Monthly Archives: April 2014

Canadian Film Day: Hoorah or who cares?

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Via my social media outlets, I discovered that today is Canadian Film Day (presumably only in Canada).

Oh Canada, our home and native film industry… (although not necessarily native in the sense of indigenous peoples).

The discovery caused me to pause, as I realized that it has never mattered to me that a film is Canadian…only that it is good, entertaining, thought-provoking.

As an artist who is Canadian, I almost feel guilty that this is the case. And as a friend of several writers, directors, performers, etc, who live and work in Canada, I am embarrassed to say that I am not sure I can name 5 films that I know with any confidence are Canadian.

My attempt: Black Christmas, Exotica, The Sweet Hereafter, Decline of the American Empire, Scanners (honesty check: of this list, I have only seen Black Christmas)

Don’t get me wrong; I don’t have a problem with having a Canadian Film Day to celebrate my nation’s achievements. I think it’s great to pat our collective selves on the backs every once in a while.

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I guess my bigger question is does it really matter if a movie is Canadian or not, whether from an artistic or audience perspective?

When an industry is in its infancy, it needs to be protected and nurtured, but much as with the Canadian music industry, I think the Canadian film industry is well beyond its infancy. It doesn’t need training wheels. We shouldn’t be coddling it out of some odd sense of nationalism. It is more than capable of competing (and does) with the big boys and girls of the world.

This country has played incubator to world-renowned directors, writers, performers and production companies, and these people and groups became world-renowned by competing in the world. By setting the bar high and achieving even more.

My fear with art-via-nationalism is hearing the phrase “You know, for a Canadian film, this is pretty good.”

I worry that in blindly supporting the Canadian film industry simply because it is Canadian, we won’t push ourselves as hard. That we will be willing to settle for good enough for a Canadian film. That mediocrity will reign, punctuated here and there with islands of brilliance.

As some of you know, I am cowriter of a sketch comedy show–SomeTV!–currently in production in Toronto. One of our mandates as a writing team was that we are NOT writing a Canadian sketch show, regardless of all of the writers being Canadian and residing in Canada for initial broadcast in Canada.

Sure, the show will have Canadian sensibilities given the Canadian writing and acting, but we’re targeting a global stage with this project.

Likewise, none of my film screenplays are targeted as Canadian. Nor all but one of my teleplay concepts (the one revolves around Canada’s Parliamentary system).

Sure, many of them are set in Canada, but that is more an artifact of my knowledge base and personal experiences than anything else. Any of the Canadian locations could be swapped for American or British locations with only a few modifications to the story.

I’m not trying to write The Great Canadian Story. I’m trying to write The Great Story, which may or may not feature Canada and its people.

I wish every movie to do well, even the ones I don’t particularly like. I want all of the artists involved to find personal satisfaction and achieve greatness. I want audiences to be entertained and money to flow.

And maybe this is biting the hand that feeds me (when and if it ever decides to feed me), but I don’t particularly care if those movies, artists, audiences and money are Canadian.

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PS: I am a strong advocate of any organization that supports the development of new artists who push the envelope in storytelling. Again, though, I advocate these organization whether Canadian or other.

 

My screenplays:

Tank’s: Animated musical feature, female co-lead; Winner of Best Animated Feature Screenplay at 2014 Nashville Film Festival

An impulsive adolescent fish, ripped from his Amazonian home, struggles to find his place in the world of a pet shop, complicated by feelings for an idealistic, privileged fish and the iron-fisted rule of a villainous eel. A story that proves even a fish in water can be a fish out of water.

Captain Pete: Humourous family drama, female lead, set in Eastern Canada

To reconnect with her increasingly distant son, 35-year-old divorcee Billy tries to protect her son’s pirate-hunting lunatic friend from himself and an intolerant town, and in the process, may help both him and herself reconnect with the world.

The Children of San Miani: Murder thriller, female lead, set in Northern Italy and Canada

A crusading young Turin police officer must partner with a Vatican officer and faces Vatican interference as she tries to prevent another murder linked to a 35-year-old child abuse mystery, and in the process, faces the demons of her own Catholic upbringing.

