Pulp Writing: The Creative and The Business of Writing

Seems I lit a bit of a fuse with my post regarding the Asylum here. There were the usual blog comments and a couple of comments over at the Facebook page.

One of the themes running through the comments were that you could knock out a script in 30 days or less and walk away with a thousand bucks in your pocket. That it didn't take much effort, or craft or creativity.

For my part in that discussion I want to apologize, because that sentiment is wrong. It's wrong on a creative level and a business level. It dangles the carrot that you could knock one of these stories out and go on to do better things with your time. That because the pay is low it doesn't deserve your full attention.

Let me tell you now - and I'm telling myself this as well - the job you have in hand is the one you need to concentrate on no matter how little you're being paid, no matter how hard the work is to accomplish.

If you accept the terms of the job it's absolutely in your best interest to do the very best you can do. Every time. These are your clients (as is the audience) and they deserve your best no matter what you're getting paid upfront, on the back end, whatever.

If you're like me you're a fan of these movies. What do you want to see up there onscreen? What would make your jaw drop to the floor?

The job in hand deserves all of your creative attention. These are the hard nuts to crack - the jobs where you must create on deadline and with the idea there is no money. If you do get to the nut of it then you'll understand exactly how you can apply these techniques to future jobs.

It speaks well of you to do your best every time, because if you don't , you develop the reputation for "phoning it in."

That's a stink that doesn't wash off.

In a world where budgets are dropping, production co's are doing more with less, and new low-cost methods of distribution are the modus operandi, you don't want that sort of stink.

Below are two books by Paul Arden I think you'll enjoy that speak to the creative and the business. They are advertising-specific in terminology, but universal in truth.

2010 Writing Advice from The Asylum

Recently the founders of the film production and distribution company The Asylum were interviewed for Wired magazine discussing how they have been successful with their "mockbuster strategy."

From the article:

Using cheap digital technology and even cheaper talent, the Asylum can turn around such requests in as little as four months (the Sherlock shoot — one of the Asylum’s longest — was 14 days). And though the majority of its films are sci-fi or horror, the company has lately expanded into biblical-disaster movies (The Apocalypse), teen-sex romps (18-Year-Old Virgin), and even family fare (Sunday School Musical). It’s a new kind of B movie: low risk and made to order. “I said, ‘Make me a T&A movie in 3-D,’ and they did that with Sex Pot,” says Keith Leopard, director of content acquisitions at Blockbuster. “They’re constantly delivering good little filler products for our customers.”

And for writers wishing to understand what it takes to craft one of these movies:

The Asylum simply strips away all of the lofty ambitions found in a big-budget spectacle and boils down the hot-selling concept to its essence. If the movie is about robots, you get robots. If it promises dinosaurs, you get dinosaurs. “We don’t skimp on the genre,” Latt says. “When I talk to writers, I say, ‘OK, take a three-act structure. Write your first act, your second act, your third act — let’s develop it. Let’s get it good. Now take the first and the second act and throw them away. I only want to make act three. Because that’s when the drama happens.”

The result is a popcorn movie without pretensions — or hackneyed moralizing — which many genre fans appreciate. “I will go on record to say Transmorphers is better than Transformers 2,” says Kevin DeBolt, a 36-year-old Asylum fan from Chicago. “At least with Transmorphers, you know what you’re getting into when you start watching. “

Of course, nailing the timing — not to mention making money — is greatly helped by the fact that the Asylum consults with its distributors, who carefully study the market and have a good idea of what will rent six months down the road. “There’s nothing wrong with people who have a passion project — their black-and-white coming-of-age film,” Bales says. “But it’s hard for films like that to find an audience. We’ve listened to our buyers. And when they say, ‘We need this,’ we take it seriously.”

Read the whole article. I look forward to discussing it with you.

Every Scifi Pulp Action Movie ...

needs fight music. That is, the soundtrack you hear in your head as you write the fight scenes - fists flying, leaps over tables, bottles crashing over heads, cars crashing, flying out the window on a curtain only to swing around and come back in to the fight.

Then of course with my just-completed Scifi project FLY BY NIGHT there's the additional rayguns blasting, zeppelins roaring past skyscrapers as they patrol overhead, wings flapping, battle cries, eye goggles askew, perilous falls toward doom and so on...

(The kitchen sink is in there somewhere)

But no matter what movie it is - you hear something in your own mind that captures the momentum and feeling you want to convey in your picture. Here's the feeling we're trying to capture for the action scenes in Fly By Night:



Bellware adds to the mix here.

