MURDER YOUR DARLINGS

by Gina Sestak

"Murder your darlings."  We've heard that command before.  It generally refers to slaughtering our favorite words and phrases.  I'm using it in a different sense today.  I'm talking about killing off our characters.

Don't think for a minute this is easy.  Characters are real to us.  They live within our minds, offer guidance on our plots, let us know their innermost desires.  Killing them can be traumatic for the writer.

Let me back up a little and explain why I'm writing about this on a rainy Monday morning.  I'm not in the process of disposing of anyone in my WIP, thank goodness.  That's hard enough.  No.  Today I'm finishing up another kind of project.

I've mentioned before that I've been taking classes at Pittsburgh Filmmakers.  I've just completed a short course on Screenplay Character Development and am in the process of finishing up the final project for Advanced Acting for the Camera.   That's where the murdering comes in.

Let me back up even further.  Last year I took an Acting for the Camera class.  It was a horrifying experience, not only because I look so utterly dreadful on screen, but because the camera picks up and emphasizes every flaw in a performance, no matter how minor.  It's frightening to watch.  That class required a final on-screen monologue, lifted from a real movie.  The idea wasn't to imitate the actor who'd originally done the scene, but to do it as if you had been cast in the part.  I chose to take my scene from Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, the section where the old witch (played brilliantly by Geraldine McEwan in the original) warns the Sheriff of Nottingham about what the future might hold and tells him the truth about his background.   It worked out fine.  I got an "A" in the class.

For the present class, students were required to pick a particular actor to study.   Of course, as those of you who have been reading my posts about my Bollywood addiction might suspect, my first choice was Shah Rukh Khan.

The instructor wouldn't let me use him.  His films aren't in English, for one thing, although he does have some spectacular monologues in Hindi.  I had to find somebody else.  I thought about another favorite, Alan Rickman,

but he doesn't have that many monologues to choose from and I didn't think I could get away with spending three minutes on screen looking shifty-eyed.   I finally settled on Emma Thompson.

Which brings me back to the topic of this post.  The obvious choice of monologue would have been the scene from Sense and Sensibility when Elinor reveals to Marianne that she really does have feelings. I didn't make the obvious choice because another scene was calling out to me, a scene from Stranger Than Fiction.  Has everybody seen that film?  It's brilliant.  Emma Thompson plays a writer, Karen Eiffel, who ---   But let's just watch the trailer:

See the connection?  For my final project, I will be performing a monologue about trying to figure out the best way to kill off Harold Crick, a scene we can all identify with.

Wish me luck, okay?

LIES FLAT AND IN PERFECT ALIGNMENT

by Gina Sestak

[I'm running into problems inserting photographs -- pretend that the big square, above, that will not show the photo or permit me to delete it isn't there. I'm putting the photos in as links, below, rather than stay up all night cussing.]

"Lies flat and in perfect alignment." Those words used to appear on the spiral notebooks I used in high school, but I came to apply them to the desired appearance of my hair. It was the 60s, after all, and most of us wanted our hair to be long and straight, like Peggy Lipton on Mod Squad. To my mother's despair, I was born with naturally straight hair. I could achieve that look without even having to iron it, as so many others did.

Perfect alignment seems to be a thing of the past, at least when applied to the hair of characters in movies. I was noticing that this weekend, while watching Bottle Shock. This is a beautifully photographed film; the opening scene of vineyards is worth the price of admission even if you don't particularly care about wine or international rivalries. Chris Pine's hair, though, is badly in need of a comb. In fact, another character asks him if he has a comb. That character, Steven Spurrier, is played by my favorite actor, Alan Rickman, who looks as if he could use a comb himself, and a razor. Maybe he's just gunshy after what happened to Judge Turpin in Sweeney Todd.

Speaking of Sweeney Todd, the Oscar for messiest hair should definitely go to Helena Bonham Carter, both as Mrs. Lovett and as Bellatrix Lestrange.


What do you think? Should these rich and famous actors comb their hair?

THERE IS NO JUSTIFICATION FOR CRUELTY

by Gina Sestak

The first time I killed a character, I felt terrible. He was a minor character I had created solely to die in battle. Since my protagonist would come through the fray unscathed, I thought this minor character's death would make the scene seem real. Still, my gut reaction was to try to save him. I wanted to destroy those foul attackers who had set upon this young man with their swords and short, sharp knives. I didn't. The story really needed him to die a horrible death.

Which brings me to my topic for today: where should we draw the line in our treatment of fictional characters?

The title of this piece is a quote from a 1991 film, Closet Land, written and directed by Rhada Bharadwaj. There are only two characters in Closet Land, a writer (Madeleine Stowe) who is suspected of planting subversive ideas in her children's books, and an interrogator (Alan Rickman) who, for 90 minutes, questions, manipulates, abuses, threatens, and tortures her in an effort to obtain a signed confession. It's a hard film to watch.

So why watch it? Amnesty International supported the film as a strong statement about the condition of political prisoners. One of the executive producers was Ron Howard -- that's right, Opie. And the two actors involved did such wonderful jobs of portraying the characters that it's difficult, even after the film ends, not to admire her and despise him. You want to run right out and put an end to all injustice in the world. The film made a point.

And maybe that's the key. It is often necessary to portray extremes of cruelty just to get a point across and, to advance the story, we sometimes do terrible things to our fictional characters -- or rather, we allow our fictional characters to do terrible things to one another.

Where do you draw the line? When does it stop being a compelling read and start becoming sado porn? That is the question for the day: how do you handle cruelty in your writing?

By the way, the complete quote is:

Victim: Your aim is to debase and humiliate a human being. There is no justification for cruelty.
Interrogator: Our aim is to rid society of negative influences. The end justifies the use of certain unorthodox means.

The Interrogator's line sounds like something out of a White House memo, doesn't it? Perhaps all world leaders should be required to write "There is no justification for cruelty" on the blackboard a few hundred thousand times, until the message sinks in.