Tuesday, December 20, 2016

2016 Barter Deals and Discounts

Happy Holidays!

Save 20% on Professional Analysis or Snapshot Service or 10% on coaching or Mentoring. Mentoring clients also get a free copy of my 10-hour DVD set Complete Screenwriting: From A to Z to A-list. Sign up this month and use the services anytime in the new year.

UPDATE: Get in touch with me before January 2 and you can extend the discount for a week.

Here are some reasons to take advantage of this time-sensitive offer:
  • If you sign up this month, you may be able to take a deduction on this year’s taxes.
  • You can save money now AND later. When my book comes out next year, I will be raising my personal consulting rates and offering services for beginners through a couple of my associates. However, my current clients will have my current prices fixed for them for at least six months after any changes to my prices.
  • If you want to change the life of a write in your life, purchase a gift certificate for my Coaching or Mentoring services. Don't compare Mentoring to notes. Instead compare it to a semester at film school or a yearlong certificate program. With Mentoring and either my Complete Screenwriting DVD set or a seat in an up and coming class, writers receive up to 100 hours of close attention with more than half-of-it being one-on-one.
  • If you want to give loved ones or family members a little hint about your Holiday Wish-List, send them here. Let them know if you're interested in the DVD Set or Story Analysis Services. We can set up a gift certificate.
REGIFTING CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE

I like being creative in my dealmaking… especially this time of year when it might allow you or someone you care about to get feedback that could really impact a script or career. PayPal invoices allow you to pay for your services with any credit or debit card. We can also work out payment plan. And of course…

My yearly barter needs list that can be all or part of a deal:

LOW END

Gift cards for Best Buy, Barnes and Noble, Amazon, Zingermann's (And Canters, Katz’s, Juniors and Jerrys, I guess, too), Lowes/Home Depot (300 max...let's not create too much more work), Chipotle, Kohls, Apple Store (could turn to middle end), Verizon, Mortons, Ruth’s Chris, PetSmart.

MIDDLE END

Gift card for Guitar Center. Frequent Flyer Miles, used Mac Laptop (mostly for Web and Word) for my assistant, Web Design which also includes things like SEO, marketing, etc.

HIGH END

Flight vouchers, time shares, divorce/family attorney services in New York for family member, used car on East Coast for lifelong friend in need. Places to stay while visiting Paris or Italy.

Save $100 on DVD set until January 10

 Use Discount code 2016 and save $100 on the 6-disc set, Complete Screenwriting.
THE TRAILER
"Complete Screenwriting is more information-dense than anything ever recorded. It's so head-and-shoulders above what anyone else is teaching that It'll take a while for it to sink into most people's heads. That's actually my favorite thing about what you teach. It takes re-reading or re-watching a few times for such big concepts to integrate into your screenwriting consciousness. It's like learning algebra for the first time." - Devin M

Email me to make a deal or ask any questions!
.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

OUTRAGE ON THE PAGE






“Network. Dr. Strangelove. Do the Right Thing. Thelma and Louise. Taxi Driver. Birth of a Nation (2016). Roger and Me. Umberto D. Apocalypse Now. Writers, beware of Facebook becoming self-medication for outrage. Channel it.”

I posted the above quotation on my personal Facebook page about a week before the election. I listed films which were inspiring in how they were able to express a sense of outrage within a mostly conventional approach. It didn’t surprise me that the above meme popped up after the election that paid homage to a film on the list, Dr. Strangelove. Here is an expansion on my thoughts on how to deal with the current times in your art.

***
If you are a storyteller, you have a moral obligation to strip away falsity in your stories to create something authentic and true. Cinema is such a powerful medium that audience need to see themselves, parts of themselves—their truths—in the world and characters reflecting back to them from the screen.

Audiences are actively seeking some authenticity on the screen. Even when it’s there in the most surprising or implicit way, it can transform them in a magical way. It’s a powerful experience that can teach people how to be, remind them of who they are, and make them feel connected—not so alone in the world. Those bigger-than-life images affirm their lives, give credence to their existence.

