Living the Romantic Comedy

The 5th Annual Asta Awards

The Best in Romantic Comedy 2009

[Our Astas are named for the terrier film star who upstaged Cary Grant in such screwball classics as Bringing Up Baby and The Awful Truth.  Award winners from 2008 can be found here, 2007 here, 2006  here, and 2005 here.]

A fairly thin year for our genre, with only two romantic comedies that are likely to endure and find their place in the greater rom-com canon, one a trailblazer and one decidedly old guard traditional.  Herewith, the categories.

Best Female Performance: Yes, it's been Sandra Bullock's year, but I'd say the funniest, sexiest woman on screen in '09 was the unsinkable Meryl Streep, who gives It's Complicated the emotional credibility it needs, along with some peerless mugging, just for fun.

Best Male Performance: It's taken me years to warm up to this guy, who I initially dismissed as just another pretty six-pack, but I gotta admit that - while Bullock got all the attention - Ryan Reynolds showed new depth in The Proposal (Best Romantic Comedy to Watch on an Airplane) and did a great supporting turn in Adventureland, as well.

Best Couple: This year's Best Rom-Com Chemistry lit up a non-romantic comedy.  There's no denying that George Clooney and Vera Farmiga generated the year's most memorable sparks in Jason Reitman's Up in the Air, bringing a sorely missed Golden Age gleam to their wittily erotic encounters.  2009's Best Cute Meet is also found in this dramedy, a deftly played scene in that most mundane of milieus (they meet in a bar, fer chrissake) with timing and tones that positively sing.

Runners-Up Couple was also in a non-rom-com - Stanley Tucci and Meryl Streep, delightfully married in Julie & Julia, which also featured the year's Worst Couple: the spark-less "Why is He With Her and Why Should We Care?" duo of Chris Messina and Amy Adams.

Best Bellamy: It's always fun when a romantic comedy features a good Mr. Wrong for our heroine to tangle with, and in the interest of non-spoilage (and a hat-tip to the movie's canny triangle-tweaking), the Asta goes to both Wrong-But-Maybe-Right-Guys Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin in It's Complicated.

Best Performance by an Octogenarian: Bless her heart, how great is booty-shaking Betty White, who gamely transcended the ridiculous excesses of her role in The Proposal?

Best Future Stars of Romantic Comedy:  Ginnifer Goodwin made the most of a tacitly thankless role as the embodiment of the title in He's Just Not That Into You, suggesting she's a rom-com lead to watch for in the 'Teens; Jesse Eisenberg gave Michael Cera some Future Tom Hanks competition in Adventureland.

Best Meta-Rom-Com Moment: Sooner or later, someone had to do it, so let's give props to the totally nude "Crash Into You" scene (a wry commentary on the time-honored sex-gag high jinks that invariably ensue in such pics) in The Proposal.

Best Clinch: Meanwhile, the most deeply satisfying resolution to a rom-com storyline was found on the small screen at the end of Curb Your Enthusiasm's just-about-perfect season finale, as Larry David, literally within seconds of finally reconciling with ex-wife Cheryl Hines, proved just how precarious their happily-ever-after would be.

Best Teen/Twenties Rom-Com: The Old Wine in New Bottles winner of '09 was Greg Mottola's warm, wise Adventureland, a stealth missile of rom-com pleasure that brought an uncharacteristic level of sophistication to a sub-genre that's like, not necessarily known for that.

Best Bromantic Comedy: No competition - Paul Rudd and Jason Segel's pas-de-dudes made John Hamburg's I Love You, Man the best in a still-hardy brother genre, a movie that out-Apatow-ed Judd Apatow, whose overblown Funny People was only half of a great movie.

Best Rom-Com Hybrid: I realize I'm in a minority here, but must cite Tony Gilroy's clever Duplicity as the year's best "It's a Breath Mint And a Candy Mint" cross-breeding of genres.

Rotten Tomatoes Sidebar: We interrupt the Bests with special Astas to be bestowed on 2009's Most Overrated Romantic Comedy,  He's Just Not That Into You, the Ugliest Rom-Com Ad Campaign, for  the equally gross The Ugly Truth, and the year's Best Trailer That Saved You From Actually Having to See the Movie: Ghosts of Girlfriends Past.

Worst Romantic Comedy:  There was stiff competition at the bottom of the barrel in 2009 (from hideous chick flick Bride Wars to quirky-ed to death indie All About Steve) but hands-down winner was the execrable Couples Vacation.  Vince Vaughn, my life called, and it wants the two hours I wasted watching this piece-o-hack movie back.

Best Direction: Marc Webb proved that video directors can indeed make a full-length feature snap, crackle and pop with his impressive helming of (500) Days of Summer, one of the most visually entertaining romantic comedies of the decade. 

Best Screenplay: (500) Days of Summer, written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, breathed fresh air into a sometimes deflated genre, being alert to detail (e.g. from the parens of the title to the use of the numbers-titles device throughout) and delivering the substantive goods - it's a romantic comedy that's actually about something: in part, the danger of buying into the ethos of romantic comedies.

Best Romantic Comedy: For the first time in Astas history, it's a tie - between (500) Days of Summer, the Youthful Rom-Com of the Year, and It's Complicated, a Triumph of the Ageless.  The films also share Best Rom-Com Set Piece awards, one for Summer's nifty "You Make My Dreams" musical number, and one for Complicated's delirious pot-smoking sequence.  Some day, someone (keep your eye on Jason Reitman) may marry the edgy cinematic panache of Summer to the savvy Old School showboating of Nancy Meyer's movie to create one platonic ideal of rom-commery, but in the meantime, these two pics together form an inclusive portrait of Funny Movie Love in 2009.

Disagreements?  Secondings?  Outraged "How could you overlook...?!" comments?  Tell Living the RomCom, as we bid 2009 adieu and send happy new year's wishes out to you.

Give 'Em the Goldurned Statuette

Assuming there are thousands of other blogs discussing Avatar today, the movie and the money and the whole zeitgeist of it all, I feel pretty comfortable offering you a bit of counter-programming.  I just saw a little movie - teensy in the shadow of James Cameron's juggernaut - which, if there is any justice left in the world, ought to earn at least one Oscar in the new year.

How much do I love thee, Jeff Bridges?  Let me count the movies that would make up my personal pantheon of favorites when it comes to the guy who may well be my favorite American actor: Starman (1984), The Fabulous Baker Boys (1989), The Fisher King (1991), Fearless (1993), The Big Lebowski (1998) and now Crazy Heart (2009).  

He's great, of course, in the movie that introduced him to most of us - 1971's The Last Picture Show, and I developed my man-crush on Bridges in the now-overlooked Hearts of the West (1975) - perhaps because he was playing an idealistic aspiring screenwriter who comes of age in cynical Hollywood (identify much, young Bill?).

A glance at the filmography suggests that although Bridges is up for an Oscar for playing a guy named Bad, he's rarely, if ever, been anything but good - even when stuck in middling mainstream melodrama (e.g. Against All Odds, 1984), ahead-of-its-time genre weirdness (Tron, 1982) or too dark for the room misfires (The Vanishing, 1993). 

Though he's been perfectly believable as both an American president (2000's The Contender), and a nefarious comic book villain (Iron Man, 2008), Bridges has long been seemingly most well-suited to playing shaggy-haired underdog misfits (e.g. 1972's Fat City, 1981's Cutter's Bone).  But he's also done the romantic leading man thing many times over, even holding his own with Jane Fonda (The Morning After, 1986) and Streisand (The Mirror Has Two Faces, 1996). 

