Pitching is an audition

I thought a lot about pitching today as I listened to short film pitches from my scriptwriting students.  Most of them actually didn't pitch the story.  Rather, they described the way the story would work.  They described the effect the story would have.  But for the most part, they didn't tell the story.

It's like auditioning for American Idol and describing the effect of the song you'll sing, instead of singing the song.

Pitching is difficult.  You need to know your story inside and out and you need to be able to tell it in an engaging manner.  You must become a storyteller.  Go inside these story and perform it.  It's risky.

What I heard today was about standing outside the story and describing it, rather than performing it.  It was safe.

Performance equals risk.  That's what a pitch must be.  A performance that takes a risk.

Congrats to Canadian indie film Moon Point

Just saw Moon Point during it's first week - now extended for another week! - at the AMC Dundas Square cinema.  Nice little indie film with the usual killer soundtrack that helps to carry over some of the bumps in the talky script.

I wasn't a big fan of the story, such as it is, a kind of shaggy dog road trip via wheelchair and it was stuck in the trendy indie film world of slacker 20 somethings dealing with the kind of problems most of the world would kill to have.  It's the Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State, 500 Days of Summer universe.

But I really liked the secondary characters, a veritable who's who of Canada's supreme comedic acting talent.  The wonderful Jayne Eastwood practically french-kissing her budgie and a wacky Art Hindle in a banana suit are worth the price of admission.  It's not really in the service of a story that mattered much to me, but who cares?  This little film got made for 12 and a half cents, I believe, and what's even more amazing, got distributed in theatres!  (Thanks to renegade film distribution company IndieCan Entertainment.  I hope they can give the big boys a run for their money getting English Canadian movies into real live cinemas.)

Good for them.

Another Earth doesn't work

I was really disappointed in this film, given all the hoopla surrounding it out of Sundance.

It makes the cardinal sin of having not enough story to fill up its length.  So the director has to shoot interminable shots of his leading lady doing nothing and jazzes it up with some admittedly effective music. But it didn't stop me from being bored.

It's a shame actually because the premise, while not original, is intriguing.  Lifted from a great science fiction film called Journey To the Far Side of the Sun, in which an exact duplicate of Earth is discovered orbiting the sun exactly opposite to our Earth, Another Earth takes that premise and plants the new Earth in our orbit.

A lot of critics have rightly pointed out that the film breaks the cardinal rule of science fiction by messing with basic science.  The other Earth in this film appears to have had no effect on our earth's gravity despite getting closer and closer until it's five times the size of the moon by the film's end.  This new planet doesn't appear to affect the tides or much of anything.  Even when contact is established with what appears to be an exact duplicate of a scientist, nothing much seems to matter to people on this planet, particularly the dull and uninteresting lead character, other than entering a contest to be on the first rocket to travel to this other earth.

Meanwhile, the character who killed the other leading character's wife and child while driving drunk the first night the new earth appeared in the sky, attempts to apologize to him after her release from jail, only to lose her nerve and decides to clean his house instead.  Huh?

Eventually, they become lovers.  Huh??

And then she wins the contest and decides that now she can tell him she's his wife and child's killer.  To make up for this, she gives him her ticket so he can go to the planet and perhaps find a duplicate wife and child waiting for him.  Huh???

This almost sounds interesting, except that other than these plot points, NOTHING HAPPENS.  The screenwriters who were also the director and leading lady could use a few basic storytelling for film classes.  Though, given the success of this film for reasons that I don't get, I suspect they will have started believing their own reviews and stand little chance of improving their skill set next time out.  But based on this effort, I won't be lining up any time soon for their next.

What's the Story spec?

We all know what a story is.  My six year old nephew knows what a story is.  But I know that when I ask my script writing students to tell me what it is, they have a tough time nailing it down to something that isn't vague, or open to interpretation.

Today, while teaching my first scriptwriting class of the new semester, it occurred to me that what we really need is a spec for a story.

If my class was car design, first we'd have to agree on what a car IS before we can make one.

So we have to agree what a story is, before we can make one.

The "spec" for a car is an engine, wheels, a steering wheel, brakes and a way for an operator to manoeuvre it.  That's I think, the bare minimum requirements to define the spec for a car.  It doesn't specify what a table or a carrot is.  It's a car.  No debate, no opinion.  That spec could lead to a Ferrari or a Toyota or any other car.  And we could argue about the quality of the final car, but we shouldn't be able to argue about whether it is a car.

In the same we, we need something that is clear, specific and non-debatable as a spec for a story.

It seems to me that any analysis of good stories, particularly movies leads to the story template that I've blogged about on here in the past:  Character/Action/Goal/Adversary.  Those are the minimum requirements for a story.  They're the steering wheel, engine, brakes and wheels equivalent.

