Category: screenwriting
July 24, 2020
B-Movie Mistakes
If you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you’ve probably caught on to my questionable Saturday viewing habits. Questionable in the sense of “why would someone keep doing this to themselves? And to their liver?”
I’ll sit down with some little toy soldiers to build, put on a movie with aliens or giant monsters or werewolves, and tweet out the occasional observation, critique, or scream of pain. It’s kinda fun, in a masochistic sort of way, and I’m a big believer that you can learn a lot from figuring out where bad things went wrong and how they could be fixed. And I’ve seen a lot of screenplays go wrong over the years. Some I worked on. Some I read for contests. And… some I watched while building little toy soldiers.
Over all this time, I’ve seen definite patterns emerge. The same mistakes happening again and again and again. It was part of what made me start this whole ranty blog way back when in the distant before-time.
And screenwriting is a form of storytelling, which means some of these mistakes—maybe even all of them—are universal. I might not have any interest in writing movie scripts, sure. Not everyone does. But these issues can show up in books, short stories, comics… all sorts of storytelling formats.
So maybe they’re worth checking out.
Anyway, here are my top ten B-movie mistakes, updated a bit since the last time I write them out. Some of it may seem generally familiar. Some of it… well, I’ve found new ways to look at some problems over the past three years.
10) Bad directing
Let’s just get this one out of the way, because it’s the easiest one. It’s also the most universal one. This’ll be a horrible blow to anyone who likes auteur theory, but while there are some phenomenal directors out there, the simple truth is there’s also a lot who have absolutely no clue what they’re doing. None. Yeah, even some directors you’ve heard of. They have no concept of narrative, continuity, pacing… anything.
This is a killer because ultimately, the director’s the one interpreting the story on the page into a visual story on the screen. Even if they didn’t write the script, the best story can be ruined by a bad storyteller. How often have we seen a book or movie that had a really cool idea or an interesting character and it was just… wasted?
Because of this—random true fact—whenever you see a horrible story on screen, it’s always the fault of the director and producers. Never the screenwriter. The only reason scripts get shot is because the director and producers insist on shooting them. If it was a great script and they butchered it—that’s their fault. If it was a bad script and they decided to shoot it anyway—that’s also their fault.
9) Showing the wrong thing
This kinda falls under bad directing, but I’ve seen it enough times that it really deserves it own number. Sometimes a story keeps pushing X in our face when we really want to see Y. Or Z. Sometimes the story calls for Y to be the center of focus, but we still keep putting X on camera. And sometimes there’s no need to see X at all—we understand it through dialogue and acting and other bits of context—but we show X anyway.
A lot of this is a general failure of empathy—the filmmakers aren’t thinking about how the movie’s going to be seen. I’ve also talked a couple times about subtlety, using the scalpel vs. the sledgehammer, and that’s a big part of this, too. Sometimes there’s a reason we’re seeing a lot of nudity or a swirling vortex of gore, but all too often… it’s just because the storyteller doesn’t know what else to show us.
8) Bad action
Pretty sure we can all think of an example of this. The almost slow-motion fight scenes that feel like they filmed the rehearsal. The medium-speed chase that drags on waaaaaay too long. The pointless shoot-out that clearly wasn’t thought through since everyone’s standing out in the open.
Action gets seen as filler a lot of the time, and it doesn’t help that a lot of gurus teach it that way. “Hit page 23—you need an action beat! Hit page 42—another action beat!” There’s absolutely nothing wrong with action, but bad action is particularly bad in the visual storytelling format of movies. Unnecessary action isn’t much better.
Think of scale, too. It’s always better to have a small, well-done action scene than a sprawling, poorly-executed one. We can relate to two people fighting so much better that two gangs of sixty people each slamming together. Especially when it’s supposed to be two gangs of sixty members each but there are maybe eight people on screen. Moving in slow motion.
7) Too Much Stuff
Remember when we were young and there was that one kid (we all knew this kid) who got so excited to be Dungeon Master? And he made that awesome dungeon with five liches and a dozen displacer beasts and twenty gold dragons and thirty platinum dragons and fifty minotaurs all wearing +3 plate armor and using +5 flaming axes and a hundred zombies and Demogorgon and half the Egyptian gods and…
I think we’ve all played that game, right? Let’s be honest… maybe some of us were that kid?
Some B-movies get like that. The filmmakers have too many ideas—way more than their budget or schedule allows—and they try to stick everything into the story. Every cool idea from every other cool story, sure to be just as cool here, right? Truth is, they almost never are. All these extra ideas just end up being under-developed distractions at best.
