Archives for the month of: November, 2008

Writing in public

November 23, 08 //
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As I sit here in a coffee shop, ostensibly finishing my next script, I find myself pondering the dynamic of writing in public. I recall being in a cafe a few years ago. It was connected to the local brew-and-view, and it was a place where movie-types hang out. A kid was hacking away right there at the counter on an old Remington typewriter. It was obvious from his formatting that he was working on a script. You couldn’t avoid looking at him–clackety, clackety, clackety…zing. I was reminded of Jim Harrison’s aphorism: “You can’t create great art if you’re always yelling ‘Look at me!’ like a three-year-old who has just shit in the sandbox.”

So that gets me to wondering my own motivation for writing in public places, coffee shops in particular. I can come up with a host of practical reasons, but I also can’t avoid the notion that there is a certain amount of exhibitionism in the practice. I want to be seen writing scripts, even if people don’t know what I’m working on. “I’m special, dammit! I’m an artist. Look at me!”

This is no different from why Hemingway wrote in cafes in 1920s Paris. He was building a public image, and, perhaps, more importantly, an internal image of himself as a writer. We all know what a solitary, isolating pursuit this can be.

That being said, there are also many good reasons for writing in a cafe. First, there is the precedent set by Mr. Hemingway and his cohorts. It’s just what one does if one is a writer. You are part of the tradition. Writers haunt cafes. In my own case, there’s also the fact that a four-year-old girl inhabits my domicile. It’s hard to write with an little person around. There’s a certain kind of peace one can find in the chatter and bustle of a cafe that one can’t find in a quiet office at home. Especially if a kid keeps opening the door and poking her head in to ask for help dressing a Barbie.

There is also a certain amount of pressure you put on yourself when writing in public. Since you’re posing in public as a writer, you have to be seen actually writing. Working those keys is part of the package.

Next, there’s the issue to easy access to strong, quality coffee. That’s essential. Most of my bad habits are dying a slow death as I age. I’ve even given up my nightly glass (or three) of my beloved red wine, limiting libations pretty much to the weekend. One of my sole remaining vices is great quantities of caffeine. Writing in cafes puts me in close proximity to the supply.

I find the best cafes have both outdoor seating and lack of wireless access. Getting away from the distraction of the Web for a few hours increases my productivity. And as for the outdoor seating, this may be less universal, but I thrive on being out of doors. I’m sitting in a cafe in northern Oregon right now looking at a view of the Coast Range. It’s a crisp 45 degrees, and the sun is shining. Perfect writing weather…just enough chill in a vest and sweatshirt to keep me from being too comfortable.

Writers write in cafes. And part of the equation is certainly posing. When I was recently in LA, I spent a lot of time in cafes in Santa Monica and Hollywood. I had time to kill, and few locations are more oppressive than hotel rooms. So I sought out the famous cafes and actually accomplished some productive work. Some of the more notable cafes of choice for LA screenwriter-types include the Bourgieos Pig in Hollywood and the Novel Cafe in Santa Monica. Both are excellent locations, and I recommend them highly. You’re bound to see scripts open on laptops as you walk through with your double Americano looking for a table. These establishments have eclectic atmospheres and are filled with other writers taking advantage of the poseur practicality of writing in public.

Writer in chief

November 12, 08 //
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I have to admit that I’m still giddy after last Tuesday when everything changed and it felt good to be American and not have to continuously say to anyone we meet from overseas, “We’re really not all like that. Really.”

So being a sappy Midwesterner who reads a lot of other sappy Midwesterners, I was very much struck by the elation in Garrison Keillor’s latest Salon piece. Because we actually have real, verifiable writer as president (elect). We have someone who can actually shape sentences, sculpt language. How rare is that? How many capable people get advanced degrees, MBAs and the like, and can’t even write a phrase that’s kind to the ear? How many of these politicians have to hire ghostwriters and speechwriters to make themselves sound coherent? And here we have an actual wordsmith on his way to Washington:

“And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early ’90s, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of the Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could’ve written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.”

