You've never seen this one...

You've never seen this one...

I've had time to think about my trip to Windsor, the little city across the river from Detroit. And of course that means, "what stories can I use for something new."

Now that I'm waiting for Hallmark to decide if they want to use one of my three ideas for one of their Hallmark movies, of which I've explained in the past. My producer sent the 2 page stories a few weeks ago so from now on, it's out of my hands.

In the interim, a director friend of mine is trying to sell a screenplay I wrote some years ago, a weird story that he suggested. Quickly, it's about a hitman who is sent to a city to kill a union agitator but the hitman has to save him from a gang and thus is now his unlikely friend who turns out to be gay. But the real story is about the hitman and conjoined twin women and he falls for one of them.

What?

Yeah, I said it was weird. Here's what they said on Kevin Spacey's website:
 "The main characters are well-defined, the story moves along at a good pace, tension mounts appropriately."


"I really liked it from the first page, it got a little weird with the intro of the twins but after awhile I began to appreciate the inventiveness of it all. Very clever, Bravo"

"Reminded me of Chinatown, best part is the Sally/Sophie characters that compliment each other"

"This script is great. This story is great. I read this story with the girl upstairs, we started reading yesterday and she came home and demanded we finish - the story had so captivated her imagination."

"This was certainly a strange tale, but it grew on me."

"You've created the perfect film noir world, your penchant for character, mood and atmosphere, the progress of the story became a very enjoyable experience."

"The fact that you have both a plot and character is a commendable quality in and of itself."

So what do you think?

Some of my writer and director  friends think it's the best thing I wrote. 

And I didn't want to write it. But the director pushed me on, even though I know little of gay life except for that time in Detroit when my car was broken and I walked into a bar where there were a lot of friendly women. Only friendly women. I had a couple of beers waiting for the auto club and actually had some conversation with them.

And I had very little knowledge about co-joined twins. I didn't even know the word "conjoined".  And the word "Siamese" seemed dated. And why was that word used so long?

So how does a small-town farmboy who moves to the big city write a story of a world he doesn't know?

I treated them like everyone else. In other words, as I wrote their world (with suggestions from my director friend who has a thing for weirdness) as they saw it, just like everyone else. To them, nothing was unusual, the twins worked in a fish packing place, the gay union guy is married to a woman and life goes on.

If you read it, you see that in the writing. Nobody really thinks they're weird, no more than the old lady who lives beside me, who clips leaves off the trees at 6am. Nor the girl with orange hair, or the woman who steals magazines at the Ventura/Van Nuys magazine rack. 

I guess we all have odd things about us, at least to some people.

But by making every "odd person" in the story very normal, it worked out a lot better than if I was trying to write how a co-joined couple live or laugh, or in this instance, love. 

Yes, the hitman and one-half of the conjoined pair make love.

Like I said, I've never written a story like that. In fact I've only written a love scene which was inspired by that same director. I gotta find new friends.

But what was strange to me, was how people reacted. The thought of watching love-making with a cojoined twin would be interesting.

So I just said "they made love." Let the director figure it out.

Besides, my mom, if she was still alive, would probably go with it. If she discovered that Ellen was a "lizbee-an" and still liked her, she'd like the two sisters.

Thinking about it, I might posts the entire screenplay if I can figure out how to do it. Then you can read it and see what you think.

Meanwhile, I wait for Hallmark

Not being John Malkovich

Not being John Malkovich

This is a little bit of a departure, but still within movie limits.

I don’t remember the first time someone said I looked like John Malkovich, nor that I looked like John Lithgow. Personally I prefer Malkovich as I’d put Malkovich’s great scene against Clint Eastwood in In The Line of Fire against Lithgow’s 3^rd Rock From The Sun romp. My first Malkovich comment was from a friend of a friend and it seemed that mostly women who said I resembled him. 

To be honest, there is a slight resemblance, at least to me, and I am in the movie business as well having written a dozen or so TV movies and a few features. One of the early notices was at LAX while I waited for a friend at the gate. I noticed two men about twenty feet away were looking at me then talking, glancing back and forth until one approached and asked if I was John. I smiled and shook my head “No, sorry.” They had to leave but I think they didn’t believe me. 