The Naughty List: Dark adult comedy, holiday-themed

After a near-fatal accident, Santa vows to make amends to the Naughty kids, but when he learns two of them—now warlords—are racing toward war on Christmas Day, he drops everything to intervene as only he can, with catastrophic results.

Life on campus – Vanderbilt University

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I took my camera with me when I attended the Nashville Film Festival and wandered the grassy lanes of nearby Vanderbilt University.

These are some of the plants and animals I found on campus.

Music and the soul

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Alive Inside movie poster from the Sundance Film Festival

Alive Inside movie poster from the Sundance Film Festival

I am not a musician. I do not play an instrument, nor do I sing (not well, at least), and I do not understand how music is constructed. I do, however, like music and firmly believe that if we ever discover proof of a human soul, it will translate itself to us in the form of music.

I have, of course, no evidence to support this belief, although a recent experience at the Nashville Film Festival suggested I may be on the right track. The event was the showing of a documentary called Alive Inside: A story of memory and music.

The film, directed by Michael Rossato-Bennett, follows the story of social worker Dan Cohen who has spent the last several years bringing iPods to nursing homes across the United States. Cohen has found that even with the most neurologically shut down senior (e.g., clients with Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia), revive when they music from their youth.

Director Michael Rossato-Bennett (l) and social worker Dan Cohen (r)

Director Michael Rossato-Bennett (l) and social worker Dan Cohen (r)

Slowly, as the story plays out, we are introduced to human husks that reside in these homes and palliative care centres. People who had once been husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, sons and daughters, but who have been reduced to masses of barely interactive biological matter by their medical conditions.

And yet, when the headphones are placed over their ears and music pours down thin white wires into ear buds, those husks are infused with life. Like a balloon that only shows its true form upon inflation, the inert bodies and death masks take the form and substance of the human beings they once were.

Henry comes alive again as the music reaches inside

Henry comes alive again as the music reaches inside

Eyes glow with life, spines regain flexibility, paralysis becomes movement, and disengaged spirits connect with the world. If only for a few hours, the catatonic fog lifts and a human is reborn.

The science—discussed in part with Dr. Oliver Sacks—suggests that the familiar, beloved music of the individual’s past activates that part of his or her brain as yet left untouched by disease, effectively relinking the connections between their worlds within and without. That may be true, scientifically.

What was certain to me was that the music either reignited the spark that makes us human or provided the fuel that converted a seriously diminished spark into a sputtering flame. The results were miraculous.

Even in cases where disease hadn’t erased the person’s individuality but dampened it with manic-depression or multiple sclerosis, the music seemed to quieten the internal maelstrom enough for the person to re-emerge. The woman immobile without her walker, shoved it aside to dance to Spanish guitar.

The story of Alive Inside had a personal connection for me as I immediately thought back to my now-deceased grandmother Dorothy who fortunately had maintained her mental faculties except at the very end. Her apartment, as I remember it, was constantly filled with music, her CD player rarely turned off. New CDs coming into her home every Christmas, every birthday. Elvis, Michael Buble, The Mills Brothers, Motown and light opera. She was at her most contented when listening to music.

The caregiver...

The caregiver…

...becomes the care-receiver.

…becomes the care-receiver.

But the world was completely different when she was in the hospital—a life of cardiac issues catching up with her eventually. In the anemic, lifeless wards where wonderful warriors did their best to stave off the inevitable, I could see Dorothy’s spirit wane with each passing day. Even if I didn’t always think she was physically ready, my happiest days were knowing she was going home.

When something upsets the norm, ceases to function correctly or goes completely dormant, it is easy to set it aside and forget about it. When that something is a loved one, setting them aside is never easy but it is often easier than coping with the problem. And once set aside, forgetting becomes that much easier.

Seeing that a person is still inside that morbid husk of a human, however, changes everything. Knowing that we have committed a living, breathing, connectable loved one to solitary exile becomes less palatable, less conscionable.

Music isn’t the solution. It doesn’t reverse what has happened to the person biomedically. Within minutes or hours of the music ceasing, the individual typically deflates to his or her former shell.

But we who have witnessed the transformation, we have been permanently changed because we can never see that human shell the same way ever again.

We know that shell is not lifeless, and once we know that, there is no going back.

If you get the opportunity to see Alive Inside, please do. And be sure to bring plenty of facial tissues.

Winner @ Nashville Film Festival

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Me sharing the red carpet with friend and writer Larry Shulruff.

Me sharing the red carpet with friend and writer Larry Shulruff.

Late yesterday, my screenplay Tank’s won best animated feature at the Nashville Film Festival.

Pretty stinking stoked about this as it was a screenplay I had contemplated retiring for a bit to seriously rewrite it later. Still needs a rewrite, but happy to let it rest on its laurels for a bit.

Thanks to all you lovelies who had to listen to me kvetch about this thing for the last couple of years, and in particular to Marsha Mason, whose incredible reading and analysis helped me make this a massively good read.

Dom Hemingway – A Review

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A redemption story of a career criminal who has played the game by an unwritten code, who has done his best to do right by people within the criminal world and been screwed at every turn. The only people he hasn’t done right by, in fact, are his ex-wife and daughter, whom he completely screwed over. (Trailer)

Written and directed by Richard Shepard, who brought us The Matador, Dom Hemingway works on so many levels—from its amazing opening soliloquy (no better way to describe it), through astounding montages of decadence that can only be described as balletic, to tender moments of friendship punctuated with foul language.

But sadly, because it works on so many levels, the places where it doesn’t are glaring. And there is perhaps no bigger failure than the actual story.

There is no doubt that Shepard can write. His use of words to express universal ideas and human frailty are musical. Unfortunately, those skills only serve to create islands of poetry in a story that slowly drowns in conflicting tides. The movie bogs down into little more than a series of fortunately/unfortunately vignettes that ultimately don’t go anywhere.

Likewise, the moment we leave the criminal aspects of the story and Dom has to face the wreck that is his life and relationships, the dialogue becomes wooden and cliché.

Even the redemption angle is eventually undercut by additional scenes that suggest Dom has learned little. Not sure what Shepard’s thought was here—that people don’t really change, perhaps—but it might simply be an unverbalized acknowledgement of Shepard’s own limitations.

The performances of Jude Law and Richard E. Grant cover for many of the story flaws. Law’s Dom is a man who can’t get out of his own self-destructive behaviours long enough to actually succeed and let his skills prove himself. Grant, meanwhile, plays the long-suffering conscience who just wants his friend to be happy, but doesn’t have the energy to watch Dom implode in his own fear yet again. Unfortunately, the minute these amazing men leave the screen, the movie flat lines.

(Side note: Just before the movie started, the theatre screened an ad for Filth (trailer). It was amazing how similar the lead characters of the two movies appear, as Law seemed to be channelling his inner James McAvoy at times.)

Perhaps the best way to describe Dom Hemingway is to say you will feel energized watching it, but a little empty of dissatisfied as you leave the theatre.

I wanted this movie to be better. I wanted it to be the best movie I’d seen all year, the most complete movie. Alas, it wasn’t.

No time to hate

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I’ve seen a lot of hate and anger in my social media feeds lately, directed at people of different religions, heritages, philosophies, and lifestyle choices, and it makes me sad.

I am sorry that the individuals who have posted this stuff feel this way and think these things. They are not bad people. They have their reasons of which I cannot possibly fathom. I can only offer them my love.

If I have contributed to these feelings in any way, through my humour, sarcasm or cynicism, I am sorry. That was not my intent. I meant only to induce people to smile and think.

The world can be an amazingly shitty place that naturally prompts fear, anger, hatred. The challenge is that these feelings only serve to make a shitty situation that much shittier.

The world can also be an amazingly beautiful place that hopefully prompts feelings of wonder, awe, unity and love. And just as in the previous situation, these feelings too serve to make a beautiful place that much more beautiful.

I cannot ask you to set aside your negative feelings. We all feel pain in our lives. To even suggest that you ignore these feelings is to invalidate them. That would be wrong of me.

I can only ask that you try love whenever you are able.

Not in the hope that it will cure your ills or diminish the slights you have suffered. Merely in the hope that a surfeit of love in the world will make those ills and slights easier to bear, if only because you will find you do not have to bear them alone.

