DEVELOPMENT

From here it descends into a flurry of emails and phonecalls back and forth with Jess with Arif standing on the sidelines ready to chuck in another thought grenade as they say inside the Borg cube that is corporate America.

So these are the edited highlights of the various drafts that are produced in this period.

Arif says he would like to get an American actress for the lead and would I have a problem with that. I say not a problem, but shall we just make the heroine American? I (along with most Irish people) have a bit of a thing about Irish accents. It’s not that most attempts are bad (at least you can recognise that it is an Irish accent), it’s just that there is no such thing as an Irish accent in the same way that there is no such thing as an English accent. You have a Cockney accent, a Geordie accent, a Scouse accent, an Oxbridge accent, a Sloane accent, a Welsh accent etc, etc. In Ireland you could have a Belfast accent (that’s the really slow one), a Cork accent (that’s the really fast one) and within Dublin where the film is set you would have to change your accent depending on whether your character came from Donnybrook or Phibsborough. However many actors when faced with the brogue that is Irish , seem to opt for this generic, one size fits all “begorrah, bejaysus top o the mornin’ to ya, twas himself to be sure...” lilt that comes straight out of Darby O’Gill. Not all of them of course, there are some great efforts - my all time favourite goes to Katie Hudson in the film About Adam where she got the southside Dub accent note perfect. But overall, I think it is a stick that people would be waiting to beat our poor actress with, so why make her job harder. Besides, thinking about it, it would be quite cool if the character was American. It’s gives her a “stranger in a strange land” mystique.

Suggestion that we are suffering from a surfeit of villains – what we shall call the Spider Man 3 problem. Easy enough to understand – we have a limited amount of screen time and we should focus on one antagonistic relationship. I can see the logic of this, although it will lose me my favourite scene in the movie (which is the minor villains scene) It also gives me a problem as the last act hinges on an action by the same minor villain. I can wallpaper over that, but it’s a pain.

Another suggestion in step with that is instead of losing the minor villain make him a woman. Shave her legs and then he was a she. And the coloured girls go do, do do, do-do-do, do do. Interesting one from Arif this. Again, simple enough. We have not many women characters – one really strong one but she does not turn up until page 33 (another simple change – get her onscreen on page 3 if only for ten seconds so the audience can get to know her) and the rest are okay, but minor. I have a long think about this one and then have a chat with Jess. My mail below sums up my thoughts.

‘Man, he lives in jerks – baby born an’ a man dies, an’ that’s a jerk – gets a farm an’ loses his farm, an that’s a jerk. Woman, it’s all one flow, like a stream, little eddies, little waterfalls, but the river it goes right on. Woman looks at it like that.”
John Steinbeck – The Grapes Of Wrath.

Hi Jess,
OK, so been having a think about the Vittorio as a woman idea – and while I am not opposed to it – I am a little concerned about it, and think we need to think it through carefully. Initially I thought it was a fairly easy change, but the more I think about it the more, I think we would need some fairly extensive rewrites. I think certain scenes would have to be completely overhauled – the “Godfather” scene at the start would probably need to go – that’s a man talking – and while the stuff in the middle could probably stay – I am having trouble with the bike scene at the end – as I think that is a very stupid male response to a problem – see above quote by Steinbeck (no expense spared in whipping out the literary big guns to make my point) I am not saying that it is beyond a woman to do that – I am just wondering if a woman character did it, an audience would be less forgiving of her than a man (unfair I know) – I’m not even sure if that is important or not since we can ask how much sympathy we want an audience to have with Vit. (or whatever we end up calling her). I’m not even sure if this is a valid concern, but it’s the one I currently have. If you think this is unfounded, then I will stick in the changes, but would like to have your thoughts on it.

Incidentally, I don’t know if you are aware of the Bechdel Test of Women in film.

To pass the Bechdel rule, a film must have
1. At least two women in it
2. Who talk to each other
3. About something other than a man

Surprisingly few films pass that test – we currently don’t. But I was thinking of our motivation for this change, and if it really is to redress the balance of gender equality, I am unsure if that is a good enough reason. Put it like this. There aren’t a lot of women here. Heroine I think is a cool character – although I suspect Pauline Kael would have gone to town on us, that she is naught but a male fantasy. Caroline needs work, but I think I can economically round her off to make her a bit more real, Lou has almost no screen time, but I still think she is a strong woman, and Dympna again has almost no screen time, but is pivotal and in one sense is the strongest woman of the lot. So despite limited numbers, I think the women we have are okay. Or will be by the time we are done.
Jess comes back and we agree to drop the Vtt. as a woman and go back to looking at dropping him altogether.

**

Peter phones up – he thinks he has spotted a Star Wars size plot hole. Our conversation goes something like this.

Pete: “Why doe the hero walk into the trap at the end?”

