Captain Marvel is a superhero roughly as powerful as Superman, minus the heat-vision and cold breath. What’s unique about the character is that in ordinary life, he’s teenager Billy Batson. Speaking the name of the wizard who gave him his powers (Shazam) calls down a magic thunderbolt, transforming him into the studly superhero. But he’s still a teenager in there.

If this to you sounds, “Like Big, but with superpowers,” then congratulations! You now understand Hollywood.

So that you may further understand Hollywood, let me briefly fill you in on what’s happened in the meantime.

I wrote a draft for New Line. Around the time I turned it in, there was a lot of speculation about whether New Line would continue to remain in business, but there was enough enthusiasm that the mini-studio ran the numbers and considered going into production before a potential actors’ strike. (The WGA strike hadn’t yet happened, but it looked inevitable.) Director Pete Segal was busy on Get Smart, costarring Dwayne Johnson, and rumors began building that The Rock would play Black Adam. A lot of people liked that idea, me included.

I would describe this draft as a comedy with a lot of action. It mostly centers on Billy Batson getting and learning how to use his powers, and discovering what happened to his parents that left him an orphan. One of the appeals of the project is that Billy is a comic book hero who actually reads comic books. Black Adam ultimately becomes the adversary, but he works much like Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies — a dark force to battle at the end, not a constant presence throughout. I wrote the draft I had pitched, and was very happy with how it turned out.

I got notes from New Line and the producers — mostly about set pieces, and keeping Black Adam from becoming too sympathetic — but before I could get started, the WGA went on strike. I couldn’t write, nor did I talk to anyone involved for 100 days.

When the strike was over, Shazam! was suddenly a Warner Bros. movie.¹ The new executive at Warners said he agreed with the New Line notes, and told the producers I should go ahead with my rewrite. We weren’t on the official production schedule, but there were discussions about budgets and timelines. We were definitely Pete Segal’s next movie, and many of the stories coming out of the press junkets for Get Smart were about Shazam.

When we turned the new draft in to the studio, we got a reaction that made me wonder if anyone at Warners had actually read previous drafts or the associated notes. The studio felt the movie played too young. They wanted edgier. They wanted Billy to be older. They wanted Black Adam to appear much earlier.

(I pointed out that Black Adam appears on page one, but never got a response.)

I expressed my frustration that I’d wasted months of my time and a considerable amount of the studio’s money on things that should have been discussed at the outset. I asked for a meeting with the executive in charge. He and I had one phone call, then I got a new set of notes that didn’t gibe with what we had discussed. (The written studio notes, I will say, were well-considered. I disagreed with the direction they were taking the movie, but they were thorough and self-consistent.)

In retrospect, I can point to two summer Warner Bros. movies that I believe defined the real issue at hand: Speed Racer and The Dark Knight. The first flopped; the second triumphed. Given only those two examples, one can understand why a studio might wish for their movies to be more like the latter. But to do so ignores the success of Iron Man, which spent most of its running time as a comedic origin story, and the even more pertinent example of WB’s own Harry Potter series. I tried to make this case, to no avail.

I was under contract to deliver one more draft. So I took them at their (written) word and delivered what they said they wanted: a much harder movie, with a lot more Black Adam. This wasn’t “Big, with super powers” anymore. It was Black Adam versus Captain Marvel, with a considerable push into dark territory and liminal badlands like Nanda Parbat. It wasn’t the action-comedy I’d signed on to write, but it was a movie I could envision getting made. The producer and director liked it, and turned it in to the studio while I was in France.

By the time I got back, the project was dead.

By “dead,” I mean that it won’t be happening. I don’t think it’s on the studio’s radar at all. It may come back in another incarnation, with another writer, but I can say with considerable certainty that it won’t be the version I developed.²

Yes, that sucks. And obviously, I can only share my interpretation of what transpired. There were dozens of meetings and phone calls in which I had no participation. As a reader, you should certainly consider the possibility that I wrote shitty scripts they simply didn’t want to make. Because Warners controls copyright on them, I can’t put them in the Library for you to read yourself. So you have to decide whether to take my word on it.

