But — and, being very new at this, this may be a stupid question — now what? What should or could I be doing to help make myself/my projects easier to sell, either when my new spec goes out, or in the future? I trust my reps completely, but I’d love to do anything I can to make their jobs a bit easier.

I have this nagging feeling that I should somehow be trying to turn my general meetings into possible work down the line, but I’m not sure if that’s true, or if it is, how I would go about it. I just don’t want to look back a year from now and realize that I squandered what heat I had, if that makes sense.

– E.

You’re at the phase in your career in which you’re “taking generals.”

General meetings are the hey-it’s-nice-to-meet-you part of a screenwriting career, and while you do fewer of them once you have more credits to your name, they’re always an important part of the job. This is how you meet the junior executives who will later become senior executives, and get them thinking about you as the kind of person they would like to hire.

I had a ton of general meetings off my first script (Here and Now), which never sold. When I say ton, I mean fifteen or twenty, at least three a week for a while. Mostly, my agent was sending me out there so I could practice being in a room without making a fool of myself. After the first dozen or so, I learned How to Meet, and stopped worrying about being the worst-dressed person in the room.

Your goal in a general meeting is to figure out what they might be able to hire you to write. At a certain point, they’ll talk about the kinds of projects they have in development, and the things they’re looking for. If anything sparks, pursue it. Talk about it in the room, then follow up the next day, and the next week. You’ll be chasing a lot of half-baked projects, most of which will never come to be. But one or two might. And that’s what you need.

Your advantage at this point is that you’re cheap and available. A producer could likely hire you with discretionary funds to rewrite a mediocre project she has sitting on the shelf. And if that opportunity comes up, take it. Do an amazing job, then let your reps spin that in your next assignment. And your next.

– kaz

This will never end. It will continue to be a problem as long as you write. I’m certain that Stephen King, even after umpteen books, wrestles with this problem. In fact, his prolificacy might be a coping strategy; rather than decide which thing to write, he just writes them all.

At this moment, there are no less than fifteen projects competing for brainshare in my head. Five of these are things I’m contracted to write, while the other ten or so are old ideas, recent ideas or things that just occurred to me as I walked up the stairs to my office.

So which projects do I write?

Well, I should write the ones that I’m being paid to write, and more specifically, I should work on the one that is next due. So I spend the bulk of my writing time on the project with the nearest deadline. Honestly, that may not be the project that excites me the most at any given moment. But I’m getting paid to do my craft, so I’m certainly not going to complain.

But what about those other projects, the ones I’m not currently writing?

They’re battling it out in my subconscious, each trying to get my attention long enough that I’ll recognize how worthy it is. Sometimes they’ll even gang up on me: The Nines was three separate ideas that conspired to fit together.

Some “old” ideas get written this way. Others simply recede so far back they’re nearly forgotten. That’s okay. You’re not going to become best friends with every nice person you meet. You’re not going to write every good idea you have.

In some cases, simple timing makes a new project suddenly possible. For the Alaska pilot, I pitched it to the network within a week of having the idea. The Remnants was possible only because the WGA strike meant I couldn’t work on any of my “real” stuff.

If you have four ideas, all equally viable, I’d recommend writing the one that has the best ending. That’s the one you’ve thought through the most, and the one you’re least likely to abandon midway. But whatever you do, just pick one and write it without delay. If you have great ideas for your other projects, absolutely take some notes, but don’t switch. Finish what you’re doing, or you’ll have a folder full of first acts.

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.

How does The Flash feel about immigration? Is Wolverine pro-choice? Does Black Canary support the First Amendment rights of hate groups? We don’t know, and really don’t want to know.

To be certain, comics sometimes do have their characters take specific, controversial political stands. Famously, Frank Miller’s Superman in The Dark Knight Returns is literally working for Reagan. But more often, we get placeholders and parallels to soften the blow.

