Script Updates

A few things hopping right now:

- Supervillain: Things are still moving forward with the investors, but the rate of speed has not picked up. Yesterday I was told everything is cool, but my producers are looking for other opportunities just in case. With that in mind, this weekend’s opening of Hancock may do great things for my script. When Supervillain made the rounds of the studios, readers liked it but conventional wisdom said that superhero comedies always flop. We’ll see what Hancock has to say about that. So the producers are readying Supervillain for a renewed studio push.

And then there’s the title - “Who Wants To Be A Supervillain?!”. Now, we all love the title and all the game-show desperation it brings. But it does seem a little, well, Y2k. Yeah, dated. At least for getting shown around the studios. If the movie ever gets made, we’ll see (by then it will be WAY dated…). But for showing it around, it needs a little refreshing. Any suggestions? I have the perfect title, but I stole it from a friend who has been trying to get a project with the same name going for years, so I really shouldn’t use it…

- Aftershocks: I’m currently finishing up a mini-rewrite (somewhere between a polish and a rewrite) for the script’s new manager/agent to spiff it up before it gets sent out. This rewrite is somewhat… experimental for me. Not “experimental” in that the script is getting any weirder, but “experimental” in that I may end up chucking it completely and reverting to the original version. I have received quite a few sets of notes on it lately (from Abbot and elsewhere) and after talking with the script’s new representation I decided to address some of the more consistent observations. I have previously discussed the contradictory feedback the script has received (and all scripts receive), but I do have to admit that some points pop up somewhat consistently among those who don’t like the script. Those who do like the script tell me to disregard these points, and there’s the rub: sometimes the very thing a non-fan sees as a weakness a fan will call a strength. So it’s tricky. As I’ve discussed before, Aftershocks is an atmospheric drama, and some people love this. Others say it needs more drive and focus. So the question is: is it possible to crank up the drive a little without destroying the atmospherics that many readers love? We’ll see. The worst-case would be to screw up what is already there while trying to make tweaks to attract an audience that just isn’t going to like it anyway. I’m trying to find a middle ground. But if the feedback on this new version tells me that this middle ground is the worst of both worlds, then the rewrite gets chucked and the original draft gets sent out instead. So it’s still on the hard drive and waiting, just in case.

One more new scene needs to be finished (the scene is 85% done) and then another read-through to smooth things out and it’ll be ready for my agent. Then it’ll come back with his inevitable notes… The hope is to finish it tonight, or at least this weekend.

- Dead Guy and Psycho Ex: Oh, yeah. I’m supposed to be writing those too, huh?

“Playing With the Pieces” or “Why It Takes Me So Long”

I don’t like to outline. I used to, I may again, but not right now.

In school I outlined - we all did. I wrote 3 features this way, with each outline getting better and more detailed than the last. I would refine the outline first and then write. If an idea came to mind while I was writing, I would stop writing, add the scene to the outline, and then tweak the outline again and again before resuming writing. By the third feature, my process was disciplined and precise.

And completely lifeless.

It was actually a chore to complete that third feature. Part of this was because I was writing the script on spec for a producer (based on his idea) who bailed halfway through, but the other part was because the writing was so lifeless - all the “fun stuff” had been explored and laid out before, at the outline stage, so the writing itself felt like dictation. The script turned out okay I guess, but the process was an exercise in drudgery, without life or spark or energy. Without discovery.

So with my fourth feature I decided to try an experiment: I would take the 4 structural chunks of the script and only look at 1 at a time. I could outline, use index cards, anything I wanted, but I could only work on 30 pages at a time - thinking about anything beyond that 30-page unit was off limits until it was done and polished. To challenge myself, I consciously tried to write myself into a corner every 30 pages. And each section would end with an ambitious climax or cliffhanger, one which I had no idea how to top or get out of. It was great.

The good news is that this fourth feature ended up being Aftershocks, still the script I am most proud of. The bad news is it took 7 years to write. I honestly had no idea how to end the thing as I would set it down and then pick it back up months or even years later, letting it breathe as I worked on other scripts and other ideas in between. False starts and dead ends on the second and third acts took years. But once I figured them out… well, as I said, I’m pretty proud of it.

Something changed when I started writing Aftershocks: I started writing an idea that

Four Years

Stay with me here - a few related ideas swirling around.

