Category Archives: Writing

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This is the 100th post on my official website.

Frankly I’m amazed I stuck with it this long.  When it was decided I needed to boost my “web presence”, I created this place to do just that. The theory being people interested in hiring me would Google my name, and this website would appear in the search results. They’d then see how brilliant and insightful I was, they’d hire me on the spot and pay me lots of money.  Ergo, I was to use it to promote myself and my work, as all professional writers are supposed to do.

It didn’t quite turn out that way.  Instead I ended up using it to just write about things that interested me, kind of like my Twitter profile became a platform to crack stupid jokes and test material for projects I am writing. Ironically I am very successful at this, having gained more followers on Twitter than I had “friends” on Facebook (which is not the reason I deleted by FB page — though there is a diff. reason for that).  Here I usually blog music, some pop culture, and some promo work, namely my comic book series Mixtape. Some said I was “doing it wrong”, and that this website should exist primarily as self-promo.

But the way I rationalized it, there’s so much self-promo going on in the land of the internet, why not break with that and just write about things that interest me?  I’m never going to get tens of thousands of visitors to this thing, or hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers either, and I’m okay with that, because I’m one of those types prefer quality of interaction over quantity.  Instead of promoting my work, why not write amusing and interesting work, and let people judge it and me based on that work?

So 100 posts in, that means time to reflect, right? So in that spirit, I’m re-posting the most popular, most visited, and all around best posts as decided by clicks on those posts, in descending order. Yes, because I’m too busy/lazy right now to write new content.  But some of you new arrivals may not have dug back that far, so it’s new to you anyway.

Here we go:

10 – HAVING AN AVERAGE WEEKEND

Nostalgia time, as I reflect on a teenaged ritual that sadly only exists in memory.  For me, anyway – I like to think teens today still embark on searches for that special something without doing it from their computer.

9 – GRATITUDE

A.K.A. “The Blog Post I Wish I Didn’t Have To Write” because it was written the day after the passing of Beastie Boy Adam “MCA” Yauch. And yes, it’s a huge loss to music, like losing a Beatle must be to my parents’ generation.

8 – LIVING IN THE SPRAWL

This is actually my personal favorite of anything I’ve written here.  Typically it’s lodged at number 8, but I felt like I channeled something of the sense of longing one gets, growing up in the suburbs, the excitement of downtown and the big city like a siren’s call.  Also, a companion piece of sorts to “Having An Average Weekend.”

7 – MIXTAPE 2013

This one dropped just before Christmas 2012, and details the future of my comic book series Mixtape.  The future is bright.

6 – NO EXCUSES

Written early in April 2012 (less than a month before the passing of Adam Yauch), this was written about another year’s passing since the death of Nirvana frontman Kurt Cobain … and how the passing of another Grunge era icon is too often forgotten.

5 – THE REAL THING

This was posted to mark the release of Mixtape #1 in April 2012.  Mixtape #2 dropped in December.  I promise the wait between future issues won’t be that long again.  Hopefully.

4 – THE PROMETHEUS MENACE

The title is pretty self explanatory. Note to self: next time I see a really lousy Sci-Fi film, write about it immediately and the hits will follow.

3 – TIRED OF WAKING UP TIRED

The most recent update to this blog was surprisingly one of the most popular.  Maybe because we’ve all had crazy vivid dreams.  Maybe because we never forget the most memorable ones.  But really, it’s probably because there are pictures of booze, and zombies, and cute/funny cats — all thing people are known to enjoy reading about.

2 – T.R.U.E.

My first webcomic.  Hopefully not the last either, as people really seemed to like it.  It was created for a Spanish comics fanzine, their final issue.  This is the English language version, and is totally based on a true story involving Alec Baldwin, Tina Fey, and some CHUDs.

And the most popular post on my website ever …

1. THE OTHER WHITE MEAT (PART 3)

Though you really need to read parts one and two first to get the whole story (the links of which are embedded at the top of part three).  This detailed the 15 year journey of my screenplay “Hell For Breakfast” to the big screen (in New Zealand, anyway) under the name “Fresh Meat.”  A cautionary tale of sorts, but I was surprised to see how popular it was.  I guess other people’s pain is funny.

So that’s the top ten of the first 100.  It doesn’t even include such personal faves such as how Writer’s Block isn’t necessarily a bad thing; or the one about my love and fear of Horror Movies; of how I became a comic book fan.  It doesn’t include the one I penned nearly a year ago, about how I hate celebrating my birthday, but ultimately consider myself fortunate to be able to celebrate one at all.  It doesn’t even touch on my fixation on Degrassi Jr. High and Degrassi High, and the unexpected influence that seminal Canadian teen soap had on Mixtape.

So, if you have some time to kill and want to know more about me, my writing, and how I’ve manage to carve a living out of it, the above are as good a place as any to start.

Now, I think I’ve procrastinated enough, don’t you … ?

 

Tired Of Waking Up Tired

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Sleep is one of those things that can prove elusive. I’ve grappled with insomnia over the years, and am currently working my way through another bout.  Friends advise me to see a specialist, or take some over the counter melatonin, but usually I just ride it out.  At some point the lack of sleep catches up with me and I crash hard, reset the internal clock, and am back at it until the next round.

Also: really freaky weird dreams result from that insomnia.  Not while I have it (because when I have it I’d rather blow my brains out), but because when I do finally crash, the dreams are exceptionally vivid.  And in the last month I’ve had three particularly vivid and just plain weird dreams, which I will now share with you.

So ... much ... whiskey .. (drools)

So … much … whiskey .. (drools)

This was just before Christmas.  My wife and I were passing through a small Northeastern town, and stopped into a bar for a drink. Turns out we’d ambled on into a whiskey bar – a hi-toned one that only served whiskeys.  Yes they mixed drinks, but only whiskeys, and most came for straight shots of the good stuff.

It was a quiet day there, so I struck up a conversation with the owner who said that while business was good, he was retiring and looking for someone else to take over the place for him.  He showed us around, and showed us the apartment upstairs that he lived in.  Both were in the offing, and after some minor consideration, my wife and I decided running a whiskey bar would be fun.  The apartment would be ours, I could keep up with writing, and we’d both run the bar ourselves.  At least that was what we thought.

I woke up.  Literally, woke from this pleasant dream.  I lay there for a bit, went to the kitchen for a glass of water, returned to bed and fell quickly back asleep.  But this time was one of those rare occasions where I resumed the dream where I left it off, back at the whiskey bar.

Only things had changed slightly.  Like genre.

Bearing a slight resemblance to the Bridge-And-Tunnel crowd ...

Bearing a slight resemblance to the Bridge-And-Tunnel crowd …

See, somewhere between when I last left the bar, things had slipped into horror movie mode. And we were dealing not with fine whiskeys but with a zombie outbreak.  My wife and I and some patrons had barricaded us in the whiskey bar and were fending off hordes of flesh and brain eating zombies.  How did we hold them off?  By employing the arsenal of weaponry the owner had left us the keys to.  Apparently zombie attacks were “just a thing” that the town had to deal with from time to time, like black fly season in parts of Canada.  So we unloaded on the brain biters, blasting them to bits, and celebrating victory with a sampling of single malts.

Then I woke up. The End.

Dream #2 requires a bot of backstory.  In 1983-1984 I was living in Scarborough Ontario.  It was a Saturday and I was in the rec room watching TV, and there was some crazy animated film I happened to land on midway through.  It was the story of a megalomaniacal alien from another planet, who had come to earth to fulfill some prophecy.  To do this, he had disguised himself as a rock star in the Glam Rock mode (clearly modeled on, and voice by, David Bowie circa Ziggy Stardust).

Sorta like this ... only Bowie.

Sorta like this … only Bowie.

The only people standing in his way?

The Bruddahs!

The Bruddahs!

