Selling a script is a lot like selling a car – you just want to get the damn thing off the drive because it’s annoying your wife.
Um …
Okay, selling a script is nothing like selling a car unless you count ‘having the same word in the sentence’ or ‘a financial transaction involving the exchange of goods’ as similarities.
Oh, which I guess they are.
Maybe selling a script is like selling a car?
No. No it’s not, is it?
Although, by an amazing coincidence, I am trying to sell this car:
… and can’t really figure a way to mention it on a scriptwriting blog.
Go on, what do you say? It’s blue, mostly shiny and got all sorts of neat gadgets. Like wheels. Four of them. Five if you count the spare. Six if you count the steering wheel, which is probably cheating.
Climate control, electric windows, electric mirrors, electric sunroof, headlights, immobiliser, power steering, central locking, CD player … um, what else?
Once owned by a completely un-famous (but vaguely infamous) scriptwriter – does that stir you in any way? I think the car’s immortal, I’ve certainly never been able to kill it despite a homicidal approach to roundabouts and a complete lack of interest in maintenance.
I once drove it through a puddle so deep the water was lapping at the windows. Well, I say puddle, pond is more like it. Lake maybe? No, pond – let’s not exaggerate.
Ooh! The interior is exactly 26 seconds into the past. That’s right, the interior is in a different time zone – a weird and fabulous land where the radio still plays the intro of the song while the rest of the world is on the first verse. Seriously, if you approach the car with a portable radio you can hear the time shift. If you shine a light into the windscreen, you can get into the car before the light hits the interior!
Granted, that does make reading road signs rather difficult; but what’s life without danger?
Longer. That’s the answer. In case you were wondering.
Come on, what do you say? It looks a bit like K.I.T.T. – assuming K.I.T.T. was Japanese and a bit shit. Volunteer a reasonable price and it’s yours! I’ll even throw in a personal visit from me as I drive it to anywhere in the world of your choosing!
Subject, of course, to you paying the petrol and my return train ticket/flight/submarine fare.
Come on people, how can you afford to pass up this, the bargain of a lifetime?
Let’s say you design cars for a living and this guy hires you because he wants to sell a car. Ostensibly, he hires you because you’re the expert in designing the thing whereas he’s the expert in selling them.
Sounds simple, yes?
You discuss what he wants and he tells you he’s looking for a mid-budget, four-door, family saloon. Okay, so that’s cool – you start with the basics, the things all cars have: wheels, engine, windows, steering wheel, doors … then you arrange them to suit the requested specifications: four doors, a boot, leg-room in the back … and then you add your own touch, the individual design elements which are both unique to this model but also are in keeping with your general style.
You deliver the design and he likes it. Not loves it, but likes it. It’s a good place to start … but he has a few minor suggestions:
Does it need four doors?
Does it need all that leg-room in the back?
Why not have a sloping hatchback thingy instead of a boot?
Will this car appeal to teenagers?
Can you make it more sporty?
All of which sounds rather odd and you patiently explain why it is the way it is:
It’s a four door saloon, four-door saloons tend to have four doors.
It’s a family car, family cars need space for the family.
A sloping hatchback thingy makes it a hatchback, not a saloon.
Teenagers with children rarely have the money to buy a new car.
Maybe. But do families want sporty family cars? It’s a debatable point.
But this guy is adamant, he knows all about selling cars and he knows what people will buy. To impress you, he reels off a list of cars he’s trying to emulate which have all sold really, really well.
All the cars on the list are fucking expensive, two-door, sports coupés … and that’s where you realise the problem. He doesn’t want to make a mid-budget, four-door, family saloon – he wants to make an expensive, two-door, sports coupé … he just doesn’t know what those words mean or indeed have any fucking clue which bits of the car any of those technical words you’ve been using (like ‘doors’) actually refer to.
Patiently, you try to explain to him the difference between what he wants and what he’s asking for but he won’t listen. Why are you getting so fucking uppity? He’s paying you, just do what he fucking asks!
So you go away and you try to design the impossible: an expensive, mid-budget, two-door, four-door, sporty, family saloon, hatchback. After many, many sleepless nights and a rift in your own family which will probably never heal – you manage to satisfy all of the bozo’s requirements … and the result is a fucking mess.
You can see it’s a fucking mess, everyone else can see it’s a fucking mess … but the guy who hired you thinks it’s a work of art and can’t understand why it took you so long to deliver. Still, fuck it, you’re getting paid and you’ll get a percentage however many of these monstrosities are sold. Someone’s bound to buy one, there are a lot of idiots in the world.
Including the one you’re working for.
The one who’s now hired a guy to build your design. The builder takes one look at your design (believing it to be a mid-budget, four-door, family saloon – because that’s what he was hired to make) and sacks you. You’re obviously a fucking moron who can’t even count to four. He convinces the sales guy you’re a twat and hires his own designer. His designer thinks all this bullshit about a car needing doors and wheels and engines is just crap taught by people who can’t design cars themselves. It’s a bullshit formula which gets in the way of proper artistic vision and he turns in a design which appears, at first glance, to be a seven-foot long ashtray … but on closer inspection is just a God awful piece of shit.
