Oscar Nominated... and Crazy!

Before Gary Busey ended up making the kind of stuff I write, he was an Oscar nominated actor who played Buddy Holly and was in one of my favorite movies - BIG WEDNESDAY. Actually, if you made a list of Gary's movies, he's been in a ton of great stuff and steals the film in everything from LETHAL WEAPON to UNDER SIEGE.

Here's Gary on the red carpet at the Oscars...


- Bill

In Today's News....

STARBUCKS CLOSED TODAY

Starbucks coffee shops all over the United States are closed today from 5:30 to 8:30. Though the company denies rumors that the reason for the simultaneous store closings has anything to do with the secret society that owns the company, or their disciples (known as “baristas”), or the annual animal sacrifices that keep the chain growing at an alarming rate. It is believed that after this day of rituals and animal sacrifice, two hundred more Starbucks stores will be born. Nothing for us to worry about.

Picture: Starbucks leader addressing courtyard full of baristas.

- Bill

Questions...

I'm sure you all have questions...

And I'm looking for questions...

Questions about the *writing* of screenplays. (Craft oriented - not business oriented.)

I'm preparing some new articles for Script Magazine and preparing to fill in some new script tips - and I need to know what YOU want to know.

Ask them in the comments section. Or suggest articles or Script Tip subjects.

- Bill

Pencils Up!

Yes, that sounds slightly obscene, and I’m sorry about that. But my pencil *is* up... because a couple of days ago I landed an awful screenwriting deal... that pays.

My big problem was that right before the strike I really needed to sell a screenplay. This is a “no visible means of support” business, where there are no regular paychecks. I can’t ask for more hours or do a double shift or any of the other things I used to do when I needed money. I have to find someone who wants to buy a script. Before the strike I was talking to some people... and I think they may have forgotten me by now. But it seems that one, and possible even two, people have remembered me.

The one that came through was kind of interesting. I have these two specs I’ve been playing around with - one is a solid B action script, I don’t have many of those that didn’t get slapped onto celluloid, and the other is a monster movie. The reason for the monster movie - I seem to know a bunch of people who make movies for Sci Fi Channel. So a script like that is something I might actually be able to sell. And they can be fun to write. I came up with this silly idea about a frightened lab mouse that was given a growth hormone and became as huge as a car... and stopped being frightened. In fact, it became as arrogant as the scientists who injected it, and began throwing its weight around and causing large scale panic in the city. I have a sketchy outline and have written a handful of pages... when I got a call from a director I know who was looking for a script for Sci Fi Channel. Hmmm... Well, I pitch him my mouse script, and he says No... You see, he has access to a cool location... okay, it’s Hawaii... and wants to do a movie about giant killer *frogs*. So, I re-pitched my mouse story as a frog story in Hawaii and changed some stuff and, well, it’s a deal. The money sucks, but bad screenplay money is still pretty good money. And the script will be fun to write - it's kind of a TREMORS thing.

No sooner did I leave his office than my cell phone rang, *another* director looking for a project. I’ll have to do a whole blog entry on this one, because it’s looking... unusual. But this director knows a producer looking for a solid B action script... so I wrote up a paragraph on the one I’m already writing and sent it to him when I got back... and I’m hoping this mysterious producer he has will like it. That would be great, because I’m so far along on that one I’m thinking it would make more sense to finish it before I basically start from scratch on the monster movie script. I can juggle both scripts with the deadlines given. If they say yes to the solid B action script, that’s a better deal... and I may end up with 2 films released this year... or maybe both will hit early next year.

Meanwhile, still looking for an agent or manager.

Anyway, I’m back to work. Movie #20 shoots this summer. If I can turn this other script into movie #21, that would also be cool... If not, well, the year is still young.

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Character Moments.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Sweet & Sour Chicken at City Wok.

MOVIES: IN BRUGES - Okay, the trailer makes it look like a comedy, but a TV review said it was a serious movie with lots of violence...

And it's this strange combination of things that all come together.

It's like the Odd Couple as hit men - and there will be hits! Brendan Gleason is always great, but here I was completely identifying with him as he had to put up with ADD loudmouth Collin Farrell - in a twitchy, boorish, and so-dumb-he's-funny performance. Farrell is everything that is not cool in this film, and it starts out funny... and he ends up everything that is human. Just when you think it's a really funny buddy movie, something happens that turns it into a serious film about emotionally messed up characters... who happen to be these two guys. The surface is funny - but these characters have so much depth we keep peeling back layers and learning more and more about these two guys and we feel the tragedy of their lives... and yet they're still funny.

Another thing I loved about the film is the "small town" feeling of Bruges - everyone they meet they keep meeting again. Though there's an element of coincidence, it's really set up well. So a comedy character later becomes the key to resolving a serious plot element - and you might look back and think that the whole reason they were in the film was that resolution element... except the character has become such an important part of the comedy side of the story that the film would fail if you removed them. (By the way, all of these things you never really see coming... and if you do, it seems natural for them to happen.) The film is filled with connections and call-backs. A fat American tourist family is good for a few jokes... but later they impact the shoot out!

By the way - bloodiest shoot outs ever. Compares to RAMBO.

But for me, the thing that really got me was the relationships. It’s really about one man who is at peace with himself, and another who is not. This film is often silly, often violent... but has a soul. The scene where Gleason talks about his late wife is powerful stuff.

MOVIES: I've keep forgetting to write about THERE WILL BE BLOOD... It's strange - every time I post an old script tip, that night I see a movie that I could have used to update the tip. Before seeing TWBB I posted a tip on character driven stories - and if any recent film falls into this category, it's TWBB. The film has no traditional story - it's all about Daniel Day Lewis' character. He's a relentless man. Driven. Probably crazy. In the opening scene he's deep in a mine, finds some gold or silver (I forget which) and then falls while climbing out and busts his leg. Really busts it. So he's laying at the bottom of the mine shaft with his leg at an unnatural angle and some gold in his pocket... and he climbs his way out and drags himself all the way back to town to cash in his gold. Laying on the floor, leg still messed up, while they cut him a check. That's who this guy is.

The movie is his life searching for oil (and screwing people out of their oil), his relationship with his adopted son, and a strange parallel relationship with a preacher he screws out of oil money. He is not someone you like - but he is fascinating. We kind of care about him because we care about his adopted son - and hope he finds a way to not hate everybody (and himself) so that he can love his son. That gives us "access" to his character. But this guy is larger than life - so big he threatens to break through the screen.

And the arena for the story are the early days of oil - where you could make a fortune if you had the rights to the right piece of land. Amazing world for a story - and we see all of the amazing details of this world - they show us how to look for the land most likely to yeild oil... without the land owner knowing what you are doing. How to do an exploratory dig. And how to build an oil well - in fact, the way oil wells evolve from buckets to derricks. And the cinematography is just amazing.

This is a dark, evil, nasty movie about people you can not like - and may even hate. But Daniel Day Lewis just grabs you and does not let go - and we are allowed inside this guy, who hates people and wants anyone who even tries to compete with him to die. He is compelled to do things that he knows will lead to his ruin... and you see how tortured he is.

Okay, I'm *not* a fan of Paul Thomas Anderson, and this film is 2 hours and 38 minutes - add trailers and that's 3 hours of my life... but I never looked at my watch. It was fascinating. This is my favorite PTA movie - beating HARD EIGHT (you probably never heard of that one). Daniel Day Lewis deserves an Oscar... let's see if they give it to him.

DVDS: I've seen a dozen DVDs... and I'll talk about them later.

PAGES: Hey, moving right along... 5 pages on the action script. Cool scene where the Vice President forms a plan that would kill the President... in order to stop terrorists from controlling US nukes.

- Bill

Welcome To Black History Month

Or maybe this is African American Heritage Month, which I think is the same thing, just with some new PC lingo... but “African American Power!” just doesn’t sound the same. Even though they have added a day this year, it is still the shortest month of the year. Heck, it’s more than half over! And we throw in a bunch of other holidays and events, which makes that short month seem even shorter. We have Ground Hog Day and Valentines Day and Presidents Day... no Black Presidents yet, but that may change soon.

I wonder where all of the Black movies are this month? Is WELCOME HOME ROSCOE JENKINS it? You may not know this, but African Americans go to the movies in disproportionate numbers. It’s a major audience segment in the United States... so where are the movies this month? They opened GREAT DEBATERS over the Christmas holidays, to sneak it in for Oscar consideration. But why isn’t February - kind of a slow box office month - capitalizing on Black History Month by releasing several films that appeal to that large cinema audience? Every studio ought to be fighting for that audience this month... and doing a wider release of movies like GREAT DEBATERS this month... It would be a cool time to re-release the film, since it just won an NAACP Image Award. I doubt ROSCOE JENKINS will win one.

I’m kind of pissed off because I was going to use this short month to talk about some of my favorite films that just happen to star African Americans... starting with the great family film SOUNDER - except that film is not on DVD anymore. What? This is a great film with an amazing story and dialogue that I’ve quoted in articles about screenwriting (because they are universal life lessons). How does this film go out of press? This is the kind of movie everyone should watch during Black History Month.

I guess I could talk about SHAFT’S BIG SCORE or THREE THE HARD WAY, but even though I love those movies, they may not have much in the way of universal life lessons... But I bet I could find one or two if I tried. That's the cool part about mainstream movies - they are great at disguising larger messages.

Some people wonder why we don’t have White History Month... but isn’t that just about every month? And what about Hispanic History Month and Asian History Month and Indian (Native American) History Month and Indian (from India) History Month and... Well, we are a country of many different heritages, but only 12 months.

So I say - take one. You want a month? Just take it!

PBS has been showing episodes of Julian Bond’s great documentary EYES ON THE PRIZE about the Civil Rights Movement in the 60s, which coincided with the Anti-War Movement and prison reform (Atica! Atica!) plus the deaths of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King.... a turbulent time in the United States, but a great time - people were standing up for what they believed in. Fighting for what they believed in. (And this lead to the anti-establishment cinema of the 70s and all of those great films.)

