The Hobbit

THE HOBBIT was disappointing. It had all the spectacle you could possibly want. It had a quest, and evil, battles, a wizard, and a decent, ordinary man caught up in the middle.

It left us unmoved. It's a bad sign when you see a movie in the middle of the day and,  at six, you're thinking, "Boy, I'd really like to see a movie."

I feel that its tone does not match its story. The book is a light entertainment. It has lots of humor. There is never any really strong reason why Bilbo Baggins needs to go on an adventure, but he does, and many surprising and amusing things happen to him.

The tone Peter Jackson takes in THE HOBBIT is the epic tone of THE LORD OF THE RINGS. But that worked for LOTR. That was about a decent man who, very much against his will, undertakes a terrifying journey, because the fate of the world hangs on it, and he is the only one who can do it. (All, right, and his handyman.)

Bilbo does not need to go on an adventure in THE HOBBIT, and the only thing that hangs in the balance is whether some amusing dwarves will get their mountain of gold back.

Jackson tries to inject meaning into the movie. Gandalf has an ulterior motive for wanting Smaug taken out. There are rumblings of a Dark Power. And, as the story progresses, Bilbo develops an affection for the dwarves and seems to reach some desire to man up for their sakes. But it never adds up -- it can never add up -- to THE LORD OF THE RINGS.

It does not help that Jackson is making multiple movies out of what is not a terribly dense book. Had he been willing to cut a bit of story, he could have made one really great entertainment out of the book; but he wanted to make two movies. So he finds himself adding events I can't remember in the book, such as a brief interlude starring Radagast the Brown.

Overall, the movie feels less like Peter Jackson needed to tell a story, and more like he wanted to hang out in Middle Earth some more.

I wonder what Guillermo del Toro would have done with it?

We actually saw the movie in IMAX 3D. Waste of money. The primary effect of the 3D was to remind me, whenever I cocked my head, that I had to keep my head absolutely vertical. I've never appreciated the need for 3D. Somehow the world feels less 3D in a 3D movie, because the 3D keeps drawing attention to itself. Whereas in a 2D movie, I have no trouble interpreting perspective, and focus, and the relative haziness of things in the distance. I

How to Make a Film for $50,000

We watched TINY FURNITURE, Lena Dunham's debut feature. Like her HBO series GIRLS, it is a rawly honest portrait of a 22-year-old college graduate with no direction and few redeeming characteristics. It is often funny, in a sort of horrifyingly accurate way.

I'm always suspicious when I hear that someone shot a feature for $9,000 (as Robert Rodriguez did EL MARIACHI) or $2,000; sometimes I think people deflate their budget to impress people. In this case, $50,000 seems about right.

How does she do it for $50K? She stars herself, first of all, and her mother, and her sister. They may not be astounding actors, but they're playing characters close to themselves. Dunham knew what her actors were capable of. I gather the other actors were non-union. That saves money.

Second, she's shooting in her parents' fabulous loft, and a few other locations. It helps when your parents have a fabulous loft; if they do, try to figure out what you can shoot there.

But it's really in her shooting style that she saves herself time. Dunham uses very little coverage. Many dialog scenes are covered in only one wide two-shot; others are shot in two closeups.

That means there were very few setups. Each time you move the camera to a new setup, your director of photography (DP or DOP) will need to relight. You will need to reconsider the frame. Possibly redress the set.

Dunham's camera rarely pans or tilts. When the camera follows actors during a scene, they can miss their marks. When they miss their marks, you've blown that take. That eats time on a set.

There are no dolly moves. Setting up dolly track really eats time. Your AD and DP will tell you it's just ten minutes to lay down track, but it never feels like that on the set. And then once the camera is moving on a dolly, making sure the actors sync up with the dolly is a job for professional grips, and they'll need a few takes to get it right. Moreover, if the camera is moving, the lighting has to work for every angle the camera sees along its trajectory. More time.

I bet the shooting schedule wasn't that long.

If you keep the camera pointed in one direction and never see the reverse angle, you can shoot a crowded party scene, as Dunham does, with four or five extras.

Dunham's approach works pretty well for a low-key comedy of manners in which people talk in apartments and occasionally on empty city streets. It wouldn't have worked, obviously, for a movie with a lot of run and jump.

