{"id":254,"date":"2008-11-26T16:55:05","date_gmt":"2008-11-26T04:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/?p=254"},"modified":"2008-11-26T16:55:05","modified_gmt":"2008-11-26T04:55:05","slug":"tick-tock","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/tick-tock\/","title":{"rendered":"Tick Tock"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-family: Courier;\">You know those black-and-white films where &#8211;<\/p>\n<div class=\"scrippet\">\n<p class=\"sceneheader\">INT. NEWSROOM &#8211; NIGHT<\/p>\n<p class=\"action\">Several strata of cigarette smoke span this large room.  A handful of reporters sit at their desks, hands and fingers stabbing and massaging their typewriters.<\/p>\n<p class=\"action\">An OFFICE DOOR opens to reveal THE EDITOR, cigar in a corner of his mouth &#8211;<\/p>\n<p class=\"character\">EDITOR<\/p>\n<p class=\"dialogue\">I want five hundred words on string theory using words of three syllables or less!  Which one of you bums feeling lucky?<\/p>\n<p class=\"action\">One dozing JOURNO pushes his fedora up from his eyes and sticks a well-chewed pencil stub into his mouth:<\/p>\n<p class=\"character\">JOURNO<\/p>\n<p class=\"dialogue\">Give me ten minutes, chief &#8211; five if Miss Stanton brings me a cup of joe.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\n<b>How do they do that?<\/b><\/p>\n<p>(Okay-okay-okay:  it&#8217;s a <i>movie<\/i>.)<\/p>\n<p>I was flashing on those kinds of scenes when I took up a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.titirangitheatre.co.nz\/whatson.htm\" target=\"_blank\">24-hour theatre challenge<\/a> last weekend.  Twelve hours to write a ten-minute script (to be followed by another twelve hours where the director and actors would make the script a reality).  I&#8217;d spent the first two hours thus:  30 minutes to find out the actors&#8217; strengths and weaknesses (the director couldn&#8217;t make the meet-and-greet so I&#8217;d have to wing the content and style); 15 minutes to drive home; 45 minutes of quality time with The Goddess; and 30 minutes of, among other things, making coffee, adjusting my seat, realigning the rubbish on my workspace for optimum feng shui, scheduling my chocolate intake, and surfing the net.<\/p>\n<p>&#8230; Maybe the quality time was more 30 minutes (and no less) and the <strike>fart-arsing<\/strike> writing prep\/warm-up was 45 minutes.<\/p>\n<p>So.  There I was, in my cave, mentally juggling the following elements:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>three actors &#8211; one male and two females &#8211; to play with;<\/li>\n<li>two props &#8211; a length of rope and a violin case &#8211; to work into the story;<\/li>\n<li>and less than ten hours before I had to hand in a script.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The first opening riffed on <i>Waiting for Godot<\/i>.  Maybe too self-referencing.  I stopped after the second line of dialogue.<\/p>\n<p>The second opening came straight out of <i>Casablanca<\/i>.  I stopped the moment I typed (V.O.).<\/p>\n<p>I had beginnings but no ends.  With the nine-hour mark rapidly approaching, I tried to tackle it more from a production point of view instead of my usual story-is-king position.<\/p>\n<p>I had my props, both meat and inanimate.  I had a running time.  I was one of six writers, and my position in the playing schedule was four &#8211; after an intermission.  Assuming the first three plays were trend- and bar-setters, I needed to get right into the action.  I needed to stake a claim on the audience&#8217;s attention, and keep it.<\/p>\n<p>A filthy smile formed on my lips:  <i>What if we returned from intermission to some good ol&#8217; bondage?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I laughed out loud.<\/p>\n<div class=\"scrippet\">\n<p class=\"action\">The stage is BLACK as &#45;&#45;<\/p>\n<p class=\"character\">HAYLEY<\/p>\n<p class=\"parenthetical\">(unseen)<\/p>\n<p class=\"dialogue\">Aow!  &#46;&#46;&#46; Yes.  &#46;&#46;&#46; Agh!  &#46;&#46;&#46; Yes!<\/p>\n<p class=\"action\">LIGHTS UP on &#45;&#45;<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p>\nAnd in that beginning was the ending, too.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, I&#8217;m just too cool for school.<\/p>\n<p><u>POSTSCRIPT:<\/u>  As it played out on stage, all I could see were the bits of dialogue I could have trimmed, all the action I could have written, as well as an act that is one long <a href=\"http:\/\/tvtropes.org\/pmwiki\/pmwiki.php\/Main\/FridgeLogic\" target=\"_blank\">fridge moment<\/a>.  But it has a beginning, middle and end.  It has a set-up, exposition and pay-off.  And it got some laughs, none of them cheaply, and <i>moved<\/i>.  Thank the gods for <a href=\"http:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/2008\/11\/18\/aktors\/\">actors<\/a> &#8211; and the director, of course.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>You know those black-and-white films where &#8211; INT. NEWSROOM &#8211; NIGHT Several strata of cigarette smoke span this large room. A handful of reporters sit at their desks, hands and fingers stabbing and massaging their typewriters. An OFFICE DOOR opens to reveal THE EDITOR, cigar in a corner of his mouth &#8211; EDITOR I want &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/tick-tock\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Tick Tock&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4,23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scriptwriting","category-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/254\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dfmamea.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}