How to Write Back to the Future part 2

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How to Write Back to the Future part 2

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Make a movie so popular that the studio threatens to make a sequel. I mean they offer to make a sequel with you and your buddy, but if you say no, they’ll make it anyway because it is impossible for Hollywood to not make a sequel to a movie that grossed over $100 million domestic box office. You both say ye$.

2 – The Genre. Same as the first one. Sci-fi adventure buddy comedy, but with more time travel! So much more time travel. And while both of you come up with the story, let’s have the one with the typewriter actually write out the screenplay while the other one directs a movie about framing rabbits.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? Well, you have to go to the future now because of that little joke you made at the end of part one. So start with that. Then get out of it because you don’t want people writing articles about how inaccurately your movie predicted the future when the real 2015 rolls around and everyone is angry that we don’t have hoverboards or flying cars. And to make things worse, we stupidly put Jennifer in the DeLorean. Ugh, girls. Find a way to knock Jennifer unconscious for most of the movie. Also change the actress to someone more comedic. Okay now we need to get back to the past so we can get Back to the Future. But which past? Marty’s conception at Woodstock, with Marty messing up his parents having sex? No, that’s just the same movie different details. Let’s get more creative with this.

4 – The Fun Stuff. There has never been a time in Hollywood that your characters get to go into their own movie, so let’s have the most fun going back into Back to the Future. The last half of the movie takes place conveniently on the night of the famous Hill Valley lightning storm we know and love so well from part one. Doc says that the day could be important to the space time continuum, or a coincidence, but either way, you’re the writer, so you get to write whatever you want as long as you admit to your chosen conveniences. Go back into your own movie. There are now two Martys at the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance and two Docs trying to get their Martys Back to their respective Futures. Paradox. We get to recreate scenes from the first film, but to save money only change one side of the street or something. Only build what the camera can see. Thank goodness Lea Thompson saved her dress. Okay let’s figure out how we get from the future to the past.

5 – The Device. Grays. Sports. Almanac. Every sports result from 1950-2000 in one little book. This book gives Biff the power to eventually become Donald Trump. Sorry to say that name, but he is the real inspiration for the terrible Alternate 1985 casino-owning Biff, even when writing this movie in the mid 1980s. The Almanac is our MacGuffin, as it drives the plot and then is destroyed at the end. Oh and how the DeLorean time travels needs to change – we travel a lot so simplify it with Mr. Fusion and whatnot. Seriously, we go from 1985 to 2015 to Alternate 1985 to 1955 to a trailer for part 3 in 1885. It’s a lot of time travel, so the machine works for most of the film. It won’t really break again until part three.

6 – The Marty. George McFly is the protagonist of part one, meaning his character goes through a change. We don’t particularly want to work with Crispin Glover again, though, so make George hang upside down in the future or cast someone else or both. We also need a protagonist, so give Marty something personal to deal with. Ah, he’s chicken. Yeah. His insecure machismo ruins his music career, so Marty has something to learn. There is no mention of Marty’s hatred of being called a chicken in part one. We’ve gotta add it in part two, so hide the first “nobody calls me chicken” in the familiar cafe before the hoverboard chase. The audience will be too distracted by the “I remember that! It’s the same but different!” to notice that you’ve added a previously nonexistent character flaw to Marty. Sneaky.

7 – The Jokes. Same but different. Everything in 2015 is a joke of the projected culture from the mid 1980s. Advertisements for tourism to “Surf Vietnam”, weathermen that can predict the weather, Ronald Reagan as your tv waiter in Cafe 80s, flying cars, and the abolishment of lawyers. And then, more same but different – in Alternate 1985, we need a way for Marty to wake up with his mother again, but how? “The easy way.”, meaning we just knock him unconscious. There are actually fifteen separate instances of a character getting knocked unconscious in this film, so we really do use “the easy way” quite a bit. It’s fine, as long as we call it out. Make it a joke. Laughter distracts. And then, in good ole’ 1955, even more same but different. Same movie, more of the same characters, different perspectives. Pretty cool.

