IFH 820: Screenwriting, The BAM Method, And How To Write A Screenplay That Stands Out with Mike Bierman

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
You are listening to the ifh podcast Network. For more
amazing filmmaking and screenwriting.

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Podcasts, just go to ifhpodcastnetwork dot com.

Speaker 1 (00:12):
Welcome to the INDIEILM Muscle Podcast, Episode number eight to
twenty Cinema should make You forget. You're sitting in a theater,
Roman Polanski.

Speaker 2 (00:22):
Broadcasting from the back alley in Hollywood. It's the Indie
Film Hustle Podcast, where we show you how to survive
and thrive as an indie filmmaker in the jungles of
the film biz.

Speaker 1 (00:32):
And here's your host, Alex Ferrari. Welcome, Welcome to another
episode of the Indie Film Huscle podcast.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
I am your humble.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
Host Alex Ferrari. Today's show is sponsored by Rise of
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www Dot filmbiz book dot com. That's film bizbook dot com.
Enjoy today's episode with guest host Dave Bullis.

Speaker 3 (01:55):
My next guest is actually a forty five time award
winning screenwriter and he's the founder of the popular Facebook
group Screenwriters who could actually write. We're gonna talk about
a lot of this stuff, including templates, and we're gonna
talk about his process of writing. We're gonna talk about
save the Cat and all that other good stuff. What
does he think about all of it? Well, why don't
we all give it a listen with my guest Mike Bierman. Hey, Mike,

(02:19):
thanks off for coming on the podcast.

Speaker 4 (02:21):
Oh my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (02:23):
Oh, it's great to have you. Mike. You know, you're
somebody that's been on my radar for a while. You're
you're the host of the screenwriters who could actually write
Facebook group. You're a forty five time award winning screenwriter,
so you know, obviously you're somebody that I've wanted to
talk to, and you know, just to get started, Mike,
I wanted to ask you. You're a trial attorney, you
know by day, and I wanted to ask you when

(02:44):
did you get bit by the screenwriting bug.

Speaker 4 (02:47):
I'm actually not. I hardly ever practice anymore because between
managing my daughter and doing the group actually takes an
enormous amount of time. Given the number of posts I do,
which you've seen, I'm sure you can understand that I
rarely practice law anymore. I'm licensed, I can practice, you know,

(03:07):
do all the things I used to do. I just
don't do it anymore because what happens is I end
up with a bunch of court dates that I can't control,
scheduled out at infinitum, you know, out into the future
and cases can drag on for years. So rather than
commit to those types of things, I'm doing something else.
I try to avoid trial work, although I do still

(03:31):
practice some entertainment law behind the scenes, including recently I've
done some of that, but generally I don't practice that anymore.
And the way I got started in screenwriting is my daughter,
Erica Bierman. She's in Hunger Games, Catching Fire, Hunger Games,
Mocking J one. Her scene was cut from Mocking J

(03:51):
two it revealed too much too early, but she was
also in Dumb and Dumber two. She was when she started.
She was getting auditions, even very high level stuff, and
I'd read the scripts and I'd say, Wow, you know,
I just don't think this is written very well. I
think I can do better. And so I bought The
Screenwriter's Bible by David Trotdier, which is one of three

(04:13):
or four books that I recommend everybody should have. I
skimmed through it, I didn't read it, wrote a nineteen
page short script submitted to the Page Awards, which is
top three contests in the world, and took top twenty
five scripts out of something like seven thousand scripts. So

(04:34):
just self taught and started off with a bang.

Speaker 3 (04:38):
So the first screenwriting book that you ever bought was
actually deod Tardier's book. Is that was that correct?

Speaker 4 (04:44):
Yes? And it's a great book. It's a really good
overview to screenwriting. There are other books that I like
for different purposes, but that's a great first book. It's
hard to imagine a better first book to start with
an and Dave Trider is actually a member of the group,
so I highly recommend that book. And while we're on books,

(05:08):
I also highly recommend Linda Aronson's The Twenty first Century Screenplay,
which is all about different structures non three act, all
types of different jumping time structures and very complex structures.
And it's a great book because you can actually figure

(05:29):
out what structure would best suit your story idea. If
you know what you're doing when you start writing, you
can custom pick a structure that would be the best
skeleton to flesh out for your story. So that's an
incredible book, very very complicated. She's a very high level writer,

(05:51):
she's from Oxford University. A very meaty book and it's
one you can spend a lot of time with for formatting.
I like your cut two is showing by TJ. Alex,
which is a pen name. I know people who know
who that is. I haven't bothered to ask, But that's

(06:15):
the best book for formatting. It goes into the most
depth any given situation. There are typically three to five
professional acceptable ways you can choose from him to do it,
and that is an essential book for screenwriters. Rick Toscin

(06:35):
also Richard Toskin also wrote Playwriting Seminars two point zero,
which is most of a playwriting because he was dean
of theater at USC for I think about thirty years,
a very long time. But that book also crosses into screenwriting,
and it's an excellent book that breaks down the analysis

(06:56):
of story, whether it's playwriting or screen And so those
are those are four books that I highly recommend.

Speaker 3 (07:04):
You know, it's it's funny, Mike, because the first book
I ever read about screenwriting was also David Chardier's book
about formatting. I went into a borders and remember them
when they were still around, but whatn't.

Speaker 4 (07:15):
Yeah, I was sad when they went away.

Speaker 3 (07:18):
Yeah, because now all that's left is Barnes and Nobles
and maybe a few independent stores here and there. But uh,
you know, it's sad to see that that part of
it go.

Speaker 4 (07:25):
You know, Yeah, the brick and mortar bookstores are deaf,
they're they're really enjoyable because you can you can browse,
and there's a certain atmosphere and you can you can
kill a few hours and find things you have no
idea exist at the end of the internet. The Internet's great,
but there's a certain allure to a brick and mortar bookstore,
and hopefully those will come back. I should have mentioned

(07:46):
also that Rick Toscan that I just spoke of, who
I think recently got a Lifetime Achieving award from I
guess National damone of the Arts. He's actually in the
screenwriting group as well, So we have some really high
end gurus in there, lots of pros. Well over one
hundred produced films, films you've heard of written by members

(08:09):
of the group.

Speaker 5 (08:09):
So I thought i'd mentioned that, Yeah, the there are
some members of the group that i've you know, I've
seen their posts about, you know, different things that they've
they've written that have you know, been produced.

Speaker 3 (08:20):
For instance, I know somebody just wrote a the the
the screenplay for the latest steven Sagall movie, and I
remember he was in the group, and I was talking
to him briefly. I think that's is that Charles or Chuck.

Speaker 4 (08:31):
I think his name is Chuck Asmeyer, end of the End,
the End of the Gun, and he has I think
he actually has another film coming out on that same
deal with the same producer, not starring Steven Sagall. I
know more about it, but I can't. I can't say

(08:53):
at this point that info is under wraps. But what
I what I just told you is fine. He does
have another film under that deal, and I think he's
either optioning or about to sell another script imminently. So
we have a lot of activity. I have two feature
films in production myself right now. So you know, there

(09:13):
are a lot of There are a lot of people
in the group with a lot of things going on,
some really great stuff.

Speaker 3 (09:21):
So that's why the name fits so well. Screenwriters who
can actually write and not just talk about theory.

Speaker 1 (09:26):
Right, We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,
and now back to the show.

Speaker 4 (09:38):
Right. Well, you know there's a certain haughtiness and snottiness
to it. I'm the first to admit it, and I
actually did it on purpose because in reviewing screenwriting groups,
there's one group in particular, it's just enormous. I won't
name it, but it has nearly twenty thousand members, and
the type of questions asked in that group are just

(09:59):
my boggling. The the lack of thought going into you know,
posting a question with your name on it before you
put it up, it's just incredible. I think when I
started the group in my in my group description, I
named it kind of sarcastically because I was leaving the
other group just in disgust and wanted to try and

(10:22):
get people who were, if not more experienced, a little
bit more thoughtful about what they were writing and what
they were saying, a little more educated people in the
in the craft. And so I think I posted, you know,
screenwriting screenwriting Forum, hopefully without questions like is water wet?
And is it okay to kill my character? So the

(10:45):
whole thing kind of started out as a sarcastic announcement
of a departure from kind of like the Great Unwashed,
with people saying, you know, I'm a screenwriter because they,
you know, wrote something on a napkin once. To try
to attract people, even beginners, by people who are more
serious about learning the craft, who are looking at it

(11:06):
as a profession rather than as a hobby.

Speaker 3 (11:10):
Yeah, it's uh. You know, I've joined other groups in
the past as well, and a lot some of these questions.
There was way too many questions about formatting. And for instance,
there was actually a group that meant physically here in Philadelphia,
and these the beginners who would show up but always
ask about formatting and what I said.

Speaker 4 (11:27):
By a book, by a book, I mean, read a script,
buy a book. It's it's just not that. It's not
that tough. And unfortunately, I'm sorry to cut you off there,
but you know, unfortunately that is all too common in
a lot of screenwriting groups. And one of the rules
I have a rules driven group for this purpose to

(11:50):
try and keep the group on focus. And you know,
no political posts, and there are a bunch of other
a bunch of other rules, but you know, one of
one of the basic tenets of the group is search
the group itself before you ask a question, because they've
been in people been in there for over a year,
answering in depth almost anything you can think of. And

(12:12):
also search the internet before you ask a simple formatting question.
Buy a book, It's just not that tough. And so
all you're going to do by by asking that type
of question in an open form, is attract ridicule, show
you have no idea what you're doing, and get a
bunch of troll responses. So you actually never get the

(12:33):
right answer because even the people giving you the right
answer will be deluded by all the trolls. So and
that's very common, as you know.

Speaker 3 (12:41):
Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. You know, when when people would
ask that in the group, in the physical group, I'd
always say to the other person that was running it
with me, I'd say, why don't we take these people,
put them in their own group and we can go
over like formatting, and then the other half of the group,
you know, we'll work on actual you know, writing and
getting too the structures and it. And you know, we

(13:01):
kept going back and forth on this, and I said,
because every meeting, we're sacrificing our strongest for our weakest.
And what I mean by that is, you know exactly, yeah,
just just you know, spending all this time on formatting
when you could buy fade in or final draft the
writer's do wet or whatever and it takes care of
it all for you, or.

Speaker 4 (13:17):
You know, like well no, no, no, there's a miss
a little bit of a misconception. It takes it takes
care of the Uh. There's a difference between formatting and
element placement on the page, and this is a common
uh misunderstanding or or people misstate this. The screenwriting software,

(13:38):
there isn't any screenwriting software that actually formats per se
for you. What the screenwriting software does is it actually
puts the elements in place on the page so that
you don't have to work in word counting spaces. For example. Uh,
you know, if you're going to do a parenthetical under dialogue,
the screenwriting software will put the position the cursor in

(14:01):
the right place for you know, a play format or
screenwriting format for character or shot or transition or dialogue,
action note, special, whatever it is that you're trying to do,
it'll actually set it up on the page for you
with the right number of preceding, following and intervening spaces

(14:24):
in intervening character returns. But what it actually doesn't do
is format And so that's one of the things that
happens in beginning groups a lot, and I've seen it.
I've seen professional scripts where people actually said, when I
was script doctoring or rewriting a script, I'd say, hey,

(14:44):
you know this is going to be a lot more
work than you thought. Well, why is that? Is the
story that well, the story's okay, the problem is the formatting.
Everything's off. Well, that's impossible, I use final Draft. Well
that's a very naive comment. That shows how many screenwriting
formatting errors they're going to be because the software doesn't
actually format, it just puts things in the right place.

(15:07):
The formatting is the understanding of how to how to
direct the camera without using shot direction, for example in
the specscript, and how to properly write down the entire
skeleton of a visual film in writing using as few

(15:28):
words as possible, leaving as much white space on the
on the page as possible. And screenwriting software is just
the beginning. It's kind of like saying I have a Ferrari,
so now I'm going to be a you know, a
champion driver. There's an enormous difference between having the car

(15:48):
and being able to drive. It. Does that kind of
make sense?

