More reader mail...
Sand Man writes:
I find it beneficial to have an actor in mind when I write or read a screenplay. Would someone like yourself find it beneficial to have the writer suggest an actor they feel fits the characters they've created..?
First off, as a writer, I think it can definitely help to have a certain type in mind when writing. If it crystallizes the character for you, that's not a bad thing. I don't often do this myself, however on one of my recent scripts, my wife instantly came up with a casting choice after reading the script. The funny thing is, I wasn't thinking of this actor and probably wouldn't have come up with the name on my own, but as soon as it was pointed out to me I could really see it! Now when I picture the eventual film, that's the actor I envision.
However I decided not to go back and insert a reference to that actor in the description. I realize that putting it in could help a reader picture exactly what I want them to. But what if they hate that actor? What if that actor's latest movie has terrible buzz? Or worse, what if this exec has seen an early cut of that actor's next film and knows he or she can't act their way out of a paper bag?
I also worry about boxing their imagination in too much. Maybe they don't think this particular actor is marketable and limiting their imagination to that specific type, I've closed them off from coming up with other possibilities they might have actually worked with. These are things I worry about, but at the end of the day, it's all a judgment call.
I have no doubt that there are some professional and produced writers who would totally endorse naming actors in your script. It's a perfectly acceptable shorthand, especially if you're dealing with readers who have limited imagination. Also, it's a much easier trick to use if you're naming an actor with a lot of mega-successes under his belt. (In other words, using "Robert Downey Jr." probably isn't going to be as much of a knock against you as "Chris O'Donnell.")
So is there really a right answer here? I'm not sure, but there's probably a right answer for you.
Ian writes:
I've read plenty of screenwriting books and plenty of scripts. I think I'm pretty competent when it comes to putting a story together, and anyone who reads my work says my dialogue is strong. But it's action and description that I still can't figure out.
I'm never sure how much to describe a setting or a character's expression, and when to keep the description to the bare minimum, and I think it's affecting my work negatively since, obviously, a lot of the writing in screenplays is action and description.
So I was wondering if you could weigh in on this? Should I keep the level of description consistent throughout, or should it change from scene to scene? Do I just keep things simple on the page, and let directors, cinematographers and actors fill in the description for me? Anything tips you could give me would be greatly appreciated.
If by consistent, you mean that every scene should have the exact same level of description, I rather disagree with that. It's going to vary depending on the specificity of the environment. For example, if your main character is walking into an unremarkable office or a grocery store, there's a good chance you'll do less describing than if they wander into an alien spaceship or something totally foreign.
Also if you're returning to the same environments several times over, you won't need to write nearly as much on subsequent visits as you will the first time.
In terms of how complex you get, I don't think you need to delineate every single piece of blocking in the scene. If it's important that a character cross a room in a particular way, then certainly go crazy. If you get carried away and try to spell out every movement in the script, you're going to over-complicate the read and that can hurt you.
The question-behind-the-question here is really about figuring out what's essential to tell the story. I can't give you a one-size-fits-all answer. That's one of those things you discover yourself through trial and error.
Showing posts with label casting. Show all posts
Showing posts with label casting. Show all posts
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Webshow: Casting
This week we turn our attention to something that I suspect a lot of writers fail to consider when they start writing: casting.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Are these parts castable?
I've noticed in a few spec scripts I've gotten recently that some writers aren't giving enough thought to casting when writing their scripts. Now before you say, "Wait a minute! Aren't you always telling us to not offer casting suggestions?" let me explain what I mean.
Not long ago, I read a script that had no fewer than four major roles for characters under 12 - and two of those roles were under six years of age. It was a very weighty drama with a lot of the emotion depending on the ability of some very young actors. I have to admit, years of enduring bad writing has made me very wary of spec scripts with young protagonists just on principle. It's hard to write young kids without being cloying, and too often, it feels like green writers fall into the trap of concocting "cute" things for their supporting kids to do.
Generally, if I read a spec with one child actor in it, it doesn't usually trip my alert. I figure that there must be at least one child who can be found that can fit the bill. Also, if the film has a lot of adults in major roles, there's the expectation that their acting might compensate for any weaknesses with the younger actors. Plus, every now and then filmmakers get lucky and stumble on the next Jonathan Lipnicki (you know, from Jerry Maguire) or Dakota Fanning. Odds are you can find at least one talented kid. Last season, I was very impressed with a young actress named Ariel Winter, who appeared in a multi-episode ER arc as the daughter of a woman in need of a heart transplant. (She's currently on Modern Family.)
But the rub was that this script was about as heavy a drama as they come, and I'd wager that a good 70%-80% of it was based on the interactions of these kids. With two of them being between the ages of 5-7, that had me concerned that finding the right child actors could be a hassle.
Oh and all of these kids were siblings - so in addition to all of that, you had to believe they were related too. (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure there were also lines remarking on just how alike the kids looked - which probably would have been cut if the script got any further.)
I'm not saying that casting this film would be impossible, but the success of the project would be resting on some very small shoulders. My advice might have been to cut the five year-old and age the seven year-old up to being nine or ten. Given the restraints of the premise, it would have required some rethinking, but it would have kept me from thinking, "How are we going to find a five year old who can say and emote this convincingly?"
I'm less worried about the other end of the spectrum. If you can't find a 90 year-old actor, you just age-up a 70 year-old one. However, I do seem to recall reading once that M. Night Shyamalan wrote himself into a corner with Lady in the Water, when he insisted on finding a particular ethnicity for a role, despite being told that there were few choices in that demographic. (I think he was looking for an overweight half-Asian woman, but I'm unable to locate a copy of the book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, which covers this in detail.)
So while this isn't a major issue, and casting people sometimes work near miracles, give it some thought the next time you write a five year-old half-Asian/half-Samoan set of fraternal twins who are crucial to the plot.