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote “The Naval War of 1812,” and in my humble opinion, Obama’s is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

So we will soon have someone who can write running the country. Imagine that. Only a few years ago we were noting how the Bush Administration was placing classic books under his arm as props trying to convince the public that he’s not as baseless as he seems, Laura’s earnest bookishness aside. There were all those reports of the famous Bush-Rove reading contest, though none of us believed it any more than we believe in Kim Jong Il’s library of literary achievements. Then Katrina hit and things started to slide for the radical right and they stopped attempting to make their commander look booksmart. And they’ll be gone along with their entire charade. They were always great at fiction (Mission Accomplished) even if they were lousy writers.

And now here we are feeling good as a country despite some really heavy shit happening on the markets and around the world. Someday W. will have his autobiography ghostwritten by someone who actually read all of those book he carried around, and it will sell quite a few copies before being ultimately remaindered.

But in the mean time we’ve got a guy who can write now in charge. Language does matter. Words are important. Writers can change the world. And the next chapter is starting to look pretty good.

Local film scene

November 10, 08 //
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I’m new to the Northwest, but there seems to be a vibrant local film scene.

The Northwest Film and Video festival is currently ongoing at the NW Film Center. I attended a couple events this weekend in Portland, and there’s that definite upstart energy you’d hope to find in that sort of venue. I’ll definitely be checking out more events and workshops up there. Gus Van Sant is perhaps their most noted alum.

At the NW I met the guys who made Cthulhu. Haven’t seen the film, but the trailer has a big film look. Tying into the Lovecraft mythos was a smart move and may make this film have a long-tail resonance like Bladerunner. Having heard their story, I’m sure these guys will be putting together new projects in the future. This film recently landed distribution, a major accomplishment for an indy film. It was shot in Oregon.

Reel Film Snobs is a local film program out of Salem. It’s a fun and refreshing alternative to the standard film review model.

Tension, context and subtext in dialog

November 7, 08 //
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A friend once told me that every conversation that takes place in a screenplay should be an argument. It’s advice he heard from a writing teacher, and I think it’s basically sound. I’d replace the concept of an argument with the more general notion of tension. It doesn’t have to be direct confrontation, but there should be something at stake beyond the exchange of words.

The key to tension is subtext. In my limited experience rewriting for a director interested in on of my scripts, that is one thing he has emphasized: strip all your dialog of all explanation and description. After all, that’s what the director and actors will add visually and through the sound and the way that they deliver the lines. What should be left is only the subtext. And that subtext should be laid on a foundation of tension.

Here’s a scene from my latest script where I feel like I get it right:

EXT. ROADSIDE OVERLOOK

Coyle and Lilly sit at a picnic table with a view of the ocean. They share a sack lunch. It would be a lovely spot in season, but now there is gray skies and drizzle. They are hunched under their rain slickers. Lilly looks dejected.

LILLY

Your girlfriend going to pick you up?

COYLE

How do you know about that?

LILLY

Everybody knows.

COYLE

It’s not serious.

LILLY

I know what it is.

COYLE

Can we talk about something else?

LILLY

What else is there?

Coyle can’t answer. They eat.

COYLE

You want me to walk you home?

LILLY

Better not. Sally doesn’t like you.

COYLE

I won’t say what I think of her.

LILLY

She’s a good person.

COYLE

So you want to stay with her then?

Coyle stares at her, chewing. Lilly looks at the water.

COYLE

Because if that’s what you want, I’d like to know. I’m working hard trying to make things right.

Pause.

LILLY

She’s a good person. She’s not Mom. She’s not you.

Coyle looks at her long and hard. She risks a quick glance into his eyes. He nods.

LILLY

I better get going.

She crumples up her paper lunch bag. She picks up her board and wetsuit. She nods at her father and then begins walking along the highway toward town. The wind kicks up.

COYLE

I love you, Lilly.

The wind is strong and she either doesn’t hear or she doesn’t care to respond.

