The producers of Greta have put up a really slick flash site for the movie. Check it out. It incorporates a lot of the music and production design that's used in the film. I'm particularly enamored of the doodle animations.
There are also sites for the film on MySpace and Facebook.
I'll post more news about the movie when we know what the release plans will be.
I've been mum for a while because this bit of good news had not been officially announced yet and I didn't want to jinx anything, but...
My first movie just went into production.
It's called Greta, and it's being produced by Whitewater Films and directed by Nancy Bardawil. It stars Hilary Duff, Ellen Burstyn, Michael Murphy and Evan Ross. It should go without saying that I'm completely floored by this great cast, especially considering that this is a pretty small movie.
Here's an article about the project.
This project has been a long time coming. It's one of the first scripts I ever wrote and, at one point, in a careless moment, I nearly threw away the only existing copy. A number of producers have gotten involved -- and then uninvolved -- over the years. But it's finally, truly happening.
In one of my early posts, I talked about the bottle of wine that I've been saving until my Big Break, and how, year after year, no matter what good things had happened to me, I've yet to pop the cork.
Well, I'm about to pop that motherflippin' cork. And drink the whole damn bottle.
Last weekend was the second and last of the two-weekend shoot for my short film, Walking Wounded, and I'm still recovering. It's a 16-page script, which means we averaged four pages per day. That's like shooting a 110-page feature in about 27 days, which is pretty respectable.
The Panasonic HVX200 treated us pretty well. It's got its limitations -- gainy blacks, for instance -- but overall I'm very satisfied. It functioned flawlessly and we've got some great images. However, I don't know how anyone could work with the 4 or 8GB P2 cards. The 16GB cards were released right before this shoot, and we got to use two of them, for a total of 32GB of in-camera storage. That allowed us to shoot an entire day before off-loading, a process that took around half an hour or more. If we had to swap out 4GB cards so we could off-load and keep shooting, I think I would've jumped in front of a bus.
Among the random things I learned on this shoot...
- August in the San Fernando Valley is mighty hot, and white people who spend all day on the roof will get sunburned.
- Assistant directors and script supervisors are essential for any production that aims to be even a hair above amateur; I know because we didn't have one and we suffered for it.
- People who will work on your short for free because they like you -- or, even better, they like the project -- are priceless.
More updates to come as editing and visual effects get underway.
Okay, so there haven't been much in the way of updates. Sorry, I've been pretty busy working on two different feature projects and trying to fit the short prep into whatever spare moments I can find.
And, all of the sudden -- we're shooting in 3 days! Wow. How did that happen? The good news is, I think we're almost ready. A very talented cast is in place, the crew is assembled, the script is tight and I've got most of it storyboarded.
The cast consists of Rob Zabrecky, who starred in my last short and currently appears in the new -- and pretty damn cool -- MTV show, Room 401, and Mageina Tovah, whose filmography is downright intimidating, and includes both Spider-Man 2 and 3.
I'm storyboarding the film with FrameForge 3D Studio 2, which is pretty useful, but can also be frustrating. There's so much that you can do with it, but if you aren't disciplined, you end up fiddling with details to the point that you've spent two hours laying out a handful of shots that only take 30 minutes to actually shoot. That kind of dicking around can turn a time-saving tool into a real time waster.
My advice, should anyone give this software a go is, try not to endlessly manipulate your character's poses and facial expressions, and build really elaborate, detailed sets. Build a roughly accurate set, position your characters roughly where they need to be and move on.
Here are some sample frames that I rendered in a "sketch" style.
Wish us luck...
The short is coming together. Shooting dates are set. Locations are secured. The script is polished. A slick FX shop has come on board to help out with the effects. And just this week, I secured the talents of a really gifted illustrator for the design of the aliens and their various machines.
His name is Alex Ruiz and here's a sample of his work.
I'm currently reading The Making Of Star Wars, which I highly recommend. In it, some of the people involved with the film talk about how Ralph McQuarrie's concept sketches really informed everyone's vision of what the movie would look and feel like. Looking at Alex's work, I'm starting to understand what they were talking about.
I'm about to pull the trigger on a fairly ambitious project -- a new short film, produced under the auspices of the Socal Film Group. It's been a while since my last short, DUST DEVIL, and this one will be considerably more demanding and, if things go well, a much more impressive piece of filmmaking.
