Did a little outlining of an idea last night, and then followed that up with two pages on that personal screenplay I add to from time to time. On the latter, I am ruthlessly enforcing a lack of my usual discipline; I write scenes without knowing in what order they will appear, and often without much pre-planning as to which storyline they will move forward, if any.
This script will never sell on the spec market; I think I work on it to prove to myself that I can do something whose sole impetus is creative satisfaction. I want to let a feeling be my lighthouse, guiding me towards what needs to be written rather than what, consciously-calculated, solves the equation for x. I think, with all the words I throw at getting employed in Hollywood, that this sort of thing keeps me from stagnating. I do wonder how it will turn out, if I ever actually complete a draft.
In both it and the more mercenary idea I was brainstorming, there are rites of passage for teens and young adults involved. I’ve had a couple of conversations recently about the late John Hughes – one of the pillars of his legacy was that he took the tumult of that period seriously. Ferris Bueller’s Day Off may be a fantasy lark, but look past the cute hooky antics and realize it was also, just under the surface, a suicide intervention. Ferris has a girlfriend, but the love story in that movie is with his guy friend Cameron, whose cathartic, car-destroying rage, I am certain, saves his life.
When we’re adults we look back at the big questions we had as kids and dismiss them as stupid or naive; and that’s always the challenge for a writer trying to capture that and depict them honestly. Most movie and TV children and teens act like winsome and tiny grown-ups, and the insult of it grates. It’s not done out of malice, but out of fear – that audiences will react with the same embarrassment we feel in contemplating it.
What we have to remember is that young people are on a quest to discover themselves; and at that moment, it is the most important quest of their lives. They may ask questions that we grown-ups already answered – or, possibly, simply gave up asking – but we cannot let our cynicism about our own separation from that stage of life block us from getting to know these characters. Knowing them means looking at them with unguarded eyes, and it is the first step towards loving them.