Unfaithful Adaptations Are the Best

Q. Picked up a paperback (interesting blend of action and horror) at the local dollar store and when I finally got round to reading it, liked it enough to inquire about optioning film rights. They are available.

Tha author's LA agency strongly suggests "partnering" with a producer who will let me write the adaptation. They also would be receptive to an offer by me.

I don't have a strong relationship with a film maker to trust not getting cut out of the picture. That leaves the scenario of making an attractive offer, writing the thing, then doing The Shopping (without an agent, of course). Sheeesh!

Here's the thing. A bestseller is valuable to a producer or a studio. It is a bankable element. There is a proven audience for this world and this story. Most books you find at the dollar store are proven to have a small audience. So basing your screenplay on one may not be helpful.

On the other hand, how faithful an adaptation do you plan to make? You can't copyright an idea. You can only copyright the expression of an idea. E.g. no one can copyright "girl romanced by vampire"; they can only copyright a girl named Bella being romanced by a creepy stalkery sparkly vampire and a hot werewolfey dude on the West Coast, etc. etc.

Novels don't usually adapt well to movies, because the plot of a movie is basically a short story.

(Some novelists write in a very cinematic easy-to-adapt style. There are reasons every John Grisham novel gets an adaptation, and being best sellers is only one of them. They generally have only one or two points of view, and time flows at a regular pace. There's no, "Over the course of the next few years, Johnny came to understand...." Everything that happens in them is a scene involving at least one of a core cast of a few people talking, fighting or going somewhere in a hurry. There are few flashbacks. You always know exactly what is happening and who it's happening to. The characters have very little inner life unless it's also expressed in dialog. Etc.)

So the best adaptation is often an unfaithful one, or rather, one that is faithful to the theme and the spirit of the novel, not the details of the plot. An introverted character may need to become talkative. A long thought process will need to become a verbal argument. You will almost certainly merge characters and cut others.

It may be that your unfaithful adaptation winds up so far from the novel that you really only have to change the names of the characters, and you no longer need to option the novel.

Now, I'm not a lawyer, and no lawyer is likely to tell you exactly where that line is. But consider that Fifty Shades of Grey started out as Twilight fanfic. And consider that there are a bazillion books and a bazillion scripts and really not that many plots.

This approach will also free you to write a better screenplay. You can usually tell a movie adapted from a book because there are scenes that are cool that don't really forward the story: that's the screenwriter trying to keep a scene from the book that really doesn't fit in the movie.

So what I would do in your case is read the book and then put it away somewhere. Do not read it again. Write a script based on it. And by "write a script," I mean, as always, tell it as a story, orally, over and over to anyone who will listen, until you can tell the entire story off the top of your head because it flows so naturally. You will wind up adding scenes. You will forget a lot of scenes; oh well, they were forgettable.

After you've finished writing the script, reread the book and see if you have stolen anything copyrightable. My guess is you will not have.

You have now saved a few thousand bucks, and you can't get removed from the project.

Not everyone will agree with this advice, and the line between copyrightable and not copyrightable is not bright and clear. But the times I've optioned material it's generally been a pain in the ass that I optioned it, especially because the script came out so differently than the source material. So there you go.

Note also that this process is not how producers generally approach adaptation. That's because (a) they have money (b) scripts cost more money to them than options (c) they can take a book and an option to someone else to give them money. Hence the above is not how, say, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds gets made. But if you're a screenwriter without a track record, then optioning a book may not be the best way to go.

Sketch Comedy Pitch Questions

Q. I've been writing comedy sketches. The producer of a sketch comedy show said I could follow up with him next month.
When I follow up with him, shall I ask if they’re accepting pitches and include a short pitch for my work or just stick to asking if they’re accepting pitches?

A. Wait till you’re asked, I think.

Q. I’ve written lots of one-page queries for novels/short stories and picture books (which, usually, also want you to include the first 10 pages of your book or an entire picture book or short story). I’m assuming, that for screen, these are even shorter pitches? I was thinking I’d pitch about three sketches to start, so maybe just a line each?

