Guest Columnist: Nate Winslow — “Producing an Indie Film”

We started a weekly column last week with Nate Winslow, a 22 year-old trying to get a $1M movie produced. Here is the next installment:

Welcome to Week 2! Last week I left you at the end of my introductory post posing a question about writing for a limited budget, thinking I’d lead into that discussion this week but that discussion already happened here and here. So I’m going to encourage everyone who’s interested in indie filmmaking/screenwriting/the contents of this column to go there and keep that discussion going in the comments, and I’ll jump on ahead.

“Screenwriting is re-writing.” I’m 99 percent positive that a famous writer said that, and it is completely true: the first draft of Bad Actor was written over a year ago now, and we’ve gone through more than 30 revisions since then. The script has undergone two complete overhauls during our rewrite process and retained only the most basic structural and story elements from that initial draft. That’s a lot. We probably made a lot of extra work for ourselves, looking back. But that’s not a terrible thing, because that ridiculous drafting process taught me a few things that I’m about to share with you and hopefully spare you some suffering.

Revision Thoughts:

Scott has had a variety of posts covering the writing processes of tons of professional screenwriters, and this has come up in a lot of those posts, but I’ll reiterate: outline. Why? It can act as your first, second, third and maybe fourth draft before you ever have to commit to the time consuming act of getting from FADE IN to FADE OUT. If we had planned our story out in any sort of detailed fashion from the get-go, I’m pretty sure we would have seen the glaring structural errors that were causing the problems during the first ten rewrites before we set foot in Final Draft. I’m telling you from painful experience: It. Saves. You. Time.

Readings!

One of the big problems I had during this re-writing process was being able to stay objective. I was losing my editorial cruelty and that doesn’t make any rewriting easier. So we sat down and asked what’s better than reading the script over and over to ourselves with no end in sight? Having actors do it for us! We posted a notice on Mandy for a script reading the next weekend, made sure the actors knew it wasn’t an audition and waited. We had over 200 responses in three days and were scrambling to narrow all of that down to 6 actors. We rented a little studio room at Ripley-Grier in Manhattan for three hours and the actors came in and ran through the script. From that first reading I think I had four or five pages of notes: there is absolutely nothing better for finding problems with your script than seeing it play out in front of you in the hands of talented actors. Some benefits that we experienced during that process were:

-Pacing: When you’re sitting in front of your laptop, it can be hard to get a sense of the way the film’s pacing will feel to an audience. Sitting watching a group of actors run through your entire script makes places where your script lags, where it goes too fast or where that supporting character disappears for an act abundantly clear.

-Dialogue: Plenty of lines that I thought worked perfectly…until I heard them being delivered by an actor who was emotionally connected to the scene. Incredibly useful and sometimes painfully enlightening.

-Characters: When the script is being acted out in front of you, the sudden realization that all of your minor characters sound exactly the same becomes inescapably clear. Or you thought that your protagonist’s opening scenes really painted him as a stalwart defender of orphaned children, but now you realize it just makes him sound like a misguided extremist.

-Feedback from actors: Another huge benefit of readings is the workshop aspect of it. We usually had the actors read through the script once and then take 30 minutes or so to talk with the actors and ask for their opinions. Scripts are written for actors, and hearing their side of the story can be eye-opening.

Readings are a fantastic way to get your script out from under your potentially doting gaze and into an environment where you’re not just hearing the words on your page, you’re seeing the words on your page. I highly recommend you try and do it at least once if you’re developing a script for an independent film: it’s cheap and the rewards are bountiful and immediate. So those are some things that I can recommend from my personal experience with this project — to wrap this week up, here are some things that I DON’T recommend.

DO NOT:Completely ignore your limitations for a “kitchen sink” draft: the first draft that I read for BAD ACTOR was a sprawling 135+ epic. There were over 75 characters, and there was less emphasis on sound structure and more on paragraph-long descriptions. How would I have gone about that now, with hindsight? Outlined! If I had forced us to plot that all out in beat form, we would have seen how long Act I went staring at us right there.

DO NOT: Have a line producer or a unit production manager or someone other than you, the screenwriter, be the first person to bring up edits relating to scenes that are too expensive/impractical. That behemoth first draft of ours also had three enormous crowd scenes in downtown Manhattan that would have at least tripled our budget, and they didn’t get edited out until much later. Having worked with our line producer on our budget for the past 4 months, I’m aware of how much the sentences in a script can equal 150,000 dollars out of production. By editing yourself for big spending in those early drafts, you’re saving everyone time and — most importantly — money.

DO NOT: Take every single edit or comment that you receive on your script as the word of the Lord and immediately edit accordingly. In our development stages, we had a lot of people reading the script and giving us feedback. I figured the more people who read it the better, and so I was sending it to a lot of people I had worked with before, regardless if they were specifically a writer by trade. We got tons of feedback, which was great, but I think we might have gotten too much — or, we got too much feedback that we then took and worked into the script. Not everyone is an expert, but almost anyone you send a script to will want to read it, edit it and send you their changes because people love to feel involved in the process. That’s all well and good, but it can handicap the script. So: if I could, I would actually be a little more confident in what Felipe (the writer) and I knew was working and what wasn’t when we were receiving feedback.

And there you have it. Those are some of the lessons I learned in the past 6 months in terms of the revision process: for anyone else out there going through this, what are your recommendations/strategies? Any different approaches for revising a low budget script? As always, I’d love to get a discussion going in the comments, so fire away!

As I’ve said multiple times, there’s no right way to write a script. However there can be an enormous value in working out the story’s plot in detail before typing FADE IN. If you’ve done the hard work in the prep-writing phase of breaking the story, then you minimize the chances that you’ll be stuck in endless rewrites during pre-production and — worse — production.

Thanks, Nate, for that info. Any of you who have produced or been involved in an indie film, please feel free to weigh in with your thoughts re the scripting and revision process.

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