2009

So here we are at the end of the year, hell at the end of the decade and …

Actually, when does the decade end? Is 2010 the end of this decade or the beginning of the next one? Tricky number, zero. Still, fuck it. If the Romans couldn’t get to grips with it then why the fuck should I? I mean, they built roads and shit while all I’ve ever done is push buttons on a keyboard … and even that I do pretty badly.

Mind you, have you seen the roads in Rome? Shockingly bad. Fuck knows how those people supplied an empire.

But I digress.

Did you have a good Christmas? Did Santa bring you everything you wanted? I asked for World Domination and some French Fancies but the fat git failed on both counts. How was 2009 in general? Mine went almost exactly like this:

JANUARY

I realised we were living in the 21st Century … nine years after the fact.

Discovered Oli stops reading when he reaches his own name and then talked briefly about magic puppies with Lego faces.

Tries to get someone to hold my hand.

Learnt, once again, communicating by email results in appalling scripts and that the more notes someone has for you, the better the script is.

Revealed I had a BIG IDEA … with no time to write it.

Had a pile of work, so massive and so daunting … I decided to fuck everyone off and go to Disney Land instead.

Didn’t go to Disney Land, just knuckled down and attacked the pile of work.

Talked about a Writer’s Vision – basically how to lie in order to get money.

Revealed to the world that Satan talks to me through the TV and told me I have to leave Pipex and sign up to Sky Broadband or he’s going to make me rape, kill and eat next door’s babies.

Fielded an email from an American Production company looking for something almost exactly like the BIG IDEA. It’s right easy this marketing lark – you just sit there and wait for them to call you.

And then saw Seven Pounds and got depressed because I can’t write like that.

FEBRUARY

Had a pointless conversation with an Air Hostess in the middle of a forest.

Got bored.

Decided, more or less on a whim, never to speak to anyone ever again.

Named and alphabetised my T-shirts.

Decided I didn’t want to be in Battlestar Galactica.

Revealed my obsession with Creative Screenwriting Podcasts.

Got confused about Easter.

And got bored once more, this time by Benjamin Button. Fuck it, if he doesn’t pay any interest in his own life, why should I?

MARCH

Failed to blog about THE A TEAM V DAD’S ARMY and DAISY DOGNUTS. No, I have no idea what that means either.

Talked about the technical difficulties involved in writing a script … although for the life of me I can’t remember which fucking script I was talking about. I may have been making shit up to make myself seem cool.

Shit a solid gold brick.

Explained why this:

Made me into a writer.

Discovered a clone of me from the future used to stalk me in the past.

Got attacked by a T-Rex and rescued by Spiderman.

Got nominated for a Rose d’Or. Sort of.

Met up with Lara Greenway and Terry Wogan in Madam Tussauds.

Got emails from actors asking if they could be in a film I didn’t write. Only to find out I may have written bits of it, sort of.

Realised I could carry all my scripts around on my phone, all the time.

Got annoyed about mugs and companies who sell themselves as cool without actually telling you what their products do. Like Apple.

And offered to buy people lunch.

APRIL

Got nominated for a BAFTA. Actually, this has nothing to do with me.

Dropped an imaginary phone into an imaginary vat of home brew at Dan Turner’s imaginary house.

Wrote a script to an extremely complicated and prescriptive set of rules. Rules which the producer who set them immediately complained about.

Karma Magnet came out as a DVD extra.

Pimped some stuff for someone else.

Got fucking angry about the media’s ‘information’ about Swine Flu and declared it was all fucking bullshit and no one was going to die from it. Bird Flu, anyone?

Warned people their ideas would make a 90 page script into a 180 page script. They didn’t listen, I wrote the script, they got upset.

And filming started on a sitcom pilot … so I hid in Crouch End.

Wow, nothing really happened in April, did it?

MAY

Got annoyed about story drops – the point in a film/TV thing where you could stop watching and not feel like you’d missed the next hour.

Got really unreasonably upset about MOMENTS LATER. That must have been a particularly bad day.

Just for the Record began filming. I went to hide in the Caribbean and got sucked off by an air steward in First Class. There was a video of that and everything … but I seem to have lost it.

Got a phone call from the Mail on Sunday who wanted to talk to me about not being in Cannes.

Took a meeting in a room chock full of little rubber pigs – every single one of which bore a sticker proudly proclaiming: THIS IS NOT A TOY

Went to Nuneaton. Never again.

Apparently I went on holiday somewhere, but for the life of me I can’t remember where.

Oh, and I bought a new laptop:

Touchy touchy!

JUNE

Came over all positive for a moment and said some nice things. Hopefully that was just a phase.

Launched Jack Tweed’s movie career. Great.

Went to the Screenwriters’ Festival and drew some sperm:

Muttered something about being forced to promote stuff even when I thought it was shit

Saw a preview/promo for Fleeced:

Saw a trailer for Just for the Record … which has since been removed. Damn.

Saw a poster for Just for the Record … which has since been binned.

Tried to make sense of Spatulas, Iguanas and a fruitbowl.

Attacked a man on the bus so I could rip this page from his paper:

Because of this paragraph:

Which is about a sitcom pilot I co-wrote.

And came over all nice again and promoted other people’s short films.

JULY

Finally explained about the movable goalposts of excitement.

