"Girls Side"

Ah, the British Royal Family. There's no one quite like them. Rich and classy, and rich, and sometimes hilarious. The Queen is still the "Queen of Australia" and Head of State for the Antipodes. She remains highly respected here, so much so that she felt safe traveling in Melbourne by tram.

The Queen is respected for having kept her nose clean and getting on with the business. Her family are viewed with a mixture of disdain and fascination, valued mostly for their varied party-tricks, such as toe-sucking, and novelty reincarnation wishes. Oh, and weddings. Grand, slap-up weddings; ones we never get invited to, but are allowed to watch on TV.

Australians watched the most recent Royal Wedding in their millions, arranged in serried rows in lounge rooms; women at the front, clutching hankies; men standing at the back, clutching a tinny; all anxiously awaiting a pratfall, or an unprogrammed response to the question, "If anyone here knows of any reason why..."

So it was with great interest that I came across an American report on the Wedding, as part of the Girls Side web series. Girls Side is a series of video reports on matters of national importance, but told (I assume) from the girls' POV. It's put together by a couple of New Yorkers, Lorraine Cink and Michelle Ciotta. I enjoyed this report, partly because it features an American doing a British accent, which is funny. When they try to do an Australian accent, it's cringe-worthy. (Please don't do that, Lorraine. Stick to the Royal Family.) Meanwhile, here's Lorraine Across the Pond.

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"The Cat Piano"

The Cat Piano is a beautifully animated, short film made in Adelaide by The People’s Republic of Animation. It was voiced by Nick Cave, written by Eddie White, and directed by Eddie White & Ari Gibson, in 2009. 

The Cat Piano won awards at a heap of Festivals, including Flickerfest, Melbourne International Film Festival and Sydney Film Festival, and made the Oscar shortlist for the 'Best Animated Short' category at the 82nd Academy Awards in 2010. 

It is also the best example I have come across of a short film being marketed across the social media spectrum. You can read about the film, listen to the soundtrack, check the vital statistics, discuss it on Facebook, buy the DVD, or simply watch it, at several locations. See the list below the video window below.

Note: This is not a cartoon for children.

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A glimpse of the Oscar Qualifying Shorts

A Shadow of Blue by Carlos Lascano

If you're interested in animated short films, there's an excellent article online at Cartoon Brew, listing the forty-five qualified shorts in the running to be nominated for an Academy Awards. 

A Morning Stroll by Grant Orchard

The article includes a still from each film, links to the film's website, and, in the case of My Hometown, the actual film, which is voiced by Yoko Ono and includes one of her songs. My Hometown was made by Jerry Levitan, who met with John Lennon in 1969 when he was 14.

The artwork is amazing, as you'd expect. Enjoy.

 

Actors, dialogue and the art of listening

Writers tend to worry about dialogue, with good reason. A bad line can kill a scene. A good line can become the buzz phrase of the year. And be quoted in the actor's biography, with all credit to them, but that's the business we've chosen.

This blog has borrowed a few quotes from Michael Caine's book Acting in Film. It was written for actors, but provides food for thought to writers as well. Here's one more.

Hannah and Her Sisters

Many writers fail to appreciate just how much a good actor can extract from a single word. Michael Caine explains:

You can bring new life to an apparently mundane reply by planning a thought process based on a key word and then never voicing it.

Other actor: "Would you like some tea?"

You:  "Yes, please."

"Tea" is the key word. The simple word "tea" can open up so many responses. Let's say you would have preferred coffee. The minute the other actor says "tea," your eyes will change because you'd really like coffee. Or maybe you're allergic to tea. Then you answer politely, but with a bit of anguish, knowing that you won't really drink it. The camera thrives on niceties like that; yet you often see actors missing out on these little presents that can open whole realms of possible action.

"Tea" could be an indication that he's too poor to offer you booze, or that he regards you as an alcoholic who shouldn't be offered a drink. Take the script and explore these possibilities because to pick up key words opens a repertoire of potential response that can lift a scene off the page and into reality. Don't make a fetish of it or you will complicate things unnecessarily. You'll seem a maniac if everything sets you off. But take it to reasonable bounds and you'll find that your performance is more interesting to you and more believable on the screen.

Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

I have been guilty, in my writing, of underestimating actors, with the result that I compensated by overwriting the dialogue. It's about trust, really. (If you've watched as many bad film actors as I have, you'll know the fault doesn't lie 100% with me.)

Back to Michael Caine: If you think an actor can do a lot with one word, look at what a good one can do with no words at all.

When I was very young and in repertory theatre, I was given some advice by a clever director. He said:

"What are you doing in that scene, Michael?"

"Nothing," I said, "I haven't got anything to say."

"That," said the director, "is a very big mistake. Of course, you have something to say. You've got wonderful things to say. But you sit there and listen, thinking of wonderful things to say, and then you decide not to say them. That's what you're doing in that scene."

And that's the greatest advice I can give to someone who wants to act in movies. Listen and react. If you're thinking about your lines, you're not listening.

