Kyle Michel Sullivan's Blog: https://www.myirishnovel.com/, page 261

Talk about short, if not so sweet...

Okay, kicking Stasi out of Carli's Kills, except for two scenes, made it easier to finish this draft...but shortened it. After all the adding and cutting and dumping and including, the script wound up being 80 pages long. Normal rule of thumb -- one page equals one minute...but if I work it out right in my timing, considering I'm only a quarter as detailed as I normally am in the action bits, the project should wind up at about 90 minutes.

I do have a couple of moments later in the story that will need to be set up in the first part, and I think I want a bit more of Zeke's background. But then, other aspects of the script don't quite hang together, yet, so the next pass will be to clarify and streamline the story, making sure I have everything I need for it to be properly told.

I get the feeling part of the problem is that the one-word theme of the story is shifting...but I'm not sure to what. Francis Ford Coppola once said, "When you make a movie, always try to discover what the theme of the movie is in one or two words. Every time I made a film, I always knew what I thought the theme was, the core, in one word. In The Godfather, it was succession. In The Conversation, it was privacy. In Apocalypse Now, it was morality." Of course, Coppola also said a script should be like Haiku, which is the exact opposite of Tolstoy, so maybe I'll take this as just his opinion.

Still...I was thinking CK was all about redemption, but it's not happy with that. It seems to be more about guilt, which combines with the idea of punishment. Which is rather moralistic. I sort of know why...but is that workable? I'll have to let that stew in my brain for a while before I dig deeper into it.

Lately, when I think of Zeke -- whose name has become Robert Ezekiel Lindstrom, for some reason -- I'm picturing this guy: Darcy Oake. He's a Canadian magician who did some very cool stuff on "Britain's Got Talent" and made it to the finals. Dunno if he can act, but he's got good camera presence. Of course, he'd have to fake missing a leg, but that's easily doable for a magician.

And just to be clear, I'm posting this image of his hot little self just so no one will think I'm really as deep as I think I am.

La Guerre Est Finie...

Anastasia overplayed her hand. She forgot -- I'm the writer, dammit, so I get to decide. Play nice or else. She got the "or else;" she's cut down to one scene...and she doesn't even get to tell it. I added a character who was there, that night, and it worked out one hell of a lot better.
Which, in truth, is probably what I was really aiming for (says 20/20 hindsight). I wasn't just missing the obligatory scene; I was missing a way of fitting it into the story. And by sketching out part of the first scene, I began to sense it shouldn't begin there. So now the script starts with Carli and Grady.
The obligatory scene still doesn't fit perfectly, but it's in and done, and now I can finish polishing up the last 20 pages of the script. I may shift the scene around some, in the next rewrite, just to see if it works better later or earlier in the story...and I may put Stasi's death scene back in...but I'm not having to worry about that, now. I smashed this friggin' wall to bits, and proved I'M THE MAN! Well...the writer. Man. Person.
Looks like I'll have a solid first draft of Carli's Kills done, tomorrow. The one I'm currently working on was too rough to be considered anything more than an extended outline of the story. So I'll only need another 5 or 6 rewrites to make it readable.
And it's still doable for under $500K. The story's pretty much centered around the Cantina Madriza and surrounding desert. Carli's home. An apartment that, with a green screen backdrop, could double for a highrise in downtown Phoenix. One bomb going off and a building burning down. Cheap, up one side and down the other.
Well...that's what I was aiming for.

Damn, damn, damn, damn, damn...

I've lost control of the script and I'm now fighting to regain it. Anastasia didn't just hijack the story; she raped it, tossed it aside and spit on it. I had a nice enough rhythm going and build to the scenes, and yeah, it needed something more. But this? A queen bitch to counter Carli? WTF!?!?!

I've already tried cutting her back, but she ain't havin' none of it. She's like Carli's doppelganger. Shit...I need to step back and figure out what the hell's going on. This is wrecking my fun little thriller.

I think it started when I roughed out some storyboards for the opening. Nothing very good; just something to get me closer to a visual rhythm...and the scene shifted from a quick snarly moment to a long zoom in on Mindy and her man screwing in a hotel room, not cutting until she gets out of bed to go to the balcony. Then it's from behind, zooming in, again...and that's as far as I got, but that was still 8 frames of work to get the feel for it.

Thing is, I was dissatisfied with my sketching. It looked juvenile, and now I want to go in and make it better. And I have the feeling that dissatisfaction kick-started something in my brain about the story. It's too ABC in its simplicity...and yet not honest enough. And yet, it is. There's something else I need to fight -- my tendency to make every story I write, lately, about something deep and meaningful and the length of a Bible instead of just plain quick and fun.

