Had a bit of a nightmare at the cinema the other night. Got halfway through Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, thinking Mike Newell was doing a pretty sound job and marvelling at the fact that Steve Kloves seems to be have been given a bit of freedom to actually do a proper bit of adaptation, rather than simply regurgitate the book wholesale, when the projector broke down.

Bugger.

We sat there for forty-five minute waiting to see if they could fix the projector, and then a further fifteen in the queue waiting for a refund when they couldn’t. And then a further half an hour on the motorway in a traffic jam.

Double bugger.

While we were waiting for the initial diagnosis of the projector, my wife lamented the fact that had we not had to sit through half an hours worth of trailers and adverts, we’d be much further into the film. It struck me that the cinema must be the only place where we go, pay good money and are still subjected to fifteen minutes of advertising.

Surely that can’t be right? If you want banner ads removed from web sites, you pay a subscription (though that model seems to be fading) and we don’t expect to find any adverts on the BBC as we pay our license fee, so why should we pay £13 (for the two of us) plus petrol money, plus popcorn/drinks etc. and still have to sit through adverts?

I’m sure other people have whinged about this, but I thought that as I rarely get on my soapbox about things, this week I’d make an exception.

I suppose the cinemas will claim that it’s just a case that they have to show ads to keep the business viable. I don’t know, I don’t run a cinema. But surely there’s a principle being violated here. Perhaps it’s simply as Mr Rankin points out; it’s a tradition or an old charter or something. But it sucks.

Grabbing my trusty Screen International, it says here that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire took almost £15 million pounds (£14,933,901* to be precise) across 535 sites in the UK between 18-20 November, which is £27,913** per site on average. Plus the money they make from food and drink and booking fees etc.

And they still make us sit through fifteen minute of adverts? No wonder people are being put off going to the cinema.

If anyone has any wise words on this subject as to why we should be forced through this, I’d love to hear them.

I don’t have a problem with trailers for other films. Trailers make sense and they serve as a support act, accustoming the eyes and ears to the whole experience (and allow you to be a bit late).

Anyway, I’ll shut up and now and get back to the Architurus screenplay (48 pages and counting – I had a bit of a hard time getting back into it again after the break to finish SToA, but the pace is picking up again now…)

* About $26,000,000

** About $48,000

After five very long evenings staring at SToA, I think I’m finally at final edit.

I’ve tweaked and twiddled for hours and I can now watch it all the way through without cringing at any point. Must be a good sign.

I’m learning slowly how to trust my inner critic. He can be a pain in the arse sometimes when I don’t want him around (like when writing a first draft), but at this point he’s been a godsend.

It’s taken me a while to allow him back, especially having locked him up for past couple of weeks while I was working on the screenplay. But he’s had some fun in the past few days, so that means he should shut up when I turn back to the screenplay in the next day or so.

I’ve corrected the colour (that’s an art in itself, I hope I’ve done a decent job), got the sound as good as it can get it and now it’s all ready for the Miller Meister to take over and weave his audio magic across it.

Must sleep…

As another week rolls by and I’m just counting off the pages of the new screenplay as they appear on the screen. It’s always exciting to see a body of work grow, and if anything, I’m slightly ahead of myself on the page count front, which is good (not that I’m going to kill myself if my turning points don’t exactly match up with where Messrs Field et al say they should, but it’s a reasonable guide when you still a noob like me)

Apart from that, little else to report. I’m ploughing through a book my old boss lent me a few months ago, Charles Mackay’s ‘Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds’. It’s a fascinating book, and has a huge section about Alchemists. Perhaps I should have read it a year ago before I wrote SToA…

It’s given me some great ideas for the voice over, which I hope to record some time, in the next day or so, at least as a demo to try over the footage before the Miller returns from the Maldives.

After a week or two of malaise and holidays, things are starting to move along now. I finished the re-edit of SToA with new intro sequence at the weekend which looks much better than I anticipated, although I still haven’t worked out the dialogue for the voiceover fully yet.

One thing it has left me is unsure about the very last shot. It’s meant to represent the Alchemist in the intro sequence travelling through time to possess the body of the main character, but as Alex Finbow pointed out, it doesn’t really. It needs more work there. I’m curious at to whether I could just cut it shorter and not bother with it. The new finale to the Ritual scene proper works a lot better than before and may be strong enough by itself.

The Architurus script is coming on really well now. After a couple of false starts, I’m now nearing the completion of a first act that I’m really happy with. There’s plenty of conflict, the characters seem to be finding their feet and it’s tripping along at a merry pace.

The thing that’s really struck home over the past few weeks is that the story must be structured. The only reviews I tend to read these days are those in Screen International (or on Screendaily.com) as these usually tend to be honest critiques of the story. Time and again the underlying criticism of many films is, ‘great story, but lacked structure’.

One of the key things I’ve found is to stick as close as I can to the Dramatica structure, but not to plot in so much detail. Consequently I’m finding it much more fun now I don’t really know what’s going to happen. It’s a bit like orienteering, Dramatica tells me which direction I need to be heading and I have a reasonably good idea where I need to end up, but I have no idea what the terrain is like on the ground till I get there and I have to work hard to fight through the undergrowth and forge a path.

This is quite different to how I did things before, plotting everything in detail. I found that the detail was never enough and the undergrowth was always a lot thicker than I expected and encouraged me to take different (better) routes which I hadn’t anticipated. Eventually (it always seems to be somwhere towards the end of act 2) I ended up walking on a completely different track to that which the ‘detailed’ outline said I should be on. And so, unable to reconcile the two, I berated myself as a bad writer gave up and tried something else.

But now I’ve seen the light, it still isn’t all roses. One downside to all this rigidity is that Dramatica can give you too much structure. With SToA I’m finding I’m cutting stuff out, like the Graveyard scene, mainly because I’d stuck to a rigid (albeit cut down) structure, only to find that I’d repeated myself; not completely – the sentiments expressed were from different perspectives, but the outcome was eventually the same. But at least I had the choice later on to do that, rather than realise I’d not covered enough ground and the film was lacking (and consequently fodder for the critics).

The only way around this is experience and trial and error. Last night I hit a sticky wicket for a while ’til I realised that the scene I was trying to write had a similar set of variations to a previous scene, so I just mashed the two together. Lesson learnt.