A hearty welcome to all the new readers, who are presumably here thanks to Amanda the Aspiring TV Writer's post last night. Traffic today is up 200% from last week, and it's six times what it was before the Dan Callahan interview.
Hopefully I'll have some new posts later in the week. For now, welcome and thanks.
If you aren't reading Amanda's blog, do yourself a favor and check it out.
Karma Coalition
Genre: Sci-Fi Thriller
Premise: An ex-professor seeks the truth about a secret organization known as the "Karma Coalition."
About: A high-profile pick-up from Warner Bros. in late 2008 to the tune of 1.5 million. Christensen is the lead singer for a band called Stellarstarr. Christensen also co-wrote "Sidney Hall" which has been set up with producers Ridley and Tony Scott.
Writer: Shawn Christensen
"I just sold a script for 1.5 million dollars suckerrrrrs!"
Now I've caught a lot of flak for liking this script so much. People barrage me with arguments like "It's got plot holes you could drive a semi through!" They say it's cheesy, clunky, and all over the place. You know what I say? You're wrong. You're 93% stinking wrong! This script was a hell of a ride. Not to mention I'm a sucker for a good "ordinary man in extrodinatry circumstances" tale - and Karma Coaliton takes care of my fix.
Beware. Major spoilers follow. Part of the reason I liked this script so much was that I didn't have any clue what it was about going in. So if you plan on reading it, tread carefully. There are spoiler landmines everywhere.
A recent flap of deaths has been occurring all over the world - deaths of very important people: Archdioceses, scientists, celebrities. But why? What's the connection? There's someone who knows. Someone who's been betting on these deaths from the beginning. And getting it right every single time. So we're going to find out who this person is and how they're making these amazing predictions right? Wrong. The prognosticator is killed on Page 6.
Whoa.
William Craft, a relatively young college professor who just lost his job for sleeping with one of his students (wait a minute, don't all college professors sleep with their students? I thought that was one of the perks.) is just trying to make it to the next day. He's a widow. His soul mate/wife/love of his life died in a car accident six years ago. Without her, he's been stumbling through life, looking for a purpose.
William's life is turned upside-down when the police blow into his place and arrest him. Remember the prognosticator? Turns out William used to be friends with him. He's thrown into an interrogation room and told that he's under suspicion for the murder of this man. Before they deal with that, however, the cop slides a mysterious box across the table and asks William to open it. The box belonged to the prognosticator and was left to William.
William carefully pries the box open. Inside are five things. One, a note that tells him the cop opposite him is one of the dirtiest cops in the city. Two, a gun. Three, smoke bombs. Four, a DVD. And five, a note. A note that simply says: "She's still alive."
Have I got your attention yet? Welcome to Karma Coalition. I don't know about you, but I'm hooked.
I'm not going to tell you how William gets out of the room because it's pretty obvious. He's got smoke bombs! After escaping, he takes his newfound possessions to a friends' and pops the DVD in. The DVD is of the prognosticator, who informs him that in 2013, a huge catastrophic event takes place that wipes out 90% of the earth's population. Because of this, a secret organization called the Karma Coalition is faking the deaths of very important people all over the world, in order to get them onto a secret island called "Parista," where they will be safe and the human race will continue.
Guess whose wife is on that iiiiiiiii-sland?
Naturally, William will do anything to get to the island. And the good news is, he's on the Parista list. But the cops chasing him have other plans. Will William make it to Parista? Will he be reunited with his wife? I'm sorry but you'll have to read the script to find out. Or the rest of the review.
I loved the heart-pounding unpredictable nature of Karma Coalition but it did have its faults. (Major spoilers) When William finally gets to Parista, we have about 7 minutes to wrap up the storyline between him and his wife. He charges into a restaurant where his wife and her parents are having dinner and it just feels...wrong. Clunky. Weird. This is the love of his life and it's not the way to reunite them. Part of the predicament of Karma Coalition is that you do have the main character getting to his destination late in the screenplay, forcing you to wrap up a lot of storylines in a very short amount of time. As a result, all of the storylines get short-shrift. None more than him and his wife, which should've been an incredibly emotional moment and wasn't.
But the final sequence of Karma Coalition is ridiculously fun. The cops are tracking down the island of Parista, trying to find William. Yet they're being led deep into the middle of Wyoming. How can there be an island in the middle of Wyoming? The answer leads us to "the big twist," which I suspect put Karma Coalition over the hump and secured it that huge sale. Many people point out that the twist doesn't hold water (ahem, island reference). And if you really think about it, there are definitely some inconsistencies. But I had so much fun getting there and the twist was so unexpected, I didn't care. It's one of those things you know they're going to address in the rewrites anyway, so I just went with it.
Sure Karma Coaltion can be silly at times. And it's not afraid to toss in a few cliches. But the script is so fast and its imagination so vibrant, I'm going to prematurely vanguish all you Negative Nancies out there and highly recommend it.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Probably the best "ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance" movie is either "North By Northwest" or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The reason we've been so light on this genre lately is because Hollywood demands more realism these days. Your character has to behave in a realistic way. I don't know about you but if a terrorist pointed a gun at my head, I wouldn't go for a Bruce Lee sweep of the legs combined with a Trinity wall climb, simultaneously grabbing his gun and forcing him to shoot his own partner. I'd probably scream like a little girl. The problem in these movies is that sooner or later, your character will be forced into choices that require extraordinary actions. How he/she goes about them in a believable way is the key to making the genre work. I'm telling you this after highlighting a scene in KC where our "ordinary" hero escapes an interrogation room with smoke bombs. So obviously these rules are not hard and fast. But I guarantee you this issue will be brought up in any script you submit. So you might as well nip it in the bud now.
Premise: An ex-professor seeks the truth about a secret organization known as the "Karma Coalition."
About: A high-profile pick-up from Warner Bros. in late 2008 to the tune of 1.5 million. Christensen is the lead singer for a band called Stellarstarr. Christensen also co-wrote "Sidney Hall" which has been set up with producers Ridley and Tony Scott.
Writer: Shawn Christensen
"I just sold a script for 1.5 million dollars suckerrrrrs!"Now I've caught a lot of flak for liking this script so much. People barrage me with arguments like "It's got plot holes you could drive a semi through!" They say it's cheesy, clunky, and all over the place. You know what I say? You're wrong. You're 93% stinking wrong! This script was a hell of a ride. Not to mention I'm a sucker for a good "ordinary man in extrodinatry circumstances" tale - and Karma Coaliton takes care of my fix.
Beware. Major spoilers follow. Part of the reason I liked this script so much was that I didn't have any clue what it was about going in. So if you plan on reading it, tread carefully. There are spoiler landmines everywhere.
A recent flap of deaths has been occurring all over the world - deaths of very important people: Archdioceses, scientists, celebrities. But why? What's the connection? There's someone who knows. Someone who's been betting on these deaths from the beginning. And getting it right every single time. So we're going to find out who this person is and how they're making these amazing predictions right? Wrong. The prognosticator is killed on Page 6.
Whoa.
William Craft, a relatively young college professor who just lost his job for sleeping with one of his students (wait a minute, don't all college professors sleep with their students? I thought that was one of the perks.) is just trying to make it to the next day. He's a widow. His soul mate/wife/love of his life died in a car accident six years ago. Without her, he's been stumbling through life, looking for a purpose.
William's life is turned upside-down when the police blow into his place and arrest him. Remember the prognosticator? Turns out William used to be friends with him. He's thrown into an interrogation room and told that he's under suspicion for the murder of this man. Before they deal with that, however, the cop slides a mysterious box across the table and asks William to open it. The box belonged to the prognosticator and was left to William.
William carefully pries the box open. Inside are five things. One, a note that tells him the cop opposite him is one of the dirtiest cops in the city. Two, a gun. Three, smoke bombs. Four, a DVD. And five, a note. A note that simply says: "She's still alive."
Have I got your attention yet? Welcome to Karma Coalition. I don't know about you, but I'm hooked.
I'm not going to tell you how William gets out of the room because it's pretty obvious. He's got smoke bombs! After escaping, he takes his newfound possessions to a friends' and pops the DVD in. The DVD is of the prognosticator, who informs him that in 2013, a huge catastrophic event takes place that wipes out 90% of the earth's population. Because of this, a secret organization called the Karma Coalition is faking the deaths of very important people all over the world, in order to get them onto a secret island called "Parista," where they will be safe and the human race will continue.
Guess whose wife is on that iiiiiiiii-sland?
Naturally, William will do anything to get to the island. And the good news is, he's on the Parista list. But the cops chasing him have other plans. Will William make it to Parista? Will he be reunited with his wife? I'm sorry but you'll have to read the script to find out. Or the rest of the review.
I loved the heart-pounding unpredictable nature of Karma Coalition but it did have its faults. (Major spoilers) When William finally gets to Parista, we have about 7 minutes to wrap up the storyline between him and his wife. He charges into a restaurant where his wife and her parents are having dinner and it just feels...wrong. Clunky. Weird. This is the love of his life and it's not the way to reunite them. Part of the predicament of Karma Coalition is that you do have the main character getting to his destination late in the screenplay, forcing you to wrap up a lot of storylines in a very short amount of time. As a result, all of the storylines get short-shrift. None more than him and his wife, which should've been an incredibly emotional moment and wasn't.
But the final sequence of Karma Coalition is ridiculously fun. The cops are tracking down the island of Parista, trying to find William. Yet they're being led deep into the middle of Wyoming. How can there be an island in the middle of Wyoming? The answer leads us to "the big twist," which I suspect put Karma Coalition over the hump and secured it that huge sale. Many people point out that the twist doesn't hold water (ahem, island reference). And if you really think about it, there are definitely some inconsistencies. But I had so much fun getting there and the twist was so unexpected, I didn't care. It's one of those things you know they're going to address in the rewrites anyway, so I just went with it.
Sure Karma Coaltion can be silly at times. And it's not afraid to toss in a few cliches. But the script is so fast and its imagination so vibrant, I'm going to prematurely vanguish all you Negative Nancies out there and highly recommend it.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Probably the best "ordinary man in an extraordinary circumstance" movie is either "North By Northwest" or "Close Encounters of the Third Kind." The reason we've been so light on this genre lately is because Hollywood demands more realism these days. Your character has to behave in a realistic way. I don't know about you but if a terrorist pointed a gun at my head, I wouldn't go for a Bruce Lee sweep of the legs combined with a Trinity wall climb, simultaneously grabbing his gun and forcing him to shoot his own partner. I'd probably scream like a little girl. The problem in these movies is that sooner or later, your character will be forced into choices that require extraordinary actions. How he/she goes about them in a believable way is the key to making the genre work. I'm telling you this after highlighting a scene in KC where our "ordinary" hero escapes an interrogation room with smoke bombs. So obviously these rules are not hard and fast. But I guarantee you this issue will be brought up in any script you submit. So you might as well nip it in the bud now.
Hanna
GENRE: Action
SYNOPSIS: A 14 year old girl who also happens to be a trained killer must fight her way through a strange country to reunite with her father.
ABOUT: Mystery pile people. Sorry, I know very little about this one.
WRITER: Seth Lochead
Oh sweet Hanna. Why do you frustrate me so? Hanna is about your atypical 14 year old teenage girl with an AWOL Navy Seal/CIA father who’s moved to the backwoods of Sweden so he can raise and train her to become an assassin. Yes, Hanna is a cold-blooded killer – a “Little Nikita” who really is little.
Within the first five minutes, father and daughter are captured by 50 agents for reasons I’m still not entirely clear on. The implication is the father wanted to be caught, purposely burning a fire he knew would be seen by an array of satellites that are constantly on the lookout for him. Apparently this guy's wanted badly. For reference's sake, I only have a single satellite looking for me. Once captured, because he and his daughter are so dangerous, they’re sent to different holding bays in separate countries.
Of course neither stays captured for long. Using Jason Bourne like badassery, they escape and head off to different locations. Here is where the script gets muddy. Hanna finds a family in the middle of Turkey who she befriends. She reveals she’s trying to get to the German Consulate in Istanbul (this is where her father told her to go). In hot pursuit of Hanna is the organization that captured her, which is headed up by the steely Marissa, who becomes obsessed with finding her. There's clearly some sort of link between them but what is it?
Hanna makes it to Istanbul where, for some odd reason, Marissa decides to call off the dogs. Hanna’s given a train ticket by the consulate to the backwoods of Sweden, the very place her and her father were abducted. Yay! Hanna gets to go home!
Hanna trudges up to the cabin where her father is waiting for her. Yet it ain't all pancakes and nursery rhymes. He's pissed off! He reveals that the whole point of this exercise was for Hanna to be reunited with her damn momma! But that's okay, because remember those 50 agents that abducted the two of them earlier? Well they're baaaaack! Except this time, they only want Hanna. She's whisked off to a jail in Stockholm where the mysterious Marissa awaits. She escapes her confines by Jason Bourning a few soldiers to set up a finale with Marissa. After a few pleasantries Hanna finds out that Marissa...wait for it...IS HER MOTHER. Hanna cuts the family reunion short though and pulls out a glock, shooting her mom in the head, sending her a little closer to those satellites she seems to like so much.
We get a prologue where Hanna explains why she did what she did. “My father told me about her. He would tell me stories about her. I decided I didn’t like her.” Man, and to think when I don't like someone I just don't return their calls. Now whether this means that Hanna truly didn’t like her mother because of these “stories” or, in a scene that preceded the movie, her father planned this whole assassination from the get-go, possibly even bred Hanna for this very purpose, will remain unclear. But even if that was the case, I’d still be asking myself, uhhh, why? What’s the reason the father wants to kill Marissa so bad? Because she likes to look for him?
Probably my biggest problem with the story though is that it didn’t need to happen. If the father wanted Hanna to kill the mother, why didn’t he just send her or drop her off at the city where the mom was located? For someone as well-trained as he obviously was, I’m sure he’d have no problem finding and getting the daughter to the location. The "deliberately trying to get caught" thing creates too many questions and is a very flawed plan for someone who’s supposedly so brilliant. When these agents break into the house for instance, Hanna starts killing them. Even though they’ve been told not to kill, once people start dying, all bets are off. Who’s to say they don’t shoot her dead to save their own lives?
I don’t know. Part of me just thinks this type of stuff isn’t my thing and it’s better left to someone who lives and breathes the genre. So I’ll stop dogging it. The writing itself was exceptional and I’ll give it to Seth Lochead for creating an interesting character in Hanna and keeping the story moving at a brisk pace. But I’d tie up some potentially large plot holes before sending this one to the big screen.
[ ] trash
[x] barely readable
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
[x] barely readable
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
WHAT I LEARNED FROM HANNA: There is a scene in the middle of the script where Hanna is staying with a family in Turkey who has no idea who she is. A local warlord comes by asking for money from the father. The warlord physically embarrasses him in front of his family and it’s a wonderful moment because we see Hanna watching this and we just know that she’s going to tear him to pieces. And of course she does. Use your character’s secret strength in a scene where nobody else knows they have it besides the audience (for example – in Big – he uses his childlike curiosity to woo over the boss in the famous big piano scene). That scene always works.
Buried
Genre: Drama-Thriller
Premise: A man wakes up in a coffin with no idea how he got there.
About: Ryan Reynolds just signed onto this last week. Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes will take the reigns for Chris Sparling's script. Spain-based Versus Entertainment will finance the film.
Writer: Chris Sparling
This was the only picture I could find of Ryan Reynolds with his shirt on.
I loooooooooved this script. I loved it for so many reasons I can't count them. First of all, I am always on the lookout for a smart cheap movie idea, something that can be shot with minimal hands, minimal equipment, and minimal funds. You know, a way for you to actually *make* a movie without having to go through that sludge-pit known as the Hollywood "system." I tell anyone who will listen: If you can shoot the movie yourself, do it, because you'll achieve what 98% of screenwriters never will - having a finished film. But don't be fooled into thinking this is easy. I don't care who says anybody can make a film with a camera and a Mac. If you want your movie to look professional, you're going to need somebody who knows how to light, somebody who knows how to shoot, somebody who knows how to dress a set. You're still going to need things that cost money. Therefore, you're extremely limited in the scope of your film. It's why a lot of low-budget films take place in one location. Keeps things cheap.
So when I heard of a script where the whole thing took place in a coffin?? I flipped. Like flipped out in anger. Why didn't I think of that?? The cheapest movie set EV-ER. But wait. How do you write an entire story that takes place in a coffin? Let's ask Chris Sparling.
Paul, an American truck driver in Iraq, has just woken up in a coffin. It's burning up. Hot as balls. Lack of oxygen makes it hard to breathe. And let's not forget the coffin, which only allows him a few inches of room in every direction. I will offer this warning right now: If you are claustrophobic, do not read this script.
At first Paul has no memory of how he got here. But things start slowly coming back to him. He was driving a truck, delivering food, when there was a loud explosion. Many of his co-workers were killed but somehow he wasn't. He remembers Iraqis coming towards him. But after that? Nothing. Now he's down here, in a grave, in Iraq. Yes, Sparling wrote an international thriller with a 75,000 dollar price tag. (well, maybe 2 million after Reynolds is paid). Can you say genius?
Paul feels a buzz. A buzz! It's a phone! He has a phone! He checks it. It's not his. It's got 1 bar of flashing reception and 2 bars of battery left. This phone is his only chance at survival. When it runs out, so does he. He starts frantically calling people. First Emergency. He hurriedly explains his situation but the operator is suspicious. Why is a man buried in a coffin, supposedly in Iraq, calling an Ohio emergency line? The woman is worthless. He hangs up and calls home. But all he gets is the answering machine. He leaves a desperate message but who knows if his phone will even work by the time his wife gets home.
