Burn Notice was back in style this week. I was wondering how the cliff-hanger from last season was going to resolve itself, and I still wonder if the writers had a plan when they put Michael’s car in the back of that transport. It almost felt like they changed their minds a little. Anyway, it was a decent episode, and I especially liked Sharon Gless chain smoking. Michael catches in the midst of lighting one off the other, so she has a cigarette in each hand when he opens her door. “You might want to slow down a little,” he advises. I suspect the Fi/Michael relationship is cooling so there can be some sexual tension with the new “boss.” And I can’t say it often enough: Bruce Campbell is the most natural actor I’m aware of. Every word he utters seems like the honest truth of his character.
We watched an indy film called The Man in the Chair, starring Christopher Plummer as an elderly former movie “gaffer” who lives in the Motion Picture home for aging film workers. A juvenile delinquent but avid movie student wants to complete a 10-minute film over the Christmas vacation so he enlists Flash’s help after hearing the guy go on a drunken rant at an old movie house during a screening of Touch of Evil (he calls Charlton Heston “Chuckles” and suggests that Orson Welles—who blessed him with the nickname Flash on the set of Citizen Kane—get the marbles out of his mouth). Flash is as curmudgeonly as they come, and his two vices are Wild Turkey and Cuban cigars. At first he tells the young boy to bugger off, but he is gradually won over and enlists the help of all his old cronies to make the movie. There are a lot of familiar faces among the aged supporting cast. The boy doesn’t really know what he wants to make the movie about, but he falls into his story when he sees the abysmal conditions some of the elderly are living in. Robert Wagner plays the producer who stole Flash’s wife forty years earlier.
There is a lot of pretentious stuff to remind us that it’s an edgy movie. Blurry shots, different film stocks, etc. but beyond that it’s a decent movie with a good heart. It dances the line with becoming saccharine, especially in the linkage between the elderly and dogs in the local pound, but Christopher Plummer is brilliant and he carries the film on his bent shoulders.
A few weeks ago, I sent a screenplay adaptation of one of my unpublished short stories to a friend of mine who has been making short films for the past few years. I figured the required effects might put it out of his league, and he pretty much agreed, but he liked the idea and had some notes for how to handle the opening scene better. Purely as an exercise, I punched up the script based on his notes, then went back to the story and rewrote the beginning there, too. It’s only been submitted a couple of times, even though the first draft dates back to 1983, so I got it back into circulation when I was finished with the revisions.
I tinkered with this and that for the rest of the day on Saturday until mid-afternoon. Then I opened up a new document, intending only to write the opening paragraph of a story I’ve been developing in my head for a couple of weeks. I didn’t think I knew where the story was going or what it was about. The main character came to life in that first paragraph. He had a couple of problems that were expressed in those three lines, and all of a sudden I was off. By the end of that writing session I had written nearly 2500 words of the story and, after reviewing the material to recapture the voice, I finished the first draft yesterday afternoon at 5000 words. Since I didn’t know exactly where I was headed, only roughly, I think there are a few logic problems and perhaps some inconsistencies in the plot that I need to handle, but I’m really tickled at the way the story evolved. I have no idea at all where this guy came from, but once he opened his mouth, he told me everything I needed to know to turn a couple of loosely related ideas into his story. I love it when that happens. Absolutely love it.
This morning I took another pass at the story that I’m going to submit tomorrow morning. The voice and tone of that story is completely different from the one I wrote on the weekend, so I’m glad I didn’t touch it while I was writing the new material. I switched the order of two paragraphs and fine-tuned a few sentences. I’ll probably go over it once or twice more before sending it off on a wing and a prayer.