David Niven listening to Claudia Cardinale in The Pink Panther 

I first encountered that advice, second-hand, from another great English actor. David Niven published his first autobiography, The Moon's a Balloon, in 1971. In it he provides an endless stream of anecdotes from the Golden Age of Hollywood, including the following:

Irving and Norma, like all top movie people, had a private projection room in their house. One night Lubitsch brought down a print of Bluebeard's Eighth Wife and they ran it after dinner for their friends.

I sat squirming with embarrassment throughout the showing but after it was over, everyone, with one exception, was overly flattering and enthusiastic. Fairbanks and Sylvia, Merle, the Astaires, Paulette Goddard and Frederick Lonsdale, all puffed me up most pleasantly. One guest sat silent in his chair. Finally, I could stand it no longer.

"What did you think, Mr. Chaplin?"

 His answer constituted the greatest advice to any beginner in my profession.

"Don't be like the majority of actors... don't just stand around waiting your turn to speak—learn to listen."

"Who..."

Another webseries that played at the Marseille Web Fest is Who... It was created by Michael Ajakwe, Jr., who is himself a very interesting guy. He is a first-generation Nigerian-American who has written/directed/produced theatre, TV, movies and this webseries.

In his spare time, he set up LA Web Fest, the world's first all-web series festival. The second installment of which is due to take place from April 19-22, 2012, in Culver City, California.  Here he talks about the first festival.



The LA Web Fest attracted a lot of interest, including that of a French filmmaker who wanted to set up what became the Marseille Web Fest. In the following video clip, Michael Ajakwe talks about how he became involved in that.

 
The webseries Who... consists of two women talking about... well, sooner or later, everybody.

Here's the trailer.

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One page equals one minute?

One page of a screenplay equals one minute of screen time. Everyone knows that. It's in all the screenwriting books, starting with Syd Field and moving forward. All the gurus repeat that mantra. So why bother thinking about it for yourself?

My introduction to the question came through Terry Rossio. He devoted Column 17 of Wordplay to the question of: "Fudging," meaning, "fudging the page count." 

Any script with a page length over 125 is suspect. Over 130, and the script is, at best, an interim draft with "Lots more work to be done." And it may not even get read. "If it's too long, it goes to the bottom of the pile," a Disney executive told me once. "At one o'clock in the morning, a 105-page script can look a lot more appealing than a 135-page script."
   The bias isn't just due to how long it takes to read the script. The classic rule of thumb says that one page of script will average out to one minute of screen time. This isn't always true -- sometimes a single descriptive line such as 'the horses stampede through town' can take more than a minute, and some dialog scenes will take less. (It's said that screen time eats up dialog, and action eats up screen time.) But over the course of a script it's supposed to average out to that magic page-a-minute. So a 135-page script is automatically considered to be a longish movie, more expensive to produce, and may limit the number of screenings the exhibitors can schedule in the course of a day. Bad things all.
   In addition there are structural concerns. Quite often in a 135-page script, the spin into Act III won't come until after page 100. It can feel a bit odd to head off in a brand new direction at a point where some movies are winding up. The script, then, may be thought to be paced too slowly.
   Oh, and I should mention that none of this actually makes any damn sense whatsoever, of course. There are many films that work just fine at 150 minutes or longer. And the screenplay for the first Terminator movie was, I believe, 170 pages long. But these are the biases we deal with, whether they have merit or not. If your script is under 105 pages, all the notes you get will be about stuff that needs to be added. If your script is over 130 pages, all the notes will be about stuff that needs to be cut. At 115 pages or thereabouts, the notes tend to be confused and cancel out, because no one can figure out whether to add stuff or cut stuff.
   So what do you do when your screenplay is edging into the unreadable 130-page plus territory?
   You cheat, of course.

The most important line in that quote is this: "These are the biases we deal with, whether they have merit or not."  (I take the You-cheat-of-course line for granted.)

You have to understand that every "expert", from a potential Executive Producer to the funding body's receptionist to the catering assistant, knows that one-page-equals-one-minute. Which means you have to look like you believe it, too, or you'll be considered a fool.

Anyone who has ever wrestled with a script on Movie Magic Screenwriter or Final Draft knows the hassle of getting stuff to stay where they want it, without having page breaks cut text in awkward places and making the page look ugly. Man, the hours I've spent rewording dialogue or action lines, just so they were short enough (or long enough) to have the automatic page break fall in a neat place! 

One of the tricks Terry Rossio talks about is "eliminating the widows," a widow being a typesetting term for when one or two words at the end of a line wrap around down to the next line.

I had an experience early on with a script I wrote, where I changed one word. One lousy word. I went from a long word (I forget what, now) to a shorter equivalent, on about page 2. There were no other changes. Everything else was identical, except the script was now lighter by three or four characters. That one change caused a ripple effect which resulted in a script that was two pages shorter. Two pages!  Which must give us a new rule, that four-characters-equal-two-minutes-of-screen-time. No?

