W2 - Wendy to the Second Power

Ooh, one of the guys who took the Michael Hauge Story Mastery workshop with me found a good page on Mike's site that lays out his screenplay structure and gives examples from good scripts.

http://www.screenplaymastery.com/structure.htm

Man, the screenwriter and story mastery workshop with Michael Hauge went off wonderfully this weekend. He can really cram a lot of education into a single day! The members of the Austin Screenwriters Group really need a hardcore course in structure, too. It's where everybody sort of flails around...

Even me! I'd assumed that my many scripts and many workshops, and, heck, teaching story structure in informal classes for UT, would make me pretty experienced. But nope. When we who'd submitted our story descriptions and first scenes got discussed during class time, I had 10 minutes of explaining and justifying, and it didn't fix my main problem.

NOW I discover a screenplay really needs a finish line/final goal. Not to achieve a final (good) state, but an actual Something. I'd had that in my 2nd screenplay (THE CUNNING MAN) that did so well in Nicholl's and other contests. But I realize now it's not that final oomph thing in many of my other scripts. Dang. So I'm working on it, and Mike was nice enough to read another pass at my story template when I took him back to the airport yesterday.

Another wonderful event this weekend was going to the home of Peggy Schatz in Spicewood for the informal potluck party with Mike Hauge. OMG, what a gorgeous home! Full of art and antigues, but with casual Texas elegance. It's landscaped and set in trees, out in the Texas Hill Country. She even has a German farmhouse they renovated as a guesthouse. That's where Mike stayed (saved us the cost of a hotel, yo). She grilled a mess of fajitas, so it was all lovely.

So for my weekend: WORKSHOP WIN! Here's Mike objecting to the camera in the room:

Screenplay consultant and best-selling author Michael Hauge is coming to Austin Saturday to do a workshop on story mastery. Know why? Because I ASKED HIM TO. I coordinate these things because I get to have very cool conversations with important Hollywood people, yo!

It's gonna be very cool to workshop with Mike again (like I did in San Diego in 2007), and it was supportive of the Austin Screenwriters' Group to let me invite Mike as an official ASG workshop.

But dang, I've been project managing my head off for this. It's a bigger deal and costs more than the events we've done in the past. So there are about a dozen people all volunteering or contributing something toward the event. Very generous of us all, since nobody (but Mike) is getting paid for any of this. But you gotta admire the spirit of cooperation that's gotten us this far!

Right now I've got 5 boxes of his books and DVDs. I went to the Oak Hill Methodist Church yesterday and viewed the room and got the key. I've sent out 15-20 emails coordinating. I've promoted to all the major writing groups in Austin. I put up the Web page onto our ASG site. I just went to HEB today and bought still water, sparkling water, coffee of all types, Diet Coke and Dr. Pepper, granola bars, etc. I'll get fresh donuts on the way to the event Saturday morning. I figure, with a price of $95/$125, we should have some drinks and snacks for the folks.

The good thing is, we needed 17-18 people to break even, and we have 30 or so. Yay! It was a gamble and it paid off financially. Now looking for the day to come and all the stuff to work out... Then Saturday evening, PeggyS is hosting a potluck BYOB social at her home for all to hang out with Mike!

One thing about Ron Howard (good old Opie!) is that he can direct a movie well, where the plot moves along in a snappy pace, the POV is not too arty but adds a little extra to the visuals, and everybody turns in a solid performance. That's pretty much my opinion of ANGELS AND DEMONS, the Part II of the DA VINCI CODE series. Even though it's from a book written by Dan Brown and set in character Robert Langdon's (Tom Hanks) life before the Da Vinci code stuff.

For that reason, I was a little, "Who is SHE?" about the Dr. Vittoria Vetra physicist character. Audrey Tautou was so memorable in the first movie, and surely Agent Sophie and Langdon began a long-term relationship from that adventure? But you only see her as a photo at Langdon's home...

Like many folks, I found Ewen McGregor in priest's robes as the Congomongo (or whatever; they took some Vatican term and made a fake position of power of it for the purposes of the story) to be somewhat erotically charged. Everytime he's used to play someone spiritual or sickly, nope, I don't buy it. He always seems lusty and earthy to me no matter what he plays. (Seeing him buck nekkid in THE PILLOW BOOK all those years ago imprinted me bad, maybe?)

The plot and its 4 deaths to prevent each an hour apart at certain mystical locations only sussed by doing a sort of geocaching, where the powers that be fight Langdon, but some secretly support him, all that is fine. There's a point when I realized that a character was being so purely sacrificial, and the background had been set up for that so it made sense, and I confess I leaked a few tears... It was dramatic, and the special effects were both metaphorical and fascinating.

