Weekly Wrap-Up -- Catch-Up Edition posted by kza

Hey folks, things have been busy around both the Shockah and Grymz homesteads, which means things are gonna be real slow here at Spitball!. I’m pretty sure things are going to get more active here in the next few weeks, but until then, here’s what’s been happening:

Towards the Spitball! Tourney of Story Ideas, Shockah presented character sketches for the two story ideas under consideration, Terminal Connection and Little Black Stray. Little Black Stray so caught Shockah’s imagination, that he proceeded to write not one, but two more posts about his vision for the story, including details of a shocking and depressing ending that one reader was driven to state in the forums that she “liked it”.

Poor Terminal Connection, however, has not received the same kind of attention. However, it did lead to a brief discussion of whether precognition is involved or not. The Magic 8-Ball says, Outlook not so good.

On other fronts, Burley asked that we, and he, remember the sounds, and Shockah, hepped on goofballs (which is Mountain Dew and chocolate cake) started writing rants, in the Signal vs. Noise style, about screenwriting technique. Something about Loose Ends and Letting the Audience Do the Work. Yes, there will be more.

And there will be more genuine Spitballing! as well. In the next few weeks, we’ll be hearing Burley’s take on some characters from the Terminal Connection and Little Black Stray universes, as well as getting to the last two stories in this heat, La Commune Planet and The Scabs. And from there, it’s just a hop, skip and a jump to the final heat, where the winner of the First Spitball! Tourney of Story Ideas will be crowned.

Be there, or be octagonal.

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Re: [2] Round 11, Part Two [Terminal Connection v. Little Black Stray] posted by kza

Yesterday, I went into some details about my vision for the Little Black Stray story idea. You can either scroll down, or click here.

Today, you’ll find some notes for the characters and their milieu, as well as the terribly depressing ending I had in mind.

(All names are placeholders.)

Griff: Movie nerds out there know that Griff is the character name that Samuel Fuller used in nearly every movie he made. Sometimes the main character, sometimes a supporting character, Griff was nearly always a guy who was painted in shades of grey; he had the ability to do heroic things, but was also very weak and could succumb to that weakness. That’s how I see this Griff — he thinks he’s tough and above emotion, and thinks he has to be to make the five. But coming into contact with the Mysterious Woman will test those beliefs, and lead him to do some awful things.

Lefty: Lefty’s been on the team for nearly as long as Griff. Six months ago, while sweeping for booby traps, Lefty was attacked by a Chomp, a robotic bear trap attached with explosives. The Chomp got Lefty’s right hand and blew up. While this kind of thing is always dangerous, it’s not incapacitating — Lefty was stabilized, and a order was called in for a replacement right hand. The hand arrived; unfortunately, it was another left hand. Lefty’s figured out how to use the second left hand so it’s almost as good as a normal right hand, but it’s still annoying to him. However, he does get a kick out of freaking out the new guys.

Geez: With a hard “g”, for “geezer”. Although, in my character sketch for Griff, I made it sound like no one has ever made the five, for dramatic purposes, I think it’s necessary for us to see both how a new guy arrives, and how someone who’s paid their dues leaves. Also, to make my ending work, I need a guy who made it out.

Despite the name, I’m not sure that Geez is necessarily an old man; it might make more sense if he were young, someone with the potential to survive, but perhaps someone’s who has prematurely aged as well. Regardless, Geez is likely the nominal leader of the team — he’s seen everything, knows every possible task, and has survived longer than the rest. I can also imagine that the rest of the team actively protects him from danger — because of his wisdom, but also to renew hope — if he can make it, the others can as well. However, it will be his time to leave, and then Griff will take over.

Newb: Just as we need to see the end of the “life cycle”, as it were, we need to see the beginning as well. I see the newbies arriving in some kind of coffin-like pod (a bit of a nod to Innocence) and retrieved by the Jukes like any other piece of equipment (and it’s likely the coffin has other supplies they’re more interested in). The Newb character will, temporarily, be the audience focus character, a way for the audience to get inside the world and get their bearings. And then, in order to undercut the whole “life cycle” thing, I’d kill him off pretty quickly. The world of the Jukes is a dangerous one, and no one is safe.

