The Screenwriting Thread: Without Us You Would Be Staring at A Blank Screen

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JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

This thread's been really helpful seeing how other writers work. Right now I'm trying to finish up first drafts for a couple features and an hour-long cable pilot re-write, but I'd really appreciate it if anyone has the time to critique something a little different I finished a few weeks ago with my writing partner. (I'll happily critique something in return, as long as it's not just a vomit-draft.)

A Day in the Life (PDF)

Logline: 'The Pope elopes from the Vatican for one, full day of the growing up he couldn't manage within its stifling walls.'

The script is a 23-page comedy short with almost no dialogue. It follows The Pope, who, bored with his life, runs off to an unnamed American city for a day. It's kind of my attempt at a short, Beat Takeshi-type road movie, if he made one about the Pope for broad American audiences.

(To be relevant to current discussion: Written with Celtx on an oft-overheating, used MacBook Pro. :cool:

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# ¿ Sep 17, 2011 20:35

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# ¿ Apr 27, 2024 15:27

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

MixMasterGriff posted:

FTFY.

Haven't had a chance to look it over, but 23 minutes is too long for the internet, and too short for a feature (obviously), so the only real chance you'd get to have anyone see the thing is through festivals, and if that doesn't work you're hosed.

I would imagine it working better as like, a 3 minute video, just have it real simple. It could easily go viral.

I'll take a look at it when I get a chance though!

Thanks. I'm aware of the troublesome length, but we really liked the structure and the gradual pacing. We mostly thought it'd be fun to write and a different kind of portfolio piece. Maybe if I think I can sell it enough I can find a way to break it up into a series of (*shudder*) webisodes or something.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2011 05:13

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Magic Hate Ball posted:

Remember that the best short films are little golden nuggets. It's nice to consider a languid pace but 23 minutes can be a terribly long time. Some of the finest short films I've seen have been less than ten minutes, and some of the most frustrating have been longer than 15.

edit: just read your Adventure Pope script and it's a case in point. You've taken what could be a funny, sweet, light film and turned it into a massive monster that is by turns surreal, violent, and boring. You're all over the place here, with a lot of interesting connectivity and montage and you've got all sorts of creative, imaginative descriptions in your script but you're saying so little. It's terribly muddled and overblown. Trim it down. Maybe it's just against my tastes but why the grit? You have a couple very good, very cute moments, such as with the caricaturist drawing the kid as a pope, then turning to see the Pope, but you're crushing it together with heavy-handed moments like a troupe of gay men rollerskating around him, or a meth addict stabbing him. I dunno. What are you trying to say?

Thanks for taking the time! The grit comes from two places. First, it really is inspired by a lot of Beat Takeshi films. Pretty much all his lighter films are still sprinkled with moments of grit or crushing reality, and his violent, nihilistic films are still sprinkled with humanistic moments of play and shared joy. He really uses the contrast to punctuate changes in the stages of life and the journey. We were hoping to embrace both sides of the coin in the Pope's story to show both him having an effect on more mature things and situations as he grows, and to have higher peaks and lower valleys for those around the Pope as he stumbles through his journey, mostly in the latter half, though, for reasons I think become clear as you read the below.

Second, the script is trying to follow the Pope through his metaphoric new life. Once out of the Vatican, he is (forcibly) rebirthed with the playground kids shoving him out the slide, and then develops from a toddler through to late-middle age by the end. (The Brass Doors in the Vatican he returns to are closed, something reserved almost exclusively for when a Pope dies.) We wanted to have the Pope face a wide variety of life experiences, and have a bigger impact on more people as he got older, wiser, and learns to embrace his kind-hearted, loving nature in the face of whatever conflicts were before him or around him.

The biggest meaning to take from the different scenes, I think, comes from considering them in relation to the other scenes he's been through, like comparing one part of your life to another and seeing why you were happier at one time than another. Like when he starts getting competitive, and loses, at the arm wrestling, he tries to learn martial arts, a more aggressive physical confrontation, and quickly hurts himself. Right after, he thinks he's being accosted by the rollerskating troupe, but they're just having carefree fun together, and he subsequently learns to appreciate the experience by engaging in it constructively with others (musical skating montage). From there, he tries to connect with people more, finding the happiness in it, but he's still got strong impulses he's not experienced in controlling or curbing, hence strip club, bar, abandoned warehouse, etc.

The script is really supposed to mirror that growing up throughout the different parts of life and what people learn to appreciate and why at different points in their life. He makes the biggest and most positive impact on others in his later years, just being friendly and positive around others and embracing his social role as both an important spiritual figure, and just another human here to help, at the same time. Then as he has a last reverie (or maybe requiem for himself) with the redneck in the woods, we see the in memoriam, "posthumous" impact he's had on the lives of those he's engaged with, by nature of embracing his social role. With the return to the Vatican, we see the perspective of the social institution on his "new life," AKA he's apparently assumed dead. And maybe, considering who he is upon his return, maybe that Pope is dead.

Does that help shed more light on what we're trying to say through the script? Some of the scenes might seem to meander a bit, but I think they're mostly pretty in-service to the above goals for the script. Which scenes in particular grate you the most? The rollerskating one is literally the image we had that made us start thinking about the idea in the first place, and while pretty on-the-nose in terms of showing an embrace of social diversity for common good, despite institutional dogma, I think it's great for capturing the newfound excitement and energy he's stumbled on in that stage of his life (entering teen years from my metaphoric estimation) and the communal enrichment that can come from that (before it gets drawn off-track by tits and booze).

Christ that was too long, but hopefully our goals are more clear. We tried to make the condensed-life structure pretty obvious with the gradual progression of things, but we didn't think we could cut it down more without losing some stages in life. And we didn't want to try and drag out a fairly simple idea into a too-long feature. With all this extra info, what would you suggest for shortening/tightening it up?

# ¿ Sep 18, 2011 20:19

JMBosch: May 28, 2006; You're dead.
That's your greatest weapon.

Magic Hate Ball posted:

JMBosch, it's great that you've put so much thought into this project, it doesn't really come through, mostly because you're being too blatant. The pope going on an adventure is a silly idea, almost like something out of a commercial, and it probably has to do with the fact that the pope is regarded more as an icon than a person, and you're trying to get what is essentially a symbol in a funny hat to go on this big metaphorical journey. It's just doesn't function well because "The Pope" is too big and the idea is too small. Either buff up the events or scale down the main character. He could be a naive priest. This brings up the other issue, which is simply that the basic concept is pretty old-hat. Making the main character the pope just adds a layer of weirdness that is let down by the relatively mundane, vaguely confusing script (your descriptions, by the way, are far too verbose). The concept might work if you were to elevate the whole thing and make it poetic. The pope on a slide is something you'd see in a commercial.

Thanks for the notes, and I see what you mean. We were hoping the "icon" status of the Pope would help imbue the "person" side of his experiences with some more metaphor, gravitas, and comedy, but I definitely understand the commercial comparisons and the problem with simple, broad, and sometimes under-stated, events bumbled through by such a strong icon.

I'll think of how we might be able to either crank up the weight and drama of the events he has to go through (without getting too needlessly gritty), or how to distill it all down to a much shorter, more poetic piece... And yeah, I gotta work on the general verboseness, as you can see, hehe.

# ¿ Sep 19, 2011 01:29

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