The larger point of this retelling is to help readers understand that at every level in a screenwriter’s career, there are projects that simply don’t happen, mostly for reasons you couldn’t anticipate at the outset. I’ve had good experiences at Warner Bros. (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Corpse Bride) and bad experiences (Tarzan, Barbarella). My next movie is at that studio, so while I’m frustrated by the way they handled this project, I have no axe to grind. When they have a movie they want and support, they’re top-notch.

I got paid well to write Shazam, and I get to keep that money. The real cost is an opportunity cost — the other projects I could have written that might be in production now. More than anything, that’s one of the reasons production rewrites are so appealing to established writers: you know those movies are going to get made.

Also softening the blow is that I’m already writing a new project, one I might have had to pass up if Shazam had dragged on any further. The first half of 2009 is going to be very busy. So while I’ll miss Shazam, and the movie it could have been, I won’t feel too bad if this is the last post I ever write about it.

1. Warners has a relationship with DC Comics that goes beyond the corporate kinship with New Line, so they apparently could have gotten involved even if New Line had remained separate.
2. Keep in mind that press releases often have little relationship to reality. The same week I found out that Shazam! was dead, Variety and several online news outlets ran stories about Pete Segal’s new overall deal with Warners, which highlighted Shazam! as his next project. I got several “Congratulations!” emails.

You can check out Augusto’s plugin here.

I hadn’t heard of Habari either, but it’s PHP-based like WordPress, and looks like it’s trying to incorporate several newer features of the language.

As always, if you’re a coder who feels like bringing Scrippets to your favorite platform, please consider this an invitation. Currently, we’re available for WordPress, bbPress, vBulletin, Drupal and Blogger, with less-elegant solutions for Movable Type, TypePad, WP.com and Tumblr.

But it costs $14.99. That’s simply too much.

Amazon sells the physical DVD with all the special features for the same price, at considerably more cost to the retailer. They have used copies for as little as $2.04.

Obviously, the advantage of online viewing is that you can watch the movie immediately. For that purpose, iTunes has it priced at $9.99, which not only suits the title but feels like a more appropriate price. (iTunes link)

I don’t get any advance notice when the movie will be showing up in different venues, so if you spot it somewhere else, let me know. I’m particularly curious what the options are outside the U.S.

Other laudable additions include Deliverance and A Face In the Crowd. If you haven’t seen the latter, add it to your Netflix queue. Half the young actors I know idolize this movie, so if you can work it into a conversation, you’re halfway to casting your feature.

It also reminds me of my junior-year class in postmodernism, in which we spent at least half the semester trying to arrive at a definition for the term — and never really got one. This video certainly has aspects of what we were seeking. It appropriates familiar cultural elements (The Charlie Brown Christmas Special) for use in unexpected contexts (advertising), much the way Michael Graves used the Disney dwarfs to hold up the roof of the Team Disney building. And in both cases, the project doesn’t really make sense unless you’re familiar with what it’s playing off. In this case, Lucy isn’t Lucy and Linus isn’t Linus, but the joke doesn’t work unless you understand who they usually are.

But I’d argue that the video also represents more than whatever postmodernism is or was. It’s the kind of thing you can’t imagine existing without YouTube. While the technology to make it could exist independently of internet distribution, the idea of doing it feels net-dependent. If Ernie doing M.O.P. is the quintessential video mash-up –

– then The Charlie Brown Ad Agency is its close kin. A mix-in, maybe. And it exists in the same metaverse as Beyoncé’s Single Ladies video, which remakes a mash-up (Walk It Out Fosse).

I offer these observations without any clear idea about what it means for screenwriting, but you can look at many current films through this lens. The Dark Knight is less a Batman movie than a Big Serious Movie with Batman mixed in. Twilight isn’t a vampire story. It’s a teen girl fantasy with a small thread of vampirism — not even real vampires, but something almost wholly different — woven in.

And I think that’s what our books and movies are going to be for a while: Aliens vs. Predator vs. Mr. Magoo. Our cultural world is vast and ephemeral, so we look for familiar icons that we can recall and repurpose. We want to know just what we’re getting, yet still be surprised. We’re toddlers that way.

On a crisp Friday morning in October, the final truckload of VHS tapes rolled out of a Palm Harbor, Fla., warehouse run by Ryan J. Kugler, the last major supplier of the tapes.

