A Scene from B.A.T.T.Y.

Yesterday I showed how I handled the problem of noise description in a scene from a comedic novella (code name B.A.T.T.Y.) I'm working on. I thought today I'd present the entire scene (free book sample!) along with an explanation of what the scene does and why it's constructed the way it is.

I wanted to accomplish a number of goals with this scene. The main character, Tyler Schremp, has been talked into having a quick drink at Joy Joy (a fictional restaurant/bar in Palo Alto) on the way home from work. Schremp has group therapy at seven, so the drink has to be a quickie. Both Schremp and his buddy Matt Dixon are young engineers working for a hot toy-company startup in Silicon Valley (called HoityToyty). They have a love-hate relationship with their jobs. They love creating high-tech toys, but their boss (an insufferable ass) has them working on such idiotic projects as a scent-emitting unicorn doll (Fresh Scent Cornelia). You put Glade scent-packs in the unicorn's ass, and then, assuming the batteries are fully charged, the doll spurts air freshener (in microprocessor-controlled bursts) out its anus all day.

The goals for the scene are:

• Show that Schremp and Dixon are best buds of long standing. Male bonding.
• Show their dissatisfaction with work, their eagerness to go into business for themselves.
• Have them talk about Schremp's main problem, which (at the moment) is how to reconnect with the beautiful and mysterious puppet-toting redhead he met a few nights ago.
• Do all this in a lighthearted way.

The entire scene is a segue from an office scene to a group-therapy scene. It has to cap off a lousy day at the office while paving the way for group therapy. (The redhead will show up at group therapy.) Here's the whole scene:

     The crescendo of cacophony at Joy Joy hadn't yet reached full-on Happy Hour earbleed level, but the din was prodigious -- so much so that Dixon had to go back out the front door to the sidewalk to check his voicemail while Schremp, securing the last empty stools at the bar, fetched two tall glasses of Buttface Amber (one of the featured microbrews-of-the-day) from the red-suspendered, all too jolly bartender-du-jour.
     As Dixon finally shuffled back inside, tucking his iPhone in his pocket, Schremp asked: "Anything important?"
     Dixon, accepting a beer from Schremp: "Hitler called, he wants his youth back. Other than that --"
     Schremp raised his glass, said a "Heil Mary," and took a sip. Dixon did likewise.
     Dixon: "What about you,? Any word from --"
     "Not a peep. Beginning to think I popped the clutch." Schremp licked foam off his upper lip and looked in vain for a coaster on which to see his beer, finding, instead, only a soggy cocktail napkin. "You know, maybe I just --"
     "I wouldn't worry about it," Dixon said, with a dismissive flip of the hand. "It's only been, what, a week?"
     "Yeah. Not even." Schremp was having to speak loudly now, to be heard over the background noise.
     "But you called her, right?"
     Schremp nodded as he drank. "I don't feel right leaving, you know, a hundred messages or something, though. Don't want to come across as a stalker . . ."
     "How many times have you called her?"
     "Twice. Plus one text message."
     "Pffah. Dude. That's not stalking. Take it from someone who knows." Dixon held his glass up and admired the three concentric rings of foam in the empty upper third. "Look, chug lines . . ."
     Schremp sighted across the chug lines and down the crowded bar, taking in the pot-luck assortment of helter-skelter hairdos, the predominantly northern European profiles (punctuated by the occasional soft/rounded Oriental face), checking, meanwhile, for redheads with puppets, drooping parallel e-cigs, some hint of a chocolate-suede Sole Society ankle boot. But alas, no joy, as the fighter jocks say.
     "I mean, sometimes I think maybe I am a bit obsessed with her, in a way," Schremp said, fiddling with his glass. "I keep replaying that night over and over in my mind . . . The flashbacks are on a tape loop sometimes, like when you can't get a song out of your head?"
     Dixon nodded. "Earworm. Very dangerous. One time I got Devo stuck in my head for two days . . ."
     "That happened to me with Bryan Ferry's 'Boys and Girls.'"
     "Don't know that one."
     "Well, do NOT listen to it, my friend. Understand? You'll go insane . . ."
     "Like that movie -- what's it called? -- where there's this videotape, and if you watch it, you'll die seven days later."
     Schremp nodded before making concentric Chug Line No. 7 in his glass. "The Ring. That's exactly it, that's what's happening to me. And it's been almost seven days . . ."
     "Yeah, but you're not going to die just because Marcy didn't call you back."
     "Molly. Not Marcy."
     "What's that? I can't hear you . . ."
     Joy Joy was fast approaching the Fire Marshall's room-capacity limit (or so Schremp supposed), the place packed now with clamorous roisterers intent on pushing the decibel envelope beyond airline baggage-handler recommended maximums. Cocktail glasses (three in a waitress's hands at once) clinked and clacked, cash register slamming shut as someone's stool-leg stuttered across the floor nearby ("What can I getcha?"), burly guffaws competing with soprano laughter, a sudden swoosh of street noise as fresh celebrants burst through the main entry door, wine cork's thoppp! providing a grace-note to a distant woman's rising arpeggio of giggles -- the thrum of a vox humana orchestra tuning up.
     Schremp swirled the remaining two ounces of beer in his glass. He scanned the crowd, eyes finally falling on Dixon. At the first lull in the background noise he said: "We could fix the noise problem, you know."
     "Yeah, we could go outside . . ."
     "No, I mean we could fix it. With technology."
     Dixon was game. "Go on."
     "An array of microphones in that wall over there" -- Schremp motioned with his head -- "and an array of speakers in this wall over here. Right? Invert the signal, drive the anti-noise through the speakers, time it so the noise gets canceled for these people right over here . . ."
     Dixon mused on it, nodding, far-away stare, feigning comprehension. "Interesting idea..."
     "See, if you have enough microphones, you can triangulate the origin of any individual sound in this room . . . or all of the various sounds --"
     Dixon's brows unfurled, an Aha moment slowly washing across his face.
     "-- and likewise, with an array of speakers, you can focus calibrated anti-noise on any location in the room . . ."
     "Barroom active noise suppression. BANS."
     "Exactly."
    Dixon slapped the side of Schremp's shoulder. "Freakin' brilliant. Dude, you're a genius, you know that?"
     The two clinked glasses and then knocked back the rest of their beers.
     Dixon grabbed a half-soaked cocktail napkin from the bar and used it to wipe his mouth. "This," he said, "is exactly the kind of stuff we ought to be working on. Instead of unicorns with April-fresh anal glands."
     Schremp nodded, half-smiling. "Yep. It's just about that time."
     Dixon glanced at his watch. "Group therapy?"
     "No. I mean, yeah, that too. But what I meant was, it's just about time . . . for us to turn the page. You know? Put HoityToyty behind us."
     Dixon smiled. "Ordinarily, the last thing I want to put behind me is a herd of unicorns. But in this case, my man, you're absolutely right. I'm with you. All the way."

