October 28 – Sick and Hungover…and Kind of Sad
It was approaching three in the morning when I finally hit the sack, and I had promised myself to attend one of the 9 a.m. seminars Sunday morning. All those blasted pitches the day before had taken me away from the seminar action, and I wanted to take full advantage of whatever empty space in the day I had, especially considering this was the last day of the Expo. Somehow, someway, I couldn’t tell ya, but I managed to drag myself, hungover on Coronas, out of bed sometime between seven and eight. Making matters a bit more complicated was that my throat was killing me, always the sure sign of an impending cold. It was Sunday, though, so no rush hour to deal with. I got down to the Marriott in good time and was only ten or fifteen minutes late for the first seminar.
I wanted to try something that didn’t relate to any of my scripts, so I picked a seminar on horror films. Mind you, I was the biggest horror buff on the planet when I was a youngster. Seriously. My best pal growing up, guy named Dave, would make a point of coming over to my house for sleepovers ‘cause mine was the only joint in town with a dad who didn’t mind if his kiddies enjoyed a spot of Freddy or Jason. Still, we’re talking a couple of decades ago. And yeah, the first novel I ever wrote, when I was a high school freshman, could definitely be catalogued as horror, but that novel’s crap. When I tell you I’ve written four novels, I am most definitely not counting that one. Also, it was in the back of my mind that I might find inspiration through this seminar to give horror a screenwriting shot. Why not? That Presidential script was my first foray into comedy, and had gotten great feedback. Maybe I could do the same with some blood splatter and put all those sleepovers to good use.
The seminar I picked was called The Suspense is Killing Me! Writing Horror Action Sequences. It was taught by a petit lil’ blonde thing by the name of Sara Caldwell. When I walked in at 9:15 a.m. or so, glass of ice water in hand to sooth my throbbing throat, the lights were dim and Sara was delivering her lecture with the aid of a slide show on a huge screen to her left. Sara herself remained standing at a podium for the whole lecture with a voice that was very measured and clipped, practically clinical. She had half-moon specs to read her notes but more often peered over them both at us and the slides on the screen. While most seminars simply had rows of chairs, this room seemed to be a sort of ballroom with about a score of round tables for six to eight people each. Most of them were full. Sara later said that when they moved her seminar to this room at the last minute, she was afraid a good chunk of chairs would be empty. Apparently our gal Sara underestimated how much horror is fit to burst out of so many screenwriting brains.
When I walked in, Sara was on a slide entitled Pacing: “You wanna take the reader for a ride – make it fun!” Apparently I hadn’t missed too much seeing as she was just getting to character introductions. “Action introduces characters,” one slide said. “Introductions are powerful!” Of the many things she listed about getting to know characters was to see how they behaved in their environment…alone. But don’t introduce everything about a character at once. Not too little, but “don’t throw in the kitchen sink.” The gist of the bit on character development was to let the action and conflict develop the character. All of this may sound obvious, but it’s amazing how lots of films, horror and otherwise, don’t do it all that well. For horror in particular, Sara cited several examples of how films use the act turning points for character development, when the protagonist uses an existing character trait when it’s most needed. One example was the end of act two in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when Nancy figures out how to pull Freddy out of her dream and into reality. Character behavior in horror films, as in all genres, can expose not only the strengths but also the weaknesses of that person. Behavior can add depth to personality which, most important of all, should make the audience care. All too often in horror films you have the audience actually cheering on the homicidal maniac with the chainsaw, eagerly anticipating the methodology of the next kill. Sara couldn’t emphasize enough how the best horror films have you cringing, not cheering, when the protagonist is in danger. You take Descent, for example. Sara did. By the time those characters encounter those subterranean cannibals, you actual fear for them. It kills you seeing them get killed one by one. And speaking of cringing, Sara said that the best way to build suspense is to tease. As with characters, don’t give it all away at once. Set up a hook and tease out the hook over ninety minutes. And for horror films, the hook should engender an escape rather than a pursuit. Descent, anybody?
Sara’s lecture also included tips for writing horror that were not only aesthetic but practical. Horror films, per Victoria Wisdom’s two lectures on Thursday, are among the most lucrative genres. One of the best ways to make your script as sellable as possible (especially important for first-timers) is to use settings that wouldn’t be too expensive to create. Luckily, horror lends itself to such settings. Again, like Descent, a good low-budget setting is an isolated one, whether it be a maze or labyrinth (literal or implied), a house or cabin, an expanse, or what have you. And then find a way to make that simple space seem distorted, as in The Haunting, for example, or Hellraiser. In general, ways to distort space or logic are to make the normal abnormal, make the known suddenly not so known, make surroundings familiar to the protagonist suddenly dangerous, or utilize the unlimited potential of hallucinations, as in A Tale of Two Sisters.
The importance of foreshadowing and heightened themes also came up, which can be conveyed via symbols and motifs. One example is The Sixth Sense. The jewelry box from the dead girl represents danger, and mirrors become a motif, representing Bruce Willis’s separation from the real world. And speaking of foreshadowing, don’t be afraid to use the double whammy. For example, the initial shock can be the foreshadow. The crisis seems over, but it’s only just begun.
Two things inseparable from horror flicks are sex and violence, and good ol’ Sara saved those two topics for last. As with character development, horror films oftentimes give sex and violence short shrift. It’s either too cheesy and over the top or too clinical and unemotional. As with all things related to storytelling in general, sex and violence are always at their best when tied to an emotion. If you don’t get the audience involved emotionally, they won’t care, and the thrill of the sex or violence will be cheap. Just like when Freddy’s chasing that coed, you don’t want the audience cheering him on with “How will…?” You want 'em thinking “What happens if he actually…?” When Sara discussed the sex part in particular, she discussed films with sex scenes that were actually tied to a romance between two characters. One example is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matt wants to destroy as many of the pods as possible. He does so, but loses the love of his life. When that happens, you, the audience, feel awful about it. You’re not rooting for the dissolution of their relationship. In Hellraiser Julia and Frank really do fall for each other, and their affair is beyond passionate. When Frank needs Julia’s help to get new skin, you have no problem believing the lengths to which she goes to help him, including murder. By the way, Sara showed a page from the Hellraiser script, written by Clive Barker (also the director), and the way he described their love-making scene in one of the flashbacks was very vivid, and also metaphorical (they make love on top of the wedding dress Julia wore when she married Frank's brother). You can tell Clive’s primary passion is prose. And you can also tell just how lost in each other Frank and Julia become as well as, unfortunately for everyone else in the tale, how much the young couple becomes severed from reality.
As with sex, of course, violence also needs to be tied to emotion and motivation. Obvious examples: Zombies require human flesh to survive; that Great White’s gotta eat, etc. Or take Hellraiser again. Frank needs Julia to lure as many people as she can to that attic where he’s hiding out, because the more innocent saps he can get his hands on, the more his body becomes whole. We, like Julia, don’t know at first that this is Frank’s purpose in asking her for help. Sara couldn’t emphasize enough that if you can expose a character’s emotion and purpose behind a violent act, it can be really potent.
To sum up, Sara reiterated some general tips. Action sequences in horror should be vivid yet sparse and succinct. Don’t reveal everything about a character at once. Tease it out, just as you do the hook. Instead of dialogue, let the actions, especially violent actions, illuminate a character’s interior. Read as many good horror scripts as you can to see how it’s been done, but don’t be afraid to break the mold a bit. That whole breaking the mold thing is always easier said than done, but you can see her point. So many horror flicks seem derivative. Among the oodles of flicks she recommended we read (and of course watch): Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, Descent, The Sixth Sense, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Haunting, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Don’t Look Now. She also recommended a pair of websites: dailyscript.com and a new one called constructinghorror.com, which only just launched November 15. Suffice it to say that after the lecture, I was most definitely jacked to try my hand at horror.
I only had two pitches today, both with management firms. At 11:35 a.m. I pitched to Headlong Entertainment, and at 3:35 p.m. came Paradigm. Coincidentally, the head honcho at Headlong used to be one of the managers at Paradigm. Anyway, there isn’t much to relate here. Both were represented by very nice, professional young lasses who listened well, seemed very amenable to my story, and collected information. Yup, you guessed it. They never got back to me. The most interesting bit about these pitches is what happened in the holding pen. I can’t remember for which pitch I was waiting, but when my time slot was waiting in that last room, sitting in our numbered chairs, a woman with long jet-black hair walked over to the woman with long blonde hair sitting next to me, whose face was concealed behind her bangs, and said to her in a low voice: “Thank you so much for being rude and nasty. That was very writerly and human of you.” She walked away while the blonde didn’t say a thing. She only made this sort of goofy “shoo, fly, shoo!” motion with her hand. And then, just for good measure, although well after the other gal had left the room, the blonde patted her chest twice in quick succession before holding her hand palm out, as if waving good-bye. As a writer, I have to say I love it when I find myself in the middle of a drama because I can speculate endlessly about how it all began. I won’t speculate here, though.
I did have a more positive encounter during the pitches. While in the various waiting stages for one of them, I met a young man in his twenties from Ohio, a bit shorter than me and with perfectly combed black hair. The guy was pitching an action script that he described as North by Northwest meets Die Hard. With paintball. I don’t remember the gist of the actual plot, but suffice it to say that it was a very commercial action picture that made me think of Victoria Wisdom’s statistics from Thursday. Action is the most lucrative genre, and the 16-24-year-old males are the most lucrative bracket. Whether this guy knew it or not, he’d angled for the fattest sale. What’s more, that night, after the Expo wrapped, he was off to meet a producer in the Pacific Palisades to talk about his script, the lucky bastard. This producer was apparently a friend of the family’s from Ohio. If you needed any more proof that networking is the skeleton key to get past any and all gatekeepers in this business, there you have it.
Instead of eating my free boxed lunch out on the patio as usual, I decided I was too sick and tired (literally) to let the sun beat down on my head. So I stayed down on the lower level of the Marriott and sat in one of the oodles of chairs scattered around the corridors outside the seminar rooms. And there I struck up a conversation with a guy named Edward. In his early sixties and a local like me (in his case from Santa Monica), I had actually met Edward very briefly the day before while waiting for one of my plethora of pitches. We spoke extensively, mainly about his project, which is a documentary he’d already begun shooting. I won’t spill the details of it, as Edward had been reluctant to tell me everything, seeing as it had to do with his wife’s family and was still in the works. It led to us talking about stuff outside our respective movie aspirations. For a long time now Edward’s been making a healthy buck on the stock market. I work for Yahoo! and have exercised Yahoo! stock options plenty of times, yet Edward ran laps around me in telling me the health of Yahoo!'s stock, where it’s been, going back several years, and where he believed it was heading. He was cautiously optimistic about it, which was good to hear seeing as how Yahoo!’s been every financial journalist’s favorite dartboard for a good while now. Still, Edward told me this about two weeks before Yahoo! had its name dragged through the mud over the China affair. That’s okay, Edward. None of us saw that coming.
After lunch Edward headed over to the Renaissance for some more pitching while I stayed at the Marriott for the early afternoon guest speaker. From 1:30-2:30 p.m. in the main ballroom I was excited to see they had Scott Frank. Never heard of him? I guarantee you’ve seen at least one of the movies he’s written. Check it out: Dead Again, Little Man Tate, Malice, Get Shorty, Heaven's Prisoners, Out of Sight, Minority Report, Flight of the Phoenix, and The Interpreter. In early 2007 he made his directorial debut with The Lookout, which he also wrote. It’s possible you missed The Lookout because it came out in the winter-spring season, that cinematic dead zone between all the Oscar stuff and the summer tent poles. But don’t worry. That’s why we have Netflix, right? Although he’s pushing 50, Scott looks good for his age. I’d guess he even lifts a little bit. And he’s got a full head of black hair.
He talked about going to UC Santa Barbara in the late seventies and early eighties. One of his professors nudged him to take a stab at screenwriting and became his mentor. Similar to the CS Open contest, he first gave Scott a four- or five-page scene to write. Scott did it, turned it in, and got it back marked up and down with red ink. There was also a comment at the top that said something like, “Not bad” or “Keep going” or something really succinct that provided Scott with enough fuel to keep at it. After graduating, he moved to Hollywood and lived the cliché of the struggling screenwriter who tended bar. He made his first big sale, Dead Again, thanks to someone he met during one of his bar tending gigs who knew an agent. That agent eventually led to the sale. Say it with me now: Networking!
His M.O. as a writer involves renting office space and working there Monday through Friday from nine to five. He instills that traditional work structure on himself to be as productive as possible, although he admits he can easily kill the first three to four hours of the day surfing the web, surfing his coffee, not writing a single line. Poor guy. If he hadn’t already wracked up that pretty impressive oeuvre, I might actually feel for him. Continuing with that theme of networking, he said he was amazed that events like the Screenwriting Expo exist, and sort of wishes events like this had been around when he was a young buck. He knows that he could very well not have met that person at the bar who knew the agent, and that he could’ve remained a starving screenwriter considerably longer. So he encouraged us to take advantage of the Expo to network as much as possible. “There’s a dearth of good scripts in Hollywood,” he said. “So if you’ve got just one good script, and you knock on enough doors, your chances of success are good.” I’m paraphrasing, but I specifically remember him mentioning the “dearth of good scripts.”
When the moderator asked him about his most positive experience in the film industry thus far, Scott said it was directing The Lookout, hands down. Although the film is set in St. Louis, he shot it in Winnipeg. In the winter. When you see it, he said, it’s important to know that the snow is real honest-to-God snow. It doesn’t just look like it’s cold, it was really goddam cold. One of his predominant memories of the shoot is how unbelievably freezing it was and how he was always counting the minutes to when he’d be able to get back inside. Still, he said, it was by far the most rewarding experience of his career.
After my 3:35 p.m. pitch to Paradigm, I met Edward in the corridor right outside the pitching ballroom. He’d just finished his last pitch of the day as well. He had nothing else to do at the Expo. My plans were to meet up with Julie, the Scotswoman I’d met the night before, but that wasn’t for another three hours. There was one more event that we did have the option of going to. At around 5 p.m. or so, back at the Marriott ballroom where I’d seen Scott Frank, they were having the Screenwriting Expo closing ceremonies. Included would be the top three finalists from the CS Open tournament. The program said that all three scenes would be read in front of the crowd, and that the crowd would get to vote for the winner. Neither of us had any interest in going. Still, we decided to stroll back to the Marriott, where he was parked and where I could park myself for the last time at that outdoor patio. With any conversation about our respective movie projects long since exhausted, Edward talked to me about his two kids. His son, around ten or so, was having great difficulty in math. In particular, his most recent assignment had something to do with averages, means, medians, and the like, and his son had really wrestled with it. This worried Edward greatly, and as his son got closer to high school, the concerned father was still vacillating between public school versus private. While I got settled on the patio, Edward was heading down to the seminar rooms to see if anything else was going on. There was no need to exchange cards as we’d already done so at lunch that day. We promised to keep in touch.
While sitting out on the patio, the lack of sleep from the night before finally catching up with me and the fire in my throat showing no signs of cooling down, I watched with a pang in the chest as various Expo-ers had already checked out of their rooms and were catching cabs and shuttles back to LAX. Of course the vast majority of them I had never met, yet we had all spent all day every day at this event for the past four and half days. We’d put our lives on hold to do so. Many of them traveled from great distances, which speaks volumes about their dreams and determination. I don’t know, but something about all that made me feel like we were a ginormous family. For my part, I’d never been around so many writers in my life. Most people I know on a day to day basis have no interest in writing, and so there’s no one in my life who really gets where I’m coming from. It’s no one’s fault. As Bruce Hornsby said in another age, that’s just the way it is. I know I risk sounding really sentimental here, but I think one reason I’d had no trouble at all connecting with so many people at this event was that I knew in an instant where they were coming from, and vice versa. It didn’t matter where they lived or how much older or younger they were, we were all united by a passion to create. One of the people who walked out was that slick-haired kid from Ohio with the North-by-Northwest-meets-Die-Hard script. With his big black backpack strapped on, he turned and spotted me sitting there. We made eye contact as he continued walking. We nodded and smiled at each other. And then he was gone, off to the Pacific Palisades to pitch his action adventure. I’ll probably never see him again, but I’ll always wonder if he made the sale.
Another thing about watching all these people that made it extra throat choking was that it was late in the afternoon. The sun was setting behind LAX a couple miles away. So there you go. Any writer could appreciate the obvious symbolism here. Not just the setting sun, but the fact that the sun was setting behind the very airport where many of these Expo-ers were now heading for the journey home. If you find a scene that more blatantly captures an ending, please do let me know.
I had a notebook in which I’d been jotting down notes from seminars as well as from my own observations, all of which became fodder for these blog posts. I was just starting to jot down stuff for this day when Namiko showed up. She was also done for the day. Instead of the closing ceremonies, she was killing time before another Expo-er, a fellow Japanese gal who was now living in the northeast and wasn’t heading home until tomorrow, was going to take her out to dinner. She sat out on the patio with me for a spell. We talked about our day and the Expo as a whole. Both of us had nothing but positive experiences to recount and were both happy we’d gone to the time and trouble to attend this sucker. I’m really glad Namiko was satisfied. The poor gal’d flown all the way from frickin’ Tokyo.
Eventually we decided to adjourn to Champions, the sports bar where she, Florencia, and I had had drinks that very first night after the pre-Expo pool party. As with Edward, Namiko and I had long since exhausted any conversation about our writing aspirations, and so we started sharing bits of our personal lives. As it turns out, we had quite a bit in common in terms of musical tastes. She likes U2, and U2 practically got me through high school. She likes Suzanne Vega, and I was heading to a Suzanne Vega concert in two weeks. Beck and Weezer are two more of her faves. I saw Beck at the Universal Amphiteatre a couple years ago. And so on. We also talked about our frustrations with relationships. If there’s one true universal language, it’s not mathematics, it’s dating. I sort of ventilated onto her the various issues I had with the L.A. dating scene, how the lack of community in this mutant sprawl translated into lots of seemingly aloof people with whom it was hard to connect. Sure, there’s always the possibility of meeting someone at work, but most everyone I know at Yahoo! is pretty involved with someone else. Namiko, in her late thirties and also single, said that in Japan, the workplace was definitely one of the prime spots to meet a potential mate. As she described it, their version of speed dating was when a collection of companies put out the call to all singletons under their respective roofs about a singles event after work on a certain weeknight. In Namiko’s case, she and other singles from Sega would head to a bar after work where there’d be a commensurate number of singles from other companies.
