The Horror Blog posts a short Bloomberg interview with Roger Corman. I’ve got a lot of respect for the man and his work, and while the whole interview is worth a read, there’s one quote that stands out. The Horror Blog also chose the same quote, and I think it’s worth repeating:

“The strategy was to make the best possible film for the money. I’ve seen so many people slough off low-budget films. You cannot do that. When Jonathan Demme did his first film, which was for us, it was a woman-in-prison picture. He said to me, “I’m going to make the best woman-in-prison picture ever made.” That’s the attitude that you must have.”

And holy shit, is he ever right. And more than that, he’s actually agreeing with me. Ok, that sounded pretentious. When I finally saw Bolas Chinas, the low budget movie I acted in last year, I was disappointed. Not because it was a low-budget movie with largely amateur actors; I already knew that. I was disappointed because the director, who also wrote the script and edited, had not realised the full potential of the thing. The script wasn’t particularly good, and it also wasn’t finished before we started shooting, and the editing was incredibly sloppy and careless.

The problem, again, isn’t the budget. It’s that people don’t care. In this case, lots of people involved were originally making “art film”, and did this project for fun inbetween other, more “serious” project. And it’s fine to make a movie for fun, I guess. But it’s not fine to not care about it. Making a movie is hard work, and lots of it. If the people who are doing it, when they get tired in the middle of the project, as always happens, say “fuck it, it’s just a project for fun, my real, serious art movies are what matters, I’ll just do this as quickly and carelessly as possible”, then what you get is a movie that sucks, instead of a movie that’s at least competent and decent for the resources you had available.

If you’re going to make a movie, make the best movie you can. Maybe even make the best movie of its type ever made, if you can bring yourself to say that (I’m not sure I could). But always do the best you can, give it 100%, because if you don’t, if you stop caring, it’s going to suck, no matter what the budget is. There are lots of big-budget turkeys that are obviously a result of people not caring, not caring because they don’t believe in the project, or they believe it’s going to be a blockbuster no matter what, or for any number of other reasons. And they flop. Low-budget movies where everyone does their best usually come out at least decent, and the people involved often get a chance to make another movie, maybe with a bigger budget.

If you’re going to do something, do it right. If not, just don’t bother, because it’s going to suck. Roger Corman agrees with me.

I saw Silent Hill about a week ago. I’ve never actually played the games, but what I’ve been told about them makes me think I’d like them a lot. Director Cristophe Gans made the moody and very cool Le pacte des loups (Brotherhood of the Wolf), which, although the script wasn’t wonderful, was very well executed, I thought. And, of course, Roger Avary wrote the script. Roger Avary is interesting, perhaps most famous for working in a video store with Quentin Tarantino, and then writing work on Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction. I’ve always wanted to like him and his movies more than I actually do, since he seems like a smart and cool guy, but Killing Zoe was a derivative nihilistic bore, and The Rules of Attraction was competent and at times funny, but didn’t live up to the source material at all, so I had my doubts.

And I was right. The movie is stylish and very cool, and at times really creepy, especially creepy looking, but what the hell is going on in this script? The dialogue, especially in the first act, is just screwed up. It’s stilted and unnatural, the sort of thing that makes you go “people don’t talk like that!” every few minutes. The set-up is weak and uninteresting, and you just want people to go to Helltown USA so people will speak fewer annoying lines, and get into the action.

When the main characters arrive in Silent Hill, things make a turn for the better. The first time the darkness falls and the town changes into some twisted nightmare hell version of itself, it’s awesome, and it gets better every time it happens. The effects are very nicely done, both the makeup and the digital stuff. It’s not directly scary, but it’s creepy and makes you jump, which is decent. People continue doing and saying things that make no sense, but it’s ok, you forgive it because of the other things that are going on.

Then, when the mysteries start being resolved, the group of wannabe witch-burners from Monty Python and the Holy Grail show up, wanting to burn some witches and claiming they were turned into newts. This goes on for a while, until you get mightily fed up with them, and they kill one of the secondary characters. You want them to die for being such an idiotically bad and cliched exaggeration of fundamentalist christians (such an idiotic group to begin with that you’d think it’d be hard to exaggerate them), and you get your wish.

The climactic scene is one of my favourites in the movie, a sort of Dante’s Inferno by way of Hellraiser and Japanese tentacle porn, with strands of sapient barbed wire snaking through a church, grabbing people, invading their orifices, and tearing them apart in detail, with characters unable to do anything but stare slack-jawed at what they’ve unleashed. Almost everyone dies, which means that almost everyone annoying dies, so it’s a nice pay-off.

The aftermath is also decent, but by then you’ve stopped caring.

This movie is a typical example of one of the ways screenwriting can fail. As a treatment, this probably looked very good, the general story they’re telling is not bad at all, it’s marginally original, well put together, and so on. But when writing out the actual scenes, something went horribly wrong, and every character became wooden, the dialog became stilted, and people’s motivations and actions made no sense. The devil’s in the details, as they say.

