July 2006 Archives

I have not seen Lady In The Water.

What I have done is read Michael Bamberger’s book The Man Who Heard Voices, a non-fiction account of M. Night Shyamalan’s creative journey to bring Lady In The Water to the screen.

I’ve also read a large number of reviews of both the book and the movie.

This is my defense of M. Night Shyamalan, which may seem a bit surprising to anyone who’s been reading this site for a while. After all, Shyamalan talks about himself as artiste, uses the new age lingo that Ted and I despise, doesn’t seem to understand that he’s the employee of a corporation, and prizes singularity of vision over all else.

First, let me say that I have enjoyed some of his films, and I’ve not enjoyed others. I’ve never met the man, and I can only assume he’s been modestly amused (or maybe not) by my parodies of his films. I am, however, fascinated by the current swarm of commentary surrounding him.

Lately, it’s become fashionable to say that M. Night Shyamalan is an ego case out of control, a spoiled multi-millionaire who refuses to listen to anyone else, and every bad review he gets for his latest self-indulgent affair is nothing more than a just dessert.

I think that’s a bit harsh. Bamberger’s book does occasionally drift toward hagiography, and some of Shyamalan’s qualities that Bamberger thinks are as impressive and special as a Tiger Woods drive are, well, not. Bamberger, a sports writer, is a bit out of his element. Watching Derek Jeter drive a fastball over the left field wall at Yankee stadium is a beautiful thing, but it doesn’t make him Babe Ruth…or even Albert Pujols. Bamberger studies Shyamalan, but he’s too easily impressed by the man’s intuition and craft. Lots of successful writers and directors are intuitive, and most practice studied craft.

What Bamberger does capture, though, is the depth of Shyamalan’s insecurity and self-doubt. Whenever faced with doubt or rejection, Shyamalan descends into a miserable internal dialogue. His external dialogue involves repeated requests for faith or belief, but that’s baloney. Shyamalan doesn’t want mere faith or belief. He wants appreciation. He wants the audience to love what he wants them to love. He’s putting on a show, just like the rest of us in this business, and he craves their enjoyment.

That’s why his internal dialogues are so interesting, and so familiar.

Yes, the man makes millions of dollars. Yes, he’s managed to seize the very kind of creative control that most writers only dream of. Yes, he seems to reactively reject the concerns of Nina Jacobson, Dick Cook and Oren Aviv (full disclosure—I worked for Oren Aviv for two years as a marketing executive).

On the other hand, he actively seeks the input of a snippy internet reviewer, his assistants, his family…practically anyone near him. Shyamalan takes a lot of lumps for his precious behavior—he gets incredibly fretful when people don’t read his script right away the second they get it, and he gets even more agitated when they don’t respond the second they’ve finished it—but I understand that.

I feel the same way. I don’t talk about it, and I sure as hell don’t complain about it the way Shyamalan does, but I feel it. Of course I do. When we write screenplays, we obviously pour a tremendous amount of emotion and concern into it, and thus we are tremendously vulnerable to our readers and our audience.

Shyamalan’s ego, pretentiousness and preciousness are all superficial. What he really seems to be, more than anything else, is scared in a very identifiable and human way.

I get scared all the time.

When you write something that you believe in, the odds are that your beliefs will be attacked by someone. Maybe your employers. Maybe your friends. Maybe your wife. Maybe the critics. Here’s the tough part. Are they right? Are their interests aligned with yours? Should you change it? Should you not change it?

What if you do the wrong thing?

What if you defend your work because it’s what is best for the work?

Does that make you an ego case? Does that mean you’re intractable?

What if you change the work because you think that others might be right?

Does that make you weak? Does that mean you’re any less of an author, your conviction and purpose dilluted by vacillation?

I don’t know if I’m going to like Shyamalan’s latest movie, but I’m glad I read the book about him. I picked the book up expecting to be turned against him. Instead, I found myself wanting to meet him just to say, “Yeah, me too, man.”

M. Night Shyamalan and I are very different people and very different writers. We approach our craft differently, we approach the business differently, and we approach people differently.

I wonder, though, if our fears and motives aren’t exactly the same.

A: Failure Is An Orphan.

The emailer asks a question that deserves a serious answer, although theoretically it should be obvious.

Screenwriters are supposed to be in charge of the story of the movie. Screenwriters, therefore, should be responsible for the quality of the story, and screenwriters should receive the praise or the blame for the story.

Doesn’t work like that. First of all, which screenwriter? The credited screenwriter? The uncredited screenwriter? Moving beyond that, screenwriters are employees of production companies. Those companies often ask the screenwriter to make changes, deletions or additions that the screenwriter warns them against. They may occur regardless.

Then there’s the editors. A screenwriter can write a screenplay, a director can cast and direct the film of the screenplay, and an editor can take the footage and create a different story than anyone intended. I’m presuming, of course, that the director is just one person, but that’s not always the case. Anyone interested in film should take the time to watch Exorcist: The Beginning and Dominion: Prequel to the Exorcist. Both films originated from a story by William Wisher and Caleb Carr. The movie was first shot by Paul Schraeder. The studio, unhappy with Schraeder’s film, then hired Alexi Hawley to do extensive rewrites and hired Renny Harlin to direct large amounts of new footage.

The two movies are similar but dissimilar. They have overlapping footage, common story points, but they also have widely divergent footage and divergent story points.

It’s absolutely fascinating to watch both films. It’s the only instance I can think of where we, the audience, get to see the rewrite process in film form. Why is this so rare? Because it’s absurdly expensive to reshoot half of a movie with a new director. Nonetheless, by watching these two movies and seeing how similar footage serves the story in different ways, you quickly get a sense of how editing, pacing and style can affect how one experiences a story.

In the final analysis, however, directors are typically made responsible for the film’s quality. This responsibility and the authority that goes with it may not be justified, but at the very least, they’re commensurate. There’s a truism in Hollywood: when a movie flops, the director suffers but the writer doesn’t.

For better or worse, the industry views the writer’s goal as writing a script that justifies the green light. The director’s job is to make a successful film. And so, the director typically gets blamed for the story of the movie, but the writer skates away happily.

A lot of writers like this. I don’t.

Because I want writers to be filmmaking partners with directors, and because I want the job of the screenwriter to be understood as “write a movie”, I want writers to shoulder some of the burden. I want writers to share equally in the praise and blame. We deserve it, frankly. Mind you, I’m not talking about film critic reviews, which routinely blame screenwriters when things are bad and ignore them when things are good. No one cares about critics. Seriously. No one. I’m talking about the business, where success has a thousand mothers and failure is an orphan. If we’re partners and the film fails, we have to own that with the director.

But if it succeeds…

So it is written…Among the various songs of doom we hear in Hollywood (the box office is over!, people hate movies!, we’re out of ideas!), the one that’s always managed to sneak past my cynicism and actually worry me is this one: “Video games will kill us all!”

Of course, they’re not going to destroy the movie business any more than television did. The gaming industry, however, is enormous in every sense of the word.

I’m a gamer. I’m not a hardcore gamer, but what I love, I love. When a new Splinter Cell game is released, I get it. That day. I own a GameCube, a PS2, an Xbox and an Xbox 360. I play sports games, platform games, puzzle games, racing games…hell, I’ll play anything.

Anything except those damned RPG’s. Role Playing Games. Dungeons and dragons crapola. Elves and clerics living in ridiculous fantasy worlds, picking locks on treasure chests and worst of all, constantly referring to each other by names that have absurd apostrophes.

“K’shanna! You have discovered the Sword of V’landroth!”

What is that? USE VOWELS!

Anyway, point being…I do not like those games. And thus, it was with great concern that I discovered that the highest rated game for the Xbox 360—by far—was an RPG.

It’s called The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

I bought it. I bought it against my better nature, against my better instincts and knowing full well that I would open myself to endless mockery from my wife.

Let me first say this.

Best

Game

EVAR.

Now let me get to the larger point.

