The Wearing of the Green

A happy and safe Saint Patrick's Day to you all.

All of my grandparents were Irish; my father's father was Irish-German, the rest full-on Irish. I'm proud of my heritage, but there's a lot about their lives that I don't know. My father and his own father were not close and had much left to reconcile when my father died before his own, my father's mother was long dead when I was born. I knew my mother's parents while growing up, trundling into Manhattan to visit their apartment, which in memory seems windowless and dim. Somewhere in my mother's house, there's a Polaroid of some of us kids at Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade in the late 60's, hauled out one Thanksgiving day years later as proof that I had indeed been brought to see the parade so could I please get over myself and help set the table.

My mother's father died when I was young, and my memory of his death isn't so much about him as it is my first memory of a wake, dark wooden rooms and leather couches, sitting with my sister as my mother moved around the room. My mother's mother came to live with us in the late 70's, bringing with her my first recollections of stories from her homeland, her brother Paddy, my mother's cousins, some of them my age. Photos of faces with familiar features, distant and impossibly green landscapes, thick grass you'd lie down into and sink out of sight.

My own celebration of St. Patrick's Day will have to be brief today as I'll be working. I plan on scouting out at least a corned-beef Reuben to get my fix (hey, sauerkraut counts as cabbage) at lunch, I'll toast my predecessors with a bottle of ale when I get home late tonight. Maybe I'll bring my DVD of The Quiet Man with me to work, grab a few minutes of Barry Fitzgerald to tide me over.

Last night was spent thinking about my ancestry, this blog and a script I was reviewing for Zoetrope. Now that it is out of its experimental phase, I showed this blog to my wife for the first time, and thankfully, she likes it. What I spent a good portion of the evening on was the Zoetrope script, and the writer had tackled a pretty big subject: the ethical corruption of TV journalism. Not the most original of topics, we've had 15 Minutes lately dealing with tabloid TV head-on, sleazy TV journos have been stereotypical tertiary characters for a while, and we all remember and admire Network for its prophetic warnings about the power of television. While the author of the Zoetrope script had the basics of an interesting premise, the story was threadbare, the characters two-dimensional and unoriginal and the dialogue painfully on-the-nose.

But the formatting was perfect.

So I'm wondering about the reaction other Zoetrope readers have had to the script, considering the climate there as outlined by Scott the Reader a couple of weeks ago. The writer's name was one I recognized from a few posts in a private office I belong to, so I thought I was getting a script from one of the more experienced writers, but this just reads like a first-ever-completed script. No one could fault the look of the pages, the sluglines are fine, the descriptions four lines or less...But it reads badly, so badly that I feel I couldn't encourage the writer too much to keep trying because I can't be sure this is something he should be trying. Self-recognition is part of what this blog is about, the exploration of whether being a professional screenwriter (both fiscally and in the recent John August speech sense) is something I can achieve. I'd no sooner assume I could be a writer as I would assume I could be an Olympic snowboarder without having at least some talent for it to start with before training myself, yet as has been explored elsewhere, one can assume they can write a screenplay if they have the right tools and obey the format, but maybe can't be honest with themselves about their level of talent for it. It's a shame, I feel I'd be justified in telling the writers of some scripts I've read at Zoetrope that they need to explore their talent privately a few years or hang it up, yet if you present that opinion there, you are vilified. Apparently to some folk, a workshop environment means never having to say, "You stink."

The very first script I read there was a monstrosity titled "Casablanca On The Moon", was mostly prose without dialogue and even had parenthetical passages describing how the writer would eventually flesh out portions of the script based on feedback to the ideas he presented in said passages. In between all that were some of the most sadistic descriptions of violence on characters that weren't even involved in the rest of the script. And yes, there was a character named Rick, rebels came to his bar on the moon, but the writer was careful to point out the differences between his script and the film Casablanca by saying things like, "Here's where I'm going in a different direction---HERE WE GO!" and the script veered off into depictions of mass crucifixion, beatings and fascism. I can't tell you how it ends, not because I didn't finish, but because the writer didn't finish, choosing instead to explain he planned on collecting suggestions from reviewers on how to proceed from there. Amazing.

I have to admit, I'm not the most frequent visitor to Zoetrope. I tend to visit a few months every two years. The atmosphere there now is the worst I've seen, even worse than the early years when some of the most vocal participants were thinking they could sell their first script through the site itself to Coppola directly. I'd revisited to review the one more script I needed to submit one of my own for review, but my heart isn't in it. The last two submissions got some helpful reviews and good numbers, but to get those reviews I was song-and-dancing my script all over the main board. The newbie reviews I got were four lines about the first ten pages and then one of them even packed out the rest of his review with a cut-and-paste quote from Dave Trottier on proper formatting to show appreciation to me on having formatted correctly. Until this point I'd thought I could find good reviewers by building a name for myself through networking, but now that a name I trusted as being a sensible member has laid an egg, I'm unsure I can even get the limited amount of good feedback I'd been hoping for among the requisite newbie reviews.

I'll give it some time, but I think I just gave up on Zoetrope. I'm proud to be Irish, but I've had enough of the green.