My Script Bumps Auspiciously Into "Two Adverbs"

So, I started that treatment. It simply took off. Strange things happened. After having carefully chosen the name of my protagonist, the moment I started to fill in the first Final Draft index card, another name landed on the screen, a name I had never even considered, but which felt perfectly right!

Under that spell, everything started to unravel. Moments, events, even dialogue were popping in my mind with urgency; I was typing as fast as I could under the imperiousness of ideas and of the dramatic moments created. Like I was taking dictation. Another character I had never envisaged was just "requested" by circumstances and soon enough I was foreshadowing and connecting dots in a new world of my own.

After eleven scenes I stopped and wrote about the experience. And that's when the flow broke, but I let it go, I wasn't upset, for some reason... (I wish I hadn't taken that ESP test. Now I'm haunted by my own "precognition" powers... I can't start believing in THAT now! Although it explains so much of my behavior and yes, moments of clarity in advance of many situations, but that's cheap, nah... I'd much rather think of those as moments of... empathy, or life-as-a-story type wishful thinking...)

So I embarked on a web cruise, did some tests, and then... I went to Joshua's blog-within-website (martially named The Daily Dojo) and checked out his latest posts, where I discovered a link that was to change my life.

Maybe yours, too?

Drum roll! (What?!? :))))

Introducing the Two Adverbs initiative, and most of all, Quintessential Blog "The Inside Pitch", which Christopher Lockhart, my new guru in screenwriting, has been maintaining for two years. (Where was I? Huh? What the hell was I looking at on this world wide web?).

I still haven't finished reading it. I'm savoring it properly. Of course, the script that I've been reading hundreds of books for, the very script I had just started writing so magically, became a secondary thing.

I am now re-thinking it, as I'm doing the logline exercise.

What a cool device! THE DEVICE!!!

I had once noticed, when in film school, that I worked best when I chose a THEME for a script, in advance of anything else. So I've always been trying to tell myself what exactly I wanted to convey with anything I wrote -- well, not so much these blog posts where unfortunately I just experiment and free-flow/fall, which is a dumb attitude, come to think about it, but in tune with the times. However, this theme-first approach is a very European way of doing things and it allows for so many internal flaws it's not funny. If you don't believe me, go to a European Film Festival. I almost never make it to the movies, I only socialize. Yes, they are THAT BAD! And oh, all those funky AUTEURS have bloody THEMES behind their movies, which they will freely discuss at length. That's when they don't put on the "I'm just an artist, you should do all the talk around my masterpiece" cloak.

If I had magic powers, I'd force all of these sinful "auteurs" into the logline sobering exercise. Post fact. Then make them give back all the money the state funds lavished upon them! That is, unless they're able to come up with good loglines for their productions and the reason why these failed to turn in the slightest profit is thus proven to lie elsewhere. Like, in the American überdominance of the market. Sheesh!

Christopher Lockhart's blog reads like a good book, and his insight is invaluable. We're talking someone who's seen tens of thousands of film concepts and scripts and who takes the time to convey his experience, to build an effective bridge between scribes and the industry!

Sure there are other books, (honestly, his blog is to be judged on a par with the most successful books in the genre), like "The Mailroom", "You'll Never Have Lunch in This Town Again", combined with the McKee "bible" and the Linda Palmer offering or other revealing looks into the biz. I'm not saying you shouldn't read those -- by all means, read everything -- but if you want to then narrow things down into the here and now of it, the realities writers need to consider when sitting down and telling a story for Hollywood -- go to Lockhart's blog and aspire it all.

Christopher is engaging into a serious dialogue with his blog readers. He's been doing all sorts of cool things for them, including logline lotteries (he went as far as to invite other story execs to his house to discuss the winning entries!) Most importantly, he b l o g g e d about all of these things convincingly and powerfully, in an almost incredible attempt to help everyone trying to break into the industry -- not to mention the industry itself, according to a simple equation: less crap landing on those desks = a better world.

This is THE BLOG! I tell ya! Go there NOW! If only for this link, it was worth putting up with the self-indulging stuff dumped within my blog's entries -- for which, curiously enough, I won't apologize.

And also go to Joshua's blog, for his own writing and for a very carefully selected set of links. I feel like ripping them off and posting them here, but hey, he did all the work so that wouldn't be fair.

(On a side note, I also happen to agree with Joshua's enthusiasm for Stephen King's "On Writing".)