The Rough Draft

I just had an interesting talk with a friend of mine this morning. We were discussing a high school Creative Writing course we took together. What did it teach us about the act of creative writing? Nothing. We never covered the fundamantals of three act structure. We never covered arc, character or story. It was for all intents a basket weaving course. But then here I sit almost two decades later, a writer. I guess they did teach us something, I’m just not too sure what.
There’s a current trend in Hollywood films right now, they suck.

It’s as if story has taken a backseat to something (I’m not sure what) but what is consistent is their second to third act transitions are weak or completely missing. It also seems the larger the budget, the weaker the transition.

It’s really simple. Story is told in three acts (if you don’t agree, tough). At the end of the third act our hero should be on the way to his resolution track or at the very least an event should be pushing him in that direction. If you don’t have the circumstance that is believable and in keeping with the world you have created, your story will stall and run out of gas a half mile from the finish line. Usually, this is a try fail of huge proportion to the character. It’s almost always a fail scenario for them. They lose and have to fight back from that loss. In other words, when they fail they must be able to come back from that failure. This success should have been set up in act one usually as their special skill, gift, tool etc.

It’s all about the pacing. You make the transition too convoluted or confusing (hats off to Guy Ritchie who does convoluted well) the reader loses interest and guess what, you just lost a sale. So in reality, it’s not just the third act. it’s your inciting incident, your first plot point, your mid point all of your setups and payoffs it’s about the whole package. It’s got to sing, it’s got to move, it’s got to have characters people care about, good and bad. If movies are going to change, it’s got to start with the writing. It’s up to us.

It’s up to you. Good luck.

Steve Abbott

Well I’m pulling on my Dennis Miller boots this week Guilds, Unions, what do they do for you?

The film industry is rife with them and they don’t all cover the same sectors across Canada. For example, West of the Ontario border, most of the trades, (grips, gaffers, accounting and PA’s) are covered by IATSE. On the other side of that border, some are still covered by IATSE while others the DGC. So what you might ask, well if you look at how IATSE runs its affairs, you see a marked difference between them and the DGC. Namely costs and attention to where your abilities lie. One focuses on ability, the other on money. I’ll let you surf their sites to see which is which.

As a writer though, our Guilds are pretty straight forward, you go either WGC or WGA. I of course lean towards the WGA because their minimums are almost three times ours with the dollar conversion.

Of course, all of this is just the preamble to my rant. What the hell is going on with Canadian film? Our government is always going on about promoting our national image internationally but they have set up a series of controls that basically limit our ability to produce product in a timely fashion. A good example is Bruce Sweeney’s film Last Wedding. That film took three years to get to screen. Bruce had to go back to the Govt. three times for cash and each time he needed to wait for the reply. Bruce is not some newbie director. He’s as well established as anybody in the field! But three years? No film should take more than two years from the greenlight stage to be fully completed and I’m including all of the preproduction and script work in those two years.

The Americans might go on about runaway production but lets be honest about where is the majority of Canadian film talent is going? It’s not to Ottowa. Now I’m the last guy to go on about the Govt. paying for film but I sure would like to see them get the hell out of the way of the film maker and let us tell our stories how we want to tell them, not with some bogus cultural slant. No more turn of the century life on the open prarie stories. Get the Canada Arts Council out of the way of deciding what you the public should be watching that’s intrinsically Canadian. I’ve got an idea, rather than sinking 4.5 million into a painting of a red stripe, or another million into a meat dress, or even 45 thousand into a room whose lights go on and off at set intervals, let’s plough that money back into developing decent buisness and bank funding structures. How about an organization to help with distribution of Canadian content. In other words tools that we can use, rather than throwing scraps on the table for us all to fight over.

We’ve sold my last film, The Terrible Old Man, here in Canada, and that is great. We made the film with money we received from a private investor and apart form a small grant of finishing funds from the NFB, we did it our selves. Our next step is to sell it to the American and British markets, followed by Germany and South America. I’m not saying Govt. help is required but it sure would make the introductions just a little easier.

I’m Steve Abbott and I’m waiting to sell out.