Weekend Progress

Aftershocks - I did indeed finish the rewrite on Tuesday night, then gave the rewrite to 7 or 8 friends on Wednesday. Quick feedback from the first 2 was positive. Pleased with myself, I took the long weekend off. Then today I emailed it off to the script’s new representation for their notes. We’ll see what they think.

Supervillain - I tossed around a few replacement titles all weekend and ran them by a few friends. Everybody’s a critic. I narrowed those down to 5 lucky finalists (I thought I could decide on 1 but no go) and emailed those to Supervillain’s producers. I think I’m in good shape - I thought they were pretty good and I can live with pretty much any of them. Suggestions are still welcome…

Hancock - helped me out (I think). Good numbers. Now we have to take advantage!

Wall-E - saw it on Friday with the wife and kids. I am a huge Pixar fan and I was not disappointed. That said, I think the claims of “Best Picture” contender are somewhat overstated. Best Animated Feature, sure, but Best Picture material? I liked it but there are a couple of Pixar features I’d rank it below. More discussion soon.

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?

Worst #1 Pop Song of All Time

“(Ain’t Nothin’ Gonna) Break-a My Stride,” Matthew Wilder, 1983.

Made my root canal yesterday 1,000 times worse just by being on the dentist’s radio. I’d like to go and break-a his face.

“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.

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?

Free Script Coverage? Abbot Management?

Interesting… very interesting. Saw this on a blog a couple of days ago:

Abbot Management is currently accepting Film and Television Screenplays for consideration.

The Producers and Production Companies that accept our submissions expect a professional quality product. That being said, most of our Screenplay submissions will be rejected, some will be placed in our Development Library, and few will be selected for representation and sent out for Producer / Production Company consideration. Regardless of our decision, in most cases our coverages are forwarded onto our writers so they understand what works / does not work with their Screenplay - free of cost.

Free coverage? Nice. Usually writers pay services $60+ for “industry-quality” coverage of their scripts. Intrigued, I surfed on:

Our team includes an East Coast Manager, a West Coast Manager, an Entertainment Lawyer, a Development Manager, and fifteen Script Readers.

We currently represent 13 screenwriters and are developing the works of 28 Screenwriters in our Development Library. In our short history we have received over 500 submissions, and represent only the highest quality in film and television Screenplays.

We have never sold a Screenplay, then again our doors are still closed to the industry. Our estimated launch is Mid April, when we will distribute our Screenplays to the Producers and Production Companies that accept Abbot Management submissions. Until then, we will continue to develop our Clients material and evaluate new writer submissions.

Sounds great: best case = management, worst case = free coverage. I googled and found another blog mention, with an apparent quote from Tim Lambert, the guy who runs Abbot: