London 10: Day 7 - Sex & Italian Films

The day began with one of the 5 (FIVE!) Free classes - on sex & violence. The other class I had scribbled notes for on the flight over. I had very little material on this one and would be winging the full 2 hour class. The problem with winging a class is jet lag, lack of sleep, and all of the various problems that I might have making stuff up off the top of my head when the top of my head isn’t working.

But the class went well, there were lots of questions about both sex and violence - and this is where I realized that it was a difficult subject for a class because answering questions was slightly embarrassing... and difficult to be precise as to how much sex or violence is too much. But the class went better than expected... and once again was sold out. The room was completely packed with people - around 150 or so.

And here’s the problem - Raindance has not printed brochures for my weekend class at all, but Elliot is passing out brochures for one of *his* upcoming classes in every sold out class that I do. Even though he mentions the weekend class in the intro, are the people just supposed to remember that after the class? They have no way of knowing *how* to sign up or where or how much the class costs... And my fear is that these free classes are completely undercutting my weekend class - it’s like getting 5 free servings of hors d’oeuvres and then the waiter asks what you would like to order for your meal... well, you’re really not hungry any more. In the past these classes had a nominal fee - 10 pounds (about $15) and there was only one of them... just to whet your appetite, but leave you hungry for more. This time, even though all of the classes are “selling out” there is no actual selling as they are free. There is standing room only, but not only does none of this translate into even a small amount of money per course, the audience is filling up on the free food and not hungry for the weekend class.

The Shooting People daily mailer has been promoting the 5 free classes, but not the weekend class. And Elliot wants to do a split of profits with me instead of the flat fee for teaching the class which we had done previously. Of course, in the past the weekend class has done well, so Raindance made a pile of money of giving me a flat fee. I suspect that no one is signing up, so they want to give me a % of what little money they make. I’m already wondering how I will handle this... but I have no idea how many people have signed up, so maybe I’m worrying overt nothing.

After the class I have several people come up to me with questions, and I answer a few then tell folks I must race to the cinemas to see films...

MOVIE: BREAKING ROCKS - A documentary about Billy Bragg’s program to buy guitars for prisons so that prisoners have a way to express themselves through music. They follow Bragg and others as they buy guitars, stencil them with the program logo (and other fun things) then deliver them to various prisons in the UK, and start guitar workshops. Prisoners learn how to play, learn how to write songs, and eventually perform at prison concerts... and when an inmate is released they perform at a charity concert to raise money to buy more guitars and keep the program going. The prison wardens and guards love the program because it keeps prisoners busy doing something constructive. One guy (outside) says - the problem with just punishing prisoners is that eventually they are released and may move into your neighborhood. It’s better to try to rehabilitate them and give them options in life for when they are released. This makes sense - and the idea behind this program is to teach prisoners to sing about their problems rather than let the anger bubble inside of them. The doc shows some success stories who have had music careers after release, but they stress the purpose of the program isn’t to teach prisoners to be folk musicians, but to find a safe way to vent their angers and problems through music. After the film, one of the prisoners (who has been paroled) played three songs he wrote in the cinema - and they were pretty good.

MOVIE: MIME-MIME - Okay, I have a problem. An Italian filmmaker who has attended a couple of my free classes told me that I *must* see his film today... and I do not remember the title. I bumped into him in the lobby and he said, “You are seeing my film today, right?” And I said, of course... but what is the title? I thought it began with the letter M, so I go to the screening of Mime-Mime... which is a Japanese film.

Story has a spoiled Japanese college girl who is having an affair with her (married) high school teacher while she tries to sort out her life. She ends up meeting a guy her age who she used to know when they were children, and this guy is a mess... a philosophy major who dropped out of college and seems to be drifting through life like she is. When he misses the last train after they have dinner together, he sleeps at her apartment... and this slowly blossoms into a romance, which means she must stop sleeping with her high school teacher as she decides to become exclusive with this guy. Kind of a quiet little story about 20 something Japanese kids trying to figure out what to do with their lives - every indie... but the problem for me? Every other scene was them having a meal! I have had nothing to eat, yet - and the film must contain 20 meal scenes where we focus on them eating. Even the scene where a friend eats a bowl of noodles while our gal takes a shower in the next room focuses on the noodles! There should be a warning before movies that are almost all meal scenes, so that you can make sure to have eaten first! The cinemas have popcorn and sweets but no *food*. I’m now very hungry... and still have to figure out which film is my Italian friend’s.

MOVIE: EMILIA GALOTTI - After Mime-Mime, I dash over to another cinema where the movie began 5 minutes ago. The problem with having 3 screens showing festival films is that the showing are often not in sync - and you must miss part of some movie in order to see another. I have now missed the first five minutes of this film... in *Italian*. Hey, is this the right movie?

After a few minutes, I hope not. This is the most arty and pretentious film I have ever seen. It reminds me of the Calvin Klien Obsession perfume commercials that Saturday Night Live did parodies of... except this is a movie like that! Characters spin and pose and speak as if what they say is the most important thing in the world - and the entire film is fake looking... there will be an over-the-top conversation in front of a background of ocean waves or something. And in almost every shot there are three models posing in the background or on the side of the screen. The story is some sort of rise and fall of a famous fashion model, and her wealthy patron and potential lover. Everyone poses with every sentence, and the sentences are big and flamboyant. And the backgrounds are arty as hell - often a spotlight on one person who speaks while the three models pose and someone else sits in a chair and speaks in strange cryptic slogans. As this thing goes on - and the models keep posing against false backgrounds of birds flying in slow motion or waterfalls or whatever, I wonder what I’m going to tell my Italian friend when he asks, “Did you like my movie?” This is the most pretentious piece of crap I’ve ever seen! At least the Obsession commercials are over in 30 seconds!

I duck out and buy a popcorn, still hungry from the Japanese film, and when I sneak back in, the film is winding down... Well, I really have no idea if it is winding down or not, but the fashion model is posing against a strange background as she does drugs and ODs and ends up posed artfully on a morgue slab as the three models pose and wail in the corner and her wealthy benefactor and his assistant talk between wild poses.

When the film ends, my Italian friend enters the cinema... and I get really worried about what I’m going to say to him... when he thanks me for coming to see his film, takes a seat, and the *next* film begins...

MOVIE: MOTHS - Ah, *this* is the correct Italian film! To date, the most beautifully shot film I have seen at the festival. Amazing lighting that reminds me of Gordon Willis. After a festival filled with ragged indie cinematography or overly arty cinematography, this film just looks beautiful.

Film starts with a mid-40s man telling his mother and father he’s going out - and everyone is shot beautifully. You wonder what this guy is doing still living with his parents, but we’ll get to that... As he walks through the city - some Italian coastal town, I’m sorry I don’t know which one - we get all of these *mazing* post card shots. One great shot after another. Unlike the previous Italian film, these shots are of real places... but the cinematography makes them look like the most beautiful place on earth.

The guy gets to this alley by the sea where he meets his pal, and the story slowly unfolds. These two guys in their 40s are small time criminals - not members of some gang or mob, they are much much smaller than that. Two petty thieves, two failures, two dreamers whose dreams have never come true. They guy who still lives with his parents is the less talkative of the two... the other guy is the one with the schemes. They are waiting for some guy who will completely change their lives - allow their dreams to come true... and as they wait, they talk about their dreams and schemes and lives. It’s good that we have had those post card shots of the city, because much of the rest of the film is these two guys standing in the alley talking as they wait. Still beautifully shot - but two guys talking. This might seem like some film I would not like - two guys just standing there talking - but what they say is constantly funny and the scheme is slowly revealed.

Though this is not Jules and Vincent from PULP FICTION, these guys have the same kind of clever dialogue that reveals them as dreamers and losers - the schemer has convinced a guy to sell him a Ferrari, and they will meet in this alley. But the plan is to knock the guy out with a baseball bat, steal his car, and drive to Paris where every woman is beautiful and easy to seduce. Once they have that car, every door that has ever been closed to them will instantly open! As they discuss their futures and pasts, love in the heart versus physical love, friends of theirs who were not as lucky as they are (a cab driver who was robbed and beaten and is now confined to a wheelchair) and what kind of yacht they will buy when they get to Paris; bits and pieces of their personal lives come out, and we really get to know these guys (as we laugh at the outrageous things they say). The schemer’s plans to live in Paris are shown in a collage fantasy sequence with the two of them driving their stolen Ferrari in post card photos... great, because it is *not* real. Eventually the schemer admits he has never been to Paris, but has seen pictures of it, you know, on the internet. Even though it is two guys talking, it never gets boring (I laughed the whole time) and eventually the Ferrari actually does show up...

And that is when things go really wrong, and we get away from the alley to a sea-side stairway where the end of the film takes place... and secrets are revealed and more plot twists occur. Oh, and this is more beautiful cinematography that makes you want to hop a plane for Italy.

After the film, my Italian friend (the producer) does a Q&A along with the director and one of the two stars (the guy who lived with his parents). This beautiful film was shot in 5 days. Based on a stage play, the two stars had played these roles on stage, knew the dialogue, and they basically did the play in front of the camera (variety of angles) in the alley again and again. Made on a shoe-string, though you would never guess by looking at it. Though the conversations are shot from several angles and look great, and we often see the ships at the dock near the alley as they wonder what the people are doing on those ships and where those ships may be going, it was shot very quickly. My producer friend they shot as much as 40 minutes one day! A great little movie, dialogue driven, and a nice actor’s showcase.... plus is looks great! Tarantino should bring this one to America on his Rolling Thunder label.

