Ten Manipulations: Vamping to the End

I sent Ernest an email asking what the deal is. He sent me an email back this morning, saying he's been busy with end-of-term schoolwork and he would call me. Still waiting for that call...

Meanwhile, made some very minor progress on the script. The first half is getting to the point where there's little more I can do. The back half is still a bloody mess. I'm going to attempt surgery once again tonight.

Since we almost had an ending to this project -- an act one crisis in hindsight, I hope -- maybe it's time to talk about them. Endings. In divising the story, we considered and agreed not to force all the characters together at Sand's art show or with some natural disaster. Instead we wanted to take advantage of having multiple storylines to create what Robert McKee would call an 'ironic' ending. The means just that it ends both bad and good. Some characters come out okay, some don't. Plus, in this story, some don't really end at all. Because life goes on. Life doesn't tie up in a neat ribbon ala Love Actually.

Not to knock Richard Curtis, the writer/director of Love Actually (I love Black Adder), but he was making an entirely different kind of movie. Ten Manipulations is about the artful manipulation of reality, and without a texture of documentary reality the more dramatic and coincidental moments just aren't plausible.

So how to improve the ending without showing the hands of the writer pushing the characters together? How to be both satisfying and slightly ambiguous? It has been done before, but it's a hard sell, especially from the page. You're relying on the nuances of the reader's imagination. What solution?

It must needs be thematic. Clearly CHARLIE and his philosophy of art are the foil for the thematic elements of manipulations and art and reality and what it means to grow up. Problem is, CHARLIE's main conflict is the trouble he's having reconciling all these issues with himself. Is it bullshit to give him an epiphany, the sort of thing that rarely happens and never with people who are sound of mind? Charlie is a failed artist -- and yet this movie must not fail as art (or entertainment). All that inner conflict -- not just in Charlie but me also -- is a bitch to dramatize and its ultimate success will be in finding a real film actor who can suggest it via closeups and a director who understands how and where to find those closeups.

But getting something on the page that we can all get behind, that we know will make a killer film story, beyond what we already had. Well that's an uphill war with even steeper skirmishes.

Yeah. No one said this would be easy. But why must it be so consistently difficult?