Not long ago, I read a script that had no fewer than four major roles for characters under 12 - and two of those roles were under six years of age. It was a very weighty drama with a lot of the emotion depending on the ability of some very young actors. I have to admit, years of enduring bad writing has made me very wary of spec scripts with young protagonists just on principle. It's hard to write young kids without being cloying, and too often, it feels like green writers fall into the trap of concocting "cute" things for their supporting kids to do.
Generally, if I read a spec with one child actor in it, it doesn't usually trip my alert. I figure that there must be at least one child who can be found that can fit the bill. Also, if the film has a lot of adults in major roles, there's the expectation that their acting might compensate for any weaknesses with the younger actors. Plus, every now and then filmmakers get lucky and stumble on the next Jonathan Lipnicki (you know, from Jerry Maguire) or Dakota Fanning. Odds are you can find at least one talented kid. Last season, I was very impressed with a young actress named Ariel Winter, who appeared in a multi-episode ER arc as the daughter of a woman in need of a heart transplant. (She's currently on Modern Family.)
But the rub was that this script was about as heavy a drama as they come, and I'd wager that a good 70%-80% of it was based on the interactions of these kids. With two of them being between the ages of 5-7, that had me concerned that finding the right child actors could be a hassle.
Oh and all of these kids were siblings - so in addition to all of that, you had to believe they were related too. (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure there were also lines remarking on just how alike the kids looked - which probably would have been cut if the script got any further.)
I'm not saying that casting this film would be impossible, but the success of the project would be resting on some very small shoulders. My advice might have been to cut the five year-old and age the seven year-old up to being nine or ten. Given the restraints of the premise, it would have required some rethinking, but it would have kept me from thinking, "How are we going to find a five year old who can say and emote this convincingly?"
I'm less worried about the other end of the spectrum. If you can't find a 90 year-old actor, you just age-up a 70 year-old one. However, I do seem to recall reading once that M. Night Shyamalan wrote himself into a corner with Lady in the Water, when he insisted on finding a particular ethnicity for a role, despite being told that there were few choices in that demographic. (I think he was looking for an overweight half-Asian woman, but I'm unable to locate a copy of the book The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale, which covers this in detail.)
So while this isn't a major issue, and casting people sometimes work near miracles, give it some thought the next time you write a five year-old half-Asian/half-Samoan set of fraternal twins who are crucial to the plot.
Thursday, June 25, 2009
Interview with COLLEGE and DEMOTED Screenwriter Dan Callahan: PART IV – More Rewrites
Part I – The Writing Process
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Bitter Script Reader: Taking out the subplot of Kevin (Drake Bell) constantly bumping into his ex during the college weekend is another huge change. That’s probably fifteen pages of scenes that now have to be replaced with something new.
Dan Callahan: It’s funny because I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall and said we’d done all that in the original draft of College. If I’d known Forgetting Sarah Marshall was going to be such a hit I’d have fought harder for all of that stuff to stay in the script because in the original draft his ex-girlfriend is there with the new boyfriend, who goes to school there. And to me, it amps up the stakes of what’s going on…. He’s just like, “Can this get any worse?” To me it gives a lot more depth to what he’s going through and what he’s trying to overcome in the course of a weekend. Everything that can go wrong, happens and at some point he’s gotta come through it and learn from it.
BSR: And in the original script there’s no subplot about the high school kids lying to the college girls about being in college themselves.
DC: In the script they know. That was a note because they felt the college girls wouldn’t hang out with this guys. Our point was that these girls are freshmen, so there’s not much difference in age there. Literally a year apart in age. It’s not that big a leap.
BSR: And it sets up where the audience knows that when the main character tells a lie, you know he’s gonna get caught at the worst possible time. The girl is going to shut him out, and then he’s going to have to do some grand apology. And we’ve seen that before. And I thought it was neat in the first draft that you completely avoided the issue.
DC: Our attitude was like “Fuck it. That’s the way most people would go with it.” And that’s the note we got that we had to go with, but originally they were just honest about it.
BSR: They know from the start in your first draft.
DC: It’s more about them blowing off the girls and the girls getting mad… That’s another one of those big moments that got taken out and because of that you lose a lot of the heart. Him getting over the girlfriend and then going back to high school and saying "I’m over you…" that’s a nice moment to have. And it’s sold more in the original draft.
BSR: And the girlfriend is much more of a presence in your first draft.
DC: She’s got some funny moments…. There also is that sort of patheticness where he’s not over her. He kind of does want to get back together with her. Her being there makes it even worse, but at the end of the day he realizes it’s not the best thing for him… this girl wasn’t right for him. It took a really crazy, shitty weekend for him to realize that, but he did. As opposed into the movie, it becomes him trying to prove his ex-girlfriend wrong. “I’ll show her I’m not who she thinks I am.” I preferred him taking the weekend – I felt it was more original – taking a weekend to get over this girl, and he does.
BSR: So many of these changes ended affecting the second act. And in taking that out, all the stuff you got hit for in the reviews had to be added. There was a recurring theme in the reviews that attacked the movie as sadistic or homophobic. There was one review that said the filmmakers seemed to need to work through some kind of repressed homosexuality, and I read the draft with interest and can say that none of that stuff is in there. The whole bit where they have to do body shots off the hairy guy – none of that shit’s in there!
DC: The gay frat house was never in there. That was one of the producer’s ideas. That they thought would be funny…. There might have been a little subtext with Bearcat… Yeah, so, those are notes you get… and that’s where producers or whoever comes in and thinks they have a funnier idea than you and they tell you to go write it and you don’t have a choice.
There’s nothing wrong with actors coming in and improving. Particularly guys who are comedians because they might come up with something funnier than what you did. But I think it’s important to get what’s on the page so you’ve got those different versions… Certain lines are written for a specific reason. There are a lot of changes, as you saw, from our original draft. That first draft that we went out with was always my favorite, I think it’s the best version. And a lot of stuff that got taken out was stuff that I really miss when I watch the movie.
And the other thing that happens is in these writing sessions you’ve got a lot of people’s opinions and the script often becomes a mishmash of people’s opinions. And as the drafts go on it becomes a Frankenstein of all these versions. We went through two directors, so you’ve got notes from the first director that might still be in the script and then you bring on a new director and they’ve got their own notes. Then the guys from State Street who were set to produce ended up pulling out because of differences they had with the producers at Element so now you’ve got so many people coming and going. And you’ve got a draft with so many opinions in there that it really is a struggle to keep it fluid. It’s never quite what it was before… and that’s the hardest part.
But what are you gonna do? You don’t want to get fired. You want to get paid.
BSR: And if you won’t do it they’ll just bring in somebody else.
DC: And it would just slow down the process more. You know that if you stay and get the notes done, you’re a step closer to getting the movie made. If they fire you, they have to go to other agencies, pitch other writers, meet with other writers, hire another writer. You just put the project behind weeks, or months, which only increases the chances of it not getting made.
BSR: So if you want to get paid….
DC: Take the notes. Argue for what we can argue for… and do them as quickly as possible so we can just keep going, keep going, keep going. That’s all your goal is. When I’m some writer who makes a million dollars a script, then I can go tell someone to go fuck themselves. But I’m not. You do what you have to do to keep your job. We wanted to be the last writers on the project. And we were.
Tomorrow: Reaction to the final film, and new projects.
Part V – Release and Reaction
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
Interview with COLLEGE and DEMOTED Screenwriter Dan Callahan: PART III – Notes, rewriting, casting and SUPERBAD
Part I – The Writing Process
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Bitter Script Reader: What kind of notes did you get? Was it stuff you generally agreed with, or was it stuff you didn’t? You said you ran through a ton of options before [in the writing process.] Did you find yourself having to do some of those?
Dan Callahan: I think in general we probably didn’t agree with most of the notes. We’d never been through the process of getting notes from producers and because it’s your work, you think you know better. You think you know the material better, and at the end of the day, you DO know the material better… as the writer. You know the characters better, the story better. Anything they suggest you’re generally going to have an answer for right on the spot.
So a lot of the notes we had issues with. But what do you do? There are certain notes that we fought against, but if there were notes that made sense to us – we might not like them, but they made sense….
BSR: You pick your battles.
DC: Yeah, [if] they could potentially make the script better, we’re more than willing to try them. Also, you’re getting paid for these. Again, every step is a motivation, so you’re gonna do the work. You’re getting paid for it, so you have to do the work.
BSR: And it’s your first script so I imagine the incentive is there even more.
DC: The ultimate goal is getting the script done. I think on College we negotiated at least two rewrites so they had to give us two shots at getting the script right. I think we did more than that… I can’t remember exactly. Occasionally you end up doing free work in there. It’s hard to get those notes, hard to have those discussions, hard to hear those notes…
BSR: Was there a point where they gave you notes and were like, “Do they even get what we’re going for with this?”
DC: Oh yeah! Believe me... they’d email the notes and I’d call Adam like, “Did you see this note?” You’re just sitting there going through each one getting pissed trying to figure out how you’re gonna do this stuff. There were some big notes that were big changes we had issues with.
BSR: I noticed in reading the script that there were at least two, maybe two and a half, subplots that seemed completely pruned out. In the original script the set up is that they’re going to see his sister on campus at the sorority house and she sends them over to the frat house.
DC: Yeah, that’s a BIG change! Right.
BSR: You take the sister completely out and it leaves a huge gap in the second act.
DC: That was a note we were not happy about, but for whatever reason they wanted the sister out. We had a problem with it because it was the motivation. It gave the opportunity to go to that specific school. The original plot of College was very similar to Forgetting Sarah Marshall in that it was about a kid who gets dumped and needs to get away for a weekend to get over this break up.
BSR: And I liked the way you set that up in the original draft better too. In the first script, right on page one, he gets this self-possessed break-up letter from the girlfriend but in the movie she comes and essentially breaks up with him for being boring.
DC: Yeah and that was one of the first things I wrote too. Sort of a funny note…
BSR: I laughed out loud at it because it was such a strong voice for that character.
DC: [In the script,] as you’re hearing the note, he’s watching her blow some other guy in a car. In the first two pages, this guy is at his lowest point – where everything he thought is flipped on its head and not only that, this girl’s left him for a college guy, which is setting up something we pay off later and it was that sense that “Okay, I just went through the worst week of my life…” They hear the speech about the great weekend at college, and the kid’s like, “That’s what I need. I need a vacation. Because everywhere I go, I’m gonna run into her… And even better, I’ve got a sister already at college so that gives me a place to go, a place to stay and an excuse to tell my parents why I’m going up there.”
And the minute you take the sister out, it becomes “Why are they going to this school? Where are they staying? Why are they staying there?” With the sister in there, they assume they’re staying at the sorority house, which is like heaven to them. They get there, the sister’s like “You can’t stay here. We have these charter rules. Guys are not allowed to stay in the house. But I’ve set up with our brother fraternity house a place for you to stay.” And that gets them into the fraternity. It’s a logical reason.
BSR: Whereas in the film, he goes up for Morris’s (Kevin Covais) college visitation – which is also in the first version. I’ll admit I thought it was a little strange there were multiple motivations for the guys to go up.
DC: We wanted to give each guy something going in. In the original draft, it was: Main guy crushed over girlfriend. Totally about getting over her, like Forgetting Sarah Marshall – and this was WAY before Forgetting Sarah Marshall. That’s his reason. For Morris, it’s he’s got an academic reason. And the Carter character (Andrew Caldwell), who’s different in the script than he is in the movie…
BSR: Yeah, I was going to get to that one too…
DC: He’s purely going to get laid. He wants to fuck a college chick. So they each had their thing. The sister helped get them in the fraternity house in a logical way – because they can’t stay with the sister. The minute you pull the sister out…. That’s a big battle we had. How do we sell it [to the audience?] In the movie, they’re set up in the dorms…
BSR: Which is a logical enough reason.
