Speaker 1: Welcome to episode 432 of the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I'm Ashley Scott Myers, screenwriter and blogger at sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I am interviewing writer and director and oftentimes producer Keone Waxman. He just wrote and directed a new feature film called The Ravine. It's about a murder-suicide and was based on a true story. And then it was turned into a book by two people that were involved with the case. And then Keone ended up adapting that book into a screenplay. So we talk quite a bit about that process, the art of adapting novels into screenplays. So if that's something you're interested in, this interview is definitely for you. So stay tuned for that. SYS's six-figure screenplay contest is open for submissions. Just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com slash contest. Our regular deadline is May 31st, so it's coming up. If your script is ready, definitely submit now to save some money. We're looking for the best low-budget shorts and features. I'm defining low-budgets as less than six figures, in other words, less than one million U.S. dollars. We've got lots of industry judges reading scripts in the later rounds. We're giving away thousands in cash and prizes. This year we have a short film category, 30 pages or less. So if you have a low-budget short script, by all means, submit that as well. We've got a number of industry judges who are producers and are looking for short scripts. Once again, if you want to submit or learn more about the contest, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com slash contest. If you find this episode valuable, please help me out by giving me a review in iTunes or leaving a comment on YouTube or retweeting the podcast on Twitter or liking or sharing it on Facebook. These social media shares really do help spread word about the podcast, so they're very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mention in the podcast can be found on my blog in the show notes. I also publish a transcript with every episode in case you'd rather read the show or look at something later on. You can find all the podcast show notes at www.sellingyourscreenplay.com slash podcast and then just look for episode number 432. If you want my free guide, How to Sell Screenplay in 5 Weeks, you can pick that up by going to sellingyourscreenplay.com slash guide. It's completely free. You just put in your email address and I'll send you a new lesson once per week for five weeks along with a bunch of bonus lessons. I teach the whole process of how to sell your screenplay in that guide. I'll teach you how to write professional logline and query letter, how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material. Really it's everything you need to know to sell your screenplay. Just go to sellingyourscreenplay.com slash guide. So a quick few words about what I'm working on. Mainly I've been spending a lot of time recently just trying to understand crypto and the NFT landscape and how it actually could work for filmmakers. I've got a couple interviews I'm working on lining up. There definitely seems to be sort of a movement with the NFTs and the crypto to try and raise money for a film. Obviously with my film, The Rideshare Killer, it's already done. So I'm trying to come up with something that I can offer as NFTs now that the film is done. So that's really what I've been kind of thinking about. And as I said, I haven't really found a lot of filmmakers that are that into it. I do think that in the future and over the next decade, there's going to be a lot more opportunities with crypto and NFTs in the filmmaking landscape, but really in almost every industry, but certainly in the filmmaking landscape. So I've come up with an NFT project that I am going to do for The Rideshare Killer. So I'm working on getting that ready. Might be another month before I can officially start trying to sell these NFTs for The Rideshare Killer, but I sort of figured out what I want to do and now I just need to execute on what I've come up with. So stay tuned for that. It's going to be a pretty big project, so it's just going to take me quite a while to kind of get everything up and running. We're still waiting for our first payment from Indie Rights on The Rideshare Killer, so that's exciting. We really didn't start until, you know, I think it was pretty late into January, so we haven't even had a full quarter here, but we're just excited to see how much we're going to get off this first quarter. We really have no idea what it's going to look like. I think the first quarter will hopefully be something, but usually these things start slowly and then that second, third, fourth quarter, hopefully some revenue will start to come in. We're definitely looking for that. If you haven't checked out the film The Rideshare Killer, you can watch it for free on TubiTV. I've mentioned that before. They do show ads every 15 minutes or so, and that's how the filmmakers, we actually make money is by these ads that they tie to the film. It's just like watching regular television. You're going to watch the movie and then they're going to put in some ads at hopefully some opportune places. Also through trying to track my own films and figure out where they are playing, I discovered this website, justwatch.com. You can search for a movie on it and it will tell you exactly where it's playing among all the streaming platforms. That's just a handy tool for any film you're thinking of watching and you're wondering. I know I run into this all the time. There's a movie I want to watch. I have all of these services, Netflix and Hulu. Between me and my kids and my wife, we're paying for all of these things. I don't even know some of the ones we have. I think my wife even has Peacock. She watches soccer. We have all of these things, but you can never tell what is playing where. This website seems very, very handy. Again, it's just justwatch.com and you can just type in a movie and it seems pretty accurate. So far, the movies I've checked, it's like, oh yeah, that actually is accurate. So if there's a movie you want to watch, not just The Rideshare Killer or my other film, The Pinch is on there as well, but not just those films or not just obscure films, but any film you're thinking about watching, you can go and just put in justwatch.com and it will tell you where it's playing, whether that be streaming the TVOD, the SVOD, or the AVOD. It will tell you where you can potentially watch that. So hopefully that's a good tip. So those are the things that I've been working on over the last couple of weeks. Now let's get into the main segment today. I am interviewing writer and director Keone Waxman. Here is the interview. Welcome, Keone, to the Selling Your Screenplay podcast. I really appreciate you coming on the show with me today.

