anyone need a drink? :: SimplyScripts Screenwriting Discussion Board

Hey, just joined the board, figured I would introduce myself, tell my tale. I promise to lie only once!

Once upon a time, in a land called Boston, I found myself in an office job. I sat in my cubicle, day after day, consuming coffee by the gallon, watching the sunset through the tinted glass windows. The job didn’t pay well, and truth be told I wasn’t very good at it, though I tried.

In college, I had worked at a neighborhood dive bar, which had a couple of college nights, and happened to be known as one of the toughest bars in the city. Though I grew up in a poor, blue collar town, and was in my share of scrapes, unfortunately I lost more than I won, so I was no tough guy. But I liked the people at the bar, and the challenge of the job, and the cash in my pocket. So I loved the job.

So I found myself going back, first just for a shift on weekends, but eventually full time as I left my office job. What started out as a transition while I figured out something to do became a life path. At some point I determined I would like to own my own place.

Odds were stacked against this. No one in my family had money. I saved tips, looked for opportunities, and several years later, by some miracle I pulled it off. With a partner, I bought a beat up old place and turned it into the top bar in the city, which it stayed for 6 or 7 years. That’s when the wheels started to come off.

Actually they kind of started to come off before that. Running the bar was all consuming. We had two full bars in the place, a thousand or more guests on weekends, and I DJ’d, tended bar, bounced, cleaned toilets, mopped floors. So I let personal things go. Meanwhile, things had become sour with my partner, and he schemed against me. Other circumstances worked against me, so a combination of my own mistakes and flaws, along with bad luck and betrayal, resulted in my losing everything. And this is where I found myself this past summer.

I began to write. I worked on a novel, got about half done, hope to finish someday. But the bar still haunts me. I want it back. I started thinking my experiences in the industry could be the basis for a good screenplay. I had dealt, over the years, with guns, knives, drug dealers, mafia, corrupt cops, corrupt politicians. And I learned the enormous power of music, had even developed my own formula, and I thought this would make a potentially entertaining movie.

So I started writing a screenplay this past November. If you think I’m naïve now, you should have seen me then! I had never read a screenplay, frankly had not seen too many movies. I didn’t even know anything about format when I started writing on a word document.

But I started researching online. And I find myself fascinated by the screenplay world. I have developed a tremendous respect for those who have found a way to make a living at it. I want to continue learning.

I finished my screenplay a few weeks ago. The theme it was built around was the idea that the bartender, in an effort to learn how to prevent trouble in the bar, learns how to read the people around him. Read them so well that he becomes in tune with their changing attitudes, their moods, even their thoughts. In being able to see others as he never could before, in the end, he learns to understand himself in ways which he never had.

Along the way, as I have been learning more about what real screenwriters do, it occurs to me that some similar process could be at work with the professional scriptors. Like the bartender, the screenwriter learns to see the world in very different way, and perhaps learns to see his own self in a different light.

Well, I doubt anyone is still reading this post at this point, but if so…thanks! I am willing to read anyone’s work if they would like me to, though as you know by now, I am truly an amateur. I am pretty good at making drinks, however, and can offer quite capable advice in that area. I will probably post my screenplay here at some point, see if anyone reads it. The last week I have been working on a horror screenplay, and I do think I have progressed from my first screenplay, but horror seems much easier. Cheers, wish I could send you all a shot…Jack Daniels maybe.