10 Years of Bitter Posts - The Worst Query Submission I Read

I haven't been reading scripts professionally for over five years - astoundingly half the life of this blog. Early in my first year of blogging I wrote about the worst query submission I ever receieved. To date, this has yet to be beaten in its awfulness.  

My original post of this is available here.

Over the years, I've read thousands of scripts and I can tell you where most of them have ended up - in the circular file. However, every now and then I get a script so hilariously, unbelievably bad that I have to save it for posterity. There's one such script that I have held onto for most of my career. To be honest, I'm not sure how it made its way into the company I was working for at the time. It has all the earmarks of a "slush pile" script, and yet, somehow it got to an assistant who didn't take this sort of thing.

My theory has always been that she requested the script so she could use it to torture me.

It's hard to know where to begin with this abomination, so I'll just describe it the way a professional reader would see it. The first thing you'd notice is that the script is significantly thicker than most other screenplays. A quick flip to the back page will confirm that it is just shy of 160 pages in length - about 40 pages and 33% longer than the accepted norm!

You would also notice that the first fifteen or so pages bound in the script are not actually part of the script. Beneath the cover page is a Table of Contents, that helpfully explains that there is an Introduction, an Overview, and a section on "marketing considerations." These marketing considerations include "observations" on the particular cultural subset depicted in the film, as well as the "Author's Commitment to Marketing."

I'll say this now - as the screenwriter, it's not your job to tell the producers and marketing department how to market their film. Yes, you need to give them something marketable, but then shut up and let them do their jobs.

Oh, and the writer also included several pages of reviews from their last book. (Self-published, of course.)

The page and a half cover letter helpfully informs the executive that the film was inspired by a true story, and then leads into a long uninteresting anecdote about a conversation the writer had which inspired the film. The second paragraph details how this screenplay was first written as a novel and then adapted by the author. The author suggests that "This is a perfect vehicle for Halle Berry, and we already know what she looks like in tight, black latex... though there are others who work as well." In case you don't know this, NEVER offer casting suggestions in a cover letter. Let the casting people do their job.

The next paragraph says that though the script is a little long, that's mostly because of the long descriptions of the settings and actions, and the writer estimates that the film will be more than two hours and fifteen minutes. This is also the point where the writer casually mentions that several scenes are a direct riff on an existing and well-known novel - to the point that several characters assume the identities of the other author's characters.

Oh, and as we get to page two of the cover letter, the author says that all her friends have responded well to the script and again she mentions the research on marketing that they themselves gathered.

But the author still hasn't shut up - there's yet another page! An addendum to the cover letter. It starts with "I forgot to mention how much research went into this script," and then spends three paragraphs singling out specific scenes and essentially saying little more than, "Someone told me this stuff in an interview."

So finally, after I've stopped laughing so hard that my throat is sore, I peel back the real cover page. I'm not greeted with "FADE IN" as I should be. No, I still have to get past a one-page list suggesting possible cast members for the eight lead roles.

Seriously, days like that don't just make me hate my job. They make me hate writers.

Now I'm going to tell you the first two words in the first two paragraphs of the script:

1) "CAMERA PANS"
2) "CAMERA MOVES"

Never, ever, EVER, NEVER direct in the screenplay! At this point I pretty much know all I should need to know. It's utter amateur hour. Not only can I be assured that the writer has no clue what they're doing, I can already tell from the pitch that this is not something that my bosses would ever go for. Unfortunately, this was not one of those times when I had the luxury of simply going back to my bosses and telling them what I told you. It had been made clear to me that I had to read the whole thing.

This script was wretched. There was excessive voice-over narration throughout, insanely overly detailed description, including a healthy serving of "unfilmables." (For those not in the know, "unfilmables" are what we call information in the description that cannot possibly be shown visually. For instance, if the description tells us that Bobby has been emotionally crippled ever since his mom died in his arms when he was 8, that's bad writing. If we need to know that, it should come out through dialogue or action. Putting it in the description means that the only people who will know this are those reading the script.)

There were also a number of graphic sex scenes that, if filmed as described, would have earned the movie an NC-17 easily.

This thing is utter garbage. It's not the most offensive spec script I've ever read, but it's definitely in my Top 5 Worst, if not THE worst. I keep it as a reminder to never make the mistakes that writer did. Plus, every now and then it's good for a laugh.

