Maibaap Films

“Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking” | Scott Myers

2012-02-08T14:22:00.000+05:30

From Psychology Today:

1. You are creative.

2. Creative thinking is work.

3. You must go through the motions of being creative.

4. Your brain is not a computer.

5. There is no right answer.

6. Never stop with your first good idea.

7. Expect the experts to be negative.

8. Trust your instincts.

9. There is no such thing as failure.

10. You do not see things as they are; you see them as you are.

11. Always approach a problem on its own terms.

12. Learn to think unconventionally.

I think my two favorites are this:

There is no such thing as failure. Whenever you try to do something and do not succeed, you do not fail. You have learned something that does not work. Always ask "What have I learned about what doesn't work?", "Can this explain something that I didn't set out to explain?", and "What have I discovered that I didn't set out to discover?" Whenever someone tells you that they have never made a mistake, you are talking to someone who has never tried anything new.

Learn to think unconventionally. Creative geniuses do not think analytically and logically. Conventional, logical, analytical thinkers are exclusive thinkers which means they exclude all information that is not related to the problem. They look for ways to eliminate possibilities. Creative geniuses are inclusive thinkers which mean they look for ways to include everything, including things that are dissimilar and totally unrelated. Generating associations and connections between unrelated or dissimilar subjects is how they provoke different thinking patterns in their brain. These new patterns lead to new connections which give them a different way to focus on the information and different ways to interpret what they are focusing on. This is how original and truly novel ideas are created. Albert Einstein once famously remarked "Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand."

And then this summary:

Creativity is paradoxical. To create, a person must have knowledge but forget the knowledge, must see unexpected connections in things but not have a mental disorder, must work hard but spend time doing nothing as information incubates, must create many ideas yet most of them are useless, must look at the same thing as everyone else, yet see something different, must desire success but embrace failure, must be persistent but not stubborn, and must listen to experts but know how to disregard them.

The thing about creative writing: We're not dealing with widgets, rather we're pilgrims in a universe infused with mystery. As desperately as we may want to believe there is some foolproof routine or all-knowing system to write a great story, the truth is writers are wranglers of magic.

And that's the way it should be, at least in terms of being authentically creative, perhaps nowhere more than screenwriting. Anybody can write a formulaic script. It's only writers who go into their story and engage their characters within the context of their story universe as organic, alive and real entities with their own back-stories, personalities, wants, needs, fears and so forth that we tap into the magic.

And so a toast, fellow pilgrim. May we commit ourselves each day to the ever-challenging task of engaging our Creative Self in order to Wrangle the Magic!

For more of the Psychology Today article, go here.

"Twelve Things You Were Not Taught in School About Creative Thinking" | Scott Myers

The Art of Screenwriting No. 1, Billy Wilder | Paris Review

2012-01-29T16:41:00.001+05:30

Legendary stuff from Billy Wilder. What stories he tells! Hilarious and insightful. If you love the guy, go through the (long) interview, else you may check the excerpts below.

The Art of Screenwriting No. 1, Billy Wilder | Paris Review

Excerpts...

Theater vs Pictures
The tragedy of the picture maker, as opposed to the playwright, is that for the playwright the play debuts in Bedford, Massachusetts, and then you take it to Pittsburgh. If it stinks you bury it. If you examine the credits of Moss Hart or George Kaufman, no one ever brings up the play that bombed in the provinces and was buried after four shows.

With a picture that doesn't work, no matter how stupid and how bad, they're still going to try to squeeze every single penny out of it. You go home one night and turn on the TV and suddenly, there on television, staring back at you, on prime time, that lousy picture, that thing, is back! We don't bury our dead; we keep them around smelling badly.

On Disappointments
Now, I do have to admit I was disappointed by the lack of success of some pictures I thought were good, such as Ace in the Hole. I liked the movie very much but it did not generate any "must-see" mood in audiences.

On the other hand, sometimes you'll have a rough time, and the film will turn out all right. On Sabrina I had a very rough time with Humphrey Bogart. It was the first time he'd worked with Paramount. Every evening after shooting, people would have a drink in my office, and a couple of times I forgot to invite him. He was very angry and never forgave me.

Sometimes when you finish a picture you just don't know whether it's good or bad. When Frank Capra was shooting Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night, after the last shot she said, Will that be all Mr. Capra?

We're all done.

All right. Now why don't you go and fuck yourself. She thought the picture was shit, but she won the Academy Award for it.

On Writing Partner, Brackett
After Sunset Boulevard, Brackett and I parted friends. Twelve years together, but the split had been coming. It's like a box of matches: you pick up the match and strike it against the box, and there's always fire, but then one day there is just one small corner of that abrasive paper left for you to strike the match on. It was not there anymore. The match wasn't striking. One of us said, Look, whatever I have to give and whatever you have to offer, it's just not enough. We can end on the good note of Sunset Boulevard. A picture that was revolutionary for its day.

On Writing Partner, Diamond
We had a great deal of trust in each other. But sometimes with writing you just can't tell, especially if you're writing under pressure. Diamond and I were writing the final scene of Some Like It Hot the week before we shot it. We'd come to the situation where Lemmon tries to convince Joe B. Brown that he cannot marry him.

"Why?" Brown says.

"Because I smoke!"

"That's all right as far as I'm concerned."

Finally Lemmon rips his wig off and yells at him, "I'm a boy! Because I'm a boy!"

Diamond and I were in our room working together, waiting for the next line—Joe B. Brown's response, the final line, the curtain line of the film—to come to us. Then I heard Diamond say, "Nobody's perfect." I thought about it and I said, Well, let's put in "Nobody's perfect" for now. But only for the time being. We have a whole week to think about it. We thought about it all week. Neither of us could come up with anything better, so we shot that line, still not entirely satisfied. When we screened the movie, that line got one of the biggest laughs I've ever heard in the theater. But we just hadn't trusted it when we wrote it; we just didn't see it. "Nobody's perfect." The line had come too easily, just popped out.

On Writing Partner, Chandler
He accused me of having as many as three martinis at lunch. Furthermore, he wrote that he found it very disconcerting that Mr. Wilder gets two, three, sometimes even four calls from obviously young girls.

Naturally. I would take a phone call, three or four minutes, to say, Let's meet at that restaurant there, or, Let's go for a drink here. He was about twenty years older than I was, and his wife was older than him, elderly. And I was on the phone with girls! Sex was rampant then, but I was just looking out for myself. Later, in a biography he said all sorts of nasty things about me—that I was a Nazi, that I was uncooperative and rude, and God knows what. Maybe the antagonism even helped. He was a peculiar guy, but I was very glad to have worked with him.

On Writing
To begin to make even a mediocre film you have to learn the rules. You have to know about timing, about creating characters, a little about camera position, just enough to know if what you're suggesting is possible. They pooh-poohed it.

On Fitzgerald
Whenever we saw Scott Fitzgerald there, we'd talk with him, but he never once asked us anything about writing screenplays.

Pictures are something like plays. They share an architecture and a spirit. A good picture writer is a kind of poet, but a poet who plans his structure like a craftsman and is able to tell what's wrong with the third act. What a veteran screenwriter produces might not be good, but it would be technically correct; if he has a problem in the third act he certainly knows to look for the seed of the problem in the first act. Scott just didn't seem particularly interested in any of these matters.

On Hawks
At some point he worked with Howard Hawks on To Have and Have Not, and he cowrote The Land of the Pharaohs. On that movie they went way over schedule with production and far past their estimated costs. On screen, there were thousands of slaves dragging enormous stones to build the pyramids. It was like an ant heap. When they finally finished the film and screened it for Jack Warner, Warner said to Hawks, Well, Howard, if all the people who are in the picture come to see it, we may break even.

On Hecht
Hecht truly endeared himself to the people he worked with. A producer or director would be in a jam . . . the set built, the leads hired, the shooting begun, only to admit to themselves finally that the script they had was unusable. They would bring out Hecht, and he would lie in bed at Charles Lederer's house and on a yellow tablet produce a pile of sheets, a screenplay ready to go. They'd take that night's pages from Hecht's hands, forward them to Mr. Selznick, who'd fiddle with them, have the pages mimeographed and put in the actor's hands by morning. It was a crazy way to work, but Hecht took the work very seriously, though not as seriously as he would a play of his. They call that sort of thing script doctoring. If Hecht had wanted, he could have had credit on a hundred more pictures.

On Lemmon
It was wonderful to work with some actors. Jack Lemmon. If we were to start at nine, he'd be there at eight-fifteen with a mug of coffee and his pages from the night before. He'd say, Last night I was running lines with Felicia—his wife—and had this wonderful idea. What do you think here? And he'd go on. It might be wonderful and we'd use it, or I might just look at him, and then he'd say, Well, I don't like it either. He worked hard and had many ideas, but he never was interfering.

Sometimes I'd have an actor so stubborn that I'd say, All right, let's do it two ways. We'd do it my way, and I'd say to my assistant, Print that. Then to the actor, All right, now your way. We'd do it his way with no celluloid in the camera.

On Producers' Comments

WILDER

I was talking once with a writer who had worked at Columbia who showed me a script that had just been read by Samuel Briskin, one of the big men at that studio. I looked at the script. On every page, there was at the bottom just one word: improve.

INTERVIEWER

Like The New Yorker editor Harold Ross's imperative "make better."

WILDER

That would be one word too many for these producers. Just improve.

On 'Idea Guys'
There was one guy who never wrote a word but who came up with ideas. One of them was: San Francisco. 1906 earthquake. Nelson Eddy. Jeanette McDonald.

Great! Terrific! Cheers from the producers. A film came out of that sentence.

Do you know how Nelson Eddy ended up with his name? He was Eddie Nelson. He just reversed it. Don't laugh! Eddie Nelson is nothing. Nelson Eddy was a star.

On Studio Rivalry
The studio era was of course very different from today. There were many different fiefdoms scattered around town, each producing its own sort of picture. The Paramount people would not converse with the MGM people; wouldn't even see each other. The MGM people especially would not consort for dinner or even lunch with the people from Fox.

One night before I was to begin One, Two, Three I had dinner at the home of Mr. and Mrs. William Goetz, who always had wonderful food. I was seated next to Mrs. Edie Goetz, Louis Mayer's younger daughter, and she asked what sort of picture I was going to make. I told her it was set in Berlin and we'd be shooting in Germany.

Who plays the lead?

Jimmy Cagney. As it happens, it was his last picture except for that cameo in Ragtime.

She said, Who?

Jimmy Cagney. You know, the little gangster who for years was in all those Warner Brothers . . .

Oh! Daddy didn't allow us to watch Warner Brothers pictures. She had no idea who he was.

On Direction
Film's thought of as a director's medium because the director creates the end product that appears on the screen. It's that stupid auteur theory again, that the director is the author of the film. But what does the director shoot—the telephone book? Writers became much more important when sound came in, but they've had to put up a valiant fight to get the credit they deserve.

On Writers & Stars
Nobody consults the movie writer. In production, they just go wildly ahead. If the star has another picture coming up, and they need to finish the picture by Monday, they'll just tear out ten pages. To make it work somehow, they add a few stupid lines.

Brackett and I were writing a picture called Hold Back the Dawn. Back then, no writer was allowed on the set. If the actors and the director weren't interpreting the script correctly, if they didn't have the accent on the right word when they were delivering a gag, if they didn't know where the humor was, a writer might very well pipe up. A director would feel that the writer was creating a disruption.

For Hold Back the Dawn, we had written a story about a man trying to immigrate into the U.S. without the proper papers. Charles Boyer, who played the lead, is at rope's end, destitute, stranded in a filthy hotel—the Esperanza—across the border, near Mexicali or Calexico. He is lying in this lousy bed, holding a walking stick, when he sees a cockroach walk up the wall and onto a mirror hanging on the wall. Boyer sticks the end of the walking stick in front of the cockroach and says, "Wait a minute, you. Where are you going? Where are your papers? You haven't got them? Then you can't enter." The cockroach tries to walk around the stick, and the Boyer character keeps stopping it.

One day Brackett and I were having lunch across the street from Paramount. We were in the middle of writing the third act of the picture. As we left our table to walk out, we saw Boyer, the star, seated at a table, his little French lunch spread out before him, his napkin tucked in just so, a bottle of red wine open on the table. We stopped by and said, Charles, how are you?

Oh, fine. Thank you.

Although we were still working on the script, Mitchell Leisen had already begun to direct the production. I said, And what are you shooting today, Charles?

We're shooting this scene where I'm in bed and . . .

Oh! The scene with the cockroach! That's a wonderful scene.

Yes, well, we didn't use the cockroach.

Didn't use the cockroach? Oh, Charles, why not?

Because the scene is idiotic. I have told Mr. Leisen so, and he agreed with me. How do you suppose a man can talk to some thing that cannot answer you? Then Boyer looked out the window. That was all. End of discussion. As we walked back to the studio to continue to write the third act, I said to Brackett, That son of a bitch. If he doesn't talk to the cockroach, he doesn't talk to anybody! We gave him as few lines as possible . . . wrote him right out of the third act.

On Being a Director
I don't come from the theater or any dramatic school like the Strasberg school, and I didn't particularly have ambitions to be a director, to be a despot of the soundstage. I just wanted to protect the script. It's not that I had a vision or theory I wanted to express as a director; I had no signature or style, except for what I learned from when I was working with Lubitsch and from analyzing his pictures—to do things as elegantly and as simply as possible.

The Art of Screenwriting No. 1, Billy Wilder | Paris Review

Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings | NYTimes.com

2012-01-16T10:30:00.000+05:30

SEEING Lindsay Doran on a midafternoon stroll near her office in Culver City, Calif., you might wonder about this woman with the flowing curls and contemplative smile. Art historian? Massage therapist? Micro-financier? A little of each.

Ms. Doran is in the movie business, and her résumé runs from production executive on "This Is Spinal Tap" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off," to producer of "The Firm," "Sense and Sensibility" and "Stranger Than Fiction," to president of United Artists Pictures, and now an independent producer.

What's not on her résumé is just as intriguing: script doctor, for one, and anti-smoking advocate who helped lead the effort to eliminate on-screen puffing. But the biggest position missing from the official CV is her role as a missionary for mood-elevating films. Terry Rossio, a writer whose credits include "Shrek" and the "Pirates of the Caribbean" movies, playfully describes her as a "Pied Piper, leading all those ratty, bleak and violent screenplays in town over a cliff."

Ms. Doran is an omnivore who likes movies light, dark and in between. But when she attended the Austin Film Festival last year, "something I found both terribly sad and terribly sympathetic," she recently recalled, "is that aspiring screenwriters ask again and again, 'What can I write that a financier wants to make?' Not, 'What can I write that fills me with joy?' "

After reading the book "Flourish," by Martin E. P. Seligman, a catalyst of the positive-psychology movement, she began rewatching films through the lens of what Dr. Seligman identifies as the five essential elements of well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. (He refers to these elements collectively as perma.)

The results surprised her. And they inspired a stealth campaign to reverse the Hollywood superstitions that a "movie is only art if it ends badly, and that you'll only win an Academy Award if you write or direct a movie about misery or play someone miserable," as she put it. During the past six months, at a symposium and in a series of presentations to filmmakers, she has strongly advocated the concept of cinematic Zoloft.

"What shocked us," said Dan Lin, a producer of the Sherlock Holmes films whose team recently watched a Doran presentation, "were Lindsay's points about what audiences care about most — relationships and the positive resolution of those relationships. We had previously thought what was most important was the lead character winning at the end of the movie."

Reflecting at her home here in December Ms. Doran said: "Some people say I'm just talking about formula filmmaking. What I wanted to know is: Why is the formula the formula?" She analyzed box-office hits and critically acclaimed movies on the American Film Institute's favorites lists. She broke down their emotional components, isolated the elements of mood elevation and tested her findings against those of market researchers. She concluded: Positive movies do not necessarily have happy endings; their characters' personal relationships trump personal achievements; and male and female viewers differ in how they define a character's accomplishments.

Ms. Doran had long been drawn to "funny dramas and comedies that make you cry," she said. Now she knew why.

In a July presentation before the Second World Congress of the International Positive Psychology Association in Philadelphia Ms. Doran recalled her first "aha!" moment, when she recognized that the perma elements of well-being that Dr. Seligman, a University of Pennsylvania professor, had identified were the basis of the movies that made her, and others, happy. She showed how these five factors were embedded in films as far-flung as "Ferris Bueller" (characters who displayed positive emotions throughout), "The Godfather" (characters fully engaged in what they're doing throughout) and "The Karate Kid" (a character completely focused on accomplishment).

"It's no surprise to say that American movies specialize in stories of accomplishment," she told her audience, adding later, "When Jennifer Grey finally dares to make the scary leap at the end of 'Dirty Dancing,' when the Karate Kid performs the impossible kick that wipes out his opponent, or when King George VI gets through his wartime speech without stammering — those accomplishments are among the great pleasures of cinema."

Ms. Doran's second "aha!" moment came when she consulted a veteran market researcher who oversees hundreds of previews annually. "I listed the five elements of well-being, and he said, 'I can already tell you one thing: Audiences don't care about accomplishments.' " She was thunderstruck. Wasn't the Hollywood ending about accomplishment?

No, he said, adding: "Audiences don't care about an accomplishment unless it's shared with someone else. What makes an audience happy is not the moment of victory but the moment afterwards when the winners shares that victory with someone they love." So she mentally rewound the concluding scenes of these "accomplishment" films. Ms. Grey leaps into the arms of Patrick Swayze at the end of "Dirty Dancing," and after that she reconciles with her father. Jaden Smith performs that impossible kick at the end of "The Karate Kid," but afterward makes peace with his opponent and shares the moment with his mother and trainer. Colin Firth conquers his stammer at the end of "The King's Speech," and then shares his victory with his wife, daughters and the crowds cheering outside the palace. The film closes with a title card that reads that the king and his speech therapist remained friends for the rest of their lives.

"Three generations of psychiatry and psychology have been suborned by finances to the misery agenda," Dr. Seligman said in an interview, explaining why there is not much government grant money to support research on mood-elevating films. "Movies are a form of soma," he said, referring to the idea of an uplifting drug, and he hypothesized that "more perma-like movies would make people's lives better, but nobody's researched that."

Jonathan Haidt, a University of Virginia professor of psychology and the author of "The Happiness Hypothesis," said, "People not only use movies and music as soma to feel good, they use it to open themselves to others." It may follow that watching narratives about positive relationships in a darkened room alongside others is elevating.

Not long after Ms. Doran's insights about the nature of movie accomplishment and relationships, she realized that relationship movies were gender-specific. In movies aimed at men and boys, she said, "there is the goal, the thing the hero is trying to accomplish." Then, she continued, "there's the relationship, usually with a woman, child, friend or father. Usually at the end the hero realizes the relationship is more important than the accomplishment." But in most movies geared toward women, she realized, the relationship is the accomplishment.

"Some would say that this is patronizing to women," Ms. Doran said, but she saw it differently: "Maybe it just means that women have figured it out."

When she shared this with some female producers, she said, they were surprised.

The actress Emma Thompson said in an e-mail, "My initial reaction to Lindsay's presentation was a bit like when you read something in a book and think you've always known it," but then you realize "the only reason you thought you knew it is because it's so well put and so clear." (Parenthetically she added, "Sometimes a comedy like 'Spinal Tap' is as good as a double dose of paracetamol.")

Ms. Thompson, who has worked with Ms. Doran on five movies including "Sense and Sensibility," was struck by three of her conclusions. First, some of the most elevating American movies "are about people desperate to achieve something that they do not get to achieve." (George Bailey in "It's a Wonderful Life" doesn't get to travel the world, Atticus Finch in "To Kill a Mockingbird" doesn't win an acquittal for his client.) Second, many of the greatest romances ("Roman Holiday," "Casablanca") are about lovers who can't or don't remain together. And in many of the most successful movies of all time accomplishment is accompanied by incalculable loss: In Ms. Doran's words, "Obi-Wan dies, Dumbledore dies, Gandalf dies, 1,500 passengers on the Titanic die, thousands of Pandorans die." The protagonist may be happy at the end, "but his smile," she said, "is laced with the loss that's come before."

What this suggested to her is that "the accomplishment the audience values most is not when the heroine saves the day or the hero defeats his opponent." Instead, she said, "the accomplishment the audience values most is resilience."

So where does Ms. Doran go from here? As she continues speaking with filmmakers and studios, she said in an e-mail: "I think the thing that they're getting out of it is that the 'happy ending,' the one that is most memorable and might make people go back to see the film a second time, might not be about winning. It might be about not winning, about finding something deeper that means more than victory."

"A lot of people seem stunned," she added, that ending with a character who survives loss "might be both the more inspiring and the more commercial way to end a movie."

Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings | NYTimes.com

FSFF's Favourite Online Film Studies Resources in 2011 | FSFF - Catherine Grant

2011-12-24T12:21:00.000+05:30

Not since its December 2008 blog entry A-Z of Favourite Scholarly Film and Moving Image Blogs has the otherwise intrepid Film Studies For Free ventured into the rather crowded, online territory of end-of-year lists.

But, as it signs off on its seasonal break until the first few days of 2012, FSFF thought the time was right for a listing of links to its favourite, openly accessible, online Film Studies resources in 2011.

Thanks so much to all who worked hard to bring you these openly accessible treasures in the first place. And thanks also, dear readers, for being there to appreciate them.

FSFF very much looks forward to seeing you again in the New Year.

Top seven film and moving image studies history resources online in 2011:

The Colonial Film Project archive plus two freely accessible chapters by those involved in the project: Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Empire and Film (BFI/Palgrave, 2011) and 32 sample pages; and Lee Grieveson and Colin MacCabe (eds), Film and the End of Empire (BFI/Palgrave, 2011) and 25 sample pages
Media History Digital Library
The Turconi Project
EU Screen
European Film Gateway
The Permanent Seminar on Histories of Film Theories
The Kracauer Lectures website

Top five, most consistently brilliant Film Studies bloggers:

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson for Observations on Film Art
Luke McKernan for The Bioscope (also see McKernan's two new ScoopIt! projects: The Bioscope and Screen Research)
Roland-François Lack for The Cine-Tourist, The Daily Map and The BlowUp Moment (also see The Autopsies Group website) and also on Twitter
Dan North for Spectacular Attractions (also see The Cinema of Puppetry) and also on Twitter
Tie between Michael J. Anderson and Lisa K. Broad for Tativille and Ten Best Films; and Omar Ahmed for Ellipsis

Best new Film Studies blog: Katherine Groo's Half/Films
Best 'media studies approaches to film and moving image studies' blog - tie between:

Just TV by Jason Mittell (also on Twitter)
Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style by Anne Helen Petersen (also on Twitter)
The Chutry Experiment by Chuck Tryon (also on Twitter)
The Negarponti Files by Negar Mottahedeh (also on Twitter and Facebook)

Most consistently original, Film and Moving Image Studies writer active online - a tie between:

Adrian Martin (e.g. see all the links here)
Nicholas Rombes (e.g. see here and here)
Amanda Ann Klein (also see here)
David Bordwell
Kristin Thompson (also see here and here)
Jeffrey Sconce (also see here)

Best Film Studies informed, commercial film criticism website: Alternate Takes
Best new online film journal in 2011 - a tie between:

LOLA edited by Adrian Martin and Girish Shambu
ALPHAVILLE edited by Laura Rascaroli and others at the University of Cork
JOAN'S DIGEST edited by Miriam Bale

Best recently established online academic Film Studies journal: MOVIE: A Journal of Film Criticism
Top twelve established, online, (mostly) English language, Film Studies journals:

Screening the Past
Film-Philosophy
SCOPE
Jump Cut
Senses of Cinema
MEDIASCAPE
Participations
Bright Lights Film Journal
CINEPHILE
Offscreen
La Furia Umana
World Picture Journal
For links to one hundred more journals (including some brilliant, primarily non-English language journals, like Transit: Cine..., see here)

Most generous, Open Access Film Studies author: Thomas Elsaesser for the below freely accessible e-books and for the hundreds of further resources linked to from his website:

Best online cinephile news and criticism site: MUBI Notebook (thanks so much to David Hudson and Daniel Kasman for their brilliant work)
Best cinephile salon site - a tie between:

Dave Kehr's place
Girish Shambu's place

Best seven multimedia/multiplatform/multichannel-style film and moving image studies websites:

Most impactful online Film Studies work in 2011 - a tie between:

Tim Smith's work on how movie viewers watch, showcased here as well as on his blog Continuity Boy and his research site.
Matthias Stork's video essays on Chaos Cinema (see FSFF's original post on this)
Aitor Gametxo's video essay: Variation: THE SUNBEAM, David W. Griffith, 1912
Steven Shaviro's work on Post-Cinematic Affect: see here for lots of links

FSFF's favourite Film Studies academic links on Twitter: @filmdrblog (also see the Film Doctor's actual blog)
FSFF's favourite non-academic, film studies-informed, online film critics - a tie between:

Srikanth Srinivasan (also on Twitter)
Matt Zoller Seitz (also on Twitter
Kevin B Lee (also on Twitter here and here)
Jim Emerson (also on Twitter)
Jonathan Rosenbaum (also on Twitter)
Ignatiy Vishnevetsky (also on Twitter)
Farran Smith Nehme (also on Twitter)
Marilyn Ferdinand and Roderick Heath (also on Twitter here and here) and see Rod's blog
Anne Billson (also writing for the Guardian and on Twitter)
David Cairns (also on Twitter)

FSFF's ten favourite FSFF blogposts (and blogpost clusters) in 2011:

FSFF's most read post in 2011 by some distance was "An incarnation of the modern": In Memory of Miriam Bratu Hansen, 1949-2011
Most popular resource at FSFF: Open Access Film E-books List
Best search engine for Open Access Film Studies (and other Arts and Humanities resources): JURN (thanks, as ever, to the indefatigable David Haden)

FSFF's Favourite Online Film Studies Resources in 2011 | FSFF - Catherine Grant

Roger Corman remains unflinching in the face of an evolving industry | Kristopher Tapley

2011-11-27T12:54:00.000+05:30

"I think to succeed in this world, you have to take chances. I believe the finest films being done today are done by the original, innovative filmmakers who have the courage to take a chance and to gamble. So I say to you, keep gambling, keep taking chances."

