The Zombie badwagon

I wrote my zombie script after World War Z came out, but before Zombieland. I wrote it to be a writing sample, because it requires a huge budget, and at the time nobody was making zombie movies with huge budgets except Resident Evil, and Resident Evil doesn't count because it's a video game.

I'm not saying I invented zombies, just that I wrote big budget zombies when nobody was writing big budget zombies. Except the guys from Zombieland, I guess. They probably thought up that script before I wrote mine. But whatever, I still wrote my first draft before I even knew about that script.

So anyway I wrote Not Dead Yet and it got me the attention it was supposed to. Some cool industry people read it, or at least got the opportunity to read it. Two of the people who could have done something with it may never have cracked it open, or if they did I never heard about it. But anyway, it made the rounds and got me a little attention. So I thought that was pretty good for a big budget zombie movie.

Then came Zombieland. And then Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, and now Boyscouts vs Zombies and Zombies Vs Gladiators are making the rounds, and despite wanting to read those things, I also have been annoyed that I made my script have too high a budget even for big budget movies.

I was riding this wave before there was a damn wave. Which makes me think that although I am happy to have a great writing sample, I wish I had made a great writing sample that also could double as something I could sell.

Checkpoint

In the beginning you can write whatever you want, you know? If it sounds good, fuck it. Let those words fly. Don't worry about what's commercial or interesting to other people, just write for you. It doesn't matter because nobody's buying this anyway.

But then you get tired of writing stuff that sucks so you say to yourself, "Self, write something good," and then you do. And so what if it's not the most original idea? And so what if the budget is ridiculously huge in a genre such as zombie films with their tiny little budgets? This script shows what you can do as a writer. Everybody says so.

But people sort of wish you had something a little more original. So you say to yourself, "Self, write something really original. But still good." And you go off an put together such genre twisting elements you're just pleased as punch at the glorious piece you've concocted. Nobody has ever written anything this bold and daring in the action genre, surely the world will be clamoring for your marvelous new script.

Then your manager points out that you have written a martial arts period piece starring a woman in an inter-racial relationship who fights on the side of the Confederacy. Not what the boys are clamoring for on the studio lots. Do you pull it off? Heck yeah. Will anybody buy it? Only if they're super duper awesome. But do you really need a second writing sample? Not really.

So then you say to yourself, "Self, perhaps it's time to write something someone will want to make," and you set to work on that modern-day chase story that can be made for a low budget and a high star power and appeals to everybody. And you hope your manager doesn't give up on you before you finish.

Scriptshadow's logline contest

So as many of you guys already know, Carson picked his top ten loglines.

In case you haven't heard about this yet, Scriptshadow, the guy who reviews a screenplay a day and who's blog you should be reading if you are serious about the craft, put up a contest to select a good screenplay from among his readers. First, you submit your logline and he picks 10 he'd like to read. Then, you submit your first ten pages or a one-page synopsis and he picks 25 of those he'd like to read. Then you submit your whole screenplay and he picks his top three.

Guess whose logline he picked in his top 100? Memememe!

Here is my logline:

Twenty years after the zombie apocalypse wipes out life as they know it, a pair of survivors learns they are not alone, and must fix their issues to protect their warrior children on a dangerous journey by boat to save a woman who may be the key to reviving humanity.

Now here's the thing. I know I don't have the world's most original idea. It's not a high concept script by any means, and up next to all those other loglines it looks really boring.

Take this logline for a script by Josh Eanes called Humans!:

In a world populated by sentient zombies, an outbreak of humans threatens the lives of two ordinary zombie youths, as does an increasingly chaotic military response.

Or this one, by Mike Rinaldi titled In the Heat of the Dead of Night:

A Southern town divided by racism, intolerance, and William Faulkner must come together to survive an invasion of the walking dead and the only man who can unite them is a compulsive necrophiliac.

My heart kind of sunk when I saw those because let's face it, they're more clever than mine. I want to read them. I want to see them on screen.

So that brings up the old discussion about concept vs execution. These two scripts are terrific concepts that announce their potential up front. Mine is a story not unlike some we've seen. So when Carson reads our scripts, I'm curious to see how strongly the idea figures into his decision. It could very well be that all three zombie scripts are strong, but let's say one is not - will the idea save it? I don't know. I'm interested to find out.