He gets fired and promptly makes millions selling his revolutionary new theory on car design to the world in a series of books, webisodes and lectures.
Meanwhile, sales guy and builder guy hire someone who knows all the theories. Someone who’s been to every fancy lecture going, read all the books and got some mighty fancy looking letters after their name. They know exactly what goes into making a car and they turn in their design … six months late – because they had a very understanding tutor at uni who allowed them to do that sort of thing. This new design has all the elements you’d expect to see in a mid-budget, four-door, family saloon. Doors, windows, engines, steering wheel, leg room, boot space … it’s got it all … laid out on the ground in a chalk outline of a car.
The builder guy points out it’s not a car, it’s a collection of car parts laid out in the general shape of a car but the designer doesn’t understand the difference. He avidly points out all the bits are there, so what’s the problem? And he gets fired.
By this time, the builder guy has had enough and either leaves or gets fired – depending on whose account you believe. A new builder is hired, he looks through all the designs and he decides your original one was the best – so you’re back on the project.
Fuck.
Still, it’s all money at the end of the day – so you agree to a few minor design tweaks.
Three years later, you’ve redesigned the fucking thing eighteen times. It’s been a jeep, a camper van, a 4×4, a moped and currently resembles a flowerpot on wheels. The original sales guy has had a nervous breakdown and has been replaced by a guy who’s realised that what the original guy meant by mid-budget and what the rest of the world mean by mid-budget are two completely fucking different things. He has a go at you for not being able to stick to the apparently non-existent budget and demands you fix the design so it can be made for four and a half pence.
Which can’t be done.
Never mind, he has some ideas – chief among which is cutting the number of wheels to three, the number of doors to one and using kite string instead of a steering wheel. At this point, the tight-arsed money men (who only invested in the car so they have something to tell girls instead of having to develop a personality) pull out and the car project dies.
Until the original sales guy comes back from the loony asylum with millions of pounds he won from some deranged billionaire resident in a game of ‘guess when I’ve shit my pants’.
All systems are go!
Everyone likes the design (which is now so close to the original as to be virtually indistinguishable) and the builder finally gets to do his job instead of spending all his time telling the press how he had to redesign the fucking car because you couldn’t do your job properly. It’s started! He’s actually doing the job he was hired for!
Spectacularly badly.
So badly in fact, you wonder why he even bothered with the fucking design in the first place since he obviously hasn’t looked at it at all and is just randomly making shit up. Eighteen wheels, in one corner! Cardboard diaphragms instead of doors! And the engine is so woefully underpowered its output is measured in mouse-power as opposed to the traditional horse.
And the only explanation he’ll offer? It’s symbolic. Symbolic of fucking what? His inability to build a car or grasp simple reading skills?
When the abomoination is finally finished, the sales guy fires the builder, hacks off all the bits he doesn’t think belong to a car (including all the fucking wheels) and puts the resulting mess on sale where (surprise, sur-fucking-prise) it fails to sell a single unit and garners rightly appalling reviews.
All of which blame you.
And you know the real tragedy?
THIS IS MY FUCKING LIFE, EVERY FUCKING DAY!
Balls to the lot of you. I’m going to buy a car to cheer myself up.
Not in a ’stealing a motorbike, out-running the Nazis and failing to jump over barb wire fences’ kind of way … although, put me in a fast car with a long bonnet and I inevitably hum the theme tune to ‘Bullitt’ … but no, every now then when I’m re-writing a script I remember a story I once heard about Steve McQueen – apparently, so the story goes, the first thing he did when looking through a script was to cross out all the dialogue he felt was unnecessary.
A wise move I feel. Frequently, on a first draft, I include loads of dialogue which could easily be conveyed by a look or a glance. People, particularly friends, often communicate without actually saying anything and it’s a great way to reduce the length of your script without actually cutting anything.
The problem is, how do you convey the exact meaning of the removed line with a few words which describe the expression on an unseen person’s face?
For example. If you take this random shit scene:
COLIN
Stuart!
STEVE
You what?
COLIN
No, not Stuart ... Simon?
STEVE
Are you fucking kidding me?
COLIN
Shit, sorry. Erm ... Sam? Sanjay? Sarah? Steve!
Steve McQueen! Hey!
STEVE
What the fuck do you want?
COLIN
Can I have an autograph?
STEVE
No. Fuck off.
COLIN
Right.
And you cross out all of Steve’s dialogue, you get:
COLIN
Stuart!
COLIN
No, not Stuart ... Simon?
COLIN
Shit, sorry. Erm ... Sam? Sanjay? Sarah? Steve!
Steve McQueen! Hey!
COLIN
Can I have an autograph?
COLIN
Right.
Which makes no fucking sense. Adding in action lines to describe Steve’s expressions gives you:
COLIN
Stuart!
Steve frowns.
COLIN
No, not Stuart ... Simon?
Incredulous, Steve stares at Colin.