These days we seem to be complacent.

Maybe we shouldn’t be?

Maybe we should stand up for what we believe in? Make it part of our screenplays?

On a message board a couple of days ago, I said that speeches and overtly political or social movies don’t seem to work - people don’t go to the cinema for sermons... they want *entertainment*, they want escape. But we can use the power of story to make our points without any overt preaching. You got something to say? Stand up and say it... with a story.

No speeches. Nothing overt. You want to be subversive.

The PIRATES movies seem to be big fun adventure films - but the first film makes the point that sometimes a good man (Will) must do the wrong thing (become a pirate) which is completely against the law in order to do the right thing (save the woman he loves). The second film and third film have anti-government, anti-capitalist messages... but the average audience member probably didn't notice any of that. It was just part of the story. Nothing hit them over the head... but maybe they will worry a little bit more about big business using government to further their global marketing plans.

One of my favorite films is the original INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS about aliens who take you over and turn you into ultra-conformists. You don't think for yourself - you follow the leader blindly. The government, the police, everyone wants you to just give in and become one of them... but our hero stands up to them (not easy). Okay, now this is a scary sci-fi movie, not some sort of political film... except it's really both. One on the outside, one on the inside.

My thing is blue collar workers - we (I used to be one) are completely under represented on film. It seems like most movies are about guys who wear suits and work in offices - sometimes we don’t even know what they do in those offices. Blue collar workers are almost invisible in American movies - and I think much of that is due to the people who write scripts usually not having much blue collar experience. You may not have noticed this, but they are closing factories right and left in the United States and moving those jobs to other countries. We now depend on other countries to manufacture things... and that bites us on the butt when the low cost manufacturing creates lead based Mattel toys and defective kid car seats and... Crap! I’m preaching!

Instead, I usually channel this stuff into a screenplay. My protagonists often work with their hands, and the stories sometimes have backgrounds in the blue collar world. I want to make sure people realize that car they drive was build by *people*. You know that chair you’re sitting in? Somebody made that. And if we don’t do something, the people who make everything are going to be *Chinese*. I want to make the people who make things *visible* in movies.

So, you want a month? Take it. Figure out what you want to say and find a way to say it in a story. I believe in sneaking your message into mainstream films, so that hundreds of millions of people around the world will hear it. They go to the cinema to see some big summer adventure flick... and come away wondering if a good man must sometimes break the law to do the right thing or if you should just go with the flow or stand up for what’s right or...

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Emotion Pictures.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Fish Tacos at Islands.

MOVIES: RAMBO - This is either the sketchiest movie ever made, or Kabuki Theater at its finest. It almost seems like there was no script, they were working off a treatment. The story is so simple, the characters are so simple, everything in this film seems like the rough draft - completely undeveloped...

But maybe that’s by intention.

Rambo is a man of few words, and really huge arms. In last year’s ROCKY return, Stallone was an old burn out who didn’t have a chance in Hell of going ten rounds with the champ. Rambo is a different kind of burn out - a man who has seen to much killing. Stallone’s arms are huge, his body in great shape... but his face is kind of puffy. Old. Beat up. And that works. When we first see Rambo, he’s living in Thailand (I think) catching exotic poisonous snakes for some tourist side show. I’m not sure this job really exists, and it seems like something from another movie, but I guess they had to come up with something for him to do.

He’s hired by a group of missionaries to go up river into Burma to do missionary stuff. Rambo tells them they should just go home - but probably used less words than I just did. The missionaries all look the same and act the same, except one is female. Non one has any character in this film. That might work for Rambo - he’s kind of an icon - but doesn’t work for these folks, because we need to care about them, so that when they get captured by evil army dudes in Burma we will want Rambo to go in and save them. Since Rambo refuses to take them up river, they send the girl missionary to talk to him... except that would require dialogue. So, they look at each other for a minute and speak maybe 5 words between them, then we cut to Rambo on his boat taking the missionaries up river. Where’s a naked Daryl Hannah and a slightly crazed John Lithgow when you need them? None of these missionaries had any personality at all.

No scenes, no moments, no real interaction between characters.

There is an interesting connection between the lead Missionary and Rambo - both are men who believe a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do... except there is no conversation about this and no actions that compare and contrast this...

So, after a bunch of time, Rambo gets them up river and then returns to his life of snake catching... end of story.

But one night the Minister from the church the missionaries came from, Ken Howard in probably a full minute of screen time, shows up at Rambo’s place and says the missionaries were kidnaped by the evil army dudes and he’d like Rambo to take a boat full of mercenaries up river so that they can rescue the missionaries.

Cut to, Rambo piloting the boat of mercenaries who are going to rescue the missionaries.

Now, these mercenaries has absolutely no personality - no *character*. We have a kid and a bald mouthy guy... and the rest. Compare them to the Space Marines in ALIENS - where over a dozen different characters are complete individuals after only a few minutes of screen time. That’s a good group to compare these Mercs to, because all of those Space Marines began as characters in RAMBO: FIRST BLOOD 2. James Cameron wrote the script for that, was rewritten by Stallone, and took his Merc characters from *that* script and dropped them into ALIENS. You’d think Stallone might have learned something from that, but I guess not. We end up with these completely interchangeable characters... which screws up any chance of caring about them when the shit hits the fan and Rambo has to save their sorry asses. The mouthy Mercenary dogs Rambo, but that’s it. If you think this is setting up that big scene where they have to set aside their differences and work together, you got the wrong movie.

The Mercenaries blow it, Rambo saves their sorry asses...

But in the most violent scenes ever put on film. People’s heads *vaporize*.

Okay, the Evil Army Dude, that’s about as much personality or character as he gets, has this “hobby”. He takes prisoners to one end of a rice paddy, throws land mines in the water, then forces them to run across the rice paddy. They step on a land mine - we get to see big chunks of their bodies fly. This is frightening, sick stuff... and you want the Evil Army Dude to die some horrible death. So, when the rescue turns into a chase about three quarters of the way into the film, we are ready for Rambo to set traps and kick some ass... and that’s what happens. Evil soldier guys get blown to bits, have body parts shot of, or have their heads explode...

And we cheer!

Isn’t it cool when that bad soldier gets blown in half?

Dude, that guy’s legs got blown off at the knees! Now he’s, like, crawling!

Man, the whole top of his head just vaporized! And he’s still running! Cool!

Okay, this brings up a really good question - why do we like violence? I know that some of you are saying that *you* don’t like violence, but the majority of the people in that cinema audience, both men and women, were cheering and laughing as people were being blown to bits very realistically on screen. You may not like violence, but the full cinema at this RAMBO showing liked it - and I suspect that was why they were there.

Is it life affirming? When I was a little kid, I liked horror movies because I *survived* them. That made me stronger. When we see somebody killed on screen and it’s not us, do we feel like survivors - and is that what makes us cheer? The more scary the monster, when I was a kid, the greater the joy of surviving... is the same true with more violent scenes in a film?

Or do we have a savage streak? Something sick and primitive that turns other people’s violent deaths into sport? There’s syndicated TV show on Sunday nights that is all about vehicle crashes - it’s 30 minutes of wrecks. Not the car race, not who won the car race, not who drove really well in the car race... but the people whose cars crashed and flipped a half dozen times and then whatever was left of it caught on fire. People watch this show. Um, I watch that show sometimes. Did people cheer the violence in Rambo because they are just deeply disturbed?

I don’t think that second one is true, because RAMBO opens with real life footage of atrocities in Burma - and nobody cheered. I felt kind of queasy, and people around me where gasping (not cheering). And when they showed the innocent villagers being blown up by the land mines hidden in the rice paddies, no one was cheering... they were getting mad at that Evil Army Guy for being such a bastard and hoping that Rambo would kick his butt good.

So it seems that *revenge* is part of the equation. That innocent people - even though we know they are actors and these are special effects - getting killed makes us angry. But bad guys getting killed makes us cheer and laugh.

Okay, so many many bad army guys get killed in really violent ways, and finally we come down to the lead Bad Army Guy - he’s the commander. He ordered all of the rice paddy races where innocent people were blown to bits (that we get to see). He’s the ultimate bad guy in this film, even though he has no dialogue. So, how do you think he gets it? What do you think Rambo does to him?

If you guessed Rambo throws some land mines in a rice paddy and forces him to run through the rice paddy... you’d be wrong. That’s what we want Rambo to do to him. That is “justice” in the world of action movies.

But Rambo just stabs him with a knife and kills him - over in a couple of seconds.

Then Rambo goes back to his life of capturing snakes...

Not really, he goes home to see his father. Now, given Stallone’s age, if his father is still alive he probably won’t even remember he has a son. But Stallone’s dad seems to live on a horse ranch somewhere that looks like it exists only on a Hallmark card.

What movies will Stallone sequel next?

PAGES: Actually did 7 pages on the action spec, and it looks like I may have landed a job writing another script. I'll bring you up to speed on this stuff in a couple of days.

- Bill

Valentines Gifts For Him!

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Character in conflict - GONE BABY GONE..
Yesterday’s Dinner: Chicken Burrito at Cheesecake Factory.

MOVIES: I've seen both RAMBO and IN BRUGES, and will report on them in the next couple of days.

DVDS: I watched EXTERMINATOR CITY - a train wreck of a film that combines puppet robots and GIRLS GONE WILD. You know how some films require that you consume a 12 pack in order to enjoy them (I've written many of these)? This film requires you to drop acid *and* do mushrooms to fully understand the story. The robot puppets are kind of MST-3000 style - and the only thing that moves is their mouths. The bodies don't move, the camera doesn't move. I got the feeling the whole film was made by one guy with a tri-pod. He would set up the camera, then operate the robot puppet. There are no "two shots" of robots - that would require an extra person. So we get close up of Cop Robot intercut with close up of Psychiatrist Robot. Never both in the same shot. Never any two characters in the same shot. No long shots or wide shots at all.

