You’re not limited to two hours of running time, nor are you pressed to stretch out a group of characters in a situation into 22 or 24 episodes. It’s almost a perfect compression chamber; you’re limited, but not too limited, and you don’t have to crank out so many ideas you thin out the storyline.

The miniseries seems most useful when adapting larger books. Take Game of Thrones, the adaptation of the Song of Ice and Fire books. George R.R. Martin has been quoted as saying he purposely wrote the series so it couldn’t be turned into a movie. The books are gargantuan; the producers decided to dedicate one season to each book (or split each book in half and get two seasons from each) and the show has become wildly popular. The Pillars of the Earth was another massive book that was subsequently turned into a miniseries. The Walking Dead’s first season was an eight-episode miniseries.

So what are the drawbacks?

Well, for starters, you usually don’t get any more than eight episodes per season. A popular situational comedy like The Big Bang Theory can have more than twenty episodes a season; that’s five months out of the year that fans can watch new episodes, gather around the water cooler, and discuss what happens. The buzz sticks around. Once Game of Thrones finishes its third-season run (eight more episodes to go!), viewers will have to wait another year to find out what happens. And yes, that’s another year of hiding from those who have read the books and are eager to release spoilers.

But still—can we really hope to attract and keep audiences by providing new content just ten times a year? The modern world is constantly producing new content, new things to catch our attention. If a show isn’t running for a long period of time, if it isn’t keeping us on our toes for several months, at least, why should we follow it?

Good writing always helps, as does excellent production value. The miniseries I’ve discussed above have outstanding production teams behind them who work hard to create vast worlds for us to lose ourselves in. They craft a quality product and the viewers return each time, eager to immerse themselves in it once more.

I suspect the miniseries will become more of a trend as time goes on, particularly as more and more online venues involve themselves in creating TV shows (Netflix among them). I’ll go deeper into this next time as we explore new avenues for TV and film.

The point of a trailer is to tease viewers a little bit—get them sold on the idea that they want to see your movie, that there’s more glorious buffoonery (or horror, or drama) than what was shown during the preview. You want to give them enough of the basic storyline to let them know what they’ll be getting into, then get them wondering about what happens next. With any luck, they’ll be buying tickets/the DVD/what-have-you shortly thereafter.

So: Tease the audience, give them a hint of the storyline, and leave them wanting more.

Some good trailers I can recall from recent releases:

Superbad. The aforementioned Superbad was, at its heart, about nerds trying to get laid (“We could be that mistake!” enthuses Jonah Hill in the trailer). Storyline: check. Then there’s McLovin, cop hijinks, and some pretty clear indications that Jonah and Michael are not going to be making sweet love the way they hope in the movie. Teasing, check. This is one of those movies that arguably gave it all away in the trailer, but it’s hard to deny it was a great trailer.

Cloud Atlas. I don’t mean the extended five-minute version (though that was enticing as well); I mean the standard theatrical trailer. This is a movie with a complicated storyline involving past lives, and it takes us through the various characters and timelines in a very quick introduction before seguing into many plot points (each character having their own story). Audiences definitely get the impression that this will be a movie encompassing many lives, and will include romance, action, and adventure. There really isn’t one consolidated storyline, but I felt this trailer did a good job.

The Matrix Reloaded. Setting aside the disappointment many felt with the movie, the trailer itself was both perfectly paced and visually dazzling. Neo and his compatriots are fighting for all of humankind to end the rule of the machines, and they’re going to run into trouble from Agent Smith (lots of Agent Smiths) and a host of new villains.

Inception. I’m not referring to the original minute and a half trailer, which did not address the fact that the movie deals with dreams (I remember trying to figure out what the movie was about). The second trailer says upfront that they deal in dreams, and the manipulation thereof to steal ideas. From there, we get just enough looks at dazzling vistas and action to know we’re in for a treat.

2013 seems to be the year of the re-imagining. We’ve got familiar stories dressed up in more expensive costumes, laden with special effects and witty one-liners. For starters, Hansel and Gretel have been recast as extraordinarily attractive, leather-clad adults in Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters. We’re updating The Lone Ranger by adding Johnny Depp. On television, we have Do No Harm, a highly modernized version of Jekyll & Hyde, and it seems like there’s always room for a new Sherlock Holmes adaptation.

