Entrails, Yum!
Jul. 18th, 2008 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
handful_ofdustIn honor of Greg Lamberson’s “The Box” entry, I decided to also do a public round-up of my completed—and, just for fun, uncompleted—scripts. The completed ones are, as follows:
No Vacancies—my first ever attempt at a screenplay, right after I first read Syd Field. It’s 63 pages long and I wrote it over a weekend, staying up until I got drunk from lack of sleep and fell over, then waking to immediately start in again. Very simple tale of a corporate scout who drives into the wrong Prairie town, needs repairs, and accepts a ride to the local motel with a guy she meets in the town’s one diner. This turns out to be a msitake. Very informed by stuff like Blood Simple and The Postman Always Rings Twice (Nicholson version)…I think there’s a sex scene in there (between two lifeforce-sucking ghosts) which is a complete, blow-by-blow rip-off of the first time Nicholson and Lange go at it on the kitchen table. Probably not the best sample to lead with, either, since it inevitably gave guys ideas about me. It formed the basis of my recent scriptment for Exit Zero, which I’m still waiting on the full script draft go-ahead for. But anyhow…
Reconsider Me—Based on a stage play I’d written the year before, which dovetailed my bad love for Season One Wiseguy into a possessed-medium-allows-us-to-consummate-our-weird-relationship Mafia ghost story which reads very Innocent Blood to me now. I pumped out a bunch of angles to make it more “visual” and “filmic”, and also made half the gangsters Chinese in order to root it more firmly in “realistic” Toronto rather than Godfather-land. Like I should have worried! Some interesting Italian witchcraft in this version, though—stregas and streghe, etc. It doesn’t help, however, that I was working on an electric typewriter, so my version of “editing” a manuscript involved literally cutting and pasting it back together, adding amendments in pen and then photocopying it all over again.
A Kiss With Teeth—No, really, this isn’t a Manhunter “homage”! I mean, just ‘cause the main character is a batshit insane psychiatrist who abuses his status as a police consultant in order to cover up his own crimes by doing them in the “style” of whoever they’re investigating, then slapping them onto the end of the caught serial killer’s bodycount…that could be anyone. And then he meets a nice girl who also likes to kill people, and they go out on dates (and kill people) together. But we’re all men of the world here, Mr Burton; we know how seldom these things work out.
Actually, much as I like to slag on AKWT, it is a pretty good idea, and could possibly be revised for the Saw age (if I wanted to). And it did get me both my first option and my first teaching job, so there.;)
Dead in Irons, Draft One—I wrote this over the year I worked as a security guard, and it reeks pretty hard. Set during Convict Times, it involves the lifelong and after-death struggle of prison warden Giles Virgil Gavett and bushranger Jack Brace, whose massively slashy mutual hatred leads to instutionalized torture (Jack literally becomes Giles’ whipping boy), murder and haunting, with an eventual really weird side-trip into Hellraiser territory. It’s a huge, sprawling period piece with a cast of thousand which essentially spins around one guy trying to get another guy to let him possess his body, lit and fig. A mess, and maybe not even a hot one.
Never one to let a stinky horse rot in peace, I spun Dead in Irons into two revisions, one finished (Bound by Blood) and one not (Dead in Irons, Draft Two). Bound by Blood still revolves around Giles and Jack, only here they’re vampires; I’m the heroine, with my Mom making a cameo as a tragically dead person, and a slanderous parody of my Dad as the Renfield character. It’s okay, though it gets pretty crazy here and there, like where I have Giles running around during the day protected by this fetish-suit with blackout goggles. DiI 2, however, is actually fairly sound…a genuine horror story with Young Adult pretentions which tries to conflate/explore my dislike of Tasmania, my relationship with my Dad, and Australia’s Convict Times history; I also switched Jack Brace out to a chick here, making her Giles’ prisoner/ticket-of-leave wife, for extra sexual/power dynamics. I might go back to it someday, if I could cut a co-pro scheme and/or get somebody to pay my way over to do real research.
