The would-be screenwriters thread - Page 2

Hammerhead, I would say that the second idea has a lot more potential than the first. That's the kind of story where you don't really need much of a plot -- finding characters to inhabit that world. Their day-to-day lives in that kind of forgotten/ignored part of Americana put a big grin on my face. Do it!

My story was inspired by the Warren Zevon song, "Werewolves of London." At least the setting anyway. Plus, it gives me a cool scene to use the song.

The drama is best described as a cross between "An American Werewolf in London" & "Carrie." And no it's nothing like "Ginger Snaps."

Working on "HARD TARGET...with werewolves" myself.

I've told this story before, but since sixth grade, when I saw "Casper" and fell in love with Christina Ricci. My first screenplay was a vehicle for her. So a little over ten years at this point. (Although I'm no longer writing Christina Ricci vehicles, but as stupid as that story is, that was the catalyst that started it all.)

Yeah, I've got a vehicle for her to ride on. Hey-yo!!!

Sorry. I'm still trying to figure out my 'big' project. I've always wanted to do a comic book, much like Craig Thompson's Blankets, but that is insanely daunting. I'm actually thinking of doing a series of animated shorts. I know, drawing one panel for a comic as opposed to 30 drawings for a second doesn't seem like a trade-off, but it's where my mind is at.

"Only in this to bone Christina Ricci" five!

(Not really, though, she's dating the Hebrew Hammer.)

As I mentioned in the Exorcist thread part deux, my screenplay is derived from my personal escapist fantasy of stealing all the money from the safe at my store, driving south and using it to pay for my gas as I hook up with every girl I ever met on the internet (who, surprise surprise, all live in the middle of nowhere Midwest) in some kind of wild sex tour, all while being chased by the police.

It took a couple drafts, but eventually I had the good mind to take the emphasis off the sex with girls with low self-esteem, and more onto the chase.

All of you have better ideas than me. I hate that. But seriously, Patrick, that sounds awesome.

You should have read the earlier shit I wrote about it. It was all depressing and bleak and everyone was stuck rotting and it was so heavy handed and then they fucked. I even had a scene where the guy slowly fingerpaints a smiley face the girl's belly with her own period. It was really REALLY unpleasant. I deleted it all, and am now starting off semi-fresh (starting on the blank page, only now I know exactly what I want to do).

My main problem is that I am azlways the main character. Every story I do is so much from my life. It takes a bunch of re-writing to get the story to where I'm not directly commenting on my own life, but letting the character have a life of his own.

Yeah, a smiley face, I know.

If that smiley face part is taken directly from your life then there is nothing that any of us can do to get you laid...you should be pluggin' bitches left and right.

It is difficult to give a character their own voice. I tend to put myself into the characters I write, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.

Wow. And the way you were describing it, I thought it was going to be darkly comic, like Carl Hiaasen or Elmore Leonard.

I hear you on the "the main character as yourself" issue, but I'm pretty tired, so I'll talk about that tomorrow.

I'm working on a screenplay for my feature writing class right now, but I'm having trouble getting it all out on the page, which is an entirely new experience for me. My first official formatted feature-length script I cranked out in two and a half weeks my freshman year of college in a burst of energy, and ever since then I've wrote 3 more feature-length scripts that I got out pretty easily.

With this one I know exactly everything that's going to happen and I have total confidence, but I've got so many movies I'm in the middle of right now I just can't summon up the energy/passion for this one to get it all out. I put together a 28-page scriptment for it two semesters ago, and right now I'm 11 pages into that which has translated into 60 pages of script so far. This may get pretty fucking epic.

Please tell me that El Chupacabra is involved somehow.

I have no idea why the word "Epic" suddenly made me wish you were at work on THE best Boston-based Mexicobeast film of all time. That really frightens me, actually.

This thread is getting to be too much. Too much sharing, too much giving.

