The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 65 - When Space is King

One of the biggest elements of New York City life is housing. Ask anyone who lives here. New York is one of the few cities I can think of where it’s not only perfectly acceptable and polite, but also expected, that when talking about housing, you ask, “What do you pay per month?” In other cities, that’s an invasion of privacy. In New York, it’s a way of life.

The City is defined by locations and rates – which borough you’re in, and which neighborhood within that borough – affects not only your social calendar, who comes to see you, how long you commute, and what you pay, but also how you live your life. What with nearly 9 million people living in just over 300 square miles, it’s no surprise that housing becomes king. And, for the first time in two years, I found myself among the horde of people searching for a new place to live in the City.

I won’t go into the details of the search – if you’re thinking of moving to New York and have questions, though, please feel free to email info@screenwritersleague.com and I’ll provide whatever advice I can – other than to say this: I did my apartment search based on how I thought it would affect my writing. Every place we went, I stood in “my” room and looked around, wondering what my writing vibe would be. Will I work here? Does the room lend itself to creativity? Go beyond the bedroom – would I be comfortable writing in the living room? Do I feel that this space mutes my creative drive?

I won’t debate you if you read that and think I’m a bit OCD. A bit “out there.” A bit nuts. Maybe I’m alone in that feeling. Doesn’t mean I can deny it, though. A writer’s space is key. Read enough interviews with writers, and they often talk about needing their desk to be a certain way or their office to meet X, Y, and Z requirements. We’re neurotic by nature, and if we’re not comfortable in our environment, no matter how psychological and avoidable the reaction to that space can be, the creative process can be thrown all out of whack. I was lucky enough to find a new apartment that I not only like, but that I can imagine myself sitting and writing in. I can clearly see myself at my desk in my new room, as well as my new living room.

Thank goodness for a creativity-welcoming apartment.

Trailer Trash XL: Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter (1974)

"One man dared to take a stand against this evil! One man dared to hurl a challenge of cold steel against the terror of the undead! He was Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter!"

Many men NEVER dare to hurl a challenge of cold steel against anything. They're barely men at all.

In the late 19th Century, Mark Twain (nee Samuel Clemens) penned several of the most treasured American novels. Nearly 100 years later, his ancestor Brian Clemens tipped the scales back in the favor of terrible by writing and directing the Hammer b-film Captain Kronos, Vampire Hunter.



At 0:10 - Why are so many beautiful maidens taking that shortcut through Vampire Forest? I try not to question B-movie logic, but damn.
At 0:21 - O.J.-vision!
At 0:55 - "Just brushing my hair in front of the mirror... in the middle of Vampire Forest..."
At 1:16 - Bitten on the mouth??!?


"You see? He's been bitten on the mouth!"

Trailer Trash is a weekly tribute to oddball, cheesy and often just plain terrible movie trailers. Writers: These movies got made... so can yours! You can read through our archive by clicking here.

Hollywood...

Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertulucci referred to it as “the big nipple”. Paul Newman refused to move west, saying he’d be too close to the cookie jar. Having just visited Hollywood a second time, I definitely see what they mean.

LA is a movie town. Its wealthy inhabitants made their fortune in the film industry as artists or as facilitators. Its working class is comprised of commercial actors, television writers, and music video directors. Its other main industries – tabloids, porn – derive from movies.

LA seems like a good place for aspiring screenwriters. At NYU, many professors advocated a post-graduate move. But if we were married to New York City, they would say to establish ourselves in LA first, and then we’d be able to write from anywhere. A manager I met offered a different perspective: “LA, New York… Live where you’re inspired.”

That statement has a lot of resonance. Too often, I consider a potential relocation as a good career move, feeling more able to market myself in Hollywood. I never considered the effect that could have on my writing. Not just in terms of the physical writing, but also being within proximity of The League, my former professors, and good friends…all of which create a great writing environment.

Marketing is secondary to writing something that represents my voice and talent. And as we’ve seen from Juno and Gran Torino - and of course from our newly represented Cakeman - you don’t need to have an address on Sunset Boulevard to get noticed…you just need your address on the title page of a good script. At least that’s what my trip to Hollywood reaffirmed. And it also inspired me to return as soon as possible…via First Class, courtesy of the big nipple.

What, When, Where this Weekend - The Perfect Sleep, Goodbye Solo, Monsters vs. Aliens

What, When, Where is a weekly guide to select screenings, discussions and events in the NYC-area of interest to screenwriters. Have an event you'd like to see listed here? Give us a heads-up at info@screenwritersleague.com.

- The Cronenberg Retrospective at IFC Center continues. This weekend is my favorite: Videodrome.

- Filmmaker Matt Tyrnauer will be on hand to introduce tonight's screening of The Last Emperor at the Film Forum.

