Looking for Story Fodder?

This is one of those time-wasters that might spark something: the IamA channel in Reddit is full of people who have done or experienced something out of the ordinary, from being a bouncer at a kink club to surviving being shot in the head.

District 9

Hunter and I went to see DISTRICT 9. If you've missed the publicity, it's a mockudrama about insectoid aliens living in a slum in Johannesburg, South Africa. A big chunk of the setup comes in the form of documentary footage following around one government bureaucrat as he attempts to clear out the District 9 slum, evicting a million "prawns" so they can be resettled to a camp outside the city.

It's a wild ride, and the documentary style footage lends a sense of reality to the situation. Until you get out of the movie theater, it's a wild ride.

Go see it -- it's definitely worth seeing -- and then read the rest of this post. But sit a ways back from the screen -- a lot of the documentary-style footage is shaky.

(And here's a really good interview with first-time director Neil Blomkamp...)

/* SPOILERS */

The basic idea is that the "prawn" ship arrived twenty years ago, but has lost its command module, and so hovers, non-functional, over Jo'burg. The millions of prawns have lost any sense of order in their society. They've turned District 9 into a slum that's a dead ringer for some of the poorest townships in South Africa. The aliens seem to spend their days turning over trash heaps looking for things to eat, especially cat food, which is a sort of drug to them -- Nigerian bandits have set up inside the township to sell them cat food at outrageous prices.

/* NO, SERIOUSLY, DUDE: SPOILERS! */

It turns out the only thing the government is interested in are the prawn's weapons: energy rifles of spectacular power that, unfortunately for the arms manufacturers, can only be operated by the prawns themselves, due to a poorly understood biological relationship between the weapon and the prawn's arm.

A mild-mannered and banal but heartless bureaucrat, Wikus van der Merwe, is put in charge of a massive slum clearance operation -- they're moving the prawns to resettlement camps out of town. The resettlement is brutal and deadly.

When the bureaucrat gets sprayed with a liquid used in prawn technology, he quickly starts turning into a prawn. Soon he's taken away by the arms guys, who have been looking for a way to get the prawn weaponry to work. Since his arm is now a prawn arm, bingo, he can fire their cool weapons.

The bureaucrat escapes back to District 9, where he meets the one prawn who seems to have a plan, involving a canister of the precious liquid, which will allow him to fire up the missing command module, get back to the ship, fire it up, and escape from Earth. The bureaucrat and the smart prawn take some prawn weapons from the Nigerian bandits, invade the arms manufacturer's lab, grab the canister, and run back to District 9. The arms manufacturer sends its vicious soldiers after them. In a spectacular firefight, the smart prawn escapes to the mothership with his son, and the bureaucrat, in a heavily armed exosuit, fights off the soldiers.

In the end, the soldiers are all dead. The bureaucrat has transformed entirely into a prawn. The smart prawn takes the mothership away to his home planet.

There are many compelling things about the movie. We watch the bureaucrat transformed not only from human into prawn, but from a callous, cowardly, smug bureaucrat into someone willing to fight, if only for his chance to be turned back into a human being, so he can be with his wife again. And we come to care about the prawns, especially the smart prawn, who has a smart son. You don't often find yourself sympathizing with something with bug eyes and tentacles.

It's also neat that you don't know where the movie's going to go. Because the first half is so unrelenting -- the prawns really live in hell on Earth -- you're expecting a downer ending. So the bittersweet ending is a real surprise.

From a purely narrative point of view, the movie is a success, as a sort of horror/thriller. It's the story we've seen before, about the heartless oppressor who becomes the oppressed and learns the hell he's been putting them before. It could be a story about a Bureau of Indian Affairs guy who becomes an Indian, or apartheid bureaucrat who gets reclassified as black...

As science fiction, there are some gaping holes in the logic of the situation.

