I made a film with ping pong balls flying out of an Asian stripper which was a huge success, then one with a dude fisting a sheep which was a complete disaster – no one knows nothing!
Stephan Elliot, 2013
Writer/Director, The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert

In Conversation with Tom Schulman

Day 3 kicked off with another “In Conversation With” session with one of the international guests, a man that I’d already heard talk a number of times over the conference, Tom Schulman. What I loved about listening to Tom Schulman and Paul Abbott (the two international guests) were that they weren’t afraid to be completely open and honest with their failures as well as their success. Tom spoke at great length about the difficulty of being a writer in Hollywood and his love affair with movies.

Early on in his life, Tom had been a philosophy major which he said he found to be rather uninspiring. What set him on his path to Hollywood was a task that was set for one of his philosophy classes in which he had the choice to either write a term paper or make a short film about the subject matter. As most students would’ve done, he decided to shoot a film.

This little experience got him hooked on telling stories through the medium of film and soon after completing the short he began to borrow the college’s old Arriflex camera so he could shoot his own little shorts. He even got a job at a small film studio and instead of getting paid a wage he would get stock and the guy who ran the studio to shoot his films for him. At this point he never saw himself as a writer and ended up going to USC film school where he wanted to direct rather than write. That want to direct is what got his writing started as he felt (like many of us) that to be able to direct, he needed to be able to write.

After graduating from USC he started writing as a way of getting by and his first ‘Hollywood’ experience was having one of his treatments bought by ABC, only to be entirely re-written by another writer. He was told constantly that his writing didn’t have any humanity and shopped Dead Poets Society around for years with no luck. In talking about Dead Poets Society he said:

• It took him two to three years to figure out if he wanted to write it or not
• He wrote a one hundred and seventy five page outline before even beginning the script
• Was told by a studio that no one gave a shit about poetry and to rewrite it as a dance movie
• Another studio offered to make it as a TV movie, Tom’s response – “Go Fuck Yourself!”
• Alec Baldwin & Liam Neeson were originally courted to play the Robin Williams role, at the time they were complete unknowns
• The film went through two directors before finally getting underway with Australian Peter Weir at the helm

He also chatted about his successful comedy feature Honey, I Shrunk the Kids which was a rewrite on an original drama concept that Disney had called Rounded. When Schulman was first contacted they told him that he had seven days to turn the film into a comedy as they started shooting in ten days. The entire project hinged on Schulman’s rewrite as Rick Moranis was threatening to walk off the film.

He finished with this quote which I found rather cool:

“Writing is a wonderful exercise into the imagination. You get to play God.”

Recipe for Success: The Ingredients of a Smash Hit Comedy Feature

The last official session for the conference for me was about writing comedy features, something that I was a little bit dubious about going in (due to the lack of these in Australia for some time) but I felt instantly better when I discovered the panel consisted of Tom Schulman (you know the drill), Stephan Elliot (writer, Priscilla) and David Parker (writer, Malcolm).

This session was basically a case study where each writer spoke about their projects and how and why they succeeded in the marketplace. Of Malcolm, David Parker told the audience that distributers didn’t want to touch it in Australia but as soon as he took it abroad and sold it in the States they were automatically interested. He also mentioned that rather than shoot the script that had been rewritten for funding approval, they took the money and shot their original script – ballsy, and something I doubt you’d get away with these days!

Stephan Elliot spoke extensively about the timing of movies. He said that Priscilla came at a time when HIV/AIDS was a topic that had been flogged to death and that people were getting tired of the dreariness of how it was being dealt with in the media. Priscilla showed an uplifting spin on the topic which is why Stephan feels it found an audience. This was a point that Tony Briggs also touched on when talking about The Sapphires and how the Stolen Generation had been previously represented before they made the film.

Tom Schulman pretty much touched on everything he’d spoken about in the other 500 sessions that I’d seen him in so not much to report on there.

What ended this session though, was a discussion that arose from an audience member asking why Australian comedy or even film in general didn’t “travel” well overseas. What made this discussion interesting was an American woman (who had been a staff writer in at Disney for twenty years before marrying an Australian and moving here ten years ago) had to say. She said that American’s make movies for an audience whereas Australian’s make movies to please the funding bodies and the industry as a whole.

This is something that, to be honest, I kind of agree with. I think due to the lack of a studio system here, it means that we are limited in terms of where we can go to get money and the biggest source comes from film funding bodies like Screen Australia and the state funding bodies. Unfortunately for us these funding bodies are government run and therefore have to adhere to certain guidelines when it comes to financing film, which is understandable.

I think this is starting to shift with some bolder, more independent projects, starting to come to the fore in the last few years thanks to private investment and crowd funding (Red Hill, Undead, The Tunnel, Crawlspace, etc) however it’s an interesting thing to think about. What makes our industry tick? Do we make films for the market place like Seph, Emile, Penny, Tom and others had mentioned continually during the three days of the conference?

Maybe it’s time we had a good hard look at the kind of films we make and possibly make some bold steps to change it for the better. And perhaps this is already happening with films like The Rover, Son of a Gun and Predestination all currently in production. I’m not saying there isn’t room for our art house dramas like Snowtown, Wish You Were Here and Animal Kingdom – they are all amazing films in their own right. However we need to start looking at a balance between our art house cinema and our slightly more popcorn cinema so we can start to be more sustainable as an industry.

That’s it from the AWG conference. Hope my ramblings have been useful/done the conference justice.

Having failed at everything as a writer, that’s how I got to where I am.
Tom Schulman.
Academy Award winning writer of Dead Poets Society, 2013.

So day two rolled around and unfortunately due to the commute back and forth from Melbourne I managed to miss what I was told was a brilliant networking breakfast. Although to be honest every time I hear that word networking I cringe a little. I just feel like the word makes me feel like I’m supposed to be friendly with people because I may need them at some stage. I’d rather think of it as an opportunity to meet like minded people in film who i’ll hopefully have long lasting relationships with. Either way I missed it, so onto the first session for the day.

Moneyball: The High Stakes World of Development for the International Market.

I was looking forward to this session more than most as it was about developing content that works on an international scale rather than just a local scale and it also had one of the best panels of the weekend. It was chaired by Jan Sardi (writer, Shine) and featured Penny Chapman (Producer, Matchbox Pictures), Seph McKenna (Head Australian Production, Village Roadshow) and Emile Sherman (Producer, The King’s Speech, Shame). Looking forward to where Chris and I would like LateNite to head, this was a very important session as we want to think big in terms of the film and television that we want to produce.

The conversation started off with Seph talking about the “10 point plan” that Roadshow use to judge a project before jumping on board as a distributer. They basically allocate 10 points to 5 categories which include Screenplay, Director, Cast, Producer and Budget. It’s an important concept to think about because as filmmakers it’s easy to forget about the business side of making films.

He also spoke about Original Concepts as opposed to pre built franchise/brand ideas, sighting examples and thoughts behind both models. In regards to original concepts he spoke about the importance of cast as, without a pre built audience, they are what you’re selling on the poster. In the case of a pre built brand he used the example of Mao’s Last Dancer which, before going into production, was based on a book that had sold 1.3 million copies worldwide so you could argue that you potentially already have 1.3 million ticket sales in the bank before you even start rolling.

Seph is a man that I have been lucky enough to meet on a number of occasions through friends and projects I have been attached to and I have to say he is an incredibly generous and intelligent man. His parting advice at the end of his spiel: Market is key. The script must be beyond fantastic but at the end of the day, who are you making it for?

Emile Sherman was next cab off the rank and he spoke in depth about the four categories that he feels Australian film fall into. They were:

Art House

• Makes some sales in Australia and some small art house sales world wide
• Snowtown, Wish You Were Here

Australian Focus

• Often comedy (perhaps based on a book)
• Don’t really work overseas but hit big with the local market
• Red Dog, Wog Boy

Breakout Film

• Can have a wide release throughout Australia
• Works as a film overseas
• Bought and distributed by bigger art house distributers worldwide
• Have something a bit different, perhaps a bit of publicity or festival driven
• The Sapphires, The King’s Speech

Commercial/Genre Film

• Requires a wide release, not only here but overseas
• Needs a decent PA/Marketing budget
• Competes directly with Hollywood movies
• Has to put an Australian cast up against American casts, how do they compete?
• A Few Best Men, Mental

He also spoke about what he called, the writing paradox for producers, “Everyone wants the new original thing that’s worked before”. A really interesting concept which had me thinking for quite a few days about that in relation to my own projects. It seems to have been a constant theme throughout the three days, how do you take what’s already been done and find that hook, that original twist?

In terms of the business side of things, Emile echoed Seph’s comments about knowing your market. He said it distresses him to see writers working on concepts that don’t have an audience and that his job a lot of the time is to work with writers to shape their film into something that has market appeal. He also mentioned thinking about budget early on when writing. For example The King’s Speech was made on a budget of 13 million as they knew with Firth, Rush, Pearce and Bonham Carter starring that would be able to safely recoup their budget from box office numbers. With his other film Shame, they knew it would only have a very small art house release due to the subject matter and therefore only had a budget of 6 million.

Penny Chapman was last in line and she spoke at great length about her experience at working in the Hollywood system after her company Matchbox was bought up by NBC Universal back in 2011. She spoke about the writers being the ones who sell projects in the States and that as television “takes over” from film thanks to HBO, a great showrunner (head writer) and writing team is gonna be what gets a project up.

They finished off with a story about a writer called Graeme Simsion, a man who I’ve had the pleasure of working with through a table read of his script The Rosie Project a few years back. Graeme won an AWGie award for his script but just couldn’t get the project up, no one wanted to touch it. After a few years he managed to get the script bought as a novel, with a publisher putting forward quite a substantial amount of money to get it written. And would you believe it – now people are chasing him for the film rights… what a strange industry we work in!

Warp Factor None: Writing Sci Fi Film & TV in Australia

I went to sit in on this talk due to a couple of projects that Chris and I have been working on in the last few years that have a bit of a Sci Fi twist to them. I was thoroughly disappointed with the talk which didn’t really seem to go anywhere. The panel seemed to talk mainly about the fact that Sci Fi could definitely and should be made in Australia, but really it isn’t that much. It was a real shame because the session was packed with writers who I think were expecting a bit more of an insight into Sci Fi writing and the deconstruction of what makes it work in Hollywood but perhaps currently not here.

The one thing I did pull out of this talk was the idea of Sci Fi content being impossible on low budget and that’s why it’s not really funded in Australia. The panel members sighted a few examples of low budget Sci Fi which have kicked huge goals around the world including Primer ($7,000), Cube ($350,000), Moon (5,000,000) and of course our very own Mad Max (350,000).

Before I move on I’d like to point out the huge slate of Sci Fi films being made in Australia including:

• The Rover (David Michôd)
• These Final Hours (Zac Hilditch)
• Predestination (Speirig Brothers)
• Tremula (Shane Krause)

Check them out if you get the chance.

Horror, The Horror

This talk involved writers Shane Krause, Shayne Armstrong and legendary genre producer Anthony Ginane and was about the issues that producers often find with first time screen writers. The two Shane’s had literally just come off judging the Terror Australis Competition and so got an insight as writers as what producers must have to put up with when reading a huge volume of scripts (they had to read 130 and pick 12 for the competition). They broke the talk up into 13 “rules” which I’ve attempted to summarise below.

Titles Matter

• Make them short and sharp / make sure people can spell and remember it
• Allow them to have multiple meanings within the screenplay
• Try to make it eye catching

Size Does Matter

• For genre in particular, longer scripts aren’t necessarily better
• People hate reading these days, don’t give ridiculously sized treatments/supporting material
• Make your pitch document as interesting and compelling as possible, don’t fill it with useless shit

Write like a Demon, NOT a Psycho

• Be professional (typo’s, grammar, punctuation etc)
• Energy, creativity and commitment come across on the page
• Use correct formatting
• Keep in mind Australian paper size is bigger than American paper size

Density Controls your Destiny

• A fast read is a good read
• Be careful that you don’t overwrite the BIG print
• If it’s taking you 6 lines to say something, can it be said in 1 or 2?

Your Soul is Judged within Two Pages

• Within two pages, the reader knows if you can write or not (can you write evocatively, character, situation etc)
• The more scripts you have to read, the quicker the judgements are when reading
• If it’s shit in the first two pages, it’s unlikely it will get better

Prepare to be Decimated

• Your script must be compelling in the first 10 pages
• Always a concern when the opening is too slow a burn
• If the premise isn’t knock-out interesting, you have to find a way to hook your reader immediately
• Don’t leave things too late in the read!

Death to Dilettantes!

• Know the genre, know the market, know the reader
• Horror scripts should be scary / if it’s not thrilling it’s not a thriller
• Be passionate about your genre
• You can only break the rules and conventions if you know them back to front

Premise is King

• Have to be able to distill your premise/hook in a couple of sentences
• What’s different about your premise/idea
• If you want it to be a theatrical movie what about your film cuts through?

