For as long as I can remember, I wanted to be a Hollywood film director. My adventures in show business began at age nine when my sister and I used a handheld camera to recreate the greatest movie we had ever seen. That movie, “Dinocroc,” was a universally panned horror film about — you guessed it — a dinosaur-crocodile hybrid.
As the years went by, our movies increased in quality and ambition, and our interests changed as well. Between the two of us, I was the square. My sister committed herself to film and went on to study animation. Meanwhile, I shifted my focus to math and science, letting filmmaking fall by the wayside.
When senior year of high school rolled around, my future seemed decidedly technical. I was a prospective engineer, and science-related activities constituted the meat of my resume. However, without homework or tests to keep me occupied, I had time to reflect on some of the passions I had ignored in the name of college acceptance. I found myself frustrated with the shrinking role cinema played in my life, and I resolved to make a change.
I plopped down in front of my computer, cracked my knuckles and wrote the screenplay for a feature-length film, because fortune favors the bold, right? The script was more than 100 pages long, complete with a massive cast of characters and dubious formatting. There were several pages of just dialogue, and there were scene descriptions that lasted a mere sentence, but that hardly mattered to me.
Drama, action, romance, comedy — my script had it all. It was my swansong. It was my masterpiece. It was “Pulp Fiction.”
Wait, what?
Slowly and terribly, I realized I had rewritten “Pulp Fiction.” The characters had different names, the order of events was slightly altered and it was nowhere near as good, but it was undeniably a rip off of “Pulp Fiction.” How could I not have realized earlier?
I am now absolutely confident that every aspiring screenwriter — past, present and future — starts off by writing a mediocre copy of his or her favorite movie script. At the very least, that’s what I tell myself whenever the specter of that first script comes back to haunt me. So no, that script was not my swansong, nor was it my masterpiece, nor was it the script that kickstarted a lucrative film career. However, it was the script that rekindled my passion for filmmaking.
Sometimes it takes failing to realize you want to get good at something. With that in mind, I prefer to think of my “Pulp Fiction” wannabe not as a failure, but instead as a reality check. I have been invested in screenwriting ever since and I am committed to improving. There’s always the chance I’ll repeat the same mistake — maybe I’ll write 100 more screenplays and every one of them will be a copy of a famous film. That said, if just a single one of those rehashes ends up being fun and well-written, then I’ll be satisfied with the progress I’ve made. After all, every movie script rewrite is an improvement when the starting point is “Dinocroc.”
John’s column runs biweekly Fridays. He can be reached at j.benenati@cavalierdaily.com.
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