Brand X

So, me and Sylvia have decided to enter our spec in the Nicholl Fellowship competition, once we determine the tricky issue of my eligibility. Obviously, prior to doing that, we want to make sure our spec is in such terrifyingly awesome shape that it inspires a near-religious wonder in all who view it. Unfortunately, I'm not that good, so instead I'm sitting around worrying about the title.

Inspired by a post over at one of the screenwriting blogs I read, I thought I'd throw the question of the title open to both readers of this blog.

The story is a romantic comedy about a young man who relocates to another coast and finds himself in love with two different women, only to learn that neither of them has a problem with being polyamorous. From there, things get complicated. The theme is based around our protagonist learning that the rules for life he's been trying to learn don't actually exist. The setting is contemporary American geek culture, because geeks haven't had a movie about us yet, and hey, we run shit.

The current title is THE SECRET MANUAL, after the hypothetical instruction book for life and love that the hero assumes must, on some level, exist. As a title, it's okay. However, I'm concerned that it's too oblique and sounds vaguely like some kind of spy thriller. Any other suggestions?

Labels: writing

In my first post in this blog, I mentioned that this job didn't look to be easy. And hoo boy, it hasn't been, nor is it likely to become so. Which is fine; I actually love it when it's hard. When something's hard to do but you manage to do it anyway, you feel like friggin' Batman. The snag is that second step, managing to do it anyway. Mostly I find a way to pull it off to my own satisfaction, and that's cool. Some nights, though, it doesn't click. I'm getting the words down on paper, they make sense, they express the right things, they fit into the structure I've outlined, but they don't feel 100% right. And if there's one thing I believe about this job, it's that if you don't bring 100%, you might as well stay home. It's not exactly writer's block; I don't really get that much. I can always find words to type, that's easy, but that tricky sense of rightness, that state of existing completely in all the characters' heads simultaneously, that knowledge of exactly where things need to go, hearing the backbeat of emotional rhythm and just having to shake my ass to it... when that's not there it can be a real bitch.

I can imagine a day when, if I'm still doing this job, it could turn into just another grind, sitting down and hammering out the work while wishing I was doing something else. Right now I have very fresh memories of being in a place where I would have been thrilled, thrilled to get a nine-to-five OFFICE SPACE soul-killing cube monkey job, so long as it paid enough to cover my rent, and that helps a lot in getting my enthusiasm for writing going. I mean, I'm doing my dream job right now. That ain't so bad. Thing is, I've heard from many quarters that dream jobs have a way of turning into just plain jobs, not because the job changes but because you do. I can only hope that when I get to that point, I'll remember an hourly mantra of "I hate this fucking job" and that unmistakable feeling of figuring out the dates on which various utilities will be cut off, and having to seriously consider which ones I could do without for a few days.

Writing is much, much harder than the jobs I've been working for the past ten years or so, but I worked those jobs so that I could keep writing, and one day be doing the job I'm doing now. So as enjoyable as bitching and moaning is, I do try to keep it in some kind of personal context.

Labels: writing

Tim Kreider, in his commentary to this week's cartoon says that Americans are the funniest fucking people in the world. He's right. Say what you will about this nation and its people, we can bring the funny like no one in the history of humanity. The latest proof? Ohio State Senator Robert Hagan. You try and make bigotry a wedge issue to get out the bigot vote in an election year, we're going to laugh at your ass, because this is goddamn America.

America! America!
God shed his grace on thee!
Till selfish gain no longer stain
The banner of the free!

Labels: politics

Here's why I love working with a producer who I genuinely respect.

There's a structural, even a conceptual issue with the story I'm working on. This is one of those things that, as mentioned in previous posts, becomes clear during the treatment phase. It's the kind of thing that, if handled wrong, could prevent an audience from buying into our fictional world, and if that happens everyone's boned. There are solutions, some of which I can come up with because, well, it's my job. I have no doubt that a solution will be found, and I'll write it, and if I do say it myself I'll probably do a decent job of it.