Then Paul receives a call. A man, Jabir, tells him that unless Paul can come up with 5 million dollars by 9:00pm (it's 7:00), he will be left in his coffin to die. Paul, who already had anxiety issues *before* he ended up in a coffin, nearly shits his pants. He gets back on the phone, trying to get to the FBI, but in a well-disguised commentary on the state of our society, no one gives a shit. They forward him to other people, give him other numbers to call. If you've ever had to call Time Warner with an internet problem, Paul's situation might be familiar to you. He finally contacts a man in Iraq, Dan, whose job it is to deal with these "situations". Dan tells Paul that this is common practice for poor Iraqis. They kidnap and bury Americans, then ask for a ransom. If the money isn't paid, they leave them to die. Since the U.S. doesn't negotiate with terrorists, you can understand how precarious Paul's situation is. But Dan says he's going to find Paul. "How many of us have you found?" Paul asks. Dan doesn't answer.
The signal keeps flashing in and out, cutting off his calls prematurely, making everything even more frustrating. The battery bar goes down to one. Every call wastes precious battery juice. And as he waits, there's a nearby bombing, which shakes the ground, cracks the top of the coffin, and allows sand to start pouring in, slowly filling up the coffin. All the while, Paul begins to wonder if Dan is really trying to save him, or trying to keep him from turning this into an international incident, which could scar the U.S.'s already tainted reputation. Is Dan trying to keep Paul quiet until he dies?
This is top-notch storytelling here. Sparling really does a bang-up job creating tension. There are so many ticking time bombs: the battery, the signal, the air supply, the ransom, the sand, will Dan's people find him in time? It's all ticking down and you really feel this guy drowning - running out of options. My only fear film is whether an audience can handle being in a coffin for 80 minutes. I guess we'll find out. But it won't affect how solid this script is. A great read.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One location movies should be kept SHORT. I would highly recommend they not be over 95 pages. "Buried" understood this rule and was only 80 pages long. Audiences get a little jumpy if they're in one place for too long (blame Michael Bay). So keep the story slim.
Premise: A man wakes up in a coffin with no idea how he got there.
About: Ryan Reynolds just signed onto this last week. Spanish director Rodrigo Cortes will take the reigns for Chris Sparling's script. Spain-based Versus Entertainment will finance the film.
Writer: Chris Sparling
This was the only picture I could find of Ryan Reynolds with his shirt on.I loooooooooved this script. I loved it for so many reasons I can't count them. First of all, I am always on the lookout for a smart cheap movie idea, something that can be shot with minimal hands, minimal equipment, and minimal funds. You know, a way for you to actually *make* a movie without having to go through that sludge-pit known as the Hollywood "system." I tell anyone who will listen: If you can shoot the movie yourself, do it, because you'll achieve what 98% of screenwriters never will - having a finished film. But don't be fooled into thinking this is easy. I don't care who says anybody can make a film with a camera and a Mac. If you want your movie to look professional, you're going to need somebody who knows how to light, somebody who knows how to shoot, somebody who knows how to dress a set. You're still going to need things that cost money. Therefore, you're extremely limited in the scope of your film. It's why a lot of low-budget films take place in one location. Keeps things cheap.
So when I heard of a script where the whole thing took place in a coffin?? I flipped. Like flipped out in anger. Why didn't I think of that?? The cheapest movie set EV-ER. But wait. How do you write an entire story that takes place in a coffin? Let's ask Chris Sparling.
Paul, an American truck driver in Iraq, has just woken up in a coffin. It's burning up. Hot as balls. Lack of oxygen makes it hard to breathe. And let's not forget the coffin, which only allows him a few inches of room in every direction. I will offer this warning right now: If you are claustrophobic, do not read this script.
At first Paul has no memory of how he got here. But things start slowly coming back to him. He was driving a truck, delivering food, when there was a loud explosion. Many of his co-workers were killed but somehow he wasn't. He remembers Iraqis coming towards him. But after that? Nothing. Now he's down here, in a grave, in Iraq. Yes, Sparling wrote an international thriller with a 75,000 dollar price tag. (well, maybe 2 million after Reynolds is paid). Can you say genius?
Paul feels a buzz. A buzz! It's a phone! He has a phone! He checks it. It's not his. It's got 1 bar of flashing reception and 2 bars of battery left. This phone is his only chance at survival. When it runs out, so does he. He starts frantically calling people. First Emergency. He hurriedly explains his situation but the operator is suspicious. Why is a man buried in a coffin, supposedly in Iraq, calling an Ohio emergency line? The woman is worthless. He hangs up and calls home. But all he gets is the answering machine. He leaves a desperate message but who knows if his phone will even work by the time his wife gets home.
Then Paul receives a call. A man, Jabir, tells him that unless Paul can come up with 5 million dollars by 9:00pm (it's 7:00), he will be left in his coffin to die. Paul, who already had anxiety issues *before* he ended up in a coffin, nearly shits his pants. He gets back on the phone, trying to get to the FBI, but in a well-disguised commentary on the state of our society, no one gives a shit. They forward him to other people, give him other numbers to call. If you've ever had to call Time Warner with an internet problem, Paul's situation might be familiar to you. He finally contacts a man in Iraq, Dan, whose job it is to deal with these "situations". Dan tells Paul that this is common practice for poor Iraqis. They kidnap and bury Americans, then ask for a ransom. If the money isn't paid, they leave them to die. Since the U.S. doesn't negotiate with terrorists, you can understand how precarious Paul's situation is. But Dan says he's going to find Paul. "How many of us have you found?" Paul asks. Dan doesn't answer.
The signal keeps flashing in and out, cutting off his calls prematurely, making everything even more frustrating. The battery bar goes down to one. Every call wastes precious battery juice. And as he waits, there's a nearby bombing, which shakes the ground, cracks the top of the coffin, and allows sand to start pouring in, slowly filling up the coffin. All the while, Paul begins to wonder if Dan is really trying to save him, or trying to keep him from turning this into an international incident, which could scar the U.S.'s already tainted reputation. Is Dan trying to keep Paul quiet until he dies?
This is top-notch storytelling here. Sparling really does a bang-up job creating tension. There are so many ticking time bombs: the battery, the signal, the air supply, the ransom, the sand, will Dan's people find him in time? It's all ticking down and you really feel this guy drowning - running out of options. My only fear film is whether an audience can handle being in a coffin for 80 minutes. I guess we'll find out. But it won't affect how solid this script is. A great read.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[x] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: One location movies should be kept SHORT. I would highly recommend they not be over 95 pages. "Buried" understood this rule and was only 80 pages long. Audiences get a little jumpy if they're in one place for too long (blame Michael Bay). So keep the story slim.
Another great blog
Another great screenwriting resource is screenwriting/UCLA professor Scott Myers' website Go into the Story. I just discoverd it this week and found a lot of helpful tips.
He's running a great series on agency coverage, including the politics of said coverage. This is an area I've generally stayed away from since I don't want breach any confidentiality agreements I've signed over the years. As you'll see, while agency coverage is very similar to standard coverage, there are a few other factors that an agency reader might have to keep in mind as part of their job.
Anyway, check out the site. I'm currently going through the archives and enjoying many of the posts.
He's running a great series on agency coverage, including the politics of said coverage. This is an area I've generally stayed away from since I don't want breach any confidentiality agreements I've signed over the years. As you'll see, while agency coverage is very similar to standard coverage, there are a few other factors that an agency reader might have to keep in mind as part of their job.
Anyway, check out the site. I'm currently going through the archives and enjoying many of the posts.
Interview with COLLEGE and DEMOTED Screenwriter Dan Callahan: PART V – Release and reaction
Part I – The Writing Process
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Part IV – More Rewrites
Bitter Script Reader: Were you seeing dailies as they came in?
Dan Callahan: Well… Writers generally are not brought to set. The original director of College did like to have writers on set and we probably would have been on set the whole time. A lot of directors probably don’t like to have writers on because they feel like someone’s looking over their shoulder. So I understand. We went down for a couple days… and we had a good time in New Orleans… and that was the first time we got to see some dailies. And it’s hard to tell if it’s working or not… Dailies are so rough. It’s really hard to tell what you have, especially comedy because it’s so much about how it’s edited together, the pacing, the timing. And when you watch dailies there’s none of that there, so it’s really hard to get a feeling. So that’s all we saw, what we knew. Occasionally we’d get updates from the producers, but [after that] we didn’t see anything until we saw a cut of the movie. And the cut we saw was pretty far along so any issues we had wouldn’t have mattered. Not that they’d listen, but if we came in with a bunch of notes, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Once the project is sold and you’re done with the rewrites and it starts shooting, you’re done. It’s their movie now, which is tough.
BSR: Is there a part of you that was thinking, “Maybe they know what they’re doing? Maybe this will work?”
DC: With Deb [Hagan] as a director, [this was her first feature, so] we hadn’t seen any of her stuff. We had no idea how it was gonna look, how it was gonna be directed. [As far as the producers,] I liked [their earlier movie] Waiting… So you’re just hoping they can make something really good, really funny. At the end of the day you hope that the producers and directors know more about the actual making of the film than you do. It’s a collaborative process and you have to live with it, you have to deal with it. There’s things that they’re gonna do that you’re gonna like; there’s things that you’re probably not gonna like. It’s never gonna be your vision. So you just gotta live with it. That’s the way it is.
BSR: Did you end up seeing it in a theatre with an audience?
DC: We got them to show us a cut [ahead of time], so we kinda knew already what was coming out. We were told it was pretty far along. It’s hard because you’re so close to it, you could be overreacting to some stuff. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think it is. Maybe you’re just sick of it… and so it’s hard. You feel like “Maybe I’m not laughing because I know what’s coming. I know every joke.” So you chalk a lot of it up to that. That might not end up being the case in the end, but you end up trying to find a reason why you’re feeling the way you are.
BSR: When it came out, were you obsessively tracking the box office and the reviews?
DC: No, I didn’t look at the box office. Adam did. We both were in Chicago that weekend visiting family. A news channel wanted to do a story on us because we were local guys, and we flew home to do that. I did go see the movie with my parents sitting behind me, which… if you’ve seen the movie…
BSR: Yeah… I wouldn’t want to be in that position.
DC: It was my parents and two of their friends came also and I had already told them I didn’t want them to see the movie because it was obviously inappropriate for them. But they insisted on coming and it was… it was tough. It was tough literally having your mom behind you with some of the stuff going on.
BSR: I can imagine.
DC: Sweating bullets, you know? But I think we had an idea of what it was gonna do. We knew it wasn’t Superbad.
BSR: In that sense was it a relief that a few weeks before it came out, you sold Demoted?
DC: Yeah, Demoted was done quite a while before College so, yeah, it is nice to have something else.
BSR: You had the next one in the hopper before any reaction to College.
DC: The other thing is, at the end of the day for a writer, if people are gonna look at you for jobs, they’re gonna read your script. They’re not gonna watch the movie because it’s less about the writer when it comes to seeing what’s on the screen. So we felt confident that with the writing and the scripts and the drafts that they could get a good idea of what we wanted to do. So it doesn’t matter how College turned out for us. People are gonna try to blame you but people who work in the business are not gonna blame the writer.
If somebody’s looking to hire me for a job or wants to read my material, that’s what they’re looking at. They’re not going to go watch College – they’re going to physically get the script and read it. And they’re either gonna like it or they won’t. Writers, when it’s a bad movie, they get away with it. As long as it’s a good script. Now if it’s as bad as the film turned out to be, then you’ve got a problem. But we never felt that way. We always felt that College was a strong script and that people who read it would like it whether they’d like the movie or not.
So that’s a situation where you just try to write the best material possible. To laugh out loud reading a comedy is a hard thing to do. If you can get people to physically laugh out loud, that’s a sign you’re on the right track. I think College has some of those moments. Demoted definitely has those moments. That’s what gets people excited about something. So after College, you’re like “Can I do this again?” And it’s nerve-wracking because you’re not sure you can do it again. Was it a fluke? A one time thing? And after everyone of them it becomes that.
BSR: Are you happy with the process on Demoted?
DC: Yeah, strangely enough the shooting draft came very full circle to the original. We changed a lot, but at the end of the day, I was asked to put back a lot [of the original stuff.] Which was good, and it’s rare when you come back and the director says, “Put that back in.” It’s much closer to the first draft than College. It’s still different. There are still things that I have issues with, but it’s much closer to the original than College was.
But that’s also a case where there’s gonna be far more adlibbing because of your cast. You’ve got a guy like David Cross who’s… a thousand times funnier than me, he’s gonna come up with better shit than I came up with. So... you’re cool with that.
I had a much better relationship with the director on Demoted. Pretty good relationship with producers on Demoted. When I fought for notes, as long as I had a reasonable reason and came up with an intelligent rebuttal to a note, they’d generally say, “Okay, you’re right.” So there’s less of those holes where things were pulled out. I spent a lot more time on set in that movie, so I was definitely more involved.
But still, at the end of the day, they go off and they make their movie and it’s not about you any more.
If you're curious about Demoted, check out the trailer from Cannes in this the article at Collider. Demoted stars Michael Vartan (“Alias”), David Cross (“Arrested Development”), Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings), Sara Foster (“90210”), and Constance Zimmer (“Entourage”).
The synopsis provided to Empire Online reads:
Mike (Sean Astin) and Rodney (Michael Vartan) are mid-level employees with a fondness for playing pranks on office jerk Ken Castro (David Cross). But when their kindly boss dies, Castro is promoted to his place and Mike and Rodney are demoted to the secretarial pool. Where, unsurprisingly, they don't cope too well.
Thanks again to Dan Callahan for all his time and insight.
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Part IV – More Rewrites
Bitter Script Reader: Were you seeing dailies as they came in?
Dan Callahan: Well… Writers generally are not brought to set. The original director of College did like to have writers on set and we probably would have been on set the whole time. A lot of directors probably don’t like to have writers on because they feel like someone’s looking over their shoulder. So I understand. We went down for a couple days… and we had a good time in New Orleans… and that was the first time we got to see some dailies. And it’s hard to tell if it’s working or not… Dailies are so rough. It’s really hard to tell what you have, especially comedy because it’s so much about how it’s edited together, the pacing, the timing. And when you watch dailies there’s none of that there, so it’s really hard to get a feeling. So that’s all we saw, what we knew. Occasionally we’d get updates from the producers, but [after that] we didn’t see anything until we saw a cut of the movie. And the cut we saw was pretty far along so any issues we had wouldn’t have mattered. Not that they’d listen, but if we came in with a bunch of notes, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway.
Once the project is sold and you’re done with the rewrites and it starts shooting, you’re done. It’s their movie now, which is tough.
BSR: Is there a part of you that was thinking, “Maybe they know what they’re doing? Maybe this will work?”
DC: With Deb [Hagan] as a director, [this was her first feature, so] we hadn’t seen any of her stuff. We had no idea how it was gonna look, how it was gonna be directed. [As far as the producers,] I liked [their earlier movie] Waiting… So you’re just hoping they can make something really good, really funny. At the end of the day you hope that the producers and directors know more about the actual making of the film than you do. It’s a collaborative process and you have to live with it, you have to deal with it. There’s things that they’re gonna do that you’re gonna like; there’s things that you’re probably not gonna like. It’s never gonna be your vision. So you just gotta live with it. That’s the way it is.
BSR: Did you end up seeing it in a theatre with an audience?
DC: We got them to show us a cut [ahead of time], so we kinda knew already what was coming out. We were told it was pretty far along. It’s hard because you’re so close to it, you could be overreacting to some stuff. Maybe it’s not as bad as you think it is. Maybe you’re just sick of it… and so it’s hard. You feel like “Maybe I’m not laughing because I know what’s coming. I know every joke.” So you chalk a lot of it up to that. That might not end up being the case in the end, but you end up trying to find a reason why you’re feeling the way you are.
BSR: When it came out, were you obsessively tracking the box office and the reviews?
DC: No, I didn’t look at the box office. Adam did. We both were in Chicago that weekend visiting family. A news channel wanted to do a story on us because we were local guys, and we flew home to do that. I did go see the movie with my parents sitting behind me, which… if you’ve seen the movie…
BSR: Yeah… I wouldn’t want to be in that position.
DC: It was my parents and two of their friends came also and I had already told them I didn’t want them to see the movie because it was obviously inappropriate for them. But they insisted on coming and it was… it was tough. It was tough literally having your mom behind you with some of the stuff going on.
BSR: I can imagine.
DC: Sweating bullets, you know? But I think we had an idea of what it was gonna do. We knew it wasn’t Superbad.
BSR: In that sense was it a relief that a few weeks before it came out, you sold Demoted?
DC: Yeah, Demoted was done quite a while before College so, yeah, it is nice to have something else.
BSR: You had the next one in the hopper before any reaction to College.
DC: The other thing is, at the end of the day for a writer, if people are gonna look at you for jobs, they’re gonna read your script. They’re not gonna watch the movie because it’s less about the writer when it comes to seeing what’s on the screen. So we felt confident that with the writing and the scripts and the drafts that they could get a good idea of what we wanted to do. So it doesn’t matter how College turned out for us. People are gonna try to blame you but people who work in the business are not gonna blame the writer.
If somebody’s looking to hire me for a job or wants to read my material, that’s what they’re looking at. They’re not going to go watch College – they’re going to physically get the script and read it. And they’re either gonna like it or they won’t. Writers, when it’s a bad movie, they get away with it. As long as it’s a good script. Now if it’s as bad as the film turned out to be, then you’ve got a problem. But we never felt that way. We always felt that College was a strong script and that people who read it would like it whether they’d like the movie or not.
So that’s a situation where you just try to write the best material possible. To laugh out loud reading a comedy is a hard thing to do. If you can get people to physically laugh out loud, that’s a sign you’re on the right track. I think College has some of those moments. Demoted definitely has those moments. That’s what gets people excited about something. So after College, you’re like “Can I do this again?” And it’s nerve-wracking because you’re not sure you can do it again. Was it a fluke? A one time thing? And after everyone of them it becomes that.