It wouldn't have worked for a searing drama, either. Dunham's actors rarely need to express a deep or complex emotion. If they did, they might not have been able to carry it off. You need skilled actors for that. (SAG and ACTRA will give you good rates if you're shooting low budget, so don't rule out pro actors.)

When you're thinking about your debut feature, you're probably thinking low budget. Think about what resources you already have. Think about the kind of story you can shoot well with those resources. Don't shoot something you can't shoot well. Marry your story to your assets. That's what Dunham did on this picture, and hey! she's got her own HBO series now.

What could you shoot for $50,000?

Why Directors Are Bastards

I've been going through the footage we shot last week for my short film. Overall I'm thrilled. Lovely photography, two thrilling performances from our two actors. And we came in on time and under budget.

But, you know, there are a couple of things I wish we might have done differently...

...two things I had misgivings about during the shoot, and didn't kick and scream enough about, because we did not have a lot of spare time, and I was focusing on what I was focusing on, and I'd already mentioned the issues a few times.

Now, of course, I wish I'd kicked and screamed a bit more.

And it's my fault, as the director, for not making those things priorities.

Thing is, if you a decent, reasonable person, you have learned not to throw a tantrum when you don't get your own way. You are used to compromising.

It's something you have to unlearn to some extent as a director. No, I want it the way I want it, damn it!

Of course many directors are famous for being uncompromising asshats. They kick and scream and throw tantrums. Just because, as a director, you can be a jerk, doesn't mean you should be a jerk.

But, at the same time, you have to learn to be a bit of a jerk. Because no one is going to be a jerk for you. 

There Goes the Sun

Just finished shooting my latest short, ROLE PLAY. My d.p. showed me this snazzy website, which tells you where the sun rises and sets, as well as times for golden hour, and the various shades of twilight, for any latitude and longitude and any day of the year.

Dan O'Bannon's Guide to Screenplay Structure

Dan O'Bannon was known for his work on DARK STAR, ALIEN, RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD and TOTAL RECALL. Not a bad run for a science fiction screenwriter. Over the course of 35 years, he also wrote a book about screenwriting, which is now coming out a few years after his death.

(That alone is impressive, because these days publishers seem primarily interested in books only if the author will be out there beating the drum for his book. An author needs a "platform." )

It's a little hard for me to critique a screenwriting how-to book. If the author is saying sensible things, he's saying things that most professional screenwriters know, although we probably all crystallize the rules in our own way. I've got my own book and my own approach. And it's hard for me to remember what I didn't know when I was just learning how to do this.

But I did enjoy DAN O'BANNON'S GUIDE TO SCREENPLAY STRUCTURE. I like that he doesn't just analyze screenplays that hew to traditional three-act screenplay structure and ought to work. He also looks at screenplays (and plays) that have other structures (like Shakespeare's 5 acts). And he looks at movies that have messy stories that ought not to work, and yet did very well -- for example DUMB AND DUMBER.

He has an interesting analysis of LAWRENCE OF ARABIA: what is the story actually about, amid all the swirling themes and conflicts.

He has another interesting analysis of PSYCHO, which famously breaks the rules by changing main characters -- and plots -- midway through. It shouldn't work, and yet, it's a classic.

I can't say that the book told me anything that I didn't know at some level. But an odd thing happened while I was reading it. I realized a pair of fairly serious flaws in a feature I was writing. I had given my hero a series of lucky breaks in the third act, when all the breaks should normally be going against her. I had also made the confrontation with the Big Bad the second-to-last set piece, when it needed to be the last.

(I was trying to save a Big Surprise for last. But you should probably never sacrifice drama for the sake of a surprise.)

It was an odd thing, because I know you should never give your hero a lucky break after the first act, and I'm not even sure Dan O'Bannon says that in his book. And he doesn't talk about drama vs. surprise. But just following his line of thinking about the movies he was dissecting got my brain working in ways that it had not been working, and I came to grip with two structural flaws that my readers and pitchees had not caught.

Any book that does that is worth a read.

Where Should I Go? Follow the River.

Q. College is tearfully expensive, and the school you emphasize is the best funnel into the entertainment industry (USC) is one of the most expensive of them all; to me, it is prohibitively so. Realistically, the only schools within my family's means are smaller state schools, the best of which is still isolated from any hub of film or television. 

Is it more valuable to spend four years getting an affordable education in a little-going-on city and graduating with relatively low debt, or taking the risk of striking it out West and trying to break in with a high school diploma and a winning smile? 

Both routes have taken people to success, and both have led others to failure.

I would hate to tell anyone to skip college and just try to break into the film biz. College gives you a lot of skills you need for life, not just showbiz. Whether you're a writer or a producer or a director, you'll need to express yourself clearly, and organize your thoughts, and plan ahead, and research, and these are the basic skills you get in college.  After you have a college degree is not too late to move to LA, and you'll need one to get a job as a producer's or agent's assistant.

At any state school, you'll be able to make films. Hell, anyone with an iPhone and a computer can make films now. If you make a couple of shorts every semester, and put them on YouTube, and see which get the hits (ignore the idiot comments, just check the hit counter), you'll learn a huge amount about filmmaking. Just find the other guys who also want to make movies, and make movies.

The only person I would tell to move to LA without a college degree is an actor. No actor can afford to burn the last of their teen years in Peoria. By the time you get to LA with your college degree, other actors your age have built up solid resumes. You've got college theater credits. They've got TV credits.

One compromise would be to move to LA, establish residency (I think it's 6 months?), and then go to UCLA at the in-state tuition rate, which is hella cheaper than USC, even though it is not exactly free either.

Or, do the same for City College of New York. Or the University of Texas at Austin.

It is unquestionably better to put down roots in a filmmaking hub. However, if that's not an option, try to wind up in a major city with a strong arts community, and hopefully a theater community to pull actors from. San Francisco, New Orleans, Portland, Seattle, Boston, Nashville, Chicago, Philly, Miami: surely one of these has a college you can afford?

(Almost all of these are port cities. Make of that what you will.)

By the way, USC has a top MFA program, but I would not particularly recommend anyone go there undergrad for the sake of filmmaking. For that matter, I don't think anyone needs a college degree in filmmaking, or indeed, any degree in filmmaking. The city you're in is the thing, and the arts community, and then just making films. Film programs give you access to free equipment, and fellow students to work with you, and feedback from professors, and they get your parents off your back about the huge amount of time you're spending making movies. But they are not necessary. Just go and make stuff.

Yeah, I'm with Zero Punctuation

Yahtzee pans ASSASSINS CREED 3 pretty hard on the grounds of being boring. His main beef is the lack of stabbing people, which after ought to be the core mechanic of a game about being an assassin. In the first eight hours I played, there was a tedious lot of running around in the snow, and agreed, not so much with the stabbing people by surprise.

I have a few other beefs. AC has always made the decision that it should be incredibly hard for guards to kill the hero. Since he's an uber assassin I suppose that could be justified, but you can literally stop controlling him and have him stand there for ten seconds before he finally gets killed by the five guys surrounding him. I saw him shrug off a firing squad of nine guys firing muskets at about twenty feet. Even Batman in ARKHAM can't take more than a few direct hits before he goes down. The point is that, as Batman, you can make him very hard to hit, and in return, he hits very hard.

It seems to me a stealth game (and if AC is not a stealth franchise, what is it?) ought to punish charging into a squad of armed soldiers. However, whilst trying to pickpocket a redcoat, I alerted the squad. So naturally, not wanting to go back to a checkpoint (there are very few checkpoints and no way to save a game anywhere else as far as I know), I killed all nine of the soldiers.

By contrast, DISHONORED, Corvo Attano can't take more than a few hits with a sword, or even one hit with a pistol, before he's gone to save-game-land. That seems about right. The point is Corvo is incredibly stealthy and the mooks won't see him at all if you're careful.

But I have another beef, and that's that the storytelling is weak. In the early sequences, an English gent named Haytham is trying to find an Old Ones site that the Mohawks know about. So he spends an awful lot of time rescuing various members of his team and then helping the Indians fight off General Braddock... to the point where it's very easy to forget why he's doing all this and you wonder why you're getting involved in local politics when, theoretically, you are an Assassin fighting against the Templars for control of ancient futuristic technology. I felt the same way during RED DEAD when our hero spent days or weeks helping the Mexican government slaughter rebels, and then helped the Mexican rebels slaughter government dudes, all because he wanted someone to tell him where some old enemies were hiding.

At a certain point you're like the old man who still flirts with waitresses but can't remember why. It's not a good idea if your plot gets too far removed from your hero's crucial, live-or-die objective.