Held a meeting in a street which was on fire.

Attended a screening of Splendid. It was.

Got hassled by an all female Squad of pissed up Motown fans. One of whom insisted she was a natural blonde with the landing strip to prove it who went on to kick me in the chest with a spiked heel. I quite enjoyed that day.

Got angry about morons giving James Moran a hard time for writing good telly.

Did this:

For these people:

Deleted more than I wrote.

Ran out of ways to procrastinate and very nearly had to do some work.

And saw the trailer for the sitcom pilot I co-wrote:

AUGUST

Oh, and a music video from the same:

Another trailer for Just for the Record. This one’s still there!

Took part in a three-way conference call between New York, Barbados and Crawley. (I was in Barbados, but strangely my car was in Crawley).

Was told I wasn’t allowed to photograph an imaginary gorilla and used it as an excuse to show this trailer again:

Finally realised (but haven’t fully accepted) that NO ONE FUCKING CARES ABOUT SCRIPT FORMAT.

Confessed I frequently imagine I’m Steve McQueen.

And tried to work out what I wanted out of the SWF.

SEPTEMBER

Are we all still here? Are you as bored as I am yet? Yes? Good, moving on.

Saw a trailer for Exposé.

Signed contracts and received feedback for the BIG IDEA. Wait, did I mention I sold the BIG IDEA without trying? No, not to the American Production company, but to a different American Production company. Actually, my friend sold it for me without my permission or knowledge. Suits me, as long as I don’t have to do any work.

Made some cats out of blue icing.

Talked about two adaptations and how they’d missed the fucking point. Since I’m now working on two adaptations I look forward to people throwing that blog back in my face.

The Dutch gave me some money, via the BBC.

So did Sweden, Denmark, Italy, America and Russia.

And, for reasons which escape me, babbled about furniture for far too long.

Is that it? Is that all I did in September? Was it a short month this year?

OCTOBER

Hooray! This is nearly over and I can go and do something more interesting!

In October, I lost my rag with Microsoft.

Got suckered into thinking this was a real school orchestra:

Got stuck in a rant about designing cars and then bought one to cheer myself up.

And … that’s it? That’s fucking it? What the fuck was I doing in October?

NOVEMBER

Went to the Screenwriters’ Festival – fannyed around, didn’t really make the most of it and met a lot of nice people. Like Hayley McKenzie – she’s lovely. Oh, and I compared cock size with Simon Beaufoy. I’m not telling you who won.

Masturbating monkeys … I still don’t really want to talk about that.

Tried to sell my car via my blog. Bizarrely, I actually sold it in absolute darkness, during a storm and a power cut to two Eastern Europeans who paid cash and didn’t want to test drive or even inspect it.

Got all mellow and wibbly over stuff like this:

Wrote an open letter to directors.

Wrote an open letter to writers.

Wrote an open letter to producers.

Hmm … looks like I did more in November than October but still, come on! Have I really been too busy to blog?

Yes, I have as it happens …

DECEMBER

 Moaned a lot about writing constantly without actually writing any scripts.

Pointed out the target audience for a script is the producer and the director, not the people who pay to go and see a film. That’s the target audience for a film.

Spoke to a wall.

And that was it. That’s the entire fucking year.

I can’t help noticing the beginning of the year involved a lot more blogging than the end of the year. I’m sorry about that (unless you hate my blog, then I’m happy for you) but I have been exceedingly busy. I’m currently working on four feature scripts as well as keeping all the other plates spinning and blogging has become an expensive luxury.

January and February 2010 promise to be absolutely fucking mental and possibly completely impossible – but hopefully once this lot is out of the way, normal blogging service will be resumed.

And by normal service I mean me talking shit in extremely long-winded, ill-thought out and ill-advised posts.

Happy New Year to you all, see you in the next decade!

Or maybe the last year of this decade … depending on how you count it.

Writing for your target audience

When you’re writing a script, it’s absolutely vital to keep your target audience in mind. There really is no point writing something they don’t want to see.

Of course, frequently, your target audience doesn’t know what they want to see and it’s up to us to try and persuade them; but the maxim remains true – you’re not writing to please yourself, you’re writing to please them.

And by target audience, I of course mean the director and/or producer – they are the initial target audience for your script. You may think the target audience is 16-24 year olds (whatever the fuck that actually means) but in reality you’re writing what the producer or director thinks 16-24 year olds will like.

If you’re writing comedy it’s not about what you find funny, it’s about what they find funny. If it’s a drama, it’s what they find dramatic. If they think the dialogue’s stilted because they don’t believe people talk like that, there’s no point playing them the recording of your friends’ conversation you’ve lifted verbatim …

Well, actually, that might work. Or they might just think you’ve got freakish friends and fire you by association.

Anyway, the point is: you’re writing to please the people who have hired you.

Obviously, in an ideal world you can pick and choose your projects and collaborators so carefully you will never write something you’re only half interested in and you will all instantly agree on the best way to make the film.

In the real world, you occasionally have to bow to the will of someone who you fundamentally disagree with. The real skill, of course, is to find the middle ground where everyone is happy. Which is tricky.

Particularly since producers and directors tend (and I stress tend since there are no absolutes here) to think very differently.

