The movable goalposts of excitement

One thing I find you have to do as a writer is constantly readjust what you think of as being exciting. It’s like a series of little victories which are horrendously exciting the first time you achieve them, but quickly become tedious when you slog past them for the hundredth time without actually getting any further down the road.

For example, I can still remember the giddy excitement I felt when I first sat down to write a script. This was it, I was on my way! After years of telling people my sci-fi series was far superior to anything currently on telly, I was actually going to prove it!

Surely fame and fortune would be mine by the end of the week?

Nope.

It turns out, writing a script is difficult and writing a good script is nigh on fucking impossible (hence my comfortable rut of consistent mediocrity). Once you’ve started the first script, starting subsequent scripts is easy. It’s finishing the fuckers which is the tricky part; but that’s the next milestone …

I’ve finished a script! I’ve actually finished a whole script! This is so exciting! I’m days away from being rich and–

Nope, apparently it’s shit.

Bugger.

Still, now you’ve finished one script you can finish others and while it’s nice to finish them, it never feels quite as exciting as the first time you type THE END. You soon learn that particular goalpost is not really a major achievement but more a prerequisite for actually being a scriptwriter.

And so on. Every time you achieve the next step it’s initially exciting until you realise that particular project just isn’t going anywhere and is a career dead end. It’s like a giant, life long game of snakes and ladders where it’s increasingly difficult to get excited about any given ladder since you know you’ll be back at the beginning any day now.

Over time you just learn not to be phased by it. The first time you option a script is pant wettingly exciting, the tenth time without a single one of the projects going any further is considerably less so.

And all this is right and good, you can’t continue to be excited by the same thing over and over again indefinitely, certainly not when the reason you’re getting excited is because you believe it’s a step on a journey somewhere. The problems arise when you have to deal with other people. When someone options a script from you, you have to pretend to be excited because it’s their project now and they’re excited because they know for an absolute fact they’re going to make a fucking amazing movie out of your script …

Whereas you know, with reasonable statistical certainty, they’re not going to achieve anything and you’ll probably never hear from them again until they ring to apologise for the project falling apart because they couldn’t get funding/the actor they need/out of bed in the morning.

So you have to pretend and jump up and down and squeal and shout ‘Yay!’ a lot until they let you go home.

Similarly, when someone else options their first script and is breathlessly exuberant – the correct response is to buy them a drink and go ‘CONGRATULATIONS! That’s fucking awesome!’ because it is. Getting a script optioned by someone is awesome …

It just doesn’t actually mean anything useful.

Neither does winning a competition, getting a commission, getting an agent … hell, even going into production can ultimately result in nothing useful at the end of it. I’ve had seven feature films start shooting now and not one of the fuckers is actually finished. Even the one already out on DVD.

Maybe someday they will, maybe they won’t. If one of them ever does (and it’s actually good) then I probably will get a bit of pant moisture building up, but until then, I’ll just calmly wait and see what happens. An attitude I think confuses people:

“Oh my God! So-and-so’s in your film! That’s so cool!”

“Yeah, yeah it is.”

“You don’t sound particularly excited.”

“No? I can wave a flag, if you like?”

And so on.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying people shouldn’t get excited about these things, because they are exciting and it really is great you’re all making progress. I’m happy for you, I really am. I’m just not going to get excited about any of my projects, no matter how many times people talk about theatrical releases, until I’m sitting a cinema watching a film I wrote which I, and everyone else, have bought tickets for.

Basically, I’ll believe it when I see it.

Having said all that, I read an option agreement this morning whose terms did have me browsing the Aston Martin website and picking out colours …

Damn it, I’ve just wet my pants and drooled all over the keyboard …

A bit of a blur

It’s been another busy few days. Wednesday/Thursday/Friday saw me:

Have dinner in Jamaica, breakfast at 38,000 feet, lunch in Nuneaton, dinner in Crawley, breakfast in Eastbourne and lunch in London. I’d like to tell you which days they happened on, but it was all a bit of a jet-lagged blur and I’m not 100% certain.

Simultaneously I plotted one screenplay, was commissioned for a second and optioned a third (which doesn’t actually exist yet, but I’m sure I’ll have written it - or something vaguely like it – by the time everyone’s excitement dies away and they realise they haven’t actually seen a script).

I’ve also completely disrupted and possibly ruined a serious meeting about tweaking the rough cut of a produced movie by shouting about Star Trek, had a phone call from the Mail on Sunday about not being in Cannes, undergone a three pronged Mac-vangelist attack (I claim victory on the grounds one of their Macs packed up halfway through the argument) and taken 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

In other news, ‘Just for the Record’ is getting a bit of local press attention:

http://www.gazette-news.co.uk/news/4384415.On_location_in_Essex___funnyman_Rik_Mayall/

and

http://www.echo-news.co.uk/news/4384407.Strip_club_plays_part_in_Rik_Mayall_movie/

My favourite quote being:

“Mr Lawson said: ‘To get the cast we’ve got, it must be considered a pretty good script and story!’”

Mr Lawson being Steve Lawson, the director and all round good egg.

I’ve never used the phrase ‘all round good egg’ before, but it seemed to fit and I’m always up for new things.

And that’s it. That’s your lot for a week or so since I’m now off on holiday to my parents’ house in France. I may post something mid week, I may not. In fact, I probably won’t.

Or maybe I will?

No. No, I doubt it.

But I will leave you with a few words of warning:

If you ever find yourself sitting in a cafe, calmly discussing whether or not to rape a young girl in front of the decaying corpse of her father … make sure you announce loudly, and at every possible juncture, that it’s JUST A FILM. It did seem to put a few people off their soup, but I thought the screaming histrionics and the threat to call the police were uncalled for.

Story drops

Something I dislike while watching a movie, and something I try to avoid when writing one, is when the story drops – a point in a film where there is no more story, no more goals to attain, no paths to walk, no lessons to be learnt.

Unless, of course, you’ve reached the end of the film – then that’s fair enough. But I dislike a story drop in the middle of the film, when one story ends and there’s a pause before the next one begins. Even if the pause is only a few seconds, that’s a few seconds where the audience are thinking: “Is that it? Can I go now?”

It sounds like an obvious pitfall to avoid, but it does happen.

Hancock springs immediately to mind, like an enthusiastic puppy who’s tried to show how much he loves you by biting a child in half. Two separate stories with no appreciable join. One ends, they go for dinner, the next one begins. The result is everyone complaining it’s two films joined together.

It’s not, it’s two stories NOT joined together.

The first opposite example I can think of, bearing in mind I’m busy, hungry and don’t want to be here, is True Lies. Two stories which aren’t even woven together that much, but somehow seem like a coherent film.

Somehow? That kind of vagueness isn’t applicable, we’re writers, God damn it. We need to understand why.

Okay, so there are two stories:

1. Arnie has to stop terrorists who’ve got a nuclear bomb.
2. Arnie’s wife is bored and about to have an affair – he needs to win her back.

What actually happens is we start with story one for a bit, then we forget about it and move to story two; but there’re enough questions left hanging about story one for us to want to find out how it will end. Story two goes almost all the way through its arc: Arnie stops his wife having the affair (even though she wasn’t really going to do it, she does love after all), he gives her the excitement she craves and reveals himself to her. All they have to do now is kiss, she finds out he really is the man of her fantasies and that story is over.

At this point, the hotel/dancing scene, we’ve pretty much forgotten all about story one. If they kiss and story two ends, there’ll be a story drop. “Is that the end of the film? Wasn’t there some terrorists or something? Fuck it, let’s go to the pub.”

So it’s vital BEFORE they kiss, the terrorists break in and the two stories smoosh into one. The kiss gets shoved back until the end of act two and it all seems like two great stories in one magnificent film instead of two short films glued together.

It would have been very easy (and very crap) to have the kiss and make up in the hotel scene, then get back to the terrorists – but then you’d have this odd section for the first half of act two where there were no terrorists, no fights and all Arnie did was bang on about his wife for a bit.

And all it took to make the film seem like one film was to move two sequences – the explanation: “I’m a spy.” “Fuck me!”; and the kiss: “Actually, that’s kind of hot. Fuck me. Seriously, do it now.” … the third act of that story.

Same with Hancock – move the bit where he achieves his goal of public acceptance by saving people (the explanation: “It’s okay, he’s a good guy!”; and the kiss – or handshake in this case: “Well done, jolly good show.”) to the end of the film and hooray, one really cool film instead of two good films with a dinner break in the middle.

