The State of the Blog: February posted by Martin

Friends, Romans, lovers of monospaced courier 12pt typefaces. Welcome to the state of the blog for the end of February.

Spitball! is now officially two months old. If you search “spitball” on Google, we make the front page. This month there have been over 60 posts, mostly dealing with the ongoing plot battle. It started last month when Shockah suggested that we come up with 25 each “in a world” scenarios that revolved around the idea of the Prison Planet, which we decided would be our jumping off point.

After picking our personal 8 favorites, we paired them together to have blowouts. Currently, we’re on round 7 of 8, which has taken up most of the month. Although the going is slow, I think it’s very fruitful, with lots of good ideas being thrown around and lots of ideas being challenged. When this round is done, there will be four heats to pair the 8 down to 4, then 4 to 2. Then, the battle for the plot of the screenplay that we will write in full on the blog.

But, if that’s all you’ve read, you’ve been missing Shockah’s fine posts on the Sequence Method, which are worth a read for the simple fact that he can give you a succinct overview of points of the sequence method better than the guys who write books about it. If you know nothing about it, this is a great place to start. You’ll find them all in the Technique archive section. Also, you’ve missed my beginning’s in making the world’s first screenplay method based on pure farce, and stealing language from the upstanding sport of cricket (certainly a sport that deserves far better than my dragging it down). Our intention, both of us, is to better our craft, our writing, and our analytical skills. I can only joke about something I understand, so that’s my motivation in. Shockah’s motivation, I believe, is his love of figuring out systems and rules, arcane and otherwise. Both of us want to learn this stuff so that we can forget it and write better movies.

It’s been said, but bears saying again that the work is here is released into the public domain. We have doubled the number of people commenting on the forums on plot from 1 to 2. Like last month, I am once again reminding those friends of ours whose shows we have gone to, movies we have worked on, stories we have read, websites we have helped design, dinners we have cooked, shoes we have shined, and good times we have participated in to please get in to the forum and leave us comments. We know you’ve come to our readings and given us your time and effort in the past, but this is your last chance to solidify your relationships with us before we either become famous or social pariahs. If you’re lurking, feel free to de-cloak with some ridiculous anonymous moniker. The people here are named Burley Grymz, Urban Shockah, and Tippy Canoe. You’ll be in good company.

But, this is partially our fault, we have not done any hard promotion yet. During March and April these things will start to happen. In the meantime, you can have that satisfied feeling that comes from being an early member of the group of people, and have an active voice in shaping the way that the forums take shape.

Last month I said that January was the beta month. February was the month where we shook out the cobwebs, and have tested the word limit on this blog thing. So far so good, say I. As always, we’re interested in your feedback of all sorts, be it about the design, editorial standards or lack thereof, or usability issues. Log on to the forums and let it fly. In any case, even if you area lurker, we appreciate your time in reading. We hope you’re enjoying yourself.

Comments (0) — Category: communications

Round 7.5 [Rachel, My Dear v. Methane Madness] posted by kza

Rachel, My Dear

Good job with that synopsis — that’s much more interesting than what I could come up with. One thing, though: I think that, if the house is representative of Gabe’s madness both literally and figuratively, then Gabe himself needs to come across as rational and sane as possible — even when (or especially when) dealing with the house. I don’t think Gabe is aware of his madness, in the same way that that guy from the Sacks book isn’t aware that he’s blind. My point being, I don’t want Gabe to be one of those Mu-wah-ha-ha! villains. He’s sick, he’s sad, he’s messed up, but he’s not Fu Manchu or some-frickin’-body. In fact, he probably tries to save her, but is tripped up and consumed by the house (i.e., his madness).

Oh, and great call by Spitball! reader Tippy Canoe: she suggested that Rachel also be an architect, and allow her to architect her way out of her situation. I’m not entirely sure how to implement the idea at this point, but that’s probably because I don’t really know what the house is like. But still, that’s a wonderful idea.

Methane Madness

So lemme toss some spitballs atcha:

In the year 2136, the Earth has begun to colonize space. A primitive form of terraforming has been developed, allowing humans to colonize the various moons, and even some asteroids, of the solar system. The effort is headed up by various competing corporations, looking to mine resources and establish commercial and political dominance on Earth — the governments of which have, over the years, ceded authority to the corporations.

One particular corporation, after a battle waged politically, economically, and militarily, managed to secure a prime area to establish an outpost. The corporation assigned one of their brightest and most ambitious scientists to head up the terraforming project. This scientist had developed some advances in terraforming technology, which, if successful, would cut the time necessary to a few months instead of nearly a year. Although there were some — corporate executives, rival scientists — who doubted the new process would work, the scientist got the go-ahead, and it seemed to work — within months, a livable atmosphere was created.

Then one day, as the third-shift contract miners headed off to work, there was an awful noise that could be heard in every part of the colony, a metallic shriek that seemed to emanate from the terraforming laboratory, quickly followed by a bright flash and then deafening silence. The only survivors were the miners that were deep in the ground and needed special suits to breathe — everyone else in the colony was horribly killed, dying quickly from the vacuum of the now-missing atmosphere.

The scientist (who was off-planet at the time) was taken by the corporation and questioned. An investigation was conducted, and it was discovered that the scientist knew that the catastrophe was a possibility, and was negligent in not revealing this to the corporation. The scientist claimed that he was framed and the lab was sabotaged by a rival corporation, but it didn’t matter — the corporation’s stock plummeted. He was sent to the corporation’s prison planet — a small moon that was the subject of one of the first, failed, terraforming experiments, and surrounded by a poisonous atmosphere. There, he would spend the rest of his days, as an unpaid slave, building little trinkets to export back to the homeworld.

Not exactly original, but I’m trying to lay a groundwork for future development. More importantly, this is, ideally, just background info, more for our sake, and wouldn’t directly appear in the script proper — else what we have is, essentially, the beginning of Dante’s Peak. And nobody wants that :-)

Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay

Talkin' 'Bout Structure, Part III posted by kza

Annnndddd… we’re back. Thanks for joining us.

So again, we’re talking about the sequence method of structuring a screenplay, as expounded by David Howard and Paul Joseph Gulino, in their books, How to Build a Great Screenplay and Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach, respectively . Back in Part II, I talked about the first four of eight important “qualities” (I couldn’t think of a better word) that make up a screenplay using the sequence method: the Point of Attack, the Predicament, the Main Tension, and the Point of No Return. If you haven’t read it (especially the part about not having the books in front of me), you may want to before continuing.

And before I continue, some more general comments. One thing I want to be clear about, if I haven’t already, is that I don’t see this (or any other theory of structure) as a One True Way. Just following it word for word isn’t going to create a great screenplay; in fact, it’s possible to follow it too closely, to the detriment of the story you’re trying to tell. (Wonder why the third act of Wedding Crashers goes on for frickin’ forever? Or why Red Eye is so bare-bones? There’s your answer.) I think of learning structure to be like learning a martial art — you learn it to know when to use and when not to use it.

Another thing to be clear about: this process, whether it’s to figure out the structure of a potential screenplay, or to analyze the structure of an existing screenplay or movie, can’t really tell you anything about why the work in question is beautiful or artistically worthy or deep. In mainstream filmmaking, great movies and shitty movies share the same structure, and what separates one from the other can’t necessarily be teased out by looking at Predicaments or Resolutions. To use another simile, examining structure is like an autopsy; we can open it up and see how the bones are connected, how the heart is made up of four chambers, how long the digestive tract is, but we can’t see where the soul is located.

One last thing: In Part II, I talked about the Point of No Return. Although, for the simplicity of explanation, the Point of No Return is slotted into the third sequence, that’s actually the latest in the story that it can appear. It can, and usually does, come earlier, even in the very first sequence, if it makes sense. For example, in The Matrix, the PONR is when Neo takes the pill, and this occurs near the end of the first act, in sequence two. I suspect that, in an ideal screenplay, every action taken is a kind of PONR, one that irrevocably moves the protagonist towards his or her final destination.

So, to continue:

First Culmination: This happens around the midpoint of the screenplay, and as the name indicates, is a kind of a climax and summing up of the action so far, but not the final one. Although the second act (sequences three through six) is all about answering the Main Tension, the First Culmination allows you to answer the Main Tension in a tentative way, giving a clue or preview as to the outcome of the Second Culmination (although that preview or clue can be, probably should be, misleading.) Another use of the First Culmination is to give a hint as to the potential outcome of the story, by either mirroring it (e.g., a positive culmination to a positive resolution) or contradicting it (a negative culmination to a positive resolution).

Unlike the Predicament or the Main Tension, which I feel to be the very heart of screenplay storytelling (if not storytelling in general), the First Culmination seems to be a tool more for the storyteller than the audience. It’s a organizing principle, a way to make sure that the story, despite any narrative detours, stays on point. Part of classic storytelling is the use of recapitulation scenes & dialogue — scenes and dialogue that repeat information we already know, as a kind of reminder as to what’s happened so we can fully absorb the complications that are forthcoming. (Bill Paxton’s Hudson in Aliens, IIRC, is the designated recapitulator, continually whining about what bad stuff has already happened and what bad stuff is likely to happen in the future.) The Culminations aren’t really recapitulations, but they seem to be what the recapitulations are pointing towards — a kind of marker that indicates how far we’ve come in the story, and how much further we have, and where the characters stand at that point in time.

Second Culmination: This is almost exactly like the First Culmination (only this time, the only clue points towards a potential outcome), with one important difference: this is where the question posed by the Main Tension is answered. And the answer is a simple “yes” or “no”. That “yes” or “no” may reveal complications or ambiguities of a physical, philosophical, or moral nature that belie that straightforward answer, but the question and its answer should be clear and unambiguous. For example, in High Noon, can the sheriff get the townspeople to help him? No. In King Kong, will the crew rescue Ann Darrow? Yes. In A History of Violence, will Tom end the threat of Carl Fogarty and his goons? Yes.

(“Hired goons?”)

Now, note again, what’s going on with the second act, and within it, the Main Tension and the Second Culmination. The second act is, in a sense, it’s own short film, much like how a sequence is like a mini-movie. There’s a question that deals directly with the protagonist — Will they do something or other — and the Second Culmination answers that question. The second act is, in a sense, a complete unit; while it needs the first act to set up the circumstances and context that frame the Main Tension, the story could, conceivably end right there. The crew could leave Skull Island, and that’s that. Tom Stall could just stay home and hope no one else comes after him and his family. The sheriff goes off to face the bad guys and we could fade out right there. (That’d be kinda odd and unnerving, wouldn’t it? If you want to see a film that tries something like that, check out the unusual Burt Lancaster Western, Valdez is Coming.)

But of course, it doesn’t end there. From the ashes, another story — the third act — rises, one with its own tension that must be answered. (See below.) Looking over various movies, what I’m seeing is that while the Second Culmination sows the seeds for the third act, what actually pushes the story from one act to another is a decision on the part of the protagonist. Tom decides to face his brother in Philadelphia. Carl Denham decides to bring Kong back to New York. Neo decides to risk his life to save Morpheus. What’s interesting, to me, is that this seems to be the flipside to the external event that causes the Predicament that creates the second act. Thus: external events create the second act, but protagonist decisions create the third.

Third Act Twist/Tension: So the third act begins, and it usually begins quietly. After the Predicament has caused the protagonist’s life to turn upside down, he or she answers the Main Tension and a new status quo is established, even if we, the audience, know it’s only temporary. Denham and company are back in New York and Kong is on stage. Tom is reunited with his gangster brother. The Matrix’s idea of a quiet beginning is mowing down security guards and rescuing Morpheus — and in the context of what’s to come, it is a quiet beginning.

But then something happens — the Twist — to disrupt the new status quo, and a new Tension is created. Kong breaks free and goes on a rampage. Tom’s brother orders him killed. Neo is trapped in the subway with Agent Smith, whom he can’t kill.

The Third Act Twist/Tension appears to be an organizing principle for the writer — what am I building toward, and how? — much like the First Culmination. But after thinking about the third acts of various mainstream movies, it seems like the third act is where the writer deals with the theme of the piece in the most direct way. (That seems rather obvious after writing it, but it never occurred to me in that way until now.) I’m thinking of Kong climbing the Empire State and finding death there, of Neo becoming The One, of Tom Stall coming to terms with the history of violence between him and his brother. While the concept of theme is an important one, and Burley and I will certainly tackle it in the future, for now, it’s slightly outside the scope of what I want to talk about. Nevertheless, it seems pretty clear that while we expect the protagonist to confront the greatest obstacle here, at the same time, this is where we expect to see the greatest elucidation of the theme. And these two parts (obstacle and theme) may be encoded within the same scene, and they may not be.

Resolution: This is pretty basic: every story reaches a point where there are no more questions that need to be answered. The key word here is “need”; there are always more questions that can be asked when it seems like everything’s been wrapped up, including the impossible-to-avoid “What happens next?” But, generally, once the Tension created by the Twist has been dealt with, this creates a final status quo, and this is usually where the story ends.

And there you have it — the eight important qualities of the sequence method. I’ve tried to be as clear as can, with concepts that can be very nebulous, and, admittedly, not fully understood by myself. I hope I can engage the readers of this site (and Burley, of course) into a continuing discussion of structure, one that can further illuminate these concepts. If you’re interested, click here and the discussion will begin!

Coming up next: A close look at Jaws.

(And speaking of which: Who would you cast in Jaws if you were remaking it today? Tell me here. I wanna know.)

Comments (0) — Category: technique

Round 7.4 [Rachel, My Dear v. Methane Madness] posted by Martin

Rachel, My Dear

I think you’re dead on talking about horror that is really not horror at the base. I see this one differently than you, at this point. I think that this is a story of a mentally disturbed man and his new bride who doesn’t know about his illness until it almost kills her.

I would say something like this: Rachel and Gabe are engaged. Rachel is a partner in a small public relations firm. Gabe is a partner in a small architecture firm. They met, live in the city, but dream of a weekend house out on an island / in woods / nearby but far-enough away. Gabe has been working on a house for Rachel on a tract of land they bought together. Rachel knows this much, but she’s never seen the house and Gabe won’t let her near it. He’s holding it as a surprise for their wedding night.

But Rachel is a go getter, and she’s a little worried about these longs weekends that Gabe has been taking up there. Plus, he’s missing work and really becoming obsessed with this house project. She drives out to the land to get a look herself, and is confronted with a very odd modernist house with almost no windows. It appears to be done. She enters the house, looking for Gabe, whose car was parked outside.

She calls out to him, but can’t find him. She finds a door that appears to lead to a basement, but the stairs go on for an impossibly long time into pitch darkness. The door closes above. She’s trapped. She sets to finding her way out, and eventually finds a way back into the house which no longer has a doorway to the outside. Gabe is there, on the other side of a small window, and is panicked when he sees Rachel. He left the house to see her car and realized that she must be inside, but it’s too late. The door is gone—was it removed? It seems like it was never built in the first place. Rachel is trapped, and he’s sorry—but he’s got to go back to town. He’ll be back. He disappears and darkness is starting to fall. The house is making noises. There is only one flashlight and no lights inside, and only one distant blinking red light outside. What’s a girl to do?

So—that’s where I see it going. The house would be a physical personification of his madness, which as the house gets weirder and weirder would manifest itself in his behavior growing stranger and stranger. Maybe he sees her as a sacrifice to the house? I don’t know, but this is the feeling I’m getting from it. The stairway to no where might be too derivative, though—but I think it’ll give you the idea.

Methand Madness

You raise some very good points about the redemption plot, which I’m keen on making not-hackneyed, and the atmosphere thing. I haven’t figured out the pseudo-science yet, but I largely see it as a McGuffin. The big thing, I think, would be presenting his lab as realistically as possible, given that they are in a controlled environment.

Maybe part of the tension comes from the fact that none of the other prisoners know that he killed everyone, so they are eager to help him at first with his science experiments, but then rebel against him and keep him away from his lab when they find out.

Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay

Re: I've Made A Terrible Mistake posted by Martin

If you’re not confused, then you don’t understand Tip Scum. I think that’s my new motto. Basically, every screenwriting technique book I’ve ever read ends up with complex diagrams (McKee is particularly fond) to explain ideas that really don’t need them. Everyone has you tracking threads of information that, if mapped on corkboard with string, would look like one of those airline diagrams that shows worldwide flights. Everyone is so complex that even people who understand it can’t succinctly explain it, because if they could then they couldn’t charge so much for seminars.

So, in retaliation, I think that it would be appropriate if Tip Scum is all about confusion, because if you’re not confused than your plot isn’t complex enough. If you’re not confused, then you’re not relating to your batter, er, protagonist enough, because if your protagonist isn’t confused, then there is no drama in their life worth exploring and therefore no story.

In any case, the Sandshoe Crusher, if expressed in mathematical terms, would be: Sandshoe Crusher = (Inciting Incident + Predicament) / Point of Attack. Does that help confuse things better? Good! You’re catching on.

Comments (0) — Category: technique

Round 7.3 [Rachel, My Dear v. Methane Madness] posted by kza

Great post, dude — you made me excited about both ideas. Of course, that just makes things harder, dudn’t it?

Rachel, My Dear
So what I’m hearing is a kind of mash-up between Panic Room and House of Leaves. That’s the kind of candidate I can back. I also like your description of it — it’s very much a horror piece, but one that’s more poetic in nature, like the stories of Arthur Machen.

