Writing Teenage Bodyguard - A Screenplay

The Writing Process - Prep and History - Part 5

A word or two about screenwriting….

I have the screenplay format down now pretty well, although it's one of those things you strive to perfect all your life. How to tell a story in that format to grab producers or whoever so that they buy and produce it, and it does well.

It's really an impossible task, as is film production itself. It’s important to note that for a spec script you are writing a spec script, not a shooting script. Most new screenwriters learning the art are attempting to write shooting scripts because those are the ones most freely available online and in books. But that doesn’t do you much good. Something to consider if you want to try your hand at this.

All things considered, the fact that any film ever gets made amazes me.

Before started, aside from taking classes, online or in person, watch videos, get DVDs, Netflix has some. Buy a couple of books on screenwriting and read them before you being. Read about 100 screenplays (in the right format but any format is better than none, just don’t be surprised if you don’t’ get anyway for using the wrong format. Then write 10 or 15 screenplays and start trying to sell them.

Post them on MovieBytes.com and its associated WinningScripts.com. I’ve had a quite a few producers contact me over the years from there. Some authors too. I’ve had most of the good things that happened to me actually in the realm of film production, come to me from there in recent years.

There’s other sites I’ve used but this was my first screenwriting site and others have come and gone but I’m still with this free service. I also have my own web site at JZMurdock.com and social media sites. But get a web presence.

As for media, books, DVDs, etc….

In looking over my book shelf just now first I have Trottier’s book, The Screenwriter’s Bible, now in its 6th edition. About $17.31 as of today on Amazon but you can get it used for half that and maybe with a more knowledgeable writer’s notes in it, you never know and I love when that happens. Bonus!

I need to mention "Dr. Format (TM) Answers your questions" third edition, by David Trottier, author of The Screenwriter's Bible.

Okay so I have Chris Soth’s DVD: “SOLD! How I set up three pitches in Hollywood”.  I worked with Chris for a while on his paid mentorship program and it was very enlightening so I feel I should give him a shout out. I’m not much on pitches, it’s just against my personality and my loss, honestly. Chris also has “Million Dollar Screenwriting, The Mini-Movie Method” that he teaches and learned at USC Film School.

Next up, I have “The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Screenwriters – Insider Secrets from Hollywood’s Top Writers”. Finally and foremost, Lew Hunter’s Screenwriting 434 – The Industry’s Premier Teacher Reveals the Secrets of the Successful Screenplay”.  “Invaluable” – Joel Schumacher.

My screenwriting history….

Now I took script and screenwriting at my university at Western Washington University for a year. In my senior year toward a psychology degree I decided I could get a double major with all the credits I had but settled for a minor in creative writing. I started with Fiction Writing 101 and rapidly rose to the top of the class. But my dialog was lacking so my professor sent me to the theater department for Playwriting 101, a terrifying class. But I was chosen along with seven others for a special rest of the yearlong class in writing in a team environment, such as on a TV show. It changed my life.

After that I got into IT and go nowhere with writing until I sold my first short horror story in 1990.

A few years later I became a public cable TV producer and produced a documentary that aired a couple of times before I moved out of Seattle and got married and that changed everything.

Toward the end of the 90s I became an unpaid in house writer for Scorpio Pictures production company for two years. That taught me what it was like to work with producers more than anything else and I never got anything on screen. So do to internal issues there, I moved on.

In 2002 I got divorced and that messed me up for a while.

Around 2010 I started to realize my two kids would be grown and out of the house shortly so I started writing day and night so when they did move I would have either something to avoid the “empty nest” syndrome with, and a possibility at my next career. I spent that first 18 months writing constantly and furiously on my original screenplay, Ahriman, the last thing I wrote in college and got double A’s on it. It was also nearly optioned through producer Sean Davis at Scorpio, to a Middle Eastern group of investors but it fell through when he left the company.

A writer contacted me off of MovieBytes.com that next year and request I adapt her paranormal romance novel, Dark of kNight and I did. I’m not into writing romance and have avoided it, though I’ve had women beg me to after they saw some I had done. But I’d made a pact with myself to accept anything if I’d learn something and it moved my writing career forward. I didn’t want to adapt someone else’s writings, but it was a learning experience.

That led to my getting two books published and another author wanting an adaptation of her spy romance novel, Sealed in Lies. I said at that point, no more adaptations and posted it on MovieBytes.com and forgot about it. But I kept pushing both adaptations, after all I had written them and it was money in the bank.

Through MovieBytes.com I have had both producers and agents (like Josh Bauer of the Bauer Company in LA) contact me and things never went anywhere, though titles of my screenplays continue to intrigue. Some that originated from my college fiction and screenwriting classes, like: Colorado Lobsters, Sarah, Poor Lord Ritchie’s Answer (which won a contest from actor Rutger Hauer), Popsicle Death.

Recently a producer from a UK production company asked for the adaptation of Sealed in Lies and I sent it to him. He asked if I had anything else and I emailed him a list of my finished screenplays and ideas I plan to write. He settled on my teenage bodyguard idea, which was a true story that happened to me at 18 in 1974.

So I said I’d whip out something intelligible and if he liked it, I’d move it to the top of my pile and write it ASAP. I sent it to him along with what he called a “Look Book” of newspaper clippings about the Tacoma crime family, and photos of myself and things in the story from back then, as it’s an historical drama really. He liked it and so, I’m in the middle now of writing it.

And now we are full circle. I’ve left out plenty, but you get the idea from this.

And now….the writing.