is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Sunday
Jan 01, 2006

In the beginning were two words posted by Martin

Kent and I have had a lot of conversations about the project that you’re looking at here. We’ve talked about the forums and the blog, what each post needs, what each post doesn’t need, should we have a blogroll or not, and a myriad of other subjects under the sun.

There’s one topic we have not broached at all, save for two words. That’s about the screenplay we’re going to write here. After all, the idea is that every conversation we have; every attempt at outlining, writing and arguing about what parts should be in and what should be kept out—all of those conversations are going to take place here on the blog. In public. With you watching and commenting, hopefully.

But Kent and I are full of it. Ideas. We’re full of ideas, so in order to give a bit of focus to an otherwise potentially out of control project, we picked an idea from our archive that we wanted to develop here. Of course, in our archive, the project is still only two words long. We’ve never really spent any time on it, other than to speak the two words, laugh and say “that’d be awesome to work on.”

Okay, enough teasing. Those two words—the words that will start us on the journey into the deepest jungle of screenwriting—the words that will launch this ship into the treacherous seas of public humiliation. Those two words are:

Prison Planet.

I mean, come ON! How much better can you get? As a sub-sub-sub genre, I have a loving affinity for Prison Planet movies, the most famous of which is probably Alien Prison Planet, but also due mention are Escape from Prison Planet New York, and Escape from Prison Planet Los Angeles. And even though there is a movie with the moniker Prison Planet, we still feel that the genre is under mined. The definitive prison planet movie has yet to be written. And, rest assured, ours will be outside the general cliches of the genre.

Which is not to say that our writing talent is so large as to avoid them, but is to say that although I love the Prison Planet, I’m not so down with spending a big chunk of my life writing a sweaty-muscle-men-bash-it-out sort of movie, which the genre seems to naturally suggest. But, that’s a topic for another post. Or, rather, a conversation another post will start. For now, dear friends, we will leave those two words hanging in the air. Two words that may evoke deep feelings in some of you. At the end of it all, we hope to take you to: The Prison Planet.

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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

Urban Shockah pic

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

Burleigh Grimes pic

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.