Aside from Hansel & Gretel (not that I have anything against the movie or the source story – I just don’t quite get the modern appeal), all of aforementioned stories have compelling characters, storylines, and (at least in some cases) a lot of nostalgic appeal. The Jekyll & Hyde story, no matter how watered down, brings up questions of how we handle our darker instincts. Every year there’s at least one Shakespeare adaptation emerging from some corner of the globe; his stories have endured for similar reasons: they address issues that we still face today – they speak to the human condition.

Those seem to be the stories that loan themselves to re-imaginings down the road. No matter how firmly entrenched they are in their respective timelines, you can still extract the plot itself, place it in another genre, if necessary, and have a fully coherent (and recognizable) film. They can be redone again and again, and they’ll usually still be watchable, because even the familiar forces us to examine ourselves and our own stories in a new light.

Did the writers of Jekyll & Hyde and The Lone Ranger set out to create tropes that would stand for decades? Probably not. In the end, they’re stories – pen set to paper in hopes of entertaining (or at least generating a paycheck).

Who knows – maybe in thirty years we’ll see The Lone Ranger…In Space. 

In honor of that tradition, I spoke to a few screenwriter friends and asked them what they hoped to accomplish in the new year. If you’re not big on creating official resolutions, there’s no harm in just writing down some things you’d like to accomplish in the new year—it’ll keep you on track.

Watch, watch, watch.

Don’t get so consumed in your work that you forget what got you into screenwriting in the first place—likely a love of movies and television. Watch the flicks and shows that make you laugh, cry, think, or just flat-out entertain you.

Write, write, write.

Every word counts. Not every word will make it to the finished product, but every time you sit down with a pen and paper (or a word processor), you’re practicing your craft.

Read, read, read.

Read other scripts. Read treatments. Read books. Read magazines. Read everything you can get your hands on; not only will you be improving your own craft and learning how others do it, you’ll also be keeping up to date on trends—and maybe gaining new ideas in the process.

Don’t sweat the hard stuff.

Everyone goes through rough patches. After a third round of revisions with no end in sight, you may feel like flinging your computer through a window and going back to work as an accountant. Don’t. Persevere. There’s always light at the end of the tunnel.

Take on the exciting (but dangerous) project.

If something gets your energy up and makes your brain start dancing, don’t just set it aside to work on when you’ve got more time. Throw yourself into it—the best projects are the ones you’re excited about! Don’t know where it will lead? Do it anyway. At least you tried.

Try a new genre.

Branch out a little bit. Test your boundaries. If you’ve been working on sci-fi scripts for the last three years, give a romantic adventure a shot. If all you write is romantic comedies, look into horror. You’ll never know something is right or wrong unless you give it a shot—and who knows, you might write the next genre-bender!

That’s a wrap for 2012, gang. Good night and be safe, and see you next year!

At first glance, transferring a book to movie format seems easy. Just lift the dialogue, right? Well…not quite. The art of bringing a beloved book (or even just a controversial one) to the screen is a great deal more complicated than that. After obtaining the rights—which can be a complicated process on its own—the screenwriter must then break the book down to its component parts and create a treatment that will fill the allotted screen time. If you’re considering taking a novel to the big (or small) screen, there’s a few things you should think about before you start in on writing.

Characters

Characters are the most recognizable aspect of a book, and they’re often the things readers will scream loudest about if anything about them is changed. Books—especially longer, epic works—may have dozens upon dozens of major and minor characters. It’s virtually impossible to give all of them adequate screen time, so some may be reduced, combined, or eliminated altogether. Certain traits may be transferred to another character. This is often up to the screenwriter and the filmmaking team.

Storylines

There’s only so many plots and subplots you can fit into ninety minutes (even slightly more) of running time. Lord of the Rings enthusiasts caused a ruckus when it was announced that Tom Bombadil had been cut from the trilogy. In addition to selecting which plots to follow, bear in mind that not all plots will transfer well to screen. It might be perfectly interesting to read about your space pilot making five pages’ worth of repairs to his ship while thinking about his dead mother, but an audience is not going to want to sit for five minutes while your lead actor fusses with machinery and does nothing else.

Timing

Don’t try to create a literal adaptation of a book. Wikipedia cites Erich von Stroheim as a director who tried to do just this, and wound up with a 9.5-hour movie version of the novel McTeague. The film, Greed, was edited down quite a bit by the studio, and the end result was “largely incoherent.” Part of the business of adapting a novel is figuring out what to cut and what to combine; a reader can always put a long book down and take a break—a movie watcher can’t.

