I feel pretty good today.

I have been processing a lot of stuff lately due to school. So much new input, and way more physical input than my depressed self ever got. There is less moving about than at Kwantlen, seeing as most classes are on the writing floor of 198 West Hastings, but the stakes, as well as the mental intensity, is way higher.

And I know that this, right now, is the grace period. I only have a little bit of homework, and it’s fairly easy stuff. The hardest thing so far has been to read the script for Misery. It is ironic that this is the first script of many that I will have to read as part of my studies turns out to be one of the few I have actively avoided ever since my mother told me what happens in the book.

Avoided the book, avoided the movie, ended up having to read the script in my first week of film school. Whatever.

Actually, I found, to my delight, that I quite liked reading the script. It was such a high density way to absorb a movie. It’s just like watching the movie except you can experience minutes of the movie in a matter of seconds. After all, the screenplay format is designed to tightly adhere to the “one page of script is one minute of movie” rule, and it takes way less than a minute to read a page, especially if you are as fast a reader as I am.

So I found myself doing the online equivalent of eagerly turning every page with breathless anticipation. Of course, that’s probably not going to be true of every script I read – the one for a Misery was written by William Fucking Goldman, the guy who wrote both the book and the screenplay for The Princess Bride, one of my favorite movies of all time, amongst many other things. Goldman is considered, and not just by me, one of the best screenwriters and script doctors of all time,

So in a sense, by starting us off with Misery, the prof is starting us off with the best as a way of easing us into script reading and analysis. Reading that script was not only highly pleasurable, but sparked my appreciation for what makes a screenplay truly excellent.

I hope I can write that well some day. So much packed into every word!

As for the story : I can’t help but feel sorry for poor Annie Wilkes. She’s clearly a deeply broken person. A monster, to be sure, for what she does to poor Paul Sheldon, the writer, but not an entirely unsympathetic one. The scene with the scrapbook suggests that she has killed people all over the USA, but that seems like an informed attribute to me. Nothing else about her suggests she has the sort of issues that would lead her to be a serial killer. She’s certainly no coldblooded psychopath or psychotic driven to repeat the same scenario over and over again, and nothing we see suggests she is sadistic.

I’d diagnose her as having borderline personality disorder. And that can lead to violence (in fact, it usually does) but not to the point of being a serial killer. Maybe the studio (or Stephen King, for all I know) felt she wasn’t villainous enough to deserve her very violent end just for what she did to Paul. She had to be a true monster in order to deserve her sticky end because, if she’s a a serial killer, then our hero Paul is not just freeing himself, he’s preventing who know how many future murders.

People like their moral lines drawn with a very thick pencil sometimes. Myself included.

Now that I have read the script, I have to write a brief thing where I say where the seven pillars of storytelling – Setup, Inciting Incident, First Act Turn, Midpoint, Second Act Turn/All Is Lost, Climax, and Resolution – are in the script, with page numbers to prove I have read the thing (and not just seen the movie), and a few sentences justifying my choice.

No problem. Setup is the stuff leading up to the accident where we see Paul’s process and establish that this is his last Misery book. Inciting Incident is the accident, duh. The First Act Turn occurs when Paul wakes up and discovers his new predicament. The Midpoint would be where Paul realizes he’s basically being held hostage. That sets up the rising tension leading to the Second Act Turn, which occurs when Annie reveals that she knows all about Paul’s moving around before and how she never called anyone about him. The Climax is, of course, when he brains her with his typewriter, and the Resolution is the “18 months later” bit at the end where we see that Paul is doing fine now.

And after the harrowing events of the movie, I really, really needed that. If the movie had ended when the cops came in, it would have pissed me off. I needed to see that Paul was fine on all levels after his experience with Annie. Walking, happy, not in an asylum.

I look forward to reading more scripts. It might even become a habit. I could “watch” a lot of movies that way. I wouldn’t get the full experience, of course, but it could help me catch up.

I ordered in Chinese food for supper last night, which is probably part of why I feel good today. I have come to the realization that I have a strong reason to improve my diet now : so I can be more focused and alert in class. I spent a lot of my class time last week barely able to stay awake and feeling very spaced out and hazy. I would much rather feel like I feel right now.

So I need to improve my diet to Chinese Food levels. Lots of meat and vegetables. Give my body everything it needs to run well.

It could make life a hell of a lot easier.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.