And also, as in RED DEAD, I started wondering how this guy could slaughter so many redcoats who were not his enemy. In AC II, you did not have to kill anyone who didn't have it coming. Sometimes you did, sure, but that was on you for not being stealthy enough. In AC III, you have to lay waste to the British Army to complete the missions.

The characters are weak, too. This is a game with yards of cut-scenes. But none of them develop the main character. At least, they didn't develop Haytham while he was the main character. Characters are defined by their flaws. A character without flaws is boring. Haytham is boring. So is his eventual Mohawk wife, Kaniehtí:io; fortunately for her, she's voiced and (I guess) mocapped by Kaniehtiio Horn, who manages to radiate star quality even when she's computer-generated.

Let's say this again. A character needs to have flaws. Their objective must be personal. Even if it is political, it must be made personal. Haytham wants an artifact because he's an Assassin. But why does he care? Why is that important? What does it mean to him?

AC3 is a spectacular game; but that only highlights its flaws. I really want to like this game. But it has no core. No core mechanic, no core story. Such a damn shame. 

Cinecoup

A few days ago I got invited to an info session on the new Cinecoup program. It's intended to be a sort of incubator / gamified competition for $1,000,000 in production financing.

Jason Joly comes out of the hi-tech world of incubators and accelerators -- companies that help entrepreneurs get their act together. Although he's spent time in show business, he talks more like someone from the game world. He talks about analytics and metrics and social media.

And he's got a million dollars to make your movie, and guaranteed distribution. Distribution is the Achilles heel of the already not over-mighty Canadian film industry. Most English Canadian movies get released for a week or two on a few screens and then head straight to DVD, with a few (government-mandated) appearances on TV. Joly has a solution for that.

His idea is to get a hundred filmmakers to submit two minute trailers for their film idea. Through the magic of the Internet, potential viewers will vote on the trailers. Winning filmmaking teams movie through stages of writing scripts and refining their ideas until ten projects are optioned. Then one winning project gets a million bucks and a distribution deal.

The winning project has, at this point, got a lot of support from people who want to see the movie. Joly has the metrics that tell him where these people are. So he can then go to exhibitors, and say, hey, fifty thousand people in Winnipeg want to see this movie, and I have all their eddresses. The exhibitor can now show the movie knowing he already has an audience for it.

Then, as word of mouth spreads, the release can go wide.

Back in ancient days (1974), there was a dog movie called BENJI. Nobody wanted to finance it. Once it was made, nobody wanted to show it. The producer-director rented theaters and showed it. Word of mouth began to spread. He started taking out ads telling people in a city that if they wanted to see BENJI, they should bug their local theater. BENJI started to roam around the country.

BENJI went on to gross $35 million on a budget of oh, say, two million. Equivalent to about $175 million now.

So I am excited by the idea of using Internet metrics to match up clusters of interested audience members with local theaters. Your local theater doesn't have anything against EDDIE: THE SLEEPWALKING CANNIBAL or PEEPERS in principal. A ticket is a ticket. They object to the lack of marketing. They don't know if anyone will come in to see EDDIE. With TRANSFORMERS 2, they know some people will come in the door.

There are a few issues with Joly's model. You don't start with a script or a concept. You start with a trailer.

There are certain kinds of movies you can go out and shoot a teaser trailer for with no money and no time. Joly mentioned HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN and PARANORMAL. Neither of these depends on acting or cinematography. If you have a 5D and some friends, you can go out and shoot a trailer for something like HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN this weekend.

If you wanted to make something like AWAY FROM HER, it would be harder. That kind of movie is all about the acting. (Most of what I write is all about the acting.) You would need to have some really amazing actors as friends, or go through a casting process and hire actors. You would need to rehearse them.

And some movies don't "tease" well. There are movies where one scene can't show what's good about the movie. There are already plenty of great movies where trailer cutters struggle to convey in two minutes what works in a hundred minutes. And they have an entire movie to choose moments from.

On the other hand, it's perfectly fair to design a program that favors high-concept low budget movies over execution-dependent movies. It's probably easier to market HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN on no money than it is to market AWAY FROM HER.

If you're a professional, a two minute trailer is probably something that eats two to four weeks of your professional life. That's a lot of resources to put into a 1 out of 100 shot at distribution. If I make a short, I have something I can submit to festivals and build my reel. A two minute trailer -- especially if it's not as good as, or better than, the movie I want to make -- isn't really something I have another use for.

