The Screenplay Rewrite
by aparnamalladi
I cannot even remember when I started to write ‘The Anushree Experiments’. In fact the screenplay started out with the title ‘Hanglider’. I think I conceived towards the end of my Phenomenex days when I was working in chromatography sales. I know it was towards the end of Phenomenex days because the birth of the possibility o a new feature film is what ended the so-called ‘Phenomenex days’. I have to define those days for you.
Phenomenex Days
I was selling chromatography columns and silica to Biotech and Pharmaceutical companies. I was having a blast and was on a complete high. I was so in the ‘zone’, I could do no wrong. I was closing deals like it was going out of fashion and made a ton of money for Phenomenex and myself. I had just gotten back from a much-needed holiday in Kenya and was getting restless as I usually do when my savings account swells and I know I can afford to plug out of the matrix for a couple of years and be a filmmaker full time. This had become my life. Plug into the matrix for a couple of years, make some money, plug out and make a movie.
When I joined Phenomenex I was so poor from having made my last feature film ‘Mitsein’ that I had barely enough money to fill gas in my car to drive to work for two weeks till I got my first paycheck. That meant, I had no money for food. At work, since we were in training, we got fed some breakfast food and in the evening I ate the food my roommates had in the pantry. At the time I was renting a corner in a two bedroom apartment filled with 2 or 3 illegal Brazilian girls who looked like supermodels and cousins of Giselle Bundchen and an extremely handsome, better than Brad Pitt looking Austrian art gallery owner from Vienna who was studying Brazilian Jujitsu. Trust me, it was my reality for a few months while I saved enough to get out of that place. At nights it was a regular Rio style party with Argentinian beef on the grill and dancing till the wee hours. During the day, the girls hung out at the pool side in their g-strings and bikinis and lazed. The Austrian cutie and I were the only two outsiders in ‘Little Brazil’. While he had a great time with the girls, I spend my time studying chromatography since we had an exam every day and training was a bitch. During lunch my training partner Wynne Tsing brought me lunch. She has always been very intuitive and she realized I had no money for food so she fed me every day for two weeks till I got my first paycheck. Fast forward 2 years and I am living in a posh loft in downtown Los Angeles with filmmakers and actors and musicians. Wynne and I are co-writing ‘The Anushree Experiments [Then titled 'Hanglider']‘ and a year later we both quit our jobs and jumped head first into writing a screenplay that was a lot of fun. We created fun characters and fun scenarios and we created a protagonist who was a bit of both of us. She was the girl we both had been at some point or the other in our lives and transformed.
Wynne and I both attended ‘The Writers Boot Camp’ in Santa Monica and we got more skilled and better with writing. With every stage we realized how much we did not know and how stupid we were to even write what we had written so far. There were times I was so depressed that I would have to be woken up midday by Wynne who came downtown with her cheery smile and Starbucks coffee and muffin and kicked my ass out of bed. She even tried getting me into Bikram Yoga to get me out of my funk. I sweated so much that I ran out after a few sessions. It was better to write then endure Bikram.
A year of writing full-time, attending the Screenwriting Expos, shifting from Movie Magic to Final Draft, Writers Boot Camp and attending the Squaw Valley Screenwriting Workshop all boiled down to a 100 odd pages of a screenplay titled ‘The Anushree Experiments’. Phew! Talk about distillation.
The screenplay then went through endless drafts. I have lost count of them. However, there was always that third act that Wynne and especially I could not crack. Something was off. We never did feel right. Being a story about a father and a daughter, Wynne felt I needed to talk to my father in India and resolve any stuff I had with him so I could write that scene. After a lot of resistence I made that call and cried and resolved a lot of stuff with my dad and cleaned up a lot of baggage. Guess what! The third act still sucked.
In the meantime I was also coming to the end of editing ‘Mitsein’. I got caught up in finishing that film. I was avoiding it for years. I knew I could not make my next film till I finished ‘Mitsein’. I finally finished ‘Mitsein’ and then sat on it. I was too attached to it and did not share it with anyone. Did not want to send to film festivals and did not want to screen it for anyone. I had many demons to deal with [Especially from the shooting of 'Mitsein'] and it took a lot to finally start sharing that film. I showed it to a few close girl friends who liked it and encouraged me to send it out. After 6 months of nightmares and dodging I finally sent the film out to festivals and let it go.
As ‘Mitsein’ started to screen at festivals, ‘The Anushree Experiments’ loomed back up and there was that dreadful and blah boring third act. Yuck! Well by this time I had decided to move to Hyderabad, India to shoot ‘The Anushree Experiments’. I moved from the Downtown Loft to an Old Spanish House in Glendale with a beautiful terraced garden and orange trees. I did not want to sign a full year’s lease and wanted to pay month to month till the time came for me to extract myself to Hyderabad, India. Here at this Spanish haven, I tried rewriting a bit and cleaned up a lot of the screenplay. I still avoided the third act and it’s boring resolution.