BSR: Are you happy with the process on Demoted?
DC: Yeah, strangely enough the shooting draft came very full circle to the original. We changed a lot, but at the end of the day, I was asked to put back a lot [of the original stuff.] Which was good, and it’s rare when you come back and the director says, “Put that back in.” It’s much closer to the first draft than College. It’s still different. There are still things that I have issues with, but it’s much closer to the original than College was.
But that’s also a case where there’s gonna be far more adlibbing because of your cast. You’ve got a guy like David Cross who’s… a thousand times funnier than me, he’s gonna come up with better shit than I came up with. So... you’re cool with that.
I had a much better relationship with the director on Demoted. Pretty good relationship with producers on Demoted. When I fought for notes, as long as I had a reasonable reason and came up with an intelligent rebuttal to a note, they’d generally say, “Okay, you’re right.” So there’s less of those holes where things were pulled out. I spent a lot more time on set in that movie, so I was definitely more involved.
But still, at the end of the day, they go off and they make their movie and it’s not about you any more.
If you're curious about Demoted, check out the trailer from Cannes in this the article at Collider. Demoted stars Michael Vartan (“Alias”), David Cross (“Arrested Development”), Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings), Sara Foster (“90210”), and Constance Zimmer (“Entourage”).
The synopsis provided to Empire Online reads:
Mike (Sean Astin) and Rodney (Michael Vartan) are mid-level employees with a fondness for playing pranks on office jerk Ken Castro (David Cross). But when their kindly boss dies, Castro is promoted to his place and Mike and Rodney are demoted to the secretarial pool. Where, unsurprisingly, they don't cope too well.
Thanks again to Dan Callahan for all his time and insight.
What happened to...Moneyball?
note: (9/23/11) Since these drafts, Aaron Sorkin came on to do a final rewrite on the script, which is the one that eventually went in front of the cameras.
To get caught up on what exactly "Moneyball" is and the drama that occurred this week, go here to find out.
Genre: Sports Bio
Premise: A general manager with the lowest payroll in baseball invents a new way of scouting involving little-known but very powerful statistics.
About: Based on a true story. Adapted from the book by Michael Lewis. Moneyball came to the attention of everyone when Sony Exec Amy Pascal shut down the movie 3 days before the start of production due to Soderbergh's rewrite of the script (episode of Entourage anyone?)
Writers: Steven Zaillian (Dec. Draft)- Steven Soderbergh (June shooting draft) -- Edit: I thought I'd mention this because people keep bringing it up. There is a May Zaillian draft that I've been told is quite different from the December draft I read. Some of the things I liked in that Dec. draft were missing from Zaillian's subsequent draft (meaning it wasn't Soderbergh's sole choice to get rid of them).
Do you know the kind of balls it takes to shut down the production of a Brad Pitt movie? When Brad Pitt says he'll do your movie, 20 million dollars or not, he's doing *you* a favor. And it's not like Pitt hasn't picked up and walked off on a whim before. Anybody remember The Fountain? - And that was before he met the baby buyer. Nowadays Brad goes out for groceries and he comes home to two more kids. So the fact that Amy Pascal, Chairman of Sony Studios, halted production on Moneyball upon reading the most recent draft by Soderbergh is a BFD. The question is, what happened? Well, we all know Soderbergh has a seriously off-kilter approach to directing. Given some room, he'll turn your straightforward sports tale into a series of flashbacks and flashforwards with Spanish subtitles and 97 minutes of voice over. Lucky for you, Scriptshadow's got both drafts and will get to the bottom of this mess. Did Soderbergh destroy Moneyball? Did Pascal overreact? Read on to find out.
STEVEN ZAILLIAN DRAFT
Baseball is a game of numbers. No other sport in the world depends more on numbers than baseball . From singles to doubles to home runs to RBIs to errors to batting averages to slugging percentages to on-base percentages, the sport *is* its numbers. And it's those numbers that form the nucleus of Moneyball's story.
I'm sure when I say the name Billy Beane, it doesn't mean much to you. But you say the name Billy Beane in baseball circles, and it means a hell of a damn lot. Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A's. The Oakland A's are one of the smallest markets in Major League Baseball. To give you an idea of how small, the Yankees payroll is 120 million dollars. The A's payroll? 40 million. Do the math. So the question is: How do you compete in a league where every other team has at least twice as much money as you do?
Billy is a complicated man. He loves the grind but hates watching the fruits of his labor. Billy doesn't travel with the team. He doesn't watch the games. He doesn't like any of the players. All he cares about is putting together a team that wins. Unfortunately, his 40 million dollar payroll has made that next to impossible. Early on, Billy is with his girlfriend, getting ready to escape to a tropical island. But Billy gets a call on his cell, and that call leads to a few more calls, and the next thing you know, a trade is going down. He smiles politely to his girlfriend, hands her his ticket, and says, "Go ahead. I'll meet you there in a few days." And leaves! It's the perfect introduction to Billy because that action, that sequence, tells us exactly who he is.
You see, Billy just lost the three best players on his team and has been told by his owner that he's only got a few million bucks to replace them. So Billy heads off to another tropical paradise, Cleveland, to discuss some trades with the GM of the Indians, Mark Shapiro. Billy is particularly interested in a player named "Rincon", someone so low on Shapiro's radar that he barely recognizes the name. After Shapiro agrees in principle to a trade, a previously unseen nerdy 20-something on a laptop walks over and whispers into Shapiro's ear. He slinks back to the couch and Shapiro calmly turns to Billy, "I'm sorry, you can't have Rincon." Billy spins back and glares at this mystery kid. "Who the fuck are you??" his eyes say. But the kid is already back to his computer. This kid's name is Paul.
Billy corners Paul outside the building and demands to know what the hell he told Shapiro. The argument turns into dinner, and Paul lays out his approach to baseball. He's calculated every single statistic known to baseball and only one is inexorably tied to winning: On-base percentage. Since everyone else is obsessed with home runs and RBIs, this stat has been relatively ignored. Paul believes that if you create a team full of only players with high on-base percentages (A stat so insignificant that you could get the players for dirt cheap) you could theoretically win all the time. Billy thinks Paul might be crazy, but he's up shit creek anyway, so he hires him.
Billy and Paul then apply this untested strategy in the face of years of baseball experience. The idea that you can look at a spreadsheet, and not at the player himself, when putting together a team, causes all sorts of drama inside the A's organization. Essentially, Billy assembles a rag-tag motley crew of rejects with high on-base percentages. When Oakland quickly falls into last place, the drama only gets worse. But the stubborn Billy and Paul stick together, and in the end their faith pays off, as Oakland ends the season with a 20-game win streak, the single longest win-streak in American League history.
The only problem with the script is that it gets too wrapped up in its details, too wrapped up in its numbers. We follow the A's through an entire season and, not unlike keeping tabs on a real baseball season, it's hard to stay focused. Late in the script I was myself asking that age old question: What's driving the story? The best I could come up with is: the curiosity of whether the stats system is going to work. But in that black hole where stories go to die known as the second half of the second act, there isn't enough to remind us of this - to keep us focused - and the story loses some luster as a result. The question is, did Soderbergh address this issue in his rewrite and, more importantly, what else did he address? We'll talk about that in a second. But in regards to Zaillian's draft, I'm going to recommend the read. Sure it wandered. But I've always been fascinated by the jobs of General Managers, and this gave me some great insight into their world.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
Script Link: Moneyball (link taken down by request)
SODERBERGH DRAFT (dated 6-22-09)
note: Bad news. I cannot post this draft. It's got Sony markings all over it and you'll just have to trust me when I say it wouldn't be a good idea.
So was it *that* bad? I mean, studios go into production all the time with terrible scripts. Particularly when huge actors like Pitt are involved. So what made Pascal put her foot down? What made her embark on a decision that would taint the project from now til release? I'll tell you what. A bad script. Soderbergh really screwed this up. Moneyball wasn't Chinatown, but at least it was a story. Soderbergh's turned it into a mishmash of ideas in search of a point. It's like he yanked the sail off the boat and let us drift out to sea.
It's hard to point to any one change that ruined the script, but there are several troublesome choices that were made. Remember that early scene where Billy leaves his girlfriend at the airport? That scene told us everything we needed to know about who we'd be following for the next two hours. What does Soderbergh do instead? He has Billy meet Paul in one of the most basic, uninteresting introductions to two characters I've seen in a long time. The two stand around and proceed to tell us (er, I mean each other) exactly who they are.
[scrippet]
BILLY
JP said you're the guy I should be talking to.
PAUL
JP is great.
BILLY
JP is great. He said you just got promoted.
PAUL
Yeah, I was advance scouting and I was just made Special Assistant to the GM.
BILLY
Well, Cleveland's a monster franchise. I think John Hart and Mark Shapiro are super smart. They got a good thing going.
PAUL
I have to say, it's nice knowing at the beginning of the year that you're probably going to the playoffs.
BILLY
I'll bet.
PAUL
I hear you're extended.
BILLY
Yeah, four years. It's good, you know. I can watch things happen. And we're close to getting a new stadium.
PAUL
Which you need.
BILLY
Which we definitely need. So let me ask you. Can you work spreadsheets and all that stuff, like Excel? Can you manage a payroll?
PAUL
Yeah.
BILLY
Great, because I suck at that...
[/scrippet]
Yes, instead of that great scene where the mysterious Paul walks up and whispers into Shapiro's ear, we now get, "So let me ask you: can you work spreadsheets and all that stuff?"
The draft was an Exposition Empire, with characters blurting out all sorts of things we needed to know without a hint of subtlety. I kept thinking I was at a museum listening to a tour guide, "And here we have Billy. Billy has discovered a secret set of numbers. He will now try to apply them to his team and hopefully win in the process." All the fun from the first draft is gone here. The dramatization. The subtext. It's vanished, not unlike the Montreal Expos.
Also gone are most of Billy's scenes with his daughter, the only true relationship with another human being he has, and therefore the only thing that humanizes him - Billy's drifting from woman to woman (Although there's only scarce mention of it - he appears to be married in Soderbergh's version), the flashbacks of Billy as a player (replaced by interviews with real people who played with Billy) and that feeling of, "Billy and Paul against the world," stemming from their unique system and how it flies in the face of 150 years of baseball - probably the most exciting part of the story.
But the biggest faux-pas is the handling of the all-important "on-base percentage" stat. This is what the A's figured out that everybody else ignored - the hidden statistic that was the key to their success. It's what allows them to compete with half the salary of all the other teams. This is the movie. Yet here it's treated like an afterthought. In fact, I couldn't even tell you what the A's secret to success was in Soderbergh's draft. It's implied that there's a spreadsheet involved but the explanation stops there. A spreadsheet of never-explained numbers? That's how the team wins? That's your hook for the movie?
Look, Soderbergh is the kind of director that likes to find his movies in the editing room. Shoot a bunch of stuff, see what sticks. If something doesn't connect logically , throw some voiceover in there and add a little score. That seems to be his plan of attack with Moneyball. I don't know what the final movie would look like so I couldn't definitively tell you if he would of salvaged this, but I do know he turned a solid script into an incomprehensible mess. And that's why his movie was shut down.
[x] a mess
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don't write a sports movie. They're too difficult to write. If the team ends up winning in the end, it feels overly-sappy and cliche. If you go with a grittier more realistic approach, it comes off as boring and self-important. Lose-lose. If you must ignore my advice, go with either a boxing movie or a true story (like this one). But just know that writing a good sports movie is RFH (really fucking hard) and selling one is even harder. Take my advice and don't do it.
To get caught up on what exactly "Moneyball" is and the drama that occurred this week, go here to find out.
Genre: Sports Bio
Premise: A general manager with the lowest payroll in baseball invents a new way of scouting involving little-known but very powerful statistics.
About: Based on a true story. Adapted from the book by Michael Lewis. Moneyball came to the attention of everyone when Sony Exec Amy Pascal shut down the movie 3 days before the start of production due to Soderbergh's rewrite of the script (episode of Entourage anyone?)
Writers: Steven Zaillian (Dec. Draft)- Steven Soderbergh (June shooting draft) -- Edit: I thought I'd mention this because people keep bringing it up. There is a May Zaillian draft that I've been told is quite different from the December draft I read. Some of the things I liked in that Dec. draft were missing from Zaillian's subsequent draft (meaning it wasn't Soderbergh's sole choice to get rid of them).
Do you know the kind of balls it takes to shut down the production of a Brad Pitt movie? When Brad Pitt says he'll do your movie, 20 million dollars or not, he's doing *you* a favor. And it's not like Pitt hasn't picked up and walked off on a whim before. Anybody remember The Fountain? - And that was before he met the baby buyer. Nowadays Brad goes out for groceries and he comes home to two more kids. So the fact that Amy Pascal, Chairman of Sony Studios, halted production on Moneyball upon reading the most recent draft by Soderbergh is a BFD. The question is, what happened? Well, we all know Soderbergh has a seriously off-kilter approach to directing. Given some room, he'll turn your straightforward sports tale into a series of flashbacks and flashforwards with Spanish subtitles and 97 minutes of voice over. Lucky for you, Scriptshadow's got both drafts and will get to the bottom of this mess. Did Soderbergh destroy Moneyball? Did Pascal overreact? Read on to find out.
STEVEN ZAILLIAN DRAFT
Baseball is a game of numbers. No other sport in the world depends more on numbers than baseball . From singles to doubles to home runs to RBIs to errors to batting averages to slugging percentages to on-base percentages, the sport *is* its numbers. And it's those numbers that form the nucleus of Moneyball's story.
I'm sure when I say the name Billy Beane, it doesn't mean much to you. But you say the name Billy Beane in baseball circles, and it means a hell of a damn lot. Billy Beane is the general manager of the Oakland A's. The Oakland A's are one of the smallest markets in Major League Baseball. To give you an idea of how small, the Yankees payroll is 120 million dollars. The A's payroll? 40 million. Do the math. So the question is: How do you compete in a league where every other team has at least twice as much money as you do?
Billy is a complicated man. He loves the grind but hates watching the fruits of his labor. Billy doesn't travel with the team. He doesn't watch the games. He doesn't like any of the players. All he cares about is putting together a team that wins. Unfortunately, his 40 million dollar payroll has made that next to impossible. Early on, Billy is with his girlfriend, getting ready to escape to a tropical island. But Billy gets a call on his cell, and that call leads to a few more calls, and the next thing you know, a trade is going down. He smiles politely to his girlfriend, hands her his ticket, and says, "Go ahead. I'll meet you there in a few days." And leaves! It's the perfect introduction to Billy because that action, that sequence, tells us exactly who he is.
You see, Billy just lost the three best players on his team and has been told by his owner that he's only got a few million bucks to replace them. So Billy heads off to another tropical paradise, Cleveland, to discuss some trades with the GM of the Indians, Mark Shapiro. Billy is particularly interested in a player named "Rincon", someone so low on Shapiro's radar that he barely recognizes the name. After Shapiro agrees in principle to a trade, a previously unseen nerdy 20-something on a laptop walks over and whispers into Shapiro's ear. He slinks back to the couch and Shapiro calmly turns to Billy, "I'm sorry, you can't have Rincon." Billy spins back and glares at this mystery kid. "Who the fuck are you??" his eyes say. But the kid is already back to his computer. This kid's name is Paul.
Billy corners Paul outside the building and demands to know what the hell he told Shapiro. The argument turns into dinner, and Paul lays out his approach to baseball. He's calculated every single statistic known to baseball and only one is inexorably tied to winning: On-base percentage. Since everyone else is obsessed with home runs and RBIs, this stat has been relatively ignored. Paul believes that if you create a team full of only players with high on-base percentages (A stat so insignificant that you could get the players for dirt cheap) you could theoretically win all the time. Billy thinks Paul might be crazy, but he's up shit creek anyway, so he hires him.
Billy and Paul then apply this untested strategy in the face of years of baseball experience. The idea that you can look at a spreadsheet, and not at the player himself, when putting together a team, causes all sorts of drama inside the A's organization. Essentially, Billy assembles a rag-tag motley crew of rejects with high on-base percentages. When Oakland quickly falls into last place, the drama only gets worse. But the stubborn Billy and Paul stick together, and in the end their faith pays off, as Oakland ends the season with a 20-game win streak, the single longest win-streak in American League history.
The only problem with the script is that it gets too wrapped up in its details, too wrapped up in its numbers. We follow the A's through an entire season and, not unlike keeping tabs on a real baseball season, it's hard to stay focused. Late in the script I was myself asking that age old question: What's driving the story? The best I could come up with is: the curiosity of whether the stats system is going to work. But in that black hole where stories go to die known as the second half of the second act, there isn't enough to remind us of this - to keep us focused - and the story loses some luster as a result. The question is, did Soderbergh address this issue in his rewrite and, more importantly, what else did he address? We'll talk about that in a second. But in regards to Zaillian's draft, I'm going to recommend the read. Sure it wandered. But I've always been fascinated by the jobs of General Managers, and this gave me some great insight into their world.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
Script Link: Moneyball (link taken down by request)
SODERBERGH DRAFT (dated 6-22-09)
note: Bad news. I cannot post this draft. It's got Sony markings all over it and you'll just have to trust me when I say it wouldn't be a good idea.
So was it *that* bad? I mean, studios go into production all the time with terrible scripts. Particularly when huge actors like Pitt are involved. So what made Pascal put her foot down? What made her embark on a decision that would taint the project from now til release? I'll tell you what. A bad script. Soderbergh really screwed this up. Moneyball wasn't Chinatown, but at least it was a story. Soderbergh's turned it into a mishmash of ideas in search of a point. It's like he yanked the sail off the boat and let us drift out to sea.