All in all, it’s probably worth seeing, for the nightmare visuals and climactic scenes of pandemonium, if nothing else. For anyone who’s not a horror fan, it’s going to be a waste of time, and even horror fans will likely feel at least a bit let down.

This is a screenwriting public service announcement, for your comfort and safety.

When writing screenplays about lesbian assassins, there are some simple rules that should be obeyed for greater enjoyment, fewer complaints about clichés, and fewer lesbians demonstrating outside the theater and setting fire to your house.

• Lesbians are not ice-cold psychopats who kill men on a whim. Not even lesbian assassins.
• Lesbians do not generally hate men, or despise them.
• Lesbian assassins do not show a predilection for attacking male victims’ genitals.
• Lesbians do not become lesbians because they are tired of men, are betrayed by them, or because they are raped.
• Lesbians are not hypersexual seducers who can turn any straight woman to a life of cunnilingus and comfortable shoes by a mere smoldering look.
• Lesbians do not necessarily die at the end, nor do they lose their true love, or are otherwise punished for their otherness.
• Lesbian assassins do not wear schoolgirl uniforms unless there’s a good reason. Well, at least a somewhat plausible reason. Alright, go ahead, put them in a schoolgirl uniform, you know you want to.
• Lesbians do not lounge around half-naked any more than straight women do, sadly.
• Lesbians, even lesbian assassins, probably have a fairly normal life outside of the hot, hot girl on girl action. Not that you care.

I’m sure there are more, but these should get you started. Subvert the dominant paradigm, damn you. Oh, and do it with style. And tits.

The script is quite possibly done. I mean, I still need to go back and re-read in a couple of days, I’m sure there’s some details here and there that’ll change, and of course, it needs to be translated. But it feels done to me. I read through it today, after putting some finishing touches on it yesterday afternoon, and I’ll be damned if it doesn’t look like a decent movie to me.

Of course, I need other people’s opinions. So I sent it off today to a select few (well, 5 people) whose opinions I trust, in different ways, and who also have quite varying tastes. And they’re not afraid to tell me that my stuff is crap, if it is. So now we’ll see.

In the meantime, I’m going to start the treatment for my next mexploitation movie. Or, well, mexi-dyxploitation. The one with the lesbian schoolgirl assassin. I’m already having fun just thinking about it.

I ran into Alex, the director of Bolas Chinas, at a cafe today. Apparently, he’d just finished the first cut a few days ago, and it clocked in at 2 hours and 20 minutes, which is of course ridiculous for a script that’s less than 60 pages. But I kind of expected it, Alex is so in love with all the takes that it would be hard for him to cut anything, at least for the first cut. Now, he just needs to cut, well, an hour or so. He promised us that we could see the final cut in a week, but I doubt it’ll be that fast. Still, he insisted it looked great, and other people told me the same thing, so it’s going to be interesting.

As for my script, it’s almost done. It needs an action scene in the second half of the second act, and while I know who it should involve and what the outcome should be, I’m having some problems maneuvering the characters into the right situation without changing earlier scenes that should ideally be left alone for purposes of characterization. But I’m sure I’ll figure it out within a few days. After that, it’s just polish and dialogue work, and then translation. I have to say I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.

My writer’s block suddenly just… stopped on Thursday. I finished the long treatment, solving the problems with the end that I had, and then wrote 18 pages of screenplay, all in about 5 hours on Thursday night. Yesterday, I wrote 14 pages more, and also sent what I had off to Øyvind, to get a second opinion.

He basically said, it’s pretty good, and he liked it, but it had some problems. Which was basically what I expected. I’m going to write this more or less straight through to the end now, and then go back and revise. However, a very rough first draft should be done this coming week.

This is a semi-spec mexploitation direct to video script, semi-spec meaning that I’m not paid to write it, but the production people specifically asked me to write something, because they were interested in what I could do. So I have hopes. If nothing else, Øyvind and I agree that it’s a lot better than the script for Bolas Chinas.

Wish me luck, I’m going back to writing.

Screamwriter tagged me for answering this set of questions about me and my tastes. It’s a good warm-up to writing my “what made me get into horror” post, which I haven’t gotten around to yet.

ONE (1) earliest film-related memory:
I remember watching Linnea Quigley’s infamous lipstick scene in Night of the Demons, which my mother perhaps irresponsably rented and let me watch. It scared the shit out of me, but was also exciting, both sexually and otherwise, and it probably warped my little mind for life.

TWO (2) favourite lines from movies:
I’m not big on lines, I’m more of a context guy, but probably a couple of those that run a chill down your spine, like:

THREE (3) jobs you’d do if you could not work in the “biz”

FOUR (4) jobs you actually have held outside of the industry

THREE (3) book authors I like

TWO (2) movies you’d like to remake or properties you’d like to adapt

ONE (1) screenwriter you think is underrated
David Cronenberg. In addition to being one of my favourite directors, he actually managed to make amazing adaptations of Naked Lunch and Crash, and great original material, like Dead Ringers.

THREE (3) people I’m tagging to answer this meme next
Sean T. Collins
I apologize for not knowing any more writers online.

Federico was kind enough to link to some of my posts, especially the one that talked about movie production software. Since that’s led to a lot of people from free software planets clicking through to here, I figure it’d be good to talk a bit more about it.

