Cleveland City: The Screenplay

Two weeks ago four members of my writing group and I did the very first table reading of Cleveland City . We read a critical Act 1 scene out loud, in character. I mostly listened. And for the first time I heard the words of my 10-year project come to life. Dialogue is very tricky. I once read somewhere that if you nail your dialog, then you can remove the character names from the script and be able to know who is saying what based on the words themselves. That is how important language is. Each one of us speaks just ever so differently. The language of characters on screen is not the formal written language most of us learned in school. No one really writes how they speak or speaks how they write. And as a screenwriter, my job is to write the dialog that's authentic to each character's personality, backstory and actions. It must also be conversational. It must flow. The first table reading of Cleveland City helped me realize that as is the dialogue is too clinical. The c...

Body Heat was very much about that for me. What happens when a guy who has personal charm and has done well with women but isn't effective in the world runs into someone who's effective in the world?" - Lawrence Kasdan Some of the best Noir films tease us with the possibility of what may happen between men and women. The women are sultry. The men are bad boys. And the good men - once they meet the sultry women - they then go bad, too. In the 80s and then then 90s, a heyday for Neo Noir and great cinema in general, we were blessed with many cinematic gems that, with their dimmed lighting, reserved pacing and and intense actors, forced us, the viewers, to sit in those theater seats with great anticipation as to what will happen next. Will they kiss? Will they cheat? Will she kill? Will he die? The male actors who rocked these films most? Michael Douglas, William Hurt, Denzel Washington, Jeff Daniels. But it was the female actors who lured in and marked these men...

"(Film Noir is) a movie which at no time misleads you into thinking there is going to be a happy ending." - Roger Ebert It all started with the alleys of Cleveland. Living in downtown Cleveland, back when it was the uncool thing to do, to bypass traffic patterns, you often took shortcuts. Alleys are the very best shortcuts and so much of noir is anchored in alleys and shadows because the characters in film noir at a critical and often desperate time of their lives took a shortcut. And they've been paying for it ever since. Urban alleys, especially of those Midwest metropolises that cultivated during the industrial revolution, are dark and narrow and creepy. They typically house garbage dumpsters, building back doors and shady parking spots for even shadier cars. Sometimes there's rats, often used as cinema symbolism to signify a betrayer. The combination of alleys (short cuts) and rats (betrayers) and absence of light (darkness) creates an atmosphere of clau...