Speaker 3 (15:51):
Yeah, yeah, it does well because you actually touched upon
what I was going to was. Actually I was going
to say, was there were people who had Microsoft Word
Open and they were using like four tabs for a
character three tabs for this.

Speaker 4 (16:02):
That is brutal.

Speaker 3 (16:03):
Yeah, because they would turn in a script and I
would look at this and I'd go, it's all off.
And I said, what did you write this in? And
and that's where I'm saying, you know, the screen because
they would always say, well, Dave, you know, how do
we write this blah blah. I'd say, no, no, you just
use drug the software. That's what I mean about, you know,
buying final draft or whatever and.

Speaker 4 (16:20):
The positions the elements correct. Yeah, that's then the other
The other thing beginners don't understand is, you know, they'll
go out and pick Helvetica or you know, I don't
even know the names of all the fonts, crazy fonts,
swirls and you know HP Lovecraft fonts, and Okay, that
stuff's great, uh if you're if you're writing a free

(16:40):
verse poem or something. But screenwriting is designed for every
page to be one minute of screen time. Now, obviously,
depending on action, depending on on dialogue, the level of vocabulary,
the the way the script's written, each page is going
to vary. Obviously, you have an enormous amount of action,

(17:04):
tightly written action a page to go conceivably several minutes.
But if you you know, okay that if you write
there's a two mile car chase down the dirt road,
that's not gonna happen in one minute, okay. So uh
it's the page length for filming can vary, but the
whole idea is, on average, one page is one minute

(17:27):
of film. Now. The only way you can do that,
if you think about it, is if you have a
particular font style, which is called a fixed pitch font,
and the standard for that is Courier, which is an
old news font. It's I find it fairly ugly font.
But they've developed all kinds of variant Courier fonts. So

(17:49):
there's you know, Courier Final Draft. They've patented their own
Courier New Courier Dark, which is one I really like,
and there there are a bunch of other variance of Courier.
And what it comes down to is no matter what
character you type, whether it's a special character, dollar sign,
hashtag or pound sign, exclamation point, period, comma, capital P,

(18:16):
small X, it doesn't matter whatever character you type, they
all take up exactly the same amount of space on
the page. And that's why you have to use a
fixed pitch font, and some people will try to cheat.
Let's say you're a novelist and you're overwriting your script
and you want to get it down from one hundred
and sixty five pages to one hundred and twenty where

(18:38):
somebody might actually read it, and you can't figure out
any way to do it because you're overwriting everything. You're
too greened to rewrite your script properly. So what you
do is you get the bride idea to go in
and change the font to some font other than final draft.
Go ahead and add a couple of lines one top,
one bottom, cheat the margins left, and write, and all

(19:01):
of a sudden, your page count drops down to one
hundred and thirty pages. You're within striking distance of your goal.
The problem is any professional looking at a single page
of your script will immediately throw in the trash. M h.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah. And you know again, that's something that I've also
seen too, especially on the cover page, like they'll use
like a different font for the title, and you know,
like in all those specialized fonts and and some.

Speaker 4 (19:26):
Artwork, artwork thrown down the margins.

Speaker 1 (19:28):
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
And now back to the show.

Speaker 4 (19:39):
Yeah. In in spec script, Yeah, I have actually have
a book coming out being published by dose Blant Publishing,
and it's it's going to be called It's coming out
fairly surely. I'm essentially finished with the manuscript, the body
of it. I'm working on the uh, some of the pictures,
clearing copyrights, things like that. But the book's going to

(20:01):
be called Secrets of Screenwriting, with a subtitle of Collected Essays.
I don't want anyone to think that this is like
any of the other screenwriting books. It really isn't. It's
a collection of my long essay posts from the group
over the last year, and it's kind of a rambling,

(20:24):
disordered volume, full of all kinds of prolls of wisdom
that just occurred to me from a post or someone's
comment or something. I would pull out my phone and
write these gigantic, sometimes five and six page posts. They
probably have a mental problem. I don't know why I
do it, but I do. And a lot of people

(20:47):
asked me to collect those, or they wanted me to
archive them somehow so they could reference them. Several pros
have used my rewriting post, which is very populous, about
six pages long, one pro actually printed it out and
glued onto the wall above his computer messaged me to
tell me how useful it was. And I have a

(21:08):
copyright post people tend to like Screencraft. Publish part of
that copyright post, and I'm going to publish the whole
thing in the book with Screencraft's permission. They've already given
me permission to republish the whole but that should be useful.
I've kind of lost track of where I was, but
there's a plug for the book.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
Do you know when that book's coming out, Mike.

Speaker 4 (21:33):
I'm a the contract to get it out in the
next I think I've got sixty days or so to
get the manuscript, and that's not a problem because the
manuscript's essentially finished, and then the publisher has to publish
it within six months. So and we're shooting for Barnes
and Noble, you know, the brick and mortar stores. I

(21:54):
guess there'll probably be a hard hard copy hardcover version
and the you know, steam entered paperback type version. We
suspect it'll be oversized, probably a five by eight or
five y nine. It is probably gonna be about two
hundred and sixty pages, and it won't be like any
other It won't be like Trottier's Guide or anything like that.

(22:16):
That'll be fully index where you can go in and see.
You know, g I have this particular question I'm want
to look this is. This is more of different subjects,
the philosophies behind different ways of writing story things like that.
It's it's more say, form rather than subject driven like

(22:42):
a lot of books, So it'll be very different. It's
more of the kind of the book you sit down
in a in a coffee shop and read it to
get kind of like a mixture of opinion and method
and things like that. So it'll be very different.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
Oh, very cool, because you know, I have a ton
of screenwriting books and this does sound very different than
all the rest that I have. Obviously because this is
a podcast, you can't see it, but next to me
is my library of screenwriting books.

Speaker 4 (23:09):
But yeah, well you know that's just smart. I mean,
this is a is a very estheteric craft. It's a
very closed industry. A lot of the really good screenwriters
either don't have the time to help or don't want
to help. And I've actually seen sabotage in groups I've
seen I won't name any of them. But I've seen

(23:31):
professional or advanced writers who actually get paid all the
time to write giving wrong answers on purpose to throw
off either someone they don't like or somebody that you know,
they just decided to screw with. And of course that
doesn't that doesn't help anybody except the pro who's keeping

(23:51):
down the competition. So opinions are going to vary in
screenwriting books, and I have my own very strong opinions.
My book is going to be full of them. It's
going to be full of cursing. It's not edited, uh
it's it will be edited, but the language won't be
edited out. Sometimes if I'm angry about something, you know,
I'll flavor the post with a sprinkling of cursing because

(24:13):
that's just how it came out. To keep the book genuine,
it's the posts are actually going in as the original essays.
They're not being edited down to make it politically correct
or anything like that. So the book will offend some,
it will amuse some, and it should help everyone that
reads it, and that's fantastic.

Speaker 3 (24:32):
You know, sometimes we need it. We need a little
tough love, Mike, and that's.

Speaker 4 (24:36):
And that's what the book is I'll yell at you,
I'll prop you up, i'll beat you down, then i'll
lift you up again, and I'll i'll inspire you to
write better and to keep going. And then I'll i'll
beat on you a while for doing something a certain
way that's that's not a very effective or good or

(24:57):
or smart way, and then I'll build you up again.
So it's it's it's kind of a tough ride. But
enough people approached me to write it and said, geez,
you need to put all these things in a book.
These are terrific that a publisher actually approached me to
publish the book, So, you know, kind of a nice situation.

Speaker 3 (25:17):
Yeah, it is an amazing situation. And you know, sometimes
we need that tough love, you know, just a funny anecdote, Mike,
I think that you'll really enjoy, you know. I once
time had a beginner approached me with a script and
they came into one of our group, but one of
my groups that I was running, and their script had
several pages within within the in the script with design

(25:38):
drawings on them of what they were talking about inside
the script.

Speaker 4 (25:41):
It's not good, and it doesn't you know, it's it
doesn't matter if they're Picasso, and it doesn't matter if
they're Hemingway. Those things are not a good combination for
a specscript. If you're if you were hired by somebody
at dream Works who's absolutely visually driven, and you've already
got the job and they see you doodle in the

(26:01):
margins and say, jeez, what a great drawing. I'd short
like to see some of those in your script. By
all means, there's some artwork in the script, but in
a regular spec script you don't do that. You don't
put artwork in Every rule is made to be broken.
One of my most award winning scripts. It doesn't have
artwork in it per se, but I do some interesting

(26:25):
things with a couple of different fonts that are cut
in as JPEGs. One of the languages that the script
is written in is Galileean Aramaic, which was a language
spoken in the early Middle East which ended not too
long after Jesus' time. That's one of seven languages in
the script. Well, there's no font for that, so I
actually had to cut JPEGs into the script to put

(26:48):
in the original Galilean aramic which actually mattered because at
one point the language actually appears on the screen as
a special effect. So to save producers the four months
it took me to get four or five words, let
me see, we have a four words took four months

(27:09):
to get translated by one of the world's experts in
this language. So to save producers time if anyone picked
up the script, I went ahead and had the translation
already done and put in the script. So you know,
rules are made to be broken, but you need to
learn the rules and get good so you can decide
when you need to break them. I've never put our

(27:30):
work per se in a script, and I'm up to
I don't know thirteen features, with eight solely written and
then others co written with best selling authors and people
like that. And I had one person that wanted to
put artwork in the script and had a very frank
talk with them, and I said, look, you came to me,

(27:51):
you want me to write this with you. I like
the idea, I like the story. If you insist on
putting artwork in the script, you're going to write it along.
And that was it.

Speaker 3 (28:00):
No artwork, you know, And that's something I want to
get into.

Speaker 4 (28:04):
Mike.

Speaker 3 (28:04):
Is you your screenwriting?

Speaker 4 (28:06):
Uh?

Speaker 3 (28:06):
You know your methods? And uh, you know, so when
you were starting out, you know, you had David Tardier's book,
and you know, obviously you know you're reading, you know,
you say to skin through that, and you were writing
down your own ideas. And so I wanted to ask,
did you ever adhere to any sort of like method,
you know, whether it be three acts, five acts, any
of that when you were writing, or did you just

(28:27):
simply just sort of had you had a starting point.

Speaker 4 (28:29):
And you just went, okay, so three acts and basically
didn't read the book, just looked at the book for formatting,
hadn't read any any professional script that the like of
any movie that I liked. Just had seen a bunch

(28:50):
of scripts that I didn't think were written well that
had been sent to my daughter. There were some that
were written well. They were you know, by all means
that someone researches this. Oh she auditioned for that. Mike said,
the script is crap. Now, some of the scripts were crap.
A lot of them were just mediocre. So, and I'm
unusual in that I don't outline, and most writers do outline.

(29:15):
There are just a few, I would say, maybe less
than four percent, probably closer to two percent don't outline.
I don't know if I want to call it a
gift or if it's a curse. Most writers will actually
execute a complete.

Speaker 1 (29:34):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor
and now back to the.

