Kenneth Atchity's Blog, page 151
October 17, 2016
Guest Post: Memo to a Successful Writer by Dennis Palumbo
Hollywood on the Couch
The inside scoop on Tinseltown, USA.
by Dennis Palumbo
How to keep making it after you've made it
I’ve heard from a number of my Hollywood writing patients who are new to the business, as well as some successful veterans, ask me to write a column about them. People who are doing well, having their TV scripts and screenplays produced, being offered good deals.
So here goes.
It doesn’t suck. When they option your work, when your film is opening or your pilot is picked up, it can be very sweet indeed.
There are still challenges, of course. Like keeping your focus on the writing, and not getting caught up in just having meetings and developing pitches. Not to mention the effort it takes, in the midst of all the business concerns, to remember why you wanted to write in the first place.
Success in the industry can be as terrifying as it is exciting, as complicated as it is gratifying. But it’s worth it. Seeing your words transformed into feature films and TV episodes, getting to communicate what’s in your mind and heart to countless others, is a profound joy.
That said, here are some things to remember to help keep you grounded...and keep you writing.
YOU ARE ENOUGH. You have everything you need—right now—to be the writer you want to be. As Emerson said, “To know that what is true for you in your private heart is true for everyone—that is genius.” Which means each writer has within him or her the entire range of human experience. If you feel it and think it, pretty much everyone else does, too. So keep mining your own particular thoughts and feelings, what excites or worries or intrigues you, and you’ll have an inexhaustible supply of things to write about.
STAY CURIOUS. One of the great gifts that creative people tend to share is a sense of wonder. The best way to keep your writing fresh and your ideas unique is to be open to new experiences, concepts and situations. Moreover, smart writers are always reading new things, discovering new films or innovative TV programs—in other words, keeping their eyes and ears open to what else is going on around them creatively.
BE IN THE WORLD. I don’t mean you have to watch CNN 24/7, but an understanding of the issues and stresses confronting the people around you is crucial to keeping your writing relevant. Whether you write the broadest of comedies or the most sober of dramas, the best writing is informed by the context in which it is created. Our own culture—political, social, economic—is and has always been the well-spring for the most creative story-telling. It’s what makes a narrative or a collection of characters—and their concerns—relatable to the audience.
DON’T PANIC IF YOU GET STUCK. What does it mean if, in the midst of a script or treatment, you get stuck? It means you’re a writer—and that’s all it means. Writing is hard (and good writing is harder!), so getting stuck, or having doubts about which direction to take the narrative, is just part of the job. Writers only get in trouble when they give their writing problems a personal meaning—when they think it’s evidence of some defect or inadequacy in themselves. It isn’t. In my experience, once I help patients challenge the notion that a writing problem indicates something deficient in them, they tend to be better able to grapple with the actual problem itself—and work through it.
TRUST YOURSELF. Your talent, instincts and hard work have gotten you this far, so it’s unlikely that this skill set will abandon you. No matter how things are going, trust yourself. Every writer, regardless of success, has to navigate the ups and downs of the business. This is a lot easier to do if you can trust yourself—creatively, professionally and personally. You’re the one knows best how to tell a story, craft compelling characters, build to a suspenseful moment or the pay-off to a joke. You know best how to thrill an audience, how to make them laugh and cry and think.
Which means, no matter what, remember who you are and what you can do
Reposted from Psychology Today
Why Bob Dylan's Nobel Prize is the best thing that can happen to the book world Bob Dylan
Bob Dylan performs at Desert Trip in Indio, Calif. on Oct. 7. (Allen J. Schaben / Los Angeles Times)Carolyn Kellogg
When the Nobel Prize was given to Bob Dylan this week, it seemed to many in the book world like a lost opportunity.
Each year, the bright light of the Nobel falls across our cultural canvas and illuminates the work of a major writer — and in recent years that’s usually been a writer who is little-known to American audiences.
