Author: d f mamea

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Grrgrll farggle raar – Debrief

After threatening to, I followed through.

INT. IMAX THEATRE – DAY

DAVE and STEVO, their necks unnaturally craned at a certain angle in order to see as much of the HONKING GREAT IMAX SCREEN without inducing whiplash, watch what they hope are the final minutes of “The Dark Knight”.

ON SCREEN where GARY OLDMAN holds his SON tight and intones:

GARY OLDMAN

Because... he’s the hero Gotham deserves – but not the one it needs right now....

ON DAVE as he tries to move his head without it, like, hurting.

DAVE

(thought balloon)

Some chiropractor’s going to buy their next speedboat with this neck.

ON SCREEN as Batman’s BAT-POD streaks through GOTHAM’S UNDERGROUND STREETS.

GARY OLDMAN

... because he’s not our hero – he’s a silent guardian...

ON DAVE as he glances slideways at STEVO – and realises that he is asleep.

GARY OLDMAN

(on honking great imax screen)

... a watchful protector...

DAVE sits up, a lightning bolt of spinal pain lost in an eureka moment --

DAVE

(thought balloon)

I know what he’s going to say!

-- and DAVE’s lips move in sync with --

GARY OLDMAN

(on honking great imax screen)

... a dark knight.

Ah, Mr Hilton. I really should’ve taken the hint when you wrote:

CHRISTIAN BALE IN A RUBBER SUIT flips HEATH?S TRUCK using his BAT-PHYSICS-VIOLATOR, then rides up a wall in order to turn around like a BADASS. FANBOYS in the AUDIENCE cheer wildly for this, even though it looks RETARDED.

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The Working First Draft

I finished a first draft last week. It’s what I call a working first draft – a partially muscled skeleton of a script that I don’t show anyone for fear of their never reading my scripts again. I think one of William Goldman‘s Screentrade Adventures – or was it Stephen King‘s On Writing? – had a name for it. Can’t find the reference. Anyway:

  • I have completed a draft;
  • it has a beginning, middle and end;
  • and I’m still excited by the idea behind it.

While I was typing out the epilogue, I found I had a lump in my throat and a tear in my eye – touching reminders of why I’m so attached to the story. It was great. If When I have that effect on the reader a few drafts from now, I’ll be pretty effin’ stoked.

The current draft is a pretty measly 85 pages long. The story’s a 120 page kind of script. The missing pages are currently in the form of, at best –

INT. HERO’S PARENTS’ HOUSE – EVENING

Our HERO has dinner with his MOTHER and FATHER.

HERO

– SAYS SOMETHING TO REINFORCE HIS ALREADY-ESTABLISHED RELUCTANCE WITH WHICH HE DINES WITH HIS PARENTS –

FATHER

– SAYS SOMETHING TO REINFORCE HIS PREVIOUSLY HINTED AT DISAPPOINTMENT WITH HERO –

MOTHER puts her cutlery down.

MOTHER

Stop it – just stop it!

HERO and FATHER look at her.

– or, at worst –

INT. HEROINE’S OFFICE – EVENING

PLACEHOLDER – until I decide how to establish our HEROINE as ‘a woman not to mess with’ without making her come across as having regular testosterone injections.

This week is time-out from the script. I’ve got my work cut out for me.

And I can’t wait.

(Big-ass fedora-tips to Mr August and Nima Yousefi for making the above scrippets available.)

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Alright Already

Okay. Alright.

So I blogged about a chicken – and a dead one at that – and tried to pass it off as being about supporting characters by bookending it with some weak-ass scriptwriting observations. It’s just that, in the aftermath of Wallace’s sudden departure, The Goddess said, If we’re like this over a chicken we’ve only known six months, we’re gonna be a mess when The Dog karks it.

And I looked at The Dog –

– and flashed on my earlier ramblings about her.

… Best not to think about it.

Anyway, I was going to post about the use/misuse/abuse/un-use of supporting characters but I ended up drafting something about finishing the first draft of a script.

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A Warm Egg

Introducing new supporting characters to an existing narrative is a challenge: they have to have a good reason to join up; they have to add value; and they better be damned interesting.

The Dark Brown One, The Light Brown One and The Mid-Brown One.

That’s pretty much how I felt when The Goddess decided to get some chickens – real chickens – earlier in the year.

So.

  • Good reason to join up? Because The Goddess said.
  • Do they add value? They lay eggs, silly.
  • Are they interesting? See below.

I never expected The Chickens to be interesting. They arrived stringy and without combs, and with the promise of egg-laying still a few months away.

As I struggled to adjust to a growing menagerie – there’s the beginnings of a post on the The Worm Farm somewhere on the hard-drive – an endless loop of Sesame Street‘s what-comes-first-the-chicken-or-the-egg tormented me during my waking hours. I had to find a place – like a pigeonchicken-hole in My World for them. In a feeble attempt to describe our homestead as Fortress Mamea, having established The Dog as our Rapid Deployment Force and The Cat as a Spec/Black Ops unit, maybe the fowl were our CAP. But it never really fit.

As summer slushed to autumn, and autumn torrented into winter, specific personalities emerged from these creatures whose brains could not be larger than my thumb.

The Light Brown One was flighty from day one, and is still nervous to this day. ‘N.S.’ best describes this one.

The Dark Brown One was the demanding one – the one most likely to flutter up and get first dibs on what you had in your hand.

And the Mid-Brown One was the adventurous, curious one – the first to try a grasshopper, and the first to discover flight (ie., to the top of the fence that separated their ‘meadow’ from the rest of the property).

Wallace – 2008

The Mid-Brown One – Wallace – was killed today. One of the neighbourhood dogs – a pure-bred mastiff – escaped his keep and the first we saw was him with a mouthful of very dead chicken. We’ve met the mastiff on a number of occasions: he’s a sweetie with an overabundance of slobber; and his owner is very conscientious about keeping his dog under control.

