Category: screenwriting

December 20, 2013

Black Christmas

If you’ve been following this ranty blog for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard me mention Shane Black once or thrice. For those who came in late, he’s one of the men behind the million-dollar spec-script boom 20 years ago. You might know him as the writer of films like The Monster Squad, Lethal Weapon, The Last Boy Scout, and The Long Kiss Goodnight.

(Supposedly, an unwritten part of his deal for Lethal Weapon was getting to be in an action film, so the studio stuck him in some stupid alien-fighting-bodybuilders-in-the-jungle movie that no one was going to see–never expecting Black would rewrite all his dialogue to become one of the most memorable characters in the film…)

He took some time off from Hollywood and then returned a few years back as the writer-director of the award-winning Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, which propelled Robert Downey Jr. back into the public eye. Then the two of them got together again for this summer’s Iron Man 3, which Black directed and co-wrote.

Anyway, back when I used to write for Creative Screenwriting, Black was kind of a Hollywood legend as a person and as a writer. So when the editor of CS Weekly asked us for December article ideas, I tossed out doing a general interview with Black. After all, the man’s set almost every movie he’s written at Christmastime—he had to have something to say about it. My editor agreed it would be a neat thing and put out some feelers, and we both kind of forgot about it. We were a very small, niche film magazine, and he was… well, he was Shane Black.

So when Black wrote back in less than a week and said “Sure, let’s grab a coffee or something,” you can imagine the squeals of glee.

Alas, reality hit just as quick. At this point the magazine was starting to struggle financially and my first novel, Ex-Heroes, wasn’t going to see print for another three months. The squeals of glee faded and I suddenly realized I couldn’t afford to grab a coffee. Hell, I wasn’t sure I could afford gas to drive to a Starbucks to meet him. After the shame faded, I wrote back with some lame excuses about sound quality and not wanting to waste his time. We set up a phone interview and I missed my big chance to hang out with Shane Black for an hour.

Fortunately, he was very pleasant and gracious on the phone, and it was one of those conversations where I felt like I learned more about storytelling in forty-odd minutes than I had in some college classes.

A few of the usual points… I’m in bold, asking the questions.  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 Mr. Black was specifically endorsing any of the ideas I’ve brought up here on the ranty blog—it’s just me linking from something he’s said to something similar that I’ve said (some of it inspired by this conversation).

By the very nature of this discussion, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here, though not many. Check out some of his movies if you haven’t already seen them. They’re clever, damned fun, and filled with fantastic characters.

Material from this interview was originally used for a “From The Trenches” article that appeared in the December 18th, 2009 issue of CS Weekly.

So, anyway, here’s me talking with Shane Black  about Santa, Christmas, storytelling, and Frankenstein in the Wild West.

Happy Holidays.

Were you a big fan of Christmas specials and movies growing up? What are some of your favorites?
Well, it’s interesting. I watch all the old Christmas movies and I like them for odd reasons. Like It’s A Wonderful Life.  It’s a Christmas movie, but within it they have a lot of bizarre, Capra-esque touches that are more indicative of just life. The scene where the gym starts to open–the floor starts to pull back and there’s a swimming pool underneath. Someone falls in and then everyone just jumps in the pool. That moment is as fresh today as it was back then. That kind of crazy improv moment where everyone starts laughing and jumping in. Even as a kid I was struck by that. “Wow, that’s a different kind of moment than most movies. That feels like it just happened almost by accident.”

My favorite Christmas film is probably this Spanish Santa Claus movie. It’s called Santa Claus and I even used a bit of it in Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang. Basically, Santa Claus fights the Devil. The Devil tries to stop Christmas. There’s this one scene where he just runs around the room doing gymnastics. You’ve got to see it. You’ve got to pick it up and look at it— The Devil’s this really athletic, slightly gay-looking guy who can blow flames through a phone line. If he calls you on the phone, flames come out the receiver and they singe your ear. That’s probably my favorite. Santa’s really lame and the effects are terrible.

My other favorite was called Santa Claus and the Ice Cream Bunny. There’s no snow. It was filmed in Florida in broad daylight. Santa’s sled is stuck because there’s no snow, and they’re all waiting for the Ice Cream Bunny. While they’re waiting Santa tells all the kids the story of Jack and the Beanstalk, which takes roughly 50 -75 minutes. At the end of which the Ice Cream Bunny shows up and everyone says “now we’re safe.” I can’t believe some of the frauds–even as a child–that were perpetrated on me (chuckles). It’s pretty amazing.

About half your films have been set at Christmas. I know your first script, Shadow Company, was originally set at Halloween, and then you rewrote it as Christmas in a later draft.  Why?
Yeah.  Christmas for some reason… Even though it’s a worldwide phenomenon I always associate it with a certain kind of American way of life. It’s also sort of a hushed period, during which, for a period of time, we agree to suspend hostility. I’m always fascinated by the almost palpable sense in the air that something’s different at Christmas.

If you look at a tipping point scenario– how many people does it take to start a standing ovation? Just one. And then in five seconds two other people, then three, then four, then 75,000 are clapping. Because the tipping point is as simple as one person pushing in that direction. And it can go ugly just as easily. It can go the other direction. One person starts to get out of hand and then everyone’s out of hand.

So Christmas to me represented the best we have in terms of keeping things on that side of the dial. A period in which, for whatever reason, the tipping point was more likely to bump into someone on the street and have them say “Oh, hey man, my bad,” then to have him say “Fuck you, buddy! Watch where you’re going!” That was remarkable to me.

Also in California, Christmas, if you look at it as a substance almost, as a thing more than an idea, Christmas exists out here in California but in these indescribably beautiful ways to me. You have to dig for it. It’s not a 40 foot Christmas tree on the White House lawn, it’s a little broken, plastic Madonna with a flash bulb inside hanging off a Mexican lunch wagon. It’s a little strand of colored light in some cheap trailer in the blinding sunlight, but it’s still protesting its Christmas-ness. I adore little touches of Christmas that indicate subtly… It’s like talismans. You walk around and these are the magic. These are your touchstones. Little bits of Christmas that remind us that this doesn’t have to be a blinded, blighted, sun-washed, hostile place to live. Christmas has always had that magic ability to me, to exist almost like a magic substance that you find little bit of if you dig carefully enough for it. I know that sounds kind of crazy.

No, I’m intrigued. When did you develop this view? Was Lethal Weapon set at Christmas because of this or did the… the philosophy of Christmas develop along the way?

Along the way. Well, Lethal Weapon is a Frankenstein story to me. It’s a guy who’s a monster of sorts, who sits in his trailer and watches TV.  People despise him, they revile him, because… it’s like a western. They think the west is tame. They think they’re safe and secure in this sedentary little suburbia. This sort of lulling effect that whatever violence and terror are in the world, we’ve managed to secure ourselves from it. But he knows different. Frankenstein in his trailer, he’s been with violence, he’s lived violence. He knows that its still there. The west is not tame, it is not gentrified. When violence, in Lethal Weapon, comes to the suburbs and takes this guy’s daughter and kills cops, they go to Frankenstein and say “Look, we hate you for what we do. We think you’re an anomaly at best and a monster at worst, but now we need you because you’re the only one who understands this. We’ve gotten hypnotized by tranquility. We forgot that violence is still there, and you’re the one who can deal with that, so now we need to let you out of your cage.” That was the idea. Christmas, it seemed to me, was the most pleasant, lulling, hypnotizing atmosphere in which to forget that violence can be so sudden and swift and just invade our private lives.

Did you actually study screenwriting?
Nah.  I took theater classes at UCLA. I was studying stagecraft and acting. It was a Mickey Mouse major.  y finals often were painting sets, y’know? It was kind of a cakewalk though college. I took all the requirements– I liked theater, I liked movies, but I’d never seen a screenplay and I thought they were impossibly difficult. Coming from back east I just assumed  movies were something that floated through the ether and appeared on your TV screen and some magician wrote them, but there was certainly no way I could. Then I read a script and it was so easy. I read another one and said “I can do this. This is really rather simple.” So I never took classes, I just read scriptsI loved.

My style, such as it is, that sometime people comment on, is really cribbed from two sources. One is William Goldman, who has a kind of chummy, folksy, storytelling style. It’s almost as though a guy in a bar is talking to you from his bar stool. And then Walter Hill, who is just completely terse and sparing and has this real spartan prose that’s just punchy and has this wonderful effect of just gut-punching you. I took those two and I slammed them together, and that’s what I use. People say it’s interesting. Mostly it’s a rip-off. It’s Goldman meets Walter Hill.

Did you always write like this or are there some older Shane Black scripts that will never see the light of day?
No, the first scripts I wrote were scripts I wrote after I decided to go out and see what they look like. So I picked up William Goldman,  I picked up Walter Hill, and then I wrote Shadow Company, which even on the page, the ’84 version, looks exactly like a Goldman script. Lethal Weapon, it’s pretty much in the style of those two writers. Material aside. Material is different, I’m talking solely about the style on the page and learning the logistics of how to do it. Those two were my mentors.  ater mentors were people like James L. Brooks, who taught me an amazing amount, and Joel Silver, of all people, qualifies as a mentor.

How do you generally write? Do you use outlines or notecards or just start cranking it out from page one?
I don’t really use notecards. What I do is I try to figure out what the piece is about and link that to the story arc or the character arc. I always think there’s two things going on in any script–there’s the story and then there’s the plot. The plot is the events. If it’s a heist film, it’s how they get in and out. But the story is why we’re there, why we’re watching the events. It’s what’s going on with the characters.  And theme above that. Once I get those things, once I know what the theme is and what it’s about, I can start trying on story beats and plot beats to see if they feel like they’re moving, but they have to relate to the overall theme. If you look at The Dark Knight, you’ll find before those guys wrote a word of script, they knew exactly what their movie was about. All the themes were in place. Sometimes they has to bend the scenes in The Dark Knight to fit the theme they were trying to get across. It’s clear they didn’t write the scenes and then look for what they were about, they clearly knew where they were headed. So thematically I get a sense of what the movie’s gotta be, but I don’t use notecards.