It's hard to point to any one change that ruined the script, but there are several troublesome choices that were made. Remember that early scene where Billy leaves his girlfriend at the airport? That scene told us everything we needed to know about who we'd be following for the next two hours. What does Soderbergh do instead? He has Billy meet Paul in one of the most basic, uninteresting introductions to two characters I've seen in a long time. The two stand around and proceed to tell us (er, I mean each other) exactly who they are.
[scrippet]
BILLY
JP said you're the guy I should be talking to.
PAUL
JP is great.
BILLY
JP is great. He said you just got promoted.
PAUL
Yeah, I was advance scouting and I was just made Special Assistant to the GM.
BILLY
Well, Cleveland's a monster franchise. I think John Hart and Mark Shapiro are super smart. They got a good thing going.
PAUL
I have to say, it's nice knowing at the beginning of the year that you're probably going to the playoffs.
BILLY
I'll bet.
PAUL
I hear you're extended.
BILLY
Yeah, four years. It's good, you know. I can watch things happen. And we're close to getting a new stadium.
PAUL
Which you need.
BILLY
Which we definitely need. So let me ask you. Can you work spreadsheets and all that stuff, like Excel? Can you manage a payroll?
PAUL
Yeah.
BILLY
Great, because I suck at that...
[/scrippet]
Yes, instead of that great scene where the mysterious Paul walks up and whispers into Shapiro's ear, we now get, "So let me ask you: can you work spreadsheets and all that stuff?"
The draft was an Exposition Empire, with characters blurting out all sorts of things we needed to know without a hint of subtlety. I kept thinking I was at a museum listening to a tour guide, "And here we have Billy. Billy has discovered a secret set of numbers. He will now try to apply them to his team and hopefully win in the process." All the fun from the first draft is gone here. The dramatization. The subtext. It's vanished, not unlike the Montreal Expos.
Also gone are most of Billy's scenes with his daughter, the only true relationship with another human being he has, and therefore the only thing that humanizes him - Billy's drifting from woman to woman (Although there's only scarce mention of it - he appears to be married in Soderbergh's version), the flashbacks of Billy as a player (replaced by interviews with real people who played with Billy) and that feeling of, "Billy and Paul against the world," stemming from their unique system and how it flies in the face of 150 years of baseball - probably the most exciting part of the story.
But the biggest faux-pas is the handling of the all-important "on-base percentage" stat. This is what the A's figured out that everybody else ignored - the hidden statistic that was the key to their success. It's what allows them to compete with half the salary of all the other teams. This is the movie. Yet here it's treated like an afterthought. In fact, I couldn't even tell you what the A's secret to success was in Soderbergh's draft. It's implied that there's a spreadsheet involved but the explanation stops there. A spreadsheet of never-explained numbers? That's how the team wins? That's your hook for the movie?
Look, Soderbergh is the kind of director that likes to find his movies in the editing room. Shoot a bunch of stuff, see what sticks. If something doesn't connect logically , throw some voiceover in there and add a little score. That seems to be his plan of attack with Moneyball. I don't know what the final movie would look like so I couldn't definitively tell you if he would of salvaged this, but I do know he turned a solid script into an incomprehensible mess. And that's why his movie was shut down.
[x] a mess
[ ] barely kept my interest
[ ] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Don't write a sports movie. They're too difficult to write. If the team ends up winning in the end, it feels overly-sappy and cliche. If you go with a grittier more realistic approach, it comes off as boring and self-important. Lose-lose. If you must ignore my advice, go with either a boxing movie or a true story (like this one). But just know that writing a good sports movie is RFH (really fucking hard) and selling one is even harder. Take my advice and don't do it.
Interview with COLLEGE and DEMOTED Screenwriter Dan Callahan: PART IV – More Rewrites
Part I – The Writing Process
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Bitter Script Reader: Taking out the subplot of Kevin (Drake Bell) constantly bumping into his ex during the college weekend is another huge change. That’s probably fifteen pages of scenes that now have to be replaced with something new.
Dan Callahan: It’s funny because I watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall and said we’d done all that in the original draft of College. If I’d known Forgetting Sarah Marshall was going to be such a hit I’d have fought harder for all of that stuff to stay in the script because in the original draft his ex-girlfriend is there with the new boyfriend, who goes to school there. And to me, it amps up the stakes of what’s going on…. He’s just like, “Can this get any worse?” To me it gives a lot more depth to what he’s going through and what he’s trying to overcome in the course of a weekend. Everything that can go wrong, happens and at some point he’s gotta come through it and learn from it.
BSR: And in the original script there’s no subplot about the high school kids lying to the college girls about being in college themselves.
DC: In the script they know. That was a note because they felt the college girls wouldn’t hang out with this guys. Our point was that these girls are freshmen, so there’s not much difference in age there. Literally a year apart in age. It’s not that big a leap.
BSR: And it sets up where the audience knows that when the main character tells a lie, you know he’s gonna get caught at the worst possible time. The girl is going to shut him out, and then he’s going to have to do some grand apology. And we’ve seen that before. And I thought it was neat in the first draft that you completely avoided the issue.
DC: Our attitude was like “Fuck it. That’s the way most people would go with it.” And that’s the note we got that we had to go with, but originally they were just honest about it.
BSR: They know from the start in your first draft.
DC: It’s more about them blowing off the girls and the girls getting mad… That’s another one of those big moments that got taken out and because of that you lose a lot of the heart. Him getting over the girlfriend and then going back to high school and saying "I’m over you…" that’s a nice moment to have. And it’s sold more in the original draft.
BSR: And the girlfriend is much more of a presence in your first draft.
DC: She’s got some funny moments…. There also is that sort of patheticness where he’s not over her. He kind of does want to get back together with her. Her being there makes it even worse, but at the end of the day he realizes it’s not the best thing for him… this girl wasn’t right for him. It took a really crazy, shitty weekend for him to realize that, but he did. As opposed into the movie, it becomes him trying to prove his ex-girlfriend wrong. “I’ll show her I’m not who she thinks I am.” I preferred him taking the weekend – I felt it was more original – taking a weekend to get over this girl, and he does.
BSR: So many of these changes ended affecting the second act. And in taking that out, all the stuff you got hit for in the reviews had to be added. There was a recurring theme in the reviews that attacked the movie as sadistic or homophobic. There was one review that said the filmmakers seemed to need to work through some kind of repressed homosexuality, and I read the draft with interest and can say that none of that stuff is in there. The whole bit where they have to do body shots off the hairy guy – none of that shit’s in there!
DC: The gay frat house was never in there. That was one of the producer’s ideas. That they thought would be funny…. There might have been a little subtext with Bearcat… Yeah, so, those are notes you get… and that’s where producers or whoever comes in and thinks they have a funnier idea than you and they tell you to go write it and you don’t have a choice.
There’s nothing wrong with actors coming in and improving. Particularly guys who are comedians because they might come up with something funnier than what you did. But I think it’s important to get what’s on the page so you’ve got those different versions… Certain lines are written for a specific reason. There are a lot of changes, as you saw, from our original draft. That first draft that we went out with was always my favorite, I think it’s the best version. And a lot of stuff that got taken out was stuff that I really miss when I watch the movie.
And the other thing that happens is in these writing sessions you’ve got a lot of people’s opinions and the script often becomes a mishmash of people’s opinions. And as the drafts go on it becomes a Frankenstein of all these versions. We went through two directors, so you’ve got notes from the first director that might still be in the script and then you bring on a new director and they’ve got their own notes. Then the guys from State Street who were set to produce ended up pulling out because of differences they had with the producers at Element so now you’ve got so many people coming and going. And you’ve got a draft with so many opinions in there that it really is a struggle to keep it fluid. It’s never quite what it was before… and that’s the hardest part.
But what are you gonna do? You don’t want to get fired. You want to get paid.
BSR: And if you won’t do it they’ll just bring in somebody else.
DC: And it would just slow down the process more. You know that if you stay and get the notes done, you’re a step closer to getting the movie made. If they fire you, they have to go to other agencies, pitch other writers, meet with other writers, hire another writer. You just put the project behind weeks, or months, which only increases the chances of it not getting made.
BSR: So if you want to get paid….
DC: Take the notes. Argue for what we can argue for… and do them as quickly as possible so we can just keep going, keep going, keep going. That’s all your goal is. When I’m some writer who makes a million dollars a script, then I can go tell someone to go fuck themselves. But I’m not. You do what you have to do to keep your job. We wanted to be the last writers on the project. And we were.
Tomorrow: Reaction to the final film, and new projects.
Part V – Release and Reaction
Choose this month's Scriptshadow Challenge script
Leave your pick in the comments section, my e-mail, Scott's site, or Scott's e-mail. Please do not e-mail me asking for any of these scripts unless you're my BFF. How do you become my BFF? By sending me newly sold specs. Duh.
Here are the choices...
"Kidnap" (Knate Gwaltney): After her son is kidnapped at a local mall, a woman embarks on a chase to save him. Genre: Thriller
"Witchita" (Patrick O'Neill): Story revolves around a single chick who has terrible luck with men, but meets a mysterious, handsome man on a blind date. The mysterious man is actually a secret agent who pops in and out of the woman’s life. Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz attached. Genre: Action-Comedy
"Father of Invention" (Trent Cooper, Johnathan Krane & Nicole Beattie): Story centers on a humble inventor-turned-egomaniacal billionaire who loses it all when one of his inventions goes horribly awry. After eight years in federal prison, he returns bankrupt, homeless and determined to rebuild his reputation and fortune. Kevin Spacey attached. Genre: Comedy
"The True Memoirs of an International Assassin" (Jeff Morris): After a publisher changes a writer's debut novel about a deadly assassin from fiction to nonfiction, the author finds himself thrust into the world of his lead character, and must take on the role of his character for his own survival. Genre: Action-Thriller
"The Heartbreaker" (Alec Ward): Comedy about a guy hired to break hearts. Genre: Comedy
Here are the choices...
"Kidnap" (Knate Gwaltney): After her son is kidnapped at a local mall, a woman embarks on a chase to save him. Genre: Thriller
"Witchita" (Patrick O'Neill): Story revolves around a single chick who has terrible luck with men, but meets a mysterious, handsome man on a blind date. The mysterious man is actually a secret agent who pops in and out of the woman’s life. Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz attached. Genre: Action-Comedy
"Father of Invention" (Trent Cooper, Johnathan Krane & Nicole Beattie): Story centers on a humble inventor-turned-egomaniacal billionaire who loses it all when one of his inventions goes horribly awry. After eight years in federal prison, he returns bankrupt, homeless and determined to rebuild his reputation and fortune. Kevin Spacey attached. Genre: Comedy
"The True Memoirs of an International Assassin" (Jeff Morris): After a publisher changes a writer's debut novel about a deadly assassin from fiction to nonfiction, the author finds himself thrust into the world of his lead character, and must take on the role of his character for his own survival. Genre: Action-Thriller
"The Heartbreaker" (Alec Ward): Comedy about a guy hired to break hearts. Genre: Comedy
Upcoming: Scriptshadow Challenge choices
Stay Tuned. Today at 3pm Pacific Time, I'll be simultaneously posting with Scott, the five choices for this month's Scriptshadow Challenge. Your vote will determine which script we go with. It'll be fun because three of them are recent spec sales. So pop by and leave your vote. If the comments section doesn't work for you, feel free to e-mail me.
Interview with COLLEGE and DEMOTED Screenwriter Dan Callahan: PART III – Notes, rewriting, casting and SUPERBAD
Part I – The Writing Process
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Bitter Script Reader: What kind of notes did you get? Was it stuff you generally agreed with, or was it stuff you didn’t? You said you ran through a ton of options before [in the writing process.] Did you find yourself having to do some of those?
Dan Callahan: I think in general we probably didn’t agree with most of the notes. We’d never been through the process of getting notes from producers and because it’s your work, you think you know better. You think you know the material better, and at the end of the day, you DO know the material better… as the writer. You know the characters better, the story better. Anything they suggest you’re generally going to have an answer for right on the spot.
So a lot of the notes we had issues with. But what do you do? There are certain notes that we fought against, but if there were notes that made sense to us – we might not like them, but they made sense….
BSR: You pick your battles.
DC: Yeah, [if] they could potentially make the script better, we’re more than willing to try them. Also, you’re getting paid for these. Again, every step is a motivation, so you’re gonna do the work. You’re getting paid for it, so you have to do the work.
BSR: And it’s your first script so I imagine the incentive is there even more.
DC: The ultimate goal is getting the script done. I think on College we negotiated at least two rewrites so they had to give us two shots at getting the script right. I think we did more than that… I can’t remember exactly. Occasionally you end up doing free work in there. It’s hard to get those notes, hard to have those discussions, hard to hear those notes…
BSR: Was there a point where they gave you notes and were like, “Do they even get what we’re going for with this?”
DC: Oh yeah! Believe me... they’d email the notes and I’d call Adam like, “Did you see this note?” You’re just sitting there going through each one getting pissed trying to figure out how you’re gonna do this stuff. There were some big notes that were big changes we had issues with.
BSR: I noticed in reading the script that there were at least two, maybe two and a half, subplots that seemed completely pruned out. In the original script the set up is that they’re going to see his sister on campus at the sorority house and she sends them over to the frat house.
DC: Yeah, that’s a BIG change! Right.
BSR: You take the sister completely out and it leaves a huge gap in the second act.
DC: That was a note we were not happy about, but for whatever reason they wanted the sister out. We had a problem with it because it was the motivation. It gave the opportunity to go to that specific school. The original plot of College was very similar to Forgetting Sarah Marshall in that it was about a kid who gets dumped and needs to get away for a weekend to get over this break up.
BSR: And I liked the way you set that up in the original draft better too. In the first script, right on page one, he gets this self-possessed break-up letter from the girlfriend but in the movie she comes and essentially breaks up with him for being boring.
DC: Yeah and that was one of the first things I wrote too. Sort of a funny note…
BSR: I laughed out loud at it because it was such a strong voice for that character.
DC: [In the script,] as you’re hearing the note, he’s watching her blow some other guy in a car. In the first two pages, this guy is at his lowest point – where everything he thought is flipped on its head and not only that, this girl’s left him for a college guy, which is setting up something we pay off later and it was that sense that “Okay, I just went through the worst week of my life…” They hear the speech about the great weekend at college, and the kid’s like, “That’s what I need. I need a vacation. Because everywhere I go, I’m gonna run into her… And even better, I’ve got a sister already at college so that gives me a place to go, a place to stay and an excuse to tell my parents why I’m going up there.”
And the minute you take the sister out, it becomes “Why are they going to this school? Where are they staying? Why are they staying there?” With the sister in there, they assume they’re staying at the sorority house, which is like heaven to them. They get there, the sister’s like “You can’t stay here. We have these charter rules. Guys are not allowed to stay in the house. But I’ve set up with our brother fraternity house a place for you to stay.” And that gets them into the fraternity. It’s a logical reason.
BSR: Whereas in the film, he goes up for Morris’s (Kevin Covais) college visitation – which is also in the first version. I’ll admit I thought it was a little strange there were multiple motivations for the guys to go up.
DC: We wanted to give each guy something going in. In the original draft, it was: Main guy crushed over girlfriend. Totally about getting over her, like Forgetting Sarah Marshall – and this was WAY before Forgetting Sarah Marshall. That’s his reason. For Morris, it’s he’s got an academic reason. And the Carter character (Andrew Caldwell), who’s different in the script than he is in the movie…
BSR: Yeah, I was going to get to that one too…
DC: He’s purely going to get laid. He wants to fuck a college chick. So they each had their thing. The sister helped get them in the fraternity house in a logical way – because they can’t stay with the sister. The minute you pull the sister out…. That’s a big battle we had. How do we sell it [to the audience?] In the movie, they’re set up in the dorms…
BSR: Which is a logical enough reason.
DC: That’s logical enough, but then… [they leave because] the dorm sucks, and the vague notion that one of the guys has a cousin who used to be in that fraternity. So now you’re coming up with very loose reasons and logic for them to stay in this fraternity and it’s tough because we had a rock solid reason for them to be there.
BSR: And then the frat house is a much larger part of the movie than in the script. In the movie there’s this runner about how they don’t have any pledges to beat up on, so that’s why they’re so eager to take the guys in…
DC: And in the original draft it’s just a place to stay. These guys don’t love the fact that the high school kids are staying there, but because it’s their sister sorority, and they’re friends with the girls and they hook up with the girls and don’t want to piss them off, they’re willing to let them crash there. They still put them in the basement and they still sort of shit on them because they’re high school kids and they don’t really want them there, but they’ve sort of been pushed onto them. But it’s more than some other reason.
BSR: Like “we want to torture someone.”
DC: So what happens is when you start taking a piece out - by taking that sister piece out - you just named five problems that we had to answer. And we answered them, but none of them felt as strong as what we originally had.
BSR: And I think the other change that affected the script pretty drastically… I read a lot of the reviews and most of them go “Superbad ripoff.” But the original script doesn’t read like that at all because Carter is not a poor man’s Jonah Hill in the script.
DC: He’s the Stifler [from American Pie] of the group.
BSR: He’s the guy who thinks he’s a lady killer. He’s probably been laid a couple of times because he’s described as handsome and cocky. And a lot of the dialogue is the same, but the attitude behind it…
DC: It’s completely different and that was… we never wrote a fat kid in the movie.
The fat kid character was supposed to be Stifler. Supposed to be good looking. He’s a lady killer in high school. And the original draft is that when he goes to college, he’s not a lady killer there and he’s frustrated because he’s so used to getting girls, now he’s out of his league and he can’t get the girl.
BSR: Now he’s a small fish in a big pond.