Hopefully, you’ll all be focussed on telling the best story at the script stage – but best is an ambiguous term and everyone will have different ideas about what it actually means.

For a writer, that tends to mean the most coherent, emotionally moving story. Whether that emotion makes you cry or makes you hang on the edge of your seat as giant robots knock the fuck out of each other – writers tend to be all about making sure the characters’ actions and the plot make sense.

Producers tend to think in terms of selling the movie and what elements they can beg, borrow or steal. If they can film in Puerto Rico for free – one of the scenes needs to be set in Puerto Rico. It adds production value. If they know four female and three male actors who are interested in working for next to nothing – then that’s who has to be in the story. If the producer bumps into Brad Pitt and he says he loves the project, wants to work for free, invest in it and let you have his house as a location – then guess what? The best way to tell the story is for the 19 year old female protagonist to become a middle aged bloke living in LA. Or wherever else Brad Pitt may have a house.

Possibly the only time this isn’t true is when it’s an adaptation – I can imagine a producer turning down Julia Roberts in those exact same circumstances if she wanted to play Batman (then again …) but if it’s a completely new project – the producer (hopefully) understands what it takes to actually get the film financed, made and sold.

The director, on the other hand, tends to think in terms of images and will give you instructions like:

“I don’t care where it’s set, who’s in it or what happens, but I really, really want a dog with a fridge for a head. I think that’s a great image and really opens up dramatic possibilities.”

It doesn’t open up dramatic possibilities at all – it just makes life really fucking complicated; but they have this image in their head and they want to see it in the film. They think in pictures, whereas producers think in numbers.

And please don’t get me wrong – neither of these things is a bad thing and I’m not saying either side has no interest in any other element because if they’re good at their job they will be interested in everything which goes into making a script great from characters to plot to motivations to arena and whatever; but there frequently can be a bias towards a certain type of thinking.

And this is why it’s really important to keep your target audience in mind. By all means talk about why a character is doing something or how this smoothes the weird transition from act one to act two; but remember to frame at least part of your ramblings in a way your target audience can understand.

If you want to tell a story about a depressed sofa who’s fed up with people sitting on it all day – then tell the director what it could look like and how certain images really leap out at you, while you’re telling the producer how many people love sofas, associate with sofas and what kind of merchandising deals you could do with DFS.

This stuff isn’t that difficult but it’s taken me a while to work it out. Sometimes it’s easier to get your idea across than others and I think when someone’s struggling to see the beauty in the idea it’s because you’re using words which don’t make sense to them.

Telling a writer he has to have a talking sofa in the film because you can get a great merchandising tie-in is unlikely to fly. Telling the same writer about the characterisation of the sofa and how it fits into the plot will get him salivating.

Well, probably not; but you get the idea.

Now, can anyone think of a title for a talking sofa movie? I’ve got this great contact at Habitat …

What the fuck is this shit?

As many people are aware, I’m not a big fan of Apple products and can safely say I’ll never own any. Assuming of course that by ‘never’ I mean ‘until I do’. The reasons have nothing to do with the intrinsic worth of any of the products, components or software and I’m by no means convinced Microsoft, Windows or any mobile phone manufacturer you care to mention are any better – I just have a strong dislike of Apple and everything they stand for.

To me it comes down to two things:

1)The weird cult-like aura which surrounds happy-clappy Apple users and the self-satisfied smugness they exude. It’s just fucking weird and slightly creepy how you people behave. No offense meant – I just don’t want to risk being like you because you freak me out.

I have a strong desire not to belong to any organisation or group – it’s part of the reason I have no interest in team sports, when you don’t care who wins it makes the mechanics of the games very dull. Although I have zero belief in any of the numerous gods knocking around, I hesitate to consider myself an atheist because I don’t like the idea of belonging to that group.

I experienced a lovely bit of Apple-mania the other day when I had to endure eight hours of four Apple-users haranguing me because I was using a non-Apple laptop. Eight fucking hours and the only time they went a bit quiet was when someone else saw me using the touchscreen on my laptop and went on for a little bit about how cool she thought it was. The Apple-loons went quiet for a bit before deciding that nobody actually wants touchscreen on a laptop – that’s why Apple don’t make them and I was obviously deluded or deranged for believing I did want it.

Later on, at the hotel we were all staying in, I found Team Apple in a bit of a funk because none of them could access the Internet. Weird, I thought, I’ve got no problems. It turns out they’d phoned the hotel’s business centre for technical support and after the usual lengthy process of determining they weren’t complete fuckwads, had worked out how to plug the cable in and turn their computers on, the helpful woman asked if they were using Macbooks.

“Of course,” they all cried, “what else would we use?”

So the woman explained Macbooks never seem to work with the hotel’s Internet and promptly hung up.

I did laugh quite a bit … but then, being the kind chap I aspire to be, I offered to let them use the Internet in my room. Oddly enough, they all declined presumably on the grounds if Steve Jobs intended for them to use the Internet he would have made their computers compatible with it.

The second reason, 2)if you’re keeping track of these things, is Apple’s advertising campaign which makes me want to hurl bricks at the telly. The whole concept of Apple’s advertising is ‘Sell the sizzle, not the sausage’ and they’ll do anything to avoid telling you the truth. It’s a string of brightly coloured lies to a funky dance track designed to make you think the product is cool rather than asking what it actually does and why it costs three times as much as everyone else’s identical products.

