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In three parts…the dove, the bat and the Alamo
"The Real Story About How Ozzy Osbourne Bit the Head off a Bat" by GoshDarnBlog.com 2023.
In the 1980s, growing up, my mom would take me to this drug store in Brooklyn Heights and there were lots of movie, rock, comic books, games and novelties sold there.
There were also magazines and products at this drug store with Ozzy Osbourne on it that really stuck out and caught my imagination.
I’d see pics from his albums with his long hair, crazy smile, dressed as a black magician or as a werewolf and whatnot.
My mom would not ever let me buy any of it, so I’d just look at the pictures whenever we went to this drug store.
Girl, Girls, Girls
I remember vividly, one time, a girl I grew up with was going to school down the street and she happened to be in the drug store standing near the Ozzy Osbourne pictures for sale and she said, “Hi,” to me.
She was older now and I could’ve rekindled the friendship we had, but I was shy, and instead I was interested in looking at these images of Ozzy being all sacrilegious.
They really fascinated me more than her, and I’ll never forget how I shied away from becoming her friend again.
Looking back on it, that was dumb… but Ozzy Osbourne is not dumb!
Long Live Ozzy Osbourne
He’s a rock legend and has inspired more than one generation and even inventing “heavy metal,” according to Rick Rubin the producer, who was quoted saying that in “The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne.”
POTUS George Dubya even invited Ozzy to an official presidential dinner that he attended.
Ozzy Osbourne has way more than nine lives
As you can tell, at the time of this writing, I just finished watching a great documentary called “The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osbourne” and I’ve finally learned what these legendary magazine covers I saw as a child were going on and on about.
Ozzy’s Story
From the documentary I learned Ozzy bought a PA and a microphone after getting out of prison when he was very young.
He’d learned his lesson and did not want to go back to prison, nor work a 9 to 5 job.
He gets a band
He put up a flyer and the bandmates of Black Sabbath gave him a call and a the rest was history.
They create their genre
They rehearsed in a community center across from a movie theater and realized how people really liked horror movies, so they started playing the “devil’s chords” so to speak.
A legend is formed
Ozzy says in the doc that everything happened really “fast” in his career and Black Sabbath become the number one band in England, after The Beatles of course, who inspired them.
The band breaks up
They broke up eventually though and Ozzy ended up going to LA with his new partners in crime, Randy Rhoades the guitarist of “Crazy Train” and Sharon Osbourne, then his manager.
1. Do doves really fly?
They decided to do something big and memorable, so he went into the LA meeting with two live doves in his hands.
One died when he bit the dove’s head off, shocking everyone but Sharon, it seems when you watch the doc.
Apparently, Ozzy was so wasted he hardly knew what he was doing and, yes, there are pictures of it.
2. The Infamous Bat Incident
Ozzy Osbourne decided to start sending raw meat into the audience with a catapult, like intestines, etc.; all lofted up into the air and onto the fans at concerts.
The concert goers started throwing animal parts back up on the stage themselves and it became a “thing.”
Dead chickens, snakes and one night a very big frog that Sharon thought was a baby. Then a bat that Ozzy thought was innocently made of rubber.
Wasted, he thought it would be funny to bite the rubber bat’s head off and instead, realized instantly, it was a live bat, but by then it was already too late and the myths of Ozzy Osbourne’s antics on stage were born and grew in lore.
He had to get a series of rabies shots even after making this “bat” mistake during his concert.
3. The Alamo and Ozzy… Perfect Together
One night Sharon Osbourne hid all of Ozzy’s clothes because she wanted to discourage him from going out with his mates to get wasted.
Instead he took her clothes and wore them out.
Later on, during interviews and a visit to “The Alamo,” he was still wearing girl’s clothes and decided to take a pee, right there.
Ozzy got arrested and was officially banned from San Antonio.
There’s more, more and even more to the Ozzy Osbourne story
The documentary is thorough about Ozzy’s interesting life and plays out like his video autobiography.
I highly suggest watching it to learn about this legend of rock and metal.
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You’ll never fokkin guess, dude.
We’re all like sure dying to know, aren’t we?
I mean, all these years of not dating anyone at all because we are just too dang nice.
I mean, getting headaches and heartbreaks from trying to figure out why that girl we like so much only dates a**holes?
I mean, who the heck made this line up in the first place anyway, and why the heck does everyone repeat it?
