Phantom Menace beat-by-beat December 19, 2009
Posted by James D Hartland in George Lucas, Notes, Phantom Menace, Review, Script Editing, Star Wars, Theory.add a comment
People love to hate on the Phantom Menace for JarJar Binks and the annoying little kid, but the problems of the film run much deeper than that.
Doing the rounds on the internet at the moment is a brilliant, joke filled 70 minute break down of all that is wrong with the story of the Phantom Menace, covering everything from the overarching problem of a lack of a true protagonist; through to scene by scene bad choices in logic. This really is essential viewing for anyone who cares about Screenwriting or Star Wars.
Note: Contains some naughty words (as any review of a Star Wars prequel should!)
Celtx 2.5 out November 8, 2009
Posted by James D Hartland in Celtx.1 comment so far
If you read my first blog post about the free application Celtx, I was hoping that it would get feature parity with Final Draft within a year, sadly that never happened, and a few years later Final Draft (and Movie Magic) are still slightly ahead in features. Though you have to take into account Celtx does way more than simply script formatting, acting as a one stop pre-production suite, so to bemoan the slow development of the screenwriting aspect is perhaps a little unfair. Either way, slowly but surely Celtx is getting there, and I’m sure it will eventually get there, when you consider how many years it was between new versions of FD and MM.
The newest version of Celtx is out, with the biggest new feature for screenwriters probably being revision tracking.
Revision Mode can be used to lock scene numbers while editing a script. You can also track changes using colour coded edits.
- Toolbar – a new toolbar will appear when you are in the Revision Mode
- R+ Increments – ability to increment revisions with one click
- Rev Label – you can assign any name to the Revision
- Colour Edits – edits in Revision Mode can be colour coded
- Scene Numbers – nested Locked Scene numbering that supports Hollywood (A/B), Numeric (1.2.1), or create your own template.
- Scene Fixer – provides an easy way to manually fix any scene numbers
- Display Marks – choose between ‘All Marks’, ‘Current’, or ‘Hide’ to track colour edits
- Omit Scenes – omit any scene
- Reset – resets the script back to standard editing mode
Celtx might not yet be the best screenwriting application money can buy, but when you consider it is free and gets the job done just fine, it’s hard to knock it for anyone who doesn’t wanna invest £165 in an application just to write scripts.
You can read about all the new features in 2.5 here.
Friday the 13th, Remakes and How I Love Romance November 4, 2009
Posted by James D Hartland in Friday the 13th, Halloween, Remakes, Rob Zombie, Romance, Romcom, War Games.add a comment
I’ve always had myself down as an old fashioned, romantic kinda guy, but I never really thought it was represented in my movie watching habits. I guess because when you think of romance in movies you think of god awful romcoms that no one should watch. But in recent years I have become increasingly aware that actually I love a bit of romance in my movies, generally when it’s mixed in with the main story rather than being the focus of the plot.
Like one example of a movie that made me realise this was War Games, a movie all about a kid hacking into the nuclear defence system, but when I watched it a few years back the thing that made me really enjoy that movie were the scenes were he was trying to impress the cute girl by showing her his computer and the subsequent bond they form. Had the girl not been involved in that movie and it had been his kid brother or something I just wouldn’t have enjoyed it nearly as much.
Now we have all seen movies where they tack on a romance subplot just because that is the thing to do, and of course I’m not suggesting every movie should have a romance element. But I do get a kick out of them when they are done well. In fact quite often the fleeting romance moments are some of the few redeeming moments in an otherwise crappy film. I’ll find myself bored out of my brain, and then you will get a man and a woman on-screen together with a bit of chemistry and suddenly I feel myself smiling against my better judgement. I’ve even caught myself doing an excited clap at two leads kiss in a movie which up until then I have hated with all of my heart. I just can’t help but be made happy by seeing people in lurrrve. 
I watched the Friday the 13th remake last night and it was so terrible that aside from a couple of funny death moments that lasted about 3 seconds each, the only remotely interesting part was the estranged attraction between the guy looking for his sister and the brunette girl in another relationship. Sadly this stuff only had a couple of very brief scenes before it went back to the brain-dead awfulness, and it was hardly chemistry leaping off the screen either (I’m talking about real tiny scraps of entertainment here), but during those fleeting moments of romantic tension I suddenly found myself perking up, thinking ‘Maybe this movie won’t be a chore to watch after all’. I’m such a sucker for romance!