COLIN
Shit, sorry. Erm ... Sam? Sanjay? Sarah? Steve!
Steve McQueen! Hey!
STEVE
What the fuck do you want?
COLIN
Can I have an autograph?
Steve scowls.
COLIN
Right.
Hmm … which actually works quite well. Damn, this is a pretty poor example. Although, ‘Steve scowls.’ is a fairly ambiguous statement; you can scowl in anger, scowl in confusion, scowl in something else I can’t think of with everyone fucking talking at me and the TV on.
Seriously, why am I writing this fucking post in the lounge?
Anyway … maybe, for some completely unknown reason, it’s vitally important to get across the specific meaning of a scowl. Don’t ask me why, I’ve no fucking idea. It just is, okay? Obviously the whole film hinges on this one scowl.
On a more serious note, I have had actors ask what their characters are thinking during a particular scene and it’s handy to be able to specify what a particular reaction means without loading your dialogue up with exposition.
STEVE
I really am rather miffed at your inability to remember my name,
because I'm rather famous and should be instantly recognisable.
You cunt.
I also remember Aardman saying they wrote dialogue for Gromit in all the Wallace and Gromit films so the animators could get the expressions right. I think it’s a good idea to specify exactly what the unspoken dialogue is since it helps with the read, the audience will be able to decipher the actor’s expression and body language and it steers the actors towards getting the right meaning across. But how best to go about it?
Personally, I’ve opted for just writing the dialogue in the action lines:
Steve scowls - no. Fuck off.
Again, this is a particularly bad example, but there you go. I’m tired.
I have no idea whether or not this is considered correct or incorrect format; but I do know no one’s ever complained. An actor may choose to express the words in a different manner, that’s up to them. The point is the meaning should be clear in the script.
Some people will tell you putting dialogue like this in the action lines is an unfilmable. Those people are of course completely fucking wrong. Describing the intent behind an expression is not unfilmable since actors can pull faces and cameras can be pointed at them. It only becomes an unfilmable when there’s absolutely no fucking way to deduce the words from specific face movements:
Steve scowls - maybe Maria had a point back in 1979 when she set
fire to Elton John's wig? Although the thing with the alpaca
was just wrong.
But that’s another post for another time when I’m feeling less likely to kick a hole in my computer at the memory of random fuckwits telling me it’s unfilmable when I describe an actress as angry or scared as if people are incapable of conveying such complex emotions.
And don’t get me started on the mongo-fuck-loons who bandy ’show don’t tell’ around as if they actually know what it means.
I went to see this the other night and while the case may have been curious, Benjamin Button certainly wasn’t. About anything.
I should probably post a SPOILERS warning about here, but I genuinely don’t think it’s possible to spoil the story in this case. However, if you haven’t seen the film yet and think you might like to, look away now.
And keep looking away for the rest of the post.
Come back tomorrow. There might be some funny swearing by then.
I’m sure most of you know the film’s about Benjamin Button, a guy who’s born old and grows younger. Fair enough, sounds interesting. The story, on the other hand, is about a guy who’s born old and grows younger … for three fucking hours.
And that’s it.
For three hours, a man gets younger on screen.
He has no interests, no desires, no wants, no needs, no … curiosity about anything at all.
For me, a good film gets me asking questions – that’s how I engage with a movie. Who did it? Why did they do it? What’s going to happen when x meets y? And most importantly of all: how’s he going to achieve … whatever his goal is.
And there’s the problem (for me, anyway. I’m not saying it’s a bad film, just I didn’t care) - Benjamin Button has no goals. He just is.
There’s an inevitable comparison here with Forrest Gump – partly because it’s the same writer, but mostly because it has all the same components: a totally passive protagonist in the deep South to whom things just happen. A boat. A flighty girl who’s the focus of his obsession there sometimes. A long passage of time. War. Big house. Single mother who dies … it’s cut from the same cloth.
The difference is, interesting things happened to Forrest. He’s a passive guy who accidentally finds himself in some of the major events of the second half of the twentieth Century. He also has a goal – he loves … whatever Robin Wright-Penn’s character was called. Jenny? Yeah, Jenny.
I think.
So imagine Benjamin Button as a Forrest Gump if he never saw anything interesting and didn’t really care if he got the girl or not.
Sound interesting?
No?
Put it this way, I actually went to the toilet during the film – something I never do for fear of missing something. In this case I didn’t really think it would be a problem. When I returned I asked my mate just in case:
“What happened?”
“He got a bit younger.”
Oh. Thrilling.
The most telling line of the film for me came when the trawler tug Forrest Benjamin was working on got drafted into WWII – ooh! What’s going to happen now? How will war change him?
Then came the line. Something like:
“I didn’t really see much of the war.”
Oh. Brilliant. I’m glad they filmed that. Imagine if I’d gone the rest of my life not knowing Benjamin Button didn’t really see anything during the Second World War?
Okay, so shortly after that he does get shot at and everyone except him dies. Or maybe there was someone else who survived. It’s hard to say. There was a really interesting Captain, Brad Pitt in a lot of make up and then a load of nondescript people in jumpers. Most of the jumpers got killed. Maybe. The Captain definitely did, which was a shame because I liked him. He seemed like fun.
