If you like music and movies...

Composer Jim Steinman loves to refer to his best-known work, Meat Loaf's Bat out of Hell, as a "cinematic" album. And he's right. There's a reason that the 1960s, 70s, and 80s are often credited with some of the best music of the century: because that's freaking true. The Beatles' The White Album, the Who's Quadrophenia, Bruce Springsteen's Born to Run, the Clash's Sandinista!, and of course Bat out of Hell - these are not only some of the greatest albums of all time, but they're also known as concept albums, meaning that unlike 90% of the popular albums released today, they're built around a unifying theme or, in the case of Quadrophenia, the whole album is meant to tell a single story. And I mean, call me a nerd, but holy cow wouldn't that be great for a movie.

No, really, hear me out. We've made movies out of books, comics, TV shows and amusement park rides (Pirates of the Caribbean, anyone?), and as of lately, a new trend has popped up: making films out of video games. Which is great, don't get me wrong, but you know what's happened a couple of times but never really became a thing, the way making movies out of video games became a thing? Making movies out of concept albums. Oh, sure, it's been done. But it usually was borne out of a desire to create a franchise (think the Monkees TV show or, like, pretty much every single Beatles film ever made). I can only think of a few albums that were ever genuinely turned into a film for the sake of turning an album into a film. And some of them, like Quadrophenia, weren't even direct adaptations, more like dramas loosely based on the original music.

So these are the albums I'd most like to turn into a film if I could. Some of them are Greats. Some of them are...well, not. But they're all close to my heart and if I ever got the chance to make any of them into a movie, you bet I'd take it.

Avery's Top 5 Rock Music Films:

5. The Christmas Attic (Trans-Siberian Orchestra)

I saw this show performed last year at the Palace of Auburn Hills and...holy shit. I love artists like TSO because it's almost like they set themselves up for this kind of thing. Their albums are mostly rock operas, and The Christmas Attic is no exception. The album tells the story of a little girl who goes up into the attic and finds a box of letters that tell a love story with a sad ending. Now, this might sound entirely cliche, but if you've seen their live show, you know it's anything but. And if I were to make this album into a movie, I'd try to channel that same intensity (though given that it's a movie, maybe I'd dispense with the laser show) and I'd try to include as many members of TSO in cameo roles (or, heck, if they're up for it, major parts) as possible.

4. Rock Spectacle (Barenaked Ladies)

Rock Spectacle is the first live performance album from the Barenaked Ladies and it contains some of their finest songs: "When I Fall," "Straw Hat and Old Dirty Hank," "Brian Wilson," and of course the famous "If I Had $1,000,000." This was one of the defining albums of my childhood. When I was a kid my dad would put this on and we'd dance to it - sometimes there'd even be stretches where I made him play it every night. I always felt like there was a story to the music, even when I was little and could understand literally none of the lyrics. Well, now I'm older and (theoretically) wiser, and I feel it now more than ever. This is also probably the album with the most room for fun, because I swear if I made this into a movie, it would have the biggest ensemble cast ever - and, as an added bonus, this band loves to sneak little bits of humor into their music, even some of their less-upbeat songs, which leaves plenty of room for comedic interpretation.

3. Bat out of Hell (Meat Loaf)
There's been a movie (or TV special) or two about the making of this album, but I don't want to do a biopic or documentary. I want to do the story of Bat out of Hell. I want to take the stories that Jim Steinman told in his lyrics, and bring them to life. I mean LOOK AT THE COVER ART for heaven's sake and tell me that's not one of the most cinematic things you've ever seen. Imagine that on a movie theater screen. Of course it would be violent--with a title track about a motorcycle crash, how could it not be?--but the more "fun" songs, like "All Revved Up" and "Paradise by the Dashboard Light" would usher in the chance to show off Steinman's infamous sense of humor, and that would be the major hook for an audience.

2. Don't You Fake It (Red Jumpsuit Apparatus)

It's not exactly a concept album in the vein of Bat out of Hell or Quadrophenia, but you can't deny there's a cohesive sound in Don't You Fake It. It's one of the most underrated albums of all time, and undoubtedly RJA's best. And if you listen to the lyrics, the songs really are mini-stories of their own. Watch Ronnie Winter's Half of Us interview and the inspiration for those stories becomes painfully clear. And that would be the storyline for the movie: the story of the formation of Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, with the real-life events behind each individual song getting a spotlight. And it probably wouldn't be as fun as some of the others (let's be honest though, none of the ones I've thrown out there so far would be straight comedy, except maybe the Rock Spectacle movie), given that it's based in real life as opposed to, say the theatricality of Bat out of Hell, but it's because it's so heavily based in reality that I feel like it's a story that really, really needs to be told.

1. Born to Run (Bruce Springsteen)

WHY HAS NO ONE DONE THIS YET!?!? Springsteen once said that he could see every song on Born to Run taking place at the same time, over the course of the same summer night in different places. There's your film plot, right there. And of course "Jungleland," the operatic epic about the Magic Rat and his involvement in an unfortunate street war on Flamingo Lane (my God, Springsteen should've been a novelist), would be the entire third act. The whole thing would, of course, take place in 1970s New Jersey, a shout-out to Springsteen's hometown. The film practically writes itself. If only Clarence Clemons could be here to see it...

In the end, I know the odds of actually making any of these films are so impossibly low that it's almost laughable. But that's part of the fun of filmmaking: having an idea that's so out there it'll never happen...and knowing that someday, somehow, if you try, you just might have a chance.

Where it all came from

Maybe it's the fact that I'm now a college graduate that's got me feeling so nostalgic, but for some reason I can't stop thinking about what I used to do, the things I used to write about, and how they compare to the films that I make and the scripts I want to write now. And I don't mean the stuff I made my first year in a high-school-level film arts program. I mean that back when I was ten years old I would make up "scripts" using the text function of Microsoft Paint, and I would laugh myself stupid over my own cleverness. Every single script, I shit you not, revolved around my pet rabbit, Sassy, asking for someone to feed her, and some bunch of crap going down that prevented us from actually feeding her. It was stupid. It was absolutely, dead-on, flat-out, no-other-way-to-interpret-it ridiculous.

And my mother, God love her, encouraged me to do it every step of the way.

When I was very, very little--I mean, too young to write much beyond my own first name--I would dictate stories to her. These were often less than one notebook page and were stories about characters that I knew from TV shows, movies, or the thousand and one picture books that had accumulated since my first birthday. Stories like "Mickey and Minnie's Day Off," or "Do-Good Dog Eats Too Much Junk Food," or "Donkey Dan Cleans His Room." I didn't know then that I was essentially writing fanfiction (I told you I was a born geek, didn't I?), and my mom didn't let me in on that secret just yet. Instead, she wrote down the stories that I told her, and then hand me the notebook so I could illustrate them. She never told me "This is a waste of time" or "If you want to do this, learn to write, I'm too busy." Later, when I got older and learned to type, she patiently sat next to me while I wrote version after version of "The Nutcracker" and "Once Upon A Clothesline," both of which were plays that we had seen in local high schools. I must've been about eight then--maybe younger, I don't know. My dad would act them out with me, sometimes videotaping, mostly not. We still have those tapes somewhere, and I'm sure if you dug through the hard drive of that old computer, all those "Nutcracker" word documents would still be there.

I remember being eleven years old and deciding, out of the blue, that I was going to write a book series. You see, back in those days I loved The Baby-Sitters Club series (I know, I know) and by that point I had a grasp on that "original characters" concept. So I decided, why not? I could write about ten and eleven-year-olds; I knew that age demographic well enough, didn't I? That was when my mom finally decided that it was time for me to learn how to write. "Beginning, middle, and end," she'd repeat over and over. "Conflict and resolution. That is what will make people want to read your stories." I'd e-mail her word documents with seven-or-eight-chapter stories that I'd written in one or two days, and she would send them back with comments typed in red. "You can't just sit down and write a book series," she told me one day, and I responded, with all my fifth-grade innocence, "Well, why not?" Later she told me that was the moment she knew that I was going to be a writer.

