Arousal Feedback, Draft 3 -- Last Call!

Only two more days are left for all you feedback readers to send in your critiques! You've already had over three and a half weeks, so no excuses now... (Draft 2 readers are absolved, but everyone else should form a line over here with their hands out, palms up.)

Seriously, if you want to send in your feedback for Arousal, you've got until Wednesday evening @ midnight...

(Ray gets an extension to Sunday because he's cute and cuddly.)

Movie + cell phone + thug = unhappYness

This Christmas day, my wife and I went to see The Pursuit of Happyness. Good film, very much enjoyed it. Will Smith flexes his dramatic acting skills in a head-shaking true story.

However, this dude sat next to me. He was generally quiet and unobtrusive, which is always a blessing. But the most amazing thing happens about a half hour in...

First, his cell phone rings...
Second, he answers the cell phone...
Third, he continues speaking—not whispering—to the caller.

I was stunned. I stared at him, hoping his peripheral vision would feel my steely gaze, but to no avail.

My wife almost lost it. She leaned over and said, in a loud whisper, "You need to hang that up right now!" He ignored her and kept talking.

I sat there. Fuming. Certain things should be common sense. Not turning off your cell phone in a movie theatre is being pretty think-skinned, but (barely) forgivable. But answering a phone call? And then not whispering??? It's so far beyond the pale that my wife and I were speechless.

This... thug wasn't mostly listening on his call, so I told myself that the next time he speaks... and he did—

Turning to him, I said—in a regular voice—"Dude, seriously—you're talking on a cell phone. In a movie. Get real." (Should he not take my reproach gracefully enough, I at least wanted everyone within earshot to know I wasn't being nasty about it, just appealing to his sense of decency.)

He looked at me, for a long moment during which he must have thought he had a right to be offended. And then he hung up. Nothing else happened for the rest of the film.

Though I'm not really for capital punishment, it might be the only way some thugs will ever learn.

AROUSAL: The Story So Far

I thought it would be fun to do a clip show to track the progress of Arousal from its first baby steps. Here goes:

OCTOBER 2005
A discussion with a fellow filmmaker about gratuitous sex in films fires up my engines. I ruminate.

NOVEMBER 2005
Still mulling over the discussion about gratuitous sex scenes, I stumble across a related concept which might be a cool idea for a film. I run it by my wife for medical plausibility and it seems feasible.

DECEMBER 2005–JANUARY 2006
Think some more. Ultimately, I decide the idea is worth spending time turning into a script.

FEBRUARY 2006
I write the Origin of my Arousal.

In trying to get my head around who the characters are, to clearly picture them in my head, I start trolling Myspace for some random souls to be my visual placeholders, which I talk about in The Beauty of Myspace Casting. If you've already read the script, can you suss out who's who in the picture at left just on their eyes alone?

Research begins in earnest. Writing a horror film means I need to know the genre, to anticipate the audience's expectations. I start adding films to my Netflix Queue. Here is my list as of today:

My Netflix Queue for Horror Research
Repulsion (When it's crossed off, I've seen it!)
The Vanishing
Wages of Fear
Diaboliques, Les
Come and See
Knife in The Water
Cabin Fever
Prophecy
Wrong Turn
Ju-on: The Grudge
Ringu
High Tension
Night of the Living Dead
Dawn of the Dead
Saw
Signs
The Shining
The Haunting
The Innocents
Eyes Without a Face
House of 1,000 Corpses
Shaun of the Dead
Cannibal Holocaust

Films I've already seen
Jaws
Blood Simple
Deliverance
28 Days Later
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

MARCH–MAY 2006
While toggling work on other projects, including being a Script Super on a feature, I think about Arousal in all my free time. Daydream is more like it... I wake up thinking about it, I go to sleep thinking about it, I eat with the TV off and drive while thinking about it. Could all this be considered billable time?