Every now and then I find a story drop in one of my scripts and it annoys the piss out of me. It shouldn’t happen, there shouldn’t be moments where if you stopped reading, you wouldn’t feel like you’d missed anything.

It’s a fairly simple rule, but one that needs to be drummed into me:

DON’T RESOLVE EVERY PROBLEM UNTIL THE END OF THE SCRIPT.

If there’s ever a point where your characters have nothing to worry about and can just slip off for a bit without anyone noticing – start again.

How odd

It appears The Wrong Door has been nominated for a Rose d’Or:

http://www.rosedor.com/content/festival2009_competition_nominees.php

Is that good?

Apparently:

“Throughout its history, the festival’s goal has always been to reward originality, quality and creativity in entertainment programming, and to encourage excellence in television and new media. Each year, since the festival began, the Rose d’Or has acquired the best of the year’s new entertainment and made it possible for international broadcasters, buyers, producers and press to view it all.”

So there you go. That is good, isn’t it?

According to the Swiss I’m original, creative, excellent and the best of the year.

Well not me personally, but a show I contributed a little bit to. So I guess that makes me only slightly original, creative, excellent and only partly the best of the year.

I hope it’s a part of me I like.

The Swiss are encouraging me. That’s nice of them.

Truly we live in a wondrous age.

Who do you want to be?

Just be aware, it’s going to take me a long time to get to the point.

When I was a kid we had two main types of play: games which involved pretending some lump of plastic was real (Star Wars figures, Lego, Action Man – although Action Man always had to fight invisible enemies because no one I knew had more than one figure and he was too big to fight anything else); and ‘games when we’re the people’.

‘Games when we’re the people’ would involve me, my brother and our friends pretending to be people from whatever was the favourite movie or TV show of the week. Obviously, favour would always go to a show or movie which had more than one main character – there’s no point playing Indiana Jones or James Bond because once you get past casting someone as the titular character … there’s not a whole lot left.

Unless Indy and Bond team up. Which they probably did in our world.

The best TV shows, the ones we used to play at most, were the ones with a few good characters so everyone got to be someone they liked.

Doctor Who was great because everyone could pretend to be the Doctor at the same time. Better than that, you could pretend to be your own Doctor since we were only on number four at the time. I think I was always the 11th so I might get a bit upset next year when the new guy utterly fails to be me.

For the other shows there was usually a hierarchy, an order of preference for who we wanted to be. No one always agreed, but for me they went something like this:

Blake’s Seven: Blake, Avon, Villa. No one ever wanted to be Tarrant .

The A-Team: Face, Murdoch, Hannibal, BA – all of them were good though, so it didn’t really matter; but Face was by far the coolest one of the bunch. Feel free to disagree – you’re wrong, but feel free to be wrong.

Star Wars: Han, Lando … maybe Chewie at a push. There were no girls in our group so no one wanted to be Luke.

Star Trek: Kirk (who wouldn’t want to be Captain Kirk?), Spock, Bones, Scotty. Chekov and Sulu … if we really had to, but personally I’d rather be an anonymous red shirt.

This isn’t to say other characters in these shows weren’t interesting, dramatic, well written or good actors – it’s just they weren’t … cool. They didn’t have any attributes I aspired to, I didn’t want to be them or be like them in some small way.

And that to me is really important in a TV show (or movie) even now I still want to see characters I want to be like. That’s were things like Life on Mars went right for me: I would like to be Gene Hunt. Just for a day. I’d like to be that sure of myself, that masculine, to drive fast, shoot first, punch people for being annoying and still be an all round nice bloke. Sam Tyler … well he whinges a bit. Nah, not really interested.

But that’s fine. One character I’d like to be per show keeps me interested. More than one is just a massive bonus.

And this is where Star Trek went wrong for me:

Star Trek: Kirk, Spock, Bones, Scotty – they all have elements of their personality I admire.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Picard, I’d love to have that much natural authority. Who else though? Riker?No, his attributes seem to include growing a beard and walking sideways. Data, he wants to be more like me – I don’t respect that. Geordi … did he have a personality? Worf is always wrong and very angry about it:

Picard: “We must do something before that alien eats our faces. Suggestions?”

