Writing Teenage Bodyguard - A Screenplay

The Writing Process - Writing - Getting Started - Part 4

This is interesting…how to make this work. You have to fictionalize it of course, to keep it from being a documentary. I'm writing after all, entertainment, based on reality. It's not about me, it's about a project, completing the mission of writing a good screenplay.

I am to begin with, a horror writer, a writer of the macabre as I like to think about it, and being a fan of the masters from back when I was a kid. You can see this on Wattpad here in my ongoing story, The Unwritten. And if you’re been reading that, sorry, I’ve gotten side tracked with this screenplay (do what has the potential to pay first, first) but I’ll get back to it. I pretty much know the ending, I just need the time to finish it. 

I have found those people originally based in horror, seem to make good films, interesting drama, with an edge. David Cronenberg, David Lynch come to mind. But I've also learned to temper my orientation so as not to distance non horror readers, too much when necessary. 

Sometimes less, even much less, is more, much more.

Augustas, the producer I am now writing this screenplay for said that my story reminds him of a Ryan Gosling film like "Drive" or "The Place Beyond the Pines", the latter of which oddly and luckily enough I just watched a couple of weeks ago and the former I watch earlier last year.

I see now what he means about "Pines".

In this story, I find I'm having to compress several people into one, various incidents into that one week. Various locations, into one town. Although in the end the finished screenplay will not be actually only what happened that week, along with some fictional situations mostly in the last half or quarter of the screenplay, many of the things I will use happened, just not with that person, or in that location, or at that time. 

The job however as I have understood it in this kind of project is to offer the look and feel of what happened and not just the truth. Though I prefer to stick to the truth as closely as possible.

I’ve seen many films where I had myself complained, “That’s just not what happened.” But the screenwriter doesn’t shoot for 100% accuracy, but 100% experience. So you will walk away feeling you were involved in something that actually did happen. For the most part. Because a 100% accurate film that never gets made is 100% unwatched. And unpaid for.

The fact is that all this still did happen to me. And that is important, to me anyway. Because I'm not writing a “make me look good” film, but a producible, sell-able product. My problem with this story is that in the telling, I’m a pretty unbelievable character to begin with and many of my exploits are unbelievable. I’ve had people nearly (and politely) call me a liar, years go. Because I had done things so outside of their own experience or anyone they knew, and mostly all before graduating high school, that it seems incredible in the telling. It didn’t however seem to incredible at the time. 

Well in screenwriting, that’s all about set up so that when things happen in the film, it’s believable. Though granted, sometimes the set up can be cleverly given after the fact.

For instance I use in one scene, something that happened to me later and in another city. But it totally could have happened during the period of this story. It just fits. Years later, on the way with my first wife to see I think, "Looking for Mr. Goodbar", I outran (out drove really) a cop in Spokane, Washington and got completely away with it. In a 75 Monza Town Coupe no less.

I'm including that in the screenplay because it fits this story so well. Only instead of my wife, it’s the waitress. I do that in another scene where it was actually that same wife, only back when we were just dating (the scene in the Z28 by Mt. Rainier.).

And it’s better than just making something up. At least if I’m called on the carpet about it at some point, I can say that it did indeed happen, though not that week in the story, but it is still a true story and I did do that. I had that capability and I actually did it at some point.

I'm also compressing my friends Dave and Rod and stories of Rod and I and our gf's around that time. So what will be seen on screen is again, all true, just not in that particular scenario. In that case it actually happened a few months before hand. And some a year later. 

I just prefer that to simply inventing things.

I've had to tweak the ending, add in confrontations that never happened near the ending just to make it all fun and interesting. And sellable.

All that being said….

I did the research, I allowed it to gestate for a time, I got the greenlight to go forward, and I had to start typing. 

I wrote the treatment in MS Word 2013. I decided the treatment would be one page for every ten of the screenplay. That way I’m left with a 100 page screenplay and that, seldom works out. It’s just too easy to write a treatment that puts more dense information in it so that when you go to write the screenplay, you find that one sentence sometimes, not one page, can turn into ten pages. 

I see figure that there is about half a paragraph for a page so five paragraphs per page of treatment for every ten pages of screenplay. Or something like that. Treatments are a format all to themselves in a way. I found that once I started writing the screenplay however that the treatment allowed me to quickly write out in screenplay format.

For the screenplay, I’m using what I have used for many years now. Final Draft. I’m using version 8. I believe I am one version behind what is currently available. I’ve used Word years ago and I’ve tried using FrameMaker which was my go to software back in the 90s when I was a Sr Technical Writer. But now a days, Word does me just fine (or notepad which I use for quick notes) and Final Draft makes life much easier in screenplay format. 

I opened a file I had of Teenage Bodyguard from a year ago. I had written several pages having really no idea where to go with the story at that time. It was an interesting read and was mostly all about ME. Completely unusable. So I saved it for a future screenplay fully about ME and created a new file for this new orientation.

FADE IN….