The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 68 – The Power of Research

All movies require research. Think about some of your favorite sci-fi or historical movies. Think about the best war movie you can recall, or the great Wall Street, courtroom, or medical drama that just came out. No matter the subject, setting, or time period, extensive work goes into getting the most accurate depiction of the world possible – often before a film even goes into production. I recently found this out firsthand.

My post-Apocalyptic script, which I’ve been working on for about a yeah and five months now, is, like any script in that genre, set in a devastated Earth where many things have gone terribly, terribly wrong. And, like most post-Apocalyptic scripts, the way in which things have gone terribly wrong was the jumping off point for not only the story, but for my writing process. Before I really began writing, I did (what I thought was) extensive research into the “what-ifs” and “what would happen” behind all situations imaginable for the world I was creating. I thought I did a pretty good job hammering out the points and was pleased to be able to answer any questions that came my way.

Then, about a month ago, a friend of mine who works in the development office at a production company with a first look deal at Warner Bros. got in touch with me. She wanted to make a push for the script, but could I answer some questions about the world first? I sent off my answers, and things quieted down for a bit. Well, about two weeks ago, I heard back from her. She was still working on the script, but all the creative/development people she showed it to kept getting hung up on the logistics of the world. Could I send another few paragraphs explaining how certain things would happen if the Earth “died” the way I wrote it? A page and a half email later, I felt confident that I had done my best to answer everything as coherently and completely as possible. At Onyx’s suggestion, I even emailed some physicists about specific questions pertaining to my script, and sent those off to my development contact.

Though I’m still waiting to hear back from my friend about my script, I’ll say that I was surprised by how much and how many times I was asked to give detailed answers about my writing. I know, I know. This shouldn’t have come as a surprise. I guess what caught me off guard was how hard a time my friend and her coworkers were having getting on board with some of the key elements of the spec. How many times do we go to the movies knowing that we’re supposed to completely cast logic aside? Or we see fire in space (cough *Armageddon* cough) and don’t bother asking how or why? How many times do you, the viewer, ask yourself how any studio was able to get behind something that was so clearly not researched at all?

One of the best weapons a writer has is his/her ability to research. My spec would have been dead in the water long ago if I couldn’t answer basic questions from the rest of the League and my friends, let alone from development staff at production companies. Make sure you know your world. Research as much as you can. Know what it’s supposed to look, sound, smell, feel, and taste like. Because, I can almost guarantee you, someone will ask, and you’d better be able to answer.

10 Ways to Save NBC's Kings

Last week, a new show was cut short before its time. Kings, the bombastic NBC hour-long drama starring Ian McShane and a host of mid-level character actors was exiled from its prime Sunday night 8pm timeslot to that barren wilderness that is Saturday night TV. While the ultimate fate of this show may be to compete against House reruns on USA it irks me knowing that it didn’t have to be this way. So here, I’ve compiled a list of 10 things that creator Michael Green could have done to keep his baby alive


1. A Killer Opening Sequence

Kings was touted as an epic – a modern retelling of the biblical story of King David. Complete with court intrigue, war, and the classic archetype of the young man who goes to the big corrupt city. The formula was sound. But if there’s one thing that the HBO and Showtime shows do well, it's giving you the impression of physically transporting you to another realm, and that starts with an opening sequence that grabs your viewer and takes them there. From Weeds to Six Feet Under, this is something that people have come to expect from the TV shows they take seriously in the way Kings so wanted itself to be. Premium cable shows usually farm out their opening sequences, so for small trailer and commercial houses these highly stylized and intricate sequences become the jewel of their reels. The Kings opening sequence is some stock footage of butterflies put with some digital butterflies on a background of butterflies and some kind of annoyingly serious music with a digital star filter and an age preset. Meh. Network shows on that level keep their opening sequences short and sweet for a reason.


2. Put It On A Premium Channel

Kings could have really flourished on a premium network – from the creative control the creators would have retained to the more selective viewing audience they would have reached, there would have been a chance for this show to flourish and grow, without worrying about why people aren’t switching channels from America’s Next Biggest Celebutard’s Got Talent. This show is just aching to be on a real network, you can feel it when you watch it. All Kings wants is to tell its story without Billy Mays interrupting it every 4 minutes to sell epoxy.