Jukes: I picked this word (a slang word the prisoners use for themselves) because I needed something and it just popped into my head. Then I found this, which I’m pretty damn sure I’d never read before. Weird!

Big Mama: First, whenever I try to imagine what this thing looks like, I always end up thinking of the Big Trak. Only, you know, without a giant keypad on top of it. (Did anyone else have one of those?) It’s got to be big enough to hold fifty (or more) prisoners, and be able to navigate difficult terrain. I figure that it operates under a primitive AI that can be modified or overridden by Boss. The Jukes ask it permission for everything: to be let in, to get supplies, etc.

The Jukes work on revolving shifts, with the population split into thirds. One third does one task, one third does another, and the last sleeps. On board Big Mama, every Juke has his own chair — this is the closest a Juke has to a room. While in the chair, a pair of glasses descend from the ceiling and are placed over the Jukes eyes — this puts the Juke into an enforced sleep, so that Big Mama can do what it needs to do. This includes emptying out the Juke’s shitsuit, bathing the Juke, feed him intravenously, and run the nocturnal emissions program. Boss isn’t too fond of homosexuality, and doesn’t want to foster it (and any feelings of kinship that may accompany it), so while the Juke is under, he has a hallucination/dream of sex with a woman (the details pulled out of the Juke’s own subconscious). While this is happening, Big Mama manually stimulates the Juke to ejaculation. Yes, ick. Even more ick: what do you think Big Mama does with all that sperm?

Of course, Boss can try all he wants to eliminate emotional connection between Jukes, but it just reappears somewhere else. When two Jukes really like each other, one will challenge the other to a ritualistic knife fight, which involves shouting insults at each other, then taking turns stabbing the other. Since medical technology is pretty advanced, this isn’t as dangerous as it seems, although some Jukes can go too far in the heat of passion. When it’s over, the two Jukes are ‘together”, and woe to anyone who gets between them.

The Ending: So what happens is that Griff (and some of the others) remove or damage the Boss chips, sabotage Big Mama (possibly killing the remaining Jukes on board during sleeptime) and run away to join the Mysterious Woman (who really needs a name) and her underground society. For a brief moment, Griff experiences true happiness. Unfortunately, one of the Jukes is a spy and still hooked up to Boss, and he relays the coordinates of the society to the authorities, who destroy it with an air strike, as the spy gets Griff and the others out of there. The spy is likely killed by Griff and/or the others.

Griff is transferred to another Juke team, and serves out the remainder of his time. He makes the five. He is sent back home. He tries to reestablish contact with his family, but has no luck. Finally, he is contacted by his little brother, now five years older. The brother explains to Griff that he is no longer welcome in the family and not to bother them anymore.

Griff tries his best to settle back into society, but it’s nearly impossible. He decides to track down Geez — maybe he can help. He finds Geez living by himself in poverty in a rundown project. Geez is doing even worse than Griff, but somehow maintains the same sense of hope for the future that he had back in the Jukes. Griff takes a knife from the kitchen, and in a Caché-esque uninterrupted long shot, proceeds to stab Geez to death. Griff picks up the phone and calls the police, and then sits silently in a chair waiting for them to come. The last shot is of the Prison Planet, where Griff will be sent back to, the only place he knows how to survive.

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Re: Round 11, Part Two [Terminal Connection v. Little Black Stray] posted by kza

Hey folks, this is Shockah. Burley’s a busy little stubblebeard, and he’s not going to be able to post for a little while, giving me the keys to run the place for the time being. This is not unlike needing a babysitter at the last minute, and turning to slacker Uncle Charlie, who asks the kids, “So, any of you know how to play dice?” But I’m sure we’ll get through it okay. Right kids? Right? Kids?