To make the most of her visit to the States, she wasn’t heading back to the grind just yet. First thing tomorrow morning she was checking out and then heading over to a hotel in Beverly Hills called Lux. Her plan was to spend all of Monday and Tuesday visiting various spots around L.A. Her plane back to Tokyo was departing that Wednesday. When she e-mailed me after getting back, she told me that she got the chance to take the VIP tour of Warner Brothers, which I’d recommended to her based on my own experiences with the tour over the summer. When I first met her at the pre-Expo pool party, she’d told me her favorite show was ER, and I remembered that the ER set was one of the stops on the Warners tour. And so I was not surprised in the slightest when in her e-mail she said that the best part of her whole visit to the States was seeing the ER set.
At 6:30 p.m. I met good ol’ Julie out on the patio where she and I had met and talked into the wee hours the night before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was depressing that all this was about to end, but why not stretch it out a bit further? And what better way than to get away from the hotel for a spell? I huffed it back to my car at Lot C, drove back to the Marriott to pick up Jules, and drove us north about 10 miles to the Westside. We wound up at the Napa Valley Grille in Westwood Village, just a few blocks south of UCLA, a few blocks from where my mother grew up, and by utter coincidence all of one block from the apartment where Julie lived the previous February while attending a UCLA extension course in screenwriting. I’d been to the Napa Valley Grille once before, back in early August with a gal I’d met at, you guessed it, one of those speed dating ‘mabobs. It didn’t work out with her, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a great little place. The menu isn’t exactly Cheesecake Factory affordable, but the food’s definitely worth it. No, really. If you’re in the area, make it a point to go there. As Alan Coulter says on The Late Show, you’ll be glad ya did!
On this night I decided to forgo beer—the Grille’s got Blue Moon on tap, by the by—and let Julie order us a bottle of white. She’s to wine what I am to the sudsy stuff. For the appetizer I ordered their pizzettes, which are basically little tiny baby pieces of pizza. In addition to the tomato sauce, the pizzettes contain—you ready for this?-- duck confit, creamy blue cheese, black mission fig, celery root, wild mushrooms and truffle essence. I told you you better be ready! I don't even know what half that stuff is, let alone how they get it all on those little infant slices. Jules skipped the appetizer and dove straight into the main course, which for her was jumbo lump crab ravioli, stuffed not only with crab meat but also with butternut squash and lobster mushrooms. My main course was the roasted free range chicken breast. You know what? I just realized what a monster goof it was to describe my dinner on an empty stomach. You have no idea how famished I am right now. No joke.
I got to know Julie by far more than anyone else at the Expo, between the previous night’s chat-a-thon as well as our dinner at the Napa Valley Grille. I’m not kidding. I know I told her a lot about my life, and she practically gave me the lowdown on herself from the moment she popped out of Mum’s belly to this night. And what a life she’s had. After scoring a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Psychology, she worked as a drug counselor to addicts and their families. This was in the Sheffield area in Yorkshire, North of England. It’s the same neck o’ the woods where that flick The Full Monty took place. Ever see The Full Monty? That’s where. There were the awesome, rewarding times as well as the tragic. She made sure to emphasize the awesome. Yeah, these kids—and they were mostly kids—were into heavy shite. Yeah it could be maddening sometimes, but the reward of seeing them get better made it all worth it. It wasn’t all work and no play. They’d go to the movies. No, really. With a smile on her face like a proud mother hen, she regaled me with tales of how she’d pack the kids into some raggedy ol’ bus and chauffeur them into town to catch a matinee at the local cinema. As for the tragic times, remember we are talking about hardcore addicts here. I think you can guess.
We’re both children of divorce, only hers came much later than mine, as she was approaching twenty. Branded into her brain forever is the image of her, her brother, and their parents at the dinner table when their parents broke the news. Branded forever is the clatter of her brother’s fork falling to the plate in reaction. Also like me, though, and just to stay positive here, she’s remained close to both parents. They both have vastly different careers, so she needs to carry two different mental lexicons when talking to them, but she’s plenty whip-smart to do that. Whenever her mother visits her, wherever she happens to be living (Jules has gotten around), her mother always falls in love with the place and says she could easily see herself living there. As I pointed out to Jules, of course her mom’s going to say that. The hen just wants to be near the chicky to make sure all’s well.
As with Namiko, we also commiserated about being perpetually single. Jules has a gig that requires her to travel during the week. ‘Course the awesome thing about that is that she almost never spends any of her own dough. Everything’s expensed. On the flip side, she’s living alone out of her suitcase Monday through Friday, and she’s usually at work twelve to fourteen hours a day. As a singleton, she said more than once, it can really suck not to have that last call of the day.
When dinner was over, we took a stroll around Westwood Village, where she pointed out to me where her screenwriting extension class was held the previous February. This was when we discovered that the apartment she lived in during the class was all of a block away from the Grille. For my part, I showed her the Geffen Playhouse, where I go a handful of times a year and where I’d just seen the Wendy Wasserstein play Third, starring Christine Lahti, the month before. And we walked by the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf that I always read at prior to curtain time whenever I go to the Geffen.
There was no delaying the end now. It was after ten at night. We hopped back into my Focus, and I took her back to the Marriott. We hugged and said happy trails. I drove the thirty or so light years up the 405, back into the Valley, back into my life. As I came up over the hill and down toward the innumerable amber lights dotting the black Valley floor like a sheet of marbles over an abyss, I thought about how paradoxical the Expo had felt in terms of time passage. It went fast because I was always on the go, yet it seemed I’d lived a small lifetime because of all the people I’d met, gotten to know, and said good-bye to. When I got back to work the next day, I just knew I’d have that familiar feeling of having never left, yet at the same time of having been through so much in the five days I’d been away. And since I was horrifically underslept and my throat was kicking my ass up and down the L.A. basin, I also knew I’d show up grumpy. There was no denying it. I’d be sucking down the Starbucks Breakfast Blend like it was the last Breakfast Blend in the Milky frickin’ Way. No joke.
