, you usually describe a person when they’re introduced but otherwise, nope; in a novel, you have to give yourself a clear picture of the person because you’ll be describing them multiple times), flashbacks or little bits of anecdotal backstory…hell, in my particular novel, there’s even a lot of weird history of the town that would never get into a screenplay.

Because most of the changes above have to do with inserting and removing scenes, notecards are optimal for this type of thing. In the first bulletpoint, I’m trying to find similar scenes that I can use to combine events from that late chapter with earlier events. In the second and third, it’s the simpler matter of pulling certain scenes out and replacing them with something new. The notecards will help me keep this all straight.

Is it ironic that the first time I’m using notecards in a non-classroom environment is for one of my few non-screenwriting projects? It seems like notecards should be more common for novelists, but I don’t hear much about that as a viable method to help keep things straight. Maybe I’m just not cut out for it.

Posted by Stan on April 26, 2008 1:50 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 22, 2008

Joke Ideas

I hate it when I have an idea that starts as a joke but turns into something legitimate, like that Young Patriots idea or Rolling in It: The Movie. Both started out as jokes, but the more I thought about them, the more I liked them. It’s a sickness, I think. I have commercial instincts — really, I do! — I just choose to ignore them so I can focus on crazy shit people would probably pay me not to think about.

The latest came about simply enough. Thumbing through the Writer’s Market to find a suitable publisher of my epic masterwork, it occurred to me that very few of them dealt with a genre I’d classify as “comedy.” Many of the ones listed as “humor/satire” focused more on something political or nonfiction. Even worse, many of them pigeonhole themselves into a particular genre…and that’s where the joke idea came from. Since my current novel can’t even fit into a different, non-comedic genre (like “detective fiction” or “romance novel”), the places where I can submit it are severely limited. I told a friend of mine that I should start writing a novel that combines every conceivable genre. She thought that was hilarious, and together we concocted a basic story:

At an unspecified point in the future (sci-fi!), a private investigator (mystery!) on the Martian colonies (also sci-fi!), which have been dubbed by Earth as the “new frontier” (western!), is hired to search for the woman he once loved (romance!). When independent-minded colonists start to talk revolution (political allegory!*), war breaks out between Mars and Earth (war!). Against this colorful backdrop, the P.I. has to return to Earth undetected (thriller!) and search an unfamiliar world (adventure!) until he reunites with his love (more romance!).

So yeah, it’s about as retarded as you’d expect…

…or is it?!

It’s rough around the edges, although maybe not for an idea that was fleshed out during a 15-minute gigglefest**, but once I started to think about it, it does seem like the kind of goofy comedy I could have a lot of fun with. Once I flesh it out and iron out the story kinks, it could be entertaining…but will it be commercial?

*Also a shameless rip-off of Greg Bear’s Moving Mars. [Back]
**If it’s wrong to hang around with women and giggle like a schoolgirl, I don’t want to be right. [Back]

Posted by Stan on April 22, 2008 4:52 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 17, 2008

Room Service

Poring over* somebody’s screenplay, I’ve realized something: detail is a lost art.

Have you ever read an old-timey screenplay, something from the ’40s or ’50s? The screenplay for Treasure of the Sierra Madre is ridiculously vivid, jammed with visual information and nuance you don’t get in a modern screenplay. I can understand a desire to be concise for the sake of the reader. The most important rule in any kind of writing is to know your audience and cater to them, and the audience for a screenplay is generally “overworked readers who only read the dialogue” and “barely-literate producers who would rather read a two-paragraph synopsis.” However, there’s a big difference between brevity and eliminating necessary details.

For instance, this screenplay opens in an office. The slugline just says INT. OFFICE - DAY, there is a short sentence about a character — who isn’t even given a physical description — sitting at his desk, then dialogue. So what we get from this is (a) the scene takes place in an office, and (b) the character has a desk. Oh, and I mustn’t forget: it’s daytime.

Some might say, “Well, Stan, you dick, offices share a general sameness that is often a topic of stand-up comedy and David Fincher movies.” I hate to whip out my street cred here, but as a veteran of no fewer than 630,000 office jobs, I can tell you: yes, in a very, very, very general sense, offices have a great deal in common. There are still a shitload of important differences, so when you’re forming your mental picture of this office, it’s important to know things: cubicles or no cubicles, gigantic corporate building or one-story shitbox, cluttered with crap or pristine and antiseptic? If you get one idea stuck in your head because there’s no description, it’s jarring to read something later like, “Johnny steps out of his cubicle.” You’re like, “What the fuck? What cubicle?! All it says is he has a desk!”

It’s the same basic problem as the lack of physical description on the character: because there was none, based solely on his dialogue, I imagined the character as Dian Bachar from Orgazmo. So then later, the fact that he’s dumpy and huge becomes a plot point. Tell me that upfront so I’m not baffled.

I will acknowledge that part of this is my fault, because I’m obviously jumping to the wrong conclusions. With nothing to go on, what else am I supposed to do?

What’s wrong with a little bit of description? I’m not talking a Stephen King description that starts with a three-page description of the office, then veers off into a 30-page tangent about a tertiary character’s struggle with alcoholism, then six pages on a figurine somebody keeps on a shelf in the break room. It can be sparse and simple, like An enormous cubicle maze spreads out as far as the eye can see. A little hyperbole doesn’t hurt anyone. JOHNNY, early 30s and enormous, manages to wedge himself into his desk chair, which groans with disapproval. It’s possible a sloppy reader might think this is a talking chair or something, but doesn’t that paint a clear — perhaps redundant — picture of Johnny’s hugeness? If his being fat serves the plot, we need to know. Do we need to know that he’s blond and has a crew cut? No. Do we need to know that I may have unintentionally described Drew Carey? Not unless you’re a casting director.

Even if the type of office we’re in doesn’t strictly matter to the plot, it builds atmosphere. Even if Johnny’s fatness matters for one isolated joke, it’s integral to his character and our vision of him. Envisioning a fat, tall guy instead of a scrawny, tiny guy paints a different picture — while the dialogue doesn’t change, the way we read it does. So what the fuck, writers? Why are you leaving all this shit out? I know you’re told people in “the industry” don’t like to read, but they also don’t like being frustrated.

*Where “poring” means “indifferently skimming between ADD-induced trips to IMDb and YouTube.” [Back]

Posted by Stan on April 17, 2008 6:34 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 13, 2008

Openings

In my quest to perfect an homage to Steven Seagal, I have to consider the importance of the opening. In his earlier, better movies, he always had something resembling a prologue to establish his character and, often, establish the story. In Hard to Kill, there’s a pre-coma sequence in 1983 showing him as (a) a bad-ass, (b) a cop/surveillance expert, (c) a loving family man, all prior to getting shot and ending up in a seven-year coma. In Out for Justice, there’s a shorter, better sequence where he asks his partner if everything’s all right (this foreshadows a plot point — seriously!), then throws a pimp through a car windshield.

I knew I’d need a similar opening, but I couldn’t figure out how to work it in. As the story stood yesterday, it started with the main character arriving in Nigeria, but he doesn’t want to announce his bad-assiness right away. He has to build up to it. At first, I thought, What if he foils a terrorist attack on the airplane? Almost immediately, I thought, Too soon! So then I started thinking that something has to happen at the U.S. airport. It reminded me of Marked for Death, which hilariously implies not only that Seagal and Keith David sneak duffel bags loaded with handguns, shotguns, and high-powered assault rifles into Jamaica…they come back to Chicago with said bags of guns plus a decapitated head.

So yeah, that’ll be it: he gets into it with a security person over the massive quantity of weapons he’s trying to carry on to the plane. That seemed lame, though. My annoying penchant for satire reminded me of the often-reported incompetent TSA workers, leading me to consider opening with a style-establishing joke — building suspense as we think he’ll get busted, but then the glazed-eyed TSA worker doesn’t even care. And he goes and kicks some ass in a Chili’s Too (fulfilling the barfight quota). I’m still mulling it over, but I think some variation on this will end up opening the script.

Posted by Stan on April 13, 2008 1:30 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 11, 2008

Quantum Leap

Tonight, I watched a Quantum Leap rerun that started making me think about the potential for a remake. I’ve heard rumblings of remake attempts in the past that are detailed enough to make me think they at least had one in development at one time, but obviously it’s never come to fruition. It’s one of my favorite shows of all time, but there were always a few elements to “leaping” that went unaddressed. (And yes, being that I loved the show, I fully understand that this was a show with a science-fiction premise that had very little to do with science-fiction. Probably for the best, since the attempts they made to explain things scientifically — most notably in the earlier episodes, and dropped pretty quickly before the end of the second season, then resurrected it when the “Evil Leaper” showed up and tried to ruin the show — were pretty retarded.)

For some reason, this particular episode made me start questioning the rules of Quantum Leap more than anything else. It strikes me as strange because it was really a fun throwaway episode with Sam as a beauty queen; it didn’t build on the show’s long-running mythology or have any significant impact. It wasn’t exactly filler; even an inessential episode of Quantum Leap uses the prism of the past to tackle contemporary issues. No, it was just something about Sam’s particular goals in the episode. He had two objectives that, atypically, would not have resulted in anyone’s death or cause some kind of cataclysmic event to occur. The first objective: save a fellow contestant from a sleazy photographer who takes nude pictures of her and ruins her life. The second objective: place at least third in the pageant so the woman Sam’s leaped into can get a scholarship and become the country’s first female cardiologist.

It started me thinking about some of the things the show never addressed: what happens if Sam fails in his mission? Does he start over, or does he just keep going in that life? Does whatever is leaping him through time leap him into another person, or another time, to solve the same problem in a different way? The show touched on this idea (very briefly) in “The Leap Home,” the two-parter where Sam first leaps into himself as a high schooler to make sure his school basketball team won a pivotal game, then leaps into a soldier in his brother’s Vietnam platoon. In the first part, Sam becomes obsessed with saving his family: his brother would die in a few months in ‘Nam, his sister would marry an abusive alcoholic, and his dad would die of a heart-attack. Nobody listens to him, but he has a chance to save at least one of them in Vietnam (and he does). Still, even though he got lucky, saving his brother wasn’t a primary objective (instead, he was there to save an obnoxious photographer played by Andrea Thompsons, one of my least favorite actors, whose Pulitzer-winning photos would contribute to public dissent against the war).

This particular episode could have tackled the same stories in a number of different ways. Say Sam had a harder time getting the photos back. According to Ziggy*, the nude photos of the contestant didn’t appear publicly (on an erotic calendar “seen in your better muffler shops”) for a month. That gives him ample time to solve the problem in a variety of different ways — going after the photographer, as he does in the episode, or if it’s too late he could dive into the seamy underbelly of Deep South porn peddlers circa 1958. Like Hardcore, only better because he’d be in drag all the time while lecherous men hit on him.

Or let’s say he solved the photo problem but, as a result, blew the pageant. He was already struggling because he’s a man, not a beauty queen, and he has no clue how to do any of that pageant crap. It was hard enough to believe that, with minimal rehearsal time, he’d get up to #4 before blowing everyone away with his impromptu Jerry Lee Lewis impression. So, at the end of the hour, he’s failed one of his missions.

It could go one of three ways: they could have a “Bobby in the shower” ending where Sam leaps right back into the same point in time, making the next episode Groundhog Day-esque variations on the previous leap; they could have him leap into a different person involved in the pageant and, again, show us a different take on the same plot; or, the least repetitive option, they could have Sam “stuck” in 1958, forced to find alternate methods of getting college money.

They could delve into other questions like the consequences of Sam “dying,” and whether or not he can age. Notice that these are all still very ingrained in both the show’s formula, either extending the show’s usual standalone-episode format for occasional multi-episode arcs or answering questions that don’t need elaborate, science-fiction answers.

The only potential downside to a new Quantum Leap series: obvious generalizations aside, the past three decades just aren’t quite the same as tackling the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s. One of the struggles facing Journeyman, a recent rehash that I actually enjoyed (it had superficial similarities but enough differences to make it worthwhile; too bad nobody but me watched it), was a way to make the ’80s and ’90s and distinctive as earlier decades. They never quite accomplished it, although they didn’t have the “travel within his lifetime” conceit, so he traveled to earlier time periods. The “within his own lifetime” bit is essential to the idea, even though they bent that rule once in awhile; otherwise, you could go crazy with leaping antics and the time-travel would overshadow the character drama. The only way to fix it is to set the series earlier than 2008…or make the leaper really, really old.

Even so, given the chance, I’d remake Quantum Leap. You know, assuming nobody is interested in that awesome Young Patriots series.

*For non-Quantum Leap fans, that’s the gargantuan computer built for the QL Project that Al accesses via a goofy, tricorder-like PDA precursor. [Back]

Posted by Stan on April 11, 2008 10:31 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 10, 2008

Blown Wad

I felt pretty confident when I sent Dying Proof to the Big-Shot Producer. Not just because I thought I finally had a solid draft and, because he confessed to never “getting around” to reading what I sent him in June, I dodged the bullet of ruining my chances with that imperfect draft (which I knew had major flaws when I sent it to him; I just didn’t have the time to fix them, hoping instead that he’d saw the raw potential). That was part of the reason, but the main reason was: with semi-frequent harassment, it takes him about six months to read something. From me, anyway. He’s busy with other projects, and at the end of the day I’m nobody. I knew I could send it to him and have a huge window to continue work on new projects, so when I got the inevitable “What else you got?” question, I’d…actually have something.

That’s not to say I don’t have anything, but he’s read two of the six screenplays I have in “ready for reading” condition; he has a third in his possession as we speak. The first two he said, without elaborating, that he felt were too “bleak” and “over-the-top.” That’s pretty much my sense of humor. I don’t want to get too high and mighty, but I was just arguing with a friend in L.A. about my sense of humor, which some consider uncommercial. They sit there, they laugh their balls off, and they say, “There’s no way anyone will pay money to see that.” Because there’s this perception that in order to appeal to “flyover” states, comedy has to be sanitized and formulaic. (Evidence to the contrary: the Apatow machine, which has found success in features it never did on television, in part because TV network publicity people are morons.) They’re kinda missing the part where I was born and raised in the heart of “flyover” country. I understand the humor of the Midwest, and around here, the more depraved you are, the harder people laugh. Maybe it won’t play in Denver or Mobile, but the Midwest is pretty big, and everybody here is fucked up, possibly because everybody calls us “flyover” states like we don’t actually matter.

That rant out of the way, it became clear that maybe I’d be safe sending him another comedy; I’m not sure if he asked for something different because he was genuinely put off by jokes about the lighter side of meth abuse and gang rapes, or if he wanted to see if I have anything close to range as a writer. I’m not sure if this would be the case or not, since most producers and agents I’ve encountered love to pigeonhole you. If you send them a comedy, you’re a comedy writer, so if they ask for something else and you pitch them a humorless thriller, it will confuse them. That’s stupid, but it’s the way things are. I don’t know if the Big-Shot is progressive in his awareness that some writers aren’t so easy to define, or if he really just doesn’t think I’m funny.

Either way, I sent him the thriller, but I have nothing else except more comedies. I have some non-comedy projects in planning stages, but nothing I could send him…unless you take into account that six-month window between me sending it and him reading it. (And if I need to stall for more time, I can easily just stop harassing him for a month or two.)

Unfortunately, things are different this time. When I wrote to him about this new draft, he told me this was pretty good timing on my part — he just made a partnership with some people looking to make a thriller. Kind of odd, considering he doesn’t specialize in anything close to thrillers, but hey, that could go back to that whole “progressive” thing. And besides — why should I care? He’s saying, “Yes, good timing. Send it!” So I’ll send it…

…and he tells me because of these partners, the turnaround won’t be the usual slowdown. These guys will have an answer in two weeks.

Oh fuck.

The clock started ticking the second I sent the script, and while I don’t fully believe the two-week promise, I at least feel safe assuming it won’t take six months or more. So if they start beating down my door for something new — especially if it’s a thriller — I have nothing.

Nothing but pitches, and to use yet another awful pun, pitches ain’t shit. There was a miracle time in the mid-’90s when “bought on a pitch” became a mantra — people were selling great concepts for $1 million during the course of a single elevator ride, then delivering shitty scripts and laughing all the way to the bank. Somehow, it occurred to Hollywood executives that this business model didn’t work. It gave writers — gasp! — shitloads of money for very little work. That’s a job reserved for executive producers, dammit!

So while I have the option of pitching these concepts out of desperation and hoping it’ll buy enough goodwill and time for me to finish something…the clock is ticking. Once I’ve done the preliminary work — figuring out the characters, beating out the story, etc. — I could probably crank out a serviceable draft in a week. But the preliminary stuff, for me, takes anywhere between one month and six, depending on how much trouble I have figuring out the actual story. Besides which, only one of my first drafts has been really good and solid right out of the gate — it’s a rare thing, but it came from an idea that had been germinating for two years before I sat down and crapped it out on paper.

At times like these, I think of scripts like that zombie script, with a story and characters that are all right there, and I say to myself, “Just run with it.” If you want to know the circumstances for plagiarizing fiction, they’re all right here.

I won’t do that, though. I have better, marketable ideas — I just don’t have them on paper.

Which leaves me with one last, awful idea: the Nigeria script. Enough potential for goofy comedy to keep me interested, but if I play it straight enough — fully deadpan satire that’s only over-the-top in its action — I could just beat this thing. It’s the kind of script where the characters are already fleshed out. They’re all archetypes (or stereotypes, depending on how cynical you are) of the genre, the story’s all laid out, and it technically qualifies as a thriller.

This just might work…

Posted by Stan on April 10, 2008 3:11 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 8, 2008

Based on the True Story of Steven Seagal

A few years back, I worked for a well-known tech company that I’ve taken, in writing, to calling Motorama. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist figure out the actual company, but it may take a rocket scientist to think of Googling “Motorama” in search of embittered ex-employees giving fake names to everyone and everything around them. I worked in their super-secret contracts department and, in fact, had to sign a non-disclosure agreement stating I would not discuss any of their state or federal contracts. Consequently, it’s difficult to discuss the screenplay idea it gave me.

I’ll only say this: thanks to loopholes in the contract provisions, I discovered an easy method of embezzling from the company. Well, not easy, but easy enough. With so little oversight, all you really had to do was falsify some invoices, and Motorama would pay out. Because you know what they did with invoices, for accountability purposes? Threw them away. I hope that doesn’t violate the agreement. There’s a more complicated part of the scheme that I won’t discuss, but needless to say it gave me a screenplay idea that never got off the ground. Why? Because there’s no story.

Actually, there is a story, but it was, like, half Normal Life (an exceptional and underrated movie if you haven’t seen it) and half Bananas: with the help of a custodian (who gets a cut), a disillusioned office worker starts embezzling to keep his wife happy; somebody discovers the scheme and has to be taken care of, and when too many people start asking questions about that, he ends up gunning down the whole office and fleeing the country with the help of a drug cartel the janitor’s brother runs. Yes, it’s a comedy full of embezzlement, murder, and drug cartels. Party! Anyway, he flees the U.S. and inadvertently becomes a propped-up dictator in a small Central American country and prevent a plot against his own life. (The idea came from something I read where a drug cartel in a small Mexican city staged a mayoral election, had him win on a landslide with a campaign promising benevolent leadership, then had him be the most incompetent, useless mayor in history — and so, when the cartel had him killed, citizens cheered and gladly elected one of the top lieutenants to run the town. It’s been so long, I honestly can’t remember if that came from a short story or a factual account. So I guess that means I would have been ripping off three things.)

Eventually, the idea changed to an Nigerian custodian and village. There is no global problem that’s funnier to me than Nigerian 419 scams. Both the instigators and the victims make me laugh endlessly; I even recorded an awful novelty song about them. As even more time passed, I dropped the office worker angle and thought it would be more fun to satirize the recent spate of “African issues” movies like Hotel Rwanda, The Constant Gardener, Blood Diamond, and The Last King of Scotland.

Before people get accusatory, this couldn’t have less to do with race. Every time I hear stories coming out of Africa, I feel a little bit ill — and feel blinding lily-white guilt over the fact that European whites fucked up that continent to begin with. Fuck you, David Livingstone and Otto von Bismarck! This has more to do with my hatred of the inept Hollywood belief that making a movie, even a well-made one, will solve anything. Usually, the just reduce complex struggles to the simplest cause-and-effect patterns imaginable, leaving audiences wondering why it’s so difficult to solve the problems. If they made more movies about disenfranchised whites inflicted with the horrors of genocide, I’d gladly mock them. In fact, I’ve read a half-dozen scripts attempting to deal with the problems in Chechnya — if this becomes a genre of political film, it’s next on my list. To sum up: I just like to mock and offend; I don’t care about the target.

Also, wait until you see the revised character! As before, he’s the kind of guy who would willfully shoot up a largely innocent bunch of people to save his own ass. He comes to Nigeria after getting screwed over by a 419 scam — he’s after the man who stole his money and has no interest in anything else. He gets swept up in the social struggles and politics, but the entire time he’s mostly whining because he doesn’t have his money. I didn’t really have much more of a plot than that…

…until now.

As I mentioned yesterday, I binge-watched the following Seagal movies over the past couple of days: Above the Law, Hard to Kill, Marked for Death, Out for Justice, Under Siege, and On Deadly Ground. I have a half-dozen other Seagal movies lined up, and if you’re wondering what the fuck, I’ll let you know I have to review a book on Seagal coming out on May 20th, and it occurred to me that I haven’t seen any of his movies since they stopped being played every other day on HBO. On top of that, the only Seagal movie I’ve seen more than once is the first Under Siege. Since a great deal of the book involves first plot summary and then in-depth analysis, it occurred to me that I should refresh my memory so I can assess whether or not the half-assed Ain’t It Cool News writer who authored the book does them justice.