JUNE 2006
It's time to start hammering the errant ideas into a story of some kind. Do I tell one person's story, or many? Do I tell a nonsequential narrative like Jackie Brown or The Limey? How should the story end? How can this film be different than all the others that came before it while still be fresh and surprising? At last, I feel it's time to get Aroused, so I spend most of June fine tuning my five page single-spaced outline.

At some point in the mix, I write about Throwing Rocks at a Tree, which is getting your characters in a mess, make them think they find a way out, but put them in an even bigger mess. Wash and repeat.

JULY–SEPTEMBER 2006
The dam bursts! All my many months of troubleshooting story problems culminates in what feels like divine will. Draft 1 is written within 10 days (spaced out over 35 days), and I provide updates at 14%, 19%, 22%, 39%, Halftime, and 67%. At 77%, I talk about the coming denoument of the plot, and at 83%, I talk about Shane Black's good news/bad news theory of action. Not surprisingly, the five page outline I had started with changes a lot as the story is translated into finer details. Character motivations pull the story down unexpected paths, plot holes once glossed over in the outline become gaping holes not easily spackled over.

As Draft 1 comes to a close, I throw out an invitation to chat with me via Instant Messenger as I type out the final pages of Draft 1 (which haven't changed much in Draft 3!)

On September 6th, 2006, the news becomes official: Draft 1 is 100% complete!

SEPTEMBER 2006
I go over that first draft and am generally pleased how much of it I like. Sure, it's got flaws and is nowhere near done, but I don't feel like I'm going to have to rewrite it from the ground up. After an two hour extension for my self-imposed deadline, I announce that Draft 2 is officially ready for scrutiny! My growing list of readers has queued up to read this draft and I implore them all to be brutally honest.

OCTOBER 2006
The first of the feedbacks trickle in... and one reader in particular, while entertained for the first half, is so shocked by the degree of violence in the second half that she stops reading it. Had I not prepared my readers for the anguish within? To offset that kind of reaction, I issued an Arousal Warning.

Feedback is an indispensible tool of the trade and, while I half-expected some adverse reactions from those who don't like gore, I had also not expected any reactions that severe. It got me thinking about what exactly I was aiming for with my story. Some people like gore for its own sake, while others consistently prefer suspense over gore. Was I writing The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or Scream? If I were showing gore for its own sake, then that would be—technically, at least—gratuitous. And if that were true, had I lost sight of my original intentions? And if so, was I bad, sick and wrong for that choice? Thus I had a long internal (and external) debate about Gore vs. Suspense.

I always try to collect as much feedback from my readers as possible to allow the proper context for the feedback as a whole: if 1 of 20 people hate the story, I can probably ignore that 1 person's feedback. If all 20 people hate the story, I need to take heed. Because I have relatives in town, I extend the deadline not just once, but twice.

NOVEMBER 2006
For a second draft, I am happy to see a lot of really positive feedback. There is also much constructive feedback, so I compile it all and let it percolate in my head for a few weeks.

NOVEMBER–DECEMBER 2006
As I begin rewriting Draft 3, I remember what Harvey Weinstein had said about Clerks, so I pay particular attention to Arousal's first 30 pages by dissecting it into a whammy chart.

DECEMBER 2006
Knowing that I need a little extra time, I give myself an extension (my readers expect nothing less!) and yesterday, I decide it's time to put the pen down: Draft 3 was done.

JANUARY 2007 (projected)
While some people think there are three stages to a film—pre-production, production, and post-production—there are actually only two: making a film, and selling a film. For scripts, this truth becomes glaringly obvious. Now that I've written this script, I expect to follow my own advice in submitting scripts to Hollywood. Oh joy of joys.

I'm done getting Aroused!

That's it. I'm done. I'm shagged out. I'm spent... draft 3 of Arousal is complete. (For now.)

I made several improvements from Draft 2, thanks in great part from my feedback readers. Arousal is still at a barely passable 120 pages, but it'll have to do for now. I'm sure that, with enough skullsweat, I could cut out another 8-11 pages, but I've memorized almost every page by now—which means it's time for a break.