Opening this weekend...

THE PERFECT SLEEP, written by Anton Pardoe, dir. by Jeremy Alter


Premise: Against the backdrop of a noirish dreamscape, a tortured man returns to the city he swore he would never return to, in order to save the woman he has always loved yet can never have.

Playing: Quad Cinemas

A low-budget, comic-book style noir film? I'm all over this.

GOODBYE SOLO, written by Bahareh Azimi & Ramin Bahrani, dir. by Ramin Bahrani


Premise: Two men form an unlikely friendship that will change both of their lives forever.

Playing: Angelika

I've heard very, very little about this one so far, but Time Out's glowing review has me intrigued.

MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, written by Maya Forbes & Wallace Wolodarsky, dir. by Rob Letterman & Conrad Vernon


Premise: After being hit by a meteorite on her wedding day, Susan Murphy is transformed into a monster named Ginormica and subsequently whisked away to a secret government compound where others like her have been rounded up over the years. When the Earth comes under attack by an alien commander known as Gallaxhar, however, Ginormica and her new allies are set free to save the planet.

Playing: Everywhere.

I'm not sick of 3D yet. I have a feeling I will be soon... but not yet.

What are you doing/seeing this weekend?

Torn

Lately I’ve been trudging through one of my worst writing slumps yet. It’s the kind of slump that forces you to sit in front of the computer for hours on end without banging out a meaningful sentence. Stretch that over a period of 3-4 weeks and you know what I’m going through. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the last bad slump I had was around this time last year, which happens to be one of the busiest stretches for me at work. It’s tough enough to get the pages flowing when you’re mentally exhausted by the time you sit at your computer, but it’s another thing when you’re mentally exhausted and you don’t know which of your ideas you should be working on.

I don’t have a manager just yet to tell me “That idea is great and it’s got current appeal. You should work on that now, I know just the person who would be looking for it.” It’s up to me to reach in and grab one of my ideas, which seem to be constantly shifting their order of potential and priority. Right now I’m torn between writing what I want to write and writing what I need to write. In one hand I have several ideas that are more high concept and big budget in nature. These are the kinds of scripts that I enjoy writing most, especially if I’ve got one that’s historical in nature. They’re my “want to” scripts. In the other hand I have a series of script ideas that are more low budget and contemporary. These are the scripts that I feel like I need to write, largely because they balance out my body of work. Of my scripts that are most industry ready, they are definitely expensive, hard sells. Another reason why I feel like I need to write some of these smaller scripts is that the stories are more personal in nature. There’s more opportunity for me to put first hand emotional experience into the characters in these stories than in the bigger, high concept pieces.

I suppose it could always be worse. I could not even have an idea to choose from. Instead, I have several ideas that I feel are all above average. I just keep going back and forth, struggling through a few pages of one script before having a mini revelation and deciding that the other project is what I should be struggling through. How do you gain momentum when you keep switching creative vehicles? I feel like ultimately I’ll have to abandon one idea and focus my limited energies on the other until things improve and the slump lifts, but there’s still the question as to which one. I’m curious as to what some of you might think of a situation like this.

If you’ve got a distinctly character driven story and a distinctly concept driven story, is there ever one of the two that’s the safest bet? I know that can depend on so many things, but let’s enter the realm of fantasy and say you’ve got the best concept driven story ever and the best character driven story ever, but you can only do one. Which would you choose?

Book Alert – Screen Plays by David S. Cohen

I recently had the great pleasure of reading David S. Cohen’s Screen Plays, which analyzes the paths that 25 recent, yet quite different screenplays took from first draft to screen. While Screen Plays addresses the on and off-set struggles to bring the 25 select screenplays to fruition, detailing the process of getting producers, actors, directors, and studios attached, the central figure in every account is always the screenwriter(s) working on the project. Cohen, an entertainment reporter for both Variety and Script magazine, knows firsthand what writers go through when trying to bring their work to the screen – he spent time as a writer on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

If nothing else, Screen Plays should be hailed as a work of encouragement for emerging writers everywhere. The 25 writers and writing teams profiled often had to battle through studio changeover, a slew of actors and directors getting attached and unattached, and numerous turnarounds in order to stay on their projects and get their movies made. There are a handful of examples of writers that didn’t give up and bore the fruits of their persistence in this book. However, Screen Plays is more than just a proverbial encouraging pat on the back, more than just a reminder of what can come true for those of us who are dedicated to and willing to put work in toward this odd profession.

