THIS DOCUMENT IS YOURS TO USE, GIVE AWAY,

ALTER OR REPRODUCE FOR ANY PURPOSE,

WITHOUT SEEKING MY PERMISSION.

@filmutopia

Sunday Morning Movie Blog

e-book One - 2009-2010

A collection of articles about screenwriting and the movie

industry, written by a full-time media hobo

www.filmutopia.co.uk
www.lonegunmanifesto.com

#
 Introduction

At the end of May 2009 I had just completed a feature film script called
Smoke, which had attached directorial and acting talent. I was also starting
to feel the pressure of over twelve years obscurity in the movie making
community. Twelve years of writing spec scripts for the industry and making
digital movies… none of which had resulted in the career I set out to have.
Smoke looked like the project that would probably change that… however, it
came about at a time when the independent movie industry was in turmoil
over new technology, 2.0 social networking and the evolution of self and
hybrid distribution strategies.

The Sunday Morning Movie blog started as a way for me to make sense
of my personal journey as a screenwriter and as a movie-maker… whilst I
tried to deal with and understand my place in both the mainstream movie
industry and also as a radical independent movie maker.

The goal I set out to achieve was to write and deliver an article about
the movie industry every single Sunday morning.

One year on, I can say, hand on heart that I have published something
every single week. However, what has been remarkable about this journey
has been the dialogue and discussion these articles have generated in the
screenwriting and movie making community. It has been this connection to a
group of people who felt some connection to this journey, which has inspired
me to turn out article after article. You guys have been marvelous.

This ebook is a collection of some of the better pieces… often the pieces
that gathered the most response and discussion and also a new article about
writing micro-budget, which has never been published anywhere before.

I have decided to make this document open source… this means you can
use, distribute, give away, alter anything you find in this ebook without
needing to seek my permission. Feel free.

In compiling this ebook I have been forced to re-read a year’s worth of

articles… an interesting experience. What struck me about that, was how my
personal journey and attempts to make sense of the industry accurately
reflects some of the pressing discussions in independent movie making about
the future of content creation and distribution. We are living in interesting
times, with the digital revolution, 2.0 social networking and also uncertain
economic stability.

I hope you enjoy what’s been written… viva la revolution!

Clive aka @filmutopia

 How to Write Micro-Budget Scripts
Every now and again I'm asked to write articles about micro-budget screenwriting.
A couple of weeks ago I was asked to do this and, for whatever reason, the guys who
commissioned it never got back to me. So as I'm up to my eyes trying to get 400 Grams
ready for production, I thought I'd publish as this week's article... as you can see, the
writing style is a little more formal than my usual. Hope you enjoy it.

The Wrong End of The Horse

Three week's ago I cast an actor to play a part in a movie which begins
principle photography in August of 2010, the only thing is neither the script or
his role exists, yet. He said a resounding, yes! So, now I will write a role
specifically for him.

The week before that, I was out selecting and photographing locations…
again, for a project that currently is no more than a half page of notes on an
A4 pad. If I’m honest, this is my favorite way to work: have an idea, call
some people I want to work with to see when they are free, pick some
locations that inspire me and then build a movie around those things.
Welcome to the world of micro-budget screenwriting, a way of creating
movies I think you’ll discover can be more liberating, more challenging and
ultimately more rewarding than anything you’ve previously experienced.

Almost all the advice I’ve ever read about writing screenplays was
written by and for people who are writing either spec scripts or scripts for the
industry. The good news is that some of the core basics of that advice also
applies to writing a micro-budget screenplay. Good structure and character
development are key to the writing of any good movie script. However, built
into the vast majority of the advice about writing for the industry, are a set of
assumptions that are very particular to the way the industry works as a
business and which have no bearing at all on the process of creating a great
piece of cinema. This piece is about looking at movie making in a
completely different way. A way I believe has very real benefits for all kinds
of screenwriting and not just for micro-budget.
 I think the first thing to understand is that the vast majority of rules about
story-telling in the TV and movie industry are nothing but a series of
conventions. These conventions have evolved along side the industry’s
development as both a creative and a business medium. So, for instance, if
you look back at the early days of cinema, in Fritz Lang’s M actors were
filmed looking directly into the lens. This is completely opposed to the
modern convention, where a director will always shoot away from the actor’s
eye-line, usually as if the POV is over another actor’s shoulder. That
directorial convention is so entrenched in modern movie making and in the
minds of modern audiences, that to break it now just looks wrong. It would
seem like the director had made an actual mistake, as opposed to a choice.
As such, this convention has passed into the fundamental language of film-
making and is now pretty inviolate. However, despite this, in reality it is still
only a creative choice.

For screenwriters the primary conventions are mainly about knowing our
place in the industry’s pecking order. So, we are discouraged from doing the
director’s job by choosing shots for particular sequences or by thinking about
the look or style of the movie. We’re forbidden from telling the actors how to
do their jobs by being overly specific in our writing of direction. At the same
time, many of the conventions of narrative structure have been created by the
industry in an attempt to codify a template for box-office success. For many
screenwriters, learning to write for the industry is largely about learning to
conform our creativity to the requirements and norms of the industry. All of
which are laudable disciplines for people whose primary ambition is to get
paid for writing. However, putting that aside for a moment, 90% of the
conventions adopted by writers in the industry are solely designed to create a
demarkation of what is the writer’s role and what is someone else’s job. So,
you can write the dialogue (providing you understand the director and actors
will rework it in production)… you can create the plot (providing it conforms
to understood narrative structures)… and, you can even evolve the character’s
inner life (providing you don’t tell the actor how to achieve that). On top of
that, you must lay out the script in the subscribed professional format, in Final
Draft 8, so that other people can effectively use your script to do their jobs of
finding locations, creating a look, making wardrobe decisions, creating
schedules and the timing of sequences.

What makes writing micro-budget such a challenge for successful

industry professionals is exactly that set of conventions. The very things they
are discouraged from understanding and controlling when working for a
production company, are the very things that are required to understand to
write a great micro-budget script. A good micro-budget writer needs to
understand not just how the drama works, but enough of the production
process to understand what can and can’t be achieved on the available
budget.

Writing micro-budget, is largely about understanding the importance of

the specific. Any movie budget is made up of a list of all the places, services,
contracts, things and people you need to create a movie. The more a writer
understands about this how to use this process to their advantage, the easier it
is to write micro-budget. Historically, the most famous micro-budget movies
have all been developed by people with a phenomenal understanding of
production. Robert Rodriguez was able to to write and shot El Mariachi, on
film, with a production budget of $7,000, mainly because he spent years
honing his talent as an editor. Primer, by Shane Carruth, was written and shot
on 35mm film, also for a budget of $7,000, a massive achievement for a first
time movie maker, which he achieved by applying a scientific methodology
to studying both writing and production. Now, El Mariachi, is an action movie
and Primer is science fiction. Both of these highly successful movies confound
the widely held views, still held by the vast majority of film-makers, that
micro-budget automatically means shooting digitally and also means
avoiding writing scripts for what are perceived to be high-cost genres.

The fact that micro-budget is done best by those who understand

production, doesn’t mean that writers without that experience shouldn’t
attempt to write one. There are ways for a writer to approach micro-budget,
even if they have very little production experience or knowledge and I
suggest that the starting place is to take on board just one or two guiding
principles, which will give any writer a shot at getting their first micro-budget
script off in the right direction.

Principle One: Time is Money

The easiest way to increase a movie’s production cost is to increase the

number of days it takes to shoot. This is largely because the people who make
movies are all freelancers, paid on a day-rate. It’s also true that the vast
majority of production equipment is hired in for productions and therefore has
a “cost per day” implication. In very simple terms, the easiest way to make a
micro-budget movie is to shoot it in as few days as possible. At the same
time, if you can the lower the number of shooting days you need to complete,
you increase your chances of attaching the kind of actor you really dream of
having on the project; an actor who can justify five days on a project of this
level, but not six weeks.
In very practical terms, the number of locations that a movie is shot in
and the distances those locations are spread apart from each other, directly
effects both the number of days shooting and with it, the budget. However, at
the same time, nothing betrays the smallness of a budget quite as quickly as
poor location choices. For me, the first major creative choice, before
considering the plot or the characters, is deciding exactly where your movie
is going to be shot… and, more importantly, that it is somewhere visually
interesting. A place which will be a major contributor to the look and feel of
the movie, whilst at the same time being a location that you can control and
easily get permission to shoot at, without incurring phenomenal expenses.

There have actually been a number of movies where people have

transcended the location/budget problem, simply by being astoundingly
clever. Top of my list for smart uses of location has to be the sc-fi horror
movie The Cube. What they did in that movie, was create one studio set of a
cube shaped room and then use it multiple times. What’s clever about this, is
the whole plot of the movie revolves quite literally, around the simple
premise of a group of people trying to negotiate their way out of a maze of
interconnected cube shaped rooms, each of which presents its own dangers
and challenges. Like all smart low and micro-budget movie making, its
execution didn’t just try to hide the lack of budget, it turned a neat budget
cutting solution into a genuine benefit. In many respects, the same can be
said of Blair Witch (a movie I personally detest). But, again, the production
chose a location they could control, which added to the look of the movie
and which would cost them next to nothing to shoot at.
Many writers will find this way of working, the picking of a location and
writing to that location, completely unnatural. As I said at the start, the
industry prefers us to think in terms of the characters and the plot… and not in
terms of exactly where a movie will be shot. Other people, I hope, will find
the idea of starting the writing from a specific location incredibly liberating. I
know I do. These days even when I am writing spec scripts, I work from
location photographs and my writing is the better for doing that. One of the
things I’ve become very aware of, is that environments impact on human
behavior and therefore impact on plots.
 Getting a grip on your use of location, is one of the primary skills of
micro-budget movie making. Just to recap, the points a writer needs to hit are:
the maximum use of as few visually evocative locations as possible; where
there are multiple locations, they should be close together and easy to
control; and, the more you integrate the location into your plot, the better the
movie will be. Do this one thing well and creatively and you can bring a
budget down from low to micro-budget, or a micro-budget down to practically
nothing.

Principle Two: Money Doesn’t make Movies, People and Resources Do!

The saying guns don’t kill people, people kill people, also applies to
money and its relationship to the movie industry, in that, money doesn’t make
movies, people do. The second principle of writing micro-budget is largely
about understanding that simple premise. It’s about looking at movie making
from the wrong end and working backwards.

The reason movie making costs money is largely because of the

workflow and conventions that the industry has created. In that workflow, a
writer has an idea for a movie, the movie is set in 1914 England and also in
the trenches of Passendale. A producer who likes the script, raises money in
order to be able to pay for all the people and resources needed to make that
movie. Or, if you cut that process down to basics: first comes the idea, then
comes the list of resources needed to make that idea a reality.

A lot of writers like the traditional model, simply because there is a huge
ego boost from having a lot of money spent on making something that started
off in your head.

OK. For micro-budget, just reverse that process.

That’s right, the smartest way to create a good micro-budget project is to

start with a list of resources and then develop the project backwards from that
list. The great thing about this kind of movie making is that it doesn’t matter
how new you are to the industry or how unconnected you feel from the big
players, every single person on the planet has some of the resources you need
to make a movie. What takes a while to develop, is the ability to see those
resources for what they are… to see the potential that each of us has sitting
right in front of us. The irony is, that if you have the right contacts, some
technical understanding and imagination, it’s actually possible to make a
1914 period drama, with the scenes set in the trenches, on a micro-budget
and without anyone ever realising you did it all on an almost non-existent
budget.

Writing for micro-budget then, is largely about changing your mind-set as

a writer. It’s about looking at the process of movie making with fresh eyes
and thinking about the creative process from different angles. What it most
definitely is, is challenging. It asks more of us than working in the industry,
simply because it asks us to be more responsible and accountable for what we
write. It asks us to let go of the ego boost of having people spend vast
amounts of money on our ideas and instead asks us to improvise with the
things we have to hand.

At the start of this article I said I had spoken to an actor about working
on my new movie. A movie that is not yet written. That actor is a resource. I
also said that I had been out scouting locations. Locations are resources. The
truth of the matter is that my actual process is vastly more complex than
those two facts, but that is only because I have thirteen years of production
experience to make it so. However, despite the fact that what I do is more
complicated and more radical than I have outlined here, at the heart of it still
lies those two core principles of “time is money” and “it’s resources that
make movie, not money.” They are a great starting place for any writer who
feels the urge to step into a larger, freer and more fascinating world.
 Why The UK Movie Industry is Bollocksed

I have this theory about why the UK movie industry is so completely and
utterly bollocksed...

It could be utter wank... but I don't think so

Basically, it's this:

The writers, the agents, the directors and producer who currently make
movies in the UK learned their skills in the UK TV industry.

These people try to make movies using techniques that are considered
inviolate in UK TV... and when they get to make a movie, invariably they
create something that looks and actually is, a bit wanky, a bit poor...
generally not worth the price of admission.

UK TV Drama, from the soaps right up to the big budget show pieces,
only has one basic formula for creating drama and it's this:

Cause inner turmoil for your characters by putting them through constant,
relentless conflict... and by exposing them to their worst emotional
nightmares, over and over again.

This technique is never, ever questioned in UK TV drama and more

importantly it's never discussed why it's such a pivotal technique... and
actually the answer is simple, inner emotional turmoil is CHEAP!

Yes, you have to pay the actor the same amount of money whether she
has to spend the day hanging from a helicopter or whether she has to spend
the day acting her ass off, because of the acute inner emotional turmoil
caused by the discovery her father touched inappropriately in the bike shed.
However, one requires huge budgets and helicopters and the other involves
some crying, a lot of tissues and a menacing cut-away of a bike shed!

Writers, directors and producers in the UK make their day to day living
by churning out hours and hours of this formulaic approach to creating drama.
The only variable, the degree of crassness or subtleness with which it's
applied.

On top of that, pretty much the only delivery method applied in UK TV

is the "people talking" technique.

So, people talk in offices... people talk in the street... people talk over
the kitchen table... people talk in restaurants... if it's a comedy they talk
themselves into humiliating and embarrassing situations... if it's a drama they
talk until they uncover each other's secrets and throw each other into inner
emotional turmoil.

The truth is, the UK TV industry has become pretty adept at this approach
to programme making and every now and again, when they get a project with
a budget, like Dr Who or a period drama they throw a light frosting of props,
effects and costumes over the whole thing, and it sort of works... on the small
screen.

However, these techniques look cheap, tacky and tedious when applied
to movies... because movies are bigger than "I'm upset, because I'm afraid
Eric will cheat on me with Denise... OMG, what are Denise's knickers doing
in his jacket pocket!"

Movies have lots of ways of telling stories... some of them involve car
chases and big budgets and some of them involve densely metaphorical
cinematography, where it becomes necessary to have runners pick all the
daisies out of an entire field, because they're throwing off the colour balance.
Cinema looks and feels bigger than TV... except when it becomes hacked
down to TV's size by writers, directors and producers who think they
understand the medium... but in fact don't.
Over the last twenty years I've sat through literally hundreds of British
made movies, that would have done better if they'd been made for TV.
Everything from the plotting, the writing style, the casting choices, the
shooting style, every single aspect of the movie shouted small screen. Then
they wonder why the movie tanked at the box office.

Until UK movie producers are sat down and told that the techniques they
learned making Casualty and East Enders do not transfer to the big screen, the
UK movie industry will remain hopeless and until UK writers learn that TV
writing techniques don't apply to movie scripts, then the industry will remain
what it currently is... hopeless, parochial and hugely disappointing.
 (I still pretty much feel the same about this as an issue and a whole year of dealing
with UK agents and agencies has further confirmed my thinking that they are locked
into a world-view that is damaging the development of the industry.)

Be Nice, You Assholes

There are two different movie industries currently pretending to be one

industry... the old world industry and the new wave.

Sometimes the people from these two industries work together. Quite
often the people from these two industries pretend that there is only one
industry and paper over the cracks, but the truth of the matter is this, the old
world ways of doing business are increasingly under pressure from the new
wave interlopers, because the old world ways don't work as well as they used
to and much like the mighty Roman Empire, a lot of the old worlders haven't
yet figured out that they're stuffed.