Worf: “Captain, may I suggest–”

Picard: “No. Shut the fuck up, anyone else?”

I suppose O’Brien was quite cool. In a bluff, say what you mean kind of way. Two people, okay – not bad.

Deep Space Nine: Hmm … O’Brien again. Sisko … maybe?

Voyager: If I woke up and found I shared any personality traits at all withany of the characters … I’d shoot myself. And Alice too in case she’d inherited them. I can’t imagine sitting around with a bunch of five year olds going:

“Let’s play Star Trek Voyager – you can be Ensign Kim.”

“Which one’s he?”

“The real dull one who has nothing interesting to say.”

“Can you be more specific?”

Which brings me onto Battlestar Galactica. Until recently I’d never seen any of the new series. Not because I didn’t want to, but because  by the time I found out it was on I’d missed a year and a half and wanted to watch it from the beginning.

Luckily, I got the first three seasons on DVD for Christmas.

Now, I loved the original series because it was just so damned cool – Starbuck, Boomer, their costumes, the Vipers, the Cylons, those big fucking guns … all so cool. Yes the stories weren’t always up to scratch but as far as I can remember from watching it when I was (however old I was – eight? Six? Don’t know.) it was one of those shows like Blake’s Seven or Buck Rogers which starts off witha fantastic premise, four or five amazing episodes and then runs out of steam. They literally had no idea what they wanted to do with it.

Buck Rogers was so poorly thought out the second season had absolutely no relation to the first apart from three of the characters.

So a re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica should be so fucking amazing it’s untrue. And that’s exactly what everyone else keeps telling me.

Well, I’ve watched the first season now and the stories are great, the characters are interesting and it’s well made but … there’s no one I want to be.

Starbuck (the coolest character around – Faceman, in space! With a cool uniform and a big fucking hand cannon in a low slung holster!) is now a girl. Interesting choice, interesting character … but I have never, ever wanted to be a girl. Well, maybe for half an hour or so; but not as an aspirational choice.

Which is not an insult to women by the way. I’m sure most women don’t want to be men – at least not in a watching TV kind of way. Even though being a guy is a fuck load easier – the shoes fit, we have pockets and we can go to the toilet anywhere we like.

So Starbuck is a girl now. Fine. That means any girl who wants to play ‘games when we’re the people: BSG’ can be Starbuck. Who’s left?

Boomer was always a super cool character. A smaller role but … man he was cool.

Oh wait, he’s a girl now too. And a Cylon. Nope, don’t want to be him. Her.

Apollo is pretty much the same as he was back then: wet and conflicted. Don’t want to be him.

Adama? Too old, too grumpy. Tigh? A grumpy, alcoholic, cuckold? Nope, don’t want to be him either.

The deck chief? Can’t even remember his name. Does he have a name? He’s alright in a solid dependable way. Not exactly the stuff of fantasies is it?

So none of the characters are cool. I don’t want to be any of them.

The Vipers are still super cool though – I could be a previously unseen Viper pilot. Yeah!

Except, no.

They no longer dress like heroes – they now wear Lurex uniforms with their muscle vests on backwards – and their awesome sidearms have become crappy little popguns. When they’re not being pilots they seem to dress up as the guys from Babylon 5.

Don’t get me wrong here, I’m not disparaging the writing, the acting, the direction … I’m just struggling to care about any of the characters because I don’t want to be them. This makes me an outsider watching stuff happen to other people instead of imagining it happening to me.

Incidentally, I think this may be why I’m not that fond of soaps – they have no aspirational (to me) characters. Instead they’re populated with people I fear I’m already like and wish I wasn’t.

Okay, so BSG obviously isn’t for kids. It’s got a lot of sex in it and adult themes and complex plots … although, is it me or did a lot of plot points in the first series just get ignored? Gaius invents a Cylondetector – he has 60 years worth work ahead of him. Next episode, apparently he’s given up on that and is now vice-president. No one’s interested in Cylons any more, they’re so last week.

He finds out Boomer is a Cylon … then doesn’t tell anyone. Why? Where’s his self-preservation?

Is Adama a Cylon? Test him, don’t test him, test him, don’t … is he or isn’t he? By the end of the episode it seems like the Pres don’t care no more. And never mentions it again.

