Monday, May 30, 2011

Collaboration: It’s Not All about Me

Here’s a real screenwriting bloggety-blog for those of you still committed to seeing your work played out by the great actors of our time on the big screen….

Writers have to be somewhat egotistical to pull off anything. We have to believe that our story has some importance, some meaning, in order to slog through the work it takes to produce it as a script, a poem or a story of any sort. Honestly, the merit of writing a tale that is meaningful to others is our craving. Defending our point of view becomes a major part of the work of writing, of each story, and yet it is only when we become as confident of our point of view, as a ballerina is confident of her pirouette, that the writing begins to shine on its own and attract an audience.

In screenwriting, and perhaps playwriting, the moment we are confident of our point of view, we begin to understand that our writing is part of a collaboration of points of view. Wait. What? Yes, I am saying that just when you think you’re done, the real work of a screenwriter begins. We’ve developed our writing skills necessarily, up to this point, to work independently, but that’s not all. There is more. Upon reaching a success plateau, say having your script optioned, or getting ready to make a short video with a group of like-minded souls, you are now volunteering to let others into your work circle and actually welcome their additional points of view, and if you're lucky you've been paid to let go of the reigns.  They’ve chosen your script because it struck them as “true” at some level, but now they have opinions about it as well. You go from being confident that your screenplay is perfect as it is, to being asked to consider the necessity of change (locations, for instance) or improvements (i.e.; stronger villains).  Screenwriters do sometimes whine about being left out of the process, once their work is in the development process.  Everyone wants to make a mark on the writer’s former territory, and it can be heart-wrenching to the unprepared.

Most of the working world works in collaboration with others, but writers often believe that they have sole ownership of their efforts. Most likely, they became writers because they have a tolerance for working alone that many do not share. I know that was true for me, but I also know from experience that screenwriting is different. Whether you start alone and then join a team of producers, actors and crew, or you start with a writing partner or even a team, when you type the words, “the end” on your script, a new level of work begins.

You may see this as an argument to be loosey-goosey with your point of view, to be a panderer to anyone who will give you money for your work, but let me be clear: NO! No that is not what I’m arguing for in the least. If anything, I will argue that you must carefully build up a confidence in your point of view before you will be ready to open up to other people’s perspectives with any grace at all. Additionally, only when you have begun writing your own take on a story will it have the cohesiveness it must have to attract others to want to collaborate and bring it to the screen. Why? Because a director or producer or agent will sense the weakness of a premise without a point of view, and will know that a writer submitting such mumbo-jumbo is not ready for the rough and tumble world of collaboration.

Collaboration is THE process of filmmaking. Imagine an architect with the hubris to believe that the grand temple he has designed will be built with his own hands. Um, it has to be a very little building, or maybe the ONLY building he will build in a lifetime then. If you are a writer who wants sole ownership, then consider that screenwriting may not be where you want to focus your storytelling gifts. If you can imagine how the dynamic of teamwork will enhance your work, then you are in the right place.

There are tried and true methods for building strong teams, and, unless you also want to become a director, you don’t really have to pay attention to all of them. In fact, a production team is most often an organic expansion of talented people who more or less share a point of view. Famous writer/directors like Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese have worked with a tight knit group of talent for decades. That said; there are things you can work on as a writer to ready yourself for the collaborative process:

