A Certain Point of View: Writing, Film and Stuff

(C) 2005 Ballantine/Del Rey Books In 1979, almost a year before the release of Star Wars - Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, I purchased my first copy of Carol Titleman's The Art of Star Wars. The trade paperback edition of a hard-to-find Limited Edition hardcover published by Ballantine Books, Titleman's book not only had the stuff you might expect from a book titled The Art of Star Wars - sketches, production paintings, storyboards, costume and set designs, and pictures of the various models used in the movie - but it also contained the complete fourth revised draft of George Lucas' screenplay for the movie. Titleman's book - which was later reissued in 1997 as The Art of Star Wars - Episode IV: A New Hope - was only the first in a series of Art of Star Wars tomes; each of the live-action Episodes plus the new Lucasfilm Animated series Star Wars: The Clone Wars has had an "Art of" volume dedicated to it. J.W. (Jonathan) Rinzler's The Art

FADE IN: INT. SOUTH MIAMI HIGH - MUSIC DEPARTMENT WING CORRIDOR - AFTERNOON We see JIM standing in the hallway, leaning against the wall opposite the closed door of South Miami Senior High's choral practice room. He looks a bit on edge and is trying to catch his breath after his sprint down the stairs from the second floor. As he stands there, the door swings open with a loud metallic squeak and two girls (MARIA and TERESA) step out of the chorus room. ANGLE ON MARIA AND TERESA We SEE two girls in their late teens, dressed in casual attire (jeans, blouses, comfortable shoes, etc. which are appropriate for a high school's dress code of the early 1980s.) MARIA is the clear "alpha" of the two, not just because she's taller and a tad more attractive than TERESA, but she's also the more outgoing and has presence. She smiles at JIM. BACK TO SCENE JIM looks at the two girls and smiles back politely in recognition, though he clearly simply wants to

Adapting a literary work, no matter if it's a novel, play, short story, poem or a non-fiction book or magazine article, is a process which requires a lot of careful analysis, patience and a knowledge of how film differs from the various written media. The biggest difference between, say, a novel and a movie derived from it is that though both tell essentially the same story and feature the same protagonists and antagonists, the form in which they're presented and (of course) "consumed" is very different. Take, for instance, Stephen King's It , a 1000-plus page doorstop of a novel which is set in two different time periods (1958 and 1985) and has a huge set of characters and situations, as well as a complex plot and a very "big" finale. Before ABC-TV aired the television miniseries based on the novel, my friends and I often wondered how such a huge novel could ever be adapted into a satisfying audio-visual experience. After all, It not only had a

When I began adapting Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken into its as yet untitled screenplay sibling, I thought that it would be a somewhat easy project because its source is a short story with a small cast of main and supporting characters and only a few settings – the narrator’s college campus office, his apartment, a cemetery in Miami-Dade County, and the high school he had attended back in the early 1980s. Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken (or, as it was originally titled, Reunion ) also has a very simple structure – it’s an extended flashback to the narrator’s final day as a high school senior in June of 1983, with a “present day” (1998) frame which serves to set up the main story and give it what I hoped at the time would be a poignant epilogue. However, because I have learned – from both watching movie adaptations of novels such as The Hunt for Red October and reading how-to books along the lines of Sy Field's Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting - that adapting a pro

Once I made the decision to adapt my short story - Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken - as a no-frills, just-to-see-if-I-can-do-this screenplay, I had to start thinking about the story’s structure and how best to approach it so it works well as a movie. One of the reasons for choosing this story instead of, say, my thinly-disguised recollections about my first time with a woman, was its simplicity. It is, in essence, a long flashback (with a dream sequence tacked on for good measure) set in June of 1983 during the main character’s/narrator’s last hours as a high school student, with a frame story set in what was “present day” in 1998. Love Unspoken, Love Unbroken has several built-in advantages that make it fairly easy to adapt, at least in theory. It has only a small set of main characters. There’s Jim, the narrator, a college professor and best-selling author in the frame story, and a Harvard-bound high school senior in the main body of the story. There’s Mark, his best friend

Even though my writing career has taken many unexpected turns (such as my becoming a journalism student in high school and, more recently, becoming a regular online reviewer for such sites as Amazon, Epinions and Viewpoints), I’ve always dreamed about either writing a novel (doesn’t every writer?) or an original screenplay. Over the past 30-plus years, the biggest literary projects that I’ve successfully completed (other than reviews and online musings) have been a trio of short stories which I’ve submitted to a website called Literotica. Two of them, as you might have guessed from the website’s name, are about sex; I (rightly or wrongly) wanted to write a thinly-disguised account about my "first time" and share it with at least part of the world, plus I thought it would be a good “pushing the literary envelope” exercise. The third major story which I submitted to Literotica was not about sex at all but rather my first major stab at serious fiction, a short story titled