And I'd like to thank...

 Another "aren't we wonderful" awards show is over and only the big one left on Sunday, February 24th. I dvr'd it so I could catch the awards I wanted to see, mainly best actor, best supporting actors (male and female) as they like to say. Goes back to Shakespeare's day when all actors were male.

With all the thanking going on it made me think about me. Well, actually me as in "writer".  We're a little more different than any other person in the movie business.

We work alone. 

Nobody to cheer us on, no group hugs, no nothing. Just a white screen in front of us waiting for our brilliant (or not so brilliant) words to be invented. I always thought that if I ever win anything I would simply say this:

"I'd like to thank somebody but actually I did it all by myself"

And writers do it by themselves. Sure, we might have a producer harassing us, or the occasional actor asking for more great lines, but generally we are alone in a room. Not counting those who "write" at Starbucks, we call that performance art.

So what happens when writers win. They thank their producer, not for his help but rather to have hired us. And we thank the actors of course, for not screwing it up too  much, and finally we thank our spouses and families and hope they won't complain if our next five screenplays don't sell.

But you can bet at the bottom of all this, we know that nobody would have had a job if it weren't for us. You can't make a movie without a story. So how do we have awards shows. Well, it's usually in a tent or hall somewhere and not covered by TV cameras because, after all, we're just the writers.

We're not like those scam Golden Globes which consist of around 75 foreign critics who sell their words to studios who give them freebies and trips. And we're not actors who get to dress up pretty and think the world revolves around them.

Am I bitter? Naw... here's why. I get to make the movie first.

About fifteen years ago I was working on a TV series in Vancouver as a writer/senior story editor. I had written an episode that started like this; 
 

EXT. CHINATOWN - NIGHT

Neon lights reflect on the wet dark streets of Chinatown as a soft rain mists across the steam rising from sidewalk grates. A man steps into streetlight, lost and disheveled… a desperate character.

Okay, so that’s the first scene in the screenplay I wrote. As I stood there I watched a crew of about forty people working in the rain, setting up lights, moving cars, putting up traffic signs, raising rain tents. Gaffers ran past me and actors were led to their trailers. Then an A.D. I knew walked up and looked at the street with all the busy crewmembers and then turned to me and grinned;

 “It’s all for you Jim.”

At that moment, he said what I already knew, all I did was write a handful of words and now a made-up shining city was coming to life and getting ready to make my dream come true.

Nobody can take that away from me.

The Writer's Guild Christmas Party

The Writer's Guild of America, West holds a Christmas party where a few hundred writers and guests take over an upscale restaurant. Nobody really knows how many WGA writers there are, estimates go from a few thousand to 10,000 members. The west coast WGA is the largest.

Last one I was at was held at Beso, a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard and co-owned by Eva Longaria of Desperate Housewives fame. Eva also brought pizzas to the writers' strike a few years ago. And while her restaurant is way too upscale for the likes of me and other writers, we get a chance to hang out where wine bottles rest in a huge glass wall for all to see.

The event is free and we all get one ticket for a drink. Last year, after I used my ticket I bought a Manhattan and it cost $16 so you know that was my last drink.

Writer's come in all shapes and colors but mostly are middle-aged men with jeans and occasional sport coat or sweater. Mostly we look like we look at home or work. There were a few suits and some glitter costumes but ordinary is the look of the evening rather than the hipsters who regularly come to Beso.

It's a big restaurant with an upstairs private room and actor/waiters moving through the crowd with trays of beef tacos and thin pizzas. Tables were removed to accommodate  the crowd of loud writers and guests.

What's interesting is that I've discovered there are a lot of writers who work on various other things than movies and TV. I met a writer whose job it is is to create questions for Jeopardy, another writes a reality show where he figures out ideas for one of those housewives-of shows. I even met a radio news writer who was in WGA thru a separate guild in New York.

As I mentioned, men are in the majority here and women writers are fewer and minorities even fewer. It's changing a little, but not much. 

