Competition Alert - London Screenwriters' Festival

Happy Friday, readers. To ring in the (much needed) weekend, we thought we’d share some information we received here at League HQ about a free feature screenplay competition. Circalit is partnering with the London Screenwriters’ Festival to offer a lucky and talented scribe a cash prize, a meeting with a top London-based literary agent, and free tickets to the festival.  

The London Screenwriters Festival makes its debut as “the biggest screenwriting event in Europe” this coming October. The festival boasts a host of speakers including Tim Bevan, Co-Chairman of Working Title, and the BBC’s Head Drama Commissioner, Ben Stephenson. Oscar shortlisted film director Chris Jones is the festival’s creative director. The three day event takes place at Regents College in Regents Park, London from October 29 through 31. 

For more information or to enter your script, visit http://www.circalit.com/projects/competitions. The deadline for submissions is one week from today, on October 15.

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 144 - Planning for L.A.

At long last, and after much dreaming, it looks like an L.A. trip is growing increasingly likely (and imminent). My manager called me early last week to update me on our quest to land me an agent. A few weeks back, we'd gone out to agents at three of the major agencies, and then followed that up with another three at slightly smaller, but no less prestigious, companies. As of last week, we'd still only had one tentative and one confirmed agent interested, and the one whose interest was clear followed up with my manager (a very good sign) to see what the status of the project was. 

From everything I've heard, read, and experienced, this is almost as bad a time for an unknown writer to try and secure representation. Very few people seem to want to read new material by new writers and risk getting on board with something that is not a "sure bet" - especially because even "sure bets" with established talent involved are giant leaps-of-faith now. The spec market seems to be warming (possibly), in large part due to Inception and other original successes, but it's a slow climb back to high interest levels from industry players. The level of caution is still difficult to overcome, and for outsiders like me - i.e. unproduced, unsold, unknown - the hope of getting work over someone with credits is incredibly low. 

All of the above means that having interest from an agent at one of the top companies is a major coup. (Aside: I'm not trying to toot my own horn here; rather, as always the purpose of the site, I'm trying to put things in perspective for our readers in similar or hoping to be in similar situations.) If you're based anywhere but L.A. as I am and you really want to try and break into the film industry, there is very little that should get in the way of you taking advantage of an opportunity like this. When my manager called and asked if it would be at all possible for me to fly out west for a day or two, I immediately said I could drop whatever and go whenever. Even if the agent and I don't click - the purpose of my trip would be to put in some face time and see whether or not we could work together - the opportunity to go out there is something that I can't pass up. I might not get another chance like this. 

Beyond that, making the trip indicates something else about me as a writer that all aspiring scribes should adhere to. It means I'm willing to work with people. That might seem pretty basic (or maybe confusing), but it's essential. The same way that a rookie scribe going through script development with other people must be open to notes - both taking and actually implementing - he or she must be able to work with people at their convenience. Because I'm not in L.A., making the trip when someone needs me to helps to show my commitment to my career. If you're outside Hollywood and trying to work your way in, put some money aside in the event that you have to make the trip. You might not have the luxury of asking people to wait a month or two so you can scrape together funds for a plane ticket. Keep $500 or $600 aside, get yourself on travel deal email lists, and look up anyone you know out there who might offer to host you on their couch for a few days to a week. If someone asks you to come out there, the only real answer - if you're able to travel - should be "yes."

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 143 - The Act Two Hump

Ask just about any writer what the most difficult pages to write are, and I bet you'll frequently hear, "pages 60 through 70." If not that, then "the second half of act two" or "the pages right after the midpoint." Ask me the same question, and I'll invariably tell you the same thing.

I like to call it the "60-70 slump" or, a bit more generally, the "Act Two hump." Basically, these are the pages that just plain suck to write. Act One often breezes by. It involves a lot of set up, but also a lot of fun. The stakes aren't necessarily too high yet - in fact, theoretically they're as low as they'll be throughout the whole script, since the stakes should build steadily as the film goes on. This first half of Act Two (pages 30-60 in a conventional three act, 120 page script) build rapidly, as does the action or conflict or tension. The midpoint (60) hits, and should hit hard - for better or worse. The protagonist meets with great defeat here or is thrown off the path he's been following or experiences a great success from which she might fall later. Things change at the midpoint. It's what comes next that's the hard part.