  • Story confidence building. Being confident of your story, knowing it inside and out is the first step towards being ready to work collaboratively. You must be ready to answer any question and defend any story point throughout your script. This is not about bullshitting. This is about knowing your material inside and out.
  • Prepare yourself to compromise. I have a screenwriting friend, who had set a scene in a grocery store, but the production company couldn’t get a grocery store to agree to be the location, and so she had to rewrite the scene for a hardware store. These kinds of things have happened everyday in filmmaking since the golden age. Flexibility is a great asset any screenwriter can bring to the table.
  • Don’t take it personally. When you’ve worked on a script for a year or sometimes more, remembering that it isn’t just yours is difficult to say the least. Is it possible that you’ll be working with insensitive, egotistical people in Hollywood? Are you kidding? Make like a duck in a rainstorm and let it roll off your back, as my wise grandmother would say.
  • Keep your eye on the prize of a whole career of writing screenplays rather than investing all of your creative self-belief in one project. At the beginning of your career, accept you are on a learning curve. As your films find an audience, you’ll know more and more how to handle “the development process.”
  • Use your skills! You’re a writer! Keep notes of why those changes were made and when. Write out reasons for defending your preferences before exploding on the scene with demands and defenses, shooting from the hip of emotion. Use your skills to work out the best choices, and when you can’t find a meeting place realize that sometimes compromises are not win-win, but you can live and write another day if you can work with others and do your best.
  • Combine survival and celebration. Enjoy each step of the experience of seeing your idea come to life with others help. Enjoy the additions that enhance your idea and the scramble to get it all done. Enjoy the changes you disagree with for what they are: a learning experience.
I will say that the learning experience is sometimes hard and not apparently enjoyable for many writers. I have seen some writers spin themselves into addictions and worse because they were asked to give up something they didn’t want to give up. Unfortunately, I have not seen these writers’ work back up on the silver screen since. That’s the truth. Collaboration is not about one person, and making movies is all about collaboration.

Wednesday, May 25, 2011

Empower yourself

The truth is that working in Hollywood is hard! There are endless meetings, and long hours, and lots of reading, not to mention the driving. Endless drama marks the day and it isn't all entertaining. So what are those who have found their fate lies behind a desk in Hollywood to do with the submission of some 50K ideas in any given year? How in the world does the cream rise to the top? How can they bring to order the mass chaos that lands in their in-box every single day?

Agents, the gatekeepers of Hollywood, run the first line of defense against the onslaught. They say, "No, thanks," a lot. Why? Writers want to understand why this elite group of arbiters hasn’t chosen them. I'll tell you the bottom line reason: it is because the writers make it easy to say, "No, thanks." How can that be? They've written the script of their lives, how can this make it easy for an agent to say...? How? I could take the easy way out, lie to you, and say it is all just numbers. They reach their limit. However, that isn't really the how. The how of "it's easy," is that the script is not the only thing that you need to bring to an agent to make it with them or anyone else in Hollywood. The amazing truth is that the script is barely a business card in magnitude as an introduction to Hollywood. It may be the biggest effort of a writer's life, but its impact on the future of a screenwriter is initially negligible. What? Yes, there is a "what" that the writer should be bringing to an agent, producer, manager or anyone else who has the power to say, "Yes!" to them besides a single script. The most important thing you bring to a person in power in Hollywood was never just a story in script format.

It took me years to understand this folks, and the "what" is directly related to "point of view" that I've brought up before on this blog, but it isn't just your point of view. No. There's even more besides a story and a point of view. To get there you really have to invest in your own point of view and I want you to understand why it is so important to have that point of view. Many schools will tell you that you must find a "niche" while at the same time being broad in your strokes and enlisting the lowest common denominator to support your work. This is mumbo-jumbo, folks. It means NOTHING. What you have to do is find your point of view and develop it so that it is indelible, so that it is Teflon. Your point of view is what the people who eventually come to see your screenplay made into film want to know about. Your point of view challenges a film goer, television viewer. Your point of view makes the story that has been told a million and a half times unique in its detail and expression. Because your point of view will find the "what" that you must bring to the table in Hollywood, and that "what" is AUDIENCE.

Why it is so hard to find someone to read and represent our scripts is that we make it easy for agents and producers to say, “No, thanks.”  How we writers make it easy for agents and producers to say, “No, thanks,” is by expecting our stories to be the only thing they are looking for in a client. What is lacking is a clear audience for our point of view. Where do we get that audience? The “where” is known as “credits” in Hollywood, but it is really “credentials” as well.  Our credentials prove that we have followers already and that there is a foundation of work to build upon.

Palm hits forehead. We’re supposed to come to Hollywood with an audience already loyal to our work? Yes. It doesn’t have to be a huge audience (though that is certainly helpful), but we have to show that we have been committed to using our talents out in the world for a good period of time. Whether we just left film graduate school with a school award and a film under our belt, or we have made a hobby of entering our spec scripts into screenplay contests and finally winning one or two of them, these accomplishments show that we are committed to sharing our point of view with an audience.  Right now, there are amazing opportunities to build audience with tools that have never been available before. There are websites dedicated to opening up awareness of your work. There are video sites where you can upload your short films. There are workshops and classes you can take. You can blog about film…grin. In short, there is no excuse left to wait until you are “discovered.” Empower yourself today and tomorrow Hollywood might just come knocking on your door.

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Introduction To Screenwriting Class

Next week I teach Introduction To Screenwriting. It used to be that I kept it simply to the subject of learning how to write a screenplay, but frankly, I believe that is an unfair scenario to launch any writer into with the starry-eyed gaze of hope.  If you want to be a writer, you have to start somewhere. This much is true. However, of all writing venues screenwriting is perhaps the most unforgiving.

I’ve talked about the odds here: 55,000 story ideas, 400 chosen. Pretty sad. Then take it even further. There are 400 film schools in the world just about. Therefore, if just one student who has practiced this craft for 3-4 years makes it, that cuts out all the hobby screenwriters who are just learning the craft. Screenwriting is a professional choice, and not a good hobby. It takes a year to develop a good feature-length screenplay for the most professional writers, working about 10 hours a week. They generally work on several projects at once. There are methods. There is a structure to learn. There are those scenes that need truer vision, and dialogue that must be trim and support the action.

Learning how to write a screenplay could very well be helpful for writing any other kind of story because at its best it is dynamic, structured, active and tidy. A novel, poetry, and even proposals for business would be helped by understanding screenwriting. There is no doubt to me about that. Screenwriting is specific in its demands, and yet the best screenplays are unique and revealing. The heart of a great screenplay is a point of view that stays truthful. This is what makes a screenplay transcend the “formulaic” trap screenplays can fall into, and sometimes this means honing a story down to the simplest of themes.

The way a ballerina makes dance look easy, a screenwriter makes writing look easy. It doesn’t mean that there haven’t been years of practice behind the work. The rule of thumb is that most screenwriters don’t get this on their first, second or even third try. It can take up to ten speculative screenplays before a writer finds the screenwriting groove. When you taste it, you’ll realize that all the crap you were writing before was just crap. I don’t know any other way of putting it kindly. The iconic literary agent I once worked for put it this way to me, “Don’t worry about it, Amanda, the cream always rises to the top.”

So, if you’re going to take my class, realize that Hollywood is fat because it only takes cream. If you’re going for that dream, it will take hard work, and lots and lots of planning, and practice runs. That’s just the way it is and will continue to be for the near future. However, that said, I do believe that we are entering a new era. At the beginning of new eras there are opportunities available for upstarts, improvisers and smart asses, like there never is once it becomes established.

In this Introductory Class, we’re going to touch on those new possibilities because I believe it is important to teach what, from my point of view, is becoming an obvious opening in the entertainment industry. I’ll introduce the different pathways that are meeting at this crossroads…there’s no longer one straight highway to the promised gig. If you pay attention to what is happening in Social Media and practice a little bit of extrapolation, you’re going to begin perceiving opportunities that never existed before. I’ll give you some clues as to where to start.

I hope to see you next week!

Thursday, May 12, 2011

Passing the Tip Jar on the way to the Promised Gig

There are a number of things making a confluence in the streamed distribution of media these days that really matter to the future of artistic expression through filmed stories. What a mouthful.

My Word®  program did not like that sentence and it told me so with green underlining.  What happens when a computer program recognizes something that doesn’t fit its expectations? In the surprising wisdom of Microsoft® land, green underlining, in the world of Social Media, well, it just doesn’t show up.  

If we let information pass through our Facebook Newsfeed without comment it simply stops appearing. By this process of elimination, eventually, all the users see are what the users find agreeable or worthy of comment. What could the benefit be for corralling our tastes this way? Simple answer: Advertising. However, this frankly undoes the benefits of social interaction. What we get is groups of people who indentify with similar notions that never face much disagreement.