Talking to writers is never easy as many prefer not to really talk to anyone but their friends. Since both I and my guest Mary are pretty good talkers and we managed to talk to a lot of the crowd. Mary introduced me to Tom Schulman, an Academy Award winner who seemed quite friendly and not aloof at all. 

Of course there's nothing like success to make a person humble and there were some of those. I had my deal with the French company that had some good reaction but again the worst thing a writer likes is another writer who's working. Not always of course, but often.

In some ways, the party has the feeling like the employees broke into the owners mansion and are taking advantage of everything. A lot of the discussions I had were from unhappy writers and the lack of work or the lack of respect that writers get. 

I've never bothered with that, I always felt that I respected myself and didn't really care what my bosses thought of me and as long as I delivered, that's all that really counts. The truth is that most of the WGA members are out of work, I read a statistic that suggested around 85% of WGA members are not working. That beats the national unemployment rate for any other job, except for actors maybe.

But we choose what we wanted to do and that's how it goes; some of us are talented, others like me are lucky, and still others aren't sure why they became writers. I spoke to one of the actor/waiters who wanted to make some contacts with a writer who could connect him to a producer and I didn't want to tell him the odds of that happening as writers are the last people to be able to help anyone.

There's an old offensive joke wherein a young not very smart starlet anxious to get herself into movies sleeps with the writer.  Nobody cares about the writer.

That's the joke.     

But she isn't.

She also brought pizza.

 

Thanksgiving

 

                                          To both of us



 

My 45th

Finally I finished my newest screenplay which took me a fair amount of work, not to say that it's also personal to a great amount. Most of the time, I usually use people I know in my screenplays, being either close friends or strangers I've seen on the street. This time I have to write something that is very close to me.  Me!

Me and her -- our time in the Rockies. 1971.

Here's the point.

Sometime ago I received an email from a girl on Facebook who asked me if I had married her aunt.  Well, guess what? I did marry her aunt. How about that? We were married for about six years and eventually went different ways. No anger or anything like that, we just separated.

So I called my ex, not sure to expect Brenda, above photo and we had a good talk and eventually started to talk more and I eventually went to see her a few times. We had a good time and she remembered the great time we had in the Rocky Mountains near Calgary. We spent three months at an arts school there when we were together. Both of us agreed it was one of the best times ever.

I took a class in film even though I was already working in television and she took a writing course. It also had courses in music, theater and more. I remembered hearing students practicing instruments among the incredible mountains.

But then, my ex came up with a really good idea?

Why not go back there for our 45th Anniversary? Both of us laughed.

And then she said that I would probably write a screenplay about it.

So I did. 

But I wasn't sure how to write it. It definitely had to be different than us, that would be too awkward. So I created two characters similar to us and to pieces of people that would work in the story without us having to be too far apart from the present. Different names, of courses.

I also needed to change the location for one reason.

It had to be in the U.S. Mostly because I felt the story had a lot of the U.S. that we drove many times. Also it would work better than have a story in Canada. Because there are very few good movies from Canada. I hate to say that but it's true. I've always felt that Canadian films seem to be a combination of British and U.S.

However, the French in Quebec make wonderful movies and I always felt they had their own country within Canada and know that they lived in Canada before the English took it over.

Then I stole a few ideas from my book "How To Not Get Beat Up In A Small Town Bar". It's a book I published about a lot of driving in the U.S. and Europe and of course, Canada. You can see those pieces in my book.

And so I wrote.  And it took me almost two months, with some stopping now and then. It seemed to work well but I went back to the start and changed a couple of things. Endings are always a problem and I am still unsure.

Then I sent a copy to two friends of mine, both good on screenwriting. One a woman and another a man. Paul has directed more movies and tv than I ever knew. And Mary has good sense and ideas.

Then there's the ending. I had a dozen ways but didn't get one I liked. I left it for a week and then came back. I went thru a few more and then just realized it was right there all the time.

