Bulletproof Screenwriting

Alex Ferrari 1:50
Enjoy today's episode with guest host Dave Bullis.

Dave Bullis 1:55
My next guest is actually a 45 time award winning screenwriter, and he's the founder of the popular Facebook group screenwriters who could actually write. We're going to talk about a lot of this stuff, including templates, and we're talking about his process of writing. We're going to talk about save the cat and all that other good stuff. What does he think about all of it? Well, why don't we all give it a listen with my guest, Mike Bierman.

Dave Bullis 2:21
Hey, Mike, that's not for coming on the podcast.

Mike Bierman 2:49
Oh, my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

Dave Bullis 2:51
Oh, it's great to have you, Mike. You know, you're somebody that's been on my radar for a while. You're the host of the screenwriters who can actually write Facebook group. You're a 45 time award winning screenwriter. So, you know, obviously you're somebody that I've wanted to talk to. And, you know, just to get started, Mike, I wanted to ask you, you're a trial attorney, you know, by day. And I wanted to ask you, when did you get bit by the screenwriting bug?

Mike Bierman 3:14
I'm actually not. I hardly ever practice anymore, because between managing my daughter and doing the group actually takes an enormous amount of time, given the number of posts I do which you've seen, I'm sure you can understand that I rarely practice law anymore. I'm licensed. I can practice, do all the things I used to do. I just don't do it anymore, because what happens is I end up with a bunch of court dates that I can't control, scheduled out ad infinitum, you know, out into the future, and cases can drag on for years. So rather than commit to those types of things, I'm doing something else. I try to avoid trial work. Although I do, I do still practice some entertainment law behind the scenes, including, recently, I've done some of that, but generally I don't practice that anymore. And the way I got started in screenwriting is my daughter, Erica Bierman. She's in Hunger Games, catching fire, Hunger Games, Mockingjay one. Her scene was cut from Mockingjay two. It revealed too much, too early, but she was also in Dumb and Dumber too. She was when she started, she was getting auditions even very high level stuff. And I'd read the scripts and I'd say, wow, you know, I just don't think this is written very well. I think I can do better. And so I bought the screenwriters Bible by David Trottier, which is one of three or four books that I recommend everybody should have. I skimmed through it. I didn't read it. Wrote a 19 page short script, submitted to page Awards, which is top three contests in the world, and took top 25 scripts out of something like 7000 scripts. So. So just self taught and started off with a bang.

Dave Bullis 5:05
So the first screenwriting book that you ever bought was actually their chart. Here's book is that was that correct?

Mike Bierman 5:11
Yes, and it's, it's a great book. It's a really good overview to to screenwriting. There are other books that I like for different purposes, but that's a great first book. It's hard to imagine a better first book to start with, and Dave Trotter is actually a member of of the group, so I highly recommend that book. And while we're on books, I also highly recommend Linda aaronson's The 21st Century screenplay, which is all about different structures, non three act, all types of different jumping time structures and very complex structures. And you it's a great book, because you can actually figure out what structure would best suit your story idea. If you know what you're doing when you start writing, you can custom pick a structure that would be the best skeleton to flesh out for your story. So that's an that's an incredible book, very, very complicated. She's a very high level writer. She's from Oxford University, very meaty book, and it's one you can spend a lot of time with. For formatting. I like your cut to is showing by TJ Alex, which is a pen name. I know people who know who that is. I haven't bothered to ask, but that's the best book for formatting. It goes into the most depth any given situation. There are typically three to five professional, acceptable ways you can choose from to do it, and that is an essential book for screenwriters. Rick Tosca and also Richard toskin also wrote playwriting seminars 2.0 which is mostly about playwriting, because he was dean of theater at USC for, I think, about 30 years, a very long time, and that but that book also crosses into screenwriting, and it's an excellent book that breaks down the analysis of story, whether it's playwriting or screenwriting. And so those are, those are four books that I highly recommend.

Dave Bullis 7:31
You know, it's funny Mike, because the first book I ever read about screenwriting was also David charter, his book about formatting. I went into a borders and remember them when they were still around, but I wouldn't, yeah, I was sad when they went away, yeah? Cuz now all that's left is Barnes and Nobles and maybe a few independent stores here and there. But, you know, it's sad to see that that part of it go, you know,

Mike Bierman 7:54
Yeah, the brick and mortar bookstores are just there. They're really enjoyable because you can, you can browse, and there's a certain atmosphere, and you can, you can kill a few hours and find things you have no idea exist. The end of the internet. Internet is great, but there's a certain allure to a brick and mortar bookstore, and hopefully those will come back. I should have mentioned also that Rick toskin, that I just spoke of, who I think, recently got a Lifetime Achievement Award from, I guess, National Endowment of the Arts. He's actually in the screenwriting group as well. So we have some really high end gurus in there, lots of pros. Well over 100 produced films, films you've heard of, written by members of the group. So thought I'd mention that,

Dave Bullis 8:39
Yeah, the there are some, you know, members of the group that I've, you know, I've seen their posts about, you know, different things that they've they've written that, have, you know, been produced. For instance, I know somebody just wrote a, a the the screenplay for the latest Steven Seagal movie. And I remember he was in the group, and I was talking to him briefly. I think that's that Charles or Chuck.

Mike Bierman 8:59
I think his name is Chuck Cosmeyer that ended again, the end of the gun. And he has, I think he actually has another film coming out on that same deal with the same producer, not starring Steven Seagal. I know more about it, but I can't, I can't say at this point, that info is under wraps. But what I what I just told you, is fine. He does have another film under that deal, and I think he's either optioning or about to sell another script imminently. So we have a lot of activity. I have, I have two feature films in production myself right now. So so, you know, there are a lot of, there are a lot of people in the group with a lot of things going on, some really great stuff.

Dave Bullis 9:48
So that's why the name fits so well. Screenwriters who can actually write it, not just, not just talk about theory, right?

Mike Bierman 9:56
Well, I, you know, I there's a there's a certain haughtiness and snottiness to it. I'm the first to admit it, and I actually did it on purpose, because in reviewing screenwriting groups, there's one group in particular. It's just enormous. I won't name it, but it has nearly 20,000 members, and the type of questions asked in a group are just mind boggling. The the lack of thought going into, you know, posting a question with your name on it before you put it up, it's just incredible. I think when I started the group in my in my group description. I named it kind of sarcastically, because I was leaving the other group just in disgust. And wanted to try and get people who were, if not more experienced, a little bit more thoughtful about what they were writing and what they were saying, little more educated people in the in the craft. And so I think I posted, you know, screenwriting, screenwriting forum, hopefully without questions like, Is water wet and is it okay to kill my character? So the whole thing kind of started out as a a sarcastic announcement of a departure from, kind of like the great unwashed, with people saying, you know, I'm a screenwriter, because they, they, you know, wrote something on a napkin once to try to attract people, even beginners, but people who are more serious about learning the craft, who are looking at it as a profession rather than as a hobby.

Dave Bullis 11:37
Yeah, it's, I've joined other groups in the past as well. And a lot some of these questions, there was way too many questions about formatting. And for instance, there was actually a group that met physically here in Philadelphia. And these the beginners who would show up would always ask about formatting.

Mike Bierman 11:53
And when I said, buy a book, buy a book, read a script, buy a book, it's just not that it's not that tough. And unfortunately, sorry, cut you off there. But on for it. Unfortunately, that is all too common in a lot of screenwriting groups. And one of the rules, I have a rules driven group for this purpose, to try and keep the group on focus. And, you know, no political posts, and there are a bunch of other, a bunch of other rules. But you know, one of the, one of the basic tenets of the group is search the group itself before you ask a question, because they've been in people been in there for over a year, answering in depth, almost anything you can think of. And also, so search the internet before you ask a simple formatting question. Buy a book. It's just not that tough. And so all you're going to do by by asking that type of question in an open forum is attract ridicule, show you have no idea what you're doing, and get a bunch of troll responses. So you actually never get the right answer, because even the people giving you the right answer will be diluted by all the trolls. So, and that's very common, as you know,

Dave Bullis 13:08
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You know when, when people would ask that, in the group, in the in the physical group, I'd always say to the other person that was running it with me, I'd say, why don't we take these people, put them in their own group, and we can go over, like, formatting, and then the other half of the group, you know, we'll work on actual, you know, writing, and get into the structures. And the only, and he, you know, we kept going back and forth on this. And I said, because every meeting, we're sacrificing our strongest for our weakest. And what I mean by that is, you know, exactly, yeah, just just, you know, spending all this time on formatting when you you could buy fade in, or final draft, or writers duet, or whatever, and it takes care of it all for you. Or, you know, like,

Mike Bierman 13:45
Well, there's a miss, a little bit of a misconception. It takes, it takes care of the there's a difference between formatting and element placement on the page, and this is a common misunderstanding. Or, or people misstate this, the screenwriting software, there isn't any screenwriting software that actually formats per se for you. What the screenwriting software does is it actually puts the elements in place on the page so that you don't have to work in Word counting spaces. For example, you know, if you're going to do a parenthetical under dialog, the screenwriting software will put the position the cursor in the right place for, you know, a play format or screenwriting format for character or shot or transition or dialog action. Note, special, whatever it is that you're trying to do, it'll actually set it up on the page for you with the right number of preceding, following and intervening carriage spaces and intervening carriage returns. But what it actually doesn't do is format, and so that's one of the things that happens in beginning groups a lot. I. Uh, and I've seen I've seen it. I've seen professional scripts where people actually said, when I was Script doctoring or rewriting a script, I'd say, hey, you know, this is going to be a lot more work than you thought. Well, why is that? Is the story that? Well, the story is okay. The problem is the formatting. Everything's off. Well, that's impossible. I used Final Draft. Well, that's a very naive comment that shows how many screenwriting formatting errors they're going to be because the software doesn't actually format. It just it just puts things in the right place. The formatting is the understanding of how to how to direct the camera without using shot direction, for example, in a spec script, and how to properly write down the entire skeleton of a visual film in writing using as few words as possible, leaving as much white space on the on the page as possible, and screenwriting software is just the beginning. It's kind of like saying, I have a Ferrari, so now I'm going to be a, you know, a champion driver. There's an enormous difference between having the car and being able to drive. It does that kind of make sense?

Dave Bullis 16:17
Yeah, yeah. It does well, because you actually touched upon. What I was going to was, actually, I was going to say was, there were people who had Microsoft Word open, and they were using, like, four tabs for a character, three tabs for this. That is brutal, yeah, because they would turn in a script, and I would look at this, and I'd go, it's all off. And I'd say, What did you write this in? And that's what I'm saying, you know, the screen. Because they would always say, Well, Dave, you know, how do we write this? Blah, blah. And I'd say, no, no, you just use, grab the software. That's what I mean about, you know, buying final draft or whatever, and positions the elements correct?