If that meant the Nobel had been feeling increasingly remote, it was expanding our conversation. Sure, we might be raising an eyebrow and asking one another who the heck Tomas Transtromer or Svetlana Alexievich might be, but this was good – it asked us to consider the written words of the wider world.
Americans notoriously read very little work in translation; it’s only about 3% of our annual book-buying diet. A Nobel raises the profile of its author considerably.
Before their prizes, recent Nobel winners have mostly been published by small, independent presses here in the U.S. (afterward, they are picked up by major publishers). When the prize is announced, there’s a rush on their work, which means an influx of cash to a struggling small press and runs to the independent bookstores that regularly carry those books.
So there were murmurings of dismay in the publishing community when the Nobel Prize in literature went to a Grammy-winning musician who’s been making headlines for more than five decades. There would be no fall Nobel bump.
But it’s not the job of the Swedish Academy to bolster American independent publishing. Really, its task is to award excellence in literature.
By picking Dylan, it made a bold gesture to expand the definition of “literature.” It has, in effect, thrown open the doors to popular culture.
And that is a huge opportunity.
The divisions between “high culture” and “low culture” are as archaic as the gramophone and 5-cent silent movies. We live in a world where people read books and comic books, watch films and television shows, listen to podcasts and pop music, with equal avidity and intelligence. And the Nobel, in recognizing Dylan’s work as literature, acknowledges that artists create works of popular culture with just as much care, control, courage and genius as Ernest Hemingway did sitting down at a typewriter.
Dylan experts can battle over whether or not he writes poetry; he wasn’t given the prize for that. He was given the prize for writing lyrics and music.
If music and lyrics can count as literature, as plays have done, could not other forms?
Could we, someday, see a Nobel in literature go to Art Spiegelman, Barbara Kopple, Alejandro Jodorowsky, David Simon, Ira Glass, Hayao Miyazaki, Beyoncé?
Wait, wait, hear me out. We are experiencing an undeniable renaissance in storytelling in traditional media like television and film, not to mention new Web series, podcasting and emerging forms like the visual album.
Although it could be argued that authorship is complicated when considering collaborative works like film, television and music, the Swedish Academy swept that aside by giving the prize to Dylan. No matter how many names you can find on his records, the Nobel went to him alone.
When I talked to former L.A. Times pop music critic Robert Hilburn about Dylan’s work, he emphasized the words. “He’s a great cultural figure because of his words and his ideas,” he said.
And for all the flash and bang of any performed art or filmed project, it’s the words that count. “Breaking Bad” didn’t exist without Bryan Cranston’s brilliant performance — but he couldn’t get there without the words on the page.
Dylan’s Nobel says that words don’t have to be bound within covers to be literature. It’s possible the Swedish Academy will back off its radical choice. Who knows what kind of pressure it will be under to return to the traditional choice, to return to the poets and playwrights and novelists who have traditional publishers, traditional books.
But for now, literature is all around us. Read it or listen to it or watch it.
Dylan’s Nobel Prize is a wonderful moment — a wonderful moment for literature.
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October 16, 2016
The first production photo from MEG!
(Daniel Smith)Jason Statham is gonna need a bigger boat.
The giant shark movie Meg began production in New Zealand this week, and Warner Bros. has released the first photo from the project.
Meg sees Statham as a rescue diver named Jonas Taylor. He’s enlisted to save a deep-sea crew left stranded at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean by a 75-foot-long shark called the Megalodon, a prehistoric creature he encountered before. Li Bingbing (Transformers: Age of Extinction) plays Suyin, the daughter of the oceanographer who recruits Jonas, and the two must work together to confront the beast.
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October 15, 2016
Dennis Palumbo's Essay "Is Your Psycho Killer Just...Psycho? " Featured in Suspense Magazine September- October Issue
As some of you may know, I'm a licensed psychotherapist in private practice, specializing in creative issues. But I also write mystery fiction, both short stories and novels. Which means I also read a lot of mystery fiction, and have for many, many years.And since I believe good crime fiction holds a mirror up to society -- exposing both its flaws and triumphs, dangerous excesses and moral ambiguity -- it doesn't surprise me that many contemporary mysteries and thrillers feature ever-more-violent criminals, ever-more-psychotic murderers, ever-more-deranged serial killers. As our world threatens to tilt into chaos -- social, economic, and political -- our crime fiction seems to traffic more and more in the realm of the psychologically-disturbed culprit, the villain whose heinous crimes appear totally random, totally senseless.
