Nacimiento Road crosses the Santa Lucia Mountains in the southernmost parts of Monterey County. If you didn’t know the road is closed because of last winter’s storms you are now in the know— turn back and go another way. Speaking to a grizzled hard hatted flag waving traffic control worker I learned that it will be years before crews go up top the Santa Lucia’s to fix what last year’s monster atmospheric rivers have wrought.
I’m suffering through what I usually agonize over at this stage when devising a new plot— the screenwriter is trying to flesh out a story worth the effort.
Nacimiento is a Portuguese word, and since I’m focusing on bossa nova it turns out that this word, Nacimiento means— birth! In this instance I take it to mean the story that I am giving birth to. You gotta’ run with coincidence, feed these opportunities, the accidental interconnectivity matters.
What’s even more portentous Nacimiento Road intersects the Coast Highway at the exact fictionalized location of the story I am concocting.
I’m pouring over the bossa nova music of AntônioCarlos Jobim, Gil Gilberto, João Gilberto, Astrud Gilberto, Karrin Allyson, Luciana Souza, Marcos Amorim, and Vinicius Cantuária. I’ve got this idea to take the Brazilian musical rhythms into my plan, that the bossa and samba beats can be cut into the flow of the film. For example, you could cut a montage by beat pattern, a romantic scene could be equally as hooked into the beat of a song. This is not a musical, not yet, but more of a story with a highly integrated soundtrack.
I’ve got a restaurant, bar and hotel perched precariously near where the Coast Highway has been closed due to a slide. The slide is a real world fact, confirmed by Caltrans, bulldozers and road closures. The restaurant on the other hand is pure fiction. Our proprietor will be dismissive of the threat to his business, troubles from landslide are far off and distant. He behaves like Harry Truman at Mt. St. Helens.
With the road closed by the slide there is a musical group from Brazil traveling up the coast when their tour bus is halted by the road closure.
The bossa nova singer is the leader of the group, she will go into the restaurant see the empty stage and hatch her plan to stay and perform here along the Big Sur coast.
We already know what fate has in store for the roadside business, but before the fated demise (cliff gives way and club falls into the Pacific) takes place we will have a live show on stage with songs, and colorfully dressed samba dancers. The shows at the fated to collapse into the ocean venue will include an audience in part made of the repair crew brought in to get the road reopened.
I’d like the bossa nova singer to be wanting love, unable to find lasting love, will only love if it is for the whole ball of wax— the singer wants a family, a husband, a marriage— a marriage that will last a lifetime fueled by a love that will span eternity. I’ve spent time in my own marriage reflecting on the unbound nature of love, and want to create characters that speak of this power of the heart and its link to the cosmos. Collapsing cliffs, eternal love and fate seem somehow linked up in this story.
Our road repair crew may have one brave man who isn’t sure he has what it takes to love for eternity but nevertheless tries to overcome the bossa nova singers’ ambitious matrimonial goals she seeks. This great rising idealism, this unquenchable quest for the purest love, a boundless beyond carnal love should be a battle of the wits for the pair. I especially like a white hot passionate Brazilian that has no less than the greatest longest lasting love as her goal. Men have the same goals, they just can’t admit it. Men are just that one subway stop away from a more fully realized understanding of love.
I like the idea she is on a cultural visa and unaware that her father is the restaurant owner, that the singer is in fact having grown up in Brazil while unaware that she has rights as a US citizen. This will come out when her mother arrives and sees the father for the first time since having left for Brazil when the mother and club owner’s relationship misfires. Border Patrol is obviously keystone cops’ opportunity— wish me luck.
Climate change comedy will require some careful calibrating. One more piece to the puzzle is the tension created by the ongoing landslide. I’d like to have a bulldozer swept off the slide into the ocean. To keep it light probably the operator will need to escape with his life. We’ll see. Maybe that works.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned from writing my first screenplay. First, visualize— think through the storyline and the cinematic opportunities not in words of dialogue but by what an audience will see. Next, commit to the soundtrack. Main characters are obvious, they arrive as needed to build the plot, but the characters you can’t see from the start are the supporting players, they help push the central characters, these are your catalyst’s. Writing snappy dialogue is fantastic, we all want to experience elegant dialogue and character driven speech. It appears to me that a good script is packed with clever storytelling devices. Flashbacks, narrators, and montage are examples of devices you may or may not want to deploy in your story. Given the mission of writing climate change comedy there is the important job of making the comedy work as a comedy while making the problem of climate change bend but not break your characters.
You may or may have not noticed but last week it has been reported that our whole earth measured 2 degrees centigrade hotter than at any time since humans has been alive here. I’m of the mind to want to keep my audience focused and to remain drunk on comedy than to be sobered up by the climate problems we have been forced to confront. We need to be joyful warriors in our journey to saving our planet. The plot continues to thicken—
