Shooting Bird Shooting

Okay, Gentlemen, thank you for giving me this opportunity to answer some questions that I have received. Thanks, too, to Bjorn who has let me wander off the sexual path to explain how I wandered off the sexual path. 

Couple of things, I always saw "Bird Shooting" as potentially a script, I like to write dialogue which sometimes confuses my readers as they'd prefer my characters to shut up and fuck. Generally they get around to that but...later rather than sooner. This was written...last year in sections as I thought of them. It ended up here in several parts as I couldn't find a way to condense it. ("Studville" is the précis for Birds and is closer to the scripted story line.

Here, to, I drift off course and write about other things....I'm old, 77, so allow me a few conceits. One hopes you'll find some interesting things here, if not, you can quit reading, grade it down and no harm done.

Thanks for sticking with me this far. The credits have rolled, it's an overcast, chilly day somewhere on a hill by a hedgerow, there' s the roar of a gun and...Bird Shooting begins....

When it was announced that a piece of mine, “Bird Shooting”, had been optioned and would soon be “A major motion picture coming soon to a theatre near you!”. I thought, Horse shit.

IF I live to see the finished product I’ll be amazed. I’m still sitting with a picture I wrote for Jim Garner as a follow up to “Support Your Local Gunfighter” and that’s…..oh….maybe 40 years ago? He’s dead, everyone in Gunfighter is dead and, finally the script was returned by his estate to my company. Fine, I liked the piece then, still do BUT it was specifically tailored for Jim and I don’t know how or who might step into the role. (Charlie Sheen has been suggested but…whether he could play a Sheriff in Texas….?Also , I don’t know if we could get the insurance on him. ) Jim made “Murphy’s Romance” instead of mine and, having seen the script, he made the right choice-picked up an Oscar Nomination for it. Which takes us back to Birds.

In my email in box, which is there on my bio, I’ve been hit with guys wondering how in hell that can be a movie as it’s a Valentine to male homosexuality; With few exceptions, every male in it is sleeping with another man or just having casual sex…and that’s how I wrote it-I knew I would it place at Gay Demon so it was tailored for the general requirements of that site. That’s what you read and, at one level, what I wrote. BUT you can take the sex out and still have a compelling story about a man who has been both used and abused and now lives in a very small town with yet another father. You may remember that the first night Bill spends with Billy, he hops into bed with him and sucks his cock. Art just had a head on with reality; Of course the kid is frightened in the screenplay, he does go into the bedroom, Billy does think he is used to kissing his (dead father # 2) goodnight and, as it’s cold, Billy hauls him into bed with him. The difference here is that they’re all wearing some sort of, abbreviated, sleep wear and most people will understand the motive to protect a young person who has just shot his father. Indeed the piece opens with the gun shot, the Vultures circling and lines about his father being shot so completely, there’s a hole in him through which you can see the ground. Do you see the wound? No, but you have seen the muzzle blast, the man fall then the lines. This is, and I use it several places, the Hitchcockian trick of making an audience believe what they never saw; In “Psycho” one never sees Janet Leigh get stabbed, only her reaction to when she sees the knife tear the shower curtain (the stand in for flesh) then the blood going down the drain. To this day people will say, “When I saw that knife go into that girl…” I wonder what picture they’ve seen. Equally, although Bill is the putative hero, he’s no saint by a long shot. A buddy of mine, now doing Life for Murder One, once said based on my poacher kills, if I were in prison-a place he thinks I’d find interesting-I’d have tears tatted down to my nuts; I was always enthusiastic about saving our animals.

At this stage when there’s nothing to lose, Marshall, my agent, and I as well as a couple of the studio people play a game called, “Who’d play whom? This isn’t an easy one to cast for, and I’ve already had fights, numbers one through six with the studio about this, no women, no ethnics. I know the small town in which this take place and, sure, there are women living there-I do keep the quicky scene at the town meeting where the woman complains about “noise pollution messing up her hens egg laying…to which the answer is get a Rooster…in either house.” No one, if it makes the final cut, will get it…but it amuses me. One of many, many times I’ve written one or two liners that did make the final cut and were almost groaned at if anyone even got it. For example:

In “The Great Race”, Blake Edwards’ overblown, over produced tribute to old fashioned films, there’s a moment when someone, maybe Peter Falk, runs up to Jack Lemmon and says, “The Great Leslie has run away with a small friar”. As professor Fate, Lemmon’s answer is, “The Great Leslie has run away with a chicken…?” It goes very quickly, few people even hear it much less get the gag. Edwards liked it so it stayed in. Problem was, Edwards liked almost everything and it all stayed in which is why it runs for nearly three hours. I was on loan out to Edwards and wrote the unfortunate exchange; While no one, thankfully, asked for my SWG card, I was sorry I’d ever written it. And I have a point.

