THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT

By David Beilstein

IT started with a letter to a friend about screenwriting aesthetics. At first my purpose was simple enough - trying to create a basic manifesto of sorts, on the approach and view, the screenwriter with exalted ambitions should scale in order to achieve a recognisable, and accurate view. 

But the letter grew and grew, as did references, into something longer. Larger. The attempt was made to finish the damn thing for my friend's birthday, but that didn't happen. The letter grew and grew, and I began to change my voice within the letter - a voice aimed at a general audience. 

Now, an unproduced screenwriter attempting a "book" about screenwriting is about as useful or rational as a dropout attempting to teach mathematics at MIT. Still, I've always believed the writer writes what has been ordained for him to compose - composition being a blend; a beautiful blend, of all those things Almighty God has put at the fingertips of the author. This concerns, universally and individually, the good, the bad, and the ugly of human experience. 

In that sense, when the muse arouses, coming into the mind and hand, the writer is an apostate not to be at the whim of that process. 

So, I continued to hunt-and-peck. What I have now is an overlong manuscript - a screenwriting version of Tom Wolfe's Stalking The Billion-Footed Beast; couched in theological wherewithal, as it were. 

In the future, since being an unproduced screenwriter (not for long, I pray) I will post some of what I wrote about screenwriting on here. Bits and pieces, really. Some of the pieces of this great wash of type is some of the best writing I have ever done, in my humble opinion. Not meaning, of course, I am any good. I'm a student - the magic of word order and diction still arouses me as a young man on his honeymoon. 

And that is a good thing - for someone who seeks to pay his water bill, car, etc., writing ought be some kind of romance; not ever replacing the real thing, but being crucial to the makeup of the individual. SOme vocational paths are like that, and, some are not. 

I will make no apologies. I'm a confessional Presbyterian - an old school Church goer. Part of what I do in the "manuscript" (for we cannot rightfully call it a book) is to outline why movies cannot be "Christian" - by that I mean, "evangelistic." 

I have debated friend and foe on this point - but it's true. 

In order to prepare some of the future ideas in my manuscript, I'll pull a quote which documents (to me anyway) what all this boils down to in the nitty-gritty, as they say. 

"Movies are not confessional art forms told to people, 

but a dramatic art form glimpsed by people." 

— Gary Ross