A mile-long ship is hovering over Jo'burg. We are asked to believe that, humans having cut their way into it and rescued a million prawns, no one is interested in any of their science or technology except for their portable guns. Surely the prawns know a great deal about their ship, and apparently we've learned their language. Surely every scientist in the world would be working with them to figure out their technology? I know I'd be more interested in a ship that can fly interstellar space than even the most spectacular guns. And what's their medical technology like?

But the filmmakers are making an allegory about arms sales in Africa, so we're stuck with the premise that evil arms manufacturers have been put in charge of the prawns.

Also, if we were hosting a million refugees from a species armed with spectacular weapons and spaceships, wouldn't even evil arms manufacturers want to treat them a whole hell of a lot better, just in case more of them showed up, this time with a functioning ship?

Even if we made them all live in one place, wouldn't we have programs where they came to human labs and universities and factories to teach us what they know? Because, y'know, unlike the Zimbabweans now pouring into South African society and living in slums, the prawns are technologically way ahead of us.

The situation is cheated a bit. It's not as messy as it "really" might be. Unlike illegal immigrants and South Africans, the two societies aren't really slamming into each other. They were, the movie tells us, but now the prawns are all behind walls.

What the filmmakers have made, instead -- if you scrape away the allegory -- is a well-told and moving and exciting but simplistic version of the story we've seen before of an ordinary bastard in a suit who becomes one of the people he's been oppressing. He loses everything, but discovers he's willing to endure any humiliation, any suffering, in order to preserve his hope of going back to his ordinary life.

To keep things simple and exciting, then, the end of the movie degenerates into an extended action sequence where the good guys win and the bad guys lose and virtue is rewarded and evil gets torn limb from limb.

I guess that's why I felt a bit disappointed coming out of the picture. I went to see a movie about humans living with aliens, and I saw a movie about the trials of an ordinary bastard in a suit. And then it became a straight popcorn movie with big explosions, and not so much you need to think about.

Still, ja -- a hell of a movie. Utterly convincing digital effects -- apparently they used no animatronics -- compelling situations, a moving ending. And pretty damn awesome for a $30 million first feature.

Oh, and here, courtesy of reader Frederic, is the original short the movie's based on:

Interesting that many of the "man in the street" interviews in the movie are real South Africans being interviewed about their feelings against the "alien" Zimbabwean illegal immigrants currently flooding South Africa. More here at io9.

CMF Submission

[CANADIAN POLITICS] I sent in my submission about the Canada Media Fund. It reads:

I'm a professional television and feature writer. I co-wrote BON COP / BAD COP, which broke the all-time Canadian box office record for a Canadian movie. I also co-created the television series NAKED JOSH, which ran for three years on Showcase.

Cancon is important to me. It's clear that the Canadian networks don't take Cancon seriously, and would be happy to show nothing but American television series. If the Cancon requirements are reduced, my job will disappear.

It's happened before. When the drama requirements were diluted to allow lifestyle series to qualify as "Canadian drama" in 1999, Canadian drama series on the air dropped immediately from 12 to 2.

It's been proposed to allow American writers and American showrunners to work on Canadian shows funded by the CMF. If Cancon is to mean anything at all, we can't allow that. American writers are not going to tell Canadian stories. They are going to turn our shows into carbon copies of American shows, set in Generica -- that bland, featureless North American landscape that has no aspects of Canadian society in it, but could theoretically be somewhere in Canada.

Cancon is important to everyone in Canada. A country with no sense of itself falls apart. In Canada, falling apart is a real threat. We nearly lost Quebec several times. There are lots of Newfoundlanders who consider their nationality to be "Newfie," not "Canuck." Stories are what bind us to each other and give us a sense of ourself as a nation. Whether they're serious dramas like "Zone of Separation" or goofy comedies like "Corner Gas," watching ourselves on TV is one of the things that makes us Canadians, and not just "not-Americans."

