Pick Up Your Feet, Mother

     I viewed this trip to England and Ireland with some trepidation, considering my decline in agility and my use of a cane. Surely the land of Miss Marple would be prepared for the plucky senior citizens out there who could not vault over waist high hotel bathtubs or sprint down and endless airport hall to the recorded voice telling her that in ten minutes, if you she has not  reached the gate, the poor old thing's  bags will be removed from the plane.  That from the amazingly hostile Dublin airport.
     So, it is a mixed review. London cabs are almost unbroachable without humiliating yourself, but that's O.K., because you can't flag one down anyway, and if you do, they are beyond expensive.
Hurling yourself upward and onto the jump seat can work minimally, in that you will be inside the cab when it moves forward, but barely.
     Elevator options for access to places like subway platforms are at best here and there.  A major tube stop will begin with an optional elevator down to the first level platform, but the next level is accessed by escalator.  Great. And the next level?  Steep long stairs only.  Go figure.  And an accessible hotel room?  An elevator, of course, followed by stairs down the to the room's doorway.
     Tops for grin and bear it situations are restaurant bathrooms. Of course there are stairs up to dining, since the ground floor is often the pub level. And from there to the restrooms?  Often laughably narrow and steep stairs - and perhaps circular to add insult to injury -  dating back a couple of centuries  or more.  The prize winner was in a very stylish restaurant and inn on the site of the former royal goat pasture in the heart of London. The youthful staff looked at me with such horror that they must never have had to deal with such a circumstance.  But in true British fashion, they recovered nicely and followed me up and preceded me down from the loo, in case I should fall.  I guess then only the help would be harmed, should I topple .
     Perhaps the most culturally eye opening moment was on may way into Ireland, where the airline employees - those who weren't tongue tied by self-importance - addressed me as "Mother."  Old Mother McCree, do ya think, now? Really, they need to get over it.
     In spite of the reality of the inconvenience, a cane had some very self serving benefits. Beginning in  Atlanta airport security, and continuing through Heathrow passport control, we were advanced to the head of every line. Whenever we were faced with a line, my husband began whispering "wave the cane,"as the open sesame. It generally worked, and "Mother" was not above playing her trump card every time. 
    

I forgot the most important part !

     In my saga of the last few days, reported in part in the previous blog, I forgot Ava! Smart Ava! House manager Ava! Our black lab, who keeps us running  and organized, became ill on the day we viewed the house we are buying.  Really ill.  Throwing up and everything else for two days.  To the hospital, i.v.'s, tests, prayers, hand wringing. Not only do we need her, our other dog, Timmy needs her.  Ava is the alpha dog. Timmy can't eat without her.  He waits patiently while she finishes her dinner before approaching the dog dish.  When it's his turn,  he methodically cleans his plate, just as she taught him. Without anyone to tell him when it was his mealtime, he was perplexed. His sad face was sadder than ever. He picked at his food, and with Ava spending the night at the vet's, he burrowed under a quilt and slept. He had no pal to offer the priceless gift of his beloved owl toy, or a friend for a bedtime tug of war.

     A virus. No blockage, no cancer, nothing that medicine and a few days won't cure. Joyous homecoming. Ava slept on my feet, her four paws sticking up in the air in her posture of bliss. Timmy pushed his blunt little nose onto my pillow, snoring peacefully.  The world was back on its axis. I clung to the edge of the mattress.  There are more important things than a good night's sleep.

I'm baaaack....

     Actually, I have been back for about two weeks, but I guess life was just waiting around to pounce on me. Hence the long  blogging delay.
       London was fun, but so overbuilt and overcrowded that I hardly knew it. And we moved fast. No opportunity for jet lag. Did I say "move fast ?" Our "friends lunch" began the visit with 3 hours of food and conversation ( at the Grazing Goat Inn) followed by a flash cab trip (if 30 minutes can be called flash) to the Tate Modern to see the Edvard Munch exhibit. Then another race across London for another firiend's get together  dinner before collapsing. More details about the England segment later, including Stonehenge and Salisbury. And photos, as soon as I learn how to insert them.
      On to Ireland. Gatwick: patrolling phalanxes of police in body armor, bearing full automatic weapons and accompanied by German shepherds.  Standard, we were told. Arriving in tiny Knock Ireland, a different story. We are ushered through the airport, not much more than a doublewide, as the lights are turned off behind us as we go.  Customs?  Passport control?  Don't bother.