And of course there's a relationship implicit between those four elements:  Character DOES the action FOR the goal OPPOSED by the adversary.

That's our spec.  With that spec, you know what you have to make.  There's no way of knowing whether it will be a good story or a bad story, but it will be a story.

100 Essential Films

Everyone has their list.  Here's mine in no particular order.  All are essential viewing.  I recommend reading the screenplays as well.


Citizen Kane
Metropolis
Petulia
Badlands
Days of Heaven
Breathless (original Godard)
The 400 Blows
Wild Strawberries
The Seventh Seal
Nights in Cabiria
La Dolce Vita
8 1/2
The World of Apu
Ikuru
Tokyo Story
Seven Samurai
Ugetsu Monegatare
Kind Hearts and Coronets
Kes
Night Mail
The Lady Vanishes
The Thief of Bagdad
Olivier's Richard III, Hamlet, Henry V
The Third Man
Brief Encounter
Black Narcissus
A Taste of Honey
Blowup
Repulsion
If....
The Ipcress File
Paths of Glory
Lawrence of Arabia
Lolita
2001: A Space Odyssey
A Clockwork Orange
Barry Lyndon
The Go-Between
Frenzy
Local Hero
The Long Good Friday
Brazil
A Fish Called Wanda
My Beautiful Laundrette
The Crying Game
Trainspotting
La Belle et La Bête
Children of Paradise
The Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie
Don't Look Now
Black Orpheus
Diabolique
Wages of Fear
The French Connection
Godfather I and II
Apocalypse Now
The Wild Bunch
Shock Corridor
The Parallax View
Taxi Driver
The Searchers
Stagecoach
High Noon
Some Like It Hot
The Apartment
The Fortune Cookie
Sunset Boulevard
They Drive By Night
Casablanca
Sweet Smell of Success
The Graduate
On the Waterfront
Singin' In the Rain
The African Queen
Psycho
Chinatown
The Maltese Falcon
Raging Bull
Dr. Strangelove
Bonnie and Clyde
Annie Hall
Midnight Cowboy
North by Northwest
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
The Philadelphia Story
Rebel Without a Cause
Vertigo
City Lights
Modern Times
Duck Soup
A Place in the Sun
Three Colours: Red, White, Blue
Kieszlowski's The Decalogue
Talk to Her
Law of Desire
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown

In order to achieve even a modest level of film literacy, you need to have seen these.

I envy anyone watching them for the first time.

Simple, but not easy

I just turned in the first draft of a script I've been commissioned to write for the University of Toronto's internationally trained lawyer's program.  It will be a drama that's used for teaching purposes.  Hopefully, it will help lawyers in the program be better prepared for what they will face in the Canadian legal workplace.

I love turning in drafts because it means I get paid.  But it also means I have written.  I hate writing, love having written.

Perhaps hate is too strong a word, but writing is hard.  I keep trying to explain to my scriptwriting students that it isn't cut and dried or an exact science.  However, what you have to do is actually simple.  Keep an audience engaged for the length of the story.  And there are certain storytelling principles that were first defined by Aristotle that have not been disproved since that you can use to make your story effective.  So, it is simple.

Simple, but not easy.

Kind of like e=mc squared.  It's a simple formula, but to understand it really takes some knowledge and to apply it takes even more knowledge.

Simple, but not easy.  I think that applies to pretty much anything done well.

A couple of reviews: Midnight in Paris and Crazy, Stupid, Love.

Screened Midnight in Paris and Crazy, Stupid, Love. on the plasma last night.

Midnight in Paris is part of Woody Allen's shift away from New York and filming in Europe chapter in his body of work.  The glorious part of the movie comes from turning the camera on in Paris.  Just as with New York, Woody Allen and his DOP's are able to make these cities look glorious.  Every shot in the opening is a post card to the city and of course evokes the magnificent images of New York in Allen's film Manhattan, which remains a favourite of mine.  In Midnight in Paris, Allen shoots Paris cityscapes as if painted by Monet.

But the remarkableness drains away quickly once the story begins to unfold and the characters appear.  If Allen hadn't made Zelig, Purple Rose of Cairo and Bullets over Broadway, perhaps Midnight in Paris would feel original.  A hack screenwriter who hates himself - yet another Woody Allen avatar played by Owen Wilson this time but at least he doesn't do an outright imitation - visits Paris with his shrewish fiancee played by a vacuous Rachel McAdams - I've never understood her appeal and she doesn't explain it to me in this performance - and dreams of living here in the 30's and writing his artistic novel.  One night - at midnight - he encounters a time traveling car that takes him back then where he meets F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and the other Americans in Paris.  Gertrude Stein reads his novel and encourages him to be an artist.  Meanwhile, his wife and her parents become increasingly weary of him and his mysterious disappearances.  Finally, he decides to break up with his fiancee and stay in Paris, conveniently hooking up with a fetching Parisian shop girl.

