Project Wilson Phillips - Team Wendy: Day 2

Download the Team Wendy version of the script HERE.

Bob Holt (p. 49-58) - This is my part of an email exchange I had with the person immediately following me. He found me via Twitter, seemed terribly confused by the script, and asked me several questions, including what the hell was going on, and what I tried to accomplish with my pages. I had gone so far as to outline every scene and make a character list trying to nail down who they were at any given point in the pages, so I was happy to share that work with him and give him a little push.

###

Hey Anthony,

Doug and Leliah: It seems like each writer wrote them differently. Sometimes good, sometimes not. Sometimes working together, sometimes working against each other. (For example, it seems they're working together, but then one writer wrote that Doug was protecting Trenton, so...)

Motive of the Vegan machine: Unknown. There was a mention of it becoming self-aware. There was really nothing else in there to suggest what its end goal might be.

So what I did (or tried to do):

1) Vegan needed a goal. I briefly mentioned world domination, robot overlords or what have you. It's general enough to build on, or just to leave abstract if you don't want to deal with it.

2) I didn't like the whole Vegan concept, so I decided to shut Vegan down. Also, I figured it would be a good Act II climax to shut it down for good. Maybe. Whether or not shutting it down succeeded or only made it angry is up to you. Basically, I wanted to give my push to the story without ruining everybody's fun if they wanted to keep it in.

3) Doug and Leliah. This was actually the craziest part - they were completely unmotivated, or maybe more to the point, randomly motivated. So I built in that part of Vegan's master plan were all of these doppelgangers to go around and do its bidding. Also, it made mistakes in replicating them - really just a way of explaining away
the character inconsistencies that plague the whole script. Do with it what you will.

4) Jackson. He was in desperate need of motivation and making his own destiny. I even have him say at one point that he needs to take action because stuff keeps happening TO him. Of course, then I make Cohen the main actor at the climax, so... Oops.

[Bitter Note: I didn't discover Bob and Anthony's collaboration until last week when they sent me their testimonials. To be honest, I would have discouraged this communication had I known about it at the time. I had taken some pains to ensure that no one had anyone else's email address, but didn't think anyone would use the names on the title page to track down the previous writers. I'll make the rules more explicit next time if you guys think this skirts the spirit of the experiment.]

Anthony Filangri (p. 58-69): Well when I first read the script, I was at a total loss. I had so much stuff going on with school, I really wanted to drop out. But karma is a bitch and I didn't want that on my conscience. So what I did instead was contact the writer who did his pages before me to see what the hell he made of the story. He wasn't really sure himself, but he explained it to me the best he could and what he planned to do with 10 pages which was -- try to get things into gear and shut the Vegan down.

So the vegan was shut down... but the third act was just starting. In the 10 pages before mine, it is said that the vegan had developed a brain of his own basically. Why not take it literal, and have a real life vegan -- a robot spawned out from the vegan before it was shut down. There were still secrets afloat, so the robot started killing people to get to them. By the end of my 10 pages, I set up a huge action sequence that hopefully the writer after me took advantage of. It was also up to the writer/s after me to come up with a twist in which I had no idea what it could be. Good luck to them!

All in all, it was a cheesy mess but I still had fun with it.

Delta Kirby (p. 69-79) Being the second-to-last writer for Team Wendy I knew I had to do three things: resolve certain aspects of the plot; begin a sequence of climactic events for the last writer to finish, while also giving him/her enough space to tie up the script and give it an acceptable ending; and reveal the identity of the shadowy figure.

I decided to make Jackson the Shadowy Figure because pretty much all of the living characters (six, not counting Jackson) were accounted for, except for an ancient journalist, and I didn't think an old man fighting the foul mouthed hero would be that exciting to watch. Funny, yes, but not exciting. It would also reveal that Jackson himself was a clone, and I believed that threw up a lot of opportunities for the person after me to use. Maybe Jackson joins AJ, maybe he's already lost and the whole world is clones, maybe he has to sacrifice himself to reset the world, I don't know.

I then wrote ten pages in which all but a couple of characters die, several things explode for no reason, and a group of evil clone office workers are destroyed by the corpse of an intern. Why? Because it felt appropriate for what I read as a self-aware sci-fi action thriller. Why set the last scene on Neptune? Again, because it felt like a direction the script would take.

Ben Ritter (p. 80-90): When I inherited the script, I had to read it three times. The second time through, I took notes to help me keep the different characters straight (with the cloning and the robots, I was pretty confused). I eventually ended up with the characters’ names in one column, their descriptions in a second column, and the word “dead” in a third column for all but two characters. It was inevitable, therefore, that my pages would constitute a showdown between the two living characters, Jackson and AJ.

Since it had been established that any character could be cloned and resurrected at will, the stakes seemed too low for a physical fight, so I thought that a battle of the wits (and some sort of moral decision) would be potentially more interesting. I also decided to flesh out the character of AJ a little more. We already knew that he was the richest man in America, a sci-fi fan, and considered himself to be something of a comedian. To this I added (I hope) a degree of vanity and loneliness (the previous author had decided that AJ lived in a palace on Neptune, so I thought these were attributes he would likely have). Throwing a costume party pretty much for his own benefit seemed nicely in-character, and I thought of the idea of him dressing as Emperor Palpatine pretty early (based on the electricity-throwing scene the previous author had written).
I had never gotten a really good feel for Jackson’s character throughout the script, and I feel that my characterization of him fell flat as a result. I tried to get some leverage out of his relationship with Candy, which previous authors had alternately developed and dismissed, but to be honest, in my pages, he’s mostly a straight man for AJ’s antics. Subsequent rewrites would hopefully amp up the relationship between Jackson and Candy a little in earlier scenes and make Jackson’s choice seem more natural.

