Hi group,
I'm writing a screenplay for my next home-made li'l movie, in the surreal comedy style, and I'm pretty satisfied with the story and equally confident in my ability to write appropriate dialogue, but I'm having trouble figuring out the most effective way of organizing the following scenes, which constitute the first part of my movie.
The scenes:
1:
A man in black introduces himself to a confused-looking girl as Death, and informs her that she is in Heaven. He tells her that no matter what religion she has followed on Earth - christianity, Islam, atheism, etc. - everybody all ends up here. Heaven has had the monopoly on souls for generations - the different religions are just soul traps for the confused mortals, who don't realize the true nature of the afterlife. Furthermore, he explains there used to be loads of angels in Heaven, but they've all left to some other planet to start their own kookie hippie commune religion. The only angel left in Heaven is introduced as a man dressed in white - Azmo - whom the others left behind because of his obnoxious spoiled-kid attitude. Therefore, Death finally explains, he is trying to recruit a few new angels from the recently-deceased. The girl, looking as confused as ever, hasn't understood a word of it. Death sighs at Azmo - "This ain't gonna work. We're never gonna break this memory thing."
[Note: This heavy load of exposition, if it stays in this form, would be peppered with filmed sequences illustrating all this, making Death's speech more of a narration than a monologue]
2. Back on Earth, a young goth chick named Mercedes is having a fight with her parents and decides to shock them by signing a contract with a fringe god called Phug. She sends off the signed contract in the mail.
3. Phug - who turns out to be an actual alternative god, and not just a false religion started by Heaven, recieves the letter and is overjoyed and overcome with megalomania by the prospect of his first soul in centuries. He sends his two Emotion Demons, Irvul and Urvil, off to make sure Mercedes dies before she changes her mind. (Phug himself can't go, on account on him being a small dish of green liquid.)
4. Death receives the phone call from God, telling him about Mercedes and how he'd better get that soul gathered himself or there'll be Hell to pay. Death decides to pay Mercedes a visit to convince her to sign her soul back to Christianity, but Mercedes thinks her parents sent him to lure her back, and she runs away.
5. Death is now forced to use his only option - he must call Mercedes directly up to heaven using the power of an angel. Unfortunately, Azmo is the only angel left in Heaven, and he is less than cooperative, so he refuses, throwing a tantrum when he's not allowed to play video games.
6. Irvul and Urvil track Mercedes down and try to make her die a natural death. Naturally, Mercedes is pretty freaked by all this, gets in a car and races away as fast as she can.
7. Here we see our final player in this drama, a man named Lenny Finkelstein, who is introduced shortly before being hit and killed by Mercedes' car.
8. Death gets paged about this new death just as he's giving up trying to reason with Azmo. He appears in front of the corpse and sees to his astonishment, that Mercedes is the killer! He remembers The Haunting Clause - that the spirit of a deceased man may seek revenge on his killer by gathering her immortal soul! Death now has an option!
9. Returning to Azmo, Death tells him that there is a new option. Azmo will have to help Lenny in this quest ("just pretend it's a video game and Lenny's, I dunno, Super Mario") because Lenny has no memory span at all. This needs to be explained (this is where I'm truly having problems) - back in the Olden Days, when the souls of mortals was a competitive market, some Gods started offering incentives to followers in return for their soul. First, it was free deoderant, but soon Gods came up with offering 100 years of extra life after death. Things escalated naturally, until Eternal Life became the one thing that drove all other gods out of the market. The problem was, mortals weren't cut out for eternal life and went completely insane with boredom after just a few thousand years in Heaven. Therefore, in order to keep the peace without breaching contract, it was agreed that after death, your soul lived on forever, but all short-term memory was erased. Therefore, people are walking around in Heaven with the attention spans of goldfish and enjoying their vapid little lives.
Now, the stage is set[finally]: an obnoxious angel and a soul with no memory are trying to reach a very confused young girl before the Emotion Demons do.
Anyway, first of all, THANKS for reading all that, it really is long on paper
and second, if you have any narrative ideas for this, I would truly appreciate it and thank you in the credits
Goja
I'm writing a screenplay for my next home-made li'l movie, in the surreal comedy style, and I'm pretty satisfied with the story and equally confident in my ability to write appropriate dialogue, but I'm having trouble figuring out the most effective way of organizing the following scenes, which constitute the first part of my movie.
The scenes:
1:
A man in black introduces himself to a confused-looking girl as Death, and informs her that she is in Heaven. He tells her that no matter what religion she has followed on Earth - christianity, Islam, atheism, etc. - everybody all ends up here. Heaven has had the monopoly on souls for generations - the different religions are just soul traps for the confused mortals, who don't realize the true nature of the afterlife. Furthermore, he explains there used to be loads of angels in Heaven, but they've all left to some other planet to start their own kookie hippie commune religion. The only angel left in Heaven is introduced as a man dressed in white - Azmo - whom the others left behind because of his obnoxious spoiled-kid attitude. Therefore, Death finally explains, he is trying to recruit a few new angels from the recently-deceased. The girl, looking as confused as ever, hasn't understood a word of it. Death sighs at Azmo - "This ain't gonna work. We're never gonna break this memory thing."
[Note: This heavy load of exposition, if it stays in this form, would be peppered with filmed sequences illustrating all this, making Death's speech more of a narration than a monologue]
2. Back on Earth, a young goth chick named Mercedes is having a fight with her parents and decides to shock them by signing a contract with a fringe god called Phug. She sends off the signed contract in the mail.
3. Phug - who turns out to be an actual alternative god, and not just a false religion started by Heaven, recieves the letter and is overjoyed and overcome with megalomania by the prospect of his first soul in centuries. He sends his two Emotion Demons, Irvul and Urvil, off to make sure Mercedes dies before she changes her mind. (Phug himself can't go, on account on him being a small dish of green liquid.)
4. Death receives the phone call from God, telling him about Mercedes and how he'd better get that soul gathered himself or there'll be Hell to pay. Death decides to pay Mercedes a visit to convince her to sign her soul back to Christianity, but Mercedes thinks her parents sent him to lure her back, and she runs away.
5. Death is now forced to use his only option - he must call Mercedes directly up to heaven using the power of an angel. Unfortunately, Azmo is the only angel left in Heaven, and he is less than cooperative, so he refuses, throwing a tantrum when he's not allowed to play video games.
6. Irvul and Urvil track Mercedes down and try to make her die a natural death. Naturally, Mercedes is pretty freaked by all this, gets in a car and races away as fast as she can.
7. Here we see our final player in this drama, a man named Lenny Finkelstein, who is introduced shortly before being hit and killed by Mercedes' car.
8. Death gets paged about this new death just as he's giving up trying to reason with Azmo. He appears in front of the corpse and sees to his astonishment, that Mercedes is the killer! He remembers The Haunting Clause - that the spirit of a deceased man may seek revenge on his killer by gathering her immortal soul! Death now has an option!
9. Returning to Azmo, Death tells him that there is a new option. Azmo will have to help Lenny in this quest ("just pretend it's a video game and Lenny's, I dunno, Super Mario") because Lenny has no memory span at all. This needs to be explained (this is where I'm truly having problems) - back in the Olden Days, when the souls of mortals was a competitive market, some Gods started offering incentives to followers in return for their soul. First, it was free deoderant, but soon Gods came up with offering 100 years of extra life after death. Things escalated naturally, until Eternal Life became the one thing that drove all other gods out of the market. The problem was, mortals weren't cut out for eternal life and went completely insane with boredom after just a few thousand years in Heaven. Therefore, in order to keep the peace without breaching contract, it was agreed that after death, your soul lived on forever, but all short-term memory was erased. Therefore, people are walking around in Heaven with the attention spans of goldfish and enjoying their vapid little lives.
Now, the stage is set[finally]: an obnoxious angel and a soul with no memory are trying to reach a very confused young girl before the Emotion Demons do.
Anyway, first of all, THANKS for reading all that, it really is long on paper
and second, if you have any narrative ideas for this, I would truly appreciate it and thank you in the credits Goja
.