'WHY DO I WANT TO BE A SCREENWRITER?

 Screenwriting Goldmine asked the question. 

I once said to a (then) fellow advertising copywriter ~ in a pub ‘conversation’, i.e. gassing session ~ that I was more driven by the need to persuade than to communicate.

That’s obviously contradictory, and I’d said it before I even knew what I meant. But it suddenly explained to me vividly why I wrote.

It’s common knowledge that writers (like most psychiatrists!) do what they do in order to ‘correct’ their own unresolved inner world. But I wanted to correct others’ too. Because this world looks pretty unresolved to me ~ and getting unresolveder-er by the day!

I write in the vain hope of fixing something, of adding something to the sum of human insight, however little, and perhaps only for a few isolated individuals.

It’s constantly forgotten, but writers are thinkers. We think about stuff that needs to get thunk. And sometimes we crack something, we see a way forward, a way through.

That’s why I revere Orwell, Lawrence, Ibsen, Camus, Kerouac. They exposed the lie. They blazed the trail. Not only are their protagonists Heroes, but so too are they. I hope to be heroic. Some day.

(Oh, and the other reasons I write are: Fame, Wealth, Babes and a Massive Funeral.)

Read the rest of the Screenwriting Goldmine survey here:

http://www.screenwritinggoldmine.com/blog/why-do-you-want-to-be-a-screenwriter/2013/05/30/#comment-71190


(Originally posted, WritersCut.net, 31/5/2013.)

 

A CHAT WITH THE                 SCREENWRITING GOLDMINE COMPETITION . . .

 

    2012 Finalist Interview ~ Brian MacEvilly

    With Sally Brockway

Brian MacEvilly has lived several different lives – including advertising copywriter and long distance driver.

He's also spent a lot of time in the wilds of southern Colorado.

It’s not hard to see all these different worlds in his excellent screenplay 'SONG OF THE LOST SISTER', which tells the story of a battle for survival between a man and a woman among rugged Colorado mountains in deepest winter – and which came a worthy runner-up in this year’s contest.

You must be delighted at making that Final five out of so many scripts.

Absolutely. You put your soul on the page and, like a 5-year-old, you need somebody to tell you you’re a good boy every so often.

How long have you been writing for?

I was an advertising copywriter for a long time, and I only started to write screenplays full-time in the last couple of years. Even though I’m a little older than a lot of the competition, I still see myself as a new writer. I started entering contests for the first time in 2012.

Wow. And you’ve placed in quite a few of them.

Yeah, 'LOST SISTER' won the Atlantis Award at the Moondance Festival. It got a Top 10 Drama in StoryPros International, and a finalist in the Creative World Awards. I also won First Place in the Super Shorts category in the Gimme Credit Contest in LA.

Is that because you waited until you were ready to enter?

Pretty much. I hope.

Do you do a full working/writing day now?

I got up at 5 o’clock yesterday morning, mostly because I just couldn’t sleep. I’ll get at it before dawn. I might do it seven days a week. I’ll repair to the local tap house intermittently to keep myself sane, but it’s what I do all the time.

So are you making a living?

No, not at all.

What’s the plan?

My next plan is to write for television. A mini-series. I’m also doing a zero-budget two-hander called 'BENDER', which is about a macho cop who's tasked with interrogating an effeminate gay male, and finds himself in a battle of wills to prove who really is 'the better man'.
'LOST SISTER' was the first of a triptych of women’s portraits. The second, 'RAISE THE SKY', is the story of female executive handed a big break which, she discovers, is designed to sabotage her whole career.
The mini-series, 'SONS OF MEN' I plan to be the ultimate male weepie, spanning everything from 'Ordinary People' through 'Once Were Warriors' to 'Nixon'. I also write comedy as therapy, and I’m planning a hi-tech chiller.

That’s a lot of projects, Brian!

I have crates of notes in vaults, all filed and cross-indexed, but I may never get to half the scripts I’ve planned. I sometimes daydream about having a Renaissance style studio where a team of interns transcribe my notes, and I hammer out beat sheets while others 'execute'. I know it sounds insanely narcissistic.

Tell me about the project Lost Sister. How did it begin?

It kind of budded off other stuff. I read the feminists in my teens, you know, Germaine Greer and Kate Millet and many more, because women’s liberation I saw as an essential part of human liberation. I was also reading Black Power and Existentialists and the Beats at the time.

