The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 259 - It All Goes Back to the First 15 Pages

I spent my Presidents' Day, not touring the Lincoln Memorial and Washington Monument as perhaps others did, but rather going over the second draft of my sci-fi collaboration with my writing partner. Almost a year to the date since we began working together, we now have a very strong workable draft of our script. It didn't come easily or quickly, though. Leading up to today, we went through seven drafts of our outline (and minor revisions along the way) and two major drafts of the script, before arriving at the one we went over today. 

We're poised to send the script to the producer who paired us together. Before we do it, though, there's one more issue we have to tackle in the script. It's not exactly a small matter. In fact, it's what the entire screenplay is built on. I'm talking about the protagonist's character. 

The hero of our story is a senior in college with some heavy baggage in his past. He is incredibly talented and smart, but he's also afraid (for good reason) of his own potential. He's at an amazing academic institution, but he's squandering his potential. In short, he's both the most capable student in his class, and a slacker. 

We've been struggling with our protagonist since we started working together, but today it was most apparent that he can't straddle the line we have him on now. It just doesn't work. And if our protagonist and his motivations don't work, then the rest of the script fails, too. 

In fact, over the course of our one and a half hour conversation, pretty much the only thing we discussed was our protagonist. More specifically, we spoke about our protagonist as we see him in the first 15 pages. Fifteen pages. Because of how we structured the screenplay (a 4 page prologue, inciting incident around page 11, and a big reveal on 15), we only have the first fifteen pages to set up our protagonist. However, with the prologue, we go down to eleven pages. That's not a lot of room to establish a deeply wounded character with incredible potential. 

We spoke at length about him. What does he want? What motivates him? What is he afraid of? Of course, all of this will have to come to a head over the course of the script, as he evolves, grows, and changes by the end of act three. I think we landed in a good place by the end of our conversation, but it just goes to show - if your protagonist isn't clearly written, especially within the first fifteen pages of your script, then good luck getting it to a producer. We're not even going to show the one that we work with our draft until this issue is resolved. It's a no-brainer that she would ask us about the protagonist - or tell us that she doesn't understand his motivations. It's that apparent. No way will we turn in something that's weak at such a fundamental level.

How do you make sure your protagonist is as strongly written as he or she can be?

Article Alert - Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair has a very interesting article on the recent history of the spec market's rise, fall, and minor blip upward. Check it out for a good read for anyone trying to break in with a spec these days (like all of us here at the League).

The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 258 - Make Sure It All MAkes Sense

My writing partner sent me notes on the second draft of our sci-fi collaboration last week. As I mentioned earlier, after doing a read through of it simply to read it and get a feel for how it flows and for the strength of the plot, I had a pretty good feeling about the draft. For the most part, my partner responded in kind. He had three "big" notes, which I've been working on this week. (I say "big" because, though the notes are impactful, they will not alter the plot structure at all.)

His first note was to look at the protagonist's character more closely, particularly within the first act. When we meet the protag, he's pulling into himself, unwilling to let his potential loose because of something that has happened in his past. He goes through a pretty transformative arc over the film, but in the beginning, he's not the most likable. That's not the problem; the problem is that, in the beginning, he gives us (the viewer) no real reason to want to get to like him - or to care about him at all for that matter. Therein lies the issue. It is fine to have a nasty protagonist; it is not fine to have one who is so apathetic about life that we are apathetic about him or her. 

The second big note was the most minor of the trio. It involved the antagonist's backstory, and required merely a reversion to the way we set something up in the first draft in order to correct it. Basically, the antagonist has some major scars and disfigurements. I had altered something in the second draft, which wound up negating the impact (but not the necessity) or the origin of those scars. The first draft saw a plausible and plot-driven reason for those scars, so I simply reworked his backstory to achieve that again.

Lastly, and most involved, came my partner's thoughts on the third act. Act Three, in particular the climax, is the pivotal moment of the film in which all gets resolved (or not) and the good guy wins (or not), forever beating his antagonist (or not). The stakes and competing objectives must be crystal clear at that time, so that the audience knows what a victory or loss could mean for the protagonist. Though my writing partner and I understand the stakes, he rightly pointed out that the way it's written now might not make it readily graspable for the audience. This week, correcting act three has been my biggest challenge, one I am not quite done with yet but see the obvious need for adjusting.

When the above three notes are all addressed, I plan to go through the script and re-read it from page one to make sure that everything has been integrated properly and coherently. At that point, I'll also go through and look for any streamlining I can do, particularly as far as the dialogue is concerned. My partner said he had some line notes and rejiggering of dialogue, but he wanted to wait until I had gone through the major points before giving those to me. Ideally, I'll be able to nip some in the bud and make his minute notes moot points. Either way, it feels great to continue streamlining, cutting, and making this the best possible script I can before we send it out to our managers and friends for fresh eyes and then, gulp, to buyers. 