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(Images are property of their owners and are used here without permission but in the hope that I have done them justice.)

Bible or Anachronism – The Elements of Style

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As we approach the 100th anniversary of this well worn tome on writing correctly, I would like to survey my social media environment to determine how often Strunk & White’s The Elements of Style is actually referenced by people on a regular basis.

NOT do you own it.

NOT have you cracked it open at some point.

BUT do you actually use it to improve your writing.

OR do you not even know about what I am talking.

Those of you who know me well, already know my stance on the book. At the same time, as I have seen the book referenced countless times as a classic must-have, I have come to consider that my bias regarding the book may have been a product of the era in which it was thrown at me, and thus, I should be open to reconsidering the tome.

Enemy—The movie with the meta title

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Enemy

So, it was $5-Tuesday yesterday at the Carlton Cinema in Toronto and a friend invited me to see a movie called Enemy, starring Jake Gyllenhaal. Like any weary movie-goer, I immediately jumped online to look at the trailer and thought, “Hmmm, weird, but interesting”.

I was half right. The movie was weird.

At this point, I should probably say “SPOILER ALERT”, but truth be told, I am not sure that if I laid out every event that occurred in this movie, you would know what was happening. I sat through it and I don’t know what happened.

As the trailer indicates, the movie is about a man who is dissatisfied with his life—never explains why, he just is—and is merely going through the motions of living until one day when he realizes that his exact doppelganger lives in town.

Terrified at this revelation—never explains why, he just is—he is nonetheless drawn to his twin and after jumping through a series of over-complicated hoops, he meets the twin. At which point, he second-guesses his decision and it is his twin’s turn to go neurotic—never explains why, he just does.

As you may have guessed from my above repetition of “never explains why”, my greatest issue with this movie is unclear character motivation. Perhaps it says more about me and my life history, but I have no idea why any of these characters acts as extremely as they do.

I am confident that it is part of the artistic conceit of the piece that at numerous moment are you fully sure which Jake Gyllenhaal character you are watching onscreen. The challenge with this is that the emotional rollercoaster of each of the characters is such that from cut-to-cut within the same scene, I am never sure which Jake Gyllenhaal character I am watching. I ended up watching the characters’ clothing rather than the actor’s face to try to follow the story.

And the motivations of the secondary characters are just as muddy for me, although at least here, we have different actors and so don’t have the Gyllenhaal rabbit hole with which to contend. Like a faucet tap, the emotions of these characters change with a flick—questioning in one moment, horny in the next, and angry in the third, and all in the span of 30-45 seconds.

A definite statement of who I am, I spent much of the movie trying to predict the reveal of the story based on the clues or purely on conjecture.

Twins separated at birth? Time travel with a glitch? Parallel universes collide? Psychotic episode of one man leading two lives?

No SPOILER ALERT to say none of these came to fruition, but that still doesn’t mean that any of them may not be true. Hell, all of them might be true. I don’t know.

And any hope of a conclusion is muddied by a massive metaphor that scurries through this movie—I won’t tell you what it is—and yet offers no satisfying explanation.

Enemy is described everywhere as a thriller. I’d be more inclined to call it a puzzler…and even that may be too lofty. Head-scratcher and headache-giver might be more accurate.

As I read up on the movie to write this, I learned the film won Canadian Screen Awards (our Oscar) for Best Director and Best Supporting Actress, and was nominated for Best Film. I find that disturbing.

The film was based on the 2002 novel The Double (O Homem Duplicado), by Portuguese author José Saramango. Part of me wants to find the novel to see if it is any clearer than the movie, but as of this moment, a bigger part of me just wants to walk away from this entire episode in my life.

 

Previous posts about characters in writing and film:

Just Tell The Story – Austin Film Festival

The Dignity of Characters

A Matter of Character

Can You Relate?

I Am Always Right (Motivation)

Dara Marks at Toronto Screenwriting Conference 2013

Unpacking Baggage (Part One)

Unpacking Baggage (Part Two)

Re: Rewrites (Part Two)—Toronto Screenwriting Conference 2014

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In Part One of this post, we examined Paul Chitlik’s approach to reviewing the structural elements of a story, including the idea that a screenplay is actually comprised of four stories: The plot-based Main Story, the relationship-led Emotional Story, the protagonist’s internal Personal Growth Story, and the humanizing Antagonist’s Story.

