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Writers Block: David Rielly blogs one screenplay pitch a day for a year
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Photo courtesy David Rielly. . .
Screenplay pitch for Tuesday, March 3, 2009:
Title: The Googlebots
Plot: Newly-created search bot KIKI71 happily browses the web carrying out its indexing function until it stumbles upon the SPIDERS of a treacherous WEBMASTER who is quietly laying the groundwork to destroy the internet. KIKI71 enlists a motley crew of ANTS, DEEPBOTS, SPAM HARVESTERS and HUMAN USERS to fight back, all while trying to discover the identity of his creator... who may be the key to their salvation.
Tagline: "Coming soon to a googleplex near you."
If, like me, you spend some of your days browsing the World Wide Web like googlebot KIKI71, but instead of happily indexing your time spent procrastinating, you're eagerly searching for that one place that will jumpstart all that has gridlocked and coagulated your creative juices (or at least your desire to actually do some work), then David Rielly's The Word Player might provide you with a slice of salvation. Like the quote of the day on that tear-away calendar someone re-gifted and now sits on your desk, David provides you with a daily morsel of thought (chewing gum for the soul, if you will) in the form of a screenplay pitch that can begin your day with a spring in your fingertips and a grin on your face as your imagination takes over and fills in the blanks of the would-be movie. Intrigued by his creative process and the art of screenwriting in general, I recently tracked down the blogger so we could chat about his pet project.
Marvin Miranda: I think your blog is a great project: writing one screenwriting idea each day for a year. How did the idea come to you?
David S. Rielly: Thanks for the kind words Marvin! I’m glad you’ve been enjoying it. Next Monday will be my 100th pitch, so it feels like a good milepost to take some time and talk about where I’ve been and where I’m going.
I started my blog “the word player” in May of ‘07 as a kind of catch-all writing outlet to talk about film, music, wordplay, etc. I had run into a wall after nine months of writing my fifth script Blood is Thicker earlier in the year, and after five years of working on one script or another I decided I needed a break from screenwriting. Fast forward to February of ’09 when I felt like the blog’s format had gone stale. For two weeks I blogged about what avenue to pursue, and after hashing it out I settled on creating one new movie pitch a day, including a title, logline and publicity tagline.
My inspiration was twofold. First, I’m appalled at the lack of originality in today’s studio movies. The ratio of original concepts to remakes, prequels, sequels and reboots has to be at an all-time low. I thought it would be cool to show just how easy it is to come up with original film pitches if you just sit down and actually put your mind to it. You know? That if a schlub like me can come up with one original pitch in 30 minutes a day that, more often than not, people can look at and quickly identify as a workable or entertaining premise, then million dollar screenwriters who theoretically spend a few full days a week writing should be able to come up with original pitches that are good enough to convince their risk-averse studio bosses to greenlight.
MM: Yeah, I hate to be the one to go on record as saying this, but it seems to me that it's more of a trend then lack of imagination in the part of Hollywood, you know? The first comic book adaptations, sequels, remakes, etc. were successful, so "let's make 'em all" is the current attitude. Part of the great thing about my job is seeing that imagination and originality are still out there coming from all over the place, including Hollywood at times, but it's just not what Hollywood seems to be interested in as a whole right now. You're right about the ratio.
The other inspiration is less grandiose. My wife, Somsara, is a graphic designer who’s been meditating for about a year, and has settled into a routine where she meditates every morning for 30 minutes before work. I decided to use that same 30 minutes to devote to my Movie Pitch Project, which is nice because this kind of writing to me is a form of meditation-- I look as deep as I can within and see what bubbles to the surface. Although I’m not technically meditating, David Lynch’s [Transcendental Meditation] book Catching the Big Fish has also been a big inspiration for my process.
MM: Do you think screenwriting qualifies as an art form?
DSR: Screenwriting is absolutely an art form! A good screenwriter is an artist in a similar way that a good architect is. Neither are there physically laying bricks or hitting marks in front of the camera, but without their blueprint the amazing artisans of the world wouldn’t quite know what to build. An individual artist can create something of beauty by themselves, but the art of screenwriting is creating something of beauty that can only be built at a larger scale by many hands.
MM: What do you feel is special about it?
DSR: Reading a screenplay that hasn't been produced is kind of an art itself. Ironically, the screenwriter must craft his pages austerely to ensure the story will lushly come to life, as visually as possible, inside the reader's mind. Every word counts. They have to write pages that will be interpreted by a tiny niche of industry-ites the way the writer intends, with an almost absurd economy of words. But, those same words also have to speak to an audience of (they hope) millions of ticket buyers. To me, it’s the many layers of a script, each with their own set of stringent demands, that make it an art form.
The biggest challenge for screenwriters is to convey character without being able to write about what’s going on internally in the character’s mind. You literally have to show what they’re thinking. Using voice-overs, with few exceptions, is cheating.
This kind of talk always makes me think of two of my favorite screenwriting maxims: “If it ain’t on the page, it ain’t on the stage,” and “Show it, don’t say it.” Too many screenwriters fall in love with their dialogue and tell the story via exposition. In my experience, the most fulfilling movies show you far more than they tell you. Writing visually, in such a way that a director you may never meet will know precisely what you mean, is one helluva mean trick.
MM: If you enjoy a movie, do you track down a screenplay and read it? If so, what are you hoping to learn from reading it?
DSR: I don’t any more. In fact, I’ve sought out very few screenplays that have already been produced... though as a development guy I’ve read plenty of screenplays that went on to be produced. I’ve gone back and read Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Thelma and Louise, Mulholland Drive, to name a few off the top of my head. I read those because they were excellent examples of a very specific genre. The most amazing script I ever read that eventually became a movie was Alan Ball’s American Beauty. Man that script had the town aflutter. Really good movie, but the script promised something even better.
MM: For what genre do you find it the hardest to write a screenplay?
That’s hard to say, because I’ve only written five unproduced screenplays! I’ve tackled satire (Dictated, Not Read), relationship drama (Get the Balance Right), holiday adventure (I Hacked Christmas), period sci-fi (Flashback Lunch) and murder mystery (Blood is Thicker). To be honest, they were all hard! The easiest to me (and probably not coincidentally, the script I had the most success with as a spec) was Hacked, because it had the least amount of autobiographical and personal stuff in it. Hacked was born of a simple desire to write a good commercial holiday movie, and when the concept “jaded teen hacker breaks into Santa’s naughty and nice list, switches all the naughties to the nice side and vice versa, holiday wackiness ensues” came to me, the first draft practically wrote itself.
MM: Now, you're writing screenplay pitches that are a couple of sentences, maybe a paragraph long. Can you explain to our readers (and to me) the difference between your pitches, a treatment, a scriptment, and a screenplay?
DSR: I was a development guy for a dozen years and I never heard of a scriptment! Is that something new?
MM: Frankly, I've only come across that term once, but it's stuck in my head. It was when James Cameron was set to direct Spider Man. He wrote what was being referred to as a "scriptment," which seemed to read like a combination of script and treatment. I think I still have it somewhere.
A treatment is usually a 1-2 page write-up of a screenplay idea that bangs out the plot with little or no dialogue or screenplay formatting. The screenplay is usually between 90 and 120 pages. A good pitch should be short as hell. I read a great description of a pitch as told by big time producer Derek Dauchy recently on screenwriter John August’s site:
“If you can pitch and understand it as a title, it’s gigantic. If you can sell it with a logline, great. If you need a paragraph, you’re in trouble.”
This quote has really inspired me as I’ve pursued the Movie Pitch Project. The high-concept title is really something to aspire to. Slumdog Millionaire. Daddy Day Care. Fight Club. I hope I’ve come close in some of my pitches so far. I hope that The Googlebots and Miss Universe don’t need much explaining beyond the title. Most of my pitches are a paragraph in length, but I strive to keep them as concise and pithy as possible.
MM: I don't read scripts. Usually, I can't stand reading them. But, I do love reading a Tarantino script, especially when it's right off the presses, before casting even begins. Besides wanting to know what the film will be about, the reason I like to read them is because they're highly entertaining, usually using a more narrative approach, like in a novel, and typically filled with his commentary. This is the case especially with his more recent scripts, now that he's known for that style. Now, I'm not in the minority when it comes to people enjoying his scripts, yet, why do you think it is such a "No-No" in Hollywood to write that way? It seems that it'd be easier to get away with breaking the rules of iambic pentameter in a college poetry class than you would in breaking the rules of scriptwriting in Hollywood.
I love Tarantino, but I’ve never read any of his screenplays. It’s great that he can get away with breaking the rules, but at this point in his career he’s only writing stuff that he’s gonna direct so there’s no need to worry about how his deviations from the standard are going to be interpreted. It all comes back to the e.e. cummings rule of capitalization- you better damn well know the rules backwards and forwards before you start breaking them, and I have no doubt that Tarantino knows every rule in the book.
