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The trials and tribulations I experienced attending my first film festival started right away when I needed to get my pass to attend the screenings. Some of this challenge was due to my own circumstances, as I didn’t have a working printer at the time and couldn’t print out a digital ticket, so I was left with picking up a physical pass that would allow me to watch the different films. I believe the option I went to – which was overly optimistic when I was planning out the excursion – was an all weekend pass, to avoid having to continually pay each time I wanted to see a movie, might not have allowed a digital pass anyway.

I figured this would be easy enough – just go to the location that was hosting the film festival. This should have been my first sign that things were going to be a bit challenging.

For this particular film festival, there wasn’t a central location. Movies in the festival were being played in multiple locations, which is not uncommon for these events.

However, the film passes weren’t being distributed at the locations playing the movies. They were being held at local businesses that had agreed to participate in holding them until the purchasers of the passes arrived to collect them.

As I said, this should have been a warning.

What’s more, these local businesses were not on the strip of road in between some of the locations that were screening the films (more on that in next week’s post). They were scattered all around the town, and even neighboring towns, which required hopping on some of the highways for a few minutes. It was about a fifteen minute just to get to the coffee shop that seemed to be the closest to the hotel I was staying at.

This should have also been a warning of things to come.

When I arrived at the shop, which was serving customers when I first entered, there wasn’t any signage confirming that the movie passes were being held in the location. And when I talked with the cashier, and sheepishly went through the “I bought a pass to a film festival and was told I could pick it up here,” they of course didn’t know what I was talking about, and had to talk to the manager.

The manager knew about the tickets, but still, this wasn’t a great start. This was my first experience with a film festival, and this was the first thing I did that day.

They did have passes for people to pick up, and although I had some concern because passes were just dropped off at this location, and there was no way to verify who was picking up passes from which location, so there was the possibility someone could just buy one pass, then go to each location, pick up one of the passes, get scratched off each list, but have multiple passes which could create a situation where all the passes would’ve been picked up before people showing up a day into the festival like me would be able to get theirs, ultimately having me walk away empty handed, I was content that I had gotten mine and would be able to attend the films I wanted to.

As I mentioned last week, my car alarm went off every time I unlocked it and opened the door, so after doing this and drawing some stares from the street I parked on, I got in my car and made the return fifteen to twenty minute drive back to my hotel to settle on which films I was going to watch that day.

This action was going to lead to the bigger challenges I faced the rest of the day.

I attended my first ever film festival in Long Beach Island, New Jersey when I bought tickets for the Lighthouse International Film Festival. I didn’t know what exactly to expect, so this smaller festival was a good one to dip my toes into for that reason.

It gave me a good sense of what to expect for film festivals going forward, and because the other two I ended up going to that year were much bigger, it was nice to get a feel for them on a smaller scale.

I learned it was wise to arrive about twenty to thirty minutes before they would start seating you. Yes, this did mean standing for that amount of time, but it also meant getting in sooner and seats – in general, but also better seats – were more readily available. This also avoiding the bad etiquette or arriving late or even from being barred entry because the film had already started.

I learned that the director was often there for the screening of the films and typically would both introduce it and participate in a Q & A after the film was done. I got my first taste of scheduling out my day to watch movies. It was a full weekend, but after work, running a mile as part of my conditioning for marathon training, and then the drive to southern New Jersey, I arrived late Friday night, and with my hotel room only being booked until noon on Sunday, when the earliest movies would be only halfway done, and driving a car that I couldn’t lock the doors without the alarms going off every time I unlocked them and open the door for the first time, I decided to focus on just the Saturday showings.

As of this post, this is still the most number of movies I’ve seen in a theater in one day, not just for film festivals, but even just going to the movies in general.

But even though it was small in comparative size to the later competitions that I would attend, but that did not mean it was without its challenges. In fact, I’d say that I had more challenges in this film festival than the other two combined.

I’ll ignore the inability to lock the car doors without the alarms going off as that was an issue I had beyond the film festival, and one that persisted until the car died. I will however include the start of the trip itself, which was driving into the heart of the thick smoke that was going through New York at the time. The smoke had actually made it all the way upstate to where I lived, to the point where I had to keep my windows closed and didn’t like going outside for more than a few minutes. Because of this festival’s location, I had to drive towards it, and the thickness and smell just got worse the closer I got to the location, which I could’ve avoided altogether if I didn’t go.

The thing is, I don’t even think this would make it onto the podium of challenges that lay ahead for me that weekend.

I’ll start to go into them, next time.

It wasn’t easy making the decision to no longer pursue adapting Dig Down into a screenplay as my first screenwriting credit. I had been following this path of adapting my first two novellas into scripts for about two years at this point, and while I had placed as a finalist a few times in some screenwriting contests, after this Zoom call discussing my script, I understood that this was as far as I was going to be able to take these stories in their current state.

So that left me with an important question I had to find the answer to…

Where do I go from here?

At the time, I felt I had the makings of a new story, one that would actually be the length of an average novel. But while I liked the story I was outlining, I also knew that I would be under the same time constraints to write it as I had been experiencing last year. I also knew writing and self-publishing another book wouldn’t generate attention alone. Part of the appeal of writing screenplays, in addition to being quicker to write than novels, was that if they were optioned, the audiences they could reach were more likely to be bigger, and this in turn could finally draw attention to the books I had already published.

But where did that leave me? I felt trying to adapt I’m Not My Father was likely to lead me to the same destination, collecting some accolades, but hitting the same ceiling because judge’s would recognize it as an adaptation of a book.

I didn’t reach the conclusion right then and there, but the seed for what I would do next was ultimately planted in response to this question. The course of action was to come up with a new story. Not the book I was planning to write next. A story that I was specifically going to write as a screenplay. This would help me avoid the pitfalls I was experiencing from trying to adapt from a story I’d already written in a different medium.

For the first time in over 15 years, I’d be writing a story with the intent that it would be a screenplay. If I was going to make an adaptation in the future, it would be from a screenplay instead of to one.

But I’ll have more on that later.

Because the next thing I did in my screenwriting journey was attend film festivals.

After some time had passed after my second script consultation for my screenplay of Dig Down, I felt I had two options in front of me for what to do next. Despite all the critiques in this Zoom call, I felt the clear lion’s share of them were constructive and would enhance my screenplay, but that in doing so, I’d have to make more than just some superficial changes to the story.

I understood that this was a different medium, and as such, changes would need to be made if it was going to thrive in this adaptation. But a lot of changes that were suggested were going to have huge impacts on the story, changing key components that readers had said had really resonated with them. The major one that comes to mind was the suggestion of showing off Rob’s genius or his master plan of getting out of his predicaments. A note like that tells me the character wasn’t understood. And it was unlikely revisions would help that along, as there was also the note to shorted it by about 20 pages to 90 total.

But another option came to mind.

And it was actually in line with what the first judge from the Page Turner screenplay competition had said.

The similar advice both had said was to have people come to me with the offer to make the story a movie, rather than me pitching it to them.

Now, the way they posed it was different. The Page Turner judge was talking about it in the context of my books when I had said I was looking at getting a screenplay turned into a movie to drive sales for the book. I was essentially saying my driving goal for the script was to promote the book. He said that if I could get the book sales, I would have people coming to me make the move. He was essentially saying the book sales could promote the move.

The Santa Barbara judge was demonstrating ways in which the script could be pared down. They gave some good examples where the objective of the scene had been reached, but that it kept going, because that was how the scene/chapter had gone in the book. While they were insistent that this was the way to craft the screenplay – and at the time, and even more so with time to think on it, I can see they were right – they also said I could write it my way if the studio was coming to me for a script, or an actor, essentially anybody with some pull, because then it was my story that was in demand instead of being pitched.

This felt like the option for me. I could understand the need to make changes to the script I had worked on for Dig Down. The advice given in the second script consultation with the judge from Santa Barbara was excellent, and not in any of the books on screenwriting I had read, but making all of those changes I felt would lead to a story so vastly different from my vision for it. And if I’m being honest, too different.

Somebody could make an adaptation of Dig Down under these parameters, but I wouldn’t be the best one to make them. If I was going to be involved in the screenplay adaptation of Dig Down, it would need revisions like the Santa Barbara judge had suggested, but not to the scale he was recommending. It would need to be a scenario where the sales for the book were at a point where people were coming to me with the goal of adapting the story to the screen, and that would allow me to keep the story as closely aligned with my vision for it as possible.

I’ll explain where that left me, next time.

The last key takeaway that I had from my second consultation for my script of Dig Down had to do with the judge’s comments on the length of my scenes. A consistent note they had for me was that I needed to end my scenes much sooner than I was doing, and they even gave some early examples of how the most important information in a scene had already been revealed, and that I could move on from it.

The judge gave some context to their note, even though I felt their point was fair, and that they didn’t really have to elaborate. They brought up some famous screenwriter’s, Quentin Tarantino came to mind, probably because in their experience a lot of aspiring screenwriters emulated him and his writing style. But the judge was quick to point out that not only was Tarantino already established as a successful screenwriter and director, but that that success actually had studios seeking him out to write his own movies.

They brought up Tarantino’s standing to contrast with my own – an up and comer with no significant writing credentials, particularly in film, that would make studios want to take a chance on my expansion of scenes long past the main impact of them already being delivered.

While this might sound brutal, once again, it was a fair point. What’s more, it also echoed a sentiment that the judge from my first script consultation had said. In that first consultation, the context was different, but essentially the judge had led off saying that the ideal situation for me was that the novella of Dig Down had so many sales that studios/producers would be approaching me about an adaptation.

Despite all the areas of improvement that this second consultation focused on, I couldn’t help but take this as a positive direction, especially since the experience of both meetings were so night and day. I had entered these contests looking for notes and feedback, ideally hearing the same points and areas to improve on. So while this call varied wildly from the previous one, and I was starting to feel like I was in no man’s land in trying to figure out what to do next, just completely lost and directionless, this one note gave me a frame of reference that both of them shared.

It was this note that made me realize both judge’s were right, even though their opinions of my script were vastly different. I believed I had a good story in Dig Down. The feedback I’ve received on the novella supports that belief.

But when I adapted it, I was trying to keep as much of the novella in the script. It felt like the true version to me. And while I feel that it’s the best version of the story, I can see how this wouldn’t be perceived as the best version from a first-time screenwriter.

For that reason, I can see that if Dig Down was to become a script, and a movie, it only had two options to do so. The first would be to revise the script heavily, whittling it down to about ninety pages, essentially loping off about 20 pages from the screenplay. But as I said in an earlier post, just like adding a bunch of pages to the story would weaken the pace and overall story, removing a lot would also have the same impact.

Or, I could go with option two: which I’ll go into next time.

Last week, I covered some of the most important advice I’d ever gotten about screenwriting, that the actors were the audience of a script, which I had never really considered to that point, but once I heard it, I realized how much sense it made. But that statement only laid the groundwork for the most important advice I was given about screenwriting.

The most important advice I was given about writing a script was to tell the story through the dialogue.

When the judge of the screenplay competition that I was having the Zoom call with said this, I felt it was counterintuitive. Movies are, after all, a visual medium. Why would you tell the story through dialogue?

But I quickly realized how sound this advice was.

The reason is that while a movie is a visual medium, a script is not.

This also built off the advice I covered in the previous post, that the actors were the audience for a script. Since they’re the end user, it only makes sense that they’re the ones who are facilitating the advancement of the story.

This was an adjustment for me, as my method of storytelling actually had an origin all the way back to grade school. I still remember when I was in fifth grade, whenever we had writing assignments, usually to tell a story in one to two pages (and we mostly stuck to one page, occasionally bleeding over into the start of a second) our teachers (our classroom had a divider, so I only had one teacher, but the divider was often opened so that both teachers could give joint presentations to both classes once) gave the “guideline” to not just make the story all dialogue.

This guideline made sense for the class. They were trying to develop our ability to write, even if we weren’t going to be writers when we grew up. But the reason they gave for not writing a dialogue heavy story was to “not make it like a TV show or movie.” That was fair advice, because we weren’t writing either of those. They were also trying to get us to write incorporating other writing devices, maybe incorporating other senses beyond just what we would hear, maybe what characters would feel or sense. Without using the crutch of just relying on dialogue, we might even develop atmosphere…or themes.

It’s funny to think that this note from my teachers actually stuck with me all these years, that I still don’t place an overreliance on dialogue in my stories, and that when my characters say something, its because they have something to say. But it created this conflict for me when I got this counter advice during the Zoom call. I’d been writing for so long without the story being mostly dialogue, that this felt foreign to me.

It wasn’t until I re-examined the advice from both my fifth grade teachers and the contest judge that I realized I was not getting conflicting advice. The fifth grade teachers had insisted on not making the stories we were assigned to write mostly dialogue because “they were not a TV show or movie.” But now, I was writing a movie, and so my approach to storytelling had to change.

Just like the advice I covered last week, this might have seemed obvious, but I had brought with me a certain way of telling stories without fully assessing whether this was appropriate for the medium I was writing in. Once I’d gotten this advice, I could actually see how I was capping the potential of the screenplays I’d written for both Dig Down and Lock the Doors, because although I’d adapted them to the format of screenplays, I hadn’t fully adapted them to how stories are told in screenplays.