It's a sci-fi thriller set in the aftermath of an alien invasion that has decimated the population, a nod to sci-fi films like Omega Man, War of the Worlds and the like.
On a budget of zero.
Okay, not literally zero, but virtually zero. We'll be renting an HD camera and there will be some basic costs that you just can't avoid. I also need to pick up a computer with some serious balls and some FX software, but that stuff isn't a direct production expense, since I can use them for many other applications. But everything else -- lighting, grip, crew, talent, locations -- will be borrowed, bartered or stolen.
The real trick to this project will be the effects. There will be many. Lots of CGI and lots of really challenging compositing. On a budget of zero.
(If there are any CG artists out there interested in donating their talents in exchange for material for their reel, don't be shy. Click my name at the bottom of this post and email me.)
Barring unforeseen circumstances, production is going to happen toward the end of July. Postproduction will take considerably longer. I intend to document the entire process right here, in gory detail. So, wish me luck and watch this space.
This is pretty cool.
Quiet, a short film written by Steve Barr and directed by Marshall McAuley, two very good friends of mine, made Film Threat's list of best short films of 2006.
Way to go, boys!
You hear cautionary tales about it all the time, but the true horror doesn't strike until it happens to you.
CHDD: Catastrophic Hard Drive Death.
I spent the past five weeks traveling -- visiting family and driving all over the northeast. I planned to do some work while we were on the road. After all, the home office is a nice comfort, but not necessary. I work on a laptop. My office goes where I go.
Two weeks into the trip, I settled down in an unused bedroom of my in-laws' house to start polishing up my latest spec. Half an hour later, I noticed an occassional, faint buzz emanating from the left palmrest of my Apple Powerbook.
That's where the hard drive lives.
As one of the few moving parts in a computer, hard drives make noise. But I've been using this laptop for a couple of years, and this was a new noise.
And it started to get worse. Louder. More frequent.
I made a panicked phone call to my Techie Friend, who had me run a couple of disk utilities that should tell whether or not the hard drive is starting to fail. The tests showed nothing. The hard drive appeared to be in good health.
But then something really disturbing happened. I went to save a file and, while the program was writing to the disk, the buzzing noise kicked in and the system froze. I got that spinning, technicolor pinwheel of death (you Mac users know what I'm talking about).
I was about to force quit when, all the sudden, the buzzing noise stopped and the system unfroze. The file had even been saved. But, disk utilities be damned, something was definitely not right.
As Somerset warned Mills, "This isn't gonna have a happy ending."
I transferred my working files to my wife's iBook and, the next day, my Powerbook shit the bed. Wouldn't even boot up. It was dead. Kaput. It was no more.
This was an ex-hard drive.
I shipped it back to Apple, and they replaced the hard drive. What that means, of course, is that everything on the old drive was gone. Just a ghost of ones and zeroes, lost to the digital ether.
The good news: I had a backup. I always backup. I'm practically religious about it. I'm gay for backing up.
The bad news: the backup was at home in Los Angeles, so I lost a couple weeks of laptop use. Which was annoying, but tolerable.
The great news: my backup procedure has always been to simply copy my personal files, not the programs themselves. In otherwords, I just drop my home folder onto an external drive. It's a simple and quick system. The drawback is, in the event of CHDD, you have to reinstall every program and reset every preference. However, in one of the few strokes of good fortune to grace my pathetic life, I had recently changed my backup procedure. A couple months ago, I bought a new external drive -- a 500GB Maxtor One-Touch Firewire drive.
My old external was also a Maxtor One-Touch, but I'd never used the one-touch feature. With the new drive, I decided to give it a shot.
Here's how it works:
Before you use the drive, you partition it, creating a separate partition that is at least as big as your internal hard drive. Then you setup the Maxtor software, creating a backup script., which allows you to perform a complete backup of your hard drive by simply pushing the lone button on the front of the external drive.
It takes a while to run the backup. But, when you're done, what you've got is an exact duplicate of the contents of your internal drive. You can even boot up from the external drive (which is exactly how you restore the backup to your new internal drive).