Wonder Woman’s homeland of Themiscyra is isolationist, as the U.S has been at times. The Green Lanterns police the universe, like U.N. peacekeepers writ large. And X-Men are mutants who fight prejudice, discrimination and mutant-phobia.

Sometimes the analogies are transparent. Black Adam rules Kahndaq with an iron fist — he’s literally a weapon of mass destruction, and a danger to the free world. But the facile Iraq/Al-Qaeda parallels only go so far. Yes, he’s a tyrant, but there’s no religion or oil at stake, no greater cause beyond his own ego. If Black Adam were to get sucked into a magic scarab, or sent to the farthest reaches of the universe, there would be no more “Kahndaq crisis.” ¹

And this is probably a good thing. I’d argue that the thematic success of comic book characters, and comic book storylines, comes from how closely they can approach the line separating Real from Too Real, without crossing it.

For example, this summer’s The Dark Knight is set in the most realistic Gotham City yet, but its characters still speak in broad philosophical proclamations. Just listen to Batman:

Sometimes, truth isn’t good enough. Sometimes people deserve more. Sometimes people deserve to have their faith rewarded.

Sometimes, dialogue should only be spoken while wearing a mask. His statement makes sense in abstract, but you wouldn’t want it applied to, say, the invasion of a sovereign nation based on false evidence. Even Commissioner Gordon seems to understand that Batman is better suited to villain-thumping than leadership. His improbable answer to his young son’s question about why Batman is running:

Because he’s the hero Gotham deserves, but not the one it needs right now…and so we’ll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he’s not a hero. He’s a silent guardian, a watchful protector…a dark knight.

(MUSIC RISES.)

Efforts to place TDK’s Batman on a real-world political spectrum are doomed. Sure, he’s tough on crime, but he’s also anti-gun. He holds himself outside the law, but destroys his own phone-tapping technology. Is he a Conservative? A Liberal?² A Libertarian?

Nope, he’s just Batman. And as a comic book character, he’s allowed to hold simultaneous incompatible philosophies.

I think fans are responding to this latest wave of superhero movies not because they’re more realistic, but because they safely insulate us from reality, letting us address epic themes without uncomfortable details. Law versus Chaos is entertaining in TDK, but messy when you look at Iraq. The military-industrial complex is, well, less complex when Tony Stark can simply stop making weapons. And become a weapon. Or something. (The important thing is, he beat up Jeff Bridges, who was visibly evil and bald.)

The episode of Heroes: Origins I was set to write and direct last year deliberately crossed that line between “somewhat believable” and “far too realistic.” It was structured as an installment of A&E’s great documentary series Intervention, and followed two addicts with superpowers. We never shot it — the whole series got shelved — but I’m not sure it would have worked. And the producers were certainly nervous. In Iron Man, Tony Stark’s alcoholism is fundamental but non-threatening; real addiction is too real, too uncomfortable.

On some level, we want to keep our heroes just pure enough to fight the bad guys without encumbrance.

1. As recent history has shown, simply getting rid of the leader achieves less than you’d think in the real world.
2. Note: Dry humor at link. You have to read a few entries to get the gist of it.

My question is: What’s the best way to label the new characters/actors? I checked your Big Fish shooting script in which you used terms like “YOUNG EDWARD” — but do I have to do this, if the older (or younger) characters never turn up again? Because “ADULT CHRIS” or “ADULT GINA” sounds a bit stupid in German. Could I just keep the original name after pointing out the leap in time or would that cause confusion?

Might sound like an insignificant detail to you, but it’s been bothering me for some time now.

– Fabian
Germany

Yes, you need to label them differently, because people will actually get confused. They might not when they’re reading through it from page one, but when they’re going back through the script looking for a specific scene, they will need to know immediately whether they’re looking at an 18-year old or a 10-year old. And if you do make it to the production stage, that chance of confusion increases exponentially, because scenes will be scheduled and shot out of order.