I'm not sure I stand much of a chance anyway, since I just discovered that the screenplay I consider the best I ever read, Tonight, He Comes, is one Carson thinks is stupid.

Still, it's a cool exercise and I'm sort of amazed that Carson has taken all this work on himself. I'm also pleased to see not only a pro you probably know already - William Martell - in the list, but also a 19-year-old writer. It doesn't matter who you are, an idea's an idea, and all ideas are welcome. It's going to be pretty neat to see the development of where the clever ideas leave off and the great scripts take over.

It's hard out there for a zombie

Dear Emily,

Thank you for entering Not Dead Yet into the 16th Annual Austin Film Festival Screenplay Competition. I want to thank you for sharing your work with us. I know there are a myriad competitions out there and I value your decision to submit to ours.

The competition received nearly 4,000 entries this year. The quality of the entries was remarkable. Every year we strive to maintain a level playing field which is why we make sure each and every script is read more than once. However, judging art at this level is a very difficult process and one that is, by nature, subjective.

Regretfully, I must inform you that your screenplay did not advance to the Second Round in the Drama category. Don't let this discourage you. Your writing talent and the viability of your script in the marketplace are not subject to the outcome of a competition. I encourage you to continue working to get your script recognized. Competitions are a good start, but don't stop there. This is an industry that demands persistence.

The Austin Film Festival and I wish you all the best in your continued efforts, and we hope that we can continue to be a resource for you in the future.

Thank you,
Alex McPhail
Screenplay and Teleplay Competition Director
Austin Film Festival

The Nicholl Fellowship again, or, Oh Goddamit.

July 28, 2009

Dear Emily,

With a record number of entries and a readily apparent increase in quality, this year’s Nicholl Fellowships was more competitive than in any previous year. Now that scores have been tallied for all 6,380 entries, we have to inform too many writers of scripts featuring compelling stories, intriguing characters and excellent craft that they have not advanced into the next round. Regrettably, Not Dead Yet was not one of the 321 entries selected as a Quarterfinalist in the 2009 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting.

You should realize that while we strive to make the evaluation of screenplays as objective a process as possible, it is inherently both a personal and an extremely subjective matter. A lack of success here may not have any bearing on your reception in the marketplace where a sale is the ultimate measure of success. I’ll even venture a prediction: several non-advancing writers will become professional screenwriters in the near future.

To tell you a little about the process: each script was read once. After receiving an initial positive evaluation, over 2,700 scripts garnered a second read. Just under 800 scripts were read a third time. Each read resulted in a numerical score being awarded. Scores for each entrant's script were totaled, and the Quarterfinalists were selected on the basis of highest scores.

Early next year, we'll send you a link to a 2010 application form, which will include a list of the recipients of the 2009 Fellowships. Results will be posted online at www.oscars.org/nicholl in November.

Best of luck with all your future endeavors.

Sincerely,

Greg Beal
Director
Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting

PS: Your script received two positive reads in the first round but finished outside of the top 1000 entries.



Well Goddamit.

You and I shall meet again, Nicholl. And next time, you won't be so lucky.


ADDED: I've noticed that in the past couple of hours a lot of people have come here searching for info about the Nicholl Fellowship, mainly who the quarterfinalists are. The list is not revealed until the finalists have been chosen. Any other questions, feel free to post them in the comments and I will find you the answer.

Why I worry about Zombieland

If you haven't yet seen the trailer for Zombieland, watch it. It's both funny and explodey, just like the screenplay. It looks like they've changed a few things but for once it looks like most of the greatest bits of the screenplay made it to the screen.

I'll be there opening night because this is right up my alley. A little too much up my alley, unfortunately.

The more I think about this movie, the more nervous I get. One of the reasons I switched from TV to film was because I was tired of constantly having to create new material when two weeks after I wrote a spec it became outdated. A film script never goes out of style, right?

Yeah. Well when I first wrote Not Dead Yet nobody had really embraced action over horror in a zombie flick. Even Resident Evil and 28 Days Later are still by and large horror films. Well maybe not that last Resident Evil movie. I'm not sure exactly what that's supposed to be.