Maybe I'll work on Safe Harbors over the holidays, or maybe my as yet untitled romantic comedy about reincarnation.

Thanks for all the great comments. I know some of you wanted to read the last draft, but preferred to wait for Draft 3; if you still want to read Draft 3, please contact me!

Arousal Draft #3: 2 day extension!

I know, mea culpa, because I waited until a week before Arousal's draft 3 deadline to begin rewriting in earnest. Still, though—in my defense, I had printed out everyone's feedback and kept it all in mind so that when I did start rewriting, I wasn't beginning in a total vacuum. A stitch in time and all that.

Page length has been pretty amusing to observe with each successive draft:

Draft #1: 107 pages (31 Aug 06)
Draft #2: 117 pages (16 Nov 06)
Draft #3: 125 pages (17 Dec 06)

In my own view, a script's length (and here I mean only a reader's script bandied about for a studio sale) really hits the mark at 109 pages—109 is enough pages to develop a feature length story, but doesn't look too daunting to read on a Saturday night because of the twisted pyschology behind 99 cent pricing: if you had a choice between reading a 110 page script and a 109 page script, you'd probably choose the 109 pager because that 1 page difference feels much shorter.

While I was pretty happy that draft #1 came in so svelte, and luke warm that draft #2 was longer, you can imagine my face while looking at my behemouth of 125 pages. Good Christ, I'm not James Cameron yet!

So axe some of it I must. I'm trying to cut between 6-8 pages (leaving me with a decent 117-119 pages). That's a lot to strike out, but it's possible to excise a line here, a word there, a paragraph here, a redunancy there... I'm constantly amazed how much repetition can be removed to make each remaining word really pack a punch.

This part of the process is where you really question the need for scenes (indeed, the need for every word of every paragraph in the script), and where I feel the most important work is accomplished, where the script's sparkle finally begins to show. It's painful because you've got to kill some babies along the way, but the script is almost always the better for it.

Draft #3 new deadline: Sunday, December 17, midnight.

Arousal's Whammy Chart

The first time Harvey Weinstein saw Clerks, he walked out: "It looks like hell and everyone's talking and nothing happens in the first five minutes."*

That painfully honest feedback was bouncing around in my head as I wrote Arousal's second draft. Weinstein wasn't wrong—generally, you know instantly whether you're going to like a movie or not. Not to say that rules can't be broken, but Clerks is the exception because Kevin Smith is endowned with a unique brand of whimsey.

Storytelling is, at its core, about sales. However, instead of selling a tangible product, you're selling an experience, a feeling. Because the key to sales is getting your foot in the door, you have to do or say something which grabs your potential customer's attention for the first 10 seconds. Once you've won that 10 second battle, you have to do or say something that buys you another 30 seconds, and then a minute, and then 10 minutes, then a half hour, then an hour. It's about small battles, carefully planned and executed.

For screenplays, this translates into pages: each page is a battle. Of course, each scene is a battle, too, but pages are a physical delimiter and if you can just... get them... to turn... that... page... YES! They'll read a little more... and then a little more. And look—a new scene! Why, what happens in that scene? Oh, I have to turn the page again? Okay... And so on. Pages are the small battles that win the war.

Thus, the Whammy Chart. It's so easy to focus on the particulars of a scene, to weed out the plot implausibilities, correct the typos, the vapid dialogue, the stale characterization... and all the while, lose sight of how the script feels as a whole. This technique is mentioned in Writing Treatments that Sell, among other places. It measures the story's intensity rating on a page by page basis and provides a holistic viewpoint where a script's weak points (and strong points) stand out immediately.

Using Excel, this is the Whammy Chart I completed for Arousal's Act I. I had been concerned not enough conflict was happening to get readers to turn the page, and I was right. This is the amended Whammy chart, so you can't really see what the original story looked like, but the first draft had a lot of 2's and 3's in the first 15 pages. I pictured myself sitting in the audience with Harvey Weinstein as he assailed the screen, "Nothing happens in the first five minutes!!! Killing... me..."

Thanks to my Whammy Chart, I revamped Arousal to make the threat more real in the first 3 pages. In theory, the palpable danger should give the reader enough whiplash to want to read until the 10 page mark, where something else side-swipes them. That should kick them to the end of page 30... and so on. Evidently, readers agreed.

On a micro scale, the Whammy Chart is also useful as a mental guide: whenever I'm done with a draft, I weigh the pace and tension happening across each page, and—starting with page 1—try to move the paragraphs around so that the bottom of each page ends with a mini-cliffhanger. I am, literally, trying to create a page-turner. No novelist can ever pull that trick out of his tool chest!

* Harvey was told to watch Clerks again and "keep thinking 37". Miramax eventually bought Clerks for $227,000.

Readers have been Aroused...

Here's a sampling of the feedback I've gotten about my feature screenplay Arousal:

I was held captive throughout and didn't put it down.... The story line and plot kept my attention from page one to the end. —J.M.

Gross, disgusting and horrifying... An entertaining read.... I read it from start to finish nonstop because the story moved along so well.... definitely marketable. —G.G.

A solid script that stands a good chance of being a successful film.... the story had me fully engaged by the end. —R.C.

Huge potential.... has enough sex/nudity to get you 3 consecutive NC-17 ratings without parole. —D.R.

With the right actors, even on a shoe-string budget, this baby will become a cult classic because it is well-written and entertaining.... one of the finest horror films I've ever read... I would buy the DVD for $15.99 if it went direct to DVD. —J.L.

Marvelous, simply marvelous. I love your writing. —M.S.

You have the three major items that make a horror film for me: gore, nudity, and the use of alcohol or drugs.... it kicked into overdrive and you had my undivided attention. —L.I.

A really interesting and good script.... the ending was pretty awesome. —W.R.

I'm not usually a fan of zombie movies, but this one is original enough that it's more than just a zombie movie. —S.C.

There were moments when I jumped, moments when I exclaimed, "Oh my God!", and moments when I was so scared that I looked over my own shoulder. —C.L.

I enjoyed it. Especially the ending! Brilliant. —A.R.

Intrigued by the premise... —S.D.

You are a sick sick puppy and obviously have some issues to work out. Having said that, I must say I loved all the really dark and disturbing aspects of the script. —P.N.

I really got into the script... never got bored. —T.T.

Thrilling... —A.S.

I was trepidatious, nervous, nail-biting and excited-scared... —Z.B.

As you can see, the response to Arousal's early draft is overwhelmingly positive, which is always nice to hear because it means my many months of "dark room ponderings" haven't been completely for naught...

However, not all Arousal's feedback is laudative, and the constructive comments are an ideal jumping off point to hone Arousal into something even better. Reader feedback is like a film's test audience—it identifies which parts are universally loved... and universally loathed. Certainly, I have a vision of the story I want to tell and I want to get as close to that vision as possible, but I also don't want to tell a story that makes every reader throw the script across the room after reading the final FADE OUT.

A great story is like a musical piece—it should make almost every reader feel some sort of resonance by the end, even if that resonance is dissonant only to them. Not everyone is going to appreciate acid jazz or house music or thrash metal, but they should be able to see there's something appealing about that brand of whimsey to other people. Brazil, for example, has an ending you either love or hate—likewise, some readers are not going to like Arousal. My focus, then, is about how uneven that love/hate ratio is, and whether I can live with that margin.

One of the best uses for feedback is uncovering all the "false notes", the weak links in the chain which yank the reader out of the story: flat dialogue, clumsy plot development, improbable setups or payoffs, typos... all these jolt the reader and ruin the story's pace and tension. Thanks to all your wonderful feedback, most of those weak links have been mended, for which I'm extremely grateful; when you start to know a script inside out, your eye skips right over the most obvious problems. When we finally roll cameras next year, all you feedback readers can be assured a place on the IMDB as a story consultant! I couldn't have done it without you!!!

Saepa stilum vertas, iterum
quae digna legi sint scripturas.

