So on the way home from the prison, I stop at Nobody Beats The Wiz and buy this screenplay-formatting software program called SkriptMentor. All in all, I’d recommend SkriptMentor to aspiring screenwriters. In addition to formatting features like slug lines, scene numbers, dialogue breaks, etc., SkriptMentor also offers “idea generator and story guidance” options that include over 50,000 plot and subplot possibilities, 20,000 character combinations, and some 5,000 conflict situations. But I do have some serious reservations. I find several of the tutorial features rather intrusive and cumbersome.
For instance, whenever there’s a sex scene in your script, a dialog box is displayed on-screen reading: Penis size? You’re given several standard options: Harvey Keitel, Jeff Stryker, and Porfirio Rubirosa. There’s a 5-inch default setting. You’re also able to customize the penis size of your characters in much the same way as you adjust tabs and margins in word-processing programs, by manually dragging a size box. Some users may appreciate features that enable you to cut and paste penises from one character to another, or the Find and Replace command that allows you to change penis sizes throughout your script with a single keystroke, but I find it annoying that every time I have a male character engage in or even discuss sex, this penis-size dialogue box plops into the middle of my screen and I have to scroll through the entire Tool Palette just to choose the default setting and continue with my scene.
I find the Ass Menu equally aggravating. With the introduction of every new male character, however subsidiary, a dialogue box is displayed reading Ass? and offering a menu with several options: Hirsute, Hairless, Dimpled, Smooth, Blemished, etc. Clicking any of these options opens a submenu. For instance, there are six levels of Hirsute, from Blonde Down to Coarse Simian. Within Blemished, you can choose Birthmarks, Moles, Keloid Scars, Needle Tracks, Pimples, Folliculitis, Boils, and then you can customize buttock-boil placement with a click, drag-and-drop feature, etc. Again, although some of you may find these features creatively stimulating, I think it would behoove the makers of SkriptMentor to allow users to more easily circumvent these options. Having to scroll through an Ass Menu whenever a FedEx deliveryman appears at the door can really bog you down, and that’s the last thing you need, especially when you have this looming deadline.
And perhaps most distracting of all is that every two pages or five minutes, a dialog box appears on-screen reading: Requisite Springsteen Dirge?
You click No.
Five minutes later: Requisite Springsteen Dirge? Again you click No.
Five minutes later: Requisite Springsteen Dirge?
No!
It’s really irritating. Perhaps this is a valuable feature for those aspiring screenwriters who may have written a script and inadvertently omitted the requisite Springsteen dirge, but at least they could provide some sort of bypass option. Wouldn’t it be better, when you initially set the format parameters of your screenplay, if you could just choose No Springsteen Dirge, double-click, and move on?
PART TWO THE VIVISECTION OF MIGHTY MOUSE JR
A SCREENPLAY
by Mark Leyner
(7th Grade, Maplewood Junior High School)
Submitted in competition for
the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo/Oshimitsu Polymers
America Award
FADE IN:
EXT. SPACE, 520 MILES ABOVE EARTH’S SURFACE
We HEAR faint CH-CH-CH.
KH-12 PHOTORECONNAISSANCE SPACECRAFT’S POV
SLOWLY ZOOM in from KH-12 satellite (at 98-degree sunsynchronous inclination) to prison
Earth. Western Hemisphere. North America. United States. East Coast. New Jersey. Princeton. New Jersey State Penitentiary.
As CAMERA ZOOMS in from space, CH-CH-CH becomes LOUDER and LOUDER.
EXT. NEW JERSEY STATE PENITENTIARY IN PRINCETON
A SERIES OF ANGLES
Concertina Wire. Guard towers. Exercise yards. Etc.
GAZEBO (originally used in The Sound of Music) that Michael Jackson presented to then-governor Christine Todd Whitman for use in state’s maximum-security institutions for conjugal visits and punitive solitary confinement.
CH-CH-CH is now literally deafening.
(The loudest sounds that can be tolerated by the human ear are about 120 dB. For CH-CH-CH at GAZEBO SHOT, use Dolby Spectral Recording at 150–175 dB.)
TITLE FILLS SCREEN:
The Vivisection of Mighty Mouse, Jr.
We hear PERSIAN SANTOUR (72-STRING HAMMERED DULCIMER) AND TAR (SIX-STRING LUTE WITH SKIN BELLY) WITH TECHNO RHYTHM TRACK AND SAMPLED CHORUS FROM JESUS AND MARY CHAIN’S “JUST LIKE HONEY”
Hold, then:
DISSOLVE TO:
INT WARDEN’S OFFICE
WARDEN gets down from her desk, crumples two notes into little balls, shuffles them behind her back, and then extends two fists.
WARDEN
Pick one.
MARK’S POV
His eyes dart anxiously from fist to fist — from right fist to left fist, to right, to left, back and forth, back and forth, and back and forth. This oscillating pan continues for seven minutes, becoming steadily faster until camera movement is a pendular blur.
Display boilerplate MOTION PICTURE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA WARNING at bottom of screen:
Prolonged exposure to this cinematic effect may induce petit-mal seizures in some viewers.
Finally, MARK taps the Warden’s left fist.
WARDEN opens fist and smooths crumpled note.
CLOSE SHOT of note:
You wanna get high?
MARK
(coyly)
You … wanna?
WARDEN
Do you have any drugs?
MARK
(patting pockets of leather trousers)
I have one linty phenobarbital, which we could split. Or if you have any, uh, air freshener or Pam, we could, like, huff the butane …
WARDEN
(De haut en bas, but generous. Keep in mind that this is a woman from a dreary rust-belt town in the northwestern corner of Pennsylvania, who, as the child of emotionally withholding working-class parents, grew up with no sense of entitlement, but, motivated by a passion for discipline and punishment and impelled by sheer Polish-Catholic chutzpah, clawed her way up the New Jersey Department of Corrections hierarchy to become the first female warden of a men’s maximum-security facility in the state’s history. At this precise moment in the movie, she transcends the stereotype of the “compulsively glamorous yet tormented warden” and achieves a hard-won noblesse. It’s worth doing hundreds of takes to achieve the finely nuanced delivery that this line requires.)
Hmmm … I think we can do a little better than that.
SLOW-MOTION TRACKING SHOT
as warden puts arm around Mark’s shoulder and walks him to a locked room adjacent to her office.
We hear DONNA SUMMER’S “MACARTHUR PARK” (dance mix).
(The distance between the warden’s office and the adjacent locked room is less than five feet, but the Giorgio Moroder dance mix of Summer’s “MacArthur Park” is some eight and a half minutes long, so this TRACKING SHOT of the WARDEN and MARK should be slowed down as much as possible to accommodate the FULL LENGTH of the SONG.
In addition to super slow motion, intercut long shots, detail shots, retracking dolly shots, high angles, wide angles, reverse angles, freeze frames, canted frames — whatever is necessary to stretch this five-second walk into an eight-and-a-half-minute shot coextensive with the sound track.)