When is good good?

Quick update on my new Christmas screenplay, one producer wants to hang onto it, however two others are still interested. My main concern is that the Christmas movie market, at least for Hallmark, has closed; they already have their quota of Christmas movies.

What's left is Lifetime who seem to specialize in woman-in-jeopardy stories about bad husbands. And ABC Family which is a whole other story. And of course, straight-to-dvd is always an option although dvd sales are slowing down. 

Anyways, when is good good was the question.

One of my UCLA extension students once asked me when I knew if my screenplay was good. Simplest answer is when someone buys it.

Okay, that's the hard, cold answer. But let's consider what makes a good screenplay and what doesn't. It can be a comic book, a pirate movie, a romcom, a horror movie or anything else. There's no restriction on genre. There's even no restriction in non-genre (if you don't know that term, I'll explain it later).

Take my last Christmas screenplay, the one I wrote in less than 4 weeks last winter/spring. It literally poured out of me, I knew what to write almost every day. It came, as they say, naturally.  I knew it was good.

I passed it around to two director friends. They said it was good. Then I passed it to an agent, he said it was good. He passed it to 3 producers and two liked it and one didn't. And that was the producer who didn't like my writing on a 1-page synopsis. I knew he wouldn't like the screenplay. Can't win 'em all.

Why was it good?

Because when you read it, you feel like you were in a movie, you forget that you're reading it. Stephen King writes like that most of the time. You read page one and all of a sudden you're at page 98. Time flies by. 

And my screenplay had that feel. All of the above people read it on a week-end and they get a lot of screenplays to read on the week-end. And this was the best one. When it's bad,  you tend to say "I'm only on Page 33? It's gonna take forever!" 

When it's bad, you struggle through every page, you know you are reading.  Sure, it's subjective but generally when you think you've spend 5 hours reading a script, it's not good.

One more thing about good.

It doesn't mean it's going to sell. Having a good screenplay is one thing; having someone who wants to buy it is another. Everyone loved my Emperor of Mars, but nobody wanted to make it. I wrote it in 1989 and it wasn't until 2003 that a handful of people actually attempted to make it (and failed each time).

One thing I've always said about my writing, you may not like it, but it's not written badly. So how does that work? A good writer will still engage the reader, even if they don't like the story but ultimately the story isn't what they want, need or expect. And when that happens, you can't argue with it. You just keep showing it to anyone you can find.

So, before I chase you away with arrogance and hubris, not all of my screenplays are good. In fact a lot of them aren't good. They're not bad, just not that good. So why the inconsistency?

I write what is called non-genre screenplays; this isn't a special category, it's just a description for screenplays that aren't action, horror, romantic comedy or sci-fi. And that is what most movies are.

I have written all of the above, but very few got sold. Non-genre screenplays are generally those odd movies, ones that don't fit a category easily. The King's Speech is a good example; it doesn't really fit into a genre. 5 Easy Pieces is another example.

Many indie films are also non-genre,  Wendy and Lucy, Frozen River, same as Winter's Bone.

My best screenplays are in that genre and they're my best because that's the thing I do best, tell offbeat, personal stories that generally end in an ambiguous ending.

Not that I've tried to do big action films and sci-fi material, it's just that somehow, some way, I don't seem to have the same energy nor depth. I once wrote an action screenplay and a producer said that while it was okay,  it wasn't Jim.

What? Of course it was. Me.

But what he meant is that it didn't have the feeling that my Emperor of Mars screenplay had on him. It was just another action screenplay, like all the others. And they could hire anyone to do those films. Lesson: A good screenplay can limit your future work.

But... but...

But I had to admit he was right, I admire guys like Shane Black who created a style of his own, copied even to now. And I would love to write a big action/sci-fi screenplay that would be of blockbuster status.

But it ain't me. And it ain't in me.

Has it cost me? You bet. But I know that when I wrote something of my own, something about my life, my friends life, my ex-wife's life, my small-town beginnings and every other aspect of me, it usually turns out good.

Trouble is, not everybody wants to buy it. And nobody wants to buy anything now anyways, or at least what I write and what my friends write.

So you're not gonna see my name in big lights, I'm stuck with the non-genre category, but what the hell, it's given me a not bad life.


And as my dad used to say, "you can't be rich and beautiful".

And finally, I got some interest from a screenplay yesterday that I had forgotten about. A sex-suspense-thriller woman-in-jeopardy screenplay that a director friend persuaded me to write even though I don't like writing these kinds of movies.

Go figure.

Oscar reflections

Well, the Oscars have come and gone, and with few surprises, the big one being that the Facebook movie was leading going in, expecting to take the top prizes with the exception of best actor. 

Going in, Social Network had won 10 awards out of 16 for best picture while King's Speech had 4 awards for Best Pic going in. But the Academy voters went to the underdog in a sense, awarding King's Speech Best Picture as well as writer and director and actor.

Social Network won writer, music and film editing. 

So why did everyone go for the King?

Well, this is my theory; 

David Fincher is a good director but has one characteristic that I felt was negative, his movies are very dark and without feeling. Not saying they're bad, but they are pretty cold and remorseless.

I liked Social Network but felt it was about greed and betrayal with no real caring for any of the characters who were calculating and greedy. The only element I found that balanced it was Sorkin's screenplay which began and ended with Zuckerberg alone after being rejected by two women.

It made me feel a little sorry for the character, after all money can't buy love.

But that was made up by Sorkin, who must have seen that otherwise nobody would care about anybody in the film. In fact, he did say at a screening I attended that he "borrowed" a lot of Citizen Kane. If you remember, Kane was an unlikeable character and the only thing that mattered at the end was  - "Rosebud", the sled he had in childhood.

And we all know what Rosebud really meant but it's not relative here.

Whereas, King's Speech was the classical struggle to overcome great odds and also being inspirational.

There you go - greed and betrayal vs overcoming great odds. I figured the younger Academy members would go for what some of their generation considers admirable in the way of values while the older members would go for the classic handicapped character overcoming obstacles.

Think My Left Food, Rainman, Beautiful Mind, Shine  and many others.

And basically, that's what happened. Sorkin won for best adapted screenplay and he deserved every bit, he is a great writer and one who values of the writing craft.  And David Seidler won for King's Speech.

Thirty-five years ago I had a brush with the Academy awards when my former partner, Phil Borsos and I made a short film called Cooperage, about a barrel factory. We came to Los Angeles with a 35mm print and got the Los Feliz theater in Silver Lake to screen it for a week.

That's what was necessary to qualify for the Academy Award nominations.

It's mostly a technicality; you really don't need an audience, you just have to have it screen at a legitimate movie theater in Los Angeles. How does that work with no audience?

Well, maybe a little audience. We got the projectionist to put up our short at the very end of the movie that was playing. So, as the audience were filing out, our short started. Some would turn around and watch the 15 minute film, while others left.

After each screening we would pick up the 35mm print and take it with us to the motel. We did this for one week and it qualified and was entered into the 1976 Academy Awards.

We made it as far as the final handful of shorts being considered and were in the finalists but never made it to the bigtime. Still, it was a lot of fun to even be considered, as they say.

That same year we won the Canadian equivalent of the Oscar, the Genie and won awards at Athens, Sydney, Chicago and New York. Also an award for Cinematography, for both myself and Tim Sale.

Phil made another short that was an Oscar finalist but sadly he passed away in 1995 at the age of 41.


And my chances at the Oscar are more remote than Charley Sheen's.


Ah, life...


(Thurs: Packaging Ghostkeeper)

And the award goes to...

I'm now about 20 pages into the Ghostkeeper sequel screenplay and am going through all the usual things; like it's really good for an hour,  then it's awful and I don't know how to write, followed by "it's not too bad", and so on and so on. 

So I thought I'd post a quick review of the films nominated for the Academy Awards. One thing continually bugs me about the way the media handles the awards. They usually only mention the actors and the movies. Sometimes they'll include directors but nobody ever mentions the writers.  They'll be buried somewhere on page 5 of the LA Times while the actors faces grace the first page.

After all, who's more important, the actors or the writers? I know people who think the actors make up all the words they speak, you don't have any idea how many times I'm asked "exactly what does a writer do?"

But that's another subject and who likes whiners.

What's interesting about this year is that it could be a landmark year for anyone under 40. Or it could remain like it's always been.

It seems that 3 movies are the leaders, The King's Speech, True Grit and Social Network. Social Network is the favorite in Las Vegas but not a sure thing.

What's interesting about Social Network is that it's essentially a movie for 20-somethings. I saw it and didn't mind it,although I thought of it as an HBO movie. But I noticed I felt sorry for the guy who started Facebook. But that was a bit of manipulation by Arron Sorkin, the writer who flat out stated that when he wrote it he had Citizen Kane in mind. I was there when he said it.

What does that mean? Well, if you remember Citizen Kane it came to the fact that even though he was ruthless and uncaring, when he died, he remembered the sled he had as a child. The point being that he wasn't happy with his riches and success. That made the rest of us feel better, you won't necessarily be happy if you have all the money in the world. It's an equalizer.

What Sorkin did was inventing the thing about Mark Zuckerberg losing a girl at the beginning of the movie. And the last scene has him being rebuffed by another girl as he watches her walk away.

We feel sorry for him now, don't we? Or at least we can think he doesn't have everything in life.

But what's more important in the race for the Oscar is this; it's a contest between hope, inspiration and loyalty and greed and betrayal

True Grit for example, is about loyalty and hope, and the King's Speech is the same thing. It's about the good that comes from people. It's positive.

Social Network, on the other hand is about betrayal and greed, sort of a Y-Generation version of Wall Street, the movie.

The average Academy member is above 40 and so this is where the contest begins to be interesting. Will the older members vote for loyalty and hope or will they vote for greed.

And more important, is this saying that greed and betrayal are the standards and values for anyone under 40. 


Blame Arron Sorkin, he made Mark Zuckerberg likeable. Ironically Zuckerberg did get the girl in real life. But that ending wouldn't have been as good.


(Monday: GKPR 2)