A couple of weeks ago when I filed a claim with SGI in regards to the engine fire I had with my RX-7 in September, my adjuster exclaimed "don't worry, we're not as bad as you've heard."

Hmmm.

I had my car towed through a claim center in Saskatoon. They towed the car back to the shop and told them to replace one vacuum line and a solenoid near the firewall. Uhhh, no. Mainway called me and suggested I call my adjuster and tell them they are way off. Somehow, the (appraiser?) missed the twenty or so burned electrical wires, as well as some of the black fire damage on the hood.

I will hold off from responding to my adjuster's claim about them not being too bad until the road appraiser is done looking at my car, hopefully some time this week.

Post #100!

I'm heading to Calgary next weekend (not the one coming up, but the one after) to try and find a job, and a place to rent. I really don't think either will be too difficult, so we'll see what happens.

I've witnessed a few movies on the big screen lately,but for some reason and finding myself reviewing terribly old movies that windup in my DVD player before I get around to them. I'm not too sure what it is, maybe I'm afraid of being up-to-date, or maybe I paranoid of having the same content as everyone else.

I see no less than two inherent flaws with the latter of my statement above:

1) Everyone reviews movies on their blog. That's just the way it is.
2) Similar content is better than the no content I've been showing as of late.

Really though, none of it matters. I'm babbling, and not reviewing this movie. But, I suppose it all goes hand in hand with The Ladykillers.

I found the beginning of this movie a painful experience to sit through, and that pretty much set the tone for the entire piece. I awkwardly enjoyed the visual style of the flick, and Tom Hanks' performance was awesome, although some of his windy monologues were a little hard to follow as a casual observer.

If I had actually dedicated myself to the 90 or so minutes this movie asked of me, I might have come away with a little better understanding of what the filmmakers were attempting. However, it just didn't hit for me. The ending fell pretty flat. At least one of the characters (I believe his name was "Lump") completely threw me out of the story every time he took over my TV screen.

Meh, I could've lived quite peacefully without ever having seen this movie. It's nowhere near any "must-see" lists I'm going to write.

Fun With Dick and Jane

It was cheap night at the theatre last Tuesday night (over a week ago now, woo), so Lana and I decided to go check out Fun With Dick and Jane.

It proved to be a good way to spend $11.00 for the two of us to be entertained. I am a huge fan of Jim Carrey, and this movie did nothing to let me down. Téa Leoni was also outstanding, and Alec Baldwin* did a great job supporting them both.

I'm not going to say too much about it, but I liked it a lot. You should see it. The trailers were pretty good too - R.V., Click and some other one caught my eye... bastards.

* For some reason, IMDb does not credit Alec Baldwin on his role in this movie. I have no idea why

Waaay back on January 21, 2006 or so, my writing partner and I embarked on our newest screenplay - Guardian Angels, Inc.

Here it is, February 8, 2006 and we have made our way through all of 23 (yes, twenty-three!) pages since then. We're slackin' to say the least. Well, not really. We start out with a very easy page per day quota -- which we are beating (it's been 19 days, including 01/21 and 02/08 in the count), but it sure feels like we are slacking.

At this rate (1.21 pages per day), we have got about another 80 days of writing left to get us to Page 120. 80 days is completely unacceptable. We need to pound out the first draft by sometime mid-March at the latest.

So, stealing an idea from another blogger - David Anaxagoras to be exact, I will be introducing a progress bar over on the right one of these days to keep track of our progress.

Watch for it.

Currently: 23/120 (19%)

As any screenwriter - or for that matter, writer in general - knows, the writing process is generally an extremely personal affair. However, when writing with a partner, as I do, this changes a little.

I let you fine folks know in my last post that we are hard at work on a new project, and I'm going to try and give a glimpse into the way we write without giving away too much of the story. I have no idea why I'm letting you all in on our absurd writing process, but what the hell.

I'm sure all the other screenwriters who will read this are going to be appalled - but I'm pretty sure noone actually reads this stuff.

Anyway, Guardian Angel's, Inc. started when Ryan came to my house one afternoon and had just watched a TV commercial he found quite funny...