I also regret that I couldn’t think of a way to tie in the very first scene with the woman identified as “Viper” (who may or may not be the same person as Leliah) torturing a young man in a dark room. (The “Vegans” teleportation system is also, confusingly, sometimes called “Viper,” but I think this was a typo by one of the earlier authors.)

I thought this project was an interesting experiment, and I’m glad to have been a part of it, but I don’t think the resulting script is very good. The biggest problem, I think, is that all of the authors (including myself) wanted to add something substantive to the script, so about every 10 pages, a character was killed, a character was revealed to have not been killed, a character was revealed to be a clone or a robot, a character traveled to Neptune, a character traveled through time, etc. At best, I think there is a certain campy charm to a script spiraling so wildly out of control, but this came at the expense of things like character development and coherence.

I think one key difference between this script experiment and improv (especially long-form) is that very few improv games would have someone exit the scene completely and hand the creative reins over to the next player, so (even with the “yes, and” principle in place) crazier impulses could, to some extent, be kept in check by the other players onstage. It’s also unlikely that anyone but a beginner would do something as drastic as pulling out a gun and shooting another character for shock value unless this action arose naturally from the scene. If you were to repeat this experiment, it might be interesting to have each writer write one character throughout or do something else that would allow earlier writers to have continued input through the later pages (maybe submit notes every 10 pages that the next author could read but wouldn’t be required to follow).

Project Wilson Phillips - Team Wendy: Day 1

We're on the home stretch of the Collaborative Writing Project scripts as we hit Day One of the final team.

Download the Team Wendy version of the script HERE.

Joe Kavanagh (p. 11-20): As was said in the introduction email to us "this thing is laced with traps." I wanted to see if I could knock away as many of them as possible so team members following behind could take the story to more interesting places. The chance to take the story to a place where none of the other stories would go also made it more interesting for me (and, I hope, my team members following behind). It's also quite hard writing the second ten pages of a story with no outline and hoping for it to make sense later. I thought about where I would take the story to its end before writing but I only control my ten pages. It was a great writing exercise that I would happily take part in
again.

Dustin Rush (p. 21-30): The main thing that drew me to this challenge was the idea of limitations. I wanted to see what would happen to my writing when I was given a few pieces of the story. The toughest part for me was figuring out what to do with all the characters and information that had been created. Some I just flat out ignored, others I had to decide their significance.

I needed to know who the protagonist was and what he was going after. So I tried to establish that. I thought the story had a lot of fun foundational work already built in. It felt like my job was to shape the thrust of the story and round out some of the main characters.

In some ways I think it was more difficult than writing your own story, because I couldn't go back and erase anything. But I never would have come up with V.E.G.A.N.S. so it was definitely fun to work off of someone else's ideas.

Amy Baack (p. 31-41): I was in charge of writing fourth, which meant I got the script after 30 pages had been written. At this point in a script, the story should be fairly well established: the protagonist, his goals, and his obstacles should be fairly clear. My goal was thus to focus on moving the plot along. I found that the script wasn't exactly clear yet, so I did my best to try to clarify the protagonist and antagonist and their competing objectives. I then tried to pick up the pace and have some fun with the story.

Patrick O’Riley (p. 41-49) When I first received the 42 page pdf, I found myself quite overwhelmed. There were around 5 main characters that seemed to demand equal attention within an ever-expanding conspiracy. My first decision was that at least one of these people would complete an arc and die. According to the page count, it seemed my pages would include the stories midpoint, meaning it was my duty to stop adding dots and start connecting them.

Firstly, I wanted to draw up clear allegiances. With his introduction, Doug had mentioned making the reporter gaff of "telling the truth about people in power" so it was clear his character was meant for a high moral standing. It then became my job to explain why Doug would claim to be defending AJ Trenton and shoot Murphy near where my pages began. Since the shooting happened off-camera, I decided that it would be Murphy, not Doug who survived the shootout. Doug's story began with protecting his partner, and having essentially broken it off with Editor Keller, he was able to commit fully to Leliah. To protect her from the police he believed to be crooked, Doug was claiming to be on their side to keep them at bay. Dying on her behalf provided closure to Doug's arc.

My intention was to break the major cast into three teams: The Good Cops (Murphy, Mack, and Cohen), The Reporters Who Bend the Rules to Bring Evil To Light (Leliah, Joshua, Doug, And Keller), and The Bad Guys (Candy, Trenton, The Chief, and Leliah's Father). I tried to make these teams clear by putting each team all in a room together of the course of my pages. Whether or not these teams remained in tact beyond my pages remains to be seen but all-in-all I found this to be a fun worthwhile experiment and I look forward to similar exercises in the future!

Project Wilson Phillips - Team Chynna: Day 2

Download the Team Chynna version of the script here

Max Bowen (p. 62-71): My assignment was pages 61-70. As I read the first 60 I noticed a couple of things bumped me logically, and I had some story concerns given that we were heading into the homestretch.

1) There was a passage where a couple of journos were suddenly pulling "service revolvers." It seemed like the writer got confused about which characters he/she was working with, and nobody carries a revolver anymore.

2) There were a shitload of characters and it was difficult to keep them straight, especially when there were shifting loyalties and undercover types. There were also FBI and LAPD, which was muddying the water for me.

3) When the police station blew Trenton and the Russian were allegedly in there and Jackson was walking in to interrogate them when the building blew. This seemed like a bit of logic that the previous writer missed.

4) There were allusions to a bombing plan, but no one had spelled it out, and we were about to be 70 pages in.

5) The homeless guy had been dropped.