6) Killing the wrong people
There’s always going to be collateral damage in certain types of stories. Thing is, by nature of being collateral damage, the story doesn’t focus on these people and their deaths don’t really register. And they shouldn’t. That’s what collateral means after all—they’re secondary. Not as important. But in the tight, compressed nature of a movie, we need these deaths to be important. They need to serve a purpose in the story, hopefully on more than one level.
I’ve talked about the awful habit of introducing characters for no purpose except to kill them. We meet Phoebe, get three or four minutes of backstory and bamshe’s dead without moving the plot forward an inch. Because Phoebe wasn’t really part of the plot, she was just there to wear a bikini top and let the FX crew show off their new blood fountain.
The only thing worse than this is when it’s time for the ultimate sacrifice… and my hero doesn’t make it. A minor character steps forward to throw the final switch or recite the last words. And the “hero” sits back and watches as someone else saves the day.
5) Wasting Time
This one’s the flipside of point #7. I just mentioned that in the limited space of a movie script, everything needs to serve a purpose. If that touching backstory linking two characters doesn’t affect the plot or story somehow, it’s just five minutes of filler I could’ve spent on something else… like the plot or the story. If these shouted arguments don’t somehow reveal something key to the progress of the movie… they may just be a lot of wasted time.
One of the most common time-wasters in B-movies is the unconnected opening. It’s when the first five or ten minutes focus on a group of characters we’ll never see again, usually never even reference again, and who have no effect on the rest of the plot. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these openings that couldn’t be cut, and I’d guess 83% of the time the whole movie would be stronger—on many levels—without it.
4) Not knowing what genre my story is
I’ve mentioned a few times that I worked on a B-level sex-revenge-thriller-sequel where the director thought he was making a noir mystery. I’ve seen horror films done as sci-fi and fantasy movies that were done as horror films, and vice versa. Heck, I’ve written stories where I’d planned it as one thing, and realized halfway through it was something very different.
I’ve talked about genre a lot over the past few weeks, so I won’t go into it much more here. To sum up quick if you don’t want to hit the link, all genres have certain expectations when it comes to tone, pacing, and even structure. If I’ve got a story in one genre that I’m telling with the expectations of another, there’s going to be a clash. And that clash probably won’t help my storytelling.
3) Plot Zombies
All credit to A. Lee Martinez, creator of this wonderful term. Sometimes, characters do things that are unnatural for them just to further the plot. The brave person becomes cowardly. The timid person does something wild and unpredictable. People argue and storm off for no reason. Well, so one of them can get murdered by the monster after going for a calming nighttime swim in the lake, but past that… no reason.
Plot zombies just stumble around a movie, doing whatever the story calls for. They don’t have any personality or agency, and really, one plot zombie’s pretty much the same as any other plot zombie. If I have an inspiring speech or an act of wild abandon or a last minute moment of brilliance, and there’s no reason I can’t swap all the characters around in it… it means I’ve got plot zombies.
2) Horrible dialogue
Bad dialogue always makes for bad characters. If we can’t believe in the characters, we can’t believe in the story. If I can’t believe in the story… well, that’s kind of it, isn’t it?
So many movies have painfully bad dialogue. Pointless arguments. Annoying characters. Awful technobabble. And sometimes—too much of the time—it’s just bad. It’s lines that sound like they went back and forth through Google translate and then the actor’s seeing them for the first time on a teleprompter while they’re filming.
Personally, bad dialogue drives me nuts, because it means the storytellers have no idea what human beings sound like. It’s a massive failure of empathy, and that empathy almost always shows up elsewhere. I’ve never, ever seen a story with bad dialogue that excelled everywhere else. It just doesn’t happen.
1) Who am I rooting for?
This is still the number one killer in America
So many movies have absolutely no likable characters. Everyone’s self-centered, obnoxious, stupid, or arrogant… or a combination of these traits. They’re all awful, sometimes disgusting people. All of them. The bad guys and the good guys. People start dying and I’m always glad, no matter who they are.
If I’m expected to sit here and watch this for ninety minute, I need a reason to follow someone besides “they’re the main character.” I need to like watching their story play out. I need to be able to identify with some aspect of their personality. The movie needs to have someone I actually care about. ‘Cause if it doesn’t. I won’t care if they win or lose. And if I don’t care about that… well… I’m not going to be sitting here for ninety minutes
And that’s my personal, current top ten B-movie mistakes.And next time here, I thought I’d talk a bit about editing this new book.
Until then… go write.
And maybe enjoy a movie or three.