Though he covers material as diverse as the wildly successful and high-grossing Gladiator to the under-the-radar, largely unknown The Caveman’s Valentine (a novel to screen adaptation that I think I was one of ten people who saw), Cohen manages to weave a coherent narrative throughout the twenty-five case studies. I have to admit how pleasantly surprised I was to see Cohen weave the experience of one writer detailed in the opening chapters of the book into those of another scribe dealing, for example, with completely different material and a much smaller budget later on toward the end of the book. Cohen contrasts the experiences of successful, A-list writers David Franzoni (Gladiator) and David Beinoff (Troy) with those of one-time spec king Shane Black as he tried to sell Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. What is most interesting in that comparison is how Black abdicated his throne out of disgust for Hollywood, while Franzoni and Beinoff each used their rising status to accomplish what other writers might have never been able to pull off – the high-budget, historical epic. Any writer with hopes of what little bit of power a screenwriter is entitled to in Hollywood will take the comparison and career paths of those three writers to heart, studying them and, hopefully, one day being able to apply the best strategy to his or her own career.

The range of scripts, approaches, and writers that Cohen covers is admirable, a sign of true dedication to creating a wide-reaching image of the industry from a writer’s point of view. In addition to the above mentioned scripts, in little over 300 pages, Cohen manages to paint coherent pictures of the successes and failures of collaborations (Mona Lisa Smile, Witness, and Monster’s Ball to name a few), indie-pictures that made a big splash (Lost in Translation), those that didn’t (A Dirty Shame), foreign films (Hero), and adaptations (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The Hours, and Evening). He’s not afraid to say when the noble efforts of a writer failed to make a good movie (Random Hearts). And he writes about the movies, gets the writers to open up about them in such a way that while reading, I felt an overwhelming to re-watch the movies in question (American Beauty).

Screen Plays is a great look into the life and work of a working screenwriter. The scribes interviewed are exceedingly honest about what the process of adapting a book, working with a partner, losing a project, or seeing a movie flop or suffer the fate of bad reviews was like. It would behoove any aspiring writer to read this. Learn how to protect your work, or if you’ll be able to. Read about what faith in a project can do and how to get (most) of what you like about a script onto the screen. Experience vicariously what it’s like to be told your picture won’t get a release because of content, or how your masterpiece is way too long and pricey. Find out which battles you’ll have to fight, and which you probably shouldn’t. Screen Plays deserves a spot on any screenwriter’s bookshelf.

Screen Plays

David S. Cohen

342 pages

$15.99

Harper Paperbacks

Before you rush out to buy Screen Plays, email The Screenwriters League. We have five promotional copies of David S. Cohen’s book to give away on a first-come, first-serve basis. To claim your copy, email info@screenwritersleague.com with “Screen Plays” in the subject heading. Include your name and shipping address. And be sure to subscribe to The Screenwriters League so that you can be notified first about future promotions and giveaways.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 64 - Write Badly, It's Good for You

When I was a freshman in NYU’s Dramatic Writing program, my professor said something that was both surprising and enlightening. One of the assignments he used to give, which we weren’t fortunate enough to have time to do, was to write as bad a short script as possible. His theory: setting out to write badly often produced the best work to date, because none of the concerns about turning out a masterpiece are present. The writing becomes unrestrained.

Think about it for a second; it actually makes sense. All too often, I find myself hesitant to put words on the page, lest they be any less than perfect. Writing a first draft is as much about trying to just get the story out as it is about writing a good script, maybe more so. Yet, when I work on drafts, I find it all too easy to obsess about every little detail and derail the writing process, allowing myself to get stuck on small scenes that will probably get cut anyway. I don’t like having to do extensive rewrites, but perhaps it’s best to not set out to write gold every time.

I’m trying the “Write Badly” approach right now. OK, I’m not actively setting out to write a terrible script that could never see a production. What I mean, though, is that I’ve discarded the heavy weights of perfection in favor of a fun, carefree write that will require rewrites later, but will keep me actively working on something now. I’m in between drafts of my Roman army spec and awaiting notes on my post-Apocalyptic spec. I didn’t want to start a new action spec, for fear of triple-stacking myself in that genre right now, which could lead to a blending of projects. Like any committed writer, though, I didn’t want to just sit idly by or allow myself to fall into a slump for lack of projects.

The solution was simple: write the high school comedy I’d been toying with, with no real commitment to quality yet. I needed a cool down period in between projects, but had to keep the muscles moving. Sort of like slowing to a jog or a fast walk between sprints, I wanted to keep exercising, but focus more on maintaining a work ethic than really diving into something serious right now. And I’ll tell you this, I’m really enjoying it. I almost feel like I’m cheating when I come home, write for an hour, and have five coherent pages of something I’m not 100% serious about right now. I’m writing, but it also feels like a break from writing. If you’re stuck in a rut or taking a step back from one project before diving into rewrites or another major project, yet you want to keep active, then maybe this is right for you. Write “badly;” you might like it.