A basic rule of thumb is you’re just not supposed to worry about who might play this or that character in the movie adaptation of your novel or novels. But absolutely no one listens to me or cares, and I feel like some having some fun. So, here goes. It’s eerie how well the actress Zendaya matches the young woman who is central to this five novel series.
Zendaya
I’m really delusional, but I’m not so delusional at the moment to actually think there is a real chance that I will not only sell these five novels, then them being popular enough to become movies then have Zendaya specifically fulfill my vision on the screen.
But it is nice to daydream.
Really, the only reason I even mention this is how one-to-one Zendaya is to what the character looks like in my mind. But I have a huge amount of work ahead of me so lulz.
A lot of ink has been spilled by people complaining about Disney’s handling of the Star Wars franchise. They’re slowly getting better, but that improvement has come largely on the edges. The main franchise continues to be a shit show of half-measures and muddled movies that seem to be just crap put together in a hap-hazarded way.
The last few franchise movies have been so God-awful that I have simply walked out of them. The issue is not Kathleen Kennedy being “woke,” is that apparently Disney on an institutional level is not fans of the franchise and have no idea what to do with them.
For me, Disney has not one, but several existential problems they have to fix with the main franchise of Star Wars. All of these are extremely difficult to fix because of what Star Wars has become as a cultural and, most importantly financial standpoint.
Off the top of my head, the biggest problem of Star Wars is what you might call the “Bloatware Problem” Disney looks at Star Wars and sees dollah bills — selling toys — and also an opportunity to sell the “woke” agenda to a fan base of mostly center-Right men. Disney has done this to the point that the whole thing is unwatchable now.
But it gets worse.
Star Wars has always been camp for little kids. Despite the best efforts of middle-aged fanboys, Star Wars has no internal logic that functions. Things just happen for no fucking reason. They have begun to try to fix this problem by using the rubric “A Star Wars Movie” for some of the darker films, but Disney wants to sell toys, so it’s difficult to have sex or gore in a Star Wars movie.
There are no ready fixes to these problems.
I do think if they just would cool it with do ANY Star Wars movies for a few years, it might help to clear the air. Then I would really lean into using the massive universe that Star Wars has and explore the stories of lesser known characters.
Go to a planet that doesn’t have just one type of climate, for instance. Anyway, whatever. Until Star Wars gets its act together, I’m going to try to make my own interesting worlds for people to play in.
But for my broken ankle, I would probably be zoning out at a bar somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard on one my regular “Writer’s Retreats.” But, alas, I’m hobbled for the moment, so I have to make do with what I have.
And what I have is Syd Field’s “Screenplay.”
I have more than that, obviously, but this weekend, I’m trying to study that book so I can get some sense of how to properly structure the screenplay outline I’m half-assed working on as my current creative “second track.” I have a really compelling movie concept that I want to do something with as an method to “distract” myself from the main track of writing four novels.
But the only way I could get to this point was a lot of hard work on those four novels. Now that I know how *I* develop a big, overarching story, I can just reuse what I have discovered and use it in a different way — the different way of outlining a screenplay.
I still don’t know how to use Final Draft, though.
But that’s the second stage in all of this. The first stage is to game out the story as well as possible, then turn around and learn Final Draft.
I’m well aware that I probably need three solid completed screenplays to my name before I think about doing what I want to do — simply fly to LA for a few days and walk around, hoping my natural larger-than-life extrovertedness will “somehow” get me near a producer or something.
This IS EXTREMELY DELUSIONAL.
But it’s also how, as I understand it, Hollywood really works. You do your hard prep work, then hope for the best. It’s all in who you know, not what you know. I’m also well aware that 99% of the people in LA are writing scripts and have exactly the same idea I do.
My mom always told me I was special, though. Wink.
I’ll put a move on you.
Right now, I have a strong scifi movie idea, a strong Wedding Crashers-like movie idea and MAYBE a screenplay based on The Impossible Scenario that I’ve been mulling a lot of late on this site. Maybe. I’m going to have to think some more about that third one. I also have the idea for a movie that I might be able to pitch to Seth Rogen because it deals with a film concept that he, also, is interested in. I just know how to actually pull it off, something he, to date, has not (apparently.)
The only problem with the Wedding Crasher’s style movie I have rolling around in my mind is, well, I’m not THAT funny. But I really like the concept — which I find hilarious — and maybe just by writing it, it could be the basis for a new version I wrote with someone else that was, like, actually as funny as the movie deserves to be.
Anyway, I’m kind of overwhelming myself with creativity, which is how I like it.
I spend a lot of my time thinking of names. And the idea that a name as great as “Shiv Roy” exists drives me crazy. Shiv Roy has got to be one of the greatest character names because I have no idea about the character and yet I do. Shiv, as in a small knife combined with “Roy” which means “sun” or “king” (I think — rex and roy are very similar).
The character with the perfect name — Shiv Roy.
So, while I have never watched an episode of Succession, “Shiv Roy” is so, so great. It’s so loaded that virtually anything the character does is ironic. If she’s sneaky and does “front stabbing” then she lives up to her name. But if she’s not, then that’s an interesting use of a character with a name like that.
Anyway, just had to get that off my chest. Back to thinking up equally great names to populate four novels.
One of the core struggles I have with The Impossible Scenario is how many people would you need to successfully build out the planetary infrastructure for the, say, 1`billion people about to follow to the planet?
This, only on an livable planet and 1 billion people.
I have gone back from about 1 million to about 60 million over and over in my mind. Remember, a Galactic Empire has told humanity that it’s going to zap 1 billion humans to a new “homeland planet.” So, in this case, 1 billion people being saved from doomed earth isn’t as laughable as you might assume. No space ships would be involved. People would just wake up in some sort of re-animation pod on the other planet as if nothing happened.
The more people you use, the better the story telling because then you have the jarring image of people snapping back to normal life on a whole different planet. The fewer people, the longer it takes to colonize the planet and the less people have an emotion connection to the story.
Anyway.
I honestly don’t know.
And, what complicates matters even worse is if things were really all that existential, then the 10(ish) major nuclear powers would jump to the front of the line and demand they get more people to settle in the first few waves or they threaten to blow the world up.
Here’s my thinking — even though under the conditions of the scenario the first settlers to this new “homeland” planet would have to work their asses off, they would be in a position to become fabulously wealthy once all was said and done. And incredibly politically powerful.
So, there would be a huge crush of wealthy, powerful people who would, if nothing else, want their offspring to be among the first group of build-out settlers, no matter how many you might come up with.
Of course, if you’re writing the script, you find a way where your Everyman or Everywoman finds themselves among this first wave of settlers and the plot would be how they rise through the ranks to become a global leader.
This is a massive universe I’ve come up with, but there’s catch — it’s much more of a movie universe than a novel universe and I’m working on four novels right now. What’s more, I love those four novels I’m working on so much that I just don’t feel like pulling mental energy away from them to start from scratch to tell the story of all of this.
But I might at some point in the future. And I’m aware from my Webstats that people are growing interested in this scenario. I’m such a nobody that if someone scooped this idea up and made a movie or movies out of it I would be flabbergasted. I would be angry that they did it at first, but, lulz, I did explain it to them.
And, yet, I dunno.
Just because someone is interested in this doesn’t mean they’re willing to throw the huge amount of money at this idea necessary to create a Star Wars or The Matrix sized franchise out of it.
But, at least in my mind, the universe is fascinating. Imagine if we learn that not only are we not alone in the universe, but 1 billion of us can survive earth’s impending doom — if we’re just willing to work together.
It just occurred to me that there’s one person who could pull off a reboot of the super-campy movie Barbarella that stared Jane Fonda — Miley Cyrus. The two women even look alike.
Anyway, Cyrus has just the right over-the-top vibe to her that she would do a great job. I think she would love doing something so campy.
I’ve struggled with the practical aspects of colonizing a habitable planet the size of earth using only existing technology for about a decade now. And I think the key to doing so is to approach it as an economic problem. If you’re trying to unite the planet and avoid the dangers of nationalism, then you create six (or so) holding companies that would serve as modern day versions of the British East India Company.
What do I know.
Whenever trying to settle a planet, you have a number of pretty big issue to contend with. If you look an economic-political-ethnic map of the globe, the earth is not one, but several planets. You have the United States, which is big enough to be its own thing. Then you have “The West” which is rest of the First World. Then, you have China and India as their own things. Then Latin America. This is where things get murky.
Africa doesn’t really fit any specific designation other than “The Third World” because it’s so split up, poor and culturally influenced by its former colonial powers.
Anyway, the point is — with all those different types of human civilizations on earth, how do you get everyone to see themselves as “just human” on a new planet?
I propose you use the United States as the foundation of your global civilization via your global spanning holding companies. Then, later, once everyone is on the same page, you let individual nation-states begin to be established. But, even then, the economics of this new world would be very different than what we assume about earth.
There would be a lot more wealth for everyone to tap in as you built out the new settlement’s economy, which would change the idea of “First World” greatly. The conflict — and potential plot for a novel exploring this scenario — would be how much everyone who wasn’t American would absolutely hate this method of settling a planet.
But, anyway, I keep thinking about this scenario when I want to switch gears from working on four novels.
I’m going through my “Rear Window” phase where everything is a lot more complicated because, well, lulz, I broke my right ankle. My life is a mess at the moment. Even the most basic of things are extremely difficult or impossible without someone giving me some help.
So, I found myself stuck in front of my TV, forced to watch Netflix’s “Red Notice.” I was mildly curious about watching it before, but now I was nearly forced to watch it.
Red Notice / The Internet
Within seconds in to the movie, I knew was going to be bad. Or, more specifically, it was cheap. I think the movie itself had a budge of $200 million but it definitely seems as though all that money was put in to the casting of the three leads.
The Rock, Gal Gadot and Ryan Reynolds were all very pretty to look at and did a great job of acting in the context of the movie they were expected to be in. But otherwise, the movie felt cheap. It felt like a b-movie that took the Captain America growth serum.
At its heart Red Notice was a b movie.
It wasn’t a bad movie, it was just a b-movie that had outgrown itself.
Anyway, the whole thing began to grate on my nerves to the point that I got my caretaker of the moment to allow me to grab the remote and stop watching it.
by Shelt Garner @sheltgarner I’m essentially using the method of development for the structure of a big story that I have formulated over the last three years to now work on a screenplay. The scifi movie concept is set in the far future and has is very much a warning about both the threat of MAGA and global climate change.
One thing I’ve noticed as I actually develop this screenplay’s outline is how much more native and organic outlining a screenplay is for me than a novel. There is a very strict rule when developing a screenplay — more screen time equals more attention directed to a concept or theme.
This also exists for novels, of course, but the whole dynamic of how you handle this is different for a screenplay. Because it’s on the screen, there are all these tricks you can use to really stress to the audience in a subtle way that this or that thing is REALLY IMPORTANT.
As such, I find myself flexing a different part of my creative mind as I go through the scenes of the outline. It’s a lot of fun.
And now that I’ve severely broken my right ankle and I’m literally unable to do anything but sit in front of my laptop every waking hour, it’s at least possible I’ll be able to focus a lot more attention on my various side projects over and above the four thriller novels I’m working on.
All that is the goal, at least.
I’m struggling to find a silver lining in this dumb, freak accident. And, if nothing else, if I ever reach my “potential” I can look back and all of this will be a funny story I can tell on the TV talk show circuit.
So, I severely broke my right ankle a few days ago and just came back from surgery today. As such, I’m at the beginning of a three month period where I pretty much can’t do anything but just sit on the couch with my laptop.
I’m thinking that this is now a great opportunity for me to throw myself into a wide range of writing, developing and reading. Unless I’m missing something, I can now have a very, very intensive spurt of creativity where I focus on an array of novels, screenplays and short stories that I have either been working on already or have been lying around in my mind.
It is only three months, of course, so there’s only so much I can do. But I’m hoping that I given how far I’ve gotten with thriller one and thriller three, that this added focus will help me really plow through the less developed thrillers two and four.
I’ve already figured out part 1 (three chapters) of Part 1 of the second thriller. It’s meant to be an almost literal retelling of the events leading up to, and immediately following the fall that precipitated this dumb accident in the first place.
And my involvement with the medical field as a result of this freak accident has me thinking AGAIN of the pandemic scifi novel I’ve been mulling. It’s a great concept that would be written in a first person POV. I first thought the concept up when I was in South Korea, but it’s only been since COVID19 struck that I’ve realized I could do something with it.
The concept is meant to make the idea of a pandemic very personal and intimate in a number of ways. Having gone through a real pandemic has made me understand a number of practical issues that would have previously escaped me.
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