Telling A Good Story

While looking through my things I came across another box of research material on past movie scripts.  I had a writing coach back in New Jersey, Joe. Joe actually had real experience in the industry as opposed to the thousands others in the cottage industry of reviewing movie scripts and helping you get an agent.  Many of these other places charge a lot of money for little or no real service.

Joe also wrote his own movie screen plays but probably made more money doing editing, camera work and special effects. One writer who I meet through Joe had over a dozen screen plays sold as options but was still waiting for anyone of his scripts to go into production.  The option money made a great second income but at that time the writer wasn't ready to quit his day job.

I'm a big believer in statistics. Over 100,000 new screen plays will be registered every year with  Writers Guild of America. Hollywood will make about 600 feature films. Ninety percent of all the screen plays ever written are not very good but that means there are at least 10,000 competently written scripts for about 600 possible projects. Out those possible opportunities quite a few of those screen plays will adaptations of comic books or ideas scribbled on a cocktail napkin.  So you have to be either extremely talented or extremely lucky.

Another set of stats that keeps the prospects of writing in context is the Writer's Guild has a benefits and retirement package. You have to earn a minimum of $30,000 a year as a writer to qualify.  The last time I checked less than 5% of the 20,000 members qualified. These odds begin to make lottery tickets look like a good investment.

 

The Ten Commandments according to Joe.

You should use enough truth to sound credible but don't use so much of it that your film becomes a documentary .

Never let facts get in the way of a good story.

Comic books and movies are sibling forms of media. Both are minimalistic ways of telling a story.

Just because it's true does mean it's entertaining.

The less dialog the better.

Exposition in a screen play is a bad thing

A dollar up front is worth more than ten times as much on a backend deal

Feel free to be artistic with your own money but never forget that Producers and Backers are usually only interested in profits.

Realize once you sell a script it belongs to somebody else and you suddenly become the least important person in the filmmaking process.

Movie making is very risk sensitive. No one really knows what will be a hit -otherwise no one would make a bad movie. Safe ideas are easier to sell.

One mistake in the movie making process can ruin everything. A bad movie can become a total financial loss -just ask the investors for the movie Playback starring Christian Slater. The film had a budget of 7.5 million and it only grossed about $300. That makes Ishtar, Heaven's Gate and Donny Darko look like raging success stories. 

One of the best Golden Turkeys is The Conqueror -yep with John Wayne. Believe it or not, it made a profit.

Right now I'm throwing out notes on Oak Island, Nova Scotia. Joe wrote an action adventure screen play about rumored treasure buried there.  I did some of the background research. Joe's script was rejected because the studios felt it was a little too derivative of other films like National Treasure. The studios did like Joe's writing style filled with fast paced action, gun play and a devilishly booby trapped maze under the island that of course does not exist.

The real Oak Island is about 150 acres and it's connected to the mainland by a causeway. So yes you can just drive to the island. For over two centuries it been rumored that pirated buried their gold there.  Or that the French government in Canada constructed this self flooding chamber to hide their loot after being defeated in The Seven Years War (also known as The French And Indian War). My favorite wild ass story is the last remnants of The Knights Templar buried The Holy Grail on the island.

There have been several attempts to dig down into the "Money Pit" to get the treasure.  Each excavation has gone through layers of sand clay and logs, reached about a hundred feet in depth when the pit flooded and started to cave in on itself. The real controversy comes from one group that claims to have found a coded inscription on a rock and all kinds of manmade items during the excavation. 

The other group says the "Money Pit" is a natural sink hole and anything so far found in the pit had either fell in or might have been planted by past treasure hunters to keep their financial backers interested in investing in the project.

I find it all pretty cool but that part doesn't make a movie. People want the romance of a tale. That's one reason why we like Pirates. The real life of a pirate was kind of dismal. They made far more money stealing slaves and barrels of molasses than almost anything else. The classic chest of treasure was exceedingly rare. Often any gold or silver the pirates got was from robbing rich passengers, so a few coins here or bit of jewelry there would be saved up over many voyages.

It's fascinating from a historical view point. The Skull and Crossbones flag was for real. It was the same naval battle flag used by the Knights Templar during the Crusades. Pirate crews elected their captain and quartermaster -the only two recognized officers on board. Everyone could vote and everyone got an equal share of the profits. Many pirate ships even had a system of disability insurance. When a crewman was grievously injured he would be dropped off at the next safe port of call with a set sum of money depending on extent of his injuries. The English, French and Spanish Navies were no were near as democratic as that but all that freedom had a price because you could be hung for being a pirate. Many sailors would go back and forth from being a pirate to being a legitimate seaman and back again to being a pirate.

But in the movies all of those facts are not very important. Long before The Pirates Of The Caribbean, the best pirate film out of Hollywood was Captain Blood with Errol Flynn.  Actually it could be argued that Captain Blood is still the better film but the point is neither on depended on historical accuracy.

 

Who knows if they will ever make a Hollywood Blockbuster about the treasure on Oak Island. Maybe someday a successful crew will reach the bottom of the Money Pit and find it was empty as the Al Capone's vault.  The real treasure of Oak Island is the story that gets vacationers to visit this obscure little island.