• Part One (8:45) talks about the genesis of the movie, from script through Sundance.

• Part Two (9:57) looks at how they’re trying to get the movie out in the world, from direct downloads to DVDs to college screenings around the country.

Although the discussion in general will make sense to anyone interested in making indies, some of the specific details on OTMM will make more sense if you watch the movie. For this week only, readers can download the film for $2 here.

In the rooftop party after the screening, several people asked about my interest in tiny movies — most of the projects I work on have a lot more commas and zeros in the price tag. To me, it’s an experiment in disintermediation, just like The Variant was.

What happens when you take out the typical distributor? What do you gain? What do you lose?

I’m toying with the idea of doing The Remnants as an itty-bitty feature, but would only do it if I could get it out in the world in a way that made sense creatively and financially. So I’m watching things like OTMM closely. I’m happy to be a trailblazer, but would love to know what cliffs and monsters lie along that path.

The first form, a contraction of the word, is widely used to indicate that the same character is speaking after an interrupting bit of scene description. Almost every screenplay you read will have it.

Most screenwriting software will automatically generate the (cont’d), and you should let it. It’s standard, and particularly useful for actors. It’s your choice whether to have it be uppercase; (cont’d) or (CONT’D) are both fine. Pick one and stick to it.¹

A related situation happens when a block of dialogue needs to extend off the bottom of the page. Screenwriting software will offer to put a (more), with a matching (cont’d) on the next page. Let it — though you might also consider tweaking the lines so that the dialogue doesn’t break there.

A second form of continued happens when a scene spans across multiple pages. If a scene continues off the bottom of a page, most screenwriting software will offer to put CONTINUED: at the top left of the next page, next to the scene number.

You don’t need it. Turn it off.

The only time to use these continueds is when you’re headed into production, complete with a shooting schedule and scene numbers. They help reduce confusion when you have colored revision pages. Beyond that, they’re clutter. Get rid of them.

The final form of continued happens in scene headings. Some screenwriters use CONTINUOUS to indicate that action is ongoing despite changes of location:

I’m not a big fan of this use of continuous, because it’s all too easy to forget what time of day it’s supposed to be. In the (rare) cases in which I need to clarify that the action from one scene to the next is continuous, I put it in brackets.

1. You may run into situations in which a character is both speaking and giving voice-over in a scene. Your software might try to flag those voiceovers as continuations of the character’s normal dialogue. Don’t let it.

I’ll be leading a Q&A with the filmmakers right after the screening, talking not just about the film but the challenges and opportunities in making and releasing a microbudget movie.

If you’re considering making a little movie, you should keep a close eye on OTMM. It’s good — a tiny, Swingers-esque two-hander. And the filmmakers are smart guys, not just how they made the movie, but how they’re putting it out in the world. They’re doing everything I would try, but will it work? It’s a great case study for indie films in 2010.

Here’s the info:

Tuesday March 16th – 8:00pm

Downtown Independent
251 S. Main Street
Los Angeles, CA 90012

Tickets are $7, available in advance at Brown Paper Tickets.

I feel like scripts with multiple storylines (3+ stories) like Pulp Fiction or Crash can rely on simple loglines that get across the overall theme of the story. But what about scripts with two distinct storylines that parallel one another…do you pack both storylines into the logline? Or do you pick one and focus the on it?

– Mac
Los Angeles

Some movies are really difficult to logline. Go is one. When forced to give a short description, I try to chart the three main threads: “It’s about a really tiny drug deal, a wild night in Vegas and two soap opera actors — all of which cross paths at LA’s underground rave scene.”

Again, not great. But it gets the job done.

For something like Big Fish, I make the parallel structure clear: “It’s the story of a man’s life, told the way he remembers it: full of wild, impossible exaggerations. At the same time, his grown son is trying to separate the truth from the fantasy before his dad dies.”

Julie and Julia has dual storylines, yet summarizes easily: “It’s the story of a young woman determined to cook her way through Julia Child’s famous cookbook, intercut with the adventures of Julia Child’s life.”

If both plotlines are key to your story, you need to make that clear in the logline. Otherwise, you risk future readers feeling like you bait-and-switched them.

You’d love to see a bigger sample, and correlation does not imply causation. But to me, it suggests that increased sampling usually generates more sales than it costs.

Advance screenings of movies work the same way. When a studio expects good word of mouth, they are often willing to give up a day’s box office¹ in order to get more people talking about their movie. They’ll also conduct word-of-mouth screenings tailored to specific audiences. “Free” and “exclusive” are big motivators.

(thanks Howard Rodman)

1. When you buy a ticket for a sneak preview of The Proposal, it’s actually counted towards another film, generally one from the same studio currently playing at that theater.

