Owen Egerton on Writing, SCOTUS on Selling Used Books, Valuing Your Script, Odd Punctuation – Random Things for this Week

A few random things for this week:

• Advice for writers. Owen Egerton, Austin’s favorite author for a billion years running and someone I interviewed two years ago, recently published a list of 30 pieces of advice for writers.  My favorites are 12, 14, and 21.
• Could selling used books become illegal? Though the title is sensationalist, this is a well-crafted article about a student from Thailand who bought textbooks overseas (where they’re cheaper) and then sold them in the U.S. at below-market rates for profit. Wiley sued, claiming a copyright violation of sorts, and has thus far has won the suit to the tune of $600,000. The case is now before the Supreme Court, and whichever way they rule, the implications their decision could have on the publishing industry could be pretty staggering.
• How much is your film script worth? Script mag put together an article on valuing your work as a writer breaking into the industry. Most of the beginning is pretty basic and self-explanatory, but once you get to the bottom it has some really interesting points about coming in as an “investor” or a co-producer.
• Unusual Punctuation Marks. I think the interrobang, the percontation point, the exclamation comma, and the question comma should become standard usage. What do you think?

InkTip Loglines

My favorite loglines from this month’s issue of InkTip magazine:

• Coal for Christmas (Family feature by Lois Wickstrom and Jean Lorrah) - A young boy fears his baby sister will die of pneumonia in their freezing home, so he tries to be bad enough to force Santa to bring him whole load of coal for Christmas.
• Dead Again (1/2 hour comedy pilot by Agata Darlasi and Angelo Kyritsis) - An arrogant executive is cursed to die every day at 10:47 pm in ridiculous ways.
• Military Disco (Comedy feature by Patrick Connelly) - Two privates try to get themselves kicked out of the Army by pretending they’re gay and starting a dance club, but their plan backfires when Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell is repealed and the military leadership sees it as an opportunity to bolster recruitment.
• Repatriation (Drama by Janelle Dessaint Kimura) - An American photographer in Tokyo is forced to leave her Japanese husband behind when world governments methodically join together to repatriate all citizens to their country of racial origin, creating an artificial “post racial” world. She risks everything to circumvent the new world order to raise her children in a diverse, secure location.
• In Search of Cyndi (Romantic Comedy by Ben Espin) - On a frigid beach, two wayward teenagers discover a severed, frozen foot wearing a gold anklet with “Cyndi” engraved on it. The boys embark on a comical but heartfelt search to match this unusual “glass slipper” with its Cinderella. Happily ever after has never been so – awkward.
• The Zamboni Driver (Comedy by Scott Teel) - Sick of watching losing sports stars earn outrageous salaries, a fed-up, underpaid NHL Zamboni driver requests a $5 million contract. He loses his job, but not before he becomes a media sensation, inspiration to the home team’s players, and hero to millions in the working class.
• The Sleep Traveller (Sci-Fi feature by Faye Stergioula) - In an attempt to find out who ran him over, a cripple resorts to hypnosis. When the amateur hypnotist asks him to avoid the car, he does it – and wakes up able-bodied!
• Charisma (Suspense feature by Sean Lisik, and not the same as the script by the same name I wrote several years ago) - Ninety-nine percent of the world’s serial killers are male. “Charisma,” displays the manipulative, seductive differences of the exception.
• The Healing Gland (Suspense feature by George Gaio Mano) - An accident reveals that a man carries a cure for cancer in his body. Unfortunately, removing the cure from his body will kill him, and that is what everybody wants to do.

This, of course, doesn’t include the logline for Postville, which also happens to appear in this month’s issue.

Fifty Shades, Showing v. Telling, and Gay Characters – Random Things for this Week

A few random things for this week:

• Clinical psychologist rips Fifty Shades a new one – This article, “Fifty Shades of Grey Giving Bondage a Bad Name,” is an opinion piece written by a clinical psychologist and published in the Sydney Morning Herald. In a nutshell, the author, who in 2006 published what at the time was the largest empirical psychological study on people in the BDSM community, doesn’t have a lot of great things to say about the book. While I agree with her on most counts — that the sex is “boring, repetitive, and leads women to aspire to undesirable and frankly unattainable goals,” that “in BDSM terms, Grey is a lightweight,” and that “Fifty Shades is just another bodice ripper,” I disagree that it demonizes BDSM and the people who practice it. Although I haven’t read all three books (I’ve skimmed most of the first two), from what I’ve read, it’s the protagonist who thinks it’s terrible (or odd, or unusual) at first, not the author. The protagonist becomes a convert, at least to an extent.

