Snorting Flour

It’s 11:15am, I just had a mini panic attack. I’d just hit the 70 minute mark of edited material on Railed Up and Wrecked when the power goes out. My external hard-drives don’t have any juice, so final cut pro (my editing software) starts looking for files that are no longer there. Everything goes red. In Final Cut, red means bad.

11:23am power comes back on. I open up final cut. It takes literally a minute because of the size of the movie. A minute’s a long time to have look at a window telling you the progress of opening a file, that if lost, would cause me to go into a homicidal rage . I’m pretty sure it’ll be all good, but I still worry, because that’s what I do. I worry about stuff, it feels like I’m doing something. After the long minute, it opens, the red is gone, everything’s all good.

Still, not a great feeling to have after finishing up editing a real cool scene with a great performance by one of my actors, Brendan Hunter. This guy’s a beauty. He gives off a Peter Saarsgard type of vibe because of his voice. Except Brendan has this intensity that makes it seem like he might just snap at any moment and, maybe kick your teeth in, if he feels so inclined.

I wish I had more scenes with the guy. When we were filming, I never really knew what he was going to do. After the 15th take, (each take was different incidentally), he started to get right up in my face at the end of the scene. This was a perfect character choice, as the guy he’s playing is named DB (I couldn’t think of a name for this character while writing so I called him DB, which was my short hand for DoucheBag). The first time Brendan got up in my face, I was so taken aback that I literally could not handle the tension, so I would laugh and fuck up the take. Neil the editor is now angry at Neil the actor for being a bitch and not being able to stay in character because Brendan was dishing out gold.





DB is one of 4 characters that Trent (my character) and Mike (Scott Reid’s character) go to deal drugs to. Each of the four guys only has one scene each. All these guys did truly bang up jobs with these parts. These were some of the most fun scenes to film. Maybe because all the guys playing them were very unpredictable. Case in point: Dusty McDougall pictured below began snorting the flour I had brought as prop cocaine at the end of each take!! Even when he wasn’t on camera…Haha Beauty. Each scene had it’s own little tangential story that helped them be fleshed out characters. But not so tangential that they take away from the main story.



I read this book about screenwriting by Syd Field, it was a decent book, less a few big lies, such as with a screenplay: a page of script = a minute film. Syd you dirty liar. I have a 90-page script that’s going to be a 135-minute first cut. I don’t actually blame Syd, because I’d say 90% of the stuff in his book helped me.

This book is still covered in post it notes marking all the important info. That’s something I was into for a while, what with studying and all. So all the books I read for like two years were all fat cuz they were overflowing with post it notes. Quick side note: All my third year engg notebooks are covered in post it notes containing the millions of invented fractured English words that my teachers would use. Example: Mow-teep-why = Multiply. In-vin-a-mint = Environment. Per-mee-tee = Permeability. Trripell Hump Backattack =??? Something involving some chemical reaction ???. Haha good times.



Anyways Syd Field’s book talked about how a scene has to be doing one of two things, or else it doesn’t belong in the movie. A scene either has to move the plot forward, or else it has to reveal something about the characters. The plot ones are important otherwise you a have stagnant movie, that’s not really headed anywhere. But if have nothing but these scenes, you have a boring movie that takes a straight-line path from A to B. And the second type, this is where I found a lot of freedom in the script writing. I tried to come up with the most interesting, funny, entertaining ways of revealing certain things about characters. Did I go overboard sometimes? Absolutely. But that’s what editing’s for, poor Sharky’s 7 minute speech will probably be cut down to 2 or 3 minutes ☹ Not cuz it’s bad just cuz the point can be gotten across with 2 or 3 minutes.

One thing that really helped me as far as screenwriting was the structure that the screenplay needs to follow according to good old Syd Field. Now again the structure part is like the plot moving scenes I mentioned. There’s certain points you need to hit, like the point about 15 to 20 pages in that sends the main character out of old world and into the new world where they will go through stuff that will change them yada yada yada: essentially sending them into the action of the story. Then another point 90 pages in (this is based on Syd’s erroneous 120 page recommendation, essentially 3 quarters of the way through) where something sends the character towards the climax.

So if you know the beginning, the end, and these two points, you’re good to go. Now it’s within this structure that a good writer (whether or not I am or not remains to be seen, but we’ll go on the assumption that at least I know what good is….maybe) can find freedom. You can take a bunch of different paths to get between these four points. So with Railed Up I tried to not do the run of the mill straight line between the four points, but I also tried not to have the line veer so far of the straight line path that it gets lost in tangential BS that slows it down too much.

So with the four guys DB (Intense manic Peter Saarsgard), Ozzy (played by my buddy Izzy haha), Chase (played by flour snorting Dustin MacDougall), and Anton (a very late find, this guy needed to be the epitome of douchebaggery, as well as kind of tough, played very nicely by Todd Moon (who is not as big of a doucher as the one he’s playing)) I was able to come up with interesting and entertaining ways to reveal certain things about certain key characters, none of which I will reveal right now.



Movies are surprisingly not that long incidentally. I’ll explain. Once I realized Mi Heramano: my 140 page “masterpieceofshit” needed to be rewritten. I did it differently. Over the summer and beginning of fall, before 4th year structural got out of control with homework, I would carry around my notebook, writing down ideas, scenes, orders of scenes, beginning, end, other structural points, funny pieces of dialogue, the points I wanted to get across with each scene etc etc etc. I would bring this everywhere, to class, to watch my gf (Nicole ;)) and my sister Ali ( who’s in the movie as….my cousin…big stretch I know, I’m so creative haha) play hockey with the Dinos. You never know where or when ideas'll hit you.

Then by October 2008, school got too busy, so I left everything to fully concentrate on school. Then in December 2008, I picked back up the notebook, and for a couple days really finished fleshing out ideas, structure and what I wanted the movie to say.

Then I busted out my trustee macbook pro, and started writing this bitch out. Now screenplay formatting is a pain in the ass and seriously gets in the way of creative flow. So over the course of two weeks (but mainly 3 or 4 five-hour writing sessions) I wrote a 25 page jumble that was the whole screenplay. This was something only I could understand, because there’d be dialogue without noting who said it. But this was enough for me to be able to put it away again by January, concentrate on my final semester, and be able to pick it up again in May and just transcribe my Neil code jumble into a formatted screenplay.

But that’s what I’m saying, my 25 page jumble = 91 page screenplay = 135 min first cut. Ridiculous! That just shows you how long books are and how movies are just a completely different medium. Without getting into too many differences, you can get a lot more into a 400 page book as far as ideas, insight, intricate stories etc. But with film, you have the advantage of significantly higher sensory impact on your audience. That means, that with film, you better know what you want to say, and the ideas you want to get across, because you only have 25 pages to do it.

Just to bring things back around, if I was writing Railed Up the book DB, Chase, Ozzy, and Anton would probably have fully developed tangential stories of their own within the main story. But because I don’t have time to veer too far off the main path of the movie, we only get a glimpse into these characters. But hopefully it’s enough to like what we’re shown.