The old world people are easy to spot because their business formula is
money + fame = power... and power is something you exercise and
demonstrate at every possible opportunity. "Don't you know who I am!" I
could write pages and pages about the rudeness and the bad behaviour I've
seen and heard by old world movie people, who genuinely believe that fame
and money give them the right to act like jackals, but I'm not going to... we
all know stories like that and anyway the new wave people are more
interesting.

When people talk about the digital revolution, they generally talk about
the technology and not about the culture that technology has created. Almost
all the people in the new wave movie industry were either directly created by
digital production techniques... or have been dabbling with it. And what's
really, really interesting is what defines the new wave people isn't the
technology they use, it's that co-operation is at the core of their thinking.

There is a reason why people who have adopted digital production

techniques tend to me more cooperative than people who only make movies
the old way. It's because almost everyone who learned digital in the early
days, did it because at some point in their lives, their ass was hanging out of
their jeans and it was the only way they could make movies and if you're
making movies with no money, then goodwill is the largest part of your
production budget.... and, guess what, nice people with interesting projects
survive better in that world than assholes. On top of that, the new wave
movie makers are all about sharing skills and information. On a low budget
production team, if your DOP is also an editor, that's a good thing. The guys
who pass on their skills and their intel to the people they work with, are the
ones that survive, because each person they taught is now a buddy.

This new wave cultural evolution is the opposite of the forces that
shaped the old world movie industry, where behaving like a jackal is how
you rose to the top. The old world movie maker mentality is: don't tell
anyone anything, don't cooperate, build weasel clauses into every contract so
you can bail and, any problem can be solved if you throw enough money at
it.

Rising up through the industry at the moment is a huge group of people

who value good manners, are cooperative by nature, who hate egotistical
assholes, who can multitask into any part of the production process (all your
DOP's can edit, direct, do post production audio, art direct, etc) and who
strongly suspect that people who throw their weight about don't have the
talent to back it up. Not only that, these people are all networking, all of the
time and are starting to pull some fairly major projects together.

Even though they don't know it, yet, the old world movie industry is in
decline. It's floundering about because economic forces are putting the old
worlders under pressures they don't understand. Production budgets are being
cut right across the business... and ironically, the people who don't find that
concept even slightly daunting are the new wavers... because new wavers
always have a workaround.

The truth of the matter is the old world movie industry always has looked
flaky to anyone who understood business. The people who defined their
importance by the size of their production budget, who weighed up everyone
they met to see if they're were worth talking too, who only trusted their
lawyers and who held their customers in contempt... those guys have always
looked wrong to the outside world. However, the big change in the industry
over the last ten years, is that more and more they're starting to look wrong to
the people on the inside as well.
 (Again, one year on, I still hold this world-view. If anything my experiences at
Cannes Film Festival have shown me how the new-wave movie makers are starting to
have a growing degree of influence.)

Why Fame = Money

There's been a lot of heat online this week about James Cameron's trailer
for Avatar. I've yet to read anything positive about it. I watched it and was
frankly underwhelmed. Let's face it, has been a lot of hype about the movie,
about how it will herald in an age of 3D movie making... and yet, when the
trailer came out, my first instinct was "I can't be arsed to watch that movie"
There is a general impression out there in cyber-land that the production team
got so excited by the technology, they forgot to make a movie. Of course, it
may just be the magic doesn't translate to a 2D trailer. I doubt it, because a
compelling story doesn't disappear in the cracks between 2D and 3D.

"Tech-glamour" is a common failing in the movie industry and it happens

at all levels. My take is, the second you start to believe that either a
particular camera format or editing system or effects package is going to be
the making of your movie, then you're stuffed. The things that make a movie
are the way it's written, the way it's cast and the way the team works
together to tell the story in an interesting way... the camera format ought to
be the least important thing on the set.

This week on Smoke casting has been the primary issue. We already
have one of the two male leads cast... a great name actor and we were
massively excited when he agreed to attach to the movie. This week I may
have found the other male lead... or rather, I have found an actor I really like,
what I don't know is whether I can persuade investors and distributors he's the
right guy for the job. He's done some good work in supporting roles, but in the
language of the industry "he's got zero box-office," which basically means
having his name on the poster won't bring money through the door. In a sane
world that shouldn't be a problem, in the real world, it is.
 If I'm honest, this is the part of movie making which drives most people
insane. The easy part is casting the movie, if you don't care about either ever
making it or seeing it in a cinema... because let's face it there are loads of
talented actors out there. I could cast this entire movie in an afternoon, if the
quality of acting was my only concern. The hard part is explaining to the the
investors and distributors why someone who has done incredible work as a
character actor, is the right person to take one of the lead roles, despite his
lack of box office.

It's not like I don't understand the economics of the movie industry.
Getting production finance is linked to what an investor believes will be the
return on US theatrical distribution. A British movie is doing well if it does
$1.5M in the US at box office, therefore, if you need $10M worth of
production finance, you've got to persuade people your product can perform
phenomenally at the box office. Guessing box office returns is far from
scientific and one of few factors you can actually put a figure against is what
your lead actors have achieved at box office... if you've never explored Box
Office Mojo do so, it's an education. If you're going to argue against that kind
of maths, then you've got to have something else to put in place of it, which
is equally compelling. Again, those kinds of arguments aren't impossible and
I do have some ideas.

What I also know is any attempt to rewrite this script down to a $2M
production budget, will mean cutting all the stuff that makes this movie a
movie and this is why the vast majority of UK movies are so bloody awful,
because when you write your movie to hit a particular budget, then you end
up cutting out the very things that make it cinematic you end up with
expensive TV, rather than cheap cinema. A mistake I see happen all too often
in the UK, where we have an inflated idea of how important our home grown
talent is to the rest of the world and where people are still trying to make
movies in the £1M-£2M price range. In my opinion, that is not enough money
to make a movie.
(Actually, it now looks as though making Smoke in the £1M to £2M budget range
is going to be the best shot at getting it produced. What I hadn’t figured into my early
thinking was the need for the project’s writer and producer to have worked their way
up through the ranks. It’s going to be a few years before anyone could put £5M into
one of my movies… so, you live, you learn)

I think this is why Richard Curtis who wrote "Four Weddings and a
Funeral" has been so successful. He picked a good, high profit genre, wrote
bloody excellent scripts, in a genre where previously they'd been a lot of bad
ones... but more than that, he made sure the movies stayed cinematic. And,
he also made the right casting choices to secure the budgets he needed. In his
early films there was always one US female box office name and she was
generally the love interest. That's smart producing.

I actually met Richard Curtis a few years back at the Edinburgh Film
Festival. He was standing in a crowded bar with a little semi-circle of "fame
space" around him. (fame space is the distance the British put between
themselves and a celebrity in crowded social situations). I just stepped up,
introduced myself and chatted with him for about half an hour, mainly about
the writing process. I found out that Blackadder was rewritten about 24 times
before it got commissioned and that he writes an entire series when he's
pitching a new TV project, he doesn't just write the first episode and hope it'll
be enough to make the sale. He knows the writing always needs a lot of work
to make the sale.

In reality the same is true on Smoke. The team knows what it needs to
do in order to make the movie fantastic. My job as producer is to defend their
right choices and then make sure they make good financial sense for
everyone. If I can show the investors how to turn a profit on a movie that
hasn't been compromised in either writing, production or casting, that will be
quite an achievement.

Bottom line is... I've got a lot to think about.

(The main change in my thinking since I wrote this, is a clearer understanding of
how the UK Film industry in particular revolves around who know whom… and also
the resume of the person involved. I rather naively thought one good script could open
any door. About that I was wrong. It helps but it’s not the whole process)
 Why You’ll Always be an Unknown Movie Maker

It's been a tough week. I got a phone call at the start of the week to tell
me the development funding application for Smoke had been removed from
the selection process. For both the movie and me personally, this is a major
set back. It's a set back for the movie because it means I can't afford to bring
my team together to complete the budget, which in turn puts back any
conversations with investors. Personally, it means more time living without an
income... I can't even start to explain what that means. I can reapply, but it's
going probably going to be at least three months before I can do that.
Effectively, if I stay with the same game plan, this means putting the movie
back three months.

The truth of the matter is I made a stupid mistake on the funding

application. I didn't re-read the funding criteria as I was rushing to hit the
deadline and because of that, I presented the information they needed in the
wrong way. I forgot the golden rule of applying for grants, which is: if you
don't tick all the boxes, your application will never get in front of the panel.

Making the presentation mistake isn't the only problem... the other
problem is larger. The other problem is the one that keeps me up at nights.

The biggest problem an unknown producer faces is the issue of

credibility.

People in the industry have an natural distrust of anyone unknown... the

assumption is, if you're unknown then you must be a wanker. It's not an
unreasonable assumption because the vast majority of unknowns you meet at
film festivals and industry events are wankers. There are a lot of wannabes out
there who make it tough for everyone else, by being a horrible combination
of hopeless, arrogant and insane, all at the same time. People in the industry
try to avoid talking to those people at all costs... something they achieve by
only talking to people they already know. You can see this on twitter,
celebrities and media types largely follow the people who they consider the
insiders, the safe people... people they know. In other words, other
celebrities. In the real world, in the movie business, the same rules apply.

What this means for the someone like me, is the biggest problem I face
pulling the movie together, is dealing with the industry's equivalent of the
"tick boxes.” In the same way that funding organisations need you to present
information in the right way, people in the industry need some evidence that
the project is "viable.” Viable is just another word for a project not run by
wankers. In other words, a well established name can take any piece of shit
to people and they'll listen... an unknown can turn up with the best project in
the world and the industry will fail to listen, because chances are it'll be a
waste of time.

At the moment, it's not unusual for me to be on the phone to a gate

keeper (the people they put between you and the people you need to talk to)
and for that person to say "Well, we've never heard of you."

So, right now, the biggest hold up on this movie is having me as the
producer. I don't have the right profile for a project of this size. Again, this
isn't because I don't have the skills to make this movie... I do. In fact, I have
a phenomenal understanding of what this movie needs to get made and to do
good business... what I don't have is the right level of access to make this
movie easily. Like I said, it's about credibility.

So, this week I've spent a lot of time considering whether to carry on
with my original game plan, to produce this movie myself, or whether to
make the process easier by shopping around for a co-producer with sufficient
credibility to open the doors I need opening.
(This is actually the decision I eventually took. Having no money and no
established reputation in the industry proved to be too big a handicap to allow me to
make this movie on my own terms)

Bringing in a co-producer is a mixed blessing. Right now I'm able to

protect the project from stupid decisions. The second I bring in another
producer, I lose the ability to do that. It also means that my company comes
away with a much smaller piece of the pie.

I haven't made any decisions yet. Push on by myself and or put time and
effort to finding the right co-producer. It's not an easy decision to make. The
irony of all this, is had the development funding come through it's a decision
I could have held off for at least another couple of months.
 #

What Disney Taught Me

Like a lot of people my age, Disney was my introduction to cinema. In

fact, the first movie I ever saw was the original animated "101
Dalmations." (Yes, I am that old!) It was at the Savoy, Kettering in Northants.
The main thing I remember about that day, was the Savoy had a little coffee
bar down one side of the entrance, where you could drink milk shakes. The
stools were real Americana, chrome poles that supported glamorous red
leather bar seats. This was the first time I'd ever been to the cinema by
myself, I must have been about eight or nine years old. It's hard to explain to
people who've grown up with huge colour TVs, home cinema and HiDef
computer screens, just how huge the visual and audio chasm was between
home entertainment and cinema in the 1960's. Going to the cinema was
literally mind blowing. To this day I still prefer to see movies in cinemas or at
the very least, projected. Something I don't think will ever change.

As a producer it's hard not to find Disney inspirational. He reinvented

animation and took it from being B movie, pre-feature short, kiddie
entertainment and transformed it into a highly profitable, story and art driven
industry. He did the one thing that all movie makers strive for, he made
marvelous movies and profits at the same time. Not only that, he did it the
arena of family entertainment, an area where all too often the output was
trite, mediocre and patronising. A trait that is often still true today. I
personally would love to slap the back of the head of anyone who believes
children's programmes and movies can be handed by second rate writers and
directors (dolts!).

These days what I really take from Walt Disney are a set of core values I
apply to movie making (not the family entertainment thing, er, I'm not best
suited for that. I think swearing is funny, grown up and clever), but rather a
set of core values I can distill down to one simple bench mark:

What can we do to make this movie phenomenal?

 The irony of this core value, is that what I see in the lot of the movie
makers and producers around me is a shorter and much less satisfactory
version of that core value, it seems to me that often their core value is
simply:

What can we do to make this movie?

The difference, in terms of how a movie is produced, between "How can

we make this movie?" and "How can we make this movie phenonemal?" is
vast. It is a completely different mindset.

What I'm doing at the moment is building a team of actors and crew
who want to bring their own particular skills and passion for the project and
give them the opportunity to work together to create something phenomenal.
To each of them I'm saying, not "How can we get this movie made?" but
"How can we make this movie, stunning, phenomenal, wonderful?" Of course,
what's interesting about this process is that by concentrating on how to make
the movie "phenomenal" we are greatly increasing the chances of it actually
getting made... simply because it's easier to sell a phenomenal movie than it
is one that is merely, good. Something Walt Disney understood all too well.

What's amazing about this process, is I'm discovering how rare it is for
people in the industry to be asked to do the things they are passionate about.
How sad is that? The good news is that every time I put the script in front of a
movie professional I want to work with, I get the same response "This is great,
let's make it." To which I respond "Thanks, but let's make it phenomenal."
 The Changing Face of Movie Producing

This blog really only exists because friends on Twitter asked me to write
about what I do as a media hobo and producer. So, this week, rather than just
rambling on about whatever was in my head, I thought I'd ask the folks on
Twitter what they'd like me to write about. By far the most popular request
was "what producing skills should writers have?"

First up, I'm not sure that I'm the best template to use if anyone is
looking for success in the movie industry. Despite the fact that every script
I've ever written has either been produced/optioned or has had significant
industry interest, in terms of actually making a living, financially I would
have been better spending the last twelve years delivering pizza. Seriously, I
would have earned more money, had less personal grief, been through fewer
divorces (probably), kept more houses... and, best of all I would have eaten a
lot more pizza. So, in a lot of respects, pretty much everything I write here, is
what I learned from the litany of mistakes I've made.

If I've anything original or worth saying about producing movies, I guess,

for me, the one thing I really believe is that in the new digital world "pigeon
holing yourself" is bad for producers.

One of the things I see, every single day, at all levels of the movie
industry, are people who make a decision about where they fit in the industry
and then mentally box themselves into that slot. At the bottom end, there are
the independent film makers who decide the only way they'll ever make a
movie is to buy a camcorder and do it all themselves; at the top end, is the
Studio Executive Producer who won't look at a project which has a budget of
less than $25M. In both cases, before the new project is even written, each of
these producers has decided on the budget range and the distribution method
for the film. In the case of the indie it's "no budget" and "on the net." In the
case of the Executive Producer, the budget is "$25M+" and distribution is "A
global theatrical release, followed by DVD and TV sales, mainly pegged to
sales in the USA." What's funny about this, is if you gave them both the same
script, the indie would make it on a camcorder with his mates and the Studio
Exec would attach the big bankable names of the moment and make it for
$32.6M. What's even funnier, is chances are, both of them will probably
make a bloody awful movie.

I genuinely believe one of the hardest things a writer/producer needs to

be able to do, is to look at their script and see realistically where it slots into
the industry. Is this a movie I need to make myself on camcorders? Is this a
movie I make with professionals, but on a micro-budget? Is this a "Made for
TV" movie, I pitch to a producer who specialises in that kind of material? Or,
is this a massive Hollywood Studio, $25M+ starfest, where I'll need lots and
lots of help? The hardest part of that equation isn't the script itself, but our
own personal comfort zones, because, just in the same way that an indie with
a camcorder is often too scared to put a script in front of the majors, major
name directors and producers are too terrified to put their professional
reputation on the line by turning out a camcorder movie with friends. (I do
actually believe we'll see this change soon... I even have some ideas about
who will lead the way)

My personal take is that knowing where the script will best fit, is the
number one skill a producer needs to have, that and having the confidence to
work at every level. In terms of how you get to that point, the only way to do
it, is to do it. It's a lot like rollerblading, you have to be prepared to dive in
and make a dick of yourself, over and over again, until you reach the point it
all just feels automatic and natural.