10 Years of Bitter Posts - The Ron Moore Story

One of my favorite stories to tell is the time back in college where I had an actual communication with a showrunner I admired and was completely inept in knowing how to capitalize on it. I'm often hard on overeager writers who jump the gun in pushing their script on someone, trying to get somewhere before they're ready. We've ALL made that mistake, and today I'm going to tell you about mine.

Back in school, I had long wanted to be a screenwriter and a director, but hadn't given much thought to TV writing. All of that changed when I - being a fan of Deep Space Nine - came across a bulletin board one of the show's co-executive producers/writers, Ronald D. Moore, frequented. He regularly answered questions submitted by fans, often dealing with the production process and the evolution of storylines and character development. It was my first real in-depth look inside the process of creating a television show. I learned a lot about writing just by reading his posts.

These days, Moore is probably best known for being the executive producer of the Battlestar Galactica reboot and the showrunner of Outlander, among other achievements.

After Ron left the Trek franchise, he also gave a very interesting five-part interview on his time working on those series. This interview is notable because he talks often of finding the "truth" in writing, and how a writer has to respect his audience. Interestingly, a lot of the criticisms he lobs at Star Trek: Voyager presage creative decisions he would later make in the Battlestar Galactica reboot.

I was in college at the time of this interview and roughly a year later, I found myself with the opportunity to create a TV show for a student-run cable network that we were attempting to get off the ground. I immediately latched on the idea of doing a teen-drama type series set on a college campus, and soon went mad with delusions of writing episodes with the same character complexity and compelling stories as on my favorite shows Homicide and Buffy, among others.

It's a bit ironic looking back on my ambitions now. The first season was a bit looser and less grounded. In the second season I exercised more control over the storylines and wanted to do more dramatic, serious storytelling. Homicide episodes like "Crosetti," dealing with the loss of one of the squad to suicide, and "Have a Conscience," where Detective Kellerman considers taking his own life were huge influences. Years later it took me a little too long to realize that 13 Reasons Why was probably the closest a TV show ever came to being the kind of series that I was shooting for tonally and in terms of some of the leads.

This endeavor was a total grass roots effort. There was a dedicated group of students trying to make this work, but the school administration wasn't exactly behind us and none of the media-related departments wanted to get saddled with us either. That meant that all of our work ended up being done on our own time and we were responsible for finding our own equipment - including cameras and editing facilities, and all of this had to be done on our own time. This was no mean feat, as DV was just on the verge of breaking through AND Final Cut Pro was still a relatively new and expensive program that wasn't yet owned by every wannabe filmmaker. Had we been working on this three years later, it would have been twice as easy. At the time, we were shooting on VHS and sneaking into editing labs during late nights and weekends. In one semester, we shot and edited about ten half-hour episodes of our little college drama. Considering the restrictions on our time and the limitations we had, that was pretty impressive.

I say all of this mainly so you can appreciate how unusual this was at the time. This preceded YouTube by at least three years, so we were nowhere near the time where every aspiring filmmaker essentially had his own laptop studio, with easy distribution via video sites like Break.com, YouTube or Funny Or Die. Three years later, it probably would have been a lot easier to produce the show, but also would have been much less impressive to anyone "in the biz." However, I'd have made that trade in an instant. I'd have killed for greater access to Final Cut and it would be nice to watch the episodes and not cringe at the shitty VHS quality. (Yes, I said VHS. Feel free to shudder.)

As long as I'm on this tangent, I might as well say that while some of my writing in that show was of questionable quality, the experience was invaluable. I learned a lot about staging scenes, shooting coverage efficiently and writing tighter dialogue. When you're forced to hear poor dialogue many, many takes in a row and realize that it's not poor acting, but your overwritten verbiage that's causing the problem, you're motivated to overcome your weaknesses.

So feeling proud of myself, I finally got up the nerve to write Ron Moore a letter telling him all about what I was doing in college and how I had learned more about character writing and TV production from him than I had from any professor. (This wasn't smoke - many times that season I found myself drawing inspiration from his writings and interviews.)

Eight weeks later I had nearly forgotten all about this letter - until I returned home one summer afternoon to find a message from Ron's assistant on Roswell, where he worked at the time. She said that Ron had been very touched by my letter and asked me to call her back so that he might thank me himself.