It was a Pepto-Bismol commercial that went something like this: A man and his wife were at home watching tv, when the doorbell rang. The husband was visibly sick, so the wife pulled nice and answered the door for her sickly life-mate (FYI, life-mate is my word of the week). She gets to the door, swings it open and turns and yells at her husband, "Honey! It's upset stomach and diarrhea!"

At first I chuckled and let go of the thought. Later that evening, we were driving to the local watering hole (does anyone actually talk like this anymore?) and the commercial played in my head, even though I had never seen it. Being the devoted screenwriter I am (yeah, right), something popped in my mind and I started bouncing ideas of Ryan. Surely enough, he started popping ideas right back at me, and over the next couple of days we fleshed out a decent idea for a story.

We talked about it at the bar. We talked it about while watching TV. We talked about it while I did some shopping at Wal-Mart.

So we let it stew in our minds for a few days, then met up to flesh out an outline. And when I say outline, I really mean a piece of loose leaf with about twenty jot notes on it. That's all we accomplished, even though we had the entire 120 pages written in our heads only two days before. This was completely unacceptable.

Soo, we let a couple more days go by and got back at the outline. We finished with about 2.5 pages now, and probably about half of the story "outlined". By this point I'm getting sick of the bullshit outlining stage, and want to start putting pen-to-paper, or finger-to-keyboard, whatever the case may be.

But no, Ryan had decided we were going to fully flesh out the outline, and have everything hand-written so we could let the stupid thing write itself. I was having none of it. We never argued about it or anything, we just never got anything done. Every few days we would bust out our lame excuse for an outline and attempt to add to it, getting nowhere, and forgetting all of our perfectly plotted story beats from just a few weeks before.

Then came a road trip. The two of us had a seminar in Regina one weekend in early January (the 7th and 8th to be exact), and on the way home, something amazing happened -- Ryan revealed a voice recorder! Sweet! He'd had the damned thing for months, but we never got around to actually utilizing it. The 2.5 hour drive home was a perfect time to get started.

So we drove the whole way talking about story ideas and when we came to agreement on a scene or story beat, we recorded it. And this carried on for the full ride home. The next day we listened to our masterpiece, and through all the cussing and unnecessary conversation that somehow made it onto the tape, a really good story was beginning to evolve - and a good half to three quarters of it had been decided on, on tape. Now that was one hell of an outline to get started on.

I was busy for the next couple of weeks, so on the 21st when we finally had some time to get started... we did just that. We got started.

Once we start writing it pretty much goes something like this. I bust open Final Draft and write a couple of scenes with Ryan's supervision. Since I can type faster, I usually do most of the writing - that and Ryan can't spell, uses no punctuation and has no sense of grammar. Whatever, that is of inconsequence. Once I've pounded out a page or two in about ten minutes, Ryan will take over and write about three quarters of a page in the next three hours. He puts out good pages, but they are unbearable to read to anyone but me, so I take his non-sentences, turn them into something that looks like the English language and we move on. This process repeats itself until we are finished.

So today we sit on page number 29, with the story heading exactly the way we want it to - and exactly the way it is on tape. Sweet deal. I really can't wait to finish this first draft -- which we have been dubbing the "outline" draft -- because our initial rewrites are always an extreme challenge, and we chop the story so much it's usually indescernable from the original, but always much better.

We're still developing our process, but it's working so far.

I made an interesting discovery while browsing the scribosphere today. This point probably has no regard for anyone but screenwriters, but I found it interesting.

I pulled these stats from The Blank Page. It is a list of sources for all movies made from 2000 - 2005 that used WGA writers. The results are quite startling to someone in my position -- an aspiring writer, who, is writing specs.

This is also of note, as I am an aspiring producer, and am looking to option a screenplay based on a true-life story. I'll get into that later -- much later, as I haven't even formed a production company yet. However, that's another story for another day.

