The Screenwriters' Thread

Anyone here an aspiring screenwriter/written a screenplay?

My dream job is to write and direct movies. We'll see if I ever get there, but I figure I may try to become a screenwriter in the next few years...

I wrote a script this past year for a college course. It's a romantic comedy called Mismatched, 110 pages. In the near-future San Francisco, a revolutionary dating service scans your brain and assigns you to a True Love Match™. But one night, a lightning storm hits the servers, and two people who think each other are merely okay are told they're soul mates.

Writing it was an interesting experience, and I had an outline but no super-clear or informed road map to start from. My family and friends have enjoyed reading it, but a movie producer friend of my father's ripped it a new one, saying the pace was deadly slow, the stakes were way too low and the conflict was nonexistent. All fair points...

So now I'm thinking of starting an action screenplay set in a dystopic, hyper-industrial parallel-universe Los Angeles. It's sort of like Zorro meets Aladdin, set in a vaguely-20th century Mexifornia, and with a female protagonist. A supporting character would be descended from Zorro himself, but while the original Zorro story is in the public domain, the character is still trademarked, so I might have to be very vague about it.

.... Anyone else rockin' the "INT./EXT. ..." style?

I'm definitely interested in writing, haven't really thought about directing too much. I've written one short that's been entirely through the production process: Face to Face, a fanfilm based on the original ending for Kill Bill. Technically, it was an adaptation from two sources, so very little original content as far as dialogue goes besides what we improvised on the day of filming. If everything goes according to plan, that will be going online on Wednesday, the 7th of October.

I'm in the process of writing another short film called "Disposal" that deals with two people trying to dispose of a not-quite-dead-dead-body. I'm probably going to direct and edit that. It can be annoying at times not being able to make what you really want to make, but seeing what you can do with stuff that is basically free makes for an interesting experiences.

As James Cameron said, if you want to direct, just pick up a camera and start shooting. Best way to get experience.

I'm kicking around screenplay ideas all the time, but I don't having anything concrete finished. At this point, I'm looking for a short to medium length screenplay to shoot. If anyone feels like shooting a screenplay my way, I would be more than happy to read it.

Gaith, I like your first idea better. It's more real and personal than the second idea.

Too many times, people follow advice of people who aren't qualified.
You don't ask a financial planner (who may be broke or breaking even) how to be rich.
You ask a rich person how to be rich.

Now if that producer is super successful, then by all means listen to him and work on the pacing, conflict and up the stakes. If he is a crappy producer, get a an opinion from somebody who is more qualified.

Probably the best kind of person to get advice from is a successful screenwriter.

yeah, maybe do a "fanedit" of your first screenplay to have a better pace if needed, but the subject is definitely interesting and would bring more audience (in a theater near you) than the second, IMO (don't forget the girls! Even James Cameron do not... Make them laugh and cry and you'll have a big budget for your kick ass SF second movie! lol. Just kidding, don't sell your soul!).

Well, I thought Mismatched had a pretty commercial angle too, but the thing is, and my producer friend was right about this, there's really no tension at all. The faux-soul mates get along pleasantly enough (if they didn't, their - spoiler! - ultimate coupling wouldn't work), and they therefore face no consequences if they don't fall in love. They go on a few dates, which are somewhat awkward but mildly enjoyable, fifty pages later, they kiss. There isn't even a sense of urgency, a la Pretty Woman or When Harry Met Sally, as there's no love deadline , and neither faces any competition for the other. A nifty idea, but I'd have to start from near-total scratch to make it work, and I'd rather just start on my new project.

reave said:

At this point, I'm looking for a short to medium length screenplay to shoot. If anyone feels like shooting a screenplay my way, I would be more than happy to read it.

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I've written a 25-pager on the experiences of a few college students in a single, contained house when the sun suddenly and unaccountably disappears. If you didn't want to do collegiates, it probably wouldn't be too hard to make 'em young professionals. Interested?

Edit: I originally misspelled this thread as the "Screenwriter's" thread. Just to double-clarify, all screenwriters are invited to discuss their ideas and work here!

Gaith said:

Well, I thought Mismatched had a pretty commercial angle too, but the thing is, and my producer friend was right about this, there's really no tension at all. The faux-soul mates get along pleasantly enough (if they didn't, their - spoiler! - ultimate coupling wouldn't work), and they therefore face no consequences if they don't fall in love. They go on a few dates, which are somewhat awkward but mildly enjoyable, fifty pages later, they kiss. There isn't even a sense of urgency, a la Pretty Woman or When Harry Met Sally, as there's no love deadline , and neither faces any competition for the other. A nifty idea, but I'd have to start from near-total scratch to make it work, and I'd rather just start on my new project.

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So create some conflict. Make this new "brain scanning" system one of the first public uses of technology that was previously limited to hospital and experimental use that wasn't 100% even then. As such, people are skeptical of its accuracy and usefulness. That gives you an "out" to create differences in their personalities that the machine didn't pick up. They have to learn that their similarities outweigh their differences.

