We're making a damn movie

We’re making a movie.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment the reality dawned on me, but it's something that's been stewing in my brain for the past year. We’re making a damn movie.

Acceptance is the first step, I guess. You’ve got to admit to yourself that you’re making a movie.

Shooting a feature was always a goal, from my first home movies shot with my schoolyard friends in the back yard to more comple flicks shot and edited on DV with friends from high school. Somewhere around the age of 16, my best friend Bob and I made plans to shoot a feature together one day. We shook on it, then I headed off to screenwriting school and he started on a college path that led to a Master’s Degree in cinematography.

My screenplays, for the most part, have a tendency to be tiny. Not in the sense of page count, and especially not in the sense of concept – but in scope. I like to concentrate on a handful of characters and tighten the focus on the small world they inhabit day to day. In short, I like to write low-budget scripts based around two or three actors.

I applied to NYU’s screenwriting program because I wanted to make movies, but was more interested in creating stories than working a camera. Sometime between starting NYU and the two years post-graduation I spent trying to “break in” to the industry, the filmmaking bug died out in me. I had tunnel-vision on the “typical” (I use quotes because there is no such thing as typical in this industry, it seems) path to becoming a Hollywood screenwriter, where you write spec scripts, score an agent, move to LA, sell your first feature and then wait for the lucrative rewrite assignments to roll in. This is how half the books say it’s done, and by golly, that’s how I was gonna do it.

Plans to make my own movie? Say hello to the backburner.

Once I had a few specs under my belt, I tested the query waters. Nothing wide – just dipping my toes. I liked my scripts (or else I wouldn’t have sent them) but I wasn’t in love with them – at least not as much as much as I was with a script I’d been messing with for over a year. This was the one – this was the script that was truly representative of my potential; an idea that had been brewing in my head and in my heart for several years. This one’s my baby. I’ll wait til I finish that one and hit the ground running with it.

And query I did. The logline generated interest – I received quite a few requests for the script, which led to more than a handful of rejection letters. The notes were all very positive: they liked the story, they really liked the characters, they’d love to see what other scripts I have, but they’re sorry, it’s not the type of script that they’re looking to represent. I even received *two* notes from separate agents saying more or less the same thing: they loved the script, but it was too small for them.

Too small? Bah. You could shoot this script for a few thousand dollars. Isn’t that a good thing? I appreciated the kind words when I received them, but the rejections still felt like defeat after soul-crushing defeat.

After many, many frustrating rounds of querying, I got desperate. I received an E-mail from one of NYC’s wonderful indie theaters regarding a screening followed by a Q&A from one of my favorite contemporary filmmakers. This particular director is known for her small character pieces, centered around one or two characters and spanning only a minimal number of locations. She’s able to make these wonderfully deep films out of so little material, which is what I really love about her work. There are few writers/filmmakers I feel I identify with, but she’s certainly one of them.

This was my chance. Face-time with a director who I thought might share my ideas of what storytelling should be. Yes, it’s probably rude to approach her with a script right after a screening. Yes, it’s probably extremely off-putting. But, how many chances would I get? So off I trekked, 108 neatly-clasped pages of script in my bag.

(The movie was wonderful. Watching it, I grew even more enamored with my fantasy of her working on one of my ideas.)

I waited until the screening let out and she was hanging around in the lobby before I pounced. After the initial flurry of fan-gushing (“I love you.” “Your movie brought me to tears.” “Did I mention I love you?” etc.) I took a deep breath and came clean with my pitch.

She was extremely sweet through the whole spiel, despite how uncomfortable I regret probably having made her. She asked questions and nodded while I breathlessly ran through the story, the characters, the high concept. When I was finished, she remained silent for a moment before hitting me with a suckerpunch of a question:

“If you love the idea so much, why are you trying to give it away?”

I had to pause – the question knocked me backwards. Not what I was expecting at all. Give it away? I just wanted to see it get made. I told her that.

“If you want to make sure this story is actually made, you should shoot it yourself. No one is going to get it right but you.”

I… I’d never thought of it that way. I told her I’d give that some thought and she told me she’d keep an eye out for it at the festivals. I thanked her and let her get on with living the free-wheeling life an indie auteur while I pondered over the implications of her words.

Shoot it myself? A feature? Me? Don’t I remember setting that life goal back when I was a wee lad? I’d better make a phone call to check with someone who might remember. Remember Bob, the DP from the beginning of this post?

“Hey, Bob. It’s Austin. Listen, I had this funny idea that we should shoot one of my scripts…”

This instantly launched Bob into a long rant which more or less boiled down to “I’ve been telling you that for years!”

Okay, Bob. You were right. It’s time for us to make our own damn movie already.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 83 – The Unifying Factor

Characters are supposed to have arcs. So are plots. So are scripts as a whole. And over that arc, there’s something that, no matter where the character goes or how the plot unfolds, ties everything together. This is the unifying factor (as I like to call it).