Considering I hadn't included my phone number in the letter, I was rather impressed that this message had found its way to me. I assumed that this assistant had spent the morning tracking me down. Thanks to a journal I kept at the time, I have a pretty detailed account of how this went. In all its embarrassing glory.

So after I pick my jaw up from the floor, I dial the number and get transferred to Ron. He actually sounded excited to be talking to me! "I wanted to thank you for the very nice letter you sent," he said. I reply with something like "well, I have been a big admirer of your work for a long time."

Then he says to me, "So tell me about this show you're doing. I want to hear all about it." (My mind at this point is screaming "My idol just asked me to tell him about *my show!* This has got to be a dream!")

So I give him a Cliff Notes version of what we're doing, how many eps, and all that wonderful stuff. He sounds genuinely impressed. "Wow, I've never heard of anyone doing anything like that!" he finally says.

Then he says, "Hey, I'd love to see an episode sometime if it wouldn't be too much trouble for you to send a tape." Excitedly, I assure him that there'll be a package arriving at his office soon. (I sent it priority mail on Saturday. I sent him a copy of episodes 5 through 9, with the tape cued to ep 9. In an enclosed letter, I told him that ep 5 is the place to start if he is more interested in following the story, but ep 9 is the one he should look at to get an idea of the level of acting and production values we achieved in the end, and what we hope to maintain next season.)

All told, we chat for about 15-20 minutes. As the phone call concludes, he tells me "Stay in touch."

For an embarrassing insight into my naivete, take a look at this excerpt from an email I sent to my fellow writers about this phone call:

How cool is this? A Hollywood producer has a copy of our show! Now, the likelihood is that he'll probably watch it and maybe be entertained. But imagine if he's impressed...either by the acting or the writing or the directing. What if he shows it to other Hollywood types and they like something in it? Sure, it's unlikely, but this could be how we get our foot in the door in LA. Think about that for a few minutes.

I should also mention that Ron's very friendly assistant had also sent me an email that same day, and I spoke to her again after talking to Ron so that I could get a more efficient mailing address, sending the tape directly to their production offices on the lot as opposed to the general network address. And this, dear readers is where in retrospect, I totally dropped the ball.

A few weeks go by. No word from Ron. But I figure he's a busy guy and he probably hasn't had time to watch the tape yet. After about three months, I'm starting to wonder if he saw it and he didn't like it. Or maybe I dropped the ball by not following up with him sooner. What if he's completely forgotten me? I didn't want to be the kind of pest who bugged him a week after sending it, but he did say to "stay in touch." Eventually, I start trying to figure out a non-desperate-sounding pretense for contacting him again.

Fortune smiles upon me when a throwaway mention in an early episode that season seems like it could have been a shout-out to my show. I decide to send him another letter. Within a week, I have my answer, an email from his assistant:

"I just wanted to write and let you know that we received your letter, and the tape you sent earlier of your campus television show. Ron has been unable to view the tape, at this point... (due to the CRAZY hectic producing schedule I keep him on-- balancing his time between writing, story-developing, and post-production.) As you know with making a television show, it can be quite busy!

Ron extends his best wishes to you in your television-writing ventures.
Take care."

So... the brush-off. But hey, I still think that was pretty cool of Ron to track me down in the first place and chat with me on the phone. I might not have gotten everything I hoped out of it, but it gave me a pretty cool story and left me secure in the belief that Ron Moore was a pretty cool guy. Anyway, after that last email, I took the hint and decided to leave with some of my dignity intact.

Now class, can anyone tell me what I did wrong, and how I overlooked another opportunity that was right under my nose?

That's right - the assistant. I totally overlooked the opportunity to cultivate some kind of relationship there. Here's a secret about the industry - while everyone naturally resents being used, most people are only too happy to lend other up-and-comers the benefit of their experience. To put it another way - there are few people who don't enjoy talking about themselves. Use that to your advantage. If you ask the right questions, you might learn something.

So what I should have done is sent that tape, then emailed the assistant to not only thank her for making that contact possible, but also to ask her for advice. I could have said that I was considering moving out to LA in a little over a year, just after graduation, and asked if she had any advice about making that move. I could have asked about what areas are good areas to live in, how much an apartment costs, how hard it is to find a job, how she got hooked up with her job, when's the best time to move to LA, and so on.