Back in the day, the filmmakers of the Italian Neorealism movement reacted to their collective trauma, loss, and disillusionment during and after World War II. They couldn’t bear the artifice and superficiality of Hollywood movies, their own white telephone films (the symbol of the complacent status quo bourgeoisie) and contrived melodramas. They lost their patience and turned the cameras to the suffering right in front of them. They wanted to capture something closer to the unglamorous, unvarnished reality, as a way to connect directly to common people and their suffering.

However, if you look closely at the films of that time of De Sica, Rossellini, Visconti, their styles differed vastly. We can all learn something about that. Ultimately, one of the most passionate film movements, Neorealism, wasn’t about style or form. It was about humanity.

In the early 1960s, Federico Fellini put the moment in film history in a larger context:
 “Neorealism is not about what you show, but how you show it. It’s simply a way of looking at the world without preconceptions or prejudices. Some people are still convinced that neorealism should only be used to show a particular type of reality – social reality to be exact. But then it becomes propaganda.”
Creating an objective slice-of-life reality that mimics the minutiae of our day-to-day grin is not the only path to capture some truthful essence of our lives. It’s about honesty. It’s about your reality. It’s about authenticity.
Your personal voice might reveal itself in ways that these films do…
  • As outrage – See above.
  • How we dream – Wild Strawberries, Fantasia, Spellbound
  • How we nightmare – Night of the Hunter, Rosemary’s Baby, Blue Velvet
  • As magical fountains of hope and optimism – Amelie, Wizard of Oz, Singing in the Rain
  • As adult fairytales that allow us the only chance to work out elements of our irrational side  After Hours, Birdman, Edward Scissorhands, Pan’s Labyrinth
  • As reminders that we are capable of uniting the most disparate, contradictory and illogical ideas, feelings and impulses – Persona, Mulholland Drive, Adaptation, The Orphanage, The Arrival
What’s broken about our society is also broken on the screen in mainstream films. Consider even the most systemic constructs of unfairness—in forms of prejudice and inequality. The dominant ideology translates these to symptomatic and specific representations on the screen that become codified rules themselves.
 
You can’t address every flaw in narrative cinema and society. However, the ones that prevent you from telling your story, you can attack on the page.
Here is an eclectic group of films that benefited from defying a status quo assumption or two: Mi Vida Loca, Carol, Dog Day Afternoon, Secretary, Hedwig's Angry Inch, Fruitvale Station.
This is not an intellectual process. Maybe not even political. But it’s definitely personal. To write in your voice, eradicate the assumptions and expectations that oversimplify, misdirect or obfuscate your ability to reveal yourself and your world in all of its nuanced complexity and humanity.
Allow people to see themselves on the screen. It could be a look into the struggles of a marginalized group. It could be a reminder that  it's okay not to be perfect: an ambiguous ending, a chubby protagonist, a character’s embarrassing flaw.

Ironically, your perfect script will honor the imperfect at the core of being human. 

Writing in your personal voice isn’t egotistical or solipsistic. It’s not selfish to tell personal and idiosyncratic stories. In fact, writing in your personal voice is perhaps the most selfless duty you should perform as an artist. 

The best way to show viewer their truth is to reveal some of yours.

The most personal story you tell will also be the most universal.



Wednesday, December 12, 2012

LOCK IN 2012 PRICES ON COACHING + GIFT IDEAS


Several new benefits for my coaching and mentoring clients will far outweigh the upcoming 2013 price increase. I have been spending and will continue to spend 5-10 additional hours on each project to help not only the script, but the writer's craft, to reach its full potential. After seeing every mentoring client that attended the last Champion Lab have a similar epiphany about screenwriting craft, I am including a free seat in a 3- to 5-day class for all new clients. These 25-40 hours in the small class exponentially accelerate writers' growth.

Coaching and mentoring clients will also receive benefits that include access to loaner copies of my DVD set, voluntary homework and exercises, free online courses and up to 12 months of access to exclusive content from me including videos, craft articles and outtakes from the DVD set.

If you have been considering a big step to improve your screenwriting career, don't compare Mentoring to notes. Instead compare it to a semester at film school or a yearlong certificate program. With Mentoring and a the lab, you receive up to 100 hours of close attention with more than half-of-it being one-on-one.

"My brain grew three sizes in the Champion Lab. Jim is a film savant who analyzes a script from multiple vantage points (writer, director, coach) which results in an avalanche of insight. I'm now coaching with him and his other-worldly abilities are making a huge difference in my work." - L.H. 


Sign up and here is what you get:
  • 20-35 hours (double that for mentoring) of feedback on your script: notes, discussions, emails, calls, work-shopping scenes, etc.
  • A free seat in the $600 East Coast Champion Lab, the upcoming Online Scene Writing Class and other classes.
  • Six or twelve months of access to exclusive content including videos, craft articles and outtakes from the DVD set starting in January.
  • $100 discount on my new multi-DVD set. (Mentoring clients have option of borrowing a loaner copy) 
  • Copies of Killer Endings and/or T-Word: Theme.
Remember, you can always test the waters with the $200 Snapshot Evaluation and if you upgrade to Coaching or Mentoring, you will receive credit for the entire fee.
  
Seeing a movie - or better yet, your own script - through Jim's eyes is like playing a round of golf with Arnold Palmer." - John Dummer
    
LOCK IN 2012 PRICES FOR YOURSELF 
OR AS A GIFT

There are a few ways Coaching can be within your budget. You can save money with a deposit, a payment plan or by taking advantage of a couple of the gift ideas below.

Make a down payment of 40% of the mentoring or coaching service by the end of the month and you will be guaranteed the current price on that service for the next 18 months -- a full year-and-a-half. The deposit is nonrefundable but can be used as a credit to any story analysis services at their regular price. When you are ready to use the service, pay the balance and we are ready to go.

"Jim is the definitive teacher. Always empathic, specific and insightful with his notes, never failing to inspire. If you work with Jim you will become the best writer you can be. Guaranteed." Geoff Parks actor/writer
And check out some other options below. 

 GIFT OPTIONS
 

Make the first of two or three equal payments by December 17 and take until end of February to make the final payment. Let me know it's a gift and we will send the DVD Killer Endings and a card-stock announcement that describes the service and all of the new perks above. Mentoring service will include my T-Word Theme DVD also.
 

Make a 50% deposit by December 17 and pay the balance by end of January. If it's a gift, we will send the DVD Killer endings and a card-stock certificate that describes the service and these perks:
  • Three months of access to exclusive content including videos, craft articles and outtakes from the DVD set, starting in January.
  • Free spot in Online Scene Writing Class (see above).
  • $75 discount on my new multi-DVD set.

 If you order by December 17 and let us know it's a gift, we will send a card-stock certificate/announcement that describes the DVD (on its way soon) and the free Online Scene Writing Class. If you order T-Word Theme or Killer Endings, there is a good chance they will arrive by December 23. Discount Code FINALLY will give you the current best deal.
 
GIFT CERTIFICATES

If you want to give loved ones or family members a little hint about your Holiday Wish-List, send them here. Let them know if you're interested in the DVD Set or Story Analysis Services. They can email me and we can arrange for digital or hard-copy gift certificates. 

Story analysis services will go through www.jamespmercurio.com and the DVDs through www.a-listscreenwriting.com with Paypal, Credit Card or Invoice.  If you have any questions or need to discuss how to keep a gift secret, let me know.

Thursday, October 4, 2012

THE WORST SET OF NOTES EVER

I sometimes tell a story involving Paddy Chayefsky to my students and clients. I don’t remember where I heard it and have not one shred of evidence that the incident ever took place. Why do I continue to tell it? Because even if it never happened, it’s still true.


It goes something like this…

Chayefsky was in a meeting with a young development exec who was giving him notes on his script. He raised a concern with something near the end, on, say, page 83 and Chayefsky, as the yarn unwinds, listened, nodded and agreed. Chayefsky assured him that he knew how to fix it. 

For me, what follows is a curious ellipsis. Maybe Chayefsky was being helpful in explaining himself. Maybe the exec had to flex his power and pushed for the solution. Maybe Chayefsky was actively getting under the “kid’s” skin. I am not sure what motivates the next action but somehow or another…

The legendary playwright/screenwriter proceeds to describe his plan for fixing the ending: he will rewrite page 23. The “suit” interrupts and reminds him that the issue was page 83. Chayefsky nods and confirms that he will take care of it… by tweaking page 23. The “Who’s on first?” sort of confusion continues and then you can assume your own “shaggy dog” ending.

