I've been dealing with mold
And that's not a euphemism!
Got home from the Venice Film Festival and while my wife Emma continued along with to Toronto (Mistress Dispeller got great reviews at both) I got back to work. Not with anything fun, but instead with scrubbing moldy beams in our attic!
It’s a nice reminder to stay humble, which is I think the key to having a long, successful, relatively fruitful career. You never want to become one of those people who can’t scrub his own mold out of the attic. Or, wait, actually I think you definitely do want to become someone who doesn’t have to scrub his own mold. Hang on. I think I’m doing this wrong. I’m not even sure the mold is a useful metaphor, so much as it’s just mold. It’s all been cleaned up and dealt with over the last week, and I have been assured nobody was mold poisoned, à la JK Rowling, so that’s good.
What have I been up to creatively, you ask?
Well… The treatment I mentioned last week for an original action/comedy spec is finished and sent off to the producer. I’m waiting to hear how that goes over, but I feel good enough about it, and far enough along, that in the meantime I feel like I can start writing the spec itself. I’m actually heading out of town on a little writers’ retreat this weekend to clear the cobwebs, clear the mold out of my sinuses, and try to get started!
Normally I wouldn’t write myself a “Treatment” before writing a script, so much as an “Outline,” but since this is something I’m working on with producers, I wanted to write something more legible and more emotional than bullet points. This producer (like a lot of producers) told me they didn’t mind an outline, but in my experience, well-crafted prose in paragraphs (which is what a Treatment looks like) is always a smoother read for people than what I’m able to use as shorthand for myself in an outline. Always always always try to make the read as smooth as possible, and especially try to make the emotional experience of the movie as clear as possible. Any time I’ve ever shown someone an actual outline, we’ve gone back and forth about the tone and emotion of certain scenes for ages. If you can get away with it, I would always recommend turning in a more written Treatment than an Outline. (In features this is totally common, in TV it’s a little more likely you will in fact be asked for an Outline. Even there, though, I’d suggest you get more flowery rather than not flowery enough).
It’s a little more work, because you’re writing for an audience rather than simply “notes to self,” but, I find it’s particularly useful to ensure that each major moment in the screenplay will flow naturally into the next. It’s easy for an outline to end up not quite working from scene to scene, since you’re going from bullet points to a script with dialogue. But with a treatment, in my experience, it tends to be a little easier to stitch everything together, since you’ve already done the work of making things flow, and the treatment tends to by nature be a bit more flowery.
Now that I have a treatment, my instict is that even if there are things the producer bumps on or wants to change, the overall emotional flow of the film is coherent enough (and we have already basically agreed on enough of it) that any additional revisions can be absorbed into the draft as I’m working on it relatively easily. I also feel comfortable getting started before any notes because this is still something we’re doing on spec, if it were an assignment, I’d probably be more diligent about waiting for each step to complete (and each check to clear) before moving on to the next phase.
So this morning I’m trying to get this post out the door to you and then get about 5 pages into the draft! I have that marked out in my calendar as taking the next five weeks or so, so I’ll keep you posted on my progress in the weeks to come. I’m going to write the first draft in Highland, then when I have a decent draft I’ll probably move that file over into Final Draft. Why? I like the ability to convert my outline in Highland directly into a draft, and I like the interface better for typing quickly. But, since revisions tend to be tracked for actual production in Final Draft, I’ve just gotten used to doing my revisions there. Weird? Maybe! But that’s my process.
In addition to the new screenplay, I have another treatment on something I owe to another producer, and then am simply waiting to be told about when and where pitches have been set for a pitch I developed with a director.
Then I’ve got a directorial debut in the works. It’s still very early days for that one, but we’re at the phase of the project where we get to talk about independent film’s age old dilemma. Every movie you’ve ever seen has at some point gone through this “Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?” style bind. You can’t cast a movie without money, but you can’t get money without a cast. How do most independent films get past this conundrum? Well… something’s gotta give. The first and easiest way to get through is to cast someone you know, or your producer knows, or your cousin knows. So had a fun call today with producers about who we’d want for this movie, and how to go about getting those people.
Speaking of independent film, I really want to highlight a recent favorite of mine: Zia Anger’s “My First Film.” As a piece of meta-fiction, Anger’s created a film about making and abandoning her first film (something that can in fact happen, and happens to more people than you might think). As someone who did once make a film at the age of 21 that is entirely unwatchable today (phew), this obviosly really hit for me. But I think it’s a really great piece of filmmaking either way, and captures the chaos and stress and magic of making a movie, or making just about any piece of collaborative art. It’s really a beatiful film and I fully cried watching it, and I cannot recommend it enough!