Cleveland City: The Screenplay

Back in late Autumn, 2008, as the last of the tree leaves descended onto the thinning grass, I struggled to figure out the third act of the story. How does it end? I kept asking myself. So I took two steps to help me: 1. I printed out color headshots of all the actors I wanted in the roles, with their character names included and then taped them all up on the wall that faced my writing desk. 2. I made a soundtrack off all the songs that sounded like what I wanted the film to look like. Once I did both, thus cementing the tone for the story, finishing the script came much easier: looking into the eyes of those faces and listening to those songs inspired my sense of sight and sound. A decade later, as Jacob and I work on finishing the most current version of the story, I was thinking of revisiting the soundtrack to see if it still fits. But couldn't find that list of songs anywhere. And, yet, just yesterday, while going through some boxes of my older projects, I just happe...

"Your future is all used up." Marlene Dietrich, Touch of Evil German Expressionism fueled Film Noir . The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari , with its distorted shapes, exaggerated sets and extreme shadows, set that tone of something not quite right lurking in the background, ready to take center stage. With each scene the uncomfortable viewer knew one thing: a crime will be committed. There's a murder. There's a kidnapping. There's a master. There's a pawn. There's a narrator. There's a surprise twist ending. Nothing is what it seems. That was 1920. The world had just seen its great war. And while German Expressionism began prior to the massive destruction, how could the film medium ever return to something naive? It took another world war for America to give birth to Film Noir. The timing of things certainly didn't hurt - the horror of WWI fueled the darkness of 1930's pulp fiction and then talented filmmakers and actors fled Europe to Ameri...