Back to Index Cards Agin

I'm rewriting a script of mine for a producer. I always felt the script was a little soft -- too much travelogue, not enough story. As usually happens with some time away, the script's weaknesses are so much more in evidence. Time away is almost as good at giving you perspective as a great writing partner.

So, it's back to index cards. Just because you've written the whole script doesn't mean index cards can't help. It's hard to restructure a script with script pages. Even if you have that much floor space, you can't physically see the whole thing. So I generate index cards and start marking them up and moving them around...

Teale's Up for Outstanding Performance in a Video Game!

On Contrast, we had the pleasure of working with the immensely talented, and tiny, Teale Bishopric. She brought our heroine Didi to life with her voice. She was such a pleasure to direct.

And now she's up for an ACTRA Award for Outstanding Perforance in a Video Game, alongside a whole bunch of industry veterans in AAA games!



At videogame dev conferences, I keep hearing how the voice acting process works in many AAA games. The actor isn't allowed to see the script until he's in the booth. Partly that is because of fanatic secrecy, partly because the writers wrote the script the night before.


This makes it very hard for an actor to do their best.


Guillaume, our studio head, and I, knew that a great performance from Didi would make the game, and a weak one would break it. So we rehearsed with her twice. I'm sure her father, Thor, who is a fine actor himself, rehearsed her a few times as well.


We also rehearsed all the other actors. We even got both Vanessa Mitsui and Elias Toufexis in the booth for the Kat/Johnny scenes, because we wanted the arguments to feel like real arguments. Sure, a good director can act the lines with the actor in the booth, and if I'm there in the moment acting with the actor, then I can tell if the performance is where I want it to be. But having both in the booth is more fun, and frees me to listen, and I think the performances show the results.


Yes, it takes time. And money. But actors love to rehearse, and if you give them the chance to rehearse, they will do whatever they can to make one happen. Rehearsing will save you time in the studio, which is far more expensive than rehearsal time, and you will get a much more human and compelling performance.


By the way, I don't really like to feed the recorded performance of one actor to the other, as sound engineers will offer to do, because I don't know how much time they're going to need, and the recorded performance will either cut them off, or give them a longeur to overcome. But I'm the writer, so I know what I want the lines to sound like, and I did some training as an actor, so I can modulate my own performance. If I want the other actor to get angry, instead of asking for an angrier reaction, I'll be more provocative. If I want the other actor to slow down, I'll slow down. Usually the writers are not the directors. And there's your excuse to take acting training.


Anyway, we're all so thrilled for Teale, and we hope she wins a shiny statue!

Jessica Nigri journalizes me

What I been working on...

Not to be confused with "My Father's Office"

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This is almost as good as a free membership to My Father's Office, a fine Irish pub on Montana in Santa Monica. But they don't have Aeron chairs.

All these moments lost in time, like tears in the rain.

Back in my days as a development exec in LA, I nearly worked with both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy. I was working for an Israeli producer out of his house in Tarzana; we were trying to make co-productions, to pick up enough money from this country and that to patch together a budget. Shatner signed on to be the star of our action movie, Warriors. We met him up at his house in the hills, and he had some really excellent points about his character's motivation. I went off and rewrote the script, and it was a lot better, and then foreign buyers nixed Shatner as the lead -- we literally could not finance a $2M movie with Shatner in the lead. So we had to apologize to Captain Kirk and cast Gary Busey.

That was before Free Enterprise, in which Shatner discovered that he could play a pompous buffoonish version of himself to great hilarity, which gave him Denny Crane, his brilliant Boston Legal character, and he became a star again.

The Gary Busey movie did not turn out brilliantly. I am not 100% sure Busey ever actually read the script. I'd guess he did not read it before we started shooting. But that's another story. (Actually Gary Busey is a whole flock of my stories.)

Later, we had a movie about the Israeli air strike on the nuclear reactor in Baghdad. Saddam was about to get the bomb in 1981 and the Israelis flew a bunch of F-16's across Jordan and Iraq and blew it up. They did such a good job of flying literally under the radar that the Iraqis thought it had to be the Iranians, until the Israelis admitted it.

Hollywood Pictures, a Disney film label, optioned the project. Soon, Leonard Nimoy wanted to direct it. So we had a lovely breakfast up at the Bel Air Hotel in Stone Canyon -- it's a series of bungalows nestled among trees -- and it was the first time that I'd realized that Leonard Nimoy was an old Jewish guy. He had smart things to say. He grokked the project. He liked my rewrite of the script.