Four upstart punks from Queens called The Ramones.  They had confounded the evil rock star’s plans, and the climax took place in Madison Square Garden at an epic battle of the bands that featured everyone from Lou Reed and Rush to the New York Dolls and Parliament Funkadelic.  At the end it was just The Ramones and Bowie left standing, and what ensued was a mash-up of punk tunes and classic 70s era arena rock as these two titanic forces battled, all roto-scoped by Ralph Bakshi from actual Ramones and Bowie performances –

And probably a little bit of this influence too ...

And probably a little bit of this influence too …

And I woke up.  The End.

I woke up really pissed, actually, because I wanted to know how it ended.  But I was most pissed that it existed only in my mind, fueled by memories of seeing Rock & Rule and Rock and Roll High School years before (with a bit of American Pop thrown in as well).  I tried to fall asleep again, but it didn’t take. That dream was over.  Damn it.

The third and final dream was triggered one evening when I arrived home to this pleasant bit of news:

“The cat’s missing!” my wife cried.  She’d looked everywhere, but the thing was gone.  Given we live five stories up, concern was that the cat had climbed out onto the fire escape or fallen from a window.

Or gone off into some Stephen King story where he blasts gnomes with his laser eyes.

Or gone off into some Stephen King story where he blasts gnomes with his laser eyes.

“Hang on”, I said; “When did we get a cat?”

She couldn’t say.

“Okay, describe this cat to me,” I asked, because I’d never seen it, because WE DON’T OWN A CAT.

“It‘s a cat,” my wife said. “Four legs, a tail, whiskers, ears …”

“Anything more specific?  What color? Is it black, or all white?  Calico?  How big?”

My wife stared at me. “I don’t know.”

“What’s its name?”

“Its name?  You don’t name cats. Why name an animal that refuses to come when you call it?”

I looked around our apartment.  There was no litter box or scratching post, or that smell non-cat-owners always notice when a cat is about, and is something a cat owner has become acclimatized to.

I went back to my wife. “There’s no cat here.  I know this, because we don’t own a cat.  We’ve never owned a cat.  We never will own a cat, ever.”

“Why?” my wife asked.

“Because you’re allergic to cats.” I told her.  “And I don’t like them. Period.”

Sorry, we're still not taking you in.

Sorry, we’re still not taking you in.

“Oh,” she said, almost surprised by this fact of medicine. “You’re right.  Never mind.”

“So what do we do about this cat?” I asked.

“Fuck it,” she said. “I’m allergic to ‘em anyway.”

The End.

Now there are questions that still linger with that final one. Why the hell did I dream we’d lost a cat we never had in the first place?  Why a cat and not a dog, which would be more plausible given my wife and I generally like dogs.  A cat?

Then my wife reminded me of something.

See, where we live now is upstairs from the apartment we used to live in.  That apartment faces the street, and you pass it every time you enter and exit the building.  It sat empty for several months after movin’ on up in the Jeffersonian sense, until one day I was coming home and noticed curtains were up, lights were on, and perched in the window staring out at the street and me, was a smallish black and white cat.  I remember being somewhat weirded out by the fact this four-legged feline was prowling about the apartment I lived in for three years and a bit. I’d moved out, the cat (and presumably its owner) had moved in.

So why on earth would I want to medicate this insomnia problem away?  Some of the best material I’ve generated has been due to lack of sleep.  So yeah, I’ll ride this one out, because I know there’ll be weird dreams to reward me at the end.  Cha-ching.

[DISCLAIMER: the above dreams have already been copyrighted, so steal them at your peril. Actually, go on and steal them.  My Lawyer likes suing people over copyright infringement. ]

[Another DISCLAIMER: I don't hate cats, really. They're fine. Put your pitchforks away]

The Writer’s Block

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“When making music gets too easy, it becomes harder to make it sing” ~ Jack White

For a writer I don’t talk or write very much about writing. Not in general, anyway. I certainly talk about my writing enough, but not much about the craft.  It’s a double-edged sword; why write about it when I should be writing it? Plus, every writer has their opinions on how best to write. They’re all different, and they all come from the same place; experience.  But since everybody’s experience is different, their advice, their “rules”, will likewise be different.  It’s why I’m loath to embrace the teachings of writing “gurus” or “experts” as really they’re teaching you how to write like them.

