What I'm Working On During the Strike
One of the strange side effects of the strike has been the absence of the white noise of expectation.
I was waiting to hear about so many things. Will this studio get back to me about this project, did this director pass on my feature, am I going to hear from these producers about “x?” I was always waiting for the phone to ring or a new email to show up. All day, every day. Refresh, refresh, refresh.
The fact that none of those things is going to happen right now has liberated my mind from the waiting. I’m also liberated, temporarily, of creating with the expectation of taking ideas to this particular market. This may be the last pure writing time for a while.
Going into the strike, I knew I didn’t want to work on any new material for film and TV. I have two fully finished pitches, a TV spec in progress, and a feature spec that was just starting to make the rounds. When the strike ends everybody will be in a rush to get their stuff going again. It will take time for all of my projects to gain momentum. A new feature or additional TV spec would just be gathering digital dust.
A week or so ago I came up with an idea for a character who is a reflection of so many of my current interests and obsessions. I’m just not quite sure what form this new story is going to take. Short story? Fiction podcast? Novel?
I have 25k words of an unfinished novel in a folder on my desktop. I already stole the antagonist for my latest feature spec from it. There are lines of dialogue, character descriptions, and whole scenes that made it into ROAR. My first real attempt at a novel basically turned into one long brainstorming document for a totally unrelated project. (No work is ever wasted) I still haven’t proven I have the stamina to finish a novel, let alone write a GOOD one.
Instead of trying to force it I’m spending time every day thinking about the character and where the journey takes them next. I have been calling each new scene a chapter, but it’s just to keep things organized. I brainstorm a new “chapter” every day, writing down as much detail as I can, asking myself questions, solving problems, making lists of the people in her orbit, or the orbits of the other characters she interacts with. There are a few stray lines of dialogue that surface but not many.
I was listening to The Writers Panel episode with Tony Gilroy and he talks about “sketching” in Word documents. Once he picks up some momentum, or “gets hot,” as he puts it, he transfers it over to Final Draft. I’m kind of doing the same thing by hand in my journal right now. I’m on chapter 10 at the moment, still laying the foundation. I have no idea what the end is going to be. But I can tell you a little bit about the genesis of this character…
I was really bummed that my modern take on Esmeralda (of HUNCHBACK fame) never made it up the ladder at Universal. I was thinking about her a lot and wondering if there was a way to take my setup and give her an entirely new story, set in New York instead of Paris. I realized there was a thread connecting her to ROAR, which is the idea of criminal underworlds intersecting with the supernatural world because they both operate in the shadows.
The next question was, “Why isn’t there a female Quasimodo type character?” With the exception of The Bride, almost all of the famous Universal monsters are male.
Those roles were showcases for iconic performances by male actors. When I think of the modern day version of Lon Chaney the first person who comes to mind is Johnny Depp. He’s constantly utilizing makeup design to create memorable characters. Ron Perlman has done a ton of this as well. I was having a hard time coming up with an example of an A-list actress who does the same thing on a regular basis.
It was equally hard to come up with examples of those kinds of characters, outside of superheroes and villains. There aren’t nearly enough female creature features. Then I remembered a character who wasn’t in the vein of the Universal monsters but who was instantly iconic and for many of the same reasons: Lisbeth Salander, from THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO.
One of the things I think is missing from the modern monster takes is that they don’t take the care to invest you emotionally in the monsters. The original FRANKENSTEIN gave you a powerful feeling of empathy for the creature. I felt that same connection to Lisbeth.
She has such an iconic look, it tells you volumes about her as a person. There’s a reason (or many reasons) why she’s put this armor on against the world. It serves to put people at arm’s length and keep them on their guard. But it’s also a testament to her power. It is immediately compelling.
I felt for her, even before the really terrible thing that happens to her in the story happens. I wanted to protect her even though I know there’s nothing I could do for her that she couldn’t do ten times better. By the end, I wanted to be her.
It’s funny that Lisbeth popped up again as I’m walking the picket line and getting more fired up about this current fight between artists trying to eke out a middle class living and billionaires who are buying support yachts for their main yachts. I’m just about ready to burn it all down. When they ask where I was radicalized tell em it was the main Disney gate on Alameda!