Speaker 4 (29:41):
Show, fleshed out outline that maybe thirty forty to fifty
sixty pages before they write the screenplay, and they'll actually
write it from the outline. I have never done that,
and I write natively, but I also have developed my
own trademark writing method that a lot of even pros

(30:04):
have commented publicly. They said that it's helped them a lot,
and a number of them are adopting. And I call
it BAM, which is the Beermann Asynchronous method. And with BAM,
what I do is I write the almost always write
the end first, and sometimes I write the beginning first,

(30:24):
but it's always either the beginning or the end, and
then I wrote write the other end of it, whether
it's the beginning or the end. So I always start
with the beginning and end when I start a script,
and frequently the very first thing that I will do
is write the end and write fade out the end,
and it'll be the first scene I write that's very

(30:46):
common for me. Then I'll go back and write the beginning.
And then typically what I do is I will tie
scenes into the beginning and end scene the first and
last by definition, and I will work back from the
outside in which sounds strange until you try it and
see what it does. I will tie you know, I

(31:08):
may write the end, then I'll write the beginning. Then
i'll write the second scene of the screenplay. Then I'll
go write three scenes back from the end. I'll jump
back and write, you know, the third scene at the beginning.
And then I'll know that I need a particular second
act scene or a break, and I'll go in and

(31:29):
i'll write that, and I'll just float it in the
middle of final draft of writer duet, which is what
I use now. I'll just float it in there and
I will then write whatever scene occurs to me that
I'm inspired to write, that I know needs to be
written at the time, and I fit them all together
like a jigsaw puzzle, and I attach them to the anchors,

(31:53):
which are both ends, and as I develop scenes in
the middle, I'll when I know I have two scenes,
sorry is a long answer. When I know I have
two scenes that are going to stick together. I won't
put any asterisks between them. I use like three asterisks
when I'm floating a scene, and I'll pull the asterisks
out when I tie two scenes together and I know

(32:15):
that nothing will go between those scenes, and then they
may still be floating somewhere in the second or third act,
somewhere in the middle of the script, and I just
build the whole script that way. When I write the
last scene, it's almost always a second act scene somewhere
in the middle of the script, and I write it,

(32:36):
rewrite that scene, and I'm done, because I also rewrite
as I go, so then the whole thing only needs
to be skimmed for continuity and for proofing errors. That
method is a method that I developed on my own
and gave a name to because people wanted to know
how it was writing. A lot of people who said

(32:58):
it sounds crazy tried it. I absolutely love it. What
it does is it prevents writer's block. If you're writing
from the beginning of a script seen by scene, and
you know where you're going, you may have a bunch
of things you already know you want to write, but
you can't link it up because you get stuck earlier on.
With my method, you never get stuck if you if

(33:21):
you don't know what you're gonna do next for a second,
you just jump ahead and write the next thing you
know you're going to put in, even though it may
not be connected to what you just wrote. Does that
make sense?

Speaker 1 (33:30):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (33:30):
Yeah, it makes sense much.

Speaker 4 (33:33):
And so I've had I've had several pros, you know,
one guy eighteen produced movies, another guy twenty produced movies,
another guy six produced movies. They've actually all used it
come back and said, my god, this method is wonderful.
I don't know, I don't know why. I haven't, you know,
used this before. I never thought of it. I've never

(33:54):
seen it before. David Silverman, who is the creator of
the Wild Thornberrys, actually just recommended and endorsed this method
and said it was genius. So that's kind of nice.
The interesting thing is, I haven't had anybody given an
honest try after understanding the method, which I described in

(34:17):
my upcoming book. I haven't had anybody given an honest
try and say that it didn't work for them. I've
had a number of people who've refused to try it.
You know, jeez, that's scary. I can't imagine it, but
I've never had anybody who actually sat down and gave
it a good try who didn't benefit from it. So
that just developed again from learning to write my own way.

(34:42):
I didn't go to film school. I didn't go to
I wasn't a film major. I wasn't a screenwriting major.
I don't have an MFA in screenwriting. I just did
it on my own, and it works for me, it
works for a lot of other people, and interestingly, it
works for people who outline and for people who don't outline,
because all of the right Pa that I just mentioned,
with the twenty and eighteen six movies and the Thornberry's creater,

(35:07):
they all outline extensively. One of them is just an
absolutely encyclopedic outliner, and the method still worked for him.
So just kind of made sense to me, and I
started writing that way.

Speaker 3 (35:25):
You know, you mentioned, you know, beating writer's block. You know,
I think that is. You know, that's something that I've
dealt with too, Mike is. At first I thought it
was writer's block, and I realized, you know, what I
think it was was decision fatigue. And what I mean
by that is, you know, you start your screenplay from
the beginning. So here we are, you know, Act one,
page one, and you know, we start to sort of

(35:46):
write this the.

Speaker 4 (35:49):
Dangerous and deadly, scary, blank white.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
Page fade in interior, right, but but you know it.

Speaker 4 (35:57):
Was a dark and stormy night. Oh damn, I'm.

Speaker 3 (36:01):
It's kind of like that movie Throw Mama from the
Train and Billy Christal keeps writing the same sentence and
you can't figure out what to go next, and and
uh so what you know? And it's basically, you know,
decision fatigue where you realize, oh my god, this screenplay
could go in like ten thousand different directions. And there
was actually a book I was reading about this, uh
the same sort of like you know, principle of you know,

(36:23):
decision fatigue, and you know what you know, obviously it
could go in ten thousand different directions. And his argument
was if you actually, you know, go back to the
theme and the and the the whole you know, the
main tension and everything of your screenplay, there really probably
isn't ten thousand ways it could go. Really, it has
to all tie in together so that way, you know,

(36:44):
see one, you know, we're not you know, we're on
an island and then seeing two. You know, all these
other different things are happening that have never been established.
If you know, if you get what I'm trying to say,
I do, and.

Speaker 4 (36:56):
What the the decisions fatigue problem that you've labeled and
that you've designated is a very common problem. And the
band method, what I just said, you can see immediately
how that prevents it from happening. If you know the end,
you know where you're going. So, by definition, every single

(37:17):
scene you write is going to do one of three things.
It's either going to develop character or it gets thrown out,
or it's going to advance the plot, or it gets
thrown out or the holy grail of a scene is
that it develops character, reveals character, deepens character, and advances

(37:39):
the plot. That's what you should aim for in every
single scene. If you write a scene that doesn't do
any of those things, throw it out. You kill your
baby because it's not getting you to where you need
to be. And because budgets are determined by page count,
and whether your screenplay is picked up and produced or

(38:03):
not may very well depend on what your page count is.
If you can tell story a in ninety pages, or
you can tell story A in one hundred and ten,
and you can't get it down from one hundred and ten.
Story A ninety pages is much more likely to get

(38:23):
made than one ten because line producers and people who
determine how much a movie's going to cost to make,
they will assign, depending on genre, style, a bunch setting,
costume requirements, things like that, locations, they'll figure out special effects,
CGI goes on and on. They'll figure out a per

(38:44):
cost page on average of the screenplay. They'll multiply that
out and they'll say, Okay, your spring to make this
movie is going to cost us one hundred and ten
times whatever that page cost is. That's going to end
up being a lot higher than what times whatever the
page cost is, right, Yeah, So if you can write

(39:05):
the same story, tell the same story more efficiently in
fewer pages, even if nothing changes. I've rewritten scripts for people.
I did a rewrite for Creative Artists and untitled Entertainment
Package project, and the original script was I think, oh,
i'ven't looked at this in a long time. A couple
of years ago. The original script was somewhere around it

(39:29):
was one hundred and twelve pages.

Speaker 1 (39:31):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor.
And now back to the show.

Speaker 4 (39:41):
And they wanted it to be one hundred pages before
it went to budgeting. They wanted a hundred They didn't
want a hundred and twelve. So first thing, one of
the first things I was asked to do, was reduce
the page count. So when I rewrote the script, not
only did I I told them, I said, I think
I can hit one hundred pages. They said, that would

(40:01):
be great, that's what we had in mind. We'd love that.
So I actually hit ninety nine and a half pages,
which is one hundred pages. Okay, you know ninety nine
go to the one hundred page halfway down. So I
hit the goal. But not only did I do that,
I filled five major plot holes and I added a
whole new story arc. So I was able to make

(40:21):
the story more complex, more complete, get rid of problems,
and still knock twelve pages out of the out of
the thing. And so that's a successful rewrite, and they were.
They were very happy with it. So I kind of
forgot how we got here. But this is again why
you have a goal post in mind. You don't wander

(40:44):
off and get lost. Now I see how I found
my way again. If you know the end, everything that
you write is going to be advancing your characters, your plot,
moving all of the things you've created toward that end.
If you know where you're going, you don't stumble and
get lost. You always move toward that goalpost. There are

(41:06):
gonna be a lot of choices on the way that
you're going to have to make, but those choices are
now narrowed and focused by the fact that you know
where you're going. A lot of people who overwrite don't
have an ending in mind, and they'll wander this way
and that way, and they'll end up having, you know,
five or eight or ten scenes that don't contribute to

(41:26):
where they eventually end up. And you know, it happens
all the time. I read somebody wrote a comment yesterday, Gee,
I just finished my screenplay and I hate it. I
hate my own screenplay. It's not what I set out
to write. I don't know how I got here, I
don't like the ending, I don't like the story, and
it's not what I intended. So now I've got to

(41:47):
do a page one rewrite. That's because you didn't know
where you were going. Yeah, you know.

Speaker 3 (41:53):
One piece of advice years ago that I heard. It's
the writer of Fight Club, Chap Paulknok.

Speaker 4 (41:58):
He actually ripped terrific writer.

Speaker 3 (42:01):
Yeah, he's phenomenal. He gave me the advice that he's like, right, right,
your beginning, he goes literally he goes, right, you know,
whatever opening, what do you want to do? And then
he says, go to the go to your last page
whatever that might be, and he goes, just write the end.
And he said, what you're you're going to do is
because it's going to feel complete if you do do
it this way. He said, then what you're going to
write so that way again, like you just said, it

(42:22):
was a goal and that's what he also, you know,
told me a couple of years ago, was it it's
a goal and that way you know at least you
know what you're going towards, and that way you correct.

Speaker 4 (42:31):
So he has a similar that I didn't know he
said that, but he has a similar philosophy to to
what I do. And it sounds like he starts off
writing the same way. And by the way, you should
note I do that whether my screenplay is linear or nonlinear, Uh,
it doesn't matter. I write the screenplay nonlinearly, even if

(42:53):
it's going to be a linear form. So let's say
it's a straight three act you know first, the second
act break, you know, page twenty three. What you know?
If it's going to be a straight three act screenplay
and it has a linear plot, without flashbacks, without jumping around,

(43:13):
nothing fancy, just a simple straight story. And that could
be anything from a family film to a military film.
You know, you can do anything that way. The subject
matter doesn't matter, it's just how you choose to write it.
Time wise. You can use my form, and I do
use the form to write linear screenplays. I just don't

(43:34):
write them in order. I write the whole screenplay out
of order, but when you end up reading the screenplay,
it's in order. And it also works for nonlinear methods.
If you're writing something like fight clubs nonlinear, if you're
writing something that jumps around, and you have an unreliable
narrator and he may or may not be crazy, and
he may may not be who you even think he is,

(43:57):
you can still use that method and jump all over
the place and write the screenplay that's going to be nonlinear,
and write it in a nonlinear fashion, which sounds very
chaotic but actually makes sense when you're doing it. So
if you, as I always say, if you know where
you're going and you know where you're coming from, you
have a nice defined world that you're working with in,

(44:20):
you're not going to start writing you know, crazy stuff
about Mars in your story about you know, the kids
starting school in new school district because the parents got divorced.
You know, all of a sudden, you're writing about Martians
on Mars, right, and you're having a space shootout because
you had no idea where you were going with your screenplay.
And I've actually seen crazy stuff like that. I'm sure

(44:43):
you have too. People end up with like three different
stories in one screenplay. They get horribly lost, and then
they get right or back to writer's block. Oh you
know I don't want to write next. Yeah, because you
jacked the whole thing up. You got yourself in a jackpot.
You've written yourself into a core and nobody would know
what to write next because none of it makes any sense. So,

(45:07):
you know, learn a writing method and stick to it.
Like I said, my method works for me. It's worked
for everyone I know that's tried to do It's gotten
back to me on it. But you need to learn
to write in a consistent method that works for you.
However you write and stick to that, develop that method
and make it work for you. You know, Chuck has his

(45:29):
own method that's apparently similar to mine, and I think
that's a very smart method. It's funny. I admire that writer.
Maybe that's why I like him so much, because we
write in a similar convention. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (45:42):
Yeah, you know, great mindstack a like right.

Speaker 4 (45:44):
So well that's what that's what they say, you.

Speaker 3 (45:47):
Know, because you know, just to continue with what you
were just saying about, you know, no no writer could
fix you know, A screenplay has all those problems because
you know, there's no goal, there's no sort of central
narrative to it, right, you know. I remember what I
read a play years ago, and it was this this
guy had this idea for the this like anthology, i'm sorry,
a horror movie trilogy. And I read the first part

(46:10):
of it, the first screenplay. I read all one hundred
and some odd pages, and literally it was about these
two vampires who live in like this old mansion or
something that has all these catacombs underneath it, and it's
just about like it's almost.