Given where your time jump occurs, I’d label the adult characters as such, or give them slightly altered names. (The young version of CHRIS becomes CHRISTOPHER as an adult, etc.)

. . .

A two part question: I’m currently writing a spec script, a legal thriller set in Washington D.C. While I started it over a year ago — outlining, making notes, character sketches — I shelved it due to other work demands. Now I find that the subject matter (domestic oil drilling) is gaining topical currency in a way that I didn’t anticipate when I started out. Which is both good and bad.

A) Should I continue to write it, knowing that there is a strong possibility that it may be old hat by the time I finish (6 months to a year for a passable first draft. I have a day job!)? Or should I forge ahead in the hope that it may still hold some topical currency by the time I’m finished? And…

B) Since much of the story has to do with the law, and the subversion of a particular piece of legislation, how do I go about acquiring some fluency with legal protocol without enrolling in Law School? I’m a naturalized American citizen, so there is still lots I don’t know about the American justice system. If you were to approach material like this, where would you begin in order to make it at least plausible? Would you line up a couple of friendly D.C. lawyers and try to get some interviews? Try for an internship at the Dept of Justice? This material needs to be very well-executed for it not to be laughable (I’m after The Firm, not Pearl Harbor), and I’m anxious that the plot details at least make sound legal sense.

– Mark
New York

Yes, write it. No, don’t take an internship at the DoJ. But you’re going to need to hang out in D.C. to get the answers you want.

The kind of research you need to do will be an ongoing part of the process. You research; you find something that helps your story; you hit a roadblock; you do more research. You’re looking for believable dialogue, but more importantly, a believable approach to the situation you’re presenting in your story. That’s why you need to find someone (better yet, a couple of someones) who approximates the kind of characters you have in your story.

When I was writing the pilot for D.C., I wandered around Capitol Hill introducing myself to young staffers, and got them talking about their jobs. A few were interesting enough that I kept up with them via email, and could easily ask them a question about their lives on or off the clock. The show wasn’t staggeringly realistic — it had roughly as much verisimilitude as Felicity — but the characters were doing and saying the kinds of things they would in real life. (Just faster, and with better hair.)

From what you’re describing, it sounds like you need attorneys and staffers who handle energy legislation. You can find them. If you know anybody working in Washington, you’re probably two degrees of separation from someone in that job. And if you don’t know anyone there, hop on the train and head to the Hawk n’ Dove bar at happy hour. Two beers in, you’re likely to meet someone who knows someone.

That’s an absurd oversimplification, of course.

One page of a battle sequence might run four minutes of screen time, while a page of dialogue banter might zip by in 30 seconds. No matter. The rule of thumb might as well be the rule of law: any script over 120 pages is automatically suspect. If you hand someone a 121-page script, the first note they will give you is, “It’s a little long.” In fact, some studios will refuse to take delivery of a script over 120 pages (and thus refuse to pay).

So you need to be under 120.¹

Which usually means you need to cut.

Before we look at how to do that, let’s address a few things you should never do when trying to cut pages, no matter how tempting.

• Don’t adjust line spacing. Final Draft lets you tighten the line spacing, squeezing an extra line or two per page. Don’t. Not only is it obvious, but it makes your script that much harder to read.

• Don’t tweak margins. With the exception of Widow Control (see below), you should never touch the default margins: an inch top, bottom and right, an inch-and-a-half on the left. ²

• Don’t mess with the font. Screenplays are 12-pt Courier. If you try a different size, or a different face, your reader will notice and become suspicious.

All of these dont’s could be summarized thusly: Don’t cheat. Because we really will notice, and we’ll begin reading your script with a bias against it.

There are two kinds of trims we’ll be making: actual cuts and perceived cuts. Actual cuts mean you’re taking stuff out, be it a few lines, scenes or sequences. Perceived cuts are craftier. You’re editing with with specific intention of making the pages break differently, thus pulling the end of the script up. Perceived cuts don’t really make the script shorter. They just make it seem shorter, like a fat man wearing stripes.