I was originally just going to watch a smattering of Seagal, but something amazing happened as I watched Hard to Kill: I started to love Steven Seagal. Back in the olden days, I didn’t think much of him as either an actor or an action hero, but time has passed, I’ve seen a shitload more action movies, and it’s pretty amazing how…different his movies are. What could be rote, indifferently made martial-arts schlock actually has artistic aims and a political conscience. Obviously, it’s problematic when Seagal’s characters solve every political problem by beating the shit out of people and, more often than not, murdering them with weapons they tried to kill him with. It’s an effective short-term solution, but not much more.

I can’t say enough about the surprise and enjoyment derived from these movies. He’s a better fighter than Van Damme, he has Stallone’s take-charge (uncredited) writer-producer-star attitude and a much more cynical political outlook, he wasn’t a comical ‘roid rage case like Stallone/Schwarzenegger (in fact, his pudginess gives him a surprising “everyman” quality, even though he took potshots for it both then and now), he has the charm and wit of Bruce Willis, and — dare I say it? — by the time he hit Out for Justice…he could actually sorta act, which puts him above most of his action-movie contemporaries. I’m not saying he’s Oscar material (then again, maybe he is), but what impressed me is the evolution of his chops over the course of these movies, as well as surprising but rewarding choices (like his anguished delivery of the line “I’m taking you to the bank…the blood bank…” in Hard to Kill).

Seagal’s fixation on the Mafia, Catholicism, CIA corruption, and the late-’80s/early-’90s urban drug culture (and later, the environment) fills his movie with such vivid characters and labyrinthine plots, they barely qualify as action movies. Of course, the plots get thinner and the action gets more emphasis as the movies go on, but it’s very clear from the outset that Seagal — operating as a producer and a mostly uncredited writer — has a peculiar worldview that he’s expressing with these movies. I admire him for that.

You might be wondering why I’ve slipped into Seagal worshipping. The answer’s pretty simple: I found both the plot and the padding for this movie — the untapped goldmine of social-relevance action movies, combined with the “African issues” movies, made a storyline crystallize. I won’t divulge it, but let’s just say it won’t be terribly difficult to piece together if you watch a couple of classic Seagal movies and notice the similarities in story and theme.

The ultimate goal, when I finally start work on it, is to have something that operates both as satire and as a straight action movie — in true Seagal fashion, forcing the audience to contemplate the deep corruption in African politics and the desperation that leads to the exploitation of greedy Americans (who, elderly or not, kinda deserve what they get). To sum up, it’ll basically be the scene in The Gods Must Be Crazy where the militants chase the anthropologist in fast-motion, stretched out over two hours.

Posted by Stan on April 8, 2008 10:30 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 7, 2008

Perfect Plot

I had trouble sleeping last night for a really dumb reason. It’s been a week since I sent Dying Proof to the Big-Shot Producer, and somehow reading through other peoples’ work made me realize something:

Dying Proof had a serious plot hole, and now it was out of my hands, ready to be scrutinized by people who may notice it and not care, notice it and toss it aside, or (if I’m really lucky) not notice it at all. The hole is a basic logic flaw that affects many thrillers and action movies: why do villains go to such elaborate ruses when it’s way easier just to shoot somebody?

In the script, the protagonist discovers a lone newspaper article — the only known evidence of a massacre that he witnessed, which is the main reason he’s now in hiding. He’s trying to uncover not just who was responsible for the attack, but proof of their culpability. So the newspaper article makes him hunt for the reporter listed in the byline, and when he finds her, he makes an appointment under false pretenses. And, of course, it turns out that everything about this — the newspaper article, the reporter, the office where they’re meeting — is an elaborate ruse, a trap he just walked into and may not walk out of…

Except why’d they go to all that trouble? This is the question that puzzled me as I tried to sleep last night. Eventually I drifted off, and when I woke up this morning, I realized:

Dying Proof had no plot hole. Yes, it features a typical nonsensical “convoluted trap” set-piece, but…it actually does make sense. They have to formulate this ruse because they have a ballpark idea of what city he’s in, but (a) they don’t know specifically where he is and need to flush him out, and (b) they need to lure him to a private place that he thinks is public — an open office. Nothing bad could possibly happen there, right?

Still, while it’s not an out-and-out hole, it did force me to ask two questions that go unanswered:

1. How do they know he’s looking for information in newspaper archives and that he’d stumble across that particular article (technically two questions)?
2. Why not lure him to the office, pull up in a van, grab him, and take him to an abandoned warehouse where they can kill him without any difficulty? It’s much cheaper than renting one entire floor of an office building to kill one guy.

I have answers to those questions, but they aren’t in the screenplay. Well, they are now — I added them in — but they aren’t in the draft that was sent out. I don’t think either question makes or breaks the story. I’m not a huge fan of scripts that spell out every little detail, treating the audience like idiots. However, I’m trying to anticipate possible questions — complaints and perceived flaws — because even though I have an explanation, those reading it may not think of one.

This is the problem with creative media. How can you truly tell when something’s “finished” when it’s always evolving? I’m not going to pretend like I’m an artist or anything, but there is a part of me that strives for perfection in whatever I’m attempting. A week ago, I thought I’d sussed out all the potential plot holes and logic problems. Beyond the solid feedback I received, I noticed a few issues of my own — and was somewhat gratified that they weren’t noticed by the people who read it. In fact, one of my usual readers said of the previous draft: “It’s amazing how quickly this moves. I didn’t realize any of the problems until I thought about it a few days later.”

Writing something that’s deliberately fast-paced to gloss over its many flaws…is not exactly a goal. It’s a means to an end in some cases, and in that case I’d jabbed myself with a coffee IV drip and written the entire thing in 36 hours because Big-Shot told me on Friday that he wanted to see something ASAP, so I gave myself until Monday — along with the laughable excuse that I went fishing up in Wisconsin for the weekend.

The next draft took more time, but I tried to keep as much of the caffeine-induced rapid pacing as possible. I’ve been walking around saying, “This is as good as this draft will get, but talk to me in a month.” That’s my way around the evolution process. My own opinion will change — it’s not just the influence of others that produces new drafts — and I will continue striving for unattainable perfection.

I’ve been writing long enough to know it’ll never happen, though. There’s always going to be something I’d do differently. It has less to do with intangible qualities like “perfection” and more to do with my ever-changing opinions. I binge-watched six Steven Seagal movies, and while it didn’t change my opinion about Dying Proof, it changed the way I’d write an action movie in the future. Maybe in a month or two, after the ponytailed spectacle sinks in, I’ll go back to it and decide what it really needs is a disillusioned cop with a shady CIA past trying to unravel a conspiracy involving cocaine. Or possibly decapitating a Jamaican druglord’s twin.

Point being, you have to strive for perfection and accept “as good as I can make it.” That’s not to say you need to settle for “good enough,” which usually isn’t good at all, but if you know in your heart, at this moment in time, you can’t make the story better, and you can objectively say that’s it’s pretty fucking good (or have others say it for you) — it’s time to send it out or set it aside. It’ll always be there when you want to come back to it..

Posted by Stan on April 7, 2008 4:12 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 5, 2008

Nothing Ever Happens

So the second script I read had one unfortunate side effect: very little in the way of plot. It gave me an early Richard Linklater vibe because of the setting and the writer’s penchant for meandering scenes of characters just hanging out. Although he defies many conventions, Linklater’s a master of subtext and conflict. For instance, Dazed and Confused has a very loose plot — seniors want to beat up next year’s freshman class — that sets up the characters and their minor goals over the course of the night (e.g., “beat up a freshman”/”don’t get beaten up”). It has the traditional obstacles and changing goals, but it’s mostly a movie about hanging out. Yet, from the conversations these characters share, everything they say tells us a little something about them. Their attitudes on superficial things like music, acid-induced dreams, fashion — what a person discusses and the way others react to it all tell us things about who they are.

The script I was given had the loose plot and the deliberate (some might say “plodding”) pace of a Linklater film, but it didn’t have much else in common. When the characters talked about buying a keg, all they were talking about…was buying a keg. That’s a problem. Similarly, the characters desires and goals are shielded until, quite literally, just before each goal is altered. (In one case, we don’t know a character wants a scholarship until page 100, and he gets the scholarship on page 102 — ooh, the suspense. In another, the character reveals he’s unwilling to take the scholarship because he knocked up his girlfriend and needs to take care of her. Beyond logic problems I won’t go into, this is another conflict that’s brought up way too late and then resolved almost immediately. In literally the same scene that he mentions it to the love interest, she’s hit by a drunk driver and killed, leaving him to take the scholarship.)

I don’t want to go on and on ranting about this particular script, but I do want to bring up some fundamental tools of drama that this script should have employed but didn’t.

The Unbreakable Bond

The Unbreakable Bond, illustrated by Lajos Egri in The Art of Creative Writing, is the most effective dramatic tool I’ve ever read about. In fact, much of what I write features unbreakable bonds even when I don’t intend them to (not that that’s a bad thing). It works pretty much the way it sounds: characters who are polar opposites in nature and goals are thrust together for one reason or another, unwilling to cave to each others’ wills. At least, not until the climax.

The wonderful thing about unbreakable bonds are, it works on more than just a protagonist-antagonist/hero-villain level. For instance, in this script, two best friends are vying for the same scholarship. There’s no conflict about this whatsoever — in fact, we don’t learn until far too late how important the scholarship is to either character. But the foundations of an unbreakable bond are there — bound by friendship, a team, and direct competition for this scholarship. The opposites are there, too: one’s a spoiled, carefree rich kid who doesn’t seem to need the scholarship, while his best friend is poor and desperate. Every scene should crackle with conflict, but mostly they just hang out until the rich friend has a temper tantrum after the poor friend already has the scholarship.

Here’s a more famous unbreakable bond: Sarah Connor and Kyle Reese in The Terminator. You have a militant from the future and a frilly, young waitress. They’re thrust together (in more ways than one) by a combination of time travel and desperation. Sarah Connor has seen the terminator — she knows she’ll die without Reese. This creates tension between the characters even though the central conflict is between the two of them and the machine. You could argue that in the vastly superior Terminator 2, the bond between herself and the terminator is even more unbreakable than between her and Reese in the first one. I could see it — after all, there’s nothing more “opposite” than allying with your former worst enemy — but one of the great ironies of T2 is that Sarah Connor is no longer all that dissimilar from the terminator. He may be a machine and, in her mind, an enemy, but they share the exact same goal: an obsession with keeping John Connor alive and safe from the T-1000. There’s still plenty of conflict there, but it’s not unbreakable bond conflict.

(On a related note, the underrated and hopefully soon-to-be-renewed TV series The Sarah Connor Chronicles elaborates on this dynamic and creates an unbreakable bond. Unlike the mindless, militant characterization of Sarah Connor in T2, on the TV series she’s softer and less willing to kill indiscriminately. Thrust together with an unwanted terminator companion, the main source of conflict is trying to achieve the same goals through opposite ways. Rather than killing the dorky cell phone salesman who will have direct involvement in Judgment Day, Sarah opts to burn down his advanced homebrew chess-playing computer.)

In the latest draft of Dying Proof, I counted a total of three unbreakable bonds, only one of which was intentional:

1. The heroes are siblings on the run from the law (long story). As such, even though they don’t get along, they’re forced to hide out together. The brother has a single-minded obsession with clearing their names, while the sister is dealing with the problem by trying to pretend it never happened.
2. The two villains, corrupt federal agents, have opposite methods of handling situations. One’s an older agent with duplicitous Cold War ethics, more interested in building elaborate fronts to lure people into traps than just killing them. His partner is a rank-climbing sociopath who will do anything to make his bosses happy. They’re forced together to find the siblings.
3. The brother and the older agent, who has secret reasons for keeping the siblings alive, are forced to help each other in order to bust the younger agent.

The Love Story Ploy

The problem with the screenplay I read is that it was, indeed, a love story, but it didn’t use its romance to give us any kind of reflection of the characters involved. This problem is compounded by the stoic nature of the protagonist; we don’t get a window into his emotions until the last 20 pages, which makes him exceedingly dull to spend the preceding 100 pages reading about. Plenty of movies have had taciturn protagonists, many of them with romantic subplots that allow us to get a glimpse into the true nature of these characters.

In Hard to Kill, bad-ass cop Mason Storm awakens from a seven-year coma (comas are a typical side effect of getting shot in the chest, twice, at close range, with a shotgun) to discover he still has reason to be on the run. He enlists the aid of sexy English nurse Andy Stewart, who, trust me, is a chick. Once he gets her to believe him…okay, more accurately, two dead bodies in the hospital within 15 minutes of him waking up make a more compelling case than Mason Storm. Anyway, she takes him away to a hidden cabin, where he can rehabilitate and fall in love.

Storm is not an emotional guy. He’s sarcastic and fearless, but all we get from him is that block-of-wood Seagal face intercut with Vaseline-lensed flashbacks to his family life before his wife was brutally murdered. The only way to get him to open up, and to understand what he’s really thinking and feeling, is for him to sex up Andy Stewart and then tell her what life was like pre-coma. There’s plenty of story and conflict prior to that, but this subplot gives both Storm and Andy a deeper emotional complexity. Did you ever think you’d hear the phrase “emotional complexity” applied to Hard to Kill? It’s there, and it’s a better movie than you might think.

So the love story in this script could have been used to let us know how he feels about the protagonist’s troubled family life, his desperation to leave town, etc. Instead, what do they talk about? Baseball. And, as I mentioned above, when they’re talking about baseball, all they’re talking about is baseball. No subtext. There are only two instances where we know what he’s feeling. The first occurs just before he gets the scholarship; the second occurs just before he tells her he’ll give up the scholarship to raise the baby. We don’t even get an emotional cue when she dies. In fact, quite alarmingly, he spends his last week of school all smiles. So is the point of the story that she didn’t mean anything to him and now he doesn’t have to shoulder the burden? It’s anybody’s guess, because unlike Mason Storm, he doesn’t let the love interest — or the audience — know anything.

I have to say, even though the first script was better than expected, I am having major concerns about the members of this hippie co-op. In fact, I’m back to thinking it’s just a classy-seeming way to get someone to do coverage.

Posted by Stan on April 5, 2008 12:36 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 3, 2008

The Bead™

Sometimes I read a script that I just can’t figure out. I know it has problems, I can even put my finger on what they are, but I can’t offer up solutions; granted, some people don’t like solutions, but offering solutions while I point out problems has never failed me, and one of the unfortunate side effects of covering so many scripts is that I am, at this point, a better reader than I am a writer. The only way to solve this kind of problem is to figure out what’s causing it, but what happens when I can’t even do that? I know the characters are thin, but why? I walk myself through the story, reminding myself of surprising moments of nuance and subtlety that give the characters depth. Why is it that, at the end, I felt like they were paper-thin? Something went awry.

I can’t pretend to understand how it happens, but when I actually talk out these problems, I figure them out. It’s all in how you’re telling the story. Here’s the story, and here are its flaws. But what if the writer did this, that, or the other? The solutions present themselves, and if you do it right, you can solve every single problem in one fell swoop — and if you’re really good, you can do it without insulting the writer.

You’ve found The Bead™.

That’s right, I make up my own screenwriting jargon. Fuck off, motherfuckers. The Bead is mine. From the old marksman term “get a bead on,” corrupting the meaning slightly to apply to targeting the screenplay’s problems and obliterating them*, I’ve found myself defining “The Bead™” as an all-encompassing solution — one shot fixes everything, just like The Manchurian Candidate. Oh wait.

I was worried as hell last night because that script the Big-Shot Producer sent me had major problems, many of which stemmed from what I felt was a clash between writer and producer(s), and I had no solutions. Talking it out this morning, I figured that shit out. In fact, the solution is so simple, I’m both annoyed and disappointed that I agonized over it for so long to begin with.

Here’s the story:

Protag is a neurotic, passive office worker who’s in love with Love Interest, portrayed (in the writer’s exaggerated humor style) as the perfect woman. He has a friend, Antag, who has all kinds of luck with women, an endless parade of one-night stands. Through a wacky set of circumstances, Protag witnesses Antag faking a dangerous situation, filling the woman with raw animal lust. Protag wants to know how this is done, so Antag introduces him to an entire team of guys…who devote time, money, and a lot of effort to get Antag laid. None of them get laid — they just assist Antag. (Careful readers will note that’s a flaw.)

Protag sets his sights on Love Interest, but Antag has to talk him down — first Protag has to learn the basics, so Act Two is filled almost exclusively with slapstick set-pieces as Protag attempts to play the hero for women (with the help of The Team) but manages only to humiliate himself. Much of this is repetitive and while the set-pieces are funny in theory, in practice they come across as labored. The writer is operating on a domino principle: he spends all his time setting up the way it’s supposed to go, so we understand just how wacky things are when they go wrong. Again, it gets repetitive.

The big third act shift occurs when Protag humiliates himself in front of Love Interest (causing her to get angry, because she actually did like him). He quits The Team, realizing all it’ll get him are one-night stands when what he wants is true love. Antag agrees in a sleazy way — he decides Love Interest is the perfect foil for all his plans, and if he can win her, he can retire from his shenanigans and settle down. He asks her on a date, and she agrees far too easily. He acts overtly sleazy, even while taking her on a perfect date told to him by Protag earlier, but Love Interest has turned stupid and falls for his smarmy charm.

Meanwhile, Protag decides to fight for her honor, but first, he has to get past The Team. More slapstick. In the restaurant, Antag is accosted by a steroid case claiming to be Love Interest’s ex-husband (she admits he is, but she has a restraining order). He starts pummeling Antag, until finally Protag gets to the restaurant. Love Interest, appropriately charmed by Protag’s effort, calls off the ‘roid rager. Turns out, he’s not her husband; he’s her brother, and he’s just pretending. She knew about Antag all along and set up this dinner to humiliate him, which would somehow clear Protag’s name. This doesn’t make as much sense as it could if you keep in mind that if she believed Protag had somehow been set up, she could have just said something. Besides which, there was no guarantee Protag would leap in at the eleventh hour, or that Antag would ask her out…so what was the point? Also, while the twist ultimately redeems Love Interest’s intelligence, we still spend about 30 screen minutes thinking she took stupid pills, which is frustrating enough that the twist doesn’t make up for it.

Here are the three main problems:

1. Labored, repetitive slapstick gags occupying most of the story time
2. With few exceptions, thin characters
3. The whole third act

What we want to do is take these problems and find one way that both retains the obvious plot mechanics — emphasis on slapstick, surprise “twist” ending — while improving the weaknesses. I came up with a detailed outline of what I’d do differently, but the goal of coverage isn’t to rewrite somebody’s work; my main goal is to nudge the writer in the right direction.

Here’s the right direction: you have your klutzy, inarticulate Protag, and you have Antag letting him in on the secret of The Team. As he explains it, what if Protag unintentionally pointed out that The Team does all this work…for another guy. None of them get laid — they don’t rotate, some of them are married, one’s a kid, etc. — and as the script is now, we’re left wondering about that. In fact, the last-minute development that two of them are married (and one’s divorced, but still, there would be teams when he was married but still on this team), so you either have a bunch of cheaters or you have a bunch of guys getting someone else laid for no apparent reason.

(Why this Team exists is less important than what Protag does to it, although I did come up with open-and-shut backstory: the team did rotate originally, but it reached a point where Antag was just so damn good at closing the deal, while the others were hit-or-miss, each member of The Team found themselves rooting for Antag, wanting him to succeed, until it reached the point where now they’re just doing it out of habit, not even realizing they no longer get anything out of it, not even vicarious thrills.)

So The Team’s up in arms, which will add some development to those characters. Maybe one of the married guys wants his uninterested wife to get jealous (or hell, maybe he just wants to get some). Maybe the divorced guy wants to prove to his exes that he isn’t a loser. Maybe the kid wants to prove he’s a Real Man. Giving them each clear goals, along with new scenes and characters to illustrate their lives away from The Team (in place of clunky setups for slapstick gags), makes the more interesting and more sympathetic.

On top of the development, it’ll also fix the repetitive slapstick problems. There’s only one way you can go with “an individual klutz ruins a well-oiled machine” gag. We’ve destroyed the well-oiled machine; The Team is still operating, but they aren’t operating together. Each has his own agenda, and they’re all jockeying for the girl. It adds more dramatic conflict, for one thing, but it also adds more slapstick variety — and it doesn’t make Protag the endless punchline. The scenarios could end up any number of ways, depending on who does what wrong and for what reason, and perhaps Protag has assumed an unintentional leadership position because he opened their eyes. This gives him the confidence to create his own danger scenarios, which he’s as inept at as anything else.

Finally, it fixes the third act. First, you have to change any indication that Antag is a bad guy — in fact, it’s probably safest if it’s rewritten so Love Interest barely knows Antag exists. His Team has turned into a disaster. Antag wants things back to normal — he wants Protag off the team and wants to be able to manipulate his friends into serving his interests. This is a more logical motivation for asking Love Interest on a date. He just needs to act less sleazy so we’d believe she’d go out with him, at least once.

Rather than having Love Interest stupidly fall for Antag’s distinct lack of charm, perhaps she’s willing to “drown her sorrows,” so to speak, with a guy she doesn’t particularly care for, just so she can get over the guy she did care for. (Keep in mind, she liked Protag.) Meanwhile, Protag finds out about the date (as he does in the current draft) and goes on the war path. Maybe, instead of fighting the team, he enlists their help — but their own personal chickens come home to roost, with wives and ex-wives and girlfriends and junior-high kids and maybe even former one-night stand victims chasing them down.

