Karen Sandler

Tag: screenwriting

  • Recombined Shoot

    DGA director Regina Ainsworth on the set of Recombined.

    As I described in my post Movie to Books to Movie to TV, I’ve been working with director Regina Ainsworth with an eye toward pitching my young adult sci-fi novels, the Tankborn trilogy, as a television series. Regina suggested we needed a visual expression of Tankborn‘s world as part of our pitch. To that end, I wrote the short script, Recombined, while Regina built relationships, raised funds, and gathered cast and crew who were as passionate about the project as we were. We shot the film December 1st, 2018 on one long (and very cold) day in Burbank.

    I’ve written a number short scripts and have seen three of them made into films, but other than one SAG actor in one of those films, cast and crew were amateurs. The cast of Recombined were all SAG-AFTRA, and we had a professional union crew.

    The Warner Bros. signature logo

    The shoot took place at Warner Bros. Ranch, just down the road from Warner Bros. main studio. It’s where the iconic Friends was shot, and it’s currently the home of Veronica Mars.

    It was an unusual arrangement allowing us to shoot a short film on the Warner Bros. Ranch lot (one of the security guards said “That never happens”), and we were all so grateful for the opportunity. The cast and crew blew me away with their performances and dedication to the film.

    As screenwriter, my main role was to consult on the script as needed. I also volunteered to be amateur stills photographer (we also had a pro, Molly White, taking stills). I entertained myself by getting pictures of the action between shots.

    Most gratifying for me as the author of the Tankborn novels was seeing my characters come alive. The lead actor, Naïma Hebrail Kidjo, did an amazing job breathing life into my main character, the GEN (Genetically Engineered Non-Human), Kayla. I loved how the makeup/hair artist, Alexandra Bayless, created the GEN tattoo on the GENs’ cheeks and how she did Naïma’s hair for her role as Kayla.

    Naïma Hebrail Kidjo (Kayla) in the makeup chair getting her hair braided and standing for a shot in front of the blue screen.

    The script is loosely based on a “wedding” scene that I’d originally written for Tankborn which never made it into the final published book. With several modifications, the scene became the script for Recombined. Since I started from my own source material, I had the freedom to add any necessary characters, including the GENs Gaddiel and the Intercessor who officiates the wedding (joining).

    Left photo, Glenn Stanton (Gaddiel), right photo, from left to right, Dane William, Jessie Hendricks (Alia), and Leilani Smith (Intercessor)

    Recombined is now in post-production, Regina working hard on putting together in a cohesive way the jigsaw puzzle of the shots we got that day. I can’t wait to see the final product.

    A picture, or it never happened. Here’s me hanging out with actors Shay Ali (Ved) and Patrick McCarthy (Captain Ansgar) before the first shot of the day. Photo credit: Molly White

  • Fake Blood and Shooting After Dark–the Making of a Vampire Flick

    Poster 2At this point in my career, I’m a dedicated novelist. I’m sticking to writing and promoting my traditionally published books like the Tankborn Trilogy and the upcoming Janelle Watkins mysteries, as well as my indie published romances.

    But there was a time when I would fill in the gaps waiting for an editor’s notes or when I was between book contracts by writing screenplays. I’d work on my own or with a producer to write feature length scripts. I was a member of the Writers Guild of America and made a little bit of money as a screenwriter.

    I’d also play around with short films. I’d write a short script (ten or so pages, which translated into about 10 minutes of film), then find ways to produce that script. It helped having a friend with a production studio (The Studio Center) complete with cameras, sound equipment, a green screen, and editing bay. Frank would charge me bargain rates in exchange for directing credit.

    Sweet Tooth was one such project. I’d gotten the idea years before and had intended to write it as a short story. I ended up writing it as a short script instead. Here’s the logline for Sweet Tooth: It’s Trish’s last chance–she either makes big sales at her next WundaWare party, or she’s history.  Trish does her best, but she can’t seem to overcome an irresistible temptation that ruins everything.

    Linda-Karen-Frank Since this was a super-low-budget film, I had to make some choices in the writing of it. I had to be able to shoot the whole film in one location–my house. Since it was a vampire movie and shooting “day for night” wasn’t practical, it all had to be shot after dark. Other than the camera and sound work (and the editing later), I did pretty much everything. I was writer, producer, set decorator, propmaster, continuity, and craft services. All the props came from either my own kitchen or the dollar store. The actors all worked for credit only.

    We shot over two weekends, Friday and Saturday nights. There were a few pitfall in our choice of a production window. First, we started on the night of the summer solstice, which meant it was the longest day of the year. Waiting for “dark” made for a very late start each night.

    Myrtle-deadThe other issue was that the first couple days of shooting were hot-hot-hot (we can get over 100 degrees here) and my AC wasn’t working right. So it was sweltering in the house.

    We were all troopers, though. I got to make some fake blood on the fly (corn syrup with red dye and a touch of chocolate syrup for color). I’d sold Tupperware for 15 months back in my 20s, so I had a lot of fun setting up a display of the faux plasticware, WundaWare. I also enjoyed getting inventive with the various rooms of my house, transforming them into the sets we needed.

    Trish-vanityMy takeaway from the experience is that filmmaking is an entirely different animal than publishing. The biggest difference is how many people are involved. Yes, when you’re publishing a book, you rarely do everything yourself, even if you go indie. There will be an editor, a cover designer, marketing folks, and if it’s print, someone to manufacture the book.

    But imagine if books were written like films are made. You’d have to hire people to act out your characters. You’d have to bring in a propmaster to acquire every single item you’ve described in your scenes, plus a set decorator to lay everything out. A sound crew would have to record the sound or you wouldn’t have any dialogue. A gaffer would have to make sure the lighting is just right, or your reader wouldn’t be able to see who or what is in that scene. And craft services had better feed everyone, or your characters would be getting mighty cranky.

    [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g9lU5MVM-k]

    That would certainly make things a lot livelier for the novelist–and a lot more expensive and time consuming to write a book. I think I prefer the thinking-it-all-out-in-my-head-and-typing-it-on-my-computer way of doing things. That way, the only one filching out of my refrigerator is me. My characters can just eat air.

    How about you? Have you ever been involved in a film production? I’d love to hear your experience.

  • Subtext–When Your Characters Don’t Say What They Mean, or Mean What They Say

    There’s a concept I’ve mainly seen in screenwriting called “on the nose” dialogue. That’s dialogue in which there is no subtext, in which a character baldly says exactly what they’re feeling inside.

    What’s the problem with this? First, in the real world people almost never say what they’re really feeling. Emotions make us feel vulnerable. If we admit we like someone, we risk hearing back that the someone doesn’t feel the same way. If we tell a friend a secret, like how terrified we are of tiny little dogs, we risk being ridiculed.

    Second, in fiction, if the dialogue is “on the nose,” it deflates the tension between our characters and in the story.  We expect to be told all sorts of lies in the course of a story. Or maybe not so much lies, but we expect that the realization that a character has early in the book, or half-way through or three-quarters of the way through might not actually be true. People and characters don’t even tell themselves the truth most of the time.

    So, like real people, our characters should hide what they really feel. They should nibble around the edges of expressing their true emotions. Maybe they invite the special someone over for dinner, but make sure he knows he’s just one of several guests. Or he admires her new smart phone and asks all about it because he’s been thinking about buying one like it.

    Here’s a hastily written example of dialogue that is thoroughly on-the-nose. Boyfriend and Girlfriend are talking on the phone:

    Boyfriend: Okay if I bring Spot tonight?
    (Girlfriend smiles happily)
    Girlfriend: You know I love your dog.
    Boyfriend: And we’ll need to stop by Mom’s on the way to the restaurant.
    (Still smiling, Girlfriend nods)
    Girlfriend: Your mom is great. I’m always glad to see her.

    So here, “You know I love your dog” means “You know I love your dog.” And “Your mom is great” means “Your mom is great.” Girlfriend is saying exactly what she means. It’s pretty boring and doesn’t say much about the characters.

    Here’s an example where the action gives the dialogue a little bit of subtext:

    Boyfriend: Okay if I bring Spot tonight?
    (Girlfriend sticks a finger down her throat & mimes gagging)
    Girlfriend: You know I love your dog.
    Boyfriend: And we’ll need to stop by Mom’s on the way to the restaurant.
    (Girlfriend screams silently while pulling at her hair and kicking her feet)
    Girlfriend: Your mom is great. I’m always glad to see her.

    Now “You know I love your dog” means “Your dog disgusts me.” And “Your mom is great” means “I hate her, she drives me crazy.”

    So think about what you say to your spouse, girlfriend, boyfriend, parents, particularly if there are emotions at stake. Are you speaking on the nose, saying exactly what you feel? Or is there subtext?

    And as you write your characters, make sure there’s a message under the dialogue that doesn’t necessarily match what’s being said. That’s subtext. And subtext will amp up your writing.

  • 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.