Just as an example, I got started with writing my first feature screenplay by reading Viki King's
"How To Write A Movie In 21 Days" back in 2009 after a friend and I had talked about it for a while.
My concept that I came up with was a bunch of Spanish wine merchant families, 18th century, there's a whatever infestation on the vineyards, so they take a bunch of ships across the Atlantic and establish new vineyards in Venezuela,
then export / re-import the wine from the New World as genuine Spanish product that they had cleverly hidden in caves whatever ...
that plus a bunch of derivative scenes is like the whole movie. No complexity, no real character web, just one thin basic concept and scenes like sword fights, horses and wagons, a family quarrel, flash-forwards to university and art gallery people opening secret boxes with books in them, cops, sex, violence, and a James-Bond-style ending.
Oy.
So genius, second script, I'm gonna write A SEQUEL.
A cousin in Venezuela, machine guns, country-club kids everyone hates, a quinceanyera party, set piece after set piece, disaster. But with a catchy title.
More, I'm then into a new California revenge-on-the-road story (which I'm now still working on in rewrite number seventeen with two dozen punch-ups, six months in development, a hundred proofs and polishes and now doing another draft this summer which I thought would take a week and it's now a month and I'm ALMOST done, twelve years later).
I decided to try and relocate that from California to Australia to make a larger arena of story.
FAIL.
But, had fun doing a bunch of research about Australia. And maybe got a few more ideas about the characters ...
Then, six or eight books in, finally discovered John Truby's "Anatomy Of Story."
Used that as a workbook for four months, my girlfriend of five years broke up with me because she could probably see I was long gone down the rabbit hole. Moved out, finished the script, wrote the novel in 2012, a sprawling epic Euro-thriller called HELP ME KILL (which is on my Profile page here on Stage 32). Learning to create and work from a detailed outline.
Then, number five was a rewrite I did with Open Gate Entertainment (script consultant) in 2021, on the heels of outlining a broadly-conceived quarantine project, the requisite international sci-fi epic sports five-Act financial-arbitrage sex romp. Still a work in progress.
And by that momentum picking up after a long hiatus I wrote in 2021 a nice fun feature script called SUPER TURBO JET BOATS, unfortunately yet another budget-buster but a strong new entry into what is now my fave genre, ADVENTURE / COMEDY (Think Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson in The RunDown).
Just finished my latest bawdy 2022 banger, short and sweet at 95 pages, "Cavewoman Ski School," a goofball raunchy vagabond of a low-budget feature script with many fun and timely elements, albeit completely implausible and probably unpalatable to like 90% of industry execs.
No problem. Now working on finishing this fucking rewrite and then I have another new concept for a four-quadrant animated feature, plus three or four good ones on the back burner.
What's the point?
For anyone who is working through this early stage, I feel your pain.
