Senior Thesis- Part Eight

This week I began the editing process because I felt like I needed some time off from writing the actual screenplay. The way it is right now, I’ve written the first 50 or so pages, and now I’m editing what I have. Looking back on it, I’m not sure this was necessarily the smartest approach to editing my screenplay, especially not for someone as lazy as I am.

From all the professional writers that I’ve spoken to, it seems like people prefer to write 2-3 pages a day, and edit those before they continue. That way, you get the writing and the editing out of the way in one sitting. Both of the professionals that I interviewed said that approach works the best. When I discussed it further with my mentor, Mr.Huber, he gave me the precise reasoning behind it. He said that if you edit it after you’ve already written the entire thing, you’ll find mistakes or scenes that you want to take out, but if you take them out, you’ll be forced to change 10 other scenes because they build on that mistake.

Its a lot like that board game Jenga, that I used to play back in the day, where you’d build a stack with these blocks, and then you had to go around and take out a block one by one, until the whole thing crumbled. I feel like if I take out any scenes, I wont be able to replace them with anything better or worthwhile.

Whats more, I have so many scenes and lines which I love and that I think are necessary, but now that I’ve given my script for a few people to edit, they’ve told me to remove entire scenes. The most blunt answer that I got was from Mr.Huber when he said, “editing is something that a lot of writers dread. When you get rid of a really good line, it feels like you’re drowning one of your own kids.” As gruesome as that image was, he was right. Every time I get rid of a really good scene, I have a sort of separation anxiety for the rest of the day. The only thing that pushes me to keep editing is the thought that my screenplay will only benefit from it.

Senior Thesis- Part Seven

I’ve been writing for a few months now, and it’s not getting any easier. If I was to come up with an image or a phrase that encapsulates the process of writing a screenplay, I’d say that “writing a screenplay is like squeezing an orange”. In the beginning, it couldn’t have been easier. The slightest touch and the juices would immediately start flowing. The first few pages were the easiest. I had written the first 10 pages within the first day I sat down to write.

Then, as the weeks progressed, I had to apply a bit more pressure. The dialog was starting to become a bit stiff and unoriginal. I still had good lines, I just felt like they weren’t coming as easily to me.

Then it came to the point where I was hunting for any spots that still felt moist, any spots that still had color. I was now squeezing the white part. The hardest part wasn’t writing the scenes and lines anymore (which was still hard as hell). It was figuring out how to transition from one scene to the next. I couldn’t figure out how to go from two characters fighting with each other, to having the two of them go their separate ways. I kept writing, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was selling the scene short. It’s like there’s a movie theater in my head, constantly playing this film, and there’s a guy watching it, and he’s like “What the fuck, that’s it? That’s all that happens? That what I came to see?”

On the other hand I’m trying to avoid overwriting certain scenes. Nothing is more annoying in a movie that a scene that goes on even a tiny bit too long. The movie Superbad (2007) which I personally hold to be comedic gold, cant be considered perfect because, despite the 99% of the movie that made me laugh, there was still that tiny, miniscule, one-friggin-percent that managed to have a voice loud enough to annoy me. I would have considered the movie to be the greatest ever if the cop car scenes would have just been trimmed down a bit.

Finally, I’ve reached the point where I’m squeezing the peel. I’m really reaching for any drop I can get. I’m scraping the bottom of the barrel. What’s worse, I am not even close to the 120 page quota that’s considered industry standard for movie length. At best, im another 40 pages away. At this point, overwriting isn’t even on my radar. I’m hitting road blocks left and right. If I manage to write one or two pages, its considered a GREAT day.

So as far as achieving what I set out to do in my thesis question (Writing a successful screenplay) I don’t think I’ll even be able to come close to figuring it out on my own and translating it into my work. I do think, however, that I’ll still be able to research existing works and spot the things that work, and the things that don’t.

