Notes from Underdog.

Excerpt from commentary on Criterion's The Hit DVD

The film The Hit (1984) is by Stephen Frears and remains one of my favorites of all his films. It recently came out on DVD at last, in a lovely DVD from, natch, Criterion. It's the story of two hitmen sent to retrieve a stool pigeon (they call 'em grass or supergrass in UK parlance) who fled to Spain after he turned on his gang. The hitmen (John Hurt and Tim Roth, in his first major film role, and quite charming) and their bounty (Terence Stamp, terrific as always) play mind games on each other, as they travel back toward France by car. Things are complicated when they end up with a woman rider as well. I won't say more except that you should absolutely see the film, and read the script, too, if you can find it.

At any rate, among many gems to be found in the DVD commentary, I ran across this:

I believe this is either the film's writer Peter Prince or editor Mick Audsley (they alternate so frequently it's a bit hard to tell -- Frears is also on the DVD commentary, as is Tim Roth and John Hurt) but regardless, these are excellent words of wisdom for budding filmmakers, scribes and editors:

"We were intent to always strip away the dialogue to its most boiled down form, so that the cinematic experience is complete. It's giving you the imagery and the framing and the cutting and the sizes of the images is giving you as much information as is coming from the characters' mouths. It's in our nature as filmmakers to want to boil down to the bone the dramatic spine of the movie. Get it down to its rawest form at any time is part of the editorial process, and it's certainly something that we develop later on when I'm working on scripts before they're shot -- always trying to reduce, reduce, reduce.

Because in the end audiences' minds work very quickly. They make deductions very quickly, and the cinematic image's so powerful that it communicates so rapidly. Often a look will say a great deal more than a line of dialogue."

MyPDF Scripts: New resource for screenwriters

Just wanted to give a plug to a great new resource for screenwriters looking for scripts to read:
MyPDFScripts

Which has quite an extensive selection of screenplays in pdf format, both new and older.

Okay, I love David Goyer's stuff, but I can probably skip Ghost Rider. But, Young Frankenstein?  They have it. Children of Men? Check. Juno? Check.

You can sort by ascending and descending date (or title or author) order.

So have at it. And soon, just in case someone shuts them down (not sure about the legality of all this, but hopefully it will stay around for the public good).

Looped into In the Loop

Before I could finally spit out a review of the brilliant political satire IN THE LOOP -- which is an absolute scream, see it if you haven't -- much of the critical world has already reviewed it.

But I gleaned a few interesting things from listening to the director/co-writer Armando Iannucci (a Scottish chap with an Italian name, who created The Thick of It, a TV forebear for In the Loop) interviewing with Elvis Mitchell on KCRW's The Treatment.

Mitchell:  We were talking about screwball comedy, and that was something I noticed when watching the film. It almost feels like something like the Front Page, one of those dialogue-driven comedies where people are really going after each other... It's like watching a play,  there has to be that kind of character doesn't there?

Iannucci:  We spent an awful lot of time not just in the shooting process, but in advance fleshing out the characters. I cast the film really early on. So that the writers know precisely who it is who is playing each part, what they look like, sound like, what their own natural verbal tics are -- so that they can then write those parts to that actor.  Actors do their own research but then we spent about 2-3 weeks rehearsing the scenes, workshopping them, improvising around the scenes. Just to get the relationships between characters going.  The shoot is very cast driven.
...   I really don't consider the final writing process  to have happened until I've watched that first take of the scene. Sometimes in the end I'm taking some of my favorite lines out, simply because I think  that though it's a funny line it destroys the atmosphere and the reality.  If it comes on a point where you can't believe that character under that load of stress at that point would ever come up with something so well thought out... And also we don't give the actors that much time to learn their lines or indeed to say them. [laughs] Because I want to capture that essence of in politics people are making things up, I want to capture that look of panic in their eyes as they say the words.

I was very much aware of those Preston Sturges and Howard Hawks, those fast talking dialogue-driven films of the 30s and 40s, and I really liked that model as something to structure the script around. The plot underneath all the profanity and realism and so on, was deliberately structured along the lines of a screwball comedy, where two or 3 different things are happening in different environments, and they all start coming closer toward each other and affecting each other and then a madcap climax in the last 15 minutes. That's something I always found satisfying watching so I was very keen to get that sense of screwball comedy.

