(Submitted without comment.)

BRAD RADBY’S FOREWORD
by Brad Radby

I think holidays are cool things to have happen at you.

Like I was born on July 4th, and fireworks always make me think, “Time to get out of the uterus!”

Okay let’s get real for you about the book. The story is a cool one and maybe you can find the Christmas meme Brian put in it so you can learn about yourself and how deep you can be.

That’s how we grow and save the poor people from those mosquitos the internet nerds are always complaining about. How come they can’t fix that one again?

LOL!

I hope you like the book when you do your reading with it.

Brad Radby
Augtember 46, 2023

Brad Radby is the two-time Academie Award winning director of Brad Radby’s The Exploders, among many other theatrical motion pictures. He is a survivor of the Super Airplane ride, and resides in Los Angeles with his wife Melinda.

With last episode’s revelation of who Adam and Eve are, I thought it would be interesting to go back and look at the original scene that introduced the corpses (corpsii) in Season One.

It doesn’t go anything like I remember – I guess they did some improv actoring on the TV show set.

Okay talk to you later.

It was Sunday night, and I was trying to think about what I was gonna do my important blogging about in the morning.

Nothing was really coming to mind, so I looked in the DRAFTS thing in WordPress to see what I had.

Here’s everything:

What Ever Happened To madpropstobakedpotatoes.com
What PTSA Also Stands For
On Being Deceptively Muscular
I Watch Sober House Every Week Now
My Final Word on LeBron to the Knicks
TurtleCalls.com
Is LeBron Pregnant -
I Murdered Someone With My Car LOL
Good Guy Dictators
Bruce’s Yams Returns
The Monopoly Movie
The Leg Tattoo

None of those are striking me, although they’re all things I still want to touch on.

The last one reminds me I need to go get my shoulder tattoo maladjusted. Maybe I should do that this week, so it’s fresh for the fun summertime and the big election.

I wish I could tell you what I was working on right now so you could have some heart attacks.

Might be on another social media break soon. : /

(I fully support the picture to the right.)

So upon return from my big-time Twitter/Facebook/whatever hiatus, the question becomes, “what now?”

To answer this question, I need to make a bullet-point list, and then put the bullets in little digital disguises that make them look like numbers.

For example, take these bullet-points:

*
*
*

Once I’ve finished getting their espionage clothes on them, they’ll look more like this:

1)
2)
3)

You see?

As the alleged numbers explain the positives and negatives behind why I should and/or should not be an avidly aggressive Tweeter, nobody will even know that they’re really bullet-points, and that’s how the logic starts to come into place?

Anyway, in the two weeks I was gone, I wrote a complete screenplay, two full movie treatments, did good on the other thing I do, and got in six fewer I’m-Tweeting-while-driving based car wrecks.

Take that for what you will, and please let me know where to buy little hats for those bullets, because that will look so cool on them when they’re doing their spy work.

So I am very close to getting my Nexus One SuperPhone, and in preparation for that – as well as recuperation from WSM? – I am going away for a couple weeks.

I also have a script to finish that requires some underwater research – eliminating all distractions and not getting electrocuted is essential.

No blog posts.
No instant messaging.
No Facebook.
No Twitter.

I even deleted UberTwitter from my phone – frankly I need to rethink the manner in which I personally use Twitter altogether.

Anyway, I’ll see you on or around Monday February 22nd – of course I’ll have email, but like I might be deleting every third message just as a kind of sport or game of chance with myself.

I’ve been working on this script for something that’s being put together, and I’m a little back and forth on the writing style – I do think my time in novel-land messed with me just a bit.

Anyway, here’s a small piece.

Anyway, the part I’m questioning is the action line that ends with the big “NOT EVEN THE NAPKIN IS HELPING”. Especially the end, but the whole line is in question.

Debating with myself:

1) It does nothing to help from a production angle – it’s really a bunch superfluous words, and there are more compact ways of getting the point across that the napkin isn’t making him more at ease.

Example: He takes the napkin – it brings no comfort.

2) On the other hand, this isn’t a shooting script, and the way it’s written all over-dramatic to the point of stupid helps put across the ridiculous-played-straight tone of the material.

It needs to be played like this napkin should be a Xanax or something, and this is a way to do that without having to be all “even though it’s a napkin, he takes it from her like it should be relaxing him”.

At the same time, I do know that some readers will need their hand held like that, though. (And that’s fine – they’re not predisposed to like this, if I had to guess.)

3) A lot of the script is written in this style, and it reads FUNNY. So tell a coherent a-b-c story along with that, and you’re in good shape – a good story that made you laugh is a successful comedy screenplay.

I dunno – my thoughts – would love yours.

