This poor old,
neglected, abandoned blog has been as dead as the proverbial Monty Python
parrot these past few years. So why resurrect it now? Well, I’m a writer and
writers are supposed to write blogs I was told at the recent London
Screenwriters Festival. But much more than that, the Festival made me want to write, and ever since I’ve been
editing my feature film script, honing and burnishing it to make it the best it
can be. Four wow factors and a surfer in the course of 3 inspiring days brought
about this transformation.
1. First up was Pilar Alessandra and her
2 screenwriting sessions I attended. Fluent, confident, polished, every inch
the LA screenwriting professional teacher in her nifty designer dresses and
giant heels, she really knew her stuff. I’d come to LSF to immerse myself in
the craft of screenwriting and she proved to be the ultimate Hollywood swimming
pool. Her sessions on maximising impact and dynamic dialogue examined film
clips and handouts which were almost tailor-made to my needs, full of insights
on types of scene, pay-offs, character flaws, tells, sub-text etc. You can
catch up with her here: http://www.onthepage.tv/2012/#Home
But she also pulled off the well nigh impossible trick of enabling her classes of hundreds to participate in each session. In her Dynamic Dialogue session she asked us to write a monologue in 1 minute and find the perfect line within it. Here’s what I wrote:
I wish you’d stop sniffling. I know you’ve got a bad cold but it’s
distracting, it’s annoying. Don’t you have any hankies? I know this is
important, that you don’t want to miss anything, but we’re missing stuff
because of your constant sniffling. It’s making my blood boil. Gie us a break
for Christ’s sake!
For the first hour
or so of her talk this guy next to me was sniffling all the time and disturbing
my concentration, so eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and gave him it with
both barrels into the roving mike. My key line was the first sentence, but
Pilar liked ‘Don’t you have any hankies?’ And you know what? It worked. He
didn’t sniffle again for the rest of the session!
2. Next up was Chris Jones, the powerhouse and driving force behind the
Festival, who demonstrated real passion and commitment to teaching the craft of
screenwriting and encouraging us to believe in ourselves in all his sessions.
In his Live Script Edit he gave out the first draft of his Gone Fishing short and then a later draft and discussed the
differences with us. He also issued the opening pages of various scripts that
had been sent in, elicited our comments and then suggested how they could be
edited. By the time we had done this a few times we were able to spot the
weaknesses for ourselves in the ones that followed and apply this to our own
scripts.
I thought I knew
quite a lot about using social media but decided to go along to his Sunday
morning graveyard slot just in case I could pick up a few more tips. Well, there
were tips aplenty and I came away with pages of notes and a host of things to
follow up like branding, e-mail aggregators, text baiting and plug-in widgets
to sharpen up my practice. But it was his Manifesting Success session with
Jonny Newman and his closing round-up that infected me and many others with his
boundless enthusiasm and ‘can do’ mindset. By the end of the Success session
one woman had decided to have a baby, a new writers’ circle was going to be set
up in London, and lots of us had made personal commitments to think big and
write big! I don’t know what you’re on but keep taking it, Chris. chrisjonesblog.com
3. There’s no question that screenwriting legend Joe Eszterhas’s
presence at the Festival was another massive wow factor. To see him up on the
stage with Basic Instinct playing on the big screen behind him and hear him
spill the beans on how the script got written and the picture got made was a
definite highlight. There was something magical about the way the light caught
him, Chris Jones and Lucy V Hay on stage with their backs to the screen whilst
they watched and commented on the film on a laptop in front of them. Joe knew
some of the characters and their dark side from his years as a reporter covering
police stories and wrote the first draft in 13 days. A bidding war followed in
Cannes from which he emerged $4m better off, the highest fee ever paid to a
screenwriter at the time. He later turned down $8m to write Basic Instinct 2.
But I’d heard beforehand from some of the guys who had a Script Lab session with him that he tore up the script, spent the time asking them all about themselves and their writing, and finished by offering to read the whole of their scripts not just the extracts they’d sent in. So when he said he’d always been known as a troublemaker, I knew where he was coming from. He advised us not to be put off by rejections and his one piece of sound advice to screenwriters was ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down!’
But I’d heard beforehand from some of the guys who had a Script Lab session with him that he tore up the script, spent the time asking them all about themselves and their writing, and finished by offering to read the whole of their scripts not just the extracts they’d sent in. So when he said he’d always been known as a troublemaker, I knew where he was coming from. He advised us not to be put off by rejections and his one piece of sound advice to screenwriters was ‘don’t let the bastards grind you down!’
4. The last wow factor was the openness, enthusiasm
and dedication of the delegates themselves. At the opening reception everyone I
met was up for it, willing to talk, to share where they’d reached in their
screenwriting path, to exchange cards and to encourage each other. There was a
strong feeling of ‘we’re all in this together, let’s go for it’. Funnily
enough, I didn’t see many of them again - maybe not surprising amongst 800
delegates and 150 speakers - but those I did, our conversations went deeper and
it felt like we could become real friends. There was a buzz about the whole
place and a determination to apply what we’d learned and keep our writing going
after it was over. The whole event was truly inspiring (life changing lots of
folk called it) and I’ve already signed up for next year. londonscreenwritersfestival.com
And the surfer?
Well, I found him after slipping away early from David Leland’s session on
screenwriting and procrastination. My notes of his talk are few and far between
(always a bad sign) and on this limited evidence he is a great screenwriter but not a great teacher of screenwriting. All
was not entirely lost, however, for I managed to catch the tail end of Tony
Jordan’s interview with Lucy V in which he described his procrastination drug
of choice, namely spending about 3 days playing solitaire and other computer games
before he could write. When the urge finally comes upon him he rides the writing
wave and doesn’t get off it until he’s forced to. I’ve been riding that wave
ever since.