DC: That’s logical enough, but then… [they leave because] the dorm sucks, and the vague notion that one of the guys has a cousin who used to be in that fraternity. So now you’re coming up with very loose reasons and logic for them to stay in this fraternity and it’s tough because we had a rock solid reason for them to be there.
BSR: And then the frat house is a much larger part of the movie than in the script. In the movie there’s this runner about how they don’t have any pledges to beat up on, so that’s why they’re so eager to take the guys in…
DC: And in the original draft it’s just a place to stay. These guys don’t love the fact that the high school kids are staying there, but because it’s their sister sorority, and they’re friends with the girls and they hook up with the girls and don’t want to piss them off, they’re willing to let them crash there. They still put them in the basement and they still sort of shit on them because they’re high school kids and they don’t really want them there, but they’ve sort of been pushed onto them. But it’s more than some other reason.
BSR: Like “we want to torture someone.”
DC: So what happens is when you start taking a piece out - by taking that sister piece out - you just named five problems that we had to answer. And we answered them, but none of them felt as strong as what we originally had.
BSR: And I think the other change that affected the script pretty drastically… I read a lot of the reviews and most of them go “Superbad ripoff.” But the original script doesn’t read like that at all because Carter is not a poor man’s Jonah Hill in the script.
DC: He’s the Stifler [from American Pie] of the group.
BSR: He’s the guy who thinks he’s a lady killer. He’s probably been laid a couple of times because he’s described as handsome and cocky. And a lot of the dialogue is the same, but the attitude behind it…
DC: It’s completely different and that was… we never wrote a fat kid in the movie.
The fat kid character was supposed to be Stifler. Supposed to be good looking. He’s a lady killer in high school. And the original draft is that when he goes to college, he’s not a lady killer there and he’s frustrated because he’s so used to getting girls, now he’s out of his league and he can’t get the girl.
BSR: Now he’s a small fish in a big pond.
DC: Exactly. Sort of the crossover from high school to college. Their lives in high school are one way and their lives in college are different. And the original draft had more of their lives in high school, setting up the things… like there’s a high school party that gets busted and they run away. In the movie, the high school party got taken out, but they kept the college version so when they get busted there [it’s a punchline without the set-up]. This is what happens when you take things out. Domino effect kills you.
Carter was one of those things in casting - we don’t even know - we just get one day “Here’s who’s playing Carter” and we look him up and go, “It’s a fat kid. This makes no sense.” The other problem is that once they cast the fat kid, they never came back and said, now that they cast a fat kid, we should probably go back and rewrite the character. So now you have a fat kid who ends up hooking up with the hottest girl in the group and it makes no sense! Having your character suddenly be a fat kid and not rewriting [for] that is a major issue. A major problem. Then you should cast the girl opposite him to be a fat girl… Or just throw in a line of dialogue that says she’s a chubby chaser. It’s funny. Make a joke out of it.
BSR: Once you make him a fat kid, it plays like Superbad. Especially with the new introduction to the group. In the movie, the first scene where Carter shows up he comes in, scarfs down food and makes some crack about Of Mice and Men being gay…
DC: And that was stuff the director put in that we didn’t even do.
BSR: You didn’t even write those scenes?
DC: I do not remember those lines. We had a new opening where he comes in, with the mom getting the kids ready. There was nothing about Of Mice and Men [in any of our scripts.]
BSR: I had the feeling watching it that it might have been an improv. I got the sense that there was a lot of letting that guy run loose.
DC: Our movie and Superbad shot really close together. Almost at the same time, I think maybe we were a month behind. When Superbad came out – a lot sooner because College switched from Lions Gate to MGM – it delayed the release again because why release on top of Superbad. But when I saw Superbad, I was like “the characters are identical” and it sucks because I knew that people were gonna think that we ripped off Superbad. I never read Superbad [before writing College.] I loved Superbad. I think it’s fucking hilarious. But it was definitely gonna play like we ripped off Superbad.
BSR: Especially with the first scene of the three of them together in the movie, with Carter ripping on Morris and complaining to Kevin (Drake Bell) about “Why do we have to hang out with this guy?”
DC: It’s a similar set of characters, but it was never meant to be that way. That was just something where the kid who played Carter came in, they liked him, and decided that he was just the funniest guy instead of going with it as written. It really was an issue when I saw the movie from a writer’s perspective, because I knew that there were certain situations that he was in in the movie that don’t make sense now because of who they cast. It would have been so easy to fix it. It just never got fixed. We were never asked to make changes.
BSR: It’s like they were unaware it was a problem.
DC: I just can’t understand watching it being filmed and not realizing you have to answer “Oh, this is a different kind of guy.” I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t get fixed. Change one little thing and [see] what a domino effect it has on him and the script.
Tomorrow: More about rewriting.
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Bitter Script Reader: What kind of notes did you get? Was it stuff you generally agreed with, or was it stuff you didn’t? You said you ran through a ton of options before [in the writing process.] Did you find yourself having to do some of those?
Dan Callahan: I think in general we probably didn’t agree with most of the notes. We’d never been through the process of getting notes from producers and because it’s your work, you think you know better. You think you know the material better, and at the end of the day, you DO know the material better… as the writer. You know the characters better, the story better. Anything they suggest you’re generally going to have an answer for right on the spot.
So a lot of the notes we had issues with. But what do you do? There are certain notes that we fought against, but if there were notes that made sense to us – we might not like them, but they made sense….
BSR: You pick your battles.
DC: Yeah, [if] they could potentially make the script better, we’re more than willing to try them. Also, you’re getting paid for these. Again, every step is a motivation, so you’re gonna do the work. You’re getting paid for it, so you have to do the work.
BSR: And it’s your first script so I imagine the incentive is there even more.