Things like the iPhone 2’s “GPS mapping like you’ve never seen before!’ or the iPhone 3Gs’ ‘we’ve invented video!’ claim get my blood boiling. And nothing makes me laugh harder (except perhaps old people falling over onto kittens) than the small print at the end of the ads:

“Steps removed and sequences shortened”

Or, in other words:

“Doesn’t actually do any of this.”

Or my new favourite for whatever it iPod it is they’ve just added video to where the small print points out it can’t actually take video like they’ve just shown you.

Not that the ads aren’t seductive – many’s the time I’ve watched an ad for the latest app and wished my phone could do that … only to remember it can because it, like most phones these days, has access to the Internet and most of the apps they advertise can be replicated with Google and an Internet connection.

The words which spring to mind when I think of Apple are Sirius Cybernetics Corporation with their smug doors, GPP features and ‘your plastic pal who’s fun to be with’.

Again, let me point out before you all go mental that I don’t particularly like Microsoft products either and suspect Apple stuff might be slightly better but probably still falls short of adequate. The difference I think is in the way the companies present themselves and I’ve long thought if I was at a party I’d rather spend time with Bill Gates than with Steve Jobs. I mean, yeah, Bill Gates is probably boring, nerdy and embarrassing. He’s the friend you don’t introduce to women because he’ll bore the shit out of them and they’ll hate you by association. A bit like a retarded cousin your parents force you to play with.

Steve Jobs on the other hand comes across as the kind of guy who’d steal all your possessions and try to sell them back to you for a profit. He looks and sounds like a used car salesman and seems about as trustworthy as a politician. In fact, nothing would surprise me less than if he went into politics one day. He might get the pussy, but only because he’s a verbal rapist.

All this is a really long winded way of talking about the differences between the two companies marketing strategies. Apple seem like a self-promotion company who also sell a few electronic items. Microsoft seem like a clueless, but harmless bunch of geeks who get stiffed by other marketing companies because they have no idea how to talk to anyone.

I loved those Apple commercials with Mitchell and Webb where the Apple guy was smug, trying too hard to be cool and annoying while the PC was a bit rubbish, shabby and trying hard to please everyone – that always felt right to me …

Until I saw this pile of shit:

I mean, seriously, what the fuck is this shit? Have they lost their fucking minds? Is this really the best way they could find to advertise Windows 7 (which I don’t fucking care about anyway)? A bunch of retards who can’t act sitting on a sofa pretending listening to some moron talk about ‘new’ features (which I’m pretty sure are exactly the fucking same just with different names) on a fucking laptop?

With cocking balloons in the background?

What the fuck?

Is this really the best they can do?

Or is that the point? Did they have a meeting say “Face it guys, we suck at marketing. Why don’t we just go the whole hog and suck dead man’s balls?” Maybe the point is it’s so fucking awful it’s even got people like me talking about it? Jesus fucking Christ, I never really cared about owning a laptop with Windows on it before but now I feel the need to look into Linux or whatever the hell the other minority OS is called.

That advert is so bad, at first I assumed it was some Apple-fanatics with too much fucking time on their hands and a camcorder making a piss take. I sat through the first minute or so thinking it wasn’t very funny. But apparently it’s real. I just … I can’t … what the fuck?

Even worse – there’s a whole fucking series of them!

Luckily, this school orchestra came along at exactly the right time and distracted me with laughter:

Adaptations

I’ve seen two films recently which were adapted from books I enjoyed (well, one  I absolutely loved and the other I thought was amazing until it reached an incredibly shit conclusion), in both cases the films fell significantly short of good and I thought I’d discuss why.

But first off, some housekeeping:

1. There will be SPOILERS (in every sense of the word) for The Time Traveller’s Wife and My Sister’s Keeper.
2. I’m in no way blaming or attacking the script writers since we all know, at a certain level of film making, you do what you’re told or you get fired. And that’s before the actors improvise all over it, the director makes shit up on the day and the editor hacks out random bits.
3. The following thoughts are just my opinions and not to be confused with facts. Just because I didn’t fully appreciate the films doesn’t mean they’re inherently bad and if you loved them I’m not attacking your opinions (even though you’re wrong).
4. The following is by no means an public proclamation of ‘I could do better’ – I can’t. Pointing out flaws in a script is a thousand times easier than creating your own flawed script. It’s just a way of me talking through how I might approach an adaptation should I ever get the chance.

So, starting with The Time Traveller’s Wife:

I loved the book. Seriously, loved it. Five stars (out of five) and a frequent moon around the N section in Waterstones in case Audrey Niffenegger’s written anything else.