The unifier is usually thematic. Family is a great and common theme – the loss of family, dysfunctional families, comparative families. What one character experiences toward the beginning of a film carries him/her throughout and bridges the gap with the other characters he/she meets along the way. The unifying theme can be quite obvious (think Paul Haggis’ CRASH), or a bit more subtle.

However, a unifying factor can also be more tangible. In THE RED VIOLIN, for example, that one object – literally, a red violin – connects the different stories that take place over a few hundred years.

In doing my rewrites, I happened to stumble upon my tangible unifying factor. I had the themes in place that I wanted to work with from the get go, but the numerous characters our protagonist meets in his journey were about as loosely connected as possible. Over the course of reworking the script, I found – with a lot of help through discussions and brainstorming sessions with Onyx – a way to tie everyone together. Though not obvious at first to me, all of the seeds for the common link were there from the get go. All I had to do was turn them from set dressing into part of a larger through line. And I’ll admit here; it’s helped a lot.

My protagonist is a bounty hunter tracking a suspect, and not to say that he didn’t have a solid arc before, but there wasn’t a lot of connection between the suspect’s crimes and the world as a whole. When I added that unifier, though, he fit right in. Suddenly, everything congealed to make this nice big, single picture. I have to go through and re-read the entire script to make sure that I didn’t inadvertently overcomplicate things, but at least they’re all interconnected now.

Site Alert - Greenwriter.org

"Screenwriters in America print 180 million sheets of paper a year. In six months, we hope to cut that in half."

This environmentally conscious mission statement comes directly from www.Greenwriter.org, a new site that hopes to save trees while connecting writers with agents, producers, and managers. According to the site - which no one at the League currently uses - producers and agents pay monthly or per use to download WGA registered scripts (and treatments, loglines, synopses) in their search for new clients or material. Writers, however, pay nothing to use the site. (As an environmentally conscious writer, the mission statement itself was enough to draw my attention to the site.)

Again, none of us here at The League have tried Greenwriter, in part because it is a new kid on the block - the site only went up about a week ago. But, this could be just the thing that writers are looking for. No, it's not reinventing the wheel, but it is another resource. Proceed with caution, as always - especially when it comes to putting your work on the web - but know that this is another tool that is out there for you to use.

The Writing Week (Vol. 2) part 82 - Getting Closer, Getting Stuck(er)

Re-writes. The cosmetic fixes are done. The I's are all dotted, the T's all crossed. I've struggled over single words for ten minutes or more in some instances. I can't find anything else left to do other than address some of the major changes I still need to make. I just haven't figured out how to make them.

I find myself in a new situation these days, and think that part of why I'm stuck is that I'm still acclimating to it a little bit. When I first started working with the producer who optioned my script, she and her manager gave me notes on the draft they had. While I could get behind pretty much all of the notes, the re-writing process has revealed that I don't quite understand the reasoning for all of them.

This is where the clear issue arises. Obviously, though my previous manager tried to sell my script and I've shown it to other people in the industry, it hasn't yet sold. I'm now fortunate to be working with two people who believe in the material as much as they do, and I know that they have reasons for suggesting everything they did. Those are probably some of the very reasons why the script was passed on at other companies. And, at the end of the day, I understand where they're coming from with their notes. I'm just having a hard time incorporating them.

Last week, I talked a lot about acknowledging that my script isn't perfect. With that now fully accepted, I think I'm still having issues letting go of some of my existing interpretations of scenes. I like a line or banter too much to cut it, though I know that cutting it will be the first step toward implementing the changes. Other ideas I like, yet I just don't know how I'm going to work them in. Ultimately, the solution is simple: sit down and do it. The producer can't move forward until she has the newest draft, and as fun as coming up with ideas for directors or production companies to take the script to it, it's irrelevant now. I just have to write. I gave myself the deadline of the end of the month to have the draft done, and that's less than a week away. The clock, my friends, is ticking.

The Hurt Locker

The more I read about The Hurt Locker the more I feel like I’m the only person who left the theatre disappointed. My disappointment turns into confusion when I read about people praising Kathryn Bigelow’s film as “a near perfect movie.” I just don't get it. God knows that when I first saw the trailer, I wanted this film to be near perfect. I wanted it to be the summer gem that you remember for all the right reasons. I’ll remember The Hurt Locker for a long time, but not for its cinematography or fresh angle on the modern war experience. I’m going to remember a frustratingly one dimensional protagonist, an out of focus narrative, and too many key moments lacking realism in a film that's strongest when grounded in reality.

The Hurt Locker follows a three man bomb squad operating during the Iraq War. Jeremy Renner plays William James, the “new guy” on the team and the one who gets to put his hands on the dreaded IEDs that litter the streets of Iraq. I really enjoyed seeing the war through the eyes of a bomb technician. It wasn’t that this fresh perspective shed new insight on the war (the Iraq War still sucks here) but more that it provided a new vehicle to show us how the war is terrible and how it puts an awful mental and physical strain on the men and women who participate in it. Every soldier has a role in the field, some more exciting than others, and some more suspenseful than others. You might think that bomb squad technician gives you a healthy combination of the two, but I found that it was heavy on suspense, leaving the film searching for excitement in other ways.

