The Wretched :: An Introduction
The background behind my original screenplay.
There’s something funny about waking up and throwing on The Social Network soundtrack first thing in the morning…
As a kid growing up, all I wanted to be was a movie director. With my friends and neighborhood buddies I made a few home movies when we were all about 11 or 12 years old, roughly about 2006-2007ish. Ninja Movie Madness was maybe the only one I can think of that we actually completed. I shot and edited the whole thing with them, and I can look back now and relate to what George Lucas was going for with all those Special Edition re-releases of Star Wars, because there were a few different versions of that less than 10 minute movie, each with slightly different edits and songs. I had them uploaded to Myspace, but a few years ago their servers lost everything before 2016 after a failed server migration. I’ve tried searching Vimeo and YouTube too to see if I had it anywhere else, but sadly Ninja Movie Madness appears lost to time and is just a memory at this point.
There were other little videos we made, our next movie was going to be called 9mm Blast, but we had the cops called on us before we started filming because the airsoft guns we had as 12 year olds didn’t have orange tips clearly visible enough to calm some of the neighbors down. That pretty much brought an end to my filmmaking career as child, but not the end to my creative endeavors. Jump to fall 2015, and I’m now at Cleveland State as a junior and business major.
I’d moved on from wanting to be a movie director, even briefly wanting to be a game designer in high school too, but at this point in college, I was still taking a bunch of gen eds and was happy to take anything related to film. I took Intro to Film in an earlier semester which was a lot of fun, we watched classic movies like John Wayne’s The Searchers and my final paper was a written shot-for-shot breakdown of the drug deal scene towards the end of Boogie Nights (which was actually an option on our list of movies to pick from, not just my favorite Mark Wahlberg flick). But in the fall of 2015, I began taking a screenwriting course. This is still my favorite class I ever took. It’s a shame it’s so long ago now, and my memory is a little hazy on the details about this time in my life, but I really wish I could remember or find my professor’s name somewhere so I could give him credit for making it my favorite time at CSU. But if you’re out there reading this, Mr. Professor of fall 2015’s COM 325 Section 50 class, thank you.
Mr. Professor had experience as a screenwriter himself. He had IMDb credits. He walked us through story and character development, creating beat sheets and loglines, understanding the language and shorthand of how to write a screenplay, and everything. Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat was our textbook. Over the course of the semester we’d be learn how to write a screenplay piece by piece, and by the end we’d have created our own. It’s during this class that I wrote The Wretched.
A chunk of it at least.
The brief: The Magnificent Seven meets Mad Max set in space.
Logline: In the distant future, four wildly diverse inhabitants of a prison planet must set aside their differences in order to overtake the tyrannical warden who is guarding the only way off the planet and free themselves before the planet is eradicated by a nearby sun preparing to go supernova.
We didn’t write our whole 120 page screenplay during the semester, but our final paper was the completed first act to our story, just the first 30 pages. And that’s what I want to share with all of you.
Starting in 2020, comic writer Robert Kirkman and Skybound Entertainment began re-releasing The Walking Dead in full color as The Walking Dead Deluxe. If you didn’t know already, the 193-issue series that spawned the megahit zombie franchise was originally a black and white comic that ran from 2003 to 2019. While these new reprints are the first time the series has been put into color, they also include the Cutting Room Floor, a behind the scenes look by Kirkman at his original plot outlines and breakdowns and reflections on each issue of the series.
These reprints are only available in single issues, with no intentions to collect them in trade currently, and while it may be easy to fall behind with their fast-paced release schedule (there’s a new issue every two weeks), I find it super digestable in terms of being able to reread the series again without having to stop reading everything else I’m into at the moment.
I mention The Walking Dead Deluxe and the Cutting Room Floor at the end of each issue because that’s the kind of the experience I want to do with The Wretched here on Peace, Love, and Comics.
Starting this Friday (Hey, about time I created a schedule to hold myself to), I’ll start sharing my original pages to The Wretched and talk about where my head was at during the time, where my influences came from, how I feel about my writing and storytelling now, and more. I’m nervous to share this all, but I’m looking forward to it! I have a hard time going back and re-reading anything I’ve written and The Wretched is now nearly seven years old, but I’m proud of what I wrote at the time and am ready to share it with more than just a few close friends and family as I read it again for the first time in years too.
I’ll see you all back here Friday for the opening scene.
::RC
“Mr. Professor” may be Evan Lieberman. I just searched the faculty at CSU and he was there then, and he still is. It sounds like it was a really interesting class. I wish I had the wisdom to explore classes like this when I was in college.