Overcome FEAR: Get off your ass and WRITE!

Not yours… The studio! That’s right… They FEAR you and your screenplay! Yes, of course they want to find that needle in the stack screenplay that catapults their career into executive head-honcho but it’s their very own fear that often keeps them from recommending your screenplay.

Fear of what?

Fear of losing their job, plain and simple. Think about it… You submit your outstanding screenplay… A low-level producer reads it and likes it a lot (I almost said love but does a producer ever really love anything?) but stops dead in his or her tracks when it comes time to “kick it upstairs.”

Why? They LIKE being a producer. They LIKE telling their friends and family that they are a producer. They LIKE handing out that business card – driving that BMW…

So what the HELL do you do?

GET OFF YOUR ASS AND WRITE!

But write your ass off knowing that you have three seemingly insurmountable (don’t you love that phrase?) obstacles standing in your way…

I only mention the top sheet because it summarizes the coverage… The synopsis is the reader simply retelling your story in between 1 to 3 pages…

Ah… That brings us to the comments section… This is where the rubber meets the road. Can you say, CONCEPT? This goes hand in hand with my post yesterday, “Do YOU have a WINNER?”

These are the things that will be on the comments section of the coverage…

So there you have it. How does YOUR SCREENPLAY fare when asking these questions about it? And, more importantly, are you answering these questions HONESTLY? If not, then it’s time to find somebody who will.

Trust me on that.

Let’s take these questions one by one…

Well is it? What makes it strong? How is your screenplay DIFFERENT from other produced films within the same genre? Is it different? It sure as hell better be…

I recently read a police detective drama. The writing was okay… The characters were okay… The dialogue was okay… Really, nothing made this screenplay STAND OUT and hence, therein lies the problem… It was no different than watching some hum-drum made for TV movie. A guy gets killed in the beginning i.e., the inciting incident… This causes an investigation. The investigation takes the detective through some political maze of police corruption. In the end, the police corruption isn’t even dented but the bad guy who killed the inciting incident guy also gets killed by the investigating detective.

YAWN…

It was no different than hundreds of other movies you’ve ever seen before… No real twists. No real obstacles. No concept that HOOKS you. Just fucking boring.

How could the writer change this around? Fuck, I don’t know… LOL. Hmmm. Let’s see… What if the guy that got killed was the detective’s gay lover? What if the detective was trying to keep the fact that he’s gay a secret but now here he is investigating the murder? What if he has to play with the evidence to keep himself from becoming a suspect? What if he finds out that his murdered gay lover was having sex with certain police officials and then blackmails and extorts money from them?

Okay, so maybe the gay thing has been overdone or we’ve seen it before… Let’s go in some other directions… LOL.

What if the dead guy has a wooden stake through his heart?

What if the dead guy’s head was missing?

What if the dead guy’s upper and lower teeth were missing?

I could go on and on but I hope you get the picture… You’ve got to UP THE ANTE with these stories to make them different and often, simply by asking yourself ONE MAJOR QUESTION about the story (no matter how stupid it is) can launch an outstanding concept for your story.

This makes your job just a little harder… This is when it’s time to really hunker down and learn everything you can about structure and screenwriting. Read screenplays and emulate styles that appeal to you and feel similar to your own writing… Find screenplays that have similar scenes in them to see how it was executed in a produced film. More often than not, this is the kind of stuff that comes from one hit wonders… They come up with an outstanding premise and concept but they simply do not know how to pull it off.

Congratulations! You’re a screenwriter but you just haven’t figured out how to come up with a great concept… This goes back to what I’ve said about screenwriters writing for contests… Not all screenwriters mind you… Just the ones that write about that historical worm farm debutante that takes over the family business after her father dies. I could of course go into ways of making this epic into a high concept story but why bother? At least at this point you know about structure… You know how to create characters and write dialogue. This is a MAJOR ACCOMPLISHMENT! So now it’s time to start figuring out how to UP THE ANTE of your stories.

Okay, what’s this HOOK thing? Well, that’s when you’ve got this great concept and premise but it’s just still lacking something… You didn’t go the distance… You got a little lazy because you figured the concept was good enough all by itself. Hooks are for both the reader and the audience… This is where upping the ante becomes very important and really (opinions will vary) should be established within the first 10 to 12 pages… Normally, it’s very much as I described above… Take the inciting incident and give it a HOOK that makes us lean forward in our theater seats and pay even MORE attention than we normally do. If not the inciting incident (there is no hard and fast rule), then you’ll need to figure out how to up the ante of your concept…

Let’s go back to the worm farm debutante… Geez… I’m doing it after all.

How could we establish a hook in what could be (trust me, it was) a very boring story? What if the debutante had no other way to save the family business than to steal the worms from all the other worm farms? Or maybe she kills off all the worms… LOL. No, worms are cool. They don’t bother anyone… How about killing off the other worm farm owners? Maybe she hires a geneticist to create a super worm? Maybe her father was experimenting with super worms when he died and she continues on with his experiments but they go awry… In other words, you gotta just get in there and dig your feet in and start brainstorming! Don’t worry how stupid all the questions are… That’s simply you purging yourself of all the garbage to get to the good stuff! I tend to think in ways of thrillers and horrors so I apologize to the squeamish. How about a super worm that tastes like chicken?

