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Speaker 2: Welcome to the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, Episode number four forty eight.
Speaker 2: Your dream doesn't have an expiration date, Take a deep
Speaker 2: breath and try again. Kat You Whitten broadcasting from a dark, windowless.
Speaker 1: Room in Hollywood when we really should be working on
Speaker 1: that next draft. It's the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast, showing you
Speaker 1: the craft and business of screenwriting while teaching you how
Speaker 1: to make your screenplay bulletproof.
Speaker 2: And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another
Speaker 2: episode of the Bulletproof Screenwriting Podcast.
Speaker 3: I am your humble host Alex Ferrari.
Speaker 4: Now.
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Speaker 2: Enjoy today's episode with guest host Dave Bullis.
Speaker 3: My next guest is actually a forty five time award
Speaker 3: winning screenwriter and he's the founder of the popular Facebook
Speaker 3: group Screenwriters Who Could Actually write. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 3: a lot of this stuff, including templates, and we're gonna
Speaker 3: talk about his process of writing. We're gonna talk about
Speaker 3: Save the Cat and all that other good stuff. What
Speaker 3: does he think about all of it? Well, why don't
Speaker 3: we all give it a listen with my guest Mike Bierman. Hey, Mike,
Speaker 3: thanks off for coming on the podcast.
Speaker 5: Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 3: Oh it's great to have you.
Speaker 4: Mike.
Speaker 3: You know, you're somebody that's been on my radar for
Speaker 3: a while. You're you're the host of the Screenwriters Who
Speaker 3: Can Actually write. Facebook group you're a forty five time
Speaker 3: award winning screenwriter, so you know, obviously you're somebody that
Speaker 3: I've wanted to talk to, and you know, just to
Speaker 3: get started, Mike, I wanted to ask you. You're a
Speaker 3: trial attorney, you know by day, and I wanted to
Speaker 3: ask you, when did you get bit by the screenwriting bug.
Speaker 4: I'm actually not.
Speaker 5: I don't. I hardly ever practice anymore because between managing
Speaker 5: my daughter and doing the group actually takes an enormous
Speaker 5: amount of time. Given the number of posts I do,
Speaker 5: which you've seen, I'm sure you can understand that I
Speaker 5: rarely practice law anymore. I'm licensed, I can practice, you know,
Speaker 5: do all the things I used to do. I just
Speaker 5: don't do it anymore because what happens is I end
Speaker 5: up with a bunch of court dates that I can't
Speaker 5: contryle scheduled out at infinitum, you know, out into the future,
Speaker 5: and cases can drag on for years. So rather than
Speaker 5: commit to those types of things, I'm doing something else.
Speaker 5: I try to avoid trial work, although I do still
Speaker 5: practice some entertainment law behind the scenes, including recently I've
Speaker 5: done some of that, but generally I don't practice that anymore.
Speaker 5: And the way I got started in screenwriting is my daughter,
Speaker 5: Erica Bierman. She's in Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Hunger Games,
Speaker 5: Mocking J one. Her scene was cut from Mocking J
Speaker 5: two it revealed too much too early, But she was
Speaker 5: also in Dumb and Dumber two. She was when she started.
Speaker 5: She was getting auditions, even very high level stuff. And
Speaker 5: I'd read the scripts and I'd say, Wow, you know,
Speaker 5: I just don't think this is written very well.
Speaker 4: I think I can do better. And so.
Speaker 5: I bought The Screenwriter's Bible by David Trotier, which is
Speaker 5: one of three or four books that I recommend everybody
Speaker 5: should have. I skimmed through it, I didn't read it.
Speaker 5: Wrote a nineteen page short script submitted to Page Awards,
Speaker 5: which is top three contests in the world, and took
Speaker 5: top twenty five scripts out of something like seven thousand scripts.
Speaker 5: So just self taught and started off with a bang.
Speaker 3: So the first screenwriting book that you ever bought was
Speaker 3: actually David Tardier's book. Is that was that correct?
Speaker 5: Yes? And it's a great book.
Speaker 4: It's a really good overview to.
Speaker 5: Screenwriting. There are other books that I like for different purposes,
Speaker 5: but that's a great first book. It's hard to imagine
Speaker 5: a better first book to start with, and Dave Trider
Speaker 5: is actually a member of the group, so I highly
Speaker 5: recommend that book. And while we're on books, I also
Speaker 5: highly recommend Linda Aronson's The Twenty first Century Screenplay, which
Speaker 5: is all about different structures non three acts, all types
Speaker 5: of different jumping time structures and very complex structures, and.
Speaker 4: It's a great book piece.
Speaker 5: You can actually figure out what structure would best suit
Speaker 5: your story idea. If you know what you're doing when
Speaker 5: you start writing, you can custom pick a structure that
Speaker 5: would be the best skeleton to flesh out for your story.
Speaker 5: So that's that's an incredible book, very very complicated. She's
Speaker 5: a very high level writer, she's from Oxford University. A
Speaker 5: very meaty book and it's one you can spend a
Speaker 5: lot of time with for formatting. I like Your Cut.
Speaker 5: Two is Showing by kJ Alex, which is a pen name.
Speaker 5: I know people who know who that is. I haven't
Speaker 5: bothered to ask, but that's the best book for formatting.
Speaker 5: It goes into the most depth any given situation. There
Speaker 5: are typically three to five professional acceptable ways you can
Speaker 5: choose from him to do it, and that is an
Speaker 5: essential book for screenwriters. Rick Toscan also Richard Toskin also
Speaker 5: wrote Playwriting Seminars two point zero, which is mostly a
Speaker 5: playwriting because he was dean of theater at USC for
Speaker 5: I think about thirty years, a very long time. But
Speaker 5: that book also crosses into screenwriting and it's an excellent
Speaker 5: book that breaks down the analysis of story, whether it's
Speaker 5: playwriting or screenwriting. And so are Those are four books
Speaker 5: that I highly recommend.
Speaker 3: It's funny, Mike, because the first book I ever read
Speaker 3: about screenwriting was also David Chardier's book about formatting. I
Speaker 3: went into a borders and remember them when they were
Speaker 3: still around, but I wentn't.
Speaker 5: I was sad when they went away.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because now all that's left is Barnes and Nobles
Speaker 3: and maybe a few independent stores here and there. But
Speaker 3: you know, it's sad to see that that part of
Speaker 3: it go.
Speaker 5: You know. Yeah, the brick and mortar bookstores are deaf.
Speaker 5: They're they're really enjoyable because you can you can browse
Speaker 5: and there's a certain atmosphere and you can you can
Speaker 5: kill a few hours and find things you have no
Speaker 5: idea exist.
Speaker 4: The end of the internet.
Speaker 5: Internet squad, but there's a certain allure to a brick
Speaker 5: and mortar bookstore, and hopefully those will come back. I
Speaker 5: should have mentioned also that Rick Toscan that I just
Speaker 5: spoke of, who I think recently got a Lifetime Achievment
Speaker 5: award from the I guess National Damone of the Arts.
Speaker 5: He's actually in the screenwriting group as well, So we
Speaker 5: have some really high end gurus in there, lots of pros.
Speaker 5: Well over one hundred produced films, films you've heard of
Speaker 5: written by members of the group. So I thought i'd.
Speaker 3: Mentioned that, Yeah, the there are some you know, members
Speaker 3: of the group that i've you know, I've seen their
Speaker 3: hosts about, you know, different things that they've they've written
Speaker 3: that have you know, been produced. For instance, I know
Speaker 3: somebody just wrote a the the the screenplay for the
Speaker 3: latest Steven Sagal movie, and I remember he was in
Speaker 3: the group and I was talking to him briefly. I
Speaker 3: think that's is that Charles or Chuck I think his.
Speaker 5: Name is Chuck Meyer this End of the End, the
Speaker 5: End of the Gun, and he has I think he
Speaker 5: actually has another film coming out on that same deal
Speaker 5: with the same producer, not starring Steven Stagall. I know
Speaker 5: more about it, but I can't. I can't say at
Speaker 5: this point got infos under wraps. But what I what
Speaker 5: I just told you is fine. He does have another
Speaker 5: film under that deal, and I think he's either optioning
Speaker 5: or about to fell another script imminently. So we have
Speaker 5: a lot of activity. I have. I have two feature
Speaker 5: films in production myself right now.
Speaker 4: So you know, there are a.
Speaker 5: Lot of There are a lot of people in the
Speaker 5: group with a lot of things going on, some really
Speaker 5: great stuff.
Speaker 3: So that's why the name fits so well. Screwrits who
Speaker 3: can actually write it, not just not just talk about
Speaker 3: theory right.
Speaker 5: Right, Well, you know there's a certain haughtiness and snottiness
Speaker 5: to it. I'm the first to admit it, and I
Speaker 5: actually did it on purpose because in reviewing screenwriting groups,
Speaker 5: there's one group in particular it's just enormous. I won't
Speaker 5: name it, but it has nearly twenty thousand members, and
Speaker 5: the type of questions asked in that group are just
Speaker 5: mind boggling.
Speaker 4: The lack of.
Speaker 5: Thought going into you know, posting a question with your
Speaker 5: name on it before you put it up, it's just incredible.
Speaker 5: I think when I started the group, in my in
Speaker 5: my group description, I named it kind of sarcastically.
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Speaker 5: Because I was leaving the other group just in disgust
Speaker 5: and wanted to try and get people who were, if
Speaker 5: not more experienced, a little bit more thoughtful about what
Speaker 5: they were writing and what they were saying, a little
Speaker 5: more educated people in the in the craft.
Speaker 4: And so I think I posted, you.
Speaker 5: Know, screenwriting screenwriting forum, hopefully without questions like is water wet?
Speaker 4: And is it okay to kill my character?
Speaker 5: So the whole thing kind of started out as a
Speaker 5: sarcastic announcement of a departure from kind of like the
Speaker 5: Great Unwashed, with people saying, you know, I'm a screenwriter
Speaker 5: because they you know, wrote something on a nap and
Speaker 5: wants to try to attract people, even beginners, but people
Speaker 5: who are more serious about learning the craft, who are
Speaker 5: looking at it as a profession rather than as a hobby.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's you know, I've joined other groups in the
Speaker 3: past as well, and a lot some of these questions.
Speaker 3: There was way too many questions about formatting, and for instance,
Speaker 3: there was actually a group that meant physically here in
Speaker 3: Philadelphia and these the beginners who would showup, woul always
Speaker 3: ask about formatting.
Speaker 5: And when I said the book, buy a book, read
Speaker 5: a script, buy a book, it's it's just not that.
Speaker 5: It's not that tough. And unfortunately, sorry to cut you
Speaker 5: off there, but you know, unfortunately that is all too
Speaker 5: common in a lot of screenwriting groups.
Speaker 4: And one of the rules.
Speaker 5: I have a rules driven group for this purpose to
Speaker 5: try and keep the group on focus. And you know,
Speaker 5: no political posts, and there are a bunch of other
Speaker 5: a bunch of other rules, but you know, one of
Speaker 5: the one of the basic tenets of the group is
Speaker 5: search the group itself before you ask a question, because
Speaker 5: there've been in people been in there for over a year,
Speaker 5: answering in depth almost anything you can think of.
Speaker 4: And also.
Speaker 5: Search the internet before you ask a simple formatting question.
Speaker 5: Buy a book. It's just not that tough. And so
Speaker 5: all you're going to do by by asking that type
Speaker 5: of question in an open form is attract ridicule, show
Speaker 5: you have no idea what you're doing, and get a
Speaker 5: bunch of troll responses, so you actually never get the
Speaker 5: right answer because even the people giving you the right
Speaker 5: answer will be deluded by all the trolls. So and
Speaker 5: that's very common as you know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. You know, when when people would
Speaker 3: ask that in the group, in the physical group, I'd
Speaker 3: always say to the other person that was running it
Speaker 3: with me, I'd say, why don't we take these people,
Speaker 3: put them in their own group and we can go
Speaker 3: over like formatting, and then the other half of the group,
Speaker 3: you know, we'll work on actual you know, writing and
Speaker 3: get into the structures and you and you know, we
Speaker 3: kept going back and forth on this, and I said,
Speaker 3: because every meeting, we're sacrificing our strongest for our weakest.
Speaker 3: And what I mean by that is.
Speaker 5: You know, we'll know exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, just just you know, spending all this time on
Speaker 3: formatting when you either buy fade in or final draft
Speaker 3: the writer's duet or whatever, and it takes care of
Speaker 3: their all for you or you know, like you said.
Speaker 5: No, there's a myth, a little bit of a misconception.
Speaker 5: It takes it takes care of the Uh. There's a
Speaker 5: difference between formatting and element placement on the page. And
Speaker 5: this is a common uh misunderstanding or or people misstate this.
Speaker 5: The screenwriting software. There isn't any screenwriting software that actually
Speaker 5: formats per se for you. What the screenwriting software does
Speaker 5: is it actually puts the elements in place on the
Speaker 5: page so that you don't have to.
Speaker 4: Work in word counting spaces.
Speaker 5: For example, Uh, you know, if you're going to do
Speaker 5: a parenthetical under dialogue, the screenwriting software will put the
Speaker 5: position the cursor in the right place for you know,
Speaker 5: a play format or screenwriting format for character or shot
Speaker 5: or transition or dialogue, action note, special, whatever it is
Speaker 5: that you're trying to do, it'll actually sit up on
Speaker 5: the page for you with the right number of preceding,
Speaker 5: following and intervening carriage space is in intervening carriage returns.
Speaker 5: But what it actually doesn't do is format And so
Speaker 5: that's one of the things that happens in beginning groups
Speaker 5: a lot. And I've seen it. I've seen professional scripts
Speaker 5: where people actually said when I was script doctoring or
Speaker 5: rewriting a script, I'd say, hey, you know this is
Speaker 5: going to be a lot.
Speaker 4: More work than you thought. Well, why is that is
Speaker 4: the story? Dad?
Speaker 5: Well, the story's okay, the problem is the formatting. Everything's off. Well,
Speaker 5: that's impossible. I used final draft. Well that's a very
Speaker 5: naive comment. That shows how many screenwriting formatting errors they're
Speaker 5: going to be because the software doesn't actually format, it
Speaker 5: just puts things in the right place. The formatting is
Speaker 5: the understanding of how to how to direct the camera
Speaker 5: without using shot direction, for example in the specscript, and
Speaker 5: how to properly write down the entire skeleton of a
Speaker 5: visual film in writing using as few words as possible,
Speaker 5: leaving as much white space on the on the page
Speaker 5: as possible. And screenwriting software is just the beginning. It's
Speaker 5: kind of like saying I have a Ferrari, so now
Speaker 5: I'm going to be a you know, a champion driver.
Speaker 5: There's an enormous difference between having the car and being
Speaker 5: able to drive it.
Speaker 4: Does that kind of make sense?
Speaker 5: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it does well because you actually touched upon what
Speaker 3: I was gonna was. Actually I was going to say,
Speaker 3: was there were people who had Microsoft Word open and
Speaker 3: they were using like four tabs for a character, three
Speaker 3: tabs of this. That is yeah, because they would turn
Speaker 3: in a script and I would look at this and
Speaker 3: I'd go, it's all off, and I said, what did
Speaker 3: you write this in? And and that's why I'm saying,
Speaker 3: you know, the screen because they would always say, well,
Speaker 3: Dave you know, how do we write this blah blah blah.
Speaker 3: I'd say, no, no, you just use you know, drive this soft.