Speaker 2: Great. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 1: So to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background. Where did you grow up and how did you get interested in the entertainment business?

Speaker 2: The short of the very long story is I was born and raised in Hawaii, grew up out there. And then I went to film school in Boulder, Colorado years ago. You know, there wasn't much of a film school at the time, but there was definitely a film department. We had a lot of avant-garde filmmakers there, a lot of documentary filmmakers. And so they let us just kind of be hands-on. And so going up from film school out there and going to the camera department, I started working on movies while I was in school. And then I started, of course, making my own shorts and writing. And I ended up dropping out, believe it or not, and did my first film in Colorado, in Denver, years ago, and just sort of moved out to L.A. and just kept going.

Speaker 1: Gotcha. Gotcha. So let's just talk about that first film a little bit. How did you bring that together? How did you raise the money and get that off the ground?

Speaker 2: Well, what happened is that, again, I was, you know, like I said, I was working in the film industry there just while I was going to school, you know, as a cameraman, a camera assistant. And I ended up working on whatever films came into Denver. At the time, Perry Mason was the only series there. It was a small community, but every once in a while, a film would roll through. And so I would work as an assistant cameraman on that. And one of the companies I was working for at the time, they saw one of my short films and asked me if I would, you know, help them adapt the film or write a script. And, you know, nothing really went with it, but then I had written something on my own and they picked it up and said they'd produce it. And then, again, you know, as things go on, you know, in the industry, Michael Madsen, who had just made this little film that nobody's seen yet, called Rushmore Dogs, saw my script and said he wanted to play it. It was a film about, at the time in Denver, there was a big jazz community. And so it was about a tenor sax player sort of loosely based in the life of Chet Baker. And Michael had just played, you know, a killer, Mr. Blonde. And he said, I want to play something different. And so he came up to Denver and we ended up doing that film there. And from there, I, you know, moved out to L.A. and got an agent and did that whole thing.

Speaker 1: Yeah, gotcha. So let's talk about that transition just real quickly, and then we'll get into your latest film, The Raven. Talk about that transition, moving into L.A. What were some of the first things you did professionally? You'd made enough contacts. Were you writing a bunch of scripts? Did you have a bunch of scripts? Maybe just talk about that, getting to L.A., getting settled and getting some of those first paid gigs.

Speaker 2: You know, it's almost about writing, you know, it's almost about having the script. I would tell everybody that the script is your currency, you know, whether you're a producer, a director, a writer, all three or just one of them, the script is your currency because that's what people initially buy, right? They initially want to see that film made into something. And if you have something interesting that has a voice, that's what they're going to look for. To answer your second question, the hardest film to make is your second movie, your first film. A lot of people can make the first film. And I understand that in this day and age, it's a lot easier to shoot a film because you're not shooting on film. I mean, literally, you know, you don't have to rent cameras and crew in this or that. You can shoot it on your iPhone and people love it if it's a good script and a good story. So for me, a lot of it just became writing, writing, writing. And you just keep writing and you just keep going. And hopefully somebody is going to see or read something that you have. And whether it's an agent, a manager or producer, or even someone who just says, yeah, that's really cool. I have a friend who and, you know, every day you write and every day, you know, the next day, if it's all crap, you throw it away and you write again. But, you know, you just keep writing and pretty soon you have a screenplay. And so it's just a lot of a lot of just, you know, coming up with ideas and really sort of being influenced by what you're seeing around you.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. So let's dig into your latest film, The Raven. Maybe to start out, you can give us a quick pitch or a logline. What is this film all about?

