After my vacation, I needed a vacation.
It’s been a busy couple of months. I took a 2 week vacation in July for my birthday in Las Vegas - some celebration with friends and the rest writing by day and being in Vegas by night... whatever money you bring to Vegas, stays in Vegas. After that I zipped back to Los Angeles for about a week, mailed some orders and searched my mailbox for the visa forms for China that were supposed to have been sent on June 24th - stressed over that for a while. Then zipped up to the Bay Area for a class reunion and to help my parents with a manual labor project at their house... oh how I just love doing heavy lifting! When I returned to Los Angeles... the China visa forms had *just* arrived (I had a friend checking my mail for them while I was away). Now I’m worried that the visa forms won’t make it through the Chinese government bureaucracy in time for me to teach my class. Oh, and I have to prep my London class right now - I’m hopping a plane in a few weeks for that non-stop orgy of film that is being on an international film fest jury... and then teach my class the day after closing ceremonies. Oh, then I fly back to Los Angeles for a week, and then hop a plane for Hong Kong (provided my Visa gets back to me in time) and do a class for the Hong Kong Film Academy. Now, somewhere in here I have some meetings on projects, including one on the big remake project - which seems as if it is going to get a major rewrite... which I will have to do in between all of this stuff because the sooner that rewrite gets done the sooner that project can happen and the sooner there will be a large payday for Bill.
So, it was important for me to have that time to relax and recharge my batteries.
Only, they didn’t seem to get fully charged and I don’t think they’re holding a charge like they used to.
There are all kinds of reasons for that - I’m sure age is a factor. When I was in my 20s I had all kinds of energy to do all kinds of things and didn’t seem to need much sleep. Now, well, I need to sleep. And I can’t go drinking every night and get up to go to work in the morning and take classes and make films and write scripts and... well, I can barely do any of that stuff now, even with 8 hours of sleep every night. Doing that manual labor, working on my parent’s house, just wiped me out every day. Sure, part of it was due to it being over 100' in Concord most of the time - but I just can’t do a day of hard work and then write a bunch of pages like I used to. I can either do the work or the pages, but not both. I’ve become a wimp.
I think another factor is burn out. When you first start writing there’s an excitement about it, and that elusive goal keeps you working harder and harder. But once you’ve achieved that goal and realized it ain’t everything you imagined... well, it’s just not as exciting anymore. My almost 20 year career has been frustrating. I put in a lot of work, and most of it leads to a dead end. I still do not understand why I don’t have an agent or manager - and why it’s easier for me to get a meeting on a studio lot than get an agent to read a script. What’s up with that? Meanwhile this guy who my friends and I think is the worst writer we have ever read (with the best networking skills) has just landed another assignment - and has an agent - and we all wonder how long this emperor will go before it is discovered he has no clothes. That assignment could have been mine or yours or any of my friend’s who actually can write, but this biz often makes no sense. These things slowly chip away at my energy
And then there are those little things in life that just seem to sap the energy from you... like a little wire causing a short that drains your battery over a period of time. When I began having problems with my laptop just before my high school reunion, someone online (I think Cathy) asked me how long I’ve had it... I couldn’t remember. Now I know that it was almost 3 years. Well, several months ago the battery stopped holding a charge - so two and a half hours of outdoor in the park writing time shrunk to 15 minutes. Hey, I can’t just ride my bike to the park and write anymore. Pisser. Now, somewhere along in there I wore the letters off the keys, and actually wore a crater in the shift key and a couple of others. I probably should have replaced the thing then, but it still had over 40g on the hard drive completely empty. The entire “D” drive was untouched! So I bought some colorful stick on letters... and my laptop looked festive! I think some computer company should offer colorful letters as an option. The laptop was fine after that, I just had to replace the letters every couple of weeks. Then, in Vegas, the whole H key decided to escape. Okay, time to replace the laptop... but it didn’t happen in that post-Vegas week, and while I was in the Bay Area for my reunion, the laptop just broke down. It began freezing up. Hey, I can make it through a couple of weeks like this and replace it when I get back to LA, right? Well, after a week of losing work because the damned thing froze up when I was almost finished with something but had not saved it, I realized I’d have to replace the laptop away from home... which lead to another week of pulling out my hair while I was trying to get info from the now almost dead laptop onto the new laptop... but every time I plugged in the migration cable the old laptop would crash. This was going on while I was half-asleep from doing manual labor at my parent’s house... which added to the frustration. Of course, eventually most of it was solved and I now have a new laptop that will probably need to be replaced in 2 years when it still has half of its hard drive untouched. But, as you folks reading this know, when something goes wrong with your computer, it’s a major thing. That computer is *my life*. That seemed to drain any energy I’d managed to save up over my 2 week vacation...
And I didn’t get much done at all while I was in the Bay Area... which means I have to get all of that stuff done now, plus the stuff that’s scheduled to do now, plus the rewrite in the script that was not on the schedule, plus some last minute stuff for the Film Fest, plus...
So I already seem to need another vacation. The batteries seem to take longer to charge and don’t seem to hold a charge as well...
- Bill
My continued attack on UK television's M4M2:
9/3 - 17:30 - Black Thunder - When the world's most powerful stealth jet fighter falls into enemy hands, only one man can get it back. Starring Michael Dudikoff.
Monday, August 31, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Tarantino's Top 20 Spaghetti Westerns
Now that Tarantino's BASTERDS has blown up the box office, it seems like a good idea to look at his favorite Spaghetti Westerns... I'm sure you'd read my article on BASTERDS in Script Magazine and have seen the movie and maybe even seen the Italian film with the same title in order to compare. So what else is there left to do but look at his favorite Italian cowboy films?
Tarantino’s Top 20 Spaghetti Westerns.
1. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
2. For a Few Dollars more
3. Django
4. The Mercenary / A Professional Gun
5. Once Upon a Time in the West
6. A Fistful of Dollars
7. Day of Anger
8. Death Rides a Horse
9. Navajo Joe
10. The Return of Ringo
11. The Big Gundown
12. A Pistol for Ringo
13. The Dirty Outlaws
14. The Great Silence
15. The Grand Duel
16. Shoot the Living, Pray for the Dead
17. Tepepa
18. The Ugly Ones
19. Django, Prepare a Coffin
20. Machine Gun Killers
Click on the DVD box for more information on the movies. The score for THE BIG GUNDOWN is one of my favorites, and the Django films are a lot of fun. One thing about all of these films is you start to wonder if Lee Van Cleef just moved to Italy and got rich - he ends up being in so many of these movies it's crazy.
Somewhere, there is a land where men do not kill each other. Somewhere, there is a land where...
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
Blue Books are back!
- Sweet 17 Bonus - a Joe Eszterhas book!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Symbolic Dialogue (and comedy) and 40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS.
Yesterday's Dinner: Something at Mel's Diner.
Movies: I've seen the genius of GI JOE and will soon comment on that.
Tarantino’s Top 20 Spaghetti Westerns.
1. The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
2. For a Few Dollars more
3. Django
4. The Mercenary / A Professional Gun
5. Once Upon a Time in the West
6. A Fistful of Dollars
7. Day of Anger
8. Death Rides a Horse
9. Navajo Joe
10. The Return of Ringo
11. The Big Gundown
12. A Pistol for Ringo
13. The Dirty Outlaws
14. The Great Silence
15. The Grand Duel
16. Shoot the Living, Pray for the Dead
17. Tepepa
18. The Ugly Ones
19. Django, Prepare a Coffin
20. Machine Gun Killers
Click on the DVD box for more information on the movies. The score for THE BIG GUNDOWN is one of my favorites, and the Django films are a lot of fun. One thing about all of these films is you start to wonder if Lee Van Cleef just moved to Italy and got rich - he ends up being in so many of these movies it's crazy.
Somewhere, there is a land where men do not kill each other. Somewhere, there is a land where...
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
Blue Books are back!
- Sweet 17 Bonus - a Joe Eszterhas book!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Symbolic Dialogue (and comedy) and 40 DAYS AND 40 NIGHTS.
Yesterday's Dinner: Something at Mel's Diner.
Movies: I've seen the genius of GI JOE and will soon comment on that.
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
District 9 - Sci Fi Action with brains and soul.
It’s a foreign film, so it’s cultural.
So, here we are at the end of summer... and not a great summer. Though there have been some gems like HURT LOCKER and HANGOVER, most of the films have been big really stupid popcorn flicks. Last summer we have IRON MAN and DARK KNIGHT, two films that worked as popcorn *and* were good films that actually explored characters and issues. Movies that were both kinds of good. This year it seems like no one was trying to make movies that were “popcorn plus”, instead we’ve had good popcorn like STAR TREK and bad popcorn like... well, too many to name them all. What happened? Has the slump in DVD sales made the studios stop thinking about tomorrow? And aftermarkets? Hey, no one’s buying DVDs anyway, so why make a film that is good enough that people will want to own it and see it again and again? Let’s just make completely disposable summer popcorn flicks that people forget as soon as they’ve seen them? (Hmm, maybe that’s the marketing plan - if the film is really forgettable consumers will have to see the film again on DVD?) The problem with making completely disposable summer films is that they cost so damned much. There was a time when a movie could live just on cinema box office receipts, but with summer popcorn films costing as much as $250 million, many of these films *need* the DVD money to make a profit for the studio. The thing I do not understand - it costs the same to make a big popcorn movie with a brain as it does to make a big stupid popcorn movie - so why not make the version that I want to buy on DVD and see again, rather than the version that makes me want to go home right after the movie and pop in IRON MAN or BATMAN BEGINS into the DVD player to wash away any memory of that crappy film I just paid $11.50 to see?
So, here comes this $30 million sci-fi film from South Africa with no one in it you’ve ever heard of (Shia LaBouf isn’t in a single frame of this film, thankfully) and it opens at #1 in the USA on opening weekend and ends up #2 in its second weekend... and I suspect this will be one of those word-of-mouth films that hang around for a while. Oh, and I already want to buy the DVD because I not only want to see the behind the scenes making of stuff, I want to see the movie again.
For years, South Africa was a cheap place to shoot Hollywood movies - when they couldn’t afford to shoot the LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake in the USA, they shot it in South Africa. So they have good crews there with all kinds of experience making Hollywood movies... but I can’t really tell you the last time I saw a South African film in a US cinema. Maybe one of the Harry Alan Towers flicks for Cannon qualifies as indigenous South African. Well, they’ve conquered America, now.
DISTRICT 9 is a pseudo documentary, and part of what makes it creepy is that “bug” in the lower right corner identifying it as property of the company our hero Wikus (Sharlto Copely) works for. There’s an old Sean Connery movie, THE ANDERSON TAPES, about a large scale burglary that has been completely recorded on audio by... someone. This was probably the first film about how everything we do is now recorded by some form of surveillance equipment. The idea that all of the things we see in DISTRICT 9 were recorded on video from surveillance cameras and are in some company’s vault is chilling.
But at first, the film seems like a boring documentary. Lots of talking heads and commentators and footage that seems like it belongs on the History Channel. Except this mundane footage is all about an alien space ship that just stalled out over Johannesburg. One of the amazing things in the film is the complete understatement. The huge space ship, which would be an amazing special effect in some Hollywood film and would get all kinds of close ups and action shots, is just this thing hanging in the sky in the background of shots. When Wikus drives to his suburban home, the space ship can be seen in the background of the shot. It’s just there - no big deal. The tone of the film is bland, documentary style, and even the aliens are treated as another boring element in our story. They’ve been living in District 9 for the past 20 years, they are nothing special anymore. Now they are just another part of everyday life - the make the nightly TV news only if there’s a riot or some other newsworthy event in District 9. Usually, the aliens are kind of out of sight and out of mind.
But the doc is about the removal of the aliens from District 9, and their relocation to a far off area which looks good on the brochures they have printed up for the aliens, but is really a tent city so far away from human population that even the riots won’t end up on the nightly news. Wikus has been given the job of supervising the relocation, and he’s a vapid bureaucratic idiot who often slips and calls the aliens by the “P word” during the interview. He even justifies using the term because the aliens look like prawns, don’t they? Oh, and the reason why he was put in charge of this? He’s the son-in-law of the government official in charge of Alien Affairs. The first phase is to go door-to-door in the alien shanty town and serve eviction notices. They need the aliens’ scrawl on the form to make it legal. Because there are documentary cameras rolling, Wikus will be going in personally to help serve notices... and we follow along.
There’s some great suspense built around there not being enough bullet proof vests for Wikus’s number two man (William Allen Young) - and once they drive into the walled and barb wired District 9, it’s filled with poverty and crime and gangs and violence... and you worry that number two guy is going to get shot. But Wikus oblivious to just about everything - they do a great job of making him so dumb he comes off innocent. When he calls the aliens “prawns” to their face, you think he just doesn’t know any better. He’s not *maliciously* racist. He doesn’t hate the aliens. He just sees them as being animals. This allows us to see him as racist without being repulsed by him.
We *are* repulsed by the racist military guy Koobus (David James) who is providing security for the operation. He is itching to kill him some prawns. He thinks the best solution to the alien problem is just to kill them all. If this eviction thing turns into a riot? That would be a great excuse to fire a few missiles and drop a few bombs. This character gives us both sides of racism, so that we can use the actions in the story itself to “discuss” the issue. Whenever there’s a situation where either diplomacy or military action can be used, Wikus and Koobus represent each of these standpoints in the debate... and, the debate is usually after all hell has broken loose in District 9 and the aliens are attacking them. Not some dry discussion of racism but a run-and-gun argument about how they can survive.
Though I’m not sure we identify with Wikus, once he gets into the dangerous world of District 9, we *do* worry about him, because he is way over his head. He’s like a baby who has wandered into a cage full of Michael Vick’s pitbulls... and then picks up a stick and starts poking them. You worry for the baby, you know the baby is doing something stupid... but it’s a baby, it doesn’t know any better. Wikus is a baby. He is blind to his own racism, but the story is designed to open his eyes. As he goes from shack to shack trying to get aliens to sign their eviction notices, suspense moves a little into the background - this is a documentary, and we begin to get used to what is happening (even though, I have to tell you, the aliens are just amazing in this film. I wondered whether they used actors in green suits as substitutes so that the on-camera actors would have someone to talk to. No amount of mundane attitude on screen can take away from the fantastic CGI work in this film - it’s *better* than the stuff in GI JOE, much more realistic!). But just when we have lowered our guard, we see a couple of aliens up to no good, collecting some black fluid that will allow them to enact some secret plan.
Okay, I’ve decided not to spoil it all by talking about the specifics of what happens next... But for a movie with a giant flying saucer in just about every shot, where well over half the beings on screen are amazing CGI aliens, this film is not about any of those things... it’s all about Wikus. It’s not about the special effects, like a Hollywood movie, it’s about the people. Wikus goes through several transformations in the course of the story, and if we didn’t identify with him at the beginning, we do later on and really begin to care about the guy and see the story through his eyes.
When things go wrong in District 9, Wikus begins to see the aliens, not as a bureaucratic problem or as animals or as “prawns”, but as *people* with the same sort of problems that humans have. He comes to understand their struggle... and slowly switches sides. And this is so subtle, there is no dialogue about his “transformation” and change in beliefs. No idiot lines the writer had to put in the script for the development execs and producers that no one removed before filming. Just as the documentary “bug” stays in the lower right hand side of the screen, the reality of the situation remains. The character gradually changes scene-by-scene without us really noticing - except this casually racist bureaucrat has now become a friend to the alien they have named “Chris” and believes the aliens have rights.
Along with the emotional changes in Wikus, he also goes through a physical change that is connected to another change on the emotional side that turns him from a bumbling bureaucrat into an action hero. Though I think Charles Pogue may be due a check for some of the story ideas, eventually the film becomes a really unusual buddy action flick with Wikus and the alien they call “Chris” kicking some military ass and blowing some things up real good. But even when we are in the middle of a massive battle scene where they break into a top secret government installation, the story never loses sight of the people (including aliens) in the scenes. Even the action scenes have an emotional component and deal with Wikus and his relationship with “Chris” and his new feelings of guilt over being a casual racist who allowed his government to herd these alien people up into pens, like cattle. This entire story is about Wikus seeing the error of his ways and changing them to become a more honorable person. It’s about Wikus transforming from a guy who sees the aliens as “prawns”, animals, different... to seeing them as not much different than himself - and seeing “Chris” as a friend. Unlike any of the big dumb Hollywood special effects films we’ve had this summer (including STAR TREK), this film is really about the people in the story. Like all good sci-fi, it’s a metaphor, an allegory. It’s not just about the aliens and action scenes, it’s about a social issue that touches all of our lives.
