The kind of script you should be writing

I'm going to try as much as I can and without causing myself trouble, to blog about things I'm learning that nobody told me about when I was hunting for a rep.

Today, I'm going to talk about the biggest challenge ever: THE NEXT BIG IDEA. People will often tell you to write commercial, but they don't tell you what else you need to write. Just having one good script is not enough. You need to show that you can continue to produce work the town will want to read, and hopefully buy.

So I've got a script worth reading. Heck, I've got two scripts worth reading. I'm taking meetings, working my thing, getting introduced to the town.

Meanwhile, I have to figure out what to write next. Those ideas I've been saving up for years on little color coded index cards? USELESS.

When you're on your own you can write whatever you want. Want to write a Civil War martial arts story? Knock yourself out. Passion can drives your work. You write the idea that excites you the most.

Once you start building a career, you write the idea that excites you the most but which also 1) has a commercial concept, 2) fits within the genre of your previous work, and 3) can have a star in the lead role so you can make attachments.

Never underestimate the importance of a star vehicle. When you're writing a script to get the attention of a rep, you need something that will attract a star, and not just one or two stars. If the only person who can star in your movie is The Rock, it's going to be a hard sell. What happens if he's not available, or if he doesn't want to do an action movie right now? You're stuck.

So the best thing you can do to get noticed is write something commercial with a lead who is a white male in his early 30s. Then write another one.

This is a lot harder than it sounds. That's where I am now, trying to beat out an idea that fits that criteria and has obvious potential to make money. I think getting my masters degree was easier.

Thoughts on the film: Haywire

I liked Haywire, and here's why:

It was refreshing to see the camera lay back and let the star do all the work during action scenes. We've come to expect our action scenes to have a zillion cuts, largely so we don't notice the big stunt double who's doing all the tough stuff in between close-ups of the beautiful star's face looking intense. In this movie, there was no need for the star to have a stunt double do all the work, so we got to watch the pure action scene without cutting in and out and back and forth and shaky-cammed to death.

She looked like she could kick ass, she acted like she could kick ass. I felt like Gina Carano's acting was just fine as long as she had something to do, although the scenes when she was sitting still and talking were not so good. Anything that took place inside a car was cringe-worthy.

BUT-

The MOS stuff in Barcelona was terrific, and for once I actually liked Channing Tatum, and you just can't beat those action scenes. I'm jealous of how well that woman can move her body to kick major ass.


Is it a perfect movie? Definitely not. I barely understood the plot, and the parts I did understand had some serious holes, but it was shot beautifully and clean. No extra bullshit. I wish more action movies were shot that way, because sometimes I feel like the constant movement of the camera is trying to make me think there's more going on here than there is. I loved that in one scene, Carano was just running after a guy. Just running, trying to catch him, doing what a woman like that would actually do. It wasn't super fancy. It was just straight up, old school running.

The problem is, the marketing made you think this was a Bourne movie with a chick. It's not. The premise is similar, but the shooting style is vastly different, and if you went in expecting Bourne you'd be angry at what you got. That's probably why audiences responded so poorly.

I'm sad about the audience response, but at least nobody can blame the weekend on a strong female protagonist. Thank you, Underworld 4. And Haywire will make its investment back because of its low budget. Hopefully this was a great introduction to Carano and we will see more of her soon. I'd write something for her in a heart beat if the job came up.

Go to Haywire.

This has been an insanely busy week. I had a doctor's appointment on Tuesday to get started on therapy for my wrist, I had a walk through with the caterer Wednesday to plan for the wedding, I had a studio meeting on Thursday, and in between I've been managing a big sales push for yearbooks at work, so I haven't had any time to actually sit down all week. I had a whole slew of blog posts planned and no time to write them.

The more stuff I have to do, the more wired I become. I'm sure by the time I walked into the office on the lot yesterday I looked like a cocaine addict. I hope I wasn't too frightening.

Tonight's activity is Haywire.

Haywire. Go see it, everybody.

As of this writing, it's got 84% on Rotten Tomatoes. Hey, that's good! It's got an ass kicking chick who actually knows how to fight. Did you see that arm bar she pulled on Channing Tatum in the first five minutes? Textbook. Don't know what an arm bar is? You don't have to! It's still awesome to look at!