I'm so glad this was my Italian friend's film and not the other one!

- Bill

London Interlude 4

One of the odd battles I fight every time in I’m in London is about milk. If you order a coffee it automatically comes with milk. You must *stress* that you want “Coffee Black” and even then they will give you a strange look as if you have just ordered a chicken dinner with the head still on the chicken. In the Starbucks here there are no coffee drinks without milk. None. They have just begun drip coffee (before everything was espresso based) and you must stress that you want it black or they will just put milk in it automatically. There are no iced coffee drinks where which do not have milk - none. I usually drink iced coffee, and this has been a major issue in every Starbucks. They ask how you can drink iced coffee without milk? I don’t really know how to answer that. In one Starbucks I said that in America we stop drinking milk when we start drinking beer... and they looked at me as if I were an alien... and then told me this could not be true. At another Starbucks they insisted that all Americans drink whole milk every day. You also get milk in your tea, here - I was at a restaurant a couple of days ago that *only* served iced tea with milk in it. In fact - you can not get iced tea in Starbucks. It is not on the menu at all. If it was, I’m sure it would *only* come with milk in it.

I get my vitamin D from the sun, I don’t need to drink milk.

- Bill

London Interlude 3

My hotel room has maid service every day... but I am one man with 2 towels, and do not need maid service every day. I am used to the hotels in the USA which now have an environmental thing going on where you can save pointless laundry by using the same sheets and towels for a few days. I don’t need fresh sheets every day, and I only need fresh towels every other day. I ask how to handle this at the front desk and they tell me to use the Do Not Disturb door card to keep the maids from automatically replacing unused towels and changing the sheets... but this results in a letter from the head maid telling me that if I need fresh sheets I can call this extension on my phone and they will change my sheets... How many trees am I killing to prevent wasting unused towels?

- Bill

London Interlude 2

“Here, take one.” It’s a bowl of gold disks, like fake gold coins. I take one and put it in my pocket before leaving the Raindance Café on my way to the cinema. I get to the cinema, and wonder what is in that gold foil container... could be chocolate, could be a condom. There were condoms in the gift bags one year at Raindance. I don’t want to open it up in the cinema lobby if it’s a condom... and I *really* don’t want to open it and pop it in my mouth in the dark cinema if it’s a condom. That means it is staying in my pocket all day until I get back to the hotel.

Except at the end of the day I’m at a party at the Raindance Café where the music is so loud you can not hear what anyone else is saying and I reach into my pocket to check the time on my iPod and... it’s slippery. Chocolate. I have a pocket full of melted chocolate. Yech!

- Bill

LONDON 9B: Day 6 - Pitch Panel Notes

The previous post was all about the Pitching Panel, and here are some notes on pitching...

CLEAR TITLES

One of the things I mentioned right off - if you are pitching a script, make sure you speak slowly and clearly when giving us the important things - like the title and your name.

Don’t mumble it. And don’t speak so fast that we can not hear it. If you were writing your script on paper, you wouldn’t scribble it in crayon - you would want it to be easy to read. The same is true when you are *speaking* your story - you want it to be easy to hear. You want to enunciate your words, don’t slur them together. Don’t speak so softly we can’t hear you. Yes, you are a writer not a public speaker - but when you are ordering coffee in a coffee shop or talking to a friend about those pricks on the pitch panel who didn’t pick your pitch as the winner, you are speaking to be understood. Why should the barista or your pals get the benefit of clear and easy to understand speech and those of us trying to hear your pitch do not?

Even when you are pitching against the clock, talking faster does not help at all - it just makes it more difficult for us to understand what you are saying. People also tend to speak faster when nervous - I know I do - so try to keep that under control. We need to be able to understand what you are saying. Speak clearly.

And make sure you have a title that isn’t going to take me a half hour to write down or will be impossible for me to remember. In a way, your title is the very first pitch for your script - so make sure you have a good one. When we get into that room to decide which pitch wins, we will need to remember the title - so pick a memorable title. Nothing generic or complicated or something that doesn’t match the story or something that requires some special knowledge on our parts to make sense. Your title is part of the pitch - it had better be great!

GENRE?

One of the problems was that we had no idea what these stories were going to be, and often thought the story might be a comedy from the beginning of the pitch, then the story veered off into violence and we realized it was some other genre. Tell us what the genre of your story right up front, title and genre, and then it will be easier for us to see that story. And strange tonal shifts and genre shifts? Don’t work in a pitch and usually don’t work in a script as well.

Tell us the genre right up front so that they have a context for the rest of your pitch. I think I say this in my Thriller Class CD - there is often a fine line between the thriller and comedy genres, and dealing with a dead body can be a frightening experience in BLOOD SIMPLE or a laugh outloud comedy in WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S. Tell us which your script is so that we can properly imagine it as you pitch it.

SKIP THE DETAILS

A pitch is not about your complete story - that’s why you have the script. A pitch is about your concept, the idea of your story. The main problem many people had was that they wanted to tell their entire 110 page script moment-by-moment in 2 minutes. How is that even possible? Many people began with all of these details that proved to be meaningless to the story. They began with the protagonist waking up and brushing his teeth and taking a shower and dressing for work and... then the bell would ring because they had used up their time!

I understand setting up the protagonist in their ordinary world... in the screenplay. But in a pitch if you tell us that this is an accountant, I will *imagine* what his ordinary life is like. If you tell us it’s an astronaut I will imagine their ordinary life. The key to pitching is to find the essence of *everything* including character, and then trust us to figure it out. Better to have us not sure of some detail than bore us to death... and never get to your story because you have run out of time.

THE SCRIPT TELLS THE STORY

The same goes for scenes and bits of dialogue and story details. The script tells the story, the pitch is all about the basic concept... and interesting us enough so that we ask to read that script. Don’t worry about telling us the story, and don’t give us a scene-by-scene telling of the script - that’s not a pitch. You want to condense the story down to the absolute essentials, and don’t tell us what happens in any scene unless it is critical to the story... and even then, save that stuff for late in the pitch. You want to begin with the concept, and *never* tell us the story scene-by-scene. Let the script do its job and let the pitch do its job.

SEED OF THE STORY

Give us the seed of the story - protagonist has a problem. Not the details. And give us that seed of the story right up front. Begin with title and genre and (maybe) some similar film to give us an idea of tone and then give us your 3-5 sentence logline. Tell us the whole story in a couple of sentences right up front. That way if the bell rings, we still know your whole story. And if the bell doesn’t ring, you can fill in a couple of spicy details, which we’ll talk about in a moment.

The biggest problem with many of the pitches is that they had no seed of the story - and no story. Often they were a bunch of scenes that seemed to be unrelated (except they happened to the same characters). If you can not distill your story down to a few brief sentences, you do not have a story... or you do not know what your story is.

CONCEPT RULES

The difference between a pitch that caught our attention and one that did not all came down to concept. You know I harp on high concept or having some sort of story hook, but here I was surrounded by British film industry people who are probably the anti-Hollywood, and the pitches that caught *their* attention were the ones with high concepts. When you distill your screenplay down to its essence - that story seed - what becomes important is how interesting that concept is. If your story *idea* is interesting, we will want to read the screenplay. If your story idea is boring or we have heard it before, why would we want to read it?

The winner of the night had a great high concept, and so did the two runners up. These *ideas* caught our attention and intrigued us. I know that a couple of the judges actually wanted to read some of the scripts from these pitches. If your concept is unclear or your concept is something we have heard before - throw that script away and write one with a great idea. The goal here is a great story well told - and so many pitches did not start with a great story... or, if it was in there, they didn’t focus on it or get to it before the bell rang. You are pitching the *concept* so get to that right away - it’s part of that story seed, that protagonist with a problem. Find the most interesting concept that expresses your story - if you have a woman who wishes she knew in high school what she now knows, you can have her coach a kid similar to her... or return to high school in disguise as a student... or ZAP back to high school and be that student again (as in PEGGY SUE GOT MARRIED). Your concept is critical - so pick the very best concept for your story. I would not want to read the first version of this story at all, would be mildly interested in the second version (which is NEVER BEEN KISSED) and be really interested in reading that third version. PEGGY SUE has that magic and fantasy that we go to the cinema to experience... and connects to our wish fulfillment to actually have the chance to change our lives (instead of just relive it). Make sure you start with the great concept instead of the okay one - it’s not “A Just Okay Story, Well Told”.

WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT?

If you are doing something in a genre, you need to tell us right up front what makes this cop-chases-serial-killer story completely different than any other. One guy pitched his story and it was *exactly* the same story as a popular film, just with one character from the film removed and replaced by another. Um, that’s a Search & Replace job, not writing an original screenplay. But even if your story doesn’t *obviously* resemble some other film, because you only have a limited time to pitch your story, you will be giving us kind of a short hand version without details, and some elements may sound a little generic, so you need to tell us what makes your story unique and unusual right up front so that we use that as a frame of reference for those parts that may sound a bit generic.

And whatever makes it different needs to actually make it different. If you have a buddy cop story and one is tall and the other is short, that has zero impact on the story.

CONCEPT MATTERS

One problem with some of the pitches was that they had *excuses* for the story and contrived plots that just rang false. When you have 110 pages to tell your story you might be able to do some fancy footwork and disguise these things, but anything false and contrived becomes obvious when you compress and condense your story down to a pitch. The strange part is that many people who pitched didn’t think these things were important because they only became apparent in the pitch. Problem is, once the film is made the *trailer* is a pitch, and will expose these defects... and when stars go on talk shows and pitch the film, it will sound awful (or incomplete). The concept actually matters - and if you have contrived something it will sink the film, so no one will even want to read the script. You need a story where the concept makes sense without footnotes.

