It was just about 5 p.m. last Tuesday that my life changed,
at least for this week. I had just
returned from Dr. C where we discussed my status in the CFP and the path I
would be on for at least the next two years assuming things go well on
September 21st (or at least don’t go disastrously.) I opened my email and found the announcement
from MovieBytes.com about this screenplay competition in L.A. for which the
deadline for submission is midnight L.A. time on Thursday, some 58 hours
hence.
MovieBytes
is one of the more respected screenwriting web sites out there, so named
because it’s all about making movies (of which the screenplay is the first
major step) and it’s all done online (thus the bytes.) It’s a free subscription and I signed
up for 25 years ago receiving an email at least twice a week, particularly useful
because they keep you up to date about all the competitions that are out there,
frequently even with commentary about their value (or lack thereof.)
As I’ve
written before, I’ve been in a bit of a stir over Ash Wednesday due to the
almost complete lack of consensus over how to proceed with the rewrite. It has, of course, been very gratifying that
virtually everyone agrees on the screenplay’s strengths. Virtually everyone who has read it has called
it a “page turner” so I’m comfortable that I have written a compelling drama that
amply keeps the reader’s interest. I had
concerns that as a male writer I could do justice to a script where the lead characters
are female but, so far, every woman who has read it, both pro and amateur, has
let me know quite emphatically that all the characters but particularly the
females were solid and very believable.
I have always known that my real gift is for dialogue but, it’s been so
long since I’ve completed a script that … who knows? In fact, there wasn’t even a mention of the
dialogue in the professional critique I received from Elizabeth in KC. I had to write to her and ask her to
enumerate, for which her response was, “I did not mention dialogue because I
thought it was fine. In fact, I consider
it to be your biggest strength.” So I
guess the kid still had it in him.
And
then there were the deficiencies. I had
four people from the industry and four lay people read it for initial feedback
after 26 years of keeping the ending a closely guarded secret. It was critically important that the script
be polished before revealing the ending.
It was the only way I could know if it worked. If it didn’t work in polished form, then I
would know it didn’t work and that I had failed. But if it didn’t work for them in rough form,
then I wouldn’t know whether the failure was with the ending or with the rough
writing. I wanted the professionals as a
test for how studio readers and agents might respond to it. I wanted the few lay people for how a typical
moviegoer might respond.
The
distressing thing was that the professionals did all say that they had been
able to guess the “surprise” ending but this was not based on any logic
presented in the script but by virtue of being too analytical for their own
good. I had asked everyone to send me a
note before they read the finale as to how they thought it might turn out. It was amusing that even though the
speculations they sent were completely different from the actual ending, each
of them still stated they had guessed the ending. For the most part it was because I had
defined it from the outset as being a story about a con job and so they expected
a con. One of my readers in particular
had such a spectacular memory as to remember a vital two-word clue that I planted
on page one 150 pages later when the same clue appeared. That clue was the key to the mystery. That clue was the reason why the surprise was
nullified. But would a typical studio
reader, let alone an audience member, have been that sharp? I very much doubt it.
The odd
thing was that all the professionals missed the point and perhaps that was my
shortcoming but they still missed the point.
Because as I flat out stated in the logline and synopsis, (and certainly
thought I had brought out very clearly in the actual script), this was not a
story about a con at all. This was a
story about two women who feared they might be the targets of a con but because
the suspect was someone near and dear to them, they were in a violent emotional
upheaval since they had so much to lose if they accused this person and then
turned out to be innocent. I had never
seen a con job story before that was told from the point of view of the target,
always from the point of view of the con artist. That’s why I thought this story was going to
be special. I wanted to put the audience
in the same shoes as the two women, swaying back and forth between stalwart certainties
and grave doubts, until the final act of betrayal or shame. I wanted the audience to feel the same
betrayal or shame that the characters felt.
This was what was different about my approach to this genre. Actually, all but one of the lay people got that. None of the professionals did. I wanted the professionals to experience the
story like a typical audience member as it unfolded. They failed to do this. Their approach was just too darned
intellectual for their own good.
Liz in
Kansas City actually said I had violated the rules of the genre, that the story
had been a suspenser all the way until the finale, and then turned into a
thriller at the end. You can’t do both,
she said. Up until the moment I read her
critique, I had never heard that there was any difference between a suspense
story and a thriller. In fact, I’ve
always described Ash Wednesday as being a romantic suspense thriller with nary
a peep over 26 years from anybody that there was no such thing.
Liz
also docked me for insufficient description of the characters and settings,
even though in my 40 years of working in the business and writing scripts, the
one thing we’d always been knocked over the head with was the hard-fast rule
that scripts should be very light on description, just the bare-bones
basics. What a character and setting
looked like was the director and art director’s job and it was considered the
mark of an amateur to have that in the script.
