I Love Actors
My screenwriting class is almost over. Last night, my fellow students and I brought one of our scenes to class, and cast it by dropping scripts on each other’s desks, and rehearsing it once or twice in the hallway. There were four males out of a class of sixteen, and only three of us were native English speakers, so I was cast for roughly half the scenes that were acted out. I played a doctor, a flaming homosexual (with a make-out scene!), an anchorman, a cop ("Officer Sweet"), and a child (twice). My poor boss was cast as every single minority character from a taxi-driving Sikh, to an 80-year old Chinaman. At one point, a large white student towered over my short Indian boss, and demanded that he make a more realistic looking turban out of his sweatshirt before he would consider yelling “Action!”
It was a hell of a lot of fun. A type of fun I haven't had in years. I’ve never acted before (except, occasionally, like an idiot), and all the flakey things that I’ve heard actors say suddenly made a lot more sense. And the scripts came alive when the professional actors read them. I cast one of the actors who I think is an obnoxious prick (and who I hope dies in a fire) as the main speaking role in my scene, and he was amazing, working with an accent he made up on the spot. When I read my scene before class, even after the Youngest punched it up a bit, I was thinking, "At least I won’t be embarrassed," and afterwards I was thinking, "I’ve got fucking talent!"
The only bad part of the night was three "chick-flick" dramas with breakup scenes in which all three of the female characters said "Who are you?" to a guys who had just broken up with them. Do people really break up like this, or do they watch people break up like this? Or do they watch people break up like this, and then break up like this?
The difficulty with screenplays (for me, anyway) is that it is so easy to use movie jigsaw puzzle pieces. How many movies have their been with an overhead shot of a beat-up pickup truck driving down a dirt road, kicking up dust behind it? If my movie gets made, there will be one more. I used to scoff, but these puzzle pieces are in movies because they work. It’s the medium’s fault for needing action, motion, and an ultra-tight plot. The truck scene tells the audience, in just a few seconds, that the person driving lives in a rural area, is not wealthy, is traveling some distance, and is probably an unsophisticated hick with a simple life. Screenwriters don’t have the luxury of a narrator (unless Morgan Freeman is running short on cash) so they rely on the audience to fill in the predictable gaps. A boiling tea pot in a movie script fills in for a prose sentence like “A sense of foreboding fell upon the room.” I used to roll my eyes at how in the movies, a cab is always waiting for you when you need one, but the alternative is an awkward cut scene from one place to another, or a really boring scene that will look like unprocessed footage from a reality TV show.
Other scripts included a whodunit that takes place in a children's library, a children's fantasy story, a madcap Woody Allen-esque comedy, and an NFL drama from a chick whose father was a professional football coach. Then again, she also claims to have been best friends with the person "Will" is based on from the hit sitcom "Will and Grace," so she may just be a pathological liar.
The whole class bonded. Two of the professional actors exchanged "good working with you"s after class. People waved and said "good-bye" to each other. We learned each other's names. Someone passed out a sheet of paper so we could write our email addresses on them. Everyone was giddy and exhilarated at watching their creations come alive, and nobody was in a hurry to leave – except that asshole actor who kept checking his iphone.
My screenwriting class is almost over. Last night, my fellow students and I brought one of our scenes to class, and cast it by dropping scripts on each other’s desks, and rehearsing it once or twice in the hallway. There were four males out of a class of sixteen, and only three of us were native English speakers, so I was cast for roughly half the scenes that were acted out. I played a doctor, a flaming homosexual (with a make-out scene!), an anchorman, a cop ("Officer Sweet"), and a child (twice). My poor boss was cast as every single minority character from a taxi-driving Sikh, to an 80-year old Chinaman. At one point, a large white student towered over my short Indian boss, and demanded that he make a more realistic looking turban out of his sweatshirt before he would consider yelling “Action!”
It was a hell of a lot of fun. A type of fun I haven't had in years. I’ve never acted before (except, occasionally, like an idiot), and all the flakey things that I’ve heard actors say suddenly made a lot more sense. And the scripts came alive when the professional actors read them. I cast one of the actors who I think is an obnoxious prick (and who I hope dies in a fire) as the main speaking role in my scene, and he was amazing, working with an accent he made up on the spot. When I read my scene before class, even after the Youngest punched it up a bit, I was thinking, "At least I won’t be embarrassed," and afterwards I was thinking, "I’ve got fucking talent!"
The only bad part of the night was three "chick-flick" dramas with breakup scenes in which all three of the female characters said "Who are you?" to a guys who had just broken up with them. Do people really break up like this, or do they watch people break up like this? Or do they watch people break up like this, and then break up like this?
The difficulty with screenplays (for me, anyway) is that it is so easy to use movie jigsaw puzzle pieces. How many movies have their been with an overhead shot of a beat-up pickup truck driving down a dirt road, kicking up dust behind it? If my movie gets made, there will be one more. I used to scoff, but these puzzle pieces are in movies because they work. It’s the medium’s fault for needing action, motion, and an ultra-tight plot. The truck scene tells the audience, in just a few seconds, that the person driving lives in a rural area, is not wealthy, is traveling some distance, and is probably an unsophisticated hick with a simple life. Screenwriters don’t have the luxury of a narrator (unless Morgan Freeman is running short on cash) so they rely on the audience to fill in the predictable gaps. A boiling tea pot in a movie script fills in for a prose sentence like “A sense of foreboding fell upon the room.” I used to roll my eyes at how in the movies, a cab is always waiting for you when you need one, but the alternative is an awkward cut scene from one place to another, or a really boring scene that will look like unprocessed footage from a reality TV show.
Other scripts included a whodunit that takes place in a children's library, a children's fantasy story, a madcap Woody Allen-esque comedy, and an NFL drama from a chick whose father was a professional football coach. Then again, she also claims to have been best friends with the person "Will" is based on from the hit sitcom "Will and Grace," so she may just be a pathological liar.
The whole class bonded. Two of the professional actors exchanged "good working with you"s after class. People waved and said "good-bye" to each other. We learned each other's names. Someone passed out a sheet of paper so we could write our email addresses on them. Everyone was giddy and exhilarated at watching their creations come alive, and nobody was in a hurry to leave – except that asshole actor who kept checking his iphone.
Labels: My Indian BossMan, The Arts
posted by Mezz0 at 4:02 PM
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