The article, directed towards screenwriters, starts off by saying that, although movies like Avatar, Titanic, and Transformers 2 are panned by screenwriters, we should look at what they’re doing that makes them so financially successful.

Bill says “you make not know a single person who saw Transformers and liked it … which means you need to increase your circle of friends to include more actual ticket holders.”

Ouch.

Bill backs this up with an example where CinemaScore polled entire movie theater audiences who rated the movie a B+.

“Go to screenwriting message boards and you will find many writers who think Avatar is awful. Go to the audience and you will find the majority of people think that Avatar is great. Do you see a problem there? And it is not the audience’s problem, it is our problem.”

Agreed.

Bill suggests that we need to spend more time looking at why movies work and perhaps a little less time at why they don’t work.  He then posits that there are two main reasons why Avatar worked.

1) Avatar created a unique world people could escape to. “Pandora is unlike any place we have seen before on film.” A lot of folks ragged on the fact that the movie had similarities to other films like Dances With Wolves, Ferngully, or Pocahontas. But Bill points out that while there are similarities (and perhaps Avatar is closer in plot to The Fast and the Furious) that Avatar is… different enough.

Movies have to blend the familiar (so the audience can relate) with different (so the audience is intrigued). Avatar does this.

2) Avatar continually reinforced a theme, even if, at times, the theme ran under the surface. “In Avatar, the theme is that everything in the world is connected, and by destroying one part of the world, the other parts will also be destroyed.”  Bill then gives multiple examples of the theme throughout the script and labels reinforcement of the theme as “invisible writing” — the forward action (the plot) reinforces the theme at every turn.

M A R K

Quick note. My new web venture SaveOnBrew is in BETA for TEXAS users only. We’ll roll it out to the rest of the country in a month or so. If you’re in Texas, and want to check it out, go to www.saveonbrew.com and kick the tires.

It’s a lowest beer price search engine!   Wheeeee…..

M A R K

What almost always twists my spine is the thought “they’re making THAT crap instead of making BETTER crap.”  Only so many movies can be made a year and only ONE THING motivates a studio to make a movie: PROFIT.

Everything else is secondary. EVERYTHING. And that’s just the way it is when you’re a publicly held company and your responsibility is to return a  profit to your shareholders.  So the people that run the studios TRY to make good movies, because, generally, good movies draw crowds and, if all goes well, the movie makes a profit.

With the rise of the internet fan-boy, though, the landscape has changed. The vocal few have literally been able to influence the landscape of movie making. Suits in Hollywood, thinking about a rabid built-in fan base (and trying desperately to not get fired) grasp at straws and then you get things like Scott Pilgrim. Like Jonah Hex. Like Daredevil. Like Elektra. Like Kick Ass. Like Kazaam. Like Spawn. Like the upcoming Green Lantern. Priest. Green Hornet.  And more. Many many more.

I’ve tried to put this idea onto blog a few times, and I can never really say what I want to say. This morning, though, I found a few posts that say almost exactly what I would say, if I had the vocabulary:

How a Scott Pilgrim boondoggle happens:

There are about two thousand geek movie websites. They all go to Comic-Con. Their only friends are other geek webmasters. They all leave messages on each others’ websites, leading to hundreds of thousands of comments. They are all obsessives with no life, thus the ability to devote loads of time to running a geek movie website. They have few, to no, friends who aren’t part of this geek web circle.

Universal publicists look on the internet and see a hundred thousand twitter and comment messages on two thousand movie websites. They see a huge response at Comic-Con, from these same two thousand webmasters. They say to themselves, “We have the next Avatar on our hands! Look at all the noise this movie is already generating!” Then Universal pours more and more money into marketing this sure fire hit to the non-geeks. What Universal failed to understand is that the Comic-Con crowd, the 2,000 geek webmasters, the twitterers and the commenters were all the SAME people, talking to EACH OTHER. You can have every geek movie site post two years worth of positive press on a movie and still have nobody outside that circle read one word of it. They are written, read by, and influence only each other.

A few thousand websites is a pretty nice base. It’ll get you about a $10 million opening. Not terrible. However, these websites, with the added comments, it can look truly immense on the internet. This often fools the unwary into an over-commitment of marketing money and over-estimating a phenom.