Speaker 3: That's what I mean about, you know, buying final draft
Speaker 3: or whatever and.
Speaker 5: The positions the elements correct.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that and then the other.
Speaker 5: The other thing beginners don't understand is, you know, they'll
Speaker 5: go out and pick Helvetica or you know, I don't
Speaker 5: even know the names of all the fonts, the crazy fonts,
Speaker 5: swirls and you know, HP Lovecraft fonts, And Okay, that's great,
Speaker 5: h if you're if you're writing a free verse poem
Speaker 5: or something. But screenwriting is designed for every page to
Speaker 5: be one minute of screen time. Now, obviously, depending on action, uh,
Speaker 5: depending on on dialogue, the level of vocabulary, the the
Speaker 5: way the script's written, each page is going to vary. Obviously,
Speaker 5: you have an enormous amount of action, tightly written action
Speaker 5: a page to go conceivably several minutes. But if you
Speaker 5: you know, okay that if you write there's a two
Speaker 5: mile car chase down the dirt road, that's not gonna
Speaker 5: happen in one minute, Okay, so it the page length
Speaker 5: for filming can vary. But the whole idea is on average,
Speaker 5: one page is one minute of film. Now, the only
Speaker 5: way you can do that, if you think about it,
Speaker 5: is if you have a particular font style, which is
Speaker 5: called a fixed pitch font. And the standard for that
Speaker 5: is Courier, which is an old news font. It's I
Speaker 5: find it fairly ugly font. But they've developed all kinds
Speaker 5: of variant Courier fonts. There's you know, Courier Final Draft.
Speaker 5: They've patented their own Courier New Courier Dark, which is
Speaker 5: one I really like, and there there are a bunch
Speaker 5: of other variants of Courier. And and what it comes
Speaker 5: down to is, no matter what character you type, whether
Speaker 5: it's a special character, dollar sign, hashtag or pound sign,
Speaker 5: exclamation point, period, comma, capital, p small acts, it doesn't
Speaker 5: matter whatever character you type, they all take up exactly
Speaker 5: the same amount of space on the page. And that's
Speaker 5: why you have to use a fixed pitch font. And
Speaker 5: some people will try to cheat. Let's say you're a
Speaker 5: novelist and you're overwriting your script and you want to
Speaker 5: get it down from one hundred and sixty five pages
Speaker 5: to one hundred and twenty where somebody might actually read it,
Speaker 5: and you can't figure out any way to do it,
Speaker 5: because you're overwriting everything.
Speaker 4: You're too green to rewrite your script properly.
Speaker 5: So what you do is you get the bite of
Speaker 5: THEA to go in and change the font to some
Speaker 5: font other than final draft. Go ahead and add a
Speaker 5: couple of lines one top, one bottom, cheat the margins
Speaker 5: left and right, and all of a sudden, your page
Speaker 5: count drops down to one hundred and thirty pages and
Speaker 5: you're within striking.
Speaker 4: Distance of your goal.
Speaker 5: The problem is, any professional looking at a single page
Speaker 5: of your script will immediately throw in the trash. H.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and you know again that's something that also seen two,
Speaker 3: especially on the cover page, like they'll use like a
Speaker 3: different font for the title and uh, you know, like
Speaker 3: like in all those specialized fonts and.
Speaker 5: Some artwork, artworks thrown down the margins and yeah, in
Speaker 5: in spec scripts. You know.
Speaker 4: I have actually have a book coming out.
Speaker 5: Being published by dose Blant Publishing, and it's, uh, it's
Speaker 5: gonna be called It's it's coming out fairly shortly. I'm
Speaker 5: essentially finished with the manuscript, the body of it. I'm
Speaker 5: working on the uh some of the pictures, clearing copyrights
Speaker 5: things like that, but the uh, the book's going to
Speaker 5: be called Secrets of Screenwriting, with the subtitle of uh
Speaker 5: Collected Essays. I don't want anyone to think that this
Speaker 5: is like any of the other screenwriting books. It really isn't.
Speaker 5: It's a collection of my long essay posts from the
Speaker 5: group over the last year.
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Speaker 2: and now back to the show.
Speaker 5: And it's kind of a rambling, disordered.
Speaker 4: Volume full of all.
Speaker 5: Kinds of prolls of wisdom that just occurred to me
Speaker 5: from a post or someone's comment or something.
Speaker 4: I would pull out.
Speaker 5: My phone and write these gigantic, sometimes five and six
Speaker 5: page posts. They probably have a mental problem. I don't
Speaker 5: know why I do it, but I do. And a
Speaker 5: lot of people asked me to collect those, or they
Speaker 5: wanted me to archive them somehow so they could reference them.
Speaker 5: Several pros have have used my rewriting post, which is
Speaker 5: very popular.
Speaker 4: It's about six pages long.
Speaker 5: They one pro actually printed it out and glued it
Speaker 5: onto the wall above his computer messaged me to tell
Speaker 5: me how useful it was. And I have a copyright post.
Speaker 5: People tend to like screencraft. Publish part of that copyright post,
Speaker 5: and I'm going to publish the whole thing in the
Speaker 5: book with Screencraft's permission.
Speaker 4: They've already given me permission to republish the whole but.
Speaker 5: That that should be useful. I've kind of lost track
Speaker 5: of where I was. But there's there's a plug for
Speaker 5: the book.
Speaker 3: Do you know when that book's coming out?
Speaker 5: Like, I'm with their contract to get it out in
Speaker 5: the next Uh. I think I've got sixty days or
Speaker 5: so to get the manuscript and that's not a problem
Speaker 5: because the manuscript's essentially finished and then the publisher has
Speaker 5: to publish it within six months. So, and we're shooting
Speaker 5: for Barnes and Noble, you know, the brick and mortar stores.
Speaker 5: I guess there'll probably be a hard hard copy hardcover
Speaker 5: version and the you know, standard.
Speaker 4: Paperback type version.
Speaker 5: We suspect it'll be oversized, probably a fight by eight
Speaker 5: or five y nine. It is probably gonna be out
Speaker 5: two hundred and sixty pages, and it won't be like
Speaker 5: any other It won't be like Trottier's Guide or anything
Speaker 5: like that. That'll be fully index where you can go
Speaker 5: in and anthy you know, gee, I have this particular question.
Speaker 4: I'm gonna look this is this is more of.
Speaker 5: Different subjects, the philosophies behind different ways of writing story,
Speaker 5: things like that. It's it's more s a forum rather
Speaker 5: than subject driven like a lot of books, so it'll
Speaker 5: be very different. It's more of the kind of the
Speaker 5: book you sit down in a in a coffee shop
Speaker 5: and and read it to get It's kind of like
Speaker 5: a mixture of opinion and method and things like that.
Speaker 4: So it'll be very different.
Speaker 3: Oh, very cool, because you know, I have a ton
Speaker 3: of screenwriting books and this does sound very different than
Speaker 3: than all the rest that I have. Obviously, because this
Speaker 3: is a podcast, you can't see it, but next to
Speaker 3: me is is my library of screenwriting books.
Speaker 4: But yeah, that sound you know, that's just smart.
Speaker 5: I mean, this is a is a very estheteric craft.
Speaker 5: It's a very closed industry. A lot of the really
Speaker 5: good screenwriters either don't have the time to help or
Speaker 5: don't want to help. And I've actually seen sabotage in
Speaker 5: groups I've seen. I won't name any of them, but
Speaker 5: I've seen professional or advanced writers who actually get paid
Speaker 5: all the time to write giving wrong answers on purpose
Speaker 5: to spoil off either someone they don't like or somebody
Speaker 5: that you know, they just decided to screw with And
Speaker 5: of course that doesn't help anybody except the pro who's
Speaker 5: keeping down the competition. So opinions are going to vary
Speaker 5: in screenwriting books, and I have my own very strong opinions.
Speaker 5: My book is going to be full of them. It's
Speaker 5: going to be full of cursing. It's not edited. It
Speaker 5: will be edited, but the language won't be edited out.
Speaker 5: Sometimes if I'm angry about something, you know, I'll flavor
Speaker 5: the post with a sprinkling of cursing, because that's just
Speaker 5: how it came out. To keep the book genuine, and
Speaker 5: it's the posts are actually going in as the original essays.
Speaker 5: They're not being edited down to make it politically correct
Speaker 5: or anything like that. So the book will offend some,
Speaker 5: it will amuse some, and it should help everyone that
Speaker 5: reads it.
Speaker 3: And that's fantastic. You know, sometimes we need it. We
Speaker 3: need a little tough love, Mike.
Speaker 5: And that's and that's what the book is. I'll yell
Speaker 5: at you, I'll prop you up, I'll beat you down.
Speaker 5: Then i'll i'll lift you up again, and and i'll
Speaker 5: i'll inspire you to write better and to keep going.
Speaker 5: And then I'll i'll beat on you a while for
Speaker 5: doing something a certain way that's that's not a very
Speaker 5: effective or good or or or smart way, and then
Speaker 5: I'll build.
Speaker 4: You up again.
Speaker 5: So it's it's it's kind of a tough ride, but
Speaker 5: enough people approached me to write it and said, geez,
Speaker 5: you need to put all these things in a book.
Speaker 5: These are terrific that a publisher actually approached me to
Speaker 5: publish the book. So, you know, situation, Yeah.
Speaker 3: It is an amazing situation. And you know, sometimes we
Speaker 3: need that tough love, you know, just a funny anecdote, Mike,
Speaker 3: I think that you'll really enjoy, you know. I one
Speaker 3: time had a beginner approached me with a script and
Speaker 3: they came into one of our group, but one of
Speaker 3: my groups I was running, and their script had several
Speaker 3: pages within within the in the script with design drawings
Speaker 3: on them of what they were talking about inside the script.
Speaker 5: It's not good and it doesn't you know, it's it
Speaker 5: doesn't matter if they're Picasso, and it doesn't matter if
Speaker 5: they're Hemingway. Those things are not a good combination for
Speaker 5: a spec script. If you're if you were hired by
Speaker 5: somebody at dream Works who's absolutely visually driven and you've
Speaker 5: already got the job, and they see you doodle in
Speaker 5: the margins and say, jeez, what a great drawing. I
Speaker 5: short like to see some of those in your script.
Speaker 5: By all means stores some artwork in the script, But
Speaker 5: in a regular SPECS script you don't do that. You
Speaker 5: don't put art work in. Every rule is made to
Speaker 5: be broken. One of my most award winning scripts, it
Speaker 5: doesn't have artwork in it per se, but I do
Speaker 5: some interesting things with a couple of different fonts that
Speaker 5: are cut in as JPEGs. One of the languages that
Speaker 5: the script is written in is Galileean Aramaic, which was
Speaker 5: the language spoken in the early Middle East which ended
Speaker 5: not too long after Jesus' time. That's one of seven
Speaker 5: languages in the script. Well, there's no font for that,
Speaker 5: so I actually had to cut JPEGs into the script
Speaker 5: to put in the original Galilean Aramic, which actually mattered
Speaker 5: because at one point the language actually appears on the screen.
Speaker 4: As a special effect.
Speaker 5: So to save producers the four months it took me
Speaker 5: to get four or five words, let me see, we
Speaker 5: have a four words to four months to get translated
Speaker 5: by one of the world's experts in this language, so
Speaker 5: to say, producers to time, if anyone picked up the script,
Speaker 5: I went ahead and had the translation already done and
Speaker 5: put in a script. So you know, rules are made
Speaker 5: to be broken, but you need to learn the rules
Speaker 5: and get good so you can decide when you need
Speaker 5: to break them. I've never put our work, per say,
Speaker 5: in a script, and I'm up to I don't know,
Speaker 5: thirteen features, with eight solely written and then others co
Speaker 5: written with best selling authors and people like that. And
Speaker 5: I had one person that wanted to put artwork in
Speaker 5: the script, and had a very frank talk with him,
Speaker 5: and I said, look, you came to me, you want
Speaker 5: me to write this with you. I like the idea,
Speaker 5: I like the story. If you insist on putting artwork
Speaker 5: in the script, you're going to write it along. And
Speaker 5: that was it.
Speaker 4: And no artwork.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and that's something I want to get into.
Speaker 4: Mike.
Speaker 3: Is you your screenwriting? You know your methods and you
Speaker 3: know so when you were starting out, you know, you
Speaker 3: had David Tardier's book and you obviously you're reading, you know,
Speaker 3: you say to skin through that, and you were writing
Speaker 3: down ideas, and so I wanted to ask, did you
Speaker 3: ever adhere to any sort of like method, you know,
Speaker 3: whether it be three acts, five acts, any of that
Speaker 3: when you were writing, or did you just simply just
Speaker 3: sort of had you had a starting point and you just.
Speaker 5: Went, okay, so three acts and basically didn't read the book,
Speaker 5: just looked at the book for formatting, hadn't read any
Speaker 5: any professional script that you like, of any movie that
Speaker 5: I liked. Just had seen a bunch of scripts that
Speaker 5: I didn't think were written well, had been sent to
Speaker 5: my daughter. There were some that were written well. They
Speaker 5: were you know by all means that someone researches this.
Speaker 5: Oh she auditioned for that. Mike said, the script is crap. Now,
Speaker 5: some of some of the scripts were crap. A lot
Speaker 5: of them were just mediocre. So, and I'm unusual in
Speaker 5: that I don't outline, and most writers do outline. There
Speaker 5: are just a few, I would say, maybe less than
Speaker 5: four percent. Probably closer to two percent don't outline. I
Speaker 5: don't know if I want to call it a gift
Speaker 5: or if it's a curse. Most writers will actually execute
Speaker 5: a complete, fleshed out outline that maybe thirty forty to
Speaker 5: fifty sixty pages before they write the screenplay and they'll
Speaker 5: actually write it from the outline. I have never done that,
Speaker 5: and I write natively. But I also have developed my
Speaker 5: own trademark writing method that a lot of even pros
Speaker 5: have commented publicly. They said that it's helped them a lot,
Speaker 5: and a number of them are adopting. And I call
Speaker 5: it BAM, which is the Beerman asynchronous method. And with BAM,
Speaker 5: what I do is I write the almost always write
Speaker 5: the end first, and sometimes I write the beginning first,
Speaker 5: but it's always either the beginning or the end, and
Speaker 5: then I wrote write the other.
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Speaker 2: to the show.
Speaker 4: End of it, whether it's the beginning or the end.
Speaker 5: So I always start with the beginning and end when
Speaker 5: I start a script, and frequently the very first thing
Speaker 5: that I will do is write the end and write
Speaker 5: fade out the end, and it'll be the first scene
Speaker 5: I write.
Speaker 4: That's very common for me.
Speaker 5: Then I'll go back and write the beginning, and then
Speaker 5: typically what I do is I will tie scenes into
Speaker 5: the beginning and end scene the first and last by definition,
Speaker 5: and I will work backward from the outside end, which
Speaker 5: sounds strange until you try and see what it does.
Speaker 5: I will tie you know, I might write the end,
Speaker 5: then I'll write the beginning. Then i'll write the second
Speaker 5: scene of the screenplay. Then i'll go write three scenes
Speaker 5: back from the end. I'll jump back and write, you know,
Speaker 5: the third scene at the beginning. And then I'll know
Speaker 5: that I need a particular second act scene or a break,
Speaker 5: and I'll go in and i'll write that, and I'll
Speaker 5: just float it in the middle of final draft a
Speaker 5: writer duet, which is what I use now.
Speaker 4: I'll just float it.