NOTE: For you Prelude to a Super Airplane fans, Timothy is someone you will know, at least indirectly. (It’s not Colonel T, and this story takes place in 2001.)

If you haven’t yet watched Chapter 7 of Who Shot Mamba? you might want to do so – what follows will be filled with spoilers, because this segment is LOADED with revelations.

Do it, then join me below.

(If you haven’t watched Chapters 1-6, you have some homework to do, friend.)

Again…spoilers follow…

So Calvin Stadiums is the instigator of the shooting of Mamba, and continues to threaten people with guns.

If you haven’t quite put the pieces together, Calvin Stadiums is 90% based on Wizards star and gun enthusiast Gilbert Arenas…and this was written well over two years ago – long before he was suspended by the NBA for his firearm incident.

Calvin is so much a Gilbert avatar that a couple years back we were in discussions with Arenas’s people about him playing the character. We were told “yes” at one point and put the entire production on hold to wait…and wait…and wait.

Dylan Mooney came in and owned the role in a way that made for a better movie anyway, but we hold that Gil has The Curse of the Mamba hovering over him.

You laugh, but guess who was very close to playing Sherpa (from Chapter 1) and then decided against it?

Yep…Greg Oden.

In any case, while writing WSM?, just how much Gilbert was there inserted into Calvin? Here’s the breakdown of the basketball-based aspects of the character:

GILBERT ARENAS
- Obvious play on the name
- Uniform number
- Agent Zero/Henchmen Zero
- Aloof and Quirky
- Obsessed with Orange Roundie
- Unique father-son relationship
- Big Tiger as symbol of sorts
- Washington, DC
- Gunplay (unintentional)

MICHAEL JORDAN
- Greatest ever
- Gambling problem
- Competitive arrogance
- Petey Skippen sidekick

KOBE BRYANT
- the complete lack of self-awareness the younger Kobe had

The biggest Calvin-Gilbert-gun similarity of all is something I can’t talk about until the movie is over, but it was what struck me most heavily when the Arenas/gun stuff started, because it was something I had decided on years ago.

Keep watching – and there’s much more about the transition from Arenas-to-Stadiums right here.

I spent about an hour and a half yesterday watching the marathon of the two original V miniseries on SyFy while I worked.

When I was done with that, I stopped pretending to get work done, and instead embraced my wild nostalgia for the subsequent 8.5 hours.

After that, I went and read the recaps of the single season of the regular TV series.

It wasn’t until I reached this synopsis of the last episode that I realized what a profound effect this franchise had on my work, particularly the type of writing I’ve been doing for about the past year.

When Diana learns that Mike and Philip have agreed to a friendly fencing exhibition, she orders James to make sure the swords are deadly — instead of unarmed exhibition weapons, Mike and Philip will use swords charged with nuclear disintegrators.

Now, if that doesn’t sound like it’s right out of my Brad Radby book or my Saved By the Bell Begins, I don’t know what does.

After reading that, I couldn’t help it, and started watching the episodes on thewb.com – particularly because of the way Marc Singer’s Mike Donovan embraces the action jump, the action run, the action ladder-climb, the action casual walk, and the action going-out-to-dinner.

Those of you who have seen 2WO G2N G2Y – which is nobody – would be as shocked as I am to see I’m basically doing Mike Donovan in that role.

You can watch some choice Donovan clips right here.

Oh, and if you’ve read my Prelude to a Super Airplane book, you know that the V screengrab at the start of the post was also good for a mild heart attack.

What is your favorite kind of action thing to do and when was the last time you did it.

(This is it – the conclusion to my big budget, theatrical Saved By the Bell reboot movie. Links to the Intro, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

Zack is inspired for sure now, and decides to get serious and organize a Zack Attack. He has to hurry, because Keanu has pushed the button, and the bronchitis is making its way through the tunnels to Bayside City, and it’s going to come out of all the nuclear oil wells right during the the Miss Bayside City Pageant, which is happening at halftime of the Valley City-Bayside City Professional Football Bowl, sponsored by Buddy Bands.

Just to make sure nobody tries any tricks, Keanu also has tied all Zack’s friends to different nuclear oil rigs throughout Bayside City, and if any of them are untied from the oil rigs, then the nuclear oil will destroy everything in the United States that Keanu doesn’t like, and that’s like a lot of things, and that’s what Keanu tells Zack in his video blog dot com email.

Zack is like all hardcore about having lots of guns strapped to him, and uses his jet-ski to sneak down the Bayside City Canal and get Screech free, who then uses his nerd tricks on the computer to get Kelly free, and then Slater gets Jessie free, and he calls her “Momma,” and that’s so the people watching the movie can have tingles about their nostalgia again.

