Friday 14 January 2011

It's votin' time kiddies - get your votin' hats on and head down to that comments section (or else I'll cry)

Okay kids - so I've written seven story lines for seven possible screenplays.
Now I'm going to take a week off to concentrate on my music career.

No seriously, I'm going to concentrate on my music career.

Yeah I know that's what everyone says when they quit the cast of Neighbours when they're actually secret coke heads - but I really am. I can't afford to be a coke head. I work for a charity for heavens sake!

Anyway - cast your votes below, or I'll remake Titanic on a dingy.

Love love love xxxxxxxxxx

Thursday 13 January 2011

Robots need love too.....

Botdance - a synopsis for a strange and unusual fifteen minute film by Jess Sweetman

(Disclaimer - parts of this synopsis are based on what my brother Jake actually thought, for many years, the movie Flashdance was about. Suffice to say he was deeply disappointed when it turned out not to actually be an extended 80's music video with no plot or robots.)

Natasha, a twenty five year old loser has been to purgatory, heaven and hell following an attention seeking suicide attempt (whiskey and lemsip) which went awry and killed her. Having escaped from Hell by cutting a bargain to correct all her previous bad behaviour she takes the wrong pipe to The Past and ends up crashing into The Future.

The Future is a land where robots have taken over England and rule with an iron (ahem) grip. Adult humans are slaves whilst their offspring are hoarded into nurseries until they are of working age.

When patrolling robots, on account of her clothing and inability to respond to simple commands, mistake Natasha for an infant suffering from giganticism she is placed in a nursery where she befriends some socially inept teenagers. The teenagers take Natasha into their confidence and show her the special space that they have hidden from the robots, in which they are learning to dance - using cuttings from 80's magazines that fell through a wormhole in space as inspiration, and the soundtrack to The Stud, the Jackie Collins penned classic movie. Dancing has been prohibited by the evil robots - who only have one early 80's dance move to brag about and is punishable by death.

Using her age and experience as someone who hasn't been raised by robots to her advantage Natasha takes leadership of the group, showing them a variety of moves which she invented whilst holed up in her room with no friends. The teenagers learn fast and Natasha is also able to put the moves onto Todd, a particularly ripped 17 year old.

The robots burst in, however, and the teenagers and Natasha are forced to start the revolution against the robots. Because of their physical prowess and dangerous moves they are able to fight down the attacking hoards and the revolution is a complete success. The teenagers and Natasha are put in charge of the country.

After imposing one law upon the newly liberated humans - compulsory dance - and ignoring all other social need whilst distracted by hair products, the rediscovery of films and music and their own squabbles, the teenagers and Natasha are overthrown by the adults and Natasha takes the opportunity to grab a wormhole back to the past, where she was originally supposed to be, leaving a heart broken Todd behind.

Tuesday 11 January 2011

Um.....

Okay so house hunting got in the way of writing today.
Will finish tomorrow. In the meantime - start commenting on my previous blogs or I will scream.
Love you all xxxxxxx

Monday 10 January 2011

The ultimate champion of everything

Caroline is 15, ginger, overweight and sarcastic her best friend Molly is eight months pregnant and called Molly - suffice to say that everyone at their school hates them. However due to their amazing friendship and the fact that everyone else in their school are dicks, they don't really care very much.

But even the two outsiders can't help noticing that something strange is going on at the school. Every day it seems another outcast is turning up with something missing from their personality and the top of their heads and no one seems to be doing anything about it.

After an unfortunate fighting incident Caroline is put into detention by Miss Roper, the scary Biology teacher where she uncovers the terrifying secret that the most popular girls at school are taking part in a terrifying ceremony of penfighting, led by the teacher herself.

After being caught evesdropping she is forced to bring her own pen fighting skills out of retirement, having buried them and the shameful secret that she has carried to this day before fighting the ultimate battle of good versus evil penfighter in order to save herself, her school and her rapidly going into labour best friend.......

Sunday 9 January 2011

Back to screenplays about lost souls in seaside towns.....

And then what? A treatment for a 15 minute film by J Rosie Ratbag 

It's 1993, Lily, a 71 year old woman is living in temporary accommodation in a crumbling hotel on Clacton seafront. As part of the Care in the Community scheme, which took place in Britain in the 80's and 90's Lily has been moved away from the mental hospital where she spent the majority of her life, having suffered several nervous breakdowns in her mid thirties.

Lost from the routine that permeated her entire life Lily finds sanctuary walking the beach during the day, sometimes accompanied by her bawdy, funny niece Alice.