Yes, Red Tide is an obvious influence - not only with the film noir visuals, but with the use of structural "frames." This IS a comic book movie we are making here.

Foundation

From Brigid Alverson over at Robot 6:

"I call this the Zuda Test, because I formulated it while reviewing the comics at Zuda.com, DC’s webcomics competition site. Each month, I and my Digital Strips colleagues Steve Shinney and Jason Sigler read all ten of the comics at Zuda and discuss the pros and cons of each one.

Month after month, I found myself making the same complaint: After eight pages, I had no idea what was going on."

Read the whole essay. In those first eight pages you should visually give us an idea of what world this is, who the characters are, and why we should care about them...

They don't necessarily have to speak, in fact, it may be more intriguing to not have them speak to one another, but we have to have a sense of their characters and the world.

Perfection is Overrated...

So yesterday I completed my first draft of FLY BY NIGHT and sent it off to the producer, sat back, relaxed and got some sleep.

And it's funny because there were several folks around me who said "Huzzah" and so forth and that's great and all (and we really love them for it)...

But let's be honest for a moment.

A first draft is just priming the pump for what will be the real job. As they all say, "Writing isn't the problem, its the rewriting that's the bitch."

But so many folks have problems just getting that first draft out of their system. Their level of expectation for a first draft is soooooo high that they either get bogged down in the writing process and grind to a halt never completing that first draft - or- they never begin it in the first place. They have this insane idea it has to be perfect from the starting gate.

Poppycock.

Part of the reason you do a first draft is to get all of your bad ideas, bad dialogue, bad character choices and... crap out of your system and onto the page. There in the light of day, in harsh Black & White are all your bad decisions (along with a healthy dose of good ones) staring you in the face.

The good news is now that you can see them - and see how an early bad decision affects the rest of the script - you can deal with them. You can fix the structure by moving a few things around in their "proper order." You can rethink your dialogue and your characters perspective and your world.

Now that you see them - they are fixable.

And what's really fun is that there are now options you can see too: Traps you can lay. Surprises you can spring on your audience. New directions. Layering.

You can't see those options if you don't get that idea / treatment / first draft out on the page. It doesn't need to be perfect, it just needs to get done... it needs to be fixable.

and the more you just do it and get it out of your system -- the more you write, then rewrite -- then the better you get at all stages of the game.

Who Else in This Burg Just Completed a Feature Film Script?

Yeah baby!

What?!

That many...?

Bastards...

Welcome...

Via my sitemeter, I see that many of you are visiting Pulp 2.0 from John August's site and his post regarding writing a D2DVD movie.

Welcome. Sit down. Take your shoes off and have a beer. Feel free to look around and ask questions. We aren't fancy just entertaining (well, we try anyway).

If you're wondering about the Pulp 2.0 monicker, let me just say that profitable indie film screenwriting and movie-making today is like the old pulp magazine business model:

Make it fast. Make it cheap, but for gosh sakes above all make it entertaining.

To get you started with some of our pulp film-making philosophy (though I really hate that word) I would suggest you start here.

We also take a look at the world of new media, comics, and publishing because these days it's all entertainment. If you want to survive as a writer in today's economy it helps if you can do it yourself. We try and help you do that as much as possible. No bullshit.

Pulp Painting...

I like first drafts...I really do.

There's nothing like the excitement and tension you feel after typing FADE IN and realize you are going to fill approximately 95+/- pages until you reach FADE TO BLACK (but in this case it's more like CUT TO BLACK since this is an action movie).

But there's a whole other level of excitement at work in the process beyond writing something like:

"Our heroine races headlong at the oncoming tram, bullets striking all around her as she..."
[REDACTED]

No, the real excitement is knowing that after you get through with the first draft - you can get to the real work of layering everything. Because the script isn't the final product - the movie is - and after you write that first draft, then you can begin to write the movie.

"Writing the movie" is that point (for me) when you have the canvas in front of you. It's the right size and shape and you've spent all this time thinking about what you're going to paint. The first draft is that coat of white gesso paint you apply to the canvas so that everything else sticks to it:

Your background, your foreground, your mid-ground, your highlights, your shadows and then your detail.

That's how paintings are built and that's how screenplays are built - in layers. This is especially true for screenplays for low budget films because those layers have to work together to "paint the picture" effectively without you running out of paint.

But what are the analogues of story to painting?

Your background is the world your story takes place within.
Your foreground is your main character(s) - the subject of your focus.
Your midground is your supporting characters - spaced between your focus and your world.
Your highlights refer to your main characters' best qualities.
Your shadows refer to their worst qualities - their weaknesses or flaws.