The film takes many unexpected turns, and presents some information to us in a way that exposes *our* racism - I suspect this may be uncomfortable to some viewers. My racist beliefs took me down the wrong path at one point - and that made me reevaluate myself. The film holds a fun-house mirror up to society - and up to ourselves - and shows us who we really are in the safety of a science fiction story about battles between humans and aliens.
And, what is pure fantasy for those of us in the USA is only part fantasy in South Africa, where they had Apartheid until recently, and a similar story played out when relocating people from District 6.
Go for the special effects and really cool action scenes, leave thinking about racism...
And hoping you won’t have to wait 3 years for the sequel.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
Blue Books are back! - Sweet 17 Deal includes a Joe Eszethas book!
- Bill
Original short film DISTRICT 9 is based on...
So, here we are at the end of summer... and not a great summer. Though there have been some gems like HURT LOCKER and HANGOVER, most of the films have been big really stupid popcorn flicks. Last summer we have IRON MAN and DARK KNIGHT, two films that worked as popcorn *and* were good films that actually explored characters and issues. Movies that were both kinds of good. This year it seems like no one was trying to make movies that were “popcorn plus”, instead we’ve had good popcorn like STAR TREK and bad popcorn like... well, too many to name them all. What happened? Has the slump in DVD sales made the studios stop thinking about tomorrow? And aftermarkets? Hey, no one’s buying DVDs anyway, so why make a film that is good enough that people will want to own it and see it again and again? Let’s just make completely disposable summer popcorn flicks that people forget as soon as they’ve seen them? (Hmm, maybe that’s the marketing plan - if the film is really forgettable consumers will have to see the film again on DVD?) The problem with making completely disposable summer films is that they cost so damned much. There was a time when a movie could live just on cinema box office receipts, but with summer popcorn films costing as much as $250 million, many of these films *need* the DVD money to make a profit for the studio. The thing I do not understand - it costs the same to make a big popcorn movie with a brain as it does to make a big stupid popcorn movie - so why not make the version that I want to buy on DVD and see again, rather than the version that makes me want to go home right after the movie and pop in IRON MAN or BATMAN BEGINS into the DVD player to wash away any memory of that crappy film I just paid $11.50 to see?
So, here comes this $30 million sci-fi film from South Africa with no one in it you’ve ever heard of (Shia LaBouf isn’t in a single frame of this film, thankfully) and it opens at #1 in the USA on opening weekend and ends up #2 in its second weekend... and I suspect this will be one of those word-of-mouth films that hang around for a while. Oh, and I already want to buy the DVD because I not only want to see the behind the scenes making of stuff, I want to see the movie again.
For years, South Africa was a cheap place to shoot Hollywood movies - when they couldn’t afford to shoot the LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT remake in the USA, they shot it in South Africa. So they have good crews there with all kinds of experience making Hollywood movies... but I can’t really tell you the last time I saw a South African film in a US cinema. Maybe one of the Harry Alan Towers flicks for Cannon qualifies as indigenous South African. Well, they’ve conquered America, now.
DISTRICT 9 is a pseudo documentary, and part of what makes it creepy is that “bug” in the lower right corner identifying it as property of the company our hero Wikus (Sharlto Copely) works for. There’s an old Sean Connery movie, THE ANDERSON TAPES, about a large scale burglary that has been completely recorded on audio by... someone. This was probably the first film about how everything we do is now recorded by some form of surveillance equipment. The idea that all of the things we see in DISTRICT 9 were recorded on video from surveillance cameras and are in some company’s vault is chilling.
But at first, the film seems like a boring documentary. Lots of talking heads and commentators and footage that seems like it belongs on the History Channel. Except this mundane footage is all about an alien space ship that just stalled out over Johannesburg. One of the amazing things in the film is the complete understatement. The huge space ship, which would be an amazing special effect in some Hollywood film and would get all kinds of close ups and action shots, is just this thing hanging in the sky in the background of shots. When Wikus drives to his suburban home, the space ship can be seen in the background of the shot. It’s just there - no big deal. The tone of the film is bland, documentary style, and even the aliens are treated as another boring element in our story. They’ve been living in District 9 for the past 20 years, they are nothing special anymore. Now they are just another part of everyday life - the make the nightly TV news only if there’s a riot or some other newsworthy event in District 9. Usually, the aliens are kind of out of sight and out of mind.
But the doc is about the removal of the aliens from District 9, and their relocation to a far off area which looks good on the brochures they have printed up for the aliens, but is really a tent city so far away from human population that even the riots won’t end up on the nightly news. Wikus has been given the job of supervising the relocation, and he’s a vapid bureaucratic idiot who often slips and calls the aliens by the “P word” during the interview. He even justifies using the term because the aliens look like prawns, don’t they? Oh, and the reason why he was put in charge of this? He’s the son-in-law of the government official in charge of Alien Affairs. The first phase is to go door-to-door in the alien shanty town and serve eviction notices. They need the aliens’ scrawl on the form to make it legal. Because there are documentary cameras rolling, Wikus will be going in personally to help serve notices... and we follow along.
There’s some great suspense built around there not being enough bullet proof vests for Wikus’s number two man (William Allen Young) - and once they drive into the walled and barb wired District 9, it’s filled with poverty and crime and gangs and violence... and you worry that number two guy is going to get shot. But Wikus oblivious to just about everything - they do a great job of making him so dumb he comes off innocent. When he calls the aliens “prawns” to their face, you think he just doesn’t know any better. He’s not *maliciously* racist. He doesn’t hate the aliens. He just sees them as being animals. This allows us to see him as racist without being repulsed by him.
We *are* repulsed by the racist military guy Koobus (David James) who is providing security for the operation. He is itching to kill him some prawns. He thinks the best solution to the alien problem is just to kill them all. If this eviction thing turns into a riot? That would be a great excuse to fire a few missiles and drop a few bombs. This character gives us both sides of racism, so that we can use the actions in the story itself to “discuss” the issue. Whenever there’s a situation where either diplomacy or military action can be used, Wikus and Koobus represent each of these standpoints in the debate... and, the debate is usually after all hell has broken loose in District 9 and the aliens are attacking them. Not some dry discussion of racism but a run-and-gun argument about how they can survive.
Though I’m not sure we identify with Wikus, once he gets into the dangerous world of District 9, we *do* worry about him, because he is way over his head. He’s like a baby who has wandered into a cage full of Michael Vick’s pitbulls... and then picks up a stick and starts poking them. You worry for the baby, you know the baby is doing something stupid... but it’s a baby, it doesn’t know any better. Wikus is a baby. He is blind to his own racism, but the story is designed to open his eyes. As he goes from shack to shack trying to get aliens to sign their eviction notices, suspense moves a little into the background - this is a documentary, and we begin to get used to what is happening (even though, I have to tell you, the aliens are just amazing in this film. I wondered whether they used actors in green suits as substitutes so that the on-camera actors would have someone to talk to. No amount of mundane attitude on screen can take away from the fantastic CGI work in this film - it’s *better* than the stuff in GI JOE, much more realistic!). But just when we have lowered our guard, we see a couple of aliens up to no good, collecting some black fluid that will allow them to enact some secret plan.
Okay, I’ve decided not to spoil it all by talking about the specifics of what happens next... But for a movie with a giant flying saucer in just about every shot, where well over half the beings on screen are amazing CGI aliens, this film is not about any of those things... it’s all about Wikus. It’s not about the special effects, like a Hollywood movie, it’s about the people. Wikus goes through several transformations in the course of the story, and if we didn’t identify with him at the beginning, we do later on and really begin to care about the guy and see the story through his eyes.
When things go wrong in District 9, Wikus begins to see the aliens, not as a bureaucratic problem or as animals or as “prawns”, but as *people* with the same sort of problems that humans have. He comes to understand their struggle... and slowly switches sides. And this is so subtle, there is no dialogue about his “transformation” and change in beliefs. No idiot lines the writer had to put in the script for the development execs and producers that no one removed before filming. Just as the documentary “bug” stays in the lower right hand side of the screen, the reality of the situation remains. The character gradually changes scene-by-scene without us really noticing - except this casually racist bureaucrat has now become a friend to the alien they have named “Chris” and believes the aliens have rights.
Along with the emotional changes in Wikus, he also goes through a physical change that is connected to another change on the emotional side that turns him from a bumbling bureaucrat into an action hero. Though I think Charles Pogue may be due a check for some of the story ideas, eventually the film becomes a really unusual buddy action flick with Wikus and the alien they call “Chris” kicking some military ass and blowing some things up real good. But even when we are in the middle of a massive battle scene where they break into a top secret government installation, the story never loses sight of the people (including aliens) in the scenes. Even the action scenes have an emotional component and deal with Wikus and his relationship with “Chris” and his new feelings of guilt over being a casual racist who allowed his government to herd these alien people up into pens, like cattle. This entire story is about Wikus seeing the error of his ways and changing them to become a more honorable person. It’s about Wikus transforming from a guy who sees the aliens as “prawns”, animals, different... to seeing them as not much different than himself - and seeing “Chris” as a friend. Unlike any of the big dumb Hollywood special effects films we’ve had this summer (including STAR TREK), this film is really about the people in the story. Like all good sci-fi, it’s a metaphor, an allegory. It’s not just about the aliens and action scenes, it’s about a social issue that touches all of our lives.
The film takes many unexpected turns, and presents some information to us in a way that exposes *our* racism - I suspect this may be uncomfortable to some viewers. My racist beliefs took me down the wrong path at one point - and that made me reevaluate myself. The film holds a fun-house mirror up to society - and up to ourselves - and shows us who we really are in the safety of a science fiction story about battles between humans and aliens.
And, what is pure fantasy for those of us in the USA is only part fantasy in South Africa, where they had Apartheid until recently, and a similar story played out when relocating people from District 6.
Go for the special effects and really cool action scenes, leave thinking about racism...
And hoping you won’t have to wait 3 years for the sequel.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
Blue Books are back! - Sweet 17 Deal includes a Joe Eszethas book!
- Bill
Original short film DISTRICT 9 is based on...
Monday, August 24, 2009
Class Reunion
A week ago I went to a High School Class Reunion - a picnic in a park in my hometown. When the classmate organizing it first sent me an e-mail, I got kind of nostalgic, and spent a couple of days watching the openings of my favorite TV shows when I was a kid... you know, the HAWAII 5-0 theme still rocks. I’m sure part of the nostalgia thing was that I also had a birthday coming up - and it would be birthday and class reunion almost back-to-back. Now that both are in the past, it’s time for me to start thinking about the future again... and get back to work.
Oh, but that class reunion...
I attended my 10 year class reunion, but none of the others. Because I was still living and working in my home town, the 10 year wasn’t a big deal. I saw many people from high school in the grocery store or where they worked. And people hadn’t really changed that much - everyone was still on their first spouse. Some people had kids... but some people had kids (or were pregnant) their senior year of high school. The one person I most wanted to see at my 10 year was my friend Daryl, who got into all kinds of mischief with me (and Todd, and others) in high school. We pulled all kinds of pranks and found new ways to rebel against the world - we commandeered room 312 and took it as our student lounge. This involved changing the locks on the door. We organized the pot smoking kids to sit on the roof over the faculty lounge and blow smoke into their air vent. Because back in those old days you needed a hall pass to be anywhere on campus when class was in session, we, um, found the spare time stamp machine and the box of hall passes and created our own. I’m sure the statute of limitations applies to all of these crimes, now... or maybe I’ll be blogging from jail for a while.
Most of our pranks were just small every-day things - pushing someone’s car across the parking lot to another space and then trying to convince them that they had parked it there, putting a notice in the faculty lounge to bring cookies or cupcakes for everyone in your 3rd period class (for some reason the teachers who fell for this and brought cupcakes for the class were never *my* teachers or Daryl’s teachers or Todd’s teachers). The strangest prank we did - and it was ongoing - was to *dress* the statue in the school library. The old librarian had this statue of - some Greek dude, I forget who, now - and it was he wanted everyone to respect the statue... which meant we had to come up with some prank to disrespect it. So, once or twice a month we would create a diversion to keep the old librarian occupied as we dressed the statue in clothes we bought from Goodwill. That old Greek dude was in drag half the time, sometimes in School Colors before a big football game, but always wearing something weird. At first the old librarian would freak out and remove the clothes, screaming at anyone in the library about the sacrilege... but the next day we’d get the statue dressed again, and eventually the old librarian just gave up. But he still ranted it all the time and eventually quit - so they hired a cool new librarian, Dot Caveny, who like the statue dressed in strange clothes. We continued dressing the statue until we graduated, and then some other kids took over. Besides coming up with many of these pranks, I was never without a special notebook where I was writing a fictionalized version of our antics as a novel. I still have all of those notebooks in storage somewhere.
When Daryl was a no-show at the 10 year reunion, we joked that he was probably either on the road to making his first million or in prison for conning a millionaire. Every year when I drive back to my hometown from Los Angeles, I go to many of my old haunts and used to bump into Dot Caveny at TR’s Bar & Grill in Concord. A bunch of teachers used to hang out there after work, and she was in that group. One year I drove up just to go to her birthday party there. We would talk of the old days, and debate whether Daryl had made his first billion by now or was up for parole. Had to be one of the two - he was too intelligent and too clever to be working some boring normal job. Well, TR’s closed - it’s now a pizza joint - and I haven’t seen Dot in years. I hope she’s okay.
Oh, but that class reunion...
I haven’t seen Daryl since graduation, and he was supposed to attend this reunion. Which meant, I had to be there.
And all of us are going to be, you know, old.
Well, here’s what I learned from going to this reunion - people age at different rates. These people are all the same age as I am (give-or-take) yet some looked and acted old and others were still full of energy and could have passed for at least a decade younger than they were. The hot busty high school cheerleader? Still pretty hot! I imagine if you removed her bra at this point (something I fantasized about often while in high school), they’d hit the floor and bounce, but she still looked great - and was flirty and the same firecracker she was many years ago. The school stud - still on the prowl. He was hitting on every woman there... and he looked great. Probably some Just For Men products involved, though. One thing that’s funny - people still hung out with their old cliques (leaving the braniac social misfits to talk amongst ourselves for much of the time). Another thing that was interesting was that most of the guys have jobs where they do some form of manual labor for a living - though at this point they usually supervise others doing the labor. Our high school seemed to produce people who do remodels or put in pools and jacuzzis or repair cars. Not a lot of computer programmers or dot-com millionaires. Bill Gates did not go to my high school.
As the reunion progressed, we realized we were all waiting for Daryl’s entrance. Would he drive up in a limousine from his LearJet which landed at Buchanan Field? Would a prison van pull up and release him, in shackles, to attend the reunion but keep him from wandering any further than his chains allowed? Would he zoom in wearing a jet pack? Would he show up with Lindsey Lohan on one arm and a champagne glass in hand? What if he’d had full identity changing plastic surgery and we didn’t recognize him? It was difficult enough to recognize some of the people at the reunion, just because they looked, you know, old.
As we waited for Daryl to show, we swapped stories about him. One of the gals talked about how he was her lab partner, and kept breaking beakers and petri dishes... and *she* had to go get the replacements so that he wouldn’t get in even more trouble. I told about the time Daryl “borrowed” his dad’s prized Cadillac and we swiped some little flags from the Veteran’s Graveyard and taped them to the front and rear of the Caddy, and “motorcaded” through town, trying to see how many cars would move to the side of the road to let us pass by. Everyone had a great story about the legendary Daryl...
But as the sun began to set and the reunion picnic broke up, Daryl still had not arrived. He was either buying the Oakland As as an investment, or they wouldn’t release him from that Federal Prison because they needed him to play tennis against Bernie Madhof's Federal Prison’s tennis team. Whatever the reason, we all left having not seen him... but still having experienced the fun he had brought into our lives many years ago. He was a real character - and maybe it’s better that we didn’t get to see the 9-5 married-with-two-kids version that he may have become. Daryl is a legend who will live on in all of our memories, even when the hot cheerleader starts to look like an apple doll.
I wish I could *create* a character than interesting and dynamic and memorable.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
Blue Books are back!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: What's your story? and the mess that is DREAMCATCHER.
Movies: Though I haven't seen many movies, I have seen DISTRICT 9, and tomorrow I'll share my thoughts on it.
Meanwhile, films to avoid on UK's M4M2 Channel...
8/25 - 15:30 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/28 - 14:15 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
8/29 - 18:30 - Black Thunder - When the world's most powerful stealth jet fighter falls into enemy hands, only one man can get it back. Starring Michael Dudikoff.
I am so sorry.
- Bill
Oh, but that class reunion...