Then there was the time I visited Scotty’s Castle in Death Valley and joined a group of four. After awhile I caught a woman glancing at me, turning away. She said something to her husband and he glanced back but didn’t want to be obvious. I wondered if something was wrong but they continued to sneak looks at me. As we toured I asked questions from the docent and this time they smiled at me like we three had a secret. Finally the tour was over and I was walking to my car when the woman approached first and said what Malkovich probably hears a lot, “Excuse me, are you…” I stopped her and said with a smile, “No, I’m sorry, I get that sometimes.” Husband came up and quickly caught his wife’s disappointment. I felt bad now. I almost wished that I did say yes.

This has happened at least twenty times with a group of mellennials  at the restaurant at the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard last Sunday. Before that, about two months ago with a group of African-Americans having pizza on Van Nuys boulevard in Sherman Oaks. As I passed, one spoke loudly, “Hey, John.” I turned around to see who he was talking to. It was me. I said  I wasn’t “him” and my now usual “I’m sorry.” However, the best story happened in Paris, naturally. My brother Dave and I had traveled to France for two weeks and found a nice little hotel on Taylor Street near Republique. 

We stayed for several days and ended each evening at a small cafe on a corner, looking very much like a movie set. There was a tiny alley on one side and a busy street on the other. The alley had several small shops including a barber shop for Africans. I noticed that every time we went to the café we saw several men in the barber shop shouting and waving their arms at each other. Being a writer, I was curious about this situation and on our last evening in Paris, I told Dave that we should go over there to see what the fighting was about. Dave was a little apprehensive but I figured we’d be okay, the worst they would do is tell us to go away.

We began to walk towards the barber shop when a very large African stopped us with a raised hand, which lowered until he was pointing at us. Then he looked straight at me and said those words. “John Malkovich.” I shrugged and said I wasn’t John Malkovich; rather my name was Jim Makichuk. That was always my out whenever being stopped, both names are very similar if you say them fast and it often leaves the person confused long enough that I could leave. But he was not convinced, “You are John Malkovich.” And with that he introduced himself as Etionne and took me by the arm and led me into the shop, with Dave behind. 

Inside, Etionne began to introduce me to the group of six friends. Most smiled but some were suspicious as I made the rounds, shaking hands. Finally I asked why they argued every night here and the big African said “politics and sports.” So it was simple, happens everywhere in the world. He then introduced me to BobX, the African owner who gave haircuts and whenever an American rapper would be in town, BobX would be picked up and taken to whatever hotel the rapper was staying for a cut. Then Etionne said that we should all retire to the bar for wine. So he, Dave and I and BobX along with four more Africans crossed the alley right back to where we started earlier. 

It soon resulted in some deep, serious conversation about life. I learned that it was very hard for them to get work, most didn’t have much education and so they hung out at BobX’s shop while their wives and children were at home. BobX was talking to Dave about the problems of being African in Europe and that he was always afraid that his business would fail. At one point he looked Dave straight in the eye and said “Dave, all I would ever hope for in my life, is to be like you.”

It stunned Dave who answered by saying BobX’s life was way better. But BobX was not changing his opinion, “Dave, you have the good life.” Dave, who is a newspaper man had no answer. In hindsight BobX was right for both of us brothers as compared to the uncertain lives they lived. I smiled and agreed with BobX. We stayed for about two hours and finally it was getting late and we all got up, Dave and I were flying out the next morning so we shook hands, exchanged emails and Etionne looked at me and said quietly, “Thank-you John”. 

This time I simply nodded “Yes.”

I was thinking of putting two photos side by side for you to judge but then I thought that some of you might say I didn't look like John at all, and some would say a little and others a spitting image. So instead I go to the movies and take a great line out of John Ford's movie, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance.

"When the legend becomes fact, print the legend"

The thrill is gone

The thrill is gone

The baby-boomers 1946-1964, me included watched movies differently than the following generations, Gen X and arguably the Millennials (there's a few rogues in between but they're not important). 

Some of you might hear boomers say that movies aren't as good as they used to be, or the actors aren't good or the stories seem to always be about CGI effects and zombies.

In truth they aren't as good, at least for us. The reason is simple, we've seen every possible plotline in thousands of plotlines. It's hard to find a movie that isn't like something else. But there's also something missing.

We really believed in movies.

Coming out of WW2, the studios began to face that evil empire known as television. And they really didn't know what to do. Movies began to look like bad TV. They had giant wide screens but the content wasn't enough.