Take “Writer’s Block”. Some debate its existence. Some sniff they’ve never experienced writer’s block, and that its existence is the sign of a lazy wannabe writer.  Thing is, I’m naturally suspicious of people who claim writing comes easy to them all the time. My guess is that’s because they’re not trying terribly hard, like they’re setting the bar low (like, on the ground low) and then crowing after they’ve jumped it with ease.  Now they may be THAT good (and some are masters of their craft), but I’ve yet to see it in any writers I know, or in myself, and I’ve been writing pro coming up on fourteen years.

From my experience, writer’s block exists, though it’s less a wall you keep crashing into than a sign something is amiss with the project in question. Some structural flaw, some lapse in story logic preventing you from moving forward on it.  It’s your mind telling you something’s wrong, and forcing you to articulate what the problem is.

For me writer’s block isn’t necessarily a bad thing; usually it means I’ve written myself into a corner and need to backtrack a bit, to write my way out.  There have been times where I’ve had to take a break from a problematic project, go off and do something else for a bit, then come back to it, figure out where I got tripped up, and proceed from that point.

Around 12 years ago I had conceived the idea for a monster movie, while on a bighttime bus ride through a raging snowstorm back to the city.  On getting back home I plotted it, outlined it, and started writing it.  And I got to maybe the two thirds through it, to the point where … I … just … stopped.  It felt like I’d hit a wall.  I put it aside and told myself I’d get back to it in a day or two.  Months elapsed and I still hadn’t returned to it.

Then, one night, I had a dream.  In that dream, I saw the characters in that screenplay, all sitting around where I left them, checking their watches and saying; “He’s coming back, right”? They were just there, waiting for me.  And the next morning I awoke, picked up the screenplay where I left it, and finished it in the next day and a bit; 40 pages drafted in a white hot flash of inspiration. Now, they were shitty pages, but they wre finished shitty pages, and I could look those pages now  as a problem that needed solving.  Determining just what I had done wrong was relatively easy, and by the end of that month I had rewritten and revised to the point I said to myself; “Hey, this isn’t too bad after all.”

[Turns out when it was finally finished, and sent out, ended up being the best received screenplay I've ever written. It's yet to be produced, but it led to me being hired on numerous projects.  It’s about vampires.  It may still have life in it.]

This is NOT the vampire to which I refer. Good lord, no.

So point being, sometimes you need to hit that wall.  Sometimes you need writer’s block.  You need to have limitations thrus upon you, to overcome them and become better at what you do.  I’d rather face those obstacles than take the steps to ensure they’re never there in the first place. You do that, you’re just fooling yourself that you’re doing great work.  You fear failure so much you’re not willing to risk it at all.  Limitations force you to become more creative in how you solve those problems.  Being more creative makes you better, no matter what your profession.

And my favorite Beatles album, by the by …

 There’s a little known story about the Beatles that, I think, illustrates this perfectly.  Post Rubber Soul, McCartney lobbied EMI, the Beatles’ label, to let the band travel to America, as the US of A had all the then state of the art technology not available to them in the UK. The Stones had done it, and the Beatles wanted to do it too; they wanted to play with these new toys.  But contractual obligations with EMI left them stuck in the UK, much to their chagrin. They and their producer George Martin were forced, against their will, to decamp to the best studio they could find, which was still using WW2 era equipment.

The studio was Abbey Road.

And the albums they recorded there — Revolver, The White Album, and the landmark Sgt. Pepper became groundbreaking works.  All because they had to take those limitations, that archaic technology, and bend it to their will to craft the sounds they heard in their heads.

See what limitations get you?

So yeah, you ask me again, I’ll tell you that Writer’s Block definitely exists. It exists because I put it there, and in the process forced me to use the tools I had all along to smash it to pieces.