December 19, 2019
A Heartwarming Holiday Tale of…
Y’know, I just realized something. This might be the last post of the year if I don’t do some off-day stuff. I may have to reschedule some things…
That said… less than a week till Christmas. Writing’s probably (understandably) one of the last things on your mind. Or maybe it’s right there, teasing you with cool new ideas. Perhaps even holiday-themed ideas.
Writing stories that revolve around Christmas—or any holiday—is tempting. It’s very relatable. A lot of the groundwork is already done for us as far as setting goes. Heck, depending on my characters, a lot of backstory may already be done. A Christmas story can be kinda freeing and give us an instant theme to go with. Or go against. Everything becomes more shocking and dynamic when set against a bunch of innocent carolers trying to sing “Joy to the World.” Except maybe another group of carolers.
Plus, let’s just be honest. Christmas stories are lucrative. Forget superheroes, there’s a fair argument to be made that Christmas stories are one of the best-selling genres out there, especially if you write screenplays. Seriously. Think of all those cable and streaming channels that are just brimming with original movies about dogs and holiday romances. I was in a holiday-themed anthology a couple years back, and I know there’ve been several more since then.
Forgive me for sounding all capitalist, but… there’s a lot of money to be made off Christmas.
Now, that said…
If I’m thinking about a clever idea for a holiday story I do need to be a little careful. The ugly truth is, it’s all been done before. All of it. No matter how clever or original I think my take is, there’s a good chance someone’s done it before. Because, as I mentioned above, this is a huge market and lots of folks have written lots of stories.
Look at it this way. Think of all the different versions of A Christmas Carol you’ve ever seen or heard of. There’ve been books, plays, movies, and animated specials. We’ve all seen it done dozens and dozens of times, set in the past, present, and future. There’ve been versions of it that leaned toward drama, toward comedy, horror, sci-fi, you name it. I’d guess at least thirty or forty television shows have done takes of it, too. Heck, just in the past couple years they’ve done it on Ducktales, Looney Tunes, Scooby-Doo, and Family Guy.
How about Santa? There’s Santa Claus origin stories. Evil Santa stories. Cool Santa. Robot Santa. Son of Santa. Daughter of Santa. Brother of Santa. New Santa. Heck, at this point I’ve seen multiple stories where Santa’s an action star defending his workshop from invaders. Like, it’s pretty much a solid subgenre at this point.
I mean, at this point even Krampus is pretty commonplace. He shows up in a bunch of books. Just typing the name into IMDb gives me over a dozen movies where he’s specifically mentioned in the title, and I could probably come up with just as many where he isn’t. There’ve probably been another dozen or so supernatural-themed shows where he’s appeared in as well (he had an appearance on Grimm that I really liked).
All done many times. In many ways. I’m not saying these stories can’t be done again, but this is one of those areas where I really need to be aware how often this relatively small pool of material’s been mined for ideas.
Except… weird as it sounds, there is kind of a niche where people love getting the same thing again and again. If you scroll through some of those big holiday movie listings at Netflix, Vudu, Tubi, or whatever platform you like to use, you’ll see the same themes showing up again and again in hundreds of movies. Literally, hundreds. Holiday romance. Small towns. Loveable pets. Holiday romance in small towns. Loveable pets saving the holidays in small towns. Seriously, you’re chuckling but you probably know a dozen stories like this, right? I think there’s a whole holiday romance subgenre.
My point being, if I want to appeal to that market, it’s very important that I don’t do anything too new or radical. This audience is looking for a sort of comfort food. They want to know that he ends up with her, she ends up with him, and that the dog lives and saves Christmas. Breaking these traditions might arguably make a more interesting story, yeah, but that’s not what these are about. He ends up with her. She ends up with him. The dog saves Christmas. Done.
So think about stories this holiday season. Do I want them as a general background? Do I want to put a clever spin on something old? Do I want to lean into one of those niches? Whichever one I’m thinking about… I should put in a little extra thought. Just to be safe.
Next time, performance reviews.
Until then… I wish you all a peaceful Solstice, happy Hanukkah, merry Christmas, joyous Kwanzaa, gleeful Boxing Day, and a glorious Ascension of Tzeentch.
Now go write.
October 28, 2019
Zombie Love
Hey, look! It’s even more bonus content! What the hell? This is turning into one of those blogs where there are semi-regular posts.
Hahahaa no it’s not. I’m just going to be really busy in November (for a couple of reasons) so I wanted to give you some extra stuff now while I had time. Plus, hey, it’s Halloween and I can always blather on about this sort of stuff a bit more. So everybody wins.