And Elizabeth Taylor helped close the studios down.

She made Cleopatra for $1 million salary. This was the first big price ever. Before every actor worked for a studio and not negotiate for a part. Liz changed all that. Of course there were others doing it but her's was the biggest. And it flopped.

Some people say it still hasn't made it's budget.

So what did we  believe?

We believed that there really were a thousand extras on the wide shots because there were real people standing so far away from the camera you needed binoculars to see them.

It was real.

Okay, there were some special effects in movies, big studio movies like War Of The Worlds. But even then, if we didn't believe it all, we believed it could happen. Aliens attacking Earth. Of course the cold war made us feel that the aliens could well be Russians.

And then there was morality. Morals. Meaning bad guys get their just fate and good guys always win. Naturally that's not the case in real life but movies are not real life either. 

We even had cartoons where someone or something died. You should watch Lady And The Tramp from Disney, everyone cried. And Shane, the great western (although a little bit too long) where Shane the gunfighter rides away from a small boy and off to die after a shoot-out. And the boy shouts after him in echoes. 

Every kid cried at that movie.








And in the late 60's we got The Graduate, which spoke directly to us boomers in our teen and early 20's times. We examined society and that led to a lot of things including sexier movies and of course, Viet Nam. Which brought rebellion and marching against the war. 

It all worked more or less until the early 1980's. Something new came out on TV.

Entertainment Tonight.

Up to then, the general public knew little about how movies are sold and what actors are having feuds and what is an agent or a manager. We knew nothing of these things. 

And the biggest thing to happen -- happened.

The weekly gross of current movies.

Suddenly we all begin to see what happens that isn't on the screen. We learned how much actors got paid and how much a movie made, and if it was a flop or a hit and who was in trouble and everything we didn't know about movies.

And I said to a friend; "This is the end of movies as we knew it."

From now on the smoke and mirrors we used for movies to make the movies real suddenly were exposed. Sort of like when the magician tells you how he really made a rabbit disappear. People now knew how movies were made.

They knew how much movies cost, who was hot and who was not and a thousand things they never knew before.

The magic was over. Movies were fake now, because the audience knew how they were made.

So what happened next?

A smile for Paris

Like all of us, I was really upset with the terrorists who took so many innocent lives some years ago. My French producer lives in central Paris said his close friend took a bullet but fortunately is recovering.  So this was little story in Paris some years ago.

The producer (and director) will be making my script Chase (La Poursuite).

It's a very difficult issue, living here in the U.S. and Canada. Canada is especially distant from most of the world's troubles and mostly because Canada isn't familiar to most troubled places.

I was in Paris four years ago with my brother and found a nice little hotel in the Republique area just off Blvd St. Denis and stayed for a week. We had the perfect Paris experience, I hadn't been there since I was working in Luxembourg on a film.

I also met some Algerian men, I think I mentioned this in a past blog. Anyways, Dave and I would wrap up each evening with a few glasses of wine. Each night, I noticed a barber shop for Africans and also noticed that the barber shop was always loud. Lots of arguments. 

On our last night I decided to go across the alley and ask them what the arguments were. That's when one of them, a big guy, approached me and pointed saying I was John Malkovich. I said no, but he said yes.

He took me inside, introduced me and suggested all of us go for wine at that little place Dave and I went to. I found out that the arguments were about sports and politics interestingly enough. 

Etonne, the big Algerian said it was hard to get jobs there. And BobX, the barber shop owner was always afraid he might lose the barber shop. The others also felt it was difficult to make a living. But for now, we were all friends, I think there may have been one who was suspicious but when I showed him my 4-yr old pic he had to laugh.

It's the photo on the blog cover, how could you not like that kid?

Sadly, it occurred to me Friday, my brother emailed and wondered how those Africans were doing, and realizing it would even be harder for them, as employment was rare. I wish I had a solution. 

And I wish I can see them again sometime soon to drink and laugh and talk about our lives, good and bad.

Anyways, I'll post something else in the next day or two.

Where do you get ideas for a movie?

Finally back on the blog, week-end holiday messed up a lot of work for me, and I took off a day or so.

Having said that, I get a lot of people who ask me where my ideas come from so here goes.