Wait for the second-act reversal! Six months later, all our ideas turn up in major blockbusters, and clues indicate one of us is the thieving Hollywood professional, posting under a false identity. Who's using their real name? Whose handle is a cryptic pun? Where does harmless snark end and devilish manipulation begin?

Then there's a car chase.

You know, 10-15 drawings per second is quite enough for animation. If you're really lazy you should get either Adobe Flash or Adobe After FX. It's pretty easy to do Don Hertzfeldt-style animation with the latter software.

Two years ago we did a balls to wall-action short about a pair of cops searching for the murderer of other cop's former work partner. It was set in the 80's and there was a seriously homoerotic vibe between the main characters. Our international title was COP & COPPER. It was basically a gayer double episode of Miami Vice crammed into a 30 minute short film. A spoilery piece of dialogue:

C1: DAMNIT! How the hell did that creep get to the station?
C2: Only one kind of people kill suspects at police stations.
C3: Do you mean...
C4: Yes. COPS.

I'm working on a sequel right now, it's not going to be set in the 80's but it will compensate that by being fifty times better.

Finding a distinctive voice for each character is something I struggle with, and the only times I've been successful is as the result of researching real-world analogues. For a short story I wrote about a hitman, I read everything I could on Richard Kuklinski, and rented "The Iceman: Confessions of a Mafia Assassin." By the time it came for me to sit down and write, my perception of him had merged with my goofy voice to create enough of a character that I could sit back and let him dictate his own actions, dialogue, etc.

D.

I don't really consider myself as a screenwriter, but I've got a few ideas that I should write down sometime. A couple of short films that I've got figured out from start to finish and two ideas for feature length films. The other is a realistic take on the whole amazon women jungle movie genre. The other is a remake of Seijun Suzuki's Tattooed Life set in the modern day. I saw Tattooed Life six months ago and it just blew me away in that it dealt with some issues that could be directly lifted from my life.

The problem is that I'm terrified of the thought that when I start writing these things I either notice that I can't write for shit or that I notice that my ideas are worthless.

What I tend to do is wirte each character as a different facet of my personality. so one character will esentially be me on a bad day, another will be me in a whiney mood etc. I also fins I get unintentionally influenced by what I've just watched. for Example if I watch an episode of buffy I'll catch myself writing like a poor mans Joss whedon, or kevin Smith or anyone else that has a distinctive way their characters talk. If I find my character are all starting to sound the same I'll start writing them based off how different friends talk, that way their voices sound true yet unique.

This is a definite hurdle that I had to struggle with. In the end, I realised that, yes, it WILL be shit. Without a doubt, what I write will be shit. If it's the first thing I write, it will be shit.

But, as Ernest Hemingway once said, the first draft of anything is shit. So practice. Re-write.

Read your script. I dug it. In terms of advice the only things I could sugest is maybe some sort of an event going on in the background that the camp is building up to. Being television I think general audiences like to have a sense of momentum even if it's a false one. Theres always the big dance or the big game etc that serves as a backdrop to the character development which is clearly the main focus of your script.

Other just little things I noticed (aside from the odd typo here and there but that's to be expected on a draft your still working on) There was a line on page four Lauren: Well at a hundred and five bucks an hour, it sure aint for the money.
I'd be tempted to shorten this to "Well, it sure aint for the money. it's probably just a trivial thing but with TV going out to most countries now days, you never know in some countries that could be a huge amount of money, or the could use a different denomenation and it could pull them out. Also asuming the councilers are on about the same wage they'd know what they were getting paid and wouldn't say it out loud. (it's nitpicking really)

on page 12 theres an exchange

"who rides shotgun in fire engines"

"firefighters"

this is just a personal thing but because firefighters is the obvious expected line there I'd be inclined to throw the audience off for a second by changing firefighters to nuns or something completely not associated with with fire trucks.