I feel that is a scene where the tension is palpable. Here is the context: Coyle is the father, Lilly is the daughter in foster care. Sally is her foster mom. Coyle’s trying to get her back. But he’s also sleeping around (the girlfriend mentioned at the beginning), carousing, drinking, getting dragged into an unsolved murder case and generally doing a lot of things that will make it harder to get Lilly back. Lilly knows this. Knowing the context of the scene makes a lot of the dialog more clear, but I also think that context shows up as tension and subtext in the actual exchange. You don’t need that context. As a beginning writer, I found that I was continuously adding too much context in the form of description and explanation. Now I struggle to strip things down to the bone. I think this particular script is loaded with good tension and subtext. We’ll see when I send it to contests if it does as well as my other scripts.

One other note about adding tension to dialog. You have to be careful. While it’s always a good idea to ratchet up the tension on the page, you also have to learn when to turn this sensor off. When you wake up obscenely early in the morning like I do, the world you’re building inside your head is blurred with the one in which you actually live. It’s never a good idea to add tension and subtext to your daily conversations. Sometimes I’ll be sitting with my wife or daughter and chatting and that little voice in my head will remind me that I should be adding tension to the conversation. And I’ll say something that pisses them off. Not a good idea.

Change

November 4, 08 //
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INT. CLASSROOM

Mr. SMITH walks into the room and lays his briefcase on the desk. He sighs.

SMITH

Okay class. Today we’re going to talk about the Reagan Revolution.

The students yawn. He writes the words on the board.

SMITH

Have any of you ever heard of this?

The students look around. They’re bored.

SMITH

It was a very dark time in our country when a small-minded ideology and a room full of conservative blowholes (in both parties) basically controlled our government for  thirty years. It was a period characterized by greed, xenophobia, corporate handouts and generally screwing minorities, the working class and the occasional intern. Anyway, we’ll breeze through this lesson quickly so that we can move on to a brighter period in our nation’s history.

Here’s to hOpe. Go out and vote.

Writing for the budget

November 4, 08 //
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When you first start writing scripts, one of the great liberating experiences is the ability to start a scene with something like this:

EXT. PARIS STREET – AFTERNOON

Smith steps to the curb and hails a cab...

And then, you can follow up with the next scene, with a quantum leap:

EXT. SEASIDE CAFE, HAVANA – MORNING

Pilar sits across from Valencia...

It gives you a sense of freedom as a writer to be able to jump from one location to another. After all, you just need to type the name of the place in your scene heading and you’re there. A leap from Anchorage to Albequerque is only a matter of characters on the keyboard. This is profound, because most of us spend a huge portion of our lives hunched over a keyboard in some dingy office or in the corner of a coffee shop. Maybe we hang out on the fifth floor of the library next to a stack of books nobody reads. To be able to leap around the globe via our narratives is one of the attractions of this pursuit.

But what I’m learning now is that such freedom can be a dangerous thing. Producers read scripts differently than we do as writers. When they see a location change, numbers start to click in their heads. A change in the setting, and the addition of numerous locations, can inflate the budget in less time than it takes you to complete a scene heading.

I’m rewriting a script now with budget and locations in mind. I’m eliminating action sequences and removing an entire series of scenes that take place two thousand miles away form the main center of action. I’m also collapsing characters, combining several similar roles into a single character to reduce the casting costs. A producer said that I could take the script in two directions: a big budget action film, or a character-driven drama. Their company specializes in the latter. I was presented with a challenge: rewrite the script to reduce the cost of making this film, and they’ll consider an option.

The pragmatic requirements of filmmaking are quite different from, say, novels where you’re only limited by your own imagination. When you set a scene in Cairo, that won’t require you to send the second unit to Africa to get b-roll of the pyramids. Or you don’t have to worry about the fact that a scene set in Havana becomes problematic if much of the cast and crew is made up Americans, who are forbidden to travel there by the knuckleheaded blowholes in Washington.

I’m also finding that it’s not always a matter of collapsing and contracting your script. Sometimes you’ll be called upon to increase a role, attracting a different caliber (and more expensive) level of talent. On this same project, I’m removing minor characters and increasing the visibility and prominence the four lead roles so that they can try to attract four major actors for these key parts instead of just one or two.

Writing for a budget is nothing I’ve ever had to consider doing before, writing as I have mostly fiction. My first two scripts featured international locations. My third script was set entirely within forty miles of where I live, my thinking being that this script might make a nice independent project someday, or at least attract interest from different types of production companies looking for smaller budget films.