It was approaching three in the morning when I finally hit the sack, and I had promised myself to attend one of the 9 a.m. seminars Sunday morning. All those blasted pitches the day before had taken me away from the seminar action, and I wanted to take full advantage of whatever empty space in the day I had, especially considering this was the last day of the Expo. Somehow, someway, I couldn’t tell ya, but I managed to drag myself, hungover on Coronas, out of bed sometime between seven and eight. Making matters a bit more complicated was that my throat was killing me, always the sure sign of an impending cold. It was Sunday, though, so no rush hour to deal with. I got down to the Marriott in good time and was only ten or fifteen minutes late for the first seminar.
I wanted to try something that didn’t relate to any of my scripts, so I picked a seminar on horror films. Mind you, I was the biggest horror buff on the planet when I was a youngster. Seriously. My best pal growing up, guy named Dave, would make a point of coming over to my house for sleepovers ‘cause mine was the only joint in town with a dad who didn’t mind if his kiddies enjoyed a spot of Freddy or Jason. Still, we’re talking a couple of decades ago. And yeah, the first novel I ever wrote, when I was a high school freshman, could definitely be catalogued as horror, but that novel’s crap. When I tell you I’ve written four novels, I am most definitely not counting that one. Also, it was in the back of my mind that I might find inspiration through this seminar to give horror a screenwriting shot. Why not? That Presidential script was my first foray into comedy, and had gotten great feedback. Maybe I could do the same with some blood splatter and put all those sleepovers to good use.
The seminar I picked was called The Suspense is Killing Me! Writing Horror Action Sequences. It was taught by a petit lil’ blonde thing by the name of Sara Caldwell. When I walked in at 9:15 a.m. or so, glass of ice water in hand to sooth my throbbing throat, the lights were dim and Sara was delivering her lecture with the aid of a slide show on a huge screen to her left. Sara herself remained standing at a podium for the whole lecture with a voice that was very measured and clipped, practically clinical. She had half-moon specs to read her notes but more often peered over them both at us and the slides on the screen. While most seminars simply had rows of chairs, this room seemed to be a sort of ballroom with about a score of round tables for six to eight people each. Most of them were full. Sara later said that when they moved her seminar to this room at the last minute, she was afraid a good chunk of chairs would be empty. Apparently our gal Sara underestimated how much horror is fit to burst out of so many screenwriting brains.
When I walked in, Sara was on a slide entitled Pacing: “You wanna take the reader for a ride – make it fun!” Apparently I hadn’t missed too much seeing as she was just getting to character introductions. “Action introduces characters,” one slide said. “Introductions are powerful!” Of the many things she listed about getting to know characters was to see how they behaved in their environment…alone. But don’t introduce everything about a character at once. Not too little, but “don’t throw in the kitchen sink.” The gist of the bit on character development was to let the action and conflict develop the character. All of this may sound obvious, but it’s amazing how lots of films, horror and otherwise, don’t do it all that well. For horror in particular, Sara cited several examples of how films use the act turning points for character development, when the protagonist uses an existing character trait when it’s most needed. One example was the end of act two in A Nightmare on Elm Street, when Nancy figures out how to pull Freddy out of her dream and into reality. Character behavior in horror films, as in all genres, can expose not only the strengths but also the weaknesses of that person. Behavior can add depth to personality which, most important of all, should make the audience care. All too often in horror films you have the audience actually cheering on the homicidal maniac with the chainsaw, eagerly anticipating the methodology of the next kill. Sara couldn’t emphasize enough how the best horror films have you cringing, not cheering, when the protagonist is in danger. You take Descent, for example. Sara did. By the time those characters encounter those subterranean cannibals, you actual fear for them. It kills you seeing them get killed one by one. And speaking of cringing, Sara said that the best way to build suspense is to tease. As with characters, don’t give it all away at once. Set up a hook and tease out the hook over ninety minutes. And for horror films, the hook should engender an escape rather than a pursuit. Descent, anybody?
Sara’s lecture also included tips for writing horror that were not only aesthetic but practical. Horror films, per Victoria Wisdom’s two lectures on Thursday, are among the most lucrative genres. One of the best ways to make your script as sellable as possible (especially important for first-timers) is to use settings that wouldn’t be too expensive to create. Luckily, horror lends itself to such settings. Again, like Descent, a good low-budget setting is an isolated one, whether it be a maze or labyrinth (literal or implied), a house or cabin, an expanse, or what have you. And then find a way to make that simple space seem distorted, as in The Haunting, for example, or Hellraiser. In general, ways to distort space or logic are to make the normal abnormal, make the known suddenly not so known, make surroundings familiar to the protagonist suddenly dangerous, or utilize the unlimited potential of hallucinations, as in A Tale of Two Sisters.
The importance of foreshadowing and heightened themes also came up, which can be conveyed via symbols and motifs. One example is The Sixth Sense. The jewelry box from the dead girl represents danger, and mirrors become a motif, representing Bruce Willis’s separation from the real world. And speaking of foreshadowing, don’t be afraid to use the double whammy. For example, the initial shock can be the foreshadow. The crisis seems over, but it’s only just begun.
Two things inseparable from horror flicks are sex and violence, and good ol’ Sara saved those two topics for last. As with character development, horror films oftentimes give sex and violence short shrift. It’s either too cheesy and over the top or too clinical and unemotional. As with all things related to storytelling in general, sex and violence are always at their best when tied to an emotion. If you don’t get the audience involved emotionally, they won’t care, and the thrill of the sex or violence will be cheap. Just like when Freddy’s chasing that coed, you don’t want the audience cheering him on with “How will…?” You want 'em thinking “What happens if he actually…?” When Sara discussed the sex part in particular, she discussed films with sex scenes that were actually tied to a romance between two characters. One example is the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Matt wants to destroy as many of the pods as possible. He does so, but loses the love of his life. When that happens, you, the audience, feel awful about it. You’re not rooting for the dissolution of their relationship. In Hellraiser Julia and Frank really do fall for each other, and their affair is beyond passionate. When Frank needs Julia’s help to get new skin, you have no problem believing the lengths to which she goes to help him, including murder. By the way, Sara showed a page from the Hellraiser script, written by Clive Barker (also the director), and the way he described their love-making scene in one of the flashbacks was very vivid, and also metaphorical (they make love on top of the wedding dress Julia wore when she married Frank's brother). You can tell Clive’s primary passion is prose. And you can also tell just how lost in each other Frank and Julia become as well as, unfortunately for everyone else in the tale, how much the young couple becomes severed from reality.
