All Eyes on Me

Heh, this Dream Machine scene is mostly a lot of funny bits strung together. It doesn’t really have an arc or anything. But I like it anyway, as there are several good jokes in it— or at least, ones that will be good jokes once they get a bit of polishing.

This is for a planned Dream Machine episode 8– where shooting delays make it so nobody can travel for the Thanksgiving holiday, so Meredith tries to host a dinner to create a senes of solidarity among the whole grumpy team. It’s a chance to have the characters messing around instead of working and getting to know each other personally. Plus getting on each other’s nerves in a new way, since everybody’s grouchy and frustrated. :-D



This one occurs after last year’s #9 - “Friendsgiving” and #28 - “Extreme Rendition,” but before “Glorified Babysitters.”

( Day #19 - Emotional Potluck )

Ah, now we’re on to something. This is also from that theoretical bottle episode I’d like to eventually do with Leah and Ryan for Dream Machine (season 2?) that I was noodling on with Day #8 - Flawless. This happens before that, when they first get to Ryan’s house to hang out and commiserate. I did a better job here of getting in that idea I had that they theoretically are hanging out to support each other through a difficult time, but every time one of them gets vulnerable about something, the other panics and deflects rather than engaging with it.

Other things I like about what I did here is that I thought it would be good and humanizing to give Ryan a slightly uncool hobby he doesn’t let a lot of people know about, and that this scene is actually kind of funny. Needs punching up, but not quite as much as some other scenes.



( Day #13 - Man Cave )

Bah. I’m at home in Pennsylvania visiting my dad for the weekend, and not getting any work done. Due to inability to buckle down on a project that really needs doing, I’m snatching at a scene that’s relatively easy. Eventually I want to do a bottle episode of Dream Machine, where Leah and Ryan hang out late at night after a really demoralizing night at like the Emmys or something. And they talk about some real stuff, but every time one of them gets too real, the other one panics and has to divert the conversation away.

This scene only sort of gestures at that, but it’s the best I can pull out without time to focus.



( Day #8 - Flawless )

Okay, here we go. Let’s try some Dream Machine episode six, since I know a little more than zero about it right now.

A big part of episode six is going to be about Ryan’s alienation from his family. He and his ex-wife Veronica, née Waters, had a very acrimonious divorce and have not been in much contact since their separation except to occasionally fight over something. I’ve been trying to work out a timeline of their relationship, to figure out what the significant moments were.



Here’s my tentative thoughts. They were relatively young when they met, when he was up and coming in the film industry and she was making a name for herself as a fashion model. Let’s say around 1994. They were both pretty wild partiers, and though Ryan wasn’t an addict yet, they still used plenty of drugs. Their careers were on the rise and they were happy and had a lot of fun. They were in a committed relationship, but had no plans to get married until Veronica got pregnant with their daughter Meryl, born in 1996. They had a son Marlon (yes, they named their kids after Meryl Streep and Marlon Brando) four or so years later, in 2000.

Veronica got clean for the kids, pivoting away from modeling to found a lifestyle brand she still runs to great success today. But Ryan’s drug use gradually got worse, as he encountered career stumbling blocks and struggled with the demands of being a husband and father. They had a bunch of good years together, I think, but things started to crumble as his addiction took over his life. He’s described in scripts so far as a “fifteen-year heroin addict,” who’s been clean for about one year, which suggests he got into the hard stuff around 2004, but I think he was already pretty deep into other stuff before he reached that point. I’m not exactly sure how long their marriage lasted— between ten and fourteen years —but it definitely broke down several years before their actual split. By the point they crashed they despised each other, chiefly due to Ryan’s lousy behavior, which extended to not being a very present or supportive dad to his kids.

At the time Dream Machine picks up, Marlon is openly hostile with resentment toward him, and Meryl has cut him out of her life in entirely, banning him from her wedding when she got married a couple years ago and refusing to speak to him. Now that he’s clean and pulling his life together, Ryan would like to do something to repair these relationships. But since they’d heard the rehab song and dance from him before, they’re not optimistic. However, this is the farthest he’s come on that path ever, and he’s hoping that will make a difference. But he’s got to get over some more of his own bullshit first.

Here’s a scene with him and his son Marlon, who’s still in contact but doesn’t cut him an inch of slack. There’s not enough here yet, but it’s meant to display Ryan’s bad habits in relating to people that he will have to work on through the course of this episode.

Let out commence with the banged-out garbage!

( Day #1 - Nefarious Plan )

Bernie and I are having a disagreement about using narration in Dream Machine. Since we’re working in the Zoom+ form, which is limited in what we can visually depict, it seems like it might be necessary for a narrator to explain some of the action in order to be clear what’s going on. I concede that might be the case, but I’ve been making an effort to find ways to depict things as clearly as possible, to maximize the chance that we will not need to use one.

I am not a fan of narrators in visual media, film in particular. I feel like it’s often a crutch, used to explain to the audience what they should be thinking and feeling in the failure of the greater narrative to convey that using more elegant or more inherently cinematic means. My hope is that with my filming choices, the right editing, and well-placed sound effects, the action will be parsable without it. But not only does Bernie not believe that will be possible, he actually likes narration, or at least has no problem with it. I think he might actively prefer we include it here.

