Been underground on the blog recently, as I’ve been consumed with completing of the screenplay adaptation of my surf-themed dramatic novella, The Rise and Fall of Piggy Church. I finished the script last night and sent it to my agent. I’ll know in a couple days what he thinks.
If the story and its imaginarium are art, then certainly the screenplay adaptation is a craft. Scripts have time-honored guidlines that deal with construction, plot, and “shootability.” Some topics and genres are far sexier to film producers than others, too. So the screenplay is one thing; but finding people who care and can access money is something else entirely. That’s the agent’s job.
Piggy Church presented an adaptation challenge for a couple reasons. One is that the paperback version of the story wouldn’t translate properly to film as orginially written. This story is based upon five selfish people whose lives revolve around a pier and it’s the only thing I’ve ever had published that’s dark in spirit and tone. While comedy comes easy to me, anger and evil do not. The adaptation made me really dig into who these five characters were and why each was so selfish in his and her own peculiar way.
Because movies are constrained by the sights and sounds of the screen, the adaptation also required a remerchandising of key novella scenes. Because of that I had to create several new ones, and delete many from the book that no longer fit the adaptation.
Since effective communication between two people hinges on three things–non-verbal communication, voice and tone, and words–I had to translate the novella’s narrative descriptions and dialogue into visual backdrops, non-verbal cues, and much wider actor latitude. These are vital to a good adaptation because 55 percent of communication is non-verbal, 38 percent is voice and tone, with just 7 percent reliant on the words used. In the movie business, the two “people” communicating are (1) the film and (2) the audience.
Given that communicative framework, it’s easy to see why great actors create unforgettable characters in excellent films. The writer provides the actors scenery, backdrop, and situations in order to maximize non-verbal acting effectiveness. The writer also must feed the performers key dialogue that can be delivered with deft nuance. Too much dialogue can bog this down. Brevity, therefore, is good. Silence is great. Excess rhetoric is bad.
Books aren’t as demanding. When writing a book, I can trust the reader’s imagination to expand the boundaries of what’s possible because the visual imagery isn’t on a screen where everyone sees the exact same thing. A book reader’s imagery is different; everyone’s is a uniquely personal experience.
The Piggy adaptation also forced me to really tighten all three segments of a structurally strong movie: the beginning, the middle, and the end. Basically speaking, the beginning is the first one-fourth of the film. The middle constitutes half. The end spans the final fourth.
In order to grab viewer interest, a film must have an early hook. In Piggy’s case, I open the movie with Blackie (a protagonist) in Vietnam in 1968 fueling a defoliant plane with Agent Orange that poisons everything it touches. From there the story flashes forward to Zaire in 1974, where Blackie works in a copper mine by day and performs mercy killings at night. The next leap is 30 years ahead. Wracked with cancer caused by Vietnam’s Agent Orange, Blackie is a solitary figure fishing for giant sharks at night off a desolate Florida pier.
Each of these opening scenes is designed to provide the viewer everything he or she needs to know about the background of this vital character. The story’s other four characters are introduced with similar framing in the following successive scenes. Also revealed are the film’s three big conflicts: a culture clash, the whoring of principles for money, and whether or not developers have the right to block and deny beachfronts and access from those of us who wish to go.
All of this in integrated into the first one-fourth of the Piggy Church adaptation. The middle (half) is designed to build empathy for the three “have nots” and enmity for the two “haves.” The plot builds here, and climaxes with big trouble marking the end of Act II (the middle). The end (Act III) resolves the story with an unsuspecting twist. All is not as it has seemed.
I decided to adapt this story for film because what angered me enough to write it as a novella still remains. I think this is a story that must told, and shared, so I wrote the adaptation with great passion. The characters are solid, the conflicts are very real, and the plot resolution makes for an excellent film. Two new characters are introduced who were not in the novella, and a couple new nicknames have been added. Two-thirds of the original novella is in the adaptation. One-third is new.
Time will tell whether The Rise and Fall of Piggy Church movie script is good enough to earn an audience. If it does, it may be a big one.