The prize for the year’s most interesting movie goes to Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, which is based on the shenanigans of real-life corporate whistleblower Mark Whitacre in nineties Illinois.  The story itself is nothing to write home about, given that Mr Whitacre’s lies, damn lies and even more damn lies are in fact mere child’s play in the context of some of the more recent stories that have hit the media fan.

So what makes it interesting? Well. To begin with, it plays more or less as straight corporate drama but for two industrial sized spanners in the works: a V/O narration loaded with random gags and pointless observations such as you’d expect in some cutesy indie flick, and a brassy, bafflingly incongruous soundtrack that sits - or rather, schmaltzes - somewhere between blaxploitation and James Bond.   

These elements are of course backed up by the exclamation mark in the title. You see, Soderbergh is going for punchy! and fun! here. And as you might expect, it really doesn’t work!  

So how did it come to be? Were these fun bits integral to the project from the start? Or did Soderbergh and co trudge their way through a painfully dull rough cut and say, ”Jeez, what the *!@#! can we do to save this piece of *!@#!? Hey, I’ve got it! Let’s have a comedy voiceover and some cornball music! Hey you guys, let’s do this thing! All right! High Five! Woo hoo!!!”

If that is what happened (and of course there is a slight possibility that it didn’t quite happen that way), then they made the right decision. The Informant! is one interesting movie, folks!

There’s a piece in the Agent’s Hot Sheet section of September’s Creative Screenwriting magazine about four quadrant surprise summer hits that come from spec scripts. Jim Cirile mentions that Emile Gladstone of ICM warns writers “never to underestimate the power of heart in a story”.  It’s a point that Robert McKee also likes to hammer home. If there’s no emotional pull, he says, the audience will lose interest, regardless of the quality of the set pieces. Although we could probably all think of plenty of exceptions to disprove that, I think it’s generally true.  

One of the biggest emotional rides I’ve experienced at a cinema was watching Disney Pixar’s Up in 3D a couple of weeks ago. What a rollercoaster that was! And how real was Mr Fredrickson? OK, he doesn’t look real, and he’s not supposed to either, but he’s actually far more real than a lot of people I meet.  

And why? Because not only did the writers et al invest in getting to know his character as part of the development process, but they also let us get to know him in the first act - right from childhood through to old age - so that when the story proper takes off, Mr Fredrickson is not just another CG invention. By then he’s almost our grandfather, or father, or whoever. 

Up is a wonderful film - a wonderful four quadrant summer hit (or make that Autum hit if you live anywhere near me), and one that will stay with its viewers for many reasons, perhaps the most important being good old fashioned emotional impact. 

I took out that scene I didn’t like, and put a couple of segments of it in as flashbacks, and I think the whole thing works better now. It looks to me like it’s holding together. I’m more or less done with it and am looking forward to writing my next short. Shorts are birds in hand. What I need is a couple more before I go exploring in the bush again…

Writing this short has thrown up a few questions about formatting which are probably worth mentioning here. Originally, I intended to write You’re Easy Wallace as a standard spec script, but some shooting script gremlins crept in through the back door.

I think the important thing to remember when writing a spec script is that the props buyer will not be reading it. And you can also forget about the director, the lighting guy, the PM and the Assistant to Mr Clooney. Just keep your story nice and simple.

But rules of thumb for spec scripts don’t always make sense. For example, this apparent rule that you shouldn’t include a draft number and/or date on your title page. I can kind of see that it’s academic how many drafts it took the writer to reach the script that eventually gets bought. So as soon as it’s bought, I suppose it effectively becomes a first draft again. But what about, say, in the UK, you receive development funding for your spec script from, say, a screen agency. Surely it makes sense for you to number and date each draft that you hand to them so that you all know what shape the script is in at any given time? What I’m saying is, there’s a hidden element of horses for courses to what initially appears to be an endless list of unbendable rules that tradition has imposed on us screenwriters.

And on that issue, it seems odd that, according to the film schools and screenwriting manuals, formatting is fixed and rigid, but on the other hand, it seems that an awful lot of successful screenwriters have scant regard for rules; they just do as they please. So what do you do as a budding writer? Well I suppose you keep your voice neutral and write by the book.  

But what makes this tricky is that certain formatting practices designed for production actually make for a more vivid read - like the occasional camera direction (“ECU on a mint condition 1980s watch”), or the odd capitalized sound or special effect (“He watches the FLAMES as they continue to BURN.”). OK, maybe I have speed-read too many scripts over the years, but to me, a line like: “A MOTHER grabs her SON and drags him away, unable to stomach any more” reads better capitalized. In the context I wrote it, the mother and son were the important components, so it makes sense to capitalize these words. But then, shouldn’t I be capitalizing the names of all non-speaking characters, for consistency? That’s the problem; a spec script reads better, in my opinion, when you mix and match the rules of  both formatting types, without sticking to any hard and fast rules. The downside of that though is that you end up somewhere in the heavy rough of the golf course we like to call screenwriting, and your script will look amateurish to some.

Ind the end I decided to be a good boy and uncapitalize my sound and specials effects, and keep my voice as neutral as possible. The formatting doesn’t draw any attention to istelf now, apart from one bit that, to be honest, I don’t know myself how to format. I’ve got a monologue (a reporter’s piece to camera) that’s designed to run partly concurrent with some action (preperation for a stunt) that’s noted in the scene description.  Let me know if you have any ideas on how to lay this out!

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarghhhhhhhhhh. There I was, thinking I had something approaching a decent draft, and having re-read it, it seems perfectly worthless.  I wanted it to be an exercise in screenwriting without any limitations such as writing to budget, but as it is, it just doesn’t seem to hold together. Trying to write a half-decent short makes one-armed press-ups look easy. 

On the bright side though, I think I’ve got the story figured out. I think the problem is the way I’ve presented it.  There’s one particular scene that bugged me all along, to be honest, but I had my head in the sand about it. It just seems incongruous and wrong, so playing around with the narrative is an opportunity to fix that. I will take out the scene from the linear narrative and just throw in a couple of segments of it as memory flashbacks during key scenes. I know that everyone’s writing flashbacks these days - it’s an incredibly overused and tedious technique, but sometimes it just works. I think it might just work in this script, in which case the story might just hold together after all.

Whatever your opinion of Blake Snyder (and I’ve made mine known on many occasions), his enthusiasm was never in doubt, nor was his ability to sell scripts and screenwriting manuals, and to pass on to others what he had learned over the years. The film world will be a poorer place without him.

Today I received outstanding script notes from Monica Solon, a Brazilian writer who has a particular affinity with Wales. She fed back on my previous draft a couple of weeks ago, which was useful, but this time she’s really excelled herself by seemingly highlighting the cause of every single weak point (as well as the strong points) in the story. This has given me a great opportunity to come up with a solid final draft, which I’m now looking forward to writing. Thanks Monica!

I heard back from a producer friend today who again seems to like the script, but unsurprisingly has some concerns about the budget. As it is, the story is about two men, and in the current draft you could argue that there’s no discernable protagonist. The common sense approach from a producer’s point of view would be to make it leaner and more manageable by focusing on the main character. This is what he would like to do if he did take the project on, but he’s also moving away soon, so it might not be practical for him to produce it.

I think that the slightly impractical or at least challenging nature of the script production-wise will prove to be a problem in getting it made, but as I said before, if I get it to a solid final draft I’ll be happy. Then, if someone wants to produce it, we’ll take it from there. I will have a chat with my producer friend in the next couple of weeks anyway and see what he says.

I received feedback from a writer/academic friend who also liked the story. He came at it from a different perspective from most film people, which was really useful. He made a number of valid points about my use of language and also questioned a pay-off that occurs at the end. I’m glad he mentioned that, because it’s crucial in terms of the story’s meaning, and I think I need to make the pay-off clearer, and set it up better as well.

A friend of mine who’s been in the business a long time gave me some invaluable feedback on my script. She liked it but asked a lot of questions about the subtext and characters’ reactions to events. I think what came out of our phone conversation was that I didn’t know my story world well enough. This is definitely true. When I write a short there’s a voice in the back of my mind saying, “Don’t worry - it’s just a short. Wing it!” I’ll try not to listen to that voice again. Of course it makes perfect sense that any time spent on the backstory is an investment towards creating a well-rounded and meaningful screenplay. So it’s back to the drawing board again…