If your story is a romantic comedy about an old fashioned newspaper reporter chasing the same story as a slick television news guy... and they begin hating each other and eventually fall in love, you may not think the story they are both chasing is important. It’s a rom-com, not a news film... but that story is what brings them together and what drives the story, so it is *critical*. The story they are chasing is the story the audience is watching as they fall in love, and you can’t leave it out of your pitch. It can’t be boring. It can’t be unrelated to the theme of your script. It can’t be unrelated to each character’s emotional conflict. That story they are chasing is what the film is about, while your couple is falling in love. So it had better be great and unusual and original and amazing.

WHY IS THIS A MOVIE?

Often the stories pitched sounded like they would be better on the small screen or the pages of a book or a stage play. If what you are pitching is a *movie* it needs to be something that requires the big screen to work - a larger than life story that fills that huge screen. If the story you are pitching is internal - something that would be better suited to a novel - you need to write it as a novel. Your story needs to match the medium.

When you pitch the story, focus on the elements that make it a movie. The things that will fill the screen and the things that are visual. If your story is two people talking in a house for 90 minutes, that is a stage play. What do we *see*? How is the story told through the actions of the characters? Don’t pitch a TV movie to a cinema panel. And if someone on the panel asks you why this is a movie - you had better know the answer. You had better know why this is *not* a novel or a play or a TV movie - why it *must* be a movie in order to work.

And part of this is probably why 600 million people worldwide would pay to see it. Why your story is going to be something worth spending the $106.7 million the average film costs to get to the screen. Every producer wants to know how they are going to make their money back... and make a huge profit as well. If your story isn’t going to get people all over the world lining up to see the movie, don’t pitch it. If you *must* tell that story on film, find the money and make it yourself. Put your money where your mouth is. If you want to use someone else’s money, you must have a story that will be a great financial investment for them. Why is your story a movie? Why will people all over the world want to pay to see it? Why can it *only* work on that big screen?

WHO IS YOUR AUDIENCE?

So, here I am the Hollywood guy on the panel, and the British guys are asking “Who is your audience?” A film shows in a cinema. A cinema has a line of people buying tickets. Who is buying tickets to see this story? Who does this story appeal to enough that people will leave their homes and stand in line and buy a ticket? What age group? What sex? What other popular films is your story like? One thing I always say is to go to BoxOfficeMojo.com and look at the top 20 films for the past 5 years... that is 100 films popular films. Odds are your story is like one in that 100. If not, that’s a problem. But usually the potential audience is obvious - because they are the people around you when you go to the cinema. You should be writing the kinds of movies you regularly pay to see in the cinema (not wait for DVD or cable). And that gives you a clue to who the audience is. But when someone on the panel asks, *know* your demographic and *know* how well similar movies do with the audience. When you pitch a script you are trying to sell it to the producer, and that means you need to be able to explain why it’s a good investment.

DON’T READ IT

Yes, you are nervous... but if you read your pitch off a piece of paper in a monotone and never make eye contact with us, we are going to pay just as much attention to you as you are playing to us... and *not* want to read your screenplay. You can use the page for reference, or hold on to it in case you forget, but it is *better* to just tell us the story as if you are telling a friend about the movie you saw Friday night. Just talk to us.

I know this may seem completely unfair, but performance matters to some extent. If you sound bored when you read your story, we will think your story is boring. If you sound passionate and excited by your story, that will rub off on us. You don’t need to be an actor, you just need to be *human*.

By the way, one person who pitched was *too slick* - it was a complete turn off for me because they were *not* human, but some sort of TV Sham-Wow Pitchman type. Plastic. This person also used a bunch of completely obvious tricks in an effort to make us listen (they named their protagonist after panel members) and this completely backfired. I don’t want to hear some fake person pitch their false pitch, I want to hear a real person who is passionate about their story.

After I was told to announce *not* to read your pitch, the very next person who pitched read their in a boring monotone. If you can not learn from those who pitch before you, and can not change things at the last minute, you are doomed. This is all about knowing your story and caring about your story. As the night went on, the time allotted for a pitch went from 2 minutes to 90 seconds to 1 minute... yet almost no one altered their pitch to fit the shorter time period! Most continued to tell us moment-by-moment what happened inj the story instead of cutting to the chase!

FLASHY & TWISTS RULE

You may not like this, but in a pitch a great idea or interesting character is what matters. One of the pitches had a funny idea for a protagonist that had the whole panel laughing... and that was one of the two runners up. Guess what? That person was racing the clock and I’m not sure we got all of their story, or that the story even made much sense in the long run. But that character was so fascinating and such an amusing idea for a character that we all wanted to read the script. Now, we may read that script and the story doesn’t hold up - but the purpose of the pitch is to get us to read your script. Then it’s up to the script. If you have some flashy element or location or character or situation or some plot twist that completely rocks our world, we want to read that script. When you are pitching, make sure to include the good parts!

Oh, and your story better *have* a story - not just a set up. There were a couple of pitches that were all Act 1 with no visible Act 2... and when someone on the panel asked what happens next, the answers were vague and evasive. Just some stuff happens. Nothing exciting or interesting. Your *entire screenplay* needs to be exciting and interesting! Every single moment!

FRESH MEETS?

I was surprised that the others on the panel were *encouraging* those who pitched to reference some other popular film as a way to give us an idea of general tone. But it really is much easier to imagine what the film will be like if you start out by telling us it’s like RAISING ARIZONA or like TAKEN or like RANSOM or like SEANCE ON A WET AFTERNOON - four very different movies about a kidnaping. By telling us which movie your story resembles right up front, we can imagine it in that context. Pitching is short hand, and whatever you can do to get that idea to us quickly is great.

But anything that confuses us is a problem. There were people who did the “meets” thing - it’s STRAW DOGS meets DRIVING MISS DAISY meets ABSOLUTE POWER meets AMERICAN GRAFFITI... and I have no idea what the hell that story can be! If you are going to have films meet, make sure there are *ONLY* two films meeting and that those two films meeting makes us instantly see what your story is. More than two films is confusing. Two films that have zero in common is confusing. If you have two films meet, make sure they are compatible!

BEST SCENES

If you get all the way through your pitch and the bell hasn’t rang, tell us one or two of the greatest scenes in your script. The scenes that will end up in the trailer and attract that paying audience. Again - cut to the chase and don’t give us all of the details of the scene, but the *concept* of the scene. And make sure that scene is something that captures our imaginations and makes us *need* to read that script.

ENDINGS

Here’s the thing about a pitch - if you have a story where we can see a possible ending, you don’t need to tell us what that ending is. We can imagine it. If we imagine a different ending, not a problem. But if you have the kind of story where we can not easily imagine a potential ending, you need to show us that you *can* resolve this conflict... and that means telling us the ending. We need to know that you didn’t paint yourself into a corner before we waste our time reading a screenplay without an ending (or where the ending clearly doesn’t make sense or doesn’t work). Don’t worry about ruining the story by telling us the end - this is all about getting us to read your script. If your story has a twist end, it had also better have an exciting beginning and exciting middle and exciting 109 pages before the big twist on page 110. We may know how it ends, but the rest of the ride needs to be exciting - and those are the details you are not telling us in your pitch. A great film can be seen more than once - even after we know how it all ends.

So, those are some pointers on pitching your script - next time I hope to hear a bunch of great pitches!

- Bill
SCRIPT SECRETS: LONDON - October 10 & 11, 2009 - BIG IDEA class, using GHOST as our primary example and it includes the new Thematic element!

DRINK WITH BILL IN LONDON!

PITCH PANEL NOTES

Monday, October 12, is the official Drink With Bill night. I haven't set time or specific pub, but it will be near the Holbourn Tube Station and probably in the 7pm range... those things may change slightly, so look back here for details.

(Probably Ships Tavern pub on Gate Street)

- Bill

LONDON 9A: Day 6 - Pitch Panel

I forgot to mention the rain. It’s been raining all day. It’s supposed to rain tomorrow, too. I have brought with me (since my luggage is here) a raincoat - but it’s very heavy and warm, and it’s not *cold* here, just wet. I also brought a sport jacket and Script Secrets baseball cap... and decide those will be my rain gear for the day. This ends up being a good choice as the rain is on and off all day, but walking across town in the warm humid weather would have killed me in the raincoat. I get to the Café a little damp both from without and within (perspiration, I didn’t pee myself or anything) and prepare for pitches.

I’ve done the Live Ammunition Pitch Panel a few times in the past - here’s how it works. The person pitching pays 5 pounds, pitches for 2 minutes, the panel then critiques the pitch, and we write little notes, and at the end of the night we go into a back room and figure out who is the winner, and the two runner ups... and the winner gets all of the money collected and the runners up get lovely parting gifts and the home version of the game (actually, some Raindance swag). I decided to break this out into its own blog entry because there were pitching lessons to be learned.