Tilda Swinton’s character – she seemed really interesting. I’d like to have known more about her – but didn’t get the chance.
Which is really what this film’s about. Benjamin Button meets some interesting people … and completely fails to be changed by them. He just meets them. They’re interesting. He’s not.
We meet his daughter in the first scene – but she doesn’t find out she’s his daughter for two and a half hours. What a revelation! A character discovers something we’ve known for hours.
Great.
Shortly after this she stops reading Benjamin’s journal (“That’s the last entry.”) and my mate started picking his coat up and checking he had everything. “That’s what I thought,” chimes in … whoever the love uninterest is “but then I got a phone call.”
“Oh for fuck’s sake!” opined my mate as he settled back in for another thirty minutes or so of watching someone get younger.
I’m not saying it’s not well filmed or acted – just there’s nothing which held my interest.
No, that’s not true. There are plenty of good bits – the story about the clock, the lightning guy, the bits about whats-her-name getting run over – but none of them feature the protagonist. Can you even call him a protagonist if he doesn’t do any pro-ing? Is he just a tagonist? Or maybe just an ist?
Films with no unity of time are hard to pull off – part of the reason I don’t really like bio-pics is people rarely have one goal for their entire lives and the more you try to show, the less interesting it becomes. The more successful ones (for me) pick short periods of someone’s life and show them trying to achieve something.
Watching someone from birth to death without them ever really paying any interest in their own lives is … boring.
I like everything and everyone surrounding Benjamin, and if the intention was to show how people can live their whole lives without ever really getting involved in the world around them then … well done. It certainly achieved its goal. Because that’s the impression I got – there was probably a really interesting film happening just out of shot.
Still, other people seem to like it so I probably just missed the point.
I’m just plodding along at the moment, trying to get a re-write finished. It’s bloody painful, nothing’s flowing and nothing I’m writing is actually any good - I really am just stumbling towards the end with the intention of making it sing the next time through.
The problem is it’s a complete re-write which still has to have all the elements people loved about the last draft. Basically I’m dropping a different version of the story around the same characters and a lot of the same dialogue, which is a bit weird.
It’s not like taking the same characters and putting them in a new story (almost like a sequel or a different episode) and it’s not like keeping the story the same and replacing the characters with better ones – it’s keeping all the scenes with the heroes interacting with themselves and changing all the ones where they meet the villains.
The villains have changed characters and swapped motivations and gained new backstories – the heroes have always been spot on from the beginning and the way the talk and the things they say are crucial to the script’s appeal.
It’s a bit like taking Star Wars, keeping all the Farm, Cantina, Millenium Falcon and Rebel Base sequences, throwing out everything else and trying to weave a new story around what’s left.
In my head, it should be easy – I have these shining jewels of scenes which I just need to get to – as soon as I get to the next scene I can skip on five or ten pages without re-writing a word …
But it doesn’t actually work like that. Instead I’m finding the ‘fixed’ scenes need tweaking to fit. The plot’s coming into them from the wrong angle. It’s like threading beads onto a piece of string – you have to make sure the holes all line up and at the moment they just don’t.
On top of that, it turns out the perfect, saved scenes are actually chock full of exposition I no longer need. The budget’s been greatly expanded and it’s now possible to show all the expensive stuff instead of starting the film just after it finishes – so there’s absolutely no need for the characters to talk about it.
Except the bits that still aren’t clear – so I’m combing through each scene, extracting the best lines and the needed exposition and trying to build new scenes around those fragments.
Even the fight sequences can’t stand as they were – sometimes there are extra characters in the room, sometimes one or two might be missing – so everything has to change.
It would be easier to junk the whole script and start from scratch but that’s not the brief – it has to feel like it’s the same script only much, much better.
And it’s driving me fucking nuts.
I’ve been working on this on and off since September.
September!
That was last fucking year!
I haven’t been doing it continuously, of course. The problem is people keep waving money (or at least more inevitable money) at me so I get sidetracked onto other projects. This particular project will (theoretically) pay me more than everything else I’ve written in my entire career combined … which is exactly the reason why it’s the least likely to happen.
A low budget film is one investor who fancies financing a film so he can boast about it to his mates.
A higher budget film needs a lot of people digging deep and expecting a return. The bigger the outlay, the more nervous people get and the less likely it is they’ll actually hand over the money. Since the majority of the money comes on the first day of principal photography I have to work on the projects most likely to go into production.
And even they’re not guaranteed.
So although I’ve been picking at this since September - I probably haven’t managed more than a week or two’s work in that time.
Which causes another problem – expectation.
If I knock something out in a week, I can claim I rushed it. That’s why it’s crap, not because I can’t do better – I just didn’t have time.
Six months down the line? It’s got to be a work of fucking genius … and it’s not. At the moment it’s extremely pedestrian and just … wrong.
I just need to get to the end, just keep plodding on – get it all down and then tidy it up later. And I am getting there, but fuck me am I not enjoying this?