If you're successful with your trailer, the program expects you to write the script for nothing, and then offers to option it for two years for $2500. That's a long time to tie up your best idea, considering you only have a one-in-ten shot of it getting made; and if it's not your best idea, then why are you wasting your time on this program? You should be working on your best idea.

So this program favors people who have some spare time on their hands.

Also fair, by the way. There are already plenty of programs for pro filmmakers. You can't even apply to Telefilm's Independent stream unless you have two shorts that have been to specific festivals, or some produced longer form credits.

Another issue is the social media aspect. If you know any filmmakers, then your Facebook feed is filled with friends who want you to like their stuff on various sites to help them get it made. So to make it to the top of the Cinecoup pyramid, you either need to be a genius at social media, or you need to find a genius at social media for your team.

Maybe that is the future, and we will all have to partner up with social media folks. But right now, some of my filmmaker friends are really good at pestering their Twitter feed and their fan base and their Facebook feed, and some perfectly good filmmakers I know don't have a Twitter feed, 'cause they're too busy making films.

So, as I asked Joly in the meeting:  will the Cinecoup competition have a large enough audience base that votes from the actual audience swamp any one filmmaker's buddies? Otherwise it's not a filmmaking contest, it's a personal popularity contest.

(Filmmakers probably will have to team up with marketing people in the future, as filmmaking becomes more individual and entrepreneurial. According to Ernesto Sirolli on his TEDx talk, every successful entreprise needs a creator, a marketer, and someone to look after the money. Right now marketing is an afterthought -- filmmakers depend on their distributor to market their picture after they've sold it. But you can't do that with a web series that you never actually "sell."  And you really can't even do it on a low budget movie:  the distrib just isn't going to put that much into it. On a million dollar budget, you can't afford to take out ads in papers. But with digital distribution technology, there's no reason why a million dollar Canadian, or American, or South African movie can't find an audience across the globe -- if you team up with someone who's savvy at promoting it internationally on the Internet.

(Unless, say, it's about hockey. Hard to sell hockey globally.)

I have no idea if Cinecoup will be successful. I admire Joly's effort to disrupt the current paradigm. Anything that gets the filmmakers and the audience closer is a good thing. Anything that "disintermediates" opens the door for certain kinds of projects that won't get made if Telefilm and SODEC analysts have anything to say about it, which they do. At the same time, there are movies that need a couple of decision makers to make a gut check -- you can't really sell them until they've been made. There's room for both kinds of movies and room for both kinds of distribution paradigms.

It will be interesting to see what Joly and Cinecoup come up with.

UPDATE:  Markuze has his own issues with this program. 

What's Your Bag, Baby?

I am hardly the authority on accessorizing, but a Faithful Reader wrote in to ask me what the best bag is for a screenwriter.

Personally, I'm fond of the Swiss Army Bags. They're lightweight and strong. If I'm going out with my iPad, I have an iPad bag for it. If I'm taking my MacBook Pro, then I use my Swiss Army computer bag.

Both Swiss Army bags do have an awful lot of pockets, and, I suppose, would be a tad lighter without them. But ballistic nylon is going to be much lighter than almost anything you might put into such a thing.

Lisa has just a padded sleeve for her laptop, with a shoulder strap. That's not so flexible, though. If someone hands you a script, or you have to bring your bike helmet with you (because you took a Bixi bike), there's no room.

I think if I were more of a hipster, I'd want this snappy, iconic, jet set bag:

What's your favorite bag, baby?

Ron Shusett, Part Three

Crafty Screenwriting:   Could you talk about the ALIEN franchise? How has that developed?

Ron Shusett:        Not that well. The second was brilliant. I think James Cameron is on the level of Steven Spielberg as a director. He did a smart thing. He didn't try to compete with the first. He concentrated more on action. Brought the little girl in. It was the perfect complement to our film. The exoskeleton and the queen being larger than any of the other aliens. That was a superb evolution.

From there, some very bad things happen. The critics and the box office prove it. 3 and 4 were quite failed, flawed movies. Audiences didn't like'em.

The one later sequel that did work was the first ALIENS VS. PREDATOR. It had a great inspiration based on comic books. It was like "Frankenstein meets the Wolf Man," two unbeatable creatures fighting. It grossed over $200M and was not extremely expensive.

