Day 179: Are you looking for a screenwriter?

Seven years ago, a producer - looking for “new” writers - read a draft of my first feature film screenplay. A meeting ensued and whilst he told me that he’d enjoyed reading the script, it wasn’t “the kind of thing” he was looking for. Some candour: I was sat in the boardroom of this producer’s production company and could smell a cheque book, so, like any good writer worth their salt, I replied quick-smart “what kind of ‘thing‘ are you looking for?” The producer went on to tell me of a book, an Australian story from the Second World War, that he’d always thought would make a good film. I suggested that maybe I could read the book and return with some feedback from a film writer’s perspective. He wished me good luck as the book was long out of the print, but, yes, he’d welcome that if I could find a copy.

I did find a copy of ‘The Ridge and the River‘ and returned to the same producer with a ten-page document explaining why I thought the story a great yarn but perhaps not such a propitious candidate for a feature film. The producer listened to my debrief, then left the room, returning with a pile of five more books. So began a two year process of him giving me potential film stories to read and me, dutifully reading them and responding.

This process went on until I was heading off to the UK to embark on a year-long feature-writing programme (Writer’s Passage) at The Script Factory in London; before departure, my producer-friend handed me a weighty photocopy of the latest work that he wanted me to read, a substantial enough piece to send me over the allocated baggage allowance at Qantas check-in. That document sat by my bed for the first six months of the trip, until I returned back to Sydney for Christmas.

Not two minutes off the plane and I received an email from the producer, wanting to know where I was? I thought it best to read the hefty tome before I let him know that I was back in Australia, and so I did. Now, this book wasn’t the best of the ones I had read, BUT, there was something in it that I loved; an essence or spirit at it’s heart that made me want to adapt it. I rang the producer, we met up to “do lunch” and before I even put my writer’s arse onto a bistro seat he enquired “what do you think?” I replied “I think you’re onto something with this one”. He was glad I’d responded in this way and said “I’ve bought the rights!” “Good for you.” “I want to you to adapt it”, “good for me!”.

We’re four drafts on from that original conversation; Australia’s federal film funding body have invested in two of those drafts, the NSW state film office paid for another. Academy Award winner Robert Towne (screenwriter of Chinatown, Shampoo, Days of Thunder) has worked on it, so have writers Jan Sardi (Shine, Mao’s Last Dancer) and Matthew Dabner (The Square), producer Sue Murray (Ten Canoes) and director Peter Andrikidis (tv series East West 101, Underbelly, Wildside).

The story’s location has shifted from Cambodia to Afghanistan, the time of the story from 1948 to 2010, a French detective is now an Australian; work on the fifth draft of The Detective is imminent. All this because someone opened their door just a crack and I wedged my foot in, then my elbow and stuck my body in to keep it ajar.

Day #179 Tip: The first rule of business: stay in business
The business of writing is, in many ways, no different from any other business, in that the biggest trick to pull off, is to keep writing; even when - as the banner at the top of this Blog announces - there is no money. Like the water diviner with his Y-shaped twig (a practice known as “dowsing”, after William ‘Smasher’ Dowsing [1596-1668]) we must practice our own methods of seeking out where the necessary “stuff” is, without the aid of scientific apparatus, if we are to put food on our table and a roof over our head whilst going about our business

Somehow, I’ve managed to keep going and today, I had lunch with a another successful producer, whom I’ve recently become acquainted with, who has an idea for something that he wanted to pitch to me in order to start the slow roll of a ball that may gather momentum. Many such efforts have, in the past, turned into “balls of confusion” and crashed off into the undergrowth, taking me with them, but that’s part of the rough n’ tumble of this business. Right now, I’m inspired, the creative sap is rising and who knows where this one might roll to?

Maybe “Smasher” Dowling and his twig of divination is not the best parallel to use, perhaps Burt Lancaster’s character of Starbuck (!!!!!), the “charming” con man who came to town promising to bring rain (for money) in the 1957 film The Rainmaker, is nearer the mark, maybe not?! But who is who in this metaphoric scenario that I’ve invoked?

My point is this: when the pennies from heaven are not falling, well, maybe that’s just how it’s meant to be, but perhaps we have develop a bit of a weather-eye for these things and best we nurture our olfactory senses too, for there’s gold out there in them-thar hills somewhere and no reason, dammit, why it shouldn’t be ours....make that, MINE.

Day 178: A league of his own

Australia’s Australian Rules Football season and the Rugby League season are over for another year. Collingwood’s Magpies settled the “rules” replayed final in Melbourne, at the MCG, yesterday and, today, the St.George-Illawarra Dragons beat the Sydney City Roosters in the “league” final.

The coach of the Dragons, is Wayne Bennett, arguably Australian rugby league’s greatest coach of all-time, having now won seven Premierships with two different teams (the Brisbane Broncos and the Dragons). Wayne Bennett is an extraordinary and, in many ways, unassuming man.

Sixty year-old Bennett was, himself, a player who competed at the highest level for the national side, was coach of the Queensland State of Origin team and once, a Queensland police officer, before finding great success as coach of the Brisbane team and now at St. George. In 1999, however, it was not Wayne Bennett’s professional world but his personal life that was revealed to the public, via the ABC television series Australian Story, which detailed his and his wife’s family life in this “deeply personal documentary”, much of it centering on the raising of their children, two of which have disabilities.

I can’t remember the radio show that I heard Wayne Bennett interviewed on, about that time, but I recall how his words moved me when he faltered, consumed with emotion, speaking of the fears he held for his disabled children and how they would cope when one day in the future, he and his wife were no longer around. That interview must have been two or three years after, as it prompted me to buy a copy of his inspirational book “Don’t Die With The Music In You” (a quote from American intellectual, Oliver Wendell Holmes Snr., “regarding failure to meet one’s potential”).

On the back sleeve of my copy of the book, there is a quote from humanitarian and one-time Australian cricket captain, Steve Waugh, who says: “If you want to be mentally tough, do as Wayne Bennett says: ‘follow your beliefs and don’t give into yourself.....’” Bennett himself, in one of the many quotable lines in the book offers this: “You have a choice in life. You can sit back and criticise or you can try to make a difference.”

Everything I’ve read about Bennett, quoted by others who know him, includes the words “revered” and “respected” amongst many, many other plaudits and just watching the response to this tall, genteel figure of a man at the final siren tonight, when the Dragons had won, spoke volumes of the love and affection all those in his orbit, feel for him.

There are many inspirational books by sportsmen and women - players, athletes and coaches alike - Wayne Bennett’s 2002 publication is the only one that I have and I’m not really a huge League fan?! But I like the headings of some of the bite-size chapters in this slim’ish volume: Talent Is Only The Beginning, A Stranger Called Discipline, You’re Not A Failure Until You Start Blaming Others and A Dreamer Who Saw Things We Cannot Imagine.

Congratulations to Wayne Bennett and the Dragons on today’s victory.

Day #178 Tip: Clichés are clichéd for a reason
The dictionary defines the word “cliché” as “a phrase or opinion that is overused and betrays a lack of original thought”.

Many times in the process of writing a screenplay I find myself confronted with choices to make about a scene or a character and I question whether the idea that I’ve come up with is clichéd or not? What I’ll do is take out an A4 pad and then list twenty solutions to my problem, twenty ways that I could execute the scene in question, putting my first thought, the clichéd one at the top of the page. By idea number ten, I guarantee you that I am so far away from cliché that I have now become contrived.

Contrivance is as deadly an enemy of the screenwriter as cliché, so from thought number eleven through to number twenty I must press on, to not only find a solution that is somewhere in between the two extremes, but a solution that works for the the problem that I’m trying to solve, is organic to my story and is the most powerful solution for the script.

However, sometimes, not always or often, I find myself back at the cliché because in some instances, cliché is tried, tested and true; what I have to do then is find a way of reworking the platitudinal so that it appears new and fresh.

Wayne Bennett expresses “don’t die with the music in you” in this way: “It means don’t go through life, whether it be relationships, sport - life - sitting down at the end saying it could have been better.” Is coach Bennett thinking “seven times champion” tonight, or is he contemplating a return to the Bronco’s for a tilt at an eighth? Maybe amongst all the deserved celebratory chaos, he’s thinking that now the season’s over, he’ll get to spend a little more time with his kids?

There is nothing clichéd or contrived about Wayne Bennett.

Day 177: “Is this a dagger which I see before me?”

I’m missing delinquency and wrong doing, not in my own life, thank God, but on the page, on my trusty laptop’s screen, the “dagger of the mind” that Macbeth spoke of.

It’s TIME for some CRIME.