Mike Bierman 16:49
Yeah, that then the other, the other thing beginners don't understand is, you know, they go out and pick Helvetica, or, you know, I don't even know the names of all the fonts, crazy fonts, swirls and, you know, HP, Lovecraft fonts and, okay, that stuff's great if you're if you're writing a free verse poem or something, but screenwriting is designed for every page to be one minute of screen time. Now, obviously, depending on action, depending on on dialog, the level of vocabulary, the way the scripts written, each page is going to vary. Obviously, you have an enormous amount of action, tightly written action. A page could go conceivably several minutes. But if you you know, okay, if you write, there's a two mile car chase down the dirt road that's not going to happen in one minute. Okay, so it the page length for filming can vary, but the whole idea is, on average, one page is one minute of film. Now, the only way you can do that, if you think about it, is if you have a particular font style, which is called a fixed pitch font, and the standard for that is courier, which is an old news font. I find it fairly ugly font, but they've developed all kinds of variant courier fonts. There's, you know, Courier, final draft. They've patented their own. There's courier, new courier dark, which is one I really like in there. There are a bunch of other variants of courier, and what it comes down to is, no matter what character you type, whether it's a special character, dollar sign, hashtag or pound sign, exclamation point, period, comma, capital P, small x. It doesn't matter whatever character you type, they all take up exactly the same amount of space on the page, and that's why you have to use a fixed pitch font. And some people will try to cheat. Let's say you're a novelist and you're overwriting your script and you want to get it down from 165 pages to 120 where somebody might actually read it, and you can't figure out any way to do it because you're overwriting everything. You're too green to rewrite your script properly. So what you do is you get the bright idea to go in and change the font to some font other than final draft. Go ahead and add a couple lines. One, top, one, bottom, cheat the margins left and right, and all of a sudden your page count drops down to 130 pages. You're within striking distance of your goal. The problem is, any professional looking at a single page of your script will immediately throw in the trash.

Dave Bullis 19:40
Yeah, and, you know, again, that's something that I've also seen too, especially on the cover page, like, they'll use, like, a different font for the title, and, you know, like, like, in all those specialized fonts and some artwork

Mike Bierman 19:54
Artwork thrown down the margins. And yeah, in in spec scripts. Yeah, I actually have a book coming out, being published by dos a blank publishing and it's, it's going to be called, it's coming out fairly shortly. I'm essentially finished with the manuscript, the body of it. I'm working on the some of the pictures, clearing copyrights, things like that. But the book is going to be called Secrets of screenwriting, with a subtitle of collected essays. I don't want anyone to think that this is like any of the other screenwriting books. It really isn't. It's a collection of my long essay posts from the group over the last year, and it's kind of a rambling, disordered volume full of all kinds of pearls of wisdom that just occurred to me from a post or someone's comment or something, I would pull out my phone and write these, these gigantic, sometimes five and six page posts. They're probably have a mental problem. I don't know why I do it, but I do, and I a lot of people asked me to collect those, or they wanted me to archive them somehow so they could reference them. Several pros have have used my rewriting post, which is very popular. It's about six pages long. They One Pro actually printed it out and glued it onto the wall above his computer, messaged me to tell me how useful it was. And I have a copyright post. People tend to like screen craft. Publish part of that copyright post, and I'm going to publish the whole thing in the book with screen crafts permission. They've already given me permission to republish the whole but that should be useful. I've kind of lost track of where I was, but there's, there's a plug for the book.

Dave Bullis 21:57
Do you know when that book's coming out Mike?

Mike Bierman 21:58
I have another contract to get it out in the next I think I've got 60 days or so to get the manuscript in. That's not a problem, because the manuscript is essentially finished, and then the publisher has to publish it within six months. So, and we're shooting for Barnes and Noble, you know, the brick and mortar stores, I guess they'll probably be a hard, hard copy, hardcover version, and the, you know, standard paperback type version. We suspect it'll be oversized, probably a five by eight or five by nine. It's probably gonna be about 260 pages, and it won't be like any other it won't be like Trotter's guide or anything like that. That'll be fully indexed, where you can go in and say, you know, gee, I have this particular question. I'm going to look this is, this is more of different subjects, the philosophies behind different ways of writing story, things like that. It's it's more essay form, rather than subject driven, like a lot of books. So it'll be very different. It's more like kind of the book you you sit down in a in a coffee shop and read it to get it's kind of like a mixture of opinion and method and things like that. So be very different.

Dave Bullis 23:24
Oh, very cool. Because, you know, I have a ton of screenwriting books, and this does sound very different than all the rest that I have, obviously, because this is a podcast. You can't see it, but next to me is my library of screenwriting books. But, yeah,

Mike Bierman 23:37
Well, you know, it's just smart. I mean, this is a is a very esoteric craft. It's a very closed industry. A lot of the really good screenwriters either don't have the time to help or don't want to help. And I've actually seen sabotaging groups. I've seen, I won't name any of them, but I've seen professional or advanced writers who actually get paid all the time to write giving wrong answers on purpose to throw off either someone they don't like or somebody that you know they just decided to screw with. And of course, that doesn't that doesn't help anybody except the pro who's keeping down the competition. So opinions are going to vary in screenwriting books, and I've I have my own very strong opinions. My my book is going to be full of them. It's going to be full of cursing. It's not edited. It will be edited. But my the language won't be edited out. Sometimes, if I'm angry about something, you know, I'll flavor the post with a sprinkling of cursing, because that's just how it came out. To keep the book genuine. It's the posts are actually going in as the original essays. They're not being edited down to make it politically correct or anything like that. So the book will offend some, it will amuse some, and it should help everyone that reads it.

Dave Bullis 24:58
And that's fantastic. Know, sometimes we need, we need a little tough love, Mike,

Mike Bierman 25:03
That's, and that's what the book is. I'll yell at you, I'll prop you up, I'll beat you down. Then I'll lift you up again. And I'll, I'll inspire you to write better and to keep going. And then I'll, I'll beat on you a while for doing something a certain way. That's, it's not a very effective or good or smart way, and then I'll build you up again. So it's, it's, it's kind of a tough ride, but enough people approached me to write it and said, Geez, you need to put all these things in a book. These are terrific that a publisher actually approached me to publish the book. So, you know, kind of a nice situation.

Dave Bullis 25:44
Yeah, it is an amazing situation. And, you know, sometimes we need that tough love, you know, just a funny anecdote, Mike, I think that you'll really enjoy, you know, I one time had a beginner approached me with a script, and they came into one of our group, but one of my groups that I was running, and their script had several pages within within the then the script with design drawings on them of what they were talking about inside the script.

Mike Bierman 26:10
Doesn't, you know, it doesn't matter if they're Picasso and it doesn't matter if they're Hemingway. Those things are not a good combination for a spec script, if you're if you're hired by somebody at DreamWorks who's absolutely visually driven, and you've already got the job, and they see you doodling the margins and say, Geez, what a great drawing. I sure would like to see some of those in your script. By all means, throw some artwork in the script, but either in a regular spec script, you don't do that. You don't put artwork in. Every rule is made to be broken. One of my most award winning scripts, it doesn't have artwork in it, per se, but I do some interesting things with a couple of different fonts that are cut in as JPEGs. One of the languages that the script is written in is Galilean Aramaic, which was the language spoken in the early Middle East, which ended not too long after Jesus' time. That's one of seven languages in the script. Well, there's no font for that, so I actually had to cut JPEGs into the script to put in the original Galilean Aramaic, which actually mattered, because at one point, the language actually appears on the screen as a special effect. So to save producers, the four months it took me to get four or five words, let me see we have a Yeah, four words took four months to get translated by one of the world's experts in this language. So to save producers time, if anyone picked up the script, I went ahead and had the translation already done and put in the script. So, you know, rules are made to be broken, but you need to learn the rules and get good so you can decide when you need to break them. I've never put our work, per se, in a script, and I'm up to, I don't know, 13 features with eight solely written, and then others co written with best selling authors and and people like that. And I had one person that wanted to put artwork in the script, and had a very frank talk with them, and I said, Look, you came to me. You want me to write this with you. I like the idea. Like the story, if you insist on putting artwork in the script, you're gonna write it alone. And that was it. And no artwork,

Dave Bullis 28:28
Yeah, and that's something I want to get into Mike, is, you know your screenwriting, you know your methods, and you know, so when you were starting out, you know, you had David's book, and you, you know, obviously you're reading, you say, you skim through that, and you were writing down your own ideas. And so I wanted to ask, did you ever adhere to any sort of like method, you know, whether it be three acts, five acts, any of that when you were writing, or did you just simply, just sort of how you had a starting point and you just went,