If I wrote a short story, these days, it'd wind up being 250 pages long.

BAM! First wall...

One of the fun parts of writing is getting into the story and suddenly finding yourself completely rearranging everything. I was still trying to find the right moment to detail what happened to Lara on the night she was raped, and why...when all of a sudden Anastasia hijacked the script. She decided she was going to be a bigger part of it all, and now I don't know what to do.

Seriously, she wants to be the queen bitch or she's gonna tear it apart. If I go the way I'm thinking, right now, it changes everything. Probably for the better. Maybe. No...definitely. The characters in the story decide its direction, and if Stasi feels this strongly (and no one else is willing to fight her over it), that's the way it goes.

So in the opening -- crazy little Mindy does the dive out of the hotel window. Everything else in the first half pretty much stays the same, but this alters the second half in a big way. Because now Carli's looking to find Stasi to talk to her. To find out exactly what happened to Lara and why. And when she does find out (as she must), all hell breaks loose.
But I don't know how to write this moment, at the moment. I've tossed out half a dozen different scenarios and none of them work. Guess I'll focus on it, this weekend.

Of course, Zeke wasn't too crazy about this turn of event. At first. But then he saw I'm going to play with him and this situation, some, like I did with Chase, and that made him smirk at me. He doesn't have a problem with me saying, it's time men were viewed as sexual objects for the taking, by women.

God, the Dworkin Queens will HATE this movie, once it's made...I hope.

Reversals work

The scene where Chase is being interrogated by Carli was falling flat...until I made it funny. He thinks Carli was bought for him as a birthday present, and he's hoping she's going to force whiskey down his throat because he's now 21 and legal for anything, ANYthing. Like an eager bunny rabbit. It takes him a little bit to catch on that's not what's happening.

I did some thinking about this kind of thing in a thriller...and remembered movies like Myra Breckinridge and Basic Instinct, where men are the victims and women the aggressors...and in ways somewhat similar to CK. Granted Myra uses a strap-on to violate Rusty, in MB, as a form of revenge rape against all men, while Carli plays with Chase's fantasy about her real reason for interrogating him in a sensual way...as if she's about to "force herself" onto him. Sharon Stone's character uses sex as a weapon in BI, just like Carli uses sex to get Grady to go home with her. Of course, MB bombed at the box office, despite Raquel Welch being a huge star, but BI made hundreds of millions, so...

I tried to indicate the moments of love and sensuality come between Carli and Zeke, because they're equals. I'm leaving it up to the director as to how far they go with them, but in my mind, I'd make it Red Shoe Diaries, to the max. All soft touches and golden light with nudity and kisses.

I think I will storyboard the full script, just to see how that works.

Mind drifting and shifting and wandering so...

This is a really good movie, and Brendan Fraser holds his own with heavyweight actors like Sir Ian and Lynn. He was smart to take it on.

Working on the interrogation scene between Carli and Chase drained me...but it's still being fun.

Careful...too much fun being had...

Okay...so I've got a dealer named Chase in Carli's Kills. College preppy guy with a kick-ass SUV who handles only pot and pills for the Greek House boys and girls and thinks he's hot shit. I even found the perfect photo representation of him.
He didn't have anything to do with what happened to Carli's sister, but he's supplied by Dax's gang...so Carli interrogates him. He's who gives her the final rendition of what happened that night...at least, enough for her to figure out, since he wasn't actually there.

Well, just to be wicked, I decided to pull an homage to the shower scene in Psycho, but it's Carli with a gun instead of mamma with a knife who rips open the curtain. And she questions Chase as he's tied, naked, to a chair, dripping wet. Threatening his manhood with a loop of piano wire.

I want it to be goofy and creepy and funny and obnoxious and everything. Which is probably way too much, but I can always scale it back.

And keep it in the book. Which will be a LOT kinkier, OMG will it...

I've always wondered if women are interested in seeing men threatened with sexual violence. I know most slash fiction, a lot of which includes male on male rape of well-known TV and film characters, is written by women. And there's a whole sub-culture of sexual assault by tentacle, against both males and females, that is practically devoured in Asia. So maybe women are after a little payback of their own.

We've had a century of violence against women on film, and very little in reverse. Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! is one of the few examples of male and female roles being turned on their heads. Maybe this would go over big in Japan...and freak the Talibangelical preachers out in Arkansas and Kansas.

Amazing where your research will take you, and the crazy-assed ideas you'll get from it.

Of course...

I went through the printout of CK with a red pen, today, mainly to get a feel for the flow...and sure enough, I forgot something. I learned years ago from a couple of men who'd actually written and worked in film and television is that there are certain scenes which are just plain obligatory in your project. They may not be the same from one to the next, but once you read the script you'll know if it's missing because anything after that will fall flat.

