more adventures in filmmaking, again, part two (ii)

Whenever you're writing a screenplay you will recieve notes from readers for changes you should make. It's a lot of hard work reading scripts - I'm doing it at the moment for a low budget feature scheme in bog town...

it would be good to have something multi purpose to say... you always expect that the reader has them at hand anyway.

Here's a series of script notes I recently sent out to the great Tony Grisoni, I hadn't had time to read his new script and anyway - he hadn't actually sent it to me...

General notes for any script I haven’t read at all yet:

Start with something funny happening to somebody, or something bad, or something or just something happening to someone.

Page 1 – 400, Sc 1 – 500. Maybe remove all explanations of characters motives throughout, replace dramatic reasons with random action – random is very popular with a younger demographic.

Page 56 – WHAT???!!!

Page 1 – 400, all Scenes. Repetition is also important to a lot of 1 - 3 year olds. Maybe make allowances for very young viewers by having the story told again and again.

Page 16 Sc 97– not clear what is happening to whom and why it has happened to him!

Page 90
look I know he’s the antagonist and the bad guy, but is it really necessary to paint him in such a bad light! No one’s that bad, surely? Maybe make him nicer throughout from the beginning, maybe make him do a few nice things, be kind to people and such.

Page 78 Sc 230 – need a clear idea of why who wants what and when.

Page 134 Sc 300 – cut out all dialogue relating to the characters apologising to each other.

Needs speeding up at the beginning, get going slower though and spend some more time speeding through things make the pace a lot more erratic and even.

Have all characters repeat every single line they say for clarity. I know it’ll make it longer but it’ll appear to be weightier. And it will be heavier to carry as well.

Always have your characters wear the same clothes, whatever the weather or time of day it’s easier in the edit to change it around. At present I imagine they change too often into dinner jackets and the like, especially around page 30 for a formal dinner with an important character suddenly arriving to announce some very grave news.

It’s important in all character descriptions to be aware of each persons shoe size.

It’s good but the audience could do with being taken out of the story occasionally, below are a couple of examples:

If it’s a Romantic Comedy:

A moment when a man, unconnected to the story, possibly just passing by and enjoying himself, is suddenly distracted by our romatic couple finally kissing he smiles warmly although he is initially out of focus we pull focus onto him and follow him home, where, still smiling he administers a lethal injection to his long serving family pet (a parrot!) ill from eating the wrong kind of cuttle fish. He breaks down and sits at the kitchen table for a few moments until the phone rings with important news of an avian illness breakthrough – we cut back to our leads...


An Action/Adventure story:

Mid way through your contemporary, high-octane thrills and spills, the hero takes time out to reflect on the antics of his grandfather, himself a decorated war hero cut to: WWII - High on a cliff face our heroes ascend – paying homage to Guns of Navarone – until a major comes across a small nest of rare eggs! A speech about the value of these eggs on the then legal trade to collectors follows, giving the audience a chance to put the film into historical context. A private slips and falls, silently, so as not to alert the enemy to his comrades position, to his death on the rocks below. Cut back to our contemporary hero as he makes breakfast for his hot girlfriend, a soon to be dead undercover officer in the NYPD. Oh the irony!

Make it more complex, please ...
the audience must be made to feel that people are saying something significant even when nothing is happening have more dialogue and ignore my earlier note about repeating each line twice instead, for a Mamet styled complex web of a drama, here is a guide to writing dialogue about nothing two men are looking out of a window while they wait for the scene to get started finally, one feels more important than the other:

MAMET STYLED DIALOGUE-

Man One
Did you see that? Did you? Did you see that?

Man Two
Did I see that? Did you see that? Did I see that?

Man One
Did you? Did you? Did you see it?

Man Two
It?

Man One
That!

Man Two
“Did you see that?”

Man One
Did I see that?

Man Two
Did you? Did you see that? Is that what you’re saying? Did I see that? Did I?

Man One
We

Man Two
Well – Did I?

Man One
What?

Man two
“What?”

Man One
Er

Man Two
What? What did I see? Did I see it or that or what?

Man Three
Hey you guys, guys, guys did you by any chance see the thing I just saw? Did you see that? Did you see the thing?

There isn’t a scene in a police cell! But why? Here’s an idea...