There are probably about a hundred different things I could have asked this assistant that not only would have made her feel like an expert, but would have benefited me in the long run. As a bonus, it would have maintained that relationship. Who knows? Maybe when I moved out to LA, I could have used that to meet with her for lunch, perhaps finding a way to approach Ron eventually. Or she might have been able to submit my resume for any open PA positions on the show.

The point is, I overlooked an opportunity to ingrain myself with someone who might have been lower in the ranks than I wanted, but who still could have taught me a lot. Today's writer's assistants are tomorrow's writers - and had I thought of it like that, I'd have realized it might not be a bad idea to make friends with someone who was climbing the same ranks I wanted to.

I eventually reached out to her several months after I moved to L.A. and had a job. By that point, she'd left the business and had moved elsewhere.

As for Ron, it took many, many years but we finally crossed paths at San Diego Comic-Con. Ron was a guest on a writing panel and as the program concluded I managed to maneuver myself into walking past him as he got off-stage. I reintroduced myself, explaining about the letter I wrote all those years ago. "Oh yeah! I think I remember that!" he said. This might be true, or he was just being polite.

Either way he indulged me in a brief chat and I posed for a picture with him. This coincided with a brief high in my career where it seemed like I might have a project that could go, so at the time, I took it as an omen. It would have been a nice "full circle" kind of act if that encounter with Ron preceded a career boost. Even without that, it was nice to get that closure.

10 Years of Bitter Posts - Dan Callahan and Robert Levine interviews

Over the years I've done a number of interviews (all of them conveniently linked on the side of the blog,) but the first two deep-dive interviews I did will always remain closest to my heart. Part of this is because it was nice to have these interview subjects indulge me for what often came out to an hour and a half chat. The result of that longer talk was an ability to go further in depth about topics that often get skimmed past in shorter interviews.

With Dan Callahan, I knew I had a compelling opportunity. In 2008, Dan saw his first produced feature script hit theaters, a late summer arrival entitled COLLEGE. If you remember this movie you might not remember it fondly - it only scored a 6% on Rotten Tomatoes and opened at #15 in the box office. Its entire domestic gross was less than $5M.

I spoke to Dan nearly a year after this, so he was under no illusions about the film or its reputation. One pre-interview request I had was that I wanted to read the draft that sold so that I could compare it to the film. Would it be possible to see where this film went so wrong? Or was it a case of every failing of the film already being deep in its DNA?

To spare you the suspense, the script - written with Dan's co-writer Adam Ellison - was quite a bit better. Had it been shot as is, it probably would have been a decent film. Not a monster hit, but one that its target audience would probably remember fondly. And so with Dan, I tried to trace all the ways that bad choices turned his earnest teen comedy into... something less.

Part 1 - The Writing Process
Part 2 - Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part 3 - Notes, Rewriting, Casting, and SUPERBAD
Part 4 - More Rewrites
Part 5 - Release and Reaction

Some time after that, I interviewed Robert Levine, then an Executive Story Editor and writer on HUMAN TARGET. Since our interview, Robert has become the creator and showrunner of the successful Starz series BLACK SAILS. At the time, I was interested in talking to Robert because he was a writer who came up through the assistant ranks.

There are a lot of writers who break into TV via means that seem less achievable - they had a couple unproduced feature sales and then someone bought their pilot, they sold their novel for adaptation, they had a career as a doctor and became a writer/consultant on a medical show. Robert's path seemed more achievable - get in as an assistant and figure out how to make yourself valuable to the show. In our chat we covered that, as well as some specific questions about JERICHO, which was his first show as a staff writer.

Part 1 - Climbing the ladder as a writers' assistant
Part 2 - Working on JERICHO's first season
Part 3 - Writing season two of JERICHO
Part 4 - Writing the JERICHO comic book and getting an agent
Part 5 - Writing for HUMAN TARGET

Please give these a look. I sometimes worry that since they're so far back in the archives, newer readers haven't seen them.

10 Years of Bitter Posts - ER week and TV deep dives

Working my way through my old posts, I see it only took me a couple months to do my first deep-dive theme week on a TV show. It was March 2009 and ER was just about to finish a 15 year run on the air. Having watched the series pretty much since the beginning - and with the morning TNT reruns a staple of my viewing while I started my day - I saw an opportunity to use the show as a teaching tool.

