Because of that, the screenplay (or is it a webplay?) gathered dust. Then I saw the preview for a new film starring Ricky Gervais and Greg Kinnear. The film is called "Ghost Town" and it features the tried and true storyline of a guy seeing dead people and having to do something to help get the dead people to where they need to be.

The storyline has been done a million times before and this film doesn't really seem to add anything new. Then I started to think, how could you make it fresh? I came up with a line for a film trailer that I liked...

"What if you could see dead people...

And they were a bunch of assholes."

I then imagined a film in which a guy can see dead people and they fuck with him all the time, kind of like a reverse Christmas Carol with a bunch of Scrooge-like ghosts making fun of Bob Cratchit and his cripple of a son. I couldn't see myself fashioning an entire film out of that so I decided to add it to The Lost Angels and building the short (30 or so pages) in to a feature length script (90 or so pages).

So that's what I'm going to attempt to do. My script is about cop who can see dead people (and wants to get rid of them) and his renegade partner (who has just found out he has a little kid ala The Game Plan, Three Men and a Baby, etc.). I haven't come up with the exact logline but this film is pretty free form right now so we'll deal with that later.

Anyway, that's the plan (or the closest thing that I have to an actual plan). Let's see how it goes. Hopefully this will last longer than my superhero page which bit the dust after a month of laziness. 

Craig Mazin (writer of Scary Movie 3 and 4 and Superhero Movie) wrote a nice article on his blog The Artful Writer about how the recent spate of "spoof" movies, including his own films, aren't truly spoofs. He believes they should be named "comic film re-enactment" since so many of the jokes are simply plugging in jokes from other comedic films. More specifically, Mazin writes:

...much of what they do is reference a film without actually parodying the film. For example, in Date Movie, Allison Hannigan’s character has a nightmare in which she discovers she’s about to marry Napoleon Dynamite. The Friedberg & Seltzer version of Napoleon Dynamite says the exact same things that the actual Napoleon Dynamite character said, and nothing more. Similarly, at the end of Epic Movie, a Borat look-alike shows up to say, “Is nice!”, but that’s it.

I agree with that and am going to try to make my spoof movie more of a textbook "spoof" however I am going to take the path that Friedberg/Seltzer and Mazin himself have beaten down and spoof a whole slew of films as opposed to focusing on one movie or one genre.

Now, I haven't really broken down how these movies go but, honestly, there really isn't a set direction to take. Half of these films don't even bother telling an actual story, focusing more on a "plot" that allows their characters to move around as much as possible so they get into the most hijinks. 

So here we go. Should be fun. Hopefully it'll also be funny.