They finally get the restaurant, and Protag is forced to finally stand up for both himself and for Love Interest’s honor, which impresses her (exactly as it does in the script, even though in both cases it’s a fairly cheesy reversal — but it’s necessary for the generic happy ending). They declare their love for one another —

— and then we’re hit with the surprise ending that this was Antag’s plan all along. He knew the only way to get him off the team was to get Protag and Love Interest together, and the only way Protag would finally pass her “tests” would be to grow a pair and stand up for himself, so it’s yet another scenario he engineered. It gives us the exact same ending: they’re in love, and Antag hasn’t learned a thing.

I really hate the kinds of romantic comedies that beat rote formulas into the ground. I’m surprised I came up with something that still fits the formula but is, at least to me, about 10 times more interesting than what I read.

I just hope they listen.

*Note: May result in death by sniper fire. [Back]

Posted by Stan on April 3, 2008 1:33 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 2, 2008

The Co-Op

Things have officially gotten weird with the Big-Shot Producer. I fired off the fourth draft of my confusing conspiracy thiller, Dying Proof on Monday. I expected the usual month (or two…or three…) of silence, followed by an unenthusiastic “What else you got?” followed by me scrambling to turn one of my demented scripts into something reasonably mainstream. Instead, I received a lengthy response urging me to join some sort of bizarre co-op.

Here’s a succinct explanation that omits the weird sales-pitch aspects and new-age feel-goodery: a group of professionals — among them studio readers, agents, executives, writers, and producers — exchange material on a semi-weekly basis. The group is large enough that you’ll keep getting things to read every week or two, even if you aren’t submitting anything for a few months. Somehow I qualify by having a tenuous business relationship with Big-Shot, and that makes me wonder if it’s like 80% unemployable losers, 20% legitimate people. I don’t know, because it’s anonymous.

“Anonymous?” you ask, as it gets the Hmm, this whole thing sounds like bullshit gears a-grinding. I’m not saying it’s not bullshit — I’m just telling you what I know: this guy is legitimate. His creepy co-op may not be, but I’m far more interested in keeping in his good graces, and if turns out to be beneficial, good. If it’s a waste of time…well, that’s less good, but at the moment I have time to spare.

The anonymity factor, as he explained it to me when I asked for my details, comes from the fact that the readers and executives (and maybe even agents) will add your script and title to their coverage databases if it’s a piece of shit. With no names and fake titles, they can’t shut you out like that, which is good because the whole point of the co-op is to foster development in the writing. You can’t do that if you’re going to get blackballed for submitting a shaky first draft.

Of course, I have a solid fourth draft that I’m unashamed to have this man read, because I know him. When it comes to anonymous people commenting anonymously, I am uneasy. In my experience browsing Internet message boards, I know that anonymity breeds cruelty and contempt more than healthy discussion and debate. Then again, I’ve gotten notes before. I can tell the difference between good, constructive notes and awful, half-assed notes. I’m fine with negative notes when they’re constructive. I’m even when when they aren’t constructive, because then I know I can just ignore them. Still, it’s difficult to read somebody trashing something you spent a lot of time on, especially if they’re off-base.

Trying to look on the bright side: this is a group of people taking time out of theoretically busy schedules to volunteer to read shit they don’t have to read. The thing that lures some people in is the idea that they might find something really great; for others, it’s the idea that their really great thing might be found. With the shroud of anonymity, if it’s universally panned, nobody will know you wrote it. Big-Shot added that if it gets a majority of good feedback, and/or reaches a point where some anonymous person is legitimately interested in it, the shroud is lifted. That’s a good thing for me, assuming it’s not just a hook to get me to do free coverage.

But free coverage I’ll do, because hey, at the very least it’ll keep my skills sharp. At the slightly-above-very least, Big-Shot — the only person who knows our secret identities — may consider throwing me some paid reader work. I wouldn’t complain about that.

After waiting for the details and then thinking about it for a few hours, I agreed to take part. Tuesday night, he sent me two scripts. One was anonymous; the other was not.

In fact, it was so non-anonymous that I Googled the writer, and he has a feature in the works that I’ve actually heard of (full disclosure: I’ve only heard of it because a super-hot actress I have a crush on is in it). So non-anonymous that he’s repped by a legitimate agent from a huge company. So non-anonymous that Big-Shot listed himself as the producer.

Suddenly I found myself in the same ethical quandary as I did with The Manager, only worse because the Big-Shot Producer isn’t a useless tool. Back then, I felt uncomfortable because when The Manager sent me a script he himself wrote, it felt like a conflict of interest. Did he really expect to get honest feedback? Was it an absurd test, and if so, did I pass by lobbing him softballs or by giving him brutal honesty?

Things got worse here; granted, it’s not a conflict to have people outside of your specific offices look at a script you’ve got your name on, even if it’s not as the writer. But when you’re sending it to somebody who wants something out of you, and you aren’t keeping it anonymous, do you really expect to get brutally honest feedback? He says they’re a tough crowd, but are they tough on him?

I read the script, and while it’s a passable romantic comedy (certainly better than the bulk of what The Manager sent me, albeit still kind of bland and formulaic), I have some big issues with it. Worst of all, the issues I have focus on writing problems that, I sense, are caused by a writer trying to please a producer — meaning, the writer’s inept incorporation of Big-Shot’s ideas have sunk the entire thing.

I’m not sure what to say, but I doubt it’ll be honest.

Posted by Stan on April 2, 2008 10:53 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

March 29, 2008

Sycophants

Found this on a blog, where the author has a weekly tradition of predicting weekend box-office success:

SUPERHERO MOVIE (2960 theaters). Craig Mazin over at Artful Writer wrote and directed this, which means it’s likely to be more consistent and funnier than “Epic Movie”, “Date Movie” and that ilk. Should do pretty well. $19.3 million.

This is a pretty good blog, for the most part, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with the prediction — I’m just a little distracted by the reasoning. I’ve checked out Artful Writer on occasion, and for the most part Mazin knows his shit — but even as writer-director, he’s not the only guy in charge. Take, for example, two films he’s credited with co-writing: Scary Movie 3 and 4. Co-written by Mazin and longtime Zucker collaborator Pat Proft (the fourth also adds even longer-time collaborator Jim Abrahams), directed by David Zucker, each with unusually good casts — and they’re just dreck.

The quality problems stem from a desire to spoof the latest movies…without having any story purposes for doing so. The best Zucker movies took a genre and ran with it. If they could come up with story reasons to add a spoof (such as the Blue Lagoon part of Top Secret! and the Casablanca/Saturday Night Fever flashback in Airplane!), they’d go for it. Now, they’ve given up on trying to find “story reasons” — or coming up with the lamest possible narrative motivations — and instead settled on Family Guy-style randomness. That may work for a cartoon*, but it’s harder to successfully pull off when you have to contend both with live-action and movie lengths. It’s even harder to pull off when the lack of effort is so evident. To quote from the AV Club’s review of Date Movie:

As with the Scary Movie series—of which Date Movie director Aaron Seltzer and co-writer Jason Friedberg are chief perpetrators—the result is a comedy that congratulates its audience for getting references to movies that made over $200 million.

The early Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker movies didn’t have to be on the cutting-edge of pop culture. Top Secret! — released in 1984 and by far their best movie — spoofs The Great Escape, various popular genres from the ’50s and ’60s (Cold War spy movies, beach movies, musicals, westerns), Elvis, the Beach Boys, to the extent that the overtly current references (the sex machine and Blue Lagoon bit) almost take you out of the homage/spoof of decades-old movies. There has to be a disconnect here. ZAZ made some of the all-time great spoof movies, so what’s gone wrong here? Boredom with current movies? A studio mandate that they must parody X, Y, and Z top-grossing movies? Considering the TV spots for Superhero Movie devote an unhealthy amount of face time to an already-stale Tom Cruise Scientology video spoof, it’s clear how the studio wants the movies to be seen (and made for that matter): topical and disposal. Will anyone find that parody funny (or even recognizable) a year from now? Two? Ten?

While Mazin shouldn’t shoulder the complete burden for Superhero Movie’s probable suckitude, he’s not blameless. It’s unsafe to assume, just because you read his blog and he seems pretty sharp, he’ll make the cream of the spoof-movie crop. In fact, Superhero Movie is getting the best reviews since the first Scary Movie, but none of the reviews are effusive, exactly. The bulk of the positive ones spend far too much time explaining that Date Movie, Epic Movie, and Meet the Spartans are so putrid, the marginal quality improvement in Superhero Movie is like a breath of fresh air.

I have nothing but respect for Terry Rossio and Ted Elliot for turning Disney’s lamest ride into a pretty good movie; that doesn’t let them off for the sequels. I love Ken Levine’s blog, but would that have made me assume Mannequin 2: On the Move is worth the time? Back in the olden days, when I used to read misc.writing.screenplays, I admired and valued the wisdom of Bill Martell (a nice antidote to Skip Press, who still trolls that place — yeah, I checked in about a month ago just to see what was doing). In fact, I still check out Martell’s “script secrets” on a regular basis, and I was kicking myself when I started Dying Proof because his book on writing action screenplays is out of print (and going for something like $95 on Amazon)…and yet, I don’t necessarily see myself running out to rent one of his Cinemax late-night epics starring Shannon Tweed. Unless, well, it’s late at night, and I…well, you can imagine.

Point being, you can’t put blinders on or accept certain givens just because you respect and value a fellow writer; more often than not, you’ll find yourself saying, “Wow, what a shitty movie… I wonder if the script was better.” You know, like I’ve done with a half-dozen Woody Allen movies over the past decade.

*It doesn’t, a fact many Family Guy fans fail to notice. [Back]

Posted by Stan on March 29, 2008 1:19 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (3)

March 27, 2008

Character Ark

Yes, I know how to spell. That’s a pun. You’ll see.

I discovered from the blog of stupidity that a screenwriting forum I no longer read (because, honestly, it got too full of people like her) has had somewhat of a debate on character arcs, prompted by a post by this guy. His take is decidedly an argument against arcs. Her take?

But that doesn’t mean authority is always wrong either, because that would be equally short sighted. So I say, if your script calls for character arcs, knock yourself out. And if it doesn’t, knock yourself out with that too.

Way to be Switzerland!

I’ve always found McKee’s Story (the book that prompted this debate, apparently) as more of a beginner’s tool. As the title suggests, it gives you the nuts and bolts of story, and while it has a pretty rigid methodology for placing these nuts and bolts into the script itself, most writers realize — slowly or quickly — that screenwriting doesn’t require a “kitchen sink” approach. Much like Ikea furniture, even if you follow the instructions, you’re bound to have a few screws left over.

That said, I will reluctantly admit I agree with my stupid-blogging-nemesis’s bottom line — not every script needs a character arc in order to succeed. I disagree with the general contention that it has more to do with story than a writer’s particular tastes, because my personal experience always starts with a character arc, tied tightly to the story, but more often than not, these arcs either get changed or eliminated in later drafts.

The first draft of a screenplay I’ve been working on for over a year had a pretty simple character arc: the protagonist had a strong, active desire to not act anything like his father, but the machinations of the plot put him to the test, and as a result he reluctantly turns into his father (quite literally; long story). By the fourth draft, which I’ve just finished, the arc is about the relationship between the protagonist and his sister; they each have arcs that are intertwined, and they couldn’t be more different from the first draft. (In fact, in the first draft, he didn’t even have a sister, and by this draft, the father thing has almost become such a red herring that it may disappear in the next draft.)

Meanwhile, I couldn’t find the narrative throughline to my war screenplay until I started thinking about potential characters, many of them inspired by former friends, and I stumbled on the most obvious solution: one of the characters grows so disillusioned with the inanity of this “war,” and the increasing violence and chest-thumping of his friends, that he ends up turning his back on these formerly close friends. Suddenly, it turns into a coming-of-age story, with this character as the anchor. From there, I can figure out all the surrounding characters, plot the major beats of the story, and within a few weeks, I’ll have a serviceable first draft.

Notice how intertwined the storyline is with the protagonist’s emotional journey. That’s just the way I work. Story depends on character motivation, and if a story goal changes, it’s either because of an external factor…or the character’s motivation has changed. What changed it? That’s the arc, and in my scripts, usually it’s the story that changes the character and his or her motivation — that’s why they’re tied together so tightly. However, I have one friend who is so story-focused his early drafts have flat caricatures, and another who is so character-focused her “stories” just kind of amble on without purpose, like a Richard Linklater movie or any one of my blog posts.

With regard to “Mystery Man,” I don’t wholly disagree with him. His blustery “character arcs are stupid and I have proof!” attitude is a little unnerving, but his point holds up in more than just the examples he provides. Countless noir (anti)heroes go through the entire film without changing — that’s the whole point. They have a hardwired code of ethics that they stick to, unwavering, no matter how the shit flies around them. His example of The Maltese Falcon is great. In both the novel and the film, Sam Spade’s character unspools as the film does. At first glance, he appears to be just as sleazy and conniving as the sordid bunch he’s mixed up with, but as the story moves, we learn he’s abusing them (just as they try to abuse him) to find out what he needs to know to uncover who murdered Archer, his partner. Not because he liked Archer, particularly — it’s part of his code. If his partner’s murdered on a case, he owes it to the partner to find the culprit. (In the novel, Spade also mentions it’s bad for business if your partner gets killed and you aren’t a good enough detective to solve the case. I haven’t seen the movie in awhile, but I believe they omit this callous but hilarious explanation.)

Still, character arcs exist even when they don’t appear to. I’ve seen some super-thin, bordering-on-unnecessary character arcs — it doesn’t take much to establish your character, then force them into a situation that allows them to change or be changed as a result.

To take one of Mystery Man’s examples, I thoroughly disagree that Indiana Jones remains fundamentally unchanged. Throughout the trilogy, yes, an argument could be made, because he pretty much has the same arc in all three movies, meaning the changes that occur within each movie clearly don’t last. However, pretend for a moment it’s 1981, Raiders of the Lost Ark has just hit the big screen, and we’re seeing Indiana Jones for the first, and possibly last, time.

At the beginning of Raiders, there’s the great sequence with the idol and the giant rolling ball and the double-cross by the rival archaeologist and his native pals. Indy has a slightly jumpy guide who dies pretty quickly in a booby trap. This leaves Indy pretty much unaffected; he keeps going, because at that point, nothing matters but grabbing the idol. Human lives, with the possible exception of his own, don’t matter.

By the end of the movie — well, he’s not willing to blow up the Ark of the Covenant with the rocket launcher, but by that time his priorities have definitely shifted from getting the Ark for the State Department. Now he has two goals: keeping Marion safe and keeping the Ark out of the Nazis’ hands. These are story goals, but they represent change inherent in the character — as soon as the Ark has been dug up and Indy realizes the awesome power that’s been unearthed, he knows it shouldn’t fall into the wrong hands. He’d never destroy an artifact of that magnitude, but he’s definitely lost interest in having it just to have it. At the same time, he understands the value of people over artifacts. Not huge arcs, but they’re definitely there.

Temple of Doom downplays the “I can’t let this awesome power fall into the wrong hands” angle, but they it has a similar “people over objects” arcs, with Short Round (and to a much lesser extent, Willie). As Mystery Man rightly points out, the start of Indy’s mission this time is pretty selfless — he’s set on a quest to find a sacred stone that he has little personal interest in, so he can save an Indian village (and the children who have been enslaved). If you’re a robot or a monster, you can argue that Indy finally embracing the surrogate father role with Short Round — with Shorty’s declaration of love finally snapping him out of blood-nightmare hypnosis — did not fundamentally change him. After all, Temple of Doom takes place a year before Raiders, and Short Round is nowhere to be found. His absence does not appear to have any real bearing on Indy, but who knows? A lot can happen in a year, especially when you’re Indiana Jones.

Last Crusade brings back the exact same arcs: Indy’s priorities change when he learns the Nazis want the Holy Grail. How does this not reflect a transformation in his character? It’s blunter than usual, which is maybe why this is the only one Mystery Man was willing to acknowledge. If his character remained unwavering in his commitment to find the Holy Grail above all things, the Nazis would be little more than annoying, difficult-to-swat houseflies. He’s still willing to grab that cup for himself, but he’s only willing to do so after his father is safe and the Nazi threat has been neutralized. As with the other movies, his external goals have shifted in a way that shows a change in the person we understand him to be.

These inner changes are so subtle and quick, so intertwined within the story itself, they may have been unintentional — but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there. They don’t have to necessarily happen over the course of the entire movie, or in the third act, as the misleading term “arc” (and the more-misleading McKee) might have you believe. In The Parallax View, Joe Frady starts out as a confirmed skeptic, unwilling to believe any wild government conspiracy theories. He changes his tune by the second act, and although he remains pretty much unchanged through the rest of the movie, his early change is significant. In fact, he wouldn’t have any external goals for the entire movie if he didn’t experience a fundamental inner change — but it’s not something people would traditionally think of as an arc, since it happens in the first 20 minutes. It’s advantageous, though, because in a film like this we get to see the change — not just have hints of its possible future impact.

For all my arguing and complaining, like I said, I don’t fully disagree with Mystery Man. His underlying point is valid. The bulk of his other examples are either solid enough for me not to poke holes, or I just haven’t seen the movies recently enough one way or the other. I agree that a great screenplay doesn’t, by necessity, have to have a character arc. I do, however, believe that many films have subtle, barely-there arcs that shouldn’t be ignored. They’re there for a reason, and they add to the overall story. If Indiana Jones had seen Nazis and said, “Eh, they’re an emerging, misunderstood political party. I still want the Ark, but it’s not like they’re pure evil,” or if he had found out they kidnapped Marion and said, “Eh, we used to do it, but I really want that Ark,” it would have revealed new information about his character without making fundamental changes to the “obsessed playboy archaeologist adventurer professor.” But do you think it would have made a better movie? Indy’s goals needed to change, but in order for that to happen, he needed to change.

As Mystery Man says somewhere in the middle, “I should acknowledge that gurus and theorists have different interpretations about arcs.” I don’t think this is applicable just to gurus and theorists, but to all writers. With something so subjective, you can only go back to the filmmakers themselves to find out if my interpretation of Indy’s arcs are what they had in mind, or if Mystery Man’s belief that Indy remains fundamentally unchanged holds true. As with my Die Hard contention, none of us wrote the screenplay, so we can all make well-supported, valid, but completely separate arguments about the usual dramatic conventions.

It doesn’t mean any of us are right.

Posted by Stan on March 27, 2008 2:33 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

March 22, 2008

Research: Period Music

The new screenplay I’m working on has gotten me jazzed on bad mid-’90s nostalgia. See, it’s about a bunch of seventh-graders, so I don’t want to fail, in spectacular Diablo Cody fashion, to replicate the rhythm and jargon (both idiomatic and pop-cultural) of contemporary 12- and 13-year-olds. I’m still entrenched in the decaying pop-cultural mélange of 2008, so I could probably fake it much more reasonably than Ms. Cody by, for instance, not putting words into a 2008 12-year-old’s mouth that they would not know. This goes beyond inauthentic dialogue, though. I don’t even want to admit, much less understand, that we live in a world where a 12-year-old would have their own cell phone, credit card, or laptop. I simply can’t write it.

I’ve elected, instead, to set the screenplay in the spring of 1995 and try my damndest to evoke the junior-high zeitgeist of the day. It was a world where people were united and divided by MTV (because, back in those days, they still played about 12 hours of music a day, as opposed to the current 30 minutes) and whether or not you had a Super Nintendo, where kids were much more divided by moronic cliques than anything I ever saw in high school (one thing movies consistently get wrong).

As a result, my primary method of research has been looking at back issues of Guitar World and Nintendo Power — the only magazines I subscribed to at the time — and I’m eternally grateful to myself for not throwing anything away. Ever. These magazines are like time capsules. There’s plenty I remember interesting me back then, but the small things I’ve forgotten are encased within those pages. Even though I haven’t really thought about it in over a decade, did I remember Bush’s single-factory Sixteen Stone? Yeah, it was right there, sitting inside my brain. But what about the Toadies’ endlessly replayed “Possum Kingdom”? Never would have entered my head if Guitar World hadn’t tabbed it. Same with Alanis Morissette, despite my sister blasting Jagged Little Pill, like, four times a day for a year.

It’s nice to fill in the gaps of what I’ve forgotten and didn’t care about — it’ll help me flesh out the other characters — but the main goal is to recreate the world I inhabited at the time, one that cared about pretty much nothing but music and video games, where you’d get the shit beaten out of you for admitting you liked the Goo Goo Dolls more than Pantera (based on a true story, though fortunately I wasn’t the victim — good thing the Goo Goo Dolls sucked!), where meaningless shit was so much more important than it is now.

It’s — among other things — a valentine to my misspent youth, and consequently I compiled a list of albums (which I at one time either loved or hated) to help me get into the mood when I write. I’d like to try to dig up some more bad R&B and pop, but at the time, I was all grunge and metal, so that’s where my mind goes first. If anybody has any suggestion from music in this period (around 1992-1995) — even if it’s older music, if there’s a period-relevant reason for you listening to it, like Beavis & Butt-Head getting me into AC/DC and Black Sabbath, I’m all ears.

Posted by Stan on March 22, 2008 2:13 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

March 12, 2008

Welcome to the Party, Pal…

Here’s what nerds argue about:

Where’s the first act-break in Die Hard? I watched this movie today, for the first time since I was maybe 10-years-old, in my continuing effort to analyze the way movies in this genre are put together. In particular, this movie was recommended to me because it shares one common element with my action thriller: an extremely long first act. I’m not ordinarily one to follow the goofy Field/McKee “if [insert jargon] doesn’t happen on page [number], your story will fail” line of reasoning. For me, screenwriting is about 30% mechanics, 70% instinct. Anybody who has seen a lot of movies could write a screenplay with a rough but definable three-act structure, even if they don’t know that’s what they’re doing. The structure may be the only thing they get right, with all the plot points and arcs hitting the right beats, because it’s ingrained in the medium.