 

Every Day Is Halloween

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Anybody who knows me knows I am a horror fan.  To look at me you probably wouldn’t guess that – while I tend to favor black clothing out of general laziness, I don’t have any horror tattoos, or paint my nails black.  I don’t wear those colors on my sleeve.

But, I’m a fan.  Perhaps the biggest disappointment of my career is that none of my horror screenplays have actually been produced. Well, technically, this one, but it is more of a comedy than a gut wrenching horror (the story of how it became what it did can be found here).  There’s also one I’m developing with the folks at Rue Morgue Cinema, and a great one I wrote for the fine folks behind this upcoming thriller.

So yeah, I’m a fan.  Thing is I wasn’t always one.

When I was much younger, I was plagued by nightmares.  Bad ones.  Ones that woke me screaming in the night.  When we lived in Vancouver, our house was nestled on the edge of some pretty deep and dark woods, and I was convinced there were things living there.  Dark things.  Things with glowing red eyes.  Things that would burrow underground at day, and at night, they’d rise and stalk the shadows.  Their eyes would inevitably be drawn to our house, lights gleaming from within.  I knew they could see me too, passing by the windows that looked out onto our backyard.

One time I was in the basement, where we had our TV.  For some reason I was alone.  My parents were upstairs, as was my sister, but at some point I was certain I wasn’t alone down there.  Our basement was only partially finished.  The TV room was to the right of the stairs, but through another door there was only the unfinished portion – my dad’s workshop, the furnace, and storage.  This door was opposite the TV room.  You had to pass that door to go back upstairs.  And for some reason I was convinced that something had gotten in and was waiting on the other side of that door.  Waiting for me to pass.  Waiting to open it and get me.

So, what I remember doing was turning the volume on the TV up to mask my footsteps, and at a particularly boisterous moment in the commercials, ran from the TV room and up the stairs.  I stole a look back … and I saw the door that I was sure had been closed a moment before was now open, and I saw a long hairy leg and large hairy foot step out.  I ran up the stairs, convinced that it would grab me before I reached safety, and drag me outside, muffling my screams, my family none the wiser.

Anyway I made it upstairs and muttered something to the effect I was going to bed.  I went to my room and closed the door.  In there I was safe … unlike my bedroom in Mississauga, where we lived previous.  That room definitely had a monster in the closet.  I know this because I saw it – dark, vaguely human, vaguely simian.  Once I actually hid under the bed from it, and saw it lurch from the closet, heard it sniffing the air for me; I actually stayed beneath the bed all night, not poking my head out until morning came.

Note: not the actual closet monster but a reasonable facsimile

When we moved across the country I was relieved.  But when it became apparent that there were monsters in our new house, I wondered if it was the one from back East that had followed us across country, only traveling at night, sticking close to the shadows, gradually getting closer and closer.

We moved to Edmonton the following year, and as we settled in to another house, I knew that monster had left the Vancouver house and was slowly but deliberately making its way towards us, and to me.  The Rocky Mountains would slow it down somewhat, but it was definitely on its way.

So yeah, I had a vivid imagination, and scary stuff on a vivid imagination is like giving a hyperactive kid a handful of candy before bedtime.  And for the longest time I avoided horror movies like the plague. This was because if I saw something scary on TV or in a book, I KNEW I’d have bad nightmares.  Seriously, even the assorted ghosts and ghouls on Scooby-Doo would induce paroxysms of terror in me.

What could possibly be behind this door — AHHH JESUS!

So horror?  Not my thing.

My dad, on the other hand, was a fan.  He famously took his parents to see Psycho – my Grandmother being likewise a fan of the macabre (more on her in a bit).  Even as a father with a couple young kids, he’d go out to the movies with his work buddies every so often, and it would usually be a horror film – Halloween, The Fog – and when we got our first VCR (yes, it was a Betamax), he’d plumb the shelves looking for monster movies to watch after we kids had been tucked off to bed.  I’d know he’d be down there watching them, and occasionally I’d creep downstairs and listen to the sound of chainsaws and machetes splitting skulls form just outside the TV room.  Once, he and I were at a department store for something, and one of the movies being shown on a TV in the electronics department was Poltergeist.