Federico says that I talk about “obsolete tools”. That’s not strictly correct, Final Draft, for instance, isn’t so much obsolete as it is finished. In its current design, without substantial rewrites and rethinking of the philosophy, there’s not much more it can do, except for perhaps fixes for some annoying and random limitations (screenplays can be saved as PDF, but treatments can’t, for instance).

From what I’ve seen, when software is finished in that sense, there’s an opening for new software to come in and take its place. It usually takes all the good things from the old program’s user interface, and improves the underlying architecture and philosophy to the point where wholly new things are possible. I’ve used Final Draft 6 for several years, ever since I started dabbling in writing screenplays, and it’s actually quite slick for the basic writing process. Screenplays are written in a very strict format, and Final Draft is basically a text editor that does all that formatting for you, so all you have to think about is the text itself. For that, it’s great, and it’s by far the most used screenplay editor. The other main contender being a macro package for Microsoft Word, which does basically the same thing, but is somewhat more cumbersome, and obviously required MS Word.

What should a new, free screenplay editor do, ideally? A lot of work should probably go into the file format. The basic format is easy to define, since the screenplay format has changed almost nothing in the last 20-30 years (and little before that, too). XML is an obvious choice, the DTD wouldn’t even be particularly complicated or large. Then you would need to replicate Final Draft’s rough editing interface, which is that of a text editor with a monospaced font and some special formatting, and a few special hotkeys. That’s all you need for a basic editor, I could write a screenplay just fine with that.

From there, there are two directions you could go. One is to make it better for screenwriters, which on one hand would include things like advanced (optionally server-based) revision control and collaboration features. Final Draft has some rudimentary revision control, along the lines of the revision control in MS Word, and it’s had over the internet collaboration for a few years, where two people can work on the same screenplay, and do text-based chat. Free software could probably do both of these better, by offering a range of revision control and backup options, integrated with Subversion and Arch, and the collaboration stuff is perfect for GOCollab.

Additional features for screenwriters would be to improve the things that are not about writing the screenplay itself. Final Draft is very screenplay-oriented, and does little to provide tools for story development. You can write treatments, but they’re basically just text documents, and you can work with “index cards”, but that’s just another view of the scenes in a screenplay. A real index-card mode with color coding and various other features, some way to look at events and subplots, there are many things that can be done here.

On the other hand, there are a lot of non-screenwriter things that involve the script. The final version of the script (called the shooting script, the one with numbered scenes) is used as a backbone and reference for everyone involved in the production, from preproduction through shooting to postproduction. Production assistants, sound engineers, art department, location scouts, editors, CGI artists, everyone uses an annotated version of the shooting script as a reference for their work.

Final Draft uses a separate program, called the Final Draft Tagger, to do some of this breakdown. It allows you to tag bits of the script with various codes to signify cast member, prop, costume, sound effect, set dressing, etc., for use in budgeting and scheduling, but it’s fairly basic. Using XML namespaces and server-based revision control, everyone could add their own data to the script, maintaining a centralized copy where everyone could sign off on the information. Daily call sheets could be almost automatically generated from this, as could a wealth of other information.

There’s much more that could be done, especially extending into the production and post-production, but as a starting point, something with this feature set would absolutely kill all the competition, and it’d be a great place to start for extending into production and budgeting, shooting, and post-production, and at some point becoming a complete system for movie production work, unlike anything that exists today.

I just finished the character studies and story outline for my mexploitation script. I needed fewer characters than I thought to make it all fit together, and pretty much everything fell into place. I even got the required comic relief in there (although it’s only in a subplot, it should be good enough). I’ll need to reread and polish tomorrow, then I’m going to do a 10-minute pitch to Øyvind and a couple of other people, to see how it’s received.

Looks like we’re not going to be filming tomorrow, at least I assume now, since noone’s told us anything yet. I read the final version of the script, and it’s not changed much. Much to my chagrin, the face-farting scene has not been changed, although there’s a chance it might be changed during filming, given that bits of the script have things like “dialogue here, it’s about: “. I admire Alex’ balls (Chinese or otherwise) for starting filming with this.

I was woken up by a call this morning, from a production person, who told me we had a call tomorrow at 19:30 for a sequence in a nightclub. I confirmed and went back to sleep. Later, I was woken again by a call telling me that the sequence was cancelled, and that it might not be filmed until mid-December. An email even later told me that she’d be in touch to keep me updated on call times for next week.

I was supposed to get the finished script on Monday, and I haven’t seen it yet. I’m worried about that, since I need time to mentally prepare, find my character’s center and motivation, and so on. They should be happy I’m not a method actor, or I’d have to spend two months like some idiot thug on the streets of Mexico City to “get into character”.

Writing’s going well, character studies are done, and I’m pretty happy with them, treatment is about 50% done, with all turning points and climax nailed down, mostly a matter of filling in the blanks, setting up a couple of auxiliary characters, etc. It should be done this week. My girlfriend’s going away for a few days on Friday morning, that should give me the time to finish up the treatment.