Day 41: Applying Myself to My Craft

I’ve been taking a break from my crime work, last week and this, to prepare a development funding application that I, a director and a producer are submitting to Federal (Screen Australia) and State (Screen New South Wales) film funding bodies for me to write a first draft.

There is no prescribed way to find money to write film. For the screenwriter, it’s part of the business-end of the writing business and you’ve got to get professional at doing it, but I digress.

The long synopsis (20 pages) that I’ve written is for a film called The Age of Enlightenment, a love story between a young woman who lives in England of 1870 and an urban Aboriginal man, living in Sydney in the 21st century. I’m sorry but it’s neither the time nor the place to explain how and why boy-meets-girl, but let’s just say that the “meeting cute” scene is a little different.

I first came up with this idea and spitballed it with a friend some fourteen years ago. The idea was jotted down on a file somewhere on my Mac that I owned at the time (an SE). Occasionally I’d open up the file in a moment when I was tired of whatever it was that I was working on at the time, and I’d fiddle. The file was then transfered to my Blueberry iMac Laptop in 1999 (still the fastest computer that I’ve ever owned, including this one that I’m working on now) and again, de temps en temps, I’d click on the folder named The Victorian Girl and I’d tweak it a bit and dabble in the idea.

FInally that file and folder have ended up on this iBook G4 and the story is ready to go to a First Draft screenplay; it has a producer attached and a director, the same friend that chewed the idea over with me all those years ago. Neat, huh?

We’re very lucky to live in a country where we have a Ministry of the Arts that commit to funding film projects and film practitioners. I have personally been very lucky in that they have funded me on several ocassions over the years on different drafts of various screenplays. But I was never always successful in my applications, in fact, for a long time there I got knock-back after knock-back and became quite the cynic. Who me?!

That was until I heard a friend talk about a friend of his who was being a repetitively successful recipient of film funding monies and put it down to “mastering the art of the application”. My ears sprung up when I heard that and I set about making it my business to also develop this facet of my writing craft. I didn’t think that there was a secret formula or recipe and I didn’t go and talk to the successful friend of the friend, although I could have. What I did, was put as much care and applied equal diligence into the writing of my application - the CV, Biography and all-important Script Development Notes that accompany the application - as I did the writing of the script.

I figured out that I couldn’t force anyone’s hand and make them say “yes” to my application, but I could make it very, very hard for them to say “no”. It’s a nuanced difference and I’ve continued to have as many losses as I’ve had wins, but it’s forced me to hone my skills in writing the one-line, one-paragraph, half-page, one-page and three-page synopsis and learn how to pitch myself and my film stories. As a consequence, if you’re a producer, investor, director or financier, depending where and when I bump into you and how many seconds or minutes you’ve got to hear me out, I’ve got THE pitch for you.

Day #41 Tip: “I Have Numerous Projects In Various Stages Of Development”
Back in 1999, I stumped up the Aus$400, or whatever it was then, to attend the DOV Simmons (see picture above of a man that looks more like a magician than a teacher...in some ways he is!) 2-Day Hollywwod Film School. Sounded great; he promised to tell you everything they take three years to tell you in Film School, over just one Saturday and Sunday.

That noise I just heard....was that the door of your open mind just slamming shut?

I can’t remember much of what DOV rattled through at high speed with incredible chutzpah (I think the notes I made were on that old SE) but I remember him telling us keen and assembled filmmakers that we need to have “...various projects in numerous stages of development”. And if I didn’t have such projects, I at least needed to memorise the phrase so if ever asked what it was that I was working on, I could at least trot out that sound-bite to give the impression that I was a pretty busy writer.

I have made it my business over the course of my screenwriting apprenticeship to squirrel away ideas and gently nudge them along to different stages of being and store them away in files on this computer, because they’re the embryos that will wonder develop into my ideas that might grow to be screenplays that could eventually make it to a cinema near you. It's the currency of my business.

Last year, I was able to put together a document that held thirteen synopses of feature film ideas, two of which are now moving forward. It’s a far cry from me, the writer, that used to have all his eggs in the one basket. Like most of us, I learnt the hard way; when that one script (the one egg in the basket) was moving along, so was I. When that script was floundering, (the basket had tipped over) strangely enough, so was I.