Simply "My 45fth."

And no, it's not mine, it's my ex, she had it right from the start. It can be used for both I suppose but I think that each of us probably think it was ours.

But I know that it wasn't, even though they are rough on first drafts.  So I went through the screenplay again, slower, finding errors that they and I missed. Simple things, changing names often or sentences and realism.

Here's me. 1971 with Brenda above. These two b&w photos show our 1968 Mustang, loved that car. We were waiting for it to be fixed and in the meantime we were thrown out of a nearby cafe because we were "hippies".  We were far from that. 

Funny thing... I was already shooting film for a TV network and knew more than the teacher. But he gave me and another student bad marks. That other student and I started a small company in Vancouver and had a short film in 1976 at the Academy Awards! He passed away a long time ago and I miss him.  And my long hair and beard.  I was mad because the cafe tossed us out.

Far out!

The projector - or How I Got The Movie Bug

A few years ago the major movie studios announced that they are not going to make and deliver 35mm prints of their movies to theaters in the U.S. and Canada. Instead movies now will be sent via digital means and eventually will come from "the cloud". The projectors above were similar to those used in my home town. 

There are two of them because a feature-length film of around 100 minutes wasn't one single reel. Often it took 6 reels or more, depending on the length. Each reel weighed maybe around 10 lbs.  Running was basically simple, reel 1 and reel 2 were loaded on their projector. Then when reel 1 was ending reel 2 was ready to take over . That's when the projectionist would have to shut off projector one and turn on projector two.

The trick was to never see the screen go black for even a second and thus it took a steady hand and a lot of practice. Projectors were used from the very start of the movie business and lasted just around 100 years. A pair of these projectors and a projectionist were, to my thinking, the inspiration to my love of movies. And it began with me screaming.

I was about 4 or 5 when my parents took me to see a movie, apparently because they couldn't find a babysitter. The movie was "The Living Desert", a Disney documentary about the desert.

All went well until a rattlesnake appeared on the screen, magnified to the size of a house. It seemed to leap out at me and I yelled like hell. I wanted out. My mom immediately took me out to the lobby and calmed me down. But I was not going back. No way.

Then she took me upstairs to the projection room. Since my town was pretty small, everyone knew everyone else and the projectionist, Leonard Kaminski, sat me down near the projectors and my mom went back to sit with dad. I remember some theaters used to have a room at the back of the theater with windows so moms with babies could watch a movie without having to annoy the audience. But ours didn't have that feature. 

It was wintertime and the projection room was warm and cozy and I soon became relaxed. I watched Leonard expertly switch the projectors then take the used reel of film and rewind it. It became hypnotic to me. There was the warmth from the projectors and something else.

The click-clack sound of the film going through the projector.

It was soothing and I  had the feeling that I was safe. The sound was much like the sound of a train clicking along the tracks. And I was totally mesmerized by this new world that seemed to protect me.  It was the beginning of a long friendship with those projectors and it led to a life in the movies. 

Ironically I had the chance to meet Leonard several years ago before he passed away and he remembered me just like I remembered him. I told him what I did for a living and he said he figured I would because he noticed how I studied every aspect of what he and the projectors did. Once in a while and as I was older, Leonard would let me sneak in and sit with him, with me watching the screen through a small window.

But now, the projectors are gone and many of the older theaters in small towns are having to close down due to the costs of buying digital projectors. Some small towns have used Kickstarter.com to solicit funds from the locals and many now have digital. Yet I'm sure that many don't.

And what about my theater back in northern Manitoba?

I have been assured that they have installed brand new digital projectors ready for the next kid who falls under the lure of movies. And I think Leonard, somewhere in projectionist heaven, also agrees.   

 

 Before it was a church and then turned into the movie theater that I learned from by watching almost every movie I could see. Sometimes I would listen at the back door if the movies were "Adult". 

The cross is just a telephone pole.