On her walks she begins notice a fellow walker, a crap transvestite in her mid 40's called Diana. Lily follows Diana on several occasions, following her into charity shops - (quickly buying the clothes that Diana perused) and to a local community centre, where Diana teaches a drama class.

The next day, accompanied by Alice, Lily attends the drama class and begins to get Diana to take notice of her, although her shyness prevents her from speaking. They audition for the upcoming play and Alice is awarded the part of Juliet in Romeo and Juliet whilst Lily plays a tree.

Rehearsals for the play go well, as seen through a montage sequence, and Lily begins to break the ice with Diana. The two of them almost speak on several occasions.

Then, on the night of the show, disaster strikes. Brian, the strange man who was due to play Romeo has to pull out due to work commitments and Diana is forced to step in. Meanwhile Alice has an allergic reaction to the seafood dinner that the ladies cooked themselves the night before and swells up - having to be taken to hospital. No one else is available who knows the part and time is of the essence.

Prompted by a visit from the Virgin Mary in a cup of tea Lily finds the courage to speak and admits to Diana that she knows the part word perfectly. The show goes on, with a perfect kiss and both leads being showered with roses at curtain call.

Two weeks later Lily and Alice are preparing to go on one of their walks,  Diana shows up as they're leaving the hotel and the three walk away together.

Saturday 8 January 2011

Breaking my own rules again

Hello, I've decided to take today off because a) I'm vaguely hungover and full of lovely fish pie, b) we've been house hunting and it makes me want to curl up in a ball and weep and c) because, as a mistress of my own destiny, I like setting my own rules and then breaking them.

Back tomorrow with more amazing ideas. Hopefully!
love love

Friday 7 January 2011

Is he ill?? No he's just a little horse....

"I'm losing more than I ever had" a synopsis for a 15 minute screenplay by Tommy Lassoo

Phillip lives in a one bedroom house on the outskirts of Norwich. Over the last year his life has changed dramatically - Phillip used to weigh 30 stone, today he is a shadow of his former self. Now freed from his prison of fat, the details of parts of his life known entirely to his friends, neighbours and complete strangers, Phillip lives from day to day, he goes to work, he comes home, he exercises, he cooks, he sleeps.

We speak to his parents, who are still desperately trying to analyse what went wrong - why their son transformed himself from a happy, if loner child, to a one man eating machine. We speak to his ex girlfriend, who fell in love with the man she used to run alongside in fields near the houses where they grew up, but was driven away as he hid himself from the world.

Phillip says that food was his hobby, now dieting is his hobby. He doesn't wish for anything else.

Prompted by the machinations of a documentary crew who fear that their upcoming project for Channel 4 will fall flat due to lack of movement or story - Phillip's past life is dredged for anything they can find. Nothing turns up - he was a happy child who loved running, trotting and grazing.

Finally, flabagasted by their subject's lack of motivation the crew start setting him up in different social situations - a blind date, a comedy club, a shopping spree, but nothing can break the blank canvas of Phillip. Eventually they go to extremes and con him into attending an S & M club.

Phillip wanders the length of Torture Garden barely expressing a thing, he trudges through rows of spankers and wankers without even lifting an eyebrow. As the director starts to hissy fit Phillip's attention is caught by a young woman on a hobby horse. He approaches her and they speak in whispers for a few moments.

In the final scene we see a glorious pantomime horse galloping across a field in perfect sunlight. Phillip has found himself.

Thursday 6 January 2011

So what would happen if Jordan was kidnapped, Patti Hearst style, by a bunch of angry feminists and then began to understand their ways ......?

Calling occupants of interplanetary bras - an idea for a 15 minute film by J R Sweetperson 


On 1 January 2014, exactly one year and four months to the day since her dramatic kidnapping during the Inside Soap Awards, Jordan, or Katie Price as she was known, or Dr Shakira Tigerlady as she now refers to herself, emerged from a burned out beach hut in Clacton looking dishevelled, without make up but otherwise healthy, clutching a hand grenade and demanding to be taken to the editor of Marie Claire Magazine.

Furious psychiatric evaluations and a criminal trial for fire arms charges and her alleged role in a bank robbery in Chiswick later, coupled with six months in a residential facility for wayward crazies, she's here now for an exclusive interview with us - Behind the Makeup - to talk about her time in captivity, her trial and her subsequent rejection of her former self. Not to mention her PhD in Cultural Studies, marriage to Kim Kerr, the lead guitarist of Riot Grrrl band Fucktits, and the upcoming release of their first collaboration on itunes.

It promises to the wildest 15 minutes of your life.

Wednesday 5 January 2011

You have to watch this!!!!

Jeanette Leech - goddess of screen and literature about psych folk pointed me in the direction of this. It's Todd Haynes' first film Superstar - the Karen Carpenter story. This was the holy grail of my university class. I've wanted to see it for about ten years and it's fucking amazing. In every way.

Go on - you know you want to......

It was the damn cat who started it all......

Some chumps in need of rescuing - a treatment for a 15 minute film by J Rowan Ramirez. 

It was the damn cat who started it all. My mother always told me you shouldn't trust a broad who lay down in an instant of you meeting her and let you stroke her belly, but I never had listened to a word my mother said. I'd been happy not leaving the house - other people called it a funk in a bad way but I saw it more as the James Brown kind of funk. And who needed to leave the house anyway? We live in an internet age - I can get sushi delivered in the morning and the fat sucked out in the PM, and the people who go to work say I'm the chump?

But the damn cat wouldn't leave it alone, so while I'm instant messaging some guy in Albuquerque who says he can fulfil my wildest fantasies with just the click of a mouse she's jumping across my keyboard like there's ants in her pants. I told her she could have him, he'd sent a picture of a catalogue model which meant he'd be some thirty stone sweat ball who couldn't use Photoshop whacking one out in his mother's utility room, but she never stopped to ask. Hell, she was a cat.

"Please help me" types the cat. Man alive, who'd have thought the cat could talk? Or at least type. I stopped for a minute. This was quite unusual. Then she did it again: "Laura, I need your help. Marvin."

Maybe some background will help. You see, two years ago I wasn't the wreck you saw before you - I'd been like the regular shmos, you know - house, job, loving and supporting relationship. I'd been one of those chicks who smiled and showed their teeth as if she meant it, and I think I did.

But I'd messed it up one night  - you see I'd always had this weird thing for this no one from the seventies. I had always told myself that it was ironic but somehow it managed to hit my brain on the way out and stick around, my original first love had been a Dungeons and Dragons freak who'd run off to join a suicide cult so he seemed like a much simpler daydream - so when he came to my city I had to go and find out what was what.

The concert was strange - a crowd made up of middle aged straight men and their confused looking wives, a bartender too young to give a fuck and a floor that looked like on of my dead grandfather's lungs. My Albuquerque friend would have felt right at home, but I can safely say it freaked me out. So I went outside, the thing was - it had freaked him out too so there I am, face to face with the man who used to be my idol. A drunk, swollen, bitter and I can pretty safely say facelifted version of the man I'd imagined my first kiss with.

Maybe we were kindred spirits or maybe our kindred spirit was bourbon, either way I found myself slapping aside all of those husband and house thoughts as we hit the seedy hotel bar next door, followed by the seedy hotel.

I would have got away with it too, but I'd left something behind. I was always told that a good writer takes their notebook with them everywhere they went - an album worth of songs, beautiful songs, the pouring out of my soul from my perfect life. I guess I left it with the wrong guy. Six months later, as I was planning a June wedding, his new album broke new ground. Some Rick Rubin produced comeback to rival Johnny Cash, with a host of stolen songs- and just who was he kissing on the front cover?

So it's been two days and the cat won't stop. I tried putting her outside but she has these voodoo qualities these days, I keep expecting my head to shrink. All the time it pops up - "Please help me. I'm being held against my will. Find my ex wife - she'll know where I am." All from the man who ruined me for the sake of a few goddamn pop songs. Why should I help him? Why should I leave the house? Why should I do anything but sit here and rot?

The cat looks at me with pleading eyes, her kind know how to make you squirm, they must have been taught that shit at kitten school. "I don't even know who his frickin' ex wife is!" I plead with the moggy, as I sit down and google his name.

They have everything on the internet. Food, sex, everything but slee. One day people will never have to go outside again. I reassure myself of this as I print out a map and dust off my coat.

That goddamn cat. She really owes me one this time.

Tuesday 4 January 2011

Seven ideas in seven days - DAY 1!

Creativity needs to be forced. It needs to be kicked around and threatened, it needs to be confined to a room and poked with sticks. It's a lazy bastard who, given the opportunity, will kill itself in front of the TV eating pizza and watching Judge Judy. This is the story of my life - and probably every other creative person I know, but not this week! If this blog has taught me anything it is that I work much better when I have deadlines and challenges and different things to think about. I'm a whirlwind kind of girl, hence the mountains of unfinished novels that litter my life.

