The would-be screenwriters thread - Page 29

 

Shane Black, Terry Rossio, David Hayter and Mark Fergus all talk craft.  Great, lengthy interview.

I am at a crossroads in my horror script. I mean it to be a play on found footage genre and have reached a point after a pivotal event when I intend to lock off the narrative and have one location of characters cut off from the other and I can't decide who to stay with.

The script is an homage to Ghostwatch while being quite different as well. It is told from the point of view of a character whose a PA on his first day on set. The script reaches a point at the end of the first act when a non-supernatural event traps the on location crew and a search and rescue must begin. I can't decide if I should trap the PA in with the crew, watching the live feed of his own rescue as well as trying to fend off an unknown force, or should I keep him outside the location, watching his new crew-mates and friends fall one by one to an unseen assailant found footage style while he tries to help with the rescue.

His struggle internally come from the fact that it was his fault that the crew got trapped in the first place, as he was the one that triggered the non-supernatural event ending act 1.

/edited to correct massive and weird grammatical errors.
Edited by Tim K - 7/26/12 at 8:56pm

I'm no fan of found footage, but it seems to me like having him trying to lead the rescue efforts make more sense from a character perspective. Plus, if he has a live feed of the trapped crew being attacked, you can have your cake and eat it too.  It lets you play around with those FF sequences without confining your entire narrative within that limited aesthetic.  

Thanks for the suggestion. I was leaning that way as well, but hesitated because I had already written the PA into a positon that would get him trapped with the crew and suddenly realized that that might not be the best place for him to be used.

Totally agree. It hurts to read his stuff.   Just like many of you here I've just now started on my very first screen play/story.  It's been sitting in my head for far too long and it's time to get it out.  UCLA has some screen writing classes I'm thinking about taking.  I feel that I'll learn much better in a class room setting then I would reading how to do it all from a book. 

We are moving to a house twice the size of our current one in a few months time and I'm really excited to finally be able to have a personal space strictly for me.  A mancave, I guess.  Basically though, I've decided it will be a little office for myself and I am finally going to sit down and start writing once we are settled in.  I can't wait!!!

Anyone here have any advice / helpful anecdotes about pitch meetings? I'm expecting a meeting with a semi-pro independent filmmaker in the coming week or so about a screenplay I'm working on (I pitched it to an actor friend and he put me in touch with this filmmaker and his production company). I'm a bit of a control freak and have a very strong vision for what this film should be and want to avoid as few deviations as possible, but I don't want to come across as a stubborn asshole either (despite that kind of being true).

 

I prefer to keep it simple and call the thing a horror film, but if I'm being anal about it, it's a psychosexual drama with supernatural elements.

In my experience you should be very careful with using other films as references, but in your case it might help. The term "psychosexual drama" can go a bit over his head. Can you name any similar films or books? I once worked with a director who constantly used the phrase "deep psychodrama" to describe things that HAD ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IN COMMON.

Thank you for replying. Yeah, I'm not going to use "psychosexual drama", for me it really is very much a horror film, it's just the tone and subject matter is somewhat unusual for the genre. Let The Right One In is a reference I could make, but to a certain extent, so is Hemingway's Garden of Eden, though neither is an immediate inspiration.

The thing with directors is that they can be arrogant fucks who take pleasure in changing your script and running it to the ground, but sometimes you meet one who actually can elevate it and make it better. 

 

I'm developing a short film with two producers and we were having a meeting with a potential director. Our short is a bit surreal comedy+survival story. The minute the director said: "you know the film LOOK WHO'S TALKING? Where Bruce Willis is trapped inside a baby's body and his body is kind of a cage? I think that's our main character right there", we knew we had our guy. Especially since we were looking for someone who's not afraid to do something that has a risk of ending up, well, ridiculous.

That is something I'm concerned about (outside of it simply falling through). It's primarily a lowkey piece with an unsettling undercurrent that really only peaks in severity twice (but, like in PSYCHO*,  those two peaks are very important and approrpiately shocking). The general setup is familiar, but in the execution, it actively avoids certain horror movie tropes and builds tension from a different angle. I expect this to be the hardest part of the sell to help the director visualize.

 

 

 

*I think I just found another reference to make this easier.

i saw on robert mckee's youtube a promo for his website. fukkin loved the dude's book, but is it worth the $$$ for a poor ass mutherfuker like me to get that site?