Whenever I wrote papers for school, she insisted on reading them first and giving me feedback. At the time I hated her for it. I'd write what I thought was a perfectly good essay, and she would tear it apart. One day she told me, exasperated, "You write better than anyone I know. You're just not applying yourself." I wrote the essay because I had to, but afterwards I hid in my room and cried. When you're a kid, after all, you can't tell the difference between healthy criticism, of which I had plenty, and real disdain for your writing.

Meanwhile, I fell in love with my dad's camcorder. I started making tapes on my own, which I called The Avery Udell TV Show. It was awful, it was stupid, and it was my favorite thing to do. Every single one of these shows was improvised; the thought of filming one of my scripts never crossed my mind until the day my dad suggested, "Hey, why don't we think about what we're filming before we film it?" There was a novel idea. I started doing re-takes, but still didn't edit--that would come later. I figured out how to dub music over the tapes and began making fake music videos. When I look back on this, I can't help but laugh because most of my music videos told better, more concise stories than my "TV shows."

When I got to high school I wrote fanfiction and, fearing that my parents would find out, never posted it. I wrote about my then-favorite band, the Jonas Brothers. I wrote about Harry Potter. I wrote about Twilight, and--when I got a little older--Red Jumpsuit Apparatus and The Academy Is... and Selena Gomez. I wrote and wrote and wrote, and I often got in trouble for writing too much. "Go outside!" became a frequently-issued suggestion/command in my house, right up there with "Get off the computer!" As I'm sitting here with a laptop writing this now you can rest assured that I did not, in fact, get off the computer. Instead I began showing my parents my stories, and at first they'd laugh (and, honestly, I can't blame them) but then my mom, with her usual sky's-the-limit attitude, pointed out "You know, if you just changed one or two things, this would be a much better story." Whenever and wherever she told me to change something, I always did. And when I got to college, I was thankful for her instruction after reading some of my classmates' papers. There are many things upon which my mom and I still disagree, but the importance of knowing how to write has never been one of them.

When I look back on my childhood, it's not too hard to see why I ended up going to Interlochen. I was always encouraged to be creative. My dad fueled my creativity by acting in every one of my God-awful home movies with me, by dressing up in whatever ridiculous costumes I asked him to wear and improvising rap songs on the spot just to make me laugh, by acting out scenes from Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to my heart's content, and by taking me to see whatever silly movies I wanted to see. (Dad, if you read this, I'm sorry about Twilight. Really, I am. I hope seeing American Sniper made up for it. I know it didn't, but I'm trying, okay?)  And my mom encouraged me to be creative and productive. It's really to her credit that I know how to write at all; I like to think that at least some of it is innate talent, but I know far better. Without her criticism I might still write like certain fanfics I've seen--all bad punctuation and worse storylines--and for that I am grateful, no matter how painful it was to hear critique at the time.

When I hear my friends talk now I realize just how lucky I am. Some people would've killed to go to Interlochen, but their parents wouldn't have let them because it's "a waste of money" to get an arts-based education. Some of my friends at McDaniel would've killed to major in art, theater or music, but their parents pressured them into psychology, business, or pre-law because it was "more practical" that way. One of my classmates told me she wanted to be a painter, not an art therapist, but her parents convinced her that she'd never make any money and had better do something "real" with her college years.

I know that their parents all meant well and did what they did out of love, but I can't help but feel spoiled sometimes, because my parents chose to show their love in a different way. They told me, from the very beginning, that if writing was my passion I should follow it. To this day my mother actively encourages me to apply for professional writing jobs instead of the "more practical" route of administration or State work - both of which I could, with my background in communications and writing, theoretically do. My parents have always been, and always will be, my biggest fans and greatest supporters. Whether it's patiently hearing out my half-baked screenplay ideas or driving me to workshops with professional filmmakers, they are always there for me in whatever ways I need them to be. They were right there with me when I wrote my first script about feeding my pet rabbit, and they were right there with me when I won Audience Choice at my first-ever film festival. And should a miracle occur and I ever make it to the Oscars, they will be right there with me then, too.

