Songs Pre Lyrics

Q. I'm not a songwriter, so it's probably a bad idea for me to pretend to be, no?

But then what do I do in the script? Especially when the lyrics are helping move the story forward?

• JOHN
• (song)
• [Verse 1]

But that doesn't tell you what the content of the song is.

Another idea is:

• JOHN
• (song)
• [Verse 1, about how he wishes she would stay]

I'm hoping neither of those is right, because they're awfully clunky. And I'm hoping I don't have to write the lyrics myself, because chances are the lyrics wouldn't be more elegant than what's above. And I can't afford to bring a songwriter aboard before I get funding.

If you're not a lyricist, just describe the song. But I would do it in the action, not in dialog. It confuses the reader when there are things in dialog that aren't dialog.

I would venture to say it is almost impossible to get a movie musical set up that's not based on a Broadway musical that's already a hit. The person writing in, though, is writing a short film, and the financing is apparently not an issue.

You can do the same thing if there's a song on the radio: "There's a song on the tinny radio, a sad song that sort of fills the air without grabbing your attention." You don't need to write the lyrics for that, either.

Stalkers in Cinema

I've been reading Gavin de Becker's book THE GIFT OF FEAR, about how you should pay attention when your intuition tells you that the person in front of you is dangerous.

He makes an interesting claim about movie romances: that a lot of them glorify stalking, and / or abusive behavior.

It was The Graduate. In it, Dustin Hoffman dates a girl and then asks her to marry him. She says no, but he doesn't hear it. He waits outside her classes at school and asks again, and then again. Eventually she writes him a letter saying she's thought it over carefully and decided not to marry him. In fact, she is leaving town and marrying another man. That would seem a pretty clear message -- but not in the movies.

Hoffman uses stalking techniques to find her. He pretends to be a friend of the groom, then a family member, then a priest. Ultimately he finds the church and breaks into it just seconds after Katharine Ross is pronounced the wife of another man. He then beats up the bride's father, hits some other people, and wields a large wooden cross against the wedding guests who try to help the family.

And what happens? He gets the girl. She runs off with Dustin Hoffman, leaving her family and new husband behind. Also left behind is the notion that a woman should be heard, the notion that no means no, and the notion that a woman has a right to decide who will be in her life.

I dunno. Is that still true? THE GRADUATE was a long time ago. Would we find Ben's behavior a bit stalkery now?

On the other hand, Disney's BEAUTY AND THE BEAST is about a guy who threatens a girl's father with death in order to get her to move in with him, prevents her from leaving, yells and screams and breaks things, generally terrorizing her ... and she falls in love with him.

On the other hand, Disney movies often have terrible morals. I can't help watching THE LION KING and wondering why Simba deserves to be king of anything, and why the animals of the savannah don't deserve a say in who's going to be their ruler.

Do movie romances still glorify stalkery and abusive behavior that's excused because we see everything from the deluded point of view of the hero? Discuss.

Long Treatments of the Past?

I've heard from a few different people that during the old studio system days of Hollywood screenplays were written from lengthy treatments. I've heard as high as 300 pages. Were these regularly produced before screenplays?

Beats me. I do know that Telefilm asks for a twenty-page treatment before you go to script, and I find that unbearably long. At that point you're writing dialog, you're just not writing it in the format.

Many people have learned how to read a script, but few people really know how to read a treatment. So it may be that to communicate all the things that a good script does, some writers overwrote.

But it seems to me a good way to take all the fun out of writing the script.

Hook Me Up

Emerging writer/blogger Mary Pedersen gets it about the need for a premise. Here are her twin posts about why you need a hook, and what happens when you don't have one.

Oh, and don't forget to check out my online seminar on The Hook!

The Star Wars

Mystery Man on Film blogs about the early drafts of STAR WARS:

Let it be said, my friends, that the early drafts of Star Wars should be a rich source of encouragement to every aspiring screenwriter the world over - because they royally sucked. They are of the same low, amateurish quality that may be found in many first screenplays written by newbies on TriggerStreet. (Thus, many scripts and new writers have the potential to reach Star Wars heights.) Had Star Wars never happened, had Lucas uploaded his first draft onto TriggerStreet, and had he theoretically asked me to review his script for him, I’m not sure I could’ve even finished reading the darn thing.

I read that first draft. It is shockingly bad. Huge hunks of steaming unsayable dialog. Crappy space opera plot. Incoherent narrative.

But if you're willing to throw out your darlings and rework, you too can come up with something shootable, and good.

The post has links to the drafts, btw.

Meanwhile, CHUD has an interesting analysis of what went wrong in the TERMINATOR: SALVATION rewrites after Christian Bale came on board.