Scene In Police Cell:

Any film about crime needs one, or even a comedy, romantic drama or anything else maybe you have characters or individuals already ahving to contemplate things in an overnight cell maybe before court appearance or while police go about your investigations well if you do –

- A young man in the background, part of a cast of nere-do-wells, skulks nakedly in a corner and grinds his shoes into the rough ground of the cell, stubbing a rolled cigarette.. there’s a knock at the door and a young officer hands him his freshly washed, pressed and ironed clothes, the prisoner hands him a tip.

what is writing for?

look - an old fashioned typewriter like the sort an

old fashioned writer would use in the old fashioned days

I am on a final draft, last ever, polish, reworking etc version of a road movie I am co-writing with Helen Solomon. It’s tough going in the heat we are having right now, the computer I had borrowed years ago from Steve, his old one, fell

apart and quit when the going got tough and so I abandoned the comfort of mac’s for the familiarity of a pc…

I am skint and in need of income to pay off mounting debts and rent, gas, electricity and council tax bills to name a few and yet I still have to spend the next few weeks finishing off something I thought we had virtually competed.

It’s irritating, but each time I redo the bloody script, it throws up more and more questions like dismantling a watch and not remembering how all the little wheels and cogs (it’s not a digital watch in this metaphor) go back together… it might still work in the end but it will have a few nuts and bolts missing from it.

Anyway, enough shitty metaphors and such, what the fuck shall I write about?!

I could moan about the film industry, but to be honest I don’t know the first thing about it – neither do many of the people who allegedly work in it, but there you go (ha ha – satire) – so instead I shall describe the film industry.

You’ve probably heard about it, but how do you get in?

Well, it’s a big building situated in a forest somewhere in the South East of England, near Big Town. No one is exactly sure of the location, but you know you are heading in the right direction when you can smell it’s sweet aroma. There’s only one big door, but it’s on rollers with a big light next to it saying ‘filming in progress’ that lights up whenever filming is in progress.

Inside is a big machine that has hundreds of people working on it, some just technicians, desperately trying to keep the thing working, others programming it’s tiny brain. Filming in Progress means stuffing the big machine with stuff and watching it all happen.

None of the workers can remember getting in, or even the way out – they just keep at it until they drop… similarly, the heads of the factory spend their time marketing the tiny product of all this work, a small lump of gooey film that emerges at the end.

The film is flattened and flavoured and then put into the shops in the high street, then some pictures of it are shown around in playgrounds and people are encouraged to come and ask a man in a brown coat to let them have a look.

That’s it basically.

I sometimes wonder if life wouldn’t be better if I was working there.

Some films are made independently of the industry, of course. This means that smaller machines, much less stable and often more wobbly are passed around and used to press smaller lumps into smaller product. A man looks at it and says he’ll take it off your hands and then he throws it as far away as he can. If it lands near someone they have a sneaky little look at it before kicking it away again.

But there’s more to film than this – some people are actually making films for each other! Some people are making films as if it were a communicative form, instead of a big lump of commercial goo thrown in the faces of a willing public.

These people work in the community, in your city, in your street, they make films about something and they make films because they care to.

Some would say they are the fringe, but I prefer to think of them as the mainstream, why? Because they more than outnumber the few who make mainstream cinema what it is today. Some would argue that they are outsider artists, yet they are in their own communities, not outside at all and certainly not outsiders. Their view is wide and clear, it’s a few based in London who cannot see them, and don’t recognize it for what it is when they are forced to look at their work.

First of all – how should you make a film. There must be rules, right? Well NO, there aren’t any… people will tell you if they like what they see… though they may have been conditioned to accept the normal stuff, they often feel as if the scales have fallen from their eyes when they see how fresh real world filmmaking can be.

You have to have foundations for telling a story? Well maybe – but you didn’t learn to speak by studying alone… you learnt from the environment you are in – film is just another language if people can tell what you’re saying then you must be saying something they can understand… that’s how film works.

We should all be making stuff.

Instead I am stuck in doors writing this and then returning to the endlessly looooooong script rewrite.

Pretty soon, the new Bang! Short Film festival will be running at the Broadway Cinema here in leafy little Nottingham Town.

Check them out at www.bangshortfilmfestival.com

The hardest bit is selecting the films. We screen shorts from the city, the region, the country, the nation and internationally, but try to balance it in favour of the region, something like a 60/40 split.

We want to show something of everything, funded, unfunded, drama, doc, community project, huge budget, star studded drama or no-one knows me calling cards… all are eligible and ALL get a screening as we host the event 3 TIMES A YEAR!