Speaker 4 (46:25):
Like shit, we haven't seen that one before, and.

Speaker 3 (46:27):
It's just all these different people, like groups of people
go in there and they're getting killed. There's no there's
no goal, there's.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
Nothing like literally, there's no story exactly a lot And unfortunately,
I'm hearing a lot of reports of this from screenplay
contest screenwriting contest judges that they're seeing a lot of
screenplays that have essentially no purpose. There's no story being told.
You know, Okay, I get it. It's slasher genre, and

(46:57):
we're going to see a whole bunch of blood, a
whole bunch of people killed, and then all of a
sudden we decide that's enough and we stop the movie.
But it never tells a story. That's that's not that's
not screenwriting. That's just dribbling out garbage. And this is
what happens when you have an unfocused person writing that

(47:18):
doesn't know why they're writing or where they're going. You
end up with something like that. You know, a lot
of writer's block. Also, jumping quickly back to that, because
it ties in here, is if you have problems in
your opening, in your first act, and the first act
is unfocused, not set up right, not structured right, you

(47:39):
really don't have any idea why you're writing, and that'll
be very apparent to the reader very quickly. By the way,
you don't know why you're sitting down and writing to
tell this story. That is going to cause you massive
writer's block, because if the first act is poorly structured
and poorly set up everything that comes after, it's like Domino,

(48:00):
It's like Jenga or Jackstraws or any of these things.
If you if you've set the foundation badly, there's no
way the house will stand. I even have a post
written on this and right about making an analogy to
you know, building a house. You know, don't build a
house on sand, Okay, build it on rock. I have

(48:20):
a whole essay on this, and that's it's all about
first act structure and knowing what you're doing in the
first act because that sets up the entire story, doesn't it.

Speaker 3 (48:33):
Yeah, it really does. Like they say, if you have
the second or third act problems, you have first act problems.

Speaker 4 (48:37):
Really correct, and again, most of those problems can be
solved by knowing the beginning and the ending right when
you start. But David silerman I just mentioned that while
Thornberry's creator wrote a it was very gracious, and he
wrote a recommendation for my book that'll be on the

(48:58):
you know, fronting side or back cover. I don't know
where it's going. There are a bunch of recommendations to fit.
And he said that using this particular method, you end
up with a much twistier, surprising plot, with all kinds
of fresh takes on things that isn't stale, that may

(49:19):
even surprise the writer. By writing using a different.

Speaker 1 (49:25):
Method, we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,

Speaker 4 (49:36):
You end up with something that may even surprise you.
It doesn't surprise you in that you of the beginning
in the end, but how you get there can vary,
as I said, and so you may discover some ingenious
twists and things along the way, but you always know
where you're going. So there are a bunch of different
ways to tell the story, and the details may vary
of what is going in the story, the different more lessons,

(50:00):
and the different challenges that characters face, internal and external challenges.
You know, no stories, no story works if the protagonist
is perfect. Okay, we work with flawed characters, and some
of the best stories are told from the most damaged
flawed characters, and the story as they get the external challenges,

(50:26):
you look at how their character, their internal character reacts
to that and you see the character's character arc, which
can be you know, learning improvement, change changes the mechanism
that drives the character arc, or you can have you know,
some characters will go through some things in as sociopathic characters,

(50:50):
other damaged characters, and they may actually not have a
character arc. The secario, which I really like, evokes strong reactions.
Some people don't like the film because they think Emily
Blunt's character, the agent, the FBI agent she plays, doesn't
have a character arc. I argue that she does have

(51:11):
a character arc without getting too far into spoiler. She's
completely by the book and incorruptible at first, and then
at the end when faced with her own death because
she's going to go forward and reveal by the book,
reveal all the criminal and sketchy things that were done

(51:32):
that Josh Brolin's character very much, the CIA guy wants
her to say everything went by the book, to cover
up all the things they did. In the end, to
save herself, she falsifies a document to save her own life.
So my argument has always been. She does have a
character arc. She changes from the incorruptible you know, perfect

(51:56):
if you will agent, the idealized agent, and she changes
to somebody who, to save herself, falsifies the report of
what happened. So but anyway, you know, you start with
with damaged characters and you move them through the story,
and that's that's the story arc. That's why we're entertained,

(52:19):
is because we get to see change in a character.
If you have a character that you know is waterproof
and bulletproof and you know nothing ever happens to them,
which I've always felt was a big danger with Superman,
by the way, you know, that's why there's Kryptonite, right, yeah,
because if he has no fault, he has no weakness.

(52:41):
What are we going to do for a story? You
developed the the ultimate badass Marvel superhero that can't be touched,
that nothing can ever happen to them, Like the Silver Surfer,
There's there's really not a whole lot you can do
with that character. And that's why the Surfer had with
the appearances and things. You look at somebody like Deadpool,

(53:02):
who was in a very very damaged character who may
or may not even be sane and Marvel finally, you know,
Ryan Reynolds fought ten years to make Deadpool, and they
insisted on you know, the script being genuine to the
source material, and Marvel is very worried because it's you know,

(53:23):
totally not PC and it's dirty and filthy, and he
curses and he has sex, and he does all kinds
of bad things that heroes shouldn't do, and that makes
him fascinating. And that's why Deadpool killed it at the
box office. I honestly believe it was. It was probably
my favorite movie of the year. It's not probably not

(53:45):
gonna win any osters maybe special effects, who knows, but
entertainment wise, you know, I thought it was. I thought
it was a terrific film because you had such a
flawed character and it was just so entertaining to watch
him go through all that.

Speaker 3 (54:00):
So yeah, and I also agree with that. The reason
I liked it was because it was so different than
all the other superhero movies that are coming out. Obviously,
you know, it didn't take itself too seriously. It was
completely different. It was a complete one eighties from all
the other superhero movies that were coming out, and it's
just I think that's why I enjoyed it so much.

Speaker 4 (54:20):
Yeah, he break, they break the fourth wall the time.
You know, he turns and looks at the camera and goes,
you know, you know, gee, would a superhero really do this?
And you know, oh, there's a fourth wall break within
a fourth wall break, and they they constantly pull the
audience in. And those are things. Those are things that
were pretty much although you know, even in Greek theater,

(54:40):
in Roman theater, those are things the aside where the
actor turns and talks to the audience. Okay, those are
things that have always been in storytelling. In modern screenwriting,
they were pioneered by Shane Black, of course, with the
with the Shane blackisms, you know, one of the most
famous being you know, he's describing a mansion and I'm paraphrasing.

(55:03):
I don't remember exactly, but he'll say, you know, he's
describing the place, and he stops and he says, oh,
look guys, basically, and he's writing like this in the script. Look, guys, basically,
this is exactly the kind of place that you would
buy if you hit the lottery and you had millions
and millions of dollars and you wanted two great parties
for all your friends. This is this is the shit

(55:24):
you would buy. And he puts that in the script.
So Deadpool did much the same kind of thing. You know,
when I sat through the opening of Deadpool, by the
time they finished writing the credits, you know, calling the
director an overpaid tool and the writers, you know, the
real heroes journal I was fully satisfied with the price
I paid for the movie, just getting through the opening credits.

(55:48):
You know.

Speaker 3 (55:48):
Also, Mike, you mentioned Shane Black. I saw that you
actually were able to meet Shane Black. Was that at
a writer's conference that.

Speaker 4 (55:55):
Was at Austin Film Festival. So script called Needles, which
is an allegorical diabolical thriller that I found myself talking
about a lot because people are curious about it, and
that's how I went to Austin. I wasn't going to go,
and the director of Austin, Matt Matt Dee, called me,
I think, a couple times, convincing me to go because

(56:17):
apparently my script was going to finish pretty high. Frank Airbaht,
director of Shashank Redemption, Walking Dead creator, and you know
a bunch of other stuff. He'd picked Needles top ten,
of course, I didn't know this at the time, but
he'd picked it top ten scripts for the Science Fiction
Award and top ten scripts for the Horror Prize out

(56:42):
of eighty six and twenty seven scripts. So when you
do really well at some of these film festivals like Austin,
I made the top group where I got to have,
you know, secret meetings in special places with great people
that nobody else could go to. And those meetings often
had you know, twenty thirty forty people that's it from

(57:05):
the whole film festival, whereas people who wrote scripts that
did decently but finished lower, they'd be in a room
full of, you know, hundreds of people. And so I
ended up in a room, very small room, you know,
size of a small dining room, maybe a little bigger,
with Shane Black and a whole bunch of high finishers

(57:30):
and he was taking questions. So everybody was kind of shy,
and I think I asked the first question. I'm not shy,
I jumped up and I asked him about It was
something about working with Robert Downey Junior and Val Kilmer.
Their methods are very different, and what was going on
in Robert Downey Junior's life, which I won't rehash here

(57:52):
at the time, and you know, got to ask him
one on one questions right there, which I think they
actually put on a podcast on the radio, which is
kind of cool. But he had actually auditioned my daughter
for a film, and her audition went straight to him
and he really liked her, and we went back and
forth on a couple roles on that. Ultimately we didn't

(58:14):
we didn't finish one of the auditions. We chose not
to do. But I was a terrific guy, very very
generous guy with his with his time, and just extremely
gracious to other writers. So I got got some great
pictures with him. I can prove it happened.

Speaker 3 (58:35):
Well, that's how I actually saw it too. I saw
you met him because when you were on John Fallon's podcast,
I actually saw That's one of the photos he added
was you and Shane Black. And I wanted to make
sure I asked you that, Mike, because Shane Black is
I don't think there's a screenwriter alive right now who
hasn't who doesn't envy or you know, look at Shane

(58:58):
Black as sort of like a guide in one way
or an other.

Speaker 4 (59:01):
Well, I mean he's you know he's he's a pioneer.
He's a guy that did something that you know, in
modern times in screenwriting, nobody had done. And he did
it with He did it with dash and and bravado,
and he nailed it. So he he's a guy much
to be admired, you know. I also met Terry Rossio,

(59:21):
who was just absolutely incredible guy. And he was very,
very funny. And we were standing outside in front of
the hotel and I.

Speaker 1 (59:29):
Will be right back after a word from our sponsor,

Speaker 4 (59:39):
I asked him for I asked him if I could
get a picture. And you know, a lot of people
walking by him had no idea who he was. And
so he went walking by me and my ears pricked
up and I said, holy smokes, there he goes. And
so I went out politely introduced myself and he said
he said to I don't know if it was his
driver or somebody that was hanging out with him. He said,

(01:00:00):
he said, I like this guy. Let's take about a
dozen pictures. And he turns to me and he starts
to direct to see he says, he says, Okay, we're
just a couple of guys hanging out talking here, there's
a there's a strange accident or happening in the distance,
and all kinds of weird stuff is going on, so
we start acting like we're watching this. Of course, he
was much better at it than I was. And uh,

(01:00:20):
I got like a dozen pictures of us making stupid
faces and kind of grabbing onto each other and going ooh,
went on. He's just hilarious and just a terrific guy.
And I met h John Lee Hancock, and I met
uh with the blind Side, I wrote, I met Andrew

(01:00:43):
Kevin Walker, who that was great to meet him in
the game. And yeah, and those are a couple of
my favorite movies. So, uh, you know, the Evolution of Seven,
any anyone who aspires to be a screenwriter really needs
to read the story of Seven and what he went through,
you know, as a tower record tower records clerk, trying

(01:01:04):
to get anybody interested in this thing. He finally gets
an agent on the phone, starts talking as fast as
he can and spitting stuff out, and the agent doesn't
hang up on him, actually is interested, starts asking him questions,
agrees to read the script, and then boom, all of
a sudden, it takes off from there, but you know,
all the time to get to that lucky break. And

(01:01:25):
then you know, the director after director had him rewrite
the script. The original script had the head in the
box ending, which was, you know, shocking to the studios.
There's absolutely amazing ending, and you know, oh, that's too much.
We need to rewrite it. So they kept having him

(01:01:46):
rewrite the script, and then that director would go off
the project. The next guy would come in, Oh, I
love this project, Let's rewrite the script. So they kept
doing that, and then finally David Fincher came in and
a parent I read an interview recently, I wasn't clear
on how this happened. Apparently Andrew Kevin Walker sent him
the wrong script. He sent him the earliest, the first

(01:02:11):
version with the head in the box, and Fincher loved it,
and they went together and fought with the producers in
the studio to get it made. And my understanding, if
I recall, is Morgan Freeman is actually the reason why
the movie got made the way it did because at
some point Morgan Freeman came forward and said, look, if

(01:02:32):
you don't make it with that ending with the head
in the box, I'm gone. I'm walking and so that
did it. But I got to meet him, I got
to meet his brother. They were very nice and I
just heard him talk and I waited around, and you know,
these people are normal people. I mean, they're not gods,
and people idealize them. And I know who that guy is.