But then it's a twisty who-done-it, and it twists so crazy much that by the end, I was like "Wait, how could that plan even work?" Meaning the whole logic underpinning the whole movie was rank suckage. It's still a fun ride! But at the end you wonder if Dan Brown and the screenwriters even knew what the underlying story was.

Saw this UP movie last week as a small break in my marathon of screenplay editing. Boy, it's delightful! Cranky old Ed Asner does a great job of voicing a sad, moribund 78-year-old man. But I REALLY loved the other voices. Jordan Nagai, a darling young Asian American actor (see him here uncomfortable next to the 3D costume of Russell) voiced Russell, and he was never false or even boring for one tiny second. Just precious! Wonderful energy, a wonderful obsessive POV (obsession is the greatest gift to humor, man), touching, and still with a recognizably Asian sound to his voice. I also loved Dug, the doofus dog, who was voiced by the co-director and co-screenwriter, Bob Peterson. Dug had a voice, thanks to a high-tech collar designed by his master. And what Dug said and how he said it was the same EXACT way I make up dog voices in my head.

At one point Dug looks up with round, hurt eyes and says, "I hid under the house because I love you, that's why, and I'm very sad that you might be mad at me." Another character named Kevin has no dialog, just squawking, but that's a wonderful creation of a character too. My cat Tucker has a vastly more dog-like personality (I love you all the time, hey is that food you're eating, wait a minute I'm coming too) than an aloof cat personality. I hear his voice somewhat like Dug's...

I really would love to find a place to buy the merit badges that Russell wears! Each one is a gorgeous design in embroidery, and several are clever with in-joke things. This Website on movie easter eggs tells some of the details.... I'd wear several of them on my coats and sweaters, were they marketed!

There's been some discussion on a list I'm on about how this movie just is not as charming / moving / engaging / whatever as WALL-EE. And that's true. But Wall-EE was an extremely stylized robot character who could only communicate through squeaks, beeps, a scant few "facial" gestures... when a character is so non-human, we humans watching invest a huge amount of brain magic to keep up with the story. That was the genius of the design of Wall-EE, and why they deserved their Oscars. Also, Wall-EE was a story about finding your true love and living with her forever. UP is about losing your true love and finding some small solace in other relationships until you can join her on The Other Side.

Very different underlying emotional message.

I worked about 25 hours on this project in the last three days, was just down at Kinko's/FedX making my copies tonight at 8pm... Worked on it until 2 am last night. Started again at 1pm today. And I've achieved a completed and fairly polished draft of CAN'T SAY NO, my first (true) comedy script! W00t!

I say first true comedy script because I've tried to write comedy before and the script turns out only funny some of the time. Humorous bits for tension relief. A True comedy script is OMG so hard! A joke or two on every page! There is something humorous on every page, and on many pages there are 2-3 jokes on this one. It reads sort of like 30ROCK crossed with BIG BANG THEORY. Here's the blah-blah.

CAN'T SAY NO is a family comedy about a geeky, ignored engineer who invents creativity glasses to help his overworked team of product developers become more productive. Their job at a combo Ronco-type product company and Home Shopping Network is driving them all crazy since the new Assoc Producer cut their project schedules by half. But turns out the glasses have a side effect: they make the wearer so charismatic people hang on their every word and give them anything they ask for.

The immediate deadline was Austin Film Festival -- tomorrow is the final, final day to submit to their contest. I also am taking this to the Hawaii Writers Conference and working on it (or on HEAVEN & NELL? I'm still puzzling that) at the retreat. But that's not until August. Here are the reputable (and some not-so-much but I'm trying it out) contests I'll be submitting to. I missed March deadlines for some I'd planned on; catch that in 2010 I guess.

• Austin Film Festival - due 8 June - √
  
• SlamDance - due 15 June, but they take electronic submissions, top prize $5,000 - √
  
• Final Draft Big Break Screenplay Contest - due 15 June, take electronic submissions, over $30K in prizes - √
  
• ScriptShark Insider Contest - due 30 June, take electronic submissions
  
• First Glance - due 12 July, take electronic submissions - √
  
• Cynosure - due 27 June, has to have a female or minority protagonist (my main character is a geeky white guy, but his antagonist who becomes his romantic partner is a Korean-American woman) - √
  
• Writers on the Storm - due 27 July, take electronic submissions - $10K grand prize - √
  
• Zoetrope All Story - due 8 September - prize is consideration by Francis Ford Coppola

Who else? I've posted lists of reasonable contests a couple of times; I'll check to make sure I haven't left someone off. Ah, found them: Scriptapalooza, Scr(i)pt Magazine, Nicholl Fellowship, Writers Network.

