Back to the true north

Beginning to settle into minus 28C temperatures as Calgary is having a "cold spell". There isn't much wind but lots of minor accidents, I usually pass 5 or 6 every day and see trucks hauling wrecked cars away.

I sometimes get Americans who tell me that Canada doesn't have the freedoms that America has. This, of course, is so totally wrong it rarely gets a reaction from me anymore. In fact it's in our national song, O' Canada. Some of the first words include "the true north strong and free" and we do have a bill of rights which include all freedoms that America has, except assault rifles.

Regardless we survived 12/21/12 and the planet is still here. 

But beyond that I met an old friend who grew up in the same little town as I did, and which was the inspiration for Emperor of Mars. We both fell in love with our Grade 5 & 6 teacher, Miss Mazure, who was around 18 years old or so. She is vividly portrayed in Emperor and some of you probably remember the booksigning last May.

My friend Peter and I recounted stories of the past and it was a pleasure to see that he had many of the same feelings for small-town Canada, very similar to small-town America, held great memories that formed who we are now.

I couldn't say the same for the 90 mile drive from Calgary toha halfway point for both of us, the roads were really bad, as you can see above. And of course, a handful of cars in the ditches. I don't miss the Arctic-like conditions at all. But it is a test of strength to drive anywhere during winter.

And back too the movies, I will be meeting with Joe Thornton, the producer for Ghostkeeper 2, the sequel. We hope to finance the movie to shoot this winter in Calgary but if you've read my past blogs, you'll know how damn hard it is to raise the money.

I'll be at the Deer Lodge for a visit, the hotel we shot the original Ghostkeeper and I am also doing a final edit on my screenwriting book which should be out in late January 2013. I also have a new screenplay to write, but that won't start until I get back in a week or so.

This morning I drove a mile or so to the nearest Tim Horton's coffee joint, well-known in Canada and slowly spreading into the US. It's a legendary chain that every true Canadian knows well. Sort of a MacDonalds of donut shops but nothing like the ones in the U.S. 

As I paid for my coffee and yogurt and scone, the young girl smiled and said "Merry Christmas", which took me aback for a moment... I wondered, can she really say that? Won't someone sue her? But apparently not. I paused, looked around and then spoke:

"Merry Christmas to you too". She smiled. 

I glanced around, nobody saw me say that. Phew... as the cartoons say.

While some countries don't have the freedom to say that without law suits, apparently it's okay at the McLeod Trail Tim Horton's coffee place.

The true north.  Eh?    
 

Holidays

This week is rushed. I'm putting final touches on my screenwriting book which I want to publish in January. There's a few issues to deal with technically. 

Since the book is an instructional manual the format is set. But I am also including a complete screenplay as well, it offers some issues. The book is written on the computer but the screenplay is scanned. 

Trouble is the screenplay format has too reduce its size but also, because it's scanned from paper, it's a little grey. You would think this is an easy fix, but it's somewhat complicated. I have to figure this out.

I also have to get the cover done, with a photo my friends liked, rather than just titles. Since it's about a working writer (me) I thought this would be more interesting than titles which don't lend to getting attention. But that also has issues, but my friend Shirley, who was part of the blog at the very beginning, is going to help out greatly.

On top of all this, I'm preparing to go to Calgary, where my brother lives. He works in the newspaper business and we always get together at Christmas.

There might be a problem with the posts as I've been having trouble with Google, who seem to want me to change passwords every other day. So if I don't post over the next 2 weeks, it's due to internet problems.

Anyways, here's the first pass of the photo. I wanted it to look just a little surreal, rather than sharp and realistic. Let me know what you think. . Titles will go in bottom third, the dark area.

     
Will send photos of snow and cold.
 

On the road

I first read Jack Kerouac's landmark novel On The Road when I was fifteen. Needless to say it was a landmark moment in my life and one that remains an essential part of who and what I am.

The book is basically a rambling collection of stories around a handful of characters in the late 1940's. It was published in 1956 and immediately became a classic example of that period of time in America. Kerouac and his friends were literate, many were university students and others were just plain crazy people.

What's significant about the book is that it was arguably the first book about young people looking for something else besides the world they saw as different after a world war. And rather than look for jobs, they decided to travel across the country for no real particular reason except adventure, drinking, lots of sex and drugs.  And also seeing a country that was recovering from four years of seeing soldiers dying in Europe and the Pacific.

It was also the beginning of the Beat Generation, which would lead to rock and roll, jazz,  beatniks, hippies, the love generation and a feeling of discovery of another America. The one that was waiting to be discovered with cars, something that didn't happen that much in the 20's or 30's.

And it changed my life.

Not so much the drugs and sex, but the feeling I always had when I traveled across the great prairies and the Rocky Mountains and the truckstops where so many characters I've noticed and whom filled my screenplays. It was my adventure.

Kerouac wrote the book on a long roll of newsprint, he wrote on a typewriter at a frenzied rate, no doubt fueled by other substances.  He was from a French Canadian family in upstate Massachusetts and wrote not only of the lifestyle of the road but also of the discovery of what the country had become, from lonely towns to cities and in a way that made it all sound like a movie to me.

I have driven probably a million miles in the last 40 years, my trusty Ford SUV now has over 300,000 miles and I've had several cars. My friends say that all I need in life is a tank of gas and a highway I've never been on. The highway photo at the top of this blog is in Nevada and part of a documentary I did. 

And this brings me to the movie. Finally after years, someone has made On The Road. Francis Coppola, who made The Godfather, optioned it 25 years ago with the intention of making it but never got it together. Finally he gave it to Brazilian Walter Salles who made The Motorcycle Diaries, about the early days of Che Guevara. This took 8 years to get made and finally it will premiere Dec 21st.

But I always wondered if the book could be a movie. It's style of prose is completely different than most novels, it rambles, it rolls along. Sentences continue for forever and the energy was either felt or not. And that's the dilemma. Can it make a movie?

The early reviews were mixed, which I expected and I am uncertain about the outcome. I will see it, I have to see it, but yet a part of me doesn't want to be disappointed, not since it means so much. 

I guess I'll see if the adventure remains.



    

 

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.

This year it 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 writer's, 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 drink 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. 

That's the joke.    

How an idea comes and goes

Having written for around 40 years or so (who counts after that many years?) I seem to be getting more ideas than ever for a screenplay.  My latest one came when I watched consumers storming big box stores and malls for Black Friday sales. I had to return a suitcase to Macy's and thought I'd drive by the Fashion Square Mall near me to return it.

But it was not to be, the streets were blocked off as though a hurricane was coming and traffic cops were everywhere. And it was all for the mall traffic. Needless to say I turned around and went home.

But on the way back, I started thinking about Black Friday. I'm always looking for a holiday movie for Hallmark or Lifetime, and I thought that maybe a movie called Black Friday could work. It would be about four or five people who have adventures in a shopping mall on that big day.

But then Black Friday was a great title for a horror movie too. Maybe even better than a family movie for Hallmark.

I thought it over for the rest of the day, bouncing each idea around and trying to imagine what kind of story I could write, and for which idea.

By Saturday, I was focused on the mall idea, and with green screen and CGI, it could be made for those mini-budgets that Hallmark deals with. You wouldn't need a thousand extras, you could create them on computers.

But the dark side of me was also pushing the horror film. My first movie, Ghostkeeper, was a horror movie, although it could be labeled as a "supernatural thriller". There wasn't really a lot of horror in it because I'm not the kind of person who wants to see people being cut up.

And that brought me back to the nice Black Friday. A friend suggested I see that Arnold Schwarzenegger movie Jingle All The Way (remember that one?) where Arnold fights for a special toy for his son.  Maybe I could still make the family version.

But by Sunday both ideas started to look lame, the horror movie definitely not what I wanted to write and the family one was too much about money and buying stuff, and I didn't think that was particularly inspiring either. 

By the end of the day I dropped both ideas and this morning put them into my files for projects that might be resurrected, or maybe not.

But then there was that mall cop movie with Kevin James, but it didn't do much business.

But then I remembered a screenplay I read that was written by Sam Peckinpah, the great screenwriter and director whose movie The Wild Bunch, is a classic. He had written a screenplay about someone locked in a department store all night and was being terrorized by an unknown presence that seemed to be hunting him. 

Well, that's not a horror film completely, it's more "Hitchcockian" as they say. Suspense. I could write a suspense movie. 

I'll see how I feel Tuesday.
 

Work & Hitch

So much for Thanksgiving, now I can get back to editing my book on screenwriting. I'll work on it today, Friday, but week-ends are not for writing and the weather in Southern California is just fantastic, so lots of bike-riding coming up.

LA Times didn't care for the Hitchcock movie with Anthony Perkins, which opens today. I saw it at a screening with my director friend, David Winning and both of us felt the same way about 10 minutes into the movie; all I could see of Hitchcock was Perkins impersonating him, and try as he could, he never resurrected the spirit of "Hitch".

I think the appeal of this movie won't move the audiences to see it, and young generation has no idea who he is or was. Best performance was Helen Mirren, who always works well. Some comments suggested she was far more attractive and interesting than Alma, Hitch's actual wife.

The girls (Jessica and Scarlett) work fine but in general the movie is more like a TV movie on Lifetime.

So much for reviews, more interesting stuff Monday. 

 

The Bear and me...

About two weeks ago I received one of those green envelopes from the Writer's Guild of America. It's the envelope every writer loves to see because of it's contents.

Commonly called "Residuals", it comes down to this; money we get for not doing anything.

A lot of writers at this point will say "No, Jim, we've earned that money."

But a lot of others will say "it's free money." Even my director friends, who also receive residuals agree. It's kind of like you're walking down the street and someone hands you $100 or $2000 just like that.

What are residuals? It's a payment for every time one of my shows, either feature film or TV series, is played somewhere in the U.S. and Canada and all over the world, sort of. I'll explain the world later.

These residuals usually add up in formulas I never quite understand, sometimes annually and sometimes bi-annually. The amounts vary from $2000 to as low as $1. An actor friend of mine actually received a residual for $00.00. It cost 47 cents to mail it.

And the bear?

Well, that's Gentle Ben, a movie I wrote in 2000 and that plays or sells dvds all over the world. The residual check I got recently was for $2000 so that bear is working for me. I get a complicated list of where it played and how much it earned but the bottom line is that it's essentially "free money."

Why do I say that? Well, I was paid Writer's Guild Minimum for writing the screenplay. They paid me when I handed the screenplay over. Done. The cameraman gets paid and they're done. The editor is paid and they're done.  The lighting person is paid and they're done.

Only writers and actors and directors get residuals. But there is a catch with writers, naturally, in which we lose a little of that free money. And this ties in with foreign "royalities" ( another word for residuals).

It goes back to copyrights. When I write a screenplay I own the copyright in much the same as someone can copyright an invention. It belongs to them no matter what and forever. 

Except in America.

Studios, notorious for cooking their books (aka stealing from us) learned long ago to "buy the rights". But how can they when international law says the copyright stays with the writer? Well, they figured out that if they hire the writer under the category "Work For Hire". What this means is that they have bought the copyright and you don't own it anymore. Regardless of international law. And guess who shares your residuals? 

Yes, once again the big guys figure out how to get back some of that money they paid you.

However, Europe and Canada  and other countries collect and pay writers a royalty (also called a "foreign levy) that is based on usage, how often the program/movie is played. And the writer gets all of this money. So even if Gentle Ben is paying US residuals I also get the foreign money once a year and it's for several of my movies and totals around $2000 a year.

So that's why I see it as free money. I didn't work for it, I didn't write a word or even ask them for money, they just send it to me. And the bear has been feeding me for 12 years so far.

Thanks, Ben.