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I can add to my credentials "Screenwriter."
Allow me to explain. Quite sometime ago Jabriel sent me a draft of a script he'd been working on for film school and asked for notes. I did what I did best, I tore it to shreds with the viciousness of a rabid badger trapped in an unhappy marriage, with 2 mortgages, and 3 kids who hate him... on the same day that he got laid off without a severance package because a consultant wanted to bring in someone younger and cheaper. Oh, and his wife is leaving him and taking everything because she discovered that he'd had an affair. How did she find out, you ask? Because the badgett (girl badger) gave him herpes.
Needless to say, it was a rough experience for Jabriel. But don't worry, loyal readers, this story has a happy ending (I hope). In the end, after berating him and possibly destroying his will to live, I asked him "What the hell did you really want to say?" He wavered a little but I kept pushing and ended up asking the right question: "What theme are you after?" He responded with "Absolution."
I thought about this for a little while, inverted it, and returned with the beginnings of a story for him. Two friends, one has betrayed the other by sleeping with his girl, and a conflict occurs. A common story, a simple story, and a cliche story. I had a twist, though. The wronged character responds in the opposite way that you'd expect. Rather than acting out, he swallows it all, shrugs it off, and doesn't do anything. More than that, he refuses to admit that any wrong had been committed. This presents an interesting situation (in my eyes) because asking forgiveness, apologizing, and supplicating has nothing to do with making the wronged party feel better. It has everything to do with attempting to repair a relationship and (more importantly) exorcising your own guilt. Simply refusing to accept an apology is simple and boring. But being unable to even apologize because the wronged person refuses to even admit you did anything out of order? Now THAT'S interesting.
So that's basically how I pitched it to Jabriel. I then started to flesh out the characters and gave them temporary names. Ed, the guy seeking forgiveness, and Richard, his friend who doesn't see why Ed feels bad. Then we dove straight into dialogue, discussing it over the phone and testing out how it sounded. It worked very well, we're pretty good at it.
The one problem we had early on was Richard. While he's interesting, he's a tough character because that sort of reaction is not very human, and the key to storytelling is to make them believable in every way. It doesn't matter that you know someone in real life who would shrug this off (Hi Richard!) because real life doesn't have to be believable, it's real. So in our discussions it became clear that Richard couldn't be truly aloof. So we started working on it.
Somewhere in there Jabriel had to pitch it to his school and prior to doing so he made some (what I felt) were drastic changes that were unneeded. I pitched a fit and soon discovered why hollywood writers go mad. We ended up butting heads, I'm all about subtext in stories and Jabriel felt it needed to be more blatant and heavy-handed to work as a film. It was one of the few fights he and I have ever gotten into. Think about that, even when I was fighting tooth and nail with his adopted sister we didn't fight... but we fought over this script bigtime. *laugh* I think in the end we were both incredibly pissed at eachother for a week or two and then got over it. The script wasn't picked and went on the back burner, where we'd tweak it from time to time (and I won the fight over removing his inflammatory addition to the script, and Jabriel won the fight over his addition of chess).
Things went on for a while like that, minor tweaks here and there. Nothing major. Then it came to the point where Jabriel had to submit it for his film school's final project and we looked at it again. Changes were made, and frankly the story started to get a LOT tighter. He submitted it and it was accepted, thus giving Jabriel the title of both co-writer and director. Pretty bad ass, if you ask me. Your humble narrator, of course, got his respective title as well. ;)
I'm way proud of this. Anyway, a new wrench has been thrown into this: The Professors. They are giving notes, and are trying to turn a complex film of subtext that ends on a down note into a hollywood Passenger 57 style film. We're fighting them, of course, because they'll fuck it up if they get their way. I'll probably draft a character treatment for the 3 characters in the film as well as theme and purpose of conflict. I suspect that the reason we're getting these boneheaded and heavyhanded notes is because the profs don't get the script. Subtext is hard to include in a screenplay, after all. Also suspect that these people know very little about writing stories, this isn't a creative writing class after all.
So that's where we are right now. We're at war with the profs over ths script and trying to get them to allow us create something that is new, powerful, and unique.