Glee

We watched the GLEE pilot. I was surprised at how rough it was. There were a lot of what seemed to me like beginner's mistakes, which may account for the plunging ratings over the course of the airing. (According to Entertainment Weekly,"it held on to less than half of its tailor-made Idol lead-in and, more worrisome, dropped 3.5 million viewers over the course of the 60 minutes.")

SPOILERS...

1. It's a show about a high school glee club and the teacher who supervises it. Yet, weirdly, the teaser showed cheerleaders going through their paces, and ended with the cheerleading coach telling them, "You think this is hard? Waterboarding is hard." What? No glee club. No glee club teacher. The teaser for a pilot for a series wants to be the series in microcosm. It either shows you who it's about -- Meredith Grey waking up from her one-night stand and then discovering he's a doctor at her new hospital -- or it shows you what it's about -- the clever BUFFY pilot teaser which shows you that vampires are alive and well, uh, or at least well, in Sunnydale's high school.

2. Then you want to quickly set up the driving question for the episode, so we know what we're rooting for. The episode ends with the glee club teacher deciding to coach glee club after doubting whether he should, because his wife wants him to be an accountant, not a teacher. Therefore Screenwriting 101 tells you that the episode needs to start with that question: can he / should he / dare he coach glee club? Because we want to be rooting for the eventual ending.

Instead, it starts with glee club auditions. And then the hero volunteers to coach glee club. Even offers to pay $60 a month to do it. (Huh?) It doesn't become clear that coaching glee club will be a problem for him until act 3 or 4 or so. So we're not rooting for him to coach, because he already is coaching. Instead, we're rooting for the club to win a regional competition, because we're told that the club will be canceled otherwise. That's different jeopardy.

Meanwhile, the audition sequence belonged to a pilot where there was no glee club to begin with. Tragically, though, we didn't get to hear anyone sing except the kids who were chosen. It's always fun to watch people audition badly. That's one of those Sequences that Always Work. But if the pilot is supposed to be about whether this teacher will get up the gumption to coach glee club, then you don't have auditions because there already is a glee club. If there isn't a glee club already, then we don't really need to worry about glee club being shut down because there wasn't one to begin with!

If you are going to end with the glee club teacher braving his wife's displeasure (!) to coach glee club after all, then you'd think the story would be something like this: previous glee club teacher is fired for feeling up a student. Principal says "we're going to have to shut down glee club unless we can find someone qualified to coach it." Hero teacher says, "I can't afford to do this permanently but I'll do it until someone qualified comes along." And then he comes to love the kids and when they finally say, "we can't find anyone permanent, we're going to shut it down" he finally decides to do it.

Oh, and you have to throw in some better obstacles to his saying yes. Not "we can't find a space to sing in." The club is a mess. The kids hate each other. They fight over parts. They're singing the wrong parts for their voices. They sound like crap. They're all on the verge of quitting.

3. Be brave. The show is supposedly about what misfits glee club kids are. And they've got a bunch of misfits: geek in a wheelchair, sassy fat black chick, Asian lesbian, suspiciously high-voiced effeminate boy. And we all love misfits who succeed, because most of us have felt like misfits at one point or another. But what happens is that the teacher blackmails a handsome football player into joining glee club because he heard the guy sing in the shower, and no one will support the glee club unless the "popular kids" are in it. So now the fantasy is ruined. The moral stops being "you can sing your way out of being a loser" and now it's "only handsome jocks need apply." It doesn't help that the handsome jock can't actually sing anywhere near as well as the effeminate boy. Meanwhile, the sassy fat black girl (! what is this, the 80's?) with the killer voice gets relegated to backing vocals because, um, she's a fat black girl.

What if the lead guy is more like Adam Lambert? Instead of a handsome jock, he's a pudgy red-headed bisexual kid who gets the crap beaten out of him? But onstage he becomes a star. And the sassy fat black girl is the lead girl?

That show I'd watch.

I know, America voted for Kris Allen. But I don't think Kris Allen can carry a show. He's nice enough, but no one tunes in every week for "nice enough." And there were 32 million votes for Adam Lambert. Who knows how many actual voters there were (those 12 year old girls are pretty handy with their text messaging), but there ought to be enough to carry a show.

4. You sure you want this show to be about a teacher? Is that some kind of weird co-viewing deal because it's a 9 pm show? the show seemed confused about this, too. The two cute white singers got a backstory sequence each, complete with voice over. The teacher didn't. The fat sassy black chick, the Asian lesbian, the effeminate kid and the cripple don't get any introduction at all. We spend a lot of time with the teacher and his wife, whom we're supposed to hate; could we spend some of that time getting to know the students in the glee club, and in particular, setting up a love triangle or two in there?