And the less fun something is, the harder it is to concentrate.
I just spent the afternoon naming my T-shirts and arranging them in alphabetical order.
George MacDonald Fraser died. I was a bit upset about that.
I set out to write a feature in six days (due to some ridiculously bad time-management skills). I actually managed to write it in three … and it was shit.
I found out I had no idea what blue pages actually are. Or rather, I knew what they were, but not exactly what they looked like and how to do them. I’m still not 100% sure but I’ve come up with my own version and no one’s complained so far.
Whilst on location for ‘K‘ I managed to work out a cheap way of throwing an actor off the roof.
I got fired from a film and inexplicably became obsessed with tin foil as a direct result. Looking back on that, it might have been a teeny tiny nervous breakdown.
I learnt how to write a sex scene which won’t upset actresses, then got called a sexist by Piers for using the word ‘actresses’.
Weirdly, someone asked me to put more swearing into a script. I’ve never been asked for that before or since.
I learnt how to keep actors happy. Or happier, anyway.
I finished the first draft of ‘Mixed Up‘ and for some reason felt the need to post a video of my friends and I massacring ‘I Believe In A Thing Called Love’.
I decided ‘Mixed Up‘ was going to be my last low budget film and from now on I was going to concentrate purely on some TV specs.
I started work on two more low budget films. Since I can’t remember what they were, they obviously went the way of most low budget films and imploded on contact with reality.
I went to the thing I got invited to – a BBC shindig and chance to meet the producers of the BBC’s New Comedy Unit. Where I stood in the corner for a few hours, got very hot, very angry and completely failed to meet any of the producers of the BBC’s New Comedy Unit.
I realised there are very few female sidekicks.
I picked up even more low budget film work.
Abi Titmuss completely failed to mention me in The Sun and then promised to continue to never mention me in public. I decided not to believe she existed.
Karma Magnet turned up online. People seemed to like it.
Abi Titmuss made good her promise and failed to mention me in Closer.
I confirmed, once and for all, actors don’t really have sex in sex scenes. Unless it’s porn.
I got to write for Doctor Who. Not the show, or even the current Doctor, but for Sylvester McCoy and that’s good enough for me.
I decided some actors needed punching in the throat.
And then ‘Mixed Up‘ started shooting, so I went and hid in the Caribbean.
Went to the screening of The Wrong Door, met loads of people including Doctor Fox, Sarah Morgan and her boyfriend, didn’t make a tit of myself (except with Doctor Fox) and managed to steal a T-shirt:
Two days later, I had to give the T-shirt back. A handy tip – if you steal something, don’t mention it on your blog.
Learnt how to be constructive with my criticism rather than just scrawling SHIT on the script in red ink, wiping my arse on it and sending it back.
Met Gordon Robertson after knowing him via email (not in the biblical sense, that’s impossible) for a few years. He’s a nice bloke.
And then waffled on a bit about random shit to avoid having to do any real work.
Discovered cats and touchscreen computers don’t mix.
The Wrong Door got a lot of publicity in the run up to the show – 12 of the 14 reviews I read were very positive. 2 were very negative.
The Wrong Door kicked off. So did a guy called Ben Randall who was so upset he didn’t find a programme funny he came all the way over to this blog to call me names.
The Wrong Door had the highest opening of any show on BBC Three (about four people) which seemed to greatly upset a handful of Internet loonies who went on and on and on about it for fucking ages.
I made the mistake of suggesting the people coming to my blog to call me names because they didn’t find a TV programme funny were a bit mental. Several people took great exception to this and went far out of their way to call me names in an effort to prove how mistaken I was about their lack of sanity and a real life.
Got my first death threat. Actually I got two death threats and one offer to rape my three month old daughter to ‘teach me a lesson’. That was nice. Perfectly sane behaviour that, I thought.
Still working on that fucking treatment.
Had a superb meeting where people offered me lots of money. I didn’t, and still don’t, really believe them.
Got offered another low budget feature film. That’s more like it.
Yet more abuse about The Wrong Door. One guy has taken to posting insults then changing names and agreeing with himself. He doesn’t seem to be able to grasp concepts like IP addresses, I can see it’s all one guy. I assumed this was a guy because I like to think women have better things to do.
An old project threatened to spring back to life … and then didn’t.
Finally finished that fucking treatment.
Oh and a bit more abuse about The Wrong Door.
On a serious note, all that abuse was a bit wearing. You write in the privacy of your own room for years until someone decides they want to make your work. You’re pleased, they’re pleased, the show comes out and generally people either like it or turn it off. Then a small contingent of morons think it’s perfectly acceptable to come and call you names, threaten your family and generally behave like cunts because – horror of horrors – THEY don’t like it. It’s depressing and it’s demotivating. I expected to be slagged off in papers if the critics didn’t like something I’d written. I expected to be slagged off on forums or other people’s blogs – all that’s fair enough; but the sheer persistence of a few individuals who felt the need to come here and spout off about it did actually get me down.