Suddenly what we have is a flat drama, and isolation. Rather than encouraging a marketplace of ideas, it creates a narrow aggregate of purpose. For instance, if I “Like” enough dance discussions on Facebook, all I’ll see in short order are dance discussions.  I might even be fooled into believing that everyone I know loves dance as much as I do, and that we all agree about its importance. This method can narrow and narrow our worldview without us even realizing that we have capitulated by our very choices. Even if our friends share a post about something other than dance on their page, if we haven’t commented on their posts lately, it simply doesn’t show up.

YouTube makes suggestions, Google Ads advertises and Facebook sorts us. Aggregate schmaggregate. Do I really want to see only rom-coms, or action flicks? Do they think I’m stupid? Hmmmm. Apparently. Apparently, they’ve guessed that this is the business model that will work – force-feeding us a diet we didn’t even realize we chose. If they keep presenting us with films in the genre we like then, surely, we’ll click on them and prove their method, and then they’ll form a personal channel for us that we’ll pay for. There I go extrapolating again. Yes, of course, computers are getting quickly to the point where they can extrapolate our subtle choices into a personally aimed set of interactive programming and advertising that will somehow sell products, guarantee viewership and that can be withheld, post-addiction, until ransom is paid. This is, perhaps, the Promised Gig of the near future for most writers and artists.

It may seem crazy, but I make every effort to comment on the broadest passing of postings and websites that I can because I don’t want to be so narrowed that I forget the rest of the world exists. I enjoy having new opportunities all the time to see the world in a way that surprises me. In fact, I would be far more likely to pay for variety than I would be to pay for sameness. Without a moment to spare, in comes the amazing world of micropayments.

For individual content creators, meanwhile, Flattr could create a “tip jar” that actually produces more than a trickle of virtual coins.” – Matthew Ingram, Gigaom.com

I revel in this fact: Independent Artists can make money again! Remember earlier in the week I said that we internet creators are as Mariachi bands at the “Town Share” and that we’d accept pesos on the way to that promised gig? Well, this is what I was hinting at.  User Folks, you have entered the square and for a while now have had your fill of free music, films and funnies, but now it is time to show your appreciation for the work you really appreciate so that the artists, writers, singers, and filmmakers can get from day to day sharing their eclectic mix. Put a dollar in the virtual tip jar, please.

NOTICE TO ARTISTS: This “tip jar” is not a ticket!  It is inspiration-based flow. Your job is to inspire, entertain, and be truthful. Isn't that why you wanted to be a filmmaker, screenwriter in the first place? We are returning to the time of the Bard. This time it is easier because we artists don’t have to sleep on the ground and carry around a harp, but it is harder because we are faceless entities that come out of a piece of technology that rests, in full ownership, in a person’s hand or on their lap. The recipients of our art cannot relate, necessarily, to the realness of us and our needs, the way a Bard’s audience could see his gaunt face. The person holding the technology has already paid a hefty lump sum just to own the stage we play on, and now we pass a virtual hat. Ouch, but really, we're artists and we have to do that in one way or another.

Oh, that may distress the shortsighted among us who were counting on our big Hollywood break, the million-dollar script sale and the single-card credit rolling down the silver screen.  However, once again I ask you to look to ePublishing to recognize that this is not the end of the world. A book selling a million copies for $.99 with a 30-95% royalty rate is going to make a good living for its author.  A short film that is tipped by a 100,000 users on YouTube, Twitter, or Facebook, anywhere from a penny to $20, is going to make a living. Being prolific helps, being the best of the best helps more, and so what are you waiting for? The longer you wait for someone else to have faith in your work without passing the tip jar, the longer you'll be temping, bar-tending, or working at a job you hate. Let's blow the user's mind and encourage them to participate by tipping us personally for our work!

Tuesday, May 10, 2011

Mariachi Square & the Arbiters of Content

When I was a little girl, I spent many summers in southern Texas on the border with Mexico. Often we would travel across the border for lunch and an afternoon in the Mercado in small towns like Reynosa, and Progresso, and cities like Matamoras, Mexico.  One of my favorite experiences was walking through the town squares where the Mariachi bands gathered in their big sombreros, and sharp suits of black with gold piping, white with blue piping, or fuchsia with silver piping. The colors were magnificent, but the music was even better. Dozens of guitars of all shapes and sizes, trumpets blaring and the perfect harmony of brothers and sisters singing and that cry, “Aye, yie-yie-yie~!” filled my ears and my heart with joy.