Yeah, we may be non-competitive and unfunded (so far), but we think the idea of celebrating the regions artists, filmmakers, communities, youth, OAP’s… er… everyone, is a really crucial thing so we do it all year round… screening films for all the family on the first day, art and experimentia in the café bar and a main programme of shorts on Sunday evening… as well as taking it on the road and now hosting/organizing a HORROR FILM FEST – Mayhem – every May…

The point is that if we screen it audiences will come… and they do, they come to see the unusual, the fresh, the original, the meaningful, the bizarre and the crazy…

It’s something that maybe some of the cinema chains should realize. People love shorts, they love films and they will watch unique, edge work far from the centre of the ‘normal’… this consensus, which sees us sold out sometimes, is the mainstream, or at least it’s a reflection of the secret mainstream they don’t want you to see.

Chris versus Steve! Dull Blog Review Follows...

Rubbish Film Review Alert!

STOP THE PRESS: Cronenberg Crap - Henenlotter good but no one really knows who he is!

Ok – for anyone who has visited Steve’s weblog, Adventures in Uncinema, he boldly claims that I foolishly believe that Basket case 2 is a better film than David Cronenberg’s dead famous Dead Ringers. I stand by that claim.

Look! It's a proper film and everything...

It came about when we were at one of our irregular horror nights, a 7pm – 4 am screening of various horror films on a bog screen around at Gareth’s place and attended by us sad devotees or anoraks or whatever.

In the delirium of back-to-back horror film watching strange themes seem to emerge as films blur into each other: torture, duality, noses… that kind of thing, and then, after a night of Paul Morrisey’s Flesh for Frankenstein, Miike Takashi’s amazing Masters of Horror episode, obscure Japanese art-sex-horror Blind Beast we settled on a lighter comedy outing for a finale – Frank Henenlotter’s basket Case 2, a strange little gem of a black comedy I first saw at Manchesters Black Sunday Horror Film Fest many, many moons ago…

It’s remarkably unpretentious and with it’s twin, the earlier Basket Case, make a bold statement about duality and separation and ultimately loneliness.

I don’t want to look like a bigger cunt than I am, but while Cronenberg is waffling about Cartesian Duality in his laboured film, Henenlotter is just getting on with it.

Jeremy Irons isn't even a proper monster,
look at him - rubbish.

In Basket Case, Siamese twins of the oddest kind are separated, Duane from his ugly, frightening looking brother Belial, but somehow they are still linked… SPOILER ALERT… psychically they can never leave each other, one always aware of the others activity, however deranged or violent that might be… so while Duane might be the better looking one, he is as much a part of his brothers twisted mind and unable to escape his biological history… and in a remarkeable twist ending to Basket Case 2, Duane takes it upon himself to literally rejoin his ex-conjoined twin, sewing him back onto his side forever…

Belial - rubbish effects, but at least he's a proper monster,
look he's dead scary! And he doesn't thesp about on set,
demanding milkshakes and the like.

BC2 lacks the horror of it’s predecessor, lacks the ugly stop motion animation and frightening new York locations, but it makes up for it in two ways – first the hilarious make-up effects, a weird, unreal series of masks that exaggerate difference and make a virtue of low budget – and in some ways allow you to suspend your disbelief that in fact it’s bizarre team of freakazoids on display are not ‘handicapped’ but instead creatures of the imagination…

And secondly it extends it’s theme beyond duality and beyond the rigid confines of Cronenberg’s film.

It’s a Statten Island of Doctor Moreau! Annie Ross (the great Jazz Singer from Scotland) plays a kindly matriarch who has taken to boarding the ‘freaks’ away from the glare of hack journalists – but she has a dark side too and any hack getting near enough to snap pictures for cheesy newspapers is soon a victim to her army of others… So she ain’t such a saint after all.

In the end, everyone is revealed to be a freak of one kind or another… In Dead Ringers the themes are played out on a purely tonal level, people speak the themes occasionally, or dream them, but the film is all surface and not much fun at all really – everything is very dour and portentious throughout.

I may have cheated by comparing TWO films to Dead Ringers, but then Henenlotter has actually made THREE Basket Case films and Cronenberg has yet to deliver a sequel to his joke free twins flick… so the BC films are better value, too.

Anyway – not much of an argument and poorly spelt too. See you later when I rubbish another film and praise something really silly instead, like an inverted snob.

So there you go... I am right!

a break from the depression

Beneath Our Very Feet a Secret World

hey this blogging thing is hard work! I have no idea if anyone can read it, sometimes it appears blank to me, Steve informs me the image on the last post was just blank... ah, and my spelling is terrible.

anyway, enough about me and what is essentially (as most blogs seem to be) a vanity project, instead I thought i'd spend a little time talking about Dario Argento's Inferno.

