Lessons Learned

One advantage of writing some of these low-budget films is that you learn your lessons the hard way.

Blockbuster online has some reviews posted, and here's an example:

Awful This movie was stated to be a family kids movie. This had my 6 yr old girl crying all night. Not a movie for kids if they love animals. The quality is horrible.

Who'da thought that killing the dog 20 minutes into the movie might have some undesirable side effects?!

Some reviewers actually do like the emotionality of it -- but clearly several were not expecting the DVD with the cute, happy dog on the cover to turn into a FESTIVAL OF DEATH.

And, it really is something of a festival of death. We start in a cemetery, dog dies around 20 minutes in, then ghost dog and ghost dad *both* leave hero kid at end of movie.

My subsequent kids/family films are a tad less morbid.

Career indecision

While there are many practical disadvantages to starting screenwriting at 38, one advantage is that you feel like you're in your 20s at 45.

Deadly Sibling Rivalry

Somehow the blurb ended up on-line for the next movie going into production:

After a wife and mother falls into a coma following a car accident, her troubled twin sister steals her identity to start over with a new life. Problems arise, however, when the comatose woman's daughter gets suspicious.

Evil twins!  How can that not be awesome?

This will shoot in February, but I couldn't get the timing right so I won't be out there at the beginning. I might be out there again first week of March and catch the tail-end of the shoot, though.

This is one I'm the sole writer on.  However the base concept came out of a kind of machine.  The bosses made up a list of different Lifetime-y concepts (each basically described in about as much depth as the above blurb), then ran them through a sort of internet focus group to see which ones were most appealing to their demographic.  Apparently that makes network executives far more comfortable when they say, "go with that one".

I'll likely be starting in on another one of these Lifetime-style films before too long -- but this time an actual remake of a Lifetime movie from the 90s!  I was a tad surprised too.  TV movies get remade?!

The producers are also trying to get involved with SyFy this year and make a movie for them.  They are desperate to do this because they are all males.

It is hard, however, to get into business with SyFy.  I have a theory that this is because most producers, writers, and directors are male, and if they're going to do a low-budget TV movie, they all want to do something like giant piranha tarantulas.

I know I do.

Giving the fans what they want

Somebody on the Lifetime website pointed out one of the key failings in Next Stop Murder:

I saw the premiere movie tonight of Next Stop Murder and was not pleased with it. I didn't expect it to be good anyway. There was one scene where a woman gets choked with a chain. A chain? I mean my god you people aren't even trying. I don't know why in god's name you don't air thriller movies with scenes of plastic bag suffocation and pillow smothering. This deeply disturbs me because I watch both networks. I'm never gonna be content with your new moves am I? Sorry for being so blunt, but it does upset me. Sorry.
razael 1:22am Mon Sep 20

And razael takes this stuff seriously!  Here are some of razael's later posts over the next couple weeks:

I would like to apologize if I have offended anyone about my movies comment last night. I just get so worked up sometimes when I wait for a movie on lifetime & LMN and they don't have certain scenes in the movie that I am looking for like say a pillow smother scene for example. But I'm sorry for my angry comments. I read a post that was directed towards my comment from last night and it got me thinking & I felt guilt about it. I'm sorry and I really enjoy lifetime & lmn movies. I really do. I just hope they air more movies with scenes that I am looking for. Anyway, thank you lifetime for accepting my posts and comments. Thank you all. I'm sorry. razael 6:48pm Mon Sep 20

Hi Karliann just got your message. Haven't been online in awhile. Anyway, when I meant I wanted to see more thriller type movies, I meant with pillow smother scenes of a victim being smothered with a pillow. Suffocation scenes. That's what I was referring to. When a victim is smothered with a pillow by the killer in the movie. That's wall I meant. Which probably sounds a bit disturbing. It is even for me, but they rarely show suffocation scenes on lifetime & lmn movies. Mostly it's people getting shot or stabbed or whatever. You weren't being intrusive. Some people just might not get people like me who want scenes of smothering. But we all have our likes in films. I try not to judge. Anyway, see ya.
razael 6:37pm Fri Oct 1

Lifetime & LMN, can you air more thriller movies with pillow suffocation scenes. Victim being smothered with a pillow and scenes like that. I notice you rarely show movies like that. I'm looking for more thriller & mystery movies to add to my collection. Thank you.