For early drafts, of course, and because it helps in the early stages to
capture the emotion by writing like a novel rather than a sterile script, I
include all that in the early drafts, then strip it out for the final. So this is the first time I’d been advised by
anyone that I needed to provide detailed descriptions of this stuff.
That’s
just a sampling. There were a number of
suggestions offered by my various readers as to what was lacking, but no
consensus at all. The one thing I
thought was sorely lacking was a nice tight clear investigation. The investigation section which comprises a
good deal of the second half of the script I always felt was weak and certainly
too long. Ironically it was the one part
of the script that no one else had a problem with.
The one
thing that I and everyone have agreed on is that, at 150 pages, the screenplay
was too long. The standard is 120 and
you have to be a writer of rather large repute to be allowed longer than
that. So I’ve always known that I need
to cut the script and I had always envisioned it as a 2 hour movie. That is the reason for the very precise
format a screenplay must follow.
Properly laid out, a movie will run one minute per script page.
Before I got these initial
comments, I thought I knew where the cuts would be. I’m glad I sent it before I made the cuts
because cutting it first would not have helped.
I got feedback about deficiencies that I had never even considered. Some I disagreed with for sure but others
certainly gave me lots of food for thought.
The problem was that, without any consensus, I have been in this
quandary for the past few months as to how to proceed. I had decided that perhaps the best approach
is to write the first draft of my next script before I return to this one.
That
was my thinking before opening that email last Tuesday afternoon. It was an announcement from the Fresh Voices
Screenplay Competition in Los Angeles for their quickly approaching deadline by
11:59 p.m. last Thursday. I had not
considered contests as I felt the script needed to be polished more before
going that route. But now I was
rethinking this. I have always known
that the big advantage of screenplay contests is that, if you can place, they
will send your script to several studio executives for evaluation, possible
optioning or sale, and definite mentoring.
That’s right! You don’t even have
to win; if you can just place in these contests, you get to meet with studio
executives and producers and get mentored on how to develop it to the point
that they might actually buy it and put it into production. And as frosting on the cake, there is usually
a nice five-figure cash prize that goes along with it. Those are pretty good perks.
But I
noted two additional benefits to Fresh Voices that are not typical of most
contests. Not only was the entry fee
rather modest (only $60), but they promised optional written feedback for a
modest additional fee of 25 dollars and, in this case, if I could meet the
September 8th deadline, the feedback would be free.
Suddenly
I’m thinking … I’m going to go for this.
I have 58 hours until the deadline.
That’s not a lot of time but it certainly is an interesting
challenge. The one inviolable
restriction however was that the length could be absolutely no longer than 130
pages. Well, that’s the one thing on
which we could all agree, I had to cut it down.
I now had 58 hours to cut 20 pages from the script. Forget about all the other criticisms. Since I didn’t understand some of them
anyway, the best approach now was just to go with my own instincts and rewrite
accordingly. First step: the first act was 50 pages, should be 30. There’s my 20 pages right there. Let’s start hacking away and cut that first
act down to size.
And so
began the ecstasy and the agony of the rewrite, the biggest ecstasy of course
being the free feedback if I could meet the midnight deadline. With one more industry opinion under my belt,
perhaps I will finally find some consensus.
That’s really the only reason I was doing it (aside of course from the
challenge of eliminating 20 pages in two days) was to get that report
card. Maybe it would provide some
clarity. For free, what did I have to
lose? And wouldn’t it be a kick if I
actually managed to place and got a trip to L.A. to meet with some real
producers?
Thus I
began, and it was mostly an ecstasy, especially when I factored in the other
pleasant benefit that, once this was down to 130 pages, there was any number of
industry professionals I could now show it too.
That’s right. In researching this
contest, I discovered to my pleasant surprise that most contests and agencies
now consider 130 pages rather than 120 to be an acceptable script length. I reread the entire script to see if there were
any parts of it that could be lost without confusing the story. I decided the entire first scene in the
bedroom was unnecessary. There were just
two lines of important dialogue there that I could easily move to another
scene. The protracted birthday party ran
almost fifteen pages. I decided I could
accomplish the same dramatic impact by eliminating all the buildup and simply
starting the scene with her blowing out her candles, thereby cutting half, then
adding maybe a half dozen lines to fill in gaps from the early part of the
scene.
One
very effective trick I use in rewrites is to simply eliminate widows and
orphans. Widows and orphans are that lone
word or two that ends up creating a new line at the end of a block of dialogue
or description. I had these on every
page. Whenever I spotted one, I would
look at the block of text. Is there a
way I can say this with two fewer words; is there a way that I can substitute a
small word for a big word and thus lose that extra line? When I wrote the 3rd draft in
April, my goal was 150 pages and I ended up with 158. Doing that widows and orphans exercise alone got
it down to 150 pages.