The first thing I did was copy the entire script and paste it into a text file. Then I trimmed out all the dialogue and synopsized each scene to give me an outline of the story to date. Because there were so many characters, I listed the major players to help me keep them straight.

[Note: he included these, but I’m not reprinting them due to space constraints – Bitter]

As I thought about the issues the main goal I set for myself in outlining my 10 pages was to set Trenton's plan in stone. So I decided that he was going really big with this and was going to blackmail the entire world. Big stakes. Big box office. right?

I also wanted to prune back the dramatis personae and make sure that the three different teams were now clearly defined (FBI/cops, Trenton/badguys, and journos). Since this was going to be a world wide plot I figured that the FBI would be a better counterpoint to an international terrorist, so I decided on a reveal that the intern and Agent Jude were actually working for the feds, sort of, since Jude was actually with Trenton and I decided to trim Viper. I also wanted to get out some pipe that explained how Trenton wasn't killed in the police station blast in case anyone else was wondering besides me. There was also the Russian to consider. His character had been dropped, so he had the pleasure of dying in the explosion. I also wanted to use the ringing cell phone as the reveal, because that seemed to be what the previous writer was aiming for, and it's always a fun device (possibly overused, but fun). I realized that my best shot at getting the homeless guy back in was after Jude whacked Jackson, and I wanted something dramatic for her so why not call in a chopper to pick her up after she'd gotten far enough away from Jackson.

I added the following four scene outline to the previous outline:

[Note: not reprinting this either – Bitter again]

Then I scripted it, did a quick polish and emailed it back to Bitter.

Nicole Hill (p. 72-87): When I first read the script, I saw a lot of intrigue, and action. I usually write more character-based relationship heavy scripts, so, I wanted to use my pages, not only to sort of tie up some loose ends, but to bring the motivations of the characters to light.

I wanted to bring reason behind the madness and slow it down a tad bit to enter some back story. Yes, there's a lot of killing and explosions, and double-crossing, but why? I also wanted to bring some closure to some of the early beats, like the dead guy in the trunk. I also wanted to show that Agent Jude had a method behind her madness. Yes, she screwed around, but, all the sex was really just to get to her end goal of paying homage to her father's legacy. I also wanted to create a situation where you had some sympathy for Agent Jude. She did lose her father, and her brother is crazy. I wanted Rogers to feel this sympathy also, and ultimately, that's why he allows himself to land in bed with her. Since we were heading towards the finish line, also wanted the reporter, Doug to start to be suspicious of Jude. She's always around when there's trouble, so, there must be a reason.

[Note: I gave the final writers some leeway in the length of their final pages. I let them know if they needed more than ten pages to wrap things up that was fine. I didn't expect that Philip would go above and beyond and produce 24 pages of writing!]

Philip Prince (p. 88-112): Being as I was the last 10 pages of the screenplay, one of my key issues to combat would be somehow putting my personal twist in, how others had done it before me. And believe me, I tried. I wrote the way I wanted the story to go, while still taking into account a beat sheet mentality.

Basically speaking, I had to wrap the story up, and couldn't go wasting pages forever. Unfortunately, while I did successfully add in the kind of story I wanted to tell, I actually did a disservice to the work that was done before me. It wasn't that I refuted the plot points that were brought up before me. But in some cases I out and out ignored them to do the ending I wanted to do. And not only was that a disservice to the writers, but it was a disservice to the characters. They had been grown into three dimensional people over the course of 87 pages, who was I to make decisions for them because I had wanted them to be somewhat different than what others interpreted them as.

So, I went back to page 1. Not page 1 of my part but page 1 of the entire script. I sat with a pad in hand and marked every character tick I saw in each character to reveal more about their inner thoughts, actions, desires and emotions. I also had to look for themes that resonate with every character and what happened to them over the course of the story. Whether it was from their action, their inaction, or the actions of other, and what did that mean when it came to the theme for the story.

The last thing that I wanted to make sure to include, as I believe it is in all proper endings, were callbacks. One of my favorite screenplays ever written is "Back to the Future". It is a callback bible for how to include them in your screenplay. It also also makes the movie more watchable as you notice the tiny things about the plot that later come back in funny or dramatic ways(see: Twin Pines Mall changed to One Pine Mall). So I sat back, read, and found what callbacks I could use to wrap up the story in a neat bow. Or as neat a bow as I could wrap it.

With all that together, I wrote down a scene-by-scene breakdown of where the groups are when I received my portion, who was with each group of characters, why where they there, and what were they ultimately hoping to accomplish in terms of plot and inner resolution. And what you will read is the culmination of that. There are some things that I might have missed to hit on, and some of you may not like the theme I ended the story on. But these are the things that stuck with me as the essence of the characters and story every subsequent read I had, and I did read over it alot.

So enjoy, and I think this was a great experiment and hopefully can get annually done. Although, next time someone else can deal with the stress of not making a sucky ending with such great writing before you. LOL. Enjoy!

Project Wilson Phillips - Team Chynna: Day 1

If you want to read my explanation of the first ten pages, go HERE.

Download the Team Chynna draft of the script HERE

Brad Bauner (p. 11-21): My main goal was to not screw up the script for my team. I think when everyone has 10 pages, it's easy to want to do something big and splashy to make yours stand out, but, at least in the first position, that could be really detrimental to the group. I concentrated on steering the tone of the script to a mystery with some humor and on fleshing out the characters and their relationships. I wanted to answer some questions that were left in the first 10 pages and leave some different unanswered questions so those writing after me would have plot points to play with. Overall, I was happy with the character, relationship and plot development in my 10. And hopefully, I didn't screw it up.