This game was written. Of all the games I’ve played, this one was not only the most clearly written, it was the most dependent on its writing. And yet, the writers of the game are not credited as writers. They did not earn minimums for their work. They do not have credit protections. They do not receive residuals. Not one penny of residuals for one of the best-selling games of all time.

This is Wrong.

I’ll back up to explain why writing is so important to this game. Yes, you fight monsters. Yes, you run around in dungeons. And yes, godDAMMIT, people have those ridiculous names with the apostrophes. The structure of the game, however, works like this.

Your character walks around a very, very large region of land consisting of nine cities and scores of smaller hamlets. You meet literally hundreds of individual non-playing characters. A large number of them have individual stories to tell. These stories, into which you become embroiled, are quests. Some quests are small. Some are large. Some are fast, and some are multiparters. The quests begin to stack up like firewood, each with loads of dialogue. At one point, I had about thirty quests that I was involved in.

You’re like a hero-for-hire wandering through a collection of short stories, and in each short story, it’s up to you to find your way to resolution.

Some of the quests are obvious. You meet a man whose wife was killed by goblins. You kill the goblins to avenge her on his behalf, and he grants you a reward. Some are trickier. Should you choose to kill a character who hasn’t threatened you, you are visited in the night by a shadowy man who represents the Dark Brotherhood. He invites you to join the Brotherhood and become a killer for hire. This spools out into a dozen quests, one of which involves you attending a dinner party and convincing each of the guests to kill each other. You get caught up in adultery, politics, betrayal, religion, the bizarre whims of demigods…and in every instance, the action and the goals and the choices you make are entirely in service of story.

On top of that, there are hundreds of readable books in the game. Yes, a writer sat down and literally wrote books so that players could read them.

So…who is the writer of Oblivion?

As best as I can tell, it’s these guys.

Quest Design was done by Brian Chapin, Kurt Kuhlmann, Alan Nanes, Mark E. Nelson, Bruce Nesmith and Emil Pagliarulo.

Additional Design was done by Erik J. Caponi and Jon Paul Duvall.

Additional Writing was done by Ted Peterson and Michael Kirkbride.

I say “as best as I can tell” because that’s what scrolls by after a long list of guys who programmed the texture maps for the trees and stuff.

I want these guys to be treated like kings, because they did great work. What to do, though? Video game writing isn’t covered by the WGAw or ANY union, for that matter. It’s the wild west out there, and that’s the way the employers like it, even though familiar Hollywood names like Les Moonves are sitting on the Board of Directors of the company that produced Oblivion.

As union guys go, I’m an extreme pragmatist. I know that the video game industry will never be organized and under union jurisdiction the way Hollywood is, and that’s for one simple reason. A large majority of the work is done overseas or in Canada. Ubisoft, Square Enix, Nintendo, EA…good luck trying to convince the French, Japanese and Canadians that they should abide by U.S. labor law.

On the other hand, there are still games made here, and I think we ought to be organizing them. Oblivion is made here. It’s indisputably written. My goal to bring wage minimums, pension and health care, credits protections and profit participation to the video game industry pretty much starts with one single game.

I don’t know the entire title, but I have the first part.

The Elder Scrolls V.

Yes, we have a box office record to crow about here at The Artful Writer. What record? Well, as it turns out, Scary Movie 4 is the biggest Easter weekend of all…

…what? Oh, right. Pirates. I didn’t check the—oh? What happened?

It did WHAT?

HOW MUCH????

::spit take::

Ladies and gentlemen, I salute Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio, who are now the proud owners of the single best box office day in all of film history.

Fifty-five million dollars.

In one day.

By the time the weekend is over, they will own the record for the largest opening weekend of all time. See ya, Spidey.

Congratulations, Ted and Terry. It’s an astounding achievement.

Today, I bought a computer. Again. For like, the ninetieth time of my life. I don’t just buy computers. I collect them. Yeah, I’ve got a Franklin Ace 1000 (c. 1982) in my storage room. So what? It’s a passion.

In celebration of my latest purchase, I’ve decided to leave all of the serious bloviating behind for a bit and talk about gear.