So, until Burley comes back and we can have the usual discussion about the two character sketches, I’m gonna devote the time to… well, whatever comes to mind. And am willing to commit to blog.

First up: Notes on Little Black Stray.

Normally, I’d avoid posting these kind of “designer’s notes” — it’s not like this script has been filmed and there are people clamoring to know how we did it. And even it had been filmed, it might be a bit presumptuous to expect anyone to care about its genesis. But since a) this is supposed to be a open window into our process, b) I have space to fill, and c) I really like the story idea, I’ll talk a little about its influences and how I see it developing.

The idea for how the labor camp works is actually based on material I wrote over ten years ago. I had an idea for a role-playing game adventure for the GURPS system involving a group of prisoners (the players) who are forced to clear out a section of semi-post-apocalyptic Chicago. The idea was to introduce them to this prison system (the giant prison/tank that moved them from job to job, the incredibly dangerous tasks, the constant monitoring, the weird social system that developed out of these circumstances), then have them stumble upon a lab buried underneath the rubble. They’d investigate, and encounter some a race of hideous creatures — and while that was happening, the creatures would be destroying the tank and eating the other prisoners. So the players would be freed — the authorities would assume that everyone was dead — but the only way for them to proceed would be to go deeper into the lab, and look for a way back to civilized Chicago — all the while, they’d encounter even weirder and more dangerous things.

So yeah, it was just Aliens Redux, but I always liked the idea of the mobile labor camp that seemed to have every method of control worked out, but I never knew what to do with it, exactly. (I would soon decide that game writing wasn’t the life for me, and as much as I love the Bug Hunt genre, I never really wanted to write a screenplay of one.) So it sat in my head’s cold storage for years, until this story idea came up.

The difference here, of course, is that it’s set up for a Bug Hunt, like a diorama with no figures, but the bugs never come, instead replaced with a mysterious woman, sexual tension, the prospect of sexual violence, and the specter of war crimes.

I’m not exactly sure what to do with the woman yet, but what I’m leaning towards is: there’s a community living on the supposedly uninhabited planet that the government doesn’t know about, and would cause a major scandal if revealed. There’s two kinds of tension from this. One, it’s possible that the authorities will want to cover this up if they should find out about it. Second, the community would be a kind of utopia for the prisoners, if they can find a way to escape the prison and their violent natures don’t fuck it up.

If there’s a template for this movie, it’s not really Aliens, but Samuel Fuller’s great war movie Fixed Bayonets!. I’d suggest everybody watch this movie for its own sake, but if you’re interested in my vision for this story, it’s a must.

Tomorrow, I’ll go into more details about how I see the prison working, ideas for some of the other characters, some of the situations and conflicts they might find themselves in, and my proposed, Burley-will-never-let-me-get-away-with-it Super Godawful Downer Ending. Stay tuned!

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Round 11, Part Two [Terminal Connection v. Little Black Stray] posted by kza

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.

Character Sketch: John “Griff” Nakano
Relationship to Story: Protagonist

My name is John Nakano, but my Jukes call me Griff. It’s an inside joke I’m not privy to. My life was pretty cozy up until my dad died, and then suddenly we were poor. I had family to feed, so I joined the army, and that was fine for awhile. When I got out of the army and found nobody hiring, I offered my skills to the highest bidder. I killed seventeen people for money before I was caught. I wasn’t really caught, of course. I was just sold off to the highest bidder.

I am a murderer, and that’s why I’m here. I’m stationed on XAE7809, a planet in the Corinthian system. Every decade or so, one of the prefectures gets their panties in a bunch and it’s war. They pick some uninhabited planet to get fucked up, because that’s more civilized, of course. This time, 09 drew the golden ticket, and so they fight and fight and drop bombs and plant mines and lots of people on both sides die. Then, when everyone’s smiling again and the generals are shaking hands and the planet has cooled down, us Jukes go down and clean that shit up. And when it’s done, it’s onto the next one. We’re free to go once we’ve served five years. I heard of a guy that made it to three.

