a long day, with smoking.
He's not quite Noriega, but he's right around the corner from Noriega
I woke up much earlier than I expected and got ready for a full day of the conference. I knocked on the door across the hall and Pooks came with me to Starbucks to get breakfast (today's selection: orange juice and croissant).
Then we headed up to the Driskill Ballroom for seats at the panel on the Action movie, which consisted of Shane Black and Barry Josephson, with Harry Knowles as the moderator. Toni joined us for what we expected would be a cogent discussion of the modern action movie.
This may be the panel that has cured me of any desire to read Aint It Cool News ever again.
Pooks asked me beforehand why I didn't like Harry Knowles and I said, "I don't like his attitude." This probably stemmed from his incessant references to every movie he's ever seen in his essays on Aint It Cool News--which to me is not a sign of someone who's comfortable with his knowledge but is so insecure and needy for respect that he has to keep mentioning, "I know about a lot of movies!" at every opportunity.
For example, I cracked up whenever I read an interview with Sharon Stone in which she mentioned how intelligent she is. People secure in their intelligence, I've found, don't have to announce this. (I'm not saying she isn't smart, just that it's sad she has to keep mentioning she is.)
I'd never seen Knowles in person before, but Pooks had, at the conference last year--she liked what he had to say last year. By the end of the panel, she was less fond of him than I was.
Harry Knowles seemed to believe that the entire panel discussion was there for his benefit. He did more talking than the other two members combined; for example, he rambled on at length about the original Rollerball for no discernable purpose that I could fathom. One audience member stood up and said something to the effect that she'd like to focus on modern movies, but after her question was answered, Knowles went right back to what he was doing--including questioning Black and Josephson about The Last Action Hero, a movie both of them would probably rather forget.
Finally another audience member stood up and said, "Harry, we're writers, we'd like to talk about spec scripts." Josephson took over for the second half of the panel and we got a little more information, such as you don't need to open with a big impressive action scene--but you do need to make your main character as intriguing as possible as quickly as possible.
An audience member commented that action movies seem to be much alike, and Shane Black replied, referring to romantic comedies, "How many ways can you have people fuck one another up and then say, ''Kay, come here'?" Meaning that there are similar elements in all movies of a feather--that's why they call them genres. I thought that was a pretty funny comment.
The only two mistakes that Josephson would cop to seeing in spec scripts:
- not compelling
- overwriting a weak premise
Which, you know, seems fairly obvious...but you'd be surprised. Hell, these are flaws in produced action movies--imagine how bad spec scripts are on these elements.
After Action came the panel on writing about real characters, which had Larry Karaszewski (Larry Flynt, Man on the Moon), Bill Broyles & Al Reinert (worked on Apollo 13) and Larry Wright. It was interesting to hear how they take real-life events and shape a story out of them, since most of us do not have a point to our lives. You're using real people to tell a story--and it may not be the story they want told.
Another problem with real-life events is that everyone knows the ending. You know the astronauts make it home, that Andy Kaufman is going to die (...maybe, according to Karaszewski). How do you make that dramatic? Well, there are ways to increase the perceived drama in a situation.
The most important thing they stressed is that you have to get beyond what actually happened to the drama. Toss the research. You don't want to be false--but neither do you have to be a slave to what actually happened in every single instance. Which is a lesson I'd like to tell a few people I know who are working on real-life stories and defend every bad story choice with: But this really happened. It might make for great factuality...but lousy storytelling.
For lunch a large group of us went out to Manuel's, on Congress. Despite having 8 people, they managed to seat us pretty quickly. The Mexican food was decent.
After lunch was a panel with Polly Platt, Craig Baumgarten, Brad Fuller, Jeff Altschuler, and Turk Pipken talking about how to get your movie made (an advanced topic). They discussed that it's harder now to get your movie made than in the past, because a committee has to decide whether to make the movie or not. And the MBAs do a statistical analysis of what the movie's performance has to be beforehand.
I got a flaming headache in this session and excused myself to go take some Tylenol.
I ran into Pooks back at the hotel and we went to prepare to storm the barricades of Scott Frank's session on Dialogue, which was following Ted Tally's session on Description. The craft sessions were being held in the tiniest room in the hotel, with terrible inflow and outflow design and even worse airflow. I think you're getting the picture, and it isn't pretty.
We were first in line to get into the room--which was damn far-sighted of us, because a lot of people wanted to hear Scott Frank's words on dialogue. Pooks and I rushed in to get 4 seats together, which turned out to be one seat too many: Ruth took one look at the room and said, "Get me out of here." (She's claustrophobic.) Toni managed to get into the room and fight her way over the bodies to the seat we'd saved.