DC: Exactly. Sort of the crossover from high school to college. Their lives in high school are one way and their lives in college are different. And the original draft had more of their lives in high school, setting up the things… like there’s a high school party that gets busted and they run away. In the movie, the high school party got taken out, but they kept the college version so when they get busted there [it’s a punchline without the set-up]. This is what happens when you take things out. Domino effect kills you.
Carter was one of those things in casting - we don’t even know - we just get one day “Here’s who’s playing Carter” and we look him up and go, “It’s a fat kid. This makes no sense.” The other problem is that once they cast the fat kid, they never came back and said, now that they cast a fat kid, we should probably go back and rewrite the character. So now you have a fat kid who ends up hooking up with the hottest girl in the group and it makes no sense! Having your character suddenly be a fat kid and not rewriting [for] that is a major issue. A major problem. Then you should cast the girl opposite him to be a fat girl… Or just throw in a line of dialogue that says she’s a chubby chaser. It’s funny. Make a joke out of it.
BSR: Once you make him a fat kid, it plays like Superbad. Especially with the new introduction to the group. In the movie, the first scene where Carter shows up he comes in, scarfs down food and makes some crack about Of Mice and Men being gay…
DC: And that was stuff the director put in that we didn’t even do.
BSR: You didn’t even write those scenes?
DC: I do not remember those lines. We had a new opening where he comes in, with the mom getting the kids ready. There was nothing about Of Mice and Men [in any of our scripts.]
BSR: I had the feeling watching it that it might have been an improv. I got the sense that there was a lot of letting that guy run loose.
DC: Our movie and Superbad shot really close together. Almost at the same time, I think maybe we were a month behind. When Superbad came out – a lot sooner because College switched from Lions Gate to MGM – it delayed the release again because why release on top of Superbad. But when I saw Superbad, I was like “the characters are identical” and it sucks because I knew that people were gonna think that we ripped off Superbad. I never read Superbad [before writing College.] I loved Superbad. I think it’s fucking hilarious. But it was definitely gonna play like we ripped off Superbad.
BSR: Especially with the first scene of the three of them together in the movie, with Carter ripping on Morris and complaining to Kevin (Drake Bell) about “Why do we have to hang out with this guy?”
DC: It’s a similar set of characters, but it was never meant to be that way. That was just something where the kid who played Carter came in, they liked him, and decided that he was just the funniest guy instead of going with it as written. It really was an issue when I saw the movie from a writer’s perspective, because I knew that there were certain situations that he was in in the movie that don’t make sense now because of who they cast. It would have been so easy to fix it. It just never got fixed. We were never asked to make changes.
BSR: It’s like they were unaware it was a problem.
DC: I just can’t understand watching it being filmed and not realizing you have to answer “Oh, this is a different kind of guy.” I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t get fixed. Change one little thing and [see] what a domino effect it has on him and the script.
Tomorrow: More about rewriting.
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Bitter Script Reader: What kind of notes did you get? Was it stuff you generally agreed with, or was it stuff you didn’t? You said you ran through a ton of options before [in the writing process.] Did you find yourself having to do some of those?
Dan Callahan: I think in general we probably didn’t agree with most of the notes. We’d never been through the process of getting notes from producers and because it’s your work, you think you know better. You think you know the material better, and at the end of the day, you DO know the material better… as the writer. You know the characters better, the story better. Anything they suggest you’re generally going to have an answer for right on the spot.
So a lot of the notes we had issues with. But what do you do? There are certain notes that we fought against, but if there were notes that made sense to us – we might not like them, but they made sense….
BSR: You pick your battles.
DC: Yeah, [if] they could potentially make the script better, we’re more than willing to try them. Also, you’re getting paid for these. Again, every step is a motivation, so you’re gonna do the work. You’re getting paid for it, so you have to do the work.
BSR: And it’s your first script so I imagine the incentive is there even more.
DC: The ultimate goal is getting the script done. I think on College we negotiated at least two rewrites so they had to give us two shots at getting the script right. I think we did more than that… I can’t remember exactly. Occasionally you end up doing free work in there. It’s hard to get those notes, hard to have those discussions, hard to hear those notes…
BSR: Was there a point where they gave you notes and were like, “Do they even get what we’re going for with this?”
DC: Oh yeah! Believe me... they’d email the notes and I’d call Adam like, “Did you see this note?” You’re just sitting there going through each one getting pissed trying to figure out how you’re gonna do this stuff. There were some big notes that were big changes we had issues with.
BSR: I noticed in reading the script that there were at least two, maybe two and a half, subplots that seemed completely pruned out. In the original script the set up is that they’re going to see his sister on campus at the sorority house and she sends them over to the frat house.
DC: Yeah, that’s a BIG change! Right.
BSR: You take the sister completely out and it leaves a huge gap in the second act.
DC: That was a note we were not happy about, but for whatever reason they wanted the sister out. We had a problem with it because it was the motivation. It gave the opportunity to go to that specific school. The original plot of College was very similar to Forgetting Sarah Marshall in that it was about a kid who gets dumped and needs to get away for a weekend to get over this break up.
BSR: And I liked the way you set that up in the original draft better too. In the first script, right on page one, he gets this self-possessed break-up letter from the girlfriend but in the movie she comes and essentially breaks up with him for being boring.
DC: Yeah and that was one of the first things I wrote too. Sort of a funny note…
BSR: I laughed out loud at it because it was such a strong voice for that character.
DC: [In the script,] as you’re hearing the note, he’s watching her blow some other guy in a car. In the first two pages, this guy is at his lowest point – where everything he thought is flipped on its head and not only that, this girl’s left him for a college guy, which is setting up something we pay off later and it was that sense that “Okay, I just went through the worst week of my life…” They hear the speech about the great weekend at college, and the kid’s like, “That’s what I need. I need a vacation. Because everywhere I go, I’m gonna run into her… And even better, I’ve got a sister already at college so that gives me a place to go, a place to stay and an excuse to tell my parents why I’m going up there.”
And the minute you take the sister out, it becomes “Why are they going to this school? Where are they staying? Why are they staying there?” With the sister in there, they assume they’re staying at the sorority house, which is like heaven to them. They get there, the sister’s like “You can’t stay here. We have these charter rules. Guys are not allowed to stay in the house. But I’ve set up with our brother fraternity house a place for you to stay.” And that gets them into the fraternity. It’s a logical reason.
BSR: Whereas in the film, he goes up for Morris’s (Kevin Covais) college visitation – which is also in the first version. I’ll admit I thought it was a little strange there were multiple motivations for the guys to go up.
DC: We wanted to give each guy something going in. In the original draft, it was: Main guy crushed over girlfriend. Totally about getting over her, like Forgetting Sarah Marshall – and this was WAY before Forgetting Sarah Marshall. That’s his reason. For Morris, it’s he’s got an academic reason. And the Carter character (Andrew Caldwell), who’s different in the script than he is in the movie…
BSR: Yeah, I was going to get to that one too…
DC: He’s purely going to get laid. He wants to fuck a college chick. So they each had their thing. The sister helped get them in the fraternity house in a logical way – because they can’t stay with the sister. The minute you pull the sister out…. That’s a big battle we had. How do we sell it [to the audience?] In the movie, they’re set up in the dorms…
BSR: Which is a logical enough reason.
DC: That’s logical enough, but then… [they leave because] the dorm sucks, and the vague notion that one of the guys has a cousin who used to be in that fraternity. So now you’re coming up with very loose reasons and logic for them to stay in this fraternity and it’s tough because we had a rock solid reason for them to be there.
BSR: And then the frat house is a much larger part of the movie than in the script. In the movie there’s this runner about how they don’t have any pledges to beat up on, so that’s why they’re so eager to take the guys in…
DC: And in the original draft it’s just a place to stay. These guys don’t love the fact that the high school kids are staying there, but because it’s their sister sorority, and they’re friends with the girls and they hook up with the girls and don’t want to piss them off, they’re willing to let them crash there. They still put them in the basement and they still sort of shit on them because they’re high school kids and they don’t really want them there, but they’ve sort of been pushed onto them. But it’s more than some other reason.
BSR: Like “we want to torture someone.”
DC: So what happens is when you start taking a piece out - by taking that sister piece out - you just named five problems that we had to answer. And we answered them, but none of them felt as strong as what we originally had.
BSR: And I think the other change that affected the script pretty drastically… I read a lot of the reviews and most of them go “Superbad ripoff.” But the original script doesn’t read like that at all because Carter is not a poor man’s Jonah Hill in the script.
DC: He’s the Stifler [from American Pie] of the group.
BSR: He’s the guy who thinks he’s a lady killer. He’s probably been laid a couple of times because he’s described as handsome and cocky. And a lot of the dialogue is the same, but the attitude behind it…
DC: It’s completely different and that was… we never wrote a fat kid in the movie.
The fat kid character was supposed to be Stifler. Supposed to be good looking. He’s a lady killer in high school. And the original draft is that when he goes to college, he’s not a lady killer there and he’s frustrated because he’s so used to getting girls, now he’s out of his league and he can’t get the girl.
BSR: Now he’s a small fish in a big pond.
DC: Exactly. Sort of the crossover from high school to college. Their lives in high school are one way and their lives in college are different. And the original draft had more of their lives in high school, setting up the things… like there’s a high school party that gets busted and they run away. In the movie, the high school party got taken out, but they kept the college version so when they get busted there [it’s a punchline without the set-up]. This is what happens when you take things out. Domino effect kills you.
Carter was one of those things in casting - we don’t even know - we just get one day “Here’s who’s playing Carter” and we look him up and go, “It’s a fat kid. This makes no sense.” The other problem is that once they cast the fat kid, they never came back and said, now that they cast a fat kid, we should probably go back and rewrite the character. So now you have a fat kid who ends up hooking up with the hottest girl in the group and it makes no sense! Having your character suddenly be a fat kid and not rewriting [for] that is a major issue. A major problem. Then you should cast the girl opposite him to be a fat girl… Or just throw in a line of dialogue that says she’s a chubby chaser. It’s funny. Make a joke out of it.
BSR: Once you make him a fat kid, it plays like Superbad. Especially with the new introduction to the group. In the movie, the first scene where Carter shows up he comes in, scarfs down food and makes some crack about Of Mice and Men being gay…
DC: And that was stuff the director put in that we didn’t even do.
BSR: You didn’t even write those scenes?
DC: I do not remember those lines. We had a new opening where he comes in, with the mom getting the kids ready. There was nothing about Of Mice and Men [in any of our scripts.]
BSR: I had the feeling watching it that it might have been an improv. I got the sense that there was a lot of letting that guy run loose.
DC: Our movie and Superbad shot really close together. Almost at the same time, I think maybe we were a month behind. When Superbad came out – a lot sooner because College switched from Lions Gate to MGM – it delayed the release again because why release on top of Superbad. But when I saw Superbad, I was like “the characters are identical” and it sucks because I knew that people were gonna think that we ripped off Superbad. I never read Superbad [before writing College.] I loved Superbad. I think it’s fucking hilarious. But it was definitely gonna play like we ripped off Superbad.
BSR: Especially with the first scene of the three of them together in the movie, with Carter ripping on Morris and complaining to Kevin (Drake Bell) about “Why do we have to hang out with this guy?”
DC: It’s a similar set of characters, but it was never meant to be that way. That was just something where the kid who played Carter came in, they liked him, and decided that he was just the funniest guy instead of going with it as written. It really was an issue when I saw the movie from a writer’s perspective, because I knew that there were certain situations that he was in in the movie that don’t make sense now because of who they cast. It would have been so easy to fix it. It just never got fixed. We were never asked to make changes.
BSR: It’s like they were unaware it was a problem.
DC: I just can’t understand watching it being filmed and not realizing you have to answer “Oh, this is a different kind of guy.” I don’t know what happened, but it didn’t get fixed. Change one little thing and [see] what a domino effect it has on him and the script.
Tomorrow: More about rewriting.
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction
The Only Living Boy In New York
Genre: Drama
Premise: Coming-of-age tale about a young man trying to find himself in New York City.
About: Allan Loeb is one of the hottest writers working today. He broke onto the scene with Black List favorite, "Things We Lost In The Fire" (which I've been told is a much better script than it is a movie), penned the surprise hit "21," and most recently finished the job of one of the most sought after assignments in town, "Money Never Sleeps" (aka "Wall Street 2"), and he's got like six other projects in development. The Only Living Boy In New York is unique in that it's one of the only drama specs sold in the last 5 years that didn't have any talent attached (translation: It was really f'ing good).
Writer: Allan Loeb
Like I always say, if you're gonna steal, steal from the best. "Living Boy" is basically "The Graduate" meets "Great Expectations" with a pinch of "The Great Gatsby" thrown in for good measure. The coming-of-age stuffy upper-crust 20-something angsty tale in NY is likely to appall as much as it appeals since older folk tend to roll their eyes at insignificant "problems" us young men endure ("Oh, I missed work because I partied too late. What ever am I going to do?"). This attitude reached an all-time fever pitch during the successful run of "Garden State," a movie "Living Boy" will no doubt be compared to. But while "Boy" definitely has its share of angst, its characters lift it up and beyond Zach Braff's New Jersey opus. Things feel a bit more meaningful here. And I can attribute that mainly to Loeb's excellent writing.
20-something Thomas lives in New York City. He's best friends with a super-hot (in a hip alternative way) college chick named Mimi. In an ecstacy-inspired night of regret and stupidity, Mimi makes the mistake of granting Thomas an all-night sex-a-thon. As a result, he's fallen hopelessly in love with her. Of course Mimi considers the night a monumental college-level mistake (boy did I have my share of those) and doesn't see why Thomas can't just get over it. Thomas spends a good portion of "Living Boy" wondering why a sweet decent-looking guy like himself can't land a hot girl like Mimi.
That's the least of his worries though. While wandering aimlessly through New York one day, he accidentally spots his asshole of a father kissing a woman that is definitely NOT his mother. The 30-something icy business woman, Johanna, is easily the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. Thomas is furious. His mother is already on the verge of a mental breakdown and finding out that her husband is cheating on her would surely push her over the edge.
Rounding out the cast of characters is the mysterious W.F. Gerald (it even sounds like someone from The Great Gatsby), a 50-something "unmade bed of a man," as Loeb puts it. The wise W.F. is always there to dole out his sage advice when Thomas needs it. And Thomas needs it in spades.
He begins following his father's mistress and when he finally works up the courage to confront her, he demands that she stop seeing him. The woman, who seems not to know of these things called "feelings," makes it very clear that both she and her father can make their own decisions and that Thomas has no say in the matter. She follows this by accusing Thomas of falsely approaching her - insisting that the only reason he followed her was because he wants her himself. Thomas is appalled at the suggestion and storms away.
Later on, at a swanky upper crust party, Thomas runs into Johanna separately from his father, and she proceeds to seduce him (for the sport of it, of course), taking him home and engaging in a wild night of animal sex. Thomas now finds himself in an affair within an affair...sort of... as he starts sleeping with the same woman that is sleeping with his father. That's comfortable. Of course Mimi, playing off of Thomas' new popularity with the ladies, suddenly changes her mind and decides that she wants a relationship with Thomas. But Thomas has long since fallen in love with Johanna, and now cares only that she dump his father so the two can be together alone...and not...with his father (your average 20-something dilemma).
The way Thomas weaves in and out of these storylines is humbling to say the least. Loeb is an incredibly gifted writer. One of the true marks of great writers is how they describe their characters, and Loeb doesn't disappoint.
[scrippet]
...Mimi Pastori
wears a double dyed pink wife-beater that stops just short of her bumper sticker... the Chinese symbol of balance. She owns a temple of a body built of feminine mesa-morph and displays small diamond stud in her nose.
All of Mimi's attempts to hide her beauty fail miserably.
[/scrippet]
Or the way they write dialogue...
[scrippet]
THOMAS
I think... I... August eighth. I think August eighth was real.
MIMI
It was amazing, Thomas, but it was just one night. We were both on ecstasy, I thought I was a pirate and I was vulnerable because Nick left... and it was just one night.
THOMAS
Well, I'm crazy about you.
MIMI
And I'm crazy about you. But--
THOMAS
Don't say "as a friend."
He pulled the words right out of her mouth...
MIMI
Why not, Thomas? Why is that so bad?
THOMAS
Because pretty girls like to recruit their rejections and call them friends.
[/scrippet]
Or just how they can describe something in such a way that you know exactly what they mean...
[scrippet]
Howard immediately looks around. This transparent look-through-you gaze that famous and extremely rich people do when they want to talk to someone more important.
[/scrippet]
The Only Living Boy In New York's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. We're looking at a character study here. And because Loeb is so focused on these great characters, the story itself is minimal to non-existent. Which is fine. That's par for the course in this genre. But "Living Boy" stops just short of feeling like something important. It doesn't make you reevaluate your life the way a viewing of "The Graduate" does. It's limited to the inter-connectivity of these handful of characters. But it's a great handful. I wouldn't mind scooping up a few of them and tossing them in my own screenplays. If you're a fan of "coming-of-age" films, this is a must read. If not, I would still encourage you to check this out. But I can't promise it's going to knock your socks off.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Take your time and describe your main characters people! Look at the way Loeb describes Mimi above. It takes time to come up with that. But it pays off. I know a lot of writers who would've gone with, "Mimi, 22, is artsy and hot." I'm not saying I haven't seen professional writers do this. I have. But you get so little time in a screenplay to convey the true essence of a character, and if you nail it the description, it makes things so much easier on you and the reader later on.
Premise: Coming-of-age tale about a young man trying to find himself in New York City.
