Swamp Driver Monthly – In the Pit
3/19/25
I am grateful for many, many things in my life, but foremost among them is that I have an incredibly patient and supportive girlfriend.
“That line is different in the screenplay!”
“In the screenplay, she shoots him in the head, not the chest.”
“I was laughing so much when I got to this part of the screenplay…”
And to each of these comments, interjected while watching the movie that was made from said screenplay, she smiled encouragingly and let me keep rambling.
Since moving to New York, there has never (until now!) been a month where I’ve seen more movies than I have plays. I have long self-identified as “not really a movie person”—my attention span suffers much more watching action unfold on a screen than it does when it’s happening before me onstage. It’s hard to get me interested in watching a movie, and that inertia is more often than not paralyzing.
Well, it turns out that I love reading screenplays. And that reading a screenplay is an incredibly effective way to get me really interested in watching a movie. I get so curious to see what is kept and what is changed; which subplots are expanded or excised; how casting and performance and cinematography and direction (and and and!) affect the meaning of the lines I’d read on the page. Each time, I think about what the screenwriter’s expectation for the movie might have been, and whether the execution of the film lived up to them, surpassed them, or dashed them to pieces.
I’ve been getting a lot of mileage out of William Goldman’s books on screenwriting, and he frequently describes the experience of writing the first draft of a screenplay as being “in the pit.” Not in an inherently ominous way—more in the sense that you are alone, and confined by the obsession of seeing the work through, even though you’re in the dark and can barely see what you’re doing because you don’t really know what you’re making yet, and you won’t know it, not until it’s in some way complete and you can stand it up and look it in the eye.
At least, I imagine that’s what he means. I’m 75 pages into my first screenplay, and I’m nowhere near ready to make eye contact with the mess that I’ve wrought—but I’m excited for that day to come, and I’m excited to know exactly what it is I’m doing.
In the meantime, though, I’m having a hell of a lot of fun figuring it out.
INSPIRATION/CONSUMPTION
Things I watched on a stage:
Another reading of Leah Plante-Wiener’s Cankersore Paradise
A reading of my classmate Amalia Oliva Rojas’ I Hope This Letter Reaches Mitclān
A reading of my classmate Jonathan Barbee’s RICELAND
Chad Kayo’s I’m Repeating Myself at The Brick
A reading of Sam Walsh’s The Things We Say with Stroller Scene
Things I watched on a screen:
Children of Men. You guys. This is perhaps my favorite movie opening of all time. I’ve been struggling to find the right exposition device for my screenplay (I’m trying really hard to avoid an expository text crawl à la Star Wars/Mad Max/Terminator/Blade Runner/etc.), and Children of Men is now my north star. The cold open sets up both the practical realities and the emotional stakes of the dystopia with an incredibly effectiveness that left me giddy at the level of craft being deployed. (CW for violence and utter bleakness.)
Gladiator. It took me so long to be able to stop seeing anything but Roman Javert when Russell Crowe was onscreen.
Mad Max. My favorite part was when his wife played the saxophone.
The Running Man. Ali and I looked at each other about four minutes into this movie and said, “Wait… Is Arnold Schwarzenegger a terrible actor?”
The first two episodes of Mary Beard's Ultimate Rome: Empire Without Limit. Mary, Mary, love of my life.
The pilot of Xena: Warrior Princess with Ali (her first time—a sapphic rite of passage).
The first episode of Spartacus: Gods of the Arena. The dialogue and violence were just as absurd as I remembered… And Lucy Lawless and Jaime Murry were just as stunning as I remembered…
The Silence of the Lambs for probably my third or fourth time. A forever favorite.
Thelma and Louise. Susan Sarandon, you’re everything to me.
A rewatch of the pilot of The Handmaid’s Tale, for research.
A bunch of Severance as we head into the finale…
Things I read:
The screenplay for The Silence of the Lambs. Brilliant.
The screenplay for Thelma and Louise. Sensational.
The screenplay for Alignment, a spec script that sold for $3 million in November. I’m an absolute novice to the business end of screenwriting, so it was really interesting to see an example of a contemporary screenplay that got the industry buzzing.
The analysis chapter on The Silence of the Lambs in Syd Field’s “Four Screenplays.” I learned that there were originally supposed to be flashbacks to young Clarice encountering the lambs during her final confrontation with Lecter, but they didn’t even end up shooting them—because, as director Demme put it, “the scene was so powerful as it was(...) that if (I’d) cut away from her into a flashback, (I’d) be thrown out of the Directors’ Guild.” SO FASCINATING AND SO COOL!
Logan’s Run by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson.
The Body by Stephen King.
William Goldman’s Which Lie Did I Tell. I love Goldman’s voice and I love the way he delivers advice. Many thanks to the friends who recommended this book (a sequel to Adventures in the Screen Trade).
This doesn’t fall into the above categories, but I cannot even articulate the death grip that the following modern reinterpretation of an Ancient Byzantine chant has on me.
SUBMISSION/REJECTION/AFFIRMATION
Got rejected from the Great Plains Theater Conference! Womp womp.
Learned that I’m semi-finalist for a thing! Fingers crossed!
Had a grant application to The Puffin Foundation get rejected. Alas!
I’ve still heard nothing from the O’Neills, and I realllllly want that rejection to just come in already so that I can move on with my lifeeeeee.
GENERATION/COLLABORATION
I got to team up with a bunch of college buddies to put up a show in Fucked-Up Play Fest on the Ides of March! T’was a total blast.
I’ve been in rehearsal for my play 4044 4040 4409 as part of Interrobang?!: New Works 2025 at The Brick! This has been my first time dabbling with devised theater, and I’m so grateful to have the steadfast support of our fearless director Willow Funkhouser and this extraordinarily enthusiastic team of actors. Our bonkers, surreal, movement-driven romp through the grocery store runs April 11th and April 12th—come out and see us!
Had a reading of light as light, my thesis play, in class! Learned a lot! I think I want to do a page-one rewrite and possibly cut my cast down to four. Oops! We’ll see…
I also had a reading of my play what if everyone lives with Stroller Scene. I think I’ve finally solved my “crisis of protagonist” with this play and am really excited to dive back in with a clearer point of view.
Had a little internal Road Kills reading! Gotta say, it was a relief to leave my third reading of the month and not feel like I wanted to bulldoze and restructure the full play! There’s still plenty that needs fixing, but these tweaks are thankfully isolated to more specific areas.
Most of all, I’ve been in the pit with Provocator. I’ve now re-outlined the movie seven times based on things I’ve learned while writing, and am constantly going back to the beginning to retool the screenplay to match my revised given circumstances. Wrestling with a new medium at first forced me to take more of a diamond polisher approach than I’m used to, but once I got the hang of it, I was able to really start swamp driving ahead. The goal is still to finish by the end of March—stay tuned next month to see if I make it!
Until the next nineteenth,
Sophie