We are going to run a screen-writers competition with some partners later this year. You know the sort of thing, we’ll set a brief of some sort, have submissions and then winnow the field, the winner gets optioned and comes along on our development track with a shot of making their film.
The question we are knocking about, is what sort of brief for spec scripts is most helpful?

Before everyone rushes to answer, I think its worth abstracting the problem a level, the key question in this sort of thing is:

• What sort of constraints in a brief encourage creativity and interesting outcomes and which sorts inhibit it?

In my experience both as a writer and having run competitions like this before, there are certain types of criteria that are freeing and others that are limiting.

I think the difference between them is a conceptual one: the distinction (not mine but Guillemo del Toro’s, and Aristotle’s before him, but its useful so I’m nicking it) between the core genesis, the heart, the controlling idea of a story and the syntax that is then utilized to tell the story.

The former is the inviolate idea that comes from a writers psyche / muse. It doesn’t arrive ready formed, they come out of long invisible and unfathomable gestation processes in writers heads. They come from forgotten nightmares, buried neuroses, long abiding passions and pre-occupations. Orson Welles’ obsession with fame; Aaron Sorkin’s issues with displaced fathers and the love that can exist between groups of colleagues; Joss Whedon’s fascination with the underestimated power of women; Almodovar’s love of mothers; del Toro’s fascination with the distinction between being and becoming. These are the ideas that inform all these film-makers films, no matter how different their ultimate expression in different types of films.

This is the bit that I think we can’t and shouldn’t prescribe, because it would encourage false or forced entries. We want people to write about what’s inside them, not what we think people should write about. So I would beware of prescribing the themes we want people to write about. We don’t want to puppet writers.

The SYNTAX of a story, however, that is something that is more about audience / market / style then it is about guts and internal process. Orson Wells talks about fame and power as eloquently in KANE as he does in OTHELLO; Almodovar has explored the power of women in melodrama (TODOS SOBRE MI MADRE) and in sex comedy (TIE ME UP TIE ME DOWN); Wheedon deals with women’s power and the politics of it in both teenage vampire fantasy and in Sci-Fi Western (FIREFLY/SERENITY). Sorkin is exploring the same type of philia today on the set of Studio 60 as he did for 4 years in the White House. The tensions between Fascist political ideology and the freedom of fantasy that everyone loved in PANS LABYRINTH were already being explored in HELL BOY. (and apparently in its sequel!)

By Syntax, therefore, I mean choices of: GENRE, LOCATION, SETTING, MILIEU, TONE, FORMAT and PHYSICAL or CONCEPTUAL Limitations. I think this is where we should focus our criteria.

In as sense, there is nothing terribly radical in this thinking of mine. Its just the difference between a teacher who asks his class to write a sonnet about anything they want, but making sure they respect the form of the sonnet, and a teacher who asks everybody to write a poem about a frog who became a prince. The results of the former exercise tend to be more interesting, more varied, and have a greater chance of uncovering a real poet.
At least that’s what I think. What do other people think?

The practice of ego-surfing (typing yourself, your friends and your sexual conquests into google to see what you find) just got a big boost with ZOOM INFO
Which organises all the info that sprawls round the internet about us into a neat resume sized chunk. I’m sure I’m coming to this party late, but it’s so much fun… Check it, it’s addictive!

I’ve been having a debate with my friend Simon Hill about the difference between the Scientific Method, and the princples of Rapid Prototyping.

I have been arguing that there are close parallels between the two, to whit

The SCIENTIFIC METHOD, if one could distill it into a single line, goes like this:

Experiment –> measure –> alter –> re-experiment –> remeasure –> deduce

RAPID PROTOTYPING METHODOLOGY goes like this:

create —> test —> iterate. RAPIDLY.

To me the parallels seemed self evident. But here is Simon’s latest missive which lays the counter-argument rather persuasively:

“ACTUALLY THEY’RE NOT (SIMILAR)! Scientific method and rapid prototyping resemble each other superficially, but really, they couldn’t be more different. They are actually separated by a whole developmental stage. Let me count some of the ways

1) Scientific method is about proving hypotheses are true, consistent, explanatory—theory; rapid prototyping is about testing whether a machine, a device, a thing, WORKS and fixing it before you’ve gone too far down the road because that is expensive to change. A theory, on the other hand, can be changed with a stroke of the pen.

2) Scientific method is dedicated to producing THEORY, thought itself, that can then be applied; rapid prototyping is dedicated to producing THINGS. Those are the two most fundamentally different categories in the whole frickin’ universe: ideas and things.

3) Scientific method proceeds by reasoning and theorizing about the results of experiments; rapid prototyping most commonly fixes problems as they arise, and finds solutions through trial and error. There are no experiments in web development; there’s only trying it to see if it works. There’s no hypothesis being tested (something of the form, “If X, then Y”; and “If I press Start, then it will Work” is not what I mean!)

4) Rapid prototyping arose to cope with the complexity of certain kinds of “wicked” projects, it arose out of Cybernetics (if there is any foundational discipline that can claim parenthood), to make development go faster and increase its quality. Scientific method, on the other hand, makes everything go VERY SLOWLY.

I’m not saying there is anything wrong in rapid prototyping. It is absolutely a good idea. For engineering. For web development.”

So here’s my question, and why this debate is relevant to us at slingshot. Is rapid prototyping a useful methodology for feature film development? PIXAR, the company with the most successful track record in the history of feature development (seven features in ten years, all of which took $250 million or more at the global Box Office) certainly thinks it is: its development process is derived from the principles of software and game engineering. But how does that reconcile with Simon’s persuasive argument that prototyping is about things not ideas. Aren’t films more ideas than things? Or are they more things than ideas?

This might seem like a somewhat ontological debate, but it comes into real focus for us as we continue to refine and refocus our development process.

Development, incidentally, doesn’t stop when the cameras start rolling. Its a continuous process of honing the film at every stage - from the cuts we made as a result of audience testing on SUGARHOUSE (which I guess is an example of prototyping and testing) to the script re-writes which are taking place now on FRENCH FILM as a result of a read through we had down at our latest Film Foundry a couple of weeks ago (does a read through count as an early prototype, or is it a scientific experiment? Is a script an idea whereas a film is a thing?).

Have Simon and I got ourselves into a semantic twist?

this one’s for you, Mary-Lou!

BAFTAs tomorrow (Slingshot’s being represented by Rachel in a slinky dress), Oscar’s next week (see you at the Soho House Party) but the most important awards of all are the LA Weekly’s 28th Annual Theatre Awards…

Why? OK, I am a little biased, cause DIRK, the little play I co-adapted with my pal James Goss some years ago, has been nominated not once, but 3 times… (including for best Adaptation - its based on the Douglas Adams’ novel Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency which obsessed me for so long that the only way I could get it out of my system was to make it my own…)