Speaker 2: OK, well, it's The Ravine, not The Raven. And the reason why I say it is because it's about it. Yeah, but it's about a it's about a that's the main location. So do you want to just want to clarify? Sorry about that. When I talk about it. No, no, no worries. Because when I talk about it, you're going to you're going to understand that the idea that is adapted from a book and the book was a novel based on a real incident and a real incident was a murder suicide that sort of unraveled because the they found a car at the bottom of a ravine at the bottom of the ravine. There's a body in it that was shot by a shotgun and the car was over the edge. And they they actually never would have found it, except some people almost they literally almost to the you know, they almost hit a deer, swung inside of the road and looked over the edge and saw this car down and then unraveled into this whole real story of a murder suicide. And I was brought to it because it happened to it was a real story that happened to the the writers of the of the novel and eventually the eventual financiers of the film, the executive producers of the movie, because it happened to them. It was their best friends. And so they had tried to struggle through the idea of how do you I mean, almost tore them apart. So how do you you know, how do you go on living when you know, it isn't so much of the trauma, the trauma that happened, it's the questions right in the guilt and the could I have stopped it? And why did they do it? And should I have seen it that I should have known? And it really almost so they wrote a book. And when I got the book, it was full of really their journey. But what a great sort of exciting incident. And as a writer, you go, that's a great incident that you can then, you know, I can dramatize and I can come up with a million more ways and reasons why someone would want to find this visually interesting. But then, you know, as I started working with them and talking to them and we started, you know, I shot in New Orleans before and moving the film to New Orleans where you have, I don't want to say an open spirituality, but you have the city itself is is rich and deep and long, you know, storied with all sorts of different kind of spirituality and, you know, and, you know, just various ideas of what makes the world go around from music to culture to even just the feeling like you're in the Caribbean when you're not, you know, everything. So the idea is that, you know, you put it there in order to imbue the film and the material with something that was a little more universal and maybe a little bit more on the thriller aspect. So for, you know, for for me, the whole thing is I was brought a book that resonated with me and I thought I could make this into a movie that resonates with others.

Speaker 1: How did you get, how did you find that book originally?

Speaker 2: Well, OK, so I do a lot of action movies and the company that I work with, the producer that I work with, we're constantly doing and looking for movies to shoot that has, you know, that are very different. But Phil Goldfein, the producer I work with, he was given this book by, you know, a friend of a friend gave it to him and he read it and said, you know, let me give it to Keone if he likes it. And that really snowballed into all of us sort of not just understanding, you know, and really kind of vibing together, but really understanding what the intent was of it. And, you know, going from, you know, a very plot driven, genre driven material, which is what an action movie is, which I love and going into something that was more of an exploration of the character surrounded and wrapped in a thriller. I thought, OK, this could be really cool. So it was brought to me and it just snowballed from there.

Speaker 1: Gotcha. And maybe you can give us some tips. It sounds like you've done adaptations before, but maybe you can give us some tips for writing a screenplay based on a book. Are there any things that you ran into that maybe some things you learned or just some things that you had to overcome while doing it?