The men around me are dangerous. Serial killers, schizophrenic maniacs, guys with bad impulse control who are just wound too tight. I’m not crazy. When I killed, I was always calm and in control. I would never, ever let my emotions spill out and affect my work. It was just work to me. I never thought of work as something that was a large part of me. My father was the same; he was able to put his work — he was a doctor — in some kind of compartment in his head, and never let whatever happened there at the hospital impact his family. If it wasn’t for the medical books and charts and all that stuff, we wouldn’t have even known what he did for a living.

Like every other Juke here, I got a chip in my brain. Boss tells me where to go, what to do, how to do it. If I don’t know how to do something, Boss downloads it from a satellite and tells me. If I say I don’t want to do it, Boss encourages me to do it anyway by tapping directly into my nervous system and fingering my pain receptors. Boss can’t kill me, though — there’s a law against that. The Jellicoe Act. They can make you suction up chemical waste that will slough your skin right off, they can make you clean up a mine field, but they can’t kill you with the press of a button. Sometimes, though, guys just drop on the job, and given the stress, it’s probably natural. Still, you have to wonder.

The Jukes take care of themselves. Other than Boss’s voice in our heads, we don’t see anybody else, not even other teams of Jukes. There’s about fifty of us in a team, and we all live inside Big Mama. Big Mama is our home on wheels. She’s mostly automated, with a little help from Boss on high. Big Mama feeds us, bathes us, and puts us to sleep. She even jacks us off and relieves some of that tension. Big Mama also has a program that condenses a full night’s sleep into a couple hours, because Boss always has work for us. But other than that, a team’s on their own. They make their own rules, and they enforce them. There are always problems, but it usually works — your fellow Juke is your only chance of making the five.

And I’m going to make the five. When you do your five, you’re considered dead until you come back. I have to get back. My family’s there. I haven’t seen them or heard from them in almost two years. I have to show them I’m alive. I have to be there for them. I have to pay for these five years.

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Re: [4] Round 11.0004 [Terminal Connection] posted by kza

Wow. They’ve really tightened the rules on netiquette breaches.

Surely you’re familiar with the Southern California code of conduct: use-a-piece-of-polystyrene-foam-covered-with-fibreglass-and-float-on-a-wave-in-the-ocean or expire?

Same thing, bro.

If that piques your interest, then once again I offer human meat (with no synopsis).

Tom Noonan! Dude, that’s all you had to say.

Here’s an idea, cribbed from Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest:

Instead of doing so much, why don’t you do just a little?

Put another way: do you need all that exposition yer slangin’? How little can you get away with? The human mind — the audience’s mind — is built to find patterns and make connections. It’s always working, even when it seems like it isn’t, and it’s always looking for clues to make sense of the world — or your film. Why work so hard to lay out every character, every relationship, every moment of plot, when there are minds out there in the audience who will do that automatically? It’s like that NASA project to scan the universe for alien life — why try to crunch all those numbers (which’ll take forever) when you can have millions of people crunch some of the numbers with a screensaver?

An anecdote: My wife and I watched the Michael Mann thriller Collateral last year on DVD. Unbeknownst to either of us, we somehow started the film at chapter two (where we see Tom Cruise enter the office building), completely skipping what we would later discover was nearly 13 minutes of film. Were we confused by what was happening? That was the funny thing — not in the least. It was completely intelligible. And it was a pretty exciting beginning, to boot: the film started in media res, and before we knew what was going on, Tom Cruise was holding Jamie Foxx hostage. Going back over the beginning after it ended, we were surprised (and grateful) that we skipped having to hear Foxx explain his lifelong dream twice in a row.

Was it perfect? No — in fact, there was clearly a kind of emotional hole in the narrative, as we missed Foxx making a connection with Jada Pinkett Smith. But it was never in doubt that Foxx cared about Smith, and wanted to save her from Cruise. A little rewriting could have saved a lot of tedium.

