Last Thoughts On The Film Year

Things have been a little mini-hectic, but not in particularly exciting ways. The wife and I are heading to New York tomorrow to see my family, so everything has been a process of gearing toward that -- getting a late rush of work done, making sure Christmas presents and such are taken care of, attending to all of the random details of the season.

So don't expect a new post here until the new year, though after that hopefully they will be very regular again.

Otherwise, a few film thoughts:

It's a bit strange the lack of huge blockbusters this Christmas season -- there is no Lord of the Rings-level hit, no Narnia, no Harry Potter, not even a King Kong. Instead, we get things coming out like Night at the Museum, which looks like Jumanji, complete with an overacting Robin Williams. Or We Are Marshall, which is supposed to be rousing but just seems a bit too depressing at its core. And it's hard to imagine The Good German or The Good Shepherd breaking $50 million gross for their whole runs.

So that leaves Rocky Balboa, which is apparently male comfort food -- you know what you are going to get, there's some punching, and word is that it doesn't suck as badly as Rocky V. Even though we know it probably does.

One of the reasons that I like studying box office is that it is a good indicator of what producers will be looking for, but the news in the last few months has been a little odd. Children's movies always seemed a bit automatic, but now there are so many cartoons that it is diluting that (while though Happy Feet did well, it also cost $100 million). Charlotte's Web opened at $11.4 million in its first three days; it cost a reported $85 million. Ouch.

In fact, the reported budgets for a lot of the movies out right now are kind of scary, especially since few of them seem like they will make the money back. I'm sure the new Bond movie will turn a profit, but it cost $150 million. The Holiday cost $85 million; what the hell did they spend that on? And this is without advertising costs.

Flushed Away cost $149 million. Yikes. It has made about $70 million U.S. box office. They are going to have to sell a lot of DVDs.

Though at budgets like these, someone is getting paid.

Blood Diamond cost $100 million, and has made $18.2 million in 10 days. It'll probably do some worldwide business, but it's hard to see it turning much of a profit. Between this and Catch A Fire, which didn't make much at all, it's not a good time to be shopping around serious thrillers set in Africa.

Apocalypto cost a reasonable $40 million, but it looks likely to top out at less than $50 million in the U.S. box office. The Nativity Story only cost $35 million, but it has only made $18 million in its first 17 days.

A lot of movies completely tanked this fall. Fast Food Nation was a complete flop. Few people cared about Tenacious D. Turistas made it clear that movies like that are no longer automatic hits. The Fountain bombed. A Good Year has only made $7 million. Flyboys, which cost $60 million, made $13 million.

Bobby isn't doing much of anything; neither are For Your Consideration or The History Boys. Little Children, despite a lot of good reviews, has only made $2 million. The Last King of Scotland has only made $3.5 million, and it's on its way down. The Nicole Kidman movie Fur won't break $250,000.

So what made money? Borat made $122 million -- and only cost $18 million. Little Miss Sunshine made $59 million, and only cost $8 million. So comedies are largely doing well; even The Santa Clause 3 has made $80 million.

The Departed did well. The Prestige did okay. The Queen has made $25 million, and can't have cost much. Stranger Than Fiction did okay. Deja Vu will probably make money after the worldwide gross is figured in.

The Pursuit of Happyness may wind up being the sleeper hit of the season, and its $55 million budget seems practically reasonable.

But there just isn't a whole lot out there to get thrilled about. Dreamgirls is supposed to be solid, though it doesn't have the buzz it had a few weeks ago. Children of Men still looks interesting, but no one is talking about it for any prizes any more. Letters From Iwo Jima is supposed to be good.

Hopefully 2007 will be better. Until then, have a safe holiday season, and don't eat the fruitcake.

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Weekend Boxoffice #12

Three solid box office openers this weekend. Though none will probably break $30 million for their first three days, all should perform well.

CHARLOTTE'S WEB (3566 screens). It has a lot of name value, but it also looks like it skews very much toward little kids, while the fact that this is a holiday shopping weekend could hurt it. Call it $24.8 million, though it should do well in the long run.

ERAGON (3020 screens). The dragon effects look good, and this was a best-selling book, so it'll challenge for first, and maybe even take it. Call it $26.3 million.

THE PURSUIT OF HAPPYNESS (2852 screens). Destined to have a generation of people to spell happiness wrong. But it's Will Smith, it looks uplifting and it's the only one my wife wants to see. $23.0 million... But it could surprise everyone and come in first.

Predictions? Which of these are you likely to see?

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Holiday Lull

There just hasn't been much to post about the past few days. Hollywood is quiet, though there's enough work trickling in to keep me off the streets and out of trouble.

I'm planning for a trip back to Long Island over the holidays, to see family, and remember why it's good to be away from the frozen northeast.

The writing group continues to go well, while my brainstorming of my new script continues to yield a lot of promise, though the tone is still elusive; I'm not sure if it's a dark thriller, an offbeat drama/thriller, or more of a comedy. Probably the middle one, but it's still shaking out.

Here's a (vague) script-related question for you all -- if you want to feed my brainstorming, because anything you throw out that's interesting, I'll keep and use:

You are suddenly a version of yourself with a playful, vengeful side, and no moral compunction whatsoever. So you go into the deadend job you work at, at a big, faceless, cubicle-filled corporation, without caring if what you are about to do will get you fired (and not fearing any legal punishment either). So what would you do to your boss? To your rude coworkers, who deserve payback?

Let fly.

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Jenny Lewis on Conan

As has already been established, I have a married-man crush on Jenny Lewis.

This is her new song, "Fernando", though it isn't on her CD (despite what Conan says); no idea why she's playing it all over.

It rocks, though; enjoy.

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Weekend Boxoffice #11

So there's a diverse quartet of movies opening this weekend, in one of the hardest weekends to predict this year.

UNACCOMPANIED MINORS (2775 screens). On the one hand, it sort of has a Home Alone vibe, but I don't think they've done a particularly good job in selling it; I have no sense of the individual characters, much less the plot, other than "kids running wild at an airport". That might be enough. Call it $13.7 million.

THE HOLIDAY (2610 screens). I think this movie will do well; it has a good cast, and it has a fun vibe that most of the movies out there for adult audiences lack. $19.4 million.

APOCALYPTO (2465 screens). This is actually supposed to be good, but the problem is that it looks like a history lesson, and apparently it's more of an action tale -- essentially an extended foot chase as a man tries to get back to his family. So though it may entertain males 14-24, I don't see them actually seeking it out, while I think Mel's name is death. $6.1 million.

BLOOD DIAMOND (1910 screens). This is supposed to be very good, but it also looks like a tough sell. Still, I can see most people choosing this over Apocalypto. $12.7 million.

Predictions:

The Holiday $19.4 million
Unaccompanied Minors $13.7 million
Happy Feet $13.5 million
Blood Diamond $12.7 million
Casino Royale $11.5 million
Deja Vu $7.5 million
Apocalypto $6.1 million

Feel free to weigh in with your thoughts...

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Un-funking Myself, and a Book Review

So the process of prying myself out of my funk has begun in earnest, with two fairly major things so far this week:

1) I was invited to join a screenwriter's group, the first time I have ever tried this, but it's a process I am already enjoying.

The group meets once a week in a very small theater, where actors do cold reads of a 25-page chunk of whatever the writer is currently working on; the other writers then tear it apart. They do four chunks for four different writers each week, and the process looks very effective; the actors are good (and hearing your words read out loud definitely seems helpful), while the critiquing writers seem bright and spot-on.

I'm scheduled to wheel out my first 25 pages in January, so the benefit of this is that it is giving me one more reason to start something new, so --

2) I've begun work on something new. I was organizing my ideas file last week, sifting for lost gems, when I came upon a premise that I've played with in different ways in the past, but which I never came close to cracking enough to inspire me to attack it in earnest.

Over the weekend, I started brainstorming ways to tackle it. I changed the main character, found that that was working, and jotted down a bunch of ideas.

Then, because reading work is slow (damn holiday season), I got a chance to really put some thought into it the last few days. In addition, yesterday I did something that I'd always wanted to do writing-wise, and which turned out to be the perfect thing --

I read a screenwriting book, with the idea that I could filter the nascent ideas I had through whatever process it was recommending, and give an immediate jumpstart to the whole script.

And it turned out to be the perfect book. "Writing A Great Movie: Key Tools For Successful Screenwriting" by Jeff Kitchen. Kitchen is a respected writing teacher and script doctor, with a real grounding in dramatic structure, and the book is geared toward helping you do a lot of the work before you sit down to write, so you don't wind up doing 20 drafts of the same script, like I always do.

I didn't actually buy this book. It was sent to me in hopes that I would review it on my blog. It's the first time anyone has ever done this, and it turned out to be kismet, because reading through it automatically helped me flesh out certain parts of my idea, and really made me wish that I'd read this book before writing my supernatural thriller.

Anyhow, Kitchen gives a detailed immersion in drama and narrative structure and dramatic situations and character development and theme and other devices that prod the writer into not being such a lazy-ass and to actually do the work to make their script more dramatic. Kitchen illustrates his points by showing how they work on six films (The Godfather, What Women Want, Minority Report, Training Day, Tootsie and Blade Runner -- a pretty good genre swath) and then he uses the devices to create a plot of his own, just to illustrate how it is done.

There's no format instructions in this book; it's screenwriting for people who already know the basics, and are ready to do the work to make their script stronger structurally before diving into the first pass. I admit that I skipped over some of the denser sections, but I'll probably go back, and it's nice reading something from someone who really knows their stuff.

Worth a look.

Okay, I'm going back to brainstorming now.

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funk.

So I haven't posted much about writing recently, because I haven't been doing much writing.