Turn the stylus frequently if you wish to write
something worthy of being reread.

—Horace, Satires, vol. 1, X, p. 72-73

Last call for AROUSAL feedback

Attention Feedback Readers!

I'm compiling all my feedback for Arousal and would love to hear your comments if you haven't sent them in yet. In this busy world, I know it can be daunting to write a commentary sufficiently meeting your own expectations, but if you can spare just five minutes to briefly tell me what you thought of Arousal, and specifically what you thought of the ending, I'd be very grateful. You've read Arousal by now, so why not jot down a few notes that might guide me in tackling Draft 3? (And Janey, you're exempt from this, so you know.)

By the way, I've gotten some excellent feedback so far. You are all the cat's meow. Or the bee's knees. Or something quaint. I love all your reactions, even the negative ones!

Finally, I'm shooting for Draft 3 to be complete by December 15. So start getting excited!

Arousal Feedback Extension!

"Holy shit! I still have to write that feedback for Ross!"
"Crapper—that feedback is due on Halloween??? I'm a goner!"
"There's no way I'll read 117 pages by tomorrow!!!"

If any of the above describes you, there's no reason for you to be scared, even if it is the day when the dead are meant to walk the earth...

I have family in town and am completely distracted and wouldn't be able to read feedback even if you gave it to me on time. Which is why I'm granting all you slackerheads another week to give me feedback on Arousal. (Latecomers: Arousal is my feature horror script I'm shooting in the spring and I'm offering a story consultant credit for anyone daring enough to give me their honest feedback.) On November 8, all my relatives fly back out of town and I'll be able to give all your wonderful comments the attention they deserve.

So congrats—your executioner got a rain check until November 8th @ midnight.

Lucky bastards.

Gore vs. Suspense

Had an epiphany of sorts last night about Arousal, in part due to a long email convo with the same person who had such ad adverse reaction to it last week. It shows you can always learn from the ones who don't like what you're doing.

Rather than tell you what this reader said, I'll just quote them:

The truth is, I felt conned. The beginning of your movie is really very good. I was trepitatious, nervous, nail biting and excited-scared. Then just completely fucking horrified and repulsed. The shift is really sudden and nasty. It suddenly becomes this whole other animal....

I believe subtle nuances make a good movie. The intimation of something frightening is much more interesting than the obvious.

Movies like Psycho are psychologically terrifying without being over the top visual.

Your movie, half way through, becomes something that moves from suggestively scary, to downright ugly. I couldn't watch it.

And my reply:

I have been pondering the nature of gratuitious elements in stories at length since our recent communications. The question you say—the "why?" factor—is the core of the issue, in my view. But instead of "Why does this element in the film exist?", the broader question might be better framed as "Why does this film exist?" Certain stories require certain elements: take those elements out, your movie won't make sense. If they can be taken out, then they're needless to the story, and thus gratuitous. If it's graphic sex or violence, then it's equivalent to watching porn or a snuff film. (See? I've been listening! tee hee)

My challenge from the start of this project was: how do I write a story including sex and violence but where none of the sex or violence is gratuitous? For the story, then, I would argue that the sex and violence are crucial to the development of my story...

However.

The story itself may be called gratuitious. That I cannot, in good faith, dispute. The story might even be called an excuse to show a lot of sex and violence. But no more so than the sex in Boogie Nights, right?

I forgot to add here that the answer to "Why does this film exist?" for Arousal is more commerical than artistic, i.e. I'm making this film to be financially successful, not really to make an artistic statement (there is a tiny artistic statement in there, but let's face it—it's a hack and slash film I want to sell so I can make enough money so I can do this full time).

Then I came to my small epiphany:

I wouldn't want to see Chainsaw Massacre, but I would see Scream. I'm finally starting to see your point now...

I'm sitting here kind of speechless, because I'm thinking of Session 9, and that film is almost entirely bloodless, but it's terrifying because everything is suggested. There could be ways to tone down the gore and even ramp up the tension. Jaws is another example which I'm sure you must be thinking of. Blair Witch, too.