Speaker 5: In there and I will then write whatever scene occurs
Speaker 5: to me that I'm inspired to write that I know
Speaker 5: needs to be written at the time, and I fit
Speaker 5: them all together like a jigsaw puzzle, and I attach
Speaker 5: them to the anchors, which are both ends, and as
Speaker 5: I develop scenes in the middle, I'll when I know
Speaker 5: I have two scenes, sorry is a long answer. When
Speaker 5: I know I have two scenes that are going to
Speaker 5: stick together, I won't put any asterisks between them. I
Speaker 5: use like three asterisks when i'm floating a scene, and
Speaker 5: I'll pull the asterisks out when I tie two scenes
Speaker 5: together and I know that nothing will go between them scenes,
Speaker 5: and then they may still be floating somewhere in the
Speaker 5: in the second or third act, somewhere in the middle
Speaker 5: of the script, and I just build the whole script
Speaker 5: that way. When I write the last scene, it's it's
Speaker 5: almost always a second act scene somewhere in the middle
Speaker 5: of the script, and I write it, rewrite that scene,
Speaker 5: and I'm done, because I also rewrite as I go,
Speaker 5: so then the whole thing only needs to be skimmed
Speaker 5: for continuity and for proofing errors. That method is a
Speaker 5: method that I developed on my own and gave a
Speaker 5: name to because people wanted to know how it was writing.
Speaker 5: A lot of people who said it sounds crazy tried
Speaker 5: it and they absolutely love it. What it does is
Speaker 5: it prevents writer's block. If you're writing from the beginning
Speaker 5: of a script, scene by scene, and you know where
Speaker 5: you're going, you may have a bunch of things you
Speaker 5: already know you want to write, but you can't link
Speaker 5: it up because you get stuck earlier on on. With
Speaker 5: my method, you never get stuck if you if you
Speaker 5: don't know what you're gonna do next for a second,
Speaker 5: you just jump ahead and write the next thing you
Speaker 5: know you're going to put in, even though I may
Speaker 5: not be connected to what you just wrote.
Speaker 4: Does that make sense?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it makes sense.
Speaker 5: But and so I've had I've had several protos, you know,
Speaker 5: one guy eighteen produced movies, another guy twenty produced movies,
Speaker 5: another guy six produced movies. They've actually all used it
Speaker 5: come back and said, my god, this this method is wonderful.
Speaker 5: I don't know, I don't know why. I haven't, you know,
Speaker 5: used this before. I never thought of it. I've never
Speaker 5: seen it before. David Silverman, who is the creator of
Speaker 5: the Wild Thornberrys, actually just recommended and endorsed this method
Speaker 5: and said it was genius. So that's kind of nice that.
Speaker 5: The interesting thing is, I haven't had anybody given an
Speaker 5: honest try after understanding the method which I described in
Speaker 5: my in my upcoming book. I haven't had anybody give
Speaker 5: it an honest try and say that it didn't work
Speaker 5: for them.
Speaker 4: I've had a number of.
Speaker 5: People who've refused to try it, you know, geez, that's scary.
Speaker 4: I can't imagine it.
Speaker 5: But I've never had anybody who actually sat down and
Speaker 5: gave it a good try who didn't benefit from it.
Speaker 5: So and that just developed again from learning to write
Speaker 5: my own way. I didn't go to film school I
Speaker 5: didn't go to. I wasn't a film major. I wasn't
Speaker 5: a screenwriting major. I don't have an MFA in screenwriting.
Speaker 5: I just did it on my own, and it works
Speaker 5: for me, it works for a lot of other people,
Speaker 5: and interestingly, it works for people who outline and for
Speaker 5: people who don't outline, because all of the writers that
Speaker 5: I just mentioned, with the twenty and eighteen and six
Speaker 5: movies and the Thornberry's creater, they all outline extensively. One
Speaker 5: of them is just an absolutely encyclopedic outliner and the
Speaker 5: math that still worked for him. So just kind of
Speaker 5: made sense to me, and I started writing that way.
Speaker 3: You know, you mentioned, you know, beating writer's block. You know,
Speaker 3: I think that is. You know, that's something that I've
Speaker 3: dealt with too, Mike Is. At first I thought it
Speaker 3: was writer's block, and I realized, you know, what I
Speaker 3: think it was was decision fatigue. And what I mean
Speaker 3: by that is, you know, you start your screenplay from
Speaker 3: the beginning, so here we are, you know, Act one,
Speaker 3: page one, and you know, we start to sort of
Speaker 3: write this.
Speaker 5: The dangerous and deadly scary blank white page.
Speaker 3: Fade in interior. But but you know it was a.
Speaker 5: Dark and stormy night.
Speaker 4: Oh damn, I'm stuck.
Speaker 3: It's kind of like that movie Throw Mama from the
Speaker 3: Train and Billy Christal keeps writing that same sentence and
Speaker 3: you can't figure out what to go next, and and
Speaker 3: so you know, and it's basically, you know, a decision
Speaker 3: fatigue where you realize, oh my god, this screenplay could
Speaker 3: go in like ten thousand directions. And there was actually
Speaker 3: a book I was reading about this, uh, the same
Speaker 3: sort of like you know, principle of you know, decision
Speaker 3: fatigue and you know, what're you know, obviously it could
Speaker 3: go in ten thousand different directions. And his argument was,
Speaker 3: if you actually, you know, go back to the theme
Speaker 3: and the and the the whole you know, the main
Speaker 3: tension and everything of your screenplay, there really probably isn't
Speaker 3: ten thousand ways it could go. Really, it has to
Speaker 3: all tie in together. So that way, you know, see one,
Speaker 3: you know we're not you know, we're on an island,
Speaker 3: and then seeing two, you know, all these other different
Speaker 3: things are happening that have never been established. If you know,
Speaker 3: if you get what I'm trying to say.
Speaker 6: I do, and what the the decision fatigue problem that
Speaker 6: that you've labeled and that you've designated is a very
Speaker 6: common problem.
Speaker 4: And uh, the band mess said what I just said.
Speaker 5: You can see immediately how that prevents it from happening.
Speaker 5: If you know the end, you know where you're going. So,
Speaker 5: by definition, everything scene you write is going to do
Speaker 5: one of three things. It's either going to develop character,
Speaker 5: or it gets thrown out, or it's going to advance
Speaker 5: the plot, or it gets thrown out or the holy
Speaker 5: grail of a scene is that it develops character, reveals character,
Speaker 5: deepens character, and advances the plot. That's what you should
Speaker 5: name for in every single scene. If you write a
Speaker 5: scene that doesn't do any of those things, throw it
Speaker 5: out your you know, kill your baby, because it's not
Speaker 5: getting you to where you need to be. And because
Speaker 5: budgets are determined by page count, and whether your screenplay
Speaker 5: is picked up and produced or not may very well
Speaker 5: depend on what your page count is. If you can
Speaker 5: tell story A in ninety pages, or you can tell
Speaker 5: story A in one hundred and ten, and you can't
Speaker 5: get it down from one hundred and ten, story A
Speaker 5: ninety pages is much more likely to get made than
Speaker 5: one ten. Because line producers and people who determine how
Speaker 5: much a movie's gonna cost to make. They will assign,
Speaker 5: depending on genre, style, a bunch setting, you know, costume requirements,
Speaker 5: things like that, locations, they'll figure out special effects CGI.
Speaker 4: Goes on and on. They'll figure out a per cost
Speaker 4: page on average of the screenplay.
Speaker 5: They'll multiply that out and they'll say, Okay, your spring
Speaker 5: to make this movie is going to cost us one
Speaker 5: hundred and ten times whatever that page cost is. That's
Speaker 5: gonnad up being a lot higher than what ninety times
Speaker 5: whatever the page cost is, right, Yeah, So if you
Speaker 5: can write the same story, tell the same story more
Speaker 5: efficiently in fewer pages, even if nothing changes.
Speaker 4: I've rewritten scripts for people.
Speaker 5: I did a reway for creative Artists and untitled Entertainment
Speaker 5: Package project, and the original script was I think, oh,
Speaker 5: I've been looked at this in a long time.
Speaker 4: Was a couple of years ago. The original script.
Speaker 5: Was somewhere around It was one hundred and twelve pages,
Speaker 5: and they wanted it to be one hundred pages before
Speaker 5: it went to budgeting. They wanted one hundred. They did
Speaker 5: one hundred and twelve. So first thing, one of the
Speaker 5: first things I was asked to do was reduce the
Speaker 5: page count. So when I rewrote the script, not only
Speaker 5: did I I told them I said I think I
Speaker 5: can hit one hundred pages. They said that would be great,
Speaker 5: that's what we had in mind. We'd love that. So
Speaker 5: I actually hit ninety nine and a half pages, which
Speaker 5: is one hundred pages. Okay, you know ninety nine go
Speaker 5: to the one hundredth page halfway down. So I hit
Speaker 5: the goal. But not only did I do that, I
Speaker 5: filled five major plot holes and I added a whole
Speaker 5: new story.
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Speaker 5: So I was able to make the story more complex,
Speaker 5: more complete, get rid of problems, and still knock twelve
Speaker 5: pages out of the out of the thing. And so
Speaker 5: that's a successful rewrite, and they were. They were very
Speaker 5: happy with it. So I kind of forgot how we
Speaker 5: got here. But it is again why you have a
Speaker 5: goal post in mind. You don't wander off and get lost.
Speaker 5: That's the how I found I found my way again.
Speaker 5: If you know the end, everything that you write is
Speaker 5: going to be advancing your characters, your plot, moving all
Speaker 5: of the things you've created toward that end. If you
Speaker 5: know where you're going. You don't stumble and get lost.
Speaker 5: You always move toward that goal tost There are going
Speaker 5: to be a lot of choices on the way that
Speaker 5: you're going to have to make, but those choices are
Speaker 5: now narrowed.
Speaker 4: And focused by the fact that you know where you're going.
Speaker 5: A lot of people who overwrite I don't have an
Speaker 5: ending in mind, and they'll wander this way and that way,
Speaker 5: and they'll end up having, you know, five or eight
Speaker 5: or ten scenes that don't contribute to where they eventually
Speaker 5: end up.
Speaker 4: And you know, it happens all the time.
Speaker 5: I read somebody wrote a comment yesterday, Gee, I just
Speaker 5: finished my screenplay. I hate it. I hate my own screenplay.
Speaker 5: It's not what I set out to write. I don't
Speaker 5: know how I got here. I don't like the ending,
Speaker 5: I don't like the story, and it's not what I intended.
Speaker 5: So now I've got to do a page one rewrite.
Speaker 5: That's because you didn't know where you were going.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know one piece of advice you're years ago
Speaker 3: that I heard from the writer of Fight Club, Chuck
Speaker 3: Paul Knook.
Speaker 4: He actually terrific writer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he's phenomenal. He gave me the advice that he's like, right, right,
Speaker 3: your beginning. He goes, literally he goes, right, you know,
Speaker 3: whatever opening, what do you want to do? And then
Speaker 3: he says, go to the go to your last page,
Speaker 3: whatever that might be. And he goes, just write the end.
Speaker 3: And he said, you're gonna do is because he's going
Speaker 3: to feel comple if you do it this way. He said,
Speaker 3: then what you're gonna write? So that way? Again, like
Speaker 3: you just said, it was a goal, and that's what
Speaker 3: he also, you know, told me a couple of years ago,
Speaker 3: was it it's a goal and that way you know
Speaker 3: at least you know what you're going towards, and that
Speaker 3: way you correct.
Speaker 5: So he has a similar uh that I didn't know
Speaker 5: he said that, but he has a similar philosophy to
Speaker 5: to what I do. And it sounds like he starts
Speaker 5: off writing the same way. And by the way, you
Speaker 5: should note I do that whether my screenplay is linear
Speaker 5: or nonlinear. Uh, it doesn't matter. I write the screenplay nonlinearly,
Speaker 5: even if it's going to be a linear form.
Speaker 4: So let's say it's a straight three act you know.
Speaker 5: First the second act break, you know, page twenty three,
Speaker 5: what you know, if it's going to be a straight
Speaker 5: three act screenplay and it has a linear plot, without flashbacks,
Speaker 5: without jumping around, nothing fancy, just a simple straight story.
Speaker 5: And that could be anything from a family film to
Speaker 5: a military film. You know, you can do anything that way.
Speaker 5: The subject matter doesn't matter, it's just how you choose
Speaker 5: to write it. Time wise, you can use my form,
Speaker 5: and I do use the form to write linear screenplays.
Speaker 5: I just don't write them in order. I write the
Speaker 5: whole screenplay out of order, but when you end up
Speaker 5: reading the screenplay, it's in order. And it also works
Speaker 5: for nonlinear methods. If you're writing something like fight clubs nonlinear.
Speaker 5: If you're writing something that jumps around, and you have
Speaker 5: an unreliable narrator and he may or may not be crazy,
Speaker 5: and he may may not be who you even think
Speaker 5: he is, you can still use that method and jump
Speaker 5: all over the place and write the screenplay that's going
Speaker 5: to be nonlinear, and write it in a nonlinear fashion,
Speaker 5: which sounds very chaotic but actually makes sense when you're
Speaker 5: doing it.
Speaker 4: So, as I always say, if.
Speaker 5: You know where you're going, and you know where you're
Speaker 5: coming from, a nice to find world that you're working
Speaker 5: with in you're not going to start writing, you know,
Speaker 5: crazy stuff about Mars in your story about you know,
Speaker 5: the kids starting school in new school district because the
Speaker 5: parents got divorced. You know, all of a sudden, you're
Speaker 5: writing about Martians on Mars, right, and you're having a
Speaker 5: space shootout because you had no idea where you were
Speaker 5: going with your screenplay. And I've actually came crazy stuff
Speaker 5: like that.
Speaker 4: I'm sure you have too.
Speaker 5: People end up with like three different stories in one screenplay.
Speaker 5: They get horribly lost, and then they get right or
Speaker 5: back to writer's block. Oh you know, I don't want
Speaker 5: to write next. Yeah, because you jacked the whole thing up.
Speaker 5: You got yourself in a jackpot. You've written yourself into
Speaker 5: a corner and nobody would know what to write next
Speaker 5: because none of it makes any sense. So you know,
Speaker 5: learn and writing method and stick to it. Like I said,
Speaker 5: my method works for me. It's worked for everyone I
Speaker 5: know that's trying to who's gotten back to me on it.
Speaker 4: But you you need to learn to write in.
Speaker 5: A consistent method that works for you however you write
Speaker 5: and stick to that, develop that method and make.
Speaker 4: It work for you.
Speaker 5: You know, Chuck has his own method that's apparently similar
Speaker 5: to mine, and I think that's a very smart method.
Speaker 5: It's funny. I admire that writer. Maybe that's why I
Speaker 5: like him so much, because we write in a similar convention.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, great mindstick, I like.
Speaker 5: Right, So well that's what that's what they say.
Speaker 3: You know, because you know, just to continue with what
Speaker 3: you were just saying about, you know, no no writer
Speaker 3: could fix, you know, a screenplay that has all those
Speaker 3: problems because you know, there's no goal, there's no sort
Speaker 3: of central narrative to it. You know. I remember when
Speaker 3: I read a screenplay years ago and it was this
Speaker 3: this guy had this idea for the this like anthology,
Speaker 3: i'm sorry, a horror movie trilogy, and I read the
Speaker 3: first part of it, the first screenplay. I read all
Speaker 3: one hundred and some odd pages, and literally it was
Speaker 3: about these two vamp hires who live in like this
Speaker 3: old mansion or something has all these catacombs underneath it,
Speaker 3: and it's just about like it's almost like.