More...
Roger Corman remains unflinching in the face of an evolving industry | HitFix.com - Kristopher Tapley

Writer’s Style: An Introduction | My PDF Scripts

2011-11-09T20:10:00.000+05:30

Howdy. Sheridan here. I've decided to take a crack at (what I hope will be) a new and continuing column of the site. No promises on how often I'll actually get around to a new post, but hopefully I'll be able to con some guests into helping me out by spotlighting their own screenwriting favorites.

So what's this all about, then?

Well, I've often thought about and, especially, as of late, have become increasingly interested in writing style.

As I pore through the many screenplays that I currently have – organizing, reading, and reading, and reading, etc. – it's hard not to realize the effect a writer's style can have on a screenplay and the film overall. I know some of you are uttering the words duh! at this very moment, but honestly, how many people, especially we burgeoning lot, are actually aware of this fact?

The more I read the more I begin to realize that some writers have an indisputable style that is all their own. A style so eccentric, so different, that without ever seeing a cover page, you can instinctively and intrinsically just know who wrote it. Just take a look at action lines by Wes Anderson or dialogue by John Sayles or the dark undertones of Paul Schrader or the balls out craziness of Tim Talbott or the fourth-wall-breaking of Shane Black or the heartfelt absurd themes of Charlie Kaufman.

If any one thing is quickly apparent when studying the craft of screenwriting, it's that good screenwriters do, indeed, have their own style. They may tackle myriad genres or a host of varying stories, but one thing is always overtly certain: it is their story.

And it makes sense: if directors can be known for their visual style, well, then, why not writers for their written style? Sure, most of the writers I mentioned earlier also wields a director credit or two, but that's the point: at some point their voice became so uniquely their own that no one else could tell their story the way they could. And as an aspiring writer/director myself, this is a lesson I've taken immense pleasure in discovering and learning.

It's exactly like that lesson you've read in every screenwriting how-to book currently gathering dust on your bookshelf: give me the same thing, only different. But here's the bit that I think has been routinely left out: give me the same thing, only different, and make it your own. The goal isn't simply to parrot what's come before and modernize it and/or give it a different twist. The goal is to tell me the story in your voice.

I can't tell you the number of screenplays that I've read that are absolutely, atrociously, make-me-wanna-take-hot-spoons-to-my-eyeballs boring. Why? Most aspiring screenwriters can grasp structure fairly quickly; to connect A to B to C isn't that difficult to comprehend, but what they seem to overlook is that they're supposed to be telling me a story.

No, I mean you are supposed to be telling me a story.

You.

Yes, you.

Still not getting it?

If I were to walk into the room that you're currently in, take a seat with my cup of coffee, and say, "Okay, tell me your story." How long could you hold my attention?

One cup?

Two cups?

Four pots?

It's no different on the page. When you write, I want you to tell me the story. What I don't want is the same cookie-cutter b******t everyone else is throwing at me.

No, g*******t, I want you to rip your f*****g larynx out of your throat and staple that f****r to the page and sign the byline in blood.

Because I want YOU to tell me the story. I want to hear your voice when I read it. I want the story to be so uniquely your own, and I want it to command my attention so ragingly, that it makes me weep when I have to read the words FADE OUT.

So, as a good introduction to Writer's Style, I suggest you download The Robotard 8000′s Balls Out and, for better or worse, I dare you to argue that – from the very first line of the script – it's not uniquely their own.

And while you're reading that, I'll be working on a write-up of the writer whose style I've been wanting to spotlight for quite a while now: that of Walter Hill.

Writer's Style: An Introduction | My PDF Scripts

I Hate Dialogue | ScriptShadow

2011-11-06T16:51:00.001+05:30

"You think you can write dialogue like me? YOU think you can write dialogue like ME??"

I hope you don't think you're going to learn a lot about dialogue in this article. Dialogue is a constant battle for me. It's something I don't totally understand. The reason for this is that dialogue is the one aspect of screenwriting you can't truly "break down." You can't divide dialogue into three acts. You can't add a character arc to dialogue. You can't give dialogue backstory. You simply write down the voices in your head. And while some people have interesting voices to draw from, others don't.

The funny thing is, dialogue looks so damn easy from afar! In fact, it's why most people get into screenwriting. They think, "I can write better dialogue than THAT!" So they dive in, write up 120 usually autobiographical pages (likely the crazy adventures of them and their friends – "Our life is just like a movie!!!"), show it to their inner circle, get a bunch of polite but suspiciously distant "I liked its" punctuated by one brave soul who's willing to say what everybody's thinking: "I don't get it. It's just a bunch of people talking."

Ohhhh. You learn your first lesson. Dialogue actually has to have a POINT! It actually has to move the story forward. Why didn't somebody tell me? Quentin Tarantino has ten minute scenes about Royals with Cheese. Why can't I do that? Because you're not Quentin Tarantino. You're you. And "you" has to learn that within every scene of dialogue, there must be a purpose. In fact, you should be doing SEVERAL things with your dialogue at once. And that's where we learn just how difficult dialogue is. Sure, if all you had to do was have characters talk, dialogue would be easy. Instead, there are five main things that need to be accomplished whenever characters speak. Let's take a look at them.

MOVE THE STORY FORWARD – Every scene should have a point. It should be moving the plot along in some way. If a problem is introduced into your story and a scene goes by without the characters attempting to address that problem, guess what? You're not moving your story forward. So when your characters are talking, make sure the majority of what they say centers around pushing their own goals and needs along. You do that, you'll be pushing the story forward. If no one wants anything? If characters just talk about life and stuff? Your dialogue isn't doing its job.

REVEAL CHARACTER – You want to use your dialogue to tell us more about your characters. Screenplays are short. They're not like TV shows where you have hundreds of hours to delve into a character's life. Therefore you have to sneak character development in wherever you can. Dialogue certainly isn't the only way to do this, but it's one way. If a character says he just spent three hours at the gym, that tells us he's a workout freak. If a character always talks about his ex-girlfriend, that tells us he's not over his ex-girlfriend. One of the big ways to reveal character through dialogue is to identify your character's fatal flaw and keep hitting on it throughout the script. Look at Rocky. Here's a character who doesn't fully believe in himself. So we get a scene where he expresses fear at the idea of fighting Apollo. We get a scene where he nervously flirts with Adrian. We get a scene where Mick tells him he's a bum. The dialogue is constantly reminding us that Rocky doesn't believe in himself yet, which is a key part of his character.

EXPOSITION – Exposition is the worst. It's hard enough to make dialogue sound good on its own. Now we have to waste it on logistical story elements every 8 minutes? It's like trying to pick up a girl and then her disapproving friend walks up. The words just don't come out as easily. This is why the trick with exposition is to simplify what you need to say and convey it in as few words as possible. Exposition is always going to trip up your dialogue a LITTLE bit. But at least this way you minimize the damage.

KEEP IT UNDER 2 PAGES – To me, this is one of the hardest things about dialogue. If we had 5-6 pages for every conversation, dialogue would be as easy as accusing Justin Bieber of fathering your baby (baby baby ohhhhh...). But the average film scene is 2 minutes long. 2 MINUTES! That's only 2 pages for your characters to say everything they gotta say. This is why new writers hear this critique so much: "Cut cut cut cut cut." You gotta cut everything down to its bare essence because you don't have time in your scene to include all the bullshit. Sure, some scenes are longer than others. A five minute dialogue scene is not unheard of. But it's still rare. Which means learning how to scrunch all your dialogue into a very small space.

ENTERTAIN – This is the scariest part of all when it comes to dialogue. After you do all that stuff – the story, the exposition, the characters, the minimizing – the dialogue still has to entertain us! It still has to sound like two people talking in real life, even though in real life, every one of these conversations would probably go on for more than an hour! That means going back, smoothing it all out, editing it, rearranging it, adding a joke or two, and continuously asking yourself, "Does this sound like two people really talking?" Until the answer is "Yes," keep rewriting it.

Now that we know the stipulations working against us for writing brilliant dialogue, let's talk about the tools you can use to fight these inhibitors. I don't have all the answers. I fight against dialogue every day. That said, I know these five tools help improve dialogue.

COME IN LATE, LEAVE EARLY
This was mentioned in the comments the other day and it's a great tip – especially for beginners. Come into your scene as late as possible and leave your scene as early as possible. In other words, only give us the meat of the scene. Not the fat. Say your characters are meeting at a coffee shop. Tom is getting the coffee while Sarah waits at the table. Tom says, "What do you want again!?" "A double mocha decaf!" "Large?!" "Uhh, yeah, large!" Tom waits, grabs the coffees, walks over, sits down, a moment for the two to get settled, they ease into a conversation…and then SOMEWHERE around here they actually start talking about the story. UHHHHHHH…NO! Why the hell would you include all that irrelevant nonsense?? Start with them ALREADY AT THE TABLE WITH THEIR COFFEES. Catch them five minutes into their conversation, right when they're talking about the important stuff. That's what I mean by "Come in late." Then, as soon as you've met the point of your scene, get out. Once Obi-Wan and Luke agree on a transport fee with Han in the Cantina scene, they don't sit around for another five minutes chatting about the weather on Kashyyyk. We cut away. Now obviously there's some flexibility in this rule. Sometimes you want William Wallace to take his time riding through the village, building up the suspense, before he BEATS DOWN the English. But for the most part, coming in late and getting out early will keep your dialogue focused and on point. You won't write a bunch of boring shit if you only include the meat.

SET-UP
The best dialogue scenes are set up ahead of time by carefully building up your character's goals, secrets, motivations, etc. You then place them in a scene (preferably with something at stake), and watch the dialogue write itself. For example, Joe and Jane talking about their friend's wedding is boring. But if we find out beforehand that Jane plans to kill Joe in this scene, talking about that wedding becomes a lot more interesting. Paul meeting his potential father-in-law is mildly entertaining. But if Paul's girlfriend tells him beforehand that she'll never marry someone her father doesn't approve of, now Paul meeting his father-in-law is SUPER entertaining. Watching Mick beg Rocky to be his coach is a strong scene no matter where it is in the film. But the reason it's a classic is because we watched Mick kick Rock out of his gym and tell him he didn't believe in him earlier. So if a scene isn't working, go back in your script and see if you can set it up better. Once you find the right situation, the dialogue will write itself.

SUBTEXT/DRAMATIC IRONY
This is one of the best ways to improve your dialogue. Give one character a secret. Give both characters a secret. Or tell the audience something the characters don't know. If you do any of these things, you'll create subtext, unspoken words beneath the text. If we know that Frank plans to break up with JoJo, then anything they talk about before the break-up will have subtext. If Julie secretly likes Tom and the two accidentally get stuck in the bathroom at a party, anything they talk about (Math class, bird watching, dinosaurs) will have subtext. There are other ways to achieve subtext (which you guys are free to highlight in the comments section) but this approach tends to create the most powerful dialogue situations.

STAY AWAY FROM ON THE NOSE
When we first write dialogue for a scene, we often think literally. If a character asks, "Are you thirsty?" We might have the other character respond, "Yes. Could you get me some water?" That's a very literal on-the-nose response. Most people talk in and around what they're trying to say instead of saying exactly what they're thinking. They use slang, sarcasm, manipulation, indifference, caution – any number of things – to keep the conversation off-center. Rarely does dialogue go down a straight path. So let's ask that question again. "Are you thirsty?" A more interesting response might be, "No, my lips always dry up and bleed like this." Your characters are not robots. Nobody speaks literally. So make sure you're mucking up the dialogue and that no one is speaking on-the-nose.

KNOW YOUR FUCKING CHARACTERS (KYFC)
Writers hate doing character biographies because it takes so much damn time, but holy hell does it work. Why? Because the more you know about your character, the more specific you can make their dialogue. Bad dialogue is usually general – vague, non-specific. Rick comes home late one night and spots his roommate, Jed, on the couch. "What's up man?" "Not much. How'd your day go?" "Shitty. I'm exhausted." This is the most general boring conversation EVER. Let's say I did some character biographies ahead of time though and found out that Rick is an aspiring actor and Jed is a compulsive gambler. Let's try this again. (Rick stumbles in) "I've got two words: Fuck Stanislofsky." "I need to borrow money." Rick gives Jed a look. Jed: "What?? How was I supposed to know Vick would tear his MCL." "I'm not giving you any more money." "Come on. The Raiders are a sure thing." It ain't going to win any Academy awards but it's certainly better than "How'd your day go?" Why? Because it's SPECIFIC. It reveals character. It has the people in the scene saying things only they would say. Do your homework on your characters. I promise it will pay off.

And that's all I got my friends. I know it's not the end all article on dialogue but the truth is I don't know everything about dialogue. Which is why I'm turning to you. Please. I want to learn. Tell me how YOU approach this aspect of screenwriting. What tips and tricks help you? This is the least defined area of screenwriting. Let's try and crack it.

I Hate Dialogue | ScriptShadow

You are my density | David Bordwell

2011-11-05T19:57:00.000+05:30

DB here:

The mobster Joseph Rico is in protective custody; tomorrow he testifies against the big boss. But Rico fears reprisals, so he decides to escape. While a sleepy cop guards him in the washroom, he bends over the sink and rinses his face.

Turning so suddenly that water spatters on the mirror, he grabs the cop in an armlock and slams his head against the sink, just below the frameline.

Rico turns to the window to make his escape.

What interests me in this passage from The Enforcer (1951) is not just what happens in the mirror but also what happens on it. While Rico belabors the cop's head, we're given a chance to notice the splash of water that hit the mirror when Rico whirled to the attack. While the action is moving forward, we're reminded of what had triggered it.

We get a sort of parallel reminder in the next scene, when we see the wounded cop again. He's sporting a big bruise on his left temple, a souvenir of Rico's assault.

Pfui. Details, you might say. Or you might (correctly) instance this as another case of Charles Barr's enlightening notion of gradation of emphasis. But it's worth getting a little more specific, because even this simple scene (by non-auteur director Bretaigne Windust) offers us something to think about, and something for today's filmmakers to try.

Most films today don't fully exploit the visual dimension of cinema. True, we have dazzling CGI and fancy camera moves. But when it comes to less flamboyant scenes, directors have limited their options by relying too much on stand-and-deliver and walk-and-talk. There are other aspects of visual storytelling that today's filmmakers neglect. One aspect is the possibility of gracefully moving actors around the set in a sustained fixed shot. A specific tactic I've mentioned before is the Cross, and another involves ways to get people into a room. The option I'm going to sermonize about today is what I'll call scenic density.

By scenic density I mean an approach to staging, shooting, and cutting in which selected details or areas change their status in the course of the action. I don't count the bustle of background business, all that street traffic that is so much pictorial excelsior in our movies. Nor do I refer to stuffing the setting with desk and kitchen flotsam, allusive pop-culture posters, and the other distinctive "assets" that will be exploited when the film's world gets transposed to a videogame. I mean something more expressive and intriguing.

Using it up

Go back to the Enforcer scene. The shot's composition creates a delimited zone of action. The guard cop is framed tightly in the mirror. When the fight breaks out, it's initially framed in that mirror–a narrowing of visual importance. Moreover, the shot is designed to highlight the spatter on the mirror. It's fairly prominent, stuck near the center and, providentially, in the spot that the cop's head initially occupied. The lighting picks out the drips, and in a shot where the figures move in and out of frame, there isn't an equally constant center of interest. We're probably concentrating on Rico's punishing of the cop, but the dribbles of water remain prominent enough to claim our interest, especially when Rico passes out of frame.

So here's my first condition for scenic density: the shot keeps several items of dramatic significance salient in the composition.

This technical choice asks the filmmaker to think of the frame as a field of dynamic masses and forces. Such an idea was part of the aesthetic of "advanced" European and Japanese silent cinema of the 1920s. Many directors explored this dynamism, often aided by low angles and wide-angle lenses. Here are examples from Eisenstein's Old and New and Murnau's Tartuffe.

This pictorial density became especially prominent in American cinema during the 1940s, when low angles, wide-angle lenses, and locations and smaller sets encouraged cinematographers to pack their compositions snugly, as in this shot from Panic in the Streets.

Boris Kaufman, cinematographer for Jean Vigo and Elia Kazan, summed up the principle:

The space within the frame should be entirely used in the composition.

Since cinema is a time-bound art, however, the salient elements in the shot could and should change. But if the frame space is wholly "used," what room is there for change? The only options are to have the using-up elements shift position, or to reveal that the frame isn't used up.

Vivid instances, also from the 1940s, can be seen in Anthony Mann's work, both with and without John Alton. Generally, Mann used the new fashion for depth composition, especially big foreground elements, to heighten scenes of violence. Physical action becomes more aggressive if people rush the camera and halt in tight close-up, especially because wide-angle lenses tend to accelerate movement to the foreground. Mann thrusts violence abruptly to the camera with an almost comic-book effect, as when the club owner is shot in Railroaded, or a man is flung to the floor in Raw Deal.

Even when this in-your-face tactic isn't employed, the Mann films find ingenious ways to develop what seem to be completely locked depth compositions. In Border Incident, Ulrich confronts the Mexican government agent Pablo, disguised as a Bracero. A looming depth shot is followed by a reverse shot displaying a compact composition.

Is the frame space fully used? The second shot above is opened up when Ulrich leans forward to sock Pablo, creating a vacant spot on the far right for Pablo to fall into. The shot is emptied and re-filled, dense once more.

Memories, memories

Aha, you may be saying. Density just refers to squinchy, fussy shots from an era that favored cheap flash. No. The Enforcer shot isn't all that cramped. Of course the blank, unchanging walls serve to highlight the mirror-reflected fight and the water dribbling down the glass, but you can imagine how much more jammed and skewed Mann's treatment of Rico's escape would be. As for the flashier depth, I just needed some clear-cut cases of density, examples in which details and spatial zones become starkly salient. Now I want to suggest that scenic density can be achieved in something more spacious, even monumental. That has to do with time and memory.

Part of what gives the Enforcer shot its interest is the superimposition of two moments of action in a single space: Rico's diversionary turn from the washstand, recorded in the splash he made on the mirror, and the struggle taking place a few seconds later. A further trace of that struggle and that splash is visible in the bruise on the cop's head in the next scene.

That dripping spatter can stand in for the second quality of spatial density I want to highlight: Its capacity to coax us to recall earlier action in the locale. Characters leave their marks and spoors in the space, and those get activated as memories. Unlike the slick surfaces of today's settings, in classic films the settings can bear the impress of human transit, leading us to recall bits of behavior and emotional states. Let me illustrate from Lang's Hangmen Also Die (1943).

It's Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia, and Gestapo Inspector Ritter is questioning Mrs. Dvorak, the vegetable seller who could identify the woman who misled the officers pursuing an assassin. Torture, or at least what we think of as torture, hasn't started. She is simply standing in front of his desk as he brandishes his riding crop in the manner of a good movie Nazi.

When Mrs. Dvorak denies knowing the woman, Ritter taps the back-rest of the chair. It simply falls off, and we realize it's not fastened to the chair.

Ritter says, "Pick it up again." Now we realize that intimidation has been applied for some while; Ritter has made the woman stoop to replace the back-rest many times. She does so again as the camera tracks back. This is nicely detailed too. She starts to pick it up by bending over, finds the effort too painful, and then goes to her knees to pick it up–just as Ritter taps his riding crop against her hand, a teacher gently chiding a slow pupil.

As Mrs. Dvorak rises to put the piece back in place, the camera pans slightly right to pick up the woman bringing in a tray. Happily Ritter sniffs the coffee jug and resumes questioning the old woman.

Cut to a shot of her by the chair. "Let's start from the beginning," says Ritter, offscreen. Unthinkingly Mrs Dvorak starts to rest her hand on the loose slat, forgetting that the top slat is unattached. It's a natural response. She's been standing there for a long time and would like something to rest on, and the chair is temptingly close. (Presumably, that's its purpose, to taunt the unwary prisoner forced to stand a long time.) Remembering just in time, she yanks her hand away. If she knocks the back-rest off, she'll just have to pick it up again.

Cut to Ritter. "Don't be nervous, Mrs. Dvorak. I'm prepared to—"

Cut to Mrs. Dvorak. As he continues, "–devote to you all of tonight," she forgets herself again and relaxes her hand, this time on the back-rest. It falls off, making her start.

She looks up as Ritter says, offscreen: "Even longer if necessary." Cut to Ritter, gesturing with a piece of sausage and saying, coaxingly, "Well?"

Slowly she goes to her knees again as the camera tracks in on her.

Back to Ritter: "That's the girl." Back to her, rising in pain to replace the back-rest.

The scene concludes with Ritter reminding Mrs. Dvorak that she's in Gestapo headquarters. She acknowledges that she doesn't expect to leave without giving information. He starts his questioning all over again as the scene fades out.

This quietly suspenseful scene establishes a bit of furniture as a key prop. Once the faulty back-rest is marked for our notice, we're expected to remember that it's a means of intimidation–something that Mrs. Dvorak, in her anxiety about refusing to aid the Nazis, twice forgets. Lang's shots, simple and uncrowded, makes the chair, like the spattered mirror in The Enforcer, preserve the trace of human activity. Yet it's more acutely integrated into the scene's drama than the mirror, and remembering how it was used earlier makes us wait tensely to see how it will be used again.

Long-term density

Several scenes later, the Nazis threaten to kill four hundred Czech hostages if the assassin isn't turned over to them. Mascha Novotny has set out for Gestapo headquarters to denounce the man she helped, but she changes her mind and decides not to betray her country. She will only plead for her father's life. Once more we're in Ritter's office.

Centered in the frame, standing out as a pale oblong against the grayer background, the fateful chair is made salient during Mascha's conversation with Gruber. I suspect there's a sort of spatial suspense here–will she move to the chair and dislodge the precarious piece of wood?–but more important, I think, is the fact that the chair ineluctably reminds us of Mrs. Dvorak and her quiet resistance to pressure.