Evan Shaw (p. 22-31): I felt fairly fortunate to be third in line for the script. TBSR mentioned that he thought he had the easiest job since he was starting with blank slate, but I felt that by having the characters and situations established, my only real job was to push the story forward in an interesting way. I was getting “bad guy” vibes (yes, that’s the technical term) from Chief O’Banion based on the previous pages. So, I wanted to solidify his place as a possible antagonist by having his press conference relay purposefully inaccurate information.

I also liked the contrasting personalities of Doug Taylor and Jackson Mack, so I wanted to create as much conflict between the two. There was some underlying sexual tension between both Taylor and Editor Keller and Mack and Editor Keller. So, I figured emasculating Taylor in front of Keller would give him the motivation to go balls out in an attempt to out-perform Mack. I really wanted to do something with the tattoo that was setup in the previous pages, so I figured a good opportunity for future twists and back-stabbings would be to give Katie the same tattoo. Is she out for vengeance? Is it a coincidence? I have no clue, but I was hoping it would be something the next writers would be able to work with.

I also wanted to make Katie the female version of Jackson Mack. It’s still unclear if she’s a good gal or a bad gal, but one thing is for sure: She’s got more balls than most men. It didn’t really contribute to the main story (at least not yet), but I liked the mini-story idea of the homeless man’s struggle to get a drink. It also helped tell more about Mack’s personality; the fact that he tossed a few bottles of liquor to the homeless guy instead of money -- He knows something about pain. The very first idea that came to me was that I wanted that body to go missing at the end of my pages. I thought it would create something tangible for the characters to look for, with the idea being that if you can find the body, you can find the person who’s really behind the crime (whatever that may be).

Rosie Claverton (p. 31-39): When I first saw the script so far, I was a bit stumped. It was outside my usual comfort zone and very American in style. I also wanted to explore the women in the story, who seemed competent but hadn't done much beyond sexing things up.

I wasn't sure if we'd really finished Act One off and there were so many characters to get my head round. Therefore, I decided to explode the police station and really shake things up as an Act One ender, which conveniently disappeared/incapacitated a fair few characters and created some angst.

Then, my writing buddy Laurence suggested that forcing two very different characters to work together might be a good way forward. Doug and The Intern were already heading to the mansion, so I put Viper and Katie there too. This could serve as a B story, I thought, and maybe reveal a bit more of their agendas. I tried to make sense of Viper and Katie's actions before this point and put my reasoning in Doug's mouth.

As an aside, I was convinced that the Homeless Person was Matthew Kidwell undercover, but I couldn't find a way to work that into my section.

Carlos M. Hernandez (p. 39-50): After reading the first 40 pages, I really wanted to bring the story back to the first scenes. The previous writers helped put the characters in different places and plugged in back story where necessary. Now, as we headed into the midpoint of the story, I wanted to narrow the focus on character motivation and push it forward.

Doug Taylor felt like the true protagonist of the story. It was his partner that was missing and he had the greatest motivation to get involved deeper because of that. He also came off as the guy at the lowest point with potential to grow.

The villains, on the other hand, while evil and willing to kill for any reason, did not grasp me as people with motivation to do evil. So, I wanted to establish the true antagonist and it made sense to me that defeating him would net Kidwell. I simply chose Trenton because he had been left alone for the most part and seemed to me the mirror of Taylor: Men longing for respect. I left subtle hints that Trenton could be motivated by wanting to be more than a geek, but left it vague enough for the future writers to take it whichever direction they wanted.

The chase scene had two major purposes: demonstrate the seriousness of their situation and to further establish Doug's propensity to do whatever it takes to find Kidwell. He fires a single bullet, makes one pull of the trigger, but I hoped it would show that Doug wasn't going to be this pushed-around journalist any longer. He had now done something he wouldn't have done a day ago and (because I like breaking parallels) something that Trenton had never been able to do.

Eric John Anderson (p. 51-61): I wasn't sure what to send you in regards to my pages, so I'll just tell you my experience:

For the most part, I was confused by the writing that I had received to that point. There were so many different plotlines and character arcs going that I couldn't figure out what to do next. Since I was in the middle of the screenplay, I had the opportunity to raise the stakes of the story with a twist, but the characters should have been on their way to their end goals and most of them weren't.

To make everything clearer, I decided to write a short outline for every scene. I also created a quick bio of each character thus far. The characters that I liked the least and that I thought were less important I decided to kill off or shun them from the script. I also wanted to clearly define the relationships thus-far, since it had not quite been expressed. And finally, I wanted to have a clearly defined goal for the characters.

Mostly I just wanted to blow it all up and start fresh without completely throwing off the main storyline thus far. We'll see if it was successful or not.

Project Wilson Phillips - Team Carnie: Day 2

Wrapping up our look at the first group to finish the Collaborative Writing Project dubbed "Project Wilson Phillips," here are the thoughts of the remaining members of Team Carnie reflecting on what they attempted to do with their pages.

Download the Team Carnie draft of the script.

Elena Ostroumova (p. 39-51): I was kind off baffled by the load of information and plots, and twists, and cliffhangers that were left for me after the 30 or so pages, that were written before me. There were the characters, the protags and the villains, and the poor guy, who gets (or doesn't get)
shot in the first scene, and the journalists, and the Russians (the latter two I was most surprised to see, because I'm a Russian journalist).

