In movies, clocking someone on the head and knocking them out cold is a handy switch to flip, to take characters out of a scene. There's no drama attached to it, certainly no medical reality. Knocking someone out in a movie is just a "beat" - just a throway "yeah cool" before something gets blown up and maybe - maybe - The Wrong Person dies, so the hero/ine can finally reach their finish line.
There are no finish lines. Jerks and restarts, crashes and troubleshooting. No real endings or beginnings. No real episodes. Life doesn't proceed in story arcs. It's why writing is never good enough.
Reading that scene, where she half-hilariously knocked out the bad guy with a flowerpot in a greenhouse. The greenhouse setting only used so that, inevitably, someone could crash through a glass wall.
Eleventy-hundred scripts a day swirl through the restaurants of Hollywood in hopes of making it before That One Producer. Telegenic wait staff carry ten thousand poorly formatted scripts on eight thousand two-year-old smart phones. The telegenic girls bend low while they serve, the telegenic boys caress square or slumping shoulders with their hips--never hard enough to spill anything. They're all writers. They're all directors. They'e all fodder; all they really want is to be in front of a camera, even a camera for a cable network.
They can't wait to get knocked out. They will die for you on cue. On camera. Put me in a scene just to turn me off! I'll be that plot device! Just take me!
Just love me.
And I realized: the flowerpot is more important.
And I was finally knocked out.
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| Image: Wikimedia |
4 comments:
I really enjoyed that story! The ending made me smile; it's very well-written.
Thank you, Me!
Me/she;-) is right…I love your story, Diane!
Lilac, thank you - you might say a flowerpot made me do it!
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