Film Courage Plus: Individual Dialogue.

FILM COURAGE did a series of interviews with me in 2014 and 2015 -about 36 (or more) segments total. That's almost a year's worth of material! So why not add a new craft article and make it a weekly blog entry? All I have to do is write that new article, right?

INDIVIDUAL DIALOGUE

Dialogue is two things: what a character says (the meaning of their words) and how they say it (their character peeking out from behind the words). Many scripts get the first part, but you also need the last part. Even if your dialogue is witty and fun, if it does not expose character and is interchangeable with some other character’s dialogue, it’s *lacking character*. That is a serious script problem (no matter what your name is, Woody Allen). So let’s look at ways to make your dialogue character specific.

In the “Supporting Characters” Blue Book I explain my Barista Theory of attitudes and how they help define characters. The basic intersection between who a character is under their skin and how they speak is probably attitude. Because I write in coffee shops all over Los Angeles, I come into contact with many “baristas” who have the same basic lines of dialogue... yet all sound very different. One barista is unbelievably upbeat about everything and is the most sincerely positive person I have ever encountered. She will find the silver lining in any cloud. If you’ve just lost your job of 15 years, she’ll say, “That’s great! Now you can spend more time with your kids and family!” If you spill your coffee, “We just started a new pot, so your new cup will taste fresher!”

Another barista is all about himself, so if you order an iced tea with melon syrup, he’ll say, “I like the berry syrup.” No matter what you say to him, his responses are always focused on himself. If two hundred people just died in a plane crash, he would find the way to make that about him. “Yeah, a tragedy that all of those people died, and the news report pre-empted my favorite show, ICE ROAD PIZZA DELIVERIES.”

There are pessimist baristas, and needy ones who seem to want your approval, and baristas who see everything as a dig at them, and ones who *must* one-up you to show their superiority, and people who just don’t have the time for you, and ones who think everything is sexual (if you know what I mean, that’s what she said), and servers who are confused by almost everything, and ones who think their time is more important than yours, and people who are ultra-efficient and very detail oriented, and baristas who are amazed by almost everything, and ones who worry about the most unlikely things you can think of, and people who think everything is a question, and baristas who...

Each of these attitudes and traits are things that come out in the phrasing of the sentence, not the information in the sentence. This attitude influences the way they react and act and speak and everything else. Take the same event, and each reacts according to their attitude. So the key to writing great dialogue is knowing your characters. Knowing how they see the world. All of us look through a “lens” and see the world in our own way, which influences everything else. How they think, how they physically react to a situation. I have a Script Tip on creating characters for your horror screenplay that gets into taking these different attitudes of different characters and figuring out how each will *physically* react to finding a friend dead. Because that “barista theory” attitude isn’t just great for dialogue, it’s how this specific character reacts to the world around them no matter what happens in the scene. That’s just who they are!

Now, that might seem to be “surface characterization” to you, but it goes deep into who the character is, their past, and how they see themselves. Which brings us to ...

BACKGROUND AND EDUCATION

Imagine three baristas: One barely got out of high school and is working this job making coffee for people as a potential career because the coffee shop has health insurance. One went to college and majored in Music Theory and is working this job because it allows them to play in their band at night, and it will probably end up their career because it has health insurance. The third is a total brainiac who went to college and majored in science and is working this job at nights because their entry level science job doesn’t offer health insurance. How will each think about that melon syrup you asked for in your iced tea? How will each see a cup of regular drip coffee that someone orders? How will each’s education relate to making that pot of drip coffee? How they measure the coffee? How they pour the water into the coffee maker? Now look at how their education will come out in their dialogue. Not just their attitude, but their vocabulary, their phrasing, even their sentence structure. One of the things about being a writer is that you have to think using your character’s knowledge and experiences... which you never had! You need to use your imagination plus research to figure out how this character would speak. This character’s vocabulary might be entirely different than mine! I need to figure out how they would say this, not how I would say this.

Background is another element. Imagine five different Baristas: One from Seattle, one from the Southern USA, one from the North Eastern USA, one from Texas, and one who just moved here from Portugal. Not only do these locations influence the vocabulary and phrasing of how each Barista speaks their “lines”, those different backgrounds will also add regional attitudes and regional vocabularies. If you take your pessimistic barista from Seattle and your pessimistic barista from the Southern USA and have them speak the same “line” it’s going to be completely different! Their backgrounds will peek through and the exact same “line” about having a $5 pastry to go with your drink will filter through their geographical backgrounds and sound completely different - even though both will be tinged with pessimism.

PET WORDS & COMMON WORDS AND SWEARS

Though that Seattle Barista and the Southern USA Barista will have different words they use to address customers, darlin’, those common words that we use every day like “Yes” and “No” need to be personalized to fit the specific character. This is one of those places where your vocabulary becomes important, because as the writer you are speaking for everyone! Even though I can usually “hear” my characters, I create a “cheat sheet” for each of them for when I have to do a rewrite later and might not hear their voices as clearly... or when I wake up still asleep but have to write 5 pages to make my quota and my deadline. So all of the common words and phrases that a character will say throughout the story - yes and no and right and wrong and hello and goodbye and anything else you can think of that will be said by multiple characters in your story: go on a “character sheet” with this character’s character oriented words they use to those common words. Hey, one character might say “Yes” and “No”, but the others all have to use some other words that mean the same thing - that *show their character*. There are dozens of words that mean “No”, and the character who says “Nope” or “I don’t think so” or “No way” or “Negative” or “I think I’m going to have to pass” or “Not on your life!” or “Negatory” or an of the dozens of other ways to deny or refuse will not only offer variety but make each character an individual... and memorable. So give each of your characters and *character specific* word for any common words that may pop up in your screenplay. Think of how *this character* would say “No” that tells us something about them.

Let me tell you something about “Pet words” and those words that people use all the time. A good example of this is Paul Newman in HUDSUCKER PROXY” who says, “Sure, sure” as his answer to any question - whether he agrees or not. It’s his way of dismissing others. Real people often have these words and phrases that make up a big chunk of their dialogue - sometimes a word or phrase that they use while they think up the actual answer, sometimes a word or phrase that pops up at the end of many of their sentences, Friendo. Sometimes, well, it’s what I like to call a “weasel word” that, well, a character uses to give them time to, well, think of a good lie. (Which brings us to something I wasn’t going to talk about on this article, sentence structure, like Captain Jack Sparrow in the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN movies who speaks in long convoluted sentences meant to make you think that he’s said something important while making you forget whatever question you just asked him. He speaks in a way designed to both confuse you and impress you. Think about sentence construction, too!) “Let me tell you something” prefacing a sentence is a pet phrase that a character might use. We are trying to find distinctive and interesting ways for characters to speak that show us character. This is not what they say, but how they say it.

In the Dialogue Blue Book I talk about how I realized that I had a favorite swear word. I read one of my screenplays and it was all shit! Every single character had the same swear, which is my swear, and I may have broken a record for the amount of shit in a screenplay. Not only did all of my characters swear exactly the same, they amount of “shit”s in that script made all of them meaningless! This is a problem with F Bombs - if you use too many they eventually don’t matter. I’ve written a couple of U.S. Navy Co-operation movies, and rule #1 is that sailors can not “swear like a sailor”. Swearing is against the rules, and a sailor can be punished for it - and in a co-op movie you will have to show the punishment... or lose that day shooting on the aircraft carrier with Billy Dee Williams. So I had to find ways to do PG swearing. Which made my swears unusual and interesting. But in *any* screenplay, if you want your F Bombs to be explosive, think as if you are writing a PG movie and only get one or two of them. Find other swears for the rest - and finding character specific swears will make your dialogue more interesting and distinctive. There are plenty of PG things that are vile and disgusting and work just as well as an F Bomb. Spielberg got away with having one character call another “penis breath” in a family film... when you know what they really meant.

So be creative with your swears and make sure that each character has their own personal favorite swear that fits their character. In one of my scripts “Kitty crap” was a character’s individual swear, and everyone I met with on that script (48 studio meetings) loved that character’s distinctive dialogue and that swear.

Think of how every line of dialogue is specific to the character speaking it, and they way they say it tells us something about the character. You want to be able to cover the “character slugs” in a screenplay and still know exactly who is speaking, because nobody else in the story speaks that way. Think about how your dialogue is an extension of the character’s attitude and education and background and everything else about them. It’s *their dialogue*. Make it sound like them, and only them.

“Who said that?”

- Bill

MORE ON DIALOGUE!