Over the past year, I've started to see a new class of producer emerge.
People who, like me, are experimenting with a more flexible approach to the
industry and they are making some remarkable choices. Of these, Robert
Llwellyn is one of my current heroes. Best know, internationally, for playing
the OCD android "Kryten" in the BBC series "Red Dwarf," (@bobbyllew on
twitter) currently produces one of the best DIY online shows in the world
"Carpool," a show where he interviews interesting folk, whilst giving them a
lift in his much loved Toyota Prius. It's a great show and I've watched it
evolve from its rather shaky roots, where, to be honest the sound quality was
sometimes a little below par, to its current, all singing version.

As a producer, what I like about Carpool is that it's a concept Bobby

could easily have slotted into regular broadcast TV, a world where he's an
established name and where he has the right level of connections. Instead,
he's made what I believe to be a better decision, he's created a successful
online fanbase for the show, done everything for himself and now, having
proved its worth as a concept, he can either sell it on as an established format
or, look at other ways of getting a return on his investment. Personally,
although I'd love to see it on TV, I kind of hope he's got other plans for it.

In lots of respects, as a producer I am the mirror image of Bobby. He's an

established and much loved TV star, who is discovering the how's and why's
of self production and distribution, whereas, I am the guy who can make a
$750,000 feature film with just $60,000 in cash and a shit load of good will,
who is learning that just because I can do it that way, it doesn't mean that for
every project, it is the best way to go. For me, this is what makes the current
movie and TV industry so exciting. For the first time ever, it isn't just one
thing. In a very real sense, it is whatever we can make work and whatever
excites us most, both as creatives and as business people.

For the screenwriter who wants to be a writer/producer my main advice

would be, don't pin your whole career on one script. Take an honest look at
each script you write and then slot it into the sector of the industry where it
fits best. With some projects this may mean sitting on a script until you've got
the right contacts to create an opening for it. The other thing I would
definitely do, is take at least one script and make it for next to nothing...
nothing teaches you about writing or producing better than actually making a
movie and seeing from the end result, where you screwed the pooch.

Who is the Audience for this Movie?

One of the things I've understood for years, and one of the reasons I
believe I can make a living as a movie producer in the current economic
climate, is that the movie industry doesn't seem to take marketing and
advertising seriously. In the current economic climate, my take is that a
professional marketing strategy for a movie is more important than the cast
we attach in terms of securing finance and also ensuring the success of the
movie. The days of "it'll make money providing X is in it," are over.
 Historically, the industry has a limited number of techniques which work
brilliantly when they work, but that have an appalling failure rate. I've spent
decades in this industry shaking my head as both Hollywood and
independents fail time and time again to apply any kind of creativity to what
is essentially the launch of a new brand or product. Whilst at the same time,
both the industry and independents also get overly hung up on the means of
delivery, rather than on the content of the message. Or, in other words... the
answer isn't "the internet," is what you do with it. The same applies to any
other advertising or marketing medium... the answer isn't posters, it's what
you do with them... etc etc

The good news is that the core principles of understanding a movie as a

product are pretty simple.

When I first got a job as a copywriter in radio, I was taught how to write
commercials by a team with a very simple philosophy. That you could
approach any advertising problem by answering three simple questions:

1) Who are we talking to? (defined by a specific desire or problem)

2) What do you want them to do? (buy stuff)

and

3) Why should they do it? (a compelling reason which addressed the

desire or problem)

This may seem simplistic, but by using it professionally for thirteen years
I discovered it's actually a very sophisticated way of approaching marketing
and advertising problems. In particular, it's about the dance between the
"who" question and the "why" question... or, in other words, the way the why
of why people should go to see your movie, is linked to an understanding of
who your core audience is and what they want.

What's really, really important, is to grasp that "Who" is defined by a

specific desire, rather than in the normal marketing speak of most "marketers."
So, for instance, "17 to 25 year old cinema goers" is not a "Who," it's a piss
poor generalisation which tries to predict movie going trends based on the
assumption that all 17 to 25 year olds want the same thing from movies. A
better who might be: "a person who enjoyed 'Withnail and I'" ... or "a person
who thinks some graffiti is brilliant urban art"

For Smoke I've a huge list of "whos" all of which are matched to the
strengths of the movie, which in turn become linked to the "Whys." Some of
those "whys" are about the genre of the movie (comedy)... what kind of
comedy it is (is it more appealing to the kind of people who like 'Spaced'
than it is to those who like 'Friends')... and some of those "whos" are directly
related to the type of characters in the movie, the kind of world they inhabit,
the cultural references in the movie. In total I've identified about sixty
specific groups of people (defined by what they like) who will naturally find
"Smoke" their kind of movie... that is, they will if any of them ever find out
that it exists. This means that part of Smoke's marketing strategy is about
finding ways to isolate specific groups of people (whos) and then let them
know about the movie's existence and why it's for them.

In some respects Hollywood has always used a crude version of this

formula, but only to the extent that "who are we talking to?... someone who
likes Brad Pitt... why should they see this movie?... because Brad Pitt is in it"

or "who are we talking to? ... people who loved 'The Matrix'... why
should they watch this movie?... because it's 'The Matrix IV - in which Neo
and Trinity's child battles the Architect's plan to redecorate the matrix in
Hello Kitty merchandise'" (sorry about that one... I had a moment... but, you
do know it's only a matter of time, don't you?).

The easiest part of this equation is always the "what," because it's very
simple... "what do you want them to do... buy the movie and tell their friends
to see it."

What I'm trying to do with the business plan for "Smoke" is to define my
market pretty clearly in the early stages of the movie's development. A
process I started when the script was being written and one I intend to
formalise into a marketing strategy before I approach investors... This isn't
something I want to be doing when the movie is completed. I'm doing it now
because one of the strongest assets any movie has is the script and it's easier
to adapt the script to conform to the needs of the market, than it is to adapt
the market to the needs of the script. Of course, the major players do this all
the time. The problem is, often the changes made to make a script conform to
the market, are applied without any real understanding of what the market
actually is... or in many cases what the script is really about and who it really
appeals to.

For Smoke this has meant a rewrite of the original script to alter some of
the language, so that it would be broadcast safe on mainstream TV... the
tricky part was achieving that without compromising the piece. My baseline
is that every alteration has to make the movie better, not just more
mainstream. Doing both is and was possible. It's never about compromise...
that's important... and also where many market driven rewrites go wrong.

The bottom line is... I understand Smoke both as a script and also I
understand it as a product. For me, that's the key to getting all this to work..
and this also is the big change I really want to see happen in the independent
movie sector. Let's be grown ups and recognise that our movies have to
perform as products... but at the same time, let's make a commercial virtue
out of our understanding of what makes a great movie. Those two factors
don't have to be contradictory... but, and this is a big but... in order to do that
we have to stop the belief that niche marketing can be achieved by throwing
up a website, designing a poster, attending a few film festivals and hoping for
the best. The marketing strategy needs to be targeted, specific to that movie
and built like a brand launch. If the movie is costing multiple of millions of
pounds, the marketing of the movie needs to reflect that. Even if the movie is
costing nothing, the marketing needs to reflect the commercial potential...
and by the way, no movie costs nothing, by the time you factor in crew and
cast time investment, they're all expensive products.

This is the reason I sometimes despair of current trends in independent

movie making, where business strategies are being formulated on the baseline
belief that audiences can't be built through conventional business strategies.
When, what I see is a failure to treat each movie as a distinct product and to
develop marketing strategies designed to talk to and nurture a desire to see,
in each movie's natural set of Whos. Every movie has an audience, you just
need to know who they are and then talk to them! What's exciting about the
new media developments is that that is now possible, but like I said earlier...
new media/new distribution isn't the answer, it's what you do with them. It's
all about content, for both the product and the marketing of that product.
 Mood Swings, Rejection and Life in the Industry

@stephenfry is an institution on twitter, one of the central figures. A man

whose contribution to spreading information and rallying the good people of
the world to worthy causes, is legendary. He is also a great wit, a talented
writer, a phenomenal actor and a rather wonderful human being and yet, he's
also a man who is prone to what Churchill called "The Black Dog," or mood
swings... manic depression.

He's been having a bit of a rough time the last twenty four hours and my
heart and my best wishes go out to him.

I'm not manic depressive, but I understand mood swings and I also
understand the steep price that is extracted when you are blessed/cursed with
the personal combination of creativity and vulnerability.

Personally, I think vulnerability is one of the keys to good drama, both

for actors and for writers. However, the downside of that, is that the very
things that equip a person to be a good dramatist, are sometimes liabilities
when it comes to surviving the business side of the industry.

Which in a way is what I've been trying to write about this week... that
delicate balance between artistic integrity on one side and business integrity
on the other. A thought I'll come back to.

However, for the moment, I just want to talk a bit about how one of the
hardest pressures on an independent movie maker, in my experience, is
learning how to survive rejection and criticism. In fact, perhaps more
important than that, is how we stop our own minds from creating phantasms of
rejection from less than perfect evidence, especially in an industry where the
actions of most of the people you will do business with, will reenforce your
sense of rejection. I had the perfect example this week. We'd sent details of a
documentary project out to someone nearly a month ago and heard nothing
back. In this industry, nothing back usually means you are not important
enough even to get a personal rejection. However, I made the follow up call
anyway and discovered that the person in question has been out of the
country on holiday for the past three weeks. Or, in other words... we're not
actually rejected, yet.

Even with a project like Smoke, where we're getting a lot of support and
interest from the industry, I would say that at least a couple of times a week I
have to deal with either a personal rejection, or a personal snub or in some
cases outright rudeness from someone in the industry. The problem is, dealing
with this means not just an adjustment of the business plan, but it also means
taking the emotional hit, picking yourself up one more time and finding some
way of getting positive about the project again. Some weeks this is easier
than others... and sometimes, like this week, you hit a spot where for no
particular reason at all, everything seem harder and more futile than usual.

The industry is harsh... and yet it needs vulnerable, creative people. This
is one of the great dilemmas of the movie industry.

On some levels I equate artistic integrity with vulnerability, although I

don't think they are exactly the same thing, I can see connections. When a
creative in the movie industry talks about finding truth, or making an
important movie, generally they're talking about exploring human
vulnerability... and more importantly, they're also emotionally invested in
seeing the movie made the way they believe it should be.

The flip side of this equation is having business integrity. Business

integrity is about ensuring that my artistic integrity isn't created through
exploitation. For me, that means making sure that everyone who works on the
movie is paid the right rate for their time and their input and also it means
ensuring that I do everything in my power to ensure that the people who
invest in my movie, make a handsome return on that investment. In my
opinion, artistic integrity without business integrity is both egoistical and
narcissistic.

These days I read a lot of articles about why the movie industry is
suffering so much. Almost all of them point of external and evolutionary
forces: economic down turn, credit crunch, internet piracy... blah, blah,
blah... actually, my take is that industry has never paid sufficient attention to
the balance between artistic integrity and business integrity. So, on one side
you have had a lot of independents who have made movies with artistic
integrity, but who haven't cared enough about the business side of the
equation to protect and serve their investors. On the other side you have a
huge section of the industry whose only interest is in short term business
gains. In particular a distribution industry who learned they could make
money without having to try too hard... providing they only turned out easy to
sell movies.

I guess what I'm saying is we'd have a better movie industry and better
movies if vulnerable creatives like myself, learned how to do more than just
take the knocks, but also managed to take a step back and understand our
larger responsibilities as business people... and at the same time, it would
also make a real difference if the distribution sector of the industry learned
better marketing and advertising skills and stopped reducing every movie to
"what was the budget and who is in it?"

On a personal level, I understand that Smoke's ability to make it to

cinema screens depends all most exclusively on my ability to carry on
making the right business and artistic moves and also to a larger extent, my
ability to dust myself off, pick myself up and believe it's all worth the effort.
Which is what I'm going to do right now...

Media Hobo Movie Kung-Fu

One of the things I learned very early on in independent movie making,

is I have to be adaptable. This is because regardless of how well I do my fund
raising, I'm always going to be presented with problems that can't be fixed,
with the amount of money I have available. What this seems to mean is that
independent movie makers often learn one of two skill-sets: how to creatively
adapt to the circumstances or how to compromise.

When it comes to movie making, my take is that compromise is always

a mistake. In fact, I'd go as far as to say, that it's better not to shoot, than to
shoot a project you know isn't going to be the movie it should be. That's why
adaptability is the most important skill a producer can have. Not only that,
the less money I have, the more adaptable I have to be.
 Personally, I think adaptability is probably more important than money
and the top end of the industry would be in better shape, if people used more
of it, instead of spending their way out of problems... but that's a rant for
another day.

I learned my attitudes to adaptability through the study of martial arts. In

particular a Tai Chi based martial art called Feng Shou. Without getting too
Kill Bill about it, what I learned from my teacher, Chee Soo, was that the best
way to deal with an on coming force was to get out of its way... and more
than that, to give it a little bit of help.

This may not sound like it can be applied to the movie business, but it
can. In business terms, what this means is that I won't get my movie made by
struggling against the forces at play in the industry. I'll get Smoke made by
pointing the business plan in the same direction as the tide. Not only that, as
the tide changes I need to adapt with it, rather than trying to force my way
forwards with the old plan.

This week, I've made a strategic shift to turn Smoke into the tide.
Basically, I've started writing a version of Smoke to pitch as a novel.

One of the underlying truths of the industry is that adaptations of existing

novels, perform better at the box office and are more likely to get made, than
new ideas from spec scripts. A lot of screenwriters, trying to sell speculative
screenplays bitch about this issue. It's occurred to me that rather than kicking
against that trend, it made perfect business sense to turn Smoke into a novel,
as well as screenplay. The argument for doing it is very simple: firstly, it's an
opportunity to take my existing product (the script) and open it out to new
potential markets. This means that even if the movie never came off, I'd still
have an alternative opportunity to earn from the story; secondly, getting the
novel published automatically increases the potential audience base for the
movie and increases its credibility as a product. It's a win, win situation.. and
as Smoke is currently stalled by lack of development money and the endless
wait for people to get back to me about stuff, it's also a sensible use of my
time. When in doubt, write.

Part of my thinking about reworking Smoke for the book trade, is related
to the current push from people like Power to the Pixel and Ted Hope to get
independents to think about multi-platform releases as a way of building
audiences. However, whilst they seem to be obsessed with digital platforms,
I've been looking wider and at more traditional industries. I've been asking
myself: would my movie make a credible graphic novel? Can I sell it as a
comic book series? Is it more literally and therefore more attractive to people
who read fiction?

The bottom line with cross platform selling, is that I need to match the
alternate products to my movie's potential audience base. With Smoke it was
and still is a toss-up between novel and graphic novel... but, as I have the
skill to write a novel, unaided, the novel won... for the moment.

I've enjoyed this week's writing, a lot. Writing a novel is a new

experience for me, so starting was actually quite a scary experience. When
you have skills in one style of writing, they don't automatically translate into
a new medium. However, it's coming together really nicely. What's been
really interesting for me, has been to see how writing a screenplay in novel
form, has forced me to unpack the characters in greater depth than I do for a
screenplay. I'm honestly surprised screenwriters don't do it more often.

There's actually a lot more to this idea of going with the flow, rather than
kicking against it... especially in terms of the business side of movie
production, but maybe that's a discussion for another day.

What I think is important though, is to get over the idea that in the
movie business, the movie isn't the product, the story is, the characters are.
And, like in any business, there are often multiple ways to bring those
characters and this story to an audience... all of which ultimately serve the
best interest of the movie.
 How I Learned to Write Screenplays

I first came to screenwriting about thirteen years ago, when I was already
an international award winning radio copywriter. I had just won The London
Internationals and had come to the conclusion that I'd tackled all the
challenges advertising had to offer me as a writer. I wanted new challenges
and I also wanted to do some "serious" writing, or at least some writing where
the client's stupidity wouldn't ruin my work. I have to laugh, because if I'd
known then what I now know about the movie industry I never would have
seen it as the better or more expressive option than advertising. Hey, and in
advertising I also got paid!

