So, Tim has arrived safely in Taos. He says it's absolutely gorgeous there, with mountains rising straight up all around them (this from the man who poo-poohed when I expressed envy over the scenery when he first got the invitation; good to know he's not as immune to natural beauty as he thinks!) and that the high altitude hasn't made him collapse or anything :-) He's sharing his 3-bedroom condo with Ken Wharton, Susan Fry and Mikey Rossner (she's sleeping in the living room). Nice roomies! There's a big central condo/ suite where the workshopping and, of course, gourmet cooking is done. There's also a river running so close by that you can sit on the porch and fish!

I'm getting past the fear that something horrible will keep him from returning home to me and moving into the pure jealousy over the workshop :-) I'll be talking to him every night, and I'll try to post any interesting tidbits here. He's already having a great time.

I miss him terribly.

Heather I am glad to hear Tim arrived safely and is having such a good time. I know what it is to miss someone. Do not to be too lonely. Just think how great it is when people get home. Really great. [smile]

Hellllloooo!

Tim! I hope you are having a FABULOUS time at Rio Hondo!
Make sure to have Maureen cook you her excellent better than Martha Stewart could dream about food! If you leave without her cuisine magic effecting your digestive system, then consider it your own fault, since I have provided you with the information neccessary to badger her for food.

As for the whole screenwriting he said/she said. I think, at this very moment, we all need to take our little selves away from the computer and get a fucking drink. Have one on me. I'll pay you back at the next con I see you at. I'm feeling pretty good myself. I'll go out on that limb and say what I'm thinking, Hey! Have a damned drink and make some good love and forget about what the damned lowest artform in existence is, and just get on with what's important to you all. I love it. No kidding. If you love it, I love it. Passion is what's important right now. I'm not even kidding. Get your head out of your head and feel, okay?

Much Love,
Christopher

"Affecting",mpt effecting, your digestive system, thank you.

And just as a post-amble: hey, I just hate to see people calling each other names like grade school kids. If you got your peace, say it. Beyond that, leave the witty little snarky comments to the backbrain of your backbrain, and you know, remember to separate yourself from your own ideas every now and then. I promise it'll make for a less rough future if you do. Seriously, I promise.

Christopher B-zak

Nick, the problem here isn't that someone's dared to disagree with you. The problem is that when you're faced with disagreement, you hit the ground running with this abusive jackass shtick of yours. It actually does render the entire discussion pointless; you've shown no sign of being interested in actual discussion, only in showing off. I realize it's part of your "too cool for your bourgeois morality and manners" persona, but it gets old.

Ah guys, arguing with Nick is a lot like arguing with my older brother, so I've got a lot of practice with it. It's just like old times. And I'll have you know I like my brother quite a bit.

However, Heather, as Tim's official representative in this matter, just say the word & I'll switch over to sending Nick emails.

(Hmm. Nick, Straczynski thinks the whole plot point on x/2.5x/and so forth thing is a load of crapcakes, by the way. Is it possible you're just not reading very good scripts? Sturgeon's law applies to everything, after all. And I remain curious about why we're ranking writing forms in the first place.)

But all that aside, congratulations to Tim on his safe arrival. I hope he does have fun & learn a lot. Big sympathies to you too, Heather. I hate it when my wife goes out of town, because the cats won't come to bed when she's not there. Total deprivation, even if I do get the whole bed to myself.

Edited by author 06-09-2003 10:33 AM
Jon: the studios are a leading element of it, but now, nearly 70 years into a studio system, the whole political economy of movies is built around the old needs. A movie has to be a certain length to accomodate a profitable number of showings and not just for studios, but for the theater owners, who just won't book a film that is too long (this was partially handled by the radical increase in the number of screens; since then movies have shifted from 90 to about 130 minutes). A movie also may not have a reel so long that a new form of projector or 35mm print film stock would have to be designed and created, and to avoid intermissions (remember intermissions?) and film breaks. Dialogue-intensive films are devalorized to material that can easily sell to foreign markets, etc. It's an industry-wide issue, and the studios are only one part of it. That's why we can't think of anyone who qualifies to really remake movies: they'd have to own their own theatre chain as well.

