Gustavo Freitas's Lounge Discussions

My script is finally done and I’m learning that getting current contact information for producers, actors, etc. is nearly impossible unless you subscribe to services like IMDb or contactanycelebrity.com. Is this money well spent? Thanks.

I would like to thank Richard Botto, founder and CEO at Stage 32 for the opportunity that Stage 32 provided me. By being a member of Stage 32, I was able to find a screenwriter who took a chance on my true story of international intrigue and danger. I offered a three-year option for one dollar on my memoir Running Scared. https://www.amazon.com/Running-Scared-Robert-William-Jackson/dp/1496035860 First, some background on my story. I wrote my memoir in 2006, while I was in the Veterans Administration hospital and recovering from surgery at the Veterans Administration that didn’t go well for me due to bungling medical care and a botched surgery that left me with the flesh-eating disease on my abdomen. I thought I was going to die, so I broke my silence, and wrote the biography of what I found but was gagged and threatened with death if I told while I was laying in the VA hospital. A death threat delivered by the National Security Agent in front of a witness in the summer of 1988. I taped the meeting and the death threat. Three weeks after the death threat my VW bug blew up in flames when I started it. I had been warned to always leave the door open and don’t put on the seatbelt until you have started the car. I rolled out of the flaming car as it exploded. The message the agent had delivered to me and the writer of my first book that we would be terminated with extreme prejudice had been underlined. It was not a question of whether we would suffer pain, it was a question about how long they would torture me until they allowed me to die. I took the death threat and the exploding car as a sign to keep my mouth shut from 1988 until 2014, when I finally published the memoir on Amazon. I found I have a heart condition in 2014, so the NSA death threat was moot. From 2014 until 2018, I went on Twitter and tweeted thirty times a day looking for a writer who would take my story on a one-dollar option for a three -year contract. Finally, I had a writer who said he couldn’t do it himself but recommended I go to Stage 32. I joined Stage 32 and posted my Running Scared advertisements and copy looking for a screenwriter for two weeks, until I met the screenwriter Gustavo Freitas. Gustavo Freitas is a Brazilian screenwriter with a background as an Intelligence Officer at the Brazilian Marine Corps, where he reached the rank of captain. After that, he became a lawyer and a federal attorney, working as a legal adviser in the presidential staff under two different Presidents. With this personal experience on intelligence and politics, Gustavo interviewed Robert Jackson for a period of eight months to research his participation in the Iran-Contra scandal and to adapt his memoir into a screenplay. Gustavo and I worked out a contract and a purchase price for the memoir rights, and I hired an entertainment attorney, signed the contract, and the film manufacturing began. PROJECT SYNOPSIS This story is a thriller/biopic based on the life of Robert W. Jackson, a Navy Petty Officer who uncovered and publicly denounced an illegal scheme to sell weapons to Iran to gain secret funds for the White House to funnel to the Contras, who had been cut off by Congress. It all started while he was serving on the USS Kitty Hawk, and noticed irregularities, and ended up with him embroiled in the Iran-Contra affair. Based on the book Running Scared, which tells Robert Jackson’s story; and on personal interviews conducted by the screenplay author, Gustavo Freitas, Jackson revealed additional events and details that were not in the book. He also provided Freitas with documentary and other evidence, including a recording of one of his interviews. Jackson then contributed to the revisions of the script and provided detailed technical notes that ensured further accuracy in the story. Although a lot of research was involved, and the film on the whole hews closely to true events, the script contains connective story tissue that helps fill documentary gaps. Jackson’s whistleblowing was covered contemporaneously by the LA Times in a series of pieces written by reporter Glenn Bunting. Jackson ended up testifying before Congress, but a legal maneuver prevented him from revealing the details of the scheme where the White House used the Kitty Hawk for transshipment and concealment. I took Gustavo’s script and put it on Stage 32 with my ads looking for a producer, production company, or studio trying to create a team of people who could help get this excellently written movie script written by Gustavo Freitas onto the silver screen. Four-hundred-forty views later and Gustavo contacted me, and NO REST FOR THE BRAVE www.norestforthebrave.com began the development process under the guidance provided by MPMG and Roth Stock Pictures. Moving Pictures Media Group, also known as MPMG, is a production company founded for motion picture, television, and internet content. MPMG provides a full suite of services to assist independent filmmakers, production companies and investors in the development, production, post-production, distribution, and marketing of their projects. www.movingpicturesmg.com In the film and television business, think of Roth Stock Pictures as the bridge between creative and business. We are story driven first and foremost. That is always our main priority. However, once a good story has been identified, our instincts quickly turn mercenary in order to get your project financed and into theaters, on broadcast and cable, streaming, in hotel and airline systems, and anywhere else we can get your content in front of an audience! Roth Stock Pictures: Engaging Audiences on All Platforms. Visit www.rothstock.com for more. I would like to thank MPMG, Roth Stock Pictures, and Gustavo Freitas for their help in the film manufacturing process. Currently the film project is in the development phase. None of this would be happening if it weren’t for Richard Botto and Stage 32’s platform connecting people in the film industry to help people succeed in Hollywood. And now… I am going back to penning HESTER AND HER ADVENTURES WITH MERLIN a Scottish action-adventure tale. Maybe, someday, this story will be adapted into a PG-13 action-adventure film. It has Puck, wizards, a house brownie, and vampires in this Young adult Scottish story.