8 – The Title. Paradox. No, but that is what we will use during filming so no one invades the set of Back to the Future part 2. Also add Doc to the poster, you know, because two people. Part two.

9 – The Ending. Part two is really just the set up for part three because we are successful movie nerds now and we want to make a Western and play with horses and trains and guns for three months. Foreshadow part three when Alternate Biff watches Clint Eastwood in A Fistful of Dollars, inspiring Marty to mimic Eastwood and defeat Buford in part three. It also lets the audience know that Marty knows that reference. Assume that no one in the audience knows your references, you movie nerd, so you must make all references self-contained within the movie, meaning it is set up before it is revealed. And now that we’ve set up the real ending in part three, let’s end part two with a lightning strike, but instead of Marty in the DeLorean, it’s Doc in the flying DeLorean – same but different, am I right? We can have fun with the Western Union guy and have 1955 Doc faint at the sight of another Marty after seeing him go Back to the Future. But really, the most important thing, as per the director’s request, is that there is a teaser for part three tagged on before the credits of part two. The audience needs to know that this story isn’t over. There is more. One more. But no more. Never any more. Trilogy forever.

10 – The Heart. Part two really builds the friendship between Doc and Marty, and the opening sequence inspires the first scene in the popular adult cartoon Rick and Morty. It also gives Marty a character flaw, and gives Doc something to hope for in discovering women. It gives two film school buddies the chance to make cinema history and go back into their own movie. Also, hoverboards.

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Back to the Future part 2. Bob Gale did from a story he and Robert Zemeckis developed.

How to Write Alien

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How to Write Alien

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Make a movie with your film school buddy John Carpenter called Dark Star that uses a spray-painted beach ball as an alien. Inspire yourself to write a movie with a realistic looking alien.

2 – The Genre. Horror. The last movie you made was a spoof comedy, so just to change it up to make this one scary. Use artwork from H.R. Giger as inspiration for the alien and the sets.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? You are stuck on a spaceship with a hungry alien. But how does the alien get on board the ship? Once you figure that out, the rest of this realistic alien movie will fill itself in. How about non-consensual-face-impregnation? Sorry for using that word, but that’s what happens. Now we can put a lot of sexual imagery in because a man gets impregnated after an unfortunate encounter with an alien face rapist. I mean face hugger. I mean non-consensual-face-impregnator.

4 – The Fun Stuff. “I didn’t steal Alien from anybody. I stole it from everybody.” – Dan O’Bannon. Go ahead and take ideas from old films, like The Thing From Another World (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), Planet of the Vampires (1965), Junkyard (1953), and Strange Relations (1960), among others. You can even pitch this as “Jaws in space”. You can tell your actors some of what’s going to happen in the chest bursting scene, but you’ll get a real reaction if they don’t know how much blood will be thrown on them during filming. Super fun.

5 – The Device. The alien has to be scary. Let’s give it acid for blood, so if you spill its acid-blood, it may burn through the walls of your spaceship and also kill you. Good defense mechanism. Let’s also give it double jaws, a mouth within a mouth. Like we said, this is Jaws in space, so it needs more jaws than that shark. Two Jaws. And of course the only way it can reproduce is by face hugging a trespassing human, growing inside that human, and then bursting out of the chest killing that human. Let’s make alien childbirth disgusting and scary to men.

6 – The Ripley. Write a badass survivor named Ripley. Make him smart. Make him always correct, so if you listened at all to Ripley’s advice there would be no movie. Make him a her. Wait what? Ripley is a lady now? Ew. Who made that decision? Oh, the director. You may write Ripley as a man in the original script but some guy named Ridley Scott will change the gender as a way to give this perfect character a flaw. Being a woman is the only thing wrong with Ripley. Being Sigourney Weaver is everything right with Ripley.

7 – The Jokes. Kill the funniest characters off first, please. The crew is made up of working class types, so of course they have senses of humor. It gets less funny the more people are killed off, though. It’s only respectful. Also, put a cat in to ease some of the tension. People like cats.

