is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Sunday
Jun 04, 2006

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.

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

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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.