SCRIPT HISTORY

This screenplay began as a monologue – at the time what I thought was a theatrical monologue – while I was attending the Yale School of Drama back in the autumn of 1997. It was even published in a modified form in a volume of theatrical monologues for actors, “Audition Arsenal” by the respected theatre publisher Smith & Kraus.

However, I never actually could write a play to go with that monologue. Then, about 4 years ago, I wrote the scene that follows the monologue and realized “Limping Towards Babylon” wasn’t a play, but a movie.

But then another fallow period until the summer of 2014 when, to jump start more writing, I brought that monologue and scene into the writers and actors group in Los Angeles that I belong to, called Safehouse.

As so often happens in my writing, working with actors stimulates my imagination and the script began to organically grow.

While many actors worked with me over the months – too many to name and I am grateful to all of them – I chose this particular group of actors as the core, first because they seemed to fit the characters best and then eventually a synergy occurred where in subtle ways, I started to also mold the characters around  them.

We even began to rehearse outside the confines of  the Monday Safehouse meetings… when I augmented the cast with the addition of Adam J. Smith as the main antagonist.

While I continue to make minor adjustments, the script was completed on August of 2015, i.e. after about a year and a half of intensive writing, but technically, 18 years after first putting pen to paper (yes, back then I always did my first drafts in long hand).

THE WRITING PROCESS

I had one main thought in my head when I picked up the script after so many years:  I want to write a script with an ensemble script without any anti-heroes… actual good people who nonetheless don’t always do good things… in addition, considering the setting, the characters would be smart and talented… and the tone realistic but somewhat heightened.   (This could be called my core writing aesthetic,  even though I have a tendency to constantly experiment in multiple styles, genres and structures.)

Additionally, for some mysterious reason I had in my memory a French  sunny Romantic Comedy that had the heroes in a kind of modern Film Noir murder mystery.  (I can’t recall the title as I saw it some 25 years ago.)  And I also had made 3 trips to France, twice with one of the great loves of  my life.  These images combined with a German language TA whom in real life, I had a minor crush on at Yale (this is post-the previously mentioned relationship), and voila the character of Amandine was born.

While this is perhaps not the wisest thing to admit regarding a film script, as the process of writing was organic, I did not adhere to the strictures of a 3 act structure.  Instead, I wrote a 4 act screenplay and quite unintentionally had channeled my love of Chekhov into a very non-Russian, American setting.  Again, I realized this quite after the fact, but there are many parallels in Chekhov’s four great plays to elements in “Limping Towards Babylon.”