The story was twisted and action packed as much as it could be possibly done in the first 38 pages. I was going "Whoa!" on every page of the first reading. That was a good thing. I've clearly had the beginning of Act Two to write, so basically my idea was to slow down a bit, to get to know the characters a bit more, to get the insight into the reasons behind their actions, to give them names or tell something new about them, to give the next writers some leverage, so they could continue right on with the action. My ten pages were mostly talking, before the "doing" part, which I hoped would follow. I really wanted to explore the story about Editor Keller and how she was involved with this whole micro-chipping issue, hence the story of her mother and the secret files she passed on to her daughter before her disappearance.

Then I had the unsolved mystery of the note Doug found in the bar and how it lead him to the place where Nina was. And I also really wanted to play around the idea of Nina actually pretending to be VIPER on the island, not actually being zombied into it. So that's how the whole
"antidote" idea came to mind. I also really wanted to keep Jurgens in the story, who turned out to be Keller's long-time ally and friend.

And the most important thing, I really wanted to give some thought to the title - "Project Wilson Phillips". Who the hell is Wilson Phillips? And I sort of liked that intern guy character, and he was the right age, so I thought I'd through in a bit of mystery with the "Phi" clue. So they have to find the antidote, but they are going to go the long way, because he's actually right under their noses.

I also wanted to tell a bit more about A.J., why he turned out the way he did, so that's how I came about his childhood trauma, and long-time vendetta against his father, for not saving his mother, and marrying for a second time. The thing I didn't quite have place to really think
about, is what exactly was Vitaly's business in all this. He was obviously connected to A.J.'s research projects in Russia, and he was delivering the suspected "antidotes" to A.J. But I really wanted to know more, so I hope to find that out from what was written after me.

In the end of my ten pages I've formed an unlikely team of Doug Taylor - Nina Kidwell/Mack - Jackson Mack, with backup from Andy Keller and Jurges Hickey, with a hind that Jacksons partner Murphy could also join into the fun later on in the story.

Mr A (p. 51-60). I was happy to be apart of this experiment, most importantly, as in an exercise. I had intended to, on one hand, keep my segment interesting, and on the other, keep the flow and story intact. It was a concern of mine to continue what was already laid out, move it forward, but contribute to the overall story in my own way. I hoped to keep each aspect of the story intact in the way the previous contributors might appreciate.

I wanted to continue forward as the story had been unfolding, but also add a bit of interesting and revealing information as I fell midway through the story. It took some time, but I hope that the end result is as I intended.

Frank Livorsi (p. 61-70): Things that I tried to do with pages 61-70.

The scenario I was left with:

I was left with our group of commandos landing on an Island in the Pacific Ocean after Hi-jacking a helicopter. One other thing to deal with was the appearance of the “Behemoth” on the Island.

I tried to make it difficult for Nina, Jackson, and Doug. The Dogs, the Patrol boats, the chase. I wanted them worse off then when they got there. That’s why the helicopter was destroyed, stranding them there, with no means of escape. (All is lost.)

At this point it’s really kind of hard to determine who the protagonist is. Nina/Viper might be, but she has been killing off people throughout the script. Do we really like her? Jackson Mack, no. Doug, maybe.

The antagonist is easy, that’s AJ. So going off the earlier information that the newspaper editor, Andi Keller, is the half sister of AJ, I tried to give my team mates the option of making her the protagonist. Andi challenges AJ at page 70. She tells him she knows about , “The Chip.”

I also tried to give a possible explanation for “PHI,” making the intern, Phillips, the possible connection. I tried to tie in the “Fantasy Girls,” from the beginning of the script, using Vitaly to bring them there on a boat. The boat was a way to get Phillips on the Island, and an attempt to give them ( our commandos) a means of escape, if the writing team chose that route.

The Behemoth capturing Phillips, the intern, was a way of keeping both of them active in the script. Phillips handing AJ the phone was a way to introduce Andi Keller as the protagonist and next challenge.

Katy Quigley (p. 71-80): With my pages I tried to sort out a couple of the loose ends that were hanging around and sort out some of the confusion with regards to the relationships between some of the characters. I spent a fair while making notes on what had come before and had a couple of diagrams detailing what had been said by what characters and their relationships, this definitely came in handy when the plot began to get quite confusing. Having written scripts at college before, I thought it might be a fun way to get back in to the process, it was short and other people were relying on you to get it done, which definitely spurred me on.

Hank Pena (p. 80-90): I'll admit that I wrote my pages after a marathon of "N.C.I.S." and "Warehouse 13" the characters in those shows influenced this.

I wanted my pages to show a separation in the character's personalities, be (hopefully) a bit witty, and offer a good explanation to tie what I'd read together.

I searched the internet for examples of PHI and followed all that I read to the conclusions I wrote out. I chose not to write an escape scene and more action because I wanted to leave the final writer with an opportunity to write some cool action ending. Which, as an action writer, pained me. If I didn't take my pages up writing explanation and summation, the movie would have had to end like a Scooby-Doo episode...with everyone explaining what just occurred.

Patrick (p.90-99): I spent a day or so thinking, and had some ideas, but those ideas would take more than 10 pages. I'm a fan of brevity in film, so I decided to use my inability to provide an all inclusive, hit all the bases ending as my ending.

Also, while reading the script, I noticed as it went on, the tone shifted to a more comedic thing, so I figured I'd just end it on comedy.

It was an interesting experience, cuz, I was working two 10 hour a day jobs at the time. I had thought that would effect my writing, but, it didn't. It just gave me more time to think about writing, and play out my ending in my head, a million different ways before I got a chance to sit down and do any actual writing.

Good times.

Project Wilson Phillips - Team Carnie: Day 1

We're continuing our look at the results of the Collaborative Writing Project, with the first comments from the writers who picked up where I left off.

The Team Carnie version of the screenplay is available here.


