Project Wilson Phillips - Team Wendy: Day 2

Download the Team Wendy version of the script HERE.

Bob Holt (p. 49-58) - This is my part of an email exchange I had with the person immediately following me. He found me via Twitter, seemed terribly confused by the script, and asked me several questions, including what the hell was going on, and what I tried to accomplish with my pages. I had gone so far as to outline every scene and make a character list trying to nail down who they were at any given point in the pages, so I was happy to share that work with him and give him a little push.

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Hey Anthony,

Doug and Leliah: It seems like each writer wrote them differently. Sometimes good, sometimes not. Sometimes working together, sometimes working against each other. (For example, it seems they're working together, but then one writer wrote that Doug was protecting Trenton, so...)

Motive of the Vegan machine: Unknown. There was a mention of it becoming self-aware. There was really nothing else in there to suggest what its end goal might be.

So what I did (or tried to do):

1) Vegan needed a goal. I briefly mentioned world domination, robot overlords or what have you. It's general enough to build on, or just to leave abstract if you don't want to deal with it.

2) I didn't like the whole Vegan concept, so I decided to shut Vegan down. Also, I figured it would be a good Act II climax to shut it down for good. Maybe. Whether or not shutting it down succeeded or only made it angry is up to you. Basically, I wanted to give my push to the story without ruining everybody's fun if they wanted to keep it in.

3) Doug and Leliah. This was actually the craziest part - they were completely unmotivated, or maybe more to the point, randomly motivated. So I built in that part of Vegan's master plan were all of these doppelgangers to go around and do its bidding. Also, it made mistakes in replicating them - really just a way of explaining away
the character inconsistencies that plague the whole script. Do with it what you will.

4) Jackson. He was in desperate need of motivation and making his own destiny. I even have him say at one point that he needs to take action because stuff keeps happening TO him. Of course, then I make Cohen the main actor at the climax, so... Oops.

[Bitter Note: I didn't discover Bob and Anthony's collaboration until last week when they sent me their testimonials. To be honest, I would have discouraged this communication had I known about it at the time. I had taken some pains to ensure that no one had anyone else's email address, but didn't think anyone would use the names on the title page to track down the previous writers. I'll make the rules more explicit next time if you guys think this skirts the spirit of the experiment.]

Anthony Filangri (p. 58-69): Well when I first read the script, I was at a total loss. I had so much stuff going on with school, I really wanted to drop out. But karma is a bitch and I didn't want that on my conscience. So what I did instead was contact the writer who did his pages before me to see what the hell he made of the story. He wasn't really sure himself, but he explained it to me the best he could and what he planned to do with 10 pages which was -- try to get things into gear and shut the Vegan down.

So the vegan was shut down... but the third act was just starting. In the 10 pages before mine, it is said that the vegan had developed a brain of his own basically. Why not take it literal, and have a real life vegan -- a robot spawned out from the vegan before it was shut down. There were still secrets afloat, so the robot started killing people to get to them. By the end of my 10 pages, I set up a huge action sequence that hopefully the writer after me took advantage of. It was also up to the writer/s after me to come up with a twist in which I had no idea what it could be. Good luck to them!

All in all, it was a cheesy mess but I still had fun with it.

Delta Kirby (p. 69-79) Being the second-to-last writer for Team Wendy I knew I had to do three things: resolve certain aspects of the plot; begin a sequence of climactic events for the last writer to finish, while also giving him/her enough space to tie up the script and give it an acceptable ending; and reveal the identity of the shadowy figure.

I decided to make Jackson the Shadowy Figure because pretty much all of the living characters (six, not counting Jackson) were accounted for, except for an ancient journalist, and I didn't think an old man fighting the foul mouthed hero would be that exciting to watch. Funny, yes, but not exciting. It would also reveal that Jackson himself was a clone, and I believed that threw up a lot of opportunities for the person after me to use. Maybe Jackson joins AJ, maybe he's already lost and the whole world is clones, maybe he has to sacrifice himself to reset the world, I don't know.

I then wrote ten pages in which all but a couple of characters die, several things explode for no reason, and a group of evil clone office workers are destroyed by the corpse of an intern. Why? Because it felt appropriate for what I read as a self-aware sci-fi action thriller. Why set the last scene on Neptune? Again, because it felt like a direction the script would take.

Ben Ritter (p. 80-90): When I inherited the script, I had to read it three times. The second time through, I took notes to help me keep the different characters straight (with the cloning and the robots, I was pretty confused). I eventually ended up with the characters’ names in one column, their descriptions in a second column, and the word “dead” in a third column for all but two characters. It was inevitable, therefore, that my pages would constitute a showdown between the two living characters, Jackson and AJ.

Since it had been established that any character could be cloned and resurrected at will, the stakes seemed too low for a physical fight, so I thought that a battle of the wits (and some sort of moral decision) would be potentially more interesting. I also decided to flesh out the character of AJ a little more. We already knew that he was the richest man in America, a sci-fi fan, and considered himself to be something of a comedian. To this I added (I hope) a degree of vanity and loneliness (the previous author had decided that AJ lived in a palace on Neptune, so I thought these were attributes he would likely have). Throwing a costume party pretty much for his own benefit seemed nicely in-character, and I thought of the idea of him dressing as Emperor Palpatine pretty early (based on the electricity-throwing scene the previous author had written).
I had never gotten a really good feel for Jackson’s character throughout the script, and I feel that my characterization of him fell flat as a result. I tried to get some leverage out of his relationship with Candy, which previous authors had alternately developed and dismissed, but to be honest, in my pages, he’s mostly a straight man for AJ’s antics. Subsequent rewrites would hopefully amp up the relationship between Jackson and Candy a little in earlier scenes and make Jackson’s choice seem more natural.

I also regret that I couldn’t think of a way to tie in the very first scene with the woman identified as “Viper” (who may or may not be the same person as Leliah) torturing a young man in a dark room. (The “Vegans” teleportation system is also, confusingly, sometimes called “Viper,” but I think this was a typo by one of the earlier authors.)

I thought this project was an interesting experiment, and I’m glad to have been a part of it, but I don’t think the resulting script is very good. The biggest problem, I think, is that all of the authors (including myself) wanted to add something substantive to the script, so about every 10 pages, a character was killed, a character was revealed to have not been killed, a character was revealed to be a clone or a robot, a character traveled to Neptune, a character traveled through time, etc. At best, I think there is a certain campy charm to a script spiraling so wildly out of control, but this came at the expense of things like character development and coherence.

I think one key difference between this script experiment and improv (especially long-form) is that very few improv games would have someone exit the scene completely and hand the creative reins over to the next player, so (even with the “yes, and” principle in place) crazier impulses could, to some extent, be kept in check by the other players onstage. It’s also unlikely that anyone but a beginner would do something as drastic as pulling out a gun and shooting another character for shock value unless this action arose naturally from the scene. If you were to repeat this experiment, it might be interesting to have each writer write one character throughout or do something else that would allow earlier writers to have continued input through the later pages (maybe submit notes every 10 pages that the next author could read but wouldn’t be required to follow).

Project Wilson Phillips - Team Wendy: Day 1

We're on the home stretch of the Collaborative Writing Project scripts as we hit Day One of the final team.

Download the Team Wendy version of the script HERE.

Joe Kavanagh (p. 11-20): As was said in the introduction email to us "this thing is laced with traps." I wanted to see if I could knock away as many of them as possible so team members following behind could take the story to more interesting places. The chance to take the story to a place where none of the other stories would go also made it more interesting for me (and, I hope, my team members following behind). It's also quite hard writing the second ten pages of a story with no outline and hoping for it to make sense later. I thought about where I would take the story to its end before writing but I only control my ten pages. It was a great writing exercise that I would happily take part in
again.

Dustin Rush (p. 21-30): The main thing that drew me to this challenge was the idea of limitations. I wanted to see what would happen to my writing when I was given a few pieces of the story. The toughest part for me was figuring out what to do with all the characters and information that had been created. Some I just flat out ignored, others I had to decide their significance.

I needed to know who the protagonist was and what he was going after. So I tried to establish that. I thought the story had a lot of fun foundational work already built in. It felt like my job was to shape the thrust of the story and round out some of the main characters.

In some ways I think it was more difficult than writing your own story, because I couldn't go back and erase anything. But I never would have come up with V.E.G.A.N.S. so it was definitely fun to work off of someone else's ideas.

Amy Baack (p. 31-41): I was in charge of writing fourth, which meant I got the script after 30 pages had been written. At this point in a script, the story should be fairly well established: the protagonist, his goals, and his obstacles should be fairly clear. My goal was thus to focus on moving the plot along. I found that the script wasn't exactly clear yet, so I did my best to try to clarify the protagonist and antagonist and their competing objectives. I then tried to pick up the pace and have some fun with the story.

Patrick O’Riley (p. 41-49) When I first received the 42 page pdf, I found myself quite overwhelmed. There were around 5 main characters that seemed to demand equal attention within an ever-expanding conspiracy. My first decision was that at least one of these people would complete an arc and die. According to the page count, it seemed my pages would include the stories midpoint, meaning it was my duty to stop adding dots and start connecting them.

Firstly, I wanted to draw up clear allegiances. With his introduction, Doug had mentioned making the reporter gaff of "telling the truth about people in power" so it was clear his character was meant for a high moral standing. It then became my job to explain why Doug would claim to be defending AJ Trenton and shoot Murphy near where my pages began. Since the shooting happened off-camera, I decided that it would be Murphy, not Doug who survived the shootout. Doug's story began with protecting his partner, and having essentially broken it off with Editor Keller, he was able to commit fully to Leliah. To protect her from the police he believed to be crooked, Doug was claiming to be on their side to keep them at bay. Dying on her behalf provided closure to Doug's arc.

My intention was to break the major cast into three teams: The Good Cops (Murphy, Mack, and Cohen), The Reporters Who Bend the Rules to Bring Evil To Light (Leliah, Joshua, Doug, And Keller), and The Bad Guys (Candy, Trenton, The Chief, and Leliah's Father). I tried to make these teams clear by putting each team all in a room together of the course of my pages. Whether or not these teams remained in tact beyond my pages remains to be seen but all-in-all I found this to be a fun worthwhile experiment and I look forward to similar exercises in the future!