(01:02:53):
I know his name. I've seen that actor on TV. Well,
when you really meet him, they're just regular people. Some
of them act like they're not regular people. Some of
them act like regular people. Most of them want to
be treated like anybody else. They don't want to be
you know, they've had enough of that. Some of them
aren't that way. You know, some of them have huge egos.
A lot of them just want to be left alone

(01:03:14):
and treated like anybody else. So I waited in a
very short line because people were afraid to approach them,
and went up and got to talk with them for
you know, it wasn't long, maybe five minutes, but got
pictures with them too. And so, so what is there
what's the what's the saying the essay fortune favors the bowls? Right?

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
Yeah, yeah, there's also uh, what's the essays saying?

Speaker 4 (01:03:40):
Yeah, that's what I was going for. The essays I
don't remember if it's Fortune favors the bowls. It's something
like that.

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Yeah, I forget what that actually is, but I think
it's very similar to that. I think. But is there
any screenwriters you haven't met yet, Mike, that you really
wanted to meet?

Speaker 4 (01:03:57):
Oh? I mean, I suppose there are a lot of there.
There are a lot of great There are a lot
of great writers and a lot of great screenplays out there.
I mean, my my favorites just you know, like you,
Shane Black, and Andrew Kevin Walker, Terry ROSSI Ar. I mean,
it's just amazing to meet them all in one trip.
Just just amazing. But you know, I don't know if

(01:04:20):
I really have an answer to that. One of the
one of the shocking movies for me of the year
that didn't get a lot of press and play it
was Fences. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah,
the acting is terrific, that the dialogue is wonderful. It's
just it's a beautifully made film. It's a very simple film,

(01:04:41):
but the acting, the quality of the acting and the
writing the dialogue will just draw you in. I couldn't
turn the damn thing off. I sat down and started
watching it. I had places to go, people to see,
I had things to do. I had no intention of
watching the movie. And I mean I sat there with
my jaw dropped. Found that I've been standing there fifteen

(01:05:01):
minutes with a rowote my hand watching this thing. You know,
my daughter got it as a sag screener and came in.
And that's probably I would say, that's probably acting wise
and script wise, probably the best film I've seen this year.
I don't know what it's going to do with the Oscars.
I suspect Denzel Washington will probably win a Best Actor.

(01:05:25):
Biola Davis certainly should be in the running for Best Actors.
I don't know that she had enough screen time for it,
but Denzel certainly she went. And you know, that movie,
as I said with Deadpool, with the opening, that movie
is worth the price of admission if you only watch
the first scene where Denzel Washington is talking about death.

(01:05:48):
The scene is so mind blowingly great that the whole
movie is worth watching just for that one scene. And
you know, it doesn't stop there, so he can't really say,
you know, any one particular writer. A number of the
writers that I'd like to meet are dead, so you know,

(01:06:09):
that's kind of a kind of a bomber.

Speaker 3 (01:06:11):
But but as we're talking about, you know, Defences, I
thought it was phenomenal as well. I think you know,
Denzel stole the show in that movie. You know, he
just plays that charismatic, tragic hero obviously because there's a
lot of regret in him in that man's life, in
that character's life, and you know, as he's sort of

(01:06:32):
talking to everybody, everybody in one way or another, sees
him at his best, sees him at his worst, and
it's sort of you know, one way or another also
at the butt end of his worst. And you know,
his son, he talks to his one son the one
way his other son. You know, he constantly wants more
from him, and he's he doesn't go about it the
right way, and you know, it's just a phenomenal movie.

Speaker 4 (01:06:54):
Yeah, because he wants to, you know, he wants to
make the changes he couldn't make himself in his own life,
in his have his son live those. And and also
you know, excel as he did the way he did
because he's getting older and he sees, you know, his
own mortality, which we we know from telling you about death.

(01:07:17):
So he he you know wants to live vicariously through
his son. Also, he's just an absolutely phenomenal movie. I'll
probably watch it again when we get off the phone. Wonderful,
wonderful film. I don't know if it if it kind
enough circulation buzz the box office to to win Oscars.
You know that what the Oscars people pick frequently isn't

(01:07:38):
anything near what I think is the best. And other
people agree with that. But that's terrific writing. The dialogue
is phenomenal.

Speaker 1 (01:07:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:07:46):
So, and it's almost a self contained movie because a
lot of it happens in that one house. And you know,
I wanted to ask you too about about you know,
your screenplay for The Grocer, because that's completely containing self
you know, self contained screenplay and that one third pass
in the London Film Awards.

Speaker 4 (01:08:03):
Correct, Yeah, it won it one third and it's won
a bunch of awards. It just took third at London.
It's uh, it's in the running in in another contest
that just made another cut. The Grocer is completely contained.
It's one hundred percent contained. It is one location, the
entire screenplay. There there are some movies that try to

(01:08:26):
do that. It's very difficult to do it and carry
it off with a with a very entertaining movie, because
a one location screenplay is going to be very dialogue heavy.
It has to be, unless, you know, you do something
completely avant garde and have a bunch of people sitting
in a room watching paint dryer ants crawl around, you know,

(01:08:47):
some experimental thing, you know, I'll a racer head meets
Salvador and Ali or something like that. You're you're gonna
tend to be dialogue heavy. Needles is ninety seven percent
per one location, which is a desert saloon which may
or may not be in Needles, California, in the Mojave Desert.

(01:09:08):
It's actually purgatory but appears otherwise. And it is only
two other locations that occur as flashbacks. One is a
very brief flashback to gold Gotha and it's I think
a quarter page, and the other flashback is like a

(01:09:31):
Pacific Northwest.

Speaker 1 (01:09:33):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,

Speaker 4 (01:09:44):
Rainy Mountain, Rainy Mountain, Winding Road. And that's it. So
you know, ninety seven percent contained grocers, one hundred percent
contained The entire story happens at a grocery store in
its parking lot. That's it, one location for the whole thing.
And of course, you know you hear all the time

(01:10:05):
that's what everybody's looking for is one location. You bring
the you bring the cast and crew in, you set
the date, you get everything set up, and you never
have to move anywhere. Right. You look at a movie
like Spy Game, for example, which I love, they have
you know, Hong Kong, they have you know, settings in Vietnam, Langley, Virginia, China,

(01:10:32):
Coastal China. You know, it's a Tony Scott you know,
big big bang, big budget, big stars, and it goes
all over the world. The Born films do that too.
Those are very expensive to make and a lot of
the places where films like that want a film, like
the Middle East, these are not stable places where you

(01:10:54):
can just go set up a camera crew. This is
covered in argo. You know, it's no secret. There are
a lot of places you can't film and you have
to try and mimic, uh, you know, find another location
that works. Then you have to you know, if you're
not filming where they are, you have to build sets
that make it look like you're really there, and and

(01:11:15):
things like that. You know, Bridge's spies. They had to
had to. Uh, they're showing Berlin being divided east and west,
the communists and the and the democracy, and they've got
the they've got the wall being built right down the
middle of the city. I mean, that's all an incredibly
expensive scene to film. I turned to my wife. You know,

(01:11:36):
I've seen it many times. She hadn't. I turned to her.
Last night we watched again. I watched it again. She
watched it, and I said, I said, imagine the cost
of the scene. How many people are there, all the
soldiers and uniforms, you know, as far as the eye
can see. It's just very, very expensive. Well it contained
screenplay does the exact opposite of that. It minimizes your actors.

(01:11:58):
It minimizes your locations too minimalist, as low as you
can get one location. Now that there's even an extreme
uncontained screenplays. If you look at Ryan Reynolds buried, essentially
the whole movie happens with him in a coffin. That's
that's as contained as you can get. You're in a coffin. Okay,

(01:12:21):
So but anyway, that's that's considered a very desirable thing
these days. Hopefully somebody will hear this and asks to
read the script and buy one of those those scripts.
I keep having people rave, man, this needs to get made. Well,
I agree with you. Let's let's sell the screen. Contact
my manager, we can make a deal. But that's that's

(01:12:44):
also a smart way to start off for writers that
want to learn to develop character and get kind of
be fuddled or thrown off by changing locations. They're always
posts in my group. You know, what do I do?
You know, how do I move the camera? I have
a camera, you know, in a bedroom, shooting out the

(01:13:05):
window at stuff happening outside. How do I write that?
You know a lot of people get hung up on
all that, and that's all formatting. A lot of people
get hung up on that stuff. If you have a
single location, you can concentrate much more on character, can't you.

Speaker 3 (01:13:19):
Yeah, that's very true.

Speaker 4 (01:13:20):
And we look like Fences. You mentioned Fences was a play, okay,
and the movie the movie feels like a play when
you watch it very much. You know, Samuel Beckett Theater
of the absurd, he has he had a play that
was I think half a page or a quarter of
a page. He has plays where the entire play there

(01:13:43):
are two people in trash cans talking to each other.
You talk about dialogue heavy, you talk about illusions. You
need to get an encyclopedia out, and people said this
about needles. You need to get an encyclopedia to understand
everything going on because it's so deep with illusions, because
you know, they've got to talk, or it's going to

(01:14:05):
just be two people with their heads sticking out of
trash cans. The whole thing. You know, Beckett has somebody
buried up to their neck in fand the whole play
is one character buried up to their neck and fant
all you see is their head. That's minimalist. Okay, well
that's what you shoot for. Maybe not that extreme, because

(01:14:26):
it's very hard for something like that to be entertaining.
You have to be a master to pull that off.
But what you want to do if you're starting out
is pick a setting that you don't move from. Work
on developing and deepening and broadening your characters and examining
the moral challenges, the philosophical ideals they have as they
deal with whatever situation you're creating, and go ahead and

(01:14:52):
develop the characters and worry more about that than jumping
all around in like a Borne. There's nothing wrong with
the Born films, but you know, jumping around, you know,
elevators and trams and planes and going all over the place,
concentrated on the character and buildings developed the character. There
was a there's a play on Broadway called Blackbird and

(01:15:13):
Sandasty subject matters a chad mall station and stuff like that,
but it basically has a Erica was up for a
role in as playing I think one hundred and fifty
five shows at the Belasco Theaterre with Michelle Williams and
Jeff Daniels, and they were gonna make it three Erica Bierman,
and she actually got the preliminary offer on that. We

(01:15:35):
were waiting for the final contract to come through. And
the director wrote the little tiny part out at t
end so they went with a cast of two. The
whole play is the cast of two for whatever the
length of a full length Broadway play is. And it

(01:15:56):
is a woman grown too. I don't need to go
into this too much, but basically it's a woman grown
to womanhood who was basically a child, young adolescent when
she was entered into a sexual relationship with a guy.
It's not like forcible rape, but it's statutory rape. And
he ends up, you know, living his life and having

(01:16:18):
a family in a business and she actually shows up
at his business years later and confronts him.

Speaker 3 (01:16:24):
Oh wow.

Speaker 4 (01:16:26):
Yeah, and so very very intense, very dialogue driven, character driven,
and very contained. You've got something that has more than
one location. It does have more than one location, but
the vast majority of it is one location. And so
that's the kind of thing that for a play or

(01:16:46):
for a film, cuts your costs down dramatically. And that
is what has recently of late been in demand. And
you hear people screaming all the time, I want contained screenplays.
That's what they're talking about.