It was the first time I felt like I really went in-depth on a topic, and probably one of the first times I strayed so far from my direct experience as a script reader. A lot more work went into these posts, but it was more satisfying because I always enjoyed talking about what I loved than bitching about what I hated.

When you're putting so much energy into communicating your opinion, you're more easily fueled by an appreciation for the topic rather than distain. This is not to say I don't enjoy the occasional "Oh, fuck THIS" post, because I do, but I have far more enthusiasm for a series of posts that go "Oh my god! This is so awesome! Let me count the ways so you can take it in and see how this is awesome too!"

This might be how I ended up writing a thirteen part-series on 13 REASONS WHY. It's DEFINITELY how I ended up writing an love letter to the 16 Great TV Shows that made me the writer I am today.

But my blog's virginity for that approach was lost to ER, almost ten years ago.

Part 1 is an examination of the pilot script and the main characters:

I recently rewatched the pilot for the first time in several years and several things struck me. First, at the time it premiered, I remember all the hype about how ER moved too fast, the camera never slowed down, the editing was too quick and MTV-like. It just goes to show you how things change in 15 years of TV because the pace was a bit more leisurely than on most ER episodes today, and the moving camera wasn’t nearly the breakneck pace it was made out to be. The lighting was also more diffused and “natural,” along with a more muted color palate. It’s as if they were making an effort to be “real.” If I wanted to be glib, I’d say that the current incarnation of the show is like the TV-version of the original series. 

But never mind much of that because we’re here to talk about writing. There are five regular characters introduced in the pilot: Doctors Mark Greene (Anthony Edwards), Doug Ross (George Clooney), Susan Lewis (Sherry Stringfield), med student John Carter (Noah Wyle) and surgeon Peter Benton (Eriq la Salle). (Nurse Hathaway is in the pilot as well, but at the time of production she was not intended as a regular character and was in fact, supposed to be killed off in the episode, but more on that later this week.) The premise is simple – we’re a fly-on-the-wall for 24 hours in the life of Chicago’s Cook County General emergency room.

Part 2 takes a look at a two-character scene where one of the doctors has to break it to a patient that they have terminal cancer.

Part 3 examines another pivotal scene, the doctors reacting to Hathaway's suicide attempt.

Part 4 is a deep-dive into one of my favorite episodes, "All in the Family," aka the one where the ER staff fights to save Carter and Lucy after a stabbing.

10 Years of Bitter Posts - I'm gonna keep talking about sexism and misogyny until you stop writing it

There are some topics that I've covered from the start of this blog and have kept returning to over the years. You'd think I'd have run out of things to say about it, or at least that an issue of such magnitude would have seen some progress over the years, which only makes a lack of progress even more disheartening. I'm speaking, of course, about misogyny and sexism in scripts.

There are a lot of things I've seen recur in bad scripts. When you've read a lot of these, you almost start to get desensitized to it because you notice there are certain mistakes that every first-time writer is going to make. Dialogue will be too on the nose, scenes will take too long to play out, characters will give long speeches about meaningless pop culture because the writer really wants to pontificate about Bob Dylan... and every female character will have ample breasts.

Let's say I was reading 10 scripts a week. I would bet that AT LEAST two of those scripts described the size, shape and/or condition of the breasts of a female character. It's almost always gratuitous too. Even if the script organically got to a moment where the female character strips down to a bikini or lingerie, there's rarely a need for leering scene description. (Too few writers think about the fact that the actresses are going to READ that description too.)

You might be inclined to consider this as benign sexism, but it's dangerous to objectify your characters like this - and when it's systemic across a lot of scripts, you start to realize the problem is bigger and uglier than a screenwriter who is typing while horny.

I don't think this casual sexism is unrelated to an uglier brand of misogyny I often encountered in scripts. Rape and sexual assault are often badly mishandled and one of the biggest red flags is when the writer objectifies the victim of sexual assault. A rape scene should not feel sexual - it should feel like a violation. It is not a power fantasy - it is an act of violence and degradation. Emotionally, we should NOT be relating to the perpetrator (unless the entire point of the script is to implicate the audience along with your assailant, but that's a rare situation and a tricky needle to thread to boot.)

