I left for London on April 12 and returned home a
week-and-a-half before the May 1 Nicholl Fellowship deadline. My co-writer and I
finished as much of the screenplay as we could before I left; we both planned to
edit it during the week I was in Europe.
During the 11-hour flight home a man in the
seat next to me noticed me editing the screenplay and gave me his contact
information. He works for a company that licenses characters and produces video games for SONY and
X-Box; they have offices in three countries.
Back home, the jet lag worked for me. I’d wake up just after 3:00 a.m. every day and work on the screenplay several hours before work.
My co-writer and I had given ourselves permission
to create the story without being perfect. The final days before the deadline we met at lunch and reworked scenes to
maintain tension. We also sharpened dialogue, throwing out options until a
better line appeared.
We hope we accomplished the following:
•
The protagonist progresses from experiencing a want to identifying and fulfilling a need. She experiences polarity (challenging to accomplish)
•
The story's premise is controversial; the various
characters' feelings about and reactions to the controversial choices the
protagonist makes are equally strong. This shows that there is validity in the differing views, reveals passion and humanity, and hopefully creates a deeper understanding of the issue
•
The characters don't cry but we wrote the story so
that (we hope) the audience will
•
We avoided using cliches and tried to remove the
ones that had appeared
I received an email on the day we finished the screenplay from Irvin Kershner's son. It was a photo of his father playing the viola, taken on his 90th birthday; truly amazing. We had finished the screenplay on my mentor's birthday. We polished the screenplay and submitted it to the Nicholl
Fellowship competition on May 1.
We’re planning to continue meeting at lunch to write and are
working on an idea for a new screenplay I proposed. Our goal is to complete a new
screenplay every six months (a guideline suggested by Frank Wuliger to aspiring
screenwriters during a class I took from him: write two screenplays each year).
My co-writer is an editor/writer/designer who had
never written a screenplay. Today I reviewed everything we’d done and the many
elements that we had built into our screenplay.
This morning a USC professor invited me to share the process we'd used to a Facebook group of her current and past students. Making progress after graduation has been challenging for many of them and she wants them to see that it’s
possible to make progress creatively in small periods of time.
In my next entry I’ll write more about that here; pretty
amazing to have completed an entire screenplay in less than two months. Today as I
reviewed with my co-writer what we’d accomplished I realized (and mentioned to
him) that I hadn’t learned the process we’d used in any of the
courses I’ve taken. Reading a summary of our journey might be helpful to new
screenwriters.
