Seabiscuit
At Act One: Writing for Hollywood, we were told to take one of our favorite movies and "master it", meaning become a sort of arm-chair expert on the film, especially as it relates to structure, character, and story design.
The film I've decided to take on is Seabiscuit, in spite of the fact that at least one good friend of mine was pretty disappointed in the film. When I first watched it, I immediately went out and bought the book. Sure, the book's better...books often are. But both tellings of the story move me, reminding me of Walter Farley's Black Stallion series, which I read repeatedly as a child. It was a great delight to see just how much Farley borrowed from the story of Seabiscuit, right down to the match races driven by radio personalities like "Tick-tock McGlaughlin". I suppose I've always loved horse stories, sports stories, and underdogs. For both sentimental and technical reasons, this movie will be on my top twenty list for a long time.
Watching it yesterday afternoon, taking some eight pages of notes, I saw again what captivates me about Seabiscuit, two things in particular: 1) the restoration/redemption themes ("you don't throw away a life just because it's a little banged up") and 2) the fact that it's not driven by a single hero, but by multiple underdog protagonists. Ensemble pieces appeal to me, and this is why I chose this film to dissect--I want to know how to tell multiple protagonist stories. (We watched L.A. Confidential at Act One this summer, and I like that film for the same reason.)
Some see the opening hour of the film, in which screenwriter Gary Ross introduces the major characters, as an exercise in thin story-telling, asking the viewer to swallow huge events (the building and losing of a financial empire, an immigrant family's devastating choice forced by the Depression, the losing of the open country to technology) in mere breaths of time. For me, this is economy, demonstrating film's ability to compress stories visually, creating possibilities for scope that are virtually impossible to create in live theatre. The deft cutting weaves the stories of America, Charles Howard, Tom Smith, and Red Pollard together, finally setting the stage for the entrance of the title character, creating a collection of "banged up" characters that, in the end, become a true community, the kind that will "fix them all."
As I work on the play, I'll post snippets here and there of what I find. In the meantime, this film would be a great piece for church small groups to watch, mining the interactions to see what conditions make for healing...
Community again...
7:03:12 AM 
|
|
