Tag: screenwriting

Why I Need A Second Creative Track

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I have really been spinning my wheels the last few weeks with the very first few chapters of the third draft of my first novel. I’m afraid I’m feeling a bit burn out. There is a very arbitrary structure in my mind about how the story progress and because I just can’t get it where it needs to be, I keep reading then revising the novel’s first three chapters over and over and over again.

As such, I think I need to give myself something different to piviot to creatively whenever I feel this way. At the moment, it seems like it’s going to be delving into the icy waters of screenwriting.

But this will happen in the context of my main goal still being finishing a mystery-thriller that is an homage to Stieg Larsson’s original Millennium series. My novel is so different that pretty much only I would notice any similarities.

Most of what is similar to Stieg Larsson’s work is structural in nature or the result of “form follows function.”

I will freely admit that my novel just isn’t as good as the novel I’m using as my “textbook” — The Girl That Played With Fire. That novel has a lot of heart. But that is, in general, what I want people to think of on an instinctual basis when they read my novel.

If they are fans of The Girl Who Played With Fire, they will feel like they’re putting on an old brown shoe. It will feel very cumfy and familiar, even if my novel is totally, completely, it’s own thing when it comes to subject matter.

That’s my goal, at least.

But I’ve studied Larsson’s stuff so much and have come to see some of his editorial decisions on a macrobasis as “the right way,” even though there is no such thing, I keep revising and revising and revising.

This is wearing me out. So, rather risk total burn out, I want to be able to pivot to screenwriting as necessary now and again.

It will be interesting to how long this plan lasts.

Video: Mulling Using Screenwriting As My Backup Creative Track

The Old Kook Tax & Psyching Myself Up To Start A Screenplay

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

As I continue to spin my creative wheels with the first act of the third draft of my first novel, I find myself pondering yet again a second creative track: a screenplay.

I already have the infrastructure to do so — I have Final Draft. But the thing that stopped me from plunging into screenwriting remain: there is a sharp learning curve when it comes to writing a screenplay. So much so, that I honestly feel like just redoubling my efforts with my main creative track of a novel.

And, yet, I’m not getting any younger and I’ve progressed far enough with the novel that I think maybe it would be fun to piviot to writing a screenplay whenever I feel overwhelmed with the main creative track of the novel. I think, in general, what’s going on is I’m ready to expand my creative horizons beyond just one novel that I keep tinkering with.

I’m very much in a put up or shut up moment. I have GOT to finish something. But there are a lot of problems with a second creative track being screenwriting.

I’m Too Old
I’m just too old. At 50, I’m so old that I fear that any hope of being a screenwriter is kind of an even bigger delusion than being a novelist. But, lulz, it would be fund to just tinker around with screenwriting despite my decrepit age.
I’m a Kook
This is a problem because I have no friends and no one likes me. If I was “normal,” I could maybe find a creative collaborator who could help me develop a screenplay.
I Live In The Wrong Place
I really live in the wrong place. I live in BFE Virginia. But, lulz, it would be fun to have a few screenplays done so if I ever happen to find myself in Hollywood I might be able to pitch them.

The upsides to screenwriting some on the side as I progress with writing a novel is that I could flex a different creative muscle or two in my mind. I have a few really great scifi concepts in my mind that would be fun to explore. I think what I’m going to have to do is do treatments for these screenplay concepts before I sit down to actually write anything.

The temptation will be, of course, to simply use those treatments for novels, rather than screenplays. But, lulz, as long as I’m being creative, I guess that’s all that matters, right?

Mulling A Scifi Screenplay Concept

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’m officially at an age where I am constantly reminded of how precious my remaining days of life are. I wasted way too many years grieving over the demise of ROKon Magazine and now, here I am, at 50, troubled by all the doors that have closed behind me for good.

And, yet, I continue to be consumed by delusion to the point that I still have hope that somehow, someway, I will “blow up with my DJ money” and pull of a third hattrick — this time for a national / international audience.

As such, I continue to chung away at a mystery-thriller novel that I hope will be the cornerstone of a six novel project. What’s more, despite all the mental energy devoted to such an endeavor, I still find myself dreaming up other story concepts.

That sort of thing just happened to me today when I returned to a time-travel story that has been rolling around in my mind for some time. I like it because it deals with multiverse concept while also addressing some major issues of the day.

