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.

April 28, 2008

Well, how did I get here?

How do I work this?
Where is that large automobile?
This is not my beautiful house.
This is not my beautiful wife.

What is that beautiful house?
Where does that highway go to?
Am I right? Am I wrong?
My God… what have I done?

Page Count = 3

Script Frenzy 2008 - I’m in. And I invite all other writers to join in as well. Let’s do this thing. The idea: to write a screenplay (100 pages) in April. Come on, that’s less than 4 pages a day.

I’m kind of tweaking the goal for my purposes - instead of writing a 100-page script, my goal is to write a total of 100 pages combined of Dead Guy and Psycho Ex. If I do that, I will possibly finish both scripts in April (or at least be very, very close). Plus I have a pretty powerful idea for a short story or short script - maybe that will get played with as a little (or even big) experiment.

And I even put my money where my mouth is and got started today - 3 pages of Psycho Ex. First new pages of that script in a long time. It feels good. Hey, 3 or 4 pages a day is all it takes. I’m just going to take it one day at a time.

If I can keep it up all month, I’ll have (rough) first drafts to start rewriting.

And if I can’t, at least I’ll get a little kick in the pants. The Challenge needs all the momentum it can get…

Who’s with me?

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

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!

Hurry Up And Wait

Not much posting lately - there are a few balls in the air right now but none of them are resolved enough to write a complete post about. Just when it looks like something is about to happen, there’s another pause to hold it up. So here’s the latest:

Supervillain Coverage: Last week I received the three rounds of coverage from Abbot Management. This proved to be no less complicated than the coverage for Aftershocks. The first reader happened to be the same reader who was negative about Aftershocks, but he gave Supervillain a “Recommend.” However, he had a lot of critical commentary and gave me fairly low marks - basically he felt the script was commercial enough for Abbot to get involved, but he believes the script will require a pretty comprehensive rewrite. His comments revealed that he may have a different basic philosophy than I have regarding what the story is about and what its content should really be, what the script should basically be about. This was… interesting. Thoughtful and philosophical musings about the primal relationship between the expectations of the reader and the writer will result from this some day soon… Anyway, that’s one recommend. And because it came from this particular reader, I thought I was in, no problem.

The second reader was not as critical in his commentary but passed on the script. After the first reader, I was surprised at this. I guess I interpreted the first reader to be the big hurdle, which he apparently wasn’t. So that’s 1 and 1.

The third reader loved it. Loved it. The kind of reader that actually makes the dream seem possible. This reader had been one of the readers who liked Aftershocks, although he was not the same reader that I labeled my ideal reader in that post. So, 2 recommends and 1 pass. This was the same score I racked up with Aftershocks, so I assumed I would receive an email fairly quickly with some discussion as the script made its way up the chain. But after several days, no further news. I’m sure these guys are busy and are reading plenty of stuff, and their speed is still astonishing. But again, no bottom line to report yet. I expect something fairly soon.

Supervillain Option: I checked in with my producers the other day for a progress report. The option lapses in a couple of months, so with an agent possibly interested I thought it best to catch up. They say they still have 80% of the budget committed and they talked to a possible money source a week ago who may be interested in footing the entire bill. So again, progress, but nothing definitive to report.

Dead Guy: The Good News is that act one is one scene away from being done. We have reached Syd Fields’ infamous plot point one. The Bad News is that this scene will begin on page 39. Yes, it’s way long. I’m up to 39 script pages/50 pages total with outline. The Very Bad News is that I still don’t have a firm enough grasp on The Line to take me through Act 2. Much more thinking work required. Have I mentioned that this may actually be a novel and not a screenplay? Dead Guy is about to move to the back burner to make room for

Psycho Ex: Currently at 45 script pages/54 with outline. It had stalled in the act two lull, but I’ve come up with a couple of ideas to make The Line stronger. It appears that the point/counterpoint strategy of writing two mirror-image scripts simultaneously might have actually worked for once: getting stuck on one has energized me on the other one. Imagine that.

It’s been crazy busy at work and will remain so through the end of March, so I may not make much headway for a while. As for The Challenge 2.008, the scripts appear to be moving in parallel as I had suspected, so the idea of a timetable becomes… complicated. That seems to be the theme these days.

Only one way to simplify everything: just keep writing.