Case in point (the Payton’s pup).

Tonight was the last night of the summer screenwriting class I took with Marc Calderwood through UNM Continuing Education, and like each of the others, it was educational and entertaining.

After Marc took a little time to recap some of the big thoughts we were supposed to take away from the course, he then led us in an enjoyable exercise that took much of the rest of the class time.

Marc had pulled down two random scripts from a script sharing site online (zoetrope.com), and then added to them one of his favorites, and then printed the first 10-11 pages of each of them for each class student.

We took the scripts, and each student gave each one a quiet 15-20 minute read before we gave it 15-20 minutes of discussion time as a group.

The guiding question of the discussions: Was this a good start to a script?

The first script was super interesting and clearly covering some intelligent material, but in the way it was written, it was like a series of snapshots that catapulted the reader through a burst of short, undeveloped scenes.

I understood what the author was trying to do- trying to briefly let us know about the ascendant life of a father so we had a context to understand his troubled daughter. The problem, in this case, was that the reader got snippets of information about so many events and so many people in those 10 pages that they never quite let you know who the script’s main character was. This script clearly had an identity problem.

The last script of the evening was also fun to read, and not simply because I knew what film it was for when I saw the scene description lines on the first page. Knowing it was a script for Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day was enjoyable, but actually reading the film’s lines and scene elements as they were written let us clearly see what a working script looked like. Clean scene descriptions. Sharp dialogue. Showing, not describing. Andsome hilarious, witty line exchanges.

The third script we looked at, which was the middle one we reviewed tonight, gave me a special feeling of delight because, in all of its efforts to be phantasmic and super scifi, it was hilarious, out of the gates.

I say this not wishing to be hypercritical or disrespectful of its author. That writer has done something that I have only dreamed of doing: they have written a complete film script.

Still, I am pretty sure this script was not meant to be comedy, but I could not help laughing at certain words used erroneously, action sequences described atomically, and a few spelling and grammar errors that were glaring and common and screamed that the final copy was subject to rudimentary review.

I never did quite figure out what the story was about.

The story began with an Iron Age family on a planet tending their farm while looking up into deep space, and out of nowhere, some sort of being, part time human, part time wolf man, and part time red space globule cluster, roars into a medieval castle floating in space on rainbow gases and guarded by centaurs and attacks his siter with two flaming soars. There were solar flares. There was a black hole opened up there somewhere that his sister was sucked into. There were fragments everywhere. And then this human-glob creature left the castle and dove down to the planet, where the family’s son vaguely recognized the demigod world killer and ran to fight him.

I had glimpses of Monty Python sequences running through my head as the action played out- all of this on the first 4 pages.

I saw the red globule cluster in my mind like a big glowing tube of translucent jello on the main viewscreen on Kirk’s Enterprise, like a cheap special effect from an episode from the first season of the original Star Trek. See it, with a star field behind it, on that big screen Kirk and Spock stare at?

At other times, I felt as if a scene being described was from an episode of Red Dwarf with its cheesy plot turns and special effects.

What I have to give the author credit for, definitely, is a script that is fully entertaining. From the son on the planet “loosing” apples, to all the bulls there being called tauruses all throughout the script, in both descriptions and dialogue, to the father on the planet slipping in and out of an Irish accent “He shall be killed by me arrows”, I thought THIS script had great promise as a Space Balls-type interstellar Dune comedy. It was that funny. And I only got through about 5 pages of it in the allotted time.

I love being able to laugh at stuff like that.

It was funny. It wasn’t supposed to be. But, man, quietly I chuckled while everyone silently read.

Accidental comedy is the best.

Well done, Wrath writer, wherever you are. I hope you are discovered.

Tonight’s final class, like the rest of them, was enjoyable.

Thanks, Marc, for a good 6 weeks, and if I see you teaching this again, I’ll probably join you for another round.