MOVIES

Meanwhile, back at the ranch ...

At film festival's retreat, four screenwriters get direction on their scripts

By Chris Garcia
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FILM CRITIC
Wednesday, March 25, 2009

It's lunchtime at the Austin Film Festival's Writer's Ranch, a countrified retreat in Kyle for four handpicked screenwriters. Three of the aspiring writers make sandwiches in the open kitchen in the house they're sharing for a week. They nibble pickles and chips and organic Doctor Krackers, those teeth-snapping squares, nobby with nuts and goodness. Nearby, a veteran Hollywood screenwriter takes a bite out of the fourth writer's script.

While we eat our picnicky repast in the living room, the fourth writer, Sean Corrigan of Austin, joins us for a casual gathering across a spread of chairs and couches. Typed screenplays lie open, and a tall flip-chart littered with writers' notes puts a workshop-style punctuation mark on the homey tableau.

"Herschel and I just changed my ending completely," Corrigan says, plopping on a couch. He sounds encouraged. "The entire last scene in the insane asylum is now gone. It gives a whole new purpose to the character. We found a common thread."

Corrigan and Herschel Weingrod, whose writing credits include "Trading Places" and "Kindergarten Cop," have wrapped a three-hour meeting, during which Weingrod dissected Corrigan's screenplay, a political thriller titled "Confession," page by painstaking page. Weingrod came with seven pages of notes about the script.

Altering, omitting and tweaking are the ink, sweat and tears of making a screenplay presentable — and salable — to Tinseltown muckety-mucks. That's what Corrigan and his cohorts — Melissa McVeigh of Portland, Ore.; Ken Pearson of Phoenix; and Ya'Ke Smith of Austin, who teaches film at the University of Texas — are doing this late January day in a nondescript guest house at Ranch Studios, a film, television and multimedia production compound spread over 257 acres of rugged ranchland.

In this exclusive setting, they're taking counsel from Weingrod, Shane Black ("Lethal Weapon," "Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang") and Dan Petrie Jr. ("Beverly Hills Cop") with the scripts that landed them there. The neophyte scribes, each of them finalists, semifinalists or second-rounders in the screenplay competitions at last year's Austin Film Festival, went through a layered application process to get to the Writer's Ranch, a concentrated, hands-on seminar conducted by the festival since 2006. The final quartet was winnowed from about 25 applicants.

"We look at where they are in their career and if they can really be helped by the program," Alex McPhail, head of the Writer's Ranch, explains. "We're looking for people who are ready to make a go of it, move to L.A., set up shop and start their career as a writer."

If the aspirants don't actually move to L.A., they still get to go there during the second leg of the program this summer. The Austin Film Festival pays for it all.

First, they spend a week with pros in the house in Kyle. Then, back at their respective homes, they have six weeks to rewrite their scripts. After that, in June, they are flown to Los Angeles for pre-arranged pitch meetings with movie big shots. The aim is to option or sell the scripts.

The house exudes a bargain-basement "Real World" flavor — four strangers shacking up in one big abode for a common purpose. (The place even has a hot tub, wink-wink.)

Less "Big Brother" and more boarding school, days on the ranch are modeled for learning. Eight-hour schedules are filled with writing, discussion and lessons. Akin to the famed in-residence Sundance Institute, it's about shaping and developing the scripts, pushing them to better drafts, polishing them to higher sheens. The terms structure, dialogue, character and motivation are the lingua franca. The tippity-clack-clack of notebook computers is stereophonic. Around midnight, it's fade to black, beddy-bye until the next taxing day.

Weingrod, Black and Petrie, who took turns at the house, aren't there to make friends with the writers. They evaluate, advise and critique, which isn't always easy for tender-skinned newbies.

"It took several days of hearing all kinds of ideas before I could even open myself up to them," Corrigan, who also acts, says. "The first two days were just overwhelming and frustrating, because so much needed to be changed in my script. It's disheartening. My script is a thriller, so one thing is contingent on everything else. If you remove one thread, everything unravels. It's not easy to fix."

"It's like organizing your closet," adds McVeigh, whose screenplay "Domesticated" (her first) is about a housewife who gets tangled in a net of intrigue and temptation. "You have to throw all that stuff out of it and make a complete mess of it before it looks better."

Smith chimes in, "I came here knowing that my script, a character drama, needed some work. It's painful, but to get all these different perspectives is helpful."

"They have credibility," Corrigan continues. "They've earned the right to tell us what's wrong. So when Shane Black says that this character doesn't work for him, you kind of have to pay attention."

Lessons have been learned. Corrigan cut out lines of dialogue that his protagonist spoke to himself. Weingrod "told me it's got to go. He can't stand that."

Pearson, whose script "Short Tracker" is a drama set in the world of auto racing, arrived at the ranch with the idea of being "putty in their hands." It wasn't so easy.

"I've seen this movie in my mind a thousand times, but that's hurting me," Pearson says. "I have to understand the mind-set of someone reading it for the first time. I have to get new ideas so I can improve it."

McVeigh's worried that her script's "downer" ending will repel Hollywood suits who prefer feel-good commercial fare.

"It's a very heavy piece," she says. "But it has an interesting kernel of an idea that I can rework based on the feedback. Before this, I could never get a consistent idea of what's the matter with it. And that's what this is all about. I welcome any comments. Throw them at me."

The pros don't throw them. Each one has a different approach, tactful but firm.

With Weingrod "it's a dialogue, not a monologue," Corrigan says. "Shane was here yesterday and he was fantastic, but it was very much, 'This is what I think.' He offered feedback, but with Herschel it's very much back and forth."

Like Black and Petrie, Weingrod has been a longtime juror and panelist at the Austin Film Festival and Screenwriters Conference. This is his third Writer's Ranch.

"What I'm trying to teach these people is how to seduce the reader, to get their product up the food chain," says the Los Angeles-based writer. "Each script is an intellectual puzzle. I analyze them, but I don't have rules and charts. My approach is completely subjective and instinctual. Every story needs to find the best way to tell it."

Because selling one's script is the evasive objective, Weingrod takes a pragmatic stance, urging the writers to "think about it like a business" and consider their scripts as new products for a hungry, hypothetical audience. The Writer's Ranch is their chance to get read without the standard prerequisite of having an agent. It deletes the middle man and delivers them to the source.

"This is our break," Corrigan says.

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649