is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Tuesday
Jan 03, 2006

Contemplating the Engine posted by Martin

What does a prison planet look like? Does a culture that has a prison planet pick a planet bereft of resources? What if the Prison Planet is old—centuries old? Does it become a viable culture and government (hello Australia!)?

What kind of prisoners does this culture send there? What kind of crime is so subversive that you must abandon the people that commit them? Rape? Murder? Sexual Offenses? If so, what level of offense? What if the government could legally, and culturally acceptably, get rid of their political opponents, would they do so?

How does the culture get their prisoners there? Prison planets could only exist in a culture that has very inexpensive space travel. Does that mean that there are aliens there? How does the alien government feel about this culture banishing their citizens?

The cliche of Prison Planet seems to be the Mad Max landscape—post-apocalyptic—but Prison Planet isn’t post-anything, it’s pre-something. Also, it seems to me that it wouldn’t resemble prison movies or shows that we have seen—the engine of those being the following recipe: 1. Take violent and unpredictable men, 2. Put them in an incredibly confined space.

But on the Prison Planet, can’t the prisoners spread out anywhere they want to? If so, would they start trade networks? What kind of commerce would arise?

If a group of prisoners—let’s say women—controlled a resource, could they take control of the planet? What would a prisoner-run matriarchy look like?

These are the kinds of questions running around my head, when I think of Prison Planet. I want to know what the engine is before I can see characters existing on it, not to mention that the engine might dictate the plot itself. Grand struggle, or personal struggle? Well, always the latter—of course—but in the context of what?

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What is Spitball!?

Spitball! is two guys collaborating to write about writing and collaboration. We're writing partners who have worked together since 2000, and placed in the top 100 in the last Project Greenlight for our script YELLOW.

Currently, we are both working on multiple screenplay, short story, and novel ideas independently and together, and collaborate on this blog.

What Spitball! used to be

Spitball! started as an attempt to collaborate on a screenplay online in real time. From January 2006 to July 2007 we worked on an interactive process to decide the story we were going to make. A full postmortem is coming, but you can find the find all the posts by looking in the category Original Version.

During this period, we affected the personalities of two of the most famous spitball pitchers from the early 20th Century. Look at our brief bios for more info about this, and so as not to be confused as to who is talking when.

We rebooted the franchise in early 2009 in its current form.


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Kent M. Beeson

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Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) is a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home writer, living in Seattle, WA with his wife, 2 year old daughter and an insane cat. In 2007, he was a contributor to the film blog ScreenGrab, where he presciently suggested Jackie Earle Haley to play Rorschach in the Watchmen movie, and in 2008, he wrote a film column for the comic-book site ComiXology called The Watchman. (He's a big fan of the book, if you couldn't tell.) In 2009, he gave up the thrill of freelance writing to focus on screenplays and novels, although he sometimes posts to his blog This Can't End Well, which a continuation of his first blog, he loved him some movies. He's a Pisces, and his favorite movie of all time is Jaws. Coincidence? I think not.

Martin McClellan

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Martin (aka Burley Grymz) is a designer and writer. He occasionally blogs at his beloved Hellbox, and keeps a longer ostensibly more interesting bio over here at his eponymous website. You can also find him on Twitter.