Tuesday Talkback - Do you seek out spoilers?

We live in a world where the internet has made it harder and harder for film and TV spoilers to be preserved. News travels at the speed of a tweet. Two decades ago, if a Batman movie was shooting out in the open in a metropolitan area, there might have been some local news coverage and a few lookey-loo passerbys, but the public at large wouldn't have a front row seat to the proceedings. Now with YouTube, Twitter and dedicated spoiler sites, all it takes is one guy with a camera phone and suddenly footage of Batman and Bane fighting before the cameras is there for all the world to see. Studio lots aren't safe either. All it takes is one visitor to snap a picture of an actor wandering about in costume and suddenly the world gets a sneak peak at the latest villain in a franchise.

And that's not even getting into the whole issue of people posting scripts or script reviews of films still in production.

But at a certain point, doesn't this rob the movies of their fun? I admit I took a look at a few of the Bane pictures from The Dark Knight Rises shoot, but I've made it a point to avoid all of the video and most of the other paparazzi shots. If someone sent me the script today, I probably wouldn't read it until after I saw the film. I don't need to unwrap my Christmas presents early. I'd rather be surprised.

So who's like me and who's the opposite of me? And to those people who do make it a point to hunt down every illicit spoiler and try to snag a copy of the script a year before it comes out, why do you do that? Curiosity? Bragging rights to saying you saw it first?

If you've sought out spoilers before, have you ever felt they hurt your enjoyment of the film (or TV show)? Have they ever enhanced your opinion of the final product?

Reader question - Writing group etiquette

Script Tease asks:

I think it would be great if you would or could address Writing Group etiquette. There's no rules on paper but most writers are in a group and the rules vary. However, I seem to run into problems and have witnessed many "verbal" death matches over notes. So if you can give your opinion on 1) how to politely handle a script full of toilet humor 2) How to tell a writer they've written a novel - not a script 3) How to handle getting booted out of a group (yes, it happened to me..but like my mother says..."They were just jealous! lol)
Thx!

First, go read these posts from way back:

Writing groups: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3

As for your questions:

1) Some writers are sensitive, others you could say, "This is shit" too and they'll want the detailed autopsy notes. Definitely know which breed you're working with.

With regard to a script full of toilet humor, the first question I have is, "Is it funny toilet humor?" You could try to diffuse the harshness of your critque by saying that maybe toilet humor isn't your thing, but does the problem go deeper than that? Is the toilet humor organic to the story? Is the gag plausibly staged, or is it just put in there for shock value?

For instance, I feel like a lot of the toilet humor in American Pie is horribly strained. The titular joke alone with the pie feels very forced, even with the conversation that's supposed to set it up. I don't believe a guy would do that. The earlier gag with the substance in the beer cup is set up a little more organically, but it's still paid off with a lot of sitcom hackery. The "coffee gag" in the second Austin Powers film

Over the years I've seen a lot of poorly motivated toilet humor. Too often, it's clear that the writer came up with the punchline ("Hey, let's have the prom queen get splattered with semen shot out of a reversed vacuum cleaner!") and then worked backwards from there. Unfortunately, the puppet strings are often very much in evidence.

But I'm drifting... my point is that perhaps you should explain why that concept isn't working for you rather than just make a blanket "anti-toilet humor" statement. If you go in with some form of "This sucks because it's toilet humor," then anything you say will probably be ignored. I don't like toilet humor much either, by the way, so I'm not criticizing you for taking exception to it.

2) This is a delicate thing too. I think a good way to start is by pointing out any unfilmables with in the script (descriptions of inner thoughts, backstory details in the action paragraphs.) Writers who write novelistically tend to make these mistakes, and so if you express that none of this comes across visually, they might understand your point. One technique might be to ask them to do a reading or a performance of the scene for the group. Then, compare what someone reading the script would understand versus what someone watching the movie would be able to intuit.

3) As for getting booted from a group - the best thing is to not take it personally. Sometimes people don't mesh, and if the group booted you, I'd bet that there were chemistry issues on both sides. Maybe they were frustrated with your notes, but I'd bet you were probably equally frustrated with them ignoring your notes.

Friday Free-For-All: Taylor Swift does Eminem

I mean... she "covers" Eminem.



The Apocalypse is upon us.

Reader question - doing coverage for an internship

I got an interesting question via Twitter from @codyisdead. He says:

applied for intrnshps in LA. Most req coverage of scripts. Do you have a sample cov. On ur site? And, can I intern for you?

140 characters is often quite limiting so I might need clarification on one point. Are you saying that you're being asked to do sample coverage as a prerequisite for getting an internship? That seems... odd. I never heard of anything like that back when I was an intern.

Granted, when I was an intern, the hottest song on the radio was Evanesence, Katie Holmes was at the top of my celebrity list, and everyone anticipating that the second Matrix movie was going to be awesome. In other words, things change.