razael 3:40pm Sat Oct 9

LIfetime & LMN, I was wondering if you would show more movies to my liking. I watch both networks quite often and with your thrillers, mystery and crime movies, it's always the same: someone getting run down by a car, someone getting shot or stabbed. I'm looking for fictional movies not ones based on true events. I want more scenes of pillow smothering and plastic bag suffocation. Can you air more movies with scenes like that? I'm talking newer movies though. Like your world premiere movies from this year. 2010. Thank you. I apologize to anyone, if my comments are disturbing or offensive. If so, I deeply regret you seeing it. I just want to see more lifetime & lmn movies to my liking is all. The ones I've seen this year just isn't what I've been looking for. Thank you lifetime & lmn.

razael 1:54am Tue Oct 12

This is writing?

Unlike writing a novel where I think it's key to keep putting down words to hit that 100k mark, writing a script requires a whole lot of sitting or walking around and rolling broken ideas over and over in your head until they finally shatter and the jagged pieces come back together in the right way.

It is guilt-inducing.  You are, in fact, doing nothing while doing this.  When I smoked I would go outside and stare at the tip of a cigarette while thinking and it would focus me.  This is what I miss most about smoking.

I wonder why screenplays are different from novels in this.  One reason might be that screenplays must be so focused, whereas novels have room to explore.  It might also be a practical matter.  Novels (and individual scenes in novels) take longer to write so you have more time during the process to do that thinking after you've finished your pages for the day.  In essence, you're spending the same amount of time thinking about the story, but there's more writing required for a novel so your writing doesn't get ahead of your thinking as often.

L.A. Times Botches Lost Finale Review

L.A. Times botches the review.  Spoilers at the link despite many mistakes.  My own discussion follows the break and will include spoilers -- hopefully if you're reading a news feed, it doesn't include stuff after the break.

Urban Fantasy Mary Sues

In Urban Fantasy novels the main characters are typically complex enough, but the love interests... 

Good God!  I've never seen more perfect examples of masculinity.  Olympic athlete physiques.  Nobel Laureate intellects.  Great in bed.  Utterly selfless and devoted to the protagonist.  Any conflict in the relationship arises from a misunderstanding or some secret that's necessary because if not kept the world'll get destroyed or something, or from some failing of the heroine.

To be fair, female love interests in stories written by men are typically idealized too, but there's usually at least some true conflict in the relationship.

The Weight of Ideas

When we moved from NJ to Florida we boxed up all our books, weighed them, and mailed them so we could just throw the rest of our stuff in the car and drive.  I learned that a box of books averages 25 to 40 pounds.

That was the first of 6 moves over the following seven years.

Subsequent moves averaged 10 boxes of books for me and approximately 30 boxes for Jaru.  That's over half a ton of books.  And that's not including the bookcases.  Each move involves schlepping that half-ton of books twice -- once into the truck, and once up to the apartment.

And it's not just during moves.  You end up with a wall piled with boxes of books that every two months or so need to be re-arranged when you have to get to an outlet or adjust some furniture.

Then just last week I had to drag a 50 pound boxed bookcase up to our apartment and spend four hours punching little plastic bits through holes in cheap press-board to assemble it.

I am fucking ready to see the book as technology vanish into my personal rear-view mirror.

I'll miss the cotton gin more than I'll miss books.  At least the cotton gin hasn't personally tried to kill me.

My first "Somebody in Hollywood is Mad at Me"

And my first gossipy post all in one!

Last summer I sent out a screenplay and it wound up getting a strong response.  Got a number of requests and then two offers came in fairly quickly.

The first offer was from a management company.  They were going to develop it with me then take it to various places where they had connections.  We talked on the phone and then scheduled to talk again down the line about the notes they had and so on.

A few days later a small producer also contacted me wanting to option it.  They had some connections with strong track records and laid out a pretty clear plan.

One of the unfortunate facts of life is that, at least for me, instead of having places come in wanting different scripts, I typically have 2-3 places come in all wanting the same script.  Concept is king.

I've grown nervous over the years about telling companies that other companies are interested in the same screenplay they are.  Some people are mellow about it and professional.  But some places act like this is some kind of personal insult to them.  I suspect they think I'm lying.  No places have ever gotten into a bidding war, so there's really no upside.

But I have to make a decision sooner or later and that means I need to tell everyone involved that I've got another offer and I'm trying to figure out which place I want go with.  The smaller producer just laid out their pitch.