• Your heroes or villains can't be all highlight or all shadow or else they don't work with (or against) the background.
  

• You can't put too many characters in (your mid-ground) or else you lose focus on your foreground (your hero).

• And your background can't be all one color (emotion) because you lose all the wonderful, interesting detail.

Have a good weekend. I'll be slapping paint.

Pulp (Screen) Writing...

Pulp screenwriting is dependent upon so many things that are beyond the writer's ability to control - the production's talent, organization, vision - that when it comes to delivering a screenplay to your producer you always have to remember to a) make it entertaining, and b) make it bulletproof.

Now the first one is easy if you have talent and storytelling chops -- the craft of it all.

But the latter is where many new screenwriters get hung up. They want to jam pack their story with so many - characters, ideas, FX, locations, you name it - that they paint their script with a target and hold it up for the producer to take shotgun blasts at it.

I've always been an advocate of keeping it simple. One idea taken to its logical extreme rather than 50 ideas all crying out for attention in the "script-nursery." One of the areas where I think writers tend to shortchange themselves is in thinking that way - that they have to generate a ton of ideas in order to make the world they've built within the script "real" enough.

What they are really doing is drawing attention away from what should be the focus of your script - that one idea that is so cool it carries the story on its shoulders through that marathon of 96+ pages. So forget the "mosaic" or "cornucopia of ideas" approach to writing and stick with what works, what makes your story better.

In pulp storytelling - comics, prose or film - the story you are telling doesn't have to be "real." It just has to be real within the context of the story you are telling. That gives you a lot of room to explore that one idea you have that sparked the story in the first place. It gives you a lot of room to stylize and enhance that one idea rather than having to stylize and enhance 50 ideas, some of which are probably working at cross-purposes from one another.

In pulp storytelling - you want clarity and entertainment value. Again, that one idea that is turned on its side and looked at from a new perspective. That one idea that will resonate like the single note held by an opera singer's voice, instead of the crashing din of a thousand singers each singing a different tune. Each trying desperately to be heard above the rest - but to no effect.

But really - don't just listen to me about this. Go read Steven Grant's latest column at Comic Book Resources. He discusses the comics of "Mad Ideas" but really it's all the same thing - pulp.

If you want to amp up the value of your screenwriting - that is, get it sold - then switch up your strategy and start focusing on one idea you can explore instead of twenty ideas you can jam into your script because they are cool.

Because a producer is going to be able to shoot a script that explores one idea really well, and he's going to reject anything else.

The British Micro Wave...

I've long been threatening to finish up this post, but due to work overload and stress I'm going to have to cut my original notes down to bullet points and linkology. For that I apologize as part of my responsibility here at Pulp 2.0 is to sift through some of the ephemera of the indie film business and bring you just the pulp - the stuff that matters.

Anyhoo - apparently there is now a movement around the UK that is similar in tone,if not style to the MicroCinema movement here in the United States. The UK is producing around 100 low and micro-budget films per year that are outside "traditional" distribution channels. For clarity's sake "Low and Micro-budget" are defined as movies made for $1.62M (1M Pounds) or less. Notably less.

This movement has merited an article in the Guardian describing the movement thus:

Lately, the microbudget template has been adopted by a number of lottery and public-funded schemes. The first, Film London's Microwave division, aims to produce "commercially minded, innovative features", each with a budget not exceeding £100,000, as a cost-effective way of helping launch new film-makers. "We're not going to find talent unless we give more people a chance," says Mia Bays, Microwave's production executive. "And at £100,000, the risk is much smaller." Microwave, which is supported by BBC Films and media training body Skillset, doesn't provide the entire budget for each film; it typically invests half, then helps the producers find the rest.

Industry eyes are keenly awaiting Microwave's first two releases. Mum & Dad is a blackly comic horror about a serial-killing family. Shifty, an urban drama from 32-year-old Eran Creevy that was nominated for five British independent film awards, hits cinemas in April. Both are professionally crafted, pocket-sized movies that belie their budget. If either one succeeds at the box office, you can be sure you'll be seeing more microbudget films going into production.

Certainly, given their minimal cost, the potential for making a profit is enhanced. Once a film goes into the black, the profits are split 60/40 between Microwave and the film-makers. "So if one of the films is The Blair Witch Project or Open Water," says Bays, "then that's a pension plan for everyone who worked on it."

