John August

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Finished a short film: Now what?

First Person

One of my most frequent pieces of advice to would-be writer/directors is to make a short film. After all, with the wonders of digital technology, any monkey with a good idea and a long weekend should be able come up with something watchable. Right?

The next step is getting someone to see your miniature masterpiece. That’s where my knowledge comes up a little lacking. Fortunately, my assistant Chad Creasey has just been through the process. He and director Dara Resnik recently made a charming short film called “Great Lengths.” You can read all about it at their website.

Pretty much every weekend this spring, either he or Dara were flying to some festival across the country. With this in mind, I asked Chad to write up advice about short films and festivals. He was gracious enough to reply at, well, great length:

Take it, Chad:

first personYou did it! Maybe you had to destroy your great aunt’s guest cottage and illegally tap into the city’s electric line because you couldn’t afford a generator. Maybe you had to bribe the local sheriff to NOT make his 3:00am rounds in order to get that awesome explosion shot. And maybe you subjected your body to experimentation to cover the cost of the final audio layback. But dammit – you are now the proud owner of a completed short film!

So what do you do with it?

Chances are, you want people to see it. Although the internet offers venues like IFILM with which to showcase your work, nothing beats the rush of the live audience screening. You can always rent a screen at the local multiplex (costly), but most filmmakers prefer to show their work at a variety of film festivals.

The festival circuit

The past five years have seen a tremendous surge in the number of festivals. It seems like every city from Ashland, Oregon to Dubrovnik, Croatia has one now. What’s fantastic is you have literally thousands of places to submit to — but the overall quality of these festivals varies greatly. I’ve been to ones that treat the filmmakers like they were A-list celebrities, and others that made me buy tickets to my own screening.

After going through it, I have a couple of recommendations.
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Ingenious comment spam booster

Geek Alert

For readers unfamiliar with content management systems like Movable Type (which this site uses), one annoying trend is comment spam, where an automated system will place comments on various articles, linking back to a target site — often one that sells cigarettes, for whatever reason.

The original goal for comment spam was apparently to boost Google page rankings for ne’er-do-well sites by increasing their number of “incoming links.” Movable Type and Google are now smart enough to keep this from happening, but the spam comments persist. MT-Blacklist, a plug-in, does a good job helping sort out the valid comments from the crap, but some of the older articles on the site which pre-date MT-Blacklist still have spam comments.

Which brings us to today. Every time someone adds a comment to the site, I get a copy of it in my email. This morning I got a strange one:

Q: if two players are presented with a diamond flush(Ace, Queen, 10, 7, and 3) in the five community cards and player A has in the hole (ace of hearts and queen of clubs), and Player B has in the hole (jack of diamonds,and 9 of spade). who is the winner?,and please explain why player A or B is the winner.thankyou

I get a lot of off-topic questions, but this one seemed perversely far afield. (Even though I knew the answer: Player B, right?) Only when I pulled up the entry did I realize that the comment directly above it was a leftover spam ad for “seven card stud x play poker online x free texas holdem…” So the new “question” was really comment spam designed to boost exposure to the first comment spam.

It was meta-spam.

On one hand, I was sort of impressed. The spamming system either kept track of everywhere it placed its first spam and went back for a follow-up (months later, it seems), or searched the web for copies of the first spam and tacked on the second.

Here’s to you, Mr. Spammer, for a hard day’s coding. Now go to hell.

Hiring a “script doctor”

QandA, So-Called Experts

I just got to LA a few months ago. I have written a few screenplays, well received from a manager, producer and teachers at my college. But have not landed an agent or manager, yet. I am writing a new script, it’s a hard write but very rewarding. It not only has commercial appeal but I think it is my step in the right direction.

A fellow writer suggested this script doctor to me, just to help me after I got through the “grunt” of my script and really help me polish it. I have tried workshops and things like that with my other scripts, but I do not find them very effective. I figure I would rather take the money and give it to a pro, get a one on one meeting with them and get good notes, of course do the re-writes myself, but getting someone else to look at it and help. My friend the writer tells me he would not send anything out before it goes through her. He swears by her. I think I might try it. Any advice about going to a script doctor?

–Silla Desade
Los Angeles

“Script doctor” generally means something different in the industry, so I want to draw a distinction between the kind of script doctor you’re talking about and the kind of script doctor Variety would talk about.

In the industry, a script doctor is an established screenwriter with a bunch of credits who comes in on a project shortly before production and does a rewrite to fix some specific, nagging problems. (Or, depending on your perspective, destroys the things that made the project unique.) Steve Zaillian is a highly-regarded script doctor. Arguably, I could be considered a script doctor, because I’ve done a fair number of these 23rd-hour emergency jobs. But no one’s business card reads “script doctor.” It’s a specific task within screenwriting, but not really a profession in-and-of itself.

A lot of times, the work you do on these projects is described as “surgical,” which fits well with the script doctor moniker. Generally, you’re not rewriting the whole script. You’re fixing a few key sections that aren’t working.

The person your friend is recommending to you may or may not be a screenwriter. In some cases, it could be someone analogous to a literary editor, who goes through a text and helps “clean it up” before publication. If so, great. Good writers are not always good proofreaders, and it’s important to have sharp eyes looking over your work.

If this person is truly going to rewrite your script, however, I have to question the legitimacy of your career aspirations. Screenwriting isn’t about banging out a first draft and letting someone else make it shine. If you really have limitations in a given area — dialogue, plotting, whatever — you need a writing partner, not a self-styled guru.

Bringing a ringer for a pitch

Pitches, QandA

Would a producer frown on a writer bringing in a ringer to a pitch meeting?  I am the absolute WORST pitcher on the planet.  Could I bring in a friend of mine who is excellent at pitching to do the dirty work for me?  Is this even acceptable?

–Gary

Nope. Not unless your friend is going to be writing it with you.

Believe me, I recognize the fallacy of expecting a writer — whose principal talent is sitting alone in a room for hours on end — to suddenly be talkative and entertaining when pitching a project. Most writers, self included, would much rather toil away in happy isolation. But producers and studio execs want to hear from the writers themselves. So we put on our least-wrinkled clothes, practice what we’re going to say, and try not to make asses of ourselves in pitch meetings.

My standard advice for any pitch: Pretend you just saw the best movie ever, and you want to convince your friend (the producer) why she should see it. Try it with a few real movies and you’ll see that you naturally hop from high point to high point, and don’t dwell a lot on the underlying logic or subplots. That’s a pitch.