Like Ewan MacGregor? This movie has that!

If this movie does well, cool options open up for me. If this movie does not do well, I've got an uphill climb with some of my projects. So believe me, I'm completely self-centered when I say please, everyone, go see this kick ass movie. You know you want to. You've been thinking about it. You said to yourself, hey, maybe I want to see that tear jerker about the kid and his dad and whatever? No, you don't. That kid doesn't even punch anybody in the face in that movie.

Remember how George Lucas has betrayed you? Yeah, you don't want to go through that again.

Underworld is okay, but we all know the fourth of anything isn't all that great.

So go see Haywire, because it's awesome, and also because seriously go see this movie.

Meetings: Part 1

Now is the time when I go to meetings. I haven't done too many yet; I hope to fill my calendar with them in the coming year. These are great meetings because I'm just going in to chat with people, make sure we like each other, see if they have any projects for which I'd be a good fit.

Driving on a studio lot is cool. I've been on the Warner Brothers lot before as somebody's guest at one of those bi-annual sales where they sell off all the shit left over from old TV shows and movies, but I've never been on a lot in any kind of official capacity.

So when I drove on a lot the other day, I admit I got a little giddy. I've seen enough movies to know how you're supposed to act, so I just pretended this was like any other day for me when I told the guards where I was headed. It's a nice feeling when your name is on a list. And not a list of people who've been banned from Putt putt for climbing the fake rocks.

Anyway, I took the water like everybody else, but the problem with drinking water during a meeting in an unfamiliar place is that I always have to ask where the bathroom is. And in all that talk about water bottles, here's something nobody ever mentioned before: Tip the valet a dollar. I had to ask some guy who was standing next to me waiting for his car.

I've got another meeting this week - thankfully within a short distance of my house this time so I won't be in traffic for an hour, not that I mind, then another at the end of the month. I'm excited about both meetings, and I hope they shove another one in there soon.

Meanwhile, I'm writing, writing, writing, and finding ways to avoid grading papers.

A few general thoughts on reps

Having a rep is amazing, but as I learned last time I had a manager, it does not guarantee any kind of success. Their job is to give you opportunities. Your job is to make the most of those opportunities.

Reps sign you on because they think you can make them money. They can get your career going. The few I've dealt with have struck me as people who love getting excited about working with someone they believe has talent, and that excitement is contagious. Your job, as an unrepped writer, is to get that excitement going over you.

But there are different kinds of reps. If you don't know about hip pocketing, that's when the rep doesn't do any work on your behalf, but if you need someone to submit for you, they'll do it. So let's say you're at a party and you meet a studio exec. You pitch him an idea, he likes it, tells your rep to send it over. That's when you call your hip pocketing agent to send that requested script over. And maybe if he likes you enough, or if you show signs of promise, he'll decide to fully represent you.

Any "agent" or "manager" who wants money up front is a fraud. Period. I don't care how much they gush over you. They are full of shit and you shouldn't do business with them.

There are plenty of stories of reps who sign a writer then forget about them. It happens quite a lot, actually. But as a very successful A-lister once told me, a rep who never calls is not a rep. If you end up with a rep who hasn't contacted you in months, break it off. They're not interested in you. Remember the excitement the like to feel? As soon as they lose that sense of excitement, you've lost them.

But it's not the end of the world if you have to fire a rep, even if you have to go back to being without one for a while. Sometimes it's not a good fit. I know plenty of successful writers who've been through three or four reps until they found the right one, and I know successful writers who stuck with the first one they landed. It's different for everybody.

But the important thing is, no matter who is representing you, keep working. Bust your ass, do what they say, and maybe you can keep that excitement going. That's where I am now: busting my ass to take advantage of the opportunities I'm being given.

And now, the busying

You guys are amazing. I actually had to block off a couple of hours on Friday morning just to respond to all the nice emails and posts and tweets.

I figured I'd at least have a couple of people making snide comments, but it was all positive. All people who are happy for me. That was great.

The nature of this blog will probably change now, but I think it will be helpful to chronicle as much as I can the journey as it happens. I can't go into any specific or name any names, but I can talk in general terms about what I encounter.