So while there’s definite weirdness going on in this house — possibly dangerous weirdness, but maybe not — the real conflict here is between Rachel and her fiancé. (This dovetails with a discussion we had, a long time ago on a different blog, about how some of the better horror movies are, at their base, dramas, but the conflict of that drama is turned into a horrific metaphor. See also: Cat People, The Brood.) So that would be my “way in” with this — what is the conflict between these two people, a conflict that could be expressed as a standard drama (like, say, The Squid & The Whale), and how can that conflict be turned, via the house, into something horrific?

So I’ll take an opening shot: Rachel and her fiancé (let’s give him a name, cuz I hate typing that word; let’s call him Gabe.) — Rachel and Gabe move into a new house. They’d been struggling to make ends meet for a long time, both of them working, but just recently he’s come into a lot of money via his job, and their economic status has changed. They’ve found a house that they love, but it’s out in the boonies, and it’s kind of a fixer-upper. Still, it’s summer, the countryside is nice, and they have some time before they have to return to work, so why not live a middle-class dream for a few months?

But it doesn’t go well. It brings up personality conflicts and buried resentments. Gabe thinks that if they put enough work into it, they’ll get through this rough time and be happy, but Rachel is getting more and more disillusioned with the whole thing. But before she can do anything, there’s an accident, and Gabe is seriously injured. He’s hospitalized, and Rachel promises him that she’ll continue the work on the house without him. She goes back to the house, but soon finds that the house has a consciousness, and is keeping her a prisoner for nefarious reasons of its own.

Okay, a little weak — probably because I have a better idea of what I want it to be like in the abstract, but finding the right details for it is eluding me. Maybe it’ll give Burley a better idea.

Methane Madness
Mmmm, good stuff on the protagonist. I like the idea that he killed some people accidentally, and is paying for it both physically (the prison) and mentally (his conscience). Admittedly, the whole redemption angle’s been done to death, and that’s what I’d be more concerned about rather than the re-examination of the prison model (not that that isn’t important, of course.) I think we could find away to either a) do the redemption thing really well, so it isn’t a such a concern, or b) find a way to undermine or deconstruct the redemption plot, but it still seems tough.

Another concern: Why hasn’t anyone else figured out how to change the atmosphere of this planet? (Or have they?) Is it a simple process, and it’s just that no one’s been able to get all the right ingredients together, or is a total mystery, and the protagonist is brilliant enough to see how to do it? (What I’m getting at is not the choice between the two — they’re both fine — but trying to create something believable for either choice. Chemistry aint my strong suit.)

Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay

I've Made A Terrible Mistake posted by kza

D’oh! I got confused. For some reason (even though it’s perfectly clear what you wrote), I thought the Sandshoe Crusher was the supposed to be the equivalent of the Point of Attack, not the Predicament — I guess cuz it was the first definition you put up there, and I immediately thought of it in terms of the first part of the sequence method, the Point of Attack.

So, unless I’m still confused, Predicament = Sandshoe Crusher = Inciting Incident.

(I know, the audience is just swooning.)

Comments (0) — Category: technique

Re: Talkin' Bout Structure, Part II posted by Martin

which, contrary to what Burley said below, I think is the equivalent to McKee’s Inciting Incident, but then again, he’s got the books, not me

So he got them out to look it up. I present you with:

THE INCITING INCIDENT VS. THE POINT OF ATTACK / PREDICAMENT (aren’t you just juiced about this?)

First, the definitions.

From Story, by Robert McKee, pg 189:

The INCITING INCIDENT radically upsets the balance of forces in the protagonists life.

pg. 190

…the Inciting Incident is a single event that either happens directly to the protagonist or is caused by the protagonist. Consequently, he’s immediately aware that life is out of balance for better or worse.

So, to sum up, the Inciting Incident is the event that really kicks the story in. Everything before is for empathizing what life would be like without the event.

Next, from How to Build a Great Screenplay, by David Howard.

No mention of the Inciting Incident, but this on page 288:

The point of attack is the first revelation of the material that will eventually create the main story. Imagine the main story is a thunderstorm and the undisturbed status quo of the protagonist is the quiet life on the farm. The point of attack would be the moment when we first hear thunder in the distance.

That’s very different than McKee’s Inciting Incident—this sounds more like a thematic foreshadowing. Howard doesn’t talk about the Predicament, he just goes straight into the main tension.

Finally, from Screenwriting, the Sequence Approach, by Paul Joseph Gulino. Page 14:

Usually, by the end of the first sequence, there arises a moment in the picture called the point of attack, or inciting incident. This is the first intrusion of instability on the initial flow of life, forcing the protagonist to respond in some way.

So, this sounds much more like McKee and less like Howard. But Howard always seems to dance around ideas more than just nail them down. He’d rather talk about the chicken or the egg problem of whether stories or story tellers came first.

Then, on page 15, Gulino says this about the predicament:

Whatever solutions the protagonist attempts during the second sequence lead only to a bigger problem, or predicament, marking the end of the first act and setting up the main tension, which occupies the second.

It sounds like he’s saying that the Predicament is like the second part of the Inciting Incident—whereas McKee tends to bundle the whole package—incident and response—Gulino breaks them up. The Incident and then the Predicament, which is essentially the character’s conscious desire to confront the issues raised by the Inciting Incident. I would say the character has some say in the Predicament, since it springs from her conscious attempts to restore order, and ends up with her creating more disorder.

I personally like the expansion of the Inciting Incident, so will take this into consideration with further developments of Tip Scum.

Comments (0) — Category: technique

Talkin' 'Bout Structure, Part II posted by kza

Now where was I? Oh right, the so-called sequence method.

(Again, as Burley mentioned, I don’t have the books in front of me, so what follows is based on memory, along with stuff borrowed from other writers [like McKee] and my own additions. I probably won’t delineate between what’s from the book and my own crazed imaginings, so take all this stuff with an added pinch of salt.)

What’s interesting about the sequence method is that it was developed, not as an alternative or rebuttal to the Aristotelian three act structure, but from observation of how actual movies were put together. The guy who came up with the sequence method (whose name escapes me) realized that, since a projected film consisted of a number of reels that had to be changed, the writers and directors, since the silent era, were (either consciously or unconsciously) choosing to end each reel with a kind of climax, as if each reel were a mini-movie in its own right. This was done so that the transition from reel to reel (which, in the early days, meant a brief gap in the show, as the reel was physically swapped) felt smoother. (Imagine if the reel ended in the middle of a chase or a gunfight, and then a couple minutes of blank screen passed before it resumed.) Even when the technology was in place for seamless transitions, reels were still ending with some kind of climax. This guy decided to see if this was something that unified all the movies that had been coming out of Hollywood since the beginning, and if there was something there to help his film students write their screenplays. This is how the sequence method came about.

So, what is it?

Basically, it’s breaking a story down into 8 sequences, usually around 7 to 15 pages (minutes) apiece. Each sequence is, in a sense, a kind of short story or mini-movie, with a beginning, middle, and end, and while it isn’t complete in regards to the story as a whole, there’s a completeness in and of itself, in what the sequence is trying to accomplish.

And to a certain extent, that’s it. I know, not exactly mind-blowing. In fact, kinda obvious, innit? If you have a story you want to fill out to 100 or 120 pages, then breaking it down into smaller pieces is just common sense. Yet, when talking about structure, for the longest time, the only terminology we had was the (in)famous three act structure. And while coming up with a first act is probably within most people’s grasp (“It’s about a guy who falls in love with a girl but it turns out she’s a vampire on the run from a group of vampire hunters but she’s actually a good vampire, see, not like her dad who’s the one who killed a whole village but the hunters don’t know that”) and a third act probably is as well (“Uh, they all team up to beat Daddy Vampire, and they live happily ever after”), it’s that damn second act that causes all sorts of problems. And that’s because it’s the biggest part of any movie — usually about 50-70% of the script. (Well, except for maybe Die Hard… but that’s for later.) How do you fill all that space? If, as I’ve said before, you’re a natural storyteller, then you use your silver Scheherazadian tongue and just go until you’re finished. But if you’re like the rest of us, you need some guidance. And so, if you think of the second act as 4 sequences of varying length, suddenly the problem seems a whole lot more manageable.

Now you could, conceivably, write a feature-length screenplay if you just put eight short scripts together. Sure, it would be awfully patchy, and if it didn’t have a recurring main character, it would be more like an omnibus than what we think of as a proper feature-length. But it’d still be a feature-length.

But what say you have a main character you want to follow through the entire story, a character who has some kind of problem to deal with and who grows in some way. (I know, I know, it sounds cliché and banal, but 90% of all stories are about this. 75% of all people know that.) How can the story attain the kind of momentum needed to achieve this?

This is where the real value of the sequence method comes into play, IMO. Now before I get into it, I’ll admit a lot of this is an adaptation and expansion of concepts that have been popularized elsewhere. You’ll see stuff that isn’t too different from what Syd Field was talking about all those years ago. And of course, it’s all based on Aristotle’s Poetics anyway. But the way Howard puts them together really works for me. So:

There are 8 other qualities (that almost, but not quite, line up with the 8 sequences) that, once defined for the story, become what I call the story core. They are, in order: Point of Attack, Predicament, Main Tension, Point of No Return (PONR), First Culmination, Second Culmination, Third Act Twist/Tension, and Resolution. Everything that you really need to know about a script before you write it is contained in these 8 qualities. Define them, and you have a solid foundation from which to work. (Also, I don’t know anything about pitching story ideas to other people — I’m hoping I get a chance to learn — but right now, if I had to, I’d use the story core as my pitch outline.)

So what are they?

The first two make up what we think of as Act One:

Point of Attack: This is the moment in the script when we get a sense that the placid status quo of the characters is going to be shaken up. Howard uses the metaphor of “storm clouds on the horizon”, which I like quite a bit. This isn’t when the protagonist’s status quo is shaken — that’s next — but merely a warning that some kind of earthquake is coming. There’s usually some continuous link between this and the next quality, the Predicament — in Jaws, both revolve around the shark. But I’m not sure there always has to be; it can also simply be one of causality. For example, in A History of Violence, the Point of Attack is when Tom Stall is attacked by the thrill killers and he miraculously takes them out. How did he do it? How is he and his family going to react to the media blitz? The status quo has been shaken up, but at the same time, it could just end right there, with Tom being praised as a hero and then returning to the quiet life of a café owner. But of course, it doesn’t — it’s just a lead-in to the…

Predicament: Although all 8 of these qualities are important, there are a couple that are the heart and soul of the method, and this is one of them. The Predicament (which, contrary to what Burley said below, I think is the equivalent to McKee’s Inciting Incident, but then again, he’s got the books, not me) is the thing that happens to the main character that upsets his or her life. I think it’s important to note again, it’s an outside force (another character, the environment, a social system) that impacts the character — it usually isn’t some kind of choice the character brings on herself. (However, and this goes for all eight of these, I’m sure there are exceptions.) Instead, the character makes a choice because of the Predicament. And the Predicament can be something very physical (like Woody knocking Buzz out of the window in Toy Story) or it could be emotional or social in nature (as in a woman in her 30s realizes to her disappointment that she isn’t young and hip anymore, in A Shockah Script That I’ve Been Working On, For Like, Fucking Forever). The point is, the main character is knocked for a loop, and that’s ultimately what starts the story. And that’s why I consider it to be, oh let’s call it the “heart”, of the method. Go up to somebody and ask them, “What’s your predicament?” Assuming they don’t look at you crazy, you might get an answer like, “Well, I’m ten thousand bucks in debt, and my girlfriend is leaving me, but I know that if I can get my inheritance from my grandfather, I can get my life back together”. (Or whatever.) In other words, the spark for a story. (Which is also why I like the term “Predicament”. If you went up to someone and asked, “What’s your inciting incident?”, hopefully they would look at you crazy.)

The next four make up what we think of as Act Two:

Main Tension: If the Predicament is the heart, the Main Tension is the soul. When the Predicament strikes the main character, she’s going to have to make a decision regarding it. What’s she gonna do? Is she gonna run to Vegas to get her fiancé back from that hussy? Is she going to use this opportunity to re-examine her life, maybe decide to become a rabbi? Whatever the character decides, that will become the Main Tension. The Main Tension is always phrased as a question, starting with “Will”. Will the character get her fiancé back? Will the character become a rabbi? During the course of the next three sequences, the character will attempt to answer that question, ideally (from their perspective, not necessarily ours) with a “yes”. The Main Tension is the engine that drives the second act; nearly every scene relates to how that character is trying to answer (or failing to try to answer) the question the Main Tension poses.

What’s interesting about the Main Tension and needs to be said again so it’s understood (although it might take some time to fully grok it), is that the Main Tension applies only to the second act. For example, the Main Tension of High Noon is “Will the Sheriff get the townspeople on his side to defeat the bad guys?”, not “Will the Sheriff defeat the bad guys?”. (That last one is part of the third act.) In some senses, a screenplay constructed to these principles is not really one story, but three, mapped to each act. But we’ll get to that later.

Point of No Return: The Point of No Return, or PONR is an important quality that is often overlooked by novice screenwriters and screenwriters named “Shockah”. Simply put: what keeps the main character from throwing up his hands and saying “Fuck it”? It’s important to think about, and (especially with stories that are more about emotions and relationships than shit blowing up and life-and-death stakes) not always easy to determine. Clearly not everything works — you can’t have the PONR be a deadly world-threatening virus in the middle of your romantic comedy. (Or if you do, please let me read your screenplay.) I haven’t looked into too deeply, but I suspect that the PONR is usually another form of Predicament — another external event that forces the main character into action and a decision. (Although sometimes, I suspect the decision has already been made for them by the circumstances.) In The Matrix, the PONR is the choice between the red and blue pill — which I’d normally decry as blatant and uncouth, but it’s pretty cleverly encoded into the mythology of the world.

(I once had an idea for a screenplay where a guy gets on a train and ends up in a town, and the first act is clearly set up as a horror story, with the guy as the hero. But after the elaborate setup, the hero decides to just get back on the train and go home rather than risk his life, and the rest of the story is about something else, and the horror stuff never comes up again.)

Okay, I’m going to take a break here. I don’t know about you, but when faced with overly-long blog entries, I tend to get a little impatient and start to skim before long. (Damn TV! Taking away my ability to.. uh… something something.) Hopefully y’all didn’t skim. In Part III, I’ll talk about the First and Second Culminations (a.k.a. the second half of the second act), the Third Act Twist/Tension, and the Resolution. Then, in Part IV, I’ll apply these terms to some popular movies (Jaws, The Matrix, and at least something non-actiony, maybe Sideways) and see if any of it makes sense to me.

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Round 7.2 [Rachel, My Dear v. Methane Madness] posted by Martin

Rachel, My Dear (Shockah rank: #15, Burley rank: #2)

v.

Methane Madness (Shockah rank: #7, Burley rank: #9)

54-40 OR FIGHT!

Rachel, My Dear
Rachel had it all: a promising new career, loyal friends, and a loving fiancé. But one morning, she wakes up to find it all gone — and discovers herself in a world of brick and glass, imprisoned by an architectural madman. She need only confess her love for him to be free — but Rachel is going to fight back.

Pro
Okay, question one: who did this to her? In my initial reading, I thought that the fiancee does it. Why? That’s a good question. To avoid the admitted problem of the SAW-alikes, I say we not make the person a psycho. I thought one of the reasons Panic Room worked, when it did, was the intersection of the protagonist and antagonists desires, even though they had little to do with each other. It was the intersection of two characters with strong desires that are perfectly blocking each other.

So what if our architect was Rachel’s fiancee, and his madness wasn’t life threatening per se until she blocked his desires some how? What if, for instance, he has uncovered some before unknown connection to another world, and the architecture is built to that (or, a mash-up between the Winchester Mystery House and House of Leaves). Let’s say that it starts out with the classic saw of the architect husband promising the wife a beautiful modern house—and it seems to be at first, until she uncovers some strange things about it….

Now we’re talking fear, tension. Rachel’s desire is to escape the house, but she’s blocked by her husband’s desire to finish the house. Maybe he doesn’t even know that she’s there? Maybe he does, but the capture was not purposeful, but now that she’s in there is no going back.

Now that has great creep potential: the unknown physics, being trapped, a person who is not who you thought they were, and the loss of her dreams.

Con
Well, the Prison Planet thing, of course. Also, we’d have to make sure it’s not too derivative. What new element can we bring to the story to make it seem fresh? Suspense and horror often follow the cookie-cutter formulas, and when you see monsters they look like monsters you expect. I think that’s why Alien was so powerful (despite the Bob Fosse moment—Shockah knows what I’m talking about, and the rest of you can ask me later), the Alien creature was so unique and unlike anything that had been seen to date. But, now, every alien has to have viscous, dripping bile and razor teeth.

Anyway—what’s HR Giger moment for this story? How can we make it unique?

Methane Madness
In a World where stranded humans must guard themselves from a poisonous atmosphere, one scientist finds a process for rendering the air on the planet breathable. The only problem is, the planet is a prison and the guards will kill them all if they found out about the experiments.

Pro
I totally loved your ideas for this—the prisoner being caught outside by the vicious guards. I also love the underground scientist idea, secretly working on something while the meat-headed guards have no clue. I think his crime was involuntary manslaughter on a large scale. Imagine if he was responsible for a gas leak at a laboratory that killed thousands of people in a town. He managed to escape with the help of a gas mask. It was all a mistake, and so his work here is a direct vindication of the event that landed him in prison. He needs to save the prisoners to save himself.

It reminds me of my favorite prison movies, among which some of you might be surprised to learn is the Eastwood classic Escape from Alcatraz. I saw it as a kid, and I will never forget his digging away at the concrete with a spoon.

