Andrew Chapman Screenwriting

8 On The Black List!

This has made my day! I just got a really excellent evaluation on The Black List for a screenplay I wrote called Runts. (I’ve shared the final part of the evaluation in the second image). A previous evaluation described the script as being “stunningly executed”.

The crazy thing is, I wasn’t sure about this one. I abandoned it a few years ago, convincing myself it wasn’t good enough. And then Rachel read it a few months ago and told me I was crazy, it’s great! (Her words). And convinced me to revisit the story and get it out there. Now I kinda love it.

Link to The Black List page: https://blcklst.com/dashboard/projects/149594

Andrew Chapman Screenwriting

Writing Runts

While I was between jobs, about a year and a half ago, I wrote a feature-length script in four weeks. This week, I read it for the first time since then. It’s a hell of a lot better than I remember. It needs a couple of new scenes and a slightly different ending, but I’ve got that all figured out, and I’m on a mission to finish it today.

The next step for this script is the almost impossible step. It requires luck, an incredible amount of random chance, and not much else. Somewhere out there is a director who is looking for something exactly like this, and our paths have to cross at just the right time.

RUNTS. A council house in the south of England. Night. Two young brothers bury their dead mother in the garden.

So begins a story of two boys, Brian, aged 11, and Dean, 16, as they learn to fend for themselves while keeping this dark secret. Things spiral out of control, and Brian begins to realise that there is something very, very, wrong with his older brother.

Andrew Chapman AuthorTube

B-Movie Review – The Black Sleep – 1956

Transcript-

I am embarking on a writing project (a screenplay) that is going to require a lot of research. Luckily for me that research mostly involves watching a whole bunch of old movies. And I’m talking b-movie schlock horror. Mad scientists, monsters, screaming girls, crumbling castles, fog, lightning, all that good stuff. As I’m watching them I figured I might as well share some of the great old movies with you, starting with The Black Sleep from 1956.

It was released in America as a double feature alongside The Creeping Unknown which, if you live in the UK, you might not have heard of. Over here it was called The Quatermass Xperiment.

The Black Sleep was so scary to audiences back in 1956 that the parents of Stewart Cohen tried to sue United Artists and the Lake Theatre for negligence after their nine year-old son died of fright. He was so afraid that he ruptured an artery.

Written by John C. Higgins, (who also wrote a film called Robinson Crusoe on Mars starring Adam West, which I’ve only discovered in writing this introduction and is going straight to the top of my to-watch list), The Black Sleep is about a mad scientist who is trying to cure his wife’s brain tumour by experimenting with people’s brains.

It stars Basil Rathbone as Dr Joel Cadman, the mad scientist of the movie. The quality of the movie is heightened by two supporting cast members, legends of Universal Monster movies; Lon Chaney Jr. and Bela Lugosi.

Dr Gordon Ramsey, played by Herbert Rudley, is in prison the night before he is due to be hung for murder when he gets a visit from his old mentor, Dr Cadman. Cadman tells Ramsey that he believes he is innocent but is unable to help. He offers Ramsey a sedative to make the hanging easier. This is a lie. The powder he pours into Ramsey’s drink is an East Indian drug known as The Black Sleep which induces a deathlike state of anaesthesia.

Ramsey is pronounced dead in his cell and so avoids the noose. The body is turned over to Cadman. When safely inside Cadman’s abbey home, Ramsey is revived. Cadman explains that he needs Ramsey’s talents to help him revive his wife, who is in a coma due to a deep-seated brain tumour.

They get to work on examining the brain of a corpse.  Ramsey learns that the “corpse” they had experimented on was alive and was now being kept in a basement dungeon where more living victims of Dr Cadman’s experiments were being kept, including Curry; the very man Ramsey had been accused of murdering.

Curry is played by Tor Johnson who you might recognise as the big guy from the infamous Ed Wood movie, Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Lon Chaney Jr. plays Mungo, who walks with a dragging leg and torments Laurie Monroe (played by Patricia Blair). It turns out that Mungo is her father, Dr Monroe. He was a lecturer at the medical college who suffered a brain disease that Cadman said he could cure. Instead, his experiments turn him into a mindless leg-dragging monster.

The Black sleep was Bela Lugosi’s last movie (unless you count Plan 9 from Outer Space, which he was in but died before the film went into production. They used test footage of Lugosi in the finished film).

