Month: June 2007

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dfmamea.com: Year One

Holy smoley – it’s a year already.

Plug-time because it’s important to give credit where it’s due. All praise to:

  • The Goddess who says nary a word when she catches me blogging instead of Writing;
  • The Webmistresse, whose redoubtable webskills made the site a reality;
  • you Readers, all five of you, for making my visitor stats look good, and providing the occasional but welcome break from the email- and comment-spam.

Jesus loves you.

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Needs Must and All That

Danny Stack‘s latest Story Vault about dramatic need, along with Jane Espenson‘s post on the need for story/character stakes, got me thinking.

My path to film analysis was as follows:

    • blind acceptance –

Okay. She has to go back into the house for the cat because she loves widdle Ferdie.

    • followed by a curious questioning –

But why would the previously right-thinking Bindy go back into the house she’s just escaped from? Shaka the left-handed half-blind machete surgeon IS STILL IN THERE!

    • until I realised that there was a correlation between the VCR counter and such out-of-character behaviour –

[With 0:62:25 elapsed and 0:28:42 remaining] Bindy has yet to run Shaka through the bandsaw, detonate the C4 in the basement, and have a topless clinch with Chad the newspaper boy*.

It was likely after a three-hour-long (subjective) ninety-minute film that I had my I could’ve done better’n that moment and, still in that bubble of complete and utter naivete, started plotting my ideal action film:

    • Draft one:

The Hero’s dog is killed. Vengeance is sought. A helpful dog joins our Hero as the Sidekick on his journey. The Baddies are vanquished. The Sidekick is adopted.

    • Hm. Draft three:

The Hero’s family is massacred. Vengeance is sought. A helpful Waif joins our Hero in his quest. The Waif is kidnapped by the Baddies but not killed. The Baddies are pulped. One. By. One. The Hero rescues the Waif and they kiss.

    • Meh. Draft fifteen:

The Hero’s family is threatened – there’s a close call involving the Baby. The Hero and his Plucky Family hit the road but the Baddies are always a step behind. The Hero’s Dog is revealed to be a mole. The Hero is conflicted but is interrupted by an extended Woo-drenched firefight, at the end of which the Hero sacrifices himself for his Plucky Family – but is saved by a last-minute, redemptive and fatal act by his Dog.

I learnt an important lesson during those rewrites**: if I don’t make the reader care it’s just another exciting-but-quickly-forgotten carnival ride (or an excruciatingly interminable cuppa with your parents’ friends).

 

* How do I know all this? Because these scenes are in the trailer I’ve seen a dozen times already and they haven’t happened yet (although in this instance I’m going to be short-changed by Chad and Bindy sharing a chaste kiss before an abrupt end-credit-roll).

** I also learnt that reusing elements from earlier, discarded drafts is Writing Smarter.

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Blog Rating

– despite the presence of the following words:

  • shoot (2x)

  • dead (1x)

I thought (hoped) I was less well-behaved than that.

(Fedora-tip to Idiot/Savant.)

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International Film Fest Time

he 39th Auckland International Film Festival programme arrived in the mail a couple of days back. It’s that time of year. (A bittersweet moment: Amit Tripuraneni‘s Five wasn’t selected but there’s Francis Glenday‘s Tumanako Springs to catch.)

A perusal of its 152 glossy pages brings back familiar behaviours, namely:

  • excitedly dog-ear-ing a third of the programme because they’re ones that I must see, until –
  • a reality check of limited funds means some serious whittling – I hope I can still live with myself with a new list of twenty or so, and then –
  • I’m gripped by the realisation that family commitments make the idea of leaving either the Goddess and children, or just the children with a babysitter, for even just ten films (or just over thirty hours in total*) is just asking for trouble, until finally –
  • somewhere between three and six sessions are selected and booked.

C’est la vie.

Friend and festival veteran Stevo once sagely advised: use the fest to see something that’s unlikely to return ’cause the big and/or popular productions are bound get general release – and failing that, they’ll eventually make it onto video.

Excellent advice for those with limited funds and/or time.

 

*     Maths in a Minute: based on an average movie running time of 105 minutes, with an additional 90 minutes return-travel and park-finding time – just ten films is a 32.5-hour commitment over the festival’s sixteen-day run.

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The T.V. Week is Filling Up Nicely

It was a lean autumn* as the third season of Desperate Housewives lurches from one cliffhanger to another, sometimes leavened only by a game of “Spot the Marcia Cross Stand-In/Body-Double”.

There was a brief flutter of excitement when TV3‘s site FAQ said that Battlestar Galactica was returning to the screen. Unfortunately they meant Season 2, which has been available on DVD for the past year or so (duly devoured only early this year). Which’ll explain the 11:00pm scheduling.

Still, as we enter winter, two household favourites return today: Medium and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

Closer scrutiny of the T.V. guides in the next few weeks might be rewarded with The Shield‘s Season 4 and The Wire‘s Season 3.

Hope is a terrible thing.

 

*    For telly maybe – it’s been nice to catch up with last year’s movies.

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Paper Trail

I’m a hoarder by nature. Pre-Goddess, I shifted flat innumerable times and each shift entailed a re-evaluation of my hoarding criteria. With each shift I held on to less and less. But what I held on to mattered. Or I couldn’t bring myself to part with. Either reason was good enough for me to schlep it around.

Amongst the clutter that I dragged around were reams of ideas and notes and bits of stories. Each story had an audit trail of previous iterations. I drew comfort from the fact that if whatever change I’d made in version x.y+1 didn’t pan out, I could go back to v.x.y, copy-and-paste what I needed, and continue with v.x.y+2.

I didn’t tell a soul about this. It smelt of eccentric writerly behaviour and I feared it might lead to some superstitious obsessive compulsive behaviour. And then DJ Ash gifted me a movie book, inside which was the following:

I like to have all the actual physical pages that I have done in front of me: all the drafts, and all the revisions, and all the markings on them. It gives me a sense of security; ie., ‘look at all these drafts you have done, you must be a very responsible person – now all you have to do is use your good taste and refine these pages’.  – David Mamet, Some Freaks

And all was well in the Land of D.

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New Cutie Honey

Found in a recent issue of the Australian Empire magazine – a TV-show-now-on-DVD:

“[New Cutie Honey] is as buxom as the puerile mind can imagine: her ‘super powers’ come from a device implanted in her bosoms, which when energised engage a transformation that shreds her clothes in numerous 360-degree slow-mo tracking shots. Momentarily naked, she is then reassembled into an array of lurid tight-fitting costumes as she shouts ‘Honey Flash!’.”

I am nothing. Nothing.

 

UPDATE: god I love this business.

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Short and Sweet

I hate synopsising. I hate it. Hate it hate it hate it.

After however long of bitching and scratching and gnawing at ninety-plus pages of script, the last thing I want to do is be succinct about it. I’m all out of succinct after condensing working draft text like –

He draws and fires in one continuous movement, the action a blur even at twenty-four frames per second, and his opponent drops to one knee.

– into –

He fires.

Stinky Jim drops.

When asked to cram the past month or so’s work into a freaking convenient one- or two-pager, my first impulse is to shriek, You wanna synopsis?, snatching up any sort of writing surface – a book, a piece of paper scrap, the applicant’s forehead – and scrawling out –

One man’s journey of self-discovery.

I never act on my impulse because, upon being asked, I immediately and automatically answer: A synopsis? Sure!

… Sigh.

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