Ritter leaves to consult his superiors. When he comes back, a new composition keeps the chair prominent and lends a new centrality to the clock on Ritter's desk, surmounted by a snarling cat or something like it. (It's visible in shadow in the earlier scene with Mrs. Dvorak.) But now the camera arcs to minimize the Dvorak chair and show the beast and Ritter targeting Mascha.

Soon enough, as if to make sure we remember, Mrs. Dvorak is brought back in, having undergone serious torture. The camera positions reactivate our memories of the earlier scene.

As she continues to lie to protect Mascha, Mrs. Dvorak never touches the chair. Although she has been tortured, she seems wearily defiant, as if her refusal to aid the Nazis has given her some strength: no need to lean on the chair now. As a final cue to our memories, Lang has Ritter play once more with his riding crop, letting its shadow fall on her heart.

The threat is clear: For lying, the old woman will pay with her life.

The chair reappears in a later scene, but I'd argue that then it serves more as a pointer to another prop. The resistance movement fights back by framing Czaka, a beer baron sympathetic to the Nazis, as the assassin. Lang could have explicitly recalled the questioning of Mrs. Dvorak by having Czaka lean on the slat and knock it off. Instead, the composition makes Ritter's clock more important than it was in earlier shots. As Czaka tries to defend himself, the framing blocks our view of the chair but emphasizes the snarling catlike creature on top of the clock. And the chair has shifted a little off and become a bit darker; it's no longer as salient.

This cluster of scenes from Hangmen Also Die illustrates how scenic density can add layers to a film. One scene recalls another not only by similarity of situation and locale but by tangible marks left on it by earlier action. Having seen Mrs. Dvorak subjected to Ritter's oily intimidation, we generally expect something like it to be applied to Anna. This conventional situation is given a rich, concrete presentation by the repeated camera positions and the simple chair that, unmoving, enters into the drama.

Of course as a Hollywood director, Lang was pressured to reuse sets and camera setups. That saved money and time. But he turned such repetitions to his advantage by letting certain objects come forward at crucial moments. They not only become part of the drama but prime us to remember them, and what they revealed, in ensuing scenes. And even though Lang never pursued the aggressive, packed deep-focus of other directors working in the 1940s, he shows how roomier, less pressurized compositions could still be charged with echoes of earlier bits of behavior.

Is this sort of visual-dramatic economy, calling on precise memories of concrete actions, lost in today's American cinema? I suspect it is.

In studying Hangmen Also Die, I was curious about a perennial problem. Was the byplay with the chair a Lang invention on the set, or was it some version of the script, or in the original story by Lang and Bertolt Brecht?

The film didn't have a secret script, as the poster says, but the sources do remain a bit obscure. A draft of the original story signed by Lang and Brecht, in that order, exists. It indicates only that the greengrocer, called Frau Blaschke, is subjected to eight hours of "the usual Gestapo brutality" and refuses to identify the girl. There were other drafts of the screenplay, but I don't have access to them, if they exist, and standard sources on Brecht in Hollywood don't mention this scene's details.

Somewhere along the line, though, the chair-back business was concocted. I found the shooting script signed only by John Wexley (Brecht claimed that he was robbed of credit) and annotated in pencil, perhaps by Lang. That script indicates that Ritter's room contains "a vacant chair with its seat close against desk." and Mrs. Dvorak is standing beside it as the scene begins. Much of the dialogue is the same , with some slight changes notated in pencil, possibly by Lang. But the camera movements indicated are different from those in the final film, and more importantly so are the actions. After Mrs. Dvorak claims that she doesn't know the woman who helped the assassin, we read the following. I indicate pencil notations with {}.

In her fatigue, she places hand on back-rest of chair. But its dowels are loose and back-rest clatters to the floor.

RITTER (saccharine): Pick it up, Mrs. Dvorak.

CAMERA MOVES IN CLOSE as she obeys, stooping with painful fatigue–she has done this many times tonight.

RITTER: Now put it back in place, Mrs. Dvorak.

(She does so)

As Ritter questions her:

MED. SHOT – MRS. DVORAK. Without thinking, she is about to place hand again on loose back-rest–when she remembers and jerks back.

RITTER'S VOICE: Now don't be nervous, Mrs. Dvorak…I'm prepared to devote to you all of tonight–and even longer, if necessary.

Mrs. Dvorak, unconsciously reacting to this, once more rests hand on chair. {She jerks back but} The piece of wood clatters to the floor.

MED. SHOT – RITTER. Ritter waits patiently; when she doesn't move, inquires:

RITTER: Well…?

CAMERA PULLS BACK to INCLUDE Mrs. Dvorak, who stoops to repeat painful routine. Ritter smiles approvingly.

RITTER: That's the girl.

Nothing here is indicated about Ritter's riding crop, nor does he initially knock the back-rest off the chair. Mrs. Dvorak does it herself, accidentally. And the scripted line is "Pick it up, Mrs. Dvorak," not, as in the finished film, "Pick it up again, Mrs. Dvorak." The film version makes it clear that the byplay with the backrest is part of Ritter's softening-up technique, something indicated in the script but not spelled out.

The later scenes in the film show other differences, mostly additions of things not mentioned in the shooting script. For instance, the script doesn't mention the shadow of Ritter's riding-crop. But the excerpt shows that the shooting script points toward some of the detailing we find in the finished film. It provides the sort of nudges that a director, especially one as oriented to gesture as Lang was, could elaborate on the set.

The Lang/ Brecht story has been published as "437!! Ein Seiselfilm," in The Brecht Yearbook vol. 28: Friends, Colleagues, Collaborators, ed. Stephen Brockmann (2003), 9-30. The passage I mention, kindly translated for me by Ben Brewster, is on p. 16. Broader background on Brecht's adventures in Hollywood can be found in James K. Lyon, Bertolt Brecht in America (Princeton University Press, 1980). Chapter 14 of Patrick McGilligan's Fritz Lang: The Nature of the Beast (St. Martin's, 1997) offers an account, mostly relying on Brecht's viewpoint, of the making of Hangmen Also Die. The shooting script is in the John Wexley collection of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and the State Historical Society here in Madison. Thanks also to Marc Silberman, renowned Brecht expert, for advice.

You are my density | David Bordwell

Similar But Different (Five Parts) | Scott Myers

2011-10-29T14:59:00.001+05:30

'Similar But Different' (Part 1: Remakes)

Posted on October 24, 2011 by Scott

Perhaps you are sick of me talking about how Hollywood approaches moves and TV with the business ethos of 'similar but different,' a subject I have explored here, here, here, and here among many other posts.

Hey, I am sympathetic to you. However since now more than ever Hollywood is relying on similar but different, I'm going to hammer on the subject for the next three days. More after the jump.

We start with this recent LAT article: "'Footloose:' The '80′s are dead. Long live the '80′s." Despite the inauspicious B.O. performances of Footloose, Fright Night, Conan, The A-Team and Arthur, Hollywood keeps dipping into the 80s well:

Seasons, like paychecks and Republican presidential front-runners, come and go. But some things remain constant. Like '80s remakes. And, specifically, their power to make us yawn.

[Last] weekend saw the moviegoing public shrug off two more retreads, a revival of a 1984 Kevin Bacon classic and a prequel of a 1982 John Carpenter cult hit. "Footloose," that Bacon revival, pulled in $16.1 million — not a terrible number, but considering how heavily the movie was marketed, not exactly auspicious, either. Results for "The Thing" looked more grisly — the movie eked out only $8.7 million.

The films join a long list of '80s reboots that have yielded lackluster results: "Fright Night," "Conan," "The A-Team," "Arthur."

So if 80s movie remakes may not be faring all that well at the box office, why does Hollywood keep going to that well? Safe to say the big reason is 'similar but different.' A remake is the perfect execution of that concept: It is the same movie, only done with a different cast and a revised script to reflect contemporary sensibilities and freshen up the story.

At the core of 'similar but different' is a belief: All stories have been told before. More from the LAT article:

In "Drive," the well-reviewed art-house piece that has established a loyal fan base, Nicolas Winding Refn channels the spirit of "Miami Vice" and other pastel-colored entertainment. Throwback action movies such as "The Expendables' and "Fast Five," meanwhile, have turned into the biggest hits of the last couple of years. "Footloose" may have struggled, but its spiritual descendants, the "Step Up" films, has blossomed into one of the hottest teen franchises of the last few years.

And this summer J.J Abrams looked to the movies of the 1980s, like "Stand by Me" and "The Goonies," in creating his coming-of-age adventure "Super 8." The film went on to become a huge global hit.

There are good reasons we're looking back to the movies of several decades ago: There were some storytelling values to that period, for one thing, and there are only have so many stories to tell.

Even a contemporary director such as Jason Reitman, one of the more original-minded filmmakers out there, said he felt the ghosts of decades past when he gets behind the camera. "In a strange way, I always feel like I'm doing a remake," he told 24 Frames in an interview last week. "I mean, 'Thank You for Smoking' was 'Jerry Maguire' if Jerry sold cigarettes."

So even if the B.O. results aren't overwhelming, there is a default attitude deeply entrenched in Hollywood that will persist in remaking 80s movies… then over the next few years 90s movies… and so on.

That attitude? Similar but different.

You don't have to like it. You do have to understand it.

[Another reason remakes are so popular, as manager-producer Gavin Polone notes here, is that movies are "the greatest hard asset they [studios] possess," so a remake not only generates its own revenues through box office receipts and ancillary streams, it can also increase the value of the original film, a case of double-dipping.]

'Similar But Different' (Part 2: Retro)

Posted on October 25, 2011 by Scott

With several remakes currently in movie theaters (e.g., The Thing, Footloose, The Three Musketeers) and a confluence of interesting articles of late, I decided it would be valuable to revisit a familiar subject that has a definite impact on a screenwriter's life: Hollywood's default business approach of 'similar but different.' Yesterday I spotlighted this this 24 Frames [LAT] article by Steve Zeitchik that delved into the whole 80s remake phenomenon. We explored two ideas:

* On the business side, remakes are popular in Hollywood because they are the perfect version of 'similar but different,' perhaps the safest way to create a product that carries with it strong consumer pre-awareness.

* On the filmmaking side, remakes are an acknowledgment that all stories have been told before, so why not retell the good ones.

Today I want to highlight a recent article by LAT's columnist Patrick Goldstein. The title suggests one thing — "Is Hollywood's mania for remakes spinning out of control?" However if we dig into the piece, we confront a powerful dynamic that seems to be at work in contemporary culture which would also help to explain the enduring power of remakes.

Some excerpts from Goldstein's article:

"Everything old is new again," the expression goes, but in pop culture these days, it seems more fitting to say everything new is old again. This weekend is an apt example: Paramount Pictures opened "Footloose," a remake of the cheesy 1984 dance movie, and it's battling for the box-office crown against "The Thing," a new version of the 1982 John Carpenter horror film from Universal Studios.

I guess it was inevitable that we'd have a weekend where both of the big new releases were remakes. (Next week brings another: "The Three Musketeers.") Whether you're writing about Hollywood, pop music, TV or theater, the prefix "re" gets a serious workout on your keypad, since every other new project seems to be a remake, reboot, revival, reissue, relaunch, reunion, restaging, reimagining or reenactment.

Goldstein had a sit-down with Matthijs Van Heijningen, the 43-year-old director of "The Thing."

Van Heijningen spent his teen years gorging himself on Kafka novels and groundbreaking American movies, notably "The Godfather" series, "Blade Runner," "The Exorcist" and "Jaws." At 17, he said, he sneaked into Carpenter's "The Thing" (itself a remake) and was impressed, being a Kafka fan, by what he calls "its nihilism and sense of doom."

The movie resonated with him so much that when Van Heijningen was looking to make his feature debut here, he found himself eager to revisit the film. The whole mania for remakes tends to revolve around commercial motives — it's usually easier to sell something that is familiar to audiences — so it's hardly a surprise to discover that there was an element of careerism in Van Heijningen's decision to pursue the film.

"It is slightly strategical to do something that's familiar," he told me. "But I thought I could give the movie some of my own flavor as a filmmaker. It's a lot like making a commercial. There's already a story, created to sell a product. So as a director, you just have to find a way to express your own ideas inside of that framework."

—-

Van Heijningen has a shrewd grasp of showbiz history. In the 1970s, with the studio system in a state of collapse, a generation of New Hollywood filmmakers seized power, inspiring a decade of auteur-driven artistry. But by the 1990s, Hollywood was once again firmly in the grasp of media behemoths. Intent on bringing order and sustainability to their often-chaotic studio subsidiaries, they began systematically developing the kind of film franchises and remakes that were easily marketable and offered predictable profit potential.

Here we see the merging of the two points we explored yesterday: Hollywood's 'similar but different' credo, filmmakers attempting to find an aesthetic justification to retell a story that's already been told. But later in the article, Goldstein cites another dynamic which suggests that the real energy behind remakes may not be studios or filmmakers — but consumers themselves:

Why are we so culturally backward-looking today, especially when our technology — our iPhones, iPads and computer graphics — leaps forward at such a dizzying pace? If anyone has a good theory about this deceleration of pop culture, it's Simon Reynolds, whose recent book, "Retromania," is about how pop music has gone from being an exploratory art to a form of cultural archaeology.

He argues that retro has become a structural feature of pop culture, acting as an inevitable down phase to an earlier manic burst of creativity. Though he's speaking in terms of music, many critics might apply that logic to film or TV as well. "Like a boom-time economy, the more fertile and dynamic a genre is, the more it sets itself up for the musical-cultural equivalent of recession: retro," Reynolds writes. "The sheer creativity of its surge years (the sixties, seventies and parts of the eighties) inevitably made it increasingly irresistible to be re-creative."

But today's retromania is also tied to the way young consumers experience pop culture. When I was a kid, I wanted nothing to do with my parents' music or movies. I needed to carve out my own cultural identity. Today's kids, thanks to the easy access to Netflix and YouTube, make far less of a distinction between what is old and what is new. With a century of culture just a click away on any computer, young consumers have become the ultimate archivists, just as willing to embrace familiarity as innovation.

What if remakes are primarily a response to a retro consciousness permeating contemporary culture? "Young consumers have become the ultimate archivists, just as willing to embrace familiarity as innovation."

What if old is the 'new' new?

Given the business, aesthetic and consumer state of affairs that suggest 'similar but different' is going nowhere soon, what is a screenwriter to do? It's easy for a professional screenwriter when asked by an aspiring writer, "What should I write," to go to the default answer: "Be yourself, write something original." Frankly I wince whenever I hear that, not at the spirit of the answer, but at the absolute lack of help that advice offers as it stands in complete opposition to nearly everything the Hollywood movie business is about.

The reality is this. A screenwriter has two choices: To play the game or not play the game. That is the subject of Part 3 of this series.

'Similar But Different' (Part 3: Playing the game)

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Scott

It may not be pretty, but screenwriters — professional and aspiring — have to deal with it: Hollywood's default business model of 'similar but different.'

* Movie studios want projects that are similar to movies that have been hits. Per their logic, this is a safe way to approach script acquisition and development — If something was successful before, it can be again — and increase the odds the 'new' project will make a profit — Marketing efforts will benefit from pre-awareness among consumers.

* Movie studios want projects that are different enough from movies that have been hits. When they toss out a phrase like a "fresh take," they don't mean wholly original, rather they want a story that offers a spin on something that has been produced before.

I'm not saying this is a good state of affairs. Nor am I saying it's necessarily a bad state of affairs. I'm just saying it is the state of affairs.

In the first two posts in this series — here and here — we looked at this phenomenon from a studio, filmmaker and consumer perspective, each a contributing factor to the preponderance of remakes, prequels, sequels, and heavily similar movies.

Today we bring it all down to the screenwriter. And the simple fact is you have a choice:

You can play the game. Or not play the game.

You may look at the status quo of the Hollywood movie business and decide you simply can not work within the 'similar but different' framework. You want to write original stories, cutting edge scripts, movies not just filmed product.

If this is who you are and what you are about, two things:

First you absolutely have the right to write whatever stories you want. Indeed I'm sure all of us who visit this blog applaud your courage and creativity. God knows we need visionaries and unique voices creating distinctive films.

Second if you go this route, eventually Hollywood may seek you out if you create a successful niche for yourself, but on the whole that approach is not the studios' first resort. Rather they want screenwriters and filmmakers who work within the confines of 'similar but different.' In other words, screenwriters who can play the game.

What is the game?

It's coming up with similar but different stories.

It's providing your take on writing assignments that is — shock! — similar but different.

It's trafficking daily in a world of ideas and story concepts that fit comfortably within the broad perimeters of stories that have been written and produced before.

You must understand that almost every single professional screenwriter including A-listers, make their living writing these type of projects.

For example, Sony asks Aaron Sorkin to write a Steve Jobs movie which you can be sure the studio is thinking is similar but different to another Sorkin film, The Social Network.

Warner Bros. hires Ben Affleck to write a movie version of "The Stand" that is a remake of a TV mini-series.

Name any A-list screenwriter or filmmaker and I guarantee you they have worked on at least one and more likely many more similar but different projects..

Here's the thing: There is no inherent reason why a similar but different movie has to be bad. Indeed they can be great. Look at some of this year's quality hit movies: Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Bridesmaids, The Help, Rango, Contagion, Moneyball.

Why do some of these similar but different films succeed aesthetically while others just feel like knock-offs? I would suggest that it's because the filmmakers looked below the surface of remake and retro sensibilities to some familiar, powerful dynamics that exist in all stories which we can mine to craft compelling narratives: archetypes.

'Similar But Different' (Part 4: Archetypes)

Posted on October 27, 2011 by Scott

In the first three parts of this series — here, here, and here — we have been exploring Hollywood's default business strategy of 'similar but different' pretty much on their side of the playing field.

Now it's time to move the ball to our (i.e., writer's) side.

As we have noted, simply because a movie is 'similar but different' doesn't mean it will necessarily be a bad one. Indeed there are remakes that are arguably better than the originals, one of which we will consider below.

Thus if we acknowledge it's possible to create 'similar but different' stories that are good, even great, it behooves us a writers to figure out how to do that.

For purposes of this discussion, I will suggest two narrative elements we can use to write entertaining and compelling 'similar but different' stories, thus allowing us to survive, even thrive as we play the screenwriting game in Hollywood. Today we look at one of those elements: Archetypes.

Now I suppose only I could attempt to pull a discussion like this back to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung, but honestly doesn't 'similar but different' apply to the very idea that all stories share universal elements? Whether we talk about The Hero's Journey, metamorphosis, and other character or narrative archetypes, aren't we essentially looking at variations on familiar themes?

The difference between the Hollywood studio version of 'similar but different,' furiously digging through development slates for something that hearkens back to a successful previous movie, and a Campbell-Jung approach tapping into character and narrative archetypes, patterns that have evolved over thousands of years and exist both in our consciousness and unconsciousness, is a matter of depth. And therein lies the secret: By using archetypes to dig deeper into our stories, we go beyond a shallow, surface level approach to writing, which is prone to generate nothing more than 'knock-offs,' to find and create stories that resonate with script readers and movie viewers on multiple levels of entertainment, meaning, and emotion.

Archetypes have power because they carry with them associations we have made through the tens of thousands of stories we have read, heard, or listened to in our lifetimes.

Archetypes are true because if used well, they reflect genuine and real aspects of the human condition and the universe around us.

Archetypes are entertaining because we recognize them consciously and intuitively, both as familiar forms and when crafted against type to surprise us as fresh variations.

In other words, understanding and being attuned to archetypes as we craft our stories, even 'similar but different' ones, allows us to find deeper drama, humor, thrills, action, suspense and all the rest of the psychological reactions we hope to evoke in our characters and plots.

A great example of this is the Coen brothers' remake of True Grit. As noted previously, a remake is Hollywood's perfect version of a 'similar but different' story: It is the same movie, only done with a different cast and a revised script to reflect contemporary sensibilities and freshen up the narrative. Any filmmaker who sets out to do a unique and compelling retelling of a previously told story has a huge challenge. In my view, one of the major reasons the Coens succeeded with True Grit is because of their understanding and use of archetypes. Whether they were conscious about these elements as they wrote the script or not doesn't matter. The fact is their cinematic version of True Grit is infused with powerful character and narrative archetypes.

I have already done an analysis of the story's archetypes here, so I will only summarize my thoughts [I encourage you to go back and read my OP].

In the movie, we see the five primary character archetypes:

Protagonist: Mattie Ross

Nemesis: Tom Chaney

Attractor: LaBouef

Mentor: Rooster Cogburn

Trickster: Mattie's father

Each character provides a specific function to the story and in aggregate create a rich tableau of personalities and interrelationships.

Moreover there are several narrative archetypes at work as well:

* The Hero's Journey: Mattie leaves her Old World — the family farm — traveling to the New World — the wilderness — in order to pursue the goal of killing her father's murderer.

* Metamorphosis: Along the way Mattie confronts both her adult self and juvenile self, going through a transformation of her psyche.

* Romance: In LaBouef she finds an idealized version of a potential lover.

* Surrogate father: In Cogburn, she finds a more powerful and compatible version of a father figure.

* Good versus evil: She is an innocent who is exposed to the harsh realities of a dark and dangerous New World.

* Stranger in a strange land: She is a fish-out-of-water.

* Underdog: The odds are stacked against her.

I'm sure you can find more.

These character and narrative archetypes connect with us psychologically in a variety of ways and in so doing create a depth of experience that transforms this remake of True Grit into a powerful 'new' version of the story.

So how to survive as screenwriters while playing the 'similar but different' game in Hollywood? One set of tools we have is archetypes. Use them well and we can play their game while playing our game… and everybody wins.

In order to use archetypes well, we don't come at them randomly, but must see how they service a story's central organizing principle — its psychological journey.

'Similar But Different' (Part 5: Psychological Journey)

Posted on October 28, 2011 by Scott

In the first three parts of this series — here, here, and here — we explored Hollywood's default business strategy of 'similar but different' from the vantage point of movie studios. In the fourth post here, we shifted the perspective to the writer's side of things by considering powerful tools available to writers — archetypes — how they can be used to transform a 'similar but different' story into its own unique and compelling narrative.

But that's only part of the story. Character archetypes and narrative archetypes do not exist in a vacuum. Properly understood, they serve a story's central organizing principle: its psychological journey.

In any script, there are the events that transpire in the External World, the domain of what the reader can see (Action) and hear (Dialogue). I call this the Plotline.

There are also a related movements that occur in the Internal World, the domain of what the reader can sense (Intention) and interpret (Subtext). I call this the Themeline.

The Plotline and Themeline comprise the two realms of the Screenplay Universe.

Throughout the course of a story, events in the External World impact characters. They process and assimilate what happens which causes a change in their attitude in the Internal World. In turn that shift in perspective gets reflected in how they act back in the External World.

So throughout a story, there is this recurring dynamic — action, reaction, action, reaction — that plays out like a dance between Plotline and Themeline.

The result of that is the Psychological Journey. A character begins the story in one Psyche State and over time through a series of actions and reactions ends up in quite another Psyche State.

[Almost all movies feature a Protagonist going through some sort of metamorphosis].

To the degree we as writers create a compelling psychological journey [or set of psychological journeys] in a story, the more likely we are to entice the reader into our story universe. Furthermore a 'similar but different' story can evolve into a compelling experience for a reader. In other words, the specifics of a character's psychological journey can transform a familiar narrative into a unique one.

Yesterday we looked at the Coen brothers' remake True Grit to explore that story's use of character and narrative archetypes. Today let's examine another remake — the most obvious example of the 'similar but different' mentality — with the script we have been analyzing this week: The Thing.

In the 1951 original (The Thing From Another World), the story's psychological journey was focused on the group of men and women banding together to successfully defeat an alien force. The psychological journey of the remake is substantially different:

* Unlike the original, the remake's take on the Thing is that the alien has the capability to enter into a human's body and transform itself into an imitative version of its host. This sets into motion the primary component of the story's psychological journey for its characters: Paranoia. Who has been 'infected'? Who is for us? Who is against us? Have I been infected? Is my or their behavior a sign of the infection?

