"I was getting laid a lot in this movie" - Hilarious Arnie commentary

Saw this on the Village Voice's Topless Robot blog a few weeks back and haven't been able to stop laughing at it: Arnold Schwarzenegger and screenwriter/director John Milius giving a DVD commentary for Conan the Barbarian. These guys sound stoned out of their freaking minds.



John Milius (who already had the Apocalypse Now screenplay under his belt at this point) went on to write both Clear and Present Danger and Red Dawn, as well as co-create HBO's Rome. As for Arnie, I hear he went into politics or something.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 75 - Option and Conference Call

It never ceases to amaze me how rapidly modern transportation can shoot someone around the world. I woke up in Spain on Thursday morning, and within 12 hours of take off from the Pablo Picasso Airport in Malaga, I was downing beers with most of the League down on the Bowery. But I wasn’t just coming back for beer (they have that in Spain, I’d have stayed abroad if that was the only reason). No, as good as beer is, I had another reason. I had managed to pop onto my email a few times while overseas, and did two key things: I accepted the revised option agreement from a producer who wants my post-Apocalyptic spec, and I set a call for Friday evening with the producer and her manager.

Friday night, after two 16 ounce coffees and a few cans of soda (jetlag was beginning to set in with a vengeance), I sat down for my preset call. At just past 8pm EST, the phone rang. On the other end: producer Gretchen Somerfeld and manager Kevin Donahue. With the option agreement in the mail, it was time to get down to business. The point of the call was script notes, and we got down to business with little chit chat beforehand.

All in all, the notes were very easy to stomach. I’d gotten a lot of positive feedback from professional readers (at management companies and prod cos) who had seen the script, and had been told more than once that the draft I had was pretty solid, especially for a newbie’s spec. Nonetheless, no one had picked it up yet, so there was undoubtedly work to be done. Basically, I managed to write something that most creative execs and managers have told me would cost between $70 and $100 million to make. Not a small sum, especially for an unproduced writer. While the script is strong, it is not perfect, and in order for a studio to cough up that sum, it needs to be.

One of the issues with the script as is is that it builds slowly. I don’t mean to imply that it takes a long time to get into the script – hell, it starts with a body falling off a roof – but for a high budget action, it opens small. The producer and manager want to see it open with a bang, a chase or fight, something that gets the heart pumping 30 seconds in while also establishing the world. Whereas Gladiator opens with a battle, I opened my script with the aftermath. So, one major change will be a reworking of the first ten pages.

Next, I also have to focus a lot on long scenes, especially long because of dialogue, and make sure that the action remains throughout. I tend to overwrite dialogue for two reasons: I love writing it and I’m never sure if the reader gets what I want them to from the scene. However, as any screenwriter knows, dialogue can be a good script’s enemy. Though I will do my best to focus on the dialogue and cutting the script down where I can, Gretchen will also be working with me on it.

The notes kept coming, but for the most part, I was able to almost instantly get on board with them. I really think that they’ll help sell the script. That does not necessarily mean that they are working toward my original vision for the script. However, Hollywood is a game, and the one I’m playing now requires me to write the most saleable script, even if it’s a bit more mindless than what I originally intended. I will probably have to cut some of the layers that I was hoping to include, but can already admit that they weren’t working. With any luck, though, if the script sells and a director is attached, I’ll be able to work with him or her to get some of my ideas reincorporated. Right now, though, I’m doing everything I can to turn it into a payday.

Trailer Trash XLIX: Fantastic Voyage (1966)

"It drops the bottom out of the world you know and understand!"

A lot of you may be familiar with this movie, or at least the seven or eight episodes of The Magic School Bus that it inspired. By the 1960s there had already been science fiction movies that took us on journeys into space, to the bottom of the sea, and the center of the Earth. Fantastic Voyage, however, was the first movie to send Raquel Welch on a journey through a man's small intestine.



In case the theatrical trailer wasn't psychedelic enough for you, we present a SPECIAL TRAILER TRASH BONUS: The Original 1960s TV Spot:



"Four men and a beautiful girl, off on a FANTASTIC voyage!"


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.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 74 - Recharging My Batteries

Well, I'm back on the proverbial road again. Six months ago I was deep into one of the most southern points of Africa. Now, I'm in Europe, staring at what is the too rapidly approaching end of my vacation. New York City can't quite draw me back yet, but I'm having a hard time denying that I can hear it calling.

I love to travel just as much as I love to write. And I think the two go hand in hand. Even if I don't write scripts that take place in Africa or Ecuador or Europe (at least not yet), going to those places helps me shape my view of the world. It helps me become a more well-rounded writer. And, maybe most importantly, it helps me recharge my batteries.