In “Bird Shooting” there’s considerable dialogue or the suggestion of it which I simply turned to dialogue or in my shooting notes, put in that this action should occur. Example; The written story has Shep Collyer slap his working gloves (a typical cow man reaction) on his butt then put them in his pocket. Happens just that was in the screen play but it’s subdominant to the dialogue which is whether the judge got branded or not and all of this is filler as I need to establish the noise, the mess, the dust of the round up so Bill, Billy and certain other characters can get away unnoticed. I don’t explain how Serge finds out they’re gone or bother to give him a GPS as to where Bill is when he shoots the two men in the car. Audiences, so long as they can follow the action, do not get caught up in detail that, in reality, might be a bit more important.

And who’s playing these people? Well, in our game of “Hey, what about so and so…” I am stuck on Eric Roberts as Serge. He may be a bit too old but at this stage, I’m above such minor considerations. If he weren’t too short, I’d rework some bits to constrain his need to move and make gestures and put in Michael J. Fox as Billy, the most sympathetic character and the one whose death book ends the piece. Then there’s Bill. This may surprise you but…I always, and the studio agrees, felt we need an actor 30 or even 35. Bill as written is never a kid. Billy tried to figure out just how old he really is when it’s necessary to send him to High School with Jeb. In the written piece, he concludes he may be as old as 18 or 19 which means a fully fledged adult male could and will play the part. Bill is while not quite, early on, the son of a bitch he begins to reveal himself to be, is never, ever less than the bad boy hiding a lot from everyone. So, who could or would play Bill? I have a defect in that my familiarity with Pop Culture stops during Nixon’s first administration so…it may be that Walter Glutz is THE young male star, hot as hell but I’ve never heard of him. I’ll watch some dailies, some out takes but…I don’t know him. Next week, for example, old friends will be in town for a concert and I’m giving a dinner for them. We go back a long way so this is a walk down memory lane with their, pleasant, singing as they feel fit. Most of you will not have heard of Manhattan Transfer but I’m so looking forward to finding out how their children are etc-last time I saw them was in Indianapolis, back stage-I was off to lecture at Purdue-and that would be about 1993? 94?. We have ground to cover.

Because my beloved Uncle Rip-see the notes on “The Marrying Kind” is almost drawn from reality I’d like an actor who has the warmth and actuality of Cowboy that he had. A man I tutored in Chemistry more than 50 years ago would be great but Tom has a show and, candidly, is too old for this role; While I and every woman in America who loved Tom believes he could still procreate, it’s an age problem.

And I’m still stuck with Bill. The last seventeen minutes are when, as is said, “all is revealed”. He comes back hoping he can get Billy to understand why he has to be shot and, when he cannot, must shoot Billy. This requires some acting chops as the play up to then fulcrums on these final revelatory moments.

I want you to stop here and notice that since “way back up yonder” sex has never been mentioned or used; I don’t need it in terms of the screenplay, adds nothing although I would very much like to write something for the screen that has a realistic portrait of the homosexual lifestyle. Problem is….homosexual life is just like life and just as boring. Read and watch, even our beloved Bjorn moans that he’s pressing Forty. Forty? I don’t even remember who was President when I was forty although I’m take a safe bet and safe Her Britannic Majesty, Elizabeth II was on the thrown.

Here’s something you may not have noticed; Cowboy films, or films that have a cowboy motif don’t date as badly as things that are now clearly of a specific period. I cannot look at a black and white picture, depending on the principal players, and not know almost to the year when it was made. Does it spoil the picture for me…..in a way. But only because in some cases, this was an era I knew and lived in. Now, take the end of that same era, put it in colour, add drama and the cowboy motif and what have you? “Bad Day At Black Rock”. I’m a train buff so the Southern Pacific Streamliner that opens and closes the picture is worth watching just for that. Also, it’s a helluva good story, one with a complicated plot that does not reveal itself quickly not to mention the performances, notably Spencer Tracy. Great films can be killed by era. Watch “Dodsworth”, novel by the Brilliant Sinclair Lewis, brilliant picture but…no matter the performances of Walter Huston, Ruth Chatterton, Mary Astor and David Niven, it is very tightly stuck to the time between the wars. You can’t remake it as too much depends on conceits of time and place that now would seem…odd. (Clare Boothe Luce’s Masterpiece, “The Women” has suffered through at least two remakes, one of them a musical, and both were “the sort of bad picture that give bad pictures a bad name.” [I forgot the critic who wrote that but it’s a good line, happy to use it, sorry it’s uncredited.] )

