L'Avventura, and Adventures Properly Considerered

Our plan was to go into New York tonight, grab the kid and head North, but now it seems unrealistic to drive into New York, and it looks like we wouldn't be able to grab the kid until too late.

So, we're riding it out in East Hampton, in a house made of wood and huge glass windows. Fortunately, we're on one of the few bits of really high ground in town.

At least, we hope we're riding it out; there may be mandatory evacuations. In which case we're riding it out in the high school. Which doesn't seem much fun at all.

However, "an adventure is an inconvenience properly considered."

We did watch L'AVVENTURA, Antonioni's 1960 masterpiece. It is a strange movie. Almost nothing happens. Some rich people go to an island. A girl disappears. They search for her, but then give up. Her boyfriend and her best friend hook up. Yet somehow, it holds your interest.

How does Antonioni do it? I don't know. And that's why the movie bears watching over and over.

The Dialogue Series

THE DIALOGUE SERIES is a DVD series of 70-90 minute discussions in which more than two dozen top screenwriters share their work habits, methods and inspirations, secrets of the trade, business advice, and eye-opening stories from life in the trenches of the film industry. Each writer discusses his or her filmography in great detail and breaks down the mechanics of one favorite scene from their produced work.

Interview subjects include Oscar® winners and industry veterans like Paul Haggis (Crash, Million Dollar Baby), Callie Khouri (Thelma and Louise), Paul Attanasio (Quiz Show, Donnie Brasco), Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich), Peter & Bobby Farrelly (There's Something About Mary, Stuck on You) and David S. Goyer (Dark City, Blade, Batman Begins). The series is hosted by Michael De Luca, film fanatic and former President of Production at New Line Cinema. In a climate where "industry" talk shows are mostly fluff pieces, Mike De Luca's probing and savvy style elevates this series to a true exploration of the craft and its masters.

The people behind this series were kind enough to send me the David Goyer interview.

Now, I'm not the best person for this sort of disk. Most of what David Goyer has to say in this disk isn't news to me. It may be interesting for you, though.

What I want in a writer interview is for someone to ask the questions I'd ask the writer if I were taking him out for Irish whiskey at the Paddock, or fine tequila at Reposado. Questions about writing craft. Questions about how the business works at a high level.

Granted, most writer gossip is too specific to publish. How is it working with [name of executive]? What is up with him? How fast do you think [name of writer] is gonna get a show on [network] now that he's dating [name of executive]? Did she jump or was she pushed?

Or, Hey, I hear you're working with [supposedly respectable producer who owes me $33,000]. Watch out!

But smart writers always have arcane questions for each other. And perhaps if the interviewer had been another writer, instead of the former President of Production at New Line (i.e. a suit), the questions might have been more probing and useful.

For example, De Luca asks Goyer about his monicker "The Prince of Darkness," and Goyer talks about how he got that nickname in high school, and then goes on to talk about his tattoos. I would have asked: do you promote that name as part of your brand as a writer? Do you find it helps you get jobs like the movies you've been writing -- DARK CITY, BATMAN BEGINS -- because people say, "Hey, let's get that Prince of Darkness guy!"? Do you find you're losing out on period dramas and rom coms because you're that Prince of Darkness guy?

Or, Goyer mentions that on the first BLADE he was a writer, on a second a writer-producer, and on the third, a director. Both Goyer and De Luca are very interested in Goyer's experience as a director, because directors are important people in Hollywood. But I would have been interested in knowing what it means to be a writer-producer. Was that just a courtesy title? How much authority came with it? And authority over whom? Did the director listen to you any more?

It's hard coming up with good interview questions. It is perhaps the hardest part of doing an interview. You have to really know your subject and figure out what to ask him that he hasn't been asked before. The rest is typing.

This is a DVD, and that ought to have a higher signal to noise ratio than a radio interview, say. Because you're paying for it, and you're supposed to actually look at it, not just listen while you sit on the 101. (The Dialogue Series does leverage the screen a bit, by explaining who people are talking about when they name drop.) I want someone to take a three hour conversation and squeeze it down to the juiciest one hour. I want ideas going by at high speed so I want to stop the disk and run that by me again. I did not feel these discs met that standard.

But then, a DVD like this is not for me, and you may not have a lot of writer friends to quiz over Red Breast. If you're still getting a sense of the biz, and wonder what really, really successful writers are like in person, you may find these disks useful.