Listen to the rest here: KCRW The Treatment: Armando Iannucci

Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers on collaborating and adapting Where the Wild Things Are (from Script Magazine)

Highlights from Script Magazine piece by/on Spike Jonze and Dave Eggers on the writing of the Where the Wild Things Are script, and the challenges of adapting a very, very short book.

(Most of this isn't available online otherwise. And you should buy the darned magazine on newsstands anyway.) 

---

Spike Jonze: The early draft primarily focused on the characters. I wanted to be really specific about who Max is and who the Wild Things are and let the story become their relationships to each other. Dave and I would sit together in the same room, mostly just talking through scenes, One of us would make notes or riff and the other would try and write it down.

Dave Eggers: We had fun every day writing it. There  were a lot of days we'd just take two or three hours of warming up before we put a word down. And we have 80 pages of dialogue that's not being used for every one of those characters because we just went on and on. We'd have a whole inner-life and backstory and everything, and then, of course, we couldn't fit it all in there.  The book was only 70 something words, so we had to do a lot of filling in. 

Jonze: First and foremost I was concerned with who Max is, and what's going on in his life that he's trying to figure out. I wanted to make a movie that takes kids seriously. Maurice [Sendak] said: "Make sure you don't just take the heavy side of the kid seriously. You take the imagination seriously, his sense of joy seriously."

Eggers: We never thought "are kids going to like this?" Not once. This is the way it has to be written. We never dumbed anything down or said no, that's too much of an adult theme. We were determined not to do anything that would cheapen the material. 

...

Eggers: Spike wanted to explore to deeply as possible the psyches of the Wild Things--that they are these giant, manic-depressive creatures that came from Maurice because they're all based on his aunts and uncles, and their giant faces and their bad breath and their giant teeth coming down. So we started with the Wild Things. They're all meant to represent different things and be tangential relationships with Max's world a little without being direct representations.

---

[What's interesting too is the revelation in this piece that Jonze came up to San Francisco to live here for awhile while he worked directly with Eggers. Eggers saw himself "as more of a facilitator" helping Jonze put his ideas onto paper and so on. But while the ideas may be Spike's, it's clear from reading this that the beauty of the script (which I'm admittedly just presuming from little I've read of it, and from the clips and trailers) was assisted greatly by their collaborative process.]

Eggers: Spike's method of working is the definition of organic. It had to be very real. I always would prefer to write alone, and send stuff online, and write marks on a piece of paper, and send it back. That's how I do things. But he really wanted it to be like, "Let's talk this through. Let's act this through, figure it out. What would he say here?"

Jonze: I think sometimes that was really frustrating for Dave because he just wanted to be productive. I definitely work a lot slower than Dave. He's very experienced as a writer, very disciplined, always moving forward. If he gets stuck, he just puts something in a placeholder and keeps moving. But, if it doesn't feel right I'll stay in that place until I find what feels real or right or true. I don't want to let go, I don't want to leave it.

Eggers: It was a real learning process for me, in terms of you do get at some incredibly real stuff if you actually put yourself in the shoes of the character.

James Schamus on underwriting and overwriting.

James Schamus, on the two different ways of writing scripts, during interview about Lust, Caution for Creative Screenwriting mag podcast:

Q: When you write action like that, how descriptive are you?

Schamus:  Usually with Ang (Lee), I underwrite a lot, as opposed to the work I've done in the past. That kind of horrible but well remunerated rewrite thing, where you tend to overwrite. On the Hollywood stuff where the goal, writing for the studio, the whole goal is to write a screenplay that the executive believes no cretinous director, the biggest hack, could destroy -- it's fool proof. So they could hire their cousin. Whereas for Ang it's the opposite. I try to write stuff that really, truly scares him. Where he's like, "Uh oh, how do I..."  I tend to underwrite for him.