I attended my 10 year class reunion, but none of the others. Because I was still living and working in my home town, the 10 year wasn’t a big deal. I saw many people from high school in the grocery store or where they worked. And people hadn’t really changed that much - everyone was still on their first spouse. Some people had kids... but some people had kids (or were pregnant) their senior year of high school. The one person I most wanted to see at my 10 year was my friend Daryl, who got into all kinds of mischief with me (and Todd, and others) in high school. We pulled all kinds of pranks and found new ways to rebel against the world - we commandeered room 312 and took it as our student lounge. This involved changing the locks on the door. We organized the pot smoking kids to sit on the roof over the faculty lounge and blow smoke into their air vent. Because back in those old days you needed a hall pass to be anywhere on campus when class was in session, we, um, found the spare time stamp machine and the box of hall passes and created our own. I’m sure the statute of limitations applies to all of these crimes, now... or maybe I’ll be blogging from jail for a while.
Most of our pranks were just small every-day things - pushing someone’s car across the parking lot to another space and then trying to convince them that they had parked it there, putting a notice in the faculty lounge to bring cookies or cupcakes for everyone in your 3rd period class (for some reason the teachers who fell for this and brought cupcakes for the class were never *my* teachers or Daryl’s teachers or Todd’s teachers). The strangest prank we did - and it was ongoing - was to *dress* the statue in the school library. The old librarian had this statue of - some Greek dude, I forget who, now - and it was he wanted everyone to respect the statue... which meant we had to come up with some prank to disrespect it. So, once or twice a month we would create a diversion to keep the old librarian occupied as we dressed the statue in clothes we bought from Goodwill. That old Greek dude was in drag half the time, sometimes in School Colors before a big football game, but always wearing something weird. At first the old librarian would freak out and remove the clothes, screaming at anyone in the library about the sacrilege... but the next day we’d get the statue dressed again, and eventually the old librarian just gave up. But he still ranted it all the time and eventually quit - so they hired a cool new librarian, Dot Caveny, who like the statue dressed in strange clothes. We continued dressing the statue until we graduated, and then some other kids took over. Besides coming up with many of these pranks, I was never without a special notebook where I was writing a fictionalized version of our antics as a novel. I still have all of those notebooks in storage somewhere.
When Daryl was a no-show at the 10 year reunion, we joked that he was probably either on the road to making his first million or in prison for conning a millionaire. Every year when I drive back to my hometown from Los Angeles, I go to many of my old haunts and used to bump into Dot Caveny at TR’s Bar & Grill in Concord. A bunch of teachers used to hang out there after work, and she was in that group. One year I drove up just to go to her birthday party there. We would talk of the old days, and debate whether Daryl had made his first billion by now or was up for parole. Had to be one of the two - he was too intelligent and too clever to be working some boring normal job. Well, TR’s closed - it’s now a pizza joint - and I haven’t seen Dot in years. I hope she’s okay.
Oh, but that class reunion...
I haven’t seen Daryl since graduation, and he was supposed to attend this reunion. Which meant, I had to be there.
And all of us are going to be, you know, old.
Well, here’s what I learned from going to this reunion - people age at different rates. These people are all the same age as I am (give-or-take) yet some looked and acted old and others were still full of energy and could have passed for at least a decade younger than they were. The hot busty high school cheerleader? Still pretty hot! I imagine if you removed her bra at this point (something I fantasized about often while in high school), they’d hit the floor and bounce, but she still looked great - and was flirty and the same firecracker she was many years ago. The school stud - still on the prowl. He was hitting on every woman there... and he looked great. Probably some Just For Men products involved, though. One thing that’s funny - people still hung out with their old cliques (leaving the braniac social misfits to talk amongst ourselves for much of the time). Another thing that was interesting was that most of the guys have jobs where they do some form of manual labor for a living - though at this point they usually supervise others doing the labor. Our high school seemed to produce people who do remodels or put in pools and jacuzzis or repair cars. Not a lot of computer programmers or dot-com millionaires. Bill Gates did not go to my high school.
As the reunion progressed, we realized we were all waiting for Daryl’s entrance. Would he drive up in a limousine from his LearJet which landed at Buchanan Field? Would a prison van pull up and release him, in shackles, to attend the reunion but keep him from wandering any further than his chains allowed? Would he zoom in wearing a jet pack? Would he show up with Lindsey Lohan on one arm and a champagne glass in hand? What if he’d had full identity changing plastic surgery and we didn’t recognize him? It was difficult enough to recognize some of the people at the reunion, just because they looked, you know, old.
As we waited for Daryl to show, we swapped stories about him. One of the gals talked about how he was her lab partner, and kept breaking beakers and petri dishes... and *she* had to go get the replacements so that he wouldn’t get in even more trouble. I told about the time Daryl “borrowed” his dad’s prized Cadillac and we swiped some little flags from the Veteran’s Graveyard and taped them to the front and rear of the Caddy, and “motorcaded” through town, trying to see how many cars would move to the side of the road to let us pass by. Everyone had a great story about the legendary Daryl...
But as the sun began to set and the reunion picnic broke up, Daryl still had not arrived. He was either buying the Oakland As as an investment, or they wouldn’t release him from that Federal Prison because they needed him to play tennis against Bernie Madhof's Federal Prison’s tennis team. Whatever the reason, we all left having not seen him... but still having experienced the fun he had brought into our lives many years ago. He was a real character - and maybe it’s better that we didn’t get to see the 9-5 married-with-two-kids version that he may have become. Daryl is a legend who will live on in all of our memories, even when the hot cheerleader starts to look like an apple doll.
I wish I could *create* a character than interesting and dynamic and memorable.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
Blue Books are back!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: What's your story? and the mess that is DREAMCATCHER.
Movies: Though I haven't seen many movies, I have seen DISTRICT 9, and tomorrow I'll share my thoughts on it.
Meanwhile, films to avoid on UK's M4M2 Channel...
8/25 - 15:30 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/28 - 14:15 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
8/29 - 18:30 - Black Thunder - When the world's most powerful stealth jet fighter falls into enemy hands, only one man can get it back. Starring Michael Dudikoff.
I am so sorry.
- Bill
Friday, August 21, 2009
Sorry, no Fridays With Hitchcock This Week!
I'm tired and was busy doing other things... but you can scroll down and find ROPE and a bunch of others!
- Bill
- Bill
Wednesday, August 19, 2009
Script Killer Notes!
When I learned how to drive, I was taught to not just pay attention to the car in front of me (and the cars beside me and behind me) but look far enough ahead on the road to be prepared for whatever might come my way. If there’s a big accident ten cars down the road, I need to be prepared for that. If there’s a swerving driver a dozen cars ahead of me, I need to start worrying about *why* that driver swerved - what’s in the road that will soon be in *my* way? I have a rule when I’m driving on the freeway (like I-5 between Los Angeles and the Bay Area) - better to have a reckless driver *behind me* than in front of me.
Of course, many people in Los Angeles seem to be more interested in talking on their iPhones and eating soup and texting their new screenplay idea than keeping their eyes on the traffic in front of them. Many people have no idea what’s happening more than a car in front of them, because they’re not even paying that much attention to the car in front of them. One day, I’m driving down Santa Monica between Westwood and Century City - and see the cars in front of me stopping... so I slow down and stop. But the left lane is empty, and a car speeds past... and hits the old man in the crosswalk. That’s why the other lanes were stopped, but this driver wasn’t looking ahead nor thinking ahead. The pedestrian was alive when the ambulance took him away... the driver told the police he never saw the guy in the crosswalk. Of course he didn’t - he wasn’t looking that far ahead. Many people in Los Angeles live for the moment... and never think about the moments after that.
What the hell does this have to do with screenwriting?
Well, as writers, part of our job is to see the whole story, and be able to see the chain reaction some script change might make. Actually, that should be everybody’s job on the film - especially the people *giving* the notes... but for some reason they don’t kick the short sighted development execs and producers and directors out of Hollywood... or at least prevent them from giving script notes. Because this biz is filled with people who can’t see the effect a note will have ten pages from now, let alone throughout the rest of the script. The problem is, the note that you and I can see just won’t work, they can’t see... and often want you to “just give it a try”. Hey, why not? It’s only work... work that *you* are doing while they play tennis and come up with more notes that we can see have no chance of working.
Of course, part of our job is to be a good typing monkey and do even the rewrites that we know are pointless. William Goldman tells a story in ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE about working with a director who wanted Goldman to give him “all of the riches” - which is director code for write all kinds of stuff that will never end up in the final draft, and the director will pick and choose which scenes he wants to keep. I’ve worked with directors like that - they have you write hundreds of pages of scenes and then whittle it down to 110 pages that they will shoot.
There are two schools of directors, by the way: movies and TV. A movie director has a plan (often storyboards) and shoots the shots they need to make the movie. A TV director shoots a ton of footage and then figures out which shots he (or she) is going to use in the editing room. Live TV and most sitcoms are shot with multiple cameras and they piece it together in the editing room (or on the editing console). Movies tend to be scheduled and planned, and shot over a period of time (rather than a live performance like a sitcom). But many film directors either come from TV or just fly by the seat of their pants and have no idea what they are shooting until they shoot it, and may not even know what the movie will be until they edit it.
I would rather work with someone who knows what they want than work with someone who knows what they want when they see it... which means after you write a dozen different things that weren’t it. But you usually don’t know which kind of director you’re working with until it’s too late. And there are plenty of producers and development people out there who want you to give them “all of the riches” - and you do draft after draft after draft that weren’t it. (Though I don’t believe a writer has only so many scripts in them and then they run out or something, I do only have so much time on this earth and could get hit by a bus tomorrow... and would rather write stuff that has a snowball’s chance of getting on screen (like a new spec) than something that has no chance at all (like that version of the script with the director’s wild idea that you know just will not work). Do you know how many spec scripts I could have written instead of all of the drafts I knew wouldn’t work before I wrote them.
But, like I said, my job is to write. And if I want to keep getting hired to write, I need to be a good employee. One who doesn’t say things like, “That’s the dumbest note I’ve ever heard!” Though I might be able to see far enough down the road to know the note won’t work, my job is to write it anyway and let the producer or director or development person see what I already know.
One of the things that directors and producers and development people often don’t understand is that you have already considered the change they are suggesting - you looked down that road when you were outlining the script and realized it was a dead end or the scenery wasn’t as interesting. You looked down hundreds of different roads - every scene, every line, every action in a script is a fork in the road - and you’ve looked at the different ways your script might go and combinations of ways it might go, and already selected the best possible route. You know where their changes lead and your road is better. But some folks need to see that for themselves... and my job is to write up that version.
You get all kinds of notes, crazy notes, and it’s your job is write them up. You have to pick your battles when it comes to notes, and discuss the notes that you mildly disagree with and when you get a note that will completely ruin your script - strongly disagree with the note and explain *logically* and *calmly* why the note will take the script in the wrong direction. In fact, if you can explain why it will lose the producer money you’ll have a much better chance of winning the battle than if you argue based on art or craft or character or quality. Money talks. But sometimes (well, maybe even usually) you don’t win these debates and end up ruining your own script (or quitting, and some other writer comes in to not only ruin it but completely change it into *their* script). A writer’s job is to write... and sometimes make the changes that break your heart.
When you get a bad note, you might think you should *not* give it your best work and *try* to make that version of the script suck. But I've learned that executing the note poorly always backfires - there is still a sex scene in CRASH DIVE. I thought for sure once they saw how silly that sex scene was (on a submarine where the crew is 110 *men* and no women... except the one in the sex scene) they would want it removed. I went out of my way to carefully write the end of the scene before the sex scene and the beginning if the scene after the sex scene so that they cut together *prefectly*. That way the scene could be removed without harming the script. And when it stayed in the script and they actually filmed it, I thought for sure it would be cut out before the movie aired on HBO. The network wanted the sex scene in the script, but sooner or later they had to realize it was stupid, right? They had to cut it out before they put it on the air, right? Wrong. They want what they want and if you write the crap version, that’s the version they will film.
And if they *do* notice you have done a crappy job of executing their brilliant note? That’s often a good way to get replaced by someone who doesn't care.... and will make enough changes to not only claim a screenwriting credit but completely destroy your script. So I will give a note I don’t agree with my very best shot and really try to make it work... even though I know it can't work. You try to make it work - and that’s your job.
NOTES THAT KILL
But every once in a while I get a "script killer" note - one that will destroy the screenplay. One that you can not ever make work. One that *no one* can ever make work. Can the hero and villain just be friends and stop fighting? Got that one about three times, now. Can all of the characters talk and act the same? Had that a couple of times. Does there have to be a resolution to the conflict? I’ve got that a couple of times. Does there have to be a conflict? You would think that no one would ever give you that note, but I’ve had it a couple of times. Do the characters have to be motivated - why can't it just be a bunch of coincidences?
I have a friend who had a director order him to change all of the dialogue into cliches because "People understand cliches". He suspected this director *only* understood cliches. You get these notes, and try to find some reason for them - and often there is not. The problem with the notes that remove conflict or motivation or make the script bland and boring or remove the “engine that runs the machine” is that they are script killers. Story is conflict - remove conflict and you permanently damage the script. It will not work. The story dies. These are notes that can never work - and you don’t even have to see that far down the road to figure it out.
You would think that “script killer notes” are rare, but I get them all too often.
A couple of years ago on a project that eventually died, the producer and I had a meeting with a director I was in awe of - one of his films is a classic. I was not worthy. He the usual list of silly notes and notes that I knew would not work... but he also had a couple of script killer notes: Can we remove the emotional conflict? Why does the story conflict need to be resolved at all? Does there have to be an antagonist? Why does one event have to cause another - can’t it all just be a series of coincidence? After the meeting the producer asked how I was going to make those notes work, and I said I did not know - but this was a big director, I wanted him to direct my script, I was going to find the way to make the notes work. I struggled, could not find a way to make the notes work. You can’t remove the conflict and have a story, or make the story a series of coincidence and have it still work. I called the producer and explained my problems trying to make the notes work - and (for once) the producer understood. He thought the notes wouldn’t work when the director came up with them. I asked if he might call the director and ask what the reason behind the notes might be (because I could not figure it out). Sometimes a note is about the symptom, not the disease - and that throws you off. Well, the producer called director and asked him what his reasons were for the (script killer) notes. And the director answered, "Because I'm the director and that's what I want." Producer, bless him, said: No, you are not the director. And the project died.
Usually they don't die, they get turned into crap then filmed.
I have this script called STEEL CHAMELEONS about a Westworld-ish theme park with androids that have "liquid skin technology". Say you want to sleep with Angelina Jolie - if she's in the android's program it becomes Angelina Jolie. Or if you're interested in Russell Crowe, it turns into an anatomically correct Russell Crowe. No chance of diseases, they hose them down afterwards.
Well, with a minor upgrade, these things can change into people not on the program - they touch you, they can look just like you. And some bad guys come up with a scheme.
The script is kind of like Carpenter's THE THING or INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS - you don't know who is real and who is one of them. There's a scene where one replicates a Senator, and our hero (and agent with Alcohol Tobacco Firearms & Androids) doesn't know which one is real - and both insist they are the real one. There's a scene where he's chasing one with a distinctive look... into a crowd, and the android disappears - none of the people in the crowd have that look. And there's an infiltration of the hero's team. And a character who seems to die... but it's really an android that looks like them, and they are still alive. Basically, anything that has to do with duplicate people is used in the script. When it was written (ages ago) the idea was to use a handful of morphs, and the rest is just actors playing androids. Cheap!
So a couple of years ago it gets read by a production company who claim to love it, and they have a meeting with me, and the big cheese has this note: Just a minor change, he wants all of the androids to look like the androids from I ROBOT.
Because I'm oddly practical, I ask if they can afford to do all of that CGI, and he says they'll have to cross that bridge when they come to it, but there have to be all kinds of unemployed CGI people who will work for pennies...
And I asked if he was talking about the androids looking like robots just in the factory scenes (where they didn't have to replicate anyone as part of the story) and he said, No - in every single scene. All of them. The androids throughout the film will look just like the androids in I ROBOT... and the whole liquid skin thing would be dropped.
Now, I suspect the note under the note here is that this guy really liked the androids in I ROBOT. If it was about the trailer or production value, the factory androids would have solved that. But it was something else...
And that note would ruin the entire script - it *could not work* with that note. The *concept* was androids who could replicate specific people and take over their lives to infiltrate places and do very bad things. If the androids couldn’t replicate specific important people and do very bad things, there is no story. And the "cool stuff" was all of the scenes where the hero couldn't tell who was real and who was an android. So I turned down the sale and walked... but wondered what would have happened if they had bought the script, *then* given me this note. How could I have ever made it work? The “engine that runs the machine” is that these androids can look like anyone, can infiltrate even the most heavily guarded location... they could replicate the President of the United States! How would you know he was an android if he looked and sounded and acted just like the President? And had his fingerprints.
