Okay, back to my Beaudry script. As I wrote a few days ago, the script began with my asking the question "What if a white guy and a black guy who share the same last name were to meet each other?" It was a moment I didn't experience, but the question itself was interesting--particularly if the name is rare enough that most people who bear it can be safely assumed to be closely connected, like Toombs. Why did I pick the name Beaudry? I liked the Frenchness of it--the history I concocted has the Beaudrys arriving during the Revolution with Lafayette--but I was also working downtown at the time, and the cheapo parking lot I found was bordered on one side by Beaudry Avenue. So there you go: a name. (Betcha dollars to doughnuts that the Bundys of Married With Children were named for the street in West L.A.)
But that was a couple years ago. Since then, the story has kept evolving, often in major ways. The first take on it was co-written with Marc Rosenbush and more directly reflected the circumstances of the idea's inception, as a couple of actors named Beaudry ended up together in the cast of a touring production of Beckett's Endgame. (That's how you can tell Marc was involved--Endgame is his obsession. But it's a great thing to be obsessed over, and the themes of the play worked rather well with our story.) Then I decided that I really needed to explore this family-related idea on my own, so I did the next version myself.
This time it became a tragedy, in which racial bias and simple misunderstandings cost a man his son and his soul. There were nice parts to this treatment, but I couldn't escape the feeling that variations on that story have already been told often enough, and that the central idea got shoved to the side for a traditional racial drama. "It should be a road movie," Marc suggested, picking up on one of the elements of our original attempt at the script, and it made some sense: get these two guys stuck in a car together, and you've got an inescapable situation where their problems would have to come to the fore.
Now, of course, there were structural problems: for a screenplay, you would really have to get these guys on the road together by the end of the first act, which really isn't a long time at all (only about twenty minutes), during which we had to be introduced to both characters, have them meet, establish their antagonism, then find a way to get them both in a car together, driving somewhere that would be relevant to the story. Not so easy; my first several tries at this took fully half the script just to get them together.
But films can be marvels of economy. I watched Jane Campion's Holy Smoke and was amazed at how quickly the first act moves along: Kate Winslet's character is introduced already on her trip to India, and her discovery of and interest in the cult happens in just a couple of minutes, almost entirely without dialogue. Inspired, I went back for another pass. The final crucial story element was the addition of a third character: a young black woman, Samuel's cousin, who would go on the road trip with the other two men and develop a difficult romantic relationship with the white character, Whit. (Why is he called Whit? I honestly can't remember; but I'm pretty sure it's not because the name is "White" with the e left off. I pretty much pick a name out of the air and go with the first one that comes to me.)
A script has a three-act structure; now I had a three-legged character structure as well. Things started to work, and I was able to get everyone on the road together by page 25. The most recent draft was critiqued by Marc and then by Buffie Groves when she was here, and as always Buffie was just brilliant. She pointed me toward an examination of Whit's need to find nobility in his life by claiming a famous ancestor; then Samuel and Elise, who are also connected to this famous ancestor, tell him what the man was really like, and Whit is forced to find his own nobility on his own terms.
So that's what I'm doing now, hoping very much that this will be the last major revision. But as Marc points out, every time I do one of these I hand it to people saying "Okay, now it's finished!" In this way, years have passed of constant disappointment because the damn thing never manages to be finished.
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