Unfortunately, they didn't refresh the franchise on the second AVP. Just too many repetitive elements from one AVP to the other. I’m just happy that I got a shared story credit on only the first one in 2004.

CS:    Which brings us to PROMETHEUS.

RS:    I read the script for that, and I thought, it's got a lot of great scenes, but the ending is gonna undo it. There are some things you can't follow. Why would they destroy a race they created?

CS:    Why would an advanced race of super-powerful aliens need to destroy humanity by dropping aliens on us? Why not nuke us from orbit? It sort of felt to me like a classic visual director's movie:  one scene that's cool after another, but nothing holding it all together.

RS:    Some directors, when God gave their visual talent, maybe He did something to impede their story talent.

CS:    What themes bind your work together?

RS:    If I had to choose one thing to bind my work together, it would be:  I want to amaze the world. I don't want to make a movie that is something they've seen before in any other movie. I'm a writer and a producer, and those two always fight each other. The showman in me cares less about the story working great than the audience going bananas. Usually the showman wins, but I'm working with partners who excel at character, and they keep me on track.

CS:    How has the environment changed since you came up?

RS:    Those that make the decisions on big budget films seem less interested in original material, more inclined to lean heavier than ever on sequels and remakes.  But still we see from time to time hugely creative original material that does get made successively.  That gives me and others I know the courage to continue and go for highly imaginative ideas.

I heard Dick Zanuck say seven years ago, you can't figure out what a good script is. Intelligence and craftsmanship count, but the only way you really know is gut instinct. Your brain can talk you out of some of your best ideas. And he was in both eras, at Fox under his father, and then at Warners. He did JAWS and THE STING.

Was TOTAL RECALL too complicated? Financiers said it wouldn't work.  They felt the action audience will be annoyed by the convoluted story structure. They'll find it too cerebral. For eight years, everyone said "6 people will come and see it". Arnold wanted to do it, but he couldn't do it until he became number one at the box office. And people thought ALIEN would not get made—it was too bizarre. 

These days it takes a major name to do something original. Joss Whedon's AVENGERS did a billion seven hundred thousand because they let him do it the way he wanted. Cameron, Spielberg, Christopher Nolan—they have the clout to do the outrageously imaginative. No one wanted to do INCEPTION, but "How can we turn down the guy who made a billion on BATMAN?" I was thrilled when the executives said in an interview, "We wouldn't have done it if it wasn't Christopher Nolan." That took a lot of character to admit.

I can't go by logic. I have to trust my own instincts. Do I like it myself? It's that simple.

That's why I'm having difficulty now. The business people are trying to go by logic. To sell a script, you have to do things that the buyers don't think are too crazy. But the things that do the best, if they're done well, are the things that are too crazy. 

Ron Shusett, Part Two

Crafty Screenwriting:    How long does it usually take you to write a script?

Ron Shusett:    If my writing partner and I get the third act in a timely manner, it takes a year and a half. It's a different timetable when you're a writer for hire. I never have trouble coming in on time. We can always write it timely. Usually you have 12 weeks plus rewrites. But if I really want to write something wonderful, it usually takes a year and a half.

TOTAL RECALL was the stunning exception – 3 years to come up with a payoff. We didn't have "Mars gets air" for three years. And only then was the movie of a piece, was of a whole. AFI ran an article:  why can't Shusett and O’Bannon get their Total Recall screenplay made? Because they can't come up with a third act. But finally we did, got it made and it was a big success creatively and financially. I was really gratified to find that later USC had a whole history of how we couldn't get a third act, and finally did and delivered a hit.  The evolution of that script was the film school’s example to writers how you can struggle, but persevere.   

That's why I've never been an enthusiast about writing TV. I've written three pilots. But I can't be comfortable with the limitations of TV timing. An idea could come in an hour or a month. Or a year. And then you think, "How did I not think of this idea five months ago?" They come when they're ready.

CS:    Dan O'Bannon had been working on ALIEN for a year and a half before you met him, and he was on page 29, right?

RS:    He couldn't figure out how to get the alien on the spaceship in a way that no one had done before. He didn't want them to just leave a vent open. We had all these film school peers, and I brought him TOTAL RECALL to work on together. And he showed me what he had on ALIEN. And I came up with the chest-burster. "He impregnates him. He injects something into him. And it just bursts out of his chest." And then we knew, now the story's gonna work. No one's seen something like that. After that moment it took us only three months to get the whole structure, and then maybe another 3 months to get the script written. And it was virtually exactly as you see on the screen, except for Ash being a robot, which was Walter Hill's idea.

