I got two tomatoes, one for the both of you!

So, I read the first (of what I asusme will be many) of the scripts off of the Blacklist, The Gunslinger by John Hlavin.  I heard described as a western meets Taken, which is pretty much what it it.  It's a revenge movie pretty straight up.  This script could have easily just been cliche, which it is in sections, but because it was so well written, it doesn't matter.  The script moves so well you don't want to stop and think about what you've read, you just have to know what happens next.  It just keeps racheting up the tension and stakes until the end where you're on the edge of your seat and you can't wait to see how it ends.  I defintely got a lot of out the action lines, which were short, but detailed.  You knew everything that was going to happen, which made seeing it in your head much easier.

Next, on to the Pomodoros:  As of 6:30 on 12/19, I am at 63 Pomodoros.  So, unless I am completely worthless, I will be able to hit my goal of 65 Pomodoros before I leave for TC on Monday.  Since I am going to be spending a lot of time sitting on planes on Monday, my goal is to have 72-75 Pomodoros when I land in TC.

Whoa, we're halfway there.....

So, I hit Pomodoro's 50-52 tonight.  A day or two behind scheudle, but who's counting (well, besides you gentle readers).  What seemed impossible only a few days ago, now just seems highly unlikely.  My screenplay is grinding along.  I realize that I hate starting writing, once I get going I rather enjoy it, but the prospect of sitting down and actually starting seems huge.  I think part of it is that I know the tremendous amount work it's going to take to rewrite my script the way it should be.  Oh well, I soldier on.  Since I'm unemployed, I'm basically paying myself to write and I should think of it more like that.  Hopefully that will be more inspiring.

Anyways.  So, I watched Inglorious Basterds and read the script yesterday.  The big thing I noticed (other than the scenes that were cut), was QT's setting something up with no pay off (in the script).  In the script after the massacre in the bar, the Jew Hunter finds a solider still alive who tells him what happened, instead of the way better finding the autograph.  You had this great set-up her signing an autograph and kissing it, and then completely forgetting it.  Thankfully he realized his mistake.  It reminds me of that screenwriting saying that's about if you see a gun in the first act, someone better use it (or something like that).  I feel like once I deleted that one character from my script I realized that I had set all this great crap up and I just needed to that character out of the way to see it.

Well, I continue path with blood in my wake.  I'll give the week end update as always on Saturday.

PS: I'm going to start working my way through this years Blacklist, so if you have any suggestions let me know.

Is it catsup or ketchup? All I know is that I am behind on my tomatoes!

Alright, so I got a total of 21 Pomodoro's this week bringing my grand total up to 33.  I should be more like 36, which isn't too far off the pace, but with Christmas (eve and day) and NYE coming up and me going back to TC for a week, I was hoping to be close to 80 by the time I went back.  Unfortunatley that would require me doing like 10 a day.  My new goal is be at 65 when I leave for TC.  It's doable.  It's like 4 a day.  With screenplay reading I should be able to accomplish that, especially if I keep reading the screenplay while I watch it on DVD, which takes longer (I'll only do that once a week).
Speaking of screenplay reading while watching the movie, I did that with The Dark Knight today.  The biggest thing I got out of it was how even though it's one way on the page, it will be different on the screen.  I know that's fairly obvious, but what I mean is that all of the elements were there, but a lot of times, sequences were edited different than they were written and in all of those times what appeared on the screen was better.  Most of the times it involved intercutting between scenes and not playing out one scene and then moving on to the next scene.  Pacing wise it kept the movie moving a lot better.  This is something I need to think about when I'm trying to build tension, but I still need to get a bunch of story out at the same time.  Can I use dialogue from one scene while I'm showing something else.  Stuff like that.

Oh well, here's hoping next week is better.

You gotta know what you're talking about

Up in the Air (2/18/03 draft) by Sheldon V. Turner, based on the book by Walter Kim

I'm going to start by saying, I don't know Jason Reitman found his Up in the Air in this script.  I haven't read the book, I know nothing about the book.  My hope is that the book is closer to Reitman's vision, and this particular screenwriter and countless producers conspired to ruin to it....Although, my fear is that this is a farily accurate adaptation.  I have nothing to back that up except for the fact that the writer makes little mistakes which leads me believe he doesn't know what's he's talking about and just parroting a summary of the book.  Case in point, the protagonist refers to people as "Japeto".  I think this is reference to "Gepetto" from Pinocchio.  But, who knows.  The more egregious case occurs on page 32 where as joke (I assume) he answers the phone "Edie Ahmean".  I can only assume he is referring Idi Amin famous Ugandan dictator.  While I don't expect everyone to have seen Barbet Schroeder's General Idi Amin Dada: A Self-Portrait (Last King of Scotland had not yet come out this point), I do expect someone who is trying to make a cultural reference to at least do the research on the spelling of the person's name. (On a complete sidenote when I saw the writers spelling all I could think of was Edie McClurg's role from Ferris Bueller's Day Off
Being a fan of the film and after these (and other minor mistakes) I was predisposed not to like this script, and I didn't.  It again makes me realize that Jason Reitman is one of the best filmmakers of generation.  He knows when not to touch a script (Juno) and when to rewrite and make it his own.