I had run my very first one-touch backup just a week before we left for our trip. So, instead of reinstalling several dozen programs and futzing with preferences and settings, all I had to do was boot up from the external drive and, using the Maxtor software, restore from the backup.
The results are, essentially, magic. It's like the hard drive never died.
I'm going to make this full backup procedure part of my regular routine.
My work -- the fruits of my labor -- exists in an ethereal form on my hard drive. In years past, I made sure to have paper printouts of every version of every script I wrote. That practice filled up a four-drawer filing cabinet. But nowadays, I tend to deliver drafts to my employers as a PDF file. The last script I wrote, I never printed out a single copy. I don't need to anymore.
That's nice and convenient, but it means I have to take extra measures to make sure I don't lose this stuff. I take this seriously. My work has value. I always felt that way, of course, even before I was getting paid for it. But now that I am getting paid, my work has value to people other than myself.
I simply can't imagine the horror of having to call a studio executive and tell her that the script they paid me to write, the one I spent the past six months working on, vanished in a flurry of grinding noises inside my laptop. That would be a catastrophic failure -- on the part of both the hard drive and my wee little brain.
I haven't posted much lately. Work and some unexpected traveling have kept me busy. Also, I'm lazy. Also, there hasn't been much fun news to report. But there are two developments worth mentioning.
A New Attachment
We've got a new director on board the Lucy Liu project (DEVIL TO PAY) -- Antonia Bird.
This is exciting news. Antonia is a fine director (Priest, Mad Love). She made The Hamburg Cell, an excellent, understated film about the 9/11 terrorists. It's an interesting piece because the protagonists are about as unsympathetic as you can get (i.e. mass murderers) and there are no real antagonists in the story. Ordinarily, that's a recipe for a flat, conflict-challenged film. Yet, somehow it works extremely well.
I can't wait to see what Antonia does with my script.
Meet My Shorts
Another, smaller recent development is that my short film, DUST DEVIL, is now online.
A special thanks to Rod Ramsey for making that happen (despite my total lack of cooperation).
The short played at last year's LA Shorts festival, Shriekfest and the Haydenfilms Online Film Festival. It's a flawed film, but there's a lot about it that makes me proud. Also, everybody involved busted their ass on it, and I think it serves as a fine show reel for several of them.
Please check it out and lemme know what you think.
So, after a couple of friends notify me that my site is down, I contact my hosting service and come to find out that the Dept. of Homeland Security confiscated the entire server because some sub-human uploaded something that he probably shouldn't have.
Meanwhile, the hosting service set me up with a new server, but of course my files are gone. And what's on the top of my to-do list?
"Backup my website."
I admit it. I was lazy. I didn't back up any of my content. Lesson learned.
The good news is, by doing a few quick Google searches and clicking on the "cached" links, I was able to find all of my posts and most of the comments. So, I'll be able to restore Who Are You People pretty soon, thus narrowly avoiding a global panic.
And this time, I'll back up the whole darn site.
LATE UPDATE (May 22, 2006): Posts have been restored. I'll eventually try to restore as many comments as I can.
Screenwriters, by their nature, tend to immerse themselves in stories -- movies, TV shows, books, comic books, videogames, whatever. After all, if we didn't love stories, we wouldn't be screenwriters, right? Yet, one of the unintentional side effects I occassionally run into is that I'll write a line or an action beat that I later on realize came from a movie I saw years ago, or a book I once read. With luck, I'll spot lift before I show the script to anyone. Sometimes I don't (in which case it becomes an homage).
Recently, however, I had a different problem. I had an idea for a short film. I kicked it around a while. I fleshed it out. Finally I wrote the script. I ran it by some members of my film group. They dug it. I got excited. Started planning out the shoot. Even got a lead on a cool location. In other words, I was becoming emotionally invested in the project.
Then my manager read it and said, "I like it, but I feel I should warn you... they did this same story on Desperate Housewives last season."
The thing is, I don't watch Desperate Housewives. I know -- it's a great show. I should watch it. But I don't. I try to limit my appointment TV, and DH didn't make the cut.
In actuality, my story isn't identical to the subplot on DH, but they both involved a kid killing someone, and the kid's parents helping to cover it up. There was some brief rationalizing about making the short anyway. But, I didn't entertain the idea for long. I didn't want people to see the short and say, "Oh, they did something just like that on Desperate Housewives." It's just too humiliating. I'm expected to come up with original ideas. It's not sufficient to explain, after the fact, that I don't watch the show.
