THE 13-DAY SCREENPLAY

OR HOW TO DREAM UP A WHOLE MOVIE, FROM IDEA TO FINISHED SCRIPT AND SCORE, IN ONLY 48 REGULAR-SIZED DAYS

AUTHOR’S NOTE: As of tonight, we are now 43% of the way to our goal, with $10,690 raised. So this is a great time to jump in. Only 17 days left to go!

https://thegreatdividemovie.wedid.it/campaigns/12069-the-great-divide

And for a peek at our cast and their characters, check out our website for this handy-dandy guide! (It’ll come in handy in a minute, I promise!)

https://thegreatdividemovie.org/the-characters

Every project has an origin story. And if you’re anything like me, every origin is weird. But this new movie kinda takes the cake, in terms of how it all went down. 

So here, real quick, is the play-by-play on how The Great Divide came to be. (And for those of you who find the actual creative process tedious, this might be a good one to skip.)

4/13/2023

Arrived at the Headwater Theater in NW Portland, where the Actor’s Lab held its classes, around 45 minutes early, and stood around in the parking lot, smoking a joint and watching the clouds roll by. Nobody else there. Just the little black box theater down by the railroad tracks, where rusty and abandoned rail cars brazenly displayed their graffitoed wheel-to-ceiling tattoos in perpetuity. 

I don’t normally get high before class – remembering my lines is hard enough as it is – but this wasn’t a regular class. This was the day set aside to watch ALL FIFTY SHORT FILMS in the LabFest Film Festival: a special event shared by all Actor’s Lab classes worldwide

Our job was to make a 3-minute film – no more, no less – shooting only on either a) our phones or b) Zoom. And fifty of us, including most of my class, had submitted one. 

Long story short: we watched them. It was really fun. And at the end, all I could say was, “We should be doing this EVERY day! Making movies together! I swear, I’m gonna write us all a script right now!”

And everybody went, “Uh-huh.” It wasn’t the first time I’d made these kinds of noises. But watching everybody on the big projector screen was the last straw. Which got instantly lit, and promptly set a raging fire ablaze right under my ass.

4/22/2023

After a week of swinging and missing at random ideas, while working on three other projects, I finally devoted a day to nothing but locking down a story. Trying to fix on a workable location, where we could shoot for free. 

Fact is, I am huge on knowing my locations in advance, and memorizing them. Then I can close my eyes and see the scene. Who’s standing where. What do they do. Where do they go. And where’s the camera. Without that, I’m just guessing in a vacuum. Which I do not like to do.

Then I thought about the beautiful home of Sarah Brody Webb, one of my classmates. I’d directed a LabFest short there a couple weeks back, for classmates Michelle Kelley (who wrote and starred) and co-star Sahi-Van Tull. 

I’d shot out maybe a third of the rooms, and checked out all the rest. So I knew where everything was. How many rooms on which floor, down the hall from which others. Where the dining room was. Where the pool table was. Where the grand piano was. Where the trampoline was.

And suddenly, I was starting to watch a party take shape. Happily (or maybe not-so-happily) moving from room to room. I didn’t know who any of the characters were. But I could see my actors perfectly. All twenty classmates. Laughing here. Arguing there. Getting high on the porch. Getting drunk in the basement. 

And I thought about The Anniversary Party. And I thought about The Big Chill and Return of the Secaucus 7. One of which staged its reunion around a death, the other being an annual thing that just happened to have a death-adjacent this time. So that was an option, too. Anniversaries? Deaths? Birthdays? Arbor Day? 

And then I saw Sarah, Marjorie Marcellus, and Samm Hill together. Three siblings at the core of the story. So a family affair. Not sure what kind yet. But certainly well-to-do. 

The possible ingredients of the plot were thickening. So after about two hours, I was like, “We better lock this down before I go any further. I don’t wanna dream up a whole movie, just to have her say no.”

 So I wrote Sarah an email, saying, “We can shoot a feature in your house for free? Maybe two weeks tops? Just the class and a tiny crew?”

It was a Saturday night, so I didn’t expect to hear back till morning. But an hour later, she checked her email on a whim. Saw my weird message. And immediately responded.

“Hmm!” she said. “What kind of movie? As long as it’s not a horror movie–”

“That’s totally fine–”

“Because I really don’t like horror movies–”

“Then let’s do a comedy, A social satire.” And told her the ideas I was having. Asked which kind of event they should be celebrating.