What I didn’t understand then was that these Mariachis trained all their lives, and they made their living by being the best of the best. Mariachi Square was a grand audition stage, not there just for my entertainment, but to hawk the Mariachi wares, to win the prize of playing at a wedding or Fiesta QuinceaƱera. Throwing a band together, shooting from the hip (because aim was impossible) or assuming their grand idea was good enough would have been unthinkable. These men and women were professionales in every sense of the word, and the bigger the band the higher the price and the grander the occasion. The duets and trios were better suited for wandering the restaurants or intimate affairs. Each band, quartet, trio and duet knew all the songs that it could know, and could play those songs on the spot in any circumstance.

This brings me to the movies and television and the new explosion of “filmmakers” on Youtube.com, Vimeo.com and any number of smaller aggregate and the question of skill and talent. Right now, during the birth of this new entertainment, anything seems to go, but I’m here to tell you that this will not last very much longer. Imagine if Mariachi Square had been filled with a bunch of amateurs. Would anyone in their right mind spend even a dollar to hear their songs? Is it any wonder that YouTube has no business model, yet? I am not saying that the potential is not there, of course.

It used to be that the arbiters of content in the entertainment industry resided behind the wrought iron gates of grand studios, in the air-conditioned high rises of New York City and the Sunset Strip, and precious Spanish Colonial bungalows from Malibu to the Hollywood Hills. These people had an eye for talent and potential. They had worked their way up through the industry from mailrooms to cubicles and right into the corner office. They spent their lives looking for the perfect combination of fresh and edgy work that could be “developed,” for the road to final cut is a collaborative affair.

Now the arbiters of content still reside in those faraway places, but they also now live in small apartments in Tokyo, mud huts in Africa and trains in Europe. They live in trailer parks in Florida, and mansions in the Rocky Mountains. They live at the end of a satellite signal, and when they like what they see, they share it. A well-loved piece of filmed entertainment goes viral in a day, and for the first time ever we can have an exact number for just how many people “hit” the program. There is no more bull shitting a project to success. Its success is in numbers, and no one knows whether that work was a struggle, developed into something we love, or whether it was shoot-from-the-hip aimless, and just happened to tickle us.

Right now, the more seemingly spontaneous a short video on YouTube is, the more popular. How many flash mobs and baby moments captured by accident can we absorb? I think probably many more, but eventually, the surprise grows thin. When that happens, I ask you dear screenwriters to be ready with projects that make sense for the format. When we turn that corner, then business models will emerge.  

My extrapolating mind says that these business models will look very different from the big-money projects done in Hollywood, but there will be big money to make nevertheless. The difference is that the future of multi-level storytelling will depend on a balance between giveaway and micropayment. Suddenly, we will be Mariachi Bands in the “Town Share” vying for bigger prizes, and still accepting the pesos for individual songs.  These auditions will begin the moment we share our first concept on-line, because like a website, we will only have a moment to capture the audience’s imagination. We will have to be perfectly tuned, and choose the right offering for the audience we hope to win over. Some of us will be better suited to wander through the square alone or with a few fellow collaborators, collecting micropayments and surviving. Some of us will join bigger collaborations and become more event-focused. Both styles are valid, and there are a myriad of in-betweens.

That leaves to Hollywood the slickest packages, aimed at the very broadest audiences. I’m not saying there isn’t a place for that, but now there are opportunities to work at many different levels. We must understand that the arbiters of content no longer live only in the ivory towers of Hollywood, but are walking amongst us, and this should not be a relaxing acknowledgment. There is some room for slackers at this stage of the game. However, in the end, they will be relegated to this small slice of time when anything goes. Those of us who are serious about the craft will determine, by virtue of elimination from the on-going game, that our mission is to be the best of the best in our expression.