Mike Bierman 28:58
Okay, so three act, and basically didn't read the book, just looked at the book for formatting, went hadn't read any any professional script that they like, of any movie that I liked, just had seen a bunch of scripts that I didn't think were written well, had been sent to my daughter. There were some that were written. Well, they were, you know, by all means, someone researches this. Oh, she auditioned for that. Mike said the script is crap. Now, some of some of the scripts were crap. A lot of them were just mediocre. So, and I'm unusual in that I don't outline, and most writers do outline. There are just a few, I would say maybe less than 4% probably closer to 2% don't outline. I don't know if I want to call it a gift or if it's a curse, most writers will actually execute a complete fleshed out outline that may be 30, 40, 50, 60, pages before they write the screenplay, and they'll actually write it from the outline. I have never done that, and I write natively, but I also have developed a my own trademark writing method that a lot of Even pros have commented publicly. They said that it's helped them a lot, and a number of them are adopting, and I call it BAM, which is the Bierman asynchronous method. And with bam, what I do is I write the almost always write the end first, and sometimes I write the beginning first, but it's always either the beginning or the end, and then I wrote write the other end of it, whether it's the beginning or the end. So I always start with the beginning and end when I start a script. And frequently, the very first thing that I will do is write the end and write fade out the end, and it'll be the first scene I write that's very common for me. Then I'll go back and write the beginning. And then, typically, what I do is I will tie scenes into the beginning and end scene, the first and last by definition. And I will work backward from the outside in, which sounds strange until you try and see what it does. I will tie, you know, I may write the end, then I'll write the beginning, then I'll write the second scene of the screenplay. Then I'll go write three scenes back from the end. I'll jump back and write, you know, the third scene at the beginning. And then I'll know that I need a particular second act scene or a break, and I'll go in and I'll write that, and I'll just float it in the middle of final draft of writer duet, which is what I use now. I'll just float it in there, and I will then write whatever scene occurs to me that I'm inspired to write, that I know needs to be written at the time. And I fit them all together like a jigsaw puzzle, and I attach them to the anchors, which are both ends. And as I develop scenes in the middle, I'll when I know I have two scenes, sorry, the long answer, when I know I have two scenes that are going to stick together, I won't put any asterisks between them. I use, like, three asterisks when I'm floating a scene, and I'll pull the asterisks out when I tie two scenes together, and I know that nothing will go between those scenes, and then they may still be floating somewhere in the in the second or third act, somewhere in the middle of the script. And I just build the whole script that way. When I write the last scene, it's it's almost always a second act seen somewhere in the middle of the script, and I write it, rewrite that scene, and I'm done, because I also rewrite as I go. So then the whole thing only needs to be skimmed for continuity and for proofing errors. That method is a method that I developed on my own and gave a name to because people wanted to know how it was writing. A lot of people who said it sounds crazy, tried it, and they absolutely love it. What it does is it prevents writer's block. If you're if you're writing from the beginning of a script, scene by scene, and you know where you're going. You may have a bunch of things you already know you want to write, but you can't link it up because you get stuck earlier on with volume asset. You never get stuck if you if you don't know what you're going to do next for a second, you just jump ahead and write the next thing you know you're going to put in, even though it may not be connected to what you just wrote. Does that make sense? Oh yeah, it makes sense. And so I've had, I've had several pros, you know, one guy 18 produced movies, another guy 20 produced movies, another guy six produced movies. They've actually all used it. Come back and said, My God, this method is wonderful. I don't know. I don't know why. I haven't, you know, used this before. I never thought of it. I've never seen it before. David Silverman, who is the creator of the wild Thornberry, actually just recommended and endorsed this method and said it was genius. So that's kind of nice that. The interesting thing is, I haven't had anybody give it an honest try after understanding the method, which I describe in my in my upcoming book, I haven't had anybody give it an honest try and say that it didn't work for them. I've had a number of people who've refused to try it. You know, geez, that's scary. I can't imagine it, but I've never had anybody who actually sat down and gave it. A good try, who didn't benefit from it. So then that just developed again from learning to write my own way. I didn't go to film school, I didn't go to I wasn't a film major, I wasn't a screenwriting major. I don't have an MFA in Screenwriting. I just did it on my own. And it works for me. It works for a lot of other people, and interestingly, it works for people who outline and for people who don't outline. Because all of the writers that I just mentioned with 20 and 18 and six movies and THORNBERRY crater, they all outline extensively. One of them is just an absolutely encyclopedic Outliner, and the method still worked for him, so just kind of made sense to me, and I started writing that way.

Dave Bullis 35:52
You mentioned, you know, beating writer's block, you know, I think that is, you know, it's something that I've dealt with too, Mike, is I first I thought it was writer's block, and I realized, you know what I think it was, was decision fatigue. And what I mean by that is, you know, you start your screenplay from the beginning. So here we are, you know, act one, page one, and, you know, we start to

Mike Bierman 36:13
Sort of write this, the dangerous and deadly, scary, blank white page,

Dave Bullis 36:21
Fade in interior but, but, you know,

Mike Bierman 36:24
It was a dark and stormy night. Oh, damn, I'm stuck.

Dave Bullis 36:27
It's kind of like that movie throw mama from the train. Billy Crystal keeps writing the same sentence. He can't figure out where to go next, and, and so, you know, and it's basically, you know, decision fatigue, where you realize, oh, my God, this screenplay could go in like, 10,000 different directions. And there was actually a book I was reading about this, the same sort of, like, you know, principle of, you know, decision fatigue, and, you know, we're, you know, obviously it could go in 10,000 different directions. And his argument was, if you actually, you know, go back to the theme and the and the the whole, you know, the main tension and everything of your screenplay, there really, probably isn't 10,000 ways you could go, really, it has to all tie in together. So that way, you know, Scene one, you know, we're not, you know, we're on an island. And then Scene two, you know, all these other different things are happening that have never been established. If you get what I'm trying to say?

Mike Bierman 37:21
I do, and what the the decision fatigue problem that that you've labeled and that you've designated is a very common problem in the BAM bath. And what I just said, you can see immediately how that prevents it from happening. If you know the end, you know where you're going. So by definition, every single scene you write is going to do one of three things. It's either going to develop character, or it gets thrown out, or it's going to advance the plot, or it gets thrown out. Or the holy grail of a scene is it? It develops character, reveals character, deepens character, and advances the plot. That's what you should aim for in every single scene. If you write a scene that doesn't do any of those things, throw it out. Kill your you know, kill your baby, because it's not getting you to where you need to be, and because budgets are determined by page count, and whether your screenplay is picked up and produced or not, may very well depend on what your page count is. If you can tell story A in 90 pages, or you can tell story A in 110 and you can't get it down from 110 story A 90 pages is much more likely to get made than 110 because line producers and people who determine how much a movie is going to cost to make, they will assign depending on genre, style, a bunch of setting, you know, costume requirements, things like that, locations. They'll figure out special effects, CGI goes on and on. They'll figure out a per cost page on average of the screenplay. They'll multiply that out, and they'll say, Okay, your spring to make this movie is going to cost us 110 times whatever that page cost is. That's going to end up being a lot higher than what 90 times whatever the page cost is, right? Yeah. So if you can write the same story, tell the same story more efficiently in fewer pages, even if nothing changes. I've rewritten scripts for people. I did a rewrite for creative artists and untitled entertainment package project, and the original script was, I think, Oh, I haven't looked at this in a long time. A couple years ago, the original script was somewhere around I was 112 pages.

Mike Bierman 40:08
And they wanted it to be 100 pages before it went to budgeting. They wanted 100 they didn't want 112 so first thing, one of the first things I was asked to do, was reduce the page count. So when I rewrote the script, not only did I I told them, I said, I think I can hit 100 pages. They said, that would be great. That's what we had in mind. We'd love that. So I actually hit 99 and a half pages, which is 100 pages. Okay, you know, 99 go to the hundreds, page halfway down. So I hit the goal. But not only did I do that, I filled five major plot holes, and I added a whole new story arc. So I was able to make the story more complex, more complete, get rid of problems, and still knock 12 pages out of the out of the thing. And so that's a successful rewrite, and they were, they were very happy with it. So I kind of forgot how we got here. But this is, again, why you have a goal post in mind. You don't wander off and get lost. Now see how I found I found my way again, if you know the end, everything that you write is going to be advancing your characters, your plot, moving all of the things you've created toward that end. If you know where you're going, you don't stumble and get lost. You always move toward that goal post. There are going to be a lot of choices on the way that you're going to have to make, but those choices are now narrowed and focused by the fact that you know where you're going. A lot of people who overwrite, don't have an ending in mind, and they'll wander this way and that way, and they'll end up having, you know, five or eight or 10 scenes that don't contribute to where they eventually end up. And I, you know, it happens all the time. I read somebody wrote a comment yesterday, gee, I just finished my screenplay, and I hate it. I hate my own screenplay. It's not what I set out to write. I don't know how I got here. I don't like the ending, I don't like the story, and it's not what I intended. So now I've got to do a page one rewrite. That's because you didn't know where you were going.

Dave Bullis 42:20
Yeah, you know, one piece of advice years ago that I heard from the writer of Fight Club, Chuck palnock. He actually terrific writer. Yeah, he's phenomenal. He gave me the advice that he's like, right, right. You're beginning. He goes, literally. He goes, right, you know, whatever opening, what do you want to do? And then he said, Go to the go to your last page, whatever that might be. And he goes, just right the end. And he said, what you're going to do is because it's going to feel complete if you do do it this way. He said, Then right. So that way again, like you just said, it was a goal, and that's what he also told me a couple years ago, was it's a goal, and that way you know, at least you know what you're going towards, and that way you're right.

Mike Bierman 42:59
So he has a similar that I didn't know he said that, but he has a similar philosophy to what I do, and it sounds like he starts off writing the same way. And by the way, you should note, I do that whether my screenplay is linear or non linear, it doesn't matter. I write the screenplay non linearly, even if it's going to be a linear form. So let's say it's a straight three act. You know, first, second act break, you know, page 23 what you know if it's going to be a straight three act screenplay, and it has a linear plot, without flashbacks, without jumping around, nothing fancy, just a simple, straight story, and that could be anything from a family film to a military film. You know, you can do anything that way. The subject matter doesn't matter. It's just how you choose to write it. Time wise, you you can use my form, and I do use the form to write linear screenplays. I just don't write them in order. I write the whole screenplay out of order. But when you end up reading the screenplay, it's in order. And it also works for non linear methods. If you're writing something like fight clubs, non linear if you're writing something that jumps around and you have an unreliable narrator, and he may or may not be crazy, and he may or may not be who you even think he is. You can still use that method and jump all over the place and write the screenplay that's going to be non linear, and write it in a non linear fashion, which sounds very chaotic, but actually makes sense when you're doing it. So if you, as I always say, if you know where you're going and you know where you're coming from, you have a nice, defined world that you're working within, you're not going to start writing, you know, crazy stuff about Mars in your story about, you know, the kids starting school in New school district because the parents got divorced. You know, all of. Sudden, you're writing about Martians on Mars, right? And you're having a space shoot out because you had no idea where you were going with your screenplay. And I've actually seen crazy stuff like that. I'm sure you have to people end up with like, three different stories in one screenplay. They get horribly lost, and then they get right back to writer's block. Oh, I, you know, I don't know what to write next, yeah, because you jacked the whole thing up, you got yourself in a jackpot, you've written yourself into a corner, and nobody would know what to write next, because none of it makes any sense. So, you know, learn a writing method and stick to it. Like I said, my method works for me. It's worked for for everyone I know that's tried to do has gotten back to me on it, but you need to learn to write in a consistent method that works for you, however you write, and stick to that, develop that method and make it work for you. Chuck has his own method that's apparently similar to mine, and I think it's a very smart method. It's funny. I admire that writer. Maybe that's why I like him so much, because we write in a similar convention, I don't know.

Dave Bullis 46:09
Yeah, you know, great minds think alike, right?

Mike Bierman 46:11
So well, that's what, that's what they say, you know,

Dave Bullis 46:15
Because, you know, just to continue with what you were just saying about, you know, no, no writer could fix, you know, a screenplay that has all those problems, because, you know, there's no goal. There's no sort of central narrative to, you know, I remember when I read a screenplay years ago, and it was this, this guy had this idea for the this, like, anthology, I'm sorry, a horror movie trilogy. And I read the first part of it, the first screenplay. I read all 100 and some odd pages, and literally, it was about these two vampires who live in, like, this old mansion or something that has all these catacombs underneath it. And it's just about like, it's almost like we haven't seen that one before. And it's just all these different people, like groups of people go in there and they're getting killed. There's no There's no goal, there's nothing.

