The would-be screenwriters thread - Page 9

I read Chuck Jones' biography Chuck Amuck several years ago (I recommend it to anyone who's a fan of Looney Tunes). He talked about including current references in your work. Generally, he was against it, and when you look at the cartoons now, forty to sixty years later, it's easy to see why. I don't know how concerned anyone here is with making their work timeless or relevant more than ten years from now, but that is a factor.

Jones refused to put references to movie stars, songs or politics in his work. Consequently, Jones' cartoons are still thoroughly enjoyable and timeless for a modern audience. By contrast, for example, there's a Friz Freling short in which Yosemite Sam bangs on a door and hollers for Bugs to open the door, then turns to the audience and says "Notice I didn't say 'Richard'?" This is a reference to a song that was popular at the time called "Open The Door, Richard". I'm sure it probably got a laugh the week it came out. Now it's junk.

Maybe it's hopelessly optimistic to shoot for timelessness, but nevertheless, it's something I think about.

And to bring up the "David Caruso in Jade" reference again; I haven't seen Jade, and it didn't ruin the joke at all. That's the secret. If not getting the reference keeps the scene from working, then you've got a problem.

I had a recurring nightmare as a child that I've been meaning to develop into a horror story. Figuring out how to wrap a plot and characters around a formless nightmare, of course, is a daunting task. I'm still working on that.

I once woke up from a nightmare and wrote an entire short story based on it in one day. I don't know if I think it's any good. It's certainly an odd piece.

Congratulations, man. I hope to duplicate this feat soon. I'm deep into act two at the moment.

I'm realizing something weird about myself. I didn't think I had any strange little writing quirks to speak of, but apparently I have a really hard time ramping up from a cold start on the computer. I have to start with pen and paper. If I sit at the computer with some handwritten material to transfer, I can keep going once the handwritten stuff runs out. But if I sit at the computer, and try to start writing, I get nothing. It's kind of annoying, because realistically, I know it shouldn't make any difference. But it does. I hate being illogical.

Did this post float in from a completely different thread? I have no idea what you're asking.

If he wants to disguise it as his own work, he's going to have to go through and misspell all the words and remove the punctuation. So we have time.

That's a great question, and one that isn't easy to get into.

On the one hand, there's my hero, David Cronenberg. He's been repeatedly accused of displaying terrible attitudes toward women and sex in his movies, with work like Videodrome and Rabid. He responds that a writer is under no obligation to reflect what's considered "healthy" or "normal" by the culture at large. He can only write what's in his head, and if that happens to be fucked up, then so be it. The women that a writer creates can only ever be the kind of woman who can exist inside that writer's mind. It can only be the impression of what the artist thinks women are.

On the other hand...

Having been married for nearly seventeen years now has had an effect on my perspective. My wife hates it when rape is used as a dramatic tool to motivate the male character, as if it's something that happened to him. And she's completely right to feel that way. It short-changes the female character, making her nothing more than the property of the man. Raping his woman becomes comparable to stealing his car or burning his house; she's reduced to an object that the hero values. Clearly, this is weak writing.

On the other hand, again...

If horror movies were forced to give up threatening women, they would lose one of their most powerful tools. We expect women to react with much more powerful emotion to any given situation. And when you're trying to frighten the audience, there's no underestimating the power of seeing a terrified woman on screen. Should horror movies be expected to give up their ace in the hole in the name of political correctness?

Mind you, it's possible to drum up tension with a terrified man, one of the reasons I admired Hostel so much. But for a mediocre filmmaker (and let's face it, most horror films are made by them), threatening a woman makes the job much easier.

In the end, I think it's acceptable to threaten and violate female characters, or even portray them in a sexually negative light, so long as you go to some effort to make them characters who are having an experience of their own. A woman who has no place of her own in the story is just being used as a prop. If you're not addressing the experience from her point of view (or at least considering it), then you're guilty of what Cronenberg is so often accused of. What gives him a pass is that his female characters are alive, and react to the events of the story on their own, and according to their own motivations. They don't exist entirely for the benefit of motivating the protagonist.

It's an interesting point. Red Eye, for instance, which I thought was otherwise an interesting film, took a mis-step there, I thought. It seems typical of male writers that, when they need a dark incident in a woman's past, rape is the automatic easy go-to. They don't seem to understand what a big deal that is to a woman. Having been raped has far more long-term effects than are generally gone into in a movie, and the idea of using it as something that made a woman tough and scrappy is pretty silly.

I've been putting some thought into why I'm so god damned slow at writing. I think the problem is that I keep trying to make every single scene, every line of dialogue, into some kind of work of art in itself. I never think "Okay, let's just get this scene out to bridge the distance and get this plot moving". I'm always stalled out until I can think of a way to make it really come alive for me. I suppose there are worse things than being a perfectionist, but it's kind of pissing me off how long it takes me to get something down on the page. Sometimes I wish I could, as Slater says, "vomit out words onto the page", just to get it done.

My first run-through on my script had a lot of camera directions. I finally realized that I was directing the movie, and removed a lot of that.

Point #1 is interesting. I'm going to have to look at my stuff to see if I'm doing that. I feel like I'm being fairly concise and not wasting a lot of space with unnecessary stuff, but it's hard to tell when you're still in the middle of it.