Let’s say THANKS…

Let's say Thanks!When you’re sitting in the sand wondering what everybody back home is doing on Christmas day, it keeps you going… Unfortunately, there’s quite a few of our service members sitting in the sand that can’t quite visualize what’s happening back home for whatever reason.

I know you’re busy but please take 5 minutes out of your day to send a card to one of our troops.

He or she will appreciate it more than you’ll ever know.

Trust me.

Unk

Either click on the card or RIGHT HERE!

If you’re so inclined, consider slapping a link on YOUR blog or web site to help get even more cards to the troops by Christmas…

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December 5, 2006 | Filed Under Uncategorized

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What’s your motivation?

We Can Do It!Hollywood is undergoing a transition and everybody is SCARED from studio executives all the way down to the Production Assistant.

Why?

Movies aren’t special anymore.

When I was a kid, my Dad would drop my brother and I off at the local theater to go see a movie. Trust me, this didn’t happen that often so when he offered it up, we always wanted to go.

I remember arriving at the theater not even KNOWING what was playing and guess what? Not even CARING what was playing.

Why?

Because going to the movies was SPECIAL.

It almost didn’t matter what was playing back then… GOING to the movies was almost as much of an EVENT as the movie itself. It was the anticipation of KNOWING you were going to get your money’s worth… Combine that EVENT with a great movie and you’ve got a great combination.

Everybody is trimming down…People are getting fired. Actors, Directors, and Screenwriters aren’t getting jobs. The studios THINK because of home entertainment systems, the Internet, Pirating movies, copying DVDs, etc. etc. etc. that going to the theater is dying out.

And it is but NOT just beause of those problems.

Nope.

Because going to the movies isn’t special anymore.

When going to the movies was special, I couldn’t wait to become a self-sufficient adult so that I would someday have my own money to go to the movies whenever I wanted and when that finally happened to me back in the 70s, I started going to the movies whenever I wanted and guess what?

Going to the movies was special.

Even as an adult, I didn’t look in the paper to see what was playing… Movies WERE SO SPECIAL that it didn’t matter what was playing! You just went and picked one, got your popcorn and your drink (actually I never had the money for popcorn) and enjoyed the flick…

Hell, every once in a while the movie was SO SPECIAL that you stayed and watched it TWICE!

When was the last time you stayed and watched a movie twice? Sure, it’s more difficult to do that these days because it’s easier to get caught but every once in a while I still see people doing it.

So I kept going to movies whenever I wanted all the way up till they weren’t special anymore. It kind of snuck up on me…

Up until about nine years ago, I would easily see six movies every weekend that’s how much I love movies. By now however, I wasn’t just showing up. I wasn’t as happy to just see whatever was playing… No. By now, I was picking up a paper and seeing what was playing. By now, if there wasn’t anything that I thought was good, I would either stay home and do something else OR at a minimum, just go see ONE movie.

I remember standing in line for the midnight showing of SHOWGIRLS. I remember the line literally being around the block and me at the very end of it. I love Joe Eszterhas’ writing so of course SHOWGIRLS had to be good, RIGHT? It was definitely worth standing in line for over an hour, RIGHT? Shit, and Paul Verhoeven was even directing it… I loved BASIC INSTINCT, TOTAL RECALL, and ROBOCOP.

Those three movies were special. Those three movies were an event. Those three movies made me love going to the movies.

The theater was FULL. Mostly guys of course but a smattering of women.

The movie sucked.

I lived 115 minutes from the theater back then… It was a long drive home and I drove back all the way thinking about how movies suck these days.

Why?

Hopefully, I don’t have to tell you but just in case you haven’t thought much about it, how about the following list:

Now let’s take it a step further… Once we are sitting smack dab in a theater watching a movie that’s predictable and derivative, what else is wrong with it?

Remember the old Protagonists who didn’t need a character arc? They just went ahead and RIGHTED WRONGS. About their only real flaw was that they took matters into their own hands. Ah, THOSE WERE THE DAYS.

Things were easier back then… The audience wasn’t as sophisticated as they are today. It didn’t take NEARLY as much to make a movie special as it does today and guess what?

That challenge is HERE TO STAY and it’s just going to get WORSE.

Today, many of the movies I see in the theaters are very much like a lot of the kids I see in my local coffee shop…

BORING.