I can juggle a lot in my head. I can’t get more than say, twenty pages, without planning ahead.

How long does it normally take you to get a first draft of something?
I try to keep by studio standards, which is three months. They give you three months from commencement pay to final payment, and I think that’s enough time if you really work at it. We did a draft that I really loved, and it did not make the screen, of Last Action Hero, my partner and I. We did that in six weeks and I was very proud of that. From sitting down with this original screenplay and completely rewriting and retooling it. We were good, we were fast.

You mentioned your partner. I know you worked with Fred Dekker for a while–have you gone back to writing with a partner?
Lately just to facilitate things. It takes me so long to think of ideas and so long to convince myself to get to work, and there’s so much fear involved. Writing to me is a process of just desperately trying, on a daily basis, to concentrate until something becomes more interesting than my fear. Then you’re sucked in and you start doing the work, but up ’till then it’s just horrifying to me. So if I can have help, if someone’s in the sinking boat with me, even if we’re both going to drown, at least there’s a comfort to not being alone. I’ll write the next one solo.

Now, you took time off, came back with a new script you shopped around, and nobody knew who you were. That was Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, right?
It was.  Most people would have nothing to do with it.

Did planning to direct it change how you wrote it?
No, I thought about that. That was when I was dealing with Jim Brooks. He basically said “You don’t need to worry because you direct on paper. You don’t call shots, but you call mood and you call progression and pace and emphasis and just about everything else.” So I may have even done a little more of that on Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang.

Now that you’ve sat in the director’s chair, has it changed how you approach a script?
No, except I’m even more conscious of what will later be shoe leather. The greatest shoemakers in the world supposedly can make a pair of shoes and leave no [extra] leather. They didn’t waste any. I’m very conscious now as a director. If you’ve got two scenes, like a newscaster and a scene before that of a conversation, can’t you have the conversation with the newscaster in the background and do it in one? It’s just shoe leather. No shoe leather.

It’s probably safe to say a lot of people have offbeat movies they watch this time of year, and a bunch of them are probably your movies. Is there anything unusual you like to watch at the holidays?
Oddly enough, every year about this time, for no reason I can fathom, I watch The Exorcist, my favorite movie [chuckles].  Every year I’m reminded of how it doesn’t age, not one single day. It’s as riveting as it ever has been.
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November 8, 2013

Ironclad Screenwriting

            Hope you all had a wonderful Halloween, Guy Fawkes Day, or respective eerie holiday.
            As some of you know, I’m a bit of a geek, and as such I’m very excited for the release of Thor: The Dark World tomorrow.  And since I’m always willing to be pop culture relevant—and I’m really slammed with other stuff right now—I thought I’d post a fun conversation I had with Justin Theroux, who wrote the third of the “Wave One” Marvel movies, Iron Man 2.  Justin was great to talk to, even when he had to bite his tongue about some still-secret plot points and reveals.  He also had a very positive and realistic view of working in Hollywood and working on a major tentpole movie (a sequel in a set of interlocking movies, at that).
            A few points, but you’ll probably figure it out as it goes.  I’m in bold, asking the questions.  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.  If you see a long line of dashes (————) it means there was something there I didn’t transcribe, probably because it was just casual discussion or something I knew I wasn’t going to use in the final article for one reason or another (there are off the record discussions now and then).  Any links are entirely mine and aren’t meant to imply Justin was specifically endorsing any of the ideas I’ve brought up here on the ranty blog—it’s just me linking from something they’ve said to something similar I’ve said. 
            By the very nature of this, there will probably be a few small spoilers in here, though not many.  Check out the movie if you haven’t seen it yet.  It’s fun and you’ll get a bit more out of this.
            Material from this interview was originally used for an article that appeared in the May/June 2010 issue of Creative Screenwriting Magazine.
            So, anyway, here’s me battering Justin with questions about Iron Man 2.

————————————————–

So… how does someone go from being an actor to screenwriter on a huge comedy to the sole writer on Iron Man 2? 