Well, you’re going to need to get your Big League Chew gum out for this one, folks…
Baseball was responsible for the line
Throughout Leo Durocher’s career as a manager, he was described as anything but nice.
Get this scientifically documented methodology used to develop high school pitchers into pros!
He just wanted to win baseball games.
His autobiography published in 1975 was called Nice Guys Finish Last.
An excerpt from the book, found on the University of Chicago website, tells us how Leo Durocher’s infamous phrase came about.
“The Nice Guys Finish Last line came about… wholly by accident. I’m not going to back away from it though. It has got me into Bartlett’s Quotations — page 1059…It came about during batting practice at the Polo Grounds, while I was managing the Dodgers. I was sitting in the dugout with Frank Graham of the old Journal-American, and several other newspapermen, having one of those freewheeling bull sessions…and just at that point, the Giants, led by Mel Ott, began to come out of their dugout to take their warm-up. Without missing a beat, I said, “Take a look at that Number Four there. A nicer guy never drew breath than that man there.” I called off his players’ names as they came marching up the steps behind him, “Walker Cooper, Mize, Marshall, Kerr, Gordon, Thomson. Take a look at them. All nice guys. They’ll finish last. Nice guys. Finish last.”
Right now, at the time of this writing, I would much rather be watching Jack Ryan Season 3 on Amazon, but here I am writing more content to monetize.
The goods news is that in the future…maybe these words will make money and pay for my one hundred dollar plus Amazon Prime Subscription I pay on credit card every January.
And, no, I did not write this blog post in Chat GPT or Open AI if you’re wondering.
Anyway, let’s take a sip of our coffee and get down to those polished brass tacks, shall we?
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DEATH WISH COFFEE REVIEW
You’ve seen the black boxes and bags in the Grocery store. You’ve seen the advertisements online and off, you’ve seen the skull and bones…yeah… have you tried Death Wish Coffee?
I know you’ve been interested in trying it
You’ve said to yourself “Hmmm…” when you’ve seen it on the shelves in the stores, but for some reason you’ve shied away from it and stuck with your tried and true blend and brand.
Well, I’m going to break the mold and tell you about Death Wish Coffee.
You can see me try the drink over on The Gosh Darn Podcast where I’ve given you my opinion.
You see, I am a coffee expert
I was drinking cappuccinos in cafes since I was 16, while I got up on the open mike at poetry readings.
I’d drink coffee in high school if I pulled an all-nighter to finish my homework, which was like every night… I still have nightmares.
But yes the black stuff has been a thorn in my side for years and whether I like or not I’m addicted. At least it’s not heroin.
So without further adieu I will try Death Wish… instant coffee…hot not iced!
What I realized about Death Wish Coffee is that it is bitter just like espresso.
I can see myself making a mocha with this or if I had a coffee machine or milk steamer… cappuccino, latte or I could see myself pouring sweetened condensed milk in there.
Death Wish is both green and black coffee beans
I enjoyed it a lot, but I don’t think I would drink more than one at a time. I can’t imagine overdosing on this all morning long! I don’t desire to that!
Be wise with your health when drinking the strongest cup of coffee on earth.
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5 Simple Tools for Your Blog Website
HOW TO START A BLOG
A summary of this gosh darn blog post
1. Buy web hosting and start your blog
2. WordPress for creating your content
3. Create "Great" with Canva
4. Get Response for starting your email list or newsletter
5. Use this intuitive website to write your blogs
What's blogging all about?
Making a blog on your own is an intimidating process in the beginning stages, but honestly, once you give it a shot, it can be surprisingly personally satisfying ride.
What you really need to know about blogging you can find out here because I've been doing it for a while and even wrote a book about my experiences!
Now that you're ready to make your blog a reality... read on!
Some questions for you
What’s your favorite hobby?
How much do you like writing?
Those are just a two questions to ask yourself before you dive in head first! Also...
What are the benefits of blogging?
They are many like...
Teach others
Inspire others
Make money
Plus blogging skills are in demand nowadays and you can make money online easy-peezy on places like Upwork.
Make money on Medium.com
This blog website was started by the Twitter guy and has a great community of writers.
If you have the knack for typing out your personal story or if you have the idea of reviewing the latest TV show binge watch, go do that and start sharing your opinions.
Promoting your blog posts online
Search engines, social media and Google Search will help promote your blog in the future, but right now you need the brass tacks or the basics to get started on your blogging journey.