But even though zombies are obviously nothing new, I was at least taking it to a place nobody had really thoroughly explored. It was about a post apocalyptic zombie world where people had to learn to survive because this is how it is, not more humans anywhere. And then one group of humans finds another group of humans in California.

I thought I was going to have to worry about being a copy cat of World War Z, but that appears to be mired in preproduction.

Instead, it was Zombieland that may render me impotent. A story about a couple of guys in a post-apocalyptic zombie world who find another pair of survivors as hijinks ensue. And more importantly, it's straight action, barely any horror at all.

This one's a comedy. Nobody would ever call mine a comedy, but no matter what I do it will look like I'm a shadow of Zombieland. If I had a lower budget, I could sell my script as a knockoff to one of those companies that likes riding the trends. That is, if Zombieland is successful. If it's not successful, nobody will want to touch my screenplay because clearly zombie action flicks are a bad investment.

But I have a huge budget so I can't even sell my script as a cheap copy. I could try to offer it as a sequel, but it's not nearly funny enough so I'd have to rewrite it big time, and that's unlikely to matter anyway because that's dependent on a ton of factors out of my control.

In other words, I have until October. When Zombieland hits, I think I may be out of opportunities with Not Dead Yet. It's still a good work sample, which was its original purpose anyway, but with all the zombie scripts on the market these days, I'm worried about getting thrown aside by a zombie-fatigued reader.

The Beefcake says I worry too much. About everything, not just this, which I find interesting since I am a consummate optimist. I am an oxymoron.

Anyhow, it's just another reminder of why I need to get off my ass and finish my next project. I wrote a screenplay since Not Dead Yet but I don't like it, so I need this one to be good.

I guess I should stop writing here and go write over there.

Geographical updates

Interesting weekend. Everybody survived.

Saturday The Beefcake's parents took us to a historical landmark. Not only had I been to this landmark before, but I used it as a backdrop for Not Dead Yet. When I first went there I wasn't thinking of turning it into a zombie lair - it was only later when I was planning my screenplay that it occurred to me that it made a terrific location for the story. I didn't take pictures or anything so I wrote it all from memory.

So Saturday since we were taking the same tour I had already taken, I looked around and figured out what I got wrong. And I got several things wrong.

I was pretty damn close on a few scenes, and nothing I wrote is disastrously off, but I saw about five things I need to change to make the story more accurate to its location. It's all a sentence here or two, fortunately, so it won't adjust page count, and a couple of changes will actually make the scene stronger.

It was neat to walk around and ignore the tour guide lady's rambling about art and shit while I tuned to the Beefcake and asked "Hey do you think you could shoot a zombie from that bell tower or is it too high?"

I wonder if anyone else on our tour heard my weird questions. I was wearing my "Zombies only want you for your brains" T-Shirt so they probably thought I was just some crazy zombie lady. Which I am.

Sex scenes

This week, Mystery Man posted a long, interesting article about sex on film, and it made me think about my own relationship with sex scenes.

Simply put, I don't have one.

I am all about gunfire and fist fights and explosions and whatnot, but I very rarely bother with a sex scene, and when I do it's usually just the foreplay.

My mom taught me about the birds and bees when I was 3, 6, 8, 12, and 15. Nudity was not something to be ashamed of in my house and I was always told the truth as far as my mother knew it. For that I am grateful. I'm really glad to be out of an abstinence only school system so I can honestly answer kids' questions too. It's appalling what they don't know.

Mistaken theories I have dispelled over the years:
-You cannot get an STD from oral sex
-Girls do not have orgasms
-You can get AIDS from a toilet seat
-There is no such thing as a morning after pill
-Condoms don't really do anything

And probably a lot more, but that's all I can remember off the top of my head. The point is, I'm not afraid of sex or talking about sex.

But too much sex on film makes me uncomfortable.

When I think of the great sex scenes I've seen over the years, they're almost always on TV - the scene where Buffy and Spike screw the house to the ground, the scene where Sidney and Vaughn finally bump and grind while she's making dinner, the scene where Chrichton and Aeryn Sun couldn't keep their hands off each others' leather-clad bodies when they were drugged by vapors. These are my favorite scenes because I wanted for so long for these people to get together. I feel that electricity when they finally hook up because I've been craving it the same way they have.

