(No, this film still is from Brigham City.  It’s just a great still of The Sheriff.)

My thoughts:

First, I didn’t find FALLING to be “spiritually disquieting” (or causing unease or anxiety). It opened some very probing questions, which, personally, only led to very assuring answers for me. And the film as a whole moved me.

Second, I don’t buy the line that Mormons are embargoed from seeing R-rated films. Bleh. Can this myth please die?

And thirdly and waxing philosophical, as for this quote of Dutcher wondering “what if it’s not true?” -

That surprises me. I don’t expect religion to leave me doubt-free. It’s clear the Savior had his profound doubts just before enacting the atonement. In my book, doubt and questioning, looking for answers – that’s the soil for faith and belief. It was certainly where Joseph Smith began his journey. Proof isn’t the point. You can no more disprove any point of religion (for example the existence of God) than anyone can prove it.

The results of living your religion are the proof. Meetings, taking the sacrament, service, study, testing the word of God. You try the experiments; and do the results make you unhappy or happy?

If you’re not trying the word of God – if you aren’t going to church, if you isolate yourself from your religious community, for starters – you won’t get results. It’s easy to conjecture there’s no merit to a theory you aren’t testing.

And much of the test is what my service or involvement can contribute. As a Bishop put it to me, he never found any ward (Mormon congregation) he liked until he stopped focusing on what others were (or weren’t) doing for him, and started focusing on what he can give.

I see friends who begin expressing doubt, mere luke-warm feelings, or even disenfranchisement, with the church, the people in their ward and the things they believe and say, and this all happens at the same time they’ve stopped attending church. Guess what? What these misguided people around you need is for you to go to church and present your take on things in a positive, non-threatening way. (And I know these friends have good and enlightening things to say.)

If others may not be seeing the light, how about shedding some of your own? The Mormon church is designed to informally acquaint us with each other’s insights. If there sometimes isn’t much insight, there’s even less if people nonplussed with that fact keep on waiting for the situation to change – without realizing they can change it. Without realizing they can never know how they positively impact others. There are many people in the LDS religious community who have no idea how they’ve positively impacted me.

Did Jesus walk the streets during his ministry visiting the sick, the poor, the social outcasts, the odd ones, the unwanted, all the while asking himself “What am I getting from these weirdos, what’s in this for me?”

Religion may not be thrilling very often, ergo the command to “endure to the end”. I’ve found that any time I give up the endurance test, again, I feel empty.

Never mind I’d tell you like many a Mormon I know it’s all true. Which I do. My doubts are about what this religion can actually do for me (the acknowledged paradox being that I shouldn’t just be in it for me). I’ll always be figuring that out – and those doubts are exactly what lead me to keep trying things out.

I just ordered a Canon VIXIA HD30 camcorder – this is a higher end HD consumer beast. I’m excited about it. There are many things I’ll do with it.

I’ve been asking around and doing a lot of research about HD and particularly how it may transfer to film and/or project on a big screen, and I want to say I notice a fairly sharp divide between people who insist video should never imitate or copy to film vs. people who say go for it. What’s odd to me is that folks against it seem to usually describe that as the more realistic or practical approach, or that copying video to film is only “dreaming.”

Well, gee, imagine any film maker dreaming.

I’m in no mood after writing my thesis to cite the sources of facts I present and form my conclusions on. Suffice it to say I believe you could verify these facts.

My take is that in truth it is more practical to go digital if you can. We are in a digital cinema revolution, and physical film stock may always have its place, but the reality is that the blockades to shooting digital film which audiences don’t perceive as different after transfer to film – never mind the options to just distribute digitally increasing every year! – blockades to that quality break down steadily every year.

[Why am I speculating? With a ruler I drew a grid on a post-it note at the resolution of HD - 3 pixels an inch assuming a 30 foot screen - and filled it with alternating black-and-white squares, and looked at it from 40 feet back. There would really need to do be some image processing and projection magic with the way pixels transition into each other to make it look good. Fairly obvious "I am pixels" look at that resolution. But I need to know. I'm looking for sources that give a lot more detail on this, and I've also simply got to do real application visual tests on all this theory myself, somehow.]

About digital film projection, I’m going to speculate now. I don’t know how this actually plays out, this is theory, and I’d love to know of the real-world tests that certainly are playing out on these questions. But my speculation is that depending, digitally projected high-definition video could look not only anywhere from sufficiently as good as film to just as good, but better. Consider resolution available from the Red One. Here’s a picture of a 2006 model with some kind of super-exo-death-armature-skeleton-frame thing around it.

………………..

[This section had inaccuracies about the resolution of the Red One when I first wrote it - it's fixed now.]