Cancon is important to our place in the world. When Americans think about Canada, if they haven't seen any of our movies or TV shows, they think of us as polite white people who are brave about the winter. They're not really aware of how our society is different. Just look at the spectacle of the Republicans trying to scare Americans away from single payer health care by claiming our health care system is worse, when in fact, it's better. They're not aware that we have lots of New Canadians, that our cities are tolerant and multicultural, that we resolves the whole gay marriage thing without a fuss a few years ago ... they don't know us.

When they see our shows, they get a sense of who we are, whether it's "Corner Gas" or "Degrassi" or "Naked Josh" or "Flashpoint" -- the show about snipers where the snipers try not to shoot people.

Americans take Britain seriously because they know who the British are. If they don't take Canada as seriously, it's partly because we've spent too much money on CSI and "Law & Order," and not enough creating our own popular culture.

Our TV and movies create who we are. Let's not sell them out just because our broadcasters think they can make a few more bucks.

Thank you.

Alex Epstein

Actually, Canadians whine constantly about the winter.

You can send in your own submission at ctf@ctf-fct.ca.

Random Thoughts about Casting and Such

We held a casting session yesterday. We saw about fifteen actresses for the two lead roles in our six-minute little teen vampire comedy, YOU ARE SO UNDEAD. Yes, it's time to do another BravoFACT, inshallah.

I love casting. Casting is where you get to see professionals make your lines their own. (Or, in this case, Lisa's lines.) If a scene is going to be funny, it's going to be funny in the casting session, or at least in one of your casting sessions. (I think it might have been NAKED JOSH where we saw a lot of auditions that really hurt our confidence in the lines, until we got David Julian Hirsh nailing them.)

I like to take a bit of time with auditions, do multiple takes for the camera, and really see where the actors can take the direction. It's exciting watching a really good actor incorporate your directions. Suddenly a new emotion is there, or the scene takes a different flavor.

I'm always amazed watching dancers pick up choreography. They can see the choreographer do something once, and then repeat it. I can't do that. I spent part of the 70's failing to pick up the Hustle.

A good actor, you tell her, "when she says this, it's like a slap in the face to you," or, yesterday, "When you bite her, it's a huge rush," and boom, it's there.

The part of the brain where dancers can see the choreography in their heads, and actors can see the emotions, I see a sort of shape of the scene, or a shape of the whole screenplay. I can see where something's wrong in a story structure. I can sort of see how it would fix itself if you did this, or that. In my mind, the story actually has a shape that feels wrong or right.

One of the most valuable things I've ever done for my writing was taking Meisner Technique acting classes with Joanne Baron. I never had any intention of acting; I wanted to learn what actors do in the scene. I think every director should do some acting training, so you can understand how to talk to actors. But I found that acting helped my writing. I can feel the emotion in the scene more clearly and brightly. I can act the characters for myself better. I can tell when I'm forcing them to do stuff they're not really motivated to do.

I know a lot of you are taking writing classes. I feel the classes that have helped my writing the most haven't been writing classes. The acting classes were terrific. Taking Richard Marks's editing class at UCLA was really helpful. Taking Robert Farris Thompson's "Afro-Atlantic Tradition" class back in college gave me some pointers on syncopation. Sometimes it's helpful to attack things tangentially rather than head on.

I'm Casting

Next week, I'm casting a six minute teen vampire comedy I'm directing, off Lisa's hilarious script. If you know any awesomely talented Quebec actresses who can play 16-18, lemme know. Kthxbai.

Ex-Pat?

I'm an American writer just beginning my foray into writing as a career. Even though I grew up a stone's throw away from Los Angeles I can't see L.A. being my gateway to the industry. I spent my first three years as an undergraduate in New England, enjoyed six months in Ireland, about to head up to UBC in Vancouver for a semester, and finishing up an undergraduate degree in creative writing at UCR . Not only do I tend to live a better life away from California, but most of my writing tends to thematically wrap around questions of cultural identity with a distinctly Anglo tint (the only spec script I've written was an episode of Skins).

While all of my classes, books, and blogs detail Hollywood with steely accuracy, what if we don't want to go that route? What if I'm an American planning to live and work and write abroad? Are there any good resources detailing the non-american systems?

