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The first screenplay I wrote (and completed) was called PATCHWORK about a gangster who dies in a hail of police gunfire landing in toxic waste. He returns from the dead 25 yrs. later and goes after his old gang to find out who sold him out to the cops. The gag was that whenever he was injured he was able to replace his worn out body parts with new ones from his various victims. By the end he was a totally insane zombie killer who added arms to his body so he was shooting 4 guns John Woo-style instead of just two. Gunplay and gore. (lots of body humor and disgusting stunts in the story) I wrote it in MS Word and have a yellowed, moldy copy sitting on my shelf in my office. Completing that script led to my finally going to California, getting a job, and taking a few classes at Writer's Boot camp... which led to another completed script... and another... and another... Then, based on some of those I was "hired" to rewrite some scripts we were producing to make them fit the budgets and schedules we had and smooth them out. The rest is D2DVD history putting about 6 movies through my computer and onto the shelves at your local Wal-Mart, Blockbuster and around the world. Now - between writing copy for websites, directing and producing videos for clients - I write and publish books that have a movie and TV personality about them. I may have to resurrect PATCHWORK and craft it as an ebook.

My first script was called "Disbanded" - During a zombie apocalypse, eight survivors set aside differences and band together to reach a military safe haven. I started it in 2004 and finished it in 2008. I bought some how to write screenplays book at Barnes and Noble just see how to format and started writing. This was before the huge zombie apocalyptic explosion of movies and television. I had been into zombie movies since the third grade after seeing Dawn of the Dead at a sleep over. There was a one quick scene that stayed with me. It was a quick 3 min montage of folks gathered around with rifles like it was a cookout and turkey shoot. Basically one big party. They were wrestling the undead and shooting them as they came over the hill and hung by their necks from a tree limb. I saw a convoy of Army national guard drinking beer and sharing stories, I wondered what their week was like? So I wrote this story. I submitted it in some writing contests but got the same, zombies are so tired, feedback. I was even accused of ripping the storyline from Aliens just because there was a a small girl character who didn't talk much. I managed to place 5th in a horror writing contest with it, so I suppose that's some validation. I really did focus on the characters and the zombies were just the environment. Oh well, it was before it's time. I do watch The Walking Dead and some scenes remind me of my first screenplay. Complete with two racist brothers as main characters in the band. You can read the script here: http://www.chriswestfield.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/disbanded.pdf

Great minds and all... But that doesn't deter me, fuels my writing fire. When a great concept hits me and Hollywood beats me to it, just means I'm on the right track. So I just go back to the drawing board and figure out something else.

Logline: When an unwed mother has her pampered lifestyle snatched away from her, she's forced to face her biggest phobia:reality.

My first script was "Dreaming of Me" -- A hunky celebrity stalks the girl in his nightly, romantic dreams to convince her they are soul mates before his jilted fiancé exacts her tabloid revenge. One morning, I awoke from a very romantic dream about a famous actor, much younger than me. I laughed it off. The next morning after another romantic dream with said actor, I smiled--no laughter. After the third and fourth nights, and two more original romantic dreams, I woke up and Googled, "Do I have an obsessive disorder?" Before going to bed the sixth night, I was on my knees praying, "Please, not another one!" That night the different dreams strung together, dialogue, subplot--the funny, the sigh, the charm--I woke up with a start and declared, "It's a movie!" I ran to my computer and instead of Googling, "How to tell if I'm a Cougar," I typed, "How to write a screenplay." I wrote the script in five days--123 pages!--for a RomCom, ha! Another 10 months of learning the craft (Thanks, Scott!), 15 pages lighter thanks to rewrites and notes from a trusted industry reader, and DOM landed me representation.