As I said in my last post I've set myself the challenge of making a 15 minute film, a good quality one with dialogue and actors and everything. So I'm starting off the writing process with a good old fashioned pitching session to myself.

My challenge this week, starting today is to come up with seven short treatments for fifteen minute screenplays. The only conditions are that they need two main actors and can be made on a shoestring budget (of about £100 if I can even save that much!). Other than that the only thing holding me back is lack of imagination and the aforementioned lazy Judge Judy watching thing. That or if I get hit by a bus.

So here we go, it's day one and here's the first treatment:

The Holiday. 

Edwyn is a hypochondriac in his late twenties, tormented by his own neurosis and the constant condemnation of Googled symptoms, the fear of death threatened by a sore throat, the cancer in the bumps at the back of his tongue, the unusual aroma of his own sweat - he lives a life of perpetual fear. His family stay away from him, his friends no longer phone, he waits in front of the TV for death to overtake him.

One morning Edwyn enters a dissociative fugue state, his memory leaves him. His personality and identity fly out of the window. Leaving all of his possessions behind Edwyn follows the fugue state and flees.

Dissociative fugue states are not only characterised by memory loss but also by flight, movement away from a person's home and, perhaps, the tragic circumstances that led to the state in the first place. Edwyn leaves London in an almost zombie walk - boarding trains to the East coast. He reaches the end of the line on the Suffolk coast and continues to walk, reaching a cliff top and continuing his walk along it.

On the cliff top he encounters Diana, an older woman, high functioning alcoholic and competitive walker, who has walked this cliff top every day of her life. Perplexed at being out-walked by this strange figure who barely acknowledges her, she passive aggressively tries to out walk him over a number of miles. But when she nearly drives him off the cliff she relents and forces him to sit a while with her on the cliff top - before leading him back to town.

Finding he has nowhere to stay Diana takes Edwyn back to her house, a filthy cat lady home characterised by piles of filthy newspaper and windows that block out the light. Pleased when he makes no comment on her surroundings she begins to warm to him.

The next day the two walk further, together in silence for an entire day.

They return and Edwyn switches on the television to reveal a televised broadcast by Edwyn's family, desperately seeking his whereabouts.  In his fugue state Edwyn pays it no attention. Diana calmly switches the television off and continues with her evening.

Saturday 1 January 2011

I'm back baby.....

Well hello there blogosphere, it's fabulous to see you and contribute my little burp to the unending noise that pours forth from you. So following a bottle of tequila, several banana daquiris (which were fabulous by the way, crafted lovingly by me) and vast quantities of cheap cava (reduced in Sainsburys) I gave myself a little new years lie in this morning but now I'm back to sprinkle my artistic thingies into the world.

So for the past three months I have been hiding out a little and not blogging. (I love the fact that the spell check here dislikes the word blogging, oh cheap irony) but I haven't been completely inactive. Basically I haven't had much to say - or rather if I started to express myself it would just come out in a nasty scream that would continue until I pass out on the floor. I am, of course, referring to our beloved government, you know - the ones who lied to the electorate continuously throughout their campaigning and then barged in with a shit load of cuts and ideological decisions that would make Thatcher blush if she wasn't an evil cyborg wearing a woman suit.

No amount of art, no amount of blogging and no amount of screaming will put this situation right, so instead I did the brave thing and hid. I hid in my quite lovely life and made lots of t-shirts instead. I also knitted. I will be posting pictures of everything that I've knitted and printed pretty soon, but first I have to get everyone I gave the aforementioned items to to take pictures of them and send them to me. I'm not a very practical person apparently!!!

But it wasn't to last - setting up this blog last year was one of the best things I've ever done because it made me get off my arse and get something done. I made four videos last year, I recorded songs and let people hear them, I wrote cartoons and discovered that I have a small and very specialist amount of artistic talent. I was in an advert for crappy bingo, I played flute on four albums and I encouraged six people to dress up in wedding dresses and go crazy in Finsbury Park. I made my life better and even if I can't counteract the bastards that are dismantling the country, at least I can spread a bit of love.

So - here are my plans for January, I'm going to find a guitarist and start a band, and I'm going to write a script for a 15 minute film. So far today I've posted an ad on Gumtree. That's the easy bit done anyway. As for the rest - I'm just going to have to push myself.

Watch this space. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx