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Uh... with more than casual looking, I can't find a single Kim Barker interview. Um... d@mn.
So, to fill up space I'll just C&P the 2009 Worst Screenplay nominees and winner. **WINNER!** Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, screenplay by Ehren Kruger, Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci, based on Hasbro's Transformers action figures
All About Steve - written by Kim Barker
G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra - screenplay by Stuart Beattie, David Elliot and Paul Lovett, based on Hasbro's G.I. Joe characters
Land of the Lost - screenplay by Chris Henchy and Dennis McNicholas, based on the television series created by Sid and Marty Krofft
The Twilight Saga: New Moon - screenplay by Melissa Rosenberg, based on the novel by Stephenie Meyer
- INT. PAUL'S APARTMENT. BEDROOM - DAY 1 BLINDING WHITENESS 2 We hear a MAN GASPING 3 softly. 4 Rhythmically. A LUMINOUS PALE SHAPE 5 slowly forms out of the searing whiteness. 6 Gradually 7 we realize we're moving across the ALABASTER BODY of a WOMAN. Her skin translucent. OMG. 1 Centered mini-slug immediately after a full slug (as if it was a character!) 2 "We hear... " 3 Softly, 4 rhythmically, 5 slowly, 6 gradually 7 we realize this is why you can't use writer/director screenplays to learn sh!t.
- ON THE WOMAN'S FACE Ethereal. Her eyes closed. Her face lifeless. Then... ...her eyes open. She looks straight at us with unseeing pale blue eyes. This is ANNA (late 20s). We pull back. PAUL (30s) makes love to Anna. Their movements perfunctory. Passionless. He turns to look at her. Realizes she's not there. He suddenly stops. Rolls off her. Sits on the edge of the bed. Shouldn't be ellipsis in the action lines. "No", she doesn't look at us. This is not how spec screenplays intro characters. We pull back... and see just how much a writer/director can do whateverTH she wants.
She must of had a bunch of nube investors read this screenplay before forking over $4.5M, which is quite a bit to pay just to see Christina Ricci's... pieces. (Black Snake Moan was... interesting, BTW.)
- 1 Anna's mother, BEATRICE (50s), sits in bed, knitting with 2 swift, violent precision. The bedside table's stacked 3 with medication. She's clearly been bed-ridden for some 4 time. An electric wheelchair in the corner of the room. 5 Anna appears at the door. Beatrice scrutinizes her for a 6 second. Then returns to her knitting. Just being a wiener here. Format's largely fine.
Page fifteen. Time to cut and run...
- ON REARVIEW MIRROR Paul stands forlornly in the rain. Their eyes meet. ANNA'S CAR She hesitates. For a moment we think she might go back to him... EXT. RESTAURANT. PARKING LOT - CONTINUOUS ... but then Anna pulls out and drives away. Leaving Paul alone in the parking lot. The rain pounding the asphalt. I don't know why the writer indented the ANNA'S CAR minislug. But the ellipsis over the EXT. RESTAURANT slug works fine for me.
- INT. FUNERAL HOME. PREP ROOM - EARLY MORNING A large room. Tall vaulted ceilings. White tiles. Soft morning light seeps in from a small round window set high on one wall. The room is silent. Still. Like a chapel. In the semi-darkness we see a BODY on a porcelain slab covered with a white sheet. We hear a key turn in a lock. Then another lock. The room's suddenly flooded with a harsh white light. Eliot steps inside the room. He takes off his jacket. Carefully places it on a coat-hanger. Puts on a pale blue smock then snaps on the latex gloves. His every move meticulous. Measured. Like a ritual. Eliot walks over to the slab, his surgery clogs softly clacking against the tiled floor. He looks at the slab for a moment then slowly pulls the sheet away revealing... ANNA'S BODY. Pale and lifeless. An ugly gash above her eyebrow. Cracked violet lips. A rip in her black dress soaked with a dark stain. She's only wearing one shoe. Eliot gently takes off the watch from her stiff wrist. Places it inside a brown paper bag. Eases off the shoe. Picks up a scalpel from a tray of instruments on a steel trolley. Delicately slices open her dress. Peels it off. He's about to cut the straps of her RED SLIP when... Anna OPENS HER EYES. She looks straight at us with unseeing pale blue eyes. Strangely Eliot's not surprised. He calmly steps back. Watches her carefully. Anna's eyes slowly focus on Eliot. She's groggy. Confused. LOL! ONLY writer/directors can get away with this. And there's a lot more of it later. For spec screenplays learn to hit the ENTER key every few lines.