Logline Central - Teddy Bear

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.

Well, here's an interesting one. We've seen movies based on: video games, board games, toys, not to mention plays, other movies, and books. This week, we look at a film that is going to be based on an illustration. 

Title:	Teddy Bear
Logline:	At night, a small brown teddy bear -- brandishing a laughably small wooden sword and shield - protects a little girl asleep from monsters under her bed.
Studio:	New Line Cinema
Genre:	Family Fantasy
More:	To be based on an illustration by Alex Panagopoulos. Dwayne Johnson, Beau Flynn and Hiram Garcia will produce. Johnson is also attached to star. New Line's Michael Disco & Sam Brown and Flynn's Adam Yoelin will oversee. Garcia, a former assistant to Johnson, found the illustration and brought it to New Line & Flynn. No writer is attached yet.

An illustration? I'm intrigued. Not sure I love the idea that movies are made based off illustrations, but I'm at least curious to see it.

Oh. Ok. I'll bite. This could be fun. There's a ton of potential in there (for either a great film, or an awful one). But if a picture is worth a thousand words, then this is a strong and succinct pitch. And nowhere near as awful as my skeptical mind thought it would be. Of course, a lot of it will come down to who they get to write the thing.

The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 257 - Reading with Fresh Eyes

The draft is done! Sci-fi spec, draft two, complete and out to my writing partner as of Monday night. And then, to kick off my edit phase, I something I've never thought to take the time to do before. I decided to read the script.

Say what? Yeah, I know what you're thinking. Of course, I read the script after I finish it. I check for typos and grammatical errors and redundant dialogue. But I don't really read it for content. Not really. Sure, I look to see if I can make any cuts or streamline and dialogue, but it struck me that when I revise a draft, I don't really look at the content, just the format. My edits become more minor than they should be. I'll tweak a line here or there or shorten a sentence of dialogue or description so as to cut a hanging line on the script and shorten it, but the trade-off is that I subconsciously commit to what I've written. I fail to read the thing from the point of view of someone who is unfamiliar with the script (or as close to that as I can get) and therefore don't look for story problems. I became most aware of this during my rewrites this go-around, when I read some dialogue from draft one and thought, "This is HORRIBLE." Same for certain beats. They just didn't make sense. How could I willingly submit that to my partner?

This time, however, I decided to put the pen away as much as possible and just read the script in one sitting. No looking for edits. No streamlining line by line. Just read it for the feel and flow of the story, and do the particular edits later. Sure, I found a few glaring things - missing period at the end of a sentence or a missing line of dialogue - that I flagged as I read, but I would have picked up on those if it wasn't my own material anyway. And you know what happened?

I liked the script. I mean, I really liked it. To be honest, I think it's some of the best writing I've done in a very long time. Very little seemed gratuitous. All the beats that needed to be there were. The characters had arcs and motivations. And Act One was the tightest, most refined that I have produced in a long time. Granted, I found some things that should go, but on the whole, I was incredibly pleased. I'm not trying to make the argument that this is because I did the read-through without edits - the two really aren't connected beyond the fact that I would likely not have seen this had I gone straight to line by line edits - but the product results were hard to ignore. I'm really jazzed by this draft, and I think my partner is, too.

Even if the draft was unsuccessful, or even just less successful, I truly feel that sitting down and simply reading the script before really editing it was the way to go. I absolutely plan to do that with every project I have going forward. It just doesn't make sense to me not to, and I can't believe I hadn't adopted that practice sooner. Getting mired in the nitty-gritty of an editing process is great, but it's important not to miss the forest for the trees. I was super guilty of that in the past. Plus, it's always fun to read a script, no?

The Writing Week (Vol. 6) part 256 - Thoughts on Structure

It's been nearly a month since I began the second draft of my sci-fi collaboration, and I have high hopes of finishing it tonight. Of course, I'll still have to to a word-by-word read-through of the whole thing, but that's neither here nor there. It'll be wonderful to have a hard copy of the script to work off of, and I can already say, without having gone through and read it again, that it's crazy the difference a draft can make.

Already, when I go back and reread draft one (I'm working off a copy of that draft, editing as I go along, so I'm getting intimately reacquainted with the first pass), I find myself thinking what utter crap some of it was. Structurally, it was fairly sound, though a lot of it proved more dependent on coincidence than I would have liked. And there were certain reveals that I withheld until the end of act two, which my partner felt were much stronger as midpoint surprises. In the rewrite, I came to see his point and shuffled a lot of important information around - to the betterment of the script. The dialogue has been streamlined and improved upon; the characters are much more three-dimensional and now have actual arcs, and the world in which we've set the story is infinitely more detailed and unique. All in all, it's a huge improvement.

