Working Title: The Sorries

Had a great time at the WGC Quebec's semi-annual free drinks get-together. We decided that since everyone in Toronto wants to visit Montreal, but only when everyone else in Toronto is here, we should pick an official weekend for Torontonians to visit.


Then the suggestion was put forward of an awards ceremony. But not just any awards ceremony. We already have the Genies and the Geminis and the Jutras and even more regional awards. These would have to be national awards. But what American award ceremony haven't we ripped off? Those'd have to be the Razzies, eh?


Ah, the Razzies: the award for the most spectacularly bad Screenplay, Direction, Performance in a Leading Role, etc. But you couldn't just vote someone a Canadian Razzie: that would be rude. No, people would have to submit their own films, by way of apology for their awful work, or the awful job that was done to their work. An award, if you will, by way of apology. Fortunately, Canadians are just self-loathing enough to do it. After all, if you write a real stinker, and you submit yourself for a Canadian Razzie, you're cool. If you don't, you're just the writer of a stinker. (As someday it may happen, I've got a little list, myself. But I'm not going to sing about it.)


And the name of these awards, to be doled out at a ceremony at, probably, McKibbins Pub, some time around the Montreal Film Festival -- whichever one we have left, that is -- shortly before the parties at TIFF? Why, inevitably, the SORRIES. Sorry is, after all, our national motto, isn't it?

So I'm putting you on notice, McGrath, Eriksen, Mohan, Fenn, KMac, etc. There will be a party in Montreal, some time towards the end of the summer. Sorries will awarded. We'll just have to work out a protocol for submissions and voting, but I'm sure Maureen can fill us in on that. Be ready to book your travel.

Treasure Island?

My kid wants to see a TREASURE ISLAND movie, done straight up (i.e. with neither cartoons nor muppets nor Cap'n Jack Sparrow). But none of the versions on IMDB seem to get decent ratings, at least not since the 1934 Lionel Barrymore/Wallace Beery one. Any recommendations?

And if there ARE none, maybe one of you should be working on one. (But don't call it TREASURE ISLAND, though, or execs will say "but there have been ten of them already!")

Zarathustra Said Some Things, No?

I saw my friends Lina Roessler and Brett Watson appear in ZARATHUSTRA SAID SOME THINGS, NO?, at the Théâtre La Chapelle on Friday. Lina's a real find. I met her on NAKED JOSH, where she was up for three totally different parts and nailed each character. (I'm still bummed she didn't get a bigger part.)

The play is a cheery psychodramas about a pair of deeply messed up people trying to find a perfect day to do themselves in. Okay, maybe not that cheery. But unlike so much contemporary theatre, there was a play there. They each wanted something from each other, and they needed something, and those two weren't the same things.

Most contempo plays I see these days, if they're about anything at all, this play was about backstory. It was not that hard to figure out what the secrets were that were going to be revealed, and it is a disease the contemporary theatre seems to have that you are just waiting for the characters to aria their Deep Dark Secret.

I try to keep character arias out of my screenplays because I find them annoying. I'd rather watch the behavior and guess where it's coming from. I especially try to avoid character arias in TV. One of the characters in the show I'm writing now starts off doing something seriously self-destructive. Why does she do it? Was she abused? Or is she just angry at her father setting a bad example? I'll let the audience chew on that for, I dunno, maybe the whole series. Once you reduce the character's pain to "my uncle raped me," the character seems smaller and less interesting somehow.

I liked how throughout THELMA AND LOUISE, it becomes clear that Louise was raped in Texas, and didn't get justice. But she never tells Thelma that.

A lot of the fun of a drama is figuring out what's going on with the characters. Why spoil the audience's fun by telling them outright?

But if you're trying to write an hour and a half of two characters talking to each other in one room, it becomes awful attractive to make it about the backstory. Otherwise, aren't they going to run out of stuff to talk about?

Of course, one can cite a kajillion counter examples of not-so-contemporary theater without backstory arias. WAITING FOR GODOT, for example. SAME TIME, NEXT YEAR. [I think. I haven't seen it.]

