A Hollywood Script Consultant

THE MUSE WITHIN
By Judy Kellem

On a recent, rainy Saturday afternoon, I was bustling about our apartment, folding laundry, cleaning out the fridge, shuffling through bills and penning a long overdue thank you note - all at the same time. My husband was doing his own multitask dance about the space and we had the television on in the background, since our CD player just broke and we somehow felt the need to have a din of noise keeping us company in our respective chores. A film called, "Elizabethtown" written and directed by Cameron Crowe played softly along for the two of us, at best, half-listening to a moment here, a line or two of dialogue there. From the little I gathered, the film was about a man who was intent on killing himself, but was forced to postpone his death when his father dies and he must first deal with the details of that passing. This sudden duty takes the hero from his home in Oregon to his father's roots in Elizabethtown, Kentucky. Each time I glanced over at the tube, I'd enter a scene at the end, or in transition from one sequence to the next - not much to go on story wise. Yet these driblets were compelling enough in and of themselves that I found myself making a mental note that I should try to watch this film uninterrupted one of these days.

And then, sometime late in the second act, start of the third, it happened. I had just rounded the corner of the kitchen to match socks on the bed when I found myself stopped dead, lips parted, before the television as the hero now embarked on a road trip home to Oregon, his father's urn strapped in the backseat passenger side, the voice of his new girlfriend narrating his journey (she had created for him a map with stops specified along the way, a travel album with pictures and notes about each place and a CD of herself talking followed by amazing music, charting an adventure for him to take as he made his way back home across the country). Within seconds I was flush, tears streaming down my face.

Then I heard light sniffles to my left. My husband had been paused mid hunt of the right film stock for his camera, and was parked just behind me, red faced and wet eyed - having caught the very same sequence.

We exchanged a sympathetic grin of camaraderie but said nothing. When we'd recovered and returned to our respective tasks, I could not shake the dewy, vulnerable feeling the movie sequence had inspired. And as I coupled black socks with black, white with white, I thought, "What an achievement! That's IT!" To be able to write (and in Crowe's case also direct) a piece SO CONNECTED that the uncommitted viewer can enter an hour and a half into your story and be brought to instant tears catching just eight minutes - WOW!

After a breath, I then of course asked myself, "So, how'd he do it???"

I like to think that the answer is what I already know and what we are constantly advocating here at Hollywoodscript.com: Cameron Crowe was creating from the absolute HEART. There wasn't an ounce of recycled, contrived, manufactured material here. It was if he had taken a handful of treasured moments, resonant memories, well-loved bits and pieces from his life experience and then used these emotionally-powered artifacts to explore a large dramatic theme we all must bear: LOSS.

In this case, it was a son's loss of a father. The story of a man who must postpone his own death wish in order to play the dutiful son, gave Crowe a place to dramatize his own brand of what it means to be part of a complex family network, to be under the pressures of "being a man", of "being the stable one" - as well as all the ways in which the roles we feel obliged to play prevent us from giving and receiving love. I like to imagine that the road trip introduced late in the tale - the image of a man traveling cross country with his father's ashes, guided by the scrapbook instructions and mix CD of a lover - allowed Crowe the perfect vehicle to share with viewers not only his own most beloved spots in North America, his own most sacred travel music but his deepest meditations on life, mined while staring down the vast landscapes along an open road from his own past.

That is what writers - and all artists - do. They cull from their own lives and their own spirits, fragments of story, of character, of idea from which they can then originally create. And when the fragments are born from the heart, tethered to the soul, the potency of that connection is not only maintained, but enhanced within the context of an overall creative endeavor.

That is why Crowe's eight minutes were so powerful. All those bits and pieces he had assembled into his script, transmitted the collective weight and impact of all those feelings.

So inspired by his model, I have found myself returning to my own reservoirs of memory... of small and large, prized or simply resonant moments, knowing that this is the beginning of my own trip home, journey to that place inside, where my own muse lives, waiting for me to engage it...to tell my own original story, in hopes that it may carry to another human being the unique heart from which it's come.

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