The other forms of writing you list are also fairly low: pop songs I don't think are as low in that they don't break their own rules in order to be a pop song. All sorts of modern political writing is low in content, naturally, but that isn't primarily a form of writing, writing is just used because improvised speech sounds bad. But of course, some political writing can be immensely powerful in form, like the Declaration of Independence's classic rhetorical structure, so that is more of a content than a form issue, ultimately. As far as blurb copy for porn rentals, anything with lots of puns is fairly low, but again it doesn't thwart its own goal to keep up with structure, the way scripts (goal is telling a story, structure demands certain things happen at certain times, so much so that it is okay for stories to devolve into nonsense) do.

It is at the point where even people who legitimately dislike the structure must use it: Straczynski doesn't like the structure any more than I do, but watch an epsiode of Babylon 5 with a stopwatch and you'll see that he does it, because he writes around commercials. He can't not if he wants his show to be on tv rather than screened against a hanging sheet in his garage, after all.

Low forms tend to yield bad results, however that is not the same as saying that low=bad. Novels are a high form, Gor novels are worse than most any script. What high/low can tell us is why some things are bad. Gor novels aren't bad because they're "unrealistic" as some anti-SF critics would have it, they aren't bad because they're paperback originals as the review apparatus would have it, and they aren't bad because they're "lies" as anti-fiction people would have it, they're bad because of John Norman.

When faced, on the other hand, with material like brilliant filmmaker Robert Altman's OC and Stiggs (adapted from National Lampoon characters) or any of the hack scenario work done by Dorothy Parker, individual explanations don't work, so we begin to look at structure and see what happened. That's where high/low is useful.

Susan: Either Tim and Jon and Barth and Mandy are stupid for engaging in pointless discussions, or you're forgetting some things, like Chris coming in here admittedly "throwing shoulder" in his very first post, Gwenda simply assuming that I've never read many scripts in her very first post, Tag coming in here (sent by Gwenda) to insist, in multiple posts, that I must be a bitter unsuccessful screenwriter. I put out a comment and a number of people who had never ever posted on this board before responded in bad faith, in order to correct by "uneducated" and "despicable" opinions. Since then, the conversation has actually gone ahead a bit, suggesting that I wasn't the one making it pointless.

It's not a matter of being "too cool" for bourgeois manners, it's realizing that bourgeois manners are a way of deciding that Person A who cannot possibly have anything worthwhile to say because Person B declares it so without sense or reason. And if we look at the phony counterarguments, we see that all of them fall into the bourgeois mode: only "successful" people have legitimate opinions, only people who support individualism in writing (ignoring deep structure, ignoring political economy) have legitimate opinions, only heterosexuals have legitimate opinions.

As I was driving to work (and I take this opportunity to mention that I won the 1987 Adair County High School Driver's Education Award and thus my driving skills are unassailably superior) I was thinking (and here I should note that a recent CAT scan taken following an accident at work--I work at a forklift dealership managing a staff of my fellow white men, the National Front meetings are on Wednesday nights--shows incontrovertably that I am possessed of a brain) that I like it a lot that Sane Susan Groppi's post was resting on top of this smouldering pile. But now it's not, so here it is again:

"Nick, the problem here isn't that someone's dared to disagree with you. The problem is that when you're faced with disagreement, you hit the ground running with this abusive jackass shtick of yours. It actually does render the entire discussion pointless; you've shown no sign of being interested in actual discussion, only in showing off. I realize it's part of your "too cool for your bourgeois morality and manners" persona, but it gets old."

Later on somebody will pop up and let everybody know that it's okay that I posted a no-content smartass diatribe here, because bearing the vast weight of an unsympathetic and hostile world on my shoulders (and here I must mention my frequent visits to the YMCA across the street, where I hone my well-muscled, manly physique) exempts me from, well, it exempts me from anything all y'all monkeys would normally expect of anyone so broadly published and well reviewed as my heterosexual self.