Speaker 5: We haven't seen that one before.
Speaker 3: And it's just all these different people, like groups of
Speaker 3: people go in there and they're getting killed. There's no
Speaker 3: there's no goal, there's nothing.
Speaker 5: Literally, there's no story exactly. And unfortunately, I'm hearing a
Speaker 5: lot of reports of this from screenplay contest screenwriting contest
Speaker 5: judges that they're seeing a lot of screenplays that have
Speaker 5: essentially no purpose. There's no story being told. You know, Okay,
Speaker 5: I get it. It's slash or genre, and we're going
Speaker 5: to see a whole bunch of blood, a whole bunch
Speaker 5: of people killed, and then all of a sudden we
Speaker 5: decide that's enough and we stop the movie. But it
Speaker 5: never tells a story. That's that's not uh, that's not screenwriting.
Speaker 5: That's just dribbling out garbage. And this is what happens
Speaker 5: when you have an unfocused person writing that doesn't know
Speaker 5: why they're writing or where they're going. You end up
Speaker 5: with something like that. You know, a lot of writer's block. Also,
Speaker 5: jumping quickly back to that as it ties in here,
Speaker 5: is if you have problems in your in your opening,
Speaker 5: in your first act, and the first act is unfocused,
Speaker 5: not set upright, not structured right, you really don't have
Speaker 5: any idea why you're writing. And that'll be very apparent
Speaker 5: to the reader very quickly. By the way, you don't
Speaker 5: know why you're sitting down and writing to tell this
Speaker 5: story that is going to cause you massive writer's block,
Speaker 5: because if the first act is poorly structured and poorly
Speaker 5: set up everything that comes after. It's like Domino's, It's
Speaker 5: like Jenga or Jackstraws or any of these things. If
Speaker 5: you if you've set the foundation badly, there's no way
Speaker 5: the house will stand. I even have a post written
Speaker 5: on this, so right about making an analogy to you know,
Speaker 5: building a house. You know, don't build a a house
Speaker 5: on sand, Okay, building on rock. I have a whole
Speaker 5: essay on this, and that's it's all about first act
Speaker 5: structure and knowing what you're doing in the first act
Speaker 5: because that sets up the entire story, doesn't it.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it really does. Like they say, if you have
Speaker 3: the second or third act problems, you have first act problems.
Speaker 5: Really correct, and again, most of those problems can be
Speaker 5: solved by knowing the beginning and the ending right when
Speaker 5: you start. But David Silverman I just mentioned that while
Speaker 5: Thornberry's creator wrote a it was very gracious and he
Speaker 5: wrote a recommendation for my book that'll be on the
Speaker 5: you know, fronting.
Speaker 4: Side or back cover.
Speaker 5: I don't know where it's going there are a bunch
Speaker 5: of recommendations to fit. And he said that using this
Speaker 5: particular method, you end up with a much twistier, surprising plot,
Speaker 5: with all kinds of fresh takes on things that isn't
Speaker 5: stale that may even surprise the writer. By writing using
Speaker 5: a different method, you end up with something that may
Speaker 5: even surprise you.
Speaker 4: It doesn't surprise you.
Speaker 5: In that you at the beginning in the end, but
Speaker 5: how you get there can vary, as I said, and
Speaker 5: so you may discover some ingenious twists and things along
Speaker 5: the way, but you always know where you're going. So
Speaker 5: there are a bunch of different ways to tell the story,
Speaker 5: and the details may vary of what is going in
Speaker 5: the story, the different moral lessons, and the different challenges
Speaker 5: that characters face, the internal and external challenges. You know,
Speaker 5: no stories, no story works if the protagonist is perfect. Okay,
Speaker 5: we work with flawed characters, and some of the best
Speaker 5: stories are told from the most damaged flawed characters.
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Speaker 2: and now back to the show.
Speaker 4: And the story.
Speaker 5: As they get the external challenges, you look at how
Speaker 5: their character, their internal character reacts to that, and you
Speaker 5: see the character's character arc, which can be you know,
Speaker 5: learning improvement, change changes the mechanism that drives the character arc,
Speaker 5: or you can have you know, some characters will go
Speaker 5: through some things in as sociopathic characters, other damaged characters,
Speaker 5: and they may actually not have a character arc. The secario,
Speaker 5: which I really like, evokes strong reactions. Some people don't
Speaker 5: like the film because they think Emily Blunt's character, the Agent,
Speaker 5: the FBI agent she plays, doesn't have a character arc.
Speaker 5: I argue that she does have a character arc without
Speaker 5: getting too far into spoiler. She's completely by the the
Speaker 5: book and incorruptible at first, and then at the end
Speaker 5: when faced with her own death, because she's going to
Speaker 5: go forward and reveal by the book, reveal all the
Speaker 5: criminal and sketchy things that were done that Josh Bolan's
Speaker 5: character very much, the CIA guy wants her to say
Speaker 5: everything went by the book, to cover up all the
Speaker 5: things they did.
Speaker 4: In the end, to save.
Speaker 5: Herself, she falsifies the document to save her own life.
Speaker 5: So my argument has always been she does have a
Speaker 5: character arc. She changes from the incorruptible you know, perfect
Speaker 5: if you will agent, the idealized agent, and she changes
Speaker 5: to somebody who to save.
Speaker 4: Herself, falsifies the report of what happened.
Speaker 5: So but anyway, you know, you start with with damaged
Speaker 5: characters and you move them through the story, and that's
Speaker 5: that's the story arc. That's why we're entertained, is because
Speaker 5: we get to see change.
Speaker 4: In a character.
Speaker 5: If you have a character that you know is waterproof
Speaker 5: and bulletproof and you know, nothing ever happens to them,
Speaker 5: which I've always felt was a big danger with Superman,
Speaker 5: by the way, you know, that's why there's Kryptonite, right, yeah,
Speaker 5: because if he has no fault, he has no weakness.
Speaker 5: What are we going to do for a story?
Speaker 4: You developed the the.
Speaker 5: Ultimate badass Marvel superhero that can't be touched, that nothing
Speaker 5: can ever happen to them, Like the Silver Surfer. There's
Speaker 5: there's really not a whole lot you can do with
Speaker 5: that character. And that's why The Surfer had limited appearances
Speaker 5: and things. You look at somebody like Deadpool, who's in
Speaker 5: a very very damaged character who may or may not
Speaker 5: even be sane and Marvel finally, you know, Ryan Reynolds
Speaker 5: fought ten years to make Deadpool, and they insisted on
Speaker 5: you know, the script being genuine to the source material,
Speaker 5: and Marvel is very worried because you know, totally not
Speaker 5: PC and it's dirty and filthy, and he curses and
Speaker 5: he has sex, and he does all kinds of bad
Speaker 5: things that heroes shouldn't do, and that makes him fascinating.
Speaker 5: And that's why Deadpool killed it at the box office.
Speaker 5: I honestly believe it was. It was probably my favorite
Speaker 5: movie of the year. So probably not gonna win any Oscars,
Speaker 5: maybe special effects, who knows, but entertainment wise, you know.
Speaker 4: I thought it was.
Speaker 5: I thought it was a terrific film because you had
Speaker 5: such a flawed character and it was just so entertaining
Speaker 5: to watch him go through all that.
Speaker 3: So yeah, and I also agree with that. The reason
Speaker 3: I liked it was because it was so different than
Speaker 3: all the other superhero movies that are coming out. Obviously,
Speaker 3: you know, it didn't take itself too seriously. It was
Speaker 3: completely different. It was a complete one eighty from all
Speaker 3: the other superhero movies that were coming out, and it's
Speaker 3: I think that's why I enjoyed it so much.
Speaker 5: Yeah, he break they break the fourth wall the time,
Speaker 5: you know, he turns and looks at the camera and
Speaker 5: goes you know, you know, gee would a superhero really
Speaker 5: do this, and you know, there's a fourth wall break
Speaker 5: within a fourth wall break.
Speaker 4: And they they constantly pull the audience in. And those
Speaker 4: are things.
Speaker 5: Those are things that were pretty much although you know,
Speaker 5: even in Greek theater and Roman theater, those are things
Speaker 5: the aside where the actor turns and talks to the audience. Okay,
Speaker 5: those are things that have always been in storytelling. In
Speaker 5: modern screenwriting, they were pioneered by Shane Black, of course,
Speaker 5: with the with the Shane blackisms, you know, one of
Speaker 5: the most famous being and he's describing a mansion and
Speaker 5: I'm paraphrasing, I don't remember exactly, but he'll say, you
Speaker 5: know that he's describing the place, and he stops and
Speaker 5: he says, you know, look guys, basically, and he's writing
Speaker 5: like this in the script. Look, guys, basically, this is
Speaker 5: exactly the kind of place that you would buy if
Speaker 5: you hit the lottery and you had millions and millions
Speaker 5: of dollars and you wanted two great parties for all
Speaker 5: your friends. This is this is the shit you would buy.
Speaker 5: And he puts that in the script. So Deadpool did
Speaker 5: much the same kind of thing. You know, when I
Speaker 5: set through the opening of dead Pool by the time
Speaker 5: they finished writing the credits, you know, calling the director
Speaker 5: an overpaid tool and the writers.
Speaker 4: You know, the real heroes. General, I was fully.
Speaker 5: Satisfied with the price that paid for the movie, just
Speaker 5: getting through the opening credits. You know.
Speaker 3: Also, like you mentioned Shane Black, I saw that you
Speaker 3: actually were able to meet Shane Black. Was that a
Speaker 3: writer's conference.
Speaker 5: That was at Austin Film Festival. So I script called Needles,
Speaker 5: which is an allegorical diabolical, diabolical thriller that I found
Speaker 5: myself talking about a lot because people are curious about it,
Speaker 5: and that's how I went to Austin. I wasn't going
Speaker 5: to go, and the director of Austin, Matt Matt Dee
Speaker 5: called me, I think, a couple times, convincing me to
Speaker 5: go because apparently my script was going to finish pretty high.
Speaker 5: Frank Airbahn, director Showshank Redemption, Walking Dead creator, and you know,
Speaker 5: a bunch of other stuff. He'd picked Needles top ten.
Speaker 5: Of course I didn't know this at the time, but
Speaker 5: he'd picked it top ten scripts for the Science Fiction
Speaker 5: Award and top ten scripts for the Horror Prize out
Speaker 5: of eighty six hundred and twenty seven scripts. So when
Speaker 5: you do really well at some of these film festivals
Speaker 5: like Austin, I made the top group where I got
Speaker 5: to have, you know, secret meetings in special places with
Speaker 5: great people that nobody else could go to. And those
Speaker 5: meetings often had you know, twenty thirty forty people that's
Speaker 5: it from the whole film festival, whereas people who wrote
Speaker 5: scripts that did decently but finished lower, they'd be in
Speaker 5: a room full of you know, hundreds of people. And
Speaker 5: so I ended up in a room, a very small room,
Speaker 5: you know, size of a small dining room, maybe a
Speaker 5: little bigger, with Shane Black and a whole bunch of
Speaker 5: high finishers, and he was taking questions. So everybody was
Speaker 5: kind of shy, and I think I asked the first question.
Speaker 5: I'm not shy. I jumped up and I asked him
Speaker 5: about It was something about working with Robert Downey Junior
Speaker 5: and Val Kilmer. Their methods are very different, and what
Speaker 5: was going on in Robert Downey Junior's life, which I
Speaker 5: won't rehash here at the time, and you know, got
Speaker 5: to ask him one on one questions right there, which
Speaker 5: I think they actually put on a podcaster on the radio,
Speaker 5: which is kind of cool. But he had actually auditioned
Speaker 5: my daughter for a film, and her audition went straight
Speaker 5: to him, and he really liked her. And we went
Speaker 5: back and forth in a couple roles on that. Ultimately
Speaker 5: we didn't we didn't finish one of the auditions. We
Speaker 5: chose not to do. But I was a terrific guy,
Speaker 5: very very generous guy with his with his time, and
Speaker 5: just extremely gracious to other writers. So you know, I
Speaker 5: got some great pictures with him. I can prove it happened.
Speaker 3: Well, that's how I actually saw it too. I saw
Speaker 3: you met him because when you were on John Fallon's podcast,
Speaker 3: I actually saw That's one of the photos he added
Speaker 3: was you and Shane Black. And I wanted to make
Speaker 3: sure I asked you that, Mike, because Shane Black is uh.
Speaker 3: I don't think there's a screenwriter alive right now who
Speaker 3: hasn't who doesn't envy or you know, look at Shane
Speaker 3: Black as sort of like a guide in one way
Speaker 3: or another.
Speaker 5: Well, I mean he's you know, he's he's a pioneer.
Speaker 5: He's the guy that did something that you know, in
Speaker 5: modern times in screenwriting, nobody had done, and he did
Speaker 5: it with he did it with dash and and and bravado,
Speaker 5: and he nailed it. So he he's a guy much
Speaker 5: to be admired.
Speaker 4: You know.
Speaker 5: I also met Terry Rossio, who was just absolutely incredible guy,
Speaker 5: and he was very, very funny, and we were standing
Speaker 5: outside in front of the hotel and I asked him
Speaker 5: for I asked him if I could get a picture,
Speaker 5: and you know, a lot of people are walking by him.
Speaker 5: Had no idea who he was, and so he went
Speaker 5: walking by me, and my you know, ears pricked up,
Speaker 5: and I said, holy.
Speaker 4: Smokes, there he goes.
Speaker 5: And so I went out politely introduced myself and he said,
Speaker 5: he said to I don't know if it was his
Speaker 5: driver or somebody that was hanging out with him. He said,
Speaker 5: he said, I like this guy. Let's take about a
Speaker 5: dozen pictures. And he turns to me and he starts
Speaker 5: to direct to see. He says, Okay, we're just a
Speaker 5: couple guys hanging out talking here. There's a there's a
Speaker 5: strange accident or happening in the distance, and all kinds
Speaker 5: of weird stuff is going on, so we start acting
Speaker 5: like we're watching this. Of course, he was much better
Speaker 5: at it than I was.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
Speaker 2: and now back to the show.
Speaker 5: And I got like a dozen pictures of us making
Speaker 5: stupid faces and kind of grabbing onto each other and
Speaker 5: going ooh, went on, He's just hilarious, just a terrific guy.
Speaker 5: And I met uh uh uh John Lee Hincock, and
Speaker 5: I met uh with the blind sigh, I wrote, I
Speaker 5: met Andrew Kevin Walker, who that was great to meet him.
Speaker 5: Yes in the game, and yeah, I those there are
Speaker 5: a couple of my favorite movies. So uh, you know,
Speaker 5: the Evolution of Seven. Any anyone who aspires to be
Speaker 5: a screenwriter really needs to read the story of Seven.
Speaker 5: And what he went through, you know, is a towered
Speaker 5: record tower, records clerk.
Speaker 4: Trying to get anybody interested in this thing.
Speaker 5: He finally gets an agent on the phone, starts talking
Speaker 5: as fast as he can and spitting stuff out, and
Speaker 5: the agent doesn't hang up on him, actually is interested,
Speaker 5: starts asking qui lessians, agrees to read the script, and
Speaker 5: then boom, all of a sudden, it takes off from there.
Speaker 5: But you know, all the time to get to that
Speaker 5: lucky break, and then you know, director after director had
Speaker 5: him rewrite the script. The original script had the Head
Speaker 5: in the Box ending, which was, you know, shocking.
