Do I mention it often enough, or not often enough? I guess a marketer might say there’s never enough! Friends might roll their eyes and find ways to exit the conversation. I have a screenplay. In addition to my written books and my photo essays, I have a screenplay. Hence, it gets shoved aside, but not here; Port Townsend has a Film Festival. How silly would it be to ignore it? There’s so much to learn.
I do not have grand plans of being known as a screenwriter. But, in my family there’s a sailor’s sailing notes from 1876. The sailor was 14. He was exiled (according to family folklore) by ticking off his grandfather. He thought getting out of the house was great; grandfather had enough power to exile the kid. Welcome to a growing up journey on a square-rigged tall ship, British Imperial India, with an unsolved murder onboard, and a lot of that growing up to do.
I’m the last member of the family who has any interest in the logs. I’m the last one who has any connection to being a writer. And I got it done because, before my Dad died, I told him I told him I’d do it.
A writer’s chore. The screenplay didn’t start that way. The story is based on the sailing notes of a 14-year-old brat. 14-year old brats aren’t known for eloquence or grammar. But, he took notes and I have them. My Dad had them first. He turned hand-scrawled notes and typed them up. I wonder if the truly original notes were on scraps of paper. My Dad typed them up, but he didn’t ‘improve’ them. Punctuation was rare. Mis-spellings, of course. Paragraphs? Ha!
I took my Dad’s typewritten pages and fed them into a OCR to create a text file. Welcome to new mis-spellings. Also notice words and phrases that made sense then but not now. Hello also to attitudes that aren’t exactly – polite 150 years later. So, I inserted grammar, fixed typos, did some Google searches on archaic phrases, and basically prettied it up.
No screenplay, yet.
I made it into a book. I made it into a private book. It had my Dad’s original text and my updated version. My Dad got a copy, of course. I self-published the book through Lulu.com, as a private link. It can be hard, if not impossible, to guess who would want a copy, so I sent the link around. They’d have to pay for it, but with no profit. It greatly simplified my logistics. Duty, done.
And then I went to a book fair as a Featured Author. Cool. Sold some books. Did some talks. No biggie. And during an afternoon BBQ break I met one of the attendees who just happened to have worked in Hollywood. I mentioned the book, not a screenplay yet; and described how hard it would be to film it. Ships at sea aren’t convenient. He quickly educated me. Pirates of the Caribbean solved lots of those problems. Instead of lots of ship shots he pointed out that they figured out what to do with CGI, conventional sound stages, dockside sound stages, ship work in a harbor, and finally far fewer ship at sea work. Maybe this is possible.
Possible does not mean probable, but the process benefits from a screenplay, which I learned how to do, and then did.
From a kid’s notes to a screenplay required some fiction. 14-year-olds have a small world. I had to guess at and flesh out much of the rest of that nautical world. In particular, my great-granddad didn’t say much about the murder because he knew that he didn’t do it. I had to recognize the fact that there was a murderer on board, that they were unidentified, and that the trip was weeks from shore. Insert captain’s interviews, distrust, intrigue, and such.
Edit some versions, and there it sits as I work on my other books.
And here I sit in the Festival’s lounge while shmoozing goes on around me. I guess I should engage, and I will, but hey, I’m a writer; I have to write.
This is a film festival, not a movie festival. As I understand it, ‘film’ is more artistic and based on advocacy or experimentation. As I understand it, ‘movie’ is MCU. Another way of looking at it, film is at most a few million, movie is tens or hundreds of millions.
I might not be in the right place. And yet, I am. I’m here for the shmoozing (and learning how to spell it), the culture (advocates and fans of films and filming), the fashion (I dress bland on purpose), and the language (holding off on the shmoozing until I can speak it). I shmooze anyway, just not in a determined way.
And yet, yesterday I spent an hour talking to someone who has also written a nautical screenplay. He even has business cards with the GPT poster on the front. Shared experiences and comradery can be worth more than the forums and the films. As a friend who organizes events said, (paraphrased) “The best conversations are in the hallways, not in the rooms.”
So, I’ll post this, share it, then get a cup of tea and see who I meet and listen for what I’ll learn.
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