One hundred and seventy-seven days ago, I began this blog with ambitions of writing a screenplay over the six months, that began back then, arriving at my destination (next Thursday) with 110 pages complete and done, of a script called Jerusalem. Here’s my opening gambit of that story:

In the forests of a wintery New South Wales, a corrupt detective - DRAKE- unable to
see his way back to a decent life, sets out into the Barrington Tops National Park, with
his dog (his lifelong companion), a shotgun, two cartridges and a suicide note safety-
pinned to his coat for easy identification. Intending to kill his dog and then himself, the
dog bolts after a paddymelon, which leads to a two hour chase deep into the forest,
where the man finds his dog impaled and in pain. As he loads the shotgun with the cartridges, the paddymelon loiters nearby in the trees, refusing to move despite
the shooing-away of Drake. His conscience won’t allow him to kill a defenceless creature under the watchful gaze of another, Drake is given the smallest window of sanity and
shoots off the two shotgun cartridges into the air; the paddymelon is then happy to
leave. Drake sets about freeing his injured dog. The animal is caught on a piece of metal
in the undergrowth and as the ex-cop peels back the tangled scrub to free him, so the fuselage and wreckage of a light aircraft is revealed. Even his detective’s sensibility is unable to make sense of the human remains left in the carnage. He snaps off a couple
of quick pictures of the wreck and it’s number on his mobile phone’s camera and, picking
up his dog, begins the long struggle back out of the forest to his car.

The ex-cop wakes the town’s vet, for help with the dog, and then reports the wreckage discovery to the police station in the local one-horse town. There is just one duty-sergeant on, dealing with the a drug-affected youth. The index number of this plane registers:
this is a plane that infamously disappeared in this wilderness, near this town, over twenty years ago, they both know that. The duty officer officer also knows who Drake is: the
bent detective responsible for another young cop’s death, the detective who was ushered
out of the force in disgrace. Drake points out that the skeletal reamins in the aircraft indicate
only one person, when in fact, two men went missing in the crash. Treated like a pariah, his suppositions seemingly of no interest to the sergeant, Drake is told to leave his phone with
the photo’s, to be downloaded when someone more techno-savvy comes on duty.

On returning the next day to check on the progress of their follow-up enquiries and
collect his phone, Drake is met with blank stares and told that they have no record of
his report nor evidence of the written statement he made and that the sergeant who
had been on duty the night before is now on long-term leave, uncontactable, abroad;
it’s as though Drake never came to the police station. But Drake remembers that there
was a third person in the police station, a youth, who could verify his story.

Hours later making his own enquiries to find the drug-afflicted young man, Drake learns
of a body that’s washed up in the run-off channel of the local dam; it’s that of adolescent,
the one other person who could vouch for what took place the night before.

And so I have the rough beginning of a story from the film super-genre that is CRIME. My story is one of the twelve sub-genres of crime, the DETECTIVE story. This short opening stanza gives me a protagonist of a ex-cop, corrupt and kicked off the force, a man also at the bottom of his life, on the brink of looking for a way out, maybe a candidate for redemption. He’s in a small town where everyone knows who is is and is loathed for what he’s done.

My protagonist’s world is then knocked out of balance: he discovers a crime scene that doesn’t add up, with a body count that makes no sense and reports it; the report and any evidence of him lodging it vanish into thin air and the one person who could witness this turns up dead. My protagonist suspects this is murder and, in the words of one of the witches from Macbeth:

“By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes.”

Day #177 Tip: “What’s ‘appened before, may ‘appen again”
I have the feeling that I’ve shared that opening of Jerusalem with you before, back in the early days of this Blog, which is symptomatic, to me, of the risk that I am running into the disease or repetition; I’m running out of things to say, this time around.

But there’s something actually nice about that and hence I’ve quoted the inimitable Bert (from Mary Poppins) to title today’s tip. You see, early on in the adventures at Cherry Tree Lane, Bert is practicing is one of his crafts - as a pavement artist (a screever[sic]) - when Mary Poppins arrives and Bert predicts what has gone before and what might be to come; it’s all very mysterious and yet exciting.

There’s whispers on the wind, for me too, that I might be heading back into the detective land of a project that I’ve been on for six years now, and, should that come to pass, then the whirligig of time will have swung around once again.

When I get to the end of six or seven months on a screenplay, almost as soon as I “put the pen down” on one story, I must pick it up on another, hence why I wanted to remind myself of Jerusalem, of where this Blog started, as I near it’s destination. I’m not sure that I’m making sense today, I’ll endeavour to do better tomorrow.