The bits I remember from the book (bearing in mind I read it about four years ago) were all about waiting, longing and people loving each other at different times. It’s a tragic romance which made me cry, or at least tear over in a manly fashion. To me, the most important and moving passages were:

1. Henry escaping his troubled marriage as a thirty – forty year old and spending time with Claire when she was only six years old. They’re going through a really bad patch where she’s losing pregnancy after pregnancy and it’s tearing them apart. He escapes to a time before they had any of these problems, before sex was an issue, where he can remind himself of who she was before all the pain and misery. It’s especially difficult when she gets to fourteen, fifteen and wants to become sexually active – she loves him, but he has to wait for her to grow into the person he loves.
2. After a gap of a few years where Claire doesn’t see future Henry at all, she bumps into him in the library and (from his point of view) they begin their romance. They’re both in their twenties now and the heartbreak here is – she doesn’t love him. He’s a bit of a prick (as most twenty-something guys are) but she knows he’s going to grow into the man she’s going to marry. For Claire it’s a waiting game – waiting for Henry to become the man she loves. For Henry it’s a weird and unsettling time – this strange woman knows more about his future than he does.
3. The pain and the emotional trauma of losing numerous pregnancies and the stress that puts on their relationship. The knowledge they still love each other, but they don’t actually like each other any more. It’s a horrible, frustrating time when it might seem like the best thing to do for each party is just to walk away. Every day gets worse, but there’s always this sense that sooner or later it will all be over and they can go back to loving each other. All they have to do is ride the storm, once this wave has passed it might be over … but there’s always another wave and no end in sight. I think a lot of people have experienced relationships like this, when the present is horrible but the past promises a brighter future. The problem of course being the present is an indefinite period of time, the past is gone and the future may never arrive.
4. Claire, waiting for Henry to come back, never knowing if he might actually return or not. What happens if he dies in the past? Will she even know? Maybe this time is the time he never returns? Every time he leaves might be the last time she sees him. It’s a horrible situation to live with, especially when you’re in the troubled times of your relationship and the last words you said were full of spite and said purely to cause the other person pain.
5. Henry waiting to return to the present, stuck in the past or the future, fighting for his life and desperate to return home. He has no idea how long he’ll be away and no idea how long he’ll have been gone for when he gets back. It’s stressful and depressing but he knows he always has Claire to come back to.
6. Claire waiting for Henry forever – after Henry dies, Claire spends the rest of her life waiting for a glimpse of him. It’s a very romantic and tragic notion, the love sick pining for the dead; but her faith is finally rewarded when she’s an old woman and it’s a beautiful moment.

That’s what the novel meant to me … and none of it’s in the film. A couple of bits are kind of alluded to or mentioned in passing, but really none of that is addressed by the film at all. So what are we left with?

Um, well, a romance where we’re deprived of the meeting and getting to know you part - you know, the falling in love bit (since they happen at different times and at different ages). Basically what we have is a romance-less romance. It’s all strangely flat and the general theme seems to be the avoidance of emotional impact.

We see Claire lose a few pregnancies but we don’t see much in the way of reaction from either of them – she’s pregnant, she’s not, she’s pregnant, she’s not – tra la la, life goes on. We’re told they argue a lot in this period but we don’t really see it, there’s no real sense of a relationship on the edge. In fact, there’s very little sense of a relationship at all. Even when Claire cheats on Henry with a younger version of himself – there’s no real emotional consequences. Henry looks a bit miffed and then they forget about it and carry on.

There’s one scene where Claire has to wait for Henry to return and that’s the only time we get the impression Henry is ever away for anything more than a few seconds. The whole time travel thing looks mildly inconvenient rather than a massive strain on their relationship.

Even Henry potentially losing a leg is glossed over since we don’t really appreciate the necessity of him being able to run. At the point he gets frostbite, Claire tells the doctor he has to be able to run or he can’t survive and in retrospect there does seem to have been a bit of running – but since it wasn’t really flagged up as important running at the time, Claire insistence that running is vital to his survival seems a bit weird because it hasn’t been set up properly.

Even Claire waiting for Henry’s return is glossed over. First of all it happens a year or so after his death, so she doesn’t have to wait that long and we get the impression their life is going to just continue as normal; and secondly it seems more geared towards the meeting between Henry and Alba with Claire being almost incidental. In fact, the only emotional parts of the film for me were between Henry and his daughter.

Overall, the film didn’t seem bad, just flat and un-involving. It’s as if they made the same list of all the things which moved me about the book and then chose deliberately not to include them. After you boil away all the emotion, what’s left? A slightly confusing story about a man bouncing around in time – Quantum Leap without the story of the week. A romance-less romance. Not bad, but a bit dull.

MY SISTER’S KEEPER on the other hand – a book I was riveted to because the dilemma is so powerful and I just couldn’t see a way out. It turns out, neither could Jody Picoult, so she slapped on an arbitrary Deus ex Machina and removed the need for any of the characters to make a decision. It’s a crappy ending to an otherwise magnificent book and ensured I haven’t read anything else by her for fear of having my time wasted again.

So in the film, when they changed the ending I was all for it. The film’s ending is much more powerful and much more moving. Giving the mother the choice, making her choose between her two daughters and come to terms with letting go – genius. A fantastic ending.

Unfortunately, they fucked up the rest of the film. I mean, all of it. The ending makes it Cameron Diaz’s story. She has to let go at the end, therefore it should be her tale from the beginning. Instead, for some bizarre reason, they chose to make it no one’s story. There are some people who are all affected by this horrible situation, but let’s not really examine any of it too deeply. Let’s just bounce around on the surface, flit from person to person and make sure the film is, once again, emotionally un-engaging.

In the book, it’s the younger sister’s story and the majority of it seemed to focus on her relationship with her lawyer as a substitute family since her’s is so fucked up. There’s a lot of examination of how it’s affecting the relationships between father, mother, sisters and brother – everyone of them has major issues and needs to resolve the family situation in order to heal their personal situations.