One thing that took me a while to adjust to was the notion of camp councellors who give a shit. My only exposure to them being from other movies and tv shows, it was hard to battle the preconception that they all stoner slackers who only apear engaged when confronted with a hockey mask and a machete. All the ace fighter pilot (for lack of a better term) type speeches about how important there jobs are were a bit jarring at first. I'm not sure how you'd combat that really cos it's more my baggage than yours, exept perhaps a couple of characters who fit the stereotype That do get fired so we know that type of thing doesn't fly at this camp(it might also make all the threats of being fired carry more weight).

I wouldn't feel obligated to impliment any of these sudgestion, after all I'm no more an authority than the next guy.

The only script that I'm finished that I can talk about is "Blood of the Father" and that's because my agent wouldn't touch it with a ten-foot pole.

Jeshua bin Joseph is a borderline schizophrenic who literally sacrifices his humanity in order to prevent a vampiric conquest.

Essentially it's a retelling of the death of Jesus as told in the bible just from a slightly skewed perspective. It starts at the point of resurrection as Jeshua becomes vampire. In flashbacks we see his life story inlcuding his delusions that he is the son of God, the offer of immortality in the desert from the pack leader of the vampire (who Jeshua thinks is the devil), and the last supper ("drink of me my lifeblood").

It was started when I was 24 as a comedy but somewhere along the lines it became a very dark drama. It has some horror elements but it's very much the story of a very troubled young man who gets caught up in supernatural forces that overwhelm his psyche.

Can you see why I haven't sold it yet?

At least fifteen years ago or so, when I realized what a screenplay actually was. I tried to convince a friend of mine at the time to collaborate, but he was instead obsessed with writing a novel. Ass.

This is my first real attempt and with plenty of re-writes, it won't be half bad. If only that damn second act could get started! Errrrrrr

I also had an idea for a film that was a bunch of vignettes set in different cars stuck in a traffic jam, and the vignettes would all somehow come together at the end of the film and the triggering incident would have all the main characters come to some kind of realization about their lives or their current crisis. Even had a title -- Shiny Metal Boxes, from the line in "Synchronicity II" ("Another working day has ended/only the rush hour hell to face/packed like lemmings into shiny metal boxes/contestants in a suicidal race").

Hello Crash. Different execution, same concept.

Then I had an idea about a guy who gets uncontrolled flashes of the future. He has no control over when or what he sees, and he has a massive wall calendar and a bursting day planner that he marks the visions down on, and it's about how listless his life is because the spontaneity is gone, since he already knows so much of what's going to happen. It would end with him knowingly getting on a plane he's seen crashing, because death is the only future he has no knowledge of.

Hey look, Premonition. Different execution, same concept.

Honestly, I can never get passed the first 10 pages. I haven't written anything creative in years. I need to. It used to be fun. It used to be something I wanted to do. Now I'm just afraid of it.

My biggest issue is getting ahead of myself. I don't have the patience to sit down and outline a story before I just jump in and start writing, without a clear idea of where it's actually going to go.

I bought a number of how-to screenplay books in my teens but none of them really helped. Formatting is one thing, story-telling is another. It was (and still is) hard to get out of the short-story hole I'd dug myself into during school.

My big thing is that I'm a plot guy. I can plot out the high points in the arc and how things get put into motion and how the whole thing resolves. It's filling in the details and dialog that catches me up. I wonder how I'm going to get to those high points and just get daunted by the whole process. It all plays out so wonderfully in my head, I want to just jump right to the visual and not worry about something as messily verbal as a script.

Whikaz, I'm in the same boat you're in. At least you weren't dumb as me and tried showing off your ten pages to anyone who would read them. Stupid. I must have bugged the shit out of countless poor souls trying to get their feedback. Of course it didn't help what I did have was poorly thought out shit. I've also tried to do what General Zod did and try and find myself a collaborator, but there don’t seem to be many writers around my deck of the woods.

Ditto this.

Enjoyed it, though. The dialogue was sharp and well written. It's tough to guage how entertaining this would be from a pilot script, which dealt mostly with character development, but the setting (and general concept) definitly has potential.

what is the point of writing without at least an outline? writing is hard enough as it is, why make it an exercise in frustration?

outline, beat sheet, character bios are all mandatory as far as i'm concerned.

Not me. I love the dialogue and the small details that make a script work. It's why I love Sorkin's work so much. Tightly plotted with dialogue that sings, how can you go wrong.

I collaborated on a script with a guy that had a great outline but just a horrendous amount of plotholes and bad dialogue. He was frustrated and I wasn't getting anywhere with my scripts so it seemed like a great chance to try my hand at collaboration. Worked great.

The script itself is a little derivative (zombie apocalypse is hardly a new idea) but I like where we went with it. I also like my characters a great deal...plus we got some really great kills in it.

Oh, see, I like writing dialog too, it's just meshing the dialog to the high points of the plot.

Had to think about this for a bit. I didn't get interested in movies until I started learning how they were made.

I think the answer is, I don't want to write screenplays. I want to make movies. And for me there's a difference between trying to write something that'll sell, and making something I want to see.

My 'obituary' story is in the saleable camp. It would be cheap to produce, and if I do it right the roles could attract valuable talent.

The 'giant robot' story, on the other hand-- I dream of getting a gang of friends together and DOING that. I don't want someone else imposing their vision on it.

Ah, I getcha...

My plot specific dialogue usually takes me until my third or fourth draft before it stops being obvious. (I hate the term "on the nose" because people usually use it where it's inappropriate) It's not always the easiest thing in the world to write.

Thanks for the feedback, guys. horrid, you mentioned some things that I thought were right on; things that I hadn't considered byt work a lot better --thanks! This is a based very heavily on over ten years of experience going to summer camp and working with kids, so it's really an attempt to write an authentic, yet sincere love letter to the camping and experiential education industry, which I feel is one of the most overlooked jobs in the country today. It's very influenced by Sorkin and West Wing, which is why the "Ace Fighter Pilot" speeches were woven throughout -- and in the feature, I plan to have a lot less of those.

As I mentioned, I wrote three additional episodes of the series before deciding that a feature was more commercially viable -- and the feature is more in the Dazed and Confused/American Graffitti/Altman vein, focusing on the characters rather than the situations, where some plots are resolved, but the story remains open ended. The challenge here is that the feature, chronologically, takes place about three summers after the first four episodes of the series, so it's really back to square one beyond the stuff I'd plotted out for the seasons in between those episodes and when this feature is taking place.

I like the back-and-forth we have here. Good discussion going.

I have no idea if this attachment dohicky worked but if it did, then this is one of those projects I tinker around with between other projects. it's an unfinished pilot for an X-files type of show. It only goes up to the end of act two, I know what I want the ending to be but it's just a matter of tying all the plot threads together for the climax in a satisfying way the is alluding me at the moment. Attachment 2275


P.S I just skimmed through it and had completely forgotten I'd named a character Devin. Coincidence but still kind of embarrasing

I'll download your script and read it by the end of the weekend, horrid. First page or so looks good, though.

Back to the "putting yourself in the story", does anyone else find themselves putting their own friends in the story as well? Like, honestly, the best description I can give to it is that it's almost like fanfiction of my life. Established (to me) characters, made-up stories. Is that hacky? How do I branch out?

All the fucking time, Patrick. For this camp project, I'm ripping off lives of people I've known and worked with wholesale, and have even gotten in trouble for it -- a guy I went to high school with tried to sue me last summer for using his name as one of the bad guys in a script that I'd stupidly posted on the internets.

I don't think it's hacky, after all, "write what you know, but make a ton of shit up, too" is sort of my mantra. I think, as has been said, writers have to put some of themselves or people they know into characters as a way into the story, as a way to be able to write the story.

There are two tricks that I've used to overcome this/branch out and avoid potential lawsuits in the future: First, don't use real names. Kidding. What I'll usually do is I'll take the framework of a person's life and then build upon it, either inventing new traits or combining those traits So for example, the "athletic, energetic, dedicated girl who likes to party" turns into "athletic, dedicated girl with self destructive tendencies," or "British music lawyer" becomes "British public defender with dead wife and kid" Sometimes this works, but sometimes -- as in the case of one of my characters -- a person's real life is just too goddamn compelling not to borrow large bits from; which is usually when I'll ask for permission re: the actual subject. This was the case with the camp project, there's a woman I work with whose life seems right out of an independent film and her story could easily support her own film, but in creating a character based on her for the project, I made it pretty clear I was using a lot of stuff from her life and her personality and wanted to let her know I wasn't trying to make fun of her, etc.

The other thing, when it comes to putting yourself in the story, again, what I'll do is I'll take various traits that I have, often negative ones, and throw them into different characters. Usually there's a character that's a direct analogue to me, but since, more often than not, I tend to write about women these days, that's not always the case. So it's more along the lines of throwing an interest I have into one character here, a personality quirk there, and dividing up those aspects of myself helps me stay fresh and not just write "struggling writer who hates himself, no. 2001."

I tend to do it with speech patterns and personalities rather than personal histories. Mostly because my friends arent that interesting I guess.

I had to take a Scriptwriting class at school and in it was this big douche with a speech impediment. He would pronounce 'r' with a 'w' sound. He was an asshole, and we had to assign people to read parts, so I wrote a throwaway character for him to read that basically was an exercise in alliteration that featured the letter 'r.' It took a few read-throughs for the instructor to figure out what I was up to, but he didn't tell me to stop. Funny shit.

I tend to think about people I know when I write my outlines. I try to make the outlines such that you don't really need dialogue to understand what's going on. Dialogue is usually the last thing I write. This way I can concentrate on interesting ways to say things out loud. If it's a short film I'm also directing I usually write a finished script, give it to the actors and screw with their heads by inventing new dialogue on set.

I like to half-blame my extended writer's block on lack of life-experiences. I know that's a total cop out but unless I start ripping from the headlines or straight just making everything up, I don't have a whole of I can draw on, personally. Anything interesting, at least.

That's partially bullshit. I mean I've had life-experiences that I could probably make interesting, just nothing overly dramatic. Or the stuff that I could make dramatic and write from would probably be so obvious that anyone reading it would immediately recognize similarities and in most cases, I don't want that to happen.

Maybe I'm just too laid back. Too un-caring about too many things. Not emo enough to spill my guts, creatively, on paper. Or lacking the talent to do so with subtlty, so that the tone or theme is there, but the details are obscured.

I came across a copy of Story at Barnes and Noble last night and just had to leaf through and find what you were talking about and yeah, he botched that pretty badly.

For the curious, he has Luke getting his hand cut off AFTER Vader reveals he's his father and somehow gets the idea that Luke is attempting suicide when he jumps off the platform.

It's been years since I read Robert McKee; what's his assertion re: Empire again?

Also, kind of funny how the guy claims Casablanca is "the greatest screenplay ever written" when anyone even remotely familiar with that production knows the script was in a constant state of rewrites and flux throughout the movie, and was often disregarded by Curtiz and his producers.

Yeah, this thread has provided me with some motivation, too. I actually started writing the feature of "Redemption Falls" again last night; I know that the first draft is going to be extremely long but I'm hoping to use the script as a blueprint and a springboard for the actors more than anything, so I just need to get the scenes and dialogue down on paper. Hopefully I'll be able to make some real headway this weekend.

My problem is that instead of focusing on what I need to be writing, I get distracted by other ideas. For example, I've been adding onto a weird detective script set in America's only combination lesbian bar/strip club/hipster concert venue every night this week instead of focusing on "Redemption Falls," which needs to get done, and soon.

That Billy Joel quote is right on -- it's such a chore for me to sit down and write for more than 40 minutes at a time (It doesn't help that I have a pretty bad back which can only stand sitting up straight for so long) -- but man, it feels good to work with these characters and stories.