Script Doctor

The "how, when, who, what, and where" of the Women's Studies production is really coming together nicely. We've got a lot of elements in place and have started to bang out something that resembles a shooting schedule. This weekend will be the big design meeting with Art Director Stephanie Petagno to finalize some costume designs and the like. At the end of the month I'll kick off the first rehearsal with the actors, a true milestone.

To that end, I spent part of the weekend working on what will be my final revision of the Women's Studies script, the "blue" script. (Once we started production, the script went from being the fourth draft to the "white" script. Since this is a production draft, it's gotten upgraded to "blue.") There will be other minor rewrites as location needs or storyboards require changes to be made. Still, from a certain point of view this is my last chance as a writer to craft the story before I hand it off for the actors and allow them to turn my words into their words.

I like to think I'm not one of "those" writer/directors. You know, the type that has to micro-manage every line delivery because the actor "just isn't capturing the vibe I intended." To me, a script is a blueprint. The actors, camera and sound crew, and art director are like the carpenters, electricians and pipe-fitters. The director is the foreman, and in this case, the foreman just happens to also be the guy who drew up the floor plans. But the foreman doesn't tell the carpenters every detail of how to put up the walls. He lets them use their own method and is just there to make sure evrything comes together as intended.

I come from an acting background, so my attitude towards actors is to give them enough space to discover their own countries, yet give them enough guidence so they don't get lost. I want them to find aspects of the script to claim for themsleves. If they need to take the words I've written and alter them slightly to make them their own, I'm down with that.

I like working with actors. A lot of directors have troubles with actors because their main tool is emotion, and to really get down and dig deep with them requires everyone to look inside their hearts and reveal truths they might not ordinarily want to share. It takes a lot of trust between actors and a director to really make the emotional discoveries, and trust just can't be given. It has to be earned.

Writing is like that too. I have respect for anyone who writes something and puts it out there for others to see. It takes a great deal of courage to expose your inner thoughts in that way, be it a poem, a novel, or a script. What if people don't like it? Or even worse, don't get it? That's the biggest fear I have, I think; a fear that people will read or see what I've written and just look at me in that queer way that says, "I don't understand what you're trying to say?" And yet there are times when I'm in the midst of creation that I myself don't quite understand what I'm trying to say. I only know I have to say it.

Another part of me feels a bit of loss at letting the Women's Studies script go into the arms of others because I've spent the better part of the last two years with it, constantly turning it over in my head. I still will of course, though once we start shooting, I'll lose the option to change anything. Film is immortal. Once an image is captured, it's always captured. You can only have so many takes before you simply have to choose one and live with it.

The consolation to it all is that I really like this script, and can't wait to share it. As great a blueprint I think it is, I think it's going to make an even better movie. And it'll do so not because of my singular voice, but the varied tones and tambours of the cast and crew's voices, singing together in harmony.

Write of the Living Dead

Short blog this week, and probably next week as well because of travel and general "busy as hell" mode within Ningen Manga Productions right now. February will hopefully bring some cool stuff.

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I announced yesterday that I'll be penning the screenplay for the zombie sequel, Deadlands 2: The New World, to be produced later this year by WetNWildRadio Films and director Gary Ugarek. While I've known I've had the gig for awhile, Gary and I held off on any formal announcement until some things evened themselves out.

I'm honored and excited to be a part of this project since a) I respect Gary, and b) I love zombie films. Though I have to admit, I'm a little daunted by the prospect of working in this particular sub-genre. I hope what I'm doing innovates rather than imitates.

Just a quick note about back-scratching in independent film. It's integral to the success of the low-budget filmmaker. The concept is pretty simple: ""Since you helped me with my film, I'll help you with yours." Gary Ugarek was an integral part of out short film, Under the Bed, and has also been a huge supporter of our efforts on Women's Studies. When someone who has been a patron to my work comes to me and asks the same favor, it's only right I do so.

Plus, it's writing which I absolutely love. I have to admit that after fifteen months of business work, having the creative outlet has been enormously therapeutic. It's renewed my resolve and love for Women's Studies, and reminded me why I do all the hard, non artistic work: To get to the good stuff.

The original film, Deadlands: The Rising will be released by Tempe Video on April 17, 2007, and features Cindy Marie Martin and I in supporting "zombie" roles. More can be found at the Deadlands website.

Origins & Influences

This past weekend was spent conducting cast interviews for the Women's Studies "September surprise." A big thanks to Women's Studies Director of Photography, Aaron Shirley, who you'll be getting to know better in a future blog. He trounced around a hundred miles in two states and the District of Columbia helping me gather footage of the wonderful cast which the world will be meeting very soon.

During my own interview I was asked, "How did the idea for Women's Studies come about?" I gave a pretty long winded answer that kind of answered the question, but not really, at least not to my liking. There are a lot more influences, ideas, and strange twists of fate that occured than a short interview would allow. I figured the blog was as good a place as any to go into further detail.

My first brush with academic feminism was some essays from Camille Paglia's Vamps & Tramps. Paglia has a lot of things to say about gender relationships, the media, and socialization, but I sum up her Vamps & Tramps thesis as such: Madonna in her "Justify My Love" heyday was the most powerful woman in the world because of her embrace of her feminine sexuality and ability to translate it the way she wanted through the media. If you find that an over-simplification, hey, Paglia wrote a whole book on it. You can get the sticky details there. She's quite funny, and I think much of her analysis is spot on. Alarm bells may ring with hardcore feminists who find Paglia to be something of a "male sympathizer," whatever that means.