In my scramble to gain attention and guarantee marketability, am I trying too hard by being so graphic? Session 9, a personal favorite, is so great because everything is left to the imagination. That got me thinking about Brad Anderson, the director of Session 9, Happy Accidents, and The Machinist, all great films which build a lot of suspense with a tiny amount of gore, if any at all.

Arousal, though, is in a different genre. It's more akin to 28 Days Later, Dawn of The Dead, Wolf Creek. It follows more in the tradition of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre than Scream, and that was a concscious choice, but I wonder now if some of the more extreme bits can be toned down to increase the suspense more.

Kevin Costner once said that acting is deciding whether or not to kiss someone—once you kiss them, it's action. Mostly, people prefer the former because there is still some question as to the outcome. A child covered in blood, standing 10 feet away and staring intently at you is probably more frightening than that same child violently attacking you because when he's just standing there, you don't know what the hell the he's going to do.

In the movie The Car, James Brolin has the demon car pull over, but the car does nothing. It just sits there. Parked. You can't see anything inside. There are no door handles. It's dark and menacing, a powerful black beast quietly preparing to pounce. Like waiting for Mulder and Skully to kiss, that delicious tension is endlessly watchable.

As I go into Draft #3, I'll be keeping this lesson firmly in mind. Since the story is, at its core, about how seeing sex and violence stirs us—or arouses us—from the numbness of everyday life, I'm unclear how much can be toned down. The town scene could certainly be revamped to insinuate rather than blungeoning the audience with an overt display of the macabre.

Warning to all feedback readers: I'm leaving town next week and won't be back until Monday evening, then 2 days later I have guests in town for two weeks. So if you want any kind of coherent reply and/or discussion, please get your feedback in within the week. Otherwise, you'll have to wait until after November 8.

Arousal WARNING!

I received an email from a feedback reader for Arousal who said they weren't finishing the script, that the script was a snuff film, and that they wanted to block me from their Myspace friends.

Wow.

I'm keeping this person anonymous because I don't wish to mock them or single them out—feedback is feedback. It's neither wrong nor right. In point of fact, this kind of reaction is ten times more valuable than laudative remarks and I'm trying to figure out why she had such a strong reaction, especially since I've received remarks like "I LOVED IT!" and "You're sick, but you have a good screenplay."

But it got me thinking... Arousal does have a lot of sex and violence in it. And I wrote it specifically so it would. I had hoped to make the storyline require sex and violence or else it wouldn't make any sense. How, for instance, can you tell a story like Boogie Nights without showing them shooting a porn? How can you show the erotic quandaries the protagonist faces in 9 1/2 Weeks without at least a few sex scenes? How can you not show Jake watching the dancing naked lady in Body Double?

So here are some words of warning to any of you feedback readers who haven't read the script yet:

• Arousal is a horror film—it is meant to get under your skin and yank your strings. If you don't have some kind of reaction to it, I haven't done my job.


• Arousal was written to be easily marketable (and easily filmable).


• Arousal has a lot of sex and a lot of violence.


• Arousal is about a hemorrhagic fever—a virus that makes you bleed from every orifice—so you will see a lot of blood.


• Arousal uses sex to explore different aspects of sexual arousal, but also to contrast sexual arousal with the clinical definition of arousal, which most people know as "fight or flight".


• When you combine sex and violence, you get rape. So of course, rape is going to be a recurring element.


• I love and respect my wife, my two cats, and everyone else, especially women—Arousal's gritty subject matter doesn't mean I'm a twisted homicidal snuff filmmaker. One need only read my yawner headstrong romantic drama 62 Blocks to Battery Park to know I originally didn't want to write horror films to make money. (I hasten to remind everyone that James Cameron's second try as director was Piranha 2. Not even Piranha 1, but Piranha 2!)


• Not everything written in the script will get to the screen—there are some horrifying scenes I threw in at the last moment that I'm unsure about because they are too extreme, and frankly, may be gratuitous. This is why I have feedback readers.

