Author: d f mamea

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Pet Sounds

Roger Ebert‘s post about his pets animal companions got me thinking.

A couple of weeks back, I spent a day in a Radio New Zealand studio watching listening to a script being recorded. I spent most of that day with my eyes closed – but instead of falling asleep as I normally would, I found myself transported into a story that I not only wrote but thought I knew inside out. (That’s actors for you.) (And I guess radio’s not called theatre of the mind for nothing.)

Since then, I’ve become just a bit more conscious of what I hear. Small, everyday sounds like —

  • The cccclicks of The Dog’s nails on concrete during our runs.

  • The grunting-beakfuls as The Chickens scarf up their seeds and pellets.

  • The low boaah-boaaahh of The Chickens as they go about their business.

  • The Cat’s paws ghosting through the house.

  • The Dog’s tail ffwhiffing across the floor as she sits, expectant.

  • The kggghhh-snort-grunt of The Dog in contentment.

These give me warm fuzzies.

And when I work them into my scripts and they make it onto the screen without someone explicating it, I’ll be happy.

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Diplomacy

Let’s say you’re meeting with someone and your relationship soured not that long ago but you need to remain civil. You have two options: to meet with them on your own, or with your manager.

You do a quick previz:

SCENARIO A: SOLO

INT. MALL – MORNING

Our WRITER meets with OTHER PARTY and, after confirmation of certain details, another meeting is proposed.

OTHER PARTY

Sweet. How about we meet at your place?

WRITER

You’re not welcome at my place and if you turn up I’ll give you a Cuban necktie and, once you’ve bled out, bury you in the garden, plant a lemon tree over you, and piss on your grave every day.

SCENARIO B: TANDEM

INT. MALL – MORNING

Our WRITER and his MANAGER meet with OTHER PARTY and, after confirmation of certain details, another meeting is proposed.

OTHER PARTY

Sweet. How about we meet at your place?

MANAGER

We’d rather meet you on Neutral Ground.

OTHER PARTY

Oh –

Other Party looks at the Writer.

WRITER

Yeah.

OTHER PARTY

Okay. Sure.

‘S a no-brainer, innit?

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Point & Click

Mm. Hmm.

  • It’d be just like John August to kick-start 2009 with a short and sweet pep talk.
  • A new blog of note: TV writer Earl Pomerantz (Major Dad, Becker) is Just Thinking. (Fedora-tip: Alex Epstein.)
  • Kiwi scribe (and fellow guild board member) Mike Riddell joins the scribosphere with The Interminable Moon, about the journey his novel, The Insatiable Moon, takes on its way to the silver screen.
  • My favourites of multi-hyphenate Edward Zwick‘s ten filmmaking rules are –
    • 3.  No plan survives contact with the enemy.
    • 10. Where there is no solution there is no problem. At some point in every production, the director loses faith in the movie and the crew loses faith in the director. Somehow it all works out.

    (Fedora-tip: Movie Maker Magazine, by way of Mr Epstein.)

  • The mighty Joss Whedon has ten writing tips, my picks being –
    • 4. Everybody has a reason to live. Everybody in your scene, including the thug flanking your bad guy, has a reason.
    • 7. Track the audience mood. Think in terms of what [your audience is thinking]. They go to the theatre, and they either notice that their butts are numb, or they don’t. If you’re doing your job right, they don’t.

    (Fedora-tip: Catherine Bray, by way of Danny Stack.

  • John Rogers‘ episode-by-episode online commentary and Q&A his Leverage series is a must-read for television junkies. Favourite moment so far: an ep that [seemed] so simple. It begins with us in the writers’ room cheering “They’re on an airplane, and have to pull off the con before they land! It’s practically a bottle show!” and ends with a 70-foot replica fuselage on the soundstage. Oh, and we had to build an airplane bathroom with wild walls, because you just can’t get a camera in there.
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Box Watch – The Wire – Seasons 1-5

I was channel-surfing late one night when I stumbled across a scene where a couple of ghetto kids were discussing arithmetic. Then it cut to to an off-duty detective with his sons at a local market and, seeing who I presumed was the show’s villain, used his sons to tail that person. And then it cut to the ‘villain’ attending a community college lecture about business management.