Obviously, there’s too much in the book for a film and it needs to be simplified – first and most obvious choice: lose the brother’s plot. It’s great in the book, but if it’s not there it makes no odds. Having said that, if you lose the subplot (which they did) then why leave in the bit at the end when the dad works with disadvantaged youths? In context of the film that makes no sense. Why’s it still there?

The next cut seems really strange to me – they practically cut out the youngest daughter. The girl who starts the story and is the prime focus of the book … gone. I mean, almost gone. She’s there, she does some stuff, but she disappears for long stretches of the film and has almost zero relationship with her lawyer. Yet he still comes to her at the end of the film and they part ways as if they’re best of friends.

In the book, the little girl is the protagonist and the mother is the antagonist, with the family as casualties on the battle ground. This makes a great story but leaves no room for an ending. Hence the casual resolution of the book – oh yeah, she just gets run over. Problem solved.

Given the film has the better ending, it seems to me the real story here is one with the mother as the protagonist – desperate to save the life of her eldest daughter and the little girl as the antagonist. The protagonist’s arc is being forced to come to terms with the fact she’s destroying her family by trying to save one of them. When she realises her mistake and lets her eldest daughter die, she saves her family and puts them on the road to recovery. It should have been a powerful and moving tale but instead it’s a mish-mash of scenes which flits from point of view to point of view without really letting you latch on to anyone. I spent the film waiting to cry and spent the majority of it bored rigid. The only really emotional bit for me (bar isolated bits and bobs) was the ending – and the only reason that was upsetting was because I mentally grafted it onto the book and the characters I actually cared for.

So all in all, I felt both adaptations failed t capture the spirit of the books – after all, that’s what adapting a film is all about – the spirit. You can’t keep all the scenes and all the characters, but the essence of the story should remain untouched.

At least I think that’s what adaptations are about, but as I’ve mentioned many times before – my opinions are suspect at best and to be treated with derision.

I’m going to stop now, Alice is shouting at me.

Splendid trailer

I had nothing to do with this one, but I really, really like it so I’m pimping it anyway.

Ladies and Gentlemen, the tremendous trailer for the spanking sketch show, Splendid:

Seriously, no one cares

Recently, or maybe it wasn’t – I can’t remember, there was another bun-fight on Shooting People about script format. You know, the usual thing: one side of optimistic dreamers thinks script format should be thrown out and is limiting and restricting. The other side of staunch stick in the muds think format is a rigid, fixed thing which is vitally important to making a living as a writer.

Of course, in the main, neither side has actually made any money or headway in the industry. At least not in the UK, and the reason I can say this with reasonable assurance is because NO ONE FUCKING CARES.

Seriously.

No one.

Not really.

Let me clarify that with the old ’script format is wearing a suit to a job interview’ analogy. In this analogy, the person is the story and the clothes are the format.

So the opposing positions:

1. I should be able to turn up to the interview dressed as Coco the fucking clown if I feel like it because they’re hiring the person, not the clothes.
2. Employers expect you to wear a suit, therefore you should wear a suit if you want the job. Further more, the lapels should be exactly 1.7 inches wide. The tie must be a neutral colour tied in a double Windsor falling no higher than the top of your belt. At its widest point it should be 2 inches. The belt should be … blah, blah, blah.

See? Both wrong. The truth, as fucking usual, is in the middle. Wear a suit, yes; but no one fucking cares what the specifics are. As long as it’s got all the essential parts of a suit – no one in the UK cares.

They just don’t.

A script should have sluglines, action, dialogue and characters. Bold them, italic them, put them in capitals – do whatever makes you feel good – just make sure they’re all there and are recognisable.

Okay, some readers do care and you might want to try and please them since they might be your first point of contact; but the thought process goes like this for each opposing point of view:

1. Oh fuck, this guy doesn’t know format at all – he’s going to be a God awful writer. I’m not looking forward to this.
2. This guy knows how to format a script, let’s see if he’s a good writer.

Both points of view will become equally irrelevant if you’ve written a pile of shit. Granted, a badly formatted pile of shit is a thousand times more painful to read than a well formatted pile of shit – but they are both piles of shit.

If you think format isn’t important, you’re wrong. It’s there for a reason. Lots of reasons. Lots of very good reasons in fact. By saying format is irrelevant, you’re actually saying ‘I have no fucking idea what a script is for’.

If you think format is everything and has to be adhered to, to the millimetre or you’ll be laughed out of town – you’re also fucking wrong. What you’re saying there is ‘I’ve read too many books and believed all of them’.

Group one: read a formatting book so you understand exactly why things are the way they are.

Group two: read more scripts for fuck’s sake. See the variations in produced material – the variations NO ONE FUCKING CARES ABOUT.

Another facet of the Shooting People argument was one side wanted to throw out the current format in favour of one he’d invented. While the other side thought format has evolved to where it is now and is totally and immutably fixed.

Both wrong again.

The reason you can’t just throw away one set of rules and replace them with another is because no one would understand the new rules for quite a long time. In other words, chaos.

And the reason script format isn’t immutably fixed is because it has evolved and is still evolving.

