Bystander Page

I’ve been experimenting with pages for the last few weeks. This is what I was referring to when I mentioned that I was going to be making some changes to the site soon.

I was under the impression that a page could be used to host posts. That impression was incorrect. So, my original plan has to be modified a bit.

I’ll be putting up a page for all screenplays I’ve written, are writing, or revising, as well as notes about what’s going on, status, things like that.

Specifically with Bystander, I want new writers to be able to see what a first screenplay looks like. I want them to know that to get past the intimidation of writing you need to just sit down and do it. Accept that it will be bad. Accept that it will seem amateur. Accept all of that. Because that’s what it is. The point is that you’ll have started. And you can’t progress until you establish a starting point.

Hopefully by sharing what I’ve written, and allowing for new writers to see how you do get better with practice, it will help push people past that intimidation.

Anyway, there will be more later. Probably tonight. I spent about two hours last night writing and rewriting this small four page scene. I think I might need a break from it. I just can’t get it right. This should provide the sort of distraction I need.

Enjoy.
-Steve

Mobile blogging

Just got the WordPress app for my iPhone 3G. Using it to post this. Pretty impressed by the functionality so far, rather robust.

Enjoy.
-Steve

Where do you get inspired?

There I was, sitting in the movie theater, waiting for The Dark Knight to start and I got this vision in my head. Some guy walks up the steps, pulls out a gun, and then just shoots me in the face.

Boom.

Why? Who knows. But that’s what popped into my head.

Three hours later I was home on my Macbook typing away. Somehow that single bullet into the head turned into my fingers vomiting out a third of an outline for a screenplay.

Now I’ve got the entire first act outlined, the mid point more or less set up, a few pinches tossed in, and a third act that is starting to come together. I’ve never worked this quick before on an outline. I think a lot of it has to do with the stuff I’ve been practicing over the last year or so. The exercises. Thinking critically. Structurally. Visually.

What started with a bullet in the head has turned into a struggle between good and evil, with the very forces of Heaven and Hell involved. Epic? Sort of. Fantastic? Probably. Fun to write? I’m certainly looking forward to it. It’s turned into the type of story that most guys dream of writing.

But it still comes down to taking advantage of a moment I was inspired. I kept the thought in my head. Left it simmering. And the first chance I got to get it town on paper (so to speak) I did it. I just started going. Writing. Skipping deails I didn’t know. Then filling them back in when they popped into my head. It just felt so good.

I know it’s going to be one of those fun projects you work on, knowing good and well nothing will ever come of it, but doing it nonetheless.

Which leads me to the topic of my post, where do you get inspired? What great moments have come and just set you off?

If you read this, I’d like to know. Please drop a line in the comments section.

Enjoy.
-Steve

Movie Review: The Dark Knight

Christian Bale as Batman.

Heath Ledger as Joker.

Maggie Gyllenhaal as Rachel.

Arron Eckhart as Harvey Dent.

Morgan Freeman. Gary Oldman. Michael Caine. Anthony Michael Hall. Eric Roberts. Nestor Carbonelli.

This movie must be a win win for everyone, right? Maybe, maybe not.

Don’t get me wrong. The Dark Knight doesn’t disappoint. Christopher (with brother Jonathan) Nolan put together a great story yet again. The performances were top notch. Ledger brought a refreshing take on The Joker. Gyllenhaal saved a character that Katie Holmes almost destroyed. It was a good summer flick.

Notice I didn’t say great.

This is a movie that could have been better. And I don’t think I’m being overly critical either. With the top notch super hero flicks that came out this summer I think I have every right to be. The bar has been set pretty high. Long gone are the days of super hero campiness. That stuff is done. Thank goodness. Because for longevity’s sake they needed to be.

This is a new age of the serious superhero movie. Superhero movies that play out more like Bourne movie than a Spiderman movie. This year showed that you can put a guy in tights, and set it in a story complicated and adult oriented, and have it get over huge. But with great movies comes great responsibility, right?

First and foremost, The Dark Knight was about twenty minutes too long. I had problems staying focused toward the end. There were a lot of, in my view, unnecessary pinches in the second half of the film. Up until that point it was cruising along at a great pace. I felt like I was watching The Departed or The Bourne Supremacy, more than I did a super hero flick. Things had tension. Things had drama. Characters were dynamic. Then it just became too much. The pinches became more and more overwhelming and unrealistic. I was losing my ability to suspend disbelief.

Second, Harvey Dent’s character was really interesting, but ultimately wasted. I’ve read some reviews that said Eckhard’s performance was lackluster, and I couldn’t disagree more. But the shift to Two-Face didn’t need to happen when it did. In my view, it should have been the last shot in the movie, and set up the villain for the third film like they did with the Joker card at the end of Batman Begins. But alas, marketing won out and a second villain turned up at the end.

But see, I thought that was too much. We’d already invested so much time in The Joker that I didn’t want him to have to share any time with Two-Face. It was all going so well and then, well, we shifted from a good guy love triangle to a bad guy hate triangle. It was just too much for me. I thought they took what could have been great villain and wasted him in the third act.