But Woody's done this all before.  He wrote this first as a short story, "The Kugelmass Episode", published in The New Yorker in 1977.  And he's done variations of it in at least 3 of his films mentioned earlier.  It's a lovely idea, but tired.  Midnight in Paris becomes an exercise in identifying the personalities - Oh, THAT's Zelda Fitzgerald!  Ooh, Salvador Dali - an admittedly cute turn by Adrian Brody, "I am DA-LI!"

Been there done that Woody.  A disappointment.

Crazy, Stupid, Love. (That's the punctuation used on imdb, though it isn't on screen.)  is a nice romantic comedy-drama about the manning up of Steve Carrell after his wife of 25 years, Julianne Moore, dumps him.  He meets rakish ladies man, Ryan Gosling, in a bar.  Gosling takes him under his wing, teaches him everything he knows and Carrell begins to get laid eventually sleeping with a hilarious ex-alcoholic teacher played by Marissa Tomei.  Meanwhile, a sharp young lawyer, Emma Stone, captures Gosling's heart and brings his days as a rouee to a close.  It turns out Emma is Carrell's oldest daughter and all hell breaks loose the day she brings Gosling home to meet her parents.

This film has something rare in today's cinema:  an actual story populated by actual characters.  I may not have appreciated it so much except I've been so hungry for a story and a movie with a story gets major props from me.  There's one scene in the middle of the film when Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling spend the night in bed talking that is worth the price of admission.  Funny, humane, deliciously sexy without any kissing or sex and beautifully acted and directed.  Ryan Gosling has terrific screen presence evoking a post-modern Cary Grant - too cool for school and vulnerable when someone gets under his skin.  Carrell has played the everyman schlub so often that he's close to phoning it in, but since his character gets to actually grow, the transformation from passive to active male feels earned.  The rest of the casting is quite off-beat, especially with the kid actors who play Carrell's son and his babysitter who's infatuated with Carrell - lovely actors who the camera doesn't appear to like at first, but who blossom into their cameragenicness by the end.

I enjoyed this one and give it a thumbs up.

Hitting marks

I was in New Brunswick last week to shoot a scene from the CBC TV movie "The Phantoms", playing my 30th doctor.  (I think when I reach 35, I should be getting my honorary medical degree from ACTRA.)

Working with a nice cast and crew on location is a great joy.  You become part of an instant working family for the time you're there.

But while I was there, I was reminded about something that I take for granted but that can really slow the process and make all performances suffer.

Actors have to be able to hit their marks.

Working with an inexperienced, (I assume) performer from the Maritimes who couldn't hit marks just makes it harder to actually do the acting part for everyone.  Actors probably don't realize how critical it is for camera to hit marks, especially if they are inexperienced with film work or if they spend most of their time working on stage.  Film is a game of millimetres.  Shifting your weight can make the difference from being seen or not.  And if you're not seen by the camera, the editor will use a shot of an actor who is seen.

At one point, I missed my mark because the other performer kept missing hers and so the camera assistant put black tape on top of her coloured tape so she couldn't miss it.  Except no one told me and my mark was made with black tape as well, so I ended up entering the scene and hitting HER mark.

After doing 30 doctors on camera, as well as a few more credits (75 films and TV episodes so far), hitting marks is almost intuitive for me.  To learn how to do it, requires an awareness of your surroundings, peripheral vision and respect for the craft.  It means that you have to take hitting the mark seriously.  But it doesn't mean you'll stop acting.  Only bad actors can't do both.

To give an example of the dichotomy between the technical and the emotive that must come together in film performance, I remember a story my mentor Daniel Petrie, Sr. told us at the Canadian Film Centre.  He was directing Jane Fonda in a very emotional scene where she was using a hammer and chisel to chip away at a block of stone, tears streaming down her face.  But the shot was so tight that she needed to be told if she was in frame or not - while she was acting.  So Dan Sr. told her as the shot rolled, and tears rolled down her face.  I think she won an Emmy for that performance.  I know so many actors who would be unable to develop the emotional resonance needed for a shot like that AND listen to the director telling her to move her eyes left or right, while the scene was shot.  But that's the craft.

As is hitting marks.

Doing the LEAST amount

Writing is hard.  Sorry to disillusion anyone, especially those who make script gurus like Syd Field et al rich, buying their books.  It's easy to explain what goes into a good screenplay.  It's hard to write one.

