April 22, 2002
11:36am Monday

OPEN UP YOUR EYES

Today is Nicholl Fellowship script-mail day for me. I'm entering eight days before the deadline this year so I can be admission number 3,202 rather than my usual #5,908. I've never won before, of course, or you'd know my name. In fact I've never even placed in any category besides "Sorry, but". I prefer to think of this as not so much a reflection of my skillset so much as a combination of judge fatigue, eyestrain, and general malaise. This year will be different. 2002 whispered sweet nothings and promised to be my year, has not delivered yet, and should take this opportunity to redeem itself.

(I just instructed my printer to spit out the 108 prize-winning pages, but it's doing so in atypical stop-and-start fashion. Perhaps this is a warning? Its voodoo way of telling me to save the thirty bucks and buy it a new scanner friend instead of wasting my money on entering?)

I've written, counting by title, 9.5 screenplays. The .5 being the half script I'm working on now and deciding whether or not to abandon because of the exactness of a 20th Century Fox premise coming out in July (which the dude got paid $900k to write, I might add, so at least we know I'm thinking in the right direction.) I didn't realize I'd written that many until just now when I counted on my fingers. It's a lot, and it has seriously taken me this long to really hone my craft, and if I'd found success at 24 like I expected I wouldn't have been ready. I'm a true believer in things happening the way they do for a reason, and have incorporated the provident Scottish phrase "What's for you won't pass you" into my life's mantra-reportoire. Now I'm not all that much older, but my skills are broad, and I'm confident. Let's wait and see if me and the Nicholl folks see eye to eye.

The big thing I've been working on lately is script spareness. Sparseness. I'm sort of starting a writing group with three guys, and one of them has never read scripts before (I know, it's asinine, I'm kicking myself already) but he read the first 20 pages of my Nicholl entry last week and gave me notes. There's a scene where somebody's trying to get into the protagonist's house and sticks his hand though the door to stop it from closing, and this kid runs up and throws himself against the door to lock the bad guy out, and I describe it very quickly, very fast so the reader can get the proper gist and move on with the action. And this guy asks me, "Shouldn't there be a line there about the door closing? About, like, 'the door closes with a SLAM.'?" And he's a fiction writer and that makes perfect sense for him, but my scene is described in perfect spare detail, right, no need for the slam. I'm all about spare ­ get it across, get it into the reader's mind's eye, and get out. Read David Benioff's "Stay" which sold for $1.8 million or whatever last October and you'll have a good demonstration of how to write a spare, thorough blueprint in your hands. It's its own artform, it really is. It's a challenge not to direct every damn scene, and I'm not talking about CUT TOs: and MOVE IN ONs.

18,000 freshman apply to Harvard every year, and 1,800 get in. Math geeks: what is that percentage? It's either 1% or .01%, right? (I'm showing my math-hand here.) I said in an earlier entry that I don't believe in the whole lottery mentality of screenwriting, but I'll tell you - that Harvard stat made me feel better despite myself. It says if you work hard, if you put in the hours and get to the top of your class, you'll get in, man, you'll get your Hasty Pudding moment seeing Bruce Willis and Anthony Hopkins prancing through Harvard Square in drag.