But, I wonder if it was his track record that allowed to make such sweeping changes (like everything but the setup), which is why this one falls so flat.  I am going to hope that this was a new writer without the juice to say that the ending is just too Hollywood, and doesn't fit with the tone of the movie.  This could also be a function of the time- 2003 being good times economically and 2009 being bad.

Don't condescend me....

Armored by James V. Simpson

First off this a pretty good script.  It moves ridiculously fast and keeps the tension high throughout most of it.  The big problem I had was that the script said things like "Ty's Camaro blasts into a lot full of big red ARMORED CURRENCY TRANSPORTS (ACTs), that's an "Armored Truck" for you
civilians." and "A TACTICAL MOBILE UNIT, you know it as a "police car", crawls
around the corner of a building."  I'm not really sure why the author took such great pains to assume we didn't know the jargon and to prove how smart he is by pointing it out to the reader.  Maybe it's just me (because I like to think I know a lot of stuff) but this instantly made me very angry towards this script.  I got past it, but it did stick in craw for much of the read and ended up taking me out of it from time to time.
It would be different if this was a script about a crackerjack team pulling off a heist, but this is by design average people pulling off an admittedly simple heist.  It's great you know the proper terminology for all this, but it's unnecessary.  There are countless other ways the author could have gotten this information across without making the reader feel ignorant.

On a complete side note, my curling team "You Say Zombie!  We Say Where?" clinched our playoff berth tonight and will be 3 seed after and 8-2 win.  There was actually a 5 way tie for the final 2 positions and because we had beaten 2 of the teams and lost to the other 2, it came down to tiebreaker points, which we did pretty well on this season.  Even the games we lost, we managed to win at least 3 or 4 ends which all added up to us catapulting two teams that had beaten us.  Tonight we played probably the best we had played all season, everything seemed to be firing right (or at least when we needed it).  It's too bad our Vice-Skip, Jen, won't be there next week for our grudge match against "The Untouchables".

Also, unless Ryan Grant gets negative points tomorrow night, I also clinched a playoff spot in my Fantasy Football league.

Sometimes you need a scalpal...and sometimes you need a chainsaw

First, the Pomodoro update.  I am currently at 13 Pomodoros for the month, so I am behind the pace, but I have every confidence that I'll be able to catch up.

Next, so I've been having some trouble with this script I've been writing.  I've got this character whom I love (he's sort of like a gay Micky Stone from Hustle), but he doesn't have a whole lot to do in the script until the end,  besides drop the occasional bon mot.  So, I was having trouble sleeping on Thursday night and I started thumbing through Script magazine and they were talking about editing and cutting stuff and it hit me - I had to cut that character.  I had debated cutting one of the other main charcters, but I couldn't make it work.  I changed the gender of a different main charcater, and she ended up working better, but something was still off.  The answer was always cutting this main character.
As soon as I made the decision to cut him, everything fell into place.  Now my two central characters, have actual arcs and themes.  The script (once the changes are made) will be a gijillion times better than it was going to be with the changes that I was planning as late as Wednesday of this week.  The whole script just makes more sense and will move so much better.
As a result, this will probably take the rest of the tomatoes this month to finish.

It's our differences that make us special

Ocean's Eleven by Steven Carpenter revisions by Ted Griffin

So, today I decided to try something I had read about, where you read the screenplay whilst you watch the movie.  Unfortunately, the only copy of Ocean's I could find was not the shooting script, but was (I'm guessing) an almost final draft.  What was interesting about this was the skeleton was all there, but the minor tweaks from dialogue to charcter and plot points made a huge difference on the screen.  Seeing the final version, I agreed with all the changes made.  A lot of them were just wittier dialogue, although many of my favorite moments do exist in the script.  The big change that I noticed was the end.  In the script Tess tells Danny that she doesn't want to be with him or Terry and then walks off leaving Danny with his crew, whereas on screen Danny gets arrested for parole violations (which had been foreshadowed throught the script and film) and Tess runs up and says "That's my husband".  That is one of the biggest emotional points in the film and it's not in this draft of the script.  My hope is that Ted Griffin saw the mentions of parole and then realzied that was a perfect ending.
At Screenwriting Expo John Cleese talked about how in Fish Called Wanda he couldn't figure out what to do with Michael Palin's character in the middle of the script (as he had nothign to do until the end), then he realized he should have him try and kill the witness but instead just kill her dogs (his character is huge animal lover).  This kind of thing was just somethign that was probably always there in the story and he just had to find it.

I'm going to try and do this kind of thing more often, with both shooting scripts and early drafts.

Ocean's Eleven  http://www.mypdfscripts.com/index.php?s=ocean's+11