The point is that I sent my producer/brother a long, somewhat rambling email earlier detailing the outlne of the problem and some possible solutions thereto. He'll write back when he's had the time to review my points, think seriously about them, and propose his own solutions. And I know for a fact that those proposals will be coming from someone at least as smart and dedicated as I am.

I read screenwriter blogs, books, and message boards. I hear endless horror stories about money men who Just Don't Get It. And yes, my avaricious side hopes to one day be making the big Hollywood money that only comes from working with people you'd like to strangle. But for now, at this exact point in my career, such as it is, I have a producer who intends to support his family by doing his absolute best to make the most perfect possible movie, and who has the brains and training to make that happen.

Maybe that won't always be true, but right now, it is, and I would be remiss if I didn't take a moment to thank him.

Labels: writing

I accepted a long time ago that I don't know what music causes a person to gain or lose cool points, so I just gave up and listened to whatever strikes my fancy. Which means I've got some Indigo Girls playing, and that lyric in "Least Complicated" just came up, "I sit two stories above the street/It's awful quiet here since love fell asleep" and I look sideways from my computer and my girlfriend's sleeping in my bed, face relaxed, unaware of me watching her, and I remember why there are sappy love songs in the first place. We all ought to have someone who just by existing reminds us why we do anything that we do.

That being said, I think I'm going to light up my pipe, which she hates. I'm only human, after all.

Okay, random thought late on a worknight.

So I'm wandering from blog to blog between sentences, and I come across this post on a right-wing blog. Blah blah blah, Democratic party captured by hard left, yadda yadda. I'm having the same reaction you probably are, i.e. "I'm sorry, WHAT?" I sometimes wonder if there isn't some kind of weird quantum reality going on where a lot of Republicans are actually seeing an entirely different universe than the rest of us. But that's not the point.

The point is that the guy then goes into a parody of "Springtime for Hitler" from the musical version of THE PRODUCERS, all about the crazy commies taking over the formerly-reasonable Democratic party. And this brings me to something I've noticed across the board when it comes to political song and poem parodies. No, I'm not going to say that conservatives are intrinsically untalented or unfunny, because that isn't true, but it does seem to be true that THEY DON'T GRASP SCANSION.

I've seen parodies of this sort for years, as I think many of us have, and while I wish I could say that left-leaning parodies are all funnier or more biting or something, it just ain't so. However, they do scan correctly, by and large. Right-leaning ones never do. Never ever. Sometimes they rhyme, sometimes they can even be funny or telling, but they don't scan.

It's been my opinion for years that our political opinions usually have nothing to do with the "rational" reasons we tell ourselves. Something in us just picks a side and then starts inventing reasons that side's positions are right. Factual reality can help, but it's much less of a factor than we imagine. So now I'm wondering if the key difference, the little neurological quirk that makes us lean left or right, isn't somehow linked to the part of the brain that perceives scansion. Some odd genetic hookup like all calico cats being female or all latex-allergic people also being allergic to bananas.

There once was a man from Japan
Whose limericks never would scan
When informed it was so
He replied, "Yes, I know
But I always try to fit as many words on the last line as I possibly can."

Don't get the joke? You may be a Republican.

Labels: politics

I wondered for a bit why this blog was not getting any comments. At the very least, I'd expected my producer to post something to the effect of "Shut up about the scotch I PAID FOR and get back to work, you lazy prick." The obvious answer, of course, was that no one loves me and I will die alone in a ditch and the only ones to mourn will be the wild dogs who discover my corpse is too starved and plague-raddled to eat. Turns out I had the preferences on the damn thing set so that almost nobody was able to post. That should be fixed now. Feel free to tell me to get my shiftless ass back to work.

Tonight, I discovered that reading screenwriting blogs does not infallibly psyche me up to work. The problem is that these guys and gals are writers, meaning that when they post they tend to be charming and funny and so on. Going from that to a rather dark story involving a lot of emotional pain... not as easy as I thought. Still, I persevered, (not with the writing, with the reading blogs to avoid writing, naturally) and discovered this astonishingly good post about gender and writing by Denis McGrath. It contains a link to a book that is now on my must-get-around-to-intending-to-read list.

