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+--- Thread: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg (/showthread.php?tid=5585)
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - cranefly - 10-03-2020
I'm at the 119 mark of 146 pages. I'll have a lot more to say when I finish, and in the general vain of what Yeti and DM have said. But what you've got down on paper is fascinating in its own right. It's the detailed accounting of something very unique. A job where you are constantly tasked with creating things and often with limited time and resources to do it. And you're thrown in with lots of other people at different levels of authority and ability with similar assignments. And this all leads to all kinds of conflicts. And somehow you have to make it all work.
So you've got that low-level insanity pinned down, though in places I wanted more detail, or a fuller explanation of the resolution of some conflict (and there should really be a glossary for us to turn to when you describe tools or machinery we don't know), and now you just have to layer in something more.
Most of all, and most emphatically, this book is about you. Characters make the story, and in this you're the main character. The reader wants to climb inside your head, understand what your thoughts and feelings are, how this job is changing you, helping you grow -- or how it might be desensitizing you to certain things. Are there points where you have doubts about yourself or this profession? Are you still pursuing screenwriting? How are you living at various stages of all this? Your hobbies, etc.?
I'm envisioning occasional chapters not attached to some movie project, perhaps named Intermission 1, Intermission 2, etc., where you step back and assess where you are and how you've changed, what your life outside work is at this point. These would occur after noteworthy projects that perhaps shaped you most. Tremors had to be one. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (which I'm on now) is another. Perhaps after Planet of the Apes. Dammit, I'm forgetting a couple that seemed especially traumatic. These could also address how you view your reputation this industry. Are you becoming a go-to guy in ever-higher demand, or are you getting a reputation as difficult-to-work-with? How fair do you these appraisals are?
One or more of these intermissions could be a deep dive into some aspect of your job, or the industry itself, detailing something not limited to a specific project.
One thing I'd like to see is how all this has affected your movie-going experience. Can you still suspend disbelief and enjoy a movie, or are you ever looking at the construction and props? Does it change at certain key points? Should you mention driving a few friends nuts while watching a movie you worked on?
But, yeah, the more "you" you can put into this, and the more introspective and candid, the better. You're getting the nuts and bolts parts down solid. Next up, layer in that main character.
BTW, you say sensitive things about important people, including Eddie Murphy and Brad Pitt, or give unflattering details about fellow workers, producers, or work-place politics, etc. Or incidents that just seem too much like bathroom humor. I like these things, and hope you can hold onto as much of it as you can. But editors and others might want you to tone that down. I'd say resist them as much as you can. Don't let them water it down with claims that "no one is interested in that stuff." Don't let it become an "over-worked painting" all glossed over.
I'll shut up now. Got stuff to read.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Greg - 10-03-2020
thanks, CF. I want to keep the names of my fellow workers out of it for the most part, except for close friends. I did send copies to Al and Lyndell to get their input.
I think the big names are fair game.
Yeah, I want to talk more about me......But yes.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Drunk Monk - 10-03-2020
(10-03-2020, 08:43 AM)cranefly Wrote: The reader wants to climb inside your head,
Belay that order! Been there, done that. After the Vulcan mind meld, I was left screaming in pain and all Greg said was 'no kill i'
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Greg - 10-03-2020
No kidding.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Dr. Ivor Yeti - 10-03-2020
G-Man, just pretend that you are a fencing coach being asked about another fencing coach: Talk about yourself.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Drunk Monk - 10-03-2020
Hold the phone. You have a shirt autographed by Tim Leary? Dude...
I think I've heard all the Tremors stories already. That's a fun chapter tho. Some great stories.
I do like your voice throughout most of this. You'd think I'd be tired of it by now, but you're memories are solid and your self-effacing attitude as you learn lessons on your journey gives this all a necessary humility.
Personally, I'd combine more of your paragraphs together instead of making those short few sentence paragraphs for dramatic emphasis, but that's an artifact of laying out a magazine for 20 years. The space between paragraphs is wasted real estate, especially when your trying pack the mag full of ads. Nevertheless, you have a very readable tone overall.
I'll give you my Bubba schpeal, something I told many of my more sophisticated freelancers. Write for Bubba, who don't know crap. Everything needs 'splainin'. So don't just say 'Burt Ward'. Drop that name and add 'who played Robin on TV' or something to that effect. Never assume your reader knows as much as you do. If they did, they would've written this.