It shoots 2k (just over 1080 vertical pixels). That’s a bit more resolution than George Lucas thought was good enough (snobs have turned against him after the Star Wars prequels – yes, I will make that abusive statement, anyone who derides Lucas over his Star Wars prequels is a snob – I have qualms with the stories and writing on Star Wars Episodes I, II, sorta III and totally VI, but IV and V still rock the world, and I give Lucas full faith as a technological pioneer: arguably, he has single-handedly initiated the special effects revolution, and then the digital cinema revolution. Whether he simply vanishes like a good Jedi or makes it to heaven or not, before and if you pass the pearly gates, you’ll at least have to give him a hearty “thank you”.) Never mind that the Red One looks like a Star Wars Tie Fighter or something, and has a name reminiscent of Luke Skywalker flying the Death Star trenches – they have their market down – but it can record 1152 vertical pixels (or rows) at 120 frames a second, so that if projected at the same rate, it’s showing images exactly five times the frequency of standard film. I’ve read of tests going back to the 1970s demonstrating that people see a difference between 24 frames a second vs. 60 frames a second, and 120 is twice the upper range of those tests. I’d think that would probably look brilliant. Or you can do about a five hundred more rows of pixels at 60 frames a second, or again about five hundred more than that (or 2048 rows) at 30 frames a second – still a better frame rate than film. And digital projectors that do this are steadily spreading to theaters worldwide – my dear local Wynnsong has some now

Interesting math: that highest resolution mentioned (4x) has 4,096 vertical pixels, and if you divide that into 30 feet (for the typical height of a theater screen, and that link passes those paramaters into google calculator), and express that in inches, it’s about 8 pixels an inch. The math for x1080 resolution gives 3.333… pixels an inch. How does that look when you’re sitting 30 or 40 feet back (or further) from the screen? Losing detail and size for distance, they’d likely appear a lot finer and closer together I’d think. How does the density of pixels multiply across the visual range with distance? [When I first posted this I wondered if ten inches would shrink to 1, visually, so that what used to look like 3 pixels in an inch would be 30, and whether that would be enough - but no, 300 pixels an inch (or 100 times as many as 3 per inch) would correlate with the usual baseline for digital images.] That would seem like a reasonable baseline they’d go for in apparent density for “digital film”. If the visual density multiplies by about a hundred – would it? – I haven’t done that math or looked it up – but if that were the case then x2 resolution might be effectively 600 dots per inch, and x4 resolution maybe 1200 dots per inch?]

I’ve read of cinema house worries over the fickle and perhaps difficult to manage aspects of digital media, and there may be a lot of kinks and things to figure out with digital cinema along the way – but what do we expect? – it’s a brand new medium. Besides, those kinks will probably be worked out fairly fast. It took a good 60 or 70 years or so to figure out how best to technically work film, but vast improvements with digital film are advancing over stages of years, not decades! Ten years ago nobody would have thought you could buy a camera that shot at 1080 vertical pixels for under a thousand dollars. Three years ago the same camera would have cost several thousand dollars. If the trend continues the same quality camera will be available in a few years for half the price, and a camera twice as good will be available at the same price. Expanding that trend to decades it’s easy that around, say, 2020, teenagers from middle to low income families could be armed with camcorders that shoot at a resolution you can blow up to an IMAX screen – and by then there may be some bid-to-rent digital distribution network in place so that they can show their independent film at a local theatre for costs low enough that independent filmmakers of today might gasp. You can distribute for what cost? That low?

That all sounds like a dream, and it could be, but again, given the way these specific technologies have advanced in the past decade it’s easy they may advance to that stage in another decade. In my book digital cinema has to be the way motion pictures go. (I think high definition and beyond will also radically transform home entertainment.) We’ll still use film a lot, I think, especially for long-term storage because digital storage is notoriously destructible and fickle.

I first tried the official screensaver released by Warner Bros. back in 1999 (Okay, has it been that long or longer since THE MATRIX? – I’m getting old..), and after that I tried three others – this one is far and away the best. It can emulate the opening sequence to THE MATRIX tracing a program to your phone number, calling on your name .. kinda eerie. Exceedingly cool. Change the speed, speed variation, font animation, line density, and color of the scrolling code also.

Caveat: almost predictably, you have to be a geek to install this thing. 1. It runs on windows (hmmm.. the platform on which most internetworked clients in the world are run?) 2. You have to know where your Windows install places the .scr, or screensaver files, and copy the file to that directory. On my Windows XP install, that is C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32 – and then 3. You have to know where to change your screensaver.

According to Michael Medved – who has given Dutcher some of his best reviews! – the artist as cultural or religious challenger is a mythical role that has emerged only in this last century. Medved argues that most of the artists who created our “classics” through the centuries found plenty to do – under every kind of label or adjective you could conjure: disturbed, glorious, funny, tragic – whatever- without heckling their host culture, as so many artists in our day have been taught to believe they should. It is a point given in Dutcher’s biography at his own web page that one of his teachers while in film school at BYU prophesied that the first great Mormon writer will be excommunicated. Richard, that teacher was full of crap! Without a mass of knowledge to back up my agreement with Medved, I only say that Medved’s take on artists and culture sounds to me a whole lot better than advertising your film as “The first R-Rated Mormon film!” Why don’t we just change the billboard to say “This film will shock and offend you!” What of the dopes in the narrative of this very film who claim the only way an artist will get ahead is by shocking and offending? We’re supposed to think those guys are dopes, right? They’re part of the culture that led to the lead character’s fall. So let’s not listen to them.

Now I know I’ve gone and abrasively criticized marketing. Sometime last year I abrasively criticized a marketing effort coming from Dutcher’s Main Street Movie Co. and shortly thereafter found a comment at my film blog from Dutcher’s marketing guy, abrasively criticizing my (retrospectively) amateurish concept trailer. Tit-for-tat cannon blasts among the artists in Zion. I don’t think it’s easy for artists to separate the line of personal criticism from artistic criticism. And too often we merge them – but that’s an essay for another day.

I believe Dutcher could have told the exact same story of FALLING with just slightly different directing decisions that wouldn’t ensure he turns a lot of his audience away. And his marketing of this film is way off-base. (I know, I hear the cannons blasting still.) If you don’t care about ratings (as I believe Dutcher claims not to), you don’t advertise them. If many Mormons think it wrong to ever see an R-rated film (and that thinking is in error, in my opinion), period, that’s fine for them – it is their right to risk missing out, and frankly, too many who argue against the point would seek to deny Mormons so inclined of that right, or deny them their freedom of conscience to avoid whatever they want – but the inevitable message behind “The first R-rated Mormon film!” is ironically as narrow in a different way. It actually seeks to drive the question of the appropriate to the utmost limits of tolerance – and I would argue that very approach will only produce intolerance – it isn’t going to make anyone think. Nobody thinks when they feel threatened. All they think about is either raising their fists to pummel the hell out of you or getting the hell away from the situation (Dutcher has experienced far more than his share of both, on emotional terms). Fight or Flight. It reduces us to cavemen. Where’s the love in that? Philosophical battles are one thing, but you’ve gotta know that even though there may not be a rational basis for Mormons to do so, they’re simply going to read it as an attack on their religion.

Art isn’t a culture or religion test. Life is a culture and religion test – the way we live. Art is a huge part of life (and for artists, it is literally the subsistence of their life – how they get by) – but as the Indigo Girls penned, “..there’s just no medium for life”. Life is life, art is story (where this film is concerned). And this story should be advertised for what it is – a very powerful morality tale – not for what it isn’t (G-rated).

The unfortunate irony of that advertising is that the film is, in my opinion, powerfully Mormon, but while the advertising raises a question entirely irrelevant to the film, it only invites those whose minds are closed to the question – and I have tried opening many minds to the question, and the steel trap set on that question does not respond to crow bars – it only invites them to keep the trap shut, indeed the trap may only close tighter.

I had to decide whether I think Dutcher himself or his actors went against good principle in their performances. I’ve decided I don’t think they did. The directing decisions over that question are so distracting it could not only tear down the proscenium for many (it nearly did for me, but I’d gone into the film with a lot of forethought and preparation) – it could make them want to burn down the theater. Nevertheless, to those willing to explore them, the questions are so gripping it may not matter. The context and the story, the presentation, the direction, what happens – it all very clearly paints the disturbances the film explores as just that: disturbances which are not wanted in a good life. The obvious implication is that we like good, not evil. Hallejuhah. One more film striking against evil.

This also may not be a film for the squeamish.

This film wallops the bloodthirsty with divine guilt.

Last of all, this film probes deeper into the mystery of the Atonement than any work of art I have encountered. If the story it presents is deeply disturbed, the power is in the questions the story poses of whether those disturbances could be overcome. The ending presents situations on questions of innocence and very powerful symbolic reversals – leading to Christ – which I found deeply affecting.

It is a documentary that follows the lives of several drug addicts in Utah Valley (a.k.a. “Happy Valley”) seeking recovery, and some families who have lost children to drug overdoses. It explores the harrowing reality of the prevalence of drug abuse in Utah Valley.

What transpires in the life of one family in the documentary, similarly to events reported in NEW YORK DOLL (which is also strongly recommended), is so breathtakingly perfect (and I will get your expectations up) that if it was a narrative film it would be dismissed by America’s deeply cynical culture as contrived and unrealistic. As Susan Jeffers said, “We have been taught to believe that negative equals realistic and positive equals unrealistic.” May this film give the world pause to reconsider that fallacy.

This film has sold out screenings everywhere it shows, and proceeds from the film go to aid addicts seeking rehabilitation, which can be very expensive for drug addiction. Those two marvelous points aside, the very potent spiritual substance communicated by the film is, in my opinion, a serious blow against evil.

I’m wondering about the environment the film seems to invite of broadcasted honesty. Before the film, two completely unaqcuainted men seated behind me audibly shared how sober they were, who in their family was hooked, and who died – now on that last, I wouldn’t hesitate to share. Death by overdose is a public warning and anything less dishonors the death. But if these men felt safe with each other, should they broadcast their secrets audibly through a theatre? If the full disclosure of the interviewees in the film inspires, the whole audience would do this. Let’s be wise. If a few “fall guys” wake the rest of us up, let’s keep our secrets in helpful circles and not parade them.

So, you fellows behind me broadcasting your addictions – as interesting as it makes you, if I would favorably compare you to any celebrity or artist, I’m not going to pay you great notice until you’re dead.

I didn’t ask the film maker afterward, but wanted to ask what his plans are for exposing the many other kinds of addiction that run rampantly through Utah Valley, some of which find love and acceptance easier to come by, and some of which don’t.

One thing in the film disturbed me a lot. Prescription pill abuse is twice as common in Utah Valley as the national average, and is often deadlier than illegal drugs. And a Police Officer interviewed in the film reported a large group of teenagers he had been with, apparently all of them members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day-Saints (LDS or “Mormon”), who in discussing such use (abuse) among themselves, said “It’s not against the Word of Wisdom. It’s just a pill. It’s nothing.” (For clarification, the Word of Wisdom is an LDS doctrine regarding careful use of good foods and avoidance of bad foods and abusive substances.) Okay, kids. A careful (and recommended!) read of the Bible renders a picture of Jesus which baffled and enraged the powers of his day by using his head; by dodging rules where they could not apply, in favor of principle. We need rules, but the Lord broadly spoke of all situations where we need to use our heads when He stated in Doctrine and Covenants that “..it is not meet that I should command in all things; for he that is compelled in all things, the same is a slothful and not a wise servant; wherefore he receiveth no reward.” Use your heads, kids. Do you need the Lord or anyone else to tell you this crap is ruining your body, your self-control, your spirituality, and your life, and that that is bad? You’re smarter than that.

I like to think that awareness of addiction among Mormons is spreading. A few weeks ago at my chapel, they had a joint men’s/women’s meeting with someone from LDS Social Services about the topic, and what leaders are doing and can do about it. Only one thing disappointed me: in introduction he said that while he is sure many here know someone who needs this information, nobody here is in these kinds of situations. No, sir. First, you can’t know that, and second it may be falsely flattering, and a disservice to truth and culture. A strongly repeated point in the documentary HAPPY VALLEY is the entrenched denial aspect of the valley’s culture.

The safest guess is that every ward in every stake in the church has addicts, many of whom have not yet even recognized or confessed to themselves or anyone that they are out of control, and if or when sad circumstance arrives them at that point of total desperation, they may have no idea how to get help or that it is even available. Hopefully on the point that help is available they would be comforted, if our pretension that people in their situation are very rare doesn’t open them to Satan’s lie that their case is so rare, and so extreme, and so terrible, and that they are so far down the scale of hopeless that there is no hope. Please assume that wherever you go, there are people in the congregation who need help.

I will give this film a shot. It may surprise you to hear me speaking of going to this film as taking a risk, and you deserve the respect of hearing why I do.

show

(Close your eyes when it turns black and white with Uma Thurman slashing a sword, and when someone pulls out a knife. Unless you aren’t squeamish or don’t hate gratuitous violence.)

This is another of at least a few videos posted at YouTube showcasing the myriad uses in films of a stock sound originating at Warner Bros. in 1951, eventually dubbed by Ben Burtt the “Wilhelm Scream”.

Yes, it is actually used in all those shows and films. This isn’t some weird dub-over of them (I was really surprised and amused to learn it was used in THE LORD OF THE RINGS films two and three).

I found a wave file of the “classic” Wilhelm Scream apparently directly copied from the original take Here it is. Click. Click. Click.

Download audio file (wilhelm_scream_take4_downsampled_44100.mp3)

(That’s an mp3 burn of the sound)

You can also hear the sound at sound designer Steve Lee’s web site, hollywoodlostandfound.net (this is where I grabbed the sound from), and read a detailed history of it there.

At that page and in an interview with a director (in addition to Steve Lee) in this YouTube video, I’ve learned that the man who popularized the sound, Designer Ben Burtt, will no longer be using the sound (he used it in all six Star Wars films). My blunt take: the public has caught on to the “secret” of its use – previously, mostly an in-joke between many sound designers – so now, it’s, like, popular. And the first rule of hard-core Nerddom is that if it’s popular, it isn’t “cool” anymore.

