BEING THERE

“It seems to me that it is hardly ever one character (i.e.: person) that conceives and writes a compelling dramatic story. There is almost always someone or some thing else hovering around or within that is affecting the emotional, intellectual and spiritual adventure of such an undertaking - something that moves the storyteller, that dances and sings, that finds its own ways of letting itself be known and felt. Poets used to speak of this experience as a relationship one had with one’s Muse, this inspirational, divine-like energy with which the poet was suddenly infused.

"To work in the presence of such a ‘be-ing’ is always a liberating experience because it is usually accompanied with a sense of effortlessness, as if the words and dialogue have somehow started writing themselves. In such moments the storyteller is transformed from a teller of tales into a receiver of them. But don’t think that this means the storyteller becomes less “responsible”. On the contrary, this is the height of response-ability, the mystical experience of BEING THERE.

”

- Billy Marshall Stoneking

THE COST OF DRAMA

Drama costs. No doubt about it. But how does one - such as you or me - go about assessing that cost? And what exactly is it that is being spent, and what is it actually being spent on, and where and how does the expenditure travel, and what if anything multiplies its clout?

When Tim Burton tells us that film-making is basically a very expensive form of therapy, everybody automatically thinks money, right? Films cost. But story costs more. And the old school isn’t even up to that yet. They think - they believe - that the real cost of drama is MONEY, so they go on blindly putting bucks before bangs and wondering why all they get is whimpers.

Question is - the question almost no one asks - “How do we maximize the therapy while minimizing the cost?” And the short answer is you can’t. But you CAN change the way you THINK about “the cost”, which means changing the story of what and why and how you conceive of and ultimately realise the film you have in your heart to make. If all you’re thinking about is money, you lose, or at least your investors do, and with galling regularity. Hell, maybe they have money to burn! But maybe the smoke’s making them sick.

Yeah, sure, drama costs, but you can’t buy it with money. To understand what that really means is to start changing the story of what we are doing as film-makers. The small, but revolutionary breed of ‘new’ film-makers - those with the courage and the vision to navigate the subtext and as-yet unexplored interfaces between the new technology and the ancient emotion presenting ‘language’ that is drama, who have cultivated a love and fearlessness for strong, character-driven stories, have learned the hard way that the real cost of making potent screen stories is inexpressible in the lingo of all the accountants and rubber stamps in the world. The payment one makes is much more demanding, more exacting, than coming up with a mere 10 million or 200 million dollars. This of course is still heresy to all those flat-earthers, who are yet to realize that climate change is not only real but applicable to a whole lot more than global warming. The old templates are on the way out. As is the idea of waiting for a revolution, which any storyteller worth a damn will tell you isn’t worth waiting for

ONLINE or FACE-TO-FACE STORY & SCRIPT CONSULTS