seven days

My other job is screenwriting. There is, I know, something indelibly cliched about a screenwriter who drives a taxi but that's not why I did ... do? ... it. It's just for money. I mean the screenwriting as well as the cab driving. It sometimes surprises me to look back and realise that over the last twenty years I've written or co-written the scripts for six films, two shorts and four talls, one of which was never released, or perhaps I should say has not yet been released. And they're just those that have been made, not the legion that never got off the page. I have a troubled relationship with the profession; I'm always leaving it. Every screenplay I write is my last. I'm not one of those super-committed people who live and breath entirely in the milieu of film. In fact I hardly ever go to the movies. I don't belong to any professional associations and I don't go to parties, conferences, retreats or anything like that ... ever. Except this is about to change, because my latest (last ...) screenplay has somehow ended up in a Project Lab which begins on Friday and runs intensively for the next seven days. This is perhaps problematic, perhaps not. I don't want my lack of commitment to the profession, or the role, to be exposed. On the other hand, I do want the screenplay to be made into a film. It's a good idea and I feel that it is starting to make that strange, indeed ineluctable transformation from words on pages to images on screens ... that metamorphosis I am committed to, that's where the thrill surely lies. It's a process not unlike what happens in reading, except in reading the screen upon which we project the matter our eyes have scanned is interior, private, unique; whereas the screen upon which a film is projected is the same for everyone who looks at it, never mind that they may each and all see something different there. So ... the weirdness of sitting in a room in Lidcombe being lectured upon how to avoid being shot or stabbed or bricked by a fare will be succeeded by the weirdness of sitting in a room in the old mental asylum in Rozelle being lectured upon how to maximise the empathetic potential of characters, how to refine narrative strategies towards a taut, powerful denouement, how to make choices under pressure ... pressure ... pressure ...