So... Should I Start A Blog Post Business Or Not?
Below are the 5 most important services you’ll need to sign up for to get started with creating your own good-looking, professional blog site.
You must buy a domain for like ten dollars or less and then sign up for hosting.
We recommend NameCheap to get your hosting because it's cheap.
Click on the link below to get your web hosting up and running.
2. WordPress for creating your content
WP is the standard you want to use.
There are so many plugins, like SEO and social media, to help you later on when you want to do some basic coding. Nothing is really like WordPress and combined with your hosting service it makes your blogging journey much easier.
Also, it's not hard to learn how to use the WordPress administrative “dashboard” and once you do it’ll become second nature and you’ll be in business with your blog posts.
Initially it's a free program or you can sign up for a 30 day free trial and pay a little over ten bucks a month after or buy the annual fee and save money.
Canva is the solution for you to get up and running.
You can make Instagram Reels, Youtube Vids, Facebook Banners--Basically ANYTHING you see online in social media you can make it, just like the professionals do, AND Canva is really user friendly.
If you are interested in a more "professional" software, Adobe Creative Cloud is the one you want you want to sign up for and use.
You will also learn how to make a headline better.
The site is AI, intuitive and makes you think about how to make money with your blog, which is way cool.
SurferSEO has a "free" option and a paid service. We highly recommend you click the link and check this place out!
Build a blog, write blog posts, get started in the blogging world now!
Are you finally convinced? Are you considering starting a blog now?
Personally it has been a great creative outlet for me
Hopefully I've given you some good reasons or a reason to start blogging and you're now interested in doing blog writing full time, to replace you job, . I wish you much success!
Start a blog today. Get your first blog posts up and running with the tools I suggested you sign up for.
Just to wrap it up with some takeaways:
Join Medium and get readers fast!
Learn new skills put then on your resume
Be around like minded people in the community and around the world
Brainstorm your ideas about your favorite hobby
Want to start today? Nothing is stopping you!
Thanks for reading my post on reasons you should start a blog website or not.
Share it on your personal social media account if you would like and don't forget to subscribe for more blog content from yours truly and GoshDarnBlog.com
Ron Fortier has been a professional comic book writer and author for almost fifty years, now.
The comic books he’s worked on are numerous and you’ve definitely heard of some of the super heroes he’s written comics for like The Hulk, Popeye,Rambo, Peter Pan, The Green Hornetand The Terminatorare just a few!
He spends a good deal of time now-a-days publishing independent comic books at his Airship27.com publisher site and let us tell you has has many, many books and comics published under his belt!
Ron is no stranger to Comic Cons and we at GoshDarnBlog caught up with him at the Fort Collins Comic Con in August 2022.
We asked Ron 4 questions so if you’re a fan of Stan Lee then you’ll really like Ron Fortier.
GoshDarnBlog asked him about his career and about how to do a Comic Con when you’re a newb.
Read on to find out below!
1. What’s the biggest lesson you’ve learned from Comic Cons? What advice do you have for someone who wants to be a vendor at a Comic Con?
“…For the first time, if they are sitting behind the table alright, as a creator, is have fun! Have fun meeting people, being social and talking to ’em okay? Don’t go with the mercenary attitude of “Oooh I gotta sell all my books, oh I gotta make a profit, blah blah blah,” … if you go in with that attitude it’s like I said it’s very mercenary, very cold, and it’s not what this fandom’s about. These people are here because they love Comics. The comics that you’ve written, illustrated or whatever, it’s an opportunity for you to meet with ’em and to share with them, okay, that love and that passion, if they buy something that’s icing on the cake… but trust me okay, even if they can’t the situation is they don’t have any money or whatever and they walk on they’ll remember that conversation they’ll walk away going that was hell of a nice guy and next time if I come back and have some cash I’m stopping over and getting one of his books. And it works all the time. It’s just being honest its liking people and having fun.”
2. When’s your next class at Front Range Community College in Fort Collins?
“We are starting it back up this September, once again It’s going to be an 8 week course at the front range community college alright it’ll be on Wednesday nights from 6 to 8 at night and um basically how to write comic strips and graphic novels.”