It was an accident: a dog got loose, saw something moving rapidly, gave chase, and that was all she wrote.

It’s shitty that it was the one with personality that got killed.

It’s ridiculous that I’m committing a post to a damned chicken that I was at pains not to get too close to.

But that’s how it is with supporting characters. Sometimes they get under your skin. You get to like them. And when they’re gone, you miss them and all their stupid little idiosyncrasies.

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Patience, Schmatience

So – in my true spare time, of course – I’m exploring the lastest distraction idea which, on the face of it, seems to offer an intriguing (high-concept) premise within an achievable (ultra-low) budget.

Burning questions are sketched out: who is it about? what needs to happen? does it make sense?

  Yes – I know what it’s about.
  Yes – I know what happens.
  But it’s not making sense.

I try rushing the idea from one-sentence idea to one-page concept in a lazy attempt to resolve the nonsensicalness. Uh-uh. No matter how creative I try to be, one plus two plus three will not equal the five that I want.

I refuse to be cowed.

  The idea is nifty.
  The concept is almost there.
  The budget is appealing.

Time, I suppose, to approach this with the patience and persistence of water on stone a spoilt child whining for some parental attention.

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Happy Sunbeam

Regular as clockwork: I’m two-thirds into a note- and aside-pepperedriddled first draft and bam! I’ve got an idea for another story.

I’m not worried about my current script because it’s moving.

Nor am I worried about being distracted – once I’ve racked up my minimum page-count for the day, I’m a free agent.

I think… I’m just glad I’m still getting ideas. I’m still getting turned on by the potential of new stories, and still loving it when the creative juices my writing mojo I can just make shit up.

(This post, I suspect, was brought to you by four straight days of no rain.)

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Motivation

Over at the Guild forums, Ben Reid has listed the various motivation styles of he and his fellow Wellington writing group members. I was surprised to realise that I’ve tried all of them.

Was each style a kind of stage in my development as a writer? Or a flailing about in search of One True Way to Write? Answer is currently in the Too Hard basket.

Meantime, some arbitrary categories:

Inspiration as Motivation

Watching films and television are equal parts inspiration and motivation… and de-motivation. Being motivated by a film or television programme is dead easy. The line between inspiration and de-motivation is fiendishly fine: Wow, that was soo freaking cool, I wanna do that! can oh-so-easily become I have nothing to offer, I am a hack, I am nothing.

When it comes to making up character backstories or synopsising, my first response is almost always that if I – that is, The Audience – can’t see it or hear it, why the hell do I have to write that shit? What I forget though is that once I’ve done the above bios or treatments, I find myself newly enthused – inspired, even – as I rediscover why I want to write the story in the first place.

Sharing as Motivation

I used to talk over various stages of my script with friends and family. If I wasn’t careful – and I certainly wasn’t in those early heady days – I discovered that their indulgent or polite smiles of heyyy, he’s a writer would eventually morph into looks of if he tells me about his script, I will stab him in the eye-socket with my teaspoon.

Co-writing is something I’d like to do although very probably for the wrong reason: I think all I really want is for someone else to do the heavy lifting. (There might be a future post in this.)

I don’t tell anyone about being competitive with my writing and career. It’s a secret.

Discipline

No matter how enthused – or sick to the back teeth – I am with a script, those ninety-plus pages and I need a time-out. It’s true: absence makes the heart grow fonder.

Thinking ahead to the next project is more of an occupational hazard than a motivator.

And ooh, I just live for deadlines. Especially if I’ve been wreaking havoc with my mouse-hand and sleeping patterns on Call of Duty for most of the time I should’ve been writing.

The past while, I’ve been just writing – anything sometimes, any-goddamned thing just to bloody get something on-screen – hating every single keystroke, counting the pages until I can stop, and I know it’s rubbish, and that I’ll have to rewrite it.

But I also know that every element that I throw out has broadened what I know about The Story. That every little darling whose throat I’ve crushed, gave me something, even fleetingly, towards The Story.

And in those screeds of reluctantly tapped out script-moments, I know that I’ve taken just that little step closer to finishing.

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Kev and Me

I have fond twentieth century memories of an above-average cop show where Ken Wahl and his eyebrow went undercover to fight crime, befriended the bad guys, and becoming increasingly conflicted about his work with each season. It was called Wiseguy. This (and the long-lamented Unsub) plumbed moral ambiguities and twisted the TV-cop-show genre before the likes of X-Files and then CSI made ‘dark’ and ‘gritty’ cool.

Each season of Wiseguy concentrated on one big-cheese villain that had to be taken down. Of all the mobsters and politicians and teamsters who would go into Mr Wahl’s little black book, two villains stood out for me: Tim Curry‘s rogueish music exec who was a hoot to watch; and Kevin Spacey‘s enigmatic and downright creepy criminal mastermind (and his too-intimate-for-comfort relationship with his sister played by Joan Severance).

Now that I think of it, maybe it was the actors’ approaches that were so memorable. At one end of the spectrum was Curry’s big-toothed scene-chewing, and at the other was Spacey with his looks, glances and loaded pauses. I think it was Spacey – and the writing of course – that forced me to think things like what did he mean by that? and I just missed a major clue, didn’t I?

Did Wiseguy really introduce me to my screenwriting friend, Subtext? I don’t know. But something happened when Spacey started running his lines in that show. It’s where an actor elevates the script without drawing attention. People thought that Spacey was the bee’s knees when they saw him in either The Usual Suspects or American Beauty.

I knew that already from his tour of duty on Wiseguy.

(And here’s an entertaining few minutes of Spacey and his imaginary friends. Fedora-tip: Eyes Wired Open.)

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