I have been on a million pitch panels and they are all pretty much the same - whether you are in Los Angeles or London. People make the exact same mistakes pitching their screenplays, and I suspect the problem lies with the screenplay itself instead of the pitch... but all I can do is comment on their pitches. On the panel with me were a writer-director who I talked with before and I liked him, a member of the UK Film Council (they fund films), a producer who packages projects to take to the UK Film Council, and somewhere... legendary producer Stephen Wooley. He made CRYING GAME and MONA LISA and many other great films that I frequently use in script tips as examples or talk about on message boards... because I love those films. They do interesting things within a genre and are popular with critics and the audience. I have no idea what he looks like, and accidentally sit next to him at the panel. I thought it was hippy director guy I hadn’t met, yet. When we go down the panel and introduce ourselves, I’m surprised that this hippy guy is one of the biggest producers in the UK. I guess I expected a suit.

When we went down the line introducing ourselves, we also were supposed to mention what we were interested in a pitch... and *everyone* mentioned genre. I was afraid that, as the Hollywood guy in a room full of artsie Brits, I would be the only one stressing commercial issues; but *everyone* stressed commercial issues. (Though, afterwards someone said they thought the Film Council guy may have just been saying they wanted commercial projects because everyone else said it, and when push came to shove all he really wanted to see were artistic scripts guaranteed to lose money). So, there is a lesson - even those who are artsie will say they want genre material... because genre material is what the paying audience wants to see.

Usually Elliot explains the basics of how to pitch your script, but this time he does not... and should have. Everyone makes the same mistakes... and no one seems to be learning from the mistakes of those in front of them. First up - my friends Robert and Paul... with a romantic adventure script. They make some of the mistakes I’ll talk about in a moment, but the after the pitch Elliot wants me to critique the pitch and I feel uncomfortable doing that - I’m afraid I’ll go easy on them or be too hard on them. So it’s given to someone else who ends up saying what I would have said.

And then we go through the line pitch-by-pitch until time begins to run low... as it always does, and instead of getting feedback from the panel, they get feedback from a single member of the panel. Then time begins to run low and they get 90 seconds to pitch... then some get 1 minute to pitch. But here’s the problem - even those who had 2 minutes usually ran over... way over. And even when we got down to the 1 minutes, they would just keep going. No one actually cared about the time or adjusted their pitch for less time. So the 1 minute pitches were often over 2 minutes! Again and again, the problem was that people didn’t pitch their story, they tried to tell it scene by scene! After several people read their pitch of a piece of paper in a boring monotone looking down at the page the entire time instead of making any sort of eye contact, Elliot asked me if I would tell people not to read... I made that announcement, and the *very next person* read off a piece of paper in a boring monotone!

One of the problems with giving instant feedback on a pitch is that you don’t have time to think about it - and often say things in the bluntest way possible, or the vaguest way possible (because you can’t put your finger on the exact problem). But often you are left with some major question about the story and you ask it - something that didn’t make sense in the pitch that may make perfect sense in the 110 page script. I’m never sure the instant feedback is really constructive, but that is the format, here.

We had been given a sheet of paper with space for pitch title, notes, and a rating of 1 to 10. I had a problem trying to gauge the pitches - since many were not good. I left the ratings section blank and concentrated on notes. Those pitches that were really good I noted, and ended up with 3 that I thought were really good. After the last pitch rambled on for a minute past the bell, we retired to the conference room to decide who would win... and several people followed us trying to repitch their stories so that we would reconsider them. Um, this backfires. Instead of hearing your pitch again and liking it even more, you are stalking us like a crazy person and we begin to fear you. Chances are pretty good that if we fear you we are not going to vote for your pitch as the winner.

When we discuss the pitches, everyone else’s favorite is not on my top 3... because I believe they misunderstood the pitch. They thought this crazy idea a guy pitched had to be a kid’s animated film... but I thought it was about an *adult* who still lived at home with his parents and had a strange fantasy life. Maybe I was wrong, but I swear the guy never said the lead was a kid... Anyway, everyone else was taken with a kid’s fantasy story, and so it won. I was concerned - being the Hollywood guy - that I would be the only one who liked a horror movie pitch, but it was on everyone else’s list as well. The pitch was good, clear, to the point, and different. That one was a runner up, and was another on my list of 3. We went out to announce the winners, and again people cam up to us on stage and asked why their pitch didn’t win when it was much better than the rest, or complained that if we had only heard the complete 10 minute version of their pitch it would have won, and then they launched into that 10 minute version. Folks, if you didn’t win you didn’t win. Look at your pitch and see how you can improve it!

At the party afterwards - with the music cranked up so loud no one could hear each other speak - Paul and Robert asked for some feedback on their pitch and I gave them some pointers... and decided to share them with everyone.

Next up - Pitch Pointers...

- Bill
SCRIPT SECRETS: LONDON - October 10 & 11, 2009 - BIG IDEA class, using GHOST as our primary example and it includes the new Thematic element!

London Interlude 1

“Mr. Martell, Mr. Martell! I took your course at Raindance three years ago, and you must come see my film!” “I must?” “Yes, it is playing on Thursday night! It’s my first feature.”

“Mr. Martell, Mr. Martell! I had no idea you would be here. I took your class four years ago at the Beverly Garland in Los Angeles, and you must come see my film! It’s my first feature!” “I must?”

“Mr. Martell, Mr. Martell! I’m that guy from Australia who took your class in Hong Kong three years ago, remember? I’ve got a film at the festival. Thursday night.”

“Mr. Martell, I take all your classes at Expo every year... I won’t be there this year because I’m here with my new film, and you must see it!”

“So, you’re Bill Martell, right? We’re here with our documentary POPATOPOLIS (about a sleazy B movie director) and he talks about something he directed that you wrote.” “Okay, that I *must* see.”

It’s weird, this year at Raindance there are a bunch of movies made by people who have taken my screenwriting classes. Today when Elliot was introducing me for my free class, he mentioned that one of the films playing Thursday night was made by one of my students... and then he plugged another film showing on Thursday night, and I mentioned it was also made by one of my students. When I was here in 2006 the winner of the Nokia shorts award mentioned that he had taken my class in Los Angeles (by the way, that was one great little short and I had nothing to do with its greatness) - that was strange. I have a bunch of students who have features here this year... and they are all on the same night! Three screens, all showing movies that I must see. I have no idea how I will manage it (but because the film schedules are staggered I can see most of one film and then sneak in to see all of the other). But *someone* will be asking me what I thought of their film and I will have to apologize because I did not see it.

- Bill

London 8: Day 6 - Catch Up

Twelve hours later, I woke up. I had no class to teach today, but I do have to be on the pitch panel tonight. The sleep was wonderful... though I did not dream. I feel so much better that yesterday...

In Costa Coffee I did a read-through of my article, found a bad part, completely rewrote it, then found a Starbucks with free wifi and sent it to the magazine editor... and checked my e-mail where the editor from Script was wondering if I could deliver my article early... like, the day I leave London. Um, maybe.

Then I went to the cinema, and watched a shorts program with Janet...

SHORT MOVIES:

SEEDS - written a directed by a fellow named Attila who I met at one of my classes who looks familiar, did he take my class in Vancouver? The film opens on an extreme close up of a man’s eyeball, then pulls back to show a man standing in a very long line at an indoor farmer’s market. We spend a little time with everyone in line, as they wait... and come back to many people as they continue to wait. The flaw in the film is that the people waiting in line do now talk about what they are waiting for - they just have time-killer conversations. This removes any build up there might be and makes the waiting very boring on film. Eventually our man gets to the front of the line where a woman is selling Magic Seeds, 2 for $10. He pays his $10, but asks what the seeds do. Well, they expand your mind, she says. He goes outside, sits down and opens his package... and there are two regular apple seeds, He eats them, and nothing happens. Goes back inside to complain, tells the woman he could easily have bought a dozen apples for $10 and had hundreds of seeds... and she tells him the seeds work because he hadn’t thought of that before. Back to the eyeball.

WRAP - There are many shorts that are technically well made but completely lack a story, tell a dull story, or have a story that makes no sense at all. This is one of those. A film crew prepares to shoot a scene and are waiting on an actor. The actor shows, they send him to costume and wardrobe, then to the room they are shooting in - a bathroom. They kill the actor, cut up the body in the tub (not shown) and put body parts in plastic bags... and as crew members are carrying out the bags the next actor shows up and is sent to wardrobe and make up. The end. Janet and I both said WTF?

ADELAIDE - My favorite of the bunch. Opens with a young woman calling an ambulance to report a woman having a drug reaction, and she goes into detail about the allergies this woman has and her medical history... and after she hangs up she injects herself and passes out... and the ambulance comes. She wakes up in a hospital, where we get more of her medical history - she is the ultimate hypochondriac, and her body is criss-crossed with scars from various operations that proved unnecessary (appendix removal, etc). When she goes to a pharmacy to buy all kinds of crazy things (a neck brace, etc) plus some prescribed drugs from her hospital stay, the shy young pharmacist has a conversation with her about the drugs... and it’s love! They begin dating. He has always wanted to be an EMT, and has a CPR dummy he practices on. Finally, when she’s sure that this is *the* man for her, she sends herself into anaphylactic shock and he saves her life and they live happily ever after. Loopy and strange and oddly romantic.

STALK MUCH - A guy visits his shrink for stalking, and we go through the stages of the death of a relationship, finally ending with revenge... and he goes to his ex’s apartment with a brick to throw through her window. Where he spots a woman with a brick screaming at another apartment window... and it’s a love match. The end. I liked it.

