The Marksman

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This story was written in the mid-1980s as an original screenplay. The producer to whom it was delivered sent back a note indicating his disappointment with the script. He wrote, “The story is too old-fashioned. It has a beginning, a middle and an end.” I’m not making that up. In that estimable gentleman’s honor, I have divided this narrative version of the story into three acts, labeled — well, you’ve already figured that one out.

The organization that was to have filmed this one tumbled into Ozymandian ruins, like most independent movie companies, and Marksman went to a shelf in my house where, like most unfilmed scripts, it remained unread by anyone except a producer and the author’s agent and the author’s wife.

In its original form the script is 105 pages in length. It would have made for a movie about 95 minutes long; but a screenplay contains a great deal of white space. It is in fact no longer than a novelette, or extended short story. A screenplay is nothing more than a sheet of instructions for filmmakers and actors to keep at hand while they assemble their movie out of such components as they may have gathered. Often it’s true that the tricks attributed by cineaste critics to “marvelous directorial touches” are in fact specified clearly in a writer’s screenplay before a director ever gets near the picture; but generally speaking, a screenplay does not (or at least should not) tell directors how to direct, actors how to act, cinematographers how to photograph, or audiences how to feel. The screenplay simply tells us what happens. It’s up to the actors, the director, the photographers and the sound team, the editors and the audience to interpret these happenings.

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