 

he had some tips on dialog, like ten worst things for dialog. last one was about on the nose dialog, which is the worst, but hard to avoid and u have to pay to get the premium shit on the website that tells u how to avoid that shit. youtube shit was just a tease. i read his book an æon ago and forget if it offered tips on dialog. that's what i am really interested in.

 

ne1 have ne advice about that shitt? worth the money? and how 2 avoid on the nose dialog? i'm thinking of introducing context, props, etc. to motivate that shit and try to speak in metaphor or synecdoche rather than straight up fukkin saying it, but my writing is dogshitt, man. i am a total hack and write fucking garbage dialog.

Don't beat yourself up over dialog. Even if you hate what is going down in the first draft, on the nose is fine. Just get the story out of you and on to the page. Worry about dialogue on the second draft.

Then when you get to the second draft, read it aloud. This method works even better if you have a friend to read your scenes with. Talk to them and bounce ideas off each other. Tell them where the characters need to be by the end of the scene and see if you can figure out a way that feels more natural. Try ad libbing the scene. Also don't underestimate the power an actor can have on a scrip. Often the most blatant on the nose stuff doesn't even need to be said and can be communicated with a look or gesture.

You don't need to pay to figure things out. Sometimes the best lessons are learned from watching great movies and figuring out the scenes and character motivations on your own. If you want an example of a film that uses the absolute minimum amount of expository dialog possible, watch Mamet's Spartan.

thanks, man. i think i have the beats on this draft, but dialog is still shitty. glad to know i took the right first step at least. i get you: there are scenes where like, a character is depressed and screaming and shitt and says i want to die or some shit. yeah, an actor could communicate that nonverbally, more-or-less, through performance, but how do i communicate that without dialogue to the reader, you know? i don't want to insult the audience, but i don't want to lose them either. same goes with talking to props in isolation--photo of a girl he misses, does he stare longingly at it or say something? this is a character whose face has lots all coordination from plastic surgery so he can't emote very well. that makes it trickier. i wonder how they wrote dialogue in v for vendetta so it didn't suck balls, you know, that's a tough performance.

 

sometimes it's hard to get to a point where characters would open up, expose their traumas and backstory and shit like that. so the build up to that is hard, too. i'll check out spartan but mamet is definitely pretty stylized as writers go. still i mean if i could write that shitt i would all day. will definitely check it out.

 

once i get more friends i'll hash out the script with them face-to-face. got some feedback but sometimes feedback says change it all; someone else says leave it all. notes are a difficult thing, man. you have to engage with someone who shares your vision but doesn't want to change, meets it half way. super tough when it's inchoate as is but developing toward something specific. really have to approach all your notes with caution.

The thing about notes that are telling you to change it all, is that what they are really telling you is that the scene is simply not working. You don't need to change the scene, you just need to know that the scene is not achieving it's purpose. Ask yourself why that scene is needed in the story, where does it take the story? And then try to figure out why your audience can't follow you. I know this is vague, but often times trying to fix a scene is a vague process.

What can make the notes more helpful is if the person reading the script has read it all the way through. Once they know where you are going the notes become much more helpful. Sometimes a confusing scene doesn't need to be changed when the reader gets to the end of the script and sees the story as a whole.

As for communicating emotions in a script, don't be afraid to say if the character is angry, conflicted, sad ect... What people have told me is that actors prefer emotional stage direction more than actual stage direction, though I admit this is something I struggle with as well. I was raised in creative writing to show emotion and not tell. So instead of saying a character was angry, I would instead write down their actions, how they walked, moved their arms and even change their dialoge to be louder and more stunted. Switching to screenwriting hurt a lot at first because I was (and still sometimes am) writing big blocks of text describing every move a character made, instead of just saying they felt betrayed, or sad.