Fair warning: Many of these suggestions will seem borderline-OCD. But if you’ve spent months writing a script, why not spend one hour making it look and read better?

Cutting a page or two

At this length, perceived cuts will probably get you where you need to be. (That said, always look for bigger, actual cuts. Remember, 117 pages is even better than 120.)

Practice Widow Control. Widows are those little fragments, generally a word or two, which hog a line to themselves. You find them both in action and dialogue.

If you pull the right-hand margin of that dialogue block very, very slightly to the right, you can often make that last word jump up to the previous line. Done right, it’s invisible, and reads better.

I generally don’t try to kill widows in action lines unless I have to. The ragged whitespace helps break up the page. But it’s always worth checking whether two very short paragraphs could be joined together.³

Watch out for invisible orphans. Orphans are short lines that dangle by themselves at the top of page. You rarely see them these days, because by default, most screenwriting programs will force an extra line or two across the page break to avoid them.⁴

Here’s the downside: every time the program does this, your script just got a line or two longer. So anytime you see a short bit of action at the top of the page, see if there’s an alternate way to write it that can make it jump back to the previous page.

Nix the CUT TO:’s. Screenwriters have different philosophies when it comes to CUT TO. Some use it at the end of every scene. Some never use it at all. I split the difference, using it when I need to signal to the reader that we’re either moving to something completely new story-wise, or jumping ahead in time.

But when I’m looking to trim a page or two, I often find I can sacrifice a few CUT TO’s and TRANSITION TO’s. So weigh each one.

Cutting five to ten pages

At this level, you’re beyond the reach of perceived cuts. You’re going to have to take things out. Here are the places to look.

Remove unnecessary set-ups. When writing a first act, your instinct is to make sure that everything is really well set up. You have a scene to introduce your hero, another to introduce his mom, a third to establish that he’s nice to kittens. Start cutting. We need to know much less about your characters than you think. The faster we can get to story, the better.

Get out of scenes earlier. Look at every scene, and ask what the earliest point is you could cut to the next scene. You’ll likely find a lot of tails to trim.

Don’t let characters recap. Characters should never need to explain something that we as the audience already know. It’s a complete waste of time and space. So if it’s really important that Bob know what Sarah saw in the old mill — a scene we just watched — try to make that explanation happen off-screen.

For example, if a scene starts…

…we can safely surmise he’s gotten the necessary details.

Trim third-act bloat. As we cross page 100 in our scripts, that finish line become so appealing that we often race to be done. The writing suffers. Because it’s easier to explain something in three exchanges of dialogue than one, we don’t try to be efficient. So you need to look at that last section with the same critical eyes that read those first 20 pages 100 times, and bring it up to the same level. The end result will almost always be tighter, and shorter.

Cutting ten or more pages

Entire sequences are going to need to go away. This happens more than you’d think. For the first Charlie’s Angels, we had a meeting at 5 p.m. on a Friday afternoon in which the president of the studio yanked ten pages out of the middle of the script. There was nothing wrong with those scenes, but we couldn’t afford to shoot them. So I was given until Monday morning to make the movie work without them.

Be your own studio boss. Be savage. Always err on taking out too much, because you’ll likely have to write new material to address some of what’s been removed.

The most brutal example I can think of from my own experience was my never-sold (but often retitled) zombie western. I cut 75 pages out of the first draft — basically, everything that didn’t support the two key ideas of Zombie Western. By clear-cutting, I could make room for new set pieces that fit much better with the movie I was trying to make.

Once you start thinking big-picture, you realize it’s often easier to cut fifteen pages than five. You ask questions like, “What if there was no Incan pyramid, and we went straight to Morocco?” or “What if instead of seeing the argument, reconciliation and breakup, it was just a time cut?”