The "story" has a robot serial killer attacking big breasted women just as they begin playing with their upper torso bundles of pleasure for no reason. But the robot serial killer is never in the same shot as the babes - and they aren't even on the same tape stock - the robots are crisp, the babes are fuzzy grainy - maybe shot on the director's mom's camcorder. There is *never* a shot of the robots *and* the babes. Even the killing scenes have no interaction.

The robot serial killer was an exterminator - and kills all kinds of big plastic toy bugs. Oh, and mounted animal heads on his walls often talk to him. He's crazy... It doesn't make much sense, but it's just so weird you keep watching to see if it ever makes sense. No - it gets *weirder*. The Robot Cop begins to develop the traits of the Robot Serial Killer! And those plastic toy bugs show up all over the place. It's like NAKED LUNCH made by a really horny 13 year old boy obsessed by robots!

Because there are never any shots where the robots *move* or enter a room, there are these crazy shots used to connect scenes - a really bad miniature building with a toy space ship on a wire zipping past really fast. I think he made it really fast so that we wouldn't be able to tell it was some toystore model, but it ends up so fast that we aren't sure *what* it is. This is Ed Wood film making at its finest. "Perfect!"

The only humans in this film are the topless babes... puppet robots play every other role.

I found out about this movie on a message board where people were discussing the weirdest movie they have ever seen. This was the "winner". I'll tell you, it's hard to imagine any film that is weirder now that I've seen it... but, you should *not* see it. EXTERMINATOR CITY is like a giant zit on someone's face - not pretty to look at, but can you really *not* look at it?

PAGES: Zip - For the past week I've had trouble sleeping. No idea why. I took some Exced PM, and fell alseep at like 5am. Woke up feeling like crap. I'm thinking of taking a long walk to exhaust mystelf, since I've had zip exercise for a while (and I suspect that's why I'm not sleeping well). I've always been kind of a night owl, but this is just getting silly. It's one thing to fall asleep at 2am, another to fall asleep at 5am. Oh, I *did* write articles for Script and Movie Scope magazines over the weekend. I guess it's true - I can write that stuff in my sleep.

PS: Votes in, strike's over. I wonder if anyone even remembers any of the projects we were talking about before the strike? I'll bet not. So - time to get off my butt and get some scripts out there...

- Bill

Here's The Tentative Deal

For anyone interested, here's the tentative WGA deal...

http://www.wga.org/contract_07/wga_tent_summary.pdf

- Bill

VOTE! (super tuesday)

If you are in a Super Tuesday state - go out and vote. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, just vote. This is our country, we need to run it.

If you are not from the United States and don't know about our unusual customs and strange holidays - Super Tuesday is the one day in America where everyone develops super powers and must also develop great responsibility. This is why we make so many super hero movies - once every four years we wake up as super heroes - and we fly around and bullets bounce off our chest and some of us have laser vision and must wear dark glasses... and then we vote for which super hero should run our country.

I will be casting my vote for ULTRAMAN at the orange table at Bev Garland's Holiday Inn tomorrow.

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Do It Yourself Film Making..
Yesterday’s Dinner: White Pizza at Cal Pizza Kitchen on Sunset.

MOVIES: TEETH at the Sunset 5 with my friend Rod. Okay, the strange thing about being in this business - the night before I'm channel surfing and pass the credit roll of some movie... and there's Rod's name! He does digital compositing and post work. Weird that I click on the credits just as his name comes by. Anyway, I show up at Sunset 5 a little early and wander around - the cinema is in an ultra-hip strip mall that you've seen in a dozen films ("Did we park on the Prince level?") and is anchored by Virgin Megastore... except Virgin closed. Now it's a ghost town. They are doing some renovations, so it kind of looks like a war zone. Strange how someplace that was once *the* place is now barren.

If you don't know what TEETH is about, it's the story of a virginal high school girl (a great Jess Weixler), the leader of her abstinence group, who has a second set of teeth... in her ho-ha. Any guy who touches her down there loses his fingers. And a few lose their tally-wackers.

The film is okay, but uneven. Works as a comedy and social satire, doesn't work very well as a thriller or horror film. Lots of laughs with the abstinence group and the health text books with stickers over the dirty parts and the discussion of evolution... unless you believe in creationism. It scores as social satire. Oh, and the nuclear plant is in almost every shot - and never wears out its "laugh welcome" - you just keep giggling at it.

But the movie is not scary, has no suspense, no sense of dread... in places where that's what they were going for. And the family rings false, which is a big problem. You have no idea how these people could all live under the same roof. The script seems like it needed a rewite just to clean it up. The characters (like the stepbrother and parents) were two dimensional - they seem sketchy. On the other hand, the horny high school boys all seem very real. The story also seems sketchy - as if they had a feneral idea of what was going to happen, but hadn't really thought it through - like the scene where the boyfriend's car is still by the lake... but didn't seem to be there earlier. Kind of confusing.

And you never see the monster. Problem is - you find yourself curious about the monster. You see what it does - lots of guys holding bleeding stumps - and you see a tooth they pull out of a victim - but you want to see how it's configured.

Imagine CLOVERFIELD if they *never* showed the monster - after a while you'd wonder if they had one. You'd begin to think they were ripping you off by not showing it. I realize, here, we have a little problem with showing the monster.

The movie *does* have the most beautiful location I've ever seen on film - this lake with a waterfall and a cave where the high school kids make out - it's somewhere near Austin, TX, where the film was shot.

SPOILERS:

I also did not like the ending - which kind of turns her into a killer slut. Maybe that's a "girl power" end, but it seemed like the power of the dark side.

DVD: Last night I put in the disk to AMERICAN FRIEND, and it was scratched up so bad I couldn't watch it, so I irdered another from Amazon...

But this is my favorite Wenders film. I'm strange, because I like all of the pre-HAMMETT movies and think the ones afterwards are hit & miss. I am oddly not a fan of PARIS, TEXAS.

But AMERICAN FRIEND takes Wenders' slow pace and uses it to build the suspense. And, unlike the novel, there is a real friendship between Tom Ripley and his victim in the film. A warm friendship. I stuck with the skips and scratches and articating until the end of the first murder - a never ending scene in the subway where Bruno Ganz can't bring himself to kill the man; and the longer he waits, the more difficult it becomes logistically. It's a great Hitchcock style scene... a later scene (I'll have to wait for the new DVD) with the next murder on the train is not only a nail-biter, it's *funny* - there are ironic and amusing elements in the scene that break the tension... well, for a moment. I think this is the film where I *discovered* Wenders, and then went back and saw all of his previous movies. I think part of my reason for liking the old ones more is that you can see his progress as a film maker. What seemed to happen post-HAMMETT is that he became Hitchcock after the critics recognized him - and some of the films are indulgent and a little sloppy. Still, Wenders is one of those guys who make interesting films. Like Hitchcock, the worst Wenders film still has something.

DVD: YOUNG AND INNOCENT - is a forgotten Hitchcock film that deserves to be remembered. It's a chase film, about a struggling young screenwriter who is accused of murdering a famous actress - and when he's assigned a public defender, the guy is a moron... so our hero escapes (clever scene) kidnaps a woman in a car outside the courthouse... and as bad luck has it - she's the daughter of the police chief! Now he must find the edivence that proves he's innocent and/or the real killer, plus keep her from going to the authorities. So he must convince her he is innocent first.

There are some great set pieces, and what I always thought was cool was the use of miniatures - there are all kinds of really complex models in this film. A "helicopter shot" zooms over the city, past cars on the street, past a train blasting down the tracks, to a rail road yard where a man and woman and dog are in a car... and it was all models! Cut to the real man and woman and dog in the car, with the same background. There is also a great mine cave in scene that swallows that car - and almost our heroes.

One of the cool things about older Hitchcock movies are the *gags* - in 39 STEPS there have to be 2 dozen things that deal with the handcuffs - it's as if a writer made up a list of every possible handcuff thing, and put them in the script. Here we get all kinds of gags - from the public defender's thick glasses (good for a handful) to the dog (in one scene it doesn't get in the car during a chase and they must slow down to get the running dog... as the police catch up!) to a tense game of blind man's bluff at a kid's birthday party where our heroes are trying to escape to a homeless guy who has seen the killer and the issues of getting him into an elegant night club to pick the killer out of the crowd.

Oh, and that scene has one of those amazing tracking shots - we start outside, overhead - enter the night club - hundreds of people, which one is teh killer? And as the camera slowly moves over the room with too many suspects for them to weed through before the police arrive, the camera slowly moves down to eye level and creeps up to the killer's *eyes* - they fill the screen. Cool shot, that makes us wonder how they will ever get through all of those false suspects to find the real killer - kind of a needle in a haystack. This is a breezy chase film, kind of like 39 STEPS. Probably less known because the cast isn't as attractive nor as famous. But fun to see again.

- Bill

Where Did January Go?

Happy Ground Hog Day!

The first month of the year is *over* - and what do I have to show for it? Not as much as I’d planned. Originally I was going to do a big page one rewrite on an old script in January.... but I ended up not being prepared for that. So, I decided to write a spec instead. Not some spec that I have outlined and waiting on the old launching pad, a spec that I knew nothing about. Just start writing and get the sucker done by Feb 1....

Needless to say, that didn’t happen.

But it didn’t happen for some really weird reasons.

Now, I have some great high concept specs that might be potential sales when the strike ends (which is sounding like it may be soon - even though WGA is saying it ain't over till it's over). I didn’t pick one of those to write.

Instead, I had this script idea for a typical action flick. A bunch of my better known films were military action things I wrote for HBO or Showtime a decade ago using planes or submarines or aircraft carriers. So, for some strange reason, people always ask me if I have any specs like that... and the answer is “no”. I have a plane hijack script that nobody seems to want post 9-11, and I have some other kinds of action scripts, but nothing with planes or submarines.

Part of my strike stalled (and maybe killed) studio sequel project was to come up with sequels for a movie that featured an airplane - and I came up with a couple. One was pretty much the kind of thing I was writing a decade ago. Since, for all I know this whole thing is completely dead, I thought I might pull that one off the list and spec it. That way, when someone asks if I have any scripts like that, I can whip this one out. I also need to write an action script that could star a rap star, because people often ask me for those, too.

