Current mood:	artistic
Entry tags:	hollywood, movie biz, mystery, screenwriting craft, travels, writing craft

Trip to Cape Cod - Report No. 2 - My Classes
Still catching up on my trip reports. My buddy J4 and I went to Craigville, Mass., for the 46th Cape Cod Writers Conference. They offered a variety of classes, some 5 days long, some just for an afternoon, as well as presentations, readings, box lunch discussions. Craigville, founded antebellum as a Christian Camp, has the historic Tabernacle and several rambling guest houses (including the Seaside Cottage where we stayed) as well as small cottages still run by the United Church of Christ. All interspersed among the flowered lanes and charming summer homes that grew up around the camp itself.

I was told that I did the newbie mistake: took too many classes. I signed up for Mystery Writing with Chris Knopf (M-F 8:30 to 10:00 am) and Screenwriting with Diane Lake (M-F 10:10 to 11:45 am) and took one special afternoon class "Books to Film" with Sue Berger Ramin, editor with David R. Godine, Publisher, and Deborah Kovacs, producer with Walden Media. And I really got to understand why when both my week-long classes gave me two pieces of homework to do every night. A person could shirk the homework, but I came wanting to get every drop of experience from the workshops, so there were some nights (like the Wed night dinner party) when I had to leave off frolicking and go sit in my room and write. (sniff!) J4 only took the screenwriting class, so had a slow morning after each breakfast to get ready, and then all afternoon to work on her homework and her own projects. Oh, and she TOOK NAPS many days too! I only passed out from the heat Monday afternoon, ONE NAP, and never really got to work on my own extracurricular stuff.

Here's More About My Instructors:

• About Chris Knopf’s Sam Acquillo mysteries: The New York Times said, “The spare, emotionally eloquent style of The Last Refuge gives shapely form to the story.” Publishers Weekly chose Two Time as a “Best 100 Books for 2006,” and its starred review called Head Hounds “exceptional.” Knopf has been a copywriter for 30 years. He has an MA in Creative Writing and speaks before both marketing and mystery writer audiences.
  
• Diane Lake, a working screenwriter since 1993, has been commissioned to write films for Columbia, Disney, Miramax, Paramount and NBC. Diane's film, Frida, opened the Venice Film Festival in 2002, was named one of the 10 Best Films of 2002 by numerous top 10 lists, including the National Board of Review and the American Film Institute. Frida was also nominated for 6 Academy Awards in 2003. Diane is also a screenwriting professor at Emerson College.
  
• Sue Berger Ramin works for David R. Godine, Publisher in an editorial, marketing and rights capacity. She acquires both adult and children's, fiction and non-fiction books, oversees their marketing and publicity and sells subsidiary rights. She was VP Film & TV Publishing for Penguin Books for 11 years, opening an office for Penguin in Los Angeles in 1993. Prior to that she worked in general trade publishing in the UK. Sue has served as co-producer for two movies: The Gathering Storm (HBO, BBC, 2003), an award-winning movie starring Albert Finney and Vanessa Redgrave, and The Missing, based on the novel, The Last Ride, by Thomas Eidson (Sony Pictures, 2003), starring Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones. She wrote a column on film and TV rights for Publishers Weekly, scouted for a Japanese literary agency, sold rights in video games, and has taught publishing in Emerson's Professional Studies' Program.
  
• Since joining Walden Media in 2001, Deborah Kovacs, Senior Vice President of Publishing, has overseen publishing activities for Walden Media, a film studio specializing in the adaptation of children's classics such as Prince Caspian, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Holes and Bridge to Terabithia. She established and is editorial lead in Walden Media's publishing joint venture with Penguin Young Readers' Group, which has resulted in the acquisition and publication of more than twenty original published works, including The White Giraffe and Savvy, both of which are being adapted for the big screen by Walden Media.

Chris Knopf, the long-legged mustachio'd guy to the right, taught the Mystery Class in the Lodge meeting room. I always sat facing south where I could see the ocean out of the windows.

Diane Lake extended our last (Thursday) class to include lunch on the gazebo so she could do informal Q&A about the Hollywood Biz. That's Diane in the sunglasses far left, and J4 is in the middle of the group sitting across from me.

Editor Sue Ramin (left) and Producer Deb Kovacs (right) gave us lots of handouts and informal dialoging about how literary properties get made into film, and how movie producers create books to support their movies.

I went to the workshops hoping to 1) learn new things and 2) make enough of an impression on my instructors that I could call upon the relationship later for networking. And by golly, did I ever get what I came for. It was pretty clear that, even trying to be low-key, just being me and trying to be a good, interactive student, I stuck out. Actually J4 and I were lauded for coming all the way from Texas, so people found us and our accents memorable.

