With your humble story editor on the road this week, we’ll be skipping our usual weekly routine here at the Script Project. There will be no pages read or added, no words of wisdom spouted, and no t-shirt awarded until after next weekend’s August 10 deadline.
Meantime, here are some things to think about as you use all that extra time to get your next submission together:
* Napolitano needs a plan.
For a good part of this script, our protagonist has been reactive. Things have happened to him, and he’s dealt with them in a clever or amusing way.
That’s been fine for this draft, but the story has worked best when Napolitano took matters into his own hands -- like when he confronted Prefect Duvane the first time, or when he broke into Rachel’s guest house to collect evidence.
In our next pages, when the mayor emerges from hiding in the subway tunnel, he will have thousands of cops and reporters on his tail, he’ll be recognizable to the whole city, and he’ll have no time to waste before he moves decisively to set things right.
It’s up to you to decide what those moves will be. But this is a huge turning point in the script, so give it some thought, and make it good.
* Is Napolitano really Rachel’s father? If she is, it’s news to him. (If he knew, he would have acted differently when she tried to seduce him.)
We need to clear this up once pretty soon so we can use it for the story’s climax. It would be great if he found out the news in an interesting way -- other than being told by Rachel or Celeste. It might even be worth dedicating most of an entire submission to setting up and paying off this discovery.
* What’s the trade-off? In noir, the hero usually wins some sort of Pyrrhic victory. He gets his subway but loses the girl. He rescues the girl but loses his freedom. He fights for his freedom, but at some unforeseen great cost.
Napolitano needs to learn a painful lesson about where the power really lies in this town and what lines he should never have crossed to wield it. Try to be mindful of the big picture as we set up the script’s last 15-20 pages.
One last note: I’ll be interviewed when I get back, along with contributor Mike Breiburg, for a feature on the Script Project, tentatively scheduled to air Monday, Aug. 11 on KCAL-TV, Channel 9.
If I don’t say or do anything particularly embarrassing, I’ll keep you posted.
