characters

From one grind to another

Maximum Z characters, Man of the Century, Movie of the Moment, plot, screenwriting, story, writing gigs
Yeah. Something like that.

And I’m back. My script rewrite is now in the past tense.

Maybe not an out-and-out rewrite per se, but taking a script and reformatting it into script form.  My instructions were to work my magic on the action lines and leave the dialogue alone. Mea culpa – I tinkered with some of that too.

I’ll start off by saying the idea behind the story was good, and there were faint glimmers of potential, but I had lots of problems with the execution.  I don’t know if this was a first draft, but it sure looked and read like one.

-Huge blocks of text in both the wide margins and the dialogue.

-Starting a scene in one room, then having it go to one, two or more locations, without starting a new scene

-Not giving the reader any idea who the main character is, nor establishing what was at stake, if anything.

-Characters who disappear for long stretches of time.

-Tons of unnecessary and unfilmable details.

-Story details that come out of nowhere based on nothing the reader has already read.

-Dialogue that’s pure exposition.  Sometimes repeated several times in several different scenes.

-Scenes without any conflict, or at least nothing to move the story forward, that drag on and on.

-Characters saying each other’s names over and over and over again in each scene.

-Using the same verbs and adjectives throughout the whole thing.

The whole time I was working on this, there were quite a lot of times I couldn’t help but roll my eyes in disbelief.  But the main point is: I’m done with it.

The Nicholl deadline is next week.  No way am I going to make it.  I figure I can work on the DREAMSHIP rewrite, then pump out a first draft of LUCY.

Movie of the Moment: MAN OF THE CENTURY.  A fun, small independent film from ’99 about a man who lives in then-modern NYC as if it were the 1920s. I’d heard about it when it was originally released, which was for about a week in the arthouse circuit.  If you get a kick out of the early days of talkies, or at least the dialogue, then you’ll enjoy this.  Only complaint – they never explain why the guy is like this.

Turns out the star and director also wrote it.  They must have spent a lot of time researching the slang and catchphrases of the day, because they’re prevalent throughout the whole thing.

I was also impressed with how they had about eight different storylines each tie up nice and clean in the last five minutes.

I’d love to know how they got Frank Gorshin involved.  I thought he was in it for a cameo, but he was one of the subplots.

-I got to read a phenomenal action script yesterday.  It was fast-moving, exciting and just a blast to read.  It’s what I hope LUCY can be like.

The benefit of taking a break

Maximum Z characters, Lucy Steele, outlines, screenwriting, Star Wars, story

Today was the first time I really got to sit down and work on the LUCY outline.  I’d been thinking about some of the minor hurdles I was trying to get over, which included what my bad guy wants and how that impacts Lucy’s story.

My page one is always the title, logline and plot point breakdown.

I looked at the logline, which has always given me trouble, and erased it.  I wanted something new.  Something that really encapsulates the story down to its bare minimum.  It took a couple of tries, but I came up with one that works.  I”ll probably change it again at least a few more times, but it works for now.

I looked at the plot point breakdown.  Something didn’t seem right.  The story’s there, but not the way I think it should be.  I change a few words here, add some there, and suddenly, it seems stronger.

And now into the outline itself.  Like I said, I’ve been struggling with the bad guy’s goal.  Then I realized I was worrying too much about the little things and not focusing on telling a story.  I wasn’t enjoying myself.

So one of my original plot points gets changed just a little bit.  The what is different, but the result is still the same.  And to make it that much better, changing that enables me to use it in a bigger, better way for Act Three.

So far, so good.

I’m still in the third quarter of Act Two, and realize I can flesh out at least two sequences, which really helps strengthen the story.  And I also discover I can change the setting of an important sequence, while also bringing in that much-liked rotund character from a few weeks back.

Like I said at the beginning, I really like how it’s all coming together.  True, there are a lot of details that have to be worked out for the rest of Act Two (escalating conflict!), and I started listing what needs to happen in Act Three.

Most importantly, it feels fun again.  Which is always nice.

Movie of the Moment: IT’S A TRAP!, Family Guy’s take on JEDI.  Fun, but the first two were better.  Some truly hilarious moments, but they seemed few and far between.  It’s a good thing they’re not doing these anymore.  It really seems to have run out of steam, which is even acknowledged in the opening crawl.

It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, they take on next.

Short post; big problem

Maximum Z antagonist, characters, LA Confidential, outlines

I realized what’s been bothering me about my main antagonist.  I haven’t fully figured out his goal.  I thought I did, but turns out I was wrong.

And until I do, I can’t move forward.

This is going to be tough.  But not impossible.  It’ll take some effort, but I’ve been down this path before.

Good thing I’m running into this now, during the outline process, rather than while writing actual pages.  That would suck even more.

Time to put the creativity into overdrive.

Stay tuned.

Quick Movie of the Moment: L.A. CONFIDENTIAL, which I was reminded of while reading THE GANGSTER SQUAD.  I stumbled upon it while channel surfing.  Damn, this is a finely executed piece of storytelling.  I still cry foul that this lost Best Picture to TITANIC.

There is so much packed into each scene, even the short ones.  It zooms by.  The first act alone is almost an entire story unto itself.  There are so many subplots throughout, each one connected to the others, and easy to follow.