Since I have brought up the remake of Friday the 13th…
I’ve long wondered whether I should write a blog about remakes, but there’s not much to say really. We all know the trend is shitty, and is more about money than creating good movies. What is there for me to add? I kinda have a ‘meh’ attitude to the whole thing. Though it does pain me to think about having to prefix all conversations now with which version of a movie we mean. Hopefully 20 years from now everyone will take it for a given you mean the original one and not the remake (because they are so shitty).
The interesting thing about the Friday the 13th remake is the original movie really isn’t that great. It’s not like in the case of Halloween where Rob Zombie took a great movie and turned it into a stinking turd. Friday was always the sucky slasher movie that had a reputation and popularity far outweighing its artistic merit. There was actually a feeling that maybe this Friday the 13th remake might improve upon the original one, but that turned out to be a big fat no.
This movie is pretty much an amalgamation of the first 4 Friday movies (because as everyone hopefully knows, Jason isn’t the killer until the second movie and doesn’t wear the iconic mask until the 3rd, which itself has always intrigued me; imagine if other iconic characters took 3 movies to become fully fleshed out!). You might think that by taking the best bits of the first 4 movies you would have a greatest hits package that is awesome, but you would be wrong.
This movie is such a train wreck in places, and so incredibly dull and generic in others that it makes me wish they had just taken the first movie and used that as a solid basis for this remake. The original had at least the conceit of having an interesting plot interwoven with a murder mystery. I really can’t stress enough how terrible this movie is when it makes you long for them to copy the original Friday the 13th. (And not even the worlds best will they-wont they romance could have saved this turd either.)
But like I say, there is almost no point discussing remakes. This movie made enough at the box office that they will do a sequel and there is nothing we can do about it. I tend to not bother with remakes, and I suggest you do the same.
Psycho
There is perhaps one remake that is interesting to discuss, that would be Psycho. It is interesting to me because they aimed to do a 100% shot for shot copy of the classic. Some might say this is actually the most pointless of all remakes as you already have the original with all the same shots so what is the point… at least Rob Zombie attempted something new when he completely ruined Halloween.
But in terms of an experiment, I think director Gus Van Sant’s idea was pretty interesting.
- Take a movie that old people think is amazing but young people don’t bother to watch because it is black and white and old. Recreate it shot for shot to ensure it is has all the elements that made the original one so critically acclaimed, but do it in colour with recognisable actors so young people will not have any reason not to see it.
As a concept I think that is really interesting, but there was a few problems with Van Sant’s reasoning.
Firstly, Psycho was not a multiplex horror/thriller that was going to appeal to a young audience in the 90s and beyond, no matter whether you do it in colour or not. Just the pacing of it and the character interactions, it is not something to appeal to brain-dead teenagers. In fact, the only people who would go and see this movie where the ones who liked the original.
Secondly, he didn’t actually do it shot for shot – and I’m not even talking about the few little bits he changed when I say that. What I mean is if you compare the two movies side by side he might have the camera plonked in the same place, but often he missed the hidden subtext Hitchcock put in each frame. On a directing course I did a few years back one of the sessions was showing the same scene in different versions of a movie, starting off with different versions of the same speech in Hamlet adaptations, but it ended with the course lecturer showing a side by side between the two Psychos, and even though Van Sant had the camera plonked in the same place he completely missed all the subtle stuff going on, like Bates having an additional reflection whenever he was acting creepy.
Psycho was a worthy experiment, but the results came back negative.
Maybe he should have added more romance?
We don’t know jack about TV September 24, 2009
Posted by James D Hartland in BBC, BBC Writer's Room, Seminars, TV, Television, Training, UK Film Council.5 comments
I attended another two days of seminars his past week, and as ever they were about feature films. I must have gone to 20 such events in the past few years, all about feature film writing, all provided for free from my local screen agency.
The problem is, here in the UK, everyone agrees that TV is where a writer stands the best chance of making a living from their craft, and that even if you did go on to make films you would probably work on a TV show at some point.
So where are the TV seminars?
I’d like to think I’m almost an expert on film structure by now, in part because I have gone to so many of these seminars; but I couldn’t begin to tell you what is the best way to deal with character development over several series of a TV show, or what is the best way to structure an episode into acts or sequences to best maximise the format; other than using my gut instinct of course. It seems to me like there is a massive training shortage on this sort of thing.
At least from my perspective.
Maybe if I was in a different part of the country there would be loads of this training, but here in the North East there hasn’t been diddly. The BBC do a couple of mentoring schemes for writers based in the north, but that is kinda too little too late because by the time you get on one of those schemes you are already a really good writer well on your way to being a professional.
Where are the grass roots training schemes? Why aren’t there more seminars that do “TV drama structure 101″. The BBC or who ever could get 100 writers at a time and tell them everything they need to know to go away and write a nicely structured show. I mean this is essentially what these Film seminars are aimed at doing, just raising the grass roots level of knowledge on how to write a good feature film. They don’t set out to turn you into the finished article.