Last week (May 3 or 5, I can’t remember) I hit a milestone of sorts at the day job: including the time I was temping there (I temped for a few months as a temp-to-hire ), I have now been there for four years. Four years. Is that a long time? It is and it isn’t.

It is also an additional milestone for me: it is now the longest-held job I’ve ever had. In my entire life. Four years. Is that pitiful? For a guy my age? It is and it isn’t. I worked in TV for 6 years, but that was 12+ jobs (that I can think of right now) for 7 different companies, each of which lasted anywhere from 9 months to 4 days. Even of the pre-TV day jobs, the current one is the marathon winner.

All this means at least a couple of things: (a) it has been 10 years since I started working in TV and (2) it is now impossible to deny that I am officially out of the TV business. So my current day job is no longer a fluke, it is the all-time duration king. It is now the rule, not the exception.

A friend of mine (an entrepreneur, which is pretty near-identical to being a screenwriter/producer) is now getting ready to start her first “day job” in several years, maybe ever. She has emailed me asking for any pearls of wisdom I can throw her way, because she doesn’t want the day-to-day crap of the day job to overtake its real purpose: merely funding her passion. To her (and myself), I say good luck. The day job is supposed to enable you to follow your real passion, but it can so easily overtake it and become

Script Frenzy Wrap-Up

Script Frenzy 2008 wraps up today. Congrats to all participants. As I expected, I didn’t come close to writing 100 pages, but I did get a good shot in the arm. Which, at least for me, was the point. I got 25 pages written on Dead Guy and Psycho Ex combined, and I was actually doing pretty well early in the month before the day job sucked me back in with evening and weekend OT obligations.

3 pages a day sounds insignificant and trivial, and whenever I actually sat down to do it, I was able to make it happen. But it doesn’t take long for those 3 pages every day (or so) to add up. And precisely because those 3 pages sound so insignificant and trivial, the pressure goes away and you can actually get productive. And creative. And that’s the point. 

Here are the stats as of morning 5/01/08:

Writers: 7,898

Pages: 129,743

Average: 16.43 pages per writer

At least 889 completed screenplays.

Robb: 25 pages. Let’s do this again. Every month.

Which Story Should You Write?

Back when we were discussing Abbot Management and the various issues related to feedback, a friend emailed me a very simple yet profound question:

How do you know when to listen to feedback and change your story?

This question really gets to the heart of it. Superficially, it is pretty easy to know if you agree with feedback telling you beef up a scene, hit a story point harder, punch up dialog, etc. But what about real, substantial change? What do you do when listening to feedback would fundamentally change the very story you originally set out to tell?

In terms of Abbot’s feedback on Supervillain, one of their readers wanted more comic book superhero action. He said this is what the audience expects and what the genre provides, and despite an action-oriented opening and climax, my script suffers from a lack of it. Superhero action is fun, it’s visual, it’s dramatic and external, and it fills seats and sells popcorn. He’s right. But here’s the thing: it is fundamentally inconsistent with my premise. In my story, the superhero desperately wants comic book action - it would solve all his problems. The superhero tries to get it, he makes pitiful ill-fated attempts to generate it, but there is no superhero comic book action. This is the source of the comedy. That’s my premise. So if you add comic book superhero action to my premise, you get… a different premise.

It would be like adding a time machine and car chases to Aftershocks; these would transform it into Back to the Future. Back to the Future is fun and Back to the Future is great and Back to the Future is better than Aftershocks, no question. But I didn’t want to write Back to the Future. I wanted to write Aftershocks.

So what do you do? I can hear all us artist types laughing, saying it is obvious that this reader

Script Frenzy 2008

Anybody participating in Script Frenzy 2008? Anybody know anybody participating in it? I’m fantasizing about it. It’s highly unrealistic for me right now… but isn’t that the whole point?

It sure would kick-start The Challenge back into gear, wouldn’t it?

When Do You Get Your Ideas?

Ideas are funny things. I seem to get my best/most interesting ideas (story-related or otherwise) when I am busy doing something else. If I sit down at the computer needing to come up with a great idea, I can’t do it. But get me busy doing something completely different, and I just might come up with something.