Now the gang is back together, but while they were busy getting free, the bronchitis got everywhere, and now everyone in Bayside City is coughing really hard, and the stores are out of Dayquil, so everyone is overdosing on Nyquil, and the news people remind everyone that if you fall asleep with bronchitis you can die. Keanu is on top of the main nuclear oil rig taking bids on the land from the Portuguese gangs, and everything is on fire because he’s smoking a big cigar so close to the nuclear oil.

That’s when Zack gets everyone together and says that only by working together can they stop Keanu, and they all do like a jumping group-high-five, and then get to work climbing up the nuclear oil rigs around Keanu’s oil rig, and then like jumping from their rig to his, and Keanu sees this happening, so like he’s always making their rigs have a nuclear explosion right as they jump off.

That’s really real, but the heroes are serious about just how Zack this Attack really is, and they knock Keanu’s rig down to the middle of the football stadium, which is now filling up with nuclear oil, and Zack is even more mad because a goose died when it got nuclear oil on its feathers and lungs, and that’s when he stands up like a man and rips the last shreds of his tattered Bayside High t-shirt off, and even Slater is like, “Whoa, Preppie – what are you doing??” and Zack looks at him like Bruce Willis and says, “For once…the right thing,” and it’s the most intense thing anyone has ever said ever in a movie.

There’s a big fight in the middle of the pageant between Zack and Keanu, and the good guys win when they use their friendship strategies to drop the Bayside City History Tradition Bell on Keanu just in time, and Zack calls in a favor with Johnny Dakota to get more Dayquil, and like it’s clear that there are gonna be more adventures and that’s THE END.

During the credits is when Jay-Z does his modern and legit hip-hopping version of the original Saved by the Bell theme, and it’s close enough to the old one that everyone watching cries, because they’re also showing black-and-white still photos from the TV show along with the names of the people who made the movie.

At the end of the credits, there’s a trail of oil footprints that lead into the Oval Office, and you can hear Keanu muttering, “Let’s see you save THIS by the bell, Morris…” and that’s an ominous meme for the next movie, The Bayside Knight.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four

(That’s it – I think I might actually make some calls on this. Follow me on Twitter here. Read my Perfect Strangers Begins summary right here – it’s Bruce Willis as Cousin Larry, and Antonio Banderas as Balki.)

I’m doing an interview for someone right now, and one of the questions was really interesting.

It was about how blogging and my other writing work together – whether one feeds the other, etc.

I hadn’t really thought about it much until I was asked this, but looking at it, pretty much every original idea I’ve had in the past four years started in one of my blog posts in some fashion, even if it was just a little afterthought of an afterthought, that then grew into something else.

For example, while it was folded into PTSA in a huge way, the entire Brad Radby book really started in this post, which was completely a throwaway gag that started as a discussion of a toy car.

So I guess the nightmare answer for all you writers out there is to never stop blogging.

Crap.

CAVS…I’m into it…not “schedule my life around it” into it, but I like what they’re showing me right now. None of this would’ve been an issue if not for that Washington game back in December.

Small but important point that could become a massive issue over the next two months. I think the new Star Trek looks amazing. My brother is like the biggest Star Trek fan ever, and if you’ve read PTSA, you know it’s even a pretty big story point for his character’s actions in the book.

I have no idea, therefore, how much I’m allowed to like this movie, or how excited I can be for it. Growing up, we had this thing wherein we each had possession of certain franchises.

Tim was Nintendo, I was Sega.

I had Spider-Man, he was Fantastic Four.

Star Wars was shared, but he eventually took possession.

The Batman movies were all on me. There was no counter for him on that.

Similarly, Star Trek was Tim’s – like 10000000000%.

But…this new Star Trek looks like it plays way more to my sensibilities, ie it’s loud and fast and explosiony. Plus, Tim has the entire loyalty to the original thing happening, ie William Shatner, etc.

We’ll see what happens – every trailer gets me more excited.

UPDATE: 2WO G2N G2Y did not come from a blog post in any way that I can remember. I actually don’t know where it came from – I think for some reason I needed to have a few ideas for TV shows on-hand for something.

So one of the cool things about Twitter is the meeting of people.

I’ve been very deliberate about trying to actually build a base of people who I’m interested in, and vice versa, rather than just blast up as many followers as possible.

(I’ll delve into this in my next Twitter-usage update analysis.)

Obviously, fellow filmmakers, writers, and people who do actoring have been high on that list of people-types, and one such person is Alejandro Adams, whose new film, Canary, is debuting at Cinequest Film Festival on March 1st, with another screening scheduled for March 7th.

This is the brief synopsis of what Canary is about, from the film’s website:

Canary is an intellectually daring dystopian thriller set in a not-so-alternate universe in which organ harvesting is commonplace. While a mute organ redistribution specialist stalks unsuspecting citizens of every socioeconomic stripe, a rag-tag news crew investigates various conspiracy theories and inches closer to discovering the cause of epidemic organ failure.

That type of world-next-door sci-fi is just the type of thing I’m into, and we got to talking and such, and so I decided I wanted to ask him some questions for here on the site.

This is not a joke-filled, stupid question interview. (Well, not fully.) It’s also quite long – if you’re into this type of film, or filmmaking in general, or just a conversation with a really interesting guy, dive in after the break.

1) The first thing I saw on the Canary site is a quote from a review comparing Canary to Primer, which is a little-known time-travel movie that I absolutely loved. Do you think this is an apt comparison?

That quote is from Richard von Busack, a well-regarded Bay Area critic who championed my first film, Around the Bay, and named it among his top ten of last year–I mean alongside Dark Knight, Milk, Wall-E, A Christmas Tale. He’s often brutal, so it means a lot to have his respect.

Canary is a very small film–it might have cost more than Primer to make, but it certainly doesn’t look like it! I think Primer is a masterpiece of brains and technical ingenuity, so naturally I’m flattered by the comparison, but Primer makes your head spin with its dashing about, and Canary is the opposite, lingering in various places, exploring the textures of this slightly alternate society, kneading tones and moods rather than stoking excitement of any kind.

I’d like to think that certain scenes achieve effective degrees of tension and suspense, but on the most methodical, intellectual level, not in any sensationalistic sense. In a recent exchange with Mr. von Busack, he referred to Canary as an experimental film, which I accept in the sense that popcorn-munching mainstream audiences better stay the hell away, but I prefer the point made by Nick Rombes in a piece he wrote, saying that Canary blurs distinctions between the mainstream and the avant-garde.

There are characters whose plights we grasp, there are pop-culture references, low comedy, high comedy. It may not tell a conventional story, but it’s not on a mission to alienate the audience at all costs–though it’s largely about social alienation, and that plays a big part in its execution.

Brazil and The Man Who Fell to Earth, for very different reasons, are probably good places to start when trying to figure out exactly what kind of film Canary is.

2) My feeling about filmmaking is that I just don’t understand why it’s so hard. I think this even though I’ve experienced it, and know just how hard it is to get something made at all, let alone have it reach completion and come out good.

I mean, it’s HARD. That said, part of me goes into any given shooting day thinking it should be as easy as putting the actors in place, lights/sound, push the button, and having them say the lines. Am I nuts?

This is why I like going on the record with filmmakers as well as critics and journalists – there are so many ways to come at a film and so many ways to come at the filmmaking process.

There’s a syndrome called “mommy brain” or “mom-nesia.” I don’t know where doctors stand on this issue, but I know a lot of mothers, and they all say the same thing. Through some alchemy of hormones, euphoria and stupidity and forgetfulness take a mother over just after childbirth, and the thinking is that this is a biological imperative meant to make women forget how grueling childbirth is so they’ll be willing to do it again later.

Since I can’t speak from firsthand experience, or from the dais of “science,” let’s just chalk this theory up to folklore. Anyway, it’s a great metaphor for the aspects of filmmaking you’re describing. Somehow I wake up thinking everything will magically happen, but it takes hours and hours and hours and hours to do the simplest thing.

Most of the problems you face can’t be solved–what ends up in the can is some kind of workaround that barely fits on the scale of acceptability, and you feel totally defeated at every turn. But you get a decent night’s sleep–or not–and you go back and do it again the next day, somehow forgetting how hard it was the day before. And when you start work on the next feature, the first thing you say to yourself is: “Damn, I forgot it was this hard.” Mom-nesia.

3) You write your own material, and also direct it. Editing, producing, and cinematography are also on the resume. I feel your pain. How often do you find these hats at odds with each other? How does that relationship play out internally?

It’s easy for me, actually, because I’m really only fully engaged at the editing stage. I keep a reserve of energy and focus for that part of the process, which can seem infinite.

Storytelling is a reflexive thing for me, since I’ve been telling elaborate stories in one form or another since grade school. In junior high, there were the standard concrete tables where friends and I would eat lunch, and I’d start some elaborate oral story that would be serialized over the course of a few days or the whole week.

The audience wasn’t very big, which might be why I still like small audiences, or the idea of one person watching my film on a computer. This probably also explains why my first novel had a strong oral quality in terms of the prose. I’ve written more short stories than I can count, and I have dozens of well-fleshed-out script ideas. I don’t give writing a second thought. I’m happy to give ideas away, and I like to borrow other people’s ideas and flesh them out.