The reason I mention my background, is because I came to screenwriting

as a well established, professional writer, who was at the very top of my
chosen field and yet, in all honestly, it was to take me another nine years to
actually translate the ability to write a coherent sentence, into a script that I
could "hand on heart" say was genuinely good enough. I really had no idea,
when I first started out, just how difficult and technical screenwriting is. All I
had in the early days, was the ability to write killer dialogue. This I had
learned in radio studios, by writing scripts for actors to read... which in itself
is no small achievement. Even to this day, whether it's here in my blog, in a
script or even in the novel, I still construct sentences that are designed to be
read out loud. I don't see that changing any time soon, if ever, because in
many ways, this way of writing has become the largest part of my voice as a
writer. It does also explain my idiosyncratic punctuation; hahahahhaha.

For me, the process of learning to write, has largely been the process of
writing for production. Which in turn has given me nearly twenty years of
direct feedback on how my use of language works in a practical setting. This
is one of the reasons I've always been an advocate of screenwriter's
producing their own movies, because my entire learning process has been
founded on writing, then producing, then seeing where I got it right and where
I got it terribly wrong. In all honesty I don't think I ever would have evolved
as a writer, had it not been for my opportunities to write for radio and hear the
results... and then to repeat the same process as a digital movie maker.

My personal process of learning to write screenplays, took much, much

longer than I possibly could have anticipated. About nine years and seven
movie scripts in total. Where I was lucky, was that every time I wrote a
script, a producer saw something in it that made it worth producing. (Even
when paying me wasn't an option). In no small respect, I survived in the
industry for many years, only on my ability to write dialogue that actor's
found enjoyable to work with.

What took me forever to learn, was the technical nature of the

screenplay. Not just absorbing the two millions rules: no passive voice; no
directing the camera; no directing the actors; the placement of the inciting
incident and the call to action; act breaks; character arcs; sub-text; the nature
and disclosure of secrets; the relationship of the scene to the segment;
formatting (whose rules change every other day); how to engage, pace and
write for people who don't like to read; the balancing act between conflict
and connection; 3 act structure; 4 act structure; why all the screenwriting
manuals are written by people with practically no movie credits; and, finally
the actual language of the screenplay... which is unique and perhaps the most
complex magic trick ever staged... in that, you tell the director exactly how
the movie needs to be shot, without the bugger ever figuring out how or that
you did that.

Actually, that is only half the problem, because once a script is exposed
to the industry you rapidly discover everyone interprets these construction
guidelines in different ways. In fact, I got so tired of having readers tell me
my scripts didn't follow three act structural guidelines, I actually built the key
structural points into the script of Smoke as gags... so at the end of Act One,
Font has graffited a sign in Acton to read "You are now leaving Actone!" Trust
me, that was so worth the effort.

Moving away from the technical constraints of screen writing these past
few weeks, has been an absolute delight. Writing a novel and writing a
screenplay are very, very different disciplines for me as a writer and if I'm
totally honest, although challenging, writing the novel is turning out to be
both liberating and much more enjoyable.

The first thing that struck me as a fledgling novelist, was just how much
of the creative process in screenwriting is devolved to both the actor and the
director. The rules of screenplay writing are largely about placing prohibitions
on the writer, in order to give freedom to the director and the actors to take
ownership of the creative act. So, in my original screenplay, the Transport
Policeman who opens the movie, was a device to get us through the credit
sequence and to introduce the protagonists. In the novel, I suddenly had the
space and the freedom to take this person and explore his inner life, his
aspirations and to create a credible backstory. None of which would have
been possible in the movie version.

The next thing that struck me, was how my vocabulary and writing
syntax was set free, to play on the page in the novel form, in a way that just
isn't possible in a movie script. I'm discovering my natural writing style is
both literary and lyrical, neither of which are natural fits to screenwriting. A
friend of mine once told me that screenplays have to be written in language
that is accessible to a lower than average high school student, largely
because movie producers aren't big book readers. "Clive, if they have to
consider reaching for a dictionary, they'll hate you for being smarter than
they are and they'll hate the script." The same is true of the syntax of the
movie script... it is deliberately constricting. In fact, as I've been writing this,
I've realised that in an ideal screenplay, the writing is meant to be invisible.
If you notice the writing, then it is acting as a distraction from the story.

What's happened to me, in the process of adapting Smoke into the form
of a novel, is I've been let off the leash as a writer. Suddenly, I can use the
word "rapscallions" in a sentence, without being self indulgent. For the first
time in many, many years as a writer, I am free to use all the tools at my
disposal and to have a genuine and singular voice. My characters, my story,
told in the way I want to tell it. As a writer, that is a serious amount of fun.

What I've also begun to understand this week, are the reasons that
adaptations of novels to screenplays pretty much always fall short. The truth is
that the screenplay has no possibility of accurately reflecting a novel. At least
not with the industry as it exists today. It's always going to be like trying to
stuff a live bear into a bunny costume. In that there is always too much bear
and not enough room in the bunny suit! In other words, all of the things I try to
imply or build into a movie script via metaphor and context, I can explore
explicitly in the novel.

For me, as a screenwriter exploring the novel as a form, I see the

freedoms it offers and for me personally writing in the novel form is more
challenging. Simply because I'm having to adapt to the freedoms. Whereas
the conventions of writing for screenplay are hard wired. I visualise the scene,
I hammer it down, without even having to think about how I do that. Through
hard work and study and practice, writing for screen has become second
nature.

What that doesn't mean is that it is easy. I can see how the sparse form
of screenwriting, must seen simplistic to those writers who have mainly
written novels. All I can say is, it isn't. I genuinely believe that as a writer,
the hardest challenge I have ever undertaken, was learning how to write for
the screen. Not that I believe people shouldn't try, just that perhaps they
need to accept, that no matter how good they are in their current writing
form, based on my experiences, they should probably dedicate a good eight
or nine years or getting it wrong, before they actually understand how to write
a movie, well... or, maybe I'm just a slow learner!

Given the current state of the movie industry and the fact that it's
populated largely by the insane and the terminally stupid, I can't imagine
why anyone with the freedom to write novels would ever bother. Trust me, it's
soul destroying.

What I am finding, however, is what an incredible blessing my years as a

struggling screenwriter have been to my development as a story teller. The
truth is that the very restrictions, disciplines and development processes that
are the norm in screenwriting, provide a rock solid foundation for writing a
novel. One of the common mistakes writers make, in all disciplines, is trying
to compress the whole creative process into one act of writing. By that, I
mean, taking a blank page, starting to write and then trying to plot, be
constructive in their use of language and develop characters, all on the fly.
I'm in the rather fabulous position of knowing my story and my characters, the
story arc and how it plays out and develops, already. All I'm having to do, is
write. And by that, I mean I have the luxury of only having to think about the
way in which I use words, to give the readers an enjoyable read. Bliss.

As of this week, I have absolutely no idea how or when the movie will
make its next faltering steps towards production. I'm going to take some time
over the Christmas break to consider my options there. What I do know, is
that I am happy and enjoying writing in a way I haven't for years... which for
me, is as good as it gets.

#
 If You Act Like a Dog

I've not talked much about the development of the movie recently and
that's because I've been a bit stuck. Ever since the development funding
crisis three months ago, I've had a pretty frustrating time with the project. I'd
like to believe the reason the movie's progress has stalled is only about the
lack of development finance, but actually there are more fundamental "
Catch 22" style problems, which I'm currently trying to get a perspective on...
and that's what I want to write about today.

Earlier this week @bang2write posted a link to a John Blumenthal article

titled "Why Writing a Spec Script Will Get You Nowhere" The jist of this
article is: There is no point in writing a spec, because everyone and their dog
is doing that and no one in the industry will read it anyway.

On one level John is right, one of the problems facing any screen writer
is the fact that the industry is drowning in a sea of absolutely awful spec
scripts. I friend of mine, who reads specs in Hollywood, once told me that
98% of the scripts that passed over his desk were unreadable. They were so
bad they didn't even manage to achieve the baseline for competence. One of
the results of this tidal wave of spec pap, is the industry has developed a view
point that anyone who is new and unheard of, mathematically has a 98%
chance of being a complete waste of time or a wanker... the industry is
notoriously wary of wankers.

This is a huge problem for anyone trying to break into the industry and
the heart of the "Catch 22" issue I mentioned earlier. You need to be known to
get read... but how can you get known, unless someone actually reads you?

On top of all this, is the on-going trend of the studios, to retreat from
"unsafe" projects. The studios are moving more and more to high budget
adaptations of existing brands: toys, comic books, novels, etc. So, in very real
terms, a spec script from an unknown and unbranded writer, is about the
biggest risk it is possible for a studio to take. The bottom line is that an
unknown writer like me, with a spec script, has absolutely no leverage, if I
choose to play by their rules.

My take is that every independent movie-maker and unknown screen-

writer is trying to solve exactly the same problem: how to create sufficient
leverage, in order to make their creative work worth paying attention to. I
know for me personally, leverage and my lack of it, is a daily business
problem, one I'm working very, very hard to overcome.

It seems to me that flip side of this, is that this closed community is also
the biggest problem the movie industry faces right now. Everyone wants
someone else to take the risks on their behalf: producers want agents to act as
gate keepers; talent want agents to act as gate keepers; agents want to take
the safest option for their clients; investors want the talent and distributors to
buy into the movie before they do; the agents want to see the production
money is in place and distribution is sorted before they attach their clients;
and, distribution wants to know who is in it and who is directing before they'll
even talk to you. No one wants to be the first to attach significantly and, even
when you find people who are interested, like for instance a distributor... the
golden rule seems to be, we like you, but we'll not give you anything useful,
until everything else is in place.

The whole industry really is idiotic and it's idiotic because it's run like a
school play ground where no one wants to commit to playing with the new
guys, until they see whether the "cool" kids think he's OK. If you really want
to know why the movie industry is a mess, it's because at its heart, it is run by
people who don't have faith in their ability to tell a good script from a bad
one. Well, that and an inability to market creatively or distribute sanely. (But
don't get me started on those)

From the start with Smoke, my plan was to bootstrap my way into a
bankable position... or in other words, use the leverage of the script to attach
the right talent, to attract in all the other cool kids I need to get the movie
made. Smoke started very, very well. I got my director immediately, got one
of the lead name actors I needed, immediately. Where we're stalled, is that
even with those two people attached, I still don't have the leverage I need, to
get the other elements in place. There is a good reason for this... it's partly
me... as a writer and as a producer I am too much of an unknown quantity to
give the project enough credibility.
But, actually, neither of my two major leverage issues are the real
problem... the real problem is more human and is to do with my gut level
distrust of the way the industry conducts itself. It's actually really easy, in this
business, to buy into the norms of behaviour and conduct, that seem to be part
and parcel of how things get done. Personally, over the last couple of months,
I've really started to question that. What really bothered me, was how I was
starting to accept that unacknowledged emails are the norm and unreturned
phone calls are "just how things are done." In fact, more than that, I'd started
to believe that the lack of response from agents, producers and other industry
folk was my fault. No one was talking to me, because I wasn't worth talking
to... which is bullshit.

When I was a proper, full-on independent, I never stood for any

nonsense at all. My working philosophy then was: this is my movie. I am
going to make this movie. If you want to be involved, good for you. If not,
then fuck-off. Either help me make this happen or get out of the damn way!
Those were the only two choices. What I never did as an independent, was sit
outside the door like a wet puppy, waiting for someone inside to let me in out
of the rain. All of the hold ups on Smoke, have been entirely down to my
willingness to hang around like a whore in a cheap bar, waiting for either a
government quango or industry folk to actually pay attention to the
opportunity I'm presenting them with. I've allowed them to set the pace and
the agenda.

So, as of today, the independent head is back on... everything else gets
punted to the sidelines. if I've proved anything in the last six months it's: if
you act like a dog, you get treated like one.

However, the news isn't all grim, because it seems that the industry itself
is swinging more towards the model of movie production I believe in. My
take has always been that the talent, money and the writer could package
projects and then take them to the studios for distribution... and guess what,
as Hollywood retreats its production model to the CGI effects, $100M+ brand
driven movies, in Europe, Hollywood talent is starting to see the benefits of
developing their own projects, outside of the studios, with international
money.

This is great news for me, as an English language movie producer living
in Milan, because my guess is that once more the European festival scene is
going to become the driving force behind new movie development for the
American market. A trend that I first noticed at Cannes 2009 and am now
seeing played out across the pond. If the industry becomes more Euro-centric,
more script driven and more accessible via the major European Festivals, I
might actually have a shot at making this work. What I don't see, yet, is the
London scene getting their asses into gear to be part of this... but actually, for
me that maybe a bonus, I've always done better in mainland Europe, than I
ever did in London, where the scene is dreadfully class driven and insular, or
Los Angeles, which is rapidly losing ground as a player, for my kind of
project. On top of that, I've actually got leverage in Europe, most of which I
gained by establishing a reputation on the festival circuit, as a guy who can
by-pass agents and get other people's projects back on track.

The important thing is, I don't feel either frustrated or helpless in this
process anymore... John Blumenthal was right, but he missed out two
important points. Yes, everyone is writing specs, but most of them are writing
really bad specs and good writing will always find a way onto the right desk...
and finally, the days of the screenwriter/employee are over. I shouldn't be
relying old Hollywood to discover me, when I can be out there finding
collaborators in the new global movie economy. More importantly, there is
no point trying to attract the attention of people who aren't interested in me
or in Smoke... not only is it pointless, it is disempowering and soul destroying.

There is another factor at play in all of this. The perceived decline by old
Hollywood of star power, to guarantee box office. As the major acting names
in Hollywood see their power as employees diminish, I predict they'll
become more pro-active in finding and developing projects of their own...
which has got to be good news for writers. Now, all I need, is for that
zeitgeist to filter through to their agents, who are still largely playing the "old
school" game.

We're living in interesting times, all right. On with the revolution.

 How I approach Writing the First Ten Pages

I almost didn't publish, this week. Between it being the holidays and the
head splitting migraine I had yesterday, it would have been easy just to give
myself the day off. But, the truth is, the discipline of writing is good for me, so
here I am, banging out a quick piece on the actual day of publishing. Yikes!

Last week @jeannevb from #scriptchat asked me to write about how I

approach the first ten pages of a screenplay. If you didn't already know about
it, #scriptchat is a weekly online chat on twitter about screenwriting, which
has brought together an eclectic group of screenwriters on twitter to talk
about scripts and writing.

I'm always a bit reticent to write about screenwriting, partly because it

always elicits a "who do you think you are?" response. Which is fair enough,
but which makes me sad. There is another reason. I really hate, loathe, detest
and distain all screenwriting books. I've tried to read a few over the years, but
they are always such massively tedious reading and always so badly written. I
confess I've never managed to complete one. I always believed the bare
minimum someone writing, a "how to" book on writing, ought to be able to
do, is to construct an entertaining sentence, but it appears too much to ask,
apparently.

So, what I'm trying to say is, all that follows is just how I write my
scripts, for what that's worth and it probably won't make much sense to
anyone but me... oh dear.

There is one other problem... and that's is, I both use a formal structure
and then ignore it, all at the same time. What this means in practical terms,
is that I use a four act, hero's journey structure when I'm doing my plotting,
but when it comes to the actual writing I try to ignore that as much as
humanly possible and concentrate of more important things.

From a structured, formal plotting point of view, the first ten pages are
"the hero, alone in the world, is moved towards an incident, which will throw
him into an adventure." Or, in other words... the first ten pages are about
introducing the audience to the central character, moving them towards an
event that will force them into a taking a journey (either literal or
emotional). ... you see what I mean, when you start breaking this stuff down
into principles, it becomes as dull as ditch water!

The good news is, once I start the actual writing, I forget all of the
tedious theories and work on the stuff I really care about... cinema, language
and entertainment.

For me the opening of a movie is really, really important. Regardless of

how many trailers they've seen or reviews they've read, the opening of a
movie is an uncomfortable time for an audience. They've had many
wonderful times in the cinema and they've also had some really quite
rubbish, disappointing times as well. For the audience, every new movie is a
risk. What this means to me, is that I have an obligation to entertain and
delight them from the first second of the movie. I can't just throw them my
central character and force them to sit through ten minutes of tedious plot set
ups. I can't make them pay up front for future delights. I have to entertain
them, page one, line one.

One of the easiest ways to do that is to write about interesting people.

I'll just let that one sink in a bit, because you'd be amazed at how often
screenwriters forget that very simple concept and chose to write about boring
people.

For me, the people I am usually interested in are: rebellious, intelligent

(in some way), idiosyncratic and emotionally vulnerable (in some way).

However, the character alone, isn't enough. The character has to inhabit
a world that is wonderfully cinematic. Or, in other words... they have to live
somewhere that has something going on for it visually.

So, what I'm really saying is this:

In the first ten pages of the screenplay I attempt to introduce the

audience to an idiosyncratic, intelligent, vulnerable central protagonist, by
showing that person engaged in something fascinating, entertaining and
cinematic, which tells the audience where they are, what kind of person they
are dealing with and at the same time sets up this person to be crashed into a
new world and a new adventure.
 Or, bottom line...

Interesting person, interesting world... early demonstration of personal

vulnerability

Now, the truth of this is, all of this can be achieved in the middle of a
car chase, if that's the world this person inhabits... or in the middle of a gun
fight, but, where I see Hollywood go wrong, time and time again, is when
they think the fighting and the chasing are more interesting, than the people
who are doing the fighting and the chasing. There is nothing wrong with
opening your movie with an action sequence... providing they are just
devices to reveal who the hero of the piece is, where he is idiosyncratic and
how he is in some way vulnerable.

By the same token, I also see many, many screenwriters who can't see
any further than their characters and who therefore spend the opening of their
movie, trying to unpack the characters in banal settings, with nothing
happening... except people talking. Movies, for me, usually aren't about
people talking, they're about people doing. If I wanted to see people talking
as a form of drama, I'd watch TV, where they can't afford to show people
doing.

So, to conclude... first ten pages... interesting people, doing interesting

things in an interesting place.

Yeap, all these words to basically say "Don't be boring"... and that's why
I don't write about screenwriting very often. There's nothing clever about
stating the obvious, in a long, convoluted fashion.

How I Reveal Character Without Using Dialogue

I invariably arrive early at airports. This means I always have time for a
coffee... and yet, no matter where I am in Europe, when I go to order my
coffee, the person behind the counter will automatically address me in
English, even if I haven't uttered a word. Except, occasionally, when I'm
traveling on business, when sometimes they address me in German.
Sometimes I play along and order in German.
For a couple of months now, I've been trying to figure out how to explain
my current approach to screenwriting, but I've struggled to find a way to
make it simple and coherent. Then, just the other day, as I was thinking about
my immanent trip to England, I realised that my experience of airports
explains it perfectly. It seems fairly obvious to me, that when I approach an
airport coffee seller, they take one look at me and based on their past
experiences, they take a guess at what nationality I am... and, most of the
time they get it right. Just by looking at me, most Italians can tell that I am
English. On the occasions they get it wrong and assume I'm a German, it's
usually because my idea of dressing for business makes me look more like a
German tourist, than it does an English businessman.

The truth of the matter is, every time we're in public or when we're
watching a movie or the TV, when we see someone we've never met before,
we attempt to make guesses about what kind of person this is, based on their
appearance and the setting. Who is that coming towards me on the pavement
or who is that sitting across from me on the tube train? We see people and
based on nothing more than how they hold themselves, what their hair is like
and what they are wearing, we then make up stories about what kind of
people they are. So, are they rich or poor? Are they vain? Are they confident
or shy? Are they violent or peaceful?

And, you know what... I think, in the vast majority of cases we are
probably right on the money. That guy in dirty clothes, mumbling to himself,
probably isn't a doctor. That young girl, with the Prada handbag and the
Chanel shades, probably isn't a fan of Cradle of Filth.

The flip side of this, is the concept of projected self image... or, in other
words, I dress the way I dress, in order to communicate something about who
I am. From my Converse sneakers, via my Levi 501's, all the way to the
Threadless T-shirt, black hoodie and carbon fibre Aviators, I am telling the
world, that I'm not the kind of guy who works in insurance. Invariably, I dress,
like a middle-aged media hobo. You can see me in the street, and you'd have
a pretty fair shot at guessing my record collection, my taste in books and
whether or not there was a graphic novel or two in my apartment.

This, I believe, is also true of most everyone. As individuals, we are

defined by what we wear, where we chose to be, what and who we like and
what we consume.

Hang in with me... because this does all relate to screenwriting. But,
before I talk about how I currently approach screenwriting, I need to talk, just
briefly, about conventional screenwriting wisdom and how I think it leads to
poor screenwriting.
Basically, for most writers there is a clear understanding that characters
in movies have to have emotional depth, which is developed by
understanding their backstory. So, in terms of writing characters, most of the
emphasis is usually placed on understanding the character's inner life. Almost
every screenwriting book you can lay your hands on, talks about the
character arc and character development and three dimensional characters,
but always in the terms of inner life, goals and aspirations, almost never in
terms of how to achieve that in a cinematic way. And, because writers tend
to become focussed on the inner life of their characters, they invariably also
become focussed on dialogue. The revealing of the character's inner life
becomes an exercise in exposition and therapeutic disclosures. From my
perspective, this often becomes problematic in many screenplays. As the
writer searches for meaningful dialogue to give the characters depth, they
lose touch with the visual nature of the movie. They create a mental split
between character and action; where character is dialogue and action is plot.
This leads, almost inevitably to the "when I was a kid, I had a kitten (beat)... I
Ioved that kitten" scene. Where the character reveals, in exposition, the
defining moment of their past. Oh, dear. If you hear a massive sigh, when that
happens in a movie, it usually means I'm somewhere in audience, squirming.

In many respects, this way of writing, mirrors the method way of acting.
In theory, if you understand the past history of the character, you can see how
they will move forwards through the obstacles of the plot. At least that is the
theory.

Now, what I'm saying, is that when a screenwriter sets themselves the
task of revealing a character's inner life by concentrating on the dialogue,
they are pissing into the wind. Not just a light breeze either, they are pissing
into an almighty gale... with an up-draft!

Personally, I made a decision about a year ago to abandon the idea of a

character's inner life and instead look at the different ways people reveal who
they are through the semiotics of self-image... or, in other words, I use the
way people dress, the places they chose to be, the people they chose as
friends and enemies, the music they like and the furniture they put in their
homes and offices, to tell the audience what kind of person they are dealing
with.
But that's not the whole story. One of the things I see a lot in spec
screenplays, is the use of generic locations. A generic warehouse, a generic
office, a normal kitchen. When people focus on the inner life of their
characters, they miss the deep significance of the specific. The idea that this
particular story could only happen to this specific person, in this specific
place. Think about it for a second. Would Spiderman be the same person, if
his story had been set in a generic small Mid-Western town in America? For
all kinds of reasons, Peter Parker and his story would be radically different.
He'd move differently because there would be no tower blocks to swing from.
It would be almost impossible to keep his identity secret, because there
would be fewer people and therefore, less anonymity... and most important of
all, he'd dress differently. The red tights, just wouldn't have occurred to him.
Even with the same basic story premise, moving Peter Parker to a different
location or environment, changes both him and the story. (By the way, if
you're interested, this is one way to create an interesting reboot).

Try this for yourselves... imagine how the Batman story would alter if
Bruce Wayne was from a poor Italian family living in Sicily, instead of a rich
Gotham (New York) family. Or, how different would Terminator have been, if
Sarah Connor had been born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria?

The point I'm trying to make, is that choice of locations in screenwriting

need to be specific and right for the characters who inhabit those stories and
that every single item of clothing, every prop, every stick of furniture can be
used to tell your story. This person, in this specific office, with this specific
furniture, dressed in this specific way, in this specific city. It's an approach to
screenwriting that I've used for a little while now, where I attempt to give the
audience the clues they need to decode each character, in a way which
matches the way people judge strangers in real life. This means it really
matters, not just whether they own a Zippo cigarette lighter or not, but also
exactly which model and how old it is. The inner life is revealed in the
details. This kind of writing I call observational. Fairly obvious really,
because it means I can only write to the limits of my observational skills.

The important thing about this way of writing, is it takes the pressure off
the dialogue. I don't need to say anything, that I can't show. This frees up the
dialogue for subtext, jokes and banter... and the real advantage is, it takes the
movie back to the visual and cinematic.

I did my degree in linguistic philosophy, so I tend to think about this in

terms of self-image semiotics and location as metaphor... but, the bottom line
is, it is as simple as, my protagonist lives in the rough end of Hackney, he
wears a retro fishtail parka and he owns the cheapest Zippo lighter it's
possible to buy. This is also the reason I keep observations of everyday life,
in notebooks. I take what I see, make up stories based on my assumptions and
weave the specifics into my screenplays. I am obsessed by detail, by furniture
design, by brands, by sub-culture uniforms and by fashion.

If you want to see a perfect example of this technique, go to Youtube

and do a search for "The IT Crowd"... it's a perfect example of how specific
set dressing, wardrobe choices and props, reveal the inner lives of the central
characters. It's also loaded with in jokes... which is the next level up of
metaphor and observational screenwriting. But, maybe I'll write about layered
visual metaphors another day. Watch it anyway... it's funny. (I would have
embedded a clip, but Channel 4 have disabled embedding... a quick slap to
the back of the head to Channel 4 for that one).

I hope this makes sense. And as ever, this is only how I do it... it's up to
you to decide whether it's useful or not. All I know is that this approach has
transformed the way I approach, research and write for the movies.

Next week, the world will start working and talking again and I can get
back to the business of getting Smoke out into the world. Happy New Year to
all of you and thanks for reading.
 Bloody How To Books!

One of the reasons I've become a bit reticent, over the past couple of
years, to write about screenwriting is because I'm very aware that my way of
writing is idiosyncratic. The people who read my scripts either love them or
hate them. It always falls into those extremes. I'm also very aware, that I've
yet to write a script and see an end product come out of it, where I can hand
on heart say, that's exactly what I was aiming for. So, all I can every say is,
I'm a media hobo and this is how I do it this week. I certainly wouldn't try to
pitch myself as a template for screenwriting success.

This is also one of the reasons I get infuriated by screenwriting gurus and
people who make their living selling "how to" books and courses. I've yet to
meet a working screenwriter with a decent set of credits, who is selling "how
to" guides. I've yet to read a "how to" book about writing that didn't feel
wrong, misguided or just plan evil. There is something perverted and weasel-
like about making money from the aspirations and ignorance of people who
want to make careers as writers. A pox on all their houses... seriously, people
who write "how to write a screenplay" books should be horse whipped, by a
horse. A big horse. A big horse, who has a migraine and who was once locked
in a lift with a rabid, blazer wearing, social media expert.

The other thing that bothers me about people who write "how to" books,
is how, by and large, their agendas are identical, it is to transform the writer
into a safe product, by providing a template and a list of don'ts... "don't use
montages, don't use voice-overs, don't use flashbacks, don't do this, don't do
that"... ARRRGH! This is an approach to movie making, where fear of not
getting a sale, is seen as more important than telling a great story and
because these books are never written by successful screenwriters, they are
all based on reverse-engineering of other people's movies. The best way to
understand this process, is to imagine a "painting by numbers" book designer,
creating a template for you to paint the Mona Lisa... but, who suggests you
choose your own colours... whilst at the same time, convincing you this is
how DaVinci did it.

To be fair, a lot of the industry has encouraged this kind of thinking and
unfortunately a lot of producers and agents have read and swear by these
dreadful bloody books. A pox on their houses as well.

With every passing day, I become more and more convinced that the
only way I can work as a writer, is to do it by playing by my own rules, by
trusting in the stories I want to tell and by telling them in the way that I think
works best... and, when the industry isn't interested, then I'll find another way
of doing it. This is the reason, I've already decided, that if I haven't secured a
publishing deal for the novel version of Smoke, by the time the manuscript is
completed, then I'll self-publish. Of course, I'd prefer to have a brilliant agent
who believes in what I'm doing and a mainstream publisher... but, for
goodness sake, if that doesn't happen, in this age, I don't have to roll over
and die.

I honestly believe far too many writers get obsessed with "the industry,"
agents and screenwriting competitions, simply because they believe that only
industry recognition will be enough... but let's face it, this is the industry that
gave us "Battlefield Earth," "Son of The Mask" and 'Dragonball Evolution." The
question I've asked myself, often, over the last year is, what is it I am really
trying to achieve? What I know for sure, is that I'm not working my ass off, in
order to be given the opportunity to write "Dragonball Evolution II" or even to
write an occasional episode of "Eastenders."

I'm convinced the industry is changing, in ways that mean sometimes it

makes sense to for me to work within the industry and sometimes it makes
sense to keep them as far away from a project as humanly possible. My
objective is to write stuff I can be proud of... both as novels and as movies.
The people who serve those ends, I'll work with... those that don't, I won't. At
the end of the day, it is my work and my choice.

Of course, as ever, I'm just a media hobo and this is how I see it, this
week. Next week I'll suddenly realise, that with no serious credits and no
income, I'm probably the perfect person to write a screenwriting "how to"
book.

CODA: It's now 48 hours after I wrote this piece... and I've a little
perspective on it. Like a lot of unknown screenwriters I struggle with my
relationship with the industry. On one hand, the industry still represents the
only serious way to make movies that require hardcore investment. On the
other hand, the industry is populated with idiots and tedious gatekeepers. At
the moment I see two common reactions to this, a group of writers who want
to get into the industry at any cost and a group of writers who have turned
their back on the industry and want to do everything themselves. Personally,
I'm not convinced by either approach. I've seen too many writers in the UK
destroyed, by turning out hack drama for the TV and too many independents
who miss out on the benefits of being involved in the industry... one of which,
ironically, is the difficulty in getting stuff made and the harsh feedback in the
script development process. In this piece, I think it's easy to see my own
personal struggle with this dilemma. I don't hate the industry and I could
certainly do with the financial benefits of recognition. However, I also
understand the gratification of DIYing it. I did that for nine odd years myself,
made a load of shorts and two feature films. I honestly don't know what the
answer is. The industry often seems too narrow minded, overly concerned
with playing it safe and seriously unskilled at marketing anything outside of
their comfort zone. Indies, all too often, don't have the resources to come to
the market with a product or a distribution strategy that is economically
viable, which in turn leads to compromised movies. It's a mess. I genuinely
do wish I had some answers. At the same time I see talented screenwriters
entering competitions and chasing agents, with scripts that stand little chance
of getting into production. As it stands, today, I am searching for answers and
all I have, are some ideas. Some of which are about getting to grips with
movie marketing, some of which are about writers taking more control of the
production process and acting as entrepreneurs and some of which are about
just hanging in and trying to make the best choices I can, as things unfold.
What I do know, is that talking and writing about the process helps... thanks
for being part of that process.
 Character Development and Plotting

I didn't have this blog when I first started writing Smoke and as a result, I've
never really talked that much about my writing process. However, as this
week I'm embarking on two new scripts, it seems like a perfect opportunity to
share how I go about my preparation for writing a new project. Another reason
I wanted to talk about this, is because last week's discussion about "how to"
books, really got me thinking. I've been wondering just how much my own
structural approach is dictated by stuff I read, in books I hated... my guess is,
quite a lot.

One of the tools I use for plotting and for character development is an
excel spreadsheet (see above). I can't overstate how many first draft problems
I avoid, simply by using this simple Excel spreadsheet. It's the primary tool I
use when I get blocked on the story A problem that usually occurs because
character development hasn’t had enough work. This is an extension of my
own, "When in doubt, write" maxim... so instead it reads "When in doubt,
write; when you can't write, work on the character development spreadsheet!"
Not as catchy, but for me, it works.

I've found the character spreadsheet to be the most useful writing aid I
use. Mainly because it allows me to create the plot from the pre-existing
character conflicts and connections, I created in the spreadsheet. The
protagonist and antagonist are going to come into conflict, simply because
their desires, motivations and character-flaws give them overwhelming
psychological needs to destroy each other. It's also brilliant for helping you
to spot cliches. If you've got a "tough, recently divorced cop" as your
protagonist, this sheet give you the opportunity to put a spin on that meme
and make the character unique to you and your movie. It's also great for re-
writes. Take the first draft, extract the data from your script onto the grid and
look for the holes. Then rework the character sheet, before plotting the
rewrite.

A lot of my thinking about drama, is based on the notion that the

characters in a movie or TV series need a degree of connection, rather than
just conflict. I call this "The dark mirror" and it's something I see a lot at the
moment in US TV. Basically, to create the prefect antagonist for your hero,
they just make them a darker version of the hero... this allows the hero to
struggle with the "but I'm just like him" scenario. What separates the
antagonist and the protagonist, is often as simple as the choices they make
and one of the easiest dilemma set ups, is for the hero to be forced to make a
decision identical to one made by the antagonist. Again, a device I see a lot
in current US TV and not enough in UK TV, where they still largely go for less
morally challenging dilemmas.

One of the main reasons I do all of this and my very structured notecard
plotting prior to writing, is because it means when I do get to the actual
writing, I can concentrate on the cinematic nature of the movie. I couldn't do
that, if I was also mentally engaged in character development and plotting.
This is one of the reasons my first drafts often don’t look like first drafts. Many
people like to do character development on the page. Which means they
don't really know their characters until the end of the first draft. This means
the second draft is often a massive restructure, based on what they now know
about the characters, which means the dialogue and cinematic vision often
don't surface until a third draft. Personally, I hate unpicking scripts and doing
radical restructures. So, out of laziness, this is how I avoid a lot of that kind of
rewriting.

Anyway, as usual, this is just how I approach it. Use it if it seems

helpful, quietly mock it and me in the comfort of your own head, if it doesn't

Screenwriter; Film-maker; Media Hobo?

This piece is about my take on the changing nature of media, the film
industry, the digital revolution and my personal struggle, to come to terms
with those changes. This is my attempt to explain why I am not a
screenwriter, why I'm not a film-maker and why, these days, the only label
I'm comfortable with is "media hobo."

Here we go.

I truly became a media hobo, because one day I realised, the movie
industry does not exist, anymore.

On one level this obviously isn't true. Movies still get made. The
cinemas haven't closed down. DVD shops still sell DVDs. The TV companies
still commission, and broadcast, drama and comedy. Much of it is still very,
very good. Some of it remains profitable. People are still being paid to write,
direct and produce content. Actors are still working and earning. By any sane
definition, the industry still exists.

However, over the years it's become clear to me, that the idea of one
coherent industry, no longer is a reality. Maybe it never was.

The "industry" now seems to be more fragmented than it's ever been and
is made up, largely, of independent production companies and individuals,
with varying degrees of access to traditional finance and traditional
distribution. So, for every producer who can raise $35M and deliver global
theatrical distribution, there are a thousand other producers, who are
struggling to raise $2M for a movie, that will never see a cinema and below
them, another ten thousand producers who will have decided, prior to
production, that online sales are the way to go. Often, when people talk
about the "industry," what they seem to be talking about, are the 1 in 11,000
producers, who can take a script and option it, pay in advance for the rights
to develop it. When I thought of myself as a screenwriter, my main priority
was to find a way into that circle of producers, so I could turn my ability to
write, into an income. I wanted to write, to then hand the development
problems to someone else, take the money up front and move onto the next
project.

At that point in my life, I viewed the industry as a walled city, with all
the money and work one side of the wall and agents acting as the guards at
the gate. The fact that the vast majority of producers have given up on
reading specs, in favour of only seeing writers with agents, seemed only to
reenforce that idea. However, despite the fact that I don't have and never had
had an agent, in the past three years I've self-generated: a serious, sit down,
with an Oscar winning director about one of my scripts; I've put my writing
directly in front of and attached, a name Hollywood director to one of my
projects; I'm currently talking to one of the most important producers in the
UK, about him taking the EP position on Smoke; and, I've turned down option
offers, from five different international production companies, on other
projects.

However, just to put that in perspective, my income from all that

activity has been $0. Yeap, these days, I am probably the most successful
hobo in town. At the same time, it's been the affirmation from professional
movie-makers, that my writing is worth taking seriously, which has kept me
in the game for four long years, of being completely broke, all of the time.
Even going into this year, I still have no idea, at which point all this work,
will ever turn into any kind of an income. Although, I am getting clearer
about how, this is now much more under my control, than it was, say five
years ago.

Of course, there is an argument that if I'd had an agent behind me, some
of those opportunities would have come to something. Which is a fair point.
However, it seems to me as there is no real industry as such. All an agent
could have offered me, was a different collection of desks for the projects to
land on. It's impossible to tell, really, if, or how, things might have been
different, if I'd chased agents, instead of chasing potential collaborators at the
major film festivals. What I do know, is there was a point about two years
ago, when I stopped thinking about the industry as one thing... And, I started
seeing it as a collection of small businesses and entrepreneurs, each with
their own game plan. The other thing I discovered, was that most agents are
actually much more conservative in their tastes, than most producers,
directors and actors. Of course, I could be biased, because I've always had
more success with my scripts with actors and directors, than I ever had with
agents. Maybe I've yet to met the right agent.

So, one part of my decision to become a media-hobo, was related to the

fragmentation of the industry. The other half was deeply personal, because I
do know exactly when I first decided to become a full time media hobo. It
was after my second wife left me. I responded maturely to that by hiding
under a duvet for six months, watching endless episodes of "House" on my
computer and by working on a script called "The 117 Page Suicide Note." My
intention, at that point, was to parallel the story of my protagonist. Complete
the script, then kill myself. Fortunately, my ability to procrastinate over
scripts is legendary. I never did complete that script. I did however, come out
of that period with a new perspective on what it was I was trying to do. Up to
that point, my entire career had been an attempt to find the formula for
success, at all costs. What came out of that bout of depression, was a
different approach. Basically, if writing is about writing and not about
success, then I can tell any story I want, anyway I want and take it to the
market, any damn way I please.

I think the timing of that epiphany was significant, because it occurred

just as the digital revolution seemed to open up new possibilities for story-
telling, with every passing day. In fact, I've just come off the phone with my
Brother, who has just uncovered an exciting, new way for us to get Smoke out
to an audience. Tremendous stuff, which I'm sure will become the subject of
this blog at some point.
 This is why, I am a media-hobo. I'm not a screenwriter, because my
interests in creating content are wider than just landing the new script-writing
job and I'm also no longer sure that I want to make movies, by optioning my
scripts. I'm also not a film-maker, because although I have the skills and
resources to write, shoot, edit, market and distribute a "no budget" movie, I
don't currently have a story, I want to tell in that way.

For me, being a media-hobo is about looking at the story and then
looking for interesting ways to get that story out into the world. Sometimes, it
seems, that this is going to happen by making genuine friends in the
fragmented industry and working with them on projects, we want to see out
there. Sometimes it's going to mean other things: self-publishing, e-books, this
blog, webisodes, graphic novels. At its core, it means working creatively in
any medium and whereever possible building a personal relationship with the
audience.

I think this is why my take on writing and the business, sometimes comes
into conflict with screenwriters and film-makers, because although we may
share common techniques, we often don't have common goals and
aspirations. I actually like being a media-hobo. My only aim is to tell the
stories I want to tell, in ways that interest me. I don't care about success at
any cost. I don't care, that much, what my critics think about me as a person
or as a writer and I'm still believe there is value in wanting to do it my way,
on my terms... and, most days I'm still happy to live with the consequences of
doing that.

It's entirely possible that at some point, I will change these views.
Probably the day an agent hands me a cheque or asks me if I want to write
"Ocean's 14"... because if I've learned anything at all on this journey, it
really is all just talk, until the cheque clears.
 Pitching? That’s a Tent Thing, isn’t it?

One of the most depressing sounds a writer can ever hear, is the "media
sigh." The media sigh is the sound "old media" folk make, just before a pitch,
which conveys with the most world weary of outward breaths the message
"Well, if you must."

Personal experience has taught me the "media sigh" is a guaranteed

precursor of the polite rejection letter and, that when it happens pre-pitch, it
is also a sure sign, I am completely wasting my time. It is all over, once the
fat lad sighs.

I've been thinking about pitching a lot this week, mainly because a
friend on twitter asked me what my thoughts on the Cannes Film Festival
were, as an event for screenwriters? I'm in the middle of deciding whether or
not to go, this year. I probably will, but, as usual, I'm not really sure why. Not
to pitch, that's for sure. I never go to Cannes with the intention of pitching a
script, anymore. In fact, I've come to the conclusion that pitching is a waste
of time. A lesson I learned by trying it and deciding it was not an approach to
business that was suitable for adults.

The idea of the pitch is part of the Hollywood, movie industry mythos.
it's a lie the industry has told about itself so often, it's become a half-truth.
The plucky unknown writer, steps into the elevator with the cigar chomping
movie mogul, "Gee, Mr Big Shot, I've got a swell idea for a movie!" "Go for it
son, you've got until this lift gets to the tenth floor" CUT TO: Tenth floor:
Elevator door opens "Son, that's the best idea for a movie, I've ever heard!
Miss Jones! Give this boy a contract!"

I'm amazed at how embedded into the culture, the idea of the pitch is.
At some core level, so many people want to believe "the pitch" is the door
everyone has to walk through... when, in my opinion, the pitch isn't a door,
it's a filter. The pitch evolved, not as a way of discovering new ideas, but as a
barrier specifically designed to keep people out. It's also a bad filter because
it is the laziest and least robust way possible, to develop any creative project.
Which is the reason the media sigh often comes before the pitch, rather than
after. If the pitch is a door, it's often the door that just got slammed in your
face. Not only that... being asked to pitch, is a sure sign you're talking to
someone who is "old media," as opposed to "new media." That world weary
sigh, is the hallmark of people, who just aren't having fun any longer and call
me radical, but I'm not sure people who aren't having fun, should ever be
allowed to make entertainment.

I try my level best, to never get forced into a pitch. I try to discourage
situations where the agenda is "I am selling, do you want to buy?" Instead, I
try to set up conversations, where the agenda is "I'm looking for collaborators
in this business venture, I think you could bring a lot to this project, are you
interested in talking?" Collaboration is the core of "new media," a shift
towards the idea of the movie as an entrepreneurial/collaborative businesses,
as opposed to an industry where maintaining the illusion of power is the
primary game. It's not always possible to make that shift in conversation, but
that's OK too, as it tells me who is more interested in playing power games,
than in talking business. The way someone conducts themselves with people
they believe to be unimportant, is always massively revealing. And trust me,
anyone who asks you to pitch, is making a fairly bold claim about their
importance, in comparison with you.

Last week, I wrote about the level of discussions I'd managed to

generate for my projects, without ever having an agent. All of that was
achieved at industry events, like Cannes, simply by refusing to pitch and
instead talking like a grown-up about movies as products and the business as
a business. This is a process I call co-opting. It happens when two adults, sit
down as equals and discover whether they can help each other, by working
together. The truth is, I've yet to meet a director or actor who isn't looking for
an interesting script, or a producer who isn't looking for an interesting co-
production and, I've yet to find a business I wanted to do business with, whose
rules for pitching couldn't be by-passed, if you refuse to be treated like a
child. More importantly, I've also never met anyone in the industry who I
couldn't introduce to someone else, who may be useful to their projects.
Where old school media folk tend to network only in order to meet their own
narrow agenda, new media folk tend to network for their whole community.
One is about trying to collect and control power, the other is about sharing it
about, for the common good.

Actually, that is the thing about pitching as a business ethos. It's

essentially an "old school" power play, where the person taking the pitch,
creates the illusion they hold all of the power. The implication is: if I don't
buy your script, it will never get made; if I don't take you on as a client,
you'll never get work; if I don't give you the finance for this movie, it'll never
happen; if we don't distribute this movie, it'll never get an audience.

The thing is, it's never true. The industry is way more diverse than that.
The conversation should never be that one sided. My writing is the basis for a
product, which in return is capable of generating a profit, providing the
people involved in representing, producing and distributing it, don't fuck it
up. In many respects, I have more to lose by collaborating with idiots, than
they do. The people who want me to pitch to them, are only any use to me, if
they are capable of getting their heads out of their asses, focussing on getting
the product right, getting the deals that work best for the project and only if
they can see the opportunities of the new business environment, instead of
moaning about the collapse the "old media." Which in real terms means,
every pitch is an audition that works in both directions.

Without the writing... there is no product. Sure, it has to be great writing

and a great product, but, the bottom line is, everyone eats because of the
writer and not the other way round. In the evolving digital and online
economies, that's going to become more and more true, with every passing
day.

The Good Camera, The Bad Idea and The Ugly People

It seems odd to me, just how often synchronous events occur in my life.
For instance, at 8 pm tonight I'm going to be part of the indie panel for
#scriptchat, the twitter hashtag conversation for screenwriters. However,
whilst I'm typing this pre-amble to being on that panel of "indies," I'm also
researching the Nikon D90 DSLR camera as a possible production tool. Yes,
after years and years of telling everyone and their wife that I'm not an indie
film-maker and that cheap camera ownership is a dumb way to make movies,
I am actually going to buy a camera, with a view to creating some DIY
content. It's a big decision for me. I've never advocated camera ownership
and as you'll see, I have some issues with the ethos of indie production.
I've also been taking some time this week, to take stock of what bugs
me about both the indie scene and the industry. It's an obsession of mine, if
I'm honest. I see problems with both models and I don't like a lot about either
of them. That's what this week's article is all about, my personal take on why
both indie movie-making and the industry, often suck serious amount of ass.

On a personal level, I understand the indie production mentality. Been

there, done that, remortgaged my house to pay for the T-Shirt. I'm also a big
fan of micro-budget movie making, as a concept. I genuinely believe, it is
theoretically possible to make a stunning movie for pocket change and for it
to achieve commercial success. At the same time, I also understand why that
really hasn't happened. The digital revolution has revealed an uncomfortable
truth, even given the means of production and distribution, the vast majority
of the people in the indie film scene don't have all the skills needed to make
the digital revolution happen. It is that simple. It's not about the equipment, it
never was; indie movie-makers always break the only two rules of movie
making that can't be broken, under any circumstances. But, before you start
leaping up and down and screaming, I'd just like to point out that the
mainstream industry often does exactly the same thing.

Of course, it helps if you know what the two rules are... so, here they
are:

1) Get the content right.

2) Have a mass audience for that content, who are willing to pay to view
it.

I can actually condense it down into one easy to remember phrase...

make good shit and be able to sell it to shit loads of people.

It's fairly easy to see how the industry screws the pooch. Basically, too
many filters, fear, greed and stupidity. The problem with any mainstream
media project is that there are often just too many dumb people with leverage
to effect the content: powerful actors; actor's agents; producers (multiple);
executive producers (multiple); investors; and, finally, scaredy-cat, lazy-assed
distributors. My experience is that in any creative endeavor, once there are
more than three people who have leverage over the project, the people who
have most to fear about the financial outcome, will do everything in their
power to fuck things up. The baseline is: money people don't trust creative
people and visa versa.
However, what we do need to understand about the mainstream industry,
in order to understand the failings of the indie scene, is the movie industry
overcomes most of its problems by spending huge amounts of money. If I
spend $15 on a movie ticket, then my viewing experience is a result of multi-
million dollar spending: on production, on post production, on advertising and
on the actual infra-structure of delivery (the cinema itself). I'm getting a lot,
in return, for a quite a small amount of money.

By definition, whether an indie movie is made for $2M or on $5,000, it is

already at an incredible disadvantage. Indie movie makers can't throw
money at the problem, either to make the product or to connect that product
to an audience and yet, the people who pay to see movies, expect the same
level of delivery from a movie, regardless of the budget. I've yet to leave a
cinema anywhere in the world and hear someone say "Well, that was a bit
poor, but that's because they only had a $2M production budget." Audiences
don't care about the budget, they care about the movie.

The hard truth of the movie business is, the less money you have to
spend on production, the more outstanding the content has to be, just for it to
be worth $15 and an hour and a half of the average cinema-goer's time.
Audiences don't give bonus points for artistic integrity or for trying hard. The
gig is simple, you either entertain and engage them for ninety minutes or you
don't. For me that is the real lesson of Avatar, if you spend enough money
and make something shinny enough, people will flock to the cinemas to see
it, even if the premise and script is exceedingly poor. However, if James
Cameron has shot the same script on a prosumer camcorder on a $6K budget
and cut it in Sony Vegas, it would now be Youtube fodder (and probably
hilarious).