When you get a note like this *after* they’ve bought your script you wonder why they bought it in the first place - isn’t there some other android script out there where the androids look like the ones from I ROBOT? Why don’t they buy that one and ruin it? And why can’t they see that they are taking a reasonably cool idea and making it either something bland and something that just can not work. Because once I change the androids into obvious robots, the whole infiltration thing doesn’t work, so we’ll need a new plot... and we have these machine looking androids, so it’s probably going to end up some story where the androids battle the humans and... well, isn’t that I ROBOT? It’s my experience that many bad notes are there to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear - they sand off all of the creative and interesting parts and then take the mess that’s left and turn it into something they’ve already seen. They kill the script... and either film the corpse or try to Frankenstein some sort of script from the dead parts... and that usually doesn’t work either.
When I get one of these notes, I want to ask if they are out of their fucking minds. But, you can’t really ask that... because they probably are. Many in Hollywood are, you know. You want to fight the note to the death... but that’s a good way to get fired off your own script. You want to grab the producer or director or development person and shake them... but I suspect that would land me in jail. You want to ask how they could be so stupid, but that’s not going to earn you any points, either. And the big problem is, even if you make your case and lose it and then do the very best job you can trying to write a script where the serial killer and FBI profiler don’t fight each other and are friends who pal around and there is no conflict at all in the screenplay... that script will suck big time and you’ll get fired and some other writer will be hired because you just weren’t creative enough to make it work. And then that writer will be fired and the next writer will be fired and the whole project will crash and burn and never get made... and after all of that pain and work and heart-ache... you won’t get your production bonus.
I don't know the answer to this question of how to deal with Script Killer notes. Suspect I never will.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Weird Decisions and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.
Yesterday’s Dinner: China Wall Buffet - all the Chinese food you can eat!
Of course, many people in Los Angeles seem to be more interested in talking on their iPhones and eating soup and texting their new screenplay idea than keeping their eyes on the traffic in front of them. Many people have no idea what’s happening more than a car in front of them, because they’re not even paying that much attention to the car in front of them. One day, I’m driving down Santa Monica between Westwood and Century City - and see the cars in front of me stopping... so I slow down and stop. But the left lane is empty, and a car speeds past... and hits the old man in the crosswalk. That’s why the other lanes were stopped, but this driver wasn’t looking ahead nor thinking ahead. The pedestrian was alive when the ambulance took him away... the driver told the police he never saw the guy in the crosswalk. Of course he didn’t - he wasn’t looking that far ahead. Many people in Los Angeles live for the moment... and never think about the moments after that.
What the hell does this have to do with screenwriting?
Well, as writers, part of our job is to see the whole story, and be able to see the chain reaction some script change might make. Actually, that should be everybody’s job on the film - especially the people *giving* the notes... but for some reason they don’t kick the short sighted development execs and producers and directors out of Hollywood... or at least prevent them from giving script notes. Because this biz is filled with people who can’t see the effect a note will have ten pages from now, let alone throughout the rest of the script. The problem is, the note that you and I can see just won’t work, they can’t see... and often want you to “just give it a try”. Hey, why not? It’s only work... work that *you* are doing while they play tennis and come up with more notes that we can see have no chance of working.
Of course, part of our job is to be a good typing monkey and do even the rewrites that we know are pointless. William Goldman tells a story in ADVENTURES IN THE SCREEN TRADE about working with a director who wanted Goldman to give him “all of the riches” - which is director code for write all kinds of stuff that will never end up in the final draft, and the director will pick and choose which scenes he wants to keep. I’ve worked with directors like that - they have you write hundreds of pages of scenes and then whittle it down to 110 pages that they will shoot.
There are two schools of directors, by the way: movies and TV. A movie director has a plan (often storyboards) and shoots the shots they need to make the movie. A TV director shoots a ton of footage and then figures out which shots he (or she) is going to use in the editing room. Live TV and most sitcoms are shot with multiple cameras and they piece it together in the editing room (or on the editing console). Movies tend to be scheduled and planned, and shot over a period of time (rather than a live performance like a sitcom). But many film directors either come from TV or just fly by the seat of their pants and have no idea what they are shooting until they shoot it, and may not even know what the movie will be until they edit it.
I would rather work with someone who knows what they want than work with someone who knows what they want when they see it... which means after you write a dozen different things that weren’t it. But you usually don’t know which kind of director you’re working with until it’s too late. And there are plenty of producers and development people out there who want you to give them “all of the riches” - and you do draft after draft after draft that weren’t it. (Though I don’t believe a writer has only so many scripts in them and then they run out or something, I do only have so much time on this earth and could get hit by a bus tomorrow... and would rather write stuff that has a snowball’s chance of getting on screen (like a new spec) than something that has no chance at all (like that version of the script with the director’s wild idea that you know just will not work). Do you know how many spec scripts I could have written instead of all of the drafts I knew wouldn’t work before I wrote them.
But, like I said, my job is to write. And if I want to keep getting hired to write, I need to be a good employee. One who doesn’t say things like, “That’s the dumbest note I’ve ever heard!” Though I might be able to see far enough down the road to know the note won’t work, my job is to write it anyway and let the producer or director or development person see what I already know.
One of the things that directors and producers and development people often don’t understand is that you have already considered the change they are suggesting - you looked down that road when you were outlining the script and realized it was a dead end or the scenery wasn’t as interesting. You looked down hundreds of different roads - every scene, every line, every action in a script is a fork in the road - and you’ve looked at the different ways your script might go and combinations of ways it might go, and already selected the best possible route. You know where their changes lead and your road is better. But some folks need to see that for themselves... and my job is to write up that version.
You get all kinds of notes, crazy notes, and it’s your job is write them up. You have to pick your battles when it comes to notes, and discuss the notes that you mildly disagree with and when you get a note that will completely ruin your script - strongly disagree with the note and explain *logically* and *calmly* why the note will take the script in the wrong direction. In fact, if you can explain why it will lose the producer money you’ll have a much better chance of winning the battle than if you argue based on art or craft or character or quality. Money talks. But sometimes (well, maybe even usually) you don’t win these debates and end up ruining your own script (or quitting, and some other writer comes in to not only ruin it but completely change it into *their* script). A writer’s job is to write... and sometimes make the changes that break your heart.
When you get a bad note, you might think you should *not* give it your best work and *try* to make that version of the script suck. But I've learned that executing the note poorly always backfires - there is still a sex scene in CRASH DIVE. I thought for sure once they saw how silly that sex scene was (on a submarine where the crew is 110 *men* and no women... except the one in the sex scene) they would want it removed. I went out of my way to carefully write the end of the scene before the sex scene and the beginning if the scene after the sex scene so that they cut together *prefectly*. That way the scene could be removed without harming the script. And when it stayed in the script and they actually filmed it, I thought for sure it would be cut out before the movie aired on HBO. The network wanted the sex scene in the script, but sooner or later they had to realize it was stupid, right? They had to cut it out before they put it on the air, right? Wrong. They want what they want and if you write the crap version, that’s the version they will film.
And if they *do* notice you have done a crappy job of executing their brilliant note? That’s often a good way to get replaced by someone who doesn't care.... and will make enough changes to not only claim a screenwriting credit but completely destroy your script. So I will give a note I don’t agree with my very best shot and really try to make it work... even though I know it can't work. You try to make it work - and that’s your job.
NOTES THAT KILL
But every once in a while I get a "script killer" note - one that will destroy the screenplay. One that you can not ever make work. One that *no one* can ever make work. Can the hero and villain just be friends and stop fighting? Got that one about three times, now. Can all of the characters talk and act the same? Had that a couple of times. Does there have to be a resolution to the conflict? I’ve got that a couple of times. Does there have to be a conflict? You would think that no one would ever give you that note, but I’ve had it a couple of times. Do the characters have to be motivated - why can't it just be a bunch of coincidences?
I have a friend who had a director order him to change all of the dialogue into cliches because "People understand cliches". He suspected this director *only* understood cliches. You get these notes, and try to find some reason for them - and often there is not. The problem with the notes that remove conflict or motivation or make the script bland and boring or remove the “engine that runs the machine” is that they are script killers. Story is conflict - remove conflict and you permanently damage the script. It will not work. The story dies. These are notes that can never work - and you don’t even have to see that far down the road to figure it out.
You would think that “script killer notes” are rare, but I get them all too often.
A couple of years ago on a project that eventually died, the producer and I had a meeting with a director I was in awe of - one of his films is a classic. I was not worthy. He the usual list of silly notes and notes that I knew would not work... but he also had a couple of script killer notes: Can we remove the emotional conflict? Why does the story conflict need to be resolved at all? Does there have to be an antagonist? Why does one event have to cause another - can’t it all just be a series of coincidence? After the meeting the producer asked how I was going to make those notes work, and I said I did not know - but this was a big director, I wanted him to direct my script, I was going to find the way to make the notes work. I struggled, could not find a way to make the notes work. You can’t remove the conflict and have a story, or make the story a series of coincidence and have it still work. I called the producer and explained my problems trying to make the notes work - and (for once) the producer understood. He thought the notes wouldn’t work when the director came up with them. I asked if he might call the director and ask what the reason behind the notes might be (because I could not figure it out). Sometimes a note is about the symptom, not the disease - and that throws you off. Well, the producer called director and asked him what his reasons were for the (script killer) notes. And the director answered, "Because I'm the director and that's what I want." Producer, bless him, said: No, you are not the director. And the project died.
Usually they don't die, they get turned into crap then filmed.
I have this script called STEEL CHAMELEONS about a Westworld-ish theme park with androids that have "liquid skin technology". Say you want to sleep with Angelina Jolie - if she's in the android's program it becomes Angelina Jolie. Or if you're interested in Russell Crowe, it turns into an anatomically correct Russell Crowe. No chance of diseases, they hose them down afterwards.
Well, with a minor upgrade, these things can change into people not on the program - they touch you, they can look just like you. And some bad guys come up with a scheme.
The script is kind of like Carpenter's THE THING or INVASION OF THE BODYSNATCHERS - you don't know who is real and who is one of them. There's a scene where one replicates a Senator, and our hero (and agent with Alcohol Tobacco Firearms & Androids) doesn't know which one is real - and both insist they are the real one. There's a scene where he's chasing one with a distinctive look... into a crowd, and the android disappears - none of the people in the crowd have that look. And there's an infiltration of the hero's team. And a character who seems to die... but it's really an android that looks like them, and they are still alive. Basically, anything that has to do with duplicate people is used in the script. When it was written (ages ago) the idea was to use a handful of morphs, and the rest is just actors playing androids. Cheap!
So a couple of years ago it gets read by a production company who claim to love it, and they have a meeting with me, and the big cheese has this note: Just a minor change, he wants all of the androids to look like the androids from I ROBOT.
Because I'm oddly practical, I ask if they can afford to do all of that CGI, and he says they'll have to cross that bridge when they come to it, but there have to be all kinds of unemployed CGI people who will work for pennies...
And I asked if he was talking about the androids looking like robots just in the factory scenes (where they didn't have to replicate anyone as part of the story) and he said, No - in every single scene. All of them. The androids throughout the film will look just like the androids in I ROBOT... and the whole liquid skin thing would be dropped.
Now, I suspect the note under the note here is that this guy really liked the androids in I ROBOT. If it was about the trailer or production value, the factory androids would have solved that. But it was something else...
And that note would ruin the entire script - it *could not work* with that note. The *concept* was androids who could replicate specific people and take over their lives to infiltrate places and do very bad things. If the androids couldn’t replicate specific important people and do very bad things, there is no story. And the "cool stuff" was all of the scenes where the hero couldn't tell who was real and who was an android. So I turned down the sale and walked... but wondered what would have happened if they had bought the script, *then* given me this note. How could I have ever made it work? The “engine that runs the machine” is that these androids can look like anyone, can infiltrate even the most heavily guarded location... they could replicate the President of the United States! How would you know he was an android if he looked and sounded and acted just like the President? And had his fingerprints.
When you get a note like this *after* they’ve bought your script you wonder why they bought it in the first place - isn’t there some other android script out there where the androids look like the ones from I ROBOT? Why don’t they buy that one and ruin it? And why can’t they see that they are taking a reasonably cool idea and making it either something bland and something that just can not work. Because once I change the androids into obvious robots, the whole infiltration thing doesn’t work, so we’ll need a new plot... and we have these machine looking androids, so it’s probably going to end up some story where the androids battle the humans and... well, isn’t that I ROBOT? It’s my experience that many bad notes are there to turn a silk purse into a sow’s ear - they sand off all of the creative and interesting parts and then take the mess that’s left and turn it into something they’ve already seen. They kill the script... and either film the corpse or try to Frankenstein some sort of script from the dead parts... and that usually doesn’t work either.
When I get one of these notes, I want to ask if they are out of their fucking minds. But, you can’t really ask that... because they probably are. Many in Hollywood are, you know. You want to fight the note to the death... but that’s a good way to get fired off your own script. You want to grab the producer or director or development person and shake them... but I suspect that would land me in jail. You want to ask how they could be so stupid, but that’s not going to earn you any points, either. And the big problem is, even if you make your case and lose it and then do the very best job you can trying to write a script where the serial killer and FBI profiler don’t fight each other and are friends who pal around and there is no conflict at all in the screenplay... that script will suck big time and you’ll get fired and some other writer will be hired because you just weren’t creative enough to make it work. And then that writer will be fired and the next writer will be fired and the whole project will crash and burn and never get made... and after all of that pain and work and heart-ache... you won’t get your production bonus.
I don't know the answer to this question of how to deal with Script Killer notes. Suspect I never will.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Weird Decisions and THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW.
Yesterday’s Dinner: China Wall Buffet - all the Chinese food you can eat!
Thursday, August 13, 2009
Quentin Tarantino's Early Muppet Movies
Most people don't know that before Tarantino directed most of the films we know of... in fact, before he even directed his *first* film, MY BEST FRIEND'S BIRTHDAY, he worked extensively with the Muppets. Here are some trailers for those early films, to prepare you for KILL HITLER VOLUME 1... I mean, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS...
And, of course...
The thing about Tarantino - he pushes everything to the limit so that you *remember* his work, his dialogue, his characters. That's a lesson we can apply to our scripts - don't wimp out, don't pull punches.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale! Stock market is going up, buy now!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Story Vs Character and BANK JOB.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Whatever my mom's making for dinner.
And, I'm sorry to everyone in the UK again. This is one big Kharma Debt...
M4M2 - 8/14 - 09:00 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
And, of course...
The thing about Tarantino - he pushes everything to the limit so that you *remember* his work, his dialogue, his characters. That's a lesson we can apply to our scripts - don't wimp out, don't pull punches.
Classes On CD - Recession Sale! Stock market is going up, buy now!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Story Vs Character and BANK JOB.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Whatever my mom's making for dinner.
And, I'm sorry to everyone in the UK again. This is one big Kharma Debt...
M4M2 - 8/14 - 09:00 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Briarpatch
The late, great, Ross Thomas, who specialized in action and spy novels with a healthy dose of humor, has a book called BRIARPATCH. In Thomas’ world, a Briarpatch was the territory under the control of a spy or criminal or political king maker. Might be a city or a larger territory, or maybe even a country. These guys built their territory from the ground up, and now nothing happened in their Briarpatch that wasn’t approved of or licensed or taxed by them. One of my favorite Thomas novels, THE FOOLS IN TOWN ARE ON OUR SIDE, is about an organization that moves in and takes over U.S. City Briarpatches from the old guard and installs their own governments - conquering the Briarpatch and making it their own. Behind this scheme was, I think, a retired spy with a thirst for power. They destabilized some U.S. city’s government - some old political machine that was some old guy’s Briarpatch, and then installed their own government... just as the ex-spy had done for the CIA in a number of oil rich third world countries.
Friday’s Hitchcock entry was originally postponed because I was traveling to the San Francisco Bay Area for a class reunion... and to help my dad with some manual labor around the house. I figured I’d write it and get it up Sunday, but that was before I fell into two different Briarpatches... which means you won’t get to read about ROPE and Hitchcock’s one shot movie until this coming Friday.
I spent Saturday afternoon helping my friend John doing some interesting construction work. John has been a friend of mine forever, he acted in some of my little movies decades ago and crewed on others. These days he makes short films for those 48 hour film challenge contests, directs live theater in the Bay Area, and has written a couple of plays that have been performed. He’s one of the founders of a Bay Area theatre company, too. But it’s not *his* Briarpatch that this story is about...
