Jake – The Movie .com

Making JAKE, Part 3: Finding The Foundations

Posted by on 25 March 2010 | 324 Comments

There's a book by Anne Lamott, one of the best books on writing I've ever read, called BIRD BY BIRD. One of her key tips? "Shitty First Drafts". Don't worry about it being great - just bang it out. Is it shitty? That's fine. At least you've got something to work with.

This was great advice when I wrote my first screenplay, and second, and third. When you're starting out - hell, even now- there's nothing like the sheer giddy feeling of completion of 80-110 correctly formatted pages that could be a movie. I know that finishing the first draft of JAKE was one of the most fulfilling, satisfying moments of the entire process.

But I am getting very far ahead of myself. The problem with this method, for my brain, is that the result is quite messy, and re-organizing it structurally is pretty difficult for me. I don't find changing narrative structure difficult when I'm working with material in an editing suite, moving footage from one place to another to restructure things, but when I'm editing a 100-page script, making changes to reset and move the structure is relatively hard for me.

A disciplined, organized writer would systematically approach the structural issues, dissect them, and proceed accordingly. At least, I suppose that is what they would do. As I am not one, I did what I know how to do - put the problems in the back of my brain and think about them when I wasn't thinking of anything else, or bore friends with discussions about them.

As mentioned last time, the problem I was having was this: how do you make a movie about a person who is so unlikable that they have been recast in their own life and make them the protagonist without alienating the audience?

Like any problem, there are usually a couple fundamental underlying assumptions, and this one has a couple. And questioning those assumptions is a good way to find solutions to seemingly intractable problems. The first assumption is that alienating the audience is a bad thing. Now, I definitely don't always feel that way - some of my favorite movies are antagonistic towards the audience, from HOLY MOUNTAIN to CACHE, from CLEAN SHAVEN to LAST YEAR IN MARIENBAD. But this wasn't what I wanted to do here - I wanted to follow the emotional journey of somebody who'd been recast.

And then I found, accidentally, the other assumption. I don't remember how, but one day I realized what I'd been assuming - that somebody would have to be unlikable to be recast.

What if he wasn't THAT unlikable?

What if it wasn't that everyone was happy to have him replaced, but rather just didn't care much? Or didn't notice?

And in my brain, things started to unlock, and I started to have a dim idea of where, finally, this concept was going, and how it was going to get there.