My twelve years experience of the indie scene has taught me that most
of the people involved in it are obsessed with two memes: the holy grail of
the cheap "as good as film" production camera and the "self-distribution can
bring down Hollywood" pipe dream. Twelve years ago the meme was dancing
round the Canon XL1 DV camcorder (because Danny Boyle made 28 Days
Later with it and $9M)... and the self-distribution meme was attached to DVD
on demand, via Customflicks. Twelve years later, the meme has shifted to
DSLRs, online download sales and social networking. The objects of obsession
have changed, but the memes remain the same. Production tools and
distribution which by-passes the existing industry, are still seen as the only
issues and peddled by indie-gurus as the answers to a movie maker's prayers.
If only!

In terms of means of achieving a viable micro-budget movie, it is true,

the tools have improved. However, that's not the problem. The means of
production, distribution or marketing have never been the problem. The
problems are and always have been the same: content and connection of
content to paying audiences.

In the last ten years indie film-makers have had all the means of
production and distribution options they needed to make commercially
successful movies and yet, it hasn't happened.

Personally, I think the reason for this is that all the ego problems you find
in the mainstream industry, also play out in the indie scene. Every actor,
thinks they are a writer; every self proclaimed writer, thinks they're also a
director; every camera owner, thinks they're a cinematographer; every FCP
owner, thinks they're an editor; and, worse of all, everyone and their dog
believes they are a writer. So, basically you have the same problem as the
mainstream industry, too many idiots with leverage on the project, but
without the advantages of access to hardcore production professionals,
experience of professional project development or money.

The biggest hurdle to the indie scene are the egos of indie film makers,
each of whom is interested in controlling their creative vision, to the extent
that every single aspect of production must be controlled by one person. Trust
me, even Woody Allen who can write, act and direct at a world class level,
uses someone else to set the lights and run the camera and he learned his
trade in TV, before going independent. The odds that anyone could be good
enough at everything, to make this work without professional help, are just
mind numbingly slim. Not because it's not possible to get the job done at a
reasonable level, but because it's not possible to be a world class, producer,
actor, writer, director, cinematographer, lighting director, sound recordist,
editor, comp and effects artist, PR and marketer. It's possible to be OK at
some of those and great at other bits. It's just not possible to be world-class at
every aspect.

This is the core of the problem, because it's not good enough to just be
OK. Like I said before, the smaller the budget, the more outstanding the
content has to be. That means better than can be achieved by paid
professionals, working with the best equipment money can buy.

The real problem with the indie movie scene is that it has too few filters.
The real game changer isn't the production equipment, the real game changer
is in the writing and the development of scripts so astounding, they
compensate for the lack of money spent. Personally, I think Charlie Kaufman
would make a game changing indie movie-maker, as would Paul Schrader. I
think Steven Soderburgh has probably already made the leap and gone
interestingly indie.

The thing is, the digital revolution should have been a game changer. It
provided all the tools needed to change the movie making industry forever.
And yet, until the focus of the indie and independent scene becomes about
content, instead of wanking over the means of production and distribution, it
will remain what it currently is... masturbatory.

I don't like to make predictions, but I'm going to this week... it is this:
the digital revolution will have the most profound effect on the lives of those
already established as working professionals, because it will remove some of
the filters, which have been holding back creatives in the mainstream
industry. What it won't do, is create a revolution of previously unknown,
commercially successful content makers, who did it all themselves. Not
unless indies learn a little humility and start to pay more attention to script
development.

Ironically, despite knowing all this, it's still my intention to buy a Nikon
D90 next week... because I'm like every other deluded indie movie-maker, I
still believe, in some insane corner of my mind, that I can be the one who
beats the odds. Ha!... and I actually may be right about this, because if
anyone stands any chance at all of benefitting from the advantages of the
digital revolution, it is the writers. Where this whole game really does
change, is when someone with the writing talent goes back to the two basic
rules and nails the first part... getting the content right. Do that, surround
yourself with talented people and all the rest falls into place.

This is actually what I want to try and get over in tonight's panel, that
indie movie making is full of potential, that the tools are there... but, that it
often fails to deliver, mainly because people think "how can I do that, but for
nothing" instead of concentrating on creating incredible content.

When I was looking into the Nikon D90 as a potential purchase, I came
across a site that had the "best of Nikon D90 shorts"... the images and use of
the camera convinced me it was a viable camera option, but there wasn't
one single movie which didn't bore the arse off me. I couldn't be bothered to
watch two minute shorts, all the way through. Which kind of sums up the
issue, doesn't it?

One last, throw away, thought. Maybe the point of indie movie making
has changed. It used to be the route into the industry... make a calling card
movie and festival the ass of it. Maybe that just isn't the case anymore.
Maybe indie movie making, these days, is about making movies that couldn't
get made any other way... or about making movies that break the
conventions of camera use and story-telling. Maybe, just maybe, the freedom
it offers, is more important than the commercial viability. What I do know, is
that there is an incredible opportunity to push the boundaries of cinema here
and I see far too few people pushing that envelope.

Fractal Screenplay Structures

I'm going to jump right into it this week... here we go:

There is no real difference between a movie, TV and a web-series,
anymore.

During last week's #scriptchat people asked me what I thought writer's

should have in their portfolio. I said "five good movie projects, of which one
should be micro-budget and one of which should be zero-budget." It was an
off the cuff answer, but actually I've been thinking about it most of this week,
simply because several people responded with a "shouldn't you also have a
TV project in the mix?"

The "shouldn't you have a TV project in the mix?" question threw me. It
threw me because I genuinely don't think in terms of cinema, TV or web-
series as separate entities anymore. It's all just content.

Like I said at the top of the piece, for me there is no difference between
a movie, TV and a web-series. In my head that list is even longer than just
movies, TV and web-series... but, if I filled out the rest of the list, then I'd
have to kill you, dead. Probably with my bare hands. It's in the any other part
of that list, where I'm doing a lot of research these days.

I'm confident that I'm not the only person who is sees the boundaries
between the media industries eroding and I'm damn sure I'm not the only
person who sees this as a good thing.

However.

This is a fairly big however, so I've given it, its own paragraph!

However, this may mean we'll start to see a fairly radical change in
screenplay structure and this is what I want to write about this week.

Just when everyone thought they could forget about structure, because
after all we've all been told structure is universal, it looks like the digital
revolution is going to impact on the way content gets written. It's going to
impact because now, because of the cheapness of production, we're going to
see a massive swing towards spec production. This trend that started in indie
movie production is rapidly bleeding into the other industries. TV in
particular.

I tend to use the four act structure for movies scripts... and, as I've got a
fetish about 100 page screenplays, that means four acts of twenty-five pages a
piece. There are plenty of cool places to read about four act structure, so I
won't repeat it here. What I am suggesting is that underneath the standard
story arc, writers may well want to micro-structure pieces, in order for them to
be able to play across web, TV and ultimately cinema. I'm also going to
suggest for strictly pragmatic reasons, that eight-eight minutes is the new
ninety. (90 being good length for a feature film to hit).

The easiest way to understand micro-structure is to think about some of

the old movie serials, like "The Shadow" or "Flash Gordon"

These old movie serials had an overall story, which was spread over ten
or so episodes, each episode had a running length of about ten minutes. The
idea was that each episode of the story had its own arc, whilst at the same
time being part of a larger piece. Now, these old serials were pretty crude
about how they approached it... but the actual thinking behind episodic
structuring is incredibly well suited to web-series.

Getting the balance between the episodic nature of the piece and the
overall arc of the story is a real challenge with this kind of writing. However,
isn't this the exact same balance that exists in a TV series, where, each
section leading up to the commercial break needs to hold the audience to the
next section. In fact, one of the reasons for writing a movie eighty-eight
minutes long, is because this also means you can also break the story into two
forty-four minute, macro-episodes, which is the equivalent of two episodes of
hour long TV drama.

Personally, I think we'll see much more of this multi-purpose structuring

over the next couple of years and more micro-budget writer projects, that are
structured to work as web-series, TV drama and only ultimately as a stand
alone piece of cinematic fiction.

Trust me, I've been getting my head around the structural issues of this
kind of fractal plotting for nearly five years now... and, it's a complete and
utter mind-fuck. It makes industry standard three act structure look like a
nursery school glitter picture, in comparison. It worth the extra effort though
and there is something really enjoyable about breaking the story down into
ever smaller arcs.

What is important about this, isn't so much the technical nit picking
about precise structural approaches, but the important issue is that scripts are
not one thing any longer. None of us can afford to write with only one
potential outlet for our scripts and expect to be able to make progress with
them. On a personal level, there actually is part of me that wishes I'd
structured Smoke in a episodic micro-structure, because believe me had I
done that, I wouldn't be sitting here a year later, waiting for people to return
my calls.

This is the reason I believe that writers need a spread in their portfolio.
Straight movie projects are hard bloody work to get into production. It makes
sense, therefore, to have at least one or two other projects where you have
more control over the pace things move forwards. However, like I've been
saying. The key to good zero-budget production is writing to hit the needs of
as many potential media as possible. This is the area where my personal
portfolio is currently lacking. I don't have a micro-budget fractal project in
my mix... and that's the reason I'm working on one of those as we speak.

Money, Movies and Global Stupidity

"I'd like to option your script, Red Light."

"Marvelous, what figure did you have in mind?"

"Pardon?"

"I said, what figure did you have in mind for the option?"

"Well, I can't actually afford to pay you."

"Really?"

"Yes, I'm investing in producing trailers of five scripts to take to Cannes. I

mean, I've only got a limited budget and my line producer alone, is costing
me like £250 a day!"

"Harsh!... I tell you what, why don't you shoot a trailer of the line
producer's script!"

"I'm sorry, my line producer's what?"

"Your line producer's script... I would film the trailer for that, definitely."

"My line producer doesn't have a script!"

"Exactly my point."

"I'm sorry, you've lost me, what are we talking about?"

"We're talking about the fact that you want to pay your line producer
£250 a day to shoot trailers and you don't want to pay me anything for the
five months I worked on writing the script. The script that you want to shoot a
trailer of."

"But, I'll be investing all this money in shooting a trailer of your script!
And you want paying as well?"
 This week I've been reading a lot about Bectu (The UK Union for Film
and TV workers) in particular about the "Illegality of working for free"

This court case and their "Say No to Zero Cost Labour" stance is an
interesting one. The bottom line is that an unpaid Art Department Assistant
successfully took a production to court, in order to lever the UK legal
"minimum wage" out of the production company, for the hours she worked on
their movie.

I honestly don't have a lot to say about the actual case. I don't know the
specifics. What does interest me though, is how Bectu's attitude accurately
reflects the movie industry's weird relationship with money, wages and
paying for things and also my personal take that it is this weird relationship
with money, which has placed the industry in the hands of idiots.

Fundamentally, the industry tries to sell us on the idea that it works this
way:

Writers have ideas and write scripts.

Producers select from those scripts and take the ones they think have
commercial value to investors for production funding.

Investors gamble on the idea and the reputation of the producer for
making money.

Everyone on the production becomes an employee and gets a wage for

their job (including the writer and the producer).

The investor now owns part of a product, which the producer takes to
market.
Sales agents help the producer recoup money from distributors and
broadcasters, who pay for various rights to exploit.

Distributors sell content to the public.

Actually, it is more complicated than this, because to see the industry as

it truly is you also have to imagine that everyone in the above scenario
invests 90% of their energy into trying to palm off the risk to someone else,
whilst grabbing as much cash off the table as possible. It's understanding that
everyone involved in the movie industry wants someone else to take the
actual risk, is the key to understanding why it's both insane and run by idiots.
 Once you realise almost everyone in the movie industry is out to secure
their personal pot of money at the expense of someone else, with as little
personal risk as possible, then this Bectu court case doesn't look so strange or
unusual, it looks just like every other aspect of the industry.

This self serving grasping for the short term buck, is also the main reason
investment for movies is so bloody hard to secure. The movie industry isn't a
high risk investment because the entertainment industry is inherently difficult.
The movie industry is high risk and difficult simply because its business model
forces people to become obsessed with securing a pay-off for themselves, at
the earliest possible moment in the process, in reality, before the movie
proves to be a lemon in the market-place.

What we're now seeing with the digital revolution, is a magnification of

the greed and stupidity that drives the industry. As the spectre of "FREE
CONTENT" becomes ever more vivid in the minds of those involved in the
industry, the more desperate the scramble for "ME" to get paid at any cost is
going to be. The industry has gone cut-throat. Distributors are screwing even
tighter deals; investors are demanding almost risk free investment and
massive returns; unions are demanding rate-card wages regardless of
circumstances; and, as a result of all this fear, greed and general stupidity,
the industry has become almost incapable of taking risks and in some cases,
incapable of making or distributing anything but pap.

I don't know about you, but I think it is both possible and necessary to
change this dynamic for the better. I believe the biggest challenge to the
current movie industry isn't to do with either production technology or even
alternative distribution, but actually involves a long and serious look at the
"me, me, me" business model. Seriously, how hard can it be to turn our backs
on a system which promotes internal competition for resources (ie. money)
and to replace that model with one where a movie is produced and taken to
market by a team of people, working together to a mutually beneficial
economic and creative plan.

One of the biggest myths in this industry, is that the movie business is
essentially collaborative, it just so isn't. The movie industry is more often like
two hundred coked-up pirates fighting over the ship's supply of rum, whilst
one poor bastard tries to steer the ship through a hurricane, in a sea
surrounded by sharks... sharks with guns, knives and unlimited lawyers!
The thing is, if you go back to the conversation I had with that producer
four years ago (at the top of the page) you can see, at that point, I was just as
bad as everyone else... all I cared about in that conversation, was securing
my wage at the earliest point possible and taking the risk out of the venture
for myself. I wanted to pass that risk onto someone else. I'm not defending the
producer in question, he was also being a complete and utter dick. Which is
my point this week. My point is, maybe it's time for al of us to stop acting
like dicks.

Personally, my views since then have evolved. That conversation was

one of the main reasons I decided to become a writer/producer and my
experiences since then have really challenged me to think long and hard
about whether there are better ways to do this, whether there are better and
more collaborative business models. Personally, I think there are and I'm
genuinely hopeful for the future. Of course, in terms of getting Smoke into
production, I have once more taken the questionable decision to have
meaningless conversations with industry pirates... but as I'm currently skint,
they tend to leave me alone, except for an occasional glance in my direction
to see if the conditions of my bank balance have changed in their favor. It
hasn't of late. When it does, I expect a sudden and predictable rise in
popularity.

In the meantime Bectu are using this court case to wage war on micro-
budget movie making. Or, in other words, it's shitty pirate business as usual.

Now… the funny thing about all this and the reason I still have hope for
the future, is my personal experience of movie making has always been, that
working people in the industry are actually incredibly generous, with both
their time, support and services for scripts and projects they believe in.
Behind all the rhetoric of Bectu, their membership, as individuals, are
capable of making personal judgements about whether a wage is important or
not, on a project by project basis. Above and beyond all the bullshit that
happens once there is money involved, there are still many, many individuals
whose primary motivation is still to make great movies. Unfortunately,
sometimes greed-head producers take advantage of that and generally take
the piss... ho hum.

Where I do have a personal opinion about the court case, is that

regardless of how incredibly talented this Art Department Assistant is,
personally I'd never be able to hire her onto a production. Let's face it, there
is enough litigation in the movie world already, without having to worry
about getting sued by everyone on set. I'm pretty sure I won't be the only
producer who feels the same way.

There are deeper issues here. Money in the movie industry brings out
both the best and the worst in people. For me, the bottom line is, there must
be a better way of doing this, a way that takes "me me me" out of the
equation. For the time being, I continue to work on developing that business
model. Just in the same way that I continue to surround myself with people
who are creative and sane, whilst pushing away the greed-heads, opportunists
and the wankers.