It just seems crazy to me that I know shit loads more about how Hollywood writes its scripts than I do about my own country’s TV, which like I say, is most writers’ best chance of making a living as a screenwriter.
I guess the problem stems from there being a Film Council to oversee the development of the Uk Film industry but there’s not really a TV Council over seeing the development of Television in the same capacity. But there are some funding bodies out there providing training for Television so there’s no excuse for why I should be able to go to 20 film seminars and only 1 TV seminar in the same time period.
That said, my own personal lack of knowledge on TV writing also stems from the bias of screenwriting books to deal with feature films. I must own 20 books on films but only one or two that are applicable to TV. In fact I can’t really remember anyone ever recommending me a single TV book to pick up. Everyone just reads books about feature films it seems.
In fact, consider this a shout out… anyone who knows a good book about writing TV drama leave a comment below. Realising there is this training gap I’d really love to go away and learn all about TV writing.
Inkheart insults your intelligence August 19, 2009
Posted by James D Hartland in Adaptation, Inkheart, Rants.1 comment so far
I sat down to watch the movie Inkheart last night, and by 45 minutes in I had seen enough of this mess of a movie to know it wasn’t up to much. But as I got to the ending I was utterly amazed at how terrible the story telling was, because the ending completely negates the whole previous 90 minutes.
Let me explain…
(BTW this post is Spoiler heavy, but as you won’t want to ever waste 90 minutes of your time watching this movie it’s OK)
Essentially the film is based on the premise that some people called Silver Tongues have the ability to make books come to life simply by reading them aloud. A baddie has escaped from a book and is now trying to control Silver Tongues to let him take over the real world. The Hero of the story (though I use that term loosely as one of the main problems of the film is it didn’t know who the protagonist was), is trying to get his wife back who was sucked into a book.
The problem with the ending is that once all hope is lost – all the good guys have been captured, the baddies have summoned a foul monster from a book, everything looks to be up shit creek – the girl in film, another Silver Tongue gets a pen and starts scribbling on the back of her arm, words to the effect of “All the bad guys turn to dust, all the bad things they have done in this world go back to normal, and the hero’s wife is returned to him.” She literally just writes that down, reads it out and then it all happens.
WTF??? If all a Silver Tongue needs to do is write on the back of their hand with a biro and then read it out we could have been saved so much trouble.
Scene 1: The Hero writes on a post-it note. “I hear a noise behind me. I turn around, and there standing in front of my very eyes, my darling wife, returned from the book.” The Hero grabs another post-it note “And all the bad guys die instantly cause they suck” The End
How can you have a movie where people are frantically running around trying to save the world and at any moment they could just write whatever they need and have it come to life, but none of them think to do that until the final sequence. As Brendan Fraser has had this ability his whole life then surely he has thought to test if that is a possibility at some point? Why doesn’t one of the other characters ask him if he can do it at any point during the whole movie?
The argument “Well you wouldn’t have a story if you did that” can only take you so far. The story at least needs some effing logic. Man this movie pissed me off by expecting the audience to be brain dead swamp dwellers.
Writing about this now has reminded me about Lord of the Rings and how people questioned why they didn’t just ride the Eagle across Middle Earth like they do on the way back. In a way it is the same problem, except, Inkheart is just 10 magnitudes more retarded. It is actually insulting to your intelligence, it really is. I think even little kids could pick up on this over sight.
The film is adapted from a book, so maybe the book suffers from the same problem, but either way, I could have solved this problem in less than 90 seconds in a development meeting…
The Girl who writes on the back of her arm at the end of the film only discovers she is a Silver Tongue half way through the story. So… You have a scene where you clearly state to the audience what the rules of the magic are, namely you can’t write just anything down and then read it, it has to be something read from a printed book.
Half way through the story the Girl discovers she is a silver tongue, and over the course of the film she begins to use her new found ability, but then at the end, with the shit about to hit the fan she discovers she is able to write the stuff on the back of her arm and read that, and everyone else is astounded as she is clearly the most powerful silver tongue ever to walk the earth. Ie. We set the ending up as a newly seen phenomenon that goes against the normal rules of the magic logic. She is way more powerful than these regular Silver Tongues who can only read from books.
Not only would this make the ending work but it would have finally established once and for all who the proper protagonist of the movie is – The Girl. The rewrites needed to the script to do this would be negligible, but would establish the entire logic which the movie is based on.