Smart restructuring of events can often do the work for you. A project I’m just finishing has several occasions in which the action needs to slide forward several weeks, with characters’ relationships significantly changed. That’s hard to do with straight cutting — you expect to see all the pieces in the middle. But by focussing on something else for a scene or two — a different character in a different situation — I’m able to come back with time jumped and characters altered.

Look: It’s hard to cut a big chunk of your script, something that may have taken weeks to write. So don’t just hit “delete.” Cut and paste it into a new document, save it, and allow yourself the fiction of believing that in some future script, you’ll be able to use some of it. You won’t, but it will make it less painful.

1. But! But! you say. In the [Library](http://johnaugust.com/library), both Big Fish and Go are more than 120 pages. I’m not claiming that longer scripts aren’t shot. I’m saying that if you go over the 120 page line, you have to be doubly sure there’s no moment that feels padded, because the reader is going in with the subconscious goal of cutting something. Go is 126 pages, but it’s packed solid. Big Fish meanders, but those detours end up paying off in the conclusion.
2. Page numbers, scene numbers, “more” and “continued” are exceptions.
3. I try to keep paragraphs of action and scene description between two and six lines.
4. While I rag on the program, Final Draft is smart enough to break lines at the period, so sentences always stay intact. It’s a small thing, but it really helps the read. Other programs may do it now, too.

As far as I can tell, no. The rights to my script are incredibly murky–it was a shared project between Warner Bros. and Fox 2000, based on a different comic book than the one used in the original movie. When the deal fell apart, it became something of an unadoptable orphan. (Back in 2004, I wrote about my long history with the project.)

From all appearances, this new project is starting from scratch. My agent asked around about it, and heard it described as more of a female-oriented Matrix. I’ll be keeping on an eye on it, and if it does make it into production, I’ll feel safer putting my script up in the Downloads section for all to see.

Thomas Schlamme signed on to direct it. At the time, he was a mid-level TV director. Now, he’s a super-powered TV director. We went through a few drafts, but never really clicked.

Ultimately, Bob Dolman was brought in to rewrite my script. I was devastated, but fortunately had found other projects to keep my rent paid. I kept my eye on Worms over the years, as…

• Schlamme fell off
• Universal put it into turnaround
• Nickelodeon picked it up
• Nickelodeon let it go

I assumed it was finally, really gone when one day I was reading Mike Curtis’s blog, in which he noted that a movie called HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS was shooting behind his house in Austin.

It turned out that Bob Dolman was directing from the script he (re-)wrote. Walden Media was financing it, which seemed smart, because they’d had great success adapting kid’s lit into movies. When filming was finished, I had the opportunity per WGA rules to seek screenwriting credit, but I passed. A quick look at the script showed that it didn’t much resemble what I had written. Which is no veiled slam at Dolman — he just did his own thing.

The movie came out last month, and fared poorly. I didn’t see it, but what little I read about it didn’t have me rushing to the theatre.

Now that it’s out and has done its thing, I feel better adding my original script to the Downloads section. This is the fourth of the four drafts I held onto. At 120 pages, it seems long to me, but that was probably a factor of its lengthy development. I originally wrote it in Microsoft Word; this version has been converted to Final Draft and then exported as a .pdf.

So, if you’re interested, you can find it here.

For example:

• The room bursts out in laughter, which quickly turns into applause. A few EXECS standing at the back of the room smile to each other, and nod their heads in amusement. The publishing wunderkind, #29 on Forbes’ Top 30 under 30, has done it again! The pleased crowd begins to disperse.

Since this information isn’t actually going to be shown to the audience in the scene, is it bad form to add it in? Or is it helpful in giving the reader a quick sense of the character and making the action lines a little less dry?

– Isaac Aptaker

Your specific example probably wouldn’t be to my taste. Once you have the people in the room smile, laugh, applaud and nod, it’s hard to justify another line to underscore the point again.

