Time for some shorthand methinks, so here goes: the Producer shall hereinafter be known as P, while the Director shall hereinafter be known as D. Sorted. OK so I met with D on Monday evening and both of us lost track of time, which can’t be a bad thing. D had plenty to say; after all, this was the first of the feedback for the presentation draft. What he said made a lot of sense, and he had lots of good ideas to help push the story along. At this stage it’s mainly about fleshing it all out and complicating the plot and subplots. We’ve agreed on a way to structure it all, and I think we’re both aware of an increasing urgency for getting the ending bang on and nailing it into place so that we can work backwards from there, knowing that it’s totally solid and immutable.  

D and I seem to work well as a team, possibly because we come at writing from completely different schools. My propensity for working from the inside out has eventually paid off in that we’ve established a vivid story world, and D’s eye for spotting the potential for twists and turns and complications is throwing up a whole range of “spanner in the works” opportunities, which is just what the story needs at this stage. We’re meeting again on Monday evening, so things are moving fast again now. The deadline for the final draft is the end of this year, because it looks at this stage like the guys will shoot in April next year. It seems that the great thing about projects on this scale is that there’s a decent chance that prep & production will go ahead on the scheduled dates. I know this was the case with P’s last project, and I’m sure it’ll be the same with this one, provided that everything that’s outside P’s control falls into place.  

Whose side are you on? Jonas Mekas’ or Blake Snyder’s?

Yes, Mekas said, “Shoot all scriptwriters, and we may yet have the rebirth of American Cinema,” but he kind of had a point. J.J. Murphy, who wrote Me and You and Memento and Fargo, blogs an interesting piece on indie screenwriting here.  Maybe the Auteur Theory has more substance than the Hollywood hacks and screenwriting gurus would have us believe.  After all, one thing a Hollywood film is not is organic. In his book, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, Blake Snyder tells us that he makes a point of looking at page 25 of every script he reads to check whether the writer has done the right thing of breaking into the second act. This is something, he assures us, that should NOT happen on 28 or 30. There’s only ONE place for it, AND THAT’S PAGE TWENTY FIVE, dammit. Not twenty three. Not twenty one. But TWENTY FIVE, OK?

Oh - and by the way, the correct answer to the above question is probably neither, but possibly Mekas’. Not Snyder’s. GOT THAT? Good!

Last night I followed my own (and everyone else’s) advice, and attended an industry event. Despite having double-booked it with my meeting with the director. I need a P.A. Applications most welcome. Diary skills essential. Anyway, I postponed the face-to-face simply because I’d RSVP’d for the event a while back, and who should I bump into there but the producer, who told me he was glad to catch me before I had the meeting as he needed to update me on the timescale and the financing. So there you go. Always go to these industry events.

I got an email yesterday from the producer saying he likes the new direction that the story has taken and he’d like me to meet up with the director again to bounce some more ideas around and to discuss ways of taking the story forward. If the previous face-to-face meetings are anything to go by, I think it’ll be a productive hour or two. I’m sure there are countless things that’ll need to be ironed out - some major, some minor, but by the sounds of it we’re all coming from the same place again, which is quite a relief!

Presentation treatment signed, sealed and delivered. My deadline was the end of the year, and by 6:30pm on NYE, I was just finalizing the document while Anna was flapping around having a pre-murder mystery wardrobe crisis. I emailed the treatment to the producer and director, along with a “rough rough draft”, and started sucking beers in true NYE spirit. Tragically, it was non-alcoholic beer, as I don’t drink anymore. But Beck’s non-alcoholic beer still fools me every time…The murder mystery itself was good fun and also coincidentally appropriate, given the concept of the story.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned the concept on this blog before. Well it’s a kind of murder mystery but it’s more whositgonnabe than whodunit. So our protagonist is the killer, and we know that from the off, but we don’t know who he shot or why. The story then tells of how that shooting came to be. It was really useful to write about the concept in the treatment. Although the three of us are more than familiar with it by now, somehow the process of committing it to paper made me more sharply attuned to the story. It sounds crazy but I think it’s quite common for writers to occasionally forget what story they’re telling. I think Linda Aronson is wise to advise writers to remind themselves of “what film [they’re] in”.  I know I’ve taken a major wrong turn on this project already. It’s so useful when others are involved, because these things become immediately obvious to them. Having written so many script reports and having read so many books on screenwriting, part of me is always convinced that I have immunity from making the classic schoolboy errors, but that’s simply not the case.

Although we’d decided on a 10-15 page document, I ended up submitting more. As I said, I handed in a “rough rough draft”, which is basically all the scenes that I’ve conjured up so far, written out in full, with scene headings and all. It’s all quite sketchy at this stage - very rough around the edges - but I felt that I had to write the dialogue early on. I know this goes against the classic (American) approach to screenwriting, which is all about writing scene outlines on index cards and/or mapping out the scenes on a large board that’s broken down into acts. It all supports this mantra that (again, particularly in America) dialogue must come last. Granted, Hitchcock was a fan of this method and it’s something Robert McKee keeps banging on about. But on this project I just couldn’t wait, because I wanted to hear the characters talk, and I wanted to establish the tone so that (in theory) I never forgot what story I was telling, or what film I was in. I don’t really know how you can do that successfully with a messageboard and a bunch of cards, to be perfectly honest. But to be fair though, I think it’s probably a case of horses for courses. You could argue that the atmosphere and tone should all be down to the director anyway, but I think it starts with the writer. As a script consultant, I will always give the thumbs up to a script that tricks me into thinking I’m watching a movie rather than reading a screenplay. I suppose I just want this script to play like a movie too - eventually.