Scriptwriter
Every time I sit down to work on my current project, its deadline bansheeing towards me, I find myself tempted bombarded with just, like, brilliant ideas for another script that I not only can see and hear, but virtually taste, too.
The past few weeks have been, in a word, difficult.
The Universe – ah, The Universe – has kindly pointed out that I am not alone in having this particular weakness: Mr August says You will always want to be writing something else.
Damn.
Okay, the short didn’t make it into the local festival but – half a kilo of Whittakers‘ finest later – life. Goes. On.
Mm. This week, for your infotainment:
Encouraged by Mr Reid‘s remarks, The Goddess and I watched the second and third episodes of The Sarah Connor Chronicles the other week. The promising story threads – like the possibility of Summer Glau’s cyborg growing a heart a la T2, and the ticking clock of Sarah Connor’s terminal cancer – were a little undone by small details regarding the ‘mystery’ terminator: if it’s putting itself together Iron Giant-style, how the hell does it ‘see’ to find its missing head? and what happened to the “only living flesh can be temporally displaced” rule, hm?
After the second ep:
After the third ep:
Now, with the fourth and fifth eps under my belt, I have these to say about the series:
It’s not appointment television but I’ll hang in there. Maybe my expectations of a television spin-off of a (two-thirds) great film franchise are a bit high. But if John goes off the reservation one more time, the Connors are on their own.
Having whinnied about keeping track of script ingredients, I read that Mr Tripuraneni was using Celtx on his current project. It rang a faint bell – and lo:
This, my friends, is A Sign.
Watching Sports Night with The Goddess followed Cameron’s Logarithmic Curve. We started back in February, watching about an ep a week. March was the same. April was a wash-out. But as we entered May and The Goddess got to know the characters – in particular their relationships – as an ep’s end credits rolled, I would hear a Little Voice beside me: Can we watch another one?
Such requests are unheard of in the Mamea household.
In between, amongst others, Desperate Housewives, Lewis and Build A New Life in the Country, an evening with Dan, Casey, et al, became two-ep affairs. Then last week, on a couple of nights, we watched three eps in a row. And only two nights ago, we watched five.
Then I had to explain to The Goddess why there were no more eps to watch.
In the after-match debrief – and also while we worked our way through the DVD set – it’s the little details that stand out. How less is more – where what’s not said can define a relationship far better than declarations of loyalty or bemoanings of betrayal. How a certain behaviour can really be mere displacement. How expectations of standard TV drama situations and relationships were not met because they were handled with wit, intelligence and compassion. It’s safe to say that for all the verbosity, wit and good intentions of the characters, they’re as inhibited, neurotic and selfish as anyone in the real world.
I could go on and on about Sports Night but others have said it better in the nine years since it was first aired. As sad as it was that it got canned after only two seasons, it ended as well as it started, and you can’t say that of many television series.
POSTSCRIPT: The Goddess is quite reluctant to try Mr Sorkin’s West Wing because, for all my arguments that politics is merely behaviour and relationships on a different scale and plane, it’s about politics.
Whenever I drag myself out for a run, the Dog usually accompanies me. Taking the Dog means having her on the lead, factoring in stops for toileting and meeting other dogs, and waiting for traffic. When it’s a hard run, I welcome each and every excuse to stop. But when it’s a run where I’m in the zone and I do not want to stop, I grit my teeth and wait on the bitch as she wees and poos and smells other dogs’ bottoms.
Sometimes things have to happen in their own way, no matter how much I want to beat my last time.
I’ve been gritting my teeth a bit with the television pilot lately. I’ve written a couple of pilots before but those were for half-hour shows; this puppy’s an hour-long drama.
I’ve read a heap of hour-long pilots*. I’ve got Jill Golick, John August, John Rogers, and Lisa Klink on my RSS feeds. I’ve been perusing my West Wing, Shield, Law & Order and Sports Night DVDs. (Yes, Sports Night is half-hourly but it’s so freakin’ good!)
Unlike a feature script where I can leap in – within reason and/or time constraints – keyboard blazing tight groups of sluglines and cut-to’s, a television script is much more rigidly structured. For starters, there are ad breaks to take into account. And there’s the (currently imaginary) budget to consider – no CUT-TO’s to the Iraq occupation or Victorian London for this show. And I have to establish some sort of feel or style or look – or all of those preceding words – to reinforce the show and concept as being unique and individual.