Go for the Jugular (or Heart)

• Comedy horror, make sure it’s funny but still scary
• Go for an emotional/visceral response to the material
• The art in it is the passion you develop for a particular genre

Achievability can Make or Break a Script

• Want a producer to think: that’s a good concept AND I can find the money for this
• Don’t pitch to a producer who doesn’t work in the style/genre of your film

In a Digital World, Hard Copies Rule

• Better read when you hand over a hard copy
• Just cause we live in a digital world doesn’t mean everyone reads on an iPad/kindle

Break the Rules BUT Only if You Know Them

• Fuck with the system
• Look at Wolf Creek for a good Australian example

The Numbers are Against You

• In the spec script market, 20% are good, 5% are GREAT and the rest are rubbish
• There are a hell of a lot of scripts out there

A couple of interesting points in there but the discussion ended up descending into Anthony Ginane telling everyone that the industry is hard and eventually people have to start being realistic about their careers. Perhaps not the best forum for negativity but he makes an interesting point all the same.

The Eclectic Writer: Pleasures and Pains of working in multiple genres

A great session to finish the day with as again it featured a rip roaring panel which included Tom Schulman (writer, Dead Poet’s Society, Honey I Shrunk the Kids), Andrew Knight (one of Australia’s greats, writer of SeaChange, Rake, Jack Irish), Jacquelin Perske (writer Love My Way, Little Fish) and Keith Thompson (writer, The Sapphires, Clubland).

I really enjoyed this session because it started off with all of the panel talking about how they got into writing and what made them want to write for film and television. The stories were diverse and all interesting, my favourites being Oscar winner Tom Schulman who started writing in multiple genres due to depression setting in when he couldn’t sell a script in Hollywood, Keith Thompson who got a job writing for television for Crawfords back in the day and got so bored writing for TV that he used to try to write album names and song titles into the shows dialogue and Andrew Knight who claims to have started writing after getting fired from his job for flooding the paint factory he worked in.

These four incredibly intelligent writers spoke throughout the session about the importance of finding your voice as a writer and allowing yourself to fail. Keith Thompson spoke a lot about being terrified every time he sits down to write and having to give himself a few days before getting started as he know that he will be so terrified he’ll waste a few days just staring at the screen.

They also spoke about sticking to your guns and gave their advice on (this is a quote) dealing with “fucking idiots” when selling your scripts. Their advice?

• Be polite and open to advice, don’t argue
• If you don’t agree with something just nod your head and ignore it later
• Listen and use your instincts as a writer
• Work with people that you’ve chosen to work with and check your ego at the door.

I enjoyed day two far more than day one and even though it was a long one, I felt I came out of it with a lot of interesting thoughts to ponder about story telling and the business of the industry that I’ve chosen to be a part of. I decided to miss the networking dinner to retire to my motel for some local Chinese food and to catch up on work.

Write what you know about the world emotionally. Just because you’re a canteen lady doesn’t mean you need to write about canteen ladies. Unless they’re fucking serial killers – be imaginative.
Paul Abbott, 2013.

On the drive up to the Mornington Peninsula to my first ever National Screenwriters Conference, I thought about what I wanted to get out of the next three days. Somebody had asked me previously why I was going and I couldn’t clearly express exactly why. Sometimes I think about exactly what the hell I’m doing in Film & Television, especially when people ask who I am, what I do and what my profession is. Am I an actor, a writer, a producer, a director, a filmmaker? Is it too bold and egotistical to say all of the above, am I under selling if I only say one? Believe me when I say, it’s a constant confusion.

I think what I enjoy about coming to these conferences (this is my third after attending the Screen Producers Conference last year and also SPAA Fringe in Sydney) is that it gives you a perspective from every corner of the industry. What are writers currently doing, how do they feel about the content that is being produced, what are their frustrations, their hopes, their dreams for the future of Australian Film & Television. I also do have aspirations of being a writer. At the moment I enjoy working with writers in a collaborative sense as I think it’s an incredibly efficient and enjoyable way of working. What I came to discover over the next few days was that word collaboration was an extremely important one, and one that I think quite often as young, curious filmmakers we forget about…

Paul Abbott in Conversation

Paul Abbott is a UK writer who has had a ridiculously successful career in film & television, with his original series Shameless running for ten years in the UK before being bought up and produced in the states by Showtime. He has also written the film State of Play with Russell Crowe, Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams, the critically acclaimed UK show Hit & Miss starring Chloe Sevigny, has been nominated for a shitload of BAFTA’s and won a Prime Time Emmy. Not bad if you ask me.