A local playwright named Kathy - John has directed a couple of her plays - read an article about a group who were trying to preserve one of the Word War 2 Victory ships, the Red Oak, which had been in the “Moth Ball Fleet” (hundreds of old Navy ships “stored” in the San Francisco Bay for decades - and featured in the Sam Peckinpah film THE KILLER ELITE). Since there was no World War Three, these ships had no purpose and were going to be scrapped by the Navy. The Red Oak Victory was built in Richmond, CA - in the Kaiser Shipyards - so a group turned preserving this ship into their Briarpatch. They had it towed back to the shipyards where it was built and have set about restoring it - as a floating museum. I’ve toured the ship and it’s really cool - many of the rooms are exactly like they were in WW2 - and they do sleepovers for Scouts in the crew’s bunks (which the kids probably think are neat, but the crew probably thought was just this side of torture) and tours and events.
Kathy was fascinated by the way these ships were built - often a whole ship was built in a single day - by shipbuilding crews that included a large number of women... Rosie The Riveter. My grandfather worked in the Richmond Shipyards, and probably worked on this ship, too. But Kathy wrote a play about the women in the WW2 workforce who built ships and did “man work” while most of the men where off fighting the war. And she contacted the people in charge of the Red Oak Victory to see if they would be interested in staging her play *on the ship*. They said yes, and the project I helped John and Kathy with was building a stage area in one of the ship’s holds. As we were working on this, one of the people in charge of the Red Oak Victory restoration/museum project was talking to Kathy about other plays that might also be performed on this new theater space - like MR. ROBERTS. Now it seems that Kathy may have her own Briarpatch - doing plays about the Navy and ship building on the Red Oak Victory. She built this territory from the ground up. Read about the ship being restored, talked to the people in charge about doing a play onboard, and now may be the “theatre director” for the ship. She’s in charge of the plays done in the new theatre area we built on the ship - and may even turn that into a career. Before Kathy, no one had even thought about doing plays on the ship.
After we finished work on the stage area, I dragged John to Sacramento to the Trash Film Orgy Midnight Movie. I know Trashy Christy Savage from online (and may have met her before, but don’t remember). She (and a couple of friends) have created their own interesting Briarpatch - during summer they do a midnight movie festival at Sacramento’s historic Crest Theater - one of those grand old movie palaces from the 1930s. The place is huge! Because next weekend is my reunion, this was my only chance to go to the midnight show.
The movies are promised to be trashy and bad, and the whole thing is like a ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW party. The event begins at 11:30pm with kind of carnival booths in the lobby of the cinema... I believe a fair number of folks had come from the bars nearby and were in a good mood to see a bad movie, so it was a party atmosphere. At the booth up front you could buy festival T shirts and paraphernalia, *plus* DVDs of the low budget movies Christy has produced. Christy and her friends make movies like
MONSTER FROM BIKINI BEACH in Sacramento - no reason to move to Hollywood - and sell the films online. MONSTER is a fun combo of 1960s beach movie and 1950s monster movie, and delivers everything you would want from a movie with that title. Unlike the Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movies from the 60s, bikini tops do *not* stay on (the monster’s first move always seems to be tearing off the bikini top). This is the kind of film that would play at some second string drive in as the B side of the double bill - and that is meant as a compliment. Christy has made the perfect film for $2 a carload night when you smuggled in a couple of cases of beer.
Now, I don’t know whether the midnight shows exist to further their filmmaking projects, or if the filmmaking is an extension of the midnight shows... but it’s all Christy’s Briarpatch. She has built this territory in Sacramento where she gets to make films and have a party almost every Saturday night over summer where she shows so-bad-they-are-good exploitation movies. At midnight (actually, it was 12:08) they start the party in the theatre with a comedy group doing a skit to warm up the audience. Oh, there’s a DJ who has been playing records up until now - lots of metal. There is a giant talking Tiki Head who is MC - and gets the audience chanting all kinds of silly things. After the comedy, they start the film...
LADY TERMINATOR should not be seen sober. It’s a Indonesian knock off of TERMINATOR, but obviously someone in the legal department was worried, so the opening of the film sets it up as based on the legend of the South Sea Queen (I think) who had 100 husbands and bite off all of their man-parts with an eel she hides in her woman-parts. Blood sprays from many a man’s groin area in this film. Like a garden hose of red liquid. Not subtle or realistic. Well, after husband #100 pulls out the eel and saves his man-parts, the South Sea Queen puts a curse on his family - specifically his great grand daughter - and returns to the sea.
Cut to decades later, this smokin’ hot babe who could not act her way out of a rice paper bag, claims to be an anthropologist studying for her thesis who is researching the South Sea Queen legend. Whenever she said she was an anthropologist, it got a laugh - like Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist in that James Bond movie.
Just when you are about to leave the cinema because her acting is so bad it actually hurts, she dons a bikini and dives into the cursed area of the South Sea where the Queen vanished, and comes back as the Lady Terminator... hell bent on finding that Great Grand Daughter and killing her.
And now we get the silliest rip off of TERMINATOR you can imagine, as this often topless killing machine (not really a machine, just a possessed anthropologist) chases the Great Grand Daughter chick - who is a disco singer (so that we can get a bunch of disco numbers throughout the film) and also uses the eel hidden in her woman-parts to bite the man-parts off a bunch of guys. Yes, she comes naked from the ocean and steals the clothes from some punkers on the beach (and bites off their man parts with her hidden eel), yes there is a TechNoir bar scene where she finds the Great Grand Daughter chick singing and machineguns at least a hundred extras, yes there is a scene where her eye is injured and she cuts it out... then washes it off in the sink, dries it on a towel, and replaces it, yes there is a scene where she drives a car into the police station and kills at least a hundred extras dressed as cops with a machine gun, yes she (thankfully) doesn’t talk much as the Lady Terminator. She just walks around bare chested with a machinegun and kills people. Just like Ah-nuld did.
But the funniest parts of this movie are when they try to make it look like it takes place in America. The cops - in a police station unlike any you have ever seen before (there are sofas and recliners) have a never-ending conversation about how much they love hot dogs. After about the third hot dog conversation you wonder if there is supposed to be a strang Gay subtext to these scenes... and wonder if this is plot related. Will the Gay cops save the day because they don't put their man-parts in lady-parts and are immune to the Lady Terminator?
Two of the cops are some sort of Starsky & Hutch undercover team - one has a dyed blond mullet that does not match his very ethnic features at all. They say strange things like, “I’m here in the States” which make you wonder where they might have been before. It’s just crazy - bad!
The often topless Terminator chick can not be killed - she takes a million bullet hits that don’t scar her smokin’ hot body at all, her car gets hit by missiles (and even the car is unscratched!) and almost at the end of the movie after she has caught fire and comes out of it with a totally burned face - but her boobs are completely undamaged. This film has its priorities!
Oh, for some unexplained reason after catching on fire and losing her machine gun, she develops laser rays from here eyes that burn men’s man-parts off. The writer of this film has some issues.
Anyway, halfway through this mess of a movie the Trash Film Orgy has an intermission, which is a good thing. Bad movies are only entertaining for so long, and then they just become bad. Because of all of the cop-talk about how much they enjoy eating hot dogs, the intermission show included a hot dog eating contest. I donated some Classes on CD as part of the prize package. All of the contestants were gals, and the Giant Tiki Head MC commented on this. Members of the comedy team gave play-by-play, and it was a lot of fun - people sitting in the first 8 rows were pelted with hot dogs. This primed us for the second half of the movie - which was just as silly as the first.
By the way, whenever the Great Grand Daughter chick did a disco number (which was fairly often considering she had a killing machine babe hunting her night and day), people got up and danced. Many comments were hurled at the screen (hey, it looks so easy on Mystery Science Theater - but most of the comments were just not funny). (They should have had the comedy folks or Tiki Head come up with some prepared funny material to throw at the screen, and I think the Tiki Head needs some Dean Martin style dancers.) And before they showed the film there were some comedy shorts and trailers for locally made films. It was a fun little party... I did a quick headcount and there were more than 200 people in the audience... Christy’s little cult, her Briarpatch.
To me, the most interesting thing wasn’t the awful movie and it’s odd ideas about male and female relationships and the care and feeding of eels, it was that Christy had carved out this piece of the world for herself where she can make her fun little movies and have a weekly party during summer showing old trashy movies. She didn’t need to move to Hollywood, she created her own Hollywood and became a big fish in a small pond.
There are alternatives to Hollywood. You don’t need to sell a script to a studio. You can create your own little Briarpatch and make your own little movies and have your own local events. You can be the big fish in the small pond - and never have to deal with stupid story notes or bone-head producers or all of the crap in this business. You can do it yourself like Christy and Kathy.
Saturday night at the Trash Film Orgy - BLACK BELT JONES with Jim Kelly (star of one of my favorite flicks, THREE THE HARD WAY) and more foley work than 20 studio films put together - if you’re in the Sacramento area, check it out!
* The Red Oak Victory
* RIVETS - The Musical
* Trash Film Orgy Midnight Movie
* Monster From Bikini Beach
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Point Of View and RUNNING SCARED.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Denny's Grand Slam halfway to Sacto.
Friday’s Hitchcock entry was originally postponed because I was traveling to the San Francisco Bay Area for a class reunion... and to help my dad with some manual labor around the house. I figured I’d write it and get it up Sunday, but that was before I fell into two different Briarpatches... which means you won’t get to read about ROPE and Hitchcock’s one shot movie until this coming Friday.
I spent Saturday afternoon helping my friend John doing some interesting construction work. John has been a friend of mine forever, he acted in some of my little movies decades ago and crewed on others. These days he makes short films for those 48 hour film challenge contests, directs live theater in the Bay Area, and has written a couple of plays that have been performed. He’s one of the founders of a Bay Area theatre company, too. But it’s not *his* Briarpatch that this story is about...
A local playwright named Kathy - John has directed a couple of her plays - read an article about a group who were trying to preserve one of the Word War 2 Victory ships, the Red Oak, which had been in the “Moth Ball Fleet” (hundreds of old Navy ships “stored” in the San Francisco Bay for decades - and featured in the Sam Peckinpah film THE KILLER ELITE). Since there was no World War Three, these ships had no purpose and were going to be scrapped by the Navy. The Red Oak Victory was built in Richmond, CA - in the Kaiser Shipyards - so a group turned preserving this ship into their Briarpatch. They had it towed back to the shipyards where it was built and have set about restoring it - as a floating museum. I’ve toured the ship and it’s really cool - many of the rooms are exactly like they were in WW2 - and they do sleepovers for Scouts in the crew’s bunks (which the kids probably think are neat, but the crew probably thought was just this side of torture) and tours and events.
Kathy was fascinated by the way these ships were built - often a whole ship was built in a single day - by shipbuilding crews that included a large number of women... Rosie The Riveter. My grandfather worked in the Richmond Shipyards, and probably worked on this ship, too. But Kathy wrote a play about the women in the WW2 workforce who built ships and did “man work” while most of the men where off fighting the war. And she contacted the people in charge of the Red Oak Victory to see if they would be interested in staging her play *on the ship*. They said yes, and the project I helped John and Kathy with was building a stage area in one of the ship’s holds. As we were working on this, one of the people in charge of the Red Oak Victory restoration/museum project was talking to Kathy about other plays that might also be performed on this new theater space - like MR. ROBERTS. Now it seems that Kathy may have her own Briarpatch - doing plays about the Navy and ship building on the Red Oak Victory. She built this territory from the ground up. Read about the ship being restored, talked to the people in charge about doing a play onboard, and now may be the “theatre director” for the ship. She’s in charge of the plays done in the new theatre area we built on the ship - and may even turn that into a career. Before Kathy, no one had even thought about doing plays on the ship.
TRASH FILM ORGY
After we finished work on the stage area, I dragged John to Sacramento to the Trash Film Orgy Midnight Movie. I know Trashy Christy Savage from online (and may have met her before, but don’t remember). She (and a couple of friends) have created their own interesting Briarpatch - during summer they do a midnight movie festival at Sacramento’s historic Crest Theater - one of those grand old movie palaces from the 1930s. The place is huge! Because next weekend is my reunion, this was my only chance to go to the midnight show.
The movies are promised to be trashy and bad, and the whole thing is like a ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW party. The event begins at 11:30pm with kind of carnival booths in the lobby of the cinema... I believe a fair number of folks had come from the bars nearby and were in a good mood to see a bad movie, so it was a party atmosphere. At the booth up front you could buy festival T shirts and paraphernalia, *plus* DVDs of the low budget movies Christy has produced. Christy and her friends make movies like
MONSTER FROM BIKINI BEACH in Sacramento - no reason to move to Hollywood - and sell the films online. MONSTER is a fun combo of 1960s beach movie and 1950s monster movie, and delivers everything you would want from a movie with that title. Unlike the Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello movies from the 60s, bikini tops do *not* stay on (the monster’s first move always seems to be tearing off the bikini top). This is the kind of film that would play at some second string drive in as the B side of the double bill - and that is meant as a compliment. Christy has made the perfect film for $2 a carload night when you smuggled in a couple of cases of beer.
Now, I don’t know whether the midnight shows exist to further their filmmaking projects, or if the filmmaking is an extension of the midnight shows... but it’s all Christy’s Briarpatch. She has built this territory in Sacramento where she gets to make films and have a party almost every Saturday night over summer where she shows so-bad-they-are-good exploitation movies. At midnight (actually, it was 12:08) they start the party in the theatre with a comedy group doing a skit to warm up the audience. Oh, there’s a DJ who has been playing records up until now - lots of metal. There is a giant talking Tiki Head who is MC - and gets the audience chanting all kinds of silly things. After the comedy, they start the film...
LADY TERMINATOR should not be seen sober. It’s a Indonesian knock off of TERMINATOR, but obviously someone in the legal department was worried, so the opening of the film sets it up as based on the legend of the South Sea Queen (I think) who had 100 husbands and bite off all of their man-parts with an eel she hides in her woman-parts. Blood sprays from many a man’s groin area in this film. Like a garden hose of red liquid. Not subtle or realistic. Well, after husband #100 pulls out the eel and saves his man-parts, the South Sea Queen puts a curse on his family - specifically his great grand daughter - and returns to the sea.
Cut to decades later, this smokin’ hot babe who could not act her way out of a rice paper bag, claims to be an anthropologist studying for her thesis who is researching the South Sea Queen legend. Whenever she said she was an anthropologist, it got a laugh - like Denise Richards as a nuclear scientist in that James Bond movie.
Just when you are about to leave the cinema because her acting is so bad it actually hurts, she dons a bikini and dives into the cursed area of the South Sea where the Queen vanished, and comes back as the Lady Terminator... hell bent on finding that Great Grand Daughter and killing her.
And now we get the silliest rip off of TERMINATOR you can imagine, as this often topless killing machine (not really a machine, just a possessed anthropologist) chases the Great Grand Daughter chick - who is a disco singer (so that we can get a bunch of disco numbers throughout the film) and also uses the eel hidden in her woman-parts to bite the man-parts off a bunch of guys. Yes, she comes naked from the ocean and steals the clothes from some punkers on the beach (and bites off their man parts with her hidden eel), yes there is a TechNoir bar scene where she finds the Great Grand Daughter chick singing and machineguns at least a hundred extras, yes there is a scene where her eye is injured and she cuts it out... then washes it off in the sink, dries it on a towel, and replaces it, yes there is a scene where she drives a car into the police station and kills at least a hundred extras dressed as cops with a machine gun, yes she (thankfully) doesn’t talk much as the Lady Terminator. She just walks around bare chested with a machinegun and kills people. Just like Ah-nuld did.
But the funniest parts of this movie are when they try to make it look like it takes place in America. The cops - in a police station unlike any you have ever seen before (there are sofas and recliners) have a never-ending conversation about how much they love hot dogs. After about the third hot dog conversation you wonder if there is supposed to be a strang Gay subtext to these scenes... and wonder if this is plot related. Will the Gay cops save the day because they don't put their man-parts in lady-parts and are immune to the Lady Terminator?
Two of the cops are some sort of Starsky & Hutch undercover team - one has a dyed blond mullet that does not match his very ethnic features at all. They say strange things like, “I’m here in the States” which make you wonder where they might have been before. It’s just crazy - bad!
The often topless Terminator chick can not be killed - she takes a million bullet hits that don’t scar her smokin’ hot body at all, her car gets hit by missiles (and even the car is unscratched!) and almost at the end of the movie after she has caught fire and comes out of it with a totally burned face - but her boobs are completely undamaged. This film has its priorities!
Oh, for some unexplained reason after catching on fire and losing her machine gun, she develops laser rays from here eyes that burn men’s man-parts off. The writer of this film has some issues.