I stopped after Last Action Hero tonight. You know, I still have the lid you gave me from that. It's at my mom's house, over the headboard in my room. It's covered in dust. I keep meaning to wash it.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Drunk Monk - 10-04-2020
I just finished Stupidnova which places me at the halfway point. I still have that film in my queue btw, I think on Hoopla or Kanopy. I keep wanting to watch it just so I can review it here. Alas, the things I do for DOOM.
I've been enjoying reading about your hardships with great schedenfreude.
Here's a technical point. Film titles should be italicized. That's a standard and it makes the film titles pop, which is something you really want to do with this because the BTS of films that your readers know are a major sell point. At KFTC, we switched to all caps because our bodytext font was ornate in such a way that it was harder to read when italicized, which not only defeated the purpose, it contradicted it. At Den of Geek, they italicize and bold every title because they really want it to pop.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Greg - 10-05-2020
!
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - cranefly - 10-05-2020
Standard manuscript format is to underline titles. I think that's because an underline is easier to see than italics, so the typesetter can reliably see it and convert it to italics.
Enough things have changed in the publishing world that you'd think things would change, and maybe they have. But the last I heard, underline titles.
Titles of movies, music albums, TV series, ships (e.g., Boaty McBoatFace), etc. Double quotes get used for lesser titles: story titles, episode titles in a series, individual song titles.
Some mags are outliers and have their submission guidelines. Such as KFTC. Excuse me. I meant KFTC.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Drunk Monk - 10-05-2020
fair
APA format underllined.
Perhaps it's a pop mag thing.
You're going to need a wicked index for this beast. Indexing sheer drugery but an important facet for something like this.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Greg - 10-05-2020
Yep. I've been rolling around that in my head. Also a glossary of terms.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Drunk Monk - 10-05-2020
The index is the last step. And it's a pain.
A glossary of industry slang would be fun. I still think 'Gang Boss' is a bad ass title, more so than 'Foreman', but it's a different kind of gang that comes to my mind.
You'll need a filmography too. I imagine you could rip most of that from IMDb and fill in the gaps.
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - thatguy - 10-06-2020
Title ideas off the top of my head:
"I'm not the best boy"
"Have hammer, will travel"
"Set...Point!"
"Everything looks like a nail"
"If you build it, they will come" (I think this one is for the adult film industry, so skip it)
--tg
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Drunk Monk - 10-06-2020
Queue tg's rimshot
![[Image: 3ec22951b25652c9a304c88398706173_w200.gif]](https://i.gifer.com/origin/3e/3ec22951b25652c9a304c88398706173_w200.gif)
When the hell did tg become the DOOM one-liner comedian? It's because of 2020, amirite?
RE: The Rough Draft of the Film Memoir by Greg - Drunk Monk - 10-09-2020
You know what I'm doing now ... for work? I'm reading submissions. Book submissions. For a book publisher. Srsly, it's one of my gigs now.
Suddenly, reading this feels like work.
I used to binge movies and TV and babble about them here. Now I do it for work. I'm reading this draft for fun and to help Greg. Now I read drafts for work. Work, work, work. I need a stable job. All this work and no health insurance. I mean I'm enjoying the work I've been doing but when work and play get so muddled, I think I'm losing my sense of what is play. It's all feckin work.
But then, giving how long Greg lived this crazy gig-to-gig lifestyle, I suppose I can't complain too much. Then again, we were younger then. We didn't have mortgages or a kid to put through college or a mom needing homecare.
Okay, enough about me (even though it's all about me). I'm astonished at how detailed your memories are on many of these Greg. Your overall tone is very readable but I can't tell if that's just because I'm used to it after reading you hear for all these years. Your two-to-three sentence paragraph structure still drives me batty, but maybe that's just me.
I'm enjoying the read overall. Some of the stories I've heard you tell before. Some are quite new to me.
I feel it needs some device to hold it all together beyond your progression through time from film to film. One idea I had was to conclude every film with a lesson you learned - this could be sarcastic or funny or wise or whatever as long as it's entertaining. Another thought is to add a critical review of the film at the end - like it's Rotten Tomatoes rating or something. Those are all off the cuff so don't hold me to them. You've got a all these swatches of stories - you need to sew them all into a patchwork quilt.
I'll also suggest that you exaggerate your character more - be a caricature of yourself. Right now, you're shooting straight from the hip, which is great. But shoot straighter. Be more biting, bitey man.
I was pondering tg's titles above and came up with this:
Not the Best Boy: A Set Carpenter's Hollywood Journey
And Ima gonna ital dat.