Journey to Less Shittiness (week 35)
Every week, I log my progress of going from a shitty screenwriter to…hopefully a less shitty one.
It’s always discouraging to get through a week, especially a string of weeks, where the habits you thought you had built turn out to be not as powerful as you hoped. This must be the fourth or fifth week in a row where I’m missing out on the basic work I’m assigning myself. I’d consider that watching movies and reading scripts. Those are the simplest things to get done by far. Writing seven pages and putting in focused work for seven hours a week outside of a full-time job is not as easy as throwing a movie on, or reading on a commute. So I feel especially shitty missing weeks of that type of “work.”
What’s there to do? I have other personal habits I’ve been trying to build that I haven’t done in weeks, too. There’s two basic options here. One of those that nobody likes to talk about is to just quit. I finished reading this book on quitting called The Dip from marketing guru Seth Godin. If you believe his argument, which boils down to the idea that quitting is sometimes smart and necessary if you’re doing something that isn’t going anywhere or driving the impact you want, then the idea of quitting shouldn’t be so scary. I’m inclined to agree with his argument. However, in this case, I’m going to go with the other option on this, which is to cut yourself some slack, forget about the past, and just get back on the horse. Start over, or pick up where you left off if you can. By the Dip rubric, I believe these habits are good and can drive impact if done right. Every movie I watch gives me a chance to analyze the story, why it was made, what it did right and wrong. Every script I read, I see how visuals are interpreted from words on a page, how scenes are structured, and conventions of the medium.
I’m maybe oversimplifying the options here. You could always continue to do the habit but adjusting your strategy, or update the goals to make them more aligned with what you want to get out of them. There’s gray area to play with there, as with most things. Nonetheless, at this point, I don’t think I need to change up these goals at the moment. So while this week I didn’t get to both movies, I have one to write about, and one script to write about. That’s better than nothing. Then next week, I’ll just keep trying to do what I told myself to do.
Work Log
1 script: STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON (screenplay by Jonathan Herman, Andrea Berloff) Finally got around to this one. It was a fun read, to be sure. It was extremely long, and from what I remembered from the movie, this cut had a lot more to it, so I imagine the final producer’s cut ended up killing a lot of this. An unmissable problem with this script, and maybe just a pet peeve but worth noting because I think it’s bullshit, is that it was riddled with typos. It just feels insulting to people that are slaving away over their spec scripts and going through them with fine tooth combs because they know that any slip up or mistake could be used to count against them. And it’s lazy. I mean I get it, it’s a long script, but the production couldn’t put up some money to get it read by a professional copyeditor? This is also something that’s not just a gripe but I’ve read can also cause problems with actor reads. If there’s a typo in a dialogue line, do they say the typo and it comes out wrong, or do they note it and risk insulting the writer’s intelligence? It’s still nitpicking, but it’s a problem and it’s easily avoidable. So it makes me mad. End of rant.
Typos aside, this script is extremely visual and does a good job of getting you into the heads of the characters. While interesting, I found it to be a little excessive at times; it doesn’t leave a lot to the imagination or for the actors and director to use it more as a jumping off point rather than an instruction manual. I’m more of the philosophy that the screenplay should only have the basics to illustrate the scene, the sounds, and what will eventually be up on screen rather than dive too deeply into the emotional story.
Another gripe: why did the producers enlist two white people to write this script? Even amongst the “Story by” credits, there isn’t a single POC there. Seems odd to me, especially in the political climate we’re in. I’m sure that they shopped this story around and Herman and Berloff just had the best version, or the version that the rest of the powers that be wanted to tell. It’s not to say they didn’t try, and not to say that Herman and Berloff aren’t allowed to write this because it’s about black people and they aren’t black. But I find it interesting and a difficult line to draw between right and wrong. At the end of the day, I think understanding that all movies are businesses and the people involved try to make the best decisions based on that answers some of the moral questions. And I would think due to Dr. Dre, Ice Cube, and F. Gary Gray being such big names on the producers list, they would have had some say in who they hired to write this. Are they wrong for making that decision? I’d say no, but I’d like to know more.
1 movie:
THE LEGO NINJAGO MOVIE (screenplay by Bob Logan, Paul Fisher, William Wheeler, Tom Wheeler, Jared Stern, John Whittington) Damn, check out that roster of writers! Talk about a movie written by committee.
I’m a little embarrassed by choosing this movie on HBO, but I was surprisingly happy with how the first LEGO MOVIE turned out. So I wanted to see how the franchise carried through with different characters and if it hurt them at all from a story perspective.
Ultimately, I thought this one was fine. There’s an interesting father/son dynamic between the Green Ninja (Dave Franco) and the “villain” of the movie Lord Garmadon (Justin Theroux) that is introduced extremely early, like act one. This is not a case of a Darth Vader/Luke Skywalker reveal; this is a relationship literally everybody knows about except for Garmadon himself. Which makes for some funny moments, but I think there could have been a more interesting reveal if it had come later in the movie. It does follow the Hero’s Journey pretty closely, which I felt proud of myself for noticing.
7 pages: Again, focused on rewriting, so didn’t get to generating completely new material this week.
14 pomodoros: Got ten of these done. Turns out the deadline I was trying to hit actually got delayed, which was a very good thing because I would not have made it by Tuesday. I realized I actually had a lot of extra work to do on it before I was ready to turn it into a festival. So I spent most of today getting all that done. Feeling pretty good about it! I think I’ll be submitting to two Shore Script competitions, maybe get another professional read, then submit to one more. Not sure what that third one will be.
I had intended initially for these to be going towards other writing work not necessarily pertaining to script writing, like social media and “business of screenwriting” work, so I’m going to try to incorporate more of that next week.
I also created a new desk set up for myself, which I’m excited about! I never really had primary space to write, I would just wander around my apartment with my MacBook Air and find a comfortable spot. But now I’ve got a real desk set up with a good monitor I can plug my laptop into, plus a mechanical keyboard and a mouse. So I’m feeling very good about what that’s going to do for my productivity when I can just sit down and know I’ve got my ass in the chair to work.
NEXT WEEK: I never saw the movie, but I’m going to read THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING next week. I want to get started on this biopic idea in the next couple months hopefully. This should help set the tone. Movies, I would love to get to DEADPOOL 2, SOLO, and maybe RGB. Do documentaries count? They have a story, so I guess I can analyze how that plays out.
This is my shitty journey, so I’m saying they count.
— 💩
