The Descendants -- the Story So Far

I keep saying that I want to use this blog to talk about my experiences in the serious-business Hollywood machine. But so far what few I have had, I've kept to myself -- mainly because they're deals-in-progress and there's nothing solid to announce yet. And I'm afraid I'll jinx it by announcing it ahead of time.

But there's one project that, with the beginning of a new year, I think it's safe to talk about, and especially since it's likely to be indicative of how things are going to be from here on -- The Descendants. I've made oblique references to the project, and people following my YouTube page have probably seen the trailer. But I want to talk about the story of the project thus far.

Shortly after we put out RvD2 -- nearly two years ago, gah -- a creative executive from Dark Horse Entertainment contacted me and Ryan, interested in meeting and discussing our plans for the future, including future projects we might want to do.

I put together a number of pitches and we met Chris, the exec, for dinner at a bar near Dark Horse HQ (or the HQ at the time; they've since relocated to bigger and better). I told him some of the ideas, and he listened to them patiently before making a counter-pitch. They had a project that they've been developing from an independent comic book they'd acquired. It was an action-fantasy story about a monster-killing mercenary named Charlie Stone, and Ray Park was attached to star.

Given that the fight with Darth Maul in The Phantom Menace is what inspired me (and Ryan) to pick up some sticks and start making lightsaber fights, it's not too much of a stretch to say that I have Ray Park to thank, to some degree, for RvD2 and all that came after.¹ So the idea of working with him was very exciting.

(As an aside, I had actually met Ray once before, randomly, at an EZ-Lube. We both happened to be there for an oil change, and he recognized my shoes as martial arts shoes, which led to a brief conversation.² When we met at Dark Horse to discuss the project some months later, and I mentioned we had met, he actually remembered. "Oh yeah, the shoes!")

At the time, the comic was three issues (another issue has since been published). I had read them and felt very excited and interested in the ideas, although I thought it could benefit from some expansion and development in a film. We discussed what we wanted to do with the film, and the character, and we all seemed to be on the same page with what we wanted. We wanted funny, we wanted a little overconfident, a combination of Jackie Chan and Indiana Jones.

Our first plan was to produce a short film that took place in the Descendants world, but was not necessarily part of the story canon that we were planning. Joey (Andrade, the creator) and I wrote a ten minute script for the project, but given what we wanted to do with it, it was too expensive for a spec project.

I also started to feel leery of it, though I liked the script -- since it didn't represent the overall story of the project, people who didn't like it would get the wrong impression. And people who did like it would also get the wrong impression. So it seemed lose-lose.

But as summer 2007 came up, a new opportunity arose: a company that will remain nameless³ wanted to develop Descendants as a possible web series. The decision was made to produce a 90-second teaser trailer for the project, which would first premiere at Comic-Con, and be some of the first content available on the new site.

The production of the teaser is a tale in itself. Summer 2007 I was in Florida shooting Sandrima Rising; we took a break in July for logistical reasons, which meant I couldn't prep before July. Additionally, Ray was out of town until the weekend before Comic-Con, so we literally only had two non-consecutive days to shoot (the Friday and Monday preceding Comic-Con), and four days for post, to premiere it Saturday.

I don't know how, but somehow we managed it, and the teaser is available on YouTube.

(It's worth noting that when we made the trailer, we didn't really know what this "web series" would be about, other than vague concepts we were kicking around; the RED camera also hadn't been released yet. So although it was intended as a "proof of concept," the teaser neither reflects the expected visual quality of the project, nor do any of the events in the trailer actually appear in any finished script.)

So the trailer appeared exclusively on the unnamed site for a time. But they began to dick us around regarding our continued deal with them, and it quickly became apparent that they didn't have an actual plan to produce an ongoing Descendants series; they just wanted the traffic from the trailer. We pulled the teaser from their site and started thinking about other directions for the project.

We batted around web series, mini-series, TV pilot, and ultimately we decided that we needed a script, no matter what we did. Since we didn't know what form it would take, we decided to write it as a feature film. Joey and I started working on a treatment for the project. It took multiple drafts, but we finally got a go-ahead on the script.

And then the WGA strike hit.

Now, I'm not WGA, and Dark Horse is apparently not a WGA signatory company. But I still didn't want to risk my future ability to join the union by writing during the strike. So it was agreed that I would not be able to turn in any work that had been done until after the strike ended. And that took several months, as you may or may not recall.

