Fly Me to Hollywood
A good friend of mine, an Englishman based in Vienna and a damned good screenwriter, has been urging me to take the material from my last blog ("Fly Me to the Moon") and turn it into a script. Over the years when I've told that same story, others have also urged me to do something more with it. Because I'm sensitive to the feelings of those mentioned in the piece--The Mystic Barber, Ed from Venus and The Princess of the Galaxies--I've avoided doing anything that might be construed as exploitative. I would assume that by now all of them are long gone, Ed back to Venus, Andy Sinatra to the Great Barbershop on one of the Martian Plains, and the Princess to her galaxy, and thus beyond the point of being sensitive to being turned into characters in a movie.
To be honest, though, I've never been able to work out exactly how I could use this material as the basis for a screenplay. But my friend Steve was insistant. I absolutely had to turn this into a little low-budget indie that would cost anywhere between $1-3 million and turn into a cult classic. As if.
Right?
And then I thought about it just a little more, bringing a protagonist into the story who was decidedly not me, and that's when it all opened out into something more than my little anecdote of a blog entry.
So I got to work, setting aside another collaborative screenwriting project for a few days, and sketching out what's known as a treatment, a kind of prose version with dialogue of the story. I now have ten pages, and the script essentially outlined in total. It went almost too easily, I have to say, but there was a story there, albeit a fictional one, and I know I can do this without diminishing in any way the uniqueness of the people I met at those meetings.
But the point is that one can find in any extended experience at least the germ of a story to tell. If you face it head-on you won't see it. You just need to come at it from a different angle and then you'll see it. But first you have to forget yourself in the equation. But then again, that's when writing really begins.
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Farzana Versey says:
More than just a story...
Hello and I did read the blog entry...it indeed would make for an exceedingly good film. All complete screenplays or novels need the skeleton...the process of fleshing it out is what creative endeavours are all about. And you know that only too well.
"But first you have to forget yourself in the equation. But then again, that's when writing really begins."
I'd say you have to forget being yourself. A bit of intrusion of the writer's persona does often add a dash of creating a conflict within the character.
Perhaps that itself could be the different angle...
Good luck with the project.
~F
Mary Wilkinson says:
I am interested in coming at
I am interested in coming at it from a different angle. Do you mean a different voice to the one you had originally seen it in? Or?
J.P. Smith says:
Hi Mary, and thank you for
Hi Mary, and thank you for your note. Well, I mean that as this was something I personally experienced, I needed to step away from it and in a way depersonalize the experience. Once I could remove myself from the equation, I could then see another fictional protagonist (decidedly not me) engaging with one of the characters I described in my previous post.
To do so, though, takes time and distance. As all of this happened in 1962-3, it's been some time, but only now have I seen the artistic solution to how I could use the material in a fictional format.
As a literary device, the way to do this can also solve certain blockages that sometimes arise in the writing of fiction or screenplays. It means coming into the story either from the point of view of another character, or of moving either ahead or back in time, so that what the character knows is either less or more, and the narrative can be picked up at a different point.
For me, in this instance, it was taking one of the people I'd met and creating a relationship between her and a fictional 16-year-old (also someone older than I was when I went to these gatherings).
Mary Wilkinson says:
Thanks for that, it is very
Thanks for that, it is very valuable to me. M
J.P. Smith says:
Mary, thanks. All of this is
Mary, thanks. All of this is really part of the process of using autobiographical material. Proust (a writer in whom I have a special interest) experimented with his material before writing his great novel. He wrote Jean Santeuil, which echoes to some degree many of the events he'd later use in In Search of Lost Time. But he told it there in the third person, using a protagonist named Jean. The work was unfinished, because it was clear it was going nowhere and hadn't achieved that perfect balance between story and narrator. It was only when he began writing in the first person that he could convincingly both hide his true nature (he was a homosexual at a time rather different from our own) behind a heterosexual narrator, and also explore the nature of someone trying to find his vocation as a writer. I think for a writer this is half the job: finding the point of view and the voice. For instance: let's say you're writing about a family of landowners. Say you actually grew up the daughter of said landowner. Now, you could tell it from her point of view, meaning yours, which would be valuable but limited; or from her sister's or brother's or mother's or father's. But if you told it from the servant's point of view you'd have in many ways a much richer story full of the observations of the silent servant, shaded and nuanced by a class conflict that would naturally exist. So right away you have a lot of potentially rich material.
Mary Wilkinson says:
Right. I see that now. I
Right. I see that now. I have been working on something but feel a little strangled by it because it is perhaps too close. So I could maybe change the narrator or the protagonist to the secondary character I have now. But can she, the secondary character,(hope you can follow this)but can she then project what the original protagonist was trying to convey but this time from a different angle. It is just that the original protagonist's life is too important to cast aside. She is the bones of the story but maybe I am too intimate with her to be able to move along with it. God, I hope you can follow me with my rigamarole.
J.P. Smith says:
Yes she can. She can suss
Yes she can. She can suss out (if you follow me) what the first character may be thinking. That always makes for an interesting protagonist: someone who believes he or she knows the world he or she is in, but needs to, so to speak, work out the clues for herself.
I follow you completely. It's the case of the patient and the doctor: the patient knows exactly where it hurts, but it takes the doctor to explain why to her.
Mary Wilkinson says:
JP sorry if this seems like
JP sorry if this seems like I am picking your brains, but perhaps I am but I wonder what you think of two narratives in a novel? Two contrasting voices playing off eachother? Do you think it is hackneyed? I would appreciate your thoughts. Also, is dialogue really essential? I was at a workshop recently and the general consensus was that dialogue was essential. I was the only one to disagree because I have read many books without dialogue and to be honest prefer them to books containing it. If you get the time to respond I would be grateful. Thanks, Mp
J.P. Smith says:
Let me answer that in
Let me answer that in reverse order, Mary (and pick my brains as you will; always happy to have them harvested now and again). Dialogue is vital, because dialogue is action and reveals character. In books where you may have thought there was no dialogue it was perhaps either because the entire book was written in a kind of stream-of-consciousness from one person's point of view, or the dialogue was not broken out from the narrative in the standard quotation marks. James Joyce, for instance, used dashes to set off his dialogue. But I know of very few works of fiction that do not have at least some dialogue.
Two contrasting voices, if the story calls for it, is perfectly acceptable and can make for a very interesting narrative. There are books written in multiple narrative voices, so that we see, "Rashomon"-like, all points of view of a particular situation. Not hackneyed at all, Mary.
Back to dialogue for a moment: try to imagine your favorite works of fiction without dialogue and see how impoverished they might seem without that orchestra of voices.