Tuesday, August 28, 2007

Spec Frustration

The esteemed Eric Pope and I are currently brainstorming a new verb to describe a common phenomenon amongst aspiring screenwriters (which, to my knowledge, doesn’t have its own slang term yet):

_______ : -verb (used without object)
To experience the inevitable but crushing sadness caused by discovery that your brilliant, original spec script is undeniably similar to a Hollywood project that just moved into production.

Here are some of the verbs we’ve bandied about:

• Brainjacked
• Dehymen’d
• Hollycocked
• Hollyblocked

Surely you have more ideas….

(For Pope, he was ______ by I Sell the Dead.
I was ______ upon learning of Adventureland‘s existence.)

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Themes & Outlines

We had a big Wasteland meeting last night, in which the producers unveiled the seven outlines for the seven shows we’ll be putting up in November/December.  The seven organizing principals have held up well, and will indeed be the 7 shows we produce.

A hell of a lot of time was spent parsing through two months’ worth of material, then organizing it by theme, then scraping and molding it to feel cohesive.  We still have a lot of work to do, but the show outlines look very exciting.  I think we’ve managed to write about 6.5 hours, and the remainder will come together by the end of August.  We’ve got films, experimental videos, stage sketches, fake video games, musical numbers, audience-interactive bits, and jokes to produce, rehearse, and polish.  There’s not nearly enough room in our schedules to do it all, but luckily the producers have the power to bend space-time.  All my other projects take a back-seat until Christmas.

My personal challenge in the next two weeks is to rewrite a series of sketches for the War/Aggression show, tentatively titled “My Thing Is Bigger.”  I’d written a fun running bit about a unicorn terrorist attack and the media’s exploitation of the event, which would periodically interrupt T.S. Eliot’s late-night program.  (We’ve begun referring to these running motifs as superstructures, to differentiate them from the 3-act structure we’ve built around Eliot’s show-within-a-show.)  After discussing this episode with Tucker and Haas, we decided we were missing an opportunity to actually discuss issues surrounding the Iraq War, the fictitious “War on Terror,” and the trouble we Americans have dissecting the conflict.  The unicorn runner, fanciful as it is, is going to be reworked to be a little heavier, a little more palpably linked to the global events of the last six years.

The difficulty, of course, is actually writing a series of scenes about the Iraq War, without undue levity or condescending heavy-handedness, starring a bunch of fucking unicorns.  The point is not to engage in discourse about the war, but to pull our comedy from the aspects of the war that are most real, most difficult.  I think our team can pull it off, so long as we use these:

Thursday, July 19, 2007

Baby’s First Screenplay

Today I finished the first draft of my first real screenplay. THUMBS UP! Although this should probably feel like an accomplishment, I’m too aware of how much work still needs to be done to really enjoy the fleeting moment. In many ways the work is only now starting; I’ve got the skeleton of the story on the page, I know who my characters are and where they’re going, and I basically have the sequences laid out.  However, the script suffers from the following:

• Acts 1 and 3 are too long
• Shifts in protagonist’s desire aren’t mapped to specific twists in the story
• Act 2 climax doesn’t feel climactic
• Subplot about protagonist’s parents feels forced and clunky; I forget why I created it in the first place
• I’m not using all the aspects of my primary setting to their fullest
• There are about 20 pages of room to expand, but I can’t figure out what precisely would be enhanced by expansion
• It isn’t funny yet

... and that’s just off the top of my head, without any feedback from other readers. My screenwriting professor is going to tear this thing apart (thank god).

I’m looking forward to the next (insert high number here) drafts, because I tend to do my best writing in smaller chunks in the revision process.  The shittiest scene ever written is still less intimidating than a blank page.  It will probably be another 4-5 drafts before I share the script with anybody.

I’m also—and I can’t figure out whether this is good or bad—looking forward to the next script I want to write, which becomes alarming only when I start thinking and plotting this next project while my unfinished script sits on the screen, demanding love.  I want to develop my current spec script to the point that I’m proud of it, then mail it into the wild in hopes of securing an agent. Am I naïve to think that my first screenplay ever is going to be worth purchasing, or land me representation?  I’m not going to mail the fucker until it’s representative of what I can do, but still… it’s the first.  Part of me wants to revise, polish, and bury it, theoretically forcing the emotional detachment necessary to throw a spec script against a wall of rejection letters.  But… I like my script.  I like the characters.  Someday it will be airtight, charming, and funny.

WOULD THAT DAY WERE TODAY!

Isn’t that right, noble steed?

Monday, July 16, 2007

You and I are done.

I’ve watched the season finale of The Office, season 3, at least four times. Last night I watched it again with Sarah, and the magic is still strong. The episode’s final beats are two of the most elegant climaxes I’ve ever seen—both beautiful for opposite reasons—and that’s about all I can say without diving into spoilers. Jim’s epiphany towards the end of the episode was also intercut with a true flashback, which I thought was taboo in the documentary-style of The Office… but yeah, it fucking works, and all the seeds were planted so it didn’t feel forced or out of place. 

I would kill to work on that show. I think the turning point, in terms of my obsession with The Office, was reading this interview with Mindy Kaling, in which she references the kinds of discussions they have in their writing meetings.  Wait, it’s not just writing jokes? You actually discuss character, truth, honesty, plot and development? For a job? It’s so obvious, watching the show, how much care is put into the writing, but to hear the process described in such plain terms… well, it makes it seem accessible, normal.

p.s. This article on the management lessons of The Office is alternately insightful and embarrassing.

Wednesday, July 11, 2007

Mercy, Melody!

I blame a tiny deformity in my mouth for my terrible poetry and songwriting.

When I was a wee lad, I had superhuman hearing and a minor cleft in my throat.  The cleft—specifically a submucous cleft—prevented (and still prevents) me from closing off the back of my throat like a normal person. Or so I’m told. I went through speech therapy so long ago that my only memory of it is a tiny plastic ball covered in velcro, which I used to toss against a fuzzy dartboard while a nice lady urged me to say “lamp” instead of “mamp.”  Apparently the therapy worked, because nobody knows I have a speech impediment unless I’m very tipsy.  There are only two things, throat-wise, I can’t accomplish—blowing up balloons, and playing wind instruments.

However, the latter deficiency posed a problem for young Neil, who happened to be enrolled in a public school system obsessed with their band.  In middle school I was asked to choose which instrument I wanted to play. Trumpet? Tuba? Clarinet, flute, trombone? Those were my (affordable) options. It didn’t help that at the time I had no interest in music, and the only tape I owned was a maxi-single of Little Richard’s “Tutti Frutti.” God I loved that song. Anyway, I didn’t want to take lessons in piano or drumming, and I couldn’t produce a single note from the instruments the school offered, so, I abstained from taking band.

In my particular school, not-taking-band meant not-being-educated-in-music. All of the school’s budget and teacher resources were dumped into its band (who, among other things, played at the Rose Bowl annually). The rest of the students who were either too musically deficient or too cool for marching band, got to take a single music class in middle school, where we learned about the history of music, not the art. No lessons in rhythm, no memorizing note scales, no blasting simple melodies on shitty recorders, no critical listening.

In college, I took a few classes in poetry. In discussions about meaning, context, and rhyme form, I was en fuego. But when the conversation inevitably turned to rhythm, meter, and other musical terms, I would quietly curse my ineptitude.  I made earnest attempts to get better, but they fell flat.

My Sarah, a music teacher, bless her heart, has made me flashcards so I can memorize some notes.  I’m trying to learn guitar, and even though I’m pretty good at playing chords, I can’t keep time for shit.  I suppose I’m learning, but it’s painfully slow.

And although reading and critically hearing music isn’t a prerequisite for songwriting, it would certainly help me put some words in this goddamn blank Word document I’ve been staring at for an hour, for which I have a hilarious song idea all rarin’ to go, but no pretty rhymes in which to cast it.