After months of dead ends, I finally got the idea for the (twist) ending of Aftershocks in the middle of the night, when my then-18-month-old son woke up crying and wouldn’t stop. As I trudged down the hallway to his room 99% asleep, it just hit me. The direction it took me in was a complete surprise. Years later, I got the idea for Psycho Ex while walking him home from school one day. As he spoke it was obvious that he had a serious crush on his first-grade teacher, and as I listened the idea materialized. And while I was out mowing the lawn last Tuesday, a trailer-worthy one-liner for Dead Guy was suddenly just… there.

So the best question for what I’m getting at here is not “Where do you get your ideas?”, because we all get them from the same place: life. I think the more precise way to ask the question is “When do you get your ideas?”. What are you doing when most of your ideas come to you?

It seems like (for me at least) the mind wants to

We Should Try This

Just finished listening to a great KCRW podcast with a very inspiring idea. The podcast was about how, faced with the implosion of the record business, musicians are trying out new and creative ways of building careers. The system is broken, and instead of trying to fix it they are taking matters into their own hands and trying out more individualized business plans. One of these - www.sellaband.com - is genius; musicians hold an IPO and sell shares of their future earnings to investors for cash. The website acts as a matchmaker, connecting investors to musicians and showcasing the musicians’ work. Anybody can invest, with shares going for only $10. With the help of the website, the musicians raise the money and then record and market their music. The resulting cds and digital downloads go up for sale to the public, with the investors and the musicians sharing the proceeds. Genius. Everybody wins.

Of course, the first thing I thought was - screenwriters should do this! I should do this! And I immediately thought this because, well, this is exactly what a friend of mine tried to work out back when I first moved out here over 10 years ago. He approached me and a couple of other guys - all 4 of us writers - and pitched this very idea. He had some contacts in the oil business back home in Houston, and maybe - just maybe - they could be convinced to invest in the future earnings of 4 young, ambitious screenwriters. We would raise as much as we could and then use this money to rent an office and pay ourselves regular salaries to come in to work and write screenplays. We could then be able to make a decent living while spending all our time writing. And without the need for day jobs, just think how much we could get done between the 4 of us in a year (or more) to pitch to the studios and production companies! I thought the idea was genius and was totally on board, but the thing fell apart before we could go to investors. What can I say. My friend was ahead of his time.

So how can writers use creative new business models like these? One advantage that musicians have in this set-up is that their finished products are just that - finished products, ready for sale to the public, at 99 cents a track. For writers, especially feature screenwriters and novelists, the marketplace for selling their “finished product” isn’t the public, but instead one much smaller and much more specialized. We should challenge ourselves to come up with some kind of writers’ equivalent to sellaband.

And I’m not talking about established models like www.inktip.com and www.sellascript.com. Those are great for writers, don’t get me wrong, and my option made me a fan of inktip for life. But never forget that the business plan for those sites is to generate as much money as possible for those sites, not for the writer himself. I’m talking about something more direct. Something to finance the writing process itself.

The traditional answer has been for writers to write shorter, more sellable material while waiting for their big break - specifically writing for magazines and newspapers. Writing for the web is the obvious promised land, but I still see it as merely the most recent iteration of this traditional “day job” solution. During the strike there was all kinds of talk about Hollywood writers jumping into new ventures in the web, shredding the traditional models and getting radical, but you don’t hear so much about those ideas these days. Anybody can write and shoot a movie and put it up on YouTube, and for next to nothing. And then there’s the supposed upcoming era of the 2-minute “webisode.” But I am ambivalent about these - writing and producing short films or even shorter pieces of short films is very different from writing features. And if you want to write features, the best way to get practice is by… writing features.

Maybe my hesitancy is just the kind of old-school rigidity that is exactly the enemy in this whole issue, but I’m not convinced. The idea here is to be bold, and I don’t think a day job writing for a website while writing a real movie after work is much bolder than a day job writing for traditional media while writing a real movie after work. I thought the whole idea was to use the power of the web to subvert the whole idea of the “day job” itself. But who am I? Just a guy who can’t even get a writing gig on the web and blogs for free… while writing a real movie after work at a day job.

So… who’s got the new business plan?