My first screenplay was called ALL THE RIGHT NOTES. Logline is as follows: "A high-strung college a cappella singer dying to win a prestigious competition is kicked out of his elite group, forcing him to form a new team from the only people available – the rejects from his old one." I chose this idea for a couple of reasons. One, it takes place at a college, a world I'm familiar with having graduated from one. Two, the topic of a cappella was relatively easy to research as there are a few comprehensive sources written about it, rather than an avalanche of information. (I was not in an a cappella group myself, but I found the world fascinating having had a college roommate who was a part of one). Three, I wrote it at a time that music-driven entertainment was really peaking in popularity, with the established success of "American Idol", the growing following for "Glee", and the introduction of "The Sing-Off". The script performed pretty well - it placed in the Semifinals of Scriptapalooza and StoryPros. It was requested for a read by a couple of producers, but ultimately went nowhere. I think that's because the concept wasn't really strong or unique; just another underdog story. However, it taught me how to write a strong screenplay, particularly honing my skills in the areas of structure, character development, and dialogue. I've gone back and read it, and was impressed overall, though I did find it incredibly cheesy. This year though, I'm only focusing on the hookiest/highest of concepts. Sorry - that was WAY too long :)

The first script I ever wrote was a rom-com I called STAR STRUCK. Logline: When a Canadian extra accidentally puts the American star of a major film into a coma, he finds himself faced with the hatred of both countries... and a chance for true love. I wrote it because I'd gotten into (what felt like) a three-hour Stare Fight with Anne Hathaway when I was an extra on a movie she did up in Canada, which I MIGHT have taken as an obvious sign that she and I were meant to be together. I've written six screenplays since, and when I thumbed through the first bit of STAR STRUCK recently it was both appalling, and a great indicator of how far I've come. I bought a Black List review for it at the time and it got a 6/10, though, so it must not have been completely atrocious.

I'm probably going to put some version of this story up on my own site tomorrow. I actually re-read that final draft of my first script a couple weeks ago and live-tweeted the experience. It wasn't as wretched as I feared, but it's still not anything I'd want out there as a sample of my writing. The story was about a disgraced cop who was in exile on a small-town police force after being the Mark Fuhrman-like fallguy for the failure of a high profile case. He's thrown a nuisance case that arrives in the form of a student film showing a murder, with a note saying that this actress has really been killed. So the cop investigates the local film school (I developed the story in college and wrote it my senior year. I was writing what I knew, sue me) and quickly matches the film to its director, who has a lot of holes in his story AND who had been dating the actress. Surprise, surprise, they were having problems. But a couple other twists emerge and red herrings start popping up left and right. I first came up with the idea during my freshman year and at that point, I was intending it to be a 20-minute short I would make as my final project senior year. Overtime, the story evolved and expanded to the point where I realized my treatment couldn't possibly fit into 20 minutes of screentime. During my senior year I took a screenwriting class and two of the assignments involved writing a treatment for a feature-length story and then writing the first act (delivered to the class in 15 page increments as we went round-robin rotation.) We had just learned the three-act structure before being given the treatment assignment. I went back to my dorm, looked at my printed treatment and drew three lines between various paragraphs: END OF ACT ONE, MIDPOINT, END OF ACT TWO. In what surprised me at the time, the story beats that in a perfect world would have matched those turning points, landed EXACTLY where they would have if I had done it on purpose. Basically, I had internalized the pacing and structure of your typical thriller to such a degree that I innately followed the beat sheet without trying. Before I pat myself on the back too much, I'll note that for all my plotting and structure strengths, the show comes up light on character. I was - and still am - a HUGE fan of LAW & ORDER and its influence was very apparent in the script's style. There were a lot of short dialogue-driven scenes. Almost EVERYTHING in the plot is advanced through dialogue. No real set-pieces, just a lot of talking, interviewing, debating and interrogating. This was the script I brought with me out to LA. My first internship was at a boutique management company. It passed muster with one of the assistants, who compared it favorably to a script they had just sold for $1M. He had a few suggestions before he passed it up, most of which just involved adding another red herring. I made the changes and one of the managers read it. It came out as a gentle pass and some very correct advice that this was a hard sell. I believe his exact words were, "I'm not sure the best possible version of this script could be a spec." [Note: a really weird quirk of this office was that they would use "spec" only to talk about hot scripts that sold for a lot. Technically, the script already was a "spec" since I didn't write it for a buyer, but in the terminology of the office, he was basically saying he didn't see people paying a lot of money for it.] I moved on to another internship - a production company responsible for a lot of hit films in the 90s. Coincidentally, their latest film was that $1M dollar spec. It also was their LAST film. Take from that what you will. Anyway, the director of development agreed to read my script one day. Not long after I delivered it to her, I saw her walking through the office, nose buried in a script, reading WHILE WALKING TO THE BATHROOM. Yes, whatever she was reading, she didn't even want to put it down to pee! About an hour later, she calls me into her office and says, "This is great writing, Bitter! Do you have an agent?" Don't get too excited for me. She passed it on to an agent and nothing came of it. Later I gave it to a development exec at the first company I actually worked. His takeaway: He could see I had a lot of talent, the story moved well, but he just didn't think it had much of an audience as a feature. I asked him if he thought it would work for me as a writing sample and he bluntly said, "Agents are looking for something they can sell." So I moved on to other stories. Never pin all your hopes on your first script.