Speaker 3 (01:17:01):
Yeah, you know that. That's something that I try to
do as well, Mike. And and what the way I
tried to do it was, I wrote I wrote three films,
three screenplays at a summer camp. I called them my
Camp trilogy. And and so that way, you know, it's
kind of sort of like Friday the thirteenth in a way,
you know, because always going to be at this camp.
We're not really there's no big uh set pieces, you

(01:17:22):
know what I mean. And it can be done, you
know where horror is the sort of the main character,
and you don't have to you know, go out and
get you know, a list actors.

Speaker 4 (01:17:28):
You could just you know, have that. Horror is very profitable.
They can be made for not a lot of money.
And if you're getting into contained horror where you got
very few locations, that should be very desirable material. If
it's written well, should be very marketable. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:17:41):
Uh so I I've actually pitched a few of them,
and uh, well that's a whole nother story del together.
But but you know, but you know, just going back
to Buried, you know, I agree. You know, I actually
knew what the whole concept was going in and I
always wondered, how are they going to carry this for
the whole movie. I was pleasantly surprised at how they
carried that throughout the whole movie. Be different things.

Speaker 4 (01:18:01):
Well, his acting, you know, in Deadpool, it's full of
all kinds of self deprecating humor. Of course, and Ryan
Reynolds says at one point, oh, Ryan Reynolds made it
this far in his superior acting method, you know, talking
about he's a good looking guy. Okay, well, and Buried
he acted the hell out of it. You know, you're
not the best looking guy in the world with a

(01:18:22):
blue light and a little, you know, low wattage blue
light in a coffin. The whole screenplay that was carried
by his acting. He killed it. He did a beautiful
job acting. So you know it needed a strong actor
to pull off. You put somebody who's just a pretty

(01:18:43):
face in the box who can't act, and you got
a flop.

Speaker 3 (01:18:46):
Right, Yeah, that's very true.

Speaker 4 (01:18:49):
But you know, Ryan Reynolds happens to be a pretty
face and he also can act, and he ended up
nailing that. And yes, it was engrossing from beginning to end.
Another film that I expected. I watched it for the novelty,
which I suspect you did to knowing what it was
going in saying you know, there's there's no way they

(01:19:09):
can pull this off, and then found myself via I'm
very entertained in watching the whole movie. And that's that's
a great example of a successful contained almost completely contained.
There are some other locations, but not much. I think
maybe three locations the whole thing.

Speaker 1 (01:19:30):
We'll be right back after a word from our sponsor

Speaker 3 (01:19:39):
Yeah, it's just also I made sure to go out
and get the screenplay because you know Scott Myers from
going to story dot com, he was always mentioning it,
and I made sure to coach. You got his posts
about it where he dissected the whole movie. You know,
was you know, I was blown away again. You know
how they were able to do that and they always
The way they did it obviously is they raised the stakes,
you know, constantly adding in new twists and turns. Okay,

(01:20:01):
you know he has you know, uh, well, I probably
should't go into it because in case, everybody hasn't seen
it yet.

Speaker 4 (01:20:06):
But but you know, it's kind of old to worry
about spoilers now. But I mean, yeah, you know, the
one thing goes wrong and then the next thing goes wrong.
You know, his light starts running out. I mean, you know,
it just goes from one thing to the next. And
that's what you have to do in a screenplay. You

(01:20:29):
need to keep raising the tension. You know. One of
one of my criticisms of Manchester by the Sea is
I just never felt the stakes were that high, and
I never it just didn't feel like it was increasing tension.
It's a very stately paced piece. Yeah, case the Affleck

(01:20:51):
did a fine job acting, so did the others. But
it's not a short movie, and it just moves a
little long at a very very stately pace. I like
the film. It wasn't my favorite film of the year
by far. I suspect the Academy you'll like it. It
has kind of a downer ending for them.

Speaker 1 (01:21:12):
But.

Speaker 4 (01:21:15):
It's it's a film that's a good example of one
where I didn't feel that they kept raising the stakes.
They didn't have sufficient stakes. Now, to give you an
idea of what the effect of that is, my wife
fell asleep four or five times trying to watch the movie.
We got a huge fight because I said, I said,
now's the time, let's watch me and Chester I said, no,

(01:21:36):
I'm not watching that thing. You know, I can't stay awake.
I said, no, no, no, you you really will get
in it. You know, it'll have an interesting emotional impact
on you, and you'll you'll get, you know, very particular
feeling and I want to talk to you about it.
So you know, let's, you know, drink some coffee and
let's let's sit up and watch this thing. And I've

(01:21:58):
watched it four times. I like it more each time
I watch it, and you know that's how. One of
the ways that I learned to write well is by
watching movies. Okay, I don't, it'll probably surprise you, and
I do not recommend this for most people. I read
very few screenplays by other writers. I don't go read
all the Oscar winning screenplays that are depending. I don't

(01:22:20):
do it. I watched the movies and I absorb it
that way. Is there a reason to read the screenplays.
Absolutely most screenwriters do, and I strongly recommend that people
start out that way. I don't think I've read more
than five pro scripts on produced movies. I just don't.

(01:22:41):
I just don't read them. I'll watch the movie. There
is a reason, if only to see the differences in
execution and planning. There's a great reason, you know, looking
at the spec or the shooting script and then what
they actually got can be a very rewarding and instructive experience.
It's just not something I do. That's me personally, which

(01:23:02):
again shows you that you know there are different ways
to do things and still do well and get to
the endpoint where you want to be. There are pro
writers I know that read every single script for Academy
Awards scripts they read every single script for every blockbuster
that comes out. I don't do that. I would rather

(01:23:24):
write natively without I'm not gonna say copying, but you know,
just my own way. Does that make sense?

Speaker 3 (01:23:32):
Yeah, it makes perfect sense, Mike. I. You know, I
like to I have a whole collection of screenplays, and
you know, I always find that my favorite person to
write screenplays and my favorite author is Quentin Tarantino. I
just love the way he writes. I think it's entertaining.
And I also feel though that I also can pull
from the movie so if I like, for instance, I

(01:23:53):
have the screenplay for Hell or High Water, but I
actually saw the movie about three days ago before I
actually heard the screen play, and I like the movie,
you know, just as well. And I will probably probably
end up reading the screenplay as well, just to see
what the differences are. But I really enjoyed the Hell Higwater.
Have you seen that yet?

Speaker 4 (01:24:13):
Yes? And for you know, I don't want to say
anything bad about Quinton. He has movies that I absolutely
love that are wonderful films, and he's a groundbreaking guy.
I will say he overwrites. And you know, if you
look at the screenplay for Hateful eight is I don't

(01:24:35):
like the film, and you know, the screenplay is one
hundred and eighty nine pages or somewhere thereabouts, and a
lot of people I talk with think he could have
cut an hour out of that movie. But he's also
written some just you know, some phenomenal stuff, you know,

(01:24:56):
in Glorious Bastards, reservoir Dogs, pulp fiction. I mean, he's
great stuff. He's another one though, he's an outlier. He's
he's very very smart, he's very gifted. He you know,
he still writes screenplays out long hand in a square
deal notebook. Okay, so's he's a different kind of guy

(01:25:18):
and he's made his own path. He's not somebody that
I would emulate writing, because there aren't. There are a
lot of people that try, and they just don't get
away with it. They can't pull it off. He's a
very difficult guy to try and copy, not copy like
rip off, but to try and emulate his style. He's
a he's a really difficult guy to do that on

(01:25:40):
you know there are it'd be like it'd be like
trying to write poetry like E. Cummings. You know me up,
it does out of the floor quietly stare a poisoned mouse,
and now I lose it? Who asks, you know, what
have I done? You wouldn't have? Okay, all in lower case,
no punctuation. You know, Cormack McCarthy, same thing. Go read

(01:26:01):
James Joyce, you know, go read one of the Cormack
McCarthy books. Where's the punctuation? Did the printer lose all
the periods that gavas and you know there isn't any
So why can he do that? Well? He blazed his
own way and he's phenomenal. Okay, So you know, do
you want to go be the next Cormack McCarthy and

(01:26:22):
go turn a book into your publisher that has no
punctuation marks? Probably not a good idea. It's just like
copying Shane Black. There's a conversation in my screenwriting group
brought up by a pro today this morning about how
a producer wanted him to add back a bunch of
unshootable commentary into the script that didn't have any well,

(01:26:46):
traditional wisdom says, and I wrote a post going my book,
you know, on Sally Bigfoot, write this big scenario about
Sally Bigfoot in our family. Okay, about unshootable garbage in
somebody's head that you can read on the page, and
then one ends up there. So I write this big
long thing about Sally Bigfoot, and it's like a page
and a half long, and then what somebody could actually

(01:27:08):
shoot from that script is like five words one line long,
because none of the rest is shootable. Okay, Well, there
was just this conversation that strangely, a producer was asking
this professional, multi produced guy, novelist. I'm not going to
name him here now for certain reasons, but this guy

(01:27:30):
has multiple films out and he turned in a nice
titleing script. He's an action writer. And the producer said,
you know, this is crap. What are you giving me?
I'm not saying he said, it's crap. Okay, he said,
I'm not happy with this. What are you doing here?
I want a bunch of commentary and other stuff you
know built around here. And he said, you know, well
you can't film any of that. He said, yeah, that's great.

(01:27:53):
It's the exact opposite of traditional wisdom. Okay. You see,
he asked to write stuff into the script to make
it longer, to entertain the reader, and to try and
get a particular a list actor. I can't mention who
they think they can lure in with this particular technique
by writing a bunch of stuff that they will never

(01:28:14):
be able to film. They will not change the film
script one bit, but that they want in there now.
The producer's the boss. If your producer tells you to
do that, then you do it. And that's the right
answer for that project. This is why the rules are
made to be broken. Wenton. Tarantino broke the rules. Shane
Black broke the rules. Cormac McCarthy broke the rules. E. E.

(01:28:36):
Commings broke the rules. James Joyce broke the rules. There's
a guy. There's a guy I can't remember his name,
which is sad Ny who wrote a novel it's also
in my book called Gadsby. I think it's called and
this writer Sadly again, I can't remember his name, but
he wrote an entire novel fifty thousand words, without using
the letter E in the whole book.

Speaker 3 (01:29:01):
So it's not the Great gas it's just Gatsby.

Speaker 4 (01:29:04):
Now it's Gadsby. It's like Gadsby. So he managed to write.
He managed to write an entire novel without using the
letter E in any word inside the covers. It appears
on the cover as they describe what he's done, because
if you use the word novel, it is an E obviously.
So now when they say, oh, this guy wrote a

(01:29:26):
novel without the letter E, well then you've used several
e's avenue on the cover.

Speaker 1 (01:29:31):

Speaker 4 (01:29:40):
But if you go to the actual story itself inside,
nowhere does the letter E appear. Now you talk about
writer's block, and that's what my essay was about. Next
time you think you have writer's block. I've written a
number of these. You know, look at what Lucretius wrote
De Rare. I'm not sure on the nature of things,
this epic poem that this guy wrote, you know, in

(01:30:03):
a toga in a cave with a candle, using squid
ink in a feather pen, and the type of Einsteiny
and physics and philosophy, you know, the incredible deep thinking
this guy did under these conditions. And Abraham Lincoln studied
law by candle. Okay, that's that's that's tough. Okay. Uh.

(01:30:23):
This guy did it, you know, in like fifty four BC,
writing in squid ink and he's talking about where the
universe ends. I mean really, so you want to you
want to talk about writer's block, uh, and do something
that's that's a remarkable achievement, but certainly less than than that.
Look at at this gads Gadsby book, and again it's

(01:30:43):
going to be in my book. But the guy writes
a whole novel without the letter ease. So next time
you think you have writer's block, imagine writing a novel
without using one of the letters of the alphabet a vowel.

Speaker 3 (01:30:58):
Yeah, and I would have linked that this year notes
as well. Actually, uh, I'm gonna about that about that
novel too, Mike, because that is uh.

Speaker 4 (01:31:07):
I don't know, I'll get you the info on him.

