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The Screenwriter in Cyberspace
By Charles Deemer

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Column #13 - My Holiday Cyberspace Wish List

Tis the season to daydream - and if, as a kid, I wondered what Santa Claus was going to bring me, as an adult I find myself dreaming about the future and possibilities of cyberspace for screenwriters. For example, wouldn't it be nice . . .

If Dealmakers got online . . .

I have a confession to make: I am appalled at how few people who make decisions in Hollywood are online. Perhaps, you say, this is understandable since they would quickly be flooded with electronic queries and pitches. Well, I would reply, isn't that their job?

Okay, the actual power people, the individuals, may not come online but their representatives - VP Development prodco folks and lower echelon agents - surely belong here, where business gets done so much more efficiently. An agent or development executive can consider and reject many more scripts electronically than in hard copy. I teach screenwriting online and know this as a fact: the grunt work of "opening and reading mail" and of making some kind of evaluation about it is more efficiently done online than off.

So let 1997 see more agents and development people come online.

If meetings happened online . . .

. And once the people get online, then why not much of the day-to-day activity of Hollywood? Meetings of all kinds - from pitching scripts to meeting with writers on developing projects - can happen in cyberspace as easily as in the flesh. I know because last summer I developed a new hyperdrama with a theater company in Santiago, Chile, and one of the remarkable things about the experience was how smoothly and easily the development process went. My director and I met regularly using the software Powwow for Windows, and the experience was almost everything face-to-face meetings would have been.

I recently had a similar experience in Ireland, where another new stage play received its world premiere as a result of my meeting the director of LiveWire on the net. I met with the actors in cyberspace, again using Powwow, much as I would have met with them and answered questions during a rehearsal.

Telecommuting is becoming a reality in the conservative corporate world, and in Hollywood I hope to see the trend happen as well.

If someone created the perfect screenwriting software . . .

I've written elsewhere about the perfect screenwriting program, and it's long overdue. Let's face it, we are not talking about formatting here. Many programs do this adequately. For my money, what the perfect screenwriting software would include is built-in story-development tools, including graphical representation of story structure accessible on the fly.

I was a beta tester for the new Movie Master for Windows, and the development folks there tell me something very much like this is on their upgrade list. We'll see. In the meantime, the many capable programs all have various bells and whistles but none embed quite what I have in mind, which would be immediate access to story-structure aids, character profiles, and the like, within the running software itself.

Please, Santa, next year?

If original digital movies were produced . . .

There is a huge untapped movie audience out there. Senior citizens. As the baby-boomers retire, this audience will explode to even greater numbers. These people do not like to go out at night. They don't go to theaters, and they don't go to video stores. Moreover, few movies are made that interest them or the concerns of their generation, or the concerns of seniors.

Once digital movies are produced and delivered to home entertainment screens via the Internet, this market will be famished for new product. I, for one, would love to write to this demand. There are many stories, albeit most of them character-driven, for this presently underground and unaddressed audience, which is starving for movies of interest. There's been a reason for their invisibility, which is the fact that this audience by and large stays at home. But now product can easily be delivered to them, via the Internet.

Digital movies for seniors! What a concept!

If the Internet remained open and accessible . . .

Although I have as much fun with the bells and whistles of cyberspace as the next guy, I am disturbed by the increasing glitz on the Internet. There's a trend that says content is less important than packaging. I am very sensitive to this since about 25% of my traffic at The Screenwriters & Playwrights Home Page is via text-only access. More and more, these people are finding sites that are indecipherable because of a widespread use of "frames" (God, I hate frames!) or by a refusal to use the alternative coding that would make high-end sites available to low-end users.

As a result, these text-only surfers go to a movie-related site and find [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] on the screen instead of something meaningful. I call this trend High Tech Fascism, an attitude that says if you're not good enough to run the latest browser on a pentium, then you're not good enough to visit my site.

Don't fill any fascist stockings this year, Santa.

Well, I could add more, but that's enough for Christmas, especially one with so many deadlines crowded into the holidays. Have happy holidays and see you next year.

--Charles Deemer



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Originally appeared at the Hollywood Network.