Then I emailed the management company and waited.  A creative executive there got back to me right away, said congrats on the added interest, and said that the bosses would get back to me shortly.  Very professional on their part so I'm figuring this is fine. 

It's still a tense for me because I'm going to have to make a choice and that choice could very well make an over $100,000 difference in my and Jaru's life, not to mention future career prospects.

A couple days pass and management company boss still doesn't get back to me.  I send another email saying that I'll need to make a decision before too long and CE again re-assures me.

I am in fact wrong at this point in time.  I shouldn't tell anyone that I'm out of the market until my attorney has negotiated a contract we're happy with.  So, if I were wiser, I'd have realized I had more time to wait for a response.

But I'm not wise.  And apparently neither is management company boss because a couple more days pass and they still haven't even bothered to send off a couple line email suggesting their strategy.

So I end up going with the smaller producer and email the management co that I'm doing so.  Nobody at management company ever gets back to me.

Well, it's clear they're upset.  And I do feel a little bad because I think I could have given them more time.  But I also think that any professional could've zipped off a quick email in the course of five days.  This is business after all.

Fast forward to November and I've finished a new script that fits management company's profile so I figure I'll take a shot at querying them.  Boss gets back to me and tells me how angry they are that they devoted a bunch of time to thinking about the script then I yanked it out from under them.


At this point in the email I feel a little bad.  The boss screwed up but I think I screwed up a little too.

And if his email had stopped there, I would have walked away feeling a little guilty.  But he couldn't shut up.  He kept typing.  And he said that not only had I yanked this script out from under him, but that I had also cost him his favorite assistant -- the creative executive who had emailed me a couple times and who seemed to be pretty talented.

How the hell would some unknown screenwriter from New Jersey cost him his favorite assistant? 

This dude was so un-self-reflective that he didn't realize that in the second half of his email he just told me that he mishandled that scenario so bad that he made his favorite assistant mad enough to quit working for them, a pretty decently sized management company.

If he had just shut up, I never would have known.

Given all that, I'm not terribly upset that I didn't get to work with them.  But I do feel bad for the CE and hope he ended up in a better job.

The Re-write Writing Credit

I've already been asked a couple times about the writing credit on this project so I thought I'd post the details here:

I won't be getting a writing credit on this one. But the director will give me some other kind of credit -- perhaps Story Editor or some made-up thing.

On normal movies the Writer's Guild of America has rather explicit rules regarding who gets writing credits on a movie and, in fact, is the final arbiter in disputes -- being able to override even the makers of the film.

But this isn't a WGA signatory movie so the credits are pretty much just whatever the company making the movie says they are and the original writer has ensured he gets sole credit on this -- probably so that the producer or director doesn't come in and poach a writing credit. And I certainly don't blame him for that!

Had this been a WGA signatory movie, the writing credits would be wrong on two counts -- the actual credits would likely be "Story by" the original writer and we'd share "Screenplay by" credits since much of the characterization, text, and ending is new, though there's a fair bit of the original left in there and the new stuff is pretty much an outgrowth of the original material.

The other wrong bit is the made-up Story Editor credit. The WGA is a stickler for making sure that companies don't start inventing these sorts of credits and giving them to every guy in the production who had some input on the screenplay or has enough pull to force their name into the credits because they offered a few suggestions -- it's a way of protecting writers from having their labor diluted.

Finally, I'd also be wrong here to specifically suggest what the writing credits would be -- I'd have to wait and let the final arbiters determine it.

Just like a b-

If you read the screenplay for The Dark Knight in the scene in Hong Kong before Batman goes into the big bank and grabs the crooked banker, Lucius Fox shows him a 3D map of the office created by sonar and you've got the following dialogue exchange:

WAYNE: (smiles) Sonar. Just like a b-

FOX: Submarine. Like a submarine.

But in the film the exchange is:

WAYNE: (smiles) Sonar. Just like a -

FOX: Submarine. Like a submarine.

When I watched the movie I never got the joke and knew it was a joke since they shared a little smile. But I sure got it once I read the script.

This is a good example of something that works great on the page, but doesn't work at all on screen. People don't stop mid-word and, if they did in the film, it'd sound really artificial and forced.

My guess is they found out it didn't sound right during the shoot and made a fix they hoped would work.

Nicholl Quarterfinalists Out Today

Congratulations to all the Nicholl Quarterfinalists!

The Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting contest is the best contest to enter in terms of getting you moved along in your career. Making any of the final rounds will garner reads and help you land representation even when you're out in the wild.