As with sex, of course, violence also needs to be tied to emotion and motivation. Obvious examples: Zombies require human flesh to survive; that Great White’s gotta eat, etc. Or take Hellraiser again. Frank needs Julia to lure as many people as she can to that attic where he’s hiding out, because the more innocent saps he can get his hands on, the more his body becomes whole. We, like Julia, don’t know at first that this is Frank’s purpose in asking her for help. Sara couldn’t emphasize enough that if you can expose a character’s emotion and purpose behind a violent act, it can be really potent.
To sum up, Sara reiterated some general tips. Action sequences in horror should be vivid yet sparse and succinct. Don’t reveal everything about a character at once. Tease it out, just as you do the hook. Instead of dialogue, let the actions, especially violent actions, illuminate a character’s interior. Read as many good horror scripts as you can to see how it’s been done, but don’t be afraid to break the mold a bit. That whole breaking the mold thing is always easier said than done, but you can see her point. So many horror flicks seem derivative. Among the oodles of flicks she recommended we read (and of course watch): Hellraiser, Jacob’s Ladder, Descent, The Sixth Sense, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Haunting, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, and Don’t Look Now. She also recommended a pair of websites: dailyscript.com and a new one called constructinghorror.com, which only just launched November 15. Suffice it to say that after the lecture, I was most definitely jacked to try my hand at horror.
I only had two pitches today, both with management firms. At 11:35 a.m. I pitched to Headlong Entertainment, and at 3:35 p.m. came Paradigm. Coincidentally, the head honcho at Headlong used to be one of the managers at Paradigm. Anyway, there isn’t much to relate here. Both were represented by very nice, professional young lasses who listened well, seemed very amenable to my story, and collected information. Yup, you guessed it. They never got back to me. The most interesting bit about these pitches is what happened in the holding pen. I can’t remember for which pitch I was waiting, but when my time slot was waiting in that last room, sitting in our numbered chairs, a woman with long jet-black hair walked over to the woman with long blonde hair sitting next to me, whose face was concealed behind her bangs, and said to her in a low voice: “Thank you so much for being rude and nasty. That was very writerly and human of you.” She walked away while the blonde didn’t say a thing. She only made this sort of goofy “shoo, fly, shoo!” motion with her hand. And then, just for good measure, although well after the other gal had left the room, the blonde patted her chest twice in quick succession before holding her hand palm out, as if waving good-bye. As a writer, I have to say I love it when I find myself in the middle of a drama because I can speculate endlessly about how it all began. I won’t speculate here, though.
I did have a more positive encounter during the pitches. While in the various waiting stages for one of them, I met a young man in his twenties from Ohio, a bit shorter than me and with perfectly combed black hair. The guy was pitching an action script that he described as North by Northwest meets Die Hard. With paintball. I don’t remember the gist of the actual plot, but suffice it to say that it was a very commercial action picture that made me think of Victoria Wisdom’s statistics from Thursday. Action is the most lucrative genre, and the 16-24-year-old males are the most lucrative bracket. Whether this guy knew it or not, he’d angled for the fattest sale. What’s more, that night, after the Expo wrapped, he was off to meet a producer in the Pacific Palisades to talk about his script, the lucky bastard. This producer was apparently a friend of the family’s from Ohio. If you needed any more proof that networking is the skeleton key to get past any and all gatekeepers in this business, there you have it.
Instead of eating my free boxed lunch out on the patio as usual, I decided I was too sick and tired (literally) to let the sun beat down on my head. So I stayed down on the lower level of the Marriott and sat in one of the oodles of chairs scattered around the corridors outside the seminar rooms. And there I struck up a conversation with a guy named Edward. In his early sixties and a local like me (in his case from Santa Monica), I had actually met Edward very briefly the day before while waiting for one of my plethora of pitches. We spoke extensively, mainly about his project, which is a documentary he’d already begun shooting. I won’t spill the details of it, as Edward had been reluctant to tell me everything, seeing as it had to do with his wife’s family and was still in the works. It led to us talking about stuff outside our respective movie aspirations. For a long time now Edward’s been making a healthy buck on the stock market. I work for Yahoo! and have exercised Yahoo! stock options plenty of times, yet Edward ran laps around me in telling me the health of Yahoo!'s stock, where it’s been, going back several years, and where he believed it was heading. He was cautiously optimistic about it, which was good to hear seeing as how Yahoo!’s been every financial journalist’s favorite dartboard for a good while now. Still, Edward told me this about two weeks before Yahoo! had its name dragged through the mud over the China affair. That’s okay, Edward. None of us saw that coming.
After lunch Edward headed over to the Renaissance for some more pitching while I stayed at the Marriott for the early afternoon guest speaker. From 1:30-2:30 p.m. in the main ballroom I was excited to see they had Scott Frank. Never heard of him? I guarantee you’ve seen at least one of the movies he’s written. Check it out: Dead Again, Little Man Tate, Malice, Get Shorty, Heaven's Prisoners, Out of Sight, Minority Report, Flight of the Phoenix, and The Interpreter. In early 2007 he made his directorial debut with The Lookout, which he also wrote. It’s possible you missed The Lookout because it came out in the winter-spring season, that cinematic dead zone between all the Oscar stuff and the summer tent poles. But don’t worry. That’s why we have Netflix, right? Although he’s pushing 50, Scott looks good for his age. I’d guess he even lifts a little bit. And he’s got a full head of black hair.
He talked about going to UC Santa Barbara in the late seventies and early eighties. One of his professors nudged him to take a stab at screenwriting and became his mentor. Similar to the CS Open contest, he first gave Scott a four- or five-page scene to write. Scott did it, turned it in, and got it back marked up and down with red ink. There was also a comment at the top that said something like, “Not bad” or “Keep going” or something really succinct that provided Scott with enough fuel to keep at it. After graduating, he moved to Hollywood and lived the cliché of the struggling screenwriter who tended bar. He made his first big sale, Dead Again, thanks to someone he met during one of his bar tending gigs who knew an agent. That agent eventually led to the sale. Say it with me now: Networking!