Until Oli sent me a cartoon. Which explained everything and really cheered me up. I decided I would find some way to repay him, somehow.
I completely failed to do some writing and in a gargantuan procrastination session, I redesigned my website.
Fixed the second act thing and discovered it no longer matched the ending.
Wrote a whiny post about writing treatments in the hope a certain producer was reading and would let me off for not turning in a treatment he was expecting. It didn’t work. Turns out he can’t read.
Wrote a writer’s vision for a sales pack – I don’t have any vision.
That guy’s still answering himself on The Wrong Door posts.
Hooray! December! This post is finally over and we can all go home!
Assuming any of you are still here.
Met some more writers in the pub: Paul Campbell, Danny Stack, Lara Greenway, Michelle Lipton and Oli … as well as the normal crowd. They were all nice. I told Danny and Michelle the secret which isn’t really a secret – just something I don’t bother telling people. Danny immediately left the pub, Michelle wanted to hug me.
Got angry with ten imaginary people because there were ten of them.
Panicked. Finished the script.
Cut out every other word in the vague feeling it might make it exciting and mysterious. It didn’t.
Told people how to wait. Not sure why, probably avoiding some other work.
Declared my love affair with Apparitions. Which I still haven’t seen the last episode of. I’m a fickle fucker sometimes.
Had some fun. It was fun.
Met James Moran. Told him the secret which isn’t really a secret – he seemed to find it funny.
And there you go. That was 2008 for me. How was it for you?
So there’s me, Jason Arnopp and TV’s James Moran in this minuscule flat somewhere in London. I’m not sure whose flat it is or how we came to be there, but we’ve just finished eating a meal which we cooked together … and by cooked I mean burnt the shit out of everything using every available pan, plate and utensil. The kitchen is a fucking mess, there’s food stuck to every surface and for some reason the prospect of cleaning it up sends us into fits of giggles.
The post-prandial conversation drifts onto writing and money with Jason and I voicing the opinion that James must be doing alright what with all that telly writing he keeps doing. Naturally James is very modest and declines to comment one way or the other, but Arnopp chips in with this odd sentence:
“He’s just bought a submarine!”
And so he had. Just a little one, apparently it only holds four people at a push. We all find this very funny and I desperately want to know why he wants a submarine. James isn’t sure, there was this guy selling them and he just bought it on a whim. It’s just outside so we pop down to take a look.
Five minutes later we’re standing on the pavement looking at what James describes as a personal mini-sub, but I’d describe as a rusty MG Metro, painted battleship grey with a periscope welded to the roof. Badly.
“That’s not a submarine.”
“Yes it is. It’s a mini-sub.”
“James, it’s not. It’s a Metro.”
“No, no, it’s a submarine, honest. The guy who sold it to me said it was.”
“It’s got wheels!”
“Yeah, it’s an over-ground one, not one of the ones which goes under the water.”
“An over-ground submarine? Are you fucking mad?”
And at that point, I woke up. Quite why I’m dreaming about these two reprobates is beyond me, especially since I’ve never even met one of them; but when you throw the Metro/submarine into the mix … well, it was a bit odd. Not raining kittens odd, but a bit odd nonetheless.
As you can see, I’m still working on this treatment and don’t have anything useful to blog about.
Six or seven years ago, a producer I know told me he was going to Cannes and wanted some scripts to take with him. He told me this in January and after months of frantic scribbling, in May I handed him five brand new feature scripts.
Which he then forgot to take with him.
But never mind, that focused period of writing gave me the backbone of my spec portfolio; of which: one is in production, one is in development and a third has been optioned and dropped three times on the grounds it’s funny but ultimately pointless. I think it gets optioned on the first point after the first read and dropped when the second point becomes apparent three or four reads later.
“Hang on, there’s fuck all happening! It’s just a shit load of jokes.”
Which was mostly down to my writing style at the time: start at the beginning and write until you’ve had enough. The result was scripts with not a lot of structure, depth, subtext, theme or even story. Still, they all had something going for them and it turns out a few minor tweaks created at least the illusion of all these weighty attributes and on the whole people were happy to read them.
The script which is in development is a classic example: I wrote it in a rush without really thinking and generally, people like it. Some people love it. The producer who holds the option has asked for a few minor re-writes which I’ve been happy to oblige, but basically it’s still in the form it was when it was first written. When someone asks you to fix x, y and z you don’t think about the rest of the alphabet. They obviously like the rest of the alphabet or they would have mentioned it. Sure, you polish the other letters as you go through, but you don’t start redesigning them or swapping them around.
And when I say ‘you’ I of course mean ‘me’. You’re probably all a bit more diligent.
So then we had this meeting with a potential new director who loves bits of the script but feels it needs a major re-write. Fair enough, he might be the director depending on how this re-write goes and if he wants stuff done differently (within certain reasonable parameters: i.e. providing it’s not ruining anything) then he can have stuff done differently. There’s this pointless flashback which needs burning anyway – I’ve been meaning to do it for a while but forgot during the last tweak and haven’t had the opportunity since.
