Lots to talk about on this Mish-Mash Monday!
First and foremost, Comedy Showdown scripts are due A WEEK FROM THURSDAY! I will be accepting entries all the way up until 8pm Pacific Time.
What: Comedy Showdown
Genre: Comedy
When: Entries due Thursday, June 17, by 8 p.m. Pacific Time
How: Include title, genre, logline, why you think we should read it, and a PDF of your script.
Where: Send submissions to carsonreeves3@gmail.com
At this point, your second draft should be finished. The only thing you should be doing during these last two weeks is POLISHING. Cleaning up scenes. Grammar spell-check stuff. Adding jokes to scenes to make them funnier is fine.
But you shouldn’t be doing major surgery on your script with two weeks to go. You shouldn’t be reinventing characters. You shouldn’t be replacing entire sections. Rewriting entire third acts. I mean, you CAN do all of these things if you want. But in my experience, doing so with so little time to confirm that they’re working leads to…. undesirable results, let’s just say.
Really hoping to find the next great script here so I’m rooting for you guys!
Speaking of great scripts, let’s talk Kinetic!
A few of you noticed the Deadline story about my producing partner, Eric Pacquette at Meridian Pictures, and how “Kinetic” was announced as part of his slate.
So here’s what’s going on. When Eric was working at Sony, he was always following Scriptshadow. I have to double-check with Eric about this but I think he’s hired three writers he’s found specifically from Amateur Showdown Scriptshadow posts.
So when Eric recently moved on from Sony to start his own production company, we talked about working on something together. That conversation happened right as I was finishing up The Last Great Screenplay Contest. So it was serendipitous in a way. Eric read Kinetic, loved it, and said, “Let’s f#$&ing make this movie!”
After my desperate failed attempt to get Gerry Butler attached (by the way, I still think there’s a chance Gerry’s going to be in this film – you just watch – I will use “The Secret” to will it into existence), Eric suggested we focus on getting a director. He brought Paul Katis to my attention via a movie Paul made called Kilo Two Bravo. It’s about a group of soldiers in Afghanistan who get trapped inside a mine field. It’s a really intense movie and I highly encourage anyone who hasn’t seen it to check it out!
But it’s when I met Paul that I knew he was right for Kinetic. Not only was he very astute about the script – he had a lot of good ideas on how to make it better. But it was his obsession with getting the characters right that impressed me. It’s rarer than you think to meet a director who really cares about the screenplay. And it was clear through talking to Paul that he wants this screenplay to be great.
So Paul suggested we do a couple things. One, amp up the action. Chris Dennis was thrilled about this. The only reason the action was muted in the contest draft was to keep the movie affordable. The other suggestion was to move away from some tropes and be a little more unexpected, specifically with the villain, who we totally changed.
Now when we originally talked about these changes, I thought Chris was going to come back with a script with a few changed scenes here, a few changed scenes there. Nope! We all received the rewrite Friday and Chris had done, virtually, a page 1 rewrite! Chris confided in me that the contest draft was a first draft (which is still shocking to me). This draft, he went all out. I mean this draft is fucking insane, lol. It’s like he took everything that was good and made it even better.
As a producer, one of the most terrifying things you face is receiving a new draft. Cause you don’t know what you’re going to get. Is it going to be great or is it going to be a misfire? Chris not only blew me away, but he did it in a month and a half! With a page 1 rewrite. Insane.
This movie is now Taken meets Breaking Bad with several 2021 twists.
We’re all going to jump on Zoom tomorrow and discuss the next steps. The preliminary plan is to get an actor attached so we have a full package, and then pitching it to all the big folks. I’ll keep you updated on what happens, of course.
Oh, and by the way, Eric has his ear to the ground and everyone wants a great comedy. All the more reason to enter Comedy Showdown! You could be the next project on the Scriptshadow Productions – Meridian Pictures slate!
Speaking of producing, I checked out Zack Snyder’s Army of the Dead “film school” documentary on Netflix and now I feel guilty. I spent my entire review of Army of the Dead shitting on the movie. And then you see what it actually takes to make a film??? The sheer amount of money and manpower and coordination required to create a movie makes you realize that any movie you see onscreen is a minor miracle.
The doc details how they created their post-apocalyptic Las Vegas. First of all, they shipped in hundreds of tons of rubble. Where do you get rubble? Where does one buy rubble? Cause I’m pretty sure you can’t get it at 7-11 (“Uh, yes, hi. Sorry to bother you. I can’t find your rubble isle. Is that next to the candy bar section or…?”). Yet movie people are responsible for finding hundreds of tons of something that there is no phone book listing for.
Then they used the thermal imaging photographic cameras responsible for finding hidden pyramids in Mayan jungles to take a three-dimensional picture of Las Vegas so that they could map out every little inch of the city, which they would then put into a computer to create a video-accurate Las Vegas. I mean where do you even begin to come up with that idea?
I’m watching more “making-of” stuff lately to re-familiarize myself with the movie-making side of the industry. I’ve spent the last decade focusing on the script side, obviously. But, believe it or not, before I got into screenwriting, I wanted to be a director. I went to a year of film school. I used to watch every documentary I could find on filmmaking. I read all the big books. I would only rent movies that had director’s commentaries on them. And as soon as I would finish a movie I would go right back to the start and watch it again with the commentary. I must’ve done that for 750 movies at least.
But filmmaking has changed a lot since then and there’s all these new things to learn. I’m fascinated with the Stagecraft technology they use for The Mandalorian (although I still don’t think it looks realistic enough). I just learned about “stitching” in that John Krasinski breakdown of his Quiet Place 2 scene on Vanity Fair.
Still, in the end, it comes down to pointing a camera at actors and having them believably act out the script you’ve written so I figure as long as we get that right, all the other stuff is gravy. (Although I’m not sure how that advice applies to a 30 ton semi truck riding up the shoulder of the Phoenix 17 freeway during rush-hour, banging into the sides of 45 consecutive cars in a row but I’m sure I’ll figure it out).
If you guys know of any recent great filmmaking docs (within the last five years), send them my way. I’m eating them up.
But yeah, for the first time in forever, I can glimpse the finish line of something I’m working on. I can see Kinetic getting made. It still has some hurdles to clear but they’re achievable. Fingers crossed!