Pages 53 - 57 have a LOT of slug lines chopping at a pretty good pace of many single, some double and few triple lines of action with almost no dialog.
Writer uses O.C. & O.S. interchangeably.
Done.
Looks like a very somber movie. Very respectful in it's analysis of what goes on behind closed doors at a funeral home. Somehow, I don't think this will watch the same as The Wrestler, which is essentially a very similar situational analysis.
I love vagaries. http://www.dreadcentral.com/news/36824/exclusive-agnieszka-wojtowicz-vosloo-talks-afterlife WTH does this mean? I really would love if the horror industry could get back to its roots, and that starts with focusing on great storytelling. I love to push the envelope and take a lot of risks with my work so hopefully that risk will pay off for After.Life, Blah blah blah. Doesn't communicate sh!t.
http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/interview/640 ... we shot in 25 days in November/December of 2008, we finished two days before Christmas. And then we were editing at the beginning of 2009
BD: Did you write intending to direct? AWV: Yes. While writing it, I was directing it in my head; kind of shaping the whole narrative of it and what I wanted to express, and visualizing things and scenes and setups, and just kind of creating this whole world of the funeral home and the prep room.
BD: Can you talk about the scene with the demon version of Christina that she sees in one of her nightmares? AWV ... in the script it was a more complicated setup - I had these perspective and scale changes, things would be really large and shed be exceptionally small. But on 25 days with a limited budget, we just couldn't realize it. So I kind of had to re-conceive my vision,...
BD: Anchor Bay is the distributor, and they're known for doing great special edition DVDs - have you guys started putting that together? AWV: Oh, totally. 'Im actually doing a commentary next week. And then the special features... I love director commentary. Often better than the film.
This is one of the better interviews. http://womenandhollywood.com/2.....riter-of-after-life/ W&H: This is your first film and you have a A list cast. How did that happen? AWV: They responded to the material. It's really as simple as that. If you create strong characters then actors will always respond. They like original characters that are a bit different. A bit edgier. Liam Neeson was my dream for the part of Eliot, a mysterious funeral director, who seems to possess the ability to transition the dead but who might actually have much darker motives. Liam responded to the script and to what I was trying to say with the story. He liked the idea of posing questions about life and death. Making a film that provokes people to think about their own lives. We met. We had a creative connection. He wanted to hear my vision for the film and had lots of questions and ideas. We spoke about everything from his character to the colors and textures I wanted to use to evoke the mood and the atmosphere of unease and eeriness. I think it was a combination of things.
It was the same with Christina Ricci. A number of actresses were interested in the role frankly there's still such a lack of interesting roles for women. Christina was intrigued by the character. She was fascinated by the idea that maybe our consciousness remains with us after we die and you're able to reflect on your life, which in Anna's case wasn't fully lived to say the least. Even though After.Life is a psychological thriller, for Christina it was a character piece of sorts. Again it was all about the material, a challenging and unusual role and a shared vision for the film.
http://www.fearnet.com/news/interviews/b18738_exclusive_interview_comfort_of_death_in.html Had you sold the film before you wrote it? I totally wrote it on spec, I told my story and knew that once I had a story that was strong enough I was going to get it made or try to get it made. It wasn't an easy journey at all because it's hard enough to find money for smart independent movies as it is. But we had lots of interest from a number of studios and producers, many of them wanted to dumb it down and I was very committed to keeping the story the way I wanted to tell it so I had to find the right partner. It's been a long process, it didn't happen overnight.
With such a strong cast, did you envision people like Liam Neeson and Christina Ricci in these roles while you were writing? For me it all starts with the characters I wrote, I never write with someone specific in mind, I just concentrate on the characters. But once it was ready and I had become very close to these characters and I knew who they were I started to think about casting and Liam was definitely someone that was my dream. He's a very busy man, and has tons of offers, but I wanted to try. We submitted the script and he really loved the script and wanted to meet with me and hear my vision as the director. Our first meeting was like 4 hours long. It's strange when you sit across from someone and see them as the character. I was sitting in front of Elliot in that meeting, not Liam. That's how I felt. As far as Christina, I met with many actresses interested in the role; Christina is not only a great actress but has this ethereal beauty about her that was really important to me and this character. She not only knew and understood this character well; I knew she could bring a lot to it. We had similar views on life and death and she was fascinated by what I was trying to tell in the story.