Call it the post-Nicholl crash.

A few months ago, I was riding high. I had a script that made the semifinals in the Nicholl Fellowship, for which I got about a dozen requests from managers. I didn't even send it to them all -- I was being picky.

I had also given the script to some connections in the business (mostly development people that I work for) who had expressed interest in reading it, so that they could pass it on to people (agents/managers) they know. One got me a meeting with a manager, which went really well; the manager said he was a big fan, he said his boss would read it within a week, he said there'd be a followup meeting with him and the boss.

They seemed like the perfect company for me -- they are growing, they are more interested in developing writers than glomming onto projects as producers, they seemed to want to work with me.

I thought I had it made. I thought I was on my way to representation. I had two pretty good scripts, a supernatural thriller I was finishing, and someone's else's script that I'd done a low budget rewrite on that actually wound up with my name on it too, and which is also out there.

While I waited, I did another pass on my supernatural thriller, got notes, polished it up, got more notes, polished it up again.

And waited.

Nothing.

Oh, not entirely nothing. The manager I met with vaguely touches base from time to time; I sent him the supernatural thriller. His boss hasn't read my Nicholl script yet.

The development people I work for keep promising to read my script someday.

The other managers? Black hole.

Plus it's winter, so the business is in its yearly lull. Everyone is getting ready for Christmas, and then Sundance. Things aren't going to really pick up for about 9 weeks.

In Hollywood, two months of nothing happening is nothing. But then again, two months is everything.

Lessons I have learned:

-- If you are an unproduced writer, don't assume anything. Or get too picky.

-- Just because people ask for your script, doesn't mean they will actually read it. Which, you know, sucks. I'd rather have someone tell me up front that they don't have time, rather than request it and ignore it (and apologies to anyone whose script I've ever requested and then ignored).

-- I suck at marketing myself. Really. The idea of cold-calling a million agencies and trying to get one to agree to read my script makes my skin crawl. Especially since now I fear that the scripts will just disappear into the same black hole they did at the management companies that wanted to read it.

-- If you are an unproduced writer, you need a script that is either jaw-droppingly amazing or which is so commercial that it will probably sell. Otherwise it will be met with an apathetic yawn.

Plus, the funk has soured me on both my scripts. If I thought the supernatural thriller was a home run, I'd be out there pushing it, but now I'm just tired of it, and can't conceive of anyone actually paying me for it. Which is also feeding my enormous reluctance to jump onto the whole call-a-million-agencies treadmill.

I just want to write. Dealing with people is not my skillset. So you, I know, I'm screwed. Unless it's a skillset I develop.

Right now I'm in too much of a funk to do any skillset developing.

So things percolate along. There are a dozen or so copies of Nicholl script floating around out there somewhere. A half-dozen copies of my supernatural thriller are in the hands of people in which something could happen with it.

Unfortunately, they are all Christmas shopping, or preparing to ski in Aspen.

Meanwhile? Aside from making a living, I'm trying to dive back into writing. I'm currently choosing between finishing the comedy I started 2 months ago (I plotted it out, wrote the first 16 pages, then got sucked back into my supernatural thriller rewrite), or pounding out a draft of an old idea that I've been re-brainstorming over the last few days. It's sort of a (vague, I know) cross between Invasion of the Body Snatchers and a Charlie Kaufman movie. If I can figure out the right tone, I might write it, because I think it'll be fun to write.

And hopefully it'll help me escape the funk. Because in the end, it's all about the writing.

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Weekend Boxoffice #10

Slim pickings among new wide releases this week:

THE NATIVITY STORY (3183 screens). Anyone's guess. It's getting rather bad reviews, but the devout will likely go see it. This movie's performance is actually going to be important; if it makes a lot of money despite bad reviews, the religious films will keep flowing. If it tanks, then at least maybe people will take more care in making good religious movies. Call it $15.3 million.

NATIONAL LAMPOON'S VAN WILDER: THE RISE OF TAJ (1979 screens). This smells like straight to video, so I'm not sure why it is getting such a wide release; who knows, maybe it's actually funny. No, probably not. $1.8 million.

TURISTAS (1570 screens). I read a version of this a while ago, and it wasn't terrible. Still, it looks sort of generic. $5.4 million.

Expect older movies to hold over well. Call the top four:

Happy Feet $20.1 million
Casino Royale $17.8 million
The Nativity Story $15.3 million
Deja Vu $13.1 million.

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Nice To See That Bond Is Human

So I also saw Casino Royale this past weekend (3 movies in one weekend, after not seeing any in a month) and despite hearing a lot of good things about it, I was pleasantly surprised to find that it actually was, finally, a very good Bond movie.

Daniel Craig feels perfect in the role, and it's a breath of fresh air that they finally let his Bond be human. Past Bonds were always expected to be completely inflappable, to never be worried, to always be sort of boring. Here, finally, it felt like a Bond that was really living the part.

(Now if they'd just do something similar with Superman).

The setpieces worked well, particularly the early running-around-the-construction-site one. I agree that the casino segment seems to go on for a while, though ironically it's not because of the actual poker scenes -- I think they only show three hands in the whole Casino Royale sequence.

The poker scenes were also the typical ones, in which it all comes down to everyone having the kind of great hands that never simultaneously happen in real life. You don't need to know how to read other players, or see their tells, if you get a hand like this. As it was the bad guy's tell was so painfully obvious, that the poker-expert bad guy shouldn't have needed anyone to tell him about it, while Bond should suspect throughout that he is being set up.

The very end drags on for a while, though the final setpiece is very solid too. Overall, it's an entertaining ride.

It's also an example of a studio film that gets a PG-13 despite a myriad of reasons why it should have been R, including a torture scene. Just because the brutality is implied, doesn't mean that we don't feel it.

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Deja Vu and Logical Flaws

I liked Deja Vu a lot. It's the kind of stuff I like to write -- everyday people going through a tale that is enlivened by some supernatural or sci fi twist.

Here, a lot of it works well; Denzel Washington is very likable, and the movie strikes a nice balance between geeky technical stuff, action and a nice little romance. Even all the exposition is finessed very well.

Logic is a problem though, something that some of the reviews have been picking up on. It's the kind of movie that gets you to think as you are watching it, so much so that it demands, more than other movies, that what you are thinking about should actually make perfect sense by the end.

In Deja Vu, it doesn't always. And as regular denizens of Wordplay know, co-writers Bill Marsilii and Terry Rossio have been carefully writing for a while about how they aren't completely enamored about the changes director Tony Scott made to the screenplay.

So tonight, after seeing the movie, I read the script. I have a draft makrked "First Draft May 17, 2004", which I believe was the draft that sold.

And the core story is the same. The logic problems are the same. The biggest change is the fact that in the movie, Denzel Washington's character is initially misled about the technology he is taking part in; in the script, he is simply told the truth from the beginning . The movie's version works better; it is more credible that they wouldn't tell Denzel what is happening initially, and as Denzel puzzles out what is happening, it gives the audience a chance to do the same.

Unfortunately, a lot of critics (a subset referred to as "idiots") didn't seem to be paying enough attention, and got confused over what exactly was going on.

Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman's review, in which he seems completely baffled about what is going on, is a prime example; he cites the initial cover story as what is actually happening, despite a sequence in the middle of the film that makes it perfectly clear what the truth was.

Maybe he was in the bathroom.

*** SPOILERS ***

The big logic flaw in this movie is the fact that the film (and the script) tries to have it both ways; they have fun with the idea that even as Denzel Washington goes back in time, everything he does in the past has already happened. So his fingerprints are in the woman's apartment throughout, it is his bloody gauze in the wastebasket throughout, when she talks to her friend on the answering machine, he is there with her.

But because this all happens in a time stream when the woman is still dead, it makes no sense that it is happening.

Put it this way -- when Denzel Washington goes back in time, and saves the woman from being killed, that is when everything should change. There's even a helpful drawing of it along the way (which is in the movie and not in the script; maybe that's one of the big problems, though the drawing is true) in which we learn that things that change the past will create a different time path.

The problem is that there would be no time path in which Denzel is investigating this woman's death and also find himself puzzling out evidence that turns out to be of his presence after he saved the woman. It's impossible, even under the terms of this script's logic.

*** SPOILERS OFF ***

So the script doesn't hold up under close scrutiny. Though a reading of the negative reviews (it's currently running at about 61% positive on Rotten Tomatoes) shows that a lot of the critics who haven't liked it aren't giving it close scrutiny; they aren't disliking it because this key plot idea doesn't make sense, they are disliking it because they haven't paid enough real attention to the plot to understand what the hell is going on.

And for me, the logic holes were forgivable; I was along for the whole ride, and it was a good one. Deja Vu is well worth seeing, though if you need to go to the bathroom in the middle, hold it.

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Borat

So I finally saw Borat, and I was a bit underwhelmed.

I generally liked a lot of it, and there were times I laughed a lot, but maybe it was the hype, or the fact that the commercials had given away so many of the funny moments, but I thought I'd be a lot more entertained than I was.

I was also distracted throughout by the odd construction of the whole film. Basically it is just an excuse for the setpieces in which he acts oddly in front of "real" people, to capture their reaction to the character, his attitudes and his behavior. But many of these setpieces felt contrived, manipulated just to fit into the storyline, from the prostitute just happening to show up at the house, to the college kids just happening to drive by in an RV, to the whole obviously-fake Pamela Anderson sequence.

Even the framing device didn't hold together that well for me. The idea is supposed to be that they are going across America, filming this movie, so obviously they have a cameraman with them, but they never refer to him at all. When the producer leaves, and Borat is alone... clearly he's not alone.

I know, one isn't supposed to take anything here literally. But rather than get caught up in the story here, or the story-within-the-story, or the story-within-the-story-within-the-story, they just kept bumping heads a bit too much for me.