So I have a 41-page first act, which is a huge no-no under the “mechanics first” school of thought. I believe Field says the act-break should happen on page 28; McKee, an even 30. It’s probably bad form for a bottom-rung screenwriter working on spec to color outside the lines. I know of readers who will read 10 promise-free pages, then skip ahead to 30, to the middle page (which is roughly where the dramatic “midpoint” will occur, e.g. 60 on a 120-page script), then count back 30 pages from the last (e.g., 90 on a 120-page script) to see if there’s a turning point. That’s fucking idiocy, although I admit I’ve done it myself once or twice. I usually at least read through the first act, no matter where the break happens. Fortunately, most of the shit I read is right out of Field, so it’s easy to discern the act-break and give up.

This screenplay is a little different. Although it’s still on spec, it’s written specifically for the firmly bent ear of a producer who will never, ever buy or make this script. But hey, it could get me a job doing useful things, like getting paid to ramble about why some piece of shit script doesn’t measure up to Die Hard. Point is, I have some wiggle room. This isn’t something that’s being read based on a cold-query. Plus, the 41 pages are tight as shit. This is the fourth draft, and while I don’t dare say it’s even close to perfect, the first act does exactly what first acts do, more economically (despite its length) than any script I’ve ever written. It’s merely longer because there are a lot of dominos to set up before knocking the first one down.

Before I send this off, I decided to check out Die Hard, both to refresh my memory and to justify my long first act (if necessary). Here’s the problem: the act-break is subject to debate. The friend who recommended it told me, in no uncertain terms, that the act-break is very simple to find: “Welcome to the party, pal.” That line is almost 56 minutes into the movie, which might make it the longest first act in cinematic history.

I can see it: it’s a confluence of events and characters (notably, the introduction and integration of Sergeant Al Powell) that drive the rest of the movie. In that moment, Hans and his buddies realize, in addition to posing a general threat, McClane may actually thwart their efforts completely; Powell finally believes there’s a problem, thanks to a body dropped on his squad car and a hail of gunfire from the terrorists, and calls for backup, which motivates the police and smarmy TV reporter (and later, the FBI) to show up, and gets on a steamroller of uncovering the method to Hans Gruber’s madness and how McClane will undo it all.

However, and this is where the nerd argument comes in, I’d argue the act-break comes much earlier. (And considering the length of the movie, “Welcome to the party, pal” would function as the midpoint.) The spot that screamed “act-break” to me occurs right around the 30-minute mark (sadly, the traditional place for the break). Shortly after McClane hides while Hans kills Takagi, he makes the decision that sets the rest of the movie in motion: he’s not going to come at them guns a-blazing, but he’s not going to hide. “Think…think, goddammit!” Then, he pulls the fire alarm.

The fire alarm ruse doesn’t work, but it’s the moment McClane takes action instead of hiding. (Okay, technically he takes action while hiding.) That simple action leads to Tony’s death a few minutes later, which leads to the insane Karl stuff later in the film. At the same time, if the fire alarm made Hans realize somebody was up to something, Tony’s death and the classic NOW I HAVE A MACHINE GUN — HO-HO-HO! sequence made him realize McClane was a true threat. His death is also what gets McClane the lighter, the radio, and, of course, the machine gun. The radio is the key to pretty much everything else that happens in the movie — without it, he’d never get in touch with the unsympathetic dispatchers, Powell, Hans, or anyone else — but he wouldn’t have gotten any of it if he hadn’t taken the important action of pulling the alarm.

So, what say you, movie and/or screenwriting nerds? When is the first act-break in Die Hard — the fire alarm, or “Welcome to the party, pal”? If you agree with me, can you think of any other movies (be it an action movie or anything else) with a particularly long first act?

Posted by Stan on March 12, 2008 5:51 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

February 28, 2008

Ethical Lapse?

One of the problems I found myself having as a reader (and continue to have, even in my non-official capacity as “guy who reads things”) was probably the most basic for a writer: everything I read, I knew how to make better. It didn’t help that when I read for The Manager, he had both general submissions and a “client” roster of awful, awful writers with very good ideas.

Knowing how to improve a story is actually helpful because, rather than just dumping all over a shitty script, you can hone in on the potential goodness and tailor your suggestions that way. I tried not to be the kind of guy who would look at something and say, “Here’s how I’d do it,” so I’d try to look at things as objectively as possible: what’s the story they’re trying to tell, where does it go wrong, why does it go wrong? It helped that many of these screenplays suffered from what I’ll call “objective badness,” plundering such depths of crappiness that any person with basic reading comprehension would know it’s bad. They may not know how or why they feel that way, but they know it with every fiber of their beings.

It turns into a problem when you find a script that is loaded with so many good ideas — but is so poorly executed — that giving feedback isn’t enough. You want to just swipe that idea and make it your own, to do it the justice it deserves.

It’s what we in the biz call “plagiarism.”

It’s something I’ve never done, but it’s a slippery ethical question. Everyone has good ideas. They’re the easy part. But if you’re lifting an idea you’d never have on your own, with the sole intention of making it better so it won’t get tossed into the rejection pile*, how does that shake out? Even though you know it’s wrong, it’s for the betterment of mankind. And besides, nobody but a bottom-feeding reader at a bargain-basement company, making little to know money, will ever set his or her eyes on it. So if you can get it to that point where maybe somebody, somewhere will want to look at it — is that wrong?

Yes, it is.

Which is the only thing preventing me from stealing one of the best bad ideas I’ve ever read, a really interesting take on the zombie genre. It has one of the worst third acts in any script I’ve ever read (worse than the one where the main character’s death is the act-break turning point, and the last 30 pages are specified to be “shaky digital video” of scripted remembrances of a character we barely cared about, all coming from characters we’ve never met before and will never see again), but it has so many good ideas and is such a fresh take on a mostly retarded genre that I want to swipe it, make it as good as I can, and add it to my portfolio of hacky garbage.

I don’t write horror. I could never come up with a good concept, and every time I think the genre’s an endless parade of shitty sequels and remakes, some gem proves me wrong (that is my subtle recommendation for you to all see Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon, one of 2007’s best films). When I read the zombie script, I had one of those great moments where I thought, “Wow, I wish I’d written that.” Then I had the more distasteful afterthought: “Well, not written that, but something with that ingenious setup and…everything else done differently.”

So does that constitute plagiarism? It’s like any kind of nerdy writer game: you start with the same premise to see what kinds of different takes each writer could get from the same approximate starting point. If I take the very basic elements of it but change everything else, that’s not theft…right?

Maybe not legally, but there’s still the ethics. And the potential guilt. And I was raised Catholic, so…

But I still think about this idea. It’s one of those things that just won’t leave my mind — it’s that good.

So about a week ago, Lucy begged me to let her in on the new screenplay I had worked so diligently on. It’s actually a rewrite of an old favorite I was doing to impress a Medium-Shot Producer, so I could present it to him once the dust of the strike had settled. To my surprise, she was interested enough in it to read it. She’s said that before, and usually she…doesn’t. This time, though, she not only took the time to read it — she made me sit on Instant Messenger while she read it, allowing me to get the feedback in real time. It led to a few amusing instances like:

(13:17:29) Lucy: [Goofy plot point] doesn’t make any sense.
(13:22:40) Lucy: Oh.

Granted, that helps me. As an “audience member” for the screenplay, hearing her pure reactions to what was happening — like getting confused, even if something makes sense later — makes me reevaluate when, exactly certain moments need to happen to avoid audience frustration. What I’m writing here are “selling drafts,” and it’s hard to get shit sold if you have a producer or a lowly reader (each of whom read scripts fast and not too carefully) getting annoyed because the story takes its time before it starts making sense. Of course, it’s also difficult to write conspiracy thrillers where you know the entire conspiracy upfront, but hey…making somebody else happy while making myself happy is a good challenge. One I often fail at (search for “The Ex” for evidence).

At some point during the feedback process, I don’t remember how, Lucy got me started on the zombie screenplay. I told her all about it and how awesome the idea was but how botched the execution was and how I’d do it differently because I am a fucking king while the writer who did the script is a tool. Then she said something kind of amazing:

“The setup for the movie sounds really familiar. I think he ripped it off.”

“From what?” I asked.

“I don’t remember.”

Last night, at 2:39 a.m., she did, and she text-messaged it to me: “That’s it! Ghosts of mars. Movie that entities enter people but go into someone else if the host is killed and the one chick beats it cuz she takes drugs.”

There are two minor differences between the script idea I wanted to steal and Lucy’s synopsis of Ghosts of Mars, which led me to check the movie out. I can definitively say that, yes, it has similar enough ideas for me to assume the script I read was probably ripped off from Ghosts of Mars (and probably why the ideas were so above-average while the execution was not — not to say Ghosts of Mars is a great movie, but it’s good enough).

Which leads to my final ethical question: is it wrong to knowingly rip off a shitty script that rips off a halfway-decent movie, even if you plan to deviate so far from its shady origins that it’d be unrecognizable to the sham screenwriter and/or John Carpenter?

That’s a question I can’t answer.

(Unless choosing to keep working on my own ideas while talking idly about someone else’s counts as an answer.)

*Not that I, personally, have the ability to get my shit past the rejection pile. [Back]

Posted by Stan on February 28, 2008 6:04 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

September 7, 2007

The Mountains of Indiana: A Story of Disdain

Long-time readers know I have a tendency to act bitter and vindictive mostly for entertainment purposes; sometimes I really am bitter and vindictive for various reasons, but usually I just enjoy being mean. Not mean-for-meanness sake like Bluto or something; I just don’t take life seriously enough to get worked up over much, yet I find it entertaining when others do, so I try to provoke those feelings. It’s not one of my better traits, but it is one I’ve tried to work on (often with unfortunate results). Once in awhile, though, people stumble into my crosshairs and turn into an arch-nemesis, usually without even knowing it. Would I really announce an arch-nemesis to the person? That’s not how I roll; I prefer to quietly plot their demise while maintaining a ruse of friendship. I believe it’s a strategy laid down in Machiavelli’s The Prince, but I might have that confused with Crazy from the Heat by David Lee Roth.

I’m sure it won’t surprise anybody that I managed to gain an arch-nemesis I’d never even met. Back when I was reading for The Manager, he sent me two or three scripts by this particular writer — certainly, all of them were bad in a variety of ways, but one in particular has gone down in history as the worst script I’ve ever read. Worse than Monster Truck Madness, even. There’s no denying the shitastrophe of MTM, but at least it made sense. It justified its existence as a clothesline for lazy jokes and gave off an overpowering “Rob Schneider star vehicle” stench that made me suspect that it really could get made.

The script by this writer? Nobody could make it, because everybody involved in the project would lapse into a coma when it came time to unravel the storyline and figure out just what the hell is going on within those pages. I am a big — huge — fan of conspiracy stories, but this shit didn’t even attempt to make sense. It garnered from me a tour de force of coverage, epic in length and attention to detail, featuring an explosive commentary that undid every attempt at a plot twist, every false characterization, every baffling loose end — something I’m so proud of to this day that I would like to believe the very mention of this coverage prompts a weary moment of silence, with anyone in earshot quivering with either terror or ecstasy (maybe both).

I don’t mind spilling the secrets of the “plot,” but I am trying to keep things on the down-low. It’s already easy enough to tie me back to The Manager, so spilling the names of his theoretical clients, the titles of the work, character names — any easily Googled keyword — will be stripped. I don’t trust myself in going the extra mile to alter significant plot details with a similar lack of coherence — I don’t want to be accused of going over the top or of libeling someone when it’s my own crappy writing and not his, so here it goes:

SYNOPSIS: Ten years ago, 17-year-old JOHN watches his father LARRY make a drug deal with mobster VITO DELFINO. In the present, TED GREENWALT works at a car wash. He’s poor, his wife SARAH is fed up with him, and it seems most of his life is spent at a bar with friends LUKE and ETHAN. When Ted forgets “date night,” Sarah locks herself in the den, leaving Ted to sleep alone. He has what he thinks is a dream of going to an exclusive yacht party, driving a Mercedes, owning a mansion, and sleeping with gorgeous MAYA. Everyone keeps calling him “David,” and he runs into Vito Delfino at the party. When Ted wakes up the next morning in the mansion, he realizes it’s all true. He also realizes gunmen are after him, though he doesn’t know why. He leaves Maya and goes back to his “real” life — except with the Mercedes, which he shows off to all his friends and coworkers. In the Mercedes he finds an address scratched on the back of a business card. This starts an investigation — at the address he finds MONTGOMERY, a singer from the party the previous night. Montgomery doesn’t know who he is or what he wants and asks Ted to leave. Ted tries to piece together the events of last night, revealed through flashbacks. He also recalls through flashbacks the events of 10 years ago — getting into a car accident with his six-year-old son Mark and Larry’s son, John.

To impress angry Sarah, Ted shows her the Mercedes and takes her to the mansion. He claims an uncle died and left it all to him. Sarah finds a receipt for the Olympic Hotel and demands an explanation. Ted lies, saying he wanted to give her the option of a mansion or a cheap motel. Later that night, Ted gets a call from Luke. Ted meets him at the bar, but when he mistakes an attractive girl for Maya, he freaks out and leaves. In the Mercedes, a Town Car with a Gunman driving pulls up alongside Ted. This leads to a chase, from which Ted narrowly escapes. Back at the mansion, Sarah’s gone — she found Maya’s bra from the previous night and left an angry note. Ted goes to spend the night at Luke’s. He’s awakened a few hours later by COPS who have come to check out the noise. Ted leaves the others sleeping and sneaks out the back door. At his apartment, Ted finds an angry message from Sarah on their answering machine. He also discovers it’s being watched by the Town Car. Ted sneaks away in the Mercedes and goes to the docks where the yacht party was held. He bribes the VALET for information, and he gives Ted Maya’s address. The Town Car shows up and Ted makes another difficult escape. He goes back to his apartment and has an awkward moment with Sarah. Ted drives to Malibu to find Maya. She says odd things that imply she knows more about the situation than she’s letting on. Two ATVs chase after them. Ted and Maya hop in the Mercedes and outrun them to the freeway. The ATVs fire rockets at them. Ted takes a downtown exit, and Nina forces them to stop—right in front of the Olympic Hotel. He realizes Maya is probably in on the whole thing when he recognizes her shoes — a pair identical to one he saw at Montgomery’s home. They come across Sarah at the hotel. She’s not pleased to see Ted with Maya. They argue, and she stalks off. Ted and Maya take a cab to Montgomery’s house and find it empty, abandoned. A HITMAN comes to take them out. Ted manages to get away, but Maya isn’t so lucky.

Ted goes to the police, a SERGEANT BECKER, to report getting shot at. Becker points out Ted’s picture on a wanted poster, with the name “DAVID HARBOROUGH,” wanted in connection with the death of Vito Delfino. Ted convinces Becker that he has the wrong man — Ted isn’t “David Harborough.” Becker runs Ted’s license and grudgingly lets him go. Ted — at this point looking like a bum — manages to get a lawyer’s business card. He goes to a department store to buy new clothes, gets himself all decked-out and smooth-looking, and returns to the police station. He speaks with DETECTIVE SAMSA, saying he’s Delfino’s lawyer. Samsa doesn’t believe him. Ted returns to the apartment, where Sarah shows him separation papers. She’s kidnapped almost immediately. The police bust in and search his place. They find the bloody knife that killed Delfino. They arrest Ted, who calls Luke and has him use David Harborough’s financial resources to bail him out. Once out, Ted realizes several things: he actually did kill Delfino (but was set up), when he was in the car accident that killed Mark and John it was because John had stolen drugs from Larry that belonged to Delfino, they were run off the road by Montgomery (who worked for Delfino) — and Larry is behind the whole current setup. Ted finally has to spill the beans — apparently he told Larry that John ran off to join the navy, and he told Sarah that Mark was kidnapped. He admits what happened, then pins it all on Montgomery (who’s helping Larry). Larry is so angry that he causes another car accident. Ted wakes up in the hospital, with Sarah in the next bed. Maya shows up, explains that she helped because Larry was her father, and emphasizes that Ted should be paying attention to his wife.

ANALYSIS: On the positive side: the opening exposition that establishes Ted’s character — his daily routine, his habit of lying, his marital problems, etc. — that all works pretty well. The reappearance of Sarah periodically to continue that conflict also works, building toward that resolution where Ted can finally value his wife at the end.

However, this screenplay is packed to the gills with logic problems that render the story first incomprehensible, then just plain frustrating:

• When Ted wakes up to the sounds of gun-toting scumbags beating on his door and has to make a deft escape, why does he think it’s a good idea to take his wife back there? Especially when he didn’t even bother to remove the “evidence” of his infidelity the night before.
• If I understand the basic conspiracy, it goes like this: to avenge his son, Larry wanted to not just frame Ted for Delfino’s death — he wanted to get Ted into a drugged state where he’d actually commit the crime. The ultimate goal, one assumes, is so that Larry can get some justice. It’s never really clear why Larry wants Delfino dead, why Montgomery would go along with his father’s murder, or why they’d send people to try and kill Ted when their main goal is to have him arrested and convicted of murder. Is that not their goal? If not, what’s the point of setting up the whole conspiracy in the first place? Why not just kill Ted?
• In the same vein, what’s the purpose of providing Ted/”David” with a mansion, a fancy car, credit cards, etc.? All he has to do is exactly what he does: go back home, go back to work, realize this is a “fake” life. They go to great expense to get Ted to “accept” this fake life, but they don’t think he’d be curious enough about how he got this life to find out any information? Even if he has no interest in details, sending mercenaries to hunt Ted down seems like it’d make even the least curious person just a little bit interested in what’s going on with this fake life.
• They also provide Ted with just enough clues to put together the whole conspiracy, which seems like it’d be the antithesis of what they want. People going to the trouble and expense of creating an identity out of thin air (especially a “wealthy playboy” identity) would hopefully be smart enough to tie up loose ends like having key players’ addresses written down, hotel receipts in pockets, etc.
• The mysterious house in the Hollywood Hills. It seems like an odd setup that’s never cleared up. Is this where Montgomery actually lives? Did he clear out as soon as he knew Ted was on to him? As written, it’s an intentional layer of mind-fucking, but to what end? The visits to that house are more helpful than any other clue in Ted figuring out the conspiracy, so what’s going on there needs to be made clear.
• Sergeant Becker scoffs at Ted for giving what he assumes is a fake ID. When he runs it and finds out it’s real, he gets angry but lets Ted go. He doesn’t think that, perhaps, “David Harborough” is an alias? Or that “David” pasted his picture onto Ted’s real driver’s license (therefore all the information would check out)? Or that a guy accused of murdering a known mobster would have the resources to create plenty of legitimate-but-fake IDs in police databases? Why would Becker let him go?
• From the beginning of the script, it’s clear that Ted lies constantly, but he’s possibly the worst liar I’ve ever seen. It’s very difficult to believe he could have kept the charade involving John and Mark going for any length of time. Even if he did — why? Obviously Larry is fond of blood-vendettas, but considering how easily he accepts that Ted was pushed off the road by somebody else because John had his cocaine, Larry could put two and two together and realize Ted’s telling the truth. Ted can feel guilty all he wants, but he wasn’t responsible for the accident. Even the police (who obviously handled the situation; Larry mentions a police report) didn’t find him responsible/negligent, so why the big cover-up? I’m not saying he doesn’t have to cover it up or lie about it, but (a) make him a better liar, and (b) make it clear exactly why he felt he needed to lie to both Sarah and Larry about their kids for a decade.
• Big loose end: Ted actually killed Delfino (didn’t he? if not, that’s unclear). Sure, he survives and unravels the conspiracy, but he’s still got a murder rap to beat. Considering Ted actually did the crime, this might not be easy. Where’s the resolution?

Aside from this, another big problem pops up on page one: the short scene involving John, Larry, and Delfino. It makes everything too obvious — we know it’s going to come back to those three in the end. By the time we realize John is most likely dead in a car accident (which is obvious long before it’s fully shown to be true) and Delfino was murdered recently, the Larry reveal is pretty obvious. There’s nobody else it could be.

It seems kind of silly that Montgomery is Delfino’s son, and as I pointed out it creates a logic problem as far as why he’d allow Delfino’s murder to take place. Making him hired muscle, willing to do anything for the highest bidder, makes it far more believable and loses the necessity for an explanation for why he wants Delfino dead; his only loyalty is to money, so Delfino doesn’t matter. It’s also a little too neat and tidy that not only is he Delfino’s son, but Maya is Larry’s daughter. It oversimplifies the motivations — both Montgomery and Maya are willing to commit crimes (or force others to commit crimes) out of nothing but family loyalty? It diminishes their characters by not giving them any ulterior motives or shades of gray.

I don’t usually go on that long. It’s usually two or three short paragraphs for the synopsis, then one or two paragraphs of analysis. When a story relies on so many little details to make it such dreck, you need the detail or else the feedback makes no sense. I also wanted to get the point across, this being the third and worst script I had read from this writer, that he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing. Here is one area where the bitter-‘n’-vindictive kicks in. I’ll admit a slight tinge of jealousy that somebody so bad could be a “client,” while I was slaving away as an “intern.” Of course, the more I found out about The Manager, the happier I was keeping my distance.

If nothing else, The Manager took the hint — I never received another script from this writer. Also, my friend Mark got a rewrite of this same script that incorporated many of my suggestions, but it was still a disaster. Poor feedback, or poor writing? You be the judge!