Speaker 2: Well, absolutely. I mean, first and foremost, and this isn't a big secret, you know, books are in chapter form, which is closer to television and episodic than it is to, you know, a narrative three act structure. You're talking about, you know, if you watch an hour long TV show, you have five acts, which, you know, is five chapters, which is much easier than that because you fade out of the commercial, which we don't have anymore. But you fade out, you come back and you go, did you see that tsunami that just came in? You never have to depict what happened. You just pick up with the drama afterward. In a movie, you don't do that. Right. In a movie, you follow it. So that's always the first sort of hurdle is going, where do you elipse time? Where do you elipse action? Where do you elipse dramatic import in 90 minutes? You generally don't. Right. Generally, you have to roll with it. And then the second aspect when you're adapting is you look at the chapters and you go, well, you know, in a in a, you know, in a literary form, you can come from different point of views. You can come from different time. You can come from all over. And now, you know, you know, you look at movies now with such a complex and I want to say contemporary structure. You know, we jump around in time a lot now because people think that way because, you know, I can sit on my computer and have my phone, you know, going and, you know, four different screens open on my desktop and I can still hold a conversation. So, you know, you look at it and you go, OK, that's very different than your classic three-act structure. So you put all that, wrap all that into a book. First thing you do is you go through and you redline everything you like and then you underline everything that seems to stand out to you. And then what I do is I just take it all and I just write it all down. And then I put it in an order that seems to follow a structure, a narrative structure. And then you start sort of, you know, building it out from there. So really it's a distillation, but it's also an understanding that you have a little bit more. And in this movie, in The Ravine, you'll see, you know, we jump around in time a lot. You have a little bit more, you know, leeway because you are adapting material and people are expecting to maybe react and then discover why you react later. You know, you're not necessarily setting up an act one to pay it off in act three. You know, you may be paying it off in act one and setting it up in act three. But that's just a contemporary structure.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And just, you know, obviously this is sort of sensitive in the sense you're getting the book from people that really were involved in this. And so what sort of obligation do you feel just to be to be sensitive to, you know, the reality and what really happened versus, you know, being dramatic and trying to make the best movie? Where do you see that line falling?

Speaker 2: Well, you know, that's a really good question, because I think you're all you always have to be and you have to start with you always have to be and you always have to start with the idea of you're being respectful to whatever base material, right? Because at the end of the day, that's, you know, you're not going out there to vilify and pass judgment. But at the same time, you also have to then, you know, kick yourself and, you know, kick yourself in the shorts and say, OK, but I'm dramatizing and real life may be a lot of things, but half the time it's super boring. So you have to take real life and you have to dramatize it in a way where, like I was saying, maybe you're elipsing time or maybe you're elipsing action. But the idea is you are trying to say that, you know, I mean, at the end of the day, right, you know, objective objective equals, you know, equals conflict and that's drama. Right. So you have to have conflict. And so, you know, you you look at it and you go, OK, so how can someone who's based maybe based loosely on a real person, but you don't want to say that, you know, they're a bad person. But how do you make that conflict, you know, happen with your protagonist without putting them in a bad light? So it's a difficult thing to do. But I think you also have to bear in mind that, you know, you do have to be respectful to the base material and where it comes from.

Speaker 1: Yeah. And were you in touch with the authors and did you get feedback from them? Was that part of this process of developing the script?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. All the way. Not only that, you know, not only, you know, did I get feedback from them, but they were, you know, they they were produced, their executive producers, the movie, they were on set every day when we went to locations where certain things had happened to them in real life. You know, there's a big murder that takes place, you know, you know, it affected them. You know, it's a husband and wife team and Kelly didn't want to go on the location. And, you know, Bob went in and he said, yeah, this feels this feels pretty much how it felt. You know, so you go with that. You change things with that. Like I said earlier, you know, a big part of the novel was that it was a sort of a healing process for them. And so you want to be respectful and putting some of that aspect into it. But again, you don't want to be slave to that, because if you do that, then out of context, people might be like, what is this? Why is this here? So they were there, you know, to connect. They were there from the beginning of the end. But at the same time, you know, I think that they themselves, they had they had to everyone's will say, OK, I have to step back because we're not making a documentary. We're making a, you know, a dramatizing event that affected.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. So I always like to to wrap up the interviews by just asking the guests if there's anything that they've seen recently. HBO, Netflix, Hulu, anything you've seen recently that you thought maybe is a little under the radar that you could recommend to screenwriters.

