I’ve made many submissions to film funding bodies over the years. And despite my many successes (the scripts rocked) I have had many failures (none got funded). This is despite being the world’s finest screenwriter according to many sources. These sources don’t include my parents, strangely, but do include (exclusively) these two teenage guys who ask me to buy beer for them most weekends.
To demonstrate the pathological craziness of the paper-pushers who make funding decisions, here are synopses of some of my best short film scripts. You don’t get the whole thing because I don’t want anyone to learn how to steal my nuance. Just read and dream about what could have been.
Winker
Winker is a beautiful script about an outsider, and how satisfying it is when outsiders get ironic revenge on their tormentors. Winker is a guy who can’t stop winking. He’s been to every doctor, but it doesn’t help. A psychologist says he winks all the time because he doesn’t take the world seriously. Winker tries to take the world seriously by going to funerals, but he can’t stop winking and people grow angry. He goes to the beach to recover, but winks at some surfer’s girlfriends and gets beaten up.
When he enters a "Win a Million Dollars For Winking Really Fast" contest the world is sorry there were so mean to him. He uses the money to build a giant laser, and uses it to give himself laser eye surgery and then blow up the moon. This ruins the waves for all those surfers who beat him up, and gets him an ironic revenge; that of a man with an involuntary eye twitch against the buff bronzed beach bimbos who tormented him
Man Tortured by Randy Cat
When Winker failed to get funding I realised I may have been being too subtle. And maybe not specifically Kiwi enough. Kiwis like clean & green crap, so I thought I’d write an environmental fable. I called this Man Tortured by Randy Cat.
A little background. Cats are not native to New Zealand. They were introduced for, I assume, the amusement of the white man. Cats often eat native birds. The white man has also been responsible for the death of native birds. Hence, the native birds are our heroes, the white man our villain, and the cat the tool of our telling.
The script opens with a man playing with a cat for his amusement in front of a crowd of native birds. But when the amusement turns to violence, the man gets a taste of the destruction he has wrought our feathered neighbours. The man them starts fetishising the native birds, dressing tui in tight fitting safari suits with a golden codpieces, and putting kiwi in g-strings. But this just makes the cat randy, and the film ends on the man being raped by the randy cat as the native birds fling off their fetish gear.
But again, rejection.
The Road to Karori
I took that rejection pretty damn hard, it made me think that maybe these metaphoric stories aren’t really my thing. Lighten up, tone down, that’s what I need to do. A charming romp was called for. Combined with the old axiom "write what you know!!!" I decided to ditch the cat rapists and eye disorders of which I had little true knowledge.
The Road to Karori was about my attempt to walk with my dog to Karori to meet a friend. Did I mention my dog could talk? On the way we run into humorous situations; a woman who's had her pants stolen by bees, a gang of youths looking for a rare orchid with which to make medicine for their dingo, and a batty old woman who thinks I’ve stolen her voice.
Out of this cornucopia of comedy I end up arrested and in front of a judge for treason. But my dog, he gives the most goddamn beautiful summation you’ve ever heard. I get off, my dog gets named King, and the pantless woman comes out and sings a rendition of Rule Brittania.
But, again, turned down. "It makes a distinct lack of sense." "Pointless." "It gets marks for not being predictable, but who’d want to predict this?" Such cutting comments, such brutality. My detour into comedy thwarted, I was back to square one.
Muffins
At this point I was really getting confused. "What do these people want?" I asked myself. "How can I please them?" Then it struck me. These committees are probably made up of women. Women like little kids, and they especially like to pretend that their kids look up to them. With this flash of inspiration I decided to write a script about a little boy who dreams of learning his mother’s tricks of the kitchen.
While the whole story was a complete, improbable lie, I forged ahead. I decided the boy loved his mother’s muffins so much (a lie, kids hate muffins) that he wanted to know how to make them (A lie, kids prefer crap bought from stores). So this boy parks himself on the kitchen stool and listens to his mother blab on about the secret family recipe. Each ingredient has some special story about it. For example, one grandmother’s first boyfriend went to World War I and died. At their last meeting he had given her a bouquet of flowers, and she added one of them to the family muffin recipe. That sort of unbearable crap.
Okay, this one did get funding approval. But I had to turn it down, I couldn't live with the ignominity of it. I tried selling out, but wasn't truly myself I was selling. I now feel like my true self is the Undiscovered Country without a Captain Kirk on the horizon.
But I just need to remember that the business of writing is the business of rejection. I’m sure I have shown that I have the talent.
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