Senior Thesis- Part Six

Writers seem to be a lot more down to earth than other people in Hollywood. I think it’s because of the occupation itself, writers have to get used to a lot of rejection before the ever hear good news. I think that screenwriters nowadays epitomize the stereotype of a “starving artist”. One of writers I interviewed this week said that he had 88 of his stories rejected by various publishers and studios before he ever managed to write “the big one”. I don’t necessarily know if I have that kind of resilience, but I did learn something new about the field, which is what this project is all about. I always knew it was hard to be a writer. But I honestly had no idea it was that hard. Part of the reason for that is because I figured, If you have talent, than no matter what, someone will eventually realize it and start paying you.

Looking back on it, I guess I didn’t have to interview anyone to find that out. I could have simply gone to the box office and see how much crap is out there, in front of millions of moviegoers. For example, how come a movie like Made of Honor (2008) staring Patrick Dempsey gets to be produced, but other films like I-Robot (2004) spend ten years in a studio drawer collecting dust before they ever get produced and filmed. More than anything, I’ve learned that being a successful screenwriter is a borderline impossible task. I’m like Socrates in the way that I’m just realizing how little I know now.

Not to spoil my interviews, but I found that the successful writers out there struggle with the same type of issues that I do, and that I’m not alone. Even other aspiring writers who I’ve talked to on various forums and websites have said the same thing, sometimes it just isn’t there. Sometimes you do run out of ideas, you do run out of stuff to say. The thing is, the ability to push forward and continue writing despite that is what seems to separate the ‘aspiring’ writers from the plain old fashion writers.

Senior Thesis- Part Five

Despite all the books I’ve read, all the screenplays I’ve seen, and all the movies I’ve watched, nothing has taught me more about writing a screenplay than actually sitting down and writing (for 3-5 hours at a time). Its one thing to have an idea in your head that sounds nice, that sounds like a good movie. It’s another thing to actually sit down and try to write it out into a hundred minute movie (industry standard).

I’ve already talked about how much time I spent preparing a storyboard and a treatment before writing the screenplay itself. But after spending time writing the screenplay, it felt like I didn’t prepare at all. At first, I only put in the dialog which I thought was absolutely necessary to move the story along. After a week of this, however, I realized that I was going to be short by about 40 pages (that’s forty minutes for those of you keeping score). This actually put me into panic mode because it meant that I wouldn’t have a finished product, I wouldn’t have a movie that I’d be able to sell to the typical production company. So to pinpoint the problem, I decided to watch a few movies and find out what I was missing from my own.

I was actually surprised that I didn’t realize this sooner. After watching a few films, it jumped out at me. Not every seen need’s to be there. I don’t mean that directors put in scenes for no reason and that the movie is better off without them. I mean that in most movies, not every scene in the movie needs to move the story along. Some scenes are just there. They don’t contribute the story and they aren’t plot driven.

This doesn’t mean that those scenes need to remain purposeless necessarily. In some cases, though the scene isn’t crucial to the plot, it might be crucial to understanding the personality of a certain character. An example off the top of my head would be in Iron Man, where Tony Stark (Robert Downey) is at a charity banquet, dancing with his assistant (Gwyneth Paltro), and they make small talk while he gazes into her eyes. This scene has nothing to do with his metamorphosis into Iron Man, or his fight against evil. But it does show the viewer a certain side of Stark that we wouldn’t have had otherwise. It shows the viewer that despite his reckless behavior and his blaze attitude, he is capable of having emotions, particularly warm ones which are not typical to a weapons maker. It also somewhat contributed to his metamorphosis into a more heroic-like character. Before hand, he wasn’t really a good guy; he just wasn’t a bad one.

So after picking up on little techniques and nuances like this one, I’ve begun to insert scenes like this into my own movie. It still like my movie will be short a few pages, but I’m more aware now and I’ll have something more presentable. One thing that I know for sure, even after I’ve presented this project to a panel, I still won’t consider my movie to be 100 percent done. It has a long way to go before it’s worthy of the silver screen.

The Treatment

I know a lot of people have no clue what my screenplay is even about, so I decided to put up a link to the original treatment I wrote. This is actually just a bunch of disorganized thoughts I had that I wrote down before I'd forget them. This will give you an idea as to what my screenplay is about. Hope you enjoy!