I might as well try to sell my space opera about Duke Skyprancer, all the while claiming I'd never seen Star Wars.
What kills me is that I lived with the idea for many months before becoming emotionally committed to it. It was only a couple days after deciding that, yes, this is going to be my next short film, that the anvil landed on my head.
Par for the course in the world of a screenwriter, I suppose. You can spend months researching a story only to open Variety one day to find that Steven Spielberg just signed on to make a film on the same subject. You lick your wounds and go to the next idea on you list.
"Keep kissing those frogs," as my father used to say.
Or was it "Throw a hissy fit on your blog"? I can't remember now.
In Hollywood, there is a term -- "calling card script." It's what every aspiring writer should be striving to create. It's the script that opens doors for you. So, it's really more like a key than a calling card. I'm not sure why they call it a calling card script. Nobody calls you just because you hand out calling cards. Calling cards are nothing special.
But calling card scripts are special.
I'm extremely fond of mine. Of everything I've written before and since, it's the only one that seems to be universally adored. That script is responsible for me getting the assignment that got me into the guild -- and every assignment since.
The weird thing is, nobody will make my calling card script into a movie. I've probably had forty general meetings based on that script. They tell me how much they love it. They even discuss certain scenes in loving detail. And then they ask me what else I'm working on.
A sidenote: I suspect that producers only buy a script if they can't think of a single reason to say 'no.' My calling card script is a period piece. So, even though a given producer may love the story -- usually commenting on the period detail and historical context -- they invariably fall back on that as their excuse. "I love this script, unfortunately, it's a period peice. I can't sell period."
So, learn from my mistake. For your calling card script, stay in the here and now. No need to shoot yourself in the foot right out of the gate.
Anyway, after a couple deals that died in utero, one producer actually stepped up and secured the rights to the script with an option agreement.
An option agreement is sort of a rental arrangement. For a fraction of the agreed upon price of the script, the producer pays for the exclusive right to purchase the script at a later date. A standard deal is for 10%. If the purchase price is $50,000, the producer pays you $5,000 now. When the term of the option runs out (typically from 6 to 18 months), they have to buy the script from you or forfeit the exclusive right to do so.
When I first met this producer, he said he could have the picture financed and in production within about 6 months. But, 6 months turned into a year. He renewed the option and one year turned into two. He had some talent interested -- a name director, an actor or two. I believe he had some leads on financing as well. But it never panned out. Mind you, this is a guy with an impressive track record, who put his own money down for the option. It's a testament to how hard it is to make movies that, after two years of hustling, he had to let his option lapse.
Maybe being a screenwriter isn't the worst job in Hollywood, after all.
Then again, my movie still hasn't gotten made. But the cool thing is, that script? The one everybody loves? The one that's clearly got some market value? I still own it. It still gets me meetings and maybe I can still get it made somehow. Someday.
If it doesn't exactly unlock doors, maybe I can use it to pick them.
My credit card script.
If you're in southern California, and you fancy yerself a filmmaker, consider entering the Lost Weekend Competition, a 48-hour film contest that's part of the Silverlake Film Festival. The contest, which is being hosted by The SoCal Film Group (of which I am a member), is being held the weekend of March 24-26.
The idea is this. Friday night, you'll be given the parameters of your film. Then you write, shoot and edit your short film in time to premiere it that Sunday night.
Can't be done, you say? Yeah, you're probably right. You'd better stay home that weekend. You can watch your Return of the King DVD again and dream about finally getting off your ass to make your own movie.
(That's right, bitch. I just threw down the gauntlet.)
Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are both running an announcement that Lionsgate has acquired foreign rights to my thriller screenplay, DEVIL TO PAY, to star Lucy Liu.
(The above linked articles may require very expensive subscriptions).
I anticipate these sorts of trade notices with excitement and trepidation, ever since Variety botched the spelling of my name. Big deal, you say. And you're right. Except that, in this Internet age -- this post-Ain't It Cool News world -- these trade announcements are picked up and run on websites all over the world.
Google "Gillvary Sanctum" if you care to see how far and wide.