Why did I get so angry, though? Surface-wise, I’ve read worse scripts — scripts written by people whose grasp of the English language (despite being born-and-bred Americans) is so poor that trying to figure out what they’re trying to say is an act of futility, comedies so unfunny I can’t even fathom the mind that would put the “jokes” to paper, action scripts that try to coast on a brilliant first 15 pages while circling the drain for the next 60 before just bottoming out. I’ve managed to read an entire gamut of awful shit sent to shady men with no credentials, only because “accepts unsolicited material” is written in the ad. The problem with this script, the reason I got so angry, was the raw potential. The man can string together a sentence. He can write decent dialogue. He even has a fairly good sense of characterization, and a shitload of ambition crammed into his scripts. The end result is messy as hell, and adding insult to injury — he doesn’t learn from mistakes. Each screenplay I read had the same kinds of problems, over and over again, despite the feedback I (and others, I’m sure) gave.

After I quit reading for The Manager, I tried to keep track of some of the more memorably offensive authors (some of whom were general submissions, not “clients”). Most of them have blogs and/or MySpace pages I can read for the bitter-‘n’-vindictive, but it came as a huge, coronary-inducing shock that the author of the screenplay mentioned above had a novel coming out.

A novel?! From this guy?! How?! My first thought was that he is as depraved and deceptive as I am, creating a fake publishing company (in fact, he’s the one who gave me the idea) to perpetuate the myth that he’s published. No dice — this is actually a real place, to my unending horror.

Weeks passed between my discovery and the novel’s publication, and my rage and confusion softened. It was replaced with an odd, dewy sensation I’ve come to know as “hope.” Yes, I put my prejudices aside and reminded myself — this guy is a fellow writer. Maybe screenplays aren’t the medium for him; maybe he needs the the authoritarian control and added details only the novel form can provide. All the elaborate twists and confusing characters will make sense thanks to the magic of internal thought and droning, ponderous explanations — material bad screenwriters think of as excess fat (Syd Field agrees!) and good screenwriters know how to work around.

In a show of meaningless solidarity, I bought the book the day it came out and started a-reading.

And it was a-awful.

My change of heart made me want it to be good so badly that I tried to ignore the initial flaws and hope he’d find his groove and by the end, I’d be waiting breathlessly for his sophomore effort. About 50 pages into it, I was already ready to give up. Let me describe the very, very basic plot: a disparate group of people from all over the U.S., for various reasons, set out to find a girl. They don’t know why, but they feel compelled to search for her, if only to figure out why she’s turned into the object of their obsession.

At the very least, it’s an interesting premise. Here’s the biggest problem: there is no real plot (for 300 of its 330 pages, it’s just people wandering around for no clear reason), which is fine if you can rely on interesting and unique characters to carry the story. You…can’t. He gives each character one (maybe two, if we’re lucky) trait that carries them through the book. They aren’t even interesting traits. “This guy’s a secret cutter.” That’s his entire character. We find out little else about him, or anyone else, over the course of the book. It’s supposed to be a journey of discovery, I guess, but it fails so spectacularly there’s a tacked-on epilogue explaining to us, in blunt terms, how they changed.

Aside from that, there are big story and character questions that all pretty much boil down to: why would anyone, real or fictional, do that? With no explanations, we’re left to guess, and most of my guesses ended up as “sloppy writing and no research.” I could go on and on, in detail, but none of it is terribly important. I’ll sum up some of the typical goofiness by using as an example a few early scenes:

One of the characters dials a phone number for no apparent reason (in fairness, it’s not apparent to the character, either — that much is fairly interesting). When he gets somebody on the line who sounds like she’s been kidnapped, he calls the cops. Later, a police detective forces two uniforms to break into his home while he’s showering. Again, to his credit, he at least questions the legality of them breaking in — but never explains what would motivate them to do this. It’s an unnecessary (and, again, illegal) action, made even more confusing by a few questionable police procedure actions. Now, I know not every detective has a partner, but this doesn’t mean the ones who don’t are given uniformed cops as foot soldiers to break and enter for them or act as secretaries. In a later scene, these same uniforms show up at his office…to take him upstairs to a conference room where the plainclothes detective is waiting. Why? Don’t they have parking tickets to hand out?

It’s compounded by the illogic of what happens next: the guy goes back to his cubicle, and his boss tells him if the police show up again, he’s fired. This is a man who hasn’t committed a crime, who is helping the police as a concerned citizen, and the whole exchange makes it more difficult to believe the uniforms have any purpose for being there (other than to cause this dust-up). I could understand the boss getting flustered if the dude had a record, or if he was getting arrested, or if the boss had it in for the character — there are plenty of explanations for all of these things, but we are provided with none. It’s difficult to maintain suspension of disbelief when there is little attention to detail, and we can’t believe the broad strokes we’re given.

And then there are the mountains of Indiana. You heard me right, and any Illinoisian who has driven to obscene corners of that rural state looking for the finest illegal fireworks and unconventional (some might say “physics-defying”) pornography knows full well: while there may be more than corn in Indiana, there sure as hell aren’t mountains. Yet, the climactic point in the book occurs in a small town nestled in “the mountains of Indiana.” Look, I’ve read a couple of reviews that make the (misguided) case that anything that doesn’t make sense (plenty of it!) can be chalked up to a David Lynch-like surrealism. How can you read anything about mountains of Indiana and not agree that it’s a mess of poor research and inattention to detail? The book does nothing to draw attention to the strageness of this imagery (or any of the other notable examples of “surrealism”), and the story could easily take place in a region that is authentically mountainous. I’m a big fan of ironic throwaway lines, or even a placid little, “Such-and-such had never been to Indiana and didn’t realize how mountainous the terrain was” if he wants to maintain the leaden, Bergmanesque seriousness. Just something to address the fact that the author clearly has no idea what he’s talking about: he’s never been to Indiana, he’s never even heard of the stupid knobs!

I don’t know what he was trying to accomplish. If this was supposed to be a dream-like meditation on…something, there’s too much reality; if it’s supposed to be real, the book is sloppy and riddled with implausibility. My reading on it is that he was going for something along the lines of “magical realism,” in the very vague sense that “everything’s real until it’s not.” The book is loaded with very obvious moments of strangeness, heightened reality, things that can’t or shouldn’t happen — but it mostly tries to remain grounded in reality. Tries.

You might notice problems in this novel that crop up in the screenplay I talk about above. This is the main source of frustration: in the few interviews I’ve discovered online, he keeps mentioning how frequently he writes, but what does it mean if he’s not allowing himself to improve the craft? I’ve read four full pieces of work by this man, and all four of them have the same plausibility issues, lack of continuity, lack of payoff, and lack of authentic character development. It’s hugely disappointing and makes me a little happier to continue having this guy as an arch-nemesis.

I won’t deny this: part of my reaction comes from jealousy. He got published, legitimately (even if it’s a tiny press who will undoubtedly fold after this misstep), and I didn’t. But go back and re-read the part where I wanted this book to be good. Obviously I’m pissed because he got a piece of shit published, but not as much as you think — it actually makes me optimistic. Rather than going with tricks and fakery, this hunk of junk has me convinced I could get a legitimate novel published, at a bigger and better place. No, I think I’m really mad because I think this writer does have talent (I wouldn’t have made it through 330 pages if he didn’t); he just can’t or won’t learn from his mistakes, and he has an uncanny knack for generating a lot of goodwill at the beginning, then squandering it all by the end.

Posted by Stan on September 7, 2007 6:45 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

July 15, 2007

Moving Forward…Sort Of

As many of you might recall, I’ve been dealing with a Big-Shot Producer for over two years, a combination of him being busy and not caring about some nobody and me getting frustrated in the face of what I perceive as flat-out rudeness. However, since things with The Manager went south on account of him being useless and shady, I don’t have any other options since I’m 2000 miles away from a place where I can build useful contacts. So right now I have…a contact, and granted he’s more useful than some — if you can get him to e-mail you back.

A few months ago, frustrated by my unemployability and general lack of direction, I e-mailed the Big-Shot Producer again. As he did before, he wrote back the same day — to tell me he hasn’t read my scripts. This time, though, things were different.

Somebody read my scripts, at an unspecified time in the past. Apparently they thought enough of them to recommend (or at least “consider,” which is Hollywood-speak for “I don’t want to get canned if I pass on this and somebody else buys it and makes millions”), but of course nobody followed up because out of sight, out of mind. The Big-Shot Producer seemed mildly excited that I was e-mailing again, after checking his notes and finding — what? I don’t know, but he got back in touch with me to say yes, they had notes, but he couldn’t find the drafts so could I send them ASAP? Of course, this was great for me because it gave me the opportunity to make each script suck slightly less. In fact, since I had recently adapted one of them into a novel, I used that to help me mine the material for more jokes and subtle moments of character development. I sent them both to him, and…didn’t hear anything.

However, since I knew somebody had read them and was sorta rallying for me from the inside, I kept up with it, e-mailing him once a week, not getting discouraged when he never got back to me. By the time two months had passed and I had finally decided I’d start calling over there, I loaded up my e-mail and saw:

From:	Subject:
Big-Shot Producer	Read them over the weekend!

Oh, happy day! Joy! Rapture!

And then I opened the e-mail.

He wrote that I have a “unique” take on the world (sarcastic air-quotes his), and he wanted to discuss his questions and thoughts with me. I freaked the hell out until several of my film school friends reassured me that him not just blowing me off, and wanting to discuss these scripts, are good signs. But still, from my perspective, first of all the sarcastic air-quotes are kind of assholish, but I guess the fact that he’s a producer means that he can be an asshole and I can sit there and take it and feel privileged because at least he’s talking to me. I would like to insert a joke here about how much that reminds me of high school, but the sad truth is that it doesn’t. I used to be cool (sorta) in high school; I fell apart shortly thereafter. I think they call it “peaked in high school” syndrome. Or maybe I just call it that…

Anyway, I spent another week frustrated and concerned about what he’d have to say, what kind of irritating tone he’d take, and whether or not I’d be able to sit there and listen without hopping a flight to L.A. to punch him in the neck. I was pretty much dreading his call, but on the plus side he left me off the hook about actually calling him — he wrote that if he didn’t call me by such-and-such day, I should drop an e-mail letting him know the best times to call in the future. He didn’t call, so I sent the e-mail.

It took him another four days to write back, using the dreaded “stealth e-mail” technique that bugs the crap out of me. You know the one — they e-mail in the middle of the night, so you go to bed feeling all safe and secure and then, the next morning, when you check your e-mail — bam!

Although this wasn’t so much a “bam” as an “oh, that sorta makes sense but is still annoying.” He informed me of three things:

1. He’d be traveling and therefore busy for a few weeks.
2. I’m a good writer, but…
3. The two scripts I sent him are too “over-the-top.”

He wanted to know if I had anything a bit more restrained, and the sad and somewhat embarrassing truth is: no, I don’t. I will not deny the over-the-top nature of these screenplays, but I would argue with anyone who felt they were over-the-top in a bad way. They’re not perfect, granted, but even though they get pretty out there, one thing I try to do (and usually succeed, according to people who have read them) is to ground them in something resembling reality, even if the only “real” thing about it is a character’s plight feeling relatable as the entire world around them goes insane.

I’m the last person to argue about what’s commercial and what’s not, but I’ve always had this impression that the sanitized, formula Hollywood comedy is not designed to please anyone but studio executives and maybe crazy religious people, and that if they gave dark comedies the same kind of marketing and star power, they could be hits. Hell, that’s actually starting to become a reality even though many of the dark comedies get ground up in the Hollywood machine and wind up shitty, but they get made and they make money. At any rate, the studios misunderestimate the comic sensibilities of the American public, and as a result we’re stuck with awful, unfunny comedies.

Initially, I got riled by the e-mail. I thought he was trying to insult me, even though the scripts are over-the-top and he said I was a good writer. But I thought what he was trying to say is that they’re over-the-top in a bad way, he either doesn’t find them funny or doesn’t think they’re in any way commercial, and that pissed me off. Especially since his last movie inciting incident revolved around one of the most disgusting scatological jokes I’ve ever seen. How dare he accuse me of being over the top when —

Okay, I let others help me reinterpret the e-mail as a positive thing. A few of them argue that this was probably a test — he likes the scripts I sent him but wants to make sure I’m not a one-trick pony. But, um, I kind of am. I have all these ideas for different genres, but I either get bored while writing them and make them insane or they simply don’t hold my interest long enough to actually write them, and I get distracted with another comedy idea. When the Big-Shot Producer asked if I had anything less over-the-top, I panicked because — at this point, I don’t.

Other than two dozen treatments for dramas and thrillers I’ve never written, the closest I came to having something different was what originally started as a conspiracy thriller but rapidly became a satire of mindless action movies. It had a good — dare I say, great — first act, but after that I just went wild for no reason other than boredom. My friend Mark, who usually reads my stuff, suggested I play up the comedy even more; I’m just glad I never took the time to do a rewrite based on his feedback. All the while, I had been contemplating several ideas to dial down the insane, over-the-top action sequences and make it more of a quiet, character-driven thriller along the lines of my two favorite conspiracy movies, Marathon Man and The Parallax View. With this kick in the ass from the Big-Shot Producer, I’d finally make that rewrite a reality.

I had it all figured out: I’d wait a day or two to stall, then e-mail him back and say I have this conspiracy script and ask if it interests him. I figured, since he said he’d be busy traveling for two weeks, that I could continue to use the tried-and-true (and never successful) “fake it ‘til you make it” mantra to let him know I had this script and put the communication problems on him — he probably wouldn’t get back to me for two weeks, which gives me more than enough time to rewrite the hell out of this script.

I sent the e-mail and got a response less than an hour later. He said he’d love to read it while he’s on the road.

Oh fuck.

Oh FUCK!

Luckily, this was on a Friday. I got out the ol’ coffee IV drip and hooked myself into it and worked my ass off. It wasn’t even a minor rewrite. With a few exceptions, everything past page 30 needed to go. I did reluctantly add back in a few of the less insane action sequences, because they take up page count and they did still work in the revamped plot. I couldn’t just send him what I had, though. In addition to being (a) a crappy first draft and (b) ridiculously over-the-top, the exact opposite of what he wanted, I pitched the revised idea. This wouldn’t have been a problem except it changes one of the main characters from girlfriend to sister (have fun, Freud!) so I’d have a really hard time being taken seriously if I pitch a conspiracy story about siblings on the run, then send him a script about lovers on the run.

In the end, I just had to drop a lot of stuff. It was a lot tighter, at around 95 pages (the original draft was 30 pages longer), with the overall conspiracy streamlined. I actually, as a result of running out of ideas, came up with a far superior ending that works much better with the new plot I created from the bones of the first act — but there was still a lot that I left out, and it still had its share of problems. It was a much better product to send to a producer, though: surprisingly good for being written in less than 64 hours, but with enough slight problems that he and his development people will feel like they’re doing their job and I won’t get pissed off about them destroying my “art.” If they’re acknowledging the same problems, or if I’m guiding their perspective to care about the problems I think need fixing, they’ll sincerely believe I’ve “raised the stakes” and am working synergistically with them — I’m a guy they want on their side.

Of course, it’s been almost three weeks and I haven’t heard back. I’ve sent a couple of e-mails, but once again I’m patiently playing the waiting game.

What do I expect to get out of this? Not much — a sale on any of the three scripts I’ve sent him is highly unlikely, even though I think they’re pretty good scripts. I just want him to be like some kind of Roger Corman figure — if he thinks I have any talent (“You’re a good writer!”) and offers me a menial Hollywood job so that he can keep me close and loyal and perhaps Godfather something out of me later, I’d be happy.

Posted by Stan on July 15, 2007 2:43 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 17, 2007

What Happened to The Manager?

Does anyone remember The Manager? I’ve been asked about him by a couple of people, why I’m not working for him anymore, what all happened there, so I figure since not much is going on today I’ll dive into that.

A brief recap for those two lazy to re-read all the links: last summer, my friend Mark said he responded to a vague ad on a job list for an unpaid “e-internship” reading scripts. He sent his resume to The Manager and the response was two scripts and coverage templates. He did it for a few weeks, decided the guy wasn’t completely shady, so he let me know about it in case I wanted to participate. I figured, what the hell? I was unemployed and wanted something to do, and at the time we thought maybe this guy would make something of himself and we’d be getting in on the ground floor.

Gradually, a combination of bizarre behavior and general asshole-ishness led Mark and I to believe two things: (1) The Manager had no idea what he was doing, and (2) we were not getting in on the ground floor of anything. For awhile, we had plenty of conspiracy theories that this dude was really smart and playing us for chumps, but evidence kept rolling in and it’s really, sincerely true that the man has all the business sense of a jar of bolts. Mark actually abandoned ship around October or November of last year. He was tired of reading shitty scripts for no pay, tired of The Manager ducking Mark’s requests for feedback on his own scripts (which The Manager asked to read), and tired of the bullshit idea that maybe The Manager would make something of himself and we’d ride the wave.

I kept going with it, mostly because I wanted to maintain some connection (no matter how useless) to The Industry, but also to continue building up an extensive, varied portfolio of coverage. But my heart wasn’t in it; as I complained in September, it didn’t seem like they were listening to my ideas (except for a yea or nay on submissions). They also never started paying me, which was another reason Mark decided to bail. He figured he’d let the paying slide if The Manager wanted to take him on as a client, but that didn’t happen. I bitched to The Manager a couple of times about getting paid, and he came back at me with false reassurances that they were about to break through, and as soon as he made a sale I’d be compensated. I didn’t believe it then, and obviously it never happened.

As a result of my disillusionment and lack of payment (and all the crappy scripts that simply became a chore to get through), I took more time to read them, took more time to write coverage; at one point, The Manager just told me to stop writing detailed coverage on really bad scripts, just give him a paragraph on why it sucks. Unfortunately, I ended up doing this for nearly all of them, but I’d still take the time to write a full report for my portfolio. He just didn’t want to read them.

But the real breaking point came in December. He sent me a script, an adaptation of a stage musical (trailer here, horrible and baffling short film by the author here). Because it’s not entirely evidence in either of the YouTube links, here’s a brief synopsis of the plot: a preacher dies during his Sunday sermon and is sent to hell in spite of his service as a man of God. He takes a semi-guided tour through hell, encountering several sinful stereotypes and having an occasional war of words (and song and dance!) with Satan himself. That’s…basically the entire story. It also has the baffling, religious-awakening equivalent of the “it’s all a dream” ending — at the eleventh hour, just as Satan is going to strike the preacher down, God explains that he sent the preacher to see what hell was like so the preacher would make sure his congregation never strayed from the flock. Then he wakes up in the church, alive and well, and they all burst out in song. I know it’s a musical, so I’ll forgive the bursting out into song, but how is that ending not simultaneously obvious and retarded?

But wait — it’s not actually obvious, because of all the baffling “filmic” changes that were made to the script. It is evident that the author did a rushed hack job to turn her stage script into a film screenplay. It’s obvious when “cinematic” scenes are added between the stage-show musical numbers. The “prologue” is basically a long series of non sequiturs that are supposed to make sense later (arbitrary vignettes featuring each stereotyped character pre-death); they either continue to not make sense by presenting plot inconsistencies and continuity errors, or the scenes are re-explained by the characters when they appear later (meaning either the early scene or the dialogue should be cut, but it wasn’t because the script is so poorly changed). More awful problems: certain characters have random name changes, sometimes on the same page, as if she wanted to change the names but did a half-assed job of find-and-replace. The dialogue is just terrible, and somehow the lyrics are worse. The characters, including the preacher, are cardboard cutouts.

I know musicals aren’t known for exceptional storytelling, but look: it’s hard to judge a musical without hearing the music. I can’t do much without it except judge it based on story, character, and lyrical content. It’s awful across the board, walking the fine line between crappiness and incomprehensibility. Usually it stumbles and falls to either side.

There is one interesting moment in the script. Early on, the preacher sings that he doesn’t know what he did wrong — can’t somebody show him why he’s in hell? There’s an arbitrary flashback, one of many (because it’s cinematic!!), that shows this preacher, this man of God, swearing on a Bible before getting on a witness stand and lying his ass off. It’s never explained who he’s lying for, what he said, or why — just that the preacher lied, and he knows it. Now, you might say, one act of perjury is justifiable if it’s for the greater good, but the script portrays God as an Old Testament hardass, sending people to hell for minor infractions like getting into a car accident because the driver was on a cell phone (this is strictly forbidden in the Book of Numbers).

You might also say, “Wow, what an interesting road this script is taking, 22 pages in: you have a preacher who’s sent to hell, basically because he’s one of those corrupt douchebags who uses the ‘man of God’ thing to excuse all sorts of sinning.” You would be wrong; the flashback, like so many others, has no bearing or impact on anything that happens afterward. It simply exists as yet another non sequitur and continuity error, because afterward the preacher keeps complaining that he doesn’t know why he was sent to hell, and then at the end God basically says, “You shouldn’t be here — hope you enjoyed the tour!”

Needless to say, I savaged this script. It might have been my longest coverage ever, chronicling every logical inconsistency, plot hole, and continuity error in detail in the synopsis so I could rip it apart in the analysis. I was proud of this handiwork, and I sent it to The Manager…

…and never heard from him again. By that time I was disillusioned and irritated; I’d had long stretches where he simply stopped responding to e-mails, but then enough “begging” on my part would get him to “remember” me and e-mail another script. This time, I had had it. This was one of the worst scripts I’d ever read, after a long string of other crappy scripts, and I felt like what he was handing me came from the bottom of the pile. When I first started reading for him, he did send a lot of bad scripts but there were also plenty of scripts that had potential and even several that were legitimately good; while I think it’s probably more valuable to read bad screenplays than good ones (both are important, but I’d rather look at where people are going wrong and avoid the traps than look at what people are doing write and trying to imitate their success). Now, he wasn’t sending any of the good ones* to me and I had to wade through a sea of shit. I figured if he kept me in the loop and sent more, I’d still read it, but I was tired of begging for scraps.