I’m guessing this was supposed to be Guy Pearce’s breakout film, but the spotlight shone on a very young-looking Russell Crowe.

My only complaint: the Rollo Tamasi angle.  It seems a little too fabricated and Keyser Soze-ish to me.  But other than that, I really like this movie.

Where exactly do you put a 300-pound Irishman?

Maximum Z characters, Lucy Steele, Netflix, outlines, screenwriting

Not the set-up for a joke, but a question that will be answered shortly.

I took yesterday’s work on the outline and inserted it into the main one today.  Still have some gaps to fill in, but it’s coming together nicely.  This is really turning into a rip-roaring adventure story, let me tell you.

But I couldn’t help but notice one thing about everything I had worked on last week, especially those scenes from page 45 to the midpoint.  There were a lot more than I remembered writing.  While it should be somewhere around 15-18, this was more like 27.  Way too much!  Some emergency editing was necessary.

As much as I hated to do it, I was going to have to get rid of the scenes involving a character I really like.  That would be the somewhat rotund fellow in the title of this post.  He and his flunkies would have to go.  One of the many rules of screenwriting: Kill Your Darlings.  So I did.  The end result is still satisfying, but not as much as it was when I had two sets of double-crosses in the works.  Now it’s back to one.

But all is not lost.

Since I’m now focusing on the next set of scenes, the midpoint to around page 75, part of those involve a mine.  I don’t know what kind, but originally it was going to be abandoned.  Not anymore.  I’m working on turning it into a kind of hideout where this nefarious band of ruffians is currently holed up, thereby increasing the level of conflict in the story.

It keeps surprising me how writing something one day, and maybe jotting down a thought or line, even just on a whim, can really pay off somewhere down the line.  I really like when that sort of thing happens.  It’s almost a kind of self-vindication.

I’m hoping to have a Movie of the Moment for tomorrow.  I haven’t had a lot of spare time lately, so I’ve had to spread my film-watching out over a few days.  Surprisingly, parts of this film are eerily similar to DREAMSHIP.  Crazy, huh?

Our campouts were never like this

Maximum Z analysis, Black List, Boy Scouts vs Zombies, characters, comedy, horror, movies, screenwriting, story, zombies

Finally got to read BOY SCOUTS VS ZOMBIES, a horror comedy that ranked on the Black List.

The concept: A troop of Boy Scouts on their weekend camping trip must protect an island town after a zombie outbreak and save the local girl scout troop.

Personally, I’m getting a little tired of the whole zombie thing (although ZOMBIELAND was fun), this sounded interesting.  Seeing as how I was a Boy Scout (big surprise, right?), I wanted to see what the writers, Carrie Evans and Emi Mochizuko, would do with it.

First and foremost: A really fast read.  I zipped through this thing in about 90 minutes.  The whole thing really moves along.

I was also surprised how just about all the characters veer into stereotypes. The somewhat bland main character who’s too shy to tell the girl he likes her, the too-cool friend, the fat slob other friend, the mama’s boy, the overenthusiastic scoutleader, and so on.

It was a little difficult keeping track of all the characters, especially since the first half really focuses on the boys, then really adding the girls into the mix around halfway.  It was also pretty easy to tell which characters were going to be the token redshirts.

Once it settled into ‘will they survive or won’t they?’ mode, I was trying to figure out which characters would be the surprise death.  Surprisingly, that didn’t happen.

And the subplot about the top-secret lab where the whole thing starts seems to disappear after they decide to send out the commandos to neutralize the situation.  Some kind of follow-up would have been nice.

I’d also like to add that technically, the zombies here are the “infected with a virus that simulates zombie-like characteristics” type rather than the truly living dead.  This seems to be the go-to reasoning behind a lot of recent zombie stories.  I guess that’s easier than figuring out how to really raise the dead.  George Romero used radiation, so why not something similar?  But I digress.

Some of the jokes fell a little flat, but there were a handful that made me laugh out loud.  I especially liked the line after one girl turns zombie and tries to eat her friends, one says “Jenny! No! You’re a vegan!”  I also liked how even as everything around them is going to hell, the scouts try to take care of things via the Scout Handbook.  Again, I’m biased.  I don’t know if the guys in my troop would have been able to keep their heads like this.

I wasn’t crazy about when the wide margins would say something about the characters that should really come across in their actions and dialogue (“Matt’s dad has great expectations for his son, and they don’t involve fat slackers and comic books.”)  I always thought this sort of thing was frowned upon, but these two writers were in Disney’s Writing Program, so maybe there are exceptions.

I also wasn’t sure about the idea that a zombie can do the same things they did when they were alive, like a rock climber who turns into a zombie remembers how to climb a cliff.  It seems a little weak.

I really think with a little tweaking here and there, this thing could be fantastic.  It’s already been picked up for production, so it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it.

Would I pay to see it in the theatre?  Probably not.  But I’d definitely put it in the Netflix queue.

This is my last post for 2010, and since I haven’t seen that many movies in the theatres this year, I don’t have a list of my top 10 picks.  I’m just happy to be able to watch so many good flicks, and still plan on my own stuff being part of that someday.

Have a great 2011, and feel free to drop a note once in a while.

p.s.  Almost forgot.  If you’d like to take a look at any of these scripts, let me know and I’ll forward it to you.