What is this RED TOMATOES CROSSWALK filmmaking challenge for me?
by Elena Gorsheneva
Filmmaking course includes writing, producing, directing, shooting, editing and web-publishing my own movie. What’s so hard about it? I invited my friends Michael and Philomena to play this exciting game together with me. Here’s what I’ve written to them: “You know - I have some problem with English language. And I don’t very well know how the “real” American people live. Of course, I watch TV and listen to the radio and I don’t really need anything more than a keyboard for writing a story, but now it’s hard for me to express what I have to tell through the language of my characters”.
Was it a problem for me? Cheer up: the worst is yet to come (we say in Russia - it’s just flowers, wait for fruits to come). Everybody around me has a problem with my English. I can’t even find adequate words to describe the agony of Patrick Gleason, DFA screenwriting instructor - the best one! - after he offered me to talk about my proposed story. I was telling him and my classmates about soft humor with a touch of grotesque for contemporary audience, and for the lack of a word often illustrated it with a sketch on the fly, for twenty minutes. I talked and talked. They understood nothing: I did not tell the story itself. Oops! Thank you, Patrick, for your patience and understanding and help.
This yet untold story was subjected to transformation attempts many times even before DFA classes began. I added a few new characters, deleted a few old ones, added and deleted episodes, changed dialogues - and the story has withstood all that. After going through screenwriting classes I began to transform this story to conform to Hollywood standard using Campbell’s principles - and the story has survived again.
By the way, could someone please explain to me why we are all talking about Campbell? He was a good researcher with a great analytic mind, but pilgrims’ tradition was explored in world literature and theatre well before his works. All of us know journeys made by heroes named Sid and Faust, Dante and Hamlet, Don Quixote and Chichikov, etc, etc, take even Dorothy & company’s journey to Oz. Why people are talking only about Joseph and his monomyth? What, William’s or Miguel’s stories about hero’s journey are inferior? Oh stop it. “Don’t Make Me Think”, just go and tell your story.
Where from stories are coming and what is the seed of each story I don’t know. Philomena Zito and Michael Koy agreed to play this game with me. They were full of great ideas and I’ve used many of their suggestions. For example, the conflict of driver and pedestrian came from Michael. We had a long conversation about art, Gogol’s novel Dead Souls and Shakespeare’s tragedy King Lear with Russian writer Alexandr Molodtsov, and in these discussions Designer was bourn. But he started designing toilet bowls only after Philomena sent me a funny link.
Russian poet and composer Irina Belaya promoted a humble Vegetable Vendor into wise and noble Aztec god. Aliens and Grandmother came to me trough my drawings. When I write a story I don’t see its characters, but when I draw they jump from pencil to paper. I discussed this story with Maria Nikitina and other Russian friends. I told it over and over to my big family in US and Russia. Ilya Yudin, who has helped me on every step of the way, stopped eating red tomatoes for a while. I cut, pasted and rewrote - and the story did not change, it only became clearer. It I can’t understand this myself, but somehow all this contributed to the story without changing its core - how I see “a contemporary American story”.
To be continued.