Nurture your ideas, scribble things down and stash them away, type them up when you’ve got a few minutes to spare, open up a file, collect visual images, come up with titles, then forget about them and get on with the stuff that’s in front of you. As I write this, it sounds like motherhood adviceme, and to a degree it is, but I don’t mind writing it down and I certainly don’t mind hearing it again.

My recollection tells me that DOV was worth the money, for inspiration alone, check him out.

Day 40: Mr.George’s Journey of Enlightenment

Please allow me to quote the Bhagavad Gita:

“Your proper concern is alone the action of duty, not the fruits of the action. Cast then away all desire and fear for the fruits, and perform your duty.”

Some context: The Bhagavad Gita (“Song of the Lord”) is possibly the best known and most popular of Hindu texts. It is a poem (part of the epic, the Mahabharata - another principal Hindu scripture) in which Krishna teaches the warrior Arjuna about the importance of doing one’s duty and how to achieve liberation from suffering. I know this because I looked it up in Hinduism, A Very Short Introduction by Kim Knott.

Many moons ago, I had an alter ego that long preceded this current one of The Hungry Screenwriter: across North and Central London, I was known as Mr.George. In the early 1980’s, I plied my trade as a sales rep for Sony, pedalling their audio and video tapes across the length and breadth of the lucrative part of the nation’s capital. If you cast your mind back, you’ll recall that in the era I’m talking about, cassette tape was big buisness and so, believe it or not, was Beta video tape.

My customers were London’s hi-fi trade, which was basically run by Indians, from the Mile End Road in the East to Ealing in the west and all havens in between (of which there were many) On a dusty summer’s afternoon near Acton, entering Pavil’s Electronics on the Uxbridge Road was, I imagined, like stepping into a fragrant bazaar in Mumbai, Chenai or Madras.

The nom de plume of ‘Mr.George” came about after, having introduced myself as ‘Mr.Joyce’, something got lost in translation between my language and their Hindi or Urdu.

Entering any one of these emporiums that summer, a television somewhere in the close vicinity of the counter, would be the centre of attention not me and my wares. The three, four, or five Pavil brothers, sons, cousins and/or uncles would be leaning nearby, almost huddled around the screen waiting and watching something with religious attention. Without too much ado or greeting - nothing to do with their impeccable manners, they were caught up in the cricket you see - a tea would be made and handed to Mr.George (please forgive me talking about myself in the third person [like Ross Perot did famously on the US Presidential campaign trail] but I feel that I’m looking back at me through the mists and miasma of so many days that it’s hard to relate the story in the first person and somehow, the telling of the tale works better this way).

Mr.George understood that the reciprocal thing to do, was to take the milky chai in the chipped mug and join the group of viewers, putting his bag and samples down and find something to perch on. He would then gaze from the TV screen to the framed picture of Krishna on the wall, to the framed picture of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II alongside.

For half-an hour, forty-five minutes, an hour or however long the ‘meeting ‘ went, Mr.George enjoyed himself. This small exotic and slightly unruly community, within a much larger community, had accepted him. Part of the reason they accepted him was because he, like them, loved sport, loved cricket and understood the code of behaviour for following your team, in this case, your country. Mr.George knew that the good television sports watcher rarely watched in the company of others, unless they were like-minded knowledgeable others who knew to keep their mouth shut, knew to just watch and listen and maybe at an appropriate moment mutter one comment that came from understanding, high regard or a place of deep passion. Or, alternatively, smile politely when a comment was aimed in my direction: “What you think now Mr. George, eh? Your Mr.Botham not so clever fellow after all.”

These were heady and perfumed afternoons among the lotus-eaters of North & West London, in the summer of 1981, that hypnotised me, a young man from provincial, middle-class England, on a journey from ignorance to enlightenment.

As for my sales, well, they took care of themselves; I just got out of the way and let the Pavils and many of their relatives, order tapes by the container-load from me, which they then distributed across the whole of the UK ( I never had the heart to tell my Sony colleagues up and down the country why they were struggling to sell tape to their dealers). I learnt to sit back, enjoy the odd samosa or two and allow the incense to waft over me, all the time praying to Ganesha, Vishnu, Rama, Sita and any other deity that I was introduced to, that the Pavils tape and hi-fi empire would continue to flourish and my livelihood along with it.

