The Players Directory
There’s this book, The Academy Player’s Directory, which is a couple of huge volumes with actor’s pictures in them so producers, casting folks have easy access. “Who is Dean Cameron” “Turn to page 387 of Younger Leading Men” “Oh… him… no…”
One has to renew a subscription every year to get their photo in. When I didn’t I received an email:
Dean,
As a valued past customer, we’d appreciate your input.
It would greatly help our future marketing efforts if you would take a moment to reply with a brief explanation as to why you choice not to renew your listing and let us know at what cost would you consider listing again in the printed Players Directory.
Best regards,
Players Directory
So I wrote back…
I’VE GOT NO FUCKING CAREER AND CAN’T FUCKING GET ARRESTED AFTER HAVING STARRED IN A BUNCH OF FUCKING MOVIES BECAUSE THE FUCKING INDUSTRY AND EVERYONE IN IT IS FULL OF FUCKNG SHIT.
Any more questions?
Today, I received this from them:
I appreciate your “honesty.” I’ll remove you from email list.
It’s nice to know that someone reads spam replies.
Writing a Screenplay
I think it’s no secret that I am seriously awed by the guy who does drunkenstepfather.com
It’s totally nsfw and if you just scan it, it looks like a very dirty celebrity blog and, yeah, that’s part of it, but every now and then the guy will write some prose that slays me.
I’ve written him a couple of very fruity fan-email and he wrote me back and now we have a bit of a pen-pal thing going on which invariably leaads to show-biz.
Looooon boring story turned into short boring story… I sent this to him:
HOW TO WRITE A SCREENPLAY
Writing a screenplay is easy. Seriously.
1 your main character is a person who wants something. by the end of the script, the person has gotten something else he didn’t know he wanted.
2 write down 50 ideas for scenes on the tops separate sheets of paper.
3 put them in the order you think they should be in.
4 in the middle of each sheet, write the location of the scene, the time of day, etc… you know in script format:
INT. OFFICE - DAY
Dean is writing an email to a genius.
5 Add some sort of description of where the person is or what the person is doing that illustrates what kind of person he or the main character is. so…
INT. OFFICE - DAY
Dean is writing an email to a genius. There is a pyramid of diet coke cans and unopened mail on his desk. A dog sleeps next to a dog bowl next to a ripped open 50 pound bag of dog food. The phone rings.
6 Then, add the worst dialogue you can that shows what the conflict in the scene is. The conflict MUST advance your story or advance the character… we must learn something in this scene that we do not know. You may only write two lines of dialogue. later you will go back and fill this in and make it better. but first… you are limited to two lines. thusly:
INT. OFFICE - DAY
Dean is writing an email to a genius. There is a pyramid of diet coke cans and unopened mail on his desk. A dog sleeps next to a dog bowl next to a ripped open 50 pound bag of dog food. The phone rings.DEAN
(yelling over his shoulder)
GOD DAMNIT, WOULD YOU ANSWER THE FUCKING PHONE?DOG
You are so lazy. why don’t you answer the phone. the drunken stepfather guy is from the f.b.i., anyway, you has-been!
Dean faints at the sound of his dog talking.
7 You do those sheets until you have all of your scenes written with two lines of dialogue or two lines of description and they can’t be good. you can’t make them good at this stage. so you may have a car chase:
EXT. FREEWAY - NIGHT - RAIN
A car hits an old lady who bursts into flames and melts spiderman’s balls.
The cops cut him off and the driver is scared of spiders because they throw spiders at him.
The idea is to take as much pressure off yourself being good as you can because that’s where everyone fails. they start a script and it sucks (they all do at the beginning of the process and most do at the end of the process, ass well) so they never finish them.
8 finish those 50 scenes… maybe add some… take the ones out that you don’t feel you need.
9 Then, go back and fill in each scene. fill in the dialogue. fill in the description. you’ll have at least 90 pages. you really only need 100. *try* to hit these landmarks:
pg 1-20 set the character on his journey
pg 21-50 throw a bunch of obstacles in his way
pg 51-70 he fights the obstacles but by page 70, it looks as if all is lost
pg 70-90 he figures out a totally new way to win and does. make sure that yu don’t have deus ex machina unless you’ve set it up that it would work. if it does, though, it’s not deus ex machina.
your first draft will suck like country music. you rewrite. make the main character interesting enough for your favorite actor want to pester his agent and the studio to do the movie. then each subsequent draft, focus on one character and make the character interesting enough that a star will want the part. keep rewriting until that’s true of every character… even MAN #1 and WAITRESS.