But of course our British cousins are learning the lessons we here know so well:

So how tough is it to make a film for £100,000? "It was horrifically difficult, because I'd never even made a short film before," says Creevy. "But as a film-maker, you trust yourself that you can do this, and you know the sort of film you can make, and hope people believe that. Preparation was a massive key."

A microbudget precludes huge explosions, far-flung locations, masses of special effects or star names, putting greater importance on story and character. "You think you've written something quite cheap, because it's one location and only a few actors. Then you realise that what you've saved on location and actors, you have to put into makeup, special effects and costume design," says Steven Sheil, director of Mum & Dad. He had to add 20 pages to his script after it was greenlit to bring it up to feature length - all without adding a penny to the budget. "I had to write five or six more scenes that had no new locations, no new characters, no new effects, no new art department."

(There's much more in the article that sounds very familiar)

And here's a page of links to explore.

According to our friends at Screen International (who don't allow links, etc...) many of the more exciting and distinctive bits of cinema of 2008 have come from the low budget end of the industry: London to Brighton, Of Time and the City, Donkey Punch and A Complete History of My Sexual Failures.

Here's Donkey Punch:




Theatrical revenues for these films is small on average, though one of the companies involved with this movement, Revolver has had theatrical success for its film Kidulthood which grossed $970K at the UK box office.

Rupert Preston of Vertigo (whose release of Football Factory sold 1.2 Million DVD units) is quoted as saying, "There is an economic reason for making films at that budget - you simply have a much better chance of earning your money back." Revolver knows this with its movie The Zombie Diaries which cost $8,100 to make and had DVD sales of more than 40,000 copies.

Preston adds, "The craziest thing we get is when we are approached by British producers with a budget which they think is low, of $3.2M or $4.8M. There's no cast. They openly say it's an arthouse film. You scratch your head and think, "They've got to wake up.' It just doesn't work."

Here are some of the companies that are bootstrapping themselves up and not waiting around for the money. They are making it happen.

MicroWave.

Moxie Makers.

LBFP

Slingshot Studios.

Warp X.

Digital Departures.

But what do they need?

Scripts they can shoot...cheap.

Jane Talks The Pulp

Jane Espensen talks about the new BSG TV Movie (aka D2DVD Movie) and cutting the script down to run in the time allotted:

"I just did a rewrite pass in which I cut twenty-four pages of script (from 113 to 89 pages total). It's incredible what you can do when you have to. Now, if you have to cut nine or ten pages from a two-hour script, you can probably do it with trims. Lose some scenes that can be moved off-screen, trim the fat off the ones that remain, and you can probably get there. But if you are in serious length trouble, and especially if you've already trimmed to the bone, you have to look at story. The trick here is to be open-minded. The things that get cut may include a part of a story that you think is absolutely necessary. It's okay. Put it all on the table."

No offense to Jane (who has a far better career profile at this point than I ) but she's having to cut because the script wasn't designed to run in the time allotted. That wastes time and effort and cuts down on production's momentum.

There's a better way.
The way to pack as much story into it as possible without blowing the budget or schedule.

Part One.

Part Two.

Part Three.

Part Four.

Seriously, by going into the process knowing that you only have 90-95 pages for your script you are freed. You are free to be as creative as possible to get as much cool story into your script as possible (visually), and discard the stuff that's "filler" (unnecessary dialog, scenes). You are free to make every moment count for something (read "is entertaining") and quickly immerse the audience into all the cool, interesting bits of the story and characters (unlike the show example here).

It's the pulp way.

A DVD Casewrap

(that's the DVD "cover" for you civilians) is a weird thing. It is frustrating and weird every time you undertake to design new key art for one mainly because of the clients. I've been going round and round with a client today over a design because they were saying everything "needs" to be here or there. They were citing "rules" to me (and I know them already so I really want to smash them to bits - the rules not the client, no wait...) that we "had" to follow.

Title treatment at the top.

Tagline at the bottom preferably on the left.

Etc...

Those rules are there for a reason:

1. They are a starting point. Example: Title treatments are generally at the top so they can be seen when on the shelf at the video store. A lot of clients don't understand the rules are the starting point - they think they're the end point. Go no further - "Here there be daemons" and all that.

Bull.

2. Rules are idea generators. Yes, you must put the title at the top, but how can we design around that to make the art have more depth and be more exciting? Example: layering a character in front of the title treatment to give it some depth, making the title itself part of the art. The restrictions actually force you to think outside the casewrap.

Despite what you may think - I like rules. They are made to be broken, and when done right they smash pretty. It's my philosophy that if the conditions which created those rules changes, don't the rules change as well, or at least become obsolete?