Longtime friend-of-the-site Nima Yousefi (he coded Scrippets) will be coming on board to handle a few special projects in the meantime.

With ridiculously good candidates to choose from, it’s not just protocol to say it was a tough decision. I learned quite a bit, both from video-chat interviews with applicants and calling references. I would have been happy with any of my final few choices; hiring just one was difficult. It forced me to focus on what I saw this person doing two, six and twenty-four months down the road.

I largely followed my original plan for the hiring process, starting with reviewing portfolios and emailing follow-up questions. I assigned a special project to my top few contenders, both to see what they could do and how they would discuss it afterwards.

You can read the assigment if you like. I’ve left it to the candidates whether they want to share what they did with the world.

If you feel like doing your own riff on the project, by all means go for it. If you’re using my text, I’d like attribution, but otherwise it’s free and clear.

Amazon prices Kindle books at $9.99, while Apple will apparently let prices float higher on iPad books, with $12.99 being a frequently-quoted number.

With data drawn from publishing sources, these articles break down costs and profits. Poorly. They don’t differentiate between one-time costs (designing cover artwork) and variable costs (printing each additional copy). And how much of the marketing budget would be identical with or without the ebook version?

The number that sticks out most is the bookseller’s take. A 50% cut makes sense when dealing with a physical book sold through a brick-and-mortar bookstore. A 30% cut is crazy when dealing with atoms pushed out through a virtual retailer. As a reference, I sell pdf and ePub versions of The Variant and only give up 11 cents on the dollar.¹

Amazon makes the Kindle to sell books; Apple makes the iPad to sell iPads — selling books is sort of gravy. That gives Apple more price flexibility, and should hopefully avoid absurd situations where the digital version costs much more than the paperback. ²

The publishing industry wants to keep prices up so they can make money. Can’t blame them for that. But you know something’s amiss when Anne Rice is the voice of reason:

The only thing I think is a mistake is people trying to hold back e-books or Kindle and trying to head off this revolution by building a dam. It’s not going to work.

One last point: How soon can we agree to spell ebooks with a lowercase e, and no hyphen?

The Times likes the hyphen, while Gizmodo feels the need to capitalize. I’d suggest that email is the best antecedent. That’s a term that has largely swallowed its hyphen, probably due to its verbification. Can we embrace the future and simply lose the hyphen now?

(Thanks to Quinn for the link.)

1. But I give up 65 cents of each dollar earned through the Kindle version, which sells much better.
2. I’m not ignoring the Nook or the Sony readers, but they’re not steering the ship.

The movie was written by Linda Woolverton. I never read the script, and haven’t seen a frame beyond the trailers and commercials. I’ll get to see the film for the first time on Monday, and really look forward to it.

With that clarification out of the way, let me explain a strange fact of my career: I’ve not written Alice in Wonderland three times. It’s a recurring motif.

1995

The story that became Go was originally envisioned as a retelling of Alice, substituting the underground rave scene for Wonderland. As it developed, I pretty thoroughly scotched those ambitions, but you can still see vestigial elements in the first section of the film:

• Ronna, like Alice, charges boldly into unknown territory, and proves unexpectedly brave in the face of strange events.
• She visits a smoking psychedelicist who talks in riddles but ultimately helps her.
• Poorly labeled drugs are consumed with unanticipated consequences.
• A talking (telepathic) cat offers advice.

Other than the cat, these are all extremely tenuous connections. I would never claim that Go is remotely an adaptation of Alice. Rather, I had Alice bumping around in my head during Go’s genesis, and some Alice DNA worked its way into the genotype. For example, the yellow Miata was for a long time a white Volkwagen Rabbit.

2000

Shortly after the release of Go, producer Paul Rosenberg brought me to E3 to introduce me to American McGee, who was working on a videogame adaptation of Alice. The world he had come up with was dark and spectacular. American and I hit it off so well that two hours later we were pitching a movie version to director Wes Craven.

Craven said yes, and Miramax bought it the next day. They wanted the movie out within a year.

But I was already committed to writing three other projects. So we reached a compromise: rather than writing the script, I would write a detailed treatment laying out the characters, story and world. So I did. The document was 21 single-spaced pages. American McGee liked it, as did the producers. Wes Craven didn’t. And thus began a series of writers and re-imaginings that as far as I know may continue to this day. It’s been in turnaround several times.

I left the project having a friendly relationship with American McGee, who later introduced me to fellow game designer Jordan Mechner. Which begat the movie version of Prince of Persia and several other collaborations.

2007

While standing in the registration line for the Sundance Film Festival, where The Nines was about to premiere, I got a call asking if I would be interested in writing an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland for director Sam Mendes at Dreamworks. I said yes as I was trying on my official Sundance parka.