“Producing” a project made at this level means handling the auditions, begging for locations and, in this case, shopping for a cargo van. Pretty painless in the big scheme, but I’m getting a little old to waltz into a coffee shop and say, “Can I shoot a movie here?” I’d really like to have a cute twelve-year-old girl on hand to go in and ask that and then have the cast and crew charge in after the business owner agrees.

Shooting is fun. I used to hate my camerawork but now I’d very much like to shoot something by myself, instead of in the circus atmosphere of three, four, five cameras whirling around and covering competing planes of action. Still, I don’t shoot a high enough percentage of my films to consider that a very big-brimmed hat, and the shooters and I have an exposure-by-committee policy, so it would be wrong to posture as a cinematographer.

And directing? I’m in a trance. I can’t handle the stress, so my mind goes into a state of shock from which I can hardly remember anything that transpires on set. I hate everything that comes out of my mouth. I never wanted to be a director and I don’t consider myself a director now. I have horrible social skills–but maybe that’s what makes me a bona fide director, I don’t know.

Let me give you an example. One day on my first feature the lead actress drove into the parking lot where we were all meeting and got out of her car with a smile on her face, ready for whatever we were scheduled to do that day. Total pro, perfectly pleasant. Before any of the cast or crew could greet her, I barked, “Is that gel in your hair?” It spoiled her mood, naturally. I was concerned with continuity. We had talked about her hair ad nauseam, and it was especially important because we had to deal with a salon scene in the middle of the film.

Anyway, as I said, I hate myself, and I imagine most people who work with me hate me, too. It really doesn’t matter because we’re not there to like each other. We’re there to make a film.

But editing. That’s where it happens, isn’t it? I know not everyone agrees. Sidney Lumet said something like, you can only edit what the cameraman shot, what the actor performed. Fine, Mr. Literal. But in the end, editing is what distinguishes cinema from other narrative and dramatic forms. Editing is the part that our brains had to learn to accommodate from scratch–not acting, not images, not stories, which have been with us from time immemorial.

What is it that pediatricians don’t want children under two years of age to see on television? Editing. To paraphrase O’Blivion in Videodrome, we had to grow a special organ to process this new form. I love that organ. I hope no one repossesses it.

4) Canary is premiering at Cinequest on March 1. Your last film, Around the Bay, played there, as well. What are your expectations?

It would be impossible to describe what happened with Around the Bay–so much inexplicable attention for a standard-definition home video shot in a backyard with no money. I ended up being on two TV shows, did a half-hour radio interview, multiple print and online interviews, and the reviews bubbled forth from more media outlets than I knew had a presence at Cinequest.

It was like a massive inside joke: “Let’s have this guy on our TV show! Let’s review this penny-ante film in Variety!” The indieWIRE guy said something like, once you get past the typical Indiewood crap at Cinequest, you’ll find gems like Dear Zachary and Around the Bay. Every review had that kind of cannonball quality to it. One review called out a few people who had walked out of a Tuesday afternoon screening–maybe they’d walked into the wrong movie, you know? The reviews seemed pretty combative as a rule.

I think if they’d called me a genius I would have gotten drunk on the praise, but the general tone of the reviews was a bit surreal from my perspective. But I’m incredibly grateful for that barrage of good press, and even if the film never makes a splash outside of its one festival appearance, I got to experience something that few of us “little” filmmakers get to experience.

As a matter of fact, this distilled success was so generally palpable that fellow filmmakers shunned me and went after the film pretty hard on various blogs. People actually stopped talking and left the filmmaker lounge when I walked in. Had the film been less well-received, I doubt I would have inspired such hostility. So there’s always a price.

This time I’ve been begging for bad reviews. Canary is totally different. It can’t be all things to all people. I want a handful of sensitive, awkward, lonely people to discover this film because that’s who I made it for. I want to stand up in front of the audience before the screenings and say, “At least half of you will walk out. Please walk out now.”

This movie is a tiny, delicate thing. A curiosity. It may very well crumble in a 500-seat auditorium under the pressure of a forty-foot screen. But that’s the great thing about being able to make films with small, inexpensive tools–you don’t have to be accountable to anyone but yourself. People often use the term “self-indulgent” when they encounter a degree of sincerity that this threadbare culture hasn’t trained them to recognize or to reciprocate.

Now you can make incredibly personal films with total, uncompromising sincerity, and you can easily ignore the remonstrations of those critics and viewers who demand chewing gum. Canary is not chewing gum. It’s probably cod liver oil–you hate the taste but if you can gag it down, it will do you some good in the long run.

I’m confident that there are a few people who will get this film. It’s for them. I don’t care what Joe Crowd-Pleaser thinks. And Joe Crowd-Pleaser doesn’t want to know what I think of him, either.