With Chris Knopf, since I had less than 10 min to walk from one end of Craigville to the other for my next class, I sort of politely reminded him when classes were ending that we didn't have our homework assignments yet or our handouts. It got to be a joke, and I was deputized to keep things in order. Fun!

With Diane Lake, when she'd ask questions of the students, I would answer (I'm the student you want when you do Socratic dialog). It came out that I'd read 1,000 or more scripts so far in my life, as a contest judge/reader and screenwriter group member. Diane made a point to come to J4 and me the last few minutes of her last day and thank us for coming, asked us to keep her apprised of our successes, and exhorting us to come to the Maui Writers Conference, where she was headed the next day.

The agent and producer ladies had each of us in their class talk about background, so they keyed in on how I was both a fiction writer and a screenwriter and from Austin. (I was slightly embarrassed since that was the class where I tried to get a quick swim in Nantucket Sound before it and wound up late with wet hair and a rosy face.)

Some of the cool & useful things I learned in the classes:

• Knopf: The most important element in a mystery is: voice. You have to establish one, it has to work for the subgenre, it has to be consistent and clear. Breaking voice is one of the most common newbie mistakes. Also, choosing your protagonist, which very much affects voice, is the most important thing you do re: your novel.
  
• Knopf: A mystery has a puzzle (not always, but usually, a murder to solve) that must be solved by the end of the book. The protagonist must be smart in some way: street smart, well educated, an experienced detective, etc. Since they have the skills to solve the puzzle, they need to be developed as the kind of mind that can do that. It's also why the genre attracts smart authors and smart readers.
  
• Lake: You write your spec scripts for the Hollywood reader, not the producer and not the director.
  
• Lake: Getting into the WGA; you have to get 25 points (credit for assisting on a movie, optioning a script, having a script produced, etc.) and it costs $5K. Then you have to have credits every year or you're audited and dropped.
  
• Lake: In a movie, character is more important than plot.
  
• Lake: By WGA rules, a script must be 100 pages minimum. (Each page is = one minute of screen time, so 100 pages is one hour + 40 minutes.) WGA also specifies a writer should get 12 weeks to write a feature-length script.
  
• Ramin: TV has to be broader than movies, so it's less book based.
  
• Kovacs: A movie opens Friday morning, and by 10:00 a.m. PDT that Friday, the production company already knows how well it will do from early ticket sales. Gone are the days the production houses let movies sit in the theaters and draw word of mouth to build an audience (the way TITANIC did).
  
• Ramin: 29,000 childrens books (alone) are published each year, but only 70 books make it to the NY Times Bestsellers' List each year.
  
• Kovacs: The media conglomerates from the 1980-90's are being dismantled and pieces sold off. It wasn't a good consolidation and didn't bring more efficient business or more dollars.
  
• Knopf: His mystery novel structure is: Launch, Ramp-up, Info Gathering, Bridge, Climax, Denouement. He advocates writing out your treatment so you don't write yourself into a corner and waste your effort.
  
• Knopf: To be fair, give clues early-ish in the book. Not dramatically interesting to introduce clues late and solve them right away.
  
• Knopf: Must have an agent for an editor to read your manuscript. Pitch to multiple agents until you get interest.
  
• Lake: Better to have a specialized screenwriting agent in a small firm than a generalist in one of the Big Three. You'll get a tiny fraction of their attention.
  
• Knopf: In person booksignings are a waste of time, he thinks. Better to promote yourself on the Internet, with blogs, reviews, etc.

In the mystery class, I came in with an idea for a main character helping to solve murders in Austin. I'd pitched it to Diane Gill with Eos (Harper Collins) when she was in Austin a few years back. She'd made a statement that she wished she had "Janet Evanovich with monsters" and I had an idea for a half Latina, half Jewish Mexican amateur sleuth in a fantasy future Austin. With Chris giving us homework to write character descriptions, first pages, treatments, etc., by Friday I had a reasonable description of a supernatural mystery -- PINKY BLACK AND THE BITERS. It was fun working on ideas at the kitchen table at Seaside Cottage, with J4 and Judy giving me feedback and suggestions. I was unwilling to read my weird stuff in class at first, since others there were writing murder in the Hamptons, murder in Connecticut, murder in Manhattan, etc. But Laima sweetly encouraged me to read the third day, and Chris's reaction was an open-mouthed gape. Then he said "That is wholly original; I've never heard any of that ever before." He also congratulated me for choosing Austin as a setting since it had a definite flavor and wasn't overused already. My fellow students, many of whom were in the same Massachusetts writers' group, were also supportive of my weird novel idea, and several told me they'd buy the book!

Good times, and a very unusual way to spend a week. Next year I think I'll try to go to Maui, but I can see myself returning to Craigville another year... And my final trip report will discuss our outing to Nantucket, watch this space.