So I
wrote and wrote and it was a wonderful energizing experience. There really wasn’t a lot to lose. If I missed the midnight deadline, the worst
case scenario was submitting for their October deadline and paying for the
feedback. Not really that big a
deal. But it became a matter of pride
for me to make that September 8th deadline.
I cut
and cut and rewrote and rewrote all the way through the first half which
culminates with the wedding night and Wednesday’s surprise discovery about a
secret her new husband has been hiding
from her, thereby setting up the conflicts and tensions for the second
half. By about six lines before the end
of that scene, the page count jumped to 130.
I had met my goal. The 48 page
First Act was now 33, the 43 page Second Act was now 38. It was 1:30 a.m. Friday morning (or 10:30 p.m.
Thursday in L.A.). The one thing that
was now lacking but that I definitely did not have time for was
proofreading. But the script had already
been thoroughly proofed in April and, after all, during the past two days I had
been mostly cutting with very little adding so I felt that the likelihood of
any glaring errors was very minimal. I
did however put the script through the spellchecker just as a quickie. It’s a good thing. It highlighted one instance where I spelled
Jack as “Jock” so I was able to correct that.
At 2:15 a.m. (11:15 p.m. L.A.), I
had converted it to the required PDF format and was clicking “Submit” on the
Fresh Voices web site. I immediately got
an acknowledgment that the script was received and that I had qualified for the
free feedback. I would be receiving the
written critique in early January and then notified if I had placed by the end
of January.
I had
done it and I was ecstatic. Some things
you must do in a rewrite are quite agonizing.
One of Liz’s criticisms of the script was that I had named the family
doctor Royal Payne. “I couldn’t believe
you didn’t have any jokes about that one.”
If I had been at liberty, I could have explained that there were just a
ton of great jokes about Royal Payne in the 450 page draft I had started with
but, along with a lot of other stuff, those got sacrificed to get it down to
150 pages. Perhaps the lesson now was
that the conceit about the curious names was no longer relevant and I should
just changes the characters to more conventional names.
There were also some painful cuts,
some lines that I considered to be quite witty and clever and, given the fact
that another criticism I had received was that the humor in the early part of
the script was so nice but then it got lost, I didn’t want to sacrifice any
more of the humor. But I had to be
brutal. As clever as I felt the lines
were, did they really move the story along?
Would the audience know the difference?
If the answer was no, they got cut.
They may have added to the flavor, but they weren’t necessary to the basic
drama.
So I made the goal. I now have a script that really is finished,
at least from a technical point of view and can now be shown to anyone, which I
no longer have qualms about. But …
It did bother me that I did not have
a chance to properly proof it. I am
meticulous that way. I just hate a less
than cosmetically perfect manuscript. It’s
like taking your prized collectible automobile to the Woodward Dream Cruise …
with rust on it! Nobody with any pride
would ever do that. This is why it
always frustrated me when mentoring amateur writers why they never understood
the importance of an immaculate manuscript, as if somehow proper English corrupted
the creative process. But there was no
way I could properly proof a 130 page manuscript in just 40 minutes. So my fingers were crossed and I hoped for
the best.
Finally, on Friday afternoon I
screwed up the courage to look at what I sent them. It really should be fine. What I did not consider is that, since my
computer has been down, this Toshiba laptop has been awfully buggy and doing
all sorts of strange things. To my utter
consternation, I found a major MAJOR error already on page 3. Somehow in all the machinations, the computer
had put back a section of the script that I KNOW I had cut. So the birthday party scene begins, go on
exactly as I had redesigned it for half a page, then there are six blank lines
and it starts up from the beginning again.
Horrors! The Agony!
If this had happened on page 103 instead of page 3, the judges would
probably just take it as a formatting fluke.
But on page 3, it just screams that this is a rank amateur with so
little professional pride that he never even tried to check his work. They’re going to stop reading after page
three. How could this have
happened? Even with the rough proofing I
did, surely I would have noticed all the blank lines. I KNOW there were no blank lines!
It was so shocking that I could not
read further, something I still haven’t done but must. I must find out what other disgusting
surprises the computer sabotaged me with.
I am in agony deliberating on my options. Of course, it’s possible the judges will just
dismiss it as artsy-fartsy and let it go.
I know that scene did not repeat when I was doing my rough proof. The computer did this to me when I converted
it to PDF. I’m wondering if I should
contact them and let them know that something went very wrong when I converted
the file and could I send them a clean submission? Or at the very least withdraw this submission
and resubmit for the October deadline.
Well, the first step is to do a thorough proof and see where the chips
fall.
The good news is that none of this
really matters much. The chances of this
contest making any difference in my life are very small; I did it just for the
pride of the accomplishment. And it is
an accomplishment. Ash Wednesday is now
130 pages. I can distribute it freely to
the industry. And that is something I
did not think I would be able to say for at least another year.
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