INDELIBLE FRECKLES

Sean Molloy recently posted about who he bases his characters on – on other people, on himself, on other characters, and a combination of all three.

As always his post is a much more polite and tactful explanation than mine:

I have a propensity to have my scripts’ role calls be a bountiful colours of Benetton kind of experience. I believe it’s in reaction to exclusive vanilla television indoctrination for the first couple of decades of my life.

The universe may have recognised my small contribution: John August has posted about the Bechdel Test.

  In your script:

  1.  Are there two or more female characters with names?

  2.  Do they talk to each other?

  3.  If they talk to each other, do they talk about something other than a man?

Amongst the comments on that post was this from American multihyphenate Kevin Arbouet:

  1.  How many scripts out there have two or more black characters with names?

  2.  Do they talk about something other than how white people put them down/The Black Experience?

  3.  Are they a judge?

All my scripts – television in particular – satisfy the first question of both the Bechdel and Arbouet tests (extending the latter test to all non-European* ethnicities).

Not so many of the feature scripts pass questions 2 and 3 of the Bechdel. I’d like to say in my defence that in relation to question 3, my female characters may be discussing a man but it’s never in any romantic context.

As for questions 2 and 3 of the Arbouet, none of my ethnic characters talk about their struggle in this White Man’s World, nor are any of them in a powerful and/or well-respected positions, but they’re representative of the New Zealand I see both firsthand and in the news.

And that’s all one can ask of a script’s cast of characters: that they be appropriate, realistic and representative of whatever world you’re offering your audience.

*  ‘Non-European’ – that’s ‘non-white’ to American readers.

When making small talk at gatherings, once all the parties’ occupations have had their two questions, an inevitable question thrown in my direction is What’s it like to work with actors? My usual answer is that they’re a necessary evil – a cross to be borne in order for us writers to tell our stories.

It gets a laugh – obviously I don’t give this answer when in the company of actor/s – but just between you and me, I’m a little afraid of actors.

Being a working screenwriter might be all about getting paid and buying things on TradeMe but it don’t count for a slab of Whittakers’ finest if you don’t get produced. And to get produced, amidst the small army of collaborators who will trample your ego, mince your work, and sully your vision are… actors.

Unless you take up puppeteering, anime or cartooning, you’re going to have to accept the fact that someone – not a clone of you, not some doppelganger of you – is going to take your words and -

- and what? At worst, expose you to be the hack you’ve been all along.

At best – and this happens more often than you think – bring your characters to life in ways you never imagined.

Of course what you see in readings/rehearsal/shooting/editing it’s not what you had in mind. Those uppity actors are asking a million questions about motivation, moulding your characters this way and that, challenging the backstory you created. They’re taking over… and as they put a face and tic and walk to your characters, they’re irrevocably changing them.

Change is good.

In the beginning, I didn’t care much for my character’s names. They just were, know-what-I-mean? Didn’t serial killers just happen to be called Gacy and Bundy? Didn’t Stallone and Schwarzenegger become action film brands? So what if my sister and I were named after our neighbours? (And why do people find this amusing?)

Names are important, though:

I’ve long since run out of first and middle names of friends, family and acquaintances. Unlike John August, no streetnames I can remember or think of lend themselves to being affixed to my puppets characters.

I have to work at it. But maybe I learnt from the best: