Screenplay

Screenplay

I am still waiting for literary agents to respond to my query concerning Personal Tragedies. So far, I have lots of "not right for us" responses, and a few that have made a point of saying that it was very well written. In the meantime, I'm writing a subversive screenplay about one of the last great incidents of slave rescue before the Civil War started.

I've never tried something like this before, and it is exhilarating. Henry James famously once wrote, "Show, don't tell." This is even more true with a screenplay than it is with a novel. A voiceover or text on the screen can provide a certain amount of background, but only a little. I would say that the opening crawl of Star Wars is very nearly the maximum that a film can get away with, and even that only worked because of the way in which the words receded. The opening explanations of Red Dawn were, in some respects, a sign of laziness on the part of the screenwriter (or the necessity of getting the film to a length that the studio was willing to release).

Information that everyone in the film knows has to be explained in dialog--and in a way that feels natural--not like a character is lecturing the audience. If you want the audience to know a character's name, you need to introduce him--and one way of doing so is to have another character introduce him, or he introduces himself. I learned quite a bit about film taking film classes at USC--and I'm putting that knowledge to work now.

I'm about 15 pages in so far, and I'm already thinking of the next steps. I'm told that one strategy for raising the roughly $250,000 to $500,000 to make a small independent film like this is to film a few powerful scenes, and put that up as a trailer. We'll see how that works. I've lined up a colleague from HP to play a regionally prominent black abolitionist in the sentencing sequence. He isn't an actor, but I believe that he'll do a good job--the speech that Langston gave to the court was powerful, and with enough practice, I suspect that it will be a strong enough scene to show the power of the material. (And yes, you may find it hard to believe, but there are black people in Boise. To cast the whole film might, however, exhaust the supply of black actors in our state!)