I also love the elaborate set-ups with prisoners watching over each other, watching for guards. Here’s our protagonist making partnerships with unsavory prisoners who he may morally abhor, but has to create bonds with in order to break out of his prison. And, does he even care about breaking out? If he’s somehow atoning for the deaths he caused, maybe he doesn’t even care about surviving—it’s just about the atmosphere for him. If he can change the atmosphere to breathable, then nobody can ever make the same mistake he did and kill innocent people again.

Con
I haven’t watched Prison Break more than a few times, but I think the refreshing thing about setting this on another planet is it gives us an opportunity to re-examine the model of the prison. It doesn’t have to be traditional. The guards don’t ever need to come into contact with the prisoners. What if one of the guards became a friend of the scientist through radio communication?

But, that means examining our preconceptions about prisons, prisoners and guards. Doesn’t seem undoable, but a tall order to be sure.

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Round Seven [Rachel, My Dear v. Methane Madness] posted by kza

Rachel, My Dear (Shockah rank: #15, Burley rank: #2)

v.

Methane Madness (Shockah rank: #7, Burley rank: #9)

AND THE ANCHORPERSON ON TV GOES LA DEE DA DEE DA…

Rachel, My Dear
Rachel had it all: a promising new career, loyal friends, and a loving fiancé. But one morning, she wakes up to find it all gone — and discovers herself in a world of brick and glass, imprisoned by an architectural madman. She need only confess her love for him to be free — but Rachel is going to fight back.

Pro
The first thing that hits me with this one is, unlike the other ideas, how literally down-to-earth it is. No aliens, no spaceships, no alternate realities, no unusual social systems that have to be built from the ground up, just one woman, one man, one house. (Two lungs, two lips, one tongue…) So there’s definitely an immediacy to this — it doesn’t take a lot of explanation.

It’s also a genre that creeps me out: The House As Prison. (See also: Misery, Intensity.) One of my favorites (which, admittedly, I haven’t seen in years) was a 80s Mary Steenburgen flick called Dead of Winter, where she goes to an audition and ends up being imprisoned in a mansion for reasons she doesn’t understand. (It’s a lot like that bit in Code Unknown, come to think of it.) I’m trying to think why, exactly, this particular kind of story attracts and repulses me in equal measure, thinking that if I knew what made it tick, I could bring that consciously to this story. But I have no idea — it just creeps my shit out.

It might be fun to design this crazy house. Did this “madman” design it solely for the purpose of confining Rachel? Has he done this before, then tire of his “true love”, dispose of the victim, and start over? What kind of ingenious traps does it contain? Is he controlling everything from a safehouse, or does he actually live there somehow? He wants her love — but what does that mean, exactly, and what’s he going to do if he gets it?

Con
Although the Prison Planet connection is kinda weak, that’s not my most pressing con. What I’m most worried about is transcending the genre/setup/expectations. Burley mentioned that he liked this one because it sounded like something David Fincher would give his eyeteeth for (or something like that). I can’t disagree with that — I’d love to see what Fincher would do with this idea, but I’m a little nervous to be the guy to provide the foundation for him to work from. I guess I’m not quite seeing the story here — I see some of the action, but not the story, if you know what I mean. I see lots of opportunities for clever traps and gimmicks and whatnot, but I’m not seeing the opportunity for why I should care.

(On second thought, that might be a low blow — what I’m saying here is that I’m not seeing an interesting character, yet, while I prefer Methane Madness at this point, there’s nothing in that description that suggests an interesting character, either. Why the difference? Simply personal preference? Or something else?)

Another con (but potential pro) is that the godawful Saw series has kinda already staked out this kind of material. Certainly there’s an expectation that this kind of material be grisly in a Roman arena sort of way. But perhaps that’s the signal to try and wrestle this story and its genre away from those without taste and do something interesting and thoughtful with it. But it brings up another difficulty: assuming that Rachel is the only one imprisoned in the house, then we, as an audience, know that whatever she encounters there simply isn’t going to kill her (unless we’re pulling a Psycho). So maintaining tension through, say, the second act looks difficult at this point.

However, I suspect that Burley has a completely different take on this story, and hopefully it’ll alleviate some of my concerns.

Methane Madness
In a World where stranded humans must guard themselves from a poisonous atmosphere, one scientist finds a process for rendering the air on the planet breathable. The only problem is, the planet is a prison and the guards will kill them all if they found out about the experiments.

Pro
Well, I love the idea of a small isolated outpost that has a poisonous atmosphere — so claustrophobic, and threatening to both the prisoners and the guards. I can imagine there’s a scene where the brutal guards institute some frontier justice and throw a prisoner out into the atmosphere, and we get an idea of what this stuff can do to a body. Or worse: the prisoners have to go out into the atmosphere for some kind of work detail, but they have to work fast or else the bad air will eat up their suits, and the guard cruelly close the gates on the last guy for some reason. Oh god, even worse: for kicks, the guards throw a prisoner outside, let the atmosphere have its way, then drag him back in just in time before he dies. (Jesus, where did all that dark stuff come from? :-)

Another thing: Above, I said that the description didn’t suggest an interesting character, but I’m wrong. What’s suggested is that the scientist who thinks he can turn the dangerous atmosphere harmless, is a prisoner. Okay, that’s interesting. What did he do? Kill his wife? Not bury the research his superiors told him to? Conspire to kill Glorious Leader? And did he actually do any of these things, or was he unjustly imprisoned, a la Shawshank Redemption? Regardless, it seems clear to me that he wants to change the atmosphere in order to escape. (Or might there be another reason?)

And so, we have this scenario where the prisoners are figuring out how to escape their prison, but the key to doing it isn’t necessarily carving a tunnel through rock or jumping in the laundry truck but attempting to do a science experiment under the noses of the guards. I think that’s brilliant. Admittedly, the tense scenes they suggest are at heart no different if if the prisoners were trying to hide an escape route in their cell, but the idea that the work being done is intellectual (as opposed to physical) is really interesting to me.

Con
Too similar to “Prison Break”? They’re not on another planet, but there’s some crazy shit on that show. (Also some stupid shit, but that’s mostly confined to the lame-brained lawyer character.) Also, while I see this as a pretty straightforward story… we kinda already have our straightforward story in Time to Die, which also has some (potentially) interesting philosophical/moral angles and a three-sided conflict. This story seems to, as of now, lack these added features.

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Hear ye, Hear ye! posted by Martin

Let it be known that on this day, the 21st of February 2006, our humble blog has broken the front page barrier on Google. We are currently 8th on the page for a search on spitball—one above the Wikipedia entry for Spitball!

Thanks to all of you that made it possible, and I’m a little shocked it happened so fast. The Google gods are good, indeed.

Oh, and tomorrow (February 22) is Shockah’s b’day. Make him feel good. Sign on to the forums and wish him a happy b’day in the comments for this post, which is here.

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SimpsoBurley! posted by kza

Because it had to happen…

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I'll See Your Simpsomaker... posted by kza

and raise you — The SimpsoShockah!

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Tip Scum Is Here! posted by Martin

Shockah will be happy to learn that I’ve finally started reading the books he loaned me on the sequence method. This means two things: 1. He’ll get his books back eventually (we have an ongoing thing, where we dump tons of books/dvd/comics/whatever on the other guy and then watch him squirm under the weight of the borrowed pile. Somethings are read/watched quickly and returned. Some are in a holding pattern for processing, and still others are being held in the quiet suspicion that one of us might turn out to be a rat and hold out on returning everything he has. In the interim, one of us will occasionally ask “So, have you read/watched blank yet?” and watch the other one guiltily come up with reasons why they’ve neglected our impossibly large duties. The asker will stand and nod and wait….), and 2. I’ll be able to join this conversation while actually, you know, talking about what I’m talking about.

Since I’m beginning this, I thought I’d also start, little by little, to put together The Patented Spitball! Cricket Method (TPSCM, or tip-scum) of screenwriting.

All scripts begin when something happens to someone and starts the imbalance in their lives. The sequence method calls this the point of attack. The McKee method calls this the inciting incident. In TPSCM this is called the Sandshoe Crusher. This fine page about cricket has defined a Sandshoe Crusher as a ball that actually hits the batsman on a foot. In my mind, getting a hard ball thrown at your foot would certainly set you off your game. If you were playing a game, and the normal course of the game would be a boring life, but the game being thrown off would create drama, a Sandshoe Crusher would seem to do this. So, formally:

TPSCM Definition #1
Sandhoe Crusher: That event which causes the primary character’s normal life to be unbalanced, and that they set to rebalancing.

(please note: I know nothing about cricket. I may have well made the curling method of screenwriting, but I worried about finding the proper place for the term “broom.” If there are cricket fans out there who would like to correct me on proper usage of terms, I would be most appreciative, and will do my best to make sure the TPSCM does its best to respect the language of the game, in context of the game being used a metaphor for writing a screenplay).

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Re:[3] Round Six: Rise to Vote, sir posted by kza

Also, I don’t want to totally box us in with a treatment that is the final heat winner.

Ah, once again, I’m not clear. I don’t necessarily see us using either treatment for the final winner. The final winner will have two treatments, and it will be up to us to find a compromise between the two (by either combining them or starting from scratch) to create the final treatment that will be the basis for the first Spitball! script.

But I do think that each treatment should be as detailed as we can make it, within a certain word limit. I think the more info we have, the better choices we can make when it comes to actually writing the screenplay.

But like you said, this is going to need more discussion, so when I get my thoughts together, I’ll post something more comprehensive about how I see us dealing with the winning idea.

Coming up: Round Seven!

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Re:[2] Round Six: Rise to Vote, sir posted by Martin

It cannot be said that Reminiscence did not get its fair trial. I also vote for Time to Die.

In the end, I’m suckered in by the clarity of the action lines, and even though I didn’t totally connect with your version of Reminiscence, to tell the truth I didn’t totally connect with mine either.

This might be scary, but I’m thinking the treatments in the final heat should be at least twice as long, if not longer

I’m open, but I don’t see length as a necessarily great measurement of the expression of the idea. Sometimes, good treatments are dense and hit the high notes in short form. Also, I don’t want to totally box us in with a treatment that is the final heat winner. What I suspect, is that things will become a mixture of both of our ideas. That is, after we pick the winner, I see us re-writing the treatment more than once.

But, we’ve talked a lot about what our process is to get our idea, but maybe now we need to begin the dialog about what happens after we have it? How are we going to approach writing it? What should our process be? I would like to hear if you have any of your so-called needless, but actually fun, rules to impose on us, and let’s see if we can map the process out a bit. That might give me some more specific ideas of how I personally would like to approach the final heat and the treatments we write for it.

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Re: Round Six: Rise to Vote, sir posted by kza

Anyway, I didn’t realize we were doing treatments during this heat!

Yeeeeahhh… Couple things about that:

1. I really had no intention of writing something so long. It was just an idea that I was trying hard to express, and in order to do it justice, it got longer and longer. I’m not particularly proud of the length, and I’m going to try not to do that again for the remainder of the heats. Well, until the last one that is…

2. And yet, I don’t really consider what I wrote to be a treatment. This might be scary, but I’m thinking the treatments in the final heat should be at least twice as long, if not longer. I think they should be detailed enough that we could write a screenplay from them with little difficulty — the only things, really, separating it from a screenplay would be dialogue and whatever “style” we bring to the storytelling. Since I’m sure we’ll be discussing the final heat later on, I’ll explain what I mean by that later.

I’m not totally connecting with yours.

Oh well, I tried! At the very least, the exercise was bracing.

And so, after spending four days laboriously trying to communicate a vision of Reminiscence that I think I could get behind, I rise to vote for….

Time to Die.

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Round Six: Rise to Vote, sir posted by Martin

Clearwater Shockah?

“…and I gave so much more credence to the idea than clearwater Shockah here, that I feel a bit obligated to bring it up again. [i.e., revival]”

Okay—that last bit was a real stretch, but I’m practicing my conspiratorial and hidden word play in hopes we’ll gain some of the Dan Brown market.

Anyway, I didn’t realize we were doing treatments during this heat! A for effort. No, that sounds pejorative—A for achievement, Mr. Shockah. Very good ideas, clearly told. But, like my brief synopsis didn’t bowl you over, I’m not totally connecting with yours. I think we should go to a vote and see what happens. All members rise!

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Round 6.4 [Reminiscence v. Time to Die] posted by kza

Reminiscence (Shockah rank: #13, Burley rank: #3)

v.

Time to Die (Shockah rank: #6, Burley rank: #10)

CATCH THE SPIT!

Clearwater Shockah?

Actually, that story did absolutely nothing for me. :-) And it wasn’t because it was different than my original synopsis. (Well, that’s not entirely true, but my point is, I’m not really married to my concept.) It’s just not really the type of story I want to do, at least for this idea nugget. But I really appreciate the attempt — the marriage of Being There and V for Vendetta was very amusing.

So, rather than be a Scrooge, I guess I should make my own attempt to give this a fair hearing. While you took a more comedic route, I was thinking something more Solaris-y (either version, take your pick). That’s probably kinda cliché, come to think about it, but it’s really all I got right now. (There’s a reason this came in thirteenth!) So let’s try this:

REMINISCENCE

We open on a long white corridor, with a queue of people in it, waiting very patiently, very placidly, for something. At the front of the line is a young man — we’ll call him Tom. Someone calls “next!” and Tom goes into the next room, where some technicians put a visor over his eyes, hit a few buttons, and the visor glows for a second, underneath the lenses, on Tom eyes. Then the technicians remove the visor and Tom is on his way.

Tom has just had his memories dampened. He looks at his hand — imprinted there, as a glowing tattoo, is his necessary information: his name, his job, his address, etc. As he heads back down the corridor, one of the people in line jumps out of the line and grabs Tom. Tom, don’t you remember me? he says. Tom looks at him blankly, then tries to get away from this obvious maniac. As the man paws him further, yelling things incomprehensible to Tom, security guards emerge and take the man away.

Tom resumes his life: his boring job; for entertainment, quick-cut, nonsensical, empty movies that excite the senses (like, say, The Rock); and scheduled sex with another citizen — the powers that be don’t want any lasting emotional attachments, so the sex is impersonal — maybe it’s even done through some kind of screen, and Tom doesn’t even know who he’s fucking. Or maybe there’s a screen between the two, but a videoscreen of a sexy woman (or man) facing each participant, and they think that’s who their partner is. It’s like Two Minutes Hate, only with hardcore action! ;-)

Anyway, that’s Tom’s life. But he has a secret. He keeps finding strange messages etched in out of the way places — at the bottom of his sock drawer, on the back of his medicine cabinet. He figures out that the messages are pointing him towards something. He puts the clues together and finds a secret compartment underneath his bed. He opens it and finds a cache of contraband: photos, comic books, a carved wooden horse, trinkets, all manner of items, each kept because of the memory it evokes. And it all comes back to Tom: his life as a boy, on a Tarkovsky-esque farm with his mother and siblings, enjoying his time with the animals and nature, growing up, his brother carving the little horse for him, taking over the farm when his mom falls ill, mourning when she dies, watching with incomprehension as some oppressive political force takes over the country, watching with incomprehension when they come and take him and separate him from his brothers and sisters.

(We can see these memories in a number of different ways, in different combinations: as oblique, faded Kodak moments; as stand-alone sequences, with the audience given an omniscient view of events; as stand-alone sequences with the adult Tom present, watching with the audience, a la Spider; and/or any other method we can devise.)

So Tom is a criminal — he’s regained memories, which is verboten, and apparently has a stash of mementos (sorry, that’s the best word) to help him remember, which is worse. He tries to go about his daily routine, but the memories haunt him, disrupting his work, making people look at him funny. He misses his mother — he has a vision of her gravestone in a field. He had family — what happened to them? Who was that man that stopped him in the hallway? Were they related? Does he know something about their lives in the past? Does he know where their mom’s gravestone is?

Tom decides to find him and get the answers to this questions. This is difficult in a world where no one really knows anyone else, and life has a pre-programmed quality. He questions his fellow workers about the man and the farm, but just gets blank stares. He deviates from his routine and instead of his usual entertainments, he goes to a bar — but doesn’t realize he’s being followed. The bar patrons, used to having their memories wiped, are big on trading stories, and Tom joins in. Of course, most of the stories are incredibly banal — the people not having a whole of lot of history to draw upon — but when they hear Tom’s story about farms and mothers, they are rapt, some even moved to tears. One of those present, a woman, seems particularly interested — but more like she’s interested in Tom than the story. But no leads are forthcoming, so Tom leaves, but as he steps outside, he’s nabbed by the authorities.

They drag him up to his apartment and force him to reveal the cache of mementos. They take the mementos and destroy them in front of him, and then take him down to the memory-dampening center. They strap him in the chair and leave him to the technicians. He’s terrified of losing his memories, and begs for them to stop. But the glasses go on and the lights glow and that seems to be the end of it.

But instead of the blissed-out expression of someone recently wiped, Tom still looks distressed. The glasses come off, and there’s the woman from the bar, only in technician garb. She releases him and after faking out the authorities as to Tom’s memories, she takes him back to her place. Her name is Arlece and she tells him there’s a whole underground of people like him, that hoard mementos and keep memories alive. Tom figures if the man in the hallway recognized him, then he could be part of this underground. She doesn’t know the man, but wants to help Tom find him. But they check the tattoos on their hands — they only have two days and then Tom and Arlece are scheduled for memory-dampening, and then Tom will forget the man.

