is two guys collaborating to write on writing and collaboration.

Wednesday
Apr 15, 2009

Go Ahead, Steal Me — Martin Ball

Article in Forbes about Jonathan Lethem and how he works untraditionally to get his books made into movies.

First, he’s offering the rights to his short stories for $1.00 on his website. Second, with his latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet, he:

…all but gave away film rights to Greg Marcks, a Los Angeles indie filmmaker, whose last film, 11:14, starred Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Lethem is requiring a fee of 2% of the film’s total budget once Marcks lands a distributor. And this time the option expires in five years. If the movie doesn’t get made, Lethem can go elsewhere. The author, surprisingly, also required that five years after the book and movie come out, they must enter the public domain to become available, free of charge, to anyone; copyright protection usually lasts 70 years after the death of the author.

Good on him for trying something different. I hope it pays off. And, aspiring writers — go snag a story for $1.00 to write and produce.

(via SVN)

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What is Spitball!?

Spitball! is two guys collaborating to write about writing and collaboration. We're writing partners who have worked together since 2000, and placed in the top 100 in the last Project Greenlight for our script YELLOW.

Currently, we are both working on multiple screenplay, short story, and novel ideas independently and together, and collaborate on this blog.

What Spitball! used to be

Spitball! started as an attempt to collaborate on a screenplay online in real time. From January 2006 to July 2007 we worked on an interactive process to decide the story we were going to make. A full postmortem is coming, but you can find the find all the posts by looking in the category Original Version.

During this period, we affected the personalities of two of the most famous spitball pitchers from the early 20th Century. Look at our brief bios for more info about this, and so as not to be confused as to who is talking when.

We rebooted the franchise in early 2009 in its current form.


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Our Twitter account, where we note when longer articles are posted. While we're at it, here's Kent and Martin's Twitter accounts.

Kent M. Beeson

Urban Shockah pic

Kent M. Beeson (aka Urban Shockah) is a stay-at-home dad and stay-at-home writer, living in Seattle, WA with his wife, 2 year old daughter and an insane cat. In 2007, he was a contributor to the film blog ScreenGrab, where he presciently suggested Jackie Earle Haley to play Rorschach in the Watchmen movie, and in 2008, he wrote a film column for the comic-book site ComiXology called The Watchman. (He's a big fan of the book, if you couldn't tell.) In 2009, he gave up the thrill of freelance writing to focus on screenplays and novels, although he sometimes posts to his blog This Can't End Well, which a continuation of his first blog, he loved him some movies. He's a Pisces, and his favorite movie of all time is Jaws. Coincidence? I think not.

Martin McClellan

Burleigh Grimes pic

Martin (aka Burley Grymz) is a designer and writer. He occasionally blogs at his beloved Hellbox, and keeps a longer ostensibly more interesting bio over here at his eponymous website. You can also find him on Twitter.