8 – The Title. While Star Beast sounds pretty scary, you use the word alien in the script a lot, and alien is both a noun and an adjective. Alien. Yeah. It will make for great opening credits. Also, even though the tagline “in space no one can hear you scream” looks great on a poster, this movie is made way after the silent era so we actually do need to hear all of the screaming.

9 – The Ending. Blow the alien out of the damned airlock, but only after Ripley blows up the huge spaceship Nostromo and takes off on the small escape ship. Make sure the cat survives. Save the Cat, as Blake Snyder recommends in his screenwriting book.

10 – The Heart. Alien is a movie about men being scared of getting pregnant by a realistic looking alien. It’s terrifying. And of course, the only human that survives is a woman. That’s big for 1979.

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Alien. Dan O’Bannon did from a story by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shussett. Producers David Giler and Walter Hill add the character of Ash as an android.

How to Write Casablanca

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How to Write Casablanca

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Visit war-torn Europe and write a stage play called “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” with your platonic lady friend, but don’t actually perform it. Just make sure movie producers read it around the same time that Pearl Harbor is bombed, because being “current on pop culture” will totally make Hollywood pay more for an unknown script than ever before.

2 – The Genre. Romance. Drama. Romantic Drama? We’re using black and white film and Humphrey Bogart, so also kind of film noir? Even more romantic and dramatic. And there’s a backdrop of the currently happening World War II, so we have to use existing sets on the studio lot if that’s cool with you. Our extra money is being used for propaganda** films.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? Nazis. Like I said before, they’re bad. Really bad. Like actually killing people in real life bad and in the movie they’ll shoot you if you don’t have the Letters of Transit and leave Casablanca bad. Also, just because you wrote the play doesn’t mean you get to write the movie, kids. It’s as if the original writers had to send the scripted love of their lives on a plane to Hollywood with another man-writer (or three), knowing all along how happy they could have been together, but also knowing the movie probably wouldn’t be as good if it didn’t happen this way. Problems of two little playwrights don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy tinsel town.

4 – The Fun Stuff. Romance. Drama. Nazis. Alcoholism. Murder. Gambling. Corrupt Officials. Implying sex but not actually showing it because of the Hays Code. You know, all the fun stuff.

5 – The Device. These damn Letters of Transit better mean something. Wait, the official doesn’t even check for them at the end? Why the hell does Ilsa sleep with Rick to get them? Oh, she may actually still love him. That’s sweet. Let’s not tell Ingrid Bergman the ending yet, though. We actually don’t know for ourselves at this point. Just that the Letters of Transit are used to drive the plot for most of the movie and then not needed at the end. Who gets on the plane? Do we know that? There’s a plane. And there’s problems. More than three people have problems in this story, but we mainly focus on the three lovers and those meaningless Letters of Transit.

6 – The Lover. Rick’s villain is a hero who saves people from Nazis. But Rick doesn’t care about Nazis, he only cares about drinking away the love of his life Ilsa who left him in Paris for this stupid war resistance fighter. We also have the rights to the song “As Time Goes By”. It will be famous, but “Play It Again, Sam” is not a line in this movie, as a future tortured comedian would have you believe. The quotes about the song in Casablanca are “Play it, Sam, play As Time Goes By” from Ilsa and “Sam, I told you never to play…” from Rick. But the quotes get better.

7 – The Jokes. Nobody tells you how funny Casablanca is. That. Stops. Now. Casablanca is funny. Just because there is romance and drama and Nazis doesn’t mean there can’t be jokes. Humor. Funny lines people remember forever. The line the corrupt official says after blatantly seeing Rick shoot someone, “Round up The Usual Suspects,” inspires a title for a future film. Not sure which one, though. Probably Pixar’s Up.

8 – The Title. Casablanca is a city in Morocco. Promotes tourism. “We’ll Always Have Paris” also promotes tourism, but the shorter the title the better and I’m sure the French will just use that quote anyway, along with any couple who has ever implied sex in that city.

