Thanks Obama

Looks like some change we can believe in...

Hitler by any other name.

Having a keen understanding of romance my boyfriend and I decided to see Inglorious Bastards for our one-year anniversary. I’m so glad I went. I got to have a peek at the next instalment of the gothic Mormon love-fest that is the Twilight saga and a bucket of pop-corn the size of my face. Also I now have a keen understanding of just what it takes to pitch a film in Hollywood these days. Useful no? If you’ll bear with me I’ll try and explain how you to can get a film into Cannes.

In my Writing for Screen class we do this exercise called ‘What if?’. It’s load of fun, basically it’s an idea generator and you just try to create the most ridiculous scenarios you can by continually asking ‘what if?’. Here is the example my class came up with the other day.

What if….the scene is set in a supermarket and the checkout chicks are zombies?
What if…A twelve year old boy tries to shoplift?
What if… the zombie checkout chicks attack him?
What if… one zombie, a lonely spinster on the wrong side of fifty falls in love with the boy?
What if… she tries to save him from the other zombies by putting him in a meat freezer?
What if… she can’t help herself and has a snack on his left leg before she freezes him?
What if…the boys mother comes in the next day and accidentally buys her sons corpse and serves him up to the entire extended family where the zombie virus takes hold and BAM, zombie apocalypse?

Got a basic understanding of how it plays out? Apparently so does Quentin Tarantino. I think he got bored one day and played a game of ‘What if?’ that went like this.

What if…some Jews go to France to kill some Nazi’s?
What if… Brad Pitt looked like Hitler?
What if…I sort of but not really make this movie a comment about the violence in my films and in cinema today.
What if…I can’t be bothered buying realistic special effect make-up artists anymore?
What if…I kill off the most interesting character in my movie less than halfway through?
What if…we got Mexican for dinner?
Etc…

There, now you have the formula, go forth and create. And fyi that zombie idea, I think I will turn it into my first screenplay, it’s going to be like Harold and Maude but with more entrails.

Practicing

I enter the job market at the end of this year. I’m going to take my Bachelor of Creative Arts and shop around, see who is interested. The plan thus far is to have my TV pilot picked up and whilst I make award winning radical television I’ll build my portfolio on the side, working as the worlds laziest freelance writer. I personally think I’m a bit of a catch (just quietly the tele pilot is nothing short of genius) but I’m not to sure how well shameless self promotion translates into graduate jobs for people who sort-of-but-not-really know their way around Final Cut. A writing tutor told me a blog was a good thing to have if you want to write, ‘cause prospective employers totally dig semi-literate ‘artists’ and what they post on the interweb. I’ll give it a go although as previously mentioned I’m pretty damn lazy so we will see how this all transpires shall we?