Script Sale Spotlight

Going to try a new "regular" feature here (and by regular I mean probably irregular) wherein I feature one or two new scripts or pitches that have sold recently. I won't add a great deal of commentary; it doesn't seem fair to be either too snarky or too excited without having seen the screenplay, but if something strikes me in particular I'll chime in.

From Script Magazine (in the print version):

Warner Bros. has tapped Alex Holmes to rewrite and direct The Interpretation of Murder, an adaptation of the Jed Rubenfeld novel. Paula Weinstein will produce the film. The story follows a Sigmund Freud protege who discovers a trail of sadistic murders in turn of the century New York.  Chris Kyle wrote the first draft of the screenplay. The novel was published in 2007 by Picador. The deal is the first studio project for Holmes, who co-wrote, directed and exec produced House of Saddam, an in-depth look at the ruthless reign of Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein, which aired on HBO.

Comments: It would've been more interesting if it were about Freud himself serving as detective! No, I kid. What this also made me wonder about is, whatever happened to The Alienist? Wasn't that novel, also a turn of the century murder mystery, a hot property some years ago?

From SoYouWannaSellaScript:

Tribes of October: Story is set in a future in which New York has become surrounded by an endless desert plagued by heat storms, and the city's technology is such that nothing made after 1960 works any more. In this environment, a detective goes after a Mafia don who is going after the remnants of the NYPD. The detective is simultaneously searching for the love of his life. Writers are Nick Vellelonga, Paul Sloan. Philippe Martinez attached to direct. Ray Stevenson, Jaime King, Stephen Moyer, Robert Duvall, and James Caan attached to star.

Comments: Intriguing mix of influences and ideas. Curious to see what becomes of this.

More soon.

Useful advice on acquiring story rights.

I got this online elsewhere but it's from Lehmann Strobel (and was updated this year).

Download Acquiring-story-rights >>

Definitely of great use for any of us screenwriters and/or producers who are investigating the idea of getting rights to a book or real-life story.

As I am currently struggling to do.

Wear it in good health.

The Visitor screenplay

Been so busy trying to a) write screenplay this month (with ScriptFrenzy giving me added and needed pressure), b) work + freelance work, that I haven't had much time to blog, but as I just recommended reading this script to someone I'm helping with their own script, thought I'd pass this along:

(Hat tip to Get the Big Picture for this link):

THE VISITOR, screenplay by Tom McCarthy (.pdf file, requires acrobat reader or another pdf reader)

Watch the film if you haven't already and then read McCarthy's terrific script. With this and The Station Agent he's already one of my favorite script writers.

And God help you if you use voice over in your work.

I was fumbling around and procrastinating when I started thumbing absently through Robert McKee's STORY again, and then couldn't help but remember this scene. If you're procrastinating too, give it a watch.  Still not convinced you should never ever use VO in a script, but do agree having a narrator or voice-over can be a crutch and should only be used if necessary, especially if it can be used in an ironic way or way that differs from what we're learning from visuals/actions on screen.

Anyway...

Tony Gilroy, in The New Yorker.

Interesting piece in The New Yorker on Tony Gilroy, while he was making Duplicity.

It is a warm afternoon in the historic center of Rome, near Piazza Margana, and the film crew of “Duplicity,” a romantic spy caper, is doing repeated takes of a fifteen-second shot. The movie’s director, Tony Gilroy, who also wrote the screenplay, is at one end of an alley. The British actor Clive Owen stands near him, as does Julia Roberts. Nearby hover her makeup man and bodyguard, various assistant directors, gaffers, and carpenters, and members of the Italian crew. A black tarpaulin blocks the view of onlookers and the paparazzi. An assistant director calls for “last looks”—the final touchup by the makeup artists—and Roberts takes her mark, halfway up the street; Owen moves to the top of the alley. Gilroy calls “Action!” and is echoed by a “Movimento!” from the Italian assistant director who handles the extras.

Read the rest >>

On the other hand, Andrew Sarris, in the NY Observer, feels condescended to by Gilroy in the article and the movie "an unmitigated disaster." 

How? By complaining how hard it is to keep them interested after they have feasted on the “mixed-up time schemes of Memento, Amores Perros and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” all of which are comparatively linear when compared to the strenuous convolutions of Duplicity.