Sorry.

In other words… What’s MISSING from your story? Again, we’re still trying to up the ante… If you haven’t watched every film there is within your genre and in addition, read every screenplay within your genre, you haven’t done your homework.

That’s right girls and boys… Think about how readers and audience members are going to draw comparisons and conclusions to your story and hopefully, a film. We can’t help it! I recently watched in an interview about his film, and how everyone tends to draw comparisons and conclusions to other mob genre films like and .

Like I said, we can’t help it, so make sure you find what’s missing… What we really want to see… BUT don’t simply copy what we want to see in your story from some other movie… UP THE ANTE. Figure out a way to make it different and bigger.

Cool… You can knock this out by doing your homework above, right? Same deal… See how they did it and do it BETTER. Sometimes it can take over a month just to figure out how to make one small scene better than the rest of similar scenes in similar movies… Don’t simply give up… GO FOR IT! Figure out how to do it bigger and better.

YOW! Just as important as finding the good stuff and making it better is finding the crappy, cliché stuff and NOT doing it! This is one of the reasons I like to go to the theater and watch movies with other people… I’ve learned how to watch the movie but at the same time, watch and listen to the reactions of those audience members… What I really try to pay attention to is how their reactions DIFFER from mine…

I’m HARD… LOL.

Stuff that doesn’t make me laugh seems to definitely make others laugh so when I finally do laugh, everybody else seems to be fucking ROARING. Pay attention!

If you can’t go to the theater that often, invite a myriad of people over to watch a DVD and then observe those reactions… Not quite as good because people in small groups tend to not be as impressed as they might be in the dark… Keep this in mind!

Bottom line?

Last but not least… Get off your ass and WRITE.

Unk

September 13, 2006 | Filed Under Uncategorized

8 Comments 

Do YOU have a WINNER?

Is it a winner?

No apologies for not posting recently. I’m up to my ass and elbows in my rewrite and I have a deadline meet.

Thanks to the five of you who took to the time out to email me and ask what’s going on… You like me… YOU REALLY LIKE ME! Well, at least five of you do. LOL.

My rewrite is going well except that for every ten pages I write/rewrite, I have to go back and layer in new story elements… One step forward – ten steps backward. But I love it.

Why?

Because I have a winner. How do I know I have a winner? I just know.

Do you have a winner?

In February of 2005, I was working on another screenplay, COYOTES ALWAYS COME BACK. I was almost finished but I had some last minute physical research to do. *NOTE: I believe in physical research whenever possible.

I hop in my car and start driving to this place for my research… About a twelve hour drive from where I live but I don’t care – I LOVE TO DRIVE in the middle of the night. I like stopping at places that most normal people would never stop at.

So there I was… Driving at 2:00 in the morning with digital recorder in hand and decided to make a stop at this particular establishment in of all places. As I exited my vehicle and headed toward this establishment, a vision came over me that immediately flashed some of a movie through my brain.

I was in shock! I stood there in the middle of nowhere (my apologies to those of you in Yuma) smiling. I had it. I had a winner! Better than that… I KNEW IT.

I immediately created a new folder within my digital recorder and started recording… Screw the research on the other project, it was time to go to work! I turned around in Yuma and headed back home while I recorded my notes and thoughts about this new idea.

By the time I got back home, I was exhausted and needed sleep so sleep I did but this was no ordinary sleep… No, the WINNER was still there. .

The dream became the movie and I was in it although I gotta tell ya, not much was happening. Little snippets here and there but I always woke up still thinking I had a winner.

After three months of solid research both physical and Internet based, I not only had a handle on the subject matter but I had what I thought was a pretty decent outline.

I was off and writing! I finished the first draft in less than two months and guess what? I still had a winner. Yeah, the damn thing was 168 pages but I knew I had a winner in there somewhere.

I went through the file and did some minor tweaking i.e., typos, better formatting on certain elements… You know the drill. When I was finished, I had about 161 pages. Time to print.

I printed out the monstrosity and began paperclipping all the pages of each scene together because it just makes more sense for me to do this physically rather than inside a fucking computer.

After paperclipping, I laid all these stacks of scenes on the floor. Then I pulled out a bunch of 3 X 5 cards and slid one under each paperclip. I numbered each scene card and wrote a simple logline of what was SUPPOSED to happen in that scene.

After all my work, I stepped back to look at my masterpiece. Yeah, I still had a winner…

So on my hands and knees I went… Crawling up one scene stack aisle and down another… UP CLOSE AND PERSONAL and from a completely different perspective than banging keys on a keyboard… VERY ORGANIC.

I would stop at each stack of scenes and count the pages… Then jot that number in a different color of Sharpie marker on the 3 X 5 card. This took a while but even before I was finished, I could see where changes were going to be made.

