Uncle Walt Says Lay Off

I’m quoting from memory here, so don’t hold me to it, but in one of his many fantastic poems Walt Whitman wrote something like, “Better than to tell the best is to leave the best untold.”

This is kinda what’s occupying my writing thoughts lately.

I tried, as I was writing D Line (formerly known as “the Harlem rewrite”), to keep a strong filter up to snag any dialogue or action lines that were too heavy-handed. You don’t want to hand the reader everything -– and by reader, I really mean the director or actors who might ultimately get behind the script and want to work on it. But in day-to-day America, it seems people want everything handed to them, so you end up being inadvertently trained to give them everything.

I know the first couple scripts I wrote were way too heavy-handed –- telling everything.

But the moves I like best are the ones during which I have to do a little work. No easy answers. Lots of unsolved problems. Not too much unchecked, uninspired, way-too-easy redemption. I like the ones where you have questions running through your mind during the credits, and not just about why they needed that many stuntmen.

I was thinking about this last night, while watching The Illusionist –- which was okay, but it handed me everything. I like to do a little concluding of my own, a little critical thinking. And so naturally, I’m trying to write such a script.

But where to draw the line can be tricky. To be sure, subtlety and careful open-endedness can be easily misconstrued as idiocy and lack of clarity.

As I go back and reread D Line, making notes for the next draft, I wonder if I hit the balance. This is not just an artistic question –- though I hope for my soul's sake it's mainly so -– but a practical one, too.

If I’m going to use this script to try to break into Hollywood, get an agent, maybe a manger, try to sell it and work my ass off to help shepherd it into theaters, do I have to dumb things down a little? Spell things out? Hit a more conservative structure? Do people who have to read hundreds of scripts want to do a little work for a story?

I suppose the answer’s obvious, if I’m just trying to get into theaters. Then, the answer would be, yes, dumb it down, write the Robert McKee tripe in which the cookie cutter is clearly visible and the marketability shines through like a great glowing Golden Arches, and hope you hit the blockbuster fever-of-the-day at the right time.

But I also want to write movies that I’m proud of. Oh, I know. I’m naïve. Okay, in some ways, yes I am. But it’s true: I want to at least start by trying to write honest scripts about honest people with honestly messy lives.

If, after multiple failures, I end up jaded and writing thin plastic schlock to get a paycheck, okay. Fine. Ain’t too proud to beg.

But first I want to try not to tell the best, but to leave the best untold -– so that someone sitting in the theater will be able to find it on their own terms.