I think that’s a silly decision on Ben Burtt’s part (I only speculate, perhaps unfairly, on his reasons).

I emailed Steve Lee about the legality of using the Wilhelm Scream – in a nutshell no one knows for sure who the original artist is, and while technically it is owned by Warner Bros., it has been used very abundantly (by people from all kinds of other studios and networks, etc.), and no known squabbles or legal issues have been raised over it.

Lee also added:

By the way, Ben is indeed working on “Indy 4″ and I
would be very surprised if there isn’t a Wilhelm in it.

An interesting aside – I’ve noticed a certain recording of a hawk cry appears almost pedantically in many desert and wilderness scenes in films, and it turns out it is in fact an often used recording – it’s mentioned in this Wikipedia page as “..a certain recording of the cry of the Red-tailed Hawk.”

A tradition of people who know the in-joke of the Wilhelm Scream is to shout “Wilhelm!” whenever they hear the sound effect in a movie. But if it isn’t cool to use the Wilhelm Scream anymore, how about something else?

This scream of Howard Dean, the “Dean Scream”, famously baffled and alienated the public to Howard Dean (arguably in part because the press replayed the “Scream” a lot – which.. I dunno.. it’s pretty funny and may deserve press).

I pulled that flash video out of YouTube, dumped its audio to a .wav file, made a sample of the audience cheering noise in the background of it, and then used that noise in a noise removal tool to isolate a very good approximation of Dean’s Scream without the audience cheering in the background.

Download audio file (The_Dean_Scream.mp3)

(There are technical reasons this sound may not be “perfect”, but I doubt I’d hear much or any difference without those factors – also that’s an mp3 burn of the .wav file).

I wish, oh how I wish, that the “Dean Scream” was legally a for-sure “in the clear” sound to use in any entertainment project. For informational / educational / news use (such as this post), it’s in the clear under “Fair Use” – but it isn’t necessarily in the clear for use in entertainment media.

If another actor imitated the Dean Scream however, and released it to the Public Domain – hey, we could have us the basis of something new.

Wait a bit – I think I’ll do just that.

If my local libraries or video rental stores don't have this in, I think I'll just get it – lower prices for it found by froogle are less than or not much more than rental (the first one it finds has a description of it from an entirely different film, though – what the.. !?).

This is the finished product from this script.

They’ve got these blurbs from guest speakers who are very successful screenwriters. I believe the one, Paul Haggis, is the type that a certain book I’m reading sneeringly refers to as a “Creative Protectionist” type; one who makes art for art’s sake, and who happened to be one of the one in fifty thousand who made it big doing so. Because such successes are rare (or are they just a matter of lining up the right business plan behind the art?), folks on the purely business, pragmatic side of the spectrum (who are in the habit of deluding themselves that they can “eliminate” risk) advocate going with what is tried and true – in other words, what has been done before and made money. That approach by definition demands formulaic, unoriginal, and therefore to the audience, drab films.

Which is what Haggis’ comments get at. And whatever else I might be – I think my film ambition may demand more pragmatic people at my side – I think I’m a “Creative Protectionist”. Now mind, though I counter-sneer at that term, the book from which it comes (THE PRODUCER’S BUSINESS HANDBOOK) has some absolutely indespensable loads of details on the actual operational and organizational procedures of the most successful independent film production businesses. I will not ignore the loads of wisdom and business know-how in that book. It’s just a matter of deciding what of it to take for granted and what to question, if your insticts ever tell you otherwise on anything. Because film is a business of risk, and I would think that sometimes you have to know when to knowingly take a risk, do something “untried” and “unproven”. The same kind of thing goes for listening to what folks on the fiercely independent creative artist side of things have to say; decide what to take for granted and decide what to challenge. And I don’t mean to say make rules out of any of your conclusions; I mean feel it out for every work of art you want to put forward.

To get back to where I was going, I find myself more inclined to first listen to the “creative protectionists” for creating stories, and then use the business side of things to decide what to do with my art.

So here are three excellent answers to questions by Paul Haggiss via screenwriter.com, referenced in google’s cache:

QUESTION:
Sometimes I go to sleep at night and say to myself that this isn’t working and I don’t know what I’m doing and I’m not going to write anymore. The next morning I get up and my characters are yapping again. At this point in your career, do you ever have such insecure thoughts?
ANSWER:
Every single day. You deal with it by writing. You just sit your ass in the chair and write through it. It’s the only way to solve your problems. When you come upon a problem, write directly into it. Embracing the problem is often the way to find a really interesting scene. My other trick is to say, ‘What awful thing could happen to them right now?’ Because sometimes, things are going too well for your characters and you have to give them the worst possible thing that could happen to them. [Ah ha ha! This sounds like God meddling with his lazy children who are too comfortable. "Let's give them a trial!" - RAH]

–

QUESTION:
What type of scripts are hot in Hollywood right now?
ANSWER:
Never ever ever ever ever ever think that way. That is the road to failure and hackdom. I just met with Linda Obst this afternoon, and she bemoaned the fact that all young writers are looking for a payday and therefore are writing what they think she wants to see rather than writing what is in their gut, something they have to say. I cannot stress this enough.