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=dff9wxf7_34gbdf6rfw

Senior Thesis- Part Four

Its been a bit of an adjustment, writing a screenplay after I’ve been writing short stories for so long. So much of my highschool writing has been geared towards writing in what now seems like a very specific style. With stories and other creative writing endeavors, I prided myself on the fact that I could describe so many scenes using fancy words and descriptions, but in a movie, people cant see words or descriptions, they can only see the character himself. In a book or a short story, I can actually write what the character is thinking. I don’t have that same liberty with a screenplay.

Another new facet that I’m getting used to is using juxtaposition in my characters dialog. In a book, I can tell you everything you need to know about a character whenever I want to. In a movie, the only information you’ll ever get is going to come from the characters themselves within their dialog. Viki King gives a good example in her book:

Frank:
Hows your wife? You haven’t brought her around lately.

Ralph:

She’s fine. Did you hear Jack’s getting a divorce?

She shows that just from this short exchange, you can guess the relationship between Ralph and his wife. I knew about the power of subtly a long time ago, but the experience of writing a screenplay has really taken it to a whole new level. Its much harder than I thought it would be from that aspect. I’ve had to adapt myself to the style, and nothing I’ve ever written before has really prepared me for this.

Aside from that, I’ve actually been having a progressively easier time writing my screenplay. At first, I really overanalyzed everything. When I sat down to write, I thought, “every line has to be perfect, cause then this baby is gonna win me an Oscar”. I sat down, and after 2 ½ hours, I only had about 6 pages (to get an idea, each page is about a minute in ‘screen time’) so I only squeezed out 6 minutes of a movie after 150 minutes of effort. And then I thought back to the lessons I picked up in the books I read.

I already have a basic structure of the movie written out. I have the story itself, and I have an idea what is going to be on screen for pages 1, 3, 10, 30, 45, 60, 75, 90, and 120 (arbitrary mile stones that are spread out through the movie). The dialog doesn't have to be golden, it just has to move the story along. I figure, I’ll let a consultant hammer out the rough parts and refine it once I hit it big time, or worst comes to worst, I’ll get Mr. Huber fix it up when he reads it. Either way, I’ll be leaving the nitty gritty to the experts.

Senior Thesis- Part Three

This week I started reading books that were more oriented towards the “how to” of screenwriting. As recommended by my mentor, I picked up two books in particular; How to Write a Movie in 21 Days by Viki King, and Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting by Robert McKee. So far, I’m just about finished with King’s book, and it’s really taught me a lot about starting a screenplay that I didn’t really know beforehand. More importantly, it’s taught me a lot about how I can “get the juices flowing” and approach any creative task. After reading her book and looking back, the way I used to write my movies actually seems shortsighted now. I used to just start the screenplay itself, with some vague idea of a story floating around my head, and make it up as I went along. This would lead to a lot of bumps along the way. I would write until I reached a point where I would say, “what happens next?” and I’d be completely lost. I would “take a break” from the writing to try and figure out the rest of the story in my head, and I’d lose interest in the project completely.

King’s book actually managed to break the process of screenwriting into a series of steps that are pretty easy to follow. She spends as much time preparing to write the screenplay as she does actually writing the screenplay itself. She suggests that you need to be able to visualize the story in its entirety before you ever begin writing it. King also forces the writer to ask himself a lot of questions in the process, like “How can you tell if your idea is a movie, a novel, a play, or a song?” and she actually goes through ways to identify each one. She also asks questions like, “Who is it about? Does your age play any role in the subject you chose? Etc.” Aside from the story itself, she also insists that the writer “get acquainted” with the characters themselves by putting them in different situations and asking “what would he/she do?”