For whatever reason, I liked the very-similar-in-many-ways Jackass 2 much more. Maybe it's just me.

Still, I did laugh, and I had to keep shushing my wife, who was being too loudly outrageously amused.

Within a few days, the movie will have passed the $110 million barrier. Amazing.

I fear that we are doomed to see a lot of projects try to imitate its success, with greatly diminishing returns.

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Seems Like a Good Idea To Me

The LA Times today reports what could be an example of things to come in Hollywood, and it's hard to find much fault with it.

It seems that last May, screenwriters Alex Kurtzman and Robert Orci (who wrote The Legend of Zorro and Mission Impossible III) were putting the final touches on the shooting script for "The Transformers" when they came up with the idea of punching up the humor by borrowing a page from TV and bringing in a bunch of fellow screenwriters to go through the script in a round table setting, to make the script more fun.

So they rounded up a bunch of pros who were also fans of "The Transformers" (though how they ascertained this is unclear): David Ayer (Training Day), Rawson Marshall Thurber (Dodgeball), stand-up comedian Patton Oswalt, Jon Hurwitz (Harold and Kumar), Lona Williams (Drop Dead Gorgeous), Jeff Nathanson ("Catch Me If You Can") and Don D. Scott (Barbershop).

While the screenplay's major elements (structure, plot, characters) were locked down, these writers were asked to double-check its logic and help squeeze what additional humor they could from potentially comedic moments. All invited writers signed a waiver that established they would get a standard $2500 consulting fee (for a session that ran only four hours) as well as a catered lunch; they also gave up any claim to ownership of any ideas that make it into the film.

This isn't hugely different from what some writers' groups go through, much less circles of readers during the writing process. What makes this interesting is that it is a big-budget studio film in which the original writers are circumventing the usual process of having the studio farm the script out to other writers for polishing/punching up, in favor of overseeing the process themselves, so that they can keep a lot more control over it.

In instances where the intent is to add more comedy to something, it also seems like a great idea for screenplays; there's no question that the more brains that there are adding laughs, the better, particularly in the situation in which the original writing team is the ultimate arbitor of what sticks. Especially if they have the ego-free attitude to accept ideas that will improve the script.

In the case of "The Transformers", I guess time will tell if the round table helped. But it feels like win-win on both sides; the script has to have been improved to a certain extent, while $2500 and lunch for four hours work for what was probably a fun session is hard to sneeze at either. I'd do it for $100 and a burrito.

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Weekend Boxoffice #9

Early this week, because of the holiday.

5-day weekends are extremely hard to predict, but I'll do my best.

DECK THE HALLS (3205 screens). Matthew Broderick is finally starting to look his age (87?) and when exactly was the last time Danny Devito made a funny movie? Still, it'll probably do a little family business. $21.7 for the 5 days.

DEJA VU (3168 screens). I'm not sure they've really figured out how to sell this, and its going to compete for the same audience as Bond, but they'll both probably do fine. $39.8 first 5 days.

TENACIOUS D (1919 screens). Hard to say, though I don't think it'll be too huge. $13.3 million.

THE FOUNTAIN (1472 screens). I've heard great things about this movie, and terrible things, and not much in-between. I think it'll get lost in the shuffle. $12.2 million.

My guess for the top 6 for Wednesday - Sunday:

HAPPY FEET $52.1 million
CASINO ROYALE $49.6 million
DEJA VU $39.8 million
DECK THE HELLS $21.7 million
TENACIOUS D $13.3 million
THE FOUNTAIN $12.2 million

I'm probably wrong. Tell me where, and make your own guesses.

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Natural Selection At Work

When I read on the toilet, I learn all sorts of things. This from Sports Illustrated --

"REPORTED By doctors at the Baltimore VA Medical Center, that emergency-room visits from men decline by 30% during broadcasts of sporting events. (The researchers looked at 796 pro and college football, basketball and baseball games between 2000 and 2003).

"In the four hours after the events, the number of men in the ER went up 40%. David Jerrald, the doctor who led the study, says an acquaintance of his died recently when he put off calling 911 during Georgia Tech football game. "By the time he capitulated to having 911 called, he was in cardiac arrest," says Jerrold, who hopes that men will "reconsider watching that two-minute drive and go to the hospital".

Yikes. Plus lord knows what effect being a fan might have on your blood pressure if you aren't feeling well and then your team does something stupid.

I wonder if this works for TV too -- if people are holding off heading for the emergency room if Lost or Desperate Housewives or The Sopranos is in the middle of the episode.

I was watching "A Simple Plan" in a movie theater with a friend when he started having chest pains; we left immediately and went to the hospital. It turned out to just be gas. I'm not sure what the lesson is there.

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Weekend Boxoffice #8

Holiday time is coming, and studios are trying to cash in.

HAPPY FEET (3804 screens). On the one hand, it doesn't seem they are selling this very well; it looks very childish, and it's hard to imagine boys being all that interested in it. On the other hand, penguins are still hot, it's directed by Babe director George Miller so it's probably good, and there is holiday family money to be made. Call it $20 million opening weekend, and it'll probably hang out for a while if it's any good.

CASINO ROYALE (3434 screens). Daniel Craig doesn't really do anything for me, but it looks like they are trying to make things a little grittier and different, and I think that'll help this franchise; I think people are getting a little tired of the same old Bond stuff. At the same time, a lot of this will probably be the same old Bond stuff that they want anyway. Call it $36.3 million.

LET'S GO TO PRISON (1495 screens). Also known as "Let's Rent This On Video". Hard to imagine that Dax Shepard or Will Arnett are going to bring in big crowds for what looks like a lot of standard don't-drop-the-soap jokes. Call it $4.4 million.

Top 3:
Casino Royale $36.3
Borat $21.7
Happy Feet $20.0

Your guess?

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Writing It Short, or Writing It Long

So the only new TV series I've been watching this year is "Heroes".

I was watching "Jericho" for a while, but it just got depressing, especially since every episode was the same - bleak post-apocalyptic stuff, and then a contrived mini-drama in which Skeet Ulrich (ugh) saves the day. Every week.

The good thing about Heroes is that it's the kind of stuff I like to write. Character/action/drama, with a supernatural twist. Real people put into extraordinary situations, to see what they will do.

The problem with Heroes? It's the kind of stuff I have written.

Every week, the series becomes a little more like my Nicholl semifinalist script.

No wonder none of these people who requested it have gotten back to me.

I knew there were some similarities early. My Nicholl script is also about a group of people with special abilities; generally smaller abilities than the ones at play in Heroes, but still. And one of my supporting characters is a guy who can draw the future.

But as Heroes has gone along, the story has become more about these people on the road, and the plot is increasingly becoming about their stopping a killer who is targeting people with special powers. Which is... pretty much what my plotline is.

I'm not saying they stole it; they obviously didn't. My script also has a lot of stuff that is completely different; the plotlines ultimately aren't all that similar.

Similar enough to torpedo the script? Probably. Sigh.

The fascinating thing, though, is that in my script I tell a fairly-involved story in two hours. Arguably, you could boil Heroes down to a feature too, though they are revelling in the fact that they don't have to; they get to tell it long, and that's very freeing.

Figure a season of a TV drama is about 22 episodes. Scrape out the commercials, that's about 16-17 hours to play with. That's a lot of time.

The main difference is focus. The way I crammed my story into two hours is by picking a main character and telling the tale entirely through her. It's her tale; everyone else is just along for the ride.

Heroes sprawls. It has about a dozen main characters; there are episodes when some don't even appear. The pace can be slower; they can linger over character moments. They can hang around comparatively-minor characters for longer periods of time, and give them mini-dramas that don't drive the central plotline in any way.

Of course, this is also problematic in that they need to pad a lot of stuff out; even telling a multi-character tale like this could probably be done tightly in 6 hours, so 16 is stretching it. The story tends to be a bit repetitive; we get not 1 or 2 scenes of the cheerleader healing herself after an injury, but 8 or 9.

The funny thing is that a while ago I tried to turn my script into a pilot; I had a minor "we like it, though we don't actually want to give you money" interest from a prodco. So I specced it into a pilot, and that was when I discovered the whole hunt-for-a-killer plotline that it evolved into, and then I backed it back out into a script.

Oddly, though, even the spec felt like a feature, because it still focused almost entirely on my main character. I hadn't really let it sprawl; I hadn't taken the opportunity to move other characters into the forefront.

Ultimately, I think there's interesting aspects about both writing things short or long. There's a definite tightness and structure to getting things down to feature length that is satisfying. But there's no denying that a lot of TV series are currently having fun just letting the characters and situations breathe.

Of course, in other currently-depressing news, I'm also becoming increasingly aware that my new supernatural thriller feels way too much like a very-special episode of The Ghost Whisperer. There really are only about 29 plots in the world.

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Weekend Boxoffice #7

As the weather gets colder, the movies start getting better, in theory, though there are a few clunkers this week.

Borat is tripling its screen count, to 2566. Stranger Than Fiction is opening up on 2264, and getting solid reviews.

A Good Year breaks out on 2066 screens, though it looks formulaic and sappy, while Russell Crowe, as good of an actor as he is, seems wrong in it. The Return is opening up on 1986 screens, but I have no idea what the hook of this horror/thriller is, so I guess the whole box office rests on Sarah Michelle Gellar.

Harsh Times is opening on 956, though it's hard to imagine that movie making much money, despite the advertising; the young white male audience it seems aimed at can't be all that excited about it, can they?

My predictions:

Borat $29.8 million
Stranger Than Fiction $14.7 million
The Return $11.6 million
A Good Year $6.9 million
Harsh Times $4.7 million

Yours?