In February 2008, the strike ended and I was able to finish off what I had done -- more or less. The writing of the script had opened up holes that I hadn't noticed at the treatment level, and the first draft was kind of a mess. I actually told Dark Horse that I didn't want to show them this first draft, preferring instead to repair the damage first.

This was kind of unprofessional, and if I'd been hired by a big studio I would have had to turn in that draft and would have been promptly fired, and probably blacklisted. Fortunately, the relationship with Dark Horse is more relaxed (and less official), and they understood that this was my first time writing-to-order, so Chris was willing to wait for draft two.

Like the treatment, it took several drafts and rounds of notes to get Descendants to a place where we were all happy with it. There was a lot to juggle with the adaptation, in attempting to stay true to Joey's original concept, while expanding it beyond the page and the first three issues, giving it a more cinematically-satisfying structure, and also giving us somewhere to go from there.

During this time, Dark Horse had signed a "first look" deal with Universal Studios. For those who haven't heard the term before, this means Universal has dibs on anything and everything Dark Horse develops. Before Dark Horse can take a project anywhere else, they have to take it to Universal. If Universal passes (Hollywood-ese for "no, go away"), then we can take it anywhere else.

The script gets done and Dark Horse takes it to Universal; specifically, "Uni Digital," their new media department. We are assured that UniDigi plans to read it right away -- the Senior VP is going to take the script home with him and read it overnight, which we are told he never does with other projects.

This is Hollywood-ese for blowing smoke up your ass. When you start working in Hollywood, you'll start to get this a lot. People will tell you how excited they are, how they will make your project/script their first priority, how they are taking it home this weekend, this VERY NIGHT, so that they can be sure to read it immediately and be ready to move.

Translation: don't expect to hear back for several weeks. And at that point they'll apologize, because they still won't have read it, and they'll sing you the same song then, too.

I've had the good fortune to have been involved with Dark Horse, who is a legitimate company and in Uni's good graces. Can you imagine how slow the response would be if it was just me and a script? No matter how much "heat" the script had, it'd be months I'm sure.

It probably sounds like I'm bitter about this. I'm really not. I've read a lot of books on the industry that talked about exactly this, so I haven't been taken by surprise. It's annoying, and makes me impatient, but that's how it works.

Anyway, they eventually passed.

So we've been taking it around to other places, and we've found a place that is interested in the project, based apparently only on a verbal pitch of the concept and the attachments (me to direct, Ray to star). It's essentially a foreign presale deal -- they give us the money to make the movie in exchange for the right to distribute the film overseas.

The catch: they're willing to give us $4 million. The script, according to an experienced line producer Dark Horse brought in, is a $40 million project. I feel confident that we can make a film look like much more than it actually costs. I think we could make a $4 million movie that looks like a $10 million movie. But we can't make $4M look like $40M. There are limits -- as the line producer said, "You can get five pounds into a two pound bag, but you can't get twenty pounds in."

So we were faced with a choice that had to be made:

We could attempt to make our $40 million script for a tenth of the appropriate budget. Doing so, we felt, would hurt the project and everyone involved. There was no way we could do justice to the script, or the concept, by making a film that was too ambitious for its own good. So we decided not to go this route.

Another option was to see if we could find another taker for the script. But when the script is attached to a first-time director and a lead actor who, while a great guy with geek cred, is no Tom Cruise in terms of getting butts in seats. All things considered, we figured we weren't likely to get more than $4 million anywhere we took the script.

So that left us with the third option: write yet another script, of a smaller scale, to make for $4 million. At first we thought it might be a smaller version of the existing script, but the concerns of doing it justice, as mentioned above, made us decide to develop and write a brand new script. Above and beyond any of the events in the story, what has always stood out has been Charlie Stone. His voice has been loudest and clearest and given the project its vitality. So we determined that if we wrote another story, as long as Charlie was in the center of it, we would be okay.

While I can't go into either storyline, the new script basically functions as a lead-in to the too-expensive script -- in other words, the IMDB trivia will say that the "sequel" was written before the "original." Some adjustments will have to be made if Descendants is successful and we get the opportunity to do what is now likely to be Descendants 2 -- people who in the current script are meeting for the first time will have met in the previous movie, stuff like that. I think it benefits the story in the long run, as the new script in part expands upon what was originally a side-story. Now it gets its own film, making the eventual "sequel" less crowded story-wise.

