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.
There's a certain satisfaction to the act of filling in the occupation field of a form with the word "screenwriter." It's even more satisfying when it's the truth -- when, after long years of struggle, you're finally making a living at something your mother rightly considered a deranged fantasy.
But the novelty wears thin when you've been doing it for a while, yet you still can't provide a positive response to the inevitable question that comes from the people reading that form:
"Oh, you're a screenwriter? Have you written anything I've seen?"
Civilians don't understand the vagaries of this business. They can't make sense of the Hollywood development machine. They're puzzled by any industry that would spend huge piles of money developing a product that's never going to get made.
Stupid civilians.
No. I haven't been produced yet. But, I'm looking for 2006 to change all that, because I've got three decent chances of seeing it happen.
First is a thriller called SLEEPWALKER, which I wrote for Intermedia. It's being produced by Mark Johnson and Scott Kroopf (men who have been involved with some excellent films, but none so sublime as Galaxy Quest and Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure). SLEEPWALKER is a remake of a Swedish film of the same name, so it was not an original idea of mine. In fact, I was not even the first writer brought on for the remake. Still, it's something I'm proud of.
As I've said before, nothing's a sure thing in this business. And this project doesn't even have a director yet. But I have a good feeling about it anyway. And I'm not a superstitious person, so I'm not afraid of jinxing it.
Next up is a script called GRETA. That's the one that was almost lost to the ages. A producer/director named Rick Rosenthal is planning to produce GRETA on a low budget next summer, with the very cool music video maker Nancy Bardawil directing.
Again, nothing's a sure thing, but this one has a real good chance of going, due to the scale of the production and the people involved. These aren't guys who develop movies. They make them.
The third of my great hopes for '06 is another of my original screenplays, a thriller called DEVIL TO PAY. It's setup at Echo Lake Entertainment, and Lucy Liu is attached to star as a divorced mother who is forced to rob the bank where she works in order to save her kidnapped children. (UPDATE - 5/31/06: Antonia Bird is going to direct DEVIL TO PAY!)
These are not all of my projects, but they're the ones that stand the best chance of seeing the light of a film projector in the foreseeable future. Accordingly, I hope to be writing more about them on this site, to chronicle their progress.
Unless I really did jinx them just now.
I don't have much in the way of screenwriting advice. It's like telling someone how to make love. It's more useful (and more fun) to figure it out on your own. But I do have one tip that I feel qualified to give:
Never throw anything away.
Keep every idea you come up with, every scene you jot down, every line of dialogue. And, for heaven's sake, don't ever throw away an entire script or story. This is not a repudiation of the "kill your darlings" maxim. I'm not talking about cherishing every crap thing you scribble down while dropping acid. I'm just saying, tuck it away somewhere. Just in case. Because you never know.
Shortly after I moved to LA, I was doing some housekeeping and came across an old floppy disk. I didn't recognize the file that was on it, and I wasn't able to open it, since it was written using an antiquated word processing program I no longer had. So, I pitched it into the trash can.
But it didn't stay there long. Curiosity had gotten the better of me. I dug it out and, through trial and error, was able to convert the file to plain text.
Turns out, it was a rough draft of a screenplay I'd written six years earlier. It was maybe the third or fourth feature length script I'd attempted, but I had such a low opinion of it at the time that I abandoned it.
I started to read it right there on the screen, in plain text, all of the formatting stripped away, with action running into dialogue -- and I couldn't tear myself away.
I had put the story so completely out of my mind that it was like reading someone else's work. In fact, as I became increasingly invested in the story and the characters, I realized that I didn't know how it ended -- or even if I'd ever written an ending.
Fortunately, I did. And that ending brought me to tears.
The story was about a precocious and vexing 16-year-old girl who is sent by her beleagured mother to spend the summer with her grandparents in a sleepy beach town. She's so irritated at this punishment that she declares to all interested parties that she intends to commit suicide before the summer is out. And as she goes on to wreak havoc in their lives, her grandparents can't decide whether to fear that her threat is serious or pray that it is. Not exactly high-concept, I know. But it's a nifty story, alternately hilarious and moving.
The script was rough and needed some polishing, but the spine was in place, and the characters were vivid. To a screenwriter always in search of a new idea, this was better than finding a sack of money in the gutter. I'd essentially come into possession of a free script.
I cleaned it up and showed it to my agent, and he agreed with my assessment: this was a keeper.
The script rapidly eclipsed my more recent work to become my calling card piece. The small scale and macabre nature of the story made it a tough film to get off the ground, but a number of proven producers and name directors tried. It became the first screenplay to earn me money, in the form of an option to an independent producer who went on to hire me to write a couple assignments for him. At one point, an icon of the tweener set was even attached to star.
And, as of this writing, the script is setup with a production company and a director who are proceeding with plans to produce it on a low budget next summer. If things go as planned, it will be my first screenplay to go into production.
And for a few moments, seven years ago, the only existing copy was sitting in the trash can.
I don't throw anything out anymore. In this age of affordable hard drives and CD burners, you simply have no excuse for it. In fact, when I start on a revision of anything -- no matter how minor the changes -- I save it to a new file first so I won't destroy any previous version. I might end up with forty or fifty different versions of a screenplay, most of which I will never look at again. Who cares? It costs nothing. And every now again you might just realize you overlooked a gem.