Well, I did a quick outline on this plane script, started writing it...

And then had a cool idea for a monster movie - it’s that danged CLOVERFIELD buzz. The thing I wondered is - what would happen if a little bitty scared animal suddenly became huge and had a major change in confidence. Now they could stomp just about anyone or any thing. Suddenly the shy, scared creature would really turn into a monster. As you can see, there’s an interesting little story there. The problem is, this is a dopey monster movie that I will probably not be able to sell... unless I make it myself or do some other co-production thing that ends up costing me money.

So, I should be writing the high concept studio spec...

But instead I’m writing the medium budget action spec...

Which I’m not spending all of my time on, because I’m tinkering with this silly monster movie.

None of these things were finished in January, which ended up being a completely screwed month where I got a worse cold than I had in December, there was so much danged rain that I stayed in doors - and that meant *no* exercise and that kind of lead to sleep problems. So I have *some* pages, but no new finished spec.

Now, here’s the pisser - I frequently advise people to focus on *one* script and get the thing finished. And, here I am not taking my own advice... and ending up with a whole month gone and not really all that much to show for it.

But, as Scarlet O’Hara said...

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Drama Of Inaction..
Yesterday’s Dinner: Burrito at Chipolte in Burbank.

MOVIES: The worst part of all of this non-productivity? I haven’t seen many movies. I mean, there are a zillion great films out there (that time of year) and I haven’t seen most of them. I *did* see CLOVERFIELD, which *is* BLAIR GODZILLA. The thing is, unlike Blair Witch, we knew going in that this was a movie, not some can of film found somewhere. So the opening telling us that the video was found in what they used to call Central Park is a nice touch, but we know it’s a movie. One of the things I liked about the film is that the camera has an attitude - well, the cameraman Hud does. He has a crush on a girl at the party, and the camera constantly strays to her... and strays to any other woman around. He’s a horn dog, and also nervous, and also kind of a dope. He keeps asking the wrong questions and snooping places he doesn’t belong. It’s great that we feel so much for a character that we almost never see.

After the danged monster crashes the party, we get a lot of really shaky hand held camera... and it’s okay at first, but by the time we get to the subway station I never wanted to see another shaky shot again. And that would have been a good place to smooth out the camera work, because we were hiding - the camera was stationary. And, from that point on they might have toned down the shaky came - put the thing on a steady cam rig so that we still had the feeling of hand held camera without all of the danged shaking. But that’s not what they did. Instead, even when they were hiding, the camera is shaking and jerking around like crazy.

There were some uncomfortable 9-11 moments in the film - a couple that seemed as if they were lifted from the news (one scene, where a giant cloud of dust chases them down the street and they hide in a store as the world outside goes gray, was too close for comfort). Plus, scenes of soldiers torn apart by war seems like it came from Iraq footage. I know they were doing this on purpose - this is a way to deal with the terrors of 9-11 and Iraq in a "safe" way - but it pulled me out of the story.

Another issue for me - the story was light. Though I like the idea of going back for the woman you realize you love, but they didn’t make enough of it. Though that ended up being the best emotional payoff in the film, it was still kind of a blip. The monster attack ends up being sketchy, which makes it kind of unsatisfying. That puts *more* pressure on the emotional elements, and they just weren’t satisfying enough to make up for the sketchy monster story. Add all of that shaky camera, and the film just kind of died for me after that subway scene. Yes, there is some really good stuff after that... but I was less interested. And there is a point in this film where you think it is over... but it just drags on for another ten minutes. “Drags” is a funny word to use for a film this short.

Pages: Doing an article for MovieScope, then an article for Script.

- Bill

And the nominees are...

Best Original screenplay
Juno - Diablo Cody
Lars and the Real Girl - Nancy Oliver
Michael Clayton - Tony Gilroy
Ratatouille - Brad Bird
The Savages - Tamara Jenkins

Best Adapted screenplay
Atonement - Christopher Hampton
Away From Her - Sarah Polley
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly - Ronald Harwood
No Country For Old Men - Joel & Ethan Coen
There Will Be Blood - Paul Thomas Anderson

So - what do you think of these nominees? Which movies have you seen? What scripts do you think deserve the nomination more? Anyone catch Diablo Cody on Letterman?

- Bill

PS: The post about my Levis wasn't supposed to go up until the end of the week - so I put it back in the vault. Let's look at the Oscar Nominees first.

I'm back....

Good to be back...

Good to leave...

Just good to be going somewhere.

The excitement that comes with a possible adventure in the future. *Change* is exciting. Unless you’re looking for change between the cushions of your car at the Jack In The Box drive through... that’s not exciting.

So, I return to Los Angeles, we have a monster rain storm (in LA, a couple of inches of rain means they have to close some roads), then I got hit with a killer cold... and now my nose has stopped running, but my To Do List has grown so *I* have to start running.

- Bill

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!

First off, I want to thank all of you who read this blog, and all of you who show up to read my Script Tip every day. Writing is meant to be read - so I’m nothing without you. One of the strange things about spending so much time avoiding work on the web is that I know all kinds of people that I have never actually met. Friends who are also strangers. Even though I am often cranky and hate all of the movies you love and love all of the movies you hate, I love you all and really hope that you succeed at whatever you set out to do in this new year. I want to hear about some script sales from you guys!

NEW YEARS RESOLUTIONS?

Whether you keep your New Year’s Resolutions or not, it’s a great way to set goals and focus on what you need to get done in life. My resolutions for this year center around actually cranking out some new scripts. I spent so much of last year at festivals and conferences that I didn’t get to everything on my big To Do List. I’d planned on writing a half dozen new scripts, ended up with a couple new scripts and a rewrote a few older scripts. I planned on producing some of my own scripts last year, and revising my Action Book, and I’m still working on that. Hey, I also planned on writing two new screenwriting books... and those have flopped over to this year’s To Do List.

So, was last year a failure? Nope! I cranked out a couple of new scripts and did some rewriting... Without my big To Do List, *nothing* would have been to-done. I think the best thing you can do for the new year is to have a plan, even if things change. Especially if things change. Having a plan with clear goals allows you to get back on track after things change. Having a plan gives you goals to work toward. You may not cross off everything by the end of the year, but you’ll be able to cross off something. Without a plan you’re just spinning your creative wheels. So make up a big To Do List for 2008. You may not finish everything, but try to. Make sure your list is *possible* - this isn’t a fantasy list. Here is my list for 2008...

I have an interrupted kinda cool potential deal that could change everything, but here's what's on the list (that never quite gets done):

1) Finish the action book rewrite.
2) Get an agent or manager to take 10% of my money.
3) A spec called MANHUNT - kind of The Fugitive in Europe.
4) Finish rewriting STEEL CHAMELEONS.
5) Take a bunch of mostly unseen articles from the early 90s and compile them into a book on writing your own digital movie.
6) This spec called BETRAYAL about college kids on vacation... and then bad things happen.
7) My iPod movie - write the script, make the movie. This is a cool project I plan to do with my two oldest friends - the idea is to make a dopey little movie like we used to do when we were 20 years old... with the excitement of a 20 year old... but with the knowledge we have now. Then get a distributor for the film and make enough money to make another film.
8) A spec called DREAMWALKERS.
9) Rewrite an old spec called RAILROADED because it's about an LA to SF bullet train... and that's in the news.
10) Rewrite some other specs: DEAD RUN and HARD RETURN and whatever else I have time for.
11) Articles for a few magazines I have regular columns in plus new script tips plus the last 3 Blue Books plus way too many posts here and other places...

I’ll probably provide some play-by-play along the way on all of these projects... and I’m sure that a few will get carried over to the 2009 list. I’m really hoping the aforementioned kinda cool deal comes through - if it does I’ll tell you all about it. I just hope the other folks involved remember my name after the strike is over!

On the personal Resolutions list is *actually* get back on the bicycle and lose some weight. Get out more, be less of a loner writer, hang out with people who don't drive me crazy. I tend to be non-social, and I need to do something about that. I am also going to try to be nicer and more positive - sometimes I can be a dick and sometimes I can be too much of a realist while trying to help people - it’s the difference between bursting their bubble and guiding it in the right direction. Often online I take the bait and get into some weird battle with a troll that makes me grumpy to everyone else. Sorry - and I’m going to try not to do that. And I need a girlfriend... or a blow up doll with fewer patches. These personal things are not on my big To Do List, but I hope to get on the bike to lose the spare tire anyway.

Sometimes I find that listing the *steps* to completing a project is helpful - that way I feel like I’m completing more. I can cross off “Outline new spec” and “Treatment for new spec” and “Act one of new spec” and get some momentum going. Nothing makes me feel better than crossing something off my big To Do List! I’m getting closer to finishing that new spec!

This year I have a whole bunch of great things on by big To Do List for 2008. Some of those thing probably won’t get done this year, but many of them will!

I hope you achieve everything you set out to do in the new year!

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Some other thing.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Had all you can eat Chinese food at China Wall in Concord with Wendy and her son Kyle... the coconut shrimp is great!
Movies: Hey, SOFT TARGET is on Encore Action tonight... please avoid it at all costs! It's nothing like my script! But it was one of the two films from my screenplays that were released in 2007... I hope to equal that in 2008.

Happy Holidays & Happy New Year

A belated Happy Holidays and a slightly-ahead-of-time Happy New Year to one and all!

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Something?
Yesterday’s Dinner: Christmas Dinner at my Sister's house - Ham, and the two best things on the table were some home made rolls and some snow peas and carrots.

Going Postal (part four)

((When last we left our hero, he was standing in a slow moving line at the post office remembering past lines in the post office when he was just starting out writing short stories... much as Marcel Proust ate a cookie and remembered things past.)

GONE POSTAL

These days I probably send more scripts through e-mail than regular mail. When I stand in line at the post office, it’s to mail CDs or Blue Books to people who have ordered them. And when I stand in line for a freakin’ hour, I think I should get an intern to do it for me... and someone should fix the post office.