How much can you cut from your script? How far can you pare it down before it’s unintelligible? Is it possible to go too far? (A: Yes. For all its austere glory, Primer could use just a smeench more exposition.) But again, remember: an audience does not go into a theater tabula rasa. They’re bringing their thoughts, memories, feelings… their entire life experience into that theater with them. Let them use that experience to fill in the spaces you’ve left intentionally blank.

And what, exactly, is the upside of this? If all this exposition is going to be cut out, what’s going to take its place?

Simple.

Anything and everything about the characters that has nothing to do with the story.

I’ll explain that… next time.

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Let The Audience Do The Work posted by kza

(Yep, it’s another Signal vs. Noise-style missive. I’m not sure why these are coming to me; some kind of pent-up frustration, I guess. And it should be noted that, despite the philosophy I’m imparting here, I’ve done the opposite of what I’m saying time and again, and I continue to do so. In other words, this is just as much for me as anyone else.)

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Round 11, Part One [Terminal Connection v. Little Black Stray] posted by kza

Terminal Connection
In a world where telepathy is a disease, and known telepaths are imprisoned, all laws are built by consensus over the internet via double-blind anonymous computer terminals to guard against undue psychic influence. One politician is called to jury duty, also conducted over computer terminals, but doesn’t realize that the accused, whom she thinks should be dealt with harshly, is actually her husband. Nor does she realize that the crime of which he’s accused, but hasn’t committed yet, is murdering her. And what would she do if she knew that when she’s deliberating, her husband could read her mind and was plotting to kill her precisely because she’s about to send him back to the living hell of forced labor known as the Prison Planet?

Character Sketch: Mary Harwood
Relationship to Story: Protagonist

2020. It’s been seven years since the Kuleshov Event unleashed a virus that cursed a portion of the population with telepathy. At first, it was easy to tell who was infected — they were the ones who were screaming about the voices in their head, the ones who went schizophrenic, the ones who killed themselves. But there were a few who were able to control their ability and keep it hidden, and they used it to get ahead, in business and in government. When researchers, looking for a cure, developed a test to determine if someone was a Patho (as they were called), it was soon revealed that the upper echelons of the governing class were teeming with Pathos, and a witch-hunt cum revolution ensued. An agency known as the SAFE Initiative was created, and the Pathos were round up and taken away to a place that had no name, but was commonly called the Prison Planet.

Mary Harwood is the owner of a successful chain of diamond and jewelry stores, but political aspirations gnaw at her. She’s already served on a number of corporate boards, and hopes to be an appointee when her friend Ronald Ek wins the governorship in the fall. She is also cozy with the SAFE Initiative Director of her state, David Kensington — in fact, she’s sleeping with him. That relationship is already fraught with potential conflicts of interest, but to complicate matters further, both are married. Mary’s husband, Parsons, comes from old money and was instrumental in getting Mary’s businesses off the ground.

Mary grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, the second child of John and Ellen Katsoulas, married veterinarians. Although she loved animals, she also became unsentimental about them — she worked in her parents’ office and helped put many an animal to sleep. Her two siblings — older brother Mike and younger brother Alan — also worked in the office, although only Mike would follow even remotely in his parents’ footsteps. Mary intended on studying biology in college, but was put off by the unforgiving difficulty of the classes and gravitated towards business. When she graduated, she joined a classmate’s startup business as the marketing director.

Although that business was ultimately a failure, Mary moved on from job to job, slowly climbing the corporate ladder. Things came to a crashing halt, though, when she was arrested for aiding terrorists. This was a surprise to her — she considered herself patriotic, and moreso than most. It turned out that the checks she’d been writing to her brother for many years — out of familial obligation — were going to his nascent eco-activist group. The group, during a raid on a animal testing lab, accidentally killed a guard, and were prosecuted as terrorists. An investigation into the group’s finances ensnared Mary… and a young millionaire named Parsons Harwood.