And then the drive to our hosts home, somewhere near Ballinifad (A bend, literally, in the road on the western coast).  Let's just say our hosts are athletic. They ski. He bikes, they hike. Everywhere. South America, Canada, Taos, you name it.  If I thought about a cozy chair by a peat fire was in my future, forget it.  Also visiting at the same time, a pro skier who was off into the mountains for a couple of hours on a bike every morning. And these are  lovely, kind, generous people. Just really, really energetic people. And the land... Beautiful and wild doesn't describe it.  The mountains strewn with tumbled jutting rocks, the Atlantic, a fiord, of all things, and sheep, sheep, and more sheep.  The wild ponies of Connemara. Details in the future.
       I am finally getting to the point of this blog, about what held me up during these two weeks at home post trip. About a day and a half after returning home, we found that the property next door was for sale.  We have suffered for years with a  bad owner and a succession of worse renters. I longed and prayed to own this house and it's acre of woods.  The seller had just dropped the price by a whopping amount.  A bad sign, and a strong clue she wanted a bidding war, to pay off an unmanageable mortgage debt. 
     That Sunday (last Sunday, actually) we got our realtor and took a tour of the poor misused little place.  Sunday we also wrote an earnest money check. Monday - no go. She wants all cash. There is already someone who will pay it. And they want to flip it.  No!  More headaches for us, guaranteed. Could we beat their cash offer?  Of course no one tells you what it is. Could we pull that kind of cash out of our assets on short notice? And so close to retirement, too. I felt like I was being asked to ransom a family member.  That property shares our  property line on the south, with the house so close to the common fence that it feels related anyway.
       Yeah, we gave in. I wonder if we are expected to attend the closing with a suitcase stuffed with  cash.

Lots more to come.
     

D (depart) Day

     Two and a half hours before we leave for the airport for our flight to London. My husband has just put his giant load of laundry in the dryer.  Laundry that he plans to wear on the trip. Laundry that has to dry and be packed. Meanwhile, I am packed, dressed, even wearing makeup. Estee Lauder 16 Hour - safe to wear this early because you have to crack it like a three minute egg to make it move. The husband in question is in search of a present for our hostess in Ireland (I suggested a Georgia wine a few weeks ago.  He hated the idea but didn't come up with anything else, so Kennesaw's finest it is.)
     By the time we leave, I will be a nervous wreck and my husband will be calm and relaxed. Au revoir, y'all.  Be back with you all too soon!

From the Inconstant Blogger (Didn't Spencer say that?)

    Regrettably, that title is too accurate. I have been distracted from my blogging and almost everything else lately by travel plans. I would almost always prefer to plan a trip than do anything else - even write.
     Some time ago, one of my husband's friends began to encourage us to come visit him and his wife at their "getaway", which he built near a remote village in western Ireland.  A getaway from his places in Paris and New England, that is. After much waffling (not by me) so that the trip would include visits to as many of my husband's U.K. friends as possible, we picked the fairly short notice date of midSeptember, when Ireland was assured of being windy, wet and chilly, just as it is the other  twelve months of the year, but when London friends would also be available.
     I have been to to the U.K. several times, went to Exeter U. for some International Law studies, and traveled pretty much the length and breadth of that beautiful island, but my husband has been once, and only to London, which is like saying that you've been to America, and only New York City.
      This time we will go on the train to Salisbury to visit the Cathedral and marvel at the original Magna Carta and the first clock, and make a side trip to Stonehenge. We will dine with a vicar friend in a poor parish somewhat south and west of that, in his 500 year old farmhouse.
      Let's hope the household plumbing has been updated.  I cringe at sounding like a prissy tourist. I have traveled to places where the "loo" is a hole in the floor, so this will be better. And my daughter tops that, reminding me of the months she lived in remote Sikkim, high in the Himalayas, with only an unlit "pee ravine" where one balanced on two boards above a rocky-sided ravine, day or night, all weather.
     But, not to dwell on plumbing. I am already packing my bags because it takes a lot more planning and materiel than it did when I threw a few things in a bag just hours before departure. I expect I will be on a travel thread for awhile before I refocus on writing issues. Consider it research.

Gap? Some Kind of Gap : The Irony Industry

     Here is an approximation of a bit of script dialogue:
     Mom says "Bobby is so angry with me."
     Mom's Friend replies. "Sure. Weren't you furious when you found out your parents had feet of clay?"
      The editor reads that exchange pensively and pokes those lines with her pen. "What's that mean?" she asks. I reply, "Well you know. Feet of clay.  When a kid finds out his parents aren't perfect.  He idolized them as a kid and now he realizes his perfect Mom isn't so perfect after all."
     "But I don't get the Feet of Clay thing.  Clay?  What's that about, anyway?"
     "Well, it's a pretty common expression.  In common usage, that is. I don't know how else to explain it.  It's in the Bible. Ecclesiastes, I think. It's about Nebucchanezzer. And Shakespeare, of course." I sense I have provided too much information.
      Editor, still pensive. "Hmmm.  Must be a generational thing."  She's forty, for God sake.
      Writer. "I thought pretty much everyone knew it."
      Editor. "Well, I never heard of it, and I'm not exactly dumb."
      Well, maybe not exactly, but pretty damn close. And she's wearing a religous medal to boot.
     "Just say it.  He was disappointed in his Mother.  Done.  Here's another one. Beatific smile. What does that mean?"
     "I guess literally capable of being beatified. That doesn't help. Saintly? "
     "Go with Sweet."

Previous editor: "You have a gift of not only finding the right word but the only word. That's why people will want your script."

     
     

Spoiler Alert

     If you have not already heard, Sweet Beth ( also called That's What Friends Are For, depending on my mood)was not picked up by The Tisch Group for Meryl Streep, so I will not be the hit of the month come next July.  One who knows told me that my script was a lot funnier than the Meryl Streep comedy presently in the theaters, and I choose to believe that. But Beth is still with us and will be revisiting the Women in Film who liked it last fall, so we'll see.
     When my husband called today (he's out of town, visiting his mother) to say he saw the news about the screenplay on Facebook, I have to admit I was sort of taken aback.  People read that? Social media has never been my forte, to say the least. I guess I neglected to tell him, so many other things happened that day. This is not nearly as bad as the incident a couple of years ago when my son's dog died. (This will not be a recurring theme in this blog. ) Anyway, he was not living at home and I hadn't yet told him, so he learned it from Facebook. Very bad mothering.
     The little multicolored wheel keeps spinning around on my screen and the computer is sending me terse messages (This probably will be a recurring theme.  Computers do not like me.) So, soon, back to my perilous year as a screenwriter.  It may not be destined for the screen right now, but that doesn't  mean there isn't more to tell.

but I digress.....

     I haven't blogged in a while, and I know that is bad form. I try to always "write funny."  Life is tough enough - I like to laugh when I write, and I hope you like to laugh when you read. Sometimes, though, the laughs just aren't there, so I'll just tell you and move on.
     For the last eight or nine years, as long as as I have been writing on a daily basis, I have had two faithful office dogs who wedged their furry bodies into my tiny office  and stayed with me through every word. They were old dogs, grumpy old men, best friends united against the puppies, and recently health problems and age took an inevitable toll on their combined thirty-some years.
     As they declined, my daughter cooked them special food and carried them to the backyard so they could peek from beneath the magnolias once again.  Carrying was no small feat, since they were each fifty pounds, more or less.  She took them on their beloved car trips to the drive-through for chicken nuggets, and, toward the end, slept on the floor of the den with them in case of a crisis in the night.
     They departed within a few weeks of one another, and this office is mighty lonely. Our  youthful black Lab girl has taken up office duty and is asleep at my feet right now. They were dear friends, full of quirks and behaviors, some charming, some not so much.  But it all added up to two lives well-lived, lots of love given and received, and who among us can hope for more than that.

Scene Four: Life is Change

     Just because someone loves your writing, loves your script and presumably loves you doesn't mean that they don't want to change you. It's like a marriage.  You love him for all his fine qualities, and he will be so much better once you touch up those little things about him you can't stand. Like his plot, assuming he's a screenplay. But you can't show signs of wanting to alter him too soon, lest you scare him off.
     We writers want to please. We are really desperate to please if the changes will  make them love us more. Wear my hair up?  Darling, you will never see it hanging down in those awful squiggly curls I thought you adored ever again. Let's see less of my family?  Never fear, Sweetheart.  I always thought my Mother was pesty, too. And my sister?  A complete loser, I agree.  Asks too many questions.
     And then he up and runs off with the screenplay, er that is, the busty bitch from human resources and neither your Mother or your sister gives a fig. Glad to see him go.  And six months later your sister submits a sit-com based on your awful marriage and your fool of a husband, and she she sells it. Life is cruel.
      So face it.  Whatever you write is almost certain to be changed in what may seem like the most illogical, boneheaded ways by people who do not write as well as you, and you will probably nod lamely and say, I never thought of that, because really, you never did think of  turning the heroine's druggie son into a pool boy who is just trying to earn money for film school. Life imitates art, and vice versa.
    I will leave you with a story that sounds apocryphal but which the writer swears is true.  The studio wanted his screenplay about two middle aged married couples holed up in a New England farm house during an snowstorm, confronting their personal failures and the tatters of their marriages. Very Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe?The writer was asked Why middle aged people?  Who wants to look at a bunch of saggy people with wrinkles anyway?  Let's make them younger.  Well, the writer replies, they had to have been married for a while for them to have their thirty year old son commit suicide and the elderly parent have Alzeheimers. OK, younger it is, the studio guy replies. I am thinking stewardesses, here. Marriage was kind of the point of the story, the writer protests. And New England, in the winter for God's sake?  What could be more depressing? Let's use Malibu. It's close, cheap to film, everybody loves the beach. The writer: The location is pretty important.  You know, as an analogy for the barreness of their lives.  The light of awareness in the studio exec goes on.  But you know something?  You're right.  It does need sexual tension.  Lesbian stewardesses.

Technical Difficulties

     After laboring over a post dedicated to rewriting, the computer ate my insights on the differences between re-writing and writing something new, forcing me to write a new Scene Four post. Oh, irony. But not tonight. In the meantime, if you are interested in writing screenplays, get The Screenwriter's Bible.  Amazon.  Read it at least a couple of times before starting. I am serious. It will save you tons of time in the end.

... but I digress: the Home Handyman. Halleluiah.

     My husband's name is praised at Home Dept, and he is honored among men. At least those wearing tool belts.
     When we bought this little fixer-upper many years ago, we were innocents, unaware how many  jobs required power tools, and how expensive they were. And neither of us suspected my husband's lust for acquiring these tools, and how, as the days lengthened into years, how many of these expensive and yet somehow single purposed tools it would take to fill what we had believed to be a spacious garage.  Or how, lust maddened, my husband would select home repair projects based solely on the need for the acquisition of a new and exotic tool.
      Over the weekend, he installed a new micrwave oven, one of those built-in jobs that goes above  the stove.  Do you realize that G.E. no longer places the screw holes in the same positions it did ten years ago when the oven was new?
     Observations from family, er, well, observers: "I don't think you should drill through the side of the oven.  Won't that let those little microwave thingys out?" "Why is there blood on the microwave?" "Oh my God!" "What's burning?" "Is that a fire on the top of the stove?"  "Oh, my God!" "Where are the bandaids?"
     These remarks were interspersed with many trips to Home depot, although I don't think any new power tools were actually purchased.  The job did require a power saw, a power drill with several sizes of bits, none of which we had, copious amounts of duct tape, a tetanus shot and stitches, and a stern lecture by a doctor  my son's age who probably does not have a fixer-upper and whose lust for power tools is satisfied in the operating room.
      Most of this digression is true.  I may have exaggerated the physical injury aspect, but there was blood.

Scene Three: Not You Again

     Like it or not, you have to live with your characters.  There will probably be quite a few and they will inhabit your dreams and often your waking hours as well, for quite a long time.  Each character should be recognizable, even if his or her name is not attached.  Every speech cadence is different.  Some may repeat themselves. Don't overdo accents. When the character is introduced, you can throw in their drawl or  speech peculiarity. After that, go to standard English and let the reader or the actor supply most of the speech quirks.  Don't drop every ing, even if you are sure your character will. Go lightly on the apostrophes to indicate skipped letters, because lots of between line chatter is visually annoying.
       Characters also have physical mannerisms. Some tug on a strand of hair, or seem to always be adjusting their clothing.  Don't just throw in mannerisms randomly.  Those are what card players call "tells" and communicate your character's ease or discomfort, his or her secrets or personal history. But don't use your tells so liberally that your characters seem to twitch and babble through each appearance. Moderation in all things.

Scene Two: Who and Where

    Your script will need characters and a setting, unless you are trying some new wave thing, which you aren't. The easy and cheapest locale is your own city. Film companies like my city, Atlanta, and if you don't already know a lot about your locale, make yourself knowledgeable enough to write with authority.  You can't be sloppy about locations because viewers will catch you every time, even if the director doesn't. You will lose the trust of the audience, and that is critical.
     Let your characters lead you.  If you aren't writing fluid, natural dialogue, listen to people, make notes, and read everything aloud that you write.  Reading for an audience is best, if they will be honest with you (that excuses your mother,) or just to yourself.  But it must be aloud. Listen for the musicality, the beat, the swing of it. Good dialogue could almost be labeled andante, legato, forte.
     Picture each of your characters. Cast your script, just for yourself. Make your dialogue play the characters off one another.  A comedy?  Not everyone has to be hilarious. Drama? Find the comedy relief. Unrelieved drama is dull. Pay close attention to the rules for developing the movement of the story.  Generally, by page five, lay out the subject matter of your story through your dialogue and action.  Page twenty? The inciting scene: the point of no return.  What ever happens here sets your characters inexorably on their course. And on, and on - milestone points through to the end.
       If you think that those exact points can't be that important, be aware that a studio reader judging your script may look at only page five, page twenty, page fifty, and so on.  First off, they want to know that you know what you are doing.  No one has time to waste. Second, they want to be sold, and those pages are your pitch.  Third, they don't want to work for it.  That's your job
      There are programs to help you format.  Final Draft is the main one generally in use (Tom Hanks uses Final Draft!) It will help you create a perfectly formatted script, but it won't proof, or make you interesting.  It won't ring a bell at page twenty and tell you to get on the ball, either.  That comes from writing and rewriting, having outside editing and proofing and practice.

...but I digress. Not your mother's Schwinn.

      There are times that t.v. truly justifies its existence, such as when you see the Alps from an even higher  helicopter-occupied spot in mid-air, then drop down to the kitchen gardens of ancient villages, and visit lace patterned tile roof tops of thousand year old town halls.  But I have been watching all that and more for the last two weeks.  The Tour de France.  The bicycle race? you say. Oh, yes,  I guess. More than 100 pro cyclists from around the world, in teams, a Leroy Neiman painting come to life, strung along narrow Gallic roads, climb the Alps and the Pyrenees, go though Roman Southern France and chateau laden valleys.  Every once in a while, some fall in a terrible tangle of flesh and metal, and every day someone wins something, and at the end they ride around the Arc de Triumph in Paris, but in reality, it is sport and history and travelogue  all in their most immediate, exquisite forms.
      It's time for the wheat harvest, by the way, and you can be in flowered fields with boys in straw hats, alongside a road way where hundreds cheer the racers, and a few crazed fans make fools of themselves in time honored fashion.
     In starts at 8 a.m. here in Atlanta, and goes until 11 a.m. daily, then is replayed throughout the day and evening. ESPN (44 on Comcast) carries it, as does NBC Sports.  It is startling, mesmerizing, and it matters not a bit if you know the complex, chess-like rules of the pelloton.  You will never have seen anything like it.