* Instead of a more typical Hero's Journey as reflected in the 1951 version of the movie, where the crew defeats the Thing, the remake is a much darker affair: alien kills humans, humans kill humans, humans kill alien. Eventually as witness in the story's denouement, what is left is two human beings [MacReady and Childs] playing a game of chess, awaiting their eventual death either due to Antarctica's unrelenting winter or the emergence of the alien presence in one or both of the characters.

In effect, every character in The Thing plays a Trickster — at points they are allies, at other points enemies — until eventually their real nature is revealed.

In terms of narrative archetypes — the tribe versus outsider, underdog, Hero's Journey, metamorphosis [with an alien twist] — each of these dynamics serve the story's psychological journey, the devastating impact of paranoia and inevitable decline into violence. In other words the remake of The Thing is a transformed movie experience precisely because of its radically different psychological journey.

To sum up our own journey through this series of posits this week, while we may be inclined to look at Hollywood's fixation on 'similar but different' movies as a negative, I would encourage us to keep in mind movies like True Grit and The Thing, remakes which use elements — character archetypes, narrative archetypes, psychological journey — that demonstrate how writers have the opportunity with any story to transform that which is familiar into that which is unique.

As writers, we have the tools to do this. All that's required is an understanding of those tools, careful use of them, creativity, and the passion to create distinctive stories.

Similar But Different | Scott Myers

The Business of Screenwriting: Sweepstakes Pitching, Prewrites and One-Step Deals | Scott Myers

2011-10-29T14:31:00.000+05:30

If you want to know what screenwriting members of the WGA have to confront in their interface with the studios [and what you will eventually deal with], here are three common practices: sweepstakes pitching, prewrites and one-step deals. From THR:

The development issues the guild identified in its Pattern of Demands could result in contentious negotiations. These include "prewrites" – in which writers are asked to prepare uncompensated treatments – and sweepstakes pitching.

The latter is a practice in which a studio asks multiple writers to pitch their approaches to a movie idea proposed by the studio. The studio may then ask a number of those writers to come back for meetings repeatedly, using the process as an unpaid way of having numerous writers refine the studio's initial idea. In the end, the studio hires – and pays for – just one writer (at least until it orders rewrites).

Creative rights matters such as sweepstakes pitching may be particularly touchy, since the issues are not just monetary. That means that studios' creative management, in addition to business executives, will have to weigh in on the studios' negotiating posture.

Another guild sore point: the prevalence of one-step deals, rather than the multi-step deals that predated the 2007-08 strike and the troubled economy. Writers dislike one-step deals not only because the money is less (unless the writer is then hired to do revisions), but also because it gives the writer only one shot to get it right.

Okay, let's take a hypothetical screenwriter named Sammy Glick and run him through this maze of onerous obstacles.

Sammy's agent calls.

"I got you a meeting for 'Contagion 2.'"

"How many writers going up for it?"

"Studio says it's only a couple."

Sammy spends weeks working up a take. He meets with studio execs. Pitches his heart out. Feels pretty good about his chances. Then as he goes about his life in L.A., it seems like every writer friend he runs into has been pitching… you guessed it… 'Contagion 2.'

Cut to a few years later as Sammy sits in a movie theater watching Contagion 2. He spots certain scenes, plot elements, even dialogue that seem awfully close to what he pitched.

Welcome to the downsides of 'sweepstakes pitching': Not only does a writer have to go up against – potentially – dozens of other writers in the hopes of landing the gig. There's also the fact that at each meeting, there is a CE who sits in the corner furiously taking notes from what each writer is pitching, so Sammy can't help but have a sneaking suspicion that the studio put together the best of those ideas, then handed them off to the one writer who finally landed the OWA. And Sammy is in no position to prove anything.

But let's say Sammy lands the 'Contagion 2′ gig. Good for him… until he smacks up against 'prewrites.'

Sammy meets with the studio. They just loved his pitch, but… they have a few suggestions. They walk Sammy through their ideas. "Can you work up a really short treatment with the revisions? Then we can sign off on a draft." So Sammy spends several days pounding out a treatment. Turns it in. They have more suggestions. "Just these changes and flesh out the story a bit more, then we're set to go." Sammy revises the treatment. More suggestions. This goes on for weeks of back and forth, multiple treatments, until there is a document with every beat of the story. "We just want to make sure we're all on the same page."

It would be one thing if Sammy was getting paid to write each of these treatments, but the dirty not-so-secret fact in Hollywood is writers most often do not receive any money for said efforts.

"Think of it this way. It's really about giving you your best chance to nail the draft."

Which leads to the third thing: 'one-step deals.' In the good old days [barely 5 years ago], when a writer signed a deal for a studio project, the standard contract entailed a first draft and a rewrite. That meant writers were guaranteed to have two passes at the story. Nowadays it's all pretty much one-step deals. That means Sammy only has one shot. And that simple change, not only denying a writer rewrite fees, creates a situation where — even though it's technically against WGA rules to write treatments without compensation — writers routinely do because they feel pressured to maximize their chance of nailing the script in that one draft.

So what of Sammy? Well, he could fight the system by not pursuing OWAs, only writing scripts on spec. He could become a writer-director and thereby control the content of his stories. He could leave the industry and write greeting cards.

Or he could choose as most WGA members do to work within the system… which means sweepstakes pitching, pre-writes, and one-step deals.

UPDATE: I've gotten a few dispirited emails and seen some chatter on Twitter about this post. Yes, the situation as described above is frustrating. But I feel I wouldn't be doing my job with TBOS columns if I didn't let folks occasionally see the dark underbelly of what it takes to be a professional screenwriter. You need to prepare yourself for all aspects of the craft, good and bad. That said writers have been dealing with things like this in one form or another for decades — and somehow we survive. And don't forget, for all of these hassles, you can get paid a pretty penny for your troubles. Finally there's this: You are getting paid to write. So while sweespstakes pitching, prewrites and one-step deals are a pain, there are other aspects of life as a screenwriter that can balance them out.

The Business of Screenwriting: Sweepstakes Pitching, Prewrites and One-Step Deals | Scott Myers

Exclusive GITS Q&A: John Swetnam ("Evidence") | Scott Myers

2011-10-21T18:15:00.001+05:30

Posted on March 1, 2011

On January 21st of this year, I posted this:

Bold Films buys spec crime thriller "Evidence" from screenwriter John Swetnam. Per Deadline:

Police arrive at an abandoned gas station following a brutal massacre. The only evidence at the crime scene is the victims' personal electronic devices, including a camcorder, flip Cam, and two cell phones. With nothing else to go on, a detective must analyze the bits of "found footage" to piece together the identity of the killer.

Another example of the "found film" sub-genre.

Swetnam is repped by APA and manager Jack Wagner.

This is the 1st spec script sale of 2011.

Then I discovered long-time GITS reader Emily Blake knows John. I asked if she'd inquire whether John would be up for a Q&A. Emily did and John emailed me back agreeing to answer some questions.

It's always exciting to hear from someone who sells a spec script. In John's case, even more so as he's what Variety calls a first-timer, someone who breaks into The Biz with a spec sale. So here is the story how John made that big leap into Hollywood:

First off, what's your background and how did you end up wanting to pursue filmmaking?
I am an Air Force kid which means I moved around a lot. Every two years or so I had to change friends, towns, countries and continents. It was stressful at times but it also allowed me to experience different cultures at a young age. I'm of a mixed background (Thai and white) and sometimes it was hard to find the place where I belonged or to find things that I had in common with the other kids and that's what I've always loved about movies, music and television. They cross every divide and have the ability to give a common ground to so many different people. There's something magical about meeting someone from some random town a million miles away and being able to strike up a conversation about some movie you both enjoyed. Movies connect us and I guess I've always just wanted to feel connected.

As for what was the moment that really started my dream of making movies… it was when I was living in Ely, England. My dad had a pretty tough job and we didn't have much money and I remember when they came to town and were shooting a movie called Revolution with Al Pacino and Donald Sutherland and they needed extras. I'll never forget going to visit my dad on set at our local Cathedral and seeing all these grown men in period costumes, carrying guns and "playing pretend". It seemed so unreal to me that these grown ups could have so much fun and get to make believe all day and get paid for it! I was curious and intrigued to say the least.

And then years later when I saw Jurassic Park… I was officially hooked.

Have you had any formal education or training in either/both screenwriting and directing? If so, what and how did that education contribute to your recent success in the sale of your spec script "Evidence"?

After getting a bachelor's degree in TV production at MTSU (outside of Nashville) where I studied broadcast TV and was going to make music videos, I decided to go take the leap and move to California for grad school. I have an MFA in screenwriting from Chapman University. The best thing grad school did for me was that it gave me a place to go. I had a purpose and I was taking classes and I was in Southern California. I'm not sure I learned any great secrets about writing, but I met some great friends (one of them being my former writing partner Darren Whisker who I owe a lot to) and it acted as a sort of buffer between my life in Tennessee and the business of Hollywood.

When it comes to the craft of writing… there are three types of aspiring writers as I see it. First, you have the people that will never make it. Period. There's a huge percentage of aspiring screenwriters that will never, ever, ever make it no matter how hard they work, ever, ever. That's just a fact. Then you have the ones who were just born with it. I mean, these guys just have a gift. And lastly, you have a percentage of writers who have ability, but it's very raw and buried way way down. They're not born with some extraordinary gift, but if they watch enough movies, write enough scripts, read enough scripts, and study the business in an intelligent way, they can go far. I consider myself in this category. Yes, you have to have "it" to an extent, but the rest of it is about hard work, dedication, sacrifice, determination and intelligence. Watch, read, write… repeat.. repeat…repeat. Yes, I went to grad school, but I also read every screenwriting book, watched hundreds of movies and then rewatched them to break them down story-wise, and I read hundreds of scripts, wrote dozens of my own, all while networking, interning, being on sets, and meeting people. Nothing can take the place of hard work. Nothing.

Here is the premise of "Evidence" as summarized in the press: "Police arrive at an abandoned gas station following a brutal massacre. The only evidence at the crime scene is the victims' personal electronic devices, including a camcorder, flip Cam, and two cell phones. With nothing else to go on, a detective must analyze the bits of 'found footage' to piece together the identity of the killer." How accurate is that description?

This is a very accurate description, but I just call it Usual Suspects meets Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Cloverfield-style. Not sure if that is any more clear. It's basically a found-footage movie inside a crime-thriller movie. Two movies for the price of one!

There seems to be a sub-genre of "found footage" movies including Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, Cloverfield, and another spec script that sold in 2010 "Killer." Did you consciously think that was a hot story area you could mine with "Evidence" or did you generate the story concept and decide to write it just because you liked the idea?

Evidence was born out of the fact that I was tired of sitting in my house writing script after script after script. I had always been good with ideas and had gotten repped at a few places, but I couldn't take that next step. No spec sale. No assignments. Not one dollar. So after writing 16 specs I decided to take matters into my own hands and was going to finance a movie myself so I could be writer/director and producer. So I had to think long and hard about what kind of movie I would make. I wanted to be very smart about it and decided on the genre of horror and then "found footage" because it could be done so cheap and had lots of upside. Then I tried to figure out a fresh take and a story that I thought would be cool and I came up with the multiple angles and the crime-thriller movie that surrounds the POV stuff. I finished the script after a few months and when I was done I knew it was good and it deserved more than my 50,000 credit card budget, so I decided to take it into the world and the rest… well, that was the easy part.

You're represented by APA and Jack Wagner at FilmEngine Entertainment. Were they involved in your script rewrite process, giving you feedback? If so, what areas did you focus on in rewrites to improve the script?

Evidence moved very fast. I have been in town for a while and had my share of agents/managers and I knew exactly what I was looking for this time around. I entered my script into the trackingb contest because me and Darren Whisker had a script do well there a few years ago, and that was a great experience, so I tried it again and was a finalist. Within a week Jake called me and we met up and talked about Evidence and a new spec that I had just finished that was a huge tentpole. He had passion and enthusiasm and I knew he was my guy. Soon after, we met with some other agents, but Boxerbaum killed it in the room and I knew he was the perfect fit and I couldn't be happier with my team. Evidence didn't have any rewrites at all with the guys. We just took it out fast. With the new spec, both Jake and Box had great notes and we did a few passes on it that made the story much stronger. We recently took the new script out and it's been getting a great response. Still crossing my fingers for a sale!

Now the fun part: Can you describe for us how the script ended up at Bold Films? Where were you when you heard your script had sold and what did that feel like when you received the news?

I was having a burger with Darren Whisker when my reps called. He spit up his milkshake and then we finished eating and I went home to do a rewrite on the new spec.

Press reports say that you are being given "first shot at directing." Do you see yourself continuing to write screenplays and direct them, or do you hope eventually to move strictly into directing?

The script went out very hot and we were getting interest almost immediately. I met with Bold before it sold and they really seemed to be passionate about getting the movie made which was huge, and of course it didn't hurt to be working with the guys at Marc Platt. So when they made an offer it felt like a no brainer. And now it looks like we'll be in production this summer. As for me directing, I put together a presentation and told them my vision for the movie, but I have no ego about the job, or to my script. My loyalty is to the movie. So if a more talented director with a great vision comes in, then I will do everything in my power to help him succeed if it means at the end of the day we make a better movie. To be honest, the more I think about it, the more I feel like writing/producing will be my ultimate path. Because that's what a producer does… they get things done. And that's what I came here for. Not to write movies, but to make movies.

A few questions about your creative process. How do you come up with story ideas? How important do you think the story concept is to the overall strength of a screenplay?

Story concept is like the foundation to a house. It has to be strong or everything else may come tumbling down. I've always been good with ideas and it just took me a long time to be able to execute them in professional way. If you want to write "Hollywood" movies then the biggest question you have to ask yourself when you come up with an idea is, can you really see this opening at your local theater next weekend? I mean, really? What does the trailer look like when it comes on TV? You have to be brutally honest with yourself and most people just aren't. Look, you can have a small idea and if you're an amazing writer you will get it read and get work. But for most of us who aren't Aaron Sorkin, you have to start with a great idea, something clean and fresh, and then you have to execute at a professional level. The days of getting by on concept alone are over. I think you need both. Concept and execution. But this stuff gets debated all the time and I have no idea if I'm right or wrong. It's just my personal opinion.

How much time do you spend in prep-writing (i.e., brainstorming, character development, plotting, research, outlining)? Which of the aspects of prep do you tend to devote the most time and focus to?

My process works like this. I come up with an idea and then I put on my "producer" hat. What's the budget, genre, tone? Where does it fit in the market place? Who would I cast in it? Who would direct? What's the trailer, poster? Who's my audience, etc, etc, etc? If I can answer all these questions clearly and I'm still pumped then I know I have something that I can dig into. That's when I put on my "writer" hat and forget the rest and start exploring the story and the characters. I have put myself inside a box and now I can really get creative. I constantly ask myself if I think what I'm doing is cool. Do I love this? Am I excited to see it on screen? The ball usually just starts rolling and I put together a pretty fast beat sheet. Then I do a treatment and get feedback on it asap. I love feedback. If I'm still feeling good, then I rewrite the treatment a few times before I go into a really detailed outline. Then I set it aside for a while and work on other stuff. If I come back to it after a week, read it, and still love it, I do some more rewrites and then kill the first draft. I do tend to write and rewrite as I go along, but I can pump out a first draft in under a week. Then I put on my "director" hat and really dig into the tiny details and make sure I know the answer to every possible question that might come up. What if an actor asked me this? What if the production design wanted to know about this, etc, etc? Only after I've worn all three hats, which means at least three drafts on my own, I get more feedback, take more time away and rewrite and rewrite and get more feedback until I honestly think it's as good as I can get it. Then I send it to the manager, get more feedback and rewrite. Then send it to the agent, get more feedback and rewrite. And then… I drink… and then we take it out. Easy, right?

Finally what advice can you offer to aspiring screenwriters about the craft?

This is of course the question that I get asked about the most. Here's my simple answer and I think it's something that you say all the time. Watch movies. Read scripts. Write. Write. Write. But here's the problem with most aspiring writers and I had this same issue. We think we're ready before we are. If you think you're ready to send out your script, you're not. If you think it's good enough, it's not. YOU ARE NOT READY. Spend less time worrying about agents, and gatekeepers, and all the other BS and just focus on the writing. Look, I have an MFA, I've written 18 specs, watched thousands of movies, read hundreds of scripts, and I just barely broke in this year. I mean, you see all these people who've got three specs and they complain about the system and Hollywood won't give them the time of day or some other crap, well here's the truth — 99% of the time it's the script. Period. If you're not getting noticed. No reps calling you back? It's the script. KEEP WRITING.

I truly believe that there are hundreds of ways to break in and every one of us must find our own path. The one that works for us. And at the end of the day it doesn't matter what advice I give to aspiring writers because most of them won't listen… I know I never did

There's a lot of takeaway in this interview. John has his own variation on my "Read scripts, Watch movies. Write pages" mantra. His emphasis on the absolute necessity of writing a great script is spot on. But there's one thing John says that I've never quite heard in just this fashion: When he develops and writes a story, he goes through a process of wearing three hats: Producer, Writer, Director. I think that's quite astute. It should not only help you in shaping and writing your script, it could have a residual effect of making your script more marketable because you've already been thinking like a potential producer, who can help sell the script, and director, who can get it greenlit, then made.

So thanks to Emily Blake for facilitating this interview. Here's a whole bunch of creative good karma going your way!

And of course thanks to John for taking the time out of his busy schedule to answer these questions. I'm sure everyone in the GITS community joins me in congratulating John on his good fortune and wishes him the best of luck with his filmmaking career.

Speaking of which, you can follow John on his Hollywood journey via Twitter:

@JohnSwetnam

Exclusive GITS Q&A: John Swetnam ("Evidence") | Scott Myers

The Business of Screenwriting: Trailer Moments, Set Pieces and Bits Of Business (BOBs) | Scott Myers

2011-10-21T18:05:00.000+05:30

You may have read countless screenwriting books. Attended seminars. Taken courses. But I doubt if you have stumbled across these three items in any tome related to the craft: Trailer Moments, Set Pieces, and Bits Of Business.

These may have come up in some other context, perhaps a newspaper or online article about the movie business, or a film producer's memoir. But trust me, while these three may not appear in any best-selling screenwriting book, they are phrases you will hear from in the context of the script development process. Therefore it behooves you to understand what industry types are referring to so you can keep up with the shorthand. Moreover this trio is actually a helpful packet of concepts when it comes to crafting your stories because if a screenplay is, indeed, a blueprint to make a movie and these three narrative elements appear in every movie ever made, you should toss them into your creative mix with the usual suspects: acts, sequences, plot points, subtext, dialogue, and so on.

Trailer Moment: It is what it sounds like, a moment in a script which is so noteworthy, it is something worthy of inclusion in the movie trailer. This is a big deal. Perhaps no other sales device is more critical to a movie's success than its trailer. And when the task at hand is to put together a trailer that conveys key highlights of the plot, characters, tone, mood and feel of the movie, believe me editors [at the behest of marketing execs] carefully study film footage looking for trailer moments. So when a producer or studio exec says to you about your script, "I'm looking for the trailer moments here, but just not seeing them," you have a problem. Either you have what you think are trailer moments, but they aren't written in a compelling enough fashion to come across as such, or you just flat-out haven't mined your story for enough truly memorable movie moments. And while you may be focusing on story and character, they are thinking about how they are going to sell the movie. To do that, they need trailer moments. A smart screenwriter provides them.

Set Piece: As far as I know, this is an old phrase dating back many decades in the movie business and technically refers to scenes or scene sequences which involve the location or construction of a big set. Think the chariot race in Ben Hur. That is a big ass set piece. Over time it has come to mean any substantial scene or sequence of scenes that is critical to the plot. The importance of set pieces can not be underestimated. I have never been able to find the actual quote, but I have heard that Irving Thalberg, Hollywood's first great movie producer said something to the effect when talking to his stable of screenwriters at MGM, "Just give me five great set pieces… and I'll give you a hit movie." I like to think of it this way: Set pieces are what make movies… movies. They are cinematic and memorable. They are the scenes you most likely talk about as you exit the theater, what you discuss with your co-workers the next day at the water cooler, and as such are the foundation of by-word-of-mouth buzz, a critical aspect of marketing a film. For a screenwriter, if you're looking for your script's set pieces, check out your major plot points. Chances are they're there. If not, maybe your script would benefit by making those scenes bigger and turning them into set pieces.

Bits Of Business (BOBs): This one confused me when I first heard it at meetings. "This scene could use… you know… a bit of business." "This bit of business doesn't work for me. Can't you come up with a funnier one?" Basically as I have come to understand it, a BOB (my acronym) is the answer to the observation, "It needs something." A BOB can be a line of dialogue that is called back a number of times. An interesting visual conveying humor, irony, or meaning. A clever plot machination. Essentially anything that elevates the experience of the moment while servicing the plot. Screenwriter Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio are experts at using BOBs and a great example of that is Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl. Remember the recurring line of dialogue "Parlay"? That is a BOB. Servicing iconic images from the theme park ride such as the prisoners trying to lure the cell door keys from the dog? A BOB. When Jack and Will traverse the ocean floor while holding a row boat over their heads to provide an air pocket? BOB. Ragetti's eyeball that keeps popping out? BOB. Elizabeth setting fire to all the rum on the island to create a smoke signal to lure a ship to rescue she and Jack? BOB. There's hardly a scene in the original POTC that goes by where there isn't a little or big Bit Of Business to spice up the plot. And spice is a good descriptor because BOBs do add flavor to a script.

So while you're busy digesting this or that screenwriting guru's story structure paradigm, don't forget to keep in mind these three key movie concepts: Trailer Moments, Set Pieces and Bits Of Business.

The Business of Screenwriting: Trailer Moments, Set Pieces and Bits Of Business (BOBs) | Scott Myers

Recommended: Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris + other films...

2011-10-20T11:38:00.000+05:30

Woody Allen, after decades, gives his biggest Box Office hit and it's a film not to miss. Quite a delightful comedy - Midnight in Paris.

However there's only one way to catch it - torrent download, unless you can get a dvd rip-off. Since it's not likely to release in this country. Our distributors and exhibitors have better films to show.

Owen Wilson is in tremendous form; will remind you of Allen himself. So are all the actors, especially the most charming, Marion Cotillard, who was stunning in Inception.

The film is part fantasy as it takes the protagonist, a screenwriter who wants to be a novelist, into his favorite world of '20s, where he meets Hemingway, Picasso, Dali et al & falls for Adrianna (Picasso's / Hemingway's lover) played by Cotillard; oh yeah...she is the best. (hmm...got to watch La Vie En Rose, for which she won the Oscar.)

Watch it for Wilson, watch it for Cotillard, watch it for '20s characters, watch it for Allen's typical direction - photographed amazingly, soft-n-slow-n-smooth momentum, ripping off pseudo-intellectuals, lost protagonist trying to get by....

Other films you may enjoy and may need to access Torrent to view them, unless you have watched them:

Grizzly Man (2005) - superb flick, a documentary by Werner Herzog, on a man who lived in Alaskan wilderness with bears and eventually died there courtesy a bear attack; Herzog is one of the top dudes in the game along with Errol Morris. He has a thick, coarse voice, and you can sense a lively persona despite the sombre subject; he shall also play the lead villain opposite Tom Cruise in a film called, One Shot.

Horrible Bosses - funny flick, about three friends who try to kill their bosses; stars Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Aniston besides others and all in form.

Source Code - solid concept and quite exciting; an army captain has to keep reliving for 8-mins so he can go back into a train that explodes and try catching the bomber. This one falls under the high-concept category. As a screenplay, this was rated right at the top by one of the veteran bloggers

The Adjustment Bureau - Another high-concept flick with Matt Damon. Good fun. Romantic thriller with good chemistry between Damon and Emily Blunt.

