I finished my rewrite of BLUNT FORCE and mailed it off to the Austin Film Festival screenwriting contest. I set out to take what I’ve more recently gleaned from John Truby’s book The Anatomy of Story, what I learned in his classes I’ve taken, and my most recent script and do a rewrite that hopefully wins in Austin this year.
I wrote pretty much all day yesterday, Sunday and went to bed around 3:30am (Monday). This morning I printed out a small version of the script (4-up layout) and tried to read through it again for typos, basic inconsistencies and a last minute hope at a tweak that would make it sing.
I found some good things and one major callback opportunity for what is now the very first image in the script, that is a “flashforward.” So, it made sense to catch that and call it back in the Battle.
Overall, I don’t know if it’s any better. I think it is. After my spellcheck and the final printout, I read as much of the last part as I could on my walk to the post office.
Sam’s self-revelation is the hardest thing to make powerful and concise, particularly given all of the trauma I’ve thrown on this character. But I do think that this draft is leaner and gets to the self-revelation in a more concrete way. It’s not given to her so much, as it had been before.
The previous draft was 112 pages long. Draft 3 bloomed to 126 pages, but that was the new stuff pushing a lot of the old, longer stuff, further back in page count. The final page count is a respectable 100 pages. I was a little concerned when it was dipping to 96 or so. That’s not bad, by all accounts, but 89 would have been alarming.
So, 100 pages is just fine.
I do think that the scenes and the big set pieces leading up to the actual battle work better now. There’s one reveal that you can see in the synopsis that I think works really well. I think in the synopsis it says that Knapp’s wife is shot and killed when he sends his men to attack Sam, thinking that his men will easily overwhelm Sam and save his wife.
But as I was percolating on the script and once I started actually revising it, the notion popped into my head that Sam could place Knapp’s wife in a separate location from where she and Bats were hiding. It could be a location that they could see from their hiding place, but not the same “cul de sac.”
Added to that was the notion that’s in the synopsis of Knapp locating his kidnapped wife by way of a locator chip in her fancy Rolex watch. This gave me the opportunity to have Knapp push forward, assuming he has the overview of the situation thanks to his self-identity, his experience, and his technological resources and also assuming that Sam is just a stupid female.
That set him up to put his wife in mortal danger. The final detail that occurred to me was to have Sam (and Bats) create a booby-trap device that would kill Knapp’s wife if he forced the door open. My notion was that without making a big deal about it, Sam could just be smart about the impending exchange of hostages, Knapp’s wife in return for Carl. And in so doing, she would put the wife in a place that she could control, either directly or by way of a gimmick, such as a booby-trapped door.
So, I’m pretty happy about how that plot device plays with the thematic issues for all of the characters. Knapp’s decisions hurt someone he apparently loves. Sam’s self-protective measures hurt the person she’s using for leverage as well as her brother and many others.
Lastly, this plot device is a great Apparent Defeat because any leverage Sam thought she had by kidnapping Knapp’s wife was lost when she died. That then makes it seem that Sam’s plan and desire to rescue Carl has pretty much been defeated.
The very ending of Sam retreating into her mind I think still works. I hope the journey there supports it more by being more succinct. But I do wish I felt stronger about the Self-Revelation.
But that’s just it. I think that good storytelling or screenwriting really boils down to creating great self-revelations. Otherwise, all you have is a movie with a lot of stuff happening, some of it cool, some of it not, but none of it ever sinks into your bones in that classic memorable way that the great films do.
All told, it took about a week to hammer out the new synopsis and about three days to create a revised draft.
I hope this journal was interesting and I’d love to hear from anyone with any questions, comments or tips.