I had a rep before, but I didn't have this kind of attention, so now I'm bracing myself for the amount of work I have to do. Obtaining a rep is step one; Step two is taking advantage of the opportunities with which they provide you.

I have to come up with my next project, which is a lot harder than you'd think. I was working on a Civil War martial arts story. That is obviously nixed for the time being, because while you're fucking around on your own, your dream project is all well and good, but when you're trying to build a career, you need to write material more than three people would pay to see. I'll go back to that script some day. It will be my Inception.

In the meantime, I must come up with something commercial that fits the kind of work I consistently want to write. I had a lot of ideas I'd been saving over the years, none of which are good enough for this task. So I'm in the process of developing something new. I'm also revising an old script to get it up to par.

This week I start taking general meetings. I've had one of these meetings ever, so I'm still really green on meeting etiquette. But I'm not worried. If I can make 46 juniors read a novel silently in a classroom, I can probably handle a polite conversation with a studio exec.

But I am busy. Busy busy busy. I'm so busy I'm thinking of ways I can change my original plan for the rest of the school year so I don't end up having to take so much work home. The kids shouldn't suffer because I've got a second job, but there's no way I can do my job the way I always have and still have time to build my screenwriting career.

Then again, I'm at my best when I have 100 things to do. It's a good busy. I couldn't be happier to have no time.

Winning

I've had a lot of time to think about what I'd say here today because I've been sitting on this news for weeks, unable to tell anyone. I wrote about four posts already before settling on this one. This must be what it's like to work on Project Runway.

In case you haven't yet heard, I was one of the three finalists in The TrackingB feature script contest.

I entered Nice Girls Don't Kill the first week the contest opened for entries, then I got busy working on my next script, How My Wedding Dress Got This Dirty. It turned out that the contest still had a week to go when I finished the script, so I entered it at the last minute.

Now that I had two low budget commercial scripts completed, I got back to work on my Civil War martial arts story. Things were going swimmingly, moving along at a casual pace. I wrote pages. I graded papers. Ladeda.

Then one night while I was entrenched on the couch, grading essays, lamenting that fact that it was taking me longer to give notes on these essays than it took the kids to write them, when I got a message from The Insider, the guy who runs TrackingB and the contest, asking for my phone number.

This can mean only one thing.

I pretended to be all cool and nonchalant as I answered the phone, and he told me I was one of the finalists with How My Wedding Dress Got This Dirty.

I probably said "That's awesome!" about eighty times during that conversation. Adjectives are not my strong suit.

This was a Sunday night.

Monday I drove straight from work to the Circle of Confusion office, where I met with Ken Freimann. I thought he was just awesome, and even though I knew other managers were reading my script, I signed with him on the spot.

I spent the next couple of days letting people know I'd already found a rep, thank you for your interest. All the while, The Insider let me know who he'd sent the script to, asked how I was doing and what I had decided, and gave me great advice on how to make the best choices in the middle of all this heat.

Tuesday, between grading more essays (I feel like for the past three years, nary a moment has gone by when I did not have an essay to grade), I approved the new cover for my script, complete with COC logo.

Wednesday Ken and I met with Ava Jamshidi at ICM. I loved her. Even though I knew we were waiting for other agents to read the script - agents you would cream your pants to meet with - I decided on the way home that I couldn't do any better than Ava. She's awesome, and she gets shit done. She and Ken had some terrific plans for me.

My team was made official on Thursday morning.

So to recap: Sunday night I was grading papers in front of the TV, watching a marathon of MI5 episodes. Thursday I had a manager, an agent, and my script was already in the hands of three production houses, one of which I'd been trying to get my work to for years.

And now here I am, still grading these fucking essays while my team gets my career started.

It's pretty awesome.

Keep going

I'm an eternal optimist. It helps in this town. There's an interesting dynamic here, where half the people tell you that your shit smells like roses and sunshine, and the other half fling poo in your face. Somehow you have to let your ego ride straight down the middle. So, it helps to always think everything will be okay.

Sometimes I'll write a script and think it's pretty damn solid, so I get notes. And sometimes those notes tell me to shove my head in an oven. I'll get sad, spend a day weeping, think about giving it all up and resigning myself to turning teaching into Plan A.

