“You’re Better Than This…”

I have this friend, whom we’ll call Amelia. We go back a few years; in fact, believe it or not, she’s the infamous “coworker” mentioned here, but we remain friends in spite of that. But, you know, you can sort of glean from her behavior in that post that she’s both blunt and concerned more with commercial aspects of a movie than anything else. Admittedly, she has pretty good tastes in movies, and she’s sort of like me in that she wants better movies, but she’ll work within the system she’s stuck with until she has the power to make better movies.

That said, I sent her a copy of Dying Proof a few weeks ago. She expressed some interest in reading it after I told her I had a producer interested, although “I had a producer willing to read it to make me go away” is probably more accurate.

She finally read it, and her analysis was spot-on in some areas, unintuitive in others, but hostile overall. One statement in particular jabbed me like a warm butter knife (which are more painful because they are not meant for stabby-stabby): “Stan, I’ve read your stuff, and you’re better than this.”

Ouch.

This especially stung coming from someone who has a sharper eye for the market than I do. I was insecure enough working outside my normal comfort zone — it’s a straight thriller with what I think is a glossy Hollywood sheen, far from the traditional unsellable comedies I write. Before I sent it to the Big-Shot Producer, I sent it to a group of four people go gauge as many disparate opinions as I felt I needed. I sent it to:

• Mark, who has turned into my “first reader,” I guess — we’re always e-mailing back and forth, although seeing each other in person is a rarity, so he’ll e-mail me anything from a screenplay he spent five years on to a short story he banged out in 10 minutes. I do the same with him, and I guess we trust each others’ feedback. He’s a great horror writer, and while I don’t think I could write any legitimate horror, I guess I’m enough of a fan to understand the conventions and judge his work accordingly; he has a great sense of humor, which I imagine helps with my weirdness. In fact, I don’t think we’d be friends today if not for one comment I made in a class we had together. We’d read the original screenplay for The Parallax View. One of my favorite movies ever, this early draft (which adheres to the novel more rigidly, I guess) isn’t what you’d call good. My comment on the ending made us friends for life: “It feels like a CHiPs episode!” At which point I mimicked the final line — which is Frady, having uncovered another layer of conspiracy, shaking his fists and yelling, “Aw, hell!” — followed by the trademark CHiPs credit freeze/unfreeze gimmick. Because I am that awesome and shameless.

  Anyone who can respect a good CHiPs reference is like a blood brother, so there you go. Among other things, we also share a peculiar fondness for ’70s conspiracy thrillers, which in large part inspired Dying Proof. So I still think he’s a pretty good judge, but maybe he’s a little too close to it.

• A female writer who I hoped would tell me whether or not I’m hitting the right emotional notes with the “feminine” aspects of the story. She’s also someone who has no interest in male-oriented action movies/thrillers.
• A female movie fan who has no real interest in writing or screenwriting. I just gave her the script and asked her to try to imagine it’s a movie, something she’s watching on the screen instead of reading on paper. This was also beneficial because she got on Instant Messenger while she read, so I actually got realtime reactions to the story — that honestly helped more than her overall feedback. I could tell which surprise moments worked, which frustrated, whether or not the characters stayed consistent, etc.
• A guy, also a non-writer, but also someone without much interest in the movies. I actually told him the opposite of what I told the female movie fan: read it like a novel and tell me how it comes across.

I’m always told not to get perspectives from non-screenwriters, for reasons like “they don’t understand the form” or “they can’t judge whether or not something can go from the page to the screen.” I split it with two screenwriters and two non-writers to get a wider perspective, but I say fuck any asshole who doesn’t think a non-writer can give a valid opinion on a screenplay. They may not give you something specific to the business, but it’s foolish to think their input is invalid.

I’m not ready to put too much stock into the opinion of one person when four others thought it was pretty damn good. It’s interesting because some of the time, she had valid points that were well-reasoned — and that I mostly agreed with and will address in the next draft — but more often, she stumbled into poorly reasoned “this didn’t make sense, so it sucks” territory. I don’t want to find too much fault with that, because the fact that a reader — even if it’s one of five — misses valuable pieces of the puzzle, it means something. It means I’m not getting certain things across. Part of me wants to champion subtlety and mystery, especially when the subtlety was understood and the mystery didn’t annoy other readers, but another part of me says, “Yup, she’s right; I should explain the whole thing right off the bat and have the rest of the script be about getting away from the pursuers.”

There’s yet another part of me that’s really irate with the fact that she glossed over enough of the script to not understand the basic purpose of the conspiracy. Granted, it’s my job as the writer to keep a reader interested enough to pay attention and well-informed enough to have a clear picture of the story, but what if I did all that and it’s just not her thing? She doesn’t like or understand the genre, the characters don’t interest her, so she gets bored and skims and gives negative feedback. Should I listen to that?

But that’s kind of defensive, huh? I’m mostly just smarting from the “you’re better than this” comment and want to dismiss everything else she said — legitimate or not — as crap. Yet I can’t — separating the wheat from the chaff, she did have a couple of ideas so indisputably good that I’m chomping at the bit to incorporate them into draft five.

Does this mean I’m turning over a new leaf? I’m taking the time to think hard about a person’s opinion and considering the many shades of gray before developing a clear but complex reaction. A new leaf, or just worn out and malleable?

Tags: Amelia, conspiracy thrillers, Dying Proof, friends, Mark, opinions, The Parallax View

Posted by Stan on June 9, 2008 8:08 PM