OK, so I’ve handed in the latest round of changes and Jess phones up. She and Arif have had a long chat and they think we are ignoring the elephant in the room. Basically that the structure in act one is still a bit wobbly and that the stakes are not high enough. We’re fixing all the minor stuff but we don’t seem to be making any headway with that. She has agreed with Arif that we are going to take six weeks out where I can go and try and deal with these issues. She throws out a couple of suggestions just to fire up the gray matter. One of them throws me into a blind panic – she suggests moving the midpoint to the end of the first act. For those who don’t much know, the midpoint in a movie is the point – more often than not literally halfway through the movie. Syd Field summed it up in his book Save The Cat, when he said it was "An important scene in the middle of the script, often a reversal of fortune or revelation that changes the direction of the story." At the moment, ours is occurring on page 48 – halfway through a 95 page movie – it’s the scene where hero makes the decision to allow heroine back into his life. If Jess is suggesting that we move that to page 28, then I have no idea –literally no idea, how to tell that story without changing everything - writing a completely new screenplay to the one we have been working with so far. It’s like Indiana Jones finding the arc of the Covenant on about twenty minutes in – Elliot Ness figuring out how to nail Capone on page 25. She’s saying it’s only a suggestion and making reassuring noises, but I am so full of blind panic all I hear is the voice in my own head going “OhjesusfuckorchristwhatamIgoingotwriteImscrewedomigodomigodomigod”
The next day (after Karen has convinced me to put down the toaster and get out of the bath) I phone Arif and Jess again. We have another longer conversation and I say honestly that I don’t think I can write this. This is as close as I ever come to saying “if you have a relief scribe waiting in the wings, now might be the time to produce him/her”. To me the film splits into two neat halves – hero is getting pushed and then he makes the decision to push back – and by that point (hopefully if we have all done our job well) we the audience are rooting for him to win that we might be willing to forgive him any dodgy moral gray areas that he might find himself in. If we move that decision of his forward, then I not only don’t know how to cram all that pushing into the first twenty minutes, but I also don’t know where the story goes until we get to the start of act 3 on page 70. Jess says to take a step back – forget the moving the midpoint suggestion - and look at act one again – where is the inciting incident – I tell her, and even as the words are coming out of my mouth I know that my inciting incident is a bit bobbins . And where is the act one climax into act 2. I tell her that one – slightly better, but still not quite in the same league as Marion Ravenwoods Nepalese bar burning down. So her suggestion of moving the midpoint was only to try and get the beats to that level. I digest this and sign off to go and have a think. She has insisted that in the six weeks that I have, I don’t go anywhere near a keyboard for at least two, which as it turns out is very good advice. I turn the problem over in my head – what do I want to say. Where am I trying to go? Eventually I come up with an idea and phone up Jess – what happens if we keep the same basic set up but instead this happens. It raises the stakes, it makes hero a bit stronger and it leaves the mid point where it is. Jess and Arif do their huddle and come back to me – yeah, give that a go. I do so. Karen reads it and says she thinks it is the best version yet. I send it to Jess. She knows that I am going on holiday to Greece and says she will not tell me anything about it before I get back. (Jess clearly knows that writers are a needy shower of bastards in constant want of validation)
Back in the day job, I scribble down what are possibly the worst handover notes in the history of the world for Ksenia – basically “stall on everything until I get back” and go to Greece.
Back from Greece and catch up with Jess. We finally have a draft that is ready to go out to cast? To whom I have no idea. At this point I don’t really care. I’m just delighted that it has gone out. Arif also says that Greg Coote has come on board as an executive producer, which is more good news. From a script point of view, the plan is to try and get some talent in place, and get everyone’s input and then try and have another tweak. Arif does not think act one is as funny as it was, which is a valid criticism as I was really focussing on the structure. I can spend the next six weeks trying to come up with yuks and giggles.
So for right now, I have nothing to do but get to work on the next one.
It’s only after I hang up the phone with Arif that a thought occurs to me – there is now a tiny walk on part for a ten year old girl. Maybe I’ll save that conversation for another day.
Friday, 6 November 2009
BREN AND GREG
On the subject of actors I’ll segue into a long standing dream of mine. I have a group of friends back in Ireland and when we are younger we were this wild young bunch of wannabe bohemians. Writers, actors, musicians, artists etc. My dream was that we would all become successful in our relative fields, and one day there would be a photo of us all spilling out of Lillie’s Bordello in the wee small hours having revelled in the glory of some shared project. So early on in the process, I mention to Arif that I think that some of them might have something to bring to the party and his response is “we’re trying to make the best film that we possibly can, so if you know of anyone you think might help us achieve that goal, then please let me know”. So with that in mind, I re-read the script and then phone up Bren and say that I think he might be a good fit for the part of Beach – one of the supporting roles. I tell him the same thing that I will say to everyone – namely that it’s not because we’re friends, this is my big shot and I would not float him if I did not think he would knock it out of the park, and all I am doing is putting his name in Arif’s path to see if it works. If the man from Del Monte says no, then tough titty said the proverbial kitty. Bren’s response is the same as everyones. Thanks for thinking of me, great if it plays out, if it doesn’t then no harm, no foul.
Bren after much huffing and puffing manages to get a show reel together – most of his work was in theatre so I’m a bit vexed that the best of his output was never recorded for posterity, but it’s a pretty good show reel. One of my favourites is missing though – Poem Of A Dying Man – a short film documenting the thoughts of a gangster as he is digging the hole into which he will get whacked. I think you might be able to find it on you tube if you search poem dying man. The show reel also has a bit of Fair City in there – for those not in the know – Fair City is a cheesy Irish soap, a bit like east enders shot through a filter of Wensleydale. The fact that it is known – not always affectionately – as Fairly Shitty should give you some idea of where it has set the bar for itself. In it Bren, plays some chavvy scally shaftie. It’s pretty OTT, and I mention to Jess (who has lived in Ireland and has some firsthand experience of Fair City) that this is probably not up there with The Dane. She says she is sure Arif will be able to see past it. After all Ross Kemp managed to land the East Enders gig with the Fruit N Fibre ad on his show reel, so people can read between the lines. I pack off the show reel. Arif acknowledges receipt, but says he is not even going to look at it, until he gets to casting which is down the road a bit. I hope it all plays out, but wait and see as the Zen master famously said.
So onto Greg. Mr. Kavanagh. His Kavanic majesty. I’ll choose my words carefully as I don’t want to overstate this, but in terms of a guy with a guitar, Greg is a magnificent pagan Love God walking the earth like a man. And for all those who doubt me, feel free to turn up to the Love Tailors gig in The Sugar Club, Dublin on the 19th of December. I phone him up - he now lives in New York – and we have a chat about the film. He’d love to pitch in, if there was anything going. I send him a copy of the script to read – six days later, he pings me back an MP3. This is something he has knocked together just to set out his stall. He says he will phone that night and I am not to listen to it until then. Massively tempted though I am, I comply with these instructions.
He phones and I get to play it. I think it is absolutely fantastic – it’s just perfect. It’s bluesy, gravelly, a hint of Waits, a hint of Hooker, a catchy chorus, the same narrative structure as the film, and it even contains lines of dialogue without sounding contrived.
"So, just so I understand this – you, wrote, recorded and produced this song with a band half of whom were in Dublin half of whom were in new York – in SIX days?"
"Five days, it took me one day to read the script."
"You sickeningly talented bastard."
I send a copy of the song to Arif and another copy to Jess – she won’t be involved in the music (neither will I for that matter) but it’s such a cool song, I think she will get a kick out of it. I really hope Arif decides to go for this, as I think it could get nominated for awards.
Bren after much huffing and puffing manages to get a show reel together – most of his work was in theatre so I’m a bit vexed that the best of his output was never recorded for posterity, but it’s a pretty good show reel. One of my favourites is missing though – Poem Of A Dying Man – a short film documenting the thoughts of a gangster as he is digging the hole into which he will get whacked. I think you might be able to find it on you tube if you search poem dying man. The show reel also has a bit of Fair City in there – for those not in the know – Fair City is a cheesy Irish soap, a bit like east enders shot through a filter of Wensleydale. The fact that it is known – not always affectionately – as Fairly Shitty should give you some idea of where it has set the bar for itself. In it Bren, plays some chavvy scally shaftie. It’s pretty OTT, and I mention to Jess (who has lived in Ireland and has some firsthand experience of Fair City) that this is probably not up there with The Dane. She says she is sure Arif will be able to see past it. After all Ross Kemp managed to land the East Enders gig with the Fruit N Fibre ad on his show reel, so people can read between the lines. I pack off the show reel. Arif acknowledges receipt, but says he is not even going to look at it, until he gets to casting which is down the road a bit. I hope it all plays out, but wait and see as the Zen master famously said.
So onto Greg. Mr. Kavanagh. His Kavanic majesty. I’ll choose my words carefully as I don’t want to overstate this, but in terms of a guy with a guitar, Greg is a magnificent pagan Love God walking the earth like a man. And for all those who doubt me, feel free to turn up to the Love Tailors gig in The Sugar Club, Dublin on the 19th of December. I phone him up - he now lives in New York – and we have a chat about the film. He’d love to pitch in, if there was anything going. I send him a copy of the script to read – six days later, he pings me back an MP3. This is something he has knocked together just to set out his stall. He says he will phone that night and I am not to listen to it until then. Massively tempted though I am, I comply with these instructions.
He phones and I get to play it. I think it is absolutely fantastic – it’s just perfect. It’s bluesy, gravelly, a hint of Waits, a hint of Hooker, a catchy chorus, the same narrative structure as the film, and it even contains lines of dialogue without sounding contrived.
"So, just so I understand this – you, wrote, recorded and produced this song with a band half of whom were in Dublin half of whom were in new York – in SIX days?"
"Five days, it took me one day to read the script."
"You sickeningly talented bastard."
I send a copy of the song to Arif and another copy to Jess – she won’t be involved in the music (neither will I for that matter) but it’s such a cool song, I think she will get a kick out of it. I really hope Arif decides to go for this, as I think it could get nominated for awards.
