Barri Evins begins the next informal by quoting “the great Val Kilmer,” as he quoted George Lucas (and I am not quoting directly here):  A movie is a success or failure from the minute we solidify the concept.  Execution is only 50%.  (As translated by Kilmer, “If you don’t want to see Arnold Schwartzenegger pregnant, you ain’t gonna go to the movie.”)

Ideas are the lifeblood of Hollywood, and you must have an idea file, literally, in your computer, in your brain — you must be constantly noticing things and noting them for ideas and stuffing them into your idea file — you don’t have to figure it out now, just tuck it away for later.

Amy interjects here to point out that this is the key to your life.  Pay attention.  (Barri is now about to vomit because here she is, condensing her entire three-day development seminar into the next hour-and-a-half, and Amy is calling it the key to your life.  Will it live up to the hype?)

If you want to make a living selling spec scripts, you are a gambler.  You gamble huge chunks of your time on ideas that you hope you can sell and make enough money to live.  So here are Barri’s three tests of whether your idea is marketable, and how to choose your next idea to write.

The first litmus test:  Is it a puppet show?  Making movies is the most expensive way ever invented to tell stories — there are many, many other ways to tell stories.  It could be a poem, it could be a novel.  So how do you know?

1.  Does it have a hero we can root for, trying to achieve a tangible goal — love, success, getting the girl, saving the world — despite obstacles (conflict) that get in the hero’s way.  If it doesn’t have that, it might be a puppet show.

Does it have conflict, is it cool, does it have a clever twist, is it unique or surprising in some way, something that intrigues, is it visceral — will it make you want to scream out at the screen (”don’t do it!”), well up, laugh out loud, etc.  Are you burning to tell this story?  Is it not what you know but what you know deeply and emotionally?

2.  Is there an audience?  Find out, pitch it to everyone you know or meet.  (Not just your friends and family.  Pitch it to strangers — if you can hold a stranger’s attention for a couple of minutes, you’ve got a movie).

3.  Is it pitchable?  Especially when you are selling your spec script, it will help you if it’s pitchable (rather than execution dependent).

[Amy jumps in here to say that the mentors are not saying not to write that little personal film.  We’re talking here about how to pick the script that is going to advance your career in an ever-shrinking market.  This is the reality of the game.  Get in the game first, and then you can write your own ticket.]

Finally, know your strengths.  Don’t write crap just because you think you can sell it.  Development execs can tell immediately if you wrote it just to sell it, if your heart isn’t in it.  They know when you’re trying to shove yourself into a box in order to be commercial.

Next:  Your ideas are precious.  They are yours.  You love them like children.  You need to find a way to distance yourself so you can evaluate your ideas in a bigger world.  Fortunately, Barri has a system.  And I was going to share it with you here . . . but I think some things ought to be saved for your actual retreat experience . . . when you come to CineStory.

I have just walked in on the morning’s informal — just had to have that extra hour of sleep this morning, so sue me — and I am hearing Philip Eisner talking about what a writing career is.  You are writing for the purpose of a movie being made, you are not working only for yourself, you do not have control — unless you are writing, shooting, starring, doing it entirely yourself — even if you’re Robert Rodriguez and working with a skeletal crew — you have to realize that you are talking about an endeavor that involves 50 people, marketing, enormous sums of money.  If you want a career as a writer, you are going to be a prostitute.  It’s up to you to decide what kind of prostitute.  You can be a hooker.  You can be a high class call girl, decide what you’ll do, and what you won’t do.  Phil, himself, will do most things.  Then there are other things that he will do — but they’re extra.  (I’m not doing it justice, but you get the idea.)