…

The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was “A History of Violence” in 2006. By that point major retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart were already well on their way to evicting all the VHS tapes from their shelves so the valuable real estate could go to the sleeker and smaller DVDs and, in more recent seasons, the latest upstart, Blu-ray discs.

VHS was how I saw most movies growing up. Not just classic movies, but the R-rated ones I couldn’t see in the theater. I can trace my screenwriting career directly back to a rented copy of WAR OF THE ROSES, which I rewound and transcribed, amazed to realize that somebody wrote that.

Still, I have almost no nostalgia for the VHS format itself. With its springs and gears, each tape was built to fail. I can’t think of another technology that seemed so inelegant even when it was new.

I want to offer a brief financial education for the newly-employed screenwriter. For most of you, this won’t apply — yet, if ever. But for others, this may be worth a bookmark, because there are some specific, unusual things you need to know. Screenwriting is a strange profession, and handling the money it generates is more complicated than you’d think.

1. Don’t quit your day job — until you have to.

Before writing this post, I asked a dozen working writers for their recommendations, and this was by far the most-often made point.

The natural instinct is to immediately quit your crappy day job once you’re hired to write something (or sell a spec). After all, isn’t that the dream? Isn’t this why you came to Hollywood? Every waiter and barrista in Los Angeles considers himself a screenwriter, so quitting your day job is an important way to distinguish yourself as a True Screenwriter, the kind who gets paid actual money to push words around in 12-pt Courier.

But don’t. Don’t quit your job right away.

Even if you sell a spec for $200K, it will be months before you see a cent. The studio will sit on your contract as lawyers exchange pencil notes about things you can’t believe aren’t boilerplate. When I was hired for my first job,¹ it took almost four months before I got a paycheck. I was living off of money from a novelization, but when that ran out, I had to ask my mom for help paying rent.

Nearly every screenwriter I speak with has a similar story — you’re never as broke as when you first start making money.

Beyond the initial delay in getting paid, keep in mind that there’s no guarantee you’ll have a second writing job. I haven’t seen numbers, but my hunch is that a substantial portion of new WGA members aren’t getting paid as screenwriters two years later. A career is not one sale. As one writer friend says, “I always think of myself as six months away from teaching community college.”

If all goes well, the needs of your career will eventually force you to give up your day job. You’ll have meetings at 11 a.m. on a Wednesday, and no more excuses to offer your boss. Or you’ll be hired on a TV show, which is at least two full-time jobs. So don’t panic when it comes time to quit. Just try to leave on good terms, with back-of-mind awareness that at some point you may need to get a normal job again.

Here’s how the transition happened for my former assistants:

• Rawson finally quit working for me because the movie he was directing (Dodgeball) was in preproduction. He went from being an assistant to having an assistant in less than a week.

• Dana had a movie greenlit and another script under a tight deadline.

• Chad met with Aaron Sorkin on a Tuesday morning — and got hired in the room. He had to start working on Studio 60 that afternoon.

Each of them left, but only after the needs of their writing career made it impossible not to. In the meantime, they had regular hours and health insurance. That last part is especially worthy of attention, because it may take months to get WGA health insurance started after making a sale.

2. It’s less money than you think.

We’re used to getting paychecks that have all of the taxes and expenses taken out. Maybe you’re bringing home $850 per week. The math is relatively straightforward: you know how much you need for rent, food, utilities and whatnot. And next week, you’ll get another check.

Screenwriting is nothing like that. You get paid in chunks, from which you have to pay taxes and percentages to all the people working for you. The money shrinks at an alarming rate. Worse, you have limited ability to predict when you’ll get paid again.

As an example, let’s say you and your writing partner sell a spec script to a studio for $100,000. That seems like pretty good money. But how much of it do you get to keep? Let’s run the numbers.

Out of all that money, you have less than $37K, and that’s before you’ve paid a penny of taxes. So don’t buy your fractional Net Jet just yet.

Some points while we’re here:

• Not every writer has a manager. I never did. Many beginning writers find managers helpful in making contacts and working on pitches. Your mileage may vary.

• While most managers get 10%, that’s not fixed by law the way it is with agents.