CASTING
OK, so let us talk casting. Way, way back in the day. Arif very briefly asked me who I saw in the roles. I tell him that I had originally written the part of the hero for an actor friend of mine, Brendan McDonald, but as most of his work is in the theatre, odds are Arif will never have heard of him. Arif has not, and needless to say he would like to get some names that people have heard of. So I say that for the part of the heroine, I would cast Shannyn Sossamon, who is maybe not the most well known actress in the world, but was absolutely fantastic in The Rules of Attraction and a low budget movie called Wristcutters. There are two reasons that I personally think she would be great – three if you want to count the fact that she is a really, really, really attractive woman.
One is that the female lead is a combination of mad, bad and dangerous to know and this waiflike naive quality which I think would be a tough needle to thread (I say this safe in the knowledge that I could not act my way out of a paper bag and have some cheap college shorts to prove it – hopefully none of which you will ever see)
Two is my absolute terror of what I have come to think of as the L’Oreal shot.
Picture the scene – the female lead in a film which contains a fair few motorbikes. I am therefore filled with dread that at some point, there will be a shot where a bike pulls up, the rider’s helmet comes off and stand revealed as beautiful woman – but with long tresses spilling down, her head shaking in slow mo as said hair frames her beautiful face – like we’re selling shampoo. But this bottled shit – where your hair will look like it’s spent the last five hours being pampered in a salon rather than in the sweaty confines of a bike helmet. Ms Sossamon has on occasion been known to sport this weird crop, and still look gorgeous, and it’s always been that haircut that I think of when I think of our heroine.
Arif asks me about male leads. I say that I really have not given it much thought – my train of thought usually gets to Sossamon and then derails, but Stewart Townsend would be on my list (I’m not actually sure if he is acting anymore – he was directing last I heard and his Seattle film was very good) and then just because I have to say it – I say it – Colin Farrell.
Townsend first – hero is a bit of a prickly character – he’s a guy who does not have a huge amount of friends but inspires fierce loyalty in those friends that he does have. He also starts the film at a low point in his life, on the back foot, and is a bit moody. So they guy playing him has to be almost instantly likable. And that’s a quality I think Townsend has – there is a film called About Adam which I saw years ago – where Townsend plays the eponymous Adam. He turns up and basically seduces all three sisters in a family, seduces the girlfriend of the brother, and I imagine if there is an extended directors cut floating around, he probably seduces the mother as well.
spoiler alert here for anyone who has not yet, but intends to catch it at some point in the future.
At the end of the film, he is getting married to Kate Hudson (perfect Irish accent as mentioned before) and he shags the eldest sister (lovely performance from Charlotte Bradley I thought) on the same day. A mere two hours before he marries the younger sister. I think he even has to take off the pants of his wedding suit to do it. And we the audience don’t mind. It’s not a blokey thing – as in this guy is a legend, he tapped all three sisters in the one house – he actually manages to sell it that he is doing them a favour, and enriching their lives. That is a tough sell especially to a woman audience, but it appears to work. And Townsend pulled that off – quick, open the window before we all drown in charisma. Incidentally, there was a twist in the plot, where Katie Hudson, Adam’s future wife also had a quick fling with an ex – just before the marriage – presumably someone panicked and thought it would level the playing field a bit – but I always thought it would have been a much braver and more interesting decision to not include that – leave Katie as the naive innocent and see how that played out – and I bet Stuart could have pulled that one off too. To quote the great Moliere, vice in small quantities is but a sour and wretched thing, but the clamorous surfeit of a single inequity is so pure and triumphal that it beats back onlookers with the force of heroic virtue.
And I think someone with charisma needles buried in the red at the top of the scale would be great as the hero.
So why did I say Colin Farrell? How could I not? Seriously. If someone randomly came up and said “name an male Irish actor, aged about 30, preferably with a Dublin accent” if Colin is not the first name out of your mouth, you’ve been asleep in a cave for the last fifteen years, and you need to catch up on loads of cool shit like high speed broadband and ipods. The thing about Farrell is that amongst all the stuff about the drinking, and the home movies and the adventures with various young ladies, I think people sometimes forget that the guy is one seriously good actor. I first saw him in Tigerland – had never heard of him before then – and it was only about a month after that talking to Bren that I found out he was Irish. The guy who played Boz was a mick? You’re kidding me. And all the great performances after that. Intermission, Minority Report, In Bruges, take your pick. My personal favorite Farrell moment (and I would love to know if it was in the script) was in Minority Report (cool to see that they still have braces in the future too) where Tom Cruise has just gone on the run. He has ditched the flying jet pack cops, runs down an alley and almost gets run over by another cop car containing Colin. Cruise and Farrell see each other and Colin gives a little wave. Hi, how ya doin? Me again. For me, it’s a wonderful little moment of brinkmanship masked as social absurdity in the middle of a really tense scene and beats out all the flying jet packs and self driving cars for cool stuff from the year 2054. Dragging this back to our hero, as I said he starts the story, having just been kicked around a bit by life, but he doesn’t ever whinge about it. I think Colin would be great at always just giving you that little reminder that “hey, I’m carrying a lot of baggage here, and just because I’m not moaning about it does not mean it has gone away” Plus he might throw in the pizza equivalent of that little wave in the car.
So of the two of them, who would be better? I don’t know. They’re actors – this is their art. Each of them would bring their own interpretation to their role, and I’m sure either one would be fantastic. It’s like asking which version of After Midnight do you prefer – Cale or Clapton? It’s the same piece of work but each man puts his unique stamp on it. Frankly I’d be lucky beyond belief to get either one of them.
I tell Arif all of this, and he nods and makes a note of it. And we don’t speak of it again. I’m sure he has his own list, and I have no idea who is on it. It occurs to me at this point that Arif has a pretty good poker face and a high stakes game of Texas Holdem between him and Pete would be something to see.
He’s not even going to send it out to cast until I produce a draft that he is happy with, so back to flashing cursor.
One is that the female lead is a combination of mad, bad and dangerous to know and this waiflike naive quality which I think would be a tough needle to thread (I say this safe in the knowledge that I could not act my way out of a paper bag and have some cheap college shorts to prove it – hopefully none of which you will ever see)
Two is my absolute terror of what I have come to think of as the L’Oreal shot.
Picture the scene – the female lead in a film which contains a fair few motorbikes. I am therefore filled with dread that at some point, there will be a shot where a bike pulls up, the rider’s helmet comes off and stand revealed as beautiful woman – but with long tresses spilling down, her head shaking in slow mo as said hair frames her beautiful face – like we’re selling shampoo. But this bottled shit – where your hair will look like it’s spent the last five hours being pampered in a salon rather than in the sweaty confines of a bike helmet. Ms Sossamon has on occasion been known to sport this weird crop, and still look gorgeous, and it’s always been that haircut that I think of when I think of our heroine.
Arif asks me about male leads. I say that I really have not given it much thought – my train of thought usually gets to Sossamon and then derails, but Stewart Townsend would be on my list (I’m not actually sure if he is acting anymore – he was directing last I heard and his Seattle film was very good) and then just because I have to say it – I say it – Colin Farrell.
Townsend first – hero is a bit of a prickly character – he’s a guy who does not have a huge amount of friends but inspires fierce loyalty in those friends that he does have. He also starts the film at a low point in his life, on the back foot, and is a bit moody. So they guy playing him has to be almost instantly likable. And that’s a quality I think Townsend has – there is a film called About Adam which I saw years ago – where Townsend plays the eponymous Adam. He turns up and basically seduces all three sisters in a family, seduces the girlfriend of the brother, and I imagine if there is an extended directors cut floating around, he probably seduces the mother as well.
spoiler alert here for anyone who has not yet, but intends to catch it at some point in the future.
At the end of the film, he is getting married to Kate Hudson (perfect Irish accent as mentioned before) and he shags the eldest sister (lovely performance from Charlotte Bradley I thought) on the same day. A mere two hours before he marries the younger sister. I think he even has to take off the pants of his wedding suit to do it. And we the audience don’t mind. It’s not a blokey thing – as in this guy is a legend, he tapped all three sisters in the one house – he actually manages to sell it that he is doing them a favour, and enriching their lives. That is a tough sell especially to a woman audience, but it appears to work. And Townsend pulled that off – quick, open the window before we all drown in charisma. Incidentally, there was a twist in the plot, where Katie Hudson, Adam’s future wife also had a quick fling with an ex – just before the marriage – presumably someone panicked and thought it would level the playing field a bit – but I always thought it would have been a much braver and more interesting decision to not include that – leave Katie as the naive innocent and see how that played out – and I bet Stuart could have pulled that one off too. To quote the great Moliere, vice in small quantities is but a sour and wretched thing, but the clamorous surfeit of a single inequity is so pure and triumphal that it beats back onlookers with the force of heroic virtue.
And I think someone with charisma needles buried in the red at the top of the scale would be great as the hero.
So why did I say Colin Farrell? How could I not? Seriously. If someone randomly came up and said “name an male Irish actor, aged about 30, preferably with a Dublin accent” if Colin is not the first name out of your mouth, you’ve been asleep in a cave for the last fifteen years, and you need to catch up on loads of cool shit like high speed broadband and ipods. The thing about Farrell is that amongst all the stuff about the drinking, and the home movies and the adventures with various young ladies, I think people sometimes forget that the guy is one seriously good actor. I first saw him in Tigerland – had never heard of him before then – and it was only about a month after that talking to Bren that I found out he was Irish. The guy who played Boz was a mick? You’re kidding me. And all the great performances after that. Intermission, Minority Report, In Bruges, take your pick. My personal favorite Farrell moment (and I would love to know if it was in the script) was in Minority Report (cool to see that they still have braces in the future too) where Tom Cruise has just gone on the run. He has ditched the flying jet pack cops, runs down an alley and almost gets run over by another cop car containing Colin. Cruise and Farrell see each other and Colin gives a little wave. Hi, how ya doin? Me again. For me, it’s a wonderful little moment of brinkmanship masked as social absurdity in the middle of a really tense scene and beats out all the flying jet packs and self driving cars for cool stuff from the year 2054. Dragging this back to our hero, as I said he starts the story, having just been kicked around a bit by life, but he doesn’t ever whinge about it. I think Colin would be great at always just giving you that little reminder that “hey, I’m carrying a lot of baggage here, and just because I’m not moaning about it does not mean it has gone away” Plus he might throw in the pizza equivalent of that little wave in the car.
So of the two of them, who would be better? I don’t know. They’re actors – this is their art. Each of them would bring their own interpretation to their role, and I’m sure either one would be fantastic. It’s like asking which version of After Midnight do you prefer – Cale or Clapton? It’s the same piece of work but each man puts his unique stamp on it. Frankly I’d be lucky beyond belief to get either one of them.
I tell Arif all of this, and he nods and makes a note of it. And we don’t speak of it again. I’m sure he has his own list, and I have no idea who is on it. It occurs to me at this point that Arif has a pretty good poker face and a high stakes game of Texas Holdem between him and Pete would be something to see.
He’s not even going to send it out to cast until I produce a draft that he is happy with, so back to flashing cursor.
FLAT LAKE
I take a break and go home for a couple of days. My sister is one of the organisers of the Flat Lake, a literary festival. My best friend Billy is picking me up from the airport - he too has been press ganged by the sister into attending. It’s good to be home for a few days as Peter is about to head off to Korea to teach English -assuming Kim Jong Il does not blow the shit out of it before then. Bill and I agree that we’ll do the Saturday night so Saturday afternoon, we load up on tins of beer and then make our way out to Flat lake. Imagine a big field, with a collection of big tops, yurts, tepees, a pyramid of books about forty feet high , a couple of stages, a double decker bus and a couple of goats and a couple of thousand people and that’s roughly the picture. So I’m doing my Nobel Prize Winner impression (old joke – outstanding in his field – geddit?) and wondering where to go, when my cousin James wanders over and drags me over to Clones Film Festival tent. Clones is my home town and some friends and relations have been running a really cool film festival there for the last eight years. They even have an award ceremony to rival the Oscars – The Francies – named after the lead character in The Butcher Boy – a novel written by another Clones man, Pat McCabe. At least I assume it is the Clones Film Festival tent – someone has re-arranged the letters so that it now reads MONET IS ALIVE. I have a chat with James and Harry Cleary about the festival and the possibility of getting to show Pizza in the Festival the following year, and I say I will have a chat to Arif about it when we are nearer the end.
Bill and I eventually run out of tins, so we have to resort to getting pints from the bar tent – this is precisely what we have been trying to avoid as they’re usually ropey as all buggery but they actually turn out to be okay – better than okay – pretty damn fine. Somehow we end up in a conversation with some wild young Bohemians about Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Verdal and Armand Vaillancourt. I wander outside for a smoke – I don’t have a light so I wander over to the first group of people I see and say “can I have a light?” A guy gives me one and I realize the bloke stand opposite me is Dominic West. We’re chatting a bit, I say I really liked him in The Wire, thanks very much, chat a bit about Harold Pinter, Robert McNamara, whatever really, when Pete comes over. Pete is bombed, and he wants to bum a smoke. So I hand him the ciggie and he says “...cheers man, really apprec....HOLY FUCK, IT’S MCNULTY, HEY EVERYBODY LOOK, IT’S JIMMY MCNULTY” He then shakes his hand, and says how much he loved The Wire, ya feel me, no doubt and as far as I can recall it, he calls him McNulty fifteen billion times. (I would mock except this is Cowardesque wit compared to the time I met Steven King – an experience I won’t detail here except to say so starstruck was I, I was literally having an out of body experience, watching myself make a complete dick of myself and powerless to do anything about it.) Dominic’s clearly had enough of this as he’s backing away slowly and trying not to make eye contact. I steer Pete in the other direction. A bit later I briefly meet Cillian Murphy but slip off when I see Pete coming as I can’t face “HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK IT’S THAT WEIRD SCARECROW LADYBOY FROM GOTHAM CITY, PLUTO”
I get back to Wiltshire a couple of days later. Jess’ husband has finally read the script. She says when reading it, he pictured Dominic West in the role of Hobbes. I don’t have the heart to tell her, I have pretty much insured that he is the one guy we will never get.
Bill and I eventually run out of tins, so we have to resort to getting pints from the bar tent – this is precisely what we have been trying to avoid as they’re usually ropey as all buggery but they actually turn out to be okay – better than okay – pretty damn fine. Somehow we end up in a conversation with some wild young Bohemians about Leonard Cohen, Suzanne Verdal and Armand Vaillancourt. I wander outside for a smoke – I don’t have a light so I wander over to the first group of people I see and say “can I have a light?” A guy gives me one and I realize the bloke stand opposite me is Dominic West. We’re chatting a bit, I say I really liked him in The Wire, thanks very much, chat a bit about Harold Pinter, Robert McNamara, whatever really, when Pete comes over. Pete is bombed, and he wants to bum a smoke. So I hand him the ciggie and he says “...cheers man, really apprec....HOLY FUCK, IT’S MCNULTY, HEY EVERYBODY LOOK, IT’S JIMMY MCNULTY” He then shakes his hand, and says how much he loved The Wire, ya feel me, no doubt and as far as I can recall it, he calls him McNulty fifteen billion times. (I would mock except this is Cowardesque wit compared to the time I met Steven King – an experience I won’t detail here except to say so starstruck was I, I was literally having an out of body experience, watching myself make a complete dick of myself and powerless to do anything about it.) Dominic’s clearly had enough of this as he’s backing away slowly and trying not to make eye contact. I steer Pete in the other direction. A bit later I briefly meet Cillian Murphy but slip off when I see Pete coming as I can’t face “HEY EVERYBODY, LOOK IT’S THAT WEIRD SCARECROW LADYBOY FROM GOTHAM CITY, PLUTO”
I get back to Wiltshire a couple of days later. Jess’ husband has finally read the script. She says when reading it, he pictured Dominic West in the role of Hobbes. I don’t have the heart to tell her, I have pretty much insured that he is the one guy we will never get.
DEVELOPMENT
From here it descends into a flurry of emails and phonecalls back and forth with Jess with Arif standing on the sidelines ready to chuck in another thought grenade as they say inside the Borg cube that is corporate America.
So these are the edited highlights of the various drafts that are produced in this period.
Arif says he would like to get an American actress for the lead and would I have a problem with that. I say not a problem, but shall we just make the heroine American? I (along with most Irish people) have a bit of a thing about Irish accents. It’s not that most attempts are bad (at least you can recognise that it is an Irish accent), it’s just that there is no such thing as an Irish accent in the same way that there is no such thing as an English accent. You have a Cockney accent, a Geordie accent, a Scouse accent, an Oxbridge accent, a Sloane accent, a Welsh accent etc, etc. In Ireland you could have a Belfast accent (that’s the really slow one), a Cork accent (that’s the really fast one) and within Dublin where the film is set you would have to change your accent depending on whether your character came from Donnybrook or Phibsborough. However many actors when faced with the brogue that is Irish , seem to opt for this generic, one size fits all “begorrah, bejaysus top o the mornin’ to ya, twas himself to be sure...” lilt that comes straight out of Darby O’Gill. Not all of them of course, there are some great efforts - my all time favourite goes to Katie Hudson in the film About Adam where she got the southside Dub accent note perfect. But overall, I think it is a stick that people would be waiting to beat our poor actress with, so why make her job harder. Besides, thinking about it, it would be quite cool if the character was American. It’s gives her a “stranger in a strange land” mystique.
Suggestion that we are suffering from a surfeit of villains – what we shall call the Spider Man 3 problem. Easy enough to understand – we have a limited amount of screen time and we should focus on one antagonistic relationship. I can see the logic of this, although it will lose me my favourite scene in the movie (which is the minor villains scene) It also gives me a problem as the last act hinges on an action by the same minor villain. I can wallpaper over that, but it’s a pain.
Another suggestion in step with that is instead of losing the minor villain make him a woman. Shave her legs and then he was a she. And the coloured girls go do, do do, do-do-do, do do. Interesting one from Arif this. Again, simple enough. We have not many women characters – one really strong one but she does not turn up until page 33 (another simple change – get her onscreen on page 3 if only for ten seconds so the audience can get to know her) and the rest are okay, but minor. I have a long think about this one and then have a chat with Jess. My mail below sums up my thoughts.
‘Man, he lives in jerks – baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk – gets a farm an’ loses his farm, an that’s a jerk. Woman, it’s all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that.”
John Steinbeck – The Grapes Of Wrath.
Hi Jess,
OK, so been having a think about the Vittorio as a woman idea – and while I am not opposed to it – I am a little concerned about it, and think we need to think it through carefully. Initially I thought it was a fairly easy change, but the more I think about it the more, I think we would need some fairly extensive rewrites. I think certain scenes would have to be completely overhauled – the “Godfather” scene at the start would probably need to go – that’s a man talking – and while the stuff in the middle could probably stay – I am having trouble with the bike scene at the end – as I think that is a very stupid male response to a problem – see above quote by Steinbeck (no expense spared in whipping out the literary big guns to make my point) I am not saying that it is beyond a woman to do that – I am just wondering if a woman character did it, an audience would be less forgiving of her than a man (unfair I know) – I’m not even sure if that is important or not since we can ask how much sympathy we want an audience to have with Vit. (or whatever we end up calling her). I’m not even sure if this is a valid concern, but it’s the one I currently have. If you think this is unfounded, then I will stick in the changes, but would like to have your thoughts on it.
Incidentally, I don’t know if you are aware of the Bechdel Test of Women in film.
To pass the Bechdel rule, a film must have
1. At least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something other than a man
Surprisingly few films pass that test – we currently don’t. But I was thinking of our motivation for this change, and if it really is to redress the balance of gender equality, I am unsure if that is a good enough reason. Put it like this. There aren’t a lot of women here. Heroine I think is a cool character – although I suspect Pauline Kael would have gone to town on us, that she is naught but a male fantasy. Caroline needs work, but I think I can economically round her off to make her a bit more real, Lou has almost no screen time, but I still think she is a strong woman, and Dympna again has almost no screen time, but is pivotal and in one sense is the strongest woman of the lot. So despite limited numbers, I think the women we have are okay. Or will be by the time we are done.