Mike Bierman 47:02
There's no story. Exactly, I'm hearing a lot of reports of this from screenplay contest. Screenwriting contest judges that they're seeing a lot of screenplays that have essentially no purpose. There's no story being told, you know, okay, I get it. It's slasher genre, and we're going to see a whole bunch of blood, a whole bunch of people killed, and then all of a sudden we decide that's enough, and we stop the movie. But it never tells a story that's that's not, that's not screenwriting, that's just dribbling out garbage. And this is what happens when you have an unfocused person writing that doesn't know why they're writing or where they're going. You end up with something like that. You know, a lot of writer's block also jumping quickly back to that, because it ties in. Here is if you have problems in your in your opening, in your first act, and the first act is unfocused, not set up, right? Not structured, right? You really don't have any idea why you're writing, and that'll be very apparent to the reader very quickly, by the way, you don't know why you're sitting down and writing to tell this story. That is going to cause you massive writer's block, because if the first act is is poorly structured and poorly set up everything that comes after, it's like dominoes. It's like Jenga or Jack straws, or any of these things. If you, if you set the foundation badly, there's no way the House will stand. I even have a post written on this and write about making an analogy to, you know, building a house. You know, don't build a house on sand. Okay, build it on rock. I have a whole, a whole essay on this, and that's it's all about first act structure and knowing what you're doing in the first act, because that sets up the entire story, doesn't it?

Dave Bullis 49:00
Yeah, it really does, like they say, if you have like, second or third act problems, you have first act problems really correct?

Mike Bierman 49:06
And again, most of those problems can be solved by knowing the beginning and the ending right when you start. But David Silverman, I just mentioned, the wild thornberry creator, wrote a very gracious and he wrote a recommendation for my book that'll be on the front, inside or back cover. I don't where it's going. There a bunch of recommendations to fit. And he said that, using this particular method, you end up with a much twistier, surprising plot with all kinds of fresh takes on things that isn't stale, that may even surprise the writer by writing using a different method. You end up with something that may even surprise you. It doesn't surprise you in the truth of the beginning and the end, but how you get there can vary, as I said, and so you may discover some ingenious twists and things along the way, but you always know where you're going. So there are a bunch of different ways to tell the story, and the details may vary of what is going in the story, the different moral lessons and the different challenges that characters face, the internal and external challenges. You know, no stories. No story works if the protagonist is perfect, okay, we work with flawed characters, and some of the best stories are told from the most damaged, flawed characters, and the story as they get the external challenges. You look at how their character, their internal character, reacts to that, and you see the characters character arc, which can be, you know, learning, improvement, change, changes the mechanism that drives the character arc. Or you can have, you know, some characters will go through some things in a sociopathic characters, other damaged characters, and they may actually not have a character arc. The Sicario, which I really like, evokes strong reaction. Some people don't like the film because they think Emily Blunt's character, the agent, the FBI agent she plays, doesn't have a character arc. I argue that she does have a character arc, without getting too far into spoiler, she's completely by the book, and incorruptible at first, and then at the end, when faced with her own death, because she's going to go forward and reveal, by the book, reveal all the criminal and sketchy things that were done that Josh Brolin character, very much the CIA guy, wants her to say everything went by the book, to cover up all the things they did in the end to save herself. She falsifies a document to save her own life. So my argument has always been, she does have a character arc. She changes from the incorruptible, you know, perfect, if you will, agent, the idealized agent. And she changes to somebody who, to save herself, falsifies a report of what happened so but anyway, you know, you start with with damaged characters, and you move them through the story, and that's that's the story arc. That's why we're entertained, is because we get to see change in a character. If you have a character that you know is waterproof and bulletproof and you know nothing ever happens to them, which I've always felt was a big danger with Superman, by the way, you know that's why there's kryptonite, right? Yeah? Because if he has no faults, he has no weakness. What are we going to do for a story you develop the the ultimate badass, Marvel, superhero that can't be touched, that nothing can ever happen to them, like the Silver Surfer, there's, there's really not a whole lot you can do with that character, and that's why the surfer had limited appearances and things you look at somebody like Deadpool, who's in a very, very damaged character, who may or may not be even be sane, and Marvel. Finally, you know, Ryan Reynolds fought 10 years to make Deadpool, and they insisted on, you know, the script being genuine, to to the source material. And Marvel was very worried, because, you know, totally not PC, and it's dirty and filthy, and he curses, and he has sex, and he does all kinds of bad things that heroes shouldn't do, and that makes him fascinating, and that's why Deadpool killed it at the box office. I honestly believe it was. It was probably my favorite movie of the year. It's probably not going to win any Oscars, maybe special effects. Who knows? But entertainment wise, you know, I thought it was. I thought it was a terrific film, because you had such a flawed character, and it was just so entertaining to watch him go through all that.

Dave Bullis 54:27
So yeah, and I also agree, Mike, that the reason I liked it was because it was so different than all the other superhero movies that are coming out. Obviously, you know, it didn't take itself too seriously. It was completely different. It was a complete 180 from all the other superhero movies that were coming out. And it just, I think that's why I enjoyed it so much.

Mike Bierman 54:47
Yeah, he break, they break the fourth wall the time, you know, he turns and looks at the camera and goes, you know, you know, Gee, what a superhero really do this. And, you know, there's a fourth wall break within a fourth wall break. And they, they constantly. The pull the audience in. And those are things. Those are things that were pretty much, although, you know, even in Greek theater and Roman theater, those are things the aside, where the actor turns and talks to the audience, okay, those are things that have always been in storytelling, in modern screenwriting. They were pioneered by Shane Black, of course, with the with the Shane Black isms, you know, one of the most famous being, you know, he's describing a mansion. And he, I'm paraphrasing, I remember exactly, but he'll say, you know, he's describing the place. And he stops. He says, No, look, guys, basically, and he's writing like this in the script. Look, guys, basically, this is exactly the kind of place that you would buy. If you hit the lottery and you had millions and millions of dollars and you wanted to throw great parties for all your friends. This is, this is the shit you would buy. And he puts that in the script. So Deadpool did much the same kind of thing. You know, when I sat through the opening of Deadpool by the time they finished writing the credits, you know, calling the director an overpaid tool and and the writers, you know, the real heroes General, I was fully satisfied with the price I paid for the movie just getting through the opening credits, yeah.

Dave Bullis 56:15
Also, Mike, you mentioned Shane Black. I saw that you actually were able to meet Shane Black was that at a writers conference

Mike Bierman 56:22
That was at Austin Film Festival. So I had a script called needles, which is an allegorical, diabolical, diabolical thriller that I found myself talking about a lot because people are curious about it. And that's how I went to Austin. I wasn't going to go. And the director of Austin, Matt mad D called me, I think, a couple times, convincing me to go because apparently my script was going to finish pretty high. Frank Darabont, Director, Shawshank, redemption, Walking Dead, creator, and, you know, bunch of other stuff. He picked needles, top 10. Of course, I didn't know this at the time, but he picked it top 10 scripts for the science fiction award and top 10 scripts for the horror prize out of 8627 scripts. So when you do really well at some of these film festivals like Austin, I made the the top group where I got to have, you know, secret meetings in special places with great people that nobody else could go to. And those meetings often had, you know, 20, 30, 40, people. That's it from the whole film festival. Whereas people who wrote scripts that did decently but finished lower, they'd be in a room full of, you know, hundreds of people. And so I ended up in a room, a very small room size of a small dining room, maybe a little bigger, with Shane Black and and a whole bunch of high finishers. And he was taking questions. So everybody was kind of shy. And I think I asked the first question. I'm not sure. I jumped up and I asked him about something about working with Robert Downey Jr and Val Kilmer. Their methods are very different, and what was going on in in Robert Downey Jr's life, which I won't rehash here at the time, and, you know, got to ask him one on one questions right there, which I think they actually put on a podcast or on the radio, which is kind of cool, but he had actually auditioned my daughter for a film, and her audition went straight to him, and he really liked her. And we went back and forth on a couple roles on that. Ultimately, we didn't, we didn't finish one of the auditions we chose not to do. But I was a terrific guy, very, very generous guy with his with his time, and just extremely gracious to other writers. So I got some great pictures with him. I can prove it happened.

Dave Bullis 59:03
Well, that's how I actually saw it, too. I saw you met him when you were on John Fallon's podcast. I actually saw that's one of the the photos he he added was you and Shane Black. And I wanted to make sure I asked you that Mike, because Shane Black is, I don't think there's a screenwriter alive right now who hasn't, who doesn't envy, or, you know, look at Shane Black as sort of like a guidance in one way or another.

Mike Bierman 59:28
Well, I mean, he's, you know, he's, he's a pioneer. He's a guy that did something that, you know, in modern times, in screenwriting Nobody had done. And he did it with, he did it with Dash and bravado, and he nailed it. So he he's a guy much to be admired. You know, I also met Terry Rossio, who was just absolutely incredible guy, and he was very, very funny. We were standing outside in front of the hotel, and I, I asked him for I asked if I could get a picture. And you know, a lot of people walking by him had no idea who he was, and so he went walking by me, and my, you know, ears pricked up, and I said, Holy smokes. There he goes. And so I went out, politely introduced myself, and he said, he said to I don't know if it was his driver or somebody that was hanging out with him, he said, he said, I like this guy. Let's take about a dozen pictures. And he turns to me, he starts to direct to see he says, Okay, we're just a couple guys hanging out talking here. There's a There's a strange accident or happening in the distance, and all kinds of weird stuff is going on. So we start acting like we're watching this. Of course, he was much better at it than I was, and I got like, a dozen pictures of us making stupid faces and kind of grabbing on to each other and going ooh and on. He's just hilarious and just a terrific guy. And I met the uh, John Lee Hancock and I met with the blind side I wrote. I met Andrew Kevin Walker, who that was great to meet him. Yes in the game, and yeah, and those are a couple of my favorite movies. So you know, the evolution of seven. Any, anyone who aspires to be a screenwriter really needs to read the story of seven and what he went through, you know, as a tower record, Tower Records clerk, trying to get anybody interested in this thing. He finally gets an agent on the phone, starts talking as fast as he can and spitting stuff out. And the agent doesn't hang up on him, actually, is interested, starts asking questions, agrees to read the script, and then boom, all of a sudden, it takes off from there. But you know, all the time to get to that lucky break, and then, you know, director after director had him rewrite the script. The original script had the head in the box ending, which was, you know, shocking to the studios, absolutely amazing ending. And, you know, Oh, that's too much. We need to rewrite it. So they kept having him rewrite the script. And then that director would go off the project. The next guy would come in, oh, I love this project. Let's rewrite the script. So they kept doing that. And then finally, David Fincher came in, and apparently I read an interview recently, I wasn't clear on how this happened. Apparently, Andrew Kevin Walker sent him the wrong script. He sent him the earliest, the first version with the head in the box and Fincher loved it, and they went together and fought with the producers in the studio to get it made. And my understanding, if I recall, is Morgan Freeman is actually the reason why the movie got made the way it did. Because at some point Morgan Freeman came forward and said, Look, if you don't make it with that ending with the head in a box, I'm gone, I'm walking. And so that did it. But I got to meet him. I got to meet his brother. They were very nice, and I just heard him talk, and I waited around. And, you know, these people are normal people. I mean, they're not, they're not gods, and people idealize them. And I know who that guy is. I know his name. I've seen that actor on TV. Well, when you really need them, they're just regular people. Some of them act like they're not regular people. Some of them act like regular people. Most of them want to be treated like anybody else. They don't want to be, you know, they've had enough of that. Some of them aren't that way. You know, some of them have huge egos. A lot of them just want to be left alone and treated like anybody else. So I waited in a very short line because people were afraid to approach him, and went up and got to talk with him for, you know, wasn't long, maybe five minutes, but got pictures with him too. And so, so like, is there? What's the what's the saying? The essay we have Fortune favors the bowls, right?