So if anyone out there is wondering what a difference support from your family can make, now you know. 

Book-to-movie adaptations I'm dying to make

Adaptations are a double-edged sword. Get it wrong, the fans of the book will kill you; get it right, you’ll spark endless arguments about whether the book or the film was better. And as a book nerd I’ll admit, when it comes to book-to-movie adaptations I’m cautious. I almost always come out thinking “Why did they __? Why did they cast ___? Why didn’t they include that scene where the characters ___? Why did they cut out ___?” But there are some truly brilliant ones out there (Disney’s Narnia series, Carrie, Bridge to Terabithia, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, A Clockwork Orange, The Fault in our Stars and Let the Right One In, to name a few), and it’s because of those lovely films that I believe the idea of adapting a book for the screen is not inherently a bad one. Here are the ones I’d love to get behind--and I seriously hope I’m established in “the Industry” by the time Hollywood gets around to making them.

The book: Peter and the Starcatchers

The author: Dave Barry and Ridley Pearson

Why I want to make it: It’s true there’s a crap-ton of Peter Pan adaptations, but I promise you haven’t seen one like this before, and I can’t believe for a minute that Disney wouldn’t want to cash in on it. In fact, they’ve already made it into a play--and rumor has it they’ve got a movie adaptation in the works. Whoever does it, I hope they do it right, because this is hands-down the best literary adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s play that I have ever read. It’s part-fantasy, part-sci fi, part-romance and part-coming of age--and it’s 100% pirates, mermaids, and island natives kicking ass. There is so much to love about this book. It was pretty much made for the screen; the descriptions are so vivid that it’s practically a screenplay. And then there’s four sequels, too. Hello, franchise!

If I can’t do it… I’d love to see Chris Columbus take this one on. He did such a great job with the first two Harry Potter films I know he’d kick ass with Starcatchers, because if nothing else, he’s got the child-fantasy-with-just-a-hint-of-grow-up-humor thing down pat.

Just don’t give it to: Pete Jackson. He proved with The Hobbit trilogy (which shouldn’t even exist in the first place) that he can’t be trusted with childhood bedtime stories.

The book: The Two Princesses of Bamarre

The author: Gail Carson Levine

Why I want to make it: Because it’s damn beautiful, that’s why. Because in terms of female empowerment, this book even blows Ella Enchanted out of the water. In Two Princesses, a sixteen-year-old princess who is so terrified of her own shadow that she’s never even left the castle grounds takes on a high-stakes quest to find the cure for a plague so she can save her infinitely-braver sister. Let’s just unpack this: In Ella Enchanted, what finally enables Ella to break the curse is her love for a prince. In Two Princesses, the motive for change is Addie’s sister, not her love interest. Now I’m not one of those hardcore “if it’s for a man it doesn’t count” SJW feminists, but I love the idea of a princess story where the prince/love interest takes a secondary role--and yes, I know Disney has done that before, but that still doesn’t make me any less happy when they do it again.

If I can’t do it… Catherine Hardwicke. Please, please, please give this to Catherine Hardwicke. We know that she can tackle the mystery-magical element of it, thanks to Twilight and Red Riding Hood, but I’d love to see her handle it Lords of Dogtown-style and shoot the ogre vs. human fight scenes with a GoPro and a lipstick camera.

Just don’t give it to: Tommy O’Haver, Kirsten Smith, and Karen McCullah Lutz. You might know them as the team of jackasses who ruined Ella Enchanted with a terrible script and worse direction.

The book: Future Eden

The author: Colin Thompson

Why I want to make it: Because I’m a huge damn dork...and because it’s one of the most hilarious sci-fi novels I’ve ever read. Thompson’s writing style reminds me a lot--and I do mean a hell of a lot--of Douglas Adams. Now, I’ll grant you that trying to adapt Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy didn’t turn out as well as it could have. But I don’t think we should make it like Hitchhiker. I think we should make it like Alice in Wonderland. The book is a big damn science-fiction acid trip, so let’s treat it like that! Let’s get Ellen DeGeneres to voice Ethel the Chicken. Let’s have the Jim Henson Company make Douglas into a puppet. Let’s get Danny Elfman to score the damn thing--why not?