Day #40 Tip: Do Not Concern Yourself With The Fruits of Your Action
One of my favourite pastimes used to be that at the end of 6 long months working on a screenplay, I would type the screen directions “Fade to black. End”, sit back and rather than congratulate myself on the job well done, think to myself: “well, that’s a load of rubbish.”

I’m pleased to say that my self-esteem and work practices are much healthier these days, I no longer judge myself or my labours so harshly. I took the Bhagavad Gita quote that began this piece and made it into a living philosophy or elongated mantra for my writing:

“My job is to tend to the tree (my writing/screenplay), to turn up on a daily or regular basis and to make sure that the tree is getting enough water, sunlight and food. If the tree needs me to sit down and talk to the tree, then that’s what I do. Whether fruit is succulent or withered, is nothing to do with me. Whether fruit actually comes or not, is none of my business. I must let go all expectations of a bumper crop or blighted harvest, for my sole purpose is but to tend the tree. This tending, is my duty and my responsibility and if I let go of expectations, it is my joy and my pleasure.”

I didn’t arrive at this place of laissez-faireism overnight and I can still slip back into my old ways, but it’s not like it used to be and nor am I. This doesn’t mean that I am immune to the slings and arrows (constructive or otherwise) that others pitch at my work, but nor am I too sensitive or prickly, to work with the thoughts and ideas of film collaborators. Film is a collaborative art/entertainment form, I am always (hopefully) going to be working with others and those others will always have comments on the work I offer up. A rite of passage leading from screenwriting puberty to adulthood, is learning to work with collaborators, but first I had to learn to work with me.

Krishna taught me all this, somewhere on the Uxbridge Road, London, W12.

Day 39: An Arrival at Cherry Tree Lane

Mary Poppins is one of my Top 10 favourite films. It’s the sentimental choice, one of my early childhood film memories and a movie that still gives me great pleasure; I’ve just introduced by nearly 3 year-old godson and his brother to it and, like all kids, they love it. If ever I want living proof of the power of story, the classic and reliable works in the children’s canon, demonstrate that fact again and again.

I’ve said it here before: Disney (for all the other question marks that I have around that corporation) know how to tell stories, they know story structure and they make it work for them and have done, down through the decades.

So, humour me a little and allow me to prod your minds to recall exactly what the plot is, and what takes place at the Banks’ household over the course of that film.

It’s Edwardian England, circa 1910 and the Banks family live at number 17 Cherry Tree Lane, in the heart of London, seemingly not far from the City, as Mr.Banks walks to the Bank, in that part of the nation’s capital every day. The story event that gets the ball rolling is that the children’s nanny, Katie Nanna, has had enough of her charges, Jane & Michael (they’ve ran off, chasing a kite), quits her position and leaves the household, throwing number seventeen into turmoil.

Mr.Banks (played superbly by the recently-late David Tomlinson) takes charge of things, writing an advertisement for a new nanny, tearing up a similar piece written by the children, throwing their written request into the fireplace. Prompt, the next morning, a queue of as fearsome looking nannies as your ever likely to see appears outside the house but are just as promptly carried away on the East wind that also brings someone else to the household: Mary Poppins. Things are about to get a big shake-up in Cherry Tree Lane.

Whose story is this film?

The natural response is of course that it’s Mary Poppins’s, as it’s her name in the title of the film and I’ve expressed here before that as rule-of-thumb, usually a title’s a dead give away as to who the protagonist is. But we must probe further. The central character/s of the film is or are the ones who profoundly change over the arc of the movie’s story. From the moment that supernanny Poppins arrives until the moment she leaves, does she change? Nup. Mary Poppins flies away when the wind changes (not she), as she foretold she would do, no different to the character that was deposited on their doorstep by the wind at the start of the story.

Let’s look around for other potential protagonists: what about Dick Van Dyke’s outlandish “Bert the chimney sweep”? No, he stays the same. The kids - Jane & Michael - what about them? Well....their circumstances and, indeed, their lives alter, but I would argue that they and their mother (a fine turn by Glynnis Johns) undergo little or no deep character change. The character who does undergo that change is the curmudgeonly Mr.Banks.