Before I forget, let me recommend this podcast.

http://www.nerdist.com/podcast/nerdist-writers-panel/

Though it's on tv writing, I found it invaluable and also a lot of fun to listen to. They give many tips and tricks, but most importantly I find it has kept me from feeling overwhelmed by being in the middle of a long script. I recommend you avoid the end of season episodes, the Breaking Bad one is at the top of the page right now and I'm avoiding it as well because I'm afraid of spoilers. But all of the non show specific panels are great to listen to and spoiler free.

thanks, i hope that is right. i get notes based on one bad scene or line of dialog that suggest changing the scene's direction or a character's psychology entirely, when really it might just be a few false beats or a lack of escalation…i hope there is no need to reinvent the wheel or whatever. want to try the least invasive surgery first, then maybe shuffle around plot points if need be to suit character psychology better. that said it's very hard to shoehorn in backstory. who talks about the past in explicit detail like that? no one. it's strange to me that you can just write that the character is conflicted or angry, though. judith weston's excellent book (or the five fukking pages i read of it lol) on directing actors prohibits emotional maps and result direction in general, instead insisting that directors provide action verbs rather than emotional states ("berate him" not "be angry") and metaphors (if he hates his father and harbors anger against him "say it as though he were your father"). the actors i've spoken with vary tremendously; some don't mind line readings at all if they're the most expeditious way to a performance, others need more attention and rely on a close relationship with the director who can then dictate performance based on relating his characters' emotional state to the actors' past personal history; mostly it boils down to what it takes to establish trust and how method or old school the actor is. but "be angry" is the worst direction there is second to "louder" at least in my experience but i don't know shitt about this except the little i've picked up--and directors here are undoubtedly laughing at my ignorance. and i was always told by screenwriters that creative writers could use "he's angry" whereas screenwriters could only communicate in images and dialogue, which is like the opposite, but fuck it man, if he's angry he's angry. i will do this when necessary. i'll check out the podcast maybe but i don't watch tv. i do think tv writers might be the only remaining members of an old-guard style classical hollywood studio system. you have to write, in someone else's voice for someone else's character, a script that not only fits into a 22 or 44 minute format exactly but that has act breaks around each commercial. that's fukking craft, man.

It seems like someone should mention the importance of using proper punctuation and capitalization at all times.  

 

Rather than specific emotional direction, I prefer to do as much as possible via formatting and font.  I.e., rather than a description of how I hear a line being delivered, I try to just italicize one word to indicate it should be hit the hardest, or capitalize an sentence instead of (yelling)____!, or dropping the font from 12 to 10 instead of (whispers)____....

 

I don't know if actors find that better or worse, but it reads to me as more suggestive than directive.

 

ETA: also, less parentheticals = lower page count, which is why I started doing it in the first place

Edited by Schwartz - 9/13/12 at 8:29am

can u do that? i always heard italics, capitals (excepting first time characters are introduced, dialogue headings, and sound effects, which i don't bother with lol), and stylized texts were off limits and parentheticals other than (beat) and (to her) are bad form except in cases where mood is ambiguous or sarcasm wouldn't read. not sure, though. i totally use italics from time to time, probably even caps.

I don't really know.  Like I said, I started doing it to cheat down page count, but I like the way it reads better than constant parentheticals. 

yeah, i think the best alternative is like if the context of the scene makes the reading evident, but like how do you imply whispering without saying whispering, you know? i don't know. i'm rocking high 90s in page count but want to get this down to low 90s. i feel like the bigger issue is i have almost 200 words per page is my guess and it's boring as shitt sometimes but like it's not easy, is it?

 

do you need to capitalize SOUNDS btw? i have heard mixed things.

 

i have a question--any tips for associating people with each other like thematically? i fukkin love taxi driver, one of my favorite movies and the story is the best and so organic. and i feel like the part where travis tries to kill palantine and then kills sport is amazing and it makes sense that he's destroying these father figures for the women he wants to save from them. in my movie, which is a dark comedy, a crazy guy wants to kill someone he perceives to be a father figure to him and then kill someone else who is spreading the ideology he associates with his own father and the man he killed, but who has nothing else in common with either character. it's not a concrete ideology like having them both wear badges of a political party or religious iconography, just a way of living that disgusts him. so the connection is completely tenuous. how do you go about associating two characters when they are very different people? give them the same line of dialogue? like they spout the same ideology exactly? i mean i can't have my protagonist say like "oh i killed u, now i need to kill some guy who reminds me of why i don't like u," you know? should i try to find a common prop or a common quote or is that too on the nose? man, it's hard sometimes, but it makes you appreciate the good stuff even more.

This thread has been very helpful to me in the past, and I'm hoping it will be again. I've received some great critiques and thoughtful suggestions from the folks here, so let's see if that continues to be the case!

