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

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.

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?

Some Movement

Busy season has just ended at my day job so we should be seeing a lot more writing (on both the blog and on the scripts) in the near future. Speaking of which…

It seems like just a few days ago I posted that I was in hurry up and wait mode, but somehow it has been a month already. And in the last few days there has been some movement on Supervillain:

Abbot Update: I exchanged emails with my contact at Abbot Management the other day and learned that no news had meant - as it usually does - no news. It appears Supervillain may be on the bubble over there - they don’t represent the script, but they haven’t officially passed either. At last glance of their website, they say they represent 13 writers and have 28 more in their development library, so evidently they are making commitments and signing people - and at least one of them has commented here - but not me. Via email they told me they would be making more decisions about other scripts in mid-April, and I should expect a decision then. I infer this to be further reinforcement of what I heard from one of their readers, that they think the script has commercial potential but aren’t completely happy with it yet as written. And since it is still under option, they don’t have to play their hand now anyway. At first I was bummed about the dragging on about this, but then I got some info today that caused me to stop caring (see Option Update).

Option Update: Last time I reported that my producers had spoken to a new money source that might be interested in financing the entire budget of Supervillain. Today, over a month later, I learned that this party is still interested. My producer acknowledged that things are moving slowly, but.. well, here’s what she said:

>>We’ve signed some initial paperwork with them to start exploration of a potential deal. It’s the first step toward investigating the financial details and possible terms. It’s moving along, slowly but surely.

Apparently this is a group of venture capitalists which has never invested in a film before, and that explains the slow and careful pace. My producer had lined up 80% of the budget from other sources, but this group wants to finance the whole thing itself (a very good sign we think) and they are also talking about budgets for P&A. And if they are the sole investor, we figure they would want to be serious about P&A to protect their investment. So things may be moving slowly, but this is very promising. I always try to keep myself from getting excited, but I’ll just say that today I am pretty excited.

I have officially set myself up for a quite a fall now…

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.

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.