Being that it is so head and shoulders above the other contests I cannot recommend strongly enough entering early and often. Not just because it's good -- but also because your window for entry is rather narrow.

You stop being eligible to enter the contest after you've made $5,000 for writing, even if that's just from a screenplay option or optioning a book you wrote. And that's a really easy number to hit fast.

I did not realize this and only entered once before I became ineligible -- and I can tell you that I've definitely regretted it over the last couple years.

Track Record, Track Record, Track Record

If you're fortunate enough to get more than one option offer on a script you've written and are trying to figure out who to sign with, I recommend going with the producer with the best track record -- even to the point where doing so might mean foregoing a decent option payment (around $1,000) versus a negligible option payment.

In my experience, track record -- how many films they've made and how consistently they've done so recently -- has been a better indicator of whether or not they'll be able to get your film made.

Two different companies were able to get me thousands of dollars in options -- but neither were able to make the movie. They also had few to no movies made, though they did have good financing connections.

On the other hand, a $100 option led to the assignment that got me my first film, and I worked with another producer with no option at all that eventually would've gotten set up as a little indie if I hadn't optioned the script to someone else first. Both these people had consistent (though not spectacular) credits. I think the consistency counts for a lot. People who get things done, get things done.

Was horror the best choice?

I like horror films so that's what I started out writing. And there's generally a number of smaller production companies out there looking for horror -- so it's also a practical choice. However, at the moment, the well appears to have dried up so it's not so practical now ... though it seems these sorts of trends can change every six months.

In retrospect, though, I think there was a problem with writing horror, or at least focusing so heavily on it. Horror, particularly teen, Freddy and Jason kind of horror, is intrinsically a reactive genre -- and this and other features make it a genre where it's challenging to demonstrate or develop your character building skills.

In fact, through the original Friday the 13th, the protagonists spend the majority of the film not even knowing that they're being attacked. They neither are nor can be proactive simply because they don't realize that there's anything to be proactive against.

But in most stories we much prefer our characters to drive the action -- this is how we get them to reveal their inner selves and turmoil.

This is compounded by the fact that another intrinsic feature of horror is that the characters are grossly outmatched. They can't drive the narrative because they're too busy getting their asses kicked.

A Nightmare on Elm Street actually manages to create a strikingly pro-active heroine in the Nancy character, and is a good film to study for keeping the heroine in the driver's seat -- but this is also a rare feature of the pure horror film.

Another problem with horror films is that you've got a limited amount of time to do any character development with the side characters. After all, at least one of them dies by minute 20. That means you've got 20 minutes to establish your setting, introduce the stars, set up the bad guy, and generate enough feeling for this poor dead-on-page-20 schmuck that he won't feel like a throwaway. Let alone all the other secondary characters who get eviscerated before they ever get a chance to complete even a partial character arc.

The couple family films I wrote on the other hand have plenty of time to see all the characters through to the end and they're almost completely driven by the young protagonist on their quest -- things very conducive to fooling producers into thinking that you're a much more serious-minded and sensitive writer than you actually are.

That said, I'm not sure family films are great for breaking in from outside. I don't think they were 5 years ago -- but I have noticed more small companies looking far afield for family films lately, so that might be changing.

Looking backwards, I suspect thrillers would have been good to develop. They're hero driven, many of the characters stick around for a long time, and there's also a wide market for them -- small companies look for them for DVD features, cable movies, TV movies, and particularly strong ones can also be picked up as theatrical releases.

Supernatural thrillers (by this I mean tamer, wider-audience horror films like The Sixth Sense or even The Ring) also have some of these strengths, but I'm concerned that these need a name star to sign on, which means they need to be higher budget, which means it's harder for someone outside the town to get to the kind of production company that can finance them.

Writing from the Wild

UPDATE 11/13/2009 -- the other blog is dead and gone because I am a slacker.

I'm starting up a second blog called Writing from the Wild -- this one focused solely on screenwriting.

It seems that I've made enough headway to call this a career, and so far I've done it entirely from outside of Los Angeles, which is particularly problematic for screenwriting. So I thought I'd share my experiences and talk about stuff that worked and didn't work, as well as theories pulled out of my ass, in case it'd be helpful for other people trying their hands at screenwriting from the lands of no In-N-Out.

I'm copying my screenwriting posts over there. But I'll also leave them here and generally keep this blog up to date at my standard glacial pace.