 

I have this premise, and this set-up, and a collection of characters, and even a title....but I really have absolutely no idea where to go with it or what should happen next. If anyone's interested in engaging in me bouncing an idea or two off you and seeing what sticks, shoot me a PM! 

 

And the title I have in mind? THE IMPOSSIBLE HOTEL!

This is when your wrylies come into play. Usually I'd do something like this:

 

JOEY 

(softly)

Where we goin'?

 

or

 

JOEY

(hushed whisper)

Where we goin'?

 

You could even do it in the direction if it flows better that way.

 

Joey trails behind Donna, whispering:

 

JOEY

Where we goin'?

 

 

Also, when it comes to actors, screenwriters still need to understand that it's really NOT about the actors when you're writing a script. It's about execs thumbing through it, wanting desperately to toss it down the trash can next to their desks. You don't need to be that specific when writing emotion in a character, actors tend to toss 90% of direction the script has out the window anyway in favor of "being completely in the moment in imaginary circumstances" and also, the director will give them the direction. They simply have to know the lines inside and out and react in the scene off their partner(s).

 

Action and emotional descriptions should be kept to necessity.

(beat) often feels lazy to me. It doesn't say anything at all.

 

agree strongly with that. wut im seeing is if i write a shitty scene (and i do this all the time) or it's just exposition i have to throw a lot of emotional descriptors in there; if it's organic to the character and the conflict is rooted in character psychology i can just write dialog and even tho the dialog sucks the emotion is clear. but if it's a minor character or your first time meeting him or her... maybe an (awkwardly) is okay. maybe not ideal. i dunno.

 

disagree strongly about not using beats to signify silence, though. pauses are fraught with emotion and allow it to further escalate. calm before the storm and everything.

Edited by CRIS - 12/3/12 at 5:10pm

 

i find that if u have a good character with a dramatic need and a good inciting incident then the story will write itself so long as you let things play honestly. maybe not for a heist movie or thriller or something so much in which u might be dealing with something that requires a bit more planning, but that kind of movie feels very manufactured anyway, even the best heist movies.

 

i am a big fan of blake snyder's beat sheet. i always write the same way: i figure out concept, then figure out who the protagonist is and why that concept and protagonist are well-paired, then the concept basically is the inciting incident so from there you know what your climax will be (more or less). so then u figure out how it ends--if the inciting incident asks the protagonist a question, how is he gonna answer that shitt? look at the personal, external, and philosophical facets of the narrative and find the personal change (character arc), external change (result of climax for the external world), and philosophical change (moral/ideology). ideally bring them together all at the climax. 

 

u can totally correlate michael arndt's "insanely good ending" with the blake snyder beat sheet, fwiw. take the first three beats: opening image; theme stated; set-up? okay that is external, philosophical, and personal conflicts articulated in the first 10 pages. so make sure u hit those beats or u won't have a second act and ur climax will be a mess. from the set up, the catalyst (inciting incident) provides the possibility of a story, debate withholds it just a bit, mixes the three facets (external, philosophical, personal) together usually in the form of an external force articulating the philosophy to the protagonist (often in subtext)... but then u have a dude with a need and it's about something and it's set into motion. boom, break into two

 

of course the second act is always the hardest. i can't help u there. but once you have the first act and third act u can figure out what the b story has to be and the b story and the physical and personal changes that have to occur to get you from act one to act three will all mix together into a coherent second act. when in doubt, read the beat sheet and see where u are and where the protagonist is.

 

fwiw my writing is shitt. everything i write is terrible, just so so bad. so maybe this advice is shitt.

Edited by CRIS - 12/3/12 at 5:15pm

Bump!

I finished a new script and am looking to see if anyone's interested in reading it. I have a circle of writer friends, but their comments seem to always amount to "It's great!" As much as I want to hear how perfect I am, I wonder if they're a bit too close to me at this point, so I wanted another opinion. (But it's an early enough draft that I don't want to send it to my manager yet for his.)

It's called GRAVES and runs 95 pages. I'd call it a light supernatural thriller.

You're a writer, not an actor (or a director either). Actors make the choices about where they want silence, where a character pauses in a given scene. That stuff happens in the moment. Not in a script. It's a writer's ulterior motive of dictating. The emotion is felt through the reader, who will end up feeling the blanks.

