ABOUT MY STATUS AND GOAL AS A SCREENWRITER I'm an unproduced screenwriter who loves creating emotional worlds that feature acts of heroism and redemption and which foster family and human values in the face of tragedy, chaos and evil.
ABOUT MY ONCE YOUNG SCREENPLAY Once Young combines two separate screenplays: Days Come By and Days Come By, Take 2. Days Come By, Take 2 is not a sequel but a retelling. By melding the two screenplays, Once Young tells a fuller and edgier story. Once Young is the closest any of my screenplays has come to possibly being called a "saga": it follows the life of Tracy from when she's six till 28, though the widest coverage is when she is an 18 year old.
WHY THE TITLE? The title, Once Young, clues potential audiences to the film's primary concern: young people. But the title may have ambivalence. It is derivative from two longer titles: Once When We Were Young and Only Once Are We Young. Both titles are true to story. Nothing can capture late teenage-hood than having to live through it – and we only live through it once – to experience the joys and tribulations of first love, possibly true love, and the ups and of wrestling with what maturity may look like. We see a hint of this in Once Young's Darling Harbour sequence when Tracy, reeling from momentarily having being dumped, reaches out to strangers as if to create a network to future-cushion emotional shocks. In meeting these "street" people, she genuinely wishes to know them, to connect to them – to emotionally bond. "Bond" ... well, not so much in the screenplay, but certainly in the novel on which Once Young is based.
SCREENPLAY VS THE NOVEL What I explore in my unfinished novel (Days Come To) is Tracy's credo: once she emotionally bonds with someone the thought of that bond being cut asunder terrifies her. This aspect of her personality I could not develop in a screenplay already 190-pages long. In the screenplay, Tracy reaches out to "street" people but she falls short of emotionally bonding with any of them. In the novel, it's the opposite: many of the people she meets she bonds. Several characters exploit Tracy's fear. Not in the screenplay, of course: in the screenplay she meets Norelle who shares with Tracy being victims of male violence, but it ends there. In the novel, however, Tracy pursues an ongoing emotional connection with Norelle, a bonding Tracy will not forego under almost any circumstance. It's natural, however, when Norelle falls in love with Tracy, who, due to time-pressures, limits contact to phone conversations, that Norelle feigns cutting off their friendship to pressure Tracy for a date. Instantly, Tracy, to Norelle's surprise, begs for a meeting. Again, Tracy's fear is triggered by Colbert, who, in the screenplay, meets Tracy as a busker, and though Tracy is moved by his songs and is on the verge of making an emotional connection – it doesn't happen. However, in the novel, it does. Colbert falls in love with Tracy as he's never been in love before. He, however, suffers long periods of neglect by Tracy, who is spending time with George and others; he also suffers from her presence because even though Tracy is halfway to falling in love with him, she doesn't go over the precipice to be in love (in the novel, it's clear why: Tracy will not betray George, abhorring her mother's marital betrayal of her father). Out of frustration and long-standing emotional pain, Colbert walks away from Tracy. As expected, Tracy is alarmed and she expresses her excruciating dilemma to him. Seeing her pain, he compromises. The thing is when a story is based on a long novel and on two screenplays – all rolled into one screenplay – choices/cuts have to be made. Michael, Norelle and Colbert's desire for Tracy I've reduced to one: Michael's. It's a gamble. I'm hoping because Michael is the most conniving of the three that his actions provide tension and plot intricacies. In the novel, that many people (not just the three mentioned above) vie with each other for Tracy's attention causes real problems for her in terms of "time-management", the pressure being so great that George is forced to give relief by allowing Tracy to meet her emotional obligations to these others, putting himself in peril of losing her to the more unscrupulous or desperate among them – just another subject-matter the novel-form is perfectly suited to explore but which I cannot think how to weave into the current screenplay.
MAGICAL REALITY I'm one of those writers who at the drop of a hat will interpolate a scene of magical reality (eg, George's mother and father appear from their graves to counsel their disturbed son). Why I'm not afraid to do so is because all my stories are fantasies pretending to be reality. Scenes of magical reality in this respect are honest: they don't pretend to be anything but true moments of make-believe.
REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE (1955) Like James Dean's Rebel Without a Cause (1955), Once Young is about teen angst. Where Rebel is very much 1950s middle-class America, Once Young is very 21st-century cross-class Australia. While teenagers Jim and Judy in Rebel attempt to escape from their tightly knit – suffocating – families, the parent-less teenagers in Once Young try to put together a family of their own, the kind Rebel’s neglected Plato wishes to have for himself – with Jim and Judy. Tracy is less like Judy than more. Tracy is very modern, very today. She is academically successful, but lacks life-experiences. Rather than make things happen, with only a few exceptions Tracy allows things to happen to her and events to come to her. But she does come close to realising that the meaning of life and of love and the motivations in the minds of others – and perhaps self – can only be guessed because ultimately they are either unknowable or inexplicable.