The Chudders comment on Hitfix, who comments on AICN, who comments on Slashfilm, who comments on Collider, who comments on Latino Review, who comments on SuperheroHype, who comments on Chud. So on and so on. And all of them reach no one outside that circle.

and then…

Another thing that hurts these movies is that the rabid geeks who pimp these flicks go full-jihad on you if you don’t bow face down on the dirt and praise the greatness of said awkward geek-niche film.
These Kick-Ass Scott Pilgrim lunatics are truly unhinged and it reflects poorly on the sub-genre they’ve chosen to embrace.

The bob-ombing of Kick-Ass, The Losers and Scott Pilgrim coming in such rapid succession has made me realize something. To the psycho-geek fanbase this is clearly about a lot more to them than comic books or “supporting something different.” This is about validation. They have invested real emotional and psychological capital in these films. They see these movies as validating their lives and the fact they keep bombing is a personal defeat for them.
They’re realizing they’re a small circle of largely irrelevant oddballs and it hurts them to finally accept this.
They blame the marketing, Michael Cera, internet piracy, but they refuse to blame the movie itself. They simply can’t admit that people might not want to see it because it’s just not a good movie.

I’ve met born-again right wing Christo-fascists who were more willing to admit there were cinematic flaws in Passion of the Christ than I’ve met psycho-geeks willing to admit there was anything at all wrong with Scott Pilgrim. Crazy.

One thing they missed is the payola. Those sites take money, gifts, trips. Get exclusive access. Why? Why would a company do that? To persuade them to say good things about the project.  Do I fault the marketers? Partly, yeah. Because those fan boys have close to ZERO influence. They spend all that money, all that effort, on something that only a few thousand hard-core care about.

Studios can make all the comic / super-hero movies they want. But if they continue to make bad movies, or continue to make movies nobody wants to see, then marketing teams will be drummed out of their jobs and replaced with people who (hopefully) have realized there’s no upside in pandering to the vocal few.

M A R K

Caps and all.

Version one of Untitled Space Thriller was done sometime on 8/11/10, around 7:45 my time. Not that it’s a race, but it’s also interesting to track the amount of time it takes to get something done. Just like all of the other scripts, there were times when I didn’t want to continue, and times I thought I simply couldn’t continue. But I did. And the pain was worth it.

I also completed and submitted a take on the movie version of a video game coming out this fall — starts with “Splatter” ends with “House” — and started on a pitch for another vide0-game movie to be.

Back to the Untitled Space Thriller. What an experience!. The most frustrating, yet rewarding script yet. They took the cuffs off. “Dream big,” they said.

Every script I’ve written had a budget in mind. Having just read (for better or worse) the script for ALL YOU NEED IS KILL (twice)…

… and being awed that script with that big a scope sold (for THREEEEEE MEEEEELION DOLLARS!), I thought — “hey, why not me?”

Side note: Paramount picked up the rights to LMS (Last Man Standing) at ComicCon.

(I didn’t add the yellow “GET SOME” text. Promise.)

Much like ALL YOU NEED IS KILL, LMS is a little known (outside the Comic circle) future-world with sardonic characters that 1) can not be killed; 2) have some sort of special / mystical power; 3) are ripe for video game exploitation.

Dan LuVisi, creator: “LMS, takes place 600 years in the future, in an alternate universe and is about Gabriel, this invincible soldier, who’s been created to help win a war Earth got itself too deep into with Mars. After Gabe wins the war, he comes back down to Earth and is celebrated as this incredible hero. From there, he becomes somewhat of a celebrity, a Superman of this story, but then it all takes a quick turn. Gabriel is framed for an atrocious crime, by a terrorist organization known as Pandemonium and their leader, Dante. He is then sent to Level-9 Facility, where he’ll spend the next nine years in the worst prison of all time. Once Gabriel breaks out, only then does his true story begin, and the lies and twists unravel.”

Seriously? The bad guys belong to Pandemonium? That’s not a typo? Seriously? Suggestion: re-do as P.A.N.D.E.M.O.N.I.U.M and then make all the letters stand for something really KICK ASS!

Reason I bring this up — do ALL YOU NEED IS KILL or LMS remind you of any other recent efforts?

Scott Pilgrim opened last weekend…

A movie about a sardonic one-liner slinging singing hep cat (Michael Cera playing ” Scott Pilgrim”… as Michael Cera) with special / mystical powers in a world ripped from a video game based on a story that only the tragically hip (read: nerd outsiders) think is cool.

