occasionally, while working on a screenplay, you’ll include something that wasn’t planned, but works so well that, if asked, you will feel a strong desire to lie and pretend that “The Bit” in question was the result of a lot of hard work and deep thinking ... rather just being a happy accident
there are innumerable ways this can happen, but here are two of them from my recent screenplays
the placeholder happy accident
i had these monsters – bad attitude, vicious beak, ripping claws, invisible most of the time – so far, so scary
but the problem was, they couldn’t just be (invisible) alien spider-vulture-bears[1] – they needed to have a touch of the uncanny – there needed to be something about them that would both freak the characters out (and hopefully the audience as well), while also strongly suggesting there was something more to these creatures ...
and, whatever this “uncanny something” was, it needed to be simple and visual
i didn’t know what it could be, and so rather than spend a lot of time trying to figure out what the hell it could be, i came up with placeholder idea that sort of functioned the way i thought it needed to
and so, as a placeholder, i had the monsters lay their dead victims on their backs, legs together, arms by their sides – and, just in case that wasn’t strange enough or clear enough, i had the monsters construct a small cairn on each of their victims’ chests – (the cairns were made from four objects the monsters scavenged from their surroundings)
i wasn’t completely happy with this scenario, but i thought it worked well enough as a placeholder until I came up with a better idea ... or at least, that’s what i thought
but then the placeholder idea kept doing cool stuff that went beyond the original brief, like:
(spoilers!)
• the make-up of a cairn helps the heroes confirm that someone is in league with the monsters
• the breaking-up of a cairn is used to summon a monster into a trap, and
• one of the heroes builds a cairn on their chest to “play dead” and so avoid being attacked
none of these were part of the original requirements for the “uncanny something” – but once the placeholder idea was added, it kept finding ways to be useful
so, what started as a quirky way of adding to the monsters’ weirdness and setting up “the big reveal”, also became a way of making them more interesting and complex than your usual, run-of-the-mill invisible, alien spider-vulture-bears
the bit-of-colour happy accident
i was building a multi-national cast of characters and needed a couple of Europeans – i didn’t want the usual French, German, Italian or wotevs – so, on a whim, i nominated one of them to be Latvian
the character was youngish and (i decided) a bit of a “metal head” – when i was dressing them for their introductory scene, i gave them the mandatory tattoos, black jeans and t-shirt ...
but the word “t-shirt” was sitting all alone on its own line – not an effective use of realestate – now i could’ve deleted the word,”t-shirt”, but that didn’t feel or read right
so i thought i’d add a bit of “colour” and give the t-shirt a design – i looked up Latvian metal bands and “Eschatos” caught my eye ... except it didn’t sound particularly Latvian
after a quick google, i discovered Eschatos was also the name of a scrolling-shooter game released for the Xbox 360 back in 2011 ... okay, quirky i guess, but it wasn’t what i was after
after some further scrolling i also learned that eschatos is the Greek word at the root of: eschatology
eschatology (as i now know) is, to quote the Oxford dictionary:
the part of theology concerned with death, judgement, and the final destiny of the soul and of humankind
now as the screenplay was about the end of humanity (fun stuff!), i was pretty thrilled that one character would now be wearing a t-shirt referring to the End Times!
for a moment, i felt like the universe had seen what i was doing and thought, “Let’s throw this guy a bone and let him know he’s on the right path.”
but then i remembered that the universe is both purposeless and soulless – and this tiny moment of serendipity was just another meaningless, chance occurrence in an infinite series of meaningless, chance occurrences
... but the Eschatos t-shirt stayed in the screenplay
[1] because “invisible, alien spider-vulture-bears” are, like, so banal