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Cleaning Out My Closet

I know it has been a while since I've made a substantial post, but I've been in sort of a transitional funk.

The representation hunt is rather frustrating; turns out that even semi-ing in the Nicholl Fellowship won't get people to read your script particularly fast, though it's out there.

I finished a just-about-done polish of my supernatural thriller, which is sitting on the window cooling; I want to read through once more before I deem it ready to give to people. Hopefully by then someone will actually want to see it.

Meanwhile, I'm cleaning out my closet, and throwing stuff away. This has long been a problem for me; I'm a major packrat. Among the things I had boxed up in my closet are several hundred old cassette tapes, tons of TV shows and movies taped off TV in the 1990s, old paperback books, copies of coverage that I did before I had a computer, and of course, every rough draft of every incarnation of every script I have ever written, and every note I ever made about it on the way.

It's the last two stashes that have been going first. The coverage has already been disposed of, though I thoughtfully (anally?) shredded the cover page of every single one. Aside from a few early notebooks of script notes, all the loose pages of notes and all the extra copies of intermediate drafts are going. I'm keeping several drafts of all my scripts, but when a box of stuff can be boiled down to a script or two, most of that box has to go.

I've also uncovered some writing that I thought was lost, or that I had completely forgotten about, including a pair of puppet shows I wrote for my roommate in Manhattan in the 1990s. One of them was even performed, to a happy audience, though the videotape of that performance, which I wasn't at, is amazingly dark and inaudible.

I also found some sketches that I wrote for a sketch comedy troupe that I belonged to in Manhattan, several of which were performed during the troupe's one performance, before they gloriously imploded. I wasn't at that show either (I was a writer, not a performer).

I need to stop missing the few minor successes I've had.

Needless to say, when you clean out your closet, you find yourself reliving your past. I found a big envelope full of letters from friends to me at camp and college, back from the day when people actually wrote letters. I found a box containing every Playbill from every play I ever saw in Manhattan (when I spent a couple of years reading for a Broadway theater in exchange for free tickets to pretty much everything).

I found my old Rubik's cube. There's a box of old 45s, and some comic books, and some trading cards, including a complete set of Mallrats cards, even though I wasn't a big fan of the movie.

I found all my old mathletes awards. Damn, I was sort of a nerd.

The really sad thing is is that I lugged all of this stuff across the country, and then from Pasadena to Glendale to Woodland Hills. Most of it should have been jettisoned long, long ago.

Some of it I'm keeping, still. But I'm trying to toss anything that doesn't have sentimental value, or which I'm unlikely to watch or listen to anytime in the next 20 years.

If I find Jimmy Hoffa's body, I'll let you know.

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And On The Seventh Day, They Met And Hung Out

It's time to hang out with some fellow scribes.

This Sunday, we have reserved an upstairs room at Jerry's Deli in Westwood for some dinner and conversation. Hopefully this will be the first of many get-togethers.

We need to get at least 15-20 people to easily cover the minimum, but the more people we get/more money we spend, the longer we can hang out. So we're going for the 50-person maximum.

Please e-mail me to let me know if you can be there. All the info is listed over on Wordplay here. If you don't spend a lot of time at Wordplay already, you should.

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Writing a Script is Like Building a House... and so is Building a House

So I spent today doing something that I've always wanted to do, but which I had never taken the step to actually doing myself until now.

I did volunteer work, helping Habitat For Humanity build a house.

My wife's job set up a thing for their employees to volunteer, and though not many of them did, me and my lovely brude went over to the site (in Port Hueneme, about 40 miles northwest) and spent the day busting our humps for a good cause.

Today, that amounted to installing insulation in the ceiling, then helping awkwardly move (in two adjacent houses) over 100 pieces of fairly heavy drywall up a staircase to the second floor. Then we helped fill in a ditch over a pipe.

For someone like me who spends the bulk of their week sitting around reading scripts and writing coverage, just getting out and being active with other people is nice. Breaking a sweat to help a family get one step closer to a house to live in? Even better.

I loved every minute. I may pop back over in early December, just to hammer some of that drywall in.

Anyone who wants to join me, let me know.

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Weekend Boxoffice #6

I'm not sure why it's family film weekend this weekend, but the only two movies opening wide are The Santa Clause 3 and Flushed Away.

(Borat is also opening, but only on about 800 screens).

I guess the idea is that these movies will still be playing through the Thanksgiving break, but honestly, The Santa Clause 3 looks like such srtident, shrill crap that it's hard to believe it won't be completely dead by then.

Still, though Flushed Away is likely the better movie, I really don't think they are selling it that well; I've seen a ton of commercials, and none of them grabbed my brain, even though I like this type of animation.

So, though both will do a little something-something, my prediction is:

The Santa Clause 3 $20.1 million
Flushed Away $16.1 million

Saw III will probably drop off a lot, and bring in about $15 million or so. Borat? Maybe $10 million this weekend, if it clicks. Though in 2 weeks, it'll probably be making more than all these movies.

Your predictions? (And is anyone honestly eager to rush out and see either Santa Clause 3 or Flushed Away? Do you have kids that are intrigued by either movie?)

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Trick or Treaters

I've always had a fondness for Halloween; last year I even blogged about the time I went trick or treating in July.

I grew up in suburban Long Island, where as a kid Halloween was all about getting candy from as many houses as we could. We weren't trickers, we were all about the treat. We wound up with pillowcases stuffed with candy.

But nowadays, it seems that too much fear has set in. Nevermind that there aren't any confirmable stories of razor blades in candy or costumed kids being snatched off the streets.

In the 9 Halloweens that I've had in the Los Angeles area, in various apartments, I've had maybe 20 total trick or treaters knock on my door.

Last night was a relatively good Halloween; we actually had 8 people knock on the door of our complex, and some were adorable.

But 8. Come on. That's nothing. We still have a bowl of candy sitting here that I can't eat.

It's better than last year, when we had no one knock on our door. This year, the complex sent around a piece of paper that to post on your door/window about whether you had candy. It's orange, you can't miss it, and we're in a fairly high-traffic area of the complex.

I was convinced that this was the turning point. So I bought a lot of candy, just to be sure.

8 kids came by.

And I couldn't help but notice that most of my neighbors either didn't put the sign up at all, or put up the "sorry, no candy" side of the sign.

I get that a lot of parents would rather take their kids to safe parties than turn them loose in the neighborhood or (god forbid) actually go trick or treating with their kids. I guess you can argue that most kids can do without the sugar. Maybe safety is an issue in some neighborhoods; I don't know.

But it just seems a shame that this fun, essential kid-thing of my youth is being lost.

Did anyone see a good number of trick-or-treaters last night?

Stories, please.

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An Odd Movie Weekend

So after catching only one movie in theaters in the past few months (The Departed), I made a concerted effort to get out this weekend and actually see some stuff.

I wound up seeing two movies that are about as different as can be.

Saturday's movie was Jackass 2, aka the-latest-sign-that-our-civilization-is-going-into-the-toilet. The refined part of me was appalled that the unrefined part of me throughly enjoyed it. The unrefined part of me then knocked down the refined part and took a dump on his face.

Jackass 2 is pretty easy to review. If you liked the first one, if you liked the series, you'll probably like the second. I doubt I've ever laughed more while watching a movie, but your results may vary.

The weird thing about Jackass is that it has a huge heterosexual male audience despite the fact that it is really rather gay (not that there is anything wrong with that). There is copious nudity in the movie, all of it male, while I don't think there's a woman under 50 in the entire film.

The odd thing is that, despite all of the horrible, disturbing things in the movie (including a leech attaching itself to an eyeball, something even I couldn't watch), the only thing that they had to censor to get the R rating was a shot of someone drinking some horse sperm.

Apparently all the testicle shots were somehow less objectionable.

Sunday's movie was The Queen, which manages to pull an involving drama out of what initially seems like impossible subject matter, in the reaction of the Queen of England to the death of Princess Diana. I can't even imagine how you'd sell that project in a room.

It took me a little while to get into it, but by the end I was wrapped up in the tale, and it's worth seeing.

I can almost guarantee that I may have been the only person seeing both of those movies on consecutive days, though. Not a lot of audience overlap there.

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Weekend Boxoffice #5

The only movie that is really opening wide this week is SAW III, on 3167 screens, which for better or worse is likely to do at least twice as much as any other movie out there.

Interestingly, it'll probably make more in theaters than the first one, despite having much fewer stars in it. The power of a franchise.

So easy pickings this week, just one movie.

My guess: $31.1 million.

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I'm a Logic-Fascist, and Proud Of It

So I was reading a post on another writing blog the other day, where a blogger was giving advice to screenwriters on how to get their scripts good coverage from readers.

One of the pieces of advice was to make sure the script had no logic holes. It's good advice, though the way the blogger couched it wasn't; she made it sound like the only reason that one should do it is that many readers are "logic-fascists" who put undue importance on logic in screenplays, and so one needs to remove the logic holes, even if it "upsets the delicate dramatic balance you've crafted".

I'm not entirely sure she was completely serious, but it's not going to stop me from making this point --

Most people who go to the movies are logic-fascists.

The most common comment I heard from people who saw The Departed -- from those who liked it, and those who didn't -- were complaints about one particular scene, in which a cell phone rings at a time when it just feels illogical.

Generally-solid movies like Minority Report and War of the Worlds lost big points with a lot of people because of the logic flaws in them.

And there's a good reason for this. Logic flaws take you out of the movie, and make you think about something that you shouldn't be thinking about at that moment. If your brain is stubbing its toe on something that makes no sense, that's major. That needs to be addressed.

Not because readers are anal about it, but because it bothers everyone.