A university-attending villain? A cop who wasn’t above using his own flesh and blood to run surveillance? Kids who couldn’t do maths at school but could flawlessly keep track of the flow of money and drugs when they’re on the street corner?

What. The. Hell?

I watched the ep right to the end and was little the wiser: there was a large cast; the street talk was unintelligible to me; the cops were coarse, profane and prone to disturbingly casual brutality; the drug dealers were disciplined, organised and smart. Each character seemed to have their own storyline. My casual assumptions of baddies being bad and stupid, and goodies being good and smart, did not apply. It required concentration. I had no idea what was happening.

I remember thinking, What the hell kind of cop show is this?

And I knew for sure that I wanted more.

On the strength of that chance channel-surf, I bought the DVD of the first season and never looked back. There’s nothing I can say here about the writing and the acting and the production that hasn’t already been said a hundred times over in the aether.

Creator David Simon‘s assiduously spare approach to The Wire – keep up, bub – was hard work but hugely rewarding, and give me half a chance, I’ll bore you to tears with how much I love the show. Instead, I’ll give the last word to Mr Simon himself, from an interview with Nick Hornby:

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

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Lists

We’re a two-car family:

  • The Goddess drives Her chariot, aka The Little Car;
  • and I drive the sportswagon, aka The Big Car.

The sportswagon is Japanese, inconspicuous and boringly reliable.

The chariot is Italian, spunky and an attention-seeker – the attention being of the garage mechanic kind. But The Goddess loves it to bits.

Just before we headed south last weekend*, the wee car was lustily belting along when all power disappeared – just like that – and, after some checking and poking under the hood, and reading of the user manual, the sportswagon and I towed it to the local garage.

A few days later, mid-holiday, I came upon a scrap of paper with The Goddess’s handwriting:

  • hatchback
  • 1200-1500cc engine
  • manual transmission
  • a Honda Jazz?

(Below Her writing was a scrawl by different, mortal, hands: ejection seats, STOL capability, NOS on-demand, coffee machine, HUD with satnav, cloaking device.)

Like I said, The Goddess loves Her chariot. But I suppose there’s a limit to how much one is willing to contribute to your mechanic’s passion for deep-sea fishing.

I have a similar list for my current project:

  1.  treatment
  2.  scene breakdown
  3.  working first draft
  4.  first draft
  5.  inflict on readers
  6.  second draft
  7.  inflict on surviving readers
  8.  third draft
  (and so on)

The thing is, the first draft was aborted after eighty-plus pages and although I’ve returned to a prose treatment… I’ve started another list:

  a.  it’s a story about fathers and sons
  b.  the father was a towering personality
  c.  the son has a chip on his shoulder (ie., his father)
  c.  it’s a tale of love lost… and regained

– while in a less tidy hand – still my own – and in no discernible order:

  –  throw in a car chase
  –  and a gratuitous sex scene
  –  have them sort it out over hot lead
  –  as long as they all hold hands in the end
  –  gratuitous sex tasteful love scene

Mm. Getting there.

(This’ll be the last post about the process (and That Project) for a while – the potty-mouthed Phill Barron and the mysterious Daily Screenwriter write about process much more interestingly than I do.)

*  Sorry for the week’s silence. The Mamea family were in Wellington visiting aiga and the only ‘net access I could get was through my cellphone (hence my few emails were of the all-text-on-one-line variety).

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Oh Alright

Someone’s been on my back about stopping part-way through a draft.

He’s right, but. Always finish a draft. Always. No exceptions.

Unless you can’t, in good conscience, finish.

If I didn’t know where I was headed, finishing a draft – riddled as it might be with with wrong turns, unresolved subplots and talking animals – would be essential to find out what the hell kind of story I was trying to write. Yes: an unfinished draft is an unfulfilled promise – a mere tease.

I know the story I want to tell. I know the characters. I know how it starts, and develops and – most importantly – how it ends. I can see it all, dammit. I just can’t write it.

No, that last one’s not true.

I can write it. I am writing it. But it’s hard.

Boo-frickin’-hoo, I hear you say, and I agree with you absolutely. Save it for therapy, or someone who gives a hoot.

Now keep writing.