Perhaps what's contributed to Bridge's versatility in this regard is his cool but oddly amenable reserve.  He's removed - one step back behind those shrewd but kindly eyes.  He's both present (in a palpably vulnerable way), and hidden (figuring out the angles of whatever defensive edifice his character is trying to construct).  His feelings are visible, but you're conscious of the effort he's putting into trying to keep them to himself.

 

Up until now I'd have agreed with popular consensus that The Iconic Jeff Bridges Role would be Lebowski.  But go see Crazy Heart (this is, after all, the point of my meandering valentine) and see if you don't agree: as Bad Blake, a nearly washed-up, literally and metaphorically wasted country western singer, Bridges has never been better. 

That Bridges fits so well into the worn blue jeans of Bad is due in part to the exemplary efforts of one great musical team: T-Bone Burnett and Stephen Bruton wrote the songs for him.  Sadly, Bruton - for years Kris Kristofferson's guitarist - died recently, but this makes quite a swan song. 

Many movies have attempted to make credible, memorable singer-songwriter characters come to life on the screen, but Crazy Heart delivers the goods: you believe these are hit songs, you believe Bad Blake wrote them, and well before the closing credits, you want to buy the soundtrack: these aren't throw-away faux-numbers, they're great tunes, period.

It helps that Bridges can sing (you can hear some of his own compositions on his website).  Helps that the lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal plays opposite, and it surely helps that newbie director Scott Cooper (who also wrote the adaptation of Thomas Cobb's novel) has done such a fine job with such predictable material.  

Make no mistake, this is an old, familiar story - you've seen it before, and in the case of supporting actor Robert Duvall, you've even seen it with that guy in it (Duvall essentially played the Bridges part in Horton Foote's Tender Mercies in 1983).  But Cooper has added surprising notes and undertones to an old wine to make it memorable.

Avatar will be bursting off its 3-D screen for months to come, and you'll have your pick of theaters (and dimensions) to see it in.  Crazy Heart may soon disappear, and be harder to find, so you might want to seek it out.  And those Academy voters ought to put that gold thinger into the hand where it's long belonged.

Guilty Pleasure

Like many a man getting on in years, I like to keep my hipness quota high.  Last thing I want to feel is too old for the room; admittedly, my avid pursuit of obscure indie pics and equally obtuse alt bands is probably fueled in part by my zeal to remain at least somewhere in the vicinity of the cultural cutting edge.

So what, then, am I to do with the incontrovertible fact that I thoroughly enjoyed the new Nancy Meyers movie?  I'm tempted to deny even seeing It's Complicated, let alone go public with such scandal - I might as well write SQUARE on my head in indelible marker.   But Living the RomCom strives for bloggeristic integrity, so I will risk tanking my formerly respectable cool cred rating with a full confession: I actually watched part of it again. 

Let me quickly remind you that I've gleefully reviled Nancy Meyers on occasion, and generally I steer clear of her stuff, with the sole exception of Something's Gotta Give, a movie I admire, despite its typical Meyers weaknesses (the Better Homes and Gardens of it all, the glossy schmaltz, the obscenely bourgie values, etc.).  Meyers movies are a middle-aged upscaler's Designer Porn, at times more luridly interested in beautiful kitchens than in getting us to believe the characters who supposedly inhabit them.

For this reason, along with the check-your-brain-at-the-door formulaic indulgence that's echoed in the weirdly (yet appropriately) generic quality of her titles, I suggested to a fellow reader at Uni, during an extensive in-studio search for this one's title, that the picture be called A Movie With Great Furniture and Pretty People in It.  That was before I saw it.  Now I think that what sounded like another inane non-title when I first heard it... kinda fits.

It's Complicated is one of the few romantic comedies I've seen in the modern era - a rom-com period fixated on boy-men and unmarried bridesmaid drama - that delves into the deeper complexities of long-term romantic relationships.  I know, Meyers and complex sounds oxymoronic.  Nonetheless, as a thrice-married man who's done that kind of time, I had a number of laughs of recognition during this "I'm having an affair with my Ex?!" story.  Which is the point, finally: hate or love a movie like this one - you can't deny that it's funny.

