More projects? Really?

 Why do one task well when you can do 5 tasks badly? That's a pretty long post (although it's actually short by my standards!), so here's just a list of the projects I have on the go atm:

The Blog;  Tangents: Interactive; The Mystery Play; The Podcast

Here's how they're going:

The Blog: You're reading it; you decide.

Tangents: Interactive: Dead in the water

The Mystery Play: Writing sessions every week, with 2 co-writers.

The Podcast: Dead on dry land.

So what's the most logical thing to do?

Obviously, start another project! So I'm writing a Murder Mystery movie. But the thing is, it's deliberately bad. Imagine if Clue and The Murder at Haversham Manor had a baby and it was directed by Jason Friedman and Aaron Seltzberg (The guys who wrote/directed Disaster Movie; Epic Movie; Meet the Spartans and more)

I originally planned on writing a movie with all the movie tropes and calling it Tropes, but that would be a gargantuan task due to the sheer volume of movie tropes that exist.

Then, it occurred to me that I wanted to write a movie where the red herring is an actual Red Herring. Of course, the best genre for the red herring trope is the murder mystery genre. Therefore, I looked up all the tropes associated with murder mysteries on tvtropes.org and started coming up with ways to include them in my movie. 

The problem with this though was that all of those tropes are associated with good murder mysteries, and, as I mentioned above, I wanted my movie to be bad.

Clue is a terrible movie. There, I said it. I love it, but it's a terrible movie. But it's bad in two ways. For about half the movie, it's a proper murder mystery with a proper victim and multiple possible murderers, all with motive and opportunity.

I should clarify at this point for anyone not in the know that Clue is a movie based on the classic board game of the same name (Clue is the US name; the original UK version is called Cluedo). 

SIDE NOTE: In the original UK board game, the victim's name is Dr Black. In the movie and the US board game, the victim is called Mr. Boddy. supposedly because it's not possible for Americans to understand the concept of a corpse unless that is their name. Patronising much? Extended rant here.

Then, about halfway through, there's a noticeable shift in the tone where the writer/director and actors seem to suddenly realise how ridiculous the concept is, and just decide, OK, this is a ridiculous premise, no one's going to watch this expecting a good movie, let's just have fun with it!

That's what I want from my movie. Objectively terrible, but subjectively fun.