UPDATE: I ran this by a smart emerging writer, who wrote:

There's lots of interesting information about Batman, Blade, The Flash, and other superhero movies. De Luca asks him questions that are related to screenwriters in terms of working and surviving the industry -- how to deal with notes, problem actors and directors, being rewritten, rewriting others, studio politics, cycles of movies, how genre movies can be taken seriously... things that are all useful.

But there is nothing on craft.

The closest they get to it is when David Goyer talks about finding a theme to focus on -- Batman is really about fear and parent issues, The Flash is about speed as a vice, something you get addicted to. But that's maybe a minute or two out of a 79 minute running time.

One thing that was kind of interesting was a writing exercise called "the object". De Luca presents a random object (in this case, a toy clown on a scooter), and Goyer has to mine from it a story or idea (something about a cop searching for a supernatural killer, and "the souls of 40 murdered children"). Hearing him explain how he got that from the object, and in turn, how he gets inspiration and ideas from other things, was insightful.

The questions De Luca asks that are actually related to screenwriting are along the lines of "did you go to film school, how did you break in, what kind of stuff do you have in your office, do you outline, how many hours a day do you work...". Things that are somewhat interesting, but not that helpful. ... It is cool to find out these sort of things. But there needs to be more than just that.

Why I'll Never Be a Studio Executive

Paul Graham has another insightful essay entitled You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss. It's about the difference he's observed between programmers who work for Google and Microsoft, and programmers who work for their own startups. He compares them to lions in the wild versus lions in the zoo. The lions in the zoo seem "both more worried and happier."

I think that's why I like show people.

The ones who don't seem happier are executives. They have big salaries and regular paychecks, and here in Canada, they're not in constant danger of being fired. (Though, I suspect, they also don't have absurdly lucrative "golden parachute" clauses.) But they have to work within a structure and a specific mandate. My network executive friends may like my show, but they already have one in the same territory, or it's not in their mandate, or they can't sell it to their boss.

And they're always in meetings. Ack.

I don't know anyone who's left a network job who didn't seem happier afterwards.

My producer and writer friends are worried all the time. They don't know where their next paycheck is coming from. They don't know if the industry will collapse due to moralistic Conservative government intervention. They have no idea what they'd do for a living if people stopped hiring them, or paying them.

But their frustrations are the frustrations of lions in the wild. They are always stalking the next antelope, or trying to keep the hyenas off of one they've already caught.

They all seem so alive.

Like This, Only The Opposite

Poor Kay is suffering down south. Apparently it's not fun to be a broadcast TV writer in LA at the moment, even if you're running (or were running) THE BIONIC WOMAN.

What she's experiencing, directly and vicariously? Picture the exact opposite. That's the meeting I had with my network. The notes were along the lines of, "yeah, we love it. Only here's some places you could go deeper. Oh, and this character is really interesting, we want to know more about her. When can we read the next script? And the one after that?"

I think I'm in love.

Writer Mafia Partay

The Canadian Writer Mafia had a party at the TIFF, and DMc has a dishy rundown. Check it out. (I have no idea what I'm representin' there, you do weird things when people point cameras at you.)

You Know, Just In Case

I ran across this at Post Secret, and bouncing off DREAMS ON SPEC, I thought it wouldn't hurt to put this up here.

Just in case.

Today, I Live in Paris in the '40's

They are shooting THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON, starring Brad Pitt, on my street today, and look how nice my street looks!

And tomorrow we are shooting right down the street...

Wow!

I just asked not to be considered to staff a series shooting in my town. I just have too many things I'm already committed to doing.

That's new for me. I'm still kind of reeling from it.

Hopefully, I won't regret it later. But for now, it feels kinda ... good.

Everyone's Lying

I've been reading Ian Gurvitz's book Hello, Lied the Agent.

I was suspicious of this book, partly because Gurvitz stole the joke in the title from Linda Obst's Hello, He Lied -- And Other Tales From the Hollywood Trenches, partly because it sounds bitter. And it is a bitter book. Gurvitz is another one of these comedy guys who are lucky enough to be making huge wads of cash writing sitcoms -- he worked on Becker -- while whining about how painful the process is. (Is Ken Levine the only happy comedy writer in the world?)

