Now Playing: 365 Original Feature Film Titles, Loglines and Taglines

Has a movie ever changed your life?

I can point to one that absolutely, positively, irrevocably altered the direction my life has taken.

In the spring of 1992, as my junior year at UNC-CH was winding down, I went to see the new Robert Altman film THE PLAYER at the Varsity Theater on Franklin Street in Chapel Hill. I was already a big movie nut before seeing the film, but the majority of my knowledge about the movie industry came from SISKEL & EBERT, ENTERTAINMENT TONIGHT and what I heard on the tram of the Universal Studios tour.

I'm not sure what it says about me that I felt a connection to the murderous sleazeball studio exec

THE PLAYER changed all that. I walked out of that movie wishing I could be Griffin Mill, the oily studio exec played so brilliantly by Tim Robbins. My mind reeled that someone's job was sitting at a desk, hearing writers pitch movie ideas and then saying "yea" or "nay." I loved the intrigue of the studio lot and the satiric look at the creative process that so often requires a deal with the devil.

That movie got me thinking about where I was going with my life and what my career path would be (the number one topic of most college juniors methinks). I had chosen my Poli Sci major because it was one of the top pre-law majors, but my feelings about law school had been steadily eroding for some time. I headed to Alaska the summer of '92 experiencing a real crisis of identity and generally feeling the fear.

Me, in Alaska, on the verge of an epiphany (and needing a shave + shower).

Long story short, you have a lot of time to think working the slime line of a salmon cannery, and my mind kept coming back to THE PLAYER. One day I had an epiphany of sorts at my campsite after a particularly long shift: no matter what you do you have to give working in Hollywood a shot. I graduated in '93 and by '95 I was living in Los Angeles and learning how to be a development guy as an intern Wendy Finerman Productions on the Columbia/TriStar (aka Sony) lot in Culver City.

As I was wondering what to do with this here blog, my thoughts came back once again to THE PLAYER, and one particularly funny and prescient scene. Larry Levy (played by Peter Gallagher) is the new hotshot exec at the studio where Griffin Mill works. Larry is bemoaning how expensive screenwriters are to the studio, and wonders aloud if maybe the execs in the room couldn't come up with ideas for features that are just as good....

LARRY LEVY
I'm just saying there's time and money to be saved...
if we came up with these stories on our own.

GRIFFIN MILL
Where are these stories coming from?

LARRY LEVY
Anywhere. It doesn't matter.
The newspaper.
Pick any story.

BONNIE
'Immigrants protest budget cuts
in literacy program.'

LARRY LEVY
Human spirit overcoming human adversity.
Sounds like Horatio Alger in the barrio.
Put Jimmy Smits in it and you've got
a sexy STAND AND DELIVER.

BONNIE
How about 'Mud slide kills hundreds
in slums of Chile'?

LARRY LEVY
That's good. Triumph over tragedy.
Sounds like a John Boorman picture.
Slap a happy ending on it,
the script will write itself.

BONNIE
'Further bond losses
push Dow down.'
(beat)
I see Connery as Bond.

(Thanks to script-o-rama.com for this excerpt, which I edited for clarity.)

This scene, in turn, reminded me of the many, many times I've heard my fellow wanna-be screenwriters worrying about protecting their script ideas from nefarious producers and studios. Always registering, trademarking and speaking in hushed tones about their precious ideas...

In my experience, ideas are cheap... it's the execution that's expensive. The days of the writer selling a feature pitch for millions without the accompanying polished, ultra-tight, already-written screenplay are all but gone, and besides, it's much cheaper for a producer or studio to option or buy a script than to "steal" an idea, develop and write it on their own and risk a lawsuit and bad publicity if the film is a success.

Unfortunately, the days of original screenplays (i.e. not reboots, reimaginings, sequels, adaptations, etc) being made into studio films also seem to be in danger (but I digress).

I am going to put my belief that it should be relatively easy for writers to come up with movie ideas to the test, and write a new one every day for the next twelve months, starting this Sunday March 1.

I am going to hone my abilities to write taglines on these film pitches because I think I would be great at it in "real life" and I want to put that belief to the test.

And finally, I am going to focus on what I believe is the extreme importance of a great title for a film that seeks commercial success. I read the following in the storylink.com "eZine" that I subscribe to a few days ago and I think it hit the nail right on the head:

A spec script must have a strong concept and poster that is "primal" and easy to tell - and a title that "says what it is"!

I am a firm believer in the necessity of a title that, in some essential way, "says what it is." Quick, what was the movie BODY OF LIES about? That film was referenced in an article I was reading and I couldn't for the life of me remember. I had to look it up- it was the Ridley Scott-Russell Crowe-Leonardo DiCaprio flop ($70 million budget, $39 million domestic gross) from just last year. I haven't seen the movie, so I can't make any judgment on whether it was good or not, but I can say that a generic title like BODY OF LIES, that could just as easily be the title of a legal thriller or a woman-in-jeopardy film, did it no help. No one will have trouble remembering what the hell SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE or THE SIXTH SENSE was about...

One final thought... if, by some chance, a producer or writer or actor or director reads one of my barebones movie pitches and happens to like it, I say "adapt away." As these pitches are my intellectual property, I fully expect a "Story By" credit and all the lucre that comes with it. That said, I fervently hope you take my pitch, spend a few months writing and polishing it and a year or two producing and marketing it, and make us lots and lots of money with it.

But wouldn't it be much simpler to hire ME to write it with you and/or for you?

Reboot Angle #3 > The Fiction Writer

This is part of my blog reboot process. For the origin of the thought of the motivation of the why and the why now, please click back here.

As luck would have it, I read an article in this week's Newsweek written by blogger Daniel Lyons who has, until recently, been writing the fictional mock diary blog The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. I didn't have any illusions about making money directly from blogging, but if I had this article would have dispelled them for good:

For two years I was obsessed with trying to turn a blog into a business. I posted 10 or 20 items a day to my site, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, rarely taking a break. I blogged from cabs, using my BlackBerry. I blogged in the middle of the night, having awakened with an idea. I rationalized this insane behavior by telling myself that at the end of this rainbow I would find a huge pot of gold. But reality kept interfering with this fantasy. My first epiphany occurred in August 2007, when The New York Times ran a story revealing my identity, which until then I'd kept secret. On that day more than 500,000 people hit my site—by far the biggest day I'd ever had—and through Google's AdSense program I earned about a hundred bucks. Over the course of that entire month, in which my site was visited by 1.5 million people, I earned a whopping total of $1,039.81.

1.5 million hits = $1,039.81. That pretty much blows.

Anyway...

The blogging angle I'm considering today is The Fiction Writer. At first glance, this one may be a better fit than some of the others I'm considering, if only because I have written quite a bit of fiction before in the form of screenplays. Also, and this may be so obvious that it doesn't need restating, I've read an enormous amount of fiction too. Writing fiction wouldn't require acquiring a new skillset, and that alone appeals to me.

But what format would best serve the blog post? Individual short stories? Serial fiction that asks the reader to "tune in tomorrow" (or whenever) for the next installment?

Blogging from the perspective of a fictional character that I've created? And if so, what world would I be exploring that could only be seen through that persona's eyes?

Here's a blog devoted to fictional blogs (or "flogs") that should make for interesting clicking should I pursue this route. Here's another.

My thoughts keep returning to my fifth and final screenplay Blood is Thicker. I never finished writing it, although I gave it nearly a year. Maybe I could repurpose it for the blog, stretch it out and finally complete it. How readable would screenplay-style formatting even be on a blog?

Hmm.

Maybe I should post the opening pages as a "first installment" and see?

FADE IN:

INT. SUNDAY SCHOOL - DAY

Below one-piece wooden desk-chairs, the scabbed knees and
hand-me-down patent leather shoes of YOUNG CHILDREN fidget as
they endure a scorching hot morning of Sunday School.

SCHOOLMARM (V.O.)
The evil Pharaoh had decreed that
all male children born to his
Hebrew slaves should be taken to
the Nile river and drowned.
The children paying attention grimace at the thought. The
rest do their best to fight off sleep.

A wide-eyed young SCHOOLMARM paces at the front of the room, reading from an enormous Bible she somehow balances in the palm of one hand.

SCHOOLMARM
Jochebed kept the birth of her baby
son secret for three months. She
couldn’t keep him hidden forever
but refused to let him be killed by
the Pharoah, so she set him adrift
on the Nile in a small basket made
of reeds.

Every kid wears the threadbare black or brown Sunday best befitting the salt-of-the-earth country town residents. Every kid except for the TOW-HEADED BLOND BOY who sticks out
like a sore thumb in his brand-new seersucker suit.

CLOSE ON
A color illustration from one of the childrens' Bible of Moses being plucked from the basket by Pharaoh’s daughter.

SCHOOLMARM
The daughter of Pharaoh discovered
the baby and adopted him as her
son, and named him "Moses". Moses'
sister Miriam saw where Moses had
ended up and convinced the
Pharaoh's daughter to hire a Hebrew
woman to nurse the baby.
Children, do any of you know who
she hired to be Moses’ nurse?