His M.O. as a writer involves renting office space and working there Monday through Friday from nine to five. He instills that traditional work structure on himself to be as productive as possible, although he admits he can easily kill the first three to four hours of the day surfing the web, surfing his coffee, not writing a single line. Poor guy. If he hadn’t already wracked up that pretty impressive oeuvre, I might actually feel for him. Continuing with that theme of networking, he said he was amazed that events like the Screenwriting Expo exist, and sort of wishes events like this had been around when he was a young buck. He knows that he could very well not have met that person at the bar who knew the agent, and that he could’ve remained a starving screenwriter considerably longer. So he encouraged us to take advantage of the Expo to network as much as possible. “There’s a dearth of good scripts in Hollywood,” he said. “So if you’ve got just one good script, and you knock on enough doors, your chances of success are good.” I’m paraphrasing, but I specifically remember him mentioning the “dearth of good scripts.”
When the moderator asked him about his most positive experience in the film industry thus far, Scott said it was directing The Lookout, hands down. Although the film is set in St. Louis, he shot it in Winnipeg. In the winter. When you see it, he said, it’s important to know that the snow is real honest-to-God snow. It doesn’t just look like it’s cold, it was really goddam cold. One of his predominant memories of the shoot is how unbelievably freezing it was and how he was always counting the minutes to when he’d be able to get back inside. Still, he said, it was by far the most rewarding experience of his career.
After my 3:35 p.m. pitch to Paradigm, I met Edward in the corridor right outside the pitching ballroom. He’d just finished his last pitch of the day as well. He had nothing else to do at the Expo. My plans were to meet up with Julie, the Scotswoman I’d met the night before, but that wasn’t for another three hours. There was one more event that we did have the option of going to. At around 5 p.m. or so, back at the Marriott ballroom where I’d seen Scott Frank, they were having the Screenwriting Expo closing ceremonies. Included would be the top three finalists from the CS Open tournament. The program said that all three scenes would be read in front of the crowd, and that the crowd would get to vote for the winner. Neither of us had any interest in going. Still, we decided to stroll back to the Marriott, where he was parked and where I could park myself for the last time at that outdoor patio. With any conversation about our respective movie projects long since exhausted, Edward talked to me about his two kids. His son, around ten or so, was having great difficulty in math. In particular, his most recent assignment had something to do with averages, means, medians, and the like, and his son had really wrestled with it. This worried Edward greatly, and as his son got closer to high school, the concerned father was still vacillating between public school versus private. While I got settled on the patio, Edward was heading down to the seminar rooms to see if anything else was going on. There was no need to exchange cards as we’d already done so at lunch that day. We promised to keep in touch.
While sitting out on the patio, the lack of sleep from the night before finally catching up with me and the fire in my throat showing no signs of cooling down, I watched with a pang in the chest as various Expo-ers had already checked out of their rooms and were catching cabs and shuttles back to LAX. Of course the vast majority of them I had never met, yet we had all spent all day every day at this event for the past four and half days. We’d put our lives on hold to do so. Many of them traveled from great distances, which speaks volumes about their dreams and determination. I don’t know, but something about all that made me feel like we were a ginormous family. For my part, I’d never been around so many writers in my life. Most people I know on a day to day basis have no interest in writing, and so there’s no one in my life who really gets where I’m coming from. It’s no one’s fault. As Bruce Hornsby said in another age, that’s just the way it is. I know I risk sounding really sentimental here, but I think one reason I’d had no trouble at all connecting with so many people at this event was that I knew in an instant where they were coming from, and vice versa. It didn’t matter where they lived or how much older or younger they were, we were all united by a passion to create. One of the people who walked out was that slick-haired kid from Ohio with the North-by-Northwest-meets-Die-Hard script. With his big black backpack strapped on, he turned and spotted me sitting there. We made eye contact as he continued walking. We nodded and smiled at each other. And then he was gone, off to the Pacific Palisades to pitch his action adventure. I’ll probably never see him again, but I’ll always wonder if he made the sale.
Another thing about watching all these people that made it extra throat choking was that it was late in the afternoon. The sun was setting behind LAX a couple miles away. So there you go. Any writer could appreciate the obvious symbolism here. Not just the setting sun, but the fact that the sun was setting behind the very airport where many of these Expo-ers were now heading for the journey home. If you find a scene that more blatantly captures an ending, please do let me know.
I had a notebook in which I’d been jotting down notes from seminars as well as from my own observations, all of which became fodder for these blog posts. I was just starting to jot down stuff for this day when Namiko showed up. She was also done for the day. Instead of the closing ceremonies, she was killing time before another Expo-er, a fellow Japanese gal who was now living in the northeast and wasn’t heading home until tomorrow, was going to take her out to dinner. She sat out on the patio with me for a spell. We talked about our day and the Expo as a whole. Both of us had nothing but positive experiences to recount and were both happy we’d gone to the time and trouble to attend this sucker. I’m really glad Namiko was satisfied. The poor gal’d flown all the way from frickin’ Tokyo.
Eventually we decided to adjourn to Champions, the sports bar where she, Florencia, and I had had drinks that very first night after the pre-Expo pool party. As with Edward, Namiko and I had long since exhausted any conversation about our writing aspirations, and so we started sharing bits of our personal lives. As it turns out, we had quite a bit in common in terms of musical tastes. She likes U2, and U2 practically got me through high school. She likes Suzanne Vega, and I was heading to a Suzanne Vega concert in two weeks. Beck and Weezer are two more of her faves. I saw Beck at the Universal Amphiteatre a couple years ago. And so on. We also talked about our frustrations with relationships. If there’s one true universal language, it’s not mathematics, it’s dating. I sort of ventilated onto her the various issues I had with the L.A. dating scene, how the lack of community in this mutant sprawl translated into lots of seemingly aloof people with whom it was hard to connect. Sure, there’s always the possibility of meeting someone at work, but most everyone I know at Yahoo! is pretty involved with someone else. Namiko, in her late thirties and also single, said that in Japan, the workplace was definitely one of the prime spots to meet a potential mate. As she described it, their version of speed dating was when a collection of companies put out the call to all singletons under their respective roofs about a singles event after work on a certain weeknight. In Namiko’s case, she and other singles from Sega would head to a bar after work where there’d be a commensurate number of singles from other companies.
