CHAPTER 2 - HAVE I GOT A STORY FOR YOU.
You are dying to tell your story. It’s been percolating in your brain for decades. You have waited your whole life to tell this story. What? You don’t have a story to tell? Don’t worry. Most stories that people are yearning to tell aren’t worth the telling or the hearing for that matter. It’s not having a particular story to tell, it’s the desire to tell a story. For a long time the rule of thumb was “write what you know”. While this is good advice to a point, I read a quote from a writer who said “Unless you are a Princess leading a rebellion in a galaxy far, far away, “what you know” could be very boring”. Is there a happy medium? Of course there is. There are more books out there on how to write a script then you can shake a stick at (and they are listed in the back of this book) so I am not going to attempt to teach anyone how to write a script. What I will talk about is choosing the right story / project for you and your first film. Some folks believe you should walk before you run. Others feel that if you can run, then run you should. Myself, I am conflicted. The bottom line is that most filmmakers start their careers by making a short film or two before graduating up to a feature film.
The other reality is that the cost of a feature film is significantly more and thus you may find it much harder to find someone to finance your feature with no experience under your belt. A short film can usually be made on the cheap.
For the purpose of clarity, a short film is usually under an hour long while a feature film usually needs to be at least ninety minutes if it’s a comedy and possibly longer if it is a drama or thriller. The process is virtually the same. One takes longer to make than the other but that is about it. A short film shot on 35mm film with a large cast, will take the same amount of prep and crew as a feature film shot on 35mm. There is just more cost and more time involved. So everything we talk about in this book is applicable to both whether you choose to make a short film or feature film as your first project.
It is important to choose your subject matter wisely. The success of your project will depend as much on what you choose to do as how you choose to do it. There is an unwritten rule that I find really applies. I am not a big fan of unwritten rules (not a big fan of written rules either) but this one really hits the nail on the head. ON YOUR FIRST FILM, AVOID AT ALL COSTS WORKING WITH ANIMALS, CHILDREN AND SPECIAL EFFECTS.
This may seem like common sense, but you would not believe how many first time scripts I have seen that have horses, drowning scenes, car wrecks, exploding vampires and levitating corpses. Not to mention every mob movie that has the pre-requisite gun fight show down, “Mexican Standoff” with Tarrantino-like blood effects. People. If you have never made a movie before, why make an already gargantuan task harder. So, pick a story that you can shoot on your block, in your office, in your parents’ house or in and around the local high school. If you must have cars, don’t wreck them or blow them up. If someone has to die bloody, do it off screen…. See where I am heading with this. Your first film will challenge every idea you have ever had. The simpler the story, the easier it will be to pull off a film that is better than average. Most of the things I described in the previous paragraph work great if you have a ton of cash and experienced stunt and pyro people to handle the effects. Your career will benefit more from a very well produced, directed and acted, drama or comedy with no effects and action sequences, than it will from a poorly made action or horror film that looks amateurish and reeks of bad acting and half assed production value. Getting it done is important, but if it’s crap, no one will want to see it and you will have set yourself back financially as well as in reputation. Finances can be sorted out. Reputation is all you will ever have in this business, wait until your ninth or tenth film before you send yours into the toilet.
If you are not a writer then your first task is to find a script that you connect with, that can be produced within a reasonable budget that YOU can reasonably raise and that at your level (which is beginner by the way) you can pull of with some sense of professional aplomb. If you are planning on writing it yourself, then your task is harder.
Somebody smarter than me once said there are only seven stories to tell. He or She was right. It is a rarity when a movie comes out that is so original you can safely say that you have never seen that before. The movie Memento comes to mind. Had they told that story from the beginning to the end it would have been a slightly interesting thriller. Been there done that. But by thinking outside of the box and telling the story backwards, it took your basic psycho-thriller and turned it on it’s head. In turn creating one of the most innovative films to come down the pike in a long time. Don’t rush the story just so you can start rolling camera. Most good scripts take quite some time to come together and then a number of rewrites before they are ready to be shot. Our process (my partners and I) goes something like this.
One of us comes up with an idea. Let’s use Atlantic City Serenade as an example. While we were tearing down the ceiling in Paul’s living room, he says to me “I have this idea”. I say “Oh yeah, what is it?” Then he says, “This guy, he sleeps with his daughter and doesn’t know it”. I say, “You mean he doesn’t know he slept with a woman or he doesn’t know it was his daughter?” He says “Very Funny” and I say “Great idea” Now this line doesn’t seem like much but it was the germ of an entire movie. We spent the next year thinking about and talking about the storyline. Coming up with different characters and plot points. Once we finally had the basic story concept in our heads, I sat down and in about three weeks banged out a first draft. What we call the “skeleton”. This is basically just a frame to hang the story on. Once we have something to work with, we go through each scene line by line together and make changes, tweak dialogue, delete scenes and write new ones. This part of the process can take as little time as couple of weeks or as long as four or five months as it did with “Beds & Breakfast” (which died a slow painful death due to tasteless re-writes called for by the distributor … much more on this later).
On the other side of the coin, “A Question of Time” was a script idea that I started over a year ago and couldn’t get past the first scene for various reasons. Then, a year later I came back to it, wrote the whole script in two days (after spending a week doing an outline) and went into production a month later. There are no concrete rules about how and when a project (or script) comes together.
If you choose to get a script from someone else there are things to be wary of. First and foremost, make sure you connect with the script. I don’t mean whether you like it or not, or whether you think it’s funny, or scary or suspenseful. I mean whether it grabs you on a gut level. Remember, you are going to be living with this script and this story forever. Intimately for the next two years and as a resume piece forever. So if you don’t believe deeply in the story and the script, then you will not do good service to the project. I have seen this first hand.
My advice is to read as many scripts as you can. You don’t have to be a writer or an experienced script reader to be able to tell whether a script is good or not. However, keep in mind that a great script doesn’t necessarily make a great movie. This is because a movie is more than the words on a page. If you can’t recreate faithfully what makes a great script work, whether it’s because of a lack of funding or skill, then choosing that particular script would be a mistake. Only you can make the right script choice for yourself, but it must be a wise choice if you are going to be successful.