15 Days

My dad wrote a little short story a couple weeks ago and I thought it'd make a strong short script (and be really easy to adapt -- all I did was change the formatting!)

So I spent a couple hours re-formatting, showed it to him, and then sent it off to a couple places asking for short scripts. 15 days later and a director now wants to make it.

It took me five years! I'd call my dad a bastard, but I think that might backfire on me in some way.

Low Budget Awards Season

The Oscars are over -- so now it's time for the movies that cost less than the dresses worn at the Oscars!

Billy Unger is nominated for best performance in a DVD film at the 30th Annual Young Artists Awards. Go Billy!

You'll need to scroll down to the bottom to see the list of nominees -- but he's doing well in a category where two of the other films are by Disney and Universal.


Also, my horror screenplays RED SKIES and THE SOUND are both finalists in the 2009 Paranoia Horror Film Festival script contest. After seeing their website I figured that my goriest screenplays might have a better shot.

Given that the IFFF where COP DOG showed was Feb 26-March 1, the Paranoia Film Festival is March 13-15, and the Young Artists Awards are on March 29th, and we just had 10 inches of snow dumped on us and wind chill is sub-zero -- you can imagine that this is a month I particularly wish I was in L.A.

Writing Exercises

If you ever took any creative writing courses or were part of a writing group you might remember writing exercises -- something like "write a ten page story that includes Fig Newtons, a dyslexic wombat, is set in World War II, and the main character knows how to play a Xylophone."

I always thought those were rather artificial, of questionable educational value, and distracted you from the real task of getting your actual writing done.

The distributor is now requesting that we put together stories where the lead character is a 15-year-old boy, plus or minus a year (COP DOG's 12-year-old lead would be too young for next year's slate); with an animal ala COP DOG, but we're already using a dog in another movie and couldn't afford something like a bear and definitely not something aquatic! (did you know that chimpanzee actors are governed by roughly the same working condition rules as child actors?); it must of course be about 90 minutes long; limited locations and limited number of parts, including non-speaking parts because, at these budgets, extras are expensive too (unless your family members all have a lot of free time); should be humorous but maybe with a little heart (er, sentimentality -- but not during the first ten minutes! The first ten minutes should be fun); and there must be a family aspect, i.e. adult or other members of the family centrally involved (don't ask me, that requirement is pretty vague).

It'd also be good to include a holiday theme -- but Christmas is used in another project and we need holidays that also resonate in Europe -- so no Thanksgiving and Halloween isn't so great either.

The Heart of the Story Is Emergent

I'm finishing up the first draft of a new assignment, a low budget action movie (for more info on low-budget (but higher budget than mine) action movies read the excellent Bill Martell's blog).

One thing about assignments is that the outline and structure is far more fixed than when you're doing things yourself. The people buying it want to know pretty precisely what they're getting.

I'm also working with the director on this (in fact, it's his idea I'm developing) and he wants it to have theme and character arc, some real moment of drama that we can pull out of it -- the heart of the story. So we bounce around some ideas and lay in the sketch of that for the outline.

But it's not until I'm halfway through the first draft that what feels like the correct heart starts to show itself. And it's not until I'm fully through the first draft that I hit the full theme and character drama that makes me feel this can really work.

And these are things that just never emerge, even from a detailed outline (for Marlowe the outline was over 20 pages, and the script was only 95!).

Which makes me think that the heart of a story is an emergent thing. It is not so much something that you put in there the way you put set pieces and characters and reversals in there. It is something that arises in the interstices between those bigger pieces of structure -- small moments of character, small changes in dialog, and so on. And when I did hit on the heart of the story, what I mainly did to bring it out was mainly go back and make subtle alterations to scenes.

In a real sense, the plot didn't change at all -- just some flavor bits around the plot. Which is frankly a bit nerve-wracking because I think the story felt quite a bit worse before, and that means that the difference between a good story and a mediocre one could be nothing more than a pageful or two of words out of the 100 pages of script.

Marlowe

The IMDB page for Marlowe, my first produced film, is now up. Still missing a bunch of details (like me!) and we don't have cover art yet, but a few of the principal actors are listed.

Also, my scene in the film, a true gift to cinema, is apparently staying in, so before long I'll have a Bacon number of 3.

I'm in Marlowe with Billy Unger who was also in National Treasure: Book of Secrets with Ed Harris, who was in Apollo 13 with Kevin Bacon.