COFFIN CALL - Janet knew the filmmaker. A funeral, the widow and best friend of the departed talk in the graveyard afterwards when the widow’s phone rings... it’s her husband! He was buried with his cell phone, and calls to say he isn’t quite dead yet. When the Priest comes up to give his condolences and goose the window (with a loud honking noise as her grabs her butt) the phone rings again and again and the husband wants to be dug up, but that would put an end to the potential relationship between widow and best friend. This seemed like a bad Benny Hill skit - way way too broad to ever be funny. Trying too hard for a laugh - but really without anything funny. Well shot, though, and the actress who played the widow (who was at the screening) is attractive in an unusual way.

CRAZY HANDS - Silent film (actually music and sounds) - a guy wakes up and his hands are just crazy - they move around and he can not stop them. Difficult to drink his morning coffee - it ends up all over the place! His hands will not stop moving! He meets his girlfriend and they try to have a little petting party - but his hands are crazy! They won’t feel her up! They are spastic! Neither is happy about this, and the date has gone wrong. He goes to a pub to drink away his problems... and can’t hold his beer! It splashes all over the place before he gets much more than a sip! He sits down on a bench in the pub... and it’s a piano bench... turns around, and his hands play an amazing complicated classical piano concerto. Ah, that’s what they were meant to do! The end. I really liked this one and thought the actor - who looked strange - was really good.

HOW TO STOP A MAN FROM COMMITTING SUICIDE - God has three chances to stop a broken hearted young man from standing in front of a speeding train to end his life. God narrates as he tries to stop the man with a topless woman and other dopey methods, each time failing. Last time the woman who broke his heart shows up at the train tracks to stop him, they run to each other... and a train hits both of them. Not as amusing as they thought it was. This also seemed like a group of people with film equipment and no story, who came up with this.

SHAKESPEARE, TARANTINO AND THE MITCHELL BROTHERS - Actors should not be allowed to write screenplays. Yes, there are a handful of actors who have written good scripts, but many many more like this. An actor goes to an audition and the theatre director has odd requests and the actor is a stuck up serious actor and... well, we watch them discuss the audition process. Probably funny to actors who audition a lot, not funny to the other 99.99999999999999999999% of the people who go to the cinema.

THE OLD SONG AND DANCE - One thing about movies, they often reflect the filmmaker, which is a good thing unless the filmmaker has serious issues and you worry that they are sitting next to you in the cinema instead of in a maximum security mental facility where they belong. Costumes and set from the 1920s, heavily made up man and woman enter and go to a sofa, man clicks on the Victrola, and a song plays about how men only want one thing. The man lipsyncs the song with over the top flourishes as he tries everything to get in the woman’s pants while the devil looks on. The man gets violent with the woman, has his way, and both he and the devil are happy as the song on the Victrola ends. Um, WTF? I often say writing a screenplay is cheap therapy, but this went over the line into someone who really needs therapy. Strange looking film, too.

Those were the shorts... I ended up grabbing a sandwich again and then headed to the Raindance Café in the bunker under the record store for the pitch panel. That will be the next blog entry.


SCRIPT SECRETS: LONDON - October 10 & 11, 2009 - BIG IDEA class, using GHOST as our primary example and it includes the new Thematic element!

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Screenplays Are Like Newspaper Stories and THE SHIPPING NEWS.
Yesterday's Dinner: Chicken and bacon sandwich from EATS.

LONDON 7: Day 5 - Break Down Day

I woke up at 6 am today... I don’t know why. I could not fall back asleep.

Today I’m teaching one of my 5 (FIVE!) Free classes, and this is one of two troublesome classes. I usually teach one class before the 2 day class as a sample - if you liked this class, come back for the weekend class. Usually they charge 10 pounds (somewhere between $15 and $20 depending on exchange rate) for this class and I usually fill a large room - 300 to 500 people. The sample class often makes enough money to cover all of my expenses and pay me for the weekend class - meaning Raindance makes a bundle. This year - 5 classes, 4 which are absolutely free and 1 that costs the price of a cinema ticket because they are holding it at the festival venue when there is not a movie showing. I worry that the free classes are killing the weekend class...

But I am also worried about 2 of the classes that Elliot (Mr Raindance) picked from my list of potential classes: THE IDEA MACHINE and SEX & VIOLENCE. The problem with S&V is that there was no class, just a title. I brought a couple of articles and jotted notes in the plane, but I’m afraid I only have half an hour of material. The IDEA class has a different problem - I am teaching the Idea version of the 2 day class, and fear this will *really* undercut that class... unless I come up with something different. Again - ideas jotted on the plane for a brand new class, but I have no idea whether it will last 2 hours or 20 minutes. And guess which class costs the price of a cinema ticket? This class is also an hour earlier, due to film scheduling at the cinema. That ends up not being a problem as I was awake at 6am.

On the way to the class I almost get hit by a bus going to Dullwich Library... and decide to use that as part of the class. My idea for the class was to do brainstorming - real audience participation stuff - in order to find interesting ideas. I scribbled down 12 ways to find ideas that I have never used before, and what I was afraid might be 20 minutes of class turned into 2 hours of fun. People came up withy crazy ideas and I’d had enough coffee at that point to turn audience suggestions into stories - even when the audience suggestions were strange. So, is there a library where a dull witch can learn how to be exciting?

Raindance videoed my first class - a really cute American girl (tall) was operating the camera. But she couldn’t be here for this class. At first I thought that was great - since I expected this made up class to completely suck - but after the class I really wished someone had got it on tape, since I was on a roll. Can’t have everything.

After the class I got tickets for two movies, CHAMELEON and GUTS - both had some criminal element in them. But I was exhausted and needed to write my magazine article - the editor was e-mailing me... and e-mailing Raindance! So I retired to a coffee shop to write, hoping to have it finished by the time the first movie started.

No such luck. Whatever energy I had I used up doing my class. I struggled with the article for a while, and then wandered to the cinema a half hour before GUTS began, and had a coffee with Janet in the lobby... then a strange thing happened. I did not go see GUTS, even though I had a ticket in my pocket. I went back to the coffee shop to try and write some more... but people claim they saw me in the cinema watching GUTS. I have no memory at all of the film. None. I was exhausted and sleepy and swear I did not see that film. But a couple of people asked me what I thought of it and swore they saw me in the cinema. Sleep film viewing?

I *did* finish my article, but was so tired I was afraid it might not make sense. So I’m going to read it tomorrow, make corrections, then e-mail it. This is one of those magazines that pays me nothing (as in $0 - they don’t even give me a free advert) so I’m not feeling really guilty about it being late.

Anyway - the main thing that happened that day was that I had my first real meal since arriving in London. Yesterday I ate a bag of popcorn - that was my meal for the entire day - and I wondered if part of my exhaustion may be due to not eating enough. So I wandered into Chinatown, avoiding Mr. Wu’s All You Can Eat Buffett, and had a sit down Chinese meal... which always bothers me because they have no doggie bags in London. What you don’t eat is thrown away (or maybe scraped from your plate and sold to Mr. Wu’s). But I’d had a meal! Instead of giving me energy, it made me sleepy. I went back to the cinemas, almost went to see a movie, but made the mistake of having a beer and talking to some people... and the beer just killed me. I barely made it back across London before falling asleep.

Just a completely wasted day except for the class and possibly seeing GUTS while somnabulating.

SCRIPT SECRETS: LONDON - October 10 & 11, 2009 - BIG IDEA class, using GHOST as our primary example and it includes the new Thematic element!

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: The Sex Scene Tip which goes along with my Sex & Violence Class
Yesterday's Dinner: Egg rice, sweet & sour chicken, egg rolls, BBQ ribs.

London 6: Day 4 - Class & Movies

Saturday... no fire alarm this morning, but not great sleep, either. I dash off to Starbucks to get some coffee and post some blog entries. The employees recognize me, which I find strange - how many customers do they serve a day? Is it because I joke with them about not wanting milk in my coffee? I don’t really have too much time to check e-mail and post because I have one of those 5 (FIVE!) Free classes today at the Raindance Café - Guerrilla Marketing. This will be an easy one because I have done it so many times before, though I always add something new.

Elliot gives me a hard sell introduction that makes me a little uncomfortable, but then I launch into my class and it goes well. Afterwards many people come up to talk to me, and I warn them that I have movies to see and may have to leave abruptly. My friends Robert and Paul have taken the class and I talk to them for a while - they will be pitching at the Live Ammunition pitchfest thing on Monday night... where I will be on the other side of the desk. Other people talk to me about my website or blog, and some just want to chat...

But here’s the thing - screenwriting is *communication* - and I am always amazed by the handful of people who seem to have no ability to communicate. I’m not talking about nervous people, I’m talking about people who say odd things or have trouble forming a sentence... yet want to write screenplays. There are a couple in every class. Oh, and there is also at least one stalker in every class. Some person who will not leave me alone and will follow me around the room. These are never attractive women, they are almost always strangely dressed men. And often there is someone who fits both - that “fan” who thinks that instead of saying, “Hello, Bill, my name is Carter and I read your website every day, nice to meet you in person, I’m working on a romantic comedy script, can I ask you a question?” they find some obscure thing I once said on my blog, and thinking they will win points with me for knowing some strange trivia about me will open with, “Do you need your hotel key to keep the lights on?” And I think they are crazy or maybe I’ve stumbled into the middle of a conversation... and they keep going on about blades that cut toilet paper and things that make no sense to me at all... because *I* have not read the entry on my blog about the hotel room in Denmark where I stayed in 2006 since 2006. They think I’ll be amazed at how well they know me, but I am confused because this isn’t the way you begin a conversation with someone you have never met in person... to me it sounds like a madman’s ravings. When you meet me, talk to me like a normal person - I *am* a normal person.

