zombies

That’s almost that

Maximum Z Dreamship, Eating Raoul, Fido, Movie of the Moment, outlines, rewrite, screenwriting, zombies

Except for a few tweaks and added-in details, I think the latest outline is done. Still not entirely sure the last few scenes are a little rushed, but for the most part, I like what I’ve got.

Looking at all that text makes me wonder if I tightened this thing up that much, if at all.  But my initial overall feeling is it’s better than it was before.

I’ve also been wondering about some of the set-up scenes; are they good enough?  Do they explain enough? Will the reader be able to follow along?  I’ve been guilty of writing with information the reader may not have, so I’ll have to be careful about that.

Because I think it may be time to move on to the next level:

Pages. Which I’m pretty excited about.

My s.o.p. in the past has been at least 3 pages a day. Seems doable.

Ideal situation – done by the end of August/Labor Day. Again, seems doable.

Into the abyss.

Movie of the Moment  – K and I watched FIDO, a much better-than-expected zombie flick from about 5 years ago. Imagine WWII was against zombies, and they lost. Now the living dead are outfitted with collars inhibiting their flesh-eating tendencies, so now they function in society as a kind of subservient, manual labor.

This particular story is about a loser kid who at first treats the family’s new zombie as a pet (hence the title), but soon kind of sees him as a sort of surrogate father.

Set in a well-presented 50’s setting, the film takes the subject seriously but adds equal amounts of camp.  Not as gory as you would think, but an interesting take on a subject near and dear to K’s heart.

Added bonus – comedian Billy Connolly in the title role.  He never says a word, apart from the standard grunts and growls, so his acting is all expression. Very impressive.

-I started watching EATING RAOUL, which I remember Siskel & Ebert reviewing way back when on Sneak Previews, which aired on WHYY in Philadelphia.

I knew Paul Bartel co-wrote and directed, but had only seen clips, and even those were a long time ago.

Even though I’m about halfway through, everything so far has been freakin’ hilarious. Extremely dated, especially with the whole swingers lifestyle subplot, but just a smart little comedy that still generates laughs.  Can’t wait to finish it.

-Still don’t know if I’ll get to X-MEN or SUPER 8 in theatres. I’ll try, but looks like they may be sentenced to Netflix while HARRY POTTER and CAPTAIN AMERICA get closer.

Benefit of working ridiculously early hours – catching the first show of the day at the local AMC theatres. ticket price – $6! Makes my bought-at-Walgreens-and-smuggled-in M&Ms taste that much better.

That’s something, I guess

Maximum Z Dreamship, Movie of the Moment, Nicholl Fellowship, outlines, screenwriting, zombies

As I’ve mentioned before, when I do the midday traffic shift, it usually results in some good output.  Something like that happened today.

I’m working my way through the first part of DREAMSHIP’s second act, and was trying to figure out how to approach a sequence from a different perspective. I think I may have reached a solution, so that’s good.

Not so good is a problem just like the one I was having while working on the LUCY outline: what does my antagonist want?  My ScriptQuack comments ask the same thing.  I thought I had an answer to that in previous drafts, but now I’m not so sure.  Once I can figure that out, putting more of this together should be easier – I hope.

I’m doing the midday again tomorrow, and the noon-to-6 shift on Saturday, so here’s hoping those are productive shifts as well.

Movie of the Moment: We started watching THE WALKING DEAD.  Wow.  Great stuff.  I especially like the ever-present feeling of ominous dread.  I’m dating myself, but I like how this is the same station that years ago played nothing but black and white films and their first original series was set in Pittsburgh during the Golden Age of Radio.  My, how times have changed.

There was a trailer for some set-in-space video game or something before it got to the menu page.  It got me thinking: somewhere out there has to be a spec script about zombies in space.  Think about it.  They don’t need air, but that whole vacuum-of-space thing might need a little planning.  The hard part would be to avoid having it come across as too cheesy.

But then again, that could be part of the fun.

I excel at multitasking

Maximum Z Lucy Steele, outlines, screenwriting, zombies

(I wrote this on Saturday, but didn’t get to edit it until Sunday.  Apologies for the delay.  Since I haven’t seen a lot of the nominated films, I won’t have an Oscar post, but do plan on watching the ceremony.)

I did the midday traffic shift yesterday, which gave me the opportunity to work on LUCY. Some of my most productive days are when I can work between reports.

I wanted to streamline the current section, which is basically everything after the midpoint. I also wanted to see if I could fit in my Irishman subplot a little sooner, resulting in payoff either by page 75, or into the final quarter of Act 2.

I was able to cut 3 scenes, for a tentative total of 24. If that seems high, keep in mind that more than a few are less than a page long. I have a tendency to overwrite during the outline phase. I throw it all out there: action, dialogue and a lot of notes to myself (Why does she do this?, what happens next?, expand!, etc)

A member of my old writing group once asked how I was going to get everything I had in the outline onto the page. I see the outline as a guide with nothing written in stone. And if I think a scene is too long, I’ll edit it down until I think it works.

My goal for this week is to get past the page 75 twist. Fingers crossed.

Movie of the Moment: K is a huge fan of zombie flicks. For those unaware, she grew up near Monroeville, PA, where the mall is from the original DAWN OF THE DEAD. She even has a Monroeville Zombies t-shirt from Kevin Smith’s company.

We watched the French horror THE HORDE, courtesy of Netflix. It has a great premise: a team of cops go into a gangster’s high-rise hideout to exact revenge for a fallen colleague. Then the building is attacked by zombies. Both sides team up to get out alive.

It was…okay.  Generous helpings of overacting, angry acting, repetitive dialogue and too-fast editing. I was under the impression there was lots of gore, but there wasn’t (at least for me). I was more squeamish when one guy kept slamming a zombie’s head against a cement post. That was due more to the sound effects than the visual.

They never really explain how the zombies came to be, but there are some mysterious explosions off in the distance soon after the beginning. Our theory was it was some kind of virus bomb-detonation thing.

I enjoy a good zombie flick, but there really seems to be an overabundance of them lately. We need a new genre!

Go Into The Story wrote earlier this week about the sale of ZOMBIE PET SHOP, which would be animated and family-friendly. Seriously? Wouldn’t it be easier to just make a new batch of SCOOBY DOO episodes?

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.