50 Tips On Dialogue!

*** DIALOGUE SECRETS *** - For Kindle!

***

Expanded version with more ways to create interesting protagonists! How to remove bad dialogue (and what *is* bad dialogue), First Hand Dialogue, Awful Exposition, Realism, 50 Professional Dialogue Techniques you can use *today*, Subtext, Subtitles, Humor, Sizzling Banter, *Anti-Dialogue*, Speeches, and more. Tools you can use to make your dialogue sizzle! Special sections that use dialogue examples from movies as diverse as "Bringing Up Baby", "Psycho", "Double Indemnity", "Notorious", the Oscar nominated "You Can Count On Me", "His Girl Friday", and many more! Print version is 48 pages, Kindle version is over 160 pages!

Only $4.99 - and no postage!

USA Folks Click Here.

UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

Espania Folks Click Here.

Canadian Folks Click Here.

Other countries check your Amazon websites... it's there!

Thank you to everyone!

Bill

Trailer Tuesday: THE UNDERNEATH

Last week the original, this week the remake...

Directed by: Stephen Soderbergh.
Written by: Soderbergh based on the novel by Don Tracy.
Starring: Peter Gallagher, Elisabeth Shue, Alison Elliott, Paul Dooley, the great William Fichtner.
Director Of Photography: Elliot Davis.
Music: Cliff Martinez.

The remake of one of my favorite films CRISS CROSS, Stephen Soderbergh’s THE UNDERNEATH (1995), which was his fourth film... and not a success. After the failure of this film he dove off the deep end, making some crazy low budget films... and found his soul again. It’s odd to think of Soderbergh as a crime film director, but when you look at the genre he keeps coming back to again and again it’s crime films... from OUT OF SIGHT to OCEAN’S 11. This is his first crime film, and he decided to remake a classic... which seldom works. My guess is that after SEX LIES AND VIDEOTAPE and the *great* KING OF THE HILL and the equally interesting KAFKA, he decided to do something mainstream that would earn him the studio cred to do that Clint Eastwood thing where you make one movie “for them” and they allow you to make one movies for you. But all of that backfired. The “one for them” flopped...

Not because of the cast. Peter Gallagher plays the role Burt Lancaster played in CRISS CROSS. Sexy TV actress Alison Elliott played the ex wife played by Yvonne DeCarlo. The always creepy William Fichtner played the creepy Dan Duryea role. Paul Dooley played the “Pops” character. And Shelly Duvall pops up as the nurse in the hospital, and Joe Don Baker plays the guy who owns the armored truck company in cameos. These are all good actors, and Fichtner shines in his role. So, what was the problem?



Every screenplay is made up of millions of choices, and every movie ends up being those choices plus a million other choices. The problem is, if you make one major wrong choice it all falls apart. Though you may think the idea of remaking a classic film like CRISS CROSS was the wrong choice, there are plenty of remakes that work. The problems usually come with the choices made while remaking the film. For a while Warner Brother was planning on remaking one of my favorite films THE LAST OF SHEILA (which is a great mystery film) as a *comedy* and getting rid of the mystery element. That never happened. But the big problem with remakes in Hollywood is often that they come up with some crazy drastic change that kills the story. Hey, the reason why the story was successful in the first place was because it *wasn’t* a comedy (or whatever). Why not fix some of the little problems instead of screwing around with what made it successful in the first place?

The *good* changes in THE UNDERNEATH end up being instead of his younger brother getting married as the excuse he uses to himself for the reason he comes home again, it’s his *mother* getting married to the “Pops” character. This is great because “Pops” is going to be the casualty in the robbery, so in this version it’s his mother’s new husband who gets killed! More emotional, right? The other change is that instead of his old friend who is the cop who comes after him... it’s his *brother*! Again, upping the emotional ante. These were both great changes.

Another change was the addition of a “nice girl” to give Gallagher a choice between his exwife (who is nothing but trouble) and this nice girl played by Elizabeth Shue. He meets her on the bus coming back to town, and she works in the bank branch where the robbery will take place in this version. Part of the new robbery scheme is to use information he gets from her to help Dundee’s gang pull the robbery. That makes her an unwilling accomplice, cool idea!

But all of these good choices are undercut by the bad ones.

Instead of our lead leaving town because he’s still hung up on his ex wife and even Los Angeles isn’t big enough for the both of them, Gallagher is a gambling addict who spends every cent the couple has on sports betting, and when he loses so much that the mob is going to kill him, he leaves town... leaving his soon to be ex wife to deal with all of the crap he’s left behind. Not only does this make our protagonist not a sympathetic guy, it removes the core of the story... that he’s still hung up on his ex wife. That’s the engine that runs the machine, and they remove it. Oh, and he never worked for the Armored Truck company, so there’s this silly convoluted way for him to get hired. Oh, and since the ex wife isn’t really a fan of his, the really uncomfortable scene in CRISS CROSS where he’s caught by Dundee with his ex and comes up with the robbery thing as an excuse and then must go through with it... no longer exists. All of the big dramatic scenes from the original are gone.

And by making the protag a major screw up, having the cop be his brother this time around robs all of the drama from that! In CRISS CROSS the cop was his old friend, who really liked him and thought the ex wife was trouble... and that scene in the hospital when he confronts Lancaster and says he knows Lancaster had to be part of the robbery is a *heart breaker*. The cop knows his best friend became a criminal and has to deal with all of those mixed up feelings... and Lancaster has to deal with them, too. It’s like when your parents say you disappointed them... man, that’s tough to take! Now that the protag is a screw up, and *he* is the problem? No drama at all. The brother cop doesn’t have his heart broken because he never trusted his brother in the first place. He is *established* as hating his brother (Can’t believe you wore our father’s suit to mother’s wedding).

And the robbery is almost an anti set piece here, with Pop’s death being just another thing that happens. No drama.

The film uses different tints, as Soderbergh would later do in TRAFFIC, but here I could not figure out what the purpose was. Soderbergh also does a fractured chronology, a dozen times more fractured than CRISS CROSS but not as fractured as THE LIMEY. At first I though the colors (blue and green mostly) were past and present... but then we got a past scene that was green and I was confused. Then I thought it was story threads, with the robbery plot being green and the romance plot being blue, but it wasn’t that, either. There’s a scene that changes from blue to green midway, but then changes back. I rewatched that scene a couple of times but still can’t figure out why.

The other thing Soderbergh does is an extended POV shot when Gallagher is in his hospital bed. It’s not all one shot, but we don’t see Gallagher in the hospital, just his POV. The problem here is that it isn’t used to effect. Instead of creating paranoia, it’s just a long POV shot. Because there is no focus on people passing the pebbled glass and the man sitting in the hallway just out of view as in CRISS CROSS, there is *absolutely no suspense in this scene*. It’s like a stunt shot that undercuts all of the emotions! Instead of finding a better way to do the scene, it’s a *worse* way... which is just a show off shot. Michael Bay filmmaking.

And the film ends with a pointless and illogical twist that kind of undercuts the whole movie. I liked this movie more when I first saw it than I did when I watched it right after CRISS CROSS. It’s a misfire from a director who went on to do some really good crime films (THE LIMEY really is one of my favs).

- Bill

Film Courage: Writing From Desperation.

FILM COURAGE did a series of interviews with me at the end of 2014, and then again at the end of 2015. There were 36 (or more) segments total. That's almost a year's worth of material! So why not add a new craft article and make it a weekly blog entry? All I have to do is write that new article, right?

WRITING FROM DESPERATION
So you have quit your day job and given yourself a year or two years or whatever is in your bank account to make it as a professional screenwriter... and as that deadline gets closer and closer and you haven’t sold anything, panic and desperation begins to set in... and you realize that low budget horror always sells, and even though you absolutely hate horror, you decide to write a horror screenplay so that you can make enough money to avoid having to work for a living... Good idea?

Terrible idea.



One of the unwritten rules in screenwriting is to never write about screenwriters or writers or Hollywood - it’s incestuous and the general film audience usually can’t relate to the characters... and being a screenwriter is not a common fantasy, like being a superhero or being a tough guy or falling in love or any of the other things that are part of the “dream fulfillment” of the movies. But every once in a while, a Hollywood insider does a “tell all” movie about their experiences in the business (carefully turned into fiction) and sometimes those films are successful... like the great SUNSET BLVD () directed by Billy Wilder (a screenwriter) and written by Wilder and Charles Brackett and D.M. Marshman, Jr. It’s one of the handful of Film Noirs about screenwriters, and a great example of what can happen to you when you are writing from desperation.