But it's not going to get easier, if all you do is the least amount possible.  Fulfilling one of the script guru's structural plans for a good script, doesn't mean you've written a good script.

I see this in my screenwriting courses.  Most of the students I've taught initially believe that all they need to do is write the least amount possible and they've done the job.

For example, one of the first assignments I give beginning students is to read one of my favourite Star Trek: TNG episodes, ("Darmok") and deconstruct it into beginning, middle and end.  The assignment calls for students to use no more than 3 sentences for each part and to encompass all pertinent story points.

This is harder than it looks.

But students tend to think it's an easy task and usually turn in something that looks like it took them as long to write it as it would to type it.

If you DO the least amount possible to get through whatever you're trying to learn, I suspect you also LEARN the least amount possible.

Fraggle Rock

I received this email a while ago - a long while ago - from a fan of the series, Fraggle Rock, which I wrote for when I began my career.

It was the greatest gig I ever had and I'd have been content to work for my boss Jerry Juhl, the 3rd Muppet who wrote everything Miss Piggy and Kermit had to say, for ever.  Unfortunately, Jim Henson, who directed one of my Fraggle Rock episodes, died shortly after the series wrapped and Jerry retired.  The company was taken over by Jim's children and I don't think any of the writers who worked on their shows were used again.

Here's the email:

Hi Mr. Varughese,       While doing some online Fraggle Rock research I came across a "Blogger" web page for you with links to your blog "Building the Iceberg", and your web site. I was so glad to find those, and find a couple of contact emails for you.      I have loved Jim Henson's Muppets ever since I was a little boy watching Sesame Street in the early '80s. Unfortunately I rarely got to see Fraggle Rock, since we didn't have cable in my childhood (I grew up out in the country). My grandparents did get a satellite dish so I got to see the first several episodes of Fraggle Rock, but then HBO got scrambled. After that I wouldn't get to see it unless I happened to be at someone's house at the right time of day, and if no one else was watching anything. So my Fraggle viewings became rare and treasured!      Then in college I was tickled to get to see many more episodes on the Odyssey network, and now of course I'm thrilled to have the entire series on DVD. It's amazing how crisp and clear the quality is on the discs, even down to the characters actually sounding like they're in a large cave.      I love doing creative writing, and I know I would have had a blast writing episodes for Fraggle Rock. Your own scripts for the show are so interesting and entertaining. Here are some notes I wanted to share with you on some of your scripts: Sir Hubris and the Gorgs --- I love how in the series we occasionally get these little insights into the history of the gorgs, such as hearing Ma Gorg tell of "King Gorgus the Great" here, even with a picture of him. It's also nice how you wrote Gobo having some compassion for the gorgs in this episode, Doomsday Soup --- What a great adventure to see the fraggles accidentally discover the power of invisibility! Boober's struggle to "take it back" from his worry of impending doom provides a great conflict. The special effects of that episode were really great, too. Home is Where the Trash Is --- How fascinating to see Gunge and Philo get this starring vehicle for hemselves. That was a terrific and original idea of wanting to explore their origins and their ambition to want to "return to their roots". Of course, we fans love seeing them realize they're happiest with Marjory. :-) The Great Radish Caper --- I have to give you special props for this episode, since Mokey is my favorite character in the series. Because Mokey is the most tender-hearted of the "Fraggle Five", it's natural for her to get some understanding into Junior Gorg and have some compassion for his love for Geraldine the Radish. She knows it's odd, but she's so caring that she can't bear to see him lose the one thing that means so much to him. Seeing her pitted against her friends over the radish's fate makes for a great climax to the story. I was especially tickled to see you use this episode as an example on "Building the Iceberg" in response to someone's question of theme vs plot. A Dark and Stormy Night --- I've always loved ghost stories, spooky-type things, and stormy nights, so this episode was right up my alley! Sprocket's Big Adventure --- Getting Sprocket into Fraggle Rock itself...what a brilliant idea! It's so fun to see him get to explore their world, and discover what it's like. He finally gets some relief about these strange creatures he's been trying to catch for years, and it's sweet how he comes to a friendly understanding about them. Boober Gorg --- How funny to see a fraggle think he's a gorg, especially Boober, the most fearful of the fraggles. Plus, we get another glimpse of gorgish lore, with the mention of the very fun-named "Encyclopedia of Gorgish Myth and Wisdom". Ring Around the Rock --- Again, some more interesting insight into the history and tradition of the Gorgs, with Ma and Pa having to get re-wed on their 513th wedding anniversary. It's also fun seeing the Gorg Ring go from character to character to character throughout the episode.      One thing I was curious about was whether you writers ever interacted with the Muppeteers at all (I assume you interacted with Jim Henson some, since you mention him in your blog). Also, I wondered if you wrote in notes for where any songs would appear in your scripts, or if the songwriters did that on their own, or if you worked together?      By the way, I've enjoyed looking at your blog, and your web site looks great and is very interesting and fun to explore. And it's great to see how well your career is going these days!      Well Mr. Varughese, I just wanted to take a few moments to tell you how much your scripts forFraggle Rock have meant to me. Those are some highlight episodes of the series, and are greatly enjoyable. Thanks so much for sharing those talents of yours through this series. You're an inspiration to people like me who find joy in creative writing.

