FRENZY!!!! (or RomComs: A Discussion)

No, the frenzy isn't in reference to a zombie horde feasting on the masses. It's... 

 

I know I've posted about NaNoWriMo in the past, but truth be told that never works out because novel writing doesn't really seem to be my thing. However! Script Frenzy is this April and I will be writing my first feature length screenplay! (Yay!) Also, very surprising to me, I will be writing a RomCom. I've never really had intentions of writing one in the past but this story really seems the best choice for me for my first feature.

I've started plotting it out, and currently my plan is to have the story nicely set out in index cards before April. In addition to plotting, I think I need to examine a couple of the better romcoms to set me on the right foot, through both reading and watching. Hopefully, in the end I'd be able to produce a kind of stereotypically audience gender neutral one, like 40 Year Old Virgin or Forgetting Sarah Marshall. It seems like the key to that is to have a solid bro contingent with a healthy dose of sex and sex jokes. I wasn't really planning on adding a whole lot of sex to mine, but I won't be surprised if I make that decision further down the road, during rewrites. There's certainly room for it, character and story-wise. I do, however, have a good, humorfull, broscape that is central to the story.

Screenplay pReview: Source Code

I don't want to say director Duncan Jones looks like Peter Pettigrew in this picture but... well, he looks kind of like Peter Pettigrew in this picture.

Anyway, Source Code, the screenplay that's been kicking since 2007 that everyone and their momma loves and will likely finally be in production early next year (Jake Gyllenhaal in negotiations to star).

I thought it was good. *shrug*

It's billed as a sci-fi/thriller and yeah, it's a good script. A really good script. I wasn't bored once and that, in my novice screenplay-reading experience, means something. Whether it's because I'm new to the screenplay format and it takes a little extra work to fully immerse myself in, or whether I've just been reading crappier screenplays, I start getting antsy and distracted half way through them. This one I didn't.

The problem is, to me, it read like it would play out like any other blockbuster action/suspense movie of the modern age and since I came into it expecting sci fi... well, I was disappointed.

Book to Screen: The Lovely Bones

Alright, it's about time to get down with my first Book to Screen post, something I think will be a recurring, though not necessarily regular, segment.

Here is a part of my Goodreads review (which was short to begin with), which basically says my thoughts on the book.

I felt the book was like a sentimental drama thriller, without the usual melodrama that accompanies stories of this type. It's like an "easy listening" suspense story, if you know what I mean. That doesn't mean it's cheap or sappy, not at all. I enjoyed it a lot and it affected me emotionally but it was a comfortable ride, for the most part, despite the horrors that occurred within the story.

I enjoyed the book. I give it a 3.3ish out of 5.

Now the screenplay by Fran Walsh, Phillipa Boyens and Peter Jackson (who seems to only do adaptations). Trying without spoilers.

Pledges

These are U.K. aerosols by the way.

Anyway, I'm swallowing books like they're very very large candies so I figure I ought to read screenplays as well. I pledge to read at least 1 screenplay a week. Not as if that should be a hard promise to live up to, they only take a couple of hours to read. It's just tedious reading them off the computer and I feel badly if I print them out. I think I'll have to see if I can read them in a 2page per 1 format and then use both sides.

I was looking for a copy of The Lovely Bones screenplay, as I'll be done with the book soon and the movie's coming out but I couldn't find it.

The Return of Me

Sorry non-existent readers in the ether! I had disappeared for some time, as I had predicted. It all came on far sooner than I had hoped.

Update on my writing:

I have written a short screenplay that needs more work. It is currently at 15 pages and contains an ending I am somewhat unsatisfied with but at this moment do not know how to change for the better.

I am currently enrolled in a screenwriting class and a fiction writing class. I have written many a short piece for the fiction writing class. Until recently, I had been convinced I was over fiction writing; That it wasn't for me, I wasn't built to wax on about sight and smell and sound and scape in literature.

Things change.

I'm happy in the class and I'm happy in writing. It takes... discipline. Discipline is not one of my greater talents; I have discipline better than some, worse than many, but if I can somehow make myself into a person that writes rather than can write, well, I think it's something I worth striving for. I may construct myself into a person who wakes up at 4:30 am every morning to write for two hours or... who knows what. It's something I'm looking into, considering.

It is one week before NaNoWriMo officially kicks off, and I have designs on winning it (that is to say, complete the challenge). I want to write a 50k word piece of fiction. To have that under my belt. To know I can do it.

I'm not sure what on. Yet. "But," as Betty Draper says "I do have thoughts."

Character Voice and Speech Patterns

I just read Woody Allen's Annie Hall screenplay and it was kind of weird. It was like the text was transcribed after someone had spoken the words. What I mean is, there were so many stuttered words in the dialogue, "ums," sentences starting over half way through, overlapping dialogue. Here's a piece of random dialogue:

Readin' Readin' Readin' and Doin'

One of the first screenwriting blogs I grew attached to was Scott Meyer's Go Into The Story. He updates many times a day and besides offering his opinions on what's going on in the film world he makes an effort to help any fledgling screenwriters that hop along his path by offering helpful hints. He teaches online courses for UCLA so it's a "thing" for him I guess, you know... being helpful.

Anyway, so one of the suggestions he makes is to read screenplays. Its a common thing students hear "If you want to write, read books, if you want to act, watch plays, if you want to do something else, engage as a spectator of someone else's something else." However, it's not only a tip people often ignore, with screenwriting maybe one decides watching movies is enough. Either way it's a common message.

Meyer goes farther than that though. He has what he calls 14 days of screenplays where he links to 14 screenplays of differing authors and styles. His hope, more or less, is that by reading a screenplay everyday for a time will force your brain into picking up something more quickly via osmosis. That, in reading many works in a short period, your brain will start playing connect-the-dots and see the patterns more clearly and quickly than it might otherwise. So I've been doing this.