Well...the obligatory scene I neglected, and by deliberate intent, was the one explaining exactly why Carli goes after these guys. Not her verbal explanation, but an actual visual representation of it. She has a video on her phone of what happened that night, but it's incomplete. I thought I could get away with hinting at it here and referring to it there...but that didn't work. I need a scene where Carli finds out she didn't know everything about that night that drove her sister to suicide, and that it's worse than even she imagined.

In short, I need to show it. Otherwise the whole revenge thing becomes lame.

Of course, that meant adding a couple more scenes in to set up the revelation better. So I noted where they need to go. The nice thing about having a hard copy of the script is being able to quickly jump back and forth on the pages. Maybe it's old-fashioned, but it worked. Now I'm letting it sit overnight.
I had a ton of ironing to do so watched Magic Mike. I'm a big fan of Steven Soderberg's naturalistic style, and I figured any movie with Joe Mangianello, Alex Pettyfer and Matt Bomer would be fun to look at (I bought it on special at a truck stop, about a year ago). OMG, it has the same storyline as Saturday Night Fever, which I thought was trite in 1977. It even has the same damned ending shot!

I'll grant that Channing Tatum's good-looking, but he's too Wonder Bread for me. And I stopped liking Matthew McConaughey when he did that series of dumb-blond-boy-man movies, years ago. It struck me his manner of acting has become "open mouth or close mouth or grin." Unfortunately, they got the lion's share of the naked torso shots. Plus Alex Pettyfer came across as a lot older than 19, even though he was only 22 at the time...and his acting was very surface. And here we have a movie about male strippers but not one of them is gay, nor are there any gay characters in it, at all.

What's really sad about this is, I didn't believe a minute of it. There's one huge deal concerning drugs and a sorority that was handled so unrealistically, I damn near turned the DVD off. This is from Steven Soderberg, who did amazing films like The Limey and Traffic and Erin Brockovich and Ocean's Eleven. Maybe I was expecting too much from him doing a male-stripper movie; it's rather like Orson Welles doing The Sound of Music -- interesting, but no way in hell could that work.

Damn, I wish he hadn't.

First draft of CK

Okay, it's party time. I slammed down and completed a first draft of Carli's Kills, and now comes the real work -- making sure it fits together in a way that makes sense. It's not yet 90 pages, but there are parts where I cut down the narrative part to things like -- they make love. That, alone, could take two or three minutes if done properly. Or -- She checks the pistol. Fires. Misses. Leading into a bit where Carli shows Zeke she knows more about weaponry than he does. That's ¼ of a page when it will probably be 45 seconds to a minute of screen time.
I have the scenes in the proper order, I think. I do almost believe I'm missing one, but an hour's worth of thought didn't bring it to mind, so...we'll see if it makes its appearance during the rewrite.
I printed out a copy. Now I can do my red pen thing, tomorrow. Until then, a little dance....
This is from Orphan Black, and all the girls dancing are the same actress -- Tatiana Maslany. And this gives you a solid glimpse of how movies are really made, today.
Should give actors with huge egos much pause...but it won't.

Harry Potter Marathon...

I had the day off so finished up the Harry Potter series of DVDs...and ...The Deathly Hallows duo caught me up almost as much as The Prisoner of Azkaban. Not so much because of the director but because the producers were wise enough to break the last book into 2 parts -- I know, they only did it to make more money, but it was a smart decision for the story, too. It gave the characters time to breathe and grow and feel...and to me, that made the final hour of the series breathtakingly heartbreaking instead of rushed through.

I worked out most of the plot twists without having read the books or knowing all that much about them, but one took me completely by surprise and I wonder if it was intended. It comes in a throwaway line that goes by so quickly, I wasn't sure I heard it right. But then events strongly suggested I'm right. I may be the only person reading anything into that line...but it worked so perfectly for me, I just know it's right.

It was fascinating watching the growth of Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson and Rupert Gint as actors, too. Emma Watson started out as the best of the group, but she got equalled by Rupert and surpassed by Daniel, to my surprise. No, I shouldn't say that; I saw Daniel in The Woman in Black, and he was good in that. Plus anyone who takes on Alan Strang in Equus, on-stage no less, deserves respect. I saw a road show of the play in San Antonio and it was intense.

So in order of like --
HP3
HP8
HP7
HP6
HP4
HP5
HP2
HP1
And a special hat-tip to Matthew Lewis (AKA: Neville Longbottom) for winding up so dashing.

As the saying goes -- some people hit puberty, this guy beat the hell out of it.