This is a transcript of SYS 512 – Adapting H.P. Lovecraft, Suitable Flesh, Re-animator With Dennis Paoli .
Welcome to Episode 512 of the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. I’m Ashley Scott Meyers, screenwriter and blogger with sellingyourscreenplay.com. Today I am interviewing screenwriter Dennis Paoli. He has written some classic horror films like Reanimator and just did a new film called Suitable Flash starring Heather Graham. This film is based on an HG Lovecraft short story, which he’s done quite a bit of including Reanimator. We dig into this adaptation of the classic story we talked about his process of adapting stories like this into screenplays and how he approached this film, so stay tuned for that interview. 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 and they’re very much appreciated. Any websites or links that I mentioned the podcasts 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/podcast and then just look for episode 512. If you want my free guide, How to Sell a Screenplay in Five Weeks, you pick that up by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/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 a professional logline and query letter, and how to find agents, managers and producers who are looking for material, really is everything you need to know to sell your screenplay, just go to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/guide. So now let’s get into the main segment. Today I’m interviewing screenwriter Dennis Paoli. Here is the interview.
Ashley
Welcome Dennis to the Selling Your Screenplay Podcast. Really appreciate you coming on the show today.
Dennis Paoli
Thanks, Ashley.
Ashley
So, to start out, maybe you can tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up and how to get interested in the entertainment business?
Dennis Paoli
I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, and that’s how I started became interested in the business because in high school I met Stuart Gordon, and Stuart Gordon and I hit it off, we had the same sense of humor. We both loved horror films, we used to cut school and go see Hammer films and American International adaptations of Edgar Allan Poe. And we were college roommates when Stuart got into the theater. And when Stuart moved on to movies, we had already written together because we had been in a satire group. When we were in high school that did the coffeehouse circuit in Chicago, we had worked on a couple of plied written dialogue for several of the plays that he produced and directed with the organic theatre company in Chicago that he started. And so, we had already worked together and collaborated, we were good writing partners. And when he decided to adapt HP Lovecraft stories, Reanimator stories, the Herbert West Stories for the film reanimated for his first film, he asked me to work on it, because at the time, I was also an academic. I was teaching at Hunter College of the City University in New York. And one of the courses I was teaching was gothic fiction. So, this was a perfect melding. So, to some degree, my way into screenwriting was to be very fortunate, I was fortunate to make friends, and be a collaborator with a genius, a man who turned out to be a genius filmmaker. And I was fortunate that we worked in a mode in a genre horror that I was already really familiar with, not just from loving it, but from teaching it. So, my advice to young screenwriters is to get luck. Again, you know, work with a number of people until you find those people that you really work well with, and make the most of that when
Ashley
you find it. But that’s not really luck. I mean, just getting out there putting yourself out there networking meeting people. Some of that is definitely you know, tactics and strategy. It’s not just all about luck.
Dennis Paoli
You know, you have to love what you do. I mean, as I said, we know we landed in a genre that we both really liked a lot. And then we had loved since we were teenagers. You know, we also were we as I said, we worked in satire, we had a satire group based on very much on the second city theater group in Chicago, where we love to do satire, and I still think of Reanimator the first script I wrote that I worked on as a satire of academia. It was, you know, yeah, we hope that we walk the line between horror and humor as successfully as we possibly could. And so, he got that humor in there as well. We were able to take advantage of our sense of humor. Take advantage of your entire skill set. And you know, one of the things you have to do is discover what your skill set is. So, write scripts but mostly write stories. Stewart was a great storyteller. His theater was a great story near a great narrative theatre company. So, tell stories, get used to telling the stories and discover the stories that you want to tell. And then you’ll be able to take that imaginative work with you to the next set of projects that you get.
Ashley
Yeah, sound advice for sure. So, let’s dig into suitable flesh starring Heather Graham. This is your latest feature that you wrote. Maybe you can just give us a quick pitch or logline. What is this film all about?
Dennis Paoli
Good luck, Dennis. It’s based on an HP Lovecraft story. It’s one of the stories that has the most impressive narrative arc in it. It’s as a number of Lovecraft stories are it’s a mystery. And it’s a mystery based on the identity of the main characters. Who are they really? And what it turns out to be? Is a mind swapping movie. No wait. It turns out to be a body swapping movie. No, wait, it turns out to be a gender swapping movie. It’s all of the above. And it’s all of the above, in the most bizarre and horrific way you can imagine. And it reaching back into Lovecraftian mythology and his fears about his own identity. So, we hope it also is a return, especially given the director Joe Lynch’s style. And his ability to really is chops, his filmmaking chops, he uses all the tricks that that film allows you to use. We hope that it goes back to those 80s horror films that sort of had the audience whooping and stomping their feet. And we hope it’s exciting, as well as being mysterious and scary.
Ashley
So, just give us a little background on how you got involved with this project. Since it’s based on another HP Lovecraft story, was this something you wrote on spec? Was this someone that some producers bought? You say – Hey, could you write this up and then we’re going to… think just tell us sort of how you got involved with this project?
Dennis Paoli
This is a long story, but I’ll give you the short one. Back in the 90s, when Stuart was making a couple of our other Lovecraft adaptations, Castle freak, very loose adaptation of Lovecrafts, the outsider and Dagon and adaptation of Lovecrafts Dagon and the shadow over Innsmouth, he was working in Europe directing, and he said, Dennis, let’s find the next story. And the next story that we both agreed on was love crafts, the thing on the doorstep. And so, he said, Dennis go write the script. I went wrote the script. By when Stuart came back to the good old USA, he looked at it, he liked it a lot. He put on his producer hat and tried to get it produced. It was optioned in the late 90s. But it didn’t get made. It was Stewart schlepped it around with a couple of his other projects. While he worked on another couple of films. In the early 2000s, it was optioned again, and it didn’t get made. Again, in about 2005 or 2006, he showed it to a number a couple of actors were interested in it, they optioned it, they moved it around to some producers, they couldn’t get it made. We tweaked it a little bit for each of those times. But the reason that came back to us on why it couldn’t get made was the same every time. And I let you once you see the movie, guess what it is? But the fact is, so I just sat on the script for the next 10 years. So, one for you screenwriters out there. Let this be an object lesson. This script when it was produced was 25 years old was over 25 years old. So, it you know, a good story never goes away. Keep it in a drawer but bring it out every once in a while. And during the pandemic after Stuart Gordon unfortunately passed away. I was doing a zoom memorial for him. I reconnected with an actress from his earlier film from some of our earlier films, Barbara Crampton, who is now a low budget horror producer. And she said; Do you have any scripts lying around? I sent her the script. She loved it. She connected Joe Lynch to it. He had a great idea to tweak it a new an entirely new way. It refreshed the whole script. And it got made and it’s the film that you will see style you know, sometime this weekend it comes out look for it. It’s getting a theatrical release and it’ll be streaming on shudder. I think so watch for it. And let us know how well you think we did with it. But don’t give up. It had a lot of it’s got a lot of history, that story. And we think that helped it along the way.
Ashley
And that’s fascinating. Okay, so maybe you can give us some tips, I definitely have some scripts sitting on my shelf that need to be refreshed. So, what exactly do you I mean, obviously, 25 years ago, we were living in a totally different world without cell phones, social media. So, just talk about that over the last 25 years? How many times did you sort of just bring it out and try and update it, refresh it, make it more modern? And then ultimately, what do you do? Like, what are some of those tips?
Dennis Paoli
About five times that grind it out? May and you know, and you’re exactly right, I had to add cellphones to it, I had to add new gender awareness to it. Because it’s a gender swapping film, you have to be careful, but also honest about that, when you do it now in an entirely different way, from an entirely different perspective. But I was lucky to one over that period I was still being represented by Stuart as the possible producer and director. And he really believed in the story, you need somebody who believes in your work, you need to find that person who believe who gets that story and believes in it, but also whence we lost Stuart. But we found Joe, Joe was able to give me an idea that refreshed the whole movie that changed the tenor of it, and made it once more current and more interesting. And you have to believe, you have to trust your collaborators as well. Film is a collaborative business, you have to listen to the notes you get. I know, as a writer, I hate getting notes. You know, they’re all you know, what do you mean, you don’t you just you don’t understand, you know, that’s a terrible idea. You let yourself sit with it for a couple of days. And think about how where that takes the story if you did do that. And sometimes it opens up a whole new door that takes the story to a really new interesting place. As a writer, you have to not only hope, you have to not only find those people who will listen to your tale and the way you tell it, but you have to listen to people who hear your story, and maybe have a good idea about how you can tell it a new way.
Ashley
Dennis, I wish I had more time with you. I could go on all day ask you questions. This is great. I just wonder if you could give us a few quick tips of doing that adaptation taking a classic HP Lovecraft story and converting it to a more modern screenplay. Are there some tips you can just offer our screenwriting audience?
