Writing Teenage Bodyguard - A Screenplay

The Writing Process - Fourth Draft - Part 14

I have just finished the fourth draft, my editor is now reading it prior to sending it off to the production company. I think it’s in good enough shape for evaluation. Otherwise, I’d like another month or three to polish it. So short of that, off with it.

The other day I was texting on Facebook with my editor and she mentioned a couple of things I’ll address here.

First, I had said to her about the length that the shorter the better for readers as they tend to cringe at 120 page screenplays and they’d better be really good if they’re that long. I was shooting for a 90 page screenplay and I’m at 95 now. I came up with two more short but important scenes I want to add on this fourth draft. Then toward the end I came up with two more, again, short but important scenes. I’ve had concerns about voiceover narration. I hate them, though I love some movies that use them.

My editor mentioned that my character says “awesome” and it threw her out of the story as it was too early for it to appear and maybe “right on” or “out of sight” would be better. I used to say “groovy” a lot back then and I wasn’t the only one. But I think I’d pretty much stopped saying that by 74. So I fixed that.

The other issue she was concerned about (not her in knowing me but her, as a film viewer if she didn’t know me) was the believability of the character and story. I’ve addressed that now but cutting things that were relevant to the character (in reality) but not to the film itself.

This, is something I’ve been going through my entire life. I’ve led an unusual life.

In the past couple of decades it hasn’t so much been an issue. One because I don’t tell these stories anymore because I got tired of people thinking I was making things up and second, because I think more people have done more interesting things now a days. But consider when I did a lot of these things, it was the 60s or 70s and I was very unusual at the time.

Just to be alive in Tacoma in the late 1960s and having read Aristotle, put me in a weird position around the people I knew. Mostly uneducated (no post high school) blue collar worker types. Nothing against them but in being a reader I was looked at as a weirdo much of the time because I knew philosophy somewhat and famous thinkers thoughts through the ages.

I only knew two kids at my high school who ever went sky diving by 12th grade. Myself and my friend who went with me (along with his older brother).

It was something I had been considering doing since about 10th grade when I took (and this is another one of those things) SCUBA diving along with 40 others including teachers at my high school. Outside of that class, which was mostly taught in our school classrooms and pool, I didn’t know any other kids who by even 12th grade had been SCUBA certified.

So I dumbed down my character for this screenplay. I had done that to begin with but my character was still unbelievable. So this fourth draft, I cut even more. I now appear as a kid who is dealing with things over his head, which I was, but not so over my head in reality. But now from a viewer perspective they can relate to me better and I therefore seem more reasonable and viable. It’s stupid, but it’s screenwriting. And this isn’t a documentary after all. It’s filmmaking.

I added a piece at the beginning for my character’s voiceover. Note that I say “my character” and not, “me”. It helps me see what I need to be doing and removes that wall of “hey, that’s not what I did, who I was, how it happened.”

So now I have a short scene of my Lincoln high school SCUBA club in 1972 at the Old Tacoma Dock cleaning up under it for Earth Day. Something fairly new and we wanted to draw attention to it. Only one newspaper came, a small local one, the Tacoma Review, and we made the front cover. I was in charge of getting people to show up to cover the event and they were all I could get. TV, big newspapers, all refused.

I think adding this scene helps. We’ll see what my editor says. I still have the newspaper photo clipping from that (with me with my dual tanks, which only I had in the club) and put it on my Facebook page for Slipping The Enterprise.

There is still the issue of too much narration at the end but I’m hoping to figure that out at some point, though it may work as is. Depends on the director, really. I may end up putting some of the narration in the middle as exposition with someone.

But for now, I may be done. Though in writing every draft until something is sold, published, or produced, is always the penultimate draft.