CS:    Did you and Dan O'Bannon really wear raincoats for that scene?

RS:    Sure we did. Ridley didn't tell the actors what was going to happen. They shot the scene up to there. The next day they had a dummy body; John Hurt's head attached to a hollow body. And underneath they had a puppeteer with the chestburster, and a guy with a pump full of arterial blood. None of the actors knew – they thought, we're gonna do that later.

But I saw Sigourney looking really scared. She said, "I am scared." Because she'd seen Dan O'Bannon and I trying on raincoats and giggling like it was Christmas morning. So she knew something disgusting was going to happen.

We only needed one take. We had five cameras on the actors. Veronica actually fainted. She hadn't seen John get under the dummy body, so she couldn't understand how his body could split open. She passed right out.

The funny thing, after the chest-burster, there's only three tiny specks of blood in the whole movie. We shot lots of gore, but we didn't use it. When the Alien gets Yaphet Kotto, you see the teeth going into his forehead, but then we cut away. We spent a lot of money shooting all the gore, because you don't know until you get to the previews whether you may need that extra moment of goriness. But we didn't. 

CS:    How do you know when something is ready to go out?

RS:    I go a lot on the feedback of my peers. I have about three or four people I'll bounce my ideas off of. Usually I trust my own instincts. If I'm

getting lukewarm reactions I'll put it aside. Maybe come back with an improvement. Rarely do I plunge right ahead and send something out, unless I have underlying rights that are going to expire.

CS:    How many projects do you typically work on at once?

RS:    I can't write more than two at once, at that's only possible when you have co-writers. I tried three once, and I almost had a nervous breakdown.

Right now I'm just completing two scripts at the same time. One is a huge budget sci-fi, maybe $125 million. One is a low budget horror, around $15 million.

I think the big budget sci-fi is the best and most commercial screenplay I've written in some time. The big tent pole pictures, very few have great characters. You used to have outdoor adventures like GUNGA DIN and THE ALAMO – all the action and great, timeless characters. So I started thinking, I want to write a science fiction that has as much character development as those movies.

I like this low budget horror I'm talking about. It's based on [famous 19^th Century horror story], and I tried to think how to make that fresh. And then I had an idea that [obviously I'm not going to tell you guys his hook!].

But I knew I needed three completely new effects for the script to be better than a pretty good movie. I spent four or five months just working on coming up with three new effects that nobody has ever seen before. There was a point where I had two of them. But I knew in my heart, if I were reading the script for the first time, I would not be amazed. Two days ago, I came up with the idea that [third effect]. And I knew, when they see this, they're gonna be buzzing for fifteen minutes.

I really try to have special effects that are bizarre. Two of the most spectacular scenes in TOTAL RECALL were not in the Philip Dick story: the Kuato scene, and the Edgemar scene, "I've been implanted in your brain to talk you down."

They can't just be original special effects. They have to further the story telling. That's the most common mistake I've seen in big budget sci-fi's. If you root the effects in the story, the audience will be far more thrilled.

CS:    If you're working on a script for months just thinking about new special effects – you're obviously not typing all that time. How do you tell when you're usefully setting your mind free by, say, reading websites or books or going on walks or hanging out with friends, and when you're just really loafing?

RS:    I never really stop thinking about the work. That's something my wife doesn't love about me. I'm truly an obsessed man and I'm thinking about it every moment. My friends would say, if a nude blonde came and put herself on Ron's lap, he'd ask her, "What do you think about Total Recall?" That's not good socially. But I'm obsessed with it. I don't want to be a one trick pony.

Sometimes you get a great idea when you're in a shower. My brain doesn't do it's best before ten o'clock at night. I had an amazing idea last night at 2 in the morning. That's my low budget horror. I've been working on it a year and a half already, I have everything but I need one more great effect. I'm making myself crazy, nobody's read it except for my co-writer. And then, just as I'm getting into bed, it comes, and I'm thinking, "Oh my God, this is worthy – yes, this came from the man who co-created ALIEN."

