ROAR

Some takeaways from the completion of my new feature spec

I finished the official first draft of my new feature spec a little over a week ago. I thought I’d use this issue to take a quick look back at the timeline and process.

I think the first seeds of the idea were planted last summer when I scribbled down some bullet point notes in my journal about a character who is a driver for a midwestern mob boss. It started with the driver going back to his small Appalachian town for his father’s funeral. It’s clear that he’s the black sheep, his family thinks his life of crime played a part in his father’s downward spiral. While he’s back home, he gets a call from his boss. The boss needs him for a drive to the modern equivalent of the Appalachin meeting.

On the way to the meeting, he and the boss are ambushed on a rural highway. The boss is killed, he manages to escape, and goes on the run in the woods with the assassins in hot pursuit. He survives using knowledge he learned from his father, and the only tool/weapon he has at his disposal is his father’s Swiss Army knife.

That was a pretty straightforward setup for an action-thriller. It had a character I was really interested in exploring, it had a launch point that I liked (ambush in the woods), but the more I noodled around with it, the more I was bored by the whole thing. There was nothing emotionally compelling about it and it was utterly humorless.

Then three things happened that pointed me in a whole new direction, most of which I’ve covered in stages here before. But to recap:

1. I had a conversation with my managers where they asked me if there were other genres or types of stories I loved that we hadn’t talked about yet, or comic book characters that maybe hadn’t been extracted from the IP mines. The first things that came to mind were THE CROW, GHOST RIDER, and a third fairly obscure (I think) character, a mysterious, black-clad motorcycle rider called THE MARAUDER that I loved as a kid.

2. I was inspired by the maximalist art of movies like EVERYTHING, EVERYWHERE, ALL AT ONCE, RRR, and ATHENA, movies that went over the top in their ideas and execution.

3. I spent most of 2022 trying to crack into the creature feature business with my series pitch GODS AND MONSTERS and a feature pitch for a modern take on THE HUNCHBACK OF NOTRE DAME, called ESMERALDA. My take on Esmeralda is awesome. But by fall of 2022 I failed to get any traction. I’m just not somebody people think of when they think of those kinds of stories.

I’ll be honest, I was feeling more than a little spiteful about #3. So, I thought, “Fuck it, I’ll write my own GHOST RIDER/CROW/MARAUDER/WOLFMAN, and… oh, wait… I have the perfect setup… my driver for the mob! In success, I get to create my own new story universe and potential franchise. At the very least, it will give my reps a piece of material to better make our case. We’ll have a tangible proof-of-concept.”

I was busy juggling a bunch of pitches, both on the film and TV side, but whenever I got the chance I put a little more meat on the bones of this idea. I scavenged characters and scenes from other ideas on the shelf, I revisited the setup and added a more emotional element in the form of the boss’s son. I thought a lot about how to introduce this character in the first few pages, thinking about what would make a great actor (and eventually the audience) fall in love with him. I watched a ton of movies for inspiration, including the ones I mentioned previously.

Things got pretty quiet over the holidays and I found myself with a wide open lane to work on new material. Part of the time was spent working on the series pitch that I mentioned in an earlier newsletter, and some was devoted to getting this feature spec over the finish line. A couple of issues ago, I talked about how this process was a little different than usual:

“With this new spec I’m trying something that’s equal parts “seat of the pants” and outline. I finish a handful of scenes then I stop and look at the bullet points for what’s ahead. I spend a couple of days writing in my journal about those upcoming scenes. Some of it is brainstorming, some of it is really digging into POV, exploring how the characters feel about what just happened and what they might do next, exploring alternate paths. I like being in discovery mode, as opposed to painting by numbers. The more scene work I finish the better I know the characters, the more I can let them lead me instead of driving them toward something I came up with two months ago.”

I kept this hybrid-outline practice up through the very end. I think it allowed things to emerge that I wouldn’t have found if I’d done a traditional outline. And I think it kept things fun. It goes back to the initial seed of the idea being humorless. I think part of what was sort of uninspiring about it was the hero not having anybody to talk to. So much of the fun (and dopamine dosing) from the new draft was writing the dialogue, letting this character talk to other people. These heroes can often be a little too grim, or stoic, so I made him a former boxer who had a gift for talking shit and getting into his opponent’s heads. I was able to write some great lines (in my opinion), and that was the fuel that kept me going. I had to figure out the details and texture of the next few sequences so I could get back to letting this character talk shit.

A few weeks ago I took a trip to Dark Delicacies and bought a couple of items to keep on the shelf for inspiration. I made a little shrine to THE CROW, centered on the James O’Barr signed cover my friend Jason Jenkins gave me, original artwork created for an article Jason wrote about the character in Horrorhound.

One other thing I want to mention is that I didn’t start out with any hard and fast ideas about the theme. I started with, as I said, a blender full of obsessions and a dash of spite. It was only when I got really deep into the script, almost toward the very end, when I realized there was a big idea pulsing underneath. Once I made that connection I was able to boil it down to a simple sentence, how the core concept of the movie is a metaphor for this bigger idea, then I went back and found ways to seed that idea in through a couple of vivid strokes.

I turned this draft in to my managers along with a piece of original artwork. I’ll share the piece with you at some point but I want to tell you how it came to be. For some time now I’ve been following a writer/artist named Marcus Jimenez on Twitter. He launched a Kickstarter campaign for a new project and one of the reward tiers was a full-color commission for a character of your choosing, including original characters. I backed it and chose that tier, then I asked Marcus if he wouldn’t mind doing a kind of one-sheet with the character, logline, and a brief “author’s note” that talks about the comps and theme. He did a fantastic job and it was a cool way to back another artist’s work and do something a little more fun than a standard logline in an email. He may still have some open commissions, check out Marcus's Kickstarter here!

While I’m waiting for my managers to weigh in I’m thinking of all the ways this script can be better. Because I don’t write a ton of action sequences I have really been trying to up my game, infusing them with character and also keeping them interesting by revealing some big twists and turns mid-fight or chase. One thing I realized is that I’ve made a couple of them way too easy for my main character, so I’m taking a cue from Jackie Chan and Ethan Hunt, and throwing a lot more setbacks and obstacles in his way. This next pass is about maximizing emotional impact, maximizing the potential for these action sequences, and amping up the heart and doses of humor wherever possible.

When it’s finally done I’ll have (hopefully) an original, genre-bending franchise starter in the 40-60 million dollar budget range. It’s a big, crazy swing, but whatever happens, it’s already worth it. It’s been so much fun, and in the words of Stephen Sondheim, “Look, I made a hat… where there never was a hat.”

There’s another project I’ve been working on recently that dovetails perfectly with the DNA of this feature spec. Later this year a theater company in Phoenix is going to do a production of my play, DRACULA IN TOMBSTONE. I wrote it years ago for the Halloween show at the (sadly) now-defunct Jenny Wiley Theatre. The play is about what happens when Dracula crosses paths with Wyatt Earp in the brief period of time between the shootout at the OK Corral and the events in the novel DRACULA. I’ve been doing a much needed rewrite to address some dated elements and it’s been a blast to revisit this piece after more than a decade. It’s a reminder of how much fun it can be when you throw your passions in a blender and press the button. If you’re in the Arizona Territory, I’ll let you know when you can check it out.

This Desert Pod

There are few things I enjoy as much as writing and one of those things is talking about other works of art that I love. My friend Rob Ebert invited me to be a guest on his podcast last night to talk about the Counting Crows album, This Desert Life. We went on a deep dive, track by track, and it reminded me how much I love this record. If you’re a fan of the Crows, you can find the link to it here!