As for a deadline, use the classic "marrying the wrong person" angle - one of them is X months away from getting married but is having second thoughts. Their single bachelor(ette) friend suggested they go to this service to verify their suspicions one way or the other. Naturally, they'd have to keep this whole endeavor a secret from both "other parties" and in the end has to choose one over the other.

Ultimately, this is a "chick flick date movie". Run your drafts past your wife/girlfriend/mom/sister/grandma/etc. as you go to see what you, as a guy, are missing or getting wrong. Use them as your marketing focus group. Not that you're going to write it by committee, but they'll give you that bit of female perspective that you may be missing.

If you're trying to get a foot in Hollywood's door, this story has better potential because it can be made for a relatively low budget. No major FX or stunt sequences, and the brain scanning computer can be done with a simple headset/helmet design and some fancy computer screen animations.

Ziz said:

So create some conflict. Make this new "brain scanning" system one of the first public uses of technology that was previously limited to hospital and experimental use that wasn't 100% even then. As such, people are skeptical of its accuracy and usefulness.

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Ah, but if the protagonists don't have every reason to believe that the computer is infallible and that they must indeed be soul mates, the already insufficient tension of the story dissipates entirely. I appreciate the suggestions, but screenwriting is tough, and I don't mind not getting a passing grade on the first try. And now it's time for me to try another idea, another genre, and see what happens.

I also just enrolled in an online Screenwriting course specifically built around conflict, which I'm pretty psyched about.

Ziz said:

If you're trying to get a foot in Hollywood's door, this story has better potential because it can be made for a relatively low budget.

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If you're trying to become a Hollywood writer, the best way to do so is to actually be a good screenwriter. As with any discipline, it'll take a couple tries.

Ok, then have the accuracy and usefulness of the tech only known to the people who developed it. Build it up as something the audience knows but the characters are unaware of.

As for the characters thinking they are destined for each other because the computer said so, the flaw in the computer is what creates the tension. As they learn about each other and find they're not as compatible as the computer told them they were, they start to truly learn about each other. The conflict needed to drive the story isn't whether or not the two main characters get along, it's whether the one that's engaged is going to stay or go.

Point is, this story can work. As a writer, you know you're not going to get it perfect on the first draft, so don't try to.

I love writing. I've written a couple of shorts. It seems like when I write, I get an idea from a film or novel and go on from there.

One of the scripts I'm currently writing spawned off of the idea of Vice City. It started as a drug deal gone wrong but has evolved so far from it, you wouldn't even be able to tell.

This guys' all paranoid and then someone comes from him. He's about to shit himself because he doesn't know who it is so he's having this giant thought process, etc.

I was writing a screenplay based off Superman: Red Son... But I sort of lost interest around halfway through, I might pick it up over this Summer though...

I finished my first draft for "Disposal" the other night. There's still a few sequences that need fleshing out (actually, the flashback that sets up the situation is actually longer than the actual scenes depicting the "disposal" of the body. Whether or not that is good or bad remains to be determined). Still, I'm happy with the way it turned out, and the couple people who read it really liked it.

tehwallaby said:

I was writing a screenplay based off Superman: Red Son... But I sort of lost interest around halfway through, I might pick it up over this Summer though...

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I loved the Red Sun concept, but wasn't nearly as pleased with the execution. A Soviet Batman? Why? Earth becoming Krypton? Now that's just dumb.

Now, if they'd taken that premise and made a flat out Bats vs. Communist Supes... now that could've been sweet. Or maybe not. But better than the direction they did take.

LIIIIIVVEEE!!!

I've got two projects in something resembling pre-production.

The first one is "Disposal", the one I mentioned earlier in this thread.

The newest one is called "The Room".

It's a very, very loose adaptation of the game "Silent Hill 4: The Room." The premise is that a guy is locked in his apartment, and mysterious holes appear in his wall leading him to "otherworlds" where a serial killer is, well, killing people and sacrificing them to fulfill an ancient ritual.

Writing for a non-existent budget, the story is pretty much the same. Difference is, instead of an apartment, it's a college dorm room. Instead of chains on the door, it's a shitload of duct tape (that can't be cut. Work with me here). I'm still trying to figure out how to portray the "otherworlds" since doing them in the style of Silent Hill's otherworld is too costly and too time consuming. Character names have been changed, locations have been changed or altered, etc.

I'm actually enjoying writing a horror film for a change. Horror can be a messy genre to write for, and it's fun trying to think of scary things to do that aren't either excessively expensive OR damaging to property (duct tape on the door is gonna be fun).

Woo.

Aztek463 said:

The newest one is called "The Room".

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Ehh.... you may want to reconsider the title. Google "The Room" and see what movie comes up. Then rent it and watch it's terrible glory. (Or just watch the 60-second version .

