is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Tuesday
May 02, 2006

Re[4]: A Radical Idea posted by Martin

Assuming this is correct, I vote “yea” on this plan, with the caveat that I may want to Needlessly Complicate how the winner is generated in Step 3; but that idea’s for another post.

It is correct, and I gleefully await your next addition to Needless Complexity.

What’s a magic penny song?

Are you sure you were raised in California in the 70s? I couldn’t escape this song as a kid. The Magic Penny is a song by Malvina Reynolds, whom many of you may know for song Little Boxes, which is the opening tune to the TV show Weeds. It’s pure commie propaganda tainting our children with ideas of love and giving. We should be singing Let The Eagle Soar to our children. Who wants kids to love? We want them to be tough! Anyway, I digress.

The lyrics go:

Love is something if you give it away, give it away, give it away
Love is something if you give it away, you end up having more
It’s just like the magic penny
Hold it tight, and you haven’t got any
spend it lend it and you’ll have so many
they’ll roll all over the floor

As you can see, it’s basic buddhism. Do good, and karma will repay you. Or, appealing to the lowest common denominator—greed of money—to change the lowest common behavior—greed of love. Or maybe she’s advocating orgies and gambling—not quite sure. In any case, it’s a beloved sing-song youthful ditty. You can hear the woman herself singing it on iTunes.

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What is Spitball!?

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

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

What Spitball! used to be

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

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

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


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Kent M. Beeson

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

Martin McClellan

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