The only lead they have are surveillance video of the hallway. Arlece has access, so they sneak in and find it. The next obvious step is to check the database, but they’re chased off before they can do so. But they leave with a holographic image of the man’s face. They take it back to the bar and ask around. One man — we’ll call him the Barfly — tells them that he’s met the man in question, and they follow him back to his place to see stuff he’s picked up from the man. He shows them a “time wristband” that he got from the mysterious man — we recognize it as a digital watch. Tom wants to know more, but before he acquiesces, the Barfly wants to have sex with Arlece. Arlece has no problem with it, but Tom, having come to know and trust Arlece, gets jealous and loses his temper — something that’s never happened before. He attacks the man, getting into a fist fight with him — a very pathetic scene, as neither man really knows how to fight. During the fight, the holographic image gets destroyed. Tom gets the upper hand, and beats him into submission, and, too add insult to injury, Tom takes the watch from the man. Arlece is very concerned about Tom’s violent outburst and his theft of the watch, but opts not to report him.

They go back to his apartment to fix up his scrapes. He’s more interested in the watch, which neither of them have seen before, being used to doing what the tattoo tells them. He stumbles upon the alarm function of the watch, which startles him. Arlece wants to know why he attacked the Barfly, and Tom explains to the best of his ability. Arlece doesn’t understand jealousy (not that Tom really does, either) and thinks maybe it’s best if she leaves. Tom doesn’t want her to leave, but he gets more and more emotional, Arlece gets scared and runs away. He chases after her, but loses her. He returns home and once again examines the watch.

Morning. Arlece appears at his door. She apologizes for running off, and recommits to trying to find the man and unlocking the mysteries of Tom’s memories. The Barfly told them that he used to see the man around the south side of town, so they arrive there. They look for the man, but don’t see him anywhere. Tom and Arlece are pretty much at the end of the line. There’s only a half-hour left until their scheduled memory appointment, and there’s nowhere left to go. And then they see him: The man.

They follow him back to his home, and introduce themselves. He recognizes Tom as his brother. Tom is overjoyed. Unbeknownst to the authorities, the man (whom we’ll call the Scavenger) lives above some kind of forgotten dumping ground, and he’s dug a tunnel beneath the building where he retrieves all sorts of thrown-away items, presumably dumped there long ago by the people in power. Arlece asks the Scavenger if he’s the head of the memory underground, but he has no idea what that is. He simply finds the stuff and gives it to people. He and Tom get to talking about the past, but as the Scavenger goes on, it slowly dawns on Tom, a realization mixed with dread: the Scavenger has a completely different memory of family life. No farm, a father instead of a mother, etc. Before he can really process this, though, the authorities burst in. They get the Scavenger but Tom escapes down into the tunnels. He reaches a dead end, where he finds, on the ground and sticking out of the dirt walls, hundreds of tiny, identical wooden horses — the same kind that he had. What he thought was a unique object to his personal history was actually a mass produced item. It’s likely that hundreds of people have the same horse and have created their own remembered history around it.

Arlece appears behind him. She was working with the authorities all along, using Tom to try and find the Scavenger, and stop the spread of the mementos through the community. Although there is no real underground movement, the last threat to the memory-dampening technology is extinguished, as Tom is led out and the tunnel is destroyed.

For the last time, Tom is taken back to the facility to have his memories taken away from him. But this time he doesn’t yell or try to escape, but goes placidly, almost willingly. Arlece administers the process, and is sad that they’re both going to forget what happened, but she’s resigned to it. The glasses go on.

Tom is back at home. He goes through his routine. He wonders why there are horrible marks on the bottom of his sock drawer and on the back of his medicine cabinet, like something’s been scratched off. He goes to work. Everything is as it was. Then, that night, he goes to bed, but is awoken by a beeping. He looks around the house, trying to find the noise. He finally locates it, coming from an overhead light. He removes the light from the ceiling and inside, within the wall, is the watch he put in there. He flips it over, and scratched on the back is the word “MOM”. He has no idea what this means, but when he goes back to sleep, he’s back on the farm, with his mother and brothers and sisters.

THE END

Okay, so that wasn’t Solaris-y at all. No prison planet, either. And let’s not even get into the countless borrowings from other SF movies — I’m tired enough as it is. But, while there’s (intentionally) a lot of room for expansion, more detail, and more tricksy plot maneuverings, the goal here was to lay out a sequence of logical events that built up to some kind of ending. Anyway, that’s kinda what my idea of Reminiscence could be like.

Note: The preceding synopsis (although in some ways it’s more like a pitch, but we’ll get into that later) was built using the sequence method. I’ll be posting about that next.

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Structure Doesn't Only Hold Up Buildings posted by Martin

I decided to pipe my own few cents on the structure questions, after Shockah’s fine post on the matter.

I was reminded, reading his description of his college writing experiences, of the Mamet quote that “the Avant Garde is to the left what jingoism is to the right. Both are a refuge in nonsense.” This is not to downplay abstraction or disregard completely avant material, but what I took from Shockah’s point about his college experience is much that I took from nearly every writing class I’ve experienced: They don’t teach you how to write.

Instead, they teach you to think as abstractly as possible. They try to get your mind into creative spaces. Often, there is flowery talk about personal self-expression, which millions of writers take to mean that the only craft in writing is just to express their feelings. Just ask the editors of any poetry magazine about how many unpublishable entries they receive every day (thus giving rise to the guaranteed-to-be-published poetry anthologized subsidized by the authors themselves).

What’s wrong with this? It ignores that there is craft involved in writing at all. You teach painters how to paint by teaching them how to draw and how to see. They take life drawing classes, and burn through charcoal. They study perspective. The great avant artists of the 20th century weren’t great because they were really creative, man—they were great because they understood the medium deeply. Rockwell, a huge admirer of cubism, once went to study in Paris. The instructor pulled him aside and asked for advice how to sell illustrations.

Point being this: the only education that taught me about writing was in classes where I was forced to write essays. I learned that I had to make a point, make it fast, and defend it. I had to create a narrative that the reader might be interested in—specifically, the instructor whom I was trying to impress to get a high grade.

Most of the writing classes I’ve taken are filled with the same post-modern-at-its-worst drivel about personal expression. The fact is, writing is not subjective in the least. We can judge good writing. Dickens is not subjectively a good writer, he just was a good writer. Heather McHugh is not subjectively a good poet, she just is a good poet. Both of them have mastered language in a very specific way. While I personally don’t like some authors very much, it doesn’t mean their craft is poor, it’s often a personal taste thing. What’s wrong with that? What’s wrong with not liking something?

A good beginning writing instructor would start by saying that all interesting stories share a few basic traits. Master those first, then go as outside as you want. Learn that you need a character and something needs to happen to that character. Teach Aristotle and the seven stories of the world, or just teach the three basic stories: man against man, man against nature, man against himself.

Then, let the students experiment with breaking those boundaries, pushing them, and also with working within them. Teach them how to hook a reader with a story that they care about, and that’s a skill they’ll always be able to use.

Writing instructors—and, to be fair, they may be much better these days then in my school days—are like an early Jan Tschichold. Tshichold was one of the great typographers and designers of the 20th century modernist movement. Early on, in his book Die Neue Typographie, he decried poor typography, and declared sans-serif fonts as the modernist masterpieces that would replace serifed typefaces. He was a firebrand of high order—he pissed the Nazi’s off something fierce. But, riding out the war in England, he designed the Penguin library and came to realize that 600 years of typographic refinement really didn’t happen arbitrarily—serifed typefaces are easier to read in print. The idea, of course, is that the words disappear and the message comes through. This is, what famous typography writer Beatrice Warde called the Crystal Goblet.

The same thing is true for great writing. The words should disappear and be replaced in the readers head with the message or story being told. If the person keeps thinking to themselves “Wow, this writing is really beautiful” then the writing is about the words themselves. There’s an argument for that, I think, but there’s another big argument for just telling the story.

In any case, relating to screeplay writing: I am with Shockah that methods are more like models: views of looking at your script and seeing it from a different angle. They aren’t meant to be the one true path to writing successfully. Ironically, if you read a few of these books, they all reference the same great screenplays as proof of their analysis. Wow—seems like China Town used fifteen different methods.

I am, though, nowhere near as good of a student as Shockah is. Or, rather, he has a much better memory than I do. I tend to jumble all of the terms together. And, I plan on developing my own method of screenwriting based on the game cricket just to confuse things even more. Keep tuned for that.

But in the meantime, I just have to say that these books are so needed and so popular because many writers, despite degrees or many hours spent in classrooms, don’t know how to tell a fucking story. Maybe if the world was different they wouldn’t be so needed, but what’s the harm in using the theories? If you write a good screenplay, the only thing that matters is that people will read it and forget that it’s words on paper, and they won’t give a shit which method you used to lay it down.

As for telling a story: it should be the first damn thing that you learn in any creative program. Start with how to hold the brush.

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Talkin' 'Bout Structure, Part I posted by kza

See, although we plan on writing a screenplay in front of the entire internet and his mom and everything, for me, this is the real screenwriting without a net. I’m going to expound on an issue of screenwriting technique — structure — without any sort of professional credit to my name. What’s more, I’m going to be talking about a method of dealing with structure that’s the focus of two pretty good books — David Howard’s How to Build a Great Screenplay and Paul Joseph Gulino’s Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach — without benefit of having the books on hand. Mistakes will be made, laughs will be had, cease-and-desists will be delivered.

But — But! — since, as mentioned earlier, we plan to use the sequence method in the writing of the Spitball! screenplay, some kind of introduction is necessary for those that don’t know, won’t show, or don’t care what’s going on in the hood.

What do we mean when we talk about structure? Good question, and there’s probably a good answer for it, but for right now, we’ll have to use my definition that I’m making up right now. What I mean by the word is simply how the various parts of a screenplay (usually meaning scenes) are put together into a whole, and how those parts do a number of things: how they tell a story that moves from event to event, generating a kind of momentum that (ideally) hooks a reader into the story; how the parts of a screenplay communicate ideas by virtue of how they are placed together; and how those parts are ultimately shaped to deliver some kind of effect — usually a cathartic climax.

Why is this important? There are some who would say it isn’t, and more importantly, would say the very idea of structure is a bane on screenwriting (conjured by an evil wizard, named either McKeedemort or Fieldemort, accounts vary) that has resulted in bland, stupid, predictable color-by-number scripts that’s crippled both Hollywood and the indie scene — and that screenwriters should abandon structure and “write from the heart” or “more organically” or “without boundaries” or the like, and the result will be better screenplays that are creative, profound and artistically successful.

There is some truth to this.

Any theory of structure, at least any that attempt to take into account 90% of the films Hollywood made from the beginning of the medium to today, will result in something that looks an awful lot like a formula. And anything that looks like a formula will be used as a formula. There are a lot of cookie-cutter scripts out there, both spec and produced, and I don’t doubt for a second that the rise of Syd Field and Robert McKee empowered a lot of people, people who wouldn’t otherwise bother, to try their hand at screenwriting. I mean, it’s just three acts and an inciting incident and three (or is it four?) plot points — just plug and play, right?

So I’m sympathetic. And, for the record, I definitely think there’s no correct way to write, whether it be screenplay or novel or play or what have you. If it works, it works. But, ultimately, I’m going to side with the structuralists (no, not that kind of structuralism) and make a case for structure in screenplay, and this “sequence method” in particular.

Why?

Because I have to.

Some people are natural storytellers. They know just how to hook you, and how to keep reeling you in through the entire story, so that by the end of five minutes, twenty-two minutes, forty-five minutes, two hours, you clap and cry “more! more!” and yet at the same time, feel satisfied. They don’t need no stinkin’ plot points; they know that all they need to do is make you ask, “what happens next?”

I am not one of those people.

Although I graduated with a degree in theater and (while we technically didn’t have specializations within the degree) considered myself a playwright, one thing that wasn’t really taught was structure. No, that’s not entirely true — we did discuss it, but as a way of analyzing existing texts, and this was more for the directors. No, the writers were told to write, literally, whatever the fuck they wanted, however bizarre or nonsensical, and it was the director’s responsibility to figure it out. (I shit you not.) If you know me, then you know that, if given the chance to be as ridiculous and absurd as possible, I’ll return your investment 300%.

(Maybe, if we’re lucky, we’ll get Todd Reidy to post on the forums about how he had to direct a scene I wrote — a conversation between two cleaning ladies that was composed entirely of fragments from a dream journal I had, a scene that made Ionesco look like friggin’ Miller. I thought it was hilarious, but no one who had to work on it was amused.)

And so, freed from the responsibility of constraining my off-the-wall ideas and experimental prose, I continued in this manner for my 4 years in the theater program. And while that seemed nice at the time, when I decided that film was the place to be and screenwriting was what I wanted to do, I found myself completely unprepared for the task at hand. I had stories I wanted to tell, but when I sat down to write them, they either meandered (and ungracefully so) or I was at a loss on how to fill 90 to 120 pages with content. What I was missing was structure. I didn’t know, really, where to stop, because for years I was encouraged to stop whenever I felt like. Or I didn’t know how to fill in spaces from point A to point B, because for years I was encouraged to go in any direction I wanted without a goal in mind.

I’m sure there are people out there who think this is exactly what Hollywood needs more of, and again, I’m sympathetic. I’m sure there are plenty of wannabes (and professionals) who could do with a bit of the ol’ “hang loose” philosophy. (Sure didn’t hurt Charlie Kaufman, who started in the very rigid, structurally-speaking, world of TV.) But frankly, I had been ingrained to take my creative freedom for granted, but the result of unfocused creative freedom is wank. I needed something to enforce some discipline. I needed to (as horrible as it sounds) constrain my freedom.

Because structure is, ultimately, something that constrains — or, perhaps better put, contains. It’s a vessel, it’s a box, it’s a scrapbook. It comes in all shapes and sizes (despite what you might’ve heard). The shape you choose influences what the content looks like, but you can still put any content you want into it, and it’s naturally shaped to push your story along and help it achieve its aims. Inna final analysis, though, it’s a tool. It’s there for you to use. It’s there to help you. And it can get the job done a lot faster. As long, of course, as you know how to use it, and more importantly, when to use it.

So, if you wonder why I’m pushing structure pretty hard during this Spitball! experiment — well, you would too if you spent years trying to push nails into wooden planks with your thumb.

(Well, lookee that — over a thousand words, and I never even got into the whole sequence method thing. Part II, coming soon!)

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Round 6.3 [Reminiscence v. Time To Die] posted by Martin

Reminiscence (Shockah rank: #13, Burley rank: #3)

v.

Time to Die (Shockah rank: #6, Burley rank: #10)

BEND DOWN AND TOUCH YOUR TOES!

I could/should/might’ve called a vote here, but I decided I wanted to press a bit farther into Reminiscence. Remember? Remember remembering? Both our only fan (it doesn’t have to be this way. You could be a fan too) and I gave so much more credence to the idea than clearwater Shockah here, that I feel a bit obligated to bring it up again.

If you told me “Burl,”

and I’d interrupt. “Don’t call me that. I ain’t a folk singer.”

“Burl,” you’d continue, “you have to write Reminiscence right now.”

“Okay.” I’d say as I broke into a rousing chorus of Big Rock Candy Mountain. (I’m a-goin’ to stay where you sleep all day, Where they hung the jerk who invented work, in the Big Rock Candy Mountains) while thinking of my plan of attack.

It might read like this (umm, this is, at best, a “loose” interpretation of your ‘In a World’. I riffed—forgive me): Our protagonist, a Chauncy Gardener type without the capability to remember anything, stumbles into a secret memory cell, where people gather in dark basements to share contraband from their childhoods. The police bust the party, and our man is mistaken for a member of the group. He is rounded up, and his bemused silence, or pleasant abstract comments madden the detectives interviewing him. They decide he must be the mastermind behind the parties, and subject him to strange procedures designed to find out exactly what his fond memories are. When they fail, and decide that they are being bested by this mastermind, they get a search warrant for his house, but they can’t find out where he lives, because he keeps claiming that he doesn’t live anywhere. The judge holds him in contempt, and they put him in a holding cell.

While there, he is exposed to hardened criminals who do run under ground memory cells. It’s their business. Since he’s no squealer, he is obviously no fan of the coppers, and they write down their address for him to look them up when he’s out of jail. Called in front of the judge and demanded to produce an address of his house, he simply rattles off the address that the hardened criminals gave him.

There, the police find the largest cash of contraband memorabilia ever collected in one place. Our character becomes public enemy number one, and is convicted. One woman, though, believes him and wants to save him. His mother—but, since she hasn’t seen him in many years, she can’t talk about the times they spent together. She goes on talk shows begging on his behalf.

One childhood playmate—a very sweet woman whom our character was always good to—rises up against the system, and starts bombing the government offices with huge pinatas filled with nostalgia. Underground resistance starts up, led by her, while the trial of the century is going on. Our man stands tall—well, kind of dumb and smiling, but the trial goes on in full bluster mode. Violent protest erupts on the street as he is sentenced to life on the prison planet.

And there, he lives, alone and happy in a stark and beautiful land.

Okay—that would be one interpretation. Does that spark anything for you?

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Round 6.2 [Reminiscence v. Time To Die] posted by kza

Reminiscence (Shockah rank: #13, Burley rank: #3)

v.

Time to Die (Shockah rank: #6, Burley rank: #10)

EN GARDE!

