Webshow: Knowing when to give up on a script

It's been a while, but the time has come to launch some new segments of the webshow.  Over the next month we'll be rolling out at least one new video a week.

On top of that, we've got two interviews that will be coming your way next month in honor of the release of this year's Black List.  The exact release date of the List is never announced ahead of time, but to cover my bases, I've got some Black List-related content that'll cover a pretty wide spread around the likely drop date.  Previous Black List honoree F. Scott Frazier will be dropping by to talk about his writing process and his career.  Also, Black List creator Franklin Leonard will be back for another sit-down and this time we're going to talk about the "colonel's original recipe" Black List.

But all of that is still a few weeks away.  Today, I've got a video that talks about something that every writer needs to learn eventually - when to give up on a script.

12-Step Screenwriting: Week One - Idea, Concept and Story

I'm pleased to introduce the first regular episode of the Bitter Script Reader YouTube series!

This is the first chapter of a 12-part series designed to guide and motivate a writer to complete a screenplay within three months.  Recognizing that I had an opportunity to reach a new audience via YouTube, I decided to start with the basics.

This week's video covers the difference between idea, concept and story.  You wouldn't believe how those simple distinctions seem to elude many new writers.  You shouldn't start writing a script until you can say that what you're working on is a story.



As you can see, this is back-to-basics information, but hopefully some of you will take up the challenge of completing a screenplay alongside the weekly lessons in this series.  I've done my best to minimize the jargon here.  So later on we'll be talking things like Act Breaks and Climaxes, but I won't ask you to commit things like "Fun & Games" to memory.

I also won't pull the Writers Boot Camp stunt of introducing a lot of vocabulary that isn't common to the business.  The good news is that since I'm not charging for any of this, I don't have to go to ridiculous lengths to make it seem like the basics of screenwriting can only be understood by unlocking a Sphinx-like riddle.

As always, it really helps me out to see some engagement with these videos, so please click through to the YouTube page, Subscribe and leave a few comments there.  Feel free to embed these on your blogs, and if you find the tips useful, tweet about them or put the videos on your Facebook page.

I hope that in three months time, a lot of you will be reporting back with completed screenplays.

"The best thing I could have done for my career from a networking perspective."

Part I -
Part II - Stalking Kevin Smith: Getting celebrities to make a cameo in your film
Part III - How long should a short film be?

In this final segment of the interview, director J.C. Reifenberg talks about his goals for Hughes the Force.  Then he takes a few notes from The Bitter Script Reader, discussing a few character and thematic issues.  J.C. also talks about how this film "was the best thing I could have done for my career from a networking perspective.  It's already paid off three time what I invested into it."




Readers, if you'd like to see more web interviews and more of the puppet, it's very important that you go to YouTube, leave comments, subscribe to the channel and "Like" the videos.  That kind of engagement really helps us out.

More videos will be coming over the next several weeks.

How long should a short film be?

Part I -
Part II - Stalking Kevin Smith: Getting celebrities to make a cameo in your film

"Student films come in three lengths," one of my film professors once told me.  "Long.  Too long.  And entirely too long."

When working on my own short films, I've done my best to adhere to that mantra.  When I'm making something meant to be shown on the internet, my goal has always been to be even more merciless and efficient.  I have several friends who are also students of that school of thought, and as someone who's known a festival programmer or two, I'm also aware that a longer film faces greater obstacles in getting selected, as it eats up time that could go to two or three shorter films.

Does that mean that shorter is always better?  I don't know.  It's usually my preference.  Then again, there are people I've talked to like Joshua Caldwell, Director of Digital Media over at Anthony E. Zuiker's Dare to Pass, who very firmly believe that the paradigm is shifting and people are becoming more accustomed to consuming longer content on the web.

In this segment of my interview with Hughes the Force director J.C. Reifenberg, we discuss length.  When I started watching the film, I didn't know what the running time was.  I figured it would be about 10-15 minutes.  Very quickly, I noticed the pacing of the individual scenes was slower, closer to what one would find in a TV show or a movie than in a typical short film.  As it turns out, the film is a little over 30 minutes in length.

That wasn't J.C.'s intention when he started.  In fact, he was determined to make it under ten minutes at first.  How did things evolve and why did he decide that longer was better for this particular story?  Watch below.




Part IV - "The best thing I could have done for my career from a networking perspective."

Tyler Gillett & Joel Church-Cooper's "Domesticating"

I got some excellent and encouraging script notes earlier today, so I'm far too busy brainstorming my next rewrite to come up with a blog post.  I'd ask that you use the next four minutes to watch the first episode of the webseries "Domesticating."  It's written by Joel Church-Cooper and directed by my good friend Tyler Gillett, who directed Books and is a member of Radio Silence (the group formerly known as Chad, Matt & Rob.) 



While I'm getting in plugs, the team at Radio Silence is headed to Sundance this weekend in support of their new film V/H/S.  Hit them up on Twitter and wish them well!

Joe Webb on "Books" - from pilot to webseries

Yesterday we talked to director Tyler Gillett about his work on the webseries Books.  Writer Joe Webb was also kind enough to answer a few of my questions about the project.



Are more episodes planned?

We hope so; but, probably not in the current webisode format. The scope of Books is so damn big, and the execution was so complex, that it's hard to justify the cost per episode without better distribution. So, realistically, if we're gonna have a life after this, it'll be as a half-hour show - but that's not at all out of the realm of possibility. The current plan is to shop the project to Hulu, smaller cable outlets like IFC, and potentially even a few Canadian networks (Fremantle's had success there before) in the spring of 2012, and to shoot for deficit financing in the 150-200 range per ep for six episodes. If that happens, we've got a Season One story arc ready to rock.

From the start, did you shoot this as a half-hour pilot or as a web-series? 

A little of both, which made writing the script a painstakingly long process. The awesome part about digital production is that it's like the Wild West, and if you're aggressive and ambitious, you can make something that looks like, I don't know, Shameless, with a low-five figure budget if you don't have to pay people to work. So we decided early on that our primary goal was to make a Showtime-like pilot, that we could then take out and sell (and it would hopefully be a product that would also, indirectly, sell ourselves).

But...we also had a responsibility to Fremantle to try to make it playable as a web-series, since they kicked in some money for the rights to distribute it via their small internet TV portal. To what extent we succeeded I'm still not sure. We feel like it plays great in sequence, and we've pieced it back together into it's full pilot form for sales purposes and a few big TV festivals in 2012; but I don't think a random viewer could stumble upon one of the middle chapters in the web format and have much idea what's going on.

You mentioned Fremantle covered some of the costs.  How did you fund the whole thing? 

At the end of the day, we ended up splitting the cost about 50/50 with FremantleMedia. So like 3 seconds of one Ford advertisement from American Idol were devoted to paying half our production budget. The other half came from months of Tyler shooting extra NatGeo stuff at his day rate and me teaching kids how to get into business school.

Do you have any future projects on the horizon? 

We just talked about getting the whole team back together to shoot something logistically simpler this spring while we figure out the future of Books (it'll be My Dinner with Andre, featuring Josh Beren and Peter Douglas), but we're also both working on other things. This fall, Tyler directed a horror-anthology that got into Sundance and a cool new digital show with Chad, Matt, & Baron Davis. I'm pitching in early January on a couple features and have 2 TV projects in development for the 2012 pitch season.

That being said, there's that old business adage about it being 10 times easier to keep an existing client than to attract a new one; and, somehow, I think that applies as a parallel to Books. So much of the groundwork has already been laid on the show, and I've spent so much of the last year living it day in and day out, that if I got the opportunity to continue working on it, I'd jump at it, even if the money proved barely enough to cover the monthly bills.

Tyler Gillett on "Books" - from TV pilot to webseries

Some of you might remember Tyler Gillett from my interview with Chad, Matt & Rob.  The team formerly known as CMR has recently become Radio Silence.  Their first project under the new moniker was a segment of the Bloody Disgusting anthology film "V/H/S." The movie, Bloody Disgusting's first, will be screening out of competition next year at Sundance as part of their Midnight Movies program.  The film's already been given some good press, in articles like this one and this one, and I'm hoping to get all of Radio Silence to sit down for an interview in the very near future.

In the meantime, I caught up with Tyler to discuss another recent project of his, Books.  Tyler directed this pilot-turned-webseries produced by Fremantle Media.  With webseries being produced with increasingly higher production values, I thought it would be good to take a look at how Books traveled from script to screen.

Tyler, on how he became attached to the project:

I was approached by Fremantle Media who, when I started collaborating with them, had just started soliciting original scripts from writers. I was busy with some other projects and wasn't able to really dive into the writing process myself but was anxious to develop something with them - when I asked if they had anything they were interested in creating that was already penned, they gave me a copy of Joe's story bible for Books. I loved it. It was tight, full of character, had a dark sense of humor, and was really a departure, at least how I viewed it stylistically, from a lot of the web content that I had worked on in the past. It really read to me like a serialized TV show - a mashup of Californication and Breaking Bad. 



