Batshit

On Scriptnotes a few weeks ago they read from a reader submission: 'Batshit'.  Here is an idea for a completely different short film with the same title.

Basically, it would be the story of a parent catching something like Hendra virus from you know what (I saw today that SARS was probably caught from bats originally).  They would be survived by one modern young person.  The doctor's inability to cope and the poor suffer would be mirrored by the overwhelmed young person reaching deep into their vocab and coming up with a rueful, marvelling 'batshit'.

I recently rewatched the 'Neon Genesis: Evangelion' series, and I enjoyed it very much, although the final couple of episodes are pretty hard to take. I found the bleak world view fit my current mood very much.  This story idea is probably very sophomoric.

Backstory Magazine

I just subscribed to Jeff Goldsmith's Backstory magazine for the iPad. IPad magazines are a great format - easy, glorious pics, documents, videos and more. If you have an iPad and sometimes see films, you might like to check out Backstory - it is at least as interesting as any 'making of' dvd extra, and the first issue is still free. There are four complete screenplays and several extracts. (Jeff has been a screenwriting booster for many years, starting a free podcast at Creative Screenwriting and now still free as 'The Q&A.')

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I write the music and sing the themesong?*

Here's another coincidence of the interests of this blog. For mysterious reasons, I've ended up recording little versions of the theme song to Pilar Alessandra's On-the-Page podcast, a free 30-50min chat with the sharp and funny host (Pilar) and her producer and a guest. Very enjoyable. The original theme was composed by Dave Zukowski.   I can't find a web link for him, but episode 50, at the end, is where I got his name.  There's a hotmail email address.  Leave a comment if you believe me looking up the exact email address is a good idea for your porpoises.  I mean purposes.

I've put them on soundcloud.

Are you ready to be Bemused???**

I said, 'Are you READY to be BEMUSED?!!'

* Little Britain reference
** Really, if you don't come here expecting to be bemused, it is hard to know what you do expect.

Aristotle on Screenwriting.

In a satisfying natural coincidence of two interests of this blog, Aristotle (notable in philosophy) wrote a book (Poetics) unpacking how serious drama was done in his time.  English script-development guru Stephen Cleary gave three talks at the Victorian College of the Arts in Melbourne Australia.  (It's Victorian only in being in a State called Victoria.  It's nature is a sort of strident Bloomsbury for 18-20 year olds.)

This blog post introduces them, and you can download them from there.

Plato wanted to ban fiction because it wasn't true, and he thought, couldn't contribute civic value.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (not that they had the concept fiction, but poetry and drama were understood to be in a different category from every events and rules for living) - I will begin again.  Aristotle's defence of fiction (according to SC) understood it from the inside out.  He looks at each of the elements and how it interfaces with the others, and what the overall effectiveness hinges on.

What I took from SC's explanation was that in a story, we understand people in ourselves - we read their situation intellectually and emotionally (and even physically - I sometimes notice I've got breathing anxiety when I see someone in a film underwater).  The complex drama (e.g. greek tragedy), though, keeps the protagonists off balance, constantly challenged or threatened by events, to which they respond with emotionally motivated actions that are not quite right, don't resolve the tension. The tension is escalating throughout the film until, at last, there is a realisation.

The realisation needs to happen in a specific series of moments, the hero being knocked off balance one last time and then receiving information that throws the mind back to the start of the story, that changes the meaning of everything, that makes them realise for the first time what has really been happening. The audience, feeling along with them, should be moved - in tragedy they should feel pity, and terror.  This moment is the moment of catharsis, a moment of powerful intellectual, emotional and physical reprocessing that lays hold of one as you realise that you are subject to some powerful truth, just as the tragic hero is: Macbeth learns that murder is wrong.  In a different type of film, Field of Dreams, Kevin Costner (and we) remember how we love our fathers, and they love us.

Please listen to the whole thing.  It's very good if you are interested in philosophy, film, or even just an interesting bit of psychological / cognitive processing.

Anxiety and Screenwriting

Scriptshadow is updating 'his' web-site and asked for suggestions that would support a new community site for discovering good scripts and nurturing talented writing.  There were a lot of good suggestions, most of which revolved around the way a high standard of review could be achieved by non-professional writers, many of whom (like me) aren't even working in LA. Most of these suggestions worked something like Slashdot, where good comments are moderated up, and good commenters gain some status from the contribution.  Moderators can spend their 'mod' points to lift up points they agree with.  A variation on this was to create a low-stakes market where you can offer a basic non-pro read for $5 and once your reputation was lifting your price could go up.

