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.

Happy Halloween!

(Pumpkin courtesy of /film.)

Onyx, Cake Man - you can stop drooling now.