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Lost on Broad Street:
Diary of multi-strand collaboration
Wed, 5 May 2004
The Script Factory recently teamed up with Birmingham-based director, Michael Baig-Clifford, to find a team of four West Midlands’ writers to work together on a multi-strand feature. This innovative project, Broad Street Stories, supported by Screen West Midlands, developed the writers of sixteen short film scripts, before selecting the final team, who are currently working to mesh their ideas, characters and storylines into a tale about life, love, loss and hope in a Friday night in Broad Street.
Screenwriter Andy Conway tells all...
‘It’s a short story anthology, a scriptwriting development programme and a brand new feature film all in one’, they said. All you had to do was enter your own story, then get selected along with sixteen other writers for a workshop process, and finally end up one of the lucky four writers working on a multi-strand feature film treatment.
So I entered. Why wouldn’t I?
Well, much later, when I was up to my eyes in rewrites, a screenwriter friend congratulated me on getting the gig and admitted he’d given it a miss because he didn’t fancy working with other writers. I hadn’t given it a second thought: maybe because, to me, screenwriting had always been about being a co-writer.
I got the screenwriting bug when I lived in Hungary ten years ago, sharing an apartment with a film student called Csaba. We shut ourselves away for four months, analysed movies, read all the screenwriting gurus and collaborated on two screenplays, brainstorming over Hungarian cigarettes and rocket fuel coffee. I’d been writing for years before this and had never before exposed such embryonic ideas to scrutiny. But this was liberating. Instead of taking a year to really see the problems in what you’d written, here was instant feedback, illumination, solution. All you had to do was ditch your ego.
So the idea of handing over my short script idea to see it eventually woven into the fabric of four others to form a feature film seemed quite natural. That’s what filmmaking was all about, wasn’t it?
Choosing screenwriting always meant ditching any idea of being precious about my work, knowing it would be at the mercy of producers, directors, actors and editors. Screenwriters are merely part of the film-making process; the most important part, of course, but a part that has to work in collaboration with other parts.
Gutting
So I get to the first workshop and what surprises me is that so few of the other sixteen writers are actually screenwriters. There are a few hardened hacks like me, some playwrights and a lot of people who’ve never seen a plot point before.
So we sit there, seventeen strangers being taught about short film structure whilst simultaneously trying to suss each other out. As I’d already written 13 short scripts and just had my first produced, with a second in pre-production, I thought I knew it all. But sitting there while The Script Factory’s Marilyn Milgrom laid it all out was like having everything slowly cranked into focus.
We submitted our first drafts and returned for the second workshop, where it got more personal: four writers per group, each having our script taken apart. The temptation here was to defend your ideas; protect the integrity of your vision. Or you could just accept that other people were more likely to see the faults in your story, and take their criticisms on board. I went home in the rain realising that my perfect story needed gutting.
The Script Factory had been keen to make us concentrate on getting us to develop our stories into 10-minute shorts that we could go on to make ourselves if we didn’t make the final selection, and at this point I thought that was where I was heading.
Feeling the tingle
But they phoned me back and asked me to be in the final four. I must have taken in something. I must have made it work somehow.
I find out the other three writers are Chris O’Connell, Myria Panayiotou and Diane Allton. Chris is the only one I really know from the workshops, and before we reconvene for our first session, we witness our director, Michael Baig Clifford, winning the BAFTA for Best Short Film. It’s a good omen.
So we spend a day discussing multi-strand films and the importance of the Controlling Idea, listing our characters and themes until we hit on the single idea that covers all four stories of these people, our characters, all wandering Broad Street in Birmingham on the same day. Then we start thinking about possible ways for our characters to cross-fertilise, and this is when I feel it: the tingle.
It’s that tingle that took me back to the apartment in Hungary; the tingle you get when the spark flies out from the rocks you’ve been banging together and catches fire. That spark as two ideas clash and produce a third and you get a sudden glimpse of possibility; a sudden peek at a new world.
There are more meetings over the next few weeks in Birmingham and Coventry and we fire ideas back and forth between us on a private web board; four writers, a director and John Costello, our development guru, who’s guiding us, prompting us, bullying us, nurturing us (and who ends up pulling it all together and writing the final treatment).
The trade-off
It’s the most exciting part for me: that stage where it’s not four writers, each with their own story, but all these characters, each with their own storyline, each one demanding resolution, even the ones that were only minor characters in our first drafts. These characters, taking on new lives and wandering around the real city space we’ve created, on the night that our film is set, interacting with other characters all adrift, let loose in this cityscape we’ve imagined.
And this, finally, is the beauty of collaboration. Your story can take a turn you might never have envisaged. It might become a different story altogether, and not a bit like the one that first excited you. But you have to weigh that against those flashes of inspiration that sparked up when the rocks began to clash.
It’s a trade-off.
And that pretty much sums up what it means to be a screenwriter; what it means to work in such a collaborative art form.
If you want complete control you can go and write novels.
writer, Andy Conway
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