We all have different ways of getting back onto the writing horse that we've recently fallen off of. Some of us play video games, watch movies, and generally let our minds go blank for a few weeks. Some of us get heavily into jogging. Others drink. Heavily. I travel. Whatever you have found that helps you, do it, especially if you're feeling burnout.

I tend to write really quickly for about a month, and then take a month or two off while trying to regain focus and dive into a new project. As you might have gathered from my earlier Writing Weeks, rewrites and minor edits are my baby steps back to full blown writing. But every now and then, I need something really big to stir things up, a change of scenery in which I can go guilt free about not writing. And, as absence makes the heart grow fonder, by the time I'm back to my usual stomping grounds, I want to write. Need to write.

New York City, I'll be back soon. Computer, I hope you're ready. Vacation, for now, I'm all yours.

Trailer Trash XLVIII: Bucktown (Fred Williamson, 1975)

"Where the chicks are on the make, the cops are on the take, and the welcoming committee is a sawed-off shotgun!"

In the same tradition as Bubba Smith, Jim Brown, O.J. Simpson, Rosey Grier and soon (shudder) Michael Strahan, Fred Williamson was a star football player who traded in his cleats for, um, acting shoes. One of the most prolific of the bunch, Fred Williamson's had more than 100 screen appearances over his 40-year career.


The bulk of Fred's body work includes some of the best-known blaxploitation flicks of the 1970s. Bucktown puts him on screen with blaxploitation legend Pam Grier.

Be prepared for some trailer-rapping:



For more examples of the awesome art of trailer-rapping, see former Trailer Trash subjects Dolemite and Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde.

"They're the greatest black attack pack you'll ever see!"

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.

What, When, Where this Weekend - Drag Me To Hell, Munyurangabo, Pontypool, Up

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 week...

DRAG ME TO HELL, written by Sam and Ivan Raimi, dir. by Sam Raimi


Premise: A loan officer ordered to evict an old woman from her home finds herself the recipient of a supernatural curse which turns her life into a living nightmare. Desperate, she turns to a seer for help, and learns she only has a short period of time before she is literally ushered into Hell.

Playing: All over.

Sam Raimi - back to his slapstick horror roots? I'm beyond sold. Chalk me in.

MUNYURANGABO, written by Samuel Gray Anderson and Lee Isaac Chung, dir. by Lee Isaac Chung


Premise: An orphan of the Rwandan genocide travels from Kigali to the countryside on a quest for justice.

Playing: Anthology Film Archives

The first time I'd heard of this was Time Out's review. They do it a lot more justice than any of the information I've found online about it.

PONTYPOOL, written by Tony Burgess, dir. by Bruce McDonald


Premise: A psychological thriller in which a deadly virus infects a small Ontario town.

Playing: Cinema Village

UP, written by Bob Peterson, dir. by Pete Docter and Bob Peterson


Premise: By tying thousands of balloon to his home, 78-year-old Carl Fredricksen sets out to fulfill his lifelong dream to see the wilds of South America. Right after lifting off, however, he learns he isn't alone on his journey, since Russell, a wilderness explorer 70 years his junior, has inadvertently become a stowaway on the trip.

Playing: Everywhere.

It's Pixar. Do we have any reason to doubt them anymore? It's gotten ridiculous.

What are you doing/seeing this weekend?

Terminator Salvation - False Prophet

Salvation seems appropriate given that some fans of the Terminator franchise have been anticipating this particular kind of Terminator movie as if it were the second coming. Terminator Salvation, the action packed fourth installment to the franchise, is a bit of a false prophet in that regard. The film recovers some of the ground that many feel the franchise surrendered with Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, but even with a perfectly awesome John Connor and lots of big summer action, fans will find it hard to escape the feeling that the film fell well short of its potential.

Directed by McG, Terminator Salvation takes place in the post apocalyptic world that we’ve seen in flashbacks throughout the previous films over the course of the last quarter century. John Connor (Christian Bale) is the prophesied leader of the human resistance against Skynet. On the brink of a major breakthrough in the war against the machines, Connor must decide whether or not to trust his instincts when he encounters one of Skynet’s latest creations, a part machine, part living human entity. The hybrid character remembers a human life and goes by his human name, Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington).

