Bad, bad weekend

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

 

Saying I had a bad weekend would be an understatement.

I had to put one of my cats to sleep, listen to people yell at me over a mistake I made in a news story, and I lost my script changes to my latest film, “Harvey and Me.”

I should have sensed something wrong with the cat when it stopped coming out for its meals.

Finster came with our house, abandoned by the previous owners as a kitten, it lived in the shed of our neighbors until we purchased the house in late 1998. She was such a cute kitten, numerous people tried to catch it, but she eluded their grasp. Even we had to lure it into the house with bribes of food, at which point we discovered she was pregnant and likely to die if she tried to give birth.

She took up with our cat Max and became a fixture inside the house, one of those mousey creatures who you saw most times only when being fed. When Max died, she took up to crying at night as if calling for him. Eventually, she became my cat insisting on affection each night before I went off to sleep. She had bad teeth, and eventually we had to have them removed, and so fed her softer foods. When she stopped wanting scraps from the table this week, I began to think something was wrong. Then the night before we were to go off to Woodstock for the weekend, she started to bleed, leaving us no choice but to cancel are plans and get her to the vet the next day.

Since the appointment came late in the morning, Sharon and I went to breakfast – our usual Saturday routine – during which a member of a prominent Secaucus family called on the cell phone and started to scream at me, telling me I had written the wrong age for her dead brother and the wrong cause of death.

I had written the story in a rush, and had become confused by old accounts which listed several ages. Since I could not reach any of the family members, I called the mayor’s secretary, who I knew had been very close to the dead man in the past and she gave me a cause of death.

The man’s sister yelled and demanded a retraction, I told her to call my editor and I hung up.

Two hours later, I got the bad news about the cat. A terminal growth inside its mouth we might abate through radiation therapy and surgery, leaving her little quality of life, so I decided to put her to sleep.

Just as the doctor finished getting the injection ready, another relative of the dead man called. I told her I’m in the middle of putting a cat to sleep and asked her to call back in a few minutes. She refused, and then began to scold me for my errors. I told her to call my editor, and hung up on her as well.

Dying is a curious process. Although sedated, my cat still purred and stared at me with trust as if she knew I meant well in doing this to end her pain. I knew I would miss her when she was gone, but also knew that keeping her would not help either of us, and that the cat I stroked to sleep at night after surgery and radiation would be little more than a stuff animal, and not the cat I loved. I called her name just as her breathing stopped, hoping she understood when in reality, I struggled with the limited choices any of us face when confronting these things. Wanting her to live, I killed her, because she could not live the way she needed, and I knew my keeping her alive was for my benefit, not hers.

 

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To understand how something as silly as a script matters in such life and death situations, you have to understand how I work.

In most cases, such as this one, I outline the story – getting a sense of where I want the character to go before I actually compose the work. Since this is a work I intended to act out, I needed it to pull together in a special way. Dissatisfied with the first outline, I scrapped it and started it again.  From this, I developed the first draft of the story, basically fleshing out the outline to something generally resembling the monologue I would later try to memorize.

Then, line by line, I put the script on index cards. This is a kind of rewriting process that weeds out some of the crap, and helps tighten the work.

With this script, I typed this into the computer and posted it as a monologue on my website. But I kept shuffling the cards, looking for some natural order of details. I edited out or rewrote phrases I couldn’t get my mouth around so that the script got shorter and some of the lines in the original vanished or were relocated. I took out, rewrote cards, and then shuffled the order again.

Some parts worked very well, but the thing just wouldn’t come together.

The version on the cards, of course, now differed significantly from those on the website, and eventually I had plans to retype the work as soon as I became satisfied with the text. But it wouldn’t come together, and I was almost ready to abandoned the project when somehow I misplaced the cards during the next day at work.
By rights, I should have given up the project since the monologue just didn’t gel and since none of the drafts I had left actually reflected any of the honing I had done. But I decided to redo the script anyway, even if it still fell flat when I was done.

It took several frustrating hours yesterday to accomplish this, and I was particularly exasperated by trying to remember the many subtle changes to the language I had made in the lost draft not reflected in the drafts prior to that.

Perhaps in the process my subconscious worked out the glitches I had seen in the lost text because the final text I came up with after last night’s rewrite no longer existed. The monologue flowed, and had the emotional kick I wanted to convey, lacking in the lost cards. Sure, I still have to hone some, but the order of the text is in place, and now I can started thinking in terms of image for the first time.

Since Spielberg hasn’t yet made his version of “Harvey,” research was a bit difficult as well. Partly because the film is not readily available in the local video store and I had to order the original 1950 film on line. This I have not yet received by expect it to arrive any day. So in the wait, I down loaded and read the script, which revived many of the images from a film I have seen many times when I was young. No doubt Spielberg will alter the original to install his usual personal themes, but for my purposes, the original film will do since I need to study Elwood’s phrasing and mannerisms in order to fully convey him in my own film.

This will be a challenge for Spielberg, too, in finding an actor who can convey what was so aptly conveyed by the original actor in the original film.