Jess comes back and we agree to drop the Vtt. as a woman and go back to looking at dropping him altogether.
**
Peter phones up – he thinks he has spotted a Star Wars size plot hole. Our conversation goes something like this.
Pete: “Why doe the hero walk into the trap at the end?”
Me: “What..??”
Pete: “At the end of the film, when the hero knows that guy is going to mess him up, why does he go anyway...??”
Me: “Well that would be.....because...ehm...well you see earlier when they had that conversation......and the hippie bloke....oh fuck off!!!”
I call this the Star Wars plot hole because it’s something that you can sit through on repeated viewings and all of a sudden it hits you. You’ve all seen Star Wars, right? I’m guessing more than once. Search you feelings, you know it to be true. So at the end the Rebel Alliance are on the planet on the far side of Yavin. The Death Star is on it’s way and the Alliance go out in X wings and Y wings, they have big scrap, Han Solo turns up, gets Luke’s back, they blow up the Death Star – shiny medals all round in that dodgy Leni Riefenstahl rip off scene at the end. The plot hole is “instead of going around the moon, why didn’t the Death Star just blow up the planet that was in the way and wipe out the Alliance straight away instead of giving them a chance to attack?” Kevin Smith also has a great one for the end of Superman Returns which I won't go into here, but is on one of his "An Evening With..." DVDs.
I phone Jess about it – she doesn’t think it’s a huge plot hole, but does think that we could do with strengthening up the motivation. We know what the heroes motivation is because we’ve talked about it endlessly for the last three weeks, but it’s still might not be obvious enough to anyone sitting in a darkened theatre – that enigmatic bullshit might play in Yojimbo or A Fistful Of Dollars but it will get us killed. Currently the hero is falling on his sword for his friends. Her suggestion is that maybe the villian beats up the heroine. I am appalled by this suggestion. It solves our problem for sure, but it is a massive sudden shift in tone right at the end and I think the audience will again kill us for it. We have our lovely heroine that the audience hopefully will think is cool and funny and sexy and brave and we give her a pasting ten minutes before the credits. The credits where she is supposed to be shiny and happy, whereas in reality, after the hypothetical duffing we’re about to give her she would probably never leave the house again. Jess insists that for motivational purposes I should stick with that thought.
I stick with it – thoroughly depressed now.
Two days later I’m in the Borg cube at work when it hits me – how to fix it. Jess was right – we need to tie the heroine in at the end. I knew she was right, but trouble was I did not know how to do it. Suddenly, it’s all there in my head. We have a change a couple of other scenes earlier on, but it will tie up the plot hole – sort the motivation out, link out to earlier character arcs for a whole host of other characters too. I text Jess. Then I phone her and leave a voicemail. Then I mail her. Then I leave another voice mail. This is the single best bit of development yet and I want to talk about it. Fifteen years later in subjective time I get a hold of Jess. She thinks it’s a great move, so I sit down and hammer it out. It’s a farly big change, but I boot through it in jig time. Really happy now. I’m starting to see a trend in the way this is working. Jess or Arif suggest something – sometimes it’s just a suggestion that is obviously good. I’ll do it. Other times it will be something that I will be resistant to for whatever reason I can come up with. They’ll roll out the mantra of “well try it anyway, we can always go back to an earlier version” I’ll moan and grumble, but then their suggestion will give me an idea or we’ll come up with a third way between us that works.
Example – Jess phones me up saying that the film is called The Legend of New York Pizza” but we’re not seeing anything of how the hero becomes an urban legend. She makes a suggestion that I think is a bit meh, but acknowledge that she has a good point. The next meeting we come up with the same idea but in a way that is much more visual and possibly a bit cooler. This is what we go with.
When everyone is in the zone spitballing can be loads of fun. And I still have not gotten over the giddy thrill of having an hour long conversation where the only topic is something I’ve written.
**
There is a scene in the middle of the film where the hero meets the heroine for the first time in two years. Arif thinks it could do with some work to ramp up the sexual tension and highlight their competitive nature. In his words, it should be more like the chess scene in The Thomas Crown Affair. I’ve not seen the original Thomas Crown in a while although there was a while a couple of months ago, when I couldn’t turn on the TV without happening upon the remake. "Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?" Sky Movies gold apparently. I get a hold of Thomas Crown 1 and have a look at the chess scene. I’m horrified – it’s almost like a seedy porn parody of itself – soft focus, sucking on fingers, lip licking, stroking of chess pieces etc. And I thought that scene at the end of Written On the Wind with Marylee and the miniature oil derrick was bad? I phone Arif up and whatever reasoned argument I had in my mind, I think I end up saying “are you fucking kidding me?” Arif in unrepentant and insists that OK, the scene is hokey and dated, but at the time it was daring and provocative, and there’s no denying it’s charged with tension, so that dreaded line that all writers fear – “the same thing, only different”. We eventually get it done, but just for future reference if you ever see the final film, that 45 second scene in the middle took longer to write than anything else.
So these are the edited highlights of the various drafts that are produced in this period.
Arif says he would like to get an American actress for the lead and would I have a problem with that. I say not a problem, but shall we just make the heroine American? I (along with most Irish people) have a bit of a thing about Irish accents. It’s not that most attempts are bad (at least you can recognise that it is an Irish accent), it’s just that there is no such thing as an Irish accent in the same way that there is no such thing as an English accent. You have a Cockney accent, a Geordie accent, a Scouse accent, an Oxbridge accent, a Sloane accent, a Welsh accent etc, etc. In Ireland you could have a Belfast accent (that’s the really slow one), a Cork accent (that’s the really fast one) and within Dublin where the film is set you would have to change your accent depending on whether your character came from Donnybrook or Phibsborough. However many actors when faced with the brogue that is Irish , seem to opt for this generic, one size fits all “begorrah, bejaysus top o the mornin’ to ya, twas himself to be sure...” lilt that comes straight out of Darby O’Gill. Not all of them of course, there are some great efforts - my all time favourite goes to Katie Hudson in the film About Adam where she got the southside Dub accent note perfect. But overall, I think it is a stick that people would be waiting to beat our poor actress with, so why make her job harder. Besides, thinking about it, it would be quite cool if the character was American. It’s gives her a “stranger in a strange land” mystique.
Suggestion that we are suffering from a surfeit of villains – what we shall call the Spider Man 3 problem. Easy enough to understand – we have a limited amount of screen time and we should focus on one antagonistic relationship. I can see the logic of this, although it will lose me my favourite scene in the movie (which is the minor villains scene) It also gives me a problem as the last act hinges on an action by the same minor villain. I can wallpaper over that, but it’s a pain.
Another suggestion in step with that is instead of losing the minor villain make him a woman. Shave her legs and then he was a she. And the coloured girls go do, do do, do-do-do, do do. Interesting one from Arif this. Again, simple enough. We have not many women characters – one really strong one but she does not turn up until page 33 (another simple change – get her onscreen on page 3 if only for ten seconds so the audience can get to know her) and the rest are okay, but minor. I have a long think about this one and then have a chat with Jess. My mail below sums up my thoughts.
‘Man, he lives in jerks – baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk – gets a farm an’ loses his farm, an that’s a jerk. Woman, it’s all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that.”
John Steinbeck – The Grapes Of Wrath.
Hi Jess,
OK, so been having a think about the Vittorio as a woman idea – and while I am not opposed to it – I am a little concerned about it, and think we need to think it through carefully. Initially I thought it was a fairly easy change, but the more I think about it the more, I think we would need some fairly extensive rewrites. I think certain scenes would have to be completely overhauled – the “Godfather” scene at the start would probably need to go – that’s a man talking – and while the stuff in the middle could probably stay – I am having trouble with the bike scene at the end – as I think that is a very stupid male response to a problem – see above quote by Steinbeck (no expense spared in whipping out the literary big guns to make my point) I am not saying that it is beyond a woman to do that – I am just wondering if a woman character did it, an audience would be less forgiving of her than a man (unfair I know) – I’m not even sure if that is important or not since we can ask how much sympathy we want an audience to have with Vit. (or whatever we end up calling her). I’m not even sure if this is a valid concern, but it’s the one I currently have. If you think this is unfounded, then I will stick in the changes, but would like to have your thoughts on it.
Incidentally, I don’t know if you are aware of the Bechdel Test of Women in film.
To pass the Bechdel rule, a film must have
1. At least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something other than a man
Surprisingly few films pass that test – we currently don’t. But I was thinking of our motivation for this change, and if it really is to redress the balance of gender equality, I am unsure if that is a good enough reason. Put it like this. There aren’t a lot of women here. Heroine I think is a cool character – although I suspect Pauline Kael would have gone to town on us, that she is naught but a male fantasy. Caroline needs work, but I think I can economically round her off to make her a bit more real, Lou has almost no screen time, but I still think she is a strong woman, and Dympna again has almost no screen time, but is pivotal and in one sense is the strongest woman of the lot. So despite limited numbers, I think the women we have are okay. Or will be by the time we are done.
Jess comes back and we agree to drop the Vtt. as a woman and go back to looking at dropping him altogether.
**
Peter phones up – he thinks he has spotted a Star Wars size plot hole. Our conversation goes something like this.
Pete: “Why doe the hero walk into the trap at the end?”
Me: “What..??”
Pete: “At the end of the film, when the hero knows that guy is going to mess him up, why does he go anyway...??”
Me: “Well that would be.....because...ehm...well you see earlier when they had that conversation......and the hippie bloke....oh fuck off!!!”
I call this the Star Wars plot hole because it’s something that you can sit through on repeated viewings and all of a sudden it hits you. You’ve all seen Star Wars, right? I’m guessing more than once. Search you feelings, you know it to be true. So at the end the Rebel Alliance are on the planet on the far side of Yavin. The Death Star is on it’s way and the Alliance go out in X wings and Y wings, they have big scrap, Han Solo turns up, gets Luke’s back, they blow up the Death Star – shiny medals all round in that dodgy Leni Riefenstahl rip off scene at the end. The plot hole is “instead of going around the moon, why didn’t the Death Star just blow up the planet that was in the way and wipe out the Alliance straight away instead of giving them a chance to attack?” Kevin Smith also has a great one for the end of Superman Returns which I won't go into here, but is on one of his "An Evening With..." DVDs.
