The entry begins:
I feel really nervous about hearing someone else read my work out loud. There is an audiobook of Wild Girls, by Brilliance Audio, and my plan is to get someone I know to listen to it and then tell me, in detail, how it sounds. I know the reader is a professional and I’m sure that her interpretation is excellent, but the fact remains that the sentences have, to my ear, a certain intonation, a certain rhythm to them. I feel attached to the version I heard in my head as I wrote, and I don’t want to lose it.Watch the trailer for Wild Girls, read more about Wild Girls, and visit Mary Stewart Atwell's Facebook page and Twitter perch.
Obviously, this would present certain problems were Wild Girls to ever become a film. For a screenwriter, seeing your words interpreted part of the process, and if the process is successful, the actors add something that makes the words different, better, than they are on the page. My husband is a filmmaker, and when he directed his first feature, I saw this happen at close range. Incarnated in the actors, some of the characters were totally different from how he imagined them, and that was a good thing; they gave the dialogue a depth and a texture that it wouldn’t have had otherwise. I like the thought that if I were lucky enough to ever see Wild Girls on the screen, I’d come around to the idea that performance adds something to your work, rather than taking something away from it. Still, my weird anxiety might be the reason why I’ve come up with a chronologically impossible cast here.
I’m going against type here, but I’d like to see the main character, Kate, played by Elle Fanning. Kate is brainy and a little bit awkward, and as far as I know Ms. Fanning has never played that kind of part, but it might be good for her to stretch herself. Though she’s prettier than Kate should be, she looks...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Wild Girls.
My Book, The Movie: Wild Girls.
--Marshal Zeringue
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