Jump in the River—This started out as a novella, and the less said about that, the better. I then revised it so that much of it took place inside a mental hospital, with the main character (a blatant steal of Denis Leary’s character from Judgement Night) being interrogated about a car crash that led to the death of his childhood best friend. Mick Fallon is a career bad-ass who’s been in Mexico for years and only recently returned to Toronto, where he reinserted himself into the life of Jimmy Pico, Jimmy’s wife Tina and Jimmy’s daughter Em (which, we later find out, is for Michaela). Can you possibly guess what the secret bond between Mick and Jimmy was/is?
The first version’s pretty clunky, but I eventually reshaped it into If You Have Ghosts, one of my present specs. Taking my cues more from Joseph Hansen’s Dave Broadbent mysteries than anything else, I removed the whole mental hospital thing, beefed up Tina’s character and shifted stuff around to make her the true protagonist. It now reads as noir with a twist, and could be made for under a million, if you got the right people. Plus, there’s a market for it (gay-friendly straight-to-DVD), which there just wasn’t before. (I got close-ish to being able to get funding for a production draft of this, but apparently if a guy waves around a gun in a Canadian film, it becomes “genre”—code for “this is a Hollywood project, so go to Hollywood, you dickstick”).
By Night—The year I finished this is the same year Steve sat down next to me at a Diner’s meeting and asked what I was passing around. “A screenplay.” “What about?” Fakey Dracula accent: “Vampires.” Though refined over the years, it’s never strayed much from its original intentions—a road movie in which an ex-zoo worker is hired to transport a “nocturnal animal” he isn’t supposed to look at across state lines to a privately-owned wildlife preserve. Then he looks in the back of his truck, and it’s all downhill from there. I still like the characters and think it reads well, probably well enough to adapt to book form, though it’s officially already been “filmed”—halfway, anyhow. Like, 80%, according to the director/producer. Before his crew ran off on him. I’ve yet to see a single clip, but I live in hope.
“The Diarist” and “Bottle of Smoke”—my two real professional scripts, both done for Showtime’s now-defunct The Hunger TV series. Both adapted by me from their sources, my short stories of the same name. Each presented interesting difficulties—“The Diarist” was only five printed pages long, so I had to invent a whole back-story and new characters/new plot to fill it out, but that was good, because it gave me the “Rusk” component of the famous Five-Family Coven; “Bottle of Smoke” was optioned because it was full of hot Lesbian genie-sex, which I then had to take out almost completely, because they cast a woman who won’t kiss no girl (Cathy Moriarty) as their head Lesbian. Oh, and I got paid in full, and got to join the WGC (little good as that’s done me, since).
And finally…Lilim. Which IS good, genuinely original, etc. Which is being read right now by an agent (fingers crossed). And which I’ve already done a book outline for, if that doesn’t pan out. Etc.
Okay, that took a lot longer than I originally thought it would, so I’ll be back with the uncompleted stuff later on. Like, much later.;)) See ya.
Edited to add: I can't believe I forgot an entire screenplay. Granted, I hadn't seen it for a long time--thought it was lost completely, until green_trilobite was able to give me a program to decode my crappy-ass old disks. Somewhere after AKWT but before Reconsider Me, my bizarre obsession with The Jewel in the Crown (a BBC miniseries incorporating all four books of Paul Stanley's Raj Quartet) drove me to write Black Rose, an end-of-Raj-era thriller in which naturally sadistic British assassin-spy Eldred Pennance loses her memory completely after getting the crap kicked out of her (and a bindi mark carved into her forehead); she ends up in the tender care of (oh God) Jesus Murphy, a Black/Spanish USMC soldier on leave in Calcutta, who she picked up in a bar the night before and now can't recall having hot sex with at all. They are pursued by Independence activists who want to kill Eldred for everything she's already done, as well as the members of her old assassin squad (equally crazy Brit "types"), who want to kill her for not being able to enjoy doing that stuff anymore.
This is the script my Dad eventually called the worst piece of shit he'd ever read, and which made me want to kick the guy who wrote The Long Kiss Goodnight in the balls, because it's like we read each other's minds. In both cases, the premise itself is the promblem: It's just damn hard to root for anybody when your main character is so supremely fucked-up, and your co-star is essentially going along because she's the best lay he's ever had. Also, a thousand other different brands of icky issues, from race to sex to class to what-the-Hell-ever...hey, maybe I should write for Supernatural!