Speaker 4: To the studios.
Speaker 5: There's absolutely amazing ending, and you know, oh that's too much,
Speaker 5: we need to rewrite it. So they kept having him
Speaker 5: rewrite the script, and then that director would go off
Speaker 5: the project. The next guy would come in, Oh, I
Speaker 5: love this project, Let's rewrite the script. So he kept
Speaker 5: doing that, and then finally David Fincher came in and
Speaker 5: apparently I read an interview recently, I wasn't clear on
Speaker 5: how to tappened. Apparently Andrew Kevin Walker sent him the
Speaker 5: wrong script. He sent him the earliest, the first version
Speaker 5: with the head in the box, and Fincher loved it,
Speaker 5: and they went together and fought with the producers in
Speaker 5: the studio to get it made. And my understanding, if
Speaker 5: I recall, is Morgan Freeman is actually the reason why
Speaker 5: the movie got made the way it did, because at
Speaker 5: some point Morgan Freeman came forward and said, look, if
Speaker 5: you don't make it with that ending with the head
Speaker 5: in the box, I'm gone, I'm walking. And so that
Speaker 5: did it. But I got to meet him, I got
Speaker 5: to meet his brother. They were very nice, and I
Speaker 5: just heard him talk and I waited around, and you know,
Speaker 5: these people are normal people. I mean, they're not gods,
Speaker 5: and people idealize them and oh, I know who that
Speaker 5: guy is.
Speaker 4: I know his name.
Speaker 5: I've seen that actor on TV. Well when you really
Speaker 5: need him, they're just regular people. Some of them act
Speaker 5: like they're not regular people. Some of them act like
Speaker 5: regular people. Most of them want to be treated like
Speaker 5: anybody else. They don't want to be you know, they've
Speaker 5: had enough of that. Some of them aren't that way,
Speaker 5: you know, some of them have viewed egos. A lot
Speaker 5: of them just want to be left alone and treated
Speaker 5: like anybody else. So I waited in a very short
Speaker 5: line because people were afraid to approach them, and went
Speaker 5: up and got to talk with him for you know,
Speaker 5: it wasn't long, maybe five minutes. But I've got pictures
Speaker 5: with them too. So, so is there what's the what's
Speaker 5: the saying the essay fortune favors the bowls?
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, it's yeah, there's also, uh, what's the essays saying?
Speaker 5: Yeah, that's what I was going for.
Speaker 4: The essays?
Speaker 5: I don't remember if it's Fortune favors the Bold it's
Speaker 5: something like that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's I forget what that actually is. But I think,
Speaker 3: but it's very similar to that. I think. But is
Speaker 3: there any screenwriters you haven't met yet, Mike that you
Speaker 3: really wanted to meet?
Speaker 5: Oh?
Speaker 4: I mean, I suppose there are a lot of there.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of great There are a lot
Speaker 5: of great writers and a lot of great screenplays out there.
Speaker 5: I mean, my my favorites just you know, like you,
Speaker 5: Shane Black and and Andrew, Kevin Walker, Terry Ross you.
Speaker 5: I mean, it's just amazing to meet them all in
Speaker 5: one trip. Just just amazing. But you know, I don't
Speaker 5: know if I really have an answer to that. One
Speaker 5: the one of the shocking movies for me of the
Speaker 5: year that didn't get a lot of press and play expensive.
Speaker 5: I don't know if you've seen it, yes, Yeah, the
Speaker 5: acting is terrific, that the dialogue is wonderful. It's just
Speaker 5: it's a beautifully made film. It's a very simple film,
Speaker 5: but the acting, the quality of the acting and the
Speaker 5: writing the dialogue will just draw you in. I couldn't
Speaker 5: turn the damn thing off. I sat down and started
Speaker 5: watching it. I had places to go, people to see,
Speaker 5: had things to do. I had no intention of watching
Speaker 5: the movie. And I mean, I've fat there with my
Speaker 5: jaw dropped. Found that I've been standing there fifteen minutes
Speaker 5: with the remote my hand watching this thing. You know,
Speaker 5: my daughter got it as a sag screener and came in.
Speaker 5: And that's probably I would say that's probably acting wise
Speaker 5: and script wise, probably the best film I've seen this year.
Speaker 5: I don't know what it's going to do with the Oscars.
Speaker 5: I suspect Denzel Washington will probably win a Best Actor.
Speaker 5: Biola Davis certainly should be in the running for Best Actors.
Speaker 5: I know that she had enough screen time for it,
Speaker 5: but Denzel certainly should went.
Speaker 4: And you know, that.
Speaker 5: Movie, as they said with Deadpool, with the opening, that
Speaker 5: movie is worth the price of admission if you only
Speaker 5: watch the first scene where Denzel Washington is talking about death.
Speaker 5: The scene is so mind blowingly great that the whole
Speaker 5: movie is worth watching just for that one scene. And
Speaker 5: you know, it doesn't stop there. So I can't really say,
Speaker 5: you know, any one particular writer, A number of the
Speaker 5: writers that I'd like to meet her dead, So you know,
Speaker 5: that's kind of a kind of a bummer.
Speaker 3: But as you're talking about, you know, Defences, I thought
Speaker 3: it was phenomenal as well. I think you know, Denzel
Speaker 3: Sole the show in that movie. You know, he just
Speaker 3: plays that charismatic, tragic hero obviously because there's a lot
Speaker 3: of regret in him in that man's life, in that
Speaker 3: character's life. And you know, as he's sort of talking
Speaker 3: to everybody, everybody in one way or another, sees him
Speaker 3: at his best, sees him at his worst, and it's
Speaker 3: sort of you know, one way or another also at
Speaker 3: the butt end of his worst. And you know, his son,
Speaker 3: he talks to his one son the one way his
Speaker 3: other son. You know, he constantly wants more from him,
Speaker 3: and he's he doesn't go about it the right way.
Speaker 3: And you know, it's just a phenomenal movie.
Speaker 5: Yeah, because he wants to, you know, he wants to
Speaker 5: make the changes he couldn't make himself in his own
Speaker 5: life in his have his son live those and and
Speaker 5: also you know, excel as he did the way he did,
Speaker 5: because he's getting older and he sees you know, his
Speaker 5: own mortality, which we we know from telling you about that,
Speaker 5: so he he you know, wants to live vicariously through
Speaker 5: his son. Also, it's just an absolutely phenomenal movie. I'll
Speaker 5: probably watch it again when we get off the phone. Wonderful,
Speaker 5: wonderful film. I don't know if it if it kind
Speaker 5: enough circulation buzz the box office to uh to win Oscars.
Speaker 5: You know, the what the Oscars people pick frequently isn't
Speaker 5: anything near what I think is the best.
Speaker 4: And other people agree with that. But that's terrific writing.
Speaker 5: The dialogue is phenomenal. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So, And it's almost a self contained movie because a
Speaker 3: lot of it happens in that one house. And you know,
Speaker 3: I wanted to ask you too about about you know,
Speaker 3: your screenplay for The Grocer, because that's completely containing self
Speaker 3: you know, self contained screenplay. And that won third place
Speaker 3: in the London Film Awards.
Speaker 5: Correct, Yeah, it won, it won third. It's won a
Speaker 5: bunch of awards. It just took third at London. It's uh,
Speaker 5: it's in the running in in another contest. That just
Speaker 5: made another cut. The Grocer is completely contained, if one
Speaker 5: hundred percent contained. It is one location the entire screenplay.
Speaker 4: There there are some movies that try to do that.
Speaker 5: It's very difficult to do it and carry it off
Speaker 5: with a with a very entertaining movie, because a one
Speaker 5: location screenplay is going to be very dialogue heavy.
Speaker 4: It has to be.
Speaker 5: Unless you know, you do something completely avant garde and
Speaker 5: have a bunch of people sitting in a room watching
Speaker 5: paint dryer ants crawl around, you know, some experimental thing.
Speaker 5: You know, I'll eraserhead meet Salvador Dali or something like that.
Speaker 4: You're you're gonna tend to be dialogue heavy.
Speaker 5: Needles is ninety seven percent one location, which is a
Speaker 5: desert saloon, which may or may not be in Needles, California,
Speaker 5: in the Mojave Desert. It's it's actually purgatory, but appears otherwise.
Speaker 4: And it is.
Speaker 5: Only two other locations that occur as flashbacks. One is
Speaker 5: a very brief flashback to gold Gotha and it's I
Speaker 5: think a quarter page. And the other flashback is is
Speaker 5: like a Pacific Northwest, rainy mountain, rainy mountain, winding road.
Speaker 4: And that's it.
Speaker 5: So you know, ninety seven percent contained grocers, one hundred
Speaker 5: percent contained The entire story happens at a grocery store
Speaker 5: in its parking lot.
Speaker 4: That's it. The one location for the whole thing.
Speaker 5: And of course, you know, you hear all the time,
Speaker 5: that's what everybody's looking for, is one location. You bring
Speaker 5: the you bring the cats and crew in, you set
Speaker 5: the date, you get everything set up and you never
Speaker 5: have to move anywhere.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 5: You look at a movie like Spy Game, for example,
Speaker 5: which I love, they have, you know, Hong Kong, they
Speaker 5: have you know, settings in Vietnam.
Speaker 3: We'll be right.
Speaker 2: Back after a word from our sponsor, and now back
Speaker 2: to the show.
Speaker 5: Langley, Virginia, China, Coastal China. You know it to Tony Scott,
Speaker 5: you know, big, big bang, big budget, big stars, and
Speaker 5: it goes all over the world.
Speaker 4: The Born films do that too. Those are very expensive
Speaker 4: to make.
Speaker 5: And a lot of the places where films like that
Speaker 5: want a film, like the Middle East, these are not
Speaker 5: stable places where you can just go set up a
Speaker 5: camera crew.
Speaker 4: This is covered in Argo. You know, it's no secret.
Speaker 5: There are a lot of places you can't film and
Speaker 5: you have to try and mimic, you.
Speaker 4: Know, find an other location that works.
Speaker 5: Then you have to you know, if you're not filming
Speaker 5: where they are, you have to build sets that make
Speaker 5: it look like you're really there, and.
Speaker 4: Things like that, you know, bridges, buys, they had to
Speaker 4: had to.
Speaker 5: Uh, they're showing Berlin being divided east and West, the
Speaker 5: communists and the and the democracy and they've got the
Speaker 5: they've got the wall being built right down the middle
Speaker 5: of the city. I mean, that fall an incredibly expensive
Speaker 5: scene to film. I turned to my wife. You know,
Speaker 5: I've seen it many times. She hadn't. I turned to her.
Speaker 5: Last night, we watched again. I watched it again. She
Speaker 5: watched it, and I said, I said, imagine the cost
Speaker 5: of the scene. How many people are there, all the
Speaker 5: soldiers in uniforms, you know, as far as the eye
Speaker 5: can see, and it's just very, very expensive. Well, it
Speaker 5: contained screenplay does the exact opposite of that. It minimizes
Speaker 5: your your actors. It minimizes your locations to minimalist as
Speaker 5: low as you can get one location. Now that there's
Speaker 5: even an extreme un contained screenplays. If you look at
Speaker 5: Ryan Reynolds buried, essentially the whole movie happens with him
Speaker 5: in a coffin. H That's that's as contained as you
Speaker 5: can get. You're in a coffin. Okay. So but anyway,
Speaker 5: that that's considered a very desirable thing these days. Hopefully
Speaker 5: somebody will hear this and ask to read the script
Speaker 5: and buy one of those those scripts.
Speaker 4: I keep having people rave, man, this need to get made. Well,
Speaker 4: I agree, with you.
Speaker 5: Let's let's sell the screen, you know, contact my manager,
Speaker 5: we can make a deal. But that's that's also a
Speaker 5: smart way to start off for writers that want to
Speaker 5: learn to develop character and get kind of be fuddled
Speaker 5: or thrown off by changing locations.
Speaker 4: They'll always posting my group.
Speaker 5: You know, what do I do?
Speaker 4: You know, how do I move the camera?
Speaker 5: I have a camera, you know, in a bedroom shooting
Speaker 5: out the window at stuff happening outside.
Speaker 4: How do I write that?
Speaker 5: You know, a lot of people get hung up on
Speaker 5: all that, And that's all formatting. A lot of people
Speaker 5: get hung up on that stuff. If you have a
Speaker 5: single location, you can concentrate much more character, can't you.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's very true. And then with like.
Speaker 5: Fences, you mentioned Fences was a play, okay, and the
Speaker 5: movie the movie feels like a play when you watch
Speaker 5: it very much. You know, Samuel Beckett Theater of the Absurd,
Speaker 5: he has he had a play that was I think
Speaker 5: half a page or a quarter of a page.
Speaker 4: He has plays.
Speaker 5: Where the entire play there are two people in trash
Speaker 5: cans talking to each other. You talk about dialogue heavy,
Speaker 5: you talk about illusions. You need to get encyclopedia out
Speaker 5: and people said this about Needles. You need to get
Speaker 5: an encyclopedia to understand everything going on because it's so
Speaker 5: deep with illusions, because you know, they've got a talk,
Speaker 5: or it's gonna just be two people with their heads
Speaker 5: sticking out of trash cans. The whole thing. You know,
Speaker 5: Beckett has somebody buried up to their neck and fans.
Speaker 5: The whole play is one character buried up to their
Speaker 5: neck and fan.
Speaker 4: All you see is their head.
Speaker 5: That's minimalist. Okay, well, that's what you shoot for. Maybe
Speaker 5: not that extreme, because it's very hard for something like
Speaker 5: that to be entertaining.
Speaker 4: You have to be a master to pull that off.
Speaker 5: But what you want to do if you're starting out
Speaker 5: is pick a setting that you don't move from. Work
Speaker 5: on developing and deepening and broadening your characters and examining
Speaker 5: the moral challenges, the philosophical ideals they have as they
Speaker 5: deal with whatever situation you're creating, and go ahead and
Speaker 5: develop the characters and worry more about that than jumping
Speaker 5: all around in like a borne. There's nothing wrong with
Speaker 5: the born fields, but you know, jumping around, you know,
Speaker 5: elevators and trams and planes and going all over the
Speaker 5: place concentrated on the character and building develop the character.
Speaker 5: There was a there's a play on Broadway called Blackbird
Speaker 5: and Sandasty subject matters, say Cha, Mall Station and stuff
Speaker 5: like that, but it basically has a Erica was up
Speaker 5: for a role in that. I was playing I think
Speaker 5: one hundred and fifty five shows at the Belasco Theaterre
Speaker 5: with Michelle Williams and Jeff Daniels, and they were gonna
Speaker 5: make it three Erica Bierman, and she actually got the
Speaker 5: preliminary offer on that. We were waiting for the final
Speaker 5: contract to come through, and the director wrote the little
Speaker 5: tiny part out at the end, so they went with
Speaker 5: a cast of two. The whole play is a cast
Speaker 5: of two for whatever the length of a full length
Speaker 5: Broadway play is. And it is a woman grown too.
Speaker 5: I don't need to go into this too much, but
Speaker 5: basically it's a woman grown to womanhood who was basically
Speaker 5: a child, young adolescent when she was entered into a
Speaker 5: sexual relationship with a guy. It's not like forcible rape,
Speaker 5: but it's statutory rape. And he and up, you know,
Speaker 5: living his life and having a family and the business,
Speaker 5: and she actually shows up at his business years later
Speaker 5: and confronts him. Oh wow, yeah, and so very very intense,
Speaker 5: very dialogue driven, character driven, and very contained.
