Trying Out Blogger App...

This app sucks. I refuse to finish this post until I find adequate software to do so on my awesome IPad.

Thanks a lot, Blogger.

Logline... Tuesday?... Wait, what day is it?

Oh, God. I'm so tired. Jayme graduated and had a birthday last week (that's my girl) so I missed an entry. I also started two new jobs and have been moving concurrently. I'm exhausted and depressed (bordering on mania). Also broke.

But I'm back. Doesn't that mean something?

Title: Our Dead Cat
Log line: The death of a twenty year old family pet sends a seemingly perfect suburban family spiraling wildly out of control. To keep the unit together, the family plots their revenge on the person who accidentally ran over the pet: Bill, a half blind, 50-year-old widower. A suburban murder plot ensues.
Genre: Comedy, Dark Comedy, Suspense

How about a bonus entry? Just to make up for lost time...

Title: The Home
Log line: When his wife passes and his family deems him unfit to live on his own, 72-year-old Taylor Burns is sent to live at Duke's Run Retirement Home. When old people begin dying of gory, mysterious circumstances, Taylor must put his skills as a retired detective to good use to find the serial killer. A slasher film with a geriatric twist.
Genre: Comedy, Dark Comedy, Horror

More thrilling loglines next Monday!

Made Up Logline Monday #4

Gang,
I finished a new draft of Fear of God (waaaay too long at 140 pages, but can be cut down to a manageable length). Started a newish script today (I wrote a sweet opening, anyway). A balls out action movie about ghosts that I'm very excited about. Now, for today's sweet spontaneous logline...

Title: Phantasmagoria

Logline: When his twin brother dies, an emotionally damage young boy sneaks away to his grave. When he gets there, he finds a perfectly carved set of stairs leading down the open grave. He follows them down to Phantasmagoria, a cavernous, metropolitan world beneath the earth that is occupied by every child's greatest fears. He will find his brother and bring him back to life, or die with him.

Genres: Horror, Fantasy, Children's

I also bought Drive Angry and Last Action Hero on Blu-ray today. Hooray for schlocky thrills in hi-definition!

Made Up Logline... Thursday? (Part 3)

Uh, oh. Looks like I missed my self-imposed deadline. Well, sorry blog if I happen to have a life. Some things are more important than updating you, you self-absorbed bastard. Any more lip out of you and I'm switching to Tumblr. Yeah, and we all know how you hate tumblr.

Title: Video Video

Logline: When his wife leaves him for his neighbor, a stay-at-home entrepreneur, Bill decides to quit his job as a houseboat salesman and convert their two story suburban home into the world's greatest video store. The store, Video Video, becomes a statewide hit, leading Bill into the dark lifestyle of a VHS mogul. A small town story of rise-and-fall excess set in 1985 Alabama.

Genre: Comedy

There. Everybody happy now? Next week I hope to hit the Monday deadline.I missed it because I was securing two jobs for myself and organizing a move. And watching Lethal Weapon movies in marathon succession.

I know, priorities, right?

Made Up Logline Monday #2

Updates:

1. Nearly finished with new draft of slasher film. It's at 140 pages right now. If anything, I've probably made it too big and bloated but that's okay-- God invented editing for a reason. Still, a part of me wants to make the most epic slasher film ever, in the history of slasher films. Sprawling, big, stylish, and character driven, like a Leone western. No one else wants that, it seems, so I will have to balance a tight page number with that sort of scope.

2. I'm thinking about applying online for a position as a script reader. That would be an ace gig.

3. Watched American Graffitti today. What an awesome movie.

4. The Logline...

Title: Late Registration

Logline: A high school student arrives at his new private school late, only to find the campus utterly abandoned. Stranded with night a few hours away, he must explore the labyrinthine corridors of the school to figure out who or what brought him there and why.

Genre: Horror

It's good because the hook is creepy and there's a mystery around it. It's bad because maintaining that level of mystery would be hard as fuck without introducing more characters, which would in turn kill the isolation and tension. Also, none of that "It's all in his head" bullshit. I still feel burned by Identity. Imply it, you goon, don't just explicitly say it! NO ONE WANTS THAT!

Also, I've been listening to a lot of Kanye West lately. Have you noticed?

Powering down....

Made Up Logline Monday #1

Hello everyone,

Today marks the beginning of my latest writing exercise, "Made Up Logline Monday," wherein I try to come up with a movie pitch on the fly and post my results here for all the world to see and, quite possibly, steal from. These are not joke-y movie pitches, but actual ideas I've conjured up from the depths of my pretty little head within the span of five to ten minutes. No recycling old ideas, no giving myself extra time. One logline, 5-10 minutes, there ya go.