Phil is a writer who is welcome on the set, because he will sit down and do a re-write on the set, the best re-write he can possibly do.  In one case, the studio wanted a new ending.  He tried and he tried and he tried, but he got to a point where he was out of ideas, he just couldn’t give them what they wanted.  He told them so, he said they would have to get someone else.  He was heartbroken, but he couldn’t do anything else.  The exec called his agent, Lisa Callamaro, they felt they were in an awkward position.  She talked it over with him, he told her he just didn’t have anything, and she gave them the okay to get another writer.  Phil was ready to pack up and go home (he was on location in London), but the producers said no, they wanted him to say, and his wife joined him and they stayed for the rest of the shoot.  He preserved his relationship with the producers and, more importantly, he preserved his credit on the film.  All in illustration of the point that it pays not to be a diva, not to throw a hissy fit when things aren’t going the way you want them to.

Clea has just called an end to the session, and I — who came in late, as noted above — am realizing that the theme of this session has been that screenwriting is not about sitting in your room and writing and writing and writing.  Screenplays are blueprints of movies, and we are all in screenwriting to see our movies made.  As Lisa just said, there are lots of working writers who never see their work on the screen.  They may be making a living, but they are sad.  We are in the business to make movies.

Now we get to the heart of the matter — the one-on-one meetings.

As this is my first year as staff at a CineStory retreat, this is my first time being on this side of the table — I was assigned three scripts to read, and now it is my job to give these writers notes.

I was just a little panicked.  I mean, you work and you work and you work on learning to be in a meeting and listen to notes with equanimity — Meg, Sheila and Joe spent more than two hours on this issue alone on Saturday — how not to be defensive.  But when you’re on the other side of the table, you have to worry about not being offensive!  (Well, studio execs don’t have to worry about that, but we here at CineStory pride ourselves on having compassion for the poor writer.)

So what if I really hate a script?

I sought guidance from some of CineStory’s mentors, and I searched my soul.  Is it just not my cup of tea?  Is it a genre that doesn’t interest me?  Is it a story that offends me personally?  Is it a structural problem?  Or is there truly no story there?

It turns out these are all legitimate issues to address in the meeting.  My job is to help the writer find the story he or she wants to tell.  So if I hate a script, the first question for me to ask a writer is, “What is the story you are telling here?”  It might turn out that the writer is seeing a totally different story from what I am seeing on the page.  In that case, it will be my job to help the writer actually tell the story intended.  (That is what I am hoping for.)

On the other hand, what if it’s the worst case scenario?  What if the writer really wanted to write this the way it came out?  And I think it’s just plain bad?  Then, my job will be to move on to, “What else have you got?  What’s your next story?”

This is very much against my instinct.  My gut desperately wants to shake someone and say, “What were you thinking???”  My writerly mind desperately wants to say, “Okay, if this is really what you want to write — here’s the way I would do it.”  (In all fairness, the writer could take this entire screenplay and do it in the first 20 pages, and then go on to tell a different story entirely.  Which, if I received this job as an assignment, is how I would handle it.)  BUT THAT’S NOT MY JOB.

Luckily, I got to warm up today with a project I really did like.  The story had some big structural problems, so I started out by asking the writer to identify for me the spine — the inciting incident, the plot points, etc.  The structural issues immediately became clear to the writer, and suddenly, we were spitballing ideas back and forth and the writer was re-structuring the script on the spot.  That was exciting.

So now I know I can be in a meeting on this side of the table.  And I will practice Zen coverage for the rest of the week.

The next installment of the Clip Show began with Pam’s special guest Jim Robinson, a writer/filmmaker/new media consultant, who presented us with the opening of Fight Club.  Jim’s two criteria for a good movie are (a) does he want to see it again, and (b) is he mad he didn’t write it himself?  The opening sequence of Fight Club piles so much info on so fast, and does it with excellent production and sound design.

Lisa Callamaro followed with The Verdict, where we see Paul Newman as the broken down, ambulance-chasing lawyer.  The very first shot tells you so much about the character — it’s the middle of the day and he’s playing pinball and drinking.  Then we see the money come out and we see him hustling for work at funerals.  So you know right now that this character is dead inside, and this movie is about selling things.  Also, the opening shots are filled with imagery evoking the Catholic church — which is going to turn out to be the antagonist of the story.

Jonathan Fernandez shares the opening scene from Animal House, in which we are immediately introduced to Larry, the character that we will most relate to, who does not fit in to either of the fraternities — but he will be our eye into the wacky world of this movie.

Part 3 of the Clip Show picked up after the new media panel discussion.

Barri Evins brought in Three Days of the Condor, which she tells us is directly related to North by Northwest and The Bourne Identity — all three have the same story dna.  Within the first seven minutes of the movie, we find out so many character traits about Robert Redford’s character — he’s quick, he’s funny, he’s nerdy, he’s really smart — and he trusts.  The movie is about who we can trust.

Mark Fergus brings a classic into the conversation with The Searchers.  John Wayne’s character is extremely complex — he’s closed and bottled up, he’s full of rage, he’s racist — yet he’s this family’s protector.  If you look closely at John Ford’s filmmaking, you see how Wayne is constantly, visually separated from the family.

Nana Greenwald, it turns out, has stolen Amy Salko-Robertson’s perennial choice, Harold and Maude, so she announces that the two of them are sharing.  Amy pipes up that Harold and Maude is such a great film that no matter what Pam’s clip assignment is, Harold and Maude is always her best choice.  In this case, I have to agree — Harold and Maude has one of the best openings of any movie ever, IMHO.  There in the opening, we have the whole story — Harold is rich, he has everything, but he’s morbid and depressed, and for all the things he has, his life is empty, something we see right away in his lack of relationship with his mother.  Harold is the anti-theme of the movie, where as Maude, an 80-year-old Holocaust survivor who has nothing, is full of life and love, she is the theme.  Harold learns from Maude how to love life.

In addition to the Clip Show, Pam covered a lot of territory today.

We got to meet a young screenwriting scholarship winner at Idyllwild Arts who gets to take part in the retreat and work with mentors.  We were introduced to Liz Alani, who runs the Final Draft Big Break competition, and she, in turn, introduced us to Jordan and Terry, two of the Big Break winners.

Clea Frost was introduced as CineStory’s new executive director.  Amazingly, Clea came to CineStory for the first time last year, as a finalist.  And now look at her!  But she sure remembers what it’s like to be a newbie, and how challenging the retreat can be.

Lisa Callamaro, chair of CineStory’s board of directors, introduces the CineStory Screenwriting Awards Grand Prize Winner, Nino del Pesco, and without much ceremony, hands him AN ENVELOPE.  (We all know what that means.)

Pam then talked about the CineStory community, and how people come to us looking for writers and material.  By way of illustration, she introduced Stephanie Green, a former screenwriting student of hers, who is now a director.  As a baby director who has hooked up with a hot producer, Steph is actively looking for a screenplay for her first feature.  She gave us some great advice:  go to short film festivals, research the up and coming directors who are appearing in them.  These new directors are all looking for material to make their first feature.  It’s another avenue to pursue in your career.

Then there were more clips — which deserve a posting all their own — and we moved across the way to the dining hall for dinner.

What then transpired for me personally was the high-tech Lucy & Ricky show, as I tried to connect up with my honey via e-mail from my computer to his BlackBerry, or stalking around the dining hall, and in widening circles outside, searching for bars on my cell phone.  (I finally found him, but not before I stood out in the middle of the street semaphoring my arms at his oncoming xenon headlights.)

After dinner, a fascinating panel discussion about new media . . . which deserves a post all its own.  Later.

The Clip Show — ’08 Edition — Part 1

This year’s assignment for the Clip Show was opening scenes that powerfully introduce main characters.

Meg LeFauve starts the ball rolling with the opening of Erin Brockavich, in which Erin is interviewing for a job in a medical office for which she has no training or experience.  Meg’s response to this year’s assignment is that it’s a craft question.  The writer has packed a whole lot of information into that opening speech.  We immediately learn her entire past, that she’s someone who is judged but fights for what’s right and what she believes in.  This could have been an issue movie, in which case it would have been a complete snooze.  Instead, it is about who she is, and the specificity of her character is established on the first page of the script.  Meg cautions us not to confuse situation with character.  The situation may inform and test the character, but each specific character reacts differently to the situation.  Don’t rely on situation to create character.