3. A Little Less Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Posturing

Oy, we get it already. Oh, look at you, Kings writer/producer/whoever thought that “clever” device up, someone went to college, yes they did! Someone learned about those cutesy-wootsy story devices in their craft class. What you say? There are two guys who are in every episode whom only one person in the world even acknowledges and have dry commentary on the goings on of the noble people they serve? My my, I’ve never heard of that before, so it’s compelling and makes me connect more emotionally with the story. You’re lucky no one else thought of this first, because then your ham-fisted attempt at copying a tired, overused device would only make me roll my eyes and fast forward on the Hulu.

-What are those guys doing over there?
-Who Cares?
-Good point.

4. A Little More Immersion in the World

Gilboa: This is a country that was recently torn apart by war and has now been stitched together by Ian McShane into an empire, (hell, I’d live there). Although all the talk in the show is the country this and the kingdom that, very little time in the series has even been spent outside the walls of the palace. There’s no sense of the space, or the place that these people appear to care so fervently for. The city is like set dressing, it’s not a character in the show, and in a plot where the fate of the country is so often put in peril and touted as the motivation for many of the characters’ actions, it’d be nice to give a damn one way or the other.


5. Focus More on the Ensemble Instead of The "Stars"

The two driving forces of Kings, acting-wise, were laughably lopsided. On one hand, you have Ian McShane as King Silas, a classically trained actor with a resume a mile long and the ability to straight up kill people with a derisive stare. On the other, you’ve got a Christopher Egan as David, a pure-faced blonde-haired blue-eyed twenty-something whose last big movie was “Resident Evil: Extinction”. As the main character, not much is required from him except to stand there and make moral decisions while the other characters scheme against him, like most major network shows, but still there are times where he just seems laughably out of his depth. Now, to be fair to Egan, I don’t know if the writing is at fault or his acting is- the writing is admittedly quite poor on the fundamentals, and I’ve yet to get around to making it all the way through the Resident Evil films, but it doesn’t look good, either way.

Then, you have this ensemble cast, which is dotted with “hey isn’t that the guy from…” moments. Not all of them are spectacular actors, but by the third episode I was a bit tired of focusing 70% of the plot on David and was ready to start cozying up to the other characters, like how about that wacky gay crown prince that has such a ginormous chip on his shoulder? I mean, he can’t be going all swishy Richard III all the time, I’ve devoted six hours to this show already and I’ve yet to see any reason why he wasn’t smothered as a child for just being so darn evil.

The evil gay crown prince. Never seen that before, nope. Someone would have to have a pretty BRAVE HEART to copy a character like that, tell ya what.

There are a host of remarkable characters, competently acted and sometimes even interestingly written that only get a line or two when they get on screen. I keep on getting the feeling that this is like a miniseries that got cut to a feature length, a bit of the “Mulholland Drive’s” if you will, but it’s a network drama, which should give it more than enough time to develop their ensemble cast competently and completely. It just feels rushed and that’s the last thing you want for a show focusing on intrigue. For one to pull off a show focusing on intrigue, you have to first convince your audience that they should care about whether or not character A gets stabbed in the back by character B. And honestly, as much as I yearn for this show to get a chance to say its piece in full, I’m sick of focusing on one quite uncompelling main character. Needless to say though, as always Ian McShane is fantastic.


6. A Better Advertising Campaign

Right now the studios are kind of at a loss to how to grab the 18-24’s, having been raised on advertising to the point that we don’t even notice half of it anymore, full page ads in newspapers (what were those again?) or even your average TV commercials (thank you TiVO) can’t hold our MTV and text message honed attention spans. I for one remember seeing ads in the subways with the Kings signature butterfly on it, and was quite intrigued, but there was no way for me to know what it was supposed to be – A cell phone add? Some new medication? And that was pretty much all the info I got, until the lukewarm reviews started showing up on blogs. For someone who spends over half their day plugged into their computer, I saw practically nothing until after the premiere. I’m seeing this more and more with big show premieres. If I want to watch something, I have to actively put in an effort to find out when it is and where, I guess because network TV expects their viewers to be watching commercials, but that’s something I know most of my friends and I actively avoid. For a show that’s trying to be an HBO drama for the primetime crowd, they could have taken a bit more out of the HBO playbook for this one. These kinds of shows live and die by their word of mouth, which leads me to…