Dennis Paoli
Yeah, be brave. Don’t be intimidated. Lovecraft is a genius in himself. But he’s a genius in an entirely other mode. I taught gothic fiction. He’s a literary genius. It’s his writing that’s the genius. He’s one of the great Impressionists of American literature, which means he gives you the strokes and you have to imagine the horror yourself. In film, you can’t do that you have to show it. And we decided and Stuart was when I met Stuart, he was an art student, he loved to show you. His theater was always about grabbing you and showing you the horror or the humor that was out there in the world. So, we were expressionistic, we took it to an entirely different in seemingly contradictory style. But we remained faithful to what we thought was the core of Lovecraft stories, faithful to the spirit, the spirit of fear, fear for your own identity, fear for your own gender fear for your own map for your own sanity. And we hopefully found that carried some of the details into our work, but we were trying to be brave, and stay faithful to that spirit. But also tell it in our own way that was exciting for us.
Ashley
Perfect. And I just like to wrap up these interviews by asking you the guests. Is there anything you’ve seen recently, HBO, Netflix, that you can recommend to our mostly screenwriting audience?
Dennis Paoli
You know, you know, unfortunately, I’ve been spending my time trying to catch up with my reading. So, I haven’t been watching as many things. So, I’ve been trying to catch up with what’s on my DVR, good. I DVR and I DVR hereditary, and it’s terrifying. You know, I mean, the new, it’s the subsequent horror, it’s the subsequent kind of horror film to ours, where we made horror films back in the 80s. And suitable flesh is a throwback or a new version, which is out there, which is why but the horror that came after that is including, for example, the witch I really liked the witch as well. It was I have a very faithful story that told it. And it’s in a much different mode at a much different rhythm from the rhythm I work in, but it was really effective and smart. There’s some smart horror out there, people, look for it.
Ashley
How can people see Suitable Flash? What’s the release schedule for that?
Dennis Paoli
October 27th. Halloween weekend, it opens, it gets a limited theatrical release, look for it in your neighborhood. If you can possibly see it on a big screen, see it on the biggest screen you can see, because Joe really put a couple of really wonderful visual, visual scenes and visual adaptations in that. And it’ll be streaming on shutter, and a couple other services. Starting on the 27th.
Ashley
Perfect, perfect, Dennis, I really appreciate you coming on and talking with me today. Good luck with this film and good luck while your feature films as well.
Dennis Paoli
This was fun, Ashley. Thanks.
Ashley
Thank you. We’ll talk to you later. Bye.
I just want to talk quickly about SYS Select. It’s a service for screenwriters to help them sell their screenplays and get writing assignments. The first part of the service is the SYS select screenplay database. Screenwriters upload their screenplays, along with a logline, synopsis and other pertinent information like budget and genre, and then producers search for and hopefully find screenplays they want to produce. Dozens of producers are in the system looking for screenplays right now. There have been a number of success stories come out of the service. You can find out about all the SBS select successes by going to www.sellingyourscreenplay.com/success. Also, on SYS Podcast episode 222. I talked with Steve Dearing, who was the first official success story to come out of the SYS select database. When you join SYS Select you get access to the screenplay database along with all the other services that we’re providing to SYS select members. These services include the newsletter, this monthly newsletter goes out to a list of over 400 producers who are actively seeking writers and screenplays. Each SYS select member can pitch one screenplay in this monthly newsletter. We also provide screenwriting leads, we have partnered with one of the premier paid screenwriting leads services so I can syndicate their leads to SYS select members, there are lots of great paid leads coming in each week from our partner. Recently, we’ve been getting 5 to 10 high quality paid leads per week. These leads run the gamut. There are producers looking for a specific type of spec script to producers looking to hire a screenwriter to write up one of their ideas or properties. They’re looking for shorts features TV and web series pilots all types of projects. If you sign up for SYS Select, you’ll get these leads emailed directly to you several times per week. Also, you get access to the SYS Select forum, where we will help you with your logline and query letter and answer any screenwriting related questions that you might have. We also have a number of screenwriting classes that are recorded and available in the SYS select forum. These are all the classes that I’ve done over the years, so you’ll have access to those whenever you want once you join, the classes cover every part of writing your screenplay, from concept to outlining to the first act second act third act as well as other topics like writing short films, and pitching your projects in person. Once again, if this sounds like something you’d like to learn more about, please go to www.sellingyourscreenplayselect.com. Again, that is sellingyourscreenplayselect.com.
On the next episode of the podcast, I’m going to be interviewing writer, director and actor Matthew Uribe. He is a southern filmmaker from Louisiana, and has a great story about how he started locally as an actor in Louisiana small town Louisiana, just started getting acting gigs slowly moved to a slightly bigger city eventually moving to New Orleans, where he started to get bigger roles and really started to put some of his own projects together. If you live outside of Los Angeles or trying to get your career going, Matthew has a lot of really great practical advice on how to find local opportunities and make the most out of them. So, keep an eye out for that episode next week. That’s the show. Thank you for listening.