 

Now, you can ellipses certain moments of dialogue if you really want to insinuate a moment of silence or pause. You do NOT have to write beat. It says nothing, because it's such a vague word anyway. 

Edited by Carnotaur3 - 1/19/13 at 9:28pm

 

You can PM me if you wish.  I'll give it a read and feedback, but I won't be able to do it immediately.

I'll take a look. Give me a deadline though.

fair enuff... im hardly a writer, tho. never had anything produced, optioned, or screened anywhere. just a hobby. so i feel funny even being referred to as a writer.

 

beats say something -- that there's an internal change, moment of self-awareness or reflection -- whereas dialogue itself is usually just window dressing for the subtext articulated visually. but a good screenwriter won't have to rely on pauses or on the dialogue itself to tell the story. so if you're good, yeah, you don't need it. but it's also nice to break up your big chunks of dialogue with some sort of structure and provide space for the emotional map that hopefully should be implicit and organic to the actor anyway.

 

but it definitely says something, just not something a good writer even has to say. for hacks like me... it's great!

Guys, how long does it usually take you to write a complete script from first idea to something that is completely done, nowadays?

 

I just noticed that my most recent project quietly passed the 20 months mark, still not finished, with no end in sight. I remember phases where I finished stuff in two, three weeks. At gun point I would possibly been able to spit out finished material in hours even. I have absolutely no idea what's blocking me or what I had back then what I don't have right now. Always thinking this one approach, this tone isn't right. I have absolutely no problem to come up with new ideas, to do simple pitches, summaries, treatments, shorts, but finishing something 90 pages+ seems impossible at the moment, not just this script, any script. I've a tower of unfinished work already, a tower of frustration. As if something's holding me back.

I don't know if this helps but anyway: I try to make a step outline of the story. If there's a producer or a director involved, I write that step outline into a 10-15 page treatment. Writing that into a script format is only work, just sitting down and writing the fucker scene by scene. Sometimes I need to set a time limit to write a scene, usually max 1,5 hrs/scene. So what I do is that I try to rush the first draft fully knowing that it won't be entirely awesome.

 

With that said, it's HELL when you realise the tone is wrong. It took me two years to figure out the correct tone for one thing I'm currently re-writing. But the step outlining helped. And to answer to your question, it usually takes me 4-5 months to turn an idea into a first draft. But I've never done one thing full time.

I have a problem with 4 things

 

1. Pacing: It's minor and usually corrected, but when I write a movie thats part action, I don't know how to pace the action scenes until I read and visualize it a second time

 

2. Character Actions: I often write pure dialogue scenes without emphasizing what the characters are doing in great detail, again this is undone by me going back, but even then i'm thinking "Wtf should their actions be"

 

3. I am a perfectionist: I really have written out full scripts, and trashed them completely thinking they arent good enough without even sharing with anybody.

 

4. I go on what I call "Writing Binges" where I consume massive amounts of Caffeine, Nicotene and go without proper sleep aside from 2 hour naps. The only problem is that when I don't do this my writing process is slow, while when I do, I write 5-6 synopsis' and start scripts, only to lose total interest in all but 2 or 3. I also usually suffer from Writers block afterwards, or worse TLOI (Total Loss of Interest)

 

At the spec stage (not knowing if anyone will buy it), the writer's job is absolutely to dictate.  The writer's job is to craft an emotionally satisfying experience for the reader, however he or she sees fit...of course it's going to change once it's on the stage, but everybody worth their salt is aware of that, even actors.  Nobody gives a shit whether a BEAT is there or not, as long as it adds up to something compelling.  Your job is to SELL the movie to whoever is reading it.  Production drafts are wholly different.  But like everything BEATs should be used sparingly to give them more power.

 

If you're not finishing them, it's probably because you're not confident enough in the material.  It's often a sign some significant element of the script isn't working, so you check out mentally.  That's just been my own experience.  Every script is different for me...some scripts I've mulled in my head for years before even writing anything down.  Some scripts took 3 or 4 weeks from initial spark to finished draft...rewrites of course take a little longer and are more spread out.  But I don't like to do alot of rewriting...it usually gets worse rather than better.  My first drafts tend to be more like 3rd drafts because I've been doing it for so long.

Beats still suck.