Factory/Warehouse

You may well have seen all the ballyhoo over on Shooting Pople regarding a script call made by someone calling themselves 'The Script Factory'. I responded to the original posting, and got this message back today, which I'm offering up below. A lot of work required over the next month! I won't be partaking, and I suspect that not many others will either, but hey ho - who am I to complain?

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Dear writers,

Thank you for your interest in these projects. My apologies for the group e-mail but as you can imagine we have had quite a response from our posting thus it would be too time consuming to do individual responses. Below is a list of several novels that currently are of interest. As stated in the posting we have contacts with a couple of high profile agents who have discussed these projects with their clients and would be keen to read any submissions that we put forward. At this stage there is, unfortunately, no development money but this is an excellent opportunity to have your work read by people at the very top of the industry who actually want to make the project that you have worked on. As long as the agent and their client agree to the project, we will be in a position to package it and offer Equity rates.

There a three projects that we are looking to start with.

These consist of the following -

1. A modern adaptation of Daphne Du Mauriers Rebecca
Feature film
Leads roles think -
Ralph Fiennes to play Max De Winter
Naomi Watts as 2nd Mrs De Winter

Rebecca modern adaptation we will need
- 10 line summary
- 10-15 page treatment
- 20-30 pages of script

2. Adaptation of John Masefields Dead Ned and Alive and Kicking Ned

12 Part mini series for TV
Dead Ned/ Alive and kicking Ned we will need:
- 10 line summary
- 10-15 page treatment
- 1st episode (To give you a feel it should be written as if a BBC period drama)

3. Adaptation of J.Meade Faulkners Moonfleet
6 Part mini series
Moonfleet we will need
- 10 line summary
- 10-15 page treatment
- 1st episode(Again the feel should be written as if a BBC period drama)

Please feel free to choose one that suits you best . If you find you would like to do more then that is entirely up to you. The deadline for the first round of submissions will be the 13th of October. Once again due to the volume it may be impossible to reply to everyone individually but we will let you know if you are offered the chance to present a full script or if what you have done is not what they are after. Once we have been though everyones ideas we will chose to work from a maximum of 3 working scripts from each film/tv project to move forward with. Your interpratation of the projects and the artistic direction you choose to go in is entirely up to you, if you chose to stay close to the stories or venture quite far from them in your adaptation that is at your discretion. The only real criteria is that the projects are exciting, innovative and well written. Not too much to ask for I am sure!

Also could all future responses be sent to the e-mail address scriptwarehouse@yahoo.co.uk as we have discovered that the script_factory e-mail address is very similar to the name of a company that we have no affiliation with, we would not like to mislead anyone. Best of luck and I look forward to reading your submissions.
Richard S

Dead Slow and Stop

My broadband connection ground to a halt on Friday (the AOL browser I use is essentially a virus, as it’s now decided to corrupt about a million drivers on my PC). What I’ve learnt from being completely internet free for the last few days is that the internet is a giant repository of sparkly things designed to pleasantly waste your time whilst giving you the impression you are being productive. I can get lost for hours in Wikipedia looking up obscure mental illnesses, all the time kidding myself that it’s all valuable research – that’s when I’m not stocking up on cheap CDs from Amazon or putting band posters up for sale on EBay or reading blogs or checking out what the hell happened to Danny Lloyd after he starred in The Shining (answer? Not a lot). I love the internet and I wouldn’t be without it, but when AOL decides to function, the temptation is always there to tinker, to read one more blog, to buy one more CD, to check one more fact.

Coupled with AOL’s all out war on my sanity, the deadline for the treatment I’m writing has just been pushed back to the end of August, so I now have the time to try and make it as bright and shiny as I possibly can. Ordinarily, this would mean a huge festival of procrastination, but as the internet is down, I’m forced to concentrate. And it’s actually going pretty well, partially due to the fact that I don’t have all the alluring bells and whistles of the web to tempt me. I’m in the fortunate position that I have a job that enables me to work from home a little bit, which means on the odd occasion I can shut down Outlook and actually hear myself think. Maybe there is some merit in trying to slow down a little and having an internet free day a week – but I’d like it to be on my terms rather than when my positively fundamentalist ISP dictates.

By Tuesday, my PC will be fixed and normal service will be resumed – which means more prevarication and the purchasing of more crap I don’t need. Hey ho.

Oh, I saw Nick Cave in Woodingdean on Friday morning... which was nice.

A Suitable Case for Treatment

As my regular reader might know, I have been searching for a user friendly working method for a while now: loglines, synopses, outlines, treatments, I’ve done ‘em all in the vain hope that sometime something will stick.

Unfortunately, this eureka! moment has not yet happened, and I doubt it ever will, mostly because I approach each individual project from a totally different perspective. The outline for the last feature length script I wrote consisted of a diagram sketched out on a page of A4 paper (I was going to post this, but I’m scared you’ll laugh as it’s covered in smiley faces and references to Scooby Doo). To be honest, this is probably the most successful outlining tool I’ve ever used – five drafts in and, although the narrative has changed along the way, I'm still adhering to the basic structure sketched out in this document.

I find synopses useful in this respect as well – something short (two pages maximum) that outlines the major events in the narrative that leaves plenty of room for some wild ‘riffing’ along the way. I have always found treatments quite intimidating for this reason: events are mapped out in such a way as to make ‘improvisation’ seem a little out of place. The way I write is determined by accident as much as anything else, and a full blown treatment seems to squeeze all the fun out of the process somehow. And anyway, with previous treatments, I have always found that, once the treatment is ‘locked down’, an idea materialises out of nowhere that knocks the whole thing for six – the fact that I am usually three quarters of the way through writing the script at this point really does not help.

That said, I am working on a treatment for someone at the moment – well, by ‘treatment’, I mean a series of about a million ideas that will hopefully start to coalesce into something vaguely coherent in the next few weeks. The advantage to doing things this way is that a lot of ideas get ditched early on in favour of better ones, and horrible things like coincidence get put out of their misery relatively early on.

Even so, I’m a great believer in the fact that until you start writing the script itself, you have no idea how things are going to turn out. A detail that looked eminently logical in your treatment can turn out to be amazingly silly once fleshed out in script form - the solution here as far as I’m concerned is to manically write your way out of trouble. Exposition – one of my pet peeves – is also tremendously difficult to navigate around once you are in the script 'zone'. A treatment naturally tends to be heavy on exposition as this is the way you get the essential planks of your story laid down – in the script, it’s a difficult kettle of fish altogether.

Which is why I’ve always stuck to relatively simple outlines/one pagers. The current treatment is starting to make some vague sense, but there’s no substitute to actually getting stuck in and writing the damn thing.

Opportunity Knocks

This is kinda interesting - courtesy of Shooting People and Jerk Films:

To participate in the "Ed's Dead" writing competition, read the logline below carefully. Write a 5-15 page treatment, and upload it along with your CV, writing sample, signed entry form and cover page. You can submit more than one project, but make sure to sign and upload the entry form for each one.

Competition deadline is January 11, 2008. Winners will be announced February 15, 2008

Prizes:-
#1: $3000 in cash and the option for a writing assignment
#2: $1500 in cash
#3: $750 in cash

Here is your logline:

"Ed's Dead"- Only by giving up control over a small life one can gain a great life. A young and highly neurotic man is striving for perfection. In acting out his obsession with details, he fails to enjoy life until the death of his drug dealing elder brother turns his world upside down.