CASABLANCA is coming! One night only!

CITIZEN KANE can go suck it. If film historians were HONEST, they would admit the movie is slow and pretentious. CASABLANCA, however, deserves to be one of the top films of all time. It's not only hilarious and wildly entertaining, it's "invisibly" directed - which is much tougher to do, unlike CITIZEN KANE, where you're aware every time the camera moves.

Still "cleaning the bathroom" on the novel...

Did I mention how TEDIOUS it is to make changes on MS WORD from a marked-up hard copy? There's no "creating." It's line by line, page by page of add a comma here, change a word there, correct this or that sentence - i.e., "work." I want to scream.

The Novel...

Once I e-publish it, I'll do an in depth write-up of the origins, etc. For right now, let's see...I wrote a very first draft, did a round of rewrites, and printed it out. I marked up that hard copy, and as I made those changes on MS WORD, I did another pass. Printed THAT out, marked it up, and now I'm making THOSE changes on MS WORD, and keeping an eye out for any other changes I need to make and may have missed. (So far, there's been only a few.)

This is the part of writing I loathe - the final, "cosmetic" rewrite, where the story is done. All the changes being made are just tweaking a word here, or a sentence there. It's the writing equivalent of cleaning your bathroom. (It HAS to be done, can't be avoided. It's just no fun.)

Noah Baumbach and Nicole Holofcener Are The Same Person

Seriously. Both make indie dramatic comedies that are well-written, well-acted, and well-made, but feel almost free form. Both had tremendously good debuts during the awesome indie relationship comedy era of the 90's - WALKING AND TALKING for Holofcener, KICKING & SCREAMING for Baumbach. (See? Same movie.) Both now make more dramatic movies that feature neurotic, high-strung, and highly-verbal characters. (For Holofcener, it's with Catherine Keener.) Both are very talented...but need to get back to more "focused," albeit "commercial" fare.

Oh, right...

...I'm also writing a novel. Well, re-writing one. It's horror. (Oh, how I love horror books. The best of all junk food reads.) I hope to have it finished by the first of March. A full write-up about the origins of it then.

I Write To Music

Some writers do, some don't. For me it sets the mood. It helps create the atmosphere of the genre in which I'm writing, and makes it seem more like I'm writing a movie, not just writing a script. (Therefore, it's more fun to write.)

Atmosphere is everything in film. Think about it. The good-to-great films have a specific vibe. You feel like you're placed inside the world of that movie for 90-120 minutes. The fair-to-bad films usually feel like they could take place anywhere. They feel like widgets.

If the screenplay I'm working on is horror, a thriller, or action, I write to scores of other movies. Some I've purchased over the years. A lot comes from Rhapsody - which is a Godsend for music lovers and screenwriters who write to music. Comedies, relationship comedies, drama and dramedies, I like to write to artists who fit the mood of the genre. I'll compile a massive playlist on Rhapsody. As I write the rough draft, I'll choose the best songs off each record, and form a final playlist of 40-50 songs that I can write to for the final rewrite later.

"The Fate Script: The Soundtrack"

Right now, the Rhapsody playlist is just Death Cab For Cutie and Cary Brothers. It's a modern relationship comedy about 30-something professionals in the city, so that's who they would be listening to. I will add more artists as I go along.

"The January Partial Script"

My first goal of finishing rough first drafts of partial scripts was a tiny character drama. I had written about 15 pages of it a few years ago. I knew the ending, parts of the middle. With all of that, I managed to bang out an 80 page "ball of wax" to work with later. I love those semi-impressionistic indie dramas. Where acoustic folk plays over a series of images that tell the story along with the dialogue scenes. STATION AGENT is one of the best ones. The plot was (accidentally) straight out of Nicholas Sparks, but instead of sappy melodrama, it turned out just how I wanted. The Rhapsody playlist was Iron and Wine and Kings of Convenience. They fit perfectly with the breezy, nostalgic feel of the story.

"The February Partial," "The Fate Script"

There are many movies dealing with the inner workings of Fate. The best - NEXT STOP WONDERLAND comes immediately to mind; as does SERENDIPITY - deal with flesh and blood characters who are moved closer and closer together through the story by the machinations of Fate. The worst treat the characters merely as chess pieces, as the machinations are the focus of the story. (Oddly, this works fine in the FINAL DESTINATION movies, which are the flip side of the same coin - showing Death (Fate) working in a sequence of events. It works because it's horror. Horror is about the horror more than the characters.)

Several years ago I co-wrote a romantic comedy that was more overtly about the hand of Fate in our romantic lives. Being obsessed with the subject, I wanted to write another one, but how to do it without repeating myself?

Enter "Mad Men" and TINKER, TAILOR, SOLDIER, SPY.

In newspaper and magazine articles, you should never "bury your lead." In this case - the doings of Fate - I would have to, so not to copy my previous script. But how? Mad Men" and TINKER served as models. They bury important information in a mound of chitchat. You think you're just listening to conversation, until you realize you're being told very important information. In this new Fate script, why not "bury" the connections underneath the character interactions? The connections are there, but obvious attention aren't drawn to them. Only after the movie is over will the viewer think back and say, "ah, okay: this happened, which caused this, which caused that." At the time, it's just a movie dealing with what most of us deal with - that ever-elusive search for love.

I know, I know

Almost two years? Wow. What happened? Eh, life. You know - you miss one week of blogging...that turns into a month, which turns into a year. From now on I promise to post once a week. Deal?

Where have I been? I'm still writing; still sending things out. But, life again. Problems that arise that don't so much derail you but cause you to lose 100% focus. You still write every day; still e-mail queries...but not quite with the same intensity. Suddenly, a year pass, and you realize...that a year has passed. ANYWAY.

Like most writers, I have a hard drive full of partial scripts. It's 10 pages of this, 30 pages of that. For some reason this had begun to bother me. It never had before. Some of these are as old as 1999 - and written on MS WORD to boot. But, for whatever reason this had become a point of irritation. Like a progression in music left unfinished, they need to be finished.

Fueled by this sudden and mysterious OCD-ness to finish these scripts, I decided to spend a month on each partial script and write very rough, "ball-of-wax" drafts. These drafts are just to get the general idea/story down in 80-90 pages, to expand, fine tune and finish later.

Oddly, this is a very freeing writing exercise. Your subconscious isn't constricted to a strict outline - so there's no "pressure," for lack of a better word. You already know points "A, M and Z" of the story, and the themes, and the general mood or vibe, so the ideas that flow fit what you're doing...not like stream of consciousness just to fill pages. Some ideas may stay in the final draft, many might be replaced; right now it's just to get that very rough draft down.