To just get off on a tangent, I hate "audition coverage." There are times I've seriously wondered if a company pulls this just to get free coverage of their script backlog by calling in people for a job that doesn't really exist. It's ridiculous that an applicant has to do for FREE what they are paid to do as their vocation. If it's so important to get someone with experience and they want to see how the person writes coverage, prior samples from other jobs should be sufficient. You don't ask an applicant for a Development job to bring in a script and package it for free, do you?

No one should expect an intern to be brilliant with coverage, so perhaps you mean that coverage is required if you get hired. If that's the case, don't sweat it. These people will teach you how to do coverage and you'll get to see plenty of samples of what's acceptable to them. You're there to learn and they'll help you do that.

The basics of coverage are usually 1-2 pages of synopsis and one page of comments. The format for comments is most commonly: Introduction paragraph, character notes paragraph, plot/structure/concept notes paragraph, conclusion. (The middle two paragraphs may be transposed.

I'm sure if you poke around the internet you can find some professional examples. I don't have any on my site because legally, I don't own my coverage. It's all the property of the companies I've generated it for. I would just advise you to be aware of the difference between a review and coverage. The stuff you find on Scriptshadow isn't coverage, and I single him out only because he's probably the best-known script review site. I've also seen some confusion about this fact in a few private emails to me and elsewhere on the internet.

Oh and I wish I had need of an intern - or that I had enough pull in this business that it would mean something for someone to have interned for me.

Is the Warner Bros plan to make all comic book movies "dark and edgy" a smart move?

The L.A. Times had an article yesterday about how Warner Bros. is still planning Green Lantern 2, but that they intend to make it "edgier and darker" than the original.

*sigh*

This, of course, is the big lesson WB took from the billion dollar worldwide take of The Dark Knight: dark and edgy = better. If that song sounds familiar, it's because that's what they said a couple years ago when announcing their intentions for the next Superman movie. I'm also pretty sure this isn't the first time, they've said all their superhero films will be "dark and edgy."

It's ridiculous that is their only judgement on why Green Lantern underperformed. I don't think the problem was that it wasn't dark enough, it's that there wasn't enough sense of fun and adventure. Oh, and the second act had problems.

Why did people like Iron Man? Because it was fun and because Robert Downey Jr. was charming and charismatic. The Spider-Man movies are among the top grossing films of all time and they were plenty of fun too. "Dark" works for Batman because that's the world he inhabits. But it's not Superman's world, it's not Spider-Man's world, and it's not Green Lantern's world. At least not in the degrees that Batman's is.

If you apply this sort of "one size fits all" assessment to every underperforming comic book film then you fail to examine each one as a unique property and a unique story. "Comic Book Movie" isn't a genre in the sense that "Horror" and "Comedy" are genres. If you equate Green Lantern to The Dark Knight, you might as well try to find a common element in the failures of The Godfather part III and the Star Wars prequels.

As I joked on Twitter, WB could make a Holocaust film about Hitler raping dead gerbils and when it failed at the box office, they'd think the problem was it wasn't edgy enough.

The comics have gone dark - sometimes successfully, sometimes not. The DC miniseries Identity Crisis was effectively dark and edgy when dealing in the moral greys that the Justice League was revealed to trade in, to say nothing of the shockingly brutal murder of Robin's father. It was less successful when the story's twists included a completely unnecessary violation of a beloved female character.

The Star Trek franchise succeeded when went darker with Deep Space Nine and used that to explore greater moral complexity during wartime. It was less effective in the final Next Generation film Nemesis, which featured the completely unaffecting death of one character and the mental rape of another. (Hmmm... I see a disturbing pattern developing.)

Dark is overrated. Sure, everyone remembers The Empire Strikes Back as their favorite Star Wars film, but they conveniently forget that when they were seven years old, that shit on Dagobah was boring as hell. It might be fun to rip on Return of the Jedi and the annoyingly cute Ewoks, but to the average 10 year-old who saw those movies as they came out, Jedi was probably the more exciting and "better" of the two.

Imagine if the same studio execs working on Green Lantern today had been put in charge of Return of the Jedi, and that Empire Strikes Back had been hailed as the superior Star Wars film as much as it is today. The Ewoks would either have been replaced with more ferocious, brutally violent beings, or we'd have seen the Empire's troops plow through the Ewok forces with all the intensity of the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan. Jabba the Hutt would have raped Princess Leia, Han never would have survived the unfreezing, or would have done so with a horrible disfigurement, and Luke probably would have killed his father, only to end up in the Vader suit himself by the end of it.

Okay, maybe that wouldn't have happened. But must we always go "dark?" Don't we need some tonal balance in our superhero films?

Tuesday Talkback - Mr. Rogers Neighborhood

You're summoned to the office of a studio exec with an idea that he calls brilliant. When you show up, he says he's excited about bringing a well-known children's franchise back to theaters via a reboot movie.

Intrigued, you lean forward. Artistic integrity be damned. You've seen the Smurfs and Alvin and the Chipmunks movies bring in a lot of bank. Whatever this guy wants, you're going to pitch him. You'll collect a nice payday and get some breathing room for a premise you really want to develop.