I often get past the midpoint and, even though I know what has to happen in toward the end of Act Two and into Act Three, I usually stop and think, "what's next?" Things often just stagnate here. My characters and story are not yet at a point where the later events can come to fruition - there are a couple missing beats in between - but they also can't backtrack. In short, they're stuck. Rather, I'm stuck. 

With the firefighter script that I'm working on now, I spent no fewer than two days last week essentially staring at a blinking cursor for an hour a day, trying to figure out what would come next and why my characters couldn't just skip ahead to the end. Granted, I needed the pages in between to bulk up the script, but the main concern in the writing for me at this point is the actual story progression. If it seems like the natural next move is the one that immediately brings about the end of Act Two, then perhaps I've missed something earlier or have not given enough credit to something that needs to happen. Of course, it could also mean that my story's short and warrants a bit more exploration somewhere. 

Ultimately, in this case, the solution came about in two ways. For one, I realized that the order of a few scenes building up to, including, and immediately following the midpoint turn was wrong. I had laid things out in such a way that, in order to fill a scene gap and convey some necessary information, I was going to have to write a highly redundant scene between two characters no more than a couple pages after their last one. Bad news. What's more, other gratuitous scenes and bits of information were going to be thrown in later, since the best places to achieve those moments had already been taken by earlier, similar beats. Reshuffling the scene order not only saved me wasted space in the form of redundant dialogue and action, but it got me thinking about how the rest of the script would likely play out. And when the juices started flowing, they flooded. As if lightning had struck, I raced to hammer out a very terse beat sheet detailing nine or ten sequences that would carry me through most of the rest of the film. They just all clicked right into place, connecting naturally end to end in what seemed like seamless fashion. There's no guarantee that these sequences will generate perfect pacing or pages, of course, but they at least helped me to get through the 60-70 slump, over the Act Two hump.

Don't worry that you're not cut out for this whole writing thing just because you hit a wall in your writing. It's totally natural for writers to experience that at some point. Just work through the slump - it might take some time, but it'll be so worth it when you do - and you'll be in the home stretch. 

Logline Central - Ender's Game

Logline Central is an irregular segment that takes a deeper look at loglines of scripts or projects that have just been purchased, as listed on DoneDealPro.

I don't actually have a ton to say about this week's logline. It's fair to middling as a logline in and of its own, but it's more the project and director that I'm excited about.  Just a SPOILER ALERT warning to anyone who has not read (the awesome) Ender's Game and plans to some day - the logline pretty much gives away the ending, twist, and oomf of the book.

Title: Ender's Game

Logline: Set in a world in which humans face a serious threat from an alien race known as the Formics and begin training elite military units in response. Andrew Wiggin, also known as Ender, a child becomes a top-flight solider and helps to save Earth by fighting simulations that turn out to be real.

Writer: Gavin Hood

 More: Rewrite. Adapted from the Orson Scott Card's bestselling books. Gavin Hood will also direct. Last set up in February 2004 at Warner Bros.

If the name rings a bell, Gavin Hood is the filmmaker who directed X-Men Origins: Wolverine and gets most of the blame for the consensus that the movie generally sucked. (To be fair, I didn't think it blew that bad, but I also saw it after hearing how awful it was for about three weeks.) Still, whether he ruined your X-world or not, Hood deserves much more credit - and more chances - in my book. A few years ago, the South African native directed one of my all-time favorite films, the beautiful, under-appreciated gem TSOTSI. It was such an incredibly powerful character story focused on redemption and salvation, that Hood earned my $12.50 for his next few films. I'd like to see what he does with Ender's Game, since there's a lot there about the the characters (hopefully he can mine their emotions a bit deeper than he did in Wolverine).

It's always interesting to me when a filmmaker breaks into the American market with a beautiful, small film, and then almost immediately heads franchise pics like Wolverine and Ender. That must be a tremendous amount of pressure on someone who is not of the system originally and not accustomed to the kind of budgets handed over to them. Still, despite the widely-accepted notion that Wolverine sucked, Hood got Ender, which I know holds a special place in a lot of fans' hearts. Hell, I haven't read a lot of sci-fi (despite the fact that I tend to write it these days), and even I hold Ender's Game in very high regard. I was even just talking about it this weekend, as a matter of fact. 

Let's just hope that Hood guides the ship successfully to the screen. Ender's Game is difficult material in the sense that an adaptation has a lot to live up to, but I like to think that Gavin Hood is up to the challenge. If it makes it to the screen, I'll be there.

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 142 - How to Use Slugg Lines

I really can't tell you how great it feels to be working on something new after so much time dedicated to my post-Apocalyptic spec. Not that I disliked working on that script - in fact, the complete opposite is true. I loved writing (and re-writing) it. After a while, though, my "new script" muscles were beginning to atrophy, so a change to an unexplored project was a welcome one. 

While I was writing this week (almost to page 50 of an intended 90), I got to thinking a lot about slugg lines and the way that they're best utilized. I'm pretty content with the way I handle them, but considering this blog is primarily intended to share our experiences and discoveries with other aspiring writers, I figured it couldn't hurt to talk about them a bit this week. After all, we all use them every day in our writing, and I certainly have a number of them in my week's pages, so why not.

To recap quickly in case you're not 100% sure what I'm talking about, the slugg line is the heading that appears before each scene, usually formatted like this:  INT. HOSPITAL ROOM -- DAY (or something very similar). The "INT." or "EXT." offer the environment (i.e. inside or outside). "HOSPITAL ROOM" is the specific location, with "DAY" being the time of day the scene is set. It's generally understood that the time of day be written either as day or night, with few exceptions leaning either way between or outside those general markers (afternoon, morning, evening). You can also use "LATER" or "MOMENTS LATER" or "CONTINUOUS" in place of day or night. For more on Continuous, check out this earlier post.

The reason that Day and Night are the most typical time indicators is that, for the most part, there are other people who will go through your script and prep it for production, a task that involves determining the shooting schedule. Unless it is absolutely imperative that a particular scene occur in the wee hours of the morning or at sundown, unnecessarily adding anything other than day or night makes planning the shooting schedule that much more difficult. The last thing you want to do as a new (or any) writer is make other people's jobs more difficult. Sticking with those two should not hinder your writing in most cases. 

As for Later, Moments Later, and Continuous, these are a bit different. In theory, all action is "continuous" (the movie doesn't just stop between scenes), so you do not need to use it all the time. If things are happening at the same time, you can do it - or "SIMULTANEOUS" if you want. For Later and Moments Later, I like to use them as such: both are used to denote a scene that takes place on the same day as the previous one. For example, something occurs during the day, and the following scene is still during the day, only a bit later on, I would use Later. If it is within the same 24 hours but now it's dark out, go with Night. If something happens during the day, and the following scene is a continuation of it that we have jumped to (perhaps set up to fifteen minutes later) but the locale, characters, and beat are the same, instead of writing in JUMP CUT TO, I go with Moments Later. There can even be a change of location here. If action is the next day (i.e. two "day" scenes back to back with 24 hours between them), I would use Day again in the slugg line, but specify "The next day" at the beginning of the description/action.

Your last option - and one that I like a lot - is to use Secondary Headings, especially in cases where action continues in the same location. Basically, these are modified slugg lines, which contain neither the interior/exterior designation, nor information about the time of day. You don't have to bog down the page with extra text to describe a scene set in a house, for example, in which the characters go from room to room. Rather than constantly typing INT. BILL'S HOUSE, [SPECIFIC] ROOM -- CONTINUOUS for each subsequent room, start with an overview - INT. BILL'S HOUSE -- DAY - and then follow the characters into the... DINING ROOM and then into the... LIVING ROOM and so on and so forth. "DINING ROOM" stands alone on the slugg line, followed by the action or dialogue, and then LIVING ROOM taking us into the next chunk. It reads quicker and looks cleaner. Some writers even use secondary headings almost exclusively. I like them quite a bit myself.