My politics have always been very socially liberal and I was a really enthusiastic teenage male feminist. But what fascinated me was that within a few decades it had become radical gender feminism, a very strident thing, and then went on to become ladette culture. I found that deeply disappointing. I accept that it was an inevitability and I always joke that women are entitled to be as obnoxious at men. But it seems we are at a time where males are beginning to accept that we have issues, and maybe we have got to explore our own vulnerability. And I thought, what if you put that together with feminism becoming more strident...? And then I gave it this classic, I suppose, Mills and Boon template without realising it. And there you had it.

The other key theme in the script is how, since the industrial revolution and the breakdown of nuclear families and indigenous rural communities, the whole mentoring process in males has disintegrated. That’s really what interested me. That’s what my mini-series will confront. Women have their bodies to teach them. Men don’t have the same biological process by which they come of age. They have to be mentored, and that has fallen apart. And that’s why you get this passionate following for football hooliganism or any rite of passage, often very dark. You know the attraction for violence. Violence has become the new Pop Art! I just think film could produce new archetypes of manhood. That’s actually what I was exploring.

And what about the backdrop?

I lived in southern Colorado for four years and I know that territory. I’ve hunted elk up there. Seriously, I was trying desperately not to shoot anything, unlike some of the rugged characters I was running with.
I’m attracted to wilderness survival. That subgenre has always fascinated me. And done well, it’s tremendous. It’s disparaged now but the 'First Blood', the original Rambo movie, was actually wonderful, before they turned Rambo into this right-wing lunatic. He was an anti-establishment, almost liberal character who got picked on by the cops. It was a very anti-authoritarian piece. Then of course it got co-opted into this awful reactionary agenda. But I loved it because it’s one man against the impossible.

How long do you think from start to finish it took you to write this script, if you take everything into account?

It might be five or six years since I first mentioned it to my wife. I might live with an idea for a few years before I’d actually write it.

Do you use the Goldmine method?

Yes.

You do? You lay it all out as Phil [Gladwin] recommends?

Yes. I pre-plan intensively. In fact, the original draft of Lost Sister was 280 pages, because it had been beaten out in such detail that I actually knew the lines of dialogue in the scenes before I’d typed anything. What Phil shows you is such a methodical system. You learn to interrogate and break stuff down. And particularly what Phil is very good at is quickly generating a character. It matches the way I learned to work as a copywriter. The Screenwriting Goldmine program is a field kit for how to do it in the real world – because Phil is a real world writer, not just a theorist.

That helps!

That’s actually what attracted me to this contest. When I saw Phil was doing contests, knowing where he was coming from, I wanted to be a part of that. But I never expected this! And it’s massively flattering, but on top of that, to be read by that final panel, you couldn’t ask for more than that.

Being read. That’s what you want.

It is. There are ten people out there who at least know who I am, whether or not they would have responded specifically. At least it means you got a chance to display your skill-set, good or bad, to them.  That's a fantastic thing.

So have you given up copywriting now?

Yes, I’ve given it up because it’s extremely bad for the soul.
In my twenties I went away and threw myself into the world and became a truck driver and a scaffold rigger and a bartender and all the rest of that. I'd been a voracious reader and writer in my teens and came out of college, where I was doing English and Philosophy, and packed it all in, burnt everything I’d written and decided that I’d read everything that I wanted to read. I never looked at a book again until I was in my late twenties.
I jokingly say I decided to get a decent job, but went into advertising instead. But being a copywriter taught me so much: a working method, actually functioning in a real-world writing environment, deadlines, collaboration, dealing with criticism and interrogating your subject.

But I will say you don’t have to read 70 screenwriting books. Because I have 70 books, I’m looking at them right now. At some point you’ve got to trust yourself. Throw yourself off the branch, you will fly! And I want to go more towards that. I’ve learned enough! I’ve been studying this thing forever.

I proposed a comedy to the Irish Film Board. One of the funders brought me up to Galway for a chat and we were talking about studying the craft and he said, “You know, all of those books are really just teaching you to refine your instincts.” And I think that’s true.

Nowadays I want to plan less and just write intuitively. Because that’s how I used to do it when I was a teenager. I read and wrote manically because I loved words, like a painter loves paint. Swim in the stuff.

It comes across that you love language. Your language is very vivid and strong in your work.

Thank you. I’m sometimes concerned that I describe too much. Some readers would think that I give too much direction.