With an Alec Baldwin-Meryl Streep-Steve Martin triangle at its center, this shouldn't be surprising.  I don't want to be a spoiler (the movie doesn't officially open 'til Christmas), so I won't go into the specifics of why I watched what I watched twice - I'll just say it's the moment where Martin finally gets to release his wholly reined-in wild and crazy guy persona - but there's a reason why Baldwin has become 2009's favorite just-past-his-prime comedic star, while the adage, "I'm not getting older, I'm getting better" was evidently coined for Meryl Streep.

Don't get me wrong: I'm already back to re-screening The Bicycle Thief and the latest mumble-core, while listening to Sonic Youth and Animal Collective, okay?  And I have my roster of excuses ready, should anyone challenge me on my Meyers folly.  #1, It crawled into my hand, honest (i.e. The movie came to my house, uninvited, as a screener).  #2, Many friends of mine worked on it, so I had to see it (Jack Dolman, great keyboard cues!)  #3, I can find all kinds of things wrong with it (e.g. It's at least ten minutes too long, with a groaner of an unnecessary Streep and Baldwin scene in the end).

But it took my seeing the appalling Lovely Bones - a fundamentally dishonest, pretentious travesty of a movie that, wallowing in its show-offy pyrotechnics, unwittingly mocks the supposed High Seriousness of its subject matter - to make my peace with the lure of artful fluff like It's Complicated. 

Given the dark, grim parameters of this hellish American holiday season (coupla endless wars, coupla useless political parties, coupla holes in everybody's pockets) it's nice to know that in one little corner of the filmic universe, our wish-fulfillment-fantasies of being adult, sophisticated, and benignly well-to-do can still come true.  Guilty pleasure though it may be - it's like cinematic Vicodin laced with helium - this uncool, middle-of-the-road movie provides some sweet moments of escape.

Airworld

Eight years ago, in the summer of 2001, I read Walter Kirn's just-published novel Up in the Air and enjoyed it, especially due to the synchronistic experience of reading a good part of the book on board a flight from NYC to L.A.  The cover depicted a number of men flying through the air as if they were mini-airplanes, with one crashing and burning.  A month or so later came an event which rendered such a book cover - let alone a story about a guy who practically lives on airplanes and in airports - a bit less than attractive to your average reader.  Maybe only a fellow writer would have such thoughts, but I remember musing, months after 9-11, on Walter Kirn's unfortunate book release date - talk about bad timing!

So it's kind of amazing, actually - and a testament to the power of a good story - to see that eight-plus years later, the big screen version of Up in the Air, on track to win a Best Picture nomination along with a host of other prizes and critical accolades, is arguably the most timely movie of the year.  I can't think of another film I've seen recently that seems to capture so unerringly the peculiar tenor of this moment we're in, and it's a testament to the talents of the team that's brought it to the screen that given such a moment, Up in the Air isn't just a big fat downer.

Instead, this story about a guy who flies around the country firing people for a living is a poignant, bittersweet sad-and-funny experience - a kind of high wire act of sorts, as it balances on the edge of where comedy turns to tragedy and vice versa.  The movie - which does a lot of shrewd, hard work to seem breezy-easy in its delivery - is about going in two directions at once.  You want to love Ryan Bingham because George Clooney's playing him, but he's actually kind of despicable, in a marvelously charismatic way.  And you want everything to turn out okay for the people in the story, even when everything in the movie's telling you that "okay" isn't really an option in the end.

 

Clooney was born for a role like this, and newcomer Anna Kendrick now has a career to reckon with.  Everyone on board - including, somewhat queasily, the non-actors Reitman roped in to play themselves: recently-fired people - lends substance to a world that breathes insubstantiality. 

Here are a few interviews with the director/co-adapter of Up in the Air: this one speak to his overall intentions, this one gives Walter Kirn's POV on the adaptation; the third talks about the director's use of real people in small (wrenching) roles. 

I've been singing Jason Reitman's praises since his first feature, Thank You For Smoking, and he's only getting better (Juno was his second).  The guy's now three-for-three, a damned impressive average for any filmmaker, and the evidence suggests that even when he eventually fails (nobody in Hollywood history has ever pitched a perfect, no-misser game), he's going to be interesting.  

From my point of view, this auteur is carving out an intriguing little niche for himself: Ryan, like Smoking's anti-hero Nick Naylor (and in a sense, Juno) is a slick talker in need of redemption.  All three of Reitman's movies focus in on the dance you do around the lies you tell in order to get along, and the truths that life ultimately forces you to confront.

Speaking of talk, the movie is a must-see for romantic comedy fans - though it's not a romantic comedy.  The banter between Clooney and the lovely Vera Farmiga is as witty as a vintage screwball's.  There's some twenty minutes of pure rom-com bliss scattered throughout Up in the Air: George and Vera's timing is impeccable and their chemistry a delight.  For most of the time they're on screen together, we really are up in the air in the best sense of the phrase, and I can only hope that the movie's success reminds the studios that such sophistication, nuance and panache is still worth pursuing.

Meanwhile, the material in the movie that brings us back to earth has a devastating accuracy and punch.  There's one heartrending shot here of an office, nearly denuded of desks and activity, inhabited only by a few walking wounded, that's the most eloquent portrait of America 2009 I've seen outside of a newspaper's front page. 

Reitman's artful existential tap-dance is no doubt already earning its backlash - there are those who'll find it too glib for anyone's good - but if you'd like to go to the movies and see some resonant sense of the world we're living in (with glimpses of the dreams we keep trying to believe in), Up in the Air has got it down.

Million Dollar Screenplay Tip #5

Wrapping up this week of tips - specific aspects of craft and creativity I've found in spec scripts that sell, based on my years of reading screenplays and doing notes on studio projects...

Tip #5: Selling screenplays exude the confidence of knowing what they're about.

Back in the mid-90s, Shane Black made the highest spec sale in history (three million dollars) with The Long Kiss Goodnight.  Let's have a look at its first page.

A WINDOWPANE

Assaulted from without by SNOWFLAKES.  Wind tossed.

INSIDE

A bed, dappled with moon shadow.

A LITTLE GIRL, fast asleep. The wind whistles and sighs outside...

[Little Girl has a nightmare, and kindly Mom comes in to comfort her, then:]

The child subsides, breathing steady.  Eyes closed.

The mother rises... Heads for the door. 

Flicks on a Winnie the Pooh NIGHTLIGHT --

Her entire right forearm is slicked with blood.

More blood on her Czech-made MP-5 machine gun.

After this reveal, Black's readers were compelled to turn the page and keep reading. The writing is a model of compression, brevity, and white space (see Tip #3), and a paradigm of cinematic storytelling (i.e. Every line suggests a vivid and specific image).  But what slays me the most is that very first sentence: A windowpane assaulted from without by snowflakes.

Black's choice of words is anything but arbitrary, for the first thing we perceive is a telling metaphorical paradox: In this world, nothing will be as it seems, all conventions will be subverted, and violence will rule the day.  This is a movie in which even snowflakes attack.  Subliminally, it sets up the wonderful reversal found further down the page, as warm-and-fuzzy mother-and-child imagery - that Winnie the Pooh nightlight - gives way to "Mom is a bloodstained killing machine."

I had the rare pleasure - kind of like Woody Allen's "I just happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here" moment in Annie Hall - of quizzing Shane Black about this page when he visited my class a few weeks ago, and learned that I wasn't out on any limb here; these were indeed his intentions.  Which leads me to my point: This is a story that had been worked, broken, and realized to the extent that its writer knew what the story was about - knew its thematic core so well that he was able to paint that subtext into the imagery of his first page (and all the pages after).