As a lot of you know, I worked on film crews for a lot of years, and then I wrote about filmmaking for another five or six years after that (there was a bit of overlap). This meant I got to interview a lot of screenwriters and writer-directors about their different projects, and some of them leaned into the spirit of this particular holiday season. And I still had some more of those sitting around so I figured, hey, why not share another one.
Some of you may be familiar with Fido, a wonderfully heartwarming (no, seriously) zombie story about a boy and his… well, pet zombie. It was also a nearly fifteen year labor of love for Andrew Currie, Robert Chomiak , and Dennis Heaton, taking them from film school to Lionsgate Pictures, where the movie finally came to be with a very impressive cast. I got to speak with Andrew back then, and we talked a lot about his creative process and how the story evolved going from an elaborate novella to a screenplay to a finished movie.A few of my standard points before we dive in. I’m in bold, asking the questions. Please keep in mind a lot of these aren’t the exact, word-for-word questions I asked (which tended to be a bit more organic and conversational), so if the answer seems a bit off, don’t stress out over it. Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply Andrew’s specifically endorsing any of the ideas I’ve brought up here on the ranty blog—it’s just me linking from something he said to something similar that I’ve said.
By the nature of this discussion, there are going to be a few small spoilers in here, though not many. Check out the movie if you haven’t seen it yet. It really is wonderful. I mean, it’s a feel-good zombie movie about families. What more could you want?
Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the CS Weekly online newsletter.
What got you into filmmaking and screenwriting?
I guess just, from a really young age, being a fan of movies. I remember I was six years old and my dad took me to 2001: A Space Odyssey in the theatre. And I still remember just being completely blown away by the movie—obviously not understanding it, but the visceral impact of the images. And really being a life long film buff, a film geek I guess you’d say, staying up late watching horror filmsonce everyone else went to bed. The standard path (laughs).
You’ve written a lot of the stuff you’ve directed. Do you think of yourself as a writer or director more?
I think of myself as a writer-director. I generally write on most of the things I direct. I certainly have directed stuff I didn’t write. I just find that, to me, there’s that idea that there are three films; there’s the film that you write, there’s the film that you shoot, and there’s the film you complete in post-production. Those three phases to me are so fluid that they tend to all become one. The writing process for me is directing on the page quite a bit. I guess I find that being involved in the writing is fairly critical.
D’you think you’d ever write a screenplay without wanting to direct it?
Oh, I’d love to. (laughs) But God knows who would want to direct it.
Yeah, I’m not the fastest writer, and that’s another wonderful thing about collaborating. What’s exciting for me about film is that it’s collaborative, it’s bouncing ideas off other creative people. When we wrote Fido–Robert, Dennis, and I–we spent a lot of time in the story room together just bouncing around ideas. I think often that’s the most fulfilling way of working, because you become so much more inspired by working with collaborators.
You’ve worked with Robert a few times, yes?
Yeah, Robert and I have co-written a couple things. He’s wonderful, and he’s got that combination of having a wonderfully bizarre take on the world but also being a very pragmatic writer as well. He’s great.
Now, Fido was originally a short story by Dennis, yes?
Well, Dennis had written this… it was somewhere between a short story and a script. It was seventy or eighty pages, it was pretty long. It was about a little boy in a small town who had a pet zombie. The boy just fed him raw meat so he wouldn’t eat people. We all went to Simon Fraser University
That was back in 1994. We went off and did other projects, and I took the script out to the You mentioned 9/11. There’s a lot of underlying paranoia and a very us-vs-them mood, even past the usual zombie movie standards. How much of that was very deliberate?
Oh, it was very specifically an allegory, but it’s quite subtle. You know, for example, in the beginning of the film Mr. Bottoms comes into the classroom and he tells the kids that he’s building the fences higher and there’s going to be security vans on every corner and he’s going to take everyone’s picture “just in case they get lost.” And that was very much referencing Homeland Security. What was really exciting was when we started thinking about the film in that way, it really started to affect the characters, namely Bill, the father. The idea of ZomCom– which is sort of the government and a corporation as an amalgamation– pushing fear within a community as a means of control, which happens (pause) in many, many places in the world. And Bill ended up becoming the embodiment of fear. He’s terrified of zombies and his goal in life, really, is to die and not have to come back, and he’s got this slightly absurd childhood trauma of having to shoot his father when his father turned. And the central irony of the whole movie, for me anyway, is that Fido is this dead creature who comes into the family and is more emotionally engaged in the world than the father.