Not at all. You’re telling a story and I didn’t once stop and think, Oh there’s too much detail in the story. It was very well executed.

Thank you. I’ve got a lot of feedback on that script and it’s extraordinarily contradictory. But you’ve got this Hollywood brigade who are into the Walter Hill school of screenwriting, where everything is stripped to the barest essentials. They just want to know what happened next, so they can read it in an hour and a half. But I think you have to create a world.

Have you sent your work out to any agents yet?

I haven’t. I would like to accomplish more before I do. Because you do have obligations to them and you need to be attractive to them.

What’s next for you now? Are you hoping that you placing in this competition will get more interest in this script?

I have this and another script, a comedy with a production company in Dublin; they’re just looking at it. Actually 'LOST SISTER' was picked up on when I placed in this contest. Another production company in Dublin looked for the script immediately.

Now you’re placing in contests I’m sure when you start to mention that people start to listen, don’t they?

Yeah, they do listen. I went into a pub in Dublin recently. It was a quiet night, but a couple of guys were talking production and I said, 'I’m going to insert myself here.' It turned out one of the guys was a pretty well known Irish TV director. I didn’t recognise him. Of course he’s thinking, here’s another bloody writer imposing himself. But as soon as I said 'Well, I’ve just been up to see Steve Matthews', producer on 'Love/Hate' and 'The Borgias' with Octagon Films, now he’s listening.
There are a lot of competitions, I know, but when you say that you’ve made the Top 5, and it was judged by people from the BBC Writers Room and Drama Development for ITV and Channel 4, they've got to listen. Because you’ve gotten past the sentries. These are people who know their stuff.

Will you continue to enter contests?

I don’t know that I’d keep doing that. I kind of got what I wanted, to an extent, which was the word 'Winner' or 'Top something' in it. Getting a couple of those was enough. I’d occasionally look at a writer’s site and he’d have 30 bloody contest results, and he's in the quarter-finals of the, I don’t know, the Spearfish Montana Film Festival and it’s like, 'God man, enough. Stop!'

To read more about the Screenwriting Goldmine scriptwriting method click:

http://awards.screenwritinggoldmine.com


(Originally posted, WritersCut.net, 8/2/2013.)

TWO CONTEST PLACINGS. . .

My Super Short script 'ANIMALS' has just won First Place in the Gimme Credit International Screenplay Competition in Los Angeles.

http://www.gimmecreditcompetition.com/cycle_winner.php?id=13



Meanwhile my feature 'SONG OF THE LOST SISTER' has finished in the Final 5, out of almost 500 entries, in the UK's inaugural Screenwriting Goldmine Competition.

Goldmine was judged by the heads of the BBC Writers Room, Drama Development at Channel 4 and ITV, plus the Raindance film Festival -- in  addition to execs at Octagon Films, Touchpaper TV and the McFarlane Chard talent agency.

To have been read by any one of these people was a privilege. But by all of them? It was an award in itself.

http://awards.screenwritinggoldmine.com/finalists-2012

Phil Gladwin's Screenwriting Goldmine is a training programme that I have used. 
I recommend that any aspiring screenwriter downloads it without delay.

(Originally posted, WritersCut.net, 11/12/2012.)

TRANSPLANTING...

'My father's people' -- an expression I recommend using at every available opportunity -- hailed from south County Mayo. They still do, 800 years after they swept in on the coat tails of the De Burgos during the Norman's invasion of Connaught.

We were De Stauntons then -- a locational name ('of stony ground') assumed in Britain by a clan of Norman or possibly Flemish lineage.

When an internecine rivalry arose within the De Burgos, the De Stauntons were forced to pick a side. This they seem to have done -- without giving too much away -- with somewhat more enthusiasm than the brief required.

Suffice it to say that the De Burgos realligned, in that inevitable 'what's the worst that can possibly happen' kind of way,  and the De Stauntons found themselves politically embarrassed, to put it mildly.

Clan splits, disassociations and name-changing ensued.

MacEvilly is the anglicization of 'Mac A' Mhile' (Son of the Warrior) which takes its provenance from an earlier, and presumably blemishless, head  of the clan.

The MacEvillys were finally pried from their ancestral demesne by Tibbott na Long (Tybalt of the Ships), surname Burke of course, and spouse of none other than the legendary pirate queen, Grace O'Malley.

