Authors do not supply imaginations.
They expect their readers to have
their own, and to use it. – Nella Larsen
So, I wrote a screenplay. Yay.
Maybe you did, too.
This year alone, I and 1,257,362 other hacks thought we could write a script better than half the crap we see on the tiny screens at our local multiplex. We gambled. We threw the dice. We spun the wheel. Even as our sheer numbers made the chance of seeing our scripts come to fruition at least 500,000 to 1.
Even worse, I live in West Virginia. Exactly 2300 miles separate my desk from the famous Hollywood sign. I have zero connections in the film industry. Watch the odds stack up against me.
Oh, and there’s a new option for aspiring screenwriters: “Make a Pitch Trailer!” This is how speculation (spec.) scripts get sold to producers these days, according to half the spam in my email inbox, all of it selling how-to guides for making the so-called “Pitch Trailer”. But I’m too lazy and broke to film a commercial tease for my scripts. I’d rather sit in my big chair and bitch about the hard life of a writer.
And once a year, I spend Oscar Night sitting in my big chair bitching about how awards for the arts breed homogenous work instead encouraging originality – even as I think that taking home a statue could be great fun. Just imagine how cool my acceptance speech would be.
During the Oscars, I drink whiskey, eat cookies, and post my witticisms on Facebook so that my words are reaching SOMEBODY out there. I post things like: “If you wear a shirt with your favorite movie quote on it, is that clothes captioning?”
Seriously, my acceptance speech would rock.
REALITY CHECK
The odds of my script becoming a major motion picture are less than that of a toad hitching a cross-country ride on the back of an eagle so that he might dine on seventeen-foot Alaskan mosquitos.
Still, in spite of these odds, I have a unique story to tell, a story I like very much. I have art to share! And this is America, damn it all. I need to sell, sell, sell my soul – I mean, my idea. I helped create the modern DYI sensibility! This is what Print On Demand (POD) publishing was made for! I’ll just self-publish my little script, send it into the world, and see where it winds up. Even better, I’ll break a lot of script writing rules to make it more accessible to the average reader. Who doesn’t love breaking rules?
Thus my concept for the Screen Book was born. This is not a spec. script or a treatment. It is not a shooting script, a post-theatrical release fan script, or a novelization. It is a vision script: this is what I see in my head when I sit back and imagine what my story should look like on a big screen while I clutch my tub of popcorn, box of Junior Mints, and a tankard of soda.
This is a Screen Book.
MUSIC IS EVERYTHING
One rule I often see in the scriptwriting books is that the writer should NEVER make music suggestions. That’s the job of the director and music director. So I dutiful mashed over 15 song titles into the HeartBeat Screen Book. I mean, I blew that rule out of the swamp!
Music has been integral to my life for over 50 years. How can I not think of possibilities while writing? Here, I gave myself free license and let my imagination run like a player piano.
During the various rewrites, something different emerged. My song choices matched the story so well that I began to see the scenes as music videos. By my estimation, there could be as many as 67 minutes of well-known rock songs and instrumentals blasting from the theater speakers. The other 50 minutes just link the music videos together.
So download your own version of the soundtrack/playlist (see Appendix B), plug in your ears, and listen while you read. And would someone please let me know just how many times the word “heart” pops up in these songs? Thank You.
PRODUCTION POTENTIAL
This is not the craziest thing I have ever written, but it is the craziest one to see the light of day. Now if it became a flickering light on a silver screen, that would be even better. My ego wants to see the movie made. It’s only natural I suppose. I would love to see the word “HeartBeat” in lights over the entrance to the big, old movie palace in my hometown.
And just as soon as a major studio offers me a check for $500,000, a guarantee of %50 of the royalties, and a production budget of $99 million (anything more would self-indulgent), that’s just what will happen. Right?
No way. The sun will blow up, vaporize the earth, and make aliens peering through their telescopes say, “Oh” and “Ah,” as they view the galactic fireworks long before my movie gets made that way.
Still, if someone really wants to irritate enough electrons to "film" this madness, I'm open to other possibilities (and significantly less money).
Maybe someone would like to make it look like a 1950s, B-movie: film it in black and white with intentionally bad (cheap) special effects. It could be a flickering tribute to early sci-fi movies and drive-in theaters.
Or maybe HeartBeat should be animated or brought to life with Claymation! Maybe puppetry would do the trick. Maybe you have a new idea. Have your people call my people. We’ll do lunch.
Or, to be even more realistic: If you like this story and my vision for the film, let’s play “Six Degrees of Steven Spielberg.” You know someone who knows someone who knows someone with real clout in the film industry. Pass this Screen Book along that chain of elbow rubbing. If it all works out, you, too, can watch your name go by at 60 mph in tiny print in the “Much Thanks” section of the final credits. Wouldn’t that be great? Hell, I’d buy your ticket. Get it the hands of Spielberg himself, and I’ll take you to the Oscars when it’s nominated for best screenplay.
After all, a guy’s gotta dream.
- MWolfe, Winter 2018