Mr.Banks begins the film as a dutiful provider, for his family, of all things “external” - food on the table, roof over their heads and the like - but at the start of the film, he neither has the desire nor the inclination to spend time with his children and mend their broken kite. Every opportunity he gets, he palms the children off on someone: the nanny, his wife, a chimney sweep, even the local “bobby on the beat” gets a go. By story’s end, Mr.Banks has experienced nothing short of a personal salvation or resurrection and has all the time in the world to enjoy the pleasures of “flying a kite” with his son and daughter, having gone through an “internal” character change. The Mary Poppins character is what Linda Aronson (screenwriting teacher) refers to as a “charismatic antagonist”; a benign yet inspirational force of conflict and change). Maybe they should have called the film Mr.Banks. Doesn’t have the same ring does it?

In screenplay parlance, Katie Nanna leaving the Banks’ household was the the Inciting Incident or Disturbance that knocked their world out of balance, sending them (the Banks family, and Mr.Banks in particular) on a story-long quest to restore balance, but not in the way that he or they would have expected. That Inciting Incident is the first major plot point of the film. The next big plot point comes to signal the end of Act 1 (the beginning), projecting us, and the story, in a new direction, heralding the arrival of Act 2 (the middle).

Day #39 Tip: First Act Turning Point
Sydney Screenwriter and Script Editor Matthew Dabner, worked with me on the second draft of my screenplay The Detective. Matthew and I would meet on just about a weekly basis, over six months, from beginning to completion of that draft. It was a great experience for me; my writing and the script went forward in leaps and bounds under his stewardship and Matthew was a great writer’s companion.

At some point in the process, Matthew furnished me with a single sheet that detailed the major plot points to be nailed in a script: Introduction, Inciting Incident, First Act Turning Point, Mid Point, Second Act Turning Point, Climax, Resolution/Denoument; nothing new here. However, bracketed alongside each of these script signposts, were a few words that prompted consideration about what was meant to be going on at that point. Behind “First Act Turning Point” it said: “(Where the character finds themselves at sea, and on their journey toward change)”.

This the purpose of the First Act Turning Point in any screenplay. It usually comes (in a film of 100 minutes or so) between 25-30 minutes or pages into the script and it organically builds on the story so far, yet swings it in a new direction that will be the Progressive Complications of Act 2.

When Mary Poppins arrives to fulfill the vacant nanny’s position in the Banks’ household, she is coming in response to the advertisement penned by the children and torn up by their father, Mary Poppins is not coming in response to his ad. What he asked for and what they requested are two entirely different things. Mary Poppins is a nemesis character of Mr.Banks’ (in a good way) an agent that will bring about his change (across the wide span of Act 2). Remember Matthew’s note about what takes place at the First Act Turning Point: “where the character finds themselves at sea, and on their journey toward change”, this is what happens at the First Act Turning Point of this film, this is the journey that begins the morning that Mary Poppins floats down into the lives of Mr.Banks and his family.

It’s a great exercise to watch film after film with a weather eye for their First Act Turning Point and become familiar with how, when and why it occurs. It's great to watch Mary Poppins again, armed with this insight and to see how Act 2 progresses, from Mr.Banks's point-of-vie (POV).

But for now, as Mary Poppins said (in the first of a series of book’s that the film is based on, by Australian authoress P.L.Travers): “Behave yourselves please, till I come back”.

Day 38: Nothing Like a Dame

A story that I love about (Dame) Judi Dench, that I heard her tell about herself, when rehearsing Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music for the National Theatre:

When preparing anything - play, film, television - Judi Dench leaves her handbag by the rehearsal room door, explaining her idiosyncratic behaviour thus, “...I can’t act and I live in fear of the day that someone is going to lean across the rehearsal room table and, in front of the director and the rest of the cast, reveal what I know only to well. When that moment happens, as it surely must, I will want to hurry from the room with as much dignity as I can muster. The last thing that I want to be doing, is scrabbling around under the table looking for my handbag. Leaving it by the door, I know where it is, which means that I can make a swift exit from the the horrible humiliation.”