Things go in and out of fashion, just like with suits. If you turned up to a 1970’s job interview in a 1980’s suit – they’d think you were in fancy dress. 70’s suits didn’t become 80’s suits overnight – they changed slowly.

Or at least I think they did, I have no idea. Fashion, as anyone who’s seen me dress, really isn’t my strong point.

I’m all about the style, baby.

Anyway, the point is, script format changes all the time – just slowly. Someone does something, someone else thinks it’s a good idea and copies it. It just takes little steps to change the broad strokes.

Personally, I’m a little fussy about format because I like to be. It’s a choice, not a requirement. If I started putting my sluglines in bold, guess what?

NO ONE WOULD FUCKING CARE.

How do I know? Well, here’s the annoying part for fellow sticklers – on pretty much every production I’ve worked on, someone else has fucked about with the script before it’s been sent out to cast and crew.

Sometimes it’s the director’s copy which he’s scribbled camera directions all over, chucked in loads of ‘we sees’ and ‘we hears’ and generally just moved margins around for the sake of it. Or, on other occasions, some fucking monkey in the production team has retyped the script, used the wrong tense, spelt the words wrong and in extreme cases added random bits of action onto dialogue blocks. This makes for lovely bits of speech which go something like.

DREW
God Damn you, I’m not fucking taking this. Drew punches her in the face.

Wonderful.

And yet no one complains or apparently even fucking notices.

TV uses a different format for every show. Hell, one show (whose format I was asked to copy) used a slightly different format on every fucking page.

And guess what?

Yep, NO ONE FUCKING CARED.

Make the story entertaining, the characters interesting and the read compelling. The format … just make it readable and then shut the fuck up.

Blake Snyder

“Blake Snyder passed away suddenly this morning, August 4, 2009, from cardiac arrest.

There was no one like him. You all know that. No one more enthusiastic, more giving, more truly interested in you.

He will live on in his films and his books, in the advice that will never grow old, with the spirit that will continue to thrive and inspire.

His story resonates with all who loved him, and your stories will resonate thanks to his love for you.”

I’m not really a big fan of the whole ‘teach people to write’ industry. Generally, I think it’s full of people who either regurgitate what others have said, state the fucking obvious or invent spurious new systems in order to make money. For example, it’s pretty much a given that anyone who tells you the three act structure is wrong, then goes on to describe the three act structure with extra bits that are already part of it:

“I’ve invented a five act structure!”

No you haven’t, you’ve just split the first two acts in half. Now fuck off, I’m not giving you any money.

Having said that, I actually quite like Blake’s ‘Save the Cat’. Primarily because it’s short, it’s easy to read and it generally makes sense. I wouldn’t treat it as an absolute rule book, because there’s no such thing; but it’s a good description of ‘the rules’ as the industry perceives them and the first step towards bending or breaking the rules is to understand why they’re there in the first place.

And let’s be very clear about this, ‘the rules’ came about because one man looked at some successful films and noticed they were similar. He pointed this out, with a vague idea that maybe if you did something similar then your film might be successful too … and all of a sudden there’s a huge fucking industry telling you it HAS to be done this way.

There are two bad consequences of this:

1. A large part of the industry thinks all scripts should slavishly stick to these rules and won’t hire you if yours doesn’t.
2. People who consider themselves artistic (autistic) refuse to follow anything as conformist as rules. Art doesn’t have rules, man – you’re trying to restrict my creativity. Who said films have to be interesting, dramatic or intelligible? I go my own way, I’m a visionary, a pioneer … and mostly unemployable.

Ignoring advice because it’s presented as rules is moronic. Refusing to consider anything which doesn’t exactly follow the same advice is equally moronic.

Life is about balance, find the middle way.

Read the books, learn the rules … after you’ve practised telling stories. Find out what people expect and then if you have to disappoint them at least you can intelligently explain why you’ve done it. That way, when people say stupid things like:

“This Ferris Bueller script, you can’t make it because the protagonist has no transformative arc.”

You can counter with:

“Actually, Cameron is the protagonist, but we’re telling this story from the comic relief’s point of view.”

“Oh right, that’s cool. Have some money.”

So starting from the point of view that ‘how to’ books are advisory, not dictative, then of all the ones I’ve read (and there aren’t that many) ’Save the Cat’ is probably my favourite. It’s clear, it’s simple and it’s short. The beat sheet in there makes sense to me – I don’t slavishly stick to it, but I keep it vaguely in mind when I write. The board, I kind of do that – sort of, sometimes. Other times I don’t. Some scripts need more plotting out than others.

The idea with all  these things is to regard them as tools, the more tools you have the easier the job becomes; but you don’t have to use every tool in the box every time you write a script.

By all accounts, Blake Snyder was a nice guy with an infectious enthusiasm for encouraging others. True, that was his job, but it’s nice to earn a living doing something you enjoy. In fact, I’d say that was one of the secrets of life – love what you do.

I’ve never met the bloke, but I am glad I read his book – if for nothing else, purely for this one occasion:

I was in a meeting regarding a script which, if produced, would earn me more money than I’ve earned in my entire life so far – including the paper round I didn’t do when I was 13 and all the pocket money I received from the age of 3 on.

It was a fairly important meeting.