But when the National Library recently released Ireland's 1910 census online, the great majority of MacEvillys still lived in that same historic stretch of territory which runs from Louisburgh, through Westport and the pilgrim way between Croagh Patrick and Ballintubber Abbey -- the last Abbott (1542) was Walter MacEvilly -- and east to Loch Carra; in short, the land which they first occupied eight centuries ago.

My father grew up, dirt poor, on twenty acres during the 'Hungry 30's' -- the mighty had certainly fallen by then -- and though a gifted schoolboy, by all accounts, was forced to forego university in order to find work immediately. What the heartbreak of that disappointment must have been to him I can barely imagine.

During my childhood in Cork I would travel back to 'Granny's' every summer, to save hay 'the old way' and run wild in the meadows and woods.

'The West' was an ecstatic place for me, and when the train crossed the Shannon into Connaught I was as delirious as if I had crossed the Indus and was climbing back towards Shangri La.

When I first read Dylan Thomas's 'Fern Hill' I knew immediately that the Welsh wizard had been touched by the same mystic joy. The Pagan had been ignited in me, and I can tell you now, dear brethren, he's not ever going away!

I can honestly say that that tiny farm was the undoing of me -- in the best possible sense. The same hungry patch of land that produced the 'poor scholar' who was my father, ensured with terrible irony that his son would never emulate his academic achievements -- or care to do so.

I glimpsed heaven in those sun-drenched fields -- yes, the summers were better in those days; it's called our youth! -- and no schoolroom or science lab was going to teach me anything higher or more empowering in this world.

This year that little farm, which has been in the family for almost a hundred years, went under the auctioneer's hammer. The cottage will not survive, and no stone will remain that will bear any trace of our name. So it is. Ashes to ashes, rubble to rubble.

We gathered for my Uncle Jim's commemorative mass -- one of those rare occasions I enter a Catholic church, or endure what must surely be the most uninspired religious service on the planet.

As we were leaving the cottage, closing the door for the last time, I looked around and consciously memorised the little box hedge, the humble dog roses, the firs sighing in the soft breeze. They might raze this place to the ground, but in my heart's eye it would stand forever.

I laid Jim's old bicycle into the back of the car. It had leaned against his gable for decades and now it will lean against mine.

Finally Maureen lifted some gladioli shoots from a little bed, out of the soil that had fed my forbears. Perhaps these saplings could take root in West Kerry, in the new home where I had tremulously planted myself.

We bedded them in grey weather, with 'the sky on the ground' and the year end looming. We expected nothing.

It was a misty morning, the light struggling, and the slope of the 'Strickeen' rising away beyond the kitchen window.

I was making coffee when a blanket of warmth opened across the gravel. I looked out...

It is theorised that some part of our DNA has migrated all the way from the Himalayas.

Shangri La.

It is with us. Everywhere.




(Originally posted, WritersCut.net, 10/12/2012.)

OVER THE MOON. . . 

My script, 'SONG OF THE LOST SISTER' has just won the Atlantis Award at the Moondance Film Festival -- in what I consider to be the most life-affirmative screenplay competition on the planet.

Creative Director Elizabeth English informed me that the script "should be a part of any screen-writing instruction class, on how to write a movie"!

Strunned, elated -- but not to be outdone -- I replied by stating how proud I was "to be recognised in a festival whose ethos I so respect."

I've had a number of successes this year, but this win is particularly special to me.

"Elizabeth", I added, "You're doing a terrific -- and, more significantly, important -- job. My friend Eilis Mernagh, a former Moondance winner/attendee, refers to you as a legend.

  

"I promise to keep producing accountable, life-affirmative (if sometimes testing) work. And I look forward to competing in Moondance again in the future."

I sincerely hope I deserved Elizabeth English's praise as much as she deserves mine -- and, what's more, the respect of the whole film world.

Elizabeth, that is, not me. Long may she reign! 

http://www.moondancefilmfestival.com/

(Originally posted, WritersCut.Net, 5/10/2012.)

STORIES 'R' US . . . .

As writers on writing frequently point out, the hunger for Narrative is as primal, as fundamental to us as the need for food, safety or human love.

Story, the "how" of life, is not only a source of emotional, intellectual and spiritual sustenance, it's also a virtual manual for survival in this world.

It's how hunting wisdom was passed down between men, as they sat around that timeless emblem, the camp fire. I've seen it done, having had the privilege of sitting at such fires myself.

