In Go, would Todd have shot Ronna?
Thank you for writing one of my favorite movies. I saw Go at the theater when it was released and it has since been one of my favorite movies. One my favorite characters in one of my favorite movies is Todd Gaines.
There is one part that has always left me wondering. Was Todd really going to kill Ronna?
On one hand, Todd simply didn’t seem like a murderer. A sleazy drug dealer? Yes. Murderer? No.
On the other, in a deleted scene, he did pull a gun on Claire and left Ronna for dead after Adam and Zach hit her with the car.
Todd also didn’t come across as stupid, reckless or naive. It seems if he wanted to kill someone, he would have chosen a better place than a very public party where he likely would have been recognized by his clientele.
This has always been a dilemma to me. I was hoping you could shed some light on it for me.
– Thomas Lehman
Todd Gaines never shot anyone, and had no intention of killing Ronna. He wanted to scare her.
Look at events from his perspective: He’d been played for a fool by a cocky teenage girl. Beyond the sting to his ego, she’d cost him money. If word got around out how she’d outsmarted him, other customers might lose their healthy fear of him. He knew where Ronna would be, so he decided to go find her.
When their conversation was interrupted by a poorly-driven Miata, Gaines bolted. I’d consider that fight-or-flight, a self-preservation instinct. When they find a girl’s body, you don’t want to be the guy with a gun.
In conversations with Tim Olyphant before we shot the movie, we discussed that Gaines probably wasn’t a full-time drug dealer. Maybe he went to art school, or worked as a club promoter. For set decoration, we gave him an art table and a bunch of illustrations.
If you met Gaines on a rainy morning — like Claire later does — you might think he’s a pretty nice guy.
WGA election time again
WGAw members should now have received ballots for the Board election. It’s an important vote, because this Board will be setting the agenda for the next round of negotiations.
Reading through the seventeen candidate statements, I was happy to see such a quality crop of candidates, including many writers I know and admire. In making my choices, I’ll be looking for a balance of TV and feature writers at various levels of experience. A showrunner has a different perspective than a spec writer. Both are important.
Craig Mazin has good suggestions, including a reminder on why you may want to vote a short list:
“Hey, we’re supposed to vote for eight.” No…you can vote for up to eight. You don’t have to vote for eight. Indeed, if you really want these five to be elected, just vote for these five.
Voting for eight makes it less likely your top choices will make the cut.
I get nervous voting for slates. With the financial and creative issues facing the Guild, I’d rather see healthy debate than easy consensus.
In the non-candidate statements at the back of the book, you’ll see I endorsed two candidates: Mark Gunn and Aaron Mendelsohn. Both are excellent. Over the past few years, I’ve come to rely on each of them for honesty and pragmatism about WGA matters. I hope to see them returning to the board for another term.
Ballots are due September 16th.
Writing better dialogue
(You may prefer to watch it full-screen, or HD on Vimeo.)
I’ve been promising readers that I’d do more of these screenwriting scriptcasts. And I will. Today’s is nominally about dialogue, but I ended up switching a lot of stuff around in the scene in order to accommodate new — and reduced — dialogue.
Since this scene is much longer than most of these scriptcasts, I’m including before and after versions after the jump. (more…)
Hope springs eternal
I don’t know who “BigSugar” is, but he or she has been meeting some of the same development execs:
A few years back, I did an April Fool’s post about signing on the feature version of Goodnight, Moon. This year, I got pitched it. And died a little inside.
As I wrote about in Why must we have board-game movies?, it’s not that Hollywood is out of ideas. It’s that the industry is terrified of failure, and clings to the safety of recognizable titles. In difficult times, it’s comfort food.
Writing off the page
If you’re having a hard time finding a character’s voice, get him talking about something unrelated to the scene at hand.
Let your hero knock back a beer with his college roommate. Have your corporate spy meet-cute a potential suitor at a ski lodge. Pick situations that couldn’t possibly fit in your actual movie. You just want to get your character talking so that you can eavesdrop.
Open a new document and start typing.
It can be a monologue or a discussion between several characters, but go for pure dialogue, no scene description. Let it ramble on for one page or twenty. Again: you’ll never use this, so there’s no pressure to get it right or tight.
Just like a painter will often do sketches and studies before embarking on a major portrait, writing “off the page” lets you figure out what’s interesting about your character before you burden her with plot. It’s also fun. It’s the easy part of screenwriting you imagined before you actually sat down to do it.
Math advice for paranoid aliens
Story problems in math rarely overlap with story problems in screenwriting, but today I have one that I could use some help figuring out.
Far away on a distant planet, an intelligent but very paranoid species is constructing a series of terrestrial watchtowers to scan the heavens, making sure no space-traveling enemies sneak up on them.
You can think of these watchtowers as observatories, each one watching a 180-degree (half-sphere) swath of the sky. For this simplest version, you can ignore complications like atmospheric distortion or possible moons.
Question #1: For complete coverage, what is the minimum number of watchtowers they need to build?
Question #2: What would be a prudent number to build? If you want to introduce features like atmosphere or redundancy, go for it.
This planet’s new Grand Ga’loo was elected on a promise of putting the watchtowers into orbit. After his inauguration, he’s assembled a team of leading scientists to figure out a plan for doing so. The current thinking is to have the satellites be geo-stationary (staying fixed over one spot on the planet), but the Ga’loo can be persuaded otherwise.
Question #3: What is the minimum number of satellites needed?
Question #4: How does the number change if the orbit radius is increased? If the field of view is increased?
Your answers could help some paranoid aliens sleep better at night.
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