I wrote two spec scripts that I was absolutely sure no one would ever buy: Million Dollar Baby and Crash. They both sold within a couple of years of me writing them, which is very fast.

If you try and second guess what people want and then provide it, YOU WILL FAIL.
Guaranteed.
And never listen to any agent who tells you any different.
You want to write something unique, something only you know.

–

QUESTION:
How does an unknown make it to Hollywood?
ANSWER:
You have to understand that for all intents and purposes, I was “unknown” to the film business four years ago. I had no more advantage or disadvantage than you have. You may not think that truth, but it absolutely is because I had no “heat” coming off any great television show. It was all about the script. If you write a great script and put it in your drawer at your cottage in Muskoka Lake, someone will track it down and find it. If you write a bad script and send 100,000 copies out, it still ain’t gonna sell. The trick is really simple: write a great script. And I don’t mean to be flip. That’s just the truth. Write something that’s in your heart, and if you have your craft down and if you’re really honest with the characters, it will sell. It just may take some time. I guess that’s what you should ask yourself. Not how to sell or market something, but have I written enough and experienced enough to write a good screenplay? You write, you research, you write, you research… What makes a good writer is thousands of pages written.

Where I am dubious of these comments: excuse me Haggis, but at some point someone picked up your work and put a lot of money behind it. And then audiences loved it and got more money behind it. Don’t discount that. Your success was not all pure art. It was pure art with filthy money behind it.

Other than that, he sounds just like the writers in this “ZEN” book I constantly refer to, which Richard Dutcher recommended to me – and I like what I hear. Haggis doesn’t say it’s easy, he says it’s a lot of work, but he says to go with your gut. I should also say, though, that the whole premise of sharing ideas before they are even written in first draft form – sharing them in schools and for example this online-organized writer’s workshop – that goes against what I read in ZEN. There are ideas I’d share with others, and there are ideas I won’t until I’ve got a first draft written.

One more against “doing what has been done before” – what is one of the major complaints about films? That too many of them are FORMULAIC. What does this imdb reviewer of Napolean Dynamite have to say positively about it?

I think where the film ultimately succeeds, aside from the casting of Heder, is that it doesn’t fall into the traps of predictability and stereotyping.

Whatever the writer’s gut tells them to do will be original. Actually, that could mean doing something that has been done before. Maybe in a different way, but still.

Oy. So, a first draft.. oh yeah. That’s why I went to get a program that will output screenwriting format (right now there’s Haggis again at that page: he’s hot, he’s everywhere, he’s the Indie Hero); ZEN recommended writing 120-ish pages of pure rubbish in screenwriting format to defeat the fear of the written page. That’s what I need to do, and that’s what I’m going to do.

I am also reading another indespensable book on independent film marketing: THE COMPLETE INDEPENDENT MOVIE MARKETING HANDBOOK. Though I have the same singular criticism for it that I have for the (afore-linked) PRODUCER’S BUSINESS HANDBOOK – it takes formula way too seriously – I emphasise that it is indespensable.

Lastly, I haven’t forgotten the other two books I mention here (though I haven’t finished reading them), one of which an anonymous commenter mentioned helped him get his first film off the ground, picked up by Fox Searchlight. Who left that comment? One of the folks who made Napolean Dynamite?

Look at this! Look at this entry! LONG! This is my contract with the world.

I think.

I found this animated image (1.4 MB download – you’ll have to wait on a slow connection). I don’t know where it’s from. I think it’s very funny.

I devoured the first book when it arrived (via Barnes and Noble order) and it’s been back on my bookshelf for some time now. Unfortunately I forgot some of its particulars of advice (which I’ll show), but the general advice I remember. I may skim back through it and post more detailed notes later.

The book interviews many very successful screenwriters, interspersed with short chapters of advice from the author, William (Bill) Froug, who founded and headed a reorganization of the screenwriting program at UCLA. It goes through the art and craft, and the business, and also morality, which encouraged me the most, and I’ll address it first.