Did poorly. Very poorly. Even with fan-f*cking-tastic reviews, it only made 10.5M on 2, 818 screens (about the same as Jonah Hex’s entire domestic take). And that on a 60M + 30M P/A budget.  That’s gonna make SP’s domestic take around 20M. Will it play internationally? I don’t know. I don’t think so. So far it’s made about 1M internationally on a limited opening.

So why-oh-why do they keep making movies like SP, like Kick Ass, like Jonah Hex, like the upcoming Green Hornet, the upcoming Priest, Thor?  Why do they spend MEEEELIONS of dollars on things that simply seem to be desperate long-shots?

Back to UNTITLED SPACE THRILLER.

So I thought “why not me?”

ALL YOU NEED IS KILL is OK. But it’s not great. And it’s expensive. And it has gaping plot holes. Not the geek kind, the black and white kind. Here it is: our protagonists wade into battle wearing super-dee-duper body armor and swinging a gigantic axe. Here’s the problem, it’s the future and everyone else has some sort of gun — something that shoots a projectile.  IDEA:  Shoot the moron’s swinging the axe’s!  ON THAT ALONE I would say “pass.” But they didn’t.

Hopefully, UNTITLED SPACE THRILLER transcends ALL YOU NEED IS KILL. But strange things happen. It’s a fickle market. Lotsa great writers out there.

M A R K

You can order it at Amazon, or check it out at your local video store.

M A R K

1) Write for emotional impact;

2) Make sure reader understands emotional tone;

3) Be global.

4) Let the writing be poetry, but not flowery. Rhythm. Tone. Word choice.

5) Appeal to all of the senses.

– M A R K

I’m working through UNTITLED SPACE THRILLER, somewhere near page 80.  At this point, you have to have a really good idea of where the ending is because, on the outside, I’ve only got 40 pages to pull it all together. So it’s crunch time.

Suddenly it occurs to me that I’ve had this feeling so many times in the past. THE DEAD ZONE.

The time when doubt creeps in. I wonder…

… Does the story have legs?

… Do I care about the characters?

… Is it cinematic? Can it be MORE cinematic?

And about a thousand other questions that go through my head and I realize that… I’m stalling out. That self-doubt is holding me back.

But what is more important THIS TIME is that I recognize I’ve entered THE DEAD ZONE and I’ve escaped it time and time again… and I’ll escape it this time, as well.

Last night as I was roughing in a scene, it suddenly occurred to me how derivative it was. Almost a beat for beat copy of a scene from EVENT HORIZON (one of my favorite flicks)…

… and I sort of disgusted myself with how… cheap it was. Like I was cheating myself and cheating whoever might read it.

The problem with the story was that it was trying to be too many things, instead of one really good thing. Sure, it worked, but just because it works doesn’t mean it’s good.

Before we started, Alex had commented that “it seems like [the 3rd act] is a different movie from the first 2 acts.” And he was right. But I thought (at the time) it would work because I had a good sense of the pace in my head. On page, though, it wasn’t working.

And so I descended into THE DEAD ZONE.

Once I saw the dreck I had written (the EVENT HORIZON-esque scene) combined with the page count, I realized that 1) I was in THE DEAD ZONE; and 2) The way out (this time) was to make the 3rd act congruous with the first two. KA-BLAM!  Done. Out of THE DEAD ZONE!

Of course, out of one, into another. But still…

M A R K

Both made good money. Both had a sort of robot / alien theme. D9  was rated R, T2 was PG-13.

T2 sucked.

D9 rocked.

Why?

It’s a debate for the ages. Complex. Perhaps passionate to some.

Here’s my short take on it:

D9 succeeded because it was about PEOPLE. T2 was about “giant f*cking robots!”

Clearly, some people want to see “giant f*cking robots!” and — hey — more power to them.

Movies are about people. About how people change. About how people deal with adversity. How people overcome obstacles. If you saw T2, ask yourself THOSE questions about THOSE human characters.

Your answers, unless you’re really delusional, is “well, NONE of those questions can be answered because, well, T2 is about giant f*cking robots, that’s why!”

D9 is about humanity. Even when all of the cool stuff is going on, it’s about humanity. One quote sums up D9:

Wikus Van De Merwe “… was an honest man and he didn’t deserve any of what happened to him…”

Just. Like. That.

One more thing: the Prawns. The reason they work (and the robots of T2 DO NOT) is that, they too, have humanity. They walk on two legs. Live in slums. Have kids. Fight back against oppression. All human traits. By making the prawns relatable, they became eligible for our sympathy.