Did I enjoy this first series? Yeah, sort of. I watched it all and only complained to the TV occasionally (“Oh now the Cylons attack? How convenient. What were they doing? Waiting until the episode was nearly over so they could be more dramatic?” … “Why the hell does this Cylonraider have handy control wires built into it? I’m fairly certain if someone scooped out my brain and sat in my skull they wouldn’t be able to control my legs by pulling nerve endings.” … “Can you really plug a hole in a spaceship with your jacket and then fly it into space?”).

Did I love it?

No, not really. It’s okay. It certainly passes the time.

Do I want to be anyone in the show?

No.

And that’s really important for me. It’s something I’m going to make damn sure I include in every script from now on … at least one character the five year old me would want to be.

Although, since my next project’s a porn film … hmm.

From script to treatment

Sometime in the near past (I lose track of days. I know it wasn’t yesterday or the day before but beyond that escapes me) I re-wrote the treatment for ’til Death to match the script.

A bit cock about face, I know; but since the latest draft bears very little resemblance to the original treatment and the treatment is sometimes part of the sales pack, amendments were needed.

As it turns out it’s quite a useful technique. By going through the script and summarising each scene – what happens and why – you  get a better insight into your story. Instead of reading each scene and then summarising it, I just glanced at it briefly and then wrote down what I thought it was about, how it moves the story on and what the characters were doing and why.

Only after I’d written the scene in the treatment do I go back and compare it to the script. Occasionally I find information I’d intended to be in the scene was missing, or obscure, or the characters’ motivations just weren’t clear enough. Often I’d be convinced a certain line of dialogue was in the scene only to find out it wasn’t but bloody well should be.

For one scene I couldn’t remember for the life of me what it was meant to be about or why the characters were doing the things they were. Closer examination failed to reveal any hints so the whole scene got cut and no one will ever miss it.

It’s a pretty valuable exercise – comparing what you’ve written with what you think you’ve written and one I would recommend to absolutely no one; because, although it is useful and does reveal a fair amount of interesting things about your script … Christ, it’s fucking boring.

So boring in fact I can’t remember when I did it or how long it took. That mind-numbing process robbed me of a day. Take my advice, don’t do it unless you’re having problems sleeping. Or you’re absolutely positive all the paint in your house is dry and there’s nothing else to watch. I tried to liven things up by jabbing myself in the leg with a compass but even that failed to break the monotony.

Next time I’m defintely, definitely just getting the treatment right in the first place.

How to get an American production company interested in your big idea

Step one: have a big idea. Take your time with this. Drink tea, watch the telly, lounge around. It’ll come, don’t force it.

Step two: do nothing.

Step three: answer an email from an American production company; explain they can’t have the script they want since it’s still under option, but you have got this big idea …

Step four: there is no step four. It’s over. You’ve achieved your goal.

Easy, isn’t it?

Keeping actors happy

A difficult task.

Not that actors are generally an unhappy bunch, but they do tend to be a bit on the sensitive side.

Unlike writers, who of course are massively robust and don’t crave attention or validation in any way, shape or form.

The thing I’ve learnt recently may be blindingly obvious to everyone else, but it’s something that’s only just been pointed out to me: when you first introduce a character and describe them physically, don’t be insulting.

Whereas it may be accurate and fitting to describe BOB (67) as short, fat and ugly; you’ve then got to hire someone to fill that role. Okay, so once again the rules are probably different for a multi-million pound feature; but here in the shallow end, where the money’s tight and you can’t afford huge fees, you have to be a bit more sensitive.

The last few films I’ve worked on have had a provisional cast in place before the script’s written, so I’ve known who will probably be playing what. What I’ve done in these circumstances is to find out the actor’s official age from IMDb (which can differ from their real age, sometimes by up to ten years) and knock a few years off.

The number of years deducted is on a sliding scale, if someone’s in their early twenties, then it’s one or two years; if they’re in their sixties then I’d deduct ten or more. It’s a simple thing to do, everyone likes to think they look younger than they are. Of course, for the smaller parts or if the actors haven’t been cast, then you can be a bit more honest.

After that it’s a question of finding a brief description. I tend to find two or three words which describe the character, rather than comment on physical features. Occasionally it’s important to note that someone’s beautiful or handsome or whatever; but I find it easier to say they’re ‘lively and quick-witted’ and let the reader fill in the details.

