Filmmakers have recurring visual techniques and narrative themes. Here is one analysis of Steven Spielberg:

What themes and dynamics are common to your stories?

Last week I posted this from Tom Benedek:

The last spec script I wrote got me a  wonderful manager. He loved the script. AND he refused to send it out to market. Because it was too expensive — oh, my poor hundred fifty million dollar sci fi epic. His perception – there are two people in Hollywood who can make a project like it that is not based on prominent, pre-existing material (reboot, famous book, sequel, etc.) so it is a waste of time to try to sell this. His directive – write the same kind of thing much smaller. One protagonist on screen most if not all the time and much more limited locations and effects. A movie that might cost 60 million with a star attached but that could be made for 5-9 million or even less perhaps. That script could be sent to 20 or more potential buyers. Well, I went off and wrote a novel instead.

Now, finally, I am working on a script that can be made for a price – DIY. But it is not easy. I had it all in one location until I decided (really) that there were scenes in India that belonged in the story. Actually, I’m thinking of getting rid of those scenes on a far off continent (OR will figure out a way to shoot them remote. Stage them via Skype and have a cameraman with an Iphone on location. We will see).

That post resulted in this email from filmmaker Shane Weisfeld:

Tom,

I just read about your upcoming master class about every screenwriter needing a low-budget script in their drawer.

I wanted to let you know about my first produced credit “Freezer”, which just wrapped post-production and has been picked up by Anchor Bay for North American and English-speaking distribution rights.

“Freezer” is a one-location action thriller about a man kidnapped and thrown into a walk-in freezer where he fights for his life to come up with $8 million a mob family is convinced he stole. The film stars Dylan McDermott, Peter Facinelli and Yuliya Snigir, the budget was $2.5 million, and it filmed over 17 days in Edmonton, AB and then one day of filming in L.A.

I can honestly tell you that after spending many years writing scripts and trying to break in, things didn’t start happening for me until I wrote this script – because I wrote it (with a friend of mine) with budget in mind and we wanted to write a script as a business model. The whole point was to write a script that a producer could read and see this getting made, low budget, to be shot in 20 days or less, in any city, with minimal characters.

This has changed things for me in so many ways. Not that I was writing big budget scripts before, but this was the first time I wrote a script with (low) budget in mind, but also something that could attract all the right elements needed to get a movie made, and not just have it as a writing sample and never get produced. It was also the script that got me representation, after many years of trying.

I started a blog last November – “Unsolicited: A Screenwriter’s 15-Year Journey Into The Film Industry” – and it’s all about my struggles over the years, mistakes I’ve made, things I’ve learned and observed, and a lot of the blog is devoted to the path “Freezer” took from conception to production.

I would love to share my story about this on Scott’s ‘Go Into The Story’ or any outlet you guys are involved in or know about, because although it took me 15 years to become a produced writer, the journey to become a working writer in the business is still ongoing, at the age of 38.

- Shane Weisfeld

Toronto, Canada

Representation: Mike Kuciak, Samurai MK, Los Angeles

Great story. And speaks to the value of low-budget filmmaking including writing scripts with budgetary constraints in mind. Some keys: Minimal characters, one location. That’s a good start.

Tom is offering a brand new 1-week online class called Writing the Low-Budget Script and you can find out more about it here.

Congratulations, Shane. Best of luck with all your creative endeavors!

In honor of Star Wars day — “May the fourth be with you!” — a terrific feature on screenwriter Leigh Brackett who, along with Lawrence Kasdan, is a credited writer of Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back, in my view the very best of the SW movies. Some excerpts:

Leigh Brackett wrote the first script draft of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, and her contributions helped make the saga epic.

But before Brackett had a major hand in creating the best Star Wars movie, she was a science fiction novelist in the 1940s, writing a slew of space adventure novels with titles like The Starmen and Alpha Centauri or Die!. People called her the Queen of Space Opera — and it was not always a compliment.

At that time, space opera (like Star Wars) was looked down upon as less worthy of appreciation than other types of pulp fiction, including other types of science fiction. Brackett also wrote a lot of pulp crime fiction, and had co-written the screenplay for The Big Sleep with William Faulkner. But she chose to spend a lot of her time writing these despised novels. As her friend Michael Moorcock explains in an essay:

Like so many of her heroes, Leigh preferred the outlaw life. She always said her first love was science fantasy. She said it defiantly, when it paid less than other pulp fiction. When it paid less, indeed, than other kinds of science fiction. If she had chosen, in her fiction, to hang out with the scum of the L.A. streets instead of the dregs of the spacelanes, she could have made a lot more money… Her keen sense of freedom made her, like many other fine writers of her generation, choose the more precarious life of writing science fantasy…. There was a time when the kind of science fantasy Brackett made her own was looked down upon as a kind of bastard progeny of science fiction (which was about scientific speculation) and fantasy (which was about magic).

According to John Baxter’s book Mythmaker (quoted here), a friend handed Lucas a copy of one of Brackett’s books, and told Lucas: “Here is someone who did the Cantina scene better than you did.” Baxter describes the phone conversation between Lucas and Brackett thusly:

Lucas: Have you ever written for the movies?

Brackett: Yes, I have. Rio Bravo, El Dorado, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye…

[pause]

Lucas: Are you that Leigh Brackett?

Brackett: Yes. Isn’t that why you called me in?