DC: The ultimate goal is getting the script done. I think on College we negotiated at least two rewrites so they had to give us two shots at getting the script right. I think we did more than that… I can’t remember exactly. Occasionally you end up doing free work in there. It’s hard to get those notes, hard to have those discussions, hard to hear those notes…
BSR: Was there a point where they gave you notes and were like, “Do they even get what we’re going for with this?”
DC: Oh yeah! Believe me... they’d email the notes and I’d call Adam like, “Did you see this note?” You’re just sitting there going through each one getting pissed trying to figure out how you’re gonna do this stuff. There were some big notes that were big changes we had issues with.
BSR: I noticed in reading the script that there were at least two, maybe two and a half, subplots that seemed completely pruned out. In the original script the set up is that they’re going to see his sister on campus at the sorority house and she sends them over to the frat house.
DC: Yeah, that’s a BIG change! Right.
BSR: You take the sister completely out and it leaves a huge gap in the second act.
DC: That was a note we were not happy about, but for whatever reason they wanted the sister out. We had a problem with it because it was the motivation. It gave the opportunity to go to that specific school. The original plot of College was very similar to Forgetting Sarah Marshall in that it was about a kid who gets dumped and needs to get away for a weekend to get over this break up.
BSR: And I liked the way you set that up in the original draft better too. In the first script, right on page one, he gets this self-possessed break-up letter from the girlfriend but in the movie she comes and essentially breaks up with him for being boring.
DC: Yeah and that was one of the first things I wrote too. Sort of a funny note…
BSR: I laughed out loud at it because it was such a strong voice for that character.
DC: [In the script,] as you’re hearing the note, he’s watching her blow some other guy in a car. In the first two pages, this guy is at his lowest point – where everything he thought is flipped on its head and not only that, this girl’s left him for a college guy, which is setting up something we pay off later and it was that sense that “Okay, I just went through the worst week of my life…” They hear the speech about the great weekend at college, and the kid’s like, “That’s what I need. I need a vacation. Because everywhere I go, I’m gonna run into her… And even better, I’ve got a sister already at college so that gives me a place to go, a place to stay and an excuse to tell my parents why I’m going up there.”
And the minute you take the sister out, it becomes “Why are they going to this school? Where are they staying? Why are they staying there?” With the sister in there, they assume they’re staying at the sorority house, which is like heaven to them. They get there, the sister’s like “You can’t stay here. We have these charter rules. Guys are not allowed to stay in the house. But I’ve set up with our brother fraternity house a place for you to stay.” And that gets them into the fraternity. It’s a logical reason.
BSR: Whereas in the film, he goes up for Morris’s (Kevin Covais) college visitation – which is also in the first version. I’ll admit I thought it was a little strange there were multiple motivations for the guys to go up.
DC: We wanted to give each guy something going in. In the original draft, it was: Main guy crushed over girlfriend. Totally about getting over her, like Forgetting Sarah Marshall – and this was WAY before Forgetting Sarah Marshall. That’s his reason. For Morris, it’s he’s got an academic reason. And the Carter character (Andrew Caldwell), who’s different in the script than he is in the movie…
BSR: Yeah, I was going to get to that one too…
DC: He’s purely going to get laid. He wants to fuck a college chick. So they each had their thing. The sister helped get them in the fraternity house in a logical way – because they can’t stay with the sister. The minute you pull the sister out…. That’s a big battle we had. How do we sell it [to the audience?] In the movie, they’re set up in the dorms…
BSR: Which is a logical enough reason.
DC: That’s logical enough, but then… [they leave because] the dorm sucks, and the vague notion that one of the guys has a cousin who used to be in that fraternity. So now you’re coming up with very loose reasons and logic for them to stay in this fraternity and it’s tough because we had a rock solid reason for them to be there.
BSR: And then the frat house is a much larger part of the movie than in the script. In the movie there’s this runner about how they don’t have any pledges to beat up on, so that’s why they’re so eager to take the guys in…
DC: And in the original draft it’s just a place to stay. These guys don’t love the fact that the high school kids are staying there, but because it’s their sister sorority, and they’re friends with the girls and they hook up with the girls and don’t want to piss them off, they’re willing to let them crash there. They still put them in the basement and they still sort of shit on them because they’re high school kids and they don’t really want them there, but they’ve sort of been pushed onto them. But it’s more than some other reason.
BSR: Like “we want to torture someone.”
DC: So what happens is when you start taking a piece out - by taking that sister piece out - you just named five problems that we had to answer. And we answered them, but none of them felt as strong as what we originally had.
BSR: And I think the other change that affected the script pretty drastically… I read a lot of the reviews and most of them go “Superbad ripoff.” But the original script doesn’t read like that at all because Carter is not a poor man’s Jonah Hill in the script.
DC: He’s the Stifler [from American Pie] of the group.
BSR: He’s the guy who thinks he’s a lady killer. He’s probably been laid a couple of times because he’s described as handsome and cocky. And a lot of the dialogue is the same, but the attitude behind it…
DC: It’s completely different and that was… we never wrote a fat kid in the movie.
The fat kid character was supposed to be Stifler. Supposed to be good looking. He’s a lady killer in high school. And the original draft is that when he goes to college, he’s not a lady killer there and he’s frustrated because he’s so used to getting girls, now he’s out of his league and he can’t get the girl.
BSR: Now he’s a small fish in a big pond.
DC: Exactly. Sort of the crossover from high school to college. Their lives in high school are one way and their lives in college are different. And the original draft had more of their lives in high school, setting up the things… like there’s a high school party that gets busted and they run away. In the movie, the high school party got taken out, but they kept the college version so when they get busted there [it’s a punchline without the set-up]. This is what happens when you take things out. Domino effect kills you.
Carter was one of those things in casting - we don’t even know - we just get one day “Here’s who’s playing Carter” and we look him up and go, “It’s a fat kid. This makes no sense.” The other problem is that once they cast the fat kid, they never came back and said, now that they cast a fat kid, we should probably go back and rewrite the character. So now you have a fat kid who ends up hooking up with the hottest girl in the group and it makes no sense! Having your character suddenly be a fat kid and not rewriting [for] that is a major issue. A major problem. Then you should cast the girl opposite him to be a fat girl… Or just throw in a line of dialogue that says she’s a chubby chaser. It’s funny. Make a joke out of it.
BSR: Once you make him a fat kid, it plays like Superbad. Especially with the new introduction to the group. In the movie, the first scene where Carter shows up he comes in, scarfs down food and makes some crack about Of Mice and Men being gay…
DC: And that was stuff the director put in that we didn’t even do.
BSR: You didn’t even write those scenes?
DC: I do not remember those lines. We had a new opening where he comes in, with the mom getting the kids ready. There was nothing about Of Mice and Men [in any of our scripts.]
BSR: I had the feeling watching it that it might have been an improv. I got the sense that there was a lot of letting that guy run loose.
DC: Our movie and Superbad shot really close together. Almost at the same time, I think maybe we were a month behind. When Superbad came out – a lot sooner because College switched from Lions Gate to MGM – it delayed the release again because why release on top of Superbad. But when I saw Superbad, I was like “the characters are identical” and it sucks because I knew that people were gonna think that we ripped off Superbad. I never read Superbad [before writing College.] I loved Superbad. I think it’s fucking hilarious. But it was definitely gonna play like we ripped off Superbad.
BSR: Especially with the first scene of the three of them together in the movie, with Carter ripping on Morris and complaining to Kevin (Drake Bell) about “Why do we have to hang out with this guy?”
DC: It’s a similar set of characters, but it was never meant to be that way. That was just something where the kid who played Carter came in, they liked him, and decided that he was just the funniest guy instead of going with it as written. It really was an issue when I saw the movie from a writer’s perspective, because I knew that there were certain situations that he was in in the movie that don’t make sense now because of who they cast. It would have been so easy to fix it. It just never got fixed. We were never asked to make changes.
BSR: It’s like they were unaware it was a problem.
DC: I just can’t understand watching it being filmed and not realizing you have to answer “Oh, this is a different kind of guy.” I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t get fixed. Change one little thing and [see] what a domino effect it has on him and the script.
Tomorrow: More about rewriting.
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction
Monday, May 4, 2009
Lessons from bad movies - "The Spirit"
This weekend I Netflixed a film I knew better than to spend $12 on when it was in wide release - Frank Miller's The Spirit. I'd seen the presentation for this film at last year's Comic Con, where one previewed scene played so horribly to the audience that the producer was practically apologizing for it after running the clip. I knew I shouldn't spend theatre prices on this turkey, but it immediately earned a place in my Netflix queue.
Most of the major critics took their shots at this one back when it first came out, so I'm not going to waste time with a broad review. Also, I've never really followed the Will Eisner comic upon which this is based, so I can't speak too deeply to the film's fidelity to the source material. Still even with the limited exposure I've had to the comics, I can tell that visually, the film looks nothing like Eisner's vision. It looks more like... well... Sin City, which Miller co-directed with Robert Rodriguez.
In comparing the two, you can get a sense of where Miller went wrong here. For all of its demerits - and there are many - The Spirit is a very visually strong film. There are the usual Miller motifs, and he certainly knows how to compose a shot. (Not surprising since Miller's been working in the visual medium of comic books for about thirty years.) This is one of the best-looking bad movies I've seen. I know a lot of people derided the style as a Sin City rip-off, but Miller really is just ripping off himself - and a few Eisner visuals shown in the DVD supplements suggest that Eisner worked in a similar style on some of his later projects.
What's wrong in The Spirit? Just about everything else - starting with the script. I'll give a brief mea culpa here. Back in the summer of '04, a development exec I read for got a copy of the Sin City script and allowed me to read it. At the time I hadn't read the comics, but I was well aware of the creator's reputation. I peeled back the cover page, eager to see how the story had been adapted.
I got about ten pages in before I tossed the script aside and wrote it off as a dud. It felt like the vast majority of those ten pages were made up of over-written visual description and especially over-written voiceover narration. I figured there was no way it would work. About ten months later, when the film came out, I had a healthy serving of crow. The two directors made the narration work - incorporating it in a way that really complimented the noir style they were emulating.
Given that, I can understand why no one immediately cried foul when The Spirit proved to have an equally prolific inner monologue. The problem: his inner monologue isn't always inner. There are scenes that start with The Spirit's narration, only to then shift to him talking to himself out loud. This was one of the early slips that pulled me out of the film. Narration might be intrusive, but if you can get the audience to accept it as a part of the style, don't change horses in mid-stream. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why The Spirit voices some thoughts out loud and ruminates internally in others. Given a choice between the two, I'd argue it's less intrusive to go with voiceover. That way there isn't the strangeness of a character talking just so the audience can hear him.
The script also suffers from a plot so dull it's not even worth recounting. There's a fairly mundane set-up early on that ends up pitting two antagonists against each other, with The Spirit conflicted because one antagonist is his former love and the other has a hidden connection to his own immortality. This is one of those movies where the characters end up stopping frequently to explain the plot and motivations to each other - and here's where Miller exposes his limitations as a writer and director. Exposition scenes are overwritten, some set-ups are awkwardly paced only so the story can advance, and the blocking in these talky scenes is often reminiscent of a bad high school play.
Which brings us to the element that truly brings this film down - the acting. I'd argue that only two actors escape this debacle unscathed - Dan Lauria and Samuel L. Jackson. Lauria does the impossible - he somehow finds the exact right note between camp and serious in the cliched role of the hard-boiled police commissioner. It's over the top in all the right ways, even as virtually every other actor stumbles badly when Miller directs them to be broad. Jackson escapes only by virtue of being Jackson.
Again I draw a comparison to Sin City, where Miller and Rodriguez had the advantage of having strong actors like Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro, and Bruce Willis in their corner. However, for me, the real shock was how they got solid performances out of actors who generally aren't that good. Jessica Alba might be considered one of the sexiest women alive, but her acting has never been all that impressive - yet amazingly, she turned in a surprisingly vulnerable and likable performance. Brittany Murphy is one of the most annoying actresses alive, so bad that she'll make your eyes and ears bleed - and somehow she totally blended into Sin City's style. Even Rosario Dawson stood out, despite having given few notable performances prior to that. At least one of the directors knew how to get through to these often-uneven players... and from The Spirit, I think it's safe to say that was Rodriguez.
Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega and especially Stana Katic all give performances so bad that they would be career-ending if it wasn't for their sex appeal and the fact it's clear that all of this is Miller's fault. I don't know if there are enough adjectives to adequately convey just how terrible their acting is. The amazing thing is you can completely see what they're going for, even as it's obvious just how badly they missed the target.
Let this be a lesson to all writers - great actors can sometimes save even your weak material. The right material can even elevate your actors... but when an actor tanks a performance that's all the audience will see. Few people watch an awkward scene and think, "Wow that was well-written, the actor just blew it." More likely, they'll think "This movie sucks, this actor sucks," or "this script sucks." Like I said earlier, the script certainly didn't do the actors any favors here, but the dialogue was stylized enough that the right actors might have been able to minimize the damage - had they found the right note in their performances. That's the risk you take when you write highly-stylized dialogue.
Granted, the film suffers from further problems, where logic seems to take a total vacation. My favorite example of this comes with the Spirit is captured by the Octopus. Our hero wakes up in a room decorated with Nazi motifs, and his captors are soon revealed in Nazi uniforms - except for his torturer - a woman dressed as an Arabian belly dancer, though she turns out to be a French woman named "Plaster of Paris." Then, just as you're trying to make sense of this odd cultural melting pot, it dawns on you that this "French" woman is played by Spanish actress Paz Vega.
Blame the visuals all you want for that one, but every one of those odd choices was probably made at the script level - save for the casting of Paz Vega. And even if it wasn't, Miller wrote and directed the film, meaning that all of this HAD to be his vision. It plays like a weird exercise in multiculturalism.
I can't offer any one macro lesson from this turkey, but there are plenty of little lessons to be gleaned. Some problems might be visible at the script level, and others might not become evident until actors actually say their lines out loud.
To recap:
1) Don't switch between narration and having a character talk to himself. If you're gonna go for the narration cheat, embrace it whole-hog.
2) Don't overcomplicate the plot solely through dialogue.
3) Keep exposition efficient. In the cases where you can't, don't just have the characters pace back-and-forth. Give them something visually interesting to do.
4) With the right direction, even bad actors can find the proper tone for your stylized story. Make sure the script isn't so stylized that it strands them with one-note characters.
5) Make sure there's a logic to the set design and wardrobe you specify. If your villain wears a Nazi uniform for kicks, make sure we know what that's supposed to say about his character - especially when there's no consistency between that and the rest of his wardrobe.
I'll conclude with this - it feels like several decisions could have been made at the script stage that would have minimized the damage in the execution... but then we would have had merely a boring film instead of an awesomely bad one.
Most of the major critics took their shots at this one back when it first came out, so I'm not going to waste time with a broad review. Also, I've never really followed the Will Eisner comic upon which this is based, so I can't speak too deeply to the film's fidelity to the source material. Still even with the limited exposure I've had to the comics, I can tell that visually, the film looks nothing like Eisner's vision. It looks more like... well... Sin City, which Miller co-directed with Robert Rodriguez.
In comparing the two, you can get a sense of where Miller went wrong here. For all of its demerits - and there are many - The Spirit is a very visually strong film. There are the usual Miller motifs, and he certainly knows how to compose a shot. (Not surprising since Miller's been working in the visual medium of comic books for about thirty years.) This is one of the best-looking bad movies I've seen. I know a lot of people derided the style as a Sin City rip-off, but Miller really is just ripping off himself - and a few Eisner visuals shown in the DVD supplements suggest that Eisner worked in a similar style on some of his later projects.
What's wrong in The Spirit? Just about everything else - starting with the script. I'll give a brief mea culpa here. Back in the summer of '04, a development exec I read for got a copy of the Sin City script and allowed me to read it. At the time I hadn't read the comics, but I was well aware of the creator's reputation. I peeled back the cover page, eager to see how the story had been adapted.
I got about ten pages in before I tossed the script aside and wrote it off as a dud. It felt like the vast majority of those ten pages were made up of over-written visual description and especially over-written voiceover narration. I figured there was no way it would work. About ten months later, when the film came out, I had a healthy serving of crow. The two directors made the narration work - incorporating it in a way that really complimented the noir style they were emulating.
Given that, I can understand why no one immediately cried foul when The Spirit proved to have an equally prolific inner monologue. The problem: his inner monologue isn't always inner. There are scenes that start with The Spirit's narration, only to then shift to him talking to himself out loud. This was one of the early slips that pulled me out of the film. Narration might be intrusive, but if you can get the audience to accept it as a part of the style, don't change horses in mid-stream. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to why The Spirit voices some thoughts out loud and ruminates internally in others. Given a choice between the two, I'd argue it's less intrusive to go with voiceover. That way there isn't the strangeness of a character talking just so the audience can hear him.
The script also suffers from a plot so dull it's not even worth recounting. There's a fairly mundane set-up early on that ends up pitting two antagonists against each other, with The Spirit conflicted because one antagonist is his former love and the other has a hidden connection to his own immortality. This is one of those movies where the characters end up stopping frequently to explain the plot and motivations to each other - and here's where Miller exposes his limitations as a writer and director. Exposition scenes are overwritten, some set-ups are awkwardly paced only so the story can advance, and the blocking in these talky scenes is often reminiscent of a bad high school play.
Which brings us to the element that truly brings this film down - the acting. I'd argue that only two actors escape this debacle unscathed - Dan Lauria and Samuel L. Jackson. Lauria does the impossible - he somehow finds the exact right note between camp and serious in the cliched role of the hard-boiled police commissioner. It's over the top in all the right ways, even as virtually every other actor stumbles badly when Miller directs them to be broad. Jackson escapes only by virtue of being Jackson.