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Multiple Meanings

There comes a point in a script where —

— you’ve outlined the story —

— you’ve done a scene breakdown —

— why, you even roughed out an 85-page working draft —

— but then you hit page 79 of your proper draft, you know you’ve another twenty or thirty pages to go, and all the voices you’ve been ignoring since page 47 just stop all of a sudden because –

  a.  admit it – you’re lost, and
  b.  you’re not adding value.

Now, there’s lost as in I was wondering how I was going to reach the second act out but my fingers seem to know the way and then there’s I’m making my characters walk and talk shit.

And as for adding value, there’s My characters are walking and talking shit but there’s something useful happening here, and then there’s This. Is. Going. Nowhere.

The word sanguine comes to mind – until i see that it actually means cheerfully optimistic.

Melancholic is more accurate, I suppose, but it just sounds so… down.

Hang on, my first instinct was right: sanguine, adj – eager to shed blood (archaic).

Yep.

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A Belated Review

And what have I got to say for my reading and viewing for 2008?

Yep, my book readin’s waaay down, but I’ve recently rediscovered it over the break with three (non-picture) books on the go. (But will I finish them?).

Hardcopy scripts were courtesy of the guild‘s Timpson Collection. Softcopies, as always, were courtesy of Don at Simply Scripts.

It was a very quiet year for film watching. How quiet? I’ve only seen two films apiece in Roger Ebert‘s 2008 picks and Lynden Barber‘s faves.

Maybe that was because 2008 was a year for a lot of box watching. While some people mourn the loss of Bionic Woman, and The Sopranos, I’ve got my own problems with the end of The Shield and The Wire. Don’t get me wrong – I’m glad they finished when they did: better to choose your terms of departure than overstay your welcome.

The universe shall provide.

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2009

So it’s a new year. Just like it was 366 days ago. And 365 days before that.

While other people nurse hangovers by first brushing their tongues, decry any perceived lack of progress during 2008, and/or revisit potentially rashly devised 2009 resolutions, the new year greets me with challenges opportunities to take by the horns and, once ground up, snort for its stimulating properties.

A Significant Birthday looms a mere eighteen months hence. Less than two years might seem like bugger-all to some of you but I keep flashing on the macro of a blazing matchstick in the opening credits of De Palma‘s Mission: Impossible.

dum dum dum-dum, dum dum dum-dum,…

Happy new year, all.

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Pots on the Boil

INT. LOUNGE, HOME – EVENING

I lie in the arms of THE GODDESS.

ME

I haven’t done ANYTHING this year.

THE GODDESS

Oh rubbish.

ME

I’m serious.

THE GODDESS

What were you busy doing at the beginning of the year then?

ME

... The short film.

THE GODDESS

And what have you been doing with those playwrights, hm? And that stuff for the guild?

I open my mouth, then close it.

THE GODDESS

And then there’s your radio play. Well?

ME

You can’t just let me feel sorry for myself, can you?

She kisses my forehead --

THE GODDESS

No, I cannot.

What have I achieved this year then?

I’m tempted to skew my stats a la the police leadership in The Wire but, for me, a project isn’t finished unless it’s finished, knowwha’Imean?

So:

  • To’ona’i crawls towards completion;

  • I’m co-writing a play, to premiere in 2012;

  • I have my own play to push – and thanks to the joys of misery likes company peer pressure, the first act is due by mid-January 2009;

  • the diversionary feature spec has copious thematic and strucutural notes… but an actual story has yet to emerge;

  • enamoured with the short radio play’s ‘success’, I’m writing an hour-long radio play: I’ve got the opening and closing acts while the middle is currently all rough notes – forty pages to go!

  • and the long awaited spec feature of 2007 has been roughed out and is approaching a proper first draft.

[Takes a few steps back and squints]

Okay. I suppose it’s just about perspective.

INT. LOUNGE, HOME – LATER

ME

Maybe this is my dash. Maybe this is IT. Maybe –

THE GODDESS

Maybe you needed a year to consolidate.

ME

I thought last year was a consolidating year.

THE GODDESS

It’s a bit hard to consolidate when you’re juggling paying work, don’t you think?

I mumble something.

THE GODDESS

Pardon?

ME

... I suppose.

She nods, knowing, as always, that She’s right.

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