The moral of the story could be a vague lesson about the absurdity of the development process. It could be the irony of a young kid telling an old school master how to do his job. To me, it illustrates that the identification and description of a problem often have nothing to do with how to solve it. And the two skills – to identify a story or craft problem and to be able to lead writer to a solution -- may be unrelated. This might seem like a trivial observation but the stakes are huge.

A client recently shared notes he received from a coverage service. The reader had some sense of the script problems and pointed them out. That’s their job, right?  I probably agreed with 80% or so of the 200ish comments. However, this set of notes may have been the worst I have ever seen.

If the reader wasn’t an idiot or wrong, what made the notes so bad?


First of all, the tone of the criticism pushed it over the edge for me. Mistaken for tough love, comments similar to “Pretty much all of the dialogue is unusable or unacceptable,” are merely insulting and discouraging. Beyond the nastiness, I also hated the way the reader, ironically, gave the writer his money’s worth by achieving some predetermined and bloated page count.

A valid comment like “Your dialogue is on the nose” would be supported with dozens of examples from the script. How exactly does a writer use this information to improve their script? If ten out of ten lines in a scene are “on the nose,” usually the solution isn’t beating your head against a wall and asking yourself this series of finely-tuned questions:

How do I take this line off the nose?
How do I take this line off the nose?
And this one?
And this one?

If this were a magical formula to better dialogue, my scene writing book would be done now and I would have trademarked this killer paradigm.

Let’s consider a typical list of problems with an amateur’s script:

- Dialogue is on-the-nose
- Scenes have too little conflict
- Turning points are wishy-washy
- Too much exposition
- Character goals are confusing
- Scenes go on too long
- Too much talk and small talk
- Theme is unclear
- Too many extraneous characters
- Characters sound similar

This ubiquitous summary in coverage is acceptable as long as each “topic” isn’t used to create a litany of redundant examples. The “laundry list” approach overwhelms writers and can kill their creative process and enthusiasm. These stakes can be brutal. I know writers who have abandoned a script for years or forever based on one person's opinion. The effectiveness of notes shouldn’t be measured by page count but rather by how well they lead a writer to workable solutions.

There is an old adage -- Don’t look where you fell, look where you slipped -- that can give us a fresh perspective. Almost every single instance of these 10 flaws in the script is a symptom of the exact same thing. Instead of having a 200-point checklist sitting next to your script, you simply have to ask a question or two and commit to an answer. A writer could throw away the 15 pages of notes and then jump into a rewrite that adheres to a principle or two and all but maybe a few of the 200 comments would be taken care of.

For the sake of surprise and audience retention, I will name the principle, expand it and extract a few user-friendly corollaries in the next issue of Craft & Career. However, we will continue to explore a simple and effective approach to the rewrite/development process which follows this mystery principle.

THE REWRITE

Let’s look at a way to approach the rewrite.

We would look at the protagonist’s introduction and simply ask, “What is their essence?” What is the one dilemma that sums them up? We can’t do anything else in the rewrite until we nail this. Often, characters in early drafts have vague set ups. No big deal. It goes with the territory. But our goal is to find the perfect scene: one that NAILS the character. Basically, if there is anything in the character’s first scene that isn’t special, that isn’t unique to him or her, it gets cut.  

What does this perfect scene, moment or line look like? The opening “fake suicide” sequence in Harold and Maude which is capped off when Harold’s mother asks him to be more “vivacious.” In an early scene in Dead Poets Society, Neal appeases his strict father (my buddy Kurtwood Smith from Hard Scrambled) who is forcing him to cut down on extra-curricular activities with a throwaway line that works on the surface and at the deepest level: “You know me, always taking on too much.” (Remember, he is the one who ultimately kills himself.) And do you remember what the mother in the opening of Superbad teases Seth about? If you consider the character, there is only one possible answer.

A hands-on technique to find the perfect line or action for your opening scene is to mine later scenes. Three pages in to your first draft, you don’t have a complete understanding of the character but by page 40, you might. Search scenes 3, 4 and 5 for a great action or line and “ask your character” if he or she is ready to say it earlier, like in scene 1.