Looking back, with such a limited budget and shooting schedule, would you have done anything different? Every filmmaker has the same problem, once you put what you had in your head against the reality of a 25-day shoot, any filmmaker will tell you that time is so important. If I had more time, I could have had more coverage and more takes, could have tried all these things I had to simplify. There's always a compromise, it's just the type of compromise you make. It's satisfying to know that I can make a film in 25 days. And the next film will have a bigger budget and a longer shooting schedule so it can only get easier.
- Closer in on one last map grid which fades into a transparency of itself overlaid across the actual location of the suburb. The name of this housing development is "Pleasant Valley". The transparency fades out to reveal: Page one typo Unnecessary text
- We halt outside one house. "We" do? (And "We" do several things on occasion throughout the screenplay, BTW.)
Scene numbers are not appropriate for a spec script, but a writer/director can do WhateverTH they want.
- 1 Suddenly we hear the sound of wings fluttering and see an owl 2 among the branches of the Christmas tree. It rises from the 3 tree then swoops down to the lawn where it sweeps a mouse 4 from the grass. The owl then soars off, casting a magnified 5 shadow of her wings across the house, and disappears with 6 it's prey into the woods behind. Learn to hit the Enter button.
- gates of Pleasant valley gated community. Valley should be capitalized.
Alright. Page sixteen, format's largely fine (screenplay's boring as sawdust, though).
On with the interviews...
http://www.iconsoffright.com/IV_Susan.htm WHILE SHE WAS OUT is actually based on a short story by Edward Bryant. How’d you find the short story? Susan: I was just reading loads of stuff, because I was looking for a film to direct and for any kind of budget. I was looking for a project that I could make guerilla style for $500,000 or something for like $12 million, or anything in between. I was looking for something that didn’t have loads of expensive subplotting and complicated stuff in it... I pulled this story off the shelf and finally read it and thought “This is it.” So we got the rights for it and I adapted it into a screenplay.
Because it was a short story that you were expanding to a full-length feature, what did you add to the story? What were you able to expand upon? Susan: I created obviously some new scenarios, for example the whole sequences in the housing development were definitely not in the story. I expanded on Della’s character, sent her to the mall in the beginning. I elongated the sequence in the beginning and expanded on the boys’ characters. I feel that it’s very, very true to the short story. I just made it contemporary and gave it natural expansion to fit the scenarios and locations.
Kim Basinger plays your lead Della. How’d Kim become a part of this project? Was she someone you had in mind? Or was she just a pleasant surprise during casting? Susan: I had a very short list of actors that I liked for her part. I hadn’t really thought about her initially, but then I went to meet with CAA and they mentioned her, and she just seemed so perfect that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t thought of her myself. And then they called me up and said, “Do you want to meet up with Kim?” And I said, “Absolutely, I’d love to meet with her. I’d be highly delighted to do so.”... I wrote the script so that I could make it anywhere. The dialogue was neutral, there was no American slang or anything. But when she came on I changed it to be more American, because obviously we were going to make it an American movie with her as the lead.
You mentioned Guillermo Del Toro before. He’s an executive producer on this and he helped you a great deal on this movie. How’d you initially hook up with Del Toro? Susan: Well, I met Guillermo when I first moved to Los Angeles and we all became friends. We are going to do AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS together, the Lovecraft story.
http://www.bloody-disgusting.com/interview/523 BD: How did you get the chance to break in and make this film? SM: I moved to Hollywood to make a Manson Family film with Vincent Gallo starring as Manson. We were locking up the locations when 9-11 hit. At that point the film really just fell apart and never really came together again. The studios just were not into making a film about him while all the terrorist things were happening. It was also a fairly expensive and complicated script. I would still like to make the Manson story, now I have been envisioning it as a TV series, like The Sopranos! At that point I was just thinking that the easiest way to get something made was to just write something really simple that I could make for $500,000 rather than $50 million. So I wrote the script, very quickly actually, based on a short story that was really gripping. At that point I was ready to make this movie on credit cards in the backyard, I was going to do anything to get this movie made, that’s when Kim Basinger came onboard.