Consider yourself warned!

Arousal, Draft #2: Ready for scrutiny!

Draft #2 is shiny. Come and get it.

If you didn't get an email about the script in the last hour, email me at ross >at< rosspruden.com to get the script.

Arousal Draft #2: 2 hour extension!

I tried to get the most recent draft edited by deadline, but I'm still short a couple of hours. My new deadline is 2AM (2 hours from now). Watch this space...

Oh, for a few of you, I've lost your emails, so if you want to be a feedback reader, send me an email: ross >at< rosspruden.com

Here are the people whose emails appear to be eluding me:
* Kristen Brownell
* The Question Is Moot
* Will Entrekin

Arousal, Draft #1: COMPLETE!

Well, the beast is finally slayed. So I guess it's no surprise that what comes to mind is this stanza from Lewis Carroll's Jabberwocky:

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

Screenplays are a 100 meter dash compared to the marathon of writing a novel, but they can still leave you winded at the finish line. I wrote Arousal's first draft in about 10 days of actual writing (spread out over 35 days), but spent over two months plotting out Arousal's storyline... and came up with its concept over a year ago, come to think of it. If you count the endless hours of daydreaming I expended, I really spent more like 5 to 6 months "writing" this sucker.

But it's done. And during this morning's celebratory chat session at Infusion Cafe, mere seconds after I had typed the final "FADE TO BLACK", I had my first IM chat with the inimitable "Bookstar" Myspace addict, Will Entrekin. Will's most notorious character trait is how prolific he is. Come on, bro—save some words for the rest of us, will ya? You even put Kristen to shame. Anyway, good peeps. Sharp guy. His blog is somehow always interesting. Since I have a laptop now, I can finally participate in his annaul Academy Award commentary. Scha-weet!

Out of the frying pan, as they say... For all the time it takes to write a first draft, there is a definitive end to it. Rewriting? It's like that philosophy question they used to ask us in college: if you run half the distance to a finish line, then half the remaining distance, and then half THAT remaining distance, and so on, will you ever actually reach the finish line?

Great God, let's hope so. My vorpal blade gets thirsty for blood!

Arousal IM Chat Wednesday 9AM-12PM

This is a shout out to anyone interested in a joining my Webcam conference chat this Wednesday morning!

I'll be chilling for three hours at Infusion Cafe in my über-cool whisper dome (subject to availability) as I finish off the first draft of Arousal. The hardest work is over for this script, so I can take a few distractions from friends and fellow writers as I finish off and proof the first draft. I'll be happy to answer any questions about Arousal and any upcoming film projects. My lawyers have told me no more lewd conduct, so nothing but G-rated behavior tomorrow. Sorry! (But hey, you might get lucky if you ask.)

When: Wednesday September 6th, 9AM-12PM (PST)
Yahoo ID: rosspruden

You'll have to use Yahoo Messenger to see the Webcam feed, but you should be able to use any IM application to join the chat. If you're using Yahoo Messenger, you must first add my ID ("rosspruden") as a "contact". This is kind of last minute so I'm not expecting a lot of people to be there, but if you can make it, it'd be great to chat with ya!

Arousal, Draft 1: 83% Complete

Argh... does Tarantino write such crappy first drafts? Still, 91 pages ain't bad. Quantity, not quality. Quanity, not quality.

I read somewhere that Shane Black, the writer behind The Long Kiss Goodnight and Lethal Weapon, said that the trick behind writing good action is definiing a plausible Good News/Bad News ping pong game:

GOOD NEWS—you've escaped the enemy is his private jet...
BAD NEWS—there's a henchman on board!

GOOD NEWS—you throw the henchman out of the plane...
BAD NEWS—you instantly realize he's vented all the fuel and had the last parachute!

GOOD NEWS—you jump out of the plane and knock him unconscious in mid-air...
BAD NEWS—you can't untach him from his parachute!

GOOD NEWS—you tie yourself in with his parachute and can pull the rip cord...
BAD NEWS—the rip cord is broken!