Drive - intense character-oriented film; Ryan Gosling is fundu in the slow-momentum film that has a tremendous feel to it with Carey Mulligan being the love angle; if you haven't watched the two, catch the two of the brightest young stars of Hollywood.

Tree of Life - phenomenal; may feel quite random but it's an extremely ambitious film - take on life, god, death...a family loses their kid. This should be up there for Best Film Oscar. It's magical.

The Business of Screenwriting: It’s not just about the script | Scott Myers

2011-10-15T15:41:00.001+05:30

We spend so much time here focusing on writing a great script, as well we should because that is such a critical piece of the Hollywood screenwriting puzzle. The quality of the scripts we write, whether on spec or assignment, is hugely important. They are bottom line, career changing kind of deals.

But there are other dynamics involved in working as a professional screenwriter that have nothing to do with your actual ability at crafting a story and translating said story onto the page. Here are some of key items:

* Know how to talk to Hollywood players: Whether they are studio execs or producers, directors or actors, it behooves you to become comfortable conversing with people you will perceive to be somehow 'bigger' than yourself. Of course, if their name is Spielberg, Di Caprio or Bruckheimer, for all intents and purposes they are bigger than you (not existentially, but professionally). Other than conditioning your gag reflex so you do not immediately hurl on their Guccis when you are introduced, the first rule of thumb in these type of meetings is this: God gave you two ears and one mouth… for a reason. Almost every 'powerful' person I've met in Hollywood seems to have a default operating system set to chatter. They enjoy talking about themselves. Play to their comfort zone: Let them take the lead in the conversation. Combine that with the fact that by listening you can learn much more about the person with whom you are meeting and the project you're discussing, you can almost never go wrong in going ears first, mouth second.

Note: It's almost a lock cinch you will have to work on this as your default setting will be to nervously babble on about the first things that pop into your head — Traffic! Coffee! My cat! — in order to fill space, but trust me… don't do that.

* Know the basics of the business: At the very least, you should have a working understanding of how the movie business works. Acquisition. Development. Production. Post. Marketing. Distribution. Where you plug in. What journey your script has lying ahead of it.

Note: You don't have to know everything about the business, but the more you understand the world a studio exec, producer or director lives in, the innumerable hassles and issues they have to handle, the less likely you will have a script notes moment like this: "Lemme get this straight: You want to have a scene that involves boats with children, animals, snow, and helicopters?" — eyes bugged out, glaring at your for not having a clue about what it takes to produce a movie.

* Know the players: If you're smart, you'll be able to assign names to key development execs at the studios. Also big producers. And while you're at it, top agents and managers. These are the people who dominate the script world. Everyone you meet with in Hollywood will know these players. If you can do more than stare blankly into space when a name is mentioned, two points for you.

Note: I know what you're thinking. If I don't know a name, I can just nod my head as if I do know who they are talking about. This is dangerous territory, my friend, the equivalent of Russian roulette. When a studio exec or producer meets with a writer, they are sizing you up. Would you rather get caught in a lie or simply admit, "Sorry, don't know the name." Opt for the latter. Your excuse? Smile sheepishly, shrug, and say, "I pretty much focus on writing stories." As long as you convey a modicum of what The Biz is about, the "My job is to write stories" card is an ironclad defense.

* Know the deals: You probably think Hollywood is all about scripts and talent, movies and TV shows. Actually on one level what it's really about is deals. Who bought what. Who signed with whom. Who agreed to do this with that. As confirmation of this fact, check out Variety or The Hollywood Reporter. Peruse the headlines: How many of them are deal announcements? Most of them. And if it makes the headlines in the trades, you can be sure that whoever you are meeting with knows about the litany of that day's transactions.

Note: You don't have to know the details of the deal, in fact in some ways it's better if you don't. Them: "And what about that spec deal for 'Slinky: The Movie'"? You: "Yeah, Universal?" Them: "Universal and what were they thinking. Two hundred million on 'Battleship,' dump 'Ouija Board,' then buy 'Slinky'? What I hear is going on is…" And off they go with their insider info. It's one of Hollywood's favorite dynamics: Someone who knows something someone else doesn't, then gets to display their knowledge. Allowing them to fill in the details makes them feel good about themselves… which in turn makes them feel good about you.

* Know when to take charge: Here's the thing: Most of them know about this much about story. You, as a writer, know THIS much about story. Despite all their bravado, intimate knowledge of the business, and ability to network, once the subject turns to the project itself, that's when the table turns. They want you to handle the problems, they want you to be confident, they want you to know your stuff. Whether it's a pitch, OWA or script notes meeting, at some point it's your baby. Everything else is just preparation for this moment. When it comes, you need to approach it like it's in your wheelhouse. You swing with confidence and knock that fat fastball out of the ballpark. Power respects power. And if they feel like you know what you're doing and what you're saying makes sense to them, chances are you will their comfort level.

Note: Knowing your stuff means really knowing your stuff. In preparation for these type of meetings, you must immerse yourself into the story universe, engage your characters, and work out a coherent take on the project. There are no short-cuts here, you just need to do the hard work to break the story. This is what they are paying you for.

I suppose there's some sort of algorithm wherein the better the writer you are, the less ancillary details like the above you need to know. If such an algorithm exists, I never figured it out. I do know this: If you consistently write great scripts, you could be a mime who dresses like Sasquatch and farts in their faces… and they would hire you again and again.

So write great scripts? Absolutely. That is the numero uno prime directive. But the way you are perceived as a writer can be heavily influenced by your understanding of The Biz and basic human psychology. In other words, it's not jut about the script.

Film Fading to Black | Creative COW

2011-10-12T11:30:00.001+05:30

Film Fading to Black

Excerpts:

While the debate has raged over whether or not film is dead, ARRI, Panavision and Aaton have quietly ceased production of film cameras within the last year to focus exclusively on design and manufacture of digital cameras. That's right: someone, somewhere in the world is now holding the last film camera ever to roll off the line.

Aaton founder Jean-Pierre Beauviala notes why. "Almost nobody is buying new film cameras. Why buy a new one when there are so many used cameras around the world?" he says. "We wouldn't survive in the film industry if we were not designing a digital camera."

Do camera manufacturers believe film will disappear? "Eventually it will," says ARRI's Russell. "In two or three years, it could be 85 percent digital and 15 percent film. But the date of the complete disappearance of film? No one knows."

From Radin's point of view, the question of when film will die, "Can only be answered by Kodak and Fuji. Film will be around as long as Kodak and Fuji believe they can make money at it," he says.

"It's a stunning development," says International Cinematographer Guild President Steven Poster, ASC. "We've been waiting for it as far back as 2001. I think we've reached a kind of tipping point on the acquisition side and, now, there's a tipping point on the exhibition side."

The third, and perhaps most devastating blow to film, comes from the increased penetration of Digital Cinema. According to Patrick Corcoran, National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO) Director of Media & Research/California Operations Chief, at the end of July 2011, "We passed the 50 percent mark in terms of digital screens in the U.S. We've been adding screens at a fast clip this year, 700 to 750 a month," he says.

He notes that the turning point was the creation of the virtual print fee, which allows NATO members to recoup the investment they have to make to upgrade to digital cinema. (Studios, meanwhile, save $1 billion a year for the costs of making and shipping release prints.)

Eastman Kodak, Chris Johnson, Director of New Business Development, Entertainment Imaging, counters that "I don't see a time when Kodak stops making film stock," noting the year-on-year growth in 65mm film and popularity of Super 8mm. "We still make billions of linear feet of film," he says. "Over the horizon as far as we can see, we'll be making billions of feet of film."

"Though reports of its imminent death have been exaggerated, more industry observers than before accept the end of film. "In 100 years, yes," says AbelCine's Shore. "In ten years, I think we'll still have film cameras. So somewhere between 10 and 100 years."

Film Fading to Black

Note: Michael Shannon + Chinese Film

2011-09-27T10:11:00.000+05:30

This one - Take Shelter, is generating a lot of buzz at festivals. The lead actor, Michael Shannon may end up having a good shot at Oscar nominations. Everyone's raving about the film & his performance. Tree of Life's actress, Jessica Chastain is a part of it too.

Video Interview: Michael Shannon Talks Festival Favorite Take Shelter, General Zod in Man of Steel - Thompson on Hollywood

Boy...a chinese film made at $90 mil! Rs 450 Cr flick! Wonder where and how it shall make the profit. But guess they would have a good audience at home and with Christian Bale in the flick they sure want to rock in the international arena.

First Poster Art for Zhang Yimou's Oscar Hopeful Flowers of War with Christian Bale Not Inspired - Thompson on Hollywood

Interview - Director: Bennett Miller (Moneyball) by Anne Thompson

2011-09-27T09:16:00.000+05:30

How Did Moneyball Director Bennett Miller Make a Smart Studio Movie? Brad Pitt.

Bennett Miller is not the first name that would come to mind as the director ofMoneyball, which two years ago was a problem-plagued project stalled at Sony with $10 million in costs stacked against it from past writers Stan Chervin, Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin and departed directors David Frankel and Steven Soderbergh. And yet, for many reasons, Miller was just the right fit for this Sony adaptation of the 2003 Michael Lewis bestseller about Oakland As general manager Billy Beane. The movie launched toraves at Toronto and beyond and opened well this weekend. Now Oscars are in its sights.

Miller had something to prove, after not having directed a feature since 2005's Capote, made with his two Mamaroneck buds Dan Futterman and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who won the Oscar. (Miller's been directing commercials.) Moneyball is the New York director's third film, and his first studio assignment. The reason Miller got the job, finally, was that he and Brad Pitt hit it off when they met on a film that never got off the ground at MRC, Foxcatcher, the story of DuPont heir John E. du Pont, who was convicted of killing Olympic wrestler David Schultz.

Thus, after Sony's Amy Pascal pulled the plug on Soderbergh's experimental vision ofMoneyball, Pitt brought Miller in to direct the baseball film, and stuck by him through thick and thin. Miller pitched his idea of the movie, focusing on Beane as a disappointed, stubborn, competitive guy with something to prove—a subject the director knew something about—and Pascal went along. Amazingly enough, when Miller's idiosyncratic, naturalistic, slow-paced, non-glossy director's cut got to research previews, it played. For once, his movie was saved by movie fans.

Anne Thompson: Moneyball is unexpected from a studio movie. Which script did you first read?
Bennett Miller: I first read the script that was Sorkin's first revision of Zaillian, and then I read Zaillian and then I read the book. Then I thought about if there was a movie somewhere. Then I met with Brad, and pitched him. Everybody's gotta be making the same movie, otherwise you're in a disaster, especially with these huge personalities. With them, Might can be your best friend or your worst enemy. If you're sharing a common goal, purpose and vision, then great, and if not, it's the last place anybody wants to be.

AT: So you really deliberated about taking the job?
BM: Because: What's the movie? Is there a movie? Can it get made? Is it realistic, given more money than Capote or the other movie I was trying to get made that didn't get made? Can this get made with a larger budget at a studio, when you're coming onto something that already has a past?

AT: A checkered past. There are reasons why it was difficult. You probably understood the authenticity Steven Soderbergh wanted to bring, on some level?
BM: The immediate answer is yes. But also I think he left it too open to a process that was going to discover and reveal, that we can't know exactly what would have been.

AT: That's why the studio pulled out. Whereas you were in effect proposing a more predictable outcome? But it's always risky.
BM: Yeah. (Pause) The truth is that every movie teaches you how to make that movie, and this one really had its own demands, independent of what anybody would have liked it to have been. It wanted things and needed things, and it really kept revealing itself right until the end. So I don't think it's right to say that it was predictable. From an executive's perspective, you could say that, sure.

AT: So did the studio eventually just sign off and say go for it?
BM: Well, how long have you been in this business? I mean, come on. I don't think there's anything sensational about how it gets worked out, but it's like anything, making a movie at a studio, passing legislation, whatever—it's complicated.

AT: Did it turn out better or worse than you expected: working with the studio and making the movie?
BM: Honestly, I feel like I went in there with open eyes. I had never taken an interview with a movie at a studio before, after Capote. And so I thought, 'oh, maybe I could do a Trojan Horse-type experience.'

AT: With Moneyball. What happened to The Immortalist with Vanguard/Paramount/John Lesher? You were working on that for a few years.
BM: And something else, too, called Foxcatcher at MRC, which is the one I'd committed to doing next. And the world didn't cooperate. Things were falling apart. Both things I want to do still. I have the rights, but until you see the end credits roll on opening night…

AT: You've learned the hard way. But now, you're in The Show.
BM: I'm in The Show. I've learned a lot.

AT: How did your name get thrown into the mix?
BM: I believe it was Brad. I had met him before and talked to him about Foxcatcherand when I flew out there to have a conversation we definitely bonded, we were feeling the same thing. Moneyball would not have been possible if he and I were making a different movie.

AT: How exactly did you describe your take on the movie to the likes of Pitt, Pascal, and producers Rachael Horovitz, Mike DeLuca and Scott Rudin?
BM: I liked a couple of lines from the book that reflected on Billy's past and what might be going on beyond what Billy was aware of. Michael Lewis had said that Billy wondered if there was a different life he was supposed to be leading.

AT: He didn't go to Stanford, he wasn't good in the batter's box.
BM: He wanted to be a student. He was really smart. Nobody in his family had ever gone to college, and he wanted to be the first. His mother really did not want him to go [to The Mets]. She wouldn't be in the room when he signed the contract. He was a first round draft pick! From the time he was fifteen, you've got adults who've spent their lives in baseball, they've seen everything, saying ,'This is your future, this is your destiny,' and he makes a decision based on that, and there's a big check. Again, there'd be a big check at the end of the movie, and I thought, 'well that's one thing; there's a check and a check, and a decision and a decision.'

The other thing: Michael describes Billy's excitement when these new [sabermetric] concepts are introduced to him, as not just a way of winning, potentially, but as ideas that might explain him and his outcome, and why he might have failed. To me, he thinks he's trying to win baseball games, but he's really trying to remedy something in his own life.

AT: He couldn't stand being a failure: why did all the baseball experts think he was meant to be something that despite all his gifts, he didn't turn out to be? It didn't work out. He didn't trust those people.
BM: Well he wanted to prove them wrong, and that season became a kind of trial. And the outcome would be some kind of verdict that would have something to say about who he was. He's trying to remedy something from his past and he wanted to put the game on its head, and there's a little hostility in it.

AT: He was competitive.
BM: Extremely competitive. When I read it, I saw it as a really small story, in a way it used to be OK to make a small story, like a Cuckoo's Nest, where it's like, nobody knows about these people. But this is bigger in scale.

AT: That's what I like about it. It has no gloss to it; I don't mean that in a negative way.
BM: That's the intention.

AT: How do you make a studio-level movie with a movie star and all these players and still bring your aesthetic to it? Because it's still a Bennett Miller movie.
BM: How? You have Brad Pitt as an ally. That's it. It really was his passion that got the movie made. It's a great part and he wanted to do it.

AT: It was also a commercial movie, even if it's not glossy.
BM: In my mind, I think that equals a more commercial movie, because I think nobody wants to see a baseball movie, or a light comedy baseball movie. Nobody cares, nobody wants that. That's the surface of the thing and that's actually the obstacle to selling the movie, but if it's something that people can relate to, i.e. nobody's life turns out the way they expect it's gonna be, it just doesn't happen. And nobody does not question at one point or another, 'what else might my life have been?' and the decisions you make. And also be reminded how hard and in a small way how heroic it is to challenge perceptions; your own and other people's.

AT: People respond to the idea of a rebel going up against the establishment.
BM: Absolutely. My point is that those things are commercial when they're given an opportunity. And in baseball, in a similar way, they want to keep betting on the same five tools, we're making this at a studio and there might be that impulse to revert to the gloss or the swelling score or the jokes, and I never believed that that would be more commercial than something that has less gloss, that you could relate to. I think that is the big market that is overlooked.

AT: The screenplay, how much was Zaillian, how much Sorkin?
BM: Both of these guys came on and off it. It went Sorkin, Zaillian, Sorkin, Zaillian—it was a little bit of back and forth.

AT: Well you're working with two of the best screenwriters we know. What were the strengths of each one?
BM:A guy could do worse! Zaillian had a heavier, earthier, more internal, brooding, darker perspective. And Sorkin is masterful at comedic haiku that communicates volumes in a moment, in a beat, that he could take a scene that's written and he could reduce it and put a line in and make it function in a different way. But ultimately what we're talking about is a character, the public and private self, like Capote. These guys wrote appropriately to different sides of him. Zaillian wrote more to the internal, beneath the surface, and Sorkin managed to write very effectively for the more public, charismatic side of Billy.

AT: Cinematographer Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight, Inception) was a good choice. He's unpretentious, very gifted, doesn't go for gloss. He keeps it on character, on what's really going on.
BM: Wally comes from news and documentary; has a very on-his-feet, verite style, he's the best operator I've ever worked with. He rolls into an environment and doesn't want to create something out of his imagination—all of which make him a really comfortable fit for this stuff. He'll walk into an environment and say, 'Well, what is it, what are the sources, and how do we wrangle that in and make it manageable and allow us enough time to shoot the damn thing?'

AT: How did you cast the baseball scouts?
BM: We met a bunch of scouts, interviewed them, did research. I think there are three actors.

AT: The one that gets fired?
BM: He has done some acting but he's a baseball guy for thirty-something years. He introduced me to those guys, they all know each other. I did a baseball-themed commercial about two years ago and Kenny came in to audition and gives me his dossier and says, 'I was here, here, Yankees,' and I said 'What do you think of Billy Beane?' and he says, 'Ruining the game.' I said 'Why?' and if had I been able to get a quarter of what he did in that monologue…

AT: And Jonah Hill: where did those long slow reaction shots come from?
BM: It just became a character thing. In baseball everyone's kind of operating from the gut and shooting from the hip. He's a very thoughtful guy. There's not a lot more interesting than watching somebody think on film. And the movie really ends with a decision, like you don't hear him, it's not expressed in any way, you're just sitting with a guy as he's having an emotional experience and the decision is being made. Jonah brought that, and when we were cutting it, I liked it so much, we found ways to manufacture it here and there. It's a character thing, of a thoughtful, deliberative person. Like he hesitates, thinks, measures twice, speaks…and it's funny.

AT: How was it to work with Pitt?
BM: He's got two things. One is a shamanistic ability you can't really describe. He understands how to be fascinating, and conjure a presence. He could have been a ballet dancer, he exercises a kind of control over his instrument, he understands the frame like a painter, he knows how to enter it. It's the only experience I've ever had where watching the dailies is different from what it's like being in the room, it made watching the monitor more important. He's doing a leading role, but I see him as a character actor. In this case, you have to tell the story, with your performance, you're leading the audience through your story. It's a personal story to him, he wanted to play the role. You need to be making the same movie and telling the same story. Is it communicating? To the degree that you can relate to the movie it will work and when it feels like you're being put on, it won't work. It didn't want razzmatazz and slickness.

AT: What was the most challenging thing to pull off on this film as a director?
BM: The material itself was challenging. It did not lend itself naturally to a cinema experience: Michael's book, the story, which is so much about numbers and stats, you can't ignore that, it was difficult. Hopefully at the end of the day, it was a clarified vision, but getting there is like a football size suduku puzzle. The movie is a little like that.

AT: How was the editing process?
BM: The movie was revealing itself until the last moment. The spirit of the thing is very clear, and the way it was gonna happen was never by a complete prescription. And so I don't remember how many months we edited for, but maybe nine, it was lengthy and laborious. It was a very creative period, meaning you have to keep on finding ways to make things work.

AT: How would you characterize what you were fighting to keep in the movie?
BM: If you have a vision for something, things are navigable. If it gets fuzzy, then obstacles become much more formidable. At the end of the day, someone has to show up and do the thing and there's a choice to either stick to what you believe and see, or to attempt to helm something that you don't really understand or appreciate that somebody else would argue for.

AT: Your movie has ebbs and flows and character beats that studios don't jump up and down about when they are looking for mainstream acceptance. It's not the way they would have done it.

BM: It's the same exact thing as the story itself; you need guys who are fast, you need as many tools as possible, these are the ingredients that make up a successful team or a good player or a hit movie—and you say, well, those aren't necessarily the ingredients, you don't necessarily need to have a movie of this length, or moves along at this pace, or has a joke or a cut every so often. In the case of this movie it happens that the focus groups were validating. From the first one, it was a revelation that you can trust the things that made this book a bestseller, you can trust the themes that are non-debatably universal and meaningful to people. Just trust THAT. Make it feel relatable. That will suit your purposes, too.

People are attracted to entertainment, for sure, or jokes, excitement and romantically heightened stories that might be false, but are still attractive fantasies. But they're also interested in this other thing. It's not like, I'm against this or any of those things. There's something to aim for; there's a vision there, it's about serving these things. it's allowing it to be a small, personal story that has an outcome that defies the traditional tropes and climaxes and conclusions of a sports movie with champagne corks. It's a quieter, more personal, longer lasting, I think deeper, more meaningful triumph.

How Did Moneyball Director Bennett Miller Make a Smart Studio Movie? Brad Pitt.

Scriptography | David Bordwell

2011-09-19T14:34:00.000+05:30

Hollywood screenwriters at work, according to Boy Meets Girl (1938).

It's not every conference that opens a morning session by asking the men in the audience to take off their underwear.

But I anticipate.

Last weekend I was a guest of the Screenwriting Resource Network's fourth annual Screenwriting Research Conference in Brussels. I think that a hell of a time was had by all, and I learned quite a bit, including some reasons why people are interested in screenplays.

Schmucks with Underwoods

Catherine Turney script for No Man of Her Own (1950).

In my youth, there seemed to be a solemn pact among my peers that we would never study certain areas: censorship, audiences, adaptation (novels into film, particularly), and screenwriting. An earlier generation had, through patient labor, shown decisively that these subjects were dead boring. We, on the other hand, were fired by notions of the director as auteur, and indifferent to what were called "literary" and "sociological" approaches to film. So we triumphantly turned toward The Text—that is, the finished movie.

Things have changed since then. Yet there are still tempting reasons to consider the study of screenwriting a nonstarter if you're interested in cinema as an art. If you think of the finished film as the achieved artwork, then study of screenplay drafts risks seeming irrelevant. Whatever the screenwriter(s) intended seems irrelevant to the result. So what if six or more screenwriters labored over Tootsie? The movie stands or falls by what we see onscreen.

This was the view presented in Jean-Claude Carrière's three talks to our group. He suggested that the screenplay is destined to become landfill, and rightly so. It's like the caterpillar that becomes a butterfly. Once the film has been made, the script has no intrinsic value.

Someone might say, "Wait! We study a painter's sketches, a novelist's drafts, or a composer's early scores. These materials can contribute to understanding the finished work, and sometimes they have an artistic value of their own." The problem is that in these arts, the preparatory materials are in the same medium as the result. But a script can't count as a version of the film because prose can't adequately specify the audiovisual texture of a movie. It's commonly thought, plausibly, that giving the same script to two directors would result in significantly different films. So the script is at best a series of suggestions for filming, not a sketchy version of the movie. Why not discard it when the film is done?

The study of screenwriting has probably also lain in the shadows because of the proliferation of screenwriting gurus and how-to manuals. Every American over the age of eighteen seems to be writing a screenplay; the Cable Guy who visited me last week was working on two. So all the seminars and advice books have arguably put thinking about screenplays rather close to the amateur-script racket.

Moreover, screenplay studies seem to be part of a broader, paradoxical development in academic film studies. Today scholars have more access to films than ever before, thanks to video, festivals, archives, and the internet. Yet many researchers prefer to talk about everything but the film. More and more scholars want to study just those subjects that my cohort considered dull or irrelevant: censorship and regulation, audiences (composition, demographics, critical reception, fandom), and preproduction factors (storyboards, scripts). In addition, many academics have turned to bigger thematic ideas like film and architecture, film and the city, film and modernity. These trends of research usually make only glancing reference to actual movies, mostly mining them for quick illustrative examples.