It's on my fave film personal profile page - though I probably screwed that up too. So I thought I'd give it a mention here too.

I had a chat some time last year or maybe the year before that with one of those Art Twins who do provocative, sick sculptural art, kids with cock-noses, hell, so on and so forth (some of it very good really) as they were thinking of developing a horror film - we got chatting about themes and I went for it as I had been drinking and I can't really stop my mouth after three pints... anyway... I started talking about what lies beneath the themes (social unrest, the family, sexuality, otherness, etc)... and I thought that what was at the heart of most GOOD horror films was the idea of a secret world - a world that exists sometimes just outside of our peripheral view... or often beneath our very feet.

This world is sometimes an arcane one, sometimes ancient, sometimes a product of our society, often mystical... it exists in our darkest dreams and imagination.

In the first of Argento's Three Mother's trilogy, Suspiria, Argento fuses a romantic sensibilty (ballet, architecture, secret passages and rooms) with an expressionist one (dramatic, psychological lighting, violent imagery, light and shadow) to create a truly mindblowing experience. In the film ballet step notes are used to follow a clue that leads inexorably to death and insanity.



But in Inferno he goes even further, buildings around us all the time, seemingly everyday, are the real stars of the film - they hold secrets. Libraries don't just reveal ancient tomes that mortals should not read, they also house alchemists in their basements... flooded cellars house hidden drawing rooms and beneath our feet underground passages lead to a building within a building.


It's as if the world we are in is a set and the real world, a world more terrifying than our own, is just beyond the flimsy walls we trust.

Inferno is a masterpiece, but it's not to everyone's taste. I can remember the dull reviews when it was released, the disappointment that it wasn't another Suspiria, the attacks that it was an empty exercise in style, or the attacks that it lacked style.

well time has been kind to Inferno - if you can take the fashions and the dubbing (and only those who can't engage their imaginations can't deal with the bad dubbing, fashion etc that appear in so many dismissed great works of cinema) - it looks beautiful, even brilliant, the story is layered and driven by emotion not cold logic, there is still an underlying intelligence to it's themes...

the film owes a lot to the work of Val Lewton - but don't think of it as art-horror, it's pure horror... it will seep into your dreams. For those who like gore and stuff there's that too - and killer cats, a heroin addicted countess, alchemy, thunder storms, stabbings, full moons, killer rats and Death herself.

see if you can see it! Try to anyway... you don't have to if you don't want mind you... but it's good I tell ya!

anyway - the art twins are still developing their horror film, I don't think I had impressed with my passion for Argento and constant mentioning of Fulci's City of the Living Dead.

I like my horror to explore this alternative place, or to play with my mind, but they have to have some kind of intelligence.

anyway, next blog will return to my depression and my chance to set the record straight as laid out on Steve's blog that Basket Case 2 REALLY IS better that Cronenbergs Dead Ringers!

Bye.

Adventures in Film Making, Part One - The Dull Years.

here's a picture of hywel bennett in
One for the Road -
great bloke!

Well, hello!

welcome to my first blog kind of thing - I have no (or very little) idea what I am doing or what I am playing at... so bear with me as this blog will either get a lot worse or marginally better (I would guess worse, to be honest)...

... why the title - well, I remember my good friend and fellow filmmaker, Steve, remarking that my first feature (possibly my only feature film) was depressing but reflected my world view - and to be honest that's probably true - I am a depressing bastard!

It's Rupert Procter & Greg Chisholm in
One for the Road - Look at it a bit!

My films (shorts to miserable feature) have reflected my own struggle to like the characters i write about and this is a problem that my very funders have - "oh it's quite funny and everything, but does the lead have to be such a bastard? Couldn't we sympathise a little more, make him better looking and more charming?"

what would be the fucking point of that!?

The characters are at odds with themselves, their dilemma is that they haven't the faintest ideas who they are or what would be the right thing to do... my films are as much about watching them fuck their lives up as they are about enjoying watching them fuck their lives up.

comedy for me is about watching a man fall flat on his face, pick himself up, dust himself down, straighten up and walk into the path of a runaway lorry.

and that's the theme of this blog!

here you'll have the pleasure of reading these mispelt postings as you follow my road to future failure (or success - who knows - but I'm betting on it not working out too well), watch my disastrous rise to the bottom, more failure, disaster and a little more failure....

... should be painful - i'll try to make it entertaining!

se ya soon.