MM: Tell us about your process of writing these script capsules, or pitches. It's pretty impressive. You do a fresh one each day, correct?
I write a brand new one every day, no stockpiling. When I first began the project, I was pulling from a list of titles I’d jotted down over the years, but I burned through the ones I still liked in the first month. I prefer writing in the morning before the responsibilities of the day start weighing in. I have a bunch of reference books on my desk, and if I’m having trouble getting started on any particular day I’ll page through one of them to get the juices flowing. Books on idioms and euphemisms have sparked many a title! I almost always select a title first and then pull the story from the title, kind of like Larry Levy did with newspaper headlines in that amazing scene in Altman’s The Player. One of the hardest things for me has been coming up with three or four new character names every day, so I’ll troll my friends’ Facebook Friends Lists for good ones. I have a self-imposed time limit of 30 minutes to brainstorm and write the thing--without that I’m sure I’d noodle on some of them for hours and eat into time I’m supposed to be spending on my day job as a freelance copywriter.
MM: There's the old belief in Hollywood that you need to rely on other movie ideas to get across to the execs what your script is about, "It's Bambi meets Blade Runner," for example. Are you inspired by other films when coming up with your pitches?
(I wanna see your pitch for "Bambi meets Blade Runner" on your blog tomorrow!!)
While a development guy, I heard hundreds of “It’s Movie X Meets Movie Y” pitches. I guess it’s useful shorthand, but I always had the sneaking suspicion that many of these writers would spend hours looking at lists of film titles for pitchable matches, which feels bogus to me. Oh well--to each their own! That said, I will often have a flash of another movie as I’m creating a pitch. As I was writing up one of my recent favorites called Miss Universe, I kept feeling a strong Galaxy Quest vibe. For No I was definitely inspired by the French film La Moustache, and when I was finished I realized I’d been channeling Invasion of the Body Snatchers a bit too. I’m guessing I’d get a lot of blank stares if I went around town exclaiming in pitch meetings “You guys are gonna love this, it’s La Moustache meets Invasion of the Body Snatchers!”
MM: What's been the hardest pitch for you to come up with?
Hmm, that’s hard to say. I feel like I go through creative peaks and valleys, and there are days where I feel I’m in danger of not being able to summon anything that feels interesting to me. Those days are tricky, because it will take me 20 of my 30 minutes to even settle on a title, and then I have to rush through the execution. Despite that, there are only a handful of pitches in the first 100 that I flat out don’t like. Not a bad ratio! It’s also been difficult for me to come up with pitches when I’m on the road. I love my iPhone, but I don’t feel the same creative connection with it that I do when I’m sitting in front of my monitors and able to Google around easily and page through my books.
MM: What are some of your favorites pitches you've come up with?
Well, I feel like I got off to a very hot start, largely because I was finally able to do something with the list of titles I’d been keeping for years. But in a way, I’m even more proud of the pitches that have been generated completely from scratch, that weren’t even a faint idea when I booted up the computer in the morning but were fully formed at the end of my 30 minutes. The Necktie Party may be my favorite title to date. Disco Strings has the potential to be a very funny, very "castable" disco-era comedy. The Cannery, which was inspired by a summer I spent working in a salmon cannery in Kenai, Alaska, could be a fun and cheeky horror movie in a fresh location.
I really liked The Googlebots, because I’d love to see a Pixar-style take on what happens inside our computers and across the internet. You know, I’m surprised that live-action filmmakers haven’t taken more of a cue from Pixar’s success. How many remakes has Pixar attempted? Zero. All original concepts. Sure, the animation is a huge draw, but to me the secret to their success is honing fantastic original premises to their essence, then beautifully structuring the story and elevating character to art. You’d think that live action filmmakers would pick up on that, but no, it’s all about big budget TV show movies, remaking Alien and Predator and making sequels to Heathers and Wall Street. Blecch.
MM: As a screenwriter, what are some of the scripts you admire the most?
Some favorites include Jean Renoir and Carl Koch’s The Rules of the Game, a primer for Altmanesque ensemble satire that is remarkably current today. Howard Koch and the Epstein Brothers script for Casablanca is still the gold standard for crackling dialogue and structuring a love story against a historical backdrop. As celebrated as the movie is, I think Debra Hill and John Carpenter’s script for Halloween is underrated.