Labels: writing

A word on the whisky I mentioned in the last post. I'm a single-malt man when economics allow, and like most such snobby dipsomaniacs I have a favorite. Me, Tim Powers, Phillip K. Dick, and Neil Gaiman think the best single-malt whisky in the world is Laphroaig. Smoked over peat fires from a species that grows on one island in the whole world, the tortured and distilled grains have learned the story of the peat, and it's a story that goes back before Jesus, before Mithra, when the oldest legends of mankind were the current hot gossip. They say you can taste "the body in the bog" in the aggressive earthiness of Laphroaig, and it's true. All those sacrifices who went willingly into the swamp with cords around their necks because they'd been assured it was the will of the gods... they're in the whisky, hidden under layers of time and earth and craft. The secret ingredient in Laphroaig is gullible Druids, and I can't recommend their flavor highly enough.

I'm having a glass as I write this post, and I'm reminded of A.E. Housman's famous quote: "And malt does more than Milton can/To justify God's ways to man." For me, though, the profound experience of this whisky is less about God's creation than man's. To taste a really good single-malt is to interact with craft evolved to the level of high art. As Japan did with swords, obsessing unhealthily over every possible aspect of their creation, keeping only the best practices and never accepting less until they created metallurgical miracles unequaled and unrivaled anywhere on earth... so Scotland did with their whisky. This whisky tastes like centuries of evolution and improvement, like the firm statement that "good enough" is not good enough, like man's bloody-minded urge towards perfection. More than that, it tastes like hope. Hope that that urge is not in vain, that with enough work and practice and ruthless pruning of anything but the best, even a water-alcohol solution flavored with dirt and gullible Druids can be made perfect. How could a writer, hell, how could any artist or craftsman drink anything else?

I'm a little tipsy. I'm going to bed. Lot of work to do tomorrow.

Boy, what a day.

First thing that happens is the mail comes, and with it my contract and my first paycheck. Also a bottle of 15-year-old Laphroaig, because my brother knows what motivates me to write. I sign and return the contract, open a new account to deposit the check in, and decant the scotch so it can breathe. Get some great work done on the treatment, digging up character subtext that will come in very handy later. Then I'm off for lunch and coffee with the inimitable Sylvia, to go through our spec and fix everything we noticed during last week's read-through. It's one of the most productive days I can remember, as we improve almost every section of the screenplay, including turning the worst scene into one of the best. Coming home, I note that this blog's attracted its first comment, and proceed to implement all the changes to the spec, arriving at a completed fifth draft in a couple hours of steady work, powered by one glass of scotch and one pipe of tobacco. Later in the evening, I finally get around to watching THE 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN, and discover that you can put devil's food cake mix in a waffle iron and make devil's food waffles, which are the most awesome thing ever.

All in all, one of the nicest days I can remember in a long time.

Labels: writing

AAAAAAAIIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!

Pounding diligently away at the treatment, fleshing out characters' internal states, I just caught myself typing this sentence:

"Both [characters] are aware of how painfully uninteresting their conversation is."

In other words, were this scene to somehow be miraculously shot in the form it's in now, I would be asking folks to pay MONEY to watch two people have a conversation so dull they're not even interested in it themselves.

Yes, there are excellent reasons in terms of characterization why these people would have a stilted, awkward conversation full of stock sentiments and vague banalities. So perhaps I'll get lucky and the audience will say to themselves, "Wow, I'm so bored I wish I was dead, but the emotional tone is very true to life."

I'm reminded of something that happened when I was watching FANTASTIC FOUR on DVD recently. (Not the legendary unreleased version, which was cracktastically awful, but the more recent one, which was just regular awful.) I'd been wandering in and out of the living room while I got a few things done, and the movie was more than half over, and there were bits of it I'd missed. So I asked my girlfriend, parked on the couch, "Has anything happened yet?" She replied that nothing had, and she'd let me know if anything did.

In the name of Not Being That Guy, I'm off to rework this scene.