To make the most of her visit to the States, she wasn’t heading back to the grind just yet. First thing tomorrow morning she was checking out and then heading over to a hotel in Beverly Hills called Lux. Her plan was to spend all of Monday and Tuesday visiting various spots around L.A. Her plane back to Tokyo was departing that Wednesday. When she e-mailed me after getting back, she told me that she got the chance to take the VIP tour of Warner Brothers, which I’d recommended to her based on my own experiences with the tour over the summer. When I first met her at the pre-Expo pool party, she’d told me her favorite show was ER, and I remembered that the ER set was one of the stops on the Warners tour. And so I was not surprised in the slightest when in her e-mail she said that the best part of her whole visit to the States was seeing the ER set.
At 6:30 p.m. I met good ol’ Julie out on the patio where she and I had met and talked into the wee hours the night before. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was depressing that all this was about to end, but why not stretch it out a bit further? And what better way than to get away from the hotel for a spell? I huffed it back to my car at Lot C, drove back to the Marriott to pick up Jules, and drove us north about 10 miles to the Westside. We wound up at the Napa Valley Grille in Westwood Village, just a few blocks south of UCLA, a few blocks from where my mother grew up, and by utter coincidence all of one block from the apartment where Julie lived the previous February while attending a UCLA extension course in screenwriting. I’d been to the Napa Valley Grille once before, back in early August with a gal I’d met at, you guessed it, one of those speed dating ‘mabobs. It didn’t work out with her, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a great little place. The menu isn’t exactly Cheesecake Factory affordable, but the food’s definitely worth it. No, really. If you’re in the area, make it a point to go there. As Alan Coulter says on The Late Show, you’ll be glad ya did!
On this night I decided to forgo beer—the Grille’s got Blue Moon on tap, by the by—and let Julie order us a bottle of white. She’s to wine what I am to the sudsy stuff. For the appetizer I ordered their pizzettes, which are basically little tiny baby pieces of pizza. In addition to the tomato sauce, the pizzettes contain—you ready for this?-- duck confit, creamy blue cheese, black mission fig, celery root, wild mushrooms and truffle essence. I told you you better be ready! I don't even know what half that stuff is, let alone how they get it all on those little infant slices. Jules skipped the appetizer and dove straight into the main course, which for her was jumbo lump crab ravioli, stuffed not only with crab meat but also with butternut squash and lobster mushrooms. My main course was the roasted free range chicken breast. You know what? I just realized what a monster goof it was to describe my dinner on an empty stomach. You have no idea how famished I am right now. No joke.
I got to know Julie by far more than anyone else at the Expo, between the previous night’s chat-a-thon as well as our dinner at the Napa Valley Grille. I’m not kidding. I know I told her a lot about my life, and she practically gave me the lowdown on herself from the moment she popped out of Mum’s belly to this night. And what a life she’s had. After scoring a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Psychology, she worked as a drug counselor to addicts and their families. This was in the Sheffield area in Yorkshire, North of England. It’s the same neck o’ the woods where that flick The Full Monty took place. Ever see The Full Monty? That’s where. There were the awesome, rewarding times as well as the tragic. She made sure to emphasize the awesome. Yeah, these kids—and they were mostly kids—were into heavy shite. Yeah it could be maddening sometimes, but the reward of seeing them get better made it all worth it. It wasn’t all work and no play. They’d go to the movies. No, really. With a smile on her face like a proud mother hen, she regaled me with tales of how she’d pack the kids into some raggedy ol’ bus and chauffeur them into town to catch a matinee at the local cinema. As for the tragic times, remember we are talking about hardcore addicts here. I think you can guess.
We’re both children of divorce, only hers came much later than mine, as she was approaching twenty. Branded into her brain forever is the image of her, her brother, and their parents at the dinner table when their parents broke the news. Branded forever is the clatter of her brother’s fork falling to the plate in reaction. Also like me, though, and just to stay positive here, she’s remained close to both parents. They both have vastly different careers, so she needs to carry two different mental lexicons when talking to them, but she’s plenty whip-smart to do that. Whenever her mother visits her, wherever she happens to be living (Jules has gotten around), her mother always falls in love with the place and says she could easily see herself living there. As I pointed out to Jules, of course her mom’s going to say that. The hen just wants to be near the chicky to make sure all’s well.
As with Namiko, we also commiserated about being perpetually single. Jules has a gig that requires her to travel during the week. ‘Course the awesome thing about that is that she almost never spends any of her own dough. Everything’s expensed. On the flip side, she’s living alone out of her suitcase Monday through Friday, and she’s usually at work twelve to fourteen hours a day. As a singleton, she said more than once, it can really suck not to have that last call of the day.
When dinner was over, we took a stroll around Westwood Village, where she pointed out to me where her screenwriting extension class was held the previous February. This was when we discovered that the apartment she lived in during the class was all of a block away from the Grille. For my part, I showed her the Geffen Playhouse, where I go a handful of times a year and where I’d just seen the Wendy Wasserstein play Third, starring Christine Lahti, the month before. And we walked by the Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf that I always read at prior to curtain time whenever I go to the Geffen.
There was no delaying the end now. It was after ten at night. We hopped back into my Focus, and I took her back to the Marriott. We hugged and said happy trails. I drove the thirty or so light years up the 405, back into the Valley, back into my life. As I came up over the hill and down toward the innumerable amber lights dotting the black Valley floor like a sheet of marbles over an abyss, I thought about how paradoxical the Expo had felt in terms of time passage. It went fast because I was always on the go, yet it seemed I’d lived a small lifetime because of all the people I’d met, gotten to know, and said good-bye to. When I got back to work the next day, I just knew I’d have that familiar feeling of having never left, yet at the same time of having been through so much in the five days I’d been away. And since I was horrifically underslept and my throat was kicking my ass up and down the L.A. basin, I also knew I’d show up grumpy. There was no denying it. I’d be sucking down the Starbucks Breakfast Blend like it was the last Breakfast Blend in the Milky frickin’ Way. No joke.