About: Allan Loeb is one of the hottest writers working today. He broke onto the scene with Black List favorite, "Things We Lost In The Fire" (which I've been told is a much better script than it is a movie), penned the surprise hit "21," and most recently finished the job of one of the most sought after assignments in town, "Money Never Sleeps" (aka "Wall Street 2"), and he's got like six other projects in development. The Only Living Boy In New York is unique in that it's one of the only drama specs sold in the last 5 years that didn't have any talent attached (translation: It was really f'ing good).
Writer: Allan Loeb
Like I always say, if you're gonna steal, steal from the best. "Living Boy" is basically "The Graduate" meets "Great Expectations" with a pinch of "The Great Gatsby" thrown in for good measure. The coming-of-age stuffy upper-crust 20-something angsty tale in NY is likely to appall as much as it appeals since older folk tend to roll their eyes at insignificant "problems" us young men endure ("Oh, I missed work because I partied too late. What ever am I going to do?"). This attitude reached an all-time fever pitch during the successful run of "Garden State," a movie "Living Boy" will no doubt be compared to. But while "Boy" definitely has its share of angst, its characters lift it up and beyond Zach Braff's New Jersey opus. Things feel a bit more meaningful here. And I can attribute that mainly to Loeb's excellent writing.
20-something Thomas lives in New York City. He's best friends with a super-hot (in a hip alternative way) college chick named Mimi. In an ecstacy-inspired night of regret and stupidity, Mimi makes the mistake of granting Thomas an all-night sex-a-thon. As a result, he's fallen hopelessly in love with her. Of course Mimi considers the night a monumental college-level mistake (boy did I have my share of those) and doesn't see why Thomas can't just get over it. Thomas spends a good portion of "Living Boy" wondering why a sweet decent-looking guy like himself can't land a hot girl like Mimi.
That's the least of his worries though. While wandering aimlessly through New York one day, he accidentally spots his asshole of a father kissing a woman that is definitely NOT his mother. The 30-something icy business woman, Johanna, is easily the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. Thomas is furious. His mother is already on the verge of a mental breakdown and finding out that her husband is cheating on her would surely push her over the edge.
Rounding out the cast of characters is the mysterious W.F. Gerald (it even sounds like someone from The Great Gatsby), a 50-something "unmade bed of a man," as Loeb puts it. The wise W.F. is always there to dole out his sage advice when Thomas needs it. And Thomas needs it in spades.
He begins following his father's mistress and when he finally works up the courage to confront her, he demands that she stop seeing him. The woman, who seems not to know of these things called "feelings," makes it very clear that both she and her father can make their own decisions and that Thomas has no say in the matter. She follows this by accusing Thomas of falsely approaching her - insisting that the only reason he followed her was because he wants her himself. Thomas is appalled at the suggestion and storms away.
Later on, at a swanky upper crust party, Thomas runs into Johanna separately from his father, and she proceeds to seduce him (for the sport of it, of course), taking him home and engaging in a wild night of animal sex. Thomas now finds himself in an affair within an affair...sort of... as he starts sleeping with the same woman that is sleeping with his father. That's comfortable. Of course Mimi, playing off of Thomas' new popularity with the ladies, suddenly changes her mind and decides that she wants a relationship with Thomas. But Thomas has long since fallen in love with Johanna, and now cares only that she dump his father so the two can be together alone...and not...with his father (your average 20-something dilemma).
The way Thomas weaves in and out of these storylines is humbling to say the least. Loeb is an incredibly gifted writer. One of the true marks of great writers is how they describe their characters, and Loeb doesn't disappoint.
[scrippet]
...Mimi Pastori
wears a double dyed pink wife-beater that stops just short of her bumper sticker... the Chinese symbol of balance. She owns a temple of a body built of feminine mesa-morph and displays small diamond stud in her nose.
All of Mimi's attempts to hide her beauty fail miserably.
[/scrippet]
Or the way they write dialogue...
[scrippet]
THOMAS
I think... I... August eighth. I think August eighth was real.
MIMI
It was amazing, Thomas, but it was just one night. We were both on ecstasy, I thought I was a pirate and I was vulnerable because Nick left... and it was just one night.
THOMAS
Well, I'm crazy about you.
MIMI
And I'm crazy about you. But--
THOMAS
Don't say "as a friend."
He pulled the words right out of her mouth...
MIMI
Why not, Thomas? Why is that so bad?
THOMAS
Because pretty girls like to recruit their rejections and call them friends.
[/scrippet]
Or just how they can describe something in such a way that you know exactly what they mean...
[scrippet]
Howard immediately looks around. This transparent look-through-you gaze that famous and extremely rich people do when they want to talk to someone more important.
[/scrippet]
The Only Living Boy In New York's biggest strength is also its biggest weakness. We're looking at a character study here. And because Loeb is so focused on these great characters, the story itself is minimal to non-existent. Which is fine. That's par for the course in this genre. But "Living Boy" stops just short of feeling like something important. It doesn't make you reevaluate your life the way a viewing of "The Graduate" does. It's limited to the inter-connectivity of these handful of characters. But it's a great handful. I wouldn't mind scooping up a few of them and tossing them in my own screenplays. If you're a fan of "coming-of-age" films, this is a must read. If not, I would still encourage you to check this out. But I can't promise it's going to knock your socks off.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Take your time and describe your main characters people! Look at the way Loeb describes Mimi above. It takes time to come up with that. But it pays off. I know a lot of writers who would've gone with, "Mimi, 22, is artsy and hot." I'm not saying I haven't seen professional writers do this. I have. But you get so little time in a screenplay to convey the true essence of a character, and if you nail it the description, it makes things so much easier on you and the reader later on.
Interview with COLLEGE and DEMOTED Screenwriter Dan Callahan: PART II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part I – The Writing Process
Our chat with screenwriter Dan Callahan continues as he answers the question most aspiring writers want to know: “How do you get an agent?”
Dan Callahan: There’s all these levels to writing movies. First is coming up with a good idea, or a simple idea like College, that’s so simple that people are like, “Why didn’t I think of that?” That’s hard enough as it is. It’s hard to come up with something that’s original, or something that’s not so original but that you can put your own twist on it. Then you’ve gotta [write it up], and then you have to finish the draft, which a lot of people don’t do. Then you have to show it to people, and get notes, and make all those changes. Then finally it’s like “Okay, I did ALL that stuff and I have a script” and then it’s, “Shit. I don’t have anyone to send my script around. I don’t have an agent. I’m just sitting on material that I’ve worked months for and how do I get it out to the community?”
Getting an agent is impossible because there’s that Catch-22 everyone complains about where production companies won’t look at your stuff unless it comes through an agent. If I can’t get an agent, how can I get it in front of [them?] It’s very rare you can just query an agent – specifically at the big agencies – and they’re gonna take a look at this thing. It’s happened, I heard a story… I think Hitch was a query letter, so I’m told. So it does happen, but I think it’s very difficult.
Query letters for the most part don’t work. A lot of times there’s legal reasons for that…. At the same time [agents] are working with professional writers, trying to get them work, so do they really have time to read some dude from wherever who says he wrote the next great script?
The long story short is that Adam had a friend at an agency. It’s one of the easiest ways in – checking all your contacts and all you need is one. Whether it’s a friend of a friend of a friend who works at a production company or is already a screenwriter, or a director, producer… It’s finding someone you know, or have a connection to who’s in the business.
The fact that Adam and I moved out here, and lived out here for some years… we had contacts. One of the reasons he knew the girl at this agency [was that he lived out here in LA.] If he’d been in Chicago, he wouldn’t have known this person. So it’s important that if you want to be a professional screenwriter, you gotta live in LA. Spend numerous years out here and over the course of those years, you’re gonna meet people in the business. You’re gonna have other friends trying to do the same thing you do and eventually one of those people are gonna be in a position where they can help you out or they can at least pass the script along to somebody.
And that’s exactly what happened. We gave it to a friend at ICM. She had read pages earlier and liked it and then when we finished the script we went back and gave it to her. And it was sort of bad timing because she liked it… and then told us she was quitting [the agency business.] We were like, “Ugh… just when we think we’ve got an agent at a big agency, she says, I’m leaving to be a writer.” She’s gone on to a very successful career of writing books.
What was nice of her was before she left, she passed the script off to a colleague of hers at ICM. He was from Chicago. Adam and I are both from Chicago, so she thought we’d all hit it off. We thought that a guy would be good for something like College… She gave it to him, a guy named Nate Ross. He read it on vacation and came back and was like, “I’ll take it out next week.” It literally was that quick. He read it. He knew what it was. He liked it. I don’t even remember if he had any notes. If he did, they were minor. Stuff we could fix in a week. He basically said, “Fix this. Get it ready. We’ll take it out next week.”
Bitter Script Reader: Wow.
DC: But the reason we had our agent was because we felt we wrote a strong piece of material that was professional in every way, that was funny, and all that stemmed from all that stuff I was talking about. That all lead to this moment and we got our one shot with this guy and he felt we delivered and because of that, he took us on. Now, if he’d hated College… it would have been “Okay we need to figure out another way into the agencies.” Maybe we wouldn’t have ended up at a big agency. Maybe we would have ended up at a smaller agency. It might never have sold. But the fact of the matter is, when we had that opportunity, the script delivered and that was the start.
BSR: Did it sell fairly quickly once you went out with it?
DC: No. It didn’t. You’ll hear these stories about how something was a hot spec and every studio is bidding on it, but that wasn’t our situation at all. It went out to everybody and the way it usually works is your agent takes your script and he sends it out to various producers he has relationships with and the ones that like it come back and say, “We like College and we have a relationship at studio A… We’d like to bring the script into Paramount… or Sony, and that’s how it works. Generally scripts don’t go to studios. They usually go to producers first, who usually have deals or relationships and they bring it into the studio and say “Hey, this is a piece of material we’d like to do. Will you buy it for us?”
So we had multiple producers taking it out all over town. College took quite a while [to sell]. At the time there were a couple teen comedies floating around that we were competing with. A lot of studios had teen comedies that had been sitting around for a while that they were having trouble getting made, so why add another one?
BSR: Yeah, “We already have ours.”
DC: When American Pie hit there was a flood of teen scripts and it never stopped. So the studios were sitting on piles of teen comedies. They weren’t making them, but they had plenty of them so they didn’t need another one. And there were people that just didn’t like the script, for whatever reason. It’s a mixture of timing, finding the right producers and finding a studio that’s looking for a funny teen comedy.
BSR: A lot of stars have to align.
DC: And it didn’t for a while. What eventually happened was there was a producer named Rene Rigal who worked at a company called State Street, that did the Barbershop movies. He read College, thought it was funny… He actually called me and Adam and was one of the most passionate producers about it that we had talked to. The script had been dying down and we weren’t sure it was going to sell so, yeah, if there’s anyone that’s this excited about our work – that’s the kind of guy you want out there.
So Rene and State Street had a deal with Fox. They took it to Fox Atomic, who at the time was trying to do a Revenge of the Nerds remake, so they passed because it was the same thing. Then [State Street] took it to a company called Element that was independently financed. They did Waiting… they were working on Mr. Brooks at the time. And they liked it. They had money. Rene and State Street were the ones who got the ball rolling with Element and they essentially bought it.
And it’s not like they just buy it. They optioned it first, which is the normal process that happens. Now it’s “Can you get the script to where they want it?”
BSR: And it’s on you to bring it up to snuff.
DC: The general process is: agent takes script to producers. Producers take script to studios. They option the project. The reason they don’t buy it up front is, what if they don’t make the movie? The purchase price of a script can be very expensive. So generally studios don’t want to put out hundreds of thousands of dollars, or whatever it is – six figures generally – on something they may not make. What they generally do is put out a couple thousand dollars to option it, control the rights of the script for a certain period of time.
BSR: And you get paid when it goes into production.
DC: And you get paid when it goes into production. It’s not like people think when they read in the trades that something was just flat-out bought…
BSR: Yeah, Paramount just bought it and you walk in and they hand you your Ed McMahon-sized check…
DC: Yeah, [the perception is] they hand you a big check. [In reality] that’s not the case and it’s not smart business on the studio’s part. Why put up [a lot of] money when I could put up this much money, take the option and put the script in development? Now let’s see if we can get actors and a director. Now let’s get a start date. And they literally wait until that start date before you see any purchase price, because anything can happen before that.
There’s a lot of work involved when you get to that place and it’s one of the reasons you see writers making sacrifices, doing things in their script that they might not totally agree with because at the end of the day they want to get it made. At the end of the day, it’s a much larger payday.
BSR: The difference between five figures and six figures is kind of a motivating factor.
DC: Right, you want credit and you want to get paid. Now, there can be six figure options, so it can happen that you do hit the lottery on the option.
BSR: But not with two first-time screenwriters I imagine.
DC: In our case, that wasn’t it. There weren’t studios clamoring for the project. There were people circling but it wasn’t a case where people were so hot on the spec that people were just throwing money at us. We got a very small option and now it was a matter of us getting the project in a position where we could get a director. Because this movie wasn’t about cast.
Tomorrow: Dealing with notes and rewriting, and we’ll discuss casting and the comparisons to SUPERBAD.
Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction
Our chat with screenwriter Dan Callahan continues as he answers the question most aspiring writers want to know: “How do you get an agent?”
Dan Callahan: There’s all these levels to writing movies. First is coming up with a good idea, or a simple idea like College, that’s so simple that people are like, “Why didn’t I think of that?” That’s hard enough as it is. It’s hard to come up with something that’s original, or something that’s not so original but that you can put your own twist on it. Then you’ve gotta [write it up], and then you have to finish the draft, which a lot of people don’t do. Then you have to show it to people, and get notes, and make all those changes. Then finally it’s like “Okay, I did ALL that stuff and I have a script” and then it’s, “Shit. I don’t have anyone to send my script around. I don’t have an agent. I’m just sitting on material that I’ve worked months for and how do I get it out to the community?”
Getting an agent is impossible because there’s that Catch-22 everyone complains about where production companies won’t look at your stuff unless it comes through an agent. If I can’t get an agent, how can I get it in front of [them?] It’s very rare you can just query an agent – specifically at the big agencies – and they’re gonna take a look at this thing. It’s happened, I heard a story… I think Hitch was a query letter, so I’m told. So it does happen, but I think it’s very difficult.
Query letters for the most part don’t work. A lot of times there’s legal reasons for that…. At the same time [agents] are working with professional writers, trying to get them work, so do they really have time to read some dude from wherever who says he wrote the next great script?
The long story short is that Adam had a friend at an agency. It’s one of the easiest ways in – checking all your contacts and all you need is one. Whether it’s a friend of a friend of a friend who works at a production company or is already a screenwriter, or a director, producer… It’s finding someone you know, or have a connection to who’s in the business.
The fact that Adam and I moved out here, and lived out here for some years… we had contacts. One of the reasons he knew the girl at this agency [was that he lived out here in LA.] If he’d been in Chicago, he wouldn’t have known this person. So it’s important that if you want to be a professional screenwriter, you gotta live in LA. Spend numerous years out here and over the course of those years, you’re gonna meet people in the business. You’re gonna have other friends trying to do the same thing you do and eventually one of those people are gonna be in a position where they can help you out or they can at least pass the script along to somebody.
And that’s exactly what happened. We gave it to a friend at ICM. She had read pages earlier and liked it and then when we finished the script we went back and gave it to her. And it was sort of bad timing because she liked it… and then told us she was quitting [the agency business.] We were like, “Ugh… just when we think we’ve got an agent at a big agency, she says, I’m leaving to be a writer.” She’s gone on to a very successful career of writing books.
What was nice of her was before she left, she passed the script off to a colleague of hers at ICM. He was from Chicago. Adam and I are both from Chicago, so she thought we’d all hit it off. We thought that a guy would be good for something like College… She gave it to him, a guy named Nate Ross. He read it on vacation and came back and was like, “I’ll take it out next week.” It literally was that quick. He read it. He knew what it was. He liked it. I don’t even remember if he had any notes. If he did, they were minor. Stuff we could fix in a week. He basically said, “Fix this. Get it ready. We’ll take it out next week.”
Bitter Script Reader: Wow.
DC: But the reason we had our agent was because we felt we wrote a strong piece of material that was professional in every way, that was funny, and all that stemmed from all that stuff I was talking about. That all lead to this moment and we got our one shot with this guy and he felt we delivered and because of that, he took us on. Now, if he’d hated College… it would have been “Okay we need to figure out another way into the agencies.” Maybe we wouldn’t have ended up at a big agency. Maybe we would have ended up at a smaller agency. It might never have sold. But the fact of the matter is, when we had that opportunity, the script delivered and that was the start.
BSR: Did it sell fairly quickly once you went out with it?
DC: No. It didn’t. You’ll hear these stories about how something was a hot spec and every studio is bidding on it, but that wasn’t our situation at all. It went out to everybody and the way it usually works is your agent takes your script and he sends it out to various producers he has relationships with and the ones that like it come back and say, “We like College and we have a relationship at studio A… We’d like to bring the script into Paramount… or Sony, and that’s how it works. Generally scripts don’t go to studios. They usually go to producers first, who usually have deals or relationships and they bring it into the studio and say “Hey, this is a piece of material we’d like to do. Will you buy it for us?”
So we had multiple producers taking it out all over town. College took quite a while [to sell]. At the time there were a couple teen comedies floating around that we were competing with. A lot of studios had teen comedies that had been sitting around for a while that they were having trouble getting made, so why add another one?
BSR: Yeah, “We already have ours.”
DC: When American Pie hit there was a flood of teen scripts and it never stopped. So the studios were sitting on piles of teen comedies. They weren’t making them, but they had plenty of them so they didn’t need another one. And there were people that just didn’t like the script, for whatever reason. It’s a mixture of timing, finding the right producers and finding a studio that’s looking for a funny teen comedy.
BSR: A lot of stars have to align.
