Just Effing Entertain Me

New Key Word Short Scene Competition!

Hello, everybody!

It’s been so busy lately, good lord. So much fun stuff going on. I had a lovely lunch with Ellen Sandler yesterday; what a treat that was. Ellen got her start reading scripts for Joseph Papp in New York and went on to work as the co-EP (co-executive producer) on Everybody Loves Raymond. You couldn’t meet a nicer lady. Ellen, along with Chuck Rosin and Jen Grisanti, is judging the top 10 pilot and spec scripts in the Golden Age of Television competition. We’re so lucky.

I had the most fascinating conversation with Ellen about the fact that in movies, we root for the main character to change, but in television, we root for the main character NOT to change. Because if they change, the series collapses. I also asked Ellen her opinion on why sometimes, great television shows, when on air for more than three or four years can slowly become stale – and why others do not. Stay tuned: She’ll be guest blogging about it for us sometime soon. Ellen’s IMDB lends her years of experience and I can’t wait for her to share with us!

Terrence Malick is on the Lot lately, working on post-production for The Tree of Life; I spotted him the other day and was thrilled to the roots of my hair. I’m hoping to be introduced eventually. Jodie Foster has been around as well, not sure what’s she working on, as I thought post was done on THE BEAVER.

I taught at Warner Bros. last week with a very full house and a great bunch of students. Very fun. Those are some good people.

It seems to me that it’s time for another key word competition. Dontcha think?

Let’s go with Bengal tiger, Krakatoa and hot air balloon (and yes, you need to use these as groupings. In other words, you can’t separate “Bengal” from “tiger” or “hot” from “air” from “balloon.”)

GUIDELINES
The three keywords must be used in dialogue, action lines or sluglines, as long as the words are in context and are cleverly used to achieve maximum entertainment value in a ONE PAGE scene only. Effing entertain me, in other words.

DEADLINE
Short scenes are due by Wednesday, July 29th at 12am PST. Submit HERE.

PRIZES
A $25 Amazon gift certificate PLUS a free 15 minute phone consult with me, Julie Gray!

TOP THREE ANNOUNCED
Saturday, July 31st.

SUBMIT
Here.

Wanted: Original Material

Good morning, Effers! What did mama tell ya? What was mama complaining about vociferously recently?

***
From New York Magazine:

Conventional wisdom in Hollywood of late has said that you should stick to familiar brands when making movies. It could be a sequel or an adaptation of an old TV show, board game, toy, or crumpled candy wrapper, just as long as people already know it. So how’s that working out? In a summer season where only three out of the fourteen major releases so far have come from a new idea, attendance is down 13.3 percent from last season. Even with The Karate Kid’s surprise bounty, box-office revenue is down 7.5 percent, according to the National Association of Theater Owners … and that is skewed more by 3-D gouging than anything else: Since the summer of 2009, ticket prices have actually gone up 8 percent. That’s why studio execs at Warner Bros., Paramount/DreamWorks, and Universal are now madly pinging agents and managers with an uncharacteristic, desperate, and welcome request: Send us your fresh material!

READ ON

Words Into Pictures

Hello everybody! Had fun teaching to a full room at Warner Bros today! Our topic was Words Into Pictures: Writing Cinematically for the Silver Screen. It seems obvious that script writing should be colorful, sensory and cinematic but many writers, fearing that they don’t have license to write anything more elaborate than a blueprint, err on the side of writing dull, dry pages.

We talked today about the Three S’s: sight, sound, smell. So that if we have a scene set in a forest, we engage the reader’s senses wholly by using evocative words to describe the sharp smell of pine needles on the forest floor, or the way the sun looks peeking through the branches, or the muffled footsteps of a shadowy deer.

We also talked about establishing an intention, on page one, for how you want the reader to FEEL when reading the script and in particular, when reading each scene. Know your genre and set your agenda very early. If this is a thriller, we want to set up dread on evey page. So that forest might not be so sun-dappled, right? And perhaps the pine needles are rotting and black. And wind blows the branches.

So we manipulate the world we describe in action lines, slug lines and in dialogue to literally hypnotize the reader into feeling the way we intend them to. If Muzak is playing in a deserted convenience store late at night, if it’s totally generic elevator music, that’s creepy. But if it’s “Dancing Queen” or “The Hustle,” that’s a little funny. You can indicate music if there’s a source for it in the scene. A radio, boom box, CD player or radio. Otherwise, indicating music is NOT done.

We use modifiers and adjectives in the same way a painter uses paint in a pointillist painting. Little dots flecked with color take on a complete picture when you stand back.

Don’t worry about these details so much in your first draft – this is polish work. But do bear in mind, even in the early drafts, that your job is to seduce the reader into feeling the way you want them to feel about the story.

So set your intention on page one by knowing your genre and paying homage to it on every page. Bear in the mind the Three S’s (sight, sound, smell) and dig deep into your vocabulary for descriptors that turn the red apple into a blood red apple into a scarlet apple into a blushing apple into a crimson apple and back again.

That is all. Now get back to work.

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