 

Dissecting character

To truly understand your main characters, Chitlik recommends building something of a character profile that you can use as a steady reference while examining how the character acts and speaks within the screenplay. This is critical, Chitlik says, because often when you start writing a screenplay, you really don’t know your main characters and as you write, they will become more defined.

For assistance and more insights, Chitlik highly recommends Lajos Egri’s book The Art of Dramatic Writing.

 

Protagonist

Physiology – develop a sense of what your character looks like even if you don’t incorporate it into your story (something beyond “tall man in his mid-20s”)

Sociology – imbue the character with a social history: family life, school, jobs, etc.

Psychology – how does your character think and respond to his or her environment? Here is where the personal flaw comes to the fore

How is the character reflected in his/her dialogue? – in how he sounds, the word and grammar he uses, and how he acts

What is your character’s defining line? – Think Dirty Harry, a battle-weary cop with a strong moral center who is begging the criminal to make him shoot “Go ahead, make my day.”

 

Antagonist

Physiology

Sociology

Psychology

Human quality – what makes your antagonist more than a 2-D character? Why should we empathize with him or her?

How is the character reflected in his or her dialogue?

What is the antagonist’s defining line? – Think Terminator and “I’ll be back.”

 

Dissecting the screenplay itself

Chitlik then lifts his view slightly higher from the page, offering ways to dissect the screenplay in a more technical manner from its content to the paper itself.

 

Seeing the Scene

Each scene has all 7 of the structural elements of your story, so be sure you can identify them, although be aware that some elements may not occur within the lines of the scene but rather are implied or referenced within the lines.

Does the scene have any/enough/appropriate conflict? Chitlik finds conflict to be the #1 problem of new writers, which leads us to a discussion of goals

He is adamant that every character within a scene must have his or her own goal, however prominent or minimal to the plot. The conflict, he suggests, comes from the points at which these goals thwart or oppose each other.

Also, look at the emotions of the characters within the scene. Do you maintain them throughout the scene or when they change, do they change when something acts to cause the change?

And for emphasis, re-examine the conflict of the scene.

 

Looking for Cuts

Chitlik suggests he has never read a screenplay that couldn’t benefit from cutting about 10%.

He suggests you start by looking for scenes that lack conflict, don’t move the story forward (treading water) or fail to illuminate one or more characters in some manner.

Either eliminate these scenes or find some way to incorporate the missing ingredient.

Then look to cut off the heads and tails of scenes, starting later or ending earlier. An example he gives for the tails is leaving the scene when the final challenge arises or is issued, and he points at the work of David E. Kelley in this regard. The resolution of the challenge, he argues, can easily be worked out by the audience through the start or context of a subsequent scene. You don’t have to always spell things out.

 

Presently Presentable

This is the challenge of first impressions. Chitlik gives the example of a former student who sent him a screenplay she wrote and on the title page, she misspelled her own name. This, he says, did not bode well for what was to be found inside.

Chitlik describes this as the Mercedes Benz theory of script presentation. If you are going to spend $100K on a new Benz and you are presented with two cars—one that is absolutely beautiful and immaculate and one that is dinged up and dirty—which one would you choose to spend your money on?

Look at the pages of your screenplay and ask yourself how much of the page is black and how much white. Before looking at a single word, readers will be repelled by heavy screenplays with long descriptive sections or heavy dialogue. Find ways to break this up to leave more white space on the page.

Chitlik’s other cautions are: Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar.

 

The Rewrite Plan

Chitlik’s plan is straightforward and iterative:

  1. Write a biography of the protagonist in his/her own words/language
  2. Write a biography of the antagonist in his/her own words/language
  3. Reread the screenplay, making notes on the above topics
  4. Create a new beat sheet of the screenplay, adding new scenes that help your story play out and cutting old ones that don’t work or aren’t necessary
  5. Write new pages and rewrite old ones from the beginning
  6. Go back to Step 3

If it sounds like a lot of work, it is, but Chitlik promises that with each iterative run, the work gets easier and the outcome improves.

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