The new NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM is pretty fun, with some chuckles, and a lively Amy Adams as Amelia Earheart spouting spunky 30's phrases. Many of our favorites from the 2006 movie are there. Ben Stiller of course. The little diorama guys, Jedidiah and Octavius, who now are best buds, the cowboy and the centurian. Teddy Roosevelt has found love with Sacajawea. The cavemen and the monkey, the Easter Island "dum-dum head" head...

Now Ben Stiller has become a Ronco/Ginzu Knife type of inventor. Much like the TV show personalities in my comedy script I will finish polishing this weekend -- CAN'T SAY NO. Something makes him go back to the New York Museum of Natural History, where he learns the exhibits are being boxed up and sent to the Smithsonian. Including the magical Egyptian scroll that makes all the exhibits animate each night and have wild adventures. Somehow this is an event he needs to prevent... because...? The plot mechanism isn't really strong, obviously.

But there are some new characters brought to life, including Hank Azaria (I love him!) as evil Pharoah Kamenrah who does a wonderful toffee-nosed Boris Karloff English accent with a Castillian lisp. He's got some funny scenes where you know he's riffing ad libs, and they keep them in. Kamenrah plans to take over the world, and must be stopped! Oh, and since there are 15+ museums in the Smithsonian, they have lots of more contraptions and critters and people to play with. A feature in this movie is that the magic makes paintings and photos live and visitable. The physics of it all really doesn't work plausibly, but it has some funny stuff and a set-up that pays off at the very end.

It's doing well in the box office. I love visiting the Smithsonian, so hopefully this helps them get more traffic and sell more gift shop stuff. Every time I go visit Samily, we do the Smithsonian at least once. In fact, their condo is built on a hill that Wilbur Wright flew a plane to from Washington DC during a special demo on the use of flight for federal purposes. Planes are a big deal in this movie, as is the whole of Washington DC. Stuff like that is fun.

But the movie isn't great. It doesn't have much of an emotional arc or a heart at the center. And it, like the first one, cannot get the magic to work out logically. ( Spoilers Behind the Cut... )

As I posted earlier, in happy squee-age, Andrew Davies came to the University of Texas to be interviewed, a free event for the Plan II students and anyone else who wanted to attend. J4 was very accommodating to me -- I insisted we be there an hour early because I was SURE the line would be around the building.

But we were the first two there. Ha! Got to sit right down near Davies, however, so, kewl. And by the time 7:30 rolled around, there were about 280 people in the 300-seat theater, so I wasn't far off on the numbers, just on the timing. Some random statements from this charming, enthusiastic, extremely capable adapter (my personal favorite for his PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, BLEAK HOUSE, LITTLE DORRIT, ROOM WITH A VIEW, etc.):

• He didn't start writing screenplays until he was 50 (!). He'd written fiction and children's books before then. Now he's 72. Or as he says it, "Seventy-two some of the time."
  
• He gets a sort of personal relationship in his head with the authors he's adapting, and would love to meet them. He remarked about Mr. Darcy's first proposal in P&P that the speech is given in its details at first. Then Austen launches into expository summation. And he said aloud, "Oh Jane!"
  
• He finds himself deeply immersed in the POV of young women. He sometimes feels like he is a young woman ("and what that can say about me certainly can't be good"). When the unfairness of life for a young woman of the Regency period becomes all personal to him, he has to remind himself that he's NOT indeed a young woman seeking a good husband.
  
• He knows he has a sweet deal when he writes the BBC mini-series because, unlike the 90-120 minutes of a movie, he gets 6 to 8 hours. LITTLE DORRIT was an 8-hour event.
  
• He has a list of authors he wishes he could adapt. Many are American that he named: Edith Wharton, for one.
  
• He realized once he started adapting DR ZHIVAGO that he hadn't actually read the book, but had only seen the movie. This impacted him first when he went looking for the scene where Laura loses her virginity to her mother's lover, in a crass bid by her mother for keeping the man's favor. Pasternack skipped that and other difficult (read: sexy) scenes. Robert Bolt, the screenwriter, had figured out the drama required them and added them.
  
• Which brings up one of Davies favorite things: when someone quotes a scene as being a favorite from the novel, but Davies made it up entirely. That, he said, proves he got the spirit of the prior media right.
  
• He doesn't do a lot of historical research for the period dramas (btw, not his favorite term for them). He's written so much about Regency and Victorian eras, etc., that all that background has seeped into his consciousness. Plus he works with the awesome (love her books myself!) Jenny Uglow in getting the period details right.
  
• His description of his home (Warwick? London?) which has a home-office in the attached flat next door that he also bought is fascinating. They broke the wall out of the back of the built-in closet in his bedroom to get him to the closet of the room on the other side. Most of the time he swims through the clothes to "go to work" and then swims through the clothes to come back "home" again. Much like a magical wardrobe!
  
• One of the things he will do, especially with adapting Dickens and his casts of dozens, is find the person who mostly carries the plot. He'll focus more scenes on them than on others. Like for LITTLE DORRIT, instead of starting with 60 pages of intrigue between two criminals in French jail, he starts with Amy Dorrit leaving the debtor's prison to interview for a job.
  

The week-long writers retreat that preceeds the Hawaii Writers Conference is a screened event. You can register, but until you send your work they won't accept you.

Well, I labored over the weekend on my 2-page synopsis and polished the first 10 pages of CAN'T SAY NO, my latest screenplay, a comedy. And the event coordinators called me the very next day to say I was in the Masters in Screenwriting class and could they have a credit card number please.

So that makes me happy! I kinda dismissed the quick response, but J4 said they do screen rigorously for that event, which is also something of what I'd heard. That makes the immediate acceptance of my material even more ego-boosting. W0oT!

Bromance, Judd Apatow style, shines through this movie, though he himself had nothing to do with I LOVE YOU MAN. It's so well cast, has such an interesting and likeable lead in Paul Rudd, that, while the overall plot is nothing so great, there are enough appealing moments that it's a fun movie. And it's a sort of modern thing to have a guy so sweet, so evolved, he doesn't really find fun hanging with the guys. It's never bothered the Paul Rudd character until the issue of a best man for his upcoming marriage makes him feel like a freak for having no guy friends. When he takes out personals for a best friend, goes out on man dates, and has his mom fix him up, the scenes play like classic boy/girl romance frustrations, which is fun. The guy who's whacked out on sports. The guy whose photo in his ad is 40 years out of date. The guy who moves too fast, etc. But just like in real life, when you give up on planning and scheming, the perfect person walks in and starts eating your sandwich.

The meeting scene between Rudd and Segal is fun too; insightful for Segal's character, and ingratiating and sweet for Rudd's character. Even though it's classic guy body-noises humor, it works well for bonding.

Paul Rudd really works his adorableness in this. People have written how adorable he can be no matter what, but I disagree. He can play cynical and douchebaggy pretty well (KNOCKED UP, 40-YEAR-OLD VIRGIN). I also saw Judd Apatow's personal outtakes clip at AFF one year where Rudd looked into the camera and said some of the most godawful crass stuff a man has ever spoken. Luckily, Apatow pays his editors well and that stuff never makes it on the screen, but he does encourage it in his movies, and Rudd can match him and surpass him for grossness. What this movie does is establish that Rudd expertise as his unexplored macho side. Rudd, the sensitive metrosexual guy, says these crass things and flinches. Or butchers the totally dude-ness of the made-up retort or nickname. And flinches. He's just such a good and cute flincher! It's what makes the movie. There's an arc to it because at the very end, he says several goofy dude-ish things with no grimace. And we cheer!

Jason Segal, at 6'4", can be somewhat intimidating when he shows testosterone-y rage (which is why his Marshmallow/Marshall character on HOW I MET YOUR MOTHER is such a schlubby, soft guy), so he maybe overdoes it a little on this movie. He's yelling, chest thumping men on the Venice boardwalk... But how do you balance a huge, barrel-chested guy like Segal out? With a bit part for hulking (!) Lou Ferrigno, playing himself. Just to whittle Segal down some more, you add a scene where Ferrigno (politely!) puts Segal in a sleeper hold.

Did you know that Rashida Jones is the daughter of music mogul Quincy Jones and Peggy Lipton? Her mom was the MOD SQUAD babe! Her dad must also be biracial, because Rashida appears much more Jewish than black... Poor Rashida isn't given much to do in this movie, but she makes her character as Rudd's new fiancee sweet and supportive enough that we root for the marriage even when it appears to be breaking up the bromance that we are much more invested in. And since the story wisely identifies being immature and afraid of commitment as a personality failure, we want Rudd to choose the marriage over the new friendship.