DC: And it didn’t for a while. What eventually happened was there was a producer named Rene Rigal who worked at a company called State Street, that did the Barbershop movies. He read College, thought it was funny… He actually called me and Adam and was one of the most passionate producers about it that we had talked to. The script had been dying down and we weren’t sure it was going to sell so, yeah, if there’s anyone that’s this excited about our work – that’s the kind of guy you want out there.
So Rene and State Street had a deal with Fox. They took it to Fox Atomic, who at the time was trying to do a Revenge of the Nerds remake, so they passed because it was the same thing. Then [State Street] took it to a company called Element that was independently financed. They did Waiting… they were working on Mr. Brooks at the time. And they liked it. They had money. Rene and State Street were the ones who got the ball rolling with Element and they essentially bought it.
And it’s not like they just buy it. They optioned it first, which is the normal process that happens. Now it’s “Can you get the script to where they want it?”
BSR: And it’s on you to bring it up to snuff.
DC: The general process is: agent takes script to producers. Producers take script to studios. They option the project. The reason they don’t buy it up front is, what if they don’t make the movie? The purchase price of a script can be very expensive. So generally studios don’t want to put out hundreds of thousands of dollars, or whatever it is – six figures generally – on something they may not make. What they generally do is put out a couple thousand dollars to option it, control the rights of the script for a certain period of time.
BSR: And you get paid when it goes into production.
DC: And you get paid when it goes into production. It’s not like people think when they read in the trades that something was just flat-out bought…
BSR: Yeah, Paramount just bought it and you walk in and they hand you your Ed McMahon-sized check…
DC: Yeah, [the perception is] they hand you a big check. [In reality] that’s not the case and it’s not smart business on the studio’s part. Why put up [a lot of] money when I could put up this much money, take the option and put the script in development? Now let’s see if we can get actors and a director. Now let’s get a start date. And they literally wait until that start date before you see any purchase price, because anything can happen before that.
There’s a lot of work involved when you get to that place and it’s one of the reasons you see writers making sacrifices, doing things in their script that they might not totally agree with because at the end of the day they want to get it made. At the end of the day, it’s a much larger payday.
BSR: The difference between five figures and six figures is kind of a motivating factor.
DC: Right, you want credit and you want to get paid. Now, there can be six figure options, so it can happen that you do hit the lottery on the option.
BSR: But not with two first-time screenwriters I imagine.
DC: In our case, that wasn’t it. There weren’t studios clamoring for the project. There were people circling but it wasn’t a case where people were so hot on the spec that people were just throwing money at us. We got a very small option and now it was a matter of us getting the project in a position where we could get a director. Because this movie wasn’t about cast.
Tomorrow: Dealing with notes and rewriting, and we’ll discuss casting and the comparisons to SUPERBAD.
Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction
Danny Graves' Man Cave
Genre: Comedy
Premise: A family man on the verge of a mid-life crisis turns his basement into a "man-cave", complete with all the amenities every man needs. Later he discovers a hidden passage in the cave that takes him into an alternate reality male dreamworld.
About: Man Cave was picked up by Sony in April. Joe Roth will produce. Lutz and Isser have another project set up at Intrepid called "Park Narcs," a comedy about park rangers.
Writer: Jacob Isser & Paul Lutz
I admit it. I'm a sucker for "Guy feels lost and tries to change his life" movies. Why? Oh, I don't know. Maybe because I feel that way every other week! The idea of someone taking charge and doing something about their problem is inspiring because normally, in real life, all we do is sit around and bitch about it. We never actually do anything to change our circumstances. The title "Danny Graves' Man Cave" doesn't exactly inspire thoughts of a contemplative exploration of what it means to be a man, but that's kind of what Man Cave is about. Does it succeed? I don't know if I'd go that far, but it's definitely more ambitious than your average comedy. For a script I expected to be a 2 hour beer commercial, getting this unexpectedly complicated look at life was a nice surprise.
Danny Graves is a somewhat-loving husband to his wife Alison, and a serviceable dad to his weird elementary school son, Lucas. But things have been deteriorating in Danny's life lately and he's starting to wonder, "Is this all there is?" In a random trip into his basement, a trip that gives him some much-needed downtime- he sees...the light. A cave. A MAN cave. No women allowed. No children allowed. No work allowed. Just peace, beer, and TV. A utopia to celebrate owning a penis.
Upon completion of his Mantopia, Danny discovers a secret passageway which leads to a crawlspace, which leads to a ladder, which opens up to his backyard. Except this doesn't feel like the backyard he knows. One look around tells us why. There's a picture of a vagina on the local water tower. There's a Mustang in the garage. His neighbor is no longer a pussy about everything. His wife actually dresses up sexy for him. His son actually has friends! It's...an alternate Man Universe! A man-iverse.
Danny gets situated in his new world pretty easily - this world where people drink beer instead of water, where men get tattoos during their lunch break, where women are sex objects and love it, where if you want to make a point at work, you light something on fire dammit! And best of all, Danny is the Alpha Male in this world.
But his alternate universe isn't a time machine, and whatever time he spends in the "Man-World" is time that goes by sans Danny in the real world. Needless to say, his wife, son, co-workers and boss start to get suspicious. And since there are only so many excuses (I think all us guys know that), Danny must begrudgingly balance his time between the two worlds.
The entire second act is the weakest part of Man Cave because it's just one long extension of the premise. Danny experiences awesomeness in Man World. Danny experiences suckage in Real World. Man World = good. Real World = bad. It's frustrating because you're waiting for the story to take over - but there is no story. Danny's only goal is to escape the Real World as much as possible. Not until late in the 2nd act when the Man World starts to show its cracks does the story pick up momentum again. But it's when Alison discovers Danny's Man World, this terrifying alternate reality, her sluttier hotter dopplehanger, that things really derail for Danny.
I'll be honest with you, after a great first act, I was really down on this script because nothing interesting happens for the entire middle portion. For lack of a better word it was boring. But I have to give it to Lutz & Isser. The surprise 3rd act sequence brings Danny Graves back from the grave.
In the act, Danny finds a second passageway in his Man Cave, and wonders what a Man World inside of a Man World would be like (come on - wouldn't we all?). So he crawls through the crawlspace, up the ladder, into the yard to see...Man World 2. In this Man World, his lawn is made of astroturf. His wife is dressed like a hooker and is ready for a 3-way with his hot co-worker. There's a picture of a shaved pussy on the local water tower. Neighbors have monster trucks parked in the driveway. It's both horrifying and fascinating. But Danny's curiosity isn't quenched. He needs more. So he goes into the basement, through the passageway, and into the 3rd Man World. This world is even darker. His neighbor, Norm, has a cro-magnum face and is dragging his wife by the hair. Women run around the neighborhood topless. Men are beating the shit out of each other. But Danny doesn't stop there. He goes into the basement, through the passageway, and opens up the vent to enter the 4th Man World. And it's just darkness. Darkness and shadows. And he sees something coming towards him. Hunched over. Dirty. A monster. And when the creature gets close enough to see, we realize...
It's Danny. Or some version of Danny.
He slams the lid closed and runs back through all the Man Worlds, back to the main world, desperately in search of his family, because he finally understands just how beautiful and satisfying and worthwhile his real life is.
Does it work? Not really. His wife is so unlikable and his kid so weird, that it's not clear why he would all of a sudden realize he likes them again, or have ever liked them in the first place for that matter. I kinda wanted Isser and Lutz to grow some balls (ahem - staying with tonight's theme) and stick with their dark instincts on the ending. If you create a reprehensible living situation for your protagonist, you have to give us a reason why he would go back to it other than that it's the end of the movie. It makes no sense.
To me, this is an odd script. It starts out like The Graduate, becomes a broad comedy, then hits us with a dark third act. The tonal issues alone probably should've prevented a sale. But there is *something* about Danny Graves' Man Cave, particularly towards the end, that makes it difficult to dismiss. By no means will I say you have to read this. But there are enough interesting choices in here to make it worth the read.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
WHAT I LEARNED: What's driving your story? I consider this to be *the* most important screenwriting question you can ask yourself. At every point in your script, there needs to be a clear and intense force that's driving the story. Something propelling us along. A point. A goal. A purpose. The reason Danny Graves' second act drags is because it doesn't have that engine. What's Danny's goal? What's the story's goal? What are we working up towards? Nothing. We're just waiting to see how extensively Danny's life can unravel. Personally, I don't think that's compelling enough. Sure there's the rare movie that doesn't have an obvious driving force (The Graduate comes to mind) but in those cases the characters have to be so incredibly captivating that we forget about the story. Giving Danny something tangible to go after here could've helped the script a lot. As it stands, there's nothing to look forward to other than more "antics."
Premise: A family man on the verge of a mid-life crisis turns his basement into a "man-cave", complete with all the amenities every man needs. Later he discovers a hidden passage in the cave that takes him into an alternate reality male dreamworld.
About: Man Cave was picked up by Sony in April. Joe Roth will produce. Lutz and Isser have another project set up at Intrepid called "Park Narcs," a comedy about park rangers.
Writer: Jacob Isser & Paul Lutz
I admit it. I'm a sucker for "Guy feels lost and tries to change his life" movies. Why? Oh, I don't know. Maybe because I feel that way every other week! The idea of someone taking charge and doing something about their problem is inspiring because normally, in real life, all we do is sit around and bitch about it. We never actually do anything to change our circumstances. The title "Danny Graves' Man Cave" doesn't exactly inspire thoughts of a contemplative exploration of what it means to be a man, but that's kind of what Man Cave is about. Does it succeed? I don't know if I'd go that far, but it's definitely more ambitious than your average comedy. For a script I expected to be a 2 hour beer commercial, getting this unexpectedly complicated look at life was a nice surprise.
Danny Graves is a somewhat-loving husband to his wife Alison, and a serviceable dad to his weird elementary school son, Lucas. But things have been deteriorating in Danny's life lately and he's starting to wonder, "Is this all there is?" In a random trip into his basement, a trip that gives him some much-needed downtime- he sees...the light. A cave. A MAN cave. No women allowed. No children allowed. No work allowed. Just peace, beer, and TV. A utopia to celebrate owning a penis.
Upon completion of his Mantopia, Danny discovers a secret passageway which leads to a crawlspace, which leads to a ladder, which opens up to his backyard. Except this doesn't feel like the backyard he knows. One look around tells us why. There's a picture of a vagina on the local water tower. There's a Mustang in the garage. His neighbor is no longer a pussy about everything. His wife actually dresses up sexy for him. His son actually has friends! It's...an alternate Man Universe! A man-iverse.
Danny gets situated in his new world pretty easily - this world where people drink beer instead of water, where men get tattoos during their lunch break, where women are sex objects and love it, where if you want to make a point at work, you light something on fire dammit! And best of all, Danny is the Alpha Male in this world.
But his alternate universe isn't a time machine, and whatever time he spends in the "Man-World" is time that goes by sans Danny in the real world. Needless to say, his wife, son, co-workers and boss start to get suspicious. And since there are only so many excuses (I think all us guys know that), Danny must begrudgingly balance his time between the two worlds.
The entire second act is the weakest part of Man Cave because it's just one long extension of the premise. Danny experiences awesomeness in Man World. Danny experiences suckage in Real World. Man World = good. Real World = bad. It's frustrating because you're waiting for the story to take over - but there is no story. Danny's only goal is to escape the Real World as much as possible. Not until late in the 2nd act when the Man World starts to show its cracks does the story pick up momentum again. But it's when Alison discovers Danny's Man World, this terrifying alternate reality, her sluttier hotter dopplehanger, that things really derail for Danny.
I'll be honest with you, after a great first act, I was really down on this script because nothing interesting happens for the entire middle portion. For lack of a better word it was boring. But I have to give it to Lutz & Isser. The surprise 3rd act sequence brings Danny Graves back from the grave.
In the act, Danny finds a second passageway in his Man Cave, and wonders what a Man World inside of a Man World would be like (come on - wouldn't we all?). So he crawls through the crawlspace, up the ladder, into the yard to see...Man World 2. In this Man World, his lawn is made of astroturf. His wife is dressed like a hooker and is ready for a 3-way with his hot co-worker. There's a picture of a shaved pussy on the local water tower. Neighbors have monster trucks parked in the driveway. It's both horrifying and fascinating. But Danny's curiosity isn't quenched. He needs more. So he goes into the basement, through the passageway, and into the 3rd Man World. This world is even darker. His neighbor, Norm, has a cro-magnum face and is dragging his wife by the hair. Women run around the neighborhood topless. Men are beating the shit out of each other. But Danny doesn't stop there. He goes into the basement, through the passageway, and opens up the vent to enter the 4th Man World. And it's just darkness. Darkness and shadows. And he sees something coming towards him. Hunched over. Dirty. A monster. And when the creature gets close enough to see, we realize...
It's Danny. Or some version of Danny.
He slams the lid closed and runs back through all the Man Worlds, back to the main world, desperately in search of his family, because he finally understands just how beautiful and satisfying and worthwhile his real life is.
Does it work? Not really. His wife is so unlikable and his kid so weird, that it's not clear why he would all of a sudden realize he likes them again, or have ever liked them in the first place for that matter. I kinda wanted Isser and Lutz to grow some balls (ahem - staying with tonight's theme) and stick with their dark instincts on the ending. If you create a reprehensible living situation for your protagonist, you have to give us a reason why he would go back to it other than that it's the end of the movie. It makes no sense.
To me, this is an odd script. It starts out like The Graduate, becomes a broad comedy, then hits us with a dark third act. The tonal issues alone probably should've prevented a sale. But there is *something* about Danny Graves' Man Cave, particularly towards the end, that makes it difficult to dismiss. By no means will I say you have to read this. But there are enough interesting choices in here to make it worth the read.
[ ] trash
[ ] barely kept my interest
[x] worth the read
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
WHAT I LEARNED: What's driving your story? I consider this to be *the* most important screenwriting question you can ask yourself. At every point in your script, there needs to be a clear and intense force that's driving the story. Something propelling us along. A point. A goal. A purpose. The reason Danny Graves' second act drags is because it doesn't have that engine. What's Danny's goal? What's the story's goal? What are we working up towards? Nothing. We're just waiting to see how extensively Danny's life can unravel. Personally, I don't think that's compelling enough. Sure there's the rare movie that doesn't have an obvious driving force (The Graduate comes to mind) but in those cases the characters have to be so incredibly captivating that we forget about the story. Giving Danny something tangible to go after here could've helped the script a lot. As it stands, there's nothing to look forward to other than more "antics."
Interview with COLLEGE and DEMOTED Screenwriter Dan Callahan: PART I – The Writing Process
As an actor, Dan Callahan has appeared in 14 films over the last seven years, but lately his career has taken him in a different direction – screenwriting.
His current project, Demoted, is in post-production and stars Michael Vartan (“Alias”), David Cross (“Arrested Development”), Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings), Sara Foster (“90210”), and Constance Zimmer (“Entourage”). Last year, his first feature College, co-written with Adam Ellison, was released by MGM. The film was directed by first-time director Deb Hagan and starred Drake Bell, Andrew Caldwell, and Kevin Covais.
The film was neither a critical nor financial success. (Rotten Tomatoes currently rates it at 6% fresh.) When I touched base with Dan, however, I asked him to send me the draft of the script that sold (dated January 6, 2006). During the read, I discovered interesting differences between the draft the studio bought, and the film that they released.
Dan was kind enough to sit down with me for a 90-minute chat that should be of interest to every aspiring screenwriter. Over the next five days, we’ll trace the entire experience of becoming a working screenwriter, from finishing the script, to getting an agent, to making a sale, to dealing with notes from producers and studios; the sort that could change the entire shape of a movie.
The Bitter Script Reader: Thanks for sending me the script. It’s interesting to see the version that sold versus the version that was produced
Dan Callahan: A lot of differences.
BSR: Yeah. Many, many differences. And some stuff that was totally verbatim. Half that trailer was verbatim from your original script.
DC: There’s moments that are, and there’s moments that are totally different.
BSR: We’ll get to this later, but I couldn’t help but notice going through the reviews that a lot of the stuff you got hit over wasn’t in the original script.
DC: Probably not. I could probably sit here and point out those differences and why it was a problem that they were taken out. And I think it affects the movie. But we’ll talk about that.
BSR: Was College the first script you wrote?
DC: Yeah.
BSR: Really?
DC: I studied writing in college. I was an English major with an emphasis in writing. As a kid, I’d write stories, was always creatively inclined. Art inclined. I definitely leaned toward that kind of thing. I always liked the creative writing and I didn’t like any other type of writing. I’d never want to be a journalist or write research papers. That I sucked at and didn’t enjoy. Things like create a story, I’d love to do. So while College was basically my first script, it wasn’t like I’d never written anything before.
I’d studied many forms of writing. I didn’t realize you could make a living writing movies. I never thought that there was someone out there who made a living doing that. I used to make a lot of films when I was a kid, like in school when you had to build some sort of history project… more times or not I’d option for some sort of film-oriented project. So in a weird way I was already doing this sort of stuff. I just never thought about sitting down and actually writing a film until much later.
BSR: And as far as structuring it, how did you get started?
DC: It wasn’t like I just sat down and wrote a movie. There was a class in school, a director from NYU would come out and teach like a screenwriting course: the basics. We probably had to write a short piece or something at the end of the class, so I got an idea of that. Then for me it was reading a lot of scripts, which I think is the best thing.
BSR: Yeah, so you can see how other people do it.
DC: Yeah, you know. You read a lot of stuff and I’ve always been reading scripts. To this day I would read everything I could get my hands on. Bigger scripts and what’s selling so I know what’s selling and what other writers are doing. At the end of the day it’s hard to be too original [because] so many movies have been made, so many stories have been told. And there’s things you can learn from other people’s scripts like somebody’s style, or a device and it’s something you can incorporate into your scripts…. And also just the proper structure. Half the time you’ll read an amateur script and anyone who’s written or read a lot of scripts knows immediately if that guy knows what he’s doing or not. You know what I mean?
