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August 4, 2008

Pitched

Last week, Preity 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 love, 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 Preity, 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 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 I’d hate all of her ideas — 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 were 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 — or maybe I’m smitten. I don’t want to entertain that notion, because, like I said, I’ve done the long-distance relationship thing before, and I really, really, really don’t want to fall into that again. So we’ll just say she’s a great talker.

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 on account of that whole “smitten” thing, while many of her ideas impressed me, some of them were kinda “meh” and one of them was a total dog.

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 second and third rounds — after an hour and a half, she did a “I’ll call you right back” thing, which gave me a merciful piss break (I feel really weird about telling someone, “I’ll call you back in two minutes while I urinate,” although now that I think about it, maybe she had done the same thing but was wise enough to not give a reason for hanging up), then she came back for another hour, by which time I was on. She called again the next morning for another hour, and again, I felt much more confident and less like a tool.

But when all was said and done, I don’t know where we’re at. She told me multiple times — enough times to make me suspicious — to call her “any time.” I don’t want to make a mountain out of a knob, but I do like her a lot. Why do you think I stayed in touch with her? I don’t want to miss out on a possible opportunity, but at the same time, I really, really don’t want to end up in another long-distance relationship. I guess I can just keep playing it cool and maybe give her a call once in awhile in addition to the e-mails… Maybe.

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 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  | 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?

Posted by Stan on July 30, 2008 11:51 AM  | Permalink  | 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  | 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  | 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 cult — all he needs to do is sign his name on the contract. They ply him with a woman, who sexes him up good, then convinces him to sign the contract without reading it. Now, I could have done this any number of ways — or I could have omitted the scene altogether — but it’s a movie about a Satanic cults. If there’s one thing people associate with Satan, it’s convoluted contracts signed in blood. I wanted to keep it, because otherwise I feared someone would ask why I didn’t include something like it…but I couldn’t find my way out of the scene.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted by Stan on July 7, 2008 3:17 PM  | Permalink  | Comments (0)

July 2, 2008

Pressure

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 Preity 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: she gave me valuable, valid feedback. Preity 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 reader, who seemed to hate the genre more than the story or characters, had anything constructive to say. It’s 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.

Preity 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  | Comments (0)

June 27, 2008

My Knowledge of Reading

Yeah, so I got that reader job.

I sent Preity 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 Preity wanted three so she could choose what she, having worked at the company 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 they felt about them. Instead, 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 Preity’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. Preity 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 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  | Comments (0)

June 23, 2008

Reader

Ugh…well, I hope it works out, but I haven’t heard anything all weekend. Preity e-mailed me on Friday to tell me her company 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; 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  | 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  | 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.”

Posted by Stan on May 26, 2008 11:03 AM  | Permalink  | 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.

Posted by Stan on May 23, 2008 4:14 PM  | Permalink  | 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  | 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.
**Spoiler alert: it sucked.

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

May 10, 2008

Where Do Babies Come From?

The genesis from idea to full-fledged screenplay (or novel, or short story) is nearly impossible to describe. It happens differently for every person — or, at least, people fall into different groupings in terms of what they do to take an idea from vague concept to finished work. My classic, unmarketable satire about a high school student who joins a Satanic cult when he can’t get a date for the prom came from remarkably simple circumstances: when I was in high school, I had no interest whatsoever in going to the prom, so I waited for the absolute last minute to ask a girl.

I kept seeing the girl I wanted to ask on the day I intended to ask her, but every single time, she was hanging around with one of our assistant principals, making it the epitome of bad timing (or, at least, embarrassing timing if she turned me down flat in front of an adult/authority figure). The third or fourth time I saw her, I started to think it would be funny if she turned me down because she was having an affair with the assistant principal. That’s where the story came from, and I worked my way backwards to how the guy would react upon discovering a girl he has a crush on is dating the dumpy, short, bald assistant principal: join a cult. Oscar, please.

Of course, it took me five years to finally write that thing. Not because it was so arduous or soul-crushing, but because it was one of those ideas that didn’t come out of a box fully-formed. I had to figure out why those two characters were having an affair, why it would crush the prom-asker-outer so much (because in my reality, I didn’t have much of a crush on the girl I intended to ask — we were just halfway decent friends who were single), and what the story is with the cult. It all came together, but it wasn’t like I thought about it every second of every day for five years. It’s one of the scripts where I had the broad strokes in five minutes, but the specific elements came slowly.

The more important thing for the moment is that initial second where the idea forms. Where I’m walking the track with a couple of friends (we had a gym program — apparently unusual — where you picked what you wanted to do, and you had to choose a cardiovascular activity on some days and a lazy, lazy activity, like walking the track at a snail’s pace, on other days), and I see the girl as we round the corner, and then next to her appears the assistant principal. It’s one of those moments where, if it had been a movie, this would have turned into a “jealous rage” scenario. See the girl: happy. Keep rounding the corner until the principal’s in view: WHAT THE FUCK MOTHERFUCKER?!! That’s the moment the seed planted itself in my stupid brain.

If you get an idea like that, the easiest way to handle it is to reverse-engineer: like I said above, you have an idea, so what’s the story? What are the circumstances? Who does it involve, why, and how does it affect them? Not always easy questions to answer, but if you have a germ of an idea that you think has potential, explore it. I took several fiction-writing classes in college, where they used an academic model to “force” us to come up with ideas, on the spot. For me, coming up with the idea was never the hard part — developing it gave me the most challenge, as did figuring out which ideas are worth developing and which aren’t, or combining multiple ideas into one coherent piece.

Pummeling an idea with questions right off the bat helps. If you can’t answer the questions and help yourself develop characters and a story to fit into the idea, chances are it isn’t worth developing. That doesn’t mean throw it away — you might think of something later — but that it shouldn’t take your immediate focus. It’s kind of an aggressive approach, but it works for me. And if it’s a good enough idea, it’ll stick with you until your mind starts shitting out more material to develop it. If it’s not, it’s the kind of thing you might find scrawl in a journal or idea notebook, come back to two years later, and find yourself developing it into a full outline within minutes. That’s the power of the unconscious mind — sometimes, it does the dirty work so you don’t have to.

This method might not work for everyone, but if you’re the type to have a germ of an idea without really knowing what to do with it, give it a try. Ask the journa