Joe Forte brings us the opening of Raging Bull, reminding us that originally the film opened with LaMotta in the ring, in his prime, but that version of the film didn’t work.  Then they got the idea to start it at the end — with the aging LaMotta practicing his silly presentation — which immediately pulls us into the movie.  How did this guy end up in this situation?  Then the film goes back in time and we are sucked in.

Philip Eisner shows the opening of The Exorcist, which does not follow the main character but a secondary character.  The long opening sequence on the archeological dig shows us a lot of ominous images that pay off later in the film.  He also talks about how long this film takes to get to the horror part.  It goes through all the scientific reasons possible why this girl is the way she is, and it’s a long time before you get to the vomit scene.  He says in the horror genre world, there’s a lot of pressure to get to the goo, but you want to hold off as long as possible.

Michelle Sy’s pick is the opening of The Bourne Identity.  Bourne is found floating in the ocean, bullets in his back, he doesn’t know who he is.  Immediately, the who, what, when why and how of the entire film are set up.

Regina Lee shares with us the opening of American Pie as an example of a perfectly structured film with a great opening that sets up not only the main character but also the character of the father, who is going to be very important also.  She talks about comedy as a genre, and knowing how to pitch it.  Execs want to know not only what the concept is, but whether they want to work with you, the craftsman.

This year, the clips were divided up into several parts over the course of the days.  I’ll be back with another installment later.

Whew.  That’s all I can say.  Whew.

I spent yesterday afternoon on a lovely deck in Idyllwild, listening to the combined wisdom of Meg LeFauve, Sheila Hanahan Taylor and Joe Forte, collected over their entire careers thus far producing and writing movies, distilled down into four hours of information.

It’s a powerful brew.

But let me backtrack for a moment.

This is a retreat of firsts — first year of partnership with Final Draft, first year having the Big Break winners in attendance — biggest year ever, with 21 writers in attendance.  So, for the first time, Pam decided to add an optional pre-session, a brief seminar to help writers get the most out of the retreat proper.

It turned out to be a bit more than that.

So here are some of the highlights, in no particular order:

This is a dress rehearsal for many things you will experience in your career.  How you handle the moments that will come up for you in meeting with your mentors — and in your future meetings with producers and studio execs — dictates how your career will move forward.  Be open, don’t be defensive.

The mentors spent a lot of time talking about defensiveness in its many forms.  Be clear that you are not here to be “coronated.”  You are not here for adulation.  You are here because you already know you are a good writer (you wouldn’t be here otherwise), and you also know your script needs work.  Don’t be offended when the mentors leap in enthusiastically with, “Let’s fix it!  It totally doesn’t work!  Let’s fix it!”  (Tone of voice here is everything — Meg is jumping up and down like a kid in a candy store when she says this.)

So take good notes, and listen hard.  And it will get hard.  Meg reminded us of the Zen saying, “Lean into the sharp point.”  When the notes start to push you, to make you feel wiggly inside, stay with it, push through it — and that’s when you’re really going to get somewhere.

Pay special attention when you find your defensiveness coming up.  That may be the piece of your script that most closely touches your personal stuff.  That may be where you lost your nerve in confronting your own emotions.

If you find yourself saying, “I wrote it that way because . . .” over and over again, you’re not listening.  Shut up and start taking notes.

In this rarified atmosphere, the mentors are here to help you write the script you want to write — something that rarely happens in this business.  So one thing you as the writer need to know is your own intention.  Why are you writing this story?  What is your story’s thematic?  A mentor in a meeting may take your story totally off in another direction — know what your core thing is so you can articulate it clearly and keep telling the story you want to tell.  However, the mentors are producers and working writers — they are also bringing their business minds to the table.  A lot of information they bring you, and ways in which they may help you develop your story, are based on realities and limits of the business.  This kind of information will be most valuable in helping you choose the next script you will write.