Movies can survive small logic holes, but why should they have to? There's no reason why you shouldn't craft your script to make absolute sense, simply because it's going to make for a much, much better movie.

And a much better read. And yeah, the last thing you want to do is to give a reader anything to latch onto that doesn't work in your script, because it'll just taint the things that does.

Audiences are logic-fascists, and writers need to be too.

Because if anything is going to upset delicate dramatic balance, it's that logic hole.

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The Departed (No Spoilers)

An odd movie, in that it has a lot of real story flaws and underdeveloped character motivations. It's the kind of movie where two people who have seen it can pick away for a while at the things that don't work, as I did with a friend this morning.

Still, it's a very good movie, and I was thoroughly engaged and entertained throughout. I'm not sure why I liked it as much as I did, only that the acting is great, Scorcese does a good job, and I was caught up in it throughout.

I suspect that they trimmed a lot to even bring it in at this long length, however, and that may be why some of the plot stuff (particularly involving "the girl", and Matt Damon's motivations at various times) seems rather thin.

But I still recommend it. The squeamish may want to beware, though; brain matter does fly.

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Weekend Boxoffice #4

Odd collection this week. FLICKA on 2877 screens, and THE PRESTIGE and FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS on a lot less -- 2281 and 1876, respectively.

We'll keep the prediction game to those three movies. I think it'll be a catfight with The Departed to be #1, but I'll be surprised if anything breaks $15 million.

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS $14.8 million
THE PRESTIGE $13.9 million
FLICKA $8.1 million

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Hanging Out With Writers

So late Tuesday afternoon I lugged my bones down to Westwood, to meet with two fellow writers who are separately in town for the week (despite both coincidentally being from the same general area of the Midwest); one was a Nicholl semifinalist last year, and one is one this year, so we're all in the same huge subsection of aspiring-but-hopeful screenwriters.

We met at a Starbucks for an hour or two, then wandered across the street to a bar for some drinks/dinner, and just spent a couple more hours there, just talking about movies, and about writing, and the hunt for representation, and just shooting the shit.

And it was a lot of fun, and it made me realize that it has been a long time since I have done that.

There are writers in L.A. that I occasionally get together with, but too often those evenings have a different thrust; we play poker or Scene It, or watch short films, and it's great, but it's different. There isn't enough pure writing/movies talk.

One of the two guys I met the other night is about to move to L.A., despite the fact that he knows no one here. And then yesterday, on the Wordplayer board, another writer posted a similar query; he's fairly new in L.A., and wants to know where to go to meet writers.

I replied with the suggestion that maybe it's time to put together something regular. Come up with a location where a group of people meet to hang out. Maybe once or twice a month at first; maybe, once it gets rolling, every single week.

A regular place, a regular time. If you want to go, you can; if you don't, you don't have to. No pressure, no RSVPs, just a place you can drop by and find people like yourselves.

Logistically it's tricky. Just in terms of avoiding traffic (for those of us north of the hills), Saturday nights might be best. It would be great to find a place somewhere centrally located, say in Westwood, that has the space to accomodate fluctuating groups, whether 2 people show up on a particular night, or 40.

When I lived in Manhattan in the 1990s, I regularly attended a somewhat-similar group, that met in a Times Square Howard Johnson's every Friday night for years. I once blogged about it here.

Even though that group was not screenwriter-centric (while Howard Johnson's is gone, and the group has apparently scattered), it did show that the basic concept works, and there's no reason why a regular gathering of screenwriters can't work either, whether we hook it into seeing a movie the same night or not.

Anyone who is interested in attending, or helping to get this to work, post here, or e-mail me privately. Because it's time.

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The Representation Game (Part I)

So when the list of Nicholl quarterfinalists, semifinalists and finalists came out 12 days ago, for a little while I felt like a wallflower who had just woken up with boobs. Suddenly all the guys were showing interest.

(Okay, that's probably not a good analogy, since I'm a straight man. But you get the idea. I hope).

First, I got a call from a guy at a production company (which I ironically did a little reading work for a few years ago, though that had been long forgotten by them) who wanted to read my script. Then the e-mails started flooding in. Mostly from manager/producers; everyone is a manager/producer nowadays.

It was nice, for a while. But then the flood shut off.

For the record, my script being on their list of Nicholl semi-finalists got me 1 phone call and 11 e-mails so far. Not a single one from from an agent, even a cheesy one.

Still, there are some good management companies on that list. Not all 12 requests are solid ones, but enough are.

Some wanted the script e-mailed to them, and some wanted hard copies snail-mailed to them. Some wanted me to sign dire-looking release forms (and for a couple, I did); others didn't care.

So, armed with some good advice from other writers who had been through this before (who warned me, among other things, not to send out my script too wide, and to avoid the small management companies who really only want to attach themselves as producers, and not build your career) I sent my script out to the more legit-looking places.

And now it's all about the waiting.

Though I've seen more action than most to this point. A low-level exec at one of the companies I read for passed my script with his recommendation to a couple of managers he has dealt with and liked, one of which had also requested it from me. So I got a quick read from them, and a meeting with a manager last week.

Just coffee, not lunch, a getting-to-know-you thing, but it went well. A very good vibe. The manager liked the script, needs his boss to read it, and then I'll meet with both. They are a small company, but they have sold a lot of stuff, don't attach themselves to much as producers, and are very focused on career-building. So it's all good so far.

Naturally, being in the L.A. area helps with this whole process. A lot.

So as I wait to see which ball drops next, I'm putting the finishing polish on my supernatural thriller, which no one in Hollywood has seen; it's nice to be able to dangle something that no one can get their hands on yet.

I've been trading e-mails with an impromptu circle of Nicholl semifinalists, swapping representative-seeking advice and the names of companies contacting people, so we can see which places are asking for everyone's script (which probably guarantees a huge pile of scripts on the floor of their office, and a long turnaround time) and which are being more selective. I'm even having drinks with a couple of these fellow writers tonight.

Ultimately this is just all very interesting to me. The whole Nicholl experience has gotten me writing again, and jazzed about the possibility of a career, and hopefully it'll keep me in active mode rather than the passive mode I too often find myself in, particularly when it comes to trying to be proactive about my writing career.

So... things are in motion. The game is afoot. I can't wait to see what happens next.

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Weekend Boxoffice #3

Toughie this week.

The Grudge 2 on 3211 screens
The Marine on 2545 screens
Man of the Year on 2516 screens
The Departed on 3017 screens
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning on 2820 screens

My wild guess:

The Departed $23.7 million
The Grudge 2 $23.3 million
Man of the Year $13.5 million
Texas Chainsaw $10.1 million
The Marine $8.2 million

Yours?

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Girls, Girls, Girls

So it turns out that the major bump that you get from a Nicholl semifinalist placement is a lot of attention from manager/producers.

A lot of people have negative opinions of manager/producers, mostly because of the conflict of interest of someone who is supposed to be focused on your career as a manager also trying to boost their own career as a producer -- when push comes to shove, would they choose an offer better for them, or for the writer?

The problem is that most managers now work for management/production companies -- because they can.

So as I choose a reputable few to focus on (more on this process as it occurs), I find myself pondering the commerciality of my scripts.

I really don't aggressively think commercially as I write a script. I'm not writing uncommercially, but I'm not as focused as some people about things like writing scenes that would be great for the trailer, or lines of dialogue that can summarize the plot in a coming attraction, or trying to make my tale teen-friendly, or making sure stuff blows up real good.

Having said that, I find myself with three screenplays that are about to be in play:

My frozen-time script, my Nicholl script, and my almost-but-not-quite-done supernatural thriller.

All of them have female leads. Not only that, but the first two -- the only two that anyone are going to be reading, at this point -- both have 18-year-old female leads.

I'm not sure what the Freudian implications are of my writing so many female main characters. Ironically, none of my previous scripts, or even the two someday-I-have-to-finish scripts I've been noodling around with, have female leads. Just my three solid ones. So something must be working.

The problem is that I conceived both of these 18-year-old female lead scripts a number of years ago, and the actresses I always had in mind for them have all aged beyond it. Natalie Portman is too old now. Scarlett Johannsen always seems older than she is. Thora Birch, Anna Paquin, Jena Malone, Emmy Rossum, Rachel McAdams, Anne Hathaway, Keira Knightley... all would have been more age-appropriate a few years ago.

So, since I'm bound to be faced with the question of who I see in the part, and who can star in this, it's a question I should really start thinking about, if I want to try to raise a spark in someone's eyes.

Because the best option might be Lindsay Lohan, and even she's moving beyond teen roles.

So who else is out there? Who are the interesting young actresses that can carry a film, that you want to see? Evan Rachel Wood? Ellen Page? Or do I have to wait for Dakota Fanning or Abigail Breslin to grow into it?

Pontificate, please.

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Not Fitting Into the Genre Box

When I submitted my Nicholl semi script to the competition, I had to identify the genre of the script, so that if it made the cut, and qualified for inclusion on the list being sent out to agents/managers/producers, the genre would be on it. Happily, it all happened.

The problem is that, as I've written in the past, the script is a mutt.

It's a character drama. It's a road movie. It's a hunting-a-serial-killer tale. It's not really a thriller, though there are some thriller moments. It's sort of action, but there aren't really any big action setpieces. It's sort of a mystery, but not really. There's a love story in the middle of it.

Most crucially, the main character, an 18-year-old girl, has a psychic power.

It works for what it is... but what is it?

So I don't even remember what my process was, but for some unknown reason, when I submitted the script, what I wrote in the genre line was "Fantasy Action Romance".

If nothing else, it sort of captures the fact that it's different.

But it doesn't really capture the script. And the first call I got about it was from a guy who was picturing The Princess Bride.

It's nowhere near The Princess Bride.