For no apparent reason, I decided to go to Grass Valley near Sacramento and do a Yoga teacher’s course at the Sivananda Ashram there. I wanted to detox, lose some weight and also clear all the negativity of ‘Mitsein’s’ production so I could go into ‘The Anushree Experiments’ production clean. That month at Grass Valley kicked my ass like never before and trust me when I say – ‘I saw GOD’. We were warned about the process by Swami Sita who told us we were signing up for ‘Concentration Camp’. Yep, we meditated and did 4 hours of Hatha yoga everyday not to mention the lack of sleep and the constant homework. Oh well, all in all I survived, got my certificate, was detoxed, made 4 paintings while I was there and got out.
I had started to paint like a maniac since about 8 month prior. This was mainly to deal with the rather long gestation periods of filmmaking. Concept to screen takes about 5-6 years for a film and it’s too much to ask a girl to wait before she can see her fucking expression. By the time I see my films, it feels like I am seeing some expression of mine that is sooo outdated that I need a fossil expert to make any sense of it anyway. I needed something instant to look at my ‘self’. Like in 4-5 hours. Painting was perfect. The dam broke and I was painting away. I lost sleep and hunger and watched many films while I painted. I painted for no reason at all and I painted effortlessly. I think art is the sublimation of sexual energy and if my paintings are any indication, the lack of a boyfriend and a non-existent sex life really created a prolific body of work that was very colorful and crazy. It was a poor substitution for sex, but at least it was documented.
Coming back from the ‘Yoga Farm’, I had a partial stipend waiting for me from CanSerrat, an art residency 30 minutes outside of Barcelona, Spain. After the ‘Yoga Farm’, an art residency in El Bruc, Spain seemed like heaven. I booked my tixs and was off in a month. At CanSerrat I painted, I went to galleries, met artists that I knew I always wanted to meet and I had amazing conversations. I met writers, painters, photographers, poets, sculptors, fashion designers, installation artists, performance artists and sound designers. I fell in love with creating art and got real horny about my ‘The Anushree Experiments’ again. I was all that kava and heat and swimming and Miro and Picasso and the beach and Madrid and just a languid existence with no expectations. I got up everyday and expressed what I felt like. I loved it there. I even shot a film with performance artist Peggy Jo Pabustan called ‘Peggy’s Grapes’. Excellent!
Back in Los Angeles, I threw down the gauntlet. I was moving to Hyderabad with my computer, printer and a feature-length screenplay [with a blah third act] and I was going to make my next feature film. It took me one month and a to-do list that looked like a space shuttle launch sequence to get me out of Los Angeles. I crossed off the last item on my to-do list – ‘Get on a plane to Hyderabad’. As soon I sat in my seat, I went into a 22 hour hibernation that took me half way round the world to a place I was dreading.
In Hyderabad, I had to deal with things that only hardened criminals should be subjected to. By the time I reopened the screenplay to do a so called ‘Hyderabad Rewrite’, I wanted to take a flight back to Los Angeles and drop all plans of making the – ‘Anushree’s Wasted Experiments’. I stayed however and this time I wrote with Hyderabad in mind. I visited my university [Osmania University] and started to write from a place that I was only imagining before. Now it was real. I also had good conversations with my father. It was nice to be close to him. Plus there was nothing else to do in boring Hyderabad anyway – so it was ‘rewrite time’.
When I met my film’s producer Pierre Assouline, he gave me my first major rewrite assignment. All the previous rewrites were babies compared to this one. In fact according to him this would be my official ‘second rewrite’. What the hell!!! Oh well! I hunkered down and started. I went to Mumbai and stayed for a few weeks with my writer friend Beena Gera to do the rewrite and got very little accomplished. I tried to rewrite while I went back for a ‘Tax return’ visit to Los Angeles and then to Europe. I partied instead. Two months later, I am back in 46 degree Hyderabad and sweating bullets and the so-called ‘Second Rewrite’ is not happening. My brain has stopped functioning after 40 degrees and at 46 degrees I am no longer human.
Pierre calls me from the South of France as he hob nobs at Cannes and asks me about my rewrite. I go – Blah blah blah! Yes I will have it very soon. He had spent almost 4 hours with me as he went line by line on my screenplay at Russell Square Hotel in London and I made endless notes for my rewrite. Now about a month later I was trying to decipher those handwritten notes. What the ‘F’. Did I write that and that and that. What the hell did I write as notes. Fuck it! I opened the final draft doc and started to write my screenplay anew. Fade in: I started.
I wrote my rewrite on a blank page. I knew the plot and the characters and I knew the dialogues by heart. I knew who said what and why and why not. I knew the color of the shoes in the 4th page of the second act. I knew Pierre’s notes by heart. I knew it all. And so I wrote and wrote and wrote. I joined the Talwarkars gym in Madhapur and I gymed and I wrote wrote and wrote and wrote some more.
And last weekend, on Saturday, as I was writing my third act I had a breakthrough! I knew why it was not working because I had just written a scene that made my entire screenplay work. It was the scene I had been waiting for. It was the scene that released me from my agony. And I realized why I was telling this story. I realized why I was putting myself through hell to make this film. I realized why I resisted and why Pierre called me from Cannes to ask for the rewrite. I realized what was at stake.
I would like to know your thoughts when you see the film and see that scene play out. If you would go through hell for that scene in your life.
:0)
Aparna
