Dispatch From The Quest: Miranda Sajdak
Over the course of the 24 weeks I am working with the writers in The Quest, each will write a weekly dispatch to share with the GITS community. There are several reasons for doing this, the main one educational: Hopefully you will learn something of value for your own understanding of the craft from the experiences of the Questers. I should also add they are a great group of people, so I expect you will enjoy getting to know them.
Today: Miranda has issues with Gravity:
Spoiler alert: in this week’s journal entry, I allude to some of the themes in GRAVITY. For those who haven’t seen the film/want to avoid spoilers, you may not want to read further (the last paragraph is clear of content spoilers).
Each week, as we move through prep, we’ve been breaking down elements of our story that will ultimately help us realize the whole.
This week, we looked at themelines. Now, this week actually really informed my reading of scripts in general — not just our own. I went to see GRAVITY on opening night. While it was visually pretty (despite the agonizingly long “symbolic fetal moments” and wholly unnecessary T&A), I have to say, I was entirely disappointed with the experience. Prior to my seeing the film, many friends and family have been getting tired of my — admittedly — extreme excitement over this film.
Why was I excited prior to entering the theater? Well, I read an early draft of the script — a draft which credited Rodrigo Garcia as co-writer (for those who are interested, it’s floating around on tracking boards right now). That draft completely inspired me. It was at once compelling, taut, and thrilling. It proposed the idea of a self-determined, single woman who was able to take on insurmountable odds — and rely entirely on herself to try to beat them. It had funny, humanizing beats, and a clever ending. The lead could have easily been male or female, and wouldn’t have altered the script at all. When Scott asked us what film we wish we’d written, I easily responded, based solely on that draft: GRAVITY.
Then, I saw the movie. The script I read was genius. The film I saw was Lifetime in space. There’s a reason the dialogue is getting eviscerated in the press, and, quite frankly, they’re right. The themelines changed. Rather than a competent, capable human, we have overt themelines that distinctly and patronizingly reduce the lead character to a mother, distraught over her daughter. We have a bold, cowboy man who gets to come in and save the day — despite the fact that this woman — this human — is supposedly capable enough to be on a mission to outer space (which, come on, takes some pretty specific qualifications).
As my friend Steph so aptly put it “good thing she wasn’t stuck in space with another girl — she’d have been totally screwed!” Everything that was wonderful about the original draft — everything that appealed to me about it — was eviscerated in the overt feminizing and demeaning of the lead character. They made her, as this apt review from the DCist (http://dcist.com/2013/10/out_of_frame_gravity.php) nails, a genre cliche.
So. What does that say about themelines? Well, for one, it says that Sandy and I really need to get our act in gear on our themelines. We know that we’ll be up against some pretty difficult uphill battles in terms of our chosen logline, but this week’s screening, for me, reaffirmed how important it is that we not compromise. We don’t want our lead characters to be weakened by genre cliches, and we definitely don’t want people leaving the theater feeling the way I did: let down, disappointed, and, quite simply, pissed off. We want our audience leaving the theater elated, energized, and excited that they’ve seen something truly spectacular. GRAVITY wasn’t it. Maybe our film can be.
One principle we work with in The Quest is Theme = Meaning. Often what that boils down to is emotional meaning. Not theme as proof of some intellectual precept. Not theme as the moral of the story. No. When people watch a movie, on a primal level, they want to feel something. This extends to readers when they crack open a script, especially so as most of the screenplays they cover generate zero feelings other than disdain for the crap writing.
So as writers, we need to zero in on what is at the heart and soul of the story, the emotional and psychological dimensions of the narrative.
Miranda’s negative reaction to the movie version of Gravity is heavily tied to the positive reaction she had to the original script. It is noteworthy that much of her attitudinal shift is tied directly to significant changes in the story’s themelines.
Setting aside whether you agree with Miranda or not, this discussion points to the importance of how we handle our story’s themeline, the domain of the narrative’s emotional and psychological meaning.
How about you? What’s your take on the movie Gravity? How did you respond to it emotionally?
Tomorrow: Another Dispatch From The Quest.
About Miranda: New Englander turned Angeleno by way of New York. Enjoys: high-powered action films, dark dramas, and ’90s legal thrillers. Does not enjoy: the dentist. Mushrooms. @ScriptChix.
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