9 – The Ending. Don’t worry, you don’t have to write the last line of this movie. “Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship” will be added per the producer’s request and dubbed weeks after filming. Phew. Also Ilsa gets on the plane with that damn war hero. Spoiler. But we have to hurry up to finish this movie because Casablanca will be released early to coincide with the Allied invasion of North Africa and the capture of the for real Casablanca. Gotta stay on the trends of pop culture.

10 – The Heart. No one expected this movie to be special. Casablanca is a movie about lovers torn apart by war, and it was made during that war with some of the best talent in Hollywood. Its heart was true then, but its truths stand the test of time. It will still be the same old story, the fight for love and glory…

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Casablanca. The film was based on the play “Everybody Comes to Rick’s” by Murray Burnett and Joan Alison, and the screenplay was written by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, and Howard Koch.

**Here’s a link to one of those “let’s join America in the war effort” movies. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsBG34TSJJ4

How to Write Groundhog Day

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How to Write Groundhog Day

by L.A. Zvirbulis

1 – The Inspiration. Pick a holiday that doesn’t have its own movie yet. Got one? Cool.

2 – The Genre. Take your vague yet thought-provoking “what if you repeated the same day over and over again?” idea and make it have something to do with this holiday you just picked. Fill it in with details of that neglected holiday. Make it take place in a funny sounding town that famously celebrates the holiday. Name your main character after the only animal that celebrates the holiday. Give that character the same weather-predicting job as that animal and send him to the funny town to join in all the celebrations. This is a holiday movie, after all.

3 – The Complications. What’s the worst that could happen? This time it’s not death. Usually threatening the main character’s life is considered “high stakes” but not if your character can’t die because he is repeating the same day over and over again as some sort of lesson to find happiness. Turns out the worst thing that can happen is not getting Andie MacDowell to fall in love with you.

4 – The Fun Stuff. It gets really fun once Bill Murray figures out there are no consequences in tomorrow to what he does today. Just think of all the things an unrestrained Bill Murray could do, like drunk driving, multiple suicides, and getting random women to sleep with him. Also put Bill Murray in your movie.

5 – The Device. A groundhog. No. A clock? Maybe. A song. Yes! How do you indicate that we are starting the same day over again? Sonny and Cher, no less. Hearing a pair of ex-lovers sing “I Got You, Babe” is a great way to start the day and we won’t mind hearing it over and over again.

6 – The Phil. Put Bill Murray in your movie as Phil but don’t expect him to remain friends with the director after filming, no matter how many good movies they made together before this. Also don’t expect the groundhogs acting in the movie to like Bill Murray, either, so make sure he gets tetanus shots. And definitely don’t think that you can actually cast the real Punxsutawney Phil as the groundhog because you aren’t filming in Pennsylvania for tax reasons and the town isn’t pleased.

7 – The Jokes. The comedy isn’t in one-off jokes. The comedy is in seeing our main character in the same situations but doing them differently each time. Just ask Ned Ryerson. Audiences love repetition, because it sets up some sort of familiarity. Audiences love repetition, it makes things easier to remember. Audiences love repetition, but not too much, unless, of course, the entire premise of your movie is repetition.

8 – The Title. It’s easiest if you just stick to the name of the holiday. That’s why you picked a holiday that doesn’t have its own movie.

9 – The Ending. Phil sleeps with Andie MacDowell, but he loves her so it’s okay.

10 – The Heart. “Is there anything I can do for you today?” You guys, Phil stops seeing his shadow and starts seeing the light inside of himself. Whoa. Phil finds happiness by learning how to treat others well and changes his attitude on life. People will write articles about how there are religious truths in this silly comedy that you wrote about a neglected holiday. Maybe we do all just repeat the same day…

*L.A. Zvirbulis did not write Groundhog Day. David Rubin and Harold Ramis did.

**Here’s an article about interpretations of the movie Groundhog Day – http://mentalfloss.com/article/55243/8-creative-interpretations-groundhog-day