Just over a month into the life of this blog, I wrote "Misogynistic Violence against women."

After more than five years as a reader, I now know far too many ways to mutilate, subjugate and sexually degrade a woman. I’m by no means a feminist, and there are plenty of instances where I’ve read an act of violence committed upon a female character and haven’t raised an eyebrow at it. Don’t misunderstand me – I’m not saying you should never hurt, injure or kill your female characters. That would be equally sexist. The problem sets in when it feels like the victimizer in the scene is a stand-in for the writer’s own sick desires.

This is one of those subliminal things that’s hard to point out without using specific examples, and unfortunately, to show the worst/best examples of such writing would likely get me sued. As blurry as the line gets, it most frequently gets crossed when some sort of sexual element is added to it. A scene where a woman is stabbed and her throat is slashed probably wouldn’t set of any alarms – but a scene where a woman is stabbed, then raped as the attacker takes obvious glee in her pain is going to be more repulsive.

I returned to the topic in a later post, "The script that made me want to recommend psychiatric help for the writer."

And then there was one of the most vile, misogynistic pieces of violent writing I had ever read.  It was perverted, disgusting and disturbing to such a level that the only reason I ended up with the script was that the (female) reader who had to cover the first submission of this script refused to read it again due to being the product of a sick mind.

She was right. I googled the writer.  He was a studio exec.

As much as that deserved a rimshot THAT WAS NOT A JOKE!

The coverage that script provoked was some of the most unvarnished coverage I ever had submitted to these bosses.  Some of my employers enjoy it when I take a more Simon Cowell-like approach to shredding the truly terrible scripts, others have preferred a more measured, even take on it.  The bosses for this submission were among the more buttoned-up, but in my write-up, I only barely restrained myself from suggesting psychiatric help for the submitter.

A few months later, the script was resubmitted.  I had to read it again.  The fucker barely had changed anything - and he certainly hadn't toned down the misogyny or the violence.  Or the misogynistic violence.  I made sure when I wrote the synopsis that I included every last instance of such.

I'll put it this way.  He made I Spit on Your Grave look like Mary Poppins.  So I tore him a new one, then emailed my boss's assistant and said, "Look, this concept is NEVER ever going to get a Consider from anyone.  If we take it again, we're wasting our time and the company's money."  As I understand it, the message was conveyed.  In spades.

A few weeks later, the writer attempted to submit again.  He was unsuccessful.

I've probably written other scripts that were just as bad or worse, but few made me as violently angry at the writer as that.  Rarely have I ever felt I was looking into the mind of such a sick individual.

I'm still angry about this one. I felt violated just having been forced to read it and spend three hours of my day immersed in this and then writing it up.

Granted, that's an extreme example. And almost every time I get going on this topic, there'll usually be at least one person responding with an attitude about how I shouldn't tell writers what to write, or that I'm advocating censorship, or listing rape scenes in acclaimed films as if that disproves my argument.

So here's my concession right here - YES, it's possible to write a rape scene that is integral to the story, makes a point, isn't exploitative and doesn't objectify the victim. I'm not saying never write about sexual violence. Hell, I think 13 Reasons Why did a very solid job of depicting sexual violence and doing it in a way that wasn't sleazy or crass. (I hasten to add that I'm speaking of Season 1 here, NOT the controversial sexual assault in Season 2.)

So if your takeaway here is that I'm saying "NEVER write about rape," you're misunderstanding me. All I'm asking for is some responsibility. A checklist like this wouldn't hurt:

• Is it essential to the story?
• If yes, are steps taken to depict the victim as more than just a victim?
• If yes, are you writing the scene in a way that isn't designed to excite and arouse?
• If you had to remove the rape from the story, how much would it change? Is it substantial?
• Whose arc is altered the greatest by the inclusion of the rape: The male character's or the female characters?

Many of these questions relate to issues I raised in this post, "Let's talk about rape scenes." Though it's more than five years old, it's worth a read. At one point it was one of my most popular posts. It also lead to one of my favorite reader emails, where a reader named Diana really hit the nail on the head:

I remember a foreign film way back when about the brutality of the civil war in the former Yugoslavia and its affects on women. (can't remember the title). It showed the lawlessness during that time, and the resulting roaming gangs of men. And the violence that was regularly perpetrated against women. It showed a brutal gang rape scene (that must have lasted at least a full 5 minutes of film time!) of two women in their home. It included the act of anal rape. It was riveting. Horrifying. Visceral. And realistic. It was not sexy in the least. And it was not done for shock value, though it most certainly left most of us in the audience in shock. 