In the opening scene, screenwriter Joe Gillis is dead in the swimming pool of a decaying Hollywood mansion, then we flashback to how he came to be in this pool... A crappy Hollywood apartment where he is 3 months behind in his rent and about to be evicted, when there is a knock at the door - a couple of guys from the collection agency who have come to reposes his car, and would like him to hand over the keys. Joe tells them that he loaned his car to a friend who drove it to Palm Springs, sorry. Check the apartment garage if they don’t believe him. After they leave, he goes to the parking lot where he has hidden his car, and heads to the Paramount Lot where he has a meeting with a producer named Sheldrake, who might buy his script and get him out of this financial mess... He pitches the script to Sheldrake, who is skeptical - it doesn’t sound very good. Gillis lies, and says that 20th Century Fox is also interested in it. Sheldrake buzzes his Development Girl, who comes in with the coverage. “I covered it, but I wouldn’t bother. It’s from hunger. It’s just a rehash of something that wasn’t very good to begin with.” (That’s about 6 minutes into the movie - it doesn’t waste any time.) Gillis pleads with Sheldrake for any kind of assignment, he needs the money. But he is sent on his way...

Because when you write from desperation, it shows.

When you just hack out something for a buck, it shows.

When your heart isn’t in it, it shows.

One of those things that producers often say that they are looking for in a screenplay is “passion” - they want this to be the story that you have to tell (not just for money), the story that is a part of you, that has soul. All of the things that tend to disappear when you are writing from desperation, when you are writing from panic. Though the cliche of the serious writer in their garret with only beans to eat while they complete their masterpiece is romantic, in real life that’s no way to write anything that’s actually good. I have a Script Tip called “Projectors” about how whatever we write can’t help but show our feelings and attitude and emotions - our writing *is* who we are - so if you are a bitter angry person, you will be writing bitter angry stories that are probably not going to be entertaining.

After I sold COURTING DEATH to a company at Paramount and moved to Los Angeles, I had 2 years worth of rent and expenses plus a production bonus when they made the film. Except they didn’t make the film. I spent two years like Joe Gillis - holed up in my apartment writing screenplays - and had done absolutely no networking or work to get some other screenplay sold. I could have written all of those screenplays in my hometown of Concord, CA and saved a bundle! Los Angeles is a very expensive place to live. So when my two years of rent and expenses was almost spent, I went into panic mode and tried to figure out how to sell a screenplay. But I was trying to sell the screenplays that I had written from my heart and soul (even though they contained explosions) before I realized that I was running out of money. And I sold one, that managed to get made. And there were others that got me studio meetings and a couple that ended up optioned. I realized that I needed to spend more time on the business side of the screenwriting business and from that point on I actually became a professional screenwriter (as in, I continued to sell screenplays and land assignments).

Another writer I knew was not as successful, and called me in the middle of the night asking if he could crash at my apartment because he’d just been evicted and everyone else he’d called had turned him down. I didn’t know this guy very well, and was probably at the bottom of his list of people to call, and I turned him down as well. I realized that I never wanted to be in that position, and decided that if I was getting close to running out of money again, I would just get a day job. And at one point back in those early years, I had one - working in a wine shop in the Brentwood district, a few blocks from where O.J. Simpson would later murder his wife and her friend. Allegedly. But I realized that it was better for me to write with confidence and heart and soul instead of writing from panic and desperation.

Better for you to do that, too.

So if you give yourself some arbitrary deadline like 5 Years Until I Make It or whatever, don’t quit that day job! You can write 1 page a day and have 3 first drafts in a year... which is what I did when I was working at the warehouse. That’s how I wrote COURTING DEATH (which sold and got me to Los Angeles) and a bunch of other screenplays, some that sold, some that got me assignments, and some that nothing happened with. Lots that nothing happened with! That’s how screenwriting works - you will write a stack of screenplays in order to sell one or land one assignment. So you need something to pay the bills in the meantime.

DAY JOBS FOR SCREENWRITERS
You don’t want to be writing from desperation. It’s difficult to write when you are worried about financial problems, so it’s best to have an income while trying to break in. What you want is a “disposable job” rather than a career. A career will get in the way of your career! I always picked jobs that I wouldn’t want to do for the rest of my life, as an incentive to write and not do it for the rest of my life. If I got too comfortable at my day job, it became my real job. So I looked for jobs that would pay the rent, didn’t require me to think much (so that I could be figuring out scenes at work) and had regular hours so that I could plan my writing around it. I know people who work in advertizing and do other things that are writing based day jobs and that’s good news and bad news; the good news is that you are writing and getting paid for it, the bad news is that you might use all of your creative energy writing ad copy for a toilet cleaner. But if you have a steady and stable job that is paying the bills, keep it until you have made enough money to survive for at least a year...

And then don’t be afraid to go back to work. There’s no shame in not being evicted and panic calling some guy you know in the middle of the night to see if you can crash at his place, you know, just until you sell something.

But once you get to Los Angeles, there are some day jobs that put you into contact with peopel in the business, and are better than working in a warehouse. In the “Breaking In Bluer Book” I have 15 ways to make connections in Los Angeles, and some of them are day jobs like working as an Office Production Assistant, Reader, Writer’s Assistant or Personal Assistant, and a bunch of others. But jobs that put you in contact with people in the business can be helpful - I know a limousine driver who takes people back and forth to the airport (and other places) and often has celebrities in the back of his limo... and became a Film Producer because he managed to option a screenplay and sign some second tier movie stars from the back of his limo, and then give the package to a few investors and producers and distributors in the back of his limo. Only in Hollywood! But the kind of job that puts you in contact with upscale clients that is in that “disposable” classification is a great way to make connections while you are paying the rent, and because it’s disposable you can quit when you sell a screenplay and then come back to it later if you need to. That was part of the reason why I choose working in the wine shop in Brentwood - celebrities and producers buy wine and I might meet them. That was the plan. I learned that movie stars and producers had personal assistants that did all of their shopping for them... so that’s maybe a better job choice.

But aside from the “disposable jobs” that put you in contact with people in the business, there are also disposable jobs that you can just pick up and drop whenever you want, and those are also good if you have moved to Los Angeles and suddenly find yourself in need of a job to keep from worrying about paying the bills so that you can concentrate on your screenplay and put your heart and soul into it. Scott Frank, writer-director of QUEEN’S GAMBIT (based on the Walter Tevis novel), told me that he trained to be a bartender because that was a job that you could do anywhere and there was always someone hiring. Lots of actors and actresses wait tables between acting gigs, and Kathleen Turner went back to waiting tables after filming her star-making role in BODY HEAT... she has talked about waiting tables when the posters with her picture started going up around town. If you ask any waiter in Los Angeles what they are auditioning for, they will have an answer!

IT’S GOTTA HAVE HEART!
But the main thing to do is find a way to be able to focus on your writing, and not be worried about looming eviction like that writer who wanted to crash at my place just, you know, until he sold something. He never had another film credit, so maybe he never sold anything? He might have become like Joe Gillis in SUNSET BLVD - just writing ‘From hunger. It’s just a rehash of something that wasn’t very good to begin with,” and being so desperate and panicked that they are unable to put your heart and soul into your work.

You don’t want to just hack out what you think they want, because they don’t want hack work - they want something that you care about, that you are passionate about... that is also wildly commercial and will sell a bunch of tickets. What you write from hunger and desperation is going to smell of hunger and desperation - it’s not going to be that story that you needed to needed to tell. Later in SUNSET BLVD Joe Gillis bumps into that studio reader who trashed his script at a New Year’s Eve party, and she tells him that she read over all of the scripts he had submitted to the studio and found one with a great supporting character that she thought should have been the main character. Joe says that he knew someone like that character, and that subplot was personal and emotional to him... and the reader said that showed, and he should break off that character and write a new script about them... and he does. And that’s also what you need to do - find the stories that you are passionate about that also have commercial appeal and write those. Write the kind of movies that you regularly pay to see every week in the cinema - that you would stand in line to see! And you can’t write those from desperation! As writers, we are our “instrument” - we create from within, and it’s difficult to do that if you are worried about something else... so find the ways to be comfortable enough that you *can* create.

Good luck and keep writing!

- Bill

BREAKING IN?