I think I’ve always described the main characters by personality rather than physical attributes, since in the movies nearly all women are beautiful and all men handsome; but I’ve been a bit lax with supporting characters – roles which can sometimes be even harder to fill.

I recently caught myself describing a character as chubby and balding – which may be accurate for the kind of look I wanted, but it’s not conducive to attracting a name to a low budget film.

On a final note, I’ve also learnt (ages ago, but I keep forgetting) to name all the characters. Even struggling beginners want to put the role on their CV and MAX sounds a lot better than GUARD #1.

In a low-budget world where money is not massaging people’s egos, it’s nicer for them to think they’re playing a proper role, even if it’s only one line. MAX is a small, but vital role; GUARD#1 is just a glorified extra.

There is a difference.

All this may sound pointless and unnecessary, and to a certain extent it is; but it doesn’t hurt. Anything which makes anyone else’s job easier (agent, producer, casting agent) without creating much extra work for you has got to be worth doing. It really doesn’t hurt to be nice in this world and keeping actors happy can only help the finished production.

So go on, spread the love.

Sex and the actress

With the shoot for K kicking off tomorrow, my days are mostly full with tweaks and adjustments to the script – none of them major, most of them just revolve around the practicality of filming in a certain location or the availability of a certain actor on certain days.

For example: if a certain scene is inside rather than outside, then a night shoot could be scheduled during the day and they don’t have to call the actor back for an extra night.

Or

Can we change the order of bits of dialogue to fit in with the geography of the location, so that it can all be filmed in one take?

Stuff like that.

It’s nothing too taxing, but it’s fiddly and takes up time. Time which I was going to use to start a new project; but will just have to wait a few days.

I’m back on a rather steep learning curve at the moment, with all sorts of interesting (at least to me) little tit-bits coming to light. The sort of things not really covered by screenwriting books* because they’re only peripherally connected with writing. I’ve decided to start a new series of blogs about these curious little bits of info.

I thought I’d start with sex.

I’ve always been of the opinion a well written sex scene should leave the reader feeling the need to go off and have a little fiddle.

I’m not talking about a sex scene in a family comedy or a film intended for a wide audience - you could argue they shouldn’t have sex scenes in them anyway; but sometimes they are necessary and a quick snog, fumbling partial disrobing and a dive beneath the covers is all you need.

But what about a film which demands a proper sex scene – sweaty, writhing, dirty sex?

Well, if an action scene should take your breath away, a funny scene should make you laugh, then a sex scene should give you the horn.

Obvious.

Except, maybe not.

I don’t know if this is just confined to my shallow end of the pool, but it seems sex scenes make actors and actresses† nervous. In the specific case I’m thinking about, it refers to an actress; but I’m assured the same applies to both men and women.

A sex scene, with even partial nudity, is something people have to think about. Do they really want to do it? How will it affect their career? What will their mum think of them? Will they be typecast as a slutty girl from now on? Do they really feel confident enough about their own body to put it on display for all and sundry? There isn’t even a huge paycheck to soften the blow.

Obviously, some sex scenes are crucial to a story – but do they have to involve nudity? Can the scene be written in such a way that it’s obvious no one will see anything? If the scene is written using words like ‘quivering’ and goes into a lot of detail about ‘things being inserted into gaping orifices’ then it’s bound to make someone stop and think about the type of movie being made.

So how do you write a sexy sex scene without making it sexy?

Do you make your script reader-friendly or actress-friendly?

If it’s a spec script, then I guess you write the hottest sex scene the story demands and wait and see what any future potential producer thinks.

If it’s a script written to order and plunging headlong into low-budget production, then you might have to think again. Obviously in this case you can ask the producer or director; but how an actress might feel about it is something I’ve never really had to consider before.

I don’t really have a point to make, it’s just something which came up recently and I thought I’d share.

And I’m back to revising the script. Those of you who read regularly might find it ironic to learn I’ve just been asked to put more swearing into it.

Another fucking first.

————————————————————————————

* Or at least the few I’ve read – I’ll happily admit I’m no expert.

† Or should I say actors for both genders? I don’t know, it seems to upset some people and not others.