"Hit me," you say.

"Three words," he responds. "Mr. Rogers Neighborhood."

Have at it, folks. What's your pitch?

(I deliberately picked this because there's probably ZERO chance of it ever happening, thus, no one should have to worry about getting their ideas stolen.

Reader question - mentality of a reader

Pliny The Elder asks:

What insight can you give into the decision making process behind the reader's job?

What kind of scripts make it past the reader, and which ones fail?

Do you err on the side of passing a script upwards, if it has a glimmer of potential? Are you told to favor various genres?

All good questions, some with more complicated answers than you might expect.

The number one credo every reader has to live by is to serve the client. Sure, we're there because we've proven our worth and our input is valued... but we're also there because the really important people simply don't have time to go through every submission. We're there to take the bullets on the bad scripts so they don't have to.

You know how on the old Star Treks there'd be a landing party that consisted of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy... and some guy in a red shirt you never saw before? Remember why that "red shirt" was there? So that when trouble came along, the red shirt was the one who got killed and the Captain could go about his business. In many ways, the reader is the red shirt. If something gets past us and threatens the Captain, it had better be something he wants to deal with.

This is why readers are so hard on the scripts they see. If we're saying something is worth the boss's attention, then it had better be damn good. You know what? I'll amend that slightly. It doesn't need to be across-the-board impressive, but it had better have something in there that makes it worthy of the boss's attention.

This is the second aspect of serving the client - know what your boss is looking for. Most production companies have fairly defined identities. That's easy enough to suss out just by looking at the sorts of films the company has made in the past. Granted, some are more defined than others. If you're reading for Platinum Dunes (Michael Bay's production company), you'll probably be getting a lot of action submissions and a lot of horror submissions. Here's PD's resume of released films:

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
The Amityville Horror
The Hitcher
Horseman
The Unborn
Friday the 13th
A Nightmare on Elm Street

Only two of those are not remakes and pretty much all of them are horror/thrillers. The IMDB Pro page also lists several scripts and pitches which they've purchased, most along the same lines as the examples above. Bottom line: if you're a reader at PD, you're probably going to be less inclined to pass a romantic comedy or a character drama up the ladder unless it's extremely well-written. (And yes, for unfathomable reasons there are plenty of production companies that get submissions that are "off-model" for them.)

Also, there's probably a chance that you'll go a little easier on some horror films or thrillers. The writing might not be perfect, but maybe there's a premise you see worth developing. Perhaps it simply looks like it could be done on a low budget and is essentially actor-proof. Maybe you read a script and think, "Not my cup of tea, but the company knows how to sell this kind of thing and there's a market for it." Cases like that are what "Consider with Reservations" was made for. Then you can hammer the weak spots in your coverage but still point out the potential the material has.

A company with a less rigid identity - like Imagine Entertainment - allows for a slightly different approach. There you might be open to a wider variety of genres, but as a consequence, you'll probably be more discriminating about the writing quality. Good writing will rise to the top, and as a reader in a place like that, you're probably going to be holding back the Consider ranking for a script that you'll remember for a long time.

For the writers, this is where most of the lessons I've tried to impart in this blog come in. Do you have a solid hook? Do you have vivid characters? Is your pacing effective? Does your story have strong structure? Is it visual? Is it memorable? Is there a market for it?

If I'm reading for Platinum Dunes and I get the script for Friends With Benefits, it probably doesn't stand much chance of doing better than "Consider with Reservations" since it's so off-brand for the company. On the other hand, at Imagine the brand is so diverse that Friends With Benefits just has to be a good script for me to run it up the flagpole.

That's on the production company side. The agency side is somewhat different because when you're dealing with established, repped writers, then all kinds of politics get involved. For the unrepped writers submitting, the focus is less on specific genres (unless you're writing unmarketable swill like 150-page period costume dramas) and more about proving you can write excellent. And if you can't write excellent, you'd better be able to write commercial.

As for if I error on the side of passing a script upwards, if it has a glimmer of potential, that's something that's judged more on a case-by-case basis. I always look at it from the point of view of, if my boss calls me into his office and says, "You like this? Why?" I should be able to defend it. If I'm half-hearted about it, I'll give it the "Consider with Reservations" treatment and be very specific in my coverage about what I think has merit while pointing everything wrong with the script.

I think the times when I'd err on passing the script upwards would be if it was a really original, clever screenplay. If you could feel the talent coming off of the page, even if the pace was a little slow, or the idea just a little bit odd. But honestly, if you've been reading for the same people for a while, you'll start to pick up the kinds of things they respond to and the sorts of things they don't care about at all. Some execs might be drawn to the quirkier material from raw writers, while others simply aren't inclined to take a chance and nurture something like that.

I hope that gives some insight into the process. There are so many variables in the reading/coverage process that it's sometimes hard to give a general one-size-fits-all-answer.