So I tell the crazy person I must go - I have a movie to see in a few minutes and must walk through the construction zone at Piccadilly to get to the cinema... and they follow me out the door saying more strange things that I don’t understand.

MOVIE - Vacation - A Japanese film about a death row prison guard in his 40s who is preparing to marry a widow with a young son, and in order to get two weeks off for his honeymoon volunteers to assist in an execution. Guards who do normal execution duty get the weekend off, guards who handle the executed prisoner once they are dead get two weeks off - because it scars you for life. So the day of the wedding and the day of the execution approaches, and our quiet guard must prepare for both events.

This film moved slow but was very well written - the guards all had distinctive personalities and after one or two scenes you knew each of them as if they were *your* co-workers. Not easy (to my Western eyes) when you consider that all of the guards wear identical uniforms and all are Japanese and speak Japanese. Every guard had their own perspective on the execution, from the old guard close to retirement who has been part of many executions to the new guard who will be experiencing his first execution and doesn’t know what to expect. Our protagonist has been through this before, and gets sick thinking about it.

The death row inmate is one of the major characters, and we never know what he has done to deserve this, but his appeals have not been granted. One of the fascinating things is that they do not tell him when he will be executed - this is kept secret from the inmate and the world outside so as not to cause problems. The press doesn’t know, the public doesn’t know, and because the inmate doesn’t know he will not freak out. The guards know - and must balance keeping the secret with wanting to make sure the inmates final days are pleasant ones.

Of course, no one can keep this secret, and it creates complications when the inmate wonders why the guards are being so kind to him.

Along with the planning of the wedding and the various pre-wedding events, our quiet guard’s biggest problem is his fiance’s young son. He wants to create a relationship with the boy, but neither is outgoing. The boy sits alone and draws pictures... and this creates and interesting parallel between the wedding an the execution, because the inmate also draws pictures. The boy draws fire engines and typical little boy things, the inmate draws scenic pictures of the outside world... and world he will never see again. Eventually the inmate draws a picture of our quiet guard and a generic woman getting married, and the boy draws a picture of his new family holding hands together.

There is a great scene - really well written - where our guard and his fiance are meeting the wedding planner, and the son wanders away and is lost. The fiance goes into a panic, and they search the grounds for him. The guard thinks like a child and finds the boy sleeping with his drawings in a hiding place, calls his finace on his mobile phone. He picks up the sleeping boy and carries him back, and the fiance asks if the boy is too heavy for him to carry. That line is *not* about the weight of the boy, but about whether our quiet guard is really ready to be a father. A good example of subtext in dialogue.

And then the two events occur, one right after the other... and each is very emotional. This is a quiet little film that still has me thinking about life and death. I suspect it was made as an anti-death penalty film - you witness the inmate’s execution and it is not pretty - but it is also a great character story about a quiet man who makes a major sacrifice to have a family and no longer be alone.

MEALS? What should have been my dinner break between movies is not very long, so I grab a coffee at the Costa Coffee next door to stay awake and do a little work on a late article for MovieScope Magazine... but after typing a couple of sentences it’s time for the next movie to start...

MOVIE: No One’s Son - from Croatia. This is another of those films where the actor is so strong someone in Hollywood should consider casting him. This guy was just amazing. The film is political in ways I did not fully understand. Our lead Ivan (amazing Alen Liveric) is a hero of the civil war who lost his legs when Serbian soldiers used him to find mines... they took all of the POWs and had them walk in front of the Serbian soldiers through a mine field (or get shot). Now he’s confined to a wheelchair, remember the time before the war when he was the famous front man for the rock band Refinery. He watches video of himself singing and doing dance moves that he can never do in his wheel chair. His father is a politician running for office... and the movie opens with his father and mother cleaning up after a murder in their living room. There is a dead man on the floor! Shot! They wrap his body up in sheets, take it out to the car (making sure the nosey next door neighbor isn’t watching), drive it into the country and bury it... then father and mother return and prepare for another day of campaigning. Who this dead guy is, who killed him, and why, is the meat of the story - and create a nice mystery that drives the film. Was it the father? The war hero son? The father’s right hand man who would do anything to win the election? Though not a traditional mystery with clues, the dead guy in the living room makes this more than a character study of a man who has lost his legs and his future in the war.

Iavn is an angry drunk, who has a suicidal urge to singe pro-Serbian songs in Croatian bars. This makes no sense, as he is Croatian and the Serbs are responsible for blowing off his legs. And *this* ties in with the dead guy in the living room (eventually). He also has an ex-wife and young son... and there’s a restraining order against him. His ex plans on moving to New Zealand with his son, and this causes him to violate the restraining order again and again as he fights to keep his son. He is a man at war with himself - and I believe the entire film is symbolic of the problems in Croatia today... and that’s the part that was lost on me...

But even without that extra layer of story, this is one powerful performance in an interesting film. As Ivan’s drunken exploits become an embarrassment to his politician father, who is trying to cover up the murder in his living room, a police detective begins to piece together the story and wonder why the politician and his wife would not be home in the middle of the night...

As election day approaches, and the day Ivan’s wife and son leave for New Zealand approaches, and the police detective assembles his evidence; all of these connected plot threads come together in a series of scenes that impact all of the characters... and we find out who killed the man on the living room floor and who he was... and how everything we thought we knew about these characters was wrong.

Liveric gives an amazing performance, and the special effects to remove his legs are seamless and invisible - reminding you of Gary Sinese’s character in FOREST GUMP. Another good film, and especially a great actor’s showcase.

MEALS? Between films I grab a soda and popcorn - this will be my meal for the day.

MOVIE: Redlands - 35mm mumblecore? Shot with all natural light in sepia tones with dozens of filters and film stock pushed until it grains out, this is the story of a family who lives deep in the woods in the 1800s, and a hunting trip to provide food for a starving family. Movie opens with the teenaged daughter self-aborting a baby by slamming a rock against her belly... and father discovers her and wants to know who got her knocked up, but she won’t tell. Of course, none of this is overt - you must figure it out. Much of the “story” is from her point of view with her narration. She was in love with a boy who moved down the mountain to town... and there are constant flashbacks of them making love in blurry grainy underlit extreme close ups that make you wonder what you are seeing. Much of the film is like this - BARRY LYNDON was also lit by candles, but that is a beautiful film where we can see the images clearly. That film used candle light to give the movie a warm natural glow that made you feel as if you were in the room, watching Marisa Berenson bathe. Here - not enough candles (two), so the film is pushed to grain, and even when it is not a close up, it is so grainy and dark that you often do not know what you are seeing. The film does have a distinctive look - I’m just not sure it works to get the story to the audience.

The daughter seems to be crazy, and has set the chickens free (have you ever tried to do that? Chickens are not intelligent, and always return to the place where they were last fed - they come back to the roost) and the family is starving. So dad and older brother send word (how?) to town to get a friend who is a good hunter... and just happens to the boy who knocked up the daughter. Which means the daughter and her lover are reunited for a few days before the men go off to hunt... and father begins to suspect this is the guy who knocked her up. As the three man hunting party crosses the woods and fords rivers and walks for more than half the film, we cross-cut to daughter and mother and younger brother slowly starving...

Except, I could not understand *why* they are starving. They do not have meat, but they live in the woods surrounded by vegetation. The film was shot in Northern California - and as a kid we went camping in that area... there are wild berries all over the place and no shortage of edible plants (many shown on screen in the film). There are scenes at a pond near their cabin... and why didn’t they consider fishing in the pond? In fact, when the hunters ford the river, I wondered why they didn’t just stop and fish. As a kid, camping near the Gualala River, we often caught fish *with our hands* - there were that many fish! That was only a few decades ago, when lots of people fished the river... in the 1800s? The situation seemed completely contrived and unrealistic.

The film is one of those “visual poems” that are all image and not much in the way of story - the men hunt, the women starve, the daughter remembers having blurry close up underlit grainy sex with the boy.... and that’s 85% of the movie! Eventually mom starves to death and dad “accidentally” kills the boy who knocked up his daughter in a hunting accident and they also kill a moose, and then they return home with the meat and they bury mom and the daughter decides to sleep with her father and gets knocked up again... the end.

At the Q&A afterwards that incest element was the center of questions, and there seemed to be no answers to any story questions other than it began with an image. The film does have a look, but it seems to have only enough story for 20 minutes stretched to 2 hours... and the story is simple and doesn’t really explore any of the characters. We never understand the daughter at all (filmmakers say on purpose) and she is our main character. None of the characters end up more than sketches - surface material. The film is all surface - external - images of men walking in the woods. We never get inside the characters. We never understand the characters. The film seems to treat a giant dead tree a hunter walks across and the hunter walking across it as equals - both just *things*. Dead things. This is the thing I hate about Michael Bay’s direction - it’s external and unemotional and treats everything like a product being sold in an advert. There is no difference if the “product” is a tree - it is still external and unemotional and divorced from being human. The numerous filters and grainy images and sepia tones work to *distance* the audience from the story - to turn the images into images instead of *people* on screen. It’s as if a *robot* is directing. Michael Bay’s images are cold. He does not tell a story visually, he has pretty product shots. And we get something similar here - characters seen at a distance walking through the woods... and the one character that we get close to (in focal distance) - the daughter who narrates every once in a while - is impossible to understand. She does things without reason, sleeping with the boy and sleeping with her father are equal acts... and as much as her narration may say she loves the boy, the *film* does not contain love... it is as cold and dead as the tree the hunter walks across. No effort is made to bring us into her character - instead we are kept at a distance. This is a cold, dead film with beautiful scenery. All externals.

Why are so many filmmakers afraid of human experiences? Why create all of these walls technically to push the viewer away from the people in their film? Why make cold and unemotional films and hold the characters at a distance? And why *contrive* a story, making it all seem unnatural and false and machine created? Movies are about *people*... and people are the ones who see movies. Just as a car chase does not buy a ticket to see a movie, neither does a *shot* or an *image*. If those shots and images distance us from the humans on screen and distance from *humanity* they are sabotaging the film... and making something that will appeal to Michael bay and robots.

Hmm, I guess there is now little chance that guy is going to buy a script from me, huh?

SCRIPT SECRETS: LONDON - October 10 & 11, 2009 - BIG IDEA class, using GHOST as our primary example and it includes the new Thematic element!

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: It's who you know
Yesterday's Dinner: Popcorn. Sweet, not savory... does that make it unsavory popcorn?

London 5: Day 3 - Movies!

I make it to the Apollo Cinema just in time to see a movie I missed last night that is in competition... so I *must* see it. There are three screens showing movies from 1 pm until 11pm every day - and that means I can only see one third of the films shown every day. For some reason, all of the films in competition are showing at the 7pm or 9pm slots - and they are really in competition... you must decide which you are going to see! Many of the films repeat in the mornings at the 1pm slot - but that is when I am doing those 5 (FIVE!) Free classes... or on the last two days of the fest during the morning when I am doing my weekend class. COLLIN, the $70 zombie movie, I will miss to see REDLANDS and then miss again to teach one of those free classes.

In past years they began movies at 9am, and had midnight shows on Friday and Saturday - not this year. I suspect that’s because of the venue change. The early morning shows are hard to get an audience for (the mall was open at 9am for shoppers, and I suspect they accounted for much of the morning audience when the festival was there) and the midnight shows require people to find their own way home as the subway stops at 11pm (when the pubs close and pretty much the whole city closes). So it seemed like there were fewer showings of about the same number of movies - and that meant they were all showing at the same time!

MOVIE: YOU WONT MISS ME (directed by Ry Russo-Young) - Mumblecore! The film is being touted as using several different film & tape stocks, but it doesn’t seem as if they used different film stocks for any *reason*, more like they borrowed different cameras from friends and were forced to use different films and tape and digital mediums. So some scenes have a crisp look and others are grainy and others are a mess of pixels... and there seems to be no reason for any of this. The film is not in focus, and the “story” also lacks focus... making it difficult to explain. And it often makes no sense, is completely contrived, and contradicts itself. The story opens with a 20 something woman (Stella Schnabel) in a psychiatrist’s office - we never see him, just a handheld shot of her face - as he tells her they are releasing her from the institution. They will keep cutting back to this exchange as an attempt to link completely unrelated scenes and shots and sequences... but it never works. One of the problems is the shrink doesn’t sound like a shrink at all - more like a “wishful thinking device” that tells her she doesn’t belong in a mental institution or that she’s one of the most well-adjusted people he’s ever met or...

She is a wanna-be actress, and we she goes to some auditions where everyone says she’s brilliant... but I wouldn’t have hired her. And the auditions are, well, crazy. Not like any audition for anything I’ve ever seen. There is a stage audition where two Gay guys just have her sit on stage and talk, and then one of them says, “We have to wrap this up because Sparky has to eat, you know” - which I’m using as my new catch-phrase. Another audition has her improvising for something, but the improvisation is junk... and afterwards the director says she’s brilliant, but too edgy, but he has a friend making a film that she would be *perfect* for, can he pass her name on to him? All of these auditions seem like more wishful thinking, because she’s just not that good.

Oh, and there are boys she goes out with, and some grainy shots of her riding on the back of a motorcycle with some bearded guy that get cut into the film about every 5 minutes - just a snippet. At one point that bearded guy (or maybe some other bearded guy) goes up to her apartment and gets into a fight with her... and then they go on to something else and you wonder what that was all about. There is one guy she hangs out with a lot who is a long time friend, because she says “We’ve known each other ten years, right?” at least three times in the film. The problem with improvised dialogue is that it is improvised - it stumbles all over the place and often contains some big smelly dump of exposition that was probably given to the actors just before shooting the scene. I think she sleeps with this guy near the end of the film, and then they go shopping for flowers together for some woman he’s dating... but I don’t think we ever met the woman.

Nothing happens... and even though the film was under 2 hours, I expected to have a full beard when the house lights came up at the end.

And none of it made any sense at all. In one scene she is suddenly in a country house, when she was in an apartment before. People show up at the country house and they sit around and talk without the hand-held camera changing angle, then the next scene she’s in her New York apartment again - WTF? There’s a scene where she smokes cigarettes in a hotel lobby for no reason, and then the doorman (face blurred) tells her she can’t smoke there, and she gets into a completely contrived argument with him when she refuses to leave, and security is brought in (also blur-faced) to remove her... and I guess the camera person, as there is something that looks like Paul Greengrass having an epileptic seizure as they leave the hotel lobby. And there’s a scene where she walks into a couple of really crappy restaurants and begs for a dishwashing job... the restaurant employees sometimes having blur-faces, sometimes they must have signed releases... And then the *very next scene* has her in the back of a limo going to Atlantic City to see a concert! WTF? In Atlantic City, she is staying in a hotel room with a friend we have never seen before (played by a much cuter and much better actress) and they get in a *massive* argument over... well, nothing at all. It was completely contrived. They see a concert - some grunge band - and then go back to a hotel room and hang out with them and drink and talk about nothing (all shot hand held and if there’s a cut, it’s not for any purpose, more that they had to change tapes).

The film just seems like a bunch of completely unrelated scenes that never add up to a story or anything else... and have zero truth, because everything seems false and contrived and filled with wish fulfillment lines from the shrink. The Emperor Has No Focus Puller. And this is in competition? What has cinema come to? I thought the whole idea was to communicate a story to the audience - and to make them feel something or even think about something. But this film was one WTF? moment after another - and frequently a WTF am I looking at? moment because it was out of focus. I suspect if I asked the filmmaker what she was trying to say, she either wouldn’t have an answer or whatever she answered would in no way match what was on screen (meaning she failed at saying that). Even if she said she just wanted to show this character’s life experience, that would be a failure because it’s so false and contrived. If she’s begging for a dishwashing job, how can she afford the limo to take her to Atlantic City? It’s all false!



MOVIE: 25 CARATS (written and directed by Patxi Amezcuza) - One of the best films I have seen at the festival... actually, as I write this, the best so far. Spanish (Spain is making all of the great films these days) crime film... but about parents trying not to disappoint their children (and vice versa). See, that makes it sound like some serious movie, and it’s a clever crime flick that had me laughing at the cool twists and cons and wondering how many times the filmmaker has seen LEON: THE PROFESSIONAL, because this film was obviously influenced by it. The parents and children thing came a day later when I found myself still thinking about the movie... because it’s more than just entertainment.

Late teen cutie Kay lives with her con-man father Sebas, who wants her *not* to follow in his criminal footsteps... um, too late. She tells him she is not doing anything illegal... then meets a girl friend to drink some beers and then go steal some cars in the most amusing way possible - you laugh outloud at their method. Kay wears a choker and has her hair cut just like Natalie Portman in LEON, even though she’s a few years older, so that we can have a real romance with her version of Jean Renot...

Abel is an ex-boxer and single father who works as an enforcer for a minor mobster who owns a BMW car lot. His son spends most of his time with Abel’s parents while he is out beating people up and collecting money. He wants to be a good father and a good son, and worries that his job is making him neither.

One day when Kay attempts to steal a car from a plainclothes cop and it looks like she will go to jail and her father will find out she’s a criminal like he is, Abel gets out of his car (stopped in traffic) and clubs the cop and rescues her. This begins their friendship which blossoms into a romance.

Oh, but there’s a plot or two...

A really crooked cop and his robbery squad are robbers themselves - jewel thieves. They have a big sack of jewelry they need to turn into cash, so they go to Kay’s father Sebas who claims to know a fence called The Dutchman who specializes in really hot jewels. Sebas is this funny, charismatic con man with a soul patch and sparkling eyes. Whenever he’s on screen he just steals the scene. He can be in the background of a scene - or tied to a chair with a hood over his head - and steal the scene. This actor could be a star in America and never have to learn English. But Sebas is a conman - so he *does* know The Dutchman, but also has a bigger plan... he has videotaped the meeting with the crooked cop, plans to sell it to a local TV news show, and after the crooked cop is arrested? Well, he has the money from the jewel sale to The Dutchman! Of course, all of this will require some split second timing and decoys and false bags of jewels and real bags of jewels and places with back doors and all kinds of other fun things that make this film funny and suspenseful and clever and just plain cool.

The second plot concerns Abel’s boss whose wife tells him Abel is skimming money. When he comes back saying that he could only get $100k from someone instead of the full $120k, it’s because he is stealing the $20k. The boss is torn - Abel is a friend of his, almost like a son to him. He doesn’t believe he could be skimming... but do you believe your wife or your employee? So he sends a hitman, known as The Turk (even though he is *not* Turkish) to kill Abel. Since Abel is not skimming money, he must figure out why this is happening, and it ends up being traced back to the mobster’s wife.

Okay - these two plots are going on while Kay is trying to be a good daughter to her father (and vice versa) and Abel is trying to be a good father to his son, and a good son to his father... and Kay and Abel are falling in love (hmm, hadn’t thought of the character names before). She is his second chance, he is probably a more stable father figure to her... but also a good man despite his occupation. You know, I mentioned the actor who played the father, but these two are also amazing. The actor who plays Abel has a great pock-marked face and soulful eyes - kind of like Stallone’s eyes in ROCKY - and can be tough and tender and also just captures the screen. He is like Reno in LEON... a real discovery. And the actress who plays Kay is equally good - she is cute and sexy and sly, and has the ability to show us what is going on beneath the surface.

One of the great things about this film is the cast - everyone is charismatic and interesting and plays their role with depth - there are no one dimensional characters in the film, even the villains are shaded and interesting. Everyone in this film is great - and the mob boss’s wife, who has a handful of scenes, is fantastic in them. The crooked cop and his squad are all fully developed characters, each with their own personality and quirks and character and looks. Great acting, great writing.

Eventually, Kay and Abel realize that to solve their plot problems they will have to work together to create an amazing scam that plays one side off against the other and leaves them with the money and their loved ones unharmed... but the film still has many twists and some heart-breaking elements that haunt you days after you have seen the film. One of those movies that may seem like just a funj crime film, but has a lot more going on in it.

MOVIE: DOWN TERRACE (directed by Ben Wheatley, written by Wheatley and Robin Hill) - The filmmakers had just flown in from Austin, where there film had *won* and they had fired shotguns for the first time... which seems somewhat odd since the film is a crime movie filled with violence. Kind of a dark comedy version of THE GODFATHER, but with British accents.

The aging leader of a small city criminal organization and his slacker son are released from jail after sex months, and there’s a welcome home party at their house. Not all celebration because someone on their crew must have ratted them out... but who? What makes it funny is that each member of the crime family has a very human character element that is in contrast to their gangster persona. So the hit man has a three year old son and can’t find a sitter, so he takes his kid in a stroller on a hit. The kid gets away, as does the assassination target, and the hit man must juggle controlling his child and cornering and killing the target... and that’s funny. The slacker son is tired of his father and mother trying to control his life - he is 33 (and still living at home) - and seems unlikely to take over the crime family whenever dad retires or... And when the doorbell rings and it’s slacker son’s girlfriend... she’s about six months preggers. Dad wonders if it’s his son’s kid or some strangers - does his son have the balls to father a child? Probably a girl child, he certainly doesn’t have the sperm to father a boy.

Dad is a character - not exactly Don Corleone. He’s an ex-hippy who got into drugs and the drug trade, because he thought drugs would change the world. We would all be dropping acid and dropping out. But, eventually he just became a gangster... who sings folk songs and has a guitar collection and when he gets drunk talks about how they were all going to change the world in the 60s and now nobody seems to care. This doesn’t mean he’s not vicious - he spends the film looking for the member of his crew who rated him out... and many crew members get whacked. Some because they act suspicious, some just because they are irritating. And the deaths are brutal and often funny... I laughed when an old woman who is the town gossip is pushed into traffic, It was brutal and unexpected and shocking and she bounced off a car hood in an amusing way. Eventually there are very few living suspects, but they still aren’t sure who ratted them out. Dad sings folk songs and bitches at his son for being worthless, and a dinner with the about-to-pop fiancé and mom & dad goes horribly wrong.

The film finds humor in the showing us how hard it is to dig a hole to bury a guy after you’ve wacked him, and the difficulties of having a domineering dad who is also the head of a crime family. You don’t want to blow up and tell him how you really feel.

After the film the director and most of the crew did a Q&A and the film became even more amazing - shot in 8 days! The director and co-writer were childhood friends who made VHS movies together and now they work in TV and commercials. They thought it would be fun to make a feature, so it was written around Hill’s parent’s house, since they knew they could get it for free. And Hill cast his dad as the crime family leader (great job!) because he had all of those guitars and could riff on what it was like in the 60s. The 8 day shoot was divided by scenes and pages into minutes and seconds on a stop watch and they knew *exactly* how much time they had to light and shoot each scene - and kept to that schedule no matter what. Usually they had half an hour to shoot each scene - as many takes as they could do in those 30 minutes... and not a single take more.

After the film I walk back across London to my hotel to try and get some sleep to make up for the fire alarm blast this morning, but my body is still on LA time, so it takes a while to drift off. On the way back, I stop at a Subway Sandwiches and buy some cookies and a soft drink, because my meal du jour was a sandwich from the EATS store across from the cinema bought between films. I am living on coffee and sandwiches and beers in the cinema lobby bar. I need to get some real sleep!

PS: I’ve decided to do a post on Mumblecore - why I think it is the end of cinema and why Mumblecore filmmakers should receive a mandatory death sentence - at some future date. It all ties into that movie THE INCREDIBLES...

SCRIPT SECRETS: LONDON - October 10 & 11, 2009 - BIG IDEA class, using GHOST as our primary example and it includes the new Thematic element!

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Cut The Wandering and FARGO
Yesterday's Dinner: Packaged chicken sandwich from the store across from the cinema.

London 4: Day 3 - Chasing Elliot

After finally getting to sleep... the hotel’s fire alarm goes off just after 6 am. False alarm, but you still have to throw on your clothes and grab your critical belongings, just in case. Couldn’t go back to sleep afterwards, so I wrote some blog entries.

Elliot (Mr. Raindance) said he wanted to talk to me, and I needed to get my festival pass. This year they had something new called the Raindance Café - a place to meet between screenings and for events like my (FIVE) free classes. That’s where they had the festival passes, too. But I went to the Raindance office first - in Soho - where you walk down a very narrow steep stairway to their basement offices. They should make a horror movie about the stairway... it looks far more dangerous than any of the contraptions in the SAW movies.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs, they told me that Elliot had just gone to the Raindance Café a few minutes ago, I could catch him there. Did I know where that was?
I had my big festival book with me because I had been sitting in a coffee shop marking movies I wanted to see earlier, and the address and a sketchy map was inside. I figured I could find it.

One of the strange things is that for whatever reason (friendly face?) people keep coming up to me on the street and asking me for directions. German people, Japanese people, Italian people, Scandinavian people. And, I often know the answer. Not because I have “the knowledge”, but because they are asking for places I have been. Tourist places. So I point them in the right direction and smile, not understanding a word they are saying, and hope they find their way. But this has made me believe *I* know where I am going - and I do not. I find Poland street but can not find the street address at all. I wander up and down the street looking at numbers - but it seems that the number I want does not exist. After a few tries, I figure out my mistake and find the correct address... but can this possibly be the right place? It’s a record store with two chairs... are the two chairs the “Raindance Café”? I look around the record store for someone I know, and a salesman asks if I’ve been served. I ask where the Raindance Café is, and he says “Apparently, it’s downstairs” and points to a door at the back of the shop. There are stairs behind the door and I descend...

Into a huge basement that runs the entire block - the warehouse area for every business on the street! And it is in the process of being converted into a stage area and lounge area and a screening area. Cool. I ask for Elliot... “He just went to the cinema, you must have walked right past him.” I ask for my festival badge, and they tell me their printer / laminator has broken down, so they write my name on a badge card and hand it to me. I can now get into *any* movie at the festival. Cool.

I head to the cinemas - which is a bit of a problem because they are tearing up the Piccadilly Circus area and there are detours and construction areas and a million tourists clogging the sidewalks still in operation. I finally get to the cinemas...

Where they tell me I’ve just missed Elliot, he went back to the office. Did we pass each other in the construction bottleneck? While I’m there I get tickets for the movies I want to see, then head back to the Raindance office. It’s been warm in London, and I’m working up a sweat walking back and forth - and these places are not close to each other (London people will now think I’m a wimp, but as the song says - nobody walks in L.A. and this is several big city blocks). I get to the office, climb down the horror-movie staircase, and...

Ellliot is there! And he’s being kind of evasive. Something is going on. Seems that I’m doing my class for a cut of the profits instead of a flat fee, and they have neglected to print up any fliers for the class (though there’s a stack of fliers at the cinema for Elliot’s class) - this pisses me off, because I could have easily printed up some $39 Overnight post cards if I had known. Actually, I should do that anyway - and use stickers for the dates and locations. But, Elliot says I should sell the heck out of my CDs just to make sure I make some money... except I have only brought about 50 CDs. I can’t pack a whole suitcase of CDs, and I have brought 50 CDs for the weekend class with additional class materials on them. 100 CDs total - but only 50 that I can sell. I’m not here to sell CDs, I’m here to watch movies and drink Guiness and teach a class. Had I known, I would have figured out a way to bring more CDs to sell. Can I make more CDs in London? Well, I can burn them, but the labels will be difficult because they are designed on a template that uses US paper sizes, not UK paper sizes. I’ll have to find some way to create new labels. Elliot tells me that 140 people have signed up for tomorrow’s free class, but won’t say how many people are signed up for the weekend class. Swell. But, can I sell all 50 CDs at tomorrow’s class and then make more for the other free classes?

I don’t have time to think about that, because I have movies to see...

SCRIPT SECRETS: LONDON - October 10 & 11, 2009 - BIG IDEA class, using GHOST as our primary example and it includes the new Thematic element!

PS: I posted over the weekend, don't miss those adventures!

- Bill
IMPORTANT UPDATE:
TODAY'S SCRIPT TIP: Cut The Wandering and FARGO
Yesterday's Dinner: Packaged chicken sandwich from the store across from the cinema.