So that's where Descendants has been over the last two years, and that's where it is now. We're working on ironing out the new treatment and I'll be writing the new script, with the goal of finishing by Valentine's Day, and hopefully we'll have made a deal by my 26th birthday (end of March) for my first feature film.

And then, the real fun will start.

---

1. Grudgingly, I suppose by extension that means I have George Lucas to thank for Phantom Menace. Perhaps a distasteful admission, but an undeniable one.↩


2. When he introduced himself saying "I'm Ray," I barely restrained myself from responding "I know."↩


3. They still exist, but I'm not interested in giving them any traffic by naming them. ↩

Touching base

Sorry I haven't updated this week. I've had other duties to attend to.

Anyone following my Twitter feed knows some of this already, but I'll go for it anyway.

Firstly, I've officially wire-transferred the money to pay for the RED camera and all the accessories. In my previous post on the tripod I meant to mention this, but if you live in California and your main source of income is TV or film production/postproduction, the California State Board of Equalization is your friend. Specifically, Regulation 1532, and most specifically, Section 6378.

What is Section 6378? It is a form you fill out and present when making a purchase of any equipment that you will use more than 50% of the time for "teleproduction". It is a sales tax exemption of 5.25% -- meaning that instead of 8.25%, you pay 3% in sales tax for said equipment/products. Tripods, computers, cameras, accessories...aaaalllll gooooood.

Considering the size of the purchases I've been making, that one little form has saved me nearly $3000 in sales tax. Which means I have a cushion for making payments AND a little extra for accessories I didn't know about before.

The wire transfer takes a few days, they'll probably ship by the end of next week and it'll probably be in a week or so after that. Then we play.

Next bit of news. I finished and submitted my latest draft of The Descendants. Everyone liked the script in general and hated Act 2 in particular.

I don't blame them. Act 2 is fucked. Act 2 is always fucked. It's probably the hardest part of any script -- at least for me. Usually I'll generally know the beginning, generally know where I want to get to at the end, and it's bridging the middle bit that's the nightmare.

But I think it's almost there. I give the middle section a bit more purpose and we're ready to take it to the next step. I got some really great notes from the producers and some readers and I think this next draft might really be the one.

I've read for a few friends in return, one script and one treatment. Luckily both by good writers. Both stories have potential, and I like wrestling with other peoples' ideas, seeing what I can do to make them more interesting to me. Giving notes is always a subjective thing, so I just focus on what I think would fascinate me and get me talking after a film.

Good stuff all around but a lot of writing (especially the giving notes part; I try to be thorough), so my writing muscles needed a rest from the blog.

I'll probably go light this weekend, but I've got a few YouTube vids to share so that should make up for my silence this week.

One Year of RvD2, Five Years of RvD

One year ago, on March 1, 2007, Ryan and I released RvD2: Ryan vs. Dorkman 2 on YouTube. As of this writing YouTube counts 2,618,867 views of the film, and new people continue to find and comment on it on a daily basis.

Five years ago, March 1 2003, Ryan and I released the original Ryan vs Dorkman, having no idea what it would get us, besides bragging rights on a message board. From its sudden YouTube popularity in March/April 2006, we got industry contacts -- including my manager -- worldwide attention, and the kick in the pants we needed to go make RvD2, which set off a brand new round of fun and attention.

So, with the anniversary of both films -- a year of RvD2, and a full half-decade of RvD -- I thought it was a good opportunity to chat about what we've been up to this year.

RvD2 DVDs

Immediately after the release of the film we started taking pre-orders for the Behind-the-Scenes DVDs. We had been running a camera pretty much the whole time we were working on RvD2, and we planned to cut it together, with a few additional features, for fans and others who were interested in what went into producing the film.

What we didn't realize was that the DVDs were going to be a much more difficult project than the film itself. It seems like an obvious thing, really -- we were looking at a good 2 hours of content (it wound up being 5 hours) compared to a 10-minute film. But for some reason the DVD seemed like the "easy part". As such we gave ourselves an unrealistic deadline/shipping date, and wound up completing the project 6 months later than we thought we would. It's only in looking back that I realize that the film was the "easy part", and the DVDs were the "Real Project".

But after many sleepless nights and hair-pulling, the project IS done; we have shipped to our purchasers and are fulfilling our promise to our donors to get them all copies; the demand has exceeded our expectations and we ran out of stock, but we have a huge order coming in from the replicators that will probably carry us through until the world loses interest completely.