405 Pages!

*** BREAKING IN BLUE BOOK *** - For Kindle!

Should really be called the BUSINESS BLUE BOOK because it covers almost everything you will need to know for your screenwriting career: from thinking like a producer and learning to speak their language, to query letters and finding a manager or agent, to making connections (at home and in Hollywood) and networking, to the different kinds of meetings you are will have at Studios, to the difference between a producer and a studio, to landing an assignment at that meeting and what is required of you when you are working under contract, to contracts and options and lawyers and... when to run from a deal! Information you can use *now* to move your career forward! It's all here in the Biggest Blue Book yet!

Print version was 48 pages, Kindle version is over 400 pages!

Only $4.99 - and no postage!

USA Folks Click Here.



UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

Espania Folks Click Here.

Canadian Folks Click Here.

Other countries check your Amazon websites... it's there!

Seriously - TEN TIMES larger than the paper version (still on sale on my website)! That's just crazy!



Thank you to everyone!

Bill

Trailer Tuesday: CRISS CROSS

CRISS CROSS (1949)
Director: Robert Siodmak
Writers: Daniel Fuchs, based on a novel by Don Tracy.
Starring: Burt Lancaster, Yvonne DeCarlo, Dan Duryea.

This is one of my favorite movies, but I have no idea when I first saw it. Most likely on the Late Late Show. Back in the old days, when there were only 3 networks and a handful of local stations with local programming, they always had a late night movie. Networks like NBC would show some fairly new movie during prime time, kind of the way HBO has fairly new movies today. So the late show movies were always something old, from the 1940s or 1950s... stuff like CASABLANCA. After the late show movies there was... nothing. TV stations closed down for the night at 2 or 3AM and after the sign off (America The Beautiful over The Blue Angels flying in formation) there was a test pattern until the Farm Report the next morning. No infomercials. When I came home from working at the Movie Theater, I’d usually watch the Late Late Show on Friday and Saturday nights and catch some classic film... and that probably included CRISS CROSS.



CRISS CROSS is a film noir based on a novel by Don Tracy and kicks off our Don Tracy Appreciation Week. Don who? you ask... hey, me too! The only reason why I know this novelist’s name is from the opening titles of CRISS CROSS, but when I came to this week’s Thriller Thursday episode it was based on a novel by... Don Tracy. Hey! What a weird coincidence! So I looked him up online and discovered his two most famous novels ended up as this movie and that TV episode. Tracy was a journalist who hit it big with his second novel “Criss Cross” and then crashed and burned with his third novel “How Sleeps The Beast?” about racial conditions in the modern south... which was too controversial for the times. After returning from World War 2, he shifted gears and wrote some sprawling historical adventure novels like “Crimson Is The Eastern Shore”, “Roanoke Renegade”, and “Carolina Corsair”. He came back to noir with “The Big Blackout” (Thriller Thursday) and in the sixties he wrote a detective series about a military policeman solving crimes on base and off (kind of like NCIS). Because this was the Paperback Revolution, he also wrote a huge stack of TV and movie novelizations under a pseudonym. A recovering alcoholic, he wrote an AA self help book in the 70s. Oddly, I have never read any of his detective series, even though those were the kinds of books I hunted for in used bookstores. Now I’m going to try and track some down.

But CRISS CROSS...

The film opens with Steve Thompson (muscular Burt Lancaster) making out in a night club parking lot with his ex wife Anna (sexy Yvonne DeCarlo who you may know from THE MUNSTERS), who is married to some other guy now... Slim Dundee (the slimy Dan Duryea who improves every movie he is in) a local crime boss. They enter the club separately, but later that night Thompson and Dundee get involved in a fight in a back room of the club, and Thompson’s detective pal Pete Ramerize breaks it up and asks Thompson if he wants to press charges. Thompson says no, then ends up with Dundee and his gang in the men’s room washing up... and we discover the fight was just for the sake of the detective.... but got out of hand because Dundee thinks his wife Anna may be fooling around with her ex husband. Thompson is an armored truck guard who is the inside man for a robbery by Dundee and his gang scheduled for the next day.

When the Armored Truck goes on a pick up, the two guys packing huge bundles of money into bags are talking about how their wives overpay on laundry soap by 3 cents... this kind of contrast is one of the things that makes the film great.

About 13 minutes into the film, just before the robbery, the Armored Truck now filled with bags of money, Thompson remembers how he came to be here...

And we get to the meat of the story in a 50 minute flashback (in an 88 minute film)... which is not a crime story, but the story of a man with a broken heart. Thompson returns to Los Angeles after years of drifting from city to city, working a variety of odd jobs, trying to forget Anna... his ex wife who broke his heart. Film Noir is all about the four Ds: Darkness, Destiny, Despair, and of course Doom... and Destiny plays a large part in Thompson’s homecoming. When he gets to his family house, no one is home... so he wanders through the city ending up at... the night club where he and his ex wife used to hang out. He tries to call her several times, but something always gets in his way... like a warning.

The night club has a separate bar attached, and there are two great recurring characters in that bar that you will remember long after you’ve forgotten the plot of some recent hit film. The bartender (Percy Helton) who thinks Thompson might be an undercover checker with the Alcoholic Beverages Commission is a real character, and it’s fun to watch their relationship change as time goes on. The lush who sits at the end of the bar all day (Joan Miller) is one of those great characters and great performances that makes you feel as if you’ve known her all of your life. And it’s *unusual* to make that drunk at the end of the bar a woman... you feel like she was maybe Rosie The Riveter during the war and afterwards her life went south... and here she is. I looked up the actress who played that role and she worked consistently. One of the great things about writing during the studio system was that they had all of these great character actors under contract and you could write a role for them. In the Supporting Characters Blue Book I talk about some of the great characters who pop up as Pirate #7 or Cowboy #9 (and often played both roles in different movies) and how well developed those little roles were. You remembered them. There’s a nice bit in CRISS CROSS where the Bartender is trying to tell someone how much he appreciates the Lush, his favorite customer... and she doesn’t know if she should be insulted or not. It’s a great moment for both of them. Oh, and at one point in the night club Anna is dancing with some handsome young man... a no lines extra in the film... played by a not yet famous guy named Tony Curtis!

But Thompson and Anna are destined to bump into each other... and that happens. He knows that she is wrong for him, that if they get back together again he will just end up heartbroken again... and that’s what happens. As soon as they begin dating again, she hooks up with Dundee and *marries* the mobster, leaving Thompson stood up at the night club. When Dundee leaves on business, destiny brings them together again... but this time he’s fooling around with a mobster’s wife.

How destiny brings them together: Dundee has to catch a train on business and at the last minute *doesn’t* take Anna. Thompson is at the train station... after learning about their marriage he’s thinking about splitting town to avoid the pain of bumping into her. An employee behind a center counter bends down for a moment and Thompson gets a glimpse of the woman on the other side... Anna. Thompson tries to avoid her by going outside... but Anna has gone outside as well. She plans on getting in her car and driving home... but Dundee’s #2 man is in the car, driving it to the city where Dundee is going so that they’ll have a vehicle there. Which leaves Anna and Thompson the only two people with nowhere to go outside the train station. Destiny keeps bringing them together... and if Dundee finds out about it they are both dead.

Let me take a minute to mention the Los Angeles locations. Union Station is the train station, and they really shot there. I know that sounds silly, but movies were made on the backlot at this time, and there was some train station set that all movies used. CRISS CROSS went out on the streets of Los Angeles, and you get all kinds of great shots of places in the city that no longer exist. The trolley cars, Hill Street, the old houses, this film is a moving snapshot of Los Angeles in the late 40s. It’s fascinating to watch just for the scenery.

When they eventually get caught together by Dundee, Thompson tries to talk his way out of it... by saying that he actually was there to talk to Dundee. See, he has a job that needs some criminals. Thompson has gotten his old job as an Armored Truck guard back, and has a scheme to commit a robbery. Needs criminal help. Dundee and his gang come in on the robbery... and now Thompson’s cover story for being with Anna has turned him into a criminal. Maybe there’s a fifth D in Noir: degradation. Thompson would do anything to get Anna back, he has never gotten over her... she’s in his blood. And going from respected armored truck guard to criminal just to keep her in his life is a major fall for him. The problem is: he says it off the top of his head to pacify Dundee... but it all becomes too real when they bring in a planner and put together a crew and buy vehicles and explosives and fake uniforms and gear up to do the job.

Which leads us up to that sixty three minute mark with Thompson back behind the wheel of the Armored Truck as they head to the ambush... and our final twenty five minutes of the film.