I phone Jess about it – she doesn’t think it’s a huge plot hole, but does think that we could do with strengthening up the motivation. We know what the heroes motivation is because we’ve talked about it endlessly for the last three weeks, but it’s still might not be obvious enough to anyone sitting in a darkened theatre – that enigmatic bullshit might play in Yojimbo or A Fistful Of Dollars but it will get us killed. Currently the hero is falling on his sword for his friends. Her suggestion is that maybe the villian beats up the heroine. I am appalled by this suggestion. It solves our problem for sure, but it is a massive sudden shift in tone right at the end and I think the audience will again kill us for it. We have our lovely heroine that the audience hopefully will think is cool and funny and sexy and brave and we give her a pasting ten minutes before the credits. The credits where she is supposed to be shiny and happy, whereas in reality, after the hypothetical duffing we’re about to give her she would probably never leave the house again. Jess insists that for motivational purposes I should stick with that thought.
I stick with it – thoroughly depressed now.
Two days later I’m in the Borg cube at work when it hits me – how to fix it. Jess was right – we need to tie the heroine in at the end. I knew she was right, but trouble was I did not know how to do it. Suddenly, it’s all there in my head. We have a change a couple of other scenes earlier on, but it will tie up the plot hole – sort the motivation out, link out to earlier character arcs for a whole host of other characters too. I text Jess. Then I phone her and leave a voicemail. Then I mail her. Then I leave another voice mail. This is the single best bit of development yet and I want to talk about it. Fifteen years later in subjective time I get a hold of Jess. She thinks it’s a great move, so I sit down and hammer it out. It’s a farly big change, but I boot through it in jig time. Really happy now. I’m starting to see a trend in the way this is working. Jess or Arif suggest something – sometimes it’s just a suggestion that is obviously good. I’ll do it. Other times it will be something that I will be resistant to for whatever reason I can come up with. They’ll roll out the mantra of “well try it anyway, we can always go back to an earlier version” I’ll moan and grumble, but then their suggestion will give me an idea or we’ll come up with a third way between us that works.
Example – Jess phones me up saying that the film is called The Legend of New York Pizza” but we’re not seeing anything of how the hero becomes an urban legend. She makes a suggestion that I think is a bit meh, but acknowledge that she has a good point. The next meeting we come up with the same idea but in a way that is much more visual and possibly a bit cooler. This is what we go with.
When everyone is in the zone spitballing can be loads of fun. And I still have not gotten over the giddy thrill of having an hour long conversation where the only topic is something I’ve written.
**
There is a scene in the middle of the film where the hero meets the heroine for the first time in two years. Arif thinks it could do with some work to ramp up the sexual tension and highlight their competitive nature. In his words, it should be more like the chess scene in The Thomas Crown Affair. I’ve not seen the original Thomas Crown in a while although there was a while a couple of months ago, when I couldn’t turn on the TV without happening upon the remake. "Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?" Sky Movies gold apparently. I get a hold of Thomas Crown 1 and have a look at the chess scene. I’m horrified – it’s almost like a seedy porn parody of itself – soft focus, sucking on fingers, lip licking, stroking of chess pieces etc. And I thought that scene at the end of Written On the Wind with Marylee and the miniature oil derrick was bad? I phone Arif up and whatever reasoned argument I had in my mind, I think I end up saying “are you fucking kidding me?” Arif in unrepentant and insists that OK, the scene is hokey and dated, but at the time it was daring and provocative, and there’s no denying it’s charged with tension, so that dreaded line that all writers fear – “the same thing, only different”. We eventually get it done, but just for future reference if you ever see the final film, that 45 second scene in the middle took longer to write than anything else.
MEETING IN PERSON
August 2009
We agree to meet at Arif’s house rather than Pinewood because it will save a trawl across London to Buckinghamshire. I am the only Irish person in the history of the world who ever turns up for anything on time, so I loiter on the corner lowering the tone of the neighbourhood and probably real estate prices as well. It’s good to meet Arif in person – in the great move if life, he would be played by Art Malik I think. Jess (Jessica has long ago become Jess) has not arrived, so we have a coffee and a wander around the garden. Apropos of nothing at all – am delighted to see that Arif’s garden has a “Winnie the Pooh’s thinking spot” something I would love to have in my own garden. Jess arrives. She would be played by Naomi Watts circa Mulholland Drive, I think.
We have the original draft of the script and the rewrites version. We go through the reworked version of the script, occasionally referring back to the first one.
There is a lot of spitballing back and forth. Both Jess and Arif have a great habit of not saying “I hate that, it has to go” but rather asking you what you think it’s purpose is, and forcing you to defend the choices you have made? What does this character get us? What does this scene get us? Let’s just take it as read that we were working on the heroes motivation (I had made him a Byronic hero – but perhaps he might be too Byronic – I should be making his character if not faster, certainly better and stronger) The heroine everyone seems okay with. Structure – act one still needs work. I write about five pages of notes, and then head back to the altar of the flashing cursor.
We agree to meet at Arif’s house rather than Pinewood because it will save a trawl across London to Buckinghamshire. I am the only Irish person in the history of the world who ever turns up for anything on time, so I loiter on the corner lowering the tone of the neighbourhood and probably real estate prices as well. It’s good to meet Arif in person – in the great move if life, he would be played by Art Malik I think. Jess (Jessica has long ago become Jess) has not arrived, so we have a coffee and a wander around the garden. Apropos of nothing at all – am delighted to see that Arif’s garden has a “Winnie the Pooh’s thinking spot” something I would love to have in my own garden. Jess arrives. She would be played by Naomi Watts circa Mulholland Drive, I think.
We have the original draft of the script and the rewrites version. We go through the reworked version of the script, occasionally referring back to the first one.
There is a lot of spitballing back and forth. Both Jess and Arif have a great habit of not saying “I hate that, it has to go” but rather asking you what you think it’s purpose is, and forcing you to defend the choices you have made? What does this character get us? What does this scene get us? Let’s just take it as read that we were working on the heroes motivation (I had made him a Byronic hero – but perhaps he might be too Byronic – I should be making his character if not faster, certainly better and stronger) The heroine everyone seems okay with. Structure – act one still needs work. I write about five pages of notes, and then head back to the altar of the flashing cursor.
FIRST REWRITE
August 2009.
I’ve sent over the redraft to Jessica and Arif.
In order to make this have any sense, I suppose I’d better give you a one line capsule summary of the film.
The adventures of a guy trying to make his pizza business a success.
Does that make you want to shell out eight quid at your local multiplex? Probably not, but I suck at loglines and I’m trying not to give away all the good stuff as Arif doesn’t want me to blow the whole plot on the Internet. I suppose he is imagining what would happen if Neil Jordan had a blog that said “and then it turns out that the chick in The Crying Game is really a man.”
OK, so have just spoken with Jess and Draft II was not quite the masterful revision that I hoped it was. Arif and Jess suggest that we have a meeting in person to go through everything line by line. She also sends me a scene breakdown which is basically a list of every scene, who is in it, what happens with a handy column for me to justify it’s inclusion. I take some time over this, but in some cases I can see where my arguments will be a tad wobbly.
I’ve sent over the redraft to Jessica and Arif.
In order to make this have any sense, I suppose I’d better give you a one line capsule summary of the film.
The adventures of a guy trying to make his pizza business a success.
Does that make you want to shell out eight quid at your local multiplex? Probably not, but I suck at loglines and I’m trying not to give away all the good stuff as Arif doesn’t want me to blow the whole plot on the Internet. I suppose he is imagining what would happen if Neil Jordan had a blog that said “and then it turns out that the chick in The Crying Game is really a man.”
OK, so have just spoken with Jess and Draft II was not quite the masterful revision that I hoped it was. Arif and Jess suggest that we have a meeting in person to go through everything line by line. She also sends me a scene breakdown which is basically a list of every scene, who is in it, what happens with a handy column for me to justify it’s inclusion. I take some time over this, but in some cases I can see where my arguments will be a tad wobbly.
JESS
July 2009.
There is a message on the answering machine from Jessica Loveland. She sounds nice. I phone her back. She is nice. We have a conversation about the script and how the development process should work. First order of business is to get 117 pages down to about 95. She asks how long it has been since I last seriously looked at it. She’s pleased it’s been a couple of years, as it’s a lot easier to spot where you can tighten stuff up if it’s not super fresh in your head and you’re not being the precious auteur acting like a mother grizzly bear and her cub. She sends over her original coverage from when it was wending it’s way through the competition which is pretty detailed, and reading through it again, I can see she has spotted all of the weak points that I sussed and a few others besides. She also mentions that everyone has mentioned changing the start, but no-one has mentioned changing the end, which is apparently the reverse of the way this usually plays out. No idea if that is an indication of anything at all. I’ve also been busted on not making any choices. In Jess’s words – the script is jam packed with ideas which is its strength but also its weakness. In successive drafts, we need to prioritize these ideas.
Suitably armed I head off to make some changes, and promise to try to have another draft in a fortnight
Karen is away in Utah on business, so I plan to spend the whole weekend writing. Come 5.30 on Friday I power down at work, and fire up the home PC. Nothing doing. This PC was probably last cutting edge at around the time that Alan Turing cracked the Engima code, and it has chosen this moment (can’t fault it on dramatic timing) to lay down, wiggle it’s little electronic feet in the air and die.
The script software that I use – Sophocles does not run on Mac’s so I go online and download Final Draft – a couple of hundred dollars well spent. I then have no choice but to start typing the whole thing out again from scratch. The Apple Mac is a thing of beauty but it’s wireless keyboard is not designed for a major bolus of typing. For one thing, I type like John Bonham played drums and there is no action on the keyboard to get my rhythm going. For another thing, it appears to be designed around the hands of a small child and my big chubby Shrek fingers keep slapping down in the wrong place. This is going to be painful – I move the Mac down to the kitchen, fire up the coffee percolator, nip down to the shop, load up on ciggies, chocolate and Red Bull and get going.