Vacant looks answer her. The tow-head steals a glance out the window.

SCHOOLMARM
By the grace of God it was
Jochebed, Moses’ own mother!
Praise God! To save her son’s
life, Jochebed allowed the
Pharaoh’s daughter to treat Moses
as her own son and believe that the
orphan who appeared from nowhere
was a royal gift to her from her
own pagan gods.

Tow-head squirms uncomfortably in his seat as one by one the scrawny kids in the room shoot him a variety of DIRTY LOOKS.

SCHOOLMARM
Children, it’s not very Christian
of you to make the newest member of
our church feel different because
he’s an adopted orphan. His new
parents the Weisses are well-off,
yes, but they ain’t no Pharaohs,
and your new friend here ain’t
gonna part the Red Sea.

The CHURCHBELL rings, signaling the end of the service. As the kids scramble towards the exit, the tow-head looks wistfully out the window at the people streaming out the church’s
doors.

He perks up when MR. and MRS. WEISS, dressed nattily in white suit and sundress, emerge and walk towards the schoolhouse. They both wave at him when they get close enough to see him through the window.

UNCLE TODD (V.O.)
The boy nearly jumps out of his
seat when he hears a loud series of
pops that he thinks are
firecrackers. Then he sees his
brand new mom and dad sink to their
knees as red splotches soak through
their Sunday best.

The tow-head is frozen in his chair, MOANING as he watches Mr. and Mrs. Weiss turn towards each other for one final look before toppling over into the grass.

The tow-head jumps up from his seat. Through the chaos of screaming churchgoers dragging their kids to safety, the boy watches as two men in black suits calmly throw their machine guns into the back seat of a brown Cadillac and drive out of the parking lot.

UNCLE TODD (V.O.)
Sometimes the gunmen are driving a
Caddy, sometimes a Mercedes, and
one time they were on goddamn
horses.

NURSE (V.O.)
And you’ve been having this dream
for how long Mr. Redd?

CUT TO:

The Zen of the Bridesmaid

I don't know about you, but I read in bed almost every night before I go to sleep. So does Mrs. Word Player.

Several years ago, when the wife in a couple we were friends with discovered this about us, she could barely contain her jealousy. I had no idea... I thought every couple read in bed together. It was a strange exchange, in that from that point forward I looked at what I have as lucky rather than just the status quo. In life it's all about perspective, wouldn't you say?

So a few nights ago, MWP leans over and says "read this." I took the book she'd just started, Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein, M.D., and read the first sentence in the Forward, which was written by the Dalai Lama.

"The purpose of life is to be happy."

Whoa. The simplicity of that powerful statement packs an incredible wallop. It certainly goes against the Catholic upbringing I received, where suffering and deprivation are lionized and true happiness is deferred to the afterlife.

I bet the Lama is a big LOST fan. Maybe HE is this "Jacob" we keep hearing about...

Lately, my happiness has been yo-yoing quite a bit, but the biggest X factor has been my work life. When work is plentiful, I am practically exuberant. That sensation pervades the rest of my life quickly- I hadn't been happy with my "Development Guy" work in several years, so the 3+ years I've been relying on my copywriting work (which I genuinely enjoy) has been a boon to my overall mood.

I've also been on indefinite hiatus from my screenwriting projects since spring of '07, work that was often as torturous emotionally as it was fulfilling creatively. And I've been OK with that arrangement for a long while now... until recently.

First, work slowed down in December, and it's continued to be slow into January. My mood destabilized. Then, an odd confluence of events suddenly made me revisit my career path and the happiness factor attached to it. It started with LOST. We received Season 4 on DVD for Christmas, and since we already had Seasons 1 and 2, we went out and bought Season 3 to complete the collection. In watching it, for some reason, my eye kept catching on Jeffrey Lieber's name in the credits. He is a co-creator of the show, and someone I used to know. Even though he's had his own issues with LOST, for some reason seeing his name in the credits over and over had a different effect on me than it had in the past.

It wasn't schadenfreude, it was "why him and not me?" I came into (and then lost) contact with Jeffrey long before LOST. I was a newly hired development guy for Civilian (then known as Spoke Film) and I cast my net wide looking for submissions. Naturally, I hated most of the stuff that agents sent me, but when I read Jeff's scripts (one was called "Conspiracy of Weeds" and I can't remember the name of the second) I called and set up a meeting. Nothing ever came of my interest in the scripts ("Conspiracy" was later made with the far less interesting title TANGLED), but I became friends with Jeff and his wife Holly and for a while he even rented office space from Civilian.