Right now, feature scripts are looking easy-peasy: I only need to keep the audience nailed to their seats for ninety-plus minutes and then they’re free to go.
The pilot has forty-five or so minutes with which to engage/enthrall/hook/addict the viewer and make them look forward to next week’s episode.
I can see the ep doing that – but only in my mind’s eye. In order to get it Out There, I have to write it all up – and to do that, I have to break down the ep:
Long-suffering-time readers will know how much summarising Turns. Me. On.
Having written many, many pages of notes like “HERO’s only childhood memory is of when his mother dressed he and his dog, Bingo, in matching sailor suits” and “NEMESIS destroys SIDEKICK in best-of-three pinochle”, I must confess: I’m beginning to see the attraction of index cards.
They just seem so… unromantic.
* Big ups to Mr Lee for his stash.
Courtesy of a surprise visit by Stevo and his Queen concert DVDs a few weeks back, I’ve been listening to them quite a bit lately. Even The Goddess – an ardent Queen fan from way back – is beginning to tire of Freddie and friends on the stereo.
It’s just…
I’m remembering being plunged into the cockpit of an F16 with Jason Gedrick the moment he hits ‘Play’ on his discman and One Vision fills his headphones in Iron Eagle.
I’m flashing on Christopher Lambert and Mr Mercury crossing katana-and-mic-stand as a Queen chorus announces “Here we are” in the music-video/trailer for Highlander.
I’m not so much being inspired as remembering why I do this. It feels good.
I’ve got three, no, four, posts that I’m having trouble getting over the finish line, so it’s lookee what i found! time:
Some people say that as long as you have a wham-bang-thank-you-ma’am finish, the dreck that preceded it will be forgiven. I say that if people give up watching your film because of the preceding dreck, no-one’ll appreciate the time and care and effort you put into that big finish.
If you asked me twenty years ago for a What’s Hot and What’s Not list, amongst the big hair, stove-pipe pants, and cellphones literally the size and weight of actual bricks would be:
Hot: action films that were literally punctuated by gun-fights/car-chases/explosions culminating in a climactic car-chase-leading-to-a-gun-fight-leading-to-a-BIG-ASS-EXPLOSION.
Not: action films that ended with a – yawn – mano-a-mano fight*.
In those blessedly naive days, I thought filmmakers of the latter kind of film had run out of money and had to cobble together some sort of ending. Or they’d climaxed too early. Or that the film just sucked. As I got older matured, I began to appreciate endings in which the antagonist didn’t get a multiple injection of hot lead. Instead of shrieking, Shoot the yellow-bellied cocksocker! at film’s end, I found myself nodding sagely by proxy – Let him live with his/her misdeed.
It was okay because it felt appropriate. It resonated.
The best stories – and storytelling – will do that. It’s where all the elements screenwriters juggle with – plotting versus characterisation versus pacing – come together and become an experience.
Jeopardy doesn’t have to be a firefight every ten minutes. Increasing stakes doesn’t mean a progression from saving a city to saving the world. I want the protagonist to work for my hard-earned entertainment dollar. I want them to suffer. And then, once eighty or so minutes have elapsed – as with Life If Only It Was Fair – then the protagonist can prevail, whether by mushroom cloud or bare knuckle fight.
* Which were, come to think of it, really thrillers.
If I knew five-plus years ago how hard it would be to be a professional screenwriter, I might have tried a little harder to understand the Star Trek-like technobabble that was part of the editing classes at film school. At the very least I would have been employed much more contiguously in these post-film school years.
I doubt that I’d be as happy and content as I am now, though. When I look back, I can exclaim – just like those Hallmark cards or chain-email-angels insist – I’ve come a long way, baby!
My trick to surviving, I think, is my ability to be wilfully short-sighted. Take the short film, for example. I thought I had a pretty straight-forward project: five talking heads, no gun-fights, no car-chases, a half-dozen locations, and a nine to ten-minute running time. The devil is in the details.
I obviously like to kvetch.
In the end, in the heat of of any stressful moment, I’m always struck by two thoughts:
