It does have a brief, albeit extra-pulpy, synopsis of the story:

7 RED- Louis Hollander doesn’t believe in luck and for twenty years he cheated the system until he got cocky and got caught. Now, as a spotter under the thumb of a casino boss, he turns in the cheaters. He is sent to track a mystery woman who has been busting roulette tables across the country on seemingly impossible single-number bets. Hollander’s mission is to intercept her, crack the secret of her game, and stop her from being a threat…stop her hard, if necessary. Producers are Mace Neufeld (HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, INVICTUS) and Robyn Shwer of Mace Neufeld Productions and Eryl Cochran and Branon Coluccio. Currently out to cast.

Why isn’t my name in there? Well, the only writer mentioned on any of these projects is a writer/director. Directors you can advertise. Directors are sexy. The point of these releases (as well as whatever presentation they bring to Berlin and subsequent film markets) is to give the projects some sex appeal while they raise the money. My name provides absolutely none of that. They could have put it in there just to fluff me, but there’s no business upside to it and, frankly, I don’t need it.

They’ll be doing plenty for me if they make the movie.

This article doesn’t mention who wrote 7 Red, but I’ll go ahead and spoil it: it was me

The company’s EFM projects include Midnight Sun from producers Eric Morris (Say Uncle) and Ben Smith (The Bourne Legacy); 7 Red from producers Mace Neufeld (Hunt For Red October) and Robyn Shwer of Mace Neufeld Productions and Eryl Cochran and Branon Coluccio; Rider from producers Arnold Rifkin (16 Blocks) and Damon Martin (Another Happy Day); and One Square Mile by Charles-Olivier Michaud (Snow & Ashes), which will begin shooting May 7th.

Sales and Production Unit Meyers Media Group to Launch with Four Films at EFM

Any allusions I’ve made to “the Vegas project” were about this screenplay. I really, really hope I get more news to share with you in the coming months.

That made me smile. I think I’m on the right track.

As with any creative expression, what makes great writing great comes from somewhere else, and that thing has to compel and help guide you along with whatever advice you find. Seek wisdom wherever you can, by all means, but then make it work with whatever’s driving you to write to begin with.

And while I do the ritual railing about how so many executives in Hollywood don’t know how to read, here is a development along those lines that I actually consider to be a positive. Here is a teaser trailer, not for a movie, but for a screenplay. It was sent out this week with a spec script called Grim Night, and the script was then purchased by Universal late last evening after a robust auction. Spec auctions are a more rare bird these days, so it’s worth looking at what got buyers so excited.

Now, I don’t think you’d say this is a release-quality piece of work, but that wasn’t their goal and I don’t imagine the buyers were expecting that. The point is to examine the goals of the producers who invested in this on behalf of their project, and I would say they are: to communicate the premise and tone of the story, and demonstrate that it could translate from the page to the screen. “Proof of concept” is the appropriate term. It’s basically the classic 60-second “elevator pitch”, only delivered via YouTube instead of by a nervous writer in an actual elevator (been there, played both roles).

And on that level, I think this is an excellent piece of work – you know the backdrop of the story but not the whole saga; your appetite is, as with those free samples at the food court, whetted.

There are other industry stories like this, like the 9-minute short (since-dubbed Saw 0.5) that filmmakers used in 2003 to raise the funds for the first Saw picture. As with many developments in film, the horror and thriller-makers are out on the forefront.

Back in my development days I often helped put together presentations that would help sell the idea of the movie, whether we had script for it or not. I once re-wrote the “Director’s Statement” for a documentary without telling him, and helped get him the funds to finish his movie. But we never invested the resources to do something like this. I would make a Powerpoint or a 5-6 page summary with pictures and a colorful cover page. From one point of view, this is just a natural evolution of that same idea, and one that gives the guy with a camera a distinct advantage over me and my cruddy Powerpoint slides.

If you look at it from the buyer’s perspective, it makes sense. Since the majority of projects now either come pre-packaged or as adaptations of pre-sold titles (now in development, Candy-Land: The Movie!*), when the time comes to weigh their decision of WHAT to buy, they are used to looking at more than a stack of script pages. A screenplay, remember, is in part a technical document whose format evolved to cater to the needs of the people who will film it. But when it comes to communicating whether or not the movie which will spring from it is a worthy investment, it is, if we can muster the courage to admit it, a flawed tool.

Are these teasers the right tool? I would say they’re a very valid part of the approach. A lot of writers might resist it, and I think part of the problem is that writing is goddamned hard enough without also having to teach yourself how to be an effective DIY filmmaker. There aren’t many of those. And this approach removes one of the subtly-compelling advantages of blank paper: it is the ultimate democratic medium. On the blank page, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich, poor, or have the right friends. It’s why we would like to believe that the page should be enough. If we’re going to go entirely over to who can make the best trailer – as with thesis projects at the best film schools, as with the freedom to live in LA while working an unpaid internship for six months – people with money to throw around are going to get an obscene head-start; and really, don’t they get enough of those everywhere else in life?

But this is where that gyrating price point comes back into play. I can tell you that I would be very shocked if that Grim Night teaser cost more than a few grand and a little ingenuity and sweat equity to make. So, okay, we don’t all have a few grand to spare for this; but back up for a minute and think about it as an hourly investment. How long does it take you to write a feature screenplay – I mean really do it, soup to nuts? Four months? Six months? How much money could you have made in the hours you spent on it? The answer is probably – several grand.

So what if you made this deal with yourself – that on top of the hours you set aside for yourself to write, you would use some of those same hours to generate money; money that would ONLY be used to create proof-of-concept materials that you could deliver with your script. It wouldn’t even need to be this elaborate. Hire an artist friend to draw some really great storyboards. Put together a mix tape soundtrack like Zach Braff did for Garden State. Embrace that you are going to deliver MORE than a script, and that this MORE is worth the investment of your time. Could you do that? Could you take a part-time job just to raise seed money? If not, then what are you doing here?

This could be good for you. It could let YOU be the first person to test whether your idea can really work as a movie. You’ll learn a few things, won’t you? Might even make your script better (yeah, I said it, your script’s not perfect right now.)

Does that mean more investment and risk from you up-front? I’m afraid it does. But back in the day, Hollywood would pay out $4 million if Shane Black sneezed on a napkin and called it a screenplay. The pendulum swung. This is where it is now. It can be good for you if you’ll just see how.

*Not a joke.

“F*^ing loved it”.

He want on to compliment the characters, the jokes, the emotion, and closed with:

“My only real complaint is that you make it look easy. Bastard!”

It’s nice to hear that it LOOKS easy. You and I both know different, don’t we, Jimmy?

This was a real boost. I believe this story has big, mainstream potential, and that I have managed to write it in a way that doesn’t insult real movie fans. When it comes to the stuff in my arsenal that has a chance at triggering a payday, I think that after a little tweaking this will immediately rank first. It was great to hear that I’m on the right track. It was great to be reminded that I can run with the pros – hell, I AM a pro.

Soon, it will be time to remind the rest of town.

At least twice a year I would dig those pages out, realize yet again how strong they seemed, and once again try and fail to add to them. I think a grand total of two people have ever even read them. One of them is Adam, and he thinks they might be the best screenwriting I have ever done. So there’s that.

Last year I had a breakthrough and cracked what I thought the ending should be. But I was deep in those long doldrums of not finishing anything substantial, and I felt like I needed to harness all my screenwriting mojo for that comedy I just finally completed.