First, I don't want to use this person's name to protect their privacy, but I do have their permission to reprint their email.  (Finally!  My apologies for neglecting to respond to their query until now!)

Second, I don't know if I can answer well, after so many years, but I'll give it my best shot.

 "Sir Hubris and the Gorgs" - this was a fast write.  The show runner and creative guru of Fraggle, Jerry Juhl and the executive story editor, Jocelyn Stephenson and the producer, Larry Mirkin had been impressed with the 2nd episode I'd written and for reasons I can't recall, there was a hole in the schedule that needed a script quickly.  They asked me to come up with something and as much collectively, (sitting in Larry's office spitballing with him and Jerry and Jocelyn), this idea emerged.  I have no idea where it came from, other than me wanting to write a Gorg show - which I grew to enjoy doing - and I remember Larry came up with the name of the legendary knight, Sir Hubris.  I think it was 3 or 4 weeks from a standing start to shooting this one.

"Doomsday Soup" was my attempt to write a show about the dangers of modern technology and in particular nuclear power.  Dave Goelz, who performed Boober, said one of his favourite lines from the series was in this one:  "We've reached a new level of anxiety here!"

"Home is Where the Trash Is" is perhaps my personal favourite.  It's actually a tribute to the plays of Samuel Beckett, in particular "Waiting for Godot" if you can believe it.  I was very proud of the dialogue in this episode.  I'm also proud of Wander McMooch and how he was used in the story.  Bob Stutt was promoted from background puppeteer to perform Wander McMooch.

"The Great Radish Caper" was another of my Gorg episodes.  I took a special interest in writing Gorg shows and this one was an attempt to get beyond the surface of Junior and also to see how his relationship with the radishes stemmed from his own personal loneliness.  And Mokey was going to be the Fraggle who'd understand that.  Kathryn Mullen who played Mokey was very pro-active in any Mokey episodes - perhaps to a fault - but in the end, her notes were dead on and she knew the character best.  I learned to listen to the actor in writing for their character!

"A Dark And Stormy Night" was again, a Gorg show.  Just loved writing Gorg shows, I guess.

"Sprocket's Big Adventure" began what would be our final season and I just pitched it to Jerry and Larry as "it's time to send Sprocket into Fraggle Rock."  And they agreed.

"Boober Gorg" and "Ring Around the Rock" What can I say? Gorg shows again.  I remember trying to soak up every moment during the production of Ring because it was going to be my last episode.  Still gives me chills thinking about it.

In response to your question about how much we interacted with the puppeteers, I hope you can see that it was a very good relationship with them, but they ranged.  Jerry Nelson was very laid back and seemed content to do his stuff without much feedback.  Steve Whitmire and Dave Goelz were very helpful and positive.  Karen Prell who played Red was really supportive and Kathryn Mullen was perhaps the most demanding of the cast but always right when it came to Mokey.  As the writer, I was expected to attend not just script readthrus - we had two prior to production - but to be on set during production.  If anything came up, it was the writer who had the vision of the episode in mind.  The directors had to worry about the scene, but could often forget that doing something in a scene would affect scenes that hadn't been shot.  Writers had to keep that in mind and rewrite accordingly on the fly.

One of the toughest jobs was as shows got shot and timed, you'd learn that you were either running long or short - but it was really always long - and something would have to be cut out of the scenes that had yet to be shot.  The edited length of the episode has to be exact and was predetermined by the network so regardless of how great your line of dialogue might be, it could be excised in order to keep the show to time.  That's the tyranny of television.  But an interesting writing challenge.

Responding to your question about songs, the writers always wrote where songs would go in the scripts and what the songs would be about in terms of moving the story forward.  The kind of song and the lyrics were of course left to the brilliant Phil and Dennis who always made my suggestion better than I could have imagined.  And they always respected the story requirement that was called for by me or another writer.

I hope I've answered - finally - your questions.  Thanks so much for writing and being a fan of the show.