There was a bit of cheese that didn’t need to be there too. The court scene should have been done different. You’ll know what I’m talking about when you see it. It’ll stick out like a sore thumb. The ferry stuff was okay (if not over the top), but when they do the prisoner thing I laughed out loud. You’ll know that part too. It was just….cheesy, and didn’t need to be there. It seemed forced.

This was a fun movie. With all the talent and story elements they had at their disposal it should have been better than the first one. It was well on it’s way. Then things got sidetracked.

Don’t get me wrong. This movie is worth the price of admission. It is money well spent. For me it was more of a wasted opportunity. It just tried to do too much. I think a case of less is more would have benefited the film.

I haven’t seen Hellboy 2 yet…so take that into consideration here:

In the battle of superheroes this summer Ironman wins. Followed by Batman beating Hulk in second place by a nose.

Enjoy.
-Steve

P.S. Ledger was great as Joker, but I mean come on…Oscar nom? Please. He was good, but not that good. If anything it just made me sad we’ll never see him get to reprise his role.

More color?

I got an e-mail from someone saying I need more color on my blog. They said, and I quote here, “I didn’t even bother reading your blog. It needs more color.”

So thanks, whomever you are.

Here’s your color:

When is more simply too much?

As I said, I’ve been working on a new draft of Bystander. I wanted to try and get it done before the entry deadline for Big Break, but that didn’t happen. At any rate, I’ve been working pretty furiously on it lately and I think it’s really turning into something good. Not that it was terrible before, but this was my first screenplay, so it started out a lot rougher than some of my newer works.

At any rate, a lot of what I’ve been doing is concentrating on the “showing” instead of “telling.” That involves thinking a lot more visually than when I originally started writing. However, one thing it’s helped me do is learn where to trim out garbage. I’ve freed up about 5-6 pages so far, and I’ll likely get that down another 4-5 pages by the time I’ve gotten through act three.

On the flip side, this has also got me putting in a lot more little scenes. Quick exterior shots. Cut aways. Things like that. For example, I’m redoing the midpoint of the script right now. It’s a pretty big reunion scene that gets broken up by one of the bad guys. In the original version Duane just sort of shows up. However, in the rewrite I actually cut away to what he’s doing, and show how he discovers what’s going on downstairs. It’s a quick little thing. It doesn’t take away from the focus of the scene, but it wasn’t something I would have thought of before reading The Screenwriter’s Workshop.

When I’m writing I’m really thinking of how thing would play out on the screen visually. Really contrasting it to some of my favorite movies. How similar scenes or set ups were filmed. I mean, ultimately the director will decide how to show it, but the screenplay is the framework. And the framework needs to be solid for the director to do his/her magic.

But back to my earlier point, I’ve been adding in new stuff. And with the extra real estate I’ve been creating for myself I put in a new character that will be the catalyst for a major story arc that I’m adding in. It’s nothing crazy, but it’s some additional tension that I think was missing from this last draft. The thing I’m worried about is whether it’s too much. I mean, how do you know when you’ve crossed the line into the “too much” category? Probably not until you give it a good read.

Things are coming along. Thought I’d give an update and let the other writers out there know some of the problems I’ve been having, and how I’m getting around them. I want to get this done so I can go back to Moving On. That story has been kicking around in my head again. I’m looking to implement the changes to the site this weekend. I need a project to work on anyway. Figure this is as good as any.

Anyone seen Hellboy 2 yet? I want to check that and Wall-E out this weekend.

Enjoy.
-Steve

Been Away

I took a bit of a sabbatical from writing these past few weeks.

Some of it was from feeling over worked. Some of it was from it just being summer. A trip here. A trip there. Busy weekends. Busy nights. Sometimes you just run out of time.

Things have settled down a bit so I’m eager to get back to work.

It won’t be tonight though. I have to help my cousin move. He’s packing up and moving to L.A. I wish I could say that it was because he was going to pursue a career in entertainment but I can’t. It’s a job transfer. He’s some sort of structural engineer. The growth here in the southeast has stagnated. So they need him out west where they’ve got more jobs to do than they have engineers to do it.

Yet another person going to the place I want to go to.

Oh well…

Anyway, I’ve been doing some work on the site these last few nights. Messing around with some pages and stuff. I don’t have it turned on for the general public right now. But when I do you’ll see different pages for each of the projects I’m working on. Hopefully it’s pretty neat.

Enjoy.
-Steve

Stick a Fork In It

Well, as of 2:04 a.m. I am one of the many around the globe who can now say they have conquered Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots.

I picked up the PS3/Metal Gear combo last week.

It took me around 20 hours or so to beat it on the normal difficulty. However, that includes watching all the cut scenes, which had to have been at least 5 to 6 hours worth (including the HUGE one at the end).

It was a solid game and I’ve come away feeling that it was worth it. I don’t know if I agree with the 10/10 and 5/5 scores I’ve seen around the web, but I’d defiantly say it’s a solid 8.5 to 9 out of 10.

A worthy finish to a story started a looooong time ago.

Enjoy.
-Steve

Way Out West

My cousin Chris called me yesterday with big news. He’s moving to Los Angeles, California.

Chris works as some sort of engineer for a company that specializes in the “construction of the thermal envelope and industrial refrigeration systems that keep … products cold, and help … business[es] run efficiently.” An opportunity for him within the company opened up out West and he decided to take it.

Chris has lived here in Atlanta for about the same time that I have. We’ve hung out a few times. It’s nice to know that I have family so close. But Chris hasn’t been happy, not for a while. A lot of stuff has contributed to that and he was in dire need of a fresh start. He’d always wanted to move out West. This opportunity was a great chance to kill two birds with one stone.

That makes it six people who live out in the greater Los Angeles area that I know. All of them living somewhere I’d always dreamed of moving. All of them following their life’s ambitions. And I can honestly say I’m a bit bitter about that.

Life has a way of throwing up road blocks. For me that’s my wife. We’ve been together eight years. Married for one. I knew when I decided to spend the rest of my life with her that I’d never make it out West. Part of me is angry. But what are you going to do? You can’t help who you fall in love with. And the person I fell in love with has zero interest in Southern California.

I’m not even sure what it is that I find so appealing. I think, at least for me, it’s just always served as a metaphor for freedom. While I was growing up in Detroit, California was as far away as you could get. It was warm. Sunny. Had mountains. The ocean. Lakes. It seemed like it had everything.

Even as a guy who works in IT, the West coast is where everything exciting is happening. Silicon Valley. Google. Microsoft. Intel. Apple. It’s all out West. The West coast is where people look forward, not back.

Each day I get older I see my dream slipping away. I’ll be thirty in October. Still young. But lets be honest, where you are when you’re thirty is pretty much where you’re going to stay. I don’t want to give up on my dreams. But yet something keeps telling me to let them go, become complacent. It’s as if I’m trying to prevent myself from feeling bad about not achieving what I set out so long ago to do.

Maybe that’s why I write. To escape. To prevent myself from remembering that while others are going for it, I’m stuck here, in a cubical, with blaring florescent over head lights blistering down on me, while others are looking out over the vast Pacific Ocean. Every possibility at their mere fingertips.

Maybe.

Enjoy.
-Steve

Movie Review: The Incredible Hulk

I hated HULK when it came out. I felt like Ang Lee just killed the character. The story was depressing. The action was dumb. And there wasn’t a final battle. I don’t care what people say, in comic book movies the good guy and bad guy need to fight it out in the final battle. Bottom line, it left a very sour taste in my mouth when it was all over.

Flash forward to this past Saturday night. The wife went out with her friend to go see Mama Mia at The Fox here in Atlanta. Being left with a few hours to myself, I figured I’d go check out The Incredible Hulk since this was a “reboot” of the character and I’m a big fan of Edward Norton.

Boy am I glad I did that.

The Incredible Hulk does everything Ang Lee’s HULK didn’t do. It made me care about Bruce. It had a great final fight. It made the Hulk something that seemed both unbeatable and vulnerable at the same time. And most importantly, it didn’t leave me let down.

I’ve really liked the direction Marvel has taken it’s movies since they took over creative control. Their whole Marvel Film Universe idea for their films is fantastic. The Incredible Hulk had the same feel that Iron Man did. I don’t mean that it felt like it was directed by the same people. I mean that it felt like it was in the same world. The same place. And none of this was more evident than in the final scene of the movie.

I’ve read that the original script for The Incredible Hulk was more of a sequel to Ang Lee’s HULK. Then when they brought Norton on he looked at the script and started tinkering with it. Say what you will about Norton, but the guy is a hell of a talent and knows what works on screen. Suffice to say, the changes he made to the script, and he changed A LOT, really came across to the viewer.

He made the movie more akin to the TV show, and less akin to what Ang Lee did with HULK. The first shot of Bruce straining right before he hulks out…the light hits his face…and the eyes are green! GREEN! Just like from the TV show. Yeah, you wouldn’t like him when he’s angry.

Was it a perfect movie? No. Some spots the story gets a little convoluted. I thought Liv Tyler’s acting left something to be desired. She says her lines like she’s whispering. I have no idea why. But once I noticed it I couldn’t stop paying attention to it. The final battle has no real tension…or at least not the right kind of tension. Things just go from “Hulk is a bad guy” to “Hulk is the only one who can beat The Abomination.” It doesn’t make much sense and the only reason the audience buys it is because they want to see it.

But let me tell you…the final battle is GREAT! The Abomination is as strong as Hulk in the comics. And this really comes across on the screen. The fight goes back and forth. You really don’t get a sense of who will win until the end. The way they choreographed everything just seemed to fit. These two massive, super strong, agile, super creatures fought like you’d expect. It was brutal. It was massive. And it was great.

This isn’t the best movie of the summer. I thought Iron Man was a bit better. But I didn’t feel ripped off when I walked away. I felt like it was 9 dollars well spent.

Enjoy.
-Steve

For more on The Incredible Hulk, check out it’s IMDB page:
The Incredible Hulk