Most writers go through this process with a story.  At some point, all the guesswork that's been implicit in the plotting gives way to a revelation.  You realize this is what you're really writing, the "this" being the passionately felt idea that's at the core of the thing.

Thus Sydney Pollack famously noted that the script of Tootsie only began to work for him when he finally understood that its through-line was "a man learns how to become a better man by pretending to be a woman." Until that point it was simply a funny farce about a guy running around in drag.  Once he understood its true thematic subject, that theme became the "armature" (as he called it) upon which everything else - the gags, the dramatic developments - could be hung. (For another discussion of finding that core idea and manifesting it, here's Andrew Stanton on the creation of Wall-E.)

I only wish that more of the screenwriters I read had gone that distance - digging deep enough into their stories to make them meaningful.  Too many specs I read don't seem to be about anything at all beneath their flashy, frenetic surfaces.  Truth be told, the primary mission for story analysts and development executives at my studio is more often than not to break down an already-bought project to determine what the movie really is - so that an improved draft will bring its real subject matter to life.

Our business is so slavishly fixated on product, that process doesn't get its due.  Many times I've seen a student rush to market with a draft that I knew was only half-cooked - that didn't really pulse with a clearly understood subtext.  The specs that sell have a peculiar, distinctive feeling and energy - a unique kind of confidence in their storytelling - that tells a reader in no uncertain terms, "I've gone beyond the surface of this story and broken through to what it's really about."

One senses that confidence on the page immediately.  It announces itself with a surety of focus and tone in the execution (it's a good read) that's born of a writer having successfully grappled with the true meaning of a story.  Have you gone to the mat with that issue, in your latest spec?  If you want to get your movie made, now's the time to take it on. 

[Empire artwork: pjlighthouse.com]

Million Dollar Screenplay Tip #4

Continuing this week's series of tips - specific aspects of craft and creativity I've found in spec scripts that sell, based on my years of reading screenplays and doing notes on studio projects...

Tip #4: Scripts that sell speak to universal subjects in a distinctive voice.

One knowledgeable answer to the question, "What do the studios want?" is: The same but different.

They want yet another comic book super-hero franchise installment, but they want it with a new spin - say, featuring a darker-than-dark villain whose spooky nihilism calls the hero's very existence into question (see: The Dark Knight).  They want yet another comedy about an unwanted pregnancy, but they want it from a new angle - say, from a contemporary teen's arch, blackly comedic POV (see: Juno), or from the POV of an unlikely boy-man slacker-shlub who can't believe he even got to sleep with a hottie, let alone got her Knocked Up.

It's for this reason that, should the movie live up to its effective trailer, this Christmas's Sherlock Holmes is going to be a gazillion-bucks-making franchise-starter.  What could be more old hat than Holmes?  Right, but we haven't seen this Holmes before - muscular and action star-like, with the winking wit of Robert Downey Jr. in the role and an anything-but-stodgy Jude Law in the place of his traditionally fat and nerdly sidekick, Watson.  The trailer makes it look like Lethal Weapon in hip Victorian drag.

One secret to "high concept," along with originality - that lightning-in-a-bottle element that can't be manufactured or faked - is an original take: a fresh, inspired point of view on a familiar idea that has inherent universal appeal.  This is where "personal voice" comes into play on a field that often seems anything but personal.  The individual writer who has a truly unique take on a same-old notion is the one who wins the day.

Thus, a few years back, over the same six-month period, I read at least four different spec screenplays entitled Always a Bridesmaid.  The plight of "the woman who never gets to be the bride" was clearly a movie that wanted to get made.  But the one that actually did - Aline Brosh McKenna's savvy 27 Dresses - got made because it had the quirkiest, smartest angle: its heroine was The Ultimate Bridesmaid, a woman who lived and breathed other people's weddings... and got unwittingly involved with the very guy who wrote her favorite weddings column (while her older sister snatched the man of her dreams, thus replicating our heroine's always-a-bridesmaid dilemma).