As brilliant and fresh as the book is, however, it does have its shortcomings. First off, the style of writing gets a bit obnoxious at certain points, and it feels like it’s written as more of a self-help book than a guide to writing. King tries to keep things fresh by adding little jokes or puns, but it makes the book sound way too corny. And considering she’s a writer, she falls into a basic trap and makes a rookie mistake in the beginning, where she spends the first 15 pages of the book telling you what the book is about. It’s sort of like self-hype. Most of all, the premise of the book itself is pretty arrogant if you think about it. The book claims to have the secrets to writing a successful screenplay. The first sentence of the book is, “So you want to write a movie? You’ve come to the write place!” I asked myself, if it is this easy, why isn’t everyone a successful screenwriter? It’s not like this book a secret, after all. And 21 days? Purists of the art will tell you that a great idea takes months, even years, to sharpen into a screenplay worthy of production.

I guess I’m just being a stickler, but all I can say for certain is that this book has given me some perspective as far as writing. It’s really essential that I ask myself all these questions while I’m writing because, after all, who knows better than I do about what I want to write. Plus I have to be able to defend my ideas from other sticklers out there like me.

Senior Thesis- Part Two

Like I said in my last journal entry, it looks like my screenplay is heading in the direction of a sci-fi. So far though, I've decided to focus more on the “sci” than on the “fi”. The reason I’m doing this is because I find a lot of Sci-fi movies in recent years choose to create worlds which bear no resemblance to ours, which is ok if you’ve decided you're movie isn’t sci-fi. For example, Star Wars is a film that has nothing at all to do with science. It completely disregards the laws of physics. How you ask? Well, for starters, in the final installment of the series, Return of the Jedi, the film depicts a TIE Fighter craft exploding in outer space. This would be ok, aside from the fact that there are no such thing as a “Ka-boom” in outer space. If something exploded in outer space, it would make no sound. That's because there is no air in outer space to transmit sound.

Sound is a pressure wave which requires matter of some sort to propagate it. Light, on the other hand, is an electromagnetic wave which doesn’t require matter in order to be transmitted.

Why do I know this? Because I started reading books and journals having to do with real science. I figure, if I’m going to write something sci-fi (something that takes place on planet earth, nonetheless) I should have a foundation built in reality and that stems into the fictional world. It should aggravate viewers when they see movies like I Am Legend simply set aside the laws of physics and biology even though they know better. No one is going to think less of a movie that agrees to play by the rules. I am a believer in creative license, but only to a certain extent. It should come with some rules depending on the genre. I care because I find it insulting to the viewer's intelligence.

On that note, since I cant really take part in any field work for my senior exploration, I've chosen to take it upon myself to add a few more books to my reading list. So I paid a visit to the school library and picked up a book called The Living Cosmos, by astrobiologist Chris Impey. His book doesn’t bother with the super natural at all. In fact, it steers clear from it. Instead, he chronicles the complete history of life in the universe, from the first microbes (which predate all other living things), all the way to the first humans. Luckily for me, he doesn’t assume his reader has a degree in biochemistry. He talks a lot about the elements required to build cells, and the likelihood that other planets out there host life.

The most important thing for me is that, he also has an entire chapter discussing the creation of artificial life. He states that we cant yet create life in a Petri dish by simply adding all the necessary elements. We can, however, take life that already exists and multiply it. Funny enough, he also mentions one of the other books I read for my senior exploration, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? By Philip K. Dick. He also mentions author Isaac Asimov, and asks, “Does life really need carbon or water? Could we have all of the functional processes of biology without organic chemistry?” He goes on to talk about potentially having computer algorithms replace the functions of DNA, and if androids could ever qualify as life. He says that in order for a robot to qualify as “living”, it would need to be self aware. It would need a conscious, which is exactly the point I make in my screen play.

He also talks about the likelihood of existing life on Mars, and its ability to host life, but he only covers it from an organic stand point. I am looking to combine the two and ask if Mars can host artificial life.