Here are the stats:

58% -- non-spec assignments
13% -- book adaptations
9% -- other source (true-life story, documentary adaptations, amusement park rides)
7% -- sequels and remakes
5% -- spec sales
4% -- stage play or teleplay adaptation
3% -- from a pitch
1% -- comic book or game adaptation

So, as you can tell here, as a previously unsold writer, the chances of your movie being made is extremely slim. Approximately 5% of all movies made in the past five years came from spec scripts. And I would venture to guess (as would the people from The Blank Page), that at least half of those specs were from writers who had previously sold.

This is not to say that more are not sold or optioned in that five year period, because we all know damn well that not every script that is purchased, is produced.

However, in my possible-producer line of life, you will notice that 9% of movies made come from sources such as True-Life stories. This bodes well for me, however the scribe who penned the script I'm looking into optioning, is a first-timer with no track record. This could prove troublesome trying to get the financing. Other factors will hopefully even out my chances, but I'll get into that later. I don't want to jinx myself here.

So -- even though these statistics are a ilttle discouraging, it definitely won't hold me back from doing any writing. That much is for damn sure.

I gave my two weeks notice at work today. After thinking about it for months, I've finally decided to throw in the towel and quit my job. I'm headed to Calgary this weekend to look for a place to live, and I've got work lined up, so I'm a headin' west!

I've done away with a few of the sections on this website. I found that I just did not have time to keep them up to date, which is unfortunate, but oh well.

These changes are temporary, so if for whatever reason you actually enjoyed those sections (I'm not even going to name what they are, because you know damned well that you don't care), leave a comment and let me know!

Also, a couple of new sections should be coming soon. (One for sure...)

A couple of weeks ago I posted about SGI and the claim I have in with them about my RX-7.

Well, I finally have an update.

On Monday I became a little upset with the lack of movement from the road appraisal department at SGI, so I called 'em up and got some heads rolling. I was passed around the SGI phone system for about 30 minutes before getting ahold of the big gun in the appraisal department. I stated my case and was assured that he would look into it and call me back.

Ten minutes later, I called the Mazda dealership, who currently has my car, to let them know of the progress I've made. To my astonishment, they informed me they had been contacted and someone would be there to look at my car the following day (Valentine's Day, yesterday). Wow, that man at SGI worked fast. And he called me back to let me know that "his staff" made arrangements, cool.

So I called the dealership today to see what went on. I spoke with my service advisor (I deal with the same guy almost exclusively) and he gave me the low-down. A road-appraiser was out yesterday and looked over my car. The SA showed him the burned wires that were caused by the fire, and the appraiser agreed that it is most likely flame damage. Also, he asked him to note the blackness under the hood.

The road appraiser asked that someone look over the car and report cost back to him to decide on what to do next. Since the foreman is the only person they'll let work on my car, I have to wait until tomorrow for him to get back from vacation, and hopefully something will happen right away.

I want to know for sure whether I'll be keeping the car, or SGI will be writing off before I move to Calgary. So, that gives them two weeks to sort it out!

Calgary was awesome last weekend. We found a house to live in, extremely close to downtown. Had fun, and yeah. I'm tired, and I'm going to bed so that's all I'm posting for now.

I'll give a full account later this week.

I bought a new watch last week. A Nixon Agent in Gray Digi-Camo.... this is the only decent picture I can find of it, and it's a terrible picture. But whatever. Watch was cheap, and my last watch got stolen, so my wrist was feeling naked.

Everyone in Russia is singing the Canadian anthem tonight, whether they know it or not. "Russia 2, OH Canada!!!" (for the record, I know the previous comment was lame on every level, and guess what, so was the men's Canadian hockey team) Damnit. How could this have happened? I've checked out about 10 blogs this morning, and as of yet, only one has mentioned anything about the Canadian's loss in the Olympics yesterday afternoon.

We lost to the damned ruskies! 2 - 0! Unbelievable. Not only did we lose, but we were outplayed in every aspect of the game. We had a lot of powerplays and failed to capitalize. The worst part is, is that we managed to lose two games in the f*cking round robin. How unbelievable is that? Everyone in Canada believed we were going to win Gold, and I'm sure most of the people around the hockey world believed it too. And now, we are going home empty-handed.

I wonder if Gretzky will be back for Vancouver in 2010?

I found this cartoon over at grrrl meets world: