What, When, Where this Weekend - JCVD, Otto; or Up With Dead People, Repo! A Genetic Opera, The Guitar, Role Models

What, When, Where is a weekly guide to select screenings, discussions and events in the NYC-area of interest to screenwriters.

Opening this weekend...

JCVD, written by Mabrouk El Mechri and Frédéric Bénudis, dir. by Mabrouk El Mechri


Premise: Between his tax problems and his legal battle with his wife for the custody of his daughter, these are hard times for the action movie star who finds that even Steven Seagal has pinched a role from him! In JCVD, Jean-Claude Van Damme returns to the country of his birth to seek the peace and tranquility he can no longer enjoy in the United States.

Playing at: Angelika, BAM, Landmark Sunshine

It's Jean Claude Van F'in Damme, people. And I've read it's actually good, even beyond all the awesome kicking. Onyx and I are heading to a screening after work tomorrow - you'll be hearing about this one, no doubt.

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE, written by Bruce LaBruce, dir. by Bruce LaBruce


Premise: A young zombie named Otto appears on a remote highway. He has no idea where he came from or where he is going. After hitching a ride to Berlin and nesting in an abandoned amusement park, he begins to explore the city. Soon he is discovered by underground filmmaker Medea Yarn, who begins to make a documentary about him with the support of her girlfriend, Hella Bent, and her brother Adolf, who operates the camera. Meanwhile, Medea is still trying to finish Up with Dead People, the epic political-porno-zombie movie that she has been working on for years. She convinces its star, Fritz Fritze, to allow the vulnerable Otto to stay in his guest bedroom. When Otto discovers that he has a wallet that contains information about his past, before he was dead, he begins to remember details about his ex-boyfriend, Rudolf. He arranges to meet him at the schoolyard where they met, with devastating results.

Playing at: IFC Center

Just when you think every subgenre of zombie movie has been done, here comes a gay zombie movie! Points for trying something new.

REPO! THE GENETIC OPERA, written by Darren Smith and Terrance Zdunich, dir. by Darren Lynn Bousman


Premise: A worldwide epidemic encourages a biotech company to launch an organ-financing program similar in nature to a standard car loan. The repossession clause is a killer, however.

Playing at: Angelika

Just look at that screencap up above. And can we mention this is a musical? I'm intrigued. Correct me if I'm wrong, but we haven't had a real cult musical since Hedwig, right? (Only big ones that come to mind are Cannibal!, Saddest Music in the World and Moulin Rouge, but none of those really hit the midnight movie crowds...)

THE GUITAR, written by Amos Poe and Gillian Horvat, directed by Amy Redford


Premise: The life of a woman is transformed after she is diagnosed with a terminal disease, fired from her job and abandoned by her boyfriend. Given two months to live, she throws caution to the wind to pursue her dreams.

Playing at: Landmark Sunshine

ROLE MODELS, written by Paul Rudd and David Wain, dir. by David Wain


Premise: Wild behavior forces a pair of energy drink reps to enroll in a Big Brother program.

Playing: All over.

Had to put something at least semi-mainstream up here. I've always liked Paul Rudd - and the cast is pretty good here. I've never been a fan of the nutty-children genre, though.

What are you doing/seeing this weekend?

Competition Alert - The Great American Screenplay Competition

One of the members of our Facebook group recently gave me a heads up about the following contest: the GREAT AMERICAN SCREENPLAY COMPETITION, presented by ACEFEST.

For 3 years now, ACEFEST has been one of the most anticipated annual events on the industry calendar. The American Cinematic Experience goes far beyond film exhibition and into the very most primitive stages of production - writing. The Great American Screenplay Competition is seeking the best American writers from coast to coast and it could be you! With an always impressive roster of judges, a growing bundle of prizes and nearly 4,000 industry players waiting eagerly to see the winner's work, this is your chance to get your script seen!

We are accepting screenplay submissions in all categories from October 16, 2008 - January 16, 2009. Submit early and save on fees!

Visit http://www.acefest.com/screenplays to Submit Your Script Today!

Obviously, the League cannot endorse this contest from our own experience, since none of us have submitted to it before. However, I can tell you - as a vote of confidence - that the company I work for works closely with NYFA, one of the sponsors, and in fact a number of my former coworkers have left jobs here to go work there.

Here at the League, we've all tried the contest route before, to varying degrees of success. The Great American Screenplay Competition might not be one of the better known comps. out there, but that's no reason to cast it off. All competitions are unknown at some point in their history (uh...usually at the beginning), and even the smallest ones can be a great stepping stone and resume builder. *Any win can look great on a query letter.* So, especially for you New York based writers - NYFA, or the New York Foundation for the Arts, is a source of funding for many NYC artists - it's worth checking this one out. It might just be the competition for you.

Anyone who has participated in the past, either in ACEFEST or the Great American Screenplay Competition, please let us know what your experience was.