  Of course, her argument that the book gives the (false) impression that all people who practice BDSM are psychologically disturbed is not without merit. As a writer, I’m inclined to defend the author, purely from a standpoint of a good story needing good conflict. If Christian Grey was emotionally stable, Fifty Shades couldn’t have sustained a trilogy — nor would it have galvanized a bidding war for the movie rights.

  Regardless, it’s an interesting article. Check it out.

• 5 Ways to Know If You’re Showing or Telling – Although the section on “dialogue tags” contradicts itself, lots of good suggestions here for improving writing quality.
• A few weeks ago I was involved in a Facebook discussion about how gay characters are portrayed on screen.

  
  Then on Sunday I attended a script reading and listened to a script by someone completely unconnected to the community above, who wrote a script where the main character was gay and one of the points of the script is that his gayness was “not the driving force of the movie.” Coincidence or alien plot? You decide.

In Defense of Daniel Tosh

Last week, the Internet was all abuzz about Daniel Tosh threatening a woman in the audience with rape. For those unfamiliar with the story, it goes something like this: girl goes to comedy club, where Daniel Tosh is performing; Daniel Tosh makes lots of rape jokes; girl shouts out that rape jokes are never funny; Tosh says, “Wouldn’t it be funny if that girl got raped by like, 5 guys right now?”

Interestingly, much of the controversy about this story is whether or not rape jokes are funny. I’ve seen several posts about Sarah Silverman doing a rape joke “properly,” supposedly from a routine done roughly the same time as Tosh was doing his joke. But I’m not going to talk about that. Nor am I going to argue that this was the “right” or “appropriate” thing for him to say or do. But I am going to offer a look from his perspective.

First off, if you go to a Daniel Tosh show, you need to expect that you’ll be offended. It pretty much comes with the territory. Going to a Tosh show and complaining about any of the content would be like going to a porn convention and complaining about the objectification of women. In the victim’s account of the story, she says she didn’t know who he was, that she thought he was just “some yahoo who somehow got a gig going on after [Dane] Cook,” but even so, it’s a comedy show, and many comedians (Dane Cook included) dabble heavily in the offensive when it comes to their comedy.

This brings me to my second point: never heckle a comedian. One of the things every comedian learns is how to handle hecklers, and one of the best ways to do that is pretty simple: you humiliate them. Make them realize (in a way that’s entertaining for the rest of the audience) that you’re in charge of the show, that they’re not being funny, and that if they continue to shout out you’re just going to make them look like a complete idiot. If you don’t, the show gets out of control.

Many comedians have a standard bit that they use to deal with hecklers, but those don’t always fit — as probably would have been the case here. So looking at it from Tosh’s perspective, he’s on stage, he gets heckled, he’s gotta put his heckler down, and he’s gotta figure out how to do it on the fly, in front of a couple hundred people. So he says what he says.

To be sure, it was a pretty horrific thing to say, and I think everyone agrees on that, Tosh included. He’s since apologized via Twitter, and though his apology doesn’t come across as very … well … apologetic, I think if he had it to do over again he would come up with a different way to handle the situation. Because yes, rape jokes can be funny, but even he seems to realize that suggesting an audience member be gang-raped is over the line.

Teenage Ninja Turtles

Ever since the news broke that Michael Bay’s Ninja Turtles relaunch will be changing their backstory and consequently removing the word “Mutant” from their name, fans have been freaking the f*** out. To quote Michael Bay, “Take a breath and chill.”

Remember: Michael Bay’s allegiance isn’t to fans of the TMNT corpus. They’re going to go see the movie anyway. His job is to make a CGI-fest that everyone else will go see. And if TMNT co-creator Peter Laird is on board, it’ll probably be okay.

Is There an ePublishing “Bubble”?

Last week, Nathan Bransford wondered if there is an “ePublishing bubble.” In his post, he links back to an article in UK’s The Guardian which argues “yes,” based on Hyman Minsky’s Financial Instability Hypothesis.

Great idea. Unfortunately, he only gets to the second of seven linear steps before making an argument that’s tragically flawed:

Following the disturbance, prices in that sector start to rise. Initially, the increase is barely noticed. Usually, these higher prices reflect some underlying improvement in fundamentals. As the price increases gain momentum, more people start to notice. Speculation thrives.

On first inspection, epublishing doesn’t appear to fit the model here, as it’s clear that the prices of ebooks are falling drastically (in the week of Jan 1, 28% of the top 100 ebooks on Amazon were 99p or under, and 48% were under £2.99). But that’s because we’re looking at this the wrong way round – from the perspective of the consumer. The ebook explosion is coupled with the rise of the e-reader, and the profits there are in the hands of the manufacturers. There has also been a fast turn around in these new technologies from Kindle to Kindle Fire, from iPad to iPad 2; and a brand new market of consumers for these products has appeared from nowhere. The change to cheap ebooks and self-published ebooks is a “change in underlying fundamentals”.