Speaker 4: You've got something that is more than one location.
Speaker 5: It does have more than one location, but the vast
Speaker 5: majority of it is one location. And so that's the
Speaker 5: kind of thing that for a play or for a film,
Speaker 5: cuts your costs down dramatically. And that is what has
Speaker 5: has recently of.
Speaker 4: Late been in demand.
Speaker 5: And you hear people screaming all the time, I want
Speaker 5: contained screenplays.
Speaker 4: So that's what they're talking about.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know that, that's something that I try to
Speaker 3: do as well, Mike. And what the way I tried
Speaker 3: to do it was, I wrote I wrote three films,
Speaker 3: three screenplays out of Summer Camp. I called him my
Speaker 3: Camp trilogy, and in great and so that way, you know,
Speaker 3: it's kind of sort of like Finding the Thirteenth in
Speaker 3: a way, you know, because always gonna be at this camp,
Speaker 3: We're not really there's no big set pieces.
Speaker 4: You know what I mean.
Speaker 3: And it can be done, you know, where horror is
Speaker 3: the sort of the main character, and you don't have
Speaker 3: to you know, go out and get you know, a
Speaker 3: list actors. You could just you know.
Speaker 5: Happen that horror is very profitable. They can be made
Speaker 5: for not a lot of money. And if you're getting
Speaker 5: into contained horror where you got very few locations, that
Speaker 5: should be very desirable material.
Speaker 4: If it's written well, should be very marketable.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So I've actually pitched a few of them, and
Speaker 3: well that's a whole nother story del Thegether. But but
Speaker 3: you know, but, you know, just going back to Buried,
Speaker 3: you know, I agree. You know, I actually knew what
Speaker 3: the whole concept was going in and I always wondered,
Speaker 3: how are they going to carry this for the whole movie.
Speaker 3: I was pleasantly surprised at how they carried that throughout
Speaker 3: the whole movie and adding different things.
Speaker 5: Well, he's acting, you know, in Deadpool, it's full of
Speaker 5: all kinds of self deprecating humor, of course, and Ryan
Speaker 5: Reynolds says at one point, Oh, Ryan Reynolds made it
Speaker 5: this far, and it's superior acting method. You know I'm
Speaker 5: talking about he's a good looking guy. Okay, Well, in
Speaker 5: in Barry, he acted the hell out of it.
Speaker 4: You know, you're not. You're not the best looking guy
Speaker 4: in the world.
Speaker 5: With a blue light, a little you know, low wattage
Speaker 5: blue light in a coffin the whole screenplay that was
Speaker 5: carried by his acting. He killed it. He did a
Speaker 5: beautiful job acting, so you know he needed a strong
Speaker 5: actor to pull off. You you put somebody who's just
Speaker 5: a pretty faith in the box who can't act, and
Speaker 5: you got a flop.
Speaker 3: Right, Yeah, it's very true.
Speaker 5: But you know, Ryan Reynolds happens to be a pretty
Speaker 5: face and he also can't act, and he ended up
Speaker 5: nailing that.
Speaker 4: And yes, it was.
Speaker 5: Engrossing from beginning to end, another film that I expected.
Speaker 5: I watched it for the novelty, which I suspect you
Speaker 5: did too, knowing what it was going in saying you know,
Speaker 5: there's there's no way they can pull this off, and
Speaker 5: then found myself via very entertained in watching the whole movie.
Speaker 5: And that's that's a great example of a successful contained
Speaker 5: almost completely contained. There are some other locations, but not much.
Speaker 5: I think maybe three locations the whole thing.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's just Also, I made sure to go out
Speaker 3: and get the screenplay because you know Scott Myers from
Speaker 3: Goldenstory dot com, he was always mentioning it, and I
Speaker 3: made sure to coach you got his posts about it
Speaker 3: where he dissected the whole movie. I was, you know,
Speaker 3: I was blown away again. You know how they were
Speaker 3: able to do that, and they always The way they
Speaker 3: did it obviously is they raised the stakes, you know,
Speaker 3: constantly adding in new twists and turns. Okay, you know
Speaker 3: he has you know, well, I probably shouldn't go into
Speaker 3: it because in case, everybody hasn't seen it yet. But
Speaker 3: but you know, it always reason.
Speaker 5: It's kind of old to worry about spoilers now, but
Speaker 5: I mean, yeah, you know, the one thing goes wrong
Speaker 5: and then the next thing goes wrong. You know, his
Speaker 5: light starts running out. I mean, you know, it just
Speaker 5: goes from one thing to the next.
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Speaker 2: and now back to the show.
Speaker 5: And that's what you have to do in a screenplay.
Speaker 4: You need to keep raising the tension. You know.
Speaker 5: One of my criticisms of Manchester by the Sea is
Speaker 5: I just never felt the stakes were that high, and
Speaker 5: I never it just didn't feel like it was increasing tension.
Speaker 5: It's a very stately paced piece. Yeah, Case the Afflet
Speaker 5: did a fine job acting, so did the others, but
Speaker 5: it's not a short movie and it just moves along
Speaker 5: at a very very stately pace. I like the film.
Speaker 5: It wasn't my favorite film of the year by far.
Speaker 5: I suspect the Academy'll like it as kind of a
Speaker 5: downer ending for them, but it's a film that's a
Speaker 5: good example of one I didn't feel that they kept
Speaker 5: raising the days they didn't have sufficient stakes.
Speaker 4: Now to give you an idea of what the effect.
Speaker 5: Of that is, my wife fell asleep four or five
Speaker 5: times trying to watch the movie. We got a huge
Speaker 5: fight because I said, I said, now's the time, let's
Speaker 5: watch man Chester.
Speaker 4: I said, no, I'm not watching that thing. You know,
Speaker 4: I can't stay awake.
Speaker 5: I said, no, No, like you, you really will get
Speaker 5: in it.
Speaker 4: You know, it'll have an interesting emotional.
Speaker 5: Impact on you and you'll you'll get, you know, very
Speaker 5: particular feeling, and I want to talk to you about it.
Speaker 5: So you know, let's, you know, drink some coffee and
Speaker 5: let's let's set up and watch this thing. And I've
Speaker 5: watched it four times. I like it more each time
Speaker 5: I watch it. And you know, let's tell one of
Speaker 5: the ways that I learned to write well is by
Speaker 5: watching movies. Okay, I don't it'll probably surprise you, and
Speaker 5: I do not recommend this for most people. I read
Speaker 5: very few screenplays by other writers. I don't go read
Speaker 5: all the Oscar winning screenplays that are depending. I don't
Speaker 5: do it. I watched the movies and I absorb it
Speaker 5: that way. Is there a reason to read the screenplayce
Speaker 5: Absolutely most screenwriters do, and I strongly recommend that people
Speaker 5: start out that way. I don't think I've read more
Speaker 5: than five pro scripts on produced movies. I just don't.
Speaker 5: I just don't read them. I'll watch the movie. There
Speaker 5: is a reason, if only to see the differences in
Speaker 5: execution and planning, there's a great reason, you know, looking
Speaker 5: at the spec or the shooting script and then what
Speaker 5: they actually got can be a very rewarding and instructive experience.
Speaker 4: It's just not something I do.
Speaker 5: That's me personally, which again shows you that you know
Speaker 5: there are different ways to do things and still do
Speaker 5: well and get to the endpoint where you want to be.
Speaker 5: There are pro writers I know that read every single
Speaker 5: script for Academy Word scripts. They read every single script
Speaker 5: for every blockbuster that comes out. I don't do that.
Speaker 5: I would rather write natively without I'm not gonna say copying,
Speaker 5: but you know, just my own way. Does that make sense?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it makes perfect sense, Mike. I. You know, I
Speaker 3: like to I have a whole collection of screenplays, and
Speaker 3: you know, I always find that my favorite person to
Speaker 3: write screenplays and my favorite author is Quentin Tarantino. I
Speaker 3: just love the way he writes. I think it's entertaining.
Speaker 3: And I also feel though that I also can pull
Speaker 3: from the movie so if I like, for instance, I
Speaker 3: have the screenplay for Hell or High Water, but I
Speaker 3: actually saw the movie about three days ago before I
Speaker 3: actually heard the screenplay, and I like the movie, you know,
Speaker 3: just as well. And I will probably probably end up
Speaker 3: reading the screenplay as well, just to see what the
Speaker 3: differences are. But I really enjoyed the Hell or High Water?
Speaker 3: Have you seen that yet?
Speaker 5: Yes? And for you know, I don't want to say
Speaker 5: anything bad about Quentin.
Speaker 4: He has movies that I.
Speaker 5: Absolutely love that are wonderful films, and he's a groundbreaking guy.
Speaker 5: I will say, he overwrites. And you know, if you
Speaker 5: look at the screenplay for Hateful eight, is I don't
Speaker 5: like the film, And you know, the screenplay's one hundred
Speaker 5: and eighty nine pages or somewhere thereabouts, and a lot
Speaker 5: of people I talk with think he could have cut
Speaker 5: an hour out of that movie. But he's also written
Speaker 5: some just you know, some phenomenal stuff, you know in
Speaker 5: Glorious Bastard's Reservoir Dogs, pulp fiction. I mean, he's great stuff.
Speaker 5: He's another one though he's an outlier. He's he's very
Speaker 5: very smart, he's very gifted. He you know, he still
Speaker 5: likes screenplays out long handed, a square deal notebook. Okay,
Speaker 5: So he's a different kind a guy, and he's made
Speaker 5: his own path. He's not somebody that I would emulate writing,
Speaker 5: because there aren't. There are a lot of people that
Speaker 5: try and they just don't get.
Speaker 4: Away with it. They can't pull it off.
Speaker 5: He's a very difficult guy to try and copy, not
Speaker 5: copy like rip off, but to try and emulate his style.
Speaker 5: He's a he's a really difficult guy to do that
Speaker 5: on you know there are it'd be like it'd be
Speaker 5: like trying to write poetry like E.
Speaker 4: Cummings.
Speaker 5: You know me up it does out of the floor quietly,
Speaker 5: stare a poisoned mouse, And now I lose it?
Speaker 4: Who asks, you know, what have I done? You wouldn't have?
Speaker 5: Okay, all in lowercase, no punctuation. You know, Cormack McCarthy,
Speaker 5: same thing. Go read James Joyce, you know, go read
Speaker 5: one of the Cormack McCarthy books. Where's the punctuation? Did
Speaker 5: the printer lose all the period that gavas that you know,
Speaker 5: there isn't any So why can he do that?
Speaker 4: Well, he blazed his own way and he's phenomenal.
Speaker 5: Okay, so you know, do you want to go be
Speaker 5: the next corner at McCarthy and go turn a book
Speaker 5: into your publisher that has no punctuation marks? Probably not
Speaker 5: a good idea. It's just like copying Shane Black. There's
Speaker 5: a conversation in my screenwriting group brought up by a
Speaker 5: pro today this morning about how a producer wanted him
Speaker 5: to add back a bunch of unshootable commentary into the
Speaker 5: script that didn't have any well, traditional wisdom says, And
Speaker 5: I wrote a post going to my book, you know,
Speaker 5: on Sally Bigfoot. I wate this big scenario about Sally
Speaker 5: Bigfoot and her family, okay, about unshootable garbage in somebody's
Speaker 5: head that you can read on the page, and then
Speaker 5: when ends up there, so I write this big, long
Speaker 5: thing about Sally Bigfoot and it's like a page and
Speaker 5: a half long, and then what somebody could actually shoot
Speaker 5: from that script is like five words one line long,
Speaker 5: because none of the rest is shootable.
Speaker 4: Okay, Well, there was just a.
Speaker 5: Conversation that strangely, a producer was asking this professional, multi
Speaker 5: produced guy, novelist. I'm not going to name him here
Speaker 5: now for certain reasons, but this guy has multiple films
Speaker 5: out and he turned in a nice titleing script. He's
Speaker 5: an action writer. And the producer said, you know, this
Speaker 5: is crap. What are you giving me? I'm not saying
Speaker 5: he said, it's crap. Okay, he said, I'm not happy
Speaker 5: with this. What are you doing here? I want a
Speaker 5: bunch of commentary and other stuff you know built around here.
Speaker 5: And he said, you know why you can't film any
Speaker 5: of that.
Speaker 4: He said, yeah, that's great. It's the exact opposite of
Speaker 4: traditional wisdom.
Speaker 5: Okay.
Speaker 4: He think he asked to write.
Speaker 5: Stuff into the script to make it longer, to entertain
Speaker 5: the reader, and to try and get a particular a
Speaker 5: list actor. I can't mention who they think they can
Speaker 5: lure in with this particular technique by writing a bunch
Speaker 5: of stuff that they will never be able to film.
Speaker 5: They will not change the film script one bit, but
Speaker 5: that they want in there. Now. The producer's the boss.
Speaker 5: If your producer tells you to do that, then you
Speaker 5: do it. And that's the right answer for that project.
Speaker 5: This is why you know rules are made to be broken.
Speaker 5: Quentin Tarantino broke the rule. Shane Black broke the rules.
Speaker 5: Cormac McCarthy broke the rules. He Cummings broke the rules.
Speaker 5: James Joyce broke the rules. Uh, there's a guy. There's
Speaker 5: a guy I can't remember his name, which is sad name,
Speaker 5: who wrote a novel.
Speaker 4: It's also in my book called Gadsby.
Speaker 5: I think it's called and this writer Sadly again, I
Speaker 5: can't remember his name, but he wrote an entire novel
Speaker 5: fifty thousand words without using the letter E.
Speaker 4: In the whole book.
Speaker 3: So it's not the Great gas it's just Gatsby.
Speaker 5: No, it's Gadsby. Oh Gadsby, It's like Gadsby.
Speaker 4: So he managed to write.
Speaker 5: He managed to write an entire novel without using the
Speaker 5: letter E in any word inside the covers. It appears
Speaker 5: on the cover as they describe what he's done. Because
Speaker 5: if you use the word novel, it is an e obviously,
Speaker 5: So no, when they say, oh, this guy wrote a
Speaker 5: novel without the letter E. Well, then you've used several
Speaker 5: e's avenue on the cover. But if you go to
Speaker 5: the actual story itself inside, nowhere does the letter HE appear.
Speaker 5: Now you talk about writer's block, and that's that's what
Speaker 5: my essay was about. Next time you think you have
Speaker 5: writer's block. I've written a number of these. You know,
Speaker 5: look at what Lucretius wrote.
Speaker 4: They rare.
Speaker 5: I'm not sure on the nature of things, this epic
Speaker 5: poem that this guy wrote, you know, in a toga
Speaker 5: in a cave with a candle, using squid ink in
Speaker 5: a feather pen, and the type of Einsteiny and physics
Speaker 5: and philosophy. You know, the incredible deep thinking this guy
Speaker 5: did under these conditions. Abraham Lincoln studied law by candle. Okay,
Speaker 5: that's that's that's tough. Okay. Uh, this guy did it,
Speaker 5: you know, in like fifty four BC.
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Speaker 5: Writing in squid ink and he's talking about where the
Speaker 5: universe ends. I mean, really, so you want to you
Speaker 5: want to talk about writer's block, Uh, do something that's
Speaker 5: that's a remarkable achievement, but certainly less than than that.
Speaker 5: Look at at this Gad Gadspy book and again it's
Speaker 5: going to be in my book.
