Interview: Carter Blanchard (2012 Black List) — Part 2

Carter Blanchard is a great example of talent meeting persistence. His first writing credit is a short film he directed in 1989. Since that time, he has landed numerous writing assignments and sold multiple spec scripts including “Virus” (1994), “Frigid & Impotent” (1995), ”Bedbugs” aka “Dead Asleep” (2004), and “Near Death” (2007). For anyone working in the entertainment industry, that is a long stretch of time. However it is with his most recent spec script “Glimmer” that Carter’s fortunes took a quantum leap, the script selling in a bidding war and making the 2012 Black List and Hit List.

Today in Part 2, we go behind the scenes with Carter into the creative process of writing a top selling spec script like “Glimmer.”

Scott: Let’s talk about your script “Glimmer”. It made the 2012 Black List and sold to Dreamworks in a bidding war. Here’s a logline: “When three friends go missing on a camping trip in a forest rumored to be haunted, the two left behind discover clues that lead them to a safe deposit box containing video tapes showing exactly what happened to their friends.” What was the very first iteration of this idea?

Carter: I was in a place of desperation. I hadn’t landed a job in the 16 months since I changed my representation. I hadn’t given my new agent anything that he could sell yet. I was feeling a lot of pressure. I spent a lot of 2011 trying to write a young adult novel and two specs that didn’t quite come together. It was the end of January 2012 and I was talking to a good friend in the business. I had a found footage idea that he always liked. I figured, “Okay, I can write it quickly and found footage is a hot genre.” So I started writing that, and literally within three hours of doing that, I started thinking, “What else haven’t they done in found footage..?”

I came up with the idea of a videotape being left in a safe deposit box by someone who is stuck in the past. I stopped writing this other thing and started writing all the ideas that were flooding into my head based on that one notion. It quickly became a full story. I think I wrote a full draft in three weeks, literally from that moment up until giving a draft to my agent, David Boxerbaum.

I gave it to him late in the day and then he called me first thing the next morning, really excited, and that’s when I knew I was onto something. But it still needed a lot of work, at which point I signed with Adam Kolbrenner and Ryan Cunningham at Madhouse. We spent another two and a half months working on it before it sold.

Scott: The movie has a time travel component and so you’re cross‑cutting back between the present and the past. I’m thinking maybe the seeds of that story, you going down the track of this business degree in school, then choosing another path which is the film thing, so you have in your own life these parallel paths you could have gone on… I’m wondering if there’s some innate draw you have to that idea of parallel lives that might have been working in your subconscious, that helped feed you in terms of “Glimmer.”

Carter: Oh, I’m sure there are. I’ve always thought about parallel paths. I’ve always had this fantasy in the back of my head that my father didn’t actually die, that he just found a way to escape his current reality and that I’d run into him in New Mexico or something. But yeah, I definitely thought a lot about that last year, what my life would be like had I stayed in business school. But that just taps into something about writing, in general, where your subconscious really comes up with a lot of great stuff and it’s important to keep your ears keened to pick up on when you have a good idea.

Scott: This dovetails into, perhaps, that moment where you were three hours into the original found footage idea, and then, all of a sudden, boom, this other thing comes out. It’s almost like you’re following up what you were just saying, you had all this stuff building up inside and then at that precise moment, you tapped into this new idea and that opened the creative floodgates feeding the process for “Glimmer.”

Carter: I’m also attached to that time period, 1977, when I was still a kid. That was before things in my life got real and difficult and in my face, unavoidably. The veneer was no longer covering the world in front of my eyes. I think that was part of it too. Part of me is still stuck back there in that era when things were fun and there weren’t any pressures and you could be a kid. I think that has always been floating around in the background in my head, just in my everyday life. That’s part of the draw to time travel for me… to go back and live in that world again for a while.

Scott: The story starts out in a classic teens-camp-out-in-the-scary-woods vein. You figure they’re going to be picked off one by one, that kind of thing. But then it makes this dramatic shift into a time travel mystery. Was that an intentional feint on your part to fool the reader, or was that just a natural extension of the story you wanted to tell?

Carter: Well, I wanted it to feel real, and I wanted it to come out of a place where you could really believe this was happening, selling the portal as far as how they get back. I didn’t want to do something stupid or goofy. Hopefully what I chose isn’t. I figured it would be some kind of a natural structure or some place that is accessible but not obvious, otherwise everyone would be going in there. So by necessity I started to invent where it would be, how it would come to be and how it would have existed all these years without a major public discovery. It would have been some place where people go to hike that’s partly challenging and dangerous. Caves are always a little dangerous and you wouldn’t necessarily see this one if you walked by it at a certain time of day.

This led to the missing persons mythology of the area and the fact that the hero’s brother went missing, which led to the hero’s obsession with this place… trying to figure out what really happened to his brother. Then once I settled on that, I thought it would be a fun twist to set it up as a horror movie which most found footage movies were at that point anyway.

Then it turns into a completely different movie that propels act two. There was a risk of mixing genres. I didn’t want to come off like that and have people put it down thinking it was a good horror movie and suddenly it’s science fiction and now they don’t know what it’s supposed to be. But I think it’s a worthy risk to take if you’ve got a good story.

Another unconventional component in “Glimmer” is that you’re not always staying with the hero. I did an earlier draft with Madhouse where we tried to keep the hero in the story the whole way through. It didn’t work. So we went back to the original version and just said, “OK, this is our structure. It’s unconventional, but this is what the story is.”

Scott: You also have a mystery dynamic going on bouncing back and forth between these two time planes in act two, but then naturally evolving into an action type movie in act three. In a way, you’ve got a cross-genre story here, and yet it feels very natural. How aware were you of the fact that you were doing something nonconventional?

Carter: I don’t know how aware I was beyond what I just admitted to being aware of. One of the big surprises to me was that everyone saw it as an Amblin movie [laughs]. Before it went on the tracking boards, my reps said, “Which logline do you want to use?” The logline you read to me at the start of this interview is the one I threw out there. The other option was logline they came up with, which was something like “An Amblin‑esque found footage movie the likes of which you’ve never seen” or something like that.

When they called it Amblin‑esque I was like “huh?” So I said, “Use the one I came up with.” They said okay and then they used the one they came up with anyway, which was actually brilliant in hindsight and why I love these guys. Here I thought I’d written a found footage movie that somebody would want to make for a lower budget, like Summit or someplace like that which still would have been great.

But I wasn’t really aware of anything at that point. [laughs] I was just caught up in finally nailing down a really good story. I think we did 14 or 15 drafts at Madhouse between when I came to them and the draft that sold in June. It was one of those situations where it was my gut feeling about certain things in the beginning and then I just trusted Adam and Ryan. I don’t think anyone was thinking, “Now it’s an action movie.” It just was what it was. This was the direction our characters needed to go in, in the course of what was happening to them.

Scott: You’ve got to follow the story where it takes you, right?

Carter: Yes, absolutely.

Carter has parlayed his success with that script into a high profile writing assignment, adapting the best-selling video game “Spy Hunter” into a movie for Warner Bros.

For Part 1, go here.

Tomorrow in Part 3, Carter provides more insight into writing “Glimmer” and what it was like to sell the spec to DreamWorks for high six figures.

Please stop by comments to thank Carter and ask any questions you may have.

Carter is repped by Paradigm and Madhouse Entertainment.

You can follow Carter on Twitter: @CartBlanch.

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