...and so on until you reach the ground.

Writing a climax scene with so much action is challenging, but also fun in that it's designing a game of breakneck ping pong with shocking twists and turns. But with words.

Arousal, Draft #1: 77% complete

Finally, I'm getting to the good stuff for my feature script Arousal—the climax and denoument of the main storyline (two of the three sub-plots have been resolved by this time). I'm at page 86 and closing in on the final act... Now more than ever, I have to keep reminding myself that this is only a first draft and that 60-85% of it is likely to change, maybe more.

As with every writer, I'd like to think that I crap gold turds on every try, but first drafts are deceptive... sometimes it takes a few weeks (or months) to peel off the rosy-colored glasses and handle a red pen with the scrutiny needed to tell a worthwhile story.

If I've structured this right, and chosen the right kind of ending, hopefully this will be the only way this story can end. So I'm excited to show it to you all so you can tell me what you think.

Which brings me to...

ATTENTION FEEDBACK READERS
Please be patient with my artistic whimsy—my initial drafts aren't usually released for feedback because I expect so much of it will change after my own read-through. But fear not—your time shall come! If you want to be a feedback reader, I do want to hear from you, but under one condition: you must be totally honest. If you don't like the script—even if you hate it—I really want to know that. If 1 person out of 10 hates it, that's different from 9 people out of 10 hating it... and both are valuable kinds of feedback. Oh... and did I forget? Exceptional feedback readers will get a Story Consultant credit when this film gets produced.

And let's be honest—haven't you always wanted your own entry on the IMDB?

Arousal, Draft #1: 67% complete

After a small break due to The Chosen 1's revision time requirements, I knocked off another 7 pages of Arousal today. Took me 2 hours to re-read the first 66 pages and get a feel for the script and how the tone has changed so dramatically in this second half.

Watch this space.

Throwing Rocks at a Tree

There's an old saw that likens telling stories to forcing your character up into a tree (act 1), throwing rocks at the tree (act 2) and then bringing your character back down out of the tree (act 3). For instance, if you watch King Kong, it takes 45 minutes before the boat even gets to Skull Island and in that 45 minutes, you get to understand and relate to all the characters so that when Kong finally makes his entrance—at 1 hour 10 minutes!—the audience (hopefully) cares about the main characters because they're like people in a tree getting rocks thrown at them. And rocks hurt.

I mention this because writing Arousal, my horror screenplay, has changed colors unexpectedly: writing the first half of this script has been qualitatively different from writing the second half, both in the tone of the script and (perhaps unsurprisingly) the speed of its writing.

The first half of the story establishes the characters, sets up the situation, "loads" the plot. It's like weaving a massive tapestry which really turns out to be a series of interconnected slip knots... because when it comes time to move into act 2, everything gets messy real fast.

And so it is that the second half of the script is where all hell breaks loose. The first half has been mostly dialog and how the characters interrelate, hinting at sub-text... whereas the second half is fleshing out action and getting the fuck out of dodge as fast as possible. You'd think the first half, given all the exposition you need to cover, would take longer to write than the second half, but it's exactly the inverse because—in a first draft, anyway—action is hard to write succinctly and compellingly. For successive drafts, action will probably take a back seat while I spen 80% of my attention on improving sub-text and tweaking character interaction, punching up sub-plots, etc.

I've also been studying the horror genre to gain insight on audience expectations: Prophesy, The Hills Have Eyes, High Tension, Wrong Turn, Dawn Of The Dead. In each film, the characters are put into a situation they can't easily get out of, and we love to squirm as we watch them wriggle their way out of it. There is usually a good twist, too, where the main characters are forced to make a split-second decision to run for safety and leave their loved ones behind, or stay and protect them as the cost of losing their own lives. Most importantly, there always seems to be some dark twist at the very end... sometimes even after the credits roll.

Arousal, Draft #1: Halftime (50% complete)

Sorry, no breast reveal during the show. That might make me get hate mail.