It's theoretically a show about a glee club, but the kids spend almost no time interacting with each other. So it comes across as a show about a mopey high school teacher who's trying to relive his glory days as a high school glee club star. Which, let's face it, is a bit pathetic.

If you're chasing the tween and teen audiences, especially the HIGH SCHOOL MUSICAL audience, why on Earth would you make it about the teacher instead of the kids?

5. Tone. Was this show trying to be a realistic drama? Or a campy send-up? The teachers seemed cartoonishly fun. But we're actually supposed to take the handsome jock's angst seriously. But the jock bullies are outlandishly vicious. (Seriously, picking on kid in a wheelchair?) But we're supposed to believe they're real. I remember watching ROBIN HOOD PRINCE OF THIEVES and thinking that I'd like to watch the movie Alan Rickman was in, but I wasn't very interested in the movie Kevin Costner was in. The characters didn't seem like they were in the same TV show.

6. Period. Relegating all the minorities to supporting characters? What is this, the 90's? Myspace pages? Isn't that, like, so fifteen minutes ago?


I don't think this show will be on the air long. But it was certainly instructive to watch. It's often easier to learn from a show's mistakes than from its successes, because the mistakes show where the seams are.

A la Peanut Butter Samwiches!

A fellow wrote me to ask whether he should take a certain free week-long workshop; the downside was losing a week of salary, and he's broke.

One of the marks of someone who's going to make it in the biz is the willingness to make sacrifices. I wrote him back to ask if a month or two of Kraft Dinner would clear up his finances. There are going to be times when you need to be painfully frugal in order to be able to afford to take certain breaks. For example, the mailroom jobs at major agencies pay ridiculously little.

Of course it's easier if Daddy's subsidizing, and you're up against people who are being subsidized. But if you're living on whole wheat peanut butter sandwiches (cheap as KD but a lot healthier), you will have a motivator they won't have. While they're out partying, you'll be at home staring at the TV, analyzing the act breaks, and thinking how the hell do I get promoted out of the mailroom so I can afford cucumbers?.

As Terry Rossio says, "it is a rare man who succeeds in the face of comfort."

This is, by the way, the real reason why Hollywood seems to be ageist. It's not, really, but in your twenties it's easier to work all day and all night, and live in a crappy room in an apartment with four other people. When you have kids, not so much.

When you have money, live frugally anyway. Store up your money so you can afford to seize your opportunities. I turned down a job interning on one of the very first digital editing systems, because they refused to pay anything. I'm not sure the other things I did with the time would have been more useful in the long run. (In my defense, I wasn't really interested in editing as a career.)

Right now I'm at a relative lull. Oh, I'm writing a pilot and I have a lot of irons in the fire, but the money isn't flowing in like last year. Fortunately I've got a few years in the bank. Otherwise I'd be looking at writing animation scripts that would do nothing for my brand, or teaching lots of seminars, or who knows what.

There are items you need to look successful. Everyone seems to have an iPhone these days. In LA, there's a point in your career past which you can't afford to drive a beater any more. (Hint: a vintage Mustang is cheaper than a Lexus.) And unless you're really broke, grabbing the check is usually a swell move.

But most of us spend 10% or 20% of our money on things we don't really, really, truly need. Starbucks. Dinner out. Drinks out. Movies on the weekend. (Many theatres have one cheap night, and often the first show is free. You have to see movies, but you don't have to see them Saturday.) Not paying your credit card off in full. Bite the bullet on those things a bit. The time will come when you'll feel really smart about it.

New Perspective

I rarely link to other screenwriting blogs 'cause you're probably reading them. But this one from John August seems particularly cool and I don't want you to miss it.

The question is "how do I keep rewriting when I've lost perspective." August offers three techniques:

• Challenge yourself to remove one seemingly important scene. Imagine what would happen if the actor you needed died during production, and that scene never got shot. Could you work around it? Could you make the movie better for its absence?
• Push yourself to use better words. Particularly in the back half of a script, there’s a tendency to get a bit sloppy and repetitive. Make that scene description on page 98 as sharp as it was on page 13. Here’s a test: Are you using “there are?” If so, you could do better.
• Imagine a secondary plot that we’re not seeing. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, perhaps there’s an offscreen adventure taking place that a reader will never see. Only you as the writer will know it’s there. Dangerous? Sure. But on your fifth draft, a little danger may be what you need.

Each of these is the moral equivalent of standing on a chair to help find your wallet. You'll see the terrain differently. Try it.