Taking time to find the gun.

It’s been just over a year since the last post and even longer since I had anything worthy to write about. I’ve spent about a year and a half floating around ideas looking for the right one to pull the trigger on. I’m about five projects past where THE VOID left off and each one I thought was “the one” but none were. They each had their own problems like not being high-concept enough, or being something you’d see on cable tv (for free), or something you would’ve seen 10 years ago.

It’s easy to get excited about ideas and I suppose I should be happy because at least I have some ideas. For a long time, I didn’t and that was worse. But even ideas aren’t much when you don’t know which idea is “the one“. When I say that, I don’t mean “the one” as in “the next big script that’s going to make me a million dollars“. I just mean “the one worth spending the next 4-6 months writing“.

I spent so much time working through VOID in my head before I ever sat down to hammer it out. Literally 75% of the work on VOID was mental and the rest was implementing on paper. I think that’s a gift from my “real” job as a software architect. I can think through things many levels deep and pop back up and think about more and how it all interacts. But it’s also a curse, because it preempts me from actually sitting down and sweating out pages.

All that mental work is costly. It may not be equivalent to wearing out muscles but I think it wears out your muse. I found it really hard to get excited about the projects since VOID. Just passing moments of excitement but nothing lasting. I was gun shy for a year.

Now I think I finally found the gun, and I’m ready to pull the trigger. I’m not totally excited about it yet, but sometimes you just have to write what the market wants, not what you’re the most passionate about, I guess. Right?

I’m also attempting to shift the ratio of mental-to-physical work from 75/25 to 50/50 or better. I need to start hammering out pages especially if I want to get this out by September. I’m just waiting and hoping my tired muse wakes up.

There’s probably no end to the excuses one could come up with for not writing, so I’m done. Let’s go, game on.

Lock and load, bitch.

 

 

 

 

Long time…

I totally abandoned the blog for months – oops….

Took some time off to regroup and look at everyone’s feedback on VOID – then I cut 25+ pages from the script and wrote a whole new third act.

If the previous draft was enough to open the doors, the new draft should blow the doors off the hinges.

We’ll see…

The train keeps chuggin’

Prepping for the 12+ meetings in LA – had to push those off until August because of vacations and whatnot.

Found out last night that THE VOID is in the TOP 15% of screenplays in the 2009 Nicholl Fellowships.

Hired a fantastic visual effects shop to handle the effects for THE LAUNDROMAT. Scouting locations today – prepping for the December shoot.

That’s all for now!

Just wait – not yet…

THE VOID just placed as a Quarter-Finalist in the 2009 BlueCat screenplay competition. That means it’s in the top 20% of all 3200+ screenplays that entered. If you look at it another way, it bested 2500+ other screenplays. If you look at it yet another way, it’s among 640 other screenplays considered to be Quarter-Finalists. In fact, if you look up THE VOID on the BlueCat site, you’ll see it listed twice – and that’s what this post is all about.

It’s listed twice because I got really excited when I finished the second draft and I entered about a dozen competitions/festivals. BlueCat sent me some glowing coverage – it made me feel really good because it was the first independent judgement of my work, aside from my management. Their email also said you could revise your work and re-submit a subsequent draft. Well it just so happened that I had completed the third draft in the mean time, so I went ahead and submitted it. A couple weeks ago I got another round of coverage from them – this time from a different reader – but it was great coverage, just like the second draft. It was cool because now I had two different readers diggin’ the script and both picked up on different things.

So – this is great right? Well yes and no. When it comes to BlueCat, it was great. When it comes to the other competitions, it’s not so great, and here’s why:

I acted too soon. Seriously, some of the competitions are still open, right now, in June! Why did I submit draft 2 back in March? These competitions don’t let you re-submit! Now I’ll be judged on a draft that’s only so-so and certainly not as good as draft 3.

The lesson to learn here, myself included: try to contain your enthusiasm when you finish a draft. You should really wait until the last possible week (or days) before a competition closes before you submit your work. Who knows, you might have an epiphony the day before the deadline that really makes your screenplay amazing. Hey, Shyamalan didn’t know Bruce Willis was dead until draft 6!

So do yourself a favor and wait – read your stuff – think about it – take some time off – revisit it – write some more. Basically give yourself as much time as you can to polish it before you send it out. I really wish I could go back and resubmit draft 3 to these competitions, but I can’t.

Oh – I should mention I used WAB (withoutabox) – they let you upload as much as you want. You can overwrite previous drafts with a shiny new one. But – the caveat is – there’s no gaurantee that a competition or festival is going to re-download your script. So they could have a really old draft and simply not download the new one. That Sucks.

I once contacted a local festival and asked them to re-download draft 3 and they did – it was cool of them. However, WAB still showed that they had draft 2 even though they confirmed that they had draft 3. So you can’t trust WAB’s submission status screen.

Seriously WAB – your web app consists of like 5 screens and it’s hardly rocket science. Can’t you make it more user-friendly? Spend some money and make it better for us users!