Speaker 2: Well, you know what? I don't know if it's very, you know, thinking about it. I don't think there's anything that I've seen that's too under the radar that people haven't seen. But I do have to say, when I did watch Power of the Bell, what a brilliantly written screenplay. You know, I never read the book and talking, you know, it's embarrassing because obviously we're talking about me adapting the book. I didn't read the base material, so I don't know how well how much she stayed to it. When you look at that and you have a driving plot and you have a you know, you're constantly making a left turn when everybody thinks you're going to go on a right turn. It's something to look at. And then, you know, again, another thing that's not under the radar, but everywhere right now is everywhere, you know, everything, everywhere, all at once. If you're a writer and you try to write that script, I don't know. You know, again, I don't know much about it other than I saw it. I saw my kids and they loved it. I don't know how you put that on paper and have people understand it. And if you look at the performances, they, you know, all the actors understood completely what was going on. So in terms of writing, the specificity that they must have put into that was pretty incredible. So, you know, in Power of the Dog, it's so opaque, but it's directed in a way where you're like, I totally get it. And everything, everywhere, all at once is so specific. And they pulled it off that I would love to read both those screenplays, even though they seem to be miles apart.

Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Perfect. Those are great recommendations. How can people see The Ravine? Do you know what the release schedule is going to be like?

Speaker 2: It's coming out on May 6th. It's going to be, you know, it's going to be everywhere. It's going to be on, I'll tell you right now, you know, from Prime Video and Apple TV, you know, to, you know, Google Play, everywhere you look, it's going to be coming out. Take a look at it. I think you'll, you know, if you like what I said, you're going to like the movie.

Speaker 1: Perfect. Perfect. And what's the best way for people to keep up with what you're doing? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, blog, anything you're comfortable sharing. I will round up for the show notes.

Speaker 2: Instagram, you know, Instagram is, you know, is the best way. Whenever I'm on a show or whenever I have something to talk about, I put it up there, you know, but, you know, check me out.

Speaker 1: Perfect. Yeah, we'll round up for the show. Well, Keone, I really appreciate you coming on, talking with me today. Good luck with this film and good luck with all your feature films as well.

Speaker 2: Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you.

Speaker 1: Talk to you later. Bye. A quick plug for the S.Y.S. Screenwriting Analysis Service. It's a really economical way to get a high quality professional evaluation on your screenplay. When you buy our three pack, you get evaluations at just sixty seven dollars per script for feature films and just fifty five dollars for teleplays. All the readers have professional experience reading for studios, production companies, contests and agencies. You can read a short bio on each reader on our website and you can pick the reader who you think is the best fit for your script. Turnaround time is usually just a few days, but rarely more than a week. The readers will evaluate your script on six key factors, concept, character, structure, marketability, tone and overall craft, which includes formatting, spelling and grammar. Every script will get a grade of pass, consider or recommend, which should help you roughly understand where your script might rank if you were to submit it to a production company or agency. We can provide an analysis on features or television scripts. We also do proofreading without any analysis. We will also look at a treatment or outline and give you the same analysis on it. So if you're looking to vet some of your project ideas, this is a great way to do it. We will also write your log line and synopsis for you. You can add this log line and synopsis writing service to an analysis, or you can simply purchase this service as a standalone product. As a bonus, if your screenplay gets a recommend or a consider from one of our readers, you get to list the screenplay in the SYS select database, which is a database for producers to find screenplays and a big part of our SYS select program. Producers are in the database searching for material on a daily basis. So it's another great way to get your material in front of them. As a further bonus, if your script gets a recommend from one of our readers, your screenplay will get included in our monthly best of newsletter. Each month we send out a newsletter that highlights the best screenplays that have come through our script analysis service. This is monthly newsletter that goes out to our list of over 400 producers who are actively looking for material. So again, this is another great way to get your material out there. So if you want a professional evaluation of your screenplay at a very reasonable price, check out www.sellingyourscreenplay.com slash consultants. Again, that's sellingyourscreenplay.com slash consultants. On the next episode of the podcast, I'm going to be interviewing Philip Todd. He is a Scottish filmmaker who just did a family film based loosely on an old Scottish myth about a girl who meets an elf in the woods. He turned it into a modern day, you know, sort of a reimagining of that myth in his new film called Jesse and the Elf Boy. We talked through his writing process, how he got this film produced. And, and as I said, this is based on a Scottish myth that he had heard about and he's very much into sort of Scottish mythology. So we talk a little bit about that too, sort of where he gets these ideas for some of his films. It's kind of just interesting and to hear his thoughts on that. So keep an eye out for that episode next week. That's the show. Thank you for listening.