• You can also pay attorneys by the hour — but they’re well worth the 5%.

• You generally don’t write a check for your agent and attorney — that money is deducted by the agency when they collect from the studio for you.

• The WGA sends you a form every quarter on which you list what you’ve been paid by signatory companies. It’s your responsibility to pay dues.

Flipping through Variety, you might think that all screenwriters are rich. For instance, you might read that Sally Romcom sold a pitch for “low six figures.” That’s slanguage for $100 to $250K — still a lot of money. But if you actually looked at her deal, you’d see that the money is structured in a way that she’s unlikely to get it all at once, or even in the same year.

Sally is getting paid in three steps: first draft, rewrite and polish. For each step, she is being paid half at commencement, and half when she delivers. Each step has a time frame, ranging from 12 weeks for the first draft to four weeks for the polish. There is generally a four-week guaranteed reading period between each step, which means that the fastest she could expect to be paid for these three steps is 32 weeks (12 + 4 + 8 + 4 + 4).

She’ll get $125K for these three steps. The $75K sole credit bonus only happens if (a) the movie gets made, and (b) she’s the only credited writer on it. ²

In order to pay her bills, Sally needs to be able to predict when she’s going to be getting more money. For years, I kept a spreadsheet tracking projects and expenses across upcoming months, to make sure I’d have enough cash to pay rent six months down the road.

3. WGA membership happens automatically

One day, you’re an aspiring screenwriter who hopes to join the Writers Guild. The next, you’re a working screenwriter who must join the guild by law.

The first time you sell a script to (or are hired to write by) a signatory company,³ you need to join the Guild. Odds are, the guild will contact you as soon as paperwork crosses the right desk, but you can also jumpstart the process by calling the Los Angeles office.

You’ll have to pay a fee of $2,500 to join. ⁴ Ask nicely, and they’ll let you spread out the payments.

The most immediate benefit to joining the guild is the health insurance. The plans and benefits are confusing but extensive, with trade-offs for Preferred Providers versus HMOs. It’s worth spending a few hours getting it set up correctly. Once you’re in the plan, you’ll need to keep working in order to maintain eligibility.

4. Splurge on one thing

Once you start making money, there’s a natural instinct to upgrade every aspect of your lifestyle, which has probably stalled out in a post-college, heavy-Ikea phase. Don’t. You’ll burn through your money and wonder what you spent it on. Instead, buy one thing you really want and can afford. Make that your reward.

For me, it was getting a dog. I’d wanted one since I was 10, and I was determined to move to an apartment that allowed dogs. I found a duplex off Melrose and got my pug. Twelve years later, he’s still sleeping at my feet. He’s a good dog and a good reminder of how my career started.

Your dog equivalent may be a car, a painting, or a 30-inch monitor. Buy it and enjoy it.

But don’t feel any pressure to act rich. I drive a six-year old Toyota. We buy store brands and clip coupons. We fly coach.⁵

Over time, you will probably start spending more on housing, clothing, travel and food as your standards rise. That’s okay. But spend your mad money on things on those few things that actually make you happy.

5. Don’t rush to pay off your student loans

Everyone wants to be debt-free, but classic federal student loans are some of the cheapest money you’re ever going to find. Until you feel confident that you’ll have enough money to last you a solid year, keep paying your normal amount.

Instead, pay off your credit cards and private student loans, which tend to have much higher interest rates.

6. Sock it away

Whether you’ve made a bunch of money at once in a spec sale, or carefully grown a nest egg through steady assignments, you’ll want to put your money in two virtual boxes. In the first, stash enough to live on for six months (including taxes). In the second box, put all the rest of the money you make — and pretend it doesn’t exist.

I’m not qualified to talk about investments, pensions or retirement, but I feel absolutely certain giving you this financial advice: save your money. Get financial advice about about smart places to put it, and then leave it alone. Except for rare occasions — buying a house, for example — you should never need to touch it. Your living expenses should be more than covered by new money coming in the door.

7. At some point, you’ll incorporate

When a studio hires me, they actually hire my loan-out corporation, which provides both tax advantages and liability benefits. I didn’t become a corporation until after Go, at which point my agent and attorney told me it was time. ⁶ It’s a lot of paperwork to set up — your attorney will do most of it — and a fair amount of responsibility, with quarterly taxes and other filings.