The author makes some clear value statements about uplifting films vs. amoral, degrading ones. The book I’m reading now, HOLLYWOOD VS. AMERICA, expands on that a lot – and condemns a lot. Anyway, the president of the Hallmark card company for some time produced many clean-cut, uprightly moral movies and TV movies (and some high quality ones at that) that found a very devoted audience. Froug says that uprightly moral entertainment can have a more devoted audience, even if the audience may be smaller (myself I believe the audience would be huge if there were a lot of superb and moral films). But he doesn’t know any Mormons. That’s a comment on mormon tastes for amorality, not audience size, if I need to make that clear. Anyway.. This man’s work was cut from TV even when the ratings were climbing because producers didn’t respect his work. Nyaah to those bozos! When he shaves every morning he looks at a man in the mirror he respects. They don’t. Very many in Hollywood will publicly boast about reviews and money, but privately confide they aren’t very proud of the films they turn out. The Hallmark guy was put out of TV for many years but now he’s back with his own cable channel, putting out the very respectable TV movies he likes to make. Hooray for the Hallmark Channel. I don’t watch cable but I’ll put some attention there when I.. finally get it. If what I have seen on that channel has been high quality but not necessarily superlative, it is reliably clean-cut, and for that reason it will enjoy more of my support. It’s miles ahead of Feature Films for Families if you’ll forgive my bluntness.

Now, on the book as a whole, it is excellent and has gotten me started further into writing. However, the people in and around this book and its school of thought contradict each other, and in the case of the author, himself, apparently unaware. Dutcher recommend this book along with urging me to write from the gut and not worry about structure. I’ll call that the intuitive, free-form school of thought. And the free-form school of thought is mostly what is given in this book (as I see it), by a former teacher at UCLA, yet at the LDS film festival I heard a graduate of the UCLA screenwriting Master’s program, Rodney Hensen, repeatedly emphasising an opposing school of thought: structure and story rules. Before I read ZEN, I wondered if Hensen was a rebel to what he was taught at UCLA. I also noted that Hensen is self-inconsistent: he in turns says to just let a story go where it does, which a strict focus on structure does not allow. After reading ZEN, I see that UCLA is as self-inconsistent. Also note that Hensen’s first film (SUITS ON THE LOOSE) flopped. Is there a connection to his philosophy? Myself I think so. I wish him success with his next film. Anyway, on UCLA’s inconsistency, Froug closes the book by advising that you see as many movies as you can in a year, in theaters, to get a feel for how the audience responds to things. He then says this is contrary to what one of the teachers he hired said in a new book, which teacher made the preposterous assertion that one need only be very well acquainted with his “Fabulous Five” films, one of them happening to be something he wrote, a mostly unheard-of TV movie – hello, arrogance!?

But as I said the author is himself self-inconsistent. He puts forward and is very sympathetic to interviewees who make what I think is the book’s overall main point, as I said, of writing from the gut without being overly analytical or duty-bound to rules or formula. However, the author in turns offers many apparently hard, fast rules, sometimes even in direct contradiction to things he said in earlier chapters, without noting the contradictions. For example he talks in one place about how the line of action of a film should relentlessly rise and become more intense. Elsewhere he hails recent independent filmmakers who break this rule and take things slow and let you absorb everything that is going on, as if at a flat pace of everyday life – but he doesn’t note that by praising this apparently more independent approach, he breaks with his own advice of relentlessly rising action. Also, he uses two different terms which his interviewees say they find repugnant, to which he seems sympathetic – until he totally forgets it and uses the terms himself. I don’t remember the other term, but the one was “Hollywood screenwriter.”

On overcoming fear: Froug says that the very first thing a new person, or even a continually developing writer should do, is get your hands on some books about screenplay form, study some screenplays, and then write an entire screenplay, strictly in screenplay format, of pure, unadulterated rubbish. He said to write your name a hundred times if you do nothing else. This is to overcome the raw, overpowering fear of THE BLANK PAGE. I skipped this step on my way to writing, because with all due respect to myself, I have no fear of the blank page. Hmm.. except for some fear when it comes to fiction

Froug gives great criteria for assessing whether a story idea is a great idea.

1)It will be something you have never seen before [I make exceptions to this, personally]..
2)You will be excited about it, and you will intuitively know the audience will be too.
3)It will have a strong, clear line of action.
4)You will write it more easily than other things – but it will not “write itself” – nothing ever does.

My exception to 1) is that no story is truly original – at least not in its underpinnings. All great stories descend from truth. The composition of the characters and the plot may be truly unique, but I believe buying into the idea that any story can be truly original is destructive because it will bypass things which may be very valuable as part of a story for having been “already done”. Unfortunately, the idea of absolute originality is widely bought, so an audience may balk at something you need to do, but.. whatever. There are many stories similar or alike to each other which are recieved very well by audiences.