Don Westlake writing as Richard Stark wrote a series of heist novels featuring a guy named Parker, and a handful of them are armored truck robberies... and no two are the same. The “high concept” in a heist story is the method they use to pull the heist. You need something original. The robbery here involves a monthly factory payroll delivery in cash, a tanker truck that will block the road to the factory to keep away the police, and other elements... but the main thing is the inside man: Thompson. He not only has to remove the third guard (who would stay in the truck and shoot the robbers) but put the second guard at ease when he thinks continuing the cash delivery might be dangerous for just two guards. In the planning scene we see how the plan *will* work, but execution is where things tend to go wrong...

And if you were Dundee and you had a chance to kill the guy who was sleeping with your wife during the robbery, what would you do? So instead of Thompson’s rule that the other guard (his friend Pops who is dating Thompson’s mom) and of course himself will not be harmed in the robbery; Pops is killed and Dundee tries to kill Thompson. The two exchange gunfire, wounding each other... but Thompson manages to kill a bunch of the other robbers... but the money and Dundee vanish.

Thompson wakes up in the hospital a hero... but his detective pal Pete Rameriz knows he had to be part of the robbery, and warns him that Dundee is still alive and will be hunting him. Which leads to a *great* sequence of complete paranoia as Thompson is trapped in his hospital bed, leg and arm in casts and elevated with cables... and suspicious people linger in the hospital hallways and shadows pass just outside his field of vision... often falling over the pebbled glass window. This has you on the edge of your seat. One particular guy is sitting in the hallway... and Thompson asks the nurse to bring him in. Ends up being a nice guy husband whose wife was in a car accident instead of one of Dundee’s thugs. Now Thompson *begs* the husband to stay with him (so that no one can sneak in and kill him in his sleep), but the husband says he needs to stay outside his wife’s door incase she wakes up... leaving Thompson alone.



Since this entry is now twice the usual length, I’m going to stop before we get to the ending... but what’s interesting is how it remains the story of a man with a broken heart, still in love with his ex wife, right up until the end. I think one of the things good films do is have an emotional throughline that is connected to theme. It’s Thompson still being hung up on his ex wife that drives the whole story... from the dramatic side of the story to the crime side of the story. These things are all connected. This is one of my favorite movies because all of the pieces come together perfectly... and I think we all still have some past love in our blood... and wish we could get over that long ago broken heart.

I suspect that CRISS CROSS is one of the Coen Brothers favorite movies, since Lancaster’s character often says “Sure, sure” a phrase said often by Paul Newman’s character in HUDSUCKER PROXY and there’s a dialogue from Anna, “I didn’t do anything wrong” which is echoed by Thompson later... and a very similar thing happens in BLOOD SIMPLE with the line “I didn’t do anything funny.” I think it would be fun to look at Soderbergh’s remake of CRISS CROSS next week...

Bill

Film Courage Plus: Researching Locations

FILM COURAGE did a series of interviews with me at the end of 2014, and then again at the end of 2015. So why not add a new craft article and make it a weekly blog entry? All I have to do is write that new article, right?



LET'S TALK LOCATIONS!
One of my early movie crushes when I was a kid was Leslie Ann Warren, who played CINDERELLA in the TV version of Rogers & Hammerstein’s musical back in 1965. I was 8 years old! It’s not that she was cute (she still is) but the song she sang “In my own little corner in my own little room I can be whatever I want to be” - that was (and is) me! So maybe I really have a crush on Oscar Hammerstein? Only he’s definitely not as cute. But I was a clumsy unpopular kid who lived in my imagination - and could be whatever I wanted to be. I think that’s a major part of being a writer, whether you have seen the musical version of CINDERELLA or not. We imagine ourselves doing exiting and amazing things... while we sit at our laptops or tablets or whatever we write on. But how do we write about being a cowboy or astronaut or spy or whatever exciting life of we have never lived that life? How do we write about all of those exotic places that the story takes place in (the old west, space, cool international cities) if we have never been there? We need to combine our imaginations with research.

One of the things that I talk about in the clip is my script that takes place in Finland - a country that I have never been to. About ten years ago, I landed an assignment with a company that had connections to a company in Finland and was looking to do a co-production that was similar to TAKEN - a fast paced action revenge film. They called me, and I pitched them an idea that was similar to TAKEN but different. Everything I write has some autobiographical thread in it, so my idea was: what if a guy who writes spy novels, and knows all kinds of things about the spy world, went to a big event with his wife, and she wore the exact same dress as the President’s wife... and got kidnaped by mistake? Now our novelist hero has to get her back before the bad guys realize that they have the wrong person and kill her. He writes about spies, but can he live that life for real? (I can be whatever I want to be!). The whole deal was to take advantage of shooting in Finland, but I have never been there! And the Finish co-producers *live there*.

In the old days, when I had to write about some foreign country, I bought a bunch of travel books. I found that the “Let’s Go!” books were great because they were designed for backpackers and usually had interesting “non tourist” places to check out. They also had really good descriptions of places, even if they didn’t have pictures. This was in the pre-internet times, where you couldn’t just Google someplace. So I had to find other books (usually in the library) that had photos of places that sounded interesting in the books. The problem always was - these were glamor shots of buildings and streets, made to look as beautiful as possible. And I was sure that in real life those places didn’t look as nice. But I wrote a giant stack of spy and thriller screenplays and even a couple of novels using the “Let’s Go!” books and travel picture books and the occasional travelogue film. Worked fine, some of those screenplays sold and were optioned...

But for the Finland screenplay? Since the internet had been invented, I went online. I discovered that Helsinki often doubles in movies for St. Petersburg, Russia - so that’s where I began my story. I found the sections of the city that they used in other movies and the sections of St. Petersburg that they were supposed to be. I found everything I needed online. In the clip I talk about looking at people’s vacation videos of Helsinki online - Google search. Made me feel a little like the crazy killer Frances Dollarhyde in “Manhunter” (1986) who works at a film developing lab and selects his victims by watching their home movies. Creepy! But watching a bunch of family’s home videos of their fun Finland vacation gave me multiple angles of locations and all of the small things that never made it into those pretty pictures in the travel books. One of which was a guy with a push cart who sold fish snacks (and sodas and everything else). In two different home videos! This guy is always there! So I put him in my screenplay.

DETAILS
Which is a great lesson in research. Find the details that make it seem real. Look for the things that are unusual and distinctive about the location... and look for locations that are different than anywhere else on earth. If you are writing a scene in Finland, don’t have scenes take place at a location that could be anywhere else. Not only do the details create a vivid image in the reader’s minds, they add a level of reality that your slugline can’t do on its own. Details are like anything else in your “description” - they need to be part of the story and “action”. So my guy with the push cart who sold fish snacks wasn’t just part of the description, he was critical to the scene. My spy novelist hero, when searching for his kidnaped wife, asks the street vendor questions that will help him find her or the people who took her. You don’t want to include *pointless* details in your screenplay, so you need to find a way to make all of the details important to the story... and the great part about that is that it makes the details memorable.

One of the odd things with my guy with a push cart is that the production companiy’s readers who *lived* in Finland knew exactly who I was talking about. That guy is a fixture in that neighborhood. Though you may not have a producer who is familiar with the details that you use as part of your story, details are convincing. A vague description of something sounds less credible than one with a specific detail that makes you feel as if you are there. One distinctive details is worth hundreds of words about something general. And words are gold in screenwriting. You don’t want to spend words on worthless things... or use too many words.

Thanks to the internet we can be virtually anywhere. Google Street View allows us to see those great details anywhere in the world. I think I might have mentioned my screenplay that takes place in Detroit, a city I have never been to, and finding a You Tube video that gave me a guided tour of one of my locations. I also used Street View when I did a recent rewrite to improve the description of a specific location. I wanted to make sure that people in Detroit wouldn’t think I had never been there. I had written a screenplay ages ago, “Recall”, about the auto industry and even though I had read some books I had managed to get some things wrong (reading about a location isn’t nearly as good as seeing it with your own eyes). Though it might be nice to actually go there, as writers we end up writing about places all over the world... that we have never been to. My “Hours Of Darkness” screenplay takes place in Seattle, a place that I hadn’t been to since I was 5 years old. I had seen multiple pictures of one of my locations... but none of them showed the railroad tracks that ran behind the building.

That came from a *map* - another great tool when dealing with places that you never have been. One of the great moments in Wesley Strick’s “True Believer” screenplay is when our lawyer hero realizes that two locations that seem far from each other are actually close to each other and connected by an alley. That’s the clue that helps them prove their client innocent of murder. So grab a map for locations where you have never been and look for the details that may not be in pictures. Maps are great research tools!