I’m about ten pages in when I notice something. Namely that I have not yet cut anything but I have already saved half a page. I print out one sheet and compare. It turns out that the dialogue margins on Sophocles are slightly narrower than they are in Final Draft. Nine characters by my count. So assuming I keep going out this rate I can save five to ten pages without changing a thing. I write until six in the morning and then crash out until noon. I finally finish up ar around 10pm Saturday night. Have factored in all the changes for this round and am one page over the magic number. Close enough for government business. Am so wired at this point, that everything seems to have a vapour trail. I go down to the pub for a quick pint to get the circadian rhythms back on track. I should mention that in a village of 2000 people, nothing stays secret for very long, so while I am having a chat with Bruce the landlord, when someone comes over and asks me if I would be interested in writing the village panto. Now I know I’ve made the big time.
There is a message on the answering machine from Jessica Loveland. She sounds nice. I phone her back. She is nice. We have a conversation about the script and how the development process should work. First order of business is to get 117 pages down to about 95. She asks how long it has been since I last seriously looked at it. She’s pleased it’s been a couple of years, as it’s a lot easier to spot where you can tighten stuff up if it’s not super fresh in your head and you’re not being the precious auteur acting like a mother grizzly bear and her cub. She sends over her original coverage from when it was wending it’s way through the competition which is pretty detailed, and reading through it again, I can see she has spotted all of the weak points that I sussed and a few others besides. She also mentions that everyone has mentioned changing the start, but no-one has mentioned changing the end, which is apparently the reverse of the way this usually plays out. No idea if that is an indication of anything at all. I’ve also been busted on not making any choices. In Jess’s words – the script is jam packed with ideas which is its strength but also its weakness. In successive drafts, we need to prioritize these ideas.
Suitably armed I head off to make some changes, and promise to try to have another draft in a fortnight
Karen is away in Utah on business, so I plan to spend the whole weekend writing. Come 5.30 on Friday I power down at work, and fire up the home PC. Nothing doing. This PC was probably last cutting edge at around the time that Alan Turing cracked the Engima code, and it has chosen this moment (can’t fault it on dramatic timing) to lay down, wiggle it’s little electronic feet in the air and die.
The script software that I use – Sophocles does not run on Mac’s so I go online and download Final Draft – a couple of hundred dollars well spent. I then have no choice but to start typing the whole thing out again from scratch. The Apple Mac is a thing of beauty but it’s wireless keyboard is not designed for a major bolus of typing. For one thing, I type like John Bonham played drums and there is no action on the keyboard to get my rhythm going. For another thing, it appears to be designed around the hands of a small child and my big chubby Shrek fingers keep slapping down in the wrong place. This is going to be painful – I move the Mac down to the kitchen, fire up the coffee percolator, nip down to the shop, load up on ciggies, chocolate and Red Bull and get going.
I’m about ten pages in when I notice something. Namely that I have not yet cut anything but I have already saved half a page. I print out one sheet and compare. It turns out that the dialogue margins on Sophocles are slightly narrower than they are in Final Draft. Nine characters by my count. So assuming I keep going out this rate I can save five to ten pages without changing a thing. I write until six in the morning and then crash out until noon. I finally finish up ar around 10pm Saturday night. Have factored in all the changes for this round and am one page over the magic number. Close enough for government business. Am so wired at this point, that everything seems to have a vapour trail. I go down to the pub for a quick pint to get the circadian rhythms back on track. I should mention that in a village of 2000 people, nothing stays secret for very long, so while I am having a chat with Bruce the landlord, when someone comes over and asks me if I would be interested in writing the village panto. Now I know I’ve made the big time.
OFFICIAL
July 2009
It’s up on the website.
Arif has pinged over the deed of assignment – I drop it over to Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel and they give it the nod. I need a witness so I take it down to the pub quiz to get Gary to sign it – he’s a copper so I figure that should be okay. Turns out Gary is not there, so I get Bruce the landlord to sign it. Probably does not have the same legal gravitas as a cop but to anyone who knows me, it’s probably more appropriate.
It’s up on the website.
Arif has pinged over the deed of assignment – I drop it over to Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel and they give it the nod. I need a witness so I take it down to the pub quiz to get Gary to sign it – he’s a copper so I figure that should be okay. Turns out Gary is not there, so I get Bruce the landlord to sign it. Probably does not have the same legal gravitas as a cop but to anyone who knows me, it’s probably more appropriate.
SO IT'S ONLY BEEN TWENTY YEARS
July 2009.
Working from home – the new financial year has started and there is a really bobbins job that I have been putting off for about a week – updating all the links on the excel files with the new dates. One of these easy, but painfully mundane six hour jobs jobs that you will do almost anything to avoid. I have blocked out calendar and am just going to keep my head down and get it done. For the sake of full disclosure, I should probably add that I went to the pub quiz the night before and had at least one and probably two pints more than I should have, and am consequently feeling a bit duntish- duntish being defined in The Meaning of Liff as somewhat incapitated by a severe hangover. It’s about ten o’clock when I get an email from Arif Hussein again. Could he phone me at any time that is convenient? I mail him back and say now is a good a time as any. Five minutes later the phone rings. We’re having a general chit chat about the competition, script writing in general, how long I’ve been doing it, etc and I say that at this point in (what we shall euphemistically call) my career, I would probably give a script away just to get my name on a screen. He starts laughing and says that you should never say that to a producer and what he has been leading up to is that I have won.
"I’m sorry?"
"You’ve won."
"Won?"
"The competition."
"Which competition?" (Did I mention the hangover?)
"The screenwriting competition – you’ve won it."
"The whole thing? There were all these entries and I’m the last one left?"
"Yes."
I’m feeling like Tom Berenger in Major League. Bren, is that you? I’m hungover, my knees are killing me and if you were going to pull this shit, you could at least have said you were from the Yankees.
Arif at this point is probably feeling like he is talking to the village idiot in Ryan’s Daughter, so I takea big deep breath, and try to pull it together.
"Sorry, one last time, the BFSC competition, I have won it, and Kaos Films now intend to produce the script The Legend of New York Pizza."
"Yes."
Karen gives me a free pass to have a sneaky smoke on a Wednesday night, when I am at the pub quiz. I have one or two left in the packet. I light one. This moment has been a long time coming. Almost two decades. Over half my lifetime.
So much so, that my response of “that’s really good news – thank you very much” does not quite seem to cover it.
He says that the official announcement is coming out tomorrow, but he wanted to let me know in advance. He says, he really likes the script, and is looking forward to working on it, it needs a little bit of a tweak, but nothing too major and he is looking forward to working with me. He also says he will put me in touch with Kaos’ head of development, a lady called Jessica Loveland. I ask if I can tell friends and family, and he says yes, but please don’t post it on the Internet before the official word has gone out. Not a problem. He hangs up.
I phone Karen first.
She can’t believe it.
It’s basically a repeat of the last phone call with me playing Arif and Karen playing me.
Then I phone home. Parents are delighted. I phone my sister. She asks if my niece Molly can have a walk on part. I say there are no parts for a ten year old girl. She asks if I can write one in. So my first development request comes from my own sister. Peter phones back an hour later. He’s over the moon, and needless to say he has a few words about my mockery of his sense of optimism. I eat my slice of humble pie. From now on Peter is going to be like Remi the rat in that Pixar movie, giving all of my scripts the sniff test. Yeah, that one’s good. This one’s bad. This one has no character arc or sense of dramatic irony. We hang up, as something in work has just kicked off and I need to get it sorted urgently. (if anyone cares I didn’t get those files updated for another three weeks – I am an Olympic level procrastinator)
It takes me most of the day to sort out the work issue so I don’t really get a chance to process what has just happened. At about 5.30 I log off. Karen is on her way home. I grab a beer from the fridge and the other ciggie I had left over. I go and sit at the back steps looking out over Wiltshire fields.
I’m thinking about everything.
I think about the other finalists and how gutted they will feel tomorrow morning.
I think about the first time I ever sat down to attempt to write a screenplay – in my second year in college.
I think about Joseph Conrad saying that art is long and life is short and fame is very far away.
I think about the time I saw some young Romanian girl having won an Olympic Gold for gymnastics saying "it's the achievement of my life's ambition" and thinking 'probably good to get that out of the way before you turn fifteen.'
I think about the time years ago that we were broke and Karen took a second job but wouldn’t let me get one, because it would eat into my writing time.
And then I burst into tears like a six year old who has just fallen over in gravel.
Working from home – the new financial year has started and there is a really bobbins job that I have been putting off for about a week – updating all the links on the excel files with the new dates. One of these easy, but painfully mundane six hour jobs jobs that you will do almost anything to avoid. I have blocked out calendar and am just going to keep my head down and get it done. For the sake of full disclosure, I should probably add that I went to the pub quiz the night before and had at least one and probably two pints more than I should have, and am consequently feeling a bit duntish- duntish being defined in The Meaning of Liff as somewhat incapitated by a severe hangover. It’s about ten o’clock when I get an email from Arif Hussein again. Could he phone me at any time that is convenient? I mail him back and say now is a good a time as any. Five minutes later the phone rings. We’re having a general chit chat about the competition, script writing in general, how long I’ve been doing it, etc and I say that at this point in (what we shall euphemistically call) my career, I would probably give a script away just to get my name on a screen. He starts laughing and says that you should never say that to a producer and what he has been leading up to is that I have won.
"I’m sorry?"
"You’ve won."
"Won?"
"The competition."
"Which competition?" (Did I mention the hangover?)
"The screenwriting competition – you’ve won it."
"The whole thing? There were all these entries and I’m the last one left?"
"Yes."
I’m feeling like Tom Berenger in Major League. Bren, is that you? I’m hungover, my knees are killing me and if you were going to pull this shit, you could at least have said you were from the Yankees.
Arif at this point is probably feeling like he is talking to the village idiot in Ryan’s Daughter, so I takea big deep breath, and try to pull it together.