In Coaching, my client and I will wrestle with the introduction to the protagonist and make sure we nail the character with ridiculous specificity. The goal is to figure out the essence of the character theoretically and to find a situation and visuals that express it in concrete terms. Besides raising the writer’s expectations for character introductions, the craft exercise makes it easier to find the core of the other characters.  

I can’t go into a fifteen-page discussion of character orchestration and cast design here (I will in New Orleans) but the succinct dilemma of the protagonist clarifies the essence of the supporting characters. They will be variations/foils/permutations/shadows of the protagonist. The different facets of the protagonist define the characteristics of the cast and vice versa.

Once you know your protagonist and other characters better, every scene has better and escalating conflict. You have better insight into what the characters are meant to clash about. The characters come in with stronger perspectives on that ONE THING. No small talk, no getting warmed up.

And like in a well-done time-travel movie, a ripple effect happens…

If you improve a scene, then what follows pales in comparison. You have created the new challenge of escalating the conflict and character in the next scene. The good news is that the energy you channel into earlier scenes gives you a better understanding of the characters, their relationships and perspectives. So half of your work is already done. Making one scene better makes the next scene better and so on and so on. That's why this process lends itself to rewriting chronologically.
 
If you think about how dialogue and conflict work, essentially, your challenge is to have one character get under the other character’s skin. The only way to create personal conflict is to know which buttons to push on a character. That's why this work has to be done before you can improve your dialogue
 
In this old blog, I showed how Heath Ledger as The Joker sniffed out the essence of a minor character and was able to antagonize him effectively. In a way, he may have reverse-engineered his speech to discover the cop's dilemma. But this can mimic your writing. Sometimes one line of good dialogue can lead to a better understanding of character. I never approach notes or writing in the exact same way, but I want to emphasize the importance of understanding how character set up clarifies dialogue and vice versa.

CONCLUSION 

You probably have figured out what the overriding principle is from my discussion but I will go into more depth with it in an upcoming Craft & Career and in my classes. If you are a beginner, here is a concrete tip for your rewrite that you can use now: 

Clarify and strengthen your characters’ goals and their points-of-view in each scene.  

If you are an intermediate or advanced writer and want to go through a process that will improve your script(s) and show you many subtle and advanced craft principles, check out my services.

I joke with some clients that I make them pay upfront because I don’t want to scare them away. I sometimes have my Paddy Chayefsky teaching moment. A writer knows their dialogue needs work and they want to “attack” it. I tell them that most likely the dialogue suffers because of the structure. They take a leap of faith, nod and say, “Okay, let’s work on structure.”  And then I saw, we will… by working on character.

Who's on first?

I don't know.

Third base.

I don’t think I can build a marketing campaign for my story analysis services around this tagline: “We will fix your dialogue by focusing on seemingly unrelated issues.” But I promise to not overwhelm you with a laundry list of criticisms and leave you without a plan to address them.

An awful set of notes can be really discouraging. I hope you haven't received any but if you have, try to extract a couple of overriding ideas and then throw the notes away. If you can’t figure out how to attack the few valid issues, ask others for feedback that focuses solely on those few areas. You can always use me as your story analyst services and we can even dissect the icky feedback. 

No matter what don’t let bad notes get you down. It's easy to make a great script look bad with a few pages of nit-picky notes. And a great set of notes can help you solve a hundred things at once. Don't give up looking for insight into your work but be willing to say"no" to feedback that doesn't work for you.

What’s cool about my coaching and mentoring services is that the process can follow an organic pace. I don’t have to give you 200 notes on lines of dialogue that won’t even be in the next draft. We can discuss areas in which you want to improve and we can look at the big-picture for your rewrite and then get closer to the nitty-gritty in later drafts.

Sign up for coaching and you can attend my next 3-4 day class or have a 75% discount on the New Orleans Retreat that starts on Monday. Sign up for Mentoring this week and you can join us next week for free.

"My brain grew three sizes in the Champion Lab. Jim is a film savant who analyzes a script from multiple vantage points (writer, director, coach) which results in an avalanche of insight. I'm now coaching with him and his other-worldly abilities are making a huge difference in my work."
--L.H. 2012 PAGE Semi-finalist, 2011 Winner, Just Effin Entertain Me---Sci-Fi