There’s a gig I am chasing that may yet require all my attention, but for the moment I have done enough writing that is career-focused. While a couple of different initiatives play out, I have a window wherein I can screenwrite what I damn well please. So I’m playing with a couple of different projects right now, adding bits to each depending on the mood of the evening. But I am settling into a pattern where, if I go out with the purpose of writing in mind, that no matter what I do, I am going to add a page to this sci-fi thing first. And so, finally, I have taken the ball from the 25-year-old me and, trusting that he did his job with the first 40-50% of the script, I am starting to carry it the rest of the way. I’ve written about 7-8 pages so far, and they don’t feel like something he would have written. But they feel good. They feel right for the project. Maybe that’s why it took so long to find the next part of the story – I had to grow into it.

There’s a scene in X-Men: First Class that I would gladly show in the screenwriting class I teach. It happens in the first ten minutes, so it’s not as big a SPOILER as some things I could mention from the movie, but if you don’t want this pivotal scene laid out in detail for you in advance (some of you are that pure in your desires, bless you), then read no further.

The movie opens with a reprise of the scene that opened Bryan Singer’s 2000 X-Men –a young Erik Lensherr (Bill Milner) being separated from his family at a World War II concentration camp, and revealing his mutant magnetic abilities in a desperate rage as he twists a metal gate. This was always the key to making this franchise something more than just superheroics – you could never tell Magneto that he was completely wrong in his belief in the capacity of man for evil.

But this time around we see the immediate aftermath of that scene, where Erik is brought to Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) for study. In this scene, Shaw wants Erik to show off his powers, and offers him patronizing encouragement and chocolate. He asks the boy to move a coin – the boy can’t. Now Shaw sighs, and says that for all their small-sighted bumbling, the Nazis have ways of getting results.

And now the camera switches position, and reveals a room on the other side of a glass wall filled almost floor-to-ceiling with surgical tools; a nightmare lab. In the characters’ world, this was there the whole time, but we’re seeing it for the first time. The filmmakers have chosen to expand the context, and make us dread in that exact moment what Shaw could have in mind next. We would not put it past someone to cut into a mutant to see what makes them tick.

The room didn’t change, but storytelling changed it for us, gave it additional meaning.

Now guards come in with Erik’s mother. Again, Shaw says, move the coin. Only this time, if Erik cannot, Shaw will shoot his mother. Fear is quite a motivator – Erik wants to do it more than ever. Still he cannot. Shaw counts to three. His mother tells him everything will be alright. Erik can’t do it. And Shaw pulls the trigger.

(Slightly more SPOILER-y tangent: grown-up Erik seems to have an obsession with stopping bullets, deflecting bullets, even turning missiles back on those who fire them. The movie never needs a character to say that it’s because of the one he didn’t stop here. Good writing has faith in the work it does.)

Now Erik is grieving. Now Erik is enraged. A bell on Shaw’s desk crumples. Then a filing cabinet. Then the helmets of the guards – crushing their heads and killing them.

And now all those surgical tools on the wall start to rattle and fly. And for the second time in this really cracking scene, the room is transformed by storytelling. Suddenly, the dread is not what the Nazis could do to little Erik with that stuff. It’s what Erik could do to someone, anyone, who has hurt him, with all that lethal metal. As Rorschach best said it in Alan Moore’s Watchmen: “None of you seem to understand. I’m not locked in here with you. You’re locked in here with *ME*!”

But Shaw doesn’t react with fear – he’s delighted. Laughing. We just learned something about him – he’s either more of a maniac than we knew, or there is something about him we don’t know yet that makes him less afraid. Later we will find out both things are true.

Erik, the future Magneto, holds onto that coin. One of a hypnotist’s most basic tricks is to put a coin in their subject’s hands and tell them that, after they count down from 10, they will drop it. Erik carries this coin for a long time, and has planned meticulously the moment when he will let it go. His fatal flaw is to think it will have enough meaning to the person he became getting there.