Reminiscence
In a world where genetic and social engineering have eliminated violent crime and other offenses, there is only one punishable infraction: Nostalgia. In order to keep the populace in line, the past must be eliminated, keeping everyone in a blissful present-tense existence. But some insist on remembering, collecting and hoarding pieces of the past to keep it alive. Tom was the greatest of all them, blessed and cursed with an eidetic memory. But when he’s betrayed to the authorities, Tom finds himself on the prison planet, forced to find a way to survive, all alone on a harsh — yet beautiful — landscape. Can his knowlege of the past help him, or even save him? Or will he be prey to the predators on the planet, both alien and human?

Con
Oh yes, this one. I remember when I was at the library, staring at that picture of the Robinson Crusoe guy, trying to come up with some kind of idea to fill out my quota. I’d written only the first sentence, except for that last word. So I sat there and let the first absurd thing I could think of pop into my head, and that’s what came out. The rest of it followed, piece by piece, until it looked like there was enough there to call it complete.

I’m not sure why I’m sharing this anecdote, other than to get across the Frankensteinian nature of this idea, and my relative coolness towards it. It’s interesting to me that it’s struck a chord with both you and our only fan. Hopefully I’ll be able to see it from your eyes, but right now, it’s kind of a unwieldy, over-conceptualized mess, with a strange break in the middle: it starts out as a kind of abstract, thinky kind of piece, and then it turns into something physical and brutal. (There’s probably some kind of thematic relevance that can be hashed out of those two halves — in fact, I can see it exciting the Tropical Malady fan — but it’s just incongruous to me right now.)

And Burley, in his opening pro paragraph, outlines for me some of the severe problems of this idea. How the hell would this world work? And how the hell did it even get to this point, where technology to enforce something so unenforceable was created and a government was able to use it without destroying itself and the country?

Pro
And yet, at the same time, I think those last questions are resolvable by simply not answering them — just throwing them out completely. How did the dystopia of THX-1138 come into being? Who the fuck cares? It’s clearly so far into the future that it may as well be a fantasy world of dragons and orcs — it has its own rules, which need to be understood, but how those rules came into being are not necessary for the story to work. So I see this not as “in the distant future” but “in the far, far, really far future”, and taking certain considerations of realism out of the equation entirely.

Another note: Part of this was inspired by my reading of Oliver Sacks’ An Anthropologist on Mars. One of the chapters is about a guy who, in the late 60s, became a Buddhist and joined a temple — and his family discovered too late that he had a brain tumor that a) rendered him blind, b) destroyed his ability to form memories of the present, and c) damaged his metabolism so that he got very fat. He lived in a blissful state of perpetual present, always smiling and happy, and — get this — the tumor also damaged his ability to recognize that he was blind — he thought he could see, even though he clearly couldn’t. So for awhile, he lived in this temple, and the other Buddhists thought (and who can really blame them?) that this young American had attained true nirvana. When he made it to Sacks’ hospital, Sacks figured out that he still had memories of up until the 60s, but anything he was told would fade away, Memento-like, a few minutes later. (There’s a few amazing moments in the account dealing with the passing of the man’s father and a trip to see the Grateful Dead, the man’s favorite group.)

So I was imagining that in this SF world, the population, probably through some kind of technology, is subjected to the something kind of similar, but flip-flopped — there would be a focus on the present (and the future), and the past, anything that would give their lives meaning (apart from the meaning given by the government or whoever) and distract them has to be suppressed. Obviously, this technology or whatever it is isn’t perfect (or is somewhat voluntary), else there wouldn’t be a protagonist nor a story. (I’m thinking of Fahrenheit 451, where the populace seems so quelled that the Firemen don’t seem as necessary.)

I dunno — pretty heady stuff. Too heady?

(And yet, I have no problem with the whole “how do we visualize this” thing. Not because I have the solution — ha! — but because Kubrick once said that he could literally film any written sentence, and if that’s not something worthy of emulation, I don’t know what is.)

Time to Die
In a World where death itself is beaten by genetic regeneration, a guard is killed during a riot on the prison planet. One woman—his wife—faces sure death to retrieve his body in time to bring him back to life. It’s a race against time, with one nearly resourcesless woman willfully fighting like a juggernaut against the prisoners who are holding his body hostage, and the powers that be that think she should just give up. All to simply save the man she loves from eternal death.

Pro
Oh — clarity, clarity, clarity. The clarity of it gets me high as a freakin’ kite. As Burley knows (and as I’ll probably talk about when I write up a post about the sequence method), structure is my big bugaboo, so if I can find an idea with a straightforward structure, I jump all over it. I figure if I can find something with a strong foundation, with plenty of conflict and rising stakes and blah de blah, then I can leave it alone and focus on the cool stuff: characters, atmosphere, visual rhymes, jokes, contrapuntal thematic devices, etc.

(That’s right, when it comes to screenwriting, I’m not a carpenter, I’m an interior decorator. And that applies to regular life as well — anyone who knows me knows I’ve never lifted a hammer in my whole goddam life. But I’m committed to working on that, though. Uh, the screenwriting, that is. Fuck that wood shop shit.)

And I don’t think it needs a villain, either — at least, I don’t think it needs a single villainous “muwah ha ha ” character. Seems like there’s enough neutral, incompatible wants resulting in conflict to keep it going: the woman wants her husband’s body back, the prisoners want to escape and probably want to keep the body as a bargaining chip, the prison authorities want to stomp out the riot any way possible. (And that right there, if I may apply a bit of amateur theory, is what makes for a good script. We usually think of stories as having two conflicting forces, the protag and the antag, and they fight. And there’s a lot of examples of that. But this has three antagonistic forces, each against the other, but with the possibility of two aligning against the other, maybe permanently, probably only temporarily. And it would be interesting to use the structure to explore the various three-way permutations.)

(Heh. I said “three-way”.)

Con
There is the possibility that, if we’re not careful, this could devolve into a pedestrian action flick. (I think we are careful, and having people, er, one thoughtful, caring, considerate person vetting our work helps, but it’s still something to look out for.) And yes, because it’s so straightforward, it probably isn’t as sexy as some of our more outré ideas. But that’s the key for this story idea: embrace it for what it is. This is a “B” Western, no doubt about it. It’s kind of ordinary. We’ve seen it before. It’s mythic, sure, but it borders on cliché. The question is: Will we make it a Boetticher or Mann “B” Western, or will it be one of those forgettable programmers that make up the bulk of the Encore Western channel?

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Re: [4] The Competition: Looking Toward The Future posted by kza

Oh, that’s right — the cheese. Always with the cheese.

Yeah, all right, some sort of discussion about the sequence method is probably in order. I’ll get on that ASAP. Of course, having the books as reference would keep me from making all sorts of blunders, but seeing as someone hasn’t read them yet, I guess I’ll have to make do.

(Seriously, tho, the Howard book is a pretty good read — friendly and conversational where McKee is hectoring.)

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Re: [3] The Competition: Looking Toward The Future posted by Martin

How ya like dem apples?

I like my apples baked into a pie, with a slice of cheddar cheese and all heated up first thing in the morning, thanks for asking.

Oh the ideas—sure, sounds good. For Heat #3 let’s stick with Sequence Method—I should get to know it better. It certainly can’t hurt, but I’ll follow your lead. How about it, then, a post about the sequence method? Interested? I’ll post my version when I read the books finally!

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Re: [2] The Competition: Looking Toward The Future posted by kza

Answers of Clarification (er, hopefully):

Heat #2
I imagined that we’d both write character studies for both competing ideas — so there would be a total of four character studies per battle. I figure the more info to use and work with, the better.

Heat #3
We don’t have to use the Sequence Method here; although I’m more comfortable with it than you, I’m game for anything. All I’m really looking for here is some idea (that will inevitably change) of how the piece is structured. And again, just to be clear, I’m not looking for more than a paragraph, total — I just want a taste, maaaaan.

How ya like dem apples?

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Round Six [Reminiscence v. Time to Die] posted by Martin

Reminiscence (Shokah rank: #13, Burley rank: #3)

v.

Time to Die (Shokah rank: #6, Burley rank: #10)

SET ‘EM UP AND KNOCK ‘EM DOWN!

Reminiscence
In a world where genetic and social engineering have eliminated violent crime and other offenses, there is only one punishable infraction: Nostalgia. In order to keep the populace in line, the past must be eliminated, keeping everyone in a blissful present-tense existence. But some insist on remembering, collecting and hoarding pieces of the past to keep it alive. Tom was the greatest of all them, blessed and cursed with an eidetic memory. But when he’s betrayed to the authorities, Tom finds himself on the prison planet, forced to find a way to survive, all alone on a harsh — yet beautiful — landscape. Can his knowlege of the past help him, or even save him? Or will he be prey to the predators on the planet, both alien and human?

Pro
Did I say our last idea was Dickian? Wow. PK in da house.

How do you eliminate memory? Is it a mechanical process, or is it an external thing—like you can’t sell old music, that might trigger memories, or perfumes and scents need to be cycled every 10 years, without repetition within a 100 years span? The older one gets, the more risky the proposition of falling back on memory, so in that sense the young would be heralded. Logan’s run!

So—the punishment from nostalgia, in this case, could be for people acting retro or making public displays that could trigger memories. The police would have to investigate, with the idea that they don’t want someone to come up and remind people of the past. Of course, then, you’d have secret memory parties, where people talk about the past, and maybe someone has smuggled a scent from years ago that everyone remembers.

Of course, this would be pretty impractical for the government to do, unless they gave people a big reason to switch. There is the big stick approach—banishment—but it would have to have some positive reinforcement too. One of the creepiest things about our modern world is the way that government—unlike the predictions of Orwell or Dick—may be draconian in some ways, but it does so with a big smiling face, and a thumbs up grin. It uses positive key words, and admonishes the press for being pessimistic about items the administration wants to control the message on. In other words, it’s not all double-plus-good, it’s No Child Left Behind.

Con
But again, we’re fronted with a serious issue: How the hell do you show something from inside a persons head? It’s true his memory is visual—that’s good—and I can see scenes of overlaying his memory / visualizations with the reality, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy to spell out in purely visual terms.

Also, it reminds me a bit of the Monty Python sketch from Holy Grail where all the son wants to do is sing. The son, in this case, is the dude, and the government would be the dad wanting to marry him off and inherit the swamp kingdom.

Time to Die
In a World where death itself is beaten by genetic regeneration, a guard is killed during a riot on the prison planet. One woman—his wife—faces sure death to retrieve his body in time to bring him back to life. It’s a race against time, with one nearly resourcesless woman willfully fighting like a juggernaut against the prisoners who are holding his body hostage, and the powers that be that think she should just give up. All to simply save the man she loves from eternal death.

Pro

I like the clarity of the situation. This too is Besterian, in that here’s a character with one goal: get her husband’s body back in time to rejuvenate him, and one big problem: it’s millions of miles away on a Prison Planet under the control of the prisoners. No matter how we dress it up, this story is all about two-steps forward, one-step back, and a few impossible hurdles she manages to overcome. Along the way will be people who support her, people who think she’s crazy and dangerous (say, the people who run the prison planet), and people who care about her personally but want her to just accept that he is dead (say, an ex lover who wants her for himself?). When she reaches the prison planet, how will she get the body back from the violent felons? One goal, one strong protag, lots of blocks. Very straightforward.

Con
Could be too formulaic. We’d need a strong villian—probably a prisoner—but none is lending themselves to me right now. The trick in a film like this would be to find those moments that inscribe values and interest into a character, and make her real and three dimensional, instead of cookie cutter. Otherwise, she’s just a paper cut out of an action heroine.

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Re: The Competition: Looking Toward The Future posted by Martin

I accept your joyfully needlessly complex rules, Shockah, but I have a few questions of clarification.

Heat #2
Do we both create character studies for each piece, or only the pieces that are our favorites? I would say yes. Otherwise, I accept your rules.

Heat #3
We can create this, but I’m still not settled with the Sequence Method. Then again, I’m not really settled with McKee’s method, or Goldman’s method, or any method per se. The only method I’m comfortable with is my own person Cricket method, and I haven’t invented it yet, so the Sequence Method is fine, but you might have to give me an overview. Matter of fact, I think it would make some interesting posts to do overviews of methods, what we think of them, and what their strengths and weaknesses are. I certainly have a lot to say on the matter, and I know you would too.

Oh—but, again—I’m assuming we both write about the supporting characters and the method breakdowns for each work?

Heat #4
I have no questions about this heat. This heat is hot. It’s hot hot heat.

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Re: Motion for Consolidation [The Infected v. If It Pleases The Court] posted by Martin

Yea, I second the motion. Motion passed.

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Motion for Consolidation [The Infected v. If It Pleases The Court] posted by kza

And now I’m thinking: why have drugs, when you can have hallucinatory telepathy? (And I’m also thinking of a world not unlike Bester’s The Stars, My Destination — super-privacy, not because of teleportation, but because of telepathy.)

I, Urban Shockah, move that we combine The Infected and If It Pleases The Court into a new story idea entitled Terminal Connection.

What say you, Burley — yea or nay?

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Round 5.4 [The Infected v. If it Pleases the Court] posted by Martin

Terminal Connection! Yeah! I’m on board with that. A great title, sir.

I like the idea of the drugs and the terrors of isolation. There’s a lot of fertile ground there. And, just to be totally crazy—what if there was a little of The Infected thrown in? Terrorism would be one reason to retreat, but imagine terrorism combined with telepathy? How could you have a fair trial if everybody in the court could read your mind?

Maybe we don’t stand to vote here, but stand to combine the two ideas to birth a new one. In title math: The Infected + If it Pleases the Court = Terminal Connection.

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Round 5.3 [The Infected v. If It Pleases The Court] posted by kza

Note: think of this as having been cut & pasted over the original entry for If It Pleases The Court.

First, thanks for clarifying IIPTC — I think you pretty much swept my cons right over the edge, and now they’re falling, forever falling, without end…

And yeah, now that I get it, it’s very Dick. All it needs now is a drug trip. And in this future world, where it seems like human contact is a rare and wondrous (?) thing, I can see how turning to Chew-Z and Perky Pat dolls might be a legitimate option. (Oh My Friggin’ God, I would so love to have the rights to The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. That would be awesome.) So while the plot of this one is interesting, what gets me is how potentially scary it is — not scary in a horror sense, really, but scary in a Todd Haynes-Safe kind of way. People are isolated, cuz who knows? — the next door neighbor could be a terrorist! I mean, they’ve been known to blow up stuff, and the computer/TV says it’s terrorists, so it must be true. Better to stay inside, and do all business that way. And if that means running trials via double-blind terminal connections (hey, there’s your hacky title right there: Terminal Connection!) to ensure that there’s no bias, then dammit, that’s what we’ll do. And if I’m going to spend most of my days inside, then I’m gonna pop some pills that give me a hallucinogenic virtual reality, by gum. I don’t know why, exactly, the woman doesn’t know her husband is on trial, but I can totally see it happening nonetheless. I think a more important question is: how does she find out it is her husband?

So yeah, this is a great idea. And to be honest, it brings out the lover of tricks and gimmicks in me, as well. When knowledge (both what the character knows and what we know as an audience) is scarce, there’s lots of Memento-style games that can be played. And since I know you’re a fan of Mamet and con games, I’d think you’d try and bring some o’ dat to the party.

The pitfall of that, of course, is to become so enamored of the games that the characters, the drama, the humanity of the piece is lost. I don’t think that’s something we have to worry about too much — if anything, I think we sometimes skew too much the other way, if anyone can believe that — but it is something to look out for. And creating a world like this would be easy if we didn’t care if it was plausible or sensical — but I know we do care about that, so this will be another difficulty. (Or put another way, it’ll require using some of those Outside > In skills.) But there just seems to be so much potential for some really cool Yellow-esque scenes, that I don’t care.

I suppose I should write a spirited defense of The Infected, but the spirit does not move me. Maybe next entry, if the opportunity is still there.

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Round 5.2 [The Infected v. If it Pleases the Court] posted by Martin

The Infected (Shockah rank: #10, Burley rank: #4)

v.

If It Pleases The Court (Shockah rank: #5, Burley rank: #2)

GIVE ME ONE FOR THE GIPPER…

The Infected
In a world where telepathy is a disease and the infected are prisoners, one woman will discover a shocking truth that could change everything… but on a world where a mind can be read as easily as opening a book, how can any secret be safe?

Pro:
I love that idea of a world where everybody knows what you think. To be honest, sometimes I like to pretend that I live in a world where everybody can hear my thoughts. And then, say, that woman who is on the bus and looks at me funny, I tell her what for in my head. Sure she doesn’t turn to look, but I know she can hear me…

Um, anyway—I think all of us at one time or another have played that little game. Sad are the people for whom it becomes a reality, but I have yet been able to avoid that problem.

Like you, I see that challenge of creating the rules and regulations of the world as a welcome challenge—because reading Bester I realized that it really is okay to set some hard limits on these sorts of things. I mean, just because telepathy is everywhere, doesn’t mean that there can’t be some kind of limitations. Those limitations, which could be really fun to explore, are the crux of the story. And, I suspect, where the clever protag will be able to find her way through the seemingly impenetrable maze.

Con:
Sadly, this one suffers from being one of the first, and therefore not drawn out. We got more elaborate as we went, but I think this one needs some more detail to really pull it into contender status, for me. But the idea was so strong that I placed it on my list (pretty high, too) because i think it had a really fascinating premise. Gimme a bit more, and we can really chew on this one.

