End Of Act One

Well that's that then. Finished the script. Typed FINAL after the title on the file name just to press the message home. (Yeah I know it's not really going to be final but I can relax for a bit now at least)
After one last read through, an idiot check for spelling mistakes and grammatical errors, I realised that the script is actually pretty good. I'm quite proud of it to be honest for a first feature length effort. Considering it's quite a straight forward genre story there's quite a lot of unexpected scenarios in there, which over time, add up to give an unique feel. The light hearted opening gives way to much darker scenes later on then finally to bleakness without letting up on the action. Thrilling and depressing? Now that's a sales point right there. Put that on the poster.

Now of course comes the hard part as they say: getting it produced.

I'm not fully capable of judging how much a script will cost yet, but I guess BDOJH could be made quite cheaply - not micro budget but defineately small. Less than a million sterling. I just have to select who to pitch it to. First up is WARP-X who I've always had in mind when writing this story, but I absolutely intend to give this to every company I can possibly think of that would be interested in this kind of thing.
One possibility is to approach an agent who has a much better chance of getting the script seen. I've read that agents only consider signing writer's if they have at least three scripts ready to sell. Fair enough, they are taking a gamble when they commit to a writer but there is a down side to that - you have to write THREE SCRIPTS. Three good ones aswell. Considering how long it took me to do this one that task seems herculean.
Having said that, I've learnt a lot about constructing a story, about setting an outline, the peaks and troughs of narrative, what works and what shouldn't even get near a page. I'm going to start straight away on a new script (plot keywords: dildo, avatar of creation, chainsaw, morris minor, rebirth, brothel, schoolgirl) and I'm guessing it won't take so long now that my process has become a lot more refined.

As for Bad Day On Jerusalem Hill well I guess we're approaching the end of act one. We've set up ground work and the long second act of selling it is about to start. Hopefully we'll make it to the halfway mark, the important Point Of No Return, and get in to production, over come a few obstacles on the way, learn a little about ourselves and then BLAM! - third act twist: Jesus returns to Earth invoking the rapture and film-making becomes redundant.

Can't wait.

Jeff Fahey and Daniel Baldwin in...'Urban Gauntlet'

It took me three days to write one sentence. One very important sentence. The shortest version of the script I could do. Not a tag line and not really a pitch, just a simple condensing of what the film is about. Boy was it hard.

It's important because it'll be the first thing that any prospective producer/financier is going to experience of the work, so it has to succinctly convey as much as possible about the story and get the reader's attention so that they want to continue reading the script itself.
The big problem i had was that my script when condensed in such as fashion sounds so utterly generic, and you know what it was always intended to be a traditional genre film so no real surprise there. It's always meant to have been about the execution of that traditional concept that set this story apart...not something you can easily get across in a one sentence precis.

This is what i came up with -


'An isolated community resorts to extreme measures to protect itself from people sent to help them.'


Quite simple you might think, but boy were there a lot of discarded one-liners.
To briefly recap the plot, 'Bad Day on Jerusalem Hill' is about our nerdy hero Lewis who is sent to remove graffiti from the notorious Jerusalem Hill housing estate as part of his community service - compulsory unpaid work as it's called. Here he meets up with Jordan who leads him to further criminal activity when they find a weed farm in one of the flats - they end up stealing a lot of cannabis. This sets in motion a chain of events that leads to the unfortunate death of one of the residents who then seek revenge. The entire community service team are pursued through Jerusalem, trapped and picked off one by one until the remaining survivors are forced to fight back. 'Who will survive and what will be left of them.'

So,let's break it down -

'An isolated community resorts to extreme measures to protect itself from people sent to help them.'

I think you get what this film is about straight away,you've seen this kind of thing before...'Wrong Turn', 'Deliverance', etc... an 'isolated community', cool okay we dig.

But here I've started with the community, not the people sent to clean up the graffiti who are the protagonists. This is to highlight that the script deals as much with the nominal 'bad guys' of the film as we do the heroes, something that is never really done in this kind of film.

Now we move on to 'resorts to extreme measures'. I think we all know what extreme measures implies but the fact that we qualify that with 'resorts' means that there's a definite sense that these people were provoked, perhaps they're not in the wrong.

But now it gets interesting ' from the people sent to help them.' This puts in question everything that's gone before. Is this isolated community justified in their retribution if the people they're after are meant to help them. If this whole scenario is has emerged from a benign beginning what could possibly have happened to make it go wrong. Violence, Intrigue, Community.

I went through dozens of permutations to arrive at that, including such atrocities as this -

A group of community service workers are sent to clean graffiti from the notorious Jerusalem Hill estate where a fatal accident triggers a relentless fight for survival as our heroes are pursued through an urban gauntlet.

'urban gauntlet'... fuck off mate.

99 pages and a bitch ain't one

99 pages. Phew that was difficult.

A new slicker intro and general pruning of my rather wordy action sequences and I've managed to get it in under a hundred pages.

Things to do-

- I really want to do a reading with a few mates to get a feel of what the script sounds like out loud.

- Edit the script down further, maybe by amalgamating a couple of the characters.

- Get the script out. To actual people who actually deal with this kind of thing. So we can get this made.


One thing I've been thinking about is budget. There are a lot of characters in this script - it's no Magnolia - but having both sides of the story has upped the number of speaking parts. This is inevitably going to hike the cost. This coupled with quite a few locations and I can see the budget getting out of hand.
An idea I like, to reduce the overheads, is to make the central siege sequence the entire film. One location and a handful of actors. Of course it would be a very different movie but I'll keep it at the back of my mind just in case.

Another way of dropping costs would to be to shoot various elements simultaneously with extensive second unit activity. Luckily the story has several parallel sequences that can be filmed separately but concurrently. I'm not completely sure if two crews filming for a shorter time is cheaper than one main unit filming for longer... we shall see.

Good Bad Guys done well

I spent a while avoiding the script because I thought it was a bit shit, but on re-reading it recently I like it once more. There are still problems with the opening but the end is in sight now.

I'm having fun at the moment going through and tweaking each scene to give it 'a moment'. A 'LOL' moment - I've always liked it in films where you think 'why the hell did the film makers do that',those quirky little moments that don't really have much of an impact on the story as a whole but cumulatively give it a unique tone.
I made myself laugh when I added a line which reveals that a largely anonymous masked killer is named 'Baby'.

It works in the script, trust me.


I've been listening to a lot of Creative Screenwriting Magazine podcasts which have been inspiring me. They're very in depth and quite conversational QandA sessions with scriptwriters, mainly of big american movies like Star Trek and Watchmen and the like with a few smaller films thrown in there aswell. They're very informative as to the working pratices and pratical methods of crafting a story.
I in the latest one they were discussing the merits of having a good 'Bad Guy' in relation to the movie 30 Days Of Night.
This got me thinking about 'Jerusalem' which really doesn't have a main antagonist as such. Or rather the closest thing to that, is never a consistent threat in so far as he has no interaction with our heroes until the very end.
I panicked. Shit - there's no baddie in the film. I immediately started to devise ways to develop a viable antagonist - more structural re-writes - damn.

But then it came to me, I have a 'Bad Guy' already, I always have had in the form of my very own 'Overlook Hotel' the block of flats called 'Jerusalem' where the movie is set. All those incidents that get in our character's way are the building's doing. Not in the way that the hotel in the Shining becomes a character in itself, but more to do with social, political, survivalist, economic, architectural factors that it imposes on it's residents, it's practically given birth to them.

I've got a 'Bad Guy'.

Now that I've realised that guess what... more rewrites. I'm going to take advantage of the setting more and include the very structure of the place as as a key element.

no shift, no caps, no soapbox politics...

my shift key's not working, so no caps or question marks.

i've not updated this blog for a while because i haven't written anything. the reason /question mark/

well, i needed a break from the script also having finished the first draft it kinda felt like i'd finished the whole thing. for my next script i'll deny myself the finality of the last page and leave it hanging, maybe then it'll be easier to go back to.

so i've started writing again and put a whole little subplot back in which works better than i'd realised but this has brought it's own problems with it. the characters, the pieces on the chess board, aren't in the right place for the endgame. any attempt to move them seems contrived. this is quite fustrating as essentially the second half of the script works great, it's just getting these pawns to where they need to be to initiate the 'action' that's the problem.
it's just a centeral ten pages or so that are the problem,the new begining is so much better and i've always liked the conclusion... maybe if i just ram them together hard enough they'll stick.

Martyred for writing

I think I actually enjoy writing.
I read a few articles about writing where respected authors moan about going through the process. Some feel that the end result is the only good thing, others don't even like that despite having written masterpieces.
Of course a script is not a finished product until it is filmed, which means it can forever be process, you could indefinately be on a journey and Ulysees can forever have more brave tales. And so Jerusalem twists and reforms itself anew.
When you have a cool idea or even better, manage to implement that cool idea in to a serviceable form, it spurs you on and dialogue and narrative spill out before you uncontrollably and soon you have a whole new scenario you hadn't intended. Which means you have to retro fit everything else you've written to accommodate this new direction.
That's the point I'm at now. The bulk of my screenplay works, but I've recently set about retooling the first act (which is so much better now) and subsequently have to modify the later stages to fit in with this new start. There is a problem of balancing tone. We start out with quite a light hearted set up which gives way to quite violent action later. The audience needs to be eased into the later stages of the script and at the moment everything just seems to 'kick off' without warning. Some good scenes are going to have to sacrificed to keep things smooth.


I have to keep reminding myself that I'm trying to make a simple yet effective straight forward thriller/action movie. I want to write something that I can then feasibly then go and make. But when I watch films like 'Martyrs' I immediately think I should change direction and create something of such staggering beauty and vileness, something that will leave an indelible mark on film making as that film does. I of course have to learn to walk before I can run and walking's an Olympic sport so it can't be that bad. If I can make a decent genre script then I'll tackle something greater, but for now I'll content myself with smuggling a few 'mondo' moments in to a seemingly standard story.
One final problem I can anticipate is never knowing when I'm done.


EDIT: If you intend on watching 'Martyrs' make sure you know nothing more than what is contained in the teaser I linked to. This film goes places that are unexpected.

Rewriting whilst rapelling down a building

I've got a pretty good idea what to do with the script now. Comments from various people all point towards what I'd suspected all along: the first act is too slow.
Or rather, too long. The script takes a while to get to the kicking off point and while there is plenty of incident in the first thirty pages most of it can easily be relocated to the second act. I've changed a character as well. Originally he was a very dark person who by dying instigates the 'Bad Day' of the title. He's a lot more funny now and doesn't cut up his girlfriend's corpse (ha!). Tiernan, for it is he, is now an amiable oaf who is still dispatched in much the same way he was before but now we have a lot more sympathy for him. Changing this character also modifies the the whole tone of the first half of the film: it's a lot more jokey now and a lot more fun which will contrast more with later events when things get a bit out of hand. Of everything I've written so far about forty pages have been excised from the first act, which is quite preposterous if you think about it. The rest of the script has stayed pretty much intact throughout but it's the set up which seems to be the hardest part to get right. My instinct is to give as much time to characters and atmosphere as possible - the lead role had at one point an entire thirty page backstory - but it's really not nesesary in this kind of film. Cut to the chase is now my mantra. Scenes start half way through and end early. If we need to round out a character it'll be done at the same time as they're rapelling down the side of the building (not that this actually happens in the film).
Another thing that's going to change is the emphasis on who the main character will be. At the moment it's a bit open as to who is the hero of the whole thing, it's the Magnolia of survival horror when it might be better if it where the Last Boy Scout of survival horror. From the start there's been a buddy movie dynamic between two of the characters - this will now take a more prominent role.

It's odd how many variations there have been to this story, there are innumerable ways to essentially tell the same basic tale. Tweaking things here and there can bring certain elements to the fore and totally skew the feel of the film in a different direction. I recently wanted to make it incredibly dark and add feral children in to the mix (still do) or maybe make it more hyper-kinetic like Run Lola Run.
Perhaps wisely I've settled on a more realistic slant, a kind of Shane Meadows type of film that just happens to become an out and out action-horror half way through.

The break I've had from writing has allowed me to come at the problems in the script with a fresh perspective, I can see what needs to be done and where to do it.