And as it turns out, no superhero guy (or hubby/boyfriend) appeared in a fit of rage in that film to avenge the violence against these two women. After the rapists left, the women were simply left alone with their physical injuries and their shattered psyches. And their own rage. Of which they had plenty. 

And I think therein touches on another part (I think actually it's the crux) of the (inherent) problem with these many rape scenes of women penned by men: It is that the man (boyfriend/husband/superhero guy) gets to feel the resulting rage for the violation. And to act on that rage. Not the woman who was violated. 

Rape happens to women. A lot. So not ever showing rape of women would be sort of a denial of this horrible reality. And aside from the reality that some male writers might write such scenes a little too (disturbingly) gleefully,i t's not even (just) the fact that the aftermath of the rape on the female victim is never really shown-- such as, say, the woman/girl sobbing and stuff. Or being an emotional/psychological wreck. Or even being terrified in the aftermath--maybe of men, maybe of just going outside. Whatever. No, it's not even just about those things. What's it's also about, maybe even more so about, is THE RAGE. And who gets to have it. 

THE RAGE. It would be a great term for the last year and a half, as sexual harassment and misogyny have been called out with much greater frequency and we have seen women push back against abuse, saying "No more!"

Feel that rage - and understand that rage belongs to every female character abused and mistreated. If your writing isn't reflecting that, you need to go back to the drawing board.

Dare I hope that the next five years of rape in spec scripts will look and feel different from the five or ten years that proceeded it?

10 years of Bitter Posts - Structure

In today's installment of our month-long retrospective, I tackle a post that I feel less enthused about a decade later. Even then, I was careful to couch most of what I said as general advice, not as any kind of iron-clad "rule." This was because the instant you call something a "rule," even half-jokingly, you'll attract the attention of someone who'll shout "There are no rules in writing!" and then suddenly the debate is about "How DARE you tell someone what to write!" than it is about the actual issue you were writing about in the first place.

That usually then spins out to the fire-breathing attack that "if this guy was any good, HE'D have sold a script!" The argument turns into pro-vs-amateur, which is never a good look for either side and nothing productive comes of it. 

(I want to point out that 99% of my interactions with professional writers has been positive, but every now and then you find one who seems resistant to the idea that someone without a script sale to their name could POSSIBLY understand when a script makes a bad choice. If you're writing scripts ONLY for an audience of screenwriters, then sure, shut out everything else. OR if you're faced with a snake oil guru who makes a living by slapping bullshit terminology on top of more commonly-understood jargon and then charging you through the roof for it, by all means, go after him.)

This older post was about structure. While I still stand by the spirit of the post, I wince a little at how I used page numbers as a signpost, even though I made a point of saying not to use those page numbers as exact markers. CAN you have twenty pages until you hit the inciting incident? Sure. But it doesn't happen often and when it does happen, you'll find that those first twenty pages are some of the most compelling you've ever read.

But as someone who's a stickler for structure, particularly in my own writing, I want to find a way to give the novice a way to understand how Three-Act Structure works. Save the Cat has a brilliant breakdown, but is almost two specific in two different ways: I think it seems to mandate too many specific plot points AND it's pretty specific about where the pages fall.

So how would I handle it today? I'd probably write the post without the page numbers first, describing the act breaks and turning points entirely in terms of what their function was.

To wit:

• The inciting incident is the change in the status quo that instigates the story. It's Casey Becker being murdered by Ghostface, Vincent getting into Max's cab, Chief Brody finding the body of a half-eaten swimmer and realizing he's got a shark on his hands. It's the starter's gun for your story and your protagonist. Everything else is setting the stage for that and laying out the world.
  
• The first act turning point is the major shift in the story trajectory. It's Marty McFly realizing he's in 1955 and accidentally messing up his parents' first meeting. Something MAJOR happens and it defines how the protagonist is going to spend the rest of the movie reacting to it or fixing it.
  
