Style Sheet?

Q. Your website no longer has available the Word style sheet you mentioned in your book. Is it no longer available?

It's been superseded. There are free screenplay formatting programs around, like MindStar's Script Editor and Celtx and Scripped and Zhura. Check'em out.

Show Us How Clever You Are, If Necessary

When you're writing a spec, you try to nail the template. You try to get the character voices right, and the pace of the show, and the sets they use. You try to internalize the do's and don't's of the series you're speccing.

What about when you know the show better than the reader? Won't that get you into trouble? Say, for example, you're doing a SPONGEBOB spec, as Lisa recently did. If you know your SPONGEBOB, you know that the adorable-yet-slightly-irritating young sponge frequently gets worked up over the crabby patties he serves, and often calls them "Patty."

If your reader has only seen a few SPONGEBOBs, that may seem weird. Or to take another example that came up in these pages, lately there have been a lot of new assistants on BONES; they don't last long. It's generally considered bad form in a spec to introduce new characters, other than the episodic characters every procedural has (the victims, the perps). But in the case of BONES, you have to.

If you're doing something that is correct for the show, but which a casual viewer of the show may not realize is correct, my advice would be to hang a lantern on it. In the case of BONES, have a character say, "Oh God, not another new assistant. What is that, three this week? One more and we've got a dining room set." (Or, the good version of that.)

In the case of SPONGEBOB, you could have a character say something on the order of, "You sure do get worked up about Patty."

Obviously don't do a lot of this, or it will get annoying. But if there's something important that you feel a casual viewer may not realize actually is the show, feel free to make sure we know how clever you are.

The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon

CMF Consultation

I'm pretty much a jeans guy, but yesterday I got duded up in a blazer and overcoat to go to the Canada Media Fund consultation session, along with about forty other writers, producers and documentary hyphenates. Valerie Creighton has been winging her way across Canada to ask industry stakeholders what the CMF should do and be.

The CMF is an arranged marriage between the Canadian Television Fund and the equivalent new media fund. The idea is to fund Canadian audio-visual content. But how? Everyone wants more pie.

WGC members Anne-Marie Perrotta, Gerry Lewis, Doug Taylor, Dan Williams and Lienne Sawatsky, Laurie Finstad, Rodney Gibbons and I were there to bring up creators' concerns. We want Canadian taxpayer money to go to Canadians telling Canadian stories. We want any "return on investment" formula to consider "creating culture" as the major return on investment: when Canadians see Canadian stories, it binds us together as a nation, and when foreigners see Canadian stories, they get a sense of us as a people. The point of the CMF isn't to get money back, it's to create popular culture.

I didn't say, but I should have, that the "return on investment" from documentaries is that people learn stuff, and the ROI from children's programming is kids learn stuff. Jesse saw a picture of the Eiffel Tower the other day and busted out "The Eiffel Tower is in France!" She must have picked that up from children's programming. She also seems to know what a glockenspiel is. I had to look it up.

The CMF is going to be split into "convergent" and "experimental" streams. "Convergent" means that when you bring in a TV show, they want you to tell them how there's going to be synergy with other audiovisual media, e.g. a videogame or a web application. That sounds clever and forward thinking, but as I said at the panel, would FLASHPOINT really be more popular or better if it had an Alternate Reality Game? Would it really make sense to have a FLASHPOINT videogame, where you try not to shoot people?

The experimental stream is sort of "everything except TV," and naturally video game producers are trying to up the percentage of the Experimental stream to 25% of the CMF; current spending would put it about 15%. Of course we were there to say that if the CMF is funding a digital or internet production, it should satisfy the same Cancon creator requirements as a TV production.

As Martin Brouard points out, "experimental" might not be the right word, since videogames are not exactly "experimental." I propose re-dubbing the stream "Emerging." Then you could have "Converging" and "Emerging" streams.

There was some arguing back and forth whether "Lifestyle/Reality" should be a supported genre. My take on that is that Lifestyle/Reality seems to do just fine without help, whereas documentaries and drama are not going to get made without CMF funding.