Dave Bullis 1:04:00
Yeah, it, yeah, there's also, uh, what's the SAS saying?

Mike Bierman 1:04:07
Yeah, that's what I was going for. The SAS. I don't remember if it's Fortune favors the bold, it's something like that, yeah.

Dave Bullis 1:04:13
I forget what that actually is, but I think of it. It's very similar to that. I there. But is there any screenwriters you haven't met yet, Mike, that you really wanted to meet?

Mike Bierman 1:04:24
Oh, I mean, I suppose there are a lot of though, there are a lot of great there are a lot of great writers and a lot of great screenplays out there. I mean, my my favorites, just, you know, like you Shane Black and Andrew Kevin Walker, Terry Ross young. I mean, it's just amazing to meet them all in one trip. Just, just amazing. But, you know, I don't know if I really have an answer to that. One of the, one of the shocking movies for me, of the year that didn't get a lot of press and play. It was fences. I don't know if you've seen it. Yeah. Yeah, the acting is terrific. The dialog is wonderful. It's just, it's a beautifully made film. It's a very simple film, but the acting, the quality of the acting, and the writing the dialog, will just draw you in. I couldn't turn the damn thing off. I sat down and started watching. I had places to go, people to see, had things to do. I had no intention of watching the movie. And, I mean, I sat there with my jaw dropped. Found out I've been standing there 15 minutes with the rope my hand watching this thing. You know, my daughter got it as a SAG screener and came in. And that's probably, I would say, that's probably acting wise and script wise. Probably the best film I've seen this year. I don't know what it's going to do with the Oscars. I suspect Denzel Washington will probably win a Best Actor. Viola Davis certainly should be in the running for best actors. I know that she had enough screen time for it, but Denzel certainly she went and you know that movie, as I said, with Deadpool, with the opening, that movie is worth the price of admission. If you only watch the first scene where Denzel Washington is talking about death the scene is so mind blowingly great that the whole movie is worth watching just for that one scene. And you know, it doesn't stop there. So I can't really say, you know, any one particular writer, a number of the writers that I'd like to meet are dead. So, you know, it's kind of a, kind of a bummer.

Dave Bullis 1:06:38
But as we're talking about, you know, fences, I thought it was phenomenal as well. I think, you know, Denzel stole the show in that movie. You know, he just plays that charismatic, tragic hero, obviously, because there's a lot of regret in that man's life and that character's life. And, you know, as he's sort of talking to everybody, everybody, in one way or another, sees him at his best, sees him at his worst, and sort of, you know, at one way or another, also at the butt end of his worst. And you know, his son, he talks with one son that one way, his other son, you know, he constantly wants more from him, and he's he doesn't go about it the right way. And, you know, it's just a phenomenal movie,

Mike Bierman 1:07:21
Yeah, because he wants to, you know, he wants to make the changes he couldn't make himself in his own life, in his have his son live those and and also, you know, excel as he did the way he did, because he's getting older, And he sees, you know, his own mortality, which we, we know from talking about death. So he, he, you know, wants to live vicariously through His Son. Also. It's just an absolutely phenomenal movie. I'll probably watch it again when we get off the phone. Wonderful, wonderful film. I don't know if it, if it got enough circulation buzz the box office to to win Oscars. You know, the what the Oscars people pick frequently isn't anything near what I think is the best, and other people agree with that, but that's terrific writing. The dialog is phenomenal.

Dave Bullis 1:08:15
And it's almost a self contained movie, because a lot of it happens in that one house. And you know, I wanted to ask you too, about, about, you know, your screenplay for the grocer that's completely contained self, you know, self contained screenplay, and that 1/3 is the London Film Awards, correct?

Mike Bierman 1:08:31
Yeah, I won. It won 30. It's won a bunch of awards. It just took third in London. It's, it's in the running, and in another contest, it just made another cut. The grocer is completely contained. It's 100% contained. It is one location. The entire screenplay there. There are some movies that try to do that. It's very difficult to do it and carry it off with a with a very entertaining movie, because a one location screenplay is going to be very dialog heavy. It has to be unless, you know, you do something completely avant garde and have a bunch of people sitting in a room watching paint dry or ants crawl around, you know, some experimental thing, you know, I'll erase their head, meets Salvador Dali or something like that, you're going to tend to be dialog. Heavy needles is 97% one location which is a desert saloon, which may or may not be in needles, California, in the Mojave Desert, it's actually purgatory, but appears otherwise, and it has only two other locations that occur as flashbacks. One is a very brief flashback to Golgotha, and it's, I think, a quarter page, and the other flashback is like a Pacific Northwest. Rainy Mountain, Rainy Mountain, winding road and that's it. So, you know, 97% contained grocers. 100% contained. The entire story happens at a grocery store in its parking lot. That's it. One location for the whole thing. And of course, you know you hear all the time, that's what everybody's looking for, is one location. You bring the you bring the cast and crew in, you set the date, you get everything set up, and you never have to move anywhere, right? You look at a movie like spy game, for example, which I love. They have, you know, Hong Kong. They have, you know, settings in Vietnam, Langley, Virginia, China, coastal China. You know, it's a Tony Scott, you know, big Big Bang, big budget, big stars. And it goes all over the world. The Born films do that too. Those are very expensive to make. And a lot of the places where films like that want to film, like the Middle East, these are not stable places where you can just go set up a camera crew. This is covered in Argo, you know, it's no secret, there are a lot of places you can't film, and you have to try and mimic, you know, find another location that works. Then you have to, you know, if you're not filming where they are, you have to build sets that make it look like you're really there and things like that. You know, Bridge of Spies. They had to, had to. They're showing Berlin being divided east and west, the communists and the and the democracy. And they've got the, they've got the wall being built right down the middle of the city. I mean, that's all in an incredibly expensive scene to film. I turned to my wife, you know, I've seen it many times. She hadn't. I turned to her last night. We watched again. I watched it again. She watched it and I said, I said, Imagine the cost of the scene. How many people are there? All the soldiers in uniforms, you know, as far as the eye can see. And she's very, very expensive. Well, a contained screenplay does the exact opposite of that. It minimizes your actors. It minimizes your locations to minimalist, as low as you can get one location. Now that there's even an extreme on contained screenplays. If you look at Ryan Reynolds buried, essentially the whole movie happens with him in a coffin. Mm, hmm. That's, that's as contained as you can get. You're in a coffin. Okay, so, but anyway, that's, that's considered a very desirable thing these days. Hopefully somebody will hear this and ask to read the script and buy one of those, those scripts, I keep having people rave, man, this needs to get made. Well, I agree with you. Let's, let's sell the screen. You know, contact my manager, we can make a deal. But that's that's also a smart way to start off for writers that want to learn to develop character and get kind of befuddled or thrown off by changing locations. They're always posts in my group. You know, what do I do? You know, how do I move the camera? I have a camera, you know, in a bedroom, shooting out the window at stuff happening outside. How do I write that? You know, a lot of people get hung up on all that, and that's all formatting. A lot of people get hung up on that stuff. If you have a single location, you can concentrate much more on character, can't you?

Dave Bullis 1:13:46
Yeah, that's very true. And look like fences.

Mike Bierman 1:13:50
You mentioned fences was a play, okay? And the movie, the movie feels like a play when you watch it, very much. You know Samuel Beckett, theater of the absurd. He has, he had a play that was, I think, half a page or a quarter of a page. He has plays where the entire play there are two people in trash cans talking to each other. You talk about dialog heavy, you talk about illusions. You need to get an encyclopedia out. People said this about needles. You need to get an encyclopedia out to understand everything going on, because it's so deep with illusions. Because, you know, they've got to talk, or it's going to just be two people with their heads sticking out of trash cans. The whole thing, you know, Beckett has somebody buried up to their neck in sand. The whole play is one character buried up to their neck in sand. All you see is their head. That's minimalist, okay? Well, that's what you shoot for. Maybe not that extreme, because it's very hard for something like that to be entertaining. You have to be a master to pull that off. But what you want to do, if you're starting. Out is pick a setting that you don't move from work on developing and deepening and broadening your characters and examining the moral challenges the philosophical ideals they have as they deal with whatever situation you're creating. And go ahead and develop the characters and worry more about that than jumping all around in like a born there's nothing wrong with the porn films. But, you know, jumping around, you know, elevators and trams and planes and going all over the place, concentrated on the character and build and develop the character. There was a there's a play on Broadway called Blackbird and Sundar, see subject matter, say, Cha mall station and stuff like that. But it basically has a Erica was up for role, and as playing, I think, 155 shows at the Belasco theater, was Michelle Williams in Jeff Daniels and and they were gonna make it three, Erica Bierman, and she actually got the preliminary offer on that we were waiting for the final contract to come through, and the director wrote the little tiny part out had he had so they went with a cast of two. The whole play is a cast of two for whatever the length of a full length Broadway play is, and it is a woman grown to I don't need to go into this too much, but basically it's a woman grown to womanhood who was basically a child, young adolescent, when she was entered into a sexual relationship with a guy. It's not like forcible rape, but it's statutory rape. And he and ends up, you know, living his life and having a family in the business, and she actually shows up at his business years later and confronts him. Oh, wow, yeah. And so very, very intense, very dialog driven, character driven, and very contained. You've got something that has more than one location. It does have more than one location, but the vast majority of it is one location. And so that's the kind of thing that for a play or for a film, cuts your costs down dramatically. And that is what has has recently, of late, been in demand. And you hear people screaming all the time, I want contained screenplays. So that's what they're talking about.