When Joe and I first met up to talk more about what the scripts would feel like, the conventional cinematic/tv style is something we both instantly agreed on. We knew producing the show with this style instead of what is commonly seen on the web might get us in to trouble as far as view count goes but the end game for Joe and I and for Books has always been TV. The model that Fremantle approached us with was "make a show that looks and feels ready for TV." To us, that meant we were being tasked with making some very specific and polished aesthetic choices and high concept character/story choices. 

On repurposing the show into a webseries:

The first edit of the project was actually strung out into one long 33 minute episode - our "pilot" - that was then parsed down into smaller, more digestible web-friendly pieces. Breaking it up was a hard choice to make - it felt like we were betraying the style the show was produced in and I still think that what we created works better as a single piece of media. The cliffhangers that punctuate the end of each of the 6 episodes don't quite resonate with the right tone because, with this type of show, it's hard to get an audience to invest enough in the characters in such a short amount of time for those stakes to really feel significant. The significance of the Frost brothers' predicament lands more squarely when the show is played out in one long episode.

Tomorrow: We hear from the writer of Books, Joe Webb.

Friday Free-For-All: The Joker Blogs webseries

I just discovered this! The Joker Blogs, which is a pretty cool idea for a webseries - featuring the Joker after his capture in The Dark Knight as he undergoes therapy with Dr. Harleen Quinzel.

A clever idea, a built-in audience, and an premise that allows for a low budget. That's pretty much a recipe for web series success.



I'm told subsequent episodes do a solid job of weaving in details from the movie and comic book continuities.

Workshop - Hulu as web-series distributor

A while back, I plugged the webseries, Workshop: The Series, focusing on a series of struggling Los Angeles actors. Since then, the show has been picked up for distribution by Hulu. Season 2 launched on Hulu last week, and the creators claim this makes it one of the first independently-produced half-hour comedies on the web.

In this interview, star/creator Nate Golan explains how the deal came about:

"Getting the Hulu deal was months in the making. When we were still in production on Season Two of WORKSHOP in October 2010, a friend of mine, Canyon Prince, contacted me and told me he was running the first ever New Media Day at the Anaheim International Film Festival, and asked if I wanted to include WORKSHOP. We put together a 10-minute first episode of Season Two, and previewed it in Anaheim.

"I met a guy named Keith Knee, who had helped make another web series, Blue Movies, one of the most watched shows on the Internet. Keith told me he really liked the show, and though we could present it to Hulu. Four months later, with Keith's help and advice, and the help of another associate of mine, Garrett Law at Attention Span Media, Season 2 was picked up!"


I mention this because it points to two important things to consider when trying to break in. First, Golon and his team took the bull by the horns and made their own content. They had an entire season to learn the ropes of writing, producing, directing, acting and editing their own content. As easy as it is to get digital cameras and editing equipment these days, there's no reason to not take advantage of it.

Secondly, Golon networked and found a way to get his content into the hands of the right people. In doing so, he brought his content to a much larger audience and if that's a success, Golon might eventually graduate to being able to pay his bill by doing what he loves.

I'd be remiss if I didn't point out two things:

First, Kickstarter.com is a great way to fund your projects. Workshop: The Series raised $10,500 for the budget of their second season through these efforts. Take a look at their page here to get a sense of how the site works.

Secondly, as I'm friends with many casting directors and casting associates, I probably should point out that one of Workshop's core jokes isn't exactly reflective of reality. In the premiere of season two, these actor workshops are presented as a scam and as a way for unscrupulous casting directors to line their pockets from desperate actors. I can state that ALL of the people I know in casting have indeed used these workshops to scout new talent and have indeed called in many of the workshop students for auditions. One such acquaintance was able to rattle off a long list of workshop actors whom they had booked on their shows, let alone the much longer list of actors who were called in, but didn't make it past the audition stage.

Don't let that get in the way of the joke - I just know that casting professionals are really tired of the accusation, so I'd be remiss not to offer the correction here.

Here's episode 1 of season 2:

Friday Free-for-All: Date a Human

A few weeks back, I went to the Feel Good Film Festival to attend a panel on webseries productions. There were several rather entertaining programs there, so I figured I'd showcase a few of them on the blog.

First up is Date a Human. One of the things I like about this series is that the episodes can work well on their own even if you haven't seen all the others.

In the future, Allie, a human female, has had her heart broken by a human male for the last time. All men want is babies! Can’t they think about something besides propagating their dwindling species? Fortunately Ruthie, Allie’s cat-like roommate, has the solution... all the single aliens on DateAHuman.com.

This particular episode is Episode 4 - "Total Rip Off."