Salvation takes a duel protagonist approach with Connor and Wright, surprisingly giving both characters fairly equal screen time throughout the movie. Christian Bale has a serious approach to his role, and he truly makes you believe that most of John Connor’s life has been dedicated to the fight against the machines. His routine consists of sending radio addresses to the fragments of humankind around the world and obsessing over his mother’s recordings, searching for any bit of intelligence that will give him an edge in his fight. John Connor has spent the majority of his time in the franchise running for his life, but Bale presents us with a Connor that’s ready to stand and fight, and more than qualified to do so.



Skynet’s design of Marcus Wright is very complex, but you don’t leave the movie thinking he’s a complex character. There’s a simplicity to him that I enjoyed. Similar to Connor, he’s a bleak individual, a man of few smiles. He’s in search of redemption for actions undertaken in the life he remembers, but for him redemption doesn’t seem attainable for much of the film. He carries his emotional pain while distributing physical pain to any man or machine that gets in his way. It’s easy to watch Marcus Wright in action. He’s bad ass to the point where you kind of want to see more of his story in the pre-apocalyptic world.

What I appreciated most about John Connor and Marcus Wright was that their attitudes fit what I envisioned to be the world of Terminator Salvation. Unfortunately, the nuclear devastated world as presented by McG, was hardly what I was hoping for in this installment. There just isn’t really a sense of dread surrounding Skynet and their operations. The conflict between man and machine appears be a fair fight, a far cry from the hopeless world we saw in flashbacks where dozens of terminator infantry were annihilating humans with the support of heavy armor and aircraft. In post-apocalyptic Los Angeles Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin) fights a single bungling terminator with the use of silly pulley system traps. For over twenty years our imaginations ran wild about what an impossible obstacle Skynet must be. In Salvation we get to see one of the Skynet bases and it’s defended lightly enough that a helicopter can swoop in and land right in the middle. Most of the characters look clean, trimmed, and in some cases salon styled. If you’re a fan of the previous films and love the gritty world they painted of the future, the world of Salvation was a flat out disappointment. All in all, if you don’t dread the terminators and fear the outcome of them catching up to the main characters, a Terminator movie can’t succeed. The film made the worst possible mistake they could have by having terminators that absolutely suck at terminating.

It would be hard not to blame this failure largely on the PG-13 rating, something that made all fans cringe when first discovered. The violence the terminators inflict is hardly intimate, because the rating prohibits it to be. Most of the time we see a huge explosion and surmise that several humans must have just met their end. Terminators in the previous films were a force to be reckoned with, primarily because they could get up close and personal and do things like gun down a police station, punch out somebody’s heart, or spear somebody through the mouth. That is not mindless violence. It reinforces the idea of a purely lethal force that only exists to find our protagonist and extinguish his/her life. Considering that John Connor and Kyle Reese are such high priority targets for Skynet and given the lethality of the terminators in previous films, it’s just frustrating to see terminators get their hands on the characters over and over again and fail to kill them.

After seeing Salvation I couldn’t help but think back the original Terminator and admire everything they accomplished. Michael Biehn was simply amazing as Kyle Reese. From the moment he comes scurrying into pre-apocalypse LA, we see someone who has been entirely consumed by an almost hopeless fight for survival. What fuel he has left in the tank is solely dedicated to finding and protecting Sarah Connor. Linda Hamilton’s Sarah Connor was equally excellent as she presented a completely overwhelmed and utterly terrified woman who is suddenly confronted with her grim destiny. Let’s not forget about Arnold, whose terminator is still the standard for what every killing machine should be. “Are you Sarah Connor?” The moment that unfortunate lady said yes, there was absolutely no escape. But had that been Salvation she would have been able to run out the backdoor with the terminator firing inaccurate shots into the ceiling.

Thematically, screenwriters John Brancato and Michael Ferris focus on what separates a human from a machine. Marcus Wright provides the perfect vehicle for exploration of this, but the film doesn’t seek to dive in too deeply to the questions it poses. Instead John Connor and Kyle Reese have thematic blurbs that do little more than reinforce the thematic conclusions the audience already had in their heads. Zombie seemed concerned because this is the screenwriting team that gave us Catwoman. Rest assured, Salvation is far from Catwoman, but you won’t be studying the script much. Most of the story’s disappointments will most likely be overlooked because something else will disappoint viewers or audiences will be distracted by a fairly quick pace and blockbuster action.

Salvation does leave things open for future John Connor adventures. There’s no doubt that they’ll stick with the PG-13 rating and cash in on Christian Bale’s fantastic box office run, but fans will cling to hopes that the fifth film will tap into the full potential of the world the first three movies established. Salvation was the skirmish in man’s fight against machines. What we want to see is the all out war.