10 After you’ve made it interesting for the actors. make it interesting for the cinematographers. the wardrobe person. sound, etc.
The key is having enough people waving your script around saying I HAVE GOT TO BE A PART OF THIS MOVIE!!!!!! and then you get 30-90 million for your stupid fucking movie.
That’s how you write a fucking script, sir.
Next caller
Mister Snickers is a Commie!!!
Victor and I have a couple of spamscam shows coming up so I figured I’d try to make some extra cash like the pro’s do with MERCH MERCH MERCH!!!
This is the link to the actual shirt
Summer School
Last year, I did an interview here at the house for the special features for the 20th anniversary of Summer School. The bride and I watched it and I didn’t come off like a dickhead, which is always my biggest fear. Pompous or pathetic. They didn’t use the “funny” stuff I did like show the thing Carl Reiner wrote that said “If you don’t become a big star I don’t know anything…” and offering to take him on a walk around my estate here in North fucking Hollywood.
That was probably a wise move on their part.
This weekend, the bride went to a wedding in Le Vegas…
digression
Another reason to hate weddings - “Hey, we’re getting married!!! Why don’t you ruin your long weekend, drive in horrible traffic and pay inflated hotel prices on a holiday weekend and give us some gifts!?!?”
/digression #forgive
…so after she left, I figured I’d watch the commentary Reiner and Mark Harmon did.
About 5 minutes in Reiner says “everyone thought he’d break out and hit it big… shame… someone should have done something with him” or something to that effect.
As I shut it off, I couldn’t help but think “Um, Carl Reiner, you know *you* could’ve done something with me.”
Ah well.
That’s fucking showbiz, innit?
I wonder if people would be interested in audio commentary from me and the other people who were in Summer School. I wonder if people would pay for it.
I will be finding out within two months.
oooohhhhhh how very cryptic!!!
Nerds on Rails
It’s no secret that I do web developing in my spare time. Last year, a friend aksed me if I knew anyone who would build a small site for him and a friend who had a dream…
Colin Summers, the genius behind tightcircle.com and my mightycheese email address, had been wanting to do something in ruby on rails and when we work together, he ends up buying me lunch, so we figured we’d whip up the site in a month or so.
I’d almost built it in php/mysql last rocktober or something. it’s been so damned long.
irregardlessly…
between feature creep and incompetence it took nearly 8 months to finish. i’m not going to build stuff for anyone else anymore. i’m not good at it. i’ll work for a company who has a buffer between me and the clients, but i’m not a people person.
so… the site is up. i’m sure they’re not thrilled with it, but there is some really cool technology and nice content management and a screamingly cool ruby on rails back-end.
http://www.comedyfilmnerds.com
Chris directed me in a short film - Rainbow’s End and is a good egg…
His pardner, Graham Elwood, travels to Iraq to perform comedy. Seriously. He actually lands where there is sniper fire unlike that lying scumbag.
They love movies. They love comedy. What’s better than that?
free money
A million years ago, before you were born. PayPal was handing out 10 bucks for every referral one sent them. I know someone who paid their rent that month with the money.
This is a service from Steve Case, the man who brought you AOL.
Sign up, you’ll get $25, I’ll get $10 and we’ll all be better for it.
entendre?
Great tits cope well with warming
Dog Park
Chronic unemployment gives me the opportunity to take my dogs to the dog park every day.
Sometimes, I’m lucky enough to capture something like this:
The thing to realize is that I had enough time to:
- watch and think “this is going on a long time”
- put my phone in video capture mode
- stop laughing long enough to capture said video on phone
RoR
So cool when stuff works.
This past year, I’ve been on a mission to learn ruby & ruby on rails. i keep hitting dead ends as books screw up or tutorials don’t deal with the current version or i just get lazy and bored.
regardless, this site: http://www.buildingwebapps.com/LearningRails/ has excellent webcasts if either of you are interested in learning.
That’s all.
Spontaneous Publicity
This is the kind of spontaneous publicity I need to get ahead!
Interview with a blogger thing.
So odd.