Random Script Ideas!

Nothing happening anywhere in my life so I've signed up to do ScriptFrenzy for 2011, wiping out the entire month of April. I'm telling you this because if I'm not around for the next month, you'll know where I am.  Right here, sure, but in a delicious state of smelly, unwashed, hair-pulled dishevelment and burrowed deep inside my head where it's all unfolding and unwinding.

Gosh, I do love the process!

ScriptFrenzy is an annual competition at Writer's Store to see who can produce a 100+ page film script in a month.  I've got several hopefully great screenplays all 'magpie-d', visualised, plotted and with kinks ironed out and beats in the right place so - dah! dah! - ready to be written but I've got so used to entertaining myself in other ways - shopping, blogging and massages - I've learned how to procastinate bigtime so I reckon this competition will give me discipline to get at least one of these scripts done.

But which one?  Which one?  Which one? I've only got today to decide. "Boudicca"?  "Hunting Amelia"? "Vampyre"?

No, not "Vampyre"!  That's the script I've long wanted to write about the actor Henry Irving's relationship with Bram Stoker, which has long fascinated me because it's just so "gaslight", Victorian and sinister, starting out so well but slowly winding itself into something so sick, sad and destructive it lead to Bram Stoker's nightmares which lead, in turn, to the creation of the novel "Dracula", the writing of which came from such a deep place it actually killed him.  No, I can't write that one in a month because it needs to be lovingly stoked and fed, with every nuance understood and wound around and gently pumped into life. Bram Stoker deserves that.

You know, I can't understand why no one's already written a book about this "friendship". Perhaps it's because it would be so difficult to get right.  Mind you, I always thought that about my idea for a script about very-British Bertie's relationship with his very-Australian speech therapist which is why I kept putting it off ... and it turned out I wasn't fast enough getting it down and out because I was beaten to the punch but that's definitely OK with me because it was David Siedler and his doing it and getting an Oscar for it was such kudos for Fiji!  GO FIJI!!!!

Mind you, several other script ideas I've been toying with over the years have also been usurped by other writers and those films bombed spectacularly.  No names, but those particular films either misunderstood the content or skewed it off in ways that didn't work or simply were bad scripts, so it's really just a waiting game because time will pass and people will forget and then it'll be ripe for yet another film on the subject and THEN I can pounce.

Mmmm, "Boudicca"!!!  Visualising Cate Blanchard in the lead because it would take someone of her sublime talent to drive that big 'turnaround' scene, where she stumbles through her burning palace, batted and bleeding after the assault, out onto the hillside where she wordlessly sorts through her anger and confusion until, with her knee-length red hair loose and whipping in the wind, she finally ululates her call to war over the emerald green hillsides.  Mmmm, delicious!

But "Hunting Amelia" is also calling to be written!  Can you see it?  The Pacific! Kiribati! Atolls!  High shots of Astor's white yacht framed against a turquoise sea! A canary yellow sea plane against a deep azure sky! And my script as I visualise it has lots of scenes in tightly closed rooms with tightly closed groups and tightly closed minds contrasting immediately with - POW!!! - the glorious Pacific with those endless miles and miles of unadulterated beauty!  Dark and light!  Light and shade!  And, although not actually in it, my favourite ever historical figure, Amelia Earhart, driving the action.

Have you ever had the experience where a single line in a dry historical document leaps out at you and grabs your imagination and almost immediately explodes into a story!  That's what happened here.  That line was "Major Hadley believed they were hunting for Amelia in the wrong island group so stole Astor's yacht to sail to the Phoenix Islands to look for her."  I mean, WOW!, right!  STORY!!!

And then, later I came across Major Hadley's name again in another batch of historical documents, these ones about the Japanese invasion of Kiribati, which, after reporting the Battle for Tarawa, ends with a line saying "Major Hadley refused to urinate on the British flag and so was shot by the Japanese Colonel. The other British plantation owners and their families were heartened by his example and so also chose death over the capitulation and surrender demanded in dishonouring their flag."

I actually have that flag!  Did you know that?  That very same flag! It was left in the dirt after the massacre but picked up later by a Kiribati fellow and hidden for the duration, then handed over after the war to a British Colonial Officer and thus ended up as the prized possession of a fellow called Frank Fleming who died at my father's hospital and, because dad couldn't find his family and thus who should inherit his belongings, it ended up in storage for many decades, where much later, after my dad died, I came across it and knew it had some sort of history and so was thinking something proper and respectful should be done with it and it was while researching its background I came across those documents - and Major Hadley - in the first place.

There is a monument outside the town of Tarawa in Kiribati, on the exact spot where it happened, with the names of all those plantation owners - the men, women and children - who chose death on that terrible day! I'd really love to see it!  Apparently there are so very many names, it's horrifying. And right at the top is Major Hadley.  I thought maybe the flag should be given to the Republic of Kiribati to fly next to this monument, but apparently doing that is all so political and such a minefield I was strongly advised against donating it ... so I've still got it, waiting for the right situation to arise so I can finally donate it someplace meaningful and respectful

Anyway, that's "Hunting Amelia"!  The story of Major Hadley, from there to there!  He's someone who really does need to be remembered, isn't he! But surely I'd need more than a month to do him justice!  From those documents he comes across as all Errol Flynn and cartoonish so I made him much older and darker and battling his own demons ... and it's while hunting Amelia he comes to peace with himself and his past ... yadda, yadda, yadda!  ... and so refusing to capitulate to the Japanese Colonel is a triumph and a Big Win ... yadda, yadda, yadda! ... and Konde, now a man himself, scoops up the flag and takes it with him on Astor's now filthy old yacht and sails off to the Phoenix Group to bury the remains of Amelia Earhart.

Oh yeah! This one really wants to be written!  Anyway, if you don't see me in April, yes, I am indeed avoiding you so don't bother to contact me because I'll probably not even notice you're there!