In most movies, a sex scene is there.... well, I don't know why. The sex scene in Desperado is ridiculous. It's all candles and sweat and crazy positions and basically a porn movie except they met like three days ago. And in Matrix Reloaded, there is an entire chapter that is nothing but orgy in Zion and sex between Trinity and Neo in their bedroom. An entire chapter. Nothing happens but sex for an entire chapter. It's just not necessary. In fact, it's freaking boring.

So in my own writing I often forget about sex. I wrote Not Dead Yet, which is largely a love story between a married couple in the middle of serious problems, and I didn't have any sex scenes. My awesome friend who gave me such excellent advice pointed this out, suggesting I have two zombies have sex with each other.

Although that is a super nifty idea, that wasn't the way I wanted to go here, but he was right that I should have a sex scene given how much violence I've put into this story.

I thought and thought and realized there are these two other characters who are also having marital problems but I haven't had a lot of scenes with them together until the end when we're supposed to get this big emotional reaction from the end of their relationship.

So I put in a sex scene. Tasteful, emotional, and showing character development. And in the end it actually made the final scene between the couple a ton better. I made sure to show some boobs so the boys would have something to look at, but I tried the make the most out of a tender moment gone wrong in the bedroom, a moment that would payoff later in the story. I felt pretty good about the results.

Now the story I'm writing is like 80% love story and this couple definitely has sex. In fact, the moment they have sex is a freaking huge deal, so I've got to figure out how to write it to take the most advantage of the physicality. I'm not sure how I'm going to do it yet. I'll probably need some help because although I know how to make people fight each other to the death beautifully, I'm not so sure how to make them love each other.

See my pitch

Want to see me pitch?

Go to www.pitchq.com and click on my face. Search for Not Dead Yet. Then you have to type NDY09 into the place for the guest code.

I'm giving out pretty much the entire story here, but as I've said before, I'm not too worried with stealing. Nonetheless, be cool, yo. Come up with your own zombie story if you want to. Mine's original.

Also, today is my last day of vacation. I'm going to the beach.

This is the end

I am just super excited. I said to myself long ago when I first started Not Dead Yet that this was the script that finally got me started. I felt that way because of how much smoother the process was, and how much more fun. And now that things are happening - well, I'm pretty much jumping out of my skin every moment of the day. Every time I see I have a new email I'm wondering if it's one of the people in high places.

Yes I know many things could still go wrong, but I'm annoyingly optimistic. But don't worry. The Beefcake is like King Pessimism so he keeps me from floating off into the atmosphere. I keep him from going on a killing spree.

I've gotten a few notes from people - no major changes, but an occasional observation about a minor change that might help my chances. One of my favorite notes was that I don't NEED the changes. This thing can sell as is. But the changes might help get it done faster.

That's shit you want to hear.

The funny thing is, when I started this I never imagined it would sell. I mean, it would be great, don't get me wrong. Money and a movie and launching a career and all that. But this is an expensive film and most people think of zombies as cheap, so I never thought anyone would want to buy it. But a few people in the know have indicated that it could indeed sell.

I'd also like to give thanks to World War Z. It makes it easy for me to point to a zombie action film and prove that this is a viable concept. It's supposed to come out next year and if it does well I'm in like Flynn. If it tanks I am screwed.

But that's a year from now.

Anyhow, one note that resonated with me the most, and the one I immediately set out to correct, was my ending. More than one person has remarked that it's REALLY depressing. It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to be bittersweet, but that's evidently not coming across, and some readers feel a bit let down.

So I said "But in Dawn of the Dead they end up thinking they're safe until they're attacked by a horde of zombies. And in Night of the Living Dead everybody dies."

Except those are horror movies, and as I am so fond of telling people, this is not a horror film. It's an action film.

And before you get all "But it has zombies!" Yeah well Twilight has vampires. So shut up.

I can't be a hypocrite. I can't keep going on about how my story is an action film and then ignore one of the staples of the action genre - the stabilized ending. Action films don't always have a happy ending, but they're Shakespearean. They always end with a king on the throne. And my ending left things all out of balance and hopeless.