Is it surprising that I never heard from him again? I’ve googled him and some of his clients on occasion, especially in the weeks immediately following. I wasn’t sure if he had dropped me or if he got busy actually doing something. I’ve only learned a couple of tidbits about him, none of them particularly good:

• One of his worst writers has a novel coming out next month. I won’t deny that this is part of the reason I believe I can get my novel published. No screenplays, but if the “audiobook” version of his first chapter is any indication, the dude’s novels aren’t any more coherent than his screenplays. Seriously, it’s a tiny press that’s publishing it but they have a good reputation. I don’t know how they misfired so seriously.
• From The Manager’s “LinkedIn” profile, I gleaned that he has “expanded” his management/production company buy creating a holding company. I swear to you that in January or February when I first found this, he suggesed that the holding company would be there to “hold” film financing for his productions. I didn’t really know what a holding company did at the time (I just know that I rarely hear the term outside of a corruption/scandal context), but when I eventually discovered that this isn’t what a holding company does at all, I re-googled the LinkedIn profile and found that he had changed it to say that the holding company exists that owns his various assets, many of which exist in the form of theoretical business ventures.
• He has not, to date, sold any screenplays or produced anything.
• His one big project, based on a Saturday-morning cartoon property that I don’t think there’s much of a current market for, was rejected. Apparently a big studio was looking at a bunch of different takes on the property; he had one that I thought was awful, an attempt to clone Star Wars using all of the worst aspects of the new trilogy (to sum up: politics politics politics bland love story politics politics). At any rate, it was announced earlier this year that the property would return as an updated Saturday-morning cartoon that re-imagines the characters as rock star superheroes drawn in an anime style. I honestly believe that is a better concept than the treatments I read from The Manager; I do think his take could have worked, but he chose to ignore my feedback and just kept sending more of the same.
• Saving the best for last: I found a quote from The Manager dated September 2004, in a press release for the stage version of the horrible musical, where he is listed as “producer/co-promoter.” Obviously this little project meant more to him than he let on. I don’t have any confirmation, but I do think this is why I never received a response from him.

So that’s that: The Manager and I have parted ways, and I’m probably better for it. I have a coverage portfolio that is largely useless in the Midwest, but at least I was able to spend the time honing my skills. That, and a miniscule amount of money to cover one script, are pretty much all I have to make me better off than I was before I knew The Manager.

*I attribute this to my criticism getting a little harsher, even on the stuff I liked — because it could all be better, but often I lobbed softballs because I thought he was going to pay me and didn’t want to piss off his “clients.” [Back]

Posted by Stan on May 17, 2007 1:19 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 25, 2007

The New Grift

I’ve reached a new phase of unemployability that has complicated life for me a bit, in the most annoying way possible. The past several times I’ve had job interviews (phone or in-person), I’ve been told something like this: “You are grossly overqualified for this job, but I’ll tell you why we called you…[insert list of reasons why my resume ‘popped’]” Maybe this is some new human resources flattery technique. “On the chance we don’t hire you, we want you to know that you’re overqualified, even though you’re…not.” I guess I could rule that out because most of these jobs are through friends, and I hear back from them that I didn’t get the job because the department manager thinks I’d get bored, or they don’t think I’d fit in with the other workers because of my gigantic, college-educated brain. I often shoot back with things like, “I am not easily bored” or “My college was pretty crappy,” but it never does any good.

I seem to find two sets of jobs: those I’m overqualified for, and those I’m hilarious unqualified for. I can’t seem to find a happy medium of a job I’m exactly qualified for, at least according to my experience level. Every job I’m unqualified for on paper, I think I can do. Otherwise, I wouldn’t apply. But I do apply, shamelessly manipulating my resume into something that’s about as close to fiction as you can get while still being honest. I have, on occasion, been called in to interview for the “unqualified” jobs, so I’ve had it both ways: “You’re overqualified for this job, so we’ll see.” Or “Wow, how did you even get a call from HR?” Those are rough.

So what are my options? I could go back to retail work, where nobody gives a shit if you’re overqualified because if you were any good at anything, you wouldn’t be applying to those shit jobs. However, I’m holding out for a hero until the end of the night. Nothing serious — I want something that’s just a general office thing, but that’s what I’m overqualified for. So shit, why not apply for a bunch of editor positions at publishing companies? I wouldn’t mind something bottom-rung, but I never see those jobs advertised, even on the companies’ websites. Am I looking in the wrong places? No idea, but fuck, if I can sham my way into a job where all I do is, for instance, look at submissions and say “yea” or “nay”? A job where all I do is sit around reading is pretty ideal.

But my resume, treading in dishonest waters as it is, couldn’t withstand being spread any thinner. It’s time to pull out the big guns, the complete and utter lies that I’m embarrassingly good at because, well, I have that giant overqualified brain and I like to pretend I’m a writer, so I sit around working out every single stupid detail, every single problem that could lead to me being caught, and try to have all the answers. Now, obviously, I don’t want to blow my wad by giving them all the answers — at least, not right away. But I need to know the answers. It’s how grifting works.

Speaking of elaborate cons: last year, I came up with an idea based on something a colleague told me in Los Angeles. In talking about how roughly 90% of movies and television are adapted from something else, he suggested I go trolling used bookstores for obscure little novels, track down the author or his agent and buy the rights for a song, then turn around at sell the screenplay version at a 10,000% profit (that was his estimation).

“But I have ideas,” I scoffed. “I don’t need to adapt someone else’s.”

“It’s not about using someone else’s idea,” he said. “It’s about having a prop — something they can touch and look it. They’re never going to read it. You can take one of your screenplays, find a random story that has a few vague similarities, buy the rights, and call it an adaptation. I guarantee you they won’t glance at more than a page or two, and by the time they finally read your screenplay — six months later — they won’t remember anything except the prop.”

So I went one better and wrote a novel, based on one of my screenplays. And no, this is not the novelizations of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids or Back to the Future they used to sell through the Troll Book Club — this was an actual effort to rewrite the screen story as a novel, filling it out with details, additional subplots, altering the storyline and characterizations in the script to make everything a little bleaker.

I didn’t think too much of it; despite the valiant effort, I accepted that this was hackery at its worst, so I put this whole plan in motion. I found a free self-publishing service that did not require use of their logo or advertising in any way. “Free” is fun, but for an additional one-time fee they’ll list you at a bunch of e-tailers, again without their logo — it’d have my own fake publisher’s name. I designed a complete, fraudulent website asserting the reality of the fictitious company, complete with a roster of authors and an arsenal of novels.

Using the “they won’t glance at more than a few pages” theory, I’d have a few copies printed up, maybe even leave them with producers I pitched to, maybe they’d be interested enough to google — boom, there’s the company website. Boom, there’s the Amazon.com listing — real publisher, real novel. The only trouble would come if they went a little bit past the surface and started, for instance, checking out ISBNs or just typing titles or authors into the Amazon search engine.

Then two things happened that made me rethink the strategy: (1) I started to get nervous that, with potential deals for tens of thousands of dollars, it seemed likely they would look past the surface, and I’d be fucked. (2) The feedback for the novel started coming in, and I got the (possibly misguided) idea that, with a rewrite, I could get it published legitimately. But that is a process that takes almost as much time and hand-wringing as selling a screenplay. So I’m going for it…

In the interim I need…something to do that pays money. I have a publishing company domain, a complete site design and nearly-complete content. All I need is a use for it. Like, say, asserting the existence of a 100% fake company that I can put down on a resume, claiming I’ve been working there as an editor for three years (which is usually the amount of experience they want), telling my mostly unscrupulous and far-too-supportive references to back this up, manufacturing samples of past work, roping a friend into helping create the “false front” with phone and e-mail fraud (not a felony!).

Is there any possible way this could work? It’s doubtful, but I’m at the end of my rope and I really want a job that is only partly demeaning. So fuck it — why not go balls to the wall for a few months, and if it goes horribly awry I’ll just go back to my original methods?

Besides, it’s not like I can go to prison for defrauding businesses in order to get a job. Right?

Right?!

Posted by Stan on April 25, 2007 10:06 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

September 15, 2006

New Job

Not too long ago, I was bitching about café jobs. Because, aside from the occasional obnoxious customers, I like café jobs. I like being able to prepare and sell a product I enjoy, I like droning on and on with excitement about coffee, I even like talking to customers. I hate to admit it, and I know my blog in no way reflects this, but I actually like people. “People” in the general sense of people waltzing into a store, ordering a drink, maybe chit-chatting. As long as I don’t have to forge a relationship more complex than that, I love people. It’s all the people I know well who I can’t stand. Does this say something about me or them? Or both?

At any rate, I was bitching about these jobs because I could probably do one forever, without being promoted or anything, except the pay is shit, the tips bring them to almost above shit, and the benefits — if there are any — almost always suck. I wouldn’t really want to turn one of these jobs into anything resembling a career anyway, but if they paid better, I’d love working at a job like that for a few years, until either something better comes along or I’ve saved enough to go on a coke-fueled bender that will, with any luck, set me on the path to my chosen career of “drug mule.”

Because these jobs don’t pay well, I automatically see them as demeaning. I see them as the type of thing where the customers who walk in automatically look down on me, think of me as a failure, fully aware that I’m a fat, disgusting almost-25-year-old who has given up on his dreams and is resigned to working shit jobs for low wages. I can’t remember who said it, so I apologize if you’re reading this blog and know it was you (but feel free to tell me in a the same condescending, obscenity-laced way I correct people), but when I said this, one of my friends said, “Fuck ‘em. It doesn’t matter what they think. You like the job, you’re only doing it because you like it — and, in fact, are taking a pay cut to do it — and you know you haven’t given up on anything. You just need money.”

Which is true, and it made me feel a lot less shitty about taking café jobs. It’s not about how other people see me — it’s about how I see myself. And as you all know, I see myself as vastly superior to everyone I meet. Except for all those people who are better than me.

So I had an interview about a month ago with the assistant manager at a coffee shop way the fuck out in Evanston. It paid well, had good benefits, was located in the middle of the yuppie part of Evanston (which means: obnoxious customers who tip well), and has more branches in Southern California than it does in Chicago. I figured it’d be a good start; I could work there for a year or two, then put in for a transfer to a different branch, or just quit and try to get rehired on the other side.

The first interview went pretty well. The assistant manager had a pretty good poker face, but in the end he betrayed his feigned apathy because I’m just that witty. He also told me he was recommending me for a second interview with the manager. I was pretty pumped, until it turned out to be a pain in the ass for the assistant manager to even schedule an interview. I couldn’t tell if she was flighty or disinterested, but I’m in a I need a job right now mentality, and she’s saying, “Ummm…can you wait a couple of weeks?”

I finally had my second interview, and I knew instantly that I didn’t get it. She didn’t seem interested in the answers to my questions, she seemed on a general level to dislike me, and at the end of the interview, while she feigned politeness, it was one of these, “I have a bunch of other interviews, so I’ll get back to you,” which could be taken either way, but I felt like it was the brush-off. And I was right, because I never heard back. When I finally called, she said, “Right,” in a tone that suggested she barely even remembered me, and then said, “All the positions are filled. Have a great day!”

I wondered what had happened. Usually I’m the one who instantly hates people, while everyone else tortures me by being really nice and thinking I’m just joking around when I say things like, “I will chop your head off and scoop out your insides like pumpkin filling.” The opposite only happens in rare circumstances, and when it does, it drives me nuts.

I developed this really half-assed, stupid theory. Almost two years ago, I got a wild hair up my ass to get a burr grinder. In Seattle, my sister’s then-fiancé (now husband) and my job at Tully’s Coffee got me obsessed with creating the perfect cup of coffee at home. In order to accomplish this, I’d need freshly ground beans. But those cheapie blade grinders build up so much heat and static electricity, they practically double-roast the beans (or, in the case of Starbucks, triple-roast them. You need a burr grinder, which doesn’t generate that level of heat. Some of the low-end ones generate static, but that’s why I refused to settle for nothing less than the Solis Maestro Plus.

I planned to buy one from Amazon, but returning through mail-order is a pain, so I decided I’d do a little try-before-I-buy action…except very few places sell the Solis Maestro. It’s a specialty item made by an obscure, foreign brand, so the only place I could find it at was — wait for it — this particular coffee shop.

At the time, the same manager worked there. I called up to ask if they had it in stock, and she said yes and she’d hold it for me. She was very excited — this thing cost $150, and if it’s anything like any of the other coffee shops I’ve applied to, nobody will ever buy it — especially when I actually showed up and paid for it. She was less excited when I returned two days later and gave some lame excuse to return it (I think it was, “It doesn’t work right”).

Is it possible she remembered that, remembered me, and this did me in before I even started? It seems unlikely; I probably wouldn’t have gotten a first interview, much less a second (I didn’t do the first interview with her, but if she had known, she probably would have just told the assistant manager not to recommend me). But maybe it was one of those nagging things. “Why do I know this guy? This is going to bug me for weeks.” Well, weeks passed, and maybe she put the pieces together. Or maybe she did at her store what the managers did at Borders, keeping a running tally of “frequent returners” to flag them in the computer and make sure they didn’t do it too often.

These are the paranoid things I think about, when in fact this is an Occam’s razor of rejection: she didn’t like me. Was it me personally, my work history, my not-entirely-subtle implication that I’d blow this pop stand at the first opportunity, the fact that I had a 45-60 minute drive one way? No idea, but there was something about me that made me an unacceptable employee, and as usual it sort of shattered my confidence. Employers haven’t exactly been jumping to hire me, and in most cases I can chalk that up to them either not looking at my resume at all, or giving it a once-over and deciding I don’t have enough experience. Entirely reasonable considering most of the jobs I apply for are way out of my league, but a job at a coffee shop? How could I not get that?

Shaken but still desperate enough for money that I needed to just keep plugging away on applications, I kept on rolling. On Friday, I went to Borders and tried to butter my manager to get my old job back, but she wasn’t there at the time. I filled out applications for half a dozen coffee shops in the area, tailoring it to make me the most desirable applicant (but, for the first time ever, being truthful on the application), but it turned out none of that mattered. The first application I sent out that day got a callback that afternoon. I scheduled an interview for Monday, and I said to myself, “I’m going to get this job.”

The weird thing is, my interview was actually worse than the other one. I felt incoherent, I was taken aback by his line of questioning (which was different from most coffee shop interviews I’ve had, and I’ve had a lot), and I thought I was sunk until I realized he plowed through a sheet of questions labeled “first interview” — not writing any of my answers down, mind you — and then proceeded to another sheet labeled “second interview.” Huh. Did that mean it was going well?

“I’m going to be straight with you,” the manager said. “I’m not desperate, but I do need employees who can do the job, and you have experience. I’m going to go ahead and hire you.”

“Uh…okay,” I said. “Thanks.”

He ran off to get the paperwork. I waited patiently, observing the traffic-free coffee shop, admiring my new work environs. He returned and slowly filled out most of the paperwork for me, explained to me my job tasks (most of which are common sense). As he filled out one of the forms, he asked, “How long have you been out of work?”

I lied, “Since May.” He nodded without taking his eyes off the paperwork. I added, “I’ve been looking around, but nobody seems to be hiring. Or, at least, they’re not hiring me.”

He glanced up, suspicion in his eyes.

“Uhh…” I elaborated. “What I mean is, I’ve been applying for a lot of office jobs, and I guess I just don’t have enough experience.”

The suspicion didn’t exactly go away with that remark. I continued, “I prefer working in cafés, anyway, but the office jobs pay a little better.” Finally he nodded and returned to the paperwork.

Again to pass the time, he asked, “Why’d you leave Starbucks?”

I sighed. “The manager didn’t work around my school schedule,” I said, adding, “You don’t have to worry about that since I’ve graduated, of course. She kept scheduling me at times I just couldn’t work. I’d always tell her, but she wanted to argue with me about it, so eventually I just quit. School was more important.” This is, of course, almost entirely untrue. The manager worked sufficiently around my work schedule; it just happened that I had a hard time getting up at 4:30 to go in for a shift from five to nine, then enjoy my 90-minute one-way commute to a three-hour class. Instead, I went home and slept, then called up and quit without notice.

“Which Starbucks was that?” he asked. I told him. He nodded and then asked, “I worked for Starbucks for five years. Who was the manager?”

“Uhhh…” I thought. What if he knew my old manager? What if they were friends and he called up to check out my story or use her as some kind of reference or something. Instead of coming up with a fake name like “Mike Hunt,” I blurted out her actual name. Not even just the first name — first and last, right out there in the open.

He nodded, but his eyes didn’t have a look resembling recognition. The nod turned into a shaking head, and he said, “I don’t know her.”

I shrugged noncommittally. I was getting worried at this point that my stupidity and unfortunate bout of Tourette’s-like honesty would cause me to lose this job before I even had it. Fortunately, he didn’t ask me any more questions. He handed me the various tax and benefits forms that I could fill out on my own, gave me a training manual, and sent me on my way.

I felt reasonably good — I had, in the span of an hour, gone from having nothing resembling a job to being somewhat gainfully employed. Not really in my chosen career path, but as a wise and nameless friend once said, I haven’t given up on anything. I just need money.

Posted by Stan on September 15, 2006 12:41 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

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  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 30, 2006

The Press Release

A couple of months ago, a friend of mine optioned a very funny screenplay to a producer with whom I’ve also been dealing for months. Over this past weekend, he forwarded me a press release the producer’s company wrote about the deal.

It’s flattering overall and, like most Hollywood press releases, overhypes the deal by referring to “selling” and “buying” even though what’s actually happening is “leasing” and “renting.” There are a few nice quotes from Ryan, one of which includes a veiled reference to me. That creeped me out, but it also made me feel good in a stupid way. According to him, I was the impetus for him pursuing the producer, which led to the option. If my scripts go nowhere, at least I can hang my hat on that much.

However, I took issue with one quote, this from the producer, in which he totally condescends to Ryan and his abilities. Maybe I should chalk this up to a producer touting his ability to recognize an unmolded talent within the doughy, shapeless body of a screenwriter, but first he mentions that Ryan “didn’t think he was a comedy writer.” This is patently untrue, considering — among other things — he spent several years in classes and workshops at the Second City and even, at one point, made it into the cast…for about three months, at which point half the cast ended up on Saturday Night Live and the other half was fired.

It was at this time that he originally conceived the script, with an unfunny comedian who went on to become unfunny on national television, to be a vehicle for said unfunny comedian and his even less funny friend. But when they both got the call from SNL, they jetted off to New York and left Ryan in the dust, with nothing but an idea and a half-finished script. He kept on it, freed by his ability to not write a star vehicle for two others, and the version I read — probably three years after his first draft — was pretty damn funny. Because Ryan is pretty damn funny.

But here’s why the producer doesn’t think Ryan knew he was a comedy writer: “He [originally] pitched me some giant-epic-action-biblical-save the universe from a flood type thing (or something like that).” I’m not sure if it’s the parenthetical that makes it seem extremely condescending, or the fact that he’s essentially thumbing his nose at a very vague (and inaccurate) description of a script he wouldn’t even bother to read. Maybe it’s because I read it in one sitting, jaw on the floor, stunned at how fucking good it is. Baffled by the fact that this guy, whose other scripts were mostly comedies, had written the best action-adventure script I’ve ever read, professional or otherwise. And then he goes and pitches it to a guy who tells him to fuck off and, nearly a year later, mocks him for his efforts.

That really incensed me, but what incensed me even more is: I’m a giant whore. We all have known this for a very long time, but I’m sitting there getting pissed off at this man’s lack of any kind of integrity, artistic or otherwise, belittling a “first-time scribe” nobody whom he’s not even paying (not yet, anyway…), but rather than saying something, I’m hanging back. Because I don’t want to blow a potential deal for my scripts.

This makes me the worst kind of whore. Because some whores have some kind of values. Say there are two of them, standing over there on Cicero, and a guy pulls up and wants both of them. So they go back to his moldy, potential-serial-killer dwelling, and he says, “One at a time. I like it when one of you watches.” For the sake of this metaphor, the one watching is me, the one doing is Ryan, and the producer is the john. And he proceeds to do all manner of vile things to the poor girl, most of them involving defecation, urination, maybe even a little finger-down-the-throat forced-vomiting, while the other girl leans up against the peeling wallpaper, aghast.

And now she has a choice: refuse and run the fuck away, or allow the john to do these same horrible things to her. My choice is: bring on your bodily waste…

…and speaking of bodily waste. To add insult to injury, a little more than a week ago I hauled my fat ass over to Lincoln Park to see the very last showing of this producer’s brand spanking new film. Opening and closing in two weeks, it played at 17 theatres during its peak. I went to see it because I thought I could kiss some ass. I read a lot of middling reviews, most indicating it was pretty mediocre but had a few redeeming moments. I thought, based on my previous Hollywood experience mining terrible material for little nuggets of gold that could be fostered into large hunks of gold (the gold in this instance is magic leprechaun gold that can grow like a vegetable), that I could find its redeeming qualities and acknowlege the good points while ignoring the bad.

The problem, I discovered as I left the theatre, was that it had no good points. Okay, two good points: I laughed at one very small joke, and I really enjoyed a “dramatic” scene near the end. Here’s a note to comedy writers out there: if the best scene in your comedy is the dramatic scene, you’re in trouble.

I ended up writing an incredibly vague but complimentary note to the producer. It did elicit a rapid response (and an implication that things will actually get moving on my scripts, which may seem nice but is probably more accurately described as “bullshit”), but I didn’t even have to go and see the movie to write what I did. I suppose it might be nice in case he ever attempts to cross-examine me on the film’s strengths and weaknesses. I have seen it, I won’t go in blind, but hell, what I wouldn’t give to get back the $20 and five hours I spent on that movie (yes, I’m including commute time and transit fare).