The message Shaw has for that little boy is “I am going to take away your childhood and make you a weapon.” And the way the writers and director use that manipulation of environment, the introduction of an object that will become a talisman representing a volcanic emotion, and the mysterious, horrific behavior of a character who will obsess us the way he obsesses his creation, is an elegantly-constructed mount for a gem of a scene that dramatizes exactly that. That someone could do that to a child, and that it cannot be undone by kind words or Charles Xavier’s unwavering friendship, gives Erik Lensherr more dignity and pathos than most comic book villains could ever dream of.

That little scene gets that much right and more, and yet never feels dense or complicated. It never looks like it’s working that hard. That’s what good screenwriting does.

I think, because I give 40 hours a week to The Man, and grab what writing time I can in other wakeful hours in order to pursue a life that doesn’t belong to The Man, that I have trouble with doing Nothing. If I’m not at the office or being social, I wonder why I’m not writing. Re-organizing a bookshelf the other night felt downright restful; I think because it was something with a visible result that didn’t involve staring at a screen.

There’s a technique many screenwriters use where they will lay out their ideas in a series of notecards – dividing up the prospective script by story beats so they can visualize the skeleton of it and see where things are lacking in material or just not connecting up. I’ve never tried it myself because I have this ridiculously self-defeating resistance to adopting the methods of others until I’ve blundered through something myself. I blundered my way into proper formatting and blundered my way into outlining and treatments; now I’m prepared to give this a try.

So last night I went to yon office supply store and picked out a corkboard, pushpins, and a big pile of 3×5 cards. I hung it on the wall, stared at it, and then started filling out cards with the names and summaries of story beats, then tacking them up in a rough order. This started stimulating ideas unbelievably quickly, and by the time I stopped I realized I had already blocked out over half the movie, and I don’t even have a title for it yet. And once again, I find it very refreshing that it’s a working mode that doesn’t involve staring at a screen. It’s right there in the analog universe – all the plot elements, and all the blank spaces that need filling. Whenever I have an idea it’s no trouble to scribble it out and tack it up. I did two more cards this morning without even making up my mind to work.

It’s writing I can do on my feet. When Adam and I work together, he’s the one pacing a mad groove in the floor while I type. Now I can be the pacing one, and get things nice and prepared for the Typing Me to take over when it’s time. This script could get written very quickly if I don’t overthink it, which is the only way I want to write it. This is a shot at a payday – no sense dragging it out.

And that all sounds so good and productive, and yet I still feel like this is a calm, breezy Saturday overall. I like that.

This script will never sell on the spec market; I think I work on it to prove to myself that I can do something whose sole impetus is creative satisfaction. I want to let a feeling be my lighthouse, guiding me towards what needs to be written rather than what, consciously-calculated, solves the equation for x. I think, with all the words I throw at getting employed in Hollywood, that this sort of thing keeps me from stagnating. I do wonder how it will turn out, if I ever actually complete a draft.

In both it and the more mercenary idea I was brainstorming, there are rites of passage for teens and young adults involved. I’ve had a couple of conversations recently about the late John Hughes – one of the pillars of his legacy was that he took the tumult of that period seriously. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off may be a fantasy lark, but look past the cute hooky antics and realize it was also, just under the surface, a suicide intervention. Ferris has a girlfriend, but the love story in that movie is with his guy friend Cameron, whose cathartic, car-destroying rage, I am certain, saves his life.

When we’re adults we look back at the big questions we had as kids and dismiss them as stupid or naive; and that’s always the challenge for a writer trying to capture that and depict them honestly. Most movie and TV children and teens act like winsome and tiny grown-ups, and the insult of it grates. It’s not done out of malice, but out of fear – that audiences will react with the same embarrassment we feel in contemplating it.

What we have to remember is that young people are on a quest to discover themselves; and at that moment, it is the most important quest of their lives. They may ask questions that we grown-ups already answered – or, possibly, simply gave up asking – but we cannot let our cynicism about our own separation from that stage of life block us from getting to know these characters. Knowing them means looking at them with unguarded eyes, and it is the first step towards loving them.