The first script I wrote... I don't know if it would even count, but when I was in high school, I got the incredibly gutsy idea that I would write and animate my own movie, despite barely knowing anything about moviemaking, how to make my drawings move in the computer, or how to record voices and sync them up to this animation I would allegedly be creating. And this wasn't early 3D CGI models, this was flat drawings drawn into the computer (I didn't have a scanner yet) like Disney used to do. I seriously thought I could do it. I found the script last year while cleaning out. I was scared to open it. I peeked, and it was as bad as I feared. But as bad as the script was, as underdeveloped as the sense of humor was (gimme a break, I was sixteen and just getting back in touch with pop culture), I was unstoppable back then, or I sure as hell felt like it. I miss that kid. The first "proper" script, intended for proper actors and a proper crew, done in proper style... was fine. It had some pacing and motivation problems, it was a bit too Nicholas Sparks-y, and had a couple issues that plagued a lot of indie flicks in the turn of the new century. I became a better writer for getting through that one. I worked on it and changed it, but eventually let it go. But that's not as interesting as that ill-fated cartoon.

That proper script was called "Suit Girl." The Logline: "A mysterious runaway attempts to fit in with a suburban family, but discovers she may be the one thing that pulls them apart for good. " The basic concept stayed the same, but so much of the inside changed, I spent years and years playing with it on the sidelines while working on other projects, arcs changed, I dropped one character, things got more intense, and while I still have fond feelings for it (and I love SG as a character), my style and sensibility changed and evolved since then... it was a link to the past dragging me down, so I had to sever that link.

I suspect Diablo Cody’s first screenplay was great because she didn't spend years writing scripts based on the conventional knowledge of how to write screenplays espoused by the plethora of industry experts making a buck off of the multibillion dollar indie film "industry". She was a blogger, if I am not mistaken. It's kind of like beginner's luck. The more you learn about how you're supposed to do something, the more creatively crippled you become. If you want to write something great, just write it and ignore anything and everything you were ever told or ever learned about writing (except the formatting). This may be nearly impossible, depending on how learned you are, which is why Hollywood industriously churns out incredibly boring regurgitated schlock day after day, of one tired old archetype after another, and one three act structure after another hero's journey, as directed by tragically narcissistic industry executives, based on marketing charts, and yielding a less than 50% return of films that ever break even.

This is a fun idea.....my first script was a western.....(yeah, I know) ALLEGIANCE LOGLINE: A struggling farmer in the late 19th Century American west finds work that could save her farm, but destroy everything she loves. Cliched and not very good, but I still quite like the story and go back to it from time to time... it does show up a lot of the stuff I didn't know back then, and all the stuff I have learnt since... am still learning. And it all stemmed from the idea of someone being caught in a bank robbery - kicking things off with a coincidence - and then getting sucked into a world that they had been protected from for so long. It actually started with a guy in contemporary America and kind of morphed in a western, which was a lot more fun to write. So at least I started with a first script that had a strong female lead. And it has an exploding horse..... I'm not repped, and I'm not a professional writer, but I'll always have a soft spot for Allegiance because it kicked me off on this journey. Whether I make it and further or it ever appears outside of my PC, who knows, but it was fun writing it and it showed me that I could do it.

