"Ghostwriting"

I’ve been writing stories since the fifth grade. The first stories I rememebered writing I still have. I was a big snow skier and after stumbling across an unmarked video tape of my fathers that turned out to be ‘Hot Dog’ the movie snow skiing became my subject for my first continuation of stories. For a freakin’ fifth grader that film was AWESOME-- Boobs, cussing and skiing in Squaw Valley, CA. Well, my friends, (from Viewmont and Grandview,)--- Many of my fellow friends on facebook-- Starred in these four page episodics where love, skiing, drama, and competition unraveled on those eighty pages of total bogus fiction. Reading it now I find myself laughing my ass off. They were terrible, but they were a start. Then I continued to fumble through grammatical and story errors with my underground newspaper I did in high school-- BUT, I continued to do it. If nothing else, the Hot Dog stories began my Writer’s Journey.

What’s funny was until about 2002, all my stuff was horrible. Then I wrote these three scripts, Open Barstools, Epic and The Dirty South. Years passed and I continued to write. Then in 2005, I opened up those scripts I had written and it seemed that those 3 spoken about were still halfway decent. That’s when I knew I may actually be getting better at it. Then came ‘Meter’ which was a 15 page script that was literally 3 years in the making. So when people praise that script they don’t realize how long it took me to get it there. Nonetheless, that film and script put me over as a legit screenwriter and got me enough attention to be put on a list of contract writers. Fairly recently, I have received a few ghost writing jobs. Ghostwriting is pretty simple. Someone gives me a script, says I need you to beef up this or that element of this script. Sometimes they want you to rewrite, the whole monstrosity over, sometimes just add layers to a character. I get paid accordingly to what they want done. The cool thing about ghostwriting is on top of the rate you get what I call “shut up” money which is basically an extra amount on top of the rate because they don’t want to give you credit or royalties. (Most of the time it’s because the writer is not very good, but wants to take all the credit for a good script.) I don’t mind what the stipulation is. I tend to do fairly well rewriting other peoples’ scripts where the story is already intact as opposed to starting from scratch. It’s minor money but it’s money nevertheless-- And you can’t beat sitting around in your underwear on Monday’s, watching movies and rewriting scenes to films you will one day get to see. That may, (I SAID MAY,) be cooler than making them.

Here’s an example of what this job entails. For privacy purposes I am going to use my friend Ennix Xiong’s BAD ASS KILLERS. This script is quite good, but Ennix just needed a little spice in some of the character’s dialogue. This is an exchange between the lead and his sarcastic roommate.





HERE'S MY REWRITE.