Or, as Susan said:

"Nick, the problem here isn't that someone's dared to disagree with you. The problem is that when you're faced with disagreement, you hit the ground running with this abusive jackass shtick of yours. It actually does render the entire discussion pointless; you've shown no sign of being interested in actual discussion, only in showing off. I realize it's part of your "too cool for your bourgeois morality and manners" persona, but it gets old."

Yours sincerely,

Christopher Rowe, the Bourgeois Kid

i've been riveted by the film portion of this discussion, and i've hung around hoping something cool would develop (and it has) but here's what started the blog of bile, nick. your words:

"He's a screenwriter. What makes you think he even knows how to read? Screenwriting is the fourth-lowest form of writing, being beaten out only by writing press releases for tobacco firms, scrawling Nazi slogans on washroom stalls, and rock criticism."

after listening to you build your argument, i really appreciate your aesthetic definition for "low" in the above comment but, even in retrospect, it's still nothing less than baiting. saying a screenwriter doesn't know how to read? come on. it's really irritating to hear you repeatedly cry foul as new people step in to spank you when you started the spanking machine to begin with.

everyone, not just nick, needs to drop the name-calling and over-defensiveness. talk about film or flame each other in email.

sheesh. i feel like we trashed tim's apartment while he was away.

Edited by author 06-09-2003 11:07 AM
Well, the length of movies isn't always an overriding factor. A quick wander to IMDB reveals many recent movies that are, shall we say, pretty durn long & fairly successful (quality to be debated later): Fellowship (178 minutes), Harry Potter I (152 minutes), Pearl Harbor (183 minutes), Saving Private Ryan (170 minutes), and well, others. Yes, they're big spectacle films which take up screentime. Blah blah blah. There are things in screenplays that can take a page to describe but only three seconds to show on screen; it evens out, as far as I can tell.

Let me be more specific on Straczynski scorning the plot point thing: he's referring to movies there. He fully acknowledges you have to build to a climax before each commercial break in television. Emphasis on the word 'commercial'. Go to cable (HBO, Showtime, etc), you don't have to do that sort of thing if you don't want to. You may want to, if you want to sell it in syndication on commercial television, but another advantage to working in cable is the additional freedom on, um, depiction of some subject matter which would present another obstacle to network presentation, so why bother?

And besides, those are external restrictions placed on the work by the environment they appear on, and I'll bet you good money they'll disappear in a reasonable length of time, due to new technology. Movie theaters are going to digital presentations. And TiVo, god bless it, is making the commercial break pretty much useless. I wouldn't be surprised if they did start embedding the commercials in the show (Fox, damn them, already does this with their cutesy graphics for whatever reality show they're pimping). And if they do that, why, they won't be breaking every fifteen minutes. Wait ten years, I bet it'll happen.

Now then. All that aside. These various problems with screenplays exist chiefly because of restrictions placed from without, ie, the studios (or networks, if you're in television), the theaters, etc.

(And by the way, rather than going with the high/low terminology, you could easily call it something along the lines of free/restricted. Simple/complicated. No rules/lot of rules. Anarchist/fascist. All right, so the last is even more of a red flag than high/low.)

At any rate, they don't appear to be much worse than rules imposed from without on other sorts of writing. For example, anthologies that specify a certain theme, minimum & maximum length of wordage, topics & language that cannot be used, and the like. And I can see why you would want to compare work produced for a restricted environment with one that's not. For example, comparing the most formulaic Hollywood film (of whatever sort) to an independent film done by some creative types on the same general topic. Fine.

But I don't see the need to compare work that has completely different requirements to each other. In other words, if we assume for the sake of argument that all screenplays are handicapped by the rules imposed by the studios, then why are we comparing it to something like a novel, that not only works a completely different way, but doesn't even have the external restrictions? It's like asking why don't I play tennis as well as you when a) I'm wearing ankle weights, and b) I don't play tennis, I play racquetball.

Barth: well, at least Tim will have plenty to read when he gets back. And maybe we can do something nice for him later. I dunno, bake him a cake or something.

Edited by author 06-09-2003 12:06 PM
Barth: I'm not crying foul over anything that has to do with what I actually said or actually think. I'm crying foul over people deciding that I cannot have a legitimate opinion and make up reasons for the same. There is a difference between saying "I think X is stupid" as I did in my first post and "You think X is stupid because you're a bitter ex-screenwriter/working for The Man/a fat faggot" especially when those reasons aren't true or are irrelevant.

Jon: Like I said, movie times are going up because of the radical increase in the number of screens -- also Pearl Harbor at least was a money loser and Saving Private Ryan just broke even, so we're not as likely to see many more non-fantasy lengthy movies. My point is that the screenwriter didn't sit down and decide to write a 170 minute movie, the studio decided it wanted to full X number of screens and then created a 170 minute movie that they then had written. All the HBO original features I've seen use the same structure as the movies for theatrical release; in many markets overseas they are released theatrically, so that isn't a surprise.

That's very different than pointing out that anthologies and magazines have themes, or language difficulties because there are thousands of markets out there. If there were thousands of studios and theaters with thousands of different configurations and schedules (instead of just 35mm, 70mm, digital, IMAX, SuperMAX, and 6-8 shows daily) the analogy would hold. I'm actually reminded of some of Delany's early books: he was told to cut a certain number of pages to meet the Ace page count and he couldn't do it all himself, so the publisher just took out pages at random and tied the beginning of a sentence on one page to the end of a sentence on the other. Film hasn't grown out of this sort of thing yet, books thankfully have.

Technology does and will change the structure of narratives, but right now what we're seeing is new embryonic technology being used to produce the same old shit (I wrote a Village Voice article on why web-based tv must fail a couple of years ago that deals with some of these topics here). Of course things will change in ten years, but it will take the razing of the theatrical release system and the end of analog recording techniques (bye-bye film and videotape) to really create a sea change, and even then only if the technology is actually made available outside the industry. Of course, at that same time, we're likely to see the screenplay as we know it end. Godard was able to make his brilliant, scriptless films because of the creation of self-blimped portable film cameras. We're not going to see the techniques propagated at "screenwriters' conferences" and the like remain intact while everything else changes.

Thus, I think you get it wrong when you suggest that these things are solely external restrictions, all of these things are interdependent. A screenplay is a series of instructions for making a film, you can't divorce it from actually making, editing, or distribution, especially when screenplays are very frequently commissioned to meet certain goals. Selling a screenplay on spec and actually having it made as it was first written is an exceedingly rare thing, even in independent film.

 Eyes Beyond Seeing, a film I worked on, which was actually a very ambitious SVA student film that paid, was aired on UPN in 2000 as a MoW. The reason it got aired and the thousands of other indie films made haven't been was because the screenwriter, director/editor, and producer all had one goal in mind: make a movie that we can sell. So it was designed to compete against Hollywood product and thus made with the same tyrranical structure, just cheaper. The restriction isn't external, it is internal in that the design goal of the screenplay cannot be fulfilled unless it holds to the rules.

The reason we need to compare screenplays to novels and other forms with fewer restrictions is pretty clear to me: a lot of novels become screenplays, a lot of novelists decide to write novels that are "cinematic" in the hope of selling it to the movies, and the audience has to choose where to spend its money: a movie or a novel. Why shouldn't we compare the two, especially when we are getting results like excellent comic books being turned into shitty movies?


Finally, if I said "simple/complicated" or anything other than "high/low" I doubt the reception would have been any different, since the counterargument have, with few exceptions (your thoughtful ones, Barth's comments, a sentence or two of Colleen's) haven't risen above the "How dare you criticize me you lowlife/failure/fat faggot" level.

Nick, nobody ever called you a faggot, so stop whining about it. Neither Christopher or I know ANYTHING about your sexual preferences, other than that you made an offhand comment on your blog that seems to equate heteronormative with regressive thought reducing all committed, monogomous couples to Ward and June Cleaver. He was slamming that, not you or whatever your proclivities may be and he certainly never called you a faggot.

Yeah, he was angry, because he woke up on Saturday morning to find you calling me names on the Internet. I NEVER called you names, I characterized behavior and what I thought of your arguments, never in absolutist terms. But hey, my skin's pretty thick, so whatever.

For the record, I never called you a gaffer -- I said you were setting yourself up as an industry expert and didn't seem to be one. Excuse me for inviting a few actual screenwriters over to challenge your arguments. And if any of us had chips on our shoulders, it's because this kind of thing is not new to us, as I believe TAG mentioned in one of her posts.

I'm working on an actual post, because I do deeply disagree with you and find your argument seriously flawed, but I hesitate to post it here because I think while the people you named have been in discussion mode, you have and are not.

I'm considering taking this issue over to Wordplay (don't know if anyone else here is familiar), which is filled with knowledgeable people who know alot about movies and books and everything else under the sun and who are excellent at really examining an issue. If I do, I'll post a link to the thread over there. For anyone who's interested in reading good conversation (that sometimes gets heated, but mostly not out of deference to the hosts -- Terry Rossio and Ted Elliott, who've written Aladdin, Shrek, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Mask of Zorro to name a few) about movies or scripts, I highly suggest you seek out the forums on http://www.wordplayer.com

Edited by author 06-09-2003 12:42 PM
Ah, I see. So this is solely for the purpose of judging the success in a translating of a book into a movie (or, I suppose, a play into a book, or an epic poem into a tv movie, or whatever)? I'm fine with that. No problems. I happen to think it's important to judge the success of translations of print works to film. Lord of the Rings is successful; Daredevil is not.

On the other hand, the novel Adaptation doesn't bear that much resemblance to the movie Adaptation. At that point I'm not sure why you'd bother to compare them. Or, for that matter, to compare an original screenplay on X to an original novel on X. Still have different rules of engagement.

As for your other points, I'm not convinced that Pearl Harbor was written because the studio said, "y'know, let's make a really long, really expensive movie. It'll do gangbusters!" Saying "let's make an epic spectacle," sure, with the long & expensive implied, that I can buy. But there's long (2 hours 10 minutes, like Matrix Reloaded) and then there's long. By the same token, there's expensive and then there's expensive.

As for HBO original features, are they releasing The Sopranos in theaters overseas? Besides, they don't all use the structure. I seem to recall at least one episode of Sopranos where they shot somebody (the annoying ex-boyfriend who's name I can't recall) in the first twenty minutes when a network show would've saved it to the end to build suspense. As if. Everyone figured he'd get it.

(In a side note, IMDb says that Saving Private Ryan made back their budget about a week after it opened, ending at $200 million in the US theatrical run. Heck, that's as much as Titanic's budget, another freakishly long movie, and they ended up building a 90% scale model of the actual ship. Maybe you're thinking of Pearl Harbor, but they cleared their budget in about a month. At any rate, any "barely breaking even" claims by the studio is a load.)

As for the potential response of others to alternate phrasing, I cannot say.

Nick, nobody ever called you a faggot, so stop whining about it. Neither Christopher or I know ANYTHING about your sexual preferences, other than that you made an offhand comment on your blog that seems to equate heteronormative with regressive thought reducing all committed, monogomous couples to Ward and June Cleaver. He was slamming that, not you or whatever your proclivities may be and he certainly never called you a faggot.