In sum, many academics have abandoned the study of film as an artistic medium that finds its embodiment in important works. To get to know particular films more intimately, you increasingly have to go to the Net, to writers like Jim Emerson, Adrian Martin, and other sensitive analytical critics. Talking about screenwriting can seem to be another way of avoiding coming to grips with the intrinsic power of movies.

You can probably tell that one side of me shares some of the biases I've listed. But when I remind myself that what people should study aren't topics but questions, I cheer up quite a bit. For there are, I think, worthwhile questions to be asked about all these areas, screenwriting included. The Brussels event gave some good instances of resourceful, occasionally exciting research into them.

Based on my short acquaintance, most of the research questions seem trained on one of two broad areas: Screenwriting and The Screenplay.

In the trenches

Kinky & Cosy

Screenwriting can be thought of as a practice, a creative activity with both personal and social aspects. How, we might ask, do screenwriters or directors express themselves in the script? How does a media industry recruit, sustain, and reward screenwriters? What are the conventions and constraints at work in a particular screenwriting community?

Questions like this are somewhat familiar to me. When I wrote my first book, on Carl Dreyer, I had to examine his scripts (notably the unproduced Jesus of Nazareth), and that helped me understand his characteristic methods of researching and planning his films. Later, when I collaborated with Kristin and Janet Staiger on The Classical Hollywood Cinema, I recognized a more institutional side of things. We can see from the films of the 1910s that filmmakers were cutting up the space in fresh ways. But this wasn't a matter of directors simply winging it on the set. Kristin used published manuals and Janet used original screenplays to show that shot breakdowns were planned to a considerable degree before shooting. This habit made production more efficient and controllable.

Steven Price offered further evidence of this sort, which displayed some of his research on early scenarios for Mack Sennett movies like Crooked to the End (1915). Interestingly, Steven found that sometimes the later version of a continuity script was more laconic than the initial one. Perhaps the gags, once spelled out in the first draft, could be left up to the actors. This is the sort of thing he identified as a "trace" of production practices.

A parallel of sorts emerged in Maria Belodubrovskaya's paper on screenwriting under Stalin. The Soviets, admiring Hollywood efficiency, tried to come up with a similar system. But their efforts to produce films in bulk were blocked by a censorship apparatus bent on ideological correctness. No surprise there, I guess. But Masha showed convincingly that the very efforts to mimic Hollywood's "assembly-line" system also discouraged authors from submitting scripts. The writers thought (like many of their LA counterparts) that such a setup denied them creative freedom. In addition, the prospect of story departments providing a stream of screenplays ran afoul of the tradition that gave the director control of the final draft. And the role of producer, as one who could steer the whole process, didn't exist! So much for the Soviet Hollywood.

What about other media? Sara Zanatta traced out the process of creating Italian TV series. She reviewed some major formats (miniseries, original series, adaptations of foreign series) and then took us through the process of creating individual episodes. Interestingly, it seems that the Italian system, unlike US television, makes the director the boss of it all. Frédéric Zeimat explained how he gained entry to the local screenwriting community through his university education, including work in Luc Dardennes' workshop at the Free University of Brussels. Eventually he came up with a script that won prizes. He is about to become a showrunner for a sitcom.

One of the most stimulating panels I heard considered the writing of graphic novels and animation. Richard Neupert explored how recent French animation sustained the tradition of individual authorship while still acceding to some international norms of moviemaking. The cartoonist Nix discussed how he faced new problems in transferring his three-panel comic strip Kinky & Cosy from print to television. TV demanded less written text, especially signs, so that the clips could be exported outside Belgium. More deeply, Nix had to rethink how to pace the action and leave a beat (say, two seconds) after the punchline.

Pascal Lefèvre, one of Europe's leading experts on comic art, provided a brisk, packed account of the history and practices of scriptwriting for Eurocomics. He described patterns of collaboration, format, and creative choice, placing special emphasis on comics as a spatial art different from cinema. His example was a page from Regis Franc's ulta-widescreen album Le Café de la plage. Here's a portion in which two periods of Monroe Stress's life coexist in a single space. He muses as an adult while his childish self gobbles up food under the guidance of Mom.

Comics space can also change abruptly, as when a window appears in second panel.

Other papers presented less institutionally fixed, more personal versions of screenwriting as a practice. Kelley Conway's lecture on Agnes Varda exploited unique access to the filmmaker's notebooks, scrapbooks, and databases. Kelley showed how Varda conceived three of her documentaries by means of strict categorical structures that were then frayed by digressions born out of the material she shot.

Anna Sofia Rossholm provided something similar for Bergman. Out of the vast Bergman archive she quarried sixty "workbooks," typically one for each film. Whereas Varda's books were filled with cutouts and images, Bergman was a word man, treating the books as diaries that recorded "this secret I." Anna Sofia proposed that in his jottings and planning, Bergman not only communed with himself (calling himself an idiot on occasion) but also explored patterns of doubling akin to those we find in the films. The workbooks evidently held a special place for him: he included their pages in films like Hour of the Wolf and Saraband.

David Lean might be thought of as working in between the Hollywood system and the more personal European milieu. Ian MacDonald suggested that one of Lean's unfilmed projects sheds light on what he calls screenplay poetics. MacDonald seeks, I think, a principled method for studying the creative process. He does this by tracing how a screen idea is transformed in a series of documents generated by the creative team. The process, he points out, is governed by the participants' various conceptual frameworks. For Nostromo, Lean solicited two screenwriters and oversaw their rather different versions of the novel. Ian showed that Lean seems to have found solutions to adapting the book by fitting it to the three-act structure advocated by Hollywood artisans, a concrete case of a filmmaker accepting a fresh "poetics" or set of creative constraints.

All of these inquiries could lead to more general thoughts about the creative process in cinema. For some filmmakers, it's a professional task, undertaken with full knowledge that problems and constraints will have to be dealt with. For others, such as Bergman and Varda, it's obviously deeply personal, even autobiographical. Perhaps most intimate was the film discussed by Hester Joyce. New Zealand filmmaker Gaylene Preston basedHome by Christmas (2010; above) partly on audiotape interviews with her father as he recalled his World War II experiences. Her script reconstructed her interviews with actors, then filled in scenes with documentary footage and scenes she imagined. It's a family memoir on several levels: Preston's daughter portrays her own grandmother.

The Screenplay: What Is It?

Several of these probes into the creative process raise a more theoretical question. How should we best conceive of the screenplay? As a blueprint? A recipe? An outline? These labels all suggest something disposable preliminary to the real thing, the movie. But why can't we think of the screenplay as a freestanding object? After all, there are films without screenplays, but there are also screenplays—some written by distinguished authors—that were never made into films. And some of these, like Pinter's Proust screenplay, are read for their own sake.

In cases like this, should we consider the screenplay a literary genre? And if the screenplay for an unproduced film can be considered a discrete object, what stops us from treating a filmed script in exactly the same way? Moreover, why even speak of a single screenplay, when we know that most commercial films at least go through several drafts? Can't we consider each one an independent literary text? We're now far from Carrière's idea that the script finds its consummation in the finished film and as a piece of writing it should wind up in the ashcan.

And not all screenplays are literary texts. The scrapbooks and databases that Varda accumulates are works of visual art, collages or mixed-media assemblages. Are these merely draft of the film, or do they have an independent existence or value? We seem to be asking the sort of question that Ted Nannicelli poses in his Ph. D. dissertation. Is there an ontology of the screenplay?

Take a concrete example. Ann Igelstrom's paper, "Narration in the Screenplay Text," asked how literary techniques are deployed in the screenplay. When a passage in the script for Before Sunset begins, "We see…," who exactly is this we? Ann argued that traditional narrative concepts involving the source of the narration, the implied author and implied reader, and the rhetoric of telling can illuminate conventions of screenwriting. Here the screenplay seems definitely a literary text.

In his keynote address, "The Screenplay: An Accelerated Critical History," Steven Price (above) declared a more abstract interest in the ontology of the screenplay but proposed that there was no clear-cut way of defining it. Historically, the screenplay takes many forms. Steven pointed out that even in Hollywood, there were many alternative formats, ranging from detailed breakdowns to the "master-scene" method (the option that didn't specify shots or camera positions). And conceptually, the screenplay carried traces of its original production purposes, as well as other constellations of meaning. (Mack Sennett scripts seem to him part of a Sadean tradition of dehumanized, repetitive recombination.) So if there is a distinctive mode of being of the screenplay, outside of its role in production, it will turn out to be a messy one.

Envoi

J. J. Murphy presents a paper on Ronald Tavel. Photo courtesy Richard Neupert.

If we conceive studies of screenplay and screenwriting as revolving around specific research questions, those of us interested in film as art can learn a lot. If our interests are in film history, researchers can show how organizations of production and individual choices by screenwriters/directors can shape the final product. For those of us interested in more theoretical explorations, asking about the nature and "mode of being" of the screenplay can't help but make us think more about the ontology of cinema itself.

And if want to know films more intimately, being aware of the creative choices that were made by the filmmakers throws a spotlight on aspects of the film we might otherwise not notice. It's all very well to say we'll examine the film "in itself," but our attention is invariably selective. Knowledge of behind-the-scenes decisions can sharpen our awareness of artistic matters. Anna Sofia's research on Bergman, like Marja-Ritta Koivumäki's paper on Tarkovsky's screenplay for My Name Is Ivan, activates parts of the film for special notice.

Because there were split sessions at the conference, and because I was plagued by jet lag, I couldn't attend every panel and talk. I regret missing papers I later heard were very fine, and I haven't written up everything I heard. I haven't sufficiently talked about screenwriting pedagogy, represented in papers like Lucien Georgescu's dramatic appeal to rethink whether screenwriting should be taught in film schools, or Debbie Danielpour's stimulating survey of her methods of teaching genre scripting. So this is just a small sample of what these folks are up to. But you can tell, I think, that they're posing questions at a level of sophistication that my 1960s cohort couldn't have envisioned. Despite what the cynics say, there is progress in academic work.

As for men's underpants: All is explained here.

I'm grateful to conference organizers Ronald Geerts and Hugo Vercauteren for inviting me to speak at the gathering. I must also thank conference organizer and old friend Muriel Andrin, along with Dominique Nasta and their colleagues and students from the Arts du Spectacle Department at the Université Libre de Bruxelles. My friends at the Cinematek, Stef and Bart and Hilde, helped me with my PowerPoint). Thanks as well to the Universitaire Associatie Brussel (Vrije Universiteit Brussel / Rits-Erasmushogeschool Brussel) and Associatie KULeuven (MAD-Faculty / Sint Lukas Brussel). A high point of the event was the visit to La Fleur en Papier Doré. Special thanks to Gabrielle Claes for her heartfelt introduction to my talk, not to mention a delicious bucket of moules.

A founding document in the contemporary study of the screenplay is Claudia Sternberg's Written for the Screen: The American Motion-Picture Screenplay as Text (Stauffenburg, 1997). Other books central to the conference cohort include Steven Maras's Screenwriting: History, Theory, and Practice, Steven Price's The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism, J. J. Murphy's Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work, and Jill Nelmes's anthology Analysing the Screenplay, which includes many essays by members of the group. See also the affiliated Journal of Screenwriting. The next screenwriting conference will be held in Sydney, and the 2013 one will take place in Madison, Wisconsin.

Coke does go through you pretty fast. Richard Neupert at a Coca-Cola machine that exploits a Brussels landmark.

Scriptography | David Bordwell

JCC | David Bordwell

2011-09-19T14:32:00.000+05:30

The Milky Way (La Voie lactée, 1969)

DB here, writing from a gray Brussels:

All the problems of a film are in the script.

When a film is made, the screenplay disappears.

When you consider what a scene needs to express, ask: How can the actor act it?

When you're writing a scene, try to act it out yourself.

Rather than letting dialogue explain the action, let the action explain the dialogue.

It will always be possible to make films. Don't forget to make cinema.

These and other epigrammatic insights flowed easily from Jean-Claude Carrière during his visit to the Cinematekof Belgium and the annual conference of the Screenwriting Research Network. I hope to devote a later blog to other attractions of this stimulating get-together. For now, a brief tribute to the volcanic charm of the legend known as JCC.

JCC entered cinema under the aegis of Jacques Tati. Tati wanted someone to turn M. Hulot's Holiday and Mon Oncle into novels, and the very young writer seemed the right candidate. But Tati quickly learned that JCC didn't know how a film was made. So he assigned Pierre Etaix and the editor Suzan Baron to tutor the lad in the ways of cinema. First lesson: Go through M. Hulot on a flatbed viewer, examining the script line by line while watching shot by shot. As a result, JCC says, he began to understand "the film that you don't see."

In the course of his career, JCC has written novels, plays, essays, screenplays, even a scenario for a graphic novel. In the process he became one of the most distinguished and respected screenwriters of the last fifty years. His most famous collaborations were probably with Buñuel, from Belle de Jour (1967) to the master's last film, That Obscure Object of Desire (1977). He worked with Etaix (The Suitor, 1962), Forman (Taking Off, 1971), Schlöndorff (The Tin Drum, 1979), Godard (Every Man for Himself, 1980), Wajda (Danton, 1983), Oshima (Max mon amour, 1986), Kaufman (The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 1988), Peter Brook (The Mahabarata, 1989), Malle (Milou en Mai, 1990), and Haneke (The White Ribbon, 2007). He has also become known for his work on major French costume pictures and adaptations, such as Cyrano de Bergerac (1990) and The Horseman on the Roof (1995), as well as work with younger directors, including Wayne Wang (Chinese Box, 1997) and Jonathan Glazer (Birth, 2005). His TV scripts are numberless.

Directors both young and old come to him for the unique forms of collaboration that he offers. Instead of going off to write the screenplay, JCC meets frequently with the director. (Sometimes the director stays in his house.) He might ask the director to write the script for him, and they go over the result. Through these methods, JCC tries to help the director "find the film that he wants to make." But his methods are flexible, tailored to the director's temperament. When he was working with Buñuel, the men met daily to tell each other their dreams, some of which wound up in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972). Similarly, JCC prefers to meet with the actors before production, letting them try out the parts so that he can revise things for each one's habits of speaking. For Cyrano, Depardieu read the entire play aloud, taking all the parts, and then listened to it over and over on cassettes to refine his interpretation.

Brussels gave JCC a busy twenty-four hours. In conversation with the critic Louis Danvers he introduced a Cinematek screening of The Milky Way. He gave a keynote address for the Screenplay Network conference, and he participated in a panel discussion with members of the Flemish Screenwriters Guild at the film school RITS. These sessions ranged freely over his career and his conceptions of filmmaking. He believes that there is a language of film that sets it apart from other arts. That language is grounded in the play of meaning and emotion that comes from putting one shot after another.

He explained the point through an example that seems at first to be a restatement of the classic Kuleshov effect. In Shot 1, a man in his apartment looks out the window. Shot 2: The street. A woman is walking with another man. We'll assume that our man is seeing them. Shot 3: Our man reacts.

But contrary to Kuleshov's dictum, his facial expression should not be neutral. In fact, his expression tells us how to understand the scene. If the man looks upset, we surmise that he's jealous. If he's benevolent, we assume that the woman is a friend, his daughter—or a flirt. The filmmaker needs not only techniques like framing and cutting, but also the performances of actors.

Now cut to the woman in her bedroom brushing her hair. We need to make sure the audience understands that it's the same woman, so maybe we have to go back and add a shot to the earlier scene, a closer view of her in the street. This constant flow and readjustment of images is based on guiding the spectator discreetly but firmly through the action. The audience isn't aware of this "secret film," but it governs everything the viewer thinks and feels.

For this reason, the young screenwriter needs to learn everything about how a film is made. When JCC was acting in The Wedding Ring (1971), a film starring Anna Karina, he learned that simply getting up from a couch can be a complicated matter. When he stood up spontaneously, dipping forward to lift his body, the cinematographer had to correct him: It looked awkward on film. JCC learned that he had to stand up in an unnatural way, with his feet spaced and his back rigid, so that it looked smooth on film. The screenwriter must know that even the smallest moment of action, easy to write in the comfort of a study or a café, is subject to the contingencies of production.

Where to get ideas for films? From the classics, of course. ("Balzac is the greatest screenwriter—every character is vivid.") But above all you must observe reality. Tati taught JCC to sit vigilantly in a café. Study everyone who passes. Notice details. Imagine the person as a character in a story. Give him or her some motivations. What you must do is "find the fiction in the reality." When JCC presided over the French film school La FEMIS, he promoted an exercise that required students to move out into a public space, like a market, and come back with stories about the people they saw. JCC praised Tati's genius for spinning gags and situations out of passing life—"as if God had created the world so that it could furnish a film by Jacques Tati."

JCC must be one of the few screenwriters who doesn't gripe about his work being changed in its final incarnation onscreen. He sees the screenplay as ephemeral, the chrysalis for the butterfly. Once you accept the fact that your text must be sloughed off on its way to becoming cinema, you can take joy in your work. For young people, JCC advised the same relaxed, exploratory attitude. Conceive of yourself as a writer, able to move across media. The venues for your writing are constantly changing, so be prepared to write for television as well as film, to write comics and documentaries and plays. Above all, "Don't despair of the future of cinema. It's wide open."

Jean-Claude Carrière turns eighty next week.

The best introduction to Carrière's career and ideas that I know is his book The Secret Language of Film (Faber, 1995). Some of this text overlaps with Exercice du scénario (FEMIS, 1990), coauthored with Pascal Bonitzer. That book is worth reading too, but it hasn't to my knowledge found English translation. An illuminating interview is here.

Mon Oncle (1958). "I followed Tati more or less everywhere, usually with Etaix, attending projections followed by long anxious discussions. ('Can we clearly see the dog's tail go past the electric eye that shuts the garage door? Yes? Clearly? You're sure people will see it?')

P.S. 11 September 2011: Thanks to Jonathan Rosenbaum for correcting an error in JCC's filmography, which I've rectified above. Jonathan also remarks:

I assume that you know, by the way, that Carrière appears in a scene of Certified Copy, playing something similar to the "wise old guru" role played by the Turkish taxidermist in Taste of Cherry and the doctor in The Wind Will Carry Us.

I did know and should have worked it in!

JCC | David Bordwell

Another Rare Terrence Malick Interview (1974) - All Things Shining

2011-09-14T13:18:00.001+05:30

FirstShowing.Net on the interview:

The interview itself focuses on the filming of Badlands - Malick's 1973 directorial debut, which he also wrote, starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek in a "dramatization of the Starkweather-Fugate killing spree of the 1950's, in which a teenage girl and her twenty-something boyfriend slaughtered her entire family and several others in the Dakota badlands."

The quick-fire Q&A between the writer/director and G. Richardson Cook (the interviewer who also happened to be a Production Assistant on Badlands) is a fascinating conversation about making an independent feature outside of the studio system and without a distributor in place at the time of production in an era of Hollywood during the '60s and '70s where this type of filmmaking was still kind of emerging and evolving (in comparison to modern independent filmmaking at least). So much was different and yet so much was the same (for example, approaching dentists and lawyers for funding and lying about your production costs).

In response to Cook's question "How was Badlands financed?" Malick said "It was financed like a Broadway play - that is on a limited partnership arrangement with a lot of investors who didn't know one another each coming in for a small piece, anywhere from $1000 to $50,000." (the budget onBadlands was supposedly "under half a million dollars" though Malick reveals he had been advised to say that.)

If you're an independent filmmaker yourself, a fan of Malick's work, or just a film lover in general, this vintage gem is a must read for sure.

http://www.firstshowing.net/2011/rare-interview-with-terrence-malick-from-1974-filmmakers-newsletter

Another Rare Terrence Malick Interview from Filmmaker's Newsletter - 1974

The Fate of Documentary Film | Leslie Stonebraker

2011-09-05T23:00:00.001+05:30

The precarious position of documentarians

Excerpts:

Traditionally, the festival circuit is the funnel to theatrical distribution. But like a funnel, this method enables only a fated few to make it to the marquees. The Internet offers a direct pipeline to viewers without relying on the mercy of big time distributors and movie houses. The complete democratization of technology, coupled with the prevalence of YouTube and its analogues, provides filmmakers a ready way to self-distribute their films.

"Obviously, the Internet will help," Battle for Brooklyn director David Beilinson clarifies. "But the problem is that the filmmakers don't get paid. The main thing is to figure out how to get filmmakers money so that they can continue to make films and still make them available."

The conundrum is clear: It is easier than ever to make a good documentary film, but just as hard to reach an audience in a way that makes a profit. How can a filmmaker make it in this post-millennial environment?

"The web isn't really a destination. The web is millions and millions of destinations. Even something as successful as Netflix and their recommendation engine, it's still not easy to build an audience for a documentary." Sehring strongly believes that only sites of consumption that are a destination—theaters, television or VOD—can offer indie filmmakers a taste of commercial success.

But this relationship will not result in a huge marketing campaign. Sehring admits that in a documentary, "we look for something that will appeal to an audience that has a core following anyway." In this ideal scenario, "you can do a lot of grassroots marketing" for the film, rather than spending the big bucks on promotional material to attract a new following.

Gideon Lichfield, curator of the Economist Film Project on PBS, agrees. "You have to be good at everything," he explains. "It's no longer just about the film itself, it's about the whole process that goes into the making of it, the funding of it, the distribution of it and the promotion of it, because as a filmmaker you have to do all of those things probably to a greater extent than you used to."

While Shimkin acknowledges that the Internet is the future, he still believes in what he calls "the collective viewing experience." Something about a dark room and a rapt crowd makes a movie worthwhile. For this reason, prior to monetizing a film via the Internet, Shimkin would "like to think that there's still a place for them in the theatrical setting."

It all seems to come down to marketing. Unbidden, almost every person I spoke to for this article brought up self-marketing as the primary factor behind the success of a documentary film. It is only a blessed few films that can make it through mainstream channels and specials like PBS' POV Series or OWN Network's new Film Club.

Even if funding is secured, the film is well made and people would be interested in seeing it, it may just come down to luck.

Andy Schupak, a partner in streaming website Festival-of-Films, agrees. "In the old days, you probably had a market to reach the distributor, but today you're going directly to the end user. So you have to figure out how to market to them."

The democratization of technology means that quite suddenly, truly amazing documentary films can be made for the price of a used car. Hollywood's exclusive ownership of filmmaking infrastructure is crumbling. Like in the pivotal technological transitions that have come before, the fate of documentary film will ultimately rest in the eyes of the viewers. Unfortunately, right now many films are getting lost between production to consumption. It is uncertain what the future of distribution—web and otherwise—will bring for documentary filmmakers, but one thing is clear: documentary will still survive.

The precarious position of documentarians

DSLR filmmaking: fad or the future of cinema? | Fotorater - Robert Francis Taylor

2011-09-04T23:05:00.000+05:30

The rise of DSLRs has caught the attention of professional filmmakers – but are they a game-changer or a distraction for those who strive for success in the film industry?

If you had spoken to professional cinematographers and filmmakers five years ago and told them that the next breakthrough for guerilla filmmaking was to come from a stills camera, they would have thought you were mad. Flash-forward to the present day, and that is exactly what has happened.

The advent of filmmaking with DSLRs has sprung up and surprised many people with its relatively low-cost but high-end results, giving practically anybody the chance to create eye-catching cinema.

The reason DSLRs have attracted so much attention is because of the sheer quality that they can deliver, despite not coming with the huge price-tag of a traditional film camera. It's no surprise that cinephiles and industry professionals are starting to sit up and take notice, with this mode of filmmaking even capturing the attention of Darren Aronofsky, who used a Canon 7D and Canon 1D Mk IV to film particular sections of his award-winning film, Black Swan.

It's not just because of the quality footage that DSLRs can deliver, but also down to the practicality of these tiny cameras. Traditional films would have to be shot and then processed before any editing could be done. This was a very lengthy and expensive process that has been made cheaper and quicker with a digital workflow that digital filmmaking brings with it. It's these advantages that allowed the season seven finale of US TV show House to be shot entirely in only 10 days with a Canon 5D Mk II (pictured). Having shot various projects myself using various cameras, I can attest to the super-practical nature of these cameras.

