I was a little nervous about presenting this in class because when I did the one paragraph pitch the professor was not very encouraging about it. But it was still the best idea I had going, and I very much wanted to get feedback on it and be able to work on it in a class environment. I like it now - and enough other people liked it that I had a good cast and crew lined up for it before I ran out of time - but how much better could it be both as a script and as a film if I actually had support from my professors? Can we take what would have been a good film and make it great?
So we workshopped it today. (Here's the current version if you've not read it.) First I should say that I love my classmates, but they aren't actors, and half of them speak English only as a second language and weren't sure about all the words I was making them say. So it was worth doing as an exercise, but it really made me miss Esther and Eric. It had a very different feel when they came over and we did a table read a couple of drafts ago. But as we've said in class, if your story only works with A-list actors then it's not a good enough story.
People said nice things, you can take that as read. But it's not the nice comments that are the ones that challenge you to make a project better. So yes, it's sweet and kind of fun. The best of the good comments is that Mary Jane thinks it's worth pursuing. She said it's not what she was expecting from the pitch paragraph, which had to be true since she thought it sounded feature length and I feel comfortable with my 9 pages.
The biggest issue with it at the moment is that it's not clear to her what the tone of the piece is. And since when she asked me I couldn't articulate it I figure that's pretty fair. Is it a comedy, in which case the spy scenes should be more exaggerated and over the top, or is it serious in which case the whole thing needs a bit more specificity. I need to get farther from the Boris & Natasha feel that I started out with in early drafts and go into real spy stuff.
We all got different homework assignments based on what would help our scripts the most. Mine is to decide if I'm going serious or not (I'm leaning toward yes) and then do research of spy stuff in the 70s. Let me repeat that: my homework is to watch spy films. I love my life.
I also need to work on the ending because what's going to make it work is being sure that the audience knows that these things really happened. It's not fantasy, it's memory. Mary Jane is convinced no one will know that's Ivan at the end and she's probably right. And she was so caught up in thinking about the Ivan problem that she missed me reading the stage direction for the last scene of the world's slowest getaway. So that when I told her the story of where the idea came from in the first place - when I was driving down the mid Cape highway behind a 1970s wood paneled station wagon that had a taxi sign stuck to the top, doing about 25 mph and being driven by a really old guy with his really old girlfriend in the seat next to him and wondered who are they and what are they running away from? She LOVED that image and said, well that should be the first thing we see why didn't you use it? I said I did, it's the last thing we see. So that's ok and I'll work on the ending some more. But I think telling her the story of where it all came from - being an image I encountered in life - makes her much more prone to like the story. She had already said I could keep working on it so it's not like that tipped her over or anything. But I did want to make sure I shared that because I knew it was just her way to come up with story ideas.
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