In other news, I might or might not have a nice little crap (but paying!) job in Los Angeles coming up. If I get it, and here’s hoping I do, I’ll have to hustle my fat ass across the country (again) posthaste, and it’ll last through August.

And I’ve been reading obsessively because, frankly, I have nothing else to do. Here are this month’s recommendations: The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler and House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.

Posted by Stan on April 30, 2006 8:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

January 13, 2006

Hooray for Hollywood: Calling in Favors Edition

Last week, I re-read some old scripts I had written because, since I’m too lazy to research new ideas, I thought maybe I could adapt some preexisting material into a novel that somebody might actually want to read. And then something happened that has never happened before (and hopefully will never happen again): I started reading one script, and I got really into it, like I hadn’t written it, like I didn’t really know the story…and I really, really liked it.

When I finished — I read it in one sitting, which something I rarely do, especially with my own material, which I usually put down in disgust after five minutes and come back to it a few days later — I thought to myself, “This fucker’s a screenplay. I could turn it into a novel, but right now, as it stands, it is the best screenplay I’ve ever written, maybe it’ll make an above-average novel, but it’ll make a hell of a good movie.”

It was around this time that I realized I had abandoned Hollywood and my dream of becoming the world’s first rock-star screenwriter (Roger Waters doesn’t count). Because of this, there were a few contacts that would require a whole lot of effort to un-alienate. So I decided I’d go the easy route first, sorting through the stack of business cards and old emails to see if anyone I met Out There expressed even a remote interest in reading my script.

The first one I tried I thought would either be the easiest or the toughest sell: a friend of a friend, to whom I pitched not one but two scripts, who loved my ideas, loved my hilarious distillation of my even-more-hilarious scripts, and really acted like he wanted to read my stuff. Except that when I emailed him before — I heard nothing back. I tried emailing him several more times — even he told me upfront to “be persistent” — but I never heard a peep. After awhile, I gave up. “Fuck Hollywood!” I believe I said.

“So,” I thought, “I’ll just email him once a week for a month. If he doesn’t respond, I’ll start emailing him daily, until he’s so frustrated he’ll read the script just to shut me the damn hell up.” It was the perfect plan…

But wait, he wanted to read two scripts, and careful readers of this blog will note that I only mentioned one script I’ve ever written as being anything resembling “good.” What to do about that?

Fortunately, I had blanketed the Chicagoland with this script in the year and a half before I left for Hollywood. Everybody whose opinion I trusted was forced to a read a copy, and I kept working on it, trying to incorporate both their suggestions and new ideas I had conceived (or new ideas I had conceived from a suggestion I found unusable), so by now…I still had a pretty piss-poor draft.

Over the weekend, I made it my mission to rewrite that motherfucker. It wouldn’t be perfect, it may not even be “good,” but hell, I read a lot of the shit that was being passed around Out There, and if nothing else, it would be better than that.

So I vomited out a new draft in about two days. It’s not really as amazing as all that — but, to be fair, it is sort of amazing — because I ended up keeping a lot of what was already there. It’s funny, but I wanted it to go to very, very, very dark and horrible places that I hadn’t yet taken it. Because I want to sell it in Hollywood, and nothing says “Hollywood” more than a script full of drug-addicted Satanists and implied rapists.

When I finished and reread it to my “good enough” satisfaction, I sent an email out on Tuesday, reminding this man of our history, of the stories I had told, and saying I had finished rewrites, so if he’s still interested, I’d send them over.

I wasn’t expecting to hear back at all, to be honest, but two hours later:

From: Big-Shot Producer
To: Stan
Date: January 10, 2006 12:48:38 PM CST
Subject: Email them!

Hey Stan,

Good hearing from you — we’ve been crazy with the release of [insert movie title], bunch of films in the works and starting up a TV show. Good problems to have but being short handed and short tempered I get overwhelmed.

Glad to hear that the drafts are done — absolutely email me the scripts! Attached is our standard release form — please simply fill in the blanks and attach it to your email when you submit your scripts. It is important too that you state in your email that you —have attached the submission release form— to your submission.

If you would also copy my assistant at <email@withheld.com>

Looking forward to getting them.

Best,
Big-Shot Producer
Partner / President & Ceo, [insert name of production company]

What… the fuck? I mean, seriously, this doesn’t really mean anything — yet! — but I was absolutely floored that I received such a prompt and interested response. Allow me to take out my crystal ball and predict the future: these scripts won’t sell. I didn’t really think they would — I was looking, primarily, for the opportunity to get my name out there and possibly get some rewrite work, or maybe even a (paid!) job on their development staff.

We’ll see how it goes. I don’t expect to hear back for a month or so, but I will keep you all updated on my (lack of) success in the movie business.

In the meantime, I’ll keep going to my shitty job, writing shitty songs to produce a shitty album while looking for a new shitty job.

Posted by Stan on January 13, 2006 4:35 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

May 4, 2005

Actors

It’s pretty well known that I fucking hate actors. When I was in high school, I used to act a bit. I was on the speech team. Performing was an interesting thing, but I always — for the most part — hated actors. It’s all part of the weird self-hate thing that I have, and I’ll argue that that was when it was at its worst: I enjoyed performing because, even though I wasn’t any good, I felt like it was an opportunity to try to “be” somebody else, which was satisfying since I disliked myself so intensely. But at the same time, I hated everybody around me — sometimes openly, usually secretly — and I’d be one of those “mysterious” actors who sat in a corner, brooding, while the rest of the people were shrieking at each other to demand attention.

But what it really boils down to is, all actors hate themselves equally. They all want to be someone else because they’re so insecure, they can’t take who they are, or maybe they’re too afraid to get to know who they really are, so they escape into a character. Since many actors fucking suck, this maybe isn’t 100% true, but I think there’s quite a bit of truth in it. No matter how bad an actor is, he’s trying to be somebody else. Otherwise, why the charade?

But actors are full of charades. Most of them are so hungry for attention, they dominate the conversation, they launch into “funny” stories or characters. They all want to be the party’s Robin Williams, and even Robin Williams’s shit got old 25 years ago. So you get a bunch of actors who want to be the center-of-attention-bundle-of-energy at a party? Shit, let’s go smoke some weed in the backyard, because it’s just obnoxiousness overload.

And that was the thing I never figured out, and that was the thing that made me bow out of performing altogether after high school (we’ll ignore the fact that I sucked, because while I sucked, I could still get parts). I’m misanthropic and depressed (and depressing) because I internalize my insecurities. I hate unleashing that shit on the world. It’s not fair to everybody else that I’m so insecure I have to keep talking talking talking, be the center of the conversation, be the noisy firecracker. I became very aware of how fucking annoying that kind of person can be, and I made a conscious decision to not be that way. I always prefer being the guy who sits quietly in the back, observing and mocking (orally and mentally) what’s going on. That’s how this blog was born.

With that said, I was filled with anxiety and dismay when I learned an acting class would be coming in today, and we had to come in prepared with a few short scenes (no more than eight pages), which they would rehearse a bit before performing. I was dismayed because, shit, they’re actors, and they’re gonna be coming in with their actor shit and ad-libbing all over town because it’s so “in the moment” and “true,” and just kill me now. I was anxious because I did really want to hear some of the scenes allowed, just to hear the rhythm and to see whether or not people get the jokes. I hear them in my head and I say, “I can play every single part, even the female sexpot in her 50s,” because I understand the speech pattern and the timing…

…but I’m not everybody, and despite getting some pretty good notes yesterday from this development guy who read my script, I’m still unsure of its comic worth. A comedy writer came in a few weeks ago and told us, “A joke isn’t a joke until someone laughs,” and while I don’t agree with that philosophy 100%, in this case I do, because these are words on a page, and if I’m the only one laughing at them, there’s a problem.

I picked out a few short, dialogue-heavy scenes that I thought would be interesting to hear aloud. One, I feared, was far too melodramatic. The second was just a brief exchange that I wasn’t sure was as amusing as it could have been. The third was kind of a longer, more complex scene, which I chose to see if those kinds of long, multiple-person scenes work well.

And they were off. A really attractive Latina actress and a guy all the writers kept referring to as “the prettyboy” were playing, respectively, a dour bride-to-be and her accountant fiancé. In the scene, he accuses her of having a “mental and emotional” affair with the main character, because she can’t have one physically. He has this whole monologue, which is very Aaron Sorkin and (in my opinion) quite cheeseball. I’ve always aspired to write high-quality, Sorkin-esque dialogue, but this is like late-fourth-season West Wing — it’s no “Two Cathedrals.” It’s what happens when eunuchs try to write dialogue about relationships.

But this actor, playing the accountant, saved the entire scene. He was actually a really good actor (the less said about the attractive Latina, the better). He hit all the right notes in the first reading, then I asked him in crappy actor-speak to “bring up the rhythm.” I don’t even know what that means, but it sounded appropriate. And he completely reinvented the performance on a dime, so I totally respect that. What I respect even more, though, is the way he handled the end of the scene, after the melodramatic monologue, when his fiancée responds, and he sits back down and launches into a dull job story…the dude started ad-libbing hilarious dialogue, and the melodrama of the previous monologue evaporated, leaving a scene that is actually legimately dramatic.

See, folks: actors aren’t all bad.

The second scene is the very first exchange between the accountant fiancé and the main character, who is hellbent on stopping the wedding. The accountant is smarmy and condescending, almost giving the impression he knows who this guy is and is just fucking with him for fun, so he’s instantly both likable and dislikable. It’s intended to be a brief, amusing scene.

The guy playing the main character was bust-a-gut funny, and if he hadn’t been about 30 years too old for the part, were I to produce and direct this screenplay on my own, I would’ve cast him. The guy playing the accountant, different from the actor playing the same character in the first scene — he was one of those “actors.” He started ad-libbing very badly, and then quickly going back to script to salvage his ruining of a scene I’d written.

I’m not a big “the words are God” kind of guy. I love writing, but my feeling is, if I want the words I write to be 100%, iron-clad text, I’d be writing a fucking novel. Nobody’s gonna to go to the movies and just read each page of my screenplay for two hours, so the words don’t mean shit. However…I do like to think I know what I’m doing, and I write the words for a specific reason. If an actor has a more interesting interpretation of the text, more power to him. If, however, he plays with the words and just fucks them up, that drives me crazy.

And yet, the guy playing the main character redeemed the scene for both of them by being unbelievably funny. He had the timing, he got the jokes, and he made my day. He was The Guy. This was a scene where the other actors watching actually applauded (they didn’t with the other two), and the teacher of the class leaned over to me and said, “Great scene!” Great scene!

Finally, the last scene. This wasn’t terribly complicated, but it involved three characters instead of just two (gasp!), along with characters entering and leaving. Unfortunately, the actor playing the “Jeremy Piven” best-friend role was not exactly giving it his all. He was driving the scene, and his character was supposed to own most of the beats, so it kind of just sat there like a wet noodle. The guy playing the main character was the same as before, and he was still hilarious. Meanwhile, the third character — the main character’s mother, who is sleeping with Jeremy Piven — was that same Latina. During their moments together…it was pretty painful. And yet…the dialogue got laughs anyway. You know why? Because even with the worst reads in the world — drumroll please — the dialogue is funny.

I hate it when I get all pleased with myself, but this was one of those times. I was really thinking, “Shit, maybe I’m not such a bad writer after all.” I dunno, I think little doses of confidence like this are good, because if and when I’m in the position to pitch it, I’ll have these moments to think back on to muster up the passion to really believe in the fact that the script is good, and not just for a first-draft written in 12 days. It’s by no means perfect, but considering the conditions under which it was written and the newness of it — it’s just good.

That’s right, I’m a genius and everybody loves me. Allow me to become very shallow and self-absorbed and ramble on about how great I am.

Maybe I should go back to acting!

Posted by Stan on May 4, 2005 5:39 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 23, 2005

Back to Rational Thought

It’s been a week, and I’ve realized that maybe I’ll neither die nor have my soul sucked out through my asshole. At least, not for a few months. I’m settling down, mellowing out, and trying to get used to this place. There are some cultural oddities, like the millions of people roaming the street desperately wanting to be a part of something called “the biz”* and a general consensus that lazily wrapping Christmas trees around palm tree trunks isn’t the stupidest thing in history, that I haven’t really gotten used to yet. Mostly, though, it’s just like a gigantic Schaumburg, and as some of you know, I spent the better part of 23 years roaming the suburban jungle in search of Smashing Pumpkins records, discarded Playboys, and pot, so it’s much easier for me to do the electric slide into The Wood than I anticipated. Like I said, I’m not all there yet, and maybe I never will be, but it’s a little more familiar than I thought it would be.

Did anything interesting happen this week? No, but I’ll continue rambling anyway. Let’s see…I was zinged by Earl Hamner, former Twilight Zone writer and creator of The Waltons. He asked me about my writing process, and I told him I start by drinking an enormous cup of coffee, at which point he cut me off and asked, “Have you tried gin?” Being mocked by him was definitely the highlight of my week.

I got in trouble for making fun of directors. It was mild trouble, not you’re-banned-from-the-studio trouble. It’s apparently pilot season, and they’re filming tons of stuff on the lot. Yesterday, the roadway to the commissary was blocked off for shooting. It’s lined with bungalows that can be transformed, with minimal redressing, into quaint suburban homes. On our way to lunch, we saw a director and cinematographer muttering on top of a 30-foot scaffolding. When we came out, they were still muttering, and I said, “They’re filming a pilot here, right? I’ll bet that’s the crane shot.”

It’s a pretty well-known fact that many pilot episodes feature a dazzling crane shot, wherein the camera — affixed to a crane, hence the name — pulls back and away from the action to give an exciting, sweeping panorama. It’s the most cliché shot in the history of television, and they do them in almost every pilot produced in the last 20 years because, simply, cranes don’t usually factor into the budget for episodic television. Sure, they do it once in awhile, but it’s not an every-episode kind of thing. However, since they generally have more money and time to play with while shooting a pilot, why not break out the crane?

And how about this for comic timing? As soon as I said that, and my classmates chuckled, and then a crane turned the corner down the blocked-off suburban street, which led to guffaws, which prompted me to continue my mockery of the crane shot, which got the attention of the director, who shed a lone tear I’m sure. My professor apparently witnessed this and whispered the suggestion that now that I’m in the thick of things, I should maybe keep the mockery to myself, because you never know who’s listening. It’s not an easy thing to get used to, coming from a background that revolves primarily around mocking people to their faces, but these sensitive Hollywood types need their egos stroked, so a-stroking I will go. I’ve had a great deal of practice.

Finally, I got lost for the first time since I got here. Whoever designed and named the roads in this area was smoking some fine crack. At any rate, it took me 45 minutes to find a Target (and when you think of that bullseye imagery, it just becomes funnier, doesn’t it?) because in spite of what the map may say, the road I was looking for (Empire Avenue) does not intersect with the road I was on (Hollywood Way) in any way I could idenitfy.

Here’s the best part, though: after I finally found Empire Avenue, and then I found the Target, and then I did my shopping, and then I went home, I decided I’d take Empire back the way I came. Since clearly it didn’t intersect with Hollywood the first time around, I naturally assumed it would when I was going back. I am dumb as a goddamn rock, so yes, I got lost a second time. To add insult to injury, as I attempted to navigate myself back to my apartment, I passed — you guessed it — another Target, which is apparently closer to where I live. “Store locator,” my ass.

I’m on page 83 of my first draft, and it’s going reasonably well so far. The last 20 pages are kind of assy, but it should be reasonable enough to fix.

*I’m one of these people, and I hope everybody else feels as pathetic about it as I do… [Back]

Posted by Stan on April 23, 2005 11:31 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

April 17, 2005

Hooray for Hollywood!

So here I am: Hollywood, USA, movie capital of the non-India world, but it wasn’t easy. On the contrary, the Almighty or some other deity-like skyward entity sent me a great many portents indicating — or so I believe — that I WILL DIE IN A WATERY GRAVE, NOT UNLIKE AXL ROSE’S WIFE IN THE “ESTRANGED” VIDEO.

Portent #1: The Neon Cross

I-55, near Springfield, Illinois, a rather large, impressive-looking cathedral sits beside the highway. Near its peak hangs a large, gaudy neon cross blazing green 24 hours a day. John Kennedy Toole, author of the greatest book of the twentieth century (A Confederacy of Dunces), also wrote a mediocre book called The Neon Bible. Tortured and drunk, Toole killed himself after he nearly found success but blew it because he’s a dick. Sound familiar?

Portent #2: Darkness

One of the more mysterious happenings in the Hebrew Bible is when God unleashes Ten Plagues upon the Egyptian Pharaoh, to show that His awesome power was way awesomer than that of the various Egyptian gods. One of the Plagues He unleashes blinds everybody but the Hebrew slaves, and while most of the Plagues are suspected to refer to natural phenomena (e.g., blood polluting the Nile was really just red soil that occasionally worked its way into the river), this one tends to elude (or provoke argument among) scholars. What were they talking about? An eclipse? No, that doesn’t really fit the profile, although it blots out the sun. Was it just exaggerative bullshit?

No. Clearly, the Bible was referring to night-driving in St. Louis. These fucking idiots couldn’t light an expressway with the sun. Okay, they probably could, but the point is, when you drive through at night, it’s almost impossible to see anything. There’s just no light. But hey, it’s not like they need it; it’s not like four major interstates and the largest river in North America all meet up in this city.

So yes, I drove through St. Louis with the firm belief that I was, in fact, about to jam the car into a large body of water or the side of a stripmined hill, which was a pretty obvious warning.

Portent #3: The Great Flood

After rolling through the beautiful hills and road construction of Missouri, I finally hit flat land along the Oklahoma border; almost immediately after passing the border, it started to rain. Then, it started to rain harder. It came down in violent, blinding sheets. It rained so hard big rigs were driving 40 in a 75. It rained so hard cars were parked all along breakdown lanes as people waited it out. It rained so hard Christian Slater and Morgan Freeman were at a dairy farm making a movie.

It continued to rain for the next three hours, until I breezed through Tulsa — narrowly avoiding a Greaser-Soc rumble — which is about 130 miles west of the Oklahoma border. That’s an asspile of rain, let me tell you.

Portent #4: Roadwork

I mentioned the construction through Missouri, but this was nothing compared to the pain and torment of New Mexico’s construction. The first problem is, New Mexico is a big, mostly empty desert. It’s very beautiful, but there aren’t very many alternate routes. So when you have one-lane Interstate highways bottled up because trucks can’t make it up the hill at a reasonable speed, it gets a little tiresome. It gets especially tiresome when it’s one lane for 67 miles, followed by 10 miles of road in terrible condition, followed by another longe stretch of one-lane roads.

Portent #5: Strong winds

Have you ever driven in winds so strong it kinda feels like it’ll either lift your car in the air and flip it over or simply ram you off the road? Try doing it for 400 miles.

Portent #6: Fire

Just over the California border, I spotted a huge fire. I couldn’t tell if it was a brushfire or if a building was on fire or what, but it was pretty severe, and I think since it’s a natural event, it qualifies as a portent of doom.

Portent #7: Lyme Disease!

Staying for the evening in a little shithole town in California, I discovered a tick on my leg. I shrieked, jumped up, and smacked the bizatch out of it. Lately I’ve been really tired and forgetful. Is that bad?

And so there you have it: unequivocal proof that cosmic forces don’t think I should be here. Now, let’s dip into my first week at school.

Our school rents a bungalow on a studio lot, for that authentic industry experience. Remember that episode of Dawson’s Creek where he goes away to film school in California and has his first day on the lot, and he’s totally amazed by what an amazing thing the amazing world of filmmaking is? It’s really not like that at all. They film Passions and UPN sitcoms on this lot. Everybody fits into a remarkably hilarious cliché, so you can always spot the actors and the agents and the producers and the directors and the teamsters and the writers. I tend to gravitate toward the teamsters, who are hilarious.

Here’s what we do all day in the sun-drenched, palm-lined studio lot: sit in a quiet, windowless room and write. I really feel like Columbia’s earning their money on this one, since sitting in a quiet, windowless room and writing is not something I could do in Chicago.

Each day, we have a guest lecturer who comes in to reaffirm things we were told in Screenwriting I. I guess it’s nice to know that the people at Columbia aren’t just blowing smoke up our asses — which is something I slowly became convinced of over my time there — but at the same time, it’s not exactly the inside scoop we were promised.

I suppose I’m acclimating well enough; driving around Schaumburg, Illinois, has really prepared me for navigating LA traffic (except, whereas maybe three out of 10 people in Schaumburg drive like dipshits, it’s more like 10 out of 10 here), and I’m not a suicidal heroin addict (yet), so I say things are going pretty well. One of the managers at the bookstore went to school out here, and he gave me some pointers, the main one being: just stand back and laugh at everybody, just like I do at home, because if you don’t, you either get sucked into or driven crazy by the LA mindset.

Finally, an anecdote. Today, I took a drive to a Circuit City in Burbank. I decided I’d like to invest in the Playstation 2 DVD remote, since my space-economizing has led me to bring only my Playstation 2, since it both plays video games and DVDs. I considered investing in an Xbox, but I’m not sure it’d fit in a studio apartment.

At any rate, I was waiting in the checkout line, DVD remote in hand, and the clerk was helping some guy who looked a whole lot like Fred Sanford with something unrelated to purchasing. Fred had something small and hidden from my view that apparently wasn’t working right, and the clerk was helping him out.

“I’m a songwriter,” Fred non-sequitured, “so I need this to work right.”

“Oh yeah?” the clerk said excitedly. “I’ve just been working on an independent film, and right now we’re looking for original music. It’d be great exposure.”

“Wow,” Fred said, starstruck, “yeah, I’ll get you a tape and some contact information.”

