Scriptwriting
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The Script: |
The Scriptwriting process
page 1 My involvement with The Basket began at the very beginning, when the idea of making a movie first began floating around the hyperactive catacombs of North by Northwest. . Rich Cowan, the president, (who I was working for at the time) was asking if anyone wanted to write a screenplay. I doubt that many people took him seriously. Astrologically, he’s an Aquarian, which makes him seem quite odd to most people. Some would use the term "insane", and think they were being polite. I thought at the time that he was 20 degrees or more "off", but I’ve always put myself in a similar category. I was more than intrigued: quite a bit more in fact. Mostly because of the seed idea for the movie. In Rich Cowan’s words, "I want to do a movie about basketball and opera." We started on the script in January 1996,
meeting at Frank and Tessa Swoboda’s house. (They were the other two recruits in
addition to Rich and myself). The four of us went to work, spending evenings and weekends
working on a screenplay. None of us had any experience in that area. Our goal was to
create a movie that would appeal to the millions of people that are overlooked by
Hollywood: Those not impressed by nor attracted to car chases, explosions, absurdly
powerful male characters, advertisements for toys, and careless depiction of sexuality. |
We listened to the soundtrack from Schindler’s List whenever we worked…letting it play over and over. We would occasionally use other CD’s for our background, but we always came back to the John William’s score. During the course of the three years it took to write the script, meeting whenever the four of us had time at the same time, I quit my job at NxNW, and Tessa got pregnant with her husband Frank’s baby. When Nicholas was born we named a character in the movie after him. Many of the characters were named after people that one or the other of us knew: Brigitta was my eighth grade teacher, Bessie Emery is Tessa’s grandmother, the farmers have names derivative of the six partners at NxNW, and everyone knows someone named Tom.
We worked hard, but the truth of the matter was we had no idea what we were doing. Rich had offered some instructional books at the onset, containing outlines on how to write a script. The tight confines of those hard and fast rules were not appealing to us, and we preferred to spend the first year or so working our way into a confusing mess of characters, plots, subplots, motivations, and dead ends that very much resembled the Seattle freeways of the late 70’s. Rich had originally planned to shoot the movie in the summer of ‘96. But by the summer of ‘96 we didn’t have a first draft of the script. We didn’t even have a one-line description of the movie. This fact was clearly reinforced every time someone asked, "What’s your script about?" The movie had to be shot in the late summer or early fall, so we simply had to try for the next year.
With that luxury of another year to finish it, we decided to take some sojourns into other script ideas, to give The Basket, as we called it from the beginning, some time to breathe. Truth was we were stuck and simply had no idea what to do about it. We picked up the instructional books for a time, and tried to write a script about a woman that robbed stores by removing her blouse so no one would be likely to identify her face. Eventually we became disgusted with ourselves and went back to The Basket. But we did come back to it with a new understanding of how to make characters and plots work, and were able to finish our first draft about two years into the project.