I don't think theatre built on a cathartic revelation of backstory is a function of what theatre can and can't do. I think it's a function of what film can do. If you have a romantic comedy story about two people that takes place in a room, you can write it as a play and make hundreds of dollars, or write it as a movie and make tens of thousands of dollars. (Or, if you're very successful, you can make hundreds of thousands from the play and millions from the movie.) I suspect the movies suck up all the ideas that can be movies, leaving situations that are all about character arias.

The movies' effect on theater strikes me as similar to photography's effect on painting. Photography nudged painting to become less representational because what is the point of spending days painting a scene photorealistically when someone can shoot a picture in a few seconds? Plays have to leverage the advantages they have: essentially, the ritual of the actors being in the same space. (And, I suppose, the relative cheapness of a theatre production; but in the age of YouTube, prosumer cameras and FinalCut, theatre is no longer cheaper.)

Another Goodie for Maritimers, B'yes

The 28th Atlantic Film Festival announces its Call for Feature Film Outlines for the Festival’s Inspired Script program. The Inspired Script program offers a unique opportunity for four Atlantic Canadian writers to develop their feature film outlines to treatments and pitch them at the 28th Atlantic Film Festival, September 11-20, 2008.

The program will culminate in the selection of one screenplay that will be eligible to receive a maximum of $20,000 in development financing from the presenting sponsors and allow the writer to work with a veteran story editor to help bring the treatment to a first draft script to be presented as the Script Out Loud at the 29th Atlantic Film Festival in 2009.

The deadline for submissions is Monday, May 5, 2008. The entry form is available for download from the AFF website at www.atlanticfilm.com under "For Filmmakers & Delegates." Participating writers will be announced in early June.

"We expect we'll see plenty of solid entries from the incredible screenwriters in Atlantic Canada as we roll out the 12th year of this remarkable development opportunity," says Lia Rinaldo, Festival Director. "Every year the program just keeps on getting stronger and stronger, there is certainly no shortage of great ideas in this region.

An Inspired Script jury will select the four outlines that will be developed into treatments that will then undergo two intensive weekend workshops under the guidance of [producer] Al Magee... The writers will then have the chance to work with Jan Miller to hone their pitching technique by participating in Jan's reputable Pitcher Perfect workshop. All four writers will take part in Inspired Script industry events at the 28th Atlantic Film Festival, including the Inspired Pitch & Matchmaking Session. These treatments will then be vetted back to a jury of Inspired Script sponsors who will choose the one that will receive further development funding for the next year. The chosen project will also receive a live, staged full read-through with local actors at Script Out Loud during the 29th Atlantic Film Festival.

Inspired Script is sponsored by Telefilm Canada and Astral Media the Harold Greenberg Fund. The winning treatment will be announced during the Atlantic Film Festival.

See? This is what I mean by Canada being a more nurturing cultural environment than LA.

MFA Programs Are...

Kristen Havens posts MFA Programs Are Bull****, and asks, "If you've been rejected from an MFA program for writing, ask yourself, "What would that degree have bought me, really." She hastens to specify that this applies to poetry and fiction programs, not screenwriting programs.

I think it's a good question, though. In fiction and poetry, what an MFA gets you is the ability to teach professionally at institutions that require an MFA for their professors. Other than that, you get teachers' advice on your writing, and admission to the official Poetry Writing Mafia. You may need those if you plan a poetry "career" where you get published in small presses and occasionally win grants and (because poetry doesn't pay) teach.

If you actually plan to be a poet, you don't need a poetry program. You need to write poetry that people who are not themselves poets want to read.

If you actually plan to write fiction, then write fiction. If it's good, someone will publish it. I can't imagine that racking up $40,000 in tuition debt helps you find the time to write. If you need someone breathing down your neck to get anything finished, get married.

I'm not that big on screenwriting programs, either. I think you can learn far more by going to work at a literary agency; and they will pay you for it. They pay bupkis, but at least you don't have to pay them. You'll get a sense of how the industry works, and what it wants, and what it doesn't want. Then you can write at home, and you'll have people to show your work to. My biggest problem with most screenwriting professors is they teach how to write a "good" screenplay, when what you actually need to write is a screenplay that someone wants to pay money for. Those are not the same things, as you know from the first chapter of my first book.