Speaker 4: But the guy writes the whole novel without the letter.
Speaker 5: Next time you think you have writer's block, imagine writing
Speaker 5: a novel without using one of the letters of the
Speaker 5: alphabet a vowel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I want to link to that in the
Speaker 3: show notes as well. Actually, uh, I'm gonna about that
Speaker 3: about that novel too, Mike, because that is uh.
Speaker 4: I don't know if I don't get you the info
Speaker 4: on him.
Speaker 3: Well, I was gonna look it up to when I
Speaker 3: put it in the show notes because I you know,
Speaker 3: I I don't know if that if that's an exercise
Speaker 3: in bravery or or it just admit complete madness. Maybe
Speaker 3: maybe both, right, but uh.
Speaker 5: I think it's the next It's brave and it's also stubborn.
Speaker 4: I mean, you've got to be let me see something
Speaker 4: fine for you.
Speaker 5: You've got to be mentally tough.
Speaker 4: Too. It's gadsby G. A.
Speaker 5: Dsb Y nineteen thirty nine by Ernest Vincent Wright with
Speaker 5: W R I G H T.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 5: The sad thing is, you know nobody remembers this guy's name,
Speaker 5: Ernest Vincent Wright.
Speaker 4: So did he take a gamble?
Speaker 5: You bet he did. He turned a novel into his
Speaker 5: publisher with no ease in it. That's a gamble, okay.
Speaker 5: And did his gamble payoff? I don't know what's the payoff?
Speaker 5: His book got published. You can still read the book today,
Speaker 5: you can. It's it's a novelty item. You can go
Speaker 5: look it up and say, holy smokes, how does this
Speaker 5: guy do this? And go skim the text? And he
Speaker 5: doesn't read like a tradition book because he can't use
Speaker 5: the word e He's got to write very strange, you know,
Speaker 5: circuitous roots to avoid using ease.
Speaker 4: Was he a success? I don't know.
Speaker 5: I couldn't remember his name and I'm a writer. His
Speaker 5: family didn't renew his copyright really, so yeah, I mean,
Speaker 5: none of his heirs after he died, none of his
Speaker 5: copyright ran. None of his heirs cared enough to pay
Speaker 5: the copyright feast to recopyright re up the novel.
Speaker 3: Jesus, I know. So that's amazing. You know, you know,
Speaker 3: we were talking about copyright stuff, and you know one
Speaker 3: of the things that you mentioned too in the group,
Speaker 3: you know, as you talked about copyrighting was about you know,
Speaker 3: about the WGA and also about you know, the US
Speaker 3: Patent Office, the Copyright Office, and I mean, you know,
Speaker 3: all of that is is really good stuff. And when
Speaker 3: I hear stuff like this happening, because I when I
Speaker 3: hear stuff like this happened, or where I hear stuff
Speaker 3: like you know what happened with Georgia Merrow and and
Speaker 3: and the original Living Dead, I mean, you realize just
Speaker 3: how important all this stuff is.
Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's another thing most uh, you know my
Speaker 5: book will help with that. Shamelessly plugging the book yet again,
Speaker 5: but I mean the I I'm I'm involved in the
Speaker 5: project where they had they had some issues because somebody
Speaker 5: tried to steal the project. There are other in my
Speaker 5: in a year or so in my group, there have
Speaker 5: been I used to have them written down something like
Speaker 5: between nine and a dozen stolen scripts where people have
Speaker 5: actually come in and said, you know, my script got
Speaker 5: stolen and actually had some kind of substantial evidence in
Speaker 5: and significant data and.
Speaker 4: Story behind it.
Speaker 5: Not just like oh I wrote a script and don't
Speaker 5: damn that Star Wars they stole my script. No, nothing
Speaker 5: like that, like actual matching dialogue. And I've had a happened.
Speaker 5: I've had happen to me. I won't say who.
Speaker 4: I had another writer take some stuff from one of
Speaker 4: my scripts.
Speaker 5: And there are, you know, in a group of less
Speaker 5: than three thousand people. And it wasn't three thousand the
Speaker 5: whole time the group started at one. Me, it's not advertising.
Speaker 5: I reject about ninety percent of applicants. But in that
Speaker 5: small group, in one year, we've got somewhere approaching a
Speaker 5: dozen stolen scripts where people someone ripped off somebody else's work.
Speaker 5: And there are trolls that go in these groups. That's
Speaker 5: why I've got people very careful about this. They're trolls
Speaker 5: that go in groups and they'll say, you know, producer,
Speaker 5: looking for someone to write our story, and you know,
Speaker 5: we need you to submit ten pages. Well what they
Speaker 5: do is, you know, and then we'll judge and we'll
Speaker 5: pick who's going to get the writing assignment. Well, Dave,
Speaker 5: who gets the writing assignment? Tell me, guests they're running assignment.
Speaker 5: They they assigned the ten pages that say it's the
Speaker 5: one hundred page screenplay, so that's ten ten page divisions.
Speaker 5: They assign it to twenty writers, so they have they
Speaker 5: put up an ad in the group for you know,
Speaker 5: no money. This is year you have to prove to
Speaker 5: us who you are. You're gonna write ten pages. We'll
Speaker 5: tell you what to write, and then we'll get back
Speaker 5: if if we like it. Well, keep holding your breath.
Speaker 5: We'll call you blue boy. You'll be in the corner
Speaker 5: turning blue because they're never gonna call you no matter
Speaker 5: how good you were, because what's gonna happen. They don't
Speaker 5: have any money, and what's gonna happen is they're not
Speaker 5: really looking to hire a writer. They're looking to steal writing.
Speaker 5: So they give each they give ten ten scenes they
Speaker 5: want written ten pages. Kind of a simplistic example, but
Speaker 5: I'm making it easy for the math. One hundred page script,
Speaker 5: they divide it into ten segments, however many scenes each.
Speaker 5: You know, script's typically sixty eighty scenes. But let's stick
Speaker 5: with this example. So you know, you're gonna write these
Speaker 5: ten pages for us, and they give that same pages
Speaker 5: to the same ten pages to two writers. Then they
Speaker 5: take the next you know, eleven to twenty, and they
Speaker 5: give that to two more writers, and they do the
Speaker 5: same thing all the way down the line, so they
Speaker 5: have twenty writers writing their one hundred page script twice,
Speaker 5: so they What they then do is they then.
Speaker 4: Pick through it all. They pick what they like, what
Speaker 4: they don't like.
Speaker 5: They throw it all together and they have maybe even
Speaker 5: that guy rewrite the whole thing, the whole script sitting
Speaker 5: they're written for him. They just rewrite it, pick what
Speaker 5: they like, pick well that was the guy had a
Speaker 5: great idea. Well, you know we'll keep that. We're screwing him,
Speaker 5: so why not keep it. And then they get the
Speaker 5: whole script written for him that only need to rewrite,
Speaker 5: and they pay nothing. And you know, these people aren't scrupulous.
Speaker 5: This happens all the time in writing groups. You know,
Speaker 5: send me a writing sample, send me, send me, you know,
Speaker 5: ten pages of my original script. Here's the story. You
Speaker 5: give me the first ten pages, so you know those
Speaker 5: are those are all pitfalls, not copywriting. You want to
Speaker 5: register with w g A you got an extra twenty bucks. Sure,
Speaker 5: register with WGA. Is your script copyright protected? Absolutely not.
Speaker 5: WGA serves a lot of good functions. The script Registry
Speaker 5: is uh does not take the place of copyright. It's
Speaker 5: it's it's the It works as some evidence of when
Speaker 5: something was created, not a copyright. Don't even get into
Speaker 5: federal court with a WJA registration on a copyright case. So,
Speaker 5: you know, beginning writers need to learn that kind of stuff.
Speaker 5: And a lot of it's counterintuitive, a lot of it.
Speaker 5: You know, people aren't going to tell you. They don't know.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of terrible information.
Speaker 5: I'll do it here. I'll kill the poor man's copyright
Speaker 5: for you. Tell me it's copyright, write your script, fold
Speaker 5: it up, seal it up really well in an envelope,
Speaker 5: and mail it to yourself and there now your a
Speaker 5: year protected right. No, absolutely not does nothing. It's never
Speaker 5: protected anybody in any court that I can I can name,
Speaker 5: or that anyone I know can name. It's absolutely worthless.
Speaker 5: And yet this myth of the poor man's copyright persists.
Speaker 5: These are things that you need to learn, and and
Speaker 5: books like you know, David Trottier, Dave Trottier's Screenwriter's Bible
Speaker 5: and others will address some of this stuff for you.
Speaker 5: So you think you're going to be a screenwriter, spend
Speaker 5: twenty bucks by a book, read it or's something. Yeah,
Speaker 5: And I get into arguments. I get an arguments to
Speaker 5: people in my group. I'm a I'm a lawyer and
Speaker 5: they want to argue with me about the law. Hey,
Speaker 5: tell me I'm wrong. I had somebody do it a
Speaker 5: couple of days ago. She was, she was somebody asked
Speaker 5: a question that ran into legal territory and didn't ask
Speaker 5: it to me, just threw it up in the group.
Speaker 5: And I'm not this person's lawyer, but you know, I
Speaker 5: can give you throughout general advice to writers and stuff.
Speaker 4: So I answered the question and she's like.
Speaker 5: Contradicting my answer with the complete wrong answer. So I
Speaker 5: tried to gently guide her back and now, no, no,
Speaker 5: look at it, it's really this way right, And she
Speaker 5: told me I was wrong. So you know, you really
Speaker 5: writers need to have a basic understanding of certain things
Speaker 5: just to survive and be viable. The writing is a
Speaker 5: strange occupation. You have to be able to actually write stuff.
Speaker 5: But then there's the business end of writing, which is
Speaker 5: completely different from the creation end of writing. And again,
Speaker 5: like David Trottier's book, and you know other books, they
Speaker 5: actually will talk about both, and you Linda Ayrinson's book
Speaker 5: talks talks about you know, completely story story theory and
Speaker 5: structure and plotting the whole book.
Speaker 4: Genius genius book.
Speaker 5: Rick Toskin's book talks about playwriting seminars too.
Speaker 4: He talks a lot about the business.
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Speaker 2: and now back to the show.
Speaker 5: And his very practical guide. He analyzes plays, he bridges
Speaker 5: the gap between playwriting and screenwriting. And then he talks
Speaker 5: about the business of you know, Okay, you're sitting in
Speaker 5: your in your room over your garage in Kenesaw, Georgia,
Speaker 5: churning out this stuff. Isn't it great? Oh? You love it?
Speaker 5: And what are you gonna do with it? No one's
Speaker 5: ever gonna read it if it doesn't leave the garage, right, Yeah,
Speaker 5: very true. So there's a business set. And if you're
Speaker 5: let's say you're an idiot savat, let's say you're you know,
Speaker 5: a beautiful mind, you're this gifted mathematician, or you know,
Speaker 5: if this guy was in a cave in Afghanistan scribbling
Speaker 5: the most brilliant mathematics anyone had ever seen, all over
Speaker 5: the cave walls, using you know, burnt bone and uh,
Speaker 5: scratching with a and you know, highlighting with a with
Speaker 5: a piece of u ashed out stick and a little
Speaker 5: blood dot here and there.
Speaker 4: No one's ever going to see it.
Speaker 5: Right, So the most brilliant mathematician in the world, no
Speaker 5: one knows who he is, he ends up, you know,
Speaker 5: he he demises, and then you know, three thousand years later,
Speaker 5: someone finds his cave art and recognizes at his high
Speaker 5: level mathematics, which is wonderful. And you know everyone else,
Speaker 5: all the uninformed, think it's cave art. You know, look
Speaker 5: at this, Let that some let add some fags to this.
Speaker 4: Right, and modifying the formulas.
Speaker 5: Okay, so you know there's a business send to this too,
Speaker 5: unless you're going to be a pure hobbyist and just
Speaker 5: write this stuff for your wife or your spouse, your grandma,
Speaker 5: your dad, your mom. Oh look how great this is.
Speaker 5: Give it to your kids. There there needs to be
Speaker 5: a goal, and that's the business end. And so like
Speaker 5: the books like I said, Playwriting Seminars to two point
Speaker 5: zero and the Screenwriter's Guide, a Screenwriter's Bible, those are
Speaker 5: books that discuss the business end as well. Okay, books
Speaker 5: like Aaronson's is, you know, focused all on structure and
Speaker 5: plot and story function, character function and all those things
Speaker 5: to an extreme depth, like biblical depth. It's that in depth,
Speaker 5: but it really doesn't. There's some in there, but it
Speaker 5: really doesn't approach the business as much. Your cut too
Speaker 5: is showing by T.
Speaker 4: TJ.
Speaker 5: Alex I recommend. I think there's a little business in
Speaker 5: there too, but that's not why I go to that book.
Speaker 5: So you know, you need to learn you need to
Speaker 5: learn the business stuff too. And that bridge is a
Speaker 5: knife gap to contest, which you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 4: Right.
Speaker 3: Yeah, And one thing I want to ask Mike is
Speaker 3: have you ever I mean I wanted to obviously ask
Speaker 3: this because you know we're talking about books again. Have
Speaker 3: you ever read any of the like the Big three
Speaker 3: or four books that sort of come across you know,
Speaker 3: everyone sort of comes across them, and those books obviously
Speaker 3: screenplay by sid Field, Uh, save the Save the Cat Story?
Speaker 3: Have you read any of those books?
Speaker 5: Let me be as fair as I can be. I
Speaker 5: I read Save the Cat. Save the Cat is an approach.
Speaker 5: It's extremely formulaic. You need to know it because a
Speaker 5: lot of studio execs will be expecting, you know, Save
Speaker 5: the Cat story beats and they'll go to, you know,
Speaker 5: page sixty seven of your script, page twelve of your script,
Speaker 5: page you know twenty four of your script, page five
Speaker 5: of your script, and they're going to be looking for story.
Speaker 5: Save the cat, story beats that. Blake Snyder, by all,
Speaker 5: by all reports a wonderful guy who died young. It's
Speaker 5: a shame. Supposed to be a great.
Speaker 4: Guy, and he wrote two of the worst movies ever written.
Speaker 5: You know, blank check or shoot a Stop or my
Speaker 5: Mom Will Shoot, which could have torpedoes of uster. Stallone's
Speaker 5: career dodged a bullet on that one. So you know.
Speaker 5: That book was an analysis done by Snyder over a
Speaker 5: great deal of time looking at looking for a formula
Speaker 5: common theme as thread running through the most successful and
Speaker 5: admired movies, and he distilled it down into a formula,
Speaker 5: just like a log line formula distills everything down and
Speaker 5: you start plugging your stuff in to get a good
Speaker 5: log line. Well, at some point, not every film has
Speaker 5: a log line. You can write with a standard log
Speaker 5: line formula. Once you understand what you're trying to accomplish,
Speaker 5: you may want to vary from the formula for a
Speaker 5: particular project because you may not be able to capture
Speaker 5: the log line well in twenty five words written, you
Speaker 5: know so and so must do this, or you know
Speaker 5: and beat such and such villain or this will happen,
Speaker 5: you know, blah blah. Okay, so that may not be
Speaker 5: the best approach for a movie that that you're working on.
Speaker 5: And so yeah, I've read Save the Cat. I think
Speaker 5: Save the Cat tends to put writers in a box
Speaker 5: and it makes you stick to story beats that people
Speaker 5: pull their hair out. Oh my god, I added a
Speaker 5: scene in my Save the Cat moment, my dark Night
Speaker 5: of the Soul moment moved and now it's you know,
Speaker 5: for pages past.