The book won't tell you how to write comedy. But it does give you really good sense of what it's like to be a big-time comedy writer through the course of the year. If you're not sure you know, you might give this book a look.

Poker Face

Today, I had a negotation and a poker game. Both went well. I won $17.50 at poker! I won't tell you what I got in the negotiation, but everyone went away happy, I think.

Kids, anyone working in show business ought to learn poker. Nothing will better prepare you for the bluffs and stakes-raisings of negotiation than a few thousand hands of poker. Seriously. Consider it part of your education.

And, poker with drunken writers is hi-larious. Just ask Adam Barken, or as he is now known, "Man-Boobs."

Write for Love ... ?

On Lotsa Words I read this:

I want to write for tv.
Period.

So why is it that I can't get this screenplay idea out of my head? I keep coming back to it and it's finally gotten to the point where I just have to write the damn thing - just to get it out of my system.

Is it commercial? Not particularly.
Is it high concept? Nope.

So why do it? Don't I want to write for tv? Shouldn't my limited time be spent writing that Veronica Mars spec that I've started?

Originally I was going to write something passionate about writing what you love. Then I went back through the past few years in my head and pondered which of the things I wrote strictly for love, that I didn't think were commercial, have gone anywhere.

I couldn't think of any. All the series ideas I've set up, and all the movies I've optioned, were ideas I liked that I also thought were commercial. I'm passionate about the series I'm writing a pilot for. But I chose to develop it because it was one of the speculative fiction ideas I had that seemed the most easily grasped by the mainstream audience, that had the least special effects. I wrote my medieval zombie picture because it was a goofy fun concept I knew I'd enjoy writing -- but also because it is a natural co-production shot almost entirely in one easily found location. (There are lots of empty castles in Europe. Especially in Eastern Europe, where it's cheap to shoot.) The series I developed last year had a great commercial hook.

I've got a stack of scripts that I wrote because I just had to, even though I wasn't sure I could sell them. They make great writing samples.

Now bear in mind: I'm not writing anything I don't love. I don't develop commercial ideas I don't actually want to work on. I don't think I'd be able to do a good job on them if I did. Lisa is always coming up with commercial ideas I don't think I can write, along with the ones I think I can. I put them on the backburner until I see an aspect of them that I love. Which may not happen.

I don't take writing commissions on projects I don't think I'll be able to love. On the other hand I am lucky enough that I can almost always find something to love about projects I'm asked to come in on. So I haven't had to turn down very much because I wasn't turned on by the material.

So it's tricky. You have to write what you love, but you have to write what other people are going to love, too. Is it a matter of training your muse to love commercial stuff? Or is it a gift that some people have and others don't?

Where are you? Are you trying to figure out what the market wants? Trying to figure out what you love? Trying to put the two together? Let us know.

Getting Old

Craig Mazin blogs about why screenwriting is a young man's game. He points out that he is a better writer at 36 than he was at 25, but as you get older, and you have a family, it gets harder to work the long hours, and anyway, it gets harder to suck up all the disrespect.

I think there's something else. At 36, Craig is still loving writing the Scary Movie sequels. As I get older, I find myself less and less interested in watching a broad swath of popular entertainment. For example, I can't watch a hero shoot a bunch of minions without thinking how much trouble the minion's parents went to raise them; and now they're dead. Silly, I know. As I become a more thoughtful person (from an admittedly low baseline), I find it harder to enjoy thoughtless entertainment. I lose patience with shows like Lost that I suspect aren't going anywhere. If I'm going to watch a show where people get tortured, I want it to be in a political context that speaks to the real world, as in the cleverly transgressive Sleeper Cell, not in a right wing revenge fantasy like 24.

What you don't enjoy, you can't write well.

Fortunately I am not too thoughtful. I am loving rewriting my medieval zombie picture (though there is a suspiciously high amount of theme in it). And if I'm successful enough, then I can just hire younger writers to be thoughtless for me...

How Long? How Much?

Q. How much will it cost me to have a pilot script written for my one hour drama? Also how long would it take to write? How much for a pilot script and two additional scripts?

WGA scale for an hour episode is $31,000.

WGC scale for an hour pilot is around CAD $20,000 -- say around 17K US. Scale for an hour episode is about CAD $12,000. That's an advance against a production bonus, should the episode be produced, of roughly 2-3% of budget, split among the credited writers.

