Tara Ison - Reeling Through Life - How I Learned to Live, Love and Die at the Movies

My partner and I watched movies about screenwriters. The Big Picture made us laugh hysterically but also wince; early in the movie an earnest young screenwriter, fresh from winning an award at film school, eager to make important and powerful movies, is wooed over lunch by a potential agent: 105

AGENT

Look, I’m not going to bullshit you. . I’m going to be straight with you. I don’t know you. I don’t know your work. But I know that you have enormous talent.

It doesn’t feel like Sophie’s groundless assertion of faith; it’s grounds to snicker at them both, and the earnest young screenwriter slowly succumbs to the slick Studio Executive who forces the evolution of his story from a nuanced study of love among a quadrangle of mature adults to a romp about ghost stewardesses in bikinis. (My writing partner and I soon learned that, as satire goes, this was not farfetched.) Sunset Boulevard has a gigolo hack screenwriter promising to write a script in exchange for being kept by a delusional and faded movie queen — but the screenwriter never writes, not even in a montage; screenwriting is a party game, a power play, a flirtation. 106Barton Fink tries to write, in Barton Fink , and pity poor Barton Fink for trying; this Clifford Odets — style Real Writer is trapped in a seedy Hollywood hotel room, on a deadline to deliver a fluffy, trivial script, watching the wallpaper peel and sweat while slowly losing his writerly mind and his literary pride from having made this deal with the devil. 107

Sullivan’s Travels has a successful writer/director who makes fluffy, trivial movies; he decides he wants to make an important film, something real and serious, and he hits the road in search of true suffering, in order to properly document the human condition. 108Through a series of zany adventures Sullivan winds up convicted of a petty crime and sentenced to hard time on a chain gang, where he is among, finally, the suffering dregs of humanity. One night these beaten-down, wretched beasts of burden are treated to a fluffy, trivial movie; the poor, suffering men start to laugh; the successful writer/director learns the value of offering the world something fluffy and trivial, how we all need those mindless moments of joy, and he is humbled. My partner and I felt smug because we identified with all these screenwriter anguishes; it meant we were the real thing.

The real thing, as in screenwriters , and I had to learn the screenwriter’s rules: You force your fine prose into screenplay format (which as a form is more rigid and less organic than a sestina); you don’t overwrite description (i.e, leave a lot of white space so the exhausted, overworked reader doing coverage can make it a quick read); you write only what the camera sees, capture the externals, reduce human existence to slug lines (INT. JACK’S BEDROOM — DAY, EXT. MEXICAN RESTAURANT — NIGHT) and make sure characters speak with an eye toward their dialogue margins on the page.

And a screenplay, as a piece of writing, isn’t a finished thing — a screenplay is only a phase of a story, on its way to becoming its realized existence: a movie. So by definition, it isn’t Art; it’s one embryonic part in the construction of Art, the crude charcoal sketch, the stumbling choreography, the sculpture’s wire armature, the mere tinkering with melodic notes. A screenplay is something the screenwriter creates and nurtures and possesses, briefly, then sends on its way. For other people to turn into whatever kind of thing they want. You wave bye-bye from the door and hope it isn’t run over by a bus.

I wrote scripts about characters I told myself not to get attached to, but with whom I always fell, as during a one-night stand, into a passing, passionate love. I wrote sentences I knew I’d wind up cutting in the delivered draft because they slipped into character introspection or an irrelevant linguistic play. I told myself with each assignment that I was going to be a good screenwriter and do whatever the stupid Studio Executive asked, invite in those bikini’d spectral stewardesses, all in order to get those big fat checks (buy a sable coat, or give it to Roosevelt?) and pay for my label as a writer; I’d wind up shrieking in story meetings like a hissing feral cat trying to protect her young, but I’d usually cave in the end and go slinking off, check in hand, final draft delivered with the other.

But if a script is developed in a forest and there is no one there to produce it. .? Amazing, how screenwriters can earn a nice living writing those things and never see anything they write live to tell the story. Time after time I turned in scripts to someone who wrote me that check and then locked my writing away forever in the dark drawer of Development Hell. I thought I heard my characters howl in protest. I told myself these characters weren’t real, and I swore anew, each time, that I would never fall in love again. I told myself that I was not selling myself, but I worried, late at night, that all those characters I was trafficking in would sneak up on me in the dark and take a razor to my throat.

This was much worse than being a plagiarist.

But it would get me closer to that beach house, I was sure. Occupation? I was asked on insurance claim forms, by mail catalogue operators, by people at hipster parties; I wanted to peep I’m a writer , but I still couldn’t. I’d only be found out. The question became ominous, as if asked each time by an Aryan Border Guard. I could never say it; I’m a screenwriter I said instead, filled out, muttered with a sheepish nod, but it didn’t satisfy; it confirmed that I was a mere pimp of words.

I thought about Garp. His glove in the gutter, his hovering piano, his creation of stories that come to fruition there, on the page, and that’s all they need to do. How at one point, that dazzled me, it felt like more than enough to aspire to in life.

For many years as a kid I slept in a T-shirt that saidALCATRAZ SWIM TEAM, a souvenir from one of my parents’ vacations. Alcatraz had always intrigued me: Capone and the Birdman, the fog. The mythic, iconic Rock. I’d seen Escape from Alcatraz at least three or four times. In 1992 I went off to visit friends in San Francisco and took my first tour of the island and learned how the families of the prison staff actually lived there, in an Ozzie-and-Harriet kind of family compound. I thought about being a woman or young girl in this most masculine and foreboding place and was further intrigued. What a great story. A mother-daughter story, on Alcatraz. I start playing with it. It will be a screenplay, of course. Sigh. I think about how to structure it in three acts (the climax: a convict escapes and holds the mother and daughter hostage!) I think about how to pitch it (Chicks on the Rock!). I think about which stupid Studio Executive might like it. It takes place, of course, in another era, in a real environment I know virtually nothing about, and I begin to research it. This absorbs a lot of time, but I want it to be historically accurate, before the inevitable arrival of the buxom stewardesses (plane crash on Alcatraz!). I start dating the imaginary mother and daughter, to listen to their stories, to live with them on intimate terms, although I know in my gut it will be only a brief affair, only a matter of months before our relationship is over and they’re handed off to the highest bidder, handed over to someone else, to be locked away in the bloom of their youth or brainwashed into other beings.

At some point, the idea occurs to me; perhaps this doesn’t have to be a screenplay. Perhaps I could write this as a novel. And when your stories and characters and words are a novel, they’ve fulfilled their destiny. That’s all they have to do; lie there and exist on the page. The Alcatraz mother and daughter would be safe there.