Kicking the Baby to the Curb… (ep.12)

What is this?  First it’s killing and then it’s kicking?  What kind of essay is this?

Me thinks me might have issues with the wee folk.

Psychological issues aside, I do find it a little annoying to hear other writers refer to their work as their “baby.”  Unless you plan on taking that script of yours from the idea phase to the editing booth you’re going to have to come up with a more psychologically pleasing word to come to terms with giving it up (or maybe saying that baby is all grown up and is now going to college has some merit to it after all.)  Otherwise, kicking, killing or just plain giving it a severe beat down are probably some of the more colorful terms you’ll be dealing with.

Enough of that nonsense, whether it’s a baby, a stack of papers or even the embodiment of six months of a dream crammed into one flash drive, what exactly am I referring to by “kicking it to the curb?”

The rewrites are done.

Well, the rewrites I can accomplish on my own anyway.  I’ve sat alone in the coffee shop, pondered the latest bits of dialogue by solitary lamplight sans brethren in my apartment and I am now thinking I’m 100% complete.  So it’s ready to show the world, right?

Wrong.

For the last four months… yes, it has been four months since I’ve written an article here at A Boy and His Script (how many times could I really write about rewriting anyway?) and I am now to the point where my eyes just aren’t picking up the subtle hints and clues that the work needs further polishing.  In other words, it’s now time to show it to someone.  Unfortunately, this process in itself can be a little disheartening.  Much like every other writer out there, I want a pat on the back as much as the next guy.  I yearn for someone to tell me the goods are in fact “the goods.”  I want to be told I’m a good writer.

But by God, now is not the time.

It took me a while to come to this conclusion, but for my purposes, a rewritten script is not a finished script until it has passed through the hands of someone who is going to spend the time giving you well-thought out criticisms on what works, what doesn’t work and what absolutely makes no sense.  Simply put, I need someone who is going to be brutal (or as brutal as you can get in a constructive way, of course.)

Sorry mom.

NEXT… Criticism?  Who needs it?!

Killing Babies… And other assorted happy thoughts… (ep. 11)

Killing ba…? WTF?! Man, that’s pretty grim.

Say what you will though, but I’d be willing to wager this phrase is more well known than you realize. Any Screenwriting 101 student has probably heard the heartbreaking, “It’s good, but you have got to learn to kill your babies.”

And for the record (and any FBI guys the above phrase has alerted,) I am not advocating the wholesale slaughter of the wee ones. Instead, I’m talking about rewriting, rewriting, rewriting.

Simply put, it means cutting out what you hold near and dear. For me personally, it’s just as important as character development. And like that same character development, the act of slicing and dicing comes in the second, third and fourth rewrite. Unless you’re an uber-writer, then I think I’m pretty safe in my assumption that the first draft is basically just cutting out the garbage. The second and third is the fine tuning with the realization that sometimes what you thought worked, doesn’t and if it doesn’t work? Out it goes.

If the first rewrite is about hacking with a machete your 180 page monstrosity into a workable piece of product, then the second and beyond are all about going in a little deeper, but this time with a surgical blade.

So, as you can pretty much assume, ABaHS has reached the second rewrite and is in the process of uploading all of the cherry red pen goodness into the computer. Once that’s completed, I believe I’ll now have a pretty good indication of how this little thriller will ultimately play out. Don’t get me wrong, with the outline, the cards, the first draft, I’m about 90-95% certain how it’s all going to end, but things change, characters may disappear and entire scenes may shift from Act III to Act I. Case in point, in my script The Boys of Twilight, I had a character named Tajo Jimador who was a sheriff’s deputy. His overall goal throughout the script was the pursuit of my protagonists, however through the course of the rewrite, the entire character disappeared. Tajo Jimador was no more… And dammit, I LIKED Tajo Jimador! (Granted, he could’ve used a name change, but you get the point.) Sometimes you tell the story what you want and sometimes it tells you to back the ‘f’ off, because it’s got other plans. Plans, which oftentimes, are pretty darn valid.

With the script I’m working on now, I’ve realized that in order to keep my budget low (or attractive as a relatively new writer,) I’ve had to curtail the addition of what I’ll refer to as “my little beasties.” I have to remember this isn’t John Carpenter’s The Thing. If I have a remote chance in hell of getting this made on my own, then it’s best to go the Jaws route and leave it in the shadows until the last horrifying minute.

So with that said, I’m moving on to rewrite #3 and at this juncture, I’m still nowhere near having this script ready to be shown.