Another word about Sinclair Lewis; His is the quintessential “American Novel” so much so it won him the Nobel Prize for literature. What is it? “Main Street” published around 1920 and made him, amazingly for a author at that time, a millionaire. Yet its never been a film. Why? Well, for one thing you don’t chop up Nobel Prize winners for another, the dense, descriptive text does not lend itself to film which needs dialogue to carry it along. In the 30’s either Metro or Warner’s optioned it but let their options drop when no one was willing to even try. I probably can recite whole passages of it so much do I love it but as a film? Probably never. Now and again a very long, very long piece does come to the screen. Think about “Mourning Becomes Electra” by Eugene O’Neill. As originally produced on the stage, it ran six and a half hours and was played in two sections, one in the afternoon, another in the evening after a substantial break for dinner. The film….should not have been made. Rosalind Russell struggles, as do all the actors, with a play that was meant to be on stage and four hours longer than the film. If you have a chance to see it, don’t. Par Contre, another of his longer plays, “Long Days Journey Into Night” is a brilliant film probably Katherine Hepburn’s best performance but the public, wary of the “artiness” of it stayed away.

There’s that word, “art-iness”. Although recently more “art” films have found success, generally as “indies” it can be a hard sell. “Birds” lingers on the edge of “art” no matter that it started life as a porno romp in a small town. I had two intentions, one was as you read it here and the other was the sex free version which was sold. Again, go back and read parts of it, while it might be said that even with the sex cut out, there’s a lot of implied homosexual conduct, I’ll disagree; To say that is to say that any group of men constantly together implies some degree of homosexuality. Soldiers in the fox holes, pinned down by fire, relying on one another not only for protection but some sort of bucking up (that’s with a B) and comradeship might be thought to be involving themselves in a homosexual event of sorts. I suppose it depends on the foxhole you were in, for how long and what happened.

Big issue in my mind; What I write is, to varying degrees, light weight porno NOT heavy duty eroticism. One is to be seen, enjoyed, identified with the other is evocative, ethereal, mood distracting, aimed at the visceral base of all of our sexuality. True eroticism is hard to find and will very with your ideas. For example, “Fifty Shades of Grey” was thought, by some, to be erotic. That’s their opinion; To me it was just a dirty story written to pander to public desires for smut. I’m told the movie was a dog…but I neither read nor saw any iteration of it so my comments are based solely on a precis of the script and reviews of the film.

Could I “resex” Birds? Yes, but that would serve no purpose. Could I resex it enough to put on the screen? Yes, but that changes the point of the film; then it’s just a story about a pathological killer who sleeps with men and that film has been made. And we’re back at those last 17 minutes when Bill desperately tries to get Billy, his father at that point, to kill him. It’s a moral dilemma in that Billy loves his son but sees the danger IF he lets him live. On the other hand, the moral Billy, the law abiding Sheriff Billy cannot commit a crime he knows to be legally wrong-even if maybe morally correct; Bill has already killed five men just to his knowledge. I suppose one might wonder if he hopes somehow, something will happen and Bill will be disposed of, just not at his hand. Then we’re at the end, the one they bought and not the one I preferred. Mine, as pretty much described in “Studville” shows Bill sitting on his truck, watching the vultures come. The one I wrote and discarded, had Bill, shirt off, rubbing his nipples, rolling a cigarette watching the birds rip the flesh from Billy while he’s still alive at least for a while. What Billy feared will now happen; Bill will turn into the killer he always was just with no governors to stop him.

And that, gentleman, is how the porno story you read here, will become a film sometime in the next several years, decades, who knows. Thanks to Bjorn for indulging me in putting this up, it only deals with porn but isn’t as such. Actually, we should all thank Bjorn for putting up with all of us at all times and all around the world. If there’s a Nobel for running a gay porn site, surely he deserves it.

PJ