BSR: I know exactly what you mean.
DC: Like the structure’s off and you know that this is a problem. Odds are it’s not gonna be a good script because they’re not even gonna have it in the right structure, or format, which is all just part of being a professional writer. You’ve [probably] seen those scripts that have been randomly sent out and they’ve taken no effort to take the time to research how are scripts written. “How do I present them to people?”
BSR: “What font do I use?”
DC: All that stuff is really important to making your script look professional. And if your script looks professional, people are going to take it seriously and they might actually read it. But if your script comes in Word, or some other form, or it’s got some elaborate cover page… all that stuff [will probably keep it from being taken seriously.]
BSR: Yeah, it’s like “Strike One, Strike Two” before they even open the cover.
DC: This was stuff I didn’t even know until I was looking at professional scripts. It’s important to do that stuff so that it looks professional. So for me, reading scripts by professional writers who are out there selling, that’s the best education - that’s better than any screenwriting course or any of these books…. I’d rather sit down and read twenty scripts of working screenwriters and see what they do and try to mimic that as opposed to some guy who’s just teaching a screenwriting course, but never worked as a professional screenwriter. It’s two different things.
There’s writing and there’s the business and they go hand in hand. The more professional your scripts look, the more seriously you’ll be taken as a writer. Reading scripts was the first thing that got me… before I ever wrote College, I had read a ton of scripts. Nowadays with the internet and having access to scripts online, there’s no reason someone can’t go and find scripts and read, look at it, and go get Final Draft…. Access to interviews of writers, and some of my favorite books are just interviews with writers and how they did it.
[A short digression about DVD commentaries follows, leading me to remark on Star Trek: Generations commentary by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga as a rare example of writers having the chance to be candid about all the different influences on the screenplay and why certain choices were made.]
DC: Yeah, and it would be nice to be honest about the process and why certain decisions were made. Why the studio wanted this, and this is how it turned out because of that, for either good or bad. [Most people] just watch the movie and that’s it. They don’t think about all the thought that went into every single line of dialogue, or every scene….
BSR: Or scenes that had to be cut, and so on. To get back to the writing, how long did it take you to write the first draft?
DC: I don’t know exactly, but it took a couple months. It was not a quick process. You’d think College is such a simple idea but part of that script was finding exactly how it was gonna work and where it was gonna go. It wasn’t something where we had a very big treatment. We had a really rough idea of what we wanted and essentially I just wanted to take high school and college and pair them together. The original idea was that it was gonna be a college town that was dominated by the local college and you have a group of high school kids and they’re always put down by the college kids that run this town. Never allowed into parties, they’re made fun of because they’re in high school and younger… That was the original idea… and they’re sort of fed up with dealing with this…
They want to meet the college girls and this is sort of how they do that. That sort of stemmed into “Is there another way to bring those two worlds together?” And that led to “What is something everyone has been through?” Most people have done college visits and once you open that up there’s many different ways. Is it with their parents? Is it not with their parents? Why are they going to this particular college? That opens up a whole new world of ideas, and the only movie that we’d seen that did that was PCU, which we liked, so we were surprised it hadn’t [been done.]… None of them had done the most simple thing you could do, the college visit.
BSR: Most everybody would relate to that. Everyone goes off for these weekends.
DC: PCU did it with a single kid and we felt there was more that we could do with the general idea. That was the start of it and then I’d say that after a couple months we had that first draft.
BSR: How did the two of you divide up the work on that? Were you always in the room together? Would you pick scenes? Would one of you write and the other rewrite?
DC: We didn’t write together. We wrote primarily by email. Some of the stuff I had written before Adam got involved because I’d had the idea for a while. Often when I get an idea, a scene will pop into my head and so I’ll write it down and it’ll give me a gauge as to if it’ll work.
BSR: Give you a tone to work off of.
DC: Yeah, it sort of sets the tone. For instance, there’s a scene where a kid in the cafeteria gives a speech about what happened to him…
BSR: The speech in the trailer.
DC: It’s this crazy, long speech that was the first thing I wrote for College. In fact, I wrote that before I even told Adam the idea. That speech kinda sums up the whole movie and it set the whole tone for the movie. From there it was “how do we take this speech?” Either we’d do the opposite of it and none of this shit would happen to [our lead characters] or they have an even crazier weekend. So then we just started bouncing ideas back and forth.
BSR: Figuring out the beats of the story.
DC: Exactly. Then the only time we sat in the room together was after the script was bought and [we had to do rewrites.] Mostly it was talking on the phone and shooting email back and forth. I’d write up a scene and send it to Adam. He’d do something and send it back. Just that process.
BSR: How do you handle disputes?
DC: I don’t remember any huge differences. The way that movie is, there are only certain things you could do. A lot of times you’ve written yourself into a position where your characters can only do one or two choices. You’d think there’d be ten different options but there’s really not because it wouldn’t make sense [for that character to do some of those things]... We work it out one way or the other. Often it was trying it one way, and you’d read it and it doesn’t work. So you go maybe the other way, and it’s like “Oh he was right.”
BSR: How many drafts did you go through and how long before you knew it was ready to be shown to people?
DC: There were a ton of drafts… because for me, I rewrite a lot. So by the time we did one or two or three drafts, we’d done so many options…. I went back through some of the College stuff the other day and we had about 200 pages of material that was alternate versions of scenes. I would take a scene and write it five different ways, and then go with the version I liked best. So in a way, my rewrites were happening all the time…. Almost to a fault because it slows me down.
I’ll spend days rewriting, where some people can just blow through a draft and get it done and fix it up later. I have a really hard time doing that because if it doesn’t feel like where it’s supposed to be, it’s hard for me to get into it. I end up rewriting until I get to the point where I feel it’s finished to me. Later, you’ll get a note that changes that, but at the time I’ve taken it as far as I can…. I could probably write two more movies out of the [extra] stuff I have. I tend to overwrite, just because I like to have options. Which also helps later when I get done because I’ve tried a lot of what people are going to suggest. I’m not saying it’s the best way. It’s not the quickest way. And with College it probably came because we didn’t have it so outlined out.
BSR: You had more of a wide-open playing field.
DC: There are a lot of different things you could do with that middle section [of the script.] It’s a long, long process. We waited a long time to show it to people. We waited until we felt like we’d taken it as far as we could take it, and were sick of it, that now it’s like “Let’s show it to people.”
The rewriting is important because when you do decide to show it to an agent or a producer, you’re not gonna get a second chance, so you have to keep rewriting this thing to the point… that you’ve got it locked down as much as you can. [The notes you get from friends] might be the same notes you get from the studio, so you might as well get them now and get them fixed, so that when you get the agent he’s not coming back with notes you could have gotten months ago. You might not get him to read that next draft.
It helps to write with a partner because you’re constantly giving each other notes. You’re fixing each other’s problems. It’s someone else to filter material through. By then you hope that you’ve got a solid enough draft to start showing people.
BSR: Which leads to the question everyone is waiting for… once you get it to that point, how do you get an agent?
And we’ll end today’s segment on that cliffhanger. Come back tomorrow for the answer to the question I certainly get asked the most often: “How do you get an agent?”
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction
His current project, Demoted, is in post-production and stars Michael Vartan (“Alias”), David Cross (“Arrested Development”), Sean Astin (The Lord of the Rings), Sara Foster (“90210”), and Constance Zimmer (“Entourage”). Last year, his first feature College, co-written with Adam Ellison, was released by MGM. The film was directed by first-time director Deb Hagan and starred Drake Bell, Andrew Caldwell, and Kevin Covais.
The film was neither a critical nor financial success. (Rotten Tomatoes currently rates it at 6% fresh.) When I touched base with Dan, however, I asked him to send me the draft of the script that sold (dated January 6, 2006). During the read, I discovered interesting differences between the draft the studio bought, and the film that they released.
Dan was kind enough to sit down with me for a 90-minute chat that should be of interest to every aspiring screenwriter. Over the next five days, we’ll trace the entire experience of becoming a working screenwriter, from finishing the script, to getting an agent, to making a sale, to dealing with notes from producers and studios; the sort that could change the entire shape of a movie.
The Bitter Script Reader: Thanks for sending me the script. It’s interesting to see the version that sold versus the version that was produced
Dan Callahan: A lot of differences.
BSR: Yeah. Many, many differences. And some stuff that was totally verbatim. Half that trailer was verbatim from your original script.
DC: There’s moments that are, and there’s moments that are totally different.
BSR: We’ll get to this later, but I couldn’t help but notice going through the reviews that a lot of the stuff you got hit over wasn’t in the original script.
DC: Probably not. I could probably sit here and point out those differences and why it was a problem that they were taken out. And I think it affects the movie. But we’ll talk about that.
BSR: Was College the first script you wrote?
DC: Yeah.
BSR: Really?
DC: I studied writing in college. I was an English major with an emphasis in writing. As a kid, I’d write stories, was always creatively inclined. Art inclined. I definitely leaned toward that kind of thing. I always liked the creative writing and I didn’t like any other type of writing. I’d never want to be a journalist or write research papers. That I sucked at and didn’t enjoy. Things like create a story, I’d love to do. So while College was basically my first script, it wasn’t like I’d never written anything before.
I’d studied many forms of writing. I didn’t realize you could make a living writing movies. I never thought that there was someone out there who made a living doing that. I used to make a lot of films when I was a kid, like in school when you had to build some sort of history project… more times or not I’d option for some sort of film-oriented project. So in a weird way I was already doing this sort of stuff. I just never thought about sitting down and actually writing a film until much later.
BSR: And as far as structuring it, how did you get started?
DC: It wasn’t like I just sat down and wrote a movie. There was a class in school, a director from NYU would come out and teach like a screenwriting course: the basics. We probably had to write a short piece or something at the end of the class, so I got an idea of that. Then for me it was reading a lot of scripts, which I think is the best thing.
BSR: Yeah, so you can see how other people do it.
DC: Yeah, you know. You read a lot of stuff and I’ve always been reading scripts. To this day I would read everything I could get my hands on. Bigger scripts and what’s selling so I know what’s selling and what other writers are doing. At the end of the day it’s hard to be too original [because] so many movies have been made, so many stories have been told. And there’s things you can learn from other people’s scripts like somebody’s style, or a device and it’s something you can incorporate into your scripts…. And also just the proper structure. Half the time you’ll read an amateur script and anyone who’s written or read a lot of scripts knows immediately if that guy knows what he’s doing or not. You know what I mean?
BSR: I know exactly what you mean.
DC: Like the structure’s off and you know that this is a problem. Odds are it’s not gonna be a good script because they’re not even gonna have it in the right structure, or format, which is all just part of being a professional writer. You’ve [probably] seen those scripts that have been randomly sent out and they’ve taken no effort to take the time to research how are scripts written. “How do I present them to people?”
BSR: “What font do I use?”
DC: All that stuff is really important to making your script look professional. And if your script looks professional, people are going to take it seriously and they might actually read it. But if your script comes in Word, or some other form, or it’s got some elaborate cover page… all that stuff [will probably keep it from being taken seriously.]
BSR: Yeah, it’s like “Strike One, Strike Two” before they even open the cover.
DC: This was stuff I didn’t even know until I was looking at professional scripts. It’s important to do that stuff so that it looks professional. So for me, reading scripts by professional writers who are out there selling, that’s the best education - that’s better than any screenwriting course or any of these books…. I’d rather sit down and read twenty scripts of working screenwriters and see what they do and try to mimic that as opposed to some guy who’s just teaching a screenwriting course, but never worked as a professional screenwriter. It’s two different things.
There’s writing and there’s the business and they go hand in hand. The more professional your scripts look, the more seriously you’ll be taken as a writer. Reading scripts was the first thing that got me… before I ever wrote College, I had read a ton of scripts. Nowadays with the internet and having access to scripts online, there’s no reason someone can’t go and find scripts and read, look at it, and go get Final Draft…. Access to interviews of writers, and some of my favorite books are just interviews with writers and how they did it.
[A short digression about DVD commentaries follows, leading me to remark on Star Trek: Generations commentary by Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga as a rare example of writers having the chance to be candid about all the different influences on the screenplay and why certain choices were made.]
DC: Yeah, and it would be nice to be honest about the process and why certain decisions were made. Why the studio wanted this, and this is how it turned out because of that, for either good or bad. [Most people] just watch the movie and that’s it. They don’t think about all the thought that went into every single line of dialogue, or every scene….
BSR: Or scenes that had to be cut, and so on. To get back to the writing, how long did it take you to write the first draft?
DC: I don’t know exactly, but it took a couple months. It was not a quick process. You’d think College is such a simple idea but part of that script was finding exactly how it was gonna work and where it was gonna go. It wasn’t something where we had a very big treatment. We had a really rough idea of what we wanted and essentially I just wanted to take high school and college and pair them together. The original idea was that it was gonna be a college town that was dominated by the local college and you have a group of high school kids and they’re always put down by the college kids that run this town. Never allowed into parties, they’re made fun of because they’re in high school and younger… That was the original idea… and they’re sort of fed up with dealing with this…
They want to meet the college girls and this is sort of how they do that. That sort of stemmed into “Is there another way to bring those two worlds together?” And that led to “What is something everyone has been through?” Most people have done college visits and once you open that up there’s many different ways. Is it with their parents? Is it not with their parents? Why are they going to this particular college? That opens up a whole new world of ideas, and the only movie that we’d seen that did that was PCU, which we liked, so we were surprised it hadn’t [been done.]… None of them had done the most simple thing you could do, the college visit.
BSR: Most everybody would relate to that. Everyone goes off for these weekends.
DC: PCU did it with a single kid and we felt there was more that we could do with the general idea. That was the start of it and then I’d say that after a couple months we had that first draft.
BSR: How did the two of you divide up the work on that? Were you always in the room together? Would you pick scenes? Would one of you write and the other rewrite?
DC: We didn’t write together. We wrote primarily by email. Some of the stuff I had written before Adam got involved because I’d had the idea for a while. Often when I get an idea, a scene will pop into my head and so I’ll write it down and it’ll give me a gauge as to if it’ll work.
BSR: Give you a tone to work off of.
DC: Yeah, it sort of sets the tone. For instance, there’s a scene where a kid in the cafeteria gives a speech about what happened to him…
BSR: The speech in the trailer.
DC: It’s this crazy, long speech that was the first thing I wrote for College. In fact, I wrote that before I even told Adam the idea. That speech kinda sums up the whole movie and it set the whole tone for the movie. From there it was “how do we take this speech?” Either we’d do the opposite of it and none of this shit would happen to [our lead characters] or they have an even crazier weekend. So then we just started bouncing ideas back and forth.
BSR: Figuring out the beats of the story.
DC: Exactly. Then the only time we sat in the room together was after the script was bought and [we had to do rewrites.] Mostly it was talking on the phone and shooting email back and forth. I’d write up a scene and send it to Adam. He’d do something and send it back. Just that process.
BSR: How do you handle disputes?
DC: I don’t remember any huge differences. The way that movie is, there are only certain things you could do. A lot of times you’ve written yourself into a position where your characters can only do one or two choices. You’d think there’d be ten different options but there’s really not because it wouldn’t make sense [for that character to do some of those things]... We work it out one way or the other. Often it was trying it one way, and you’d read it and it doesn’t work. So you go maybe the other way, and it’s like “Oh he was right.”
BSR: How many drafts did you go through and how long before you knew it was ready to be shown to people?
DC: There were a ton of drafts… because for me, I rewrite a lot. So by the time we did one or two or three drafts, we’d done so many options…. I went back through some of the College stuff the other day and we had about 200 pages of material that was alternate versions of scenes. I would take a scene and write it five different ways, and then go with the version I liked best. So in a way, my rewrites were happening all the time…. Almost to a fault because it slows me down.
I’ll spend days rewriting, where some people can just blow through a draft and get it done and fix it up later. I have a really hard time doing that because if it doesn’t feel like where it’s supposed to be, it’s hard for me to get into it. I end up rewriting until I get to the point where I feel it’s finished to me. Later, you’ll get a note that changes that, but at the time I’ve taken it as far as I can…. I could probably write two more movies out of the [extra] stuff I have. I tend to overwrite, just because I like to have options. Which also helps later when I get done because I’ve tried a lot of what people are going to suggest. I’m not saying it’s the best way. It’s not the quickest way. And with College it probably came because we didn’t have it so outlined out.
BSR: You had more of a wide-open playing field.
DC: There are a lot of different things you could do with that middle section [of the script.] It’s a long, long process. We waited a long time to show it to people. We waited until we felt like we’d taken it as far as we could take it, and were sick of it, that now it’s like “Let’s show it to people.”
The rewriting is important because when you do decide to show it to an agent or a producer, you’re not gonna get a second chance, so you have to keep rewriting this thing to the point… that you’ve got it locked down as much as you can. [The notes you get from friends] might be the same notes you get from the studio, so you might as well get them now and get them fixed, so that when you get the agent he’s not coming back with notes you could have gotten months ago. You might not get him to read that next draft.
It helps to write with a partner because you’re constantly giving each other notes. You’re fixing each other’s problems. It’s someone else to filter material through. By then you hope that you’ve got a solid enough draft to start showing people.
BSR: Which leads to the question everyone is waiting for… once you get it to that point, how do you get an agent?
And we’ll end today’s segment on that cliffhanger. Come back tomorrow for the answer to the question I certainly get asked the most often: “How do you get an agent?”
Part II – Getting an Agent and Selling the Script
Part III – Notes, Rewriting, Casting and SUPERBAD
Part IV – More Rewrites
Part V – Release and Reaction
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