I think Cinequest is brave and noble for programming this film, but they consider themselves a “discovery” festival, which means they’ve built their reputation on risky programming. They deserve a lot of credit for that. I’ve heard people grumble that they’ve seen three or four bad films in a row at Cinequest. Yeah, that happens. But in many cases it’s the other way around.

A couple of years ago I was only able to make it for one night of the festival. I saw a German film and a Belgian film, both heavyish dramas. They were as good as anything I’ve seen at any festival–small, earnest, quiet but deeply challenging films. Hopefully, for someone, Canary will be counted as one of those.

5) What’s your greatest ambition career-wise? Give me the raw and arrogant answer here – don’t sugarcoat anything to make yourself sound deep. What do you see yourself as capable of doing?

Raw and arrogant. Do I have any of that left in the tank? Whew.

If you consider the three genres I’ve tackled so far–domestic drama, dystopian dark comedy, sex trafficking thriller–I think there’s evidence that I’m interested in just about everything. Most filmmakers have some ideal career path along which they hope to do a certain kind of project over and over again and never sell out. I think that’s ridiculous. Doing the same thing over and over again is selling out.

Louis Malle’s whole career was fueled by the notion of never repeating himself–that led to some pretty dramatic failures, but some incomparable masterpieces, too. Bergman’s best stuff is whatever most radically departs from whatever he had done before. The year of Persona and Blow-Up really blew cineastes’ skirts up. Ah, 1966! Bergman and Antonioni reinvented themselves in one stroke.

I see myself embodying a kind of perpetual self-reinvention. I’m not trying to keep people guessing–that suggests one’s motivations are oriented outward rather than inward. I just want to do what excites me, what I’m sincerely interested in, and I think that conviction and sincerity will end up on screen.

That’s what will give my films value. Sustained sincerity sounds like a modest goal, maybe, but if you look around you can see how scarce it is. It’s a commodity.

6) When we connected on Twitter, I was excited, because I thought you would immediately cast me in one of your movies. You see, I’m a writer and producer, who really wants to act. Why hasn’t this “Hey Brian, be the lead in my next film” moment occurred yet? I’m angry.

A lot of people are angry for the same reason. Despite my self-excoriating remarks about my directorial temperament, people do want to be in my films, and they can be very persuasive. I can’t describe the lengths to which some people have gone or the unions would be after me, but I have developed a reputation in the Bay Area as someone who offers his cast members an intensely rewarding experience.

So you have a right to be angry that I haven’t cast you yet. Maybe you can put snarky little parenthetical remarks beside my answers to get back at me. Like “Oh, yeah, you’re the only person who’s heard of Louis Malle, you towering giant of culture and knowledge!”

(I’m still angry.)

7) I just wanted to add that this picture frightens me, because it makes me recall the hard drives that my film is stored within, and that I spent what seems like a lifetime in the presence of said drives.

Their constant humming, the fans, and the little glowing Western Digital circle nearly did me in. Thoughts?

I like the drives as much as I like the cameras–that’s the editor talking, eh? My editing station is immediately adjacent to my side of the bed, so I get to be as intimate with the drives as I am with my wife. Mmmm.

It’s not remarkable to me that we can shoot feature films on small digital cameras. What’s truly remarkable is that these films can be stored in their entirety and edited within these small plastic cases. If you think about how laborious and even dangerous the editing process was for a hundred years, you realize that that the digitalness of post-production what has changed filmmaking.

The camera aspect has changed only slightly. It’s smaller and lighter, but the same physical acts are required in its operation–placing it on a tripod, holding it up to one’s eye, etc. But the image information, the ones and zeroes, and the “cutting” of something which is totally immaterial–get your head around that. We have created an abstract, intangible process based on an absurdly impractical physical process.

There are signs that we may move conceptually beyond “film editing” soon, but it will require the mind of a child to comprehend the new way. At this point, I’ve never actually cut on film but in the most profound sense I only know how to cut on film because conceptually there is no alternative. By the time my kids are making films, they’ll be using other methods.

The idea that a “razor” could have been employed at any point in the filmmaking process will be laughable to them. They’ll be watching individual shots on five miniature screens affixed to their fingernails, moving shot 1 to their thumb and shot 4 to their index finger. Does the scene work like that? No, move shot 3 to the thumb.

I’d recommend your next film, and I submit myself to write it, be called “Digital Thumb Screen Guy”.

Anyway – thanks to Alejandro. This was mucho interesting for me, even though the concept of someone enjoying the full editing process, after already serving so many other functions, confounds me. Personally, I like to step in at the rough cut stage, and then work off that, if it’s necessary at all.

Please take a second and go check out the Canary film site. You can follow Alejandro Adams on Twitter right here, and you may want to make this self portrait of him your desktop.