3. What’s your comic book series Mr. Jigsaw all about?
“Mr. Jigsaw is a comedy super Hero that myself and Hawaiian artist Gary Kato created almost forty years ago now when we were first breaking into the business and it was basically a series of short stories, 8, 10 page adventures of a character who can break apart like a jigsaw puzzle, alright, he lives in the state of Maine and operates out of the city of Portland Maine he’s a young fella he’s very naïve and he thinks his ability to break apart and then reconnect is some how very cool and so it gets him into all kinds of different problems and situations but the thing is he’s so likeable and has such a close circle of friends that they always come to his aid and in the end the good guy always wins that’s Mr. Jigsaw, Man of a Thousand Parts.”
4. What’s coming up for you?
“I got a new six issue mini series it’s science fiction it’s called beyond the stars we just kickstarted issue #1 and I’m doing it with an Italian artist names Andrea Bermeda that I connected with online he’s a 30 year veteran from working in European comics so that’s the newest thing Ron forty (Fortier) has go on the shelf these days.”
I just sit there with my earphones on, not listening to any music or YouTube vlogs. I’m blogging or poet-ing or prose writing or all of that.
I hear people laughing in a weird way and now I’m comparing the barista’s laugh to some other guy in a booth across the room from me. They should both go out with each other. They have twin laughs.
A boy next to me tells his high school gf, I’ve got a cute picture of you! and she gets out of her chair to join him on his red cushioned booth seat, so she can cuddle with him while looking at the pictures on his phone.
Machine noises happen at the front of the coffee shop when “the grind” is happening or a the steam milk is airing.
Girls making noises with their mouths make very different noises than men would.
“Yeahyeahyeahyeahyeahyeah,” says a man I see at the café a lot. I always laugh under my breath when I hear him saying multiple yeahs with his urban accent. Sometimes he goes on a marathon of yeahyeahyeahs like it’s a Guinness World Record.
The smells are all over the place, but mostly it’s one of staleness. The fans are not turned up much and the door is not open, so there are smells lingering around the café.
Clop, clop, purrress, goes the wooden floor as patrons pass by. Will they spill their coffee or tea? Without a saucer underneath they’re bound to, but I did not know about saucers in cafes until I started getting pots of green tea for my table.
The door squeaks open and a chubby bald man with a beard leaves while his smell passes through my nostrils. The door opens again and he comes back inside while I realize I smelled him coming before the door opened. This is a terrible realization and I’m just glad I’m not sitting near a bathroom.
I can smell something sugary and it reminds of those ginger cookies cafes have behind the glass case with little sugar sprinkles on them.
Lots of conversation sounds spew up into the air and bounce around the wooden board walls and off the wood floor.
There’s even a child’s voice now and it all sounds nothing like a laugh track Very lively now and I’m alone typing what I’m experiencing here.
I’ve been feeling quite alone lately, so much so that I joined Tinder but I would rather talk to people, and smile and look into their eyes because apparently that’s what we are supposed to be doing because otherwise our lives are just meaningless!
I did not come up with the above new age idea on my own. Instead, an old Alan Watts recording uploaded onto a YouTube channel told me.
He’s carrying his son’s plastic sword for him and follows his son to the backdoor admiring this painting above me as he goes out. He’s looking at a painting on the wall and I know the artist who did a rendition of “When Alexander the Great Met Diogenes the Cynic.” He sat with me for a bit and drank his coffee hoping I would by a painting, but I wouldn’t.
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And gives a big middle finger to Modernism
“I have,” he says with emphasis. “In that direction I have excelled everything.”
For George, painting is more about symbolism than anything else.
“Appliances or cars er (pause) I think they don’t have symbolism… Like a can of Coke has no symbolism. A cup has symbolism. A can doesn’t. For artistic purposes, if you put anything like that… just spoils your painting…”
I ask him if he knows what an NFT is and he replies, “Huh…What’s that?”
George is forty-eight years old, from Lafayette and drives into town almost every day to draw in coffee shops. He tells me his angle is “the coffee shop.” Since he was a teenager he’s been going there to learn art rather than a school.
The man sitting with me at OZO Coffee in Boulder, Colorado, is soft spoken and intelligent. In fact he’s so soft spoken I’m wondering if my recorder will pick up his voice over the funk music and the banging sounds the baristas are making behind the counter.
On this hot August day George is hunched over in a black t-shirt. His dark hair parted to the side. In the chair next to him is a weathered leather bag with a strap that makes him look like a professional when walking down the sidewalks of this town, but in his bag are pencils and paper.