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Lessons from the Script

The screenplay draft is complete. It ended up at 114 pages rather than 112. Boo hoo.

Here's some of what I've learned so far.

The books all say that screenwriting is hard. And it is. IMHO, it's harder than poetry. Makes writing a novel seem like a stroll on the beach.

Screenwriting is a lot like a stroll on the beach—Omaha Beach.

In his book On Writing (a fine book, BTW), Stephen King talks about how he develops stories. Basically, he creates interesting characters, puts them in a dramatic situation, and lets them figure it out. There is no conscious attempt to plot or create subplots; the characters do what they must, inevitably (given their proclivities and their situation) do. King merely transcribes. He gets all the way through a novel this way; following the headlights all the way to the destination, so to speak.

It works for King because he's a master at what he does, and the form (the novel) allows it.

Screenwriting is so constraint-intensive, there is precious little room (although there is some) for organic story growth. You almost have to come at it with a complete structure in mind. Screenwriter Matt Bird has a story structure checklist (encompassing character development and all sorts of other things) that's 100+ items long. You're not going to hit even a third of the points in that list using an unprepared "structure it as you go" approach. If you can, well, congratulations; maybe you're channeling Robert Towne; in which case please accept my unworthy bow as I exit stage-left.

Alien would work well as a silent movie. The dialog augments the story.

You'll run out of room. Guaranteed. Budget 32 pages for Act I and you'll go sailing through that mark like a drunk through a stop sign. Set an absolute page limit of 110 and you'll be at 120 before you know it.

Therefore the best advice I can give you is: Enlarge all margins and tab limits at the start, just a smidge, so you'll get fewer words per page. You'll gladly kill any number of grandmothers later to widen them out again.

Another tip that may keep you from busting your page count: One day when you're thoroughly blocked, write the ending. Write the final two scenes (more, if you can) of the script, complete. Behold: Your "active writing area" is now bookended by the already-written beginning and the already-in-place ending. You have less surface area in which to work, and the paint dries faster, forcing you to up the pace. Which you were wanting to do anyway, right?

Thirty pages seems like a lot in the beginning. But when you've got just thirty pages left to write, it's never enough.

Let actions and situations do the talking whenever possible. Let characters speak only if and when they must, and even then, let subtext, not the actual words, tell the story.

Never forget one thing. Watching a movie is an act of voyeurism. Hence, all dialog is overheard. Hence, no conversation needs to begin at the beginning. Think of the times you've overheard a conversation (whether at a bar, a social function, standing in line, or whatever) in real life. Did you ever hear the actual start of the conversation? Chances are you came along in the middle. Yet within a few seconds, you figured out the essentials of the conversation (who, what, where, when, why) from context. That's how all movie dialog works. The film viewer is an eavesdropper, not a court stenographer.

Take a scene, any scene. Cut the first line of dialog. Does the scene still work? Yes? Then why did you ever think you needed that line of dialog?

More often than not, dialog is about subtext, backstory, misdirection, and/or foreshadowing, not just what's going on at the moment. We can see what's going on at the moment.

Dialog, properly done, wears a hairpiece. It's never bald.

It helps to know something about stage magic and its crazy stepsister, comedy. Both are all about misdirection.

Would your script still make for a good moviegoing experience with the sound off? Alien would play damn well as a silent movie. My Dinner with Andre would not. Look at your script with dialog turned off (in your head, at least). Which did you write? Alien, or My Dinner with Andre?

I was fortunate, with the script I just wrote, to have a multinational story, with lots of non-English-speaking characters (but zero subtitles, thanks). Try it sometime. Write a scene that involves foreign nationals, speaking their native tongues, using no subtitles, with the idea that the scene has to be understandable to anyone, of any language. See how far you can take it. Can you still make the scene work? Why or why not?

There's more to tell. Suffice it to say, the screenplay-writing process has taught me a lot. And I thought I already knew a thing or two. I was right, as it turns out. I knew a thing. Maybe two at the most.


If you'd like to see my (WGA-registered) screenplay, drop me a line. My hushmail dot com address is kasthomas. Inquiries held in strictest confidence. Please mention your Twitter handle (if applicable).

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