Anyway, halfway through this mess of a movie the Trash Film Orgy has an intermission, which is a good thing. Bad movies are only entertaining for so long, and then they just become bad. Because of all of the cop-talk about how much they enjoy eating hot dogs, the intermission show included a hot dog eating contest. I donated some Classes on CD as part of the prize package. All of the contestants were gals, and the Giant Tiki Head MC commented on this. Members of the comedy team gave play-by-play, and it was a lot of fun - people sitting in the first 8 rows were pelted with hot dogs. This primed us for the second half of the movie - which was just as silly as the first.
By the way, whenever the Great Grand Daughter chick did a disco number (which was fairly often considering she had a killing machine babe hunting her night and day), people got up and danced. Many comments were hurled at the screen (hey, it looks so easy on Mystery Science Theater - but most of the comments were just not funny). (They should have had the comedy folks or Tiki Head come up with some prepared funny material to throw at the screen, and I think the Tiki Head needs some Dean Martin style dancers.) And before they showed the film there were some comedy shorts and trailers for locally made films. It was a fun little party... I did a quick headcount and there were more than 200 people in the audience... Christy’s little cult, her Briarpatch.
To me, the most interesting thing wasn’t the awful movie and it’s odd ideas about male and female relationships and the care and feeding of eels, it was that Christy had carved out this piece of the world for herself where she can make her fun little movies and have a weekly party during summer showing old trashy movies. She didn’t need to move to Hollywood, she created her own Hollywood and became a big fish in a small pond.
There are alternatives to Hollywood. You don’t need to sell a script to a studio. You can create your own little Briarpatch and make your own little movies and have your own local events. You can be the big fish in the small pond - and never have to deal with stupid story notes or bone-head producers or all of the crap in this business. You can do it yourself like Christy and Kathy.
Saturday night at the Trash Film Orgy - BLACK BELT JONES with Jim Kelly (star of one of my favorite flicks, THREE THE HARD WAY) and more foley work than 20 studio films put together - if you’re in the Sacramento area, check it out!
* The Red Oak Victory
* RIVETS - The Musical
* Trash Film Orgy Midnight Movie
* Monster From Bikini Beach
Classes On CD - Recession Sale!
- Bill
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Point Of View and RUNNING SCARED.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Denny's Grand Slam halfway to Sacto.
Thursday, August 6, 2009
Wednesday, August 5, 2009
The Spin
I wish I could say I read every one of those blogs over there –> every day. Some get read almost every day, some I forget about then go over and catch up on, some of those bloggers post so infrequently I’ll check back after a month a find only one new post (some - no new posts!), and some... well, I hardly ever read. Sorry if that is yours.
When I check my blog hits (almost every day) I like to check out where people came from - what website they were on immediately before coming here. Usually people come from my website or a link I’ve placed somewhere or some other screenwriting or filmmaking website. Most people probably do what I do - I kind of cycle through the websites I regularly read to see if there’s anything new and exciting. Of course, a few of you come here directly from a graphic gay porn site - I still am not sure whether my website is popular in the gay world for some reason, if many gay people are interested in writing screenplays, or if it’s just some of you screwing around with me because you know I check out where my readers come from. You may owe an apology to that little girl and her mom who were sitting behind me in Starbucks last week. That kid may grow up to think all guys can do that without needing immediate medical attention.
So, every once in a while I trace a hit back to some blog I’m unfamiliar with - usually in the film or screenwriting world, but sometimes other types of blogs. And if they look interesting, I read them. If I liked it, I may read it a few more times... and if it’s always interesting I may add it to the list. When I found the homicide blog, I kept reading it and thought it might also be of interest to some of you, so it went on the list. But there are other blogs that never make the list... because they are boring.
I recently read a blog that was film reviews that didn’t make the cut. Here’s why - instead of really digging into the films, he would say whether he liked the film or not and then gave a practically scene-by-scene summary of the movie. No play in the summary was a critique or details on why he liked or disliked this scene - it was just the story. And, told in the blandest possible way. Kind of a book report. This happened then this happened then this happened. I actually read 3 entries to see if maybe this guy was just having a bad day, but *all* of the “reviews” were like that. “I liked HANGOVER. These four guys have a bachelor party in Las Vegas...” and then what happened in the movie told in the most unemotional way possible. This guy’s reviews could make a comedy seem like an episode of DRAGNET.
Another blog that didn’t make the cut was by a woman who worked for an ad agency, who told what happened at the office, Now, I’ve watched THE OFFICE and seen OFFICE SPACE and watched a couple of episodes of MAD MEN and read all of Ernest Lehman’s short stories and probably expected to read a sarcastic blog about working in an office... or maybe an expose of the cut throat business world, or maybe some rants about how stupid fellow employees are or corporate politics are. Instead, this blog was more DRAGNET - her boss wanted the Soams File on is desk by 3:30 so that he could prep for his 4:00 meeting but Gary wasn’t finished with his report, so the file wasn’t ready until after 4:00 and... It was like reading the diary or a boring person. A robot could have written this blog! Maybe a robot *did* write the blog... or a pod person.
Another blog kind of had the opposite problem, though really it’s the same problem. This guy’s blog was all this guy’s opinions on the way the film business is run. A complete angry rant (I read a couple) about how he could run the business so much better. The problem here was that it was kind of this guy’s propoganda - his beliefs on how Hollywood should be - but if you read two blog entries, you’ve read them all. Hey, a robot or pod person could have written *this* blog, too. Just programmed to drone on and on about what was wrong with Hollywood in a way that was almost impersonal.
Bland. Uninteresting. Not entertaining.
It’s life as an office worker... but without a “spin”, without a “take”. Just the life, not a way of looking at that life.
Pulp novelist John D. MacDonald said if you gave the same news story to 10 different writers you’d end up getting 10 different stories. Because each writer would find a different way of telling the story, and find a different way of looking at the story, and find different parts of the story that appealed to them. A writer takes reality and runs it through their unique filter, and it comes out unique.
I once checked into a hotel, and when I got to my room the message light was blinking on my phone. What? Seems the person who checked out never retrieved their message. Because I didn’t know that when I saw the blinking light, I listened to the voice mail... some personal stuff from some stranger’s life.
Okay - your character checks in, sees the blinking message light, plays the message... What is the message and what happens next?
Do you think we all came up with the same story from that jumping off point? I think if we each wrote a script with that as the opening scene, we’d have a bunch of different scripts in different genres, and no two would be the same. Sure, a handful of people might write rom-coms with that as the set up, but after that first scene they’d go in their separate directions.
Have you ever seen the movie MIRACLE MILE? Guy answers a pay phone, voice on the other end says...
Whether we are writing our blogs or writing our scripts, we have to give that reader a unique and entertaining experience. We aren’t just telling them what happens, we are doing it in an exciting and interesting and amusing way. We aren’t just writing a film review that tells you what happened, we want to give it our spin, our take. We want to leave our finger prints on the review so it doesn’t look like a robot wrote it. Maybe the review is funny. Maybe the reviews point out how out of touch Hollywood is with real life. Maybe it’s a Pauline Kael review all about how this movie made *you* feel while watching it - and the review tells us as much about the reviewer as the film. Maybe look at films from a scientific standpoint or a historical standpoint or a social standpoint... you have some *point* you are making in your reviews. It’s more than just telling us what happened - a robot could do that - you are adding a context.
And hopefully, you are trying to be entertaining in some way. Even if I am reading a book for research - for information - I would like to have that information given to me in a way that is a pleasant reading experience. Facts can be presented in a way that amazes the reader, amuses the reader. They are still the facts. You can also bore me to death with the exact same facts.
The most entertaining reviews are usually for bad movies - many of the TRANSFORMERS 2 reviews were incredibly funny. It’s much easier to pull off the gloves and say funny things about a bad movie that say something funny about CITIZEN KANE. Comedy comes from pain and suffering, and no, I haven’t seen the new Rob Schnider movie yet. But a good review can show me the beauty of a film I have never seen, or show me some aspect of a film that I hadn’t noticed at first.
Hey, I’ve had a few boring blog entries. There are times when I realize I need to post something and I write up some rant or something. But even when I’m writing a review of 4 FAST 4 FURIOUS, I start out trying to find a spin or a take on the film. Something that makes it *my* review, not a robot’s. Usually I find some way to use the film as a screenwriting lesson. What did this film do right or where did it go wrong... and how can we apply this to our scripts? Some of my blog entries that I like use small incidents to illustrate a larger point... or use humor to illustrate a larger point. I do wish I had more funny blog entries. Sometimes my blog entries are just information oriented. I’m sorry for the you tube fillers - if something makes me laugh or just amazes me with weirdness, I’ll post it as a filler. I’m guessing you could just look at the youtube filler posts and learn something about me - they aren’t just “this is a new movie trailer that I really don’t care about” posts. I don’t think a robot could have posted those.
What are you trying to say with this blog entry?
What makes this blog entry entertaining?
What makes this blog entry uniquely yours?
I’m sure by now you’ve realized this isn’t really about blog entries - it’s about your screenplays. Sure, it began with me reading a bunch of blogs that didn't make the cut to get listed over there -> but writing seems to be writing, whether it's blogs or screenplays.
You don’t want to write bland, book report screenplays that read like a robot wrote them. You want to infuse your scripts with your unique personality and viewpoint, and make them *entertaining*. Get *inside* the story instead of telling it from the outside. Find the most interesting angle for the story. But, you know, if those three bloggers read it and learned something, I might try their blogs again and might even put them over there on the list.
- Bill
And once again, my sincere apologies to everyone in the UK who might accidentally channel surf past M4M2 and see...
8/6 - 19:10 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/8 - 15:40 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/9 - 10:20 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
- Bill
When I check my blog hits (almost every day) I like to check out where people came from - what website they were on immediately before coming here. Usually people come from my website or a link I’ve placed somewhere or some other screenwriting or filmmaking website. Most people probably do what I do - I kind of cycle through the websites I regularly read to see if there’s anything new and exciting. Of course, a few of you come here directly from a graphic gay porn site - I still am not sure whether my website is popular in the gay world for some reason, if many gay people are interested in writing screenplays, or if it’s just some of you screwing around with me because you know I check out where my readers come from. You may owe an apology to that little girl and her mom who were sitting behind me in Starbucks last week. That kid may grow up to think all guys can do that without needing immediate medical attention.
So, every once in a while I trace a hit back to some blog I’m unfamiliar with - usually in the film or screenwriting world, but sometimes other types of blogs. And if they look interesting, I read them. If I liked it, I may read it a few more times... and if it’s always interesting I may add it to the list. When I found the homicide blog, I kept reading it and thought it might also be of interest to some of you, so it went on the list. But there are other blogs that never make the list... because they are boring.
I recently read a blog that was film reviews that didn’t make the cut. Here’s why - instead of really digging into the films, he would say whether he liked the film or not and then gave a practically scene-by-scene summary of the movie. No play in the summary was a critique or details on why he liked or disliked this scene - it was just the story. And, told in the blandest possible way. Kind of a book report. This happened then this happened then this happened. I actually read 3 entries to see if maybe this guy was just having a bad day, but *all* of the “reviews” were like that. “I liked HANGOVER. These four guys have a bachelor party in Las Vegas...” and then what happened in the movie told in the most unemotional way possible. This guy’s reviews could make a comedy seem like an episode of DRAGNET.
Another blog that didn’t make the cut was by a woman who worked for an ad agency, who told what happened at the office, Now, I’ve watched THE OFFICE and seen OFFICE SPACE and watched a couple of episodes of MAD MEN and read all of Ernest Lehman’s short stories and probably expected to read a sarcastic blog about working in an office... or maybe an expose of the cut throat business world, or maybe some rants about how stupid fellow employees are or corporate politics are. Instead, this blog was more DRAGNET - her boss wanted the Soams File on is desk by 3:30 so that he could prep for his 4:00 meeting but Gary wasn’t finished with his report, so the file wasn’t ready until after 4:00 and... It was like reading the diary or a boring person. A robot could have written this blog! Maybe a robot *did* write the blog... or a pod person.
Another blog kind of had the opposite problem, though really it’s the same problem. This guy’s blog was all this guy’s opinions on the way the film business is run. A complete angry rant (I read a couple) about how he could run the business so much better. The problem here was that it was kind of this guy’s propoganda - his beliefs on how Hollywood should be - but if you read two blog entries, you’ve read them all. Hey, a robot or pod person could have written *this* blog, too. Just programmed to drone on and on about what was wrong with Hollywood in a way that was almost impersonal.
Bland. Uninteresting. Not entertaining.
It’s life as an office worker... but without a “spin”, without a “take”. Just the life, not a way of looking at that life.
Pulp novelist John D. MacDonald said if you gave the same news story to 10 different writers you’d end up getting 10 different stories. Because each writer would find a different way of telling the story, and find a different way of looking at the story, and find different parts of the story that appealed to them. A writer takes reality and runs it through their unique filter, and it comes out unique.
I once checked into a hotel, and when I got to my room the message light was blinking on my phone. What? Seems the person who checked out never retrieved their message. Because I didn’t know that when I saw the blinking light, I listened to the voice mail... some personal stuff from some stranger’s life.
Okay - your character checks in, sees the blinking message light, plays the message... What is the message and what happens next?
Do you think we all came up with the same story from that jumping off point? I think if we each wrote a script with that as the opening scene, we’d have a bunch of different scripts in different genres, and no two would be the same. Sure, a handful of people might write rom-coms with that as the set up, but after that first scene they’d go in their separate directions.
Have you ever seen the movie MIRACLE MILE? Guy answers a pay phone, voice on the other end says...
Whether we are writing our blogs or writing our scripts, we have to give that reader a unique and entertaining experience. We aren’t just telling them what happens, we are doing it in an exciting and interesting and amusing way. We aren’t just writing a film review that tells you what happened, we want to give it our spin, our take. We want to leave our finger prints on the review so it doesn’t look like a robot wrote it. Maybe the review is funny. Maybe the reviews point out how out of touch Hollywood is with real life. Maybe it’s a Pauline Kael review all about how this movie made *you* feel while watching it - and the review tells us as much about the reviewer as the film. Maybe look at films from a scientific standpoint or a historical standpoint or a social standpoint... you have some *point* you are making in your reviews. It’s more than just telling us what happened - a robot could do that - you are adding a context.
And hopefully, you are trying to be entertaining in some way. Even if I am reading a book for research - for information - I would like to have that information given to me in a way that is a pleasant reading experience. Facts can be presented in a way that amazes the reader, amuses the reader. They are still the facts. You can also bore me to death with the exact same facts.
The most entertaining reviews are usually for bad movies - many of the TRANSFORMERS 2 reviews were incredibly funny. It’s much easier to pull off the gloves and say funny things about a bad movie that say something funny about CITIZEN KANE. Comedy comes from pain and suffering, and no, I haven’t seen the new Rob Schnider movie yet. But a good review can show me the beauty of a film I have never seen, or show me some aspect of a film that I hadn’t noticed at first.
Hey, I’ve had a few boring blog entries. There are times when I realize I need to post something and I write up some rant or something. But even when I’m writing a review of 4 FAST 4 FURIOUS, I start out trying to find a spin or a take on the film. Something that makes it *my* review, not a robot’s. Usually I find some way to use the film as a screenwriting lesson. What did this film do right or where did it go wrong... and how can we apply this to our scripts? Some of my blog entries that I like use small incidents to illustrate a larger point... or use humor to illustrate a larger point. I do wish I had more funny blog entries. Sometimes my blog entries are just information oriented. I’m sorry for the you tube fillers - if something makes me laugh or just amazes me with weirdness, I’ll post it as a filler. I’m guessing you could just look at the youtube filler posts and learn something about me - they aren’t just “this is a new movie trailer that I really don’t care about” posts. I don’t think a robot could have posted those.
What are you trying to say with this blog entry?
What makes this blog entry entertaining?
What makes this blog entry uniquely yours?
I’m sure by now you’ve realized this isn’t really about blog entries - it’s about your screenplays. Sure, it began with me reading a bunch of blogs that didn't make the cut to get listed over there -> but writing seems to be writing, whether it's blogs or screenplays.
You don’t want to write bland, book report screenplays that read like a robot wrote them. You want to infuse your scripts with your unique personality and viewpoint, and make them *entertaining*. Get *inside* the story instead of telling it from the outside. Find the most interesting angle for the story. But, you know, if those three bloggers read it and learned something, I might try their blogs again and might even put them over there on the list.
- Bill
And once again, my sincere apologies to everyone in the UK who might accidentally channel surf past M4M2 and see...