The problem of getting good screenwriting is an interesting search problem.  It's hard to say what  a good screenplay is.  There are perhaps four patterns by which good ones are produced:

• a great screenwriter who knows a lot of tricks, writes a great screenplay.  Easy to find if you know he's a great screenwriter.
• a bad screenwriter with a great idea sells a script on the idea, and then other screenwriters work on it.  Easy to find because the idea should be 'high-concept' - a sentence or two.
• a good screenwriter reworks his screenplay in development hell until it is purified or consumed by fire.  Easy to get into, hard to come out of, unless a great screenwriter lends a hand.
• a novice screenwriter writes a great script by some degree of accident.  Hard to find, because there are so many novices pumping out terrible accidents, and which of them are good?  Who wants to find out?

I would go back to what a good screenplay is.  A good screenplay offers a helpful 4D map of a world, exploring the challenges and the pathways, the anxiety and its resolution.  This post was going to be some examples of that - some of my favourite films.

The Big Lebowski - plays with the anxiety of unmotivatability.  The Dude is seduced by the Bunny Lebowski problem because he lives in denial and is looking for easy money. At least he's not a nihilist.

The King's Speech - explores the anxiety of social responsibility for which your aren't skilled.  The social aspect is important, because Bertie's identity is going to be jeopardised. He overcomes this by gaining a social identity in friendship.

No Country for Old Men - explores the anxiety of the meaning and meaninglessness - which is ultimate? There are two heros - the tragic hero whose realisation and death happen off screen and randomly, no lesson learned, no catharsis earned; the older policeman wise enough to avoid it though it means a young woman will be undefended. He has no fire of his own, but his father will meet him and welcome him. It puts the meaninglessness in a tenuous frame of meaning in life (before he was born & after his death), rather than life floating in a meaningless sea.  But its frail.  It's just a little flame.

On Twitter

I've been on twitter for a little while (since Scriptshadow's TwitPitch contest) - I mostly follow screenwriting discussions.
@BittrScrptReadr How has no one written a contained thriller about a man trapped in bathroom stall while victims of food poisoning attend to their situation?
RT @Morning_Movie: "Panic Room #2"
@BittrScrptReadr  That's pretty good. Anyone else? 
@MichaelBStark Sarcophagi -- A hemophiliac Egyptologist gets locked in the crypt he's plundering while he has explosive diarrhea


Diarrhea is a recurring theme for Michael and its always funny, and usually explosive. Explosive diarrhea has everything a good screenplay should have - tension, horror, shame, vulnerability, facial expressions and then EMERGENCY Running! Emergency Pants dropping!  And then resolution and peace.

Both Bitter and Michael have blogs, but there's something very liberating about knowing that your tweets will have been drowned from your correspondents' feeds in fifteen minutes.

A cryptic whine

My current screenplay project is too much for me at the moment, so I am going to post a list (senseless to all but me) complaining about problems I don't know how to solve (timely objections from anothersomething notwithstanding).

The story takes place in 2045 or so.  The tensions in the social fabric of the USA have come undone again and the US Army's heaviest casualties occur in a war with secessionists in the southern states.  Our hero, Langley, wants to get away from the front line and is guided into investigating a biotech company which is not producing biotech.  The tech in question is equipment (nano-technology etc) that lives in the body to repair it and protect it, something Army would obviously want.  The script currently owes itself the following:

• clarity about the law on nanotech. When is it grounds to kill a person and destroy their body without a trial, just for survival / disaster prevention?  What is the mechanism that does it?  Lasers?
• clarity about the devilry of the major devil.  While there is a bit of moustache-twirling, I haven't really got the relationship to Langley, York, and Troy clear in the text.  If it does get clear, do I lose the tension in subsequent scripts?
• A decent set of clues and very concrete bits of evidence.  (I dislike detective stories - I shouldn't have started one, perhaps)
• An alternative to animated 'data mining', which is realistic but terrible in a story.
• Action to carry conversation: no one is busy.  It's all a bit 'miss marple' but without even wastrel hobbies to form a background while people answer questions.
• Hell needs more setup.

Thanks for bearing with.  Now, unconscious processing, go!

Beyond serious

This weeks screenwriting lesson for me, from Pilar's podcast (search podcasts for 'on the page' in iTunes), squares exactly with Scriptshadow's judgement of this line.

The lesson is 'get enough words to produce a vivid sense*, and then you're done'.  Sentences are nice, but a lot of life and film is not done in them, and a serious, careful, complete sentence or four to describe some action, is bad writing for a movie. The script is a prospectus for a million-dollar project, but you don't get to have flashy graphs, artful color scheme and cheese. Sadly, money is not a keen reader.  It gets eye strain and annoyance really easily. It doesn't even do its own reading, so the eyestrain and annoyance have to be felt vicariously by other people without money, like me.

Let's look at some amateur writing (me.  It's me, mum.) As there's only a paragraph, and my posts are usually way longer, you probably have trouble seeing 4.5 lines as a chore.  You have to imagine reading this after reading it 800 times (its an eighth of a page, say, and a screenplay runs about 100 pages), and its only ten in the morning, and you've got eight more scripts to read.