“Yeah, we’re just finishing up work on it now,” the clerk continued, hyping the project to the maxxx. “We’re gonna submit it to all the fesitvals, nationwide.” His intonation made it seem like this is a really impressive accomplishment, but I don’t really see why. Aren’t most independent films (that get finished…) sent to all the festivals in the nation, if not the world? How impressive is it to burn 50 DVDs and put them in an envelope? I know in LA that driving to the post office or a mailbox is a feat, but other than that, I don’t get it…

Nonetheless, Fred Sanford was impressed. “Yeah, I got some tapes and cards in my car,” he said. “I’ll run and get them.” I really hope when he gets back to the junk shop, Lamont explains to him why he should not be impressed or sucked in by this.

So yes, I witnessed my very first sad-sack potential business deal, and let me tell you, it was at least comedy bronze. I often find absurd things in daily life, but to me none is more absurd than a nonchalant oral contract being forged between a Circuit City clerk and a customer with what I’ll always believe is a broken pair of $20 headphones.

Because I’m exceptionally mean-spirited and fairly big and menacing (not muscular, but people do tend to make that mistake), I’ve gotten used to laughing at people over the last few years when they’re behaving like morons. Usually they stare at me blankly and say nothing. Here, though, I have to be careful. One of the things drilled into my head at film school is that, for example, the ingenuous film made by Circuit City Clerk B. DeMille could end up being the next Pulp Fiction, and I could be in his office begging him to buy a script, and all of a sudden he remembers that day in Circuit City when I had a laughing fit because of the hilarity of his attempt at networking with a customer, and I’m thrown out on my ass.

It’s hard to stifle that shit, but I did it today, and I can do it again. And again and again and again. At least I’m finding amusement in it all.

I’m still not sure if I’m going to stay here. I talked to the lady in charge of internships, and she created the illusion that getting an internship after this program is as easy as taking a piss. However, the only paying internship I’ve found so far is, ironically, in Hoffman Estates, Illinois, spitballing jokes for some pornographic video game or something. I’m not sure if that’d be the best career move, so I will certainly look at other options, but right now, it (a) seems like it’d be fun, (b) is in Illinois, and (c) pays money.

So we’ll see…

Posted by Stan on April 17, 2005 3:52 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

February 16, 2005

Souls Crushed: Hollywood Edition

This afternoon, Lucy started asking me all these questions about my impending trip to Los Angeles: when I’m leaving, when/if I’m coming back, where I’m staying, —

That last one tripped her up, when I responded, “In one of those extended-stay type of hotels.”

When she wondered why, I explained that I’d rather not get too comfortable with my intial trip there, because I don’t want to stay. I will stay as long as I feel I have to for my career (which, I’ll say, could be years), but I have kind of a Barton Fink mentality about the whole thing. I want to stay in the cheapest, least homey place that I possibly can for a minimum of 15 weeks, living out of my suitcase, so I can continue living the illusion that I’m only there temporarily.

I was scarred by a television writing professor I had several semesters ago. She grew up in L.A., a child of the entertainment (specifically writing) world, who had seen and experienced that life all the way until she became a writer who ran away to Chicago to get away from Hollywood, at a time when people thought Chicago would become a hub for television shows (thanks to long-gone shows like Crime Story, Early Edition, and What About Joan). When that fizzled, she started teaching, because she just didn’t want to go back and be a part of it.

She always used to level with me in private, because for some reason she respected my abilities and knew how much I yearned to be a television writer. She said things like, “In show business, there are two types of people: vampires who will lie, cheat, and steal their way as far as it’ll get them, and the hapless friends and colleagues whose souls the vampires suck. Which one are you now, and which one will you be once you get into a kill-or-be-killed position?”

Weirdly, in my job experience, I’ve found this to be something of a universal. Lucy agreed, pointing out that this is the way most of the people at Lowe’s behave. I pointed out, though, that in a low-rung retail job or an office job, there isn’t the delusion of any kind of dream-factory wonderland at the end of the rainbow of soul-destruction. People are more realistic, and it really comes down to greed and ignorance.

I wouldn’t consider myself willfully ignorant, but I’m also not greedy. I like money, but I don’t go after a promotion to make more money or amass power. It’s partly because I’m mired in that mid-20s malaise, where I want as little responsibility as possible. Mostly, though, I’m wired to feel that constant twinge of Catholic guilt every time I remember doing something really rotten. I still feel guilty about stuff I distantly remember doing in preschool, whenever it pops into my head: “In retrospect, I shouldn’t have done that.” I get passed over in favor of people who are less qualified, but because I’m not tugging for the brass ring, not because I have no idea why they don’t want to promote me, those bastards.

There’s a classy song in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, about the virtue of playing it “the company way.” The reason why it’s hilarious is because it’s sung by a guy who’s still working in the mailroom after 40 or so years (but he was just recently promoted to head of the mailroom!). Despite his lack of promotions, age, and length at the company, the character still believes that being a yes-man is the only way to get ahead. He doesn’t even wonder why he’s being passed over; he just thinks it’ll come to him in time.

That, my friends, is ignorance.

Throughout this conversation with Lucy, she started to feel worse and worse about me, my feelings, my absolute terror at the thought of compromising my being to be successful in a profession I chose for some reason, and my preemptive cynicism regarding a business that I know something about but have not personally experienced. I finally concluded, “They say ignorance is bliss, but I never really believed that too much, which is probably why I’m such a mess all the time.”

Lucy responded, “I believe it sometimes.”

But I don’t. I can’t. Yes, strange things happen in my life that cannot be explained in any good way, and I sometimes am willing to look past it and feign ignornace, but it’s been a really long time since I’ve been thoroughly duped by my own ignorance. I’m too distrustful, after many years of ignorance-dupings.

Really, though, it comes down to my utter fear that I will either become the vampire, stealing others’ material for my own personal gain, or I’ll become the loser who gets stuff stolen from him. I don’t want to be either, but that seems unfeasible at this point.

Posted by Stan on February 16, 2005 4:35 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

October 10, 2004

[BLOGpoll] Who Wants to Read My Shit?

In my last entry, I mentioned the “canons” assembled for my portfolio review class. I imagine I’ll be bitching a lot about it, since I can’t stand the professor and — if the first peer’s scripts are any indication — it’s not going to be all fun and games, I wonder if it would be a good idea to put the selections I chose for my “canon” up on the site for you all to read. When my week to be critiqued comes up (it’s November 18th, I believe), I’ll scan the written coverage I receive, along with my notes from the discussion.

So, is that something you, the blog-nation, would like to see? Yes, no, maybe?

Leave a comment or send an e-mail to stan at stanhasissues dot com.

Posted by Stan on October 10, 2004 11:07 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

April 26, 2004

Experimental!

Unfortunately, I had to miss the screening of Baadasssss! tonight for personal reasons. As a consolation prize, you get to read a really awful, but hopefully marginally amusing, screenplay I’ve written.

As you all should know by now, I hate experimental films almost without exception. While it’s true that the experimental screenwriting class I’m taking this semester has helped me to appreciated certain experimental techniques, I still hate it overall.

And what do I do when I hate things? I make fun of them.

So, without further ado, here is the first and probably only screenplay I will put on the blog. You can read it here.

P.S.: I used the name of my old pal johnl’s love thang, Yeo-Reum, as the head Vietnamese soldier, because I had it in my head that she was Vietnamese and didn’t know any other female Vietnamese names. I realize she’s Korean, but I’m way too lazy to change the name. Sue me.

Update! Here’s what I learned today: when you type #333 in as your background color, some browsers interpret this as #030303 (which is black), and others interpret it as #303030 (which is dark gray). Similarly, when you type #CCC in as your text color, some browsers interpret this as #0C0C0C (which, again, is black), and others interpret it as #C0C0C0 (which is light gray). I have no idea why this is, but I’ve learned my lesson, and the troubles those of you were having reading my script should be fixed.

Posted by Stan on April 26, 2004 9:05 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (2)

April 14, 2004

Essay for Semester in L.A. Program

I’m not sure if this is too sarcastic or just sarcastic enough.

–––

I don’t have amazing, lofty career goals. I wish I did, so I could add some extra padding to this essay, but I really don’t. The only thing I want is to make a living writing, even if that means squatting in a recently condemned tenement, counting change so I can afford a box of ramen noodles. Hopefully, the Semester in L.A. program will ensure that my dreams of rat-infested squalor and scurvy will become a reality.

From what I understand of the program, it provides — among other things — a menacing, boot-clad foot in the door of Hollywood. It’s not, generally, easy to get a foot in the door. I’m often told to exploit every possible contact I have with Hollywood, no matter how remote. This either means taking part in Semester in L.A. or having my aunt in Boise write a desperate letter to Gary Cole, with whom she went to high school.

Semester in L.A. will, hopefully, make things a little easier than that. I have no delusions that it’s easy, or that I’ll suddenly and miraculously become the most in-demand writer in the history of the universe. But if I’m able to wedge my sweaty, corn-covered foot into the door of the Hollywood system, and if somebody decides to pay me to do something — anything! — related to writing (even if it’s reading, which I enjoy almost as much as writing), and I can quit my job at Starbucks and throw that green apron at my boss’s scowling face and say, “Never again,” and I can buy a small house on a pleasant suburban street, and I can convince my girlfriend to stop experimenting with mushrooms and marry me, I’ll be extremely happy.

Without this opportunity, I’ll probably be more depressed (and distressed) than I already am at my lack of skill and success in what I want to do. I’ll end up being a warped, frustrated old man who shoots bottle-rockets at squirrels and tosses hunks of ground beef laced with strychnine at his neighbor’s dog. Nobody wants that, especially not me.

I hope, for the sake of all the squirrels and yappy dogs in the world, that the Semester in L.A. program will help me realize my limited aspiration of being paid to do something I love.

Posted by Stan on April 14, 2004 9:41 AM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 6, 2003

25-416

It seems my favorite brand and style of left-handed, single-subject, college-ruled, wire-bound, spiral notebooks has been discontinued. This may not seem like a big deal, but it’s like the end of the world. I have to resort to top-open spirals by the same manufacturer.

“Why?” you may ask. “You know other companies sell left-handed notebooks. You can just get one of those.”

You, sir, are wrong. Call me obsessive-compulsive, but I couldn’t bring myself to buy a different type of left-handed notebook. It had to be top-open from the same brand. I don’t know why — it’s just the way it is.

Posted by Stan on December 6, 2003 2:18 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (1)

November 19, 2003

My Parody

Click here to read my structural parody of Nikolai Gogol’s short story, “The Nose.”

Posted by Stan on November 19, 2003 8:21 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

September 10, 2003

Junior High

In working on this novel, for about the past four weeks or so, I’ve been channeling the me that existed way back in junior high, much like Zack Morris did during those very special episodes of Saved by the Bell that featured Miss Bliss, portrayed by Hayley “I’m still really hot despite reaching middle-age” Mills. I’ve come to one definite and probably obvious conclusion: I was completely and utterly obsessed with sex and drugs.

The first chapter details a student with overbearing parents (who bear a somewhat striking resemblance to my parents) who struggles with the important decision to smoke a joint. Basically, his entire story thread deals with him sort of going down in the world and then going back up, over the course of his eighth-grade year. That’s the worst way to describe it ever.

The second chapter is all about a girl’s breasts. Seriously, that’s all it’s about.

The third chapter is about a kid who gets stoned before a meeting with the principal and gets suspended as a result.

And the fourth chapter is all about masturbation. But it’s not just about masturbation; it’s about a kid figuring out how to masturbate, using logical deduction and trial-and-error before simply asking a friend who has actually had sex with a genu-wine female.

And the fifth chapter, which I haven’t written yet but have sketched out, will be about a guy and a girl who get stoned and have sex all the time.

It’s going to get worse before it gets better.

Posted by Stan on September 10, 2003 3:13 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

March 15, 2003

The Doctor Is [REAL IN]

After roughly five years of stalling, I finally shelled out the money for a new Dr. Grip pencil. On a whim, I also bought the dreaded Dr. Grip roller ball pen.

I admire the new design on the pencil — it’s springier, and it’s easier to load the lead and replace the erasers.

And the pen is, quite simply, the best pen I’ve ever owned.

All in all, a good week for office-supply purchases.

Posted by Stan on March 15, 2003 2:53 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

March 11, 2003

Researching for the Ladies…

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve begun preliminary research on a novel that might possibly be more unpublishable than The Great American Parade. When I research this type of thing, I do it in a very specific way. I’m not sure if this is unique or mundane, so I’ll describe it in full and exciting detail, citing examples from my current research material.

Depending on how valuable the research material (in this case, books) is to the project, I will either buy the book or find it at a library. I buy it if it is absolutely crucial. The novel I’m working on deals with mainly religious themes (with a sci-fi slant), and, as often as possible, I’d like to cite specific supportive text from major religious texts. So, for example, I bought a copy of The Holy Bible, but I’ll go to the library and take extensive notes on the various differences between specific types of Judaism and Christianity.

This is primarily because I don’t know dick about religion. It’s just never something I really gave a crap about. It still isn’t, but if I’m going to write something that’ll openly mock all the major religions, I figure I should at least know something about them so I don’t sound like an Orbified Bill O’Reilly.

With my copies of religious texts in tow, I can begin the exegesis, which is a fancy word for “analysis,” and this is where things get sort of complicated. I have A System™. The System™ is this: multicolored Post-Its (pink, blue, and yellow) and matching highlighters mean different things. I also have stenographer tablets in legal yellow and white. All of these mean different and terrifying things.

The yellow Post-Its and highlights are quotations; the blue are (somewhat long-winded) ideas expressed by the text, which are summarized on the Post-It but highlighted in full; and the pink are strange plotlines or stories that could be abused in the novel. Meanwhile, I use the legal tablets to flesh out various thematic and thetic elements (and the ways in which they are supported by or detracted from the text. The white tablets are reserved for character descriptions (as I think of them), possible plot ideas (and, if necessary, corresponding text), scene starts, descriptions, dialogue passages, etc. Basically, the creative stuff I think of that the research inspires. The different creative aspects are demarcated through creative use of colored ink to headline whatever it is (e.g., red pen for a character description, blue for a plot idea). However, the meat of it is written in pencil.

So that’s The System™, and that’s how I research materials I own. In the case of researching stuff I don’t own, it’s pretty much the same, except instead of Post-Its and tablets, everything is written on big, yellow legal pads. The haphazardness is given order via colored ink and highlighting. If a quotation is too long to write without my hand falling off, I’ll Xerox it. Otherwise, I copy it by hand.

Pretty simple, IMO. And fun! No, seriously. I really like researching. I almost like it more than the actual writing. Almost.

But all this researching brings me to the discussion I had last night with Sarah. She asked me why I never go on dates anymore. Instead of citing the obvious, such as my grotesque physical appearance and clammy hands (which would cause her to shout things and throw shit at me through phone lines, like in Ghost Dad), I explained to her that women seemed to be turned off by my general existence.

I elaborated by saying that modern, urban hipsters don’t seem to be particularly excited by a geeky guy with his nose buried in a Bible that is filled with Post-Its and notes paperclipped onto it. I think they either assume I am starting a cult, trying to gain entrance into a cult, or plotting to make abortion clinics explode. And, hey, maybe they’re right. Like I said, I’m not very familiar with the intricate details of religious texts — one of those three could be the end result my studies.

Sarah said that if I was smart, I would buy a t-shirt that said GENIUS AT WORK. After explaining all the reasons why that’d be a hideous misnomer, not to mention that fact that it would do nothing to dispel the idea that I am a possible cult member, she said I should print up my own t-shirt, and it should say, I’M REALLY NOT A FREAK; I’M JUST RESEARCHING A NOVEL.

I thought that was actually a good idea, although a bit wordy. And since I actually am a freak, I thought the best idea would be to to chop that part out, and just leave it at I’M RESEARCHING A NOVEL. Then I thought I should add, ASK ME HOW! to show that I have a sense of humor, even if it’s a shitty one. Plus, maybe some idiot girl would ask me how, and then it’d be easier to start a conversation. Women don’t usually like my ice-breaker of, “I don’t drink, but I wouldn’t mind getting you loaded.”

Which leads me to the inevitable conclusion: I will finally print up my dream t-shirt, the one that says RAISE THE ROOFIES! with a drawing of a girl, unconscious on a motel-room bed.

Posted by Stan on March 11, 2003 4:58 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

February 8, 2003

Ideas

As is often my wont, I spent last evening browsing the Internet for descriptions of new and inventive sex acts I could one day attempt, in the unlikely event that I ever speak to a woman again. Somewhere between the Abraham Lincoln (that’s where you shave off all of your pubic hair, set the clippings on a sheet of paper, and when a girl goes down on you, you shoot your load on her face, pick up the paper, and blow the hair all over her face…the sp00 makes it stick like a Lincoln-esque beard) and the flying Dutchman (not really complicated — all you do is yell “flying Dutchman” at the height of passion to confuse your partner or any friends who may be listening/watching), I came up with a disturbing idea. A very disturbing idea. A decidedly non-sexy idea, you fucking pervert.

Actually, it was the embryo ideation of what actually might become a script or a short story or something else that is in one way or another written down on paper. But the idea itself is kind of disturbing. Usually, when really odd and terrifying ideas pop into my head (once a second, on average), I dismiss them immediately, crawl into a snug corner of my closet, and whip myself with a bloody scourge as penance. But even with all the self-flogging (in more ways than one), the idea won’t leave. It’s still there, and it’s fleshing itself out while my horrified conscience says to itself, “There is something seriously wrong with you. Seek help. No, seriously.”

It dawned on me that this is entirely what’s wrong with me, and this is why I will never, ever make any money. Ever. For life. My ideas are not mainstream. Actually, my ideas border on utterly wrong. And yet I feel like I have to run with them, because otherwise they won’t go away. I have a drawer full of completed, half-completed, or outlined written ideas that will probably never leave the musty drawer. Meanwhile, I have maybe two ideas a year that are not completely terrifying and wrong and might actually be lucrative. I guess two is better than none, but the ratio of scary to sane is becoming a little rich.

Oh well. At least this idea is marginally better than the pornographic TV sitcom I came up with that’s set in a gas station called Exxxon.

Posted by Stan on February 8, 2003 3:03 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)

December 16, 2002

We Don’t Need Your Education, We Don’t Need Your Thought Control!

I’ve been thinking about college lately. Maybe it was the sudden desire to change majors (again), maybe it’s the disillusionment with the quality (or lack thereof) of my education so far, maybe it was the sudden compulsion to choose to go to a different school and pursue a “real” major. Whatever it was, I’m sick of it, and I no longer want to go.

I’ve felt this way for awhile, I have to admit. It’s the primary reason why cut class about as often as I can without running into attendance policy-related horror. It’s also the reason why I pretty much avoid responsibility as much as possible without outright failing classes. And I’m still doing my part to do what I need to do — I’m still acing Fiction Writing, Aesthetics of Cinema, and Writing For Television, and I aced both English Comp I and II, so if that isn’t enough to stick up the Film Department’s ass, maybe I really will change my major to television.

Or maybe I’ll do it anyway. I’m still early in the film major game because I’ve spent so much time futzing with gen eds, so I imagine that if I wanted to jump ship, things wouldn’t get too terrible. It’s odd, considering the two media are so similar, how different the teachers are in the TV Department, versus the Film Department. The Film Department is full of grizzled, disillusioned losers (hmm, kinda like me…) who are so jaded with both the Hollywood scene and the independent scene that all they do is weird-ass experimental films that make little to no sense but are hailed as masterpieces by puffed-up ponces who think anything experimental must be art, whether it is or not.

Isn’t it funny how I’m disillusioned with the Hollywood scene, the independent scene, and the experimental scene? Now do you see why I want to switch to TV, where people actually get jobs after college? And there are so many internships. My God, I could have interned for Judge muthafucking Mathis, which would have been the greatest opportunity in the history of the universe. But when I called, they said while I technically meet all the qualifications, because I am not classified as a television major, they had to pass me over for that internship. Damn-fucking-it.

Judge Mathis. Can you fucking believe it? Best. Internship. Evar. Too, too bad.

At any rate, I’ve deviated slightly from my earlier point about the differences in the faculty in the TV Department and the Film Department. Hell, even the student base is different. There’s a strange camaraderie that is all but nonexistent among film students. Sure, there are pockets of friends, but those groups are enemies of everyone else. It’s like West Side Story, except with fewer knives and clumsier dancers. But everybody in the TV Department gets along so well, like they all got an extra shot of intropin or something. And the professors are so jovial and excited about the potential career paths of their students.

Most of the film professors, however, are disillusioned former students who went to Hollywood, failed, and came back with their tails between their legs. And so they teach — I swear to God I’m not making this up — that there’s no possible way that we can be successful. We can learn from better filmmakers than ourselves, but we will never be as good as they are. And, examining the track record of wildly successful filmmakers from my school… Well, let’s just say it’s not very pretty.*

I’m not saying that what they teach is necessarily wrong, and it’s sometimes nice to have somebody there telling you not to get your hopes up for something that’ll never happen, but I have to wonder if the disillusionment they spread affects the way students make their films, why they make their films, the subject matter of their films, etc. If they’re preparing themselves for failure, they can’t possibly be disappointed, but if they’re preparing themselves for failure, how many of them actually put their heart and soul into the project? I firmly believe that if there’s no soul imprinted on the celluloid, no driving force, if it’s all just technicians wandering around doing their thing, the film suffers. And perhaps that is why our school isn’t so fantastic when it comes to rousing success stories.

*Many graduates have become the tops in their field — but they’re doing the unglorified work, like costume and set design. They’re fantastic, and I don’t mean to negate or disregard their work, but when I refer to “wildly successful filmmakers,” I am referring specifically to huge directors. [Back]

Posted by Stan on December 16, 2002 11:19 PM  | Permalink  | Print-Friendly  | Comments (0)