So if you're thinking of grabbing one for yourself or a friend, you can get them through the site.

/plug

Sandrima Rising

Since starting this blog, and in a few other places I frequent around the web, I've mentioned a fan film that I shot over last summer. I was hired initially as a fight choreographer, but ultimately was choreographer, director of photography, actor, visual effects supervisor, visual effects artist, and editor on the project. And probably other stuff I don't remember.

The project's full title is The Renaissance Chronicles: Sandrima Rising; it's generally referred to by the people involved as Sandrima Rising, or simply Sandrima. Originally the gig was going to be for myself and Ryan both, but Ryan couldn't afford to take the time off of work, so I wound up flying solo.

I'm not going to go too much into it in this post, it's best saved for sometime in the future, but suffice it to say that Sandrima is what really made me realize that making a movie is like fighting a war. And I'll definitely make a post about THAT sometime down the line.

It was a very difficult, trying shoot. But it had its upsides. For one thing, it actually paid, which fan films don't usually do. So well, in fact, that I've been able to get out of the debt I've been in since my failed attempt to shoot my own fan film.

Much like fighting a war, I wound up bonding with some members of my "platoon". Robert, who I mentioned yesterday as the guy who introduced me to the Garfield is Dead meme, was one of the lead actors and we have become very close. They also flew out Travis, cameraman for RvD2 and cohost of (the one episode of) Shooting the Bull, and sharing the experience of shooting Sandrima brought us closer together as well.

Heck, I still get random calls from some of the other actors, and even one of the grips on the film. It really is like veterans who have been through some kind of hell together, and want to stick together because "nobody else understands".

Sandrima Rising also represents my retirement from fan films. I calculated the lightsaber work I've done through my 8-year "career" in the subculture and I'm pretty sure that I have done more lightsaber-related effects work than any other individual in the world, and that includes ILM artists.

I'm not sure because I haven't done a minute-to-minute comparison, but I may have worked on more lightsabers, screen-time-wise, than even the actual films.

So, I'm done with them until a) we do RvD3, or b) Lucasfilm hires me to work on the TV series. And in the case of b), it would still depend on how well they were paying.

Currently, I'm working on the visual effects for Sandrima. With fingers crossed, it will be done on schedule at the end of July; with fingers continuing to be crossed, it will be just in time for...

The Descendants

I'll need to write up a whole post about this, which I'll do when it's a "go picture". But RvD2 led to contact with Dark Horse Entertainment, which looks like it will probably lead to my directing a for-real feature film by year's end. Like I said, this is a topic for its own post and really a series of posts more likely.

My expectation that Descendants was going to get up and running soon was one of the reasons I decided to start this blog in the first place. So hopefully, this will get back on track a bit in that sense fairly soon.

Misc

Before I finish up here, Ryan also won an Emmy. That's not directly related to the release of RvD2 but it does bear mentioning as a major career-related event in the last year.

I suppose it also bears mentioning that my friendship with Ryan is as strong as its ever been. It's not just professionally that the RvD films have had a huge positive impact on my life.

So all in all, a busy and productive year. My father thought that 2007 was going to be "my year", but it seems like it was more of a prelude, setting the stage. I'm working full-time on film projects now -- I quit my job to work on Sandrima -- and with any luck, I'll never have to go back.

Over the years a lot of people have contacted us to let us know how much they enjoyed the RvD films. I know I speak for both myself and Ryan when I say it means a lot. We're both very proud of what they are, and what they've done for us. And we can't wait to show you how much more we can do.

And now for something completely different.

There's some good news to go along with the bad.

-Ray Park, best known as Darth Maul from The Phantom Menace, has just been cast as Snake-Eyes in the upcoming live-action G.I. JOE movie. That is so cool. I've had the outstanding fortune of working with Ray on our Descendants teaser, and he's still attached to star in the feature if the writer's strike ever ends. Besides the fact that it's going to put the heat back on his name, and make it easier to sell a movie with him attached, Ray is just a great guy and I'm just terribly excited for him. He deserves it.

-My good buddy Travis has at long long last released "Six in the Morning," the sequel to the popular "Three in the Afternoon". I've seen it. I liked it. We will have to podcast about it.

