The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 213 - The Ending Trickles to the Beginning

The League had its February meeting last night, and once again we focused primarily on my demon thriller. Everyone else is in some stage of development on their latest script or novel, so there weren't many tangible pages presented for the gathering. So that we'd have something to read and discuss - and since it would help me craft the plot of this increasingly logistically difficult script - I sent out the rules of the world that I'd worked on a couple weeks back.


The discussion was pretty fruitful. Doing their duty as scrupulous readers, they brought up some good questions about the machinations of the characters and their interactions. If this happens, then why do they need that to be a rule? Why do they have to submit to this power? How will you reveal all this?


This last question - the one that asks me to elaborate upon how I'm going to convey all the various rules and nuances - is pivotal. Luckily, my group members are astute and clever visual thinkers, and as a group we were able to piece together a few strong approaches to showing and not telling. Still, their ruminations made it clear that I still have a great deal of work to do in prepping how to best inform the audience of the ways in which my world works. Take, for example, Children of Men, a movie I enjoy. However, there's a blatantly expositional scene early on in which Michael Caine's character informs Clive Owen of the whys and hows of their society, despite the fact that Owen's been living in it for nearly two decades. This is clearly just for the audience, but too simple a device to seem organic. It is also the exact type of thing I wish to avoid.


During the meeting, I brought to the group one of the largest question I had and still have about the material. Namely, it deals with the ending of the movie. I've figured out how I want it to end and what it would mean for this ending to happen, but I was and am unsure of technically how it will occur in the story. Normally, I would let the writing take care of that. However, the ending and the rules that govern it is so contingent upon rules set up in the beginning of the script that I can't just wait to get there to work it out. More than with any other script I've written, the ending in this one is dependent upon hard and solid rules, which I am still working out. 


The group offered me a great suggestion that not only makes certain things easier to convey, but actually ramps up the stakes at the end, as well. Naturally, I decided to adopt this new approach. Yet, I am still left with the gaping hole before me of what in their world enables the protagonist to defeat the antagonist in a reasonable manner. 


All told, this script is shaping up to be quite a unique one for me of late. There are next to no guns or fighting in it. The material will be dialogue-cenric. And, what's more, I can't move forward with it until the rules and machinations are clear as day to me. Part of me feels that such an involved script is the wrong direction to go in, when I'm at a time where I'm trying to get something to my agent as quickly as possible. However, if I pull it off, I have a good feeling that this could be a very strong piece of screenwriting. 


Time will tell.

The Writing Week (Vol. 5) part 212 - Writing the Rules

Rules are one of the most important part of any screenplay. If you're setting your story in a new, original world, then what are the rules there? Is gravity different? Is society? Are the laws? If it's set in this world, but there are people with special powers or knowledge or abilities or allegiances, then what are the rules that govern their actions, strengths, and weaknesses?


The Matrix is a perfect example of the utter necessity of rules. What can one do in the matrix that can't be done by ordinary people? How do Neo and his allies learn new tricks and skills? What are the agents' limitations? The rules are integral to effective story telling in a case such as this. As an audience, we certainly won't know all the rules going in, but things such as, "if you die in the Matrix, you die in real life" are fundamental to the plot and the world. We - by hearing that - know the stakes. So do the characters.


Even simple seeming stories have rules. They have to. Otherwise, what's to stop the writer from relying on a crutch or a deus ex machina to expedite or wrap the story? With my demon thriller, the rules were something I had yet to solidify when I showed an outline to my manager. I'll admit that was a bit of a rookie mistake, and then move on to a point where I can learn from it.


After talking with the League last month, I took some time recently to hammer out the rules. They might not all be down there on paper, and those that are perhaps seem quite obvious, but I think it's essential to put them down in writing. And, after a prolonged period of inactivity, I have to admit that it also felt very rewarding and refreshing. I wound up writing out about two pages of bullet-pointed rules. Though I have the ability to alter them later, their presence will really prove a very solid guide to hold my hand through the upcoming re-outlining stage. I think that, from here on out, getting the rules down on the page is going to prove a necessary part of my writing process.


On another note, I read on Done Deal Pro today a bit of unsettling news. I hadn't read the site in a while, and what with the month over at the end of the day, I wanted to get caught up on January sales. Unfortunately, something I'd been dreading came a bit to a head today - there was an idea that was disturbingly similar to my post-Apocalyptic spec. I figured that had to happen at a certain point, and the stories are not identical, but the basic premise (i.e., the Apocalyptic event) is close enough to my own to warrant nervousness. I immediately emailed the discovery to my producer, and she reached out to the rest of the team. The sale in question is actually the acquisition of book rights to a novel that is slated to drop this summer. In some respects, that's good news: a) the script for the adaptation is almost guaranteed not to have been written yet, so my project could land first and b) just because the film rights were picked up, that doesn't mean a film will actually get made from it. 


I'm looking at this two ways. First, and least desirable, is that this will effectively quell any interest or heat regarding my script. The more optimistic alternative is that a rival production company will be in the market now for something similar, and the emergence of this novel will light a fire of urgency not only under my team, but under buyers. What with this project now on the table, buyers might come back to my script with renewed interest. I'm sure there's a right way to spin this in our favor; I don't know what it is exactly, but that's what my team is there for. Fingers crossed that this book isn't one of the last nails in the coffin on my post-Apocalyptic spec. While I've prepped for that, I'd hate to see it come to pass.

Wanted - Ridiculous Doesn't Do It Justice

Onyx and I saw Wanted last night (free screening a friend let me know about). For what it was – a mindless, suspend your disbelief at the door action flick – it was fun. It was fun in a way that made me laugh out loud at just how ridiculous some of it was. Don’t get me wrong, I love a “good” ridiculous movie every now and then (I will argue to praise for Shoot ‘Em Up any day of the week; when the first death in the movie is death by carrot, how can you not get on board?). Unlike Die Hard 4, Shoot ‘Em Up and Wanted didn’t seem to want to be anything more than an over the top action movie. (Bruce Willis could have played John McClane with a bit more camp this last time; it would have suited the over the top film better – though I know that’s not the McClane we all love.)

Going in knowing that Wanted was going to be full of impossible shots, head splitting action (literally), and a plot most likely held together with Elmer’s glue, I still couldn’t help but take issue with the movie at times. My biggest problem, actually, was the setting. I could have sworn the movie was taking place in New York, and after the screening, Onyx said the same thing. But the cops were definitely not NYPD – they looked European. Then, we were in a different city all together. The movie was taking place in the same city, but it certainly didn’t look like it was shot in the same place we’d been spending time. It got to the point where I was devoting as much time to trying to place the action as I was to watching it. This just goes to show something that Zombie usually brings up first—place your movie, ground us somewhere, even if the “where” is not integral to the plot. It just plain helps.

There were a couple of inconsistencies in the picture, too, which I learned to get past, but stuck with me after the screening nonetheless. At one point, a character runs at above normal speed through an office hallway and jumps across a wide city street, crashing through the opposite building’s window. In the meantime, he shoots three assassins. (This was a laugh at the ridiculousness moment.) Though a feat such as that was explained by a heightened adrenaline rush, no one else really did anything comparable throughout the entire film. If one man is superman, shouldn’t others be, too, if they’re all equals?

I guess I have to stop dissecting it now, though, or I’ll go nuts. One thing I can say the movie did well was to establish its rule: there are no rules. No physics. No pain. No impossible shot. Cars can just about fly. As can people. And bullets can be trained to fly like model airplanes, over, around, and under anything in their way. Will this movie become a classic to air on AMC twenty years from now? I doubt it. But, at least I wanted to watch it the through to the end.