Online Peer Review

With all the discussion about Abbot Management and sending your stuff off for coverage (free or otherwise), I got an email with a great, great question: how do you know when your script is ready? For writers without a network of other writers to help out with peer review (and even for writers with such a network…), this is a big question. At some point you want educated and credible feedback, but you don’t want to waste a first impression with a production company or agency or pay money to enter a contest with an early draft that you’re pretty sure needs some work. A writers’ group or writing classmates are great, but these aren’t always available.

So what do you do? I recommended to the emailer - and I recommend to everyone else - to go to www.zoetrope.com. The zoetrope site is part of Francis Ford Coppola’s domain, and basically what you do is upload scripts for other people to read while you read other people’s work in return. You read and give feedback on 4 or 5 scripts for each one you can upload, so usually you get at least 3 or 4 sets of comments on your work. Nobody sees the script comments except for the writer, and then you can email the reviewer if you like, ask questions, even strike up a friendship. There is a real culture of helpfulness there - there is nothing to gain from being snarky or mean - and all the readers are writers themselves. It is free. Plus Coppola has a screenplay contest there once or twice a year if you want to pay to enter that. I have not used it for a few years, but I will definitely be jumping back in there to have Dead Guy and Psycho Ex looked at before I send them out. Another very cool feature is that the site is not just for screenwriters - there are similar areas to exchange and give feedback on novellas, poetry, photos, graphic design,…

For me, the real secret weapon of the site (and of writers’ groups in general) is the reading you do in return for having your stuff looked at. Just becoming familiar with other peoples’ scripts, how they do this and that, discovering good practices and recognizing what NOT to do is invaluable. The reading is just as important as the writing, if not more. It is relatively easy to find classic, successful, published screenplays like Casablanca and Chinatown and whatever, but it is my opinion that reading unproduced, in-progress scripts, scripts written by people just like me and you, is much more valuable and helpful. Plus you can meet people, set up writing groups, etc. And getting feedback from fellow writers can open up new avenues for you and your story and then help you know when your work is ready to show.

Another site I tried years ago, but one that I would recommend you avoid, is triggerstreet.com. It was set up years ago in a frenzy of hype (due to Kevin Spacey’s involvement) with an idea similiar to that behind zoetrope’s, where you submit scripts and read other people’s stuff. The problem is that it is set up (or was, I have avoided it for years) as a competitive thing where people are snarky. Again, I haven’t used it in years, and maybe they changed it, but it became a competitive thing where you could make the ratings of your script look better by trashing other people’s scripts and giving them low marks, so that’s what people did. Also the script reviews were public - everybody could see them - so being critical and harsh became a competitive sport. There is some use of competitive rankings on zoetrope but the whole idea is just so different - the readers are even rated and rewarded for being the most helpful, you can seek out and talk with the best-rated readers, etc.

Anyone have any other sites they can recommend? Celtx, that free screenwriting software I mentioned a while back, appears to have some kind of community feature, but I’ve never tried it out. Or maybe people have better things to say about triggerstreet. Again, it’s been years since I went over there, so it may have improved.

So check out zoetrope and get your stuff read!

Non-Random Question

How would you describe the direct experience of falling in love? What does the “falling” really, truly feel like? The actual physical experience, the “hot flashes” and “weightlessness” below. From Dead Guy (page 29):

[Note: Hooker is Pete's best friend, NOT a prostitute.]

                              HOOKER  
                Look, I know you guys love each
                other, but…                   
                        (he shakes his head)
                Are you seriously telling me that
                you will NEVER fall in love again?
                For the rest of your life? Is that
                what you’re saying?

                             PETE
                Yes.

                             HOOKER
                You’ll NEVER get that feeling
                again? That newness and the hot
                flashes and the, you know, feeling
                weightless, being lifted up out of
                yourself, like bunny hills on a
                roller coaster? You’re never gonna
                feel that again? You can’t turn
                that off, that’s just not how it
                works. Why would you want to,
                anyway? That feeling, like when you
                discover your new favorite song,
                that’s what life is…

     As he speaks, Hooker reaches under his seat, pulls out a
     record store bag full of new CDs, and shakes it for effect.

                             HOOKER (CONT’D)
                …being totally surprised. Finding
                your new favorite song and loving
                the hell out of it before you get
                to find another one. That’s what 
                life is.

                              PETE
                Your life, maybe.

                              HOOKER
                Damn straight.

It’s still way too long and speechy, but I think I’m getting closer. Suggestions? How would you describe it?