Remember, slugg lines are malleable. They involve words that you still have to type out, and therefore, you can change them as need be. However, there's also an accepted format to them, which you would do well to work within for the most part.

Fall and Oscar Movie Preview - 2010

Fall is here, and in movie land, that means Oscar season. The following three articles are definitely worth reading if you're trying to track what's coming out between now and the end of the year and which - if any - of the releases are potential Oscar fodder.

Ken Levine does his annual fall movie preview in two parts here and here. Always good for a laugh, Levine's previews offer a good-natured (I think), usually well-deserved mocking look at what Hollywood has lined up for the final months of the year. When he lists them all out side by side that way, it's baffling to see just how many are remakes, sequels, three-quels, and adaptations. Count the original stuff. I doubt you need more than two hands.

While Nikki Finke is on vacation, Pete Hammond sums up the potential Oscar nominees at Deadline Hollywood. Granted, you don't have to care or buy into any of this if you don't want to. But lists like these are always useful as tracking devices (at the very least) for me. Regardless of how much stock you put in the Academy's decisions each year, knowing what's getting a lot of buzz at the festivals is generally pretty important for anyone looking to break into the industry, as being able to speak about what's hot (and understand the references when producers or agents make them to you) is crucial.

The Writing Week (Vol. 3) part 141 - Positive Response from Agents and A New Approach to Writing

Three weeks ago, my post-Apocalyptic spec went out to a handful of agents at some of the largest agencies. Two weeks ago, all I knew was that one had passed. My manager didn't expect to hear much until after Labor Day, as most people were out of town for the end of the summer then. Last week, as expected, we got word from the other two we went out to initially.

I was thrilled to hear that both responses were quite positive. While I can't say who or where (though obviously I know both), I can say that these are agents at companies that any emerging writer would love to wind up at. If anything, they could be considered too big - in the sense that they would have other clients earning more and therefore more "important" right now - but that doesn't seem to be a concern in either case. The agents have teams working with them, and it's likely that there would be a few people handling the material. Of the two, we're still waiting to hear from one who liked the script, but recently signed a client writing similar work (which could be a conflict of interest). Either way, two people interested in the work and a few others we're hoping to hear from this week - some of which have La and NYC offices, which could be really nice. 

As the post-Apocalyptic spec slowly moves along, I've been getting further into the firefighter one, as well. It's been an interesting writing process for me, unique in many ways. I almost immediately cast my outline aside. Sure, I still open it each day and work by it - loosely - but it's definitely not guiding my daily writing. Rather, each day I sit down to the computer (which regrettably was not every day this week), I find myself carefully crafting the day's scene(s), unsure exactly what will come up in the action or dialogue. It's a much more painstaking process than I'm used to. Normally, I can produce 4 to 5 pages per hour-long writing session; with this script, my average has dropped to somewhere around 3. I'm not complaining by any means. At the same time, though, I can't say if that change in pace and approach is affecting me positively or negatively or differently at all. Nor am I sure quite where the change from. 

Last Thursday, I reviewed Richard Walter's Essentials of Screenwriting. Perhaps the lessons emphasized in that book are governing the new writing tactics. Maybe I'm subconsciously working from a place where I'm reminded of all the re-writes I had to do on the post-Apocalyptic spec and am trying to preempt them by being more careful in my first draft. Maybe it's a combination of both. Maybe it's neither. Either way, I'm eager to see how the draft turns out. It feels much more like I'm crafting a story now, fitting the puzzle together while at the same time allowing it to evolve as it needs to, as it organically should. I like it. I'm slower now, but hopefully, even if this draft isn't solid, this new method will prove to be.