And suddenly, we’re up. Honestly, we could have probably been up earlier if I hadn’t mucked around with some things. If the site goes down again over the weekend, don’t despair. Why not see WALL-E?
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Making unnecessary and possibly horrible changes
I’m a struggling screenwriter in Brazil. About one and a half years ago, I had my first screenplay produced, a drama/thriller that had mixed reviews. The large part of the negative reviews pointed to aspects of the screenplay that I was forced to modify in the course of the production. In all, I like the result, but I think it would be better if my fourth draft (not my fifth) would had been the basis for the movie.
Now, I am having similar problems with my new screenplay in pre-production. This time, it is a child adventure that is very close to my heart, a story about ghosts and divided families. I have a very tight screenplay that is focused in the protagonists. It’s a story about a family of ghosts that is trapped in a house, each member enclosed in a separate room. Three young heroes tries to broke the curse that binds them there. Because of this, the plot is mainly focused inside the house, with a little touch of claustrophobia. Now I have the studio which is banking the project demanding the adding of new subplots. But I fear that the added subplots will loosen the narrative.
My question is: What you do when you truly think that your story don’t need to have new plots, but you have to add them anyway? How can I cut to external situations without weakening my main story?
— Sylvio Gonçalves
Brazil
You’re facing exactly the situation Hollywood writers find themselves in on almost every job. You have the draft you think is ready to shoot, but other powerful forces are pushing for more changes. Sometimes the changes come out of necessity — they simply can’t afford to shoot that sequence. But more often, the changes feel arbitrary. “We need more monkey jokes. Everyone loves monkeys.”1
So what should you do?
Lick you finger and see which way the wind is blowing. If there seems to be a consensus that more monkey jokes are needed, then add them. And don’t add half-assed monkey jokes in the hopes that they’ll fail and get cut later, because screenwriter karma dictates that the worst things you write will always get prominently featured in the trailer. So make them good monkey jokes.
Am I seriously advocating selling out?
Yes, for you Sylvio, because with one produced credit you don’t have a lot of hand to be saying, “Absolutamente não.” If making the changes will completely undermine the movie, your job is to get the other decision-makers (director, producers) to realize this. The best way to do it is to write the changes as well as you can, and present them with your reservations, explaining in advance how hard you tried, what works and what doesn’t.
There is a small but real danger that they will disagree and shoot your revisions. But your version is no doubt better than what the director or another writer would have come up with.
Coincidentally, I’m going through the same thing right now on a project I’m writing. I’ll be spending three days doing revisions I’m pretty sure won’t work, but that’s the best way to demonstrate to everyone why they won’t work. The silver lining is that the process of doing these failed revisions may inadvertently create some good material that will be helpful in other parts of the script.
In your specific case, I’d make sure that whenever you’re cutting to external situations, you’re using the cuts to increase the overall energy. Make sure you’re leaving the house with a question unanswered, and returning to the house with something changed. 2 You’re probably using claustrophobia to create tension, but there are many other tools in a writer’s arsenal. (Also, we’ll notice the enclosed spaces more if we’ve had some contrast.)
Good luck.
- This is true, up to a certain threshold. More than three monkeys, and I start to get nervous. You’re getting into monkey gang territory, and working together, they could probably take down a grown man. ↩
- Consider how Lost uses its flashbacks/flashforwards. They’re interrupting the flow, but they’re goosing the overall energy. ↩
I never told Robert Redford to suck it
I want to expand, redirect and challenge some of the discussion on my earlier post about Sundance, The Nines, and the death of independent film.
For starters, many in the P2P world were all too happy to declare victory over, well, logic. (The Nines Director: Forget Sundance, Use P2P Instead). That’s incorrect on a lot of levels.
In the article, I said that leaking a copy online at the right moment would have certainly increased awareness, and might have helped sales of tickets, DVDs and paid downloads. Notice that I really am talking about sales — that antiquated notion where people pay for things. My thesis is that if you make it at least as easy to obtain something legally as illegally, a fair number of potential users are happy to pay for it.
And I said nothing approaching, “Forget Sundance.” I said that Sundance buzz is annoying and meaningless, but that doesn’t mean the festival is irrelevant. Quite the contrary. Film festivals are public events in which thousands of people come together to watch challenging, independent film. The failure of arthouse distribution for indies makes festivals even more essential, because without film festivals, most of these movies would never screen before an audience.
Sundance is the Grauman’s Chinese Theater of festivals — you really do want to premiere there, to reach the biggest number of eyeballs at once. For two weeks each year, the American media pretends to give a shit about non-blockbusters. People stand in line to see documentaries, and Parker Posey is considered a star. It’s Fantasyland. So you trudge up and down the snow-covered streets, visiting all the different outlets and pimping your movie.
But wait. Didn’t I say the buzz is useless?
I think it is, at least as a component of the traditional bought-at-Sundance, released-six-months-later cycle. But if you could shorten that, and get those buzz-worthy movies from Park City in front of audiences worldwide in two weeks, I think you’d find some real success. Studios do this all the time with their quasi-indies, premiering them at a festival as a launch pad. We did it with Go in 1999.
Would it be difficult to go from Sundance to worldwide in two weeks? Absolutely. The lead time on a commercial DVD is still six weeks or more. But pay-per-view, iTunes and Netflix online have a lot more flexibility. All the legal work (clearances and contracts) would be a scramble. But we absolutely could have done it with The Nines.
Where does that leave theatrical?
I don’t know. My hunch is that for indies, the arthouse circuit is best left to special events and filmmaker Q&A’s. The Academy has rules about how long a film has to play in theaters in order to be eligible for awards, so for certain films, that may be a factor. But what readers outside Los Angeles may not realize is that many of the award-contender movies are sent to voters on DVD before they’re playing theaters.
Other small notes:
You can disagree with me about whether Once tanked. I loved the movie, and felt it could have and should have made a lot more. Its low budget is ultimately irrelevant, because the real money was spent on marketing.
A Sundance award-winner from this year, Ballast, dropped its deal with IFC and will self-distribute. The director gives a lot of good insight about why, and just how low the dollar figures are. If I were in his shoes, I might have done the same thing. With The Nines, we had Ryan Reynolds and Hope Davis, who were big enough names to generate some minimums. Without any stars, it’s tough to shake out more money.
Also notable is that Ballast was to be distributed through IFC’s First Take program, which debuts movies simultaneously in theaters and by video-on-demand, much like 2929’s HDNet Films program. It seems like the right idea, so I’m curious whether the business model will work.
The Sundance folks are adamant that it’s a festival, not a market. Redford himself has said, “We have to remind people of who we are and what we’re about…[W]hen buyers are coming in and looking at the guide (for commercial product), I don’t care about what’s commercial. I think we should leave that to the mainstream.”
Coming back to one of the key ideas in the original article, I’d stress that the real measure of success for an indie film’s release is how many people saw it. Festivals let people see your movie. So do theatrical, DVD, pay-per-view, TV and yes, piracy. Finding the right combination these elements is the challenge. I don’t think I have the answer, but I can safely say it’s not what we did on The Nines.
Characters for an epic tale
Useful reference for all writers. (via Team Forty).
UPDATE: Thanks to Chris for the link to the artist, Tom Gauld.
SECOND UPDATE: Because I was curious…