Case Study - "Freeze-Frame"

Another question I usually get asked as a writer is, "what sort of things do you write about?" Well, a strong recurring theme in all my work is a blurring of fantasy and reality in many and varied ways - parallel worlds, fantasy constructs, the supernatural, the masks and disguises we wear to hide our true reality, the self-delusions we create. Not sure why or what that says about me but that's probably another discussion!

The short film Freeze-Frame, produced by Serena Ryan and directed by Iain Dawson, is a prime example of this duality. In this case, though, it was a script I never quite nailed. Too many ideas, too complicated and not clear what is real and what is imagined by the main character.

The original idea was that a jogger discovers a camera on the foreshore and accidentally takes a picture of himself which implicates him in a heinous crime. A friend read an early breakdown and offered, "what if he really did it?" That lead to the whole idea of the victim being the jogger's wife. In the story, the wife has left him for another man and he has photos from a private investigator of their illicit liaisons. The discovery of the camera leads him to fantasise about killing her (while he continues to jog) as he is unable to deal with his anger and bitterness at her betrayal. The laundry sequences, the second visit to the chemist, the detective interview, for example, are therefore all totally imagined.

The notion was that the act of unleashing his dark side is what eventually allows him to heal and achieve some form of closure. An unconventional thought but one I liked very much.

So this no-budget short is an insight into a developing story style that I continue to deploy - The Tangled Web has a heightened parallel world (cyberspace), The Red Bride plays with hallucination versus supernatural manifestation, Hotel Blue explores a fantasy construct created by self-delusion and the upcoming Trench could combine several of these facets, wrapped up in a pseudo-war genre.

Looking back at Freeze-Frame, the short is not the ideal format for this sort of layering. Immortal is also a complicated short script with a character in the grip of self-delusion. Neither script received funding support though Freeze-Frame was short-listed for FTI's Link programme a couple of years ago. THAT was an interesting panel interview!

So the lesson learnt is that features are the way to go to explore "the fantasies we create to deal with the realities of our lives".

Case Study - "Immortal"

I was recently asked a fairly common question (once people discover you are a writer) - So where do you get your ideas from? Simple question, not so easy to answer. It's kind of like Kevin Costner in Tin Cup - the more you try to analyse your 'swing' the quicker it may desert you!

Yes, I keep clippings of newspaper stories that pique my interest and jot down random ideas but mainly I "see" scenes in my head which then trigger a larger narrative. Case in point is my short film script Immortal. This is a scene I wrote at 30,000 feet on a flight back to Perth from Sydney a few years ago now. I had NO IDEA what it meant but it seemed an atmospheric opening for ... something.

FADE IN :

BRIGHT YELLOW ... FLICKERS ... becomes a FLAME.

PULL BACK to a CANDLE ... wax running down its side. The

flame sputters, nearly dies.

PULL BACK FURTHER ... Crazy SHADOWS make it almost

impossible to define the space we're in.

An indistinct FIGURE clad entirely in black does pushups

within a circle of candles. Breath disturbs the flames, the

price of punishing, machine-like exertion.

A face is visible in the gutting candlelight - a face like

alabaster. Sweat drips from the figure's forehead, lands in

a pool tinged with RED.

FIGURE

(softly chants)

Forever ... forever ... forever.

One by one the candles die until only the chant remains.

I had worked with a director who always liked to start a story in ECU so we're not sure what we're seeing at first then slowly pull back to reveal what is going on. I've noticed I tend to do this in quite a few scripts (including The Red Bride) and "Pull Back" is one of the few overt screen directions I use.

The second piece of information that helped shape the story was a newspaper article about a German teenager who had killed an elderly woman and drunk her blood believing himself to be a vampire.

Imagine that? Thinking you're a vampire! Matching the thought: 'how could you come to believe you're undead?' with the 'candle scene', Immortal emerged. The first draft was about a teenage boy whose mother dies of a rare blood disease and in his grief comes to believe he is a vampire and ends up killing the nurse he blames for not saving her. An exploration of an extreme form of loss and mourning with the material lending itself to tragedy.

Only problem was, that when I wrote the scene breakdown, it seemed so ... linear. So I reversed the narrative and it took on a Memento style structure - main story told backwards intercut with forward moving sequences of the "vampire" being interrogated by a detective. At the start, we think the teenager is a vampire and slowly the tragedy and reasons for it are revealed with the climax being an emotional one as the horror of the self-deception is exposed.

The script lay dormant for a while, until recently when producer Michael Facey read it, liked it, wanted to submit it for FTI's Link program. Jeremy Passmore came on board as director and immediately impressed me with a detailed visual breakdown of the script and a stylistic approach incorporating green screen. Not what I saw in my head but sounded exciting.

A little tinkering was done to the script but hardly any changes that impacted the spine. All looked good until the short list came out ... and we weren't on it. Apparently the panel was confused by the structure and didn't get the way Jeremy wanted to shoot it. Michael was angry, Jeremy angrier while I was surprisingly ambivalent. It's a script I really like (would make a kick-arse short film) but it's not a cookie-cutter one that tends to do well in funding rounds.

The producer wants to re-submit but I literally don't know what I would change that wouldn't make me gag as I dumbed it down. I cheekily suggested we submit the chronological version, shoot it, then edit it with the fractured time-line in post!

The lesson I've learnt is that next time I write a short destined for a funding round is to keep it as simple as possible - nearly set-up/pay-off - and spell it out in the supporting documentation so the panel "get it".

Case Study - "In and Under"

"In and Under" is a television series idea created by myself and Chris Richards-Scully after we discovered we both shared a love of Australian Rules Football though, unfortunately, he follows the Dockers and I'm an Eagles man [think Liverpool v Everton or Lakers v Clippers].

We kicked around a few ideas but anyone who knows me understands I am a HUGE West Wing fan and I always saw the show as a workplace drama that just happened to be set in a football club (the wonderful Australian series by Geoffrey Atherden, Grass Roots, is another reference point).

The other element was that, at the time, there was a lot of press around the entry of the 17th franchise into the AFL - the Gold Coast team. So the show would be about a fledgling club entering the big time.

Chris and I decided we would take a satirical approach to matters as the AFL has a tendency to be quite the authoritarian regime and very Victorian-centric. So the upstarts from the West would give them what for.

But where would our fictional 18th franchise be based? We settled on Kalgoorlie and, discarding the obvious nicknames, I came up with the Rush "In honour of all the brave men and women who came to the goldfields in the 1890s". The fictional consortium "KBC18" [Kalgoorlie-Boulder Consortium for the 18th franchise] ended up being the production company name we used.

The initial description of the project was this:

Welcome to the AFL’s newest team – the Kalgoorlie Rush. Setting up an Australian Rules football team from scratch is never easy – there’s the recruitment of the players, hiring of the coaching staff , the fight for members and sponsors in a cut-throat market, the need for a suitable venue and the search for the obligatory white haired, old trainer. Not to mention the massive egos of all those involved. When the first ball of the new season is bounced will Kalgoorlie be ready to “feel the Rush”?

Next came a three minute "pilot" we shot in a day - with Chris directing, Michael Facey producing and me re-writing so I didn't have to replace an ill actor - for the Optus One80 competition seen here:

Suffice to say we didn't win though I thought it was a pretty good effort given that no-one was being paid and it was all done within a very tight deadline.

Next step was to work on a bible detailing the premise, characters, story lines, arcs etc and then came the news ScreenWest, the local government funding agency was asking for entries for a hothouse TV workshop.

A lot of work later, we handed in our submission to find out we just missed out on a coveted place. They liked the writing, liked the characters ... didn't like the football, didn't like Kalgoorlie.

Resisting the temptation to set the series in a zero-G strip club on the Moon, we persevered and the producer and I duly marched off to ScreenWest to get feedback on why our baby had failed.

Which I must say, confused the hell out of me! "What's the twist?" "The dramatic premise?" I vaguely recall making a joke while sitting through this that, no, our show didn't have a character who was secretly a lesbian vampire. Which seemed to be what they were asking.

Sanity was restored when we had a brilliant 90 minutes with Mike Bullen (Cold Feet) as a free consultation arranged by ScreenWest for the bridesmaids. We hit it off straight away as, while he didn't know much about AFL, he had pitched an NRL series to the networks ... and, I later discovered in the wonder that is Google, had pitched an English version of The West Wing!

We discussed the characters in depth, the premise, the inherent problems of the show and the extract of the full pilot script I had written. I had tried a time fractured narrative ala In the Shadow of Two Gunmen, Parts 1 & 2 from The West Wing but Mike thought I was "pulling my punches" and a more chronological approach and introduction to the characters was called for.

But here's the main problem - which is exactly what he found with his NRL show idea - it's almost impossible to get a sports-themed show up in this country. If it's AFL, Queensland and NSW won't watch it; NRL you lose Victoria - so you're carving up your audience. If only someone had said it that simply earlier instead of all the mumbo-jumbo we were hearing - sigh.

Yes, we vehemently agreed they weren't sports shows (just like Field of Dreams isn't a "baseball movie") but that is the perception issue that has so far proven insurmountable.

Now, I know I can write these characters and this show and I know it could be a fun little series but it's on the back burner until we work out a way to overcome the "sports" concern.

So what's the lesson in all this? Well, ScreenWest will no doubt be calling for submissions early next year for the next hothouse. This time I need to be more pragmatic about what I am going to spend hours and hours working on as a show concept.

I LOVE science fiction (think the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica not Prosthetics City, 2029) but there's not a snowflake's chance in hell a commercial network would consider science fiction in Australia. I mean, even the best stuff from overseas gets shown at half-past tomorrow, 2.5 light years after being screened in the US.

I'm thinking maybe a medical show ... no-one's done one of those, right?