There are three things wrong with the post office:

1) The people behind the counters. When I worked in retail, we had this little rule - the longer your line, the faster you had to work. The idea was to increase speed and get rid of the line, then you could take it easy while it was just a trickle of customers. Somewhere this rule has been lost. Not just at the post office - *everywhere*. People behind the counter take their time. When I worked retail, we could not eat or drink behind the counter, and we could pee every 2 hours. If you needed to pee before then, you held it. You could not get personal phone calls at work - period. You could not talk to other employees - unless it was work related. You were not supposed to chit-chat. It was supposed to be “hands and money”. You charged the customers and took their cash. Now? It’s not like that. And people at the post office often seem to be the worst offenders. They work slow, they close for breaks or walk away when the place gets crowded. My favorite postal employee trick is taking a single envelope to somewhere in the back room and not coming back for about 5 minutes. No one *runs* anymore at work. Like I said, this isn't just the post office, it's everywhere. The irony is that people work slow as molasses at their day job, then zip to the post office on their lunch hour... and get caught in a line where postal employees work slow as molasses. If we all worked faster and left the cell phones and personal conversations at home, everything would be easier for everybody in the world.

2) The system. Probably the main thing that slows down employees is that freakin’ computer system they have at the post office. If I want to send an envelope Priority with nothing extra, the *computer* won’t let them just give me the postage. It makes them ask if I would rather go Express. Would I be needing Insurance? Will I need a return receipt? There is a whole menu of questions that the postal employee has to go through before the machine will spit out the postage... and no way to bypass these things. I'm sure it's frustrating for postal employees to have to work through the whole menu on every single transaction. That’s just stupid. It’s *anti-customer service*. The person who came up with this should have to do hard time in a Federal Prison for interfering with the mail service. I’m serious. I'm all for serious punishment for the guys in charge who make dumb decisions. Think of all the millions of wasted hours one idiot in charge has caused? That's worth hard time in a Federal Prison.

A while back I tried the new Automated Postal Machine - which is useless, because if your envelope is over 13 ounces it has to be physically handed to a postal employee - and the danged machine goes through the whole menu, too. You have to answer a dozen questions about upgraded services you don’t want before you get to the page where you can actually print your postage. Let’s add another 10 years in Federal lock up for using the same bad system on the machines.

When you go into MacDonalds, they have a machine designed for idiots. It has a picture of a cheeseburger. If the customer wants a cheeseburger, the employee pushes the button. If they want fries, they push that button. But they system doesn’t make the employee go through every damned thing on the menu before you can tally the order. You just hit the total button. Where is the damned total button on the Post Office system?

3) The customers. The reason why I was in line for a freakin’ hour the other day was mostly due to people who were not prepared. There was a guy in line in front of me who had an armful of things to mail... not in a box. No address label. When he reached the front of the line, he asked what he needed to mail these things. The postal clerk sent him to the packaging stuff, told him he didn’t have to wait in line again. He didn’t have a pen to write up an address label. He didn’t have tape to seal the package... and used Priority tape... then told the postal employee that he didn’t want to send the package Priority. That means he’d have to remove the stuff from this package, repackage it without the Priority tape (but he didn’t have tape and didn’t want to buy it) and start from scratch... except he wouldn’t have to stand in line again. I stood there for an hour waiting, while he went to the front of the line a half dozen times. There are *at least* one of these guys in line every time I go to the post office - often a few of them.

Okay, I think it is *good customer service* to tell this guy to get the heck out of the post office and don’t come back until you are completely prepared to mail your stuff. It needs to be *completely* ready to mail by the time you make it to the front of the line. Some of you may be wondering how it could be good customer service to tell they guy to get lost and don’t come back until he’s prepared, but the rest of you have been in that line with me and know that the cornerstone in good customer service is to provide service to *good* customers and tell the others you will serve them when they become *good*. You aren’t going to penalize the people who are prepared. Actually, I think that guy needs to join the post office guy who created that stupid program in Leavenworth for interfering with the delivery of the mail. He was interfering with many of the people in line getting their mail to the slow moving postal employees who are stuck using that anti-customer service computer program to give them postage.

And what would all of these Federal Prisoners be reading in their cells? Probably Gent Magazine... without any of my short stories.

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
HAPPY HOLIDAYS!
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Giving away the concept in the trailer .
Yesterday’s Dinner: Chicken at Boston Market - actually less expensive than the burger I had at Nations last week.

Movies: INTO THE WILD - Okay, I saw INTO THE WILD, but instead of doing a little review here, I’m going to do a full blog entry on it. I think the film relates to screenwriting in a few ways.

Cable TV: SANTA FE TRAIL / CAPTAIN BLOOD - My dad lives in a Lazy Boy recliner in the living room. He spends the day there watching TV, and spends the night there sleeping with the TV on. One night TCM is showing a bunch of Errol Flynn & Olivia DeHaviland movies... with CAPTAIN BLOOD playing at maybe 2 or 3 am. Before that is a western, SANTA FE TRAIL, that I can’t remember ever seeing - and I was sure I’d seen all of their movies. I kind of like the Errol Flynn westerns, because he’s got that killer British accent and looks like he should be dueling... but he’s in some colorful cowboy outfit in the wild west - completely out of place! But Warners had him under contract, so he did whatever genre they were making. There was often a kid of Jean-Claude Van Damme accent explanation scene. But this film was new to me - and for some reason Warner Bros had allowed it to fall into public domain. Strange. So I sit in the living room with my dad, who keeps nodding off and then snoring himself awake throughout the films... and this, my friends, is what family is all about.

The day after Thanksgiving my dad decides to take me and my brother to the Car Show in San Francisco. We BART in, wander around the cars - 99% 2008 showroom models and 1% classic cars - no concept cars at all. My dad tries to fit in a couple - he’s 6'8" tall. I mention the time I was somewhere and rented a Jeep that I could not fit in even with the seat all the way back - a miserable couple of days where I avoided driving anywhere. We had a pitcher of beer for lunch, continued through the auto show... finally discovering the classic cars in a small room at the end of the show. Some cool tricked out cars and some 60s muscle cars. Then, we took the BART train back and had dinner. That’s the typical bonding with dad thing for me - just kind of being in the same room doing the same thing. You piece together memories from things like that. So I was going to watch a couple of movies on TV with my dad in his Lazy Boy.

Cable TV: - SANTA FE TRAIL’s fall into public domain was not so strange as the film went on. The story starts with Flynn playing Confederate hero J.E.B. Stewart, and Ronald Reagan (?) playing George Armstrong Custer, and a pretty good cast of Warners guys playing other members of a graduating class at West Point - all of whom would become famous Civil War guys... but the film takes place *before* the Civil War when all of these guys are friends. It starts as kind of the military version of a college comedy with all of these guys joking around, once they graduate into the army, it’s kind of a buddy comedy with Flynn and Reagan... and DeHaviland as the gal they both love. But this buddy comedy gets oddly side-tracked when the plot is introduced...

The story is about John Brown, played amazingly by Raymond Massey, who is a strange figure in American history. He was anti-slavery... to the extreme. A religious zealot who believed slavery was un-Christian. Before the Civil War, he waged his own war - coming to the western territory of Kansas after receiving mail from one of his numerous sons that Kansas may become a slave state. Brown and his army raided farms and freed slaves... and killed the slave owners. In cold blood. Often rounding them up and executing them. Then arming the freed slaves and making them part of his army. So we have a guy doing terrible things for a good cause.

And joking Flynn and Reagan are the Army guys sent to stop him.

Which makes our heroes kind of fighting *for* slavery.

And Stewart would later become a Confederate hero... along with some of the other joking supporting characters in the film. Flynn even has a little speech about how the South doesn’t appreciate the North butting into their business, and give them enough time and they will eventually taper off on the use of slaves. I wondered how much of this stuff was to placate the southern film audience and how much was trying to show how complicated the issue was at the time. Either way, the result is a movie that is not black and white (even though that’s the film stock used). Our heroes are guys trying to stop a guy from freeing slaves. I’m sure that’s why Warners accidentally let the copyright lapse on this one.... but the more I think about the film, the more I think about it... and how many breezy buddy comedy westerns provoke this much thought? The Stewart speech is all about the right way to do things and the wrong way - and using the violence of war to create social change. And the guy they are hunting, John Brown, is doing just that - he is a mini Civil War. It’s easy to disagree with his methods but agree with his goal. Nothing is simple in this film... There is no “right” side.

There are lots of good battle scenes, and some goofy stuff with Alan Hale as comic relief, and the romantic triangle, and some great suspense stuff with Flynn behind enemy lines and some drama with Brown’s wounded son captured, and all of the scenes you’d expect in a lightweight buddy comedy western... except the Brown story and Massey’s great performance (he makes you believe in his cause, and that killing slave owners in cold blood might be necessary) are way out of place. Too serious for the Reagan-Flynn banter scenes.

The film leads up to the siege at Harper’s Ferry Armory, which is the big action end. It stays pretty close to the facts (except the real Armory isn’t some boxy Hollywood sound stage set and on film the siege lasts a couple of hours instead of, I think, four days) - to the point of having Flynn’s character *not* be the guy in charge of the forces. The battle could be part of the buddy comedy film... but after that we go back to the serious Raymond Massey film about John Brown - as he’s captured and sentenced to hang and gives a passionate speech before the quick drop and short stop.

You could say this film has the most confused politics of any film ever made - but maybe that was the point? Maybe the idea was to show just how complicated the events leading to the Civil War really were. The result is a film that seems like oil and water when you watch it... but you end up wrestling with the issues long after you’ve watched it.

Cable TV: CAPTAIN BLOOD - one of my all time favorite movies. Based on a novel by Rapheal Sabatini that I read in grade school, thanks to my 6th grade teacher Bob Olsen who had these massive bookshelves in his classroom filled with all kinds of adventure and romance and other genres of fiction - not kids books, *adult* books. Of course, nothing you couldn’t let a 6th grader read - but Bob’s theory was that kids would read grown up books just to show that they are grown up - and books that were more realistic would be interesting to kids who lived in the real world. Nothing that talked down. We had to write a huge stack of book reports every year, and extra credit and prizes to hose who read the most books. I think Bob Olsen save my life, gave me a direction, and made me what I am today. And all of the Sabatini novels on his shelves I gobbled up... and bought copies of my own so that I could re-read them over summer vacation.