But then again -
As Empire’s review of the film points out, why don’t these Silver Tongues just bring James Bond or someone like that to life to help them? Even if we negate the whole “Scene 1 Post-it note” problem by doing what I describe above, you are still left with the problem that these heroes are running around when they could just read a book to summon an army to fight on their behalf.
There are moments in the story where they are locked away and don’t have any books with them which makes sense (One scene involves them sneaking a copy of The Wizard of Oz into the jail so they can use it to escape). But for every scene where they don’t have access to books there is another one where they do, and there’s no reason why they couldn’t just summon people from it to help them, but they never do.
I think to truly make the movie work you would need to solve that problem as well, which is more tricky than the ending because the whole premise of the story involves the books being read aloud and coming to life.
I think I would do it by somehow preventing the heroes from being able to invoke the Silver Tongue ability when they most need it – the Final Act.
As throughout most of the movie Brendan Fraser is the only silver tongue (The girl becomes one much later, and by that point she is already captured) all they would have needed to do is stop him from being able to use his powers at the appropriate moment in the film. Hell maybe he a sore throat and has lost his voice? Maybe it could be as simple as that? How about he cut/damaged his throat during the daring Wizard of Oz jail escape sequence earlier on, and now when they need to go confront the Bad guy they are going to have to do it without his Silver Tongue abilities as he can’t talk ???
Not only does that solve the logic problem but doesn’t that make them all the more heroic? The idea that they are going to try to stop the Bad guys knowing they are going have to do it with their bare hands with no extra help – more or less a suicide mission.
Point is, I don’t think anyone in the entire development process of this film thought about any of this stuff and that is pretty criminal if you ask me. If they use the excuse “Well it’s only a kids film and they won’t think about this stuff” then they are insulting their audience as well as being shit story tellers. With the amount of talent involved in this film someone somewhere should have known better.
/Rant
The Book Of Procrastination July 24, 2009
Posted by James D Hartland in Guitar, Life Hacker, Procrastination, Writing Schedule.add a comment
I’ve been meaning to write a blog post for weeks, but you know how it is. Life gets in the way and what not. Especially when you have decided to step up your guitar practise time so you finally don’t suck at the instrument.
It is ironic that the blog post I have been meaning to write for a while is actually about an anti-procrastination measure. Something I have affectionately named the Book Of Procrastination.
It goes something like this: Get yourself a notebook or a piece of paper and every time you get an urge do something procrastinationy, be it take the washing downstairs, look up the history of the water pistol on wikipedia, or just check Facebook once again, whatever it is just write it down in this book instead. Then during your lunch break or after you have finished you can then look at the list and deal with them.
If what I have described sounds like a simple To-do list it is kinda, but there’s more to it than that.
The idea is not just to write down all the important tasks you need to do, but literally write down every little distracting impulse you have, so that at the end of the day you can look back at the list and realise how pointless a lot of the things are, and thus not even have to do them. It is basically a psychological trick, you take away that impulse to go do whatever it is because you know it is written down as if it is in a To-do list, but by giving yourself that time to ‘cool off’ you can then cross half of the stuff off when you realise how pointless it is.
It’s like that thing of forcing yourself to wait when you have an impulse purchase in mind, and finding that often, when you have cooled off you realise that you don’t really want the thing you were going to buy after all.
At the end of the day should you actually find you have written some stuff on the list that needs to be done for realz, stuff that might benefit your life, then you can just go do it in one big splurge of activity rather than little chunks disrupting your writing. So the Book of Procrastination does work as a To-do list, as well as filtering out the random crap.
This idea might sound a bit self helpy or touchy-feely (“writing down my impulses?!”) but if you are as bad at me when it comes to procrastination then trying this out might help a lot. If nothing else it has stopped me watching stuff on iPlayer until after I have gotten my work done!
[Idea inspired from a Life Hacker article]
An awesome breaking in story June 25, 2009
Posted by James D Hartland in 21, Breaking In Story, Creative Screenwriting Magazine, First Time I Got Paid, Peter Steinfeld, Podcasts.add a comment
Every would-be Screenwriter likes to hear the story of how another writer got his big break in the industry, and in listening to the Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcast this past week I heard a really great one from Peter Steinfeld co-writer of the recent Blackjack move 21.
Full episode here (or on iTunes).
Everyone should definitely subscribe to the Creative Screenwriting podcast, its one of the best film podcasts out there. In fact it is pretty much required listening if you care about writing movies. It is by far the most popular writing podcast on iTunes so I’m guessing a whole bunch of you already subscribe, but none the less its worth praising it again.
I want more!
If you are craving more breaking in stories, theres a cool book on the subject called The First Time I got Paid For It. Deffo check out that book if this kinda thing interests you.
