I’ve vaguely committed to trying to get these three articles out (part 1 and part 2 being here) about my first experience as a producer so rather than leaving it standing, here’s the last part which is really the bit where I actually talk about how it all went. I don’t know if there’s any benefit to anyone in what I’m writing here as there are probably far better insights from people with considerably more experience than I’ve got. Maybe there’s someone who’s thinking about being a producer or about to go into it for the first time and perhaps something here might be of use or maybe not. (If you’ve come across this article hoping to find some information and it’s not here, please feel free to leave a comment or get in touch and I’ll help if I can.)
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Have you ever read a screenplay where, at the beginning of a piece of dialogue, just under the characters name, there’s a bracketed phrase like, for example, “(under his breath)” or “(fear-induced autopilot)”¹? These parantheticals are often known as “wrylys” (or wrylies - not sure what the plural is) because, apparently, it’s very common for a (novice) writer to put “(wryly)” before dialogue. Now, I gather that parantheticals are often frowned upon by script readers for a start but I’m guessing that they’re even more frowned upon if they actually put “wryly” in a parenthetical, before a piece of dialogue.

I was reading the screenplay for “Indiana Jones and the City of the Gods” tonight - the legendary screenplay by Frank Darabont that, so it goes, Spielberg and Ford said was one of the best screenplays they’d ever read² but George Lucas apparently dismissed and summarily fired Darabont from writing duties for no reason that’s even been put forward. There, on page 3 of the script, for all to see is a parenthetical before a piece of dialogue that simply says “(wry)”. One of the best scripts Spielberg has ever seen and there’s a wryly on page 3.

Fuck you Syd Field - it’s my screenplay and I’ll use a wryly if I want to!

¹ A real one from the screenplay for “The Bourne Ultimatum” by Gilroy, Burns and Nolfi
² Yes, that scene is still in it.

I woke up this morning¹ with a thought rampaging around my head. Being quite alone, it made quite a lot of noise in there and try as I might, I couldn’t get it to shut up and I really really did need it to both shut up and get the fuck out of my head beause it wasn’t a helpful thought nor particularly useful. But it’s been lingering there all day.
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The second of a short series about my experience as a first-time producer on a short film. Part 1 is here.

The director and I were both painfully aware of one significant fact during the whole of pre-production and the actual shoot: I was the only person in involved who did not have any professional experience there and I was pretty much running it. If you’ve ever seen that old Channel 4 series called “Faking It” well that’s pretty much how I felt. Fortunately for me, there are a whole library worth of books that tell you a lot about what’s involved and I’ll recommend some of those later on.
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Idle thoughts (and associated spoilers) about 28 Days Later.

Just about all of Danny Boyle and Alex Garland’s not-a-zombie film is told from the point of view of the protagonist Jim (Cillian Murphy). The only part that isn’t is the prologue where we see some animal rights activists break into a primate research laboratory and unwittingly release the Rage virus. It introduces us to what’s taken place and we see the effects of the virus. When we meet Jim for the first time - 28 days later - we know more than he does about what might have taken place.

But what if the prologue wasn’t there? What if the film started at the point where Jim first woke up? Well, it would mean that the clever way the title of the film is used as a super would be lost. So let’s go back 28 days from that point - what if we were with Jim when he had his bicycle accident and we saw him being taken into hospital, be treated and find that he’s in a coma. Then, 28 days later, he wakes up to an empty world. If we stuck with his point of view all the way through then the discovery of a deserted London would be as much a mystery for us as it is for Jim. His first encounter with the Infected would be the first time we saw what happened too.

So why am I thinking about this? It’s related to the scene in the sweet shop after Jim gets rescued by the two survivors and Selena (Naomie Harris) starts wittering on about what happened in one of the dullest pieces of exposition I can recall. The only person that this tedious coverage of recent events benefits is Jim because we, as the audience, should already be able to work out what’s happened by putting 2 (the activists unleashing the rage virus) and 2 (empty streets of London) together and getting the answer which is 4 (rage virus unleashed, everybody dead or, as we’ve just seen, infected). But if we had been with Jim then while the exposition scene may still have been dull, it would have at least been more relevant because we would want to know what’s going on as much as Jim does.

What do you think?

For some inexplicable reason¹ on Friday I got all proactive. I responded to an advert for short film scripts/treatments even though what I have in the way of short scripts I’ve been saving for me to direct. I also contacted a publishing company to see if the rights for a novel were available. In the case of the producer, I don’t think that’s going to really take off – not from anything that’s been said so far but the substitution of of “You know, I’d like to talk about one of your ideas and see whether it’s something we could take further” with the phrase “I’ve got another idea – what about love, sex, drugs and clubbing in London?”

I’m still assuming that it’s an idea for a story and not a proposition from the producer who, from what I can tell, just happens to be young, Italian and female. I haven’t got back to her yet to tell her that I’m old, married and past it².
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(Click to embiggen - full text after the jump)
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After what can only be described as a fuckawful day, starting with discovering that some cockstabbing, shiteating scrotes had stolen my bicycle leaving me in a mood that bordered on genocidal, I’ve just finished writing an entry for the Waterstone’s What’s Your Story competitionally challenging type eventuality. Although I was aware of this charidee effort on account of regularly reading Neil Gaiman’s journal, I had fallen into the age old practice that I learnt at school of Not Paying Attention so I didn’t realise that us mere mortals could also submit entries to be compared alongside great authors such as Gaiman, Atwood and Rowling. Fortunately Laura had mentioned it on her blog and the closing deadline is tonight so I got my scribble sticks and scribble pads and started scribbling.

If you’ve got a printer/scanner combo to hand, you can actually print out a postcard to do your doodle stuff on, scan it in and upload it. If you’re like me and limited to softCopy() only, you can do it online - except that you’re additionally limited to 600 characters of story. Yes, that’s right, 600 characters, including spaces and punctuation.

It occurs to me that I probably should written thing in CamelCase and forsaken the usual word-space-word pattern. Never mind.

My first foray into the murky world of filmmaking came about as a result of a post I made on the Shooting People newsletter. I had responded to a post by one of the members, a writer, who had written a tirade against producers and, in particular, producers who didn’t seem to know what they were doing. My response was published in the next bulletin: it argued that even producers had to start somewhere and that, just as all the aspiring screenwriters would bemoan the fact that they needed to be given a break, so too did those who might want to produce films.
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I’d like to say that I’m as giddy as a schoolboy with his first top-shelf magazine.

My floor is currently covered in index cards. Lots of index cards. 60 of them to be more or less precise. All but seven of them represent a scene in the third iteration of the second draft of Revelation. It’s taken a while for a document which I said I’d have written by the end of November - my own personal NaNoWriMo project as it were. But now it’s there, laid out in front of me and what’s more, most of the plotting problems I had like a missing third act and a very vague 2nd half of the 2nd act have appeared, as if by magic.

If only it were actually magic and not me boring the tits and willys off some close friends and acquaintances with my constant “What about..?”

The breakthrough, as much as there was one, came last week when I suddenly realised how the last act should pan out. Once I’d worked that out, the rest of it started to come a little easier. It’s pretty much just as David Bishop described in a post of his back in April. Once I finally knew how things all came together, I knew that the 2nd act had to contain all the events and information which lead to that point.

Of course, it may still not work. I’m well aware that the nature of this story could be exposition heavy. However, that’s not a problem at this stage and something that rewrites should be able to sort out.

Next stop: The Outline.