Which means, for today's mystery writer, I believe it's also a time to step back and reflect on how truthfully -- both in terms of believable narrative and real life itself -- a crime story villain is portrayed. In other words, is your psycho killer just ... psycho? Does your villain display the verisimilitude that all good fictional characters require -- or is he or she just crazy? Mindlessly, conveniently crazy?
Ray Bradbury once said, "There is only one type of story in the world -- your story." In other words, all writing is autobiographical. No matter how seemingly removed in time and space from the reality of your own life, you're writing about yourself. Even your impulse to tell a particular story arises from an aspect of your interior world.
Case in point: My series of mystery thrillers (Mirror Image, the debut novel, and Fever Dream, its sequel) feature a psychologist who consults with the Pittsburgh police. This character, Daniel Rinaldi, is Italian-American, was born and raised in the Steel City, and graduated from the University of Pittsburgh. As did I.
Of course, my crime novels are works of fiction, so there are definitely points at which Rinaldi and I part company. For one thing, he was an amateur boxer in his youth. The other, even more obvious difference, is that Daniel Rinaldi is a lot braver and more resourceful than I am. Most of the dangerous situations he finds himself in would have me running for the hills!
So Daniel Rinaldi both is and isn't me. As therapists, he and I are similar in our theoretical orientations and manner of doing therapy. His best friend, a paranoid schizophrenic, is even based on a patient at a private clinic with whom I was especially close. But, though we share these and other personal similarities, as a character Rinaldi clearly represents a fantasized version of me.
As do, I believe, all characters brought to life by their literary creators -- even those that seem totally removed from who we think we are. I'm speaking here about the writing of villains. Particularly those that are portrayed as crazy, psychopathic, criminally disturbed.
I can't tell you how often I've read thrillers in which the author's depiction of a "psycho" killer is pure boiler-plate: unconvincing, unmotivated, without psychological depth or realism. Why is this? Especially when the writer's other characters seem more rounded, realistic, subject to the usual panoply of feelings and motives?
In my view, it's because these writers are denying Bradbury's tenet about writing, which is that -- however disguised -- it is inevitably autobiographical. By that I mean, crime writers often see their monstrous, unstoppable killer as being "out there" somewhere, beyond the realm of normal human behavior. A caricature of evil out of a child's nightmare.
Or, even worse, they often conjure a conveniently "crazy" killer who commits the crime merely because he's crazy. Merely to horrify the reader. Merely as an excuse for gratuitous and graphic depictions of unspeakable acts. Merely as a bad guy heinous enough to have us rooting for the hero to finally stop him. In other words, the boogie-man.
I've often had writing patients, working on a violent crime thriller, complain that they just can't get inside the head of their villain "because I'm not like that."
Do you feel that way? Do you believe that because you're a nice, kind, truthful person, you can't really create a lying, vicious killer? A ruthless blackmailer? A greedy kidnapper?
Well, if so, I beg to differ.
For one thing, as a psychotherapist for more than 25 years, I've come to realize that people --common, everyday people -- have operatic passions. That stoic guy bagging groceries at your local supermarket, that helpful lady at the pharmacy, the janitor at your kid's school -- all of them, if given the opportunity to relate their life stories, would stun you with the personal dramas each has endured. The heartbreaks and triumphs, the yearnings and dashed hopes. The hurts and shame and missed opportunities they've obsessed about since high school. The deaths and financial losses and mental illnesses with which their families have struggled.