“Funeral,” she said, without a moment’s hesitation. 

After the call, I worked for another couple hours. Our first working title? Granny Fanny’s Funeral Pie.

4/23-26/2023

The next day, on Zoom, Sarah came fully on board with me as a fellow producer, and immediately drafted a questionnaire for the class: “Do you want to be in a feature film we’re making? Yes or no?” 

Next day, she sent it out. Across the board, the answer was yes. Meanwhile, I laid out a rough breakdown of social groupings for the party: family, friends, Samm’s character's decadent entourage. 

Got immediate pushback; “Is ‘entourage’ another word for ‘extra?’” I assured them that every single character would be interesting, and get cool shit to do. 

That’s when I decided that Annika James, who loves to wear wigs, would play three different versions of the same character. From that point on, the entourage was an awesome place to be.

Also that day, on the 26th, I wrote two versions of the same jazzy piano hook: one in ¾, one in 4/4. The first went to Annika’s new character, Red Andi. The second became the opening credits for the film. 

The name of the piece was “Fish in a Barrel.” And to me, it sounded exactly like this movie. Like something Henry Mancini would write for a kooky ‘60’s caper film.

4/27/2023

About a dozen of us met after class at Mi Burrito, a little Mexican place right down the street. I brought a giant stack of index cards and a half-dozen thick-line black Sharpees. In 90 minutes, we came up with fun character names for everyone present. Potential occupations. Something good about them. Something not-so-good about them. That was the goal.

In the process, we also came up with about 30 funny lines of possible dialogue, started building little interactive character beats. At that point, things really started to come alive, and people were getting excited.

The next day, on Zoom, Sarah transcribed all those index card notes to a Google file we shared. And we were off and running.

 5/1-7/2023

We heard our first giant Zoom meeting, with nearly all of the class present. Massively filled in the character gaps. And I even figured out who I was going to play: a Hunter Thompson-esque investigative journalist named Nick the Prick.

At this point, having named the family, our tentative title was The Last McManns. And this is when I started asking the actors, “Which one of you wants to kill Granny?” There were several volunteers, but much to consider in terms of motivation. And my file cards were getting out of hand. 

I was now officially thinking 100 times faster than I could write. This is generally what happens when a story truly starts taking shape. I start to bog down, because I can’t keep up. That’s when it’s time to call in help.

On Friday the 5th, Marjorie agreed to come over on Monday the 7th and take dictation, then slap the Post-Its on my wall. (Occupied, at the moment, by the film I’d spent the last year working on.)

Two days later, I stripped Duke Moses: The Farewell Tour off the wall. That script was already written. It was time to make room for the new. 

5/8-13/2023

That morning, I had one more quick Zoom with Sarah, Blair Nesbitt, Sad Stone, Krista Arrington, and Crystal Lemons. Wrote a last raft of notes. 

Twenty minutes later, Marjorie came over. And two hours after that, there were 165 FRESH POST-IT NOTES splayed across the wall, in rough accordance with the movie’s estimated 90 minute running time. (Across the top of the wall, in pink, were Post-Its labeled 10 through 90, allowing me to lay the scenes out in guesstimated ten-minute increments.)

Each Post-It had one particular narrative beat, or line of dialogue. Some were fairly broad. Some were pinpoint-precise. Either way was good. 

I now had 90% of the structure of the film laid out before me. It was all about smoothing the transitions, getting a sense of what was still missing, and filling in the gaps. 

Over the next several days, had another great class. Met afterwards with Jesse Benefield and Samantha, established the goofy parameters of their characters’ “meet cute”, and the hilarious children’s book Samantha’s “Greer” was suddenly writing.

5/14/2023

At this point, it had been exactly 30 days since LabFest, 22 days since I first messaged Sarah about shooting in her house. Every time I looked up from my laptop, Snappy, the whole story of the movie stared back at me.

I had one last Zoom that morning. A final flood of information.

Then I wrote the first three-anna-half pages of the script. 

5/15/2023

I wrote ten more pages, bringing up to pg. 14.

5/16/2023

I shared the first 14 pages with the class, and wrote a song called “Treasons to Love” for the first moment between sisters Eleanor (Marjorie) and Sarah (Olivia). Acoustic guitars and harmony voices, with a little percussion and Hammond B3. Somewhere between Crosby, Stills, and Nash and The Flaming Lips. That’s enough creativity for me.