7. Having Faith in the Show

Shows normally under-perform in their first season. Especially ones meant for people with more neural activity than your average According to Jim fan. I think that even given all its flaws, it would have found a core audience that would have carried it through. The first season would be a loss leader until around the finale, but once the DVD’s got out and more people got to watch it, the second season would have come in with a bang. The story of King David has a lot of really cool stuff in it, which I’m going to be sorry to miss, since they decided to spend their first five episodes harping on about health care reform and letting their children do script revisions… with crayons. I mean hell, Heroes found a core audience and that’s an abysmally written ensemble show whose characters, for the most part, are actively disliked by pretty much everyone who watches it. But they’re still watching it!


8. Another Draft or Three the Script

A couple of passes on the show bible could have really helped here. But by one person, not a committee. This show suffers from the same lack of authorship that your average sitcom does. Any the teeth that the show might have had have been ripped out completely by majority rule – so the crown prince becomes a stereotypical sulking evil gay, the princess becomes a chattering harebrained harpy who can’t shut the hell up about how much she wants to help people, but oh goodness her nether regions want David, and Macaulay Culkin shows up out of the blue for what appears to be no good reason. So far the only thing I know his character does is steal black pumps, and I don’t even care. Make me care, please, o writers of Kings. Let him be an evil transvestite or have some voodoo that destroys souls through their shoes because for the life of me I doubt that he got banished from the land for being an unimaginative kleptomaniac.


9. Alan Ball, David Milch, or David Simon



Oh man, between these three guys, what they could have done with a concept like Kings just boggles the mind… I’ll be in my bunk.

10. Ian McShane in Every Role.

My god, what have I done...

Nuff Said!



Kings has been exiled to Saturdays at 8pm, and the rest of the first season is available on the Hulu. This was not actually a DVD Junkie column, but Kosmic just had to get it off her chest anyway. DVD Junkie is a weekly review of TV Series on DVD. It'll be back on a regular basis soon, but in the meantime you can follow her on Twitter @kosmicblues

Best Moviegoing Experiences

Movies are made to be seen at the theater. They can be watched and appreciated on anything from a flat screen to an iPod, but you will rarely find a venue with as tangible (the sound, the size) and intangible (the collective laughter in a comedy) assets as a movie theater. As such, there are certain movies that MUST be seen at a movie theater for its full potential to be realized. 

Some may scoff at the fact that Rocky beat out Network and Taxi Driver for Best Picture in 1977. (Hell, I prefer the latter two.) But hearing my parents say how the entire audience chanted, "Rocky!" during the film's climactic fight makes me really feel it was an experience of a lifetime. I kick myself to this day for missing out on Saving Private Ryan (I compensated by seeing Enemy at the Gates opening night...). Something About Mary? American Beauty? Missed 'em. There are plenty that I chose to "...wait until it came out on [video/DVD]", only to have similar regrets.

Strangely, when scanning my facebook page,  among my favorite movies, I only consider one as a top moviegoing experience. Here are my top five:

(NOTE: this only includes movies in their original theatrical runs, not retrospective screenings - i.e. It's a Wonderful Life at IFC.)

5. The Matrix. I saw this movie pre-buzz. There was a solid audience, but it was far from full. The lights went down and, wow...

If anything could beat the originality of the premise, it was the original action POVs. It was completely revolutionary, enhancing an already mind-blowing story. The action built and built until the climax totally dwarfed the beginning. (And the best part: no one in the audience knew it would be ruined with a second and a third!)

I went with my dad and my friend. We sat in our seats a few minutes of credits, a rarity. My dad looked over at us and asked, "Are you real?" Totally awesome.

4. The Dark Knight. I preferred Slumdog Millionaire. The story, I feel, is more original, the storytelling is clean, it's beautifully shot, it's got heart ... it's my favorite movie of 2008.

But that gets to the heart of what makes a moviegoing experience. The Dark Knight action scenes were incredible, and Heath Ledger's Joker scenes provided icing on the cake. The score mirrors the strength of the characters. The camera always seems to be moving, as if in a state of panic. It's special for a two and a half hour movie to begin with a bang and end with an even bigger bang. 

Afterwards, I could deconstruct some of the movie's logistics, and certain criticisms from blogs and film buffs rang true. But that didn't keep me from going back and experiencing it again.

3. Home Alone. For a six-year-old, watching an eight-year-old command his world was the coolest thing. First of all, he's home alone, meaning he has access to parents awesome TV, he 

can eat as much ice cream as he wants, he can order his own pizza, and he can watch violent movies. Secondly, this kid is cool. He can outsmart the check-out lady with witty remarks, scare away an inept pizza clerk, and talk to grown-ups on their own level. And when two accomplished burglars attempt to step on his turf, he outsmarts them and kicks their ass (yes, he even gets to say "ass"!).

Children are at the mercy of their parents. But for me and my friends, Home Alone allowed us to vicariously spread our wings.

2. Kingpin. What parent would let a ten-year-old watch this movie? An awesome one. This was 

quite possibly the funniest movie I've ever seen in theaters. What's not to love? There's a constant stream of jokes both subtle ("We present 'The Jeffersons on Ice!'") and over-the-top ("Roy, can you get sick from drinking piss? ... Even if it's your own?"); an ex-bowler protagonist with a hook for a hand who steals a baby's breast milk to supplant coffee creamer; a 40-year-old amish Randy Quaid introduced to the decadency of America; and a creepy/hysterical performance by Bill Murray. The great thing about seeing a comedy at the theater is that you're watching it with many senses of humor. And as a result, everything was funny.

I still watch this once a year. It has something most comedies lack: a heart. It's a story about redemption, and the ability to rebuild one's self-esteem. It's not only one of my favorite movie-going experiences, but one of my all time favorite movies.

1. Jurassic Park. The magic of seeing real live dinosaurs was simply captivating. I revisited the theater three times to watch this movie, got into countless debates with other eight-year-olds

about whether such a theme park could actually be built (one was not only convinced that it could be done but that it had been done, and his rich parents took him there!), and spent countless hours watching dinosaur TV specials and reading dinosaur books. Sadly, I was not one of the cool kids as I lacked the Jurassic Park lunchbox...

I was less enthused when I got the video for my tenth birthday; I was bored when I watched it when I was twenty-one. But there's no denying or forgetting that initial excitement. That was sixteen years ago. No doubt, it was my favorite movie-going experience.

What are your top 5?

(Note, here's a movie that nearly made my list: Titanic. In retrospect, the story is pretty lame, the lines are beyond cheesy, Billy Zane is a cartoonish villain, and you kind of want to punch DiCaprio in the face. It's hard to take it seriously nowadays. But I didn't know what to expect when I first saw it. I was really involved with an unexpected love story, and the ending was effective on a superficial and emotional level. And I know I'm not the only one.)

Trailer Trash XLIII: Trog (Joan Crawford, 1970)

"From a million years back... Horror explodes into today!"

(You know a movie is going to be poorly written when even the poster's tagline barely makes sense...)

This week's movie is most notable for starring Academy Award-winner Joan Crawford in her final movie role. Oh, how the mighty can fall... (Ben Kingsley, I'm looking at you.)

The other big highlight of this movie is that it features one of the dumbest-looking b-movie monsters to ever appear on the silver screen. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Trog:


I mean, seriously! Trog looks like a guy who forgot to put on the bottom of his Chewbacca costume. I understand Joan Crawford probably didn't come cheap. But, damn. Did they not have enough money left in the budget to buy their monster a pair of pants?



At 0:08 - Do you think this is the kind of stuff Syd Barret would see whenever he closed his eyes?
At 0:44 - Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!
At 0:56 - Jurassic Park has nothin' on this.
At 1:09 - How many times are they going to superimpose that face?
At 1:18 - Now? GAH!
At 1:20 - Does anyone know if underwear is considered proper spelunking gear?
At 1:28 - Chewbacca, no!
At 2:12 - "You may want to forget what you see..." - Does he mean the cavediver in his underwear?
At 2:25 - Aaaaaand back to Syd Barret-vision.