Jeff was talented and a very nice guy, and remembering the clever twists and turns in his scripts that I read it's not hard to see how his contributions to LOST earned him a co-creator credit. "But aren't I ALSO a nice and talented guy who has clever twists of my own to share with the world?" that stubborn part of my brain kept saying every time I saw his name on the screen during our LOST-athon.

Try as I might, I couldn't silence that little voice. In fact, a rapid succession of similar events only made it more insufferable. I saw TWILIGHT and, lo and behold, one of the producers is I guy I used to work with at Wendy Finerman Productions. He was a junior development exec then (hey, kinda like I once was!) and LOOK AT HIM NOW. At the grocery store, I saw a girl I went to UNC with and was once friends with who is now producing Adam Sandler movies. We're the same age, and moved out to LA around the same time, but LOOK AT HER NOW. I watch an episode of GOSSIP GIRL and hey, I used to take meetings with the co-creator and occasionally go for drinks with our mutual friend. Damn, what did she have that I don't have?

Yeah, but would dealing with Chuck Bass' problems be any easier?

I know, of course, that it's an enormous oversimplification of the way lives and careers play out to compare myself to them, and I also know that the choices I've made have taken me out of the running for some of the successes that they are now enjoying.

BUT STILL!

Anyway, having all those things happen within a span of a few days really bummed me out for a while. But the more I thought of it, the more my mood improved. I've achieved a pretty damn high level of happiness without the industry success that I'd pursued for over a decade. I've indulged and explored my creative side and expanded and tested my business acumen while developing a personal life that I'm proud of.

And who knows, the best may be yet to come? But the biggest thing that came out of all this for me is the sensation that no matter what happens from this point forward, I was in the game. I played alongside some of the game's top players, even though I never won the big game myself. I've taken the sum of my experiences and spun them into a state of mind that, I feel, is at the very least prepared for any number of challenging paths the future may hold.

Should I happen to find my way back onto the industry path, I'll be ready. And if it doesn't ever "happen" the way I longed for it to? Well, I'll be ready for that too.

Dog Ears #8: Backstory 4

There was a time not too long ago when even the thought of reading anything in the Backstory series made me feel all icky inside. The four installments of Backstory are collections of interviews with screenwriters of different eras (1 is "The Golden Age", 2 is 1940s and 1950s, 3 is 1960s, and 4 is 1970s and 1980s) compiled and edited by Marquette film professor Patrick McGilligan. Thanks to my own efforts and the gift-giving prowess of Mrs. Word Player, I now have all four books in the excellent but largely out-of-print series, but after a really rough time writing my fifth screenplay Blood is Thicker (still unfinished after working on it for 11 months of '06 and early '07) I couldn't stomach reading all these success stories for a while.

You can't make this stuff up

Thankfully, time heals wounds of this sort pretty efficiently, so when I peeked into the one volume I hadn't read yet a few weeks ago I was happy to discover that my appetite for intimate conversations with working writers had returned. It's funny how the same words can be exasperating one day and inspiring the next...

The following are anecdotes, insights, self-recriminations and new lingo taken from Backstory 4: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1970s and 1980s.

ROBERT BENTON
p. 29 "The banalities of married life are, for me, far more interesting and more poignant than the intensity of romance. There's something I find deeply moving about ordinary life."
re: his script for NADINE (1987)

p. 35 "There are two models (of screenplay structure). In one, plot grows out of character. This is the (Howard) Hawks model. In the other, character grows out of plot. This is the [Otto] Preminger model. When I do the architecture on a script of my own, I follow the Hawks approach. I do it so that characters become more complex, and they don't tell you where they're going until they get there."

LARRY COHEN
(Cohen's script for PHONE BOOTH, ultimately made in 2002 with Joel Schumacher at the helm, was once considered by Alfred Hitchcock.)

p. 77 "(Hitchcock) seemed very, very intimidated by Lew Wasserman and the Universal executives, who had more or less undermined his confidence in himself. While making him a very rich man, they'd also destroyed him as an artist. Hitch had severed his ties with [composer] Bernard Herrmann, for example, who had been a close friend and great collaborator, and mainly it was the Universal executives who poisoned his mind against Herrmann and convinced him he needed somebody like Henry Mancini to write songs and a hipper musical score. Which he never got, by the way."