Speaker 3 (01:31:09):
Well, I was gonna look it up to when I
put it in the show notes because I you know,
I I don't know if that if that's an exercise
in bravery or or it just admit complete madness. Maybe
maybe both, right, but uh.

Speaker 4 (01:31:22):
I think it's an next It's brave and it's also stubborn.
I mean, you've got to be let me see, if
I'm finding for you, you've got to be mentally tough.
Two it's Gadsby G. A. D. S. B Y nineteen
thirty nine by Ernest Vincent Wright with W R I

(01:31:45):
G H T. Now, the sad thing is, you know,
nobody remembers this guy's name, Ernest Vincent Wright. So did
he take a gamble? You bet he did. He turned
a novel into his publisher with no ease in it.
That's a gamble, okay. And did his gamble payoff? I
don't know what's a payoff? His book got published. You

(01:32:06):
can still read the book today, you can. It's a
novelty item. You can go look it up and say,
holy smokes, how'd this guy do this? And go skim
the text? And he doesn't read like a traditional book
because he can't use the word e He's got to
write very strange, you know, circuitous roots to avoid using ease.

(01:32:28):
Was he a success? I don't know. I couldn't remember
his name and I'm a writer. His family didn't renew
his copyright really, so yeah, I mean, none of his
heirs after he died, none of his copyright ran, none
of his errors cared enough to pay the copyright fees

(01:32:48):
to recopyright re up the novel.

Speaker 3 (01:32:53):
Jesus.

Speaker 4 (01:32:53):
I know.

Speaker 3 (01:32:54):
So that's amazing. You know you know, we were talking
about copyright stuff and you know of the things that
you mentioned too in the group. Uh, you know, as
you talked about copywriting, was about you know, about the
w g A and also about you know, the US
Patent Office, the copyright Office, and I mean, you know,
all of that is is really good stuff. And when

(01:33:15):
I hear stuff like this happening, Because when I hear
stuff like this happened, or where I hear stuff like
you know what happened with Georgia Merrow and and and
the original Living Dead, I mean you realize just how
important all this stuff is.

Speaker 4 (01:33:29):
Yeah, and that's another thing most uh you know my
book will help with that. Shamelessly plugging the book yet again,
but I mean, I I'm I'm involved in the project
where they had they had some issues because somebody tried
to steal the project. There are other in my In
a year or so in my group, there have been

(01:33:49):
I used to have them written down something like between
nine and a dozen stolen scripts where people have actually
come in and said, you know, my script got stolen
and actually had some kind kind of substantial evidence, in
significant data and story behind it, not just like oh
I wrote a script and dog damn that Star Wars.

(01:34:10):
They stole my script. No, nothing like that, like actual
matching dialogue. And I've had it happen. I've had it
happen to me. I won't say who. I had another
writer take some stuff from one of my scripts. And
there are, you know, in a group of less than

(01:34:31):
three thousand people. And it wasn't three thousand the whole
time the group started at one me. It's not advertised
I reject about ninety percent of applicants. But in that
small group, in one year, we've got somewhere approaching a
dozen stolen scripts where people someone ripped off somebody else's work.

(01:34:53):
And there are trolls that go in these groups. That's
why I've met people. I'm very careful about this. There
are trolls that go in groups say, you know, producer
looking for someone to write our story, and you know,
we need you to submit ten pages. Well what they
do is, you know, and then we'll judge and we'll
pick who's going to get the running assignment. Well, Dave,

(01:35:14):
who gets the writing assignment? Tell me, no one gets
the running assignment. They assigned the ten pages that say
it's one hundred page screenplay. So that's ten ten page divisions.
They assign it to twenty writers. So have they put
up an ad in the group for you know, no money.

(01:35:34):
You have to prove to us who you are. You're
going to write ten pages. We'll tell you what to write,
and then we'll get back to if we like it. Well,
keep holding your breath, we'll call you blue boy. You'll
be in the corner turning blue because they're never gonna
call you no matter how good you were, because what's
going to happen. They don't have any money, and what's
going to happen is they're not really looking to hire
a writer. They're looking to steal writing. So they give

(01:35:58):
each they give ten scenes they want written ten pages.
Kind of a simplistic example, but I'm making it easy
for the math. One hundred page script, they divide it
into ten segments, however many scenes each. You know, script's
typically sixty eighty scenes. But let's stick with this example.
So you know, you're gonna write these ten pages for us,

(01:36:20):
and they give that same pages to the same ten
pages to two writers. Then they take the next you know,
eleven to twenty and they give that to two more writers,
and they do the same thing all the way down
the line. So they have twenty writers writing their one
hundred page script twice. So they what they then do

(01:36:41):
is they then pick through it all. They pick what
they like, what they don't like. They throw it all
together and they have maybe even that guy, rewrite the
whole thing, the whole script sitting they're written for him.
They just rewrite it, pick what they like, pick, well,
that was a guy had a great idea. Well, you
know we'll keep that. We're screwing him, so why not

(01:37:02):
keep it? And then they get the whole script written
form that only needs a rewrite, and they pay nothing.
And you know, these people aren't scrupulous, And this happens
all the time in writing groups. You know, send me
a writing sample, send me, send me, you know, ten
pages of my original script. Here's the story. You you

(01:37:24):
give me the first ten pages, so you know those
are those are all pitfalls, not copywriting. You want to
register with WGA. You got an extra twenty bucks, Sure,
register with WGA. Is your script copyright protected? Absolutely not.
WGA serves a lot of good functions. The Script Registry

(01:37:45):
is does not take the place of copyright. It's it's
it's it works as some evidence of when something was created,
not a copyright. Don't even get into federal court with
a WGA registration on a copyright case. So you know,
beginning writers need to learn that kind of stuff. And

(01:38:07):
a lot of it's counterintuitive, a lot of it. You know,
people aren't going to tell you. They don't know. There's
a lot of terrible information. I'll do it here. I'll
kill the poor man's copyright for you. Poormian's copyright. Write
your script, fold it up, seal it up really well
in an envelope, and mail it to yourself and there
now you're protected. Right, No, absolutely not does nothing. It's

(01:38:28):
never protected anybody in any court that I can I
can name, or that anyone I know can name. It's
absolutely worthless. And yet this myth of the poor man's
copyright persists. These are things that you need to learn
and and books like you know, David Trottier, Dave Trottier's
Screenwriter's Bible and others will address some of this stuff

(01:38:48):
for you. So you think you're going to be a screenwriter,
spend twenty bucks by a book, read it, learn something. Yeah,
and I get into arguments. I get at arguments to
people in my group. I'm a I'm a lawyer, and
they want to argue with me about the law. They
tell me I'm wrong. I had somebody do it a
couple of days ago. She was somebody asked a question

(01:39:09):
that ran into legal territory and didn't ask it to me,
just threw it up in the group. And I'm not
this person's lawyer, but you know I can give you
throughout general legal advice to writers and stuff. So I
answered the question and she's like contradicting my answer with
the complete wrong answer.

Speaker 1 (01:39:27):

Speaker 4 (01:39:36):
So I tried to gently guide her back and now, no, no,
look at it, it's really this way, And she told
me I was wrong. So you know, you really writers
need to have a basic understanding of certain things just
to survive and be viable. The writing is a strange occupation.
You have to be able to actually write stuff. But

(01:39:56):
then there's the business end of writing, which is completely
different from the creation end of writing. And again, like
David Trottereer's book and you know other books, they actually
will talk about both. And you know, Linda Arnson's book
talks talks about you know completely story UH story theory

(01:40:19):
and UH structure and plotting. That's the whole book. Genius
Genius book. Rick Toskins book talks about playwriting seminars too.
He talks a lot about the business and his very
practical guide. He analyzes plays. He bridges the gap between
playwriting and screenwriting. And then he talks about the business

(01:40:39):
of you know, Okay, you're sitting in your in your room,
over your garage and kind of saw Georgia churning out
this stuff. Isn't it great? Oh? You love it? And
what are you going to do with it? No one's
ever going to read it if it doesn't leave the garage, right, Yeah,
very true. So there's a business send And if you're
let's say you're an idiot of on let's say you're

(01:41:01):
you know, a beautiful mind, you're this gifted mathematician or
you know, if this guy was in a cave in
Afghanistan scribbling the most brilliant mathematics anyone had ever seen,
all over the cave walls, using you know, burnt bone
and scratching with a bone and you know, highlighting with
a with a piece of ashed out stick and a

(01:41:25):
little blood dot here and there. No one's ever going
to see it, right, So the most brilliant mathematician in
the world, no one knows who he is, he ends up,
you know, he he demises, and then you know, three
thousand years later, someone finds his cave art and recognizes
his high level mathematics, which is wonderful. And you know

(01:41:47):
everyone else, all the uninformed, think it's cave art. You know,
look at this, let's add some let's add some fags
to this, right, and they're modifying the formulas. Okay, so
you know there's a big to send to this too.
Unless you're going to be a pure hobbyist and just
write this stuff for your wife or your spouse, your grandma,

(01:42:07):
your dad, your mom. Oh look how great this is.
Give it to your kids. There needs to be a goal,
and that's the business end. And so like the books,
like I said, Playwriting Seminars to two point zero and
the Screenwriter's Guide, a Screenwriter's Bible, those are books that
discuss the business end as well. Okay, books like Aaronson's is,

(01:42:32):
you know, focused all on structure and plot and story
function and character function and all those things to an
extreme depth, like biblical depth. It's that in depth, but
it really doesn't There's some in there, but it really
doesn't approach the business as much. Your cut too is
showing by TJ Alex. I recommend. I think there's a

(01:42:55):
little business in there too, but that's not why I
go to that book. So you know, you need to
learn and you need to learn the business stuff too,
And that bridge is a nice gap to contests, which
you mentioned earlier.

Speaker 3 (01:43:06):
Right, Yeah, And one thing I want to ask Mike
is have you ever I mean I wanted to obviously
ask this because you know we're talking about books again.
Have you ever read any of like the Big three
or four books that sort of come across you know,
everyone sort of comes across them, and those books obviously
screenplay by Sidfield Save the Cat Story. Have you read

(01:43:29):
any of those books?

Speaker 4 (01:43:32):
Let me be as fair as I can be. I
read Save the Cat. Save the Cat is an approach.
It's extremely formulaic. You need to know it because a
lot of studio execs will be expecting, you know, Save
the Cat Story beats and they'll go to, you know,
page sixty seven of your script, page twelve A year

(01:43:55):
script page you know, twenty four of your script, page
five of your script, and they're going to be looking
for story. Save the cat. Story beats that. Blake Snyder,
by all reports, a wonderful guy who died young. It's
a shame. Its supposed to be a great guy, and
he wrote two of the worst movies ever written. You know,

(01:44:17):
blank check or shoot a Stop or my Mom Will Shoot,
which could have torpedo Sylvester Stallone's career dodged a bullet
on that one. So you know. That book was an
analysis done by Snyder over a great deal of time,
looking at looking for a formula, common theme, a thread
running through the most successful and admired movies, and he

(01:44:41):
distilled it down into a formula. It just like a
log line formula. Distials everything down and you start plugging
your stuff in to get a good log line. Well,
at some point, not every film has a log line.
You can write with a standard log line formula. Once
you understand what you're trying to accomplish, you may want
a very from the formula for a particular project because

(01:45:03):
you may not be able to capture the log line
well in twenty five words written, you know so and
so must do this, or you know, and beat such
and such villain, or this will happen, you know, blah blah. Okay,
so that may not be the best approach for a
movie that that you're working on. And so, yeah, I've

(01:45:24):
read Save the Cat. I think Save the Cat tends
to put writers in a box and it makes you
stick to story beats that people pull their hair out.
Oh my god, I added a scene in my Save
the Cat moment, my dark Night of the Soul moment

(01:45:45):
moved and now it's you know, for pages past words
supposed to be Oh my god, I'm gonna jump off
the roof. No, tell your story, Tell your story and
learn what Save the Cat is. In case you have
somebody that really wants the beats to line up and
you're writing for them, well then maybe you've got to
break out Save the Cat. As far as the other ones,

(01:46:06):
you know, Sidfield and all, I've started to read some
of them. I find a lot of their stuff. Yes
they're acknowledged experts. Yes they're much better known than I am.
Of course, I'm just a guy. You know, they're famous. Well,
a lot of their stuff is very philosophical and kind
of hard to put your finger on exactly what they're
saying and how do I apply this to my script?