So I added four lines of dialogue in various places and that's all it took. Now when the producers who pick it up read it they won't be quite as depressed. I still don't do happy endings, but at least this one won't quite make you want to slit your wrists as you leave the theater.

The only annoying thing is that it made the script go from 112-113 pages. One hundred thirteen is a prime number. My OCD senses are aggravated, but it's worth it if my script sells or gets me a job just a little bit faster.

Pitching at Pitch Q

So first of all, I finally have a script in circulation. In the past, the only people who read my scripts were friends or other writers or contest people who rejected me. Now people who don't already know me and aren't being paid actually want to read Not Dead Yet.

So now I have officially passed from being a douchebag who sits on her couch and writes screenplays to a douchebag who sits on her couch and practices pitching.

Speaking of pitching, Sunday I had the good fortune to visit Mel Scott at Pitch Q headquarters in a prime spot on Hollywood Boulevard. Pitch Q is a site where you can upload a video of your pitch. If you're in town, Mel will record your pitch at his office. So I did that.

First, a disclaimer. Mel is a personal friend. Even if he wasn't I would still have considered this a worthwhile activity, and I speak the truth here because I'm pretty big on integrity. Still, I thought you should know.

Anyway...

Just like most writers, I hate being in front of the camera. I'm okay if I have a script and a part to play, but ad libbing while staring at the camera makes me nervous as hell. And this was a scenario where I couldn't screw up. The pitch is recorded in one long take, and if you screw up you have to start over. And I screwed up a few times.

I apologized, but Mel told me his record so far is like 89 takes, so I didn't feel that bad. And he let me take my shoes off. If I'm wearing shoes, I am not comfortable. I have a feeling I will one day be known as that girl who takes her shoes off during pitch meetings.

Anyway, I tried picturing a friend behind the camera but then I got distracted by my wandering brain, so I tried again and got distracted by worrying that I wasn't saying everything right, so Mel taped my logline to the chair in front of me. But I still screwed up.

Then I got all the way through it and didn't know how to end. My last words in the pitch were "So it's kind of depressing."

Mel gave me a few pointers.

I shook it out. I thought to myself, Self, you do this every day. You're a teacher. If you can tell a story to a class full of teenagers, you can tell your own story to a camera.

And that's what I did. I turned on teacher mode, imagined my class in front of me and just ran through the story like I was in front of my board. I used hand gestures and went "Boooom!" when the explosions happened and I did some asides and said "Yay!" when good things happened and at the end it was pretty awesome. Mel said I wouldn't get any better than that. He even seemed to be pretty moved emotionally by my story.

My zombie story.

You hear that, haters?

I felt pretty damn good after that, even if I did tell my story at like 80 miles an hour. I think I did something like 6 takes. And now that I've done it once in front of a friend, I think I'll be completely okay doing it in front of some strangers.

Now I have the option of putting it on the site for only producers, or allowing writers to see it. So we'll see what happens next.

How do I sound as awesome as I am?

As I walked down a nearby street on my way home from getting some shit notarized, I began to think about my script and I realized I'm going to sell it. It was totally a Secret power of positive thinking kind of new wave enthusiasm moment, but I was pretty jazzed. I realized we could buy a $500,000 house instead of a $300,000 house and I could take some jujitsu lessons and quit my job and be a bazillionaire and finally land that adaptation I've been dying to work on since I read the book once in grad school. It was a pretty cool moment, realizing I was a winner.

Then I got home and wrote up my query letter to this one manager I know who reads all his query letters. I wanted to open it with "OMG you are so gonna make some money off this script because it's awesome," but that just made me sound like an idiot. Because even if it's true, bragging about how awesome you are just makes you look like a moron and everybody hates you.

So how do you get your shit to stand out? Obviously it has to have a great logline, but really a monkey could write a great logline and still produce a crappy script, and a great script might not have the world's greatest logline. I've worked on mine for a while and I feel pretty good about it, but since I have to mention the word "zombie" anyone reading it will immediately picture a B movie with some half naked, bloody bimbo lurching toward other less bloody bimbos. I made sure to mention the explosions and the flame thrower and the tidal wave, but I don't know if that's enough to get the interest going.