It's how small children were taught about big, bad wolves -- animal ones and human too.

It's how ineffable truths were imparted, often inscrutably, between elder monks and their bemused acolytes.

It's how reputations were built, others broken, as the avarice for information raced through communities with the speed of a detonation cord.

Life is Story. And Story is Life. And I have always marvelled at articles on writing that make an actual subject of "Where To Find Material" and the like.

Stories are everywhere. Not only are they not difficult to find, they're literally impossible to avoid. We trip over them at every turn, and even our very tripping is Story itself.

It is the matrix we move in. The algorithm, the DNA of our very existences.

We are Story, and it is us. And through it, we are as the clocks of history. Through it time is never truly "immemorial".

I say this, but I myself am guilty of failing to see the richness of life's Narrative.

I can't imagine how many times I've strolled into my local tap room, to be asked, "Well, any news?" only to respond with "Oh, y'know. Same old same old" -- without having made the slightest effort to think.

Of course, some of that comes from plying a solitary craft, and choosing to spare others my fictional -- and possibly quite lunatic -- obsession of the day.

Last night, once again, I gave the same answer to the same question. But the irony was that there had been nothing "same old" about my day.

I'd just had excellent script contest news. A director requested samples of my work. A producer was showing tentative interest in one of my scripts. Even an agent resumed contact, out of the blue!
(I almost wondered if an item hadn't appeared in the media claiming "Irish Screenwriter Awarded Massive Funding -- For Whatever The Hell He'd Like To Do!")

But my mental laziness went much further than this, dear reader. (I'm assuming someone out there is actually reading this. We live in hope.)

Because I have the rather asocial habit of hanging out in my drinkery's smoking room, calmly quaffing and occasionally (very occasionally) poring over some wallet-sized notes. All of which creates the amused  -- and completely mistaken -- impression that Brian is "out there, having deep thoughts".

Brian is doing no such thing. Brian's brain, which has probably been "on the computer" since 6 or 7 A.M. is now happily in neutral -- for the night.

Brian has achieved the "mind of no mind". Those monkish mentors would be thoroughly impressed.

He's capable of carrying on the most anodyne and pointless conversations with complete strangers.

You can whisper national secrets to him that would cost him his life, and he won't remember them the following day. Or, in fact, hour.

When later last night my good wife asked me, "Anyone out?" I answered, "Oh, usual suspects" as I often have. No news. Same old same old.

And then I shook myself. What was the matter with me? There was news. There was Story. There was Life.

D----- and his partner had just had their first child together. A local wildboy was going through one of the Seven Ages of Man, transformed by the responsibility of fatherhood.

S---- had just passed up a big work opportunity, and spent 24 agonising hours, torn between his financial imperatives and the wisdom to face the limits of his own ability.

It was a cruel decision, and it hurt him both materially and emotionally. But it was the right decision. He had held to his wisdom. The better man in him had won.

B---- could feel the cold wind of redundancy clawing at his door, a situation that might force him to leave the Peninsula and trade this rustic life for the clamour of the cities. I remember him gazing intently out into the night. Yet there was a strange and subtle buoyancy to him, as if some transformation was already at work.

Each was a life story -- in a moment. A micro-cosmos. A slice, a sliver of the Totality.

Each a tale that could be told with such poignancy that it would break the heart. And I had missed it. All of it.

All these lives moving ceaselessly. Threads in the Great Yarn that is existent, woven together in this rich fabric, this vibrant tapestry that is Life.

Each and every one us, the Story of the world.

It is not a secret I will forget again.

(Originally posted, WritersCut.net, 21/10/2012.)

MY SCRIPT, 'THE ISLAND' MAKES IT INTO THE TOP 21 OF THE BLUECAT SHORT SCREENPLAY COMPETITION.

BlueCat, given that it was founded by Gordy Hoffman ~ writer of the searing 'Love Liza' and brother of the great Philip Seymour ~ does have a certain credibility when it comes to claiming to represent the writer's view.

So it's a privilege to reach its Quarter-Finals ~ with two scripts, 'ANIMALS' and 'THE ISLAND', one of which has gone through to its final 21.

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/2012-Short-Screenplay-Semifinalists-Announced-.html?soid=1100387766214&aid=k5rc63UIePU

(Originally posted in WritersCut.net, 21/8/2012.)