is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Monday
Apr 24, 2006

Round 10.2.5, Part One [Rasputin the Translator v. Time to Die] posted by Martin

Great post—I’m totally digging your breakdown—it shows that this guy won’t be a pure terror/evil type. He has some method to his madness, and the base of a loving relationship as a child. The self-righteous grandparents are great too. And Florida flooding, I laughed out loud. Sorry Florida—don’t take it personally—I don’t really want to see you drown. I mean, damn Florida, I love you. Don’t be like that.

I think the vision of neon is great—and that story about the street kids is amazing. It’s amazing how fast the adult fantasies of idealized childhood go out the the window, and we see kids become a microcosm of the paranoid adult world we build and shape around us.

This is interesting commenting on a different character and thinking about how they might dovetail with the character I did the bio for in the movie—this feels so much smoother than working on the same character and having to deal with the things that don’t fit in with your vision of the character. We’ll play it by ear, but I might just pick other characters than you do in the next round.

Also—to our readers, a bit of a confession. Shockah and I met for coffee yesterday (in the awesome Cafe Fiore on top of Queen Anne Hill), and amongst the talk of Project Rockstar the game, the state of software in general, and a few upcoming things for this here blog, we discussed a few plot points on this story. I assure you, it wasn’t conspiratorial—we didn’t mean to keep them off the blog, it was just our unbridled excitement over what’s to come.

Exciting it is, but since we said we’d have everything up here, I present you the bullet points:
1. We talked about how the villain in this case is motivated by necessity of survival, and doesn’t necessarily see himself as a bad guy. He’ll be sympathetic to the heroine, and want to help her, but can’t. Either way, they have an alliance of sorts.
2. There will be a warden character who symbolizes the bureaucracy, and will ultimately be foiled.
3. Shockah asked how I saw it ending. Since we’re not telling the story here, but writing it, here’s my spoilers: I see the ending being Okkervil sacrificing himself so that the guard can live. He’ll end his arc by coming to terms with the fact that it was his choice all along to do evil, despite the fact that he felt it necessary. The killed guard will come back to life, but we’ll never meet him. We’ll know nothing of his story. We talked about the opening of the movie being the guard running and being killed, and the ending being his opening his eyes to see his wife.

Shockah? Did I forget something?

Oh—here’s something I didn’t forget: you still owe me an essay, and someday before too long, I’m gonna come a ringing to collect. When you least expect it. Bam!

Comments (0) — Category: the screenplay

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What is Spitball!?

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

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

What Spitball! used to be

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

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

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


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Kent M. Beeson

Urban Shockah pic

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

Martin McClellan

Burleigh Grimes pic

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