And then Hollywood Pictures got excited about Jan de Bont, a Dutch cinematographer who wanted to direct, and they jettisoned Nimoy. I never felt that de Bont had any particular emotional attachment to the project, like Nimoy did; he just wanted to direct and here a studio was offering him a movie. Two years and $600,000 in rewrites later, Hollywood Pictures pulled the plug on the project. We had various conspiracy theories about why the only film label in town with no Jewish execs would do a movie about the Israeli Air Force; we found it interesting that they pulled the plug shortly after Disney successfully bid for Israel's second (or fourth, or something) broadcast TV channel.

So we never got to work with Kirk or Spock. Damn it.

It's interesting that in all the mourning for Mr. Nimoy, I don't hear the name of the guy who invented Spock, Gene Roddenberry. Nimoy so thoroughly inhabited the role over the years that we forget that Roddenberry invented Spock and the whole Vulcan species. It was Nimoy, though, who invented the Vulcan salute. It's a rabbinical gesture; the hand forms a "shin," the W-shaped Hebrew letter which stands for "El Shaddai," the Almighty: may God be with you.

"A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory," was Leonard Nimoy's last tweet, and it is true, and profound. And it made me think of Roy Batty dying on the rooftop of the Bradbury building, saying words that David Peoples wrote and Rutger Hauer rewrote: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. I've seen attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in the rain."

I have something in my eye.

I wish there was a Vulcan "rest in peace."

May God be with you on the next step in your journey.

What Have I Been Up To Lately?

We'll reveal quite a bit more next week at PAX East, but in the mean time ... welcome to Wellington Wells. 

Spectacular, Spectacular

Q. ... although the Avengers did have killer dialogue, my problem with the plot was that all the action felt contrived - some really flimsy excuses for the heroes turning against each other, all the bad guys dying after they took out the controller, and so on.

Well, the heroes turning against each other was the answer to generations of fanboys' "do you think Hulk could beat Thor?"-type argument, so it was brilliant to have those entirely concocted fights in the movie.

The movie was an entertainment, eh? Audiences come to movies for multiple reasons. One is story, sure. But the other is spectacle. The pod racing in Star Trek I was gratuitous and sort of pointless, but the intended audience (kids who buy branded merchandise) ate it up. 

Yeah, all the bad guys dying was convenient, but I think a the audience can figure out that without the controller, the aliens would eventually have been hunted down and destroyed like the orcs after Sauron's demise. No one wants to see a mop-up operation. Much, much better to end the movie with the superheroes getting shawarma. 

I mean, a movie is a movie. I know you can't hack a computer or a network the way they do in movies, but it would be really super boring to watch real hacking, so I don't care. 

I think a good rule is you can do something convenient in order to avoid something boring. 

Fresh Fish Sold Here Daily

Q. I'm an aspiring author working on a novel, and have been doing so for some time. Recently a mass-market summer blockbuster was announced with several plot and thematic elements - and even one of the main character's names! - virtually identical to those in my drafts. What should I do? Should I scrap it immediately?

My immediate reaction is that if your story is so close to a recent blockbuster that you are thinking of scrapping it, you may not be leveraging the medium. A novel can have more going on than a movie. It can expand and contract time. It can get into the characters' heads. It can have a cast of thousands. It can talk about society.

Q. Alter it to be less like the movie? Wait for the film to come out and get a consensus of some kind? If so, is it better if it's a classic, a bomb, or decent and forgotten?

Well, a bomb, certainly, has less of a footprint. Our last game was known for its "shadow physics." There had actually been an unsuccessful game called, I think, Shadow Physics. But it didn't work well, I gather, so there was room for ours.

However, I'd consider writing something else that's fresher. If your novel is too similar to a summer blockbuster, that suggests to me that your plot is not spectacularly fresh, "a very ancient and fish-like smell, a kind of not-of-the-newest Poor John," as Shakespeare had it. Very few summer blockbusters have clever plots.

To get attention in a crowded market, you really need to do something that no one else has done well recently. For example, George R. R. Martin took the Tolkien tropes, took out most of the magic, and added outlandish sexual misbehavior.

As I keep stressing: your movie or novel or game has to be clever and original. Just because there are hugely successful unoriginal movies/novels/games out there doesn't mean you'll get rich writing one. Those things are commissioned by people with lots of money, and they have marketing budgets.