Next time. . . More rewrite crap? Or maybe. . . an interview!

Fury of the Red Pen… (ep. 10)

Picture a before and after photo.  You know the two I’m talking about.  The first one being the bloated photo where the person in question is seen as a little unkempt, a little rotund, a little. . . well, a little fat.  In any case, that person could easily stand to lose 20, 50, maybe even 100 lbs.  Then you take that second photo.  The “after” photo.  It’s the sleek, tanned and on its way to becoming fit photo that if given a chance, would kick sand in the face of the slovenly first photo as if to say, “Hey, chunky, check out all the ladies checking ME out.” 

Anyway, lost amidst that analogy is the status of the current screenplay.  Not quite the before and not quite the after.  Basically, what a script is and what a script will be post-rewrite.  It’s in that weird purgatory between the First Draft and the First rewrite.  With the first being the, “I want to have a great scene about dairy cows amidst my sci-fi epic!”  And the first rewrite deciding, “Uh, yeah, the dairy cow thing. . . maybe not such a good idea for the off-world colonial civil war.” 

Right now, with ABaHS, I’m right in the middle of that realm between the two.  I still have the bloated mess that is the first draft, but I’m also within sight of the leaner, meaner fighting machine that will become the second draft.  Well, maybe not so much as a fighting machine since it IS technically only the Second Draft, but maybe it’s on its way to having the ability to take the flight of stairs without huffing and puffing. 

And I owe it all to that tool we feared in grade school.  The true teacher’s pet.  The mighty red pen. 

I’m not sure when I fell in love with the rewrite process, but there is some sort of perverse thrill about going page by page, line by line excising and abolishing entire speeches, scenes and sometimes even characters with the sole purpose of obtaining a workable script. 

I. Love. It. 

I’ve always been a fan of the term, “vomiting out” the First Draft.  It’s the draft in which you just don’t hold back, because you don’t want to start self-editing until you’re ready too.  I quickly learned the real characters and the real script would come out through that red pen process.  Who cares if dairy cows save the day in the first draft?  By the time the second draft comes around and I’ve sobered up a bit, the dairy cows have left the building, but are sure to pop up in another script down the road. 

So how long do I wait between the First Draft and the first rewrite?  You’ll hear a lot of people say you have to step away and take a break so you can look at it with fresh eyes, but while I’ll agree with that somewhere around draft five or six, with that first draft you just want to go in hacking and slashing.  After the kitchen sink approach with the initial bit of writing, I’ve got to have a quick turnaround with the rewrite, otherwise I’ll start to let the old writer’s fears creep in and start thinking, “There’s so much here, where do I begin?” 

And before you know it, I’ve convinced myself that maybe the dairy cows SHOULD stay. 

Goddamn dairy cows. 

In other words, and another analogy, after you’ve let the yard grow, you’ve got to mow the whole lot before you can go in with the weedwhacker for some precision trimming. 

NEXT: Killing your babies… 

John Henry Saves the World (ep. 9)

Alternative title. . . 17 Days in April.

“Seventeen days?  I don’t want to rain on your parade, but we aren’t gonna last seventeen hours…” Bill Paxton NOT saving the world. 

So the First Draft has been completed and it only took seventeen days to complete.  ONLY seventeen days?  How is that possible without varying degrees of quality?  Well, it is a First Draft, so it is what it is.  (And you’re probably like me and never let anyone read a First Draft, no matter how much blood went into writing it.  It’s just THAT bad.)  So how come seventeen days?  For starters, as I’ve stated before, it was written entirely in longhand within a 5 x 8 ‘gold fibre’ spiral notebook that you can pick up at Staples for around two or three bucks.   That process alone probably saved me hours, days, weeks.  However, as there is with any writing tool, there is the good and the bad (on a sidenote, if you take the good and take the bad, take them both and what do you get?  (pause, pause, pause) Come on people! The Facts of Life!)

Okay, the best thing about writing everything in longhand is you can take the notebook anywhere and everywhere without being looked at like another wannabe screenwriter (laptops up!)  Instead, they’ll just look at you like you’re some kind of Rainman-ish nut scribbling away like a madman in a notebook.  And seriously though, with the price of gas what it is, lugging a few ounces of a notebook onto the Orange Line from Noho to Woodland Hills is a godsend vs. jacking around with a computer for the trip (and airports, restaurants, etc.) 

So it was with that rationale that I fell in love with the notebook and in fact have since been able to cut off a few days or a week when writing that First Draft. 