No Vacancies—my first ever attempt at a screenplay, right after I first read Syd Field. It’s 63 pages long and I wrote it over a weekend, staying up until I got drunk from lack of sleep and fell over, then waking to immediately start in again. Very simple tale of a corporate scout who drives into the wrong Prairie town, needs repairs, and accepts a ride to the local motel with a guy she meets in the town’s one diner. This turns out to be a msitake. Very informed by stuff like Blood Simple and The Postman Always Rings Twice (Nicholson version)…I think there’s a sex scene in there (between two lifeforce-sucking ghosts) which is a complete, blow-by-blow rip-off of the first time Nicholson and Lange go at it on the kitchen table. Probably not the best sample to lead with, either, since it inevitably gave guys ideas about me. It formed the basis of my recent scriptment for Exit Zero, which I’m still waiting on the full script draft go-ahead for. But anyhow…
Reconsider Me—Based on a stage play I’d written the year before, which dovetailed my bad love for Season One Wiseguy into a possessed-medium-allows-us-to-consummate-our-weird-relationship Mafia ghost story which reads very Innocent Blood to me now. I pumped out a bunch of angles to make it more “visual” and “filmic”, and also made half the gangsters Chinese in order to root it more firmly in “realistic” Toronto rather than Godfather-land. Like I should have worried! Some interesting Italian witchcraft in this version, though—stregas and streghe, etc. It doesn’t help, however, that I was working on an electric typewriter, so my version of “editing” a manuscript involved literally cutting and pasting it back together, adding amendments in pen and then photocopying it all over again.
A Kiss With Teeth—No, really, this isn’t a Manhunter “homage”! I mean, just ‘cause the main character is a batshit insane psychiatrist who abuses his status as a police consultant in order to cover up his own crimes by doing them in the “style” of whoever they’re investigating, then slapping them onto the end of the caught serial killer’s bodycount…that could be anyone. And then he meets a nice girl who also likes to kill people, and they go out on dates (and kill people) together. But we’re all men of the world here, Mr Burton; we know how seldom these things work out.
Actually, much as I like to slag on AKWT, it is a pretty good idea, and could possibly be revised for the Saw age (if I wanted to). And it did get me both my first option and my first teaching job, so there.;)
Dead in Irons, Draft One—I wrote this over the year I worked as a security guard, and it reeks pretty hard. Set during Convict Times, it involves the lifelong and after-death struggle of prison warden Giles Virgil Gavett and bushranger Jack Brace, whose massively slashy mutual hatred leads to instutionalized torture (Jack literally becomes Giles’ whipping boy), murder and haunting, with an eventual really weird side-trip into Hellraiser territory. It’s a huge, sprawling period piece with a cast of thousand which essentially spins around one guy trying to get another guy to let him possess his body, lit and fig. A mess, and maybe not even a hot one.
Never one to let a stinky horse rot in peace, I spun Dead in Irons into two revisions, one finished (Bound by Blood) and one not (Dead in Irons, Draft Two). Bound by Blood still revolves around Giles and Jack, only here they’re vampires; I’m the heroine, with my Mom making a cameo as a tragically dead person, and a slanderous parody of my Dad as the Renfield character. It’s okay, though it gets pretty crazy here and there, like where I have Giles running around during the day protected by this fetish-suit with blackout goggles. DiI 2, however, is actually fairly sound…a genuine horror story with Young Adult pretentions which tries to conflate/explore my dislike of Tasmania, my relationship with my Dad, and Australia’s Convict Times history; I also switched Jack Brace out to a chick here, making her Giles’ prisoner/ticket-of-leave wife, for extra sexual/power dynamics. I might go back to it someday, if I could cut a co-pro scheme and/or get somebody to pay my way over to do real research.
Jump in the River—This started out as a novella, and the less said about that, the better. I then revised it so that much of it took place inside a mental hospital, with the main character (a blatant steal of Denis Leary’s character from Judgement Night) being interrogated about a car crash that led to the death of his childhood best friend. Mick Fallon is a career bad-ass who’s been in Mexico for years and only recently returned to Toronto, where he reinserted himself into the life of Jimmy Pico, Jimmy’s wife Tina and Jimmy’s daughter Em (which, we later find out, is for Michaela). Can you possibly guess what the secret bond between Mick and Jimmy was/is?