5/17/2023

Three more pages.

5/18/2023

I ran the first improv rehearsals in class with Jesse, Samantha, Krista, Crystal, Marjorie, Samm, and Greg. It was fantastic to watch them play. They understood their characters already, because they’d helped create them.

5/19/2023

About 3:00 in the morning, on the day before my 66th birthday, I woke up to take a leak. On the way to the bathroom, as I passed the piano, I suddenly heard a piece of whiskey-soaked New Orleans gospel music in my head. And heard my own voice sing the following words: 

As we gaze across 

This great divide, 

God help us.

“Holy shit,” I said. “That’s the name of our movie.”

Then I ran back to the piano, pee be damned, and spent the next hour figuring out how to play the chorus of the song I’d just heard.

Fell back asleep. Woke up. Wrote another 10 pages.

5/20/2023

I spent my birthday writing and recording “The Great Divide”, which would now officially run over the closing credits. I realize it might be one of the best songs I ever write. It’s certainly the best present I could possibly ask for.

On Facebook, everyone was very nice, and sent me tons of birthday wishes.

5/21/2023

I rehearsed and refined all the soundtrack pieces I’d written to date. Soaking up the feel. Wrote five more pages. And scheduled a table read of what we had for Tuesday the 23rd.

5/22/2023

Wrote seven more pages.

5/23/2023

Had fantastic table read. Wrote five more pages.

5/24/2023

Spent the day writing a pitch document for the movie now called The Great Divide. And came up with first visual ideas of the “money pie” for the poster art.

5/25/2023

More character improvs in class. People are really getting excited. It was also my first time meeting new classmate Nate Owens (Blythe) in person. He was fantastic in the improv scenes, making up embarrassing stories with Blair (Quinn) about Quinn’s brother Bradley (played by Kody) in front of Maya (played by Sahi). I hope to remember them. No new pages.

5/26-31/2023

Spent the next six days in New York City, hardcore editing an awesome memoir for an awesome client heavily involved in NYC politics. Very hush-hush side hustle I hope I can announce later.

Absolutely no writing on the script.

6/1-2/2023

Back in Portland, class was great. Made arrangements to make breakfast for Sad the next day, discuss character of “Phuk” further. It went great. No new pages, but reread everything to get back in the groove.

6/3/2023

Wrote 4+ new pages, had to blow off party at Samm’s.

6/4/2023

Realized I’d just hit the halfway point, shared with class. Spent rest of day filling in blanks on wall, gearing up for next big blast. Then wrote 3 more pages.

6/5/2023

Wrote 10 new pages, gearing up to wrap by Thursday the 8th.

6/6/2023

Wrote 5 more pages, got to Act III.

6/7/2023

Wrote 8 more pages. Also wrote and recorded new sludgy Riot Grrrrl-esque song “The Money Remembers” for Crystal’s character Freyja to sing.

6/8/2023

Wrote and recorded first draft of “Damcin’ Death” for the dance sequence. Then wrote 7 more pages, leading right up to Freyja’s song. But could not quite hit deadline. Took a quick nap. Woke back up at midnight.

6/9/2023

Wrote the last 10 pages, and wrapped the first draft by 6:00 ayem. Then fell over at last.

***

So all told, the script took 25 days from first page to last. But if you subtract the six days in NYC, and the days I spent doing other things, it was THIRTEEN DAYS OF WRITING for the whole 86-page script. Or just under two weeks of actual typing.

How did that happen? As you can see, it was a whole lotta planning before I wrote a single word on Final Draft. A whole lotta bouncing character ideas, and shifting Post-It notes around.

But once I got rolling, I knew where I was, and the pages just came pouring out. 

And in the process, the majority of the music for the film poured out as well. Often as I was writing the scene in question. I could hear it, and the montage would form to its rhythms. An interactive magick that always thrills me no end.

Of course, this will all mean a whole lot more when I actually publish the script. But that won’t happen till the movie’s released. So you might have to wait a little.

Anyway, that’s the scoop! HOPE IT COMES IN HANDY, for any of you screenwriters who feel overwhelmed. My point is that ridiculous feats like this are possible, if you’re fired up enough, and you get specific enough, and then just put in the hours. 

Frankly, I’m exhausted just talkin’ about it! HAVE A BEAUTIFUL NIGHT! 

Yer collapsin’ pal,

Skipp

***