You never know...

The hardest thing sometimes, is to want to write. Everybody else on a movie has to be hired and then paid but writers don't always have that luxury. For Example I wrote "The President's Heart screenplay a couple of years ago, waiting for eight months. Finally I had time and no excuse and I wrote it in 3 weeks.
Why?

Because they might not like it. 

As dumb as that may sound, a lot of writers, me included, don't want to get rejected. The only other people in a movie who get rejected are actors, and at least for writers it's their work, while actors are rejected because of how they look.

Yeah, I know, there's other reasons, not that good or hard to work with, but generally it falls back if the producer thinks an audience is there for them. Like Lindsay Lohan. And 20 years ago it was Shannon Doherty... remember her?

But back to writing... if I stall any longer I might not write anymore.

So what am I getting at?

I didn't write anything this week, rather I wrote some emails and sent a 1-page story to one of my producer friends, whom I'll call "Lefty". Lefty always has a "6-pic-package", meaning of course that he has six movies in the mix. 

But none of them ever come to life. 

So why show a script to Lefty?

Because you never know.

There is a possibility for a rewrite of a screenplay, but having said that I probably lost it. And of course the actor screenplay which I started but held back because I have to get the Tokyo Trolley project ready for crowdfunding. That's a book I wrote for a 92-year old WW2 pilot. A great guy and I really like him.

So this week was about possibilities, which is what writers deal with every day, almost like waiting for the lottery, someone always wins. Same goes for that writing gig I mentioned above, by this time not only did I not get the job, I'll never get another one.

I have another idea that came from someone. Actually my ex-wife. We are friends.

And I can start the week over again next Monday.

Because you never know.

The Reader

There is, in this business of writing, one thing that makes writers shudder.  For that one thing, it is a single person, male or female who, in their world have little or no power, but for writers, they are either saviors and monsters.

These are the "readers". And they can sometimes make or break you.

 Readers have always been around, I'm sure Homer had a reader or two on his plays more than 2000 years ago. And so did Shakespeare. And Stephen King too. We all meet the reader when we choose to write words.

The readers I am talking about are the ones that read our screenplays to see if they are good, bad or great. There are more readers now than ever, because I suppose, the executives are too busy too read screenplays.

It wasn't always that way.

Even back as close as 2005, an agent could call a studio exec and suggest he/she read a new "hot" script. A runner would bring the script over on a Friday and the exec would read it over the week-end.  This was before we could email screenplays. There was a time when there was no internet.

Now, with so much information on the internet, screenplays can be sent faster and easier and with more screenplays tumbling in, they need more readers.

Now the question you might be asking is this; who are these guys and why does anyone listen to them?  Remember that famous quote from that famous screenwriter, William Goldman who did Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, among many others. He said this;

Nobody knows anything.

And he's right. Readers are hired to read screenplays to find the next hit, and it's not a job that writers could call honorable. Most of the readers are secretaries or interns or friends. You can get anywhere from nothing to $100 a read.

So why, you ask, do the people on the lowest rung of the Hollywood ladder be given so much responsibility.

Nobody knows anything.

A reader and hand in a hot script and the exec pitches it to his upper management. If they hate it, guess who takes the blame.

I've had fights with readers on those rare occasions we've met, and I don't generally like them. They've said good and bad things about my work and mostly they were wrong although they were also sometimes good and gave me ideas.  The power that they have is not really anything, but a good review can push a screenplay further up and a bad one can kill it.

So... on my new screenplay The President's Heart, the reader gave me some initial great remarks. But then the reader launched into an area where politics come into the story, and 
said that a lot of what I wrote couldn't happen. In fact he said it is implausible.

"Implausible - causing disbelief." Websters

What the reader is saying about the politics scene I wrote is that it causes disbelief. You mean like a guy who flies in the air or space aliens attack earth, or Bruce Willis races a car through the streets of Moscow at high speed? Or how about Jim Carrey being God for the day in Almighty Me.

Are those plausible?

In fact, everything in a movie is implausible, it's not real, it's actors walking around talking perfectly and being heroes and murderers.

For your consideration; I know politics. I worked for Bobby Kennedy in 1968 and Trudeau in 1969 and read tons of books on politics and continue to be absorbed by all those pundit TV shows. 

But that comment remains on that reader's report and for that one time, he/she is king. And a lot of them know it. And ultimately it isn't usually good because it is subjective, I liked Lone Ranger, my friend Barry hated it. Who's right?

But finally, my last resort is this; when I taught UCLA screenwriting back in 2003, I had my students read each other's work and then comment. But I added one thing; if they criticized any other student's screenplay, they had to offer an alternative.

Now only if I could tell my writer he/she doesn't know what he/she is talking about. 

And finally here's the "revue" of a script I sent to The Black List and the one above. These guys are real. But I still haven't sold it yet. Life is like it. What do you think?

 

“The premise of a presidential heart transplant is strong and commercial. It takes a personal need with a ticking clock, and transforms into a global crisis with a journey at its center. It's a smart base for an affordable political thriller which still has worldwide stakes. Making the protagonist a doctor was an intelligent decision, and introduces a fish out of water element that always plays well in a thriller. The setting - a chase from Paris to Luxembourg - is perfectly commercial.” The Black List  reader report.

Comments?

People who don't like you... for no real reason

People who don't like you... for no real reason

I've always felt I never really accomplished much, even though I think I've exceeded every expectation of me. But that wasn't very much to begin with, one of my high school teachers said I'd probably end up working at Chrysler's assembly plant putting cars together. 

Not that it's a bad job.

I did work at Chrylser one summer, on the line and found it somewhat comforting and secure. You knew people will always want cars and that the union would protect you. At least for my generation.

I've met people who don't like me, but not many and not really a bother to worry about. I even managed to have a career in screenwriting for a lot of years. I had some fights with producers over some screenplays and either won or lost them. 

One producer failed to pay me the proper amount of money for a screenplay. It was an easy issue to solve as the Writer's Guild had to clarify his error, which dealt with a spec screenplay I wrote and they bought. When that happens, the producer pays a full fee. What happened was that they had hired me previously to write a screenplay from a story they had.

Writing rules are complicated but what he didn't understand was this; I was paid for their previous script only for writing the script, not the idea. But my spec script was both my idea and my screenplay. Simple.

The producer paid the full amount but added to my agent; "Well, this will leave a sour taste for Jim in future jobs". My agent replied with "I'll be sure to tell him". In other words, pay the money. Did it hurt me?

One year later, I unexpectedly met the producer at a party, I didn't recognize him but he approached me and started telling me how great the movie was (the spec) and it was mostly because of my writing, etc., etc, blah, blah. I reminded him of the fact that someone else did rewrites on it, but he insisted my version was the winner. He suggested we meet again.

So much for sour tastes. 

But with the digital age and anonymity, things change. When I started this blog it went well until an anonymous reader began to challenge me on my words. That person said I didn't really know anything about the business.  This, in spite of all the TV movies and a features and episodic TV, "I didn't know anything".

My first response was to argue that, but it just feeds the anonymous people lurking out there. I wondered what they got from publicly attacking me. I found this also on the private Writer's Guild members website where they beef about everything as well as have different forums.

Again I noticed how people attacked each other, one woman left the website in tears, others were banned, and these were real names. There seem to always be a clique of bullies who seem to bond together and attack others. 

The question is; would they argue in public and alone? 

Most of them probably not, and in my blog, I can't even respond to whomever attacks me although I have a hacker friend who can and has uncovered two of the ones who feel they have to show me I'm not as great as I think I am. But I decided not to go at them... it's just not that important. Someone said the best answer is silence.

After all, I'm the high school kid whom Sister Anna Katherine said, "you'll never become anything".