But that feeling lasts a few hours, until I think about the notes and figure out how to incorporate them into the script. Then I get all excited about the rewrite and figure it will all be okay eventually.

Because eventually, if I keep working and I keep learning and I keep searching for the best story, someone will take notice.

The only people who don't make it in this town are people who refuse to learn. Don't give up, Listen, Learn, Work hard, and it will happen. I firmly believe that. You have to have faith that it will all be okay, then you have to work your ass off to make sure it does.

Bye, 2011. Long live 2012

It's cursory year-end post time.

You know how it doesn't matter how great a movie was, if the ending sucks all you remember is the sucky ending? Or the opposite. A good ending can sort of wipe away the bad memories.

I spent six months of the year in constant pain. I managed to write a script during that time - How My Wedding Dress Got This Dirty, a script that turned out pretty damn good. I have high hopes for the script in the new year.

But I don't even remember the pain now. My surgery was a major success; I even painted the living room this week. Writing is easy, and good exercise for my recovering wrist.

So in 2012, I'm going to take advantage of my new capability and write like crazy. I also want to get back into martial arts. I'll probably start with Thai Chi and yoga and move on from there to Muy Thai again, hoping eventually to get into Jujitsu.

But first, I will write this new action comedy I started last week. I've written the first draft of the outline, because I've gradually become a fan of detailed outlines after seeing how well it worked on the last script. I hope that having a great outline will allow me to write the first draft of the script super fast again. Before it was a necessity to write fast because of how little time I was able to write through the pain, but in the process I realized how much easier that made the work, pain or no pain. So I just spent two weeks on an outline on the hopes that it will reduce the amount of time I spend on the script. If I solve the story problems in outline stage, I don't have to stop and ponder solutions after I've already written pages of script.

I got engaged, finally. It was an inevitability, but it's glad to finally be able to throw my carefully laid plans into action. I'm going dress shopping next week. How funny that I just wrote a wedding script.

So I think 2012 will be a good year. I've got some cool stuff coming up besides the wedding, which I'll talk about a bit next week. I'll be doing a podcast again toward the end of the month where I can talk about it at detail, a fun way to start a good year.

2011 taught me a lot about writing and time management and controlling my ego. It has prepared me well for the year to come.

How was 2011 for you? What's up your sleeve for 2012?

Planning

For someone who loves multitasking and planning as much as I do, 2012 is going to be the best year ever. I've got screenplays going on, I've got a job to do, and now I've got a wedding to plan.

Although I confess the wedding was already planned once I decided this was my groom. I love watching wedding shows, and I was engaged once before so I already planned on wedding, and I enjoy planning things and making lists ever so much. It was really a given that I'd have a file on my computer with my wedding plans.

I've already called the caterer and the dress salon. I'm making up a guest list today, but I'm leaving room for all the celebrities I'm going to meet this year.

I'm also working on an outline for a new project, and it was flowing along nicely until I got to the final sequence. I can't figure out the magical clue that gets my protag to find where the bad guy is. I hope that as I use up those Christmas gift cards over the next two days, brainless shopping will unlock the answer, so I can go into the new year with a well-laid plan for an awesome script I can bang out.

And somewhere in there, I have to grade papers. I hate grading papers, but it must be done. Fortunately I don't have to do much lesson planning because one class is going to read Romeo and Juliet, and the other The Great Gatsby. One of the good things about teaching literature is that a lot of your class time is spent just reading. So that will help me spend more time planning weddings and screenplays and shit.

Okay, 2012. Let's do this.

Thoughts on the film: Battle Los Angeles; How this film could have been great

I've spoken many times to anyone who will listen about how much I love Pitch Black. The reason I love Pitch Black so much is that you think you're going to watch a silly B horror movie about some people fighting off monsters on another planet, but what you get is a philosophical treatise on what it means to be human and the nature of sacrifice. I love when a film surprises me by being way better than it needs to be.

Most horror movies are about the scare, and Pitch Black had some scary moments, but the story was a delivery system for an intelligent conversation, not just scares.

So flash forward a number of years and here I am, on Christmas Eve Day, watching Battle Los Angeles. This looks like it will be a pretty generic action movie, mostly about effects. The majority of action movies released these days seem to be delivery systems for explosions.

