A Screenwriter's Journey #6: Chekov's Bullet

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So, this morning I woke up early and got to 30 pages. But what does 30 pages mean at this point?

Included in the page counts before now were notes. Up until 15 pages or so, I had done no explicit writing, it was all just brainstorming and notes and random thoughts and reminders that certain things had to be written.

The first step in turning that into a screenplay is structure. But since I don't have all the ideas and necessary plot points yet, it's a very loose structure. I took each of the notes I had and did my best to put them all in chronological order according to when they appear on screen. Some things I couldn't know where to put them yet, so I had to guess at some. Some of those guesses were immediately wrong. So I put them in "order" knowing that any of those things could (and many definitely would) change. So it's a bit of a guessing game combined with an eye towards film structure.

A word about structure. This is a fuzzy word in screenwriting. Often people confuse it with formula, meaning you're copying an exact page-by-page placement of plot elements and a set of required plot elements. Some screenwriting advice suggests going this direction, but that advice largely comes from people who don't sell a lot of scripts or get a lot of movies made. All of these advice books have good advice in them, but all of them should be a guideline and any time you follow them exactly, you decrease the likeliness that someone will buy the script. They are starting points only.

Structure in a more deliberate sense means how the story is told. The basic rule of this is the simple three-act-structure (beginning, middle, end), but that's so vague as to almost be meaningless. So structure for me comes down to two basic things: 1. Plot (what happens in the story) and 2. Character arcs (how do the characters affect that plot and how are they affected by it. And both of these things borrow very heavily from a stand-up comedy concept, the set-up. For anything to have an effect in a movie, it has to be set up. Things that come out of nowhere take the audience out of the movie and make it less interesting. The "deus ex machina" (machine of the gods) that dominated classical theater has long since been discarded as a primary storytelling element and when it happens in film, people usually hate it.

In theater there's a concept called "Chekov's gun." This is the idea that if you see a gun in act 1 of a play, it had better go off in act 3. I came up with a corollary that I call "Chekov's bullet." It someone's going to get shot in the third act, you have to show the means in the first act. In both of these cases, the gun can be literal, but usually it isn't. This is just talking about anything that has an impact on the story. If you set something up early that seems like it has to payoff later, you have to pay it off. And if something important happens later on, you have to set it up early or it isn't satisfying and doesn't complete the plot loop.

So the first part in structure is to figure out what you want the viewer to feel at the end of the movie. And then you have to figure out how to get them there. It's not a hard concept and genre conventions pretty much do a lot of the work for you. If you want people to be scared, put them in a haunted house. If you want someone to fall in love with a character, you have to show reasons why they should be loved.

In previous posts, I talked about a lot of the feelings I'm going for in this movie, so a lot of that work is done. So, I start laying those things out in order. And, I start making notes of how to set each thing up. So if I want to show that the lesbian character has a crush on the SGA president, I have to both set that up in the early part and it has to have some kind of payoff later on. The fact that she's a lesbian has to either be important to the story or important to the character. Otherwise, it's just biography. Too many movies have made lesbian characters only characterization being about their sexuality, which isn't fair in a story that isn't a explicitly lesbian tale. This isn't, so it is important to her character, but doesn't define her. That means I have to come up with other things about her (she's shy, she has body image issues, etc.) and then I have to set those things up early and give them a reason to be part of the story. If she's shy, then she will have to attempt to overcome that shyness later or fail and be punished. If she has body image issues, she has to face those down or be harmed by them in the story. In good film structure, everything exists for a reason and is connected to something else in the story. Screen time is precious real estate.

Okay, so that's the start of the structure and I'll go into that more next time. Structure and character are the things that give you all your scenes, dialogue and whatever else you are going to write. In a novel you can just start writing and come back to the plot and other things at a leisurely pace, but not in a film. Your beginning has to naturally find it's way to your ending and this is almost impossible to do well without outlining your structure in advance, or at least early in the process. I've got most of that done, which is why I'm at 30 pages.

The Nerdcore Symposium 1.0: What Helps You Get Through?

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First episode of the new RevEx show that will also incorporate YOUR answers. This is the Nerdcore Symposium, where we take a deeper dive in to various topics. Today's topic is what's helping you get through the social distancing and quarantines?

Record your own response and send it to us and we’ll share!

Announcing the RevEx 100 Playlist!

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Even before coronavirus hit, there was a massive amount of quality new music being produced. With artists across the world quarantined, even more music is being produced now. To accommodate this, we’re expanding our RevEx 50 playlist, the basis for the Rev 50 in 15 podcast, is now the RevEx 100!

The idea behind our primary playlist, the RevEx 100, is to collect an eclectic mix of new and ground-breaking music. The old genre boundaries are quickly falling and the new music landscape is chaotic, let us find some of the best new music and deliver it to you. The list has no boundaries in terms of genre or concept, it’s open to any new music (that is available on Spotify, since that’s where we host the list). The list is specifically hand-picked and, with some exceptions for artistic or intellectual reasons, we choose progressive or non-political music and artists. While this playlist isn’t safe for work, it is pretty safe for people who share our values of fairness, equality, diversity and trusting the voice of the artist. This list is updated every week.

Listen to the RevEx 100!

100 songs doesn’t last long and there are more good songs than we can dig into, so we also provide RevEx Radio, which not only includes all the songs in the RevEx 100, but also includes many more songs (it’s a 400 song playlist) that includes other songs from the RevEx 100 artists, other popular artists and some obscure gems. This is also a list that is updated weekly, although this one is NOT regularly checked for content, so you may find some offensive songs on this list.

Listen to RevEx Radio!

Finally, more than 400 songs worth listening to come out each year, so RevEx Radio 2020 collects all the songs that appear and drop off of the other two playlists. The 2020 list includes every song that appeared on the other two lists for the entire year.

Listen to RevEx Radio 2020!







A Screenwriter's Journey 5: Research

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For the next part of the process, I had to do some research.

The first thing I had to research was names. I don't like randomly tossed-off names that much. I'm a fan of choosing names that have resonance with the story or character(s). Not all of them, that becomes too obvious and transparent if done to excess, but if used judiciously, it's a great tool to add subtext.

The Dortches family were the easiest. I just googled a list of common Southern women's names. I ignored obvious and over-the-top names like Bobby Sue or Scarlett. There are a lot of women characters, so I went with names that seemed they'd be given by the same mother. For the mother, I went with Lovie. I've met a few Lovie's in my time and they were all pretty bad people, not as extreme as the characters here, but bad enough. It fits. The oldest daughter, who is kind of the public face of the Dortches (she appears in commercials for the haunted house) is named Dawn. The mother didn't have the blue-skin disease, but most of the children do. She was the first to have blue skin (thus Dawn).

The daughter that is in school with the main cast is named Brandy. The b-name allows for a "Brandy Blue" nickname for the other kids to use to make fun of her. The other daughters are named Misty, LeAnn, Peggy and Tammy. These characters also all have personalities and motivations now, but I'll expand upon those later. There also two big dumb heavyweight sons who are functionally idiots, but do whatever they are told by Lovie and Dawn. Their names are Buck and Cage. Simple one-syllable names that have other meanings, but not that imply any compassion or humanity. Forceful names as they are only brute force.

The main characters also have names now, too. All the kids were born in America, but not all of their parents were. For the characters of international lineage, I wanted to do authentic names. As I mentioned last time, the two international characters are both Asian, but I didn't want their families to be from the same place. I've written Asian characters before, so I like to not repeat things, so I had to avoid China and South Korea. I chose Japan and Malaysia.

I also didn't want to go with overly stereotypical obvious names that people have seen before. The Japanese character is the shy lesbian with a crush on the black girl. I named her Himari Ito. She is proud of her culture and doesn't shy away from her heritage. But, she is basically an outsider even in the popular group. Her parents are from Japan and her mother speaks only a little English. She has pink hair, but not obnoxiously so.

The Malaysian character is the star football player, probably a quarterback. Malaysian names are more complex than American names. Ahmed is a common name, so that became his first name. Most Malaysians use a middle "name" that refers to their gender (equivalent to "son of" or "daughter of"), so for a male, that's "bin." And for last name, I went with Tengku, which helps show the diversity of Malaysian culture, as they are influenced by many other surrounding countries. So Ahmed bin Tengku.

The black kids are brother and sister (with the brother being gay). I gave them the last name Martin (with no real connection to anything). The sister is older, but less than a year so. She is named Rosa, after Parks and the brother is named Jeffrey, which I decided comes from a family friend. So Jeffrey and Rosa Martin.

The tall white girl who plays basketball I named Sarah, common enough name it lures people in with a sense that she is the normal one. Gave her the last name Willingham because it seemed really white.

The last of the six characters is the white nerd. I gave him the name Gordon Stevens. (I liked the idea of his first name being a last name and his last name being a first name).

One final character I named so far is the school principal who really only appears in one scene (so far, that may expand later). When I was thinking of her name, I looked out at the ocean in Puerto Rico and decided to give her a Puerto Rican name. I chose Valentina Casiano.

I also did research on haunted houses, to see what the trends are and to come up with a list of techniques and vignettes to appear inside the haunted house. And I researched a list of the most common phobias, so I can make sure to hit all of them at some point or another in the haunted house.

With all of this info in place, I actually wrote a few scenes, but I'll tell you more about that next time.

RevEx Social Distancing Small Table Show, Episode 38: "Yet Another Song About W**d"

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RevEx Social Distancing Small Table Show, Episode 39, wherein I engage in some "method acting" while performing the purely fictional song, "Yet Another Song About W**d." Featuring a guest appearance by the sadly mislabeled LADY Rainabong. Apologies, your majesty. Oh, if you weren't sure, the ** in the words above, those are both the letter e. Like ee. Get it. I don't think they're going to get it, Lester.