-RvD2 Behind the Scenes DVDs are at the replicators and should be ready around the Christmas season. They look great and I think all our fans, those who donated and those who ordered DVDs specifically, will be pleased and find them worth the wait.

-Haven't done a YouTube find in a while. Got a Robot Chicken sketch for ya today. If you're an RC fan you've probably already seen it. I had seen it before, but it's been a while, and for those who haven't, I thought I'd share.



The funniest part, to me, is how scandalized Mario is by the "Princess" and her proposition.

A good day...

Finished the Descendants treatment last night. The final page count was 22 pages, including cover page.

I was wild about it because, quite frankly, it rocks. I'm not going to say it's the best thing ever written, but I think plot-wise it's the best thing I've ever written, and that's what excited the hell out of me. Inspiration struck and this great story just all fell into place. At the end of it I had written something that I would love to pay to see in a theatre, to say nothing of having the privilege of making it.

I sent it off and I bit my nails wondering what the others would think. Would Chris (the producer) think it was too expensive or complicated? Would Joey balk at the liberties I had taken with some of the material? Would Ray come back with "I already did a film like this"?

I really thought I had captured what everyone liked about the comics, what compelled them to want to make the film in the first place, but I couldn't be sure. So you can imagine my relief when Ray -- who doesn't often respond unless he's really moved to -- e-mailed back saying "I really like it, great job guys." I saw Chris to drop off a DVD copy of the teaser, and when I asked what he thought, he just grinned and nodded. Shortly after that, Joey called and he was really excited, saying it really captured what we were trying to achieve in our development of the project.

In other words, everyone liked it.

I'm just thrilled to death because this is a movie I would positively love to shoot, and it looks like that's the goal. There are a few notes, which I agree with, and after I finish this other project next week, I write the script, and then we look for funding.

There's nothing more thrilling, or rewarding, than to finish a project thinking "I nailed this" and have the people who make the calls say "yep, you nailed it."

Also, the spaghetti sauce I made for dinner tonight was absolutely perfect. I am ON today.

When it's good...

I love writing. I really do. When it's good. Because when it's good, it's really good. You get in the rhythm and the flow and the story starts telling itself to you, and you just have to hope you can keep up.

It's not always like that. Usually it's awful, you have to strain and strain just to get SOMETHING on the page, and when you do, it's crap. You know it's crap. But you have to put more crap on the page or else you're not going to get anywhere. You have to create the raw materials for the process. More specifically, you have to get all the bad ideas out of your head and onto the page, so you can crumple them up, toss them out, and start over.

But oh man, four or five drafts in, it just all suddenly starts to click. Ideas you had that you couldn't make work in the first draft suddenly pair up with seemingly unrelated but equally unworkable ideas from the third draft, and then suddenly bingo, they work. They work so perfectly it's hard to believe you didn't plan it that way.

I had one of those experiences tonight, writing up a new treatment for The Descendants. Joey (the creator of the original comic book) and I have been banging our heads against a wall trying to come up with a story that's true to the spirit and the premise of the comic, while injecting new life into the concept; the opportunity to blow it up the size of a building and expand it beyond the scope of the comics is too good to pass up. But we couldn't come up with a solid storyline. We've done several drafts, first collaboratively and then back-and-forth individually, and with Joey's most recent draft I started to feel like we had hit a brick wall, we just weren't cracking this thing the way we needed to.

I had a similar problem with another concept I had, which my manager was very excited about as a concept, but I couldn't for the life of me formulate a plot. He still wants to do it. I still want to do it. But it's stuck in limbo without any kind of real storyline. And I couldn't bear to think of that happening on Descendants.

So I started to despair, I freaked out a little. It was a low point on the project, for me. But then I took the new outline, and all the previous outlines, and all the other ideas we'd bandied about, and most importantly, the comics themselves. And I looked them all over, out of order. And things started to click.

I wrote 8 pages of the treatment in one sitting, which is tough to do. Writing at that pace is genuinely exhausting, but it was great to feel so excited and adrenalized by the concept again. I don't know if the team will even like it, and it will probably need to undergo changes (there is always a better way of doing something), but I'm damn proud of this treatment.

I have to get back to writing it -- I need to get the third act on paper and send it out to the team -- but I was taking a break from the aforementioned marathon session, and thought I'd exult about the rare moment of total story clarity that makes writing worthwhile.

When it's bad, there are few things I want to do less. But when it's good...