So the allegory was certainly intentional. What we really wanted to do was, on the surface, just have fun and play with the idea of Lassie and the “boy and his dog” story, but then on the deeper level have that political resonance and then in terms of the characters, tying to that. Really, the theme we were writing from was “love, not fear, makes you alive.” Bill is the embodiment of fear and Fido is the embodiment of love. He brings this relationship into the family and becomes a catalyst for change within the family.You did a short about a zombie, Night of the Living, a few years back, yes? Are you a fan of zombie movies?
Yeah. I saw a zombie movie, I don’t even know what it was, when I was really little. I remember being really traumatized by it. In a good way (laughs). Y’know, there are so many damned zombie movies out there, it’s a bit of a drag. When we started Fido in ’94 there weren’t that many around. Now I have to read some critic going “they’re just taking the end of Shaun of the Dead and turning it into a movie.” Which is really painful when we wrote it fourteen years ago.
For me, they make such great metaphors. I think what’s interesting about zombies is that they are so close to us. They are human in a way, and they tap into some primal fears in a really visceral way. The idea of death and dying and mortality and disease, they embody all of those things. A lot of monsters and creatures in horror are of the supernatural variety or completely inhuman, so they’re not as close to us in that respect. So zombies have a greater sense of dread about them.
There’s a lot of baggage that comes with the word zombie. Did it make it tough to sell people on this story?
It did. What was great about it was getting Lionsgate and having such big fans. They read the script and said they loved it, and let’s shoot it as it is. They were completely behind it. There were other distributors and there were concerns about the script. Those concerns were mainly “what is it?” Is it a family film, a horror film, a zombie movie? The majority of the people, and very happily all of the actors, got what the world was and the depth of it and the fact that it had this satirical throughline. But certainly for a percentage of people there was this sense of, how is that mishmash of genres going to work.There’s a few things that it seems somebody would’ve started pointing at (the killings, Mr. Theopolis, schoolkids with guns, etc). Did you get a lot of notes from the producers or the studio about the script?
No, that was the great thing. I don’t think I got a single note. Everyone who was in on the film, Lionsgate, they were really big supporters. It was almost odd that people were just so supportive. I mean, I’d just made one feature before this called Mile Zero, which is a very character-driven drama, completely unlike Fido.
Did the R rating come as a shock to you?
Absolutely. I was quite disappointed with the MPAA and I had many conversations with them. I went into the editing room and we tried different things. In the end, what they needed to make it PG-13 just undermined the film in a way that just wasn’t something we wanted or Lionsgate wanted. So we decided we had to stay with an R. The thing about the MPAA is that they really got the humor and they said they were real fans of the movie. I think because children and the elderly get consumed in the movie, I started wondering if there was a moral compass at play. There’s so little violence, I was really surprised with them being so hard on it, especially in light of so many other films that are PG-13.
Was doing the script as a group, the three of you, was it very different, process-wise, than if you’d just sat down and done it on your own?
The process for Fidowas so unique in the sense that it went on for so many years. When I was out at the Film Center I was working on it for about a year on my own, and then I’d come back and we’d all work on it. It became a really dragged out process, and we got to a certain point, which was about a year and a half before shooting, where the three of us just did everything we could do and it was time for me to take it and start moving it towards production. So Dennis and Robert stepped off at that point. Screenplays can certainly exist just as screenplays, but there’s a point when they have to move towards the reality of being made and things change. Dennis and Robert were wonderful about it– I don’t want to sound like I’m insulting them. They stepped away and then I worked on it, finessing certain things, and moving it towards production in terms of the reality of creating the world and making it happen.
Do you have any solid habits or methods when you write?
I really believe in the outline. I always work from a beat sheet. In terms of the scene by scene, I just find it’s such a wonderful focusing tool for me. The way I write is probably quite a bit with the directing hat on, maybe more so than I should. I tend to imagine the scene, and then re-imagine it and flip it over and over in my head until it clicks and then put it down on paper. Even when I direct I work from a beat sheet, in the sense of what the real intent of the scene is and the character beats and the key moments. I think it’s important to keep those clear and present.
How is it for you when actors start asking for changes? Either actual rewrites of scenes or just adlibs on set?
I like and encourage improvisation at times, but the truth is sometimes if you allow improv just to start happening in an escalating way, what you can end up with is something that’s not nearly as coherent a story as it should be. I really believe in getting a script to the place where it really works and then having faith in that structure. Story structure works. Character arcs work. When they’re well written they really do fulfill the promise of the script. A lot of times actors will bring wonderful moments and wonderful bits into the process, and I completely support that, and love that, as long as the arc and the integrity of the structure is being honored.