Labels: writing

I'm a practitioner of the stepped approach to a screenplay that Robert McKee advocates in his brilliant-but-somehow-still-overrated Story, which is to say that first I work out the whole story on index cards, then I write a big fat treatment in which I figure out exactly what's happening, internally and externally, in each scene. I like this because it makes the actual writing of the screenplay much faster and easier. I already know everything that's happening in every scene, so I just have to fill in the words. The treatment is also when I can figure out scene transitions, internal logic, everyone's emotional arcs, and find any false notes.

Scott McCloud, in his justifiably famous Understanding Comics outlines a six-step theory of creativity, applicable across all artforms, that I will now misquote from my dubious memory.

1. Idea; the basic message or theme of the work. What the work is trying to "say".

2. Form; the form the work takes. A movie, a sculpture, a comic book, a dance, whatever.

3. Idiom; the conceptual vocabulary of the work. Its genre, influences, context, etc.

4. Structure; the... well, structure of the work. How it's arranged, paced, constructed, what have you.

5. Craft; the meat of the work. Making sure the dialogue's witty or the stitches are even or the hook is catchy or the prose flows smoothly. Doing a good job.

6. Surface; the most immediately noticeable parts of the work. Production values, flashy tricks, a shiny exterior. Important, yes, but only comes after all the other steps.

Most artists, McCloud argues, tend to learn their art from the outside in, first imitating the surface attributes of work they admire, then learning their craft, understanding the structure of their work, then learning to play with idiom, and finally asking themselves whether their art is ultimately about something they want to say through it, or about the art itself.

The first time I saw this theory, quite some time ago now, I immediately looked at step 4 and said "That's where I'm gonna have trouble." I knew this because I understood what McCloud meant by all the other steps, but structure was not something I'd ever thought about. I've spent a good deal of time in the years since deliberately studying, researching, and playing around with structure, and I think I've gotten a better handle on it than I otherwise would have. Let's hope so, anyway.

This ties in with the treatment issue because the treatment covers parts of both steps 4 and 5, as well as the blurry area where they cross over. Yes, in the treatment I'm working out how the characters change, whether their reactions feel emotionally true, making sure there's conflict in every scene, all that stuff. And that's great, but for me it's not the hard part. It's tactics, and that I can do. Structure is strategy. Ask any of the dozens of people who've kicked my ass at chess, strategy does not come easy to me. So the treatment is my weapon. By that time I've got the whole story laid out on index cards, and I've shuffled the cards into the best order I can, but it's in the treatment that I can really see how the scenes look next to each other. Here's where I find out if I've got any scene transitions that will give people whiplash. Here's where I find out whether my two funniest jokes are right next to each other in the middle, surrounded by a wasteland of suck. Here's where I make damn sure that I've got the emotional experience of watching the movie laid out properly.

Mankind first invented tools because we were soft and tiny and squishy and wanted to eat things that were hard and/or huge and/or sharp. Tools are what we use to overcome our weaknesses and succeed in our goals despite them. So I'm writing the heck out of this treatment because it makes the entire job easier, but mostly because it forces me to work hard at the part of the job I otherwise might do half-assedly. Whatever the final draft of this screenplay is like, it will have been written with my whole ass, thanks to the treatment step.

Also, the treatment's in my contract and I have a deadline. Which helps.

Labels: writing

It's official: Gray Area Films (the brand-new indie production company I work for) has another project for me after I finish this one. I'm going to be a professional writer for at least the next six months, and if my illustrious sibling can't scare up more projects during that time, I'll eat my hat.

I'm kidding. I would never hurt the hat.

And now, for no earthly reason, a picture of a baby fossa:

Yes, that's the cutest thing in the world. Also one of the deadliest. Learn more about my all-time favorite predator here.

Someone give Gray Area a few million bucks so I can set up a fossa preserve. My long-term plan is to clone the extinct giant fossa, domesticate them, and keep one on either side of my iron throne, trained to strike down my enemies. My power thus assured, I'll institute a series of careful reforms based on social and fiscal responsibility indexed to a sustainable 4% annual growth rate!

This post proves that when I start a blog to procrastinate, I really mean it.