8/6 - 19:10 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/8 - 15:40 - Steel Sharks - When a United States submarine is seized by terrorists, a rescue attempt by Elite Navy Seals goes awry. The submarine crew wages a silent war beneath the waves in this tense undersea thriller.
8/9 - 10:20 - Crash Dive - The crew of a nuclear submarine rescues supposed victims of a boat disaster, but the victims turn out to be terrorists intent on capturing nuclear weapons aboard the sub.
- Bill
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
Rest In Peace - Blake Snyder
Screenwriter and screenwriting teacher Blake Snyder has passed away. His book SAVE THE CAT and his follow up books are used by many screenwriters, and were an inspiration to many. He offered advice, helped writers, and was one of the few professional writers who taught screenwriting and was really good at it.
- Bill
- Bill
Monday, August 3, 2009
Script To Screen: BLACK THUNDER Car Chase
Over on one of the message boards someone is *again* asking how to write an action scene, and isn't easier to just write "Hero kicks villain's ass" and let the stunt guys figure it out. Problem with that is that an action film is about the action - would you write a comedy script and leave the jokes up the the actors? We want our scripts to give the reader the feeling of the movie - the *whole* movie. The reason why we go to action movies is for the action... and the story and characters. Which is another thing about action scenes - they are character scenes and story scenes as well (or they are just junk). Part two of my article on action scenes is in the issue of Script Magazine on news stands, now. One of the things I say in that article is to read some scripts with great action scenes.
Now, the truth is that sometimes, no matter how great that action scene you wrote, the stunt guys *do* come up with their own scene. I've bitched before about some of my action scenes being tossed in favor or scenes that not only were not about the character and didn't move the story forward - they sucked. In one of my films I wanted to smash that bad action cliche scene where Chuck Norris is surrounded by Ninjas, as each wait their turn to have Norris hand their ass to them. So I figured out how one man could fight a bunch of guys if they all attacked him at once. I wrote it up, it was a scene everyone loved in the script, and then the stunt guy tossed it out and had each of the bad guys wait their turn to get stomped by Don "The Dragon" Wilson. Very frustrating.
But sometimes the stunt guy is smart enough to get what you've written, and put that scene on screen. That happened in a few of my films, including BLACK THUNDER. Though that film had all kinds of other problems, it's one that I can watch without wanting to put out my eyes with a firepoker during the closing credits. So I thought it might be fun to look at the Chase Scene on the page, then see what they put on screen. Below is the *first draft* of the chase scene, but I don't think it went through much rewrite. After the scene is what they shot, and what aired on Showtime as one of their original movies.
EXT. HANGER -- DAY
Two big ugly bombs on the fork lift. Ratcher watches the biological weapons loaded onto the Nova. Stone startles him.
STONE
How much longer?
RATCHER
Almost loaded and ready for delivery. I'll get suited up.
STONE
Be in the air in one hour. Goodbye Kansas, goodbye yellow brick road.
Ratcher glares at Stone as he walks away.
EXT. LIBYAN TOWN -- DAY
The ancient pick up truck backfires and sputters away. Conners hidden in back amongst the melons and produce.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Rojar drives through the village.
ROJAR
You like the American Cowboy?
MELA
What about the check point?
ROJAR
We drive through.
MELA
They won't want to know where you're going?
ROJAR
I tell them the air field. Even the pilots like the fresh melons.
MELA
What if they search the truck?
ROJAR
He's hidden good. Casabas over him.
MELA
If they look under the casabas?
ROJAR
We see if this old fruit cart can out run a motorcycle.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
They leave the village, headed to the check point, and the air field a mile beyond it.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
The truck stops behind a beat up Peugeot waiting to pass through the check point.
A pair of SOLDIERS search the Peugeot, popping the trunk, looking behind the seats. Practically stripping it.
A pair of army motorcycles are parked behind the kiosk.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela watches the Soldiers search the Peugeot, tearing it apart. Tension: They will soon do this to the pick up truck.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Under the casaba melons, Conners stays very still.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
The Soldiers lets the Peugeot pass through, and gesture for the pick up to move forward.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
ROJAR
Here we go.
Rojar moves the truck up to the gate and puts on a smile. Mela is tense. Suspense builds as the Soldiers approach.
ROJAR
Hey! I have the melons for the men down there. Pilots love the melons.
SOLDIER
Out of the truck. Let's see your papers. Hers, too.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
Rojar steps out of the truck and shows the Soldier his papers. Mela hands her papers through the open window to Soldier #2.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Under the casaba melons, Conners stays very still.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
As the Soldier examines his papers, Rojar moves to the back of the truck and pulls back the tarp a little.
ROJAR
See? Melons. Fresh fruits and vegetables. Chick-peas. I have to deliver before the sun comes up, to keep them from spoiling.
Rojar lowers the tarp back into place. The Soldier hands him back his papers, then raises the tarp himself.
ROJAR
Hey? You want one? They won't notice if a couple are missing. Don't touch them all with those filthy hands!
The Soldier begins digging around in the crates of vegetables.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Under the casaba melons, Conners stays very still.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela takes her papers back from the Soldier, trying NOT to look at the search of the pick up bed.
The truck keys dangle from the ignition... She may be forced to scoot to the drivers seat, start the truck, and take off.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
The Soldier reaches a hand between the crates, feeling around.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Under the casaba melons, Conners stays still as the hand feels RIGHT NEXT TO HIM.
Close...
VERY close!
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
Rojar gets ready to brain the Soldier with a melon if he finds Conners. Tension builds.
Then the Soldier pulls his hand out, lowers the tarp, and takes the melon from Rojar with a smile.
ROJAR
You'll like that one.
Rojar gets back into the truck's cab, gets the ignition on.
Then Soldier #2 notices that Mela looks very much like one of the photos of dissidents on his clipboard. He shows the photo to Soldier #1.
SOLDIER
Halt! Halt!
Rojar slams the truck into gear and roars away, smashing the gate-arm into a dozen pieces.
SOLDIER
Halt! Halt!
Soldier #2 raises his rifle and opens fire. Bullets spark over the back of the truck.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
A melon explodes, raining juice on Conners.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
Soldier #1 joins in the shooting. Sparks off the pick up.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela and Rojar duck as the back window is BLOWN out.
ROJAR
Down! Stay down!
Rojar whips the pick up truck around a corner on the dirt road at high speed, rolling some melons out the back.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
The two Soldiers hop on their motorcycles and give chase.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
The Pick Up Truck roars down the dirt road.
The Two Motorcycles roar after it.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela sees the motorcycles.
MELA
They're right behind us.
ROJAR
I knew I should have put the new spark plugs in.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
The Two Motorcycles are getting closer.
Soldier #1 breaks away, zooming up to the driver's side window of the truck.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela looks across Rojar at Soldier #1, who is aiming his gun through the window, preparing to fire.
MELA
Down!
Rojar and Mela duck as the bullet whizzes through the cab, in one window and out the other.
Rojar grabs a melon from the seat and throws it out the window at Soldier #1.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
Soldier #1 has to pull back to avoid being hit by the melon.
Soldier #2 opens fire through the back window, shattering glass and exploding melons.
Suddenly, the tarp flips up and Conners pops to his feet in the pick up bed. He double draws his two 45s in one fluid motion and begins blasting away at Soldier #2.
Soldier #2 stops firing and starts zig-zagging, as bullets blaze all around him. One sparks off his handlebars.
Conners shifts aim, firing at Soldier #1.
Soldier #1 fires at Conners, bullets sparking off the cab.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Rojar tries to outrun the motorcycles, but the pick up truck just doesn't have the guts.
He sees Soldier #1 zooming closer to the truck to shoot at Conners, and jambs the wheel to the left.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
The pick up truck weaves towards the motorcycle, and Soldier #1 has to back off.
Conners fires at him with both guns, bullets sparking off the cycle, but missing Soldier #1. Lucky.
Soldier #2 is roaring up on the right side of the truck.
Conners and Soldier #1 exchange gunfire, bullets sparking.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
ROJAR
Hold on!
Rojar has to turn the wheel quickly, to make a sharp corner.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
Almost losing Conners from the back of the truck as he fights for balance. As he tries to right himself, Soldier #1 blasts at him, exploding several melons.
CONNERS
Who taught you how to drive?
ROJAR (O.S.)
Sorry!
Conners drops clips, reloads, and blasts at Soldier #1.
That's when Soldier #2 attacks. Riding VERY close to the back of the truck, he opens fire at Conners.
Conners hits the dirt (melons) as bullets fly overhead from both sides. He grabs the tarp, yanks it off its hooks, and tosses it over Soldier #2.
Soldier #2 is driving his motorcycle blind: The tarp completely covering him like a poncho. He drops his gun and grabs at the tarp, trying to tear it off. Steering the cycle with the other hand.
Soldier #1 opens fire, Conners blasts back with both guns.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
The road curves, and Rojar begins his turn.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
Soldier #2 can't see that the road curves, and bumps up onto the shoulder, zooming over the dirt towards a tree.
Conners and Soldier #1 continue blasting at each other. With the pick up truck shaking, and Soldier #1 zig-zagging, Conners can't get a good shot.
CONNERS
Bullets are too small.
Then he notices the melons.
Soldier #2 is getting CLOSER to the tree. He finally yanks the tarp off, sees the tree, corrects his steering, and zooms back after the pick up truck.
Conners kicks melons at Soldier #1. The third melon hits the front wheel, sending the cycle flipping into a ditch.
Soldier #2 zooms up to the passenger side, and jumps onto the truck. His cycle zooms away.
Standing on the running board, he reaches inside the truck, grabbing Mela and punching her in the face.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela fights with Soldier #2, as Rojar drives. She knocks him away... but he swings into the truck bed, fighting Conners.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
Conners fights Soldier #2 in the bed of the speeding truck.
ROJAR (O.S.)
Hit him! Use the strangle hold!
Soldier #2 socks Conners in the face, almost knocking him off the truck. Conners barely hangs on, kicks the soldier away. They trade punches until Conners knocks him off the truck.
CONNERS
Splash two soldiers.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Conners yells at Rojar.
CONNERS
Go back! We have to make sure they don't radio the hanger!
ROJAR
Go back? You're crazy!
Rojar yanks the truck into a 180 slide, almost losing Conners. The truck zooms back to the fallen soldiers.
EXT. EDWARDS AFB -- DAY
Establishing shot.
INT. OPERATIONS ROOM -- DAY
DeMuth looks up as General Barnes enters.
DEMUTH
No word, sir. A little over two hours left on the clock.
BARNES
Is the strike team ready?
Okay, that segment of the screenplay is exactly 7 pages long (I cut it at the end of the page) and the segment of film is five and a half minutes. You can see that there were some changes made when it finally came to shooting it - some *better* stunts ended up in the final film. I would never have imagined Conners throwing one soldier at the other soldier's vehicle - that just sounds dangerous! But the stunt guy took what I had and *improved it*, which is what all writers want. We want them to ADD their skills to ours.
Though once they have filmed the chase, an editor is going to cut back and forth a zillion times between vehicles and INT and EXT, and maybe from vehicle to vehicle, in the script stage we are going to use sluglines to create suspense or a twist or a reversal or a “button”. We want the reader be excited by the chase – and give them the experience of the film viewer. Where a film editor is going to cut maybe a hundred times, doing that on the page would be choppy and distracting. So we want to cut *for effect*. When you go from EXT to INT in the script there is a reason - usually to create suspense or some other excitement. There may be a cliffhanger or a “button” or a reversal or some other kind of twist at the end of the EXT before we go to the INT or vice versa. You *use* the change of location within the scene to make the scene more exciting. It's not just arbitrary.
There's a bit in my car chase where Rojar, driving, has to do a very sharp turn... and we go from INT to EXT to see our hero standing in the back of the truck as he loses balance, almost falling out, *due to the sharp turn*. There is a cause and effect thing there - where the reader thinks making that hairpin curve is the excitement... but that's what causes our hero to almost get killed! You want to guide the focus of the reader/audience to increase the excitement of the scene on the page. Though the filmed version may be different, our job as screenwriters is to make the scene exciting and involving on the page.
Every action scene is a character scene and a story scene – it's not *only* there to provide excitement. If you can cut the action scene from the screenplay and the screenplay still works – cut the action scene! There's more on this in the revised version of my “Secrets Of Action Screenwriting” book (which I am still revising!). In this story the protagonist has been hiding since his mission went south, and this scene is when he erupts into action. This is basically the end of Act 2 and the beginning of Act three, and this chase leads into the big action scene at the end.
The story: terrorists steal our new ultra-stealth fighter plane (push a button and it is invisible to the human eye) with plans to use it against us, and hero Vince Conners and his co-pilot Rick Jannick fly behind enemy lines to steal it back. But once they get behind enemy lines, everything goes wrong... Jannick is captured and Conners goes on the run. Now he is behind enemy lines - with an entire enemy army searching for him. Now he must rescue his partner and steal the plane.
Here are two Script Tips I wrote about the creative process of writing this script, one on how the theme is connected to everything in the story (including this scene) and one on how I found a character key to help me understand the motivations of the characters:
Concept And Theme.
Keys To Your Story.
At this point in the story Conners has not trusted Mela (who may be working for the underground or may be the mistress of a badguy... or both) - and this action scene is when they begin working as sort of a team. He must make the decision to trust here. Both things change the course of the story from this point on - and the end of the script could not exist without this scene.
These things also tie into character, but the big thing in this scene is that he has been completely by the book in the story - not taking any chances. This compares to his partner Jannick (who is a captive at this point) who was always reckless and takes wild chances – which is what got him captured. This action scene is where Conners begins taking chances... and crazy ones... and kind of switches personalities with his partner - who is in a scene just before this as a prisoner, no longer taking chances - he has given up. Using the melons as a weapon and having the truck go back for the motorcycle are both things designed to show that he is now taking crazy chances and doing things that will result in the bad guys finding him... or him finding the bad guys. Some of the things in the scene are two-fers: they show the change in character and change the story - but story and characters are connected so that makes sense.
You also need your action scene to be original and fresh – something we haven't seen before. Think of all of the hundreds of car chases – our job is to do something different.
This particular scene began as a joke: when I wrote this screenplay I was on a film message board with Roger Ebert and one of the movie cliches he often pointed out was the “fruit cart” - in a car chase one of the cars always ran into a fruit cart, spraying melons and fruits all over the street... so I thought it would be funny to have the fruit cart be one of the vehicles in the chase, and created Rojar Ebair The Produce King and his truck full of melons and fruit... and I would *use* the melons as weapons! I haven't seen “melon-fu” before in a film, have you? Once I had that, I brainstormed up a bunch of produce action gags. I was also influenced by the Yakima Canutt action scene from John Ford's STAGE COACH – but used motorcycles instead of horses. I also tried to come up with as many “gags” as possible that would put our hero in harms way. An action scene isn't exciting unless the hero can die... and *almost* dies again and again. If the hero isn't in danger, where is the excitement?
We want to create visceral actions, create emotions in the audience, which means the protagonist has to be in harms way - it's not just machines in the car chase, it is *people*. In SALT she jumps from the roof of one truck to another... and almost falls off - visceral action. How many times does Indiana Jones *almost die* in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK? Part of the reason why we cut back and forth from INT to EXT on the page is to create that excitement where the protagonist *might* die. One of the basic elements of an action scene is the *reversal* - more on that in the Action Book, but there's also a Script Tip in rotation on reversals in action that uses the big chase at the end of ROAD WARRIOR as an example. We want to use screenwriting techniques to make the script as exciting to read as the film will be to watch. To *use* our writing to create a visceral and emotional experience for the reader.
Eventually our writing gets transferred to the screen, and the scene may end up different (as this scene did) – but without that basic template of how the scene works to begin with, you may end up with a pointless action scene that isn't story or theme or character related.
Now, I have had all kinds of run ins with directors, but let me take a moment to thank the director of BLACK THUNDER, Rick Jacobson. There are directors you hate, directors you tolerate, and directors you like and would gladly work with again. Rick is the latter. We made two films together, and he was always a nice guy. There were no ego battles - we were both just trying to make the best movie possible. That's not to say that Rick and I agreed on everything - we had some battles, and I lost some of them. But Rick was always trying to make a good movie - he cared. And one of the great things about Rick is that he knew that good action scenes were important to an action movie. I've had other directors who pretty much cut the action scenes to spend more time on one B actor having a conversation with another B actor. No one watches a B action flick for the amazing performances... they want to see stuff blow up. Rick spent the time, and *used his imagination* to make the action scenes (and other scenes) really work. Rick also could make a film shot on a small budget look big - he has an eye for shots and angles and lighting, and his films always looked like big studio movies. I've worked with other directors who could make a $3 million HBO flick look like a $300k low budget film. I think Rick is working in TV, now, where his ability to work fast without sacrificing quality is a major plus.