Similar to the introduction of the home-video camera to the masses in the 1980s, the DSLR revolution has allowed non-filmmakers access to high-end equipment. Coupled with the rise of YouTube, budding film-makers now have a product and a means of distribution that was unprecedented. But is this a good thing?

At one end of the spectrum are those with little technical or storytelling ability, who upload countless numbers of dreadful videos that saturate the number of online films with genuine talent behind them. And then there are those at the other end who now find themselves in an ever more competitive market where visual aesthetics are not something to fall back on, but are regarded as being necessary.

The ability, or lack thereof, to capture any decent quality of sound with these cameras is also a huge issue. Pioneers of the DSLR movement like Philip Bloom spend a great deal of their time investigating and reviewing the best ways of enhancing DSLR filmmaking, but these workarounds are not entirely cheap and this is where the future of DSLR shooting starts to get interesting with Canon and Sony developing improvements.

Although I've expressed some qualms with the open access that these cameras have given to the market, the drawbacks might put many amateurs off. After the initial cost of the camera and then a decent lens, there are dozens of add-ons and extras that only serious filmmakers will consider buying. The focus now, more than ever, will be on great storytelling. You can shoot hilarious videos of your friends messing about with a shallow depth-of-field, but once people realise that your 'story' is just as shallow, they'll soon log off. With new camera models from Canon and Sony being developed, the future of DSLR filmmaking is looking very bright for the next generation of storytellers.

DSLR filmmaking: fad or the future of cinema? | Fotorater - Robert Francis Taylor

ScriptShadow: What We Can Learn from Five Box Office Surprises (Part Two)

2011-09-04T18:48:00.000+05:30

A while back, I wrote an article about surprise box office hits and what we as screenwriters can learn from them. I love trying to figure out why some movies succeed and others fail, and especially how those successes and failures relate to screenwriting, so I thought it would be fun to tackle a new batch of films and see if we couldn't gleam a few lessons from them.

Now I'll reiterate the obvious. Directing and marketing and star power are huge factors in why movies do well at the box office. But it all starts with the screenplay. Every trailer, every poster, every marketing campaign, every great acting performance – all of those things stem from the screenplay. It's with that spirit that I bring you my second installment of five surprise hits and what we can learn from them as screenwriters.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK
Rough Projected Gross: 45-50 mil
Actual Gross: 95 mil
Written by: Aaron Sorkin

What We Can Learn:

I'll give you the first trick to getting your movie to overperform. Cast Jesse Eisenberg. No really. If you remember, he was in one of the films from the last list (Zombieland). But seriously, the success of The Social Network was one of the bigger surprises of 2010.

I remember leading up to the film's release a lot of nervous people close to the project wondering how a dark look at a shiny new Internet tool was going to play to the masses. Who the hell in Omaha Nebraska wants to watch a 20-year-old kid become a billionaire and whine about it? Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. But that's the thing. That's the exact reason why people showed up.

Irony.

Don't believe me? I want you to go to any piece of marketing material you can find for The Social Network. Find me one shot or one video clip of the main character, Mark Zuckerberg, smiling. You can't can you? That's because there isn't one.

The Social Network is about a young man who made 50 billion dollars and is unhappy. That doesn't make sense. Rich people are supposed to have it all. The cars, the houses, the vacations. So when we see the richest 20 something in the world looking miserable, there's a mystery there that we want answered. And let's not forget that this is a man who created a network of 500 million "friends," who's himself friendless.

So we have two high level uses of irony in play here, and in both cases, they're used to create a compelling dynamic main character. That's important to remember. You come to The Social Network to see the person, not to be wowed by the plot. The Social Network, as a film, actually has a funky narrative structure. It's not always easy to follow and it doesn't reward you in the same way a traditionally structured movie would. But you watch because the main character is so interesting.

So before you go out and you write your next screenplay, try to come up with the most intriguing main character you can. Whether you use irony or not is up to you but you better find a way to make him as interesting as possible.

BRIDESMAIDS
Rough Projected Gross: 45-55 million
Actual Gross: 167 million
Writers: Annie Mumolo and Kristen Wiig

What We Can Learn:

Talk about a movie that came out of nowhere. I still remember when Deadline Hollywood was reporting that this thing would make 13 bucks on opening weekend. The argument was that nobody wanted to leave the safety of their homes to watch women burp and fart. They were wrong. Audiences were begging this movie to give them as many noises from as many orifices as possible.

The thing is, this film just as easily could have disappeared into one of those orifices. I mean it had no real stars. It didn't even have a hook. At least with The Hangover, there was a neat concept driving the story. This is just a bunch of bridesmaids, which last time I checked you could find every other hour on E!.

So why did it work? I think I know. And it shouldn't be that shocking. It's the characters.

But unlike The Social Network, where it was more about creating one giant captivating character, the feat in Bridesmaids was how much effort they put into all the characters. Normally, in these types of movies, the main character is pretty well defined. That's what the screenwriting books drum into your head. Make sure your main character rocks. But most books stop there.

When it comes to the secondary characters, they could care less. But what I've found is that you can usually separate the wheat from the chaffe by how much effort a writer puts into their secondary characters. That's where the real work comes in.

It's so easy to just give a secondary character a minor quirk and then move on. It's hard to sit down and spend just as much time trying to figure them out as you would a protagonist. However, by doing that extra work, your script always shines brighter.

That's what Bridesmaids got right. Every character here was extensively thought through. Kristin Wigg's character was the unlucky in love girl who always found herself with the wrong man. Maya Rudolph's character was the stoic steady-as-a-rock best friend. Rose Byrne's character was the bitter sad stepmom trying to hide behind a false smile. Melissa McCarthy's character was the crazy happy go lucky overly optimistic even when she has no reason to be character.

I read tons of comedies where the drop-off after the main character is so steep, it's as if the writer just gave up in hopes that some hilarious comedian would be cast and make the role funny. But as you know, there's nothing uglier than a comedian in a thinly written role trying to do a song and a dance to make up for how undefined the character is. If you don't believe me, go watch Night At The Roxbury.

THE KING'S SPEECH
Rough Projected Gross: 25-45 million
Actual Gross: 135 million
Writer: David Seidler

What We Can Learn:

Raise your hand if you predicted before The King's Speech came out that the movie would gross over 100 million dollars. Anyone? Anyone?

To be honest, I'm surprised that all of these movies did so well. But a stuffy British costume drama rocking the box office was particularly surprising. People say the adult drama is dead, but you wouldn't know it if you counted the box office receipts from 2010.

So then what is it that made this film such a surprise success? Well, I've talked about it before. The King's Speech utilizes two of the most time-tested and well-worn story devices out there.

The first is the underdog. Stories always work when they have a good underdog in the lead role. You can sell an underdog story to anybody - doesn't matter if they're 7 or 77, especially if it's true. Seeing and enjoying people overcome adversity is in our moviegoing DNA.

The other device is the crazy mentor. I use the word "crazy" loosely, but people are just really familiar with that kind of character and love seeing them operate. But I think The King's Speech took it one step further and added - yes, there's that word again – irony. In this case, the situation allowed a nobody to stand up and demand things from the King of England.

There's just something funny and ironic about a peasant ordering around a King. Anyway, the combination of these two well tested tools are what made a stuffy period piece one of the sexier box office hits of the year. Yes I just used the word "sexy" in conjunction with The King's Speech.

BLACK SWAN
Rough Projected Gross: 20-30 million
Actual Gross: 110 million
Writer: Mark Heyman

What We Can Learn:

This is a great movie to study for today's purposes because every movie Darren Aronofsky had made up until this point had been a box office dud. His biggest film, The Wrestler, made only $26 million. So there was really no reason to believe Black Swan would do any better. In fact, with our subject matter dressed snugly in a leotard, it can be argued that this movie would've been lucky to hit the $10 million mark.

So then what was the difference? Why did this one succeed when all the others failed? You're lucky you tuned in into Scriptshadow today because I'm going to tell you. Whereas before, Aronofsky chose stories with broad unclear narratives (Requiem For A Dream, The Fountain, even The Wrestler had a bumpy throughline), Black Swan had one of the cleanest narratives of the year.

The main character has the crystal clear goal of maintaining the lead actress role in her play until opening-night. Nipping at her scuffed heels is her evil understudy. How do you get cleaner than "Get to the end of the maze before the villain defeats you." That doesn't mean there weren't complex aspects to the story. We still got some trippy dream sequences and plenty of hallucinations. However, the objective was never in question. The stakes were never in question. We understood every story point clearly. And that's something Aronofsky didn't do in the past.

So I think this is a great lesson. Remember that when you're writing independent fare, you're fighting an uphill appeal battle. It's in your interest to make elements of your story clean and easy to understand. If you can nudge your narrative closer to a popular genre, like Aronofsky did here by making Black Swan a thriller, you can stay true to your indie roots yet still draw in a big audience. Oh, and it also doesn't hurt to add a sex scene between your two lead female characters.

INCEPTION
Rough Projected Gross: 90-120 million
Actual Gross: 292 million
Writer: Christopher Nolan

What We Can Learn:

I remember reading an article about this last month. In it, a reporter noted that Inception was a box office shock of epic proportions. Warner Bros. had made the movie to keep Christopher Nolan happy between Batman films. They had no idea it would become as big as it did.

So the writer of the article was interested in how the success of the film was going to change the moviegoing landscape. What was Hollywood going to do about this? The answer? Nothing. They just watched a sleeper film become a $300 million behemoth and had no idea what to do with it.

Now I've made my feelings clear about this film. I think it's really flawed. Regardless of that, I believe the box office for Inception is trying to tell Hollywood something.

People want more challenging big budget fare. This may sound contradictory to what I just said about Black Swan. But actually I think the statement is complementary. Independent films need more audience friendly storylines. Big-budget films need more challenging storylines.

Hollywood is confused by this because it thinks audiences only want one or the other. I believe audiences are getting sick of the comic book movies and the mash up movies and the movies based on rides and the movies based on toys. They go to these films and feel empty afterwards.

At least when you left Inception, you thought about something. You talked about it with your friends. And those are the kinds of conversations that get people back into the theater a second and third time.

I think Hollywood is really missing out on the bigger picture here. The thing that the Internet has done is it's allowed conversations about movies to be had by millions. But Hollywood keeps giving these people movies that aren't worth talking about.

Now I know that Disney VP just came out with a statement proclaiming that story doesn't matter when you're making a tentpole flick, and pointed to the terribly written billion-dollar earner Alice In Wonderland as an example. I think there will always be a market for high concept well marketed family fare. But I also think that there's an appetite from the more serious moviegoers for big budget tentpole films that also make you think.

The thing is, those movies aren't being written. And the truth is there just isn't a lot of material out there that teaches writers how to successfully write these kinds of movies. You have to balance the challenging aspects of your screenplay with the high concept marketability of a big-budget picture. If you get too esoteric or "out there" than the movie no longer becomes thoughtful. It just becomes confusing.

Using our previous director as an example, Aronofsky wanted to make The Fountain for 100 million bucks. There's a good chance the box office for that film would've topped out at $10 million.

So really, it's up to you guys to figure this out. It's up to you guys to come up with these concepts that balance the two extremes. As always, it begins with the screenwriter. So get the fuck off Scriptshadow and start writing.

ScriptShadow: What We Can Learn from Five Box Office Surprises (Part Two)

Things I learned while co-writing Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul | Peter D. Marshall

2011-08-30T12:03:00.000+05:30

1) Myth and secrecy are rampant in the film industry. No wonder no one knows the true state of the industry or what to base their decisions off of! Filmmakers won't talk (or their investors won't let them) about how much is spent making their films because they are trying to get a sales agent or distributor interested in buying it and paying as much upfront as possible, but how can anyone possibly know what is achievable and what is fantasy?

Secrecy in the industry is probably not really a revelation to you, but by holding back information in the hope of sales that mostly aren't materializing, it keeps anyone from really knowing what budget level films should be made at if recoupment is part of the plan. Solid decisions, both by filmmakers and by investors, can't really be made if no one knows the truth, both about the budgets and about the profit.

2) A realistic budget level for indie films. In order for an indie film using a hybrid or DIY strategy to see recoupment and possibly more, the production AND marketing and distribution budget must stay low. Based on our case studies, that number is below $200,000. Films that went over this budget level were far less likely to recoup within the first 2 years of release, none of the cases over this amount in the book have recouped in full yet.

3) Marketing and distribution are the production's responsibility and must be part of the budget. Many of our cases did not plan or budget for taking on this expense from inception and were caught in that familiar scene of thinking a distributor would be found and scrambling to make a plan and raise more money to implement it when low offers or no offers materialized. Over and over again our participants noted they could see now why it was important to think about this work, they remarked on how big of a job this is and that they would need to get some help on board much earlier in the process, and why a clearly defined audience was important to maximizing their efforts at reaching them.

4) Financial gain is not always the main goal. This was particularly true for the subjects of my chapter who are using file sharing sites to distribute work. Most of them were first time filmmakers and mainly they are interested in reaching the widest audience possible for the least cost and building names for themselves that could be used to get attention from the industry. Publicity and word of mouth play a huge part in this. Most of the time when filmmakers say they want to reach the "widest audience possible" what they mean is they want to make the most money possible.

Those 2 things do not always go hand in hand and it is especially so for complete unknowns. For filmmakers who have very little financial resources to reach wide audiences, it is better to spend as little budget as possible to make the content and spend a lot of time engaging with audiences and figuring out how to cost effectively distribute the work.

5) The importance of research before you sign with anyone. With the internet as pervasive as it is, there is no reason not to do your due diligence before you sign a contract, including research on sales agents and distributors. Don't just rely on a company website to inform you of their reputations or a few media write ups of some well known films they handled. Really take the time to contact a cross section of their client accounts and see if you are getting the clear picture.

You should also know what all the terms of your contract mean and don't be rushed to sign because your big premiere is happening. If you have someone on board who is solely responsible for the marketing and distribution of your film, have them get samples of contracts and really understand what you will be agreeing to, what you can negotiate, how you can terminate if the agreement isn't being followed and how to protect yourself should the company go bankrupt.

Things I learned while co-writing Selling Your Film Without Selling Your Soul | Peter D. Marshall

Transmedia & the Future of Filmmaking | NYPress - Zachary Wigon

2011-08-30T11:59:00.000+05:30

Forget 3-D —interactive media is the next wave of entertainment.

There are a lot of theories as to why the movie business isn't what it used to be. The financial crisis of 2008 significantly lessened private equity's desire to sink investments into films, independent and otherwise. A number of great indie and semi-indie distributors (Warner Independent, Picturehouse, THINKFilm) have gone out of business in recent years, leaving the ratio of independent films made to those bought at an all-time low. And most of the lucky films that do land a distribution deal get one- or two-week runs in a handful of cities scattered across the country and then go to die on VOD, as most independent distributors lack the finances to allot them even the most basic P&A budgets. Yet the problem, as evinced by across-the-board domestic box office ticket sales figures, has a far simpler answer: People simply aren't going to the movies as much as they used to.

Cinema was the dominant art form of the 20th century but, much as theater and classical music before fell out of favor with younger generations, so, too, is film beginning to go through a cultural outmoding. Thanks to Web 2.0, the Internet has shifted from utility status to something more akin to an entertainment form itself, and art forms don't get outmoded without reason—they get outmoded because they're replaced. Of course, the Internet isn't fully developed as an entertainment source yet; surfing Facebook is fun, but it's not the kind of experience that sitting back and watching a movie is. And while one can watch movies online with ease, one gets the feeling that it will take an art form endemic to the net's properties to change the way we consume entertainment.

Enter the "transmedia" movement. A cinema/digital media hybrid anchored in filmmaking, this new brand of storytelling is defined by works that combine the typical moviegoing experience with more interactive elements, enabled by new media tools. There's no standard formula for making a transmedia work—the field is too young to have ossified in form yet—so the new medium is being produced in varying iterations.

More...
Transmedia & the Future of Filmmaking | NYPress - Zachary Wigon

Writing and decision fatigue | John August

2011-08-25T22:41:00.000+05:30

This past weekend consisted of three long days of meetings and work sessions for the Big Fish musical; Sunday went fourteen hours. I had a hunch that late in the day wasn't the best time to introduce a new song, and now science has my back:

No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can't make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It's different from ordinary physical fatigue — you're not consciously aware of being tired — but you're low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain.

Writing involves a dozen choices every sentence, a thousand every scene.

Discussing material with producers and a director means understanding and deciding between myriad possible options — and the more people in the conversation, the more choices to consider.

And casting? Exhausting. It feels like it should be one of the easiest parts of production — you're not doing anything, just sitting there and listening — but it wears you out. I've been through casting on five projects, and each time I'm amazed how tough it is. You're trying to compare the actor you just saw versus the actor you saw yesterday versus the actor who won't audition.

The article explains that sugar (glucose) is one of the quickest ways to restock your willpower supply. That's why writers get fat.

Writing and decision fatigue | John August

People don’t want invulnerable heroes - Brad Bird - LA Times

2011-08-25T14:26:00.001+05:30

Excerpts:

I would not say that we ever have have completely locked scripts [at the beginning of the animating work]; they are in the process of being remade as the film is in the works. There are some films like "Toy Story 2″ and "Ratatouille" where it is really last minute, chaos reigning, trying to get the stuff ready for the animators so no one was sitting idle and drawing a paycheck.

There's no secret at Pixar, but there is a belief in letting people pursue something with passion and take chances, and most of Hollywood, really, doesn't like that. It's too scary. Some studio executives will say they love obsessive creators who take risks, but really most of them would rather play it safe.

To make something really great and different and interesting means taking risks and following these ideas in your head.

If you worry too much about that, you're just bound to fail. You have to kind of go into stories with a strong sort of "I'm doing this" sort of attitude, or else it comes off as sort of tiptoeing.

Part of the reason "Die Hard" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and things like that work so well is that the actors really get that people don't want invulnerable heroes. It's far more interesting to see heroes who are afraid and then go ahead anyway.

One of things that people get wrong is they toss off too many witty comments — and this isreally true in animation — and we tried to avoid that like the plague in "The Incredibles." When you're in danger, be in danger, don't be making wisecracks and tossing things off. You don't need to be sweating and crying but at least show that you're worried.

The trouble we have in animation is that the medium itself encourages the audience to believe that people can't be hurt.

The challenge was showing people that do amazing things but still have feeling.

You know, in the prologue of the film, there's a moment when Mr. Incredible positions himself in front of a hurtling train and, for a fleeting second, he winces. "It's quick, maybe a second long, but it's a shot to tell everyone that 'This is going to hurt.' Those little touches, if you are diligent about them, they get the audience really involved, because that's the reality that they know. This is blown often with superheroes.

Brad Bird: Hollywood isn't brave enough to copy Pixar process | Hero Complex – movies, comics, fanboy fare – latimes.com

Reader Question: How and when is it okay to use voiceover narration? | Scott Myers (GITS)

2011-08-25T12:51:00.001+05:30

Narration is generally considered a no-no in screenwriting, but some films have made magnificent use of it (A CLOCKWORK ORANGE, for one). Do you have any tips as to when and how to use narration?

There does seem to be a conventional wisdom in Hwood against narration. My guess is execs and producers think it can represent sloppy writing per the axiom, "Show it, don't say it."

However consider this list of movies:

A Clockwork Orange

Forrest Gump

The Shawshank Redemption

Fight Club

Apocalypse Now

Sunset Blvd.

Double Indemnity

Trainspotting

American Beauty

Stand By Me

Platoon

The Big Lebowski

To Kill A Mockingbird

Lolita

Babe

A Christmas Story

Each of these movies uses voiceover narration and that's just a list off the top of my head.

So what can we glean from this list?

1. When the narrator ties together a story that takes place over a long span of time. Movies that make several time-jumps and cover several years -- like Forrest Gump and The Shawshank Redemption -- can benefit from a narrator V.O. Hell, they probably wouldn't work if they didn't use narration.

2. When the narrator provides a distinctive personality (read: entertainment value), ala The Big Lebowski and A Christmas Story. The narrators in these two movies offer some of the most entertaining moments along the way.

3. When the narrator can help to establish a mystery upfront like American Beauty and Sunset Blvd. In both cases, the narrator foretells in the movies' opening scenes the Protagonist's impending death.

Other than that, when I look at that list, I see movies where the narrator offers deep insight into the Protagonist's inner world, revelations that might not be made as well through action and dialogue -- Platoon, Fight Club, A Clockwork Orange, Trainspotting, Apocalypse Now, Lolita -- each a journey into dark psychological places, where the narration is both revelatory in content and evocative in tone.

As it is, even without voiceover narration, scripts have a Narrative Voice, evidenced in the language of scene description, the nature of scene transitions, the pacing of scenes, and so on. For more on that, you can go here for an article I wrote for Screentalk magazine.

I guess the question boils down to whether your story benefits from taking that Narrative Voice, which is invisible in most scripts, and giving 'life' to it in the form of V.O.. Given Hwood's apparent disaffection for this narrative device, you'd have to have a genuinely compelling reason, like those listed above, for using narration.

What does everybody else think? And what other notable movies use narration?

UPDATE: Here is a comment from one of my students in the most recent online screenwriting course I took, her recollections of what Robert McKee had to say about using narration:

Can you strip out every bit of VO and still understand the story? Is the script moving without the VO? Coherent? Is the plot the same? If the answer is yes to all of these, then you can keep the VO. That means you aren't relying on VO to tell/clarify/explain the story, but are using the VO (if well-written) to add new depth, perhaps even contrast, to the story. You are using VO as an effect element of characterization and world-creation, not as a crutch to keep a lame plot hobbling along.

Perhaps that's the easiest way to decide: By using voiceover narration, are you adding something of value to the story, not just relying on it to facilitate a "lame plot?"

[Originally posted October 26, 2009]

Reader Question: How and when is it okay to use voiceover narration? | Scott Myers (GITS)

What's it like to have your film flop at the box office? | Sean Hood

2011-08-25T11:36:00.000+05:30

Don't they know how bad it is before it comes out?

When you work "above the line" on a movie (writer, director, actor, producer, etc.) watching it flop at the box office is devastating. I had such an experience during the opening weekend of Conan the Barbarian 3D.

A movie's opening day is analogous to a political election night. Although I've never worked in politics, I remember having similar feelings of disappointment and disillusionment when my candidate lost a presidential bid, so I imagine that working as a speechwriter or a fundraiser for the losing campaign would feel about the same as working on an unsuccessful film.

One joins a movie production, the same way one might join a campaign, years before the actual release/election, and in the beginning one is filled with hope, enthusiasm and belief. I joined the Conan team, having loved the character in comic books and the stories of Robert E. Howard, filled with the same kind of raw energy and drive that one needs in politics.

Any film production, like a long grueling campaign over months and years, is filled with crisis, compromise, exhaustion, conflict, elation, and blind faith that if one just works harder, the results will turn out all right in the end. During that process whatever anger, frustration, or disagreement you have with the candidate/film you keep to yourself. Privately you may oppose various decisions, strategies, or compromises; you may learn things about the candidate that cloud your resolve and shake your confidence, but you soldier on, committed to the end. You rationalize it along the way by imagining that the struggle will be worth it when the candidate wins.

A few months before release, "tracking numbers" play the role in movies that polls play in politics. It's easy to get caught up in this excitement, like a college volunteer handing out fliers for Howard Dean. (Months before Conan was released many close to the production believed it would open like last year's The Expendables.) As the release date approaches and the the tracking numbers start to fall, you start adjusting expectations, but always with a kind of desperate optimism. "I don't believe the polls," say the smiling candidates.

You hope that advertising and word of mouth will improve the numbers, and even as the numbers get tighter and the omens get darker, you keep telling yourself that things will turn around, that your guy will surprise the experts and pollsters. You stay optimistic. You begin selectively ignoring bad news and highlighting the good. You make the best of it. You believe.