And this one was no different. It paid some lip service to character development. (The black guy is not a stereotype because he wears glasses! And his nickname is Specs!) It tried to get me to care, but it didn't take advantage of opportunities to elevate the material into something to make me think.

Minor Spoilers Ahead.

There's a scene on a roof top where that hot redneck from True Blood tells another soldier how he wonders if these aliens get scared. What if they're just like us? Then Aaron Eckhart observed that the aliens have their weapons welded onto their bodies or something, as if they are 24/7 soldiers. Okay, we're getting somewhere. We can run with that. We're fighting these creatures, but we're just like them. Could we become them? Were they like us once? Is there a way we can get to them and talk this out?

No, they didn't really go that way.

There's your now cliche scene where the humans find an alien and drag him into the base to examine him so we can learn how to fight the enemy. They decide to stab it in lots of places to find out what kills it.

Now, here's what I was thinking. Hey, aren't they basically torturing that thing? And nobody there has a problem with it?

There's a veterinarian in the room. She offers to help by staring at them enthusiastically as they stab the creature with various pointy tools. It would have been neat if she had spoken up. Maybe, instead of torturing it, we can find a way to communicate with it? I'm not saying she'd be right, but she'd be on theme. There would have been some interpersonal conflict. There would have been a moment for our characters to argue about strategy, about what defines us, separates us from the enemy. They're the bad guys, but we're torturing a prisoner. Is that okay?

I'd love to have had that conversation with this film, but that's not what happened. They stabbed the thing until they finally found its weakness, then went on blowing shit up, restricting the interpersonal conflict to cliched gripes about who's in command. Michelle Rodriguez is tough. The black guy wears his glasses. The guy with the pregnant wife.... well just that, there's a guy with a pregnant wife. Have you ever seen a movie about a bunch of soldiers at war and one of them DIDN'T have a pregnant wife?

I guess this was supposed to be about Eckhart's journey as a leader, but then the rest of the movie should have been about the nature of leadership or something. Let's see the aliens have chain of command issues. Let's see the civilians question the leadership decisions. Maybe Eckhart's character questions the decisions of the higher ups.

The film really did give us some character arcs, but the main reason Eckhart's didn't work for me is because I didn't buy it. This guy's men think he's a douchebag, that he left some guys behind and is a horrible leader. From the second he steps onscreen, I know that isn't true. So I don't feel any real conflict, just a misunderstanding that will get cleared up eventually.

But I digress.

The point is, the script needed to pick a thesis and stick to it.

I tell the kids all the time: Once you pick your thesis, the entire essay revolves around it. So if you say a hero is someone who  likes to wear purple underwear, then every paragraph needs to go back to that purple underwear. It doesn't need to veer off and talk about spikey hair, it needs to be about purple fucking underwear. Your theme is your thesis. If your thesis is the nature of humanity, then by god, every choice you make in your story should reflect that theme.

That's how you go from just okay to great. Don't let your script be nothing more than a delivery system for explosions/scares/sex/laughs. Let those elements help your story be a delivery system for a question we can think about when we leave at the end.

Say hello, but not anonymously

I finally had to turn off anonymous commenting. I've had a run on what I suspect is the same person spamming me with strange comments that made me uncomfortable, and after asking the person to stop, they kept at it. So now you have to log in to post comments. You can log in as any of the standard methods, I think, although I'm not sure. Let me know if you have a problem with the process.

I know I get a fair amount of readers, but I rarely get more than a couple of comments. So I invite you, this holiday season, tell me about yourself. Log in and tell me who you are. How many screenplays have you written? What kind of stuff do you write? What kind of things do you want to know about screenwriting? Whatever. Say hi. I'd love to get some questions I can try to find answers to in the new year.

And while we're at it, Merry Christmas everybody. I hope this weekend is as good for you as it is turning out to be for me.

Advice for new writers in despair

There's a guy on Done Deal asking for advice on what to do with his second script. He's frustrated because he's not getting anywhere with it, and he's spending way too much time obsessing over it. His script is not an easy sell, and he says he doesn't care because he's only writing what he's passionate about, not what will necessarily sell.