Also, thanks to that amazing stunt department, and coordinator Patrick Statham. Cole McKay and Kane Hodder and the rest of the guys took what I wrote and made it real - which is what we all dream of. Having our words turned into pictures.
7 pages of script = 5.5 minutes of film... not exactly 1 = 1, but close enough. If it ain't on the page, it can't be on the screen.
- Bill
Now, the truth is that sometimes, no matter how great that action scene you wrote, the stunt guys *do* come up with their own scene. I've bitched before about some of my action scenes being tossed in favor or scenes that not only were not about the character and didn't move the story forward - they sucked. In one of my films I wanted to smash that bad action cliche scene where Chuck Norris is surrounded by Ninjas, as each wait their turn to have Norris hand their ass to them. So I figured out how one man could fight a bunch of guys if they all attacked him at once. I wrote it up, it was a scene everyone loved in the script, and then the stunt guy tossed it out and had each of the bad guys wait their turn to get stomped by Don "The Dragon" Wilson. Very frustrating.
But sometimes the stunt guy is smart enough to get what you've written, and put that scene on screen. That happened in a few of my films, including BLACK THUNDER. Though that film had all kinds of other problems, it's one that I can watch without wanting to put out my eyes with a firepoker during the closing credits. So I thought it might be fun to look at the Chase Scene on the page, then see what they put on screen. Below is the *first draft* of the chase scene, but I don't think it went through much rewrite. After the scene is what they shot, and what aired on Showtime as one of their original movies.
THE SCRIPT (first draft):
EXT. HANGER -- DAY
Two big ugly bombs on the fork lift. Ratcher watches the biological weapons loaded onto the Nova. Stone startles him.
STONE
How much longer?
RATCHER
Almost loaded and ready for delivery. I'll get suited up.
STONE
Be in the air in one hour. Goodbye Kansas, goodbye yellow brick road.
Ratcher glares at Stone as he walks away.
EXT. LIBYAN TOWN -- DAY
The ancient pick up truck backfires and sputters away. Conners hidden in back amongst the melons and produce.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Rojar drives through the village.
ROJAR
You like the American Cowboy?
MELA
What about the check point?
ROJAR
We drive through.
MELA
They won't want to know where you're going?
ROJAR
I tell them the air field. Even the pilots like the fresh melons.
MELA
What if they search the truck?
ROJAR
He's hidden good. Casabas over him.
MELA
If they look under the casabas?
ROJAR
We see if this old fruit cart can out run a motorcycle.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
They leave the village, headed to the check point, and the air field a mile beyond it.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
The truck stops behind a beat up Peugeot waiting to pass through the check point.
A pair of SOLDIERS search the Peugeot, popping the trunk, looking behind the seats. Practically stripping it.
A pair of army motorcycles are parked behind the kiosk.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela watches the Soldiers search the Peugeot, tearing it apart. Tension: They will soon do this to the pick up truck.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Under the casaba melons, Conners stays very still.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
The Soldiers lets the Peugeot pass through, and gesture for the pick up to move forward.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
ROJAR
Here we go.
Rojar moves the truck up to the gate and puts on a smile. Mela is tense. Suspense builds as the Soldiers approach.
ROJAR
Hey! I have the melons for the men down there. Pilots love the melons.
SOLDIER
Out of the truck. Let's see your papers. Hers, too.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
Rojar steps out of the truck and shows the Soldier his papers. Mela hands her papers through the open window to Soldier #2.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Under the casaba melons, Conners stays very still.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
As the Soldier examines his papers, Rojar moves to the back of the truck and pulls back the tarp a little.
ROJAR
See? Melons. Fresh fruits and vegetables. Chick-peas. I have to deliver before the sun comes up, to keep them from spoiling.
Rojar lowers the tarp back into place. The Soldier hands him back his papers, then raises the tarp himself.
ROJAR
Hey? You want one? They won't notice if a couple are missing. Don't touch them all with those filthy hands!
The Soldier begins digging around in the crates of vegetables.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Under the casaba melons, Conners stays very still.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela takes her papers back from the Soldier, trying NOT to look at the search of the pick up bed.
The truck keys dangle from the ignition... She may be forced to scoot to the drivers seat, start the truck, and take off.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
The Soldier reaches a hand between the crates, feeling around.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Under the casaba melons, Conners stays still as the hand feels RIGHT NEXT TO HIM.
Close...
VERY close!
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
Rojar gets ready to brain the Soldier with a melon if he finds Conners. Tension builds.
Then the Soldier pulls his hand out, lowers the tarp, and takes the melon from Rojar with a smile.
ROJAR
You'll like that one.
Rojar gets back into the truck's cab, gets the ignition on.
Then Soldier #2 notices that Mela looks very much like one of the photos of dissidents on his clipboard. He shows the photo to Soldier #1.
SOLDIER
Halt! Halt!
Rojar slams the truck into gear and roars away, smashing the gate-arm into a dozen pieces.
SOLDIER
Halt! Halt!
Soldier #2 raises his rifle and opens fire. Bullets spark over the back of the truck.
EXT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
A melon explodes, raining juice on Conners.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
Soldier #1 joins in the shooting. Sparks off the pick up.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela and Rojar duck as the back window is BLOWN out.
ROJAR
Down! Stay down!
Rojar whips the pick up truck around a corner on the dirt road at high speed, rolling some melons out the back.
EXT. GUARD KIOSK -- DAY
The two Soldiers hop on their motorcycles and give chase.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
The Pick Up Truck roars down the dirt road.
The Two Motorcycles roar after it.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela sees the motorcycles.
MELA
They're right behind us.
ROJAR
I knew I should have put the new spark plugs in.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
The Two Motorcycles are getting closer.
Soldier #1 breaks away, zooming up to the driver's side window of the truck.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela looks across Rojar at Soldier #1, who is aiming his gun through the window, preparing to fire.
MELA
Down!
Rojar and Mela duck as the bullet whizzes through the cab, in one window and out the other.
Rojar grabs a melon from the seat and throws it out the window at Soldier #1.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
Soldier #1 has to pull back to avoid being hit by the melon.
Soldier #2 opens fire through the back window, shattering glass and exploding melons.
Suddenly, the tarp flips up and Conners pops to his feet in the pick up bed. He double draws his two 45s in one fluid motion and begins blasting away at Soldier #2.
Soldier #2 stops firing and starts zig-zagging, as bullets blaze all around him. One sparks off his handlebars.
Conners shifts aim, firing at Soldier #1.
Soldier #1 fires at Conners, bullets sparking off the cab.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Rojar tries to outrun the motorcycles, but the pick up truck just doesn't have the guts.
He sees Soldier #1 zooming closer to the truck to shoot at Conners, and jambs the wheel to the left.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
The pick up truck weaves towards the motorcycle, and Soldier #1 has to back off.
Conners fires at him with both guns, bullets sparking off the cycle, but missing Soldier #1. Lucky.
Soldier #2 is roaring up on the right side of the truck.
Conners and Soldier #1 exchange gunfire, bullets sparking.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
ROJAR
Hold on!
Rojar has to turn the wheel quickly, to make a sharp corner.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
Almost losing Conners from the back of the truck as he fights for balance. As he tries to right himself, Soldier #1 blasts at him, exploding several melons.
CONNERS
Who taught you how to drive?
ROJAR (O.S.)
Sorry!
Conners drops clips, reloads, and blasts at Soldier #1.
That's when Soldier #2 attacks. Riding VERY close to the back of the truck, he opens fire at Conners.
Conners hits the dirt (melons) as bullets fly overhead from both sides. He grabs the tarp, yanks it off its hooks, and tosses it over Soldier #2.
Soldier #2 is driving his motorcycle blind: The tarp completely covering him like a poncho. He drops his gun and grabs at the tarp, trying to tear it off. Steering the cycle with the other hand.
Soldier #1 opens fire, Conners blasts back with both guns.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
The road curves, and Rojar begins his turn.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
Soldier #2 can't see that the road curves, and bumps up onto the shoulder, zooming over the dirt towards a tree.
Conners and Soldier #1 continue blasting at each other. With the pick up truck shaking, and Soldier #1 zig-zagging, Conners can't get a good shot.
CONNERS
Bullets are too small.
Then he notices the melons.
Soldier #2 is getting CLOSER to the tree. He finally yanks the tarp off, sees the tree, corrects his steering, and zooms back after the pick up truck.
Conners kicks melons at Soldier #1. The third melon hits the front wheel, sending the cycle flipping into a ditch.
Soldier #2 zooms up to the passenger side, and jumps onto the truck. His cycle zooms away.
Standing on the running board, he reaches inside the truck, grabbing Mela and punching her in the face.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Mela fights with Soldier #2, as Rojar drives. She knocks him away... but he swings into the truck bed, fighting Conners.
EXT. DIRT ROAD IN COUNTRY -- DAY
Conners fights Soldier #2 in the bed of the speeding truck.
ROJAR (O.S.)
Hit him! Use the strangle hold!
Soldier #2 socks Conners in the face, almost knocking him off the truck. Conners barely hangs on, kicks the soldier away. They trade punches until Conners knocks him off the truck.
CONNERS
Splash two soldiers.
INT. PICK UP TRUCK -- DAY
Conners yells at Rojar.
CONNERS
Go back! We have to make sure they don't radio the hanger!
ROJAR
Go back? You're crazy!
Rojar yanks the truck into a 180 slide, almost losing Conners. The truck zooms back to the fallen soldiers.
EXT. EDWARDS AFB -- DAY
Establishing shot.
INT. OPERATIONS ROOM -- DAY
DeMuth looks up as General Barnes enters.
DEMUTH
No word, sir. A little over two hours left on the clock.
BARNES
Is the strike team ready?
THE FILMED SCENE:
Okay, that segment of the screenplay is exactly 7 pages long (I cut it at the end of the page) and the segment of film is five and a half minutes. You can see that there were some changes made when it finally came to shooting it - some *better* stunts ended up in the final film. I would never have imagined Conners throwing one soldier at the other soldier's vehicle - that just sounds dangerous! But the stunt guy took what I had and *improved it*, which is what all writers want. We want them to ADD their skills to ours.
SLUGLINES
Though once they have filmed the chase, an editor is going to cut back and forth a zillion times between vehicles and INT and EXT, and maybe from vehicle to vehicle, in the script stage we are going to use sluglines to create suspense or a twist or a reversal or a “button”. We want the reader be excited by the chase – and give them the experience of the film viewer. Where a film editor is going to cut maybe a hundred times, doing that on the page would be choppy and distracting. So we want to cut *for effect*. When you go from EXT to INT in the script there is a reason - usually to create suspense or some other excitement. There may be a cliffhanger or a “button” or a reversal or some other kind of twist at the end of the EXT before we go to the INT or vice versa. You *use* the change of location within the scene to make the scene more exciting. It's not just arbitrary.
There's a bit in my car chase where Rojar, driving, has to do a very sharp turn... and we go from INT to EXT to see our hero standing in the back of the truck as he loses balance, almost falling out, *due to the sharp turn*. There is a cause and effect thing there - where the reader thinks making that hairpin curve is the excitement... but that's what causes our hero to almost get killed! You want to guide the focus of the reader/audience to increase the excitement of the scene on the page. Though the filmed version may be different, our job as screenwriters is to make the scene exciting and involving on the page.
ACTION IS STORY AND CHARACTER
Every action scene is a character scene and a story scene – it's not *only* there to provide excitement. If you can cut the action scene from the screenplay and the screenplay still works – cut the action scene! There's more on this in the revised version of my “Secrets Of Action Screenwriting” book (which I am still revising!). In this story the protagonist has been hiding since his mission went south, and this scene is when he erupts into action. This is basically the end of Act 2 and the beginning of Act three, and this chase leads into the big action scene at the end.
The story: terrorists steal our new ultra-stealth fighter plane (push a button and it is invisible to the human eye) with plans to use it against us, and hero Vince Conners and his co-pilot Rick Jannick fly behind enemy lines to steal it back. But once they get behind enemy lines, everything goes wrong... Jannick is captured and Conners goes on the run. Now he is behind enemy lines - with an entire enemy army searching for him. Now he must rescue his partner and steal the plane.
Here are two Script Tips I wrote about the creative process of writing this script, one on how the theme is connected to everything in the story (including this scene) and one on how I found a character key to help me understand the motivations of the characters:
Concept And Theme.
Keys To Your Story.
At this point in the story Conners has not trusted Mela (who may be working for the underground or may be the mistress of a badguy... or both) - and this action scene is when they begin working as sort of a team. He must make the decision to trust here. Both things change the course of the story from this point on - and the end of the script could not exist without this scene.
These things also tie into character, but the big thing in this scene is that he has been completely by the book in the story - not taking any chances. This compares to his partner Jannick (who is a captive at this point) who was always reckless and takes wild chances – which is what got him captured. This action scene is where Conners begins taking chances... and crazy ones... and kind of switches personalities with his partner - who is in a scene just before this as a prisoner, no longer taking chances - he has given up. Using the melons as a weapon and having the truck go back for the motorcycle are both things designed to show that he is now taking crazy chances and doing things that will result in the bad guys finding him... or him finding the bad guys. Some of the things in the scene are two-fers: they show the change in character and change the story - but story and characters are connected so that makes sense.
SCENES WE HAVEN'T SEEN
You also need your action scene to be original and fresh – something we haven't seen before. Think of all of the hundreds of car chases – our job is to do something different.
This particular scene began as a joke: when I wrote this screenplay I was on a film message board with Roger Ebert and one of the movie cliches he often pointed out was the “fruit cart” - in a car chase one of the cars always ran into a fruit cart, spraying melons and fruits all over the street... so I thought it would be funny to have the fruit cart be one of the vehicles in the chase, and created Rojar Ebair The Produce King and his truck full of melons and fruit... and I would *use* the melons as weapons! I haven't seen “melon-fu” before in a film, have you? Once I had that, I brainstormed up a bunch of produce action gags. I was also influenced by the Yakima Canutt action scene from John Ford's STAGE COACH – but used motorcycles instead of horses. I also tried to come up with as many “gags” as possible that would put our hero in harms way. An action scene isn't exciting unless the hero can die... and *almost* dies again and again. If the hero isn't in danger, where is the excitement?
We want to create visceral actions, create emotions in the audience, which means the protagonist has to be in harms way - it's not just machines in the car chase, it is *people*. In SALT she jumps from the roof of one truck to another... and almost falls off - visceral action. How many times does Indiana Jones *almost die* in RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK? Part of the reason why we cut back and forth from INT to EXT on the page is to create that excitement where the protagonist *might* die. One of the basic elements of an action scene is the *reversal* - more on that in the Action Book, but there's also a Script Tip in rotation on reversals in action that uses the big chase at the end of ROAD WARRIOR as an example. We want to use screenwriting techniques to make the script as exciting to read as the film will be to watch. To *use* our writing to create a visceral and emotional experience for the reader.
Eventually our writing gets transferred to the screen, and the scene may end up different (as this scene did) – but without that basic template of how the scene works to begin with, you may end up with a pointless action scene that isn't story or theme or character related.
Now, I have had all kinds of run ins with directors, but let me take a moment to thank the director of BLACK THUNDER, Rick Jacobson. There are directors you hate, directors you tolerate, and directors you like and would gladly work with again. Rick is the latter. We made two films together, and he was always a nice guy. There were no ego battles - we were both just trying to make the best movie possible. That's not to say that Rick and I agreed on everything - we had some battles, and I lost some of them. But Rick was always trying to make a good movie - he cared. And one of the great things about Rick is that he knew that good action scenes were important to an action movie. I've had other directors who pretty much cut the action scenes to spend more time on one B actor having a conversation with another B actor. No one watches a B action flick for the amazing performances... they want to see stuff blow up. Rick spent the time, and *used his imagination* to make the action scenes (and other scenes) really work. Rick also could make a film shot on a small budget look big - he has an eye for shots and angles and lighting, and his films always looked like big studio movies. I've worked with other directors who could make a $3 million HBO flick look like a $300k low budget film. I think Rick is working in TV, now, where his ability to work fast without sacrificing quality is a major plus.
Also, thanks to that amazing stunt department, and coordinator Patrick Statham. Cole McKay and Kane Hodder and the rest of the guys took what I wrote and made it real - which is what we all dream of. Having our words turned into pictures.
7 pages of script = 5.5 minutes of film... not exactly 1 = 1, but close enough. If it ain't on the page, it can't be on the screen.
- Bill
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