BLAKE EDWARDS
p. 91 tsuris: |ˈtsoŏris; ˈtsər| noun, informal
trouble or woe; aggravation.
ORIGIN early 20th cent.: from Hebrew.

p. 95 "Therefore I consider that slapstick–literally slapstick–is not entirely what I do. Only some of it turns out to be slapstick. Slapstick comes from vaudeville–it comes from what they called "the slap stick" (slapping sound as he demonstrates), which made that sound."

WALTER HILL
p. 106 roustabout: noun
an unskilled or casual laborer.
• a laborer on an oil rig.
• a dock laborer or deckhand.
• a circus laborer.
ORIGIN mid 19th cent.: from the verb roust

"All of this taught me one important thing that carried over to writing. If you are capable of making a living out of your talent and imagination, you are a privileged soul. As to the actual writing, you learn about writing by reading. And then you learn to make use of your own particular attitudes, gifts, and skills by–writing, writing, writing."

p. 113 "I don't pretend to be a scholar about the history and evolution of screenwriting, and I think you have to approach it as a craft rather than an art. But it's the old story; if the craft gets good enough, it is an art."

p. 116 "My clearest impression is that (Michael) Eisner wanted movies to be a kind of pleasantly flavored chewing gum and was almost physically uncomfortable in dealing with anything about the dark side of the human heart."

Remind me to tell you my Harry Dean Stanton story some day

p. 122 (re ALIEN) "I named her "Ripley" (after "Believe It or Not"); later, when she had to have a first name for ID cards, I added "Ellen" (my mother's middle name). I called the ship Nostromo (from Conrad: no particular metaphoric idea, I just thought it sounded good). Some of the characters are named after athletes: Brett was for George Brett, Parker was for Dave Parker of the Pirates, and Lambert was Jack Lambert of the Steelers."

p. 128 "My favorite description of the dilemma of screenwriting comes from David Giler, "Your work is only read by the people who will destroy it."

RUTH PRAWER JHABVALA
p. 151 "What I do realize is that I mustn't have a single word that's not absolutely necessary, no "Oh yes, I see," nothing like that. You have to compress and compress and just give them the essence."

LAWRENCE KASDAN
p. 170 "That's what the STAR WARS saga is about–it's about following those things which are strongest in you and imposing them on the world. Making a career in Hollywood is like that if you want to do your own work. If you want to do what they want you to do, it's easy. You just say yes. But if you want to do what you want to do, you're constantly manipulating the chaos of the system."

p. 176 "That's what all great tragedies are about for me–that in this adherence to a single idea, we sometimes sacrifice everything."
re: his script for BODY HEAT (1981)

ELMORE LEONARD
p. 217 "What's amazing to me when I think about it, is that while Hollywood in general prefers plot-driven stories (they ask, "What's it about?"), thirty-three of my thirty-five books, all character-driven and talky, have either been optioned or bought outright for film."

PAUL MAZURSKY
p. 229 "I'm very sympathetic to those characters. I feel that the middle class is not treated in terms of tragedy. You have to be very rich or very poor to be thought of as a tragic figure."

Thulsa-Thulsa Doom y'all

JOHN MILIUS
p. 296 colloquy: |ˈkäləkwē| noun ( pl. -quies)
1 formal: a conversation : they broke off their colloquy at once | an evening of sophisticated colloquy. See note at conversation .
2 a gathering for discussion of theological questions.
ORIGIN late Middle English : from Latin colloquium ‘conversation.’

p. 299

PM: Was Robert Shaw really as drunk as they say, shooting the scene?
JM: He was totally drunk.

(Shaw had just been busted screwing the nanny by his wife, and kept interjecting his drunken thoughts about the situation into the Indianapolis scene from JAWS, a scene that Milius wrote as a favor to Spielberg. What we see in the final product, of course, has all the nanny bits cut out.)

FREDERIC RAPHAEL
p. 328 (this next bit speaks to questions I had after viewing TWO FOR THE ROAD (1967), written by Raphael)

PM: What was the genesis of the film you did make next, TWO FOR THE ROAD?
FR: (My wife and I) used always to just pack up and travel together. While we were driving down to the south of France from London on one of these trips, I said, "Imagine if we met ourselves as we were ten years ago," and of course the idea revealed itself as a movie.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE

p. 381 confrere: noun
a fellow member of a profession; a colleague : executives from the four broadcast television networks, along with their cable confreres.
ORIGIN mid 18th cent. : French, from medieval Latin confrater, from con- ‘together with’ + frater ‘brother.’

"The difference between a movie and a novel is that a movie is just the surface of things, and the meanings and emotions can only be implicit."