I wrote a post in response to his dilemma, and I thought it was worth repeating here. So here's my advice to any writer who despairs when their first, second, third script goes nowhere:

If you don't care about whether or not your stuff is marketable, that's actually great for you at this stage. It means you can just write what you want, toying with ideas until you get it right. It also means you should stop obsessing over trying to get your script made.

Know what my second script was? Nobody but me does, because it was a piece of crap and I want it to stay buried forever. Same with #3, #4, #5.....

Right around #8 or #9, I started to produce things I'm not embarrassed to show people. That number is different for everybody, but there is absolutely no shame in writing just to learn the ropes. Every script gets better. If you stop focusing on how to sell this one, you'll be able to spend all your time on the next one.

Once you've written a great script, try to put it out there. Give it some time. While you wait, write the next one. And if the third one goes nowhere, move on. Rinse, repeat, until one day someone will read #4,#5,#6.... #32, and they will say "WOW this is really good! Let's talk."

It would be so nice if we could all just write a script early on in our careers and he could sell it for a billion dollars, but for most of us, that just will not happen. It's obvious at this point that it will not happen for you. Not now.

But if you shrug this script off, move on to the next one, and keep improving, it will happen for you some day. And who knows? Maybe then you can come back to this one and put it back out there.

Once you've tried to get your script out there and it doesn't work, move on. Try again with the next one, but make sure you've learned something from this one first.

Otherwise, you're wasting your time.

Think twice

At the beginning stages of developing a spec, your job is THINKING.

One of the things I've learned throughout the years, and occasionally need reminding about, is that you have to reject your first one, two, three, maybe four ideas. Keep working the story until you get the most creative possible series of events.

Need a maguffin? A character's on the run from the bad guys. What object do they want from him? Quick, think of something.

Was your first thought:

-A microchip/flash drive with sensitive government secrets?
-Photos of a politician in bed with a prostitute?
-A briefcase full of cash/drugs?

Too cliche, all of them. Think again.

Your first instinct is usually going to be everybody else's first instinct. Over time I have learned to get that out of the way until I get to something that will surprise the audience.

I was working on picking a maguffin yesterday, and the wise Bill Martell reminded me to use the story's theme to find it. What's this story about? Now what kind of object could lead us back there?

So I thought of something, then rejected it and thought of something else. Then I slept on it, woke up this morning, and had my answer.

It took me almost an entire day of thinking up ideas and rejecting them to get to one I think is pretty great. If you leap on your first idea and run with it, you'll end up writing a mediocre script when you could have written a great one.

Christmas Vacation

At this very moment, Los Angeles is shutting down. People are locking up doors, packing for flights, making last minute phone calls.

I love LA at Christmas. Nobody is here.

I am about to have three weeks to start something. I think I need to write something commercial, something easy to sell to back up against what I already have. I want to come back to this script, but for now I'm going to start working on something new, something that proves I know what I'm doing.

What is that something? No idea.  I'm going through my idea file, looking for things to work on, but so far nothing has popped out. So the first thing I'm going to do this weekend is flesh out some ideas and look for new ones. Then I've got three weeks to work on a treatment and maybe crank out as many pages as I can before the town winds back up and I have to go back to my day job.

I also have 87 papers to grade.

"Vacation." What a lie that word is.

Scriptshadow reviews my pages

Scriptshadow reviews my first ten pages today.

He's completely right. I've gotten a lot of read requests from querying this script, and they've all either been passes or I've been told "I love your style, but I don't think the script is there."

Carson points out a scene in the first few pages that doesn't need to be there, and he's right. The thing is, when I was writing that scene it seemed important somehow. I'd gotten so many notes on this project that I was trying to address all of them, and this particular scene fixed a problem somebody had, but now for the life of me I can't remember what it was. I don't remember why this was so damn important, because the scene now feels completely unecessary.

So that was a good review. Now, to read the comments, where no doubt my intelligence and general worth as a person will be called into question.

Black List 2011

As you all have probably heard, The Black List is out today. I've only read a few of these, but I'll gladly use these scripts as a distraction from the expository essays I'm supposed to be grading over winter break.

