Decision 2008
Good morning, Wavers! The new Script Departmentwebsite has officially gone live today. I'm very excited about the design and all the cool new stuff that we are offering including some scary-talented folks in our boutique services section.
So yesterday I had a rather thrilling experience. Right around 10am you would have found me sitting at a coffee shop on Larchmont along with Christopher Keane, one of the most respected screenwriting authors and consultants in the business. We met to discuss Chris's new boutique service available through the Script Department but naturally we discussed 3:10 to Yuma, charting character arcs, how it's hard for writers to release their choke hold on stories that are true in order to fictionalize it entertainingly and how much we both love Merle Oberon. I had the chance to ask Chris about a new idea I am working on and as we discussed it, I thought - how unbelievably lucky am I, to be getting feedback from a man with this much talent and background?? So that's when I asked Chris if he would be willing to donate a 30 minute feedback conversation on the phone with the 2nd Place winner of the Silver Screenwriting Competition. And he readily agreed. How cool is that?
About now, you are probably wondering why this blog post is titled Decision 2008. I'm taking a long way round to get there and look, it's Monday morning and I have about 18 scripts in front of me, so go easy on the Wave-inatrix or no cupcake for you.
I had a strange epiphany about character work yesterday and I wanted to share it. So I'm lying on the couch idly watching FACE OFF last evening thinking wow, there is such an interesting dynamic between these two characters and their respective sons, lovers, etc. But I was troubled by two things: One, I kept thinking - so wait - Nicholas Cage is the bad guy even though he's acting like a good guy and Travolta, yeah, he's actually the good guy, right? So I had a hard time really identifying with the bad or good guy because of the identity switch. (Bear with me, I really am going somewhere with this). But the second thing that kept bugging me was oh come on, really? You switch a person's entire SKIN - what about the bone structure, the teeth, the shape of your hands? I do not buy this for one Pluto second. (RIP Pluto, by the way).
And I thought - wait - is this story set in the future? It doesn't look it. Who is the president right now, in this story? Do we ever know that fact in movies? We know that if we watch SIXTEEN CANDLES that the president was Ronald Reagan because he has to be - it's the 80s. And of course the movie reflects the 80s in every way - the hair, the clothes, the music and mostly, the zeitgeist. And in DAZED AND CONFUSED, this is the mid-70s and we know that similarly so because of the art direction, but mostly because of the vibe of the movie, right?
So I'm thinking - we talk a lot about character work and world and things like that on the Rouge Wave - Tony wrote a great blog the other day about adjectives - but stop to think for a minute about the geo-political situation today. We have an election coming up that might be (please, god) historic - the first black OR the first woman president. That's huge. How has the Iraq war, President Bush-Rove-Cheney, Valerie Plame, Condie Rice - how has that all affected your world view in the past several years? It has - right? It has me, for sure. So, you're writing a script at the moment and say it's set in the blurry-whenever-sorta-now era. Which most scripts I read are. Romantic Comedies, horror stories, family dramas - they aren't exactly period specific, they're just sorta set in the "present".
So stop for a second and consider this: In this "present" that you are building as the world for your characters, who is the president of the US? What is going on in Gaza? How did 9/11 affect your main character? Where were they when it happened? Are they pulling for Obama? How do they feel about Scuzzball Spitzer? Did they vote? Do they ever vote? How do they feel about the state of the world right now? Should we get out of Iraq?
This might seem esoteric but it's really not. What's happening around us geo-politically not to mention environmentally impacts our day to day. From our mood, to our outlook, to our level of involvement, to the economy and whether we're upside down on our home loan or looking to buy a cheap piece of property from someone else who was upside down.
What is going on the world outside of your story? And how does it affect your main character?
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1 comment:
Julie, I think that's an excellent point you've just made. Too often people stress creating a backstory for your characters -- how did they grow up? Where did they live? Who was their first love? Why do they revile brussels sprouts? I'm not gonna say that's not important, but too often we're forced to create external forces which shape the personalities of our protagonist by pulling ideas out of the ether (he was bullied by a guy named Hodgkins when he was a kid, he almost drowned once in the Adriatic, he lost his favorite marble at age eighteen...)
Why not hold these characters up to the light of recent events? See what spectrum is cast onto the paper? Where, indeed, was he on the morning of 9/11, for example,or what does she think about Terry Schiavo? I think we'll find those questions surprisingly easy to answer.
Nice post.
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