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Friday, Jul 10, 2009
There is no self-help group out there for a screenwriter who wasted a decade of her life rewriting a straight-to-video mob farce.
Feb 23, 2005 | I stand in the center of my apartment. The room glows with the lowest-grade white copy paper. I have covered every surface available. First the coffee table, then the floor, my bed, finally my desk. For a brief moment, I conjure the image of myself as Lawrence of Arabia, staring out into the great, clean expanse of the desert. The image is fleeting because I am nowhere near as cool as Peter O'Toole and because these pages aren't simply grains of sand. They're too significant to form such a comparison. Each page on that floor marks a moment in my life. Each page, even in the smallest way, explains who I am today. As a whole, these pages symbolize a decade of work, at least 25 drafts of the very same script. They define most of my adult life. They are more me than anything else I can think of. And while I'm fishing through these pages trying to remember whether Sal is or is not wearing his toupee in the third act, I stop and look around and I think about what all of this means. I say, out loud, What have I done? Then I sit down on the floor, on top of the pages, and start to sob.
I doubt that I would have cried if I were sitting on a novel or an epic screenplay or even a hard-to-crack thriller. But they were the pages to a mob farce. There is no self-help group out there for people who have wasted a decade of their life doing that.
It goes something like this: Fran Maloni, a mousy bookkeeper, is trapped in indentured servitude to her brother-in-law, Jo Maloni, to pay off her late husband's gambling debts. Jo is a small-time gangster specializing in designer impostors (don't ask). After a raid in a clothing warehouse, Maloni thinks Fran murdered their three assailants and subsequently promotes her to hit man. Fran, unable to kill her assigned prey, kidnaps the men and, for lack of a better idea, drives them from New York to her estranged brother's house in Florida. As you can imagine, when the thugs in tow -- Donnie, Raymond and Sal -- take over the tidy home of the obsessive-compulsive brother, pure zaniness ensues. There has been much debate throughout the years as to whether the Florida drive was perhaps too unrealistic and, well, long. I liked Florida for the sheer contrast to New York. But I caved as I would many more times and wrote several drafts of the script where the drive is edited to the Hamptons. My general opinion was that if we were really concerned with realism, wasn't there an inherent problem with a mobster expecting a woman with no criminal credentials to single-handedly dispose of bodies twice her size?
I wrote the first draft of "Plan B" the summer after I turned 21. I am prone to comment that it would not have been possible without alcohol. I say this partly because it reads like I was drunk when I wrote it. The very first draft opens with a 10-page scene in which my bookkeeper heroine and her mob boss discuss interior design and fashion. No shootout, no car chase, not even a heated discussion, just a chat about drapes and dress socks over drinks and mixed nuts. The original draft also includes at least four extended scenes involving bathroom breaks, because I feared that people would find it unrealistic that my characters were able to make a 12-hour drive without peeing. (Many years later, when I voiced this concern to one of the producers, he told me that the peeing was implied and firmly suggested I stop talking about it.)