Terry Rossio's suggestion #6 for fudging the page count is: If the script's really long -- forget the CUT TOs altogether, leave 'em for the shooting script! 

I experimented with doing just that on a longish script I wrote recently. The script shrank by six pages. Not a single change to action or dialogue or scene headings, but I was suddenly a six-page better writer. I suppose that means, if you include CUT TOs in your screenplay, your movie will be six minutes longer than if you don't, because six-pages-equals-six-minutes-of-screen-time. Right?

About a year ago, I sat through a presentation by a UK screenwriting guru (another one who has never actually written a screenplay), who shocked me by making a statement to the effect that, if you use parentheticals (personal direction, actor instructions, 'wrylies', whatever) in your screenplay, you are an incompetent writer.

I went home and started a study of the use of parentheticals in produced screenplays. That's a subject for another time, but it led to me setting up a document with a table headed: Title, Writer, and No. of Parentheticals. Then I thought, seeing I'm doing this anyway, why not add No. of Pages, No. of Scenes and Minutes. The document currently holds details of well over 350 screenplays, 127 of which are either nominees or winners of Academy Awards in one of the two screenplay categories. Let's consider some of them.

Start with a personal favorite: Lost in Translation. This was written and directed by Sofia Coppola, who won the Best Writing (Original Screenplay) category at the 2004 Academy Awards for it; something her father, Francis Ford Coppola, had done in 1970 with Patton. IMDb says Lost in Translation runs for 104 minutes. The screenplay (you can download a copy here) consists of 137 pages. At first glance. Take a closer look and you will find that 62 of those 137 pages consist of maybe two lines. The rest is blank. One page has nothing on it but a CUT TO. I took the PDF of that script, ran it through an OCR package, copied the output to Movie Magic Screenwriter, and reformatted it so that it matches the original, minus all the wasted white space. How long? 64 pages.

A 64 page screenplay translated into a 104 minute movie. We can't say that the director took liberties, or didn't understand the writer's intentions, because Sofia Coppola did both jobs. What we can say is that one-page-does-NOT-always-equal-one-minute-of-screen-time. In this case, the screenplay is light by some 40 minutes.

Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson wonder where the extra 40 minutes came from.

This works the other way, too. Consider Hannah and Her Sisters, by Woody Allen, who won the Best Writing (Original Screenplay) category at the 1986 Academy Awards for it. The available version of the screenplay (download a copy here) is a HTML document. If you copy that into Final Draft or Movie Magic Screenwriter, and format it correctly, you'll find the screenplay runs about 205 pages. According to IMDb, the movie runs for 103 minutes. That leaves some 100 minutes of screen time missing. Where did it go? Once again, we can't blame the director, because Woody Allen did both jobs. 

Mia Farrow explains her theory on why the other 100 pages have vanished.

Don't take my word for it, check the facts for yourself. Here are some examples of:

Screenplays that are 30 pages, or more, longer than the movie:

   Almost Famous (2000)

   The American President (2007)

   Blast From The Past (1999)

   Bridget Jones’s Diary (2001)

   My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997)

   Ocean’s Eleven (2001)

   Out of Sight (2006)

   Sexy Beast (2000)

   The Last Boy Scout (1991)

   The Social Network (2010)

Movies that are 30 minutes, or more, longer than the screenplay:

   As Good As It Gets (1997)

   Braveheart  (1995)

   Dances With Wolves (1990)

   Moonstruck (1987)

   Mulholland Dr. (2001)

   Schindler’s List (1993)

   Sling Blade (1978)

   The Deer Hunter (2002)

   The Pianist (1978)

   Total Recall (1990)

 

This is not an exhaustive list, just ten examples from each end of the spectrum. According to the "experts", these screenplays all failed to achieve the magic benchmark, and should have been rejected by the studio, or at least sent back for a rewrite.  

Notice the names of some of the writers involved: Aaron Sorkin, Billy Bob Thornton, Cameron Crowe, Dan O’Bannon, David Lynch, James L. Brooks, John Patrick Shanley, Randall Wallace, Richard Curtis, Ron Bass, Ronald Shusett, Shane Black, and Steven Zaillian. Between them, they've been nominated for Academy Awards for writing sixteen times, and picked up eight wins. Not too shabby.

The one-page-equals-one-minute rule is absolutely brilliant for everybody, except writers. If you suffer from ADD, or you want to sound like an expert, without actually doing any work on the subject, go ahead: rattle off the formula.

If you're a writer, you should forget it completely during the writing process. Focus on getting your story out, the best way you can. But once you're happy with your story-telling, you have to go back and focus on making all the "experts" happy. And that means fudging the page count to make it as close as you can to what they expect. 

These are the biases we deal with, whether they have merit or not.

 

Terry Rossio's Wordplay is a good place to go for ideas on how to do that.
 

"Ruby Skye P.I."

Here's the first episode of the series which won the 2011 New York Television Festival, Best Family Pilot competition, a Canadian show called Ruby Skye P.I.  Written by Jill Golick and Julie Strassman-Cohn. One for the Tweens...

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