It's weird how stuff trends. Not only have we had a surge in fairy tales, but we had a wave of Snow White, a wave of Peter Pan, and now, apparently, Pinocchio.

Zombies are still in the fight, but they've gotten more complicated. Gone are the days when you can write a script about a group of people fighting off a zombie horde. Now your zombie spec needs a gimmick. John Scott III found something new with his drama script Maggie, which I really enjoyed, and there is also a script about a group of people who make a deal with a vampire to protect them from zombies. I don't know how anyone can improve on The Kitchen Sink, but I'm willing to give it a read.

Lots of assassins. There are always lots of assassins. I wonder if real assassins read about these movies and shake their heads.

I think they're now legally required to put Tarantino on the list.

If I'd realized what Father Daughter Time: A Tale of Armed Robbery and Eskimo Kisses was about I'd have read it sooner, but I never saw the second half of the title so I thought this movie was about a dad taking his daughter to a baseball game or something. Now I plan to read it.

Other scripts I'm most looking forward to reading: Chewie, Blood Mountain, Desperate Hours, The Slackfi Project, Sex Tape, Flashback, The Hitman's Bodyguard, and 77.

What are your thoughts on the list?

First ten pages at Scriptshadow

Over at Scriptshadow, Carson  has posted links to the first ten pages of each of the top five winners of his recent contest. My pages are from entry number four, Nice Girls Don't Kill. Feel free to download and see what you think. They were all interesting reads, and one script in particular kicked my ass, but I won't elaborate until after Carson posts his own reviews.

I learned quite a bit from reading these pages, particularly how easy it is to do nothing for ten pages when you think your reader is a little slow, and how much better it is when you get to the point as quickly as possible.

Have a read. See what you think.

I placed in something!

Carson over at Scriptshadow just held a contest. He was looking to review the first ten pages of a script on his site, and wanted people to submit their title and logline. People voted on which title and logline they wanted to see reviewed and the top five vote-getters were picked.

This is a good contest for me because I know my first ten pages are usually pretty strong. No matter what you think of the rest of the script or the direction I take the story, I do a pretty whiz-bang opening. Chances are, somebody's gonna die and there will be an explosion or gunfire of some sort. So I entered.

I picked Nice Girls Don't Kill to enter because first of all, I know the title kicks ass. It's my favorite title and it gets a lot of love from everybody, and I've gotten a lot of takers on my query, plus my first ten pages are pretty fun. The wedding script is more commercial, but although I like the title, it's not as jazzy as Nice Girls, and I don't feel like I've perfected my logline yet. Plus I absolutely love the opening scene to Nice Girls. Wedding Dress has tighter plotting, but Nice Girls was oodles of fun for me to write and I want to show it off.

So I picked Nice Girls. And it came in 4th! Huzzah!

I voted for It's a Long Way to Tipperary, myself.

To see the other winning loglines/titles and to follow the discussion, go here: http://scriptshadow.blogspot.com/2011/12/article-whats-in-logline-winners.html

Bamboo Killers

An incest joke

The other day I was teaching Irony, which I always do by first explaining why Alanis was wrong, although now kids don't even know that song anymore. Then I tell them the story of Oedipus. Then we read something ironic, in this case Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour."

Irony is a tough concept to grasp for a lot of people, so you've got to triple the explanation. I'll probably have to explain it a few more times to really get it to sink in. But so far they seem to be following along okay. When I asked them why the ending of "Story of an Hour" is ironic, most of the kids got it.

I love teaching that story because it is two pages long, but it teaches about so very many literary concepts. Plus feminism. After the lesson we had a discussion about the purpose of marriage, and I thought the boys and girls were going to start a gender riot. They were seriously pissed off. Kids these days are jaded.

But that's not what this post is about.

While I was telling the story of Oedipus, I got to the part where he goes in and finds Jocasta hanging from the ceiling. I said "And then Oedipus found her dead. And he was distraught. He slapped himself and yelled MY MOTHER! (slap) MY WIFE!  (slap) MY MOTHER! (slap) MY WIFE!"

Although they enjoyed watching me slap myself, they did not get my Chinatown joke. And I thought, if one of you guys was there, you'd have laughed.

So often my brilliant comedy is lost on 16-year-olds.