BLOOD is a pirate adventure book about Dr. Peter Blood, who takes no sides in war - his job is to help the injured. When he treats a rebel fighting against the government of England, he’s arrested and put on trial. Blood tells the judge he’s a doctor, not as rebel. Neutral. The judge sentences him to *death* for saving the life of a rebel. Instead of death, they ship all of the convicts to the British colonies in the Caribbean as slaves to work on plantations. Blood and his slave pals all get whipped and mistreated... and Blood has now taken a side - with the rebels. Oh, he’s bought by plantation owner’s niece Olivia DeHaviland - she buys him just to piss off her uncle. Blood insults him.

After being whipped for being insolent, Blood plans an escape for the slaves by boat. Many of the slaves have been in the navy, and know how to sail. One guy is the key to everything - he was a navigator. Without him, they’re dead in the water. The day before the escape plan, the plantation owner sees Blood whispering to the navigator and while Blood is off working, whips the navigator kid to try and get him to talk. This is a great scene, because if the kid talks - the escape is foiled. If he doesn’t talk - they may whip him to death, and the escape is foiled. Either way, they’re screwed. The kid doesn’t talk, and is close to death - which ruins the escape plan. Except Spanish ships attack and d loot the town... which creates a perfect diversion for their escape. They manage to carry the navigator guy to the docks where their boat is waiting... but it was shelled by the Spanish ship! It’s sunk! Blood hatches a plan to *steal the Spanish ship* while the Spaniards are on shore looting... and the slaves become pirates.

One thing I have to mention are the supporting characters in this film - they are so well written and well played that they become real (even if the dialogue gets a little clunky now and then). There’s a slave-pirate who always quotes the Bible... but finds ironic passages to quote, so he comes off funny instead of as a zealot. There is a tough guy, always itching for a fight. The guy who always has his flask - even in sword fights. All of the bit-part slave-pirates have *personalities* and their own little goals. The colony’s Governor is a great character - this fey, flamboyant guy in a powdered wig always complaining about his gout. The Governor’s doctors both have distinctive personalities. The guy in debtor’s prison who sells Blood the boat... and gets swept up in the escape, becoming one of Blood’s pirates by mistake. Every single minor character is an individual in this film.

And all of the great character actors under contract at Warner Bros play these roles as if they’re competing for an Oscar. If a character is only in one scene, they do everything in their power to be the most memorable character in that scene. You end up with all of these amazing actors playing amazingly well defined characters. I’ve always wanted to take over programming at TCM for a week and do a festival of great character actors in bit parts. You would see several movies with completely different stars in different genres and wonder why these films are on the same program... then you’d notice some guy like Ned Sparks is in every movie. Who is Ned Sparks you are probably asking? Well, he’s this guy who played bit parts in a lot of movies who had a very distinctive voice - and you’d recognize his voice from a couple of cartoon characters who swiped it. I think most people know the cartoons more than the real guy whose voice the imitated. But BLOOD has all of these great bit part players (but no Ned Sparks) playing the pirates - the guy in the background of some shot not only has a character, the actor playing that character is trying to make sure you remember him!

Blood has a pirate constitution which is basically communist - all money is divided evenly - no one gets a larger share. All work is divided evenly - no one gets to goof off. And if one of them is injured on the job, they get a pension (of course, it’s a pirate movie, so this is all about how many pieces of eight you get if your arm gets chopped off in battle... and it goes through every savage injury you can imagine and some you can’t). Oh, and no raping women. There are enough women of easy virtue at Tortuga, no reason to rape any. And the big one - people are not for sale.

So we get all kinds of great pirate adventures, and on Tortuga Blood decides to partner with a French pirate played by Basil Rathbone using that fake French accent from MONTY PYTHON AND THE HOLY GRAIL. More pirate adventures... and Rathbone captures a ship carrying... Olivia DeHaviland! Rathbone’s plan is to rape her and then ransom her to her plantation owner Uncle who is now the governor of the British colony. When Blood shows, he has to stop that. First with reason, and when that doesn’t work, with some damned cool sword fighting. There’s nothing like a Rathbone/Flynn sword duel - those guys actually knew how to use swords. I think Rathbone was actually a fencing champ or something in real life. So the fight scene is just amazing stuff.

Once Blood wins, he jokes with DeHaviland that she is now *his* slave. He owns her as she once owned him. She hates him... but we know they are going to hook up.

Blood decides to take DeHaviland back to the British Colony, even though he knows her uncle has every British ship in the area trying to capture and kill for him. This leads to a mutiny - and Blood has to talk his pirates into doing him this one favor... that could result in their death. This is a great scene, where one-by-one they join him.

When they get back to the British Colony, they find it under attack by French battleships - and no British ships to defend it. Blood and his pirates have to decide what side they are on, and that leads them to attack the two French ships. A great sea battle - obviously models in some shots, but when they get close enough to throw the grapnels and pull out the swords, it’s like nothing you’ve ever seen before. A non-stop sword fight with lots of twists and turns and reversals.

They began as rebels, became slaves, became pirates, and end as heroes.

How many current movies take their lead characters through so much?

CAPTAIN BLOOD is not only a big exciting adventure film, it makes a point about freedom and equality and how a government needs to answer to the people, not *use* the people.

So that was a night with dad watching movies on TV...

Pages: Still blowing my nose - lots of pages of Kleenex.

- Bill

Going Postal (part three)

(When last we left our hero, he was standing in a slow moving line at the post office remembering past lines in the post office when he was just starting out writing short stories... much as Marcel Proust ate a cookie and remembered things past.)

THE WACKING SECTION

So, the magazines where Stephen King was first published had evolved into porn... and the editor liked my stuff, but thought it needed, well, porn.

I took some of the Cain inspired and McDonald inspired stories and added a sex scene. A graphic sex scene. Often featuring unusual sex. Well, at least unusual for me, and probably unusual for the readers of Dugent magazines, since the lure of the story would be some fantasy thing that they couldn’t get their wives to do. Anyway, I added scenes to existing stories and then went down to the post office...

But now, when I was standing in line, I was embarrassed. I was holding a porno story in my hands. A story filled with sex... and unusual sex at that. I wondered if the other people in line looked at the name of the magazine on the envelope and *knew*. I wondered if the postal clerk *knew*. I couldn’t wait to get this over with and get home.

The results were pretty much the same - only know Mr. Dewalt’s handwritten notes were even more encouraging. Often the reason for rejection was that they had recently published a similar story. Part of the problem I had was trying to “normalize” writing what was essentially porn with a story wrapped around it. You might watch a movie like THE ICE STORM and think that everybody was into free love in the 70s, but I didn’t know anybody doing that. There were porno movie theaters in Concord (the old Enea) and Walnut Creek (the El Rey, know as the El Lay) but I didn’t know anybody who ever went there. I knew the *projectionist* at the El Lay, a deeply religious man who plastered religious messages over the projectionist's window so that he could not see anything on screen. This created a major problem if the film was out of focus or when he had to do change-overs to a new reel. Often, the raincoat crowd complained... but he wasn't going to look at the scren to see what was wrong and correct it! Sex was still something private, and maybe a little dirty, to me. And here I was writing short stories filled with sex.

And as Dugent struggled for their men’s magazine market share against Hustler, they went deeper and deeper into porn territory. First with their pictorials, then with their stories. Soon I was standing in line at the post office worried that someone would know the complete smut I had in my 9x12 envelope with a nested 9x12 return envelope inside. Couldn’t I just mail this from the privacy of my home? Or stand in the post office line wearing a brown paper wrapper?

Just as Mr. Dewalt was scribbling that my story was one of the two up for the issue, and aced out because the other guy had a stranger sex scene, I was realizing that this wasn’t exactly the direction I wanted to go with my career. What if the next story sold? Okay, I’d make $300... but I couldn’t show the magazine to anybody. I couldn’t even imagine showing the magazine to my parents. It was filled with nekkid women. I made the mistake of showing them one of the stories, once... and felt like a degenerate that year at Thanskgiving. And the stories I was writing... instead of the story that was 90% my story and 10% their sex scene, the percentages had been changing along the way... and now maybe 20% of the story was “mine” - what I wanted to write. I was pretty sure Stephen King wouldn’t have written these stories.

Someplace along the line, I had landed a short story in a penny a word mystery magazine... I don’t even own a copy of that, now... lost in a flood along with a few dozen movie posters from the 1940s through 1960s I had collected. That story was the thing that set me back on track...

Oh, and getting hired to write the script that would eventually become NINJA BUSTERS.

I wrote a few short stories after that, stood in line at the post office knowing that the nested SASE would be coming back to me with a rejection letter. Even if they *did* publish the short story, what would I get? $25? No way to pay the monthly bills on that! I would focus on the screenwriting thing... Stand in line at the post office with query letters and the occasional script shipping out to Hollywood... requested by some producer.

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Conflict and SPIDER-MAN 2 & 3.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Should have been chicken soup, but it was a Burrito at El Faro, Concord - a burrito so big you can't eat all of it.

Movies: I AM LEGEND. Okay, I am a huge fan of the Richard Matheson novel, even though I haven't read it in years. I first read it, probably in high school. Still have that copy. If you don't know who Matheson is, he's the guy who wrote all of those TWILIGHT ZONE episodes you remember. Seriously - make a list of 5 episodes and I'll bet at least 3 of them are his. Anyway, that's how I discovered him. I was a fan of old THE TWILIGHT ZONE TV show, noticed that Matheson wrote some of my favorite episodes, discovered that he wrote books, too... and Stephen King called his haunted house book HELL HOUSE the best horror novel ever written. An Matheson also wrote the book that was made into INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN, one of my favorite Saturday afternoon Sci-Fi movies.