As I say, operatic passions. Great loves and hates. Maybe buried now beneath years of quiet, conventional living. Beneath years of daily toil, paying the bills, driving the kids to school. But those passions are there, trust me. Otherwise soap operas wouldn't be a staple of broadcasting in every corner of the world, in every culture. Otherwise viewers wouldn't be transfixed (often as a guilty secret) with reality TV, with true crime series on cable networks, with gossip in all its forms.
Which brings me back to the crime writer, and what he or she is willing to acknowledge and explore. And, make no mistake, there's a bottomless well, a fathomless sea, a boundless horizon available, if you just have the courage to accept all that it contains.
Deep within each mystery writer lies the seeds of every kind of human. From a nun to a serial killer, a corporate tycoon to a migrant worker, a life-giver to a life-taker. If you can feel, you can imagine. And if you can imagine, then the possibilities -- for good or evil -- inherent in that which you've imagined are available to you.
Here's an example, crude but illustrative. Let's say you've always had a secret yearning to be respected. Perhaps this yearning began in childhood, when your siblings got all the glory in school or on the athletic field, and you felt ignored. Discounted. Invisible.
Imagine, then, that your villain -- a terrifying serial killer, a sociopath who murders without remorse -- has felt similarly discounted and invisible all his life. Rejected. Ignored.
Well, if you're this guy, one thing that definitely gets you some attention is leaving a swath of mutilated bodies in your wake. And if you're clever enough to continually elude the police, you probably feel a sense of pride. Of gratification. Of vindication. Now the world's respecting you, even if it's a respect based on fear. You're certainly not invisible anymore. At long last, you're getting the attention you deserve.
Luckily, regardless of how we were treated in childhood, most of us still grow up to be sane, rational citizens. Maybe our feelings are easily hurt, or we succumb too easily to envy or jealousy, but we're probably not going to do much about it. Certainly nothing criminal.
But in our fiction, we get to act out these feelings. As writers, we get to create villainous characters who do all sorts of bad things -- and, I submit, the more relatable their motives, the more terrifying they are to the reader.
The cold fact is, even a psychopath has his or her reasons. David Berkowitz, the Son of Sam, believed his neighbor was a demon, ordering him to kill through communicating via his pet dog. Mary Martin Speck, a nurse who killed 23 patients, claimed to be doing the Lord's work. Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer, felt a need to prove his superiority over those lesser beings trying to catch him.
As I say, the reasons may be irrational, based on delusional beliefs or unfounded grandiosity, but they're reasons nonetheless. At least in the killer's mind.
Which means the brave writer has to visit that mind occasionally. Has to figure out some way to relate to that mind's desires, fears, beliefs, pain, ego.
I recall a group therapy session years ago, when I was an intern in clinical training, in which one of the members got furious at another. Over some real or imagined slight. Regardless, she got to her feet and verbally attacked this second person.
After 10 minutes of vituperative rage and name-calling, the woman finally calmed herself. Then, turning to the therapist who was running the group, she said, sheepishly, "Wow, all that anger and rage ... all that ugly hate ... I'm so sorry. That wasn't me."
To which the therapist responded, "Yes it was. It isn't the sole truth of who you are, of course, but those dark feelings are in there. They're in everybody. They're as real in you as are your other feelings -- your compassion, your generosity, your joy."
As John Fowles once wrote, in his novel Daniel Martin, "Whole sight ... or all the rest is desolation." By which he meant that the totality of the human condition, the entire truth of our experience as people, has to be acknowledged if we're to live authentically. Just as, I believe, the totality of the human condition has to be explored and utilized by the writer seeking to create vivid, compelling, seriously terrifying villains.
So the next time you begin conceptualizing your crime story's villain, don't be afraid to mine your own feelings. Down deep, below the surface. It's where the motherlode of characterization, and all the narrative gold that results, lies hidden.
Just waiting for you, the writer, to bring it into the light.
***
(This essay first appeared, in slightly revised form, on the "Sirens of Suspense" website.)
October 13, 2016
‘Meg’: Filming Begins
It’s been a long road through development hell for Meg, a monster movie about a giant shark, but cameras have finally started rolling on the Warner Bros. picture. The project finally gained serious steam last year when filmmaker Eli Roth signed on to make his studio debut, but he dropped out over creative differences this spring. Warner Bros. subsequently set National Treasure and The Sorcerer’s Apprentice director Jon Turteltaub to take the helm, and now cameras have begun rolling in New Zealand on the science-fiction action thriller.
Jason Statham leads the film alongside Chinese actress Li Bingbing (Forbidden Kingdom)
Turteltaub is working from a script by Dean Georgaris (Lara Croft Tomb Raider: Cradle of Life) and Jon Hoeber & Erich Hoeber (Red), and the film is certainly being produced with an eye towards worldwide appeal. In addition to New Zealand, filming is also poised to take place in China, with Beijing Digital Impression serving as a producing partner on the film which already has secured distribution in China via Gravity Pictures.
The cast is decidedly international as well. Alongside Statham and Bingbing, the ensemble includes Cliff Curtis (Fear the Walking Dead), Rainn Wilson, Ruby Rose, Winston Chao, Page Kennedy, Jessica McNamee, Ólafur Darris Ólafsson, Sophia Shuya Cai, and Heroes alum Masi Oka.
Turteltaub has Clint Eastwood’s frequent cinematographer Tom Stern (American Sniper, The Hunger Games) handling the photography, and it’ll be interesting to see what kind of tone Meg strikes as Turteltaub’s previous output leans heavily towards the family/kid-friendly oriented.
Meg will be released in theaters on March 2, 2018.
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Story Merchant Books Releases Michael A. Simpson's Sons of My Fathers!
An evocative journey into the author's family history.The story follows the lives of the same family as they live in two eras that ripped their world apart at the seams: the invasion of Georgia during the American Civil War and the period a hundred years later during the civil rights era, the war in Vietnam, and the advent of a new alternative culture.
October 10, 2016
October 8, 2016
Hollywood High Concept
Studios today are producing, for the most part, two kinds of films. One type is pre-established franchises (comic books, TV series, famous novels, toys, such as Star Wars, Captain America, and The Hunger Games. The other type is high-concept scripts that are either conceived of in-house by executives, producers, managers, and agents who know what the market responds to — or by “spec” screenwriters determined to break the bank.
Writing even the greatest screenplay that isn’t high concept is choosing either the indie path or willful self-indulgence.
Dealing with “high concept” is one of the most challenging and frustrating tasks of the Hollywood writer, agent, or producer; reducing the story to a compelling logline is what high concept is all about. As a former academic not prepared for a world focused on marketing, it took me years to realize that the term “high concept” means almost its opposite. It means “simple concept,” as in Fatal Attraction: An innocent smile at a party turns a married man’s life upside down and put his family in mortal jeopardy.
Sometimes a title is its own high concept, as with Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling novel Gone with the Wind, the extended logline of which would be: “Against the backdrop of the great Civil War, a narcissistic Southern beauty obsessed with idyllic love struggles to reconstruct her life and finds that her true love is closer than she thinks.”
High concept is a story that will compel the broadest audiences to watch the movie after hearing a pitch of only a few, or sometimes even one, word(s):
Psycho Sleepless in Seattle ArmageddonUnwanted Attentions Vertigo JawsHow to Lose a Guy in Ten Days American SniperUnfaithful Four Weddings and a Funeral San AndreasBlack Hawk Down Panic Room SelmaRunaway Bride Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead Home Alone Cabin FeverDie Hard Ex Machina
These examples of high concept are pitched by their very titles. It’s enough to hear the title—and know that Adam Sandler and Jack Nicholson star—to compel audiences to the box office for Anger Management.
“Die Hard on a boat,” was allegedly the logline line that led to the sale of Steven Seagall’s Under Siege.
Titles like The Fisher King, Seven Days in May, Snow Falling on Cedars, The Shipping News may be evocative, but do not express a high concept that will instantly lure audiences. Though such titles may get lucky and become successful movies, in today’s blockbuster market they’d be swimming upstream.