I must confess I'm a writer+director and decided to get more involved in the writing side because most of the feedback for my first short film was story related. My first feature screenplay was called "Borders" It told two stories: one of a poor mexican widow that crossed illegally into the the US, the other was a middle class successful mexican woman that was hired to work in the US. It tried to establish a contrast between the two, their motivations and stuff like that. It was a mess - no central conflict, long scenes without drama and one story never affected the other. But the sense of accomplishment of finishing a screenplay - even if it's not that good - really motivated me. Now this is the flip side of Diablo Cody. When I wrote it the only thing I tried to learn about screenwriting was format. But I wasn't a blogger and it was my first attempt to write anything - not even a personal diary. My guess is that Diablo Cody got some kind of training writing her blog, getting feedback from it and knowing which posts were more popular than others. I didn't had that training. But I got into a writer's group and learned a lot from the comments of other fellow writers, and that (sometimes) rewriting got me better and better comments. I haven't visited that first screenplay in more than four years. I must have a printed copy somewhere, but I got more interested in other kind of stories and just decided not to develop it anymore. The first ten pages were good, the rest was a mess. I sent those first ten pages into a contest and got selected as a semi-finalist, so they got to read the rest. Four screenplays later I think I have a screenplay that's a minor rewrite away from being suitable to be sent out to contests. Learned: -The value of feedback - both for good and bad. I've seen screenplays that got worse through rewrites. -My first drafts always suck -big, they're kind of an exploration, a probe into all kind of themes and characters that doesn't always fit together. I need feedback to help me find the story I want to tell and the characters I want in that story. -I'm the kind of writer that needs a lot of prep work.

"Pipedream" 78... The miss-adventures of six wild youth searching for themselves working on Alaska's Pipeline north of the artic circle.. Sex, love, drugs, bears, ice, and snow clash in the far north. I wrote it on an Apple IIe with an Olympia electric typewriter for a printer and the predessor to Word. It was terrible. My start at learning my craft using Sid Field's Screenplay as a model... Still waiting for my big break... whoohoo... Thanks for the trip down memory lane...

My first completed screenplay(s) will be going into comps this year and up on the Black List. FINALLY! I still don't have loglines narrowed down for them, but here are the temp ones... this was my first fleshed out and completed SCREENPLAY: CONUNDRUM - thriller - A petty thief's unwitting involvement in a major crime instantly threatens the lives of his estranged family and leaves him scrambling to decide whether to run and save his life or stick around and save theirs. (i'm excited about this story) this came in second: JOY TO THE WORLD - Dramedy - A miserable young woman lost in life and struggling to survive the dysfunction of her family and judgmental wrath of her 'married with kids' friends runs off to Europe to block everyone out. What she ends up finding is a new friend in a lesbian bar owner named Joy in London who's taken life's miseries and spun a completely new world view. This opens her eyes to the tiniest joys in life and in others despite one's own faults and the faults of others. (this "logline" sucks. still a WIP/fleshing it out, but a solid structure I'm happy with) and this one turned into a vomit script over the past month thanks to an idea in the BB's idea factory. This was the first one that didn't have a real structure and went straight to pages. if I can polish it in time, I'll shoot for this third one in some comps, too. (still no set logline): FAMILY PORTRAIT - Drama - A celebratory gathering for the annual family portrait takes a sudden tailspin into blame and contempt when it's discovered one of the family member's has suddenly committed suicide. These are the three that have been completed (as opposed to halfway attempted or left as a treatment) in the last 9ish months. They might very well be crap, but I'm just happy to have not only completed one, but three :)

