Meanwile
I just wrote a screenplay in four days (over the course of a week - some days I had more time than others).
It feels.... odd. And if anyone cares, Spoilers.
I feel accomplished and good and strong, like I did something.... I don't have enough distance to know yet if what I wrote was actually any good. Here was the premise I started from, which I wrote back in MARCH and carries the title of THE PLEX:
"Parker, a manager of a crumbling movie theater, has just made a deal to revamp the place after a night of winning cards. But the other players, three hardened criminals, are convinced he cheated and decide to take him out. A cat and mouse game begins between the four men for the money, the theater, and their lives."
I mucked about with this in one way - the main character is actually named 'Saul Schneider', and he used 'Parker' as his fake name when he goes to play a backroom, illegal card game with these criminals. I keep wondering if I made the characters fleshed out enough, but I think I did. It's rough and sometimes darkly funny and weird (there's a worker at the theater, a woman in her 40's, who is directly inspired by one of my students at Essex this semester, who I think is slow but nice enough, and actually the other worker at the theater, a sarcastic teenager, comes from the students as well). But... maybe that's a good thing. I pitched it, I quickly wrote it, and I just KNEW the structure of it. I wrote a quick outline, and that was it. I just hope that.... it came out with some semblance of coherence. The only part I'm not totally satisfied with (for now) is the denouemont. After the main character has effectively pulled off as the climax this 'Cat and Mouse' game as a culmination - I think I just told my Canadian friend Karl it's in the middle between Straw Dogs and Home Alone - he rebuilds the theater and has a Re-Opening night gala (this reflecting a Special Night screening in the first act where everything goes wrong). He tears up a picture of him with his parents because... well, he let them down, I guess, since he does in fact kill the main antagonist with a machete.
I think what I am trying to do with this ending is...... one of the things that did stick with me from my screenwriting class at WPU, with Chriss Williams, was when he talked about the problems of having a script where people just shoot each other wantonly; he related a story when he was younger that he was at some place where a hold-up happened at a store, I forget which. He might've been totally full of shit, but he made an interesting point about it - when someone is engaged with violence on that level, where they actually kill or just witness the violence, it affects them. That was what I admired so much in Captain Phillips, that scene after the pirates are shot and Tom Hanks is being treated - he's not physically harmed, but he's in a puddle of tears.
My script has some cinematic allusions of course - a backroom strip club, shitty co-horts in crime, other odd things.... but if I could pull off anything with this script it was adding a realism to it underneath, that, yeah, there's some dialog here that's meant to be amusing or darkly comic, and the premise takes a slight leap of faith (there are still run-down decrepit theaters? Aren't they all closed by now, you might be thinking)... but I have to bring some realistic thing to it, or some emotion that the director or actors can do. Otherwise.... what am I doing?
Ok, rant over, time to get back to some fucking HORROR MOVIES.