On art, craft, and process: You know what? While this book gave some great advice, I think that If You Want to Write gave better advice. I need to skim that again and gather notes on it. Anyway and again, Froug and these screenwriters say to write from your gut and do not prohibit yourself from honestly exploring wherever your writing takes you, neither compel yourself necessarily by any rules or idea of structure to go in any forced direction either. Don’t obsess or necessarily even think on rules of what should go where or happen when, or how you should be writing your story. However, I would say that the rule not to have rules self-contradicts, because it is a rule: the muses, passions and intuitions have their own reasons, and if your awareness tells you to follow some guideline or rule you know, for a strong reason, follow that guide. That said however, the book asserts that such alone is nothing, and that the prattling story structuralists and gurus have produced very little actually good screenplays or films from their theories.

Then some flexible rules, or even ones to ignore if intuition says so: Avoid the obvious. Keep something back from the audience in each scene: keep them wondering what is going on or what will happen next. Keep the line of action always rising. I hate this rule – myself I say forget it unless it happens or needs to happen. I hate the insane bent in Hollywood for heightening and increasingly raising the level of action. There are films where it works, but too dang many of them do this too dang much. Something I got from the LDS film festival that this book has affinity with: forget the studio or limitations of imagination or budget and write whatever you want. Even if it can’t be made into a film for five years, or ten, or I would say even your lifetime. Write it. If a studio or production company asks you to rewrite it, forget them and look elsewhere. Unless it’s really reasonable what they ask. You judge.

Many writers outline and can’t write without outlining, and will generally stick to the outline. Some write scene labels on index cards and arrange and rearrange them to find what’s best. Almost nobody sticks with just what they outline and writing always goes where you don’t expect. Well-realized characters will be ones that you follow on their course letting them do their thing as if you are doing some investigative journalism. They will tell you what they say next and what happens next. Some writers just write the story out from beginning to end without needing to outline. Some writers start at the end or middle and work back to the beginning. A screenwriter in this book said he often works backwards from an ending he knows he wants and figures out how the story got there, and then writes up to it. But he seemed a much more logical, methodical writer than I (he writes military/government thrillers – which isn’t to say there is necessarily logic in politics!), though I may limit myself in saying that. I often have a dilemma of having an ending or important scene of a story clearly in mind, but not knowing all the details of how those characters got there; I have to work backwards through the series of responses and events that got them there. I think that’s harder to pull off effectively for my generally more intuitive, emotional ideas. As opposed to logical – for example, take a look at my life. Just take a look at this. What is the logic in this?

In my view, the most powerful stories are not necessarily conceived plots so much as characters, and what those characters do.

Many directors have zero respect for the writer and will even make a point of modifying a script to suit what they see. Or if they don’t do that, their interpretation of the script may be drastically different from what the writer intended, and the book offers many tragic cases of this. Many of the most successful films were close collaborations between the writer and director with the director consulting the writer on changes. The script on almost every film changes in production. Many producers, directors, and actors have their favorite writers that they bring on to rewrite their own dialogue. Democratic free-for-all re-writes can seriously muck up a project.

The auteur theory is garbage.

At the time the book was written, and I don’t know whether this has changed, no one in the book including the very well-networked author know of anyone who has ever seen a penny of their “percentage points” from film proceeds or royalties: all the studios count distribution expenses against those royalties, which screws the writer, is arguably simply wrong, and is unheard of in any other publishing business.

I have a story idea right now that I’m slowly fleshing out, but the funny thing is if I told you what the idea is, I flatter myself that I’d have to kill you, even though the prospect of any buyers, if there is any prospect, may be years away. Here’s why. The very first scene I wrote for it reminded me of Richard Dutcher. I emailed him and asked if he’d like to read it or wait (I flatter and promise myself) for the movie. This was his response which echoed advice I read in this book, and forgot:

My recommendation to you regarding your screenplay is to keep it fairly close to your vest until you have a complete draft. I generally don’t even let my wife read anything until I have a good solid draft. (And then she’s always the first reader). Everyone naturally feels the need to respond, and to try to shape the film into what they want it to be. And this is before you’ve even had the chance to find out what it is going to be. Also, storytellers often tend to lose enthusiasm for their stories if they’ve already succeeded in telling them in some form (even verbally to a small audience). I think it’s best to keep the story in your head and in your heart and to funnel all the desire to tell the story into the actual writing of it. In my experience, even talking about it dissipates some of the creative drive. But maybe that’s just me.

Good luck!

Richard

I’ve found this to be true – when I related to my wife the first scene which came to me (a scene near the center of the story I think), it made her laugh, and I lost interest in writing it down. Before this, I had been not relating outline ideas to her, and just writing them down. But when she laughed, my storytelling impulse was satisfied (the scene was approved and did its work), and my interest in writing it left.

I think writers can be so flipping lonely for approval of what they write that they’ll be content with an audience of one (two if you count the writer), even while every writer deserves the largest audience they can get.

There are writers who collaborate all along, deriving the benefit of knowing someone else’s mind before they pen anything. This can work very well if they work well together.

That’s that. If I find more notes from my skim re-reading, I’ll post them here.