Sheila suggested that you come up with five questions of your own about your script.  Don’t be afraid to ask your own questions.  If you think your mentor is totally off in the wrong direction, ask where he or she emotionally connected.  That could be a place to start the conversation.  Your mentor will likely ask you where you most connected, what your favorite moment in your story is.  That will give the mentor a big clue about why you wrote the script and which direction you are going.

About two hours into the session, the conversation became free and wide-ranging.  There was much about the business, the differences between indie and studio films, the concept of “concept,” which can be very difficult to get, understanding tone, and how to find yours.

Well, I could go on and on.  There was so much to chew on!  You’ll just have to get yourself to the next retreat and hear it for yourself.

I’m presently sitting checking in the rest of the writers, getting ready for the main orientation session.  More later.

It’s retreat time again, and your humble correspondent will be bringing it to you, live and uncensored.  But wait — before the retreat itself, there’s the prep session for the retreat (the Primer, as CineStory diva Pam Pierce calls it) — and before that, yesterday there was the Final Draft awards party at the Knitting Factory in Hollywood.

I love the sweaty smell of schmoozing writers.  Mingling wantonly, I overheard snippet after fascinating snippet — “we had a great meeting” — “Spielberg might be interested” — “my agent says it’s practically a done deal” (how many times have we all heard that?).  A very nice actor/writer/consultant actually tried to schmooze me!  (Boy, was that a letdown for him.)

CineStory’s own Barri Evins was there, a one-woman force of nature, as usual, and introduced me to Blake Snyder — how cool is that?  (I actually giggled and blushed.)

Why were we there?  CineStory is partners with Final Draft nowadays, dontcha know, and two of the Big Break winners, Terry O’Brien and Jordan Thomas, will be joining us at the retreat next week.  Terry and Jordan gave lovely acceptance speeches (loved your tie, Jordan).  And, of course, two of the Big Break judges this year, Blake Snyder (Save the Cat) and Dana Stevens (Life or Something Like It) were recruited through CineStory relationships.

Stephen J. Cannell was Final Draft’s Hall of Fame honoree, and gave an inspiring speech about sticking to your dream.  He offered two pieces of advice:  be nice to your agent, and write every day.  Who could argue?

All in all, it was a very ritzy event with little skewers of chicken satay, an open bar, and there was even an ad hoc mime (every great party has one these days).  Now I am all warmed up and ready for . . . the session before the retreat.  Saturday will bring us a first for CineStory:  Meg LeFauve, Sheila Hanahan Taylor and Joe Forte will be doing a workshop on how to get the most out of the retreat itself.  Do we have rockin’ mentors or what?  Stay tuned for the full report on Saturday.

blogged by Artemis

With less than a week until Retreat 08 kicks off, there are some exciting additions to this year’s program. Here’s a taste:

Prep Day: for the first time ever attendees have the option of spending an afternoon getting fighting fit. Run by our generous mentors Meg LeFauve (producer/writer and former head of Jodie Foster’s Egg Pictures), Sheila Hanahan Taylor (producer: Practical Pictures) and Joe Forte (writer: FIREWALL), prep day is designed to help each writer get the most out of their retreat experience. It takes place on Saturday October 25th.

Each year CineStory runs a screenwriting competition like no other. It’s unique because each of the semifinalists are invited to the CineStory Writer’s Retreat - four days of heaven in the beautiful mountains of Idyllwild, California.

Whether winner, finalist or semifinalist, all retreat attendees get four 90-minute one-on-one sessions with CineStory mentors and staff, all of whom are practicing and respected industry professionals. During these meetings attendees can discuss everything from the script(s) they submitted for feedback to jumpstarting their writing careers.

When not meeting in one-on-one sessions, writers participate in mentor moderated “informal rooms”, which cover everything from pitching like a pro to the state of filmmaking in the digital age. In addition, mentors and writers gather for meals, drinks, film screenings and other special events.

There’s no better prize and no other way to get there. So enter today.

Earlybird Deadline: November 16th, 2008 ($40)