    

Scene One: Death of the Semicolon

     Writing a screenplay is like writing a novel on crack.  The novel, that is, not the novelist. You have 120 pages max. (120 pages=120 minutes)to say everything that your characters have to say, and do everything they have to do. Dialogue comes in two or three line bursts. Those lines are super short and travel down the center of the page, leaving those who think they know more than you do to cover the surrounding white space with their notes.
     Between these bursts of dialogue, action lines tell the actors, director, camera people, costume designer and caterer, for all I know, what you see on the screen.  Those lines are also limited to two or three, but the run a little longer than the dwarfed dialogue lines. They are limited to what you can see and hear.  No background material, no odd family relationships or fraternal memberships.  Show it or forget it.
      And above it all, the scene heading tersely states whether it is interior or exterior, roughly where (Megan's House) and day or night.
      This is by way of saying that a screenplay is a team effort, and for those of us who really aren't team players, this can be the source of enormous frustration, requiring almost superhuman self discipline to refrain from writing : "As dawn breaks over the golden poplars lining Megan's tidy street, a dark clad figure slips...."  and sadly I could write so much more.
      One of the most brutal blows was the death of Strunk and White (Elements of Style) perpetrated by the many non-English majors who inhabit the film industry. For instance, the love of the triple dot pops up everywhere, not to signal an interrupted sentence as God intended, but mostly just for the hell of it, as far as I can tell.  Maybe they just stopped thinking about that mini-morsel of dialogue and felt it was time to move on.  Hey, if it feels good, do it, scriptwriting style.
        Another grievous loss is the semicolon.  (Megan picks her newspaper off the front steps; she looks right and left before closing her door. Or "Bobby, come here; there is something you have to see.") Gone. "Never use a semicolon in a screenplay."  Words that struck my heart.  What kind of savages are these people?
        Having a good deal of my educational history struck dead, what more could they do me?

...but I digress.

     Some days my digression has a theme. Today's theme is cheese. Since it is Bastille Day, that is appropriate, I think.
     I mentioned  to my husband (so far my first and only husband) that I had bought some French Brie to have on crackers before dinner. He said, "I think it's bad. I ate a bite and it tasted burned." I thought a few minutes. "A piece from the cheese in the container, or a piece on the plate?" And in that moment, I knew. "The plate," he said.
     Let me just say we have a very old dog with a skin condition who has to have his medicine hidden in innovative ways. Like stuffing his pills in a piece of Brie. Which he spit out, and which I saved for a second attempt later. So there was a plate that usually belongs to the cat, holding a piece of Brie wadded up around a couple of bright pink pills. And that Brie is gone. And the dog is still scratching but my husband isn't.
   

Fade In

      This blog has a limited yet vast subject.  Roughly, and with digressions, it is how little ol' me (5'3 and over 65) in the course of one year, learned to write screenplays and have one find its way to Meryl's people, with results as yet unknown. This was not an over the transom job.  This was an agent-like artist's rep. (I'm the artist.  One whom I will call AARP, with irony, is the agent-art-rep...) pitching, and people in a vast organization liking what they heard and welcoming it's digital arrival.
      Before I get completely immersed in my subject, me, I want to thank Anne Zan* Marie Steadham (of In The Shade of the Cherry Tree) and my daughter (who wishes to remain anonymous ) both of whom helped me traverse the ways of the blog.
     I am a writer, who has written maniacally for the last year, and almost constantly for the eight or so preceding years, and always to literary purpose.  This blog won't help anyone do anything.  It won't make your life better.  It may be the basis of my next book, but presumably that would only help me. You may feel free to laugh derisively, shrink in horror, or take naked enjoyment in another writer's future insanity defense.  Be my guest.
      Away we go. July 2011.


*Sorry Zan! Curse you spell check!!





Fade IN