Riding The Bus Part 1...again

A while back, before the blogs we used to have columns on the site, and we woudl write the columns every week...or two...or month...or two. Anyway. One of my old columns was called Riding The Bus, documenting our march to make the Ed Bus feature film, but mostly it offered backstory on Ed Bus and all the ways we had used him onstage, and the mythology that had been built up. This is long before there was a radio show or a two-part Ed Bus Episode.

I believe that last two episodes of our show air this weekend on WBEZ and they are two of our best, "Schadenfreude Es Muy Loco" and "*61", great shows, some of our best work, indicative of how far we went in two years. In two years we built up quite a mythology which could be summed up in three distinct social circles: Ed Bus, Phudi Mart, and Dinnerbansky & Ross. These form what we call "The Loser Trilogy."

Next Wednesday we will head in a new direction for Schadenfreude, the big screen, and we have decided as our first screenplay to do Ed Bus. I'm partial to Phudi because I'm determined to pass the lowest-budget script past as many noses as possible so that we can lobby to produce it. The lower the budget, the less they feel they have riding on it, the more power they "may" give newcomers. Having a stellar reel of your previous films would help in that bid too, but we'll get to that, this is a many pronged plan.

The choice of Ed Bus is obvious. The heavy lifeting is done, the events that drive the lives of the characters involved are right there in bright neon. Act 1 ends when Ed finds out that after 30-35 years he actually has an opponent, Act 2: the ramifications of this in the leadup to the election, plus the Rocky 4-esque tension of the formidable opponent. Act 3: election day. The easiest scripts to write have some form of "ticking bomb". Better screenwriters are able to convey this ticking bomb in a less literal way, putting this unraveling tension in the head and actions of the characters with nary an asteroid or volcano threatening earth, but it's nice to have the ticking bomb of the election to help guide this story. Plus the plethora of secondary characters creates a great world for it to take place in.

So the assignments for the week were for everyone to read "Screenplay" by Syd Field and read three of the following screenplays, Rushmore, Go, Chinatown (for structure), Raising Arizona, Panic Room (for structure), Galaxy Quest, Big Lebowski, or Swingers (who's first scene begins in the coffee shop I blogged from two weeks ago).

And I don't want to hear any naysaying bullshit about Syd Field. I began reading "Screenplay" for the first time in 13 years yesterday and it's still an invaluable resource. Much of the criticism of of Field is leveled at page 9 without any thought to the amazing analysis of drama in the other 247 pages. His analysis of action creating character and character creating action is so concise and dead-on. I love it. I plan to read it over and over and not let another 13 years lapse while I struggle to tell stories without him. The main argument is that none of the "really good" movies follow this structure. Bullshit. Memento, for all it's flipping and floppping of how events are told, follows this formula, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, they all follow this formula to some degree. Has Tarantino or Chris Nolan ever read this, i can't say, did they lay out their structure in this cold way? I don't know. Do their works follow the formula in the end? Yes. It is an art. It is still hard to write a good screenplay, and if you write your screenplay by rote as layed out in the book it will still not necessarily be good. The question is, in 2005 is it more iconoclasitc to follow Syd Field, or dismiss it?

I'll check in with my analysis of the scripts and more Syd Field as we march to Ride The Bus...again, for the first time.