Um. No. By this logic, you can manipulate any profit-making enterprise to fit your hypothesis. The iPhone is a bubble! Poker and Riverdance were both bubbles! Except these weren’t bubbles, these are trends - things whose popularity gradually expanded, and just as gradually receded to levels that were more sustainable in the long term. Yes, as with the Gold Rush, most of the profits are made by the people selling the products and services telling you “how to do it.” Just as most of the profits were made in poker, and in Riverdance. In all cases, though, the post-recession levels of participation were still much higher than they were before the expansion.

A “bubble,” by contrast, requires unsustainable overvaluation that will be corrected suddenly and massively (a “burst”). Like what happened in housing last decade, or with the dot-com before before that, or the stock market in the 1920s. In all of these cases consumers were paying the higher prices. When consumers are shelling out for concrete products that makes their lives easier, that’s the opposite of speculation; it’s commerce.

Many people are arguing that the next bubble will be in education. Although there is some dissent with that argument, I find that one much more likely to stick. But self-publishing, though it may reach a peak in popularity, will not collapse in the same way the housing market did. It will simply reach a healthy long-term equilibrium, where some people succeed and others fail.

Cool Things I Found This Week

#3. Bracing for Impact – The Future of Big Publishing in the New Paradigm – A well-constructed rant about big publishing’s mistakes over the past decade, which made the exact same mistake the music industry made before them, focusing their support on the brick & mortar retailer rather than the service their providing to their end users, therefore allowing other companies to swoop in and capture the inevitable new market. My favorite takeaway from this article: the decline of the b&m bookstore does not hurt new authors. e-Publishing provides the opportunity to take a chance on new authors at a fraction of the cost, and  gives those authors the chance to publicize themselves at a fraction of the cost.

#2. Paul Coelho: How I Write - Tim Ferriss, author of The Four Hour Work Week, contacted this renowned Brazilian author with a series of questions about his writing process, and to his surprise, Coelho responded with a half-hour audio response. “If you want to capture ideas, you’re lost, because you’re not going to live your life. You’re going to be capturing ideas. You’re going to be detached from the emotions you need to live fully. … I strong encourage writers not to think about writing every moment they’re doing something else.” My other favorite quote: “There are only four stories: a love story between two people, a love story between three people, a struggle for power, and a journey.”

#1. SMonologue on Failure from Silent Bob Speaks – This is filmmaker Kevin Smith’s blog, I think designed to promote his book Tough Sh*t: Life Advice from a Fat, Lazy Slob Who Did Good. This post, presumably an excerpt from the book, is an inspirational monologue designed to lift up one of his fans from the ashes. My favorite quote: “Nobody can hold you back in life as much as your own fear that you’ll fail. I’ll save you some time: you will fail. Sometimes spectacularly.”

Hollywood Pitch Sales 2011

Last week, The Grid published a this report on Hollywood Pitch Sales in 2011. For anyone interested in screenwriting, or feature film development in general, it would be a good thing to check out. A couple of takeaways:

• It’s shocking to realize how few movies Hollywood actually makes. The studios bought a combined 80 pitches and 59 spec scripts, total. I guess that’s about to be expected, but when you consider that there are probably hundreds of thousands of people trying to make those sales, it’s a little humbling.
• 90 agents and 52 managers made these sales. Wonder how many of them are going to be getting queried by writers in the next year. Seems like it might be a good idea to find the ones that sold one, and query them to see if they’re looking for more talent.
• Almost 35% of the pitches bought were comedies. 16% were thrillers, 13% action/adventure, 13% drama, 12% sci fi, and there was only one fantasy pitch and 1 horror pitch sold. I’m surprised by the fantasy number – expected more for that one, especially with all the adaptations that are constantly being made. Not surprised at all by horror – that’s a market that indie filmmakers have successfully taken away from Hollywood. I was a little surprised to see the comedy number that high, but it immediately made sense – it’s the easiest genre to pitch for a high concept and medium-to-low budget.

And now, for my favorite projects from the list:

6. First Man - Johnny Knoxville, of Jackass fame. “Centers on a man whose wife is elected president. A natural hellraiser, he has totally behaved himself during his wife’s presidential campaign, only to find the dynamic of their relationship changes after he moves into the White House and becomes First Man.”

5. Untitled Cook/Greenberg Pitch - Richard Donner to produce. “Follows the true story of Laura Vikmanis, a mother of two, who became the oldest cheerleader in the NFL at the age of 40.”

4. Who Invited Her? - Reese Witherspoon. “A woman insists on tagging along on a guy’s bachelor party weekend.”

3. 364 - Brian Grazer and Ron Howard. “The title refers to the number of days in a year that a normal guy spends each year figuring out the heroic deeds he will perform on the one day each year that he has super powers.”