These are characters without any real goals… These are characters WITHOUT any real motivation to do anything.

THESE CHARACTERS ARE SLACKERS.

And while the ticket-buying demographic may in fact be this population of slackers, I talk to a lot of kids and ask them a lot of questions. Questions they don’t seem to be asked very fucking often…

Questions like, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” Another one I really like to ask… “What would you buy if you had the money?” Or the ever popular, “What are you going to study in college?”

When I was a kid, people asked these kinds of questions all the time and actually considered you to be kind of a loser if you didn’t have an answer…

When I ask these questions today, maybe one out of ten answers actually boils down to a real answer but most of the time, it’s just “I DON”T KNOW.”

Probing a little further and I find out that the I DON’T KNOW answer is really because these kids already have everything they want or need. Mom and Dad just dole out the money whenever the kids need something. College has become more of a place to tread water than it ever has before… At most, the “What are you going to do when you grow up?” question is usually answered with the ever popular “GET A JOB” answer.

Cool.

So then I ask these kids why they go to the movies… The answers I get are:

Yada, yada, yada…

One thing that really surprised me about SOME of the answers was that many of these kids keep hoping for a movie that makes going to the movies, SPECIAL.

Yeah, that’s right… Just like pulling the arm of a slot machine… Oops. Scratch that. We don’t pull arms anymore do we? We just press a big fat button to spin the wheels.

Just like we USED to pull the arms on the slot machines, the ticket-buying demographic keeps going to the movies in hopes of hitting a jackpot.

Wow. Think about that. That’s a lot of trust and loyalty when you think about it… Even after seeing shitty movie after shitty movie, the ticket-buying demographic keeps giving the movie business its business.

And what do we give them in return?

Wow. Think about that. We give them the OCCASIONAL special movie. Yet, they just keep the faith and keep going to the movies…

But the ticket-buying demographic are dropping like flies as I write this… That’s right. Why else do you think DVD sales of old television series are selling like hotcakes? Old movies? Why do you think people are buying home theater systems?

Because at home, you can watch whatever you want whenever you want and make it special.

Even now with my rewrite… If COOL HAND LUKE comes on the satellite or TRUE GRIT, I stop writing and watch myself a movie. When the CINCINATTI KID loses that last hand when he just fucking KNEW he was gonna win it, I’m there watching him stay second best to The Man.

What’s any of this have to do with screenwriting?

EVERYTHING.

We don’t push ourselves. We don’t have goals. We don’t really try. We don’t have the time. We don’t learn enough. We don’t read enough scripts. We don’t watch enough movies. We don’t write every day.

We don’t.

We don’t.

We don’t.

And I’m not just talking about us UNKNOWN SCREENWRITERS either… I’m talking about a lot of screenwriters that get paid to write screenplays.

Maybe there’s a reason movies suck… Maybe we don’t know how to write anything unique anymore.

No… That can’t be it because every once in a while, something unique still makes it into the theater.

Maybe we don’t know how to write something that’s not derivative of another movie…

No… That can’t be it because every once in a while, something that’s not derivative still makes it into the theater.

Hmmm.

Maybe we don’t know how to write something that’s not predictable. Yeah, that’s gotta be it. Everything’s been done already so EVERYTHING is predictable now.

No… That can’t be it because every once in a while, something that’s not predictable still makes it into the theater.

Well shit then… What the fuck is the problem?

How can we get everyone BACK to the movies that no longer go but used to go all the time? How? What can we do to get them back? How do we get them to go back to buying tickets?

Fandango?

Hardly.

We’ve got to make movies SPECIAL again. We’ve got to make going to the movies a special event like it used to be and if we don’t, going to the movies is going to be a thing of the past.

We have to collectively get off our lazy asses and write the stuff that makes movies SPECIAL. One of the things that made movies special to me were the characters. The characters always seemed to have a direction. They always seemed to be MOTIVATED to do something that made ME WANT to sit there and root for them.

Characters don’t do that for me much anymore… And yeah, while it pains me to admit that we have no more James Stewart, no more Jack Palance, no more Steve McQueen… We do have some fucking incredible actors but in order for them to give us an incredible performance, we need to write some incredible screenplays.

We’re not.

What makes movies SPECIAL to YOU?

Unk

December 3, 2006 | Filed Under Uncategorized

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