The downside?  Yeah, that transcribing can be a drag.  But I suppose John Henry probably did ride a train or two in his lifetime as well.  Necessary evils.  We can’t all be selling millions on a cocktail napkin, so we do what we do. 

So there you have it.  Seventeen days later and I’m left with an eighty-two page document ready to be rewritten–

<record-scratching-sound-effect>

–Wait, eighty-two pages?  Shouldn’t a script be somewhere beween 90 – 120? 

Uh-oh.

Yep, I’ve never had a First Draft come in under 130 pages, much less 82, so to steal a phrase. . . “$#it just got real interesting.”

NEXT: The Wrath of the Red Pen (and consequently digging yourself out of a writing hole.)

Writers write. . . and move. . . and live. . . (ep. 8)

“Hello, boys. . . I’m baaaaaack!”  Randy Quaid saving the universe. 

Here we go, here we go. 

After a brief hiatus, ABaHS is back with all new improvements and 100% satisfaction guarantee!  Needless to say, I really didn’t improve anything and since no money was put into it, I suppose you get what you give.  But hypothetically, if you did give some money how are you to get it back?  Take it up with the boss man, because I only work here. . . and am not in the union, so I’m not contractually obligated to listen to your gripes. 

Alright, enough of that.  As you may have read, we went MIA for a few weeks.  Not out of a sense of neglect, but out of a sense of UHAUL!  That’s right, the Batcave is now the Batcave-North.  After a two week delay, ABaHS has moved from plain old Hollywood to Noho.  Really a short move actually, but spread out over the genius idea of two and a half weeks and it seemed like across the country. 

So why the lack of updates?  For lack of a desk, a cable company that couldn’t commit to an appointment for internet access unless it was a week away or a feverish rewrite on an existing script (The Boys of Twilight of which I talked about in my last post in the “In other Words…” section.)  You name it.  All apply. 

That’s not to say the writing didn’t continue, however.  I would have to say the rewrite with BoT came along better than I could have hoped, so we should have some forward momentum with that one in the coming weeks to months. 

So, I’m back with the horror!  ABaHS is looking forward to getting you up to speed with the status and continuing on with the adventure. 

Meanwhile, I want to answer that question everyone always asks.  “Why DO you write?”

Why do writers write?

Because we have to. 

 Next time, the FIRST DRAFT has been completed!!

In other words. . . (ep. 7)

Call it what you will.  Procrastination Station, Procrastination Nation or even suffering from too many Procrastination Libations, it’s something we all suffer from. . . but fortunately not in this case.  While I still don’t have the 3rd and final Act of the Daniel Petrie, Jr. interview up, it’s not without reason.  Mostly it’s due to being out of state vising the lovely land of sky blue waters (Minnesota) and since we’ve already determined I’m a Luddite it was sans laptop.  It’s also due to a feverish rewrite on an existing script of mine. 

I know this is a site of one man’s journey with ONE particular script, however I’m going to have to take a little bit of advice from Dan Petrie at this point.  One of the bits of information and concerns he imparted was the idea that he didn’t want to see the site get bogged down with one general idea.  In other words, the journey from first draft to finished film is an excellent hook, however like any good fisherman will tell you, while it’s good to have one pole resting by your side waiting for the big one to bite, it’s better to have several poles in the area doing the same thing.  A writer MUST have other lines he’s currently working. 

With that said, you’re currently reading what’s going to be a somewhat frequent addition to A Boy and His Script which I’ll file under the ”In other words. . .”  The goal here is to continue monitoring the process of taking a script from draft to draft or through the submission phase, but in most cases it will be a script outside of the initial horror-thriller involved with ABaHS.  In this case, I’m currently going through a rewrite of “The Boys of Twilight,” a script I had placed in the top 100 of Scriptapalooza in ’07.  While the kudos for the top 100 is great, it also tells me “it can be better.”  Recent events have also given me the impression there’s a little heat on the script as well, so I’m getting it up to snuff, as my grandpappy would say. 

So with that said, I’ve fought back the procrastination demons once more (and will even reserve that topic for another posting with ABaHS) and am moving forward with “The Boys of Twilight” (a rewrite which will be completed in the next week.)  After that, the juggling of the moment stops and 100% focus is back on the horror-thriller.  The final part of the Daniel Petrie, Jr. interview will also be posted this week. 

Juggle-juggle-juggle.