SHAKESPEARE'S ROMEO AND JULIET George loves reading Shakespeare's King Lear. It is obvious why when we understand his life-situation. But Once Young also parallels somewhat Romeo and Juliet: Tracy, thinking George has suicided, attempts same, but unlike in Shakespeare's tragedy, both are saved and live happily ever after.
HOW I WRITE Please note that I did not consciously write Once Young as a counterpoint to Rebel Without a Cause, nor did I consciously write the screenplay to reflect Romeo and Juliet. My comments regarding both are afterthoughts. Only after I've completed several drafts of the novel did I realise likeness to the 1955 film and Shakespeare's play. I cannot write to a theme nor do I ever wish my characters to become thematic constructs nor can I write based on being inspired by another writer's work. Whether my characters are composites or total inventions, they are organic – to me. And in being so, they have momentum that makes writing their dialogue and actions, at least in the first draft, appear easy. It's as if I become a medium or conduit through which the characters "tell" their stories. All the screenplays I've written have had that quality in the writing of them. Currently I have five scripts in the works, three of which I've started writing: however, I'm unable at this stage to finish their first drafts because that quality is missing. Because it's missing, I find writing, for example, dialogue hit and miss: I lack that emanating concept that becomes intuition that directs the way a dialogue should be written. Without concept-cum-intuition, writing dialogue is tedious and unconvincing, non-directional and has the appearance of contrivance. It's hard to sustain a story in this manner, unless perhaps one is a hack (*). I'm not a professional writer: I cannot see myself writing a story to the specifications of others or stories based on planned-out but non-organic characters. In the wings I have five stories to tell and I'm hoping someday, somehow, I can find that quality, that dynamic, to be able to finish writing their first drafts. *(Please note: my understanding of "hack" has a positive element: hacks, in the context above, are writers who have reached heights of professionalism, who have skill-sets and a work-ethic that enable them to meet, often successfully, current market demands).
ABOUT MY NARRATING STYLE As narrator I wish to be the teller of a story, not to appear as a participant in the story. I write paragraphs as an impartial describer of actions and settings. The writing may appear clinical, even to some as cold, certainly distant. To neutralise language, I first use formal language (eg, “it is” for “it’s” and “is not” for “isn’t”) and, second, I rid as best as I can emotive words. In White Days, for example, I refer to the tiger as "it" not "he". Appears clinical, yes, but it hides how deeply I felt for the tiger’s dilemma and eventual demise. I judge the success of my writing when, despite the use of neutralised language, readers feel the emotions I feel or more.
WHY ALLOW 190 PAGES? Two previous screenplays, White Days and Counterchance were reduced from c110 pages to c90 pages. I made it my goal for them to be less taxing on the patience of audiences. However, I'm not prepared to do same for Once Young. Though three-hours long in film-time, I believe it's self-sustaining. It taps into life-experiences of audiences. For example, in one of the Darling Harbour scenes, Tracy approaches a distraught 16-year-old goth girl to provide emotional support but is hit for her troubles because to the goth girl Tracy represents the kind of beautiful girl who's taken the goth girl's boyfriend away. How many late-teen girls in the audience have lost boyfriends to other girls for no better reason than they're prettier and who then may sympathise with the goth girl's distressed reaction to Tracy's out-reach? Once Young has many-upon-many other entry points for audience-engagement throughout its 190 pages.
FILM MALAISE Though I can't speak for, nor may I be in a position perhaps to speak to, producers, I would nonetheless like to say this: in the present climate, where sequels, remakes and Marvel films are the go in Hollywood for safe commercial successes, a three-hour teenage-based film may just break the cycle and forge a new way to commercial success. If I may, I would suggest to producers to look at Rebel Without a Cause: its impact broke the mould of what Hollywood films looked like up to 1955. I wish to make it clear I'm not saying Once Young is destined to be as impactful as Rebel has been, only to say soon the time will come when cinema-goers will tire of the current fare and when that time arrives it's the producers who have taken preparatory steps to fill the vacuum with new fare who may be rewarded with unexpected commercial success and critical acclaim. I do believe sensibilities change over time and often do so in barely noticeable ways. The example of this is the Harry Potter novels. It's legend now that readers from about 13 publishing houses rejected the first volume. They had failed to detect a shift in tastes and a newly emergent reading public. The most I can say for Once Young is that I think it does appeal to a nascent shift in sensibilities, to a new kind of, but currently latent, young audience with a will to return to innocence.
CONCLUSION At over three hours in filmic time, Once Young is prohibitively long. However, I believe there are enough re-energising points in the story-telling to maintain audience-interest. Though the screenplay is based on my novel, their emphases are different. For one, the novel emphasises Tracy's emotional dependence on others. I also believe Once Young can be fitted into the evolution/history of film as an accidental counterpoint to Rebel Without a Cause and a possible flow-on from Romeo and Juliet. In the end, it's all in the fun and challenges of rendering collectively and creatively a screenplay into film. Happy reading.
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