Am I Considering the Dark Side?

A colleague of mine approached me with a film idea yesterday. It’s a good idea. As soon as he said it, I saw the whole thing unfold in front of me, which has never happened before when thinking of film (which I rarely, if ever, do). My colleague is the kind of person who can actually make things happen. A very smart go-getter, as it were. It would be a good partnership, I think.  The very idea of a partnership is enticing: someone other than myself whom I would have to answer to when I’m not writing (which is the majority of the time). My friend recently go fired from her temp job and is writing full time again, which is probably the best thing that can happen to a talented writer who has a propensity for procrastination.

I would be lying if I said I went right home and started writing. I went home and watched Kings on Hulu (it is such a shame that show got canceled!). But I did jot some notes down on the BART, and today at the used bookstore I bought a book called The Screenwriting Formula for a few bucks (Okay, it was $7.98. Dammit. An investment has been made!). I’ve read a few screenplays, all of which the writers intended to adapt into plays, and I had a decent conversation with Jane Anderson about playwriting versus screenwriting when I interviewed her last October. But, really, I could use some help on the finer points of formatting. Thus my purchase.

There are definitely some incentives to screenwriting that playwriting cannot boast. The most obvious is money, but when sitting on the train last night I got excited thinking about the possibilities that present themselves when you free yourself from the bonds of the stage. And then there is the reach film has. Today John Hughes died. When Rachel told me that  I was like, “Who?” because I have some sort of protein deficiency when it comes to remembering names. All she had to say was “The Breakfast Club.”

It doesn’t hurt that I have seen two really good movies in the not too distant past: 500 Days of Summer and Away We Go.

Of course, I have no intention of leaving the theater any time soon. I also left the bookstore with Gertrude Stein’s Last Operas and Plays. Although, that I only payed $4.98 for.

For the cost of a ticket: musings about seeing Miss Julie

There is a show I want to see, an apparently amazing production of Miss Julie at Aurora Theatre in Berkeley directed by Mark Jackson, apparently one of the Bay Area’s finest. I have seen one workshop project Jackson created with A.C.T., which was pretty great, but I have yet to see a full production of his and I am anxious to do so. But I don’t have tickets yet (even though it sold out its run and is now opening up an extension) because the tickets on the website are $40 a piece. What the what!? I guess I haven’t bought a full price ticket for the theater in a while. Do people really pay that much? You dear souls! That’s why Berkeley Rep lists their season subscription holders with the donors in the back of their program.

I didn’t think I needed to ever see Miss Julie. I don’t particularly like Miss Julie. I remember teaching Miss Julie as a TA in grad school. I remember directing 30 minutes of the play with two students for a classroom presentation for extra credit. The classroom was cluttered with desks. It was in the basement. It had no windows. Three walls were concrete; the other was, oddly enough, some sort of carpet. It wasn’t good, but it was a teaching tool. The student who played Jean was a terrible student and one of the best writers I had ever taught. Both the professor and I secretly, independently investigated to see if he was cheating. He wasn’t. He was just a damn good writer and didn’t give a shit about the course. I liked him a lot.

My favorite version of Miss Julie is the futurist version my friend and I “wrote” as a string of futurist adaptations of work from the canon:

Lights up.
With a cleaver, Jean cuts the head off a parakeet.
Lights down.

But I look forward to Jackson’s production . . . not that I am going to pay full price to see it. With that I could see X-men Origins: Wolverine, Terminator Salvation, and Star Trek and even have popcorn at one of them. I’ll trade you Terminator Salvation and the popcorn, but that’s it . . . alright I might be able to wait for Star Trek to come out on Netflix, but no way about Wolverine, not with Taylor Kitsch playing Gambit. No way!

jump cut to dan’s introduction to screenplays

I just read my first movie script, which is odd considering I have been peripherally involved in theater since seventh grade, academically involved in theater since freshman year, and professionally involved in theater since the summer of 2006. And yet, ne’re a movie script to be found on my desk.

When I was the lit. intern at the Goodman, the casting intern at the time, Logan, told me about coverage–the job of dissecting movie scripts and writing up a report so the producing-powers-that-be did not have to read the scripts in full. I would imagine that–with the promise of slight fame AND money–there are more screenwriters out there than playwrights, but I could definitely be mistaken. Logan told me she made sixty bucks a pop, which was quite a bit more than one can make reviewing scripts for non-profit theaters (I think $25 per read is the most I have been offered). But she never got around to bringing in an example, and I never got around to bugging her.

So my introduction to the business of a movie script was delayed until this afternoon and I can categorically say that it is a STRANGE form. It looks like a play, but it reads more like a novel, or maybe a novella: if you take reformatting into account we’re only probably talking about fifty pages max. Like novels, screenplays have all these INSTRUCTIONS for the audience that go way beyond the typical stage directions one might find in a play. Example:

HANLEY: I do hope he is encouraged to pursue it in college.
PHYLLIS: Acting? You can study acting?
GEORGE: He doesn’t want to be an actor.
Hanley fights his inclination to challenge George.

Say what! His inclination? What’s that look like? I mean with a camera, it probably looks like a quick shift of the eyes or the slightest straightening of the spine, but the second balcony it probably looks a lot like an actor forgetting his lines.

But more to the point: isn’t that cheating! Shouldn’t the inclination be something the actor decides?! But wait, Dan, wait wait wait? When? When would the actor decide that? In rehearsal? Because you don’t get a rehearsal process in Hollywood. You get a quick reading, a quick conversation, twenty takes, and then you jump in the car and go to the next location.

I am slowly learning these things working in a city that is just a quick Southwest trip away from L.A. The Quality of Life, which opens at A.C.T. this Wednesday, was written and directed by Hollywood writer/director Jane Anderson, and all of the actors are Hollywood names. They had this to say about the rehearsal process of film:

Interview with Laurie Metcalf: I think most actors enjoy the process of rehearsals, which you don’t get in any real sense in movies and TV. I mean they call them rehearsals, but they’re not. You’re just scratching the surface, and I know I always walk away from a day on the set kicking myself and thinking about what I missed or should have done or didn’t think of quickly enough, You’re never satisfied with what you did.

Interview with Jane Anderson: A film actor often doesn’t entirely have to own the part because their performance gets shaped in the editing room. . . . Film actors don’t get a month of exploration. Often, they show up a week before, we have a read-through, maybe you have a few rehearsals; but film actors are performing on the fly. . . .When you have a week to rehearse for a film and an actor starts to go down the wrong hole, you say, “Wait a minute, actually the line means this and the character is really going after A instead of B.” And they’re grateful for that because you have to take shortcuts. If you do that for a stage actor the first week of rehearsal, you crush the exploration process.

And I guess the same is true for the writers. They prepare for a truncated exploration process with prescription-heavy scripts. They take shortcuts. They sacrifice collaborative creativity to a certain degree to ensure that the work gets done.

They are more specific in their vision on paper, but then doesn’t it get editted away in the cutting room? Is the irony that a screenplay is much truer to a writer’s vision than a play, but that the staged play more accurately presents the vision of the writer than a final editted film?