Gaith said:

I wrote a script this past year for a college course. It's a romantic comedy called Mismatched, 110 pages. In the near-future San Francisco, a revolutionary dating service scans your brain and assigns you to a True Love Matchâ„¢ . But one night, a lightning storm hits the servers, and two people who think each other are merely okay are told they're soul mates.

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Just slightly reminds of a book I read, instead of a romantic comedy it was mystery thriller:

DEATH MATCH by Lincoln Child

it had the whole supercomputer concept bringing up your perfect compatible partner. Very good book. :smile:

thunderclap said:

Aztek463 said:

The newest one is called "The Room".

Click to expand...

Ehh.... you may want to reconsider the title. Google "The Room" and see what movie comes up. Then rent it and watch it's terrible glory. (Or just watch the 60-second version

.

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The Room is in my top 100 films of all time. I must have seen it at least 10 times. Absolutely amazingly, unintentionally brilliant. An accidental masterpiece. Also the funniest film ever made, well that or The Producers.

I'm an aspiring scriptwriter. I finished a BA (Hons) in scriptwriting last year and right now am working on developing an idea for a tv show. One of the reasons I'm getting so irritated with my ROTJ fanedit is that it's taking all my time, when I should be putting everything into this.

Anyway, it's good to see that other people in this community are writing scripts. I genuinely believe that the 10 or so fanedits I've made this year have taught me quite a few things about storytelling, particularly structure and also how a plot point can be put over far more succinctly than you might think, that the audience needs to be given more credit than most scripts (and Hollywood movies) give them.

Time to resurrect a ridiculously old thread! That's a specialty of mine, dontcha know.



I had an idea for a movie the other day, the first time in a long time that that's happened. It goes something like this: right as they're about to graduate/immediately after they graduate from the Navy's Boot Camp, fifteen or so brand-new sailors are mysteriously teleported to a deserted tropical island. Apart from their clothes, the only thing that arrived with them is a large box, which turns out to be filled with 9mm pistols and clips. (Boot Camp features one day of simulated 9mm fire training, and one brief afternoon of live fire.) So it's a sort of Lord of the Flies situation, with a bunch of young men in a weird middle - they're not really all that military, particularly since there aren't any superiors around, but they're not quite civilians, either. They have enlisted in the Navy, but then, they just as tellingly didn't join the Army or the Marine Corps - they're not really aspiring warriors themselves. However, of course, unlike the kids in Lord of the Flies, these guys wouldn't have any logistical difficulty at all in killing each other should they feel compelled to.

Obviously, this may sound a lot like Lost, of which I've only ever seen the first half of the pilot long ago, and wasn't at all impressed. Since it'd be a movie, though, it necessarily couldn't be as weirdly open-ended as that show became, and since all they have with them is guns, it'd be highly implied that they were put there as a sort of real-life Survivor by - aliens? Eventually, they band together and battle something. Aliens? (Incidentally, Wikipedia lists two decades-old series, neither available on dvd, with similar concepts, more so than Lost.)


So, I guess it's more like the nugget of a concept for a movie than a story, but there it is. Reminds me of how, if I were a Hollywood big shot, I'd love to do a re-imagining of Weird Science. I absolutely love the core concept - two boys create/summon a magical bombshell genie with a mind all her own - but think that the heart of the story should be Lisa teaching the boys how to be confident, rather than terrorizing them into some making some neolithic display of manliness with the help of Mad Max-style freak mutant bikers. (Indeed, for this reason, taken on strict minute-by-minute ratios as dramatic pieces, I find that certain episodes of the Weird Science TV series work rather better than the movie.)

Trouble is, Lisa teaching the boys, with the boys making steady progress in the absence of any big villain(s), probably wouldn't make for a dramatic two hours with high stakes. So again, I've got a starting point for a story, but not a story... unless, as with my Sailors idea, Lisa and the boys suddenly start fighting aliens or something thirty pages in.

Which reminds me of another idea I once had: a man and woman who've contacted each other via a dating site meet up at a cafe... and aliens show up, start blowing the world up, and without cell service, and the world around them falling apart, the pair decides that for safety's sake, they should stick together for the next few hours, until the woman can meet up with her friends/family. And, of course, they fall in love over the course of that zany, crazy afternoon and evening. Sort of like Before Sunrise crossed with Battle: LA, in other words.






At this point, you're probably thinking "Gaith seriously needs to think of a story other than aliens suddenly appearing blowing up shit." Which is perfectly fair, but then, my favorite author (and legitimate total genius) Philip Pullman has said:And who am I, after all, to second-guess the likes of Pullman and Chandler?

You're too funny man.

I like the Navy guys on the island idea. The Before Sunrise/Battle LA could be good. It would be like a generic romantic comedy for the first 20 minutes and then BAM! Aliens.