Half Widow: A Whole New World . . .

More years ago than I care to count, I spent an unforgettable few days in Kashmir, Indian’s northernmost state. Based in Srinagar, I visited fabled gardens, stayed on a romantic houseboat docked on the local river, and gazed upward at towering mountain peaks. But the beauty of the region was offset by a sense of military wariness: Kashmir was and is disputed territory, claimed by both India and Pakistan. Both the beauty and the political tension of Kashmir are well displayed in a film directed and co-written by one of my former students, Danish Renzu.

Teaching Advanced Screenwriting workshops through UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program has introduced me to a fascinating range of would-be writers. I teach online, so there’s an international flavor to many of my course rosters. I’ve had students from Australia, Greece, and Malaysia. I’ve read a sex scene set in Africa that bubbled up from  the imagination of a Jesuit priest who (after years of missionary work) now calls Dublin home.  I’ve encountered far-off places like Nepal from the perspective of aspiring writers who’ve lived and worked there. Through my students I’ve explored the world from many angles, and I feel enriched by what I’ve learned.

Danish Renzu comes from India. A native Kashmiri, he’s so determined to make his mark as a filmmaker that he has crossed land and sea to settle in Southern California. By the time I got to know him, he had acquired a full repertoire of cinematic skills. But he wanted to tune up one of his screenwriting projects, and I enjoyed giving my input on what was working and what was not. (That very timely project, called Illegal, deals with an immigrant from India who’s forced to live below the radar in California once his educational plans fall through. Danish plans to shoot this script in the near future.)

Meanwhile, after making several prize-winning short films, Danish has put forth his first feature, Half Widow. (It’s only fair to mention his producer and co-screenwriter Gaya Bhola, who like Danish has dedicated herself for years to this labor of love.)  Half Widow, apparently the first feature to be shot in Kashmir by Kashmiris, looks closely at the life of a young woman named Neela who suffers from a grim fate that was not uncommon at the time of Kashmir’s 1999 Kargil War. Neela is happily married and expecting her first child when the local militia swoop down and arrest her husband on no particular charges. From what we’ve seen of him, he’s apolitical and totally innocent, but Neela’s desperate efforts to find and free him are all in vain. Matters go from bad to worse: she loses her baby, her devoted younger brother is also jeopardized, and she can find no value in her own life. But when an international delegation of female journalists approaches her for an interview about what it’s like to be categorized as a half-widow, Neela realizes it’s up to her to resurrect her life and tell her husband’s story. So a film that deals in anguish ends with a genuine sense of hope, showing how someone can survive the unthinkable and move on.

Half Widow, shot in increments during several trips to Kashmir, has inspired a fan base that turned out in force at a recent Santa Monica screening. It has been featured at festivals both in India and the U.S., winning such prizes as the Audience Choice Award at the Seattle International Film Festival. I feel great pride that a former student of mine is turning into a filmmaker to reckon with.

Tricia Hopper: Once a Rider, Now the Writer of “Rodeo Girl”

It was a family tragedy that started Tricia Hopper on the path of becoming a screenwriter. In 1992, when her brother died of AIDS, she wrote a play about a family facing a similar ordeal, and toured it in high schools across Southern California. Then, because she’d always loved movies, she started studying the craft of screenwriting through classes in UCLA Extension’s famous Writers’ Program. (That’s where I had the pleasure of getting to know her.) Always diligent and enthusiastic, Tricia also read how-to books and took workshops, like one offered by screenwriting guru Jeff Kitchen.

Of course, fully half of SoCal’s residents are working on screenplays, as a visit to any local Starbucks will attest. But Tricia has had the good fortune to see one of her projects filmed and released. Rodeo Girl, a wholesome and inspirational script about a teenaged girl, her horse, and her estranged father was bought and produced by Vertical Entertainment. The production values aren’t all that Tricia would have wished for, but she’s a professional screenwriter now—and that’s cause for celebration.

 Rodeo Girl began as a screenplay by Aletha Rodgers, whom she’d met in Jeff Kitchen’s workshop. When Aletha asked for Tricia’s critique of her work, Tricia found herself drawn into the world of rodeo. They joined forces, meeting three times a week for over a year. Aletha showed her the importance of deeply researching the rodeo world, and she herself contributed the complex father-daughter relationship that adds tension to the proceedings. Once they’d finished, the script started getting optioned. A mere twelve years later (nothing happens quickly in Hollywood), their third option evolved into a deal with Joel Paul Reisig, a producer-director with whom she’d connected online through InkTip. He’d been looking for a horse story with a young girl as a protagonist, and Rodeo Girl nicely filled the bill.  