2. Untitled Cook/Weisberg Female Action Pitch (formerly called Bitches 11) - “Pitched as an upside down James Bond movie told from the point of view of the women he fucked over. They’ve come together, 11 beautiful but angry bitches, ready to put him where no man wants to be.”

1. The Girlfriend Equation - “Loosely inspired by the true story of an MIT grad student who attempted to find the love of his life by creating a math equation.”

Most Profitable Films of 2011

Yesterday, The Bitter Script Reader analyzed 2011′s Top 20 grossing films, and what that means for us as screenwriters. The summary is, not surprisingly, a bitter one, pointing out that 18 of the top 20 are either franchises, adaptations, animated films, or some combination of all of the above. And as BSR points out, these categories represent  ”the three types of scripts that it’s nearly impossible for an aspiring screenwriter to break in with.”

As I was looking at the numbers, though, I realized that most of these top-grossing films also had enormous budgets. Which got me thinking: which films were the most profitable - i.e., had the highest box office return as a percentage of their budget?

Movie	Budget	US Gross	Profit Margin (Domestic)
Insidious	$1,500,000	$54,009,150	3601%
Paranormal Activity 3	$5,000,000	$104,007,828	2080%
Courageous	$2,000,000	$34,088,360	1704%
Like Crazy	$250,000	$3,372,100	1349%
Kevin Hart: Laugh at My Pain	$750,000	$7,706,436	1028%
The Help	$25,000,000	$169,499,546	678%
Justin Bieber: Never Say Never	$13,000,000	$73,013,910	562%
Jumping the Broom	$7,000,000	$37,295,394	533%
Bad Teacher	$19,000,000	$100,292,856	528%
Bridesmaids	$32,500,000	$169,106,725	520%
Our Idiot Brother	$5,000,000	$24,814,830	496%
50/50	$8,000,000	$35,016,118	438%
Apollo 18	$5,000,000	$17,686,929	354%
The Ides of March	$12,500,000	$40,850,788	327%
The Hangover Part II	$80,000,000	$254,464,305	318%
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part II	$125,000,000	$381,011,219	305%
Limitless	$27,000,000	$79,249,455	294%
Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Rodrick Rules	$18,000,000	$52,698,535	293%
No Strings Attached	$25,000,000	$70,662,220	283%
Super 8	$50,000,000	$127,004,179	254%

Before I go any further, let me mention that I got my data here, and there were some conspicuous omissions – including six of the films from the Top 20 grossing list – but after collecting the data for those films manually, I discovered that of those six films, only one made it into the top 20 most profitable, so I think this list can at least give us some useful information. It’s also worth noting that films released late in 2011 won’t make this list, though they may very well be headed in that direction. For example, War Horse has yet to make back its budget, but it was only released a week and a half ago.

The first thing I notice is that of these films, 4 are horror films (Insidious, Paranormal Activity, Apollo 18, Super 8), 9 are comedies (Laugh at My Pain, Jumping the Broom, Bad Teacher, Bridesmaids, Our Idiot Brother, 50/50, The Hangover: Part II, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, No Strings Attached), and 5 are dramas (Courageous, Like Crazy, The Help, 50/50, The Ides of March). Fourteen of them had budgets under $20 million, none were animated, and only 6 were adaptations or sequels (Paranormal Activity 3, The Help, The Ides of March, Harry Potter, Limitless, Diary of a Wimpy Kid). All of this, I think, is good news, as these are the films that make people’s careers.

The worldwide results admittedly look much more like the franchise/adaptation/animated features list that BSR posted about, as does the list of films in places 21-60 (the 100-200% of budget range). But I think this is an interesting point: comedies and horrors sell well on spec, and can launch a career, as can a good drama.

What do you think?

Publishing Predictions for 2012

Last week, Author Media produced a post predicting how the publishing industry will change in 2012. Some highlights:

• eBook sales continue to go up (duh), and may comprise more than half the fiction market in 2012.
• “a pricing structure will emerge in which price is proportional to quality.  The market will reward books that are priced “correctly” on the price-quality curve and the market will punish those books that are priced either too high or too low.”
• Major shakeup in companies – a lot of smaller publishers will be bought or squeezed out of the market, self-publishers and (their freelance service providers) will continue to become more popular, and at least some of the Big Six will finally realize that they need to rethink their publishing models if they want to survive.

Of course, my favorite part of this is the prediction that freelance editors, like myself, will have banner years, and that “entre-authors” (entrepreneur authors) will do well while people who “dabble at writing will see decreased success.” Combine this with the fact that the Year of the Dragon usually brings prosperity, and I’m feeling pretty good.