Scott Frank did not say anything earth-shattering about dialogue--no tricks, no shortcuts, just "know the characters." Know them really, really well. Know what they want, what they're afraid of, what they dream about. They can't just be an attitude or a role in the script, they have to be people. This is, of course, hard. It's why doing this well is so damn hard to do.
He mentioned that there are three main drafts of a script:
- the one to be read--it needs flow, so that the reader has an enjoyable reading experience.
- the one to get the green light.
- the production draft
(Of course, each of these drafts may take lots of drafts to get right.)
One of his recommendations was to write a scene with the most on-the-nose dialogue you can. On-the-nose dialogue is obvious: it's having a love scene in which the participants say, "I love you." Or during an argument having someone say, "You make me angry." So he recommended writing the scene with on-the-nose dialogue so that you know what the characters are saying to one another. Then you rewrite the scene without using one thing said in the first draft. You definitely avoid cliche writing that way.
The best thing he said was that there should be many things per scene to say. If you don't know what the characters are going to say, you're in trouble. You should know the characters and what they want so well that you have to hold them back from saying stuff.
Someone asked about children's stories and how to do children's voices. His response was: "I think in children's stories, the more times you can use the word 'fuck,' the better." I don't know why he said this, but it was incredibly funny.
After the Dialogue session I went upstairs to take a nap. Everyone else took off for the reception at the Governor's Mansion--I was too darn exhausted, and I didn't have an invite anyhow.
Pamie called to say that her show--which had been scheduled to start at 5, thereby interfering with Scott Frank's session--had been postponed until 9. I said, "Wait a second, I'd better write this down, 'cause I'm not going to remember it." I wrote down the information and must have dropped off to sleep seconds after we hung up.
I woke up and discovered no one had come back from the Governor's Mansion yet. After I wrote a little bit, I headed down Sixth Street to the Velveeta Room. There was no in there except a bartender and a couple of people at the bar. I wondered if I was in the right place. I saw a blonde at the bar.
"Hi, are you Pamie?"
She was, as a matter of fact. (I wonder if that happens to her a lot--random people coming up to her and saying, "Hey, are you that Squishy chick?") I introduced myself as Diane (and hoped she remembered that I was the journaler chick.)
She did know the name, she said hi, and she told me she was going on at 9:15, which meant I had time to get a slice of pizza somewhere before the show. The show was specially for an HBO representative. The room filled up more than I thought it would--it started out as me and the HBO guy and Chuy, and it ended up pretty full.
I thought Pamie's show, "Slumber Party," was hysterical. There were a few selections I recognized from her journal, and they were just as funny (if not funnier) in person. The whole thing about her father having the sex talk with her was a riot.
She told me after the show that Monks' Night Out had a show at 11. So I moseyed back to the Driskill and discovered that Pooks, Toni, Ruth, and Jette had returned. I asked if they wanted to see the improv show. Ruth begged off, but the rest of us headed back down to the Velveeta Room. MNO seemed like a talented bunch of folk, but...
Well, as I put it to the group when we were leaving, "You guys were great, and I'm sorry you had an audience of sexually obsessed bozos." Pamie's list of things not to do in order to be a good audience member? The audience did every single one. Every suggestion was sexual (and therefore stupid), which kind of put a pall on the evening. But it was fun anyhow.
I usually make fun of the anti-smoking zealots in California, because the hysteria makes me crazy sometimes. I don't like smoking and I hate being around smokers, but the way that smoking has been so regulated I'm not sure you can even smoke in your own house anymore seems to me to be a bit insane.
That is, until I go somewhere outside of California.
You can smoke just about anywhere in Austin. I must have second-hand smoked about a pack at the Velveeta Room--as I said to Darin later on the phone, "The baby now prefers Kools"--and I thought, This is just awful. It gets in your eyes. It gets in your clothes. It gets in your hair.
And it gets in your lungs. By the time we got back to the hotel, I had developed a slight cough.
So it only takes a few days in an area where they allow smoking indoors to turn me into a fervent appreciator of California's zealousness.
After returning to the hotel, I talked to Darin for a while as he packed to go to Dave Feldman's wedding in Tampa. We talked so late than I thought I'd drop off immediately after we hung up, but I just lay in bed, exhausted and not asleep.
Then I remembered I'd had a Diet Coke at the Velveeta Room.
I haven't had caffeine for months. Oy.
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Copyright 1999 Diane Patterson
Send comments and questions to diane@spies.com