• The midpoint is an equal raising of the stakes. Then the second act climax is usually where we hit the do-or-die moment. The character is at their lowest point and usually needs to rally for the endgame. If there's a plan, here's where it goes off the rails. In Back to the Future, it's probably the moment where George shows up for his rehearsed fight with Marty, only to find that Biff is about to sexually assault Lorraine. In Batman Begins, it's when Ra's burns down Wayne Manor and Bruce is left for dead, even as the League of Shadows puts into play their plan for Gotham's demise.
  
• The third act then becomes a ticking clock down to the climax. What are our heroes trying to stop or achieve? This is hero vs villain, or the big game where our characters face their opponents.

(Though to be honest, Back to the Future is a dangerous script to use for these purposes because nearly EVERY scene is so propulsive that you can make a case for it as a turning point. Marty still needs to play at the dance, George still needs to kiss Lorraine AND then Marty has to get home even as the clock tower plan falls apart piece by piece.)

But those are usually the five structural questions I need to have answered before I start writing:

• What opens up the world?
• What is the change or escalation that will define the second act of the story? What's the "oh shit" decision that gets made there? (Better if it comes from something the protagonist does.)
• What's the new challenge or threat that shows itself after the characters are starting to feel comfortable?
• What is their lowest point?
• What is the final test they face? What are they trying to stop/achieve ultimately?

There! Did it all without citing page numbers.

10 Years of Bitter Posts - Cliches I'm tired of seeing and Quick Tips

Another early feature on the blog was "Clichés I'm Tired of Seeing." When you're reading 15 scripts a week for five years, you start becoming nauseous at the signs that always accompany the least satisfying scripts to read. Most of these could be easily evaded, but too many writers fell into the most unimaginative ways of using them.

The first cliché I targeted was a resolution I'd seen in many rom-coms and dramas - where the "surprise" visual reveal of a woman's new baby bump at the climax was used as shorthand for "and they lived happily ever after." I started with that because it's not a BAD way to communicate the strength of the relationship, it's just a technique that's been done so many times that the impact it carries is usually outweighed by the audience feeling it coming.

I also took writers to task who ended their scripts with "To Be Continued." This was less common then and hopefully is non-existent now. I detested this the most when I could feel writers holding back from giving a story proper resolution solely so they could justify a sequel.

Later posts addressed:
- a struggle between two people for a gun that ends with a BANG while the gun itself is off-screen. After a moment of "suspense," one of the two combatants falls, revealing the other to be the winner.

- the old "start with the climax to get the audience hooked and then flashback to reveal how they got there" trick.

- racing to the airport to stop the love of your life from leaving.

- "It was all a dream!"

- The newscaster as an exposition delivery system.

- The use of "Get me a beer" as a universal indicator that a male character is an asshole.

- Using a bet as the catalyst for a premise that would never happen otherwise.

Looking at this list, I can see why I moved away from this series. The clichés it called out were becoming so cliché that even pointing them out was tired. It was a little like a stand-up comedian with a Jack Nicholson impression or a tight five on how white people and black people dance differently.

Somewhat concurrently, I started a series of posts I called "Quick Tips." In all candor, this was so I could get away with putting up shorter posts just to build up content. The practice ended mostly because I'm so goddamn wordy that my attempts to be "quick" soon dragged out too long.

1. First Impressions
2. Brainstorming by imagining your movie's trailer
3. Knowing your title should be catchy
4. Character names
5. Don't try to solve a note about "this character seems thin" with a one-scene dumb of emotion and backstory.

Reading these early posts, I'm very aware that I was still clearly trying to find my voice. While all of these tips come from experience, they seem somewhat generic to me. They don't even come from the affected voice of a weary, bitter reader. I figured out early on that writing every post from the point of view of someone bitching would be exhausting. I mean, I love Lewis Black, but there's a reason The Daily Show didn't need him on every night.

It's all basic, 101 level blogging. Today, I wouldn't write some of these because I don't think I'd have any new way to say them. Part of why my presence has been less and less over the years is that I realized it shouldn't feel like an obligation to have an opinion about a particular facet of writing. I can just blog when I have something to say.

But I know people found these early posts useful, and so I try to remember that I have a lot of readers who might still be contemplating writing their very first script. For them, these early posts will always be there.