I love gear. When you hang around people who work with gear, nothing’s more interesting to me than to hear them descend into their patois about their gadgets and gizmos and preferences and hates. I’ll sit and listen to two DP’s talk about the merits of one bit of ground glass over another, one light meter over another, one camera body over another. I’ll listen to grips talk about clamps. I’ll listen to the wardrobe department debate stitch rippers. I really don’t care. I just enjoy the minutia of gear.

We writers don’t really have specific gear, but why should that stop us from having fun? I present to you my List Of Screenwriting Gear. Some of it is cheap. Some of it is expensive. I use all of it.

We begin, naturally, with the laptop. Specifically, the one I purchased today. This is the 17” MacBook Pro, the perfect fusion of OS X and Windows XP operability. It’s sleek and light with a beautiful keyboard feel (and a lovely keyboard sound), a spectacularly bright and clean LCD wide enough to hold two script pages side-by-side, and boy howdy is it fast. Laptops are essential for screenwriting, because our job hopefully takes us places. I’ve got a ThinkPad that I used to use when I needed to run something in XP. It’s plastic and lame, with a cheap feel, cheap keyboard and a dismal LCD that looks bad in any condition and from practically any eyeline. If you’re a screenwriter, treat yourself to the proper tool. Now that Apple has switched to Intel chips, you don’t have any excuse.

While you’re at it, consider making a proper home base for your laptop by hooking it into an Apple Cinema Display. Protect your carpal tunnels like Craiggy does by using an ergonomic keyboard. If you’re not used to a split keyboard, it might feel weird for about a day. You’ll thank me later. Finally, tack on the King Of All Trackballs, the Expert Mouse.

By the way, I’ve been using the same damned square piece of neoprene as a wrist rest for about ten years now (it’s getting a bit nasty). Can anyone point me to SOMEONE who sells these things? I don’t want a jelly pad. I want neoprene. A square. About an inch thick.

We may use our brains for a living, but that doesn’t mean we can neglect our spines, or even worse, our asses. Like everyone else, I sit in an Aeron chair. No other chair matters. But what about a desk? After much searching (in a desperate attempt to spend as much as possible on a computer desk), I purchased the Biomorph Maxo. Apart from being massive, it has a split level keyboard platform that is freely articulating and independently adjustable from the desktop (i.e. the distance between the keyboard and the desk is not fixed). Combine that with a chain-drive crank to raise and lower the desk in its entirety, and I’m in love. Be warned; it’s not fun to assemble. Having done it, I’d recommend shelling out the extra dough to have the company assemble it for you in your home. Be further warned; it weighs more than Saturn. Literally. I checked.

I know a lot of writers enjoy listening to music while they work. I’m not one of them. I prefer silence. If I can’t have silence, I prefer a total cacophany. As long as I can’t pick out specific noises, I’m fine. Sometimes I use my Bose QuietComfort headphones to drown out the sounds around me, but I also like to use a simple Sound Soother, which offers me a choices like crickets (annoying), heartbeats (too Poe-ish) or white noise (just right).

I have two printers. The first is my workhorse, pictured at right, the Brother HL-1440. I love this thing because it’s cheap and stupid. For around $125, you get a reliable laser (not “laserjet”) printer that gives you black and white text at fifteen pages per minute…and that’s it. Nothing else. That makes me happy.

Of course, if I want to go totally mobile, I’ve got a Canon Pixma ip90. Ted turned me on to this little sumbitch. It’s totally portable, operating off a battery and bluetooth. It works. Okay, it doesn’t work perfectly, but when I’m on the soundstage and I feel like printing out five pages of dialogue, it sure beats handing my laptop over to a P.A. with greasy hands to go run it over to the office, connect it to a printer, call me on a cell phone ten minutes later to ask me why it’s only printing one page, yadda yadda.

But hey, I promised you some cheap gear, right?

Any real success I’ve had as a writer has been when I stepped away from all the fancy stuff and used this thing on these. They’re not sexy, but I’d be lost without them.