To intro - Reeves is an old man who has been dismantling himself under the influence of a chem**.

Reeves looks down, and starts to squeal with fear and horror.  The medic places a mask over his face against his terrified shaking of his head.  He eventually relaxes, recognizing his powerlessness.  His eyes dart terrified from face to face.

How should I have written that?  Well,
a. I don't know.  That's the main thing about me.  But
b. I can tell better from worse.  Maybe.

Reeves sees himself - 

- he writhes, squeals.   

The Medic FIGHTS - masking him. 

He snaps it on - gas floods Reeves.

His thrashing subsides - eyes dart terrified from face to face.

Better?  Maybe a bit, but there still isn't flow.  The test is, are you beyond serious? Is your skill so built up, so bedded down, that you can write like you're rapping, lyrically flowing from moment to moment, giving just the sense.  Seriousness can get you so far, but you have to get the serious into the background and just leave a vivid, emotional whole.


* Gottlob Frege reference
** A Chemical, but also the script you put in the head of a Golem.

Screenplays

I have just realised what I am trying to write about in my screenplays.  This is not of great interest to the readership, but as this is the nearest thing I have to a journal, I shall jot it down.

Langley (the protagonist) is the razor edge on our relationship to the future.  We are throwing away the future - failing to agree, failing to work hard, failing, failing, failing.  Langley puts a face on that. When he kills, he kills futures, happinesses for humanity that will now never arrive.  And he does it so that things can stay the same.  The last will not be first on his watch.

We are throwing away chances because we can't believe any of them, because they are all a confusion, a superposition, of mutually exclusive realities, and the only way we know to resolve this is to disbelieve them all.  Nature is over, but we can't find a well-governed nature we can believe in, much less tolerate.

This is why I think some belief in a God as the actuality of possibilities, the something of which the universe is the nothingness (not-ing). Something that keeps the future open and prevents the collapse into nihilism is needed.  And it has to have a moral character and authority, to tell us what should become, what we ought.

Australian Film

Jim Schembri has written in the Age about three recent releases in Australia - 'The Reef', 'Griff the Invisible' and 'A Heartbeat Away', which seem likely to throw away most of the millions spent generating them.  The Reef sounds like horror/drama, which I would not normally go to see.  'A Heatbeat Away' seems like warmed over dead heartwarming underdog story. 'Griff the Invisible' though, seems interesting and new, and I'd like to see it.   I will try to persuade the blog wife on that idea.

The interesting question is 'why does this ever happen?'  Not just in Australia, but everywhere, creative people of considerable talent tell horror stories of being unable to produce their great idea, and of ideas that seemed great but turned out to be terrible, and of ideas that started out terrible, were pushed and sank without trace. Why would something so financially horrific persist?  How can we do better at making good films?

I think the only people who I would trust to answer that are Pixar and maybe the Coen brothers, and the only difference I can see is that the people in charge take pains.  Their commitment to a story with a human problem, a real, earned resolution of it, is not just lip-service.  But although commitment means you can fight through difficulty, you have to be finding fairly elevated things difficult. That means you have to be very good, to know it when you have it. But it's hard to hold on to that in a world that will break all records seeing Avatar.

(I didn't like Avatar, but in fairness, it hit all its story marks. It was predictable and trite, characters were reduced to instruments (poor Michelle Rodriguez), the world was foolish, the resolution didn't resolve anything deeply, but it setup and paid off, it had a balance of humour and so on.)

Australian film production is greatly constrained by scale.  You can't get much money, so you can't do spectacle. You can't have many locations, many actors, many cameras, many microphones, long and careful editing. You could make Primer, The Magician, Paranormal Activity and similar - stories where ordinariness is exploited and subverted. My idea would be a RomCom set at a Uni, in which the big human experience is failure to communicate - the experience of floundering in a bewildering contre temps when you try to communicate with another human living in another background. But that needs crowd scenes. The whole bewildering contre temps thing is probably what goes wrong when creative people deeply love a film that bombs. So maybe a film school project.

The Social Network

Cracking Yarns has a good review of The Social Network, with the goal of examining the screenwriting - Sorkin has broken a lot of rules for this script but somehow it works.  Creative Screenwriting's podcast (Sorkin interviewed by Jeff Goldsmith) was also very interesting.

The screenwriter for something like this has a real problem - reality is messy, in events and timings, in personality and desire, in character and choice, in the big issues that a movement of moments instantiates.  To smooth this out, Sorkin has created a Zuckerberg who is looking for, starving for, good female company, but who has only hard-edged intelligence to offer for it. The film is full of cheap sex with women with little or no value to the project, serving to emphasise both the want (sex) and the need (connection into the feminine half of the world).  The film has been condemned for its treatment of women.