I actually get this question a lot:

I’m thinking about writing a screenplay, blah blah, what should I do, tips, etc blah?

I don’t know why this comes to me, considering my one produced feature credit and my one web series credit, neither of which have been released yet.

Obviously this isn’t all that I’ve written or even had made – it’s just those are the only two that are public in any way.

I suppose it’s because I have a lot of readers who are writers, and I’m all accessible and have perfected the art of pretending to be able to pretend I’m intelligent.

So yeah – I was asked this over the weekend again, and decided to just put my answer up as a post for the long haul.

I’m doing it on Sunday, because a lot of you won’t care about the answers, but it’ll be here to link to in the future.

Thus…read on if you wish. Little to no jokes follow.

Everything or not much at all depends on what you plan to do with your first screenplay, but my best advice is as follows:

1) Keep it simple. Don’t try and write the next Pulp Fiction your first time out. You need to know the basics before you start getting clever and deconstructing traditional film storytelling.

I started writing somewhere in the early 2000s, and because of The Sixth Sense, I was convinced anything I wrote needed a huge twist at the end – one which was cleverly hinted at throughout the entire film. Debate whether The Sixth Sense‘s twist actually did this another time – you get my point.

Yes, you may feel like you’re being predictable or formulaic, but those movies get made and work because…they work. For example, action movies all follow a certain formula, and that formula exists because the formula makes for a good movie. There’s nothing wrong with following it, and you can still give it a unique voice, concept, and point of view within that formula.

Picking apart the formula can totally make for an amazing script/movie, but you better understand the inner workings of what you’re ripping open first.

2) Get software or a correctly formatted template of some kind. If it actually looks like a screenplay, you’ll feel a lot better about it, and if you want to have anyone read it who knows screenplays, they will too. Final Draft is the best. Here’s a link to an MS word template.

3) Save your best concept/be realistic. You won’t realize it at the time, but your first screenplay will suck, and it might be difficult to rewrite it in the future when you know the craft better, because you already burned your enthusiasm for it on the sucky one. First time out, use an idea you can have great enthusiasm for, but don’t mind throwing away forever if/when it doesn’t come out good.

I would say my first legitimately “okay” screenplay was my third one, which is also the one that got me my first agent. My first “good” one was my fourth, and my first one to generate income was my seventh. My first to get made was my eighth.

My ninth was technically (if not creatively) my best, simply because having actually seen something go from script to screen taught me more than anything else I’d ever learned put together.

(This doesn’t include scripts that were abandoned before completion because they just weren’t working. The point: screenwriting isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme, and if you only have one idea, you better be ready to think of some more.)

4) Read a bunch of professional screenplays, including some to movies you’ve seen. There are tons of them at JoBlo. Here are the scripts to 2WO G2N G2Y (web series) parts 4-8, if you’d like to see a little of my junk.

5) Write it, then read screenplay writing books afterward. This was my what my experience taught me. I read a bunch of books – mainly to put off actually writing. It was like reading a different language. These books will be way more useful if you’re able to put what they’re telling you into some kind of context.

Disclaimer: I was NOT good in school, and only learn things by doing them. I’m literally incapable of being taught, unless I can put it into like a real-world, in my hands, “doing” of something. It occurs to me this is probably why I’ve always hated history.

6) A screenplay is not a novel. You’re not attempting to make someone weep with your beautiful prose, and if we don’t need to absolutely see it onscreen, it doesn’t go in the script. If Joe has a messy apartment, “Joe’s apartment is a mess” will suffice. I don’t want to know what color Joe’s sink is, unless it’s necessary to know that for the story for some reason.

If you write a paragraph telling your reader how glorious the sunset is, it’s a waste of time. This is not prose or poetry – this is a blueprint for making a movie. “They watch the sunset – it’s beautiful.” That’s all you need – that might even be too much, if it’s obvious the sunset is supposed to be beautiful already.

7) Start reading John August’s website. Also go back and read the archives. There’s nice insight into the business as well as doing screenwriting itself. This is who John August is, if you’re not familiar.

8) Just write it, and stop talking about writing it. If you’re asking about it, you want to write it, so go write it.

These are just my opinions, and I know the one you’re burning up about is #3. Look, I hope you’re the exception – I hope your first screenplay is amazing and makes you a ton of money.

Keep in mind when you read those stories about the “first-time screenwriter” though – it usually means it’s their first produced screenplay, not the first one they ever wrote.

Anyway, I hope this is helpful – good luck to youse.

(The following is an excerpt from my book, Prelude to a Super Airplane. It can be purchased by clicking on any of the roughly 400 banners adorning this site, or by clicking here. It’s also available on Amazon.