The tricky thing is that genre words have connotations. When you think Fantasy, it's sort of otherworldly. Lord of the Rings, Narnia, Willow, The Princess Bride.

My script takes place in present-day America. There are no creatures or little people. It's really not fantasy. Wrong connotation.

Science Fiction denotes technology, space, often the future. Star Wars, Star Trek, Minority Report, I Robot.

Supernatural denotes ghosts, demons, stuff like that.

There's not really a genre word that adequately describes a tale about a troubled girl with psychic powers falling in love while hunting a serial killer.

I could see that Fantasy was a mistake, so I actually e-mailed the Nicholl, and had them scrub the word off the list.

Of course, that leaves me with Action/Romance. Which is bound to leave people picturing something like Romancing the Stone, or Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

Not really what my script is either.

I suppose there are worse problems to have, and part of me is happy that I've written something that tried to be complex, that tries to be a lot of things.

The pessimist in me says that uncategoriable scripts tend to be dismissed.

I guess we'll see. But at least my new script is firmly a supernatural thriller.

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Five Good Hours

Yesterday afternoon, I pushed everything else out of the way for a while -- reading, the wife, life, the Mets (who weren't on until later) -- and drove to a coffee shop, armed with a very rough copy of my supernatural thriller.

And there I sat, for five hours, totally immersed in my script. Page by page, pen marking, correcting, cutting, cutting, cutting. Feeling the script; what needed to go, what needed to be hammered home a little more, what needed to be dropped in.

Chopping out the repetitive and the extraneous, and bidding it a fond adieu.

Five hours, and it felt like 90 minutes.

I love when that happens. When I'm so involved in something that time just flies by, yet I'm getting something accomplished.

Last night, I got on my laptop, and started typing in all the changes. I finished this morning.

This draft is down to a tight 115 pages. It's almost there, I think. I can't tell, because my brain hurts.

But nothing beats being able to carve out the time to really curl up with your script, in one, solid, long sitting.

That the Mets won, and are moving on, and the Yankees lost, and are done for the year, is just gravy :-)

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Weekend Boxoffice #2

This week let's make it simple.

The Departed is opening, on a little more than 3000 screens.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning is opening on a little less than 3000 screens.

Predictions for the first three days, U.S. box office?

My picks:

The Departed $28.7 million
Texas Chainsaw $18.9 million

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Protection, and the Page

My wife mentioned the fact that I'm a script reader to a woman at her job, who shared the story of her own husband. Apparently he'd spent two years writing a screenplay, then through a computer glitch he lost it all.

Every last word.

Do I feel bad for him? No. To me this just sounds stupid.

Because I worry about losing one day's work -- much less two years' worth.

Previously, whenever I wrote on my computer, I'd save everything on a disk at the end of the day. Not even the same disk every day -- I'd have 4 or 5 that I'd rotate through, just in case one was bad (or 2, or 3).

Since I've gotten the laptop, where I do all my writing now, at the end of every writing day I e-mail a copy of the script to myself.

Anal? Over-cautious? Maybe. But it takes a minute or two, and saves what could be hours of work.

But the main reason I'd never lose two years worth of work?

Every few weeks, I print out whatever I'm working on.

I've found that reading a script on the page is entirely different from reading it off the screen. And that there is nothing to jumpstart your writing -- and really seeing how it is going -- than just printing out what you have, and spending a chunk of time just curled up with the pages.

The process of disappearing into the pages just feels different than disappearing into the screen. Scenes will look differently, and read differently. Things will jump out -- scenes that are playing too long, dialogue that is dragging on and on.

More importantly, I can take a pen, and I mark the hell out of it. Jot ideas for dialogue changes, which I may or may not actually use, when I revisit it later - so it's not something I'm just impulsively changing in the computer, and then forgetting about. Tighten scenes down, pick up on repetitive bits.

I'm getting better about judiciously doing the whole editing thing too, particularly once I feel that the storyline is finally there (a place I feel I've finally gotten to with my supernatural thriller) and that the real polishing can begin.

If nothing else, the flexibility of holding the whole draft in your hand, so you can flip back and forth between scenes and lay them side by side, rather than scrolling through a draft on the screen, is invaluable.

So I have endless drafts of works-in-progress crammed into boxes in my closet, because not only do I not want to lose anything, but because I think that actually getting words onto paper, even in this computer age, is important to getting your script to work.

Writing a script for two years, and never letting the script out of your computer? On one level, ouch. But on a more basic level, to me it's a sign that he just wasn't taking it all seriously enough.

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Some of My Distractions Are Happy Ones

I've been a New York Mets fan since I was a wee lad growing up on Long Island. My dad used to take me and a half-dozen friends for my birthday every year; we'd pile into the car, and battle traffic through Queens to the game.

Being a Mets fan has often been a painful process; for most of the 1990s they were horrible, and since 2000 they haven't been very good either.

Until this year.

When I lived in Manhattan in the 1990s, I used to go to about a dozen games a year, taking the subway out. Often I brought my glove, even as an adult chasing the elusive dream of catching a foul ball. I never did, though I was with two people who were able to snag balls (one happily tearing out the knees of his suit pants in the process).

I did catch an overthrow during pre-game infield practice, an old, scuffed ball; it doesn't really count, but somehow it still does, because one can imagine the game life the ball might have had before it was retired to fielding drills.

(I just picked it up, and squeezed it. As someone who used to play a lot of softball, I'm always surprised how small baseballs are).

I was at the playoff game in 1973 when Pete Rose and Buddy Harrelson got into the fight on the field, and where Rose was showered with debris when he trotted out to left field for the bottom of the inning. The ticket stub is framed on my wall.

I also remember the game, years later, when Rose hit three home runs in one game against the Mets -- an amazing feat for a non-power hitter in a tough ballpark to hit home runs in.

It's tough being a Mets fan in Los Angeles, because unless they are playing the Dodgers or the Braves (on superstation TBS) there just aren't many games on TV; maybe a random Wednesday night or Sunday night game here and there.

The Internet is a godsend, because there are several sites that do live pitch-by-pitch descriptions of games, which are particularly handy because I can do some work, and click over every few minutes and see what I missed.

Anyhow, the playoffs start this week, and the Mets are playing the Dodgers, which always seems appropriate, with the Mets created after the Dodgers and Giants fled to the West Coast in the late 1950s. In fact, the Mets' colors, blue and orange, are in tribute to the Dodgers blue and the Giants' orange.

I only went to one Mets game this year, and ironically it was the only game they lost (out of three they played) at Dodgers Stadium. For you Dodgers fans, it was the only game that Eric Gagne saved all season, and he looked great. Unfortunately, he was still hurting, and never pitched again all year.

I've become something of a Dodgers fan, but still the blue I bleed is Mets' blue. The Mets have finally put together a team of young players, crafty veterans, and even (rare for the Mets) an actual player (Carlos Beltran) who is in his prime. The Mets' starting pitching is a bit shaky (don't expect a lot of 1-0 games in this series), but their bullpen is strong, their bats have pop, and hell, it's just nice for the Mets to be playing in October.

And by all accounts they are good guys, who all get along well, and have been busting their butts all year. No divas, no whiners, just hard-working team guys. Can't beat that.

Delta Airlines even just named an airplane after amiable young third baseman David Wright.

So as I juggle reading work, and my rewrite, and my $60 notes offer (which I thought I had shut down but which continues to bring in scripts), and paying attention to my wife, and the premiere of Lost, there's the Mets. The Mets. The Mets.

So if you flip around the channels this week, and spot the game, hover for a second, and look at the green of the field, and how pitches defy logic and gravity to spin and rise over the plate.

And hopefully the Mets are in front.

And if anyone finds themselves with an extra Dodger Stadium ticket this weekend, give me a shout.

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Saw

So late last night, not in the mood for writing (I did do some yesterday) or any more reading (ditto) I flipped on TV, cycled through some channels, and found "Saw", which was just about to start, and which I hadn't seen.

So what the hell. I watched it.

Saw has a great hook, in that it starts out with two guys, chained by their ankles to pipes on opposite ends of what looks like an oddly-huge bathroom, with a dead guy lying in a pool of blood in the center. They find small cassette tapes in their pockets, which fit in the cassette player near the dead guy, which they are able to retrieve.

When they play the tapes, they learn that same guy is messing with them. He has stashed things around the room to help them escape. But he also makes clear that if one guy doesn't kill the other by a certain time, the guy's wife and daughter will be killed.

At this point I was hooked, because there's something dark and primal about this, while the great thing about this story is that we feel like we are going through it with them; we find ourselves thinking about where helpful stuff can be, and how these guys can possibly get out of it.

It has the same appeal as many video games; you are put into a situation, and you have to figure out a way out of it.

*** Spoilers ***

Unfortunately, the writers really can't sustain the conceit. There's a great 90-minute movie in the basic concept here, a movie that just stays in the room with these two guys, as they puzzle stuff out, alternatively work with each other and turn on each other, and figure out the depths to which their unseen tormentor is messing with them.

Unfortunately this movie would have taken great talent to write, to sustain a piece with one location and two actors, and Saw doesn't really try. Instead it keeps leaving the room, for flashbacks and concurrent stories, that have a lot of shock value but which also keep costing the basic storyline a lot of its tension.

After a while all of these cutaway scenesl start feeling like a cheat, because none of the characters in the room are privy to most of this; in fact, no character in the movie is privy to most of this, not even the bad guy. It's a huge, twisty show that is really just put on for the audience, who are the only people who can really appreciate it.

But in terms of the bad guy's motivations, it just seems too contrived and over-complex, especially since at the heart of this the point is really supposed to be how basic this actually is. You have a chain around your ankle, a deadline, and a saw. How soon before you use the saw on your ankle?