UNIQUE LOCATIONS
Unusual locations make it look as if you are very familiar with the city or country that you are writing about. As someone who was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area I get bored with the generic locations in most movies (and the Golden Gate Bridge... which is the *second* most important bridge in the city - nobody ever shows the Bay Bridge that connects Oakland and San Francisco). There’s a travelogue element in going to the movies, so I want to show the audience places that other films haven’t shown them. If I’ve seen it in another movie, I want to find someplace else to set the scene. So in my “Past Lives” screenplay I have a scene in Tommy’s Joint - a bar and restaurant that’s kind of the DMZ - where a cop might be having lunch at a table next to a crook. It’s a fascinating place that I have never seen in a film. My big suspense ending takes place at one of the *two* Dutch Windmills in Golden Gate Park. You probably didn’t even know there were Windmills in San Francisco. So I am showing you something that isn’t in the usual “Welcome To San Francisco” montage.

Every city has “tourist places” and places that the residents know of, and part of making your story seem real is finding those places that don’t usually end up in films... and making them part of the story...

Though the way that can backfire is if they shoot your screenplay in Vancouver.

But think of the “Travelogue” element when writing your screenplay - where can you set a scene that shows the audience someplace fun and exciting to visit, so that the audience feels as if they have been on a vacation while watching the film? Growing up, I loved how the James Bond movies took me to exotic places around the world, and set scenes in those places so that I could see more details than if it were just that “Welcome To Tokyo” montage. In YOU ONLY LIVE TWICE a scene is set at a Sumo Wrestling Match - the wrestling is going on in the background, but you feel as if you are right there! Because every word is gold in a screenplay, you want to *incorporate* these interesting locations into your story, so we get the “travelogue” in the background... and it’s required to go to that exotic location by the story itself.

One of the things that I found in my Finland screenplay research was an ancient island fortress that is now a park. I asked if we could film there, and found out that parks are an “easy permit” and inexpensive. There were rules - I couldn’t have explosions or fires or anything else that might damage the old fortress, but I could have scenes where people are chasing each other and fighting hand to hand. Great!

But while researching the island fortress, I discovered many things that made it into the story, including a fairly new emergency tunnel *under the sea* that was built in the 1970s. Ambulances and fire equipment could quickly get to the island, now... but that also meant there was a way to get there other than the ferry boats. And usually long tunnels have places to turn out and maintenance rooms along the way... so I had my villain using a maintenance room as his hideout, and when they triangulate a cell phone call it shows that the villain is in the middle of the sea! On a boat? They look for a boat and there isn’t one. So how is it possible? Our hero eventually finds out about the new tunnel - and finds the villain. Researching locations finds story possibilities that you didn’t even know existed. You *need* to research locations!

LOCATION IS CHARACTER?
My COWBOY NIGHTS script is kind of "cowboy noir" and takes place present day. The protagonist gets fired from a dude ranch and heads to the city, where he becomes involved with a femme fatale who has a robbery scheme. In order to make the protagonist's choice to hook up with the femme fatale something we could see - visual, and not just words on the page - I created a nice cowgirl as a potential romance. That meant there *was* a choice - the femme fatale wasn't the only woman available. The protagonist now must make a physical choice between the two women, and that nice cowgirl he doesn't end up with becomes a physical symbol of his wrong choice when things go south in the robbery scheme. Also, she allowed me an ending where our protagonist gets a shot at redemption and a future.

There are several scenes in the script where the protagonist and femme fatale have sex, and one where the protagonist and nice cowgirl make love. Now, you can see the distinction between those two things on the page - I've used different words - but how do you make sure those words show up on screen? How do you turn words into something visual so that they do not stay on the page? In both scenes, the protagonist has sex with a woman. Sounds like the same scene... but what if I used *Locations* to help tell the story?

The first thing I did was look at what made the two female characters different. The femme fatale was a city girl and the nice cowgirl was a country girl - and all of the basic character things and specific character things that come from that. I wanted to use location as one of the elements to explore character - even if it was so subtle most people wouldn't consciously notice. The sex scenes with the femme fatale were all rushed and in urban locations. The rushed element matched the hustle of city life, but also fit the story - the femme fatale is the wife of a small time gangster and these sex scenes are cheating on her husband, so they have to be fast so they don’t get caught. But the scenes could have taken place in beds or anywhere - I decided to use previously established urban locations that would make these sex scenes part of the city. One takes place in an alley, one is in a car parked in a busy parking lot, one is in the husband's place of business. None of the scenes take place in a location that is *not* obviously a city.

The nice cowgirl love scene takes place in the country - which fits her character - and is also relaxed and unrushed. They have a picnic in a beautiful outdoor location after a horse ride. Where the femme fatale’s sex scenes are surrounded by car horns and buildings; the nice cowgirl scene takes place surrounded by trees and wild flowers without a building in sight. I high-lighted all of the simple beauty of nature, and the simple beauty of the cowgirl. When they make love, they take their time, and are surrounded by the best scenic location the location scout can find. Because the location is beautiful, the audience will subconsciously find the sex scene to be beautiful as well. The location is doing its part to tell the story and reveal character.

The other difference between the two types of sex scenes was also designed to show that the tone of these scenes was different: The sex scenes with the femme fatale always took place at night and in darkness. The love scene with the nice cowgirl took place is bright daylight. Bad girl and nice girl, darkness and light. Hey, seems obvious when I say it, but how often do you *consciously* notice the time of day in a sex scene? This is something that the audience *feels* more that *realizes*. A simple thing we do in the slugline that changes the tone of the scene and changes the way the audience sees the actions. As different as – NIGHT and – DAY!

Locations can be instrumental in telling your story - and researching them is easier now than it ever has been. So takes some time to think about the best location for your scenes. The best location for your story. Locations that are evocative and distinctive...

Then they will probably film it in Vancouver.

Good luck and keep writing!

- Bill

Film Courage: When Should You Abandon A Screenplay?

FILM COURAGE did a series of interviews with me at the end of 2014, and then again at the end of 2015. There were 36 (or more) segments total. That's almost a year's worth of material! So why not add a new craft article and make it a weekly blog entry? All I have to do is write that new article, right?

WHEN TO ABANDON A SCRIPT?

The two screenplays I talk about here (and everything else on "the shelf") had gone all the way to FADE OUT. It's so much easier to fix a screenplay that is written than one that is not. The shelving thing only works if you don't abandon them!



You are halfway through a screenplay and it just isn’t working... what should you do? If you finish it, it is just going to be a finished terrible screenplay - why waste the time on that when you could write something better?

We have all been there, and in the clip I say that you should just finish it, even if it stinks. Here’s why - if I have a finished screenplay that needs a serious rewrite, I am much more likely to do that rewrite. But if I have a half finished screenplay, that’s not a rewrite, that’s a write plus a rewrite... And I will never do that. You might be different, but that just seems like too much work to me. It’s not just rolling a boulder uphill, the boulder has sharp spikes coming out of it!

One of the problems with quitting a screenplay is that it becomes a habit - and I know many writers who have the first forty pages of dozens of screenplays, but not a single one that is finished. They are quitters. The minute it gets difficult, they quit. The minute they hit a rough patch, they stop writing instead of figure out the problem and get past it. Here’s the thing: there is no market for the first 40 pages of a screenplay. Nobody cares about the first 40 pages of a screenplay - that’s garbage. People buy *finished* screenplays. Finished. Finished and rewritten a couple of times until they are great. That’s what matters. Those 40 page misfires? Nobody cares. And these people quit after the first rough patch! Screenplays are filled with rough patches that you have to struggle with and stick out and figure out.

ARE YOU A QUITTER?
"Talent is a wonderful thing, but it won't carry a quitter," Stephen King.

When things get difficult or unpleasant, is your first thought to quit rather than stick it out and see if it gets better?

Do you quit writing a script if you get bored?

Do you quit writing a script if you get to that difficult part of Act 2 when it's all an uphill climb?

Do you have a bunch of half written screenplays and half read books and failed relationships and half finished projects?

Do you just quit at the first sign of difficulty or boredom when you try to watch a foreign film or something else that might take just a little work on your part?

Are you trying to avoid work?

Anything that might require a little effort on your part?

Are you a Quitter?

Hey, Bill, watching a foreign film with subtitles and a plot that only makes sense to French people isn't the same as writing screenplays!

I don't think so. I think it's all the same.

You are either a Quitter or you see things through to the end. You get over that difficult Act 2 hump. You do the next rewrite and the one after that and after that. You stick it out. The key to success is sticking it out. Not being a Quitter. Not giving up when things get rough. The things about those French films is that the first few can be work, but after a few you get the hang of it, you build up your “French Film Muscles” (which is different that Jean Claude Van Damm who is Belgian, like Hercule Poirot from MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS) and it becomes less work with every French Film until you actually might enjoy watching French Films! So stick it out!

Now here's the thing: sticking it out is no guarantee of success. You could finish that screenplay (or French Film) and all of the rewrites and still not sell it or even get anyone to read it.

But Quitting? Guaranteed failure.

Guaranteed.

I know this from experience. I have not finished a script and had someone looking for just such a script... And I have also been the one with the finished script because I stuck it out when things got tough or the script started to bore me or it required that 4 Letter Word that everyone hates: WORK... and had the very script that someone was looking for. I also have watched a lot of French Films - LEON: THE PROFESSIONAL is a French Film. It has lots of explosions!

And I have learned that even when I stuck it out and the script still didn't turn out and I shelved it, I had still ACCOMPLISHED SOMETHING. Finished the script. And many of those scripts I eventually figured out how to fix, and some sold and were made into films. Because I could rewrite a finished screenplay. That was doable. But a half finished script? That's not a rewrite, that's a *write*. I could still do that, but it's a double whammy. It's pushing the boulder uphill AND it's covered in sharp spikes. A finished screenplay is still in play - it's still *something*.

So step one is DON’T QUIT! Stick it out! Do the work, even when it becomes hard - finish the screenplay!

BUT I’M JUST STUCK!
Okay, now that the Quitters have all left the room because I used that 4 Letter Word (“work”), what should you do when you hit that wall? When you are stuck and you want to quit? When you want to abandon the screenplay or novel or French film? Should you Phone A Friend or Poll The Audience or do some sort of 50/50 like on WHO WANTS TO BE A MILLIONAIRE?

Nothing irks me more than people who hit a roadblock in their story and go to a messageboard to “poll the audience” for ideas on how to get past the roadblock. The reason why is because every story is it’s own story, the story that *you* are telling, and if you gave 10 writers the same basic story idea and they all wrote a story, you would end up with 10 different stories about 10 different things... because we all see a story from our own individual angle. It’s YOUR story and no one else can know what happens next. Sure, you might just be looking for random ideas from others that might spark something, but eventually you will get into a situation where you are working on an assignment against a deadline and there is no one else but you to spark those ideas. So figuring out how to get past the roadblocks in a story are things that you need to learn to do by yourself. Writing is a “by yourself” occupation (until you get the producer’s notes and the star’s notes and the director’s notes and the gaffer’s notes... but even then, they expect YOU to figure out how to implement them). You go into a room alone and write (even if it’s a Starbucks). So you will need to be self reliant and figure out how to spark your own ideas. You can’t Phone A Friend... but you can do some form of 50/50 - figure out the possible answers and then narrow them down. So here are five ways to get past the roadblock...

1) JUMP OVER IT FOR NOW

The most common solution - skip it until your brain is fully functioning, I outline my screenplays so I know that this scene made sense and worked in my imagination at some point in time... but there just isn’t enough coffee in the world to figure it out today. I could spend the whole day trying to figure it out... and maybe never succeed... or I could move on to the next scene and write that. But before I jump ahead, I leave myself a note...

When I'm stuck I look at the scene I'm working on and ask myself:
1) What is the purpose of this scene in the story?
2) What are the pieces of information this scene must communicate to the audience?
3) What does the protagonist (or antagonist) want in this scene?
4) What stops them from getting what they want? What is the struggle?
5) What will happen if they don’t get what they want or need in the scene?
6) What does the protagonist (or antagonist) *feel* in this scene?
7) What do I want the *audience* to feel in this scene?
8) What are the important events that happen in the scene (for later scenes)?
9) What happens at the beginning of the scene?
10) What happens at the end of the scene?


Those ten things are a “placeholder” for the scene when I move on to the next scene... and most of the time answering those ten questions helps me figure out the scene well enough to write it. It may not be the best version of the scene, but the best version will come in rewrites. I’m just trying to move forward instead of stack stuck in the mud. If I can’t figure out the scene, those ten things are the clues that will help me later, so that I know what the heck the scene was supposed to be when I come back to write it. The events at the beginning and ending of the scene are there to help me get on to the next scene - if I know the outcome of the scene and figure out a basic idea of how the scene will end, that helps me get into that next scene.

2) BACK UP AND TRY AGAIN!

Often it isn’t the scene that I am trying to write that’s the problem, it’s that I have taken a wrong turn a few scenes back, and I need to back up to that fork in the road and take a different path. So begin by going back one scene and looking at the possible outcomes of that scene and the “trajectory” of the story due to those outcomes. If you had chosen one of the other possible outcomes, would you be back on the right track? Think through what would happen next if you had taken a different path... if one of the elements fro the ten things above for the previous scene had been different, where would you be now? What direction would you be headed?

Sometimes going back just one scene will show you where you took the wrong turn, sometimes you will have to go back a few scenes. Don’t delete the scenes that you have already written - the wrong turns that lead you to a different destination - save them in a file just in case this ends up being a wrong turn, too! But usually when you spot the wrong turn, you will see the route that leads to the destination and you will be back on the road and making good time again!

3) GO TO THEME

Often the reason for being stuck is that there are too many possible directions to take the story and you don’t know which is the best way... or none of the possibilities seem attractive. This is when I usually go to theme to try and break through the block. In the “Outlines & Thematic” Blue Book and several articles for Script Magazine, I show how every single element in a story is connected. Every character, every scene, every line of dialogue, everything is part of that whole... so when you get stuck if you look at what that connection is you might find your way out.

In one of my Script Magazine articles I look at ANTMAN & WASP and how each of the main characters is part of a troubled father daughter relationship, so if you were writing that story and got stuck, you might want to look at how the scene effects the farther-daughter relationship in that plot thread and what it’s doing to resolve that troubled father daughter element... and if the answer is “nothing” than maybe you have found the problem with the scene. Or maybe it has everything to do with that, but the scene writes that thematic element into a corner and you’re stuck... and have to rethink how the scene deals with that issue.

In a couple of Script Tips I look at writing my BLACK THUNDER screenplay for Showtime that was remade by Sony as a Steven Seagal flick a decade later - and how the theme was Concealment For The Purpose Of Deception - and how characters often conceal important information about themselves from others in order to protect themselves, but that concealment may be doing more harm than good. So if I got stuck on a scene when writing that script, I went back to that theme - what is the connection between this scene and concealment? Who is trying to conceal information and for what purpose? What would happen if that concealed information were discovered? And often this showed me the path for that scene. Hey, this was a movie about fist fights and things that blow up, but knowing that theme helped me get it written in 3 weeks to make a deadline. Whenever I got stuck I had a key to the story that might open that door that got me through the scene. So look at your theme - since it secretly connects everything, how is this troublesome scene connected?

4) WHAT IS THE ANTAGONIST DOING?

Story is conflict, and the antagonist (or force of antagonism) is the source of that conflict. Sometimes you get stuck because the conflict has dissipated and there is no strong reason for the story to continue. Nothing is driving the story anymore, so it’s out of fuel and coasting... and you need a conflict fill up.

This can be caused by a week central conflict, or an unmotivated antagonist, or a protagonist that isn’t part of the conflict (on the sidelines and every once in a while the conflict touches them, but they aren’t the target of the conflict). Those are serious structure issues, and though I don’t usually suggest rewriting until you have finished the first draft, this may be a case where you want to do back and solve the basic structure issues before moving forward. But maybe if you know what the problem is, you can keep moving forward just by figuring out how you will fix it and imagining that you have made that fix earlier so that you can get back on track with this scene. Many problems are based in basic structural issues and the protagonist not being the target of the conflict, which explains all of those books on structure and the general focus on structure in screenwriting.

Connected to this is the External Conflict. We are writing SCREENplays so we need conflicts that show up on screen. If your conflict is internal and emotional and can not be seen on the big screen, that will often lead to a dead end or nothing actually driving the story. I like to think of stories as a Protagonist must resolve an emotional conflict in order to resolve a physical conflict or else something bad will happen. So you may have the emotional conflict (which is internal and can not be seen on screen) but your story may have a weak physical conflict and no “or else” factor... two things that the antagonist brings to the story. So the reason for your story stalling out might be a weak antagonist or a passive antagonist or no antagonist at all... and usually the antagonist drives the story. They bring the conflict.

Conflict is the fuel that runs your story - the antagonist (or force of antagonism) is the source of that conflict... so if you have lost sight of the antagonist and the conflict, your story can hit a roadblock. You may think that it’s you as a writer that’s out of gas, but ot’s your story that is out of gas. Go back and fill the tank! (Or charge the battery, if you drive an electric story.)

5) WHAT DOES THE PROTAGONIST NEED?

The two things that drive a story are the antagonist who brings the conflict and the protagonist whose need forces them to deal with that conflict. So you might be stuck because your protagonist has no strong need. Just as a passive antagonist can cause your story to stall out, so can a passive protagonist. This is the flipside of the antagonist issue and often pops up in action and thriller and horror screenplays where the plot is driving the story. The protagonist can end up uninvolved in that story and you wonder why they heck they are putting up with all of these problems? Why don’t they just go to a summer camp other that Crystal Lake? If the protagonist doesn’t have a strong enough need to continue down the road that puts them in danger, you will be constantly trying to find excuses for them to keep going... and will run out of excuses the way a story without a strong antagonist runs out of gas (or electricity) and just peters out.

So the problem might be the Protagonist’s Need. If they don’t have one and are just a pawn in the story, that’s a problem. If they have a weak need (“But I want to go camping!”) that is also a problem. You may need to rethink your protagonist and find the reason why they MUST keep going down the conflict road no matter how bad it gets. Again, you can either go back and fix this or move forward and finish the first draft and then go back and fix it. There are writers who can get stuck in a GROUNDHOG DAY loop rewriting the first part of a screenplay forever without ever moving forward... and if you suspect that might be you, it’s better to finish the screenplay before going back to fix problems.

WHEN YOU REACH THE END...
I think the most important thing is to put in the WORK and figure out how to get past that roadblock and reach the end of your screenplay. Get it finished. After you type FADE OUT it may still be a screenplay that doesn’t quite work, but it’s a *finished* screenplay and you are more likely to come back to it later. I have a bunch of finished screenplays that don’t quite work, and now they are “shelved” while my subconscious figures out the problems... and it usually does! I had a script with a great high concept that hit a few snags along the way - it was a mystery and only had one suspect - so when I finished it I shelved it until I could figure out how to solve that problem. A couple of years later I was grocery shopping or something and figured out how to solve the One Suspect Problem... and furiously jotted notes and then did the rewrite. But I’m not sure my subconscious would still be working on that problem had I not finished the screenplay... if I didn’t have all of that WORK invested in that story.

Yes, you will sometimes get halfway through a screenplay and you want to quit. You get partway through a foreign film and you want to quit. You get halfway through some classic novel and you want to quit...

But if you do, you are a QUITTER!

You are avoiding the HARD WORK required to reach the goal and ACCOMPLISH SOMETHING! You are like a marathon runner who just gives up! Hey, man, this running stuff is hard, I'm just gonna quit and grab a beer...

Don't be a QUITTER!

Don’t abandon that screenplay!

You can’t Phone A Friend or Poll The Audience... you just have to do the hard work and figure it out on your own. And you can do that! It’s not easy, and you may want to quit every once in a while... but don’t! Just work hard until you break on through to the other side of that roadblock! You can do it!

Good luck, and keep writing!

- Bill

NEWEST BLUEST!

OUTLINES & THE THEMATIC!

OUTLINES & THE THEMATIC Blue Book.

ARE YOUR SCENES IN THE RIGHT ORDER?
AND ARE THEY THE RIGHT SCENES?

Your story is like a road trip... but where are you going? What's the best route to get there? What are the best sights to see along the way? Just as you plan a vacation instead of just jump in the car and start driving, it's a good idea to plan your story. An artist does sketches before breaking out the oils, so why shouldn't a writer do the same? This Blue Book looks at various outlining methods used by professional screenwriters like Wesley Strick, Paul Schrader, John August, and others... as well as a guest chapter on novel outlines. Plus a whole section on the Thematic Method of generating scenes and characters and other elements that will be part of your outline. The three stages of writing are: Pre-writing, Writing, and Rewriting... this book looks at that first stage and how to use it to improve your screenplays and novels.

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NO KINDLE REQUIRED! Get the *free* app (any device, except your Mr. Coffee) on the order page on Amazon!

Hitchcock's Lost TV Episode (s2e4)

In 1955 Alfred Hitchcock became the world's most famous director thanks to his TV show ALFRED HITCHCOCK PRESENTS. The show ran from 1955 to 1962... when it expanded into the ALFRED HITCHCOCK HOUR and continued to run until 1965. An entire decade as one of TV's top rated shows... with Hitch doing comic introductions and warning us about the upcoming commercials. Hitchcock directed a handful of episodes over the years as well.

In 1957, NBC decided to do an anthology series called SUSPICION which would be a mix of *live* TV and filmed episodes, hosted by Dennis O'Keefe (LEOPARD MAN) and co-produced by Hitchcock's company... with many of the filmed episodes using Hitch's TV crew (who would later make the movie PSYCHO). The very first episode was directed by Hitchcock... and has kind of been lost over the years. O'Keefe split after hosting several episodes and the odd mix of live and filmed didn't catch on... and the show didn't have enough episodes for syndication (only 40 episodes were made), so it never popped up in reruns like HITCHCOCK PRESENTS or the other show that used most of the HITCHCOCK crew - THRILLER hosted by Boris Karloff. So this Hitchcock directed episode has been unseen for years. Based on a great short story by Cornell Woolrich (REAR WINDOW) who is one of my favorite writers and the master of suspense on paper.







And that episode is the subject of the new episode of HITCH 20.

Of course, I have my own books on Hitchcock...

HITCHCOCK: MASTERING SUSPENSE

LEARN SUSPENSE FROM THE MASTER!

Alfred Hitchcock, who directed 52 movies, was known as the “Master Of Suspense”; but what exactly is suspense and how can *we* master it? How does suspense work? How can *we* create “Hitchcockian” suspense scenes in our screenplays, novels, stories and films?

This book uses seventeen of Hitchcock’s films to show the difference between suspense and surprise, how to use “focus objects” to create suspense, the 20 iconic suspense scenes and situations, how plot twists work, using secrets for suspense, how to use Dread (the cousin of suspense) in horror stories, and dozens of other amazing storytelling lessons. From classics like “Strangers On A Train” and “The Birds” and “Vertigo” and “To Catch A Thief” to older films from the British period like “The 39 Steps” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much” to his hits from the silent era like “The Lodger” (about Jack The Ripper), we’ll look at all of the techniques to create suspense!

Films Included: NOTORIOUS, SABOTAGE, STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, THE 39 STEPS, REBECCA, TO CATCH A THIEF, FRENZY, FOREIGN CORRESPONDENT, THE LODGER, THE BIRDS, TORN CURTAIN, SABOTEUR, VERTIGO, THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1934), THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH (1955), SUSPICION, and NUMBER SEVENTEEN. 17 Great Films!

Only 125,000 words!

Price: $5.99

HITCHCOCK: EXPERIMENTS IN TERROR

Click here for more info!

HITCHCOCK DID IT FIRST!

We all know that Alfred Hitchcock was the Master Of Suspense, but did you know he was the most *experimental* filmmaker in history?

Contained Thrillers like “Buried”? Serial Protagonists like “Place Beyond The Pines”? Multiple Connecting Stories like “Pulp Fiction”? Same Story Multiple Times like “Run, Lola, Run”? This book focuses on 18 of Hitchcock’s 53 films with wild cinema and story experiments which paved the way for modern films. Almost one hundred different experiments that you may think are recent cinema or story inventions... but some date back to Hitchcock’s *silent* films! We’ll examine these experiments and how they work. Great for film makers, screenwriters, film fans, producers and directors.

Films Examined: “Rear Window”, “Psycho”, “Family Plot”, “Topaz”, “Rope”, “The Wrong Man”, “Easy Virtue”, “Lifeboat”, “Bon Voyage”, “Aventure Malgache”, “Elstree Calling”, “Dial M for Murder”, “Stage Fright”, “Champagne”, “Spellbound”, “I Confess”, and “The Trouble with Harry”, with glances at “Vertigo” and several others.

Professional screenwriter William C. Martell takes you into the world of The Master Of Suspense and shows you the daring experiments that changed cinema. Over 77,000 words.

UK Folks Click Here.

German Folks Click Here.

French Folks Click Here.

Espania Folks Click Here.

Canadian Folks Click Here.

- Bill