If I can’t do it… Let Spielberg take it--why not? He might have taken a more serious turn post-Schindler’s List, but judging by the fourth Indiana Jones film he’s still got a few lighthearted sci-fi bullets in his chamber.

Just don’t give it to: George Lucas. I know, I know--he works great with Spielberg, he’s a genius and all that, I know, it’s true--but the man tends to fix it until it’s broke.

The book: A Cold Day in Paradise

The author: Steve Hamilton

Why I want to make it: I know we’re not exactly short on action films (*cough*third sequel to Taken why?*cough cough*) but this isn’t your garden-variety detective pulp fiction. Alex McKnight is a jackass with a hero complex, he’s got a bullet lodged in his chest, he lives in the UP of Michigan where it is cold as hell most of the year, and he’s got a colorful cast of friends in his life that not only keep him on his toes, but keep a reader intrigued. I’d love to direct this partly because it’s set in my home state, and partly because holy crap did this book scare the hell out of me. You think it’s going to be a normal murder mystery, but at the end--and Hamilton does this every single time--there’s a plot twist that socks you right in the gut. I want to be responsible for bringing that gut-sock to the big screen.

If I can’t do it… I would so love to see Kathryn Bigelow do this film, Hurt Locker-style, because the issue with so many cop/action films is that the characters get reduced to archetypes and Bigelow generally tries her damndest not to let that happen.

Just don’t give it to: Michael Bay. Holy mother of God, do not let Michael Bay do this film. So much nope. Just. So. Much. Nope.

The book: Peace Breaks Out

The author: John Knowles

Why I want to make it: This is the sequel/companion novel to A Separate Peace that picks up the school year after World War II ends. The senior class of 1946 has missed the “big event of the century” by just a few months, and some of them aren’t too happy about it. Wexford, an ambitious, self-possessed student trying to make a name for himself, clashes violently with his teacher, war hero Pete, and his classmate, conservative German-descended Hocshwender, in a showdown that leads to a tragic outcome. The players may be slightly different from those in A Separate Peace, but the intensity of the narrative--and the resonation it’s bound to have with any readers who are or remember what it’s like to be teenagers--is still there. A Separate Peace has already been adapted for the screen a couple of times, and I see no reason why Peace Breaks Out doesn’t deserve the same honor.

If I can’t do it… Gus Van Sant would kick ass at making this book into a movie. Look at Elephant, for God’s sake, or Paranoid Park--this man definitely understands teenage boys, no matter what generation they’re from.

Just don’t give it to: Disney. Disney, I love you, but please, please don’t do to this film what you did to Johnny Tremain.

The book: Twisted

The author: Laurie Halse Anderson

Why I want to make it: Because Tyler, the protagonist, reminds me in turns of myself, my boyfriend, my best guy friend from college, my ex, my best friend from high school, and--most interestingly--my arch-nemesis in high school. Just like Knowles and Van Sant, Laurie Halse Anderson knows high school students whether they’re from her generation or not, and all her books demonstrate that understanding with an intensity that leaves readers winded after a few chapters on her rollercoaster. She doesn’t shy away from the hard stuff (Twisted tackles suicide, while Speak--which they’ve already adapted--tackled rape, and others take on eating disorders, PTSD, broken families and low-income families) and generally doesn’t leave much to the imagination. This might not be an easy book to adapt to the screen, but it’s a film that definitely deserves to be made.

If I can’t do it… Rumor has it they’ve already optioned this to be a film. Is it too much to hope that they’ll let Anand Tucker direct it? His technique in Shopgirl, which was to use the color palette and lights represent Mirabelle’s emotions, would lend itself very well to this kind of movie.

Just don’t give it to: See comment on Peace Breaks Out. Multiply by 4,000. Again I say: love you Disney, but don’t you dare touch this movie.