Allow me to explain. Quite sometime ago Jabriel sent me a draft of a script he'd been working on for film school and asked for notes. I did what I did best, I tore it to shreds with the viciousness of a rabid badger trapped in an unhappy marriage, with 2 mortgages, and 3 kids who hate him... on the same day that he got laid off without a severance package because a consultant wanted to bring in someone younger and cheaper. Oh, and his wife is leaving him and taking everything because she discovered that he'd had an affair. How did she find out, you ask? Because the badgett (girl badger) gave him herpes.
Needless to say, it was a rough experience for Jabriel. But don't worry, loyal readers, this story has a happy ending (I hope). In the end, after berating him and possibly destroying his will to live, I asked him "What the hell did you really want to say?" He wavered a little but I kept pushing and ended up asking the right question: "What theme are you after?" He responded with "Absolution."
I thought about this for a little while, inverted it, and returned with the beginnings of a story for him. Two friends, one has betrayed the other by sleeping with his girl, and a conflict occurs. A common story, a simple story, and a cliche story. I had a twist, though. The wronged character responds in the opposite way that you'd expect. Rather than acting out, he swallows it all, shrugs it off, and doesn't do anything. More than that, he refuses to admit that any wrong had been committed. This presents an interesting situation (in my eyes) because asking forgiveness, apologizing, and supplicating has nothing to do with making the wronged party feel better. It has everything to do with attempting to repair a relationship and (more importantly) exorcising your own guilt. Simply refusing to accept an apology is simple and boring. But being unable to even apologize because the wronged person refuses to even admit you did anything out of order? Now THAT'S interesting.
So that's basically how I pitched it to Jabriel. I then started to flesh out the characters and gave them temporary names. Ed, the guy seeking forgiveness, and Richard, his friend who doesn't see why Ed feels bad. Then we dove straight into dialogue, discussing it over the phone and testing out how it sounded. It worked very well, we're pretty good at it.
The one problem we had early on was Richard. While he's interesting, he's a tough character because that sort of reaction is not very human, and the key to storytelling is to make them believable in every way. It doesn't matter that you know someone in real life who would shrug this off (Hi Richard!) because real life doesn't have to be believable, it's real. So in our discussions it became clear that Richard couldn't be truly aloof. So we started working on it.
Somewhere in there Jabriel had to pitch it to his school and prior to doing so he made some (what I felt) were drastic changes that were unneeded. I pitched a fit and soon discovered why hollywood writers go mad. We ended up butting heads, I'm all about subtext in stories and Jabriel felt it needed to be more blatant and heavy-handed to work as a film. It was one of the few fights he and I have ever gotten into. Think about that, even when I was fighting tooth and nail with his adopted sister we didn't fight... but we fought over this script bigtime. *laugh* I think in the end we were both incredibly pissed at eachother for a week or two and then got over it. The script wasn't picked and went on the back burner, where we'd tweak it from time to time (and I won the fight over removing his inflammatory addition to the script, and Jabriel won the fight over his addition of chess).
Things went on for a while like that, minor tweaks here and there. Nothing major. Then it came to the point where Jabriel had to submit it for his film school's final project and we looked at it again. Changes were made, and frankly the story started to get a LOT tighter. He submitted it and it was accepted, thus giving Jabriel the title of both co-writer and director. Pretty bad ass, if you ask me. Your humble narrator, of course, got his respective title as well. ;)
I'm way proud of this. Anyway, a new wrench has been thrown into this: The Professors. They are giving notes, and are trying to turn a complex film of subtext that ends on a down note into a hollywood Passenger 57 style film. We're fighting them, of course, because they'll fuck it up if they get their way. I'll probably draft a character treatment for the 3 characters in the film as well as theme and purpose of conflict. I suspect that the reason we're getting these boneheaded and heavyhanded notes is because the profs don't get the script. Subtext is hard to include in a screenplay, after all. Also suspect that these people know very little about writing stories, this isn't a creative writing class after all.
So that's where we are right now. We're at war with the profs over ths script and trying to get them to allow us create something that is new, powerful, and unique.