The other thing that was untidy from a screenplay perspective was the late introduction of Sean Parker and California. Might a scene showing the software guys' investment in the dream of silicon valley have smoothed this transition?  Would that smoothness have detracted from the sense of losing our footing that the new world of California suggested? For me, I think the Silicon Valley Dreamland setup could have loaded and integrated this new world.

The Social Network is a very good movie, and a sign that Hollywood still knows, and can produce, a deep story.

Loglines

A good screenplay should have a certain unity, a completeness.  As a proxy for success at that, Hollywood craves a clear, one sentence summary of your story.  If your story will make a good film, the theory goes, the external conflict, internal conflict, the stakes and the antagonist will be clear in a single exciting-to-read sentence.

I've listed my screenplay with inktip.com, so far just using a free one-week trial.  InkTip takes a script and makes it available for production companies or agents who are looking for scripts, with a searchable database of tags.  I've turned up in searches about 7 times for about 4 different companies, but nothing in my log-line inspires anyone to read my synopsis or script.  Currently the logline is:

    Locked in the contest for control of the future, the great powers of earth panic when a young mathematician creates       machine intelligence and runs, pursued by their agents across the world, up the great space elevator and beyond, before he unleashes the permanent Resolution.


This is still too long, doesn't describe the hero's problem (except that he's young).  Here are some alternatives, but they all leave out so much that they disappoint and bore even me:


1.  A young man creates machine intelligence and is hunted by evil agents of the USA.
2.  A young man takes a risk by revealing his design for machine intelligence, but when the world comes looking for him he must step up and take responsibility before it changes beyond recognition.
3.  The war of all with all is founded in the human soul, but in 2054, a young mathematician threatens us all with the spectre of machine intelligence, machine peace, machine love.
4.  Or something else.  These are surpisingly hard to write and I should be reviewing 'The Monstrosity of Christ' and 'The Social Network'

Burgled!

We were burgled.  We lost a new and an old laptop, and our camera - it was pretty unpleasant, although they also left a lot of stuff alone.  But we've only been paying insurance since we owned our own home, about 8 months, and so the payout replacing our modest losses will be far more than the premiums we've paid in just yet.  As I see it, its like I went to the blackjack table and got a specific number paying 35:1 after only 8 tries. The question is whether to walk away an insurance winner now...  And the flaw in the reasoning is... I haven't anyway to stop being exposed to loss.

From No Country For Old Men:
Anton Shagur, remorseless killer, confronts the old man manning a service station and asks 'What's the most you ever won on a coin toss?'  After some exchanges the coin is tossed and the old man is asked to call.  Old man - 'What are we playing for?  What do I stand to win?'
Shagur - 'Everything.'
Old man - 'What do I stand to lose?'
Shagur - 'Everything.'
Old Man - 'But I never put anything up.'
Shagur - 'You've been putting it up your whole life.'

Indeed.

Resolution

I finished another pass through Resolution, my finished screenplay, in which I attempted to straighten out the hero's internal problem and external problem on the page and make his trajectory very clear.  I also needed to make the idea work a bit harder intellectually, and probably still need to work on this.

The idea is that conscious/productive/runaway Machine Intelligence will not arrive until the simplest constituent worthy of the name is capable of attachment to its external world with an attitude - and specifically an attitude of love.  To take the human brain as a model might help, but you have to let me use a simplified model - a brain as about 1400grams of thinking goop, with the smallest component being a single junction between two cells.  Each cell's external world is blood, and neighbouring cells.  Somehow it discerns which of its relationships with neighbouring cells are of service to the whole and strengthens them, but without any knowledge of the whole, only of its neighbours.  The cell is committed in relationship to its neighbours.  If necessary, it will give up connections, or die for lack of usefulness. Psychologically, the drives, reflexes, habits, substructures, structures, superstructures of personality are in relationship, competing, combining, forming alliances, frustrating each other. Somehow, we pull it all together. It's hardly original to liken the mind to society - Plato may have started it (I really have a lot of reading to do!), but once you start to do it, Rousseau seems like he's talking psychology and Kierkegaard seems to be prescribing for the state. And the point is, what character lets all things hold together?

The character that makes it better to be in relationship than not.  Service.  Love.  But the important qualification, Love from Wholeness, so that there should be an answer for anything that may go wrong in the self by reference to the neighbour, or the neighbour by reference to the self. This character, from top to bottom is Resolution.

Is there room for diversity in such a theory?  I think so, in the sense that I may yet have in my unthought, in potential, answers to problems I never experience. So paralleling gene expression, everything is present in potential, but only certain things are realised (expressed). Maybe.  Genes are one example.  Words, letters and substrate languages might make another potential example, and a more open one.  More work is required.

But anyway, confused and bored as you probably are now, you are ready to appreciate the difficulty of articulating all that and more through a sci-fi action blockbuster without confusing and boring is considerable.