Movie Blog: It's About How We Deal With Rejection and Criticism

About twice a week someone online will take time out of their busy life
to tell me I'm an idiot. Sometimes they're offensive about it, sometimes
they're just sarcastic, very occasionally they are articulate and considered in
their opinions. The considered and articulate opinions I tend to publish, think
about and then respond to... all the rest I ignore and delete.

The sarcasm and the bile that gets thrown my way used to really get to
me. It honestly used to upset me. But just recently I had an epiphany about it.
It's this:

"If people aren't ridiculing me and my ideas, then I'm probably doing
something wrong."

This is an extension of what I was talking about a few weeks ago, about
taking creative risks and being prepared to fail creatively. It is the same
thinking applied to speaking honestly in public and thinking for myself.

If we do anything creative in public, the one thing we can guarantee is

we'll have to deal with opinions and criticism. We may never get paid for
what we do, we may never get the recognition we feel we deserve... but if
we create something or express something in public, people will feel free to
tell us what they think. Human nature being what it is, a lot of that feedback
will be negative. It is human nature to try to understand and predict the
nature of reality, by creating a map for ourselves that allows us to make
predictions. As a culture we tend to create that map in terms of consensus
thinking... or in other words, if the vast majority of people believe something,
it must be true. Express a thought that is "off the map" and the resistance from
the centre-thinking will be both concerted and hostile.

The thing about movie making and the movie industry is there is very
little hard science and hard data. Especially on the business side. Everyone
does their best to create a workable map to explain how things are. From the
student film-maker making their first short, right up to the studio execs,
everyone is taking their best guess based on what they hear and what they
believe to be true. Despite what they'd have you believe, everyone... and I
do mean EVERYONE, is constantly trying to find evidence to support the idea
that their map of how things work is the right one. That's the reason that
industry folks read the trades, obsessively. Everyone wants to see what the
next trend is, so they can jump on the band wagon early, whilst there is still
some cash left in it. Which is the reason that everyone and their dog is
talking about shooting in 3D at the moment. Prior to Avatar a lot of the
industry was watching 3D, skeptically. As soon as the Avatar box office
results started to come in, everyone is suddenly a convert. Now, I am pretty
certain that at least half of the people now converted to 3D as a production
technique, were calling James Cameron an idiot two years ago. Avatar, prior
to release, was routinely slated by everyone and their dog. Once you
understand that overnight transition between "you're an idiot" to "you're a
messiah," it is possible to get some perspective on the industry's opinions and
also the way they treat unknowns.
In comparison with how the industry treats unknowns, online criticism is
nothing. By far the hardest criticism any writer or film maker will ever have to
deal with is the indifference and contempt that the industry routinely displays
to anyone they haven't heard of. I currently have two active projects, 400
Grams and Smoke. 400 Grams is a no budget Lone Gun Manifesto movie.
Smoke is a multi-million dollar production with attached talent and a name
director. Smoke as a project is now a year old. The vast majority of that year
has been spent waiting for industry folk to get back to me. In fact, the last
three months has been spent waiting to hear back from an influential UK
producer, whose agent strung us along and strung us along, right up to the
point where the he passed on the project, when we pushed for an definitive
yes or no answer pre-Cannes. I'd like to say this is unusual... but, the truth of
the matter is this about the norm. Agents can't read anything in less than six
to eight weeks and then frequently don't bother to get back to you. Talent
agents often don't even bother to pass projects onto their clients and
producers often delegate the reading of spec scripts to the office junior. This is
the day to day reality of the industry. The bottom line is that agents and
producers prioritise reading the trades over reading spec scripts. I suspect that
they do this because deep down they trust the latest trend, over their own
ability to spot a good project from a pile of specs.

Now, whilst it's important to understand why the industry treats

unknowns with contempt and indifference, it's not as important as
understanding what we as screenwriters and movie makers do with that
rejection and indifference. Unfortunately, I think the vast majority of movie-
makers and screenwriters adopt one of two responses to the industry, neither
of which I believe are completely healthy.

The most common reaction from unknowns to the industry's indifference

and contempt is the "I must be doing something wrong" response. Basically, a
screenwriter writes a script, sends queries out to agents and producers. The
response is silence. Nobody gets back to them. The writer then assumes that
the script just wasn't good enough, so they sign up for another screenwriting
course, buy another "how to" book and the latest piece screenplay software.
Having built their confidence back up, they rewrite their script and then send
out another batch of queries. Now, what I'm not saying is that writers
shouldn't review their writing abilities and attempt to improve them. What I
am questioning is whether we ought to automatically assume that silence and
indifference from the industry reflects at all on our ability to write a decent
movie script? I'm convinced that often it doesn't. In fact, what I'm totally
convinced of is that anyone who says it'll take them six to eight weeks to
read a spec script, actually has no real desire to read that script in the first
place. It actually doesn't take that long to work through a pile of spec scripts.
I can tell by the end of the first three pages whether a script is worth reading
all the way through or not. A person's ability to write cinematically shines
through from the first page.

The other reaction from unknowns to the industry's indifference, is best

described as arrogance. The "I know best" response. I see this as a very
common mind-set in independent movie makers. This response is almost a
mirror image of the unknown screenwriter's response. Instead of assuming that
they automatically are wrong about everything, the most common
independent film-maker response is to confuse isolation with independence
and to produce movies without having any development input from the
industry. This often results in bad movies and also a growing reputation for
indie movie making as being a ghetto for poorly conceived and executed
projects. Personally, I think it's important for movie makers to learn by
making bad movies. However, what doesn't seem to happen is the learning of
lessons, as a result of failing. In my opinion the problem isn't that people
make bad films, but that instead of learning from their mistakes, many movie
makers see their problems as being external to themselves, rather than one of
skill development. That they would be successful, if they just got the breaks.

In the past I have held both of these positions.

I have been the screenwriter who doubted my abilities due to silence

from the industry... and, I've also been the independent film-maker who
would not listen to anyone else. Neither position has served me well.

So, what is a sane response to rejection, criticism and the industry's

indifference. Well, the first thing to understand is that as well as having
weaknesses, both responses have strengths. What's great about some unknown
screenwriters is the way they constantly question their screenplays and take
outside notes to make them stronger... and what is brilliant about independent
movie makers is the way they step aside from the powerlessness handed to
them by the industry and attempt to find ways to empower themselves. If you
combine the strengths of the two responses and give up the weaknesses, then
I believe you actually have a chance of achieving something.

That's my point this week. We actually have a choice of how we

respond to the indifference of an industry which is appears too self-obsessed to
pay proper attention to spec scripts and talent development. We don't have to
remain powerless and by choosing to empower ourselves, we don't have to
completely reject the rest of the industry. It doesn't have to be an either or
choice.

I like the freedoms Lone Gun Manifesto movie making offers me. The
chance to experiment and try out material I wouldn't even consider pitching
to the larger industry in script form. However, the most important change
LGM movie making has had on me isn't related to 400 Grams, it's the way
it's changed my attitude to Smoke. Simply because I now have a production
moving forward, that is in completely under my control, the set-backs on
Smoke have stopped bothering me. When we finally got the "we've decided
to pass" message from that producer, I literally thought "OK, his loss" and went
back to working on my post-production workflow. If nothing else, LGM has
made me slightly more bullet proof to the indifference of the industry than I
was before.

I'm genuinely looking forwards to Cannes now... I don't feel under any
pressure at all to impress anyone. If I find the things and people I need to
move Smoke forwards, that'll be lovely. If I don't, that'll be fine too.

Why We Need Digital Graffiti Movie Making in a 2.0 World

I believe it is the movies where we get it horrendously wrong, which are

the movies which ultimately define us as artists. I know this is an odd view
because surely it is our triumphs and successes that are the really important
pieces of work? Personally, I don't think so... I think that getting it horribly
wrong is the most important thing a movie maker can ever do. It's important
because we only get it wrong when we are prepared to take risks.

I'm a great believer in taking creative risks... in fact, I believe in that

one thing more than almost anything else. This is one of the main reasons that
I have not yet found a comfortable home in the mainstream industry. The
industry is obsessed with reducing risk, largely by endlessly repeating what it
has been done previously and by selling only to the easiest audiences. If I'm
honest, movies made by safe movie-makers bore the arse off me, as does star
driven teen fodder.

The whole point about taking risks is to run along the ragged edge
towards almost certain failure. Taking risks is about taking a creative leap of
faith off the thirty story building and at the same time being prepared to hurt
when there is no crash mat to soften your meeting with the concrete below.
Hitting the creative concrete at high speed hurts... trust me, that kind of
cataclysmic failure to deliver, after all the puff and arrogance of production,
is about as rough as it gets for the fragile artistic ego. This was certainly my
experience of making my last movie. I took risks, I did things nobody in their
right mind should do either creatively or financially and my payoff was
personal bankruptcy and about six months hiding under a duvet, because I
couldn't face looking at myself in the mirror anymore. That's what real failure
feels like. If I was able to just shrug it off, there was no real risk involved. The
pay-off of all that pain, was a much deeper understanding of writing and of
the workings of the industry. The benefits of which, I still use pretty much
every single day. It is the cornerstone of the Lone Gun Manifesto. (see below)

Most of the people you meet in life will do almost anything to avoid the
lessons you learn by failure. They crave the payoff of success, but will settle
for not failing as the next best thing. Failure for most people is not an option.
That is a shame... because failure is magnificent. Failure on an epic scale is
heroic. It is good to fail. It's good to fail simply because to do otherwise is to
remain beige, safe, conventional, cushioned from the world... to remain
forever essentially fluffy and worthless.

This one of the main reasons I despise screenwriting gurus. I despise

them because their pitch is always about increasing your chances of success
as a writer. I have serious issues with that as a philosophy. I have very serious
doubts about whether avoiding failure should be ever be a consideration for a
creative person. Make stuff you passionately believe in and learn to relish
feeling like hammered shit when it all goes pear-shaped. Learn to deal with
the pain you feel when people hate the things you make. Make them
anyway.

In my less than humble opinion, indie and independent cinema

continues to make the hideous mistake of trying to recreate the working
practices and techniques of the mainstream industry, only done cheaper. My
question this week, is whether that is ever a good idea? Are working practices
used to minimise risk and decrease the possibility of innovative work,
applicable to projects where the opportunity to take risks is both possible and
the very thing that defines us as different from them? It is the very lack of
resources and reputation that we have, which gives us the freedom to do and
make anything we can imagine... in anyway we can imagine. This apparent
weakness is actually our greatest resource and our greatest strength and yet
all too often we wish and piss that opportunity away by putting success at the
top of the list of virtues, instead of maybe something better, like honesty for
instance. And if you don't think being honest involves taking a risk, try
counting how many lies you tell in the next hour!

I had a moment of clarity about about a month ago, about the insanity of
obsession with success and with emulating the industry. It doesn't work
creatively and it also doesn't work as a business model. It is time to do
something different creatively and in terms of how we approach movie
making as a business. I believe it is time to openly embrace risk taking and
failure and give to give them way more attention than success. Success is a
goal for tedious wankers and drones... personally I'd rather be good, honest,
kind and innovative, than successful.

People, I urge you to pick up your computers, your notebooks and your
cameras and make an epic effort to fail in your next project... not just a little
bit, but to get out there and make a complete and utter dog's breakfast of it.
Then, after a couple of months of tears, booze and ice-cream, I urge you to
dust yourself off and leap off that building again and again and again.

Do it! Attempt to do something outstanding and unimaginable. I promise

you one thing, when your face hits the concrete I'll be right beside you,
bleeding from every broken bone, but laughing like an Aardvark on speed!

And... just to put my own testicles firmly on the anvil of fate, here are a
couple of announcements:

The novel of Smoke will be published on December 2nd of this year!

My new #lgm movie 400 Grams will be released on February 14th 2011

The LGM document attached to this post below is open source, so you
can print it off, give it away, blog about it as much as you want without
needing my permission.
 The Lone Gun Manifesto
The Lone Gun Manifesto is an open source document. You can reproduce it,
share it, give it way and alter it anyway you wish, without my permission. For me it is a
toolkit. My toolkit. A tool kit based a mixture of punk rock and graffiti culture, a toolkit
that will enable me to shoot a cinema quality feature film, in under eight days, on a
production budget of about $600. If you don't agree with any of the principles, feel free
to write better ones. That is the reason this is labelled (vs1 beta).

LONE GUN MANIFESTO

For the last twelve years I've been banging my head against the wall,
trying to figure out how to deal with the insanity of the movie industry, whilst
at the same time exploring the equally insane world of micro-budget movie
making. The problem is that neither system works. The industry becomes
more and more obsessed with playing it safe and the independents largely try
to imitate the work patterns of the industry, only with less money. For people
like me it's a nightmare, because what I want to do is make movies and have
people watch them... and, to do that without investing three years of my life
and all of my money into a project which then flounders around the ridiculous
distribution system.

Anyway, after many years of pondering the problems of funding, shooting

and distributing movies, I believe I have an answer. However, it means
completely changing the way we think about movies. It is a production
philosophy designed to let creative people make brilliant movies quickly,
cheaply and without exploiting the people who contribute to its making.

Here are the headlines:

1) One DSLR camera, One person, One microphone (The lone gun
shoots alone)

2) Strip movie making down to the basics - a camera, a great story and
some actors

3) A lone gun never asks for permission to shoot at a location

 4) Put something original and honest in front of the camera

5) Think like a photographer, not like a film-maker

6) Money is for food, transport and a dedicated hard-drive for each
project and nothing else

7) Natural light only

8) Everyone who works on a movie, has the right to distribute that movie
for free or for profit

9) No credits before the title ever, regardless of how famous someone is.

10) The end product must be cinema quality (capable of projection to

cinema sizes without falling apart)

11) A creative common license for the movie (how open you go is up to
you, but people must be able to share and alter it for free)

12) If you’re going to be a gorilla (sic)… you may as well wear the full
monkey suit.

OK. In practical terms this means that you are shooting in public places,
but never in such a way that anyone is aware you are shooting. That's why it
is done best with a standard DSLR camera. (I really want to see someone
figure out how to do this with the RED by the way!) In terms of the sound
recording there are two alternatives: radio mics for all cast - or the way I am
doing it, a $30 pair of binaural mics, (which look like iphone headphones)
jacked into a portable digital recorder. (I've tested this method and the sound
quality is phenomenal, once you've got the hang of it) To use the binaural
system, the actors have to set away the sound, which is placed in shot
between them... and one of them is given a Zippo cigarette-lighter to clack at
the start of a scene, which gives you the cue for syncing the audio.

In reality this means you are only filming mastershots. You can't control
the environment to get coverage. However, this really, really speeds up the
production process. Basically, you and the actors pick your location. You
decide where you are going to place the camera. When you're set up, they
walk into the set up, set away the audio and play out the scene. Because
there is no crew and no lines to edit, the acting can be completely natural
(think Woody Allen circa Manhattan).

Here's the list of kit I use (feel free to improvise better solutions):
 1) A good DSLR camera

2) A portable digital audio recorder

3) A microphone (not the kind you’re thinking about.. The one I use cost
$40)

4) A Zippo cigarette lighter

5) A small beanbag

6) A computer with some professional editing software on it

7) Some actors

8) A pocket sized notebook

9) A brilliant idea for a movie

10) A script

11) A dedicated hard drive

12) An idea about how you’re going to build an audience

One of the things that I think makes this philosophy work is that the
writer/director decides in advance, to give everyone who contributes to the
movie the rights to distribute the movie for free or for profit. My project has
been running for four weeks so far - we’re in writing and pre-production. The
first actor I attached has already told me he has friends at a European TV
station, to whom he would like to give the finished movie... along with a raft
of international arts festivals. Neither of those two distribution options would
ever have occurred to me. I'm working on free distribution via iTunes and
also on getting a US theatrical release via some of my US contacts. Once
you take the rights shackles off a project, it's amazing what happens.
Seriously amazing.

Finally, I know there are issues about working this way. It forces
moviemakers to give up a lot. However, the freedoms it gives in return, to
just work with a team of people quickly and creatively to make a movie,
more than pays off for any restrictions.

And… finally, if you know of anyone who would make an outstanding

movie, if only they had this one piece of paper, then give it to them. Pass this
on to the people you believe it will inspire.

Thanks for reading this - up the revolution!