The more I’ve thought about the idea, the more I’ve come to realize it has the storytelling dynamic of a screenplay rather than a novel. The thing about screenplays is you can get away with a lot of things that you simply can’t with a novel.

I have long wanted to write a screenplay, but I fear I’ve just waited too long. Or, to put it another way, a screenplay would be something I might be able to pull off once I blow up with my DJ money. I’m delusional, yes, but I am still connected to reality enough that I’m not prepared to spend all that much time on a screenplay when I’m both too old and live in the wrong place for it to ever be produced.

But I just don’t know. I really like this scifi concept enough — and I do continue to have a lingering interest in writing a screenplay — that I might just dabble in writing such a screenplay to get it out of my system.

Actors As ‘Ringtones’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Everyone in Hollywood needs to read David Brin’s scifi novel “Kiln People.” One could posit it as an allegory for what may be about to happen to Hollywood within a decade or so. In the novel, as I recall, scans of actors are treated much the same way as ring tones were in the past.

As an aside, I think we’re all going to have to get used to the idea that Hollywood may soon be in an eternal “now” in which the stars that existed about the time of the AI revolution are forever making the same content over and over and over again as if they live forever.

The need for this to exist for Hollywood was grazed — but not touched directly — by Matthew Belloni when he said, rhetorically, that it’s not like Michael C. Hall is going to want to make Dexter shows for the rest of his life.

Well, lulz, what if he didn’t? What if the producers of the show just used his body scan and kept making the show forever — or at least as long as it was profitable — allowing Hall to live passively off the use of his scan?

I think that is a very, very real possibility. There may be a pause in the adoption of such technology because we have a Second American Civil War and WW3 to get through, but in the end, I think AI could totally transform the very idea of what entertainment is.

Or, to put another way, instead of paying $15 for a monthly Netflix subscription, you will pay the same amount for a license of the body scans of your favorite actors to use in, I don’t know, the metaverse or some shit.

All of this plays into my belief that we’re careening towards a Petite Singularity. Things could change so dramatically in the infotainment industry that we just can’t keep up.

Movie Pitch: ‘Bottom Rail’

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

There is a famous anecdote from the very end of the Civil War when a former slave is claimed to have told a bunch of white people that, “bottom rail is on top now.”

Ok, here’s my movie pitch.

The movie opens with a montage about a virus that wiped out much — but not all — of humanity. After a lot of chaos, death and destruction, humanity manages to bounce back. But here’s the twist — white people are now in the minority and pretty much the entire globe is run by black and brown people.

You would have to be very careful how you approached this story, but in general, the point would be to confront white people in the audience with how systemic racism is real TODAY. The movie would be an excuse to highlight the macro social injustice that POC have to endure in our modern world.

You might suggest that white people in this future world are blamed for the the destruction of the old world and that only adds to the prejudice that they face. Now there are obvious risks to this move in the sense that Right wing nutjobs might completely miss the point of the story and latch on to it as a parable about the perils of illegal immigration.

Ugh.

This is why we can’t have nice things.

Anyway, it’s an interesting idea. It’s a more realistic end-of-the-word scenario than is in most fiction these days.

How I Would ‘Fix’ The Movie Babylon

by Shelt Garner
@shetgarner

There was a lot for me to like about the movie Babylon. And, as I’ve written before, there were times — especially early in the movie — when I was really digging it. It was giving off “Wolf of Wall Street” vibes, in a good way, and I was prepared to make it one of my favorite recent movies.

Margot Robbie plays Nellie LaRoy and Diego Calva plays Manny Torres in Babylon from Paramount Pictures.

And….then….the movie’s plot became rather trite. How many times were we going to have to see Margot Robbie’s character screw up, only to get rescued? When the movie seemed to on course to replicate the famous fire cracker scene in Boogie Nights, I bounced out of the theatre.

But now that I’ve read on Wikipedia how the movie ended, I find myself wanting to “fix” it. And here’s what I’ve come up with.

Make the character arc of the Margot Robbie character one of redemption. Instead of time after time her screwing up and getting saved, why not use some of that time to prepare us for a redemption arc. In the end of the movie, she somehow straighten her life out and ends up living a long, long time.

In fact, maybe give her the last laugh with a faux documentary from the 1960s or something where she talks about the “good old days” and the transition from silent film to talkies.

Anyway, if nothing else, I was reminded by the movie the importance of strong character development.

How James Cameron Could Have For Sure Made His $2 Billion With Avatar 2 — The Way Of Water

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

Overall, Avatar 2 — The Way Of Water was….good. Maybe not great, but it was definitely good. Though I have to admit that it took a lot of willpower not to leave after I had used its distraction to figure out some issues with the development of the novel I continue to be obsessed with.

If Cameron had really wanted to reach his $2 billion haul, he should have really leaned into making the Red State “Star People” a bit more nuanced and complex. Give them more moral justification for what they were doing other than “Earth is dying.” Make them more human in a way that there were a few red meat dog whistles for MAGA Nazis. Had he done that, the politics of the movie would have been a lot more even handed — at least in the eyes of MAGA Nazis — and they probably would have driven the movie’s success into the $2 billion range.

But here are my complains about the actual story, rather than any political quibbles.

It’s Too Long
This movie is just way too long. I understand that it’s supposed to evoke awe in the audience with all its high-tech image shit, but yawn. Too long. It got really, really slow at times. I did a lot of eye rolling and watch checking. Repeatedly. Again and again. I would much rather it be a tight two hours than a three hour self-indulgent trip through James Cameron psche. There was a really good movie floating around in all that way of water bullshit, but Cameron was just too obsessed with being a show off to let it be seen.

It Draws Too Much From The Cameronverse
Over and over again there were call backs to previous James Cameron movies in this movie. A conspicuous amount. Some of it, it seemed, was an effort to show that he could top himself by doing really difficult shit in water. When I first started noticing all the callbacks, I thought it was fun. Then it became distracting because it was happening so much. There were call backs to The Abyss, Aliens, Terminator 2 and Titanic strone across the three hours of the movie. Give it a rest, Jimmy!

Paranoia Will Destroya

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

I’ve been feeling pretty paranoid since I saw someone from Hollywood snooping around this blog in my Webstats interested in how long it’s going to take me to start querying my first novel. My fear is that when I sent my outline to a manuscript consultant, she sent it to someone she knows in Hollywood and they’re going to use it as the basis of a screenplay.

This is completely bonkers for a number of reasons.

One, I’m making a connection that I just have no idea is there. Just because I sent the outline to her, doesn’t mean she took the next step of sending it to someone else. And I have no idea if she has any connections in Hollywood she could send it to in the first place. I do know, however, from personal experience that the moment you send something to someone, it inevitably gets passed around.

But, still, I’m giving the two events a connection and a narrative that just doesn’t exist in real life. I can’t let my personal insecurities about such things overwhelm me.

I guess some of it is what happened with ROKon Magazine. Annie Shapiro really did “steal” the magazine from me, bringing it back in secret behind my back, so once bitten twice shy and all that. And I suppose I just have to process the possibility that Hollywood might “steal” my idea, even though it’s definitely just a “possibility” and not a “probability.”

I just can’t let this irrational fear consume me. It’s embarrassing how much time I’ve thought about this the last few days. But I just can’t allow such an irrational fear stop me from moving forward. As I keep saying — make decisions on what you do know, not on what you don’t know.

And I think I’m probably be a bit full of myself to even think it’s possible that Hollywood would “steal” my idea in the first place. I know how hard it is to get ANYTHING produced and my outline wasn’t THAT good.

It’s possible that the person I saw in my Webstats from LA was simply curious when the novel I’m working on might come out and that’s it. No nefarious plot against me. That definitely seems to make a lot more sense than my paranoid delusions.

Burn Hollywood Burn: Death By AGI Logline

by Shelt Garner
@sheltgarner

The conventional wisdom is that there is going to be a massive Hollywood writers’ strike in 2023 because of the rise of the popularity of streaming. If the leaders of that strike had some foresight they would add something else to their list of demands: a ban on the use of AGI to develop and write movies and TV.

Because if they don’t do something about the use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT and its successors producing media, the very notion of what it means to be a showbiz writer might be revolutionized — and not in a good way. Instead of hiring potentially hundreds of people to develop, write and produce movies, movie studios will simply get an exec to sit down in front a computer and write a logline.

A few moments later, an entire two hour computer generated movie pops out.

I know this sounds extremely hysterical, but it’s better to get such a ban now instead of waiting when the transformation has already begun and Hollywood writers will lack any leverage to get their will.

But no one listens to me. I’m just an aspiring novelist in the middle of nowhere. It will be interesting to see, however, what comes of Hollywood when the only person who is needed is someone to walk the Red Carpet.