But in general, yes. Used judiciously, these for-the-reader-only snippets are fine. I often find myself using them when introducing an important character for the first time.

From Charlie and the Chocolate Factory:

• Mother Bucket is an ever-exhausted woman in her late 30’s, run ragged from taking care of Charlie and the four invalid grandparents. Many nights, she’s too tired to worry, and too worried to sleep.

From Barbarella:

• FINNEA (29) comes up to Barbarella at the podium, and hugs her in a sisterly but somewhat obvious manner, as if trying to share her spotlight.
• While Barbarella could be compared to the wildflowers she paints — joyful, open and a bit scattered — Finnea is like a cultivated rose. She’s very beautiful but very focused. And one suspects there are thorns to protect her.

Nothing in these descriptions is directly cinematic, but it gives the reader (and the director, and the actor) a much better idea of the intention. Just make sure that you’re never confusing these blips of exposition with real character work. Movies are about what characters do and say, not who they were before the story started.

– Dan
Ontario, Canada

To the best of my knowledge, nothing’s happening with it.

The brief history: Miramax/Dimension hired me to write a (long) film treatment based on American McGee’s Alice videogame — a trippy retelling/continuation of Alice in Wonderland. Wes Craven was supposed to direct it, but he didn’t really care for my treatment, and things quickly fell apart.

It’s so interesting how (mis-) information spreads on the Internet. For instance, the title “Dark Wonderland.” Don’t ask me where that came from. It was never real, nor was any of the “casting” that was supposedly taking place.

I had lunch a few weeks ago with American, and asked him about it. He didn’t really know what was going on either, except that the project’s apparently at Fox now. He posted everything he knows about the movie at his own site, so people would hopefully stop asking.

I’ll ask around, but as far as I know, there’s no script, no director, no actress, nothin’. But it’s still a kick-ass game. And for his part, American has become a screenwriter himself, so if anyone should take the reins, it’s him.

This list is only projects for which I’ve written entire 120-page drafts. Pitches, treatments, rewrites and aborted attempts would be a much longer list.

HERE AND NOW
Unsold. My first script, a romantic tragedy set in Colorado. Under-plotted and over-written, but it got me an agent.

HOW TO EAT FRIED WORMS
Universal/Imagine. My first paid screenwriting assignment, an adaptation of Thomas Rockwell’s book.

A WRINKLE IN TIME
Miramax/Dimension. An adaptation of Madeleine L’Engle’s book. Technically, it was made, as an ABC TV movie. But the draft they used pre-dated mine.

DEVIL’S CANYON
Unsold. Zombie western set in a Colorado mining town, circa 1859.

FENWICK’S SUIT
Fox 2000. Adaptation of David Small’s book about a man’s suit which comes to life.

DEMONOLOGY
Paramount. Two prep school girls have to save Manhattan from the Apocalypse.

FANTASY ISLAND
Columbia. Big-budget tentpole adaptation of the ABC TV show.

THIEF OF ALWAYS
Universal. Adaptation of Clive Barker’s novel.

SCARED GUYS
Columbia. Page-one rewrite of comedy about phobic brothers.

BARBARELLA
Fox 2000/Warner Bros. Based on the comic book character, not the movie.

FURY
Unsold. Violent action thriller.

This, dear readers, is what sucks about being a screenwriter. Added up, this list represents five or more years of my writing career, but I don’t have a frame of celluloid to show for it.

Not one of these projects is “the best thing I’ve ever written,” I’m happy to report. Still, many of these scripts are near and dear to my heart. Demonology, for example, is the unholy spawn of my two favorite movies, Clueless and Aliens. Others, like Fantasy Island, I’m happy enough to forget. Even though I spent months on various drafts, it never connected for me or the studio.

When asked what kind of movies I prefer to write, I’ll sometimes glibly anwer: “Ones that get made.” I don’t think that’s cynical as much as it is pragmatic. I never think about writing a script. The goal is always to make a movie.