http://www.shocktillyoudrop.com/news/topnews.php?id=8793 ShockTillYouDrop.com: While She Was Out is based on a short by Edward Bryant. Was it difficult convincing him that you were the right person to adapt this? Susan Montford: I was looking for something to write and direct, be it $500 thousand or a million, whatever I could get. I tried to direct a very elaborate film I wrote about the Manson family. It was all set to go then 9/11 hit and everything fell apart. I tried to get it going again. I was ready to do a movie guerilla-style and I came across Ed's story and I thought that was it. It was just a simple, very direct story with no sub-plots. Don Murphy: While She Was Out was actually published as a chapbook, it was an eight or nine page story. Susan had read it and the interesting thing was when I contacted Ed's people, you figure a relatively obscure short story would be available. But it was interesting because this story had been under option since 1994 consistently by this guy who had done one movie as a producer, Excalibur, and he kept renewing the story. As lady luck would have it, after Susan decided it was something she wanted to do, I contacted Ed's agents and the option had just come up. We then forged ahead, Susan wrote a hundred million drafts and here we are.
I'm sorry to keep beating this horse, but... After reading these interviews for these seven films (remember - there were none for ALL ABOUT STEVE!) of course these writers all have pat answers to obvious questions by different reporters/writers/publications, and they usually stick to the same stuff. I just LOVE! how Montford's stated price tag always begins at $500K but wildly swings on the upper side.
http://www.denofgeek.com/movies/136054/susan_montford_interview.html How did While She Was Out come about? Were you a fan of the short story? ... I first moved to [LA] to direct an elaborate film... It fell apart... I then spent several years trying to put it back together, wrote a bunch of scripts and put a bunch of projects in to development...I then realised that the only way I was going to get to actually direct was if I wrote something that I could make for any amount of money from $500,000 to 20 million and shoot it anywhere in the world. While I was thinking about this I came across the short story and realised it was perfect. It had all the potential to be turned into a straightforward, hardcore survival tale with no complex –expensive! - subplots.
After [Kim Basinger] committed I reworked the boy’s dialogue in the script to be American slang. I had deliberately kept their dialogue neutral previously so I could shoot the film anywhere.
The Numbers: Budget $6,000,000 (estimated) Theatrical Performance Total US Gross $29,784 (No. That is not a typo). Ouch!
Alright, as imperfect as the screen results were, I found this exercise to very educational.
For anyone who cares, my next little project will be to review recent Academy Award winning and nominated original and adapted screenplays - and - Razzie winners and nominated.
Useful analysis. Goes to show you that, while important, formatting is probably not a deal-breaker for a writer with connections and/or talent, so much as a convenient and more objective excuse for a Reader to thin the herd of rejectable scripts. Grating as all hell for those of us on the outside looking in, but not at all unusual in publishing/entertainment industries where it's easier to know when to reject something than to be able to explain why it's rejected.
Spot on. This project I've take upon myself to examine really emphasizes how important it is to build connections and develop professional relationships MORESO than to develop a killer screenplay. That is shown through the interviews in conjunction with the analysis/reviews.
Professionalism. Professionalism. Professionalism. Not just in craft, but also in relationships. Largely that's how I chose to conduct my behavior on this message board. I suspect a fairly decent screenplay may be rejected simply because no one wants to work with an a$$. Lord knows we see a ridiculous number of cr@p movies made, likely because the cr@p screenplay had fun people working together p!ssing away someone else's money.
I'd rather be paid than be "great" in my own little imagination. My belly growls after a while of eating a diet of self-aggrandizement. And then my kids start hassling me "Daddy, daddy. I'm hunnnngry!"
There is no way I could take in that amount of detail, but I gaat the picture!!!
Ray, thanks. Many here may know this already but it is news to me. Well most things around here are news to me.
It doesn't surprise me that the world is not as open as we hoped, not as clean, not as possible. To be honest I have seen this elsewhere.
However, in this biz, hope does appear to be a strong driver, more than other industries I have seen. So I can see the illusion created and the worthiness of what you have reported.
I think it always healthy to have a reality check and you have provided this.
The Elevator Most Belonging To Alice - Semi Final Bluecat, Runner Up Nashville Inner Journey - Page Awards Finalist - Bluecat semi final Grieving Spell - winner - London Film Awards. Third - Honolulu Ultimate Weapon - Fresh Voices - second place IMDb link... http://www.imdb.com/name/nm7062725/?ref_=tt_ov_wr
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