The thing I loved about his talk with Max Gudgeon, is that Paul spoke a lot about being daring in your writing and keeping an open mind to any and all possibilities. I felt like he empowered many people in the room to not be scared and to always be bold when sitting down to work on a new project. Some things that he said that stuck in my mind were:

• When writing State of Play he didn’t know shit about politics or journalism and he refused to research claiming that “research gets in the way of a good story. Write the story first and then research the technicalities later.”
• When asked how he writes female characters so well he responded with “If a writer can’t write a woman with the same flair that they can write a man, dog or any other living being, then they’re not a writer”
• When talking about keeping an open mind and embracing your mistakes he spoke about writing a character once and misspelling her dialogue. After reading over it a couple of times he discovered “Fuck. She does talk like that.”
• Again on the subject of creativity, originality and open mindedness he said “go left or right without making a judgment on which one is right, writers should close their eyes more”

He also sighted specific examples from his own work. About Hit & Miss he said that originally the idea was that it was to be a show about a transexual that becomes a mother of five. He didn’t feel like it was a high enough concept, so he decided to make her a hitman cause he knew that was an idea that would (and this is a quote) “blow they’re (audience) tit’s off.” You can now begin to understand where UK and US television has well and truly started to head thanks to networks like HBO and writers like Paul, basically they take a run of the mill idea, and fuck with it – high concept film and television.

Paul was a pleasure to listen to and I really think captured the imagination of the room, speaking openly and confidently about his triumphs, his failures and his way of working with intellect and good humour. The session concluded with Max Gudgeon asking what he felt made a good writer and Paul responded with:

“Fireworks and discipline. Be messy, be violent, be surprising but be a disciplined practitioner”

Sapphires: A Case Study

Next up was a case study on the enormously successful Australian film from 2012, The Sapphires, written by Keith Thompson and Tony Briggs and based on the stage play also written by Briggs.

The session started with Tony and Keith talking about how they fell into writing, which is something I always find fascinating to listen to. Tony chatted about his love of story telling from an early age (making a few embarrassed references to Phil Collins being his inspiration) and in particular his love of cinema. His family would put up a bed sheet when he was young and project as yet unreleased movies that his dad brought home from overseas (his dad was in the airforce). Keith was much the same, with film being part of his life really early on in the UK, which was where he was brought up. He was obsessed with movies, going to the cinema once or twice a week to catch the latest Roger Corman flick. He spoke of the magic of cinema and how it completely grabbed enthralled him as a youngster. Certainly sounds familiar!

The rest of the conversation was all about the development of The Sapphires and how it came to being on stage, and then the big screen. Basically Tony was doing a play called Stolen for Playbox about the stolen generation and felt he wanted to do something that showed the aboriginal people and their stories in a different light. Something that would make him laugh. One thing led to another and before he knew it he was asked to workshop the play with the MTC in Melbourne and got a brilliant response.

Once the play got up, Keith (who had a pre existing relationship with Tony) told producer Kylie Du Fresne from Goalpost Pictures to go and check it out (he had been working with her on Clubland at the time). From that point on, Goalpost jumped on board and allowed Keith and Tony to develop the script over the next 6 years.

What was most interesting about hearing these too writers talk was listening to their different backgrounds and approaches to writing, and how they coped with collaboration. Tony, an actor as well as a writer, would love to jump up and put the text on it’s feet, giving it an excitable, nervous energy. Keith would then grab his paper and pen and start furiously writing as Tony would be up on his feet, making sure they didn’t miss anything.

The other thing that came up was how Keith handled the fact that this was Tony’s story as it was about his family. Keith said he got Tony to just write EVERYTHING down that he could think of in terms of story and then it was his job to whittle it down and help craft the script, sighting specific examples of scenes from the film that were either different or completely not in the stage play.

As the talk neared the end, one thing that did come up was Chris O’Dowd’s involvement in the project. When he was sent the script, he was the last character (and piece of the puzzle as financing was also already in place) to be cast, so the script was more or less locked into a shooting draft. What they got back from O’Dowd was a series of notes pertaining to the Dave character along with the sentence “I’m an amiable man and this is an amiable character, he needs a bit more edge.” So the writers worked furiously to give the Dave character more light and shade based on O’Dowd’s notes and their own thoughts and what came from it was a more in depth character which helped take the movie in a completely different direction. The writers even admitted themselves that before the last rewrite, the Dave character had a “pretty flimsy backstory.”

A very smart actor (and writers) if you ask me.

So that was it for Day 1. Short and sharp with only the two sessions as I had to head back to Melbourne for the evening. Had a great half day though and saw lots of people who I know and love so was excited about the next two days ahead.