The Living Cosmos By Chris Impey

Movie Science:
http://www.intuitor.com/moviephysics/

Senior Thesis- Part One

There are several reasons I chose to do the topic I’m working on. Screenwriting has been a passion of mine for a while. Movies, to me, are the most powerful form of art. In almost every situation I’ve ever been in throughout my life, I’ve been able to relate that situation to a movie or TV show. It’s not as strange as it sounds though. After all, any screenwriter will tell you that they get their best stuff from everyday life. But as far as movies go, there are literally hundreds of jobs that are responsible for making the movie. What attracted me to screenwriting specifically was the role of the screenwriter. The screenwriter is the god of the particular universe that everything takes place in. He controls who lives and dies, who falls in love, and who delivers the best lines. Essentially he’s the puppet master. He’s the one with all the answers; he’s the only one who fully understands the logic behind every character. On a certain level, if a screenwriter is unsatisfied with the “real” world around him, he can just grab a pen and create a new one. Unlike a regular author however, a screenwriter gets to see that world come to fruition, to unfold in reality and take shape beyond the words on the paper.

The way we view fiction is unclear though. What is fiction? The ability to assign it definitions is a creative task on its own. Traditionally, fiction is viewed as something fake, not fact. According to the dictionary, fiction is “An imaginative creation or a pretense that does not represent actuality but has been invented; A lie”. But imagine if we had it all wrong. There are billions of stars out there spread throughout our galaxy, and billions of galaxies containing them. Each star is like a solar system of its own, which would mean that life may not be unique to earth, to say the least. Whose to say that those galaxies aren’t inhabited by creatures just like us, and that every story ever written hasn’t already taken place on those planets already. That would mean that there is a planet out there where “Alice in Wonderland” was fact; as real as gravity is to us! This would mean that we are able to tune in to these stories, much like an antenna to a radio. Or that there is some sort of cosmic memory that everyone in the universe shares; that anyone can tap into.

Crazy, eh?

As far as my research, I’ve already started looking to big names in the field, particularly focusing on the Sci-fi genre. I’ve looked to authors, particularly Phillip K. Dick, for an idea of the type of story I want to construct. Aside from that, I’ve supplemented my reading with a few “how to” books on screenwriting as a craft. And finally, as far as the screenplay/story I’m constructing, I’ve done a lot of specific research dealing with anatomical characteristics dealing with the players in my story (I am writing about clones).

P.S.

On a more external level, I chose this senior exploration because screenwriting is a field that I have a passion for, and I doubt I’ll ever get to study it in its entirety and spend quality time working on a screenplay. In a way, for me, this senior exploration is sort of a last hoorah.

More about my actual story in the next post!

Intro to Senior Thesis

Ok, as I mentioned in the opening segment, I will be dedicating a large part of this blog to my senior thesis. For my thesis question, I wanted to figure out what it takes to write a successful screenplay. I want to find out whether its a technique that can be taught and applied, a formula you can simply plug in to any old story, or a talent you are born with. I'm going to be pulling info from literally ANY source I can find, including books, Internet links, Podcasts, television etc.

As far as specific sources, so far, I can recommend Podcasts like "The Business" by KCRW, a radio show that talks about the business and marketing aspect of the show business. Overall the host is pretty solid and has a great sense of humor. The guests are usually pretty top notch, and you really feel like you get an inside look into Hollywood. The Business recently had an interesting episode, where they discussed how the divide between movies that make money and movies that win awards, has been growing steadily in the past few years.

I would also like to recommend watching the Science Channel and Discovery Channel. Trust me, it is NOT nerdy at all. Both of those offer the best programming thats on TV nowadays, and both feature visually overwhelming documentaries. They explain the science in layman's terms, yet they allow you to walk away with very captivating, easy-to-remember statistics.

Welcome!

I'm about as new to this as anyone. Basically, I'm starting this blog as part of my senior thesis at my highschool. I'm already writing a journal chronicling how my research is going, so i figure, why not Share my research for the world to see. I'm probably also going to use this blog to focus on screenwriting, science fiction, music, books and more. Feel free to email me anything. This is as much a suggestion box as it is a blogospheric work in progress. If you have any ideas you'de like to share, I'd definitely love to hear them. I can even publish them here, if you want me to be your own virtual megaphone. Not sure how this little experiment is going to go, but it has all the makings of a classic.