Labels: writing

Okay, read-through is done, and like a schmuck, I forgot to take any photos to post here. At the last minute, enough people showed up to apportion all the necessary parts. Beer was drunk, laughs were had, notes were made. Admittedly, I wasn't happy with how every line was read, but these folks were seeing these lines for the first time; actors try every line ten different ways for a reason. So that was fun. Best of all, all the subsequent suggestions were on relatively minor points, not "Nothing this character does makes any sense" or "The entire middle isn't funny at all."

Then again, true story from me and Sylvia's first screenplay, before this one. Four or five drafts in, after the read-through party, I'm doing another polish, and I come to a line where Character A is trying to tell Character B about the subterfuge being perpetrated on Character B. Is it at this point that I suddenly realize that, right there in the script, Character A has known about this for two or three weeks, has been seeing Character B on a near-daily basis during that time, and is only now trying to warn him about this. In other words, our entire second act was predicated on Character A being the biggest damn moron in the universe.

I know I'm not exactly William Goldman here, but I'm going to say with as much authority as I can muster that if your plot depends on one or more characters being so stupid they forget to breathe, your plot needs work.

The point of this anecdote is that we'd previously had a read-through with around twenty people laughing their asses off the whole way, and not one of them had pointed out that the middle of the film made no damn sense. Everybody missed it.

So, the lesson learned from that was that read-throughs are great, but apparently are not a substitute for hard work and thinking deeply about what you're writing.

That being said, back to work.

Labels: writing

Full disclosure.

Once this blog gets a couple readers, some people may wonder why I got a writing assignment like this with no previous credits and a publication history thinner than Paris Hilton and at least as sketchy. The fact is that the production company in question is my half-brother's creation, and he knows that I can write well enough to provide him with what he needs, and that I'm broke enough to work for what he can afford.

Also he totally owes me for all those times in fifth grade when a friendly game of NES Ice Hockey ended in a fistfight. Which was, I swear, invariably his fault.

So I write, he puts together the talent, scares up the investors, gets everyone paid, and does whatever else it is that producers do. Who knows? Those guys with actual practical business skills, they're all crazy. Not like us artsy types.

Thus, even before I've made it to Hollywood, I'm benefiting from its second-oldest tradition: nepotism. Fine by me. If I'd taken this assignment away from some hard-working writer desperate for a break just because I happened to know a studio executive, I'd feel bad. But I didn't. My brother's been a producer since a couple weeks ago, when he decided to become one. In other words, the guy I know isn't a Hollywood Bigwig, he's just another young hungry guy who wants a break. The difference is he's making the break happen himself.

Terry Rossio, in my favorite screenwriting column ever, says that independent films should be called no-permission films, and I agree. Rather than waiting for some guy whose job depends on beating the box office take for BIG MOMMA'S HOUSE 2 to decide he likes our art, we're just gonna go ahead and do it without waiting for someone to say it's okay.

And really, not asking permission is Hollywood's oldest tradition. The reason the film industry is in L.A. is because Thomas Edison was a raging asshole. He took his patents very seriously, and very personally, and had a very broad view of which patents were his. Basically, if he could in any way justify dicking you over on a supposed patent infringement, you could expect to be dicked. Movies back then, just after the turn of the century, were a shady, cheap, fly-by-night kind of business, and they couldn't afford to keep paying Edison protection money. So they headed as far west as they could, out of range of Edison's lawyers and goon squad, so they could make movies without having to ask permission.

My brother's a producer because he says he is. I'm a professional writer because I'm being paid by a producer. The directors and musicians and people he's putting together are likewise mostly not recognized or lauded by the arbiters of their respective arts. But screw it, we didn't ask them.

Labels: writing

It's humbling to have to interrupt one's self-congratulatory monologue about plans to join the WGA and the necessity of getting a good agent to go mooch printer paper off a friend because you've just realized you can't afford to buy more.

Labels: writing

I spend my first post in this blog decrying the writing of specs and bragging smugly about how I'm getting paid for an assignment, and then what do I spend today doing? Working on a spec.

We're having a read-through party for a comedy spec I cowrote with my friend Sylvia, and that means I've got to get a bunch of copies of the script ready on my cheap-ass old printer, which means stocking up on ink and paper, I've got to prepare reference cards for every tiny character in the script, so that partygoers will know when their assigned roles (deathless parts such as "Cube Monkey #2" and "Mormon Ninja") are coming up, and I've got to find a few bucks for beer and snacks. So that's today.