My current preference is to edit the piece together and see what it needs. We can always add it in, even if it means adjusting the editing slightly, with any necessary rewrites. But I’d like to see how it works without it first, just in case.

At the very least, I think if we use the narration, it needs rewriting. I think it needs to have more of a character to it, like an Arrested Development kind of quality. More snark, more irony. That might bring me around to the concept a little bit more.

My fan fic writing has slowed to a crawl. For a while this summer I was going GANGBUSTERS, writing thousands of words and posting on a regular basis. I even started a couple new fics, intended to be short and finished quickly… neither of which I finished before I got busier. Prep for filming for Dream Machine took over my time, and I didn’t have the energy or focus for writing for a while. That’s common for me, that when I’m in production I’m not really inclined to generate a lot of new work. Neither original stuff, nor fan work stuff like this.

I hit a transition point with my current major fan fiction, His Part to Play, about Captain America’s life post-retirement having returned to the 1940’s. As I’ve mentioned, the time has come for the story to change genres from slice-of-life character piece to more of an adventure, and that requires doing the work of plotting which I tend to find more labor-intensive to plan. I was no longer able to easily write way ahead because I had to figure out structural stuff that, up to this point, wasn’t really a big issue in the story. But during Bernie’s visit we talked out some ideas that mean I now have a better idea at least what comes next, if not necessarily every step of the journey, so I am prepared to pick up the narrative from here. Still, I’m neck deep in production, which takes a lot out of me, so we’ll have to see if I can make myself buckle down on it.

There are, however, still the two short ones. I started them specifically because I thought they’d be quicker and easier to finish. So completing them might be more doable under the demand of my current circumstances. I am continually bemoaning how difficult it is to get an audience for my work, particularly the original stuff. I’ve been trying to balance my efforts to have larger projects and smaller, more accessible projects going, because having something out there with the built-in audience that fan fic does gives me a little boost of feedback to keep me going, while I work on more important things that take longer sustained effort. It was pretty cool when I was releasing updates every two weeks and getting evidence of consistent readership and enjoyment. So it’s worth it to me to go to the trouble, even when I’m otherwise occupied.

I’ve always liked Mount Auburn Cemetery, but since the pandemic started I’ve been spending more time there. It’s beautiful and quiet, and I like places I can walk around by myself for long periods. Funny how even socially distancing, I love places where I can be alone.

I’ve been working on the next episode of Dream Machine, after a long break I took to do the Hawking shows. I had about a month in between when I was feeling too lethargic to do much of anything, but some rest and vitamin D supplements got me back to writing. Also, when I was struggling to buckle down, I put in place a strategy I teach to my students— set a ridiculously low bar as a daily writing goal and make it as easy as possible to make steady progress. Sometimes I get hung up on how I should be able to get more done, but that usually stops me from doing anything at all. But by permitting myself to do as little as one screenplay page a day, yesterday I managed to finish the first draft of the new fifth script. So I need to remember that this process really works for when I’m stuck, and I definitely recommend it to anyone else who’s struggling to get something on paper.

While I’m not great at gauging my own early-draft work, I feel like this one’s going to need a lot of editing. I have a tendency of assuming that something that was hard to write didn’t come out well, but this one feels like it lacks thematic cohesion, like it’s just lot of ideas thrown together. It should be salvageable with editing, but I think it’s more extreme than is usual for a first draft.

I’m going to have it read on Saturday, and I hope that proves helpful. Knowing people will look at it provides an incentive to get on improving it so I don’t embarrass myself. And of course the act of hearing it always highlights the strengths and weaknesses of a script. It feels a little hopeless now— my old refrain of “If I knew how to write it right, I would have done it that was the first time!” —but by now I at least know to trust the process, and it’ll come out okay.

October Review Challenge, #16 - "What genre do you prefer to write in?"

For me, this is definitely historical adventure. I really, really enjoy period pieces, particularly if there’s some sort of action, mystery, or caper involved for there to add intrigue and excitement. In episode 2 of Dream Machine, Requiem for a Dreamer, Ryan asks Leah why she likes writing historical fiction so much, and she gives a stripped down version of my reasoning:

“Everything’s just more interesting, okay? They way people talk, dress, live. Imagining what it would be like to live through important moments in history, but better. No, like, rationing food or fending off the plague. And when things get tough, it feels like an adventure, not... boring regular real life.”

That’s the rough gist of it. I love the trappings, like the dialect and the details of every day life. But I also love the sense of living through history, albeit from (at least in some ways) a more comfortable vantage point in the present. I’ll take my indoor plumbing and effective vaccines, thank you very much.

Adonis is set in an alternate-history Ancient Rome, which I also love, though this is my one project from then. I also like WWI, which my early play Mrs. Loring and parts of the related Tailor at Loring’s End involve. The various Jeeves and Wooster thoughts I’ve had have been just after, and I personally like to insert more references to it than the originals tend to. Brockhurst, my Downton Abbey-inspired larp, is smack dab during the war itself, and a small-group tabletop The Bloom of May references things that happened during it.