It’s hard to pick an all-time favorite, but if I had to I’d say, then Blazing Saddles written by Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, Andrew Bergman and a couple of others. As far as comedy goes, it has it all. Unforgettable characters like Black Bart, The Waco Kid, Hedley Lamarr and Lili von Shtupp. Great story conceit. Absurdist touches like the finale on the backlot and at Mann’s Chinese. Quotable, combustible dialogue that maintains a high level of comedic intensity for almost the entire running time. All that and it’s still, to my knowledge, the only movie that tackles one of the least funny topics ever in racism, and turns it on its ugly head for laughs without pulling any punches. Amazing.
MM: Are there specific screenwriters whose work you admire?
You know, George Lucas catches a lot of flak for being a ham-handed writer, but that “Story By” credit can be just as important to a film as the “Written by” credit, and he’s come up with the stories for some of the most original, iconic films in history. Say what you will about the dialogue in his script for Star Wars, but the structure for it is amazingly tight, and his ability to channel Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology into the definitive movie hero’s journey is something to be celebrated.
A list of fave screenwriters has to include Woody Allen, David Peoples, John August, Michael Tolkin, Bruce Robinson, Tarantino, John Milius, Mel Brooks, Judd Apatow and Lawrence and Jake Kasdan. Some of them are experts in creating atmosphere, others in creating an entire new world for a film to inhabit, others have created characters and narratives that somehow bear the heavy weight of a generation on the shoulders of their films.
One of the films I’m looking forward to the most is writer-director Bruce Robinson’s The Rum Diary, based on the Hunter S. Thompson novel. Robinson’s debut feature (as a writer and director) is the amazingly funny end-of-an-era tale Withnail & I. Hysterical performance from Richard E. Grant and insanely quotable dialogue, yet quite overlooked in the US.
MM: If you know a screenwriter's style, can you see it on the big screen when watching a movie?
I think it’s easier to see a writer’s style immediately with some of the older guys like Billy Wilder and Preston Sturges, but as far as current guys I think Charlie Kaufman would have to be at the top of the list with Tarantino a close second. Andrew Stanton and the Pixar writers would have to make the list too. Woody Allen certainly, who is both an old guy and a writer of today! I think you could identify Woody’s writing if a computer was reading it.
MM: What about if it's not a known screenwriter, can you tell what the script may have been like just by looking at the film?
That’s a tricky question to answer when talking about movies in general. So much can happen from the time a writer turns in a shooting script to the time a film premieres. They’re often rewritten by other people, which can either strengthen or dilute the script. An actor and director’s interpretation can be right on the money or way off the mark. The editor can often assemble the film in a way that bears little resemblance to the way it played out on the page. It’s certainly possible to identify a promising script that wasn’t executed very well, especially when character-oriented scenes in the first act of a movie establish a tone that is then jettisoned for more bombastic, and often incoherent, plotting down the stretch.
I think you can also identify the work of a good writer- known or unknown- through a film’s set pieces. If the good guy and bad guy just walk into a room and start fighting, that’s usually a boring set piece, even with someone like Yuen Woo-Ping as choreographer. On the other hand, if a writer leads the good guy and bad guy into a clash that feels fresh and unexpected by setting the stakes well and using windows into their respective characters as to the when and why and how of the conflict (think Uma and Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill for instance) you’ve got something special on your hands.
MM: What are your hopes for the project?
Oh boy. I have quite a few of them! I’ll try and list them in descending order from absurdly grandiose to workaday practical. I’d love for the blog to be a storehouse of ideas that other writers can use for inspiration when they need it. I’d love for writers to take my thumbnail sketches and build them out into full-fledged scripts. All I ask for is a Story By credit in return! I’d love for the blog to be a springboard for more film-oriented work. Certainly there are filmmakers and studio execs out there who are in need of someone good at creating filmic stories and characters? Right? Writing these every morning is just flat out good writing practice for me. I’m often asked to write taglines as part of my work as a copywriter, and doing one a day for the blog really keeps me sharp. Finally, this is just fun for me. I look forward to my little oasis of pitch creating each morning! I know I’ll be sad when it’s over.
MM: Do you think you will ever flesh any of these ideas out into full screenplays?
When I began, I imagined that at the very end of the year I’d ask my readers to select their favorite pitch and that would be the one I’d write. Imagine that--a script idea that had already been vetted as desirable! We’ll see if that comes to fruition. In the meantime, I’ve been tinkering with back story and character sketches for The Necktie Party. I think there’s something really fun and workable there, prickly love interest, nasty villain. Besides, I’ve never written a Western before and every writer should write at least one Western in his day. Dontcha think?
MM: Yeah, I can't wait for Tarantino's take on the Spaghetti Western with Inglorious Basterds. . .
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