Sylvia and I did a read-through party for our first spec a couple years ago, and it was a total blast. Especially with a comedy, nothing tells you what works and what doesn't like hearing people (especially aspiring actors) do your lines live, and hearing a roomful of people explode in laughter as a result. Or, of course, completely fail to so explode. Both reactions get noted in the margins, and man, are they great for revision purposes. When asking if you can afford to cut a line, knowing whether it got a huge laugh is the most vital piece of information you need.

Then, of course, after the read-through, everyone stands around, drinks beer, splits into little conversational circles, and tells you what they think of your work. Most of these are the usual polite oh-it-was-lovely bullshit, nice to hear but not all that useful, but mixed in with that are the sincere reactions, and some answers to the basic results-question of storytelling: Does it make them feel like it was supposed to make them feel? If the answer is yes, holy Jesus, it's better than sex. Sex is nice, don't get me wrong, but when you know that you took control of someone else's emotional experience and shaped it... that's a power reserved to gods. Well, and call girls.

So I guess that's where I want to be aiming, that exact midway point between a deity and a prostitute.

Labels: writing

So, I've had this blog a few hours and already I'm getting political. I do that. In the event anyone actually reads this, though, that person should by no means miss the incomparable John Rogers laying the intellectual smackdown on the theory that Hollywood is a big liberal conspiracy. Seriously, this is so good it's like watching the entire cast of The West Wing headbutt Larry the Cable Guy into a coma. It's like watching Bertrand Russell beat Pat Robertson to death with the corpse of Thomas Aquinas. It's the kind of thing we all always wish we could say, but in real life or anything resembling it, we never do.

Labels: politics

So, it seems I'm a professional screenwriter, at least for now. And if there's one thing I've learned from the net, it's that screenwriters, they blog. Having no spine whatsoever, I'm going to meekly conform.

I am presently writing a small independent film for a small independent film company that is, as of this writing, slightly older than this blog. In exchange, they're paying me enough money that I don't have to have a day job for the duration of the writing. I am thus a professional screenwriter. I'm elated, and also scared shitless.

When I was a younger man, I firmly decided not to be a screenwriter. My reasoning was, and I quote, "There is no way to win writing screenplays. You labor on something for years, pour yourself into it, and almost invariably no one is at all interested in it. If you're lucky, very lucky, someone gives you money for it, then puts it in a drawer and ignores it. Absolute best case scenario, you get lots of money and then it gets taken away and turned into shit by morons." (That's the nice thing about the internet. Your adolescence is preserved in amber for all time. Then someone finds the amber, clones a bunch of teenage yous, and they run amok...)

Clearly, I have grown either less cynical or more stupid.

That being said, there's an important distinction to be made here. The above-described screenwriting model is based on writing specs, which in this case I am not doing. I have a specific assignment, with a payment schedule and a deadline. I haven't even gotten paid yet and I already like this model better. Specs, from what I can tell, can be likened to a lottery with a smallish jackpot that charges a year's work for a ticket. I've written specs and I have no doubt I will write more. But right now I'm working on an assignment, by which I mean I know where my rent is coming from.

Or, to put it in song, here's an little ditty created by me and my dear friend Sylvia, to the tune of Avenue Q's "There's a Fine, Fine Line":

There's a fine, fine line
Between an archetype and cliché.
And there's a fine, fine line
Between "they're buddies" and "they're gay."
And you'll never know till they write the check
If all your work was worth a dime.
Yes, there's a fine, fine line
Between specs
And a waste of time.

So despite my resolution of eight years ago, here I am. Years of trying, and suddenly I'm a professional screenwriter. With one of those screenwriting blogs, yet.

When I was fourteen, I decided that I would rather have an interesting life than an easy one. And I've lived by that, and it hasn't been easy, but it has been interesting. And now I am what I've wanted to be since I was nine, a full-time writer. And it doesn't look like it's going to be easy.

For the sake of this blog, let's hope it's interesting.

Labels: writing