He sold me two drawings for five bucks last week and I’ve been carrying them around in my laptop bag. We’d had a short conversation about visibility or how my blog doesn’t get any hits, like he wasn’t going to do the interview with me because of it.
I was introduced to him several years before Covid and saw some of his paintings hanging up at Avante Coffee on Walnut. He had nudes, which I thought were cool and something you don’t see often in Boulder.
Courtesy George Dessev "The Funeral of Robin Hood"
Another time I saw his self-portrait, a striking painting, but something every famous painter has done, like Van Gogh for instance. George’s self-portrait looked similar to portraits from several hundred years ago, like you would see on the walls whenever you visit a well-known museum.
Dessev was thinking of subject matter no one knows about when he created his 36" by 40" art piece "The Funeral of Robin Hood," which will be available for sale at The Trident Bookseller and Café at his month long hanging in September 2022.
George said about Little John in his painting, "He's kind of a midget... Like Friar Tuck you can recognize."
Also you can see minstrels singing about Robin Hood's immortality in the furthest part of the picture.
There are several painters of note he’s studied with; Quang Ho and Ron Hicks at the Denver Art Students League.
His Show in September 2022
For the month of September George Dessev will have his paintings hung and for sale in The Trident Caféat 940 Pearl St, Boulder, CO, 80302.
He does not have a website you can visit so you’re going to have to go over to the café yourself to see them all.
Lots of times it's hard to find publications to submit to for pay when you're writing.
But fear not! I found a place online that will make you drool and spit it's so chock full of emails and Twitter accounts to follow, just for one pub after another!
The one place I've discovered as a freelancer, to find good publications to submit to, from non-fiction to fiction, is this one website called - Freedom with Writing!
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Trai Cartwright is a screenwriter with a 25-year entertainment industry track record. She’s worn hats as a Hollywood screenwriting consultant, a story development specialist, and has taught screenwriting and film studies as a university professor.
While working in Hollywood, she worked for 20th Century Fox, HBO, Paramount Pictures, New Line Cinema, Universal Studios and Prelude Pictures.
Currently she teaches at University of Denver’s Professional Creative Writing graduate program, Western State university’s MFA, and University of Colorado Denver’s Film department.
Also she’s currently President and Founding Board Member of Women in Film & Media Colorado and is Co-Producer of Hidden Tigers, a docu-series by Red Unicorn Films (http://www.wearehiddentigers.com)
I first met her at NCWC, Norther Colorado Writer Conference, in Fort Collins in 2015 when she did a class on how “it’s never been a better time” to write scripts for TV due to the explosion of Netflix and Amazon and other web channels making their own TV programs.
We talked about some of these things and more when I got the chance to interview her for GoshDarnBlog.com so read on and learn more about Trai.
Interview with a Screenwriter
What was the best advice you ever got from a screenwriter or Hollywood person?
One of my earliest mentors was Peter Saphire who pretty much ruined me for all bosses and mentors afterwards because he was so fantastic. One of the very first things he ever told me was this, “We’re not curing cancer. Try to have some fun!” because everybody ends up taking all of this stuff so seriously, you know? There’s millions upon millions of dollars that eventually come into play, but we’re still just making movies, so try not to take it so seriously. Try not take yourself so seriously. Just try to have some fun.
I decided to take to this utterly useless skillset of mine, this storytelling skillset, and become a teacher...
Craftwrite.com is my soul proprietorship. It’s the company that I run that I started when I got here in Colorado-- so I grew up in Colorado, ran away to New York, Chicago, LA. When I returned there was no film industry, so I decided to take to this utterly useless skillset of mine, this storytelling skillset, and become a teacher and become an editor, so I now work with writers across every medium; screenwriting, TV, fiction, non-fiction, memoir, and sometimes it’s just working one on one on a manuscript, and sometimes it’s staging classes. I teach all over Colorado and I’ve gotta tell ya, I’ve had a really, really, great time with it, but I call the business Craftwrite.
What class did you do today?
This was class #2 of a screenwriting class that I’m teaching in Fort Collins, so I’m based in Denver and I’ll teach in the community probably once a year. Sometimes it’s TV. Sometimes it’s web series. Sometimes it’s advance screenwriting. I don’t know, I’ve been missing my friends up in Fort Collins where I moved back to when I first got here from LA and I don’t know, a bunch of people were interested, so I said alright I’ll make the drive. I’m happy to do it. There’s nine of us and we talked screenplays.