I AM LEGEND has been made twice before, once with Vincent Price and once with Chuckles Heston... and was the inspiration for NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (so just about every modern zombie movie owes its existence to the book). Here's the thing - no one has ever done a faithful version of the book. So, several years ago they decided to correct that, and make *the book*. They needed a star, and Ah-nuld stepped up - not the guy I see playing Robert Neville, who is kind of a typical 1950s suburban husband. But I would accept Ah-nuld if the movie was like the book, rather than like the Heston version. Then Ah-nuld became governator and the project was shelved....

Until someone dug it out and did some rewrites and some more rewrites and suddenly it was nothing at all like the book... and so they made it.

My problem with the film is that it's kind of one note. I thought it started out good... then just kept going on a straight line without changing or escalating or twisting or becoming dramatic or anything else... which means it becomes more boring with every minute until it just turns to crap with a silly ending.

SPOILERS!

The book is kind of a through-the-looking-glass commentary on 1950s suburban life - the kind of stuff on LEAVE IT TO BEAVER and OZZIE & HARRIET and FATHER KNOWS BEST. Robert Neville is the typical suburban husband and father who carpools to work every day with his buddy Ben Cortman... then a plague breaks out that turns everyone into vampires. Now all of his neighbors and everyone he knows lives at *night* and he is the sole person who lives by day - his world is been turned upside down.

His car pool buddy Ben Cortman is now the leader of the vampire clan in his suburban town - and comes for him every night, pounding on his door and screaming for him to come out... so that they can kill him. Every day Neville goes from house to house through the town, searching for the vampires and driving stakes through their hearts... mostly searcing for the leader, Cortman. The people he stakes - are his neighbors, his friends. It's a terrible job, but they become an army at night... and soon they will be powerful enough to get through the barricaded windows and doors of his typical suburban home. Every morning, his lawn is littered with dead vampires - people he knows. He has to clear them, take them to the giant bonfires that were designed to burn the dead when the plague had just begun taking lives...

None of that stuff is in the new movie. The creatures aren't people he knows, just CGI fake looking monsters, and who cares if you kill them or not?

But he doesn't kill them - the typical suburban dad from the book has been turned into a top military scientist who was working on curing the plague... and still is. He wants to help these vampire-creatures, not kill them. And, because he's a scientist *and* a badass army guy, he's got all the heroic bases covered. He's the *perfect* guy to deal with this sort of problem (unlike the character in the book who had to grow and change in order to deal with it).

And everything from the novel has been blunted or thrown out - In the book, his daughter contracts the plague, and he and his wife do everything they can to get her medical attention... but she dies. They want a funeral, but instead must take her body to the huge bonfire and toss her in with the others. There is nothing as sad and horrible as the mass pit where they burn the dead from the book... which is also in the Vincent Price version.

The dog death in the Will Smith version is no substitute for the daughter's death... or the wife's death and return... and death again.

That's the big scene in the book - Neville's wife gets sick... and dies. He is supposed to take her put to the big bonfire, but can't go through that again... so he sews her up in a shroud and buries her... and then she comes back - covered in earth - dead... and wanting to feed off of him. This is the love of his life... back from the dead! A miracle. He just wants to hold her in his arms. Kiss her. Tell her how much he has missed her, how much he loves her... But instead he must pound a stake into her heart! This scene destroys him... and destroys us when we read the book.

Instead we get a dead dog and a scene where his wife and daughter are the victims of an accident - never to be seen again.

And the "Alpha Male" in the movie is a poor substitute for his car pool buddy Ben Cortman - after he turns into the car pool buddy from hell. Those two characers had a *history* and a *relationship* which brough drama and baggage to the scenes where Cortman and Neville battle each other. By making the "night seekers" strangers they rob drama from every scene they are in.

Having to kill his friends and neighbors by day was gut wrenching - a normal guy having to do terrible things to survive. In the film we have a hero who does heroic things (search for a cure). Nothing dramatic about that. It's a person doing what is already in their nature.

Though I haven't read the novel in years, one of the things I loved about it when I first read it was how it looked at vampires *scientifically* - all of the vampire lore gets a logical explaination that make complete sense. In the book, Neville doesn't begin as a scientist, the part of his days not staking his friends and neighbors is spent trying to figure out what happened - and that leads him to learn about science and learn about the plague... which gives us all of these amazing logical reasons behind vampires being killed by wooden stakes, and garlic repelling them, and light burning them. You read the book and begin to believe that vampires *could* really exist. None of that in the film - it's just a bunch of creatures.

The book's title comes from the end - a huge twist where we discover that Neville is a monster to the vampires. To them, he's a serial killer. I think you could pull that twist end in today's popcorn world. I think as long as 99% of the film has Neville as "hero", that 1% where we reveal he's a monster won't rock the boat too much. And he's still a vampire killer - which may be a good thing to most of the audience. But to those of us who are looking for more than popcorn, that end would have had us thinking about being on the right side or wrong side in a war - is there really any difference? On both sides, people are killed.

There's a Matheson short story about a suburban guy who cuts himself shaving... and bleeds oil. Now, everywhere he looks he sees people eating greasy food and realizes that he's lived with his eyes closed his entire life - and he is a robot. I think the end of LEGEND is Neville opening his eyes... and Cortman and all of the vampires are not really any different than they were before - they still have their eyes closed. They see him as a monster... and he gets a chance to see them as people.

This movie wasn't the Matheson book... and it's strange that the cheapo Vincent Price version you can download on the internet for free (LAST MAN ON EARTH) is closest to the book. But, maybe 20 years from now, they will make a faithful version. Who knows?

Pages: I have had the worst headcold for the past few days and have written nothing and done nothing but blow my nose. I could be a mucus doner. The good news is that the cold has now moved to my chest - meaning I have even more mucus to give. Hopefully this will all be over soon - this blog post was supposed to go up yesterday, but I was just too miserable.

Going Postal (part two)

(When last we left our hero, he was standing in a slow moving line at the post office remembering past lines in the post office when he was just starting out writing short stories... much as Marcel Proust ate a cookie and remembered things past...)

GENT & DUDE

Most of Stephen King’s short stories had been published in magazines called Gent and Dude, published by Dugent Publications... in exotic Florida. The editor was a guy named Maurice Dewalt. I read the King stories, and decided to write some horror stories similar to them for Dugent. Now, I was a fan of King and Matheson and Bloch and many other horror writers, and one of the things I loved about King’s work was that the lead characters were normal guys - some guy working in a factory picking up an extra shift cleaning out the basement who runs into some pretty big rats down there. I could see myself writing this kind of stuff. So I wrote a stack of short stories and began sending them to men’s magazines - even Playboy - why not? Just another day standing in line at the post office.

Now, I wasn’t just sending these guys horror stuff, I was also writing James M. Cain style noir pieces and John D. McDonald style action pieces, and some Chandler influenced mystery stuff. There were dozens of magazines, and if I were going to make a living and pay the rent on the *house* that Wendy and me and the three dogs and a horse were living in, I needed to sell a lot of stories every month. I had a day job at Safeway, but what I wanted to do was write full time.

(Okay, the horse wasn't living in the house. It wasn't living in the back yard, either. It was boarded at some ranch where we had to clean the stall. But it ate like a... well, like a *horse*!)

I was writing screenplays, too, and making short films. In fact, Wendy starred in my CARRIE take off, just to bring it back to Stephen King. It was part of my MONDO SHORTS - UNDERWEAR OF THE WORLD complilation. I made a lot of short films back then, and my first 35 minute compilation was called SHORTS OF BILL MARTELL and the titles were on underpants. The "sequel" was a mocumentary like MONDO CANE that looked at underpants from all over the world... and would then use a kind of Monty Python inspired stream on consciousness to go from undershorts to film shorts. Part of the fun was trying to figure out how to get from a CARRIE parody to NIGHT OF THE LIVING LIFE INSURANCE SALESMEN using underpants from around the world. But the short films and my super 8mm feature and 16mm James Bond parody were things that costme a lot of money so that I could show them in the garage - turned into a cinema by removing our cars and adding folding chairs - to my friends. No way to make any money from the shorts... the money was in short *stories*.

All of this work resulted in an even larger collection of rejection slips.

Just as a test, I sent some stories to literary magazines that only paid in copies. You’d get 5 or maybe 10 copies of the magazine. And that’s what I’d get. No rejection slips, just copies of some magazine that was probably self published (back when that wasn’t easy). Now, here’s where I missed learning a valuable lesson - I should have been self publishing my own damned magazine! I knew all of the printers in town, I probably could have used some of my Safeway money to start up the magazine and hopefully subscribers would have kept it going. But I was a *writer* not a publisher. Creative, not a business guy. I already had a job...

Well, two jobs if you consider all of the time I spent standing in line at the post office to mail short stories.

But a strange thing happened. Maurice Dewalt began sending me scribbled notes on the bottom of my rejection slips. The guy who published Stephen King’s early work liked my work! After a bunch of notes, Mr. Dewalt wrote one that said they would have published this one, but I needed to read some short stories from the current magazine. Editorial needs had changed.

So I went down to the book store... and they didn’t have any copies of the magazine. The clerk told me to try a liquor store.

That’s where I found them. I bought a copy of Dude and a copy of Gent and a couple of others I had been submitting to. I had a *subscription* to Playboy, so I knew exactly what the stories in Playboy were like, and I’d bought a few issues of Penthouse now and then and knew what the stories in there were like... I just figured that the smaller magazines had the same kinds of stories, just not by big name writers.

Well, that might have been true once, but now these magazines were competing with *Hustler* magazine, not Playboy and Penthouse. The stories all had sex in them. Graphic sex. Often, unusual sex. Could I write that? Could I write stories that were, well, pornography... then stand in line at the Post Office surrounded by other people, and *mail* the porno stories to exotic Florida? Could I write that kind of stuff for a living?

- Bill

IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Story from character.
Yesterday’s Dinner: Burger and fries at Nation's Giant - which used to be across the street and a couple of blocks down, but they moved when they put in the new downtown shopping center - they moved *everything* that was the old downtown Pleasant Hill. What didn't move, got buldozed.