Dave Bullis 1:17:29
Yeah, you know, that's something that I try to do as well, Mike, and what, the way I tried to do it was I wrote, I wrote three films, three screenplays at a summer camp. I called him my camp trilogy. And so that way, you know, it's kind of sort of like Friday the 13th, in a way, you know, because always going to be at this camp. We're not really, there's no big set pieces, you know what I mean. And it can be done, you know, where horror is sort of the main character. And you don't have to, you know, go out and get, you know, a list actors. You could just, you know, having that

Mike Bierman 1:17:57
Horror is very profitable. They can be made for not a lot of money. And if you're getting into contains, or where you got very few locations, that should be very desirable material, if it's written, well, should be very marketable. Yeah.

Dave Bullis 1:18:09
So I've actually pitched a few of them and, well, that's a whole nother story deal together, but, but, you know, but, you know, just going back to buried, you know, I agree, you know, I actually knew what the whole concept was going in. And I always wondered, how are they going to carry this for the whole movie? I was pleasantly surprised at how they carried that movie and adding different things.

Mike Bierman 1:18:28
Well, he's acting, you know, in Dead full, it's full of all kinds of self deprecating humor, of course. And Ryan Reynolds says at 1.0 Ryan Reynolds made it this far in his superior acting method, you know, talking about, he's a good looking guy, okay, well, in in buried, he acted the hell out of it. You know, you're not, you're not the best looking guy in the world with a blue light, a little, you know, low wattage blue light in a coffin. The whole screenplay that was carried by his acting. He killed it. He did a beautiful job acting. So, you know, it needed a strong actor to pull off. You put somebody who's just a pretty face in the box who can't act, and you get a flop, right? Yeah, that's very true. But you know, Ryan Reynolds happens to be a pretty face, and he also can act. And he ended up nailing that. And yes, it was engrossing from beginning to end. Another film that I expected. I watched it for the novelty, which I suspect you did too, knowing what it was going in saying, you know, there's, there's no way they could pull this off. And then found myself being very entertained and watching the whole movie. And that's, that's a great example of a successful contained, almost completely contained. There are some other locations, but not much. I think maybe three locations, the whole thing.

Dave Bullis 1:20:06
yeah, it's just also, I made sure to go out and get the screenplay, because, you know, Scott Myers from going to story.com he was always mentioning it, and I made sure to coach got his posts about it, where he dissected the whole movie. And I was, you know, I was blown away again. You know how they were able to do that? And they always, the way they did it, obviously, is they raised the stakes, you know, constantly adding in new twists and turns. Okay, you know, he has, you know, well, I probably shouldn't go into it because, in case anybody hasn't seen it yet, but, but, you know it was,

Mike Bierman 1:20:36
It's kind of old to worry about spoilers now. But, I mean, yeah, you know, the one thing goes wrong and then the next thing goes wrong. You know, his light starts running out. I mean, you know, it just goes from one thing to the next. And that's what you have to do in a screenplay. You need to keep raising the tension. You know, one of, one of my criticisms of Manchester by the Sea is I just never felt the stakes were that high, and I never it just didn't feel like it was increasing tension. It's a very stately, paced piece. Yeah, Casey Affleck did a fine job acting. So did the others, but I it's not a short movie, and it just moves along at a very, very stately pace. I like the film. It wasn't my favorite film of the year by far. I suspect the Academy will like it has kind of a downer ending for them, but it it's a film that's a good example of one where I didn't feel that they kept raising the stakes. They didn't have sufficient stakes. Now, to give you an idea of what the effect of that is, my wife fell asleep four or five times trying to watch the movie. We got a huge fight because I said, I said, now's the time. Let's watch Manchester. I said, No, I'm not watching that thing, you know, I can't stay awake. I said, None of you, you really will get in, you know, it'll have an interesting emotional impact on you, and you'll, you'll get, you know, very particular feeling, and I want to talk to you about it so, you know, let's, you know, drink some coffee and let's, let's set up and and watch this thing. You know, I've watched it four times. I like it more each time I watch it. And, you know, that's how, one of the ways that I learned to write well is by watching movies. Okay, I don't, it'll probably surprise you, and I do not recommend this for most people. I read very few screenplays by other writers. I don't go read all the Oscar winning screenplays that are pending. I don't do it. I watch the movies and I absorb it that way. Is there? Is there a reason to read the screen? Please, absolutely most screenwriters do, and I strongly recommend that people start out that way. I don't think I've read more than five pro scripts on produce movies. I just don't I just don't read them. I'll watch the movie. There is a reason, if only to see the differences in execution and planning. There's a great reason, you know, looking at the spec or the shooting script, and then what they actually got can be a very rewarding and instructive experience. It's just not something I do that's me personally, which again, shows you that you know there are different ways to do things and still do well and get to the end point where you want to be there. Pro writers. I know that read every single script for Academy Award scripts. They read every single script for every blockbuster that comes out. I don't do that. I would rather write natively without I'm not gonna say copying, but, you know, just my own way. Does that make sense?

Dave Bullis 1:23:59
Yeah, it makes perfect sense, Mike. I you know, I like to, I have a whole collection of screenplays. And, you know, I always find that my favorite person to write screenplays, and my favorite author is Quentin Tarantino. I just love the way he writes. I think it's entertaining. And I also feel, though, that I also can pull from the movie. So if I like, for instance, I have the screenplay for hell or high water, but I actually saw the movie about three days ago before I actually read the screenplay. And I like the movie, you know, just as well. And I will probably, probably end up reading the screenplay as well just to see what the differences are. But I really enjoyed the hell or high water. Have you seen that yet?

Mike Bierman 1:24:40
Yes. And for you know, I, I don't want to say anything bad about Quentin. He has movies that I absolutely love, that are wonderful films, and he's a groundbreaking guy, I will say he overwrites. And you know, if you look at the screenplay for you. Uh, Hateful Eight is, I don't like the film. And, you know, the screenplays 189 pages or somewhere, there abouts, and a lot of people I talk with think he could have cut an hour out of that movie. But he's also written some just, you know, some phenomenal stuff. And, you know, Inglorious Bastards, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction. I mean, it's great stuff. He's another one, though he's an outlier. He's he's very, very smart. He's very gifted. He, you know, he still writes screenplays out long hand in a square deal notebook. Okay, so he's he's a different kind of guy, and he's made his own path. He's not somebody that I would emulate writing, because there aren't there a lot of people that try and they just don't get away with it. They can't pull it off. He's a very difficult guy that to try and copy, not copy, like, rip off, but to try and emulate his style. He's a, he's a really difficult guy to do that on. You know, there are, it'd be like, it'd be like, trying to write poetry like EE Cummings. You know, me up. It does out of the floor quietly stare a poison mouse, and now I lose it. Who asks, you know, what have I done? You wouldn't have Okay, all in lower case, no punctuation. Cormac McCarthy, same thing. Go read James Joyce, you know, go read one of the Cormac McCarthy books. Where's the punctuation? Did the printer lose all the periods of garbage? And you know, there isn't any. So why can he do that? Well, he blazed his own way, and he's phenomenal. Okay, so you know, do you want to go be the next correlate McCarthy and go turn a book into your publisher that has no punctuation marks? Probably not a good idea. It's just like copying Shane Black. There's a conversation in my screenwriting group brought up by a pro today this morning about how a producer wanted him to add back a bunch of unstable commentary into the script that didn't have any Well, traditional wisdom says, and I wrote a post going my book on Sally Bigfoot. I write this big scenario about Sally Bigfoot and her family. Okay, about unshootable garbage in somebody's head that you can read on the page, and then what ends up there? So I write this big, long thing about Sally Bigfoot. It's like a page and a half long, and then what somebody could actually shoot from that script is, like five words, one line long, because none of the rest is shootable. Okay, well, there was just this conversation that, strangely, a producer was asking this professional, multi produced guy, novelist. I'm not, I'm not going to name him here now, for certain reasons, but this, this guy has multiple films out, and he turned in a nice, tight, lean script. He's an action writer, and the producer said, you know, this is crap. What are you giving me? I'm not saying. He said, It's crap. Okay? He said, I'm not happy with this. What are you doing here? I want a bunch of commentary and other stuff, you know, built around here. And he said, Well, you can't film any of that. He said, Yeah, that's great. That's the exact opposite of traditional wisdom. Okay, you think asked to write stuff into the script to make it longer, to entertain the reader and to try and get a particular a list actor, I can't mention who they think they can lure in with this particular technique by writing a bunch of stuff that they will never be able to film, they will not change the film script one bit, but that they want in there. Now the producer is the boss. If your producer tells you to do that, then you do it. And that's the right answer for that project. This is why Rules are made to be broken. Quentin Tarantino broke the rules. Shane Black broke the rules. Cormac McCarthy broke the rules. Ee Cummings broke the rules. James Joyce broke the rules. There's a guy. There's a guy, I can't remember his name, which is sad name, who wrote a novel. It's also in my book called Gadsby. I think it's called. And this writer, sadly, again, I can't remember his name, but he wrote an entire novel, 50,000 words, without using the letter E in the whole book.

Dave Bullis 1:29:29
So it's not the Great Gatsby, just Gatsby.

Mike Bierman 1:29:32
No, it's Gadsby. It's like Gatsby. So he managed to write, he managed to write an entire novel without using the letter E in any word inside the covers. It appears on the cover as they describe what he's done. Because if you use the word novel, it is an E, obviously. So now, when they say, Oh, this guy wrote a novel without the letter E, well then you've used several E's, haven't you on the cover. But if you go to the actual story itself inside, nowhere does the letter E appear. Now you talk about writer's block, and that's why, that's what my essay was about. Next time you think you have writer's block, I've written a number of these, you know, look at what Lucretius wrote, de rare, I'm not sure on the nature of things. This epic poem that this guy wrote, you know, in a toga in a cave with a candle, using squid ink in a feather pen, and the type of Einsteinian physics and philosophy, you know, the incredible deep thinking this guy did under these conditions. You know, Abraham Lincoln studied law by candle. Okay, that's, that's, that's tough, okay, though, this guy did it, you know, in like 54 BC, writing in squid ink. And he's talking about where the universe ends. I mean, really, so you want to, you want to talk about writer's block and do something that's that's a remarkable achievement, but certainly less than than that. Look at at this Gadsby Gadsby book, and again, it's going to be in my book, but the guy writes a whole novel without the letter E. So next time you think you have writer's block, imagine writing a novel without using one of the letters of the alphabet, a vowel, yeah.

Dave Bullis 1:31:26
And I want to link to that in the show notes as well. Actually, I'm gonna about that, about that novel too, Mike, because that is,

Mike Bierman 1:31:34
I don't know. I'll get you the info on him.

Dave Bullis 1:31:37
Well, I was gonna look it up too when I put it in the show notes, because I, you know, I, I don't know if that, if that's an exercise in bravery or or it just admit complete madness, maybe, maybe both, right?

Mike Bierman 1:31:49
But I think it's the next. It's brave and it's also stubborn. I mean, you've got to be, let me see if I can find it for you. You've got to be mentally tough to you. It's Gadsby, G, A, D, S, B, Y, 1939, by Ernest Vincent Wright, with, W, R, I, G, H, T. Now the sad thing is, you know, nobody remembers this guy's name. Ernest Vincent Wright, so did he take a gamble? You bet he did. He turned a novel into his publisher with no ease in it. That's a gamble, okay? And did his gamble pay off? I don't know what's a payoff. His book got published. You can still read the book today. You can it's a novelty item. You can go look it up and say, Holy smokes. How'd this guy do this? And go skim the text, and he doesn't read like a traditional book, because he can't use the word E. He's got to write very strange, circuitous routes to avoid using ease. Was he a success? I don't know. I couldn't remember his name, and I'm a writer. His family didn't renew his copyright, really? Oh yeah. I mean that none of his heirs after he died, none of his copyright ran, none of his heirs cared enough to to pay the copyright fees, to re copyright, re up the novel Jesus, I know.

Dave Bullis 1:33:21
So that's amazing, you know, you know, we were talking about copyright stuff. And you know, one of the things that you mentioned, too, in the group, you know, as we talk about copywriting, was about, you know, about the WGA, and also about, you know, the US Patent Office, the copyright office. And, I mean, you know, all of that is, is really good stuff. And when I hear stuff like this happening, because when I hear stuff like this happen, or where I hear stuff like, you know what happened with George Romero and the original night living dead? I mean, you realize just how important all this stuff is,

Mike Bierman 1:33:56
Yeah, and that's another thing most you know my book will help with that. Shamelessly plug in the book yet again. But I mean, the I, I'm involved in the project where they had, they had some issues because somebody tried to steal the project. There are other in my in a year or so, in my group, there have been, I used to have them written down something like between nine and a dozen stolen scripts where people have actually come in and said, you know, my script got stolen and actually had some kind of substantial evidence in, in, in significant data and story behind it. Not just like, oh, I wrote a script and, Oh, damn, that Star Wars, they stole my script. No, nothing like that. Like actual matching dialog. And I've had it happen. I've had it happen to me. I won't say who I had another writer take some stuff from one of my scripts. And there are, you know, in a group of less than 3000 people. And. Well, it wasn't 3000 the whole time the group started at one me, it's not advertised. I reject about 90% of applicants. But in that small group, in one year, we've got somewhere approaching a dozen stolen scripts where people someone ripped off somebody else's work. And there are trolls that go in these groups. That's why I've had people very careful about this. They're trolls that go in groups and they'll say, you know, producer looking for, for someone to write our story, and, you know, we need you to submit 10 pages. Well, what they do is, you know, and then we'll, we'll judge, and we'll pick who's going to get the writing assignment. Well, Dave, who gets the writing assignment? Tell me, no one gets the running they assign the 10 pages that say it's 100 page screenplay. So that's 1010, page divisions. They assign it to 20 writers. So they have, they put up an ad in the group for you know, no money. This is your you have to prove to us who you are. You're going to write 10 pages. We'll tell you what to write, and then we'll get back to you, if we like it. Well, keep holding your breath. We'll call you blue boy. You'll be in the corner turning blue because they're never going to call you no matter how good you were. Because what's going to happen they don't have any money, and what's going to happen is they're not really looking to hire a writer. They're looking to steal writing. So they give each they give 1010, scenes. They want written, 10 pages. Kind of a simplistic example, but I'm making it easy for the math. 100 page script, they divided into 10 segments, however many scenes, each scripts, typically 6080, scenes. But let's stick with this example. So, you know, you're going to write these 10 pages for us, and they give that same pages to two, the same 10 pages to two writers. Then they take the next, you know, 11 to 20, and they give that to two more writers. And they do the same thing all the way down the line. So they have 20 writers writing their 100 page script twice. So the what they then do is they then pick through it all. They pick what they like, what they don't like, they throw it all together, and they have, maybe even that guy, rewrite the whole thing, the whole script sitting there, written form, they just rewrite it. Pick what they like, pick, well, that was a dick. I had a great idea. Well, you know, we'll keep that. We're screwing him so, haha. Why not keep it? And then they get the whole script written form that only needs a rewrite, and they pay nothing. And, you know, these people aren't scrupulous. This happens all the time in writing groups. You know, send me a writing sample. Send me, Send me, you know, 10 pages of my original script. Here's the story. You give me the first 10 pages. So, you know, those are, those are all pitfalls, not copywriting. You want to register with WGA, you got an extra 20 bucks. Sure, register with WGA. Is your script copyright protected? Absolutely not. WGA serves a lot of good functions. The script registry is, does not take the place of copyright. It's, it's, it's, it works as some evidence of when something was created, not a copyright. Don't even get into federal court with a WGA registration on a copyright case. So, you know, beginning writers need to learn that kind of stuff. And a lot of it's counterintuitive. A lot of it, you know, people aren't going to tell you. They don't know there's a lot of terrible information. I'll do it here. I'll kill the poor man's copyright. For you, poor man's copyright, write your script, fold it up, seal it up really well, in an envelope, and mail it to yourself, and there. Now you're, you're protected, right? No, absolutely not. There's nothing. It's never protected anybody in any court that I can I can name, or that anyone I know can name it's absolutely worthless, and yet this myth of the poor man's copyright persists. These are things that you need to learn. And books like, you know, David Trottier, Dave Trottier, screenwriters Bible and others, will address some of this stuff for you. So you think you're going to be a screenwriter. Spend 20 bucks. Buy a book, read it. Yeah, learn something, yeah. And I get into arguments. I get into arguments of people in my group. I'm a I'm a lawyer, and they want to argue with me about the law. They tell me I'm wrong. I had somebody do it a couple days ago. She was She was somebody asked a question that ran into legal territory and didn't ask it to me. Just threw it up in the group. And I'm not this person's lawyer, but you know, I can give throughout general legal advice to writers and stuff. So I answered the question, and she's like contradicting my answer with the complete wrong answer.

Mike Bierman 1:40:03
So I tried to gently guide her back. And no, no, no, look at it. It's really this way. And she told me I was wrong. So you know, you really writers need to have a basic understanding of certain things just to survive and be viable. The writing is a strange occupation. You have to be able to actually write stuff. But then there's the business end of writing, which is completely different from the creation end of writing. And again, like David Trotter's book and, you know, other books, they actually will talk about both and Linda Aaron since book talks talks about, you know, completely story, story Theory and Structure and plotting. That's the whole book. Genius, genius. But Rick toskins book talks about playwriting seminars too. He talks a lot about the business. Is very practical guide. He analyzes plays. He bridges the gap between playwriting and screenwriting, and then he talks about the business of, you know, okay, you're sitting in your in your room, over your garage in Kennesaw, Georgia, churning out this stuff, isn't it great? Oh, you love it. And what are you going to do with it? No one's ever going to read it if it doesn't leave the garage, right? Yeah, very true. So there's a business end, and if you're, let's say you're an idiot savant. Let's say you're, you know, a beautiful mind. You're this gifted mathematician, or no, if this guy was in a cave in Afghanistan scribbling the most brilliant mathematics anyone had ever seen all over the cave walls using, you know, burnt bone, and scratching with a bone, and, you know, highlighting with it, with a piece of ashed out stick and a little blood dot here and there. No one's ever going to see it, right? So the most brilliant mathematician in the world, no one knows who he is. He ends up, you know, he he demises. And then, you know, 3000 years later, someone finds his cave art and recognizes his high level mathematics, which is wonderful. And you know, everyone else, all the uninformed, think it's cave art. You know, look at this. Let's add some, let's add some fags to this, right, modifying the formulas. Okay? So you know there's a business end of this too, unless you're going to be a pure hobbyist and just write this stuff for for your wife or your spouse, your grandma, your dad, your mom. Oh, look how great this is. Give it to your kids there. There needs to be a goal, and that's the business end. And so like the books, like I said, playwriting seminars, two, 2.0 and the screenwriters guide, the screenwriters Bible, those are books that discuss the business end as well. Okay, books like aaronson's is, you know, focused all on structure and plot and story function, character function, and all those things to an extreme depth, like biblical depth. It's that that in depth, but it really doesn't, there's some in there, but it really doesn't approach the business as much your cut to is showing by TJ Alex, I recommend, I think there's a little business in there too, but that's how I go to that book. So, you know, you need to learn, you need to learn the business stuff too. And that bridge is a nice gap to contest, which you mentioned earlier, right? Yeah.

Dave Bullis 1:43:35
And one thing they want to ask Mike is, have you ever, I mean, I wanted to obviously asked this because, you know, we're talking about books again. Have you ever read any of the big three or four books that sort of come across? You know, everyone sort of comes across them. And those books, obviously, Screenplay by Syd field, save the cat story. Have you read any of those books?

Mike Bierman 1:43:59
Let me be as fair as I can be. I read save the cat. Save the cat is an approach. It's extremely formulaic. You need to know it, because a lot of studio execs will be expecting, you know, save the cat story beats, and they'll go to, you know, page 67 of your script. Page, 12 of your script. Page, you know, 24 of your script, page five of your script, and they're going to be looking for story save the cat. Story beats that. Blake Snyder, by all by all reports, a wonderful guy who died young, it's a shame. Supposed to be a great guy, and he wrote two of the worst movies ever written, you know, blank check or shoot a stop, or my Mom Will Shoot, which could have torpedoed Sylvester Stallone's career. Dodged a bullet on that one. So you know, that book was an analysis done by Snyder. A great deal of time looking at looking for a formula, a common theme, a thread running through the most successful and admired movies. And he distilled it down into a formula, just like a log line formula distills everything down, and you start plugging your stuff in to get a good log line. Well, at some point, not every film has a log line you can write with a standard log line formula, once you understand what you're trying to accomplish, you may want to vary from the formula for a particular project, because you may not be able to capture the log line well in 25 words written, you know, so and so must do this. Or, you know and beat such and such villain, or this will happen, you know, blah, blah, okay, so that may not be the best approach for a movie that you're working on. And so, yeah, I've read save the cat. I think save the cat tends to put writers in a box, and it makes you stick to story beats that people pull their hair out. Oh my god, I added a scene in my my save the cat moment, my dark night of the soul. Moment moved, and now it's, you know, four pages past where it's supposed to be. Oh my god, I jump off the roof. No, tell your story. Tell your story and learn what save the cat is. In case you have somebody that really wants the beats to line up and you're writing for them, well, then maybe you've got to break out save the cat. As far as the other ones, you know, Syd field and all, I've started to read some of them. I find a lot of their stuff. Yes, they're acknowledged experts. Yes, they're much better known than I am. Of course, I'm just a guy. You know, they're famous. Well, a lot of their stuff is very philosophical and kind of hard to put your finger on exactly what they're saying. And how do I apply this to my script? So, you know, I looked at some of the stuff and didn't find it immediately helpful, so I ignored it. I taught myself. And you know, that's that, you know, there are conventions, there are rules, and once you learn them, you can also learn to break them and get away with it if you know what you're doing. And as far as those guys go, some of the most, most well read writers, screenwriters. I know that have read every single one of those books. They can quote you from the books and tell you what page number is on. They've never written a good script. There was, there was one guy in my group who's no longer a member, who's any social guy, threw him out, but that's an aside, and he would you, just incredible knowledge on all these, all these writers theories. And you know all you know McKee and Syd field, and you know every other, every other theoretical, theoretician on storytelling. And by the way, aaronson also is, is big on that, except she wrote a book that's a very practical nuts and bolts guide that is, is it's not all just theory. It's loaded with theory, but it gives you guidelines to actually fix the engine. Okay, they tell you how to build the engine. Tell you what the engine is, and then it'll let you put the engine together. A lot of these guys will say, let's talk about an engine. And you know, before long, you're sitting there in a yoga position, staring out at a little plant growing by itself in the desert, okay? Like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, right? Yeah. So, you know, there's practical and there's impractical, and there's, there are people that write all kinds of great stuff. And I can't, I'm not knocking these, these great, you know, well known philosophical guys like the key and field. I haven't read them. I've skimmed little bits of them and said, You know what? This isn't answering my question. Or this isn't for me, and maybe for you. I'm not saying it isn't for you. It could well be for you. My book isn't going to be for everybody, that's for damn sure. So, you know, find your approach that works and stick to it. But the guy that I was talking about a minute ago, he he bloviated endlessly in the group and everything. Ah, this guy knows everything. Oh, my God. He's the best expert anywhere, and he really did know a lot. It was incredibly impressive. And then one day he came in the group and he said, I've been doing this 20 years, and I've never finished a script. Can you guys help me? I'm not kidding, I could show you the post. So this guy, this guy could quote you chapter and verse from Syd field, McKee, from any, any but you know the the hero's journey, you know all the different theories and story methods of writing, and you. There are a lot of different people that have, you know the 237 steps of the hero and all these other approaches. And I'm not saying there's anything wrong with those. They may be the best thing ever for you, but they may not work for me. You gotta find what works for you. And so this guy could tell you what anybody wrote about, anything very convincingly. And you know, six months later, you find out the guy has never finished a script.

Dave Bullis 1:50:38
Yeah, that's I wonder. You know, it's almost like a fear of failure to start or something. I mean, then again, 20 years. I mean, wow. I mean, that is just, maybe he just movies got a ton of screenplay started but never actually finished.

Mike Bierman 1:50:54
Or maybe even that's, well, one, one screenplay worked on over 10 years, never finished it. You know, I knocked out. I knocked out a rewrite in five days that was accepted. 99 out of 100 pages were accepted first pass. I got some notes. They said, We want to change a couple things on this one page that may cascade this something else. Can you do that for us? I said, Sure. I rewrote it in about 10 minutes. I spent about 12 hours rereading the script, thinking about everything, making sure that I wasn't setting myself up for a jackpot, a story hole, a continuity error. Couldn't figure out anything that was affected by this in any way, and went ahead and turned it in. And I said, Oh my God, we love it. You're done.

Dave Bullis 1:51:40
You know, I once knew a guy, Mike, he couldn't write 10 pages in three months. And yeah, I and he wanted to be a screenwriter, and I said, You got to turn in three or 10 pages, at least 10 pages. And I gave him three months to do it, and because each month I would check back in, because that's what you had to do to join the one writers group was that you had to actually have written something. And I said, just show us something. I said, Write 10 pages. And the first month, I didn't do it, my wife, my wife and I, every excuse in the world. You got it. And in a second month, another excuse. Third Month. And finally, I said, you know, I don't think your heart is into this. I think your brain is. I think you want that, that notoriety and the women a writer

Mike Bierman 1:52:26
Exactly. And I have a whole post on this. I have a whole post on, you know, staring at the blank page and being able to to put anything fucking commit, write something. You're not a writer if you don't write. So I have a whole essay on this that people found very useful, and with seven or eight different bullet points about what, what is really going to happen in your life, what is going to go wrong if you write a piece of shit? What is really going to happen to you if you sit there and you hack away at your keyboard and you write up just a piece of road kill that a dog wouldn't eat. Guess what? Nothing happens. You can rewrite it. You could start over three years later, after you've written two good ones, you'll laugh at your first one, and maybe you'll have ideas to go back and fix it. But that fear of writing, I like I said, I wrote a whole essay on this. It was very well received. It'd be in the book. Fear of writing. If you don't put it down on the page, the one thing I guarantee you is you will never get anywhere. If you don't actually commit to write, you will never accomplish anything.

Dave Bullis 1:53:36
Mike, that is so true. And you know, Mike, we've been talking for about an hour and 45 minutes now, wow, I haven't even kept track. Yeah, well, I have a timer right in front of me. How long everything but, but? So that's another reason. I know, you know, Mike. I don't want to, you know, take up any more of your time. I know, you know, you know, you've got a million things going on as well. So you know Mike. In closing, I just want to say, ask you one, one final question. Is there anything that we didn't sort of talk about they wanted to get a chance to or is there anything that you wanted to say to sort of put a period at the end of this whole conversation?

Mike Bierman 1:54:12
Yeah, every writer is different. What works for me works for me? That's a good place to start to look at. But it doesn't mean it's going to work for you. If you find a method that works for you, no matter how many people tell you it's wrong. If your work product is good, it doesn't matter how you get there, as long as you're not stealing it. Do whatever works for you. Learn the rules, the conventions of the trade, some of them, people can't even say why it's done that way. It's just done that way. Some of the rules you're going to not be able to break, and some of the rules you will be able to break when anyone tells you absolutely Oh, this is wrong. That's wrong. Absolutes usually don't work. Learn a way to write that works for you and use that. Method. It probably won't work for me. Mine may not work for you, but there isn't necessarily a right way or wrong way. You need to get a high quality finished product out. If you stand on your head and gibber and shriek and write upside down, left handed, and that gets it done. Go for it. That's what you need to do, and you need to write. A lot of people say, write every day. You know, write three pages every day. You have to where you're not a writer. Well, I'm not a writer. I don't write every day. I write every day in my group. But as far as writing content, I don't so that's another rule. You know, writers write every day? Well, some writers write every day. There are plenty of writers that don't I write when I'm inspired, when I have great ideas, when I'm on an assignment, if I don't have anything going on, I don't feel like writing, and I sit down to write, I'm going to write crap, right? I'm not inspired, I'm not motivated. I have no direction. Then without a goal, I'm just going to meander along and write a bunch of forgettable stuff that will end up in a folder that I just wasted a day instead focus before you start to write, common writers errors. A new writer has no idea what they have to say, what their voice is, why they're writing. You need to try and discover your own voice and figure out what it is you want to say. You need to have something to say when you sit down to write. I'll close on that.

Dave Bullis 1:56:23
I couldn't agree more. Mike, Mike, where people find you out online? Sorry, I know I said that was the last question, but that's, this is the last question where people find you out online.

Mike Bierman 1:56:31
My, my information is up on IMDb under Michael E Bierman, most of my projects are in development, which means unless you have pro you can't see them, but there's plenty there. My contact information is there. I'm also I can also be reached through the Facebook group screenwriters, who can actually write if you're going to apply. I do vet people. I do not let people unless they're celebrities and they contact me separately, which has happened a few times. I don't let people in using false names, because deals are made in the group contracts form, you need to use your real name and you need to show interest in writing. If I pull up your profile, it's got a bunch of stuff about playing on the Xbox and what's your favorite whiskey and what's your favorite color, Furby. You're probably not getting into the group. So those are couple ways to find me and my emails on online at IMDb,

Dave Bullis 1:57:28
And everyone. I will link to all of that in the show notes. And again, I just want to say that Mike's group is phenomenal. It is the best screenwriting group that I'm aware of on Facebook, and it is just everybody in there is always doing awesome things. And that's sort of what I want to always wanted from a screenwriters group, you know, is people actually doing things. There's actually, like, three screenwriting groups I'm a part of on Facebook and and finally, you know, they're great. They're yours. Mike screenwriting you has one, and Scott Myers going to stories another. And those three, sure

Mike Bierman 1:58:00
He's great. He's a Facebook friend of mine. I don't really know him very well, but he's great, no question about it. Yeah, what? One? Go ahead. I'm sorry.

Dave Bullis 1:58:09
I was gonna say those three are what actually keep me on Facebook, because otherwise I just be like, there's nothing really keeping me here.

Mike Bierman 1:58:16
Hey, one final thought, shameless plug. You can look for my daughter and look for me. I'm finishing with CO writer, co producer Ramsey stone burner, exact producer guy, Francisco Poland and associate producer Craig Tallis. We're working on a feature film called the shoes, which we finished shooting about two thirds of it. We've just added an A list person, and we're going to be finishing that up in the next couple months. So got a couple films in development, but that one is one that is directly, at least partially under my control.

Dave Bullis 1:58:55
Oh, awesome, fantastic. Mike, and you know, I looked forward to seeing, you know, everything you're up to, and I know we'll be talking in the group. Michael E Bierman there, I finally got it out. I have a head cold, by the way. That's why I sound so terrible. But, oh, you actually sound great. No idea. Oh, good. That's why I'm having some trouble talking. I can't really breathe through my nose too well. But it's it's been a pleasure having you on, Mike, and I want to say thank you so much. And again, I will be talking to you very, soon.

Mike Bierman 1:59:20
Thank you so much for the opportunity. I really enjoyed it.

Dave Bullis 1:59:23
I'm glad you did, my friend, take care. Okay. Bye!