More people see artwork for DVDs and movies online than ever before. Same goes for books and comics and other media. So shouldn't people change the "rules" of design to reflect this?

You would think...

Now this also applies to stories and scripts - if you know the rules you've been operating by, then you can take them out back and "Old Yeller" them sumbitches one at a time.

Used to be you had to have a spec for an existing show in your tool kit, and could never send out an original. (Hi Shawna)
Used to be agents never looked at comic book people as writers. (Hi Bendis, Vaughn, et al)
Used to be you couldn't make a tv show without a network. (Hello, YouTube!)
Used to be you couldn't watch movies on your computer. (Hi Revver, Vimeo, Spout)
Used to be comics were only in print (Hi Wowio, ComicMix)

Rules are changing. Stories and how they are told will change with them.
Know your rules and then go out and break them.

And after time goes by, bring the old rules back for a whole new audience unfamiliar with them. (Hello web serials!)

My Monday Morning Chuckle...

So I am reviewing this week's Video Business Digital magazine and I come across an advertisement for this new DVD Premiere movie from Lionsgate.

It looks kind of cool and has somewhat of a pedigree in that the film was in the Hollywood Film Festival, Fantasporto, Brussels International Festival of Fantastic Film and was a Platinum Award winner at Worldfest Houston (whatever all that means).

But what really caught my eye was in the listing of the DVD's extras:

100K12D: The Guerilla Filmmaking of Artifacts.

This is the production model that I and many others have used before , ($100K for a 12 day shoot) but I have never used it as a selling point in an advertisement. The thing is that $100K is becoming the new $1M movie - that is, you can now produce something for $100K that used to cost you $1M to do.

I am definitely going to have to sit down and write that pulp film-making book.

Hmmm....

This Just In...

I received a screener today for a Scifi Channel original that I am going to review for the blog and for Geekerati.

Though I wonder if they follow the Scifi Channel Structure?

I won't tell you the title, but the concept is very similar to this:

(K)nightmarish Lessons 2: The Sequel

Got those wonderful, pithy notes back from Gregg and as usual his voice of experience cut through the din and got right to the pulp of the matter:

1. I am a visual writer. That doesn't always work in a frikkin audio adventure!!! Have to rethink my "tried and true."

2. It's not the writing it's the rewriting.

3. I am used to The three tier story: A plot, B plot and C plot that are all intertwined somehow. Will probably have to cut that to an A and B plot format. Yank the story elements out that absolutely need telling and hose off the excess. Shake and towel off.

4. I came in heavy - at 45 pages - but the show is only supposed to be 1/2 hour. I have to up the momentum.

The Pulp Writer's Warm-up...

I am a pulp writer...

My laptop is my chisel, my desk my workbench. I use them to chip away at the block of stone (or wood or clay) that we call Story.

I write even when I don't want to because I know that when I write I am at my best and most creative. The doing leads to the inspiration.

I write a lot and I write everything I can: short stories, comics, screenplays, plays, articles, etc...because it makes me a better writer.


(Beautiful art by Sean Phillips of Criminal fame)
I bring everything that I am to my work - my thoughts, fears, strengths, weaknesses and my experience. My writing is a reflection of who I am and how seriously I take my craft even when the deadline is Tuesday.

My first job is to entertain. Everything after that is frosting.

Now that my fingers are warmed up... time to hit it.

The Mad Pulp Philosophy...

of movies, especially writing movies is as follows:

- Write what you wish it to be.
- Use what you know.
- Serve the story.

Brian Clemens - the extremely prolific writer-producer of THE AVENGERS, THE NEW AVENGERS, THE PROFESSIONALS and THRILLER - once said he wrote the story as he wanted to see it, then went back after and fact-checked. Yes, he tweaked it a bit here and there if it served the story, but generally he didn't need to do so.

This is an extremely different take on the old writers adage, "Write what you know." It's different in that it addresses the whole energy of ideas. Sometimes I read an article or a blurb on the web and I say, "Bill, you bastard - there's a story there!" Then I furiously bookmark the site and start writing down notes, finding a structure, thinking of a character...

And I very rarely go back to the web page to "fact check." If I did that, it would rob me of the energy of the creative process... and that doesn't serve the story. We are in the business of telling the biggest, best lies we can. That's why we use facts and don't just report them.

Who cares the Nazis never invaded the US?
Who cares that they gave up a lot of their zeppelin work by 1939?
Who cares they never had a Der Mord Legion?

Dum vivimus servimus - While we live, we serve (the story)... and not just the facts.