But the Victorian age, basically the long 19th Century, is my most frequent setting. The 1880s are the time of the Mrs. Hawking plays and all related pieces, like my roleplaying game Silver Lines. Mrs. Hudson Investigates, my Holmes-related radio play done for PMRP, is around the same time. Another radio play, an adaptation of Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue done with Jeremy Holstein, is in the 1840’s, still technically within Queen Victoria’s reign. I love it aesthetically, I love the manners and the language, and I’m just a bit of an Anglophile in general. But even more than that, the imperial British way of life is rife with drama and makes for strong conflicts to critique and make points about. I am fascinated by the time, but in order to stay honest, I try to incorporate and acknowledge and even deconstruct the evils of it.

I need to write more modern day things, for the sake of producibility concerns. Period pieces are unfortunately expensive. But this is what I'd do all the time if left to my own devices.


Photo by John Benfield

October Review Challenge, #11 - "What is the most personal moment in your work?"

So until very recently, I observed a firm rule to never put too much of my own personality into my work. Let me be very clear what I mean by that— obviously all artistic work comes from the self of the artist, in a way all art is self-portraiture. But I believe that really good stories come from empathy and imagination. So I never wanted anyone to read anything of mine and feel like I wasn’t creating fully-realized characters with their own identities and voices, just me speaking for myself through them. I think that’s the mark of an immature artist who lacks the ability to put themselves in anyone else’s shoes. For this reason, I had a rule that no character I wouldn’t make any character that could be seen to be too much “like me.”

I broke that rule with Leah Lucchesi, the main character of Dream Machine. For an experiment, and following Tina Fey’s lead in my inspiration for the piece 30 Rock, I allowed her to be a pretty direct self-insert. Though I have kept her to be as unflattering a representation as possible to keep it from being self-serving, exaggerating all my own worst qualities to make her difficult, self-centered, and boy-crazy beyond even my own levels.

That means there is SOME stuff about her that is personal; Leah, too, likes Marvel actors, finds showering to be work, and thinks writing is the hardest job in the world, but it tends to the superficial. I’ve only alluded to actual meaningful things about me with her, such as how she’s uncomfortable when she feels out of control, and her fear that if she weren’t attractive nobody would give her a chance. I’ll probably do more with that eventually, but so far it’s been only the lightest touch.

The personal moment I’d like to focus on is from Mrs. Hawking part VI: Fallen Women— a moment that was actually personal to a fault. In one of the darkest Mrs. Hawking scenes ever, our hero confesses the physical violence in her marriage. With no constructive way to vent her rage and frustration, she would hit the Colonel in an effort to provoke him into fighting her back. She indicates it was a perverse attempt to prove to him that she could beat him in a fight, which would have risked exposing her secret and endangering all her work.



That part, thankfully, is not the personal part. But she explains her anger at how hard she has to work in order to be physically dangerous when you’re a woman— particularly in comparison to men. She talks about how a woman has to completely transform herself to be able to be stronger than what a man who doesn’t even try is just naturally. Which is something that personally infuriates me, and something that I think a lot of gendered violence comes down to.

It has a rawness and a realness to it. But the first time Bernie read my draft of that scene, he said “That is the first time I’ve ever read something of yours where I felt it was just you talking, not your character.” And that isn’t good; that is something I’ve been avoiding my whole writing career. I had to really work to make it feel like it wasn’t just me the author grinding the action to a halt to soapbox. Even though I do believe it’s something that makes sense for the Mrs. Hawking character, it had to really feel like her voice, like something she’d talk about in that moment. That’s why personal significance in subject matter isn’t enough. It has to be in the service of creating people who are more real, not less.

DREAM MACHINE
The 1-Hour Comedy by Phoebe Roberts and Bernie Gabin

What if you let Phoebe do her own version of 30 Rock, and they made a parody of Outlander? You get DREAM MACHINE, a Zoom staged reading in a time of quarantine

Episode 4 - “The Opposite of People“



It’s time to start casting for Offcomer, the new flagship show at Dream Machine, and Leah’s excited, even though she’s not quite ready with the pilot script. But while she likes a charismatic young actor who has emerged for the male lead, Meredith is adamant that they ought to capitalize on the popularity of their previous show’s lead Devon. Meanwhile, Josie is having trouble getting a handle on her own role, so she’ll have to gather her courage to make the stubborn show runner figure out a direction.

Starring
Naomi Floro as Leah
Liz Salazar as Meredith
Eric Cheung as Ryan / Actor 1 / Narrator
Cari Keebaugh as Josie
Matthew Kamm as Derek / Actor 3 / Narrator
Jason Tilton as Devon / Narrator
Sarah Parisi Boçi as Kristen / Park Mom
Pieter Wallace as Actor 2 / Narrator
and Andrew Winson as Tom / Narrator

Content notes: mild sexuality, mentions of body shaming, sexual objectification of men

Catch up on previous episodes:
Episode 1: "The Show Must Go Off"
Episode 2: “Requiem for a Dreamer”
Episode 3: “Change or Die"

This has been a Breaking Light Production