Screenplay Progress Week 3

When I was a boy I made a tape of all the songs that made me see something in my mind. They weren't favorite songs or sentimental ones but pieces of music that conjured images, emotions or vivid ideas. I thought if I could string them all together I'd have a soundtrack for a film I'd one day make myself. This was before even the Walkman so I could only play the tape in my room through headphones. I'd sit with a notebook and joyously jot down what I saw passing before my mind’s eye. A few years later I got a brand new Sony Walkman as a gift and that opened an entirely new door in my mind. I could take my music to the actual locations I was writing about and even better, go to new places and have the music paint a new story for me. I made dozens of tapes like this and I took them everywhere I went. These were my work tapes. I had so many ideas that came so fast that I stopped writing them down. They kept coming nonetheless.
After that awful inevitability of growing up took place and robbed me of any sense of youthful exuberance, the Walkman and the tapes and the mental tapestries all disappeared and in their place came the trappings of adulthood; bills, debt, jobs, worrying about the future etc. I forgot what it was like to dream with the transmission in neutral.

I was toiling over the script these past few weeks trying to translate the images in my mind to the page. It was almost painful the block in front of me. The TV was distracting me, the noise outside was distracting me, hell, everything was distracting me. I put my iPod on just to drown everything else out and I nearly fell over. The song was The Big Money by Rush which has an evocative intro and outro. From those two passages images started flowing quite freely and I was soon furiously writing. Suddenly it all came back to me and I dug deep into the closets for some clue to the past. I knew the tapes were long gone save one or two and I certainly didn’t have a tape player of any kind on hand. I did find an old notebook with a few scribbled notes. They were song titles all listed out like a menu to my old films. I immediately compiled a list of songs that seemed to fit my mood, loaded them into the Pod and I was off and running.

I have beginnings, several endings and lots of random passages in the middle that have yet to tie themselves together. I wake up at night with a tune in my head and suddenly, there’s an image passing before me. Out comes the notebook. My work tapes, I guess you’d now call them playlists, are loaded and ready to assist. Let’s see what comes up today…