Adapting a novel takes a lot more than just the aforementioned segments, but if you keep these in mind when approaching your work, you’ll be off to a good start.

Franchising aside, the ambiguous ending can be both enraging and entertaining. People will gather around the water cooler to discuss it, will often see the movie multiple times to see what they missed before. They may also dismiss it as a cop-out, as downright confusing, or as a cheap trick by filmmakers to leave open ends.

We tend to like our films neatly wrapped up, no strings left unpulled.

You often see them at the end of science fiction and horror films—in the latter, they tend to masquerade as “shock endings,” with a hand reaching out of a grave or the previously vanquished monster bursting out of a closet. In darker, more dramatic films, it may be that the plague has mutated or the starship’s engines are only good for another few days.

Why utilize the ambiguous ending?

Schmendrick from The Last Unicorn once said, “There are no happy endings—because nothing ends.” The happy ending has become pervasive in fiction of all sorts precisely because a happy ending isn’t always guaranteed in life. Creators have some level of control over their content, and thus can grant the happy ending to the people we’ve learned to root for.

But deep down, most of us know that does not always happen. An ambiguous ending is often the only nod toward reality that we get. The good guys don’t always win. True love doesn’t always conquer all. Even if you win the battle, you may lose the war. It’s another nod to the real life that art seeks to explore and often imitate.

What’s your favorite ambiguous ending?

There was the remake of Dawn of the Dead in 2004, which arguably kicked off the massive interest in the living dead. Before that, 28 Days Later had zombie-like creatures (who were not really zombies, but were more or less rabid). It’s been all zombies, all the time since then.

Vampires seem to come and go in cycles, but zombies have shown a considerable amount of staying power in the decade they’ve been kicking around. What about them fascinates us so much? Why have they become the go-to bad guy in just about every movie, video game, and television show out there?

Maybe it’s the horror element hanging in there. At its core, the zombie crawls out of its grave and devours the living with a single-mindedness usually seen among ants. There is no trace of humanity left in them, yet except for a very few examples, most of them are still recognizable as having once been human. I’m not just talking about the visceral element, either; rot and decay are mental deterrents, for sure, but just the idea of a body moving while not under the control of a brain is enough to scare some folks.

Zombies aren’t always the bad guys, though. The Romero films have often pointed out that the living tend to be their own worst enemies, which is itself a sad commentary on the human species. If nothing else, the living should be united against the scourge of the undead. That they instead choose to pick fights with and kill off each other is often a shock; the living dead just become a background element of the human drama going on.

But like all crazes, the zombies will eventually wind down. We’ve seen them leak into other types of films; zombies have made appearances in Westerns, sci-fi flicks, and even as foils in romantic comedies, but they may be going dormant soon enough. That begs the question: what’s the next movie monster?

Zombies and vampires both have their origins in mythology, so I suspect mythology will yield the next big creep. I’m looking toward something more obviously supernatural, though; it takes more and more to scare audiences, and people like to have things explained away. A supernatural beast doesn’t have an explanation, which makes it all the scarier.

My bet is on banshees. They’re creepy-looking (often depicted as a ghostly and/or rotten woman), supernatural (pass through walls! Paralyze you with their shriek!), scary (vengeful spirits and all that), and best of all, there’s a romantic element to them if you dig hard enough.

Which is more than anyone can say about the living dead…

At its core, subtext is saying something while doing something else. When told that she’s being let go, a woman may say, “Very well,” in a calm voice, but the tightening of her jaw and the slight welling up of her eyes might indicate she’s not feeling quite agreeable to the situation. In romantic films and books, the hero or heroine may explain to the love interest why they can’t be together, all the while stroking his/her cheek in a way that’s anything but platonic. It’s one character telling another to go away, then writing him poetry all night long.

Seger says, “Subtext is the real meaning simmering underneath the words and actions. It’s the unadulterated truth.” This is often where the skill of the writer, director, and cast are most often tested. Not only must the actor be convincing as the character saying one thing, but he must also be convincing as the character feeling something entirely different. If you pile on the subtext too much, it stops being subtext and becomes parody; if you’re too light on it, no one quite believes what’s going on.

Since subtext is what goes on beneath the spoken dialogue, it’s up to the screenwriter to first pen it into the script.

ROGER

Sorry, dear.