Again I draw a comparison to Sin City, where Miller and Rodriguez had the advantage of having strong actors like Mickey Rourke, Benicio del Toro, and Bruce Willis in their corner. However, for me, the real shock was how they got solid performances out of actors who generally aren't that good. Jessica Alba might be considered one of the sexiest women alive, but her acting has never been all that impressive - yet amazingly, she turned in a surprisingly vulnerable and likable performance. Brittany Murphy is one of the most annoying actresses alive, so bad that she'll make your eyes and ears bleed - and somehow she totally blended into Sin City's style. Even Rosario Dawson stood out, despite having given few notable performances prior to that. At least one of the directors knew how to get through to these often-uneven players... and from The Spirit, I think it's safe to say that was Rodriguez.
Scarlett Johansson, Eva Mendes, Paz Vega and especially Stana Katic all give performances so bad that they would be career-ending if it wasn't for their sex appeal and the fact it's clear that all of this is Miller's fault. I don't know if there are enough adjectives to adequately convey just how terrible their acting is. The amazing thing is you can completely see what they're going for, even as it's obvious just how badly they missed the target.
Let this be a lesson to all writers - great actors can sometimes save even your weak material. The right material can even elevate your actors... but when an actor tanks a performance that's all the audience will see. Few people watch an awkward scene and think, "Wow that was well-written, the actor just blew it." More likely, they'll think "This movie sucks, this actor sucks," or "this script sucks." Like I said earlier, the script certainly didn't do the actors any favors here, but the dialogue was stylized enough that the right actors might have been able to minimize the damage - had they found the right note in their performances. That's the risk you take when you write highly-stylized dialogue.
Granted, the film suffers from further problems, where logic seems to take a total vacation. My favorite example of this comes with the Spirit is captured by the Octopus. Our hero wakes up in a room decorated with Nazi motifs, and his captors are soon revealed in Nazi uniforms - except for his torturer - a woman dressed as an Arabian belly dancer, though she turns out to be a French woman named "Plaster of Paris." Then, just as you're trying to make sense of this odd cultural melting pot, it dawns on you that this "French" woman is played by Spanish actress Paz Vega.
Blame the visuals all you want for that one, but every one of those odd choices was probably made at the script level - save for the casting of Paz Vega. And even if it wasn't, Miller wrote and directed the film, meaning that all of this HAD to be his vision. It plays like a weird exercise in multiculturalism.
I can't offer any one macro lesson from this turkey, but there are plenty of little lessons to be gleaned. Some problems might be visible at the script level, and others might not become evident until actors actually say their lines out loud.
To recap:
1) Don't switch between narration and having a character talk to himself. If you're gonna go for the narration cheat, embrace it whole-hog.
2) Don't overcomplicate the plot solely through dialogue.
3) Keep exposition efficient. In the cases where you can't, don't just have the characters pace back-and-forth. Give them something visually interesting to do.
4) With the right direction, even bad actors can find the proper tone for your stylized story. Make sure the script isn't so stylized that it strands them with one-note characters.
5) Make sure there's a logic to the set design and wardrobe you specify. If your villain wears a Nazi uniform for kicks, make sure we know what that's supposed to say about his character - especially when there's no consistency between that and the rest of his wardrobe.
I'll conclude with this - it feels like several decisions could have been made at the script stage that would have minimized the damage in the execution... but then we would have had merely a boring film instead of an awesomely bad one.
Wednesday, March 25, 2009
Who’s the casting director here?
I can’t count how many times I’ve seen scripts where the writer has decided to “help” out the reader’s imagining by suggesting who can play the lead roles. In some cases it’s as innocuous as the character description in the text being “a Clint Eastwood type.” In others, it’s as obtrusive as creating an entire dramatis personae after the title page, suggesting the reader’s ideal cast. One of the strangest suggestions I ever saw in a script had a writer proposing that Michael Phelps would be an ideal choice to play an NFL quarterback. Suggesting actors is dicey enough, but it does the writer no favors to seriously propose non-actors for major roles, no matter what marketing viability they feel can come from their idea.
To put it gently, casting is something that is not the responsibility of the writer. That’s a complicated process that’s hashed out between the director, the producers and the studio, not to mention the casting director. The writer’s job is to create the parts, not to interpret them. You can certainly write your roles in a way that would make particular actors logical casting choices, and there’s nothing wrong with having your own personal “fantasy cast” for when you write. It’s when you include a note saying, “What about Gene Hackman for the part of the lawyer?” that you’ve crossed that invisible line. (For one thing, Gene has retired more or less, so making that suggestion only results in you appearing out of touch.)
Generally speaking, it’s best to just keep your mouth shut about casting unless specifically asked. And never, EVER, belittle the suggestions of the director or the producer. In the unlikely event they come in with the brilliant idea of casting a vapid “actress” from The Hills in your movie, say something like, “It’s funny it reads like that… I kept seeing her as a Katherine Heigl-type.”
To put it gently, casting is something that is not the responsibility of the writer. That’s a complicated process that’s hashed out between the director, the producers and the studio, not to mention the casting director. The writer’s job is to create the parts, not to interpret them. You can certainly write your roles in a way that would make particular actors logical casting choices, and there’s nothing wrong with having your own personal “fantasy cast” for when you write. It’s when you include a note saying, “What about Gene Hackman for the part of the lawyer?” that you’ve crossed that invisible line. (For one thing, Gene has retired more or less, so making that suggestion only results in you appearing out of touch.)
Generally speaking, it’s best to just keep your mouth shut about casting unless specifically asked. And never, EVER, belittle the suggestions of the director or the producer. In the unlikely event they come in with the brilliant idea of casting a vapid “actress” from The Hills in your movie, say something like, “It’s funny it reads like that… I kept seeing her as a Katherine Heigl-type.”
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