What sort of human traits did the “giant f*cking robots” have and — more importantly — did you care about them?

Watch D9 and you’ll find yourself both feeling sorry for and cheering Christoper Johnson’s and Wikus Van De Merwe’s  journey. Did you do that for anything in T2, human or otherwise?

M A R K

Me, on Monday (4 days ago…) “Yeah, I think I’ll be done by the end of the weekend.”

Me, today, Friday, 4 days later “No. Not so much. I don’t know what I was on when I said that.”

Here are a few random things that have occurred to me lately…

1) Sci Fi scripts are generally a little bit longer. Why? It’s much more about painting pictures of the future,  things people haven’t really seen before, things that haven’t been invented yet.

2) The script is 65 pages, heading for 120. Not bad for a sci-fi script. Certainly not the 130 page “epic” territory. Generally, fairly early on in the process, I’m hooked by my own story and the story pulls itself along — the things that happen have to happen as a sort of natural order of the stories’ universe. But not so much in this one — until yesterday. I wrote a scene I really connected to and I suddenly really wanted to know more. All along, I had the sneaking suspicion I was writing without heart, and I wondered if it would come through.

All this machinery making modern music

Can still be open hearted.

Not so coldly charted, it’s really just a question

of your honesty, yeah, your honesty.

Huh. Deep. And apropos. I have the most modern story telling tools around me. Literally at my fingers. Spare no expense. And even with these cold factory-like tools, my writing still needs to be open hearted — accessible. And how do you make the writing open hearted? Honesty. Good writing is many things. Telling the truth. Not cheating. Using clean, simple lines. Finding the complexity and texture within those clean, simple lines.

3) Another song…

Well those drifters days are past me now

I’ve got so much more time to think about

Deadlines and commitments

What to leave in, what to leave out.

Good lord am I getting slammed on time commitments.  Like I said at the beginning, I way over-committed on saying I would be done this weekend. But, to some extent, it motivates me. I set a deadline and I’m gonna work like hell to meet it.

4) I’m frequently approached by people who want to write screenplays. Frequently. Some of them are well spoken with good ideas. Most of the time, all they have is a semi-hook and want to know how to expand on it. Most of these people, though good-intentioned, will never finish. And I think that, as you try to break in, that’s the key. CAN YOU FINISH? The first time you finish, the script will be pretty bad but you’ll have a huge sense of accomplishment.  That’s OK (the script being bad) because, as much as you want to write the next MANCHURIAN CANDIDATE, you’re not going to. But IF YOU CAN FINISH the first one, you’ll suddenly realize you can do it again… and again… and that’s called “practicing your craft.” So, more than “writers write” — real writers… FINISH.

M A R K

Why so long?

A LOT has happened, both inside and out- of writing. Outside, I started up a new venture that I’ll be able to talk about soon. Very exciting. Very time consuming.

Inside, I got repped by UTA and, basically, we decided that the goal is to be a studio writer (hired by / working with studios) instead of a spec-chaser.

Chasing a spec sale is fine, and it CAN pay off. But if you’ve got a great spec (and I have a few…) then it gets you noticed. You get noticed, you can get work. You develop a track record. The deal is, if you’re a good writer, and you’re new, you’re cheaper than the other writers.

So you can bring both excellent writing and an attractive price point to a project.

What also can happen is that you quickly get pigeon-holed as “that guy that wrote that great Sci Fi horror” or whatever. Really, these are good problems to have.

A lot of the stuff that we pitched initially was stuff we had kicking around for a while. We had a virus idea. We had a blood hound idea. We had a hockey idea. We had an alien invasion idea. We had a bank robbery idea.

Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss. Miss.

So that was a little frustrating. And took a ton of time. One of the notes we kept getting was “think bigger.”

Think ALL YOU NEED IS KILL (which is gi-normous).

There was this one… other… idea… One that I had back about 5 years ago when people were sort of telling me the same thing about Osiris (fka Venture). “You’re really good at the sci-fi techy stuff. Do more of that.”

So away we go. I’ve already outlined the whole thing. Now I’ve just gotta write it. It’s big. Enormo-big. Space. Explosions. High stakes. A flawed hero. Cool tech stuff. Switcheroos. Right now, I just call it SPACE THRILLER.

I liked the outline. Let’s see where it goes.

I’ll be FADEing RIGHT THE F*CK OUT! in about 3 weeks.

M A R K