Part II of the Daniel Petrie, Jr. Interview (ep. 6)

As “A Boy and His Script” enters week three, we jump right into the second part of the three part Daniel Petrie, Jr. Interview.  For a quick recap of the previous post, Dan gave us a brief history on his screenwriting education deep in the mailroom of ICM, an in-depth comparison of Character vs. Plot and a few tips on the absolute necessity of outlining.  In part II, he gives us the step-by-step though process that became the Plot for The Big Easy, a few of the biggest mistakes any new writer can make and his thoughts on the various tools involving software, seminars and research outlets all at the screenwriter’s disposal. 

So enough of my rambling.  Here is Daniel Petrie, Jr. . . . the second part.

—–

ABaHS: Once you had made up your mind on what genre you wanted to work within, what was your process from that initial idea to a workable outline?  Creatively speaking, how did you decide?

DAN:  One fact was to work in the area of cops and police.  I’ve always been interested in that, which right away gives you the realistic promise of life and death stakes.  Of course, people see cop movies all the time so much so there’s really no need for another unless you have a different angle.  So I thought, “What about a corrupt cop as a hero?”  At that time, this was twenty, twenty-five years ago, we really hadn’t seen that.  [The corrupt cop] also suggested something about the female lead.  Suppose she’s a D.A. or someone who’s investigating police corruption?  Those opposites suggest that it’s both a serious investigation and a romance.  The structure of a romantic comedy and a romantic drama are identical.  It’s just one looks at the emotional conflict and casts a humorous light on it and one’s more heartfelt about the emotion conflict, but the conflicts are basically the same.  Guy meets girl, they fall in love, obstacles, whether they be misunderstandings or people intervening to propel them apart and something that brings them back together in the end.  I thought that [the romance] would make an interesting counterpoint to a cop thriller.  Still, this is a pretty mechanical construction, but sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and see how far you can get with something like this.  I thought further that it’s not a very noble thing to be a corrupt cop, but are there circumstances in which that character could still be sympathetic?  I thought, if the cop is only as corrupt as the environment in which he finds himself, he’s not doing anything worse, but he’s not doing anything better than the other cops and it would really be highly unusual in that city for a cop to be incorruptible. 

“Sometimes you have to take a

leap of faith and see how far

you can get with something like this.”

Then you think, “Okay, that’s got interesting moral ambiguities you can make use of.”  Then, when you think about [the female lead], you think she’d be working in the same environment.  She doesn’t think any of this is right.  She may know the city itself has a level of corruption, but disapproves.  That leads you to think her character is upright, but also has a quality of being morally rigid and inflexible, which is admirable, but comes at a cost.  Whereas, he would be very comfortable with inhabiting this gray area of morality that would inform all areas of his life.  He would be confident, sensual, very at home in his own skin and she’d be uptight.  What if these characteristics are revealed in their sexual lives?  I thought this was an interesting relationship between these two.  So what started as an absolutely rote paint by numbers exercise became gradually over this process something that I regarded as special.  Something that I was tremendously excited by.  It had these qualities that I was looking for.  It was familiar, but really different.  It was originally called “Windy City” and set in Chicago.  We eventually decided to set it in New Orleans as The Big Easy.  It worked very well.  That’s an example of taking what I regard as “half an idea,” teasing it through and ultimately deciding this is good enough. 

ABaHS:  If you still weren’t satisfied after “teasing it through”, would you go back and try to rework the idea?

DAN:  I would tend to put it aside if I had really given it the whole college try of going through what associations I had with it. 

ABaHS:  When starting a new script, what do you think is the biggest mistake a writer can make?

DAN:  One of the great things about my own accidental education of becoming a writer was that in order to get out of the mailroom at ICM you had to be a reader, which got you closer to becoming an agent.  So, I’m reading scripts that I simply didn’t have access to.  The scripts I did have access to before were only the good scripts.  Robert Towne, Paddy Chayefsky.  That’s quite daunting and you think, “Jesus, I can’t do that.”  When you’re a reader at an agency you’re reading the scripts as they come in.  These are people who aren’t represented yet and haven’t managed to get an introduction where an agent is eagerly reading the scripts themselves.  That can give a young writer a lot of confidence, because you almost immediately think, “If I can make an effort to spell, I can outclass a great many of these.” 

“If I can make an effort to spell,

I can outclass a great many of these.”