Lugosi plays Casimir, a mute servant. I loved him in this film. He has so much presence in every film he’s in and I’m always pleased when he pops up.

During production Lugosi was unhappy that his character didn’t have any lines so, to pacify him, the director, Reginald Le Borg, filmed some dialogue scenes with the actor and then just didn’t put them in the movie.

The film is great. They really put the effort in to make it creepy and atmospheric. They even got a real neurosurgeon in for the close-ups of the brain surgery to make it more believable.

I’m working on a screenplay that will be a homage to the old b-movies of the 40s and 50s. I love these old films and I think more people should go out there and rediscover them. The Black Sleep is available to watch on Amazon Prime and so are many other classics (including The Quatermass Xperiment, which is also great).

Andrew Chapman An Authors Life, Screenwriting

When Lovers Meteor – BBC InterConnected Screenplay – for anyone who wants it.

A few weeks ago the BBC put a call out for submissions with the following guidelines –

That’s why we’re asking for original short-form scripts, between 5-10 minutes in length whose 2-4 characters now find themselves in isolation, but connecting via video conferencing. They may be friends, lovers, neighbours, colleagues, family or strangers. But they’re all alone together and using modern technology to stay connected.

We want stories that take place throughout and via a conference call. Stories that show a moment of human interaction in an otherwise socially distanced world. Though of course, when it feels like the end of the world, the things we choose to say or the truths we reveal to one another may be the most surprising.

We want scripts that are compelling and hook us in. Ideas that have warmth and spirit, that astonish, amuse or enlighten us. They should be set now or in the near future.

I decided to submit and in a single week I came up with an idea, wrote it, polished it, and submitted it… as did 6803 others. A LOT of people got in on the action.

Unfortunately my script did not get chosen. So what to do with the script now? It’s just going to be sat in a file on my computer not doing a lot.

I like sharing. So here it is, my submission for you all to read. If anyone wants to make it as a student project or because you are bored during lockdown and have the means to do it, it is all yours. You have my full permission to use the screenplay, produce it, change it, do what you like with it. But if anyone out there does decide to record a version of it, let me know so I can watch it.

Here’s the PDF – When Lovers Meteor

Andrew Chapman An Authors Life

The Gremlin and a Public Declaration.

It’s Christmas Eve and I’m sitting in the passenger seat of a van on the way home from work. A black gremlin has just crawled out of the air vent and is now peering at me from behind the laptop screen. My plan was to write the next scene in a screenplay but this gremlin won’t stop staring. It’s off-putting. He licks his lips and blinks with one eye and then the other.

I look into its eyes and see words falling in a grey mist. I know what the gremlin is. It is nine different works in progress coalesced into a starving monster. It’s hungry. It needs feeding. It’s time to let it die.

The only way to actually kill it, contrary to logic, is to give it a full meal. Instead of writing a few hundred words here and there over a bunch of different stories I need to focus on one. So that’s it. That’s the plan. But which project do I chose?

I’ll start with the shortest one. Get that finished. Then I’ll only have eight to choose from. So here’s a public declaration; the story I’m going to focus on is a twisted little fairy tale for adults called Gnome. It’s a little known Brother’s Grimm story I’m having fun playing with. I’m giving myself a strict deadline. Midnight, Friday 31st January 2020.

Once that is done I will write The Projectionist and the Wall People. A pulp B-movie-esque horror novella. Another short timeline; three months. It will be done by midnight, Thursday 30th April 2020.

Already the gremlin is lightening up. He has gained a dopey smile and has just burped.

So, those are the two novellas I’m going to write. But there’s something else. I’m also writing a film script and I want to have the first draft finished by the end of May. I will be writing that alongside both of the novellas. It’s a different kind of storytelling and I think I have time in my week to do both without taking attention, or quality, away from one or the other.

That will free me up to start work on my next full length novel starting on Monday 1st June. By then I will hopefully have chosen which novel idea that will be. Too many ideas. I’m sure there will be plenty more new and shiny ideas that I’ll want to start working on by the time the 1st June comes around so I’ll put off thinking about that until then.

The gremlin has climbed down from my laptop and is now napping on my knee. I won’t have to kill him after all. He just needed to know there was a plan.

Okay, back to work. What shall I write? Oh yeah, Gnome. A couple of girls are about to be swallowed by the earth. Let’s hope it’s not too painful for them.