This week's entry--

Title: Chambered

Logline: In this modern day western, a pathetic low-level crook finds his niche as a single-shot, competitive gunslinger. He volunteers to participate in a drug cartel funded twenty man duel, each staged in Mexico City's most public landmarks. The tournament's only rules are don't get caught, don't get killed and make your bullet count.

Ta-da! That's not too bad. I might not write that movie, but I'd certainly see that movie. I envision it as a Peckinpah-y Western, something in the vein of Christopher McQuarrie's The Way of The Gun by way of Running Man. It's a bit long in the tooth for a logline, but I hope to improve upon that attribute as these exercises continue. One a week, every week, no excuses.

Also, did I mention I finally got some major headway in the slasher script I toiled with not writing all last week? Yeah, draft 4 (or five... whatever) is nearly there. Yet I still feel twitchy about it, and will continue to until the damn thing is finished and printed and being held in my hands for final polish.

Super Sonic, Electronic Ball Breakers

It has been at least nine months or so since I last updated this "process" blog. I'm feeling considerably moody (that time of month it seems), so I thought I might my accomplishments thus far in perspective. If it amuses you, I invite you to read along.

1. After stalling on a re-write of an old slasher script, Fear of God (formerly Redgrass and Bible Camp), I'm knee deep in a brand new draft of the script. This one is heavy on character work and veers more toward religious guilt than tits and blood (but it seems to have plenty of those, as filtered through a repressed Christian vernacular, too).

2. While stalling on the slasher re-write, I managed to churn out three or four successive drafts of an action/sci-fi/comedy that had been tooling around in my head. Not only that, but I completed the task in about two months. Brawlers represents my finest work to date, without a doubt, an over-the-top film that I'd liken to an adaptation of the Capcom game Final Fight if written by Edgar Wright, Phillip K. Dick and Jody Hill. It represents my id at its purest, and is a must read for Ike Oden fans (a camp that includes my girlfriend and her son, who is allowed to read it on his 21st birthday-- it's THAT hardcore).

3. I've kept a pretty steady hobby in writing for DVD Verdict. I'm to 78 reviews now, with my 79th, for Blue Underground's upcoming Deep Red Blu-ray, pending. I enjoy the gig and not having to purchase DVDs/Blu-rays regularly, but find myself screwing up formatting, technical specs, and other details on a semi-regular basis, meaning my editor's eye for detail is still lacking (and driving my editor's crazy, to boot).

4. I've drummed up a couple of incomplete projects that have a lot of potential. Carl of Cthulhu, my H.P. Lovecraft meets John Hughes project, has been boiled down into a three page starter script (which I will post here later). I've also began outlining a hard-boiled Action/Revenge/Domestic Drama, set in rural Alabama entitled One.

5. My projects with Greg L. Mercer have included a short mock-documentary, the beginning of an Appalachian post-modern film noir, and an upcoming Ghostbusters-style horror comedy that'll probably be in outline form by the beginning of the summer. I'm very excited about all of these, and hope we manage to finish drafts of them eventually.

6. I've entered Brawlers into four big-league contests thus far, with an eye on another sometime this month. I don't hold out a lot of hope, but submitting is, in and of itself, sort of based on hope, so maybe something good may come of it.

7. I transcribed roughly four or five years worth of my father's articles from newspaper clippings and edited something like a quarter of them so far. Writing is the family business (my father's been a newspaperman/P.R. guy for a zillion years, my brother's in OU's grad school for non-fiction, and one uncle is a notable historical fiction writer). I feel working on these has been important, not only to get to better know my father's writing (a lot of it was from when he was my age or close), but to get a feel for my family's history (much of it is autobiographical) and collected interests. Also, it never hurts as an editing exercise.

8. I'm watching something like 6 to 10 movies a week, for Verdict and beyond, which means I'm clocking in a fair amount of film studying, which never hurts the old writing muscles.

9. I'm still tooling around the freelance journalist toybox, working on a new piece on Into The Pit: The Shocking Story of Deadpit.com. The film isn't getting nearly enough attention from average film goers, which is a shame as I feel it is one of the most important documentaries about movies to come out in sometime. So I'm gonna try and put somethin' together. When this'll get done, who knows, but if it helps garner the movie attention, it will get done.

10. I made a 100 "Top Five" list during an extended family trip last month. It was exhausting, but maybe I can do something with those sometime.

That's it, I believe. Look upon my professional accomplishments (or lack thereof) of the past nine months and weep (tears of joy or sorrow, your choice). Me, I gotta go grocery shopping.