Day 176: The Usual Questions

On a screenplay of mine called The Detective I worked with a script editor - Matthew Dabner - on the second draft; Matthew is also a screenwriter in his own right (The Square) but was a diligent and thorough guide and companion, to this writer, on that draft. I’ve tried to secure his services since, on other pieces, but between his own writing and work at Screen Australia, Matthew’s dance card is pretty full these days.

At some point in the journey of that second draft, probably in the midst of getting lost, creating the Step Outline, Matthew gave me the following “usual” questions to ask of the story so far, in an effort keep me on track. I think these questions can be used as a litmus test at any point in the journey of a screenplay, even for analysis once a film is completed. Let me use the William Hurt film, The Doctor (1991), a redemption story, to demonstrate:

WHO IS THE MAIN CHARACTER:
Dr Jack McKee (William Hurt) a successful and rich surgeon with no problems in his professional or personal life; he’s in a thriving practice with two other surgeons and in a happy marriage with a wife and child

WHAT DOES HE WANT (tangible goal/conscious desire/text):
Early on in the story, Jack is diagnosed with throat cancer; he, like all patients, wants to be cured

WHAT DOES HE NEED (intangible/unconscious goal/subtext):
Jack needs to get a “bedside manner”. Abrasive, arrogant, cold and unavailable - at work and increasingly home, once diagnosed with the cancer - Jack finds himself on the other side of the doctor-patient relationship, seeing hospitals. medicine and procedures from a very different perspective

WHAT IS AT STAKE:
His career (he can’t practice while going through the final stages of his treatment), his practice (when Jack begins to see things from a different perspective, he refuses to lie in order to back his partner up in a malpractice lawsuit) his marriage (during his treatment, Jack befriends a fellow cancer patient - a young woman called June - adding to the alienation and distancing Jack’s wife already feels), his life (this, of course, is cancer that Jack is dealing with).

WHY DO WE CARE:
Because, even though Jack McKee is an uncaring and, seemingly unfeeling guy, we all know what it’s like to endure invasive medical procedures, to be at the mercy of a medical system that sometimes forgets that we are human beings with lives and loved ones, to be around those we care for when they are sick, to be confronted with the prospect of our own mortality, and how it feels, in that fearful dark night of the soul when we are scared and alone during all of this.

HOW DOES HE START THE STORY:
In an operating theatre and a marriage where he has little compassion, pity and patience for those who need, trust and rely on him, espousing these character traits and promoting them in the interns under his care and guidance.

HOW DOES HE END THE STORY:
Taking the time to personally reassure a patient who is in his hands, about to have a heart operation, Jack does everything he can to allay the fears of the man and his family. In his own family life, through the recuperation and convalescence from his illness, Jack has learnt to open up to his wife and allow her into the vulnerable parts of his world. And at the hospital, Jack creates a role-play situation for his young interns whereby they will sample and endure many, if not most, of the procedures that they will be prescribing for those they are going to care for.

WHAT EVENTS, CONFLICTS, IDEAS, CHARACTERS ARE THE CATALYST FOR CHANGE IN HIM:
The ear, nose and throat specialist that treats Jack with an appalling bedside manner
June, the fellow-patient jack befriends, from whom he learns humility, kindness and courage
The young Jewish surgeon (often bearing the brunt of Jack’s mocking) who agrees - at Jack’s request - to operate on him
Being on the other side of the patient-hospital relationship
Undergoing illness and treatment
Living with the fear that the disease may consume you
June’s death
Jack being without a voice, post-operation
The very real possibility that they might not save his vocal chords in the operating procedure
Going through radiation treatment
Watching others, at close-quarters, go through the same treatment
Travelling alongside fellow-patients, watching them deal with their own fears
Lying to June to boost her hopes of recovery and being found out
Shutting off from his wife and not sharing his fears wife her
Helping a man - physically and emotionally damaged - because of his partner’s malpractice

I could go on and on with this list.....

Day #176 Tip: There’s always more to do
There are several versions of the questions Matthew gave me that are around in the industry - Robert McKee’s “Key Questions” and his “10 Commandments”, the examining questions offered by UK scriptwriting hothouse Arista - and they are all good tools that I use to to interrogate my own writing, that of others or scripts that I read & films I watch.

The job’s never quite done, there’s always further to go.