Both Mary and Parsons were, thanks to a talented lawyer, cleared of all wrong-doing. It’s here that they met, and after a year of romance, they wed. Unfortunately, as Mary would later realize, she really married Parsons for his money and her potential for career advancement. That same year, the Kuleshov Event struck. The Harwoods were isolated from the chaos that ensued, although they personally knew several people who were affected. Parsons used his money to help in relief efforts… and quietly buy up the properties and businesses of those who were now unable to maintain them. Mary, feeling out of place in Parson’s world but asked by him to play the wealthy socialite, began to volunteer her time for the SAFE Initiative, where she first came into contact with David Kensington. She immediately fell for him, but she kept her feelings secret for the next six years, instead trying to convince herself that her marriage was working.

The world changed considerably since the Kuleshov Event and the Pathos Purge that followed a few years later. Although there are no more Pathos about, extreme paranoia is rampant in the nation. People are staying indoors more and more, doing as much as they can via computer. Trials are now done completely online on double-blind terminals, in order to avoid potential Patho tampering. One of the common reasons for murder now is “I thought he was reading my mind.” And the government is more secretive than ever.

And so the story starts with Mary Harwood, potential political appointee, finding out that her younger brother Alan has been working in gay porn under the name Al Hardwood, and, when she can at least afford it, has been summoned for jury duty on a conspiracy-to-murder case.

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Re: [3] Round 11.0004 [Terminal Connection] posted by Martin

Also: You provided a YouTube link entitled “human meat”. No way am I clicking on that. Synopsize or die.

Or die? Wow. They’ve really tightened the rules on netiquette breaches. In any case, let me instead provide you with a link to a page that has the same content in a format with no graphics and only words. Safe for everybody:

“Yes, thinking meat! Conscious meat! Loving meat. Dreaming meat. The meat is the whole deal! Are you beginning to get the picture or do I have to start all over?”

If that piques your interest, then once again I offer human meat (with no synopsis). However, I will offer my promise: It’s a no goatse zone. And, you’ll like it.

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Re: Round 11.0004 [Terminal Connection] posted by kza

Good answer. Yeah, that does help, I think. This is a tough one, though, and it’s kinda a shame that I’m the one to start it off — I think you have a better feel for it. I’m finding it hard to juggle the telepathy, the precognition, the future world that contains both of these things, the future world that produces this kind of trial system, and then plug in an interesting character, while keeping in mind the complicated plot.

With that in mind, however, I think I’m almost there.

Also: You provided a YouTube link entitled “human meat”. No way am I clicking on that. Synopsize or die.

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Re: Round 11.0003 [Terminal Connection] posted by Martin

Do some people in this world have the ability to predict the future? Or is this a semantics problem, and what you meant to say was that the husband is accused of conspiracy to murder?

Good question. I think I originally saw it as a Minority Report sort of situation. But, I don’t have a definitive vision (despite how strongly i seemed to feel about machines reading the future) What if it was a ghost in the machine that falsely accused the man? What if it was an anonymous tip after he was drunk in a bar—which then, I guess, would be the conspiracy to murder rap.

Or, what if the computers were big-brotherish in many ways with sensors in every home—to watch, of course, for telepaths who are acting badly. What if the computers used statistical analysis of behavior and samples of secreted human meat chemicals in the home to judge statistical probabilities for murder. If above 95%, it goes to a jury who look at the more human aspects of the case. Somehow, some records get crossed and the husband gets accused, and because the wires were crossed, the wife is added to the case. He is notified that he’s under investigation and placed under house arrest, but he manages to hide this from her. He gets more paranoid, and as the case goes on, he realizes that his wife is investigating him and his paranoia takes over. He does start to plot her murder.

This raises other issues, but is interesting enough to explore, maybe. Of course, as you said, you should alter as you see fit. Anything sparked by these?

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