One of his first observation was: the bad guys don’t do anything. We cut back to them a lot, but basically they’re just waiting for the good guys to come and get them.
Now it’s not quite as bad as Superman Returns where the bad guys have so little to do they just sit down and play cards until Supes comes to get them; but it’s not far off … and it’s heavily disguised. “Full of sound and fury signifying nothing” springs to mind. They look like they’re doing stuff, but if you strip it down, they’re essentially just polishing their desk and tidying their paperclips whilst they’re waiting to be punished. They have no plan.
The second major problem is all the characters are thrown in at the deep end, which means the first act is explosive and full of action and ‘oh fuck!’ moments; but when it’s all over there’s a hell of a lot of explaining to do. To make matters worse, this is a fantasy film so the whole world and all its rules needs to be set-up for the audience. And since there was too much action to begin with, the first half of the second act is just people wandering or sitting still and explaining what happened to them and how everything is supposed to work in the world they live in.
Not good.
The potential director though, has a plan. The script starts in the aftermath of a climatic event which has changed the world and shows how people react to that. When I wrote it, it was a low-budget script so starting immediately after the expensive bit seemed like a good idea. But since the budget’s been resized – why not show the whole shebang?
The three of us (writer, director, producer) threw a load of ideas around and we came up with way to set-up, introduce and overturn all the rules of the world in the first scene. Suddenly, all the exposition in the film is useless since you can SEE what happens instead of just being told about it.
Excellent! Removing this and the pointless bad guy scenes leaves loads of space for the bad guys to actually have a plan instead of achieving everything they set out to do before the film starts and then wondering what’s on telly for the rest of it.
First step: get the script and a load of index cards; go through the script and write down on cards the general gist of every scene. White for goodies, green for baddies, red for action where they meet. The resulting colourful mess looks pretty well balanced. There’s red every ten pages or so and the number of white and green cards is roughly equal.
The problem comes when you look at each card and realise most of the green cards say ‘pointless bad guy scene’ and a lot of the white cards say ‘pointless walking or talking scene’.
That’s actually great. I can remove all those scenes from the board and the script. Which actually clears out 35 pages of script without breaking a sweat. I don’t even read the scenes properly, they’re just gone.
So now I have 35 pages for the first scene and the whole of the bad guys’ story; something which will pit them against the good guys throughout. Let’s get some proper drama into this fucker! Let’s give it some fucking berries! Obviously, the rest of the story’s going to change too and I doubt any page will survive unscathed, but it’s great to see all that space to work with. This is liberating, this is inspiring! To work!
That was yesterday. Twenty four hours later and how much of this mighty restructuring have I achieved?
That took a while. The favicon in particular took hours to get right. Luckily, because the connection I’m using is slightly slower than leaning out of the window and shouting at people and is marginally less stable than the economy, the site is only partially uploaded. Bits of it work, bits of it don’t and the whole thing is generally a bit of a mess.
My sock drawer, on the other hand, is immaculate. Never before have so many socks been so meticulously arranged by colour and cross-indexed by fade and the size of the holes in both toe AND heel. It’s terribly exciting. If I want to find a sock, any sock, any one at all, I can just open my drawer and put my hand on it.
I could, of course, have done this before since I only have one sock drawer and there aren’t many socks in it; but it’s the principle which counts. They’ve been organised, there’s a system now.
After all that it was straight down to work, but then I remembered I still hadn’t watched the films a different producer gave me to watch before writing the last treatment. Now that’s finished, he’s going to want them back, so perhaps I’d better just watch one of them first.
Which unfortunately was so dull I fell asleep.
Which leads me to now. Fresh, prepared and ready to work.
I just thought I’d log on and tell you all about it first.
I’m at a bit of a loose end today. It’s not that I have nothing to do, it’s just I have nothing to do right now.
I’m working on lot of different projects, both film and TV stuff, and they’re all at different stages of development: some are one page synopses, some 4-5 page outlines, some 10 page treatments and a couple are already scripted. It’s a conveyer belt process whereby I write one stage, get notes, then move onto the next. Because there’s always a gap between finishing one stage and getting the notes, I can work on multiple projects at the same time without any problem.
Right now, I’ve completed the current stage for each project and can’t move forward without notes from the producers/directors. The problem being, they’ve all buggered off to Cannes.
Which leaves me kicking my heels wondering what to do with myself. I could, theoretically, start a *gasp* spec project … but since I’ve got a meeting tomorrow about a new film project, starting my own seems like a waste of time. Why write something you then have to sell when you already have people who want you to write things for them?
I could get a head start on the next stage of each project, but until I get the notes I could be running in completely the wrong direction. I’m not that bored.
There is a slight worry on the horizon. I have this vague fear that everyone’s going to come back from Cannes all fired up and determined to forge ahead … all of them. At the same time.
That would be completely impossible.
Well, I say impossible; more like very difficult, to be honest.
A position I don’t want to be in, at the very least.
Still, that’s all in the future. Today, I have nothing much to do. So instead of anything useful, here’re some more stills from Mixed Up.