Once upon a time, TV stations actually ceased their broadcast day and — AHHH! JESUS!

We stopped at the video store on the way home so he could rent it.  He watched it; I didn’t, even though I was fine watching it at The Bay.  I think because bringing the movie into our home meant the monsters and nightmares it unleashed would be unleashed on home turf.

What changed between me and horror was my dad pulling a fast one on his ten year-old son.  He brought home a movie for me and him to watch one afternoon.  It was a sci-fi film, and he knew I was a sci-fi fan.  I was in love with Star Wars, and all sci-fi was like that, right?

Oh yeah, it was this one:

Seriously, the friggin’ POSTER scared the crap out of me.

I was terrified from the opening credits, but resolved I was going to stick it out to the bitter end.  Sleep?  Overrated.  I had to prove to myself I could do this.  I watched through to the bitter end … and a strange thing happened.  I slept soundly that night.  There were no Alien nightmares at all.  And the following Monday at school, I was BRAGGING in the playground that I had seen this movie Alien, that a guy got his head punched off, and another guy had something burst from his chest.  I thought I was hot shit.  And in my own way I was, because I had survived Alien.

The flood gates had opened, if not to a full surge than at least a steady stream.  I was becoming more attuned to horror movies.  Alien was the gateway, and soon after that I managed to survive Poltergeist, and The Birds, and Bride of Frankenstein.  Mostly watched on an afternoon, in broad daylight, but still, I watched them.

My burgeoning interest in horror brought me and my aforementioned Grandmother closer together, given she was a HUGE horror fan.

Definitely NOT my grandmother.

Every Christmas she was a recipient of the latest Stephen King hardcover from my sister and me.  She came to expect it, and look forward to it, and soon after un-wrapping it, she’d be in her chair, cigarette clenched in hand, shunning the rest of the celebration so she could get started into Needful Things or Misery or Pet Sematary (her personal favorite, and with good reason; it’s a scary mofo).  She’d lend some of them to me to read, after she was finished with them, of course.  When she passed away in 1993, left me all her King books.  They’re sitting on my shelf as I write this.  One of them contains a note she wrote to me. You can still feel the indentations from the ballpoint, 20 years later.

Once I started exposing myself to the horror, the less it horrified me.  I realized that, rather than terrorize me, it was trying to help me.  To prepare me for adulthood, to show me that fears could be conquered, and bent to your will.  I don’t think it’s a coincidence that when I started to enjoy horror, I likewise began writing, with horror being the creative tinder for the fire that’s burned bright for well over 30 years now.  The monsters stopped visiting my house entirely — they knew I wasn’t scared of them anymore.

So, yeah, I’m a horror fan.  And if you ask any horror fan, they’ll tell you that it was an involved process of confronting, and then conquering their fears, to make them their obsessions.  Horror fans get a lot of grief from the so-called “normal” people, the ones who ask why you watch that “horror crap” when there’s already so much horror in the real world.  But if you have to ask that question, chances are you’ll never know, or understand why we do.

As much a fan as I am, I regret that horror movie, and books, aren’t the vivid, terrifying experiences for me as they once were.  When you hit adulthood, the stuff that scares you changes – it becomes more real.  People I know with families tell me they have a visceral reaction to a child in peril that they didn’t have before they became parents.  The older you get, the more you age, those worries of illness and disease stake out the same mental real estate that vampires and zombies once did.

My grandmother was never a healthy person, and even when she was diagnosed with cancer, knew it would win in the end.  But she still read horror novels and watched horror movies right up to the end.  She never articulated to me why, but I like to think it was because they made her happy, and took her mind off her own problems.  In horror, the monster can be defeated, though sometimes it comes back (usually in a series of increasingly awful sequels).  Not so much in life.