Meg (p. 11-20): I really enjoyed the challenge in Operation Wilson Phillips (Team Carnie). Being in first (or is it technically second?) position allowed for some major freedom in terms of the direction I could take. I wanted to amp up the cheese factor and go for almost a cartoonized version of action characters. I hoped to begin to weave the different characters and scenes to one interlocking story. I wanted to, hopefully, add layers to the relationships between the characters and provide some fun reveals. My process is different on everything that I write. For this one, I brainstormed a lot, made a ton of notes on the pages Bitter provided, and then just tried to have fun with action and dialogue. I’m kicking myself now for some glaring typos. But I can’t wait to see how the story ended. Or how the other teams took the story.

Stephen (21-29): When I got the e-mail from the Bitter Script Reader on Sunday night, I decided not to look at the pages until I printed them out to read at the coffee shop where I do all my writing. I'm not a fan of reading scripts in PDF form on my monitor. I think it lowers the amount of attention you dedicate to reading. Printing off the script, I did notice that I would be writing pages 20-30. My first thought, "Great! I get to end Act I." Not a bad place to be. You get to decide the direction the rest of the script goes and ask the main question of the film. Sounded like a ton of fun.

Reading the pages, though, made me realize there was a lot more I'd have to do. There seemed to be a major shift at page 9, where I assume the 2nd writer took over, and I realized there were two issued I'd have to address. 1) Right at page 9, an entirely new protagonist appeared: Jackson Mack. Doug Taylor, who seemed to be the main character up to this point, only showed up for one scene in the second ten pages. 2) Viper became Nina, Doug's missing partner from the newspaper and Jackson's sister, but I couldn't get over the fact that in the opening scene, she killed a guy for no apparent reason.

When I sat down to write, my goals were to bring Doug back into the story without completely dismissing Jackson, explain the contradiction in Viper/Nina's actions, and hit a dramatic enough point that works as an act break. I came up with several possibilities, but my main idea ended up way to complicated to get across in just ten pages. In the end, I decided that my primary goal should be to give the next writer room to take the script where he/she wanted. I did my best to eliminate or explain the issues I saw, so whoever took over from me would have an open field to run and play. I think I accomplished that, though I'd be interested to see if that next writer agreed.

CTScanHollywood (p. 30-38): With my pages, I wanted to slow the pace just a tad because there was so much action at the beginning. I wanted to show the relationship between the guys more, and also to catch the reader up a bit on what was going on- who's who, what the hell just happened etc..

Tomorrow we'll hear from the rest of the writers, and please feel free to leave your comments about the screenplay in any of these threads!

Project Wilson Phillips - The First Ten Pages

Today I want to go scene-by-scene with my ten pages from Project Wilson Phillips in an effort to explain how I attempted to give the different groups a wide latitude to go in different directions.

Writing these ten pages proved harder than I expected because they still had to feel like the coherent beginning to a story. As any reader will tell you, the first ten pages of the script are the most important pages. In theory, those pages will lay out the tone and set up the major characters in such a way that a reader will have a sense of the kind of story they’re in for, even if the inciting incident hasn’t yet happened. Everything in these ten pages should be setting up something that’s paid off later.

And conversely, major points later in the film need to be set-up early on. As an example, in Back to the Future, it’s not until the second half hour that we find out that the one thing capable of generating enough power to send the time machine back to 1985 is a bolt of lightning. That means that Marty and Doc need to know where and when a bolt of lightning will strike. Fortunately, Marty happened to get some convenient exposition in the first ten pages about an historic lighting storm that will strike Hill Valley one week from now.

Unfortunately, I don’t know what’s coming on p. 40 of any of the Project Wilson Phillips scripts, so I have to create a set-up that I have no way of knowing how it will payoff.

p. 1-2: This scene is specifically designed to hint at some kind of larger revelation without telling anything at all. By the end of it, all we really know for certain is that Young Man has some very important information that Viper wants. In fact, it’s important enough to beat him and torture him over it. Despite Viper’s threatening nature, I tried to write the dialogue in a way that wouldn’t preclude a later writer from deciding that Young Man was a minion of the bad guys, and that Viper was a good guy of sorts going to extreme lengths to uncover and expose the truth.

I was very careful not to give either character a “real” name because I wanted the door to be open for later writers to reveal that, along with their agenda. Also, I deliberately didn’t show if Viper actually killed the Young Man.

p. 2-3: I liked the idea of using a homeless man to set the scene. It wasn’t until the car chase was barreling down on him that I remembered that I hate writing car chase scenes. Besides, I figured that to do that chase justice would be to burn most of my ten pages on mindless action. With that, it hit me that it might be more fun to see the chase from the Homeless Man’s POV.

The line “Wasn’t like this before the Vegans got here,” was another deliberate ambiguity. You could take it as the ramblings of a crazy man, sure. I also figured on at least two interpretations of that line. He could mean “Vee-Gans,” as in “people whose diets cause a lot of complications at cookouts,” or “Vay-Gans,” as in “aliens from another star system called “Vega.”

p. 3-4: Newspaper city room. This is pretty much just me doing some transitional stuff while I introduce Doug. I figured a reporter was a natural main character in a story about conspiracies. There’s also a little Daily Planet flavor here, and the name “Jurgens” is a reference to “Dan Jurgens,” one of my favorite Superman artists.

p. 4-6 : I went out of my way to make Andi a contrast to the screaming editors-in-chief we’ve seen in Superman and Spider-Man. Giving her a quiet energy seemed more interesting. The “sunspot activity” was another throwaway I hoped people would pick up on, and I did my best not to make the exposition about Taylor’s position in the doghouse too on-the-nose.

