Kindle DX or iPad

Getting some assignment windfalls so I'm going to celebrate by buying either a Kindle DX or an iPad (just wireless, no 3G).

I'm not sure how much I buy the idea that reading from an LCD screen is that much harder than reading E-Ink given that I spend most of the day looking at an LCD screen, and I certainly like a color display given that I have a lot of RPG pdfs in color.

On the other hand, reading a 300 page book isn't the same as glancing through web pages and writing.  And I suspect the iPad's 10 hour battery life will turn into 5 hours in practice given my experience with laptop computers. Which is an issue given that one purpose of having the reader is to use it on flights from Newark to Los Angeles, and the added hours waiting for the flight.

And, then again, the other uses of the iPad could also be handy down the line.

The World thanks the supreme court

Finally, Royal Dutch Shell, British Petroleum, Toyota, Daimler-Chrysler, and maybe even a few Chinese-funded corporations will be able to directly help decide who wins American elections!

I remember reading a while back where people around the world wished that they could vote in American elections.  Well, now they can if they have enough money!

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.

First re-write

I got my first re-writing assignment last week. Roughly six days to do a pretty significant overhaul on a script.

The outline and structure were all there though we did change the ending. I have to say this kind of re-write isn't so bad -- though it was intense. Basically 14 hours a day devoted to getting it done quickly.

One nice thing about this is that it'll get made, and get made quickly -- in three weeks! That's why they needed it so fast. The director had to get the script to actors considering being in it and the people who pick locations and make schedules.

This is the same director as for COP DOG, though this time it's a more Hitchcock-esque film for a Lifetime-esque audience and the budget will be a little larger. My guess is that it'll have an easier time getting a U.S. release of some sort down the line.

Cop Dog download now available at Amazon

Cop Dog is finally available in the United States -- via Amazon's Video on Demand. You can rent it or purchase it via the above links (and the above links are the only way I'll earn 'residuals'!)

Predator POV

POV shots from the monster or the slasher stalking his target are fairly common in movies. But, considering how many movies have been inspired by Halloween, I'm surprised I haven't seen more people use what was an extremely effective technique in the original:

After the opening teaser, in the first act we don't see out of the monster's eyes, but instead watch the main characters with the monster's body or his vehicle framing the scene. That creates this constant, lurking presence penning the characters in, and feels much more foreboding than just looking through his eyes.

Geek Power

Midnight Chronicles went from IMDb Moviemeter rating 6,865 to 28 last week -- up 24,417% in popularity -- putting it adjacent to other such low-budget fare like Knowing and Observe and Report.

Coincidentally, this week was also GenCon -- where I imagine the DVD was released. That's really an astronomical improvement and rating for what is an essentially indie feature with no major distributor (Epic Level Entertainment, whose only other distributed films are Xombie: Dead on Arrival and The Gamers: Dorkness Rising) and no advertising. I haven't even seen banner ads at EN World.

For nerd-friendly fare I'd think studios should pay attention to this as a booth at GenCon is practically free by studio-marketing standards. I also think studios should be more friendly to RPG adaptations of their franchises. There's no money involved, but it keeps a franchise's fan base active and you can mine the good ideas that were developed for later films, comics, or TV series.

Midnight Chronicles is also available on iTunes and through RPGNow -- though I'd recommend the iTunes route for downloading since RPGNow doesn't have the bandwidth to handle big downloads yet.

Midnight Chronicles itself is impressive in certain aspects. Production quality is strong -- a few terrific special effects, some really nice outdoor scenes and outdoor cinematography. Many of the performances turned out quite well -- I think they benefitted from going after actors who could perform instead of actors who could help them get distribution (of course, what helps the movie likely hurts the producers). The action direction and fights scenes are, unfortunately, rather tame -- too slow and careful.

But the real problem is the story. There's some good elements here and intrigue being set up between the different factions -- at one point it felt like it could be a strong Babylon 5 kind of series. But it's not a series. It's 100 minutes and I think they introduced as many as 15 or so characters, all of whom are launching their own story. So instead of one fully developed story we get the first 5 minutes of a dozen or so stories. I had to laugh when at about minute 68 (!) they introduce the secret surviving twin brother of some high-ranking legate who helps head the resistance. Save something for season two folks!

This cripples the story as a film -- and is also way too much for even a series pilot (which is what the Midnight Chronicles was originally intended as). In a series pilot you need to cleave more closely to a film mode -- find your core couple characters and key on their stories so that we have an enjoyable episode and get a chance to know them. Roll out the extra characters and plot complications as the season unfolds -- because, unless that first episode catches, you otherwise won't have a season to tell your story.

Which leads me to my last general lesson that I've learned writing. Movies are small -- at about 22,000 words they're really equivalent to a novella. Especially in a genre piece where you've also got action set pieces and such eating up minutes, you really need to choose your story and focus on it. And pilots are even smaller -- though you can leave a few hooks in them for later exploration.

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.

Suspicious ballot photos posted by Iran state media?

This item is from Nico Pitney's liveblog at the Huffington Post. It is fortunate for the moral arc of the universe that criminals are, by and large, stupid -- and here they appear to be broadcasting evidence of their own crimes:

12:23 PM ET -- Suspicious ballot photos posted by Iran state media? A reader writes, "I believe this is well worth reporting: many interesting photos are being put on the web as I write, a good number of them published by IRNA itself (see here). These are images from the recent Guardians Council TV broadcast session where they 'recounted' some ballot boxes and found out that indeed Ahmadinejad's votes were higher than previously counted. These pictures show two things very clearly: 1) that a whole lot of the ballots that are being recounted are fresh, crisp, unfolded sheets - which makes no sense, given that people typically had to fold these sheets before they can slip them into the ballot boxes, and 2) that the handwriting on so many of the sheets which are votes for 'Ahmadinejad' are the same handwriting (and very clearly so)."

Pitney goes on to post another item providing more evidence of vast and clumsy fraud:

1:06 PM ET -- Rezai's spokesman claims ballots had similar handwriting. Mohsen Rezai, the most conservative of the three 'defeated' presidential candidates in Iran's election, agreed to drop his official election complaints several days ago. But Rezai's unofficial spokesman Omidvar Rasai charges in an interview here that "between 70 to 80 percent of the votes in some constituencies was written with the same pen and with the handwriting of a single individual."

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.