What do you think, do you think that (Dame) Judi’s on the money, that her judgement about herself is correct. Sure, Judi Dench has won and Oscar, Golden Globes, Emmy’s, Tony’s, Olivier Awards and has been made a “Dame” for her contribution to the arts, but maybe she’s right about herself?

I’ve heard this one, often, too: an actor can come into the theatre foyer after an opening night performance or enter a crowded room after the premiere of their film and out of the throng, if 99 people loved their performance but one didn’t, it’s like likely that the actor will spend most of their time with the one person who didn’t, obsessed with what it was they didn’t care for.

That may be true, I don’t know (I’m not an actor) but I understand the thoughts and feelings that underpin such a tale and that of Judi Dench’s. This certainly is not the time, the place and neither do I have anything like the qualifications to analyse the behaviour - conscious or unconscious - that might be going on here, that is the work of professionals more eminent in this field than I. What I think on the matter, you don’t want to know, because I think a lot of things about things I actually know nothing about.

What I can share with you, is my experience of how, as an apprentice screenwriter, I have had to find a method of working that helps with similar situations of self-doubt, low self-esteem and, most importantly, an inner critic (that I’ve been ready to punch out on numerous occasions). Most of the time, I work for myself, writer-for-hire and countless times I have said that if a boss treated me the way that I treat me, I’d have slung my laptop at him a long time ago and said “well write the thing yourself.”

My method is simply this: I don’t always trust what I think about my work. My head is a dangerous neighbourhood, I daren’t go in there alone

Day #38 Tip: Tell Others Your Story
It’s well documented in my thoughts here that I favour Robert Mckee’s version of working with the 3x5 Index Cards, over the first three months of a screenplay’s journey, in order to create the 40-60 moments/story events, that will form the basis of my screenplay.

The method prescribed to me is simple: I spend the first eleven weeks, creating the index cards, piling them up until, hopefully, I have about 200 (if I’m lucky). At the beginning of the twelfth and final week of the three months I spread these cards out on a very large table or on the wooden floorboards of my apartment. Now I get stuck into the sorting process of discarding, ordering, re-ordering and distilling the wodge of 200 film moments down to the 40-60 needed.

I put them in order of events that happen in the sequence of my story that works best, shuffling them around, moving the cards about until I’m happy with the story flow: this happens, that happens, then the body falls out of the wardrobe, then the police are called and the detective arrives and this happens and on it goes.

When I’h happy with my pile of 40-60 cards, I go to the computer, open a new a page and, card by card, type out the line/event/moment that is on the front of each card. This will generally spread over three, four or five pages; the story of the film, event by event, line by line. Now I begin to play around with the order once more, only this time, I do it on the computer: moving a line here, shifting that one there. I’ll do this for a day or so until I’m happy, then I’ll print off those 3-4 pages.

I will then read those pages to myself again and again, often aloud, still tweaking and moving the odd moment around. But I read and read and read, until I’ve got it memorised like a joke I’m going to tell someone. Once I’ve got it down pat, I run through it again and again, without the prompting aid of the pages, until that story is lodged in my head and on the tip of my tongue.

At this point, I call ten friends and ask if they can spare me half an hour of their time? I take them a coffee, sit them down and, over fifteen to twenty minutes I tell them my story, watching for when their eyes move or they might get distracted. If I’ve done my work and the story’s tight, this doesn’t happen. What does happen is that at the end of my story they, hopefully, say something like this: “...that’s great, you should write that...”

This is the way I’ve been taught to create the Step Outline for my screenplays and it makes sense to me. Script by script, draft by draft I’ve increased my fidelity to this method. The first draft of my first feature script - The Comedians - I didn’t use it at all, because I didn’t know this way of working; that’s not to say that first draft doesn’t have merit, it does, but the story woven within is shot through with holes and implausibilities; it drags, meanders and is hardly a gripping yarn.

I am still yet to use this method 100%. I have, however, pitched the opening scene of this crime story I’m working on - Jerusalem - in this way, to friends and the results, EVERY TIME, were great, perhaps I’ll post it up here one day.

But I will use this blueprint for working, 100%, when I get to the end of the third month, which will be mid to late July.

I don’t want to leave my handbag by the door, I want to leave a friend enjoying a silent nod of satisfaction after I’ve spun them a great story, well-told.