When they discuss Taylor’s partner Kidwell, I did my best to make it natural that they didn’t use that character’s first name or refer to his or her gender. I really wanted to leave that door open, and my thought was that either Viper or Young Man from the early scene could be revealed as Kidwell by later writers.

p. 6- 9: The week I wrote these pages, I’d read at least three human trafficking scripts in the previous two weeks and all of them had the Russians as bad guys. I figured if I set a particular plot up to “zig,” the next writers would be compelled to “zag,” so I wanted to see what they’d do with a semi-cliched set-up. I can’t count how many times I’ve read a scene where Russian brothel owners show off their wares to some man in power.

I couldn’t resist giving a twist to the “big client.” A.J. Trenton proved to be a fun character to write. Tell me that the image of Bill Gates or Steve Jobs in a brothel doesn’t make you giggle a little. Obviously I amped up the nerd qualities he had and I tried my damndest to get in some exposition about his character without resorting to someone directly comparing him to Gates or Jobs just so the audience would get the shorthand. (Granted, the Simpsons joke and his reference to having a smartphone a year ahead of the rest of the market ain’t exactly subtle either, but I hope they seemed organic.)

Naturally, once I had an uber-geek as the customer, it only made sense to dress the prostitutes as sci-fi sex-symbols. Vitaly’s line about not having a Princess Leia, followed by A.J. pointing out one is a pretty clear indication that girl isn’t supposed to be there. I figured I could set her up to be revealed as Kidwell too, working undercover.

Also, though this really is something that you shouldn’t do, I made sure not to specify if this “Leia” was wearing the slave girl outfit and braided hair from Return of the Jedi, or the white dress and bun hairdo of A New Hope. I wanted to leave that open to the interpretation of the latter writers. Obviously, in a “real” script, the character’s appearance should be clear to the reader as soon as they show up on-screen.

p. 9-10: I’ve always wanted to write a car chase that ended up smashing into another illegal deal, and use that to kick start the plot. I also like the image of the Russian bad guys taking out a guy we presume the police consider a big enough deal to chase all over the city.

This seemed like an appropriately over-the-top entrance for Jackson Mack. I was trying to ride the line when it came to tone. I wanted it to be just big enough so some groups could go broad with their story, yet grounded enough so if the next writer wanted to make it gritty, the tonal shift wouldn’t be completely inexplicable.

Download the Team Carnie draft of the script.

Tomorrow: Let’s hear how the first half of Team Carnie approached their pages.

Results of the Collaborative Writing Project aka "Project Wilson Phillips"

It started a few months ago. I had three teams of writers ready to participate in our round-robin style writing exercise. The rules were fairly simple. I’d kick things off with ten script pages, then throw those pages to the next person in the rotation of each team. When that person was done, they were to send me their pages and I would add them to the screenplay and pass that work forward to the next person.

As there were three teams, I tried to think of an appropriate code name for this little project, and immediately started thinking of various trios: Larry, Moe and Curly? Too obvious? Huey, Dewy and Louie? Better, but still not esoteric enough.

Wilson Phillips? Perfect. In the trio of second generation singers sired by members of The Beach Boys and the Mamas and the Papas, I’d found my team names: Carnie, Wendy and Chynna. Though many immediately identify them with their hit: “Hold On,” I tend to favor “Impulsive,” which I would say is one of the greatest forgotten songs of the early 90s. In fact, I like it so much that ages ago I tried to shoehorn it into my second script before I was smart enough to realize I shouldn’t do that.



Ah, the Nineties...

But back to the project. The rules were pretty basic. Each writer was supposed to add 10 pages. This ended up being a bit of a loose guideline. Some fell just short, while others ended up going slightly over. One or two even ran into trouble when the spacing in their program resulted in their submission being short when reformatted to match the others. Overall, everything more or less went to plan.

Each writer had a deadline of one week. Again, this mostly worked though one team in particular seemed cursed by delays brought on by illness and fickle spam folders. Everyone got a list of instructions, some of which are reprinted below:

“Yes, and?” style of improv rules is encouraged. A writer may not deny or unfairly undo details established by other writers in previous pages. However, shocking twists are encouraged so long as they don’t violate the spirit of this rule. In other words, it’s totally fair to reveal that a seemingly-paralyzed character has actually been faking all along (so long as the character’s paralysis isn’t reinforced in a scene where he’s alone and would have no reason to lie), but one cannot decide on p. 30 that the action really is taking place in Denver when early scenes have been written with it set in New York.

While I’m not going to tell you what you can’t do, try not to close any doors without opening some new ones. (In other words, don’t kill off all the characters and destroy the city in a nuclear bomb blast unless you’ve laid the groundwork for the story to continue somehow.)

I also warned them:

These first ten pages are not the greatest thing I’ve ever written. It’s hard to write the opening to a story without any idea where it’s going, and it’s just as hard to write a good opening that doesn’t box the story in too tightly in one direction. After all, since we have three teams, I wanted enough material established in the beginning so that we could end up with very disparate scripts.

So here’s a fair warning: these first few pages are laced with traps. You’re going to see things in there that you may have heard me rail against in the blog – or at least the suggestions of those things. It’s not my intention to have all of these turn out as compilations of the worst screenwriting clichés ala BALLS OUT, though. If that’s where the process takes us, so be it. But don’t forget that it’s totally fair to subvert those clichés and spin things into a completely original direction. My “cliché” set-up could play like brilliant misdirection if it’s followed by brilliant plot twists that go in a new direction.

In theory, I had the easiest job of this whole competition. I had a blank slate as I started my ten-pages and could set up anything without having to worry about the consequences.

In theory.