(laughs)  Your guess is as good as mine.  I don’t know.  I’ve been in Hollywood for about twenty years now.  I don’t know if that’s overnight.  Everyone has a weird road in this town and mine’s no different, I guess.  Everyone has a weird little story to tell.
Have you been writing all along?
I have, yeah.  If I were to thank anyone or lay it at anyone’s feet, it would be Ben Stiller who’s always been a very big champion of mine and always convinced me to do something professionally.  So Tropic Thunder was the first thing we were able to do together.  He was the one who first looked at my pages, years and years ago, and said ‘These are really decent pages.  You should be doing this more.’  He was the one that gave me the confidence.  So much of anything in the entertainment industry is confidence, and he was the first one to inject me with that.
Are you two friends?
We met… I was doing a play that he came and saw here in New York.  We met after the show and he was very flattering and I was very flattering to him.  I adored some of his earlier MTV shows and sketch work and The Ben Stiller ShowI thought was an unbelievably good show.  So I was gushing about that.  We sort of became friends over that.  That was in… 94?  95?  Four, maybe?  Somewhere early ’90s.
Were you a comics fan as a kid?
Yeah.  I was and am a comic book fan.  I wasn’t one of those comic book fans who ran out every week and bought whatever new issue was out there.  I sort of came into it backwards.  I read a lot of underground comics–Heavy Metal, Art Spiegelman, that kind of thing– but I also was an avid Spider-Manand Iron Man fan when I was a kid.—So I was a fan.  Not as probably die-hard as you might think, but I am a fan of the genre.
How did you end up on board Iron Man 2?
I had worked with Robert on Tropic Thunder and we had worked very well together and got along.  So he was the one who brought me over to Marvel.  He said ‘You should meet with Marvel.  You guys should sit down and see if you have any common ground because I think it would be a good fit.’  So I did.  I went when they were first gearing up for the very, very first initial push into development for Iron Man 2.  I sat with them for a long time and had long discussions with them about the character and that world.  We just hit it off.  It was a good match.  Shortly thereafter they said they’d love to have me and I was completely  flattered and floored, and we started developing the script right away.
Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. both said early on, if I remember, they didn’t want to be involved if there wasn’t going to be time to do a good script.  Were you already on board at that point?
Yeah.  I don’t know.  I don’t remember when they said that, but it sounds completely in line with the way those guys think and work.  They’re amazing quality control, both of them.  As is Marvel.  They were extremely hands on, even in the creation of the story.  It was enormously collaborative.  I never felt like I was abandoned to write the script by myself, even though I did the actual writing.  There was always someone to bounce ideas off of.  Kevin Feige, Jeremy Latcham, Jon Favreau, obviously, and Robert, they were always there to lob in their ideas and support.  It was a very socialist endeavor, the creation of the script.
I think the writing teams for the first film (Art Marcum & Matt Holloway and Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby) had a couple of years working with Jon Faverau.  You came on and they already had a release date for the film and less than a year before they started filming, yes?
(laughs)  You try to forget.  While you’re doing it you really try not to realize the pressure you’re under.  You try not to focus on it, at least.  You have to fake it and pretend you have all the time in the world to create it, because if you put a calendar and start X-ing days off you’ll go crazy.  I sort of operated, as we all did, I think, where it’s like ‘Well, we’ll deal with that when we get to it.’  As we had to turn in pages to effects and the line producer, we did a lot of punting of things until we absolutely had to try to move the ball across the finish line.
What’s your method?  Are you an outline guy, do you use note cards, do you just like to shuffle it all around in your head, start on page one, and plow through?
I don’t know. I love discussing things with people, almost to a fault sometimes.  I’ll bug a bus driver if I really want someone’s opinion.  The way I love to work is with someone who I trust knows the material, like Favreau and Feige, and bounce ideas off them.  Those guys had the benefits of doing [the first Iron Man] and were well-versed in the pitfalls and problems of where certain ideas could take you.  They were great at helping me eliminate certain things.  They could dismiss things that otherwise I might waste time spinning my wheels in.  That being said, when it actually comes down to writing I prefer to just wake up in the morning, make a cup of coffee, and just sit down and start hammering pages.  I write fat, usually, and hope the director can help guide me.  In this particular case Jon was good at guiding me towards what ——– on the one hand you’re trying to create a script that matches what Favreau’s vision is and what he wants to do.  I’m a big believer in being in service to the director as much as possible.
So you don’t use any outlines?
No, no, we did plenty of notecards and outlines and all the rest of that.  I think at a certain point you just have to start trucking through the deep snow and shoveling your way into it.  Or out of it.
How much did Jon actually get to work with you on this?  Was there time for the two of you to sit down and work the story, play with characters, that sort of thing?
Yeah, we met every single day in pre-production.  He was doing Couples Retreat for portions of that.  So we met very often, these epic sessions where we’d all—me, him, Robert, Kevin, and Jeremy—we’d sit in that room and beat through it.  Then I’d go away and do pages, come back, we’d beat through it some more, and I’d go away and do pages.  It was a very unified effort. We were all pulling on the same rope.  It was the way this movie had to work just because of the time frame.
What about Robert Downey Jr.  Did he have thoughts of his own for the script?
Yeah, absolutely.  Many days we met up at his house and scribbled stuff on cards.
Was it all for him?  Was it overall ideas or ideas for Tony Stark action and dialogue?
It was everything.  He’ got such an insane–insane in a great way–of working.  He’s just an idea generator.  He’s like a firehose with a powerful stream.  He’s one of those guys who’s just constantly percolating with new ideas and pushing into different areas and places where you didn’t think it could go.  There were certian idea he would have and you’d think ‘That’s completely insane.  There’s no way we could get away with that.’  He’d stick to it, and we’d write it and rewrite it, and we’d show up on the day and he’d perform it and–Oh, I get it.  That totally makes sense.  He’s the one who has it in his head.  There’s a lot of lightning firing off that guy.
How long does it normally take you to get a draft?
I honestly couldn’t tell you.  Even though we had a production draft that we ended up working off of, we were still developing whole chunks of it as we were shooting it.  Once we had the schedule for what we were shooting, we then knew we could go back in and since this is towards the end of the shoot we can go back in and really start finessing it.  So I was working on stuff on set all the way up until the very last day of shooting.