The key issue here is nationality. You can't work on Canadian shows if you're not a Canadian citizen or a Canadian permanent resident. (Permanent resident = Green Card.) I don't know about the British system, but I imagine you would need to be a British or EU citizen, or a Commonwealth citizen residing permanently in Britain. Likewise, I imagine, Oz.

So working in another country's system requires planning, effort and time. It probably takes 12-18 months to get a visa to be a Canadian permanent resident, after which you can come here and work. (You don't have to be here while you're waiting for the visa.)

There are a few automatic shortcuts. I understand that if you can prove Irish grandparents, you can get an Irish/EU passport. If you're Jewish, you can get an Israeli passport, though that's not as useful. And I have heard that if you can prove that your parents or grandparents left Spain during the Spanish Civil War, or if you can prove your Jewish ancestors were expelled from Spain in 1492 -- you can get a Spanish passport. Who knows if that's true -- ask your Spanish consulate.

The Canadian and British systems have their own flaws. The Canadian English film market is currently dreadful, and Canadian TV is under constant threat from the Conservative government. Canadian producers are only just beginning to appreciate the role of the showrunner in TV. The US market is the only market that doesn't depend on government handouts and regulations. All sorts of Canadians and Brits would love to move to LA, if they could only figure out how.

Also, there are plenty of people making indie movies and co-productions in LA. My first salaried job in showbiz was working for an Israeli producer who made elaborate co-productions. The movie I came in on, EMINENT DOMAIN, was an Israeli-French-Canadian co-pro shot in Poland and partly financed by a Welsh bank. It's a big town, LA. Not everyone's working on the next Michael Bay picture.

You can, of course, write anywhere and have LA agents, though it will be a serious drag on your career.

You can also try to break into the New York showbiz community. The drawback there is that there isn't that much work and the competition is ridiculous, because every other New York prep school kid is trying to avoid going out to the Coast, you're up against them and their connections, and they're living in their parents' classic six on Central Park West, and vacationing in the Hamptons where they might bump into Spielberg.

Without knowing what your specific questions are, it's hard to point you to resources. This blog has a lot of info on Canada, and there are probably Brit writing blogs with a similar slant. What do you want to know?

Clearance

Q. Say you have a coffee shop as a focal point in a script. Should you worry about choosing a name for the shop that is completely original? For example, could I use a place called "Capital Coffee," clearly set in Ottawa, if there happens to be a real place called Capital Coffee in Washington?

For that matter, can you set a scene inside a well-known store or restaurant chain without the permission of the company?

This is not an issue in a selling script. You can name real people and places and put real products in their hands, because you're only showing the script to a few people. (Say, at most, a hundred.)

When you get to production, there's a process you'll follow to take care of potential conflicts. The script will go out to lawyers who'll do a "clearance report." If there's only one "Capitol Coffee" in the world and you've got one in your script, you may have to change the name. On the other hand, it may not matter so long as you're in a different city. And it won't matter if there are several dozen Capitol Coffees throughout North America. Similarly, you couldn't put a character named Isaac Asimov in a script, at least not during his life; but you can always put a Lauren Ginsburg in the script (assuming you want a 40-year-old New Yorker), because there are so many of them, you're not held to be saying anything about one of them in particular.

Hard Times, Soft Seats

Is there really a recession out there?

Canadians are flocking to the local multiplex in droves -- [Cineplex] sold 18.2 million tickets in the three months to June 30, 2.6 million more than in the same period of 2008 -- helping to drive up the exhibitor's second-quarter profits to $19.8 million, from $6 million in 2008.

Playback says movie ticket sales are up.

I predicted in December that while the crash in credit would hurt showbiz in the short run, in the longer run, the recession might actually help showbiz. After all, TV is cheaper than almost any other form of entertainment, and movies come right after. It's restaurants, theater and travel that are due for the biggest hits.

Good news, anyway. Showbiz has been fairly miserable this past half year, but it looks like things are starting to pick up.