Great MST3K writers interview over at the AV Club

From my weekly Trailer Trash posts, you can probably guess I'm a big fan of the late Mystery Science Theater 3000. Keith Phipps has a great interview with a few of the former writers (and stars) of the show over here at the AV Club.

The Writing Week part 44 – Ensemble Casts

A while back, I wrote about beginning a project that involves voiceover – new, unexplored territory on my writing map. That idea, for which I wrote a 12 page character background, was the first new idea I’d had in a while. I was beginning to worry that I had somehow dried myself up, perhaps since I was spending so much time working on rewrites at that point. Now, I have three additional ideas, two of which I’m particularly excited about, and all I have to do is narrow it down.

In five days, I’ll be getting on a plane bound for South Africa for the second time in my life. (If any of you have any desire to travel to Africa, I strongly suggest getting your name on South African Air’s email list, as they have great deals pretty frequently.) While I don’t foresee doing a lot of writing while I’m abroad, mainly because I’ll be too busy traipsing around with lions and rhinos and giraffes to sit down and bang out a first act of anything, I’m definitely looking forward to the freedom of mobility and the sun on my to help me figure out what it is I want to work on next (outdoors + exercise can often = creative decision making time).

One of the projects I’m working on, the one I’m most strongly leaning toward, revolves around an ensemble cast. The idea is for a war movie – with a twist unique to Cake Man – and Onyx and I have spent much time recently trying to work out the optimal number of main and supporting characters. If you take a movie like BRAVEHEART, there are a few obvious leading roles, followed by a handful of secondary and tertiary characters, who, because of the number of them or the lack of lines for most of them, are more “that guy” than anything else (as in, “remember when ‘that guy’ died?” or “hey, it’s ‘that guy; I like him”). How many of “those guys” can you have before you dilute your script completely?

While the example I gave is a war movie (because that’s what I’m writing), sports movies are another great example of character juggling. If you watch any football movie, you’re going to recognize at least 8 characters pretty easily, maybe even 12. You’ll know the names to probably 4 of them (give or take). But you’ll really only follow one or two of them closely. It’s the same in a war movie. You might not like it when your favorite guy catches that fatal bullet, even though you only knew him as “the guy with the stutter.” The trick, as I’ll have to figure it out, is to know when to stop adding characters and how to allot the necessary time to those you do have, while not drowning the protagonist in a sea of gratuitous tertiary characters. The juggling, or management, of multiple characters can be difficult. I did it (somewhat successfully, I think) in my comic-book spec, but my new idea requires more acute concentration on unique characters with sufficient screen time.

Has anyone out there *coughONYXcough* worked with multiple characters in an ensemble situation (i.e. sport or war movie) before? Any experiences you’d like to share?

Amazing advice/rant from Unk

If you haven't read The Unknown Screenwriters rant/post on original concepts, get on it. It's long and full of swears, but some of the best screenwriting advice I've read in a while, well worth reading no matter how many scripts you've written:

If you’re going to go ahead and write a spec about something we’ve basically all seen before, you might as well stand the fuckin’ thing UPSIDE DOWN. Instead of giving us the direct to DVD version, go the extra mile and do something with it we’ve never seen before! Make YOUR VERSION the new version by which this genre will forever be measured! And, if you can’t pull that off — that’s okay — as long as that’s what you’ve been striving for.

I mean go ahead and pull that spec out right now. Got it? Good. Why is it DIFFERENT than the plethora of movies within the same genre? Is it differerent? Is it good different? Is it the same as everything we’ve seen before? Even if it’s well written, is it the same old tired thing we’ve seen a hundred times before?

Check out the full thing here. If you're not already subscribed to Unk's blog, jump on that right away.

Lord Vader...

I'm not a big Star Wars guy, but this was hilarious.

Trailer Trash XVIII: Daughter of Dr. Jekyll (1957)

"If you love me, please do me!"

Did you know Dr. Jekyll had a daughter? And that she was a vampire? That doesn't make sense to you? Me neither! Here's the trailer:



At 0:13 - I understand that's probably pretty hard for her to find out on the eve of her marriage, but imagine how terrible that is for her fiance!
At 0:35 - His teeth are the scariest thing in the movie so far.
At 0:43 - Whaaaa...? It's been a long time since 9th grade English class, so someone back me up here - Dr. Jekyll wasn't a vampire, was he...?
At 0:47 - "Drawing sustenance from beastiality" WTF? More on this soon.
At 1:00 - Ok, stake through heart. Wikipedia doesn't say Jekyll was a vampire, so that stands.
At 1:10 - Um, that's what she said.
At 1:26 - Dream sequence courtesy of the Merry Pranksters.

Regarding beastiality: What the hell? Did this mean something else in the 1950s? Y'know, like in the 1950s when boner didn't mean, y'know, boner?


Ohhhhh, bestial. My mistake. Sorry, everyone.



"A bestial fiend hidden in a woman's sensuous body!"

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.