In the days before the release, you get all sorts of enthusiastic congratulations from friends and family. Everyone seems to believe it will go well, and everyone has something positive to say, so you allow yourself to get swept up in it.

You tell yourself to just enjoy the process. That whether you succeed or fail, win or lose, it will be fine. You pretend to be Zen. You adopt detachment, and ironic humor, while secretly praying for a miracle.

The Friday night of the release is like the Tuesday night of an election. "Exit polls"are taken of people leaving the theater, and estimated box office numbers start leaking out in the afternoon, like early ballot returns. You are glued to your computer, clicking wildly over websites, chatting nonstop with peers, and calling anyone and everyone to find out what they've heard. Have any numbers come back yet? That's when your stomach starts to drop.

By about 9 PM its clear when your "candidate" has lost by a startlingly wide margin, more than you or even the most pessimistic political observers could have predicted. With a movie its much the same: trade magazines like Variety and Hollywood Reporter call the weekend winners and losers based on projections. That's when the reality of the loss sinks in, and you don't sleep the rest of the night.

For the next couple of days, you walk in a daze, and your friends and family offer kind words, but mostly avoid the subject. Since you had planned (ardently believed, despite it all) that success would propel you to new appointments and opportunities, you find yourself at a loss about what to do next. It can all seem very grim.

You make light of it, of course. You joke and shrug. But the blow to your ego and reputation can't be brushed off. Reviewers, even when they were positive, mocked Conan The Barbarian for its lack of story, lack of characterization, and lack of wit. This doesn't speak well of the screenwriting - and any filmmaker who tells you s/he "doesn't read reviews" just doesn't want to admit how much they sting.

Unfortunately, the work I do as a script doctor is hard to defend if the movie flops. I know that those who have read my Conan shooting script agree that much of the work I did on story and character never made it to screen. I myself know that given the difficulties of rewriting a script in the middle of production, I did work that I can be proud of. But its still much like doing great work on a losing campaign. All anyone in the general public knows, all anyone in the industry remembers, is the flop. A loss is a loss.

But one thought this morning has lightened my mood:

My father is a retired trumpet player. I remember, when I was a boy, watching him spend months preparing for an audition with a famous philharmonic. Trumpet positions in major orchestras only become available once every few years. Hundreds of world class players will fly in to try out for these positions from all over the world. I remember my dad coming home from this competition, one that he desperately wanted to win, one that he desperately needed to win because work was so hard to come by. Out of hundreds of candidates and days of auditions and callbacks, my father came in....second.

It was devastating for him. He looked completely numb. To come that close and lose tore out his heart. But the next morning, at 6:00 AM, the same way he had done every morning since the age of 12, he did his mouthpiece drills. He did his warm ups. He practiced his usual routines, the same ones he tells his students they need to play every single day. He didn't take the morning off. He just went on. He was and is a trumpet player and that's what trumpet players do, come success or failure.

Less than a year later, he went on to win a position with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he played for three decades. Good thing he kept practicing.

So with my father's example in mind, here I sit, coffee cup steaming in its mug and dog asleep at my feet, starting my work for the day, revising yet another script, working out yet another pitch, thinking of the future (the next project, the next election) because I'm a screenwriter, and that's just what screenwriters do.

In the words of Ed Wood, "My next one will be BETTER!"

What's it like to have your film flop at the box office? | Sean Wood

Spirit Of The Spec: You Put It Out There | Scott Myers

2011-08-16T12:50:00.001+05:30

I had a conversation recently with a former studio executive turned producer in which I found myself talking about the "spirit of the spec," essentially when a person chooses to pursue a project or goal entirely on speculation with the hopes of some eventual payoff. Not everybody would make that choice. To many, with the odds so long against success, doing something on spec is not only illogical, it's also seemingly inane.

And yet almost all screenwriters, TV writers, novelists, short story writers, playwrights, and poets have as some part of their creative self the spirit of the spec.

After my conversation with the producer, it occurred to me this is a subject we should discuss here at GITS because it speaks to the very core of why we're here and what we're about as people driven by creative impulses. So today through Friday, I will post something each day exploring what it means for a writer to have the spirit of the spec.

You Put It Out There.

One might think typing FADE IN, thereby signifying your commitment to writing an original screenplay, is the single act requiring the most courage in the process. But time and time again, I hear from writers who have a problem on the other end of the spectrum: Actually doing something with the script when it's done.

Some have confessed to me they are petrified to submit a script to an agent or manager.

Others have said they can't even bring themselves to give their script to a professional reader for coverage.

And there are some writers who have one or more scripts -- I'm talking completed drafts -- which they have never letanyone read, not even friends or family, let alone somebody in the entertainment industry.

I get it. I think we all get it. As I suggested in yesterday's post, writing a story is a scary endeavor. And yet the fact is the entire time you work on it -- coming up with an idea, acting on that idea, the actual page-writing part of the process -- your story only exists in theory. That is until you send your script out into the world. Only then does your story become in any meaningful sense of the word 'real.'

No matter what fears you have to overcome to write a story, they don't compare substantively with the type and degree of fear that can arise when you actually hand over your script to someone else to read.

At that point, your story becomes their story, no longer the private experience of you and your characters, but rather your characters and the world.

Talk about courage! Sure, typing FADE IN is a significant moment. But there the stakes are limited. If you don't write a good story or don't finish, you have disappointed nobody but yourself. However if you present your story to other people, you are taking a leap of faith they will respond favorably. And if they don't? It's no longer just you and those hectoring voices of negativity in your head to deal with. Now you actually have to take into account the feelings, thoughts, impressions and -- get ready for it -- criticisms of other people.

And yet if this is a fundamental truth -- "You can not sell it if you don't write it" -- here is another reality etched in stone: "You can not sell it unless you submit it."

A buyer is not going to magically read your mind, buy an airplane ticket to your home town, sneak into your house, locate the drawer in which you keep your precious script, read it, then wake you up with a check for a million dollars.

No, you need to put your script out there. Indeed this is where you would do well to embrace the spirit of the spec. And the spirit of the spec provides writers with two incredibly powerful words to help them circumnavigate all their fears, thus enabling them to submit their manuscripts to people who matter.

Those two words: Screw you!

If you are afraid to let your spouse read your script, repeat after me: Screw you!

If you are afraid to let other writers read your script, repeat after me: Screw you!

If you are afraid to let a professional script reader provide coverage of your script, repeat after me: Screw you!

If you are afraid to send out email inquiries to managers about your script, repeat after me: Screw you!

Who is the "you" you are telling to screw? Why fear, of course. If you have any realistic chance of succeeding as a writer, you have to squash your punk-ass fears, give them a big time beat down.

You telling me I don't have any talent? Screw you!
You telling me people will hate my story? Screw you!
You telling me not to believe in myself? Screw you!

Screw you! Screw you! Screw you!

Here's another fact to add to your list:

You can't sell a script unless you write it.
You can't sell a script unless you submit it.
You can't sell a script unless you defeat fear.

Now you may consider that to be Coach Myers talking. If you need a confrontational therapy to get you over the hump to put your script out there, go to town. Empowered with those two key words -- Screw you! -- you should be on your way.

There is another dimension to the spirit of the spec. This message comes from Pastor Myers. For those who are more spiritually inclined.

Do you recall this reference from another spirit of the spec post here:

If there is a path, that presupposes there is an end to the path. So instead of a battle over your story where some random barbarian can spring up out of nowhere and split open your meager confidence with a pole axe, if you are on a journey of discovery, it's all a matter of taking the time, asking the questions, and walking the steps necessary to get you to that end point, where you do find your story.

I want you to consider this idea: Your story's path does not end when you type FADE OUT. Rather that is simply anew beginning. The path goes on. The journey goes on.

It goes on as your story gets read by others.
It goes on as your story gets bought.
It goes on as your story gets developed.
It goes on as your story gets a green light.
It goes on as your story gets produced.
It goes on as your story gets edited.
It goes on as your story gets released into theaters.

Your script, while a key component of your story, is but one step in a longer journey. I suppose you can look at the day your movie goes wide into theaters as the end of the path. But that's not even true. I get emails every week from people who have seen K-9, Alaska, or Trojan War. It's one of the most endearing and enduring aspects of our movies that they continue to live as long as people will watch them.

Which is to say you, as the writer, are but a player in that larger journey. Your story already exists, its path is already laid out. Whether it sells or not, gets produced or not, while we may work as fiercely as we can -- and should -- to make it happen, in a very real way, our story's fate has already been determined.

So in actuality, you really have nothing to fear. The destiny of your story will play out the way it will play out. Thus when your obnoxious voices of fear would do their best to restrain you from putting your story out there, here are some other words you can use to quiet them:

Let it go.

I am afraid...
Let it go.
I am scared...
Let it go.
I'm not ready...
Let it go.

Afraid or not, your story's fate is determined. You can not control its destiny, only the story can.

So how to put it out there? Let it go.

Okay, two possible courses of action in confronting fear, one from Coach Myers, the other Pastor Myers. I know for many of you, this is not an issue. You knock off your scripts, you get them out there. That's being filled with the spirit of the spec. Because there is a baseline of belief undergirding what we do: If you put it out there, somethingcan happen.

But only if you put it out there.

Spirit Of The Spec: You Put It Out There | Scott Myers

Should all readers recognize the same script as strong writing? | The Bitter Script Reader

2011-08-16T11:16:00.000+05:30

Matt asks:

A screenplay I submitted to Nicholl made semi-finals two years ago. I re-wrote the heck out of it, again, and again, and again, figuring out of ten sps this was the first to get any attention, so I might be onto something.

Submitted it again this year, and it went out the first round.

I realize there were over 6000 entries, what one reader likes, another hates, etc... Question is: If a script is really "that good" should it be recognized as such by most trained readers? Was it most likely a fluke it even made semis before (like maybe the subject matter hit the right reader on the right day cuz of something in his/her personal life etc)??

I could probably offer some long-winded thesis about criticism, personal tastes, and how the varying quality of submissions between the two years can contribute to these different results.... but I won't. This is the sort of answer that's bound to drive some aspiring writers nuts because they DEMAND automaton-like consistency from readers.

Here's the thing - that's not possible. Sure, you'll probably find general agreement about the very best screenplays and the very worst screenplays, but there's a whole middle section of that curve that's neither enough fish nor foul to get the exact same reactions from a plurality of readers.

The very best writing - the strongest writing that's eventually going to send those writers onto their career - will probably garner similar reviews from readers. Is it likely that all the scripts at the semi-finals are at that top level? Personally, I wouldn't stake my rep on it.

I'm not saying you're not a good writer, or that your work doesn't show potential. It might just be that you're still in the middle of the pack. You show promise, but you're not quite ready for "the show." Yet.

You also have to look at the fact you didn't submit the exact same script both years. You rewrote it, which could account for the difference in reactions. Maybe there was something in that more raw version that the readers were responding too. Perhaps the rewrite took some passion, some edge or some urgency out of the script. I've seen it happen before.

But look at this - you got to the semi-finals. You hit near the target. If you were an archer, you'd keep drilling, keep firing arrows until you hit dead center more consistently. Put the reader out of your head. Yes, sometimes you might get a crap reader. Sometimes you might get a good reader on a bad day. But none of that really matters.

Why?

Because there's nothing you can do about it. You accomplish nothing by worrying about this. Reasonable, intelligent people will sometimes come to very different and still valid conclusions about the scripts they read. I took a quick look at the comments at Scriptshadow and saw plenty of evidence of this. You see evidence of this in movie reviews. Heck, I'm willing to bet that there are movies that you love that your friends can't stand.

I've got a friend who will argue that Armageddon is legitimately one of the best movies ever made. Yet he and I agree on many other films. Corner him at a party and bring up (500) Days of Summer and you will see him physically react with disgust and contempt for that film. (So he's not ALL wrong in his cinema critiques.) Me, I'm stunned so many of my film classmates had near-religious experiences during Magnolia. I hated that film so much that it's pretty much put me off of Paul Thomas Anderson's work for life.

Seriously. You will have to drug me and throw me in a straight jacket to get me in that theatre. I don't care if the film gets 100% on Rotten Tomatoes. Blame everyone who put their hand to their heart in Oscar season 2000 and said, "SUCH a brilliant movie. Magnolia was incredible."

Liars. Every last one of them.

Anyway....

Keep writing. Keep working. And when you're really good, you won't have to worry about getting the "right" reader. Even bad readers recognize a home run.

Reader question: Should all readers recognize the same script as strong writing? | The Bitter Script Reader

Book Review: Writing Movies for Fun and Profit | ScriptShadow

2011-08-11T20:33:00.000+05:30

"Writing Movies for Fun and Profit" is one of the more interesting books to come along in the screenwriting community in a while. Its authors, the writers of such movies as Night at the Museum and Herbie Fully Loaded, seem to take the opposite approach when it comes to writing than mainstays such as Robert McKee and Blake Snyder. Gone are long chapters on how to develop your characters. Absent is any in-depth look at structure. In their place is a single core piece of advice: Write big fun family "four quadrant" movies and rake in the dollars.

Despite the actual screenwriting advice being some of the worst I've ever encountered, the backstage insider look into the business side of screenwriting is nothing short of amazing. Basically, the book tells you what happens after you break into the club. It's funny, it's sad, it's interesting, but if you ever wondered what it's really like to be a working screenwriter or you want to prepare yourself for when you finally make that big jump, this is definitely a book for you.

Before I get into some of the more interesting aspects of the book, I'd like to warn you about its biggest weakness - its unequivocally terrible advice when it comes to writing a screenplay. You see, these guys believe it's as easy as slapping together a bunch of funny scenes and making a $1 million sale. Let me tell you why they think this and why they're wrong. As the authors point out in their book, on most big projects there are a lot of writers. Oftentimes, new writers are brought in to beef up the weak portions of the screenplay. So if the dialogue is bad, the producers will bring in writers who are good with dialogue. Once they're finished, the producers may realize that the structure is sloppy. So they'll fire the dialogue guys and bring in some structure guys. What our authors seem to understand but not acknowledge is that they're the "comedy" guys. They're the writers you bring in when you want jokes. But the between the lines message here – and I'm not even sure our authors are aware of it – is that when the producers want people who actually know how to write a screenplay, who understand the guts, the depth, how to add heart, and all those things that actually make a story resonate with people, they bring in writers who actually know how to write. So while our authors implying that none of that "deep" stuff really matters may be true for their own specific experiences, it has nothing to do with Joe Nobody's approach to a screenplay. Joe Nobody still has to display an intrinsic understanding of the craft to impress a reader. It would be nice if all you had to do was tell a couple of jokes to make a million bucks. But that's simply not the case.

The good news is, none of that stuff is the focus of the book. The main focus here is the business end. And I have to give it to these guys. They taught me a hell of a lot about how things work once you're a highly paid screenwriter. Here are some of the highlights.

OH NO
My favorite chapter (and probably the most terrifying chapter you'll ever read if you're a screenwriter) is the one that deals with the authors' experience writing Herbie: Fully Loaded. Now if you ask me, I'm not jumping up and down begging somebody to let me write another Herbie movie. But hey, everybody's got their thing. So these guys pitched Herbie to the studio president and she loved it. She thought it was the greatest idea ever and quickly made Herbie the most important movie on the studio's slate. She then set them up with a producer who basically had zero interest in making a Herbie movie and therefore tried to make a version of what she believed a Herbie movie for people who don't like Herbie would be like. She then proceeded to make the writers change every single aspect of their story, even though those were all the things the studio fell in love with. And they couldn't do anything about it. When you're the writers, you can't just call the studio president and say, "Hey, this producer is making us change all the things you love." There is a hierarchy. You're not allowed to go over anybody's head. So all they could do was stand on the deck and watch the Titanic sink.

This is what I don't get about Hollywood. It would seem to me that one of the more important decisions you would make as a president would be to match up a project with a producer who understands and cares about that project. It sounds like a producer was just randomly assigned to these guys. I don't see how good movies could consistently be made under that process (note to readers: the authors assure us rather proudly that that producer is no longer working in the business). But what should really tickle your noodle is that these guys also wrote Taxi – a movie in which the development process went as smoothly as newly churned butter. Now comparing Herbie to Taxi is kind of like comparing Jersey Shore to Basketball Wives. But in a close race I would still say that Herbie comes out on top. Which begs the question: How much does development really matter?

PITCHING
One of the big changes in your life after your first sale is that you'll now become a human pitch machine, pitching your own projects or pitching yourself as the best option for someone else's projects. This is an element of the business that very few people talk about outside of working screenwriters. And these guys do a pretty good job of preparing you for it. Probably the most important advice they give you is that whatever movie you're pitching should have a main character a movie star will want to play. Because no matter how much movie blogs and Hollywood insiders are trying to convince us that stars no longer matter, the easiest way to get financing and confidence behind a project is to have a movie star attached. They also point out that your idea should be different but shouldn't reinvent the wheel. It should sound like a cross between two really successful films (they use the example "Die Hard" meets "Home Alone" but I'm pretty sure they were joking – although it's hard to tell – these are the guys who wrote Taxi remember). The rest of their advice about pitching is rather practical – be excited about your movie, don't be afraid to act out some of the parts, and keep it short (a typical pitch is 15 min. long). But the point is, this is the part of Hollywood that most screenwriters have no clue about until they're thrown into the fire. It sure is nice to get a look at the logs before the match is lit.

PAGE LENGTH
One of the more amusing chapters I ran into was in regards to page count and page formatting. For everybody who thinks that the length of their screenplay doesn't matter, wait till you start writing for a big studio. The studios are so obsessed with page length that they actually have their own specific formatting requirements. They give you specific indents and formatting rules you must enter into your screenwriting software when you write drafts for them. If you turn a script in that doesn't follow that formatting data, they will chop off your fingers. The reason for this is, obviously, every page is roughly equal to a certain amount of screen time, usually 1 min. And each of the studios have perfected a formatting template that allows them to best measure the length of a movie based on the length of the screenplay. So for those of you freaking out about page length now, wait until you have to start formatting a studio script. That's when shit gets real.

GETTING PAID
One of the most enlightening chapters in the book is the chapter about getting paid. I can't tell you how many writers have asked me how much they should expect to make selling their first screenplay, and then, if the screenplay gets made, how much they should expect to make on the back end. These are the details I've always wanted answers to and the book goes into as much minutia as I've ever seen on the matter. So how much is the minimum one can make from selling a screenplay? The short answer is, the Writers Guild requires a writer be paid at least $110,000 for an original screenplay. However, you aren't in the Writers Guild. And that means somebody could pay you 200 bucks. Where things get interesting though is on the backend. This is where the writing business gets messy. The reason that those writing credits are so coveted – even on total pieces of shit like Paul Blart 3 – is because as long as you have an official credit on the film, you'll be getting paid for the rest of your life. All those writers who worked on the script but didn't get credit? They don't get diddly squat outside of their rewrite fee.

The fight for that coveted credit has created one of the most highly controversial arbitration processes in any union. Without getting into too much detail, in order to determine who gets the credit on a screenplay, a bunch of your fellow writers read all the drafts from all the people who worked on the project, and decide who to give the credit to. Each writer is also allowed to give a written argument as to why they believe they should get the credit. Oftentimes, credit is given to the writer with the most persuasive argument. So Writer A may have done a lot more work on the screenplay than Writer B, but Writer B came up with a much better argument, so he wins. This has become such an intense process, that there are actually arbiters out there that you can hire for thousands of dollars who'll write your argument for you to give you the best chance at getting written credit on the film.

This has also led to some really shady practices in the screenwriting community, some of which actually encourage writers to sabotage a good script. If you're hired to rewrite another writer, and you want to make as much money as possible, it's in your best interest to rewrite as much of the story as possible, regardless of if that new story is better than the current story. If you know that the movie you're working on is already getting made, then it's practically demanded of you to change as much as possible so you can get final credit on the film. This is at least part of the reason why there are a lot of bad movies out there. The system is rigged to encourage writers to change what's working. There are actually standard tricks of the trade – like changing all of the characters names – to help it look like you've written the majority of the story. Arbitration is one of, if not the, most heated topic amongst professional screenwriters. I can't say I know how to fix it but from the way these guys lay it out, it's clear that the process is broken. Maybe some savvy Scriptshadow readers have some ideas on how to fix it and can share their ideas in the comments section.

IN SUMMARY
What I've highlighted above is just scratching the surface. There are a ton of other topics that the book covers (including how to take notes from Martin Lawrence – well kinda). Despite some of the worst pure screenwriting advice I've ever read (please, don't listen to anything these guys say when it comes to the actual writing), I have to admit that I've never seen this kind of insight into the professional plight of a working screenwriter. Not all of us are going to hang on long enough to become screenwriting superstars, but for those of you who are in this for the long haul and expect to be looking at real estate in the Hollywood Hills at some point in your life, you'll definitely want to read this book. For those who have already bought it, feel free to offer your opinions in the comments section.

Book Review: Writing Movies for Fun and Profit | ScriptShadow

Spirit Of The Spec: You Write Your Story Scott Myers

2011-08-11T10:10:00.001+05:30

Probably most people imagine that when a writer writes a story, they are seated at their desk, plunking away at their keyboard, hour after hour until they finish their opus.

Yes, there is a good deal of 'butt on chair' time involved in writing. But when you are moved by the spirit of the spec, committing yourself wholly to your story, the fact is you are never not writing.

You are writing your story when you drive.
You are writing your story when you eat.
You are writing your story when you shower.
You are writing your story when you fold the laundry.
You are writing your story when you exercise.
You are writing your story when you sleep.
You are writing your story when you are engaged in conversation with others.

This last point can be a particularly vexing condition for your friends, family and loved ones. They know they only have a certain percentage of your attention. That at any minute, you will be there, then not there. Your body present, your mind off with your characters somewhere.

But it's not just somewhere, is it? No, when we write our story, we create a universe in which that story exists. The characters live and breathe. We may sit and write about them for a few hours at a time, but they go on with their existence, every minute of their every day.

And frankly that's one of the most damnable aspects of the writing process: Knowing just what to pluck out of that universe to put into our story. To my knowledge, there is only one way to determine that, summed up wonderfully by my then three year-old son when asked his advice about writing: "Go into the story, and find the animals."

We come up with an idea and test to see if it has merit.

We act on our idea by getting curious and following the path on our journey of discovery.

Then we write our story by going into it [immersing ourselves in that place and with those characters] and finding the animals [everything of substance that prowls there -- moments, scenes, dialogue, images, feelings, and so on].

The animal allusion is particularly apt because stories are organic in nature and frankly rather wild, teeming with life which is both great in terms of the vitality that exists there, but also dangerous because there are times when we lose our way... as if in a jungle.

A thick, dark jungle with lots of creepy shadows, a multitude of trailheads -- which ones to take?!?! -- and a constant chorus of whispered voices: Go back! Who are you kidding? This story sucks! You suck! Why are you wasting your time? You'll never make it to the end! You'll be humiliated if you continue! Epic fail dead ahead!

On the whole, writing is not only a daunting task, it is also a frightening one.

But when you have the spirit of the spec, you have a card you can play to trump your fears, a simple and pragmatic one: "If you don't write it, you can't sell it."

There is no way around that. It's an inescapable fact. Truth with a capital "T".

Thus when we struggle with our story, even to the point of feeling fear about writing it, the spirit of the spec reminds us we haven't done squat until we have that finished manuscript in hand. Everything we do is just words vanishing into thin air, an exercise in vainglory... until we type FADE OUT / THE END.

But then a moment of true existential bliss: Printing out that final draft. Feeling the heft of those pages in our hands, their warmth as they slide out of the printer, one by one. We touch them. We hug them. We smell them.

This... THIS... is what it's all about. We have gone into the story, immersed ourselves in that universe and with those characters, given ourselves over to an all-consuming creative process in order to craft something tangible, something real. Creativity incarnate. Our story. Come to life.

And now having written our story, we are ready for the next step on our journey.

Spirit Of The Spec: You Write Your Story Scott Myers