I do differ with the official WGC position on "setting" being part of the essential requirements for Cancon. If a Canadian director and writer want to shoot a movie with Canadian actors that happens to be set in, say, Ouagadougou, I think it should be eligible. What's important is that it's a story being told by Canadians. I can see the arguments on the other side, though, so feel free to opine in the comments.

I have to say I appreciate the outreach involved in this session, and the 17 other sessions taking place across the country. In the States, the government does no such thing. If you want to talk to the policy makers, you have to hire lobbyists, or contribute major bucks to their campaigns. We got a free lunch and an open ear.

A Man, A Plan, A Canal: My New Movie

Q. What should be my subject line when I am sending query emails?

You want the victim recipient to open the email, right? Put the hook in the subject line. At least, as much of it as you need in order to get them to open it.

SUBJECT: A man discovers he has been replaced by his clone...

Or, if you have a great title, put that:

SUBJECT: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist...

Or, the theme:

SUBJECT: Can men and women ever really be best friends?

Actually, that last one reads like spam. And so would this:

SUBJECT: I know what you did last summer...

So you need to clarify that:

SUBJECT: Can men and women ever really be best friends? WHEN HARRY MET SALLY... a comedy script.
SUBJECT: I Know What You Did Last Summer... a horror script.

I guess the real answer to the question "what should my subject line be?" is whatever gets someone to read your email!

Don't CUT TO:

Q. Your book talks about how to use CUT TO:

I've been after Henry Holt to let me do a second edition of CRAFTY SCREENWRITING for just this sort of thing. No one uses CUT TO: any more. The occasional WIPE TO: for comic effect, or a FLASHBACK TO: and then a BACK TO:, because you really need those to stand out. SPLIT SCREEN is crucial if you're using that device. But plain old CUT TO is old hat and wastes real estate.

Sorry 'bout that!

Q. In a recent spec, I didn't include any of these kind of directions, except for a couple of 'close up on XXX' and 'ANGLES'. Is this ok or too minimalistic?

Try to avoid "We are CLOSE ON:" and "ANGLE ON". These are shooting script directions. They don't really belong in a spec or a selling draft. They don't really belong in a shooting draft, either, unless you're the showrunner and you really don't trust your director to shoot the scene the right way, in which case why the heck did you hire him?

HCD

Q. I just subscribed to the online HCD, but I do not find any email's of any known production houses there, like Warner Bros, Dreamworks, Sony Pictures etc. Please help as I don't know whom to send my query letter to.

Those aren't production houses, those are studios. There's no point in querying a studio directly.

You wouldn't query studios, you'd query production companies. The Hollywood Creative Directory (printed or online) lists production companies, their personnel and email addresses. You would want to query the development people.

Many production companies have deal at studios; they're "on the lot." They'll have first-look deals with whichever studio whose gates they drive through in the morning.

I can't speak to how well querying producers works. I think it's very hard to get your script read if you don't have an agent. If any reader has got their script read by querying producers, please let us know.

HB2U

According to Robert Brauneis's extensively researched "Copyright and the World's Most Popular Song," "Happy Birthday to You" is not under copyright after all.

This will come as a shock to most of you, to whom it had never occurred that "Happy Birthday to You" was ever under copyright.

However, if you've ever wondered why people were singing "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" at a birthday party in a low-budget movie, the specific reason has been that Warner Chappell claims it owns the song, which brings in a staggering $2,000,000 a year in royalties. That, in spite of the music dating back to 1893.

The general reason is that Disney, in its efforts to keep a certain mouse under copyright, has convinced Congress to extend copyright to a ridiculous 95 years, thus slowing the spread of culture.

Brauneis's paper is a step in the right direction. But I doubt any Errors and Omissions lawyer will be willing to take a chance on not paying royalties to Warner Chappell; at least until someone actually gets a judgment that HB2U is public domain.

So we'll probably continue to hear "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" in student films and D2DVD movies. Though, arguably, you could have people hum it...