Are you doing a convention in August (2018)?
Yeah, a woman named Julie Cameron who is a big part of the Colorado romance writers and I believe she’s does some work for Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers as well, so we call it “the circuit,” the conference circuit, but you end up teaching on behalf of all of these different organizations and I met her years and years ago and she took some of my screenwriting classes and she said, “You know what Colorado really needs is a screenwriting conference,” so we have four different fiction and non-fiction writing conferences but nothing that attends to screenwriting and I’ve been here long enough to know that there’s enough demand to populate a conference at this point so I thought like the timing’s good. Let’s go ahead and give this a shot, so we’re going to do one day in August. I believe its august 5th. It’s a Sunday. In fact we’re just about to sit down next week to figure out whether or not we want to put everybody on the same track or if we want to offer a bunch of different classes so you can kind of program your own thing. We sent out a survey. The response was tremendous, so we think this will be very nicely attended. We’ll probably Skype in a couple of folks from LA to talk about the business out there because the truth of it is all the writing is coming, I should say all the writing that’s selling, is coming out of Los Angeles. Doesn’t mean that you can’t get your start somewhere else. Doesn’t mean you can’t perfect your skill somewhere else, but to pretend like the industry is not based in Colorado would be silly, so we want to get their perspective and hear about the kinds of things we can be doing here to make us more competitive in the overall picture.
...so the hope is that one of the scripts that you wrote, that is marketplace viable, will sell and then they’ll say, “What else do you have?” and then you can trot out another five.
How many screenplays have you written in your life?
Completed screenplays probably about 25, drafts within that. Hundreds, hundreds upon hundreds, if not thousands. The general thinking is somewhere around your fifth to seventh screenplay is when you’re good enough to have conversations. You’re not necessarily good enough to sell, but you are at least earning your space at the table and then after that it’s usually another, oh jeez, another five to seven before you’re actually marketplace competitive. Where your skills are good enough that you deserve to sell and then after that you are building out your portfolio, so the hope is that one of the scripts that you wrote, that is marketplace viable, will sell and then they’ll say, “What else do you have?” and then you can trot out another five.
When you option a screenplay what’s the average amount of money you’ll make?
Zero. People don’t make money off of options. What they get is opportunity, so in Los Angeles if you are working with real deal production companies there is the possibility that you will earn between five and ten thousand off of an option. A very, very few people actually make that price point… There’s a whole sort of pyramid that happens as you are making your way into the film industry and into a career. Obviously the very first step is optioning something, but the chances are because you’re a newbie, you have no track record, you are not even remotely appealing to the big dogs, so you’re working with other folks who are like you, they’re looking for a great story to tell for very little money, so they come to you and they express their passion, express their enthusiasm. You love their plan for how they’re going to take your script out and go to get it sold and if you have faith in them and you like ‘em well enough then you go ahead and option it. Now the WGA and all legal contracts require you to make at least a buck off of it, but for the most part and especially in Colorado, nobody makes money off of options. You’re lucky if you get a couple of hundred bucks, but again the point is is now you have other people who are excited about your work and they’re going to work on your behalf to try to get it sold. That’s what’s happening with an option.
What software do you use to write a screenplay?
Oh Final Draft, industry standard. Spend the money. It’s worth it… If you’re going to work in this industry you need to pass, which means you need to use the tools, you need to use the terminology, you need to have the craft skillset that everybody else has, so that they’re not feeling like they’re having to educate you in knowing how the business works.
What’s your favorite movies?
The one that always comes to mind I love Aliens. I love Aliens unreasonably. It’s half because it’s an impeccably structured movie. When I was coming up there weren’t a lot of classes. There were no books. Alright maybe there was Story, but it was incomprehensible. We learned structure the old fashioned way. We watched movies and we broke them down. Eventually, if you were in the business, if you worked in Los Angeles, you would make the kind of contacts where they would start floating you screenplays, those produced and unproduced, so you can start reading what was industry standard at that time and then you would break them down, so Aliens, honestly, it was my training wheels movie. It taught me how to structure a movie. I’d go back and watch it at least a couple of times a year. Also Michael Biehn is super pretty, so that doesn’t hurt anything. There and aliens and yeah, it’s a good fun movie and Jim Cameron structures about as well as anybody in the business.
What’s a good book to read on screenwriting?
You know I recently picked up John Truby? The anatomy of Storytelling (The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller). I think it what it’s called. I had done my “save the cats” education and, um, I feel like they’re all having exactly the same conversation. They’re all talking about exactly the same things, which is why you kind of read all of them because they all present it in slightly different ways, so if one book is not making a lot of sense to you go and listen to someone else because maybe their voice makes sense to you, but ultimately it’s exactly the same conversation, but John was doing something different in his book and I really appreciated that. He was talking about structure from a perspective of activating the secondary characters, so creating plot, based almost solely on this idea that the other character in the sequence is there to be in opposition to the main character, I mean this is the big takeaway for me, and that was just a new way to kind of look at things, so now if you look at some of the Oscar nominated screenplays in some of the—I can’t say it’s a new direction for structure, but it is slightly different. There was a number of movies that came out that all were behaving the same way so Three Billboards outside Ebbings Missouri is a really good example, and darn if I can come up with the other two that I’ve been kind of grouping together in my classes, but they all are kind of doing the same thing. The first half there’s no plot. There’s no plot. You are just hanging out with these people and you’re just sort of experiencing their life with them and you’re getting to know sort of the diagram of how all the characters are interfacing and then somewhere around the false resolution, the halfway point, you know something disastrous happens, and all of the characters end up escalating the dramatic states, but it’s character escalation versus plot escalation, so it’s not that more diamonds got stolen or more bombs got planted its that more characters are being more vocal and aggressive in being in opposition to our lead.
What are you doing in Colorado? I know you have some projects going on.
Yeah, so Colorado does not have a film industry, Evan. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that. Have you noticed that?
... it’s really important to me that writers do what they’re supposed to do and the number one thing that they’re supposed to do is to write a screenplay that an audience would actually want to see,...
Yeah.
Our film industry is none existent. Nobody understands development. Nobody takes development to heart. People are writing screenplays because they want to shoot a movie. They don’t really know screenwriting. They’re not hiring the people or partnering with the people who are exceptional, you know, who really, really dedicate themselves to the craft! So we’re getting a lot of extremely lackluster, microbudget, by microbudget I mean 50,000 dollars, a 100,000 dollars. We’re getting just a lot of movies where people are practicing their craft, but they’re not making things that are marketplace competitive and as a former development executive, as somebody who has been marketplace competitive, it’s really important to me that writers do what they’re supposed to do and the number one thing that they’re supposed to do is to write a screenplay that an audience would actually want to see, so I do as much as I possibly can to look for opportunities for writers, but to also create opportunities for writers to escalate their skillset. This looks like lots and lots of things. This looks like the contest that I run out of Women in Film and Media Colorado. So I’m president of that organization. It’s the state chapter of a national organization and the very first thing that I did as development chair was create a contest. It’s not that we gave a lot of money away to the writer who won it’s that we gave producer reads to this person. We gave them a table read, so hearing your script out loud by professional actors changes your understanding of your text. Having conversations with producers or agents who can look at it from their perspective is going to change your understanding of your text and it’s going to elevate your next revision, so that’s one example of what I do. Obviously I teach a ton of classes. I work one on one a lot. I do a lot of development in Colorado/ The people who have figured out what it is that I do, they come back to me over and over and over again, because I get them down the road, you know, like you’re going to get there on your own, hopefully, but if you bring in somebody who really deeply understands story and more importantly understands story from a production perspective you’re going to have a much more viable product and yes it is a product and the idea of that liability is not just being worthy of somebody’s 100,000 dollars to shoot but also is it going to get distribution, so getting people into the headset, teaching the business of screenwriting, so that when they do come to their stories, they’re coming at it understanding that there’s this whole business apparatus behind it that as writers we are a function of the marketplace. It’s very fun to write something on our own. You can do that in books if you like, but filmmaking is totally like this team thing, and we gotta be part of the teams, we gotta understand what everybody else downflow is expecting of us, so I teach a lot of classes about that. I teach producers how to produce. That’s another thing that my production partner Art Thomas and I do. What else? Just gathering up whatever. Sometimes I meet a producer and they’re looking for screenplays you know and I’ll point them in certain directions. I help screenwriters find writers groups together just whatever I can to just keep the wheels turning and to keep people feeling optimistic about what it is that they can get done. Writers are so lucky. They can always go home and write. They can always improve their skills. The same cannot be said for most everybody else in the food chain, so I like the idea that we get to go and help each other bolster each other up. We can move faster. We can elevate faster than almost anybody else in the business, so that’s on the producing side, that’s on the teaching side and then as a creative I’ve been commissioned to write a screenplay by Main Man Films Art Thomas and I did a bunch of work on that and that’s now out in the marketplace. It’s a five to seven million dollar revision that’s historical. It’s about Duke Ellington for goodness sakes and we’re being read by some top Hollywood talent because Art knows some people and, ah, again, you know, optioned it for very little money, but that’s not the point. Art knows folks to kind of build out the team of who’s going to rally around and get this thing made and then the other big project that I’m working on, we’re in post on our pilot. This is a docu-series that’s called Hidden Tigers and probably TV, we might go web series, like we can always go web series, right? That’s easy. We wanna take our shot. We’ve got a few people at the networks who are interested in seeing what we’ve done with the pilot and what this is about. There’s a young woman, a disabled woman named--- who I don’t know. She hit a certain age and her life was just not working out the way she hoped it would. She was very concerned about living the rest of her life as a disabled person and what that was going to do and she started looking around and she realized that there were so, so, so many disabled people who were living big dreams that were accomplishing so many amazing things that their disability just had no limitations on them and she decided, You know what? I’m going to go interview these people! I wanna go model myself after these people! I want to go learn how to be a hidden tiger… We’re finishing up our pilot on that then we’ll take the series out to the marketplace here probably in the next couple of months.
If somebody’s not fun to work with walk away! Life is too short.
Well, Congratulations!
Thank you. It’s so fun! Oh my gosh it was so fun. Work with good people. That’s the other good piece of advice. If somebody’s not fun to work with walk away! Life is too short.
Anything else you want to plug?
(Laughter) That I wanna plug… I think writing classes in general are important for everybody, so even taking fiction classes, even if you only see yourself as a screenwriter, you’re still going to learn a ton about writing. There’s a few great writers conferences coming up, so there’s the Northern Colorado Writer’s Conference. I’ll be there teaching some stuff about TV as well as fiction writing. I’ll be at the Pike’s Peak Writer’s Conference, shortly after that, that’s down in Colorado springs and who knows what I’m teaching there. It’ll be fiction. It’ll be some screenwriting stuff. I’m starting to cue up my summer fun, yay! I get to go back to Comic Con. I work really hard. To get to teach at Comic Con, so I can go and hang out with my people. Let’s see. The Western State University, Writing the Rockies (2018). This is outstanding, so this is three days. It’s up in the mountains in Gunnison or as I like to call it Crested Butte Adjacent. Mike Reiss is one of the teachers this year. He’s considered the show runner of TV’s greatest season of TV ever. It was Simpson’s I believe season #7 and that was him. That was his work, so he’s the showrunner on The Simpsons. Worked with him last year. We’ve got a new guy coming in named John Bowman, who’s a TV writer, oh my gosh, dating back into the 90s, like he has touched tons and tons of TV shows, so they’re putting kind of a new emphasis on TV, but again all writing has lots of things to teach you, so if you want to spend a few days up at a higher altitude learning from some Los Angeles pros, come check that out.
What’s your fee for 1 on 1 coaching?
So with the 1 on 1 coaching it really, really depends what the writer needs, so I work with writers in all capacities. Sometimes people bring very nascent story ideas to me and I help them develop it and kind of map it and figure out how to move forward with it. Sometimes they finish the manuscript, heck, sometimes they’ve had that manuscript read by their writers groups… so they took it as far as they felt like they could and then they bring me in and I’ll work on that, so it really depends on what you need. I do copy editing, so there’s a service I do called page notes, where its like 15 to 20 pages of me explaining what’s working in your manuscript, the things that need to be looked at harder and then I go through literally line by line by line and I do this for screenplays and teleplays as well and I challenge every single line not just on a copy editing level; so is the grammar correct? Is the syntax correct? But also story logic. Are you clear in what it is that you’re saying? Are these the right the adjectives? The right words? Is this consistent of voice? That’s another really, really big one in books is whether or not you’ve designed the right voice, the right format, to follow the function of what you’re executing. I love, I love working on completed manuscripts… It depends on what you need, so I would just direct you to my website and you see all the different things that I offer and you can tell me how I can be of service.
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