Sounds good.

Q. I’ve been reading some on screenwriting format and all my sketches will be formatted to what I have read on very basic style. Do you think they’ll be really sticky on how perfect the format is/isn’t? (i.e. including title pages for each sketch, camera instructions etc.)

I can’t imagine they’re too sticky about how to format sketches, so long as they’re in regular screenplay format. I would never include camera instructions unless they're essential to a joke. Personally I wouldn’t put title pages on sketches; you don’t want anything getting between the funny and the reader. But I’m not a sketch comedy writer.

"The Churn"

Javi Grillo-Marxuach asserts in Forces of Geek that Star Wars: TLJ is neither good nor bad.

The Churn is the process where creators keep going back to the same well to make stories in the same vein. It starts coming out all mac and cheese.

There will always be another rogue Jedi who has been in hiding, another bounty hunter with strange powers that boggle those who rely on The Force, another brilliant officer of the Galactic Empire with a plan so dangerous (usually involving a heretofore unknown planet killing weapon hidden by Emperor Palpatine before his death) that it could mean the fate of the galaxy (in at least one occasion, it was a double of a brilliant officer who was propped up by other brilliant officers in order to use his PR value as a brilliant officer to revive the Galactic Empire).

Of course that's presumably what the mainstream audience wants. They're paying fifteen bucks to see a small bunch of plucky rebels duke it out with the forces of the Empire and the Dark Side; that's the goods they're buying. To make a different sort of movie would be a commercial and artistic risk.

What would a different sort of movie look like?

Spec Ops: The Line is a video game that keeps coming up among game devs. It is the seventh in a series of third-person shooter games in the Spec Ops franchise. However, the developers hired to design it decided to completely hijack the franchise. The game bitterly mocks shooters and their 30-something rough-tough badass white dude heroes. Somewhere along the line, you realize that you are not playing the hero, you are, in fact, the villain.

Any similarity to the US experience in Vietnam and other places Americans have gone to liberate people is, I assume, intentional.

What's interesting to me is that the devs hijacked the franchise. SO:TL does indeed have all the things you'd expect in a third-person military shooter. It just develops an unexpected theme.

What if the next creator called on to make a Star Wars movie decides to make their own movie in the Star Wars universe? In other words, treat Star Wars as a territory, not a template?

Well, they almost certainly get fired, unless they're a 500-pound gorilla in their own right -- e.g. James Cameron. But let's suppose they don't.

They could then make a fluffy Star Wars action comedy à la Guardians of the Galaxy. They could make a Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon type action romance. They could make a tense Das Boot-style drama. They could make a Seven-type serial killer movie. They could make an Alien-style horror movie.

All of these probably have a bit of run and jump; things surely blow up. I don't think anyone wants to see the Star Wars universe version of On Golden Pond. Someone almost certainly has Force powers.

But instead of trying to remake Star Wars IV: A New Hope for the nth time, they're opting out of the Churn.

The King Arthur story lives on because people keep appropriating it for their own purposes. I once perpetrated a novel about the childhood of Morgan le Fay, the half-sister of King Arthur. (The Circle Cast, it's called, and it's been translated into German.) I wanted to tell the story of a really angry young woman coming of age and coming into her power. If I'd just tried to rewrite T. H. White's Once and Future King, there would have been no point.

Of course it is very unlikely that you, dear reader, have been asked to write the next Star Wars. But you may one day be faced with the Churn. I think a way out is to ask yourself if you can hijack the franchise. Can you tell a story you want to tell within the franchise? Or can you re-examine the franchise and find things in it that were there all along, underneath the franchise elements that everyone knows?

We are all writing in a culture, which means that everything we create involves some stealing. But make it your own — if necessary, without telling anyone.

Steal, but make it your own.

"How do I get into game writing?"

Q. What advice can you give me that would help me land a position writing for game narrative?

It helps to be able to do more than one thing. So, for example, if you knew how to use Unreal, that would be a big plus. I don’t. So someone coming in at entry level, who can read a blueprint and figure out what field needs to be changed, well, there would be an extra reason to bring them in.

The best way to get your first writing job in video games is probably being a successful writer in another field who is also a gamer. The second best is probably still to be in another job, any other job, in the same room with one or more writers. I know people have got into writing from QA and from art in the past. Then the moment someone offers to let you write something, pounce on it like an Arctic fox who's seen something small move under the snow.

Lisa long ago was in an office where she was not paid to write things. Someone asked if she wanted to do a book review. She pulled an all nighter and wrote a great book review. After that, they went to her for book reviews. You'd be amazed how many supposed would-be writers don't jump at every chance they get to write. When I was still in school I was offered $1000 to write a two drafts and a polish of a feature screenplay. I jumped on it.

Professional screenwriters I'm friends with share an almost physical aversion to turning down any sort of writing job. I'd guess most of them don't turn anything down until they have at least three things going at once.

So take any opportunity to write for money. By all means write your own stuff, but you learn craft by trying to satisfy someone who has a particular need. (I would not say the same thing about writing for free, or on the if-come, outside of a legit internship, or a writing test. Someone who isn’t willing to pay doesn’t really have a need, they have a whim.)

If I were hiring a games writer, which I'm not...

I'm not hiring a games writer. But some folks have been asking me how you become one. I think I have a different perspective than some people who give advice.

I believe the classic advice is to write some sort of conditional narrative -- a conversation that could go a bunch of different ways. One company asks you to use the Neverwinter Nights toolkit. You could also write something in Twine.

Another thought is to make a mod. Making a mod is a really cool idea. Some games (I think the Shadowrun games?) allow you to pretty much create your own complete scenario for a game, using the game assets, but changing the names, situation, plot and dialog.

That's what I might be looking for if I were hiring a ... level designer. (I am not even in charge of hiring level designers.)

If I were hiring a game writer, which I am not, I would not need an example of conditional narrative, or a mod. None of the narrative in We Happy Few is conditional. We just don't have the bandwidth to create big chunks of if/then/else.

What I would want someone to be able to do is create some characters who have their own inner life and motivations -- motivations that are at odds with each other. I want great dialog.

Great dialog is characters using their words to try to get things they want from each other, while revealing character.

Good dialog is, "does each character say only things that that character would say?" Great dialog is "does each character say things that only that character could say?"

The test for a great scene is:

a. Do the characters each want something?
b. Do they not get it until the end of the conversation?
c. Does each line flesh out the character?
d. Can I take off the character names and I never lose track of who's talking?
e. Even though the characters have their own distinct voices, is the conversation consistent with the tone and voice of the overall work?

In screenwriting, one tool is to go through the script once for each character, and think, "What would I have to do to this character's dialog so a major actor would want to play them?" Every person is the hero of their own story. If the janitor feels like he is the hero of his own story, if he feels like there's more to him than meets the eye, then you probably wrote good dialog.

Lisa's writing environmental narrative: lots of letters and poems and notes and graffiti and so forth. Each has been written by a specific fictional person, in their distinct voice. Each note of this kind has to satisfy the same criteria. We should get something from each note, and ideally, want to know more about the person that wrote it.

If I were hiring a writer, I would want to know: can you write dramatically, in different voices?

If you can do that, I can sit you down at a desk and within a week you can be adding value to the game.

Most people do not really know how to write dramatically, in different voices. That shouldn't be surprising. Just because you can dance at a party doesn't mean you can perform on Broadway as a dancer.

It should go without saying that a game writer has to play games. You have to have a sense of which sorts of things are easy to do in games, and which are hard. You have to have a sense of what verbs exist in the game you're writing. If you're going to write for, say, We Happy Few, then as you work with the level designers, you get an acute sense of the capabilities and limitations of our AI's.

TV writers watch lots of TV. They need to know instinctively what sorts of things TV does well and what sorts of things it does poorly.

But that's just exposure. If you are even a casual gamer, you can learn most of what you need to know about a game by playing it for, say, ten hours. Or even the better part of a day.

Really, it's all about the ability to create compelling characters through dialog. That's what I would be looking for if I were hiring a games writer.

Which I am not.

Director's Review Week

This week I’ve been mostly reviewing the game. I’ve been playing as Arthur. Anyone who’s wondering if there will be enough game, well, I’ve logged about 550 hours in the game, I know how the game works, and it’s still taking me the better part of the week to play through Arthur. That’s not blockers, although there are some places where progression is blocked; that’s stuff to do and places to go and weirdos to talk to and things to find out.

Probably the most fun part was when an elaborate, phantasmagorical encounter we’ve been working on for three years came to full fruition. It was hilarious. And weird. And yet, I think, at some level true.

“It never happened; yet it is still ture. What magic art is this?” says the Puck in Sandman 34, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” That’s the writing I aspire to.

We also spent a good bit of the week rejiggering the opening island, so that when the player comes out of the shelter for the first time, he is “onboarded” through a curated experience. Some new players were getting lost when they hit the open world – what do I do? how do I play? where am I supposed to go – and we’re hoping to fix that.

When Lisa and I were taking Kenneth Koch’s writing class at Columbia a long time ago, we learned two things: (a) develop a writing style by writing in other people’s styles (b) you will never run out of words. Writing a game is a master class; I’ve got to write in different voices and different media.

Originally we were just going to have audio flashbacks for Arthur, because Arthur’s main issue is someone who never comes on stage in the present, while Miss Thigh High’s issue is clear and present, and the Mad Scotsman has a special friend to talk to. But Sam asked for audio flashbacks for them, too, so I wrote the Mad Scotsman’s memories this week. They’ll have to go into the game in robospeech or temp voice or something, as the fellow who voices the Mad Scotsmen disappears Monday to the wilds of Alberta till just before Christmas; apparently where he is, there are not high quality sound studios. (Everyone now carries a pretty decent microphone in their pocket; but you still need a professional quality sound studio to get clean audio without a “boxy,” “roomy” quality of reverb.)

Other work: figuring out how to bring the player up to speed on the Garden District faster; writing clever journal entries and objectives in the game’s voice for about half the game; and editing Arthur’s nightmares. Oh, he will have nightmares. He was going to have cinematic nightmares, but with our animators working their fingers to the bone and Clara frantically editing Uncle Jack, now it’s audio nightmares.

Mo cap?

Wednesday I flew down to Texas for a motion capture shoot for a key scene in the Mad Scotsman’s story, that will also be the backbone of the story trailer!

This is the first time I’ve ever directed mo-cap. As with most motion capture shoots, we already had edited audio — I recorded one actor in London, and another in Toronto. Now we needed to give arms and legs to those voices.

So motion capture is a bit like dance. My job was choreographing the movements and gestures that are supposed to sell the emotions in the voices. I had a general idea of where the actors could move in the imaginary space we’d already built. On the mo-cap stage, I worked with the actors to express the characters they were there to inhabit. The mad Scotsman is big in all senses of the word. The other person in the scene is a British aristocrat who measures her every move.

But it’s not just gestures. As I was working with the actors, at a couple of points we’d rehearsed a scene to the point where the two actors were getting everything right; but I wasn’t feeling it yet.

In one case I realized that the other party was just sort of hanging out with our mad Scotsman; I needed to tell the actress playing her that she had something urgent she needed to do elsewhere. Suddenly the scene woke up. It’s funny, because exactly none of her gestures changed. But now, I felt it.

In the other case, I hadn’t given the actress her intention. She was saying stuff to the mad Scotsman; but she wasn’t trying to convince him. The actress didn’t know the character’s “verb”. And again, not a gesture changed, but as soon as I gave her an intention for her character, the whole scene came alive.

I find the two most powerful questions I can ask about a scene, whether it’s written, or recorded, or edited, or mo-capped are: do I believe it? And, do I care? If I can get both answers to yes, I think we end up with something pretty neat.

Rest of the team's reporthere