Within the hour, I completed my foray into the made up world sitting on the floor. I went to the fridge and got a beer… Guzzled it down feeling pretty damn good. Why? Because I STILL had a winner.

Ah… The beer gone now, I went back to the stacks and walked around, reviewing… Speculating… Squinting… Contemplating… Inspecting. I picked up a stack that had a lot of pages. I briefly read through them and the SHIT immediately stood out after reading the logline of that scene.

Ah… Back to . *NOTE: I have since purchased (back in July) and I gotta tell ya… I’m a new convert. Being able to create two sets of index cards per screenplay is worth the price of admission.

I find that scene within the file and go to work, CUTTING. Ah. I like to cut. It feels good. I don’t kill my babies as much as make them super babies when I cut. Ahhhh. I finish cutting and BAM! More than half the pages are gone and the scene literally slaps you in the face. I still have a winner.

I repeat this process and sure enough within just shy of ten hours, I have 110 pages… Well, technically, a 109 and a half. LOL. But it looks like 110 and that’s what I want… .

I’m not going to go into how I sold it… I will do that at another time as we get nearer to production. We’re trying to fly under the radar here until we actually hit the theaters next year.

Why? Because we have a winner… And that’s my point.

How do you know you have a winner?

You just know. You know so well that even after all the work, you then send that 110 page (okay, 109 and a half) stack out to those you trust and you just KNOW they are going to read a winner too.

I sent it out. I wasn’t nervous. I wasn’t waiting around for someone to call me. I just knew that the premise of the story itself did half my work for me. HIGH CONCEPT. Yeah, there’s that word… HIGH CONCEPT. Know it. Love it.

Most screenwriters simply do not have a winner to begin with. Yeah, it’s hard work to come up with a winner but I think I can honestly say that when you definitely have a winner YOU KNOW IT and after you write it (assuming you know how to write a decent screenplay), everyone else will too.

We’re not SIMPLY talking high concept here… We’re talking high concept and a premise that’s never been done before. Yes, you have seen story elements of my screenplay before but you have NEVER seen this story. I was able to move the story elements around (that a lot of us are sick to death of) so that I came up with a premise that’s never been done before.

What’s even scarier is that this is based on true events and is happening right now under our very noses… Again, I wish I could share… And eventually I will but that’s not the gist of this post anyway.

The gist is simply this…

Do you have a winner?

If not, why not?

So many times have I read a screenplay that I can plainly see that it took a pretty large chunk out of someone’s life only to have the premise or concept be something unoriginal.

You want to make that sale? You want to write for a living? You want to live wherever you want to live?

Come up with a winner. If it’s TRULY a winner, everybody else will know it’s a too.

Discussion welcome…

Unk

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September 12, 2006 | Filed Under Uncategorized

14 Comments 

Georges Polti’s 36 Dramatic Situations… Part 2.

Well by now, your head should be literally spinning with new ideas for plot and plot twists…

So… Where did we leave off? Oh yeah… You should have created a list with at least 40 to 65 dramatic situations for your screenplay.

Right?

So now it’s time to REALLY ORGANIZE… So even if you’re not quite sure what the actual order of these dramatic situations should be in, go ahead and give it a try…

IF IT FEELS GOOD, DO IT!

That’s right, based on WHATEVER structure you personally use, go ahead and try putting your list of dramatic situations in some kind of STORY ORDER according to the structure you use for writing screenplays.

Now, having said this, please don’t ask me whether or not you should be able to completely plot out your entire screenplay… It’s definitely possible but not probable and definitely NOT the point of this post.

The point being to simply give you a springboard if you will… A jumping off spot to plotting out your story.

Questions to ask yourself while making your list…

Tips to consider while making your list…

Remember, you’re not really trying to figure out your ENTIRE story and plot with this exercise… If you do, GREAT but you’re simply trying to brainstorm some outstanding plot points and plot twists that you can incorporate into your story.

Once your list is complete, you need to starting thinking about . In other words, once you have as many outstanding plot points and plot twists as you can make up from brainstorming the 36 dramatic situations, you can now start going IN BETWEEN… Kind of like that animators do with their animation cells… Figuring out what goes in between certain cells to give the animation the best looking flow of image…

So you’ve brainstormed a or from one or more of the 36 dramatic situations and you know where it goes but you DON’T know what comes after… This is where you use CAUSE AND EFFECT to figure out what happens next.

Figure out what happens next… Don’t worry if what you come up with is … Go ahead and come up with it and then tweak the cliché so it is no longer cliché.

This exercise SHOULD get you well on your way to coming up with some pretty good plot points, subplots, etc. Again, don’t expect to figure out your entire story but you should be able to come up with quite a bit to work with.

The most important thing to remember is to brainstorm these 36 dramatic situations WITHIN THE CONTEXT OF YOUR STORY AND CHARACTERS.

Unk

P.S. Download the expanded version of the 36 Dramatic Situations here… Complete with hyperlinks just in case you don’t understand a particular word Polti used… It’s a PDF document.

Download here: 36 Dramatic Situations Expanded Version

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September 4, 2006 | Filed Under Uncategorized

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