Hi everybody, I have a question regarding authorship, credit. Let me know if this ever happened to you: so, some months ago I was approached by a writer who wrote a 14-pages children's book about 2 animals fighting over a jungle and being then dominated by men. It's self published on Amazon. I wrote 100 pages of a script based in that concept with other characters, storyline, names, title, structure, moral lesson, of course dialogues, about the journey of 2 different main characters in the same environment of the book, another villain and a different final. So I put "based in X book". Now it's time to talk about payment and the author asked me to sign a paper 1st in which says that he is the original writer of the film (if it gets made) and I'm just the screenwriter. That he could write it himself if he had time, clearly ignoring the +/- 80 pages of my original story in it. It doesn't seem fair. What would u do?

Very excited to share that I have been selected for the 2019 Disney/NBC/NHMC TV Writers program .

https://twitter.com/NHMC/status/1179123600311214080

I was just devouring ep. 152 of Dax Shepard's podcast Armchair Expert with Ed Norton and he had some fascinating anecdotes around his experience as a first-time director of Motherless Brooklyn, and really fascinating insights on filmmaking in general, but one soundbite stood out.

He shared a conversation he had with the late, legendary producer Robert Evans that really struck a cord, particularly if you're just starting to pitch your projects. Evans said...

"If you can tell me in three lines, it’s a hit. If you can tell me in one line, it’s a blockbuster."

Just gonna leave that right here. Best of luck honing your pitches!

What's it called when you have something like a Title Card, but it's in the film for a given purpose? For instance, say you have a scene with a phone conversation, then it cuts to a card that says "Five minutes later . . .", before cutting back to the conversation but five minutes into it. Anybody know what I'm talking about? And, if so, what is it called? Please and thank you in advance.

Below you can find the translation of my article, published last Sunday in Folha de Sao Paulo, one of the largest newspapers in Latin America, talking about genres in Brazilian cinema. I think it can bring an overview of the industry in Latin America, which can be handy since streaming companies are analyzing their products taking into account their potential penetration in other countries, outside the US. The link for the original article is at the end os the text. It's a long reading.

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The Cookie Dilemma and the Brazilian Cinema

Suffocated by Hollywood powerful competition and lacking private investment, Brazilian's film producers lean on cheaper genres

There's an old cookie commercial in Brazil where a kid asked his mom: “Is this cookie sold out because it is so fresh, or is it so fresh because it sells too much?”

The Brazilian film industry faces an equally complex existential dilemma. Do Brazilian movies flop because they have no money, or do they lack money because they flop? In an industry that employs 400,000 people, this issue has profound repercussions.

Every year, 160 million people invade the 3,300 Brazilian cinema theaters. But 8 out of 10 prefer to watch Hollywood movies.

The incredibly low quantity of theaters, the virulent marketing of foreign titles, and our anemic public policy for the sector may be pointed out as partially responsible for this scenario, but this is the subject of another article. I am a screenwriter. And I'll talk about what I understand: tell stories.

What stories are our movies telling? And what kind of stories should we tell?

A recent study by Ancine (Brazil's National Film Agency) contradicts the myth that Brazilians don't like Brazilian movies. Of the 10 most viewed feature films in the country from 2009 to 2017, three are Brazilian and two of them are on the top of the list: “The Ten Commandments” and “Elite Squad 2”. "Elite Squad's" protagonist Captain Nascimento has sacked Captain America, at least in Brazil.

Brazilians love Brazilian movies, but the success of a few titles cannot set standards for an entire industry. We need to produce what the audiences want to see. The table below provides data to enlighten this discussion.

Cinemas are swarmed by young people, half of the cinema-goers have between 14 to 34 years of age. They love intense emotions. Thus, it's not a surprise that the genre that most attracts audiences in Brazil is adventure (38%).

The international film industry analyses this kind of information and follows suit. Of all adventure films released in Brazil from 2009 to 2017, 96% were foreign.

In Brazil, we don't follow the script as we should. Only 1% of all Brazilian feature films released in the same period were adventure movies. We simply ignored the genre with the highest average audience per movie in the country. If we add to this the action movies, another forgotten genre in Brazil, we come to 38 titles produced between 2009 and 2017, which sold over 30 million tickets. The 384 dramas released in the same period sold 35.7 million tickets.

Why don't we produce adventure movies? Or action movies, a genre in which our films perform slightly better nationwide than the foreign ones?

Comedy is our most successful case - the national box office is far above the foreign one. Our alignment with the market is unequivocal, stated by the average number of titles released every year, and also by the stories we are telling on the screens. So why can't we replicate this strategy in other genres?

For instance: there is a lot of room for Brazilian animations. We have the technique, which can be confirmed in our award-winning TV productions that are being aired worldwide. Nonetheless, investments are scarce. It is a very expensive genre to produce.

And we lack good animation scripts. We can't compare the particularities of writing a two-hour movie, in contrast to an eight-minute TV show episode. Some of our animations don't seduce the audiences. And they usually forget about the parents, the poor bastards that take their children to the movies.

Something similar can be said about horror. Considered a niche genre in Brazil, it is distrusted by distributors and producers, despite its more modest budget. There is room for writers that bring a fresh look and alternatives to the heritage of José Mojica Marins (Coffin Joe), who has undeniable merits but is only part of our tradition in the genre. In literature, for example, we have fantastic realism to inspire us.

The good performance of Brazilian action and adventure films proves their potential. However, these genres demand higher budgets to afford remote locations, breath-taking sequences and lots of visual effects. This situation has a direct impact on the number of annual releases.

About two years ago, I was hired to write an adventure movie. Due to the high cost, the producers asked me to adapt the script to English. Now they are negotiating with an American studio. It will be a foreign production, spoken in a language that is not ours.

Money plays a definitive part in the genre choices of Brazilian movies. Films are expensive. A feature can cost the same as an industrial plant. There is much talk in the movie industry about “production value”: the viewers only spend their money on a film if they “feel” that the ticket is worth paying.

This translates to impeccable sets and costumes, perfect sound, astonishing visual, A-list cast, and, of course, a compelling story. To produce animation, action or adventure in a tight budget compromises the “production value”. Audiences will disband. The financial risk may be insurmountable.

Raising investments, apart from incentive public programs, is hard all over the world. Even American blockbusters can be partly funded by tax rebates or tax cuts. Here in Brazil, things are even worse. Our economy is vilified by scorching taxes and government bonds that pay high interest at low risk, taking all the money from the productive system.

So we end up producing less expensive genres: dramas and comedies. Our comedies found the tone to please the audience. Our dramas seduced festivals worldwide. Cinema, after all, cannot live on economic results alone.

Great movies raise the bar for artists and bring deep questions to society. Some of our dramas have delivered excellent results, especially those with a supernatural penchant - a worldwide trend, and biopics, such as “Chico Xavier” and “Bruna Surfistinha”.

But there is a genre that costs the same as a drama or a comedy, and, in South Korea, it conquers 15% of the total audience: thriller. Built on an engaging text and a lean cost structure, thrillers have proven their strength in the hands of directors such as Alfred Hitchcock, Brian De Palma, Chan-wook Park, and Brazilians Fernando Coimbra and Beto Brant, among many others.

Some producers in Brazil have already noticed that. Recently I was invited to turn the book “A Garden of Sunflowers”, a drama by Lygia Barbiére Amaral, into a thriller.

It demanded an intense reengineering from me, the director, and the producers. We had endless meetings to identify together the heart of the story, and then I started adding elements of the genre without disfiguring the original plot and without losing sight of our goal: a movie with a Brazilian taste, but able to reach audiences worldwide. This is art complemented by market vision. Although this seems quite obvious, this is not usual in the Brazilian movie industry, even though it's a practice among our TV shows. Two of the five largest TV companies in the world are Brazilian.

There is a lot of space for comedies, and our dramas will continue to receive laurels worldwide. Nonetheless, taking the economic scenario of our country into account, and in face of the uncertainties of public policies for the industry, I bet on thriller to set a new normal among Brazilian audiences in the next decade, filling an important commercial and artistic gap, while adventure, action, and animation find their space among private investors.

If so, maybe after 20 years, we will be able to change the box office balance in favor of Brazilian productions.

So, turning to the cookie dilemma, the answer is quite simple: just tell a story that sells a lot, at a low cost, and eat the cookie. Then, the money to expensive productions that can sell even more will end up appearing.

Rafael Peixoto is the screenwriter of the feature film "A Garden of Sunflowers", currently under production, and author of the awarded series "Queen of Spades", in negotiation with networks.

http://bit.ly/FolhaCine1

https://blcklst.com/education/opportunities/77

The Black List has partnered with F. Gary Gray’s Fenix Studios to create a new screenwriting opportunity focused on identifying writers interested in writing a smart, elevated action script for the company.

From November 4, 2019 to February 1, 2020, interested screenwriters can submit feature script samples for consideration in the Fenix Studios Screenwriting Opportunity via the Black List website (blcklst.com.) Fenix Studios seeks to select a writer for a two-step blind screenwriting deal via this opportunity.

Script evaluations purchased on blcklst.com by January 1, 2020 will be considered for this partnership. Additional inquiries can also be directed to Black List Support (support@blcklst.com)

Fenix is currently developing a feature adaptation of the video game ECHO (written by Derek Kolstad of the JOHN WICK trilogy) as well as a feature adaptation of the video game franchise SAINT’S ROW, with Greg Russo (MORTAL KOMBAT) writing as a potential directing vehicle for F. Gary Gray.

I am a brazilian produced screenwriter, based in LA. I have written 5 produced films in my country and my work is currently on Netflix: the one hour drama Most Beautiful Thing (2019) and the comedy Samantha! (2018). After a long career in my country, I'm looking foward to make some connections and meet new colleagues here. Thank you for having me!

When you're reading a screenplay, what screams out "amateur"?

I've just started to notice that certain words in common use in these forums (like start, lawyer, survey...) appear in blue with double underlines. When I pass the cursor over them some annoying popup add appears. Am I the only one or are others witnessing this?

Has anyone received an invitation for project funding by connecting with well-known cryptographer, Paul K?