A few years ago there was a political ad on tv that was widely denounced as racist. The ad had a mother worrying about her son's schooling by saying that at one point the school had "more diversity than he could handle." This was widely and properly interpreted as "there were too many niggers in the school." Sure, the word nigger was never used, and it needn't be. In the same way, Chris never said I was a faggot, but what else does this sentence mean: "I'd tell you that I think you should apologize to the lady, but maybe apologies and manners are too 'heteronormative' for you"? Does it mean what you claim it means, to "an offhand comment on your blog that seems to equate heteronormative with regressive thought reducing all committed, monogomous couples to Ward and June Cleaver?"

There was an offhand comment on my lj that used the word heteronormative, sure, but it had to do with a panelist at Wiscon trying to demonstrate the existence of a rape culture by explaining that he often asks 5th grade boys what they think of cunnilingus and they rarely are very into the idea of performing it.

On my lj, I pointed out that there was the possibility that some fraction of those boys might just be something other than heterosexual. Weinberg's failure to contemplate this possibility is a sign of heteronormativity, which is a descriptive term, not a value judgment (if I had thought he was being malicious about it, I would have called him a "heterosexist"). I even linked that blog entry to this thread before and will do it again here.

Is there a mention of committed, monogamous couples in that entry? No. Is there a mention of ADULT COUPLES at all in that entry? No. Ward and June Cleaver? No. Do I actually even have a negative opinion of Ward and June Cleaver? No. Is there anything on that entry that can be reasonably interpreted as that? No.

Thus, is it fair for me at this point to question either your literacy or honesty since your excuse about Chris' slur is just plain ol' factually wrong? Oh yes.

Yeah, he was angry, because he woke up on Saturday morning to find you calling me names on the Internet. I NEVER called you names, I characterized behavior and what I thought of your arguments, never in absolutist terms. But hey, my skin's pretty thick, so whatever.

Yes, I referred to you as "Shrieky the Nitwit" (without identifying you, or where this thread took place, or anything else that would identify you as Shrieky to anyone) because you came in on this thread, shrieked, then ran off and complained about how someone dared defend his "indefensible" opinions on your own blog. How is this qualitatively different than what was on your blog about me? Sure, it's not a name, but that isn't a qualitative difference. How is it qualitatively different than declaring my opinion "despicable" sans logic and reason? Not wrong, "despicable." Evil. It isn't at all.

How is declaring someone a faggot (even if you don't say the word faggot) different than calling someone shrieky the nitwit? Well, shiekers aren't been beaten to death in the streets. Shriekers aren't having their children taken away from them by the courts. Maybe this is just me being PC, but I think there is a qualitative difference between insulting someone's behavior (which they are in complete control of) and someone's race, nationality, gender, or sexuality.

Btw, for someone with a thick skin, and who declared very publicly to be out of this conversation, you sure do keep harping on the same old stuff. As far as the "some gaffer" comment, that came directly from one of Tag's posts here. If you didn't use those words or feel that that mischaracterizes them, take it up with her. If you invited Tag to challenge my arguments, you might also want to explain why she hasn't done so: all she did was repeatedly insist that I must be a failed screenwriter. She was the only participant Tim called out as a troll for that matter.

Just two quick notes for Jon: typically, a Hollywood movie doesn't actually make money until it clears three times is budget. Neither PH nor PSR did that, though PSR is limping towards that with DVD sales.

The Sopranos isn't being released in theaters overseas as far as I know, but the shooting and other things that "feel" different can easily be found on network tv. Homicide: Life On The Streets and even Hill Street Blues were doing similar things (which is actually part of the structure) years ago.

High/low allows for all sorts of comparisons, not just why Movie X is better than Novel X. It also tells us why Brilliant Novelist/Poet/Playwright A is Sucky Scenarist A. It tells us why major publishers, some of whom are linked rather closely to movie studios now, push "cinematic" Book 1 rather than meditative Book 2.

On comparing the rewrite process between novels/scripts, novels are not redrafted in the ways scripts are. I certainly haven't heard of publishers keeping a series of writers on retainer in order to redraft all the dialogue from femal characters across a large number of books, or hiring someone to rewrite all the jokes in an entire month's releases (and to add some if there aren't any) without the original writer being consulted.

Nick