Ron Shusett, Not a One Trick Pony, Part One

Ron Shusett is a veteran screenwriter and producer. You probably know him best from ALIEN, which he co-wrote with Dan O'Bannon, along with TOTAL RECALL. He also wrote a draft of MINORITY REPORT, for which he was an executive producer. I had a chance to interview him, so I did, because how do you not interview Ron Shusett when you have a chance?

Complications Ensue: You're quoted on your IMDb bio page as saying, "I've never written a screenplay by myself. And with good reason. There's one aspect of screenwriting I'm weak at -- character development. I always had a natural gift for the storytelling as well as the film's big moments -- whether it be suspense, action and high-powered imaginative scenes. But when it came to fleshing out the people, the more realistic, mundane aspects of a script that are critical to have you care about the people, I was always mediocre." Can you talk about how you collaborate?

Ron Shusett: I realized long ago that I can occasionally write character scenes that work, but it's a lot of work for me. So over the years, I've worked with different screenwriters: Dan O'Bannon, Gary Goldman, Steve Pressfield. Steve mostly wrote novels, and he's great with characters. We wrote ABOVE THE LAW together. That was a joy – a low budget movie that made a lot of money. The structure was great.

I've deliberately chosen to write my screenplays with people whose strengths are not mine. I'm very good with crazy ideas. I've always had an ear for pacing. But if I hadn't gotten all those people to write with me, the screenplays would not have had the success they did. If I write a screenplay myself, and then read it, I can tell there are some good things in there, but as a producer, I wouldn't buy this. I love Dan O'Bannon's characters in ALIEN – Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto's truck drivers in space.
So usually I come up with an idea or a source, and do two pages on it. Then I get a co-writer who's talented with characters. I like to have someone who, for example, when I come up with the chest-burster, he'll say, "Yeah, that's good, I like that!"

Then we'll start with a ten-page outline. Sometimes it'll go to twenty pages. We'll develop a scene-by-scene.

Then we'll sit on the first act together. Usually my co-writer writes the second act, and I'll rewrite it; and then I'll write the third act, because I have a sense of how the pacing needs to pick up. I don't try to figure it out, my gut tells me this is what has to happen. When I'm done, he'll rewrite that, he'll work on the characters.

I think I excel at third acts. It's the hardest to get right in a genre piece. In a character piece you can waver back and forth. You can do what you want to get to the end. But with a suspense or action piece you have to end up in a specific place.

CS:  You've often started with an optioned short story…

RS: I was one of the first people to adapt Philip K. Dick for the screen. He's one of the most brilliant sci-fi thinkers of the last 50 years. How many original ideas can I find as good as that? If I get a great idea from a short story, I can write many more hits than I could by writing by myself.

Now of course there have been seven movies based on Phil Dick, and five have failed at the box office. I've been involved in the two successful ones:  TOTAL RECALL and MINORITY REPORT. Even BLADE RUNNER was a failure when it came out, although now it's legendary.

Back then, Phil Dick's stories weren't considered literature, they were considered pulp fiction. They didn't have the gravitas of success attached to them. He only made a few thousand dollars from his stories. He never made the crosser to being a well paid writer, even though his stories had this brilliant wisdom to them, prophetic thoughts.

I optioned TOTAL RECALL, the underlying short story in 1976. People had never heard of Phil Dick, they said, "You'll never be able to pull it off, the plot is too complex for main stream audiences to follow—and you need them because it is very expensive to make."

I wrote the first three drafts of MINORITY REPORT with Gary Goldman. I did not wind up with a writing credit on it because I had an executive producer title, and according to the old WGA rules, if you were a producer, you had to have done 60% of the writing to get a credit. Spielberg wanted to bring in a much darker feeling than I was known for.

CS:    ALIEN's pretty dark.

RS:    ALIEN'S dark in a different way. It's a science fiction / fantasy kind of darkness. Spielberg brought into MINORITY REPORT that Tom Cruise's son had been kidnapped by a pedophile. I could never write something like that. I can write bizarre darkness because it's fanciful.

CS:    In your opinion, are we meant to take away from TOTAL RECALL that he really saved Mars, or that he's still in the chair?

RS:    My interpretation is that I wanted you to feel it's real, or otherwise why was I, as an audience, so immersed in it. But we also crafted it carefully so that you can also interpret that he's back in the chair – and we love it. Everybody wanted it to come out that way, and if you craft something well enough, the audience will accept it.

More tomorrow of my interview with Ron Shusett!