Speaker 4: Where it's supposed to be.
Speaker 5: Oh my god, I'm gonna jump off the roof. No,
Speaker 5: tell your story, Tell your story and learn what Save
Speaker 5: the Cat is. In case you have somebody that really
Speaker 5: wants the beats to line up and you're writing for them,
Speaker 5: well then maybe you've got to break out Save the Cat.
Speaker 5: As far as the other ones, you know, did Field
Speaker 5: and all, I've started to read some of them. I
Speaker 5: find a lot of their stuff. Yes they're acknowledged the experts.
Speaker 5: Yes they're much better known than I am. Of course,
Speaker 5: I'm just a guy. You know, they're famous. Well, a
Speaker 5: lot of their stuff is very philosophical and kind of
Speaker 5: hard to put your finger on exactly what they're saying,
Speaker 5: and how do I apply this to my script? So
Speaker 5: you know, I look at some of the stuff and
Speaker 5: didn't find it immediately helpful, so I ignored it. I
Speaker 5: taught myself, and you know that's you know, there are conventions,
Speaker 5: there are rules, and once you learn them, you can
Speaker 5: also learn to break them and get away with it
Speaker 5: if you know what you're doing.
Speaker 4: And as far as.
Speaker 5: Those guys go, some of the most most well read writers,
Speaker 5: screenwriters I know that have read every single one of
Speaker 5: those books. They can quote you from the books and
Speaker 5: tell you what page number is on They've never written
Speaker 5: a good script. There was there was one guy in
Speaker 5: my group who's no longer a member, who's any social guy.
Speaker 5: Threw him out, But that's an aside, and he just
Speaker 5: incredible knowledge on all these all these writers theories, and
Speaker 5: you know all you know McKee and Fidfield and you
Speaker 5: know every other uh, every other theoretical uh theoretician on storytelling.
Speaker 4: And by the way, Aaronson also.
Speaker 5: Is big on that, except she wrote a book that's
Speaker 5: a very practical nuts and bolts guide.
Speaker 4: That is is it's not all just theory. It's loaded
Speaker 4: with theory, but it gives you.
Speaker 5: Guidelines to actually fix the engine. Okay, they tell you
Speaker 5: how to build the engine, tell you what the engine is,
Speaker 5: and then it'll let you put the engine together.
Speaker 4: A lot of these guys will say, let's talk about.
Speaker 5: An engine, and you know, before long you're sitting there
Speaker 5: in a yoga position, staring out at a little plant
Speaker 5: growing by itself in the desert. Okay, like then in
Speaker 5: the art of motorcycle maintenance, right, yeah, So you know,
Speaker 5: there's practical and there's impractical, and there's there are people
Speaker 5: that write all kinds of great stuff and I can't
Speaker 5: I'm not knocking these these great you know, well known
Speaker 5: philosophical guys like the Key and Field. I haven't read them.
Speaker 5: I've skinned little bits of him and said, you know what,
Speaker 5: this isn't answering my question, or this isn't for me,
Speaker 5: and maybe for you. I'm not saying it isn't for you.
Speaker 5: It could well be for you. My book isn't going
Speaker 5: to be for everybody. That's for damn sure. So you know,
Speaker 5: find your approach that works and stick to it. But
Speaker 5: the guy that I was talking about a minute ago,
Speaker 5: he bloviated endlessly in the group and everything. Oh this
Speaker 5: guy knows everything. Oh my god, he's the best expert anywhere,
Speaker 5: and he really didn't know a lot.
Speaker 4: It was incredibly impressive.
Speaker 5: And then one day he came into the group and
Speaker 5: he said, I've been doing this twenty years and I've
Speaker 5: never finished a script. Can you guys help me. I'm
Speaker 5: not kidding. I could show you the post. I mean,
Speaker 5: so this guy, this guy could quit you chapter and
Speaker 5: verse from Sidfield McKee, from any any but you know,
Speaker 5: the the hero's journey.
Speaker 4: You know all the different.
Speaker 5: Theories and story methods of writing, and there are a
Speaker 5: lot of different people that have you know, the two
Speaker 5: hundred and thirty seven steps of the Hero and all
Speaker 5: these other approaches. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong
Speaker 5: with those. They may be the best thing ever for you,
Speaker 5: but they may not work for me.
Speaker 4: You got to find what works for you.
Speaker 5: And so this guy could tell you what anybody wrote
Speaker 5: about anything, very convincingly. And you know, six months later
Speaker 5: you find out the guy has never finished the script.
Speaker 3: I mean, yeah, that's I wonder. You know, it's almost
Speaker 3: like a fear of failure to start or something. I mean,
Speaker 3: but then again, twenty years I mean, wow, I mean
Speaker 3: that is just maybe he just maybe he's got a
Speaker 3: ton of screenplays started but never actually finished.
Speaker 2: We'll be right back. A word from our sponsor, and
Speaker 2: now back to the show.
Speaker 3: Really, you've never owned sort.
Speaker 5: Of one that's well on, one screenplay worked on over
Speaker 5: ten years, never finished it. You know, I knocked out.
Speaker 5: I knocked out a rewrite in five days that was accepted.
Speaker 5: Ninety nine out of one hundred pages were accepted. First pass.
Speaker 5: I got some notes. They said, we want to change
Speaker 5: a couple of things on this one page that may
Speaker 5: cascadeness something else. Can you do that for us? I
Speaker 5: said sure. I rewrote it in about ten minutes. I
Speaker 5: spent about twelve hours rereading the script, thinking about everything,
Speaker 5: making sure that I wasn't setting myself up for a jackpot,
Speaker 5: a story hoole, a continuity. Ear couldn't figure out anything
Speaker 5: that was affected by this in any way. And when
Speaker 5: ahead and turned it in and they said, oh my god,
Speaker 5: we love it. You're done.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, I want to do a guy Mike
Speaker 3: he couldn't write ten pages in three months, and uh yeah,
Speaker 3: I and he wanted to be a screenwriter, And I said,
Speaker 3: you got it. Turn in three or ten pages at
Speaker 3: least ten pages, and I give him three months to
Speaker 3: do it, and because each month I would check back in,
Speaker 3: because that's what you had to do to join the
Speaker 3: one writer's group, was that you had to actually have
Speaker 3: written something. And I said, just show us something. I said,
Speaker 3: write ten pages. And the first month I didn't do it.
Speaker 3: My wife, my wife, and.
Speaker 5: I told you got it.
Speaker 3: And in a second month, another excuse, third month, and
Speaker 3: finally I said, you know, I don't think your heart
Speaker 3: is into this. I think your brain is. I think
Speaker 3: you want that, that notoriety. And then when we want
Speaker 3: that exactly, And I have a whole post on this.
Speaker 5: I have a whole post on you know, staring at
Speaker 5: the blank page and being able to put anything fucking
Speaker 5: commit write something. You're not a writer if you don't write.
Speaker 5: So I have a whole essay on this that people
Speaker 5: found very useful, and with seven or eight different bullet
Speaker 5: points about what what is really going to happen in
Speaker 5: your life? What is going to go wrong if you
Speaker 5: write a piece of shit? What is really going to
Speaker 5: happen to you? If you sit there and you hack
Speaker 5: away at your keyboard and you write just a piece
Speaker 5: of roadkill, a dog wouldn't eat. Guess what, nothing happened.
Speaker 5: You can rewrite it. You could start over three years later,
Speaker 5: after you've written two good ones. You'll laugh at your
Speaker 5: first one, and maybe you'll have ideas to go back
Speaker 5: and fix it. But that fear of writing, Like I said,
Speaker 5: I wrote a whole essay on this. It was very
Speaker 5: well received. If you be in the book fear of writing,
Speaker 5: if you don't put it down on the page. The
Speaker 5: one thing I guarantee you is you will never get anywhere.
Speaker 5: If you don't actually commit to write, You will never
Speaker 5: accomplish anything. Mike.
Speaker 3: That is so true. And you know, Mike, we've been
Speaker 3: talking for about an hour and forty five minutes now, Wow,
Speaker 3: I haven't even Yeah, well I have a timer writing
Speaker 3: to me. How long everything? But but so that's the
Speaker 3: other reason, I know, you know, Mike, I don't want to,
Speaker 3: you know, take up any more of your time. I
Speaker 3: know you know. You know you've got a million things
Speaker 3: going on as well. So you know, Mike. Inclosed, and
Speaker 3: I just want to ask you one one final question.
Speaker 3: Is there anything that we didn't sort of talk about
Speaker 3: that you wanted to get a chance to or is
Speaker 3: there anything that you wanted to say to sort of
Speaker 3: put a period at the end of this whole conversation.
Speaker 5: Yeah, every writer is different.
Speaker 4: What works for me works for me.
Speaker 5: That's a good place to start to look at, but
Speaker 5: it doesn't mean it's going to work for you. If
Speaker 5: you find a method that works for you, no matter
Speaker 5: how many people tell you it's wrong. If your work
Speaker 5: product is good, it doesn't matter how you get there,
Speaker 5: as long as you're not stealing it. Do whatever works
Speaker 5: for you. Learn the rules, the conventions of the trade.
Speaker 5: Some of them people can't even say why it's done
Speaker 5: that way. It's just done that way. Some of the
Speaker 5: rules you're gonna not be able to break, and some
Speaker 5: of the rules you will be able to break. When
Speaker 5: anyone tells you absolutely, oh this is wrong, that's wrong,
Speaker 5: absolutes usually don't work. Learn a way to write that
Speaker 5: works for you, and use that method. It probably won't
Speaker 5: work for me. Mine may not work for you. But
Speaker 5: there isn't necessarily a right way or wrong way you
Speaker 5: need to get a high quality finished product out. If
Speaker 5: you stand on your head and gibber and shriek and
Speaker 5: write upside down left handed, and that gets it done.
Speaker 4: Go for it.
Speaker 5: That's what you need to do, and you need to write.
Speaker 5: A lot of people say, right, every day, you know,
Speaker 5: write three pages every day.
Speaker 4: You have to where you're not a writer, Well, I'm
Speaker 4: not a writer. I don't write every day.
Speaker 5: I write every day in my group, but as far
Speaker 5: as writing content, I don't.
Speaker 4: So that's another rule.
Speaker 5: You know writers write every day, Well, thumb writers write
Speaker 5: every day. There are plenty of writers that don't. I
Speaker 5: write when i'm inspired, when I have great ideas, when
Speaker 5: I'm on an assignment, if I don't have anything going on,
Speaker 5: I don't feel like writing, and I sit down to write,
Speaker 5: I'm going to write crap. Right, I'm not inspired, I'm
Speaker 5: not motivated, I have no direction. Then without a goal,
Speaker 5: I'm just going to meander along and write a bunch
Speaker 5: of forgettable stuff that will end up in a folder
Speaker 5: that I just wasted a day. Instead, focus before you
Speaker 5: start to write. Common writer's errors. A new writer has
Speaker 5: no idea what they have to say, what their voice is,
Speaker 5: why they're writing. You need to try and discover your
Speaker 5: own voice and figure out what you want to say.
Speaker 5: You need to have something to say when you sit
Speaker 5: down to write. I'll close on.
Speaker 3: That I couldn't agree more. Mike, Mike, where people find
Speaker 3: you out online? Sorry, I know I said that was
Speaker 3: the last question, but this is the last question where
Speaker 3: people find you out online?
Speaker 5: No, my information's up on IMDb under Micha Lee Bierman.
Speaker 5: Most of my projects are in development, which means unless
Speaker 5: you have a pro you can't see them. But there's
Speaker 5: plenty there my contact information. I'm also I can also
Speaker 5: be reached through the Facebook group screenwriters who can actually
Speaker 5: write if you're going to apply.
Speaker 4: I do vet people. I do not let people.
Speaker 5: Unless there's celebrities and they contact me separately, which has
Speaker 5: happened a few times.
Speaker 4: I don't let people in using false.
Speaker 5: Names because deals are made in the group contracts form.
Speaker 5: You need to use your real name, and you need
Speaker 5: to show interest in writing. If I pull up your profile,
Speaker 5: it's got a bunch of stuff about playing on the
Speaker 5: Xbox and what's your favorite whiskey and what's your favorite
Speaker 5: color Ferbie, You're probably not getting into the group. So
Speaker 5: those are a couple of ways to find me in
Speaker 5: my emails online at IMDb and everyone.
Speaker 3: I will link to all of that in the show notes.
Speaker 3: And again, I just want to say that Mike's group
Speaker 3: is phenomenal. It is the best screenwriting group that I'm
Speaker 3: aware of on Facebook, and it is just everybody in
Speaker 3: there is always doing awesome things. And that's sort of
Speaker 3: what I want to always want from a a screenwriters group,
Speaker 3: you know, is people actually doing things. There's actually like
Speaker 3: three screenwriting groups I'm a part of on Facebook and
Speaker 3: and finally you know, they're they're great. They're yours. Mike
Speaker 3: Screenwriting You has one, and Scott Myer's going to Stories
Speaker 3: another and those three.
Speaker 5: Sure, he's great. He's a Facebook friend of mine. I
Speaker 5: don't really know him very well, but he's great, no
Speaker 5: question about it. Yeah, what one, go ahead.
Speaker 3: I'm sorry. I was just gonna say those three are
Speaker 3: what actually keep me on Facebook, because otherwise I'd just
Speaker 3: be like, there's nothing really keeping me here.
Speaker 5: Hey, one finals thought, shameless plug. You can look for
Speaker 5: my daughter and uh look for me. I'm I'm finishing
Speaker 5: with co writer co producer Ramsey Stoneburner, exec producer Guy
Speaker 5: Francisco Poland and associate producer Craig Talis. We're working on
Speaker 5: a feature film called The Shoes, which we've finished, uh
Speaker 5: shooting about two thirds of it. We've just added nay
Speaker 5: list person and uh we're going to be finishing that
Speaker 5: up in the next couple of months. So got a
Speaker 5: couple of films in development, but that one is one
Speaker 5: that is directly at least partially under my control.
Speaker 3: Oh awesome, fantastic, Mike. And you know, I looked forward
Speaker 3: to seeing you know everything you're up to, and I
Speaker 3: know we'll be talking in the group. Michael e Berman. There,
Speaker 3: I finally got it out. I have a head cold,
Speaker 3: by the way, that's why I sound so terrible.
Speaker 5: But uh, oh you actually sound great and no idea.
Speaker 3: Oh good. Yeah, that's why I'm having some trouble talking.
Speaker 3: I can't really breathe my nose too well. But it's
Speaker 3: been a pleasure having you on, Mike, and I want
Speaker 3: to say thank you so much, and again I will
Speaker 3: be talking to you very very soon.
Speaker 5: Thank you so much for the opportunity.
Speaker 4: I really enjoyed it.
Speaker 3: I'm glad you did. My friend take care.
Speaker 5: Okay, bye bye.
Speaker 2: I want to thank Dave so much for doing such
Speaker 2: a great job on this episode. If you want to
Speaker 2: get links to anything we spoke about in this episode,
Speaker 2: head over to the show notes at Bulletproof screenwriting dot
Speaker 2: tv for it Slash for forty eight. Thank you so
Speaker 2: much for listening. Guys, as always, keep on writing no
Speaker 2: matter what. I'll talk to you soon.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to the bullet Proofs Screenwriting podcast at
Speaker 1: Fullip Group screenwriting dot tv
Speaker 5: MHM