Writing

Explaining Yourself

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There’s some good screenwriting advice over at The Blank Page:

Okay, this is more of a pet peeve of mine, but I see it in scripts all the time. It comes from writers who think they have made a clever pun or (even worse) double entendre, and then, not trusting that the reader is getting the joke, they have to explain it in the next line of action-description. For example, you might see this:

                                 WALTER
  Hey, Jim, can you pass me the corn?

                                     JIM
   Of course I’ll lend you my ears.

Jim laughs at his little Shakespeare joke.

This reminded me of an experience we had years ago when Roger Corman hired us to write and produce a TV series version of LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS. Roger sold the pitch to the then-fledgling USA Network. When we wrote the pilot script, the inept USA exec asked us to underline the jokes and italicize any clever  social commentary. This really pissed Roger off  (us, too, but he was the lion in the room). Roger told her that if we had to explain what the jokes were then it would kill the jokes. But the executive argued that she really wanted to be sure she caught the jokes and might miss them if they weren’t clearly marked. After this horrible experience, Roger ran screaming from TV for the next decade…

Can I Sue?

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I got this email the other day:

If you’ve got
any time in your hectic sked to offer me advice I’d be grateful. As far as I know, you’re not a lawyer, but as a seasoned pro you may know!
Anyone that writes anything knows that ideas float around the ether waiting to be written.
Who hasn’t at least once, had that great , only to find out a week later  has just nailed a deal for the
same premise. That’s just the way it goes.

However… six years ago I wrote my first screenplay. It’s called XYZ, and it’s about an ex-astronaut who owns a farm/ranch in Montana. He builds his own rocket in a grain silo to launch himself into space.
Today I read that Billy Bob Thornton is to star in a movie called THE ASTRONAUT FARMER about… well you guessed it!There are no other plot points for me to see and compare yet.

I registered the screenplay electronically with ProtectRite in 1999. In the past few years I’ve entered the screenplay into a few competitions including Tribeca Films – for which I got a commendation, didn’t win of course.

So my question is this… let’s say this in-production screenplay bears a remarkable or even "uncanny" similarity to my finished work in structure and story. Do I have any recourse,  or is it just tough shit as I’m a still un-produced nobody without an agent?

Like you said, I’m not a lawyer. My guess is that
you’d have to prove that the screenwriter and producers had access to your screenplay and read it.
But I will say this, it’s not the world’s most original idea. There was even an
Andy Griffith TV movie with roughly the same concept and that later spawned a
short-lived TV series called SALVAGE ONE.

I think you sort of answered the question yourself in the first paragraph of your email… sometimes, people just get the same idea at the same time.

Many years ago, Bill and I thought we had a great idea for a spec script… a Russian cop who comes to the U.S. to find a bad guy and gets paired up with an LAPD detective. We called it RED HEAT. We were in the midst of writing it when we heard about…you guessed it… a movie going into production called RED HEAT starring Arnold as a Russian cop. This has happened to us many times during our career.

For a couple years now, Bill and I have been pitching a procedural series around town  about a special, multi-agency law enforcement team that goes after the most-wanted fugitives. This summer, TNT premiered WANTED, a series with the same basic notion. Do we think we were ripped off? No. There were probably a dozen guys out there pitching a variation of the same idea at the same time we were. That’s the entertainment business.

 

Room 222

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Bill Rabkin and I are teaching another four-week, online course of  "Beginning Television Writing" for Writers University. For more information on the session, which begins Sept. 5, click here. I don’t know how the students feel about it, but we’ve been really enjoying the experience. This is our third or fourth time doing it and I’ve discovered that helping others learn how we do what we do has sharpened my own writing. In fact, I applied some advice we gave a student the other day (she was having trouble structuring her story)  to one of our own pitches and it made a big difference.

Harvey Weinstein has PANIC attack

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Variety reports that The Weinstein Company has optioned author Jeff Abbott’s thriller PANIC, which just hit the shelves today.

Book, published by Dutton, follows young docu
filmmaker Evan Casher as he goes on the run from a dangerous spy ring after the
murder of his mother. He learns that most aspects of his life have been total
fabrications.

Abbott has written eight mystery and suspense novels, most recently 2003’s
"Cut and Run," the third volume in his Whit Mosley series.

Chick Lit Bit

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NY Times book critic Marilyn Stasio isn’t fond of "chick lit mysteries."

you can’t miss its gaudy manifestations — those slender volumes with cute
titles like ”Dating Dead Men” and ”Killer Heels” and covers in such juicy
colors you don’t know whether to read the flap copy or lick the jacket.

Slim stories. Joke titles. Juicy jacket art. Does a pattern begin to emerge?
For a category of mystery still relatively new to the market, the babe book has
already settled into some fairly narrow grooves. Even if you ignore the
generally deplorable level of the writing (which is surely an unintentional
aspect of the formula), these novels scrupulously observe all the basic
chick-lit conventions: the giddy girls in their glamorous jobs, the shopping
sprees and fashion makeovers, the gossipy friends, the disastrous dates and the
wry comic voice of a heroine so adorable she could be . . . you.

Book critic, blogger and industry observer Sarah Weinman thinks the mystery world will be buzzing over Stasio’s take on the genre. I don’t think so. The one thing these "chick lit" authors share in common is a strong sense of humor. I think they’ll shrug it off.  How about you?

The All-Important Rewrite

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Screenwriting class is in session over at Paul Guyot’s blog, where today he is talking about the importance of rewriting. Lots of aspiring screenwriters don’t give much thought… or effort…to rewriting. They focus all of their attention on having a killer opening. Mistake.

Nobody seems to want to learn to be a great writer anymore. They just want to
learn how to get paid to do it.

But what few seem to grasp is that you
seriously increase your chances of getting paid for it if you’re really good at
it. And one of the best ways to "get good" is to understand rewriting, and know
that when you think you’ve done all you can, you can still do more.

Barbara Seranella is on the mend

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I know a lot of you were worried about my friend author Barbara Seranella, who recently had liver transplant surgery.  I’m pleased to say she’s on the mend. Here’s a note from her:

Hi All, I just went through all my cards from the last two months. Again, I 
am blown away by the love. I’m home in the desert, really digging it. I 
drove my car yesterday. Everyday is a new landmark. I hired a
round-the-clock  caregiver, Ophelia. She made me a sandwich yesterday and
then admitted that it  was the first one she had ever made. Then I learned
she used to build houses  with her Uncle and knew a lot about plumbing.
Yesterday, she fixed the toilet. Today we go after a leaking
faucet.

Turns out I have to get the surgeon’s "permission" to travel. I
really want  to and fully expect to go to Chicago, so I’m working real hard
to blow him away  when I see him next. Again thank you to the million
friends who held me in their thoughts and  prayers these last two months.

IAMTW Spoofed

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When James Lincoln Warren and Paul Guyot learned about the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers (IAMTW), they cooked up this wicked spoof, a website for The Professional Hack Authors Recognition Society (PHARTS).

The Professional Hack Authors RecogniTion Society, or

PHARTS, is an organization for professional hack authors,
i.e., mercenary wordsmiths who don’t care a fig for style, content,
originality, or grammar, but are willing to write anything for money. 
We are of all ages, races, ethnic backgrounds, religious persuasions,
and sexual preferences, comprising even Old PHARTS, New
PHARTS, Red PHARTS, Blue
PHARTS.  Are you
PHARTS material?

In a back-handed kind of way, this amusing  satire underscores why Max Allan Collins and I decided there was a need for a professional organization for media tie-in writers.  We’re not stupid, we  know that tie-ins and novelizations are widely considered as hack work…even though media tie-ins regularly hit the NY Times, Publishers Weekly, and USA Today bestseller lists and handily out-sell original novels by many big-name authors. But media tie-ins rarely get reviewed and never get any respect. Hence, IAMTW.

Darkly Dreaming Dexter Development

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Variety reports that Michael C. Hall of  SIX FEET UNDER has signed to star in Showtime’s pilot for DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER, based on the acclaimed novels by Jeff Lindsay. The SIX FEET UNDER connection doesn’t end there… Michael Cuesta, a regular director on the HBO series, will helm the DEXTER pilot.  Dexter is a Miami PD forensics expert who also happens to be a serial killer.