Lucas: No, I called you in because you were a pulp science fiction writer!

After that, Lucas started out by having a week-long story conference with Brackett, according to The Secret History of Star Wars. During this time, he hashed out a lot of the story points that wound up in the final film, including the character of Yoda — and the notion that Luke has a twin sister, which isn’t brought up until Return of the Jedi. After a Thanksgiving break, they resumed the story conference, which led to a 55-page transcript in which a lot of stuff was hashed out, according to J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.

If you are a Star Wars fan, this is a must-read.

For more of the article, go here.

HT to Shaula Evans for sourcing this story.

Via FirstShowing:

I saw this NYT article the other day:

PARK CITY, Utah — David Sedaris has never allowed Hollywood to get its paws on his writing.

—-

How, then, did a 29-year-old director named Kyle Patrick Alvarez, with a tiny budget and only one movie under his belt (a phone sex drama at that), get Mr. Sedaris to let him bring one of his works to the screen?

The answer involves a little of Mr. Alvarez’s pluck in getting his proposal to the author, and a lot of Mr. Sedaris’s quirkiness in deciding to trust him.

Mr. Alvarez, a passionate fan of Mr. Sedaris’s offbeat essays, had long wanted to adapt “C.O.G.,” a fish-out-of-water tale that finds a young Mr. Sedaris working on an apple farm in the Pacific Northwest. The story, which also involves an overly friendly forklift operator with an unusual hobby and a born-again Christian who carves rocks into Oregon-shaped clocks, comes from “Naked,” Mr. Sedaris’s 1997 collection of essays.

“I saw it as dark and funny and a chance to hopefully make something special,” Mr. Alvarez said. “It’s also not about his family, which made me think I had a shot at getting him to say yes.”

But Mr. Alvarez had already been rebuffed by Mr. Sedaris’s agents. So he started to brainstorm.

Mr. Alvarez’s first feature, “Easier With Practice,” a 2009 drama about an introverted writer who has a lot of phone sex, was based on a GQ article written by Davy Rothbart. Mr. Rothbart is a contributor to “This American Life,” an NPR show on which Mr. Sedaris is also a regular. So Mr. Alvarez decided to attend one of Mr. Sedaris’s book signings and use the connection to press his case. “All he could say was no, right?” he said.

All he could say was no, right? That is so much in the spirit of the spec. Take a chance. Be willing to risk. What’s the downside? The universe can say no? It can also say yes.

In this case, Sedaris said yes. Here is video of the author at this year’s Sundance Film Festival talking about C.O.G. which debuted this weekend:

What Alvarez accomplished in getting C.O.G. made is yet another great object lesson for us to embrace the spirit of the spec.

The downside is a no. But the upside? That can be a big, juicy YES!

For more of the NYT article, go here.

Video links via @Indiewire and @peterknegt.

The 9th and final behind the scenes video for The Hobbit

The other videos in the series:

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A terrific feature on the Wachowskis (The Matrix, V for Vendetta, Cloud Atlast) in the most recent New Yorker which you can – and should – read here.

Here are is a THR article that spotlights 7 revelations from the New Yorker article.

Holy crap, what a find! From Dangerous Minds:

Blue Velvet’s original shooting script is reputed to have been over four hours long. The theatrical release came in at 120 minutes. An additional hour of deleted footage was thought to have been lost when the producer of the film, Dino De Laurentis, sold his company. Fortunately, the footage was located and was released as an extra on the Blu-ray edition of Blue Velvet . These deleted scenes have been uploaded to YouTube and I present them here for your viewing pleasure. Rumor has it that there is even more footage out there.

Things kick off with a bang in a barroom scene with Jeffrey Beaumont, Frank Booth, a bevy of prostitutes, an old dude singing some deranged blues tune, violence on a pool table and a woman with glowing nipples.

Knowing Lynch, I would guess this is NSFW:

The seventh in a series of production videos about The Hobbit.

The other videos in the series:

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Interesting and good news re friend of the blog Jason Scoggins:

Launched last summer at the Toronto International Film Festival,  FilmFunds offers filmmakers a platform to promote their wares and connect with financiers. The site allows filmmakers to upload their projects so that film fans can sample them, give feedback and vote for favorites. Popular projects can get assistance in a variety of ways, some of which are outlined below. Through FilmFunds, audiences can follow projects from inception to –maybe–the big screen.

Entertainment/tech entrepreneur Jason Scoggins (The Wrap’s ItsontheGrid.com) has signed on as CEO of FilmFunds. He plans to expand the company toward more mainstream film and TV, he says: “I’m really excited about the opportunity to build a site that meets the needs of entertainment pros as well as the needs of movie lovers around the world. Our goal is to make FilmFunds the go-to site for everyone who’s big into movies and TV.”

Scoggins is the founder of ItsontheGrid.com, a film industry database he sold to The Wrap News, Inc., in 2011.  He is a former television literary agent who began his career as a trainee at International Creative Management before moving to the Gersh Agency and Writers & Artists.  He continues to co-write The Scoggins Report, a weekly newsletter that concentrates on the day-to-day film development business and is renowned for its coverage of the pitch and spec screenplay marketplaces.

Jason has been one of my primary sources for cross-checking spec script sales and so we’ve gotten to know each other pretty well over the years. The FilmFunds initiative looks promising and hope this works out for all involved.

For more of the article, go here.