I'm not even that big on MFA filmmaking programs. These do more for you than screenwriting programs, because to make films, you need equipment, and you need friends who are willing to work for free, who love movies, and who know what an f-stop is. Filmmaking is a collaborative medium. While you can shoot your own videos at home, and edit on a Mac, it is much easier to get a crew in film school, and to work on other people's crews, than it is in Fargo.

On the other hand I think most people go to film school too soon, before they know anything. So they make the wrong calling card film (I did) and don't have anyone to show it to once it's made. I think it's better to spend a few years in LA working, and then go to film school. (Also, you'll be more likely to get in, and you'll be eligible for in-state tuition rates at UCLA, rather than the huge out-of-state rates.) My years at film school qualified me to get an assistant job working for a producer; years later, they helped me shoot a pretty good comedy short film. I think I could probably have got an assistant job anyway, you know?

So before you fork out tens of thousands of bucks for an MFA program, ask yourself if you really need to. What are you getting the credential for? No one in the arts cares about your degrees, unless you want to teach. What are you going to learn that you can't learn on your own?

That way, you'll most likely save a whack of dough; and even if you do decide to go to an MFA program, you will know to spend your time in the program focusing on learning those things that you cannot learn outside of one.

Teaching in Charlottetown, PEI in June

As part of the PEI Screenwriters Bootcamp, I'm teaching a four day seminar on TV writing in Prince Edward Island June 2-5, courtesy Telefilm and the Island Media Arts Cooperative. You must be a Canadian in the Maritimes to participate. The deadline is tomorrow but if you're interested, please email Louise Lalonde at youthinkyoucanwrite@yahoo.ca and let her know I sent ya. The website says the deadline is the 21st, but it's been extended to today, and if you can get your app in by Monday, I'm sure it'll be okay.

Sorry Screening at the Spoke

If you're in Toronto on Friday, April 11th, the Spoke Club (600 King Street West, 4th floor) will be hosting a 'live' broadcast of my short, 12 WAYS TO SAY "I'M SORRY" and others, starting at 7:30. The event is free and open to the public.

The Spoke is where we all go to start drinking before events like the WGC Awards, so you'll be in good company.

Les is Moore

Q. I am currently working on a spec pilot and have a series bible to accompany it. In the bible, I give synopses of each of the characters--long, one-page descriptions of the major characters, a few paragraphs for the supporting characters, and brief blurbs for the rest.

My question: how much of these descriptions should I carry over to the pilot, and embed into the teleplay?

On the one hand I don't want to clutter the script with a lot of material that is found in the Bible, both because it's redundant and because it breaks up the pace.

On the other hand, just introducing the lead character with "Claire, 23, has long hair, wears little makeup, and tends to favor clothing with a 60's and 70's flair" doesn't provide any context for her actions, and it seems likely that whoever is reading this thing is going to do so before plowing through the Bible.

A pilot should stand by itself. It should read like an episode of a show. It should leave you with a sense of having experienced a great episode of television, while clearly showing the reader what each episode of the series is going to be like (its template).

I keep description down to a minimum. I try to show what the character is like by having them immediately bust out a line that only they would ever say, and do something only they would ever do. So instead of saying, "JESSICA, 16, sarcastic and sulky," better to have Jessica just start in with, "Go ahead, be a dick about it."

Show, don't tell.

I generally avoid physical description of core cast because an actor reading for the part may be perfect, but feel dissed if you said "tall" and they're short, for example.

Try to avoid telling us overall details, anyway. How do we know Claire tends to favor clothing with a 70's flair? Just put her in a tie-dyed blouse.

In the US you generally go out with a pilot script, not with a bible. In Canada, because there's more development money floating around for political reasons, you can set up a project with a one-pager or a six-eight page pitch bible. I use the latter because I find it's hard to sell my ideas off a single page. These both contrast with the kind of bible you might see in a writer's room, which would have synopses of all the produced episodes, detailed character descriptions, etc. You would never go out with one of those. No one has the time to read one unless they're staffed on a show.

I wouldn't overdo descriptions in the bible, either. Tell us who the character is, not what he or she looks like. Tell us what he wants, what he's scared of, what is going to put him in conflict with the other members of the cast. You probably don't need to describe more than the core cast in the pitch bible, unless you have heavily recurring characters. If your show goes into production, someone may or may not put together character descriptions of minor characters, but those will change regularly anyway, so no need to do it now.