Wow. I mean, just wow, right? After the bizarre cave-exploring interlude at the beginning of the trailer, it's all just a man in half a gorilla costume chasing people around. Though, I suppose I'd run from that, too...


"...with the strength of 20 demons!"

Trailer Trash is a weekly tribute to oddball, cheesy and often just plain terrible movie trailers. Writers: Even Rob Schneider can get a movie made... so can you! You can read through our archive by clicking here.

What, When, Where this Weekend - Sleep Dealer, Lemon Tree

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.

Opening this weekend...

SLEEP DEALER, written by Alex Rivera and David Riker, dir. by Alex Rivera


Premise: An intercepted radio transmission is the motivation Memo needs to leave his village for Tijuana, where he goes to dangerous lengths to secure work in the hi-tech factories he once dreamed about.

Playing: City Cinemas Village East, AMC Empire 25

High-concept science fiction on a minimal budget. Don't see enough of this these days.

Check out the trailer here.

LEMON TREE, written by Suha Arraf and Eran Riklis, dir. by Eran Riklis


Premise: A drama based on the true story of a Palestinian widow who must defend her lemontree field when a new Israeli Defense Minister moves next to her and threatens to have her lemon grove torn down.

Playing: IFC Center, Lincoln Plaza

CRANK: HIGH VOLTAGE, written and directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor


Premise: When we last saw Chev Chelios, it appeared as though the assassin had met his maker. Wrong. As his story continues, Chelios hunts down the mobster who stole his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working.

Playing: Everywhere.

He's back from the dead! After "falling some 10,000 feet, bouncing off of a car, then slamming to the pavement and dying" - I'd see this one just to check out how they try to explain THAT one.

What are you doing/seeing this weekend?

Good Distractions

I’ve recently come to the conclusion that I love my home, but I can’t write there anymore. There are just too many distractions, but that’s almost too negative a word because I’m very fortunate to have everything that’s competing for my attention in that apartment. Let’s start with the beautiful girlfriend, who manages to capture my attention in so many different ways. If I’m lucky she’s batting her eyelashes at me with a grin on her face. How do you write with that going on? I’d close the door to the study, except I don’t have a study. I write in the living room and she’s always about twenty feet away no matter what room she’s in. Anyway, not the worst problem to have, although sometimes those bedroom eyes narrow and get angry, most often for silly things like me not wanting to walk to the food co-op with her, or scheduling a weekend of drinking with buddies over a Saturday engagement that she is “100% positive I told you about you douche bag. Don’t even think about it…you’re fucking going.” Sorry Cake Man and Zombie, I don’t think I can make the DC trip. At least my next favorite distraction never gets angry or talks back. Oh Xbox.

I think Xbox 360 was made by God as a test to see just how determined some people really are in their pursuits. I’ve shot that terrorist through his red beret so many god damn times, but I can’t stop going back to shoot him again. It doesn’t matter if I’ve finished the game. I can still play it through on expert. Funny thing was last weekend my girlfriend was in New Orleans, so I actually managed to get two hours of decent writing done one day. I decided to reward myself, and for some reason the best way I could think to do so was to fire up the Xbox to defend virtual United States for six hours straight. I watched the sun go down, but didn’t want to get up to turn on my living room light. I’m just glad I got the girlfriend before I got the Xbox. I hear girls don’t dig guys sitting in their boxers, wearing headsets, and talking to their buddies across the city with videogame controllers in their hands.

“Are you talking to them or playing with them?”

“Both! What don’t you understand!?”

Have you ever been writing and making progress on a scene, and then suddenly the next moment you’re looking at porn and you don’t even remember how you got there? Cake Man says he disconnects the internet when he writes. I’m just going to assume the scenario that makes me giggle the most. You should do the same.