One thing I’ve come to believe is that being completely, irrationally freaked out as a young kid, is key to becoming a sane, creative adult.  The horror fans, the writers, the journalists and the filmmakers I know count among the very best people I’ve ever met.  The ones who confronted their fears and conquered them and bent them to their will, to thrive and make a living off those things that terrorized them when they were younger.

And the ones who don’t watch horror? The ones with the “nice, normal childhoods”?

They’re the ones you really need to be afraid of.

BRAD’S TOP TEN HORROR MOVIES

  1. Alien (1979)
  2. The Innocents (1961)
  3. Jaws (1975)
  4. Dawn of the Dead (1978)
  5. Halloween (1978)
  6. The Evil Dead (1983)
  7. Black Christmas (1974)
  8. Phantasm (1979)
  9. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1973)
  10. The Haunting (1963)

 

The Other White Meat (Part III)

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[Part I told the story of the origins of my screenplay Hell For Breakfast, and Part 2 detailed how it found its way to New Zealand.]

Anytime some novice screenwriter brags they just had a screenplay optioned, they expose the fact they are novices.  Fact is screenplays get optioned all the time; how many of those screenplays get produced is another story.  Someone, and I can’t remember who (so I’ll just claim it for myself), once described an option as being a casual first date, where a produced film is like twenty years of marriage; there’s no comparing the two.  I’ve had three screenplays optioned in the last 16 years.  To date only one has been produced.  This is the final chapter in that story.

Where we last left off, Joe and I had been fired off of Hell For Breakfast, a screenplay we drafted in 1996 (after coming up with the idea sometime late in 1994).  Actually, let’s back this up a bit.

The Gibson Group, the NZ-based production company that had optioned Hell For Breakfast, had an initial option period of two years, with two renewal periods of one year each.  The first option commenced in summer of 2003, and expired in 2005.  They renewed, and that second option expired in 2006.  They renewed a third and final time, and that option was due to expire in summer 2007.  After that third option period was up, the screenplay reverted back to Joe and myself.  We figured since it had been four years and the movie was no further along, the producers would just cut their losses, let it lapse and we’d take it back.

The only way it wouldn’t revert, was if the producers triggered what is known as a “buyout” clause in our contract.  Meaning, if they paid us the balance of script fees still owed (the “purchase” price), they owned the screenplay.  And again, given it had been four years since they’d optioned the screenplay and were no closer to filming it, we figured they’d just let it go.

If you’ve been following along, you know what happened next.  They didn’t let it go; they faxed us copies of the paperwork indicating they were triggering the buyout clause.  They wired payment to our respective bank accounts, and owned Hell For Breakfast.  And since it was now their script and not our script, our services were no longer required. We had, in essence, been fired off our own movie.

Not “fired” but “rewritten” which is industry speak for when they fire the writer.

Now, this wasn’t the first time Joe and I were “removed” from a film either. We were “removed” from that other one; the “Big Job” we were working on at the same time we were in rewrites on H4B.  I was rewritten pretty heavily on Stonehenge Apocalypse (easy way to tell; everything non-suck was me, the rest was the other guy). It’s pretty common in a business where the attitude is “better to hire a new writer than have the old one(s) keep working on it, which means we have to renegotiate their contract, and it’s easier and cheaper to hire someone else.” Fresh writers mean fresh ideas (and presumably, fresh meat).

So like I said, it happened before, and has happened since.  The difference in this case was Hell For Breakfast was our story, our characters, our ideas. It existed solely because 13 years before, Joe came to me with an idea for a movie about criminals and cannibals and we wrote that movie. It was our movie once, but now it was someone else’s.  And we weren’t happy about it.

Now this is right around the point where you point out that we did sign a contract, and we did cash the checks.  And we did; of course we did.  You would do the same.  That’s the nature of the film business.  And if we were only in this business for the money we would have been happy to take the money and bolt.  But we weren’t in it for just the money.  I think to have longevity in this business, to love this job, it can’t be about the money.  It has to be about you creating something unique and different and personal.  If it’s only about dollars and cents, you’re in it for the wrong reasons because there are much better ways to earn a living.