Why go see a movie about a guy who's scared to meet his fiancee's parents?  Well, what if his prospective father-in-law is an ex-CIA agent with lie-detector equipment in his basement... and our hero is a nurse?  Casting Robert De Niro was the coup, of course, but Meet the Parents had its distinctive take already there on the screenplay page.

Here's the takeaway to consider: When you approach the market with your spec script, you're asking people to spend millions of dollars on your story, enlisting thousands of people in bringing it to cinematic life.  So what sauce did you put on that very pricey sandwich?  What makes your script just different enough to make us sit up and take notice?

If your concept isn't rife with originality, your execution should be.  I can't count how many "bunch of guys go to Vegas and high jinks ensue" specs I've read over the years.  But "guys wake up after a wild night's bachelor party in Vegas and have no idea what happened to them, or where the groom is?"  I've only read one of those, and you know what became of it.

The funny thing is, nowadays practically every spec comedy that's got guys, Vegas and/or a wedding in it is being pitched as "the next Hangover," but that's a load of crap.  The Hangover became a monstrous hit because it was driven by a mystery.  Yes, it had good guy gags.  But its writers' decision to tell the story by "leaving out last night" is what made the movie special.

Nothing's more commonplace than boy meets girl, yet rom-com specs sell every year.  Sometimes it's the concept (see: Boy meets girl at the end of the movie, aka Sleepless in Seattle), sometimes it's the execution (see the it's-literally 500 Days of Summer).  But something unique and distinctive must be put into the mix.

Think about your movie.  What spin, take or tweak are you adding to the equation, that'll make the same thing different, and get it to the screen?

[Money dog art: fun24-7.blogspot.com]

Million Dollar Screenplay Tip #3

We're midway through a week of "tips" - specific aspects of craft and creativity I've found in spec scripts that sell, based on my years of reading screenplays and doing notes on studio projects. 

This one may inspire rolling eyeballs and groans, but bear with me, and I'll keep it brief.

Tip #3:  Scripts that sell are models of form and brevity.

Nobody in the industry likes to read scripts, and readers - the biz's first line of resistance - are often the most curmudgeonly sticklers of all when it comes to format and length.

So ask yourself: Why, after spending anywhere from a couple of months to a couple of years or more on a spec screenplay, do you want to have the first industry people who read it encounter errors in format and/or excessive verbiage, and thus want to throw the thing across a room?

You know the drill, as it's basic 101 stuff, but observe three simple rules. 

One: Write with plenty of white space.  Narrative shouldn't feature paragraphs of more than four lines (three or less is ideal), and dialogue shouldn't come in fat chunks. 

Two: Traditional format - i.e. proper slugs, savvy use of formal conventions, etc. - is the coin of the realm.  A professional tennis player doesn't want to face you on a court that has no net, and we drive on the right side of the road for a reason.  Keep up with trends (e.g. The use of "CONTINUOUS" in slugs, except when specifically used to indicate we're in the same linear moment as you cut to another location, has been out of fashion for over a decade, and "CUT TO:" is being used less and less).

Three: Write shorter scripts.  In our ADD-riddled culture, the average selling spec is no longer 120 pages. 110-115 is more the norm, and in comedies especially, it's under 110 (somewhere between 95 and 105 seems to be the contemporary comedic sweet spot).

Generally, less is more.  Some scribe once likened screenwriting to crafting "a hundred pages of Haiku," and most scripts I've read that have sold in the past few years have a compressed, shrewdly compacted energy born of achieving the most with the least amount of words.  

Don't just take my word for it, go have a look at one of 2009's most high-profile spec sales: Kyle Killen's The Beaver, which topped last year's "Black List" (a list of scripts most liked by industry insiders) and subsequently got set up with Jim Carrey, then Steve Carell, and now Mel Gibson (?!) to star. 

The Beaver is about as seemingly uncommercial and indie as they come (it's about a man whose fake animal hand puppet starts talking to him and takes over his life), but here's the thing: While it does bend rules (employing a lot of voice-over and long speeches), it positively zooms in the read - white space galore, beautifully succinct, sharp, vivid narrative.  So even someone who wouldn't be inclined to read it, if told the log line, is seduced into reading from its first energetic page to its last: page 109.

You can be lax and sloppy with this stuff; you can try to reinvent the format wheel.  Why not do what the specs that sell do, instead?

[Beaver photos originally on: Splash News]

Million Dollar Screenplay Tip #2

This week Living RomCom departs from its usual format to present five "million dollar screenplay tips" - aspects of craft and creativity found in spec scripts that sell: one tip a day, Monday through Friday.  These tips are based on my experience working within the studio system as a story analyst who reads specs and does notes on projects in development.

Tip # 2:  Selling screenplays are aimed at a specific audience.

This one may seem like a "duh!" no-brainer, but you'd be surprised by the number of pre-pro screenwriters I encounter who've never seriously thought about who they're writing their screenplay for.

Here's the necessary paradox about writing a spec script: Your story should be personal (that is, be about something that's of passionate importance to you), and it shouldn't be formulaic (that is, not slavishly adhering to only the most traditional story conventions). Nonetheless, it needs to be mindful of the expectations and preferences of that mysterious beast, the paying public.

Artful though your story may be, it's an entertainment that is tacitly designed to earn its producers money.  For this reason it behooves you - at some point in your development process - to think about your movie from the buyers' point of view.  And satisfying an audience is practically all these guys ever think about.

Because studios must fill slates (roster of features they plan to release every year), and specific genres balance them out, buyers look at scripts in pragmatic terms.  First and foremost, they want to know what the script is and who it's for: Is it an action thriller?  That's one kind of audience.  A family comedy?  That's another.

Thus a family comedy that's littered with explicit sexual humor is a fish with feathers.  An action thriller that's light on scares, fights and explosive violence is a dog that won't hunt.  It's for this reason that I deplore the romantic comedy specs I've read that are neither romantic nor funny: they make no sense.  We go to a comedy to have LOL laughs; we go to a romantic comedy to have our warm-and-fuzzy romantic feelings titillated (they don't call them date movies for nothing).  So anyone writing a rom-com spec that delivers neither side of the equation is writing for an audience of one.

Does your adult drama have a female protagonist? Then you're probably writing for a female-driven audience (i.e. the women will lead the charge, and the men may come later).  If it's truly "adult," you're probably addressing women in their 30s, 40s, even (gasp) 50s and older.  Think about one of those women, and what she may want to see on the screen.

I'll wager she'll actually show up at a theater this Christmas to see Nancy Meyers' It's Complicated - a movie starring Meryl Streep, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin, about a remarried woman who's tempted to take up with her ex-husband.  Haven't seen it yet, but I'm guessing it delves deeply into the emotional concerns of a woman of a certain age and that it doesn't feature a hair-raising car chase that ends in explosive bloodshed.

Here's a good quick post about a spec script sale from this past year that illustrates this idea: the writer "had a clear understanding of the exact type of movie he was crafting."

Think about your audience.  At some point in your process, ask of your project - Who would want to see this?  Who'll pay for the sitter and the parking and the refreshments?   Or who'll see it with four friends and splurge their allowance on seeing it again?

Maybe you're writing a "four quadrant" movie (one that appeals to young, old, male and female), but my point is: there are such things as quadrants.  And the spec scripts that sell generally target at least one of them.  I'm not talking about purposely perverting your story for commercial ends - I'm suggesting that you think about who, specifically, might best enjoy the story you want to write.  If you know that, you'll be able to do the often necessary tailoring that will make your spec script a good enough fit to make a sale.