Anyway, to get back on track I’ll just say there are a lot of things at my apartment that I like, but they aren’t helping my writing much these days. So I’ve decided to return to a practice I abandoned several months ago and start writing at work again after work hours. In most cases once the clock strikes five I’m still in work mode and have a get shit done type of mentality. Some people have told me they don’t have the discipline for an after work routine at the office, but I think it takes more discipline to keep motivated for writing once you arrive back home at your sanctuary. This is the practice that led to some of the best writing I’ve experienced. Since I’ve gone back to working at the office I can say for certain that I’ve moved past my recent slump. It’s a beautiful thing to see that you’ve written four new pages in a day when it took you all of last month to reach that number. If anybody out there has been having trouble with turning out pages and you have a work environment that would allow you to stay on for an hour or two to write, I’d strongly recommend you give it a try. If you hate your job, knowing that your workplace has been a creative temple for your craft could give you a new appreciation for your space. No matter how much I might dislike arriving at my desk early in the morning, I’ll always know that this is the space where I wrote one of my strongest scripts, and that means something to me.

Musician Will Oldham on movie music - do pre-existing pop songs belong in films?

Will Oldham (AKA Bonnie "Prince" Billy, Palace, and about a dozen other pseudonyms) is far and away one of my favorite musicians working today. Beyond his extremely prolific recording career, Oldham is a really talented actor - appearing in the classic Matewan, and more recently Junebug, The Guatemalan Handshake, and the superb Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy.


It's no secret that I absolutely love this guy. I've written roles in screenplays with him in mind - and listened to many, many hours of his music while I've been writing.

Oldham recently did a rare interview with The Onion AV Club where he talks about his creative process, his acting career, and the current state of the music industry. The whole interview is fascinating if you're a fan of his, but his thoughts on film music were what really got me thinking:

AVC: You mentioned talking to Richard Linklater and Caveh Zahedi about your ideas on movie music. Can you summarize those ideas?

WO: Well, for a while, it seemed like you were always seeing movies where all the music was determined by the music supervisors and their special relationships with certain record labels. And I just felt like, “Wow, I’ll bet they spent months or years writing this screenplay, and I’ll bet they spent months shooting this, and I’ll bet they spent months editing this, and now they’re spending no time at all picking these completely inappropriate songs with lyrics to put under a scene that has dialogue.” How does that even work? How can you have a song with someone singing lyrics under spoken dialogue and consider that mood-music, or supportive of the storyline? As somebody who likes music, when that happens, I tend to listen to the lyrics, which have nothing to do with the movie. And then I’m lost in the storyline. Not only is that a crime, but it’s a crime not to give people who are good at making music for movies the work. It’s like saying, “We don’t need you, even though you’re so much better at it than I am as a music supervisor.” Like the cancer that is that Darjeeling guy… what’s his name?

AVC: Wes Anderson?

WO: Yeah. His completely cancerous approach to using music is basically, “Here’s my iPod on shuffle, and here’s my movie.” The two are just thrown together. People are constantly contacting me saying, “I’ve been editing my movie, and I’ve been using your song in the editing process. What would it take to license the song?” And for me it’s like, “Regardless of what you’ve been doing, my song doesn’t belong in your movie.” That’s where the conversation should end. Music should be made for movies, you know?

This bit of the interview really made me stop in my tracks. Anyone who knows me or my writing is aware of how important a part music plays, both there and in most everything I do.

I've (mostly) gotten out of the habit of writing songs into my screenplays, but I'm still setting my scenes to music in my head as I write, creating an imaginary soundtrack. Music can inspire certain feelings and emotions in me much quicker and more efficiently than any other medium. If thinking of a certain song can help me get into a desired mindset, I see no problem with using that as my crutch.

But, once you get past the screenplay phase and into the editing process - does using existing songs distract from the film itself?

I can see myself on both sides of the fence with this one. On one hand, I hate, hate, hate it when popular songs are slapped into a movie haphazardly, without any real rhyme or reason other than to create a hip soundtrack. (I'm looking at you, Juno and Nick and Norah.) I find myself annoyed by the music, and these negative feelings will bleed out onto the films other qualities, or lack thereof.

But on the other hand, there are plenty of examples of movies that have used an existing song to elevate a scene into something sublime - I'll use Apocalypse Now's use of The Doors' "The End" as an example for this, or the unsettling acapella version of Roy Orbison's "In Dreams" in Blue Velvet.

Do pre-existing pop songs have any business appearing in movies? When is it okay/not okay?