Launch Party

If you're in Montreal this evening, swing by my launch party for my novel, THE CIRCLE CAST and drink with us.

It's at Réservoir, 9 Duluth East, 7 to 9.

See you there!

Editor's Cut

This weekend we rented BEVERLY HILLS COP, PORKY'S and THE BLUES BROTHERS. Not because we had a jones for leather jackets, but research for a comedy screenplay.

Boy, THE BLUES BROTHERS doesn't hold up. There's some funny stuff, but the pace is glacial. We found PORKY'S irksome. BEVERLY HILLS COP still worked, but boy was it slow slow slow between the funny bits.

If Ridley Scott can keep releasing longer and longer and more self-indulgent versions of BLADERUNNER, maybe editors could start releasing their shorter and shorter "editor's cut" of old movies? It's a rare 80's comedy that doesn't need a trim and a bit of a shave. (For the record, ANIMAL HOUSE totally holds up.)

Oh, and while we're at it, will someone trim all the episodes of MIAMI VICE down to half hours? I swear there's no more than 22 minutes of story in each, along with 22 minutes of hair.

UPDATE: A reader writes in:

I work for a network soap opera, and our show typically averages about 40 scenes per show (7 acts, 5-6 scenes per act on average). We recently reran an episode from fifteen years ago, and the entire show had 18 scenes total. Even since the mid-1990s, scenes on our show last half as long as they used to! Pretty wild how the pace of TV shows continues to accelerate.

Mecal

I was happy to find out that YOU ARE SO UNDEAD is selected for the 13th Mecal International Short Film Festival in Barcelona!

How Branching Stories Fail

Hunter showed me Survive the Outbreak, a video choose-your-own-adventure made to promote The Outbreak, another zombie movie. Basically there are cutscenes, then you choose one of two story options, and find out whether you die or survive.



While it was sort of interesting to fool around with the choices, I found it unfulfilling. Here's why. The seeds of a great ending start in thebeginning. A story that seems like it could go either way really can't. The beginning of a movie that has a sad ending foreshadows its tragedy, possibly in small ways. To be emotionally satisfying at the end, a movie that has a happy ending opens the door to the happy in the first ten minutes. (In my book I call that making a "contract" with the audience.)

You can't do that in a binary tree adventure. The beginning has to serve all possible endings.

In Survive The Outbreak, you'll note that in order to survive you have to be a good guy in one situation and a terrible guy in a similar situation. While life is like that, stories want a more consistent character. It's hard to get emotionally involved if we don't know who we're watching. Of course the tree could have been written more cleverly.

It is theoretically possible to write a binary tree adventure so that we reinterpret the beginning in different ways. The writers can create an ambiguous situation that resolves itself through later information; MEMENTO was all about that. But that is awfully hard to craft. There's a reason there's only been one MEMENTO.

No WGA Award for Red Dead 'cause...

According to The Escapist, Red Dead Redemption and Mass Effect 2 aren't up for Writers Guild of America Awards, 'cause Bioware and Take Two refused to submit scripts. Said WGA President Micah Wright:

Why? We don't know. Maybe they hate unions, or maybe they just hate winning awards, or maybe they have enough statues on their mantle. No way to know. So another game gets what would likely have been their nomination. Are we happy about it? No... but rules are rules and our rules are clear and very fair."

This came up because,

In an interview with GamesIndustry yesterday, Deus Ex: Human Revolution lead writer Mary De Marle said she was "kind of mad" about the WGA game writing awards because of the requirement that nominees must be Guild members. "To tout themselves as, 'This is the award that you want to get if you write in games,' that is not true, because they're not recognizing all the games that exist," she said.

However apparently if you're not a WGA member you can still join the Videogame Writers Caucus for $60 and qualify that way.

(Mary, you will recall, was kind enough to talk to us at our panel last month.)

As videogames move towards fulfilling stories, I hope more companies acknowledge their lead writers. A videogame is a collaborative enterprise, but so is a movie. And no one in the movie industry is diminished by people knowing who wrote what. I don't know, maybe companies are afraid that writers will get too much status and power. But it hasn't happened in the movies yet, so where's the problem?

Anyone in South Korea?

I'm looking for a Korean copy of CRAFTY SCREENWRITING; my publisher neglected to send me one. If you're a reader in South Korea, would you be kind enough to tell me how I could buy one?

Check In with your Hero

Today I blazed through about eight pages of script and then stalled. I knew what the next scene is, but I couldn't figure out what to put there.

I realized: this is the point where it might be a good idea to check in with my main character. She's in practically every scene of the movie. But only now and then do we get some alone time with her, to see how she's really feeling. (She's not someone who shows her feelings easily.)

You don't always have to make a whole scene out of checking in with your main character. It might be a glance in the mirror at the beginning of a scene, or a closeup of her face as she walks away from a scene. Sometimes, you don't even need to put the scene in the movie -- you can write the scene but keep it to yourself. But checking in with your main character can allow your story to take a breath and gather its strength for the next push. And it helps make sure your story isn't going off the rails.

Also, actors love it.

Walk Like An Egyptian