I met with Sam in New York and pitched my take, which blended a lot of Lewis Carroll’s biography into the story. As before, I was backed up on other projects (including the release of The Nines), so it would be six months before I could get started. I got about 40 pages written before the WGA strike began, at which point I had to stop working.

During the strike, Disney’s Woolverton-scripted Alice roared to life when Tim Burton signed on to direct it. I’d always been aware of it as a potentially-competing project, but now my Alice would be going up against the guy who had directed my last three films. It didn’t matter that our takes were wildly different; the world didn’t need or want two pricey Alice in Wonderland movies.

The day the strike ended, I called Sam Mendes, the studio, the producer, and my agent. Tim Burton’s movie was already in preproduction. It was pointless for me to keep writing something that couldn’t and shouldn’t get made. After a few days of discussion, we reached an agreement. I wrote a check back to Dreamworks and the project was killed.

This adaption of Alice was the closest of any of mine to becoming real. I love what I wrote, so it’s disappointing and frustrating that it won’t end up on screen. But that reality is a big part of any working screenwriter’s life. Much more important than this half-written movie was maintaining relationships with studios and filmmakers I hope to keep working with for the next few decades.

I left Alice to write a different movie for Sam Mendes and two more projects for Tim Burton. So, as before, my failed Alice had a curious number of upsides.

2025

Considering it’s been 15 years to this point, I suspect it may be another 15 before I finally write an Alice in Wonderland. That’s okay. Writers aren’t Olympic athletes; we can have very long careers.

Whatever the future looks like, Alice in Wonderland will still be relevant. Depending on your approach, the story can be silly, scary, ominous or charming. Is it a dark parable of computerized dystopia? Sure. Candy-colored comedy of manners? Perfect.

Alice has become one of our fundamental myths, an ur-story that thrives through perpetual reinvention. I’m looking forward to seeing this year’s Alice, and all the ones thereafter.

I’ve changed the name of the character, but I want her to be a comedienne, as this fits really well with the story. Most of the other aspects of the story are completely made-up, and I’ll probably only include a few situations based on real events.

Can I get in trouble for creating a character with the same personality and the same profession as the real person? How much can I get away with? Can I include things that this person has said in real life? This character is fascinating and needs to have her story told!

– Lex
Calgary, Alberta

Yes, you can get in trouble. She could sue you for libel, defamation — or the equivalent under Canadian law. By your description, she probably would sue, so you’ve really answered your own question.

Don’t poke bears.

As a writer, you’re naturally going to be drawn towards real-life people who are fascinating. That’s a good thing. Observe behavior. Figure out motivations and pathology. Then forget the real person.

Unless you’re writing a bio-pic, don’t base characters on anyone who actually exists. Not only are you exposing yourself to legal trouble, you’re ultimately shortchanging yourself as a writer. Real people are good in the real world, but you need characters that feel real in the universe of your story.

So stop thinking about this character as being the comedienne. Rip a photo out of a magazine and decide your character looks like this woman instead. What does her voice sound like? Where does she live? Is one of her neighbors stealing her mail? Is she trying to avoid her Bible-quoting brother?

Make her situation specific, and specifically different than the comedienne. It’s okay to admit to yourself that she inspired your character — inspiration is free to the universe. But every detail should be something you created, discovered, or wove in from the hundreds of other people you have studied. Your story will be better for it.

My question is, when sending queries should I mention that this title was previously optioned? I don’t know how a production company or agent/manager might view this. Would it be a good thing because someone else thought the script had potential or a bad thing because they weren’t able to sell it?

– Mark Violi
New Jersey

You have two different audiences.

For agents and managers, absolutely mention that it had been optioned. Anything which shows that producers are interested in your work makes you more attractive as a potential client.

Producers and production companies aren’t necessarily going to be excited that someone else had the project before them. Yes, it validates their taste a bit, but they may worry that the script has already been burned out around town. If everyone has read it and passed, what are they going to do with it, exactly?

If someone asks, always be honest about the project’s history. But you don’t have to lead with that information.

Also, it’s legit (and common practice) to make a few changes to a script and put a new date on the cover. If you’re trying to shop a script that says 2007 on the title page, there will be natural questions about why it’s so old.

Since several candidates live outside Los Angeles, we did video interviews by iChat — which was a remarkably good second-best solution. It’s odd meeting someone on video, but once you push past the first 30 awkward seconds, it feels remarkably natural. I feel like I have a much better sense of the individual than I would on a phone call.

The contenders are each working on a short challenge project, which is due later this week. I’ve left it up to the candidates whether to make their work public.