Over the next week plus, we’ll be taking a look at each of the three scripts that resulted. Tomorrow I’ll explain what I was trying to accomplish in my initial ten pages, and later in the week we’ll hear from many members of the teams as they talk about their goals for their pages.

Team Carnie is up first and you can find their script here.

Special thanks to Nate Winslow for helping me set up the file hosting for the scripts this week.

Tuesday Talkback: Collaborative writing project

I got a recent request to update everyone on the Collaborative Writing Project. There aren't too many details, but I'll oblige.

Right now I have three teams going, with each person advancing the story ten pages from where it is when they get it. My original goal was only to put eight people on each team, as once you add in my original ten pages, that would put the script's length at 90 pages. However, I had so many people interested, I decided on 9-person teams, which would give us some leeway in the event anyone dropped out.

As it turned out, that was smart. One of the teams had a person drop out due to unforeseen circumstances. Unfortunately this didn't happen until their deadline, so they fell a week behind the other two teams. This same team experienced another delay when one participant's server problems resulted in a several-day delay in delivering the pages.

At the moment, one team has 50 pages completed, one team has 60 pages done and the third team has 30 pages done. I also have four alternates standing by in the event that any of the teams drop below eight members.

At this point it's been very interesting to see how my early threads have been taken in completely different directions by the subsequent writers. When the project is done, I'll write up a post going page-by-page through my contribution and explain my thinking for the plot strands I was setting up. My goal was to open a lot of doors for people as well as imply connections between seemingly unrelated threads. That ambiguity has given the writers a lot of room to play.

As we're more or less at the midpoint, it's time to start thinking about what to do with these three scripts once they're done. I need a way to make them available for download, so that any interested parties can read and contrast them.

Also, what would make the best use of these as they relate to screenwriting lessons? I thought about trying to stimulate discussion here, but it also occurs to me that it might be a good idea to see if anyone over at the GITS Club was interested in any discussion on the three VERY different scripts that are resulting from the same initial ten pages.

There's also a very wicked side of me that is considering putting one or more of these up on Triggerstreet just to see what sort of reviews we'd get.

So sound off - what do you think we should do with these scripts once they're done?

Calling all pro writers and bloggers - an update on the collaborative writing project

At present, I have 18 people ready to go for the collaborative writing project discussed in this entry. That's enough for two teams, though if I get an influx of people in the next few days, I'll expand that to three.

A couple people have written in with suggestions that they'd like to see an "all-star" team made up of screenwriting bloggers. I haven't asked any other bloggers directly, but I absolutely would welcome their contributions. I might even send some emails to my counterparts and see if there's any interest.

Perhaps this idea is too ambitious for the first go-round of this experiment, but I'd love to get a true all-star team made up of working screenwriters. I know there are a few who read this blog regularly, and if you fit that criteria we'd love to have you. If anyone has a direct line to any pro writers, please email or tweet them this blog post.

In brief, here's the idea and the rules:

- the product is a screenplay written round-robin style 10 pages at a time.

- there will be no treatment or plot breakdown. Each writer picks up where the previous one leaves off and is free to send the story in any direction they wish.

- "Yes, and..?" style of improv is suggested. In other words, a writer cannot unfairly "deny" or undo details that have been established by previous writers. Shocking twists that redefine those earlier details are, of course, encouraged.

- I will write the first ten pages. From there, each writer will have a week to produce ten pages when their turn in the rotation comes up.

- Each writer takes only one turn.

- Multiple teams may be working at the same time. The only common element is the first ten pages. Otherwise there is no creative overlap among the scripts or the writers.

- Have fun and be creative.

Pros, I recognize many of you are extremely busy. I'm hoping that you'll find this a fun and freeing exercise, and perhaps one that other writers might find educational. We've seen what writers can do when they have a plan - now let's see how they handle being written into a corner.

You can reach me at zuulthereader@gmail.com.

Tuesday Talkback: Collaborative writing project

I've been toying with a little writing experiment that would involve contributions from my readers and I'm curious to see if there's any support for this. Back in school, did any of you ever do a "round robin" writing exercise? The way it works is that one person starts writing a story, and then hands it off to the next person in their group after a predetermined limit is met (either a paragraph, a page or a chapter.) Then that person picks up and sends the story in whatever direction they like before passing it on to the next person. Collaborative

My idea is to try something like this with a screenplay. I'd write the first ten pages, doing my best to toss enough balls in the air that the following writers would have plenty of material to work with. Then, each writer after me would pick up, adding ten pages to the total and advancing the story as appropriate. There'd be no master plan, no treatment, no previously agreed-upon plot. This would work best if each writer tried their best to work within a three-act structure and be mindful of how the story usually "needs" to advance at the point they're dealing with within the three-act structure.

Aside from that, there'll also be a "non-denial" rule in place. This is common in improv. What it means is that you can't deliberately contradict something that's been put into play. In improv, if a character says, "Boy, life is great here on the moon," another character cannot say, "You're wrong, this is Alabama." Also, there will be no revisions allowed to previous pages. Each writer is bound by what has come before.

Ideally, I'd have at least eight people willing to participate, and each writer would have a week to turn in their ten pages. If I get a lot more than eight, then I might start two groups going at the same time with the initial ten pages. If so, that could lead to some interesting results, as we'd see how two groups starting with the same initial premise could end up with completely different results by the end.

If the results are interesting enough, perhaps we'll even toss the script up on a peer review site that's unaware of the screenplay's lineage. It'll be an interesting experiment in seeing if those reviewers detect any odd blips in story construction and characterization.

If you're interested in being a writer in this little game, shoot me an email at zuulthereader@gmail.com. Tell me a little bit about yourself and the movies you like too. If we have more than one group going, I might try to mix up the writer's roster a bit.