Film and Television Talks

I Fell Into A Large Ditch And Climbed Out With Better Perspective

Shaziane, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Leave a comment

11-minute read
I fell into a large ditch in the middle of the road to writing the screenplay for the documentary.

Well, I fell into a few. Many of them stalled the process but not as much as this present ditch has. The problem for most might actually be minor. But for me not knowing how much visual detail and direction to include isn’t debilitating per se because I have all the information in my head. But it is because I don’t know how much of it should be place on (the virtual) paper. But the solution is somewhat simple:

Read screenplays.

I began reading and it has been eye-opening to the point that I have found footholds to climb out of this ditch. You’d think I was driving…and I was but the concept of the screenplay has changed so much that a specific vehicle hasn’t been chosen. Instead, I am lugging the frame I need as I search for, find other parts, and toss them onto the roof. Thankfully it has a roof.

The process of reading to learn from screenplays is at an early stage. This isn’t something I have done before and so I am reading the frame of them too. Though I have not read many they have been quite useful, and odd in the lack of detail. This leaves a large leeway for someone else to direct, I guess. But as a documentary is that an option? Should this documentary be a docudrama? I don’t know yet.

I am still reading.

I am now on Baby Driver, Eagle Eye, and Mean Girls. Yes, they are not documentaries but as Michael Moore states in his 13 Rules for Making Documentary Films:

Don’t make a documentary — make a MOVIE. Stop making documentaries. Start making movies.

So if I am going to make a movie…a documentary movie, I need to read screenplays written for movies, and I am happy that I am.

I have enjoyed most of the screenplays. Mean Girls is an exception. I watched the film on TV shortly after its release. I wasn’t impressed by it but watched it multiple times. As I have grown older I noticed how quickly and often I am bypass it on the television. Before picking up the screenplay I blamed this on my mood: “I’m not in the mood for this genre/movie”. But now that I am reading this story, it’s not my mood. It’s the story. It’s not realistic and where my subconscious says “I’m not in the mood” while watching, my conscious self outrightly questions the holes. And yes it should be funny, and funny sometimes means stupid. But getting a laugh at something which is funny because it’s stupid is different from a hole in a story.

So when the protagonist’s crushes are two men who most would not consider hot it’s weird, but fine. When this oddity is blamed on living in Namibia for five years as though there were absolutely no other people around her during these five years, her crush choices become absurd. Didn’t her family go into the town? Watch African movies or news? And since she was 10 years old before moving to Namibia and had lived and experienced other cultures and peoples should being with her mom and dad all day and watching what they like be a reason?

The premise of the entire story is insulting to persons who were not given the chance to socialise with their peers as they were growing up and lived firmly outside of social norms and practices. It makes fun of things which are fully on the table for those jokes but does it badly, in a condescending way.

Maybe you grew up fully enclosed in a circle of people, adults, children, at home, at school, etc. But I didn’t. I didn’t grow up far away from people but removed from them because of the lifestyle my mother chooe to live and the rules she put in place for me. So I am one of the group who is terrible at reading social cues. And that is not the protagonist’s problem. Why? To make up for my inabilities I observe and as the child of two observers whose daily task and routine is observing, the protagonist would have done so and done it much better than I do and did. Her skills would have been much better than my own not only because of her parents but also because of the 10 years she had previously had living a relatively normal life.

The protagonist and her family had lived in a few first world countries. In childhood I watched a few of these – children whose families moved a lot. They were normal. Sure there’s an initial period of being the odd one out but the nonsense is being so incapable of observing, seeing, connecting, making choices for one’s self. Isn’t that Hollywood story too worn, to unrealistic?

Yeah, it’s not a new movie. But it is absurd to the point of not being funny.

What the Mean Girls screenplay taught me is how much a fully-fleshed out story matters. I don’t want my film to be watched a few times then passed over because a viewer is subconsciously uncomfortable with the story because of the holes, and condescension. I also don’t want them to like it a little more but still feel a slight subconscious aversion to it due to the faux feminism as it lines its bottom with sexist padding. That’s to a great extent unlikely but the Frozen screenplay brought that to the fore. It doesn’t irk me as much as Mean Girls, because it’s not the plot which is net-like but the ideology.

Frozen has a feminist-empowerment message or so I thought. I thought the sexist bits were minimal and then I read the screenplay and it’s definitely in the lining of telling women if they love men just right, the men will want to be good, and you’ve just got to accept them that way until they change just keep loving them. And just so we’re clear, this is actually one of the mindsets which keeps domestic abuse victims in such relationships as they hold out for the abuser to change or hope that loving them right will have some great impact.

But what Frozen has going for it, is its story.

It is not alone The Hangover, Insecure (ep. 1 and yes it’s not a movie), Ratatouille all stand beside and above it with gripping story telling. And I’d say Ratatouille has done it best from among the screenplays I’ve read. It held my attention as though I had never watched the movie and it was a story about a rat cooking while using a garbage boy as his puppet in the most literal sense.

Good stories buckle your seatbelts for you.

And so far that’s what Eagle Eye and Baby Driver are. But more importantly their significance for me is the amount of changes made. Unlike the Devil Wears Prada screenplay these do not bare the revision and their dates on the frontpage. So I am unawre of how many revisions were made before the copies of the screenplays I am reading and also after them. But the changes visible in the released movies are major. The changes serve to enhance the story, to make the dialogue flow which is very important to Baby Driver and though not done perfectly enough to hide itself is done well enough to not be disliked.

Reading these screenplays have gotten me out of the ditch for the most part. Footholds appeared seemingly out of nowhere. And now as I sit on the bonnet of this frame, cleaning small sections of my glasses with pieces of microfiber cloth as they fall from the pages I am becoming aware of potholes and ditches immediately before me and a little way in the distance.

I’ll walk a little way further in the coming month. But it will surely be a trudge.

If you’re looking for screenplays and plays, I know I suck at finding them, check out:

The last three were shared on Twitter by loves who are on the grind as well. Unfortunately, I didn’t think of sharing these with you until 0800 as I finished writing this post. So I can’t direct you to the person who so generously shared the IMSD link. But according to the Google files, Hanna Phifer shared the handful, it feels like that names what I saw on Twitter too. And the season’s worth of episode scripts came directly from Michaela Coel’s Twitter account. It’s pinned to the top if I’m not mistaken.

And yes again, reading outside of your genre is good. That’s what I hear… If you know of any other cache or libraries of screenplays please drop them in the comment section, or Tweet ’em at me.