I’ve posted the first 20 chapters (roughly 55 pages of PTSA) on this site. Links to each of those are at the end of this post, or you can download all of them as a pdf by clicking here.

Ah, ye ole Writing Hat – this one is simple, because a writer is a person who does writing.

Movie scripts entail the vast majority of my writing work, and I’ve been told that I have a singularly unique ability best described as, and I quote, “an a-hole-like ability to take anything and turn it into a screenplay”.

(The fact that you’re reading this book makes this ironically true.)

Additionally, at various times and for various reasons, I’ve written songs, and for a brief window, I attained godhood in the professional basketball online internet blogosphere.

(There were six months in my early 20s wherein I illegally drew up contracts for a large lawyering firm in Cleveland, Ohio. They paid me under the table, which for that and other obvious reasons, I won’t elaborate on. I don’t even know if that counts as writing.)

What you’re doing now is reading my first attempt at writing a reading book. I’ve never done this before, and I hope it doesn’t affect the text and/or clarity of this reading book, as it is my first attempt.

As such, I think you can probably expect repetitive phrasing, amateurish melodramatic prose, incorrect grammar and syntax, overwritten prose, adverb abuse, bad prose, over-identification of characters, and a host of other poor book writing indicators, including, but not limited to, completely making up new words, and giving up on certain sentences wholesale.

There are also a host of words, phrases, and extra commas I use all the time that I’m 90% sure I’m using wrong or whatever.

A few I can remember, in this moment:

* any and all forms of “ironic”
* raw, savage
* alpha dawg
* fingering
* ,
* or whatever

As a gift to you, and in an attempt to mask my amateur book-writing status, I’ll try to keep in mind the best writing advice I’ve ever gotten: KEEP IT SIMPLE.

That said, in this moment, one thing I know I’ll do is enhance sentences with stuff like “furthermore,” or “in this moment,” just to make things sound more like critically acclaimed literature should sound.

Now that I’ve described my various entertainment industry hats, we can probably get on with the heavy lifting of the narrative. I do want to go over one more thing, and please know that the following words came to me in a dream – a dream I’ll never, ever talk about.

This is some raw, savagely honest stuff, so turn away if you’re sensitive. Call this a reading book mission statement.

Welcome to the first reading book that I’ve ever written. I’m not even sure what this reading book is about yet – I just love the title.

It sounds epic and pretentious and stupid all at once, and if I were going to write a book, that’s exactly what it would have to be like.

Brad Radby’s Foreward, Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7, Chapter 8, Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, Chapter 12, Chapter 13, Chapter 14, Chapter 15, Chapter 16, Chapter 17, Chapter 18, Chapter 19, Chapter 20, Chapter 31

There are certain things I put into screenplays that are there purely because I want to do and/or see them.

For example, you’ll see several things in WSM? that are just wish fulfillment, such as me getting oiled up and lifting weights in the desert.

You can’t do this in real life, because 1) you’ll be called a freak, and 2) you’re just not allowed.

Seriously – try going to a state park with a weight set and screaming out some reps. They’ll kick you out. Get a camera and a permit, though? You’re good to go.

Anyway, I may have talked about this on the old site at some point, but a dream is to have the following set-up in my house one day:

So even though this is the first page of something I’m working on, I like totally want that whole set-up, right down to the 50 degree showers every morning, but minus the Chin Meyers.

One of these days, I’m gonna work up the courage to start taking the cold showers. I’m not sure why, although according to this, it’s good for you.

As for the fake-empty white room, I have no idea about that, either. In fact, I don’t know why I do anything.

What I do know, is the power went off on the entire street today, possibly because of this.

This non-power-having period instigated one thing – an entire street-full of Armenians TALKING REALLY LOUDLY IN PORTUGUESE.

Now, because I don’t speak their language, I decided it’s Armenian New Year, they cut the power, and they’re all turning into werewolves tonight, at which point they’re coming to kill my roommate.

UPDATE: It works, although it seems like there’s a space between the character name/dialog, which shouldn’t be there. Probably a bug. I will use this a lot regardless.

I don’t know if any of the rest of you are screenwriters, but John August (who writes like, big boy movies) led the development of a WordPress plug-in that will let you format script pages into your posts.

You can find it here, and I’m going to test it…now. (This is from one of the web series I’m working on.)

You can’t see it if it’s in an RSS reader, so you’ll need to open this thingie in a browser, so they say.

By the way, my new roommate watched WSM? last night, and then pretty much watched it again right after (with my commentary).

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone like it as much as he did. He, specifically, as an individual, is the exact target audience.

Really, it was fun to see someone who has never had any exposure to me or the old website so totally, completely, 100% “get it”.