My friend and fellow writer, Dennis Fallon, convinced me to try writing screenplays shortly after he moved to L.A. My first reaction was to say “no” because I had just started my first novel and did not have a lot of time. However, Dennis, ever the salesman, sold me with the line, “It will make you a better writer, I guarantee.” And he was right. In order to fit the elements demanded by a Hollywood film into 90 to 110 pages of screenplay format you have to be brutally efficient with words and story. What’s more, you have to hit all of the marks of the Beat Sheet with almost pinpoint accuracy. People in Hollywood will flip to the approximate places in the script where things like the midpoint or dark night of the soul are supposed to be and if they don’t see it they stop looking and move on to the next script. Both of those elements–economy of words and story tightness–transfer nicely to short and long form writing.
Initially, Dennis and I worked on scripts separately, passing them back and forth for comments and suggested changes. This built up both of our writing chops and eventually lead to us working on a few scripts as co-writers, culminating in our script for Plague. Dennis shopped these various efforts around and made some connections (which is the real reason you write speculation scripts). Some of these connections lead to Dennis getting paying gigs that ate up his free time for spec script writing and our little screenplay experiment came to an end. But all was not lost! I had gained a ton of writing experience, Dennis had made some inroads in Hollywood and we had the base script that would inspire our graphic novel series Plague.
But even better than that, I had enough experience writing screenplays that when future film opportunities came up I was able to jump on them. Enter, “Hunter…”
Hunter
Shortly after moving back to central Pennsylvania from the Seattle area I got back in contact with some friends from high school. One of them, Mark Stitzer, had majored in film and worked as a Steadycam operator locally. After finding out that I wrote short stories and had worked on some spec scripts Mark told me to shoot him any ideas I had for short films. I said, “Sure!” and got back to wrangling my three toddler boys. I was very interested in film making but didn’t have a lot of time.
A couple months later I looked up from helping one of my kids on their balance bike at a local park and had a vision of creepy, furry alien things coming out of the woods in the distance and dragging away the people who were walking on the bike path. It was interesting, in that it begged the question, “What would you do if that actually happened right now?”
I mulled the idea over for a bit and realized that the scene as I pictured it required creating a bunch of furry alien costumes and scrounging up a couple dozen people to act it out. It was a bit much for Mark’s indie short plan. Luckily, I had recently purchased a trail camera to catch whatever was munching on our garden veggies and seeing the images from it gave me the inspiration for a scaled down version of the same idea.
I wrote the script and sent it to Mark. Mark applied some real-world pragmatism to it and sent it back. One of the changes he suggested involved taking out the main tension-building scene due to the practical limitations of filming at night so I asked a bunch of questions about what was, and was not, possible in that realm. After a fair amount of back and forth we finally settled on a modified tension build that ended in a similar manner. With a script hashed out it was time to film.
Finding a location turned out to be its own odyssey, but through a mutual friend (the very talented Alice Teeple) we ended up at a cabin in the back woods of Pennsylvania that was not what I had envisioned originally, but which turned out to be perfect for our scare scenes. We gathered some talent (fellow writer and volunteer actor Christopher Kügler), picked a weekend for filming and met up.
The amount of stuff I learned while shooting was staggering. Beyond lighting and staging and camera angles and audio pickups I learned why the script you write is just an outline for the final film. Those moss covered steps in the beginning? Welp, the steps are painted red and have skid strips on ’em now. Those shots of pictures on a wall banging around? Now it’s a shot of a bay window flexing because this cabin has wrap-around windows. The creepy flashes in the woods outside said windows? Now they’re trail camera pictures downloading on a computer in real time because the video camera isn’t picking up the strobes outside. In short, I learned what it meant to take something that exists virtually, on paper, and bring it to life in the real world. It gave me a real appreciation for the film making process and what film crews go through translating what’s on the page into what can be shown on screen.
After wrapping up shooting Mark cracked his knuckles and edited the whole thing into the final product. This was easily the largest chunk of work of the entire process and Mark did it all himself. He entered the final cut in some local-ish film festivals and it took home an award. It made all the hard work seem worth it, but also reinforced something I had been thinking about for a while, namely: writing is the single most efficient way to convey large stories to other people in terms of time and effort spent.
When you are finished writing the final, polished version of a book, that manuscript is the product. It’s what the consumer consumes. In any other media, be it comics or films, finishing the manuscript is just the start of the process. It takes countless more hours to translate that manuscript into pictures on a page or scenes in a video. This fact reinforced my desire to write books and short stories as those mediums maximized the creative-output versus time equation that I always felt I struggled against as a stay-at-home dad/part time software developer. Would I be up for working on a short film project again? Yes, absolutely. But I am also very content to sit in my recliner with a cat on my shins and a laptop on my lap and pound out the first draft of a story that will be done when I hit “save” on the final polish pass.
On the flip side, film making produces an end product that is most easily consumed by the largest number of people. You don’t have to be a reader and spend hours to get the whole story. You just have to hit the play button, sit back and get the story delivered to you in ten minutes (in the case of “Hunter”) or three hours (in the case of a Marvel movie). But it takes an exponentially larger amount of time and effort to create that finished product.
If you are interested, the full version of “Hunter” can be viewed at the bottom of this page on Mark’s website. I hope you enjoy it!