Also, one thing that was quickly revealed is that I found people didn’t really either know or have enough of a rigorous sense about what it actually takes to accomplish what you’re trying to accomplish.  I would hear confirmations of that from the horse’s mouth, from people seeking representation.  I would read a script and think there’s some talent being shown by this writer, but it seems like the story isn’t that well thought out and I’d hear things like, “I figured it was a first draft and if someone’s interested enough they’ll tell me how to rewrite it.”  I though, wow, this is an industry that has overfull employment.  If you want to break into the business you have to write a great script, it can’t just be a good script and certainly it has to be the best that you can do.

“If you want to break into the business 

you have to write a great script,

it can’t just be a good script.”

I would constantly see scripts that would reveal in their first pages a lack of sophistication of the structure of a screenplay.  Aristotle famously promulgated the structure of a drama as that which has a beginning, middle and an end and before the beginning there is nothing.  Many of the screenplays would begin with nothing.  Meaning before the events of the story start taking place.  If you read a lot of scripts you may read some that begin with an alarm clock going off and the character wakes up, goes and makes coffee and usually there’s a funny bit about the coffee grounds that reveals character on how messy their kitchen is or whether they’re neatniks or whatever.  They get dressed and go to work, but really nothing is going on.  They just don’t know where to begin the story.  So literally they have the character waking up on the day that something is going to happen.  The ACTUAL beginning of the story.  That wouldn’t be so bad if that was THE mistake and just fixing that by lopping off those extraneous five pages fixes it, instead they’re usually indicative of a far larger problem involving material that belongs in a first act that isn’t in the first act or adversaries aren’t being introduced until page eighty.  The lack of understanding and lack of structure just compounds and compounds itself.  I happen to think really understanding screenplay structure is vital.  It doesn’t mean you can’t intelligently break the rules or do something radical, but that’s a helluva lot better when done deliberately.  Done out of laziness or ignorance isn’t that exciting. 

“I happen to think really understanding

screenplay structure is vital.”

ABaHS:  Would you attribute a lot of that laziness or ignorance to the explosion of software, seminars and generally everybody promising to teach you how to write a great script, but not focusing on getting everything in order first, the pre-script/outline process?  In other words, know what you’re doing before sitting down to write?

DAN:  I don’t know.  I remember the day when there was no screenwriting software per se.  You had to use adjunct programs to format your script after the fact or you’d use add-on macros.  It was very difficult to do all the production things.  But that’s just a word processing thing to get the right format.  It does nothing. 

I would divide screenwriting education into two camps.  I think people can get a lot of value out of all of them.  There’s one camp epitomized by Robert McKee, Truby, where these things are generally quite pricey and because of that they promise to reveal “the answer.”  For commercial reasons they’re trying to take screenwriting and mystify it and tell you these are the mystical incantations that will give you the key.  There’s another school represented by the books of many experienced screenwriting teachers.  Richard Walter and Lew Hunter of UCLA and some of the people from USC who are doing their best to demystify screenwriting by taking sophisticated concepts and trying to put them into the most simple terms they can.  They’ll talk about the sequence and the beginning of the first act, etc. in more everyday language.  I think you can get something good out of all of it, so long as you don’t become a slave to any of it.  But you can probably tell I have a bias towards the people trying to demystify the process.

“I think you can get something good

out of all of it, so long as you don’t

become a slave to any of it.”

I often find it incredibly useful to think about the screenplay I have in progress or outline and think about it in THE MOST BASIC TERMS.  Is the climax a climax, does the end of the second act reflect the characteristics of that, is it the end of the middle and the beginning of the end?  That is so valuable to me. 

ABaHS:  And this is ually done with outlining or when you’re writing the first draft?

DAN:  Oh, no, this is outlining.  And I’ll outline in Acts.  I’ll very deliberately use the Acts instead of a beat sheet.  I’ll use a format where you’re doing an outline that they taught you in school.  Big headings, smaller headings beneath, because usually when you’re working out a plot there are scenes, sequences, Acts that you kind of know fully and some you don’t have any clue about.  The ones you have no clue about and some you have full detail on might be equally important,  but if you look at a beat sheet that is, “He walks down the street in front of a bank,” has equal value with “Final Action Sequence.”  What helps keep everything in proportion is whether you have instead of the linear listing of beats the  [Act outline] in big headings.  Act I.  The second level down is “The Bank Robbery” or “The First Bank Robbery” and then below that is “Casing the Joint.”  Below that is “Character walks in front of the bank.”  And you have this thing fully worked out in your mind.  By doing it with this outline you can also choose to see only certain headings.  Eventually you get there.

—-

Next time. . . Act III . . . the climax.