This is mostly a cross-post from The Bitter Script Reader's site. My personal story in this industry is just beginning, but maybe these thoughts could be helpful for some. After years of bitter failure to finish any script, despite starting many, this past summer I decided I needed to find a way to break this habit. So I allowed myself the room to write something fun, familiar, and relatively without gravitas or artistic intent. My goal was to write a feature length script (OK 90 some odd pages) and then use that momentum to continue onto more difficult and fulfilling projects. A production company's contest was my point of inspiration. Due to the tight deadline for entry, I had to write, then (of course) rewrite the script in less than a month. So I wrote for about 12 hours a day for almost a month. It was somewhat grueling, but overall even more fulfilling. Did I win the contest? No. But I did make it into the top few finalists according to their public relations contact. Keep in mind this wasn't a screenwriting contest. The winner probably got a tattoo or redecorated their house to show they were the biggest fan of the company's work. Anyway, winning wasn't the end goal, finishing a feature length script was. And now? I'm on the second draft of my next script. A much more ambitious sci-fi story running 126 pages (as of this edit). Why do I bother relating this? Because it might be helpful to some aspiring writers who are having trouble overcoming their inner critic and getting on with the job of completing screenplays. Let yourself write something just for the fun of it, that you might not even show anyone else, that you know you wont be super proud of in the future, but that has the effect of creating a new habit of finishing. That proves to yourself that you are indeed capable of this kind of work. The title of my first script? Mega Three Headed Sharktopusicane Vs Mega Piranhacrocnami As for a logline, maybe something like: While under attack by overwhelming natural disasters and an invasion of bio-engineered sea monsters, Malibu's, and the world's, only hope is a scrappy oceanographer and her friends. Now just think how much better your first script could be.

My first full length screenplay is sadly still my only full length screenplay - It's called Beacon Hills Cop. When me and my high school buddies were kids we made a rubbish home movie called the Beacon Hills Cop. Beacons Hills being a street in my town in the UK. Anyway, it was a mash-up of Resident Evil, Red Dwarf, X-Files and Beverly Hills Cop. Years later we found the footage, edited to a cohesive film, and showed everyone involved. They then encouraged me to re-make it. So I re-wrote the remake into a 90 mins feature with a budget. Reading it back I like to note I've got a beginning, middle and end, with escalation cliff-hanger moments. The main guy is unlikable, however; a complete lackwit whom fails to act until the last moments of the film due to fear and indecision. I cranked it out in a week, and didn't look at it for years and years. Maybe I should get that second draft started...

Logline: An old, embittered, and disgraced, ex-pro football coach has one last chance at redemption when he returns to coach a winless bunch of misfits at his estranged son's university. I was captain of my high school football team, which won 3 times in two years. It was an experience that has stuck with me ever since. Does losing in sports, make you a loser in life? I decided to write a movie script, to romanticize an outcome in my own life, that was never to be. Parts of that script, has found its way into every subsequent script I've ever written. Maybe a character or scene heading, or a line of dialogue, or some fragment of creativity mined in that first attempt at storytelling. It finds it way into my writing now. I came across that first script The Field Generals, a few years back, and aside from the awful formatting of the script, I noticed how there was just too much screen direction going on. Maybe that was an early sign that I would become a writer/director. Even so, there was too much clutter. Scene descriptions were way too ornate, and descriptive. Character descriptions were way too long. But I've learned from those early mistakes to sharpen my writing style. Every beginning screenwriting book focuses on format and structure. With basic word processing software, you can get over that, not to say formatting isn't important. A poorly formatted script may prevent a great story from being read. But I don't think a really beautifully formatted script has ever made up for a bad story, bad dialogue, and a bad premise. For me, my first script was about finishing, and having it resemble a movie. Did it have an arc? Was it an experience worth making into a movie? The formatting, the structure, the devices, the character development...all were really kinda inept. But those things could be refined. I had an idea for a story, and after 100 pages, there was a beginning, middle, and an end. I would say 5 feature scripts later, I'm only now really comfortable with how to write a screenplay. I do think there are slight differences if you're a writer/director, or a writer for hire, or trying to sell a spec. One big difference is writing end of scenes and beginning of scenes. Probably not a big deal if you're trying to sell the script, but for writer/directors, you need to think about how you're ending your scenes, so when you film them, you'll have that built in. You and your editor will thank you a million times over, knowing you have ways to get in and out of scenes. Once I've written something, I don't think it ever gets put away, no matter how good or bad it is. Particles of it will resurface in some shape or form.