Now, how much of this was laid out for you from the start?  There was some stuff hanging there from the first movie, of course, but did you come on and it was already “Okay, we want Whiplash, Justin Hammer, the Black Widow, War Machine, the briefcase armor… give us a story.” 

No, no, no. To their credit, they really do give everyone involved in the process a blank slate to start with.  And that’s a blessing and a curse.  I think in the end it always ends up being beneficial to them.  You go in knowing anything is a possibility and they don’t shut any doors or windows to what you want to do until it becomes either cost-prohibitive or just doesn’t make sense with the brand.
            They’re firm believers that the fans are the shareholders in this whole thing, so they go in with the attitude of what do people want to see.  It’s not necessarily about what we want to do, it’s what people are expecting and what they want of this character.  And that’s a wonderful way to work, especially in this genre.  Everything was on the table and then it was just a question of taking things off the table.
            We opened up all the characters.  We opened up Whiplash and all the famous villains of the past and started picking up each one, rolling it around in meetings, and going “What about this guy?  What about that girl?”  We ended up getting three new characters for this movie–Whiplash, Black Widow, and Justin Hammer–and realizing there was a very powerful dynamic between those three.
How did you end up with Whiplash?
Y’know, there was a bunch… I won’t bore you with who we were looking at—translate ‘bore you’ as ‘get in trouble’.  It was really Jon’s idea.  I think Jon, very early on, had the idea of using Mickey.  We have sort of an energy theme going on, sort of a confluence of many things.  One is, our Tony Stark is a public figure.  Two, we knew we wanted to have this energy element to it.  What is the thing that’s inside him?  Could this thing become public?  Could it get out there?  It’s an arms race, essentially.  Then when we were looking at the different characters, we were thinking where can we sort of plug that idea into a character, and Whiplash—through Jon’s vision of what that character could be or become–what we all gravitated toward.  Weall thought that’s the guy.  Once Jon had pitched the way he envisioned that character, which is very different from a guy with a big ponytail and a cape, we thought that’s very cool.  These big energized whips emenating from his center chest piece.  It all, organically, started to take shape.  With the back story we thought we could have some fun there.
Now, in the first film one of the main elements was that Tony Stark had the only viable mini-Arc Reactor fused into his chest, plus there was one other one that would work for twenty minutes or so.  In the trailers we’ve got Iron Man, War Machine, Whiplash, plus what looks like a whole squadron of armored soldiers fighting them at one point.
Again, it sort of followed that….  If we walked into the room with anything, when we first started to develop, the one thing that was obviously on the table that we could not ignore was that he was a public figure.  That was the first little piece of clay that hit the table that we knew we’d have to build off of.   We thought, well, what comes with that?  What comes with that is a strange kind of arrogance, especially in today’s world, that that’s definitely going to entail?  Some kind of a newfound celebrity, to have a guy who’s a public superhero.  So there’s sort of an arrogance to Tony at the beginning of the movie that he’s the only one who is in possession of this technology.  So then the next dramatic device is… what if he’s not?  What if someone else can create it as good as he makes it, or almost as good?  That’s where we went with that.  What if the genie got out of the bottle?
War Machine is a little unusual because he’s not part of the “classic” Iron Man stories.  Rhodey is, of course, but War Machine was a much later addition.  Was this a concern, for you or the studio, since most of the successful Marvel movies seem to deal with classic elements more than newer ones?
I don’t want to talk about other’s people’s movies but… War Machine is not a dark force.  Our thinking was Tony is out in the world and has perhaps bitten off more than he can chew.  One of the themes of the movie is can one man be an island?  Are men islands in themselves, especially if you’re Tony Stark?  Again, without giving away too much, the War Machine armor and who’s using it really complements that idea or that theme.  I found it a relief to have that character in the movie.  And obviously Don is wonderful.  Only in the fact that they’re such good friends does that work.
Were you worried about the Batman issue?  Or I guess, Daredevil, since we’re talking Marvel…  That there are just so many character and elements crammed in here that there wasn’t going to be room for a coherent film story?
I wouldn’t say I was worried.  There were times where I felt that we had a luxury of riches.  It was like putting a bunch of desserts out in front of you an wondering which one you wanted to taste first.  It never worried me in that way.  If anything, it just made me want to work harder at servicing every one of them.  But I think we’ve done a pretty good job of tempering that and making sure that it doesn’t just turn into a Jackson Pollack.  Everyone has a purpose in the film, and I think as long as each one of those characters is well-defined and as long as they’re purpose-driven, then at the end of the day it just feels like a great big fun movie as opposed to a big, y’know, clusterfuck. (laughs)
There’s been some talk lately that this movie takes place before the Incredible Hulk movie which came out… well, at the same time as the first Iron Man.
(laugh)  I feel like Marvel has a great tradition of screwing the next writer. (laughs)  I think initially, when they first started interweaving it, things were considered afterthoughts.  Now—I don’t want to give away things happening in other movies—they’re starting to put a lot more thought into it and seeing it as a larger scheme.  We have things in our movie that are doffing their hats or perhaps telegraphing things that are going to happen in other movies.  That’s probably a much as I can probably say.  It wasn’t like we had a big meeting with Kenneth Branaugh about Thor.  There’s just enough cross-pollination to make it interesting, but not enough to start eating into other people’s sandwiches.
Was this something you were trying to figure out, how it all fit together, or did someone in an office just say “oh, this is the order?”
No, we knew we were going to have Nick Fury.  He showed up, you just can’t ignore it. And then there’s much smaller clues and things that we seeded throughout that will play out in other movies.  Obviously once Avengers is up and running you’ll start to feel the cumulative effect of those little jigsaw puzzle pieces getting put together.
I know there was also a point no one was sure if Samuel Jackson was going to be in the film or not.  Was that affecting you and your story?
Yeah.  For me, I just acted as if he was doing it.  We were putting him in.  He was going to go in.  It was up to the powers that be to make that happen.  I just kept writing as if he was going to show up on the first day.
Did you get a lot of notes?  Were you under the microscope, because the first film had been so successful?
Yes, but not in a way…  Marvel is a very special place.  Kevin Feige is probably the biggest comic book fan I’ve ever met.  He’s the biggest fan of his material.  He is, without question, one of the best keepers of that torch.  There would be times when we’d be bumping our heads or going ‘I don’t know how to make this work,” and Kevin would bring a clarity to the situation.  I’ve never experienced it with any other studio or any other creative process, where–literally–the head of the studio would be the one to go ‘No, you know what the fans want?  The fans want this, and at this moment in the movie this is what needs to happen and this is what we’re forgetting.”  He– and Jon, too– was great at just refocusing it.  He knows his brand and he knows his charcters so well.  He’s one of those guys who can tell you the day and date he saw this character or that issue came out or that movie premiered.  He just knows everything.  He’s encyclopedic.  I was always eager for him to put his two cents in an I would eek out his counsel on a regular basis.
Did the internet have a big influence on this?  Either for you or the studio.  Since the first movie people have been going crazy on the web with ideas and speculation, even more so once images and footage started appearing.  Does it affect your writing?
For sure.  Websites like Superhero Hype and IGN.  I wouldn’t say it’s an internet-made movie or anything close to that– because a lot of time people have ideas that have no bearing on what’s ultimately possible– but definitely.  There were times… As I said, the modus operandi of Marvel is that the only shareholders are the fans.  There’d be times when they would say ‘Oh, I read this thing, they’d be stoked if this happened.’  So we know we’re not on the wrong track pursuing that idea.  That’s really interesting and fascinating because it sort of puts a ghost partner in the room with you.  A shadow voice in the room.
Last question for you… now that Iron Man looks to be a successful franchise, did you leave some threads and ideas dangling for another sequel?  I know a lot of folks saw the Ten Rings terrorist group in the first movie as a hint towards the Mandarin…
I’m not confirming or denying that remark. (laughs)  I think that’s still in the distant future.  I would say if people looked for it they would definitely find it.
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March 28, 2013

Peanut Brittle? Right Now!

            Pop culture reference.  I have no idea why, but that commercial always made me giggle like a little kid.

            So… I’ve only got a couple of minutes, so let’s talk about right now.  Starting… now.
            When I used to read for a couple of screenplay contests, one of the most common mistakes I’d see would be writers loading the page with information that wasn’t being shown on the screen. 

INT: CAFE
Push in on PHOEBE, sitting at a table, sipping her coffee.  She’s young, blonde, and pretty in that girl-next-door way.  She’s also heartbroken because she just found out her boyfriend’s been sleeping with someone from his office.  They got in a fight when she confronted him and he told her to move out.  She moved here to Seattle to be with him, doesn’t have any nearby family, and has realized that most of her friends were his friends first.  So now she’s sitting here in a cafe, with all her belongings out in her car in the parking lot, trying to figure out what to do with her life.

          Now, in the scene I just scribbled out… what’s happening in the movie right now?  What do we, as the audience, see?  What actions are taking place? 

            Screenwriting is about right now.  Not a year ago, not last week, right now.  Nothing matters except what’s on the screen right now.  If it’s not on screen right now, it’s not important.  If it is important, it’ll come out on screen later (later, at that point, being right now).  If all the words on page one of my screenplay aren’t related to the first minute of my movie, I’m doing something wrong. 

            So, just to clarify, my script should only be talking about what’s happening right now. 
            Now, there are lots of screenplays out there by some amazing screenwriters that mention a character’s background, past relationships, all that sort of thing.  Thing is, if I really pay attention when I read all those scripts, I’d see that these elements are only brought up when they’re relevant to what’s happening on screen right now.  Because screenwriting is about right now.
            Here’s my quick little common sense analogy for you. Feel free to swap genders or locations as you like…
            If I’m out at a bar talking with Phoebe, she’s what’s important.  If I’m talking to Phoebe but thinking about Dot, it means I’m either A) a jerk or 2) focused on the wrong thing.  Because if I’m talking to Phoebe, I should be focused on Phoebe.  If I’m thinking about my boss, I’m doing something wrong.  If I’m on the phone talking with a friend, I’m doing something wrong.  If I’m thinking about my ex-girlfriend or the woman I met earlier in the evening, there’s something wrong.  And if I’m thinking about where Phoebe and I are going to be two hours from now… yeah, I’m probably still wrong.  Phoebe’s in front of me right now, so I should be focused on her. 
            Right now.
            When next week becomes right now, I think I may talk a bit about flashbacks.
            Until then, go write.
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February 23, 2013 / 2 Comments

How To Lose A Screenplay Contest

             My apologies for being a bit late, but I think this is worth it

            This is going to be one of those screenwriting-centric weeks, although you could probably find some helpful hints.  If nothing else, I’m feeling a little slappy this week so you’ll probably find it very entertaining.
            It’s that time of year again.  The big-gun screenplay contests have opened their doors and are accepting entries.  Thousands of scripts are pouring in, ready to be judged, all with the hope of winning fortune, fame, and possibly a whole new life.
            Really, who needs that kind of pressure?
            It’s so much easier not to win, isn’t it?  Less work, less effort, and less responsibility.  Nobody really wants to deal with the money or the buzz or the constant calls from agents and managers and studios, right?
            As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve watched this play out from both sides.  I used to read for a few contests and spent long days and nights going through script after script, often seeing the same mistakes again and again.  I’ve also placed in a bunch of contests– and when I say placed I don’t mean I got the honorary quarter-finalist position that was given to everybody who entered.  I’ve won prizes and been singled out a few times. 
            So I know the kind of things that make a reader cringe and shake their head.  The things that make them shout and scream.  In one or two cases, only the timely intervention of booze kept me from gouging my own eyes out.
            I’m going to share those secrets with you right now.  Here are eight insider tricks which will help you ensure that your screenplay never makes it past the first round. In fact, if you can manage all of these, your script will go down in flames.
            And that’s what we all want, right?
Don’t Worry About Spelling
            Spelling is one if those outdated, elitist things that pretty much every contest uses as a general guideline, even when its painfully abhorrent whit some won meant too spill.  That makes this then easiest way to fail.  All I need to do is trust in my idiot spellchecker and never bother to look anything up.  A dozen or so misspelled and misused words in the first ten pages of my script will make sure any reader is biased to think I have no idea what I’m doing, and that means any good stuff that accidentally slipped into my story later on will be viewed with a much, much more critical eye.
Don’t Bother With Punctuation
            When I screw up my punctuation, it really grates on a reader’s nerves because it affects how they take in the story?  This is a slow, cumulative, thing that can really kill my chances and help swing the vote if someone’s on the fence, about my manuscript!  And anything, that can help lower my chances of moving on, is a good thing, right.
            A fantastic, screw-turning punctuation mistake is not knowing how to use apostrophe’s.  Yeah, they’re almost always used to show possession, almost never plurals, but it’s easy to forget that simple rule and use them for lot’s of thing’s.  Not knowing it’s or its is a great one that will make sure the reader can’t take me seriously as a writer.  That’s one of those easy mistakes that will make the odds of winning inch away little by little until it’s a good, safe distance away.
  
Ignore the Rules
            Contest have a lot of weird, arbitrary rules and requirements.  Some only want to see certain genres or themes.  Others won’t take adaptations.  A few of them will even put certain requirements on me as the screenwriter. 
            Ignore all of this.
            I make a point of sending torture porn scripts to competitions that are looking for  strong family themes and morals.  I submit romantic comedies to sci-fi contests.  If it’s for feature films, I send them the television pilot I wrote in college.  I make it a point to go at least ten pages past the maximum acceptable length.  If the competition is only for women or minorities, I make sure there’s a picture of my pasty-white junk on the cover so the readers know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I’m an Anglo-Saxon male.
            Doing something completely unacceptable like this takes a little more effort on my part, but it’s a pretty much guaranteed way to make sure I fail.
Don’t Sweat Formatting
            Hollywood is like any industry, and “industry-standard” is a term that shifts and changes all the time.  Learning the current, proper script format is tough, and can require typing things into Google and then looking at the results.  I don’t know about you, but I just don’t have time for stuff like that.

            As I see it, all these rules about headers and sluglines are just as arbitrary as spelling and grammar.  If I must format something, I like to use classic screenplays from the ‘40s and ‘50s as my guideline.  After all, if that page layout was good enough for Casablanca it’s good enough for people today. 

            Casablancawon an Oscar, you know. 
            I’ve even submitted stage plays to a few screenwriting contests.  Because at the end of the day, it’s still going to be a story in front of an audience, right?  I’ve never been clear why this gets some readers so frustrated that they start marking down for it.  The important thing, from our point of view, is that we can depend on them to do it and keep us out of that semi-finalist round.
Submit A First Draft
            The people who want to win often do a second draft.  Sometimes even a third.  They cut and rewrite and restructure and a bunch of other stuff that… well, you’d need to be a screenwriter to understand.  It’s a lot of work to get into that very uncomfortable position of being the winner.
            I prefer to go off the assumption that my work is perfect and needs no alterations or adjustments of any kind.  It’s like a diamond in the rough, just without the rough part.  It doesn’t even need polishing.  This is a great mindset to be in, because when my script gets rejected it casts all the blame squarely on the reader.  Because my script was perfect.
            Bam.  How great is that?  No work.  No pressure.  No winning.  It’s  a screenwriting trifecta.
  
Submit the Script You’re Going to Direct
            This method succeeds in getting me kicked out of the contest for a few reasons.  I don’t need to learn formatting, because it’s just going to be for me, Colleen, Patrick, and Sam.  I don’t need to explain a lot of stuff or go into detail because we all know what we’re talking about.  And it saves me time because I don’t need to take out all the stage directions, camera angles, parentheticals, editing notes, and other things cluttering the script.  You know, the stuff I added in to help me out when we shoot this next summer in Marcus and Gillian’s garage.
            See, readers are going to get hung up on all this stuff and say it’s not relevant.  That’s just a bonus.  Now when I get rejected, I’ve got proof Hollywood doesn’t recognize my genius. And probably that the contest is rigged.  In favor of people from Hollywood.
Base It On A True Story
            Okay, if I want to use this method to lose, one of the first things to do is make sure the reader knows this is based on a true story.  I need to put it on the cover, preferably as part of the title.  Opening monologues that explain this is all based on real events are good, closing monologues are better.  If I can figure out how to do both, that’s great.  Being very clear about this up front puts all the pressure on the readers, because now they must find my story believable.  Because it’s true.
            The next thing is to make sure the true story I’m basing this on is very boring and common.  If it’s something that happens to, say, half the people on earth in a given year, that’s excellent.  A quarter of the population isn’t bad, but I really want my true story to be as banal as possible.  It’ll improve my chances of failure a lot if the events can actually be dull in and of themselves, so I need to be honest with myself about how interesting they are.  I don’t want to mess up and tell a story that most people might actually want to see on the big screen.
            This one’s a bit tougher because I’m depending on everyone else in the contest to make up stories that are inherently more interesting than my true one.  Which isn’t that hard, but I don’t want my failure to hinge on someone else doing a better job than me.  So it’s best to choose a topic like cancer, a non-competitive sporting event, or maybe something about a gutsy schoolteacher.  These things will almost always drag my script right down, assuming the reader can stay awake long enough to judge it.
Make It As Hard to Read As Possible
            Last but not least, this is the knockout punch in my “losing a screenplay contest” arsenal.  If for some reason I can’t use any of the above tricks or angles, I need to actually make the script itself difficult to read.  Using a non-standard font is good for this, and only takes a few clicks of my mouse to get the script out of Courier and into something unacceptable like , Garamond, or Papyrus. 
            Another good trick is shrinking the font.  Readers see enough scripts every day that they’ll immediately notice this and it will drive them nuts, trust me.  The downside is this will actually make my script shorter, so if I do this it means I have to make my script even longer so it stays past the maximum acceptable length (as mentioned above).  If I’m not careful, this can lead to a vicious circle where I eventually end up with a 400,000 word script in 6-point font, and that’s a lot more work than I want to put into a contest I’m trying to lose.
            There are some other tricks, too, like giving lots of characters similar names (David, Davila, Danny, Danielle, Darcy).  You can also try naming every character, including bit parts and non-speaking roles.  Y’see, Timmy, this will confuse the hell out of a reader and make them waste a lot of time trying to keep things straight, and that will get them really frustrated with my script.  I can also confuse them by naming and describing as many characters as possible at the same time.  I like to call this “the dump truck approach.”
            And there you have it.  Eight sneaky tips and tricks you can use to make sure your screenplay never gets past the first round of judging.  You might like to know these methods also work if you’re submitting to agents or film studios. 
            So, take the easy way out and avoid all that extra work and stress. 
            Don’t win.
            I’m going to be taking next week off while I deal with a lot of things for the re-release of Ex-Heroes (available everywhere Tuesday the 26th).  But Thom Brannan, author of Lords of Nightand co author of Pavlov’s Dogs, is going to sit in and talk to you a bit about getting stuff out of your head and onto the page.  Then I’ll be back the week after to talk about one of my favorite topics.
            Until then, go write.
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