The story of Rodeo Girl takes place in Oklahoma, where young Priscilla (Sophie Bolen) moves past her earlier biases and learns to become a champion barrel racer, but the film was shot in Michigan. Since Tricia wasn’t present on the set, she was later surprised by a number of changes that had been made in her script. Her heroine -- who starts out as an equestrienne in a formal riding habit devoted to the world of show-jumping -- was originally supposed to be English, but the production honchos made her American. They hired a actor of some repute, Kevin Sorbo (Hercules), to play the father character: though his gruff presence in the film is effective, all of his scenes had to be shot in three days, and his salary ate up half the production budget. There was also some tweaking of important plot points, as well as the addition of a romantic interest who (though certainly a good guy) seems a tad too mature for a fourteen-year-old girl.  

Some of the changes, including some downplaying of the father-daughter relationship, at first made Tricia cringe, but she’s pleased that the world of bronco-busting and rodeo clowns shows up vividly on screen. Philosophically she insists that “it always feels good to accomplish something you set out to do. We all know how hard it is to get a script made into a movie.” In future, she hopes to have more control over her projects. She’s just finished her first novel, and a hotshot agent wants a look. If the book is successful and Hollywood wants to turn it into a movie, she’ll insist that a gig as its screenwriter will be part of her deal. Way to go, Tricia!

I’m always delighted to put in a plug for the good folks (and great teachers) at UCLA Extension’s Writers’ Program. Courses are available either on the UCLA campus, at several other SoCal locations, or online. There’s a wide array of screenwriting courses to choose from, and spring enrollment is ramping up right now. So what are you waiting for?

 

Going Into Orbit Over “The Martian”

As Thanksgiving approaches, the world’s engineers and space scientists are expressing their gratitude for The Martian. This saga of a modern-day astronaut stranded on Mars is an upbeat movie that makes space exploration look exciting, shot by a team dedicated to ensuring on-screen scientific accuracy. I myself grew up in an era when space travel was regarded as a thrilling adventure, and government expenditure on space-going missions seemed like money well spent. It’s been far too long since we cheered a man on the moon. As someone with close family ties to Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Lab, which makes an important cameo in the film, I’m personally thankful for anything that encourages voyages (manned or unmanned) across the cosmos. Let’s keep those science nerd-types employed! And while we’re doing that, let’s keep alive mankind’s dreams of exploring our universe

Though I’m rooting for The Martian because of its whole-hearted endorsement of space science, I also love this project because of what it says about the screenwriting process. I teach in the screenwriting division of UCLA Extension’s world-renowned Writers’ Program, so I count among my students many teachers and doctors and airline pilots who’re convinced they have what it take to make it to Hollywood. Most won’t get very far, but it still remains possible for would-be writers, whatever their day jobs, to hit the jackpot in the movie game.

Take the case of Andy Weir. He’s a mild-mannered software engineer who grew up, as so many engineers do, enamored of science fiction. He’s been writing stories since childhood, but his very first novel, The Martian, was truly the little spacecraft that could. Weir researched the story intently—delving into such arcane subjects as botany, orbital mechanics, and weather conditions on Mars—and then, if Wikipedia is to be believed, offered it as a free serial on his website. Once he turned it into a low-rent Kindle ebook, it was endorsed on the Goodreads site, then discovered by Crown Books . . . and the rest is publishing history.  

But how did the 2011 novel become a 2015 Matt Damon movie, directed by Ridley Scott? Personally, I’m less interested in the business details than in the aesthetic challenges. Weir didn’t undertake the screenplay, which was written by Hollywood veteran Drew Goddard. Part of Goddard’s task was to explore the character of Mark Watney, who’s stranded on Mars when his crewmates leave him behind during a crisis, thinking him dead. Alone on Mars, without any initial way of communicating with earth, Mark does a great many creative things to stay alive. In a movie, we can watch him in action, but we can’t have access to his thought processes. The Mark of the novel keeps a running log, which shows us the way his mind works, and also introduces us to his vivid—sometimes profane, often very funny—voice. Movie audiences will never be satisfied with constant voiceover, so Weir’s idea of a log has evolved in the film into Mark’s series of video selfies, theoretically made for some far-off posterity. Given how much hard science is being thrown at us, it helps a lot to see Damon at his most brashly charming, spelling out his plans, crowing over his small successes, and struggling to absorb fuck-ups.

There are other good additions in the screenplay, like a deft characterization of an ultimate JPL space nerd who’s brilliant at solving problems of astrophysics but hasn’t yet figured out how to behave appropriately with actual human beings. And a new coda wraps up loose ends to give us a satisfying version of happily-ever-after.