Loglines

I just renewed one of my scripts on inktip.com and I need new loglines. I am happy with the loglines I have on there currently - and I have been for a long while - but that is the problem: they have been up there for a long while.

 

The site advises that writers change/improve their loglines fairly regularly because there are a finite number of companies searching the site, and if a producer sees your logline and thinks s/he is not interested, and then s/he sees the same logline still up there month after month for years, s/he will surely recognize it and think (a) I didn’t want to read that then and I don’t want to read it now or (b) that script still hasn’t sold? It must suck. The logic goes that shaking up your loglines will make them appear new and fresh and perhaps emphasize other aspects of the script which may then appeal to that producer who has read right over it many times. My current loglines have been up for at least 12-18 months, which is much much longer than they suggest before changing them.

 

Hey, I’m stubborn.

But I’m also happy with the current versions. These are the loglines that need to be replaced:

Aftershocks: Jim Noone erased his memory, disappeared, and adopted a new identity to escape his past. His plan worked perfectly - until the woman who loved him follows one last hopeless lead to find him. Semi-linear “puzzle” movie with a twist ending. Character-driven drama.

I Hate That Guy!: The world’s biggest a$$hole has had enough of the world’s biggest saint and decides to bring him down. Raunchy dark comedy - Hard “R.”

Thoughts? I am particularly reluctant to change the Aftershocks logline because I think it communicates quite a bit in a tight package. But then again, the logline hasn’t generated many hits in quite a while.

Like they say, writing is rewriting.

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:

Back At It/The Challenge 2.008

2 things:

(1) I’m writing again, which is good - very good. After the move to the house took up all my time from September - November, the holidays came along. Between those and the endless puttering and fixing and buying new stuff for a 50-year-old house, I had really been out of commission for a while there. But this past weekend Michelle took both boys off my hands for a few hours for a birthday party, so I had 2 or 3 hours of good, quality time with Dead Guy.

Yes, Dead Guy. After being banished to the back burner since at least last summer, Dead Guy is forefront in my mind again. Which leads to the complications with

(2) The Challenge 2.008. As I suggested in an earlier post, I had really meant to come out guns blazing in early January with a New Year’s Resolution/Big Bold Statement about what the new challenge would look like. A schedule of milestones, deadlines to live up to, all that, to get both scripts completed in 2008. While the final goal - both scripts done and showable and uploaded to inktip.com by the end of 2008 - is still unshakeably in place, the interim deadlines and timetables keep changing. Why? Because I had assumed that I would resume work on Psycho Ex first, finish a draft of that by April or so, get that polished and uploaded by the summer, and then keep right on trucking into Dead Guy for fall and winter deadlines. But now it appears that the two scripts are more entangled in my mind than that. Instead of writing one script and then the next, they have become interconnected, alternately as 2 sides of the same coin (the premises are mirror images of each other) or as serving as release valves - when I get stuck on one, the other one is always there waiting, a breath of fresh air. Therefore, it’s looking like I’ll continue with both at the same time, as two big chunks moving forward in semi-parallel fashion. So who knows which one I’ll finish first, or when? How should I assign deadlines or progress requirements when working like this? I don’t know, but I’m working on it. The whole point of this is to force myself to get productive again, not to devise a system with giant loopholes that I can simply walk out of.

It seems like there should be big milestones met by the end of each quarter, whether through a total page count of both scripts combined or otherwise. I’ll keep thinking about it, and if anybody gets any bright ideas by all means send them this way.

As for Dead Guy - I’ve gotten my head back in the game, but no new flow of pages yet. Mostly working on my outline, more concentration on The Line, character arcs, things like that. But specific work has been done too - the nearly-complete Act One has been tweaked and refocused, the first present-day scene is getting mapped out and taking shape, more details about Pete’s life and business trip are getting nailed down. More forward progress than we’ve seen in a long time, so stay tuned.

Now if I could just figure out how to get the boys invited to birthday parties EVERY weekend…

Not Gonna Happen

This hurts me.

As recently as 2 weeks ago I was convinced that I still had a shot at meeting The Challenge before the end of 2007. Now I have come to realize that it is not gonna happen. Not this year. I was manageably behind until about September, but then the move happened. I knew this would cut severely into my writing time, but I remained ambitious and optimistic. A little too optimistic.

I will not cross the finish line but I won’t say I failed - Psycho Ex has 45 completed script pages in a 54-page document (script + outline). Dead Guy currently has 22/31. So while I would have liked to have written more, and in less time than 8 months or whatever, The Challenge was successful in getting me off my butt. Mental masturbation? Maybe. But those are 85 pages that would probably not have been written otherwise.

And I’m not done yet.

I’ve had a few ideas of possible ways to continue into 2008 with a bigger, better Challenge 2.0, possibly (1) finishing one of the scripts by a date in summer 2008, (2) completing a showable (not just a first draft) of BOTH scripts and getting both uploaded to industry readers on inktip.com by the end of 2008, or most ambitiously (3) getting both scripts uploaded to inktip.com by some summer 2008 date. But, in the spirit of The Challenge and of setting ambitious - even scary - goals for myself, I’ve had another idea: opening up The Challenge 2.0 to discussion by you guys. After all, one of the biggest goals of The Challenge - and of setting up a blog to put the process out there for everyone to see - was to (try to) get myself out of my comfort zone and take on new ideas/requirements/pressure from the outside. It may not have always looked like it, and I may have made decisions regarding what is “realistic” and whatever in a way that may have seemed arbitrary at times, but The Challenge was pretty successful at doing this. Hey, 85 pages. Good old external motivation.

So what do you think? One script by the summer? Both by December? Something completely different I haven’t even thought of? Let’s do this.

Challenge me.

The Strike (And Me) Part One

As the WGA strike enters its 4th week, things get more and more interesting around here. And by “here,” I mean the fringes of the business. With the strike, writers can’t write or submit anything and studios can’t read or buy anything. So… where does that leave all the agents?

If no deals are getting done and no money is changing hands, agents are starting to feel the squeeze. After all, 10% of nothing is nothing. But agents have one thing to look forward to: the after-strike euphoria. The longer the strike goes on, the longer there is nothing getting produced or bought or scheduled, the bigger the vacuum that is created. And once the strike ends, there will likely be this huge frenzy of buying and shooting as studios try to fill that pipeline with quick and constant product before dead air hits the TV and multiplex. At least, that’s what everyone is counting on.

So if you were an agent, and none of your existing clients will write anything new during a strike, and yet you want to accumulate as many scripts as you can to have ready to feed to this hungry beast once the fast is over, what do you do with all this free time brought to you by the strike? You go look for new writers to represent. And that means… Robb (and a hell of a lot of other writers on the fringes of legitimacy).

Since the strike began on November 1, my script downloads on inktip.com have picked up a little. I am sure there is a ton of increased traffic on the site, and I am getting a modest number of eyeballs. I’d been keeping an eye this and didn’t see anything to get excited about - until today. William Morris - one of the biggest and most powerful agencies in the business - today downloaded both my scripts on the market, Aftershocks and I Hate That Guy!. This is easily the biggest player to check out me and my stuff in quite a while, probably ever. This could be good - Supervillain is still under option, which looks good on my inktip resume as people check me out. And as Supervillain’s producer told me the other week, a financing deal for Supervillain may benefit from the building vacuum as well. The key is that these two sides could feed off each other, each one creating heat and legitimacy for the other. We’ll see.

Could be good.

Now, to bring myself down from this nice moment: Just imagine if I had more COMPLETED scripts to put up on inktip… like Psycho Ex or Dead Guy…

Sigh.