"Sorry, one last time, the BFSC competition, I have won it, and Kaos Films now intend to produce the script The Legend of New York Pizza."
"Yes."
Karen gives me a free pass to have a sneaky smoke on a Wednesday night, when I am at the pub quiz. I have one or two left in the packet. I light one. This moment has been a long time coming. Almost two decades. Over half my lifetime.
So much so, that my response of “that’s really good news – thank you very much” does not quite seem to cover it.
He says that the official announcement is coming out tomorrow, but he wanted to let me know in advance. He says, he really likes the script, and is looking forward to working on it, it needs a little bit of a tweak, but nothing too major and he is looking forward to working with me. He also says he will put me in touch with Kaos’ head of development, a lady called Jessica Loveland. I ask if I can tell friends and family, and he says yes, but please don’t post it on the Internet before the official word has gone out. Not a problem. He hangs up.
I phone Karen first.
She can’t believe it.
It’s basically a repeat of the last phone call with me playing Arif and Karen playing me.
Then I phone home. Parents are delighted. I phone my sister. She asks if my niece Molly can have a walk on part. I say there are no parts for a ten year old girl. She asks if I can write one in. So my first development request comes from my own sister. Peter phones back an hour later. He’s over the moon, and needless to say he has a few words about my mockery of his sense of optimism. I eat my slice of humble pie. From now on Peter is going to be like Remi the rat in that Pixar movie, giving all of my scripts the sniff test. Yeah, that one’s good. This one’s bad. This one has no character arc or sense of dramatic irony. We hang up, as something in work has just kicked off and I need to get it sorted urgently. (if anyone cares I didn’t get those files updated for another three weeks – I am an Olympic level procrastinator)
It takes me most of the day to sort out the work issue so I don’t really get a chance to process what has just happened. At about 5.30 I log off. Karen is on her way home. I grab a beer from the fridge and the other ciggie I had left over. I go and sit at the back steps looking out over Wiltshire fields.
I’m thinking about everything.
I think about the other finalists and how gutted they will feel tomorrow morning.
I think about the first time I ever sat down to attempt to write a screenplay – in my second year in college.
I think about Joseph Conrad saying that art is long and life is short and fame is very far away.
I think about the time I saw some young Romanian girl having won an Olympic Gold for gymnastics saying "it's the achievement of my life's ambition" and thinking 'probably good to get that out of the way before you turn fifteen.'
I think about the time years ago that we were broke and Karen took a second job but wouldn’t let me get one, because it would eat into my writing time.
And then I burst into tears like a six year old who has just fallen over in gravel.
FINALS
June 2009.
Jesus Christ, the little script that thought it could. Pizza is now in the finals. I can’t believe it. I was convinced that if nothing else, someone would think that there is no way they could shoot it on the budget they have. I guess that must not be a factor in their thinking yet. I’m starting to feel really sick now and my brain is doing a Vicky Pollard of “Yeah but no but yeah, but no but yeah”. I have a look at the other titles. All of them sound better than mine, and one in particular Across The Water sounds really intriguing? What water? What’s across it? Dammit I want to know. I can’t help but think back to a Terry Rossio article about the importance of screenplay titles (apparently someone paid half a million dollars just for the title RANSOM – nearly a hundred thousand dollars per letter – nice work if you can get it) wherein he mentioned that one of the words to avoid like a syphilitic rodent was LEGEND. Should have changed the bloody title when I had the chance.
Jesus Christ, the little script that thought it could. Pizza is now in the finals. I can’t believe it. I was convinced that if nothing else, someone would think that there is no way they could shoot it on the budget they have. I guess that must not be a factor in their thinking yet. I’m starting to feel really sick now and my brain is doing a Vicky Pollard of “Yeah but no but yeah, but no but yeah”. I have a look at the other titles. All of them sound better than mine, and one in particular Across The Water sounds really intriguing? What water? What’s across it? Dammit I want to know. I can’t help but think back to a Terry Rossio article about the importance of screenplay titles (apparently someone paid half a million dollars just for the title RANSOM – nearly a hundred thousand dollars per letter – nice work if you can get it) wherein he mentioned that one of the words to avoid like a syphilitic rodent was LEGEND. Should have changed the bloody title when I had the chance.
ARIF
May 6th 2009.
Got news today that contract has been renewed for another year. Always a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I have another twelve months salary that I can blow on my diverse investment portfolio of food and shelter, on the other hand, it’s another twelve months of corporate America. I don’t mind corporate America as much as I should, but I will say that I hate corporate speak. Picking low hanging fruit? As one who has some first hand experience of picking fruit, you really want to pick the low hanging fruit last. Why fill your sack with stuff that you then have to hump to the top of the tree? What’s the ask? That we speak in grammatically correct English where ask is not a noun? Thinking outside the box? As someone who shares a house with four cats, the last thing you want is someone thinking outside the box. And the TLAs – three letter acronyms – dear God in heaven – the three letter acronyms. I have attended hour long meetings that have been like that line in Good Morning Vietnam. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P., shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? 'Cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we'd all be put out in K.P. But anyway, I digress. I get home from work and Karen says that some guy from Kaos has phoned and could I phone him back. Something Hussein, she didn’t catch his first name. I give them a ring. It turns out to be an Arif Hussein. Hi Arif, pleased to meet you. Turns out they’ve been trying to mail me and failing – my email account at work had been changed slightly a couple of months back – because I have made it through to the semi finals and they wanted to get a soft copy of all the scripts to send to the judges. Am starting to feel a twinge of excitement but brutally suppress it. That way, anguish lies. I ping it over.
So The Tin Man is gone - only Pizza left. I have another look at it. Night scenes, stunts, multiple locations, ensemble cast. No way in hell. I tell Peter I am down to one in the semi finals. He is really excited now. I’m convinced this is where I end up in my Willem Dafoe Platoon pose.
Got news today that contract has been renewed for another year. Always a mixed blessing. On the one hand, I have another twelve months salary that I can blow on my diverse investment portfolio of food and shelter, on the other hand, it’s another twelve months of corporate America. I don’t mind corporate America as much as I should, but I will say that I hate corporate speak. Picking low hanging fruit? As one who has some first hand experience of picking fruit, you really want to pick the low hanging fruit last. Why fill your sack with stuff that you then have to hump to the top of the tree? What’s the ask? That we speak in grammatically correct English where ask is not a noun? Thinking outside the box? As someone who shares a house with four cats, the last thing you want is someone thinking outside the box. And the TLAs – three letter acronyms – dear God in heaven – the three letter acronyms. I have attended hour long meetings that have been like that line in Good Morning Vietnam. Seeing as how the V.P. is such a V.I.P., shouldn't we keep the P.C. on the Q.T.? 'Cause if it leaks to the V.C. he could end up M.I.A., and then we'd all be put out in K.P. But anyway, I digress. I get home from work and Karen says that some guy from Kaos has phoned and could I phone him back. Something Hussein, she didn’t catch his first name. I give them a ring. It turns out to be an Arif Hussein. Hi Arif, pleased to meet you. Turns out they’ve been trying to mail me and failing – my email account at work had been changed slightly a couple of months back – because I have made it through to the semi finals and they wanted to get a soft copy of all the scripts to send to the judges. Am starting to feel a twinge of excitement but brutally suppress it. That way, anguish lies. I ping it over.
So The Tin Man is gone - only Pizza left. I have another look at it. Night scenes, stunts, multiple locations, ensemble cast. No way in hell. I tell Peter I am down to one in the semi finals. He is really excited now. I’m convinced this is where I end up in my Willem Dafoe Platoon pose.
QUARTER FINALS
April 9th 2009.
Kaos seem to be updating the webpage roughly every month. I’ve just checked and the next round is posted. Killzone is out of the running. I can’t help but feel that it had the best chance of being produced on a low budget,and this is the beginning of the end, but I duly tell Peter. Odds now 25 to 1. Incidentally, I should add that Peter was a croupier for a while, and a wicked player of Texas Hold Em, which is why we always seem to break stuff down into the statistical likelihoods. Obama is now the President, and I idly skim through the Tin Man again. I’m still liking the dialogue, but realize that the wheezy, flabby middle section is going to kill me. So everyone else might be saying “yes we can” but as far as this script is going I’m thinking “no we can’t”.
Kaos seem to be updating the webpage roughly every month. I’ve just checked and the next round is posted. Killzone is out of the running. I can’t help but feel that it had the best chance of being produced on a low budget,and this is the beginning of the end, but I duly tell Peter. Odds now 25 to 1. Incidentally, I should add that Peter was a croupier for a while, and a wicked player of Texas Hold Em, which is why we always seem to break stuff down into the statistical likelihoods. Obama is now the President, and I idly skim through the Tin Man again. I’m still liking the dialogue, but realize that the wheezy, flabby middle section is going to kill me. So everyone else might be saying “yes we can” but as far as this script is going I’m thinking “no we can’t”.
SECOND ROUND
March 16th 2009
On the phone to Pete again – he asks me how the competition is going. I’d actually forgotten about it, but I’m near the Mac so I have a quick check. All three are now through to the second round. Odds now down to about 40 to one. Peter, curse his youthful optimism is persisting in having a good feeling about this. I think he is going to be more upset than me when I get dinked at the end.
On the phone to Pete again – he asks me how the competition is going. I’d actually forgotten about it, but I’m near the Mac so I have a quick check. All three are now through to the second round. Odds now down to about 40 to one. Peter, curse his youthful optimism is persisting in having a good feeling about this. I think he is going to be more upset than me when I get dinked at the end.
FIRST ROUND
Jan 18th 2009 – my birthday. Another year older and deeper in debt. I check the Kaos website for updates. First round qualifiers have been posted up. All three have made it through. Out of a total of 206 that also made it through that gives me odds of about 68 to one. My brother Peter phones to wish me a happy birthday. I idly mention I have entered the competition. He is very interested to hear that the first prize is a produced film. In his words, “that sounds really cool – I have a good feeling about this one” I tell him that the way this usually plays out is that I make it to the last couple of fences and then fall on my ass.