And, also as reported by you, I would have to think of a way to show visual telepathy. I mean, if Lynch couldn’t visualize it effectively…

If It Pleases The Court
In a World where crimes are judged and juried by encrypted, anonymous computer terminals, one jury foreman doesn’t realize that the man she’s arguing so strongly should be committed to the Prison Planet for life is actually her husband—and the crime he’s accused of—but hasn’t committed yet—is murdering her.

Before I dig into this one, I should clarify the scenario a bit. When I say “anonymous computer terminals” in my “In a World…” I didn’t mean computers would do the work—and I especially don’t mean that computers can predict the future—, I meant that people would be sitting at anonymous terminals—like the dumb terminals that used to connect to computer servers. Like my brain sometimes connects to my body.

Say, for instance, that a series of terrorist attacks stopped centralized gatherings of government. All business is conducted from remote locations. Juries are selected of anonymous people, who work at anonymous terminals and judge ongoing cases. But, it’s all double blind. There is no live video feed, no man-facing-his-accusers in a courtroom—just facts on a screen. Maybe those facts are video of the lawyers, but maybe it’s distorted voices. This seems bad, but it could also be an overzealous way of disallowing race, gender or ethnicity to enter into a juries decision. They can’t let a convict charm them, and they won’t be affected by threats.

In any case, this jury would be led by a woman—who, incidentally, nobody would know is a woman or what race she is—and the accused would be her husband. Is it a glitch in the system, or is it a set-up?

Pro:
You say Bester, I say Dick. Phillip K, of course. I think this is the most Dickian idea that we’ve come up with (which reminds me of a story. I had a friend who worked here in Seattle at Dicks’ Burgers. Dick’s is to Seattle what In-and-Out is to SoCal, although much smaller—there are only 5 locations or so. At Dick’s, you don’t get it how you want it, you get it how they give it to you. People used to say to him “Why can’t I have it without mustard?” His reply? “Because we’re Dick’s).

I love the logical loops and issues this brings up, and the challenge of it seems engaging to me. Not only that, but I think there’s room here for real human drama. Where is this woman’s husband? Why isn’t he by her side, and how doesn’t she know that he’s on trial? Well, maybe in a land where trials are secret, people can really keep secrets. Incidentally, there’s another reason for secrecy in the proceedings: innocent until proven guilty.

This idea originally came to my head quite a while ago as a father v. son story, and it was much more complex. I like this straighter moral drama, and the issues it can pull up. About her, about the husband, and questioning a system that seems both very right and very wrong.

Con:
Well, there’s the whole we-ain’t-Phil-Dick thing. It’s a complex story at best, and a difficult one any way you slice it. And, I confess, only tenuously connected to the Prison Planet.

Well, those may be run-of-the-mill Spitball! excuses, but I stand by them.

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Round Five [The Infected v. If It Pleases the Court] posted by kza

The Infected (Shockah rank: #10, Burley rank: #4)

v.

If It Pleases The Court (Shockah rank: #5, Burley rank: #2)

UP AND AT THEM!

The Infected
In a world where telepathy is a disease and the infected are prisoners, one woman will discover a shocking truth that could change everything… but on a world where a mind can be read as easily as opening a book, how can any secret be safe?

Pro:

Ah — in some ways, the very first Prison Planet scenario, and one clearly inspired by Bester. This could be a lot of fun, designing both how the telepathy works and how its transmitted, along with an history of how the telepathy came into being, how it affected the world, and what was done about it. Some ideas were already thrown into the ring regarding this; I suggest late-comers try here and here.

And, as Burley’s mentioned, trying to show telepathy in a visual medium like film is really hard. At worst, it comes across as really silly (see also: Dune, Phantasm II.) But rather than see this as a con, I, foolishly, welcome the challenge. I think it would be fun to find a different way to represent telepathy, and while some of my ideas toward that may end up looking just as foolish as breathy voiceovers over a picture of Kyle Maclachlan, hey, at least I’ll have tried.

Con:

Like a lot of these ideas, I had no idea what the “shocking truth” was when I wrote it, and I still don’t. No real character, either — who is this woman? What does she do, and what does she want? Is she a telepath? Is she tempted at some point to infect herself for some goal? And who are the antagonists, exactly? Right now, they could be nearly anyone or anything. This is one of the first “In A Worlds” created, and so naturally it’s much lighter than the later ones, but it’s still awfully, awfully thin.

I also don’t have a sense as to what kind of story this is. Unlike, say, the idea below, which suggests at least two ways the story could be presented, this one, right now, suggests every kind of story, or in other words, none. And while, yeah, I am talking about that bugaboo “genre” to some degree, to another degree I’m not. If I were to walk into a theater, what kind of movie would I expect to see? Or, what kind of movie would I expect to see after watching the first fifteen minutes? Is it a brainy drama? A brainy action movie? Is it wide-ranging, like Altman or Sayles? Is it intensely focused, like Peckinpah or McTiernan? Is it somehow both, like Kubrick? Is it quirky as hell, like P.T. Anderson or David O. Russell? I don’t feel like I know enough to move into any sort of direction. (And if I had some idea, I’d throw ‘em up here, but I don’t.)

If It Pleases The Court
In a World where crimes are judged and juried by encrypted, anonymous computer terminals, one jury foreman doesn’t realize that the man she’s arguing so strongly should be committed to the Prison Planet for life is actually her husband—and the crime he’s accused of—but hasn’t committed yet—is murdering her.

Pro:

This is also very, very Bester, so of course, it makes me very, very interested. What kind of movie is it, though? It could be a courtroom drama, kept to a couple rooms, with the SF aspect being less visual and more verbal. In other words, I can see it where this synopsis represents 70-90% of the story. But I’d prefer to open it way the hell up, like Bester does, eventually, with The Demolished Man — I foresee that the outcome of the trial being the end of the second act, with the woman deciding that she wants to rescue her husband from the prison planet — even if that means that he may murder her. I’d also want some kind of B plot running through this, some kind of counterpoint to the main story — I don’t know what yet, but I’m sure that wouldn’t be hard. (Well, the obvious thing to do with B plots is to run the A plot but with a different outcome — so here, a character that doesn’t fight the power structure and allows a loved one to die, and is either happy with it or it destroys his soul.)

I can also see how this could dovetail with modern issues like The War on Terror/Abu Ghraib/Sanctioned Torture. A world like this would probably be pretty peaceful… but at what cost?!!?!? And in this situation, how does one fight against the system? Our proposed plot suggests that love is the motivating factor, which would be interesting, if potentially schmaltzy — in a world where all opposing political power has been crushed, it’s funny that something subtle and ineffable as love would be the random factor that could destroy the status quo. Maybe not the best idea, but it’s something.

Con:
But then, the set-up raises up a whole slew of questions, don’t it? How did we get a justice system run by computers? Why do the computers have human juries? (The original idea says the computers are judge and jury, but we have a human foreman — I’m assuming the first part of the idea is a typo.) How is that the computers can foresee the future? (Or can they?) If they can see the future and presumably it’s true, why do they have trials? (There were no trials in Minority Report.) How is it this woman is not informed of the future crime against her?

I think there’s a theory of time and a history of this world that can answer all of these questions, but at the same time, that’s a tall order — most stories only have to deal with one or the other. Is this something we want to tackle, or is it a bit too big for this project?

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Re:[5] Round Four: Rise and Vote, gentlemen and scoundrals posted by Martin

Did I call you out?

No, you didn’t—I don’t think you had a problem with it, but some readers did, and also I think some people made comments during a live reading we had, although I’d have to dig through my notes to remember. But since we’re talking about this more, I thought I’d dig up the scene and put it out there, let people judge for themselves. It was longer originally, but got shortened when for the version that was actually submitted.

To me, the interesting thing was that people seemed to take issue with a white guy writing a black guy doing something that lots of black guys do—talking about hip-hop. But, just because lots of black guys do it doesn’t mean that all black guys do it, and therefore it’s potentially a stereotype. To our credit, this same character also did a mean Groucho Marx impersonation, so he was far from stereotypical.

In this scene, set at the fictional Bierce Academy of Visual Arts, the three characters are students: David, the black character, a painter, Bernardo, a jazz pianist from Italy, and Sharpe, a “doll revolutionary” — a bit of a full-of-himself rube and Bernardo’s roommate.

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Re:[4] Round Four: Rise and Vote, gentlemen and scoundrels posted by kza

Good post, and it reminds me of a discussion that happened between some professional screenwriters, a few months back. I’m pretty sure the order goes like this:

1. Alex Epstein

2. Craig Mazin

3. John August

And of course, there’s plenty of interesting comments underneath each entry.

Also: You got called out on the hiphop/jazz scene? I don’t remember that. Did I call you out? If I didn’t like it, I suspect it had more to do with a digression in a script that was already full of digressions. But the content of it — I remember it being solid, and no different than what, say, Robert Christgau or Charles Aaron might say. Huh.

One character in Radio Golf was a carpenter. I see him and think of Jacob Lawrence’s paintings of carpenters and tools as emblematic and metaphoric of the black experience in America. Knowing this—and seeing some threads through an African American experience—does it make me any more culturally aware than other white people? Just because I know this doesn’t mean I know what it’s like to be a black guy, with all the cultural pressures from both white people and black people. If I wrote a black carpenter into a story, could it be an ode, or would it be a callous attempt to bridge a gap that is really unbridgeable?

In one draft of YELLOW (our Project Greenlight entry) we had a black character, and tried to give him some authenticity. In one scene that I wrote, this character David was trying to explain hip-hop to a jazz student who didn’t get it. I got completely called out by every body who read it. It could be that the scene sucked, but I don’t think we’ll ever know because the idea of a white guy writing a black guy talking about hip-hop made the readers way too uncomfortable to even give it a fair reading. I personally thought that I did a good job of it, but then so would a totally ignorant guy having the same experience.

On the other hand, Shockah and I specifically avoided giving any characters race in another draft. Is that better or worse? It’s relying people’s abilities to see past cultural assumptions when they read it, but if we cast a black guy as a character that wasn’t written as a black guy, is that actually a bit worse since we could have given him some cultural queues that would make him more authentic? Or, do we draw the character loose enough that the actor can bring those to the table?

And then you have the damn-the-torpedoes attitude based on crunchy idealism that says “I’m going to do it because it’s right, and damn the cultural issues!” Which, essentially, is what this recent blog entry on the Huffington Post says. I can’t say I disagree with her, but her whole attitude is downright annoying and unrealistic. Race and identity are nuanced, and a perky we-can-do-it-for-equality attitude doesn’t really get you so far. Just ask the some serious film fans (I’m a lightweight compared to those around me, but I’m happy to be in their learned company) what they thought of Crash.

In the end, I think the best we can do is raise some of these issues as best we can, and hope that it reads well from both sides of the issue. That we’re neither racist, nor pandering to the mainstream, nor being insensitive, nor too culturally aware, nor too culturally unaware, nor…well, they go on forever. But, in this case, to write about a Chinese ruled America, we’d have some serious research to do.

Because if we didn’t, it would be like the standing ovation at tonight’s performance of a great cast in a great play on an off night by white audience. A standing ovation of guilt. If I don’t stand, will they think I disapproved of the play and think I’m racist? And if I don’t write this character correctly, will they think that I [fill in the blank]?

Until we can rid ourselves of those voices, we won’t be ready to write it and do it justice. Until then, Chimerica is Chelved.

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Re:[3] Round Four: Rise and Vote, gentlemen and scoundrels posted by Martin

I wanted to post a few more notes about this short, but interesting, round. The way I see it, we had two very strong choices, and in the end we chose one over the other because it was much less daunting. We both agreed, I think, that Chimerica would have been dirt cool, but would have taken a level of cultural knowledge and sophistication that we either lack, or were daunted by the research.

I was thinking about that tonight, as I went to see a production of August Wilson’s Radio Golf. Wilson was a Seattle writer who wrote a 10 play cycle, each one about the African American experience during a decade of the 20th century. Radio Golf—the play set in the ’90s— deals with a good man, trying to do the right thing in the face of moral odds. He’s not caught by his own dirty pool, or caught trying to pull a fast one, but when circumstances he can’t control make lemons, he turns on the juice press. Well, at least until somebody tries to cut the electricity.

This, of course, an amazing play (although tonight’s performance was just off a notch—a great cast doing a great play on an okay night), that serendipitously speaks to exactly what we were facing. That is, writing racial identity authentically. August Wilson was a black man writing about black issues, but writing about histories he himself didn’t live. He didn’t live the black experience of the 1920s, but he wrote about them (ostensibly—I’m a bit shy to say that this is the first of his works I’ve seen) from a cultural understanding. Is it less authentic if he wrote about white characters? Is it less authentic if Shockah and I wrote about black characters?

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Re:[2] Round Four: Rise and Vote, gentlemen and scoundrels posted by Martin

Yeah. The Atheist.

More on that later. 4 for 4 we are!

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Re: Round Four: Rise and Vote, gentlemen and scoundrels posted by kza

No need to apologize, sir. I was ready for this one before it began. (There’s one coming up that’s like that, too.)

I, Urban Shockah, the ever-lovin’ mic rockah, vote for:

The Atheist.

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Round Four: Rise and Vote, gentlemen and scoundrels posted by Martin

At the risk of feeling like when I’m leading we go to vote fast, I think we’re ready to roll on this one. Urban Shockah—stand up and declare your intention. Rise to vote, sir.

Heat #2 (8 stories, 4 battles): While we could keep the matchup chart the way it has been (so, in other words, Rasputin would take on La Commune Planet in this heat), I thought, “why not just randomize it again?” I suggest that the I take the winners of the first four battles (since they included my Top 4 selections, even though they didn’t all make it) and you would take the bottom four (which had your Top 4 selections) and we’d order them, #1-4, and I’d match my #1 vs. your #4, and on up the line, until your #1 was battling against my #4. In fewer words, just like how we did it in heat #1.

The other looming issue is the adding of additional info to the story ideas. Clearly, some have been thought-out better than others, and some (the ones that fight the longest) have more info attached to them — but that shouldn’t necessarily be an advantage. (Or put another way, there should be some attempt to level the field a bit.) I propose that for this and the other heats, there should be some other requirements for the battle, other than the usual Pro/Con discussions.

For heat #2, I think the new requirement should be a description, preferably somewhat lengthy, of a main character. What do I mean by lengthy? I’m not entirely sure, but I’m thinking about one single-spaced page worth. (Too much? Too little?) And the character bio should, actually, not be about the plot of the story so much — that can come later. Instead, it should probably cover everything up until the story starts.

Heat #3 (4 stories, 2 battles): Along with the usual Pro/Con debates, and any other discussion about the characters that were created in the previous heat, we will also include a very brief plot outline, using the principles of the Sequence Method: a couple sentences for each sequence, and a couple sentences for the Point of Attack, Predicament, Main Tension, Point of No Return, First & Second Culminations, Third Act Twist/Tension, and Resolution.

Also: maybe this is where we detail some of the supporting characters as well. Perhaps not a page, but a couple paragraphs apiece. Or is that too much for this stage?

Heat #4 (2 stories, 1 battle): For the final battle, each of us will compose a lengthy and detailed treatment for each story — I’m thinking about 3 single-spaced pages worth. The treatment will cover the entire plot, in as much detail as is necessary to communicate both the actions and the atmosphere of the story. (Since these posts will no doubt be long, it should probably be one post per treatment.)

Anyway, that’s kind of what I was thinking. Suggestions?

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The Competition: Looking Toward The Future posted by kza

Seeing’s how we’re about half-way through the first heat of the competition, I thought it might be a good idea to look ahead and see if there’s anything we want to change for the next three heats. I had a few ideas — tell me whatcha think.

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Round 4.2 [Chimerica v. The Atheist] posted by kza

Chimerica (Shockah rank: #4, Burley rank: #5)

v.

The Atheist (Shockah rank: #4, Burley rank: #1)

C30, C60, C90, GO!

Remember when I said I wasn’t going to look at Burley’s entry before I wrote my own? Well, I already fucked that up. I got wind that Burley put up a new post, and was so excited that I jumped in and read it before I realized I said I wasn’t gonna. Turns out my excitement was justified — it was a great post that really got to the heart of both ideas.

Chimerica
In a world almost exactly like our own, America has lost its place as the prime superpower, and China has taken over. Chinese language and customs have been absorbed into American culture, and have irrevocably changed the face of the country. The cold war between China and India is heating up, and when a terrorist act is committed on Chinese soil, the culprits are traced back to America. China puts a lockdown on America, sending in troops to root out the terrorist cells and throwing the country into a state of emergency. One family will witness everything, from the beginning of the invasion to the terrifying aftermath, and will try to hold onto one another as everything they hold dear.

Pros:
True story: I didn’t realize the pun in the name until several hours after writing the blurb. But of course, once I saw it, I realized that the idea of a chimera, an illusion, had to be a key theme of the story.

Anyway, this, or something like this, needs to be written. I can’t think of a better way of dealing with, and expressing my anger and frustration with the Faux News, jingoistic side of America that dominates the discourse. It’s also our only “alternate reality” idea, and I like those a lot.

Oh, and because Burley requested it (and this another off-the-top-o’-my-head deals): intro of Chimerica > intro of our main character, a family man who’s just lost his job > his wife has a business that deals with the Chinese (clear rip of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle — of course, the same could be said of the idea in toto) > his daughter is studying in China, and is dating the son of an important official > daughter is under pressure to keep the sordid details of her family hidden; she could marry this guy and pull the family out of the hole they’re in > his son, 17 or so, is distant to him > terrorist attack on Beijing > family man suspects oldest son of being in a terrorist cell > wife’s business suffers > daughter’s relationship suffers > man can’t find job > Chinese invasion of America > there’s a curfew > there’s violence on the streets > family man discovers that son really is in a terrorist cell > family man could turn son into the authorities > decides not to > daughter, in order to salvage relationship, turns in the son > but the son’s cell goes through with plot > Chinese respond with a nuke > The End. (oh, and > wife something something, in the middle there, somewhere.)

Cons:
My god, this would be fucking hard. The sheer amount of research just to make it even remotely plausible is intimidating, to say the least. I’m not against research — although I think research should be primarily about making the characters seem true-to-life — but in this case, the setting itself is a kind of character (in that you’d have to explain it like you would a character, unlike, say, a story that takes place in modern day, where it could be taken for granted) and I don’t even know where I’d begin. Burley at least has a smattering of knowledge about Chinese culture — I know nutzink.

I also see this as (despite my quickie plot, above) kind of a multi-character piece, not so much like Altman, but something like Traffic — we’d need to see a couple different stratas of characters, and I think it would be important to have at least one character be Chinese, so we could see this world from their eyes. I’m considering this a con because it seems more difficult to do than the traditional “one protagonist” kind of story, even though it would be super-cool to pull off.

But mostly, what my quickie plot reveals to me is that this is the ultimate Outside > In script — any conception of characters seem pointless if we don’t have a concrete idea of what the world is. Clearly, this makes me uncomfortable :-)

Inna final analysis, I don’t think I’m ready to write a script like this.

The Atheist
In a world devout to an all powerful god, one man uncovers exposes an unspeakable truth: their planet wasn’t carved by a deity, it was created to hold the most dangerous prisoners in the galaxy: their ancestors. What crime is so unspeakable that not only you will be punished for committing it, but all of your heirs will as well? And what happens when you find out that your captors are still watching your every move?

Pros:
What’s cool about this is that there’s the possibility of doing a SF story where there are no obvious SF visual markers — if you turned the sound down, it’d look like a drama. Call it Ingmar Bergman’s Contact. Or Ingmar Bergman’s Independence Day. (Did I hear the sound of heads exploding, out there in the Internet?) Except maybe at the end. I suppose there has to be an confrontation at the end between the protagonist and the aliens, just so we know what the truth of the matter is — but for the most part, it seems to me like a story that’s about one guy on a quest, and how that quest affects his relationship to his family, his society, and his sense of self. What’s funny to me is that while, on some level it is a skewering, on another level, all the old myths, legends, and creation stories are true — just not in a way that the true believers thought. We’re all the ancestors of intergalactic prisoners, and are condemned because of them? Sounds like original sin to me. I’m thinking he starts as a hardcore atheist, but comes across the truth of the situation, which puts him in a weird place, antithetical with both his fellow atheists and the followers of the various religions.

So yeah, to me, this is a “Dark Night of the Soul” kind of story, with an SF twist. (Note to self: should probably rent Bergman’s Winter Light post-haste.)

Another thought: maybe it isn’t important what the crime is. Maybe, this being aliens and all, maybe it’s something that’s simply not possible for humans to comprehend.

Another thought: it’s possible that our whole premise is actually a pull-the-rug-out-from-the-audience plot twist, not unlike, say, The Rapture.

Cons:
Still needs a character, still needs some kind of plot, some sequence of events to put the character through — but I’m not that worried. The biggest problem, I think, is how to present the evidence of the Earth’s true nature. And why is it that this one guy is privy to the truth, but no one else is? (The idea of evolution/mutation is a great one, and could possibly provide a clue.) Is the truth archaeology-based? Messages from space on a computer? Does the protag have a Melvin & Howard-esque encounter with a real alien? It’s likely that my usual refrain, “It’s The Character, Stupid!” will provide answers or leads to these questions, but it still bugs me that I don’t have a clear idea of how this is going to work.

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Round Four [Chimerica v. The Atheist] posted by Martin

Chimerica (Shockah rank: #5, Burley rank: #8)

v.

The Atheist (Shockah rank: #4, Burley rank: #1)

BATTLE!

n. A method of untying with the teeth of a political knot that would not yield to the tongue.
-Ambrose Bierce

Chimerica
In a world almost exactly like our own, America has lost its place as the prime superpower, and China has taken over. Chinese language and customs have been absorbed into American culture, and have irrevocably changed the face of the country. The cold war between China and India is heating up, and when a terrorist act is committed on Chinese soil, the culprits are traced back to America. China puts a lockdown on America, sending in troops to root out the terrorist cells and throwing the country into a state of emergency. One family will witness everything, from the beginning of the invasion to the terrifying aftermath, and will try to hold onto one another as everything they hold dear.

Pros:
Oh, fuck man—America is down! This is not so hard to picture, since China owns so much of us right now. An overthrow of the US won’t come through violent revolution, but of a bit by bit sale of our interests and a slow change of our ideals over time. And a stock market collapse so drastic that we have to cash into our creditors. Oops! No more $15.00 an hour at the mill.

Plus, the pun in the name kicks ass.

It’s daunting, though, this idea. I love Chinese history, and have studied in depth the great mariner Zheng He. I have spent time in Singapore, with a population primarily descended from China, and feel like (at least more than your average American) I have an understanding of Chinese Culture. Still, I have no idea how to accurately describe an America under Chinese rule.

But, I’ve imagined something similar before. Zheng He, sailing 400 foot chinese junks a half century before Vasco da Gama sailed. They got as far as the East Coast of Africa, and there is some evidence that they sailed as far as the cape of good hope (there are some true believers who claim that Zheng He circumnavigated the globe and discovered America. I personally find those claims incredibly suspect. I’m with the scholars on this one). Imagine, though, if an armada with tens of thousands of Chinese, and hundreds of ships, some the largest wooden ships ever built, sailed into Eurpean harbors of the day? In a Europe just on the cusp of the Renaissance. I tell you, in that world it’s not hard to imagine Europeans speaking Chinese. What if the first explorers of America were running away from religious persecution, but were running away from their Chinese overlords? What if America was simply founded as a Chinese colony?

But, of course, this would be a more modern takeover. I like the idea of seeing the terrorism from the eyes of Americans—what if we were the terrorists? What would drive us to that? I have no trouble imagining an American under siege where average American’s would rise up against a controlling power.

Cons:
The biggest con for me is believability. We’d have to have Chinese language bastardizations, like Singlish—the blend of Chinese/Malay and English that Singaporeans speak. We’d have to have believable Chinese social constraints and arguments, and Chinese culture is remarkably complex.

The biggest problem would be assuming that China is like America is like India is like any super power. The relationships of class and culture are so nuanced and weighted in the Chinese culture, that we would need to tread carefully to be accurate and not just be the dumb white boys using pop-culture assumptions to make a cool script without it having any weight or nods to reality. I mean, my goal would be to watch a movie that would be riveting to a Chinese national, as well as an American.

Also, I see the struggle, but I don’t see the direct plot. Give > Me > Some > of > These > please.

The Atheist
In a world devout to an all powerful god, one man uncovers exposes an unspeakable truth: their planet wasn’t carved by a deity, it was created to hold the most dangerous prisoners in the galaxy: their ancestors. What crime is so unspeakable that not only you will be punished for committing it, but all of your heirs will as well? And what happens when you find out that your captors are still watching your every move?

Pros:
The skewering of the sacred cows! I dig this for sure. I mean, we’ll get to not only tear down a fanatical religion, but do it in a brutal way. Of course, the biggest facet of religion is faith, and what if your faith was challenged? Well then, I think we’d have three responses: 1. Some people would stop believing, when presented with evidence against. Some people would alter their beliefs to rationalize away the new evidence. 3. Some people would unflinchingly still worship the same as they always had.

I also love this idea, which comes up again and again for me, of this one guy or girl arguing against the cultural assumptions, and being maligned for it, only to find out that they were justified in their arguments. It spawns enemies from within, and more dangerous enemies from without.

You may, or may not, be disappointed to learn that I don’t have this one figured out either. I don’t know what the great crime was, or what the great secret is. I would guess that the great crime is a genocide of some sorts—or being banished because of some quarantine. Maybe the banished people are a control group being isolated to study evolution (ha! Religion and evolution in one movie, and that the evolution is imposed by the Gods in the sky?). But, whatever it is, I’m sure we can figure it out.

Cons:
What I’m not so sure how to figure out is how the confrontation between people and keepers would be. How would the aliens in the sky be represented? How would they conflict with the people on the ground? Maybe the idea is that they’re watching for signs of evolution and this kid, that I imagine leading the pack, is the first one to evolve as such. Then we could tie in to the common feeling that we’re not of this world, but of another world and we need to pass some sort of test to be brought home (i.e., follow the word of God). In any case, there are many parallels here and interesting things to play with.

But, that confrontation, as well as the reveal and the whole pace and feel, would need to be laid out. This short blurb was more of a cursory overview, so there would be some work here. But, I can totally see it working.

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Re: [3] Round Three: Rise to Vote, I Say! posted by Martin

I, Burley Grymz, also vote for:

Little Black Stray.

So far we’re 3 for 3! Next round will start, most likely, tonight.

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Re: [2] Round Three: Rise to Vote, I Say! posted by kza

I, Urban Shockah, vote for

LIttle Black Stray.

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Re: Round Three: Rise to Vote, I Say! posted by Martin

You had me at “round.” I’m ready.

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Round Three: Rise to Vote, I Say! posted by kza

I think I have enough to info to move on.

What say you, sir?

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Round 3.8 [The Exodus vs. Little Black Stray] posted by Martin

Okay, I get you. On Exodus, you need something solid to hang the plot on, and feel that this is the requirement for proceeding. I say that we either move forward under the assumption that we can do that, or go with Little Black Stray because that one already, as you said, has a strong enough plot that we will likely not run into the same problem there.

Obviously Little Black Stray isn’t perfect yet, but I’m feeling much more confident about us being able to figure some of the things out that it needs.

Also, don’t forget, which ever of these moves ahead will get another hearing. These issues can be addressed in more depth then, I say. And, if it ends up being a real favorite, it may get more than one hearing.

Still, if you’re saying that you need more information to make your choice, give us a challenge—3 ideas along X lines. Define that, and I’ll rise to define these ideas further. Or, let’s do another random brainstorm to further the ideas. Either way, or if we go to a vote, Burley Grymz stands ready.

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Round 3.7 [The Exodus vs. Little Black Stray] posted by kza

I would argue, as I am right this very second, that we don’t need to decide on the plot exactly right now.

Ah, but I’m not at all talking about plot. I’m simply talking about a one- or two-word idea that would hold the concept of the space stations together. I don’t need to know what it’s about in terms of “what happens to the characters”, I just would like to know what it’s about in terms of theme. (And to contrast, I don’t really know what that is for Little Black Stray either, and I don’t feel I need to know, because I feel like the conflict will suggest something concrete soon enough.)

That assumption is that the event of the girl showing up is the (to speak McKee) is the inciting incident, and therefore the plot has to rise precipitously into some magical realm of genius that we may not possess.

Actually, I have been assuming that, to use the sequence method of structuring, that the girl is the predicament (the thing that happens on or around page 30), not the inciting incident, or, as I prefer, the point of attack, which is the thing that happens on or around page 15. So, that, yes, the bulk of the story (the second act) is about the girl. I think what I’m looking for is, what is this third act, and what makes it cool? Or in other words, I think I agree with everything you said, we’re just using different terms.

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Round 3.6 [The Exodus vs. Little Black Stray] posted by Martin

The horror. The horror.

The horror is on fire. We don’t need no water let the mo….

Ahem. Yes, The Exodus

Upon which, I sir must raise an objection. Quoth you:

…I think one strong idea, theme if you will, needs to be selected for this one to move on.

Wrong, I say, wrong! I would argue, as I am right this very second, that we don’t need to decide on the plot exactly right now. That there is potential for the plot is enough to know, for me, whether or not it is worthy of moving along to the next level. To be too selective about it at this stage would be to start practically writing the thing. I say we vote on the ideas on the table. I say we move it ahead, or leave it to the dogs of history, who may chew on its gristle or grab a keyboard and write the first great dog-in-space story. In other words, if you need to refine this story more in order to vote on it, then I say that such needs indicate weakness in the story itself.

And just to completely counter everything I’ve just said, let me offer an alternative for Little Black Stray

We’re both stuck in our assumptions about this work. That assumption is that the event of the girl showing up is the (to speak McKee) is the inciting incident, and therefore the plot has to rise precipitously into some magical realm of genius that we may not possess.

Here’s another suggestion: the girl coming in isn’t the inciting incident, but an extension or twist on the inciting incident. What if we do a sort of hero story, where we have our main character being one of the prisoners. The first act is about his own tribulations—maybe he’s a new prisoner. But some event convinces him that he should be the leader of the prisoners (the inciting incident). His early attempts at leadership fail miserably. Enter girl, second act about healing and getting to know her, third act about her being the leader of men, and our main character finding his place as her support system—realizing that he wasn’t supposed to be the leader, but the general in the leaders army. The uprising happens. Prisoners do what they do.

Granted, we’d still need our third act twist, and to answer the question of where she came from, but it would be less of a stress than trying to create two acts from whole cloth. So, there is an idea that can take it further.

I say stand, sir. Stand and vote.

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Round 3.5 [The Exodus vs. Little Black Stray] posted by kza

Sorry for this half-assed entry — I seem to have come down with a cold, which I can only assume is some kind symptom of post-Super Bowl depression, and my energy is pretty low. The smart thing would be to rise and vote, but I’m not ready to throw down just yet. Hell, I don’t even know who I’d vote for right now. They’re both pretty good if not quite great. (This is where a sizeable, rowdy forum would be very handy. *ahem* Come on, people!)

I’m going to pose the same question regarding both story ideas, and try to answer it, and I’m going to challenge Burley, in a half-assed, sickly kind of way, to do the same thing with the same question. (Unless he wants to vote. Or he just doesn’t want to. What can I do? I’m bundled up on the couch.) Here we go:

What is the biggest problem facing this idea — what is keeping this story from moving on?

The Exodus

We have six fairly decent character sketches by which to populate this End of Humanity scenario, and coming up with more probably wouldn’t be difficult. So while that was a concern for me at one point, it’s less of one now. I think the problem is not unlike the visual image of the story itself: it’s like a bunch of good ideas floating around each other in space. But where the space stations are orbiting the Earth, what are these good ideas orbiting around? What is the Big Idea that ultimately holds this thing together? Is it a McCarthy-esque thing? Is it faith vs. reason/practicality? Is it about conformity vs. rebellion? Right now it could be any of these, and while the final story could encompass all these, I think one strong idea, theme if you will, needs to be selected for this one to move on.

LIttle Black Stray

Again, this one right now is all juicy set-up, but it’s missing the knockout punchline. (“Knockout punchline”! Get it? I just made that up on accident! I kill myself… or I’d better before someone else does.) The characters suggest themselves, which is great, maybe even ideal for my particular way of writing. The conflict of the initial situation is so obvious, it’s almost like it’s pre-rational — I get the feeling it could be silent or in a foreign language and it would still be immediately graspable. And maybe that’s where the problem lies. Maybe the initial conflict is so potentially explosive, that finding a way to “raise the stakes” is deceptively difficult. Part of me thinks there needs to be some kind of outrageous twist half-way or two-thirds into it, something that totally reverses the conflict or revises what we thought we knew about the situation, but part of me thinks that that’s just my love of gimmicks and twists and novelties coming to the fore, and that simply following the basic situation logically and building on each moment will be satisfactory enough. Either way, it needs to build, not just simmer in place, and I’m not really sure what it’s supposed to be building to, and I think I want at least an idea of what that is before voting it through.

What do you think, Burley?

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Re:[2] Reading List: Alfred Bester posted by Martin

I am shocked that nobody has ever made these books that Shockah lent me into movies. But then again, neither was Neuromancer which always seemed like a shoe-in to me. The difference here is that Gibson wrote 20 years ago, and Bester was writing 60 years ago. Neuromancer, as prescient, important and influential as it was, will probably never be made now. The reality of the Internet trumps some of the concepts that were so mind blowing in the 1980s. By the same token, I suspect that books like Snow Crash will never be made for similar reasons (of technologies to come). But Bester’s work is much less about specific technologies, and more about human conditions. Or, when there are technologies, they are either natural extensions of reasonable ’50s technologies, or they are fantastical human technologies, such as teleportation (the conceit of this book), or telepathy (the conceit of The Demolished Man, and this book as well). Whether by plan or luck, Bester picked items that age gracefully.

He inhabits his characters with one track minds. The death of a rival, revenge. They are human emotions, set amongst supposedly grander times. But the times in The Stars My Destination are hardly utopian, unlike Demolished Man. It takes place during a war time, although it’s not about the war. It is a time of oppression of religion, and fanatical privacy, due to the fact that anybody can “jaunt” (teleport) nearly anywhere instantaneously.

Of the two books, I think I actually liked this one more. It’s richer, more complex and deeper into the characters than The Demolished Man. It feels more carefully drawn to me—less frenetic, but more measured. The ending is less gotcha, and more of a natural extension of the character.

Especially noteworthy are the worlds created—the Scientists cult that lives on resurrected space ships and have fierce tattoos (including gender symbols) on their faces.

And of course, our bully Gully—a driven, divisive and cruel lead character. Driven by a singular desire, and only briefly having passions beyond it, his actions and disregard for anything but his goal are maddening and, often, shocking.

