Storytellersunplugged

Gerard Houarner

A funny thing happened on the way to a column about writing “nice,” which was another side trip on the road to someday writing about “vision.”

Linda and I went to one of Lee (Stoker winner/Stoker Banquet Weekend Fearless Leader/HWA bon vivant) Thomas’ farewell NYC parties (he’s very popular and will be sorely missed….and since Linda went to both and I only went one, I’m officially anti-social) held at The Aegean. In the midst of celebrating Lee’s farewell and birthday, Dallas came up to us and said: “How’d you like to be in a movie?”

Those of you who know Dallas can fill in the blanks on what first passed through our heads.

But it quickly became apparent that the movie adaptation of Dallas’ harrowing novel, The Girl Next Door (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0830558/), was shooting in NYC in a couple of days for their opening/final scenes and they needed background extras in suits. Linda, of course, owns many suits and even I have one, so we were both eligible. (Monica O’Rourke, also an extra, posted pictures at http://s113.photobucket.com/albums/n203/felinedependant/TGND/ ). This was a small, independent film, so there were no stars in our eyes. We wanted to support our bud Dallas, of course, and we were curious about what making a movie was about. When we arrived on Sunday at 9AM in the Wall Street area in suits, we found no trailers, saw one make-up person for the “talent” (which was not us), and discovered lunch consisted of sandwiches at a nearby deli.

Which was all good, because we had a chance to sit and chat with actors Bill Atherton and Mark Margolis about the “business” and their work, and listen in on Director Greg Wilson and Cinematographer (and frequent Horrorfind attendee) Bill Miller talk about the shots and set ups, and get a really close-up view of the movie business. Dallas was there to fill us in on what was going on, though the script writers Daniel Farrands and Phil Nutman were, alas, missing.

Now, I’ve actually written a movie-making story scheduled for Tom Piccirilli’s upcoming CD anthology, Midnight Premiere, using whatever I’d learned from DVD extras, Horrorfind bar stories, Project Greenlight on Bravo, and decades of listening to media people on convention panels, to come up with the details of a movie shoot. I didn’t see anything on the actual set that contradicted what I wrote. But if I’d had this experience under my belt, I might have added something about the strange boredom that sets in when you repeat actions for scenes over and over again, or you stand around in your “first position” waiting to repeat your actions for scenes (in the sun, wearing a suit, wondering if your ever-suntanning bald head will “match” with takes filmed an hour ago), or you sit around waiting for whatever’s going to need repetition next. It became difficult to maintain, or access, any kind of energy to run or react or gesture or act like anything besides a Romero zombie over and over again.

I couldn’t imagine trying to do the same kind of simple, basic task with the added burden of dialogue, and reacting to other human beings, and projecting some kind of dramatic presence.

Which brings me to two observations inspired by this experience, both around emotional focus.

This acting stuff is rough. The movie business demands multiple takes for a variety of very good story-telling reasons. I can really understand the work it takes for an actor to summon up the internal state necessary for being “in character” throughout the course of a twelve hour shooting day, day after day. Mark, who played the role of a homeless man run over by a speeding car, kept asking the extras, “Why are you doing this for free?” He asked this question more insistently, if also more wearily, after being strapped onto a back board and into neck brace, hoisted onto a gurney with his face covered by a plastic breathing mask supposedly attached to an oxygen tank, and passed in and out of an ambulance for an hour.

I guess some have a talent for that aspect of the work, but I’m betting most people need to fight to constantly regain their emotional focus for a scene, or a character, as the day wears on and inertia builds between the hours of intense repetition of fragments of emotional intensity.

You’d think writing would be easier, but I don’t think it is. At least not for everybody. I’m painfully aware that there are a great many successful writers who can pump out 5 or 10 thousand words a day of fiction, which includes a good deal of emotional content, and get paid quite well for their efforts. Maybe it’s another in a long line of Bad Signs regarding my choice to pursue writing, but I can’t write that fast. And sometimes the emotions come to me in bits and pieces, over time – I even go back to an earlier scene to add what I hope is a little more depth because of what happens in the story or occurs to me later.

I don’t think it’s necessarily easier being a writer because if you’re writing something that’s close to your heart, that reaches into the hearts of others, you’re accessing the same kind of energy a real actor would need to give a dramatic performance. Ideally, at some point in the writing process, you’re “feeling” what the character is feeling, visualizing the setting, living the story.

There’s also the problem of submerging yourself into your character more than once, unless you’re one of those people who can push out a story in a day.

I find it much too easy to drift out of the focus of a story over the course of days/weeks of writing it. Forget about novellas and novels.

Since I can only write for a few hours a night, at best, and often miss consecutive writing sessions because of life, I find myself working hard to get back into the emotion of the piece I’m working on. Of course, you can’t wait for the right “mood” to hit you. You have to hunt that damned mood down, club it over the head and drag it back to the campfire so you can scare all the other children with it.

Getting into the emotion for the bit I need to write means re-reading what I’ve done, planting some keywords on the page ahead of time so I have something to shoot for, or a cue to help me slip into the right frame of mind. It means thinking about the scene the night before and letting my brain know I expect it to actually work for its proteins and carbs. I’ll concentrate on specific imagery in the story so I have a touchstone to return to over and over again.

It can get boring, even tedious, to get into the same “head” day after day, or every time you have a chance to get to the keyboard. If a scene or a story becomes particularly difficult, you can really lose a sense of the voice you’re using for your characters. It’s easy to stray, go for a quick out, some change-of-pace humor or violence. (As an extra, I sometimes had to fight the urge to jump out of background mode and say, “Hey, you’re Bill Atherton! Loved you in Ghost Hunters, can I have your autograph?” Or do something else suicidally silly.) Sometimes that’s what’s needed, other times, not.

But keeping the emotional focus of the story means you need to go back to that same emotional state, day after day, to be in tune with your character. Just like an actor assuming a role during the course of a shooting day, and over an entire production schedule.

Or, to make if even more complicated, writers have to take on the emotions of their entire cast of characters. They must be depressed, and bright and chipper, and psychotic, and concerned – all the players in your scene/story. The dialogue and reactions and ticks need to be true to the internal states of all the characters. Every day. Day after day, for as long as the story takes.

And like I said above, it helps to keep the progression of all those emotional states in the back of the mind to catch missed opportunities to show and develop those feelings. Writers go back over drafts looking for more than just grammatical errors or plot holes, but opportunities to subtly reveal what was going on inside a character at various points in the story.

Goddam! Actors do have it easy, the bastards! All they have to worry about is one damned character. And it’s all right there in the script for them. And they have directors and assistants to help them. Writers have the whole cast to worry about, and the whole story, and all the little stories that make up the big story, and all they have to work with is words and imagination, not the director’s little video display that quite clearly shows something is missing, or there’s too much of this or that.

Oh. But writers sit on their asses all day, while actors have to sit in the hot sun, or under hot lights, or do other physically uncomfortable things that break their concentration and wear them down.

Everybody gets canned by the critics.

Hell. Maybe I’ll call it a draw.

But I’d still rather be a writer than an actor. I guess I like being in a lot of heads, and emotional states, at the same time.

And people wonder why I spend so much time at a psychiatric center…..

The other point about emotional focus that occurred to me was about the story-telling process itself. I noticed that the director and Bill would go for wide shots or actions shots first, establishing the setting and the major action. Then they’d “drill down” (to use that twitch-inducing addition to the jargon of consultants in apparently every profession from mental health to finance) through ever-tightening close-ups to the emotional core of the action: in one scene, one character giving mouth-to-mouth breathing to another; and in the next, a clasp of hands. Quite literally, the image came down to an actor’s lips covering the other’s mouth, and two hands clasped filling the screen.

I figure that’s probably standard operating procedure for film making (thought you could sure fool me based on those Sci Fi Channel things). And I don’t know if any of that stuff is actually going to be used in the final cut, but it occurred to me that there is probably the equivalent of such imagery in every story – film, print or spoken-word – that is remembered, that is more than superficial action-adventure or a quick scare or a generic romance. Call it a moment of transcendence, or an epiphany (to go back to my prehistoric college lit days and Joyce’s Dubliners), a climax, whatever, but for now I see it as an emotional focus for the story presented through an action/image. I also “saw” through the filming process how important such a payoff is to the dramatic impact, the “entertainment value” and “artistic integrity” of the work.

Of course, melodramas overplay the hand. And plenty of well-received and rewarded literary works completely miss the emotional focus of the story, or simply excludes that focus in favor of language or an idea or philosophy.

As we all know, horror is an emotion, and horror writers don’t have the luxury of ignoring emotion. But that payoff doesn’t necessarily have to be melodramatic or operatic: a big scare or a violent act. Ramsey Campbell makes a living from far more subtle, and disturbing, moments of dislocation that resolve themselves into an emotional focus for the tales he tells.

Anyway, the point being, if I haven’t lost myself completely, here, is that along with all the character development going on in a story (from which plot evolves), observing the film crew at work reminded me of the importance in thinking in terms of a lasting image or action, probably brief, even fleeting, that brings together all the subtle or grandiose theatrics, the shocks, reactions, emotions and changes characters have gone through to bring home to the reader (even if only on a subconscious level) a thematic aspect of the story.

Being an extra reminded me of the importance of small, brief gestures in the middle of dramatic conflict and spectacle that, perhaps, hit closer to the heart of a reader than all the zombies and killers and ghosts we love so much.

And go see The Girl Next Door when it comes out! (Not, of course, for my possible bald-headed and suited appearance — though I know you’ll want to check out Linda’s cameo — but most importantly for what looks and sounds to be an extremely well done film by people who love and respect the genre, based on one of the finest examples of that genre!)