Me: “What..??”

Pete: “At the end of the film, when the hero knows that guy is going to mess him up, why does he go anyway...??”

Me: “Well that would be.....because...ehm...well you see earlier when they had that conversation......and the hippie bloke....oh fuck off!!!”

I call this the Star Wars plot hole because it’s something that you can sit through on repeated viewings and all of a sudden it hits you. You’ve all seen Star Wars, right? I’m guessing more than once. Search you feelings, you know it to be true. So at the end the Rebel Alliance are on the planet on the far side of Yavin. The Death Star is on it’s way and the Alliance go out in X wings and Y wings, they have big scrap, Han Solo turns up, gets Luke’s back, they blow up the Death Star – shiny medals all round in that dodgy Leni Riefenstahl rip off scene at the end. The plot hole is “instead of going around the moon, why didn’t the Death Star just blow up the planet that was in the way and wipe out the Alliance straight away instead of giving them a chance to attack?” Kevin Smith also has a great one for the end of Superman Returns which I won't go into here, but is on one of his "An Evening With..." DVDs.


I phone Jess about it – she doesn’t think it’s a huge plot hole, but does think that we could do with strengthening up the motivation. We know what the heroes motivation is because we’ve talked about it endlessly for the last three weeks, but it’s still might not be obvious enough to anyone sitting in a darkened theatre – that enigmatic bullshit might play in Yojimbo or A Fistful Of Dollars but it will get us killed. Currently the hero is falling on his sword for his friends. Her suggestion is that maybe the villian beats up the heroine. I am appalled by this suggestion. It solves our problem for sure, but it is a massive sudden shift in tone right at the end and I think the audience will again kill us for it. We have our lovely heroine that the audience hopefully will think is cool and funny and sexy and brave and we give her a pasting ten minutes before the credits. The credits where she is supposed to be shiny and happy, whereas in reality, after the hypothetical duffing we’re about to give her she would probably never leave the house again. Jess insists that for motivational purposes I should stick with that thought.

I stick with it – thoroughly depressed now.

Two days later I’m in the Borg cube at work when it hits me – how to fix it. Jess was right – we need to tie the heroine in at the end. I knew she was right, but trouble was I did not know how to do it. Suddenly, it’s all there in my head. We have a change a couple of other scenes earlier on, but it will tie up the plot hole – sort the motivation out, link out to earlier character arcs for a whole host of other characters too. I text Jess. Then I phone her and leave a voicemail. Then I mail her. Then I leave another voice mail. This is the single best bit of development yet and I want to talk about it. Fifteen years later in subjective time I get a hold of Jess. She thinks it’s a great move, so I sit down and hammer it out. It’s a farly big change, but I boot through it in jig time. Really happy now. I’m starting to see a trend in the way this is working. Jess or Arif suggest something – sometimes it’s just a suggestion that is obviously good. I’ll do it. Other times it will be something that I will be resistant to for whatever reason I can come up with. They’ll roll out the mantra of “well try it anyway, we can always go back to an earlier version” I’ll moan and grumble, but then their suggestion will give me an idea or we’ll come up with a third way between us that works.

Example – Jess phones me up saying that the film is called The Legend of New York Pizza” but we’re not seeing anything of how the hero becomes an urban legend. She makes a suggestion that I think is a bit meh, but acknowledge that she has a good point. The next meeting we come up with the same idea but in a way that is much more visual and possibly a bit cooler. This is what we go with.

When everyone is in the zone spitballing can be loads of fun. And I still have not gotten over the giddy thrill of having an hour long conversation where the only topic is something I’ve written.

**

There is a scene in the middle of the film where the hero meets the heroine for the first time in two years. Arif thinks it could do with some work to ramp up the sexual tension and highlight their competitive nature. In his words, it should be more like the chess scene in The Thomas Crown Affair. I’ve not seen the original Thomas Crown in a while although there was a while a couple of months ago, when I couldn’t turn on the TV without happening upon the remake. "Oh sinnerman, where you gonna run to?" Sky Movies gold apparently. I get a hold of Thomas Crown 1 and have a look at the chess scene. I’m horrified – it’s almost like a seedy porn parody of itself – soft focus, sucking on fingers, lip licking, stroking of chess pieces etc. And I thought that scene at the end of Written On the Wind with Marylee and the miniature oil derrick was bad? I phone Arif up and whatever reasoned argument I had in my mind, I think I end up saying “are you fucking kidding me?” Arif in unrepentant and insists that OK, the scene is hokey and dated, but at the time it was daring and provocative, and there’s no denying it’s charged with tension, so that dreaded line that all writers fear – “the same thing, only different”. We eventually get it done, but just for future reference if you ever see the final film, that 45 second scene in the middle took longer to write than anything else.