Like heart surgery, it’s smart to ask a lot of questions, but you ultimately want it handled by professionals who do it every day.

Before becoming a corporation, I was managing my money easily with Quicken and Excel. The added complexity of the corporation led me to hire a business manager and accountant. The best resource for finding a good business manager is other writers. You want someone responsible, reachable and thorough. Keep in mind that a business manager is not an investment guy. A business manager is writing checks to keep the lights on. The only financial advice you’ll be getting from your business manager is to spend less money, which is always worth hearing.

1. I adapted the kids book How to Eat Fried Worms for Imagine.
2. The shorthand for Sally’s deal would be “125 against 200.” The first number is what she’s guaranteed to make, while the second represents what she’ll get if the movie is made.
3. There are a few indie companies which are not under the WGA deal, but every major studio is.
4. WGA East costs $1,500 to join. No, I don’t know why it’s cheaper.
5. Though we’re pretty canny with upgrades. Get a credit card that pays you either frequent flier miles or hotel points, and use that for everything.
6. I’ve often heard $200K/year as being the threshold at which point incorporation makes sense, but it may be higher or lower depending on circumstances.

http://www.hulu.com/go

I really doubted Hulu when it was first announced, because everything the studios touch tends to be needlessly complicated and crappy. But Hulu works great for catching up on old TV shows, and now movies. The advertising isn’t terribly intrusive, either.

Will I get residuals? We’ll see. But considering Go is easily available in hundreds of illegal sites online, I’m just happy to find it in a clean, well-lighted place with 480p resolution.

It wasn’t until conversations at a cocktail on Saturday that I realized a huge chunk of my writer/actor/lawyer friends have or had the same thing, with symptoms roughly as follows:

• Gurgling when you lie down to sleep.

• Mild fever, or chills or headache — but not enough to make you feel sick-sick.

• The kind of cough which, if you heard it come from an actor in a period drama, would telegraph the character’s impending death by consumption.

The insidious thing about this bug is that I generally didn’t felt bad enough to go the doctor. I’d skip the gym or go to bed early, but truly thought I’d be able to ride it out. I finally went in to get some drugs, and was better in a week.

In conversations with everyone who’s had it, the treatment always seems to comprise three things: an antibiotic, a decongestant and cough syrup. The brands change, but that’s always the cocktail. Of the three, the behind-the-counter decongestant (Claritin-D) required the most paranoia-inducing paperwork.¹ But the prescription cough syrup was also unsettling, because it worked so well and felt so good. I was careful to limit my doses.

Just when I thought I’d beaten the bug, it roared back to life like Glenn Close leaping from the bathtub in Fatal Attraction. I’m pretty sure now that last jolt was just me kicking the cough syrup, despite my moderation.

Still, it feels good to feel like me again. Though I now have less excuse for endless Fallout 3 sessions.

1. It contains pseudoephedrine, with is used to make meth, so the government tracks every sale.

Also, feel free to hype it in this thread.

– Lewis

It’s not uncommon. I was on and off both Charlie’s Angels movies several times, and I can think of at least half a dozen other cases where the original writers came back in before (or during) production.

In order to understand why the original writers are sometimes rehired, you have to understand why they leave projects. Sometimes, it’s simple availability: at a crucial moment during development of the first Charlie’s Angels, I was shooting a series in Toronto, so someone else got the gig (a long string of someone elses, as it turned out). In other cases, a new element (director, producer, star) wants to take the script in a new direction, which generally means a new writer — often someone they’ve worked with before.

You’re not always fired, and it’s not always acrimonious. That’s important to understand. The screenwriter wants the movie made, and wants to maintain relationships with the filmmakers and the studio. So it behooves everyone to make sure the original writer is at least peripherally involved, even if he’s no longer the active writer on the project.

The original writer might get asked back for several reasons. The simplest is cost: she may be willing to do a lot of piece work essentially for free because it’s her movie. But more often there is something about the original writer’s voice or vision that remains important despite subsequent revisions, and the producers (or director, or stars) recognize this. So she comes back in to make the new stuff feel like her stuff, and let it read like one movie rather than a patchwork.