ENTERING
August 20th 2008
Have decided to enter three scripts. Killzone, The Legend of New York Pizza and The Tin Man, which I figure are about the only three scripts I have that are really ready for market. For those who were not paying attention down the back, or got distracted by a wasp, a quick recap.
Killzone is a low budget horror that I wrote on spec for Barry Ryan in Warp X. Barry’s a friend from ago, who has worked on some films you might actually have heard off. Dead Man’s Shoes, the criminally underrated Grow Your Own and Donkey Punch which has just been released but I have not yet seen. (Innocent that I am I had to look up what a donkey punch was on the web, and all I can say is that Barry is going to have some serious explaining to do the next time he sees his mum. Suffice it to say, I had to delete my browsing history from my work PC.) Anyway, Barry phoned me up one day, and said “write me a low budget horror, eight to ten speaking parts, no special effects, and mostly set outside if you can”. Killzone was that effort and is probably best described as the bastard love child of Southern Comfort and Pet Sematary. It was actually in development with Warp for a few months with Barry and a very nice lady called Caroline Cooper Charles, before it was dropped. Official reason was that they had another project further along in development that was in the same postcode, but I rather suspect that someone, somewhere in Warp suddenly had a Damascene epiphany – “hey wait a minute, this is just the bastard love child of Southern Comfort and Pet Sematary.” I’m submitting it because Karen really likes it for some reason, it’s got a pretty solid structure and of the three scripts, it’s the one you’d have the best chance of bringing in under 2 million dollars.
The Legend Of New York Pizza is a low budget something that seems to defy genres a bit – comedy, romance, drama. Have I invented my own genre? The rodramedy? The comrorama? This is the oldest of the three scripts I’m submitting (you could still smoke in an Irish bar when it was being written) and came about from a chat over pints with my cousin Seamus – pints with my cousin Seamus always being a profitable enterprise. He mentioned and urban legend he had heard in Cork, I mentioned it to another friend John Conniffe who told me the Dublin version of the same urban legend and that was spark that kicked it all off. This story again has a nice solid three act structure and this one actually did reasonably well in competitions. It made the semi finals of the Zoetrope Contest a few years back (thanks for the nod Mr. Coppola) and it made the last 30 in the Nicholl’s Fellowship the year after – for non screenwriters, the Nicholls Fellowship is the big shiny Cadillac of screen writing comps – the only one in my experience where a placement will spam up your inbox with queries from Hollywood. This is what happened when Pizza made the top 30 although I couldn’t get anyone to bite on the premise – ah well, I console myself with tale of the number of people who rejected Back to the Future and ET.
The Tin Man. My favourite of the three but probably the least sellable. This screenplay is my love letter to big Irish families – specifically my own. Inspired by Fearghal and Anna’s wedding, it tells the love story of an American conservative and an Irish liberal at a wedding. It’s a bit of a mixed bag – structurally it is all over the place, but I think it has the best dialogue and most realistic characters. It was also an attempt to tell a real love story – not a shallow, plastic, hollow, boil in the bag, Hollywood, “you mean it was all a stupid bet?” love story. But alas, not that much actually happens. Apart from the only boob shot I have ever written in a script because I thought it was intrinsic to the plot. Normally I avoid the shagging in the screenplays because I’m such an incompetent I can’t do it well even on paper. If any of the judges rate Richard Linklater at all, this will probably be the one they go for. No competition wins for this one, and any time I have workshopped it, opinion seems to be sharply divided into those that love it and want to have it’s little babies and those that pathologically hate it and want to beat it to death with the head of a shovel. Oh and one guy who reviewed it appeared never to have heard of WB Yeats. I should also add that if Senator Obama wins the presidential election in November, it will probably give this script a shelf life of about ten minutes.
I meant to stick a confirmation of receipt postcard in the envelopes but can’t find any, so just send them anyway. And back to the day job.
Have decided to enter three scripts. Killzone, The Legend of New York Pizza and The Tin Man, which I figure are about the only three scripts I have that are really ready for market. For those who were not paying attention down the back, or got distracted by a wasp, a quick recap.
Killzone is a low budget horror that I wrote on spec for Barry Ryan in Warp X. Barry’s a friend from ago, who has worked on some films you might actually have heard off. Dead Man’s Shoes, the criminally underrated Grow Your Own and Donkey Punch which has just been released but I have not yet seen. (Innocent that I am I had to look up what a donkey punch was on the web, and all I can say is that Barry is going to have some serious explaining to do the next time he sees his mum. Suffice it to say, I had to delete my browsing history from my work PC.) Anyway, Barry phoned me up one day, and said “write me a low budget horror, eight to ten speaking parts, no special effects, and mostly set outside if you can”. Killzone was that effort and is probably best described as the bastard love child of Southern Comfort and Pet Sematary. It was actually in development with Warp for a few months with Barry and a very nice lady called Caroline Cooper Charles, before it was dropped. Official reason was that they had another project further along in development that was in the same postcode, but I rather suspect that someone, somewhere in Warp suddenly had a Damascene epiphany – “hey wait a minute, this is just the bastard love child of Southern Comfort and Pet Sematary.” I’m submitting it because Karen really likes it for some reason, it’s got a pretty solid structure and of the three scripts, it’s the one you’d have the best chance of bringing in under 2 million dollars.
The Legend Of New York Pizza is a low budget something that seems to defy genres a bit – comedy, romance, drama. Have I invented my own genre? The rodramedy? The comrorama? This is the oldest of the three scripts I’m submitting (you could still smoke in an Irish bar when it was being written) and came about from a chat over pints with my cousin Seamus – pints with my cousin Seamus always being a profitable enterprise. He mentioned and urban legend he had heard in Cork, I mentioned it to another friend John Conniffe who told me the Dublin version of the same urban legend and that was spark that kicked it all off. This story again has a nice solid three act structure and this one actually did reasonably well in competitions. It made the semi finals of the Zoetrope Contest a few years back (thanks for the nod Mr. Coppola) and it made the last 30 in the Nicholl’s Fellowship the year after – for non screenwriters, the Nicholls Fellowship is the big shiny Cadillac of screen writing comps – the only one in my experience where a placement will spam up your inbox with queries from Hollywood. This is what happened when Pizza made the top 30 although I couldn’t get anyone to bite on the premise – ah well, I console myself with tale of the number of people who rejected Back to the Future and ET.
The Tin Man. My favourite of the three but probably the least sellable. This screenplay is my love letter to big Irish families – specifically my own. Inspired by Fearghal and Anna’s wedding, it tells the love story of an American conservative and an Irish liberal at a wedding. It’s a bit of a mixed bag – structurally it is all over the place, but I think it has the best dialogue and most realistic characters. It was also an attempt to tell a real love story – not a shallow, plastic, hollow, boil in the bag, Hollywood, “you mean it was all a stupid bet?” love story. But alas, not that much actually happens. Apart from the only boob shot I have ever written in a script because I thought it was intrinsic to the plot. Normally I avoid the shagging in the screenplays because I’m such an incompetent I can’t do it well even on paper. If any of the judges rate Richard Linklater at all, this will probably be the one they go for. No competition wins for this one, and any time I have workshopped it, opinion seems to be sharply divided into those that love it and want to have it’s little babies and those that pathologically hate it and want to beat it to death with the head of a shovel. Oh and one guy who reviewed it appeared never to have heard of WB Yeats. I should also add that if Senator Obama wins the presidential election in November, it will probably give this script a shelf life of about ten minutes.
I meant to stick a confirmation of receipt postcard in the envelopes but can’t find any, so just send them anyway. And back to the day job.
THE COMPETITION
August 12th 2008.
OK, so once more unto the breach dear friends. Was wanderng around the Interweb looking for details of what is happening with the Oscar Moore Foundation (nothing at all apparently) and stumbled across some crew called Kaos Films who are running a screenwriting competition. And get this, the first prize is that they guarantee to produce the winning film with a budget of up to two million dollars, which sounds almost too good to be true. I wonder why I have never heard of them before. A run tour of Google and it appears that they have been running a similar competition for shorts for the last eight years, but this is the first time they have done one for a feature length. Any genre is allowed and the film can be set anywhere within reason. I'm taking within reason to mean is "you might have the best script ever but if it's set in Middle Earth, we can't recreate the White City on a 2 million dollar budget." I check out a few of the screenwriters blogs and am quite surprised at some of the negativity that I find. Mostly around the entry fee and the assignation of rights. OK, I'll accept that the entry fee is a little steep - sixty five quid per script - but at the same time, I'd always assumed that most wannabe screenwriters like me would be saying "CHANCE TO GET A FILM PRODUCED - WHO DO I HAVE TO SHAG OR KILL TO LAND THAT DEAL?" Hell, even the chance to get my work under the noses of the judges - Kenneth Branagh, Sir Alan Parker, Wooley, Powell, Kuhn, etc is probably worth a punt. So, sod the naysayers, I'm entering.
OK, so once more unto the breach dear friends. Was wanderng around the Interweb looking for details of what is happening with the Oscar Moore Foundation (nothing at all apparently) and stumbled across some crew called Kaos Films who are running a screenwriting competition. And get this, the first prize is that they guarantee to produce the winning film with a budget of up to two million dollars, which sounds almost too good to be true. I wonder why I have never heard of them before. A run tour of Google and it appears that they have been running a similar competition for shorts for the last eight years, but this is the first time they have done one for a feature length. Any genre is allowed and the film can be set anywhere within reason. I'm taking within reason to mean is "you might have the best script ever but if it's set in Middle Earth, we can't recreate the White City on a 2 million dollar budget." I check out a few of the screenwriters blogs and am quite surprised at some of the negativity that I find. Mostly around the entry fee and the assignation of rights. OK, I'll accept that the entry fee is a little steep - sixty five quid per script - but at the same time, I'd always assumed that most wannabe screenwriters like me would be saying "CHANCE TO GET A FILM PRODUCED - WHO DO I HAVE TO SHAG OR KILL TO LAND THAT DEAL?" Hell, even the chance to get my work under the noses of the judges - Kenneth Branagh, Sir Alan Parker, Wooley, Powell, Kuhn, etc is probably worth a punt. So, sod the naysayers, I'm entering.
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