So yeah, at the time, I was pissed, and I’m sure Joe was too.

But over time and on reflection I came to realize that what happened was probably for the best.  I don’t know if there’s an “industry” term for it, but for me there’s always a point on any project, whether one you’ve initiated yourself, or one that’s a hired job, where you deliver The Draft, namely the one that represents the best work you’ll ever do on it.  The one that hits every story beat and character moment, and if it were filmed as i,s would make for an amazing movie.

We had reached that point on H4B, at least to our satisfaction, and we agreed even before we were replaced, that any subsequent revisions would be to increasingly diminished returns. So, when informed our services were no longer required, it was almost a relief.

So, we took the checks and cashed them and moved on.  By that point I was working on Stonehenge Apocalypse and Mixtape, and Joe had become a new dad, deciding to take time off to focus on raising his awesome daughter, while working on his personal projects [one of which, his writing-directing debut Devil's Mile, looks incredible].  In a way I was glad the H4B chapter of my life was over.  It felt like old news. I no longer had an emotional connection to it.  It felt like something written by a completely different person.  Someone just learning the craft, making mistakes no professionals would make, and finding that those mistakes made the script different and weird and something that attracted people to it in the first place.

Over the next four years H4B (as I was still calling it) receded from memory.  Every so often I’d get an update on its progress, but by then I was busy on other projects.  I figured it would either go or it wouldn’t, but I figured if/when it happened it would at the precise moment I was looking the other way.

Jump-cut to May 2011, and I get an email from the producers telling us that Fresh Meat/H4B is filming in Autumn.  They need to sort out the credit situation, which we do after some back and forth, and on November 17, 2011, FM/H4B went before cameras.   As of this writing the film is pretty much done, with it premiering at the Hawaii International Film Festival on October 15, and hitting NZ cinemas on October 25th.

I wish the makers of Fresh Meat every success in the world.  I want it to become the biggets grossing New Zealand film of all time. I want it to be one of those rare non-US films that makes a big splash in the US market. I want it to become a cult classic.  But there’s always going to be a part of me that wishes we’d made that 16mm D.I.Y. movie in that house in Toronto all those years ago.  It would have been crude and amateurish, the acting would have been dodgy, the SFX would have been chezy, and the boom would have dropped into more shots than not, but it would have been ours.  But I’m okay with Fresh Meat belonging to someone else, and when it’s released on October 25th , it’ll belong to everyone, which is kind of the point.  It doesn’t become art until someone sees it, and when they do you can’t call it yours anymore.  And if having a screenplay survive the option and development process to become an actual movie is the worst thing that happens to me this year, I really can’t complain.  As I said; most optioned screenplays gather dust on the shelf and never see the inside of a theater.  Hell For Breakfast was one of those lucky few to escape that fate.

If you’re intertested in following future developments on Fresh Meat, you’ll find the official website here, and the FB page here, and they’re on Twitter as well.

If there’s any take-away from the experience, it’s this; when you’re there at your desk toiling away, after work or before leaving for work if you still hold a day job, you never know when a project is going to see the light of day, be it published, projected or televised.  The journey of H4B to Fresh Meat took 16 years, from the moment we finished the first draft, to its release. But the take-away is that you never know how long something is going to take to come to fruition.  RoboCop was written and filmed over 18 months, from January 99 to June 2000.  I wrote Stonehenge Apocalypse in 2008, it filmed in 2009 and was released in 2010.  Mixtape was conceived in October 2008, and issue #1 arrived in stores in April 2012. So you can see the earlier point – that in the movie biz, things move glacially when they’re not moving at a sprint – well illustrated.

You never know when something’s going to click, and you never know just how close you are to seeing that dream – whatever it may be — fulfilled. That’s the best part of it; who wants to go through life knowing how everything is going to turn out anyway?

[Oh, and if anyone in Hollywood snatches up the North American remake rights to FRESH MEAT and is looking for writers to adapt it, give me and Joe a call.  We have a script for it that would be PERFECT.]