I did my whole "Emily Blake the blogger" persona thing where I say a lot of "anyway"s and "okay, so"s but that sounded amateur too.

End the end I said I thought zombies were the bee's knees and if you like zombies and explosions and exploding zombies at all you'll like my script.

What do you put in a query letter?

Research

Starting a new script means research. Unless you're writing an autobiographical number, which nobody should ever do EVER unless your name is Antoine Fisher, you're gonna need to look some stuff up.

I wrote a script once about these brothers who were all thieves and they had to pick locks and crack safes. I tried to find as much info as I could but it's some very technical stuff and I'm not so good at technical stuff. And then I wrote about three brothers but I don't actually have any brothers, so I really didn't know what the hell I was writing about. I tried to write another script about an assassin for the mob but I don't know anything about that and I tried to research but it's pretty hard to find anything accurate about being a hitman. I read this one book that claimed to be accurate but I'm not so sure, so most of what I know comes from other movies. And we all know what happens when you base a movie on other movies.

Not Dead Yet worked because I needed to research only one thing: the Great Lakes. I put most of my events in familiar settings, but the route my characters had to take to get from one place to another was not one I have taken. So I met with Ex Boyfriend at the now defunct Doughboys and we went carefully over how canal locks work and what cities are on the route my characters needed to take and whatnot.

And because I took the time to make certain I knew what I was writing about the story was easy. It was sort of an epiphany of common sense. Hey, there, if you know what the characters know you can probably write them better.

Lucky for me, my new script is on a subject in which my mother is an expert, so when she visited I plopped down on the couch with her and got out my notebook. I explained my story and she immediately jumped into action. A little too immediately. She practically wrote my whole story and now she's probably going to sue me for story credit.

Now I'm just going to read this book I got from Amazon and let the rest of the story jump out at me as I read. And as soon as I feel 100% confident with my level of knowledge on the subject, that's when I know it's time to crank that sucker out.

Confidence

So after I forget how long of working on it - like a million years, I think - I'm calling Not Dead Yet officially ready for human consumption. The original version was okay, but now with the rewrite and the help of a mysterious friend, it's considerably better - better to the point where I feel confident sending it out.

I have two connections who are willing to read it and actually have the ability to get it sold or sent out as a work sample, so I sent it off to them. Of course I'm all confident and happy and love my script and - OH MY GOD I THINK THERE'S A TYPO ON PAGE 75!

It's this weird thing where no matter how much validation or confidence you have, the second you hit "send" on the email you start to freak out and wonder if you should have changed that one word on that one page to something more interesting. And what about the story? Should I have killed more people? Is the dialogue too on the nose? Is it not clear enough?

I started to go through the script again and worry that maybe I should have taken some of the advice I decided against, but then I remembered what a friend of mine read me yesterday. She read me this post from Billy Mernit's blog and I began to breathe.

He says that the most important thing in a script is for you to get the reader to identify with the main character. Even if the writing is not as crisp and clean as the gurus say, do you get involved emotionally? Do you care? Then it's a good script.

The same friend who read me that is a writer of Romcoms. I said I'd like her to read my script because if she likes my zombie script then I know it's a good script because she's not over the moon about zombies. And she said "What do you want me to look for as I read?"

And I said, "If you stop reading, tell me why."

Really that's all there is to it. A script is good if you like it. There are ways to work on your writing style and word choices and all that specific stuff they teach you in class, but in the end if a script keeps you awake and makes you want to read the next page, that's all that matters. That doesn't mean you shouldn't give a shit about grammar and form and the rest because those things are all part of making a script more readable - plus there's so much ambiguity in screenwriting already, why not do the one thing you know you can get right? But the key is always the story.

I know my story is good. And once in a writer's group meeting another group member told me that in my pharmacy scene he really thought my protagonist was going to die and he was worried.

Well that's all you really need, isn't it? If he actually thought I was about to kill my lead and he didn't want her to die? I'm satisfied with that.

So I'm just going to have to remember that when I hit "send" on the email to that William Morris agent the Beefcake knows.

[EDIT] I'm not actually trying to prove I have confidence by having someone read my script and tell me whether or not it's good. Having confidence means you don't need someone to tell you if it's good. You already know it is.