ELLORA gazes around her ruined kitchen: pots and pans smeared with grease, broken chairs, torn curtains. Her lips press firmly together for just an instant, and her eyes grow hard. Her hand twitches; she’d like to clobber Roger for leaving this mess. One day the man’s going to find himself on the receiving end of her pistol…but not yet. Not today. Just as suddenly, her eyes soften and her mouth goes slack. She composes herself and forces a long-suffering smile. 

ELLORA

Oh, it’s just fine, dear. 

From there, the director and the actress playing Ellora may experiment with her facial expressions, tone of voice, and posture. Onscreen, the audience will see all of Ellora’s quickly-buried feelings, and they’ll know that Roger may be in serious trouble.

Start observing your favorite films to see how they use subtext. Read scripts if you can, so you can better see how the crew translated the subtext from page to screen. And remember — don’t overdo it!

Let’s take a look at The Amazing Spiderman and the story behind it. What, exactly, was wrong with the original trilogy? Granted, part three wasn’t all that inspiring, but the first two were enjoyable movies with solid performances and good storylines. The first one emerged in 2003, and its reboot arrived in 2012, which means it took nine years to decide to scrap a franchise and start over.

Some of the discussion around the Web centered around Spiderman involve bringing it up to date: in the original movies, Peter Parker didn’t have to contend with YouTube or thousands of people with cell phones capturing his every move. The modern era is much harder to stay anonymous in; I imagine that’s part of the trials he ends up facing in the new film. This is likely a starting point for many reboots, particularly when a movie’s concept is solid, but may not fly with the more jaded audiences of the twenty-first century.

“Reboot” is often confused with “remake,” and it’s important to distinguish between the two. There’s also “re-imagining,” which further adds to the confusion. The new Conan is not a remake of the Schwarzenegger films from the ’80s; it’s a re-imagining via a return to the source material (the stories written by Robert E. Howard). Similarly Total Recall is not a remake of another Schwarzenegger film, but rather the short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” by Philip K. Dick. The characters, themes, and situations are probably very similar, but a reboot is a different interpretation of the material.

In the case of remakes, movies are most often simply brought up to date. The Thomas Crown Affair, The Italian Job, and Ocean’s Eleven are all popular remakes that stayed true to the original movies while setting their characters in modern society.

One thing that distinguishes reboots from its siblings is that it’s most often thrown around when discussing franchises. Look at the Hulk movies and at Superman (two reboots in ten years!). It’s a restart—and one movie does not a reboot make.

We’ve been discussing editing in recent posts, and I can’t help but see a reboot as the ultimate edit. Forget revising scenes and adding in new effects, forget reshoots, forget re-releasing. It’s starting fresh…with many of the same characters and situations as the original film(s).

It’s clearly becoming a tempting choice for many filmmakers—I have to wonder what movie is next…

Hang around with a bunch of filmmakers and you’ll realize that nothing is ever entirely finished. There’s always something else to tinker with, a special effect to smooth over, a line of dialogue that could be reworked to be just a little bit better. Part of this is the creative process; the filmmaker looks at his work and sees places he wants to improve upon, no matter how good the subject material already is. Special effects-laden films tend to suffer from the “never finished” syndrome, reemerging every ten years or so to benefit from new technology. George Lucas is an easy example to point out, although some might argue he takes this to extremes.

So how do you decide you’re done, and that your project is ready for distribution? In some cases, it’s not a personal decision; the movie may have a deadline, and your production company may look at it, announce “it’s good enough for us,” and start in on a marketing campaign. In an ideal situation, though, you get to determine whether things are really wrapped up or not.

In the best-case scenario, it’s an intensely personal decision, one made after careful scrutiny of the film and everything related to it. Take note of what you’re doing. When you consider stopping the reel and making further changes, are you changing something because it really, truly needs to be changed? Or are you just adjusting things because you like making adjustments?

The curse of the creative individual is that the brain is always, always working. Nine times out of ten, you aren’t just looking at your movie and thinking “Aha, that’s a great flick.” No, your brain is going over all the reasons it isn’t working for you, all the lighting problems you’re just seeing now, all the ways the music could more appropriately highlight the emotional impact. As you play over these scenarios in your head, the movie becomes worse and worse, and suddenly this project you’ve spent months working on needs a complete reworking.

The thing to remember is that this happens to everyone in a creative field. Writers, artists, musicians, and moviemakers all go through phases where they can’t stand the work they’ve completed, where they look at their project and feel the thing needs to be gutted if they hope to salvage it.

The key is not to do that until you know you actually need to.

But how do you decide you need to?

That’s where we’ll pick up next month…