(01:46:28):
So you know, I looked at some of that stuff
and didn't find it immediately helpful, so I ignored it.
I taught myself. And you know that's you know, there
are conventions, there are rules, and once you learn them,
you can also learn to break them and get away
with it if you know what you're doing. And as
far as those guys go, some of the most most

(01:46:52):
well read writers, screenwriters I know that have read every
single one of those books, that can quote you from
the books and tell you what page number is on
they've never written a good script. There was there was
one guy in my group who's no longer a member,
who's any social guy. Threw him out, but that's on aside,
and he just incredible knowledge on all these all these

(01:47:20):
writers theories, and you know all you know McKee and
Sidfield and you know every other every other theoretical uh
theoretician on storytelling. And by the way, Aaronson also is
big on that, except she wrote a book that's a
very practical nuts and bolts guide. That is, it's not

(01:47:41):
all just theory. It's loaded with theory, but it gives
you guidelines to actually fix the engine. Okay, they tell
you how to build the engine, tell you what the
engine is, and then it'll let you put the engine together.
A lot of these guys will say, let's talk about
an engine, and you know, before long you're sitting there
in a yoga position, staring out at a little plant

(01:48:03):
growing by hisself in the desert. Okay, like he's then
in the art of motorcycle maintenance. Right, yeah, So you know,
there's practical and there's impractical, and there's there are people
that write all kinds of great stuff and I can't
I'm not knocking these these great you know, well known
philosophical guys like the key in Field. I haven't read them.

(01:48:23):
I've skimmed little bits of them and said, you know what,
this isn't answering my question, or this isn't for me
and maybe for you. I'm not saying it isn't for you.
It could well be for you. My book isn't going
to be for everybody. That's for damn sure. So you know,
find your approach that works and stick to it. But

(01:48:45):
the guy that I was talking about a minute ago,
he bloviated endlessly in the group and ever, Oh this
guy knows everything. Oh my god, he's the best expert anywhere,
and he really didn't know a lot. It was incredibly impressive.
And then one day he came into the group and
he said, I've been doing this twenty years and I've
never finished a script. Can you guys help me. I'm

(01:49:07):
not kidding. I could show you the post so this guy,
this guy could quote you chapter and verse from Sidfield McKee,
from any but you know the the hero's journey, you
know all the different theories and story methods of writing.

Speaker 1 (01:49:30):
And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsor,

Speaker 4 (01:49:42):
There are a lot of different people that have, you know,
the two hundred and thirty seven steps of the Hero
and all these other approaches. And I'm not saying there's
anything wrong with those. They may be the best thing
ever for you, but they may not work for me.
You got to find what works for you. And so
this guy could tell you what anybody wrote about anything,
very convincingly. And you know, six months later you find

(01:50:06):
out the guy has never finished the script.

Speaker 3 (01:50:10):
Yeah, that's I wonder. You know, it's almost like a
fear of failure to start or something. I mean, but
then again, twenty years, I mean, wow, I mean that
is just maybe he just maybe he's got a ton
of screenplays started but never actually finished. Maybe I started, that's.

Speaker 4 (01:50:28):
Well, one one screenplay worked on over ten years, never
finished it. You know, I knocked out. I knocked out
a rewrite in five days that was accepted. Ninety nine
out of one hundred pages were accepted. First pass. I
got some notes. They said, we want to change a
couple of things on this one page that may cascadeness

(01:50:49):
something else. Can you do that for us? I said sure.
I rewrote it in about ten minutes. I spent about
twelve hours rereading the script, thinking about everything, making sure
that I wasn't setting myself up for a jackpot, a
story hole continuity here. Couldn't figure out anything that was
affected by this in any way. And when I hadn't

(01:51:09):
turned it in and they said, oh my god, we
love it. You're done.

Speaker 3 (01:51:13):
Yeah, you know, I want to do a guy Mike, Uh,
he couldn't write ten pages in three months, and yeah,
I and he wanted to be a screenwriter, And I said,
you got it. Turn in three or ten pages, at
least ten pages, and I give him three months to
do it, and because each month I would check back in,
because that's that's what you had to do to join
the one writer's group was that you had to actually

(01:51:35):
have written something. And I said, just show us something.
I said, write ten pages. And the first month I
didn't do it. My wife, my wife, and I I.

Speaker 4 (01:51:44):
You got it.

Speaker 3 (01:51:45):
And in the second month, another excuse, third month, and
finally I said, you know, I don't think your heart
is into this. I think your brain is. I think
you want that that notoriety. And then when we want
to exactly and.

Speaker 4 (01:51:58):
I have a whole post on this. I have a
whole post on you staring at the blank page and
being able to put anything fucking commit write something. You're
not a writer if you don't write. So I have
a whole essay on this that people found very useful
and with seven or eight different bullet points about what
is really going to happen in your life? What is

(01:52:19):
going to go wrong if you write a piece of shit?
What is really going to happen to you? If you
sit there and you hack away at your keyboard and
you write a just a piece of roadkill that a
dog wouldn't need. Guess what, nothing happens. You can rewrite it.

(01:52:41):
You could start over three years later, after you've written
two good ones. You'll laugh at your first one, and
maybe you'll have ideas to go back and fix it.
But that fear of writing, I like I said, I
wrote a whole essay on this. It was very well received.
If you be in the book fear of writing, if
you don't put it down on the page. The one
thing I guarantee you is you will never get anywhere.

(01:53:03):
If you don't actually commit to write, you will never
accomplish anything. Mike.

Speaker 3 (01:53:09):
That is so true. And you know, Mike, we've been
talking for about an hour and forty five minutes.

Speaker 4 (01:53:14):
Now, Wow, I haven't even kept trying.

Speaker 3 (01:53:17):
Yeah, well I have a timer right in front of
me of how long everything. But but so that's the
other reason, I know, you know, Mike, I don't want to,
you know, take up any more of your time. I
know you know, you know you've got a million things
going on as well. So you know, Mike. Inclosed, and
I just want to ask you one one final question.
Is there anything that we didn't sort of talk about

(01:53:37):
that you wanted to get a chance to or is
there anything that you wanted to say to sort of
put a period at the end of this whole conversation.

Speaker 4 (01:53:45):
Yeah, every writer's different. What works for me works for me.
That's a good place to start to look at, but
it doesn't mean it's going to work for you. If
you find a method that works for you, no matter
how many people tell you it's wrong. If your work
product is good, it doesn't matter how you get there,
as long as you're not stealing it. Do whatever works

(01:54:06):
for you. Learn the rules, the conventions of the trade.
Some of them people can't even say why it's done
that way. It's just done that way. Some of the
rules you're going to not be able to break, and
some of the rules you will be able to break.
When anyone tells you absolutely, oh this is wrong, that's wrong,
absolutes usually don't work. Learn a way to write that

(01:54:30):
works for you, and use that method. It probably won't
work for me. Mine may not work for you. But
there isn't necessarily a right way or wrong way you
need to get a high quality finished product out. If
you stand on your head and gibber and shriek and
right upside down, left handed and I gets it done.

(01:54:51):
Go for it. That's what you need to do. And
you need to write. A lot of people say, right
every day, you know, write three pages every day. You
have to where you're not a writer, Well, I'm not
a writer. I don't write every day. I write every
day in my group, but as far as writing content,
I don't. So that's another rule. You know writers write

(01:55:12):
every day. Well, some writers write every day. There are
plenty of writers that don't. I write when I'm inspired,
when I have great ideas, when I'm on an assignment.
If I don't have anything going on, I don't feel
like writing, and I sit down to write, I'm gonna
write crap. Right, So I'm not inspired, I'm not motivated.
I have no direction. Then without a goal, I'm just
going to meander along and write a bunch of forgettable

(01:55:34):
stuff that will end up in a folder that I
just wasted a day. Instead, focus before you start to write.
Common writer's errors. A new writer has no idea what
they have to say, what their voice is, why they're writing.
You need to try and discover your own voice and
figure out what it is you want to say. You
need to have something to say when you sit down
to write. I'll close on that.

Speaker 3 (01:55:56):
I couldn't agree more. Mike, Mike, where people find you
out on? Sorry? I know I said that was the
last question, but that this is the last question. Where
can you find you out online?

Speaker 4 (01:56:05):
My information's up on IMDb under Mike Lee Bierman. Most
of my projects are in development, which means unless you
have pro you can't see them. But there's plenty there
my contact informations there. I'm also I can also be
reached through the Facebook group screenwriters who can actually write
if you're going to apply. I do vet people. I

(01:56:28):
do not let people unless there's celebrities and they contact
me separately, which has happened a few times. I don't
let people in using false names because deals are made
in the group contracts form. You need to use your
real name and you need to show interest in writing.
If I pull up your profile, it's got a bunch
of stuff about playing on the Xbox and what's your

(01:56:49):
favorite whiskey and what's your favorite color ferbie, You're probably
not getting into the group. So those are a couple
of ways to find me. In my emails online and.

Speaker 3 (01:57:01):
Everyone I will link to all of that in the
show notes. And again, I just want to say that
Mike's group is phenomenal. It is the best screenwriting group
that I'm aware of on Facebook, and it is just
everybody in there is always doing awesome things. And that's
sort of what I want to always wanted from a
screenwriters group, you know, is people actually doing things. There's

(01:57:21):
actually like three screenwriting groups I'm a part of on Facebook,
and finally you know, they're they're great. They're yours. Mike
Screenwriting You has one, and Scott Meyer's going to Stories
another and those three.

Speaker 4 (01:57:33):
Sure, he's great. He's a Facebook friend of mine. I
don't really know him very well, but he's great, no
question about it. Yeah, one, go ahead.

Speaker 3 (01:57:41):
Sorry, I'm just gonna say those three are what actually
keep me on Facebook, because otherwise I'd just be like,
there's nothing really keeping me here.

Speaker 4 (01:57:48):
Hey, one final thought, shameless plug. You can look for
my daughter and look for me. I'm finishing with co
writer co producer Ramsey Stoneburner, exec producer Guy Francisco Poland,
and associate producer Craig Talis. We're working on a feature
film called The Shoes, which we've finished shooting about two

(01:58:12):
thirds of it. We've just added nay list person and
we're gonna be finishing that up in the next couple
of months. So got a couple films in development, but
that one is one that is directly at least partially
under my control.

Speaker 3 (01:58:28):
Oh awesome, fantastic, Mike. And you know, I looked forward
to seeing you, know everything you're up to, and I
know we'll be talking in a group Michael I Bierman. There,
I finally got it out. I have a head cold,
by the way, that's why it sound so terrible.

Speaker 4 (01:58:39):
But oh you actually you sound great, no idea.

Speaker 3 (01:58:42):
Oh good, Yeah, that's why I'm having some trouble talking.
I can't breathe my nose too well. But it's been
a pleasure having you one Mike, and I want to
say thank you so much, and again I will be
talking to you very very soon.

Speaker 4 (01:58:54):
Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it.

Speaker 3 (01:58:56):
I'm glad you did. My friend take care, okay, bye bye.

Speaker 1 (01:59:00):
I want to thank Dave so much for doing such
a great job on this episode. If you want to
get links to anything we spoke about in this episode,
head over to the show notes at Indie film huscle
dot com, forward slash eight to twenty and if you
have it already, please head over to filmmaking podcast dot com,
subscribe and.

Speaker 3 (01:59:16):
Leave a good review for the show.

Speaker 1 (01:59:18):
It really helps us out a lot, guys. Thank you
again so much for listening to guys. As always, keep
that hustle going, keep that dream alive, Stay safe out there,
and I'll talk to you soon.

Speaker 2 (01:59:28):
Thanks for listening to the Indie Film Hustle podcast at
indiefilm hustle dot com.

Speaker 3 (01:59:33):
That's I N D I E F I L M
h U S T l E dot com.

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