Anybody out there know if this was partial inspiration for Burning Man?

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Round 3.4 [The Exodus vs. Little Black Stray] posted by Martin

Exodus. Oooooh, movement of the people (in geosynchronous orbit around a charred earth…).

I agree that characters are where this is at. Here are some vague ones from my idea of it.

1. An older man who is resigned to the responsibility of life. He knows that an ounce of fuel can be stretched out for x amount of hours. Let’s call him the accountant. He is by the books. The idea of an alien signal to him is anathema. He can’t let himself be excited by it, for fear that the carefully considered and reasonably sustainable society they have created will crumble into utter chaos and selfishness. If people started consuming more because they were assured of salvation, they could overplay the short run and not live to the long run. If the aliens come, so be it, but until then we should toe the line.

2. The teenage boy who is wild. He sneaks into space suits and goes out of the air locks. He turns little broken parts of ships into mechanical beasts that threaten to puncture the thin skin of the island in space. He fixes things when they break, but more often than not breaks them first so they need to be fixed. He tries to snag satellites as they fly by to see what secrets they hold. He is in love with a girl who was his playmate when they were children, but has now decided that he is too annoying to deal with.

3. A devout woman who worships the alien signal. She is convinced that it is God coming home to take the saved to heaven, because God obviously saved them once already, and was keeping them alive for good reason. She mostly hides her religion in this secular society until the alien signal comes, and then she starts leading a church service, forming a political force to be reckoned with.

Little Black Stray

I get what you’re saying about this. You were hoping I was gonna pull something grand out of my sleeve, and when I didn’t it makes this idea less exciting. I would reply that even though I don’t have that answer yet doesn’t mean that we can’t come up with that exciting thing, if you felt it was absolutely required of the story. Actually, I think it would be necessary. I only see the first quarter-to-half of the movie about the prisoners and the girl, and then the revelation gets dropped and it turns everything on its head.

As for it being like a Western: Yes! It is—and I think this is actually important, to some degree. But it will need some things that are of its world. Believe it or not, I’m also kind of thinking of the movie Holes, but not about kids and with more adult content. And not as goofy. And not about holes.

Anyway, it’s important because the core story is portable. It could work in a Western (although the chastity of the female character might play a bigger role then), it could take place in space, it could take place anywhere that a group of men are being held against their will and forced to labor. What if a train building crew in the old west found a woman? What if British and American prisoners in Southeast Asia during the WWII prisoner of war camps found a woman?

You get the idea. But, here’s the rub, I agree with you that it needs something more. It needs something that sets the stage better, and places it firmly in the Prison Planet world. I’m sorry I don’t have the magic story yet, but rest assured that I know we could tackle that beast. Er, I mean—of course I have that all figured out. I’ll tell you later if this one gets picked and goes all the way. Until then, it will have to remain a secret…

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Round 3.3 [The Exodus vs. Little Black Stray] posted by kza

You bring up some good ideas for The Exodus (the idea that there would be an unholy pressure to conform is astute, and intriguing), but I’m still not quite feeling it. You say it’s ripe for characters (and it is, or at least, it has to be), but then what are those characters? (Obviously, that question is directed at me just as much, if not moreso, than you.) I put up some ideas in my first post, but I’ll be the first to admit that they’re uninspired at best. Let’s brainstorm spitball a few characters for The Exodus:

(Did I really just write “brainstorm”? Shame on me!)

1. One of the characters believes that the end is nigh, and runs a Palace of Pleasure for the citizens to indulge their whims. But one day, while dealing with one of his casinos, he meets a woman who believes that the Earth can be made livable again. They get into a huge argument — her belief threatens him — but finds himself falling in love with her. He really wants to believe that she’s right, and eventually spends all his capital — his business, his time, his energy — into trying to make her dream a reality.

2. Another one of the characters is a teenager who was born on the space station. She’s hitting puberty and is reacting badly to the glumness, hopelessness, and self-destructiveness of the adults around her. The alien signal gives her hope — it’s a mystery, something to project ideas of a new life onto. But her parents believe there’s no shame in admitting that the human race is over with, and plan to kill themselves — and her — before long.

3. The last character is charged with the responsibility of keeping the space stations running and under control. Anything that threatens the status quo, whether it be back-to-the-Earth movements or suicide cults, needs to be squashed. Then he finds out that his wife has discovered an alien signal that could mean renewed hope for the stations and humanity. But it’s iffy. Does he risk the safety of the stations to make an exodus towards the alien signal, or does he cover up the alien signal? Regardless what he does, how does it affect his relationship with his wife?

Did that help, or did that help kill it?

Speaking of which, I was all prepared to back Little Black Stray (still am, for the most part), but, at the risk of sounding prematurely critical, your “pro” entry muted some of my enthusiasm for it. Perhaps my expectations were too big — I think I thought that since it was your idea, you were holding back something big. But now I’m wondering, for this one: why a prison planet? Why SF? This could just as easily be (and might be better as) a Western — the girl shows up at a mining camp or an all-male town. Nothing wrong with that per se — I’d write or watch that version — but I was expecting a “leap”, if you will, to another level. It still feels earthbound. Does that make sense? I feel like it needs something “big”, probably tied into some kind of SF concept (but maybe not), in order to fully back.

(And to be clear: everything you said in your post about Little Black Stray had me nodding in agreement. The problem was, I felt like there was an “And?…” at the end of it, that went unanswered. I hope that makes sense.)

(Let me try and be clear again, cuz I’m not entirely sure if it’s coming out right: You completely nailed all the subtext and themes and character stuff that would go into this, but what I was missing was the element that I’d read in a TV Guide synopsis and go, “Cool! I wanna watch this!”)

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Round 3.2 [The Exodus vs. Little Black Stray] posted by Martin

The Exodus (Shockah rank: #7, Burley rank: #6)

v.

Little Black Stray (Shockah rank: #3, Burley rank: #4)

GET IN THERE AND LET THEM SEE YOUR TEETH!

The Exodus
In a world where the Earth is nothing more than a black cinder, the last surviving humans live on orbiting space stations, trying to make the best out of an impossible situation. Some are resigned to being the end of the human race, some think the Earth can be rebuilt and repopulated… and one scientist thinks he’s found a signal from an alien race. Are they really out there? Can they save the human race? But presenting the evidence will start a civil war in space, and threaten to end humanity prematurely.

Pros
In a world where there is no world…

Here he goes with the goddamned questions again. What would a floating life raft look like? Did they have time to organize when they left the scorched Earth? Or, is their craft a collection of mish-mashed space ships, old satellites and asteroid detritus? Do they have locomotion at all? Of course, then I get down to the questions that are really fun to ask, but completely futile: how do they process their waste and water? What about generating electricity and warmth? Artificial gravity?

Of course, the real fight here is pessimism vs. optimism. Or, in the non- religious -political sense, conservatism vs. liberalism. Resign to your fate, or fight until the end? There are good questions to ask there. I would see our simple greater-than story line something like this:

Group aboard spaceship has managed to stabilize life and chores > people get bored > some people start freaking out > other people start having chaotic fun > scientists ponder and argue > alien signals picked up > scientists argue over whether they are real > self-contained community destroys itself.

This could be a re-telling of the Salem Witch Trials, or the McCarthy hearings, or any other compressed society situation. There would be ridiculous social pressure to conform, which (of course) would spawn some wicked non-conformists. I can totally see this as a stage drama, where the play is about the process rather than the events.

But, as a movie, I think you’d need events. You’d need to take the characters—at least some of them—somewhere. But what if some couldn’t overcome their fear, and it turned into crazed sabotage? How feudal would things get? How mammalian? This one is ripe for the characters, that’s for sure.

Cons

Both of today’s movies I see pretty clearly, and I don’t feel the drawbacks as much. When I’m judging these things, my cons inevitably turn into “would that be a drag to do?” Even if the overall plot is worth the dragging, how much drag-space does the idea present to me? These have very little drag space. I think both would be fun to work on.

Believe it or not, originally I was going to fight for Little Black Stray to the death, but the more I started trying to keep an open mind and find my way into the idea of The Exodus, the more I like the damn thing. I like the compression and containment of it. I like the pressure-cooker aspect of it. I like that you can control the very air the characters breathe, and therefore the story and plot can turn in dramatic ways very quickly.

I’m not saying that I like it as much as Little Black Stray. Tonight I’m saying I like them both equally.

Little Black Stray
In a World where violent male offenders are sent to labor camps on the remote prison planet, one crew of hardened men finds something impossible: a young woman in tattered clothes, mute and frightened. A small group protect and feed her, keeping her out of sight of the guards and away from those who would use her mercilessly. As she gains in strength it seems that she has an agenda—and the truth of what she was doing on a world where no women stepped before might be a big enough secret to shatter the whole planet of forced labor.

Pros
But I love this idea too. As Shockah mentioned, there is the gender thing. But even more than that, there is an interesting exploration of masculinity and the different expressions of it. That is to say, I see some of these characters as treating the woman as a big brother might—protecting her and defending her. Some would treat her as a potential mate might, trying to woo her, and also defend her. Some would try to treat her as a possession, thus requiring the services of one and two. Some of the men, in this society, would take the roles of women, and if they did what would they say about the real woman in their midst?

But what if she could take care of herself? What if she took no shit, but was only too sick to defend herself to begin with? My ideas for the secret are not-so-well-formed at this point. I like if she’s an android, but it takes a while to learn. Or, that she was somehow left to die. Maybe she was brought to the planet for a specific reason—slavery? hostage?—and she escaped, but couldn’t go any longer.

But mostly with this, I very much am feeling the song it’s based on. If you haven’t read the lyrics, I might recommend it—but these lines especially resonated with me:

Confess all that you’ve seen
Confess with one of all your tragic misdeeds

See the sun wrestle with your door
See the sun wrestle with your door
Trembling stray, this is now your home

I also imagine her character having a great weight on her shoulders—an impossible situation. It’s a tragedy, in some ways, and it’s all she can do when she realizes that not only did she escape, but she’s still alive and feels the pain of her events too deeply.

But, then, with this new crowd of people to back her up, maybe she can gather the strength to take on the opposition.

I mean, what if the true criminals on the planet were not the prisoners, but the people who put them there or kept them there? What if, despite their differences, this movie becomes about this diverse and violent group of men uniting under her leadership to overthrow some power? Then we have the story of them finding her, healing her, hiding her—and then being trained, led—and maybe even betrayed by her—no. Probably not that, but she changes their lives. The rule with this story would be that everybody she encounters changes for the better, whether they like it or not.

In any case, my greater-than is:
Hard labor prisoner life is established > Prisoners find woman nearly dead > nurse her back to health and hide her > she recovers, is traumatized and holds / can’t remember secret > men protect and spark memories / gain confidence > she reveals awful truth > prisoners rise up under her lead, including those who tried to rape her > big confrontation happens.

Cons
I’m totally low on cons tonight. If the lord of Screenplays descended right now (Goldman? Are you listening?) and said that it was law we had to pick one of these and start writing, I’d be really psyched. Maybe I’m just in a good mood tonight and glossing over what I know will be two difficult stories, but both of these seem really clear to me. To be clear, I know there would be issues with both of them, but I’m just feeling optimistic about overcoming those issues, and that I think it might even be as enjoyable as writing YELLOW [our Project Greenlight entry screenplay] was.

If you rise to vote, sir, I will have some terrible thinking to do.

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Round Three [The Exodus vs. Little Black Stray] posted by kza

The Exodus (Shockah rank: #7, Burley rank: #6)

v.

Little Black Stray (Shockah rank: #3, Burley rank: #4)

DROP IT LIKE IT’S HOT!

NOTE OF TRIVIA: This is the first battle where both ideas have Top 8 ranks from each of us.

The Exodus
In a world where the Earth is nothing more than a black cinder, the last surviving humans live on orbiting space stations, trying to make the best out of an impossible situation. Some are resigned to being the end of the human race, some think the Earth can be rebuilt and repopulated… and one scientist thinks he’s found a signal from an alien race. Are they really out there? Can they save the human race? But presenting the evidence will start a civil war in space, and threaten to end humanity prematurely.

Pro
For some reason, I like stories that start out with a real depressing premise or world. Doesn’t get more depressing than this, does it? The Earth is scorched, presumably not a living thing left on it (although some still have hope and are looking for it), and the last humans are stuck in floating aqualungs orbiting around the very thing they helped destroy. Good job, guys! But maybe what I like about these kind of stories is that, since we start at the bottom, there must be some kind of hope to chase after, else it’s about people hanging around, waiting to die. (There are movies like that, which I’m less fond of, I think.)

And chasing after hope is part of “the human condition” — a good and worthy theme to build a story around. But let’s get down to what’s really cool about this:

Space stations.

Space stations are awesome. They’re like shopping malls in space. Who wouldn’t want to go to the Gap or Best Buy in space? Not me, that’s for sure. (Not that they’d have these stores up there — I don’t think, at least — but they are self-sustaining communities and they’d need to be visually tolerable for the people stuck there. Or maybe the original Dawn of the Dead messed me up. That would explain why I’ve always wanted to see a “zombies in the space station” movie.) And I like the idea of spending time thinking about and designing these space stations, since it looks like 90% of the story takes place on them.

And then throw in the idea that’s there like 3 or more of these space stations, each with its own politics (within and between the other stations) and goals, and it sounds like fun. (Meaning: one of them has to blow up.)

Con
Character stuff seems a little light. Certainly there’s some kind of scientist character who finds what appear to be alien signals, but the rest of it is pretty wide open. Also, it seems like a story that lends itself, for good and ill, to stereotypes: the gruff space station captain who only wants what’s good for his citizens, the idealistic scientist, the headstrong rebel who screws it up for everyone else, the love interest who’s probably on a different space station. It’s all so very anime, and I mean that in a bad way.

I’m also wondering if the extreme, uh, “containedness” of the premise might get a little boring after awhile. There’s really only a few locations: space between the stations, space way away from the stations, maybe the dead surface of earth, and of course the stations themselves (which admittedly are made up of a bunch of sublocations). Maybe not a real big deal — maybe that kind of claustrophobia is exactly the point — but I think my subconscious is trying to warn me about this.

And I just realized I have a theory about the “con” sections of these battles, at least on my side. More on that later.

Little Black Stray
In a World where violent male offenders are sent to labor camps on the remote prison planet, one crew of hardened men finds something impossible: a young woman in tattered clothes, mute and frightened. A small group protect and feed her, keeping her out of sight of the guards and away from those who would use her mercilessly. As she gains in strength it seems that she has an agenda—and the truth of what she was doing on a world where no women stepped before might be a big enough secret to shatter the whole planet of forced labor.

Pro
GENDER ISSUES! GENDER ISSUES! GENDER ISSUES! Gender issues are awesome — they’re another key component of that thing we call “the human condition”, and as drama, they’re practically inexhaustible. Men and women are gonna be bitching about each other for the next thousand years, just as they have since the beginning of time. And I know it’s a topic of some interest to both Burley and me.

So what we have here is a planet not just full of men, but full of machismo and testosterone, and full of violence and danger because of it. What happens when they come into contact with a woman, someone who is (at the outset, presumably) the complete opposite of them? Although we already know in the abstract, what makes it interesting is how her appearance affects the various male characters. Does she change them? Do some make a concerted effort to not change? Are one or more of the men changed from aggressors to protectors? Does the presence of the woman change some from somewhat docile to violent and aggressive? Basic stuff, yes, but the point is, there’s a wealth of opportunity to explore characters, which is what it’s all about, innit?

Another thing I like, something it has in common with the upcoming Methane Madness, is the plot device of “prisoners must keep secret from wardens”. Don’t know why that appeals to me so much — watching “Hogan’s Heroes” as a kid? — but it’s a great way to introduce some objective tension to a story that seems to be primarily about subjective tension.

(An explanation: one of the screenwriting books I’ve read points out the difference between the kind of conflict/tension that a viewer can pick up without any knowing what’s happened in the story previously or even the language — for example, if we see uniformed guys with guns chasing and shooting at another guy running away from them, we don’t need any special knowledge to understand what each party wants in the scene. But there can also be moments, say like one character gives another character a present which makes him break down and cry, where we need some background info to totally make sense of the scene. I don’t remember what the book called them, so for now, it’s objective and subjective tension.)

Finally: isn’t this the first idea up for battle that actually has, y’know, a prison planet in it?

Con
Okay, I’ll admit: I have no freakin’ idea what the secret agenda/big twist to this story is going to be. Presumably, Burley does, but if he’s anything like me, he just wrote it because it sounds good :-) In the interest of being proactive, I offer three (3) stupid, outrageous-as-possible ideas for a secret, composed as quickly as I can:

1. She’s actually a man! Or more precisely, she’s been genetically changed, from a male prisoner to something not-quite-man-but-not-really-woman-either-but-shares-some-of-the-characteristics-of-a-woman-though, and it’s all a experiment by the scientific mucky-mucks to see if they can eliminate crime. Or something. (If Burley knows me, he knows I like gender-bending as a theme.)

2. There’s a female prison camp on the other side of the planet, and it’s even more fucked up than the men’s camp! Can the two sexes come together and throw off their oppressors? Or something.

3. She’s an alien superpredator! And she’s going to implant her seed, seahorse-style, into the captives of the camp and turn them all into mindless, pregnant zombies! Or something.

Oh, and one last thing: even some similarities are inevitable, I don’t want this to be OZ in Space. Maybe it starts out like that, but it should eventually shed it, like a chrysalis.

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