A Screenwriter's Journey 4: Characters & Blue People

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First, my friend Aubri sent me some articles about a family that, because of a really rare disorder, have blue skin. That or something like it is perfect. I wanted the rest of the people in the story to look down on the Dortches with contempt, disgust and fear (with the last one growing over time), but I wanted to keep it complex. So the town makes fun of the people who outsiders with a skin condition. The family reacts negatively. Society treats them even worse. They snap and want revenge. That's the longer plot arc that starts years before this story. This story is the climax of that lifetime arc.

The other thing is I really wanted to dig into the main characters. The protagonist and his/her group of friends. I haven't decided on the protagonist yet, because that will come out of the character development. It will most likely be (or at least appear to be) the person with the bad experience in a haunted house that I had written about previously. They'll have a natural fear of going to this place the first time, and will be lulled into going the second time because the first time wasn't that scary. Although, at this point, I think I may make that person a fake protagonist, in the tradition of movies like Psycho and Hostel. When making a horror movie, you HAVE to have nods to your influences. It's required by genre fans.

But I don't know who that is yet, because I haven't figured out the main characters. So I'm doing that right now.

The underlying theme of this movie is class-based, in my thinking. It's not as frequently used in horror movies these days as are things like gender and race and disability. I think the best movie of 2019 was Parasite, which is very explicitly about class. I want this movie to travel in that realm.

That's built in with the Dortches family being poor and more rural and having the skin condition leading to conflict with the rest of the area, which I'm thinking is going to be a wealthy suburb of an unnamed medium/big city and the Dortches live past the suburbs as it gets more rural.

So it's already suburbs vs. country and wealthy vs. poor. Those are the underlying conflicts, but, too many of these movies layer the conflicts in ways that dilute the class critique. And I have to be careful, because this now starts to head in the direction of the themes of "Get Out." Love the hell out of that movie, but don't want to copy it.

I think the solution here is to make the richer kids be diverse as fuck. They're seniors in high school. They're the popular kids. And they look like a Benneton ad. Diverse in terms of race, equal in terms of gender, all from wealthy families, so healthy and nicely-dressed. Because they are a diverse group, though, they aren't as dismissive of different people as their parents are. So while they will definitely have problems with the Dortches and being mean to them, it'll be like in Carrie where all the teens were really mean to Carrie except the one couple who tried to help them out. All of these kids except maybe one or two will be that kind of condescending but caring mean?

So I had previously decided that the main group was going to consist of 6. There will be some other named characters from the school who will also serve as potential victims at the Haunted House.

Of the six, I wanted to avoid the trope of "the final girl" or the ending where it's a couple, so the survivors at the end will be two people, one male and one female, but not a couple, so one of them will be LG and the other won't. Zero chance of this being a couple. BUT each will have other love interests through the story.

I picture this place being Northern, because I want it relatively cold for the Haunted House so that there's nothing in this film that hints at nudity or sex (although flirting and romance and love will be touched upon). So the break down of the characters will likely be something like this:

2 black characters
2 Asian characters (but drastically different parts of Asia)
2 white characters
3 female, 3 male

2 LGBT (but these two aren't a couple, they'll each date other people outside the group)

The very specific diversity of this group is to emphasize that people from any group can be raised to be bad on issues of class and that privilege can be developed by anyone based on how they are raised. Everybody can be an asshole when it comes to class.

And I want each kid to be happy and successful at something that is normally NOT attributed to their race or gender. So one of the boys is Asian and is a football star at a skill position. He'll be straight because of the common stereotype in film of the closeted gay football player. He gets good grades, but not good enough for his parents.

The straight white girl will be a really tall, conventionally pretty basketball player. A center, so closer to 6' tall. Maybe like a white Lisa Leslie. She also likes theater and does the school play. Her hovering mother approves of everything but is overbearing.

The straight black girl is student body president and has gotten into Harvard based on her grades and leadership skills. She also does school plays, but isn't as good at that as she is at politics. Her single father is super supportive.

The gay black boy is awkward and shy. He has a steady boyfriend, but his boyfriend is in the closet, which causes problems. He has amazing grades, is openly gay and is an accomplished rapper who has made the unofficial "school song" and video to support his friends on sports and other teams. But he is timid and easily embarrassed, even by praise, off stage. He is the straight black girl's brother.

The lesbian Asian girl is on the debate team with the straight black girl. She has a crush on the straight black girl. She also runs track and field.

The white boy is a very attractive nerd. He's the treasurer in student government, is another star on the debate team and plays soccer. He also loves horror movies.

Okay, that's what I came up with in this brainstorming session. So I think I have a start on the characters. And as I started writing them up I got to start to feel characters in different ways. I'm thinking that the gay boy is definitely going to survive. I'm not sure beyond that yet. I might even let three survive because these characters are going to be relatively well-built up in the movie. But then again, the more built up they are, they more the deaths have consequences, so maybe it should only be two.

That's not to figure out for now, though...