Whenever I’m working on a screenplay I like to listen to the Scriptnotes podcast. Every episode they drop one or two little gems that I find relevant to what I’m doing. Today I was listening to Episode 738 - Building Your Audience with Courtney Kemp.
In the episode, Courtney mentioned that her masters thesis was on Clueless as an adaptation of Jane Austen’s Emma. In her thesis, she says she compared the source material to the Clueless adaptation, and the 1996 adaptation starring Gwyneth Paltrow.1
The host, John August, mentioned that Clueless was his favorite movie. Or, one of his favorite movies. And, that it was so perfect. I’ve actually never seen it. I’ll have to check it out. I used to watch the TV show when I was a kid
John then went on to explain that the writer and director of the film, Amy Heckerling, originally intended it to be a TV series first, not second. But, was encouraged to “hang it on a spine,” and turn the series into a film.2 So, the “spine” that Amy put her characters & setting onto was Jane Austen’s Emma.
A writing exercise I enjoy a lot is hanging stories from the early history of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints “onto spines.” I think it’s beneficial to look at history within preexisting story structures. I think it helps us understand history better. Makes it more easily accessible since audiences are already pretty media literate. It also makes history more entertaining.
For a while I was working on an unfinished, unpublished, book I called The Deaths of Joseph Smith.3 This grew out of a 2017 (I think) podcast I did called Strangers and Pilgrims. I took the podcast off the apps, but re-uploaded it to YouTube a few years back.
The Deaths of Joseph Smith was a parallax4 retelling of the death of Joseph Smith through three different “spines” — all of them Shakespeare plays. In one story, Joseph’s death was hung on The Tragedy of Coriolanus. In another one it was hung on Antony and Cleopatra, and the final one was The Tempest.5
I thought it was a great little project, because when you choose to tell a story through a specific structure you gain a lot from it, but you also lose a lot. Joseph Smith’s history and life was big, wide, expansive. You have to trim off a lot of fat when you hang his story on a spine. Trim off a lot of characters & events. Trim off themes. Trim off history. Because, structurally, you’re focusing on other things. You just don’t have time for them all.
Having three stories in which the climax of each of them is the Martyrdom of Joseph Smith is nice, because then, you can find a place for everyone. You can find an angle and a perspective for everyone.
If I could get some money together, I think it would be fun to hire three (3) writers. Give each of them all my research, give each of them one of the Shakespeare spines, and have them all write a parallax view of Joseph’s death. That would be a great project, I think. I could just edit it, and kind of keep it all cohesive.
If you’re a writer, and want to take a stab at hanging my research on a spine, and we can shop a book around, let me know: Coriolanus, The Tempest, and Antony & Cleopatra.
Turns out “hang it on a spine” is a pretty common phrase in the screenwriting world. It referring to story structures I think. It’s basically Kurt Vonnegut’s Shapes of Narratives. Or, the Hero’s Journey.
I am now thinking of this book as an entry in footnote 24 of Infinite Jest — one of the many unfinished projects in James Incandenza’s filmography. Unfinished. Unseen. Unreleased.
Parallax Story Structure is retelling a story from a slightly different perspective. Same characters, same events, different perspective. Orson Scott Card wrote a parallax story of Ender’s Game, Ender’s Shadow, which focused on Bean.
If I remember correctly, Coriolanus was the spine that dealt with Joseph Smith as Mayor of Nauvoo, General of the Nauvoo Legion, and United States Presidential Candidate. Antony and Cleopatra was about him, Emma, and their struggles around practicing polygamy. The Tempest was about Joseph Smith as a prophet: priesthood, keys, revelations. All these were things going on at the time of Joseph’s death. They all were around and led up to his death. But you can’t tell each of these stories in one big, giant lump. It’s too many. Too many characters. Too many themes.
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