Lots of small victories

Someone once said – making a movie is like pushing a boulder up a mountain – and it’s true. On my Advice for Screenwriters page, I said that there is no magic bullet to this, no hurdle you cross and then suddenly everything clicks into place. Even if you have the greatest project anyone has seen in the past decade, the doors don’t throw themselves and a booming voice says “congratulations, we’re making your movie, lean back and relax, everything is on auto-pilot now” – doesn’t happen.

Sure, maybe it seems that way for some projects, but what you don’t see is all the work the director and producers are doing behind the scenes to make the project a reality. It’s a lot of small victories one after another with plenty of failures and dead-ends along the way. Hopefully they shield you from the setbacks otherwise it’s likely your fragile writer ego will get damaged when you hear how many people don’t like your project, or how a certain director wants the script totally rewritten, or some actor/actress bailed on your project to do some stoner movie because they’re best friends with that writer.

Yeah – it’s pretty likely that you’re not privvy to the behind the scenes negotiations with all the creative people it takes to mount a production, you’re just a screenwriter and expected to sit there and wait for notes, then implement them. So from your protected vantage point, it’s pretty easy to assume that movies are easy to do, things just gel once a studio buyer picks up your project.

But believe me, people are fighting tooth and nail to get your movie made, and not really on your behalf (you’re just a writer) but out of their own self-interest. After all, they stood up early on and said they believed in your project, they believed in you.  Not only is their paycheck on the line, but their entire clout – no one wants to be on a failed production or be the one who stood up and fought for a movie that ultimately failed. If you have someone in your corner who will never give up on your project, that person really IS a friend – most people evacuate like rats on a ship the first time an exec or VP casts any kind of doubt on a project – no one wants to be associated with a loser.

Ok – back to the topic at hand. Lots of small victories. Well you’ve probably already won some – the first being a finished screenplay, congratulations! Hopefully you’ve won a contest or two, that’s going to help you land a manager, yet another series of small victories. They’re going to feel huge at the time – you’ll call your parents and do the happy dance, that’s cool – but 24 hours later you need to put these victories into perspective, they’re small little battles on a long road to Hollywood success. Now it’s time to get your script polished and ready for the spec market – then do battle with the dozen or so OTHER scripts on the market the same week as your own.

Everyone has a different path into Hollywood, but everyone has a series of little battles and must-win victories, too.

The waiting game…

Great news – THE VOID is being requested directly from the buyers. I can confirm that both Lionsgate and Sony Pictures Acquisitions have the script. Now we just have to wait for our producers to read and respond and make a move in their territories.

The waiting.. is the hardest part. – T. Petty

Surreal… THE VOID goes to market.

Just back from a couple weeks in the Hamptons – it was relaxing and just what the Dr. ordered, but the Hamptons are not all what they’re cracked up to be – anyway, sitting here looking over the marketing spreadsheet from my management – it contains the names and contact info. for all the production companies and studios that will wake up tomorrow (6/2/09) to find a fresh copy of THE VOID in their mail bins.

I haven’t really been thinking about this notion for the past 2 weeks – I knew it was coming – very glad the day was coming – but the reality just set in. So many people out there, perhaps some of you reading this right now, are trying to break down the door to Hollywood and get your script in to a manager, a production company, or a studio – and I just did it. When I look back I don’t even know how – it feels like I was under a trance for months while I slaved away on THE VOID and now that the memories of all that hard work are tucked-away into my memory cells, my brain is free to think about other things, like LAUNDROMAT and SURFACE – and other projects like that – but it’s also free to realize, holy shit – I moved up a tiny rung on the ladder.

Very grateful to be here on the fourth rung of this very long ladder. Fourth rung you say? Sure – here’s how I see it:

1. Write a screenplay – no really write one – because when you do, you’ll be amongst the many people who have but no longer with the many more people who say they’re writers but haven’t written a damn thing (or finished something).

2. Win a contest – you need to beat your peers, no better way to announce to the world that you are a fresh, bold voice capable of making it in Hollywood until you beat hundreds (maybe thousands) of peers in a competition. Win and you move up to the second rung – it’s nice here, stay awhile – but hopefully not too long before you-

3. Secure management – your contest win(s) set you apart from your competition but without a manager who believes in you and your script, it’s just going to sit there and collect dust as tiny little bytes on your hard drive. Now you must take your award-winning script and hook a manager. This is hard – they’re flooded with mediocre scripts every day – you must stand out in the crowd and your awards will help you.

4. Spec market – so you and your manager think your script has it – now’s the time to find out. It’s going up against the rest of the scripts out here in the market. Now you’ll find out if it’s truly special and make lots of fans at the production companies and studios. Even if your script doesn’t sell, most don’t – and I don’t expect THE VOID to sell either, but – even if it doesn’t you’ll have new fans, new connections, new friends, new opportunities – most importantly: the industry will know who you are! So don’t get complacent and procrastinate – you need to seize the moment and work on new material – strike while the iron is hot. This is where I am – I need to keep writing – but for tonight -

ENJOY THE MOMENT!

I suppose it’s time…

… to start a blog. I’ve been putting it off for a decade – I just never saw the point until recently. Call me a late-blog-bloomer. Expect dialogue on everything from my feature film work at Imaginative Entertainment, to technology, and even hardcore 3D rendering algorithms. Yes, that’s a real thing – and if you work at Pixar, I envy you!