Looking for material that I wasn’t ashamed of to submit the Student Upstart Films script contest, I stumbled upon something that I hadn’t thought about in over a year:

(Click for a PDF of the 7 page script)

It’s a play called Ms. Perkins that I wrote and got performed at the Horizon Theatre in Atlanta as part of a series of 10 minute plays put on by The Process Theatre Company.

I learned a whole lot in Atlanta about theatre two summers ago while we were doing Because the Boss Said So. I’d actually written the script in Orlando specifically for the Process Theatre show and it was performed about 5 days later while I was in Atlanta by a writer/actor (Topher Payne) who absolutely nailed the part. That’s the first of many pros of theatre over film: Writing something and getting it filmed and screened in 5 days is almost impossible, but that happens in theatre all the time.

Just reading the script — even though I think it still holds up pretty well for being a year and a half old — it’s garbage compared to what it was like seeing it actually performed live by the right person. Even if I did end up turning it into a movie with Upstart, it wouldn’t be the same at all.

First there are the technical problems: In a movie, it’s difficult to pull off the conceit that the audience takes the role of the students in the classroom. Moreso though, it’s the affective quality of the stage versus the ineffective qualities bad student films.

There’s something about being there in the room and seeing an audience full of everyone from little kids to senior citizens laugh exactly when they’re supposed to while something is happening right in front of them. There’s no worrying about bad lighting or sound quality distracting people from what’s happening. The staging seemed so easy because everything is assumed in the theatre: One desk, a hardcover copy of Anna Karenina, some papers, and two school desks were everything the director needed to tell the story, so they were the only things on stage. The rest was up to the performance.

That entire week gave me a pretty thorough appreciation of actors and good acting which they don’t really seem to teach student filmmakers at all in any of the departments at UF. At least according to observational evidence from my Electronic Field Production class, I think most people put a lot of time into thinking about shots but very little time thinking about the people they’re putting in those shots or what those people should be doing.

As much as I actually made a point of writing excessive blocking into the script, it was just so much more dynamic when it was staged because it was directed by someone other than myself. I would’ve just stuck completely by the script, so I was surprised more than once by what it actually “looked like” on stage. I think that was the point that I realized that I was one of those bad filmmakers who thought about everything except for actors, too.

Also, another thing that really weirded me out is how similar this script is to stuff that I’m writing now — like I’ve only have one idea that I just keep redo-ing over-and-over. There’s definitely a recurring thread in my monologues: Self-important characters whose facades are eventually crumble after they verbalize their vulnerabilities.

I wasn’t prepared at all when — over a year later after I wrote and then completely forgot about this — I almost wrote this exact same thing for another project (that I’m doing with Kamphey called Please Respond). Of course there were different characters and a different plot-line, but the whole arc was the same.

All that said, I would like to see how this fares against the other scripts that get submitted. Maybe it’ll get beat out by something with a foot chase scene.