My interest in feminism is borne from an interest in psychology, specifically the emotional and psychological difference between men and women. I came to the conclusion pretty early on that because of our unique but very specific biological engineering, men and women's brains are "hardwired" differently. This isn't to imply that one is better than the other, just different. We think differently. We feel differently. We approach matters of the mind and heart differently.

Anyway, in the summer of 2000, I was living in my parent's basement after what can only be called a failed excursion to Chicago. I had lived there for a year managing a coffee shop, writing screenplays, being poor, and smoking too many god damned cigarettes. Lack of funds and a death in the family brought me back east, and I spent a good amount of time feeling depressed about being no better off than when I had left college two years before. (Am I showing my age, sonny boy?)

For some reason, a buddy of mine had given me a VHS copy of Night of the Living Dead, which I hadn't seen since I was a kid. At that same time, my eldest sister was doing clerical work for a now defunct culture magazine called Gadfly. She had given me a subscription and one of the issues contained a long, rather academic article on George A. Romero's "dead trilogy." (That's Night of the Living Dead, the original Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead for the non-horror fan.)

Suddenly, I got it into my head that I was going to "research" horror films. I'd do it simply for it's own sake and to give my slacker existence some kind of meaning. I had been a horror junkie as a kid, but in my search for "meaningful art," had abandoned the genre for the most part.

During my new "studies," I read quite a few non-fiction horror books including Danse Macabre by Stephen King and Carol J. Clover's Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. I read classic horror novels. (Couldn't get into Lovecraft, but I loved Richard Matheson's I Am Legend.) And I watched horror movies. Universal's monsters, Hammer films, I Was a Teenage Werewolf/Frankenstein/Zombie, 70's exploitation flix, slashers, big bugs, blobs, and Body Snatcher movies; I watched so many horror movies that for a four month period, I was scared of my own friggin' shadow.

Finally, I took a crack at writing a horror screenplay. Was that my intention all along? Consciously, I don't think so, but the wounds from a failed comic book project had really just healed. I think my brain knew I needed to move on somehow, and the horror overdose was the only way to make myself do it. The screenplay I wrote was about a haunted corn farm and though I may be biased, I thought it was damn scary. For awhile, I toyed with the idea of trying to shoot it, but soon realized I wasn't quite ready for that.

I sent the script off to a few friends to read, including an old college professor. He liked it and came back to me with, "Hey, I shoot a short film with some of my students every year. Do you want to write a script for me? I need something less than fifteen minutes with lots of female characters that takes place on a college campus."

During this time, I had recently watched the 1975 film version of The Stepford Wives, based off the novel by Ira Levin. In the film, Katherine Ross plays an urbanite, amateur photographer whose husband moves his whole family from New York City to the suburban "paradise" of Stepford, Connecticut. In Stepford, the lawns are perfect, the houses are huge, and the men all belong to some weird Elks club housed in a creepy mansion on top of a hill.

The women of Stepford though, they're something else entirely. They clean and cook as if every scrub is pure ecstasy. Exciting times are heading to the grocery store to meet the other wives and talk over dish detergent. Ross finds this to be a little strange to say the least, especially after she meets another recent city implant, played by Paula Prentiss, who feels the same way.

Prentiss, Ross, and another woman played by Tina "Ginger" Louise of Gilligan's Island fame, seem to be the only normal women around, at least until Ginger starts to behave as strangely as the others. Soon Prentiss becomes a mindless "Stepford Wife" as well. It's then that Ross discovers Stepford's secret: the men of the town have had their wives murdered and replaced by look-a-like robots. Ross eventually comes face to face with her own robot doppelganger whose bosom is far more amply endowed than Ross's.

The Stepford Wives mixed around with the prof's suggestion of a short script with lots of women on a college campus. I thought, "What if there was girl's school that kidnapped and murdered men, a sort of anti-Stepford?" I don't remember there being any sort of "Eureka" moment, just that the idea seemed like a good one. I sat down to write it, and instead of the fifteen page script my old professor had requested, I turned out a forty page short version of Women's Studies.

The original script had Mary (who was really what is now the character of Beth) and her EX-boyfriend Zack picked up by a group of college girls (Judith, Diane, Melissa, and Sharon) after their car breaks down, and taken to their secluded women's academy.(The school was named "The Ross-Prentiss Women's Academy" as a homage to The Stepford Wives.) Once there, the academy girls take turns having sex with Zack before realizing he's sterile and killing him. Mary realizes the women are a man-hating cult and tries to escape.

My professor couldn't use it. The subject matter was too much for a small religious college. I was glad too. Even then, I realized that the story had potential beyond the slapdash short I had written.

Later, as I revisited the script, cult ideology and social theory informed the story quite a bit. Most notable were Charles Manson's "Helter Skelter" cult, and Patty Hearst's "Stockholm Syndrome" after being kidnapped by the Symbionese Liberation Army. I also did quite a bit of reading on Al Qaeda and the methods they use in indoctrinating suicide bombers.

That's the way the Women's Studies story happened. It didn't appear suddenly as much as it evolved from a variety of different influences over a period of time. And that's the way it should be. To me, a writer's job is less about having a good idea than it is recognizing the elements from his/her own experience that combined could make a good story. I'm glad I had the wherewithal to catch this one.

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Hopefully, next Tuesday will be the first of two blogs introducing our cast members. We're still working on a few things that may delay that one more week. If that's the case, we'll have some Q&A with Women's Studies Director of Photography, Aaron Shirley.