DVDs: MURDER MY SWEET with Dick Powell and Claire Trevor and Mike Mazurki. My favorite Chandler film - yes, I like it more than THE BIG SLEEP and some of you will now want to burn me at the stake. Sorry. I think Bogart does the Marlowe tough guy stuff great, but nobody captures the smart-ass whimsey of Marlowe like Dick Powell. He insults everyone with charm. When Bogart insults you, you stay insulted. Powell sneaks the insult in, pulling one over on the insultee. And the rest of the cast is just amazing - who other than Mike Mazurki could ever play Moose Malloy? And Otto Kruger was born to play Jules Amthor, psychic to the stars. And Claire Trevor - one of the most amazing actresses *ever* - plays a great fake rich woman: she is *all* attitude with nothing at all behind it. You know, it's difficult to play a bad actress in such a way that we know it's the character. When we finally pull away the attitude, she's an ex-hooker struggling to keep her past a secret. Claire Trevor is one of those actresses like Gloria Grahame, she shows up in all kinds of Noir and crime flicks, but you never know if she'll play a femme fatale or a sympathetic gal from the wrong side of the tracks who helps out the hero.

The thing about MURDER MY SWEET is that I know every single line of the movie by heart, and watching it becomes kind of a ROCKY HORROR experience. There was a time when I knew the difference between the two versions that showed on TV - all I can remember now is that one of them had the scene where Marlowe lights a match on a statue's ass and the other doesn't. But there were two versions - each missing scenes that the other included. Maybe there was a 5 minute difference in running time or something and one fit a certain number of late night commercials and the other fit the other used car lot commercial formula. Who knows? But just a great flick.


DVDs: GUN CRAZY - So I’ve been watching a whole bunch of Film Noir in prep for the audio class and since I mentioned this film when I was talking about THE BIG COMBO a few entries ago, I had to pull it out and watch it again. I probably first saw this film at the UC Theater in Berkeley a couple of decades ago, and was blown away by it. First, like most noir, it’s an adult story. Not Hollywood fluff. It’s dark. It’s sexy. Probably the thing that impressed me the most when I first saw it were Peggy Cummins’ *very* tight black trousers. Women in 1940s movies always wore skirts and dresses. If they did wear pants they were non-sexual - often mannish. But here we have pants so tight it’s almost as if she’s naked.

SPOILERS!

The story is about a boy (eventually played by John Dall) who has a gun fetish. In the opening scene he steals a gun from a shop window, admires it while the alarm blares, then takes off running... tripping on the wet street. The gun goes sliding across the wet street until it hits a man’s boot... tilt up... a *Police*man’s boot. Next scene - the boy in court explaining to the judge how much he just loves guns. He doesn’t feel whole unless he has a gun in his hands. We’ll leave that up to Uncle Sigmund... but that’s what drives the film - this guy needs a gun to feel like a man. At the trial we meet his two best friends - one is the policeman’s son, the other wears glasses so you know he’ll grow up to be a writer - and they tell the judge that our hero isn’t a killer, on a camping trip he couldn’t shoot a wildcat that was hanging around their campsite (great flashback). He couldn’t bring himself to shoot at it. Wow, same problem as Jon Voight in DELIVERANCE! Boy is sentenced to reform school, from there he goes into the army, then he comes home.

Now we have adult John Dall and his two pals - one is now a cop and the other is a writer for the town newspaper. The carnival is in town, so that’s where they go.

The great thing about this film are the set pieces. In case you missed that Script Tip, a set pieces is a big scene. In the old studio days, it was a scene so juicy the studio would pay for a new set to be built. You don’t need a new set for a set piece, you just need a big juicy scene... and even though GUN CRAZY was a low budget film, probably shot on leftover sets that had been used a million times before and real loactions that could be got cheap - and in the case of one set piece, probably shot without any set at all - the film is full of amazing set pieces.


The Carnival - maybe the same one from THE RING (1927) - has a sharp shooter as it’s main attraction. Sexy Peggy Cummins in those skin-tight pants. She shoots balloons from around her assistant, shoots a cigarette out of her mouth, and all of the other carny tricks you usually see with a knife thrower. The Barker, an aging pretty boy, announces that for a mere $50 you can test your shooting skills against the master... and possibly win $500. Kind of the same deal as THE RING, just with guns instead of fists. John Dall’s buddies put up the money, and we get a great set piece as Dall and Cummins try to out shoot each other... and fall in lust in the process. Because Dall is an amazing shot, the Barker keeps upping the ante in order to win the bet. Eventually it comes down to this insane trick where a crown that holds a half dozen matches is put on Dall’s head and Cummins *lights the matches* with her bullets. All but one. Then it’s her turn to wear the crown. Dall lights them all. Look, I don’t want even the best sharp shooter in the world to be aiming a gun at my *head* from across the room, let alone firing at me six times. That’s just crazy! Dall ends up with a job at the carnival...

Now we have a great scene - not a set piece, but a juicy *dramatic* scene that deals with the romantic triangle between the Barker and Cummins and Dall. One of the interesting things is how they used a metaphor to tell us who was sleeping with who. When Dall first joins the carnival, the Barker asks if he has a car... he says no. Cummins wants him to ride with them, the Barker says there isn’t room in their car... Dall can ride with the clown. If you watch who rides with who in the carnival scenes, you can see Cummins and Dall getting together and the Barker riding alone. Which brings us to the big juicy scene where all of this blows up. Real good. The Barker has a claim on Cummins and tells Dall he’s out of here if he doesn’t honor it. The result of the big blow up is *Cummins and Dall* leaving together (in the same car), which leads us to some relationship stuff where they realize they are broke, and then Cummins’ plan to make money...

By armed robbery.
Now we get one of the greatest set pieces in low budget history - the “backseat bank robbery”. It’s a single continuous shot - several minutes - taken from the back seat of their car as they drive down the street of a town, find the bank, hope that there is a parking spot, Cummins pulls into a spot near the front of the bank and Dall gets out. After Dall goes into the bank, a cop walks down the sidewalk, stops near the front of the bank! Cummins pulls the car up, gets out, flirts with the cop, and tries to steer him away from the bank. Not happening. This builds suspense. She keeps trying to get the cop out of the way, but he won’t budge. Then the alarm goes off. She hits the cop, just as Dall bolts out of the bank doors with the money.They get in the car, Dall driving, and now we get a shoot out and car chase from the back seat of the car. All one shot. The great thing about this is that it was probably dirt cheap - we don’t need the bank interior and extras and setting up lights in the location. It’s *one* camera set up. But it gives you the feeling that you are right there - in the getaway car with them. When the cop fires at the car, he’s firing at *you*. And it’s all one cool shot.

The big set piece is the armed robbery that will make them rich. Dall thinks this means they can retire to some exotic location and just be together for the rest of their lives. Cummins thinks only about how much money they will end up with. The target for the armed robbery - the Armour meat packing plant payroll. Well before anyone thought of product placement, we get a *real* company name and a *real* meat packing plant. Again, this was probably due to the low budget. They found a practical location and probably couldn’t afford to change all of the signs.

This is one of those split second timed robberies where all kinds of things can go wrong... and do. It’s a tense scene, then it blows up and becomes a big action scene. The great part about it are the pieces of the set piece. Dall drives up in a truck filled with beef on hooks. He gets some steaks from a butcher and puts them in his bag, then walks to the offices and has to get past a half dozen people who tell him he’s in the wrong area. Dall tells them he has the steaks for the boss’s barbeque. Everyone tells him there’s no refrigeration here - he should take the steaks back to the plant. The deeper he gets into the office, the more he and the steaks are out of place. Eventually he gets to the boss’s floor... where Cummins is working as a secretary, Here it’s Cummins who tells him he’s in the wrong place - as she leads him right into the boss’s office, where they kidnap him and have him fill the steak bag with payroll money. And here’s where we see the beginning of the end - Cummins gets trigger happy and shoots a whole lotta people on the way out. It’s a great big run and gun scene - lots of action to break the tension that has come before.

After that set piece they are on the run, and we get a great sequence where they have their last night out as a couple. They go to the Santa Monica Pier and go on carnival rides - bringing us back to the beginning of their relationship. Then they go to a dance hall, and have a nice, tender, relationship scene... not knowing that the police have traced them to California and are waiting outside. They manage to escape with nothing - they even lose some of the clothes on their backs. Only one place to go...

Back to Dall’s home town. Now we get a great scene with the criminals and Dall’s sister’s family.... trying to act normal when people come over. Dealing with kids playing in the yard when you are harboring a pair of fugitives. And eventually a great scene with Dall and his two childhood friends - the cop and the reporter. A low budget film needs big scenes like this one - juicy drama where childhood friends are on opposite sides of the law... and Dall is kind of in the middle. Cummins is all for just killing them- in fact, she’d kill anyone if it allowed them to escape. She’d kill the kids (and that is in the film). In fact, there’s a great unseen scene where Cummins does *something* to Dall’s sister and her entre family - maybe she just locks them up, maybe she kills them all. We never find out which it is, because we come to the other big amazing set piece...

The one that probably has no set!
Dall and Cummins end up chased by every cop in the state, and blood hounds, and posses and probably villagers with pitchforks... but since they are chased through a foggy swamp, we just *hear* all of these things. I’m not sure if we see a single dog - though there may be a stock shot of dogs chasing - but we *hear* packs of blood hounds chasing them. We hear hundreds of cops searching the foggy swamp for them.

The swamp is... well, it’s 99% fog and 1% a couple of thatches of tule grass.

The big scene where they hide and the cops and dogs search - is just them behind a thatch of tules surrounded by fog. And it works! It’s an amazing scene. Probably shot in some warehouse with a smoke machine. Just goes to show you, *imagination* and *inventiveness* can create production value if you don’t have any cash.

GUN CRAZY still holds up, mostly due to the amazing set pieces and great sequences and fairly obvious sexual overtones... oh, and Cummin’s skin tight trousers.

- Bill

Nothing sexual about this...