The first version’s pretty clunky, but I eventually reshaped it into If You Have Ghosts, one of my present specs. Taking my cues more from Joseph Hansen’s Dave Broadbent mysteries than anything else, I removed the whole mental hospital thing, beefed up Tina’s character and shifted stuff around to make her the true protagonist. It now reads as noir with a twist, and could be made for under a million, if you got the right people. Plus, there’s a market for it (gay-friendly straight-to-DVD), which there just wasn’t before. (I got close-ish to being able to get funding for a production draft of this, but apparently if a guy waves around a gun in a Canadian film, it becomes “genre”—code for “this is a Hollywood project, so go to Hollywood, you dickstick”).
By Night—The year I finished this is the same year Steve sat down next to me at a Diner’s meeting and asked what I was passing around. “A screenplay.” “What about?” Fakey Dracula accent: “Vampires.” Though refined over the years, it’s never strayed much from its original intentions—a road movie in which an ex-zoo worker is hired to transport a “nocturnal animal” he isn’t supposed to look at across state lines to a privately-owned wildlife preserve. Then he looks in the back of his truck, and it’s all downhill from there. I still like the characters and think it reads well, probably well enough to adapt to book form, though it’s officially already been “filmed”—halfway, anyhow. Like, 80%, according to the director/producer. Before his crew ran off on him. I’ve yet to see a single clip, but I live in hope.
“The Diarist” and “Bottle of Smoke”—my two real professional scripts, both done for Showtime’s now-defunct The Hunger TV series. Both adapted by me from their sources, my short stories of the same name. Each presented interesting difficulties—“The Diarist” was only five printed pages long, so I had to invent a whole back-story and new characters/new plot to fill it out, but that was good, because it gave me the “Rusk” component of the famous Five-Family Coven; “Bottle of Smoke” was optioned because it was full of hot Lesbian genie-sex, which I then had to take out almost completely, because they cast a woman who won’t kiss no girl (Cathy Moriarty) as their head Lesbian. Oh, and I got paid in full, and got to join the WGC (little good as that’s done me, since).
And finally…Lilim. Which IS good, genuinely original, etc. Which is being read right now by an agent (fingers crossed). And which I’ve already done a book outline for, if that doesn’t pan out. Etc.
Okay, that took a lot longer than I originally thought it would, so I’ll be back with the uncompleted stuff later on. Like, much later.;)) See ya.
Edited to add: I can't believe I forgot an entire screenplay. Granted, I hadn't seen it for a long time--thought it was lost completely, until green_trilobite was able to give me a program to decode my crappy-ass old disks. Somewhere after AKWT but before Reconsider Me, my bizarre obsession with The Jewel in the Crown (a BBC miniseries incorporating all four books of Paul Stanley's Raj Quartet) drove me to write Black Rose, an end-of-Raj-era thriller in which naturally sadistic British assassin-spy Eldred Pennance loses her memory completely after getting the crap kicked out of her (and a bindi mark carved into her forehead); she ends up in the tender care of (oh God) Jesus Murphy, a Black/Spanish USMC soldier on leave in Calcutta, who she picked up in a bar the night before and now can't recall having hot sex with at all. They are pursued by Independence activists who want to kill Eldred for everything she's already done, as well as the members of her old assassin squad (equally crazy Brit "types"), who want to kill her for not being able to enjoy doing that stuff anymore.
This is the script my Dad eventually called the worst piece of shit he'd ever read, and which made me want to kick the guy who wrote The Long Kiss Goodnight in the balls, because it's like we read each other's minds. In both cases, the premise itself is the promblem: It's just damn hard to root for anybody when your main character is so supremely fucked-up, and your co-star is essentially going along because she's the best lay he's ever had. Also, a thousand other different brands of icky issues, from race to sex to class to what-the-Hell-ever...hey, maybe I should write for Supernatural!
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-07-18 06:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-18 06:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-19 06:53 pm (UTC)glamberson@roadrunner.com
Also: I'm not going to have my own table at Festival of Fear this year, I'm just signing at the Medallion booth for 2 hrs. each day, so I'll actually ahve some time to socialize with people.
no subject
Date: 2008-07-20 08:32 pm (UTC)