Egomania Is Popular Right Now...Shit

There’s been a couple of movies lately that have really pissed me off. Not because they are bad, but because their subject matter is dangerously similar to Railed Up. What I thought was a truly original idea.

In one of the screenwriting book I read, the author talked about how, because of the amount of scripts being written these days, there’d inevitably be instances where there’d be coincidences where writers would write very similar scripts. Not plagiarizing or anything, just running with a very similar idea. Like some writers would write an entire script then see a new movie come out that was so similar to their script that it would render their story unnecessary because it had essentially been told already.

Now I thought that I’d be clear of this, because I thought my story was rather “out there.” I thought a story where a there’s a dream sequence where the main actor inhabits four characters (it used to be 6, two of them got edited out for time), would have been original.

A little side note here is when I tell people this, immediately I get the puzzled look followed by the feeling that I’m pretty sure they’re thinking this is like the nutty professor or something. So I figure from now on I’ll just describe the movie as John’s gf, Kerry, did the other night, Railed Up and Wrecked is Nutty Professor meets Requiem for a Dream. Haha. This isn’t really serious but my buddy Will-when people ask him to describe a movie he may have seen lately- he will look at them straight faced and say that it’s Hotel Rwanda meets Save the Last Dance hahaha.

Anyways, I saw a couple of movies lately that are encroaching on my original idea. First is the Michael Cera movie, Youth in Revolt where the nerdy Michael Cera invents a “supplementary personality” a cooler version of him to help him get the girl and all that. Dangerously close to the less cool – more cool versions of the main character in the dream in my movie. I saw that trailer, I was like DAMMIT! Screw you Michael Cera haha.



Next was the movie “Moon” with Sam Rockwell. This might be a bit a spoiler, kind of, even though you find this out half hour in, (skip ahead if you don’t want to know). So in Moon, there are multiple Sam Rockwells that interact with each other. It’s pretty much just him acting opposite himself for the whole movie. I saw that movie I was like DAMMIT! Screw you Sam Rockwell, even though he did a really good job playing different versions of himself…but screw you SR anyways haha.




The last one which I don’t even think I’ll mention because that would ruin a twist in my movie. But either way I saw yet another where I had the DAMMIT screw you response.

Having said all this though, I will reassure you that Railed Up is still very original. But these surface similarities are starting to piss me off haha.

A lot of times on this project I’ve considered making a list of all the things I still had to do before the movie would be done. And then I realized that would be a very disheartening thing to do, because there has always been so much to do. So I just chipped away at things as they came to me.

I’ve been all about doing it in small chunks to make it manageable and not get overwhelmed, while every once and awhile allowing my mind to wander to the big picture of how much is left to do. But Now! I have a list of about 10 things to do before this thing is done done.

Being somewhat obsessive compulsive helps quite a bit with organizing a large project like this. Usually I’d recommend writing things down in some giant excel file to keep things organized. But because I’ve been over and over the script countless times while writing and filming, then over it countless more times editing, then the same doing music and sound business; I’m so familiar with Railed Up that my head’s become that excel file.

If you say a number between 1 and 100, the first thing that’ll pop into my head will be the scene that that number corresponds to in the movie. My notebook would be completely incomprehensible to everyone besides me, partially because of my chicken scratch writing, but also because it’s just the vomit that results when I try to write down part of my cerebral excel file. Here’s an excerpt:

To go:

32 violin deep base on head turn

48 pick on string high pitch sound

57 alteration on car

39 fucked sound

43 song pump up desperado

Haha nonsense. If I were to die, this movie would be unfinishable, because these would have been the instructions I would have left behind.



Something that I find interesting is that as I re-read some of my notes it seems as though there’s A LOT of music/sound that I’ve added to the movie. This is something that I don’t think a lot of people are conscious of: there are a lot fewer moments than you would think in tv and movies that don’t have music or some sort of atmospheric sound in them.

This was one of the things that I started to think about as soon as I started trying to screen write. The moment that sticks out in my mind is listening to commentary on El Mariachi, and being shocked that all the sound was recorded separately from the film. As in, they filmed a scene, cut, then recorded the audio separate. This was done out of necessity because the camera Robert Rodriguez was using was old and loud and would’ve fucked the sound up to an un-useable degree.

This baffled me. So I watched the movie again, and aside from being stunned that the audio was recorded separately and that Rodriguez had to sync up all the dialogue and sound effects by hand afterwards, I realized how much music and sound texture was used, in addition to the dialogue. It’s way more than you think there is.

I know this, because I was talking to Ali about the music the other day and she was all worried that I was going to ruin things by having music in so many scenes. But I told her to pay attention to it when watching movies and tv. Seriously, pay attention. It’s weird how much there is.

Having said that, I don’t think I’ve overdone it. I never ever wanted the music to be overly distracting or call attention to itself. But we’ll have to see. Because after all, even though it’s a small list of things left to do, I still have a list of things to do before we’ll be able to tell if I’ve succeeded. ps I'll keep 'em coming Feds.