(Side note: I wonder how many of my fellow writers are going to be drawn to stories about fighting corporate greed after walking the picket line for however long we’re out there. We may be looking at a whole movement fueled by this strike.)
So I was thinking about a Lisbeth Salander type, about visual iconography, about a role that would let a great actress disappear into a cool makeup design, about the dark noir tones of the Universal monster movies, my failed Esmeralda pitch, taking a sledgehammer to the system…
I was outside playing with Ellie, listening to music. The new Lana Del Rey record. There’s a song called "A&W" that has a long breakdown with a thick bass riff and a schoolyard chant. It’s hypnotic. I almost feel like it put me into a trance. I found myself on the Lower East Side at night. The crowd parted… and she appeared, this character who is now demanding my attention.
It was one of those moments that feels like magic, like she just emerged from the ether. But the truth is she arrived after a year of hard work on various iterations of her. From time to time I would remold and reshape her, or the story world around her. And all the while I was being remolded and reshaped. This specific moment, strike included, brought us together.
I came back inside, grabbed my brand new CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON journal that I bought from Dark Delicacies in Burbank and got to work. (The journal is an attempt to will my creature feature era into existence.)
At this point I know what she’s been through. I know what she wants to do about it. Right now, I’m just waking in her shoes, working through the mystery piece by piece, chapter by chapter, letting one character lead me to another. I don’t know the end of her story. But I know her name. Her real name is Samantha. Most people call her Sam.
I call her by the name she gave herself, for the purpose of her mission.
I call her VESPER.
Gone Podcast Crazy
I told you about Ellie’s favorite new game and how it’s the only thing she wants to do from morning until night. I can’t stop now that I know how much she loves it. She’s lost weight, her confidence is boosted. She’s happy. So for an hour a day (minimum) I stand in the living room, or the bedroom, or in the backyard, and I wave the pole around like a lion tamer while she chases the furry little patch tied to the string.
A few days in I realized I had to do something to relieve my boredom and make some constructive use of the time. I started listening to podcasts and audio books, sometimes burning through two a day. I also joined the YMCA. Because she’s wearing herself out at home she’s not walking nearly as much, which means I wasn’t walking as much (until the strike). I listened to another podcast or audio book on the treadmill at the gym, which means I’m taking in 2-3 hours a day.
Here are two of my favorites from the week:
First, I highly recommend you listen to Ben Blacker talk to John Rogers about the strike on his Writer's Panel podcast.
Second, check out this amazing episode of Malcolm Gladwell’s Revisionist History podcast about the concept of Conceptual Innovators and Experimental Innovators by way of Picasso, Cezanne, Elvis Costello, and Leonard Cohen. I found it insightful and inspiring. Like it was made in a lab specifically for me.
That’s it for this week.
See you on the picket line or in these lines, from time to time!
Good luck with the journalling and Vesper!
Now you've got me thinking about Dark Delicacies. I loved that place when I discovered it on a visit to the states a couple of years ago!
Thanks, Mickey. Your mention of Dragon Tattoo got me thinking about all of the female Protagonist movies in that period, say, 2008-2014? Hunger Games, Twilight, Dragon Tattoo, Zero Dark Thirty, etc. (Gone Girl, Girl on a Train, Bridesmaids?) They were very successful and seem to me to be less *forced* into being, for lack of a better term. They weren't the result of a studio exec saying let's redo X but make the lead a woman to mix it up and we'll market it as female empowerment. In most cases, they were originally written by women, which is a huge part of them feeling authentic, but I don't think that's the only reason they worked. They just were more organic, for some reason; they worked because they were good stories and unknowingly plugged into the zeitgeist rather than TRYING to capture the zeitgeist, which is what so much major studio/network content tries to do these days. Maybe because we do what we do and can't help but see the ropes and pulleys being moved behind the scenes (do you imagine the screenplay page as you watch something, like I do?) we tend to overanalyze, which the general audience does not do, but I think maybe it can help us to turn off the analytical brain sometimes and just create. The trick after that is to convince a decision maker to help realize it because it's such a good story that it demands to be made, rather than because it ticks a bunch of boxes. I don't know where I was going with this, just talking out loud. 😀 Thoughts?