In the beginning, as they say, I had really bad ideas. My first screenplay was about a guy going to a film school and having conflicts with his father. This was pretty much based on my summer at the Banff School of Fine Arts in the magnificent Canadian Rockies way back in 1972. 

It was a really bad script.

I still have it and take it out now and then to see how far I've gone, although some might say not very far. Anyways, I have managed to do a fair amount of work, that being 20 feature-length movies of which half were my originals and the other half were rewrites.

Let me explain the rewrites; it's where I came into a project almost ready to film but for some reason didn't want to use the original writer. This is quite common and in most of the rewrite jobs, it was a "Page One", meaning that I basically rewrote the complete screenplay. One screenplay called Riddler's Moon went through about 25 rewrites, some minor, some huge. 

The huge rewrite was due to the fact that the movie was set in Nebraska, I think, and we were filming in Luxembourg in Europe. We had a town with barren fields but when we came to Luxembourg, the fields were green and yellow and flourishing. What did I do? The only thing that I could think of is to make the lush green fields poison. Sounds simple but it worked.

But back to my ideas; I have written a few movies based on old movies I saw as a kid, changing characters and ideas. Once I wrote a screenplay called Dream House which was based on another movie I wrote years before called The Tower. 

Both movies used the same idea; a computer that ran an office tower and went berserk and a house computer went berserk. Nobody noticed.

Early in my writing I used a formula found in screenwriting books wherein you "create the characters" by inventing them using age, type, etc. But these never really felt real. 

This changed when I wrote a script called Secrets of the Salmon and based it on a real character I knew, an executive who had drug and alcohol problems. I added some of my characteristics (not drugs or alcohol) as well as a few other people I knew.
 
From then on I would look for real people and base the character I would write loosely on them and it worked. Salmon worked so well that Jody Foster's company, Smart Egg, wanted to meet me because they didn't believe a man wrote it. It was later optioned by ABC.

I used this formula from then until now and I still use it. Creating a character may work for some writers but I'd rather steal characteristics than make them up, they're always better because they're real.

This worked well especially for women characters and I'm not the only one who works this way. 

What other ideas?

I read a lot of magazines and newspapers and find good ideas; some of them that I have on file include:

- A true story about a small town where women decided to close the town down from men and have a "night without men". 

- A baseball star who won the world series but died in combat before he got recognized.

- Mars - I have been trying to do a story on Mars and just haven't found the right thing yet. It'll probably be a copy of a classic book or old movie... or maybe original.

I have little notebooks in every room and always carry a notebook with me because I know that if I don't I probably won't ever remember the idea I lost.

So, if you are looking for an idea here's a few things to consider and don't get all wrapped up about stealing an idea; every idea has been made and I always say that each time I come up with a great idea, 4 other writers have also, two thinking of writing, one has it written and one is in post-production. So don't worry if you have a similar idea:

Funny thing is, for me at that certain age where nobody wants you, it seems I get more ideas than I ever did. And I think it's just from reading books and newspapers and almost everything. 

And I also watch people, I'm not a writer who tries to write in Starbucks, I watch people and what they do. Real people will give you more than whatever you can create.

It always brings back that common expression when you hear someone describe an event or meet a strange thing that happens, someone will always say these words; 

"A writer couldn't have written that".

Actually, writers could have written that and probably more than once.

 

The "Others"

The "Others"

A week or so ago I received email from the Writer's Guild (WGA) of which I am a member. For the record I'm also in the Canadian writer's guild, WGC. I get emails from both but this time it came close to home, from WGA.

Once a year, WGA arranges to possibly find work for the following under the category of the following people;
Minority writers
Writers with disabilities
Women writers
Writers age 55 and over
LBGT writers.


In plain speak, this is the WGA's way of saying they're helping the above categories. And where do I come in?

Writers age 55 and over.

Or as my woman writer friend says, "older men are now in with women writers."

So what am I going to do? Well, go for it, eh. I am over 55, I think maybe 98 but that's more like I feel.

So what is it all about?

It means that all of the above can send in a TV script and or a spec script and maybe a screenplay, I'm not sure of all of it.

Who do they/me send it to?

To current showrunners, people who are writer/producers. They're the people who make decisions as to who to hire and who to fire and who deals with the networks and other stuff. 

But first it goes thru WGA biz and then the showrunners will read all of the submissions, maybe a few thousand, maybe less. Then they pick the ones that might have the chops, as they say.