So while it helps kill time to have another character who turns out to have kidnapped the wife and daughter because he is being manipulated into it, and an obsessed cop trying to figure it out, it all just feels like an unnecessary risk by the supposedly-psycholtically-brilliant villain.

Plus, the whole idea of the face-down apparently-dead guy on the floor actually being the bad guy has been used a lot, and here it really doesn't serve any purpose at all -- there's absolutely no reason he needs to spend 7 hours on the floor, playing dead, when he could be comfortably sitting in the room next door, watching and listening over a camera or through a two-way mirror. Yeah, it's a nice shot when he rises out of the blood at the end, but it still needs to make a certain amount of sense.

(I'm also unclear exactly who this guy is, and how he ties in with the doctor; there's some way-too-rushed-for-2AM exposition about a brain tumor, or something. The doctor and the other guy also remain naggingly underdeveloped).

Still, there are things here that work, and it's nice to watch a horror movie that gets parts of your brain working, even if it falls a bit short at the end; it's easy to see how this rose above most recent, unimaginative horror entries, and why the sequel did so well.

But I still think it would have been more satisfying just staying in the room, for 90 minutes, with these two guys.

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Oh Well, The Run Had To End Sometime

Nicholl finalist letters went out shockingly early this year, and I didn't make the finals.

Best of luck to those still in it...

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Weekend Boxoffice Prediction?

I may make this a weekly feature of this site, because pondering future box office beats a sharp stick in the eye.

Three movies are opening wide tomorrow:
Open Season (on 3833 screens)
The Guardian (on 3241 screens)
School For Scoundrels (3004 screens)

Plus there's one major holdover, Jackass Number Two, on 3063 screens.

All you need to do is predict (in the comments section, naturally) how much these four movies will make this weekend. Closest (determined by total difference of your four predictions to the actual official gross reported on Monday) wins kudos, bragging rights, and the ability to dance around your apartment in your underwear for an actual reason.

My picks:
Open Season $18.9 million
Jackass 2 $13.7 million
School For Scoundrels $10.6 million
The Guardian $9.3 million

Contest closes at 3 PM west coast time on Friday.

Go.

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Feast and Famine

So, in case you blinked and missed it, Feast finally opened last weekend, in 146 theaters across the country. Apparently most theaters just had it as midnight shows, though it seems to be playing at different times here and there, since it made about $4000 on Sunday and $1575 on Monday.

Total four-day gross? $56,131. Less than $400 per theater. Which means that the average crowd at each midnight show was about 20-25 people. I don't think theaters were rocking.

Suffice it to say that this is unlikely to catch on as a release pattern, expecially since it usually costs $1000-$2000 just to strike each print of a film. They may be carving some copies into guitar picks as we speak.

The sad thing is that last year, when Project Greenlight 3 aired, they actually did a good job selling this as an interesting movie. So much so that, if they dumped it directly into theaters as soon as the series was over, one would have to believe that they could have at least done $10 million or so. Because the TV series is invaluable free advertising.

Now, the TV series was so long ago that most people forgot why they wanted to see it. The underwhelmed reviews certainly didn't help, while since I'm no longer big on dragging my bones out to see a movie at midnight, I wasn't even tempted.

Had it been showing at a multiplex at 4PM last Sunday afternoon? I may well have gone to see it. Had it come out a year ago? Absolutely.

One of the features of Project Greenlight is supposed to be synergy. You get people interested in a film, you get them vested in wanting to see how it came out, and then you let them see it, immediately. It's hard to argue with that template.

But you need to get it out in theaters, or at least have popped it out on DVD a year ago.

Feast may well have been a victim of the Miramax-Disney divorce, that hit right around when the film should have come out.

And I suspect (though I have no real knowledge) that last weekend's release might just have been a contractual thing; they promised to give a theatrical release to the finish product, and did.

It's also a little advertising for the DVD release, which is coming out on October 17. And I'm sure some people will pluck it off the shelves at Blockbuster.

The Feast writers just sold a couple of scripts, and one assumes that Feast director John Gulager will get another shot to direct something. Maybe.

But for the movie that was supposed to show that Project Greenlight was commercially viable -- they had finally selected a genre film, just for that purpose, rather than the coming-of-age dramas that they had done as the first two films -- what could have easily been something of a success, if they had gotten it out right away, instead put a stake in Project Greenlight's heart.

They botched it.

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Attacking Your Critics

Apparently sad, sensitive filmmakers aren't going to just sit back and take shots from critics any more.

So not only did we get M. Night Shyamalan's awkward anti-critic tirade in "Lady In The Water", but now there's Uwe Boll.

Uwe Boll is generally considered to be the worst film director working today, almost certainly the worst that is continually working on fairly big budget films.

He made the epics "House of the Dead", "Alone in the Dark", and "BloodRayne". He has another 4 movies he is directing that are listed on imdb as being in pre- or post-production.

Uwe Boll has repeatedly complained in the past about the unfair rap that his films have gotten. But his whininess just made people make fun of him even more.

So recently, he took it a step further, challenging his critics to meet him in the boxing ring.

Seriously. And it happened.

Four critics showed up to fight Uwe Boll in Vancouver, British Columbia, last Saturday, including a writer for "Ain't It Cool News". Boll took them on one by one, in a ring in an arena, with a referee and a crowd.

And while I'd like to report that the critics doled out some damage, the problem is that Boll (41) is a former semi-pro boxer, a tough-looking German who, despite not wearing protective headgear like his opponents, still dispatched them all in a dominant round or two.

You can view the carnage here.

So Boll will continue to direct bad movies. His next one is another video game adaptation, "In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Seige Tale", which has the kind of cast (Kristanna Loken, Jason Statham, Ray Liotta, Matthew Lillard, Leelee Sobieski, Burt Reynolds) who really must just be in it for the paycheck.

Meanwhile, if Woody Allen wants to do some cage fighting, count me in.

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POV

I'm finding myself with a lack of blog topics; I spent the weekend reading a ton of stuff for my job, without anything amusing coming up along the way.

I haven't seen a movie in what feels like ages, though the only thing out there I'm truly tempted by is "Jackass Number 2" (seriously), though since my wife refuses to see it I may have to take it in sometime this week while she's at work.

If I do, rest assured, I'll blog about it.

Last night I finally curled up with the rewrite of my supernatural thriller again, after not touching it for a few days. On the agenda was one of the notes that everyone gave me: beef up the villain.

My problem is that I tend to tell stories the same way -- I pick a central character, and as the tale goes along they are in every scene. Thinking back, this hasn't varied much; my frozen-time script is the only one that really breaks this mold, because it has two main characters who are apart for stretches.

The horror script I have been noodling around with jumps around from characters a lot, and the teen ensemble comedy I once did a lot of notes on them put into hibernation would be, if I write it, a real stretch -- think "Dazed and Confused" in the way that it constantly cuts between a large number of characters' stories.

The incredibly-low-paid-rewrite I recently blogged about was also sort of an ensemble piece, and I think in the long run that might be the best lesson I get from that exercise, about just bouncing around from story to story.

Unfortunately, my main-character-in-every-scene-template has a big flaw: If you are telling the type of story where there is an antagonist, and the main character and the antagonist spend the second act apart, the antagonist is going to drop out of the story for a long time.

And that was my problem in my supernatural thriller. I actually had a little scene, in which we leave the main character for about half a page, and pop in to what the villain is doing, only to rush back to the safety of the main character's POV very quickly.

But in the past few weeks, I've been musing on ways to pump up the villain's story, because it's important -- the rule that certain kinds of tales are only as strong as their villains is true.

One of my previous problems was that the villain was also offscreen in act 2 because he pretty much wasn't doing anything; he was just kind of waiting for act 3 to roll around.

Not good.

So I came up with two new sequences for him, that give him some real second-act action, which not only sets up the third act stuff even better, but which gives him some more development as a character (which was always a problem as well).

Plus it feeds the urgency of the tale; now we're reminded that not only is the villain out there, but he is taking action that is bringing him closer to the main character.

In retrospect, it seems obvious, but again I was caught in the idea that I wanted the main character in every scene, which works here in acts 1 and 3, when the main character and the villain are brought into proximity a lot.

But now the bad guy gets his scenes too, and the script is all the better for it.

I guess the lesson is that when you are figuring out the way you want to tell your story, you need to be able to bend a bit, to fit in with the particular demands of the story you are about to tell.

But no, Brett, there still aren't any lesbians. Or midgets.

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The Exposition Waltz

So I've been a good boy this week, diligently spending at least two hours a night on the rewrite of my supernatural thriller.

I've reimagined the backstory a bit, and really done a lot of work on the main character, whose emotional journey is a lot more developed, and hopefully helps drive the story more.

My problem is that this is one of those tales with real exposition issues. Because I'm jumping into the story late, there is a lot of backstory to work in along the way.

If this was a four-hour miniseries, I could spend the first hour on what happens to my main character in her childhood and as a young woman; here, the tale begins with all of these events at least five years in the past.

So it's a constant waltz, trying to figure out what to reveal when, and how best to do it. I'm trying not to have flashbacks, because it's a device that I don't think will work well in the context of my story, so pretty much everything has to slide out via dialogue or visual moments along the way.

It's tricky, trying to parcel it out, and make it feel natural. The trick is to make it come out of the story, building so much interest into the "rules" of the supernatural element of my tale and what might have happened to my main character in the past, that the characters would naturally ask each other questions or feel the need to explain things, and that the audience will happily devour each dollop of information because they want the answers too.

So at times, to make sure I have it all in there, I'll overwrite. I'll purposely give my main character long, dense, clunky speeches about what happened, but not actually leave them in any scene. Instead, I'll carve pieces off the speeches and spin it into a piece of dialogue here, a silent moment there.

Once I get this pass down, I'm going to do an exposition pass, just jotting down what information we learn in each scene, and how we learn it. I'm going to make sure everything is there, and that I haven't established the same thing in four different scenes.

I'm going to ponder whether the exposition is something we really should learn earlier, or if it serves the story to hold it off a little later. And I'm going to think about better ways to bring across the exposition, or if certain bits needed at all; there's a lot of things the audience can be trusted to put together on their own.

It's a constant dance, one that (bad metaphor alert) I've been a wallflower with too much in the past.

But it's just one of those things that needs to be done.

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More Encouraging Tales of Writers Making It

Today's LA Times tells the story of Bryan Bertino, who two years ago was working as a gaffer on commercials and low-budget independent films, trying to accumulate enough hours to get into the electrician's union.

On his off-hours, Bertino wrote a thriller spec called "The Strangers", which got knocked out of the quarterfinals of the Nicholl but got Bertino a meeting and a manager. Bertino was so encouraged by his first meeting with a production company that he quit his job. Several days later, the script sold to Universal for low six figures against mid six figures if the movie was made. Bertino celebrated by buying his first suit and a TV.

The movie starts to shooting in three weeks, with Bertino directing, a $10 million budget, and Liv Tyler playing the lead. Bertino has also been hired by Jerry Bruckheimer and Scott Rudin to write genre-bending horror scripts for them.

This week's TV Guide (hey, I read it on the toilet) tells the tale of Caroline Kepnes, who became hooked on the TV series "7th Heaven" in college; it lead her to want to become a screenwriter (we all get our muses somewhere). Kepnes wrote a sample script for the show, and wound up befriending the producer. Fast-forward; Kepnes wrote this year's season premiere of the show.

I know, it's only "7th Heaven". But real passion, focused in the right direction, can get you anywhere.

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The Crack

So as previously mentioned, I've been wrestling with my supernatural thriller, a script that has some great ideas to it but which never quite entirely jelled.

One of the problems is that the story keeps mutating. It started out as one thing, but as I keep upping the visuals and the thrills, and changing the character dynamics, and refinessing the backstory, what I wound up with was too many pieces and echoes of different stories.

Too many half-realized ideas and glancing subplots. A story that revs up, and then idles for too many stretches.

The tale I'm telling has a lot of complex things in it. It's the kind of tale that really needs to be all worked out from the start, so that the supernatural stuff and the character stuff dovetail throughout, driving the story together.

It never got that.

In the last pass, I came up with (yet another) new first act, and then a third act that finally really started revving things up pretty well. Unfortunately, this just left the second act feeling slack and aimless in comparison.

I doled the script out to a few friends, and over the weekend I got the bulk of the notes on it back. Good notes, though oddly largely different; though everyone spotted the same bad typos (fortunately not many of them) and incoherent dialogue, everyone sort of had a different take on the script's problems.

Though, boiled down, it was all about Act 2.

But as I started going through these notes, and wrestling with what they were saying, that's when it came.

The CRACK.

The crack is the loud noise in your brain, when your plotline suddenly snaps into place. When everything suddenly makes sense. When the big gaping hole in your script suddenly seals.

When all you want to do is write.

The crack.

I've come up with what amounts to three major plot changes, that actually weren't suggested by anyone, and yet somehow it was a simmering combination of all of their notes that led me to the breakthrough.

Unfortunately, the crack often comes with a price, and the price is the realization that your script isn't nearly as close as you thought it was, and that it is still going to take a lot of work to wrestle it into place (the next crack is when you slap yourself on the forehead, and wish you'd solved all these plot problems beforehand).

It's not just about plot changes. It's about tearing it all apart, and making sure that every scene deals with these changes well. It's about starting from scratch on some levels, and really making sure it's all well-constructed this time.

The irony for me of course is that most of the time, I'm giving people notes, trying to lead them to the crack, and I can usually tell when I have; I get an e-mail back that sounds like they are flipping out, going through the shit-I-have-to-do-a-major-rewrite-on-my-script-but-wow-do-I-want-to moment.

And hopefully it's those moments that help fuel greatness.

So shit. I have to do a major rewrite on my script.

But wow, do I want to.

Thanks to those who helped.

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I Wonder Whatever Happened To My Pusher?

His name was Jeff, and he had good stuff.

I met him in the late 1980s, in Manhattan. The first time he saw me, he pulled me behind a corner, and showed me a sample of his wares.

He was a little scruffy, but for a few years he fed my addiction.

He sold screenplays.

Most importantly, he sold screenplays of movies that hadn't come out yet, and in late 1980s Manhattan, that was pretty rare.

I hadn't been trying to write screenplays for long, and I certainly never imagined reading them for a living. I was living in Manhattan, managing a movie theater, noodling with the screenplay format on the side.

One day, I was up at a shop, somewhere around Columbus Circle, that sold screenplays of movies that had already come out.

I didn't understand yet that they weren't allowed to sell scripts of movies that hadn't been released, so I asked the guy behind the counter if he had a copy of When Harry Met Sally which was about to open in a month or so. He explained the rule.

And then Jeff was there, behind me. Luring me into the shadows of the store.

It turns out that he had When Harry Met Sally, and he sold me a copy. I was hooked.

For a while, I bought stuff from him regularly. He had a list, a photocopied, stapled stack of sheets of every script he had squirreled away in his apartment somewhere. He must have had a deal with a local copy shop, because he certainly kept them in business.

After a while, he'd just call me, and give me huge discounts or whatever he had left over after a convention; sometimes I'd pay him $20 for 6 scripts. I was the guy he sold to to keep eating, because even in Manhattan 15 years ago, the script pusher business wasn't all that lucrative.

So I wound up with a lot of crap. What did I care? I was engorging myself on screenplays.

I've since purged a lot of the bad stuff from my collection, like Funny About Love, but I collected a lot of solid scripts along the way.

I have two different drafts of Heathers. One even had Daniel Waters' phone number on it; my roommate George called him on a dare, and chatted with him for a while.

I have Diner, Tin Men and Avalon, I have a draft of Big with some really dumb subplots about his co-workers that they wisely cut out (and in the days before DVD "deleted scenes", stuff like this was cool in and of itself).

I have two drafts of Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead that show that Scott Rosenberg must have gotten some amazing notes along the way, because whatever you think of the movie, the early drafts were a long, long way from it.

I have a copy of This Is Spinal Tap, that is indeed only 60 pages long, mostly just describing the scenes that they improvised during filming. I have a copy of Stranger Than Paradise that is only 55 pages long.

I have a copy of "Star Wars" in which Luke is named "Luke Starkiller".

But then I became a script reader (which reading all of these scripts was no little part of), and I largely stopped buying from Jeff, because now my addiction was being filled in another way.

I still saw Jeff occasionally, and he'd call me regularly. I might have bought something interesting from him here and there, but since moving out to L.A. in 1998 I've lost touch with him.

Of course, now, with the Internet, the bottom has probably completely dropped out of his business. Because if you want to read a screenplay, all you have to do is nose around the Internet long enough, and you can probably find a copy of it.

The other day, when I mentioned the script of "Stranger Than Fiction", I soon found one in my e-mail.

The problem is that, because of the Internet, security is tighter. Before, no one cared all that much about scripts; most were floating around Hollywood, most got out, but the passing-hand-to-hand distribution system of the Jeff's in the world never let it spread too much.

But now, the Internet is easy, and it's free. I can send a script to 100 people without worrying about copying fees.

So, for instance, there's not a copy of the new Charlie Kaufman script "Synecdoche, New York" to be found online anywhere, even in the shadows. And that makes sense; it's just too early for that script to be in the hands of the public.

Jeff probably doesn't even have a copy.

Of course, now that I do nothing but read screenplays all day long, I never have time to actually read anything from my collection. But I'm happy they are all there, a memory a time in which I was still getting to know the format, still learning what makes a good sequence.

In fact, when I first started reading "When Harry Met Sally", and was 5 pages in, I thought it was going to be a movie about this unlikely pair of people driving home from college. When that turned out not to be the movie, I took that premise and made it the basis of my second script.

My script sucked, but that's all part of the process too.

What's your favorite screenplay on your shelf (that you didn't write)? Where did you get it from?

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Stranger Than Fiction, Pt. 2

So someone slipped me a copy of the screenplay for "Stranger Than Fiction", which I glanced at, not wanting to ruin the movie for myself.

But I'm happy to report that indeed, most of the scenes in the trailer are from the first act -- the writer tackles the story head on. The toothbrush bit is on page 5; the scene in which Harold learns that he is meant to die soon is on page 23.

So I don't think the trailer gives away much at all, other than the set-up. Hot damn.

The screenplay is written by Zach Helm, who is basically living the dream at this point; not only does he have this already-getting-great-reviews movie coming out, but he just got to direct his next script, "Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium", which stars Natalie Portman.

Can't beat that.

According to research I just did (in which I'm essentially cribbing from a June 2005 Variety article), Zach Helm is 31, a former DePaul University theater student/aspiring playwright who was recruited by a Fox 2000 initiative aimed at "under the radar writers".

Helm wrote "Mr. Magorium", got an agent, sold the script to Fox, and spent the next three years "going to film school", as he puts it, which in his case meant that "anytime someone offered me a job, I took it. I doctored, I adapted, I did page-one rewrites, I developed TV shows, all of which were bad ideas. I spent three or four years killing projects right and left. Maybe I saved the world from some bad movies."

Not until he realized that his fate wasn't in script doctoring did Helm discover his knack for spec screenwriting. "I'm much happier and they're much better movies" he said.

Helm has another well-received screenplay, a comedy called 'The DisAssociate", set up at Warner Brothers.

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