The director was a really nice guy and did a great job of politely telling me my script sucked, primarily using terminology from ‘Save the Cat’. If I hadn’t read the book, I wouldn’t have understood a bastard word he was saying.

“Right, so … you want a Pope in a pool? Um … you do know this is set in space, don’t you? Surely the water would just float away?”

‘Save the Cat’  is a very popular and widely read book – if you haven’t read it, sooner or later you’re going to run into someone who has and you’re not going to understand them.

RIP Blake Snyder and my condolences to his family and friends.

Psychoville

Lovin’ it.

Discuss.

Summer shorts

In a rare moment of benevolence, I suddenly feel the need to promote other people’s short films. I know, I know, I must be either ill or under the influence of some particularly potent tea; but never mind. I’m feeling promotey …

First up, two short films from one Lara Greenway:

Runner

and

Hostile

followed closely by one short film from one Lucy Hay:

Safe

and finishing with one each from two Dans – or one Dan and a Danny, which is close enough:

Origin, by Danny Stack – trailer and official website are here; but no actual film yet. Still, it’s nice to be prepared, isn’t it?

and finally, the absolutely superb:

The Big Idea by Dan Hartley.

Watch them, love them, rate them – where appropriate.

Screenwriters’ Festival Launch (again)

So last night I went to the second launch night for this year’s SWF and I’ve got to say the evening was a bit of blur … not because it involved any kind of great rampage on my behalf  (it’s kind of hard to get that effect with a cup of tea and a diet coke)nor was it bewildering, star-strucking (which I know isn’t a real word – but it should be) or fast moving … no. Last night ws a bit of a blur because I forgot to take my glasses.

I’m new to the whole glasses wearing game and rarely remember to take them anywhere. In fact, I wear them so infrequently I often forget I actually wear glasses at all and sometimes spend weeks at a time wondering why the world is out of focus. So even though we (me, Piers, Michelle, Jason, Helen and Elena) were sitting on the second row (which Piers complained about) the people on stage were a little fuzzy.

I could give you a blow by blow account of who said what and when, but I’m fairly certain since journalist extraordinaire Arnopp was sitting not four seats away – he’ll be covering all that. Instead, I thought I’d give you my impressions of the underlying message and the the reality of screenwriting in the UK.

Just so you know roughly what happened while we’re waiting for Jason to pull his finger out …

Some drinks.

David Pearson (Festival Director) and Kevin Loader (Chairman) introduced the evening.

Two writers who are finalists in the ScriptMarket initiative talked about how difficult it is to break into the industry.

Two agents, Rob Kraitt (A P Watt) and Matthew Bates (Sayle Screen), talked about how hard it was for writers to break into the industry and how there actually isn’t really an industry as such to break into.

Christopher Hampton talked about how difficult it was to get a film made after you’d broken into the industry and then given up and gone to America (he’s written 42 scripts – 14 have been produced, the other 28 vanished up their own arses).

And then we had some more drinks.

A lot of what was said is interesting but the basic message I kept getting from everyone on stage and everyone asking questions in the audience was scriptwriting in the UK looks something like this:

There are only a couple of companies with money and thousands of people jumping through increasingly smaller hoops to compete for a minuscule amount of money which has almost no chance of making you rich but might, just might, if you’re very, very lucky make you a modest living.

Getting a film made under these conditions is nigh on impossible but it does happen so although it’s mostly fruitless, it has to happen to someone so don’t give up. Even though most of you aren’t good enough and haven’t got a hope in hell.

Hmm … inspiring stuff.

But hang on, I can’t help thinking this is only half the picture.

While all these people were talking about it being virtually impossible to get a project off the ground … I’ve had seven feature films produced and haven’t had to jump through a single hoop.

One of the the writer/finalists mentioned the Microwave Feature Fund – where 90 odd projects were competing for 2 lots of funding. Funding which, if memory serves (and it probably doesn’t), is a maximum of £100,000 … so nobody’s doing that for the money. Getting that kind of funding means you can make a feature film for almost nothing as a calling card and hope it will lead onto better things, whilst basking in the satisfaction of having achieved what should be your real goal – getting the script right.

I firmly believe the script should be the writer’s ultimate goal – getting it to the point when you’re proud of it and other people think it’s good enough to get made. The feature film is the bonus at the end and belongs to the cast and crew – they made the film, you wrote the script – the two things are different.

The script is your work, your product and I think should be your ultimate goal. The produced feature film is the advert someone else makes to promote your product – your next script.

So if you’re resigned to not making much money at first and just want to get some adverts for you as a writer into the market place, then why spend all your time and attention competing for the one egg? There is another way and I’ve had seven feature films made to prove it.

True, only one of them has actually been finished so far, so it’s an experiment with no proper conclusion and may turn out to be hopelessly inaccurate – but it seems to me the full picture of screenwriting in the UK is this:

You may need to clicky clicky make biggy biggy in order to see it properly.

Or you may not. Maybe you don’t need glasses or actually wear the ones you have?

There are a lot of very rich people in this country who are happy to hand over a £100,000 in return for telling their mates (and the people they want to sleep with) they’re in the film business.

There is a lot less competition in this sector of the industry and no hoops to jump through, hence mediocre writers like me can easily get films produced … so why aren’t more people doing it?

Or maybe they are and I’m just not paying attention?