Nothing is more important to marketing your story than a “high concept logline” that makes it immediately stand out from all those stories that are subtle, nuanced, and difficult to pitch, and that depend entirely upon “execution.” Here are some more examples that have led my companies or others to sales:
• “Jurassic Shark!” (the two-word description given AEI client Steve Alten’s Meg by ICM-agent Jeff Robinov, who spearheaded a “preempt” from Disney for $1.1 million; the story was then re-sold to Newline, and then to Warner Brothers)
• When the most obnoxious guy in the world realizes he’s become an asshole on a false premise, he makes a list of all the people he’s wronged and sets out to repay them one by one. (John Scott Shepherd’s Henry’s List of Wrongs, sold to New Line Pictures for $1.6 million).
• Life or Something Like It: An ambitious and self-involved reporter is sparked into action to change the pattern of her life when she interviews a street-psychic who tells her that her life is meaningless—and that she’s going to die—soon.
• The Madam’s Family: The true “Canal Street Brothel” story of three generations of madams and their battle against persecution by the FBI.
• The Lost Valentine: A man and woman find the love of their lifetimes when they’re brought together to memorialize the bittersweet story of a doomed World War II pilot and the wife who promised to wait forever for his return.
Consider these further examples, grouped by “genre”:
A woman or a family in jeopardy The Shallows: While riding the waves at a remote beach, a young surfer finds herself injured and stranded just twenty miles from shore on a buoy—as a great white shark begins stalking her.
Room: After being abducted, abused, and imprisoned for seven years in a small windowless room a mother devises a bold escape plan.
An ordinary woman in extraordinary circumstances
The Danish Girl: What happens if the husband you adore needs to be a woman?
Woman in Gold: Six decades after World War II, a Jewish octogenarian begins a quest to reclaim the artwork confiscated from her family by the Nazis and now proudly celebrated by the Austrian government—including a famed Gustav Klimt masterpiece.
Men on a missionSaving Private Ryan: US soldiers try to save their comrade who’s stationed behind enemy lines.
Bridge of Spies: At the height of the Cold War in 1960, the downing of an American spy plane and the pilot’s subsequent capture by the Soviets draws Brooklyn attorney James Donovan into the middle of an intense effort to secure the aviator’s release.
Man against nature The Martian: He was left behind—on Mars.
The Revenant: A frontiersman fights for survival after being mauled by a grizzly and left for dead by his own hunting team.
Man or woman against the system Spotlight: A Boston news team sets out to expose numerous cases of child molestation and cover up on the part of the local Catholic Archdiocese.
Concussion: A pathologist uncovers the truth about brain damage in football players who suffer repeated concussions and comes up against the corporate power of the NFL.
People Vs. Larry Flynt: A pornography publisher becomes the unlikely defender of free speech.
Class Action: A female attorney finds that her nemesis is her own father, and must choose between her corporate client and justice.
A woman escaping from something or someone she loves.
The Perfect Guy: After breaking up with her boyfriend, a professional woman gets involved with a man who seems almost too good to be true.
Enough: On the run from an abusive husband, a young mother begins to train herself to fight back.
Sleeping with the Enemy: A young woman fakes her own death in an attempt to escape her nightmarish marriage, but discovers it’s impossible to elude her controlling husband.
Filmmakers long to spot in our onslaught of daily email queries a high concept logline that makes a story out of universal—
• human emotions: fear, love, hate, envy, etc.
• deadly sins: anger, greed, lust, etc.
• plot motivators: betrayal, vengeance, discovery, rebirth, survival, etc.
• virtues: loyalty, faith, responsibility, etc.
—and embodies those elements in characters we can care about, relate to, and root for to shape an “original story” that feels both fresh and relevant to today’s global market.
If you can do that, and your writing effectively expresses your vision, you’re only steps away from recognition in the toughest story marketplace of all.
Excerpt from my forthcoming Sell Your Story to Hollywood, at http://www.realfasthollywooddeal.com
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