Karen Sandler

Tag: icer

  • Embryonic TANKBORN (How a Script Became a Book, Part 2)

    Screenwriting is an entirely different world than the publishing world. The most obvious difference is the format–a script looks entirely different from a book manuscript. In a film script, dialogue is set off in blocks with wider margins. The dialogue alternates with description, each scene identified by an interior or exterior location. As an example, here’s an early script for Blade Runner, one of my favorite movies.

    A script is also 3-hole punched and bound with brads. A book manuscript, on the other hand, is not hole-punched and is generally kept together with rubber bands. At least manuscripts were rubber-banded together in the olden days, when they were sent snail mail to agents and editors. Nowadays, everything is e-mailed.

    It’s always funny to watch TV shows and movies where one of the characters is a novelist. The screenwriter who wrote the script bases the character on their own experience as a writer. The book manuscript will be three-hole punched and bound with brads. The novelist always hands his/her manuscript over to their editor or agent in person. The fictional writer is able to do this because they always seem to live in NYC, just like most actual screenwriters live in L.A. and are able to have personal contact with their agents/producers.

    Anyway… When I wrote Icer, the script that I eventually used as the starting point for my YA book Tankborn, I didn’t just have to learn how to write a story that was suitable for the screen (i.e., everything on the page had to be visual). I also had to learn script format. One problem with this is that although there were many sample scripts available (at that time, in printed, hardcopy form that I could order from a service) the majority of those were shooting scripts. Shooting scripts contain all sorts of camera directions that aren’t appropriate to include in a spec script (a script written on speculation). It took some years of education to figure that out.

    As I mentioned in a previous post, part of that education was a class I took through UCLA Extension. The instructor liked my concept enough that he helped me with the beat outline (essentially coaching me through the plotting process). Later when the script was finished, he suggested that he and a writer friend of his option my script for $1. I wasn’t comfortable with that arrangement, so I was then on my own.

    Here are the first few pages of an early version of Icer.

    Nothing much happened with Icer for a few years. I kept writing, mostly short stories, but a few TV scripts as well. We moved from Southern California to Northern California and my husband and I agreed I’d stay home with the kids and write while the kids were in school. I focused on novels, pretty much forgetting screenwriting.

    Then I stumbled across a tiny ad in Writer’s Digest magazine requesting scripts. Talk about a leap of faith. No way of knowing if the person on the other end of the ad was a fraud or the real deal.

    It turned out to be the latter. I got a call out of the blue one day from Fern Baum of the production company Kanter-Baum. Fern was the daughter of Martin Baum, legendary agent at Creative Artists Agency. Mr. Baum agreed to shop my script on behalf of his daughter.

    I was thoroughly awed by the massive Lichtenstein mural in CAA’s lobby, and my jaw just about dropped seeing the Oscar displayed in a case in Mr. Baum’s office (which had been awarded to Gig Young and bequeathed to Mr. Baum after Gig Young’s death). Even still, I was pretty ignorant about who Marty Baum was and the honor he paid me by agreeing to work with me.

    We went through a number of re-writes and eventually Icer went out to a long list of studios and production companies. One of those submissions was to a brand new studio called Dreamworks, SKG. Alas, Dreamworks passed. Icer was eventually optioned by Prism Entertainment Corporation, a small production company that had previously done a number of lower budget films including When the Bough Breaks starring Martin Sheen.

    I actually had one of those Hollywood “meetings” at Prism where they gave me notes (kind of like an editorial letter, except in real time). It was pretty cool. Everyone threw out ideas, some of them great, some not so much and I scribbled madly. (Note: One of the better ideas is an element that will figure into the second book of the TANKBORN series, TANKBORN AWAKENING.)

    Everyone was very enthusiastic about the script. The notes led to another round of re-writes and the script continued to improve.

    Prism unfortunately couldn’t get funding to proceed so they weren’t able to go any farther with Icer. I co-wrote another script for Kanter-Baum, but we weren’t able to get anywhere with that one either.

    A few years later, I met another producer who liked Icer, Craig Nicholls of Pendle View. We went through another round of re-writes with an eye toward decreasing production costs. By this point, CGI had come of age and what once would have been very expensive special effects could now be done at a much lower cost on a computer.

    With Craig’s guidance, I was able to kick Icer up yet another notch. Still no takers ready to finance the film, despite Craig’s best efforts. He worked with me on another script, a quirky YA time-travel called Timewrecked (now there’s a screenplay that’s ripe for novelization!), but we couldn’t get any traction on that one either.

    You’ve probably gathered reading this post that as tough as it is getting a book published, that’s a cakewalk compared to selling a script and getting it produced. I do confess I never felt completely comfortable in that world. I was never quite sure I had the format down, that I wasn’t over-writing (a screenwriter shouldn’t be directing the actors, for instance), that what I put on the page could be transferred to the screen. Books I understood. Scripts are even now still a mystery to me.

    But writing Icer led me to writing Tankborn, so obviously the time working on that script wasn’t wasted. And it was an amazing challenge and there were some very exciting times. I’m grateful for those who helped me along the way, who worked so hard to see my vision on the screen. I hope they’re satisfied with seeing it on the page instead, between the covers of a book.

  • Embryonic TANKBORN (How a Script Became a Book, Part 1)

    I think the question authors are asked most often is “Where do you get your ideas?” Unless I’m being flip (“Mail order. Three for a buck for the hackneyed ones, a couple hundred for a really stellar concept), I find it a hard question to answer. That’s because a novel is so complex, with so many moving parts. Ideas were required for many, many aspects of my YA science fiction novel, Tankborn. The characters, the plot twists, the setting, all the various details of world building.

    But if I back away from the details (which is hard for me to do) and answer the question more broadly, I have a very quick answer to where I got the idea for Tankborn. Tankborn came from Icer. In a way, Icer was the book embryo that became Tankborn.

    So, what, you ask, was Icer? Those of you who have read some of my interviews might know that I used to write screenplays (movie scripts). Icer was the first screenplay I ever wrote. When I lived in L.A., I used to take writing classes through UCLA Extension (UCLA was also my alma mater, where I got my MS in computer science).

    One of the classes I took was a screenwriting class, sometime in the early 1980s. I took notes in a steno notebook, which included the scribbled notation at left which is the very first time the concept of a “tankborn” was committed to paper. I didn’t call these still-to-be-created beings tankborns yet, but that scribbled note was the genesis of the idea.

    If you enlarge the image, you’ll see that I originally named the character Jeffry Rose and her age was 28. Jeffry Rose was a futuristic inter-planetary investigator I featured in a couple of SF stories back in the late 70s, early 80s. As I developed Icer, Jeffry Rose became Kayla Hand (the surname because of the strength in Kayla’s hands). Then that surname was dropped in later producer meetings.

    The instructor of the screenwriting class liked my story concept so much that after the class ended, he coached me through a “beat outline” or “beat sheet” to help me finish the script. As an example, to the left is a sample beat sheet (click for a larger image) for part of a Star Trek: TNG (“The Children”) that I also wrote back in that era (more details on that below). I probably completed the original Icer screenplay in the early to mid-1980s. Here’s how I described the gestation tanks in the opening of a very early version of Icer. I’m leaving out the dialogue that’s intercut in this description:

    The cells finally begin to resolve into a fetus, almost too small to be recognized as human. A larger fetus, and we see it’s floating not in the womb, but in an alien green fluid. The fetus spins slowly, until we see its face. The eyes open wide. They’re colorless, the iris solid white.

    We see another fetus, turning slowly beside the first, its eyes colorless as well. A third fetus with wide, staring white eyes. We pull back to see another fetus, then another, all immersed in the green fluid of a gen-tank.

    Note that the white eyes was how the genetically engineered slaves were identified in early script versions. Later a producer pointed out that white eyes would make it difficult for actors to convey emotions, so the identifying white eyes became a tattoo of a DNA strand of the characters’ cheek.

    Icer went through innumerable re-writes over the years as it was optioned by a couple of different production companies. That process was pretty interesting, but I think I’ll leave that story for another post.

    During the time I was writing Icer, I also played around with television scriptwriting. The usual way of things is to write a sample script for a current, very popular TV show (in my case, it was Murder, She Wrote, which was very big back then). The idea was not to sell that particular script but to use it as your calling card to get work.

    But Star Trek: The Next Generation was different. For ST:TNG, anyone could submit over the transom. I ended up writing two for the Next Gen series.  For the first of the two ST scripts I wrote, “The Children,” I plagiarized myself, borrowing the “tankborn” concept. ST scripts had five acts that were preceded by a teaser. In the teaser of “The Children,” the crew transports down to a planet to respond to a distress call and discovers something strange in a lab. Here’s how part of it reads:

    As Riker still stares, the shot WIDENS to include Tasha and Beverly, with similar expressions. Then we see what fascinates and appalls them, the source of the green glow: Five tanks, filled with an eerie green liquid. And inside each tank, suspended like a fetus in an amniotic sea, is a child, each one identified by a nameplate on the tank.

    The Trekkers out there can tell from the crew names what era of ST:TNG this episode might have fit into. An agent submitted the script for me, but sadly, they passed, saying they were working on an episode that was too similar. They encouraged me to re-submit, but by the time I wrote a second script, the original producer had departed the show, and the new one didn’t like my work.

    More later on Icer.