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.