Part of the rewrite process has gotten me thinking about story much more. This particular one is now much stronger, and perhaps just because I'm in the middle of it now, but I've been more attuned to story in general. Take, for example, Django Unchained, which I saw yesterday. I'm not the world's biggest Tarantino fan in general, and I'd been semi-hesitant to see Django. My viewing experience pretty much validated my initial expectations.


SPOILERS FOR THOSE WHO HAVEN'T SEEN DJANGO YET


Still with me? As you know, Django is a long movie. And a violent one. And you know what? I didn't feel as though either was fully justified. Primarily, that's because the ending - to me - came 20 minutes before the credits rolled. After Candie is killed - this is the antagonist, we're talking about... sort of... well, one of them - there are at least four dozen deaths yet to come. Django has technically secured his wife's freedom, but it's cost him his own, as well as his friend's life. Candie drops, and his untold number of minions storm the house, ala Scarface, for a shootout that will literally paint the walls red.

But I didn't care. The bad guy was dead. Those who were left to catch bullets were the anonymous faces of extras we'd met briefly, or only in passing. Yet, their deaths and shootout with Django took so much screentime, as a point in which I'd already been sitting for well over two hours. It was time to call it a day. Shootout over, we still have to meet a couple Australian slavers, see their three deaths, and then watch Candie Land get blown to smithereens - after another five deaths in the foyer. I didn't care about a single one of them. Sam Jackson's character was interesting, but at that point, I had already watched Django take out: a trio of brothers he had a personal vendetta against, Big Daddy and his pre-Klansmen, and Candie. How many antagonists are we dealing with? How many should I care about? I cared about Candie. I was please when he got his comeuppance. The others - excess screen time that I didn't need.

My first draft of the sci-fi spec came in at a whopping 130 pages. I'm happy to report that this draft will top out at 116, maximum. I've trimmed the fat, made sure that each scene, character, and line of dialogue is warranted, and I have made the story move as smoothly and quickly as I can. No, I'm no Tarantino and don't have the cinematic license he does. I'm content with that and, for now, simply want to make sure that my story is as strong as it can be. 

Logline Central - The General Staff

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.

This week, I want to take a look at a featured logline, not because it sounds like it will lead to a particularly good movie, but because it's one hell of an interesting acquisition.

Title: The General Staff 

Logline: Set in 1979, "cowardly" U.S. diplomats are treated with kindness and eventually delivered to safety by their Iranian hosts. 

Writer: Ataollah Salmanian 

Prod. Co: Arts Bureau  

More: Ataollah Salmanian will direct. The film is being produced by the Iranian government in response to "Argo."

A government-funded response to another nation's fictionalized account of a thirty-year old event. Wow. I wonder how often that has happened before (and plead ignorant on the history of such occurrences). 

What are the implications of the film? (Note that I care very little about the actual content in this case; it is very clearly propaganda, which isn't how I interpreted Argo, but perhaps that bears a closer look.) Is the tone anti-American? Will it portray a wildly different version of the 1979 events, depicting Americans as the antagonists? I reserve no judgment on that, or on whether or not "we" were "bad guys" in that case. Politically, what does the film mean?

Am I ignorant of Argo's implications? I wasn't aware it was a statement that required or even prompted a response. Certainly not of this variety. And, perhaps more importantly, what does the Arts Bureau seek to gain by making such a picture? From a business point of view, the hypothetical Hollywood mogul in our Logline Central posts can question whether this film would ever be picked up for distribution, receive awards consideration, or otherwise make its investment back. On a more intellectual, less financially-driven level, I'd ask - who will see the film? It strikes me that it is made for Iranian audiences to address perceived gross misrepresentations and inaccuracies in an American movie. But will it ever reach beyond the country's borders?

I can't deny that there's a small part of me, a jocular, albeit maybe fractionally optimistic part, that wonders if The General Staff is indicative of something larger, a new paradigm in international relations. Could this be the new way countries wage war? Not a cold war, but a Celluloid War. Propaganda films replace guns, and theaters replace battlefields. We address our disagreements not through bloodshed, but with esoterically re-written histories. Sure, Iran's history in this case would vary greatly from the way we in the States perceive it, but doesn't it already? Dialogue between nations would crumble if every response is delivered in the time it takes to absorb a film and develop and produce a feature film in response, but the body count would drop considerably. And, frankly, can anyone claim that the dialogue that exists now is really any stronger? Maybe the fight of the films is the new way we should go in modern warfare. It would certainly be more civilized.

Or maybe that's just another far fetched, out of touch with reality film idea.