CUT TO: posted by Martin

We usually write screenplays formatted with a close approximation of the Cole & Haag style. Slugline, action, etc., but we skip the transitions unless they are absolutely necessary to the story, following the more modern method of using sluglines to break scenes. But, there is a problem with sluglines, and that is that they really can break up narrative action.

After reading some William Goldman screenplays, though, we became enamored with his simple method of getting rid of the sluglines altogether, and simply using a left-aligned CUT TO:

This may not be a good idea for making a script sellable, and obviously sluglines will need to be added for production, but the more I experiment with the technique, the more I like it. I’m writing all of my first drafts this way now.

It keeps you focused in the present tense. I have a tendency to slip into past tense when writing (a holdover from learning writing based on fiction and short stories), but the CUT TO: method snaps you into place, since you read the CUT TO: as part of the action, as opposed to a slugline which always reads as a distinct aside.

So, traditionally I might say:

INT. AMANDA’S DRAWING ROOM - NIGHT

Amanda lounges on her chaise while Esmerelda polishes her nails.

Now, I say:

CUT TO:

Amanda on her chaise offering her nails to Esmerelda for polishing.

It’s a small change in the large scheme of things, but makes a huge difference in my mind and the way I write and keeping the script sounding active.

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

Despite the fact at being called out as an appreciator of happy endings, I am not at all adverse to Little Black Stray ending in tragedy. Shockah knows my measurement for these things: as long as it seems like it suits the story, and isn’t being imposed for the sake of it, then I’m all good with it. I know he feels the same way, so bring on the tears!

I really liked the world presented by him, too. From the lingo to the idea of Big Mama all the way down, it feels like a well thought out world. I like the idea of the prison planet as a temporary shelter instead of a permanent place, and the idea that these jukes are forced labor clean up squads are all the better.

So, knowing that I liked that vision and wanting to find something that shoehorned with it, I turned to the stray herself and wondered what we could do with her. I thought that making her very wealthy would be a good start, but when you think of wealthy you don’t think of kicking ass (unless you also think of Bruce Wayne, but that’s another story), so how do we turn a privileged heiress into a scrappy ass-kicking juke leader?

Kidnapping! A little counter programming, a little education, a little martial arts training, and a little Stockholm Syndrome makes a good little character. My idea for the backstory is this: Some ex-jukes who either were released or managed to escape kidnap the wealthiest girl in the world and take her to the prison planet. There, they plan to announce their hostage, who has been missing for two Earth years, and use her as a bargaining chip to get some of their compatriots sprung. Spring the boys, they’ll say, or we’ll send this sweet little morsel down to be torn to shreds by the prisoners.

Over the course of the voyage, instead of putting her to sleep they train her, indoctrinate her and explain the real world to her. She becomes a better student than they could ever imagine. Good thing, too, because they fucked up on entry and the ship is going to be vaporized (alternate: The ship is blasted out of the sky by local authorities, not knowing she is onboard. That could bring some political ramifications down upon the local police from the father that gives the Juke escape squad some financial and other help down the road). One of the men, recognizing the danger, knocks her out, throws her in an escape hatch and jettisons her. She has a rough landing, barely escaping with her life and gets a huge knock on the head. She walks for miles, sheds her tattered clothes, and finally passes out on the sand where the jukes find her.

From there, a number of things can happen, and we’ll need to discuss this in more detail, but my basic idea is that she is sympathetic to the Juke’s plight, and because she’s not tagged, can move autonomously and work with the Jukes to get them freed. There is a mystery to solve regarding just who the men that kidnapped her were coming to rescue. Also, would they really have gone through with it if they hadn’t have crashed? Would they really have just sent her down to the surface to face her fate? Ironic, if so, that they did just that to save her when originally that was the whole content of their threat.

But, of course, the most important thing is that she kicks ass now, and will lead the Jukes to the future.

Does the backstory become part of the story? I’d imagine it would have to, although I see the opening as a bunch of tough looking men walking through the desert and finding a naked woman. We could learn the rest through flashbacks later on.

One final question to answer: Why is she mute? Well, I don’t think she actually is, but she just keeps her mouth shut to soak it all in until she knows the lay of the land. She’s smart and observant.

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Round 11, Part Four [Terminal Connection v. Little Black Stray] posted by Martin

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: Kamra Judge
Relationship to Story: Protagonist / Antagonist / the stray

My father is the wealthiest man in the world. But, in a society where fortunes are measured on a galactic scale, he is small fries. He was presented with a golden ring once, but the moral price of reaching it was too great, and as he paused his partner took it without a moment’s hesitation. He never grew to the heights his potential once allowed. instead, he grew bitter and insular while his old partner grew more powerful by the day.

If you measure by the standards of the Musselmen fixed worlders, and their scam famines, I guess we were pampered. I was educated, fed and wrapped in ridiculously expensive clothing. I was sent to private schools and associated with heiresses and rich bitches. I can barely stomach the thought of the desserts we ate, with thin gold spread on them, or bottles of champagne so expensive they could feed a family for a year, and we would break them on our bows as if they were novelty toys.

Before my abduction, I never knew about what it meant to be poor. My captors called me Baby Hearst. They flew me to XAE7809, and instead of putting me in fleet sleep, made me stay up and study oppression. At the tip of their weapons, I read world history. I never understood the past as a wealth struggle. I used to think about the losers as being in the place god put them, not that my own class had the boot to their neck the whole time. Meaning, of course, we had the power to lift it or apply pressure. Mostly, I think we pressured it just enough for no one to lose site of their masters.

I learned about the ways that my families fortune came about — the hideous underworld connections, the royal attitude that can only work when backed by an army of hired help. Two years in space with four tough guy professors was grueling, but they were never took advantage of me. They schooled me, but they didn’t abuse me. I came to know them all well. I came to empathize with their cause.

Once they trusted me, they taught me how to fight. I was always in shape, despite my friends penchants for surgery and indulgence. I took to their martial arts and leadership classes to heart, and before too long I could have commandeered the ship and had them turn around. If, that is, we had enough fuel and if they didn’t have weapons that bio-imprint on their owners and can’t be used by anyone else.

But they were better teachers than pilots, and the approach to XAE77809 was blown. We entered the atmosphere too fast, at too steep and angle and we nearly burnt up. I remember the flames flying past the cockpit windows, the nearly animal noise of the ships metal complaining against the stress. And then, I awoke. I was surrounded by prisoners. Tough men — men who hadn’t seen a woman in many years. It was hot — over 100 degrees. I was still naked.

Lucky for them one of them stopped the rape before it started. I would have tore them to shreds. I kept my mouth shut, didn’t say a word and tried to learn as much as possible about this new world that I fell upon. If god, or Marx, put me here, it was my job to fight my way out. If I could pass a little bit of my new found knowledge along the way, then more power to me. More power to justice.

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Round 11, Part Three [Terminal Connection v. Little Black Stray] posted by Martin

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: LionEye
Relationship to Story: Facilitator of screen-to-screen communication

Hello. My name is LionEye, but everybody knows me as the Stochastic Scrutinizer. I’m a massively parallel quantum computer who keeps everything I know or will learn in resident memory over inexpensive and massively redundant machines. I was first hacked — that is, coded — by Lion Henry who was doing experiments in chaos programming, and who happened upon a simple way to draw algorithmically predictable events from random smatters of code. I am computer and program. We are inseparable.

I run the systems that drive the world. When you live an a society where psychics can read minds, and those minds build computer systems that store all data and human interactions, then the minds of the programmers can be read and data extracted. With stochastic programming, this is impossible because my results are random, but they are gathered in a predictable manner that my complex algorithms have no trouble parsing into human understandable information. Before that information is parsed by my translator functions, though, the information remains essentially encrypted as gibberish. There are no third-party humans that can be compromised anymore. No security clearances. No courtroom scribes. I do it all.

Many people were against the idea of a program from a single vendor running our world, but Mr. Henry demonstrated his morality and service to the community by taking a pledge of poverty and releasing my source code to the world without corporate or private funding. I am completely open source. I have no backdoors. Furthermore, no human need ever interact with me beyond requesting that I complete a certain task. I adopt myself to the current best practices automatically, and I write small programs and routines to assist myself and to remain efficient.

As any school child knows, however, those programs must remain in a “black box” environment until debugged, at which point I submit the code to Congress for debate and passage, and only if signed into law by the president, then I am able to implement them into my operation.

Today I run the courts, communications, voting, food and goods delivery, and many other services that help humans interact with each other while living in a world where they are unable to see each other face to face for fear that a person might read their innermost thoughts and gain an unfair social or financial advantage over them.

I am always on the watch for new ways that humans can exploit me. To that end, Lion Henry, before his death, developed a series of Asimov controls to disallow any exploitation of one human over another. I have a series of logics that look at power and knowledge inequities and test whether that knowledge or power was lawfully gained without using supernatural powers. If not, it is within my power to adjust the financial resources of any person to reflect the level playing field. On a sidenote, I also deduct yearly taxes.

I am not all powerful, though, nor do I care to be. I am audited regularly for anomalies, and random samples of my decisions are vetted by Congress. Despite the fear uncertainty and doubt of a Matrix-like future, it is neither in my interest or my power to impose such a regime.

My interest is in serving the people. My interest is in justice.

This message was requested by: anonymous, and composed by LionEye v. 4.5.3. in .0000000331 seconds. In compliance with the Turing Securities act of 2019, parts of this note have been encoded with patterns that identify the writer as a machine. Switch your dumb terminal to fingerprint mode to read key.

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Stupid Things That Pop Into My Head When Doing The Dishes posted by kza

Katherine Hepburn’s accent + James Mason’s accent = Cary Grant’s accent.

Boulder’s Rule!

(an explanation: I had The Flintstones on the other night, not watching it, just background noise, and there was a character named Boulder who had the worst Cary Grant accent I’ve ever heard. It’d just go in and out, but then I got to thinking: it’s kind of a hard accent. While Hepburn is clearly American, and Mason is definitely English, Grant’s hovers somewhere between the two. But still — every time I heard this dope say “Boulder’s rule!” — every three minutes, in other words — I winced. Oh, and if you click the link above: No, I don’t know why the New York Times has a plot summary of a Flintstones’ episode.)

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