———————————————————————————————————— WARNING! DO NOT READ THIS POST. IT’S INACCURATE, MEANINGLESS AND JUST PLAIN WRONG ————————————————————————————————————
As everyone knows, a while back the BBC decided to stop calling soaps ’soaps’ and call soaps ‘continuing drama’ …
Except, hang on, does everyone really know this?
TV, newspapers, magazines and everyone I know who’s not a writer still calls them soaps.
Do ITV and Channel Four still call them soaps?
Do Channel Five even have any soaps?
Have I ever watched Channel Five?
For the life of me, I can’t think of one program I’ve ever watched on Channel Five … how odd.
I don’t know when the BBC made its decision to change from soaps to continuing drama. For all I know they may have always referred to soaps as continuing drama and it’s only recently come to my attention; but for the purposes of this post, I’m going to assume it’s a relatively recent memo which was circulated around BBC staff. A memo which went something like this:
“Stop fucking calling them soaps, you bastards. It’s continuing drama, got it? Continuing fucking drama. Fucking deal with it.”
But presumably on headed paper.
And here’s the point.
Yes folks, that’s right: today I have a point.
Who is this change aimed at?
People who like soaps, call them soaps. People who don’t like soaps call them long names with lots of swearing in them.
The people who like them, the viewers, aren’t really aware the name has changed. Presumably, they have no interest in what they’re called anyway – as long as the shows continue to get made.
The people who don’t like them … is it an attempt to curry favour by pretending they’re not soaps? Lots of companies and organisations do this, in an attempt to distance themselves from the food poisoning/nuclear contamination/child molestation they’ve dumped on their consumers. It’s a move made by someone who knows what they do/produce is bad and want to distance themselves from it.
Again, since this information isn’t widely known, it would appear not to be the case.
So who is actually aware of this name change?
Writers, directors, producers … basically, anyone who works or aspires to work in TV.
Ah, interesting.
Being as I’m a writer, and only really read information by other writers, the only people I’ve heard refer to soaps as continuing drama are other writers. I’ll talk about this because it’s the only real reference point I have, and I’m presuming it’s a microcosm for how the industry has reacted as a whole.
New writers who like soaps and want to write for them are quite happy calling them soaps. They frequently refer to them as soaps and then guiltily correct themselves as if they’ve used a bad word. So the name change isn’t aimed at them.
New writers who don’t like soaps and don’t want to write for them (and possibly have no hope in hell of making a living in the UK) think the name change is a desperate attempt to pretend the shows aren’t a pile of shit. The name change might be aimed at tricking them into writing for something they don’t want to, but I doubt it. These still seem to refer to them as soaps without feeling the need to kow-tow to a weird form of non-political correctness.
Established writers who don’t like soaps and don’t want to write for them (are there many of these?) may be aware of the name change, but again, I doubt this will suddenly change their mind about the nature of the shows. I can’t see many suddenly turning around and deciding it’s okay to be a continuing drama writer, but not a soap writer. These guys seem to delight in referring to them as soaps just to annoy anyone who calls them continuing drama.
Established writers who like and already write for soaps … these are the only people I’ve heard consistently refer to them as continuing drama. They are the only ones who seem never, ever say ’soap’.
Maybe they’re following a BBC mandate which might otherwise cost them future employment?
But since these are the same group of people who regularly berate writers who don’t want to write for soaps as snobs, it just smacks to me of embarrassment. Whenever I read of some writer piling into a discussion in defence of continuing drama by accusing anyone who doesn’t like them of being up their own arse … it just sounds wrong. It sounds very Mrs. Bucket.
It’s not like people still calling Emmerdale ‘Emmerdale Farm’. It’s not an obvious name change which is branded on the product, in the same manner people refuse to abandon names like Opal Fruits, Marathon or Jif – fucking get over it, these products don’t exist any more and haven’t for years.
Since it’s not a widely used term and it’s not written down anywhere where the average member of public can read it, it’s a pointless correction.
“I’m a continuing drama writer.”
“What’s that then?”
“You know, Eastenders, Casualty, Holby … that sort of thing.”
“You mean soaps?”
(Embarrassed shuffle) “Maybe.”
“Why didn’t you just fucking say so?”
It’s like ‘Life on Mars’ writers refusing to admit the show was a Sci-Fi show. Will you just fucking get over yourselves?
As far as I can work out, the change from soap to continuing drama might be an attempt to rebrand the shows to attract new talent who would otherwise be reluctant to work on a soap; but seems more likely to be for the people who already work on the shows and are embarrassed about it.
If that’s the case, why write for them?
And where does this end?
Will Doctor Who be rebranded as a non-reality based drama?
Will documentaries become narrated factual drama?
Is it just because you can’t call a BBC department the ‘Soap Department’?
Am I wrong and have completely missed the point?
Have any of you worked out I don’t really care what they call these shows and I’m merely ranting to avoid doing any real work because I don’t know how to fix the current draft?
Oh, and I lied. I don’t have a point – just a LOT of meaningless words.
Posted by phillbarron 
Posted by phillbarron 
Posted by phillbarron 