In the beginning of the movie somebody other than Jeremy Renner is wearing the protective bomb suit, and seeing that Renner is nowhere to be found everyone knows that the film is going to start with a bang. You know exactly what’s coming, yet Bigelow and company manage to create one of the most suspenseful scenes I’ve seen in recent memory. The very nature of a bomb is suspenseful. They’re relatively small inanimate objects, but in the blink of an eye they can literally change the face of the world around them. You know what will happen, but you ask yourself when and how will it come to be. It’s equally impressive in later scenes when the suspense is maintained in moments where you know the bomb won’t detonate. If the bomb that can take out a city block goes off in front of William James, movie over, but we never lose that fear. I personally think it would have been excellent to have a dream sequence where the entire team gets annihilated. It’s a curveball nobody would have seen coming.


In order to keep its excitement on par with its suspense, The Hurt Locker abandons what it does best and floats off into the realm of unrealistic and illogical action scenes. One sequence has James sneaking away from the safety of his base to track down answers in the middle of Iraq, completely alone and armed only with a pistol. On another occasion the three man bomb squad decides to turn into an assault force and go hunt down terrorists in the middle of the night and without back up. All of this happens on a hunch, and why even bother with the other 100,000 soldiers that are there to help you get the job done? Moments like this find the film stretching for the sort of Hollywood action that betrays the nature of the film.

I’d be curious to see what real soldiers think of William James. He’s a rebel, a man who needs the adrenaline from having a bomb in his face much more than he needs authority. William James doesn’t care about his life and he continuously demonstrates that he doesn’t care about the lives of those surrounding him. In one scene his teammates toil with the idea of killing him and having it look like an accident. It’s the most realistic scene in my mind, because all I could think about is how terrible a soldier James is. But that’s his character and some would say that the film nailed that. Sure, but how are we supposed to care about this guy? I found that I cared about his teammates much more, and any tension I was feeling was out of concern for their safety and not James’. It’s possible that I might accept someone like James for a protagonist, but he has to be well developed and we have to understand him. The film’s lack of an antagonist makes it episodic and we often lose the sense of building action. This all makes deep characters that much more important, but the film gives you no depth and no way to understand James. In one of the scenes James’ teammate openly asks him why he was wired the way he was. Why does he take so many risks? Why is he not afraid? My ears perked up at the prospect of understanding this guy, but all he does is shrug and say something along the lines of “I don’t know, I just don’t think about it.” Great, thanks Mark Boal.

I’d say the film is a good presentation of the Iraq War. It's consistent with the theory that it sucks big time over there. Soldiers plod along, mission after mission, often not knowing who the enemy is, never truly knowing how to win. That’s exactly how The Hurt Locker felt, chapter after chapter of men struggling to survive and stay sane, but never really working towards anything. If a clear, traditional narrative isn’t that important to you, The Hurt Locker will be far more tolerable. Last I checked though, everyone needs well developed, likeable characters. I’m still trying to understand how the film managed to satisfy so many viewers (or movie critics at least) in that regard.

Logline Central - Sacred Prey

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 was taking a break from work (one of many) yesterday and came across this.

Title: Sacred Prey
Logline: A loan shark kills a man he believes duped him, only to wake up and find himself in the body of that man three days before the murder. He then must undertake a furious effort to prevent the murder he committed.
Writer: Brad Ingelsby
More: To be adapted from Vivian Schilling's novel. Room 101's Steven Schneider and Energy's Brooklyn Weaver will produce. Warner's Matt Reilly & Niija Kuykendall will oversee.

What caught me about SACRED PREY is that, to me, this is a great logline. I might not want to see the movie, but this is the one that jumped off the screen and stuck with me throughout the day. A man commits murder, and then winds up in the body of the person he killed - with enough time to prevent the murder. Awesome.

Do I have questions about it? Sure. How does his murderous self - whom I assume is still operating, but as a separate antagonist now - change, or does he? Does our protagonist wind up having to fight his physical body from within his victim's body? The more I try to piece it together, the more I question. But, the more intrigued I become. This might be a flawed script, it might fail to address those and a million other questions. But the logline got my interest, and if I was a VP of Acquisitions, I would request a read. (From a VP's p.o.v., I'm sure it doesn't hurt in the least bit that this comes from source material, i.e. Vivian Schilling's novel.)

Grant Morrison on writer's burnout

The Onion asked prolific comic writer Grant Morrison if he ever feels burned out by writing too much. His answer:

I write every day, for most of the day, so it’s just about turning into metaphor whatever’s going on in my life, in the world, and in my head. Every nightmare, every moment of grief or joy or failure, is a moment I can convert into cash via words. I use everything. Turning life into stories is how I make sense of my experience. No matter how weird or disturbing or upsetting to me personally, it all finds its way in there. I’ve been close to nervous breakdown, sheer exhaustion, or profound existential crisis several times doing this stuff, and somehow, I always bounce back refreshed with new ideas. “Bend, son,” my mother told me when I was young, “bend and you won’t break!” - Grant Morrison

The full interview is here.