And what happens?

You, me and anyone else of the group can get to meet the showrunners and even maybe get a script deal out of them. Or stay with them forever.

So I sent my S.O.B. script to them. By the way, there are no names on the script, so as to make sure that the showrunners don't know who sent a script and friends don't sneak in.

This is a difficult thing to deal with in another way. Everyone on that list above is valid for this kind of deal. But most of them are unhappy about one category.

Writers over 55.

Why? Because we're the majority group - men - old men. 

So is it fair? Remember there are no names on the scripts so showrunners don't know if the script they read is from an LGBT writer or an old man or an angry woman. And they are angry. 

There's a great article in last weeks LA Weekly about it and I'm going to try to post it on my blog later.

What do I think? I think I have a greater chance being a man since there's more of us than the other groups. Having said that I will now realize I have lost my chances. A Catholic thing. Don't brag.

But I am a good writer for women's roles, and I can verify it. Jody Foster's company, Smart Egg called me in because they didn't believe a man wrote a screenplay they were contemplating. If you want more, I can send that too.

It's a tough one, and I really wouldn't want to be in any of the other groups, I like where I am. 

But whomever wins a shot with some showrunners, we're a lot better than DGA aka Director's Guild of America. 

They're not doing anything like WGA at all. My director friend over 60 is very angry because nobody hires him anymore.

But he's done well for himself, and doesn't really need the money. Just a movie now and then.

So should I take a potential writing job from a woman because the majority of writers over 55 are probably twenty times as many as women. Maybe forty or fifty times?
First of all, there is no guarantee for me to get a job.

And since the scripts have no names, it's pretty hard to see who gets a job.

One story; I was working on a series in Vancouver with two male writers and a female intern writer. I was there for 2 weeks and noticed immediately that the two male writers had the girl running for coffee and errands.  On the third day I took her aside and told her to tell them to get their own coffee and all the other crap.

She slowly did that, with my help and ended up in my office learning a few things here and there. I left after the 2 weeks and she thanked me for the help. Ten years later I saw her at a studio and she was now a showrunner herself. And she did remember me, very much.

So you can't say that I was one of those jerks.   

But I've said this more than once and I repeat it;

The best thing about writers is that they can write. They don't need actors or crews or directors! Everyone else on the crew has to be hired, the actors, the camera "people" and the director. Writers however, depending on how much money they have or need, can always write and sell something.

I've sold five spec scripts and have about twenty more hanging on "the shelf."

Content, as Machio Kaku says, will always be needed a hundred years from now. 

Writers don't need anyone in order to write a story. Just a reasonably working laptop or whatever.

Remember, they need us more than we need them.

New screenplay to try...

Finally decided on my next spec script. Haven't really written one since S.O.B., the pilot that's running around looking for a home.

In case you forgot, it's about two women who had married the same man, not at the same time. One was in her 50's, the other was 22. And they have inherited their ex husband's a falling apart Private Investigation company. Actually a store-front on Ventura Boulevard.

And the S.O.B. isn't what you think. Rather it is a real estate term referring to homes being on the south side of Ventura Boulevard have more esteem than the south side. 

Thus S.O.B. South of the Boulevard. 

It's already been registered so I'm not worried. 

So my new one is a TV movie, of which I spoke of in the last few blogs. While the old TV movies ended around 2008, I am going for the new "TV movies" which can still connect with some networks like Hallmark (yes, the Hallmark company makes lots of them) and also Lifetime and SyFy networks.

True, there isn't the amount of TV movies around. But there are series all over the place and new networks I haven't even seen yet have short series. TV is certainly taken over theatrical movies and I don't really think that the Oscar lot isn't all that great. In fact the last few oscar players weren't all that good either.

So my new movie, also registered, is a flashback movie, a young girl getting married falls down just about when she is to get married and is suddenly back in the 1960's searching for a lost family heirloom that her grandmother lost when she was to marry. And to make it even a little more I'm throwing in the moon landing.

The moon landing?

Well, it was the 60's, after all. Why not? 1969!!

I'm just starting to play with the story, using my favorite software, Power Structure. No sales here, I just like it.

And finally, I'm going to show you a script that has been hanging along since 1985. 

Before  Strange Things.

Before Walking Dead.

Two words: Burger Zombies.

 
 Beware.