However, writers you would want to write your pilot are usually overscale writers.

The fellow who writes a pilot is considered to be "creating" the show, whether or not he came up with the idea. (Sometimes he'll agree to co-create, but don't count on it.) In Canada that usually entitles him to a royalty of, say, 1%-2% of the budget of every episode ever produced. Not sure what the deal is in the States.

The creator is not necessarily the showrunner. If the network doesn't consider the creator up to running a show, they'll pick a showrunner they like.

How long a pilot takes to write something depends on how easy a concept it is to write. I've written a draft of an hour script in four days, but that was on a show I was up to speed on, with a detailed outline. The pilot I just wrote took six weeks for a first draft, based on a finished pitch bible. If the concept needs reworking, add more time. If you choose to write without reworking the concept first, double your time estimate.

With writing as with all craft, the same tripod applies. Fast, cheap and good: pick two.

Get Close to It

Q. I've been out of school for 11 years and have a successful career in marketing. I wouldn't want to start at the bottom again. Would it make sense to change industries but stay in marketing and figure out how to squeeze my way into writing?

It would. It's good to have a day job that gets you close to showbiz, so you get a sense of what people want. And if you're marketing movies, you'll learn what sort of movies the marketers want. The kind of movies the marketers don't want get made rarely. And If you're a successful marketer, you might even like marketing movies.

My day job was developing and producing movies. I was a pretty good development guy and not a great producer. (I can't talk people out of money they shouldn't be giving me, and that is a crucial producer skill.) I learned a lot about what to write and what not to write. In fact, my experiences in my day job led to my first book as much as my experiences as a writer ever did.

If you're a successful marketer, you stand a much better chance of breaking into marketing than of breaking into writing, just because you have some expertise. But it is equally true that you stand a much better chance of selling your first script if you are marketing movies than if you are marketing widgets.

The View Out My Window

I think we will wait until tomorrow to drive to New York. It is too lovely a day not to take the dog for a walk in the park.

Le Grand Flirt

I spent the afternoon at Le Grand Flirt, an event Telefilm organized to put producers together with writers who've written screenplays (or treatments) in the Telefilm-funded Writers First Program. Ten producers, ten screenwriters, one hundred rencontres.

My throat is sore from pitching three projects every fifteen minutes.

It says something about the system in Québec that I knew two out of the ten producers. Granted two of them produce only in French, but that still leaves six I'd never met, although I've been here six years and I don't exactly have a low profile. So blessings on Telefilm's governmental head that they organized this. It does no good to fund scripts if the producers don't ever see them. (Number of Québec producers who have called me because I co-wrote the film that broke the Canadian box office for a Canadian film: 0.)

I got to meet Kim McCraw, who produced the film that grabbed the Jutra for Best Film and Best Director and a bunch of other Bests. And a bunch of fellow screenwriters I didn't know, because they don't come to the annual WGC cocktail party.

My French is definitely getting better. I had about half my conversations in French, and didn't feel I was stumbling too much over my vocabulary. I'm still lost when I have to listen to a conversation, but I can hold my own one-on-one.

I was particularly tickled that no one didn't want to read my romantic comedy just because I want to direct the sucker.

This evening I'm following up with everyone, emailing scripts. Let's see what comes of it.

Thank You, Thalia

I was pleased to hear from several friends that Bon Cop / Bad Cop won Best Picture at last night's Genie Awards. (The Genies are Canada's Academy Awards.) Maurie Richard: The Rocket swept most of the other awards. Sunday, I'm off to the Jutra Awards (French Canada's Academy Awards) to see if the screenplay picks up an award.

I got some even better news yesterday, too , since you cannot trade honors for food: Telefilm has funded further development on my spec feature Medieval. That ought to keep us in extra cheese pizza for a while. (Zesto's charges extra for extra cheese. "Cheese like gold," says Tarik.) For the past few months I've been feeling officially sanguine about work in the pipeline -- I have something like half a dozen projects that are looking seriously promising, and a few more I could luck out on -- but ever so slightly nervous, 'cause "promising" is another thing you can't eat. This is the first major project to go from promising to paying this year. We'll see what shakes out in the next few months. Thank goodness I got ahead of the game on my pilot, which I hope to finish this week or the next...